Finale
ADAM HAD FINALLY ARRIVED AT THE site of the Solar Jump in the Oil Rivers region, near the mining site formerly under the British Crown’s control. Bosch’s men cocked their guns all at once, aiming for him, until they recognized who he was and fell back. The power of the Temple name was one thing he could thank his dead father for.
Don’t worry, Father. Soon all will follow you into the bliss of destruction.
Out from behind a soldier walked Doctor Seymour Pratt, his arms behind his hunched back. Even in this relentless heat, the man clung to his long white lab coat as tightly as Civilization clung to her globe and spear at the center of the British Museum’s pediment. It was his way of separating him from those he deemed the primordial preman. The savages of the earth. It was what drove Pratt’s relentless pursuits toward science and progress. After his many humiliations had shriveled his soul and eaten away his pride, Adam now understood that fully. And that was why he had confidence Pratt would accept his offer.
Barry Bately, still in his working-class rags, stood at Pratt’s side, dutiful and silent, his mutilated lips not so much as twitching. The hat upon his bald skull slipped a little as he tilted his head.
“Adam Temple,” said Doctor Pratt. “What have you come here to do?”
“I’ve come to make you an offer.” Adam pulled Hiva’s heart out of his pocket. The pale pink crystal glittered in Doctor Pratt’s ever-widening beady eyes. “Come with me to the Coral Temple. There I will make your greatest dreams come true.”
The Solar Jump reacted to Hiva’s heart, pulling Adam by the belly button through space and time into Heaven’s Shrine. Here in this temple filled with cobwebs, he saw the altar upon which his father had been found half dead and chuckled lightly to himself.
What a life you led, Father. In some ways, I can understand why you abandoned us for this.
Doctor Seymour Pratt already knew the way. A doorway opened in the grand mural, and the glass tube hidden inside took them down, down, down into the Atlantic Ocean.
“And how do you know my dreams, boy?” Doctor Pratt asked as Adam watched the whales and the schools of fish drifting by the glass. Bately stood deathly still in the glass container, uninterested in the sea scenery before him. It was as if he would not so much as breathe unless Doctor Pratt ordered it of him.
“Because I understand you now, Doctor. Though I admit—I didn’t before.” Adam crossed his arms and looked into the deep waters. All of God’s creatures. Subordinate to man. “I wanted to believe that my thinking was far more progressive. That I understood things that an old man like you, like my father, surely couldn’t. But by bowing my head to another, I had given up my power. The natural power endowed in me by God himself. My whole life, I have debased myself for an empty vessel of a woman.”
“For a creature beneath you?” Doctor Pratt added, his furry eyebrow arched in curiosity.
“That’s just the thing, Doctor,” Adam said as a dark, domed palace upon the sea floor came into view. “Whether it be written in the books of Darwin or the scrolls of the Old Testament, it has been made clear: all creatures are beneath man. I will not be weaker than her.”
As the tube entered through the ceiling of the Coral Temple, Doctor Pratt pressed his old hand against the glass. “I knew it the moment I saw that filthy creature destroy my brother, though trapped in a zoo. Some beings need to be subordinate. It is not an injustice. It is simply progress.”
“And progress is exactly what I am here to offer you,” said Adam.
The tube dropped them off onto a platform; they were alone in this vast room. Adam’s shoes echoed upon the floor. “No,” he said as Bately and Doctor Pratt gathered behind him. “What I offer you is something more.” He turned and spread out his arms. “Evolution.”
Hiva’s Tomb loomed overhead. A cube made by the genius hands of the Naacal. A structure built to atomize the body of Hiva.
“On his deathbed, my father told me something about Hiva’s Tomb.” Adam walked up to it and placed his hand on the glass. There was a little crack in it. From what? he wondered. His finger lingered there. “This structure can deconstruct anyone down to their very basic molecules. Not just Hiva. Anyone at all who steps inside. But Hiva’s Tomb operates like anything else that requires a power source. If you were to cut the power, you would turn off the machine. With the energy separating the atoms gone, the atoms would come back together, reforming the being.” Adam turned to Doctor Pratt. “Shall I teach you how to operate it?”
“And why in the world would you want to do that?” But Doctor Pratt wasn’t a fool. He seemed to instinctively know where Adam’s line of thinking was heading. As soon as he’d asked the question, the greed in his evil, beady eyes was thirsting for the right answer.
“I read my father’s research,” Adam said, leaning against the glass. “I read your works as well. Your studies. Every discovery you painstakingly detailed as you destroyed Hiva’s body again and again. And I knew as a child: it wasn’t just for discovery, nor was it revenge for the brother she killed. It angered you deep inside to think that such a great and powerful being, greater than humankind, greater than the European, could appear in the dark skin of an African woman. It was against all logic. All reason.”
Doctor Pratt said nothing. That was how Adam knew he was correct.
“Despite my current ambition, my heart still wavers for her,” Adam admitted, crossing his arms against his chest, his bottom lip curled. “Your hatred is pure. It’s cold and clinical and wavers for no one. It is the one thing I lack. I will need it to become whole.”
Adam’s lips twisted in a serene grin as he looked up at the dome ceiling of the Coral Temple. “And you will need this to become a being even greater than Hiva.”
He pulled out Hiva’s crystal heart. It would finish mending soon. Adam did not have another moment to waste.
“Bately will operate the machine. I will teach him how, and you will give him the appropriate commands. You and I will walk into Hiva’s Tomb with this.” His hand squeezed the crystal heart. “And we will arise as something new. Something greater.”
A new Hiva in the place of the one that had failed him.
Doctor Pratt did not need too long to decide.
“It seems you’ve learned, boy,” he said. “We were born of kings.”