Jesus Was a Time Traveler (WATT Book 1)

by D. J. Gelner

  My little speech had little effect on Bloomington, whose reddening face belied what can only be described as his usual nerd-rage.

  “You should see the getup he has me wearing; quite the fancy shade of lavender,” I tried to reassure the portly scientist.

  Bloomington perked up momentarily before he affected his anger once more. To his credit, when Corcoran saw the ugly green ensemble, he merely shrugged, tore into the package, and put it on. Oddly enough, both his and my overcoats had interior pockets in which our sidearms fit rather nicely.

  The whirring of the gravity drive ceased. I stood in my same violet “finery” from the jump to Newton’s time, dumbfounded. Had it taken so long to get dressed that we had already landed? I suppose that the alternative explanation, that the gravity drive had somehow failed and we were hurtling toward the planet at an unbelievable rate, was impossible, as we all still stood, feet firmly planted to the floor of the cabin.

  “Computer, three hundred sixty degree view,” I snapped, perhaps a bit unnerved by my momentary panic.

  Fortunately, there had been no malfunction; the ship landed safe and sound, perhaps two hundred metres away from a rather tall stone wall. The sun barely peeked through a low ceiling of clouds and shined several rays directly at the ship.

  “Computer, engage cloak,” I said. Even the commands to the computer, which would have been so ridiculous mere years ago, were becoming rote and mundane as I said them.

  “Open door.” I may as well have been a walking billboard for any number of antidepressants. Where had the wonder of time travel gone? The endless possibilities for not only observing history, but experiencing it right alongside the historical figures?

  Sadly, by introducing parameters, responsibility, and the like, my Benefactor had somehow taken all of the joy out of what should have been a thoroughly intriguing and invigorating experience. “Go here! Do this! Figure out what to do! Now, now, now!” It was a grind, a bore, simply get to the next place, the next item on the list, one step closer to home.

  And what even awaited me there? A long, awkward conversation with my Benefactor, after which he’d requisition this machine into which I had soaked so much blood and sweat?

  If I was really lucky, I would be a footnote in the history books, the mad scientist who had saved the real hero, Commander Corcoran, as well as his science officer, Specialist Steve Bloomington. They were far more likely to enjoy the fruits of our labors than I, and though I could see Bloomington as content to lay on the sand somewhere like a pasty, hairy beached whale, Corcoran was different. He was a man of action, a social creature, reliant on being around others so that he could showcase his wit, charm, and ability. I had heard nothing of his historic voyage for some twenty years; even the “history” of my near-future knew precious little about the Commander, so even if he would hop “back in the saddle,” as he may say, his deeds would remain nebulous and uncertain for many years, likely guided more by legend than fact.

  As I pondered these very weighty ideas, I descended down the gangway and onto German soil for the first time in years. We were in a large field outside of the large stone walls, which were decidedly harsh, angular, and thoroughly German in their appearance. The ramparts surrounded the city and provided a sense of foreboding protection, that what was to be found inside was most certainly not worth the trouble to any enterprising invaders of the day.

  The city stood like a heart in the middle of the plain, as various pathways branched off as veins and capillaries from the four major entrances. We unconsciously walked towards one of the paths, then followed it toward the city, looking positively daft in our ridiculous outfits.

  “What’re we supposed to do this time, Doc?” Corcoran broke the silence.

  “All it said was ’see the only show in town.’ Perhaps a play, or a concert, or a—”

  “Burlesque?” Bloomington interrupted.

  “I…err…don’t believe that to be the case,” I stared at Bloomington for an extra beat, “but we can’t discount the possibility.” I offered a “make-good” smile, which the little gremlin returned.

  “Great! So what’s the plan? Poke our head around into every theatre and whorehouse?” Bloomington asked with a bit too much glee.

  “Hey, it’s a tough job, but…” Corcoran tailed off.

  “The way the clue is phrased makes it seem as though it should be fairly obvious to us: the only show in town.” I said.

  Corcoran’s lips tightened into a half-scowl, “Let’s hope so,” he said.

  We spent the remainder of the brief trek in silence until we arrived at the gate into the city. I was immediately hit full-on by an indescribable sense of nostalgia. You see, on occasion throughout my thirties, I visited the town to consult with my good (dare I say only) friend, Klaus Thurbur, the brilliant chair of the physics department at the University of Leipzig, and one of the few individuals world-wide who could keep up with my keenly efficient intellect.

  Klaus and I often would talk each other through various problems we encountered in our projects before we would inevitably retire to some dank, German watering hole and sample strong German pilsner and fine scotch well into the night. The Leipzig of my day was thoroughly European in its appearance, with glorious examples of older architecture mixed in with modern, glass-and-concrete towers.

  In the past, the town was even that much more spectacular. Sure enough, there were the venerable Old Town Hall and Law Court, both bustling with activity. Even in this day, the warty little precursors to our modern Germans moved through life humourlessly and automatonically, an “It’s a Small World” tableau come to life, though they replaced the insufferable cheeriness of the Disney attraction with unapproachable near-contempt.

  Brightly-dressed merchants hawked their wares at the makeshift market as shoddily-clad beggars and well-adorned nobles eyed each stall. Most of what was being sold was foodstuffs and assorted goods for the preparation of meals, though there were also some more artisanal artifacts on display.

  Corcoran and I were, once again, giants among the sad little throng, while Bloomington looked merely like the tallest unripened strawberry one had ever seen.

  It was easy to get lost in the crowd, so we continued to observe in the hopes that we could figure out our destination without relying on the holotran to provide an accurate translation. As if sensing my thoughts, Bloomington decided it was a good moment to rifle through his pockets to produce his own holotran in the packaging, and make a big show of placing the device on his neck.

  “Wurstchen!” Wurstchen!” A nearby vendor yelled as he thrust several links of rancid-looking and smelling sausages in front of our faces. “Would you noblemen be interested in Leipzig’s finest sausages?” We were positively revolted until we saw the man’s face, which brought us to the brink of retching. Warts pocked his discoloured visage like a particularly gruesome pumpkin, obscured only by a hoarse layer of greasy stubble. One eye looked as if it had already been stricken by cataracts despite the man’s relative youth, while the other lazily stared in a different direction.

  Bloomington indeed did let out a long, whooping cough, and nearly lost his supper from the evening before. I must admit, despite Bloomington’s numerous faults, whenever he travelled more than one hundred years in the past, he instantly became the third most handsome man in town, provided that the Commander and I occupied the first two spots (presumably not in that order).

  “No, thank you,” It was all I could do to squeak out the phrase and bring a handkerchief to my mouth to contain my own round of hacking.

  We looked around for some inkling as to what “the only show in town” may be, but people scurried about without apparent regard for direction or destination.

  As I marvelled at the fantastic examples of renaissance architecture, church bells nearby began their rhythmic “Clang…Clang…Clang…” to signal that the time to worship was nigh.

  “Gentlemen…shall we?” I nodded at the church perhaps two hundred metres up ahead.
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  “Maybe we should check out the burlesque houses first,” Bloomington pleaded.

  “Aw, come on, Bloomy. Ain’tcha the churchgoin’ type?” Corcoran asked.

  “Are you?” I asked the Commander. He offered a soft frown in reply.

  We pressed on toward the church, which was an odd-looking building as far as churches were concerned. In the middle stood a stone, buttressed, almost cathedral-like entryway. Everything else, though, was covered in white plaster, including the tall, octagonal spire on the left side of the building. “Tomaskirche” was engraved in the masonry over the door.

  I certainly appreciated the building’s uniqueness. Despite its small size, as we made our way inside, the house of worship was very clearly less than half full of patrons, each of whom appeared to be dressed far more tastefully than ourselves. The disparity drew stares from the assembled, who looked at us as if we may as well have been from Mars.

  Corcoran took a step forward and jutted a thumb out toward me, “English,” he said.

  He must have forgotten his own ridiculous pea-green outfit.

  Not that the crowd cared: half breathed sighs of relief, while the others gave some signal of understanding, either in the form of an “Oh!” followed by a laugh, or a knowing nod. Though I strained to keep the look on my face as pleasant as a spring day, internally I seethed.

  See where that attitude gets you two hundred years from now, you Gerry bastards, I thought.

  The crowd went back to speaking in hushed whispers in the rows of pews. One person, though, moved to the center aisle, and remained fixated on us. It was a noble-looking woman, whose face, though creased by wrinkles, exuded a practised worry, as if she had not only seen a ghost, but had long ago become accustomed to seeing them.

  I looked into her eyes, each a sapphire-blue, which would be striking to anyone else for other reasons, but were even more so to me because they were the same shade that greeted me in the mirror each morning.

  It couldn’t be…after all these years… I thought. No, how could she possibly—

  The woman raised her right hand in front of her body and split the fingers into that horrible, awful Vulcan hand signal with with I was rapidly becoming disgusted.

  I couldn’t keep the utterance down any longer. I struggled to control it with all of my might, but it was of no use. A single, involuntary word passed my lips, though in my mind it echoed with the force of a thousand of the church bells that now serenaded the village.

  “Mother?”

  Chapter Twenty

  I knew it was true as soon as I had said it.

  “Finny?” the woman said. She opened her arms wide and crouched down, fully expecting me to disregard the past thirty years entirely and come running toward her.

  Corcoran and Bloomington, who had made their own attempts at the hand signal (Bloomington’s was perfect, Corcoran struggled with the finger placement) dropped the effort and turned their attention to me.

  For a moment, tears welled up in my eyes. I had a thousand things to say to this woman who abandoned me, who abandoned us, who made my father’s life so difficult, and why? To run off with some vagrant street artist she dug up in Spitalfields?

  I was determined not to give into her. Instead of running over to her, as she wanted, I steeled myself and practically marched over slowly and deliberately before I mechanically extended my hand toward her.

  “Mother…you look well.”

  She recoiled as if I had spit in her face.

  “That’s it, Finny? ‘You look well?’ After all of these years, that’s all—“

  “What do you want me to say, mother? I don’t know, maybe I’ve resented you going on thirty years now for leaving father in such a bad way? That I blame you for his death? That I—“

  “That’s not fair, Finny,” she shook her head, as she struggled to hold back the tears. “That’s not fair at all. You and I both know that your father was more married to his work than anything else. That’s what killed him, not me leaving.”

  “He always made enough time for me,” I said.

  “I suppose that’s where you and I differ then,” my mother said as she turned away, “You weren’t the widow to an already empty husk of a man at twenty-eight, consigned to cold dinners in an empty house,” I rolled my eyes at her hyperbole. “Oh, sure, he’d run a hand over me every now and then,” Corcoran and I briefly locked skeptical eyes, while Bloomington, true to form, licked his lips, “and bring home fancy gifts from time-to-time, but I was dying a slow death with your father, and I wasn’t about to be thrown out at the age of—“

  “But I was? Really, mother, that’s quite touching and everything, capital job on the story and whatnot. But that doesn’t make what you did any better, any more ‘right.’”

  Her tears streamed more forcefully, “Damn it, that wasn’t what I meant to do. I hoped that the court would hear Manyx and I out. Would give us—“

  “So, Mannix is his name?” I shot back.

  “—With one ’n’ and a ‘y,’ dear,” a pronounced glee at correcting me momentarily broke through her grief, “Now where was I? Ah yes—full custody. Especially given that I didn’t want you to end up in one of those terrible boarding schools. But your father had more money, and better lawyers, or ‘solicitors,’ or whatever you call them, and he won you. Much like a prize at a carnival, something that seems so indispensable at the moment that you must have it, only to have it rot in storage for the rest of your days, without nary a care.”

  “Glad to see you think so highly of me, mum,” I said.

  “Don’t you get it? It wasn’t you. It was him. I wanted you to be free to explore whatever you wanted to. To figure out whatever most moves you, and use it to discover what you’re passionate about.”

  “But I did, mother! I found the very things that drive me. I built a time machine, for fuck’s sake!”

  “Kiss your mother with that mouth?” Corcoran whispered, unable to contain himself. I shot him a look that indicated that I would not hesitate to use my sidearm, and given his professed deficiencies as a quick-draw, I liked my chances. “Though I know I’d certainly like to,” he said to her with his rakish grin.

  She took an involuntary step backward and blushed. “My, my, is that…Commander Corcoran! No wonder you’re such an enigmatic, charming character,” she said.

  “Ma’am,” Corcoran grabbed my mother’s hand and kissed it.

  She giggled, “Though there’s been tantalizingly little released about you or your mission, you certainly deserve every accolade that’s been hoisted upon you.”

  I cleared my throat loudly for effect.

  “Oh, son, of course, same goes for you. It’s just, history is history, you know?”

  “Whatever happened, happened?” Bloomington finally chimed in.

  Mother smiled, “Exactly.” her expression changed to one of gratitude, “Thank goodness that I’ve found you in the past. Here at a Bach concert, no less. I’m so glad that you appreciate the arts as much as Manyx and I do.”

  “So…you’re time traveling concert goers?” Bloomington asked.

  “That’s absolutely right,” mother smiled once more. “He’s a bright one, isn’t he?” She turned to me, so as to accentuate any potential implications that I was most certainly not in the same mental league…

  …as Steve Bloomington…

  “How ever did you find the—“ I asked.

  “Money? Believe it or not, Finny, Manyx became quite successful as an artist. Dare I say more successful than your father ever was.”

  Not bloody likely, I thought.

  “But instead of clamoring for more, more, more, Manyx decided at a certain point—2036, to be exact—that we would be better served traveling, seeing the world. Then, once we grew tired of that, time travel was legalized, and beckoned him to find a new ‘muse.’ I didn’t argue because, hey, how else was I going to see a Bach concert? Or DaVinci paint one of his most famous works? Or—“

  I shook my hea
d, “That’s impossible. How could you jump between those time periods?”

  “Well, we need to wait until ChronoSaber comes to get us, two years from now, but that’s a small price to pay to see several of the greatest composers of all time, not to mention some of the world’s foremost geniuses.” Her disregard of my own genius did not go unnoticed.

  I rolled everything that my mother had told me around my brain. Her attempt at reconciliation had served as little more than to cover a cannon shot with gauze. Not to mention that she hadn’t the wherewithal as a parent to see another of history’s foremost geniuses to adulthood, to raise him and provide him with other motherly things, though I secretly questioned whether her influence would have impacted my father’s apparently very successful scheme for rearing me, seeing as though I built a damned time machine on my own!

  Yet still, unbelievably, irrationally, strange emotions stirred within me. Dare I say it was pity for this pathetic creature who thought that she could find her life’s calling amid the hippies of Spitalfields, yet now didn’t even realise that all she had received in return was a one-way ticket to the past, doomed forever to chase down this Bach character, lest he—

  Bach! I thought.

  Of course! That would be the only show in town in Leipzig in the 18th century. How could I possibly be so stupid? I silently damned my anger for a moment before I collected myself and nodded toward Corcoran several times.

  “This is it,” I mouthed. The Commander whispered something in Bloomington’s ear. Both appeared about as excited as a couple of children whom had been informed that Christmas had been cancelled, so upset were they that this was not a mission to sample some of Leipzig’s establishments of ill-repute. I pondered whether or not we’d even want to visit such places given the general hygiene and attractiveness (or lack thereof) the denizens of this fine city had demonstrated thus far.

  I turned toward mother with what must have been an amused, if slight, smile on my face, but was thrown to see a thoroughly defeated creature sobbing, though she still struggled valiantly to maintain some semblance of composure. Despite all of the injuries she had cast upon me through the years, despite her extended holiday to find herself with this “Manyx” fellow, whom I assumed was the character with the purple mohawk who sat in the seat next to the one she had vacated, though he made not even an effort to get up and make small talk, despite her casual tone that disregarded my accomplishments even now, despite all of those things, something compelled me toward her, first trepidatiously, but then with increasing speed as I plunged into her arms.