by Neil Clarke
The cacophony of Yiddisher kvetching and shrayen condensed to white noise and faded ten meters from the curtained cargo access. The corridor was devoid of Jews. The usual crowd of Yids was absent. Teens and young men and women no longer leaned against the hallway walls seeking haven from the noodging of their parents. Couples wishing to whisper endearments that would otherwise be drowned in the raucous clamor of the mishpocha no longer traversed the passage to and from the viewing ports that lined the outer hull. On the wall beneath one of the many red-lit fire warning switches, some child had scrawled in yellow crayon three circles, two with radiating lines, one with branches and buds sprouting from its top . . . two stars and a world with . . . an apple tree? No. “‘V’yashvoo, eesh tachat gap’no vtachat t’aynato”
‘But they shall sit, every man under his vine and under his fig tree.’
I pulled my tallis over my head and my chumash from my pocket. At the intersection with the starboard corridor, I turned aft, turning the Bible’s pages as I walked, seeking words, seeking something behind them. But I saw only random black lines and curves interweaving like the tattoo around Lieutenant Haran’s neck or the one forcibly inscribed upon my forearm; vowels and punctuation like the series of binary input I fed to Michal, simple loyal Michal, for his terminal flight to Berlin; verse and chapter numbers like the endless rows of numerals tallying all who perished in that world-shattering detonation. Devastation beyond all human conception paradoxically conceived to stop devastation—and genocide.
The words, letters, and numbers blurred and faded. Only blank pages remained, white paper so thin it appeared translucent, a match for the pallor of my skin in the photographs of the victory parade down the Champs-Élysées with captions declaring the Hero de France. Later, other captioned photos proclaimed “Traître!” and “Boucher de Berlin!” when I’d escaped France to join the Zionists in Palestine after the only country who deigned to forgive my being a Jew reneged on returning Danel to me.
“Rabbi?”
I stopped short. My tallis slid off my head and gathered around my neck like a winter scarf.
“You need to stop surprising me, Danel.” “My apologies, sir.”
Danel stood in front of one of the observation ports. The actinic glow of the sluice stream that flowed over the hull shone like moonlight and silhouetted the right half of his head and uniform, the latter neatly pressed with brass buttons like tiny stars. His metal skin gleamed like quicksilver. The glass cylinders of his eyes sparkled and cast prismatic shadows across his face.
“I have information,” he said. I waited but he did not speak. “Yes, Danel?”
He said, “I have not shared this with Captain Pétain or Mr. L’Hereux. I would not have harm come to y- . . . any of you. I fear . . .” “Fear? You fear, Danel?” He was silent.
I moved closer, imagining a tingle upon my face as I stepped into the beam of light with him. “Tell me,” I said.
“Lieutenant Haran was one of the fedayeen who led the massacre of Safed.”
“In the slaughter of the Ludskite community?” I blew out my cheeks and exhaled. “You think that someone . . . the Rebbe himself perhaps, recognized him?”
“This is what I fear.”
This is what I fear. The words projected from the small mesh screen of his mouth, little different than the grille of a radio, yet emotive, personal.
“Even so, Danel. We do not know how Haran died or . . .” “The plant on the Rebbe’s desk. Did you recognize it?” “The castor oil plant?”
“The Ludskites cultivated it in Palestine. Why?”
“It’s a versatile shrub. It can be used to create lotions, soaps, lubricants, insecticides, even fuel oil. . . . Oh.” I stopped.
The castor bean, lovingly known as the Palm of Christ, was the source for ricin, a subtle and fatal poison that suppressed respiration and blood pressure . . . But the catatonia and bradycardia? No. It didn’t fit. And why young Henrique Delacroix? The nephew of Mr. L’Hereux? He’d at best have been an infant during the second Holocaust. “We must speak to Reb Ludska,” I said.
“Yes.”
The pounding of my heart in my ears resolved into the slapping of running feet. The Rebbe’s grandson Aaron appeared, face swollen raw with tears, fear, and exhaustion.
“Help! Please! Come help!” He collapsed at Danel’s feet, his breath whistling through his teeth. Danel extended a hand and the boy grasped it, shuddered, and staggered to his feet. “It’s the Rebbe!” Aaron’s hair was disheveled. Somewhere he’d lost his yarmulke. “He’s collapsed! Come quick. Please!”
The lad pulled on Danel’s hand and led us in a run down the long corridor. We traversed long stretches of twilit halls severed by beams of light from the observation windows. We were further aft than I had gone before. The hum of the engines grew louder and its vibrations pulsed along the floor. And on the floor, lit by the glow emanating from a hull window, lay the sprawled monstrous form of Reb Shlomo ben Yitzchak Ludska; Leviathan washed up upon the shore at the End of Days. Just beyond him was a heavily secured airlock door bathed in the red light of a caged lamp above it.
The boy gave a cry and released Danel, falling to the side of the Rebbe next to whom he appeared no more than a guppy.
The Rebbe lay on his back, arms cast to either side as if in crucifixion. They twitched spasmodically.
I quickly knelt beside him. He was breathing, although erratically. His face was flushed. Lifting his eyelids revealed a glassy stare but the pupils reacted to my penlight.
“Quick. Tell me what happened,” I said.
The boy started to sob. I raised my hand to slap him, but Danel stepped forward and rested his hands on Aaron’s shoulders. Gently he said, “Aaron. Please. We’re here. Tell us what happened.”
Aaron sniffled and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. I placed my ear against Reb Ludska’s chest and heard, Baruch HaShem, a steady if slow rhythm.
“We were just doing our walk before Sabbath. We’d never gone so far before. He kept saying he was sorry. I didn’t understand . . . ”
I checked the pulse in the Rebbe’s wrist and his hand spasmed again, fingers extending momentarily open before clenching. I spread his fingers. In his palm a castor oil seed stared at me like a crocodile’s eye.
Picking it up, I grabbed Aaron’s chin and showed it to him. “Did he swallow any of these?” The boy’s eyes welled with tears. “Did he?” I demanded, shaking him.
“I . . . I don’t know.”
I let him go. “If he ingested them . . . ”
“What is the antidote, sir?”
“There is none.” I stood. “We need to get him to the infirmary. Pump his stomach. Hydrate the bejesus out of him.” I doubted Danel understood the allusion to the Palm of Jesus but he did not press me with further questions.
“The Rebbe is too heavy for me to lift, sir. Please stay while I fetch help.”
The boy grasped Danel’s hands. It was a surreal image, Raphaelian. Danel standing tall and garbed in white holding hands with the kneeling boy whose face was contorted in sorrow and pain, both of them shimmering in the blue-white light streaming through the hull window.
“I’ll go,” I said. “Stay with the boy. I’ll fetch Dr. Eugène and help.”
I ran, passing in and out of shadow, light fluttering across my vision like movie theater newsreels during the war. Ghosts seeped from my memory. I clenched my teeth and stabbed each of them. My tallis stayed draped around my neck, and I clung to either end as I ran like a man carrying a heavy burden upon his back. Run! Get Eugène. Save Reb Ludska.
My lips set. Save him so he can be sacrificed; the scapegoat for Gentile justice so the last remnant could live.
A glimpse of movement and I had to grab the person in front of me or topple over them. I heard a gasp of surprise and was enveloped in the homely aromas of soap and soup.
I had nearly bowled over Mrs. Katz.
We spun together down the hall. I instinctively lifted her, light as
a soul, to keep my balance and slammed back against the wall dispersing my momentum, holding her safe in front of me. Beside us the small red light of a fire alarm box blinked.
My heart thudded against my chest. There was no other sound but my wheezing. Then a voice said breathlessly, “I used to get ten centimes a dance.”
I set her down. “My apologies, Mrs. Katz,” I said. “I must go. It’s an emergency.”
She tilted her head, one viscid eye searching my face. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s Reb Ludska. He’s taken poison. Tell his assistants. And let them know the Rebbe’s grandson is with him.”
I took a stumbling step away from her.
“Grandson?” she said. “Reb Ludska has no grandson.”
There was a sigh, and cool air blew down upon us from an air vent. The hairs at the back of my neck stiffened.
“Wh-what?”
She shook her head sadly. “All his poor family died in Palestine. He has no son, no grandson.”
I took a faltering step toward her, then another. Her eyes buried within folds of wrinkled flesh gazed at me quizzically, like a rook with head cocked, its claws clasping some dead thing at the side of the road. I smashed the fire alarm box on the wall behind her and then began to run back the way I had come.
I passed through streaming gusts from the ventilation system like cobwebs. A cold chill passed through me, stirring the ashes deep within. This time I could not stop them.
The gray photographs of broken rubble that was once Berlin; the blackened fragments of bone to which clung desiccated remnants of flesh like Z’roa on a seder plate; the pervasive smell of boiling corpse fat saturating the air with a sickly caramel scent that sank like oil into one’s flesh and rags; the near surgical red-mouthed wounds exposing ribs like teeth across Ruth’s floral blouse and gaping wide across Hannah’s throat as if sliced by a shochet; the sky blackened and roiling with smoke quenching the sun and obscuring Heaven. Times of fire and darkness, repeated again and again, declared there could be no God, testing me like Job. But unlike with Job, succeeding. Words of prayer falling lifeless from my lips, dry and empty of hope; without answers, without expecting an answer. There were no angels to protect us, no devils but Man, and no God. The years after I escaped from Buchenwald, I searched for Him . . . not in Scripture, but in molecules and atoms, yet I discovered no Design and no morality, only indifferent forces and whims. And finally I disproved Him with Michal and Danel. If a man could create self-aware life, the proclaimed sole prerogative of the Lord Almighty, then there could be no God; no justice, no mercy. I challenged Him and received only silence. No proof He cared. No proof He was.
Danel lay supine upon the deck and Aaron knelt upon his chest. His tiny hands clutched the automaton’s cheeks and sank into them. When the boy raised his head to welcome me, his smile was cold, predatory; the plush lips pulled wide as if hefted upward by his peyos, parting to reveal teeth that glistened in the actinic sluice light. His eyes held no white. They were holes of nothingness, blacker than the Dark outside. Not a single gleam of light shone within them.
“Come help,” he said, his voice ice. “Please come help.” What had assumed the shape of the boy, summoned by the mystic Seer of Safed to kill the fida’i officer responsible for the murder of the Rebbe’s flock and family, and over whom it seemed the Hasid master had then lost control, withdrew his hands from Danel’s face as if drawing them from a pool of water.
With a spiderlike agility, Aaron leapt upward from Danel’s chest to cling to the hull wall, and then skittered rapidly across it, arching to the ceiling before falling upon me.
It was disconcertingly like catching a puppy or a small child, he was so light. Hannah had been so like this . . .
His hands fastened upon my cheeks, fingers melting into my flesh to slide along my teeth like a mallet along xylophone keys. I felt no pain, only a numbing coldness, a spectral tingle along the base of my skull. His small nose touched mine until all I could see were the black wells of his eyes, bottomless, empty, and longing.
And the thing, Deimon or erev-rav, saw the same in my own.
It shuddered and released me, falling to the floor to lie stunned upon its back. Its face contorted from a vulturine hunger to puzzled confusion.
Approaching footfalls cascaded down the corridor.
The creature the Rebbe named Aaron righted itself and kneeled in front of me, peering around my knees like a child seeking protection from a parent. It hesitated, uncertain whether to attack or flee. In that moment, I pulled my tallis from my shoulders, wrapped it around the boy’s neck, and lifted him from the floor.
He uttered a garbled scream and clawed at my fingers, the silk noose sliding tight around his throat.
“Hey! Ho there! What are you doing!” Mr. L’Hereux yelled, a squad of men trailing in his wake, including a winded Dr. Eugène. The CO scowled and strode toward me pulling a wooden baton from his belt and raising it. Before he could strike me, Dr. Eugène grasped his arm. But there was no need. Mr. L’Hereux halted, eyes widening as the boy I held shimmered and changed into the form of the First Mate’s dead nephew.
“Uncle, help me,” Henrique Delacroix croaked, extending a hand toward his uncle.
The men gasped and took a step back.
“Open the airlock!” I said.
Blank stares. “Do it!”
Delacroix twisted in my hands, features blurring again. The men continued to stare, shocked still, except for Dr. Eugène. He dragged Mr. L’Hereux forward and demanded, “The access code. Enter it. Now!”
The CO looked dazed, “Wha . . .?”
Dr. Eugène slapped him, drawing his attention and anger, but then Mr. L’Hereux nodded. His finger stabbed at a key pad beside the airlock and then he grasped the wheel on the door with two hands and spun it. With a faint hiss and gust of stale air, the heavy door opened.
The lad shimmered and Aaron screamed and fell limp in my arms, gaining weight. I shifted my grip, one hand still holding the ends of the knotted tallis. It loosened around the boy’s neck when my remaining hand slid behind his back to support him. Aaron coughed, and inhaled, and coughed again.
“It’s g-gone,” he said, hoarsely, in barely a whisper. Then more strongly and with relief, “Bless HaShem! It’s gone!” Aaron’s eyes were normal again, hazel irises rimmed with white. He smiled weakly and raised one hand to the red welt made by the tallis around his throat. “Th-thank you.”
I nodded and held him close. His small arms encircled my neck. “It is all right,” I said. “It’s over. It’s not your fault.” Rocking him gently, I stepped toward Dr. Eugene.
The good doctor reached forward to take the boy; but I nudged him aside, flung Aaron into the airlock, and slammed the door. The wheel automatically revolved and locked.
Before the men around me could act, I punched the green-lit “Cycle” button.
There was the sound of air compressors, a muffled clang, and a shuddering rolled under our feet like a weak seismic tremor.
The corridor erupted in startled exclamations and I was dragged from the airlock door. Mr. L’Heureux’s face was flushed with anger, confusion, and fear. For all these reasons, or for the lack of reason, his arm rose brandishing its sleek black baton. I had just a moment to think that there was nowhere I could replace my tallis before the baton struck.
Danel’s fingers drummed against the table top. I typed in another code and he stopped.
I was alone in the makeshift workroom Captain Pétain had assigned me. His engineers had provided me every piece of equipment that I requested. One even brought me a sandwich and a glass of wine. The sandwich was ham from the officers’ mess, but the wine was a fine Bordeaux.
Danel lay supine upon the aluminum table like a medieval bishop carved in stone atop his sarcophagus. Stripped of his spotless white uniform and every vestige of human clothing, Danel looked like the machine he was, a metallic manikin for some Austrian clock steeple whose gears had frozen, who could no longer count
time.
I rested my forehead upon the metal table top. It was cool and smelled of disinfectant and lubricant.
The Captain and Mr. L’Hereux, the latter who gruffly offered an apology, likely at the Captain’s request, questioned me about the events at the airlock, the creature that looked first like a Jewish child and then like Seaman Delacroix, and its relationship to the death of the seaman, Lt. Haran, and Rabbi Ludska. They did not mention Danel, assuming his was a malfunction that I could correct.
I answered that nothing could be certain, and questioned them in return about past port calls for the Joan d’Arc, confirming that “yes,” she’d spent time at Deimos, Tethys, and Ceres, though not Centaurin B. I nodded and said the small size and light weight of the creature, its ability to conceal itself by assuming any human form, and its equal disregard for the lives of marine and Jew suggested we’d had our first contact with a Deimon. I proceeded to provide the data I’d collected and the conclusions I’d derived regarding the unique physical qualities of the alien, the texture of its skin, mass alteration, scent, and potential biochemical secretion of a compound similar to that of ricin—and I kept a straight face through all of it.