Jesus On Mars

by Philip José Farmer

  Orme quailed before the fire and the thunder.

  Jesus rose, and the stern forceful expression was replaced by the smile.

  'You may go now. Peace and the blessing of the Merciful One shower upon your head.'

  He held out his hand. Orme rose, went to him, and kissed the hand. He could feel the power flowing into him.

  19

  'What I'm doing,' Bronski said, 'is writing an unauthorised biography of Jesus.'

  He looked across the piles of papers and recording machines on his desk at his captain. Orme was pacing back and forth across the room.

  'Actually, it'll be a short book, since it's more an outline than a massive detailed life. But I want to have it ready by the time we return to Earth. Possibly I can get it done early enough to have it transmitted before the takeoff.'

  The day before, the Marsnauts had been informed that they would be passengers on the Martian ship. It had come as no great surprise; they'd expected to be used as eyewitnesses and to validate that they had not been lying because of pressure by their hosts.

  Orme had told the others of his conversation with Jesus at breakfast. Madeleine Danton had immediately seized upon the story of the energy-being as the true one.

  'He's playing with us,' she'd said. 'He's telling us the truth, knowing that we won't believe it.'

  'But you do,' Nadir had said. 'Personally, I think you're very confused and upset. Otherwise, you'd never give any credence to such a fantastic tale. It's pure science-fiction.'

  'I'd rather believe that than that he is indeed Jesus Christ!' she'd cried.

  'Why not?' Bronski said. And during the heated discussion that followed, in which they kept interrupting each other with increasingly higher-pitched voices, Bronski had stopped them cold. He'd told them that he intended to convert. The arrangements had been made with the neighbourhood rabbi. An hour later, the rabbi called back. Excitedly, the rabbi told Bronski that he had wonderful news.

  The Messiah himself would conduct the ceremony.

  'That's real class,' Orme had said. 'I'm jealous.'

  The jest concealed a genuine seriousness. He was jealous, and he hated himself for being so. Last night, he'd prayed in the living room while Bronski slept.

  'Lord, show me the truth. Tell me whether or not this man is indeed Jesus Christ, Your son, or the anti-Christ. Or... could he be that energy-being? Give me light. Don't allow me to make the most grievous error in the world. I'm one of Your children, and surely it would not be too much to show me the true path. I beseech You, Father. Please. Amen.'

  He had not really expected that a great light would flood the room or a thunderous voice speak. Nevertheless, he was disappointed when nothing occurred. Not even his weak inner voice spoke or his own feeble light glowed. He stood up, tensed, whirled, and then let out a long sigh. For a few seconds he'd had the feeling that someone was standing behind him. It was the same sensation as when he'd awakened in the night knowing that someone had been standing by his bed.

  Who was it? What was it? The result of overwrought nerves? The dim consciousness of God Himself? Or had the real Jesus allowed his presence to be felt so that he, Orme, would realise that he was not alone? But which Jesus had it been? The one he'd been taught about when he was a child, or this Jesus, the living man, the Messiah of the Jews, and eventually of all peoples? Or was there any difference between them? Were the Christians really in error? Or was this Jesus really the energy-being?

  If Orme had not thought that it would be sacrilegious, he would have cursed Jesus for having told him that story. It had given him grave doubts, though that had not been Jesus's intention. Or had it? Perhaps he was testing Orme's sincerity.

  This morning, Orme was still wrestling with himself. To strive with your own being, he thought, is harder than wrestling with an angel. Jacob had it easy compared to me.

  He stopped pacing to look through the window.

  'Here comes Nadir,' he said. 'He looks as if he's been through hell.'

  A moment later the Iranian entered. His face was pale and drawn, and his eyes were edged in black, his hands shook.

  'Madeleine's leaving me,' he said in a strained voice. 'I told her this morning that I'd decided to become a Jew. She screamed at me and told me to get out. I tried to reason with her, but she was crazy. It was useless to argue, she threatened to kill me if I didn't stay out of her way, and she mocked me because I, a Moslem, was becoming a Jew.'

  Orme looked across the street at the Shirazis' home but could not see anyone through its window.

  Bronski said, 'I'm deeply sorry about Madeleine. But I am glad that you've made this decision. Perhaps Madeleine will calm down. I think that she knows what the path is, but she just can't force herself to take it.'

  Orme was worried about Danton, too. However, the news that the Iranian was also going to convert rocked him. What made them change their minds? And why couldn't he change his?

  'I would have had to leave her anyway,' Nadir said. 'She's a pagan, and the People of the Covenant aren't allowed to marry pagans. We'll be divorced, though we probably would have been in any event. She's impossible to live with.'

  There was no way of knowing why, at this moment, hearing these words, Orme made his decision. No great light bloomed, no trumpets blared. It happened as quietly as the birth of a mouse in a dark cupboard.

  Shaking with excitement, he said, 'I'll see you later.'

  They stared at him. As he went out the door, he heard Bronski call after him. 'Where are you going?'

  'You'll find out!'

  An hour later, having first found out where she was, he stopped his car outside the school where Gulthilo taught. Alerted by his call, she was waiting for him in an office near the entrance. Today she was dressed in a robe printed with blue and red flowers. He could smell her musky perfume. Her hair was a golden cataract down her back. Her blue eyes glowed; her smile seemed wide enough to take him in.

  'You wouldn't say why it was so important that I see you at once,' she said. 'But I think I know. You want to marry me?'

  'Right,' he said, and he took her in his arms. Behind him he heard some small girls giggle from just outside the office door.

  The initiation ceremony into the faith was short but impressive. There was a huge crowd, an estimated one hundred and fifty thousand. The onlookers were there partly because of the historic importance, since this was the first time in two thousand years that the ritual had been used. The other attraction was the presence of the Messiah.

  Jesus arrived in a ground car, probably much to the disappointment of those who hoped that he would levitate. He wore a sky-blue robe and the tephillin or phylacteries, two little leather cases, each holding four passages of the Law and worn on the forehead and left arm. He also carried his tallith, the prayer shawl. According to the law, a Jew was to wrap himself in the shawl and wear the tephillin during prayer, but when Orme had breakfasted with Jesus, his host had not done this. But as the Messiah, he was given a certain freedom. But this time he was apparelled as the chief rabbi should be.

  His wife, Miryam, was making one of her rare public appearances. She came in another car, and when she got out to enter the synagogue, the people closest to her tried to touch her robe. If unable to do this, they touched those who had succeeded. It was as if they thought the power was transmitted to her from her husband and could even be felt at fourth-hand. Or perhaps it was just an exhibition of the public's affection for her.

  Orme, Bronski, and Shirazi waited on the steps of the beth kinneseth, the synagogue. From inside it came music by an orchestra of a hundred. Gulthilo was among them; she had winked at Orme as she passed by him. There was no repressing her.

  With a blare of trumpets and a crash of cymbals Jesus entered, and the converts and notables followed him. Orme was numb throughout the vows, the symbolic circumcision necessary because they had had their prepuces removed at birth, the prayers, and then the meal eaten afterward in a large room at the university. His happiness was alloye
d with a doubt. Was he really doing the right thing? Wasn't he being swept along by pure emotion? But then, in these matters, it was always the heart that dictated after the mind had pondered.

  The next day he went through a ceremony almost as numbing but one in which he forgot his uncertainty. He and Gulthilo were married by Jesus himself. The mistitha or wedding was solemn, but the celebrating afterwards was very lively. Mistitha was an Aramaic word originally meaning 'carouse', and this certainly was one. He believed that it would have been even wilder if Jesus had not been there. No one was going to tell jokes about a bride and bridegroom on their wedding night or drink themselves into a stupor while he was around. After he had left, the party exploded, but the newlyweds did not stay long. Gulthilo's mother wanted to talk more to Orme about her daughter. Gulthilo said, 'He knows all about me, mother,' kissed her, and they fled.

  They drove to a little lodge on the shore of a lake in the adjoining cavern and wasted no time in getting into bed. At six in the morning an exhausted Orme was wakened by the shrilling of the TV. He dragged himself off the bed and staggered to the set. Nadir Shirazi's image appeared.

  Before he heard the Iranian, Orme knew that he was the bearer of bad news. Grief had cut even deeper lines into his face.

  'Madeleine called me about an hour ago. She said she was going to kill herself. I begged her not to, but she cut me off. Before I could get to the house - I was staying with Bronski, you know - she had driven a knife deep into her heart. I'm sorry to call you so early in the morning, but... I thought... you should know.'

  He began weeping. Orme waited until the deep racking sobs had subsided, then said, 'We'll be there as soon as possible. But it's a long drive...'

  'That's all right, Hfathon will send an airboat for you.'

  Gulthilo and Orme arrived at the hospital fifteen minutes later. Bronski, Shirazi, Hfathon, and a Krsh doctor, Dawidh ben-Yishaq, were in the waiting room.

  'I thought you said she was dead!' Orme said.

  'She was,' Nadir said. 'But they repaired the wounds, got the heart working again, and now she lives.'

  'But the oxygen supply to her brain... she'd been dead how long before they got her to the hospital?'

  'Ten minutes. And she was dead at least half an hour. But the ambulance men had her in a cryonics chamber as soon as they arrived. Even so...'

  Orme thought that she would be an idiot, a vegetable. Why bother? Then he thought of Jesus Christ. Couldn't he restore the cells to their original condition?

  He took Bronski aside and asked him this. The Frenchman said, 'It wasn't necessary to ask him to come. In the first place, all restoration that could be done, even by him, was done at once. You forget, Richard, that their medical science is far ahead of ours. As for her brain, well, some irreversible damage occurred. Not even he could help her. There are certain things lost that only the Creator could restore.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'Her memory. Many of the cells storing this must have decayed. They can be restored, but their contents will be gone forever. They'll be empty containers, waiting to be filled.'

  'Yes, but what about Lazarus? He'd been dead three days, and when he was raised by Jesus, he was as good as ever.'

  Bronski smiled sadly. 'You still aren't able to distinguish between the Jesus of the Gospels and the historical one. No one could revivify a corpse that had been rotting for three days in that hot climate. That's a story that originated after Jesus had died or perhaps even when he was living. It's just one of the wild tales that collected about extraordinary people in those days.'

  That was true. Madeleine did live, and her body was healthy, and her intelligence was as high as before. But she spoke believing herself to be twelve years old and in her parents' house in the city of Montreal. Prepared for something like this, the doctors had heavily sedated her to ease the shock. It would be a long time, if ever, before she would be able to understand what had happened to her.

  20

  What had Orme learned about Mars? Very little of what he had expected to discover, which wasn't much anyway, and far more than he could possibly have anticipated in imagination.

  Even when he'd learned that the Martians were Jewish, he'd had daily experiences that surprised and sometimes upset him.

  One reason for this was his firm preconception of what a Jew was. But the more time he spent on Mars, the more he realised that though he'd prided himself on his lack of prejudice, he had had far more than he'd thought possible. Or perhaps it was not so much prejudice as ignorance. Though it was hard to draw the line between them.

  Also, the Martian Jew was not, could not be, identical with the Terran Jew, though there was a basic similarity. Two thousand years ago, the two had been separated. Those left on Earth had had intimate involvement with many hundreds of different Gentile societies. Their Gentile neighbours had made a cultural impact upon the Jews among them no matter how the Jews had struggled to keep intact their identity, physical, mental, and spiritual.

  'The Jews who settled in China in olden times,' Bronski said, 'eventually became indistinguishable, physically speaking, from the Mongolian goyim. They also lost most of their Jewish heritage. On the other hand, the Jews in the Rome ghetto, though they preserved their religion, were Italian in many respects. That is, they could not escape adopting many cultural attitudes. This was to be expected. The Jews have always done this wherever they settled, and indeed, they could not have survived without doing so. But the Roman-ghetto Jews ended up looking like Italians.

  'I've had explanations from various Jews as to why so many Italian Jews look Italian and Dutch Jews look Dutch and Sephardic Jews look Spanish or Portuguese and the Yemenite Jews look Arabic. They ascribe this to a sort of protective mimetism. That's a ridiculous, nonscientific explanation. It's based on their unwillingness to admit that somehow, no matter how hard they've tried to keep the "racial" strain pure, Gentile genes have entered it. Rape can account for a certain amount of this, but adultery is the main cause. Of course, the genetic flow has gone the other way, too, and many an anti-Semite has a Jewish forefather.

  'The Jews, especially the devout, don't or won't admit this explanation into consideration. I don't know why. Throughout their history, their prophets have raved about the whoring of their people with the goyim. Or, to use a less emotional and more accurate word, miscegenation. You've read the Bible. You have. You know what I'm talking about.'

  Bronski said, however, that this was no real danger to the preservation of Jewish identity, which was not based on 'racial' purity but on religious purity. Anyway, any child born to a Jewish woman was regarded, by Jewish law, as a Jew and was raised as such. However, it usually had to endure shame and reproach and would not be admitted to the Temple to worship.

  'This was no big deal,' Bronski said, 'since there has been no Temple after 70 AD nor was there one during the Babylonian captivity. But I digress, as usual. Why not? The digressions are as interesting as the aspects of the main argument.'

  All ethnic groups underwent acculturation because of contact with other groups. But what was to most Gentile groups acculturation was to orthodox Jews backsliding -contamination, pollution, evil.

  'From their viewpoint, they were absolutely correct. How could they be Jewish, continue to be God's Chosen People, if they ceased to cling to the religion, if they abandoned any of the laws of Moses? To give up or alter even an iota of the basic commandments was to let the snake get his foot into the door.'

  He smiled, saying, 'That is, if a snake has feet. His nose, anyway. However, the Martian Jew has been isolated from both his brother Jew on Earth and the Gentile community. He has not suffered the horrible persecutions of his Terrestrial kin nor has he been tempted to adopt Gentile ways, since he knows no Gentile. He's completely unaware of the nuances, the emotional associations, of the word "Jew" as uttered by too many Gentiles and by too many Jews themselves.

  'Here, after the Krsh and the Terrestrials had worked out their cultural differences, which
was made much easier by the Krsh becoming Jewish, the society became a homogeneous unit unaffected by non-Jewish contacts. In the beginning, there was a certain amount of friction, but none of it violent.'

  For over two thousand years Mars had known no wars, no mass migrations impelled by fear, no riots. The only civil disturbances had been an occasional peaceful demonstration. There had been brawls among individuals or small groups and some murders. But these were so few that Bronski had said that he sometimes wondered if the Martians were truly human.

  He would quickly add, however, that he, like Mark Twain, had some prejudice against the human race. What the Martian society demonstrated was the potentiality of the human for peaceful cooperation. It also demonstrated that Homo sapiens (and Homo Krsh) was not a born killer. Or, if he was, the Martian society had certainly repressed or diminished considerably any instinctual drive for murder and war.

  'Yes,' Orme had said, 'but note that, now that there is going to be contact with the foreigner, the Martian is embarking on war.'

  'No. He's not declaring war. He won't fight unless he's attacked. He'd be insane or very stupid if he wasn't prepared for war. He knows the history of Earth and its present situation. He has to expect attack.'

  'Which the Martians know full well will happen. The point is that they could avoid war if they stayed on Mars. Or if they did not try to proselytise on Earth. They know that, yet they are going to try to convert the entire population of Earth. They know that this will result in war. Millions, maybe billions, will die, will suffer terribly.

  'In a sense, the Martians are belligerents, the aggressors.'

  Bronski smiled wryly.

  'You keep saying they, not us. You forget that you and I are among the they. You're not really a full-fledged Martian yet - if you ever will be.'

  'How about you? You were calling them they.’

  Bronski shrugged. 'It takes time. I can no more forget Earth than the ancient Jews of the Babylonian captivity could forget Jerusalem.'