CHAPTER 94
They had been at sea for almost two weeks. Thomas wasn’t sure what he had expected when they reached Shizuoka, but the boat had surprised him. It was huge—more than a hundred feet long—stuffed with state-of-the-art marine research equipment including sonar and a two-man submersible, and run by a crew of twenty-two, not including scientists and guests. It was owned by the Kobe aquarium, and though Parks was nominally in charge of the expedition, the boat’s staff structure rendered him little more than a passenger. Thomas had no idea what Parks had told them, but there had been a series of lengthy phone calls on the train and in the port before the expedition had been approved. God knew how he had overplayed their meager evidence, but they had eventually been welcomed aboard by Nakamura, the ship’s captain, with typically Japanese politeness.
It was impossible to discern what the captain and his crew thought of their mission, and they kept pointedly to themselves. Nonetheless, Thomas suspected that they thought Parks a loose cannon, and that it wouldn’t take much to turn the boat back to Japan. Whether the captain knew that the names of the foreigners on the passenger manifest had been falsified, he couldn’t say, but Thomas spent the first two days on deck, watching for signs of the Japanese coast guard; however much they seemed to have escaped from the mainland, the boat would quickly feel little better than a floating prison cell if the authorities opted to pick them up.
Thomas hadn’t learned that there was no alcohol on board till they set sail. At first he was merely disappointed that he couldn’t have the beer he thought he had earned, but after two more days the subject made him irritable. Everyone but Jim stayed out of his way for almost a week: no mean feat on a boat. It was about then that Thomas began to reflect on the last time he had gone for more than two days without a drink, without several drinks, and his irritability turned into something darker and more private. The thirst had passed, for now, but he felt conspicuous, humiliated, and it was another two days before he began seeking out the company of the others.
“Welcome to our very own floating Betty Ford clinic,” said Parks, with customary detachment. Jim winced, but Thomas shrugged it off.
The boat was called the Nara, though Parks had hung a hand-lettered sign over the side that read Beagle II. It cut through the blue water at what had first seemed like breakneck speed, till Thomas had taken to studying the charts with the captain at the end of the day, noting with dismay the way they were inching south. Two days ago they had gotten their first glimpse of the Philippines, easing down the western coast of northern Luzon, spending the night in sight of Manila, where the crew took on supplies. The foreigners had decided that passing through Philippine immigration wasn’t worth the risk, so they had sat up half the night, jealously staring off toward the lights of the city. Now everyone was back aboard and pushing south once more, this time through the Sulu Sea towards the thousand-island archipelago of the same name that pointed a dotted and irregular arrow southwest to the Malaysian coast.
As they got closer, the crew grew quieter, more watchful. These waters had a bad reputation, as did the islands themselves, and not just for piracy. These were the stomping grounds of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the smaller but more radical Abu Sayyaf. The latter was the extremist and belligerent wing of a largely peaceful Muslim population whose home in the islands predated Spanish conquest but often found itself left out of the considerations of the Manila-centric government. Part of the disagreement between Parks and Captain Nakamura, it seemed, had concerned the safety of their destination, a place of bombings, assassinations, and kidnappings that most governments advised their people to avoid. Combine such facts with the occasional sighting of a ten-foot tiger shark streaking through the waters, and even the pale, palm-fringed beaches darkened, became—perhaps unfairly—places of menace.
“It’s perfect, isn’t it?” said Parks, appearing at Thomas’s elbow.
“I guess,” Thomas agreed.
“No,” said Parks, “I mean it’s a perfect habitat for the fish. Like Naples, all these islands are volcanic, the same undersea caves, the same warm waters. As soon as we get close to the island on the satellite images, we’ll put the submersible down: a hundred meters or so should do it. See what’s down there.”
“You think we’ll find them?” said Thomas.
“We’d better,” said Parks. “It’s what your brother died for.”
“Maybe,” said Thomas. “You think he died because someone wanted to keep the whereabouts of these fish secret?”
“Whereabouts or existence, yes,” said Parks.
“Because they are worth money on the Chinese folk remedy market?”
“Maybe,” said Parks, staring out over the water.
“But probably not,” said Thomas, reading his tone.
“You want to know what I really think?” said Parks, rounding on him. “I think that it’s not about money, or terrorism or science. Particularly not science. I think it’s about antiscience.”
“Which is what?” said Thomas.
“Religion,” said Parks, like a man finally laying down his cards. “Specifically, Christianity. What I think is that your brother found swimming, walking proof of evolution, something he thought he could make some money off of, and they wanted him shut up.”
“They?”
“The Church,” he said. “His church, probably. What do you think the Reverend Jim is here for, Thomas? He’s doing what he did when he was charged to watch over your brother. If we find the fish, you might want to toss him overboard before he brings the Catholic death squads down on us.”
“You can’t believe that,” said Thomas.
“Really?” said Parks. “You want a list of what the Catholic church has done to people who didn’t agree with it? You want to hear about the Inquisition, or the Albigensian Crusade? Try this for size. It’s July twenty-first, 1209, a town called Beziers in France. The armies of the papacy surround the town and demand the expulsion of about five hundred members of a heretic sect called the Cathars. Knowing what will happen to the Cathars if they are handed over, the town refuses. So what did the papal army do? They attacked. Ever heard the phrase ‘Kill them all and let God sort them out’? That’s where it comes from. More or less. It’s what the papal legate or someone said when asked how they were supposed to separate the heretics from the rest. They sacked the town and slaughtered everyone they could find inside. Twenty thousand dead.”
“That was a long time ago,” said Thomas.
“Some things don’t change,” said Parks. “Religion doesn’t tolerate dissent, doesn’t debate truth. You are either with them or you are against them.”
“But Ed was a priest.”
“A priest who found evidence of evolution,” said Parks. “That made him a target.”
“I don’t see why those two things are opposed to each other,” said Thomas, “and I still don’t see why this fishapod is such a big deal if all it does is confirm what you already know from fossils.”
“It’s not about scientific proof, because these people aren’t interested in science except when they can use it to back up some half-witted tale about Noah’s ark,” said Parks with a sneer. “The fishapod wouldn’t prove anything about evolution to the scientific community that they don’t already know in general terms, but showing these things walking around might change a lot of minds that aren’t in that community. The creationists and the intelligent-design crazies can point at holes in the fossil record all they like, but if you can then point right back to a living example of Darwinian evolution, it takes the wind out of their sails. It shouldn’t, and if they were real scientists it wouldn’t, but they aren’t and it would. It will.”
It was a credo, a statement of faith, and he reveled in it.
“Ed was a Christian who believed in evolution,” said Thomas. “He can’t be in that small a minority.”
“Nonsense,” said Parks. “He was a Christian who was prepared to dump his beliefs when the facts gave him an angle he could work for profit.”
“You really don’t know my brother at all, do you?” said Thomas.
“Didn’t,” Parks corrected. “He’s dead, remember?”
“Christians can believe in evolution,” said Thomas, ignoring him.
“America,” Parks went on, “is the stupidest nation in the developed world. We cling to our ignorance. You don’t think proof of evolution is a big deal? Tell the fifty-one percent of Americans who still don’t believe in it. Tell the seventy-four percent of churchgoers who don’t believe in evolution. Tell that to the Kansas board of education who were voted in solely to get evolution out of the curriculum, so that the schools could actually train their kids to be ignorant. You think I’m making this up? You can’t make this shit up. We’re living in the fucking Dark Ages and we’re doing it by choice.”
“I think Ed believed that the laws of science are the laws of God,” said Thomas, thinking it through. “He thought that God made the world, but he did it by what you would call natural and scientific means over millions of years. God made man, but it took time because for God who resides in eternity, millions of years are but seconds.”
Parks gave him a long strange look, and Thomas looked down at the water beneath their keel, embarrassed.
“And you agree with him?” said Parks.
“No,” said Thomas. “I don’t know. Does it matter?”
“It’s Easter this weekend, did you know?” said Parks.
“I guess . . . No,” said Thomas. “I’d forgotten.”
“You know what’s going to happen over there this weekend?” said Parks, nodding vaguely toward the coast.
“People will go to church,” said Thomas, tiring of the conversation now.
“Sure,” said Parks. “And then some of them will drive out to a field and will be nailed up on crosses for people to gawk at. Actual crucifixions in the twenty-first century, if you can believe that. People volunteer to show their holiness or to ask God for an extra loaf of bread or some damn thing.”
“I’ve heard of that,” said Thomas, noncommittal, jarred by Parks’s scorn.
“And here’s the best bit,” said Parks. “They use stainless steel nails soaked in alcohol to avoid infection. Good, huh? They volunteer to be crucified, but they want to make sure that the nails they drive through their hands and feet won’t infect them. Whack, whack, whack!” he said, miming the hammer strokes with a lopsided grin.
“So?” said Thomas.
“You can’t have God and science,” said Parks finally. “You have to choose one. If you don’t, you’re just swabbing for infection after you nailed yourself up.”
Thomas said nothing. He wanted to respond, but even if he could guess what Ed would have said, he didn’t know what he thought himself.
“Don’t waver on me now,” said Parks, slapping him on the shoulder as he walked away. “The battle lines are already drawn. You’ve been on the front lines for weeks.”
A voice called to Parks from the helm. It was Captain Nakamura. Parks went to meet him.
“You okay?” said Kumi, sidling up to Thomas as he stared out over the water.
“Yes,” he said, without thinking. “I guess. Parks . . .”
The sentence trailed off. He didn’t know how to explain the leaden feeling the man’s words left in him.
“He’s a man on a mission,” said Kumi. “A crusader.”
Thomas smiled at the irony and nodded.
He hadn’t expected Kumi to still be with him. Until the moment the boat actually left the dock, he had been waiting for her to leave.
Oddly enough, Parks had made the decision for her, albeit indirectly. She had phoned the Kobe aquarium, calling as a State Department representative pretending to be looking into the unconventional hiring of an American citizen. She had, she confessed, been determined to uncover something about him or his story that would reveal the folly of their expedition. She had found nothing. Parks was in good standing with his employer, who clearly regarded him as eminently qualified— with a Stanford doctorate, no less—focused and cheap. The closest thing to a blot on his record was his failure to get tenure at Berkeley, where he had been an assistant professor right out of Stanford. Though Nakamura had final control of the Nara, the Kobe people clearly trusted Parks’s judgment. The fact that he was obsessive to the point of irrationality didn’t seem to matter much.
“I think they want to ride his wake,” she had said. “They’ll let him run his quest aground and then, when he finds what he’s looking for, they’ll hop out to grab all the publicity. If they can land a specimen—alive or dead—it will make them the single most prestigious outfit of their kind in the world.”
“So you trust him?” Thomas had said.
“Not as far as I can throw him,” she replied. “But if he’s legit and on the verge of something important, I want to be there.”
“As a representative of the American government,” Thomas added with a wry smile.
“Close enough,” she had said, before squeezing his arm and walking away in the way she used to, long ago, so that Thomas just stood on the deck for several minutes staring at the water.
That had been two days ago and he still didn’t know what it had meant.
“How’s Jim?” he said now.
“Distant,” said his ex-wife. “He seems confused, even a little sad. Why don’t you talk to him? You’ve barely exchanged words since we left Japan. Is it that he reminds you of Ed?”
“I don’t know,” said Thomas. “Maybe. You like him, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said. It was a clear, definitive answer, but it was one she had chosen to make, a statement of faith and hope, maybe even a little charity. It was less a description of her feelings than a statement about the world she wished to live in. Thomas nodded simply and said nothing.
Parks was coming back toward them, beaming.
“We’ll be there in two hours,” he announced. “Who’s coming in the sub with me?”
“I am,” said Thomas. He hadn’t thought about it before, but he knew that if anything was down there, he had to see it.