Vera grasped the statue by its waist and held it horizontally above the cloth. 'It takes a minute,' she said.
'Please tell me when it starts,' de l'Orme said.
'There,' said Mustafah. For the image of the Venus was beginning to materialize on the fabric. She was in negative. Each detail became more clarified.
'If that doesn't beat all,' Foley said.
Parsifal refused to believe. He stood there shaking his head.
'The radiation heats and weakens the fabric on one side, creating an image. If I hold my statue here long enough, the cloth will turn dark. If I hold it higher, the image will be larger. Hold it high enough, and my miniature Venus becomes a giantess. That explains our giant Christ.'
'Our paint is a low-grade isotope, newtonium,' said Vera. 'It's found naturally.'
'And you painted yourself with it – your own nude – to create the forgery out there?' asked Foley.
'Yes,' said de l'Orme. 'With Vera's help. She knows her male anatomy, I must say.' The older Dominican looked in danger of sucking the very enamel off his teeth.
'But it's radioactive!' Mustafah said.
'To tell the truth, the isotopes made my arthritis feel better for a few days after. I
thought maybe I'd stumbled on to a cure for a while there.'
'Nonsense,' Parsifal stormed in, as if remembering his hat. 'If this were the answer, we'd have detected radiation in our tests.'
'You would detect it on this cloth,' Vera admitted. 'But only because we spilled dust onto it. If I'd been careful not to touch the cloth, all you would detect is the visual image itself.'
'I've been to the moon and back,' said Parsifal. Whenever Parsifal fell back on his lunar authority, he was near the end of his rope. 'And I've never come across such a
mineral phenomenon.'
'The problem is that you have never been beneath the earth's surface,' said de l'Orme. 'I wish I could take credit for this. But miners have been talking about ghost images burnt onto boxes or the sides of their vehicles for years now. This is the explanation.'
'Then you admit there are only traces of it on the surface,' Parsifal declared. 'You say that man only recently found enough of your powder there to have an effect. So how could a medieval con artist get his hands on enough to coat an entire human body and create this image?'
De l'Orme frowned at the question. 'But I told you, this is not Leonardo.'
'What I don't understand' – Desmond Lynch rapped with his cane, excited – 'is why? Why go to such extremes? Is it all just a prank?'
'Again, it's all about power,' de l'Orme answered. 'A relic like this, in times so superstitious? Why, whole churches came into being around the drawing power of a single Cross splinter. In 1350, all of Europe was transfixed by the display of a supposed Veronica's veil. Do you know how many holy relics were floating around Christendom in those days? Crusaders were returning home with all manner of holy war loot. Besides bones and Bibles from martyrs and saints, there were the baby Jesus' milk teeth, his foreskin – seven of them, to be precise – and enough splinters to make a forest of True Crosses. Obviously this was not the only forgery in circulation. But it was the most audacious and powerful.
'What if someone suddenly decided to tap into this benighted Christian gullibility? He could have been a pope, a king, or simply an ingenious artist. What could be more powerful than a life-size snapshot of the entire body of Christ, depicting him just after his great test on the Cross and just before his disappearance into the Godhead? Done artfully, wielded cynically, such an artifact would have the ability to change history, to create a fortune, to rule hearts and minds.'
'Ah, come on,' Parsifal complained.
'What if that was his game?' de l'Orme postulated. 'What if he was attempting to infiltrate Christian culture through their own image?'
'He? His?' said Desmond Lynch. 'Who are you talking about?'
'Why, the figure in the Shroud, of course.'
'Very well,' growled Lynch. 'But who is the rascal?'
'Look at him,' de l'Orme said.
'Yes, we're looking.'
'It's a self-portrait.'
'The portrait of a trickster,' said Vera. 'He covered himself with newtonium and stood before a linen sheet. He deliberately perpetrated this artful dodge. A primitive photocopy of the son of God.'
'I give up. Are we supposed to recognize him?'
'He looks a little like you up there, Thomas,' someone joked. Thomas blew his cheeks out.
'Long hair, goatee. Looks more like your friend Santos,' someone teased de l'Orme.
'Now that you mention it,' de l'Orme mused, 'I suppose it could be any one of us.' It was turning into a game.
'We give up,' said Vera.
'But you were so close,' said de l'Orme.
'Enough,' barked Gault.
'Kublai Khan,' de l'Orme said.
'What?'
'You said it yourselves.'
'Said what?'
'Geronimo. Attila. Mao. A warrior king. Or a prophet. Or just a wanderer, little
different from us.'
'You're not serious.'
'Why not? Why not the author of the Prester John letters? The author of a Christ hoax? Perhaps even the author of the legends of Christ and Buddha and Mohammed?'
'You're saying...'
'Yes,' said de l'Orme. 'Meet Satan.'
Those new regions which we found and explored... we may rightly call a New World... a continent more densely peopled and abounding in animals than our Europe or Asia or Africa.
– AMERIGO VESPUCCI, on America
14
THE HOLE
The Colon Ridge Zone
'July 7,' Ali recorded. 'Camp 39: 5,012 fathoms, 79 degrees F. We reached Cache I
today.'
She looked up to gather in the scene. How to put this?
Mozart was flooding the chamber over Dolby speakers. Lights blazed with the glut of cable-fed electricity. Wine bottles and chicken bones littered the floor. A conga line of filthy, trail-hardened scientists was snaking across the tilted floor. To The Magic Flute.
'Joy!' she printed neatly.
The celebration rocked around her.
Until this afternoon it had been one vast, unspoken doubt that the cache would be here. Geologists had muttered that the feat was impossible, suggesting that the tunnels shifted about down here, as dodgy as snakes. But just as Shoat had promised, the penetrator capsules were waiting for them. The surface crews had punched a drill hole through the ocean floor and landed the cargo dead on target, at their exact elevation and place in the tunnels. A few meters to the right or left, or higher or lower, and
