The God Machine (42 page)

Sajan shook her head. “The map
is
the chip; don't you get it? I don't think the Gospel of Judas is really important. What I mean is, if we find it, and it proves to be as old as we thought, Franklin's codex could indeed change our view of the Bible. And of Christianity too. But I think that to him, to Franklin, finding the codex was just a means to procure the el Minya schematic. The first piece of the map. And then that piece by da Vinci. That's what Franklin meant when he said that the God machine—that the
phi
harmonic—opened a doorway.”

“But that doesn't make any sense. A doorway directly
to God! It's ridiculous. And how could they have possibly designed such a circuit—”

“Chip.”

“—in Franklin's or Edison's day? I mean, such a feat would have required a knowledge of electrical engineering completely unknown in the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, let alone thousands of years ago!”

“I know. It's as crazy as thinking the Ark of the Covenant was built as a giant capacitor. But remember, Edison's lab did anticipate the development of the solid state circuit,” Sajan said. “Just as George Boole's system of logic anticipated the requirements of computer architecture, a full century before it was needed. I know it seems strange. But there are just too many coincidences for it to be random.” She passed Koster the notebook. “It's as if a Divine hand is leading them. No wonder the Knights tried to kill us in Philadelphia and England. Can you imagine if everyone had access to such a device? Would anyone need pastors or priests, or the Church, for that matter? Not with a direct link to God in your living room. It would make the Protestant heresy seem like a peccadillo. That's why they want to destroy it.”

“Or control it.”

“What does Edison say the God machine does?” she inquired.

“It generates the
phi
frequency to open a doorway—”

“No. I mean, does he say how it works?”

Koster picked up the notebook and scanned his translation. “Not really. He says Tesla believed the
phi
frequency would somehow
‘… collapse the walls of the atomic cathedral, pull out the flying buttresses of matter, transmuting fermion to boson, returning you to the pleroma,’
whatever that is.”

Sajan stiffened in her seat. “But that's impossible,” she said. “By definition.”

“What do you mean? What's impossible?”

“Edison's talking about the Pauli exclusion principle. Remember how I told you about Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist who mapped out the architecture of the atom? In 1924, an Austrian physicist named Wolfgang Pauli defined a principle explaining why matter occupies space in an exclusive manner, and doesn't let other matter pass through it. According to Pauli, no two identical fermions may occupy the same quantum state simultaneously. Fermions are particles with half-integer spin, such as protons and electrons. No two electrons can share the same orbit around the nucleus. They're exclusive. This accounts for the solidity of matter, and why material objects collide rather than passing through one another, how we're able to stand on the ground without sinking. Bosons, on the other hand, are so-called force carrier particles, such as photons, light. They're distinguished from fermions, matter particles, by their integer spin.”

“So turning fermions into bosons would be like turning ordinary matter into light?”

“In a manner of speaking. But, as I said, it's impossible. To abrogate the Pauli exclusion principle would mean abrogating the existence of matter itself, of the physical plane. Even if such a thing were technically feasible, as corporeal beings, if we tried to pass through such a doorway, we'd be crushed, imploded into some sort of singularity.” She shook her head. “No, it's impossible. This map leads nowhere. Franklin's quest. And Tesla's, too. All for naught, it appears.” She tossed the printout back on the table.

“What are you saying?”

“The God machine couldn't work, Joseph.” Sajan stood up. She reached for her purse, tucked it under one arm and started to make her way back toward the door.

“Savita?” said Koster.

Sajan glanced over her shoulder.

Koster held out his hand. “Then I guess you won't be needing the Tesla schematic.”

“Oh, sorry,” she said. She tossed the crumpled page from his notebook back onto the table, and the paper unfurled like a rose.

S
AJAN HARDLY SAID ANYTHING AS
K
OSTER STRUGGLED
through rush-hour traffic on their way back to New York. The moment to confront her never seemed to arrive. Koster didn't know where to begin.

When they got back to the city they dropped off the car and headed downtown on foot toward his loft. Sajan insisted on taking a circuitous path. Although they hadn't seen anyone following them since returning from Europe, they could never be certain, she said. She kept looking behind her as they weaved down the avenue. They doubled back several times. They hovered in storefronts. All in all, it took them more than forty minutes to make it back to Eleventh Street, a trip that should have taken them ten.

Sajan hopped into the shower as Koster went over the notes he had taken at the Edison labs. He scanned the Tesla schematic, and connected it through PhotoShop to the other three pieces.

Now that all four fragments were linked, it appeared to be a perfect six-sided figure. But for some reason, it
still seemed incomplete, though Koster couldn't for the life of him think why. He was no designer or electrical engineer. He saved the image back to his camera, which he stuffed in his pocket, and deleted the file on his PC.

Sajan put on a simple black dress and they went out for Italian food at a little place on Minetta. Once again, she barely spoke to him during dinner. She picked at her pasta, her radicchio salad, making small talk: about business and the future of Cimbian; about living out West; about being an American of Indian descent. She talked about anything but the Gospel of Judas and the God machine. In fact, each time he brought up the schematics, she just changed the subject. And she drank. Perhaps because she hadn't eaten much that day, her gin and tonic seemed to go straight to her head. She was slurring her words by the time he had finished his double espresso.

When they finally made it outside, it had started to rain. Black cumulus clouds were stacked up over MacDougal. Koster plucked out a newspaper from a trash can nearby and they ran through the downpour with it over their heads, until they hit Washington Square. Then, without warning, Sajan suddenly stopped. She pulled him under an awning.

“Look behind me,” she said, drawing near.

Koster glanced over her shoulder. He didn't notice anything odd. A number of people were dashing about, like them, trying to get out of the downpour.

“The man in the hat,” she continued.

Then he saw him. He was standing on the far side of the street, at the end of the block. His back was to Koster. He was looking into some storefront, a butcher or baker.

“Who stops in the rain to look at some pork chops?” Sajan said. “And I'm certain I saw him before—the same raincoat and hat—on the way to the restaurant.”

She grabbed Koster's hand and tugged him down the street toward the park. When they reached the corner of MacDougal and Fourth, Sajan started to run like a demon, pulling Koster behind her. Lightning flashed overhead. It was one of those late afternoon summer storms, full of tropical air. It would be over in minutes, Koster thought. But the rain kept pouring down, pounding on them, and soon his newspaper was soaked through and falling apart. He tossed it away.

Sajan skipped through the rain puddles. Then she suddenly turned and looked back at him. “He's still following us.”

They ran by the fountain, around the Washington Arch, and then headed up Fifth at a trot. Moments later, they cut right through the Washington Mews. Someone had left the gate to the private street open and they tore up the brickwork through the rain. Koster pointed at a bower of ivy which bulged from the façade of the nearest brick building and they ducked in behind it.

The street itself seemed to be lost, out of time. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, houses had been constructed by wealthy families all along the north side of Washington Square and the south side of Eighth Street, from Fifth to University Place. The residents established a private alley between them, and filled it with two-story stables—the Washington Mews. But by the 1910s, the horse was being replaced by the automobile, and the stables were covered with light stucco and decorative tiles, and rented out to the artists who were now flocking downtown to the Village.

All this came to Koster in a flash as he pressed his back to the wall of the building, trying to keep himself hidden. Edward Hopper had passed away on this street. And there were 1,486 tiles in the wall.

He looked down at Sajan. She was staring out at Fifth Avenue. The rain poured down her face and he could
feel her trembling beside him like a bird. Her little black dress was soaked through; she hadn't bothered to put on a raincoat. Her hair lay flat on her shoulders.

She glanced up at him as a lightning bolt flashed, followed immediately by an echoing bellow of thunder. The storm was directly above them. She looked up at him, her lips parted. She wore emerald studs in her ears, Koster noticed. He was trying to remember some other detail about the Washington Mews, some architectural curiosity, when he spotted the man with the hat. He was approaching slowly up Fifth, only a few feet away from them by the gate.

Sajan was staring at him. Her dark eyes seemed to glisten with raindrops… or were they tears? He couldn't tell. It didn't matter anymore. Nothing mattered. None of her secrets. The knowledge she was using him. The fact that she was false. None of it mattered. Not at this moment, as he lifted his hands to her face, as he cupped her cheeks and brought his own face so close that he could feel the heat of her breath on his lips.

She was still shaking. She was trembling in his hands. And he kissed her. He wrapped his arms about her waist and her shoulders and drew her tight to his chest. He sucked her lower lip into his mouth, bit down on it delicately and everything that had secured him, had tied him to the earth, seemed to unravel at once. He kissed her frantically, untethered by his conscious mind, his memories and his fears.

“Joseph,” Sajan whispered breathlessly, untangling herself. “Joseph, I have to tell you something.”

Koster stole a glance at the avenue. The man in the hat and the raincoat was gone. He had passed by without seeing them. Or, perhaps, he had simply assumed they were lovers.

Koster stepped back. He looked down at Sajan's tiny face, the dark eyes, running black with mascara, the red
lips. Despite her disheveled appearance, she looked more beautiful now than he had ever seen her before. “Shh,” he said softly, putting a finger to her lips. “Don't worry. I know.”

Sajan looked puzzled. “You do?”

Koster reached into his blazer. He pulled out her locket and dangled it before her.

“You
had it? Of course, you did,” she replied. She reached up and took it. “I wondered. I looked all over my room… and yours. I thought, perhaps, I somehow lost it on the plane.”

“GLF,”
Koster said. “From Irene.”

Sajan reclasped the locket round her neck. “I can explain,” she began, “but not here.” She looked out at the avenue. “He's passed us. Come on. Let's go back to your place.”

K
OSTER'S LOFT OCCUPIED ONE WHOLE FLOOR OF HIS BUILDING
, and the elevator opened directly onto the foyer. They removed their shoes and Koster fetched some cognac while Sajan slipped into the bathroom to dry off. She returned with a towel wrapped around her hair. She had taken off her wet dress and was engulfed in Koster's terry-cloth robe. He handed her a snifter of brandy.