Alpha and Omega

by Harry Turtledove

  “Before all this started, I wouldn’t,” Eric answered. “Now? Who knows? If he can heal the sick and raise the dead”—and make the little girls talk out of their heads: a line from an old song—“maybe he’s genuine. Who knows anything any more except the Guy Upstairs?”

  “This is all getting too bizarre to stand. What are we supposed to do, anyway?” Orly said.

  “Order more champagne?” Eric suggested.

  “At room-service prices?” Orly said. “Did you rob a bank when I wasn’t looking, or has God driven you out of your mind?”

  “Yes.” Eric called room service and talked to a nice young lady who seemed eager to take his order…and money. Then he turned back to Orly. “We should put something on—for a little while, anyway.”

  “Spoilsport.” She threw on a robe. Eric got into another one.

  A guy from room service knocked on the door a minute and a half later. He wasn’t an Israeli; Eric guessed he came from India. Like developed countries all over, Israel had trouble filling a lot of low-level jobs with its own people. Relentless Israeli autonomy made service jobs extra tough.

  Eric handed him a U.S. five-dollar bill to make him disappear. The door had just closed when Orly got rid of the robe. “Trying to give him a bigger thrill than the tip?” Eric asked.

  “Who, me?” She sounded no more innocent than she had to. Then they got back to honeymooning.

  Why Eric didn’t roll over and go to sleep right afterwards, he couldn’t have said. He’d always hated doing anything he was supposed to do. Had his parents wanted him to be a Biblical archaeologist, he probably would have sold shoes.

  Orly started quietly snoring next to him. She had a smile on her face, which was nice. Champagne gave him a fine buzz. So did honeymooning. They went well together. This was a lot more fun than the quickie on Cyprus. Eric wondered why he hadn’t proposed sooner. Once bitten, twice shy—that summed it up.

  He turned CNN on again, softly, so he wouldn’t bother Mrs. Katz. How about that? he thought. He did some smiling of his own.

  The news network was still showing news. He hoped they wouldn’t get in trouble. A Congressman had been caught on tape soliciting a bribe. He swore he was innocent. There’d been a coup in an African country whose name the newsman couldn’t pronounce. Something was making flying fish in the central Pacific die. And…“The self-proclaimed Mahdi in Iran says he wants to go to Jerusalem,” the newsman said. “More after these messages…”

  “Hello, Jethro.” The Reverend Lester Stark tried to muster enthusiasm for his call-in show. Callers and listeners deserved it. If you started mailing it in, everybody would notice, and then you were in trouble. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Well, I want to know more about this Mahdi thing that’s been all over Twittter and Instagram lately. What kind of a Moslem superstition is it?” Jethro was calling from Alexandria, Louisiana. His accent said he hadn’t moved there recently.

  “I don’t like it when Muslims call our beliefs superstitions. I don’t want to pin that label on theirs, either,” Stark said. He’d done that while talking with Gabriela, but he wouldn’t with millions listening. Hypocrisy? Maybe.

  “There’s a difference,” Jethro said. “Christians believe what’s true, and Moslems don’t. It’s simple, isn’t it?”

  Lester Stark suspected Jethro was simple. He said no such thing. He just answered the question: “Muslims believe in the Mahdi the way Christians believe in the Second Coming. The Mahdi is the rightly guided one—they say—who will lead Islam to victory in a last battle.”

  “If that’s not superstition, what is it?” Jethro said.

  Religion, Stark thought. A cynical man, or a secular man, might say the two were the same. Recent events could make such a man think twice, though. “It’s what more than a billion people believe as strongly as you believe in the New Testament.”

  “But I’m right,” Jethro insisted.

  “Thanks for your call.” Stark disconnected him. Then he went on, “Now, believing in the Mahdi has been more a Shiite thing than a Sunni one, but more Sunnis lean that way these days. I don’t want to get into the differences between Sunnis and Shiites—that’s too complicated for this show. Think of them as being like the differences between Catholics and Protestants. The Sunnis say they’re more traditional. They say the Shiites are making it up as they go along. The Shiites say the Sunnis are just plain wrong.”

  That might get him a B on a Western Civ exam. He punched a button. “Our next caller is Jane, from Duluth, Minnesota. Go ahead, Jane.”

  “Thank you, Reverend,” the woman said. “How come this Mahdi is such a baby? He would hardly shave if he shaved at all.”

  Lester smiled. “I understood you. If you believe the Iranians, the answer is that the twelfth descendant of Ali, Muhammad al-Muntazar—the Expected One—was still young when he disappeared in Samarra in 878. So he’d be young now that he’s, uh, returned.”

  “What’s he going to do now that he’s come back?” Jane said.

  “He wants to come to Israel and meet with the boy here who the Jews think is the Messiah,” Stark answered.

  “What’ll happen if he does?”

  “They used to call that the sixty-four-dollar question,” Stark said. “I don’t know. Anybody who says he does is lying or talking through his hat, if you want my opinion.”

  “Will the Israelis let him come?” Jane persisted.

  “I don’t know that, either, and I’ve got sources in high places in the Israeli government.” Stark wasn’t lying, but Shlomo Kupferman wouldn’t talk about this. That miffed him, but he couldn’t do anything about it. “We’ll see how things play out.”

  “Can I ask you one more question?”

  “Quick.”

  “Do you think this Mahdi is genuine?”

  “I have no idea. The mullahs might put up somebody just to get their prestige back. I don’t believe God would like them to do that, but God can speak for Himself, as He’s made plain. If someone who isn’t genuine bumps up against Chaim Avigad, he’s liable to be sorry.”

  “I bet you’re right. Thank you, Reverend.”

  “Thank you. Our next caller is…Betty, from Oklahoma. Hello, Betty.”

  “Hello. Don’t you think people who aren’t Christians will go to hell, like the Bible says on account of they won’t be washed in the blood of the Lamb and accept Jesus Christ?”

  Thanks a lot, Betty, Stark thought. There was a question with dynamite in it. If he said yes, the Israelis might yank him off the air. If he said no, listeners back in the States would he angry. And if he hedged, didn’t he anger God?

  He did the best he could: “I believe that, yes. You need to believe in Christ to be saved. What God wants done in this world…I think He will make clear very soon now. Then everyone, of whatever religion, will have his or her faith tested.”

  “I won’t,” Betty said smugly. “I know what I believe, and I know it’s true.” She hung up.

  “God has already given us surprises. He may have more,” Stark warned. He wondered if she was still listening. Or had she got her licks in and then gone back to…To disapproving, the minister thought. And she’s good at it.

  He got through the show. The Israelis didn’t pull the plug on him. Betty’s question ate at him after the show was over. That didn’t happen every day. Usually, he walked away once the calls stopped coming.

  “How will it all turn out?” he asked his wife back in their hotel room.

  “We’ll see,” Rhonda said. “We’re lucky—we’re alive to see.”

  “With the resurrection of the dead, so will everyone else.” Lester grinned crookedly. “And it’s liable to get crowded, too.”

  “If God can bring the dead back to life, He can find a way to deal with that,” Rhonda said. Lester laughed and kissed her. Still, he wasn’t sure whic
h would be the bigger miracle.

  * * *

  —

  Yitzhak Avigad watched the Temple rise. Every time he went onto the Temple Mount, it was closer to finished. It wouldn’t be a modernized reconstruction of the Second Temple, but it came closer to that than to anything else.

  Most of the scars from the ISIS attack were gone. Some remained, at Shlomo Kupferman’s orders. “Let the world see that this Temple, like the others, was established through adversity,” he declared. “Let God also know why the blemishes remain.”

  God could figure that out with no help from Kupferman. So it seemed to Yitzhak, anyhow. The world wouldn’t give a damn. The world was still pissed at Israel for disassembling the Dome of the Rock. The world could…

  But even Yitzhak had to admit the world had a point in one way. The Temple would be massive, imposing, impressive. It would be God’s home on earth. The Dome of the Rock was beautiful.

  When the Arabs got over their snit, they could restore the beauty somewhere else. Then they could spend the next thousand years grumbling in their coffeehouses about how the Israelis had dispossessed them. Arabs were like that.

  So were Jews. Would Israel have come back to life if any people less stubborn tried to revive it? Yitzhak didn’t think so. When two stubborn peoples banged heads, they struck sparks.

  Then again, the Arabs might not have so long to grumble. That his nephew could be the Messiah had never crossed Yitzhak’s mind. But Chaim seemed to be. And the End of Days seemed to be rolling down on the world like a runaway freight.

  This alleged Iranian Mahdi…Yitzhak didn’t believe it. To him, the Iranians opened their mouths only to lie. That they might think the same about Israelis…proved to him they were anti-Semitic bastards.

  An engineering crew was taking down the causeway that had spanned the valley between the Temple Mount and the Mount of Olives. There were more soldiers guarding the work crew than men in it. Tanks poked cannon snouts this way and that. Helicopters darted overhead: dragonflies of death.

  Terrorists should have realized that messing with anything connected with the Temple wasn’t smart. Anybody who did didn’t know terrorists—so Yitzhak was convinced. The IDF agreed. He would have been astonished if it hadn’t.

  More Israeli soldiers came onto the Temple Mount. Yitzhak wondered if they were Chaim’s guards. His nephew’s life had turned upside down since he started raising the dead. It would have been worse if Chaim weren’t so good at putting his foot down. Nobody in Israel seemed anxious to push him, not when eighty-three percent of the people (according to the latest poll) thought he was the Messiah.

  But these soldiers were only guarding the U.S. Vice President. He had his own security men, too, in off-the-rack suits and worried looks. Yitzhak moved away. The security folks would have moved him anyway; they were determined to keep a perimeter around their man.

  How much did perimeters matter, when the End of Days might be coming? But the security weenies, Israeli and American, didn’t think that way. The Vice President had always needed protection. He always would. World without end, amen.

  Signs said the world wasn’t without end, though. There are more things in heaven and earth, Mr. Vice President, than are dreamt of in your foreign policy. Yitzhak shook his head. Maybe the world wasn’t going nuts when he started mangling Hamlet to himself, but he was.

  Following the Vice President came photographers and reporters. The Veep wouldn’t have known he was here if they weren’t along to tell him so. An Israeli soldier spoke to a buddy in Hebrew: “He wanted to see the Ark. We had to tell him no.”

  “I bet we did!” The second soldier laughed. They didn’t seem much older than Chaim to Yitzhak, though they had five years on him.

  If they’d used English, the American reporters would have been all over them. Refusing the Vice President anything came close to secular sacrilege. But when secular sacrilege met the religious kind, it lost. Jews had excluded gentiles from the holy precinct for forever, when they could get away with it.

  Pompey walked into the Holy of Holies in the first century BCE, and walked out amazed that it was empty. The Ark was gone by then, of course. Pompey might not have been so lucky in Jerusalem had he disturbed it. Or he might—who could guess God’s will? But the Third Temple had an outer courtyard where gentiles were permitted, as Herod’s Temple had had before. That was as far as the Vice President got.

  They set up a lectern for him there. He stood behind it and spoke in commonplaces. Yitzhak half listened as the phrases boomed out: “…this impressive building…” “…fulfillment of an ancient dream…” “…marking a new era…” “…memorable achievement…”

  He wasn’t wrong, just dull. If he weren’t dull, he might have ended up President. Then someone else in an expensive suit would have stood there sweating and mouthing clichés.

  When the Vice President finished, a reporter called, “What do you think about the Arabs who were dispossessed from the Temple Mount when Israel rebuilt the Temple?”

  The Vice President did a hell of an impression of a deaf man. A flack said, “No questions today.” Away the almost-great man went, handlers and guards holding others at bay.

  A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. A chill ran through Yitzhak. He didn’t have to change a word to make that bit of Macbeth fit too well.

  * * *

  —

  CNN was getting scary. The new Grand Ayatollah looked out of the TV at Eric. He yakked in Farsi. Eric could read it with a dictionary and patience, but didn’t speak it. A translator gave an English voiceover: “We invite the government of the Zionist entity to send a plane to Teheran to bring the Mahdi to Jerusalem so he may confront the so-called Messiah. Or, if the Zionist entity will permit it, we will fly him there. Any precautions the Zionists wish, including inspections or their own pilot, we accept. There is no God but God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of God, and Ali is the Friend of God.”

  A pretty, blow-dried CNN newsreader replaced the gray-bearded, turbaned ayatollah. What she had to say seemed anticlimactic: “No immediate comment from the Israeli government.”

  “What do you think?” Eric asked Orly. They were back at their apartment after the too-brief honeymoon. The air conditioner was on the fritz. It whined and delivered half as much cool air as it should have.

  “They never said anything like that before,” she answered. “They must think their kid is something.”

  “I guess,” Eric said. CNN cut away to a tape of the young man who claimed to be the Mahdi. Again, his eyes struck Eric: terrified and terrifying at the same time. Eric didn’t know what he was, but he was something out of the ordinary.

  Orly had her own question: “How many Mahdis have there been?”

  “Lots,” Eric said. “It’s such a handy-dandy title, anybody who wants to give his uprising some class calls himself the Mahdi.” The one people in the West remembered was the guy in the Sudan who’d given the British fits late in the nineteenth century. Kipling and Churchill and the movie Khartoum gave him a dose of immortality. But he wasn’t the only man who claimed the rank—or the most recent.

  “So why take this one seriously, then?” Orly said.

  Because of his eyes. But Eric couldn’t say that. He tried something else instead: “Because the times are messed up, and nothing, including the Second Coming, would surprise me any more.”

  To his amazement and dismay, Orly burst into tears. “Why did you have to say something like that?” she demanded.

  He took her in his arms. She didn’t push him away. She just clung to him. “What was I supposed to say?” he asked in honest distress.

  “Something that made me feel better, not made me worry more.”

  “Sorry. I thought you wanted a straight answer.”

  “I did.” Orly hiccuped. “But I wanted something that made me feel be
tter, too.”

  “Oh,” Eric said again. She was asking him for a miracle bigger than anything the Ark or Chaim Avigad had doled out till now. Telling her so appeared hazardous to his marital health.

  CNN switched to the disgraced, imprisoned founder of a company that went belly-up and left employees and stock owners holding the bag. He had colon cancer, and needed surgery. That struck Eric as fair punishment for an asshole. One more thing he didn’t say—he wasn’t sure Orly would get the joke.

  Then she made it herself. Eric almost dropped his teeth. He squeezed her till she squeaked. “What was that for?” she asked.

  “Because I love you,” he said. “Because you’re nuts the same way I am.”

  “Good. That will make things last.” Orly paused. Her smile melted. “If anything lasts, I mean.”

  “Yeah. If.” Eric probably wasn’t winning any Mister Grin competitions, either. How long had it been since people talked seriously about the end of the world? Hundreds of years (unless you were a Millerite, anyway). They talked about it and talked about it, and it didn’t happen, and they mostly decided it wouldn’t, so why worry?

  Except it looked more and more as if it would anyhow. What were people supposed to do about that?

  “You know what?” he said. “I’m scared out of my mind.”

  “Good.” Now she squeezed him. “You aren’t the only one.”

  * * *

  —

  “What are you going to do?” Shoshanah asked, her eyes wide.

  “I don’t know,” Chaim answered. “Get a falafel? I’m hungry.”

  She started to fix him one. “Doesn’t God tell you?”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” Chaim said. “I wish it did. It’d be a lot simpler.”

  “How does it work?” She handed him the pita and the balls of deep-fried chickpeas.

  He stuffed in salad and took a bite. Part of the fun of eating a falafel was getting it into you without making a mess. Israelis quickly developed the knack. You could tell a tourist by what he wore on the front of his shirt. The bite gave Chaim time to think—and to notice one (or several) of his ghosts remembering how falafel tasted. How did you explain something that happened without words?