How I Wrote the New Testament, Ushered In the Renaissance, And Birdied The 17Th Hole
The Renaissance, And Birdied The 17Th Holeat Pebble Beach
I was browsing the Aboriginal SF table in the dealer’s room of a Worldcon, and the editor, who was also hawking the magazine, asked me for a story. And off the top of my head I suggested the following title. He bought it on the spot, told me he wouldn’t allow a title change, and then I had to go home and think of a story that fit it. And, crazily enough, it won France’s Prix Ozone a few years later.
So how was I to know that after all the false Messiahs the Romans nailed up, he would turn out to be the real one?
I mean, it’s not every day that the Messiah lets himself be nailed to a cross, you know? We all thought he was supposed to come with the sword and throw the Romans out and raze Jerusalem to the ground—and if he couldn’t quite pull that off, I figured the least he could do was take on a couple of the bigger Romans, mano a mano, and whip them in straight falls.
It’s not as if I’m an unbeliever. (How could I be, at this late date?) But you talk about the Annointed One, you figure you’re talking about a guy with a little flash, a little style, a guy whose muscles have muscles, a Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger-type of guy, you know what I mean?
So sure, when I see them walking this skinny little wimp up to Golgotha, I join in the fun. So I drink a little too much wine, and I tell too many jokes (but all of them funny, if I say so myself), and maybe I even hold the vinegar for one of the guards (though I truly don’t remember doing that)—but is that any reason for him to single me out?
Anyway, there we are, the whole crowd from the pub, and he looks directly at me from his cross, and he says, “One of you shall tarry here until I return.”
“You can’t be talking to me!” I answer, giving a big wink to my friends. “I do all my tarrying at the House of Young Maidens over on the next street!”
Everybody else laughs at this, even the Romans, but he just stares reproachfully at me, and a few minutes later he’s telling God to forgive us, as if we’re the ones who broke the rules of the Temple, and then he dies, and that’s that.
Except that from that day forth, I don’t age so much as a minute, and when Hannah, my wife, sticks a knife between my ribs just because I forgot her birthday and didn’t come home for a week and then asked for a little spending money when I walked in the door, I find to my surprise that the second she removes the knife I am instantly healed with not even a scar.
Well, this puts a whole new light on things, because suddenly I realize that this little wimp on the cross really was the Messiah, and that I have been cursed to wander the Earth (though in perfect health) until he returns, which does not figure to be any time soon as the Romans are already talking about throwing us out of Jerusalem and property values are skyrocketing.
Well, at first this seems more like a blessing than a curse, because at least it means I will outlive the yenta I married and maybe get a more understanding wife. But then all my friends start growing old and dying, which they would do anyway but which always seems to happen a little faster in Judea, and Hannah adds a quick eighty pounds to a figure that could never be called svelte in the first place, and suddenly it looks like she’s going to live as long as me, and I decide that maybe this is the very worst kind of curse after all.
Now, at about the time that Hannah celebrates her 90th birthday—thank God we didn’t have cakes and candles back in those days or we might have burnt down the whole city—I start to hear that Jerusalem is being overrun by a veritable plague of Christians. This in itself is enough to make my good Jewish blood boil, but when I find out exactly what a Christian is, I am fit to be tied. Here is this guy who curses me for all eternity or until he returns, whichever comes first (and it’s starting to look like it’s going to be a very near thing), and suddenly—even though nothing he promised has come to pass except for cursing a poor itinerant businessman who never did anyone any harm—everybody I know is worshipping him.
There is no question in my mind that the time has come to leave Judea, and I wait just long enough for Hannah to choke on an unripe fig which someone has thoughtlessly served her while she laid in bed complaining about her nerves, and then I catch the next caravan north and book passage across the Mediterranean Sea to Athens, but as Fate would have it, I arrive about five centuries too late for the Golden Age.
This is naturally an enormous disappointment, but I spend a couple of decades soaking up the sun and dallying with assorted Greek maidens, and when this begins to pall I finally journey to Rome to see what all the excitement is about.
And what is going on there is Christianity, which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, since to the best of my knowledge no one else he ever cursed or blessed is around to give testimony to it, and I have long since decided that being known as the guy who taunted him on the cross would not be in the best interests of my social life and so I have kept my lips sealed on the subject.
But be that as it may, they are continually having these gala festivals—kind of like the Super Bowl, but without the two-week press buildup—in which Christians are thrown to the lions, and they have become overwhelmingly popular with the masses, though they are really more of a pageant than a sporting event, since the Christians almost never win and the local bookmakers won’t even list a morning line on the various events.
I stay in Rome for almost two centuries, mostly because I have become spoiled by indoor plumbing and paved roads, but then I can see the handwriting on the wall and I realize that I am going to outlive the Roman Empire, and it seems like a good idea to get established elsewhere before the Huns overrun the place and I have to learn to speak German.
So I become a wanderer, and I find that I really like to travel, even though we do not have any amenities such as Pullman cars or even Holiday Inns. I see all the various wonders of the ancient world—although it is not so ancient then as it has become—and I journey to China (where I help them invent gunpowder, but leave before anyone considers inventing the fuse), and I do a little tiger-hunting in India, and I even consider climbing Mount Everest (but I finally decide against it since it didn’t have a name back then, and bragging to people that I climbed this big nameless mountain in Nepal will somehow lack a little something in the retelling.)
After I have completed my tour, and founded and outlived a handful of families, and hobnobbed with the rich and powerful, I return to Europe, only to find out that the whole continent is in the midst of the Dark Ages. Not that the daylight isn’t as bright as ever, but when I start speaking to people it is like the entire populace has lost an aggregate of 40 points off its collective I.Q.
Talk about dull! Nobody can read except the monks, and I find to my dismay that they still haven’t invented air-conditioning or even frozen food, and once you finish talking about the king and the weather and what kind of fertilizer you should use on your fields, the conversation just kind of lays there like a dead fish, if you know what I mean.
Still, I realize that I now have my chance for revenge, so I take the vows and join an order of monks and live a totally cloistered life for the next twenty years (except for an occasional Saturday night in town, since I am physically as vigorous and virile as ever), and finally I get my opportunity to translate the Bible, and I start inserting little things, little hints that should show the people what he was really like, like the bit with the Gadarene swine, where he puts devils into the pigs and makes them rush down the hill to the sea. So okay, that’s nothing to write home about today, but you’ve got to remember that back then I was translating this for a bunch of pig farmers, who have a totally different view of this kind of behavior.
Or what about the fig tree? Only a crazy man would curse a fig tree for being barren when it’s out of season, right? But for some reason, everyone who reads it decides it is an example of his power rather than his stupidity, and after awhile I just pack it in and leave the holy order forever.
Besides, it is time to move on, and the realization finally dawns on me that no matter how long I stay in one spot, eventually my feet get itchy and I have to give in to my wanderlust. It is the curse, of course, but while wandering from Greece to Rome during the heyday of the Empire was pleasant enough, I find that wandering from one place to another in the Dark Ages is something else again, since nobody can understand two-syllable words and soap is not exactly a staple commodity.
So after touring all the capitals of Europe and feeling like I am back in ancient Judea, I decide that it is time to put an end to the Dark Ages. I reach this decision when I am in Italy, and I mention it to Michelangelo and Leonardo while we are sitting around drinking wine and playing cards, and they decide that I am right and it is probably time for the Renaissance to start.
Creating the Renaissance is pretty heady stuff, though, and they both go a little haywire. Michelangelo spends the next few years lying on his back getting paint in his face, and Leonardo starts designing organic airplanes. However, once they get their feet wet they do a pretty good job of bringing civilization back to Italy, though my dancing partner Lucretia Borgia is busily poisoning it as quick as Mike and Leo are enlightening it, and just about the time things get really interesting I find my feet getting itchy again, and I spend the next century or so wandering through Africa, where I discover the Wandering Jew Falls and put up a signpost to the effect, but evidently somebody uses it for firewood, because the next I hear of the place it has been renamed the Victoria Falls.
Anyway, I keep wandering around the world, which becomes an increasingly interesting place to wander around once the Industrial Revolution hits, but I can’t help feeling guilty, not because of that moment of frivolity eons ago, but because except for having Leonardo do a portrait of my girlfriend Lisa, I really don’t seem to have any great accomplishments, and eighteen centuries of aimlessness can begin to pall on you.
And then I stop by a little place in England called Saint Andrews, where they have just invented a new game, and I play the very first eighteen holes of golf in the history of the world, and suddenly I find that I have a purpose after all, and that purpose is to get my handicap down to scratch and play every course in the world, which so far comes to a grand total of one but soon will run into the thousands.
So I invest my money, and I buy a summer home in California and a winter home in Florida, and while the world is waiting for the sport to come to them, I build my own putting greens and sand traps, and for those of you who are into historical facts, it is me and no one else who invents the sand wedge, which I do on April 17, 1893. (I invent the slice into the rough three days later, which forces me to invent the two-iron. Over the next decade I also invent the three through nine irons, and I have plans to invent irons all the way up to number twenty-six, but I stop at nine until such time as someone invents the golf cart, since twenty-six irons are very difficult to carry over a five-mile golf course, with or without a complete set of woods and a putter.)
By the 1980s I have played on all six continents, and I am currently awaiting the creation of a domed links on Antarctica. Probably it won’t come to pass for another two hundred years, but if there is one thing I’ve got plenty of, it’s time. And in the meantime, I’ll just keep adding to my list of accomplishments. So far, I’d say my greatest efforts have been putting in that bit about the pigs, and maybe getting Leonardo to stop daydreaming about flying men and get back to work on his easel. And birdying the 17th hole at Pebble Beach has got to rank right up there, too; I mean, how many people can sink a 45-foot uphill putt in a cold drizzle?
So all in all, it’s been a pretty good life. I’m still doomed to wander for all eternity, but there’s nothing in the rulebook that says I can’t wander in my personal jet plane, and Fifi and Fatima keep me company when I’m not on the links, and I’m up for a lifetime membership at Augusta, which is a lot more meaningful in my case than in most others.
In fact, I’m starting to feel that urge again. I’ll probably stop off at the new course they’ve built near Lake Naivasha in Kenya, and then hit the links at Bombay, and then the Jaipur Country Club, and then …
I just hope the Second Coming holds off long enough for me to play a couple of rounds at the Chou En-Lai Memorial Course in Beijing. I hear it’s got a water hole that you’ve got to see to believe.
You know, as curses go, this is one of the better ones.