The Snake Oil Wars

by Parke Godwin

  The little lawyer appeared more controlled than ever, as if fighting for that rule within himself. The fact didn’t escape Josh Speed. “Whatever I did,” he muttered to Coyul, “I did it good.”

  “If you wish,” Yeshua said, “I could appear as in life. With or without the thorns, Mr. Helm?”

  “Don’t be facetious!”

  “I am not.”

  “That hardly helps confirm your alleged identity.”

  “You miss the point. You heard that sentiment from the crowd.”

  “I apologize for that man,” Helm amended quickly with open scorn for the insult’s author. “He should be removed”

  “The House of God, remember?”

  “For whom you still wait. But why, Yeshua – why, if you are truly the Christ, the gatekeeper for God’s predestined saved —”

  “I told you —”

  “I know. Even if you were not born of a miracle but only predestined as a link between God and man —”

  “Predestined?”

  “Why did you not proclaim yourself here?”

  “I’ve already said why,” Yeshua explained. “No one believed me. No one wanted to believe me.”

  Helm’s reiteration was a razor. “I said proclaim.”

  The notion faintly amused Yeshua. “Again you miss the point. Like that fellow up in the seats there, they couldn’t handle my being Jewish. It’s always been a problem, having to share a Testament and a God with us when for so long they managed to keep us out of the better neighborhoods. Not joking, Mr. Helm. We were a small, wandering people who needed a God who could travel light on our way to milk and honey. An omnipresent, invisible God.”

  Helm rejected that. “You’re avoiding my question. Why did you not announce yourself here?”

  Yeshua protested; he did not avoid at all. Barion, for all his failings, ran a democratic Topside. One could believe as he pleased, but no one could proclaim anything as theological dogma. Barion had ruled that out starting with the Egyptian Old Kingdom when religion became truly complex.

  Yeshua rested his elbows on the lip of the witness box, smiling patiently at the lawyer. “You’ll find that’s true of democracies. They’re never as tidy as absolute rule, and even the asses have a right to bray Proclaim? So little of what I meant is in your churches. I was an embarrassment to avowed Christians and irrelevant to anyone else.”

  “Permit me to echo a commonplace,” Helm said. “Without faith in miracles and the inexplicable will of God, there is no religion, merely an ethic. Would you agree?”

  “Readily,” Yeshua nodded. “I have my people’s need for God, even though the Jews stood more on obedience to God’s word than wonder at His miracles.”

  “Be that as it may, where would the world be without God’s will or His Salvation?”

  “I don’t know,” Yeshua responded candidly. “For myself, such a lack is unthinkable, but you might pose the question to a Buddhist or Taoist, where it becomes even more interesting. Without Christianity – your European form of it – there would have been nothing to stop Islam when they swept up through Spain. Without that fervor that pervaded every breath of Northern life, the West might well be speaking a kind of hybrid Arabic today. The Moslems had an equal religious passion, a code of morality more rigid than yours, more abstemious laymen, more learned teachers, more passionate poets, a far higher standard of sanitation – and were courteous enough to consider me a prophet.”

  “You only reaffirm my faith,” Helm maintained.

  “And my own.” Yeshua smiled. “It’s an old Hebrew trail to consider the other hand. Is fact so dry in your mouth that you need magic to wash it down? Barion could have given you miracles; that would have been so easy, to be the apparent god you hunger for, to mouth the comforting lies you need to hear. He was better than that.”

  “Are you better than that?” Helm jabbed. “Do I detect a bitterness, a disillusionment in you?”

  “As a man, yes. I thought I was right. As a spirit, I’m still waiting. Man will always wait and always believe. Faith is alive, faith is life. Faith is a passionate singer, a lark at morning, a nightingale under the moon. Man’s need for God is as urgent as his need for a woman.” Now the smile was indeed bitter. “A sweaty, living fact that Saul and Augustine, Jerome and Tertullian were ever uncomfortable with, that need for relief in flesh as well as spirit. They wanted to choke that life out of faith. They’re doing it in America today when they proclaim that God speaks through this fool or that televised zealot and no one else. You’ve mentioned heresy in this trial. I was a heretic, Mr. Helm. What else should they do but nail me to a cross for it?”

  The young man turned his hands over and studied them with a dark memory.

  “Miracles? Want to see the wounds, Mr. Helm? No trick to that, ecstatics have produced stigmata for centuries. The miracle would be all of you understanding who I was and where I fit into an ongoing process. The tragedy is, perhaps you never will. You’ll do the same thing again and again to anyone who disturbs your illusions about God and makes you actually think about Him.”

  “As Coyul is crucifying Lance Candor for his beliefs.” Helm swung around to confront the jury, his arm flung out to his client. “Who did no more than you alleged, tore away at old, rotted and unsafe laws and present lies.” Helm pointed now to Coyul. “This rabid cur slinking loose through the City of God —”

  “Objection.”

  “Sustained. Colorful but hardly germane,” Aurelius ruled, “Constraint, Counsel. Clerk will strike that from the record.”

  Stricken from record but not from Coyul’s memory. He unfolded Felim’s s memorandum, crossed out Zwingli’s name and circled another choice. He must be getting old not to have caught the nuances before this. The city Geneva, the man himself the churning white-hot heart of radical Protestantism, whose views made Luther seem like a conservative pope. What he couldn’t have done with television then. His descendants were just waiting for it like the Hittites for iron.

  “Where did Candor’s motives differ from your own?” Helm challenged Yeshua. “Alive or dead, what did he desire but that same clearer definition of and union with God?”

  Yeshua appeared weary, no longer interested in the questions. “Candor’s motives are his own. I never argued the need for secular law on Earth. You might even recall something I did say about Caesar’s due.”

  “There is no law but God’s. There can be none!”

  “You seem to be finished with me,” Yeshua inquired civilly. “May I go now?’

  “Finished?” Out of that small, dynamic figure came a desperate gesture of both arms, all the stronger for having escaped his tight rein. “I have no further questions for this witness.”

  The slim image of Yeshua simply faded from the box. Helm addressed the court. “Your Honor, let – let the record show that I would bring a charge of perjury against the witness were there time or proper circumstance. However, I do request a moment’s recess to confer with my colleague.”

  The bench granted his request. Helm moved to Speed, and bent over the table, intense. Only Coyul heard their exchange. “No matter who you are, Speed, no matter how once revered, may you be damned as a blasphemer for eternity Do you intend to put Candor on the stand?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  Helm’s eyes narrowed. “We need to talk before that.”

  “Oh?” Speed leaned back in his chair, which definitely felt just then like the catbird seat. “Bargaining a plea, Counsellor?”

  “I know who you are,” The statement dropped like a heavy stone. “I could tell them all right now. They’d be fascinated, especially your wife. I want a conference. Oh, come,” Helm reasoned, “you’re no stranger to compromise. I loved the City of God, you the image of a state, and both of us sold out whatever we had to for them. Is there any more blood on my hands than yours? Conference.”

  Speed looked down at his big, misshapen hands. Coyul saw the homely features constrict in pain. “Where?”

  Helm rela
xed a little, feeling control back in his grasp. “Why not your Void? In your agnostic manner you seem drawn to it.”

  “Being an agnostic is like being a Thanksgiving turkey,” Speed drawled. “I’d be somewhere else if I could figure a clear way out.”

  “We need to talk.”

  “That ought to be interesting.” Speed tapped his folded hands against his lips. He rose to address Aurelius. “Your Honor, both Counsel for Defense and myself request recess until tomorrow.”

  “Your reason, Mr. Speed?”

  “My colleague and I agree the preparation intervening will be fairer to my next witness.”

  “Granted. Court stands recessed until tomorrow.”

  Speed winked at Coyul. “All right, you’re on,” he said to Helm. “See you in the blue.” He vanished out of the chair and the church, streaked through a jumble of conceptions that blurred like subway stations past his consciousness and shot out into the infinity of the physical universe.

  14

  Two views from the summit

  Speed surrendered like a swimmer in gentle swells to the vast motion of the universe. Below, the blue-white ball of Earth turned lazily in space, the moon a pearl on black velvet. Above the dull brown carpet of the Sahara, a tiny point of light: a satellite inundating the world with information.

  When I was born, you couldn’t send news faster than the fastest horse. Then came the miracle of an electric spark that could flush across the continent in an hour, if the Sioux didn’t cut the wire. That satellite, with chips smaller than a fingernail, can shower earth with information automatically sent and received in bare seconds. What do you call a miracle, Mr. Speed?

  Miracles came, astonished for their moment, became commonplace, but always with the first wonder came the fear that Man had wrought more than he could manage, and the cry for return to simplicity.

  Until we managed as we always do. Our timidity is exceeded only by our courage and curiosity.

  Here in the Void, Joshua Speed came as close to articulate prayer as his complex, shadowed mind could frame, always more awed question than comforting belief. He watched the small figure of Helm come closer, somehow inimical to this place.

  “Evening, Helm.”

  “I hope you didn’t wait long.”

  “Not at all. I like it here.”

  “Yes. You would.”

  The galaxy turned imperceptibly; they turned with it. Speed could feel the discomfort in his opponent who hated this place but would not flinch from it. Some men never sat a horse well but wouldn’t quit trying. “So you know who I am. Seems your disguise is better than mine.”

  “My name is not so readily conjured with,” Helm conceded with sardonic modesty, “but your Puritans carried my beliefs to Massachusetts and your Fundamentalists are reviving them today.”

  Speed’s knowledge of history was more instinctive than academic. “German?”

  “French, from Picardy. A lawyer like yourself”

  “That much in common at least.”

  “At best, except that for any man living through any age, it is always modern times. You spawned in the vigor of a new country, I in the rubble of the Middle Ages. Labels are misleading and posterity always smug. In the sixteenth century we thought our times as post-modern as Reagan’s. Why should we not? Our verities seemed as bankrupt, the theology of Rome venal and desiccated fustian. As in your time, tradition no longer fit. Don’t underestimate me.”

  “I haven’t so far,” Speed said truthfully. “For a while, keen as you are, I thought you were Luther.”

  Helm shrugged with concession. “Luther argued well, but for all his revisionist cant, he remained Rome’s vacillating lover, half gone yet half stayed. The eye that offended me was plucked out. I went back to first principles and created a pure theocracy there on Earth for the Chosen, the Elect already separated from the goats by God’s wisdom and His Grace. As they did once in your country; as they are doing now because mine is the one ultimate, irreducible faith for the common man.”

  “To America’s discredit,” Speed said with a rime of distaste.

  “Oh, listen to him. Listen! The syphilis of secular honor.” Helm’s hard laughter echoed in the Void. “Does it discredit a drowning man to clasp himself to that which cannot sink? Jesus, man!”

  Speed thrust deftly under the other man’s guard. “Speaking of whom”

  The yearning in Helm told Speed he’d hit home. The Frenchman stared out at red Mars and distant Jupiter with bitter defiance. “Do you think I can accept that man as Christ?”

  “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” Far out in space two titanic meteors collided in silence and burst apart, fragments streaking like tracer bullets through the upper atmosphere of Earth. Helm pointed. “There’s your reality. Your ethic. Do you imagine all men are like you, that they can look on the blind, brutal collision of events and believe in no more than an equation? You think I can accept this... indifference?”

  “Yeshua shook you, didn’t he?”

  Helm was turned outward toward space, still defying the equation. “It is indifferent, it crushes me. Even if he were that martyred mortal and Christianity the ill-fitting garment made from misunderstanding, yet it was made and covered us. He admitted that. I would rather believe a lie of faith than the reality of this Void. If Yeshua spoke truth, so did I. Without faith in what we cannot see or explain, there is no religion, only mutable ethic.”

  “Are you afraid of that?” Helm shot Speed a poisoned look. “Oh yes, I’d forgotten. Your legendary image as a man of the people. Speak of lies. You were never of anything but solitude.”

  True enough, Speed knew. Not even his wife got that close to him.

  “Great sorrows were attributed to you,” Helm went on. “The maudlin turned you into suffering Christ. How did you deal with that suffering? As when your son died. Did you share the grief with your wife then? Did you share hers?”

  “I tried.” No, I gave her the form of sharing, the hollow words, the hollow arms, but women know warmth or the lack of it. I mourned the boy in a private place.

  Helm pressed his advantage. “You heard Purji on her worshipers and what they needed. The urge is no different in us. To lose that lonely, vague and vulnerable self in an Absolute. Yeshua admits his belief and goes on waiting. So will I, but how will you defeat me when you argue from an abstraction and I from a primal human need?”

  “Yes, it’s always easier to wallow than to think,” Speed said. “Thought was too hard won for me to be traded for an uncritical prayer, much as I’d like to have prayed and known I was heard. I don’t know if mine was a lack of faith or merely a more precise definition, the idea of perfectible Man against the Absolute of God. Hardly new.”

  “Hardly.” Helm shivered in a cold he had no body to feel, shoulders hunched against the emptiness around him. “Shall we to business? There’s no comfort in chaos.”

  Speed’s cruel streak couldn’t resist the jab. “You prefer the illusion of order? Look there!” Deep in space an alien sun flared nova. “Someone else’s cosmology going up in smoke. Just a matter of time for us.”

  To Peter Helm, such lights were not those by which souls were illuminated; he held to his point. “Don’t put Candor on the stand. Sum your case without him.”

  “You serious?” Speed peered at the little lawyer. “By gum you are. Worried, too. He’s already an embarrassment to what you’re selling.”

  Helm shrugged. “So he is, and so I might have predicted he would be.” That much of human history never changed. Catalysts were useful at the inception of a great cause but a hindrance later. The trial was never about Candor anymore than World War I was fought over a Serbian assassination or the Civil War over John Brown, yet the fool and his overt, futile act were always needed.

  “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t gut him like a hog in November.”

  “A trade,” Helm offered, Speed knew the game and used the fool deftly to his own ends. “So that I need not inform the det
ermined lady from Lexington. You disappoint me, Speed. Was a mere wife such a burden?”

  “I never knew much about women,” Speed admitted. “Less about love. I only felt it once, early. After that, love was always safer at a distance.”

  Helm allowed tactfully that women were difficult at best, “I can understand the distance, but why total anonymity?”

  “Why yours?”

  “My work is obviously not done. But you,” Helm wondered. “You were an idol, an icon, one of your country’s greatest —”

  “Butchers,” Speed finished the thought, biting down hard on the word. “I became what I most despised; the Robespierre girded with noble motives and squeamish at the blood I spilled.” Merely ambitious at the start. Not a zealot, not even a statesman at first but drawn deeper and deeper into a sink of principle that couldn’t be denied, terrible as it was.

  “Yes.” Helm’s tone softened with an unusual empathy. “I turned away sometimes from the rack and the stake, wondering where the engine I set in motion would stop. But even when I urged clemency, my followers broke or burned them anyway and screamed for more.”

  “Speak of catalysts,” Speed mused. “I walked among vindictive, jealous men convinced they should have my place when they could barely fill their own. Blind, ruinous men whom I wanted to boot out the door and tell them; all right, you do it if you think you’re a better man. But the responsibility was mine. Just that I was wrong so often stumbling toward an ultimate right and the number of the dead mounting while the vindictive men said they told me so... and I wrote the orders that meant more death. Why should Hitler have such a bestial image when I was the father of modem warfare? Anonymity? I’d be anything, the Void itself, rather than identify with that.”

  Helm felt the first sickness of attenuation, yet Speed was drifting away from Earth toward black nothing. “What do the deaths matter? I’ve burned men for holy principle and would again. The principle is all that matters, the end.”