Alpha and Omega

by Harry Turtledove

  The Israeli camera went to Muhammad al-Muntazar and Chaim Avigad. “Muhammad looks as amazed as Shlomo Kupferman,” Gabriela said. “The rabbi’s astonished this is happening at all. I’d say Muhammad is at least as astonished it’s happening in a Jewish place of worship. That adds another layer to his surprise.”

  “Chaim Avigad looks surprised, too, but perhaps less than either the rabbi or the Iranian,” Stark put in. “Miracles wouldn’t be miracles if we took them for granted. But, unless I’m reading him wrong, he might almost be asking the Lord, ‘What next?’ ”

  “I’d guess you may well be right,” Gabriela said. “And even if you’re imagining what’s going on inside Chaim’s head, none of us imagined the fire that came down from the clear sky.”

  “No. Will secularists claim it was a laser beam from a drone or a high-flying plane or even from a satellite in space?” Stark asked. “If they do claim such things, will anyone listen?”

  “The next question is, if God took a hand in things here, where will He reach out next?” Gabriela said.

  “Only God knows, which has never been more literally true,” Stark replied.

  “I think you’re right,” Gabriela said. And, as soon as they were off the air, she sent her ex a text, something she hadn’t done more than a handful of times since he walked out on her. Start sending Heather to church. Now. Don’t screw around, she wrote. After a moment, she added, Or we’ll all regret it forever. She nodded and hit SEND.

  * * *

  —

  Jamal Ashrawi monitored Israeli TV. It told him how the Zionist entity wanted to be perceived, which was useful. Sometimes it told him things the Zionists didn’t want outsiders to see. Then it was priceless.

  He’d done everything he could to keep the Zionists from building the Temple. Others had done everything they could, too. The bruises had faded from Haji Jamal’s body, but the mortification would never leave his soul.

  Neither would the mortification of failure. Everything his friends tried came to nothing. So did everything the Iraqi tried. The Grand Mufti took somber satisfaction in that.

  Ashrawi and Ibrahim sat on a shabby sofa, watching the Jew in the ceremonial garb wait for other oddly dressed priests to bring the cut-up pieces of the sacrificial lambs. “See how they stole the idea of sacrifice from us,” the bodyguard said.

  “They’re Jews. What do they do but steal?” Jamal Ashrawi said.

  “And look at the so-called Mahdi,” Ibrahim jeered. “By God, Haji Jamal, Iranians are a useless breed.”

  “I won’t argue.” The Grand Mufti lit a cigarette. Ibrahim looked wistful. Ashrawi set the pack of Winstons on the sofa. Ibrahim took a smoke.

  They watched as the chunks of lamb went into the fire on the altar. The old Jew in the glitzy breastplate stirred them with his golden poker—and more fire came from heaven.

  “What crap!” Ibrahim exclaimed. “Get Al Jazeera—see if they edit out the special effects.”

  Haji Jamal was already reaching for the remote. But Al Jazeera carried the same feed. “Jewish and Christian announcers claim this is God’s fire accepting the sacrifice,” a scared-looking commentator said. “No eyewitness has claimed anything different.”

  “It’s crap,” Ibrahim said. “You can see better trick photography at the movies.”

  “Yes.” Haji Jamal’s heart wasn’t in it. Some Christians were almost as upset with the Zionists as Muslims were. If they said this wasn’t a special effect, it probably wasn’t.

  Ibrahim started to say something else. Before he could, another guard stuck his head into the room and told him, “Somebody’s at the door for you.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Ibrahim rose. “Is she pretty?” He laughed raucously. Kalashnikov slung, he lumbered after the other guard.

  Ashrawi flipped from Al Jazeera to the Hezbollah channel to Fox to CNN to the Israeli broadcast to the BBC. Nobody was saying anything but that it looked as if God was accepting the Jews’ sacrifice. Not even the Hezbollah man could deny that, though he tried.

  Then Haji Jamal heard a burst of gunfire that came from much closer than the Haram al-Sharif. A minute later, the guard who’d summoned Ibrahim came in with a wiry little guy with a big mustache who carried a Galil. “He’s dead, Abdallah?” the Grand Mufti inquired.

  “He’s dead, Haji Jamal,” the wiry guy answered.

  “Then you’ve got his job,” Ashrawi said. “I don’t need people with divided loyalties.” Ibrahim had let the Iraqi’s thugs thump him. If he figured he could get away with that, he was stupider than Ashrawi thought. Haji Jamal nodded to the guard who’d summoned Ibrahim. “You’re number two now, Umar.”

  “Gotcha, boss,” Umar said.

  Umar would watch Abdallah. Abdallah would keep an eye on Umar, too. Haji Jamal would keep poking through Umar’s connections. If he found any he didn’t like, Umar would have an accident.

  Abdallah jerked the Galil’s muzzle toward the screen. “What’s going on here?” he asked. Ashrawi told him. The new chief bodyguard whistled softly. “Never a dull moment, is there? Do you think God could really be on the Jews’ side?”

  “I hope not!” Haji Jamal exclaimed. That was a horrible idea.

  Abdallah must have thought the same thing. “If He is…” The bodyguard hesitated, then said, “If He is, the Intifada goes on—against Him.”

  “No!” Ashrawi shook his head. “Who is at war with God? Who is doomed to lose everything at the End of Days? Who, Abdallah?”

  “Satan,” the guard said unwillingly.

  The Grand Mufti nodded. “Yes, Satan. If you’re against God, you’re for Satan. You spend eternity in hell. Do you want that?”

  Again, Abdallah considered. “I don’t know,” he said. “If God is for the Jews, then He doesn’t know what He’s doing.”

  “Be careful what you say,” Haji Jamal warned. “God…seems to listen more closely than He used to.”

  “He knows what’s in my heart. Whether I say it doesn’t matter,” Abdallah said.

  “Muhammad is the Prophet of God,” Ashrawi said, and Abdallah nodded. The new chief guard’s name meant Servant of God, but he wanted to be rebellious. Haji Jamal prayed it wouldn’t come to that.

  * * *

  —

  Eric wondered how to put his soul in order. He hadn’t worried about it before times got strange. He’d always figured a soul was low maintenance—what else came with a lifetime guarantee from the Manufacturer? But maybe even a soul needed a tuneup and new hoses every million miles or forty years, whichever came first.

  Orly gave him a very peculiar look when he put it that way. “Are all Americans nuts, or is it just you?” she asked.

  “I think this is just me,” he answered, not without pride.

  “You’re probably right.” His wife went on, “And we could use help.”

  “I’m glad you said ‘we,’ ” Eric observed.

  “Oh, I’m messed up, too. I don’t pretend I’m not,” Orly said.

  “You know what’s sad?”

  “Tell me.”

  “We didn’t say, ‘Let’s go to the synagogue. That’ll fix everything.’ ”

  Orly nodded. “And we didn’t say, ‘Let’s get purified with the red heifer’s ashes and sacrifice at the Temple. That will fix everything.’ That isn’t what ails us.” She cocked her head to one side. “What does ail us?”

  By the way she said it, she didn’t think Eric would answer. But he did: “The modern world. We’re too used to thinking for ourselves and looking at evidence. We’re too used to looking for evidence. We’re not used to letting God take care of things, or of us. It doesn’t come natural, the way it would have two thousand years ago.”

  Orly weighed that—and the way she weighed it would have been alien to the men who wrote the Bible, or to the prophet Muhammad. And, having weighed it, she
nodded again. “I think you’re right.”

  “You know what else?” Eric said.

  “What?”

  “Millions of secular Jews are in the same boat, and secular Muslims, and secular Christians. And you know what else besides that?”

  “No, but you’re going to tell me, aren’t you?” Orly said.

  Eric nodded. “The boat’s liable to be the Titanic, with an iceberg off the starboard bow.”

  She poked him in the ribs. He poked her, too. She squawked. She knew all kinds of dirty-fighting moves he didn’t, but she was ticklish and he wasn’t. If they’d been out to maim each other, she would have smashed him. In a friendlier game…

  * * *

  —

  Soon, the game got friendlier still. Eric stopped worrying about his soul. His body was in excellent shape. It had to be, to give him so much pleasure. And he and Orly weren’t even sinning, not when they were married. That made him feel smugly happy for a little while…till he remembered all the times they’d done it before they were married, and all the times he’d done it with other women who weren’t married to him, and the times he’d done it with women married to other men. What did God think of that?

  Nothing good, probably. “We are so messed up,” he said.

  “We’re nowhere near that well off,” Orly said. “Only I don’t know what we can do to make anything better.”

  “We can pray. Except I’m no damn good at it,” Eric said.

  “Neither am I. I never got the habit.”

  “That’s what it is,” Eric agreed. “If you do it all the time, you get used to it. I’d just feel silly. Even now, I’d still feel silly.” He laughed, not that it was funny. “I’m a modern man, and I still wonder if I’m what God had in mind all those years ago.”

  “If you’re not, He’s stuck with you—and with me, too.”

  “Uh-huh.” Eric laughed again, this time with an edge in his voice. “ ‘All those years ago,’ ” he echoed. “How many years? Just a few thousand, looks like. Jesus!”

  “You are an American,” Orly said. “No Israeli would go ‘Jesus!’ like that. And we haven’t heard anything from Him. Maybe the Christians have been full of shit all along.”

  “Nothing would surprise me any more. Except you.” Eric kissed her. “You surprise me all the time. But I like it.”

  “You’d better.” Orly laughed. “We’re both scared a lot, but not at the same time. That’s good. We prop each other up.”

  “Sure,” Eric said. But if they propped each other up and God knocked them both over, how much good was the propping? That seemed to be one more thing he didn’t want to think about.

  * * *

  —

  “That’s going to be checkmate,” Chaim said. He liked playing chess with Muhammad. The Mahdi was better, but not so much that Chaim had no chance.

  Muhammad didn’t get mad when he lost, which was also good. “It’s a Farsi word,” he said. “Two, in fact. Shah mat—the king is dead.” He chuckled ruefully. “Mine sure was.”

  “You got me the two times before that,” Chaim pointed out. His phone rang. He grabbed it. “Shalom?”

  “Shalom, Chaim.” Rabbi Kupferman’s voice always sounded funny when he talked to Chaim. Kupferman wanted to treat him like a kid, but understood he couldn’t. The Religious Affairs Minister didn’t like it for beans. “Would you come to the Temple, please? We have a new gold menorah in the Holy Place, and we would like your blessing for it.”

  What do you mean, we? Kupferman would have been happier if Chaim stayed away from the Temple. Then it would have belonged to the rabbi. That stuck out all over him, like a hedgehog’s spines. But his priests had a different idea, and he couldn’t ignore them no matter how much he might want to.

  Chaim wasn’t wild about going back himself. He might have said no to piss him off, but the route from the flat where he was staying in Jerusalem to the Temple went past Shoshanah’s falafel stand. “I’ll be there in forty-five minutes, okay?” he said.

  “Why not sooner?” Rabbi Kupferman asked. Then he muttered, “That girl…All right. It will do.”

  “And I’ll bring Muhammad along,” Chaim added. “We just finished a game of chess.”

  “God doesn’t seem to mind,” Kupferman replied. By the way he said it, God needed to listen to him before He let a Shiite set foot where only Jews should go. He sighed. “Since God doesn’t mind, I don’t…too much. Shalom.”

  “You like annoying him, don’t you?” Muhammad said dryly. “I’m that way with Ali Bakhtiar. Religious bureaucrats.”

  “Yeah!” Chaim said. “That’s what they are!”

  Somebody knocked on the door. Chaim looked out through the peephole. But it was one of his bodyguards. He opened the door. “You’re going to the Temple?” the soldier asked.

  “That’s right. How did you know?…Oh.” Chaim felt foolish. Of course Kupferman could get hold of the guards. That was only sensible, even if it left Chaim with no privacy.

  IDF men, Galils at the ready, fanned out around him and Muhammad. He assumed people he couldn’t see also watched them. He wouldn’t have been surprised if they watched him while he was in there, too. Maybe the toilet and shower were off-limits, maybe not.

  Nobody seemed surprised when he stopped at the falafel stand. Shoshanah beamed at him. “Hi, Chaim.” She nodded to Muhammad, who’d been there before, too. “Salaam,” she said—she knew more Arabic than Chaim did.

  “Salaam,” Muhammad returned—Arabic was a foreign language for him, too. He grinned at Chaim. “I like her—you found a good one.”

  “Thanks. I think so, too.” Chaim was glad Muhammad hadn’t tried to move in on him. Shoshanah was closer to the Mahdi’s age than to his. He feared he was a boy next to the Iranian.

  “Can I get you guys anything?” she asked, first in Hebrew, then in Arabic.

  “I just stopped to say hello. We’re on our way to the Temple,” Chaim said.

  “Oh. Well—hello.” She winked at him.

  “You’re crazy,” he told her.

  She gave half a curtsy. “I try.” She came out from behind the counter. “Like for instance—” She hugged him. He kissed her.

  Muhammad turned his back and watched a sparrow hopping on the ground. Shows of affection freaked him out. So did the women in short dresses and tight pants and with uncovered arms and uncovered hair. He was as antsy about that as any of the ultra-Orthodox here. He never said anything about it, though. He looked the other way. He was as polite as a cat.

  At last, Chaim broke the clinch. “We have to get there,” he said.

  “Okay. I’m glad you stopped.” Shoshanah went back. She’d make a good rabbi’s wife, Chaim thought. He wondered if she would make him a good wife. He decided it was too soon to worry about things like that.

  Muhammad stopped bird-watching. They went on toward the Temple Mount. Muhammad surprised Chaim by saying, “That wouldn’t happen in Iran in public.”

  “I guess not,” Chaim said.

  “But it’s not—nasty, the way we make it out to be.” Muhammad sounded surprised, too. “It’s just—different, you know?”

  “Some people here get upset about it, too,” Chaim said.

  Up the ramp to the flat top of the Temple Mount. Over to the Temple. Gold-plated spikes on the roof gleamed in the sun. They were there to keep birds from hopping around and fouling the holy building. That was one of Herod’s innovations, reproduced 2,000 years later.

  Chaim glanced from the roof to the heavens. He saw Muhammad doing the same thing. Fire hadn’t come down since the first sacrifice. He wondered why they were both jumpy now. Something in the air? In their spirits?

  There was Uncle Yitzhak, outside the Holy Place. Chaim waved. His uncle waved back. Had he thought this would happen when they went to inspect the red heifer? Had an
ybody?

  And there was Kupferman, talking with some archaeologists. Chaim recognized the American and the Israeli woman he’d married. She was pretty, even if she had to be close to thirty.

  Kupferman spotted him and Muhammad. He didn’t miss much. He had the High Priest’s regalia on again. The gold and semiprecious stones of the breastplate flashed as he turned toward them and beckoned them forward.

  TV cameras followed them. They tracked Chaim as he stopped, too. Half a step later, Muhammad did the same thing. Chaim’s mouth dropped open. If Muhammad’s didn’t, Chaim had no idea why not.

  Trailing clouds of glory—they couldn’t be anything else—Jesus descended from the heavens toward the Temple.

  Eric had always had mixed feelings about the Temple. It struck him as a religious Disneyland—a theme park dedicated to God. How relevant that was to the twenty-first century was a different story…for him, anyway.

  Not for the priests who carried out the rituals. They were sure they knew what they were doing. They might even have been right. The Old Testament and Talmud explained the rituals in minute detail. They didn’t always explain why the rituals were required. Talmudic scholars said God knew His reasons for the rituals of the red heifer, but they didn’t.

  From the way things were working out, it looked like He did.

  You could also learn from a religious Disneyland. Civil War reenactors taught historians things about moving and ordering men they couldn’t learn from books. Making stone tools helped anthropologists. If you wanted to see how Herod’s Temple worked, checking out the new edition couldn’t hurt.

  Not that it was just like Herod’s Temple. By the time of Christ, the Ark was long gone. Herod’s Holy of Holies was empty. Not this one. Rules for the Ark went back to the First Temple.

  Well, that was, or could be, interesting, too.

  The priests worked hard to be authentic. At a place like Williamsburg, you got a sanitized, denatured version of the real thing. What vacationers would visit a place that smelled like the genuine colonial Williamsburg?