Nowhere: Volume II of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod

by Ian R. MacLeod

  Just as in the temple, Balthasar knew and understood. “You are the Christos, the Christ—the same Christ, and yet a different one—as the Christ I have just witnessed perform many wonders in this temple.”

  “There is only one Christ,” the man muttered, glancing around at the crowds which were already gathering around them, then up at the various angels which had started to circle overhead. “I am always here.”

  “Of course, my Lord, you are all-powerful,” the theologian in Balthasar answered. “You can thus be in many places at once. And in many forms.”

  “I can be everywhere, and everything,” Jesus agreed with a slow smile, bearing what teeth he possessed within his blackened mouth. “What I cannot be is nowhere. Or nothing at all.”

  Balthasar nodded. The crowd around them was still growing. “Do you remember me, my Lord? I and two of my friends, we once journeyed…” He trailed off. Of course Jesus knew.

  “You brought that deathly unguent as your gift. Perhaps instead of asking me why you did so, Balthasar, as you were thinking of doing, you should ask yourself.”

  “My Lord… I still do not know.”

  “Why should you?” Jesus shifted his crouch on the temple steps, hooking his thin arms around his even thinner legs as the flies danced around him in a humming cloud. “Any more than you should know why you chose to return. After all, you are only a man.”

  Balthasar was conscious of the murmurs of the watching crowd—He is Here. It is as they say. Sometimes He comes in pitiable disguise—and the knowledge that Jesus already understood far more about his thoughts than he was capable of expressing. “I returned, my Lord, simply because I am a man. And because you are a god.”

  “The God.”

  “Yes.” Balthasar bowed. His voice trembled. “The God.”

  “So…Why do you doubt?”

  “I do not—”

  “Do not try to lie to me!” Suddenly, Jesus the Christ’s voice was like the rumble of rocks. The sky briefly darkened. The circling angels moaned. “You doubt, Balthasar of Persia. Do not ask me why, but you doubt. You look at Me in awe but you cannot see what I am, for if you did, if all was revealed, your mind would be destroyed… Yet, even then, I wonder if you would believe in that instant of knowing? Or even after a million eternities lived amid glories which would make this city seem squalid as the stables in which I was born. Would you believe then?”

  “I am sorry, Lord. I simply do not know.” Balthasar blinked. His eyes stung. Terrible though it was, he knew that everything Jesus had said was true. Without this accursed doubt which even now would not leave him, he could not be Balthasar at all.

  “I came to this world to bring eternal peace and salvation,” Jesus was saying. “Not just for the Jews, but for all humanity. I was born as you witnessed. My parents fled Herod’s wrath, and I was raised almost as any human child, waiting for the time of my ministry arrive. And when that time came…” He brushed the re-gathering flies from around his eyes. “When it came, I sought knowledge and solace in the wilderness for forty days, just any penitent would…

  “I fasted. I prayed. I knew I could bring down the walls of this world, rip the stars from the heavens—indeed, just as you have imagined, Balthasar, in your wilder dreams. Or I could have entered this city as pitiably as you see me now, or as some holy buffoon riding on an ass. I could have done all these things and many others. If, that was, I wished to discover how little compassion the men and women who populate this earth possess. Or perhaps… I could…” The flies were buzzing thicker. The stench seemed to have grown. A different emotion, which might almost have been interpreted as fear, played across the crawling blackness of Jesus’s face. “I could, perhaps, have gathered a small band of followers, performed small deeds, and declared myself in ways which the priests would have found easy to challenge. I could have allowed them to bring about my death. All of these things I could have done so that men such as you, Balthasar, might ultimately choose be redeemed. I could have died in an agony of unheeded screams, Balthasar …” Jesus smiled a sad, bitter smile. “If that was how your gift to me was intended…”

  “But you cannot die, my Lord.”

  “No…” Jesus picked at a fly from his lips and squashed it between ruined nails. “But I can feel pain. I could have passed through this world as lightly as the wind passes over a field of barley. And human life would have continued almost as you know it now—and worse. Armies would march. People would suffer and starve and doubt my existence whilst others fought over the meaning of my words. Cities of stone and glass even more extraordinary than this one you see around you would rise and fall. Clever men like you, Balthasar, would learn how to fly just as you see these angels flying. Yes, yes, it’s true, although I know it sounds extraordinary. Men would even learn how to pass even beyond the walls of this earth, and how to the poison the air, and the kill the living waters of the oceans. And all for what, Balthasar? What would be accomplished, other than many more lifetimes of pointless striving?”

  “I do not know, my Lord.”

  “Indeed.” Jesus shook his head. Then he laughed. It was a terrible, empty sound, and the flies stirred from him in a howling cloud. “Neither did I, Balthasar. Neither did I. And I was hungry in that wilderness, and I was afraid. There were snakes and there were scorpions… And there were other things…” Jesus shuddered. “Far worse. It was in those last days of my torment when it seemed that the very rocks taunted me to transform them into bread, that I finally understood the choice I had to make. I saw all the kingdoms of this earth spread below me, and I knew that I could take dominion of them. All I had to do was to show myself, cast myself from a high point of a temple so that all the angels in the heavens might rescue me. After all…” Jesus shrugged. “I had to make my decision. And this…” He looked around along the marble steps at the awestruck crowd, then around at the incredible spires and domes, then up at the heavenly skies. “…is the world I have made.”

  Even as Jesus the Christ spoke these last words, Balthasar and the crowd around him could see that he was fading. With him departed the droning flies, and the pestilential stink was replaced by the heady, sacred scents of the temple. He would be somewhere else, or had been in many other places already. Appearing as glowing vision on some hillside, or leading with a tongue of swords at the front of one of his many armies. All that was left of the Christ now was what Balthasar had once feared he might be—just a trick of the light, a baseless hope turned from nothing more than shadow, and a last few droning flies.

  Balthasar pushed his way down the steps and out of the crowd. He walked the golden streets of Jerusalem alone. He’d been thinking before of sleep, but now he knew that he would never find sleep, or any other kind of rest, within this city. It was all too much. It was too glorious. And he was still just a man. Perhaps he would just crumble to dust when all the rest of the believing, undoubting multitudes were resurrected. Sacrilegious though the thought was, it felt welcoming. He passed out through one of the city’s twelve great gates almost without realising, and found his way through the encamped battalions as they joined with choirs of angels in celebration of their inevitable victory. Looking back at the city as the land finally darkened and rose, he wondered once again why an all-powerful God should feel the need to protect it with such large and elaborate defences. Still questions, Balthasar… Pointless doubts and questions… Walking on and away from the blazing light, he realised that what he needed was solitude, silence, clarity.

  He was almost sure that it was night now, for his tired eyes caught something resembling the glint of stars in a blessedly black firmament. The ground was rough and dry and dusty. He began to stumble. He grew dizzy. He fell, and lost track of time until light came over him, and he winced and cried out and covered his face in awe, only to discover that it was merely the harsh blaze of the sun. This place truly was a wasteland, and in its way it was terrible. But it was beautiful as well, in the deathless heat-shimmer of its emptiness.

  Bal
thasar walked on through places of stones and dry bones. Then, as evening came, he sought shelter from the sudden cold in a decayed hole at the edge of the mountains. Others had been in this cave before him. There was a sour stench, and there were carvings on the rocks. Squatting on the dark hard ground inside after willing a few sticks to make a fire, Balthasar traced these marks with his fingers. A babble of symbols in different alphabets honouring different gods, all of which he now knew almost for certain to be misguided. Still, he found these leavings of other seekers after truth oddly comforting.

  Some of the most recent markings, he noticed, were written by one hand, and in Aramaic. Studying these scratches more closely in the firelight, he saw that they mimicked the words of the old prophecies which Melchior had once shown him, and he looked around at this squalid place in which he had sought shelter with a different gaze. Somehow, and for all that he had witnessed, it seemed beyond incredible that this decayed hole was the very place in which Jesus Christ had sought shelter in his time in the wilderness. Yet how could he doubt it, after all that he had heard and seen? The writing was loose and ill-composed—you could sense the writer’s anguish—and terminated in crude series of crosses.

  The fire died. Balthasar sat alone in the dark, waiting for the return of the sun, and perhaps for an end to his own torment. He remembered again that first journey he had taken to this land with this two friends, and the subsequent slaughter of the innocents. Jesus had survived to fulfil the prophecies scrawled on these walls, yes. But what of all the others? Was that what his gift of myrrh had foretold, the pointless death of hundreds of children? And why—the question came back to him, although left unasked in Jesus’s presence—had an all-powerful God permitted such a thing to happen? Why had pain and suffering been allowed into this world at all?

  In the darkness, Balthasar shook his head. Always the same with you, he heard the Gaspar’s voice saying. You have too many doubts, too many questions. Yet everything he had seen in New Jerusalem had left him unsatisfied.

  A slow dawn was coming, rising from the east in gaunt, hot shadow. A cur dog howled. The wind hissed. Looking out across this landscape, Balthasar thought of Jesus squatting in this same cave, and wondered about his last days of torment, and about how he must have felt, and what he had seen. Then, as heat rose and the sky whitened, Balthasar took a stick of charcoal from the remnants of his fire and began to make his own marks across the rough stone. It had been a long time since he had engaged in the practice of serious magic, but the shapes to make the necessary spell of summoning came to him with astonishing ease.

  Afterword

  The Renaissance writer and philosopher Blaise Pascal put forward what became known as “Pascal’s Wager”. Basically, he argued that there’s more to be gained in acknowledging and worshipping God than there is in actively denying, or ignoring, His existence. If it turns out that God does exist, and you’ve done all the right things and gone to church and so forth, you’ll be patted on the head and allowed into Heaven rather that enduring the torments of Hell after you die. And, if it turns out He doesn’t exist, and that death is the end of everything, well, that’s okay too, and you won’t have lost out.

  Although I can see the selfish logic in this approach, I’d still like to think I’d hold my moral ground with Saint Peter if I were to arrive at the pearly gates as a rather surprised atheist. I’d even have a fair few critical words to say to God Himself, should he agree to meet with me. To my mind, the kind of God who decides to create this wonderful but imperfect and randomly unjust universe on a whim, not to mention the concepts of death and suffering, and then demands our unquestioning thanks and worship, is clearly an arrogant sod who really needs to take a long, serious look at Himself in the mirror before he starts judging anyone else.

  My problematic relationship with the big guy upstairs probably goes back to being forced to attend the Sunday school of a fundamentalist sect known as the Christadelphians as a child. They were hardly the Taliban, and decent enough people in many ways, but they did insist on taking every word of Bible as the literal truth, which raised a great many questions and objections in my young mind. Still, I was left with more Biblical knowledge than is probably good for me, and a mixed-up sense of attraction and repulsion toward organised religion—and a need to express these feelings through my writing—that continues to this day.

  RE-CROSSING THE STYX

  Welcome aboard the Glorious Nomad, all nuclear-powered 450,000 tons of her. She is, literally, a small country in her own right, with her own armed services, laws and currency. But, for all her modernity, life afloat remains old-fashioned. There are the traditional fast food outlets, themed restaurants, coloured fountains, street entertainers and even a barber’s shop staffed by a charmingly impromptu quartet. There are trained armies of chefs, litter collectors, pooper-scoopers and maintenance engineers. Firework displays are held each evening on the main central deck above the Happy Trillionaire Casino, weather permitting. It’s easy to understand why those who can afford her tariffs carry on cruising until—and then long after—death.

  Wandering the decks in his lilac-stripe crew blazer, resident tour host Frank Onions never paid much attention to the news reports he saw in magazines left glowing over the arms of sun loungers. Still, he knew that dying was no longer the big deal it had once been. Death, it had turned out, was the answer to many of the problems of old age. With your weakening heart stopped, with your failing body eviscerated and your memory uploaded and your organs renewed, you were free to shuffle around on your titanium hips for another few decades. And, after that, you could book in for the same procedure again. And again. There were, admittedly, some quibbles about whether the post-living were still technically the same people they had once been. But, working as Frank did in an industry which relied so heavily on the post-centenarian trade, it would have been churlish to complain.

  It seemed like there were more corpses than ever as he led the morning excursion to the ruins of Knossos in Crete, with the Glorious Nomad anchored off what remained of the city of Heraklion. At least fourteen out of the forty two heads he counted on the tour bus looked to be dead. Make that double, if you included their minders. The easiest way to tell the dead apart from the living was by a quick glance at their wigs and toupees. Not that the living oldies didn’t favour such things as well, but the dead were uniformly bald—hair, like skin, seemed to be something the scientists haven’t fully got the knack of replacing—and had a particularly bilious taste in rugware. The lines of bus seats Frank faced sprouted Elvis coxcombs, dyed punky tufts and Motown beehives. The dead loved to wear big sunglasses, as well. They shunned the light, like the vampires they somewhat resembled, and favoured loose-fitting clothes in unlikely combinations of manmade fabrics. Even the men put on too much makeup to disguise their pasty skins. As the tour bus climbed towards the day’s cultural destination and Frank took the mike and kicked into his spiel about Perseus and the Minotaur, a mixed smell of corrupted flesh, facecream and something like formaldehyde wafted over him.

  The September sun wasn’t particularly harsh as Frank, Glorious Nomad lollipop in raised right hand, guided his shuffling bunch from sight to stairlift to moving walkway. Here is the priest-king fresco and here is the throne room and here is the world’s first flush toilet. The only other tour group were from the Happy Minstrel, another big cruise vessel berthed at the old American naval base at Souda Bay. As the two slow streams shuffled and mingled in their frail efforts to be first to the souvenir shop, Frank couldn’t help but worry that he was going to end up with some of the wrong guests. Then, as he watched them some more—so frail, so goddamn pointless in their eagerness to spend the money they’d earned back in their discarded lives as accountants from Idaho or lawyers from Stockholm or plant hire salesmen from Wolverhampton—he wondered if it would matter.

  He corralled what seemed like the right specimens back on the bus without further incident, and they headed on toward what today’s itinerary described as
A Typical Cretan Fishing Village. The whole place looked convincing enough if you ignored the concrete berms erected as protection against the rising seas, and the local villagers did local villager as well as anyone who had to put on the same act day after day reasonably could.

  Afterwards, Frank sat under a olive tree in what passed for the harbourfront taverna, took a screen out from his back pocket and pretended to read. The waiter brought him stuffed olives, decent black decaf and a plate of warm pitta bread. It was hard, sometimes, to complain.

  “Mind if we join you?”

  Frank suppressed a scowl and put away his screen. Then, as he looked up, his contractual smile became genuine.

  “Sure, sure. It would be a pleasure.”

  She was wearing a strappy sundress made of some kind of fabric that twinkled and changed with the dappling light. So did her bare golden shoulders. So did her golden hair.

  “I’m Frank Onions.”

  “Yes…” There was a curious intensity to her gaze, which was also golden. “…We know.” She raked back a chair. Then another. And beckoned.

  Shit. Not just her. Although Frank supposed that was to be expected; apart from crew, the only young people you found on board ships like the Glorious Nomad were minders. The dead man who shuffled up was a sorry case indeed. His toupee was a kind of silver James Dean duck’s arse, but it was wildly askew. So were the sunglasses, and the tongue which emerged from between ridiculously rouged lips in concentration at the act of sitting looked like a hunk of spoiled liver.

  “Oh, I’m Dottie Hastings, by the way. This is Warren.”

  As this Dottie-vision leant to re-straighten the rug and sunglasses, the dead man slurred something which Frank took to be hello.

  “Well…” She returned her gaze to Frank. “We really enjoyed your tour and talk this morning. What can we get you? A carafe of retsina? Some ouzo?”