The Branch

by Mike Resnick

  “… figures must be immensely gratifying to you,” Gorman was saying.

  “Oh, they are,” replied Moira with more enthusiasm than Moore had ever seen her display for anything except a corpse. “The money all goes into Jeremiah’s treasury, of course. I’m just pleased and happy to know how many wonderful people have now seen the light.”

  “Check out that transmission and see if it’s live,” Moore instructed Pryor.

  “And will there be a further Gospel in the years to come?” asked Gorman.

  “Certainly,” said Moira. “If not by me, then by someone else. Jeremiah’s ministry is just beginning, Norman. He still has most of his work ahead of him.”

  “What, exactly, does lie ahead of him?” asked Gorman. “He’s been very vague on that point, and I’m sure all our viewers would like to know.”

  “He reveals the details to no one, not even myself,” replied Moira. “But it’s common knowledge that he will ultimately fulfill all the Messianic prophecies.”

  “Does that include the establishment of a kingdom in what is now the nation of Israel?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “You’re begging the question,” said Gorman. “The Hebrew prophets expressly state that the Messiah must establish his kingdom in Jerusalem.”

  Moira smiled. “Which Hebrew prophets?”

  “Isaiah, for one.”

  “Did he?” she said, still smiling.

  “Absolutely,” said Gorman. “Would you like me to quote chapter and verse?”

  “Of what?” asked Moira. “Of the prophet Isaiah himself, or of the ten generations of Jews who repeated his prophecies around campfires, or of the Hebrew scholars who finally wrote it into the Torah, or the Greeks who rewrote it, or the monks of the Dark Ages and Middle Ages who rewrote it again, or of the men who rewrote it for the King James Version?”

  “Then you’re saying that Jerusalem is not his goal?”

  “I’m not saying anything about his goals,” replied Moira. “I’m sure he’ll reveal them in his own good time. I’m simply saying that fulfilling a prophecy and fulfilling what people think is a prophecy may not be the same thing.”

  Pryor, who had been speaking quietly on the phone, hung up the receiver and walked over to Moore.

  “Pre-recorded yesterday in Philadelphia,” he said softly. “Moira showed up, spent the day doing about twenty interviews for talk shows, and vanished. Six agencies put tails on her, and she managed to lose all of them within ten minutes.”

  Moore nodded, never taking his eyes off the screen.

  “I see that our time is almost up,” said Gorman. “Have you any last words for our viewers?”

  “Yes,” said Moira. “I have a message from Jeremiah.”

  “I’m sure we’d all like to hear that.”

  “Solomon Moody Moore!” she intoned, staring into the camera with dark, wild eyes. “Judas! Embodiment of Satan! If you’re watching or listening, I implore you: cease your persecution of the One True Messiah!”

  She turned toward another camera. “Members of the New Faith, believers of the New Truth: a man who would be the Christ-killer is in your midst! His name is Moore, and he would strike down the Messiah! Band together! Do not let him do this dreadful thing!”

  The camera zoomed in on her until her eyes filled the screen. Moore felt they were looking straight at him.

  “Repent, Judas Moore, before it is too late!”

  The picture faded out, to be replaced by a commercial.

  “Charming girl,” said Moore, turning off the set.

  “We’d better tighten the security around the building,” added Pryor.

  “Right. It’ll give the impression that I’m still here.”

  “Won’t you be?”

  “Ben, you’ve been spending too much time messing around with your girlfriends,” said Moore. “Don’t you understand what you just heard? He’s getting ready to march on Jerusalem, or at least to begin his military campaign.”

  “How do you come up with that?” asked Pryor, genuinely puzzled.

  “Why else would Moira throw up a smokescreen like that? I bet if you get tapes from the other nineteen shows, you’ll find that she gave them all the same cock-and-bull story about how the Messianic prophecies didn’t necessarily refer to Jerusalem.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Ben, a lot of the Old and New Testaments got rewritten, and a lot of stuff was edited out for political reasons, and a lot of stuff was invented to make it seem like Jesus was the Messiah—but there is one thing you’re forgetting.”

  “And what is that?”

  “The concept itself. Abe’s rabbi told me that the literal meaning of ‘Messiah’ is ‘Anointed One,’ or ‘king.’ By definition, a Messiah is the king of the Jews—and by definition, the king of the Jews rules from Jerusalem. If she’s trying to convince anyone that it isn’t true, it’s because Jeremiah’s getting ready to move and he wants as many people as possible looking in some other direction.”

  “What about the love and kisses she directed at you?” asked Pryor.

  “It makes it a hell of a lot harder for me to get around,” admitted Moore, “and it probably encourages a few thousand fanatics to go hunting for my scalp. We’ll increase our security here for show, but I think it’s time I got out of Chicago for a while.”

  “Where to?”

  Moore shrugged. “It doesn’t make much difference—but I’m going to have a little meeting with some of our associates, so fix me up something a little more luxurious than usual.”

  “Right,” said Pryor.

  “And Ben?”

  “Yes?”

  “Put out a contract on Moira Rallings.”

  Chapter 16

  Jeremiah bellowed like a bull moose as his body jerked through the inevitable contortions of the sex act. Then, panting and sweating, he slid off the motionless figure of Moira Rallings and rolled onto his back.

  “Christ!” he spat. “It’s getting so I have a hard time telling the difference between you and one of your goddamned corpses!”

  “Learn to be a little more skillful, then,” she said, pulling the covers up over her breasts.

  “I’m the goddamned Messiah!” he shouted. “I’ll learn what I want to learn and screw the way I want to screw!”

  “Then don’t complain when there’s no reaction,” she replied calmly.

  She started to get out of bed, and he grabbed her arm, pulling her back.

  “Where are you going now?” he demanded. “Off to fuck a statue?”

  “One gets satisfaction where one can,” she answered with no show of embarrassment.

  “Which one is it tonight—the general, or the one done up like the Emperor Augustus?”

  “Whichever strikes my fancy.”

  “That’s a well-traveled fancy you’ve got there,” he said disgustedly. “Why do you dress all those corpses up if you’re just going to strip them down for action every night?”

  “So as not to shock you.”

  “I’m pretty hard to shock,” he replied with a harsh laugh. “Someday I’ll tell you what I did this morning with three female members of my flock.”

  “Well, then,” said Moira, “maybe I find them more attractive in uniform. Maybe they feel better about it.”

  “It makes small difference to the dead if they are buried in tokens of luxury,” said Jeremiah in amused tones.

  “Since when did you start quoting Euripides?”

  “Since I read his fucking poems,” he answered, reaching over to his bedtable and picking up two pills of indeterminate properties. “What the hell difference does it make to you, you damned necrophile? I read them, that’s all.” He put the pills into his mouth and swallowed them.

  “Recently?”

  “Yes, recently.”

  “And when did you learn what necrophile means?”

  “Maybe I’m a little smarter than you think!” snapped Jeremiah.

  “Maybe you are,”
she said, frowning.

  “And getting smarter all the time!” he added. “Things that were incomprehensible to me a few months ago are suddenly becoming very clear.”

  “Like the word ‘incomprehensible’?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “That you really are getting smarter every day,” she replied, sitting up. “You’re using words you never knew before, you’re reading books you’d never heard of and wouldn’t have understood, and when you take the obscenities out of your speech, even your sentence construction is more complex.”

  “Everyone gets smarter, just like they get older,” he said. “Otherwise there’d be even more stagnation than you see now. So what? Leave it to a frigid pervert to start changing the subject.”

  “The subject was intelligence.”

  He ripped the covers from her and pulled her unprotesting legs apart, “The subject is what I’m looking at, and nothing else! God and Messianic destiny are half horseshit and half hokum, cooked up for a bunch of sheep. The secret of the universe is right between your legs, and I’m getting fucking sick and tired of your clogging it up with a bunch of corpses!” He glared at her. “God! If it wasn’t for that book of yours and the sequel you’re writing, I’d have your ass out of here so fast you’d never know what hit you!”

  She listened to him as he continued castigating her—really listened, for the first time in many months. She listened to the choice of words, to the concepts couched in vulgarisms, and she knew he was changing.

  It wasn’t complete yet, and he wouldn’t rank with Shakespeare or Einstein for a long, long time, if ever; but the signs of a growing intellect were unmistakably there.

  And, being a survivor by nature, she opened her body to him when he threw himself onto her, wrapped her legs tightly around his torso, shrieked in splendidly false ecstasy, made sure she dug her fingernails into his neck and back so hard that she drew blood, performed acts that even she had never attempted before, and forced herself to beg for more when at last he lay exhausted beside her.

  Long after he was asleep she rose quietly from the bed, tiptoed out of the room, and found her own special form of satisfaction. The knowledge that she was indeed on the winning side, and that that side was growing in power almost by the minute, made the experience even more exhilarating and satisfying than usual.

  Jeremiah awoke the next morning to find himself in bed with the sexual tigress of his dreams. What she may have lacked in sincerity, she more than made up for in motivation and enthusiasm, as she made certain, in ways he had previously only fantasized about, that no one would soon be supplanting her at the side of the Messiah.

  Chapter 17

  Officially it was known as the North Central Caribbean Undersea Dome, but its inhabitants called it the Jamaica Bubble.

  It was a large, totally submerged structure, residing on the ocean floor some three miles southeast of Kingston and well out beyond the coral reef. The Bubble was almost a mile in diameter at its base, and the top of it came to within forty feet of the ocean’s surface, where a series of elevators connected it to a floating airport.

  The Bubble possessed a trio of water desalinization plants that turned out more than ten billion gallons of fresh water every twenty-four hours, barely enough to satisfy the ever-increasing needs of Mexico, the islands, and the eastern seaboard of the United States. Sharing the limited space were four compact seaweed-processing laboratories and two research institutes.

  Also inside the Bubble was the New Atlantis, a luxury hotel which offered a truly impressive array of food, drink, drugs, entertainment, gambling, and sin. Solomon Moody Moore, hidden behind an impenetrable corporate veil, was its owner.

  The New Atlantis was twelve stories high. On the top floor, above the bars and the nightclubs and the casinos, Moore kept a suite of rooms.

  Unlike the spartan surroundings of his headquarters, these apartments were used solely for entertaining and reeked of luxury, from the spun gold draperies and fur-covered couches to the platinum bathroom fixtures. Van Goghs and Picassos and Chagalls and Frazettas were displayed haphazardly on the walls, as were a pair of century-old original Pogo and Li’l Abner strips. In addition to the many windows that overlooked the activities of the Bubble was a huge “porthole,” a circular view screen tied in to a high-resolution video camera that was perpetually trained on the sea life outside the dome.

  Moore hated the place. He felt uncomfortable, as he always did when surrounded by the luxuries that blurred the dividing line between himself and the masses. He had spent most of the day sitting morosely in a whirlpool tub of Homeric proportions, got out in late afternoon for a meal of filet of sole almondine, and finally dressed himself in the style of a Tombstone gambler, complete with black sombrero and silver spurs. Then he walked into the lush parlor and waited.

  Soon they began to arrive: Caesar DeJesus, an Argentine cardinal in the Catholic Church, a surprisingly blond, fair-skinned man swathed in velvet robes; Felix Lewis, purportedly the richest investor on Wall Street and activist head of the Jewish Defense League, a small, dapper, graying man carrying his own hashish pipe; Naomi Wizner, Israel’s Defense Minister, whose shaven head and slit skirt belied her fifty-six years; and Piper Black, head of the Black and Noir Conglomerate, a seven-foot-tall mulatto wrapped in gold and purple silks and wearing a jeweled turban.

  Moore greeted each in turn, opened a bottle of century-old sparkling burgundy, and filled crystal glasses for everyone except himself. Then he chatted idly about sports and the weather and the wonderful results of the Bubble’s technology, allowing each of them a chance to admire the artwork and the decor, and to make sure that there were no secret microphones or cameras planted about the apartment.

  Finally, after some twenty minutes had passed, all four visitors were sitting comfortably in the drawing room, sipping contentedly from their glasses and staring at the viewscreen, and Moore decided that it was time to get down to business.

  “I’m very glad all four of you could make it here,” he announced, turning off the screen and focusing their attention upon himself. “If anyone is hungry, I can have some food sent in, and once we’re through all of the attractions of the New Atlantis are at your disposal. But we’ve got a lot of ground to cover tonight, so if there are no objections, I think we’d better get started.”

  “All right, Solomon,” said Black, lighting up an oversized cigar. “Just why are we here?”

  Moore leaned forward slightly in his wingback chair. “I have reason to believe that Jeremiah is getting ready to mobilize his troops.”

  “What makes you think he has any troops?” asked Lewis.

  “What makes you think he hasn’t?” Moore shot back. “Look—you know the stock market; that’s your field of expertise. Well, my field of expertise is Jeremiah, and I’m telling you that even if he doesn’t have enough troops, he can afford to go out and buy some more.” He turned to the huge mulatto. “How much are you down this year, Piper?”

  “What makes you think we’re down?” demanded Black.

  “We’re not going to get anywhere if we don’t put our cards on the table,” said Moore. “My own gross is off almost seven hundred million dollars in the past nine months.”

  “Half a billion,” said Black emotionlessly. “No one is saving any more money than they used to, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that almost a billion and a quarter of our dollars, or dollars that should have been ours, have gone straight to Jeremiah this year.”

  “Why only Jeremiah?” asked Lewis. “Why not others as well?”

  “I’m not particularly inclined to tell you all the details of my business operation, and I’m sure Mr. Black feels much the same way—but I think we can both assure you that the nature of our business is such that it doesn’t encourage competitors. No one except Jeremiah could take a single dollar from us without our consent. Am I right, Piper?”

  Black nodded.

  “So money for mercenaries is not exactly his b
iggest problem,” concluded Moore.

  “If he’s got any problems at all, I sure as hell haven’t spotted them,” said Black.

  “That’s why I’ve called this little meeting,” said Moore. “To see if we can’t create a few for him.”

  “You’ve seen him, talked to him,” said Naomi Wizner. “That’s more than any of us has done. What’s his secret?”

  “No secret at all,” responded Moore. “He’s got the brainpower and emotional stability of a hyperthyroid twelve-year-old. I’ve asked Piper to join us because his interest in Jeremiah is similar to mine: we’re both getting hit in the pocketbook. But you others have been financing me and encouraging me and supporting my private little war, and the time has come to put the question to you: are you ready to come out of the closet and wage a public battle against Jeremiah?”

  “We’ve been doing that!” said Lewis hotly.

  “No!” replied Moore. “You’ve been making pious statements while my people have been in the trenches! I’m telling you that this man is going to stop being merely a religious threat and is about to become a military one. He’s got more money than he needs, and he has no reason to wait. Before I commit what remains of my holdings, I want to know where you stand on this.”

  “He’s got to be stopped,” said Naomi Wizner.

  “Killed,” added DeJesus.

  “All right, Cardinal,” said Moore. “Let me put the question to you. You say he’s got to be killed?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Isn’t that just a little inconsistent with your religious principles?”

  “My religious principles are the veneration and worship of the Holy Trinity,” replied DeJesus. “My fealty is to the Church and the Pope.”

  “Even if they’re wrong?” asked Moore.

  “That’s unthinkable!”

  “Well, you’d better start thinking about it pretty seriously,” said Moore. “Because every piece of evidence we have points to Jeremiah’s being the Messiah.”