A Creed for the Third Millennium (48 page)

'Every second of every minute of every
hour of every day I wish it! But the pattern must be finished before I
finish.'

'What pattern?'

His eyes came to life as briefly as the
sputter in a lit stick of incense. 'If I knew that, Judith, I would be what I am
not — I would be more than a man.'

And he went out to walk.

He walked, millions followed. From
Manhattan to New Brunswick on the first day, though never so far so fast again
as that, and never with so many people. Through Philadelphia and Wilmington and
Baltimore he walked, to the outskirts of Washington, D.C., on the eighth
day.

Those who walked with him were shyer
after the New York marchers went home, though some of the gaudy ebullient New
Yorkers did go all the way with him. And never were there less than a million
people on the move. Down I-95 on his boardwalk he went, followed on high by
helicopters, led by the network television vans, with his family right behind
him, and that cheery waving dog-tired little band of government dignitaries in
the vanguard of the crowd. From New Brunswick on, the Governor of New Jersey
came; the Governor of Pennsylvania joined up in Philadelphia, where Dr Christian
spoke briefly. At his age and weight the Governor of Maryland had opted to
attach himself to the reception committee in Washington; but the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, nineteen U.S. senators, over a hundred U.S. congressmen, and half a
hundred assorted generals, admirals and astronauts were slipped in among the
walking VIPs as Dr Christian strode through the drab red-brick and half-finished
ambitious public works of Baltimore, abandoned for good at the turn of the
century.

He walked. Dr Carriol did not know how,
but he walked. And each night when he stopped she ministered to the slowly
dissolving ruin of his body, each night Mama sewed a fresh pair of pure silk
pyjama pants inside his next day's trousers, each night the family tried to keep
their spirits up when Dr Christian was removed from them by his jealous
guardian, who, had they only known it, was chiefly concerned to keep from them
any idea of Joshua's condition and pain.

Dr Christian himself had ceased to think
after New Brunswick. The pain had stopped in New York, the thinking in New
Brunswick, and the walking would stop in Washington. All he kept in his mind was
Washington, Washington, Washington.

Something in his brain betrayed him. Not
the conscious part, for it understood very well that he had only arrived on the
outskirts of Washington, at a place called Greenbelt. The last night's bivouac.
Yet here he let his guard down, he relaxed as if he had actually gone all the
way to the Potomac. Instead of going straight into the cubicle which housed his
whirlpool tub and his bed, he sat with his family in the tent's main area,
talking and laughing like his old self; instead of drinking a bowl of soup, he
made a good meal in the company of his family, veal stew and mashed potatoes and
string beans, with coffee and cognac afterwards.

He was in severe pain; Dr Carriol had
acquired sufficient expertise by now to see the little telltale signs of it, the
way his eyes did not focus so much on faces as on whole walls, with faces in their
middles somewhere, the muscular spasms that followed a wrong movement (for the
family's benefit he called them cramps), the stretched lifeless look of the skin
over his cheeks and nose, the inconsequence of his conversation.

In the end she had to order him to bath
and bed, at which point he went with her willingly.

No sooner had she turned on the air feed
to the tub and firmly closed the canvas flap across the entrance to the cubicle
than he rushed to the toilet she had added to the facilities after New
Brunswick. He vomited until he had nothing left to vomit, painfully, dreadfully,
racked by paroxysms that seemed to come all the way up from the calves of his
kneeling legs. Until he was sure he was finally done he refused to move, then
had to be helped to his bed; he sat on its edge hunched over, breathing
stertorously, his face so drained and strained it was the colour of a black
pearl.

The explanations and the recriminations,
the accusations and the exculpations, all were finished in New Brunswick. Since
then Dr Christian and Dr Carriol had drawn very close, fused by a bond of pain
and suffering, united in the face of the world to preserve his secret at any
cost. She was his servant and his nursemaid, the only witness of his battle to
continue, the sole human being who understood how frail was his hold on the self
he called Joshua Christian.

So now she held his head against her
belly while he laboured to drag a little air into his lungs, then when he was
easier she sponged his face and hands, held a cup and a basin while he rinsed
his mouth. In silence. In conjunction.

Only when he was undressed and put into
clean silk pyjamas with all his wounds anointed did he speak, slowly,
indistinctly.

'I
will walk tomorrow,' was what
he said.

Further speech was not possible, he
shivered too much. The skin of his lips was blue.

'Can you sleep?' she asked.

The ghost of a smile around chattering
teeth. He nodded and closed his eyes immediately.

Until she was sure he did indeed sleep
she remained with him, sitting quietly on a chair and never letting her eyes
wander from his face. Then she rose to her feet and tiptoed out to telephone
Harold Magnus.

Finally freed from his White House exile,
he was about to sit down to a very late and much anticipated dinner when Dr
Carriol rang.

'I have to see you at once, Mr Magnus,'
she said. 'It cannot wait, and I mean that.'

He was not displeased, he was furious,
but he knew Judith Carriol better than to argue. His home was across the river
in outer Arlington, which made the Department of the Environment closer by far
to Green-belt; besides which, he loathed seeing staff in his home, and he
loathed rushing a dinner. 'My office, then,' he said curtly, and hung up. The
dinner was Nova Scotia smoked salmon followed by coq au vin, so it had better
wait until he returned.
Fuck!

The Department of the Environment had
been built after extreme petroleum rationing was instituted, so it had no
helicopter pad, and its roof had long been sacrificed to a growing colony of
store rooms for the accommodation of paper. Therefore Dr Carriol decided to
travel in from Greenbelt by car, commandeering one of the vehicles reserved for
the use of the dignitaries walking with Dr Christian. The distance was not
great, but the journey took nearly three hours. Washington had filled up with
people waiting to join the last leg of the March of the Millennium, the people
were in high carnival mood and spilled everywhere across the roads, even camping
in them. Though there were more cars in Washington than anywhere else in the
country, no one had respect for the sanctity of roads
any more. The car crept where the crowd was thickest, constantly sounding its
horn, zigzagging between clumps of sleeping campers and occasionally having
recourse to the sidewalk. It irritated Dr Carriol but did not unduly worry her,
for she knew Harold Magnus would be having much the same experience, and he had
to come a long way farther. No point in getting to Environment way ahead of
him.

As it happened, the crowd was
considerably thinner on the Virginia bank of the Potomac, and Dr Carriol had
underestimated the distance from Greenbelt to Environment versus the distance
from Falls Church; it took Harold Magnus a mere two hours. However, when he
arrived he was in one of his meanest moods, chiefly on account of the dinner
left behind uneaten. For eight days he had been tied to Tibor Reece's side,
unable to leave the White House. He hated staying at the White House; the
President was not an eater and was currently a bachelor, so the meals were
infrequent, deplorably dull, and of one course only, with no seconds offered.
Even in the middle of the night he had been unable to sneak away, for Tibor
Reece was determined to have a whipping boy on hand if anything happened to Dr
Joshua Christian. So Harold Magnus had taken to raiding the candy machines in
the White House's staff cafeteria, and during the eight days of his exile he had
consumed enormous quantities of Hershey bars, M&Ms, and Good and Plentys,
vainly trying to fill up his empty corners, equally vainly trying to sweeten his
disposition. But on this night, his last, the Secretary had rebelled. He phoned
his wife and ordered his favourite dinner, then he refused the White House fare
when it was offered. At nine in the evening he went home, his excuse the grand
reception to be held on the morrow; he told the President he had to look over
his clothes.

When the Secretary erupted through his
outer office doors at a little after two in the
morning, Mrs Helena Taverner's face lit up. She had literally been filling his
position all through his White House incarceration, and it was beating
her.

'Oh, sir, I'm so glad to see you! I need
decisions, directives and signatures desperately,' she said.

He kept on going, waving at her over his
shoulder to follow him into his office.

Sighing, she gathered a large sheaf of
papers together, her notepad and pencil, and joined him.

They worked for an hour, the Secretary
occasionally looking at the clock on the wall behind him, as he wore no
watch.

'Where the hell is she?' he demanded as
they finished.

'It's bound to be slow going, sir. She's
coming in on the March route, and I imagine it's solid people,' soothed Mrs
Taverner.

But Dr Carriol arrived not five minutes
later, just as Mrs Taverner was settling herself back at her own desk with yet
more work to do. A look of understanding passed between the two women, then a
smile.

'That bad, huh?' asked Dr
Carriol.

'Well, he's been stuck at the White House
for eight days and the food isn't what he likes at all. But his mood's on the
upswing since he's been back in his own chair.'

'Oh, poor baby!'

Indeed his mood had improved; dinner
would be eaten later if not sooner, Helena hadn't made too many mistakes in his
absence — he really ought to remember to give her a nice gift sometime — and his
White House exile was over. He greeted Dr Carriol with huge affability, a corona
corona jammed in one corner of his mouth, his paunch gaily sheathed in a
pink-and-green brocade waistcoat.

'Well, well, Judith, this is more like
it, eh?'

'Yes, Mr Secretary,' she said, taking off
her coat.

'Greenbelt tonight, then a final stroll
to the Potomac tomorrow morning. We've got it all set up, a solid Vermont marble
platform that will form a base of the Millennial memorial later on, loudspeakers
on every street corner and in every park for miles around, and
some
reception committee! The President, the Vice-President, Congress, every
ambassador, Prime Minister Rajpani, Premier Hsaio, loads more heads of state,
movie stars, and television stars and college presidents —
and
the King
of England!'

'The King of Australia and New Zealand,'
she corrected.

'Well, yes, but he's really the King of
England; it's just that the Commies don't like kings.' He buzzed Mrs Taverner
and asked for coffee and the drinks tray. 'You will join me in a glass of
brandy, Judith? I know you're not a drinker, but I heard from the President that
Dr Christian had converted you to a little cognac with your coffee, and I'm not
averse to it myself.'

When she didn't reply he eyed her more
closely, fanning a cloud of heavy aromatic smoke away from her vicinity. 'My
cigar worrying you?' he asked with unwonted concern.

'No.'

'What's the matter? His speech not up to
scratch? He does know he's expected to speak — doesn't he?'

Her sigh came up from the bottom of her
belly. 'Mr Secretary, he's not going to speak tomorrow.'

'What?

'He's — ill,' she said, choosing her
words with extreme care. 'In fact, he's mortally ill.'

'Oh, bullshit! He looks great! I've been
watching him the whole goddam way with the President ready to have my balls if
anyone picked him off, and I can tell you I watched the guy like a hawk! He
looks great.
Ill?
Walking at the rate he does? Bullshit! What's really
the matter?'

'Mr Magnus, you must believe me. He is
desperately ill. So ill that I fear for his life.'

He stared at her in gathering unease,
beginning at last to believe her, but he couldn't repress a final protest at the
injustice of her news. 'Bullshit!'

'No, the truth. I know, because I have to
deal with him every night and every morning. Do you know what his body looks
like under all that gear? He's a mass of raw flesh. He wore away his life
trudging through the north in winter. He's losing significant amounts of blood
where he's got no skin left. He's in the kind of pain that causes near dementia.
His sweat glands are great lumps of stinking pus where they've burst, and great
lumps of agony where they haven't. His toes are dropping off. Drop — ping — off!
Hear me?'

He went faintly green, gagged, stubbed
his cigar out in a hurry. 'God Jesus!'