The Best of Michael Moorcock Page 10

  “I think I’m bad luck for you.” Really she meant something else which she was too afraid to let into her consciousness. He was weak and selfish. She had stood by him through everything. But possibly he was right to blame her. She had let herself be entranced by his wit, his smiling mouth, his lean, nervous body so graceful in repose, so awkward when he tried to impress. She should have brought him down to earth sooner. She had known it was going wrong, but had believed something must turn up to save them. “Can’t we go away?” she asked him early one afternoon. The room was in semi-darkness. Sun fell on the polished pine of the table between them; a single beam from the crack in the shutters. “What about that mate of yours in Tangier?” She picked unconsciously at the brocade chair left by his ex-wife. She felt she had retreated behind a wall which was her body, painted, shaved, perfumed: a lie of sexuality and compliance. She had lost all desire.

  “And have the enemy seize the flat while we’re there? You’ve got to remember, sergeant-major, that possession is nine-tenths of the law.” He lay in his red Windsor rocker. He wore nothing but army gear, with a big belt round his waist, a sure sign of his insecurity. He drew his reproduction Luger from its holster and checked its action with profound authority. She stared at the reddish hair on his thick wrists, at the flaking spots on his fingers which resembled the early stages of a disease. His large, flat cheekbones seemed inflamed; there were huge bags under his eyes. He was almost forty. He was fighting off mortality as ferociously as he fought off what he called “the mundane world.” She continued in an abstracted way to feel sorry for him. She still thought, occasionally, of Leslie Howard in the trenches. “Then couldn’t we spend a few days on Vince’s houseboat?”

  “Vince has retreated to Shropshire. A non-pukkah wallah,” he said sardonically. He and Vince had often played Indian army officers. “His old lady’s given him murder. Shouldn’t have taken her aboard. Women always let you down in a crunch.” He glanced away.

  She was grateful for the flush of anger which pushed her to her feet and carried her into the kitchen. “You ungrateful bastard. You should have kept your bloody dick in your trousers then, shouldn’t you!” She became afraid, but it was not the old immediate terror of a blow, it was a sort of dull expectation of pain. She was seized with contempt for her own dreadful judgement. She sighed, waiting for him to respond in anger. She turned. He looked miserably at his Luger and reholstered it. He stood up, plucking at his khaki creases, patting at his webbing. He straightened his beret in front of the mirror, clearing his throat. He was pale. “What about organising some tiffin, sergeant-major?”

  “I’ll go out and get the bread.” She took the Scottish pound note from the tin on the mantelpiece.

  “Don’t be long. The enemy could attack at any time.” For a second he looked genuinely frightened. He was spitting a little when he spoke. His hair needed washing. He was normally so fussy about his appearance but he hadn’t bathed properly in days. She had not dared say anything.

  She went up the basement steps. Powys Square was noisy with children playing Cowboys and Indians. They exasperated her. She was twenty-five and felt hundreds of years older than them, than Charlie, than her mum and dad. Perhaps I’m growing up, she thought as she turned into Portobello Road and stopped outside the baker’s. She stared at the loaves, pretending to choose. She looked at the golden bread and inhaled the sweet warmth; she looked at her reflection in the glass. She wore her tailored skirt, silk blouse, stockings, lacy bra and panties. He usually liked her to be feminine, but sometimes preferred her as a tomboy. “It’s the poofter in me.” She wasn’t sure what she should be wearing now. A uniform like his? But it would be a lie. She looked at herself again. It was all a lie. Then she turned away from the baker’s and walked on, past stalls of fruit, past stalls of avocados and Savoys, tomatoes and oranges, to the pawn shop where two weeks ago she had given up her last treasures. She paid individual attention to each electronic watch and every antique ring in the window and saw nothing she wanted. She crossed the road. Finch’s pub was still open. Black men lounged in the street drinking from bottles, engaged in conventional badinage; she hoped nobody would recognise her. She went down Elgin Crescent, past the newsagent where she owed money, into the cherry-and apple-blossom of the residential streets. The blossom rose around her high heels like a sudden tide. Its colour, pink and white, almost blinded her. She breathed heavily. The scent came as if through a filter, no longer consoling. Feeling faint she sat on a low wall outside somebody’s big house, her shopping bag and purse in her left hand, her right hand stroking mechanically at the rough concrete, desperate for sensation. Ordinary feeling was all she wanted. She could not imagine where it had gone. An ordinary life. She saw her own romanticism as a rotting tooth capped with gold. Her jaw ached. She looked upwards through the blossom at the blue sky in which sharply defined white clouds moved very slowly towards the sun, like cut-outs on a stage. She became afraid, wanting to turn back: she must get the bread before the scene ended and the day became grey again. But she needed this peace so badly. She grew self-conscious as a swarthy youth in a cheap black velvet suit went by whistling to himself. With only a little effort she could have made him attractive, but she no longer had the energy. Panic made her heart beat. Charlie could go over the top any minute. He might stack all the furniture near the doors and windows, as he had done once, or decide to rewire his equipment (he was useless at practical jobs) and be throwing a fit, breaking things, blaming her because a fuse had blown. Or he might be out in the street trying to get a reaction from a neighbour, baiting them, insulting them, trying to charm them. Or he might be at the Princess Alexandra, looking for somebody who would trust him with the money for a gram of coke or half-a-g of smack and stay put until closing time when he promised to return: restoring his ego, as he sometimes did, with a con-trick. If so he could be in real trouble. Everyone said he’d been lucky so far. She forgot the bread and hurried back.

  The children were still yelling and squealing as she turned into the square in time to see him walking away round the opposite corner of the building. He was dressed in his combat beret, his flying jacket, his army boots, his sunglasses. He had his toy Luger and his sheath-knife on his belt. She forced herself to control her impulse to run after him. Trembling, she went down the steps of the basement, put her key in his front door, turned it, stepped inside. The whole of the front room was in confusion, as if he had been searching for something. The wicker chair had been turned over. The bamboo table was askew. As she straightened it (for she was automatically neat) she saw a note. He had used a model jeep as a weight. She screwed the note up. She went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. Waiting for the kettle to boil she flattened the paper on the draining board:

  1400 hrs. Duty calls. Instructions from HQ to proceed at once to battle-zone. Will contact at duration of hostilities.

  Trust nobody. Hold the fort.

  —BOLTON, C-in-C, Sector Six.

  Her legs shook as she crossed back to the teapot. Within three or four days he would probably be in a police-station or a mental hospital. He would opt to become a voluntary patient. He had surrendered.

  Her whole body shook now, with relief, with a sense of her own failure. He had won, after all. He could always win. She returned to the front door and slowly secured the bolts at top and bottom. She pushed back the shutters. Carefully she made herself a cup of tea and sat at the table with her chin in her hand staring through the bars of the basement window. The tea grew cold, but she continued to sip at it. She was out of the contest. She awaited her fate.

  Behold the Man (1966)

  “Behold the Man” first appeared in New Worlds No. 166 (Moorcock-edited), in September 1966. The story went on to win the following year’s coveted Nebula Award for Best Novella, and courted a great deal of controversy along the way.

  Moorcock expanded “Behold the Man” to novel-length in 1969, but it is presented here pretty much as it appeared in New Worlds.

  He h
as no material power as the god-emperors had; he has only a following of desert people and fishermen. They tell him he is a god; he believes them. The followers of Alexander said: “He is unconquerable, therefore he is a god.” The followers of this man do not think at all; he was their act of spontaneous creation. Now he leads them, this madman called Jesus of Nazareth.

  And he spoke, saying unto them: Yeah verily I was Karl Glogauer and now I am Jesus the Messiah, the Christ. And it was so.

  1

  The time machine was a sphere full of milky fluid in which the traveller floated, enclosed in a rubber suit, breathing through a mask attached to a hose leading to the wall of the machine. The sphere cracked as it landed and the fluid spilled into the dust and was soaked up. Instinctively, Glogauer curled himself into a ball as the level of the liquid fell and he sank to the yielding plastic of the sphere’s inner lining. The instruments, cryptographic, unconventional, were still and silent. The sphere shifted and rolled as the last of the liquid dripped from the great gash in its side.

  Momentarily, Glogauer’s eyes opened and closed, then his mouth stretched in a kind of yawn and his tongue fluttered and he uttered a groan that turned into an ululation.

  He heard himself. The Voice of Tongues, he thought. The language of the unconscious. But he could not guess what he was saying.

  His body became numb and he shivered. His passage through time had not been easy and even the thick fluid had not wholly protected him, though it had doubtless saved his life. Some ribs were certainly broken. Painfully, he straightened his arms and legs and began to crawl over the slippery plastic towards the crack in the machine. He could see harsh sunlight, a sky like shimmering steel. He pulled himself halfway through the crack, closing his eyes as the full strength of the sunlight struck them. He lost consciousness.

  Christmas term, 1949. He was nine years old, born two years after his father had reached England from Austria.

  The other children were screaming with laughter in the gravel of the playground. The game had begun earnestly enough and somewhat nervously Karl had joined in in the same spirit. Now he was crying.

  “Let me down! Please, Mervyn, stop it!”

  They had tied him with his arms spread-eagled against the wire-netting of the playground fence. It bulged outwards under his weight and one of the posts threatened to come loose. Mervyn Williams, the boy who had proposed the game, began to shake the post so that Karl was swung heavily back and forth on the netting.

  “Stop it!”

  He saw that his cries only encouraged them and he clenched his teeth, becoming silent.

  He slumped, pretending unconsciousness; the school ties they had used as bonds cut into his wrists. He heard the children’s voices drop.

  “Is he all right?” Molly Turner was whispering.

  “He’s only kidding,” Williams replied uncertainly.

  He felt them untying him, their fingers fumbling with the knots. Deliberately, he sagged, then fell to his knees, grazing them on the gravel, and dropped face down to the ground.

  Distantly, for he was half-convinced by his own deception, he heard their worried voices.

  Williams shook him. “Wake up, Karl. Stop mucking about.”

  He stayed where he was, losing his sense of time until he heard Mr. Matson’s voice over the general babble.

  “What on Earth were you doing, Williams?”

  “It was a play, sir, about Jesus. Karl was being Jesus. We tied him to the fence. It was his idea, sir. It was only a game, sir.”

  Karl’s body was stiff, but he managed to stay still, breathing shallowly.

  “He’s not a strong boy like you, Williams. You should have known better.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I’m really sorry.” Williams sounded as if he were crying.

  Karl felt himself lifted; felt the triumph . . .

  He was being carried along. His head and side were so painful that he felt sick. He had had no chance to discover where exactly the time machine had brought him, but, turning his head now, he could see by the way the man on his right was dressed that he was at least in the Middle East.

  He had meant to land in the year 29 A.D. in the wilderness beyond Jerusalem, near Bethlehem. Were they taking him to Jerusalem now?

  He was on a stretcher that was apparently made of animal skins; this indicated that he was probably in the past, at any rate. Two men were carrying the stretcher on their shoulders. Others walked on both sides. There was a smell of sweat and animal fat and a musty smell he could not identify. They were walking towards a line of hills in the distance.

  He winced as the stretcher lurched and the pain in his side increased. For the second time he passed out.

  He woke up briefly, hearing voices. They were speaking what was evidently some form of Aramaic. It was night, perhaps, for it seemed very dark. They were no longer moving. There was straw beneath him. He was relieved. He slept.

  In those days came John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness of Judaea, And saying, Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. And the same John had his raiment of camel’s hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey. Then went out to him Jerusalem, and all Judaea, and all the region round about Jordan, And were baptised of him in Jordan, confessing their sins.

  (Matthew 3: 1–6)

  They were washing him. He felt the cold water running over his naked body. They had managed to strip off his protective suit. There were now thick layers of cloth against his ribs on the right, and bands of leather bound them to him.

  He felt very weak now, and hot, but there was less pain.

  He was in a building—or perhaps a cave; it was too gloomy to tell—lying on a heap of straw that was saturated by the water. Above him, two men continued to sluice water down on him from their earthenware pots. They were stern-faced, heavily bearded men, in cotton robes.

  He wondered if he could form a sentence they might understand. His knowledge of written Aramaic was good, but he was not sure of certain pronunciations.

  He cleared his throat. “Where—be—this—place?”

  They frowned, shaking their heads and lowering their water jars.

  “I—seek— a—Nazarene—Jesus . . .”

  “Nazarene. Jesus.” One of the men repeated the words, but they did not seem to mean anything to him. He shrugged.

  The other, however, only repeated the word Nazarene, speaking it slowly as if it had some special significance for him. He muttered a few words to the other man and went towards the entrance of the room.

  Karl Glogauer continued to try to say something the remaining man would understand.

  “What—year—doth—the Roman Emperor—sit—in Rome?”

  It was a confusing question to ask, he realised. He knew Christ had been crucified in the fifteenth year of Tiberius’s reign, and that was why he had asked the question. He tried to phrase it better.

  “How many—year—doth Tiberius rule?”

  “Tiberius?” The man frowned.

  Glogauer’s ear was adjusting to the accent now and he tried to simulate it better. “Tiberius. The emperor of the Romans. How many years has he ruled?”

  “How many?” The man shook his head. “I know not.”

  At least Glogauer had managed to make himself understood.

  “Where is this place?” he asked.

  “It is the wilderness beyond Machaerus,” the man replied. “Know you not that?”

  Machaerus lay to the south-east of Jerusalem, on the other side of the Dead Sea. There was no doubt that he was in the past and that the period was sometime in the reign of Tiberius, for the man had recognised the name easily enough.

  His companion was now returning, bringing with him a huge fellow with heavily muscled hairy arms and a great barrel chest. He carried a big staff in one hand. He was dressed i
n animal skins and was well over six feet tall. His black, curly hair was long and he had a black, bushy beard that covered the upper half of his chest. He moved like an animal and his large, piercing brown eyes looked reflectively at Glogauer.

  When he spoke, it was in a deep voice, but too rapidly for Glogauer to follow. It was Glogauer’s turn to shake his head.

  The big man squatted down beside him. “Who art thou?”

  Glogauer paused. He had not planned to be found in this way. He had intended to disguise himself as a traveller from Syria, hoping that the local accents would be different enough to explain his own unfamiliarity with the language. He decided that it was best to stick to this story and hope for the best.

  “I am from the north,” he said.

  “Not from Egypt?” the big man asked. It was as if he had expected Glogauer to be from there. Glogauer decided that if this was what the big man thought, he might just as well agree to it.

  “I came out of Egypt two years since,” he said.

  The big man nodded, apparently satisfied. “So you are a magus from Egypt. That is what we thought. And your name is Jesus, and you are the Nazarene.”

  “I seek Jesus, the Nazarene,” Glogauer said.

  “Then what is your name?” The man seemed disappointed.

  Glogauer could not give his own name. It would sound too strange to them. On impulse, he gave his father’s first name. “Emmanuel,” he said.