Alpha and Omega

by Harry Turtledove

  The farmhouse opened. A big, fair man in a polo shirt and khakis came out. “Mornin’, Mr. Avigad,” he said, holding out his hand. “Good to see you again.”

  Yitzhak shook. “And you, Mr. Henderson.”

  “Bill,” the farmer said. “I’m Bill. We do this every time you’re here.”

  “All right—okay—Bill.” Yitzhak used the slang not too self-consciously. Henderson grinned. The Israeli went on, “This is my nephew, Chaim.”

  “Hello, son.” Henderson extended his hand again. The big, square paw swallowed Chaim’s. “Praise the Lord, I’ve heard a lot about you. You’re a special young fella, you know?”

  Yitzhak knew Chaim had heard that as long as he could remember. Right now, he looked more jet-lagged than special. “It wasn’t anything I did, Mr. Henderson,” he said. “My father and mother—”

  “Like I told your uncle, I’m Bill,” Henderson broke in. His drawl turned English into something slower and more musical than what Israelis learned in school. “And what your folks did, they did for you.”

  “It was weird,” Chaim muttered. Yitzhak knew he hadn’t thought so when he was smaller. Then he’d taken everything for granted, as kids do. He’d been born in a room raised above the ground on columns. He’d lived his whole life in an upper-story apartment. Even his playground was aboveground. He and half a dozen other boys about the same age went through the same thing.

  “Ritual purity matters,” Yitzhak said.

  “If you reckon it does, then it does for you,” Henderson answered easily. “I figure Jesus made it so we don’t have to worry about that stuff, but you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”

  His friendly eyes slid for a moment to Chaim’s shoes. They had clunky platform soles, straight from the 1970s. The rabbis had decided that, with enough prayer, those would insulate the boy from ritual pollution on this trip. That was what his unusual upbringing was about.

  “One reason we’re dealing with you, Bill, is your animals,” Yitzhak said. “But you’re not the only farmer with fine stock. The other reason is, your farm was never an Indian burial ground or anything.”

  “I told your friends so,” Henderson said.

  “Sure.” Yitzhak let it go. His friends in the States and back in Israel had investigated Henderson every legal way and several illegal ones. Bill had no idea how they’d scrutinized his acres. Odds were he’d be furious if he found out. But nobody could afford a mistake on something this important. As far as anyone could tell, nobody’d ever been buried here.

  “You’ll want to give Rosie another once-over,” the cattleman said.

  “Right.” Yitzhak was resigned to the chance of disappointment. His comrades had been disappointed before, more than once. It could happen again. There were other possibilities. But Rosie was the best.

  “She’s in the back forty,” Henderson said. “Why don’t y’all come with me?”

  “Y’all?” Chaim whispered.

  “More than one of us,” Yitzhak whispered back: another thing English classes didn’t teach.

  He watched the pleasure his nephew took in walking on gravel, then on dirt, then on grass. Chaim had even enjoyed walking through vast, soulless DFW. He looked like a fish raised in a bowl that suddenly found itself in a lake instead. So much to the big world!

  Then Chaim stopped, staring. “Cows!”

  Bill Henderson grinned. “You betcha. Mind where you walk.” Now he didn’t look at those funky shoes.

  Yitzhak had eyes for only one cow. Most of them were ordinary Holsteins, black and white and uninteresting. But Rosie was brick red all over, which made her the most important cow in the world.

  “She’s beautiful,” Chaim breathed. Yitzhak wasn’t sure his nephew knew he’d spoken out loud.

  “She’s the herald of the End of Days,” Henderson said. “She’d be beautiful even if she was ugly, y’know?”

  “She’s beautiful,” Chaim repeated, louder. “I didn’t know she’d be beautiful.” He pelted across the field toward Rosie. She paid no attention. Her jaw went back and forth as she grazed.

  Yitzhak and Henderson followed more sedately. “He likes Rosie too much, that be a problem?” the farmer asked.

  “No. He’s a good kid. He was raised right,” Yitzhak answered, which was true in more ways than Bill Henderson, goy that he was, understood. “When the time comes, he’ll do what needs doing.”

  But he wondered when he watched Chaim throw his arms around the cow’s neck. Rosie eyed him with that blank bovine stare. She was a good-natured creature; Yitzhak had seen that before.

  The farmer said, “Check her out. You won’t find anything different.”

  “That’s why I’m here.” Yitzhak pulled a jeweler’s loupe from his pocket. A few years earlier, a red heifer born in Eretz Yisrael raised everyone’s hopes, only to dash them by sprouting a white patch on her jaw before she turned three. One white hair was acceptable. More than one…More than one, we look somewhere else, Yitzhak thought. What can you do?

  Chaim looked up at him. “I hope you find white,” the boy said. “She’s too nice.”

  “They call it a sacrifice because you’re willing to give it up to God. God’s more important,” Yitzhak said. “Abraham would give up Isaac, you know. His own son.” The English version of his name sounded odd to him. “After a son, how can you hold back a cow?”

  “I guess.” Chaim frowned. “But I don’t like it.”

  “Don’t get yourself in an uproar yet.” Yitzhak examined Rosie along the edges of her jaws, at the base of her tail, on her fetlocks: the places where white hairs that would make her ritually unacceptable were likeliest to sprout.

  He hadn’t found any the last time he was here. His heart beat faster when he found none now. Rosie was three. She’d never been yoked. She seemed flawless. He examined her flanks and back and belly. He found not one white hair. He got manure on his trousers, but so what?

  His eyes shone when he turned to Bill Henderson. “They’ll inspect her again in Israel, but I think she’ll do. I’ll buy her.” Once sacrificed and burned on a pyre, Rosie—or rather, her ashes—would make whatever they touched ritually pure in the ancient sense, the sense lost since the destruction of the Second Temple almost 2,000 years before.

  “Praise the Lord!” Henderson said again.

  One red heifer—so much money, Yitzhak thought. Shipping her to Eretz Yisrael—so much more. The coming of the Messiah? Priceless.

  * * *

  —

  No one threw a chair—or a punch—but people were screaming at one another when the show ended. The audience howled like wolves in a butcher’s shop. This one went pretty well, Gabriela Sandoval thought with an odd mixture of satisfaction and shame.

  The cross-dressing, meth-dealing armed robber (currently out on parole) and his three girlfriends (who hadn’t known about one another till taping time) didn’t want to settle down. Gabriela guessed Paddy Bergeron would lose all three of them, and maybe his cojones, too. Once a woman realized she wasn’t it, the writing was on the wall.

  Gabriela wasn’t sorry she’d put Brandon Nesbitt between her and their charming interview subjects. She also wasn’t sorry three or four burly stagehands strolled out where those subjects could see them. No homicides here! Gabriela and Brandon already spent too much money on lawyers.

  Things quieted down. Paddy shook Brandon’s hand, then Gabriela’s. He did something with his middle finger in her palm. She jerked her hand away and wiped it on her skirt. His grin showed bad teeth. She wanted to smack him.

  One of his girlfriends was coming on to Brandon. She didn’t drop her thong and assume the position, but she didn’t miss by much. Gabriela thought—hoped—Brandon had the sense to stay away. He wasn’t always fussy about where he found pussy. But if that gal wasn’t a total skank, the word had no meaning.

 
As the audience filed out and a guest-relations assistant eased the losers off the set, the producer came over. “Good one, guys,” he said with a big smile.

  Brandon nodded. He soaked up any kind of praise like a sponge, and believed it all. “Thanks, Saul,” Gabriela said. If she sounded weary, it was only because she was.

  Saul Buchbinder persisted: “No, really. This was hot. I think we save it for the next sweeps month.”

  That told Gabriela he meant it. “Okay,” she said—making your producer unhappy wasn’t smart.

  “Outstanding!” Brandon’s happy smile showed off his mouthful of capped, almost mirror-bright teeth—nothing like Paddy’s mottled snags. Yes, he got off on having his vanity stroked. He wished the show were called Brandon and Gabriela, even if he hadn’t had the nerve to say so out loud.

  “We’ll do this forever,” Saul crowed, visions of adding on to his Maui estate dancing in his head. “Know why? ’Cause we’ll never run out of slime.”

  “Saul, I’m going on back to my dressing room to get the TV makeup off.” Gabriela escaped. She really didn’t like so much pore-clogging junk on her skin. But that wasn’t the only reason she didn’t feel like listening to Saul blow smoke. Let Brandon soak up the bullshit. She needed to get away. Some days…

  Some days were tough. Lots of people had rotgut in a drawer to help them through days like that. Gabriela could afford better. She stashed a bottle of artisanal mescal in there. She swigged. It went down smooth and warm as a mother’s kiss. The kick made her smile as she put the squat bottle away. She held it. It didn’t hold her.

  But she slammed the drawer shut. A good show, good enough for sweeps month. Freaks and geeks, freakier and geekier than usual. And wasn’t that scary? Scary enough to make her want to take another knock to keep the first one company.

  She didn’t. “Mierda,” she muttered. Her family had been in Texas since before it joined the Union, but she’d learned most of her Spanish in school and from her ex. Not that, though. It sounded so much more ladylike than the harsh Anglo shit. Her abuela used to say it all the time, and no one even blinked.

  She did hope Brandon had the sense to stay away from the hard-eyed loser who’d been screwing Paddy Bergeron. With his looks and money, he could do better in the ICU, let alone in his sleep. But when a dick got hard, nothing else mattered. Her ex had taught her that, for sure. Hadn’t he just!

  After one more sigh, she made as if to reach for the drawer again after all, then sternly checked the motion. Brandon wanted top billing on Gabriela and Brandon. Gabriela wanted to get back inside the big tent again, next to the lions and the trapeze, not stay stuck in Sideshowland with the bearded lady and the sword swallower.

  MSNBC, she thought wistfully. She’d been a star reporter there for a while. Everyone said they’d pull her out of the field pretty soon and give her her own show. She had the smarts, she had the looks, she had the ethnicity. She was heading for the top. Everyone knew it—especially her.

  Then she ran headlong into everything that made being a woman in the professions such a joy and a delight. While she was on her second trip to Iraq, her husband filed for divorce. César was an IT guy at a pharmaceutical firm in New Jersey. He worked ten minutes from home when he wasn’t working out of the living room. His lawyer used that to get a judge to grant him sole custody of Heather, who’d been three then.

  Was he jealous of Gabriela’s growing acclaim? Was he just sick of talking to her by e-mail? Had he already started messing with his new squeeze? Try as they would, Gabriela’s lawyers hadn’t been able to prove that, which was bound to be why the custody arrangement worked out the way it did.

  Going through a divorce made you crazy. Going through one by long distance made you crazier. One of the key features of the craziness was that you had no idea how crazy you were. To Gabriela, getting ahead in her career by any means possible suddenly seemed the most important thing in the world. With her family blown up behind her, what else did she have to hold on to?

  She said some things that made her seem to have come a lot closer to flying Kalashnikov rounds and RPG blasts than she really was. And, after a few weeks, she got caught. A man telling that kind of lie might have been suspended or reassigned. They canned Gabriela. That’s what you get, you uppity bitch, they might have been saying.

  So there she was, out on the street. She thought about suing, but it wasn’t as if the bastards didn’t have cause. She still needed to make a living. She still had her looks, her presence, her skills in front of a camera. She still had her—tarnished—name recognition, notoriety, whatever the hell it was.

  And so Gabriela and Brandon was born. It made money. It kept her on, or at least close to, the fringes of real journalism. Days like today, though, showed just how fringy those fringes could get. She longed for the real thing the way a methadone junkie longed for heroin.

  She eyed the drawer she’d slammed. Enough mescal and she could forget Paddy Bergeron and his unlovely loves. But, though she eyed that drawer, she didn’t open it.

  Not even a saved-by-the-bell feeling when someone knocked on the dressing-room door. “Yes?” Gabriela said.

  “The limo’s ready to take you home, Ms. Sandoval,” a young assistant said through the plywood. Sophia thought Gabriela was a wonderful role model. She’d said so, many times. It would have been flattering as hell if it didn’t hurt so much

  “Thank you.” Gabriela squared her shoulders. “I’m coming.” Out she went, ready to face the world again.

  “Your limo’s ready, Mr. Nesbitt,” Sophia said.

  “Coming,” Brandon Nesbitt answered.

  Sophia’s smile when he emerged from his dressing room showed blond good looks, expensive contacts—nobody’s eyes were that blue—and steely ambition. She was heading up in this world, and God help anybody who got in her way. She put Brandon in mind of a younger, more Aryan version of Gabriela.

  Calculation glinted behind those contacts. If throwing a fast fuck at Brandon helped her get where she was going, she’d do it. If he thought it meant more than that, he’d be a bigger fool than any of the jerks who populated Gabriela and Brandon.

  Next to Sophia, Paddy’s girlfriend seemed…honest, anyhow.

  The doorman nodded to Brandon as he slid out of the stretch Lincoln. He nodded back, and smiled his most sincere TV smile. He tipped the guy plenty, and made sure he acted friendly all the time. If you didn’t keep the help happy, they had all kinds of ways to make you miserable.

  His apartment was spacious, but none too clean. He wasn’t a swine of a bachelor, but he wasn’t a neat freak, either. Life was too short. He looked in the fridge. Nothing seemed interesting, or even edible.

  Head for a restaurant, then? He didn’t feel like it—he was tired, and he’d put himself on display enough today. So takeout Chinese? Or maybe Thai?

  A call to the Seafood Garden made sure he wouldn’t starve. While he waited for the doorman’s assistant to bring up his food—God forbid the doorman himself should leave his post—he checked his Galaxy for the latest.

  Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, e-mail. Public addresses first. They were the ones from which he drew guests. Some people were so desperate to expose themselves….

  Nothing juicy, dammit. He checked his most private e-mail. Only his agent, his producer and director, and his first ex-wife knew it. It held nothing but spam for a stock “guaranteed to triple.” He swore as he deleted that. All the secrecy in the world only slowed the tide of crap.

  He was about to start the news feeds when the bell rang. His phone said he’d spent half an hour online. The virtual world could swallow your life.

  Before opening up, he peered through the security spy-eye. Getting robbed and pistol-whipped made him check every time now. But this was just François with cardboard cartons from the Seafood Garden.

  Brandon gave the Haitian three bucks and took his su
pper. No, nothing came free. And if the staff decided you were a cheapskate, you could pack it in. Nothing would go right after that.

  He shoveled in the food—a shame, because it was great. What the Seafood Garden did with shrimp should have been illegal. And jellyfish, which he’d never dreamt of eating while he was growing up, were even better. But he’d spotted something he wanted to go back to. Never could tell who else was looking….

  Leftovers plopped into Tupperware. Maybe he’d remember them before they went bad, maybe not. He gave the phone his attention. He read. He took a few notes. Then he made a call.

  “Saul? Brandon. What do you know about a red heifer? What do you mean, nothing? You’re Jewish, for crying out loud….Yes, I know you’re not Orthodox.” Saul liked jellyfish even more than Brandon did. He also liked bacon double cheeseburgers, and you couldn’t get any treyfer than that.

  Brandon checked his notes. “These guys in Israel want to build the Third Temple. One thing you need to do to make it ritually pure is sacrifice a red heifer….It’s a cow, Saul. A rare cow—like a purple cow, almost. There’ve only been nine since the beginning of time, except now they’ve found number ten. In Arkansas, no less.”

  By the noises Saul made, he didn’t give a shit about cows. Maybe he was eating dinner himself. Well, too bad, Brandon thought.

  “Listen,” Brandon said. “The fundamentalists are creaming their jeans about this. It’s all over Twitter and Facebook. They think it’s the start of the Last Days and the Second Coming.” Raised Lutheran, Brandon believed in Brandon, period. No. He believed in ratings, too. “There’s a hell of a lot of fundies, Saul. And they watch TV. I see a Gabriela and Brandon Special coming on.”

  They didn’t just do Gabriela and Brandon. Their Specials played on the credibility Gabriela’d built up when she really was an investigative reporter. Sometimes they used it up. They’d had a couple of fizzles. And if Brandon’s own rep hadn’t had some spots on it, he wouldn’t have needed to work with Her Chicana Majesty. But there you were. And here he was.