Blameless in Abaddon by James Morrow Read Free Book Online Page B

were aboard, Kimberly plucked a megaphone from its cradle behind the engineer’s booth. The tram lurched forward, gliding into a tunnel speckled with twinkling lights, a kind of cylindrical planetarium.
    â€œEach of these constellations is mentioned in the Bible,” Kimberly announced into her megaphone. “Job 38:31, for example. ‘Can you bind the cluster of the Pleiades or loose Orion’s belt?’”
    A mile down the monorail, the tunnel opened into a room suggesting an immense Antarctic cavern. Patches of frost covered the tiled walls. Icicles hung from the ceiling like stalactites.
    â€œStation one: Preservation Central,” Kimberly lectured as the tram slowed to a crawl. “I could tell the engineer to stop and let y’all explore, but, believe me, you don’t want to. This room connects directly to our cooling chamber, and the temperature out there averages”—she mimed a shudder—“
brrr
, fourteen degrees! See that humongous silver tank? It contains nearly eighty thousand gallons of high-pressure Freon-114. After leaving the tank, the Freon spills into that huge green basketball thing, which allows it to reach a much lower pressure, then it slithers into that big snaky tube over yonder, where,
pffff
, it boils away, absorbing lots of heat in the bargain and thereby keeping our Main Attraction as cold as a penguin’s kiss. Meanwhile, that big motor in the corner sucks up the Freon vapor and squeezes it so tight it starts wanting to change back into a liquid. The Freon gets its wish the minute it reaches that
other
big snaky tube. See how we’ve got lots of water pouring down like Jehovah sending the Flood? That’s our trick for speeding up the condensation. Once the Freon’s become a liquid again, it returns to the silver tank, and the whole process starts over. Anybody got a question?”
    Not one person on the tram, Martin guessed, had been able to follow Kimberly’s lecture. They all remained mute.
    The cavern narrowed. The tram sped a thousand yards into the next station: another subterranean room, dominated by the most astonishing contraption Martin had ever seen. A steel-plated pump as big as a jetliner intersected a labyrinthine network of six-foot-wide transparent Plexiglas pipes, which were in turn connected to four igloo-sized aeration domes surmounted by an accordion-shaped bellows so gigantic it could have fanned a forest fire. Each pipe held a churning river, blue when it entered the domes, red on departure. A rhythmic thundering filled the air, a steady
thok-thok-thok
that rocked the tram back and forth on its rail.
    â€œStation two: Cardiovascular Control,” Kimberly explained into the megaphone, her voice building toward a shout. “As y’all know, not everybody agrees with us that His brain has no need of blood. Here at Celestial City USA we respect all viewpoints, so we keep Him hooked up to that device on your left: a Lockheed 7000 heart-lung machine. Every day of the year over a million gallons of O-positive blood are shunted into those aeration domes, each with a volume of two thousand cubic feet. Once inside, the blood is warmed, oxygenated, and filtered of impurities before getting pumped into His veins. The plasma itself—this part always kind of chokes me up—the plasma itself comes from just about every nation on Earth. Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims have all made donations, even an atheist named Jules Wembly. If any of you would like to augment the flow before leaving the City, just drop by one of the clinics conveniently located at each exit. Any questions?”
    An emaciated young man with four Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on his forehead raised his hand. “May I leave the tram for a minute?” he yelled over the roar of the heart-lung machine. “I want to touch one of the pipes.”
    â€œWe don’t allow that.”
    â€œPlease.”
    â€œIt’s simply