Bible Stories for Adults by James Morrow Page A

teenager in Bayonne. This morning, goaded by hunger, he broke into a sporting goods store, grabbed a fiberglass hunting bow and a quiver of arrows, and pedaled off toward the Delaware Water Gap. He hopes to bag a deer by nightfall. Lots of luck, Danny.
    Like I said, I got it right this time. I’ve won. No more tasteless skyscrapers. No more arrogant space shuttles or presumptuous particle accelerators. Damn, but I’m good. Oh, Me, but I’m clever.
    I guess that’s why I’ve got the job.

Spelling God with the Wrong Blocks
The world is not a prison-house but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.
—Edwin Arlington Robinson
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    1 J ULY 2059
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    P ROCYON -5, Southwest Continent, Greenrivet University. The air here is like something you’d find inside a chain-smoker’s lungs, but no matter—we are still exultant from our success on Arcturus-9. In a mere two weeks, not only did Marcus and I disabuse the natives of their belief that carving large-breasted stone dolls cures infertility, we also provided them with the rudiments of scientific medicine. I am confident that, upon returning to Arc-9, we shall find public hospitals, diagnostic centers, outpatient clinics, immunization programs . . . The life of a science missionary may be unremunerative and harsh, but the spiritual rewards are great!
    Our arrival at Greenrivet’s space terminal entailed perhaps the most colorful welcome since HMS
Bounty
sailed into Tahiti. The natives—androids every one—turned out en masse bearing gifts, including thick, fragrant leis that they ceremoniously lowered about our necks. Marcus is allergic to flowers of all species, but he bore his ordeal stoically. Even if he were not my twin brother, I would still regard him as the most talented science missionary of our age. It’s a fair guess he’ll go directly from this ministry to a full position at the Heuristic Institute—he has the stuff to become a truly legendary Archbishop of Geophysics.
    Amid the shaving mugs and the neckties, one of the androids’ gifts struck me as odd: a reprint of Charles Darwin’s
The Origin of Species
—the original 1859 version—hand lettered on gold-leaf vellum and bound in embossed leather. After giving me the volume, a rusting and obsolete Model 605 pressed his palms together and raised his arms skyward, crossing them to form a metallic X. “‘The innumerable species, genera, and families with which this world is peopled are all descended, each within its own class or group, from common parents,’” the robot recited. “The
Origin:
fourteenth chapter, section seven, paragraph four, verse one.”
    â€œThank you,” I replied, though the decrepit creature seemed not to hear.
    The president of Greenrivet University, Dr. Polycarp, is a Model 349 with teeth like barbed wire and blindingly bright eyes. He drove us from the spaceport in his private auto, then gave us a Cook’s tour of the school, a clutch of hemispheric buildings rising from the tarmac like concrete igloos. In the faculty lounge we met Professor Hippolytus and Dean Tertullian. Polycarp and his colleagues
seem
rational enough. No doubt their minds are clogged with myths and superstitions that Marcus and I shall have to remove through the plumber’s helper of logical positivism.
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    2 J ULY 2059
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    What sort of culture might machine intelligence evolve in the absence of human intervention? Before the Great Economic Collapse, the sociobiology department of Harvard University became obsessed with this provocative question. They got a grant. And so Harvard created Greenrivet, populating it with Series-600 androids and abandoning them to their own devices . . .
    Our cottage, which Dr. Polycarp insists on calling a house, is an unsightly pile of stone plopped down next to a marsh, host to mosquitoes and