Snodgrass and Other Illusions: The Best Short Stories of Ian R. MacLeod

by Ian R. MacLeod

  “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 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 at the awestruck crowd, then at the incredible spires and domes. “…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. 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, 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…Walking on and away from the blazing light, he realised that what he needed was solitude, silence, clarity.

  He was sure that it was fully 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.

  Balthasar 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 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 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 it 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 fulfill 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’ 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, and who had come to bring him ease. 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 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’s put forward what has become known as “Pascal’s wager”. He argued that there’s more to be gained in acknowledging and worshiping God than there is in actively denying or ignoring, His existence. If it turns out that God’s there, and you’ve done all the right things and gone to church and so forth, you’ll be patted on the head when you die and sent to heaven. And, if it turns out you’re wrong and he doesn’t exist—well, seeing as there’s probably no afterlife either, you won’t even get the chance to look stupid.

  Although I can see the selfish logic in this approach, I’d like to think I’d still hold my ground with Saint Peter if I were to arrive at the pearly gates as a rather surprised atheist, and even if I met with the Big Man Himself, should He agree to discuss the matter with me. To my mind, the kind of God who decides to create this wonderful but clearly imperfect universe with all its injustice and suffering on a whim, and then demand our unquestioning thanks and worship for it, really needs to take a long, serious look at Himself in the mirror.

  My problematic relationship with God probably goes back to being forced to attend the Sunday school of a fundamentalist sect known as the Christadelphians when I was a kid—hardly the Taliban, and decent enough people in many ways, but they did insist on taking every word in Bible as the literal truth, which raised many questions and contradictions in my young mind, and left me with a vague recollection of far larger chunks of the scripture than is probably good for me.

  New Light on the Drake Equation

  AS HE DID ON the first Wednesday of every month, after first
finishing off the bottle of wine he’d fallen asleep with, then drinking three bleary fingers of absinthe, and with an extra slug for good measure, Tom Kelly drove down into St. Hilaire to collect his mail and provisions. The little town was red-brown, shimmering in the depths of the valley, flecked with olive trees, as he slewed the old Citroën around the hairpins from his mountain. Up to the east, where the karst rose in a mighty crag, he could just make out the flyers circling against the sheer white drop if he rubbed his eyes and squinted, and the glint of their wings as they caught the morning thermals. But Tom felt like a flyer of sorts himself, now the absinthe was fully in his bloodstream. He let the Citroën’s piebald tyres, the skid of the grit and the pull of the mountain, take him endlessly downwards. Spinning around the bends blind and wrong-side with the old canvas roof flapping, in and out of the shadows, scattering sheep in the sweet hot roar of the antique motor, Tom Kelly drove down from his mountain towards the valley.

  In the bureau de poste, Madame Brissac gave him a smile that seemed even more patronising than usual.

  “Any messages?” he croaked.

  She blinked slowly. “One maybe two.” Bluebottles circled the close air, which smelled of boiled sweets and Gitanes and Madame Brissac. Tom swayed slightly in his boots. He wiped off some of the road grit which had clung to the stubble on his face. He picked a stain from off his tee-shirt, and noticed as he did so that a fresh age spot was developing on the back of his right hand. It would disappoint her, really, if he took a language vial and started speaking fluent French after all these years—or even if he worked at it the old way, using bookplates and audio samples, just as he’d always been promising himself. It would deprive her of their small monthly battle.

  “Then, ah, je voudrais…” He tried waving his arms.

  “You would like to have?”

  “Yes please. Oui. Ah—s’il vous plaît…”

  Still the tepid pause, the droning bluebottles. Or Madame Brissac could acquire English, Tom thought, although she was hardly likely to do it for his sake.

  “You late.” She said eventually.

  “You mean—”

  Then the door banged open in a crowed slab of shadows and noise and a cluster of flyers, back from their early morning spin on the thermals, bustled up behind Tom with skinsuits squealing, the folded tips of their wings bumping against the brown curls of sticky flypaper which the bluebottles had been scrupulously avoiding. These young people, Tom decided as he glanced back at them, truly were like bright alien insects in their gaudy skinsuits, their thin bodies garishly striped with the twisting logos of sports companies and their wings, a flesh of fine silk stretched between feathery bones, then folded up behind their backs like delicate umbrellas. And they were speaking French, too; speaking it in loud high voices, but overdoing every phrase and gesture and emphasis in the way that people always did when they were new to a language. They thought that just because they could understand each other and talk sensibly to their flying instructor and follow the tour guide and order a drink at the bar that they were jabbering away like natives, but then they hadn’t yet come up against Madame Brissac, who would be bound to devise some bureaucratic twist or incomprehension which would send them away from here without whatever particular form or permission it was that they were expecting. Tom turned back to Madame Brissac and gave her a grin from around the edges of his gathering absinthe headache. She didn’t bother to return it. Instead, she muttered something that sounded like I’m Judy.

  “What? Voulez-vous repeter?”

  “Is Thursday.”

  “Ah. Je comprends. I see…” Not that he did quite, but the flyers were getting impatient and crowding closer to him, wings rustling with echoes of the morning air that had recently been filling them and the smell of fresh sweat, clean endeavour. How was it, Tom wondered, that they could look so beautiful from a distance, and so stupid and ugly close up? But Thursday—and he’d imagined it was Wednesday. Of course he’d thought that it was Wednesday, otherwise he wouldn’t be here in St. Hilaire, would he? He was a creature of habit, worn in by the years like the grain of the old wood of Madame Brissac’s counter. So he must have lost track, and/or not bothered to check his calendar back up on the mountain. An easy enough mistake to make, living the way he did. Although…

  “You require them? Yes?”

  “S’il vous plaît…”

  At long last, Madame Brissac was turning to the pigeonholes where she kept his and a few other message cards filed according to her own alchemic system. Putting them in one place, labelled under Kelly; Tom—or American; Drunk; Elderly; Stupid—was too simple for her. Neither had Tom ever been able to see a particular pattern which would relate to the source of the cards, which were generally from one or other of his various academic sponsors and came in drips and drabs and rushes, but mostly drabs. Those old brown lines of wooden boxes, which looked as if they had probably once held proper old-fashioned letters and telegrams, and perhaps messages and condolences from the World Wars, and the revolutionary proclamations of the sans-culottes, and decrees from the Sun King, and quite possibly even the odd pigeon, disgorged their contents to Madame Brissac’s quick hands in no way that Tom could ever figure. He could always ask, of course, but that would just be an excuse for a raising of Gallic eyebrows and shoulders in mimed incomprehension. After all, Madame Brissac was Madame Brissac, and the flyers behind him were whispering, fluttering, trembling like young egrets, and it was none of his business.

  There were market stalls lined across the Place de Revolution, which had puzzled Tom on his way into the bureau de poste, but no longer. The world was right and he was wrong. This was Thursday. And his habitual café was busier than usual, although the couple who were occupying his table got up at his approach and strolled off, hand in hand, past the heaped and shadowed displays of breads and fruits and cheeses. The girl had gone for an Audrey Hepburn look, but the lad had the muscles of a paratrooper beneath his sleeveless tee shirt, and his flesh was green and lightly scaled. To Tom, it looked like a skin disease. He wondered, as lonely men gazing at young couples from café tables have wondered since time immemorial, what the hell she saw in him.

  The waiter Jean-Benoît was busier than usual, and, after giving Tom a glance that almost registered surprise, took his time coming over. Tom, after all, would be going nowhere in any hurry. And he had his cards—all six of them—to read. They lay there, face down on the plastic tablecloth; a hand of poker he had to play. But he knew already what the deal was likely to be. One was blue and almost plain, with a pattern like rippled water, which was probably some kind of junk mail, and another looked suspiciously like a bill for some cyber-utility he probably wasn’t even using, and the rest, most undoubtedly, were from his few remaining sponsors. Beside them on the table, like part of a fine still-life into which he and these cards were an unnecessary intrusion, lay the empty carafe and the wine glasses from which the lovers had been drinking. Wine at ten in the morning! That was France for you. This was France. And he could do with a drink himself, could Tom Kelly. Maybe just a pastis, which would sit nicely with the absinthe he’d had earlier—just as a bracer, mind. Tom sighed and rubbed his temples and looked about him in the morning brightness. Up at the spire of St. Marie rising over the awnings of the market, then down at the people, gaudily, gorgeously fashionable in their clothes, their skins, their faces. France, this real France of the living, was a place he sometimes felt he only visited on these Wednesday—this Thursday—mornings. He could have been anywhere for the rest of the time, up with the stars there on his mountain, combing his way through eternity on the increasing offchance of an odd blip. That was why he was who he was—some old gook whom people like Madame Brissac and Jean-Benoît patronised without ever really knowing. That was why he’d never really got around to mastering this language which was washing all around him in persibilant waves. Jean-Benoît was still busy, flipping his towel and serving up crepes with an on-off smile of his regulation-handsome features, his wing
s so well tucked away that no one would ever really know he had them. Like a lot of the people who worked here, he did the job so he could take to the air in his free time. Tom, with his trois doigts pastis merci, was never going to be much of a priority.

  Tom lifted one of the cards and tried to suppressed a burp as the bitter residue of absinthe flooded his mouth. The card was from the University of Aston, in Birmingham, England, of all places. Now, he’d forgotten they were even sponsoring him. He ran his finger down the playline, and half-closed his eyes to witness a young man he’d never seen before in his life sitting at the kind of impressively wide desk that only people, in Tom’s experience, who never did any real work possessed.

  “Mister Kelly, it’s a real pleasure to make your acquaintance…” The young man paused. He was clearly new to whatever it was he was doing, and gripping that desk as if it was perched at the top of a roller-coaster ride. “As you may have seen in the academic press, I’ve now taken over from Doctor Sally Normanton. I didn’t know her personally, but I know that all of you who did valued her greatly, and I, too, feel saddened by the loss of a fine person and physicist…”

  Tom withdrew his finger from the card for a moment, and dropped back into France. He’d only ever met the woman once. She’d been warm and lively and sympathetic, he remembered, and had moved about on autolegs because of the advanced arthritis which, in those days at least, the vials hadn’t been able to counteract. They’d sat under the mossy trees and statues in Birmingham’s Centenary Square, which for him had held other memories, and she’d sighed and smiled and explained how the basic policy of her institution had gone firmly against any positive figure to the Drake Equation several decades before, but Sally Normanton herself had always kept a soft spot for that kind of stuff herself, and she’d really got into physics in the first place on the back of reading Clarke and Asimov. Not that she imagined Tom had heard of them? But Tom had, of course. They were almost of the same generation. He’d developed a dust allergy from hunching over those thrilling, musty analogue pages as a kid. They chatted merrily, and on the walk back to the campus Sally Normanton had confided as she heaved and clicked on her legs that she had control of a smallish fund. It was left over from some government work, and was his to have for as long as it took the accountants to notice. And that was more than twenty years ago. And now she was dead.