by Lou Anders
“Yes,” I said. “Where?”
“You know where the tours of the Via Dolorosa start?”
I nodded.
“There,” he said. “Alone.”
I was still struggling for a remark when the taxi door slammed.
I pushed past guides and through coach parties, looking for him. He found me. He had a camera hung from around his neck and a big hat on his head, a white T-shirt under his jacket. We fell in at the back of a dozen or so people following a guide who shouted in English. I think they were Brits. Jesus rubbernecked with the rest of them.
“I saw the Gibson film on DVD,” he said.
“What did you think of it?” I asked, feeling a little smug.
“I liked it better than yours,” he said.
“I just report,” I said.
“You could have done better,” he said. “‘Moravec bush robotǃ’ I ask you.”
“I'm sorry,” I said. “Do you deny it?”
He looked at me sharply. “Of course I deny it. What use would a robot be to you?”
“And the whole alien intervention hypothesis?”
The crowd stopped. The guide declaimed. Cameras clicked. We shuffled off again, jostling down an alley.
“Yes, I deny that also.”
“And any other natural explanation?”
His lips compressed. He shook his head. “If you mean a hoax, I deny that too. I am who I say I am. I am the natural explanation.”
The man in front of us turned. He wore a baseball cap with a Star of David, and his shirt was open at the neck to display a small gold cross on a chain. He reached inside his heavy checked jacket.
“Blasphemer,” he said.
He pulled out a handgun and shot Jesus three times in the chest.
I grabbed Jesus. Two men barged out of the crowd and grabbed the assassin. He'd already dropped the gun and had his hands up. The two men wrestled him to the ground at gunpoint, then dragged him to his feet. Screams resounded in the narrow space.
“Policeǃ” the men shouted. One of them waved a police ID card, like it wasn't obvious. I learned later that they'd been shadowing Jesus from the beginning.
The assassin held his hands out for the plastic ties. He kept staring at Jesus.
“Save yourself nowǃ” he jeered. One of the undercover cops gave him the elbow in the solar plexus. He doubled, gasping.
Jesus was bleeding all over me. “Lay off him,” he wheezed. “He doesn't know what he's done.”
The man strained upright, glaring.
“Playacting to the end, demonǃ I don't want forgiveness from youǃ”
Jesus waved a hand, two fingers raised, in a shaky blessing, and sagged in my arms. I staggered backwards. His heels dragged along the ground. One of his shoes came off.
It took a long while for the ambulance to nose through the narrow streets. Jesus lost consciousness long before it arrived. I stayed with him to the hospital. The paramedics did their best—they're good with gunshot wounds in the Holy Land—but he was dead on arrival.
Jesus, DOA.
I couldn't believe it.
I watched every second of the emergency surgery, and I know he was a man.
The autopsy should have taken place within twenty-four hours, but some procedural dispute delayed it for three days. I managed to attend. It didn't even take much effort on my part—I was a witness, I had identified the body when it was pronounced dead. On the slab he looked like the dead Che Guevara. The pathologists opened him up, recovered the bullets, removed organs, and took tissue samples. Results came back from the labs. He was human right down to the DNA. So much for the bush robot theory. There was a burial, and no resurrection. No levitation and no infinitely improbable rescue. Some people still visit the grave. One thing I'm sure of: this time, he's not coming back.
There was a trial, of course. The assassin, an American Christian Zionist, disdained the prompting of his lawyer to plead insanity. He proudly pleaded guilty and claimed to be acting to thwart the attempts of the Antichrist to derail the divine plan for the End Times. I was a witness for the prosecution, but I suspect my testimony had as much effect as the rantings of the accused in the eventual ruling: not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. The assassin did six months in a mental hospital. After his release he made a splash on the US fundamentalist lecture circuit as the hero who had shot one of the Devil's minions: the false messiah, the fake Christ. The man he killed wasn't the real Antichrist, it's been decided. The Antichrist is still to come. Millions still await the real Rapture and the return of the real Jesus.
Perhaps it was some obscure guilt about my own inadvertent part in Jesus’ assassination that drove me to research his writings and the live recordings of his sayings and miracles. They're all online, and the authentic ones are carefully kept that way by his followers: online, and authentic. There's enough apocryphal stuff in circulation already, and far more interest in him than when he was alive.
The odd thing is, though, that if you trawl, as I've done, through his blog posts, his devastating put-downs in the comment sections, and the shaky cell phone and home-video recordings of his discourses, it has an effect on how you think. It isn't a question of belief, exactly. It's more a question of examining beliefs, and examining your own actions, even your thoughts, as if under his skeptical eye, and in the echo of his sardonic voice. It works on you. It's like a whole new life.
Mike Resnick and Nancy Kress, Hugo- and Nebula-winning authors both, need no introduction from me. Mike is a staple of my anthologies, a consummate old pro whom I can always count on to deliver a great and gripping yarn. It's been my privilege to know him for some years now, and I'm always glad to have him on board. Mike always chooses a coauthor for these projects, and I had my fingers crossed he'd pick Nancy. (I may have hinted loudly, too.) Her fiction has impressed me mightily in recent days, but this is my first occasion to work with her. Here's hoping it won't be the last.
Last dark, Eyoli dreamed, again. She woke screaming, again. I huddled with her against the hut wall, where my mother once held me and my grandmother held her, although not like this. I could feel my grandmother's arms around my mother, but for once it brought no comfort. Stroking Eyoli's fur, I pressed her against me until once more she slept in the light of the Three Moons, her small face smoothed free of terror.
Free of memory.
I cannot do this any longer. Tomorrow I will go to the Terrans. Maybe the rumors are true. Maybe they do not have these dreams, as my grandmother remembered hearing. Maybe they can stop Eyoli from having them. It seems incredible, but I am desperate. Let the Council be damned; I must do this for my daughter.
I cannot do less.
“Sir, there's a native outside.”
My head snapped up so fast I felt my neck twist. It hurt. “A native?”
“Yes, sir. She seems to want to come in.” My adjutant's face showed no shock, because my adjutant made it a point of pride to show nothing to a young spacer, especially to a staff officer, and maybe especially to me. But I was in shock. No native had approached the base in twenty-five years, and I would have bet my medical license that none ever would. And, of course, we stay away from them, too.
It's the least we can do, after what happened so many years ago.
So there was no protocol for this. I rose slowly, blanking the screen of my handheld. A native. Perhaps a chance to learn the truth about these strange people, to put scientific fact underneath the suppositions and rumors and, yes, myths. And, of course, a shot at the kind of journal article that established major reputations.
My fingers shook, very slightly, as I laid my handheld on the desk and made sure all room recorders were functional. “Show her in, Corporal. And then leave us.”
The Terran led me through a door into a small room. My mother had never been on this spot, but my grandmother had, before the Terrans came. It had been a meadow then, and I remembered her playing here with two friends. How young we were then! We ran and hid, giggling, beh
ind a carwollu bush, and then Issimu caught us. The feel of Issimu's hair in the warm sunshine…I smiled.
The Terran studied me. I stood straighter and wiped away the smile. I was not, after all, a green girl to be mastered by memory. I have the pride of my line, and it is an old one, and strong. When the Terran motioned to a bright large cushion and sat herself upon another, I, too, sat. And held one hand firmly in the other to still its trembling.
“Hello,” something said, and I jumped but did not fall. Then I saw that even though the Terran's lips moved, making strange sounds, the real words came from a small box in her hand. “Don't be afraid, please. I am speaking to you through a translator. That is a machine that changes my language into yours, and yours into mine, so we can understand each other.”
My mother had never seen this. My grandmother had never imagined it. My mother watched the first Terran ship come down and said, “Is it real?” My grandmother, standing beside her, said nothing, but fear ran through her.
The Terran said, “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said, and the box made a short, unintelligible sound.
“I am called Dr. Rubin. What is your name?” the Terran said. On her bright cushion she did not look quite so tall. Fur on her head only, drab green clothing on her body—the clothing did not look very warm, but then the room was too hot. I began to sweat. “I am Hutaral.” I did not give my whole matrilineal, since she had not offered hers.
“Hutaral, you are welcome in our hut.”
That was courteous. “How does the box know the language of the Ones?”
She hesitated. I studied her, and all at once what I saw was so shocking that I didn't hear her answer. I rose in panic. “You are a male!”
“Hutaral, I will not hurt you!” Dr. Rubin said, but by that time I had control of myself. Trembling, but in control.
Their males were so big, so strong, so unnatural. Once more I made myself sit on the cushion, and Dr. Rubin and I looked at each other. I kept my eyes from the unmistakable bulge in his tight pants. Finally she—no, he—said through the box, “Your males don't speak, do they? They never leave their huts.”
“Of course not,” I said. My line was an old and honorable one; we protected our males. They stayed safe at home where they belonged, poor solitary creatures. How would they survive otherwise, with no memories to help them?
“It is different with us Terrans,” Dr. Rubin said, and I took heart. “Different” was what I needed, for Eyoli. “Different” and “unnatural.” If this Terran could help, I wouldn't care if she—he —were a six-limbed fanged creeper.
“I have come here,” I said carefully, “to stop my daughter from dying.”
She was incredibly brave.
That was the thought that kept recurring to me, and it was dumb. I should have been concentrating on the visible genetic differences, relating phenotype to the genotype on record, or on her people's culture. But I kept coming back to the bravery. She had come to a Terran base, ululated outside the walls until someone led her inside, asked for the help of people who had inadvertently killed her mother. For I'd viewed all the records from that day twenty-five years ago, and I was sure this was the daughter of one of those natives, the native that had begun it all. The same slight upper body—not all of them are so thin, and we've surreptitiously recorded them for twenty-five years. The same uptilted nose, honey-colored fur, long six-fingered hands. That terrible day we had carefully laid the bodies outside the base perimeter and court-martialed those responsible. It was all that the Navy, new to 539-Beta, could do. That, and respect the natives’ refusal to have anything to do with us ever since. They couldn't know exactly what had happened inside, but we had returned to them seven dead and mutilated bodies.
And yet here she sat.
“Hutaral, where do your people come from?”
She blinked rapidly and hung her head, as if in shame. “My great-great-great-grandmother…I cannot see her memory clearly.”
Quaint phraseology. Or—was their version of their origins perhaps a religious secret, not to be shared with outsiders? But then she said, “My great-great-grandmother was told the story of an Iron Bird from beyond the stars. The Goddess sent it to bring bright seeds that grew into the Ones.”
Close enough. The original ship's embryos had included several genetic possibilities, with environmental conditions determining which phenotype expressed. That was the limit of biotechnology in those days. The natives’ genome was twice as large as mine—and, by the time humanity arrived here the second time, twice as puzzling. I said, “Did the Goddess care for the seeds after they sprouted?”
“Her iron angels cared for them.”
Those would be the first ship's robots, long since rusted away. A more accurate history had survived than anyone could have foretold, back in those dim lost days before the jump drive. But I was a biologist, not a historian. And science had waited twenty-five years for this.
“Hutaral, may I…would you permit me to let a machine touch you? It will not hurt you. It will only measure your temperature and your heartbeat.”
She blinked rapidly again—evidently a sign of heightened emotion. Then that bravery again, that amazing toughness. Had we selected for it genetically in the original package? Genes were such unpredictable things. They crossbred and jumped and mutated and influenced each other, and so often what you thought you were selecting for ended up far from what you actually got.
“Your machine may touch me,” Hutaral finally said, “only if you will help our memories.”
I caught my breath. Not just a journal article, but an entire study. Maybe the Assein Prize in Genetics. Why not? This native was the find of the century in xenobiology. Even if she wasn't exactly an alien. “What can't you remember, Hutaral?”
“I can remember all. It is my daughter. She must not Awaken, not ever.”
I went still. Not awaken? Were we talking infanticide here? Or prolonging of some sort of coma? Why would—
“She must not go insane,” Hutaral said, “or kill herself. Like all the other grandchildren of the seven.”
It didn't make any sense. The reference to “the seven”—that could only mean one thing. But I didn't see how it fit. I decided to take the practical route.
“If I am to help your daughter, I must see her,” I said. “Can you bring her here, Hutaral?”
“Yes. She must not die like the others,” Hutaral repeated. “Not even once.”
And what could anybody make of that?
The Terrans are more ignorant than I'd hoped. Almost I didn't go back to them. But then I went home and Eyoli was not there.
My heart froze in my breast. Then I was running through the village, crying to Oddu and Evvico and Imorli. “Where is she? Where is Eyoli? She's gone!”
Horror in their eyes before they, too, left their washing and cooking and ran to woods and river and pond, looking for Eyoli.
I jumped over a hole in the path; it was not there. My mother remembered it from another summer. It is so hard to keep memory sorted when fear fills the huts of the mind! I dodged around a rock, which was there, and ran right into a nest of red creepers. They had not been there in my grandmother's day, and I had not thought to look for them. Sobbing, I tried to free myself from the stinging vines, but I couldn't get loose until Evvico helped me. “We'll find her, Hutaral, we will! And she's a strong child!”
No child is that strong.
But we did find her. Walking into the river at the place of swiftest current, her face ugly with fear and panic and death. Evvico and Oddu and I made a chain of women and pulled her back just before she would have been swept away. Eyoli fought us, and when we had her safely on shore, I screamed at her. “You will not die! You will not go insane! I forbid it!”
Sanity took me then. One of those others had been Evvico's daughter. Evvico looked at me with such grief and pity in her dark eyes that my anger returned, even greater than it had been before. Anger at what? At all of it, but it came out fo
r Eyoli.
“Don't you dare die!” I screamed, and hit her with my fist hard enough to knock her out, and so stop all memory.
“Hutaral,” Oddu said softly. “Dear heart.”
But no “dear heart” was going to help us. No softness. “Tie her up,” I said, panting and wet and pressed on by memory—my mother bathing on this riverbank, my grandmother planting breadnuts, my great-grandmother harvesting her small patch of ground. “Tie her tight. I'm taking her to the Terrans now.”
In the middle of the night, after I'd failed at sleep for three hours, I sat in the cluttered office of the medical quarters and watched the old records once again.
Repetition dulls everything, even indignation. Without much emotion I watched the holo statements, made after the fact, from the four-soldier scouting party that had found the native who resembled Hutaral, far from her village, and in labor. Premature labor, they'd judged from the fact that no one was with her. They'd put her in the rover and brought her to the doctor at what would become the permanent base, though at the time there was just a jumble of half-unpacked crates and temporary inflatable dwellings. We had landed on 539-Beta only weeks before. The doctor had done what she could, but the native and her infant had both died, the infant instantly, the mother later—which was the problem.
Thus far, nobody had been to blame for anything.
But the doctor had not immediately returned the body to a village—any village—as protocol demanded. Instead, she'd taken tissue samples—not so bad—and performed an unauthorized autopsy—very bad. And she knew it, for she'd performed her xenobiology research in a small inflatable at the very edge of camp, without telling the CO. In the middle of the autopsy, six native women had stormed the inflatable.