Mission

by Patrick Tilley

  ‘But how did he get hold of the pictures?’ I insisted. ‘The Man was found in the Seventeenth Precinct.’

  ‘Leo,’ said Miriam, ‘if he checked up on me, it wouldn’t be hard for him to work back from there. Come on, you know what these guys are like once they start picking away at something. Relax. It’s all over. The Man fixed it this morning.’ She turned to him. ‘Right?’

  ‘Yes …’ he nodded. ‘You can forget about Russell.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘But I still don’t like the idea of being shadowed.’ I looked at them both. ‘I think it would be a good idea to cut down the public appearances, including that trip to the Manhattan General.’

  Miriam’s lips tightened. ‘Why don’t we let The Man decide that? And why don’t you go check the pizza?’

  I trotted obediently into the kitchen. I have learned from experience that Miriam’s mind cannot be changed by playing the macho male. Where the feminist monkey was concerned, this particular piglet had to tread very softly indeed.

  When we’d finished our cartwheel sections of pizza, Miriam pushed her plate aside and said, ‘Okay … may I now ask some questions?’ She sounded as if she meant business.

  I took a tight hold on my glass and sat back. The Man eyed me with a smile and turned to Miriam. ‘What do you want to know?’

  She lit a cigarette. ‘Let’s backtrack to the point where you decided to regenerate inside a human foetus. Are we talking about what the Catholics call the “Immaculate Conception”?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘So this was not the mental possession of a foetus of which Joseph was the biological father. …’

  ‘No,’ said The Man. ‘We altered the system a little.’

  ‘So, in fact, what we’re talking about is parthenogenesis. …’

  ‘Yes.’

  Miriam saw my questioning look. ‘It’s a reproductive process that does not require fertilisation. Which, in the case we’re discussing, would normally require penetration of the ovum by the male sperm. It usually occurs in inverterbrates and the lower plants.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  The Man directed his explanation to both of us. ‘The manipulation of the genetic matrices and basic physiology were relatively simple. The one major problem, for me especially, was karma. The psychic accretion that every Ain-folk fragment acquires by cohabiting with its human host during each earth-life. By the word ‘fragment’, I mean the element which is regarded, by those who believe in these things, as the human soul, or spirit. Now to you perhaps, karma is a mystical abstraction. A notional mode of moral book-keeping which adds up the debit balance on your life-account. And which has to be paid off during the cycle of reincarnation.’ He smiled. ‘Something else you may not believe in. We don’t have that choice however. To us, karma is an awesome reality. In physical terms, it is as if your bodies slowly became covered by a thickening sheath of coral until all movement became impossible. A crippling disability by any standards but to us, it is catastrophic. Because the acquisition of karma prevents us from re-entering the higher levels of the Empire. You are permanently quarantined in the Third Universe and, if you become seriously contaminated, it’s physically impossible to pass through the Time Gate.’

  ‘You mean “spiritually impossible”,’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘Yes, sorry. It’s this problem of language.’ He tapped his chest. ‘When I’m like this I tend to get a little confused now and then. In fact, at times, I find myself thinking the way you do.’

  ‘There’s no need to apologise,’ I said. ‘After all, for thirty-four years, you were one of us.’

  Miriam gave me a thin-lipped look. ‘We were talking about regeneration …’

  ‘That’s right,’ said The Man. ‘As I think I mentioned earlier, Gabriel’s re-entry into the Third Universe did not pose any insuperable difficulties. He and Michael had done this kind of thing before. And they suggested that the problem of my re-entry could wait until the rescue fleet arrived. As they pointed out, if it didn’t, the question of re-entry would become purely academic. The first priority was to get under cover. We had to find a couple of female hosts in good health and with a minimal degree of karma and then modify their reproductive system to enable them to conceive unaided. Once that had been accomplished, we were able to fuse our meta-psyches with the resulting embryo.’

  ‘Could you have done it without their co-operation?’ asked Miriam.

  ‘That’s a difficult question,’ replied The Man. ‘Having them on our side made things a lot easier.’

  She nodded. ‘How did you go about finding these two women?’

  ‘That wasn’t as difficult as you might think,’ he said. ‘There isn’t time to go into the history of the thing but it was something that Gabriel had set in motion on an earlier mission.’

  ‘So you knew the process worked,’ said Miriam.

  ‘It had some nine hundred years earlier,’ he replied.

  Something clicked inside my head. ‘What a minute, does that mean that Gabriel was Elijah?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Another piece of the puzzle dropped into place. Elijah, the greatest of the Hebrew prophets, who ranked equal first with Moses, had reaffirmed with unparalleled fervour that the only reality was the transcendent God of Israel. He’d also stressed the idea of salvation for a purified ‘remnant’ of the Jewish people. At the end of his life, he had delegated his prophetic authority to Elisha and, according to the Book, had been taken up to heaven on a whirlwind. For ‘whirlwind’ read five-four-three-two-one-zero, ignition, lift-off.

  ‘I think I know what happened next,’ I said. ‘Gabriel volunteered to check it out.’

  The Man smiled. ‘How did you guess?’

  ‘Well, it’s not in the Book,’ I replied. ‘But when you said he’d once been Elijah, you gave me the answer. He was the child born six months before you were and who grew up to be John the Baptist. His mother was called Elizabeth.’

  ‘Eliza,’ said The Man.

  ‘Is he right?’ asked Miriam, miffed at the way I kept horning in.

  The Man nodded. ‘Yes. Gabriel approached her husband first. Zacharias. But he panicked at the contact so we had to put a temporary censor-block in his brain. It blanked out the memory of our presence but had the side-effect of robbing him of his powers of speech. Eliza was forty-three-years-old but had had no children. Zacharias was a fifty-four-year-old priest. They were both strictly orthodox. A very devout couple.’

  ‘How did Eliza react?’ asked Miriam. ‘Was she amazed, incredulous, frightened, or what?’

  ‘She took it rather calmly,’ said The Man. ‘Rather in the way that you have adjusted to the idea of me being here. You have to remember that belief in miracles, visions and visitations from angelic messengers was part and parcel of Pharisaic Judaism. And although the Pharisees did not hold positions of power in the Sanhedrin or the Temple, their ideas still found a wide acceptance amongst the ordinary people of Palestine at the time we were there. Although, in the end, they were hostile towards me, the Pharisees’ belief in the advent of a Messiah was quite intense. Michael and Gabriel, together with other Envoys, had gone to a great deal of trouble to keep the idea alive in each succeeding generation.’

  ‘So everything went smoothly,’ said Miriam.

  The words brought a smile to his face. ‘I wouldn’t say that. It all came out right in the end but there were a few anxious moments. You see, the first, seven-week phase of the regeneration process is hypercritical. Because it’s during that period that we are unable to control our host-mothers or influence external events. After that first seven weeks, we are fully bonded to our human embryo hosts but we can detach our – let’s call it our “presence” – and can move around more or less at will. We can manifest ourselves as an externally-observed form of our own choosing, or penetrate the human subconscious, such as in a dream.’

  ‘Got it,’ I said. ‘Is that how Gabriel was able to visit Mary while his host-foetus was st
ill being carried by Eliza?’

  ‘Yes,’ said The Man.

  ‘And he told her that she had been chosen to bear a child who, according to Luke, would be host to a spiritual being that he called the “Son of God” and – ’

  Miriam cut me off. ‘And broke the news that her cousin Eliza was already pregnant with a similar child.’ She eyed me triumphantly.

  ‘I’ll go and make some coffee,’ I said. I kept the kitchen door and my ears wide open.

  ‘Actually,’ said The Man, ‘Luke’s story is pretty accurate at this point. Mary was in Nazareth when Gabriel broke the news to her. She had just turned sixteen and was engaged to Joseph who was about thirty years old. It wasn’t a love match. The marriage had been arranged between the two families. But in my “divine ignorance”, I had overlooked the fact that local custom decreed that young ladies were not supposed to get pregnant before they were married. A month or so later, Mary told her mother. Who told her father, and –’ The Man broke into a laugh as he recalled the scene. ‘It was so stupid. Gabriel and I should have known what would happen but, for some reason, it just didn’t occur to us. Things are a lot different now but, back in those days, virgin brides were highly prized and worth a great deal of money. To make matters worse, before we could get to Joseph, he’d gone to Mary’s parents to put himself in the clear and tell them exactly what he thought of their daughter. The trouble… I can’t tell you.’ He waved the memory of it away. ‘But there is one particularly vivid moment I’ve always kept with me. And that’s of stepping outside my mother and looking back at her. And seeing this small, frightened girl, just an inch or two over five feet, standing with her back to the wall inside the main room of her parent’s house in Nazareth. With these big brown eyes brimming with tears. Facing her, round the other three sides of the room were her parents, aunts, uncles, the local rabbi, the yenta, numbed by the prospect of losing her commission, Joseph – looking hurt and angry – his parents, people from his family. And my mother just had to stand there and take it. Because if she had tried to tell them the truth, they would have stoned her for committing blasphemy.’

  I came to the door of the kitchen to put in my ten cents worth. ‘Why couldn’t you tell her family. Why did it have to be a secret?’

  The Man looked across at me. ‘Why haven’t you told Joe Gutzman, your mother and your sister about my visits?’

  ‘That’s different,’ I said, retiring to get the cups out and load them on to a tray.

  ‘Anyway,’ continued The Man, ‘we managed to resolve the situation by tapping into Joseph’s subconscious while he was asleep. Gabriel told him to take Mary as his wife and explained why. He did what we wanted. In those days, people took dreams much more seriously. But he always believed that it had been his decision.’

  I returned to the doorway. ‘You mean like mine to go downtown and spring you …?’

  Miriam looked over the back of her chair. ‘What happened to the coffee?’

  ‘It’s coming,’ I said.

  The Man picked up the thread of the story. ‘As soon as they were married, I got Mary to visit Eliza in Bethlehem. They stayed together for about three months. They were both fully aware of their role in our mission but were quite happy to keep the news to themselves. And it also meant that I was living close to Gabriel who was able to give me the support and encouragement I badly needed.’ He grimaced at the memory. ‘Gabriel was an old hand at the game, but first time around, bonding one’s self to a physical body can be a pretty hellish experience.’

  ‘Where was Michael all this time?’ asked Miriam.

  ‘Orbiting Earth in the vessel that had brought us into the galaxy,’ said The Man. ‘If I can use your space terminology again – and remember the word concepts are yours, not mine – the situation was very like one of your Apollo moon missions. Michael in the command module, Gabriel and I down on the surface. Except we were marooned, and there had been no contact with Mission Control since lift-off.’

  I brought in the coffee and laid the tray deferentially in front of Miriam. As we drank it, The Man explained that during the fusion of their meta-psyches with the host embryo, they had allowed the usual Ain-folk fragment to climb aboard to act as a chauffeur for their new vehicle. As a result, their host-bodies were equipped with dual-personalities; an earth-bound soul that was only too happy to sink back into the relative comfort and security provided by a new human host, and a Celestial alter-ego.

  When Eliza gave birth to Gabriel’s infant host, the child was called Johanan – meaning ‘Gift of God.’ The censor-block was removed from Zacharias’s mind and he recovered his powers of speech. Gabriel now re-entered his surrogate father’s subconscious, and enlisted his co-operation in the mission. Mary, The Man’s teenage mother-to-be, returned to Nazareth to wait out the remaining months of her pregnancy. Three weeks before her child was due, Mary and Joseph set out together for Bethlehem.

  It was at this point that Michael placed the circling starship (my word for it, not his) into synchronous orbit directly overhead so as to maintain the closest possible link with his commander and colleague below. Communication by means of what The Man called the ‘mind-bridge’ – presumably some form of Celestial telepathy – had become increasingly erratic due to the heavy static they were getting from ‘Brax. Michael was powerless to help the grounded Celestial, but he had to remain in orbit until he received confirmation of the birth of The Man’s human host.

  To trained watchers of the skies, a new ‘star’ had indeed been born. Among the Persian magi – the priest-astrologers in the lands east of the Jordan – there were several who had observed the orbiting star-ship and had correctly deduced that it signified the arrival of a new messenger from beyond the heavens. Among them were two who, for the sake of convenience, we can label Gaspar and Melchior in accordance with the sixth-century tradition. Gaspar resided in the northern city of Haran, the legendary birth-place of Abraham. Melchior was from Babylon. As students of the teachings of Zoroaster, and the ancient beliefs of the Jews that had left their mark upon the Persian religious psyche during the Captivity, both men knew that the appearance of this ‘star’ heralded the imminent birth of a great Celestial power. They were convinced that this power would enter the world in the person of the long-awaited Messiah who, in accordance with the centuries-old prophecies, would be born in Bethlehem-Ephrata. The village that had been enshrined in Jewish history as the birth-place of King David. Balthazzar, the third of the magi who figure in this account, came from Alexandria, in Egypt. He too was a gifted astrologer and initiate of the body of esoteric knowledge known as the Ancient Wisdom.

  Three months had passed between their arrival in Earth-orbit and the moment when Johanan-Gabriel’s mother had conceived. So it was eighteen months between the first recorded observation of the ‘starship’ by the three magi and the birth of The Man in Bethlehem. More than enough time for Balthazzar to draw his own conclusions about the metaphysical origin of the event and its probable significance, and to concert a plan of action with his colleagues.

  The three magi arranged to meet in Jerusalem where the ageing king, Herod the Great, had a palace of butter-milk marble. Herod was sixty-seven, stricken with arterio-sclerosis, and surrounded with relatives who had inherited the family gift for intrigue and treachery. Herod, a favoured vassal-king who had been accorded a large degree of autonomy by Rome, was, above all, a survivor. But the constant conspiracies of his ungrateful relatives and would-be revolutionaries had turned him into a malevolent despot who, in his determination to remain in power, had not hesitated to murder his second wife, her brother and mother, and several of his own sons.

  It was at this point that The Man proceeded to demolish the rest of St Matthew’s story. Apparently, the section dealing with the Nativity had been constructed to perform three separate functions. First, to carry another vital code message. Second, to establish the legitimacy of the claim – made by the early Judeo-Christians – that The Man was the direct descendant of Da
vid, Moses and Abraham. Third, as a crude piece of anti-Herodian propaganda.

  One of the root causes of Herod’s problems was the fact that he was not really a Jew. He was the son of a rich, influential Arab whose family had been forcibly converted to Judaism. This nagging challenge to his legitimacy continued to dog the three sons who assumed power after his death and led to the bad reviews the family got in the Gospels.

  I knew it was Miriam’s turn to ask questions but I could not help muscling in. ‘So, there was no meeting between Herod and the three magi.’

  ‘No,’ said The Man. ‘The literal interpretation of the promise of a child-king of the Jews from the house of David was just wishful thinking. The important part in that section is the phrase, “we have seen his star in the east”. That’s the code-message. It was the Persian god, Ahura Mazdao, who was the “star in the east”. Behind that line lay the truth that, with my birth, the power of Ahura Mazdao had entered the world to carry on the fight against ‘Brax.’

  ‘That gets rid of one headache,’ I said. ‘I’ve been trying to work out how they could have seen Michael’s ship in the east. He would have to be orbiting from west to east to match the speed of rotation in order to go into a geo-stationary orbit. Which means that the “Star of Bethlehem” would have risen in the west. And then would have hung there as Gaspar and Melchior headed for Jerusalem.’

  The Man smiled. ‘Let that be a warning to you. Don’t take everything too literally. You have got to dig below the superficial meaning of the words.’

  ‘What about this story that Joseph had to register at his place of birth?’ I asked. ‘Were the Romans really holding a census?’

  He gave a non-committal shrug. ‘The reason why we went to Bethlehem was to be with Eliza, Zacharias and Johanan-Gabriel.’