A Creed for the Third Millennium (43 page)

He continued to walk, and the people
walked, with him, not understanding his pain. Not
understanding how intensely he resented this burden of responsibility they were
thrusting upon him. Oh, how could he get it through their thick heads that he
was just a man, and he couldn't work miracles, and he couldn't heal cancers, and
he couldn't raise the dead, and he couldn't, couldn't couldn't couldn't
Anything!

So walk on, walk on, Joshua Christian.
Hold back the tears. Don't ever let anyone know what you are suffering. How you
feel. Is this truly sadness? Is this the bottom of grief, or have I still
further to fall? Walk, walk. They need
something!
And you, poor man, are
all they have managed to find. Dreadful. Oh why can they not be made to see that
all they have found is another man? A fellow man. A yellow man. A Jell-O man. A
hollow man. A minnow man. That was fun! How many more? Any more? Yeah, plenny
more!

He walked because it was something to do.
It mechanized his pain, it drove his pain from one part of him to another, and
that was better oh that was much much better than bearing his pain alone in one
dark unmoving place. The dark unmoving place of his soul.

And the greatest of Joshua Christian's
many tragedies was that no one saw how vastly his humanity had grown, eclipsing
even his encroaching dementia; for he was more a man, not more than a
man.

In Tucson, on an early May day with the
mountains glowing in the sun and the air still cold, Dr Judith Carriol tried to
tell Dr Joshua Christian about the March of the Millennium.

His mood seemed to improve after he came
to Arizona, colder in May than the state used to be by far, but lovely yet, and
able to penetrate even Dr Christian's obdurately walled-up mind. So Dr Carriol
coaxed him to take a drive with her to see an exquisitely laid-out piece of
parkland between the fringe of Tucson and the Band A relocation town of
Hegel.

This parkland had been randomly but
artfully planted with groves of silver birch, clusters of flowering almond,
magnolia and azalea. The birches were fluffed with palest lime, azaleas
congealed whole slopes with a Japanese mosaic of colour, the magnolias were pink
and white and muted purple, the almonds were massed with white blossom, and
daffodils smothered the ground in a display of blatant narcissism that would not
have shamed the Cambridge Backs.

'Sit here with me, Joshua,' she said,
patting a redwood bench warm from the sun.

But he was too enchanted, wandering this
way and that, cupping a magnolia bloom in his hands, marvelling at the way a
dead beech had been persuaded to give tenure to a wisteria vine whose heavy
bunches of lilac flowers trailed drifting in a little wind.

But after a while he needed to
communicate his delight to an understanding fellow creature, so he approached
the bench and then sat down, sighing. 'Oh, this is wonderful!' he cried, moving
his arms to embrace the scene. 'Judith, how much I
have missed Connecticut! In all its seasons, but in spring most of all.
Connecticut in spring is deathless. The dogwoods on Greenfield Hill below those
enormous copper beeches, the weeping cherries, the prunus, the apple blossom —
yes, it is deathless! A hymn to the return of the sun, the most perfect overture
to summer. I see it in my dreams!'

'Well, you can be in Connecticut in time
for all that.'

His face changed, closed up. 'I must
walk.'

'The President would prefer that you
rested until the autumn, Joshua. It's vacation time, the wrong time for you and
your work. You keep saying you're only a man. Well, a man must rest. And you
haven't rested for nearly eight months.'

'That long?'

'Yes, that long.'

'But how can I rest? There's so much
still to do!'

Now. Careful, Judith. Slow. Find exactly
the right and proper words. Only were there any right and proper words left for
him these days? 'The President has a special request to make to you, Joshua. He
wants you to rest during the summer, but he feels also that the people would
like this long tour of yours to finish in a very special way.'

He nodded; whether he heard was
debatable.

'Joshua, would you be willing to lead the
people in a walk from New York City to Washington?'

That did penetrate. He turned his head to
stare at her.

'The winter is finally over, and spring
is here for those parts of the country that see a real spring any more. And the
President feels that with the severity of the winters increasing, the length of
the summer shortening, and the mood of the people still frail in spite of all
your good work… Well, he feels you could really jolt them into a — a summer
mood, for want of a better description. You could do this by leading
as many of them as would be willing to walk
on a pilgrimage to the centre of government. And he feels that New York City is
a logical starting place. It's a long way, it's going to take days. But after
it's over you can rest for the whole summer knowing you've — oh, how can I
describe it? — finished your long tour with a colossal upsurge of
enthusiasm?'

'I'll do it,' he said at once. 'The
President is right. The people need some extra effort from me at this stage, my
ordinary walking isn't enough any more. Yes, I'll do it.'

'Oh, that's splendid!'

'When?' he asked, indicating that he had
really heard.

'A week from today.'

'So soon?'

'The sooner the better.'

'Yes. Well.' He ran his hand across his
hair, which he now wore in a short crew cut to save time drying it of a morning;
where he had been was no climate to venture out in with damp hair. Not, Dr
Carriol suspected, that this was what had motivated him to cut it so; rather he
seemed to have developed an instinct for every kind of self-punishment,
everything unflattering. The crew cut did not suit him at all; it accentuated
his jailbird pallor, his concentration camp emaciation, and it made what was
actually a very thick head of hair look thin and dull.

'We'll leave for New York right after
we've finished here in Tucson,' she said.

'Whatever you say.' He got up, walked off
towards a cluster of bee-besieged almond trees.

Dr Carriol stayed where she was, hardly
able to believe that it had been so easy.

In fact, if one could only set aside his
growing mental oddity, all of it had been ridiculously easy. His book still sold
in the hundreds of thousands, and those who bought it not only read it, but kept
it to treasure. No one had ever tried to molest him. No one
even harangued him! And wherever the lunatic fringe was dwelling in these days
when admittedly little was left to attract the lunatic fringe, they had avoided
Dr Christian like the plague. How great was the measure of his success, how many
people had turned to his concept of God, could be seen in the way some very
important personages had climbed on his bandwagon, from television greats like
Bob Smith and Benjamin Steinfeld to political greats like Tibor Reece and
Senator Hillier. The Second Child Bureau was minus its means test. Relocation
was in the midst of massive change. And, on a less earth-shaking scale, a letter
from Moshe Chasen relayed two bits of Washington scuttlebutt, the first to the
effect that President Reece had dumped Julia after talking to Dr Christian, the
second that it was Dr Christian responsible for the radical — and apparently
very successful — change in the treatment of President Reece's
daughter.

Well. Dr Carriol slapped her hands upon
her thighs, an I-give-up gesture. Perhaps no one would ever be in a position to
evaluate exactly what had grown between Dr Joshua Christian and the people he
had elected to serve. Even in the foreseeable future. He was the brightest
object in the sky, a comet to whose glittering tail she was tied like the merest
tin can. All she saw and felt were the cooled sparks spinning in his
wake.

To Moshe Chasen had been given the job of
organizing the March of the Millennium. Oh, not in the flesh. On the computer
his wife always reckoned he should by rights have married. But Dr Chasen was
growing steadily more worried, not by the March of the Millennium, which was a
piece of cake logistically speaking; by what was happening to Dr Christian — and
to Judith Carriol. The promised meeting the day after he had picked her up from
the airport the previous January had not eventuated, nor did the
weekend visits to Washington John Wayne had told
him she planned to make. She never wrote, and when she phoned she vouchsafed no
real information. The only lengthy communication he received from her was a
coded computer telex sent from Omaha in which she detailed the format of the
March of the Millennium and gave him his instructions. Section Four was
suffering somewhat in her absence, for she was unique, they had all come to
understand that. John Wayne kept the administrative end up and Millie Hemingway
was pinch-hitting on the ideas end, but without the serpentine presence of Dr
Carriol some vital zip and snap and fizz was definitely missing.

Of course they all knew where she was,
and somehow too they all knew her mission was at the President's behest. A lot
of correct arithmetic had gone on after Dr Joshua Christian popped out of the
Holloman woodwork to take the country by storm, especially on the part of those
who had worked on Operation Search. The name Operation Messiah was never
bruited, so the leaks were not so much leaks as the inevitable exchange of
snippets of knowledge between friends in Section Four. Millie Hemingway had
clammed up a week after Dr Christian commenced his publicity tour, and poor old
Sam Abraham had been shipped to Caracas on a special teaching mission. But their
chief researchers were still around Environment in Dr Chasen's own employ. Loyal
people, but people were still people.

Then came the March of the Millennium.
The whole concept not only staggered Dr Chasen, it appalled him. A brilliant,
blatant bit of hype was how he read it. Then, his hands poised to screw up the
yard-long computer telex Dr Carriol had sent from some Omaha keyboard direct to
his own terminal, he changed his mind. Hype it was in her brain, the clever
devil, but in the hands of Dr Joshua Christian it would take on a dignity and
importance in keeping with its breath-taking size. He would obey orders for
Joshua, not for Judith. For Joshua he would whack out a dream of a failproof
plan. For Joshua. Not for Judith. He loved her as the ideal boss, always; as a
friend, sometimes; as a child, never. He also pitied her, and he was a man whom
pity moved unbearably. For the sake of pity he would perform Herculean tasks;
for the sake of pity he would forgive what love would find unforgivable. A
devout Jew but nonetheless the most Christian of gentlemen, his sins were purely
sins of omission and due to thoughtlessness or lack of perception. Yet in the
matter of Judith Carriol he sensed what no one could have perceived: the
impoverishment of a spirit that in order to survive had set up its self as a
totality.

However, his worry did not prevent his
getting down to work on planning the March of the Millennium. What he produced
was forwarded to Millie Hemingway, who annotated it, and added to it, and then
forwarded it to Judith Carriol by coded computer telexes. Dr Carriol had done
the final work during the hours she spent sitting in cars and hotels waiting for
Dr Christian to return from his walks. And the result was indeed millennial in
its scope, its care, its vision.

The privilege of announcing the March of
the Millennium was given to Bob Smith, who broke the news on his special
birthday edition of Tonight' at the end of February, 2033. Bob had adopted Dr
Christian as his own creation. Every week on his Friday show he had a film
clipping of where Dr Christian was, complete with mini-talks to those who had
spoken to Dr Christian while he walked. There was a new 'Tonight' backdrop to
the guest podium, a giant illuminated map of the United States, with Dr
Christian's tracks wandering all over its southeastern and middle and
northwestern sections in emerald green, and the towns he had visited lit up in
starry crimson, with the states he had touched pale shimmering pink, versus
the dull white of states he had still to visit.

All through March and April the publicity
built up, carefully orchestrated by the Environment think tank, which had bought
time on all the networks. The spirit of the March of the Millennium was
extolled, the difficulties of marching explained in meticulous detail, along
with exhaustive descriptions of the various facilities available en route.
Brilliantly produced one-minute commercials showed exercise programmes to fitten
up prospective marchers, meditation programmes to get marchers into the right
mood, medical programmes to aid potential marchers in making the decision
whether to march at all. Every supermarket and department store was inundated
with bits of paper and instructed to place them free of charge on every counter;
these bits of paper included maps of the march route, maps showing the various
transportation schemes to get marchers from home and back home, leaflets of
advice on what to carry, what to leave home, what shoes to wear, what clothes to
wear, what headgear to wear. There was even a wonderfully stirring theme melody
in two-four time, entitled simply 'The March of the Millennium', and composed on
commission by Salvatore d'Estragon, the great new operatic musical genius, whose
well-earned nickname at the Met was Spicy Sal. A satyr he might be, decided
Moshe Chasen after hearing the composition, but there was no doubt it was the
best piece of musical patriotism since Elgar wrote his 'Pomp and Circumstance'
series.