Alpha and Omega

by Harry Turtledove

  “Makes you want to throw a rock through the screen,” Chaim’s mother said.

  “Oh, a little,” Yitzhak answered.

  The picture cut to Cairo. The crowd there was bigger and more excited. Egyptian Arabic differed from Palestinian, but Yitzhak followed well enough. The Egyptians yelled “Death to Israel!” too. Cops stood by, looking stern but doing nothing.

  “Although the President of Egypt has deplored the attack, here is the popular response,” a reporter said.

  Chaim understood Arabic, too. What he said after that startled Yitzhak.

  “Here is Riyadh,” the Al Jazeera newsman said. Fewer people in Riyadh wore Western dress—no women did. But it was party time there, too, and in battered Baghdad as well. Then the feed cut to Teheran. That was an even bigger, even louder demonstration. The ayatollahs must have organized it, but the people shouting and pumping their fists were having a great time.

  Yitzhak noticed he was grinding his teeth. He made himself stop. His dentist kept telling him he’d be sorry later on if he didn’t. Then he started again. He had other things to be sorry about now.

  “Nice to know everybody loves us,” his sister-in-law said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Yitzhak said. Rivka Avigad looked at him in surprise. So did Chaim. Yitzhak went on, “We’ve spent too much time caring whether people love us, and look what we got.” The TV switched to more shots of the Tel Aviv ruins, then to people in hazmat suits with Geiger counters. Yitzhak quit grinding his teeth again—briefly. “Look what we got,” he repeated. “From now on, we do what we need to do, and that’s it.”

  “We’ve always thought that, here at Nair Tamid,” Chaim’s mother said, and Yitzhak nodded. She continued, “But what will the government do? I wish more people saw things like us, but—”

  “They will now,” Yitzhak predicted. “How can they help it?”

  A shout from outside: “We’re ready to move the kids!”

  “Get going!” Yitzhak told Chaim. The boy put on his gas mask. Behind the glass panes, his eyes were enormous. Yitzhak set a hand on his shoulder. Then he wondered if he should have. Was he radioactive? The counter hadn’t chattered much here. He hoped he was okay.

  Chaim’s Nikes popped bubble wrap as he hurried to a waiting minivan. He carefully didn’t step off the strip of purity. The other kids who’d been born into ritual cleanliness followed. The wagon rolled off to the south, away from the prevailing winds.

  The truck pulling Rosie’s trailer had already left. Was a red heifer more important than the children? Harder to come by, anyhow.

  Now they were all heading to safety. Yitzhak laughed at himself. They’d still be in Eretz Yisrael. Those shots of contaminated Tel Aviv, and of the Arab world and Iran celebrating, reminded him nobody here was safe.

  No one would be, either, till the Messiah came. That was what everyone at the kibbutz was working toward. When the Temple rose, when the heifer was sacrificed, the time would be ripe for His coming.

  If the Muslims didn’t care about wrecking an Israeli city, why should Israel care about the Dome of the Rock or anything else on the Temple Mount? The smile that stretched across Yitzhak’s face was predatory. Those terrorists might have played into his hands.

  No. Into God’s hands.

  * * *

  —

  Gabriela Sandoval wished for a ham sandwich. Pork wasn’t against her religion. It was, however, almost as deeply underground here as porn in Saudi Arabia.

  She was so tired, she couldn’t see straight. Her voice was shot, too; she’d been on the air for hours and hours. She sipped from another little cup of sweet, highly caffeinated mud. So far, she hadn’t used anything stronger. She would if she had to, though. Uppers were easy to come by everywhere. She’d never joined the Boy Scouts, but Be prepared still made a good motto.

  For a while, she could watch TV instead of being on it. CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and the BBC had crews in town. So did CBS, ABC, and NBC, though they’d taken longer. But tiny little independent Gabriela and Brandon had got the beat! “Hurray for that red heifer!” she said wearily.

  “Yeah.” Saul Buchbinder had a martini. Gabriela wished for one, but coffee was a better idea. The networks and news channels wanted to talk to her and Brandon because they’d been too close to ground zero.

  She wasn’t very radioactive. The Israeli doctor who’d checked her out had assured her of that. But what if the stuff got into her bones and started eating her up from the inside out? What could you do about that? You could die of it, that was what.

  CNN was on in the hotel bar, rerunning the President’s speech. “This shows how hard it is to fight freedom’s enemies,” he said. “We’ve got to stop them all the time. If they win even once, they can brag about that. Or they think so. They haven’t dreamt of the punishment this atrocity will bring down on them.”

  He went on and on. He wasn’t the world’s greatest speaker, especially if you owned an IQ above room temperature. But the message he needed to get across today was pretty simple.

  “Open season on anybody whose uncle’s pool guy knew somebody who heard of terrorists once upon a time,” Buchbinder remarked.

  “Just what the Israelis need—a hunting license,” Gabriela said. “They do plenty without one.”

  “They’ll do more with,” Saul predicted.

  “Uh-huh. What would we do if somebody got off a dirty bomb in San Francisco?” she wondered.

  Gulping the martini, Saul pointed at the President’s fleshy face on the TV screen. “Way things are these days, he’d give the guys a fucking medal.”

  Gabriela snorted, but Buchbinder wasn’t kidding. “You know what I mean,” she said. “We’d go after those guys—they might hit Dallas next, or somewhere else important.”

  “Meow, pussycat,” the producer said. Gabriela stuck out her tongue at him. That hurt; she’d bitten it when the bomb knocked her down. Saul went on, “Yeah, you’re right—we’d smash them if we figured out who they were. The way the FBI and the CIA are these days, we might not even manage that. Who do you think pulled this one off?”

  “Maybe ISIS, maybe al-Qaeda, maybe Hezbollah,” she answered. “Not Hamas or Fatah—they couldn’t do this kind of job.”

  An hour and a half later, she was saying the same thing on Fox News, sitting across from Forrest Charleston. His haircut had to cost three times as much as hers; his politics lay a little to the right of Attila the Hun’s. Unlike several former senior Fox people, though, he did keep his hands to himself.

  Charleston was sure the dirty bomb had to be an ISIS operation. “They’re trying to unite the Muslim world against the West,” he insisted. “They’re doing a good job, too.”

  “It could be.” Gabriela didn’t want to push back too hard on someone else’s show. She did say, “They aren’t the only terrorist group with a grudge against Israel, though.”

  That made Forrest Charleston pounce: “Where would they get the radioactives?”

  “Where would ISIS?” Gabriela returned. “There are four places I can see: renegade Russians, Iran if it was Hezbollah and not ISIS, Pakistan, and North Korea.”

  “What about France?” Charleston came from the Freedom Fries school of Francophobia.

  “Oh, come on, Forrest.” Gabriela wasn’t usually the sedate one in a pairing, but she could roll with it. “If France passed that stuff to terrorists going after Tel Aviv, there isn’t a big enough hole for them to hide in. Whoever did this doesn’t count the cost.”

  “All the French need is plausible deniability.” Charleston wouldn’t get off his hobby horse.

  Gabriela knew she’d sound like a contradicting bitch if she told him he was full of it, but she’d look like an idiot if she didn’t. So she said, “If they mess with the Israelis, they need more than that. So does everybody else. Talk about holes to hide in, I bet some terrorist big
shots are in them now.”

  Just for a second, Forrest Charleston looked as if he’d bitten down hard on a lemon. But he pulled himself together; no matter how far to the right he sat, he was a pro. “You were on the spot,” he allowed. “You and your partner got closer to the scene than any other American journalists. Do you think this was a professional job?”

  “I got much closer than I wanted to,” Gabriela said, wondering about her long-term health again. “With the radioactives, it almost has to be professional. And it was a big bomb, and they blew themselves up where it would hurt most. So yes, they were pros.”

  “How will this impact Tel Aviv? Will it ever be the same?”

  “That’s hard to say.” Gabriela had to hide an ironic grin. Yes, this was TV. Something had just happened, and Charleston was talking about will it ever? as if the moment were eternity, world without end, amen. She made herself go on: “Let’s see how well the Israelis can clean it up and how the people who live in Tel Aviv handle it. Maybe this is one thing more, and they go on. Or maybe it breaks the camel’s back. We’ll find out.”

  “Will the Security Minister’s resignation keep the government in power?” Charleston asked.

  He comes to Israel and he wants me to play prophet? Gabriela thought wryly. Shrugging, she answered, “I don’t know for sure, but I doubt it. Public anger’s just starting to boil here.”

  “I think you’re right.” Forrest Charleston sounded disappointed at thinking anyone besides his own infallible self could have something straight. Gabriela didn’t blame him. No one got noticed or controversial or rich by agreeing with other people on-camera. Charleston went on, “So you look for a hard right turn in Israeli politics?”

  “I’m afraid I do,” Gabriela said. And I wonder how the red-heifer people are managing. If anything will make the country pay attention to them, it’s this.

  She said nothing to Charleston about why she was in Israel. If the commentator with the fancy haircut wanted contacts with people like that, he could damn well roll his own.

  The red lights died. Forrest Charleston leaned back in his chair, far enough to make it creak. “Thanks, Gabriela,” he said, and then, “Hell of a thing to do a show about! What a Charlie Foxtrot!”

  “I know.” Gabriela held up a bandaged hand. “Do I ever.”

  An aide threw a note in front of Charleston. When he read it, he scowled and clicked his tongue between his teeth. Somehow, Gabriela knew what he’d say before he said it: “They just found the Security Minister’s body. He left a note—and a wife, and five kids.”

  “Oh, Lord!” Gabriela reflexively crossed herself, but she wasn’t much surprised. If you took your work seriously, and if it was important, and if you failed that badly, what was left? Not much. You’d always be the guy who…The Security Minister was still the guy who…, but he couldn’t hear about it any more.

  “That’s the first collateral damage,” Forrest Charleston said. “How much more?”

  Gabriela didn’t know. Who could? But her answer came close enough for government work: “Lots.” Charleston nodded.

  * * *

  —

  When the camera went on, the Reverend Lester Stark said, “Let us pray for the children of Israel in their trial and tribulation.”

  And the men, women, and children of his comfortable congregation, far from danger, bowed their heads and prayed for people killed and maimed and poisoned in Tel Aviv. Whether they would have been so charitable toward closer Jews…few thought to wonder. Nor did Lester Stark.

  To give him his due, he didn’t focus on things close to home. He was trying to look ahead, the most dangerous thing a preacher could do. How many had made jackasses of themselves by prophesying things that didn’t happen? Far too many. Stark didn’t want to join them.

  But he didn’t want to sit silent, either. That seemed safe, but the seemingly safe was the most unsafe. You had to stand up. God said so in Revelation 3:15–16: I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.

  “I take my text today from the Book of Revelation,” Stark said, which was why those verses were so much on his mind. “I do this with no small fear, for Revelation has led many bold ministers astray.”

  In the pews, people smiled as if he were joking. The imperfectly godly consensus at his seminary was that St. John the Divine chewed morning-glory seeds or magic mushrooms or whatever other first-century hallucinogens he could find on Patmos. Revelation was the word of God, but it was that word seen, in sober Paul’s phrase, through a glass, darkly. You sought certainty in Revelation at your peril.

  If the text stood before you, though, you couldn’t ignore it, not without being lukewarm. “Consider Revelation 6, verses 2–10.” He read the King James version, which he preferred to more recent translations. Some wag said the King James version was itself a miracle: the only great literary work produced by a committee.

  “Now consider the meaning of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and how those verses may apply to the present situation,” Stark said. “Might not the first Horseman, the one riding a white horse who goes forth conquering, signify Israel and its astonishing victories in 1967?

  “And might not the second, who rides a red horse and takes peace from the earth, stand for the Muslim terrorists who have wreaked so much havoc since? Now, the third rider had a black horse—and I’m not talking about the Nazgûl from The Lord of the Rings.” Stark let the people who would laugh do it. Better to break the tension now than when he’d be coming to his important points. “That third rider carried scales in his hand. Couldn’t that be another way of saying the struggle in the Middle East has been deadlocked for a long time?”

  He looked at the congregation and at the people who would see him on TV. “I know you know your Scriptures. The fourth rider had a pale horse, and his name was Death. Do I need to draw you a picture of what the Lord was telling us with that image? Not after the horror that was visited upon Tel Aviv, and upon people who’d done nobody any harm.

  “Everyone knows the Four Horsemen. But you should also notice the last part of verse 9 and verse 10 in Revelation 5. I’ll read them again: ‘I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held: And they cried out with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?’ ”

  He looked out at the people hanging on his every word. It was a heady feeling. He’d drunk liquor in his younger, wilder days. He knew the high you got from alcohol. He got a bigger one from preaching. (He also knew his television audience would follow him Bible in hand. If he made a mistake in text or interpretation, he would hear about it. That was the other side of being listened to attentively.)

  “Vengeance is coming,” he said softly. “Those souls who were martyred in this attack will see vengeance, and soon. For God cannot abide those who do such things, and their victims take His cause into their hands with righteousness. I believe that’s what those verses mean.

  “You should take them together with Daniel 5, where Daniel speaks of the downfall of Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar, the Kings of Babylon—Babylon being the ancient name for Iraq, and how can we deny that Saddam Hussein was the Nebuchadnezzar of our age?

  “I call your attention particularly to verse 27, where Daniel tells Belshazzar, ‘Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.’ Perhaps this also connects to the third rider. I don’t know—I say perhaps. God knows His own patterns. All of us mortals, no matter what codes we think we find, we’re guessing.”

  People who listened to him read The Da Vinci Code and books about vast cryptograms running through the Bible. Some people believed them. Stark didn’t; he thought they were pure heresy. But if you said that r
ight out, you lost part of your audience. Better to slide around it. You caught more flies with honey than vinegar.

  “Now Daniel prophesied the end of an empire. And he prophesied truly, for Belshazzar died that night, and Darius the Persian took his lands. As the Last Days approach, everything takes on a larger scale. Not just an empire will pass away, but the world we’ve always known. And my other point is that even atrocities like the one we’ve witnessed can work toward good, if the Lord wills they should. That’s the message I want to leave with you today. I want you to think about it till we meet again. Thanks, and God bless you.”

  Organ music swelled. The choir sang “Rock of Ages.” The camera lights went out. Now Lester Stark was just a minister with his congregation. He felt smaller without the world’s eye on him. But that wasn’t all bad. He could think about things more immediate than the Last Days. Vern Neugebauer’s daughter was getting married. Ethel Harris had lost her mother. Sam Anderson had won a prize in the state lottery—not millions, but Sam wouldn’t turn down thousands. Lester congratulated him.

  “Thank you, Reverend,” Sam said. “Your church’ll see some—I promise.”

  “Mighty kind of you. Take care of what you need, too.” Unlike some ministers with enormous flocks, Lester didn’t insist on tithing. If you didn’t want to give, you were welcome here anyway.

  But Sam only smiled. “I cast my bread upon the waters, and it came back. You’ll get some, and I’ll send some straight to those poor, sorry folks in Tel Aviv.”

  “That’s a good thing to do,” Stark said. “There’s a lot of trouble and distress in the world—”

  “There always is,” Sam broke in.

  “Yes. But that seems to be where the hurt’s sharpest right now,” Lester said.

  “Not only that, it connects up with the Last Days, like you said.” Anderson nodded, more to himself than to the preacher. “I’ve been studying the Scriptures myself. I believe you’ve fit the pieces together the way they should go.”