Though mostly forgotten now, Millennialism was a huge cultural phenomena around the turn of the century. Every Easter or Christmas, it was hard to turn on the television without half the channels showing “docudramas” based on the life of Jesus. Save for the shape of the cross (it was actually a T-shape, and Jesus only carried the cross-piece rather than the entire thing) the scene that unfolded was almost exactly like the ones I had seen on TV. The crown of thorns, the darkened sky, the “forgive them, Father, they don’t know what they’re doing” (Dr Silver’s translation program was relentlessly modern, though I think Phil missed the poetry of King James) were all there. I was somewhat shocked at how close the actual event was to its multiple media re-enactments, though six hours of real time event wave depiction wasn’t exactly designed for winning sweeps week.
I only watched the first and last half-hours, spending the rest of the day checking in every now and then while I buried myself in administrative work – a futile attempt to avoid thinking about the passion play unfolding in the lab. It was a fittingly ironic gesture. History was being made a few hundred feet away and I preferred shuffling papers.
Come 7:30 that night, I was still in my office, filling out next week’s paperwork in a vain attempt to keep from thinking, when Phil called.
“Richard, can you come here? There’s something I want you to see.”
When I got to the lab, the holotank’s murky image could barely be discerned.
“What is it?”
“The tomb where they laid out Jesus. Ruth, do an artificial light enhancement of 200 percent.”
The image brightened, and now I could clearly see a shrouded body laid out on a stone slab. “This is three hours and eight minutes after His death on the cross.”
“OK,” I said neutrally.
“Watch. Ruth, eliminate artificial light enhancement and run the recreation from the stop point.”
For fifteen or twenty seconds there was nothing to see except a few flickering bands of fuzz. Then, just as I was about to ask Phil what I was supposed to see, it started. For a moment it seemed as if fireflies had somehow gotten into the tomb. Several tiny specks of light appeared and started to fly in circles around the body. Over the next few seconds their numbers grew, until there were hundreds of them, each glowing brighter and brighter. The light became so intense that I started to bring my hands up to shield my eyes, but just then the brightness reached its peak, then abruptly disappeared. This time I didn’t need any light enhancement to tell me the tomb was empty.
“I think it’s safe to call that Transfiguration,” said Phil, a broad smile on his face, utterly calm, utterly at peace.
My mind was anything but. I felt like I was drowning in unfathomable metaphysical seas, my careful, logical denial of Christ’s divinity shattered, my worldview lying in ruins. Even today, what happened next is something of a blur. I remember talking about the project report, and Phil, down on his hands and knees, loudly offering a prayer of thanks, tears streaming down his face. But the exact words and actions of that night still elude my memory, almost as if I was stoned out of my mind or using powerful painkillers.
I left as soon as possible.
On the way home, I stopped by the bookstore and had them print out a King James Bible. I stayed up half the night reading it, feeling numb all over. The next morning I copied Phil’s files to my home system and spent the weekend reviewing them, looking for signs of tampering or fraud. I didn’t find any. Phil’s recordkeeping was meticulous and the data looked genuine.
By Sunday I had exhausted my store of plausible denial and finally started facing up to the awful truth. Jesus Christ had lived, preached, died, and been resurrected. Christianity, that silly, foolish religion I had taken such pride in scorning, was a more fundamental, bedrock truth than anything modern physics had ever discovered.
Making that admission wasn’t easy. How do you continue your life after finding out everything you’ve ever known is wrong? I could almost believe it intellectually, but emotionally I was still in turmoil. I started making a mental list of the things in my life I would have to change. I was numb at the thought of learning how to pray. I even flipped through the yellow pages looking at listings for local churches.
Still, I thought I was coping remarkably well – calmly, rationally, logically. I thought the worst was over.
I was wrong.
I got in to work early Monday morning, intending to truly congratulate Phil, something I had failed to do in my numb state on Friday. My first sign that something was wrong was the broken glass.
Outside the lab hallway, a small forest of beer bottle shards lay shattered beneath the torn safety poster they had been hurled against.
Inside the lab things got worse.
In addition to more broken beer bottles, paper readouts were scattered across the lab floor amidst overturned chairs, one of our ancient computer terminals smashed against the wall. On the other side of the room I heard the slosh of a bottle and several quick intakes of breath.
I followed the sound until I found Phil sitting in a chair at the far end of the lab, drinking bourbon straight from the bottle, a three-day growth of beard on his cheeks, his hair and clothes disheveled. A cluster of empty liquor bottles was scattered around his feet, one marooned in a shallow pool of vomit. At the sound of my footsteps, he turned, bleary-eyed, to look at me.
“Oh look, Mr Atheist is here,” he said. “Good fucking deal.”
“Phil?”
“Who fucking else,” he said, then drank the rest of the bottle and hurled it against the far wall.
“All gone,” he said. The smell of bourbon on his breath was almost overpowering. “If you want some you’ll have to buy your own. Damn good thing they deliver, isn’t it?”
“Phil, why are you doing this?”
Phil got up and staggered away. “Why’dya think?” he slurred, coming to rest leaning on the holotank. He turned and looked at me once again, his eyes seeming to focus for the first time.
“You weren’t here then, were you?”
“When?”
“When I ran the second run,” he said, caressing the holotank’s steel backside. Then he started to cry.
“I didn’t know,” he said between sobs. “How could I have known?”
“Know what? What second run?”
“The second run!” he said, angry again, tears still falling down his cheek.
“Phil, I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Please, try and calm down and tell me what happened.”
Phil looked at me a moment, then whispered a soft “Oh God,” and half-slid, half collapsed to the floor, his back against the holotank.
“The first run fuzzed out. ‘Bout a half hour after Jesus . . . after what you saw. What I showed you. The light . . . Can you believe it? Four weeks of clear resolution, and then fuzz. Lost the trace. Nothing but goddamn fuzz. God-damned.” He paused a moment. “Jesus fucking Christ, I need a drink.”
“OK, so the first run fuzzed out. What second run?”
Phil looked at me a moment, then closed his eyes. “I did a second run. I used the first run data to refine the parameters, used the crucifixion as the entry vector. I wanted to see the Resurrection. I wanted to see Jesus rise from the dead.”
“What happened?”
Phil opened his eyes again. “What happened? Not a goddamn thing happened. Not a goddamned thing.” He staggered to his feet.
“Ruth!” he yelled. “Bring up the goddamned run.”
“Dr Morley, I’m not sure what you mean—”
“Shut the fuck up you metallic whorel Bring up the last run, the one that starts Friday night.”
The holotank brightened, and once again I saw Jesus on the cross.
“Advance . . . advance recreation six hours.”
Ruth complied and I saw them taking Jesus’ body down.
“Advance another two.”
Darkness.
“Enhance the light, 200 percent.”
&n
bsp; Once again we looked at Christ’s body in the tomb.
“There,” said Phil, evidently satisfied. “There you are.” He staggered away from the holotank.
“OK, Phil, it looks like Jesus’ body. What am I supposed to see?”
“That’s just it,” he said, rooting around through the bottles near his chair in search of one that wasn’t empty.
I looked at Phil, then the holotank, then back at Phil again. “I still don’t understand what—”
“There’s no fucking resurrection).” he screamed, throwing a whisky bottle that narrowly missed my head. “He just lies there! No light, no angels, no nothing!” At that he collapsed back into his chair, tears running down his cheek again. “He’s just a corpse,” he said quietly, “just another fucking corpse.”
It took a long moment for that to sink in. “You mean, we’ve got one wave proving Jesus is divine, and another proving he isn’t?”
He nodded, looking as miserable as I’ve ever seen anyone look. “No divinity, no resurrection,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “No salvation.”
I suddenly seized on an idea. “Phil, do you realize what we have here? We finally have a first-order variation, proof of a major alternate worldline. If we can follow this wave, document the subsequent absence of the Christian church, we can prove that—”
Phil started laughing, a low, bitter sound. “Look at the run. Do you know what the apostles do after they bury Jesus? Do you? They have a meeting and decide to go on preaching as if he had risen! Far better to start living a lie than admit you had lived one all along. They even convinced themselves it’s what he would have wanted.”
At that I sat down in the chair across from him. “So there’s no way to tell which run represented our world.”
Phil nodded, letting out the same bitter laugh. “Fuck disappearing Greeks. We’ve got a disappearing Messiah.”
Both of us were silent for a long moment, neither looking at the other. Finally, I got up and said, very quietly. “Well, Phil, I understand this is very hard for you. But it doesn’t change the fact that all this was tremendous research. We’re still going to be famous, despite the uncertainty involved —”
“Uncertainty?!?!” Phil yelled, grabbing a broken beer bottle and jumping unsteadily to his feet. “You call this uncertainty? Uncertainty’s for sports, for stocks, for worries about your future! Uncertainty isn’t for your basic relationship with the world! It isn’t supposed to be about your soul! Uncertainty isn’t about God’s love!”
“Phil, calm down,” I said, backing away. “Maybe there was a mistake with the run. Put the bottle down and take a few days off, and then we’ll start again and see what the results are. We’ll just live with the results we’ve—”
“I can’t live in a world where the state of my soul is subject to quantum mechanical fluctuation!” he screamed, madness in his face. Then he started to use the beer bottle.
I managed to get it away from him before he was able to slit his wrists.
And now, here, alone, I wonder if I’m any more capable of facing that uncertainty than Phil was. It’s up to me to reveal our findings to the world.
Or not to.
One world of redemption, where salvation and eternal life are proven possibilities, proof of God’s love. Another where God is silent and the afterlife no more than a comforting lie.
And no way to tell which is our own.
How can I reveal this to the world? That the most fundamental truth about our existence is not only unknown, but unknowable? That there’s no way to know whether we’re saved or damned?
What good can possibly come of such knowledge?
And what horrors will I be responsible for in unleashing it upon an unsuspecting world?
Without a Truth, any Truth, we’re all alone in the dark.
THE PACIFIC MYSTERY
Stephen Baxter
Stephen Baxter (b. 1957) is the current British face of hard science fiction, Britain’s answer to Gregory Benford, Greg Bear and Robert Reed, amongst others. He might also be seen as the natural successor to Arthur C. Clarke, with whom he has collaborated on several occasions. Baxter’s own work began in 1987 with “The Xeelee Flower”, a story that introduced Baxter’s future history series, which has included such extreme-sf novels as Raft (1991), Flux (1993) and Ring (1994). He established a wider reputation with The Time Ships (1995), his sequel to H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, and has gone on to establish himself as one of Britain’s most innovative and entertaining science fiction writers.
Amongst his books is Voyage (1998) which tells of a journey to Mars in an alternate world where President Kennedy was not assassinated. Alternate worlds are fascinating studies in possibilities, but are seldom “extreme”. However the following story not only uses one of the most basic alternate-history ideas – that Nazi Germany won the Second World War – but sets it against a truly unique and wonderfully extreme concept.
[Editor’s note: The saga of the return of the aerial battleship Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches Hermann Goering to London’s sky, and of the heroic exploits of a joint team of RAF and Luftwaffe personnel in boarding the hulk of the schlachtschiff, has overshadowed the story of what befell her long-dead crew, and what they discovered during their attempted Pacific crossing – inasmuch as their discoveries are understood at all. Hence, with the agreement of the family, the BBC has decided to release the following edited transcript of the private diary kept onboard by journalist Bliss Stirling. Miss Stirling completed the Mathematical Tripos at Girton College, Cambridge, and during her National Service in the RAF served in the Photographic Reconnaissance Unit. For some years she was employed as a cartographer by the Reich in the mapping of the eastern Kommissariats in support of Generalplan Ost. She was also, of course, a noted aviatrix. She was but twenty-eight years old at the time of her loss.]
15 May 1950. Day 1. I collected my Spitfire at RAF Medmenham and flew up into gin-clear English air. I’ve flown Spits all over the world, in the colonies for the RAF, and in Asia on collaborative ops with the Luftwaffe. But a Spit is meant to fly in English summer skies – I’ve always regretted I was too young to be a flyer in the Phoney War, even if no shots were fired in anger.
And today was quite an adventure, for I was flying to engage the Goering, the Beast, as Churchill always referred to her before his hanging. Up I climbed, matching its eastward velocity of a steady two hundred and twenty knots towards central London – I matched her, the Beast was not about to make a detour for me. You can hardly miss her even from the ground, a black crossshape painted on the sky. And as you approach, it is more like buzzing a building, a skyscraper in New York or Germania perhaps, than rendezvousing with another aircraft.
I was thrilled. Who wouldn’t be? On board this tremendous crate I was going to be part of an attempt to circumnavigate the world for the first time in human history, a feat beyond all the great explorers of the past: we would be challenging the Pacific Mystery. Always providing I could land on the bloody thing first.
I swept up above the Beast and then vectored in along her spine, coming in from the stern over a tailplane that is itself the height of St Paul’s. It was on the back of the Beast, a riveted airstrip in the sky, that I was going to have to bring down my Spit. I counted the famous four-deep banks of wings with their heavy engine pods and droning props, and saw the glassy blisters of gun-turrets at the wing tips, on the tailplane and around the nose. It’s said that the Beast carries her own flak guns. A few small stubby-winged kites, which I later learned the Germans called “chariots”, were parked up near the roots of the big wing complexes. The whole is painted black, and adorned with Luftwaffe crosses. Despite the rumoured atom-powered generator in her belly, it is scarcely possible to believe such a monstrosity flies at all, and I can quite believe it is impossible for her ever to land.
And, like all Nazi technology, she is seductively beautiful.
I’ve done my share of carrier landings, but that final ap
proach through a forest of A/T booms and RDF antennae was hairier than any of them. Pride wasn’t going to allow me the slightest hesitation, however. I put my wheels down without a bump, my arrestor hook caught on the tag lines, and I was jolted to a halt before the crash barriers. On the back of the Beast stood a batsman in a kind of all-over rubber suit, harnessed to the deck to stop from being blown off. He flagged me to go park up under a wing-root gun turret.
So I rolled away. Bliss Stirling, girl reporter, on the deck of the Goeringl Somewhere below, I knew, was London. But the Beast’s back is so broad that when you stand on it you can’t see the ground . . .
Day 2. The highlight of my day was an expensive lunch in what Doctor Ciliax calls “one of the lesser restaurants of the schlachtschiff, all silver cutlery and comestibles from the provinces of Greater Germany, Polish beef and French wine. It is like being aboard an ocean liner, or a plush Zeppelin, perhaps.
As we ate the Beast circled over Germania, which Jack Bovell insists on calling “Berlin”, much to Ciliax’s annoyance. Fleets of tanker craft flew up to load us with oil, water, food and other consumables, and we were buzzed by biplanes laden with cinecameras, their lenses peering at us.
Jack Bovell is one of the Token Yanks on board to witness the journey, much as I am a Token British. He is a flying officer in the USAAF, and will, so he has been promised, be allowed to take the controls of the Beast at some point during this monumental flight. We Tokens are in the charge of Wolfgang Ciliax, himself a Luftwaffe officer, though as an engineer he never refers to his rank. He is one of the Beast’s chief designers. The three of us are going to be spending a lot of time together, I think. What joy.
This morning Ciliax took Jack and me on a tour of the Beast. Of course we weren’t shown anything seriously interesting such as the “atom engine”, or the “jet” motors rumoured to be deployed on some of the chariots. Ciliax in fact showed rare restraint for a boffin, in my experience, in not blurting out all he knew about his crate just for the love of her.
But we were dazzled by a flight deck the size of a Buckingham Palace reception room, with banks of chattering teletypes and an immense navigational table run by some of the few women to be seen on board. There are lounges and a ballroom and a library, and even a small swimming pool, which is just showing off.
The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction Page 7
