A Creed for the Third Millennium Read online

  'Oh, how clever of Major Withers to deliver them straight to you! I wonder where he got silk pyjamas so quickly?'

  'They're his own,' said Mama, biting off the thread between her little white useful teeth.

  'Good God!' She laughed. 'Who would have thought it?'

  'How is Joshua?' Mama asked, so offhandedly Dr Carriol knew she suspected he was quite ill.

  'A bit miserable. I think I'm just going to give him a big bowl of soup, nothing else. He can sleep where he is, it's comfortable.' She moved to the table where food had been spread out, took a bowl in her left hand, a ladle in her right. 'Mama?'

  'Yes?'

  'Do me a big favour, will you? Don't go near him.'

  Mama's large blue eyes filmed over, but she swallowed her disappointment valiantly. 'If you think it's best, of course.'

  'I do think it's best. You're a gallant soul, Mama. It's been an awful time for you, I know, but as soon as Washington's over we'll send him away for a long rest, and you can have him all to yourself. How does Palm Springs sound, huh?'

  But Mama just smiled and looked sad, as if she didn't believe a word of what she was being told.

  When Dr Carriol came into the cubicle bearing her bowl of soup, Dr Christian sat up and swung his legs over the side of the tall stretcher. Now he looked very tired, but not exhausted, and he had wrapped a cotton sheet around himself sarong-wise to hide the worst of his wounds, which were from the chest down or hidden in his armpits. Even his toes were beneath the edge of the sheet. Prepared for Mama, no doubt. She handed him the soup without a word, and stood watching while he drank it.

  'More?'

  'No, thank you.'

  'You'd better sleep in here, Joshua. I'll bring you your fresh clothes in the morning. It's all right, the family just think you're terribly tired and a bit irritable. And Mama is busy sewing a silk lining into tomorrow's trousers. It's not that cold, you'll be better off with silk than thermal stuff.'

  'You make a very capable nurse, Judith.'

  'Only so far as my common sense takes me. After that I'm lost.' The empty bowl in her hand, she looked at him, on eye level because she was standing and he was sitting. 'Joshua, why? Tell me why!'

  'Why what?'

  'This secrecy about your condition.'

  'It's never been that important to me.'

  'You are mad!'

  He tilted his head to one side and laughed at her through his eyelids, his mouth straight. 'Divine madness!'

  'Are you serious, or are you putting me on?'

  He lay down on his narrow bed and looked at the ceiling. 'I love you, Judith Carriol. I love you more than any other individual human being in the world,' he said.

  That shocked her more than seeing his body, shocked her into sitting down abruptly on the chair near his stretcher. 'Oh, sure! After what you said to me less than an hour ago, how can you now say you love me?'

  His head turned on the flat pillow and he looked at her so sadly and strangely, as if her having to ask that of him was but one more disappointment. 'I love you because of those things. I love you because you need to be loved more than any other human being I have ever met. I love you therefore in the full measure you need. And I do love you that much.'

  'Like an old ugly disfigured cripple! Thanks!' She leaped up from the chair and rushed from the room.

  The family was back; God protect me from these Christians! Why could she never seem to find the right thing to say to him any more? How could he expect to get a genuine reaction from her when he gave her news like that at a time like this? Damn you, damn you, damn you, Joshua Christian! How dare you presume to patronize me?

  She turned on her heel, went back into his cubicle, walked up to him as he lay with eyes closed, grasped his chin in her fingers and pushed her face down to his. Six inches away. His eyes opened. Black black black is the colour of my true love's eyes…

  'Stick your love!' she said. 'Shove it up your ass!'

  In the morning Dr Carriol assisted Dr Christian to dress, though more accurately he assisted her. He had crusted over on the worst areas of chafing and cracking, but she didn't think this beginning of a healing process would survive the day's march. Tonight she would have a better arrangement in the bath cubicle, a proper bed for one thing, and some sort of active exhaust system to suck stray wisps of steam out of the air. He never said a word while she dressed him, just sat and stood and turned and put his legs in and held his arms out in automatic response to the commands of her hands. But no matter how he might deny it, he was in pain; when it caught him unprepared he shivered like an animal, and when what must surely have been a stab of agony pierced him, he jerked like an epileptic.

  'Joshua?'

  'Mmmmmm?' Not the most encouraging response.

  'Don't you think that somewhere along the line each of us has to make a definite decision about life? I mean, where we are going, whether we're going to set our sights big or small, on something personal or something grander?'

  He didn't answer; she wasn't even sure he heard, but she went on doggedly anyway.

  'There's nothing personal in this, I'm just doing a job I happen to be good at doing, probably because I don't let anything or anyone get in my way. But I'm not a terrible person! Truly I'm not! You could never have gone among the people if I hadn't made it possible, don't you see that? I knew what the people needed, but I couldn't give them what they needed from myself. So I found you to do what had to be done. Don't you understand that? And you have been happy, haven't you? In the beginning you were happy, before the bugs started crawling around inside your head. Joshua, you can't blame me for what's happened! You can't!' The last two words came out despairing before they were even uttered.

  'Oh, Judith, not now!' he cried wretchedly. 'I don't have the time for this! All I want is to walk to Washington!'

  'You can't blame me!'

  'Do I need to?' he asked.

  'I guess not,' she said dully. 'But — oh, I wish I was someone else! Haven't you ever wished that?'

  'Every second of every minute of every hour of every day I wish it! But the pattern must be finished before I finish.'

  'What pattern?'

  His eyes came to life as briefly as the sputter in a lit stick of incense. 'If I knew that, Judith, I would be what I am not — I would be more than a man.'

  And he went out to walk.

  He walked, millions followed. From Manhattan to New Brunswick on the first day, though never so far so fast again as that, and never with so many people. Through Philadelphia and Wilmington and Baltimore he walked, to the outskirts of Washington, D.C., on the eighth day.

  Those who walked with him were shyer after the New York marchers went home, though some of the gaudy ebullient New Yorkers did go all the way with him. And never were there less than a million people on the move. Down I-95 on his boardwalk he went, followed on high by helicopters, led by the network television vans, with his family right behind him, and that cheery waving dog-tired little band of government dignitaries in the vanguard of the crowd. From New Brunswick on, the Governor of New Jersey came; the Governor of Pennsylvania joined up in Philadelphia, where Dr Christian spoke briefly. At his age and weight the Governor of Maryland had opted to attach himself to the reception committee in Washington; but the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, nineteen U.S. senators, over a hundred U.S. congressmen, and half a hundred assorted generals, admirals and astronauts were slipped in among the walking VIPs as Dr Christian strode through the drab red-brick and half-finished ambitious public works of Baltimore, abandoned for good at the turn of the century.

  He walked. Dr Carriol did not know how, but he walked. And each night when he stopped she ministered to the slowly dissolving ruin of his body, each night Mama sewed a fresh pair of pure silk pyjama pants inside his next day's trousers, each night the family tried to keep their spirits up when Dr Christian was removed from them by his jealous guardian, who, had they only known it, was chiefly concerned to keep from them any idea of Jos
hua's condition and pain.

  Dr Christian himself had ceased to think after New Brunswick. The pain had stopped in New York, the thinking in New Brunswick, and the walking would stop in Washington. All he kept in his mind was Washington, Washington, Washington.

  Something in his brain betrayed him. Not the conscious part, for it understood very well that he had only arrived on the outskirts of Washington, at a place called Greenbelt. The last night's bivouac. Yet here he let his guard down, he relaxed as if he had actually gone all the way to the Potomac. Instead of going straight into the cubicle which housed his whirlpool tub and his bed, he sat with his family in the tent's main area, talking and laughing like his old self; instead of drinking a bowl of soup, he made a good meal in the company of his family, veal stew and mashed potatoes and string beans, with coffee and cognac afterwards.

  He was in severe pain; Dr Carriol had acquired sufficient expertise by now to see the little telltale signs of it, the way his eyes did not focus so much on faces as on whole walls, with faces in their middles somewhere, the muscular spasms that followed a wrong movement (for the family's benefit he called them cramps), the stretched lifeless look of the skin over his cheeks and nose, the inconsequence of his conversation.

  In the end she had to order him to bath and bed, at which point he went with her willingly.

  No sooner had she turned on the air feed to the tub and firmly closed the canvas flap across the entrance to the cubicle than he rushed to the toilet she had added to the facilities after New Brunswick. He vomited until he had nothing left to vomit, painfully, dreadfully, racked by paroxysms that seemed to come all the way up from the calves of his kneeling legs. Until he was sure he was finally done he refused to move, then had to be helped to his bed; he sat on its edge hunched over, breathing stertorously, his face so drained and strained it was the colour of a black pearl.

  The explanations and the recriminations, the accusations and the exculpations, all were finished in New Brunswick. Since then Dr Christian and Dr Carriol had drawn very close, fused by a bond of pain and suffering, united in the face of the world to preserve his secret at any cost. She was his servant and his nursemaid, the only witness of his battle to continue, the sole human being who understood how frail was his hold on the self he called Joshua Christian.

  So now she held his head against her belly while he laboured to drag a little air into his lungs, then when he was easier she sponged his face and hands, held a cup and a basin while he rinsed his mouth. In silence. In conjunction.

  Only when he was undressed and put into clean silk pyjamas with all his wounds anointed did he speak, slowly, indistinctly.

  'I will walk tomorrow,' was what he said.

  Further speech was not possible, he shivered too much. The skin of his lips was blue.

  'Can you sleep?' she asked.

  The ghost of a smile around chattering teeth. He nodded and closed his eyes immediately.

  Until she was sure he did indeed sleep she remained with him, sitting quietly on a chair and never letting her eyes wander from his face. Then she rose to her feet and tiptoed out to telephone Harold Magnus.

  Finally freed from his White House exile, he was about to sit down to a very late and much anticipated dinner when Dr Carriol rang.

  'I have to see you at once, Mr Magnus,' she said. 'It cannot wait, and I mean that.'

  He was not displeased, he was furious, but he knew Judith Carriol better than to argue. His home was across the river in outer Arlington, which made the Department of the Environment closer by far to Green-belt; besides which, he loathed seeing staff in his home, and he loathed rushing a dinner. 'My office, then,' he said curtly, and hung up. The dinner was Nova Scotia smoked salmon followed by coq au vin, so it had better wait until he returned. Fuck!

  The Department of the Environment had been built after extreme petroleum rationing was instituted, so it had no helicopter pad, and its roof had long been sacrificed to a growing colony of store rooms for the accommodation of paper. Therefore Dr Carriol decided to travel in from Greenbelt by car, commandeering one of the vehicles reserved for the use of the dignitaries walking with Dr Christian. The distance was not great, but the journey took nearly three hours. Washington had filled up with people waiting to join the last leg of the March of the Millennium, the people were in high carnival mood and spilled everywhere across the roads, even camping in them. Though there were more cars in Washington than anywhere else in the country, no one had respect for the sanctity of roads any more. The car crept where the crowd was thickest, constantly sounding its horn, zigzagging between clumps of sleeping campers and occasionally having recourse to the sidewalk. It irritated Dr Carriol but did not unduly worry her, for she knew Harold Magnus would be having much the same experience, and he had to come a long way farther. No point in getting to Environment way ahead of him.

  As it happened, the crowd was considerably thinner on the Virginia bank of the Potomac, and Dr Carriol had underestimated the distance from Greenbelt to Environment versus the distance from Falls Church; it took Harold Magnus a mere two hours. However, when he arrived he was in one of his meanest moods, chiefly on account of the dinner left behind uneaten. For eight days he had been tied to Tibor Reece's side, unable to leave the White House. He hated staying at the White House; the President was not an eater and was currently a bachelor, so the meals were infrequent, deplorably dull, and of one course only, with no seconds offered. Even in the middle of the night he had been unable to sneak away, for Tibor Reece was determined to have a whipping boy on hand if anything happened to Dr Joshua Christian. So Harold Magnus had taken to raiding the candy machines in the White House's staff cafeteria, and during the eight days of his exile he had consumed enormous quantities of Hershey bars, M&Ms, and Good and Plentys, vainly trying to fill up his empty corners, equally vainly trying to sweeten his disposition. But on this night, his last, the Secretary had rebelled. He phoned his wife and ordered his favourite dinner, then he refused the White House fare when it was offered. At nine in the evening he went home, his excuse the grand reception to be held on the morrow; he told the President he had to look over his clothes.

  When the Secretary erupted through his outer office doors at a little after two in the morning, Mrs Helena Taverner's face lit up. She had literally been filling his position all through his White House incarceration, and it was beating her.

  'Oh, sir, I'm so glad to see you! I need decisions, directives and signatures desperately,' she said.

  He kept on going, waving at her over his shoulder to follow him into his office.

  Sighing, she gathered a large sheaf of papers together, her notepad and pencil, and joined him.

  They worked for an hour, the Secretary occasionally looking at the clock on the wall behind him, as he wore no watch.

  'Where the hell is she?' he demanded as they finished.

  'It's bound to be slow going, sir. She's coming in on the March route, and I imagine it's solid people,' soothed Mrs Taverner.

  But Dr Carriol arrived not five minutes later, just as Mrs Taverner was settling herself back at her own desk with yet more work to do. A look of understanding passed between the two women, then a smile.

  'That bad, huh?' asked Dr Carriol.

  'Well, he's been stuck at the White House for eight days and the food isn't what he likes at all. But his mood's on the upswing since he's been back in his own chair.'

  'Oh, poor baby!'

  Indeed his mood had improved; dinner would be eaten later if not sooner, Helena hadn't made too many mistakes in his absence — he really ought to remember to give her a nice gift sometime — and his White House exile was over. He greeted Dr Carriol with huge affability, a corona corona jammed in one corner of his mouth, his paunch gaily sheathed in a pink-and-green brocade waistcoat.

  'Well, well, Judith, this is more like it, eh?'

  'Yes, Mr Secretary,' she said, taking off her coat.

  'Greenbelt tonight, then a final stroll to the Potomac tomorr
ow morning. We've got it all set up, a solid Vermont marble platform that will form a base of the Millennial memorial later on, loudspeakers on every street corner and in every park for miles around, and some reception committee! The President, the Vice-President, Congress, every ambassador, Prime Minister Rajpani, Premier Hsaio, loads more heads of state, movie stars, and television stars and college presidents — and the King of England!'

  'The King of Australia and New Zealand,' she corrected.

  'Well, yes, but he's really the King of England; it's just that the Commies don't like kings.' He buzzed Mrs Taverner and asked for coffee and the drinks tray. 'You will join me in a glass of brandy, Judith? I know you're not a drinker, but I heard from the President that Dr Christian had converted you to a little cognac with your coffee, and I'm not averse to it myself.'

  When she didn't reply he eyed her more closely, fanning a cloud of heavy aromatic smoke away from her vicinity. 'My cigar worrying you?' he asked with unwonted concern.

  'No.'

  'What's the matter? His speech not up to scratch? He does know he's expected to speak — doesn't he?'

  Her sigh came up from the bottom of her belly. 'Mr Secretary, he's not going to speak tomorrow.'

  'What?

  'He's — ill,' she said, choosing her words with extreme care. 'In fact, he's mortally ill.'

  'Oh, bullshit! He looks great! I've been watching him the whole goddam way with the President ready to have my balls if anyone picked him off, and I can tell you I watched the guy like a hawk! He looks great. Ill? Walking at the rate he does? Bullshit! What's really the matter?'

  'Mr Magnus, you must believe me. He is desperately ill. So ill that I fear for his life.'

  He stared at her in gathering unease, beginning at last to believe her, but he couldn't repress a final protest at the injustice of her news. 'Bullshit!'

  'No, the truth. I know, because I have to deal with him every night and every morning. Do you know what his body looks like under all that gear? He's a mass of raw flesh. He wore away his life trudging through the north in winter. He's losing significant amounts of blood where he's got no skin left. He's in the kind of pain that causes near dementia. His sweat glands are great lumps of stinking pus where they've burst, and great lumps of agony where they haven't. His toes are dropping off. Drop — ping — off! Hear me?'