A Creed for the Third Millennium (13 page)

'So what's missing?' she
asked.

'God,' he said simply.

'God,' she echoed.

'Consider their circumstances,' he said,
leaning forward eagerly. 'In the last hundred years these are the people whose
exposure to God has kept on shrinking. Fewer and fewer religious vocations, more
and more churches closing — they lost the very real contact with God they had
always enjoyed. All the major religions of the western world went through
massive internal upheavals during the last century, designed by the various church higher-ups to make the
churches more appealing to the masses. But the result was exactly the opposite.
Church attendance went on falling, so did vocations. Only in smaller or more
affluent communities were there any gains that may have lasted. Now they blame
education of the masses, they blame increased prosperity of the masses, they
blame television, they blame slackened morals — you name it, they blame it.
There's a bit of truth in it all. But the chief blame lies within the churches
themselves, for failing to be flexible, for changing outwardly while refusing to
change inwardly, or for changing too late. Many people had gained an awareness
of their own intrinsic goodness, and maybe that came out of education, out of a
broadening world. People didn't want to hear any more how evil they were, nor
were their lives so grindingly poor that the prospect of living in paradise in
the next life was all that kept them going in this one. They had more, they
wanted more, they felt entitled to more. In
this
life! Yet everyone
betrayed them. Their churches, by not even trying to understand what they
needed. Their governments, by curtailing their liberties, curbing their spending
power, and subjecting them to all the nightmares of nuclear war threats. That,
incidentally, is where you'll find if you dig the only upsurges in church
attendance — when the possibility of nuclear war increased. But people shouldn't
have to turn to God out of fear! They should turn to God as naturally as a child
turns to its mother.' He sighed. 'Well, the Delhi Treaty was a great leveller.
Because in the end it was the very planet we live on that betrayed them most The
threat of nuclear war disappeared, so too did really irresponsible government. I
think what happened between 2004 and the present time is so novel in many
respects that no one has understood it well enough to deal with it positively. A
great many of the nightmare situations which have dogged Man since the beginning
of the race have actually diminished to relative
unimportance —  the prospect of mass
annihilation, territorial usurpation, even starvation. People are looking at
living,
not dying! But the living is so strange. And they've lost God.
The third-millennial world is a totally new kind of world. By its very nature it
can't be hedonistic for anyone, yet it can't be nihilistic either! And we're
doing the same old thing with the people — applying yesterday's concepts to
tomorrow's realities, imposing yesterday's facts on tomorrow's unrealities.
Hanging on to the past, Dr Carriol!'

'This isn't Band C you're talking about,
Dr Christian,' she said. 'It's everyone.'

'Band C
is
everyone.'

'You're not a psychologist, you're a
philosopher.'

'They're both just tags. Why do we have
to tag anything, even God? Millenial neurosis is the result of the fact that the
tags don't fit the goods any more. People don't know where they're going, or why
they have to go. They're just wandering in a spiritual desert without the Godly
star to guide them.'

Her gut was crawling, shivering horrific
tides of joy washed higher and higher up the shores of her mind. A new sensation
for Judith Carriol, physical as well as intellectual. That was what he did to
his audience. But how? Not the ideas themselves, interesting though they were. A
something in the man. A power. A huge — oh, what was the word?
Was
there a word? It was his eyes, and his voice, and the way he moved his
hands, and the tension in his sinews, and — and… When he talked, you
believed
him! He
made
you believe him! You looked into his face and into his
eyes and you heard what he said, and you believed him. As if he had command of
the universe. Or could have had, had he wanted.

'Let's get back to the Band C situation,'
she said, keeping her voice cool and level. Oh, what an effort that was! 'You said you had some answers,
and I'd like to hear them. I'm very much involved in relocation.' 'Well, first
off, relocation has to be reorganized.' She laughed. 'People have been saying
that for years.'

'And rightly so. The problem stems from
the fact that there was a big — I might almost say a mass — movement of people
out of the northern and midwestern cities long before official relocation was
even thought of. It started back about 1970, when the cost of winter heating
began to drive industries south to places like the Carolinas and Georgia. Take
my town, Holloman. Holloman isn't a victim of increased glaciation and the Delhi
Treaty and relocation! Except for Chubb, Holloman was already dead by the turn
of the third millennium. Every one of its factories had moved south. Downtown
Holloman was boarded up ten years before I was born, and I was born at the end
of the year 2000. The first people to go were the ghetto people, the blacks and
Puerto Ricans. Then followed the working-class whites and the middle-class
whites — Americans of Italian, Polish, Irish and Jewish extraction. The bulk of
the elderly disappeared to Florida, the waspier elderly to Arizona. The young —
including many with Ph.D.s who couldn't even find jobs as cashiers in
supermarkets — followed the work. And the sun was where it all was at. One of my
patients is an old man from East Holloman. I call him a patient, but I suppose
these days he's more an institution with us than an actual patient. I can never
bear to discharge people from the clinic if they continue to need us even after
they're cured. This old man is just lonely, and we fill a gap in his life
there's nothing else there to fill. Now his family had lived and worked in
Holloman for five generations. He was one of five children born around the
1950s. By 1985 the father was dead, the mother had gone to live in Florida, his
brother was in Georgia, one of his sisters was living in California, a
second sister was married to a South African and
living there, and the third sister was in Australia. That, he assures me, was
typical of his neighbourhood all through the last quarter of the twentieth
century, and I believe him.'

'
I
don't quite follow what
this has to do with the plight of the Band C relocatees,' she said, smiling to
take the sting out of her words.

'What I'm trying to say,' he said
patiently, 'is that for the Band C people, official relocation did not come like
a bolt out of the blue. They had already been relocating themselves for years.
The difference is that when relocation became a function of the government, they
lost the option of choosing where they would go. Had those decades of voluntary
relocation not gone before, I doubt they would have submitted. But glaciation
and the Delhi Treaty were simply frosting on a cake they'd already been chewing
so long they didn't notice the taste any more.'

'But it isn't that we
want
to
offer them no option,' she protested. 'It's just too big! Later on—'

'No, you mistake me. I'm not accusing
Washington or anyone else of heartlessness, and I do understand very well the
size of the task. The way relocation was planned was well-meaning enough, and
all approaches to the problem were hypothetical. But splitting up the permanent
and the winter-only people into different communities was the wrong thing to do.
I understand why it was done — it's hard to trek back north in April if your neighbour's settled permanently in your and his new southern town. But the crux
of the problem with the Band C people is their homelessness. What is home? Where
is home? Is home the place where they rest between November and April? Or is
home the place where they work between April and November? I can tell you what I
think. I think the northern and midwestern cities already too cold to support
industries without massive shoring up should be closed down altogether. Detroit, Buffalo,
Chicago, Boston, the rest. I think with the possible exception of the Band D
rural folk, all relocation towns should be made over into year-round centres
where people can settle properly, live
and
work. I also think there
should be a complete shakeup, full integration of Band C people with everyone
else, on the same new streets in the same new towns. The old stratifications
aren't necessary and shouldn't be perpetuated — nor should we be creating new
ones. Everyone from highest to lowest suffers the SCB and lack of winter fuel
and lack of private transport. Almost everyone has enough in common with
everyone else these days to make it possible for everyone to get along
together.'

She smiled. 'A bit garbled at the end,
but I get it.'

He didn't smile; she found herself
wondering if indeed he had much sense of humour, and concluded he probably
didn't.

'It isn't enough any more to live with
self at the sole centre of the personal universe. If it ever was,' he said, half
to himself. 'Spiritually the Communists are very much better off than we,
because they've got the State to worship. We love America passionately, but we
don't worship it. Our people must find God again. They must learn to live again
with God
and
self at the centre of their personal universes. Only not the
same old Judaic God distorted by yet another recutting. He's been demolished and
put together again by so many men — Paul, Augustine, Luther, Knox, Smith, Wesley
— and on and on. And He was a graft in the first place, between the God of the
Jews and the Roman pantheon. He's a human concept. Yet God is not human! God is
God, is ever and always simply God. I tell my patients,
believe.
I tell
them, if they cannot believe in any existing concept of God, then they must find
their own concept. But they
must
believe! For if they don't, they will
never be whole.'

Dr Carriol caught her breath, visited by
an enlightenment so clear and defined she saw a whole
world unfolding; not a visitation from God, any God, but a visitation from her
own intellect. Without knowing it, he was telling her how and what to
do.

'Oh, bravo!' she cried. Unimpelled by her
conscious brain, her hand went out to rest on his. 'I would dearly like to see
you get your chance to prove your contentions, Joshua Christian!'

He blinked, taken aback at this fervid
response after so much cool listening (he was not, he realized, used to cool
listening). Then he stared down at the white slender sinister arachnoid fingers
curled around his own; he removed them gingerly with his other hand. 'Thank
you,' he said, rather lamely.

The mood was over. He had pulled down the
shades and switched off the light, even to himself.

She rose to her feet. 'Time to go back, I
think.'

That night in her room Dr Carriol paced
the floor, oblivious to the chill; the heating had been cut back severely at ten
o'clock. All good guests were supposed to be abed and snuggled down by then, and
if they were not, they had perforce to suffer the consequences.

Damn fool thing she did, touching him!
From the moment he felt her hand he had shied away from her as if from acid.
This was not a man to appeal to through his hormones. But still, if he could
provoke a Judith Carriol into putting out her hand in the first place — what a
man!

And somewhere between the midnight moon
and the rising of the sun all misgiving vanished. Dr Joshua Christian, unknown,
untried, was the man. What a man.
The
man! If he could affect her that
way, he could affect millions. No doubt about it. And finally she understood how
tortuous were the ramifications branching out from the central conception behind
Operation Search. Maybe all along her subconscious had divined what the overall
pattern must be, but the layers of thought that had risen higher
than that part of her she called her living consciousness had never sniffed down
the alleyways and corridors she saw stretching away now. Yes. He was the
man.

From here on in it was merely a question
of logistics, getting the man to his millions. Something was working in his mind
already, he was warm wax that only needed shaping.

However, a major overhaul of the
relocation system was not the answer.
He
was the answer, complete in
himself. In him they would find all their answers. In him they would find
healing for their pain. And she was going to give him to them. She. No one
else.

Somehow the woman had spoiled the whole
of the rest of his day, thought Dr Christian, lying in his bed between layers of
down. It was not easy any more, controlling the tides that flowed sucking in and
out of his mind and tossed the frail ship of his soul up and down and around as
if he the person he the being he the living house no longer possessed true
validity compared with that awful force working within him. All wondering and
afraid, he debated the nature of that force, whether its origins were internal
or external, whether he had generated it, or it had generated him, unknowing and
uncaring, to fuel him and use him and toss him aside when his purpose was
fulfilled.

He had to search. Through this long
winter he had thought and thought and thought. That his time was running out,
that he had something to do. But
what?
He didn't know. A mission? He
didn't know! Yet he was aware that he would not be able to resist himself much
longer. Resist himself doing
what?
He didn't know! He just didn't know
what he had to do or how he had to do it.