The Seed of Evil

Rodrick looked at me intently, with that small, tight smile of his that meant he was leading up to something. “They are quite mistaken,” he said firmly. “What you are quoting is the shoddy superstition of the worshipper, the cringing obeisance he adopts towards the creator. The point is, I have never yet studied an account of the creation, whether mythical or metaphysical, that managed to do without some connection between the creator and the created. Since the universe is physical, it follows that this connection must, necessarily, be of a physical kind.”

He swallowed his rum and coke before continuing. “Do you see where I am leading? It all means that God shares some of the properties of matter. Not that he’s material in the same sense that we are—though one sect, the Mormons, teach that he is—but he must possess some material characteristics. Substantiality without extension, perhaps, or not even substantiality as such, but at any rate something, otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to arrange for the creation of a physical universe.”

Rodrick prodded a finger at me. “And as you know, there’s no such thing as a purely one-way physical arrangement. If he was able to create us, there must be some way we can hit back at him. God can be killed, even.”

I snorted. “Preposterous!”

For reply Rodrick indulged in one of his theatrical gestures I often find irritating. He rose abruptly to his feet, without a word to me, and strode for the door, leaving me to trail along after him.

He was already some yards up the street before I caught up with him. I asked, somewhat annoyed, where we were going.

“To kill God,” he answered doggedly.

His pace did not falter and I, weakling that I am, fell in step beside him.

Certain impressions of that evening remain in my memory. The warmth of the night, the vanished sunset that still left a lingering after-glow. Rodrick’s half-timbered house, like a dark mass; Rodrick’s lean face, wolf-like in the light of shaded cresset lamps as we mounted the staircase that led to the upper floor. One of Rodrick’s cleaning robots had fallen from its guide-rails and lay broken on the tiling below. It was ignored by its brothers, who continued to purr clumsily about their business.

Rodrick kept up a constant expatiation during the short walk. “You see, our space-time must be in contact with the creative principle at all points. That principle must in turn emanate directly from the deity. Discover that principle and learn to control it, and you have a weapon to which God is susceptible, and which can be aimed from any point within the creation.”

“Are you serious?”

“Perfectly.”

Either Rodrick was joking or he was paranoid, I decided. But I asked: “If you were to destroy God, wouldn’t the universe disappear?”

“Ah, you stand revealed as a pantheist!” Rodrick declared dryly. “You subscribe to the Vedantic view that the universe is an aspect of Brahman, or God, and is indistinguishable from him. I’m fairly sure the cruder, Christian view is the correct one. The universe is distinct from God, produced by an act of will, and therefore is capable of an independent existence.” He waved a hand. “Just as those buildings have outlasted the men who built them.”

Now we were in Rodrick’s laboratory, and I gazed around as he switched on the lights. An elaborate framework had been constructed on the main workbench. A number of lasers—presumably those Rodrick had mentioned purchasing—were bracketed into it, in a manner that suggested a carefully conceived pattern. Distributed through the framework, like the fruits of a bizarre tree, were mirrors, lenses and prisms.

Beyond the windows there seemed to stretch an endless menacing abyss. It struck me how sinister was the atmosphere of the workshop, with its timber rafters and clumps of grime (the house automata were not admitted here). It was more like the laboratory of a medieval alchemist than of a twentieth-century man of science. The apparatus was modern, of course, but the dim lamps created countless dark corners, and it struck me that Rodrick could have arranged the lighting better.

“All right,” I said, “granted for the moment there is a physical principle by which one might gain access to God, supposing him to exist, how would you ever locate such a principle?”

“Perfectly simple, as it happens,” Rodrick said blandly. “That information has been available for at least three thousand years. ‘And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.’ Book of Genesis, verse three. And a remarkable insight on the part of the writer, if I may say so.”