Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,86

knee feeding a handful of grass through the chicken wire to a lamb. Julian was part Chinese. “There’s been all kinds of confusion about the Leviticans.” This was the church of which he was a priest. “Some kind of imagined link to the Ku Klux Klan.”

“Maybe it’s because of the burning crosses,” Phil suggested, deadpan, gazing across a few yards of gravel to the massive concrete foundation from which the cross’s steel verticals erupted. Bracketed neatly to the structural members were the tubes carrying the natural gas from an underground pipeline. The actual burners didn’t start until maybe twenty feet above ground level, maybe because they didn’t want to roast parked vehicles. But there was a connection to an outlying altar, already dark with blood and buzzing with flies, including a sort of open crematorium that looked like it could get pretty hot.

“Supposedly the KKK burned crosses,” Ted said with a roll of the eyes.

“There’s no ‘supposedly’ about it,” Anne-Solenne started in. “What are you even—that’s like saying supposedly Muhammad Ali was a boxer. Supposedly Ford makes cars. It’s—” But Sophia silenced her with a hand on the arm. There was no point.

“If that is even true, it has no connection to our burning crosses, which have a completely different significance,” Ted announced.

Sophia said, “Okay. And that is?”

“So-called Christianity, as it existed up until recently, is based on a big lie,” Ted explained. “The most successful conspiracy of all time. And it was all summed up in the symbolism of the cross. Every cross you see on a mainstream church, or worn as jewelry, or on a rosary or what have you, is another repetition of that lie.”

“And what is that lie exactly?” Phil asked. He already knew. But he and the others all wanted to hear a living human actually say it, just as spectacle.

“That Jesus was crucified.”

There. He’d said it. No one could speak. Ted took their silence as a request for more in the same vein. “That the Son of God, the most powerful incarnate being in the history of the universe, allowed Himself to be scourged and humiliated and taken out in the most disgraceful way you can imagine.”

“‘Taken out’ means ‘murdered’?” Anne-Solenne asked. It was a rhetorical question that Ted answered with the tiniest hint of a nod.

“The church that was built on the lie of the Crucifixion,” Ted continued, “had two basic tenets. One was the lovey-dovey Jesus who went around being nice to people—basically, just the kind of behavior you would expect from the kind of beta who would allow himself to be spat on, to be nailed to a piece of wood. The second was this notion that the Old Testament no longer counted for anything, that the laws laid down in Leviticus were part of an old covenant that could simply be ignored after, and because, he was nailed up on that cross. We have exposed all that as garbage. Nonsense. A conspiracy by the elites to keep people meek and passive. The only crosses you’ll see in our church are on fire, and the symbolism of that has nothing to do with the KKK. It means we reject the false church that was built upon the myth of the Crucifixion.”

“So, to be clear, all Christianity for the last two thousand years—Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, evangelical—is just flat-out wrong,” Phil said.

“That is correct.”

“The four gospels—”

Ted shook his head. “That’s the first thing the church did, was enshrine those gospels. Telling the story they wanted to tell. About the meek liberal Jesus who gave food away to poor people and healed the sick and so on.”

“And was crucified,” Sophia prompted him.

Ted nodded.

“And . . . resurrected?” Anne-Solenne asked.

“They needed some way to explain the fact that He was still alive, so they invented all that resurrection stuff.”

“So where’d Jesus go after that? What did He do?”

“Fought the Romans. Went back and forth between this world and heaven. He has the power to do that.”

“Where is He now?”

“We don’t know! Maybe here. He has been in eclipse for two thousand years. The conspiracy of the church was powerful. They staged a fake Reformation to get people to believe that reform was possible. All a show. Orchestrated from the Vatican.”

“So, Martin Luther was running a false-flag operation for the Pope,” Phil said. “In that case—” But he broke off as he felt Sophia stepping on his toe, under the table.

He looked down at her. Having caught his eye, she panned her gaze across the entire