Interpose

 

If Christ has not been raised,  
then our preaching is in vain  
and your faith is in vain. 

—Corinthians 15:14 

 

 

HIS UNWASHED CLOTHES WERE PASTED TO HIS lean body with warm sweat. As he moved slowly down the litter-strewn street, he thought of fresh blood running on green wood, refusing to mingle with the last droplets of sap. The noonday sun heated the layer of dust on the sidewalk. A gust of hot wind whirled it into his face. He tried to shield himself with his right hand, but the grit penetrated into his eyes, making them water.

He staggered to the open doorway of a deserted building and sat down on the doorsill. It was cooler here and he was grateful no one had found it before him.

As his eyes cleared, he sat looking at the limbo of the street. A stream of dirty water was flowing in the gutter. A roach ran across the sidewalk in front of him, and a gust of wind swept the insect into the current which carried it away toward the drain on the corner.

The spear entered his side, but only enough to jar him from his shock sleep, enough for him to feel that he was too high on the cross for it to reach his heart. The pain penetrated layers of memory, bridging more than these last twenty years of pavement, to a time before they had marooned him here, and sometimes dimly to a time still earlier. His eyes were heavy with blood and sweat; his face was benumbed. The wood groaned with his hanging weight. It was green and pliant and the nails were loose in the pulp. The ropes around his arm muscles had shrunk and were biting into his bones. 

The land was dark except for the thin ribbon of dawn on the horizon. Someone was struggling with a ladder on the ground. Soon hands were removing the nails from his palms and cutting the ropes from his arms. He felt himself lowered roughly and wrapped in a cold cloth. 

Voices. They were not speaking Aramaic, but he understood them. He heard their thoughts and the words which followed took on meaning. “It couldn’t be him, look at his face, not with that face, look at his face.” 

Another voice echoed, “That face, that face, faceface.” 

“So many hangermen strung up at this time, impossible to tell for sure, for sure.” 

“For sure impossible.” 

“Anyway he was a man like this one. We’ll have fun, fun with him as well, just as well.” 

A third voice shouting, “Hurry, hurry, the machine is swallowing power parked in time.” A laugh, a giggle. “Lots of power, gulping and waiting for us—where do we take him after we fix him?” 

“Shut up!” A voice with depth, commanding attention from the shallower cortex which mimed him. “See how afraid he is...” 

Other voices. “See how afraid, afraidafraid!” 

“We’ll see how afraid he is and take it from there.” 

“From there, from there, fromthere.” 

Earlier in the garden he had asked to be taken away from this place where they were planning his death. The saving of men was not a task for him. He had done enough in helping mutate the animals into men, and more in making sure that all the main groups remained isolated long enough to breed true; he had even worked with the others trying to imprint food and hygiene commands on the groups. He would leave it to others to set the examples for the development of a sane culture. The trouble with men seemed to lie in their excessive awe of nature and their own capacities, an impressionability which led them to be convinced only by powers and authorities beyond them, or by the force of the stronger ones among them. Reason was powerless unless allied with one of these. He was not going to die for these creatures, he had decided in the garden, but they had come and seized him while his attention was with communicating... 

“He’ll take some fixing,” the dominant voice said. “I wonder if he knows what’s happening?” 

Another voice was saying, “If it’s really him, then he knows. A that brotherly stuff—and from a wreck who crawled away after they cut him down, and all the nothings made up a story. When we cut him up, we’ll know for sure.” And he laughed. 

“Cut him up, cut him up, cuthimup!” 

Later he woke up on the floor of a small room. He saw their boots near him. They were looking at the open door where the world was an insubstantial mist, a maelstrom of time flowing by in wave after wave of probability moving outward from a hidden center which somewhere cast the infinite field of space and time and possibility. He felt the bandages on his body and the lack of pain. Time travel, he understood from their thoughts. How cunning and irrational they had become to make it work, a thing so dangerous, absurd, and impossible that no race in the galaxy had ever succeeded in making it work. And like the ones who had put him on the cross, they had come for him to soothe their own hatred and cruelty through pain in the name of pleasure. The beast’s brain was still served by technical cleverness, so many centuries hence. 

Suddenly with a great effort he lifted himself from the floor, and without standing up completely threw himself head first through the open portal, tumbling head over heels into the haze, hearing them screaming behind him as he floated away from the lighted cube. “We’ll get you!” they shouted as their light faded and their forms were carried into time.... 

 

By 1935 he had been alone for twenty years, slowly learning what his disciples had done after his disappearance. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John had lied, creating a fantastic legend. Their written words only served as a reminder of who he really was. The words that he read in the public library remembered everything for him.

But he had not saved mankind, either in terms of the story or his own mission. His death was needed to complete the story, and his presence with the resources of his entire civilization, twenty centuries ago. He had not heard his people’s voice in a long time, an age since the time in the garden when the sun had hung in the trees like a blood-red orange.

He took out his small bottle of cheap whiskey and gulped a swallow, grateful for the few lucid moments in which he knew himself, knew he was not the man the apostles and time had made him. The bottle slipped from his grasp and shattered on the pavement. He looked at the pieces, then bent his head and closed his eyes. The reality of his world, so filled with knowledge and the power over one’s life, was so distant, and his exile and suffering so near and unfulfilled. Silently he spoke the words, which would have freed him in the other time, but were ineffectual here.

He tried to look through shadow to the time before he became a man, and it was a dream filled with light he had lived somewhere, the shards of a madman’s memory delivering him into an abyss of doubt. Why should not the recorded version be any more true than his memory of his home world?

He did not know who he was; he could not prove anything to himself, or anyone else. A proof of his divine origin would deny men the choice of following his example. Only fools would fail to bet on a sure thing. His followers had followed him first, then they had been given their proof; mistaken as it was, it had passed for reality. He thought of how many had followed his name during the last twenty centuries, believing in him even when it had meant their deaths.

The others, the men from the future—they had wanted a living creature to play with, to harm in the way that human wreckage was used and dumped from speeding cars in this evil time around him. They had not had their fill with him, at least. But there was no judgment in his mind, only the awareness of the life he could not lead, the powers he could not enjoy, and the knowledge that he would die eventually, never knowing again the perspective of his own kind.

Slowly the sun came lower into the west and hung swollen over the stone alleys of the city, casting its still warm rays against the face of the building and into the doorway where he was sitting. In front of him the whiskey was dry around the broken glass. An old dog crept by, sniffed at the remains and continued down the street.

His thoughts faded as he tried to remember. It was difficult to remain alert. The sun took an eternity to go down behind the building across the street, but finally it left him in a chill shadow, trying to make sense of the thought of places beyond the world and the bits of conversation floating in his mind.

“Why take the effort? It’s like dozens of worlds. They’re intelligent, but it’s all in the service of the beast.” 

“Maybe an example might make all the difference—stimulate their rationality through belief. It’s worked on many worlds. The sight of a man who was also more than one of them, a man who visibly lives the best in them, maybe it would work here too.” 

“Whoever took the job would be in for it—the experience would alter him permanently,” the first voice said. 

“Karo wants to isolate a new group, work on their genetic structure, maybe supplement it with some teaching.” 

“Karo has always underestimated the power of persuasive forces, and any creature’s ability to alter its own choices and tendencies...” 

He had come among them, taking the place of an unborn man in a human womb; and the mother had come to the cross to cry for her son.

It was so hard to remember. He still found it deadening to think that these creatures from the future had developed time travel, had taken him from the cross and had made it possible for him to have lived so long in this city. The words in the book—maybe they were truer? No one from his own world had ever thought of making time travel a working reality. They would never find him here.

He started to cough as the darkness filled the stone corners of the deserted street, and he felt the sidewalk grow colder under his feet. The evil ones from the future had taken his life, saving it for their own pleasure; his own kind had forsaken him centuries ago.

His mind clouded; it was more than the alcohol. The shock of appearing in a specific time after he had tumbled out of the shuttle, after he had floated for an eternity in the faintly glowing mists, had left him with sudden discontinuities in his thinking and consciousness, as if his mind were trying to regain the other place, the high ground of his original locus, the place he looked up to now from the bottom of a dark hole.

He heard footsteps in the darkness to his right.

Shapes entered the world, came near him and squatted on the pavement. Suddenly a can of garbage caught fire in the middle of the street and the quick, dancing glow showed three ragged figures warming themselves, their shadows jet black crows on the walls of the deserted brick tenements.

One of the men walked over to him and said, “Hey Hal, there’s an old guy here in the doorway, come see!”

The other two came over and looked at him. He looked up at them with half-closed eyes. He was sure they were not from the future.

“Too bad—he wouldn’t be here if he had anything valuable on him.”

He tried to sit up straighter on the doorstep, to show them he thought more of himself. Their stares were making a mere thing of him, something to be broken. He felt it in them, and the wash of hopelessness in himself.

“We could take his clothes,” one said. They were all unshaven and dirty, their elbows showing through their sleeves.

“Why do you wish to harm me?” he asked.

“Listen, old man, you’re not going to last long when it gets cold. We can use your clothes.”

“Do you have a drink? I dropped mine...”

“Okay, let’s strip him down. Now.”

They came at him, blotting out the light of the fire. Almost gently they began to remove his clothes, moving his arms and legs as if they were the limbs of a mannequin. His body tensed and he became an object in their hands, forgetting where or who he was. Their arms held him like constricting snakes.

He felt a spasm in his right leg and he caught one of them in the crotch with a sudden kick. The man doubled over in pain and fell backward onto the pavement, revealing the fire behind him suddenly.

“Kill him!” he shouted from where he lay. “Kill the bastard!” And he howled from his pain.

The others started to kick him. “Interpose a god to change animals into men, stir a noble ideal in their beast’s brain.” He felt his ribs break, first on one side and then the other, and they hurt as his body rolled on the pavement from their blows. “We’ve been fortunate on our world, we have to help where there is even a chance, even a small chance.” The words of his co-workers on the project whispered to him softly, but he could not remember the individuals who had spoken them.

“Take his clothes off,” the groaning man said from the pavement where he still lay. “Make it hurt good!”

When he was naked one of them kicked him in the neck, exploding all the pain inside his head. For a brief instant he had a vision of the vandals from the future materializing on the street to carry him away; but he knew that they were the same as these who tormented him now.

Two of them rolled him near the fire and he felt its warmth on his bare skin. “Can you spare me?” he whispered. A hot stone from the fire touched his back, settling into his flesh as if it were plastic. His thoughts fled and the pain was a physical desolation. He did not know who he was; he knew only that he was going to die.

A sense of liberation passed through his being as his body shuddered. He closed his eyes and hung on to the darkness. He felt them grab his feet and drag him closer to the fire. Hot sparks settled on his skin...

But he knew now that the lie of his death of long ago would become the truth. He had to die now, violently at their hands to make good all the writings and prophecies—to make worthy the faith which was linked to his name. Only this could release him to return home. Suicide would have been useless, accident would not serve to please the Father.

He knew who he was now. The written words were all true, and his only purpose was to fulfill them. He could trust no other memories. He was the Son of God, and he would have to die to hear his Father’s voice again. “The mission, you’re a teacher, a man of science, a bringer of culture, remember?” Lies! The voices died, the deceiver was beaten.

I am Jesus of Nazareth... I have to be, or my death is for nothing, he said to himself. A great light filled his mind, illuminating all his images of the world’s dark places.

He heard a bottle break somewhere near.

The light destroyed all the false memories which the deceiver had sent to plague him.

He was ready.

They turned him on his back, so the wounds on his back would touch the stone hardness. He did not open his eyes, knowing that in a few seconds the mission would be complete. The broken bottle pierced his chest, entering his heart, and spilling blood on to the street and into the cavities of his dying human shell.