A Creed for the Third Millennium (4 page)

'Well, James, between the odds against
winning and the means test, the SCB is guilt personified.'

Dr Christian would have expounded upon
this theme, and not for the first time, but Mama got in too quickly, hungry for
a display of real fireworks. Aside from listening to this nightly shop, Mama's
contact with the clinic consisted of the tours of the bottom floor of 1047 Dr
Christian felt all their new patients should experience, wanting them to see
what could be done with an unheated, naturally lightless, largely airless house
through the long months of winter.

'The SCB is vile!' cried Mama now,
summoning tears. 'What do those heartless wretches of men in Washington know
about the needs of women?'

'Mama, Mama, why do you persist in saying
such things?' asked Dr Christian, irritated. 'Why
shouldn't
they know,
for pity's sake? For that matter, how do you know they're men? And why, even if
they are men, should any man feel the sorrow of enforced barrenness less than a
woman? Do I have a clinic full of women patients? Do I? Mama, next door is
fifty-fifty, women
and
men! And railing against fate is not the answer.
The Second Child Bureau was a sop they threw us in return for our peacefully
signing the Delhi Treaty, and in my opinion the SCB has turned out the worst
feature of that whole miserable, humiliating decade! You should remember the
time a great deal better than I do, Mama, you were a grown woman where I was a
child.'

'Augustus Rome sold us out,' she said,
teeth clenched.

'Oh, Mama! We sold ourselves out! Listen
to one of your generation talk, and you'd swear it fell on us like a bolt out of
the blue. It did not! We sowed the seeds of Gus Rome and the Delhi Treaty way
back in the past. Ninety years ago, when our population stood at a hundred and
fifty million, we were at the apex of our power — and our pride. We had
everything. And what did we do? We threw our money around like it was going out
of style, and the world hated us for it. We held up our know-how as the
ultimate, and the world hated us for it. We offered the peoples of the world a
way of life they had neither the means nor the talent to imitate, and the world
hated us for it. We fought foreign wars in the names of justice and freedom, and
the world hated us for it, not least the peoples we fought for — and I'm not
thereby saying the wars we fought were always altruistic, but a great many of
our little folk believed they were. And even as we went on deluding ourselves
with outmoded thinking — martial
and
altruistic! — at one and the same
time we were busy making orthodox war an impossibility, plague a thing of the past,
religion a laughing stock, and people into digital ciphers.'

He was away, and the sofa was too
confining, so he got to his feet in the ungainly yet oddly graceful series of
unwindings his abnormally long bones demanded, and he paced a room never
designed for pacing, in and out of leaves that shuddered in the breeze of his
fevered progress, rattling pots, sending pedestals a-quaking, while his family
sat in utter thrall, pinned on the thunder of his voice and the lightning of his
eyes; his sister stunned by fear of him and shame of herself, his sisters-in-law
consumed with admiration, his brothers incapable of resenting him, and his
mother — ah! his mother screaming away inside her quiet face with a gargantuan
triumph. For when his passions cohabited with his intellect and he began to
speak, he worked a magic on his listeners that galvanized them. Even in this
most intimate of circles, composed solely of the people who had been hearing him
in full spate for years on years, still he had the power to transfix.

'I don't remember the dawn of the third
millennium, because I was literally born in it. But what did it bring? There
were those who sang hymns and prepared to die in the blaze of the Second Coming,
there were those who sang anthems and prepared to live in the blaze of
technological mastery of the universe. But what
did
it bring? Pain.
Impotence. Anticlimax.
Reality!
A reality harder and crueller and more
unendurable than any reality in the history of our planet since the Black Death.
We were cooling down in a hurry. God knows why! No one else seems to. The best
explanation the best men can offer is a mini ice age. Oh, they talk of currents
and atmospheric layers, continental plates and reversing magnetic poles, solar
force fields and tilting axes, but it's all pure speculation. However — however!
They assure us that in a few more decades or maybe centuries they'll have enough data to tell us exactly why,
and in the meantime, God at least knows. We are assured it's not going to last
too long, a matter of a mere millennium or two — the most infinitesimal mote in
the eye of time! But the reality we face is quite long enough to outlast us and
our posterity for many generations to come. The land mass we can use fruitfully
to live on is shrinking rapidly, most of our available water is on its way to
imprisonment in the polar ice cap, and the population of the world is still far
too large. That's what the dawn of the third millennium brought us! And no
matter how we might try, we can't get around it.'

He shrugged and stopped for perhaps ten
seconds, a pause exquisitely but quite instinctively gauged to be exactly the
right length for maximum effect; and when he continued, his voice had dropped
both in volume and tone, drawing his audience along with his change in
mood.

'Not that we Americans were very worried.
We were the most advanced nation on earth, we knew we could cope. We didn't
think we'd even need to pull in our belts more than a couple of notches. But
what we forgot was the rest of the world. And the rest of the world ganged up on
us! One in, all in. Permit the United States of America to grow and multiply
while the other major powers brought in population reduction programmes they
had
to bring in? No way! One-child families for every single country in
the world for a minimum of four generations and then a two-child maximum in
perpetuity, that was the agreement. Well, we stood out against it utterly alone.
And when the chips were down, we discovered we didn't have enough of anything to
take on the rest of the world united against us. We couldn't have fought a war
that big even at our peak, and let's face it, we were not at our peak. We had
wasted so terribly much of what we once had to waste, most of all the spirit, and the strength of our
people. We'd fried our brains on dope and our hearts on loveless copulation and
our souls on trash.

'When the borders of the Eurocommune met
the borders of the Arabicommune — and try as we did, there was nothing we could
do to prevent that — we had nowhere left to go except the treaty table at
Delhi.'

His voice had dwindled to whispering
sadness; the pyrotechnics were over. Or they would have been over had Mama been
content to let them die; she, who knew with unerring exactitude where the goad
pricked worst, wanted more fireworks.

'I will
never
believe we had to
sign or perish!' she cried. 'Old Gus Rome sold us out for a Nobel Peace
Prize.'

'Mama, you are typical of your whole
generation! Why will you not see that on your generation fell the blow to pride,
the loss of face, the humiliation? It's done! It's done, done, done, done! But
it's my generation that has to pick up the pieces, get things going again, lie
low and guard everything America was and will be again! You suffered the injury
to pride. I
have
no pride! So do I care whether Gus Rome was right or
wrong in committing us to the Delhi Treaty rather than to a war we couldn't win?
No! I don't!'

His brain — it was going to burst, come
spewing out of the sutures of his skull and the orifices of his head… Slow down,
slow down, Joshua Christian! He took his fiery face between his cold hands and
held it, rocking it between them until the tiny cords under the skin of his
temples dwindled away. And then he dropped his hands back to his sides and
resumed his pacing, but more slowly now, his dark eyes flashing in the grottoes
of their sockets.

Suddenly he stopped and turned to look at
his family, still sitting rapt.

'Why do I keep thinking it has to be me?'
he asked them.

No one replied, least of all he himself.
This was a new question he had only begun to ask in recent weeks, and the other
Christians were not yet sure what he meant by it. However, each night that went
by saw him less concerned with the abstract, and more concentrated upon the
personal.

'How can it be me?' he asked. 'I am here
in Holloman, and is Holloman the centre of the human universe? No! It's just
one of a thousand old industrial assholes pathetically farting their way into a
mass grave, waiting for the bulldozers of some future time to push them down and
plant forests. They tell us we have a few centuries to go yet before the
glaciers bulldoze the trees down. Time enough for forests. But once — ah, once
Holloman made shirts as well as scholars, it made typewriters and guns, scalpels
and piano wire. It fuelled learning, it clothed bodies, it propagated words, it
mowed men down, it cut out cancers and it made music possible. Holloman was a
distillation of where Man had arrived at the dawn of the third millennium. And
that's why maybe it's fitting that a man from Holloman could be
chosen.'

No one knew what to answer, but three of
them tried.

'We're with you, Josh,' said James
softly.

'Every inch of the way,' said
Andrew.

'And may God have mercy on us,' said
Mary.

'Sometimes,' said Miriam slowly, teeth
chattering as she divested herself of her layers of clothing and climbed into
her Dr Denton's, 'I think he cannot possibly be human.'

'Oh, Mirry, you've known him for so many
years, and still you can say that?' asked James, already in the bed with his
feet hogging the hot-water bottle. 'Joshua is the most human person I've ever
known.'

'In an inhuman way,' she insisted, then
added quietly, 'He's getting worse. There's been a change this winter. Now he's coming straight out
and asking how can it be him?'

'He's not getting worse, he's getting
better,' James said drowsily. 'Mama says he's coming into his full
strength.'

'I don't know which one of them frightens
me more, Joshua or Mama, so I'm going to echo Mary's comment. May God have mercy
on us, Jimmy-boy! Oh, oh, where are you? Put your arms right around me, I'm so
cold!'

Martha the Mouse scurried into the
kitchen, terrified that she might find Mama still reigning there; every night
she waited patiently until she thought Mama must surely have lain down her
sceptre and gone regally upstairs, then she would make her foray kitchenward to
prepare the hot chocolate Andrew liked to drink once he was tucked up in
bed.

At first she thought the big black shadow
on the white wall was Mama, and her heart galloped, took a flying jump and
missed, pittered away faintly.

But the shadow was Mary's, its author
standing at the stove watching a saucepan of milk.

'No need to go, little one,' said Mary,
tender-toned. 'Keep me company and I'll make your chocolate for you.'

'Oh, no! Don't trouble — I'll do it,
honestly!'

'How can it be trouble when I'm making
some for myself anyway? And why don't you send Drew down for a change? Do him
good to wait on you. You spoil him as much as Mama used to, Mouse.'

'No! No! It — he — I volunteered,
honestly!'

'Oh, honey, why are you always so
scared?' Mary smiled into the surging contents of the saucepan, added powdered
chocolate, stirred well, turned the gas off, and demonstrated that she had
anticipated Martha's advent by pouring not one but three, full mugs of hot
drink. 'You're such a nice little thing,' she said, putting two of the mugs on a
small tray. 'Too nice for us. Far too nice for Drew. And our Joshua will end up
making mincemeat out of you.'

The meek little face lit at mention of
the magical name. 'Oh, Mary, isn't he
wonderfull?'

The moment the Mouse uttered her ecstatic
superlative, all the animation died out of Mary. 'Yes, indeed, he is certainly
that,' she said tiredly.

Her reaction was not lost on Martha,
whose face dimmed. 'I've often wondered—' But she lost courage, couldn't
finish.

'Wondered what?'

'Don't you
like
Joshua?'

And Mary went stiff, trembled. 'I hate
him!' she said.

Mama was excited. Somehow this winter
Joshua had been different. More alive, more enthusiastic, more sure of himself,
more — mystical? Maturity. It had to be maturity. He was thirty-two now, just
about the age when a man or woman tied and neatly spliced the final cords that
bound together brain with hands as one integral unit. He was very like his
father, a late bloomer. Oh, Joe, why did you have to die? You were finally
coming into your own, you were going to make it after all. And yet, isn't it
typical of you that you didn't have the sense to find a Holiday Inn before death
found you?

Only that wouldn't happen to Joshua. For
one thing, he was more than his father. He was her as well. In that lay his
greatest advantage. And she was still young enough to be of help to him. Years
and years of work left in these arms yet. A ton of spirit left, too.