"Go on."

"Think of the birth of the universe as a bubble forming at the center of that ocean. Forming and expanding like an explosion, displacing the water at the speed of light."

"All right."

"What happens inside that bubble is what I saw in my later dreams. The births of galaxies and stars, the formation of planets, all the rest. I saw the history of our universe unfold. You called it 'Hubble telescope stuff.'"

"I remember."

"Eventually my dreams focused on the Earth. Meteors crashed into the primitive atmosphere, amino acids formed. Evolution went from inorganic to organic. Microbes became multicellular, and the race was on, right up the chain to fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, primates ..."

"Man," Rachel finished.

"Yes. It took ten billion years just to get to biological evolution. Then hundreds of millions of years of mutation to get to man. And all that added up to nothing in the eyes of God."

Rachel knit her brows. "Why? Didn't God intend all those creatures to exist? To evolve?"

"No. It's not like that. God was surprised by all of this."

"Surprised?"

"Well ... I think the feeling was more like deja vu. He'd seen something like it before. Not exactly like it, but what he saw made him remember things."

She turned in her seat and stared at me. "And the creation of life meant nothing to him?"

"Not in the beginning. But then-out of that teeming mass of life-a spark as bright as the Big Bang flashed in his eye."

"What spark?"

"Consciousness. Human intelligence. Somewhere in Africa, a tool-making hominid with a relatively large brain perceived the fact of its own death. It perceived a future in which it would no longer exist. That hominid became not only self-conscious, but conscious of time. That moment was an epiphany for God."

"Why?"

"Because consciousness was the first thing in that terrifying explosion of matter and energy that God recognized as being like himself."

"That's what God is? Awareness?"

"I think so. Awareness without matter or energy. Pure information."

Rachel was silent for a while, and I couldn't read her eyes. "Where is all this going?" she asked finally.

"To a very provocative place. But let's stay with the dreams for now. Man evolved quickly. He tilled the ground, built cities, recorded his history. And God felt something like hope."

"Hope for what?"

"That he might finally learn the nature of his own being."

"Did God answer his questions by watching mankind?"

"No. Because after a certain point, evolution stopped. Not biological evolution, but psychological evolution. Almost as quickly as man created societies, he destroyed them. He sacked cities, salted fields, slaughtered his brothers, raped his sisters, abused his children. Man had unlimited potential, yet he was trapped in a cycle of self-destructive behavior, unable to evolve beyond an essentially brutal existence."

"And God had nothing to do with this?"

"No. God can't control what happens inside the bubble. He doesn't exist in the world of matter and energy. Not as God, anyway. He could only watch and try to understand. As the centuries passed, he became obsessed with man, as he'd once been obsessed with himself. Why couldn't man break the cycle of violence and futility? God focused all his being on the bubble, searching for a weak point, for a way into the matrix of matter and energy that was displacing him."

"And?"

"It happened. God found himself looking at the bubble from the inside. Through the eyes of a human being. Feeling human skin, smelling the Earth, looking up into a mother's face. His mother's face."

Rachel had gone still. "You're talking about Jesus now, aren't you? You're saying God went into Jesus of Nazareth."

I nodded.

"You're saying exactly what Christians believe. Only . . . you make it sound like an accident."

"It was, in a way. God exerted his focus upon the world, and Jesus was the door that opened to him. Why that particular child? Who knows?"

"Did all of God enter Jesus?"

"No. Imagine a burning candle. You hold a second candle up to that flame, light it, then take it away. The new candle has been lit, but the original flame remains. That's how it worked. Part of God went into Jesus. The rest remained outside our universe. Outside the bubble."

"But Jesus had God's power?"

"No. Inside the bubble, God is subject to the laws of our universe."

"And the miracles? Walking on water? Raising the dead?"

"Jesus was a healer, not a magician. Those stories were useful to those who built a religion around him."

She was shaking her head like someone with vertigo. "I don't know what to say."

"Think about it. Very little is known about Jesus' early life. We have the legend of his birth. Some childhood stories that are probably apocryphal. Then suddenly he springs to prominence fully formed at the age of thirty. I've often wondered why people don't ask more questions about Jesus' youth. Was he a perfect child? Did he love a woman? Father children? Did he sin like all men? Why this huge gap in his life?"

"I suppose you have an answer?"

"I think I do. God entered the world to try to understand why mankind could evolve no further. To do that, he lived as a man. And by the time he reached adulthood, he had his answer. The pain and futility of human life was made bearable by the ineffable joys that human beings could experience. Beauty, laughter, love . . . even the simple pleasures of eating fruit or looking at an infant. Through Jesus, God felt these wonderful things. Yet he also saw the doom of mankind as a species."

"Why?"

"Man had flourished in a violent world because he had the primitive instincts to match that world. Yet if he was to continue to evolve, man had to put those instincts behind him. Evolution would never remove them. Evolution wasn't designed to produce moral beings. It's a blind engine, a mechanism of competitive warfare geared only toward survival."

Rachel looked thoughtful. "I think I see where you're going."

"Tell me."

"'Through Jesus, God tried to persuade man to turn away from his primitive instincts, away from the animal side of himself."

"Exactly. What did Jesus say and do? Forget what his followers grafted onto his life. Just think of his words and deeds."

"'Love thy neighbor as thyself. If a man strikes you on the right cheek, offer him your left.' He denied his human instincts."

"'Give up all that you have and follow me,'" I quoted. "Jesus lived by example, and people were inspired to follow that example."

"But he was killed for that."

"Inevitably."

Rachel bit her bottom lip and looked out the blue square of the plane's window. "And his crucifixion? What happened on the cross?"

"He died. The flame that was in him returned to its source. It left the world of matter and energy behind."

"There was no resurrection?"

"Not of the body."

Rachel sighed heavily, then turned to me as though afraid to hear what I would say next. "What did God do then?"

"He despaired. He'd done his best as a man, and though he influenced many, his message was embellished, twisted, exploited. For two thousand years, man's chief endeavor seemed to be finding more efficient ways to destroy his own kind. Until ..."

"What?"

"A few months ago."

"You're talking about Project Trinity now?"

I nodded. "Within Trinity lay the seed of salvation, for man and God. If human consciousness could be liberated from the body, then the primitive instincts that had crippled man for so long could finally be left behind."

"So, what did God do?"

"He focused on the world again. But in a much smaller way. On our little group of six. Godin, Fielding, Nara, Skow, Klein . . . me."

"David . . . are you saying what I think you are?"

"God wanted back inside the bubble."

"Why?"

"Because he saw that the man most likely to reach the next state of evolution-what we call the Trinity state- was as likely to destroy mankind as he was to save it."

"Peter Godin?"

"Yes."

She looked down at her lap. "Are you telling me God chose you to stop Peter Godin from entering the Trinity computer?"

"Yes."

She nodded as though silently confirming a diagnosis, then looked up at me. I'd nodded that way countless times myself. "David, you told me back in Tennessee that you felt you'd been chosen by God. Do you feel that God is inside you now?"

"Yes."

"Just as he was in Jesus?"

"Part of that original flame is in me now. That's why I had all those dreams of Jerusalem, and why they felt like memories. They were memories."

"Oh, David . . . oh, no." She tilted her head back and tried to blink away tears.

"You don't have to believe me. Soon you'll see with your own eyes."

"See what? What are you going to do?"

"Stop Godin."

She turned squarely to me, her eyes resolute. "I'm going to tell you what I think. I have to, because we're going to land soon, and you've asked General Kinski to drop us into a very dangerous situation. One you're not remotely ready to go into."

"Rachel-"

"May I please tell you what I think?"

"Yes, but you didn't let me finish. I told you that to understand the beginning, you had to understand the end."

She closed her eyes, and I saw that her patience had been exhausted. I sighed in defeat. "Go ahead."

She looked hard at me. "That man sitting paralyzed in that dark room isn't God. It's you. You've never recovered from what happened to Karen and Zooey."

I couldn't believe it. She'd gone full circle, back to her original diagnosis. "And everything I've told you today?"

"Reduced to its simplest terms, what have you told me? You're on a mission from God. A mission from God to save mankind. Do you agree?"

"I guess so, yes."

"Don't you see? By believing this fantastic story, your mind escapes the terrible pain of your family's loss."

"How?"

"Inside this complex delusion, the deaths of Karen and Zooey make sense. It was their deaths that made you write your book. It was your book that got you appointed to Project Trinity. If you believe God put you inside Trinity to stop Armageddon, then the deaths of your family have meaning, rather than being a senseless tragedy."

I squeezed the armrests to try to bleed off my frustration.

"David, you have a degree in theoretical physics from MIT. Your brain could construct this fantasy while you were balancing your checkbook."

"Karen and Zooey died five years ago," I said. "Wait. Forget that argument. Do you remember what my father said about religion?"

"What?"

"Mankind is the universe becoming conscious of itself."

"I remember."