Alpha and Omega

by Harry Turtledove

  Yitzhak thought Muhammad al-Muntazar looked even younger in person than in his pictures. An older Iranian in robe and turban—handler, interpreter, or maybe both—followed him. One Israeli bigwig standing on the tarmac was fluent in Farsi—he’d been born in Teheran. Yitzhak wasn’t, but he assumed Muhammad also understood Arabic.

  He decided to find out, saying, “In the name of God, welcome to Israel.”

  And the kid answered, “In the name of God, I thank you.” He spoke classical Arabic with a mushy Farsi accent. “You will be the Jewish Messiah’s uncle.”

  “That’s right.” Yitzhak wondered how he knew. Had he been briefed? Or did he just…know? His eyes suggested the latter. Seeing those eyes, Yitzhak wondered about the so-called tag. They were half exalted, half terrified: the eyes of someone who’d seen much too much of something great and terrible. They looked a lot like Chaim’s, in other words.

  Introductions followed. The Israeli who spoke Farsi did the honors for his country’s VIPs. Muhammad presented the older Iranian as Ayatollah Ali Bakhtiar. “He can also translate,” he said.

  “How many Iranians speak Hebrew?” Yitzhak asked in his own language.

  “Not many, but I am one.” Bakhtiar’s accent was thick, but no worse than those of plenty of Israelis. Switching languages, he went on, “I also use English.” He switched again: “Or Arabic, like you.”

  “You are a scholar,” Yitzhak said politely.

  “Your nephew’s not here?” Ali Bakhtiar didn’t want to call Chaim the Messiah, no matter what Muhammad al-Muntazar said.

  “No. He’s back at the Temple Mount.” Yitzhak stuck to Hebrew, and to a name Muslims disliked.

  The Iranian ayatollah didn’t say anything except, “Then let us go there, and see what happens then.”

  “Is that what you want?” Yitzhak asked Muhammad al-Muntazar. Then, realizing the kid wouldn’t have followed his conversation with Bakhtiar, he added, “To go straight to the Haram al-Sharif?” When he spoke Arabic, he used its name for the place.

  “Yes,” Muhammad answered. “That is what I came for.”

  Most of the Israelis knew enough Arabic to get by. When your neighbors spoke the same tongue, you picked up some. The Prime Minister opened the limo door with his own hands. “Then let’s go,” he said.

  They’d cleared the highway between the airport and Jerusalem. Yitzhak had no idea how, but they had. Maybe Chaim asked, he thought uneasily. God might listen to his nephew.

  Several limos, all looking just like this one, wove in and out among escorting motorcycles. That would make it harder for somebody with an RPG to blast the right one. Yitzhak hoped so, anyhow.

  The limo was the quietest car he’d ever been in. All the same, he heard helicopters whirring overhead. Israel was taking no chances on letting anything happen to the Expected One.

  Muhammad al-Muntazar didn’t say much. He peered out through the limo’s tinted windows. What was he thinking? Nobody had the nerve to disturb him. Yitzhak knew he didn’t.

  Traffic made everybody slow as the motorcade got into Jerusalem. Maybe not even God could clear all the cars there. Whether He could or not, He didn’t choose to.

  When Muhammad murmured in Farsi, Yitzhak eyed Ali Bakhtiar. “He says, ‘This is the place,’ ” the older Iranian said.

  Yitzhak nodded. For better and worse, Jerusalem had been the place for 3,000 years now.

  Into the Old City. Soldiers were everywhere. If ISIS had stolen uniforms, the way they’d got hard hats before…

  Nobody started shooting. The soldiers were soldiers. The limos drove to the Western Wall. Some Orthodox Jews, rejecting the new Temple, kept praying there and sticking written prayers into the cracks between Herod’s huge stones.

  Troops kept the praying men away from the cars. The limos went up the ramp that led to the Temple Mount. Muhammad al-Muntazar sucked in his breath when he got his first look at the Temple.

  Ayatollah Ali Bakhtiar flared his nostrils. “You tore down the Dome of the Rock for that?” he said. “You should be ashamed.”

  “When we want art criticism, we will ask for it,” the Prime Minister said. “And we didn’t tear it down. We took it apart so it could go up somewhere else. That’s more respect than Muslims ever gave our monuments.”

  “Enough, both of you, please,” Muhammad said in Arabic. He wasn’t supposed to know Hebrew. Maybe he was good at reading tone. Or maybe God was giving him the gift of tongues.

  The limo stopped. The others already had, to form a perimeter around it. Terrorists would want to shoot the Prime Minister. And some Israelis, Yitzhak admitted to himself, wouldn’t mind taking out Muhammad al-Muntazar.

  “Well,” the Mahdi said, and opened the door. He got out first. The other dignitaries and Yitzhak followed.

  Soldiers, a TV crew, a radio crew, and still photographers had also gone up onto the Temple Mount. Muhammad paid no attention to them. His eyes were on a small figure standing alone in the Court of the Gentiles. Tears blurred Yitzhak’s sight for a moment. His nephew wasn’t quite man-tall yet. Did it matter? In the ways that mattered, Chaim was a lot bigger than any other man alive, even without his half-visible cloud of ghosts.

  “I will go to him,” Muhammad al-Muntazar said, as if someone had told him he couldn’t. He hurried toward Chaim.

  Ali Bakhtiar started after him. Muhammad said something in Farsi. The ayatollah answered. Muhammad said something else. Bakhtiar’s shoulders sagged. Muhammad went on alone.

  “Muhammad told him to stay here. He asked how Muhammad would speak to the Messiah,” said the Israeli who spoke Farsi. “Muhammad told him God would let them talk. What do you say to that?”

  “I don’t know. What do you say to that?” Yitzhak returned.

  Ali Bakhtiar said. “You don’t. You let the Mahdi do as he thinks he must—no matter how foolish it is.”

  Yitzhak pointed to Chaim. “A lot of things my nephew’s done lately make me feel the same way.” He hadn’t expected to sympathize with an ayatollah, but he did. Things were out of their hands now. Whatever would happen, it was with the kids.

  And God.

  * * *

  —

  Chaim watched Muhammad al-Muntazar walk across the Temple Mount toward him. He envied the Iranian’s beard, even if it was thin. His own cheeks yielded only fuzz. It was slightly darker than it had been a year earlier, but it wasn’t whiskers.

  He wondered if he’d been wrong when he browbeat Kupferman into letting Muhammad come here. He’d been so sure something important would happen…but maybe not. He knew he was nothing but a human being. He had feelings about what God wanted, but he didn’t know. How could you know God? God was too big for that.

  That’s what I should have told Shoshanah, Chaim thought. He didn’t know her as well as he wanted to, either, and she was a girl. (He almost thought just a girl, but Shoshanah wasn’t just to him.) If you couldn’t know another person that way, could you know God?

  Maybe the Mahdi would tell him.

  Standing there and letting Muhammad al-Muntazar come to him might be rude. He walked toward the Iranian and held out his hand. “Peace be unto you,” he said.

  “And to you also peace.” Muhammad took Chaim’s hand.

  What language were they using? Chaim didn’t wonder till afterwards. They understood each other—he knew that. What else mattered?

  “So,” he said. “He’s chosen you, too.”

  The Mahdi nodded. “He has. I’m supposed to hate you, you know. Even the rocks and the trees are supposed to cry out against Jews when the Last Battle comes.”

  “We don’t love Muslims, either, or Iranians,” Chaim said. “But how can I hate you? I never had a brother, and now I do.”

  Muhammad al-Muntazar gave him a wry grin. “Misery loves company, right?”

  “Right!” Chaim ex
claimed. “This is wonderful, what God did with us—did to us—but it’s miserable, too, and He has to know it. We’ll never be ordinary again.” He thought about Job once more, and everything that had happened to him so God could make a point. Did Muhammad al-Muntazar know about Job? Chaim asked him.

  “Yes. The Qur’an speaks of him. He was a great prophet. Satan afflicted him, but he stayed fast to God and was rewarded in the end,” the Iranian said.

  “He got wealth. He got a new family. But all the people who died to test him stayed dead,” Chaim said.

  “Did they? The Qu’ran says his people were restored to him,” Muhammad said. “Still, I don’t know if that means his dead kinfolk were brought back to life or if he got new ones.”

  “The Bible says he got new ones. And the ones who died scare me,” Chaim said. “They have for a while now. God worried about Job and took care of him. But what about the others? What did they do to deserve to die like that?”

  “Maybe they were sinners,” Muhammad said uncertainly.

  “Nothing in the Bible says so,” Chaim answered. “Does anything in the Qur’an?” The Mahdi shook his head. Chaim went on, “God does what He wants to people, and what they want doesn’t count.”

  “Do you want to escape God’s will?” Muhammad sounded shocked.

  “Don’t be silly. I can’t. God will do whatever He wants to do. But it’s liable to be hard on a lot of people.”

  “Before I got here, I thought it would be hard on Jews and Christians, not on Muslims,” Muhammad al-Muntazar said. “Now…I don’t know.”

  “I don’t, either. We have to wait and see.” Something else occurred to Chaim. “God is good at waiting and seeing. The Ark waited 2,600 years before He let anybody see it again. Do you want a look at it?”

  “Is that all right?” Muhammad asked. “Don’t you Jews keep people who aren’t Jews away from it?”

  “Sure, but that doesn’t count with you. If God didn’t want you to, He wouldn’t have let you get this far. C’mon.” As Chaim led the Mahdi into the Temple, he wondered whether Rabbi Kupferman would have a stroke by the time they came out. Chaim had broken the rules, going into the Holy of Holies to get the Ark when ISIS attacked the Temple. Now he was breaking them again. It wasn’t that he didn’t care: more that he thought he had to break them to do the right thing.

  “I’ve seen photos of the Dome of the Rock,” Muhammad remarked as they walked through an opening in the Soreg—a stone partition a little more than a meter high (three cubits high, Kupferman insisted on saying) that surrounded the sanctuary. “My keeper is right. That building is more beautiful than this one.”

  “Your keeper?” Chaim echoed.

  “Ayatollah Bakhtiar. He is clever and pious, so he thinks he can take care of me.” Muhammad sniffed. “Only God has that right.”

  Chaim hid a grin. The ayatollah sounded like Shlomo Kupferman. “I know what you mean,” he said. They strolled through the Women’s Court, the Men’s Court, and the Levites’ Court. In the Priests’ Court, in front of the Temple itself, stood the altar. “Pretty soon we’ll start sacrificing again.”

  “You don’t sound happy about it,” Muhammad said.

  “I’m not,” Chaim admitted. “After what they did to Rosie…” He explained about the red heifer. But then he added, “If that hadn’t happened, would I have found I can raise the dead? It’s God again, doing what He wants.”

  “Yes, that has to be a miracle,” the Mahdi agreed. By now, Chaim had his raised ghosts under enough control that they often weren’t obvious to most people around him. Some could still tell they were there. Chaim wasn’t surprised Muhammad al-Muntazar, also touched by God, would sense them. The Iranian went on, “Before I got here, I would have guessed it was Satan’s miracle.”

  “And now?” Chaim asked tartly.

  “Now I have seen you and talked to you.” Muhammad touched a forefinger to his forehead: an odd little salute. “Now I know better.”

  “Okay. I wondered about you,” Chaim said. “I wondered if you were a phony.”

  As he had, the Mahdi asked, “And now?”

  “Now I know better, too,” Chaim agreed. “God did this to both of us. We’ve got to make the best of it—if we can.”

  They went up the stairs and into the Holy Place. The gold menorah and the gold-covered table for showbread already stood there, taken from the museum in the Old City. Tall, narrow sunbeams lanced through the south-facing windows. Despite them, the Holy Place remained gloomy.

  Two golden cherubim ornamented the first curtain hanging between the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies. Chaim parted it and stepped through, Muhammad following. The inner curtain was similarly adorned. “Ready?” Chaim’s voice dropped to a whisper.

  “Yes.” Muhammad’s was no louder.

  Chaim passed through the inner curtain. Again, Muhammad was only a pace behind him. The Holy of Holies should have been pitch-black. No windows pierced the walls. The two thick hangings between the Holy of Holies and the brighter Holy Place outside should have soaked up the light that tried to get through.

  But the Ark shone with no light on it. Chaim wondered if it had done that before the archaeologists found it. He supposed he could ask Kupferman. Then he shook his head. He could ask one of the archaeologists. Maybe the American with the cute girlfriend who was also an archaeologist. No, she was his wife now.

  Muhammad al-Muntazar slowly nodded. “It is a thing of God, and from God. I wondered about that, too. The Black Stone in the Ka’aba in Mecca must be like it.”

  “I don’t know. I won’t argue with you, though.” Chaim hadn’t thought anything about Islam was true. The further this went, the more complicated everything looked.

  He wondered if that was what growing up was all about.

  The Mahdi sounded shy as he asked, “May I…touch it?” Chaim needed a second before he knew where he’d heard that longing before: in his own mouth, when he was talking with Shoshanah.

  This was more dangerous than a girl was for a shy boy. “Don’t ask me. Ask God,” Chaim said. “The Ark killed a man who didn’t believe what it could do. If God doesn’t want you to touch it, it will kill you, too.”

  Muhammad dropped to his knees and touched his forehead to the floor of the Holy of Holies. Jews didn’t pray that way. But wasn’t what your heart held more important than how you showed it? Chaim thought so. Would God?

  After a minute or so, the Mahdi got to his feet. His face was calm, even exalted. “I will do it,” he declared. “If I die, it is God’s will. Tell Ali Bakhtiar I said so.”

  That made Chaim gulp. What would happen if he came out alive and Muhammad didn’t? Nothing good. The Iranians would hit the ceiling in fourteen places. They might start throwing rockets again. If they didn’t, their Hezbollah stooges in Lebanon would.

  “There is no God but God,” Muhammad al-Muntazar said. He touched the Ark of the Covenant as reverently, as gently, as Chaim touched Shoshanah. The Mahdi turned back to Chaim with a broad, relieved smile on his face. “I live!”

  “The Lord our God, the Lord is one,” Chaim said. As Muhammad had left out the Muslim part of the shahada, so he left out the Jewish part of the Shma. It seemed…right. He didn’t realize he would do it till he already had.

  He really wanted to talk to Muhammad about girls. The Mahdi was older. He had to be more experienced. But the Holy of Holies was the wrong place, and this was the wrong time. Too bad.

  “Maybe we better get back,” he said instead.

  “Probably a good idea,” Muhammad agreed. “Those are the TV pictures Iran is waiting to see.”

  “Who isn’t?” Chaim answered, and Muhammad nodded.

  When they got out where the cameras could see them again, they turned toward each other. They smiled and clasped hands once more. If this photo isn’t everywhere in the world tonight, I’ll be su
rprised, Chaim thought. But he didn’t expect to be—and he wasn’t.

  * * *

  —

  Eric’s ring tone was the Dragnet theme. Orly’s came from an Israeli hip-hop track. This call, the night after the Messiah met the Mahdi, was his. Dum-da-dum-dum! Dum-da-dum-dum-dummm! He grabbed the phone off the nightstand. “Eric Katz.”

  “Eric, it’s Yoram. You home?”

  “Yoram! What’s up?” Eric hoped he sounded as pleased as he was. Yoram Louvish had fallen off the map lately.

  He didn’t answer any of Eric’s questions. Instead, he asked, “You home?” again.

  “We sure are. Both of us,” Eric said.

  “Can I come over?” the Israeli archaeologist asked. “Never can tell who listens to phones.”

  Yoram wants to come by, Eric mouthed to Orly. When she nodded, he said, “Sure. Give us fifteen minutes to straighten up.”

  “See you then,” Yoram said, and the line went dead.

  “What does he want?” Orly asked.

  “Don’t know. He didn’t want to say on the phone,” Eric answered. Not that you couldn’t tap a phone. But Yoram Louvish was about as far from an enemy of Israel as you could get. If he thought somebody was listening in…

  “Has he gone ’round the bend?” Orly asked, which summed up what Eric was thinking.

  He shrugged. “Beats me. We’ll both find out.”

  The straightening was halfhearted. Orly had never heard of Martha Stewart, and Eric couldn’t stand her. Books and papers made up most of the mess—and the décor. Where mess stopped and décor started wasn’t obvious.

  Yoram knocked fifteen minutes later on the dot. He shook hands with Eric and hugged Orly and kissed her on the cheek. “Haven’t thrown him out yet?” he said.

  “He has entertainment value,” Orly answered.

  Eric didn’t know whether to be annoyed or proud. “Can I get you a beer?” he asked Yoram.

  “Oh, God, yes!” the archaeologist said, as if he’d been wandering through the desert the past forty years. Eric took out three Goldstars. He and Orly sipped theirs. Yoram half-emptied his. That wasn’t his usual style.