Альфред Бестер - Star of Stars [Anthology]

“Tyrell,” she said hesitantly.

He turned. “Nerina. Oh, Nerina!”

His voice was still gentle with that deep power of calm.

She went swiftly into his arms.

“I was praying,” he said, bending his head to rest on her shoulder. “Mons told me ... I was praying. What have I done?”

“You are the Messiah,” she said steadily. “You save the world from evil and the Antichrist. You’ve done that.’

“But the rest! This devil in my mind! This seed that has grown there, hidden from God’s sunlight—what has it grown into? They say I killed!”

After a long, pause she whispered, “Did you?”

“No,” he said, with absolute certainty. “How could I? I, who have lived by love—more than two thousand years—I could not harm a living thing.”

“I knew that,” she said. “You are the White Christ.”

“The White Christ,” he said softly. “I wanted no such name. I am only a man, Nerina. I was never more than that. But . . . something saved me, something kept me alive through the Hour of the Antichrist. It was God. It was His hand. God—help me now—“

She held him tightly and looked past him through the window, bright sky, green meadow, tall mountains with the clouds rimming their peaks. God was here, as he was out beyond the blue, on all the worlds and in the gulfs between them, and God meant peace and love.

“He will help you,” she said steadily. “He walked with you two thousand years ago. He hasn’t gone away.”

“Yes,” Tyrell whispered. “Mons must be wrong. The way it was. . . I remember. Men like beasts. The sky was burning fire. There was blood. . . there was blood. More than a hundred years of blood that ran from the beast-men as they fought.”

She felt the sudden stiffness in him, a trembling rigor, a new sharp straining.

He lifted his head and looked into her eyes.

She thought of ice and fire, blue ice, blue fire.

“The big wars,” he said, his voice stiff, rusty.

Then he put his hand over his eyes.

“Christ!” The word burst from his tight throat. “God, God—”

“Tyrell!” She screamed his name.

“Back!” he croaked, and she stumbled away, but he was not talking to her. “Back, devil!” He clawed at his head, grinding it between his palms, bowing till he was half crouched before her.

“Tyrell!’ she cried. “Messiah! You are the White Christ—”

The bowed body snapped erect. She looked at the new face and felt an abysmal horror and loathing.

Tyrell stood looking at her. Then, appallingly, he gave her a strutting, derisive bow.

She felt the edge of the table behind her. She groped back and touched the heavy thickness of dried blood on the knifeblade. It was part of the nightmare. She moved her hand to the haft, knowing she could die by steel, letting her thought move ahead of the glittering steel’s point into her breast.

The voice she heard was touched with laughter.

“Is it sharp?” he asked. “Is it still sharp, my love? Or did I dull it on the priest? Will you use it on me? Will you try? Other women have tried!” Thick laughter choked in his throat.

“Messiah,” she whispered.

“Messiah!” he mocked. “A White Christ! Prince of Peace! Bringing the word of love, walking unharmed through the bloodiest wars that ever wrecked a world oh yes, a legend, my love, twenty centuries old and more. And a lie. They’ve forgotten! They’ve all forgotten what it was really like then!”

All she could do was shake her head in helpless denial.

“Oh yes,” he said. “You weren’t alive then. No one was. Except me, Tyrell. Butchery! I survived. But not by preaching peace. Do you know what happened to the men who preached love? They, died—but I didn’t die. I survived, not by preaching.”

He pranced, laughing.

“Tyrell the Butcher,” he cried. “I was the bloodiest of them all. All they could understand was fear. And they weren’t easily frightened then—not the men like beasts. But they were afraid of me.”

He lifted his clawed hands, his muscles straining in an ecstasy of ghastly memory.

“The Red Christ,” he said. “They might have called me that. But they didn’t. Not after I’d proved what I had to prove. They had a name for me then. They knew my name. And now—” He grinned at her. “Now that the worlds are at peace, now I’m worshiped as the Messiah. What can Tyrell the Butcher do today?”

His laughter came slow, horrible and complacent.

He took three steps and swept his arms around her. Her flesh shrank from the grip of that evil.

And then, suddenly, strangely, she felt the evil leave him. The hard arms shuddered, drew away, and then tightened again, with frantic tenderness, while he bent his head and she felt the sudden hotness of tears.

He could not speak for a while. Cold as stone, she held him. I

Somehow she was sitting on a couch and he was kneeling before her, his face buried in her lap.

She could not make out many of his choking words.

“Remember . . . I remember. . . the old memories .

I can’t stand it, I can’t look back, or ahead ... they— they had a name for me. I remember now. .. .“

She laid one hand on his head. His hair was cold and damp.

“They called me Antichrist!”

He lifted his face and looked at her.

“Help me!” he cried in anguish. “Help me, help me!” Then his head bowed again and he pressed his fists against his temples, whispering wordlessly.

She remembered what was in her right hand, and she lifted the knife and drove it down as hard as she could, to give him the help he needed.

She stood at the window, her back to the room and the dead immortal.

She waited for the priest Mona to return. He would know what to do next. Probably the secret would have to be kept, somehow.

They would not harm her, she knew that. The rever­ence that had surrounded Tyrell enfolded her too. She would live on, the only immortal now, born in a time of peace, living forever and alone in the worlds of peace. Some day, some time, another immortal might be born, but she did not want to think of that now. She could think only of Tyrell and her loneliness.

She looked through the window at the bright blue and green, the pure day of God, washed clean now of the last red stain of man’s bloody past. She knew that Tyrell would be glad if he could see this cleanness, this purity that could go on forever.

She would see it go on. She was part of it, as Tyrell had not been. And even in the loneliness she already felt, there was a feeling of compensation, somehow. She was dedicated to the centuries of man that were to come.

She reached beyond her sorrow and love. From far away she could hear the solemn chanting of the priests. It was part of the righteousness that had come to the worlds now, at last, after the long and bloody path to the new Golgotha. But it was the last Golgotha, and she would go on now as she must, dedicated and sure.

Immortal.

She lifted her head and looked steadily at the blue. She would look forward into the future. The past was for­gotten. And the past, to her, meant no bloody heritage, no deep corruption that would work unseen in the black hell of the mind’s abyss until the monstrous seed reached up to destroy God’s peace. And love.

Quite suddenly, she remembered that she had com­mitted murder. Her arm thrilled again with the violence of the blow; her hand tingled with the splash of shed blood.

Very quickly she closed her thoughts against the mem­ory. She looked up at the sky, holding hard against the closed gateway of her mind as though the assault battered already against the fragile bars.