Alpha and Omega

by Harry Turtledove

  Orly said something in Arabic and Hebrew that should have torched the table. Barb went on smiling; she didn’t understand the words and ignored the tone. Orly started to say it in English so Barb couldn’t not get it.

  Eric kicked her under the table. She gave him a look intended to uncurl his beard. But he wouldn’t let Barb’s words pass unchallenged. Growing up in the States, he knew almost as much about her religion as his own. Israeli Jews never had to worry about learning the words to Christmas carols.

  “What about Jesus driving the money changers from the Temple?” he asked. “What about ‘I come not to send peace, but a sword’?”

  “Well, anyone will do what has to be done,” Barb answered. “Look at Israel. People here want to live at peace with their neighbors, but they can’t always.”

  In a way, that was true. In another, it was a breathtaking oversimplification. A minute’s conversation with a Palestinian or an Israeli would have made that plain. Barb saw the truth and didn’t worry about the oversimplification. That was her style.

  “Are you finished?” Orly asked Eric. Her tone said, You’d better be.

  Unlike Barb, he took such hints. Botching this one would have meant a row. He had too many other things to worry about. “I sure am,” he said, and jumped to his feet. “See you, Barb.”

  “So long.” She was still plowing through the hummus and the fuul beans.

  “Her heart’s in the right place,” Eric said.

  “Maybe,” Orly answered. “But her head’s up her ass.” And they headed back to their apartment.

  * * *

  —

  The phone on the nightstand next to Gabriela’s bed rang. It rang and rang and rang. She had the vague feeling it had been ringing for a long time, longer than she could actually remember. She had the even vaguer feeling it had rung before, rung and rung and finally stopped.

  Weren’t you supposed to do something about a ringing telephone? The proper response finally floated up into her consciousness like a walrus breaking the surface of the Arctic Ocean. When the telephone rang, you were supposed to…supposed to…answer the damn thing! Then it would shut up.

  She rolled toward the phone. That made her eyes come open. For the first few seconds after they did, she saw double. Each eyeball was working on its own, and her brain wasn’t up to putting two competing images together. Then it was. As the world came into better focus, the clock next to the persistently ringing phone told her it was 7:22.

  That wasn’t right. She wasn’t supposed to be in bed at 7:22. For the life of her, she couldn’t have said why she wasn’t, but she knew she wasn’t. She should have been…She didn’t know where, but not here, wherever here was. She realized she was wearing a dress and panty hose and even shoes. Zoned as she was, she knew you didn’t go to bed like that. So why had she?

  Maybe she could find out from whoever was calling her. The first time she reached for the phone, she missed. Stubborn as a…as a…as some kind of stubborn thing, she tried again. This time, she caught it. She almost dropped the handset bringing it to her face, but she didn’t quite.

  “Hello?” she said. Even she could hear that she sounded like a lush on a six-day bender.

  “Gabriela? My God, is that you? Are you okay?” Saul Buchbinder, by contrast, sounded as if he’d been speeding for as long as she’d been shitfaced.

  Why am I shitfaced? she wondered. All I drank last night was a glass of wine and water, lots of water. She realized she desperately needed to pee. But that would wait—for a little while, anyway.

  “It’s me, Saul,” she said. Remembering it was her made her remember where she was—and where she should have been. She gasped in horror. “The Ark!”

  “Yeah. The Ark.” Saul Buchbinder was a professionally genial man, a check-grabbing gladhander in an expensive Italian suit. Gabriela couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard him sound so grim. Come to that, she couldn’t ever remember him sounding grim. Something weird seemed to have happened to her memory, but even so….After a few seconds, the producer went on, “Brandon did the show for you. Said you were sick after dinner—something about hot food. Couldn’t get you on the phone, so I believed him. Somebody had to be there, and there he was.”

  “Brandon did the show?” Rage burned away—vaporized—much of the muzziness inside Gabriela’s head. “He doped me, Saul, the motherfucker must have doped me. The food was hot, but I ate it okay. He was trying to screw me, and he did.”

  She felt at herself in sudden terror. But no, her panties were where they belonged, under her panty hose. She’d known plenty of men good at getting women’s underwear off, but never one who could put it back on right. No telltale wet spot at the crotch, either. So that hadn’t happened, anyway.

  Even so…“I’ll kill him! I swear to God I will! The biggest story of my life, and he stole it from me? He’s dead fucking meat, you hear? No jury in the world will convict me.” At that moment, she meant every word of it.

  But all Saul said was, “Gabriela, sweetheart, I think he went and did you a favor.” Despite the endearment, he sounded grimmer than ever. Gabriela hadn’t dreamt he could.

  “What are you talking about? That should have been me up there opening the Ark, not that shitheaded asshole. Me, Saul, you hear?”

  “Listen to me, will you?”

  “Then talk sense.”

  “I’m trying to. He did the back-and-forth with Kupferman. He had it down pat—I believe now he must’ve planned everything out way ahead of time. But it doesn’t matter, not now it doesn’t.”

  “I told you before to talk sense.” Gabriela hoped she scared Saul. She sounded more than dangerous enough to scare herself.

  “I’m trying to. I’m not sure I can,” the producer said. “He walked up to take the lid off the Ark, right? He reached out, he touched it—and he fell over dead.”

  “There is a God!” Gabriela exclaimed. She wasn’t thinking any too clearly yet, though she realized that only later.

  “Yeah. I’m beginning to think maybe there is.” Saul didn’t sound grim any more. He’d gone past that. He sounded like someone maybe a millimeter away from crapping himself in terror. “All that stuff Kupferman talked about with you and Brandon, that wasn’t bullshit. That was the straight goods. Brandon touched the Ark, and God, like, struck him dead. What else could it be?”

  “He had it coming! Served him right!” Gabriela said savagely.

  “I won’t even try and tell you you’re wrong,” Buchbinder said. “The docs at the hospital are gonna do a post on him. Maybe he had a coronary or a stroke at just the wrong time. I don’t believe that for a second, but maybe. Suppose he didn’t, though, Gabriela. Just suppose. Suppose he wasn’t a piece of shit, too, and he didn’t slip you something at dinner. That would’ve been you going up to the Ark. That would’ve been you trying to take off the lid. What d’you think would’ve happened when you did?”

  “Uh—” Gabriela slammed into that one like a power-saw disk slamming into a spike. She wasn’t much of a believer. Who was, these days, except born-agains, suicide bombers, and Orthodox Jews? But what if something turned out to be true whether you believed in it or not?

  Yeah. What if?

  “ ‘Uh’ is right,” Saul said. “If Brandon hadn’t stolen your chance, way it looks to me is, that would have been you plotzing there the second you touched the Ark.”

  It looked that way to Gabriela, too. If Brandon hadn’t died of his own nastiness or something, if God had reached out and touched him when he reached out and touched the Ark, wouldn’t the same thing have happened to her? She wasn’t in Brandon’s league when it came to son-of-a-bitchery, but she knew only too well she wasn’t one of the properly pious people Rabbi Kupferman talked about, either.

  “What are we going to do?” she asked, as much to herself as to Saul Buchbinder.

  “I
dunno,” he answered. “I’ll tell you this, though—whatever it is, it’ll send ratings straight through the roof. People will tune in to see how we can top having a guy drop dead in front of the whole wide world.”

  He was right. He couldn’t very well be wrong. Gabriela’s head whirled anyway, from Brandon’s sleeping pill and from what had just happened, both. He’d acted like the worst villain in a slimy melodrama to steal her moment in the sun. And she was alive and he was dead because he had. How did any of that make sense?

  God only knew. Gabriela shivered and stared up through the ceiling at what she all at once thought of as heaven, because the odds looked better and better that that was literally true.

  * * *

  —

  Yitzhak Avigad walked the familiar grounds of Kibbutz Nair Tamid with an unfamiliar companion: a decontamination expert from the IDF. “So we’re good to come back?” Yitzhak asked.

  Ari Eitan nodded. “No problem for people. We’ve decontaminated the buildings, same as we did at the airport.”

  “And the animals? The crops?” Yitzhak persisted.

  Dr. Eitan hesitated. “You can’t treat fields and orchards the way you treat buildings. The background level is up a little. It will be, for a while. There are places that are more radioactive naturally than this one is now.”

  “Those bastards.” Yitzhak looked toward Tel Aviv. “Those stinking bastards.” He walked on, his Nikes scuffing up—radioactive?—dust. “Give me the bottom line.”

  “I thought I just did,” Eitan answered.

  “No. The bottom line is, would you live here? Would you eat what grows here? Would you eat meat from animals that graze here?”

  “Living here is not a problem. I already told you that.” Ari Eitan paused. “The Ministry of Agriculture will let you sell your produce and meat. You’re within acceptable limits. I said that, too. If you ate nothing but your own stuff, you might see a small increase in…trouble years from now.”

  “Trouble.” Yitzhak hated bullshit. “You mean cancer.”

  “Well…yeah.” The decontamination expert nodded. “I’m not sure how much it will matter, though.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Did you see how that American dropped dead when he touched the Ark? God’s paying attention to us, and we’d better start paying attention to Him. Who knows if we have to worry about cancer after the Messiah comes?”

  “I hadn’t thought of it like that.” And Yitzhak hadn’t. How would life change after the Messiah came? He’d put all his energy into working for that. What happened afterwards…lay in the Messiah’s hands, not his.

  “It’s the same in Tel Aviv. The concrete, the bricks—we can clean those pretty well,” Eitan said. “The parks, the grass, the trees are harder. But if you come back here, your odds are good.”

  Was pretty good good enough? It wasn’t up to Yitzhak, anyhow. He’d take Dr. Eitan’s word to Kibbutz Ha-Minsarah. The adults from this kibbutz could hash it out there. He looked toward Tel Aviv again. No matter what the decontamination expert said, he wouldn’t care to live in the city for a while.

  He got into his car. Instead of heading back to the kibbutz near Beersheba, he drove into Jerusalem. A phone call told him Kupferman was at the Religious Affairs Ministry and would see him. Even in West Jerusalem, finding a place to park was an adventure.

  Several people in Kupferman’s outer office sent him dirty looks as he breezed past. Had he been waiting there, he would have done the same. Since he wasn’t…he went into the rabbi’s sanctum.

  “Good to see you,” Shlomo Kupferman said. “How is Shoshanah? How are your nephew and the other pure boys?”

  “They’re well,” Yitzhak answered. He would have been angry that Kupferman asked about the heifer before the children…if the kibbutzniks hadn’t moved Rosie before they got the boys out. He asked his own questions: “How soon will we sacrifice the cow? When does the Temple start going up?”

  “We have some unbuilding to do before the building can begin,” Kupferman reminded him. Yitzhak nodded impatiently. Then the rabbi said, “The unbuilding starts next week. Don’t leak that. We won’t announce it. We’ll just do it.”

  “Next week?” Yitzhak whistled softly. That was sooner than he’d expected. The Muslim world would pitch a fit when word got out. The Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque had been there a long time. But the Temple Mount was Jewish first. Didn’t it deserve to be Jewish again? “About time!” he said.

  “Yes.” Kupferman nodded. “We could start the Temple sooner if we wrecked the trash cluttering it now, but the Prime Minister won’t see reason.” He sighed. “As if the Muslims will love us for preserving their buildings! But when we start erecting the Temple…That will be time to take Shoshanah up on the Mount of Olives.”

  “I know,” Yitzhak said. “Chaim won’t be happy. He’s made that cow a pet.”

  “We need ritually pure priests,” Rabbi Kupferman said. “Her ashes can give them to us. Will your nephew go against the word of God in the Holy Scriptures?”

  “No. He’ll be unhappy, though.” Yitzhak chuckled sourly. “When is a boy that age not unhappy?”

  “When he isn’t that age any more,” the rabbi replied.

  “Too true,” Yitzhak said. “Next week? That’s wonderful! My friends will be thrilled when I—” He laughed again, this time in embarrassment. “But I can’t tell, can I?”

  “Better if you don’t. They would tell their friends, and one friend would know a reporter or be a reporter or get excited and tweet, and…”

  “Yes. And.” Yitzhak knew how Israelis loved to gab—he was one. “Something else, Reb Shlomo?”

  “Ask,” Kupferman said. “I think I know what it is, but ask.”

  Yitzhak did: “Do you really believe God killed Brandon Nesbitt for touching the Ark?”

  “Of course.” Rabbi Kupferman said. “Either you believe God does things, or you believe things happen on their own.” He didn’t say, Either you’re a Jew or not, but he might as well have.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Yitzhak said. “But God could have done so much for us if He’d chosen to. Why is He showing His power now?” Why not during the Holocaust? was the question behind that question—behind most questions about God these days.

  “Why?” the rabbi answered. “Because the Temple will be rebuilt. Because the Messiah will come—soon, Yitzhak.”

  Eric and Orly went onto the Temple Mount by way of the Bab al-Silsila—the Chain Gate—north of the Western Wall. Though the Israelis had taken over the Mount, they followed old custom by letting non-Muslims get to the top only by the Chain Gate or the Bab al-Maghariba—the Moor’s Gate—on the south side of the Western Wall Plaza. They could leave by any of the ten gates connecting the Temple Mount to the rest of Jerusalem.

  “I don’t know how you talked me into doing this,” Orly grumbled, not for the first time.

  “Some things you ought to see in situ,” Eric said—an archaeologist talking. “We should take a good look at this stuff before it goes.”

  Her mouth twisted. “It’s not our religion. If they packed up the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and moved it somewhere else, would you go gawk at that, too?”

  “I hope so,” he answered. Orly rolled her eyes. He pointed toward the Dome of the Rock. “C’mon, babe. That’s a lot nicer building than the Holy Sepulcher.”

  “If you say so. I’ve never been to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher,” Orly said. “It’s for tourists—Christian tourists.”

  “I saw it when I got here,” Eric said defensively.

  He needed to be defensive, too, because Orly pounced like a missile-toting helicopter. “Yeah, a lot of American Jews do. They feel being Christian is normal and being Jewish is weird. We don’t grow up with that.”

  She wasn’t wrong. Eric said, “I didn’t
go see it because it was Christian. I saw it because it was old. In L.A., there’s a McDonald’s from the 1950s that’s a historical monument. This is different.”

  “Sure it is. You can’t get fries or a burger at the church,” Orly said. McDonald’s did great in Israel. They sold cheeseburgers, too, even if nothing this side of a pork chop was less kosher.

  Eric walked toward the Dome of the Rock. If he didn’t notice her sarcasm, he didn’t have to snap back. He didn’t feel like getting into a slanging match here. This wasn’t the right place, and the Israeli soldiers and their rifles had little to do with that.

  Observant Jews didn’t come up onto the Temple Mount for fear of setting foot inside the Holy of Holies. Only the High Priest could go there, and he only on Yom Kippur. He would offer two handfuls of incense before the Ark, then sprinkle it with blood from a bull sacrificed earlier in the day. After the offerings, he would back out in humility and fear.

  Kupferman offered dispensations to people who wanted them. He said he knew where the Ark had rested: on the sacred stone inside the Dome of the Rock, the stone on which Abraham was said to have offered to sacrifice Isaac (or, if you were a Muslim, Ishmael) and from which Muhammad was said to have ascended to heaven.

  To give Kupferman his due, that wasn’t just expediency. His archaeological alter ego, Sh. Nechshat, had said the same thing for years. He followed the conclusions of Leen Ritmeyer, a Dutchman who was this generation’s leading Temple Mount scholar. Eric thought Ritmeyer’d got it right, too; the man had a knack for spotting things other people missed, and for seeing what they meant.

  A guy in sunglasses, a cricket cap—almost a baseball cap, but not quite—and a sky-blue Manchester City T-shirt waved toward Eric and Orly. He wasn’t a Brit, though, even if Eric needed a few seconds to recognize Munir al-Nuwayhi behind the shades. He waved back. Orly gave a tight little nod.

  “How’s it going?” Eric called.

  Munir ambled over. He looked gloomy, the way he had most of the time since the Ark was rediscovered. He’d probably looked gloomy a lot before that, too. Being an Arab in Israel wasn’t anyone’s idea of fun.