A Creed for the Third Millennium

by Colleen McCullough

  He swept off his hood and the scarf muffling his face, ripped off his big gauntlets and tucked them into the nearest pocket in his jacket. And stood, head thrown back, regally.

  A woman went down on her knees before him, her face as she looked up suffused with blatant but sincere adoration. Fascinated, Dr Carriol saw him reach out one long sensitive hand and lay it lightly, tenderly, on top of her head; it dropped to her cheek, its fingers trailing across her glowing skin, then lingered in the air in front of her face, and made a movement which was almost a blessing. An intense and shocking love mushroomed out of him and wrapped itself all around his companions. His people. His disciples.

  'Go now,' he said, 'but remember I am always with you. Always, my children.'

  And they went, like little sheep, back into the swirl of snow outside.

  On the short ride to Sioux Falls, Dr Carriol shrank into her seat with her face turned obdurately away from Mama. Mama had started to greet her ecstatically in the airport building, and then seen something in her face which was terrifying.

  An unusual silence filled the busy vehicle as it rose into, then above, the clutching snow, its frequency-sniffing black wet nose homed in with two-yard accuracy on a beacon in Sioux Falls.

  Billy was in no mind to talk, for though conditions and in-air winds were not bad, he disliked night flying these days; the mountains were looming ever closer as they moved westward. His instruments were superb, he could see the height and contour of every upthrust in the land on the big phosphorescent screen just above his right knee, and provided altimeter and the rest were exactly calibrated, he knew they were as safe as at ground level. Still, he was in no mind to talk.

  Dr Christian was happy, and in no mind to talk. How glad they had been to see him today! How glad every day. The pattern on the loom of time which spelled out his destiny was shaping, shaping, growing, growing. Still obscure in its overall picture, but beginning to reveal some of the details. So long they had waited for him! So long too he had waited, though that was an infinitude of shortness in comparison.

  Mama was in no mind to talk. What was the matter with Judith? Why had she looked so? Oh, there was trouble coming! How to discover its direction, how to run for cover? They had committed some frightful sin in her absence, she and Joshua, and Judith's cool lustrous brain had condemned them without trial.

  The cool lustrous brain certainly put Dr Carriol in no mind to talk. It was not cool. It was not lustrous. A huge awful outrage and anger had blasted coolness to white heat, lustrousness to incandescence. Think! She had to think! But thought, useful productive thought, was impossible. So she turned her face away from the other occupants of the little cabin, and turned her heart away as well.

  When they walked into the motel which offered a haven to the few visitors Sioux Falls could expect at this time of year, Dr Carriol pushed Mama to her room as she might have shut an animal out for the night, and rounded on Dr Christian grimly, purposefully.

  'Joshua, please come to my room,' she said curtly. 'I want to talk to you.'

  His tired slow footsteps followed her sharp thudding ones the short distance from the foyer to where her room was; when she closed her door and shut them in together he sighed, and he smiled his sweetest, most special smile just for her.

  'I'm so glad to see you! I missed you very much, Judith.'

  She scarcely heard him. 'What was the meaning of that little exhibition at the Sioux City airport tonight?' Her voice came grinding out from between clenched teeth.

  'Exhibition?' He stared at her as if she were receding from him at light-speed. 'What exhibition?'

  'Letting those people kneel to you! Letting those people adore you! Touching that idiot woman as if you had the right — and the might! — to bless her! Just who do you think you are? Jesus Christ?' Her hands writhed, coiling their fingers in upon each other fruitlessly, then she reached out to grasp at a table to steady herself, to keep herself upright, and the table began to shake, to rattle. 'I have never seen such a filthy, disgusting exhibition of sheer egomania in all my life! How dare you? How dare you?'

  His skin had gone grey, his cold-festered lips worked in and out like uncomfortable new covering on old dry teeth.

  'She — she didn't! She — she wasn't! She knelt for help! She — she needed something from me, and God help me, I didn't know what! So I touched her because I didn't know what else to do!'

  'Bullshit! Fucking crap! You're not merely on an ego trip, Joshua Jesus Christian Christ! You're on a god trip! And it's got to stop! It's got to stop right this minute! Do you hear me? Don't you dare let anyone kneel to you! Oh, don't you dare let people worship you! You are no different from any other man, and don't you ever forget that! If there is any reason in the world why you are where you are and who you are on this day, that reason is me! I put you here, I created you! And I did not put you here to act out a second coming, to cash in on the fortuitous coincidence of your name by encouraging people to remember you not as one of themselves but as a divine being! The reincarnation of Jesus Christ in the third-millennial person of Joshua Christian! What a mean, shoddy, despicable trick to play on these hapless people! Trading on their need and their credulity! It's got to stop! Do you hear me? It has got to stop this instant!'

  She was foaming at the mouth, actually foaming at the mouth; she could feel the bubbles clinging all around the corners of her lips, and sucked them in with a long hiss.

  And he stood looking at her as if she had found the magical plug at the back of his bronze heel, unstoppered the tide of ichor that had kept his titanic will pushing him on from town to town without feeling the cold, the exhaustion, the despair.

  'Is that truly what you think?' he asked, whispering.

  'Yes!' she said, unable to stop herself from saying yes.

  His head shook slowly from side to side. 'It isn't true!' Shaking, shaking. 'It isn't true! It — isn't — true!'

  She flung away from him to look at the wall. 'I am too angry to continue this discussion! Kindly go to bed! Go to bed, Joshua! Go to bed and sleep like any — other — mortal — human — man!'

  Usually a tirade helps, when the object of such bitter, overwhelming rage is on hand to berate. Not tonight. Not in Sioux Falls. Not Joshua Christian. At the end of it, after he had stumbled from her room, she actually felt worse. More and more angry. More filled with more emotions than she had ever suspected she possessed. She couldn't go to bed. She couldn't even sit down, let alone lie down. So she stood with her scorching forehead against the freezing wall of her motel bedroom and wished herself dead.

  Dr Christian's room was quite warm; these good kind people had somehow managed to give him what they thought he would most need. Warmth. But he didn't think he would ever feel warm again. Is that true, what she said to me? Can it be true? Why was I ever born, to have to listen to that? It isn't true! It can't be true!

  The legs which drove like pistons up and down day after day and had long grown used to putting forth in abnormal effort suddenly would not could not did not hold him up. He collapsed to the floor and lay there, divorced from all sensation save the terrible grief of understanding how badly he had failed.

  They didn't need a god! They needed a man! The moment divinity invaded a man, he ceased to be a man. No matter what the books said or how sacred the books were supposed to be, he, Joshua Christian, knew a god could not suffer, a god could not experience pain, a god could not be at one with the people he was god of. Only as a man could anyone help Man.

  Through a dense foggy wall he plucked feebly at memory, tried to picture a woman on her knees to him, and after what Judith Carriol had said, it seemed to him looking back that she must indeed have knelt to him in adoration. And it also seemed to him that he had indeed responded to her adoration as a god would have responded. Accepting it as his right. A man would have repudiated it with horror and rebuke. No, no! He hadn't interpreted the incident that way at the time! He had merely seen someone so bowed down with her pain that she could no
longer remain on her feet — her pain had driven her to her knees, not her love! Help me! she had cried without a voice, help me, my fellow man! And he had reached out a hand to touch her, thinking that his were healing hands, and could help.

  But if in truth she had knelt to worship him, then everything he had done was in vain. Everything he had done was a blasphemy. If he was not one of them, if he was not a man as they were men, then what he did and could do had no meaning. If he was not one of them, and therefore one with them, he offered them ashes. And if he was not one of them, but was one above them, then they had used him to steal an essence they could not hope to find for themselves. They were little better than vampires, and he was their willing victim.

  His body jerked, writhed, shuddered. He wept desolately. He was broken. Broken man or broken idol? What did it matter? He was broken. And there was no one to pick up the pieces, no one to put him back together again. For Judith Carriol had abandoned him.

  In the morning he looked very ill. Aghast and ashamed of her wild outburst, Dr Carriol suddenly realized that though he had often looked tired to death, never before had he looked ill. When her fury finally quit her in the middle watches of the night, she knew that she had fatally tampered with powers she neither understood, nor respected. Had she respected them, she could never have been made so angry. She realized that what had enraged her to the point of madness was the knowledge that this puppet king, this image of her creation, was usurping powers for himself that she had not granted him, and did not consent to grant him.

  After the physical chill of her room permeated her flesh so deeply that her anger curled up and shrivelled up and died away, she understood her mistake. What bothered her was not his usurpation of powers she did not consent to grant him; what bothered her was that she had begun to think of herself as the one with the real power, and he had simply shown her beyond any shadow of a doubt that what lay within him could not by definition be anything she was capable of creating. When the king-maker is unmade by the king, towers fall, fortresses crumble. All in the mind. Her mind. His mind.

  How to repair the damage she had done? She didn't know, because she couldn't even begin to divine what the damage was. Nor was the matter one she could discuss with him in the beautiful cool sanity of reason and logic; it lacked both. Nor could she attempt an apology. He would not even understand why she was apologizing.

  For the first time in her life, Dr Judith Carriol was forced to admit that what she had said and done could not be mended, at least by herself.

  Mama scuttled into breakfast sideways like a wary crab, took one look at Dr Carriol's face and gasped, then looked at her son, and began to flutter and keen. Dr Carriol put an end to that with a single glance. Mama sat silent, eyes down.

  'Joshua, you're not well this morning,' Dr Carriol said very crisply and calmly. 'It might be better if you didn't try to go out on foot today. Use the car.'

  'I will walk,' he said, easing his lips back from his teeth painfully. 'I will walk. I have to walk.'

  And walk he did. Looking so ill that Mama sat huddled in the car and let the tears fall down her face unheeded and untended. He talked, he advised, he listened, he comforted, he walked again, he spoke in the town hall with great power and feeling, but not about God. When asked questions about God, he answered evasively if possible, otherwise as shortly as possible, giving as his reason a new dilemma within himself that had to be sorted out. Hearing this, Dr Carriol tensed. Wished with might and main and heart and soul that she could turn back the clock. Cursed her stupidity, her lack of control, the emotional weaknesses she hadn't known she possessed. Not that any local person in Sioux Falls recognized the difference in him, for no local person had seen him in the flesh before, and even so ill, so cast down, he had an enormous presence. The gulf between what had been glorious spontaneity, and now was merely iron determination, was lost on the pitifully small remnant of the population of Sioux Falls who had stayed there during the winter of 2032-33.

  On he went: North Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah. On and on and on in hideous cold, always walking, walking as if his life depended upon it.

  But the spiritual ichor that had warmed him outward from the centre of his soul had bled away when Dr Judith Carriol pulled out the stopper. And in the new bleak ice of his soul, his body began to crumble. It ached. It itched. It cracked. It festered. It bled. Every passing week saw some new external evidence of his internal disintegration. Abscesses. Boils. Rashes. Bruises. Cracks. Blisters. He told no one, he showed no one, he sought no medical aid. At night he ate as little as he ate during the day, then dropped like a stone on his bed, and closed his eyes, and told himself he slept.

  In Cheyenne he fainted, and it was many minutes before he came round fully. No, no, there was nothing seriously wrong, a weakness that had come and gone, that was all.

  And oh the grief. The terrible sorrow.

  Not Billy, not Dr Carriol, not Mama was able to plead, to remonstrate, to reason with him; even to bully him. He simply mentally removed himself from them, and from all external evidence of who or what he was. As far as Dr Carriol could ascertain, he was even ignorant of the pending March of the Millennium, for whenever someone mentioned it to him, his face did not change, did not register interest. He was a walking machine, a talking machine.

  And he began to speak continuously about his mortality. More and more he protested that he was only a man, that he was a very poor and imperfect specimen of the breed, that he too was doomed to die.

  'I am a man!' he would cry to anyone who would listen, and then he would search their eyes feverishly for a sign that they believed him; and when he imagined that they looked upon him as a god he would preach them strange sermons going round and round in ever-decreasing circles, all to do with the fact that he was a man even as they were. But of course those who heard him did not hear him; it was enough to see him.

  He continued to walk, and the people walked, with him, not understanding his pain. Not understanding how intensely he resented this burden of responsibility they were thrusting upon him. Oh, how could he get it through their thick heads that he was just a man, and he couldn't work miracles, and he couldn't heal cancers, and he couldn't raise the dead, and he couldn't, couldn't couldn't couldn't Anything!

  So walk on, walk on, Joshua Christian. Hold back the tears. Don't ever let anyone know what you are suffering. How you feel. Is this truly sadness? Is this the bottom of grief, or have I still further to fall? Walk, walk. They need something! And you, poor man, are all they have managed to find. Dreadful. Oh why can they not be made to see that all they have found is another man? A fellow man. A yellow man. A Jell-O man. A hollow man. A minnow man. That was fun! How many more? Any more? Yeah, plenny more!

  He walked because it was something to do. It mechanized his pain, it drove his pain from one part of him to another, and that was better oh that was much much better than bearing his pain alone in one dark unmoving place. The dark unmoving place of his soul.

  And the greatest of Joshua Christian's many tragedies was that no one saw how vastly his humanity had grown, eclipsing even his encroaching dementia; for he was more a man, not more than a man.

  11

  In Tucson, on an early May day with the mountains glowing in the sun and the air still cold, Dr Judith Carriol tried to tell Dr Joshua Christian about the March of the Millennium.

  His mood seemed to improve after he came to Arizona, colder in May than the state used to be by far, but lovely yet, and able to penetrate even Dr Christian's obdurately walled-up mind. So Dr Carriol coaxed him to take a drive with her to see an exquisitely laid-out piece of parkland between the fringe of Tucson and the Band A relocation town of Hegel.

  This parkland had been randomly but artfully planted with groves of silver birch, clusters of flowering almond, magnolia and azalea. The birches were fluffed with palest lime, azaleas congealed whole slopes with a Japanese mosaic of colour, the magnolias were pink and white and muted purple,
the almonds were massed with white blossom, and daffodils smothered the ground in a display of blatant narcissism that would not have shamed the Cambridge Backs.

  'Sit here with me, Joshua,' she said, patting a redwood bench warm from the sun.

  But he was too enchanted, wandering this way and that, cupping a magnolia bloom in his hands, marvelling at the way a dead beech had been persuaded to give tenure to a wisteria vine whose heavy bunches of lilac flowers trailed drifting in a little wind.

  But after a while he needed to communicate his delight to an understanding fellow creature, so he approached the bench and then sat down, sighing. 'Oh, this is wonderful!' he cried, moving his arms to embrace the scene. 'Judith, how much I have missed Connecticut! In all its seasons, but in spring most of all. Connecticut in spring is deathless. The dogwoods on Greenfield Hill below those enormous copper beeches, the weeping cherries, the prunus, the apple blossom — yes, it is deathless! A hymn to the return of the sun, the most perfect overture to summer. I see it in my dreams!'

  'Well, you can be in Connecticut in time for all that.'

  His face changed, closed up. 'I must walk.'

  'The President would prefer that you rested until the autumn, Joshua. It's vacation time, the wrong time for you and your work. You keep saying you're only a man. Well, a man must rest. And you haven't rested for nearly eight months.'

  'That long?'

  'Yes, that long.'

  'But how can I rest? There's so much still to do!'

  Now. Careful, Judith. Slow. Find exactly the right and proper words. Only were there any right and proper words left for him these days? 'The President has a special request to make to you, Joshua. He wants you to rest during the summer, but he feels also that the people would like this long tour of yours to finish in a very special way.'