A Creed for the Third Millennium Page 12

  That had been Thursday. In transports of gratitude he had realized how great and how subtle indeed was his reward for his work on phase one of Operation Search. He was to witness the unfolding of phase two, yes, but more than that; he was being told by his chief that he had pulled the rabbit out of the hat, that Operation Search was not after all a mere drill, that it was possessed of a phase three, and that he was to be permitted to stand by in full knowledge of — of what, in God's name?

  Thus between Thursday and Sunday of that week, Dr Chasen accomplished more fruitful work on the conundrum of relocation than he had since commencing five weeks earlier. For one thing, he understood now that he had his chief's wholehearted approbation; and for another, by his side, talking, worrying, dissecting, criticizing, was Dr Joshua Christian. The winner and new champion. But champion of what?

  The two men had really taken to each other. So the time and the days between Thursday and Sunday passed in an interested, happy collaboration that brought sufficient novelty and freshness to each man to make the other's presence a joy. However, while Dr Joshua Christian merely went on liking Dr Moshe Chasen, Dr Moshe Chasen passed from being intrigued to being fascinated to loving to loving deeply.

  'I don't know why,' he told Dr Judith Carriol during one of their infrequent chances to speak together without the third member of the trio.

  'Nonsense!' she said crisply. 'Simple hedging, Moshe. Of course you know. Kindly elucidate.'

  He leaned forward across her desk. 'Judith, have you ever loved anyone?' he asked.

  Her face didn't change. 'Of course I have!'

  'You wouldn't just say that, would you? Because I don't think you're telling me the truth.'

  'I only lie when it's necessary, Moshe,' she said without discomfort at admitting it, 'and it is not necessary for me to lie to you in this present situation. I do not need to protect myself from you, because you can do me no harm. I do not need to conceal my motives from you, because you can't affect the outcome of my motives even if you guess them. And you're hedging, my friend, but you're not going to deflect me. Kindly elucidate.'

  He sighed, an exasperated sound rather than a defeated one. 'I'm trying, already, I'm trying! Look, you wanted a particular man. The man. A man who could draw people to him without even trying, but a man who would not be a threat to our nation or our way of life. Charisma, right? Like I told you five weeks ago, he's got it! So how do I know why I love him? He makes you love him! Don't you love him?'

  Her face and eyes remained calm. 'No.'

  'Oh, come on, Judith! That's a lie!'

  'No, it is not. I love — the possibility of him. Not him in himself.'

  'God Jesus, you are a hard woman.'

  'Still more hedging, Moshe. Why do you love him?'

  'There are any number of reasons. He's given me the biggest boost of my career, how's that for a start? You don't fool me, I know you've picked him. I don't know what for, but you've picked him. How could I not love the man who has brought me that satisfaction, given that he was picked in the first place because he can make people love him? How could I not love a man who sees so clearly? How could I not love a man who loves so much himself? How could I not love a man who is so good? I don't mean good at his work, I don't mean good at being a man. I mean just good! I never met anyone good before! I always thought if I did, I'd be bored out of my mind, or I'd hate his guts. But how can you hate a truly good man?'

  'You could if you were an evil one.'

  'Well, he makes me feel evil often enough,' said Dr Chasen with reminiscent emotion. 'I start talking about the trend I see in this or that group of statistics, and he just sits there, and he smiles, and he shakes his head, and he says, "Oh, Moshe, Moshe, they're people you're talking about!" And I feel — well, maybe evil's the wrong word. I feel — ashamed. Yes, that's it. Ashamed.'

  She frowned, suddenly out of patience with him, she did not care to ask herself why. 'Mmmmm!' she said. And got rid of Dr Chasen as quickly as she could. Then she sat at her desk and thought.

  On Monday morning Dr Carriol suggested they not go straight from Georgetown to her place of work on the bus; instead, she suggested a walk through the Potomac parks and gardens on their way Environmentward. Her excuse was that it was a beautiful day, which indeed it was, warm, cloudless of sky, sweet and still of air.

  'I hope you don't think I've wasted your time in bringing you to see Moshe,' she said, as they wandered through West Potomac Park.

  He answered without hesitation. 'No. I quite see why you wanted us to meet, and I appreciate — no, I applaud — your reasons for talking me into coming. Moshe is a truly remarkable scientist. He's brilliant and original. But like all his kind, he's more in love with bits than bodies. As a man he's not nearly so brilliant or original.'

  'Were you able to change his way of thinking?'

  'A little. But the moment I go back to Holloman his memory of me will begin to fade, and he'll end up reverting completely to type.'

  'I didn't expect you to be a defeatist.'

  'There's a big difference between realism and defeatism. The answer, Judith, is not to change the Moshe Chasens. The answer is to change the people who comprise his information.'

  'How would you do that, Joshua?'

  'How would I do that?' He stopped on a grassy slope that slid away above him and below him, steep in its tilt; she noticed that he did not stand awkwardly, though most would have needed to be awkward in order to retain balance. Maybe that was because he was awkward in repose, all arms and legs, but give the arms and legs something difficult to do and they were gracefully at home doing it.

  'Yes, how would you do that?' she repeated.

  One moment he was standing easily, the next moment he had collapsed amid a tangle of long bones, and had to sort them out until he was sitting comfortably on the slope with his arms about his knees.

  'I would — I would tell them that the worst of the shock is over. That the time for self-abnegation is past. I would tell them to pull their pride out of the mud and their feelings out of the freezer. I'd tell them to accept their lot and get moving to live with it. So we're cold in winter and we're going to get a lot colder. So along with every other country in the northern hemisphere at least we're having to deal with mass migration away from the pole. So we're saddled with the one-child family. Well, we've got to stop harking back to the good old days and bemoaning our fate and passively resisting the inevitable. We've got to stop yearning for yesterday, because yesterday is gone and it can never come again.

  'I would tell them to get started on tomorrow, Judith! I would tell them only they themselves can throw off this millennial neurosis, by thinking positively and living positively. They have to realize that today we must suffer, because more passed away with the old millennium than just a milestone passed. Today we must suffer, and nostalgia is the common enemy. I would tell them that the tomorrow of our children's children's children can be more beautiful and more worthwhile than any age since the dawn of Man — if we start to make it so now. I would tell them that the one thing they cannot do is produce their pitifully few children in the old mood of indulgence and relaxation. Our children and their children and every generation thereafter must be strong. They must be reared to obtain their pride out of their own accomplishments and their own hard work; they must not be reared to rest on their parents' laurels. And I would tell every American of every generation, including my own, not to give away too freely what they have worked so hard to win. Because it will not earn them the gratitude and friendship they imagine it must, even from their own children.'

  'Well and good. You're advocating work, self-help, and a positive attitude towards the future,' she said thoughtfully. 'So far not very original.'

  'Of course it's not!' he snapped, nettled. 'Common sense never is original! And what's so desirable about originality, anyway? Sometimes it's the oldest and hoariest commonplaces that people see least clearly, because everyone who ought to be guiding the people is trying so despe
rately hard to be original! Common sense is common sense is common sense, men have owned it since men were!'

  'Granted. Bear with me, Joshua, I'm not playing Devil's advocate for kicks. Go on, what else would you tell them?'

  His voice dropped to rumbling, purring warmth. 'I would tell them they are loved. No one seems to tell them they are loved any more. That's a large part of the trouble. Modern administrations are efficient, caring, dedicated. But they dismiss love the way an insecure and weak man will neglect to tell his wife or his mistress that he loves her because, he will say defensively, surely she ought to know that without being told. But oh, Judith, we all need to be told we are loved! To be told you are loved lights up the day! So, I would tell them they are loved. I would tell them they are not evil, they are not festering with sin, they are not beneath contempt, they are not simple nuisance value. I would tell them that they already have every resource they need in order to save themselves and make a better world.'

  'Concentrate on this world rather than the next?'

  'Yes. I would try to make them see that God put them here for a purpose, and that that purpose is to make something of the world He put them in, not channel their thoughts into an existence they can only enter by leaving this world, by dying. Too many people are so busy earning salvation in the next life that they only end by screwing this one up.'

  'You're drifting from the point,' she said, mostly to needle him; she wanted to see how well he coped with extreme and niggling scepticism.

  'I'm groping, I'm groping, I'm groping!' he said between his teeth, pounding his fists on his knees three times in time to his words. Then he sucked in a huge breath, which seemed to calm him, and when he spoke his voice was stern. 'Judith, when people turn to me for help, they look at me with a plea for help in their eyes, and that's so easy! Where you are looking at me the way you'd look at a specimen under a microscope, and I don't even know why the hell I sit here putting up with it! You're not interested in my views about God or Man, you're only interested in — what exactly are you interested in? What kind of things do interest you? Why do I interest you, because apparently I do, and I shouldn't! You seem to know so goddam much about me, and I know nothing about you! You're a — a — a mystery!'

  'I'm interested in setting the world to rights,' she said coolly. 'Maybe not the whole world. Just our part of it, America.'

  'I can believe that, but it answers nothing.'

  'There will be time later to worry about me. Right now it's what you are that's important.'

  'Why?'

  'I'll tell you in a minute, if you'll tell me more about you and what you are and what you think.'

  He gave a Bronx cheer, loud and derisive. 'Well, if you insist on tagging me, call me a meliorist.'

  It hurt to admit he had used a word she didn't know, but her curiosity was too great for her to salve her dignity by letting the word go by now and looking it up later. 'A meliorist?' she asked.

  'One who believes the world can be made an infinitely better place through the efforts of Man rather than through the intercession of God.'

  'And you believe that?'

  'Of course.'

  'Yet you also believe in God?'

  'Oh, I'm sure there's God,' he said very seriously.

  'I notice that you never preface God with the indefinite article. Never "a" God. Simply — God.'

  'God is not indefinite, Judith. God just is.'

  'Oh, fuck all this, I'm getting nowhere!' she said violently, and leaped to her feet so that she could look down into his face, her own face pointed and wide-browed because she had tilted its chin down.

  He laughed up at her joyously. 'Oh, fantastic! I've found a chink in your armour at last!'

  'No you have not!' She was angry. 'I don't have any armour! Do you want to hear a riddle?'

  'A riddle about what?'

  'If you answer it, Joshua Christian, you will know everything there is to know about Judith Carriol.'

  'This I've got to hear. Hit me!'

  'Bright is the ring of words

  When the right man rings them, Fair the fall of songs

  When the singer sings them. Still they are carolled and said —

  On wings they are carried — After the singer is dead

  And the maker buried.'

  He looked blank, said nothing.

  'Stumped?'

  'You're just getting back at me for using a word you didn't know,' he said, only half joking.

  'Not at all. Can't you solve it?'

  'I'm no Oedipus. It's pretty, but unintelligible.'

  'All right then, I'll be less abstruse. But not about me. About you. Why I'm so interested in you.'

  He grew immediately attentive and serious. 'This I've got to hear. Shoot.'

  'You're a man of ideas, Joshua Christian. Important and I venture to say imperishable ideas. I'm not a person of that kind myself. Oh, I do have ideas, but

  130

  mostly about how to implement and channel other people's original thought. I want you to write a book.'

  That surprised him. He got to his feet and stood not beside her but lower on the slope, so that they saw eye to eye. 'I can't, Judith.'

  'There are ghosts,' she said, turning away and commencing to walk carefully down the slope.

  He followed. 'Ghosts?' He interpreted the word in its supernatural sense, so far from her train of thought was he.

  'Oh, Joshua! Not spectres! People who write books for other people.'

  'A ghoulish word for a ghoulish occupation.'

  'You have a great deal to offer people, and you should be offering it to more than the small amount of people you can see in clinic. So, since you feel you can't write, why not a ghost?'

  'I do have a lot to offer people, I know that. But only in the flesh.'

  'Nonsense! Think of it this way. At the moment the only people you can help are a small number in Holloman. I agree, you did exactly the right thing in not making your clinic larger and your patient intake so big you'd never be able to keep track of them all yourself. Your kind of treatment programme is intensely personal, and it depends on you rather than on any training you could give to other therapists. I exclude your family, because they're a special case, they're really offshoots of you. But a book — not a textbook for the experts, just a simple book for the people out there who desperately need to hear the message you want to disseminate — such a book would be a godsend! You can put yourself into it in a way you can't in any other form except personally, and we have already admitted the limitations of that approach. A book can reach literally millions of people. With a book you could have a profound effect on millennial neurosis throughout the country. And maybe the world when it's ready to hear. You say they need desperately to be told they're loved, and that no one is telling them? Well, you tell them! In your book! Joshua, a book is the only answer!'

  'A fine idea, I'll give you that, but impossible! I wouldn't even know how to begin.'

  'I can show you how to begin,' she said persuasively. 'For that matter, I can even show you how to end. Oh, I don't mean I would write the book for you! But I can find you a publisher, and a publisher will find exactly the right person to collaborate with you on a book.'

  He chewed his lip, torn between eagerness and fear. A chance at last. And what a chance! How many people might he reach through a book? But if it didn't work, would he only succeed in making matters worse? Wasn't it better to continue to help the little number he did help in Holloman than to interfere with the lives and welfare of many thousands of people he would never even know by name? A book could reach people, yes, and it was personal provided he made sure it said what he wanted to say, yes. But it wasn't like seeing people in a clinic situation.

  'I don't think I want that kind of responsibility,' he said soberly.

  You do, you know! You love responsibility, you thrive on it. Be honest with yourself, Joshua! What really turns you off the whole idea is that you're not sure it will truly be your book, becau
se you'll need help in physically writing it. That's understandable, because you're as much a doer as you are a thinker. Look, the reason I want this book from you is because your ideas are so worthwhile. And you've got the guts to carry a spiritual message. That's rare these days, and I agree with you, I think people need spiritual help more than any other kind. I don't blame you for being scared,' she said, her eyes and her face earnest as she turned them up to search his. 'But you must produce that book, Joshua! It is the beginning of the way to reach the people.'

  Such a beautiful world! He gazed around it, trying to give himself new, innocent eyes. This was the world he had tried and would try his hardest to help preserve, to see it at some distant date in the future once again the paradise of loveliness and comfort it should be and probably used to be before Man overran it. Man could learn! Man must learn! And underneath his fear and doubt he knew that he, Joshua Christian, had a very real and very significant contribution to make. He had always known that. When they wrote of men like Napoleon and Caesar they referred to it as a 'sense of destiny'. He had that sense, too. But he didn't want to think of himself as a Napoleon or a Caesar! He didn't want to feel chosen and special and privileged. He didn't want to think that he could be mistaken enough to interpret his own ability as better than anybody else's. Fatal, to start manipulating the lives of others in the belief that your own role as a chosen one qualified you to do so — nay, demanded that you do so! And yet and yet and yet… What if this opportunity being offered to him now was the right opportunity, the golden knocking one-and-only opportunity that if ignored would never come again? What if he turned this chance down and as a result his country went down into ashes? When maybe — just maybe — he could have helped significantly to save it.

  Did he dare think of his future in those terms? But had he not already thought of such a mission, time and time again in his dreams and of late in his waking hours as well? Oh yes he had, but only, he told himself, now frantic for excuses, as a child dreams of chocolate factories and no school and a self-exercising self-feeding puppy. Not as a reality! Not out of a sense of his own exclusiveness, except deep inside where surely every man and every women ever born also thought of himself and herself as uniquely exclusive and precious.