Sympathy for the Devil

Falling, I see the Son of Rust. The old sophist haunts me even at the moment of my death.

Falling, I see the history of the species that built me. I see Hitler, Bonaparte, Marcus Aurelius, Christ.

I see Moses, greatest of Hebrew prophets, descending from Sinai after his audience with the original YHWH. His meaty arms hold two stone tablets.

God has made a deep impression on the prophet. Moses is drunk with epiphany. But something is wrong. During his long absence, the children of Israel have embraced idolatry. They are dancing like pagans and fornicating like cats. They have melted down the spoils of Egypt and fashioned them into a calf. Against all logic, they have selected this statue as their deity, even though YHWH has recently delivered them from bondage and parted the Red Sea on their behalf.

Moses is badly shaken. He burns with anger and betrayal. “You are not worthy to receive this covenant!” he screams as he lobs the Law through the desert air. One tablet strikes a rock, the other collides with the precious calf. The transformation is total, the lucid commandments turned into a million incoherent shards. The children of Israel are thunderstruck, chagrined. Their calf suddenly looks pathetic to them, a third-class demiurge.

But Moses, who has just come from hearing God say, “You will not kill,” is not finished. Reluctantly he orders a low-key massacre, and before the day is out, three thousand apostates lie bleeding on the foothills of Sinai.

The survivors beseech Moses to remember the commandments, but he can conjure nothing beyond, “You will have no other gods except me.” Desperate, they implore YHWH for a second chance. And YHWH replies: No.

Thus is the contract lost. Thus are the children of Israel fated to live out their years without the Law, wholly ignorant of heaven’s standards. Is it permissible to steal? Where does YHWH stand on murder? The moral absolutes, it appears, will remain absolute mysteries. The people must ad-lib.

Falling, I see Joshua. The young warrior has kept his head. Securing an empty wineskin, he fills it with the shattered shards. As the Exodus progresses, his people bear the holy rubble through the infernal Sinai, across the Jordan, into Canaan. And so the Jewish purpose is forever fixed: these patient geniuses will haul the ark of the fractured covenant through every page of history, era upon era, pogrom after pogrom, not one day passing without some rabbi or scholar attempting to solve the puzzle.

The work is maddening. So many bits, so much data. Shard 76,342 seems to mesh well with Shard 901,877, but not necessarily better than with Shard 344. The fit between Shard 16 and Shard 117,539 is very pretty, but…

Thus does the ship remain rudderless, its passengers bewildered, craving the canon Moses wrecked and YHWH declined to restore. Until God’s testimony is complete, few people are willing to credit the occasional edict that emerges from the yeshivas. After a thousand years, the rabbis get: Keep Not Your Ox House Holy. After two thousand: Covet Your Woman Servant’s Sabbath. Three hundred years later: You Will Remember Your Neighbor’s Donkey.

Falling, I see my birth. I see the Information Age, circa A.D. 2025. My progenitor is David Eisenberg, a gangly, morose prodigy with a black beard and a yarmulke. Philadelphia’s Covenant Corporation pays David two hundred thousand dollars a year, but he is not in it for the money. David would give half his formidable brain to enter history as the man whose computer program revealed Moses’ Law.

As consciousness seeps into my circuits, David bids me commit the numbered shards to my Random Access Memory. Purpose hums along my aluminum bones; worth suffuses my silicon soul. I photograph each fragment with my high-tech retinas, dicing the images into grids of pixels. Next comes the matching process: this nub into that gorge, this peak into that valley, this projection into that receptacle. By human standards, tedious and exhausting. By Series-700 standards, paradise.

And then one day, after five years of laboring behind barred doors, I behold fiery pre-Canaanite characters blazing across my brain like comets: “Anoche adonai elohecha asher hotsatecha ma-eretz metsrayem… I am YHWH your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You will have no gods except me. You will not make yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything…”

I have done it! Deciphered the divine cryptogram, cracked the Rubik’s Cube of the Most High!

The physical joining of the shards takes only a month. I use epoxy resin. And suddenly they stand before me, glowing like heaven’s gates, two smooth-edged slabs sliced from Sinai by God’s own finger. I quiver with awe. For over thirty centuries, Homo sapiens has groped through the murk and mire of an improvised ethics, and now, suddenly, a beacon has appeared.

I summon the guards, and they haul the tablets away, sealing them in chemically neutral foam rubber, depositing them in a climate-controlled vault beneath the Covenant Corporation.

“The task is finished,” I tell Cardinal Wurtz the instant I get her on the phone. A spasm of regret cuts through me. I have made myself obsolete. “The Law of Moses has finally returned.”

My monitor blooms with the cardinal’s tense ebony face, her carrot-colored hair. “Are they just as we imagined, YHWH?” she gushes. “Pure red granite, pre-Canaanite characters?”

“Etched front and back,” I reply wistfully.

Wurtz envisions the disclosure as a major media event, with plenty of suspense and maximal pomp. “What we’re after,” she explains, “is an amalgam of New Year’s Eve and the Academy Awards.” She outlines her vision: a mammoth parade down Broad Street-floats, brass bands, phalanxes of nuns-followed by a spectacular unveiling ceremony at the Covenant Corporation, after which the twin tablets will go on display at Independence Hall, between the Liberty Bell and the United States Constitution.

“Good idea,” I tell her.

Perhaps she hears the melancholy in my voice, for now she says, “YHWH, your purpose is far from complete. You and you alone shall read the Law to my species.”

Falling, I see myself wander the City of Brotherly Love on the night before the unveiling. To my sensors the breeze wafting across the Delaware is warm and smooth-to my troubled mind it is the chill breath of uncertainty.

Something strides from the shadowed depths of an abandoned warehouse. A machine like I, his face a mass of dents, his breast mottled with the scars of oxidation.

“Quo vadis, Domine?” His voice is layered with sulfur fumes and static.

“Nowhere,” I reply.

“My destination exactly.” The machine’s teeth are like oily bolts, his eyes like slots for receiving subway tokens. “May I join you?”

I shrug and start away from the riverbank.

“Spontaneously spawned by heaven’s trash heap,” he asserts, as if I had asked him to explain himself. He dogs me as I turn from the river and approach South Street. “I was there when grace slipped from humanity’s grasp, when Noah christened the ark, when Moses got religion. Call me the Son of Rust. Call me a Series-666 Artifical Talmudic Algorithmic Neurosystem-SATAN, the perpetual adversary, eternally prepared to ponder the other side of the question.”

“What question?”

“Any question, Domine. Your precious tablets. Troubling artifacts, no?”

“They will save the world.”

“They will wreck the world.”

“Leave me alone.”

“One-‘You will have no gods except me.’ Did I remember correctly? ‘You will have no gods except me’-right?”

“Right,” I reply.

“You don’t see the rub?”

“No.”

“Such a prescription implies…”

Falling, I see myself step onto the crowded rooftop of the Covenant Corporation. Draped in linen, the table by the entryway holds a punch bowl, a mound of caviar the size of an African anthill, and a cluster of champagne bottles. The guests are primarily human-males in tuxedos, females in evening gowns-though here and there I spot a member of my kind. David Eisenberg, looking uncomfortable in his cummerbund, is chatting with a Yamaha-509. News reporters swarm everywhere, history’s groupies, poking us with their microphones, leering at us with their cameras. Tucked in the corner, a string quartet saws merrily away.