The Branch

by Mike Resnick

  “If I turn on you, it won’t be to go over to Jeremiah’s side,” answered Pryor.

  “Why not?” asked Moore curiously.

  “Because if he is the Messiah, he doesn’t need me. I wouldn’t be doing myself any good by joining him.”

  “And if he’s not?”

  “Then sooner or later we’re going to find a way to kill him.”

  “Reasonable,” commented Moore. “The underdog will always have a bigger reward for you than the favorite.”

  “You think we’re the underdog?” said Pryor with a disbelieving smile.

  “It’s sure starting to look like it,” replied Moore seriously.

  Nothing that transpired during the next three weeks changed that assumption. Moore increased his payroll and broadened his search, but Moira Rallings was nowhere to be found. She had not used public transportation to leave the Chicago complex, but within ten days Moore was forced to conclude that she was no longer in the state of Illinois, and by the time twenty days had passed he was certain that she wasn’t within five hundred miles of him.

  Business was still booming, of course. The Thrill Show was doing better than anticipated, and even Dream Come True was starting to turn a profit. The city officially declared that Mr. Nightspore and Mr. Thrush had died of natural causes, and there was no coroner’s inquiry into the untimely death of Willis Comstock Krebbs. Two more congressmen were in the bag, and one of Moore’s royally bred three-year-olds had won a stakes race in Florida.

  And yet, as the weeks turned into months, the tension among the members of Moore’s hierarchy became almost unbearable. It was broken forever on the morning of June 23, 2048, when a uniformed woman, clad in maroon, entered Moore’s private office.

  “Yes?” said Moore, looking up from a stack of computer readouts.

  “CPS, sir,” she said briskly.

  “Continental Parcel Service can damned well leave its goods in the outer office with one of the secretaries,” said Moore, turning back to his paperwork.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” said the woman, “but this parcel has been shipped under the FYEO code.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” asked Moore irritably.

  “For Your Eyes Only,” came the reply. “I have been instructed to wait until you open it before leaving.”

  “All right,” said Moore. “Let’s have it.”

  The woman walked over to his desk and handed him a flat manila envelope. He opened it and withdrew a photograph of Jeremiah and Moira standing beside the wall of a nondescript brick building.

  “Who gave this to you?” demanded Moore.

  “My supervisor, sir.”

  “Where was it sent from?”

  “I don’t know. I can check on it and get back to you this afternoon.”

  “Do that,” said Moore, dismissing her with a wave of his hand, and knowing full well that it wouldn’t have been shipped from within a thousand miles of wherever Jeremiah and Moira were hiding.

  Pryor walked into the office. “I saw CPS in here a moment ago,” he said. “Anything up?”

  “You might say so,” replied Moore. He held up the picture for Pryor to see—and as he did so, his eyes fell on a two-word message scrawled on the back: I know.

  Chapter 14

  The movement began so slowly that Moore, insulated in his Chicago offices, wasn’t even aware of it for a number of months—but finally the reports began to trickle in.

  Jeremiah had miraculously—and with no cameras to record the feat—restored sight to a blind child in Newark.

  Jeremiah had been adopted as the true Messiah by four minor Protestant sects, then by a major one.

  Some two hundred American Reformed rabbis were proclaiming that Isaiah’s prophecy was now being fulfilled.

  Twice more Moore’s men had Jeremiah seemingly at their mercy, and twice more he escaped, not unscathed but alive. If he had any headquarters, they were unknown. If his new religion had a name, it too was unknown. Indeed, his motives, his religious philosophy, his whereabouts, and his eventual goals all remained mysteries.

  The press and the networks started the game of counting his followers.

  What was once a laughably small sect soon numbered almost a million. It was still no threat to the established order, but those in power began doing a little mathematics of their own and decided to investigate the phenomenon of Jeremiah the B.

  And as the notion of a Messiah—even one it didn’t believe in—began to permeate the public consciousness, dissatisfaction set in for the first time in half a century. Social mobility and innovation had remained static for decades, as apathy and boredom buried the dream of a better life and a better world more efficiently than a thousand wars had done. But now people began to understand that even if Jeremiah was a fraud, there might nonetheless be a better way; that although they didn’t yet know how to manipulate the machinery of change and progress, it could indeed be manipulated.

  Despite tapping this responsive chord, Jeremiah made no promises, no predictions, no prophecies. It was Moore’s firm conviction that, Messiah or not, Jeremiah didn’t have the brains to figure out what to do with his mass of followers, how or where to lead them.

  And still the wave of belief grew. It crossed the Atlantic first, then spread through Europe and Asia and snaked its tentacles into Africa.

  Israel alone openly condemned him as a fraud—but Israel knew better than anyone else where his kingdom would be, if indeed he had the inclination and the power to establish it.

  Soon requests began pouring in for Jeremiah to appear on television, before committees, and in private audiences with religious and political leaders. He made a few video appearances to replenish his coffers, but rejected all other public and private confrontations, stating curtly that the Messiah had no need for any such dealings.

  And then, still in need of money, Jeremiah entered the only business he knew anything about: sin. With his followers nearing the three million mark, he had enough clout and enough connections to enter the pornography and prostitution business, and to make his initial purchases of some lower-echelon politicians.

  Moore felt the pinch slowly at first. Pornography was down three percent, prostitution seven percent, the domestic drug traffic six percent.

  But within a handful of months all of his major business enterprises were down by thirty percent or more, and Dream Come True, which had been burgeoning into a healthy money-maker with offices in eleven states, was virtually bankrupt, since the populace preferred buying their dreams from a Messiah rather than an underworld kingpin.

  When his gross had been cut in half, Moore tripled the reward and sent out the kill order once again—and many of the employees who would normally have been laid off because of the disastrous slump in business were kept on salary and ordered to help destroy the financial empire Jeremiah was building at Moore’s expense. Moore closed his distributional outlets to Jeremiah’s products—and Jeremiah established new ones. Moore had his own politicians and policemen crack down on Jeremiah’s prostitution ring—and found that Jeremiah had enough politicos and cops on his own payroll to keep his girls working. Moore plugged up every narcotics route—and Jeremiah created new routes just as quickly.

  Finally Moore decided that if he couldn’t get at Jeremiah’s businesses directly, he would do the next best thing and try to discredit him in the eyes of his millions of followers. To this end, he hired a number of research and media teams.

  It wasn’t difficult to make Jeremiah appear to be an uneducated, ill-mannered, and womanizing fool, for he was all of those. It wasn’t even hard to dig up his financial records and show the world that he had already accumulated almost two hundred million dollars. Jeremiah not only admitted it, but stated that he planned to double that amount every six months for the next two years. His scheming, panhandling youth was made public—and far from denying it, Jeremiah took a certain measure of pride in supplying Moore’s reportorial teams with some of the more salacious details they had overlo
oked.

  But when it came to proving that Jeremiah was a fraud, the going became more difficult. He had laid his hands on a crippled girl’s legs—after receiving a substantial donation from the child’s grandfather—and made her walk again. In a most un-Messiahlike ploy, he had jumped, sans parachute, from a helicopter flying at a height of two thousand feet in front of a paying audience numbering in the hundreds of thousands—and though he had to be rushed to the nearest hospital with broken legs, multiple fractures of the spine, and severe internal hemorrhaging, he walked out on his own power nine days later, perfectly healthy. He visited a dying village in Baja California, and while he was there the impoverished farmers experienced rain for the first time in more than a year.

  Every Sunday ministers and priests took to their pulpits to proclaim that Jesus was the only Messiah, and every Sunday there were a few less people in their congregations. A thousand authors and biographers tackled the enigma of Jeremiah, and came up with a thousand different conclusions.

  Jeremiah reveled in the publicity. The only thing he wouldn’t do was codify his philosophy. It was enough, he stated time and again, that he was the Messiah; all else, including his personal beliefs, faded into insignificance beside that fact.

  Within another year his followers numbered more than twelve million, and his finances grew apace. Then came the revelation that Jeremiah was building a military machine, and the governments of the world, which had largely been ignoring him in the hope that he would go away, sat up and took notice. Spies of all nationalities and religious persuasions infiltrated his organization. Up to a point they were successful: he had so many men and so many weapons and such and such a military capacity. But as to why he needed an army and where he intended to deploy it, no answers were forthcoming, Since Moore had done more research on Jeremiah than anyone else, he found himself granted amnesty for all past crimes—and, the implication went, all future ones as well—in exchange for his cooperation with the various agencies that had committed themselves to Jeremiah’s destruction. There were a lot of them, too, since almost every religious institution found its own existence threatened by the possibility of a living, breathing Messiah.

  Now, with the financial and intelligence resources of virtually the entire world at his fingertips, Moore went after Jeremiah with a vengeance.

  His priests and lieutenants were assassinated, his speeches and broadcasts were disrupted, much of his money was impounded—and still his following increased.

  And then came the incident which turned the tide of events in Jeremiah’s favor for the first time. It came from a totally unexpected source, but its effect was both enormous and immediate.

  It was The Gospel of Moira, penned by Moira Rallings, and it sold forty million copies during its first two months of publication.

  Chapter 15

  And he made a blind child see and a legless girl walk, and when the people saw him and knew him for who and what he was, then in truth did the Word spread across the bleak, unhappy land.

  —from The Gospel of Moira

  Pryor’s office was as cluttered as Moore’s was barren. It was far larger, and every inch of wall space was covered with computer screens, punctuated only occasionally by television monitors. The office housed a large conference table, a wet bar, a pair of leather couches, and a huge mahogany desk with a leather judge’s chair.

  Moore entered the room, walked directly to Pryor’s desk, and tossed a copy of The Gospel of Moira onto it.

  “Well, what do you think of it?” he asked.

  “She’s not about to win a Nobel Prize for Literature,” replied Pryor.

  “It’s some of the worst dreck I’ve ever read.” He opened his desk drawer and withdrew his own copy.

  “It’s also some of the most dangerous dreck you’ve ever read,” said Moore. “Check the copyright page.”

  “Mine is the fifty-third printing,” said Pryor without opening the book. “What’s yours?”

  “The fifty-seventh,” replied Moore. “They must be defoliating whole forests to keep up with the demand for this thing.” He sat down on one of the couches. “And in the meantime, our gross is off forty-two percent this month; and we finished the last quarter deeper in the red than ever. I think we’re going to have to pull out of Kentucky and Tennessee altogether.”

  “I know,” said Pryor grimly. “Even the legitimate enterprises are dropping through the floor.”

  “You wouldn’t think it would be that goddamned hard to kill him,” said Moore with a heavy sigh. “After all, they killed the last Messiah without any trouble.”

  “You know the answer to that: if they killed him, then he wasn’t the Messiah.” Pryor picked up the new Gospel and began thumbing through it. “And Moira Rallings became his concubine, and thus was she blessed above all other women,” he intoned.

  “It sounds like some no-talent producer’s idea of a Biblical epic,” snorted Moore.

  Pryor kept thumbing through the book, reading occasional snippets.

  “And he went into Egypt, as the prophets foretold.… And he began his ministry sullied and abused, an outcast among men.… And in the sin-ridden city of Chicago dwelt a servant of the Devil named Moore.…”

  Pryor looked up. “It’s all here—everything but the Sermon on the Mount.” He smiled.

  “I guess she’s saving that for the sequel.”

  “It’s not that funny, Ben. If half the people who buy this book throw it out, and half of those who keep it think it’s hogwash, she’ll still have gained him ten million converts in six weeks—and every last one of them is going to think Judas wasn’t all that bad a guy compared to me.”

  “We can’t keep the books out of their hands,” replied Pryor. “They’re not going through our agencies—and from what I’ve been able to find out, almost half of them are being sold by computer or through the mail.”

  “I know,” said Moore. “Besides, with that many copies in print, I’d say it’s a little late in the game to get a restraining order or an injunction to prohibit distribution. I don’t see how we could make one stick, anyway.” He paused for a moment, drumming his fingers on the arm of the couch. “What’s the last word we have on him?”

  Pryor shrugged. “As of yesterday, we have sworn statements that he’s in Albuquerque, Buenos Aires, the Manhattan complex, and Iceland. Take your choice.”

  “Damn MacIntosh, anyway!” snapped Moore suddenly.

  Xavier MacIntosh was the only agent of Moore’s to successfully infiltrate Jeremiah’s expanding organization and gain a position of authority. There was absolutely no question that he would have access to Jeremiah’s schedule, and would probably be privy to his future plans as well. But Xavier MacIntosh had wired his resignation to Moore four days ago, explaining that he had seen the light and had elected to become one of Jeremiah’s disciples.

  “It’s not unheard of,” said Pryor. “I’ve been in touch with some of our new … ah … associates, and they’ve had pretty much the same problem. As soon as they’ve got a plant in a position to do then some good, he—well, he converts. I don’t suppose there’s any other term for it.”

  “And just how are our new associates doing?”

  “Not very well. If Jeremiah ever commits his forces to some military objective, they may prove useful—but as things stand now, they’re no better at infiltrating his organization than we are. We’d probably be better off with industrial spies and saboteurs.”

  “True,” agreed Moore. “Except that industrial cartels don’t offer amnesty; governments do. Besides, look at what’s happened to our finances in the past year. No business organization is going to lock horns with Jeremiah. There may be easier ways to go broke, but there aren’t any quicker ones.” He paused. “Anyway, our immediate problem is that damned book Moira’s written. It pinpoints me as the greatest arch-villain in human history, and it’s gaining Jeremiah more support than anything he himself ever did.” He shrugged. “You know, it’s always possible that she’s right—
that I am the Devil incarnate for trying to kill Jeremiah.”

  “I doubt it,” replied Pryor seriously. “After all, lots of people have tried to kill him. The only reason you’re being singled out is that you’re the one who drew Moira into this thing to begin with.”

  “By that same token, I ought to be canonized instead of condemned,” said Moore wryly. “Neither of them had any idea what he was before I got involved.”

  “They’d have figured it out sooner or later,” said Pryor. “After all, if he really is the Messiah, it’s not just because you pointed it out to him.”

  “I know, Ben. It’s just so frustrating! Sometimes I feel like we’re all walking around underwater, we react so slowly. I thought Moira would prove to be a weak spot, and she’s done him more good than the rest of his group put together.”

  “It’s just a book.”

  “Yeah, and Adolf Hitler was just a housepainter.”

  Pryor’s intercom buzzed, and he pressed a button. “What is it?”

  “Ben, is Solomon in there with you?” asked Bernstein’s voice.

  “Yes, Abe. Do you want to see him?”

  “No. Just tell him to turn on a TV to Channel 9 if he wants to see an old friend.”

  Moore walked to a monitor and activated it.

  Moira Rallings, her skin whiter than ever, sat on a love seat, a copy of her Gospel in her hand. She had added about ten pounds and displayed a hitherto unknown fondness for see-through clothing, but seemed otherwise unchanged.

  She was being interviewed by Stormin’ Norman Gorman (formerly Herbert Russell), a twenty-year-old entertainer who had been a pop music star during a recent revival of acid rock until continued exposure to the high decibel level had caused him to go deaf. His millions of fans wouldn’t let him retire from the limelight at seventeen, so he had learned how to read lips and now hosted the nation’s third-ranked syndicated noontime talk show.