“Right, let’s fast-forward until… here you go.”
The screen showed a Roman amphitheatre. A family – a mother and a father, a boy and a girl – kneeling in the sand. A lioness, hungry, wary, circled them. The parents prayed. The children hid their faces in the folds of their father’s garment. The lioness made her lunge, and carried away the small girl by the throat.
“Let’s pause there, shall we? There’s lots more of that sort of thing – thousands of these guys getting chomped or speared or burnt. And I know exactly what you’re gonna say. This is the Romans’ doing. Can’t blame the victims, can you? But you see, the thing is, these people – the men, the women, the little ones – they’re only there because of good old Jesus H. Christ. Now, I don’t know about you, but that’s not something I’d like on my conscience. I mean, just how many kids being eaten like that would it take for this whole enterprise you’re planning to start looking, well, counter-productive, eh?
“But let’s move on. Because, you see, it isn’t long before your guys start dishing it out as well as taking it. In fact, they pretty soon begin to dish out a lot more than they take. Dish it out in spades. I’m giving you one case here, to begin with. Check out this lady. Hypatia, they call her.”
The screen showed a serene woman reading from a papyrus scroll.
“This is one clever lady, the most important philosopher of her time. Lives in a town called Alexandria, just when the Christians – that’s what your followers start calling themselves – are taking over as top dog. But she still has a soft spot for the old ways: Zeus, Athena, Apollo, that crowd. So along come a rabble of monks and zealots and fanatics and they do this…”
The image switched to show a mob attacking Hypatia, their faces contorted with rage and hatred. They tore her from her carriage, and as she pleaded for her life they sliced away her flesh with oyster shells, and then, her lips still moving, they burned what was left.
“Tut, and I say again, tut. And all because she liked to offer up a little incense to the wrong gods. But things really heat up from here. Let me zip through this.”
And there were more scenes of horror and persecution and war, each more terrible than the last. Christian armies converted pagans by the sword. Crusaders in clanking armour pillaged, raped and torched their way through the Jerusalem they had come to redeem. The great cities of Muslim Spain were left desolate. Everywhere: blood, fire and the burnt-out death of fire, and the bodies of children, and the cries of carrion birds circling.
“And the Jews, the Jews. You should see what they do to the Jews. Two thousand years of persecution. What kind of legacy is that for a nice Jewish boy like you?”
Jesus bowed his head and mumbled a prayer.
“But this is only the beginning. The really good stuff isn’t done by your guys to the other lot, pagans, unbelievers, whatever. No, the fun really gets going when the Christians start tearing each other apart. You know this as well as I do – real hatred is between brothers.”
More pictures of war followed. Massacres of Catholics by Protestants; of Protestants by Catholics.
The eyes of Jesus burned but he could not look away.
“I reckon we’ve seen enough of that, don’t you? Now there’s just one last thing I want to show you.”
The blank window filled with an image of the night, or so it first appeared. Millions of tiny lights glittered against a blue-black sky. And then the camera began to zoom in. The millions became thousands, and the thousands became hundreds. The dots of light took on a troubling complexity until just a few filled the screen. They were not stars, not these, and Jesus felt his stomach knot in revulsion.
“We’ve got a smell function here, if I can find the right button.” The nail tapping at the remote was now oddly hooked and thick and grimy.
A smell drifted through the desert. The smell of scorching fat and the acrid stink of burning hair.
And now just one figure, wreathed in flames, was visible. The woman’s rags had burnt away, and her skin was blackened and her face was in a place beyond pain. No, not beyond pain, but at the furthest reaches of pain, and the only place beyond it is death.
“Popcorn?”
The man held out a bucket. Jesus knocked it from his hand, scattering the popcorn over the ground, where it turned again to pebbles and grit. For a second, the cheerful, inquisitive, businesslike face of the figure changed, and not even the mirrors fastened to the man’s face could conceal the red fire in his eyes. And then the fire was hidden again.
“Yeah, sure, you got upset,” he said. “Only to be expected. Who’s the woman? You wanna know who she is? Does it matter? Pagan, heretic, witch, who cares? My point is, she’s burning – hell, they’re all burning – because of you. Because of what you teach. Because of what it makes men do. But you can stop it. Just walk away. Give it all the finger. The disciples, the water into wine shtick, the lepers, the woman who washes your feet with her hair, the guy you bring back from the dead, the scourging, the crown of thorns, the death on the tree, the whole lot. Say the word and it’s gone. Quite literally never happens. And when that goes, everything else goes too. No persecutions, no crusades, no burning babes like this one here. We’re all laughing.”
Jesus stared into the desert and saw an unexpected last brilliant flaming of red ochre before the darkness came.
“Let’s get it on paper, shall we? Not that I wouldn’t take your word, but it’s good to have these things on file. No need to read the small print; it’s just the usual stuff for the lawyers – you know what they’re like. Just sign here. In blood. No, only kidding. It’s not like we’re a couple of spindly goths hanging round a graveyard in Sheffield. Ink’s fine. Use this. Just click on the top there and it… you got it. Thaaaaat’s great. OK, OK. Give you a lift back into town? No? Suit yourself.”
And then Satan was gone, leaving Jesus alone on the bleak mountainside with the darkness upon him. And the screen was just the stars in the night sky, and the soft seat was a flat rock.
And Jesus thought about the smile on the face of Satan as he left and the truth came to him at last, and he allowed himself a glimpse of the future as it now stood. He saw what would become of the world. Saw that the evil was now greater. Saw that what had been small points of flame was now one great conflagration.
And then, not knowing whether to go up to the mountain top, where still a little light might be found, or down into the endless black of the valley, he cast himself onto the stony ground.
And Jesus wept.
THE BURNING GLASS
Marcus Sedgwick
In May 1814, following his abdication, the former Emperor of France Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled by the allied governments to the Mediterranean island of Elba.
In the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris there are some extraordinary machines from across the ages of scientific invention. Here hangs Foucault’s famous Pendulum, whose gentle swings disclose the rotation of the earth, and here also sits another of his great inventions: a multiple contraption comprising a large wooden table under which rests an enormous pair of bellows. On top of the table there are various clamps and tubes of brass construction. There is a tuning fork, a series of seven small round mirrors on spindles, and a small lens able to spin freely and at great speed. There is something a bee-keeper would recognize as a smoke generator. With this unlikely assortment of instruments, in 1862 Foucault determined the speed of light to within 0.6 per cent of its currently accepted value. Next to the machine is a larger but at first glance similar-looking apparatus. On the whole it seems a clumsy, unsophisticated ancestor of Foucault’s cunning device, waiting in vain to evolve into something that actually works; but in fact its true function remains a mystery to this day.