'Tom, aren't the workmen at great risk of being caught in an Arab air strike to destroy what has already been built?' the anchorman asked.
'Actually, no, John. Remember that even without the Mosque of Oman, this mount is the third holiest location in Islam. For the present, it's considered highly unlikely that the Arabs will do anything that might damage this site. They will not bomb the construction site, but many have vowed that if they are successful in taking Jerusalem, they will tear down the Temple with their bare hands.'
'Thanks, Tom,' said the anchor as the scene switched back to the studio. 'Here in New York, the United Nations Security Council will meet this afternoon in emergency session to consider what action to take in response to this outbreak of hostilities. British Ambassador to the U.N., Jon Hansen, has been outspoken in his response to the attack. Hansen, who recently led a U.N. delegation to the Middle East, called on the United Nations to respond with strict economic sanctions, and suggested that if the fighting continues, he may seek deployment of the U.N.'s recently commissioned naval forces to blockade the combatants' ports.
'But with most of the world still grieving for those who died in the Disaster and awaiting the official report on its cause from the World Health Organization, there is a sense that while the words and posturing may be the same as in any other war, realities are actually very much changed. Most of the world has seen all the death that it can stomach for a while.'
Decker turned down the volume with the remote, 'Well, Christopher, it seems our trip to New York allowed you to get a bird's-eye view of history in the making.'
Christopher looked upset. 'Holy war,' he said quoting one of the reporters. 'Once again, man uses religious differences to justify his personal desires. Religion should lift men up, not be used as an excuse to kill and destroy.'
Decker was unprepared for such a thoughtful response from his young ward. It took him a moment to shift gears and meet the boy on level ground – ground much higher than his comparatively petty statement about 'a bird's eye view of history.' He waited to hear what else Christopher might say, but Christopher seemed satisfied to keep his thoughts to himself and go back to his breakfast. Decker decided to probe. He didn't know what he expected, but here, sitting at his breakfast table was the clone of Jesus of Nazareth – a fact which seemed strangely easy to forget – and he was talking about religion. Decker wanted to keep him on the subject a while longer.
Decker had already determined never to reveal to Christopher the secret of his origin. But like most people, Decker thought about things like the meaning of the life, whether or not there is life after death, and if so, what it's like. He really wanted to hear what Christopher had to say on such subjects. As he was about to speak, Decker hesitated. Christopher was, after all, only fourteen years old. How much insight could he really have into such things? It wasn't as though Decker would actually be talking to Jesus; Professor Goodman had made it clear that Christopher had no memory of his past life. Still, Decker had to ask.
'Christopher,' Decker began, 'I don't want to pry into your private thoughts or anything, so if you don't care to talk about it, just say so; but I'm interested in what you were saying about religion.'
Yeah, that was pretty good, he thought; not too pushy; not too probing. He didn't want to say anything he'd have to explain.
What Decker was about to hear would go far beyond anything he possibly could have expected. Christopher didn't answer right away. It seemed as though he was deeply considering something. At first Decker thought it was just an answer to the question, but the look on Christopher's face said that it was something altogether different. Could he have understood the real reason for Decker's question?
'Mr. Hawthorne,' Christopher began, looking as serious as Decker had ever seen him, 'I've been meaning to talk with you about something, but the time just never seemed right.'
Christopher took a long breath while Decker looked at him in anxious surprise. 'I know who I am,' he said. 'I know that I was cloned from cells that Uncle Harry found on the Shroud of Turin.'
'What?! How do you know?' Decker managed to sputter despite his shock.
'Well, I always had a feeling that I was different from other kids. But whenever I mentioned it to Aunt Martha she would just tell me that every kid feels that way from time to time and that I shouldn't let it bother me. Aunt Martha was a wonderful lady: she could always make me feel better.
'But when I got a little older, just before my twelfth birthday, I had a terrifying nightmare of being crucified – literally! It was so real. I didn't tell Aunt Martha or Uncle Harry about it because I thought it was just a nightmare. But over the next few months I had the same dream several more times. Of course, I had heard of crucifixion, but it didn't particularly frighten me, certainly not enough to cause a recurring nightmare. The dreams were always terrifying while they were happening, but when I'd wake up, it all just seemed kind of crazy, and pretty soon I'd go back to sleep.
'Then about a year ago, I was in Uncle Harry's study. He was doing some work at his desk and I was doing my homework in his big over-stuffed chair and I fell asleep. When I did, I had the dream again and apparently I started talking in my sleep. When I woke up Uncle Harry was sitting in front of me with the strangest look on his face. He had recorded most of what I said in my sleep on his old tape recorder. When he played it back for me I didn't understand a single word. It was my voice but the words weren't English.
'Uncle Harry called someone he knew in the language department at the university, played the tape for him over the phone, and asked him if he could identify the language. The man said that I had been talking in ancient Aramaic with some Hebrew thrown in.
'That's when Uncle Harry told me the whole story about the Shroud and everything. According to the man on the phone, a couple of things I said in my sleep were similar to things Jesus was supposed to have said when he was crucified.
'It was scary, but to tell you the truth, it was kinda neat too, especially when Uncle Harry told me his theory that Jesus might have been from another planet. I guess every kid likes to think he's special. He made me promise not to tell Aunt Martha or anyone else because he was afraid of what people might think or do. He was especially worried about the fundamentalist Christians who would think it was a sin to clone Jesus. He said that the only other person who knew about me was you. And, of course, you were in Lebanon.'
'But how can you remember these things?'
'Uncle Harry wondered about that, too, and he had a theory that he thought might explain it. He said that each cell in the body has the blueprints for the whole body – not just things like race and sex and hair color and eye color and whether you'll be tall or short, but everything that every other cell in the body needs to know to function. That's how the single cell of a fertilized egg can reproduce to form something as complex as a human being. The information even tells the cells in a finger which finger they're in and how they're supposed to grow so that finger fits with the other fingers on the hand, and is the same size as the matching finger on the other hand. He said that information is also what makes cloning possible.
'Uncle Harry's theory was that the cells may include even more information than all of that. He said that about 95% of human DNA is called 'junk DNA' by scientists because they still don't know what it's for. He thought maybe the junk DNA is used by cells to record any changes in other cells, so that every cell stores the information from every other cell, including the cells of the brain. He said that might also answer some questions about evolution and something he called the collective unconscious of the species, but he didn't really explain that.' Decker recognized the reference to the theories of Sigmund Freud's protege, Carl Jung.
'Before he and Aunt Martha died, Uncle Harry was experimenting with some white mice to see if a cloned mouse would remember its way through a maze that the original mouse had been trained to go through. I don't think he ever completed his work on that.
'He thought that maybe the reason my memory is only partial is because of the cellular trauma of crucifixion, resurrection, and cloning.'
'Do you remember anything after Jesus's resurrection?' Decker asked.
'No. Uncle Harry said that I wouldn't remember anything about that because I was cloned from a cell left on the Shroud only seconds after the resurrection.'
'Is there anything else besides the crucifixion that you remember about your life as Jesus?'
'Uncle Harry tried to spur my memory by having me read parts of Aunt Martha's Bible. It was interesting, but it didn't help me remember anything. There was one thing in the Bible that seemed really confused, though.'
Decker was intrigued. 'What was that, Christopher? What was confused?'
'Well, the Bible made it seem like Jesus knew he was going to be killed, like it was all planned out, but that's
