Alpha and Omega

by Harry Turtledove

  He watched from a platform near the Pool of Siloam that people from Kibbutz Nair Tamid had set up so he and the other ritually pure boys could go where the action was without polluting themselves. The pool lay 400 meters south of the southwestern corner of the Temple Mount. He could see everything, and he couldn’t do anything about it. That drove him crazy.

  When they built the causeway, he and the other boys would bring water from the Pool of Siloam over to the Mount of Olives for the sacrificial ceremony. They still wouldn’t touch the ground. They would ride on boards atop oxen. If not for why they’d be doing it, that sounded like fun.

  The pots they would use to carry the water were special, too. In ancient days, the village of Modin, halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, had been a stopping point for pilgrims to the holy city. (It was also where the Maccabees came from, but that had nothing to do with the pots.) Since most people who’d lived there were of the priestly class, the ruling was that all pots from Modin were ritually pure.

  Nowadays, though, nobody lived at Modin. Nobody had for years. But the Reconstruction Alliance had set up a clay works and a pottery studio there, to make new ritually pure pots. Kupferman had ruled that those pots met the ancient standards. No one cared to argue with him. If you quarreled with a ruling like that, you’d end up with no ritually pure pots.

  Again, that was nice when you thought about it the right way—or, to Chaim, the wrong way. He would have been happier about everything if it hadn’t pointed toward sacrificing the red heifer: toward killing his friend.

  He couldn’t get anybody to take him seriously. That was the curse of boys his age, but he thought it was his problem alone. (That was also part of the curse of boys his age.) His mother wouldn’t listen. Neither would his uncle. The other ritually pure boys seemed excited at ushering in the new Temple by sacrificing the red heifer.

  Rosie was just a cow to them. They ate beef. So did he. But he wouldn’t have wanted to eat beef from a cow he knew personally. Anyone who’d grown up working on a farm would have laughed. Kibbutz Nair Tamid was a farm, but the ritually pure boys hadn’t worked on it. How could they without polluting themselves?

  No matter what everybody else thought, Rosie wasn’t just a cow to Chaim. His hands curled into fists as he watched the causeway stretch from one mountain to the other. Slowly, but with more determination than he’d ever known before, he nodded to himself. He would stop the sacrifice if he could.

  From such selfish willfulness sprang martyrs, heroes, madmen, and…

  * * *

  —

  Targeted killings. The Zionists denied that they assassinated anybody. They called it something else and thought that made it different. Jamal Ashrawi thought they would kill him if they got the chance.

  So the Grand Mufti went around Hebron with his squad of guards. Some carried assault rifles, some RPGs. Ashrawi wished his people could get a Stinger—or even a Russian antiaircraft missile.

  None of his friends in high places had coughed up a missile. He resented that. He also resented being unable to get an Arab-made missile. The Americans manufactured them, and the Zionists, and the Russians. Godless, one and all.

  Muslims? The community of believers? Those who submitted to God? They lacked the know-how. Oh, the Iranians made missiles, but big, hulking things, descendants of Russian Scuds that were descendants of German V-2s. The ayatollahs bought the small ones from unbelievers, too. Why did God permit the embarrassment? He had His reasons, but they weren’t apparent to Jamal Ashrawi.

  If he looked north, he could almost watch the Jews profaning the Haram al-Sharif. The Dome of the Rock, the monument that marked Muhammad’s ascension to heaven, taken apart like a child’s toy made of blocks? Al-Aqsa Mosque, too? For what? So a lying Temple could go up where no Temple ever stood before! How did God tolerate such abominations?

  Ashrawi thought he knew. God would let the Jews triumph for a while to set up their downfall, and the Christians’ with them. In the end, Islam would prevail. But the waiting was hard! Humiliation, subjection—how could a proud folk find that easy, especially when it went on so long?

  Something mundane happened then: his phone rang. He took it off his belt. “Yes?” He didn’t give his name.

  “How is it with you, Haji?” An educated man speaking excellent classical Arabic with a slight mushy accent: an Iranian.

  Haji was safe enough—millions had made the pilgrimage. “I am well, God be thanked,” Ashrawi answered. “How is it with you and your martyred country?” Normally, Haji Jamal had little use for Iranians. But they’d tried to strike the Zionist entity—more than any Arab country had.

  “We still suffer…some confusion,” the other man answered. Ashrawi believed that. You couldn’t lose your president, your top mullah, and your top general without going into a tailspin. After a moment, the Iranian went on, “But we have not abandoned the fight. If Israeli raiders lurk inside our land, we shall root them out without mercy.”

  “That is good to hear.” But Jamal Ashrawi could not help murmuring, “Mene, mene, tekel upharsin.”

  “The Zionist dogs did that!” the Iranian exclaimed. “They try to shake our faith in God. But they fail.”

  “Good.”

  “We will bring you what you need for a distraction, and what you need for something more important,” the Iranian said. “You know of men with fire in the belly?”

  “Such men can be found, inshallah,” the Grand Mufti said. God willing gave a handy excuse if something went wrong.

  The Iranian knew that, too. “Some people need to remember that God works through men. What greater blasphemy than if men fail and then blame God?”

  “Send what you can,” Ashrawi said, wondering how foolhardy the plan would be. Martyrdom was martyrdom, but most people liked to think they gave up their lives in hope of striking God’s enemies.

  “Expect it soon,” the Iranian said, and the line went dead.

  Jamal Ashrawi muttered. Yes, the Iranians were still willing to fight the Zionists. But it sounded as if they were willing to fight to the last Palestinian.

  Well, the Grand Mufti thought, their own efforts failed. Maybe ours will do better. They couldn’t do much worse.

  * * *

  —

  Yitzhak Avigad looked from the Temple Mount to the Mount of Olives. He wasn’t paying attention to the golden domes of the Russian Orthodox church on the mountainside, or to the Jewish cemetery nearby. You could still be buried there, but it cost a not-so-small fortune.

  Tradition said that when the Messiah came to Jerusalem, he would round up the dead on the Mount of Olives and lead them into the city through the Gate of Mercy, also called the Golden Gate, on the east side of the Temple Mount. But the Golden Gate had been closed up for centuries.

  How God would get around the difficulty, Yitzhak had no idea. That God would…he grew more confident as the causeway stretched toward the Mount of Olives. They would sacrifice the red heifer. They would purify the Temple Mount, the Temple, and the men and implements who would serve there. And after that it would be up to God.

  “Mr. Avigad?”

  The question, in American English, made Yitzhak turn around. “Yes?” He needed a moment to recognize the pale, dumpy woman in the broad-brimmed hat. He hadn’t seen her since Kibbutz Ha-Minsarah, and a lot had happened since. “How are you, Miss—?”

  “Taylor. Barb Taylor. I didn’t expect you to remember—don’t worry.” Barb Taylor seemed resigned to being forgotten.

  Seeing as much made Yitzhak feel worse. “Sorry,” he said. That was a rare admission from an Israeli, so rare that people joked about it. “How are you?” He could make small talk—you had to when you dealt with people from the States—but he rarely wasted time on it here at home.

  “I’m well, thank you,” the American woman answered. “And so are you people.” Her wave took in t
he construction on the Temple Mount and the causeway. “It’s so exciting.”

  The trouble was, he knew what she meant. The Jews would rebuild the Temple, and then Jesus would come down and leave them out in the cold. Again. He thought she was full of crap.

  But she was full of crap in a sweet, polite way, so he didn’t tell her to piss up a rope. He just said, “I think so, too.” She could take that any way she wanted.

  And she did. Which only went to show that no good deed went unpunished. “You’re not the only one,” Barb Taylor said. “Lester Stark is here.” She didn’t sigh over the preacher’s name with the same reverence a kid would give the latest singing idol, but she came close.

  “I know,” Yitzhak said. “I’ve talked to him.”

  “I’m jealous. That must have been so interesting,” Barb said. Yitzhak managed a jerky nod. She continued, “It’s especially exciting because a lot of ministers are more…more pumped up, about everything that’s been going on than Reverend Stark is.”

  “Are they?” Yitzhak Avigad cared about the theological opinions of Christian preachers as much as he cared about the performance ratings of NFL quarterbacks. Zero equaled zero.

  Barb Taylor nodded anyway. “They sure are. So if Reverend Stark decided to come to the Holy Land, he must think the Last Days are close.” She looked up into the bright, brassy sky, as if expecting angels right now. When she didn’t get any, her shoulders sagged a little. She perked up in a hurry. “And if he thinks so, he’s likely right.”

  Yitzhak nodded again. He thought the Last Days were close, too. Whether his version matched Stark’s or Barb Taylor’s was a different story. “He’s also here with Brandon Nesbitt’s cohost, to finish the video work Brandon started before he…died,” Yitzhak said with malice aforethought.

  He didn’t faze Barb. “It’s Christian charity, helping poor Mr. Nesbitt finish his work after he’s gone.”

  Anyone who called Brandon poor Mr. Nesbitt had never dealt with him. He’d been a self-loving bastard his whole short life. Pointing out an obvious truth seemed safer: “Christian charity? Reverend Stark isn’t doing it from the goodness of his heart, you know.”

  “Well, sure.” Barb Taylor didn’t even blink. “Ministers can make a living like anybody else, can’t they? I mean, I don’t suppose Rabbi Kupferman is exactly poor, either.”

  Yitzhak didn’t think Kupferman was in the same league as Lester Stark when it came to cash. In other ways, he didn’t think Stark was in the same league as Kupferman. Still, no denying the plump American had a point of sorts. The Religious Affairs Minister wasn’t poor.

  Before Yitzhak could put that into words, he heard a whistle in the air, and then a sharp, harsh crump! down in the Kidron Valley between the Temple Mount and the Mount of Olives. A few seconds later, he heard the same thing again, this time closer. Dust and smoke sprang up where none had been before.

  “Those are funny noises,” Barb said. “Is one of the bulldozers down there having trouble? Sounds like it’s backfiring.”

  “Those are”—crump!—“mortar rounds.”

  “Somebody’s shooting?” Barb sounded incredulous, as if wondering how God could allow such a thing. Yitzhak was wondering, too. If Iranian missiles got swatted like flies, shouldn’t mortar rounds walking up to the Temple Mount?

  Of course they should. Only they weren’t. Crump! Those were big mortar rounds, too—they sounded like Russian 160mm jobs. Portable heavy artillery. Yitzhak looked around in raw fear. Up here on the Temple Mount, especially with the Muslim structures gone, you were alone with God under the sky. That was the stuff of exaltation…till somebody tried to blow you up.

  Crump! Yitzhak knocked Barb Taylor down. She squawked. He flattened out himself. Crump! A mortar bomb slammed the Temple Mount.

  Eric was fixing a sandwich when explosions rattled his windows. “What the hell?” he said. Explosions in the States were likely to be accidents. Here…

  “Mortars,” Orly said. “Big ones, too. Terrorists’ favorite toys.” Eric couldn’t have told a big mortar from a little one if his life depended on it (and, here, it might). Having a girlfriend who was a vet got strange sometimes.

  He looked at the bread and turkey loaf. His appetite wilted like the lettuce he’d been about to add. “We’d better find out what happened.”

  More crump!s punctuated Orly’s nod. “See what the Arabs did now.” She took terrorism for granted. She’d grown up in a country where it happened all the time.

  He wondered if she would head for the Temple Mount. The west Jerusalem apartment building was only a mile away. Nothing in Jerusalem was far from anything else—except Jews, Muslims, and Christians.

  But Orly flipped on the TV. She assumed anything horrible at the Temple Mount would cross the country in nothing flat. If it bleeds, it leads was as much a rule here as in L.A. or New York.

  She was right. Of course Israeli TV had crews all over the Temple Mount. The last time there was news as big as building the Third Temple was the sack of the Second Temple in 70 AD/CE. Eric didn’t suppose the attempted rebuilding during the brief reign of Julian the Apostate counted. If that partly restored Temple hadn’t burned down, though…

  Judaism wouldn’t look the same today. Eric wasn’t sure how it would have synthesized the sacrifice-based cult and the synagogue-based religion that grew after the Second Temple fell. An interesting question, but one that would never have an answer.

  Smoke and flames rising from a bulldozer in the valley between the Temple Mount and the Mount of Olives made ancient might-have-beens less urgent. “One man dead and two wounded by this 160mm mortar bomb,” a newsman gabbled. His voice was shrill and scared, the voice of somebody who’d just got shot at.

  Orly didn’t look smug. She knew what she knew—so well, she took it for granted.

  “Other bombs fell here in the valley and at the edge of the Temple Mount,” the Israeli newscaster said. “There are more casualties, and it is—” A helicopter thuttered by, loud enough to drown him out. Still sounding shaky, he tried again: “It’s worth noting that the Muslims didn’t hesitate to shell their third-holiest site.”

  This editorial brought to you by…Eric thought. But Israeli news was more objective than anything from other Middle Eastern countries. He couldn’t be too scornful. News in the USA also split right and left, leaving a chasm where the center used to be.

  “Fortunately, no rounds struck the causeway from the Temple Mount to the Mount of Olives,” the newsman said. “At least one did descend on the retaining wall that upholds the Temple Mount. Shell fragments and bits of flying stone wounded several people on the Mount.”

  The camera in the valley panned the eastern side of the supporting wall. The gap in the masonry looked bigger than one mortar round should have managed. Then Eric realized what had happened.

  “Talk about lucky shots,” he said. “They knocked down the masonry that’s closed the Golden Gate for so long.”

  Orly looked at him. Her expression seemed as ancient and unreadable as the ones on the cherubim that topped the Ark. “What makes you think it’s luck?” she asked.

  “Huh?” Eric said.

  “What makes you think it’s luck?” she repeated. “The Messiah enters Jerusalem through that gate. How can He if it stays closed?”

  “Wait,” Eric said. “You don’t think ISIS or Hezbollah or whoever is trying to help the Messiah, do you?”

  “I don’t care what they’re trying to do. I don’t think God cares, either.” Orly sounded weird, spooked. She was starting to believe in everything that was going on.

  Eric shook his head. That wasn’t the right way to say it. How could you not believe in what was happening? There it was. Believing in the hand of God…

  She might have picked that from his mind. “You still think this is coincidence, don’t you?”

  “I’m tryin
g to,” he answered.

  “Why?” she said. “When it gets this obvious, isn’t it easier to believe what you see and what’s behind it?”

  “Maybe for you. You take this place for granted. You can say plenty of things about the San Fernando Valley and the Westside, but the Holy Land they ain’t. I’m not used to God looking over my shoulder. I like to think I’m a free agent.” Even if I’ll never sign for millions. Eric didn’t say it. It wouldn’t have meant anything to Orly.

  “He’s looking any which way,” Orly said. “That’s what you need to get used to.”

  He knows when you’ve been sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows when you’ve been bad or good….Eric needed an effort to cut off the song inside his head. It was cute when you talked about Santa Claus—till you heard it selling everything from condoms to BMWs. When you talked about God and meant it literally, the overtones were different.

  Waaay different.

  Eric felt more like Big Brother is watching you than Santa Claus is coming to town. Except God didn’t need hidden cameras and secret police. You couldn’t hide from Him by gabbling the right phrases while you thought your thoughts in the privacy of your mind. You had no privacy from God.

  Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might. Not Thou hadst better. No compromise. No bargains. This was how it would be.

  The camera cut to the reopened Golden Gate. It wasn’t elegant, but Orly was right: it would do. “I’m so scared,” Eric said.

  She nodded. “Welcome to the club.”

  * * *

  —

  Lester Stark had no congregation before him. He didn’t like preaching without one, but you could do things in Birmingham you couldn’t in Jerusalem. The Israelis probably weren’t happy to have him preaching at all. They would put up with it, since this wasn’t aimed at them.

  “I take as my text today Romans 8:28,” he said into the camera. “We have seen it in action here lately. For those who don’t have the Bible open before them, I’ll quote it: ‘And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to his purpose.’