Time Travel Omnibus, page 958
“I failed him,” she said, when Catherine asked her why she cried over such an evil man. “He believed in me and I deserted him.”
“How did you desert him?” Catherine asked.
“I died,” Joan replied. “I do not think he would have done those horrible things if I had lived. I would have prevented it.”
“You cannot hold yourself responsible for his actions,” Catherine said, but Joan shook her head emphatically.
“I am my brother’s keeper,” she said. “I did not keep him well enough.” And nothing Catherine or Margaret or Michael said would change Joan’s mind. They soon caught a glimpse of the determination and stubbornness that propelled Joan into the heart of the French army.
Joan grew angry when she read about the latter half of the twentieth century and the entirety of the twenty-first, two eras marked by a general disregard for the nations they called the “Third World” coupled with an almost manic desire to make money regardless of the expense to others or the effect on the environment. She learned how national governments were decreasing in significance in proportion to the rise of the multinational corporations with their climate-controlled bio-domes that housed their employees and provided all the amenities to support a comfortable lifestyle. She read of the early space programs in the twentieth century and the early twenty-first. And of their abandonment in the middle of the twenty-first century as “inefficient and nonproductive,” even when those programs were studying ways to protect the earth from the massive asteroid strike that many scientists were predicting before the end of the twenty-second century.
When her three teachers thought she was ready, they left the research complex that housed not only the rooms in which Joan lived and studied and the garden where she often prayed, but also the device informally known as Hawking’s Arrow. The Arrow was named in honor of the legendary physicist’s reference to “time’s arrow” and its unidirectional flight into the future.
They traveled throughout the world, visiting places of cultural, historic, or environmental significance. Joan saw Paris, with L’Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower. She visited the Vatican and rode the canals of Venice, now much smaller than it used to be due to a rise in the water level. She toured the United States and parts of Central and South America, charmed by the scenic beauty, the strange animals and the strangeness of their big cities. She also visited lands plagued by famine and disease, wartorn landscapes, burned swathes of Amazon rainforest and land stripped of its valuable topsoil through the process of stripmining. Almost a year to the day from her reprieve from death, Joan was ready to begin.
6
Wearing clothing carefully selected to appeal to young activists and the environmentally conscious—hand-woven trousers, a lightweight cotton shirt and sturdy walking shoes—the young woman who called herself Jehanne Dark started out by speaking to select audiences on college campuses, at Save-the-Earth rallies, and fund-raising dinners for victims of the almost daily natural disasters. Her words, delivered with the passion of her conviction, caught fire in the hearts of her listeners.
In the background, Michael, Margaret, and Catherine watched as their protégé quickly outstripped even their best expectations. She caught the attention of the media, and soon a camera crew followed Jehanne wherever she went. Her Campaign to Save the Earth became the hottest story in all the media formats. Her following grew, and more and more people all over the world took to heart her few basic principles:
“The world was here before you. You must respect its sanctity as if it were a holy place, for it is.
“You do not stand alone in the world. Your neighbors share it with you, and they will share your burdens if you but ask. Their poverty makes you poor. You must give to them so that you will in turn receive from them.
“The world does not need to be conquered or mastered. It needs to be healed.”
Billions of people heard Jehanne exhort the multinationals to become accountable and to treat the resources that made them wealthy with respect. Little by little, a few changes became apparent. One company declared a moratorium on its deforestation of the rainforest, and planted new trees and other plants to replenish the depleted earth. Another company closed its sweatshops, redistributed its force in new, state-of-the-art workplaces, raised the minimum wage, and instituted free health care and assistance in living expenses. Armies of young people took a year off from college to work in environmentally troubled areas. Another “army” of consumers used the pressure of their buying power to force other companies to become accountable.
“We must find a way to heal the hole in the sky,” she remonstrated at a rally in New York’s Central Park. Almost immediately, funds appeared for studying the ozone layer. A new Global Warming conference was held in Geneva, Switzerland, with Jehanne as the keynote speaker. This time, a universal accord was adopted and signed by every attending country—and even some that did not bother to send delegates.
Toward the end of the year, the first of the letters started arriving. Initially, Michael, Margaret and Catherine read them to Joan, finding them amusing and also inferring from them that Joan’s campaign was closing in on its objective. They stopped reading them when they discovered her crying uncontrollably in the garden, the latest letter clutched in her hand.
“They are calling me an alarmist,” she sobbed through her tears. “They say I only want the fame, that I am a ‘glory hound.’ ”
Catherine placed her hands on Joan’s shoulders and worked the aching muscles in Joan’s back, forcing her to relax a little. “These letters only mean that you are succeeding. They are running scared.”
“Desperate people do desperate things,” Joan said, her voice shaking with anger, hurt, and something else Catherine reluctantly identified as fear.
7
The bullet that ended Joan’s second life came during her speech at the first anniversary rally of the Campaign to Save the Earth. Joan stood tall on the outdoor podium and looked out over a sea of faces and signs proclaiming “Love the World!” “Feed the Hungry, Feed Your Soul,” “Care for the Earth: It’s Your Job,” and other pithy slogans. In the year since she delivered her first speech, she had learned how to work a crowd, how to win their minds by securing their hearts and loyalty. Already, small signs that her agenda to heal the earth was taking effect began appearing: new growth in the rainforest, indications that the hole in the ozone layer might actually seal itself in a few years, a new understanding of the need to preserve the great predators, and a resurgence of several endangered species.
As contributions came pouring in, scientists were able to study the increasing instability of the tectonic plates and form some tentative theories on how to relieve the internal stress of the planet.
The crowd was eager to hear her speech, delivered with the simple fervor of a French peasant girl from Domrémy but expressing ideas both sophisticated and tactically sound, ideas they could latch on to. Joan gave her audience a purpose and the will to carry it out.
“I do not expect everyone of you to believe as I do, that God wills us to shepherd his creation on its journey to perfection. But I do expect you to believe in the existence of good and evil. I expect you to choose the side of good and to fight evil wherever you find it. Evil’s power is destroying the earth, and only the power of good can defeat it.”
A soft thud of displaced air marked the bullet’s path from the gun to her abdomen, a coward’s shot that lacked the finesse of the instantaneous kill from a head or heart shot. She crumpled, her hand clutching the bloody wound that opened up just below her waist. In an instant, Michael was there, followed closely by Catherine and Margaret. She lay on the ground now, gasping for breath as she tried to grab control of the pain.
“Lie still, ma cherie,” Catherine whispered, “we can tend to you.” She reached for the medical kit she carried with her as a para-doctor, licensed to use certain common medications in emergency situations. She pulled out a preloaded syringe. “This will take away the pain and help you relax,” she said.
“No!” Joan said. “I do not want to rest yet. That will come soon enough.” Her words came slowly, forced out through a wall of pain that separated her from the people hovering over her.
“Get those cameras out of here!” Michael snapped, motioning toward several reporters with their micro-cams who had managed to close in on the dying woman.
“Let them stay!” Joan said. “I still have something to say. Let them give my message to the world.”
Margaret looked at Joan, tears already running down her cheek. She recognized the gut wound for the death sentence it was. “She’s right,” Margaret said. “Let her make the next few minutes mean something.”
Michael took Joan’s hand in his. “Are you certain?” he said, his voice cracking.
“I am.”
The cameras zoomed in closer as Jehanne/Joan haltingly but with determination delivered the remainder of her speech. As her life blood seeped slowly away from a wound too massive to repair, she braced herself against the growing agony. She forced herself to remain conscious enough to finish exhorting a now utterly silent crowd to dedicate themselves to their brothers and sisters all over the world and to the preservation of the world.
“It is a worthy way to spend your life,” she said. “It is a cause worth dying for.”
Finally, she fell silent, lost in the final tumble toward death, yet struggling to hold on for as long as she could. Her three friends, constant companions of hers for almost two years, knelt beside her. Michael held her upper body in his arms, raising her up a little to ease her raspy breathing and letting her head rest against his chest. On either side, Margaret and Catherine held her hands and stroked her face with the tenderness of lovers, for all three had fallen in love with her soul.
All three wept silently, their faces wet with tears that would not abate.
Joan’s hand suddenly gripped Catherine’s. She tried to moisten her lips, now nearly bloodless. Catherine reached behind her and felt inside her kit for a wet-swab. She snapped the seal on the swab with one hand, releasing the moisture into the small sponge set on the end of a four-inch stick. She swabbed the inside of Joan’s mouth and coated her lips. Joan pulled Catherine close until the blonde woman’s ear was nearly touching Joan’s mouth. A few seconds later, Catherine pulled away from Joan and kissed her forehead.
“It will be as you wish. I swear it,” she said.
Joan’s face lit up with a beatific smile then, and her eyes focused on something just beyond her friends. “Jesu!” she breathed, and surrendered her will and her soul to the inescapable sweetness of the world beyond. This time, she thought, she felt the touch of feathery wings wrap themselves around her soul.
One viewing screens all around the world, billions of people saw the martyrdom of Jehanne Dark. Watching with both fascination and horror, more than one person exclaimed, “We have murdered a saint!”
8
Joan had a state funeral, though she was buried in a simple wooden box according to the wishes she had expressed at one time to Michael. Her death served as the final catalyst, sparking her movement to unprecedented activity. Leaders stepped forward to take her place; having seen her death in great detail, they had become fearless.
When it seemed that they could take some time away from Joan’s campaign, Catherine asked Michael to activate Hawking’s Arrow again.
“Are you planning on going somewhere?” he asked, a hint of a smile showing on his face, the first one since Joan’s death.
“Yes,” Catherine said. “You and Margaret are welcome to come along.” Since knowing Joan, the formal hierarchy among the trio had broken down. They had been coworkers, military researchers attached to the Hawking machine, as well as its most experienced users. But Joan had made them friends and comrades.
“Does this have something to do with your promise to her?” Margaret asked.
Catherine nodded. She looked hesitantly at both Michael and Margaret, then took a deep breath, speaking rapidly as she exhaled. “I’ve been hearing her voice,” she said, and waited for Michael or Margaret to rationalize the experience away. Instead, both of them looked relieved.
“So have I,” said Michael.
“I have, too,” echoed Margaret.
“Then you must know where we’re going and what we’re going to do,” Catherine said.
“She thinks—thought—he could be salvaged if we snatched him before he quit the military and retired to his estates. We owe it to her to try,” Margaret said.
“I agree,” Michael added. “We point the arrow at 1435,” he said as they made their way toward the room that housed the machine.
“Gilles de Rais,” Catherine announced, “we come to you in the name of Joan the Maid.”
YESHUA’S CHOICE
Nancy Varian Berberick
Old man, old man. Every joint and sinew groaned the words. Old man.
On the day of his leaving, Yeshua grunted when he bent to ladle water from the wide-mouthed clay jug; he couldn’t help it, old men get thick in the belly, no matter if they eat modestly and they work all day. He was not very thick, but the leanness of youth had long ago become hidden. He lifted the ladle high, upending it, sighing with pleasure as the cool water poured over his head. It ran in rivulets through his silver hair, down his neck. It chased through the ugly channels of tortured flesh made by the old scars of an ancient scourging.
Again he bent, again he poured, and now he took up an old linen cloth and washed sweat and sawdust from his shoulders, arms, his thick chest and that old man’s paunch.
Old Man Yeshua.
On this day of his leaving, he was older than most in his little village, younger than most of his storied line. Those people of David’s house, men and women of legend who were said to have lived miraculous numbers of years.
By Adonai’s grace, he thought, for they had been given miraculous deeds to perform.
As, once, I had been given.
Yeshua barely flinched when he thought that. His was the loss of the abandoned; the loss of the orphaned.
Only last night, a hot night when people of Natzeret did as they always did and went up to the rooftops to spread their bedding and sleep, one of Yeshua’s neighbors heard a cry go up: Eli! Eli! Sh’vak toni?
My God, why have you abandoned me?
A child, suddenly wakened, called to her mother. Lying in silence, his own words still echoing in his mind, Yeshua heard the woman tell the little one that their carpenter dreamed and his dreams weren’t for others to talk about.
“Now come here and sleep beside me, child . . .”
They were protective of Yeshua in that little town. He had grown up there, had traveled far and then come home to stay. For a time he had been their rabbi. He was now their carpenter, and a good man for all the strangeness of him.
This nightmare, as others before it, had been spurred by the terrible news being carried up and down the roads like the cawing of ravens.
But this dream had not left in the morning. It had lingered, and through the day he’d heard the words Yerushalayim, Yerushalayim. Yerushalayim!
He felt the words as a drumbeat, he recalled all he’d heard about the fate of Holy City, news brought by those who’d fled her gates. Murderers drove them out, and war drove them out; from both sides the people had reason to dread, and the latest word was that Titus the Roman had left the city in ruins, taking four thousand prisoners with him to be sold as slaves in Rome. Like wolves, factions of Jewish zealots had torn the city apart between them like beasts fighting over a corpse. When not one of those factions could triumph over another, the man Eleazar, descendant of a long line of rebels, took his folk by the hundreds out of the city to go and sit upon the rock that had once been the palace and fastness of Herod the Great—the place known now only as Masada, the Fortress.
“These are days,” said the priests, “like the days of Babylon. These are the dark days before the storm.”
It had been said that for a year a star shaped like a sword had hung over Yerushalayim. Few, it seemed, had seen that as an evil omen, most had thought it a sign of Adonai’s protecting hand.
Only days after the blade star vanished, Titus and his legions had fallen upon the city.
As in the days of Babylon, now the Holy City, the great Temple, was a place where men were as butchers and dogs fed in the streets, the courtyards, in the gardens like wolves.
Some of Yeshua’s neighbors, the ones who had heard the tale from their own fathers, recalled that thirty or more years ago their own carpenter had prophesied this terror.
But had it been prophecy, or had their carpenter cursed the city?
Some wondered, Yeshua saw it in their eyes now.
He wondered, too. In his dream last night he’d heard the sound of his own voice as it had been on a day long ago atop the Mount of Olives. He’d stood looking down at the city, the place where he was to die—and did not die—and said to men who had been his friends that the time was near when not one stone of the great Temple would stand upon another.
