Mission

by Patrick Tilley

  He looked at me over the back of the sofa. ‘How did it go?’

  ‘Not too badly,’ I said. ‘I feel marginally better than when I called you this morning.’

  He smiled. ‘Good…’

  I dumped my case, peeled off my jacket and tie and helped myself to a glass of wine. The Man switched off the TV set with the remote control handset. I raised my glass to him as I sat down, and drank deep. ‘Where have you been – Jerusalem?’

  He stretched, and sat up straight. ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s happening back there?’

  ‘The Sanhedrin is still trying to cover up what’s happened. The four soldiers who were guarding the tomb have been persuaded to change their story. Instead of the earlier wild talk about angels, and blinding lights, they are now saying that they were overpowered by a group of my followers, who then made off with my body.’

  ‘There are a lot of people who still think that was probably what happened,’ I said. ‘Tell me, why did you just appear to the twelve Apostles and to that other group, the, uh – ’

  ‘The seventy-two Followers of The Way?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you appear before Caiaphas, the High Priest, and the Council of the Sanhedrin? It would have made things a lot easier all round.’

  The Man shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t have done any good. The Sanhedrin, as part of the ruling establishment, had reached an accommodation with the Romans. If they had embraced my message and incorporated it into the official doctrine, they’d have killed it stone dead. Nothing kills faith quicker than an educated mind. Scholarship prevents a man from acquiring true knowledge. Reason and logic are human faculties that were developed to make sense of the external world – ’

  ‘That is controlled by ‘Brax,’ I interjected.

  ‘Right,’ he nodded. ‘And ‘Braxian logic cannot explain how I can be here, and also in first-century Jerusalem. It cannot cope with the questions raised by the concept of simultaneity. ‘Braxian reason tells you that there are no such things as angels; miracles; or timeless, dimensionless worlds beyond this one. ‘Braxian rationality requires physical, scientific proof of existence as the basis for all belief. But Man’s intellect, his intuition, his instinctive emotions enable him to make that leap that takes him beyond Time and Space. To experience God, or the Presence – or whatever name you choose to give That Which Is. To know the “otherness” which is Man’s true self and to which he belongs and will one day return. The untutored mind of a man that the scholars dismiss as ignorant can make that leap. So can the unspoiled mind of a child.’

  ‘Is that why you said, “Suffer the little children to come unto Me”?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘I can see you’ve been doing your homework. It’s important to bear in mind that my mission was to free the Ain-folk. But that could only be achieved by first raising the level of awareness in each and every one of you. Your minds had to be unlocked before the Ain-folk could be roused from their drugged torpor. My words were to be the key. The message had to be spread by a revolutionary, subversive movement because it needed the fervour, the impetus and self-sacrifice that only a dedicated minority could provide. Whose evangelical zeal would carry the message beyond the borders of Israel and set the whole world on fire.’

  ‘And that was what you meant when you said that the Jews no longer had an exclusive,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right…’ He leaned forward and refilled his glass. ‘Under the Sadducees, Palestine had become a theocracy. The priests were like the ayatollahs of Iran. The Temple controlled the money supply and the economy. It was like Fort Knox and the New York Stock Exchange rolled into one. And the people who ran it, through the Sanhedrin, ran the country. They were conservatives in every sense of the word. And they had allowed the flame of awareness that lay at the core of Judaism to be smothered with the dead weight of ritual and rigid observance of the Torah. True belief had become lost in the growing obsession with the minutiae of interpretation. The outward, measurable display of piety took preference over inner enlightenment. And amongst those Jews who were opposed to the collaboration between the rich, ruling classes and the occupying power, the age-old struggle against ‘Brax had become politicised; the longawaited Messiah was no longer seen as the Heaven-sent instrument which would secure their spiritual liberation. The hopes of the revolutionaries were focussed on the emergence of a priest-king who would combine the spiritual authority of Aaron and the generalship of David, who would lead the nation to victory against the oppressive earthly power of Rome.’

  I smiled at him. ‘I can understand why they were a little disappointed in you.’

  He smiled back. ‘They were doubly disappointed. I was anathema to the religious establishment and the business community because I challenged their authority and attacked their materialist philosophy, and I was regarded as worse than useless by the anti-establishment factions. Disparate groups like the Maccabees, the Sicarii, and the Zealots. And the Pharisees, who held the middle ground. The war they sought against the Romans was of no concern to me or the Empire. Ours was a struggle that was old before the world began. The only people on whom I made any real impact were the ‘amme ha-’aretz – the “people of the land”. The unwashed peasants. The poor, impoverished sons of Canaan who had to work from dawn till dusk and were looked down upon because they neglected their ritual prayers and observances.’

  ‘And didn’t pay their tithes to the Temple,’ I added.

  He brushed my observation aside. ‘The Temple had more money that it knew what to do with.’

  I lit a cigarette and sat back. ‘So … what news of the Empire?’

  The Man frowned. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well – ’ I hesitated to ask a question to which the answer might be bad news but I was now committed, ‘ – have you, uh, had any confirmation that they know what’s happening? Have they mailed you a new set of mission orders? Or are you finally going to come clean with me and tell me what’s going on?’

  He gazed at me silently over the top of his glass.

  ‘I mean, it was great the way you bailed me out this morning,’ I continued. ‘But please, don’t tell me it was another accident. That really would be stretching coincidence too far.’

  ‘Yes, I guess it would …’ He set his glass down. ‘It’s really very simple.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ I said.

  He smiled. ‘No, I mean that. Do you remember when we met at the beginning of last week after that elevator business and we talked about ‘Brax? I told you his forces were waiting in the wings when the rescue fleet arrived in the skies above first-century Jerusalem.’

  ‘I’m not likely to forget,’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘they weren’t there to try and stop me going home. Nothing would have pleased them more. They were standing by in case we had some other move planned.’

  ‘Which, knowing you,’ I said darkly, ‘was more than possible.’

  He bit back a smile. ‘Do you remember our very first talk up at Sleepy Hollow, when I mentioned the power grid that once linked the Empire and the galaxy primes?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was smashed by ‘Brax after his break-out from the Netherworld and for the past hundred million years or so, you’ve had Celestial line-men out trying to repair it.’

  He nodded. ‘That’s right. It hasn’t been easy. After ‘Brax swept back into power his forces were despatched to the farthest reaches of the cosmos. As the nature of the physical universe changed under their malevolent influence, we began to encounter what radio hams call “signal impedance”. You may be able to visualise the problem better if you imagine the Power of The Presence being beamed out like a wireless signal and getting fouled up in an increasingly impenetrable cloud of static.’ He paused and sipped his wine thoughtfully. ‘Cloud is perhaps the wrong word. I don’t want you to think of it as a towering mass of cunim hovering just beyond the Milky Way. It’s a dark grey veil. A virulent miasma enveloping everything. Filling
this room. Clouding your inner eye. Clogging your brain. And what we’re trying to do is punch a hole through it to let the good news in.’

  ‘You’re winning,’ I said. ‘I got the message.’

  ‘Good. So, to cut a long story short, the final phase of the Bethlehem mission included setting up a power transmission from the Empire to re-charge Earth. In the way you boost the batteries of a car. But because of this problem of “signal impedance” the rescue fleet was strung out in a line to act as relay stations for the beam. Thus keeping it “clean” and at maximum strength.’ He hesitated. ‘I was to be the final stage in the relay. The power was to be earthed through me.’

  Aha, I thought. The Jewish Connection. But I kept my irreverence to myself. ‘Let me get this straight – was this operation to recharge the planet?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I frowned. ‘What does the Earth need the power for?’

  ‘To stay alive,’ he replied. ‘To help revive the Ain-folk. It’s the life-force that permeates the natural world. Humans, animals, birds, fishes, insects, flowers, grass, rocks, trees, the earth, sea and sky all possess it in varying degrees. Earth is more than just a spinning ball of sea-girt rock, gift-wrapped in clouds. It’s the mother of all life upon it. A conscious, living thing that holds within itself a memory of its past. It remembers everything that ever happened, records every emotion. And like you, it feels joy, sadness, pain, anger. It gets sick and purges itself. It was young, and will grow old.’

  ‘I never thought of the Earth as being alive,’ I said.

  He smiled. ‘Have you never felt an inexplicable affinity with a rock you’ve picked up at random on a beach? Ever experienced a sense of place – the emotional charge stored in old houses, of battles lost and won recorded by the stones under your feet? Or discovered some spot where you feel an overwhelming rapport with the earth and sky? A sense of unity?’

  ‘Yes, I think I know what you’re getting at,’ I said. ‘What Carlos Castaneda calls “power places”. Is this what was meant by those words in the Book – “I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, O Lord, from whence cometh my help”?’

  He nodded. ‘There is a power-gradient that runs along the slopes of hills and mountains. And it was the earlier knowledge of these forces that degenerated into the idea of mountain-gods. There are other places too where the lines of force converge. When the whole system was working properly, these sites acted as cosmic terminals and plug-in points.’ He smiled. ‘Celestial gas-stations.’

  ‘You mean like Glastonbury, in England?’

  ‘That was one of them.’

  ‘Popular legend has you tied into the place,’ I said. ‘Joseph of Arimathea is believed to have taken the chalice you used at the Last Supper to Glastonbury where he and his party were taken under the protection of a Welsh king, Arviragus. Other mystical traditions link you with King Arthur, the search for the Holy Grail, St George and the Dragon. There’s even a hymn which poses the question, “And did those feet, in ancient times, walk upon England’s mountains green?”.’

  ‘They did,’ he replied. ‘But much as I admire your scholarship, we’re getting off the point. As I said, the plan was to set up a power transmission but, in order to reduce interference to a minimum, we had to try and draw off ’Brax’s forces from the point in time where it was going to happen.’

  ‘I’m beginning to get the picture,’ I said. ‘You were the decoy.’

  ‘That’s right,’ he nodded. ‘As I was the only one who could upset their plans, ‘Brax had designated me as the prime target for surveillance. If I moved, they were bound to follow.’

  It finally dawned on me. ‘So it’s not tag you’re playing, but hide-and-seek. When you turned up at Sleepy Hollow with that stunned look on your face, you were lying to me. The lost time-traveller bit was just an act.’

  I could tell from his face that I’d said the wrong thing.

  His eyes seemed to catch fire. ‘I’ve never lied to you, Leo. When I made those first two trips through the time-tracks, the Empire’s plans for this part of the mission had not been revealed to me.’

  ‘So, the time-travelling was set up to look like an accident,’ I concluded.

  The Man’s face softened. ‘The crews of the rescue fleet still think it is. And because ‘Brax is monitoring all communications between our ships and the Empire, their genuine confusion is helping to cover my tracks.’

  It was too much. ‘No wonder this war has been going on for two hundred million years …’ I sat back and tried to slot this new piece of information into the cosmic jigsaw then mentally tossed it aside. ‘Let me ask you something. You’re into your second war, up to your armpits in trouble, wherever you look you’ve got problems – I just don’t understand why you guys have to put up with it. If The Presence made ‘Brax and the rest of the mob that got the boot from the Empire, why doesn’t he just un-make them?’

  He digested my question. ‘It’s not quite that simple. To do it, you’d have to undo everything.’

  I refilled my glass. ‘You mean – the Apocalypse?’

  ‘You’d need to destroy more than the Earth,’ he said.

  ‘The – universe?’ I ventured.

  ‘It wouldn’t even end there,’ he replied.

  It was a marvellously surreal situation. Out on the streets, people were worrying away at their lives as they made their way into town for a good time, or tried to get back to their brick or clapboard burrows and here I was, sitting in a fourth floor apartment on 75th Street with The Man, casually discussing the disposal of the cosmos.

  ‘How d’you mean – “it wouldn’t end there”?’

  He spread his hands. ‘Because when this universe dies, the whole cycle starts all over again.’

  I raised my glass to him. ‘In that case, next time round, just count me out.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said, returning my toast. ‘Let me quote you a few words from some unpublished material. Drawn from the elusive New Testament source material that Biblical scholars have labelled “Q”.’

  From the German word Quelle; meaning ‘source’.

  His voice took on a new resonance and it was several seconds before I realised that he was speaking to me in Ancient Hebrew which, once again, I understood perfectly. But there was more to it than that. I knew, with absolute certainty that this was the voice of Elijah, Moses and Abraham. The voice that had entered into them in the high places; whose vibrant echo had travelled down a three-thousand-year long corridor of time and now filled my mind.

  ‘Fear not, Wayfarer, but listen and be of good cheer for in Your Beginning, You were beyond Time and Space and neither shall hold you in thrall. For both came into being with the sundering of the Eye of The Presence, the Primal Fire which gave birth to the World Below. From that moment Recorded Time began and will continue until the far-flung realms of the Star-Kings and all that lies within and without returns to the point whence All Began, fusing into a single, incandescent mass of unimaginable density and brilliance. Yet None shall be crushed, and None shall be blinded for All shall be as Light and that Light shall shine forth from the Face of The Presence and all of Time Past shall be as a single heart-beat of Created Man. Then shall All begin again, and so it shall continue until The Work is as perfect as Its Maker. Only then shall the Bonds of Space and Time be broken. The World Below shall be as One with the World Above and All shall come to Glory.’

  The Man’s words recalled the currently fashionable theory of the expanding universe that would, in time, collapse in upon itself, terminating its life in a gigantic thermo-nuclear holocaust. Were these the legendary hell-fires to which unredeemed matter would be consigned while the Elect, freed from ‘Brax’s grip, rose clear of the ashes?

  I tried to grasp the concept but it was too overwhelming. How many universes had been trashed before this one, which we had barely begun to comprehend? How many more would explode into life before the required degree of perfection had been achieved? All this was a far cry from th
e naïve, devotional simplicity with which his life had been presented for popular consumption. The basic ‘Blessed are the pure in heart’ bit still came through but, when one started to think about the supra-cosmic scale of the operation that The Man had outlined, the Christian claim that God, or whoever, had sent his one and only Son to help pull us up by the bootstraps suddenly became inconceivable – and ludicrously impractical.

  Were we the only breed in need of salvation? What about the mysterious Mannish that were out there somewhere? Amongst the numberless life-bearing planets circling the billions of stars in the billions of galaxies that lay beyond our own. If The Man came, as he claimed, from beyond Time and Space; from what had been termed the Ungrund, he could only be one of an infinite number of manifestations of the transcendent power of God. What we Jews termed the Shekinah and The Man referred to as The Presence. In saying this, I was not trying to destroy the widely-held belief that he sat on the right hand of God. There just had to be more to it than that. He had already hinted at a hierarchical relationship in which Michael and Gabriel were of lower rank. And if one was to believe his story about the fleet now on station in the heavens above first-century Jerusalem, then he was clearly a top gun. Someone that the Empire had gone to a great deal of trouble to rescue, and who ‘Brax took very seriously indeed.

  All well and good. But this new explanation still left me with several worrying loose ends. ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘If the idea is to give ‘Brax the slip, why take the risk of coming back here again? Especially since they knew you were here last week.’

  ‘It’s not so much where I move to, but when,’ he replied. ‘They’re bound to catch up with me eventually. The trick is to keep them guessing.’

  ‘But why keep homing in on me?’ I insisted.

  ‘Leo,’ he said, ‘has it occurred to you that you might have homed in on me? Don’t you find it strange that when I landed in that alleyway on the East Side, none of the policemen who handled my body, or people at the hospital like Wallis, reacted to my presence. Yet you knew who I was.’