Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition by Rich Horton

Author:Rich Horton [Horton, Rich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Anthologies, Science Fiction
ISBN: 0809572508
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2006-01-01T13:00:00+00:00

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JESUS CHRIST, REANIMATOR

Ken MacLeod

The Second Coming was something of a washout, if you remember. It lit up early-warning radar like a Christmas tree, of course, and the Israeli Air Force gave the heavenly host a respectable F-16 fighter escort to the ground, but that was when they were still treating it as a UFO incident. As soon as their sandals touched the dust, Jesus and the handful of bewildered Copts who'd been caught up to meet him in the air looked about for the armies of the Beast and the kings of the earth. The only soldiers they could see were a few terrified guards on a nearby archaeological dig. The armies of the Lord hurled themselves at the IDF and were promptly slaughtered. Their miraculous healings and resurrections created something of a sensation, but after that it was detention and Shin Bet interrogation for the lot of them. The skirmish was caught on video by activists from the International Solidarity Movement, who happened to be driving past the ancient battlefield on their way to Jenin when the trouble started. Jesus was released a couple of months after the Megiddo debacle, but most of the Rapture contingent had Egyptian ID, and the diplomacy was as slow as you'd expect.

Jesus returned to his old stomping ground in the vicinity of Galilee. He hung around a lot with Israeli Arabs, and sometimes crossed to the West Bank. Reports trickled out of a healing here, a near-riot there, an open-air speech somewhere else. At first the IDF and the PA cops gave him a rough time, but there wasn't much they could pin on him. It's been said he avoided politics, but a closer reading of his talks suggests a subtle strategy of working on his listeners’ minds, chipping away at assumptions, and leaving them to work out the political implications for themselves. The theological aspects of his teaching were hard to square with those previously attributed to him. Critics were quick to point out the discrepancies, and to ridicule his failure to fulfill the more apocalyptic aspects of the prophecies.

When I caught up with him, under the grubby off-season awnings of a Tiberias lakefront cafe, Jesus was philosophical about it.

“There's only so much information you can pack into a first-century Palestinian brain,” he explained, one thumb in a volume of Dennett. “Or a twenty-first-century one, come to that.”

I sipped thick sweet coffee and checked the little camera for sound and image. “Aren't you, ah, omniscient?”

He glowered a little. “What part of “truly man” don't you people understand?” (He'd been using the cafe's Internet facilities a lot, I'd gathered. His blog comments section had to be seen to be believed.) “It's not rocket science ... to mention just one discipline I didn't have a clue about. I could add relativity, quantum mechanics, geology, zoology. Geography, even.” He spread his big hands, with their carpenter's calluses and their old scars. “Look, I really expected to return very soon, and that everyone on Earth would see me when I did.

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