Larry King took a deep breath.

  Gore Vidal fidgeted. “I was not a good science student,” he confessed.

  “Another caller!” King cried. “Go ahead, you’re on!”

  “Do animals have souls?” a woman asked, then burst into tears.

  “What is it, dear?” Jesus asked.

  “My cat Dino died a few days ago, and my minister . . . well, I asked him where my cat was now, and my minister said now here! Because animals don’t have souls. He said that about Dino, for Christ’s sake!”

  Jesus said, “Animals have as much soul as all living things, because they’re part of the same evolutionary programs we made. It doesn’t matter whether it’s pigeons or people. They achieve their share of soul, however small.”

  Gore Vidal looked at him as if to say that this wasn’t much of an answer, because it still left the soul undefined, but it seemed to console the woman, who heard what she wanted to hear and cried out, “I knew it! Thank you so much,” and hung up. Jesus looked at Gore Vidal, as if he knew what the man of wit was thinking, and said, “You do have to earn a soul, my dear man. It must be built up in the complexities of learning and response to life, along with a good memory. A soul must be deserved.”

  “Are you now prying?” Vidal asked.

  “No, your objection was plain on your face.”

  “Let me ask you something,” King said. “From what you’ve said about these levels, or scales—then there may be someone . . . above you?”

  “Of course,” Jesus said. “But they haven’t visited us.”

  “No, no,” King said, “that’s not what I meant. I mean is there someone above it all? I mean a God, a real one above all the levels of infinity?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Jesus said. “That’s not even a question.”

  “It certainly is,” Larry King insisted, smoothing back his hair.

  Gore Vidal leaned forward and said, “Larry, keep in mind that by the meaning of the word infinity it goes on forever, up and down from us. There can’t be an overall God, just the infinity. An overall God would limit it, and then would himself have to be an additional infinity.”

  “Oh,” King said, then sat back looking confused. “No,” he said after a moment, “there can’t be an infinity. And how could you know if there was one?” He laughed. “Count it? Measure it?”

  “That’s a puzzle,” Jesus said. “If we could travel indefinitely in scale, up and down through the multiverses, we might still never know whether they went on forever, since we might reach the last one in the next jump. After an eternity of travel, we would still not be certain.”

  “There,” Larry King said to Gore Vidal, “I knew it!”

  “However,” Jesus said, “the principle that you call induction would suggest, after a while, that one is facing an infinity. Besides, an infinite superspace is necessary to explain universes, to avoid the problem of origin, which then becomes inexplicable in finite systems. Local origins are acceptable, but there must be an inconceivable infinite vastness to support local origins. All reality is local.”

  Gore Vidal smiled. “Either God always existed and is the ground of being, or the universe always existed and needs no explanation, in the same way that we would not ask where God came from. Choose one. Or are they both one and the same?”

  Jesus looked at him. “I wish you people were as bright when it comes to your violent history and treatment of one another.”

  “So is there life after death?” Larry King asked.

  “Mostly no,” Jesus said. “You’ll have to gain the glory of greater life spans on your own.”

  “Will you help us?” Gore Vidal asked, looking at Jesus with eyes that knew their mortality.

  “I tried to give you life once,” Jesus said, “but you misunderstood and turned it into all kinds of mystical jargon.”

  “Jargon?” Larry King asked.

  “Words like divine love, grace, providence became meaningless as they were enlisted to serve your thieving power politics.”

  King sat back, looking appalled.

  Jesus continued, “According to your Bible, my Dad supposedly said to me, in so many words if not exactly, ‘I’ll forgive them their sins, now and forever, if you’re willing to die for this humanity on the cross. Just speaking up for them won’t be enough. I’ll know you mean it when you actually suffer and die for them. Of course, later on we’ll get you up again, but you will have experienced the human pain.’ And so on, as if my coming was a mission of some kind.” Jesus paused, then said, “But of course he said no such thing to me. I was not a sacrifice for your salvation, which still seems a long ways off to me. You got this Lamb of God sacrifice idea from your agricultural festivals, or some such.”

  “If Christ has not been raised,” Gore Vidal intoned, “then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. Corinthians 15:14, I believe.”

  “But you did rise?” King asked, ignoring him.

  “Yes, yes,” Jesus said. “But what happened to me back then was a complete accident, later embellished.”

  “But you did get up from the dead,” King insisted.

  “What else could I do?” Christ said. “Later it seemed that maybe it would set a good example, encourage you to thinking about the shortness of your lives and spur you to getting yourselves a decent life span, for a start, and more later.”

  “Huh?” King asked.

  “I wanted to set a good example,” Christ said.

  “Let me get this straight,” King said, sounding dazed. “The way you talk suggests that you . . . made us somewhere, like on a table somewhere, in some large corner beyond our stars.”

  Jesus nodded. “We made a program, with every initial condition specified, then let it run. It wasn’t the most impressive phenomenal realization of the noumena that I’ve seen. We might have started with a better Word. Still, you did get away from us, and there is much to be said for independence of action. While some of you do think, you’re mostly hopeless.”

  “Oh, come now,” Gore Vidal said. “Here I must side with Larry and say that you don’t expect us to believe that our whole universe of stars and galaxies is some greasy spot on a wall?”

  “One of you actually guessed something like the truth,” Jesus said, “a mystic named . . .”

  But even as Gore Vidal named the noumenously inclined scribbler, Jesus was also at a nearby hospital-hospice telling jokes to the sick and dying. At first a few of the patients laughed, but as the jokes found their mark one man cried out:

  “I’m pissed off! They say you’re Jesus Christ and you’ve been appearing all over the world. So you should be performing miracles instead of crackin’ funnies.” He looked around at the suddenly silent ward. “We’re dyin’ here! You should help us!”

  Jesus raised a hand and said, “A laugh is nothing to sneeze at, my friends. Laughter has curative powers.”

  Slowly, the chain reaction started, and the sick ward chuckled, laughed, then roared explosively.

  Gore Vidal sat back smugly and said, “So you’ve come to pillory us for our sins?”

  Jesus said, “I’ve come to make you laugh, to wake you up.”

  “What’s pillory?” Larry King asked.

  “You’re doing it to yourself,” said Gore Vidal.

  Jesus shouted, “Laughter is divine, a kind of grace born of the unexpected, invasive understanding that steals into us and cannot be denied. A revelation, no matter how trivial the joke.”

  “What does he mean?” King demanded.

  “I tried other ways of helping you think for yourselves,” Jesus continued. “I revealed myself in various ways, to different people. But it did no good. They made the same thing of my good advice.”

  “And what was that?” Larry asked him.

  “Religion,” Jesus said. “The bureaucratization of ethics.”

  “What’s wrong with religion?” King demanded. “You, of all people . . .”

  “It’s only a wish-fulfillment way out of your difficulties, death among them. You’ll have to work harder than just imagining a better place to go to. You’ll have to learn enough to make one for yourselves.”

  “Tell me,” Gore Vidal began, “how is it that you do miracles, given that you’re not what we really mean by God?”

  “I say again, they’re not miracles,” Jesus insisted. “Not in the sense that natural laws are inexplicably suspended. When you visit another scale, you can go around, behind, below, lower scales . . . and well, open doors in the physical laws.”

  Gore Vidal looked skeptical, as if he had just awakened. “All this you’ve made us think you’ve done, it’s some kind of hypnosis, isn’t it? And it’s not really happening.”

  He waited, as if expecting the illusion to dissolve.

  “It’s the best I can do to explain it to your level of understanding,” Jesus said.

  Larry King guffawed. “Well, he certainly put you in your place!” He was still trying to do a tube show, even though human reality itself was in the balance and about to be found wanting.

  “So what will come of your visit, this time?” Gore Vidal asked.

  “We might just have to let you go,” Jesus said, “let you dissolve into nothing.”

  “What!” King cried.

  “So you’ve come to threaten us,” Gore Vidal asked, “rather than make us laugh? We’re supposed to die laughing, I suppose.”

  “Don’t underrate nothingness,” Jesus said. “It’s a great peace. There are vast stretches of it in the up-and-down scales. Still, it’s hard to achieve. Something always persists, some suffering echo of a bad job, impossible to erase, since one would have to achieve what some of your finest today would call a zero-point field.”

  “A what?” King asked.

  “A hard wipe,” Jesus said, clicking his tongue.

  “Erase us?” Larry King cried. “How cruel! Who do you think you are?”

  “Might we not appeal our case to your father?” Gore Vidal asked, “or to some being above your . . . scale, who might be more . . . of a God than you are? Maybe there’s a God above all the scales, or outside them?”

  Jesus sighed, then said, “I don’t think so. Why do you say it’s cruel? Your misery will be at an end. I will prevent a future of suffering damnation for humanity, going on as it has in pain.”

  “But you can’t see all futures,” Gore Vidal said, “so maybe in some we’ll succeed.”

  “You’re right about that,” Jesus said. “There is an infinity of possible futures. To see or try to change them, or prevent them, would put me in search mode forever. You’re quite a bright fellow, but no, I mean this world right here.”

  “And by damnation you mean nothing more than our continued, fragile existence?”

  “Of course,” Jesus said. “As one of your great ones said, ‘First you dream, then you die.’ ”

  “Did it ever occur to you,” King began, “that we might wish to continue as we are?”

  “Everything occurs to me,” Jesus said. “Evil always wishes to perpetuate itself. Have some faith in me when I tell you that you’ll be much happier as nothing.”

  “That’s sheer sophistry,” Gore Vidal said. “We won’t be around to appreciate a state of nothing.”

  “Trust w,” Jesus said. “I’ll know you’re better off. Appreciate the thought now, while you can. You won’t be able to later. You know, bright as you are, for a man, you really should listen more closely. Worlds teeter on a Word.”

  King took a deep breath. “Are you flesh and blood, now?”

  “If you doubt it,” Jesus said as he took a Smith & Wesson revolver from under his armpit and slid it across the table to Larry King, “you can shoot me through the head.” King caught the weapon before it landed in his lap. “Feel free,” Jesus said. “That’s what you’re supposed to do, act freely, even if it looks to me like repetitive motion.”

  King put the black gun gently on the table. “Let me ask you if there’s any point to the universe, I mean from your perspective . . . uh, in the scale . . . of things.” He stared at the gun.

  “Oh, I don’t think there are things really. It’s all nearly nothing to begin with, with no beginning or end, needing no explanation of anything except local origins. The only thing that really seems to matter is being the right size.”

  “Right size?” King asked, his eyes still worrying the gun before him.

  “Morally and physically, we’re bigger than you, since we know how things have gone in the scale below us, at least down to several trillion levels.”

  “And above?” asked Gore Vidal.

  “We do not inquire upward,” Jesus said impatiently.

  “Ah—so you fear something after all, or someone?”

  “No, we just don’t care to know more of what’s there. What good would it do us?”

  “But you do know?” Gore Vidal said.

  “Hierarchies,” Jesus answered, “—endless, petrified hierarchies from endless duration. I prefer the humilities of below.”

  “And you ignore the true God who rules above it all!” Larry King added belligerently.

  “No,” Jesus said. “An eternal being would be an absurd mystery to itself. I am that I am. An all-powerful, eternal, and even all-knowing being would still be unable to answer the question, why am I like this? Such a being would be an enigma to itself.”

  “But that doesn’t rule it out, does it?” King asked, delighted by his own cleverness.

  Gore Vidal smiled and said, “Well, I suppose that would all depend on what the meaning of the word is . . . is, wouldn’t it?”

  “We already have eternal existence,” Jesus said. “It’s the unique, infinite superspace—the mysterium tremendum. You’ve heard the story—the roof of the world . . . is supported by seven pillars, and the seven pillars are set on the shoulders of a genie whose strength is beyond thought. And the genie stands on an eagle, and the eagle on a bull, and the bull on a fish, and the fish swims in the sea of eternity!”

  “Mysterium tremendum!” King exclaimed ecstatically.

  “Latin,” Vidal added, “for a right smart piece of time, as Lionel Barrymore once said about eternity.”

  Jesus said, “The most important part of that story is the infinite sea, in which the fish swims. Without that infinity, nothing would be possible.”

  “I see,” Gore Vidal said. “The buck stops there, since the infinity simply is, and needs no further explanation. It always was.”

  Jesus said, “That is what the word is truly means.”

  “I think I see what you mean,” Larry King added.

  “Wait a minute,” Gore Vidal said. “I know that story. It’s from The Thief of Bagdad, a 1940 movie!”

  “Yes,” Jesus replied. “I’ve seen quite a few. They’re so much better than the shapeless dramas that are your lives. I’ve even seen some of the movies you wrote.”

  Gore Vidal waited to hear what Jesus might say about his movies, but after a few moments of silence asked, “And my novels? Read any?”

  “No,” Jesus said, “no novels. I do envy the best moviemakers their god-like eye.”

  Gore Vidal grimaced. “Who do you fear?” he asked, pressing the question as if he had discovered something.

  “Unpleasant, unkind people, if you must know,” Christ said. “One of us got like that and fled upward into the scales a long time ago. We don’t know what he’s doing there, and we don’t care as long as he stays away.”

  “One of you?” King asked. “Could that by any chance be Satan?”

  “We don’t know his name anymore,” Jesus said with a wave of his hand.

  “I don’t quite understand this fleeing upward,” Gore Vidal said, “despite your pilfered fish story. Who inhabits the upward?”

  “It’s all pretty mysterious,” Jesus said. “The same infinity, the infinity! It’s a kind of endless horror of unknowing for us who know so much, a cloud without edges. It’s the one thing all our knowledge can’t encompass. Not even our deep travelers will ever dive to the top or bottom of physical infinity.”

  “Deep travelers?” asked Gore Vidal.

  Jesus smiled and pointed to himself.

  “Then why do any of you bother . . . to travel?” King asked.

  “It might still not be an infinity,” Jesus said. “The idea haunts many of us, that infinity might only seem to be one, and that at any moment the end may not be far off.”

  “And if you came to the end of it,” King asked, “what would you learn? That there’s more beyond?” He laughed, proud of himself for getting it.

  “Alas, yes. No matter how far we travel, the end may be an infinite way off. And if we found it suddenly nearby, there would likely be more beyond it.”

  “You’ve said we rather often,” Gore Vidal said. “Who is this we?”

  “The Trinity,” Jesus said. “And each of us is also made up of quite a few lessers. We’ve been massing for a long time now.”

  “Massing?” Gore Vidal asked.

  “We share each other,” Jesus said. “You’ve had some imitative experience of that in your worship of cultural idols.”

  “Another caller!” King cried. “Go ahead, you’re on.”

  A deep voice said over the loud crackle. “Hi, I’m from North Carolina . . .”

  “Let me fix that for you,” Jesus said, and the interference died.

  “Thanks! Lookee here, I’ve been dead for donkey’s years now, and suddenly here I am in my failin’ down old house with my dead girlfriend, who just said to me, ‘Jesse Helms, how did we get back here?’ ”

  “How do you think?” Jesus asked.

  “My question is this. How can you be Jesus Christ? From what I’ve experienced firsthand you’re just some kind of powerful alien . . . or some hogwash like that.”

  “So what’s your question?” King asked.

  “Who does he think he is, coming here and doing all these crazy things? Shoot him through the head and see what he does!”

  “Go right ahead,” Jesus said, pointing at the gun on the table.