The gunships drifted invisibly a kilometer out, and so for the first few seconds Branch saw the world turn inside out in complete silence. The ground boiled with bullets.
The thunder caught up just as their rockets reached in. Darkness vanished utterly.
No man was meant to survive such light. It went on for eternity.
They found Branch still sitting against his shipwreck, holding his navigator across his lap. The metal skin was scorched black and hot to the touch. Like a shadow in reverse, the aluminum behind his back bore his pale outline. The metal was immaculate, protected by his flesh and spirit.
After that, Branch was never the same.
It is therefore necessary for us to marke diligently, and to espie out this felowe... beware of him, that he begyle us not.
– RUDOLPH WALTHER, 'Antichrist, that is to saye: A true report...' (1576)
4
PERINDE AC CADAVER
Java
1998
It was a lovers' meal, raspberries plucked from the summit slopes of Gunung Merapi, a lush volcano towering beneath the crescent moon. You would not know the old blind man was dying, his enthusiasm for the raspberries was so complete. No sugar, certainly not, or cream. De l'Orme's joy in the ripe berries was a thing to see. Berry by berry, Santos kept replenishing the old man's bowl from his own.
De l'Orme paused, turned his head. 'That would be him,' he said.
Santos had heard nothing, but cleaned his fingers with a napkin. 'Excuse me,' he said, and rose swiftly to open the door.
He peered into the night. The electricity was out, and he had ordered a brazier to be lit upon the path. Seeing no one, he thought de l'Orme's keen ears were wrong for a change. Then he saw the traveler.
The man was bent before him on one knee in the darkness, wiping mud from his black shoes with a fistful of leaves. He had the large hands of a stonemason. His hair was white.
'Please, come in,' Santos said. 'Let me help.' But he did not offer a hand to assist.
The old Jesuit noticed such things, the chasm between a word and a deed. He quit swabbing at the mud. 'Ah, well,' he said, 'I'm not done walking tonight anyway.'
'Leave your shoes outside,' Santos insisted, then tried to change his scold into a generosity. 'I will wake the boy to clean them.'
The Jesuit said nothing, judging him. It made the young man more awkward. 'He is a good boy.'
'As you wish,' the Jesuit said. He gave his shoelace a tug, and the knot let go with a pop. He undid the other and stood.
Santos stepped back, not expecting such height, or bones so raw and sturdy. With his rough angles and boxer's jaw, the Jesuit looked built by a shipwright to withstand long voyages.
'Thomas.' De l'Orme was standing in the penumbra of a whaler's lamp, eyes shrouded behind small blackened spectacles. 'You're late. I was beginning to think the leopards must have gotten you. And now look, we've finished dinner without you.' Thomas advanced upon the spare banquet of fruits and vegetables and saw the tiny bones of a dove, the local delicacy. 'My taxi broke down,' he explained. 'The walk was longer than I expected.'
'You must be exhausted. I would have sent Santos to the city for you, but you told me you knew Java.'
Candles upon the sill backlit his bald skull with a buttery halo. Thomas heard a small, rattling noise at the window, like rupiah coins being thrown against the glass. Closer, he saw giant moths and sticklike insects, working furiously to get at the light.
'It's been a long time,' Thomas said.
'A very long time.' De l'Orme smiled. 'How many years? But now we are reunited.' Thomas looked about. It was a large room for a rural pastoran – the Dutch Catholic equivalent of a rectory – to offer a guest, even one as distinguished as de l'Orme. Thomas guessed one wall had been demolished to double de l'Orme's workspace. Mildly surprised, he noted the charts and tools and books. Except for a well-polished colonial-era secretary desk bursting with papers, the room did not look like de l'Orme at all.
There was the usual aggregation of temple statuary, fossils, and artifacts that every field ethnologist decorates 'home' with. But beneath that, anchoring these bits and pieces of daily finds, was an organizing principle that displayed de l'Orme, the genius, as much as his subject matter. De l'Orme was not particularly self-effacing, but neither was he the sort to occupy one entire shelf with his published poems and two-volume memoir and another with his yardage of monographs on kinship, paleoteleology, ethnic medicine, botany, comparative religions, et cetera. Nor would he have arranged, shrinelike and alone upon the uppermost shelf, his infamous La Matiere du Coeur (The Matter of the Heart), his Marxist defense of Teilhard de Chardin's Socialist Le Coeur de la Matiere. At the Pope's express demand, de Chardin had recanted, thus destroying his reputation among fellow scientists. De l'Orme had not recanted, forcing the Pope to expel his prodigal son into darkness. There could be only one explanation for this prideful show of works, Thomas decided: the lover. De l'Orme possibly did not know the books were set out.
'Of course I would find you here, a heretic among priests,' Thomas chastised his old friend. He waved a hand toward Santos. 'And in a state of sin. Or, tell me, is he one of us?'
'You see?' de l'Orme addressed Santos with a laugh. 'Blunt as pig iron, didn't I say? But don't let that fool you.'
Santos was not mollified. 'One of whom, if you please? One of you? Certainly not. I
am a scientist.'
So, thought Thomas, this proud fellow was not just another seeing-eye dog. De l'Orme had finally decided to take on a protege. He searched the young man for a
second impression, and it was little better than the first. He wore long hair and a goatee and a fresh white peasant shirt. There was not even dirt beneath his nails.
De l'Orme went on chuckling. 'But Thomas is a scientist also,' he teased his young companion.
'So you say,' Santos retorted.
De l'Orme's grin vanished. 'I do say so,' he pronounced. 'A fine scientist. Seasoned. Proven. The Vatican is lucky to have him. As their science liaison, he brings the only credibility they have in the modern age.'
Thomas was not flattered by the defense. De l'Orme took personally the prejudice that a priest could not be a thinker in the natural world, for in defying the Church and renouncing the cloth, he had, in a sense, borne his Church out. And so he was speaking to his own tragedy.
Santos turned his head aside. In profile, his fashionable goatee was a flourish upon his exquisite Michelangelo chin. Like all of de l'Orme's acquisitions, he was so physically perfect you wondered if the blind man was really blind. Perhaps, Thomas reflected, beauty had a spirit all its own.
From far away, Thomas recognized the unearthly Indonesian music called gamelan. They said it took a lifetime to develop an appreciation for the five-note chords. Gamelan had never been soothing to him. It only made him uncomfortable. Java was not an easy place to drop in on like this.
'Forgive me,' he said, 'but my itinerary is compressed this time. They have me scheduled to fly out of Jakarta at five tomorrow afternoon. That means I must return to Yogya by dawn. And I've already wasted enough of our time by being so late.'
'We'll be up all night,' de l'Orme grumbled. 'You'd think they would allow two old men a little time to socialize.'
'Then we should drink one of these.' Thomas opened his satchel. 'But quickly.'
De l'Orme actually clapped his hands. 'The Chardonnay? My '62?' But he knew it would be. It
