were rising, as if in some glass-walled elevator.
They were already above the treetops. She felt no breeze; it was as if a cocoon of air moved with them. She felt light, insubstantial, like a child in the arms of her father. She felt oddly safe; she would come to no harm here.
‘We’re accelerating,’ Himmelfarb said. ‘If you want the Aristotelian physics of it, we’re being attracted to the second pole of the universe.’
‘The second pole?’
‘God.’
Looking back Philmus could see the Earth, heavy and massive and unmoving, at the centre of everything, a ball of water folded over on itself. They were already so high she couldn’t make out Purgatory.
Rising ever faster, they passed through a layer of glassy light, like an airliner climbing through cloud. As they climbed higher she saw how the layer of light folded over the planet, shimmering like an immense soap bubble. Embedded in the membrane she could see a rocky ball, like a lumpy cloud, below them and receding.
It was the Moon.
She said, ‘If I remember my Ptolemy –’
‘The Earth is surrounded by spheres. Nine of them, nine heavens. They are transparent, and they carry the sun, Moon, and planets, beneath the fixed stars.’
The Monsignor murmured, ‘We are already beyond the sphere of decay and death.’
Himmelfarb laughed. ‘And you ain’t seen nothing yet.’
Still they accelerated.
Himmelfarb’s eyes were glowing brilliantly bright. She said, ‘You must understand Dante’s geometrical vision. Think of a globe of Earth, Satan at the south pole, God at the north. Imagine moving north, away from Satan. The circles of Hell, and now the spheres of Heaven, are like the lines of latitude you cross as you head to the equator …’
Philmus, breathless, tried not to close her eyes. ‘You were telling me about your research.’
‘ … All right. DNA is a powerful information store. A picogram of your own DNA, officer, is sufficient to specify how to manufacture you – and everything you’ve inherited from all your ancestors, right back to the primordial sea. But there is still much about our DNA – whole stretches of its structure – whose purpose we can only guess. I wondered if –’
The Monsignor blew out his cheeks. ‘All this is unverified.’
Himmelfarb said, ‘I wondered if human DNA itself might contain information processing mechanisms – which we might learn from or even exploit, to replace our clumsy pseudo-mechanical methods …’
Still they rose, through another soap-bubble celestial sphere, then another. All the planets, Mercury through Saturn, were below them now. The Earth, at the centre of translucent, deep blue clockwork, was far below.
They reached the sphere of the fixed stars. Philmus swept up through a curtain of light points, which then spangled over the diminishing Earth beneath her.
‘One hell of a sight,’ Philmus said.
‘Literally,’ said the Monsignor, gasping.
‘You see,’ Himmelfarb said to Philmus, ‘I succeeded. I found computation – information processing – going on in the junk DNA. And more. I found evidence that assemblages of DNA within our cells have receptors, so they can observe the external world in some form, that they store and process data, and even that they are self-referential.’
‘Natural DNA computers?’
‘More than that. These assemblages are aware of their own existence, officer. They think.’
Suspended in the air, disoriented, Philmus held up her free hand. ‘Woah. Are you telling me our cells are sentient?’
‘Not the cells,’ the priest said patiently. ‘Organelles, assemblages of macromolecules inside the cells. The organelles are –’
‘Dreaming?’
The priest smiled. ‘You do understand.’
Philmus shivered, and looked down at her hand. Could this be true? ‘I feel as if I’ve woken up in a haunted house.’
‘Except that, with your network of fizzing neurones, your clumsily constructed meta-consciousness, you are the ghost.’
‘How come nobody before ever noticed such a fundamental aspect of our DNA?’
Himmelfarb shrugged. ‘We weren’t looking. And besides, the basic purpose of human DNA is construction. Its sequences of nucleotides are job orders and blueprints for making molecular machine tools. Proteins, built by DNA, built you, officer, who learned, fortuitously, to think, and question your origins.’ She winked at Philmus. ‘Here is a prediction. In environments where resources for building, for growing, are scarce – the deep sea vents, or even the volcanic seams of Mars where life might be clinging, trapped by five billion years of ice – we will find much stronger evidence of macromolecular sentience. Rocky dreams on Mars, officer!’
The Monsignor said dryly, ‘If we ever get to Mars we can check that. And if you’d bothered to write up your progress in an orderly manner we might have a way to verify your conclusions.’
The dead priest smiled indulgently. ‘I am not – was not – a very good reductionist, I am afraid. In my arrogance, officer, I took the step which has damned me.’
‘Which was?’
Her face was open, youthful, too smooth. ‘Studying minds in test tubes wasn’t enough. I wanted to contact the latent consciousness embedded in my own DNA. I was curious. I wanted to share its oceanic dream. I injected myself with a solution consisting of a buffer solution and certain receptor mechanisms which –’
‘And did it work?’
She smiled. ‘Does it matter? Perhaps now you have your answer, Monsignor. I am Faust; I am Frankenstein. I even have the right accent! I am the obsessed scientist, driven by her greed for godless knowledge, who allowed her own creation to destroy her. There is your story –’
Philmus said, ‘I’ll decide that … Eva, what did it feel like?’
Himmelfarb hesitated, and her face clouded with pixels. ‘Frustrating. Like trying to glimpse a wonderful landscape through a pinhole. The organelles operate at a deep, fundamental level … And perhaps they enjoy a continuous consciousness that reaches back to their formation in the primeval sea five billion years ago. Think of that. They are part of the universe as I can never be, behind the misty walls of my senses; they know the universe as I never could. All I could do – like Dante – is interpret their vision with my own limited language and mathematics.’
So here’s where Dante fits in. ‘You’re saying Dante went through this experience?’
‘It was the source of the Comedy. Yes.’
‘But Dante was not injected with receptors. How could he –’
