Alpha and Omega

by Harry Turtledove

  When He said forever, he didn’t mean for the rest of your life. He meant forever. And He did mean it, too.

  Chaim sighed. “We’d better do it that way, then. I wanted to find out more about Shoshanah, but…”

  “Don’t fret,” Muhammad said. “Heaven also has its pleasures: virgins and wine and honey and feasting.”

  Heaven didn’t have those things as far as Jews were concerned. The Jewish afterlife was murky. But if everything in all the Scriptures was true—who could know what that meant? He’d have to find out. And if heaven was the way Christians or Muslims said it was, maybe he would see Shoshanah one of these days. Next to forever, what was for the rest of your life? Not much.

  “The time has come,” Jesus said. “Are you ready? Have you made your choice?”

  “Yes.” The Mahdi didn’t hesitate.

  “Yes.” Chaim did, but he chose the same way.

  Next thing he knew, he was rising. There was the Temple Mount laid out below him. There was Jerusalem. There was Israel. There was the Middle East. There was the world. His ghosts came with him…trailed after him…something like that. They weren’t gone, anyhow, the way he’d almost hoped they would be. He knew a moment’s wonder: the world seemed round and flat at the same time. That should have been impossible, but it wasn’t.

  Then, instead of looking down, Chaim looked around and up. He should have been in outer space, choking for lack of air, but, again, he wasn’t. He was…somewhere else. Except for the cherubim on the Ark, he’d never seen an angel before.

  As for Him Who made the angels…In that first instant, Chaim knew he’d made the right choice.

  * * *

  —

  Aramaic, Hebrew, Farsi…Lester Stark read the first two, but didn’t speak them well. He knew none of the third language Jesus, the Messiah, and the Mahdi used among themselves. They all understood one another, as the Israeli and Iranian had from the start. But, while broadcasting live, Stark didn’t know what they were saying. That was a handicap.

  He wished he had an Israeli or American Jewish scholar and an Iranian beside him. Instead, he had Gabriela Sandoval. She was pleasant to look at. She was bright. She’d shown herself a more than capable reporter. A linguist and Biblical scholar she was not.

  That American archaeologist—Eric Katz, that was his name—on the team that found the Ark, he would have been perfect. Or an Iranian Jew who could follow all three of them…Wish for the stars while you’re at it, Stark thought.

  Saul Buchbinder would start yelling in his ear again if he didn’t say something soon. He came out with, “They’re talking to one another in what seems a friendly fashion”—a masterpiece of analysis if ever there was one.

  “Have any idea what they’re saying, Reverend?” Gabriela asked.

  Regretfully, he shook his head. “Someone will—someone does, I’m sure—but it isn’t me.”

  Jesus proved Himself a man of the Middle East as well as the Son of God (Lester was damned if he’d believe Jesus was only a prophet [Or maybe I’m damned if I believe anything else—a depressing thought]): He talked with His hands. So did the Messiah and the Mahdi. They might have been haggling over a brass lamp, only they weren’t.

  Jesus looked up to the heavens. Chaim pointed west. At the Temple? At something in Jerusalem? At the Mediterranean? Toward the United States? Stark had no way to know.

  Then Jesus seemed to ask a couple of questions. The Mahdi answered first, with one word. The Messiah said, “Ken.”

  “I don’t know much spoken Hebrew, but I know that means yes,” Stark said.

  “By Muhammad al-Muntazar’s face, he said the same thing,” Gabriela added. “But what did they agree to?”

  She and Stark found out a moment later. “They’re…rising into the air, Jesus and Chaim and Muhammad,” the televangelist said. “They are rising into the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, as is written.” He’d been preaching from First Thessalonians for years.

  But he’d always thought the Rapture would come to everybody good, everybody worthy, just ahead of the Last Days. Jesus was returning to the heavens with only the Messiah and the Mahdi. What did that mean?

  “What does this mean?” Stark asked his audience. Many of them, he knew, sat in front of their TVs with Bibles open, trying to work things out for themselves. He went on, “This doesn’t seem to fit the Premillenarianism I’ve long espoused.”

  “Can you explain Premillenarianism for people who haven’t long espoused it?” Gabriela asked.

  “Briefly, that the Rapture would take place before the Last Days,” he said.

  As he spoke, Jesus and Chaim Avigad and Muhammad al-Muntazar rose and dwindled. There were no clouds in the enameled dome of the sky except the clouds of glory emanating from Jesus. Did that mean this wasn’t what First Thessalonians had in mind? Stark thought it unlikely, but how could you be sure? Was prophecy detailed enough to include a weather forecast a couple of thousand years in advance?

  Then something else occurred to him. “Perhaps Premillenarianism is less…damaged than I thought at first,” he said. “Perhaps Jesus has taken up into the heavens the people God reckons worthy—the only people He reckons worthy.”

  “Just two of them?” Gabriela pounced, as well she might. “Neither one Christian? What would that mean?”

  “I don’t know right now,” Stark admitted. “Maybe the smartest thing we can do is watch the monitors and see what we can learn.” And keep our big traps shut, he thought.

  “One thing we’ve learned, wouldn’t you agree?” Gabriela said. “If Chaim Avigad, the Messiah, is going up toward heaven with Jesus, he pretty definitely isn’t the Antichrist.”

  “Er—yes,” Stark replied. “That does seem plain.”

  “So does something else,” Gabriela went on. “If the three of them are going up to heaven together, doesn’t that mean all the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—are acceptable in God’s eyes? What else can it mean?”

  Lester Stark took a deep, reluctant breath. He wanted to say that only Christianity—that only his particular brand of Christianity, not Catholicism or Orthodoxy, definitely not something bizarre like Mormonism—was the one true faith. He wanted to, but he was watching the same thing she was, the same thing much of the world was. He was watching…and God was listening. No one could doubt that now.

  “I don’t see how it can mean anything different,” was what came out of his mouth. “I don’t see how anyone of good will can imagine it means anything different.”

  The Son of God, the Messiah, and the Mahdi flickered, first once, then again and again. Then they were gone, though Stark didn’t think they’d risen too high for cameras to pick them up. Maybe heaven wasn’t a mile beyond the moon after all. Maybe you had to peel back a corner of space-time to find it.

  Or maybe I don’t understand what’s going on, Stark thought. That seemed all too probable. As if plucking the thought from his head, Gabriela said, “Isn’t it Saint Paul who talks about seeing through a glass, darkly? That’s a lot of what we’re doing now.”

  “It certainly is,” Stark agreed. “When we die, when we see clearly, we’ll know everything we have to wonder about here.”

  “What do we know about this extraordinary day?” she asked.

  “First and most important, that God is immanent in the universe. No one can deny that any more. And, as you said, that He approves of—no, that He loves—all three Abrahamic religions,” Stark answered. “And we still must believe the Last Days are upon us. History is ending. Eternity lies ahead. In heaven? Or hell? The choice is ours.” He looked straight out at all the people on the other side of the screen. “The choice is—yours.”

  “Whoa!” Eric Katz breathed as Jesus and Chaim Avigad and Muhammad al-Muntazar rose toward the heavens. Rose toward heaven? He wouldn’t have been surprised. By now, he was wi
lling to believe that amazement had been burnt out of him—and from a good part of the human race.

  Everybody else outside the Holy Place looked as poleaxed as he did. Even Shlomo Kupferman might have taken a two-by-four between the eyes. He stood atop the altar, his eyes aimed upwards, his beard spilling over the High Priest’s bejeweled breastplate.

  Eric had to bite down on the inside of his cheek to keep from guffawing. Kupferman’s pose and clothes and anxious demeanor reminded the archaeologist of Sumerian statuettes of stone and terracotta. Those figurines always looked worried. The Sumerians seemed convinced their gods were out to get them. Since they lived in a region with no defenses to speak of, and their main natural resource (not counting oil, and they wouldn’t have) was mud, they might not have been wrong, either.

  Kupferman had that What are You going to do to me now, God? look, too. All things considered, he’d earned it.

  “Should we go on, sir?” a lesser priest asked.

  The Religious Affairs Minister needed a distinct effort to call his mind back to mundane affairs. He shook himself, like a dog coming out of cold water. “Yes,” he said in a voice that sounded as much like his usual tones as Roseanne sounded like Beyoncé. “We should do that.”

  Business as usual. That was what people like him were good for. In Herod’s Temple, Caiaphas had probably been the same way. And when business as usual flew out the window—or up into the heavens—people like that got a bad press. It had happened before. It would again.

  Yitzhak Avigad was staring into the heavens, too. He kept looking up even after he stood. He also looked like somebody who’d just taken a flounder in the face. He’d been brushed by a miracle that meant he’d never see his nephew again.

  Eric went over to Yitzhak. “You okay?” he asked—not the most profound question, but maybe one that would get the other man talking.

  Like Kupferman, Chaim’s uncle seemed to come back from a long way off. “He’s gone,” he said.

  “Yeah.” Eric nodded. “But you know how we say somebody who dies is going to a better place? Chaim isn’t dying, but he’s going to a better place anyway. Most of the time, we just say that. Now you know it’s true.”

  Yitzhak Avigad also nodded. “Yes, I know it. That doesn’t mean I like it.” He whistled: a low note of wonder. “This started when we went to the States to check out the red heifer.”

  “Do you think so?” Eric said. “Isn’t it more likely that it started when God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light?”

  “You can say that about anything,” Yitzhak said.

  “You sure can,” Eric agreed. Later, he would worry about whether free will was anything more than a figment of predestined man’s imagination—a figment man was predestined to have. He went on, “Don’t you think God paid special attention to this part of the plan, though?”

  “I suppose so,” Yitzhak said, most unwillingly.

  “Chaim’s in good company,” Eric said. “Who got taken up bodily into heaven before? Elijah, Jesus…and Muhammad, I guess.”

  “Every word is true, and it does me no good,” Yitzhak answered. “I have to tell my sister-in-law why she’ll never see her son again.”

  “Because God wanted him,” Eric said. Most of the time, such phrases felt like the consolation Job’s comforters might have given. Here it was nothing but the truth.

  “Rivka wants him, too. God’s got him. She doesn’t, and she won’t,” Yitzhak said.

  “Who would?” Eric replied. Behind him, a sheep’s bleat subsided into gurgles after a priest cut its throat.

  “And the other thing I’ve got to do is tell Shoshanah Mazar—that girl at the falafel stand—she won’t see Chaim again, either,” Yitzhak said. “That’ll be almost as hard as telling his mother. If—” He broke off, shaking his head.

  “If what?” Eric asked.

  “Never mind.” Yitzhak’s voice was a slammed door.

  Eric didn’t push it. He recognized finality when he heard it. Even if Yitzhak didn’t cough up answers, Eric could imagine his own. If Shoshanah had gone to bed with Chaim, maybe he wouldn’t have been holy enough to get carried up into heaven. If Chaim’s mother had raised him a different way…

  But Eric shook his head. Maybe Chaim Avigad wouldn’t have ended up the Messiah if something like that happened. It would have been some other pious Israeli kid. And what difference would that make? A different pious family would mourn and exult at the same time. It would matter to them, not to the world.

  And with God manifesting Himself in worldly affairs, who could guess what a realistic policy was now or would be five years from now…besides living the best life you could, anyway? God only knew—which held too much truth for comfort.

  Eric glanced up at Shlomo Kupferman. He wanted to ask Kupferman what it had been like for him, too. But the would-be High Priest was intent on finishing the sacrifices. Kupferman seemed very intent on that, to the exclusion of everything else. He reminded Eric not so much of the Pharisee passing on the other side of the road but of an ostrich with its head in the sand.

  Ostriches didn’t really do that, of course. Even if they did, they wouldn’t have been appropriate birds to think of while thinking of Kupferman up there on the altar. Like hoopoes—in that if in no other way beyond birditude—ostriches weren’t sacrifices acceptable in God’s eyes.

  Nu? So what? Eric might have sounded like a Borscht Belt comic inside his head, but he had the feeling he was touching truth, and ritual purity be damned.

  Shlomo Kupferman didn’t want to acknowledge that Jesus had just made His Second Coming. He didn’t want to acknowledge that Jesus had headed back to heaven with a Jew and a Muslim, either. For the rabbi, it’d be business as usual at the Temple, nothing else.

  That wouldn’t fly. Eric was sure it wouldn’t—and that Kupferman intended to roll with it anyhow. Kupferman would be sorry. You commonly were when you wouldn’t face the obvious.

  Eric was also sure Kupferman wouldn’t listen to him. Kupferman hadn’t got the Temple rebuilt by listening to other people. But couldn’t any story have a goddamn happy ending?

  * * *

  —

  Jamal Ashrawi watched Jesus ascend with the Jew called the Messiah and the Iranian youth called the Mahdi. The Grand Mufti didn’t like believing either was what he claimed to be, or that Jesus was what He seemed to be.

  But the other choice seemed to be believing Jesus was a Zionist actor and everything He was doing, special effects. With everything else that had happened, the Grand Mufti couldn’t.

  Abdallah sat beside him on the shabby sofa in the hideout, also watching intently. “Isn’t it strange that a Jew can go up into heaven, Haji?” the bodyguard asked. “Tell me how that can happen.”

  “You do me too much honor.” After that moment of modesty, Ashrawi went on, “It is possible. In the Qur’an, it is written not all Jews will go to hell—only most of them.”

  “I suppose so,” Abdallah said. “But that little punk? And a Shiite? If they’re in heaven, I’d be happier in hell. The company’s better.”

  He’d said such things before. Haji Jamal had no idea he was reinventing a joke Christians had been making for a hundred years. “Be careful what you say!” Haji Jamal exclaimed. “There is no God but God. Do you want Him to give you what you say would make you happier?”

  The bodyguard thought it over. “No, I guess not.”

  “An eternity in hell…” Ashrawi shuddered. He’d always believed, but sometimes belief felt stronger, sometimes weaker. His was very strong now. Whose wasn’t? How many sinners who laughed and said There is no God were vowing to mend their ways now? Tens of millions? Ashrawi was sure of it. Not just Muslims, either, but Christians and Jews with them.

  Jesus and the Messiah and the Mahdi winked out. They vanished from the screen, though they hadn’t risen so high that the
cameras on the Haram al-Sharif couldn’t follow them. Was that a special effect? Ashrawi didn’t think so. He thought God had taken them to heaven—wherever heaven really was.

  “They’re gone! What now?” Abdallah sounded astonished. So did the CNN announcer. The Grand Mufti ignored her. She was a Western woman. But his new head bodyguard needed some answer.

  Haji Jamal had trouble giving him one. He was astonished, too—how could anyone not be? The Dome of the Rock had stood atop the Haram al-Sharif for more than 1,300 years. In all that time, there was no sign Jesus would come back to it, or anywhere else. After the Jews tore down the Dome of the Rock and built their Temple in its place, Jesus showed up. Where was the purpose in that?

  Slowly, he replied, “What now? I’ll tell you what. We have to make the best of it. If God accepts the People of the Book, we need to do the same. It will take some getting used to, but we must. Can you doubt that?”

  “No! By God, no!” Abdallah said.

  “By God, yes,” Ashrawi said. “Now we are in God’s camp or in Satan’s. If Islam is true”—he paused, then went on—“and Christianity and the Jews’ faith with it, we must stay in God’s camp. Is it not so?”

  The chief bodyguard nodded. “It is.”

  “All right, then,” Haji Jamal said. “Our enemies are also God’s enemies. Maybe, at the End of Days, you or I will slaughter the last pig.”

  “May it be so, inshallah.” Abdallah’s eyes glowed.

  “God is willing,” the Grand Mufti said. “Would He have given us these miracles if He weren’t? Now it’s up to us to go on with His plan and see how it plays out. Can we do that?”

  “I’m sure we can!” the bodyguard said.

  “Good,” Haji Jamal said. “So am I.”

  * * *

  —

  Rivka Avigad glared at her brother-in-law, her eyes wild. “Why didn’t you do something?” she said. “Why didn’t you stop him?”