Alpha and Omega

by Harry Turtledove

  “We all have to do what we think is right,” Lester said.

  “Sure,” Kupferman replied. “But do you have to make so much noise doing it?” Lester didn’t learn how to talk to Chaim Avigad.

  * * *

  —

  You could get a good pizza in Jerusalem—if you topped it with olives and onions and eggplant and peppers and mushrooms. Sausage and pepperoni were out. Eric missed them. But even a veggie pizza improved when washed down with a Goldstar.

  Eric stared at the beer. “I want to drink twelve of these.”

  “You’d kill yourself.” Orly sounded alarmed. Like most Israelis, she drank moderately.

  “Nah.” He shook his head. “I’d just have a hangover in the morning.” After a dozen beers, it would be painful, too, but not lethal. He went on, “And while I was smashed out of my skull, I wouldn’t have to think about everything.”

  “It would still be there when you sobered up. What’s the point?” Orly proved she’d never been a serious drinker.

  Neither had Eric…except, briefly, in the bad time after his first marriage blew up. “The point is, you don’t have to worry for a while. That’s not always bad.”

  “If you say so.” She thought he was out of his mind. “Besides, why worry? If that kid’s the Messiah, it’s the most wonderful thing that ever happened, at least since Moses.”

  “Yeah.” Eric finished the beer and waved for another one. He wouldn’t drink twelve, but he needed reinforcements. “Wonderful. Maybe I’m too secular for my own good. I’m not ready for the End of Days, if that’s what this is.”

  “If the End of Days is ready for you, big deal,” Orly said. “I’m secular, too. I was. If God waves His hand in the sky, I won’t pretend it’s not there. How dumb is that?”

  “Pretty dumb, probably…Thanks.” That last was to the waitress. He took a pull from the new bottle—something Americans did more often than Israelis. “But—”

  “But what?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. I’m weirded out. I admit it. I never figured I’d be in the middle of…this.” His wave took in more than the pizza joint.

  “You came to Israel because you wanted to dig up stuff about the Bible, not because you wanted to meet the author,” Orly said.

  “Bingo!” Eric nodded. “You put it better than I could have.” They were speaking Hebrew, but she did it in English, too. Some people were natural tennis players. Orly was a natural talker. Eric wished he had the gift.

  She gave him a crooked smile. “It’s what I asked you before. Even if this isn’t why you came here, will you pretend God’s not up there waving?”

  I sure want to went through Eric’s mind. Of course he did. He liked the life he’d been living. He’d figured he would like it even more once he and Orly tied the knot, too. For someone who’d already rolled the dice once and lost, that was a great feeling. Maybe it was selfish of him to put his own desires ahead of those of the Old Testament Deity who’d manifested Himself again after a bimillennial catnap, but…

  And maybe doing all the things he’d done without thinking twice wasn’t smart. The Old Testament God took rules seriously. Which meant…“Hey!” Eric said.

  “Hey, what?” Orly said. “Is it a joke?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Let’s get married right away.”

  She looked at him, then at the Goldstar. “See what happens when you start drinking? You talk silly.”

  “One beer and a swig isn’t drinking.” Eric set his hand on hers. “I mean it. C’mon—I was gonna get the guts up to ask you soon. I did it now because…If we’re going to do this stuff, and if God is watching, we ought to be married, right?”

  “How romantic!” Orly exclaimed. How sarcastic! Eric thought. But she didn’t get up and stomp off. “You know what?” she said. “That may be a good reason to get married, the way things are now.”

  “Uh-huh.” Now Eric nodded. “But I can give you a better one, the real one.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Which is?”

  “Because I love you.”

  “That’s better,” she agreed. “We wouldn’t be doing that stuff if we didn’t feel that way, would we?” She raised an eyebrow. “You’d probably want to, but what do you know? You man, you.”

  “Babe, sex is a good thing.” Eric laughed at himself. Plato and Aristotle and Spinoza needed to watch themselves; a new philosopher was loose. He added, “It’s better when you love the other person. Otherwise, you might as well play with yourself.”

  “I won’t tell you you’re wrong,” Orly said. “We can start arguing after we get married.”

  He grinned. Then the grin slipped. That wasn’t so good, not when he was gazing at his beloved. “If we have to take the Old Testament seriously again, we really will have to watch that stuff.”

  Orly’s lip curled. “I’m surprised this Lester Stark hasn’t already started braying about it like a jackass,” she said.

  “He’s not as bad as a lot of them,” Eric said.

  “Oh, joy.” She sounded unenthusiastic.

  “Well, he isn’t.” Eric wasn’t enthusiastic, either. He did add, “I bet he’s at least as tolerant as Kupferman.”

  “Oh, joy,” Orly said again. “Talk about picking your poisons…” No, she didn’t like the Religious Affairs Minister. “And one of his people has a hold on the kid who can raise the dead.”

  “That’s the kid’s uncle, isn’t it?” Eric said. “The kid started out ultra-Orthodox, I know.”

  “Uh-huh. I wonder how he feels now,” Orly said.

  “Confused,” Eric guessed. “Why should he be different? Aside from raising the dead and everything.”

  “Yeah. Aside from that.” Orly clicked her tongue between her teeth. “I’d rather not think about that. If we’re going to talk about getting married, we should talk, right?”

  “Makes sense,” Eric allowed. “Should be simple. We’re old enough, we’re Jewish, we want to. What’s the problem?”

  He didn’t think there’d be one, which showed what he knew. “Ha!” Orly said. “You’re a foreigner, remember? The only way to get married here is through the Marriage Rabbinate.”

  “Oy!” Eric said.

  “You need to bring your passport to their office on Koresh Street. You need a letter from your community saying you really are a Jew. If you can get it, you need your mother’s ketubah.”

  “Oy!” Eric said again, louder. “Her Jewish marriage certificate? I don’t think she’s got one. She ran off with my father and got married in Vegas.”

  “They may let you scrape through without it,” Orly said. “Then you fill out a form—and pay for it—and go to the chief rabbi’s office to get your rabbi approved and a stamp on the form saying he is.”

  “Marriage by bureaucracy!” Eric said. “Tell me you’re making this up, please.”

  “Who, me? No way,” Orly replied. “Once you get that taken care of, you set up a court date—”

  “Oy!” This time, Eric said it loud enough to make people give him dubious looks. “Why do I need a court date?”

  “So you can have two relatives or friends swear you’re Jewish. Guys—the court doesn’t always recognize women. Sexist idiots. They’re as bad as God.” She sent a defiant stare heavenwards, as if defying Him to strike her dead. He didn’t.

  “How do you know so much about this?” Eric asked.

  “I found out, in case I ever needed to know,” Orly answered demurely. “I could go on—there are another couple of steps.”

  Eric muttered darkly. “Suppose this is too much hassle? What do people do then?”

  “Go to Cyprus,” Orly said. “On Cyprus, you have to be breathing and have enough money for fees. Past that, nobody cares.”

  “How do you feel about it?” Eric asked.

  She shrugged. “
It seems more official if you do it here. But it’s a lot quicker there. I could go either way.”

  “Let’s head for Cyprus and make it legal,” Eric said. “We can do it the fancy way when we’ve got time. How’s that sound?”

  “Should work,” Orly said. “But I think we’d better do the formal ceremony as soon as we can, too.”

  “In case the world ends?” Eric said with a wry grin.

  Orly nodded. “In case the world ends.” She wasn’t joking.

  * * *

  —

  Chaim liked it on the Temple Mount. He couldn’t be alone with his thoughts there or anywhere else. But not many people had been buried up there. He didn’t have more and more souls crowding in on him while he was there.

  And he’d got some control over the ones he already had. He never would have imagined he could if he hadn’t screamed at the Orthodox men rushing him. The ghosts paid attention, too.

  He had to scream, literally or mentally, to get them to notice him. Otherwise, they did what they wanted to do. It was like…he didn’t know what. Uncle Yitzhak had suggested trying to control a restive horse. Chaim didn’t want to say yes or no. All he knew about horses was that they weren’t kosher.

  It reminded him of wrestling with somebody as strong as he was. He and the rest of the ritually pure boys had squabbled. They were boys and they’d grown up together. It was a wonder they hadn’t beaten one another’s brains out.

  When he was strong enough, he could call spirits front and center, and talk with them after a fashion. One remembered stopping a Turkish bullet in 1918. “Bloody ’ell, myte, I didn’t expect a sheeny kid’d be the one wot brought me back,” the spirit said in English of a sort.

  “What did you expect?” Chaim asked.

  “Jesus, I suppose, or maybe nobody.” The dead British soldier laughed at himself. “You ain’t neither one.”

  “Well, no,” Chaim said.

  “So that’s wot I get.” The soldier’s Cockney accent was so thick, Chaim could barely understand it. “I got my ’ead blowed off, an’ when it’s Judgment Day you sure ain’t Who I expected.”

  “That’s all right,” said Chaim. “I didn’t expect this to happen, either.”

  Another ghost or spirit who came up front and center used a Hebrew so archaic it was almost a foreign language to Chaim. An American trying to make out what Chaucer was saying, a modern Greek trying to follow Homer, would have understood the problem. The ancient Jew had as much trouble figuring out the modern world.

  “Then this is yet the Kingdom of Judah?” he asked.

  “This is Israel,” Chaim answered.

  “The northern kingdom, the false line, have conquered the true, holy realm?” The ancient Jew sounded horrified.

  “No.” Chaim was saying that a lot. Nobody understood what was going on. He tried to explain that Israel wasn’t a kingdom, and what a democracy was.

  “God alloweth this? God hath said it is acceptable unto Him? Without an anointed king, how can you flourish?” The long-dead soul didn’t get it.

  “These days, just about all countries are democracies. Even the ones that aren’t pretend they are,” Chaim said.

  “Impiety! God will smite them!” The ancient Jew seemed very sure. Chaim couldn’t tell him he was nuts. He didn’t know that. Everything that had happened lately made him wonder whether the old soul didn’t know just what he was talking about.

  Chaim felt the dead everywhere he went—and everywhere meant everywhere. He got dreadfully constipated the first couple of days after acquiring his supernatural entourage. Then he let nature take its course. It was either that or explode. All these souls had done the same thing when they were alive.

  He had to go on eating, too. He went back to that falafel stand in the middle of the Old City. He had soldiers for escorts now, but they didn’t drive away any customers. They ate falafel themselves, packing pitas full of salad and the crunchy, greasy balls of deep-fried chickpeas. They were as sloppy as he was.

  The soldiers didn’t chat up the proprietor’s granddaughter. Don’t bother the Messiah’s friend. He had trouble believing he was the Messiah. If he was, orders like that were the first good thing he’d found.

  Her name was Shoshanah, which chilled him. Unlike the red heifer, she had a last name, too: Mazar. She was two and a half years older than he was. She wanted to be a doctor. Chaim hadn’t thought about what he wanted to be. When you were raised in ritual purity, you didn’t have many choices.

  “Don’t be silly,” she told him when he remarked on that. “You’ve got—what you’ve got.” Her wave encompassed Chaim’s ghostly retinue. “What do you need an ordinary job for when you can raise the dead?” She blinked. She had amazingly long eyelashes. “If you can raise the dead, maybe I’d be wasting my time learning to be a doctor.”

  “I don’t think so,” Chaim said. “They aren’t all the way back.”

  “They’re closer than anybody else can get them,” Shoshanah said. “I think that’s amazing. I think you’re amazing.”

  “Wow,” Chaim said. Shoshanah thought he was amazing. He thought she was wonderful because she noticed him. His thinking she was wonderful made her notice him more and think he was more amazing, which made him….Engineers would have called it a feedback loop. Chaim didn’t care about anything but a black-eyed girl who sold falafel.

  * * *

  —

  The time difference between Israel and the USA was between seven and ten hours. A call-in radio show that started at six P.M. on the East Coast began at one the next morning in Israel. Stark didn’t like night-owl hours, but he didn’t want to give up the show, either. Espresso kept him going.

  “Here’s Melvin from Visalia,” his go-between said. “You’re talking with Lester Stark, Melvin. Go ahead.”

  “Reverend Stark?” Melvin seemed unclear on the concept.

  “That’s me,” Lester said—he’d dealt with plenty of people like this. “How are you today, Melvin? What’s on your mind?”

  “Reverend, where’s the Rapture?” Melvin said. “If the Messiah’s here, how come all the good Christians didn’t get swept up into the air like it says in the Bible?”

  “Good question,” Lester Stark replied. “It’s the question that’s troubling me and a lot of other ministers right now.”

  “What’s the answer?” Melvin asked. “Bible’s mighty plain about this. I mean, First Thessalonians says what it says.”

  “Let me quote it, for people in their cars with no Bible handy. This is First Thessalonians, 4:16–17: ‘For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: And the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air: And so we shall ever be with the Lord.’ ”

  “I don’t see anybody caught up into the clouds,” Melvin said. “And that kid doesn’t look like he’s raising up the dead in Christ. Seems like he’s raising anybody who gets near him. So what’s going on, anyway?”

  “Melvin, anybody who answers that now is going out on a limb,” Stark said. “I see several possibilities. One is that the main show hasn’t started yet. Maybe the trumpet will sound and we will go up into the clouds soon.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” Melvin didn’t sound as if he believed it.

  “Or the coming of the Jewish Messiah may not be the second coming of Jesus Christ,” Lester said. “Maybe God has one plan for Jews and another one for Christians.”

  “Nothing about that in the Bible,” Melvin said darkly.

  “It depends. If you take the Old Testament as applying to Jews and the New Testament to Christians, you can make a case,” Lester Stark answered. Nobody would have tried to make that case before all this started happening, but people always viewed Scripture through the
lens of history.

  “I always believed the New Testament was supposed to sit on top of the Old Testament, not alongside of it, like.” No, Melvin wasn’t convinced.

  “Here’s another possibility for you,” Lester said. “The Jews may have the right view of things, and we may have the wrong one.”

  “You don’t believe that!” Now Melvin sounded horrified. You’d better not believe that! was what he meant.

  “I don’t,” Stark said. “But if it proves true, I will praise the Lord and accept that I didn’t understand His ways in fullness.”

  “I won’t,” Melvin said. Was that stubbornness or anti-Semitism or one from Column A and one from Column B? The latter, Stark suspected. His caller went on, “What do you believe?”

  Lester Stark didn’t like coming right out with it, not here in Israel. It enraged local authorities. He answered, “As I’ve said before, it is possible that this boy’s miraculous powers spring from Satan rather than God. I don’t know that they do, but it’s possible. In that case—”

  “The kid’s the Antichrist!” Melvin burst out.

  Relief filled Stark. He hadn’t had to say that himself, on a broadcast the Israelis were bound to be listening to. But shame swamped the relief. Matthew 27:11 sprang to mind. After Jesus was arrested, Pilate asked Him, “Art thou the King of the Jews?”

  “Thou sayest,” Jesus answered.

  Thou sayest, Melvin, Lester thought unhappily.

  Melvin wasn’t unhappy—oh, no. “Sure makes sense to me, Reverend,” he said. “Thanks a lot. I wasn’t sure you’d have the guts to say the word, but you did. God bless you! ’Bye!”

  I didn’t—you did, Stark thought. But it amounted to the same thing. If he was going to say it, he should have said it openly instead of giving hints and letting someone else take the heat.

  “Our next caller is Lucille. She lives in North Little Rock,” the go-between said. “Go ahead, Lucille.”

  “Thanks.” Unlike Melvin, Lucille got down to business: “If this boy is the Antichrist, what can we do about him? Shouldn’t we try and get rid of him before he gets his full strength?”