“I'd go for the latter,” said the Oxford biologist. “Frankly, I'm disappointed. Regardless of good intentions, this approach can only reinforce religious memes.” He glanced around, looking beleaguered ("like a hunted animal,” one of the more vindictive of the clergymen chuckled afterwards, in the pub). “No offense intended, gentlemen, ladies, but I see that as counterproductive. In that part of the world, too! As if it needed more fanaticism.”
“Excuse me,” said the bishop stiffly, “but we're not talking about fanaticism. Nor is he. He is certainly not preaching fanaticism. Personally, I'd almost prefer to believe he was the original Jesus come back. It would be quite a vindication, in a way. It would certainly make the African brethren sit up and take notice.”
“You mean, shut up about gay clergy,” said the Jesuit, rather unkindly.
“You see?” said the Oxford man, looking at me. “It doesn't matter how liberal he sounds, or how any of them sound. It's all about authoritative revelation. And as soon as they start arguing on that basis, they're at each other's throats.” He sighed, pushing biscuit crumbs about on the baize with a fingertip. “My own fear is that the aliens, whoever they are, are right. We're too primitive a species, too mired in all this, too infected by the mind virus of religion, to be approached in any other way. But I'm still afraid it'll backfire on them.”
“Oh, there are worse fears than that,” said the computer scientist from Imperial, cheerfully. “They could be hostile. They could be intentionally aiming to cause religious strife.”
That statement didn't cause religious strife, exactly, but it came damn close. I waited until the dust and feathers had settled, then tried to get the experts to focus on what they all actually agreed on. As I said, the consensus surprised me. It added up to this:
The supposed Second Coming had no religious significance. The man calling himself Jesus was almost certainly not who he claimed to be. He was very likely an AI entity of some type from a post-Singularity alien civilization. Further interventions could be expected. Watch the skies.
I wrapped all this around the interview, ran a few talking-head sound bites from the meeting through voice-and-face-distorting software filters, and flogged it to the Discovery Channel. This took a couple of weeks. Then I caught the next El Al flight from Heathrow.
* * * *
I was sitting in a room with a dozen men, one of them Jesus, all sipping tea and talking. All of them were smoking, except Jesus and myself. I'd caught up with him again in Ramallah. The conversation was in Arabic, and my translator, Sameh, was so engrossed in it he'd forgotten about me. I must admit I was bored.
I was, of course, excited at the idea that this man, if he was a man, represented an alien intervention. I was just as excited by my doubts about it. There was, as the bishop had implied, something quite tempting about the notion that he was who he said he was. The original Jesus had explained himself in terms of the religion of his place and time, and had in turn been explained in terms of contemporary philosophy. It begins in the arcane metaphysics of Paul's letters, and in the Stoic term “Logos” in John, and it continues all the way to the baroque Platonic and Aristotelian edifices of theology. So it was perhaps not entirely strange that this Jesus should explain himself in modern philosophical terms from the very beginning.
Right now, though, he was trying to explain himself to Muslims. The going wasn't easy. I couldn't follow the conversation, but I could hear the strain in the voices. The names of Allah and the Prophet came up frequently. For Muslims, Jesus is a prophet too, and there were plenty of the faithful who didn't take kindly to this man's claims. The gathering here, fraught though it was, was the most sympathetic a hearing as he was likely to get.
In terms of publicity Jesus wasn't doing too well. He'd had his fifteen minutes of fame. Religious leaders had refused to meet him—not that he'd asked—and even the scientists who were prepared to speculate publicly that he was an alien were reluctant to do anything about it. I mean, what could they do about it—cut him up? The defense establishment may have taken seriously these scientists’ claims about alien intervention, but there's only so many times you can draw a blank looking for a stealth orbiter before you conclude that there's no stealth orbiter. The general feeling was that something odd had happened, but nobody could be sure what, and for all anyone knew it could have been a bizarre hoax. There were photographs, videos, eyewitness accounts, radar traces—but that kind of evidence can be found any month in Fortean Times and debunked every quarter in Skeptical Inquirer.
The only people—apart from his own small following, most of it online—who paid close attention to his activities were fundamentalist Christians. Not because they believed him. Oh, no. They believed me. That's to say, they believed the religious and scientific experts I'd cited in the documentary. They were quite happy with the notion that he was an alien entity of some kind. To them, an alien meant a demon. Worse, a demon walking around in human shape and claiming to be Jesus could only mean one thing: the Antichrist.
I only found that out later.
* * * *
Handshakes all round. Smiles. Frowns. Jesus and two of the men—followers, I'd gathered—went out. I and Sameh accompanied them into the muddy street. Breezeblock buildings, corrugated zinc roofs, mud. Ruins here and there. It was nearly dusk. Lights in windows, braziers at stalls, the smell of frying chicken. A big Honda people-carrier drove slowly down the crowded, potholed street, conspicuous among old Renaults and VW Polos and Yugos.
We stood about—a moment of uncertainty about where to go next. Some problem with the traffic. Sameh was talking to the followers, Jesus was gazing around, and I was fiddling with the camera.
I saw a flash. That is to say, for a second I saw nothing else. Then I saw nothing but sky. Everything had become silent. I saw two bright lights moving fast, high above. My legs felt wet and warm. I pressed the palms of my hands on damp gravel and pushed myself up to a sitting position. I could see people running around, mouths open, mouths working; cars accelerating away or coming to a halt; everything covered with gray dust; but I could hear nothing. A little way down the street, smoke rose from a flowerlike abstract sculpture of bent and twisted metal: the Honda, its wheels incongruously intact.
I saw Jesus run towards it. Sameh and the two followers were facedown on the street, hands over the backs of their heads. They didn't see what I saw. I don't know how many people saw it. He leaned into the wrecked Honda and started hauling out the casualties. He dragged out one corpse, whole but charred. He laid it down and pulled out something that might have been a torso. Then he clambered in and started heaving out bits of bodies: an arm, half a leg, a bearded head. More. It was like the back of a butcher's shop.
He vaulted out again and knelt on the road. I saw his hands move, with effort in the arms, as if he was putting the bits together. He stood up. Three men stood up beside him. They looked down at the rags that clothed them, and then at the wreck of their vehicle. They raised their arms and cried out praise to Allah. Jesus had already turned his back on them and was hurrying towards me. He wore jeans and scuffed trainers, a shirt and sweater under a new leather jacket. He was looking straight at me and frowning.
Sound and pain came in a rush. My ears dinned with yells, car horns, screams. My thighs felt—
I looked down. My thighs felt exactly as you would expect with a chunk of metal like a thrown knife in each of them, stuck right into my femurs. I could see my blood pumping out, soaking into the torn cloth. Everything went monochrome for a moment. I saw his hands grab the bits of metal and tug. I heard the grate of the bones. I felt it, too. I heard a double clatter as the metal shards fell on the road. Then Jesus laid his hands on my legs, and leaned back.
“Up,” he said.
He held out a hand. I caught it and stood up. As I got to my feet I saw the pale unbroken skin of my thighs through the ripped fabric. My camera lay crushed on the ground. Sameh and the two followers picked themselves up and brushed themselves off.
“Another targeted killing,” he said. “That Honda. I knew it had to be a Hamas big shot inside.” He stared across at the wreck. “How many?”
I pointed at the men, now the center of a small crowd.
“None.”
“None?”
“They had a miraculous escape,” I said.
Jesus just grinned.
“Let's go,” he said.
We departed.
* * * *
Jesus had a knack for making his movements unpredictable. I and Sameh stayed with him and his followers, jammed in the back of a taxi, to Jerusalem. Through the wall, through the checkpoints. Jesus nodded off. The followers talked to Sameh. I sat bolt upright and replayed everything in my mind. I kept rubbing my thighs, as if I had sweaty hands. When we got out of the taxi at the hotel Jesus seemed to wake up. He leaned forward and said, “Would you like to meet me tomorrow, privately?”
“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 robot!’ 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.
“Police!” 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 now!” 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, demon! I don't want forgiveness from you!”
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 U.S. 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.
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* * *
NIGHT CALLS
Robert Reed
Ferrum was no Believer.
In that, he felt normal. This was an age when the powers of religion were plainly on the run. The old temples stood empty, except for the rare exceptions populated with worshippers embracing a thin, heartless scripture. Much of the world seemed eager to mock superstition and ritual, and every plaintive cry for God's vengeance was conspicuously ignored. Indeed, despite these heretical attitudes, modern life was abundant and generous and often fat. The sciences constantly generated new understandings and powers, each revolution delivered to all the races and distant creeds. Yet if some supernatural punishment ever became necessary, those same sciences promised more suffering than any Deity sitting in the most perfect Heaven could deliver. Really, Ferrum could not understand why any sober, honest citizen would entertain the preaching of mad souls and charlatans. After all, this was the Day of those twin Geniuses, Invention and Discovery, and hadn't history proved that nothing in the Creation was as half as powerful or a tenth as good as what was best about people?
Yet Rabiah insisted on finding weakness in the fashionable disbelief.
“What do you mean?” asked Ferrum sharply. “What weaknesses do you see?”
“Start with your name,” she suggested. “It's old, and it means iron.”
“I know what ‘Ferrum’ means.”
“To the ancients, our world was the obvious center of the universe. And since what is heavy must sink, it was only reasonable to assu
me that the world's heart was made of iron and the rarer metals.”
“The core is iron,” he agreed, laughing without much heart. “Those old fools happened to get one puzzle right.”
“'Ferrum’ comes from the Fifth Day.” She looked past her newest lover, concentrating with her usual intensity. “That was when the Boy Emperor conquered half of the world's land. Then the Sixth Day began, and an obscure tribe marched across a slightly different half of everything. And then the Seventh Day emerged from the darkness, and the Pale Prophet appeared, claiming to have walked with the True God who told Him to subjugate the world.”
“Which those zealots nearly did,” Ferrum interjected.
“And then that Day came to its end, and my ancestor stumbled out of the desert, inspiring a holy war that set the scene for our very long Day.”
The young woman had a temper. While it was popular to deny the value of stereotypes, Rabiah nonetheless fit the model of her people: She was passionate with a preference for strong opinions. Suggesting she was wrong, even in the most minimal fashion, brought the risk that she would explode with hard words or even a few defiant slaps delivered to her lover's bare chest.
Ferrum managed to restrain his mouth.
“Of course neither of us Believes,” she continued. “Yet don't we assume that people should be good to one another, even if it serves their own selfish interests? Don't you hunger for a world where ethics have teeth and decent, generous citizens are called godly?”
He continued to say nothing.
“And now look at the rules and rituals embedded in our major faiths. What do you find waiting there? Codes and commandments—a set of principles that pave the path to excellence.”
Ferrum was breathing deeply, staring at the bland, water-stained ceiling above his bed.
“You and I are creatures of science,” she continued. “But what is science? And by that, I am asking what it is that our discipline assumes, first and before anything else?”
“Evidence,” he offered. “Science demands evidence.”
The Year's Best Science Fiction (2008 Edition) Page 21
