Visions

Chapter 7 of Signature

Signature

Chapter Seven

Visions

Mack swept his arm at the hilltop phantom, stepping through bodies as he turned back.

“The anomaly came up pretty much by accident. I was monitoring what looked like a night rally, watching Sam scream himself hoarse on his big old sound stage. For all his frailty and advanced age, the man was an absolutely spellbinding orator. Fully swallowed up in bleating humanity, and still able to make himself heard. Phenomenal.

“That object appeared just as he was peaking. I say ‘object’ because I don’t know what else to call it--it doesn’t read normally. Every time Solomon puts out a seek, it pops up somewhere else around the planet, without any conformity to time or space; at least not as I understand them. We’ve followed it down through the ages, and seen awesome things: vintage warfare, natural calamities, odd movements of man and machine. More than that. To the bowels of prehistory, to the Cretaceous Age. Deeper. We’ve been all the way to the solar system’s formation, just piggy-backing along with this thing. Solo. Resume.”

The apparition seemed to flicker in the searchlights’ beams. A second later it was gone. After a goose-pimpling minute of dead silence, the entire human panorama rose as though from sleep, threw out their million arms, and shrieked with boundless elation.

“Solo. Stop.” The sound cut off cleanly.

“Soon after, the audio again becomes decipherable. The crowd repeatedly chants the name ‘Jesus’, as though soliciting the object’s return.”

“A contemporary of theirs?” Amantu wondered. “A celebrity, perhaps?”

“No, ‘Jesus’ was one of those ‘sacrosanct’ names, forbidden from casual usage during Butcher’s era and, thanks to the Messiah Commission, buried since. I’ve had Solomon cross-reference it extensively, and all reads inevitably lead back to that humble little spot of sheep and shepherds. Solo. World Map Overlay. But lose the grid.”

The floor disappeared; a room-sized scoop of foundation had just been replaced by apparent space. The skin now appeared backlit and papered blue, with the browns and greens of continents plainly delineated.

“The inverse image we’re observing represents the world of two and a half centuries ago. Solo. Show us ‘Galilee’.” The great blue area was sucked aside, leaving a mostly-brown skin. “Jesus lived and died on this patch. He was born of a poor carpenter, and grew up to be one himself. It was a very harsh world back then, more like the Outs than our present, civilized society. Solo. Jordan, Real Time.”

A dry plain surrounded by rolling hills under a hanging sun. Half a mile into the phantom horizon, a line of colorfully-robed men led a lazy line of dromedaries across an aching brown desert.

“As an adult, Jesus preached a kind of democratic doctrine that didn’t sit at all well with authorities. Branded a fomenter, he was arrested, tried, and executed like a common thief just outside the city walls of a place called Jerusalem. Solo. The Crucifixion of Jesus. Zoom Out, Small Wide.”

Four unseen figures on a ragged hillside, the Group cringed while a man wearing only a loincloth and a crown of thorns was nailed to a standing wood cross. His knot of kneeling observers cried out at each new agony, as though taking the blows themselves. Two other men, one on either side, already hung dead or dying. It was a wretched little scene, terribly painful to witness. Only the fact of its apparentness made it at all bearable.

“Solo. The Death of Jesus.” Solomon reconfigured the angle of sun, reducing the highlights and extending the shadows. The man on the center cross raised his eyes one last time, spoke a few words and dropped his head. As his body sagged the house lights came back up.

“That executed fellow,” Amantu muttered. “Uncannily similar to the figure we observed only minutes ago. Your anomaly--the ghostly thing outside the caves.”

Mack’s eyes gleamed. “Solo. Vision One. Still Motion. Zoom in tight.”

Night returned under the dome. Thousands upon thousands of prostrate followers were revealed, quadrant by quadrant, as Solomon ordered dense fields of data. The men now stood in that cleared space not two feet from the apparition; a very blurry, life-sized figure of a slumping man with arms raised to the sides and closed knees bent to his right. It was without doubt the crucified prisoner, straight down to the hints of a loincloth and brambly tiara, yet without any sign of a supporting cross. The same hard angle to the fallen chin, the same points of light marking forehead, cheekbone, and nose. There the sternum and rib cage, there and there the kneecaps and outer thighs. Mack and Amantu circled the specter from opposing poles, pondering details. The professor stopped and looked over a misty raised shoulder, directly into Mack’s eyes.

“I am at a loss.”

“Solo. Analyze.” Mack bowed his head and looked back up. “What we’re studying is unrelated to wavecluster images. This object represents a displacement of waveprints. There’s nothing there.”

“Yet now,” Amantu observed coolly, “our nothing has a name. Solo. Cross-reference this projection with the person ‘Jesus of Galilee’.”

The skin became a fuzzy curved screen. Innumerable files were partitioned into a hemispherical grid, with each cell instantaneously producing its own sub-grid, and so on.

“Solo,” said Mack. “Stop.” The process froze startlingly, leaving the skin with a radiant byte-on-white wallpaper. This hard shift produced a strange subliminal effect akin to surfacing from a petit mal, complete with the necessary few seconds’ mental recovery.

“Now there’s some history for you, Professor. All these files pertain not only to the personage of Jesus, but to every contiguous datum, including affected persons, parties, and whole populations.”

Amantu pulled himself out of it, his voice thick, his tongue a half-step behind his mind. “Then you have done this before.”

“Over and over. Extensively. Habitually.”

The room was absolutely silent. “Why, sir, am I here?”

“To observe. As a scholar and as a friend. Solo. Resume. Random Thumbnail, Fast Motion.” Maybe a minute’s worth of A/V graphics blew stuttering through the room, jumping centuries, climes, and participants. Women knelt, armies clashed, preachers raved. A dozen cities burned on the skin before Amantu, his brain reeling, barked,

“Solo! Stop!” The Group were in a stone hall somewhere, pondering a number of robed men poised like mannequins. Crude furniture, cheap utensils, simple decor; these were aesthetes. One man was frozen in the act of washing the feet of another. Activity had been captured between steps, so that a ghostly transparency pervaded all. The stilted shafts of sun appeared more real than the projected solids.

Abel’s eyes burned in the half-light. “Why show us all this carrier rot, Ti? As I see it, you’re defeating your whole point here. These images would indicate an entire race of lunatics--spouting, flailing, and coalescing from Day One. Okay? Neither you nor your contraption will ever convince me that Homo sapiens was mentally ill until four hundred years ago, when some mindless logic program set us straight.”

“I’m not implying illness, AJ. We come from healthy stock.”

“You think insanity’s healthy?”

“These are the projections of men perfectly sane.”

Abel and Izzy exchanged glances. The little psychoanalyst’s jaw was hanging. Now his eyes relit and a slow smirk crept up his face. “Quite.”

Mack tried Amantu directly. “We all know Solomon has the answers. Never in the history of thinking man has there been a real opportunity to put to rest the biggest question of all. As our resident historian, I think you should have the honor. What do you say, Professor? Would you like to see what all the brouhaha was about? Go ahead and judge for yourself. Just ask.”

Amantu’s head rolled up. There was something peculiarly comforting about the moment. His old programming was dissolving; he could feel it. For the first time in his life he understood the warmth of friendship; not as an annoying entertainment of the masses, but as a shared real-time experience, profound, whimsical, pregnant with memory-becoming. It struck him as a funny and very human thing to do; to accept the implied silly dare and step up to the plate. When he went into his old erect-with-hands-clasped stance this time, he did so with a boyish twinkle in his eyes. Amantu looked into his friends’ expectant faces and said,

“All right then, colleagues o’mine. I will bite.” He grinned sarcastically.

“Solo. Show me ‘God’.”

And the monks dissolved, and the skin went white. The moment froze. The world blew in.

And there was light.