A Creed for the Third Millennium (57 page)

Comfortably ensconced in her own living
room, her shoes off, her feet and body wrapped in fleecy lightweight warmth, Dr
Judith Carriol turned on her small television set. It was approaching the
end of the longest day of her life.

No matter how rational a person one was,
she thought, still the brutal severing of a link that had been sometimes
suffocatingly close for months on end, a link that had joined a whole set of
intellectual and emotional chains into a circle, a link that had brought her so
much she had always wanted and not a little pain as well — still the brutal
severing of that link must hurt. Had Dr Joshua Christian been her evil genius,
or had she been his? A bit of both, probably. Well, Tibor Reece's speech to the
nation would mark the complete conclusion of the chapter in her life called
Joshua Christian.

After she left the White House to see
Harold Magnus in his sickbed at Walter Reed, the horrors of the day had gone on
unabated. When she got all the way to the hospital through the delirious crowds
which clogged Washington, she found the Secretary for the Environment denied all
visitors. His luck had held; apparently he was indeed a very sick man and had
indeed sustained some kind of genuine seizure after she had left his office. No
doubt this would be communicated to the President and all would be forgiven.
Damn! Still, she availed herself of the opportunity to see Dr Mark Ampleforth,
discovering that the President had already been in touch, and moves were afoot
to disguise the manner of Dr Christian's death.

As she rejoined her car for the return
trip, hoping to go home, a message was relayed to her from the President; he
wished her to break the news of Dr Christian's death to his family. And would
she kindly do it at once, please, before the news broke and they heard it less
kindly? Also please tell them that a car would fetch them to the White House at
seven in the evening so that the President could personally convey his
sympathies to them.

Dr Carriol had dragged herself, aching
and hating, to the Hay-Adams Hotel, where the
Christian family was staying. She found them a little bewildered; following the
marquee reception things had somehow seemed to fizzle out, and they could find
no one to tell them how Joshua was. Oh, the reception had been impressive, as
had the actual ceremony concluding the March of the Millennium, but for them all
of it had been an anguish because Joshua was not with them. Oh, it was very nice
to talk in person to the King of Australia and New Zealand; he seemed a most
amiable fellow, was possessed of exquisite manners and never said anything out
of place or contentious. Very nice too to exchange nods and smiles and bows and
banalities with so many prime ministers and presidents and premiers and chairmen
of this and that, ambassadors and governors, senators and congressmen. But
Joshua was not there.
Joshua was ill!
All they really wanted was to be
allowed to see Joshua. Where it seemed all everybody else wanted was to prevent
their seeing Joshua.

So when about six that evening Dr Judith
Carriol appeared, she was greeted by the Christians in the manner of a returned
prodigal. She who they assumed would marry Joshua had become their only channel
of communication with him. The events of the past few days had thinned their
ranks from six to four and flattened any rebellion in them, but worry was
rapidly fanning indignation into anger. Andrew may have condemned his wife's
behaviour to Judith, but Martha's words had sunk into Mama's brain; now Mama
wanted answers.

Had Judas been obliged to talk to Mary
and the others after Jesus's death and before he, Judas, went out to hang
himself? Judith. Judas. Judas. But there had to be a Judas. There always had to
be a Judas! Without Judas, humanity would not need saving. For it was the Judas
element that justified all the pain of birth and death and everything that
happened in between, pain and pain and yet more pain.
Judas was he or she who owned high ambitions but needed the talents of others to
achieve success. Judas was he or she who rode upon the back of another's genius.
Judas was profit and loss, emotional blackmail, manipulation, despair,
self-righteousness, the purest of intentions, the basest methods, exculpation.
Judas was not betrayal! Many a Judas never needed to betray. And Judas was not
an aberration. Judas was the norm.

'Joshua is dead,' she said, before the
fermenting Christian anger could surge over her.

And they had been expecting it after all.
They had known. James moved closer to Miriam, Andrew to Mama. And they simply
looked at Judas Carriol. No one exclaimed, or wept, or evidenced disbelief. But
their eyes — oh, their eyes! She closed her own so she could not see.

'He died,' she went on in a calm and
level voice, 'at about ten o'clock this morning. I don't think he died in much
pain if any pain. I don't know. I wasn't there. His body is at Walter Reed
Hospital. He will be given a full state funeral in five days' time, and with
your permission he will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. The White
House is taking care of all the arrangements. President Reece is sending a car
for you in a very little while, because he wants to see you.'

To her genuine and naive surprise, she
discovered that the hardest thing her life had yet called upon her to do was now
to open her eyes and look at them. She
had
to open her eyes and look at
them. She had to be sure they accepted this most uninformative account. They
probably thought they would get more from the President, but she knew they would
not. No one was ever going to tell them how Joshua Christian died, or for what
reasons.

She did open her eyes and she did look
directly at them. They gazed back at her without
suspicion or criticism. That was just not fair!

'Thank you, Judith,' said
Mama.

'Thank you, Judith,' said
James.

'Thank you, Judith,' said
Andrew.

'Thank you, Judith, said
Miriam.

Judas Carriol smiled very slightly and
sadly, got up and left them alone. She never saw any of the Christians in person
again.

Now, alone at last and able to shed the
outer trappings of her public image, Dr Judith Carriol watched the shimmering
screen in front of her as it filled with a picture of the exterior of the White
House, then that dissolved, and the Oval Office came into view. It too vanished;
the President had chosen to broadcast from his private sitting room. He was
seated at one end of a small sofa, with Mama beside him on his right hand
looking exquisitely, serenely, heart-rendingly beautiful in a pure-white dress
with a sky-blue stole draped across her shoulders and through her arms. James
and Miriam were also on the President's right, Miriam on a chair and wearing
white, James standing behind her with his hand on her shoulder. On the
President's left, but standing oddly alone behind and beyond the sofa on which
his mother sat with the President of the United States of America, was Andrew.
All three men wore dark-blue sweaters and trousers. Whoever had posed them thus
was brilliant at his job. It worked. The impression on any viewer was
immediately momentous and profound.

The camera zoomed in slowly on the
President's face, drawn and very serious, truly Lincolnesque; or would
tomorrow's adjective be 'Christianesque'?

'At ten o'clock this morning,' said Tibor
Reece, 'Dr Joshua Christian died. He had been suffering from a grave illness for
some time, but he refused to have treatment until after the March of the
Millennium was over. He made a conscious decision, in full possession of the
medical facts about his condition.'

He paused, then went on, 'I would like to
quote, if I may, from the speech Dr Christian made only the other day in
Philadelphia, during the March of the Millennium. It is his last speech and the
one I personally think his greatest.'

The piercing deep-set eyes subtly
changed; to Dr Carriol, an expert, it was obvious he was now reading from a
prompting device positioned exactly in front of him and at his eye
level.

'"Be quiet. Be still. Have hope in the
future. Hope stemming from the knowledge that you are not alone, you are not
abandoned, for you are an essential part of the congregation of souls called
Man, and an even more essential part of the congregation of souls called
America. Hope stemming from the fact that you have been entrusted by God with a
mission, to preserve and illuminate this planet in the name of Man.
Not
in the Name of God! In the name of
Man!
Hope for tomorrow, for
tomorrow is worth hoping for. No tomorrow will ever come that will see the light
of Man extinguished, if you as Man work to preserve that light. For though it
came originally as a gift from God, only Man can keep it burning. Remember
always that
you
are Man, and Man is Man, and Woman united.

'"I offer a creed for this third
millennium. A creed as old as this third millennium. A creed summed up in three
words — faith, and hope, and love. Faith in yourselves! Faith in your strength
and your endurance. Hope in a brighter and better tomorrow. Hope for your
children and your children's children, and their children. And love — ah, what
can I say about love that you, all too human, do not already know? Love
yourselves! Love those around you! Love those you do not even know! Waste not
your love on God, Who does not expect it and does not need it. For if He is perfect and eternal, then He needs
nothing. You are Man, and it is Man you must love. Love wards off loneliness.
Love warms the spirit no matter how cold the body might be. Love is the light of
Man!"'

Tibor Reece was weeping openly, but the
four Christians sat and stood around him dry-eyed, utterly composed. Yet no one
watching made the mistake of thinking them without grief.

'He is dead,' the President continued
through his tears, 'but he died knowing he had lived better than most of us. How
many of us know ourselves to be truly good, as he was? I have chosen to speak to
you tonight in his own words, because I have absolutely none of my own to offer
you that can sum up so well what Joshua Christian stood for. He was faith. He
was hope. He was love. He has offered you a creed for this third millennium, a
creed which is a restatement of the unquenchable spirit in Man and Woman, a
creed which can offer all of you a positive and ongoing philosophy of life in
the midst of this cold, hard, unrelenting third millennium. Hold on to his words
and hold on to your memories of him, the man who said the words. And know that
as long as you do, he who insisted always that he was only a man can — never —
truly — die.'

That was the end of it. Dr Carriol
switched off her set before the network she had chosen to watch could come on
with its frantically collated two-hour special on the life and the work of Dr
Joshua Christian.

She got up, went through to her kitchen,
and opened her back door. There was a floodlight, hardly ever used because it
devoured far too much electricity, but nonetheless a most necessary adjunct for
a woman living on her own, illuminating as it did her entire backyard with
dazzling efficiency.

Throwing the switch now, she walked
outside. A very neat scene. A high brick wall around the yard, and a padlocked
gate which led into the side passage. Fieldstone flagging instead of grass. No
garden beds, but many shrubs and bushes, and three larger trees. First a weeping
cherry, its drooping branches past the full glory of its pale-pink blossoms.
Then there was a silver birch, its lime-green leaves still half furled, fresh
and young. And a huge, very old dogwood in white flower, its branches spreading
so perfectly it belonged in a Japanese composition; and it had a ghostly, carven
serenity about it, all its flowers turning their faces upward, laid on with the
unerring instinct of a master builder greater than any mortal man. In legend,
Judas hanged himself from a dogwood. And, then as now, it would have been in
flower. How
beautiful
to die amid such perfection!

Someone in the next house was weeping
inconsolable tears for Dr Joshua Christian, who had come to save the race of Man
and died as kings had died in the beginning of the human experiment, a sacrifice
to placate the gods and preserve the people.

'You will look for me in vain, Joshua
Christian!' she said, not to herself, but to the dogwood tree. 'I have a lot of
living to do yet.'

She switched off the floodlight, went
inside and shut the kitchen door. In the backyard in the moonlight the dogwood
blossoms glowed up into the still cold silver vault above, a patient, dreaming
loveliness.

Of all the people who heard the
President's broadcast, and though it seems an excessive thing to say, Dr Moshe
Chasen mourned for Dr Joshua Christian more deeply and more painfully than
anyone.

The moment Tibor Reece uttered his first
words, Dr Chasen burst into a paroxysm of grief, keening, wailing, weeping,
tearing at himself; his wife could do nothing to console him.

'It isn't fair!' he said when he was
able. 'I meant him no harm! It isn't fair, it isn't fair! What is the pattern?
Why is the pattern? I meant him no harm!'

And he wept again.

The President sent the Christians back to
Holloman by helicopter, promising them that he would bring them back to
Washington the following Wednesday for Joshua's state funeral and the interment
at Arlington. They were transferred from the Holloman airport to 1047 Oak Street
by car, and they arrived in the early hours of Saturday morning. James let them
in, into the welcome pure white light that streamed down on the springtime
flowering glory that was the Christian living room. The plants had not suffered
in Mary's absence, for Mrs Margaret Kelly had volunteered to come in and care
for them, and she had not fallen down on her word. The air was sweet and very
softly quiet.