A Creed for the Third Millennium (42 page)

Billy was in no mind to talk, for though
conditions and in-air winds were not bad, he disliked night flying these days;
the mountains were looming ever closer as they moved westward. His instruments
were superb, he could see the height and contour of every upthrust in the land
on the big phosphorescent screen just above his right knee, and provided
altimeter and the rest were exactly calibrated, he knew they were as safe as at
ground level. Still, he was in no mind to talk.

Dr Christian was happy, and in no mind to
talk. How glad they had been to see him today! How glad every day. The pattern
on the loom of time which spelled out his destiny was shaping, shaping, growing,
growing. Still obscure in its overall picture, but beginning to reveal some of
the details. So long they had waited for him! So long too he had waited, though
that was an infinitude of shortness in comparison.

Mama was in no mind to talk. What was the
matter with Judith? Why had she looked so? Oh, there was trouble coming! How to
discover its direction, how to run for cover? They had committed some frightful
sin in her absence, she and Joshua, and Judith's cool lustrous brain had
condemned them without trial.

The cool lustrous brain certainly put Dr
Carriol in no mind to talk. It was not cool. It was not lustrous. A huge awful
outrage and anger had blasted coolness to white heat, lustrousness to
incandescence.
Think!
She had to think! But thought, useful productive
thought, was impossible. So she turned her face away from the other occupants of
the little cabin, and turned her heart away as well.

When they walked into the motel which
offered a haven to the few visitors Sioux Falls could expect at this time of
year, Dr Carriol pushed Mama to her room as she might have shut an animal out
for the night, and rounded on Dr Christian grimly, purposefully.

'Joshua, please come to my room,' she
said curtly. 'I want to talk to you.'

His tired slow footsteps followed her
sharp thudding ones the short distance from the foyer to where her room was;
when she closed her door and shut them in together he sighed, and he smiled his
sweetest, most special smile just for her.

'I'm so glad to see you! I missed you
very much, Judith.'

She scarcely heard him. 'What was the
meaning of that little exhibition at the Sioux City airport tonight?' Her voice
came grinding out from between clenched teeth.

'Exhibition?' He stared at her as if she
were receding from him at light-speed. 'What exhibition?'

'Letting those people kneel to you!
Letting those people adore you! Touching that idiot woman as if you had the
right —
and
the might! —
to bless her! Just who do you think you are? Jesus Christ?' Her hands writhed,
coiling their fingers in upon each other fruitlessly, then she reached out to
grasp at a table to steady herself, to keep herself upright, and the table began
to shake, to rattle. 'I have never seen such a filthy, disgusting exhibition of
sheer egomania in all my life! How dare you? How
dare
you?'

His skin had gone grey, his cold-festered
lips worked in and out like uncomfortable new covering on old dry
teeth.

'She — she didn't! She — she wasn't! She
knelt for help! She — she
needed
something from me, and God help me, I
didn't know what! So I touched her because I didn't know what else to
do!'

'Bullshit! Fucking crap! You're not
merely on an ego trip, Joshua Jesus Christian Christ! You're on a god trip! And
it's got to stop! It's got to stop right this minute! Do you hear me? Don't you
dare
let anyone kneel to you! Oh, don't you
dare
let people
worship you! You are no different from any other man, and don't you ever forget
that! If there is any reason in the world why you are where you are and who you
are on this day, that reason is
me! I
put you here,
I
created you!
And I did not put you here to act out a second coming, to cash in on the
fortuitous coincidence of your name by encouraging people to remember you not as
one of themselves but as a divine being! The reincarnation of Jesus Christ in
the third-millennial person of Joshua Christian! What a mean, shoddy, despicable
trick to play on these hapless people! Trading on their need and their
credulity! It's got to stop! Do you hear me? It has got to stop this
instant!'

She was foaming at the mouth, actually
foaming at the mouth; she could feel the bubbles clinging all around the corners
of her lips, and sucked them in with a long hiss.

And he stood looking at her as if she had
found the magical plug at the back of his bronze
heel, unstoppered the tide of ichor that had kept his titanic will pushing him
on from town to town without feeling the cold, the exhaustion, the
despair.

'Is that truly what you think?' he asked,
whispering.

'Yes!' she said, unable to stop herself
from saying yes.

His head shook slowly from side to side.
'It isn't true!' Shaking, shaking. 'It isn't true! It — isn't —
true!'

She flung away from him to look at the
wall. 'I am too angry to continue this discussion! Kindly go to bed! Go to bed,
Joshua! Go to bed and sleep like any — other — mortal — human —
man!'

Usually a tirade helps, when the object
of such bitter, overwhelming rage is on hand to berate. Not tonight. Not in
Sioux Falls. Not Joshua Christian. At the end of it, after he had stumbled from
her room, she actually felt worse. More and more angry. More filled with more
emotions than she had ever suspected she possessed. She couldn't go to bed. She
couldn't even sit down, let alone lie down. So she stood with her scorching
forehead against the freezing wall of her motel bedroom and wished herself
dead.

Dr Christian's room was quite warm; these
good kind people had somehow managed to give him what they thought he would most
need. Warmth. But he didn't think he would ever feel warm again. Is that true,
what she said to me? Can it be true? Why was I ever born, to have to listen to
that? It isn't true! It
can't
be true!

The legs which drove like pistons up and
down day after day and had long grown used to putting forth in abnormal effort
suddenly would not could not did not hold him up. He collapsed to the floor and
lay there, divorced from all sensation save the terrible grief of understanding
how badly he had failed.

They didn't need a god! They needed a
man! The moment divinity invaded a man, he ceased to
be
a man. No matter
what the books said or how sacred the books were supposed to be, he, Joshua
Christian,
knew
a god could not suffer, a god could not experience pain,
a god could not be at one with the people he was god of. Only as a man could
anyone help Man.

Through a dense foggy wall he plucked
feebly at memory, tried to picture a woman on her knees to him, and after what
Judith Carriol had said, it seemed to him looking back that she must indeed have
knelt to him in adoration. And it also seemed to him that he had indeed
responded to her adoration as a god would have responded. Accepting it as his
right. A man would have repudiated it with horror and rebuke. No, no! He hadn't
interpreted the incident that way at the time! He had merely seen someone so
bowed down with her pain that she could no longer remain on her feet — her
pain
had driven her to her knees, not her love! Help me! she had cried
without a voice, help me, my fellow man! And he had reached out a hand to touch
her, thinking that his were healing hands, and could help.

But if in truth she had knelt to worship
him, then everything he had done was in vain. Everything he had done was a
blasphemy. If he was not one of them, if he was not a man as they were men, then
what he did and could do had no meaning. If he was not one of them, and
therefore one with them, he offered them ashes. And if he was not one of them,
but was one above them, then they had used him to steal an essence they could
not hope to find for themselves. They were little better than vampires, and he
was their willing victim.

His body jerked, writhed, shuddered. He
wept desolately. He was broken. Broken man or broken idol? What did it matter?
He was broken. And there was no one to pick up the pieces, no one to put
him back together again. For Judith Carriol had abandoned him.

In the morning he looked very ill. Aghast
and ashamed of her wild outburst, Dr Carriol suddenly realized that though he
had often looked tired to death, never before had he looked ill. When her fury
finally quit her in the middle watches of the night, she knew that she had
fatally tampered with powers she neither understood, nor respected. Had she
respected them, she could never have been made so angry. She realized that what
had enraged her to the point of madness was the knowledge that this puppet king,
this image of her creation, was usurping powers for himself that she had not
granted him, and did not consent to grant him.

After the physical chill of her room
permeated her flesh so deeply that her anger curled up and shrivelled up and
died away, she understood her mistake. What bothered her was not his usurpation
of powers she did not consent to grant him; what bothered her was that she had
begun to think of herself as the one with the real power, and he had simply
shown her beyond any shadow of a doubt that what lay within him could not by
definition be anything she was capable of creating. When the king-maker is
unmade by the king, towers fall, fortresses crumble. All in the mind. Her mind.
His mind.

How to repair the damage she had done?
She didn't know, because she couldn't even begin to divine what the damage was.
Nor was the matter one she could discuss with him in the beautiful cool sanity
of reason and logic; it lacked both. Nor could she attempt an apology. He would
not even understand why she was apologizing.

For the first time in her life, Dr Judith
Carriol was forced to admit that what she had said and done could not be mended,
at least by herself.

Mama scuttled into breakfast sideways
like a wary crab, took one look at Dr Carriol's face
and gasped, then looked at her son, and began to flutter and keen. Dr Carriol
put an end to that with a single glance. Mama sat silent, eyes down.

'Joshua, you're not well this morning,'
Dr Carriol said very crisply and calmly. 'It might be better if you didn't try
to go out on foot today. Use the car.'

'I will walk,' he said, easing his lips
back from his teeth painfully. 'I will walk. I have to walk.'

And walk he did. Looking so ill that Mama
sat huddled in the car and let the tears fall down her face unheeded and
untended. He talked, he advised, he listened, he comforted, he walked again, he
spoke in the town hall with great power and feeling, but not about God. When
asked questions about God, he answered evasively if possible, otherwise as
shortly as possible, giving as his reason a new dilemma within himself that had
to be sorted out. Hearing this, Dr Carriol tensed. Wished with might and main
and heart and soul that she could turn back the clock. Cursed her stupidity, her
lack of control, the emotional weaknesses she hadn't known she possessed. Not
that any local person in Sioux Falls recognized the difference in him, for no
local person had seen him in the flesh before, and even so ill, so cast down, he
had an enormous presence. The gulf between what had been glorious spontaneity,
and now was merely iron determination, was lost on the pitifully small remnant
of the population of Sioux Falls who had stayed there during the winter of
2032-33.

On he went: North Dakota, Nebraska,
Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah. On and on and on in hideous cold,
always walking, walking as if his life depended upon it.

But the spiritual ichor that had warmed
him outward from the centre of his soul had bled away when Dr Judith Carriol
pulled out the stopper. And in the new bleak ice of his soul, his body began to
crumble. It ached. It itched. It cracked. It festered. It bled. Every passing
week saw some new external evidence of his internal disintegration. Abscesses.
Boils. Rashes. Bruises. Cracks. Blisters. He told no one, he showed no one, he
sought no medical aid. At night he ate as little as he ate during the day, then
dropped like a stone on his bed, and closed his eyes, and told himself he
slept.

In Cheyenne he fainted, and it was many
minutes before he came round fully. No, no, there was nothing seriously wrong, a
weakness that had come and gone, that was all.

And oh the grief. The terrible
sorrow.

Not Billy, not Dr Carriol, not Mama was
able to plead, to remonstrate, to reason with him; even to bully him. He simply
mentally removed himself from them, and from all external evidence of who or
what he was. As far as Dr Carriol could ascertain, he was even ignorant of the
pending March of the Millennium, for whenever someone mentioned it to him, his
face did not change, did not register interest. He was a walking machine, a
talking machine.

And he began to speak continuously about
his mortality. More and more he protested that he was only a man, that he was a
very poor and imperfect specimen of the breed, that he too was doomed to
die.

'I am a man!' he would cry to anyone who
would listen, and then he would search their eyes feverishly for a sign that
they believed him; and when he imagined that they looked upon him as a god he
would preach them strange sermons going round and round in ever-decreasing
circles, all to do with the fact that he was a man even as they were. But of
course those who heard him did not hear him; it was enough to see
him.