Mission (54 page)

Alone in the high places, The Man meditated upon his mission and eventual death and how best to accomplish both. He now had the most extraordinary power ever given to a Celestial this side of the Time Gate. For not only had his past
karma
been removed, he had gained eternal freedom from the hitherto immutable law that governed existence in the temporal Universe. Nothing he did now, or in the future, could dilute the purity of his spiritual essence.

It was to these hills, as the Book says, that ‘Brax sent emissaries to parley with Ya'el. Eight Black Princes formed from his all-embracing cosmic presence. Up to that moment, ‘Brax had been convinced that he had the upper hand. Ya'el had been tied to a human host and buried alive under a crushing burden of
karma.
‘Brax's master-plan had been to offer Ya'el a truce in the hope of recruiting him to the Secessionist cause. For, reasoned ‘Brax, until his
karma
had been purged in the World Below, where else could Ya'el go?

‘Brax had persuaded himself that, with Ya'el on his side, there was a real possibility of rallying the remaining pockets of Loyalist
resistance to his dark banner. Starting with the twelve great Aeons of Eardh-Ain: the Ain-folk trapped within Man. But now, all his scheming had come to naught; his plans were in tatters. The second greatest power in the Empire had been his prisoner. For one heady moment, victory had been within his grasp and had been snatched away in a manner that ‘Brax could not have possibly anticipated. For in removing Ya'el's
karma
at a single stroke, The Presence had changed the rules of the game.

This was why ‘Brax now came, in the guise of his fawning minions, cap in hand and honey-tongued. The defeated Ya'el would have been a great acquisition, but a Ya'el freed from the law of
karma
and armed with the transcendent power of The Presence held the key to the Time Gate and the ultimate ‘Braxian vision; the conquest of The Empire and subjugation of The Presence.

Now you know where we get our rebellious arrogance from.

The Man never revealed what went on in his mind during this crucial encounter but, as we all know, he turned down the offer. Which I can now reveal was a two-way split of the World Below with Ya'el holding fifty-one per cent of the stock and ‘Brax as his trusty lieutenant. Some deal. There was as much chance of Ya'el saying ‘Yes' to that as there was of my mother doing the Viennese waltz with Adolph Eichmann.

What The Man knew, and what he was trying to tell us via this episode was that God, The Presence, or Whoever, represented, and was the source of, the essential eternal values that lay at the very foundation of existence. And that the ‘Braxian universe and the Netherworld beyond were no more than a cosmic house of cards that was already programmed to self-destruct.

In essence, the Empire gave life; ‘Brax represented death, decay and corruption. This was not important in the physical sense. The cycle of birth, death and rebirth of all life on this planet mirrored the larger life and death cycle of the Universe. And in any case, it was only our host-bodies that died. The real ‘us' – the trapped Ain-folk fragments – the intangible essence that was regarded as the soul of Man, lived on. We had not lost our legendary immortality. We had merely mislaid the key. We simply no longer understood its nature. We had become fixated with our physicality; an obsessive desire to prolong, at whatever cost, our earthly existence.

Mankind's attempt to cheat Time mirrored ‘Brax's fight against the inexorable Law of Simultaneity under which all events were
preordained by The Presence. All ‘Brax's efforts were, in the end, directed towards trying to transform the multi-dimensional nature of Time, to wrest control of the future from The Presence. It brought us back to the book analogy again. Only in this version, the characters were trying to take control of the author in a desperate attempt to stop the story from ending.

It seems irrational but down here on the ground we were trying to do the same kind of thing. Groups with more money than sense had begun to believe that cryogenics was a substitute for salvation. It isn't. And if you don't need the money, give it away to the poor. Your soul is not going to hang around until some kindly serviceman in the far future switches your central heating back on. But the lunacy doesn't end there. The medical profession and its richer patrons are so besotted with the manipulation of life that they have not faced up to the Frankensteinian future of transplant technology. In fifty to a hundred years from now, medical science may discover how to keep you alive for, say, two or three centuries. Can you imagine it? Two double centenarians humping? Each of them a sutured collage of silicone plumbing and pieces from other people's auto-accidents? Terminal men and women living in fear of a power-outage?

Even if science achieved the ultimate ‘Braxian miracle – control of the genetic matrix, giving us test-tube replicas of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bo Derek, or John Wayne and Jane Russell – all the wit and ingenuity of cloned, transplanted Man in the ages to come will not enable us to survive the death of the sun or the collapse of the Universe.

How much better to come round again as a fresh, new-born human being with all your options open. To be able to see, once again, the world through the unveiled eyes of a child. With the possibility that, this time, you may get it right.

Innocence and idealism tend to be derided as impossible and impractical states that have no place in the ‘real world'. Yet these abstract notions are not products of our brain's bio-chemistry. The moral dilemma, the concept of perfectibility, could not exist unless it had been put into our minds by some external agency. Man would not strive towards these goals, would not seek the perfect love, the perfect friendship unless he was driven by some inner force. This desire for the seemingly unattainable is the outward expression of our soul's longing to be reunited with God. The yearning of the Ain-folk to be freed from their prison cells.

The Man came down from the hills with a clear idea of what he had to do. His first priority was the recruitment of twelve disciples. As I've mentioned elsewhere, they were a symbolic representation of the twelve Aeons he had come to liberate. They also had a more practical purpose. The Man intended to use them as test-vehicles to evaluate the effects of an input of Celestial power and they were to serve as his bodyguard. The Man had not forgotten his near-fatal mugging on the road to Jericho. Even though he now had the ability to blank himself out of the landscape, his earth-host was not totally invulnerable. As long as he remained bonded to his physical body, his power was finite and could be drained away in the same manner that electrical current flows down an energy gradient. From a source of high potential to one of low. As in the incident when the woman crawled through the ring of disciples and touched the hem of his robe. Remember how he felt the power drain from him? If you don't, it's recorded in Mark, Ch.5 v.30. That was why he kept pulling out when the crowds became unmanageable.

Despite what the Book says at this point about his movements after the forty days and nights in the wilderness he did not go to Capernaum, but to Jerusalem. To seek out Mary of Magdala, who he had left in the care of Nicodemus. He found her rested and ready to travel. It was with Mary by his side that he journeyed northwards to Galilee to summon Shimon-Petrus and his brother Andreas from their nets to be fishers of men.

Andreas, you may remember, had been instructed to await The Man's arrival. Shimon, who is enshrined in Christian theology as St Peter, was not the first to be recruited, nor was he called ‘The Rock'. That is a mis-translation for ‘The Truth' – something that he, along with the eleven other disciples, was to be the foundation for. Peter's pre-eminence in the New Testament Canon is due to the creative editing of the Pauline organisation men; the essential underpinning that provided the foundations for the Apostolic Succession.

From the very beginning, The Man's teaching was, anti-hierarchical. Time and time again he stressed that the first would be last and the last first. Don't be misled by indications in this account of a pyramidal command structure inside the Empire. There are no class divisions, only degrees of essence. In the way that a cloud and a wave have their beginning in the same ocean.

I don't want to use up valuable space arguing over the Aramaic texts but the Apostles were not given the task of building a church
and all that that implies. The original message has been distorted. The Man's ultimate aim in spreading The Word was to build an army
(kahal)
of assembled organic unities
(edhah)
or, as a chronicler of the Empire might say, to reunite the fragmented Ain-folk.

Over the next few weeks, with Mary of Magdala by his side, The Man gathered together the disparate group of twelve who were to follow him doggedly until that panic-filled night in the Garden of Gethsemane. And during the next few months, he also gathered other adherents who were to form the nucleus of the group known as the Followers of The Way. Mary of Magdala was given the task of selecting and organising this group and, as she had direct access to The Man, interceding on their behalf whenever necessary.

The character and eventual fate of the twelve disciples has been chewed over by biblical scholars and endlessly romanticised by a succession of novelists. In historical terms, their personalities, like mine, are irrelevant. Their importance lay in the part that each played in enabling The Man to carry out his mission; the fact that they were twelve in number and because, as a group, they represented a varied cross-section of society. They were not all dirt-poor sod-busters, or fundamentalist fishermen. Matthew-Levi was a tax-collector, Philip a Greek-speaking student of law, Shimon the Zealot was a political activist, and Judas was a member of the Sicarii – a first-century version of the Stern Gang specialising in covert assassination of Roman soldiers and civil servants. Andreas, Philip, Nathan barTolomai, Jacob of Alphaeus, Timmaeus and Thaddeus were the disciples The Man inherited from Johanan-Gabriel. Jacob and Johan barZebedee came, as did Shimon-Petrus, from the fishing community based around Capernaum.

It was Judas, arriving from Jerusalem, who brought the news that Johanan the Baptiser had been arrested for his vituperative assault on Herodias and her pre-teen strumpet daughter, and was now languishing in the slammer at Machereus, Herod's forbidding fortress-palace on the eastern slopes of the Dead Sea. The curtain was going up on the third and final act. It was time for The Man to assume the role of an itinerant preacher whose wandering route through the Galilean and Judean countryside was to end on Calvary. But first, there was that marriage to attend in Cana.

On the way there, he made that ill-fated attempt to preach in the synagogue at Nazareth which ended, as I've already mentioned, with him being run out of town. Cana was the last time he was to meet his
mother face-to-face until he looked down at her through pain-racked eyes from the cross. It was also the occasion of his first recorded miracle when, under protest, he turned six stone flagons of water into wine. It was a somewhat frivolous use of his powers but, as those of you who've got one will know, Jewish mothers are not easily denied.

The phone rang, cutting across The Man's recorded voice. I got up and switched off the tape deck and took the call in the living-room. It was Jeff Fowler.

‘About yesterday,' he began, not wasting time on any preliminaries. ‘When you get back from Israel do you think you could persuade your friend to come down to the Institute for a complete examination?'

‘What do you hope to prove, Jeff?' I asked.

‘I'm not sure we can “prove” anything,' replied Fowler. ‘But that food and wine he swallowed last night has to go somewhere. If his internal organs are as perfect as his external appearance and motor functions imply, then he must have gastric juices in his digestive tract. In which case, what are his kidneys doing? And what's happening to the excess oxygen that's floating around his system?'

‘What makes you think there is any?' I replied.

‘Leo,' said Fowler, ‘his blood contains nothing but mature red blood cells. That means he's already carrying more oxygen than normal. But if his blood and tissue cells aren't ageing then the energy that would normally be used up in the building of new cells, muscle fibre, bone and tissue will just accumulate. How does he store it? The guy must be like a superball!'

‘Maybe he has a totally different type of metabolism,' I suggested, airing some of the knowledge I'd picked up from watching
Doctor Kildare.

‘Maybe he has,' said Fowler. ‘In which case I'd like to find out how it works. Let me give you another “for instance”. If he has no DNA in his white cells, what happens when he cuts himself? How can the
cells reproduce to cope with the infection? It's driving me bananas.'

‘Jeff,' I said, ‘I think you are going to have to accept that The Man is outside the rules. You're looking at him in the wrong way.'

‘I don't accept that,' said Fowler. ‘Okay, I know he disappeared. I admit I have no answer for that as yet, but the rest leaves us with two options. He is either real, in which case his physiology has to make some kind of medical sense, which is why it's important to be able to examine him, or we are singly and jointly the victims of an incredible illusion.

‘You're right,' I said. We've allowed ourselves to be totally deluded by external reality.
That's
the illusion. Don't you see that's what The Man is trying to tell us? We have to look at everything with a fresh eye.'

Fowler greeted this with a short silence. ‘Leo, let's be practical about this. Real is real. That's the only way we can operate. If we don't hold to that then we might as well book ourselves into the funny farm.'

‘Jeff,' I replied. ‘This is it. We were all booked in at birth.'