by Neil Clarke
I sighed and stood. “As God wills then.”
Danel returned me to my quarters. Lieutenant Haran died the next day.
Dr. Eugène requested that I be present for the autopsy. The infirmary was more a laboratory than a hospital. New European medical science had made grudging, and begrudged, advances in medical analysis and clinical diagnosis despite the restrictions on interventional treatments. The Holy Emperor was as keen on the prevention of illness as he was on submission to God’s Will once a person was afflicted.
We found no sign of malady in the Lieutenant. No pathogen, occult injury, or predisposing congenital defect, merely a nonspecific mild elevation in his white blood cell count, and a slight inflammatory response in his nose and lungs. A mild cold or allergy perhaps, though his antibody counts were normal. His body was in great physical condition, not even a hangnail or pimple, which made the cause of his death the more perplexing.
Danel remained quiet while we worked. It was not until hours later, when tired and annoyingly befuddled, I again stood outside my cabin door, that he finally spoke.
“Sir?” he said, stopping me before I entered my small berth.
Down the passageway past an open bulkhead, a number of young Jews gathered near the curtained entrance to the converted cargo hold. Leaning against the walls like school chums, they kibbutzed and laughed. That would change once word spread of the lieutenant’s death.
“Yes, Danel?”
“The crew will be concerned that a natural cause of death could not be found.”
“I am as well.”
His golden irises cycled open and closed. “There are some . . . who are not happy with the reassignment of this ship.” “Or its cargo?”
“As you say, sir. Interstellar travel is new to la marine France. Most of the crew have served only interplanetary.” He became silent and his glass bottle eyes continued to study me. For the first time, I found this disconcerting. I should have made him eyelids so he could blink. “Few have sailed the Deep Dark,” he said.
“Have you, Danel?”
“Yes, sir.” He turned from me in an oddly human characteristic of recollection. “It is . . . “ He stopped, seemingly lost in thought. “Dark?” I suggested.
“Wondrous,” he said, almost in a whisper, and then my voice, though a much younger voice, emitted from the metal grille of his mouth. “‘What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that Thou thinkest of him?’”
And this time I couldn’t speak.
“The crew is not fond of your people, sir. While they approve of the expulsion edict, they resent being tasked to perform it. And the Deep Dark . . . is unsettling to some. Please take care, sir.”
I slid open the door of my cabin, but before I could enter, Danel barred my way. “Lieutenant Haran . . . “ he began.
I suppressed my irritation and the sudden rush of anger at the thought of the Arab lieutenant. Was I angry at him? Or at the First Mate and Captain and the foolish prohibition against medical therapy?
“Yes, Danel?”
“He volunteered for this voyage.”
“Reveling in it, I suppose.” I took hold of his arm and tried to push it away, but it was like pushing against the ship’s hull.
“No, sir. He felt remorse over the deaths he caused as a youth in Palestine.”
I again yanked ineffectually at his arm but only pulled loose my own frustration. “And yet he proudly displayed his tattoo of all those he murdered!” The words echoed down the hall.
Silence followed in their wake. Like shadows, my kinsmen slipped through the heavy curtained doors and disappeared into the hold.
Gently, Danel slid back the cuff of my jacket to display the numbers tattooed upon my forearm. “As you would not forget your past,” he said, “neither would he.” He lowered his arm, and I rushed into the tiny sanctuary of my cabin.
Before I could close the door, I heard Danel say to himself, “It was as if all his programming had been erased.”
The planet was named Zion, and the irony that it was mostly swamp, barren waste, and rocky hills with no resources valuable to New Europe was not lost among the exiles upon the Joan d’Arc. Yet, it would be ours—or so it had been promised. We need but reach it. When a second crewman, a mere matelot, was discovered with a malady alike to that which killed the first, it seemed more likely we’d be spaced instead. Who would shed a tear?
Danel came for me at Dr. Eugène’s behest. The seaman, a lad really, with freckles still dotting his cheeks and an unruly sprig of red hair sprouting from the back of his head like an antenna, demonstrated the same listlessness, sightless gaze, and nonresponse to external stimuli as had the late Lieutenant.
Mr. L’Hereux’s surliness was even more abrasive, but the way he hovered around the infirmary whenever his duties permitted bespoke of a concern greater than that of the CO for a crewman, and Dr. Eugène confided to me that the boy, Henrique Delacroix, was L’Hereux’s nephew. After two days of the same deterioration of vital signs that we had witnessed with Lieutenant Haran, I again suggested the use of pharmacological agents and was rewarded with a voluminous stream of thick-voweled curses betraying the First Mate’s rural Belgian upbringing.
Mr. L’Hereux pressed us for answers, to try something, anything—anything permissible. He did not object to electric shock therapy, though I was hesitant to suggest it. I doubted it would be efficacious, and this proved the case. The boy died two days later.
Mr. L’Hereux knelt by the lad’s bedside, so silent and still that for a moment I grew concerned that the affliction perhaps was transferrable. But then the CO stood and tugged on the hem of his jacket to straighten its creases, his eyes still locked on the boy’s. When he turned them upon Dr. Eugène, they displayed no animation; yet they ignited when they set upon me. The lines of his face tightened in anger and despair. He spat upon me.
“Génie Juif de Saint-Germain!” he mocked, “Génie Juif!” He walked stiffly from the room.
Dr. Eugène said nothing in the silence that followed the CO’s departure. He would not look at me. Instead, he turned and began preparing the boy’s body for transport to the morgue. Danel, however, watched me closely.
The Genius Jew of Saint-Germain. Rabbi, physician, mathematician, inventor of calculating machines and the weaponizing of la puissance de l’atome.
“That will be all for now, Albert,” Dr. Eugène said to me. He removed the boy’s intravenous line and crossed the lad’s arms across his chest. I was struck by how little had changed in the young man’s expression with his passing. “Get some rest and meet me in the lab at 1400,” he added, pulling the bedsheets over the boy’s head.
I nodded and left. Danel followed.
On our descent of the stairs to C deck, Danel stopped me upon the landing. “It was unjust of Monsieur L’Hereux to mock you.”
“You caught that, Danel?” I withheld any intimation of bitterness from my voice. “You’ve come far in comprehending human sarcasm.”
“You taught me to listen. Not only to what people say, but how they say it. To deduce what they do not put into words. To place human speech and action into context with the events that initiates them. It has been . . . “ He paused. “. . . challenging.”
“This is not something you could do when we lived at Saint-Germain.”
“I’ve observed and experienced much since then.”
“So have we all.” This time my acerbity slipped through.
The clang of a door opening followed by rapid footfalls echoed up the stairwell. We pressed ourselves against the wall as a half-dozen crewmen in jogging outfits ran past us. At sight of me, their eyes narrowed, their distrust unfeigned. Their suspicions slithered toward Danel by association, but their eyes lowered at the sight of his officer insignia. Danel was the product of my invention but few had knowledge of this below the command level. To the general populace, such an achievement as Danel was only possible by a true Frenchman and a man of God. In this case, the honorable a
nd distinguished Monseigneur Remond of Nice, descendent of kings. For the many years after Danel and Michal had been taken from me, and until the priest’s untimely and foolish death, Remond had served as their stepfather and the public icon for unequaled French ingenuity.
And I as its corruptor.
Danel observed the sailors until the turn of the stairwell hid them. “They are ill at ease. That may pose a problem, sir. I detect insubordination. I will need to inform the Captain.” He began to descend again and I followed.
“I suspect he’s aware, Danel. And as long as you hover around me, you’ll acquire guilt by association. And by being different. That, at least, is an experience you’ll always share with my tribesmen and me.” We exited the stairwell to D deck.
Interpersonal differences became sharper and more alarming when traveling the Dark. Space paranoia has been blamed for the derelicts and disasters that have plagued la marine interstellaire in its forays deeper and deeper away from the home planet, although the common sailors whispered of Deimons.
“It is unjust.”
“It is human.”
“Ab . . . Rabbi, you were hailed the Hero de France for ending the war with Germany.”
“That appellation was short-lived.” I whirled upon him. “And I don’t want to hear it repeated. Certainly your shipmates do not. Or do you not fully comprehend what you just witnessed?”
Danel’s irises cycled close and he shook his head. “I observe much,” he said. “But the capacity for human nature to recast good as evil and evil as good is beyond my programming.”
I sighed. “It is because we humans cannot keep our passions, or our fears, from influencing our actions. We do not possess your capacity to envision all potential repercussions before we act.”
“Such as when you deserted France to join the Zionists?”
His words held no recrimination. They were merely a question, but they stopped me cold. He halted and we stood alone in the long passage with only the wheeze of air compressors and the hum of electric lights in their wire cages.
“Yes,” I said.
That the Holy Emperor may have considered my unique knowledge and ingenuity within the new Zionist state a potential threat to his realm was not lost among the people to whom I was once hailed as a hero and was now a pariah. The blame for the well-armed and organized Arab invasion and the massacres of the second Shoah was laid upon my bald head as was our current expulsion to the end of the known universe where I, and the people who had produced me, could be no threat.
In silence, we proceeded to my cabin. The door was open. Inside, Mrs. Katz was restocking the shelf above the microwave with my weekly allotment of meal packets. She was a Jewish Quasimodo, so kyphotic from age and osteoporosis that she could not raise her head to see the shelf upon which she placed the ration boxes. She noticed us hovering in the doorway, however.
“Just a moment, Rebbe,” she said. Her smile was shy, almost coquettish, a remnant petal from the bloom of her youth. Her eyes were among the few of the ten thousand remnant Yehudi that did not look at me with scorn. Her liver-spotted left forearm bore a tattoo similar to mine, small black numbers like an oddly legged caterpillar. The few Survivors from the first Shoah saw me, saw the world, a little differently. She shuffled to the bunk at the rear of the room, moving slowly and majestically, like a Galapagos turtle. She began to change the linens. Her body was failing, and yet she maintained a definable dignity. She knew, like Moses, she would not live to enter the Promised Land, but even so, she had a grace, a living presence . . .
I recalled Danel’s words.
“‘It is as if his programming had been erased . . .,’” I said aloud.
Danel picked up the conversation as if no time had passed since he’d made the observation. “Yes, sir. Neither Lieutenant Haran nor Seaman Delacroix demonstrated any volition, either conscious or unconscious. There was no recognition of input, processing of data, or function generation. No command comprehension, initiation, or completion at all. They were . . . “ He paused. “. . . not who they were.”
He was correct. Both the Lieutenant and the First Mate’s nephew displayed no will, no anime. It was as if they’d been stripped of their élan vital.
I staggered as the thought triggered a kaleidoscopic flash. Danel’s visage shattered into scintillating fragments of silver and gold and white.
Hannah laughed as she spun, her Sabbath skirt twirling about her waist. Ruth picked her up and rubbed her nose in our daughter’s belly. Hannah squealed and pulled at her mother’s hair. Their shared laughter rose on a Mediterranean breeze and turned to cries; fire everywhere, ash falling from a steel gray sky like ebony snow.
“‘Amor est vitae essentia.’”
“Rabbi, are you well?” Danel’s hand rested upon my arm. I had fallen back against the door jamb.
“Huh? Yes, Danel. Thank you.” I stood straight and checked my hands for the soot covered burns long washed away. I was momentarily confused and struggled to recall our conversation. “Yes. I concur, Danel. They seemed emptied, brain-dead patients. Their life essence gone, their souls fled.”
I shuddered and the world again began to blur. This time by ghostly images of dead-faced men and women standing barefoot in the snow, sexless in identical striped black and gray pajamas. Their soiled clothes hung off emaciated flesh and flapped like banners in a sirocco wind blowing hot and dry from the crematoriums near where we clustered for warmth . . . I pushed the vision back.
“It is as if their souls had fled,” I repeated, “. . . or been taken from them.”
“Taken, sir?” Danel said. “What could do that?”
I was about to answer, “Nothing. Humans are not machines that can be reformatted to completely forget who they are, what they are. I’m just talking nonsense,” when from the back of the cabin, a voice as dry and shrill as a rusty hinge said, “An erev-rav.”
The shell of Mrs. Katz’s back swiveled and revealed eyes like sapphires in shallow pools. “My bubbe would scold Yosef, my brother, and me when we were little nudniks,” she said. “‘Behave or the erevrav will snatch you!’” She tittered fondly at the memory. “They would leave only shells she’d need crack and bury so dybbuks and mice wouldn’t infest them and make us a bigger nuisance.”
“That’s . . . “ I began.
She cackled. “Schtuss? Ye. I know.”
Her job done, Mrs. Katz waddled down the length of the small berth, and Danel and I parted like the Red Sea to make way for her. She stopped and twisted her body so one rheumy eye could gaze up at me. “But out here in the Dark, so far from God’s Earth, who knows? The Abyss is their abode.” She glanced at her arthritic fingers, knobby as tree roots with skin so thin and pale I could see her tendons and veins. “Will Adonai be able to keep them from devouring my soul when these farshtunken goyim toss my corpse into the Deep?”
I touched her hand. The skin was like soft papyrus. “You’ll be buried upon New Zion,” I said.
She patted my wrist. “You’re a good boychik with bad luck. Like Yosef.”
She raised the thin alabaster thread of one eyebrow at Danel. “I don’t know what you are. So let God decide. Nu?” She walked down the corridor, her movements so slow and measured she seemed to float. She called back, “Ask Reb Ludska. He knows souls.”
That he did, I thought.
The mystic Hassidic Rebbe Shlomo ben Yitzhak Ludska had made aliyah to Safed with three thousand followers to grow crops and to grow closer to God. The black-coats and hamantashen-shaped fur hats of the Ludskites mingled incongruously among the secular Zionist pioneers in their swim trunks and bikinis upon the golden shore of the Galilean Sea. And the incongruity disturbed none. The Holy Land was for all Jews, whatever their stripe—or shape of hat. Of Reb Ludska’s devoted flock, less than one hundred of his sheep survived the Assyrian assault to accompany him to New Zion. Yes, he knew souls very well, having lost so many.
After Mrs. Katz passed through the bulkhead and shambled slowly to the p
assenger hold, Danel asked, “Do you think Michal had a soul?”
The strangeness of the question drew my attention from my reverie, but there was nothing that could be read from the metallic mold of Danel’s face. The implication of his question was . . . but, no. No matter how he spoke or dressed, Danel was not human. And neither was Michal. Who would know better than I?
Michal was a thinking machine, my first, and I had turned him into an atomic bomb. Through me, he ended the lives of millions in Berlin and simultaneously the Second World War, thus earning me both the appellations of Hero and Butcher. Michal had been the earliest success in the process to create Danel, to whom Michal was a good-natured Neanderthal by comparison. He could have never voiced or considered the question Danel asked.
I had never lied to them. It would have been fruitless in any case with Danel who could read the slightest stiffening of lip, the faintest blush, the millisecond of hesitancy in voice, and every other telltale. At Poque, Danel could never be bluffed. I studied him.
His eyes in the lamp light were like the sun’s corona around pupils black and unfathomable.
“Only God can create souls, Danel,” I said. “Machines, however wondrous, are the works of man and therefore flawed and imperfect.”
He thought upon this. I could imagine hearing the electronic synapses in his brain sparking as they cogitated. Then he asked, “God is perfect, no?”
“Yes.”
“Man was created by God?”
“Yes, Danel, of course.”
“Is Man not flawed and imperfect?”
I blinked and struggled for an answer, fighting the resurgence of nightmare visions, but as the silence stretched between us, Danel again placed a comforting hand upon my arm and suggested, “Perhaps this is what God intends, sir. It is for His creations to perfect the gifts they’ve been given.”
I could only stare at him. What had happened in the years we’d been separated? Did Remond actually tamper with his programming? I would have thought that bathroom scientist couldn’t build a Ferris wheel out of Tinkertoys.