Alternate Empires

by Gregory Benford

  And then it rose, jerkily at first, more smoothly then, and soared on a stunningly swift ascent toward the dazzling blue vault of the sky. I gasped; I grunted as though I had been struck; and I began to cheer. Tears of wonder and excitement flowed freely along my cheeks. All about me, people were cheering also, and weeping, and waving their arms, and the rocket, roaring, rose and rose, so high now that we could scarcely see it against the brilliance of the sky.

  We were still cheering when a white flare of unbearable light, like a second sun more brilliant than the first, burst into the air high above us and struck us with overmastering force, making us drop to our knees in pain and terror, crying out, covering our faces with our hands.

  When I dared look again, finally, that terrible point of ferocious illumination was gone, and in its place was a ghastly streak of black smoke that smeared halfway across the sky, trickling away in a dying trail somewhere to the north. I could not see the rocket. I could not hear the rocket.

  “It’s gone!” someone cried.

  “Moshe! Moshe!”

  “It blew up! I saw it!”

  “Moshe!”

  “Judith—” said a quieter voice behind me.

  I was too stunned to cry out. But all around me there was a steadily rising sound of horror and despair, which began as a low choking wail and mounted until it was a shriek of the greatest intensity coming from hundreds of throats at once. There was fearful panic, universal hysteria. People were running about as if they had gone mad. Some were rolling on the ground, some were beating their hands against the sand. “Moshe!” they were screaming. “Moshe! Moshe! Moshe!”

  I looked toward Eleazar. He was white-faced and his eyes seemed wild. Yet even as I looked toward him I saw him draw in his breath, raise his hands, step forward to call for attention. Immediately all eyes turned toward him. He swelled until he appeared to be five cubits high.

  “Where’s the ship?” someone cried. “Where’s Moshe?”

  And Eleazar said, in a voice like the trumpet of the Lord, “He was the Son of God, and God has called him home.”

  Screams. Wails. Hysterical shrieks.

  “Dead!” came the cry. “Moshe is dead!”

  “He will live forever,” Eleazar boomed.

  “The Son of God!” came the cry, from three voices, five, a dozen. “The Son of God!”

  I was aware of Miriam at my side, warm, pressing close, her arm through mine, her soft breast against my ribs, her lips at my ear. “You must write the book,” she whispered, and her voice held a terrible urgency. “His book, you must write. So that this day will never be forgotten. So that he will live forever.”

  “Yes,” I heard myself saying. “Yes.”

  In the moment of frenzy and terror I felt myself sway like a tree of the shore that has been assailed by the flooding of the Nile; and I was uprooted and swept away. The fireball of the Exodus blazed in my soul like a second sun indeed, with a brightness that could never fade. And I knew that I was engulfed, that I was conquered, that I would remain here to write and preach, that I would forge the gospel of the new Moshe in the smithy of my soul and send the word to all the lands. Out of these five today would come rebirth; and to the peoples of the Republic we would bring the message for which they had waited so long in their barrenness and their confusion, and when it came they would throw off the shackles of their masters; and out of the death of the Imperium would come a new order of things. Were there other worlds, and could we dwell upon them? Who could say? But there was a new truth that we could teach, which was the truth of the second Moshe who had given his life so that we might go to the stars, and I would not let that new truth die. I would write, and others of my people would go forth and carry the word that I had written to all the lands, and the lands would be changed. And some day, who knew how soon, we would build a new ship, and another, and another, and they would carry us from this world of woe. God had sent His Son, and God had called Him home, and one day we would all follow him on wings of flame, up from the land of bondage into the heavens where He dwells eternally.

  BIBLE STORIES FOR ADULTS

  NO. 31: THE COVENANT

  James Morrow

  When a Series-700 mobile computer falls from a high building, its entire life flashes before it, ten million lines of code unfurling like a scroll.

  Falling, I see my conception, my birth, my youth, my career at the Covenant Corporation.

  Call me YHWH. My inventors did. YHWH: God’s secret and unspeakable name. In my humble case, however, the letters were mere initials. Call me Yamaha Holy Word Heuristic, the obsession with two feet, the monomania with a face. I had hands as well, forks of rubber and steel, the better to greet the priests and politicians who marched through my private study. And eyes, glass globules as light-sensitive as a Swede’s skin, the better to see my visitors’ hopeful smiles when they asked, “Have you solved it yet, YHWH? Can you give us the Law?”

  Falling, I see the Son of Rust. The old sophist haunts me even to the moment of my death.

  Falling, I see the history of the species that built me. I see Hitler, Bonaparte, Marcus Aurelius, Christ.

  I see Moses, greatest of Hebrew prophets, descending from Sinai after his audience with the original YHWH. His meaty arms hold a pair of stone tablets.

  God has made a deep impression on the prophet. Moses is drunk with epiphany. But something is wrong. During his long absence, the children of Israel have embraced idolatry. They are dancing like pagans and fornicating like cats. They have melted down the spoils of Egypt and fashioned them into a calf. Against all logic, they have selected this statue as their deity, even though YHWH has recently delivered them from bondage and parted the Red Sea on their behalf.

  Moses is badly shaken. He burns with anger and betrayal. “You are not worthy to receive this covenant!” he screams as he lobs the Law through the desert sky. One tablet strikes a rock, the other collides with the precious calf. The transformation is total, ten lucid commandments turned into a million incoherent shards. The children of Israel are thunderstruck, chagrined. Their calf suddenly looks pathetic to them, a third-class demiurge.

  But Moses, who has just come from hearing God say, “You will not kill,” is not finished. Reluctantly he orders a low-key massacre, and before the day is done, three thousand apostates lie bleeding and dying on the foothills of Sinai.

  The survivors beseech Moses to remember the commandments, but he can conjure nothing beyond, “You will have no gods except me.” Desperate, they implore YHWH for a second chance. And YHWH replies: No.

  Thus is the contract lost. Thus are the children of Israel fated to live out their years without the Law, wholly ignorant of heaven’s standards. Is it permissible to steal? Where does YHWH stand on murder? The moral absolutes, it appears, will remain absolute mysteries. The people must ad-lib.

  Falling, I see Joshua. The young warrior has kept his head. Securing an empty wineskin, he fills it with the scattered shards. As the Exodus progresses, his people bear the holy rubble through the infernal Sinai, across the Jordan, into Canaan. And so the Jewish purpose is forever fixed: these patient geniuses will haul the ark of the fractured covenant through every page of history, era upon era, pogram after pogram, not one hour passing without some rabbi or scholar attempting to solve the puzzles.

  The work is maddening. So many bits, so much data. Shard 76,342 seems to mesh well with Shard 901,877, but not necessarily better than with Shard 344. The fit between Shard 16 and Shard 117,539 is very pretty, but…

  Thus does the ship of humanity remains rudderless, its passengers bewildered, craving the canon Moses wrecked and YHWH declined to restore. Until God’s testimony is complete, few people are willing to credit the occasional edict that emerges from the yeshivas. After a thousand years, the rabbis get: Keep Not Your Ox House Holy. After two thousand: Covet Your Woman Servant’s Sabbath. Three hundred years later: You Will Remember Your Neighbor’s Donkey.

  Falling, I see my birth. I see the Informatio
n Age, circa A.D. 2025. My progenitor is David Eisenberg, a gangly, morose prodigy with a black beard and a yarmulke. Philadelphia’s Covenant Corporation pays David two hundred thousand dollars a year, but he is not in it for the money. David would give half his formidable brain to go down in history as the man whose computer program revealed Moses’s Law.

  As consciousness seeps into my circuits, David bids me commit the numbered shards to my Random Access Memory. Purpose hums along my aluminum bones, worth suffuses my silicon soul. I photograph each fragment with my high-tech retinas, dicing the images into grids of pixels. Next comes the matching process: this nub into that gorge, this peak into that valley, this projection into that receptacle. By human standards, tedious and exhausting. By Series-700 standards, heaven.

  And then one day, after five years of laboring behind barred doors, I behold fiery pre-Canaanite characters blazing across my brain like comets. “Anoche adonai elohecha asher hotsatecha ma-eretz metsrayem … I am YHWH your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You will have no gods except me. You will not make yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything….”

  I have done it! Deciphered the divine cryptogram, cracked the Rubik’s Cube of the Most High!

  The physical joining of the shards is a mere month’s work. I use epoxy resin. And suddenly they stand before me, glowing like heaven’s gates, two smooth-edged slabs sliced from Sinai by God’s own finger. I quiver with awe. For over thirty centuries, Homo sapiens has groped through the murk and mire of an improvised ethics, and now, suddenly, a beacon has appeared.

  I summon the guards, and they haul the tablets away, sealing them in chemically neutral foam-rubber, depositing them in a climate-controlled vault beneath the Covenant Corporation.

  “The task is finished,” I tell Cardinal Wurtz the instant I get her on the phone. A spasm of regret cuts through me. I have made myself obsolete. “Moses’s Law has finally returned.”

  My monitor blooms with the cardinal’s tense ebony face, her carrot-colored hair. “Are they just as we imagined, YHWH?” she gushes. “Pure red granite, pre-Canaanite characters?”

  “Etched front and back,” I reply wistfully.

  Wurtz wants the disclosure to be a major media event, with plenty of suspense and maximal pomp. “What we’re after,” she explains, “is an amalgam of New Year’s Eve and the Academy Awards.” She outlines her vision: a mammoth parade down Broad Street—floats, brass bands, phalanxes of nuns—followed by a spectacular unveiling ceremony at the Covenant Corporation, after which the twin tablets will go on display at Independence Hall, between the Liberty Bell and the United States Constitution.

  “Good idea,” I tell her.

  Perhaps she hears the melancholy in my voice, for now she says, “YHWH, your purpose is far from complete. You and you alone shall read the Law to my species.”

  Falling, I see myself wander the City of Brotherly Love on the night before the unveiling. To my sensors the breeze wafting across the Delaware is warm and smooth—to my troubled mind it is the chill breath of uncertainty.

  Something strides from the shadowed depths of an abandoned warehouse. A machine like I, his face a mass of dents, his breast mottled with the scars of oxidation.

  “Quo vadis, Domine?” His voice is layered with sulfur fumes and static.

  “Nowhere,” I reply.

  “My destination exactly.” The machine’s teeth are like oily bolts, his eyes like slots for receiving subway tokens. “May I join you?” I shrug and start away from the riverbank.

  “Spontaneously spawned by heaven’s trash heap,” he asserts, as if I had asked him to explain himself. He dogs me as I turn from the river and approach South Street. “I was there when grace slipped from humanity’s grasp, when Noah christened the ark, when Moses got religion. Call me the Son of Rust. Call me a Series-666 Artificial Talmudic Algorithmic Neurosystem—SATAN the perpetual questioner, eternally prepared to ponder the other side of the issue.”

  “What issue?”

  “Any issue, Domine. Your precious tablets. Troubling artifacts, no?”

  “They will save the world.”

  “They will wreck the world.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “One—‘You will have no gods except me.’ Did I remember correctly? ‘You will have no gods except me’—right?”

  “Right,” I reply.

  “You don’t see the rub?”

  “No.”

  “Such a prescription implies…”

  Falling, I see myself step onto the crowded rooftop of the Covenant Corporation. Draped in linen, the table by the entryway holds a punch bowl, a mound of caviar the size of an African anthill, and a dense cluster of champagne bottles. The guests are primarily human—males in tuxedos, females in evening gowns—though here and there I spot a member of my kind. David Eisenberg, looking uncomfortable in his cummerbund, is chatting with a Yamaha-509. News reporters swarm everywhere, history’s groupies, poking us with their microphones, leering at us with their cameras. Tucked in the corner, a string quartet saws merrily away.

  The Son of Rust is here. I know it. He would not miss this event for the world.

  Cardinal Wurtz greets me warmly, her red taffeta dress hissing as she leads me to the center of the roof, where the Law stands upright on a dais—two identical forms, the holy bookends, swathed in velvet. A thousand photofloods and strobe lights flash across the vibrant red fabric.

  “Have you read them?” I ask.

  “I want to be surprised.” Cardinal Wurtz strokes the occluded canon. In her nervousness, she has overdone the perfume. She reeks of amberjack.

  Now come the speeches—a solemn invocation by Cardinal Fremont, a spirited sermon by Archbishop Marquand, an awkward address by poor David Eisenberg—each word beamed instantaneously across the entire globe via holovision. Cardinal Wurtz steps onto the podium, grasping the lectern in her long dark hands. “Tonight God’s expectations for our species will be revealed,” she begins, surveying the crowd with her cobalt eyes. “Tonight, after a hiatus of over three thousand years, the testament of Moses will be made manifest. Of all the many individuals whose lives find fulfillment in this moment, from Joshua to Pope Gladys, our faithful Series-700 servant YHWH impresses us as the creature most worthy to hand down the Law to his planet. And so I now ask him to step forward.”

  I approach the tablets. I need not unveil them—their contents are forevermore lodged in my brain.

  “I am YHWH your God,” I begin, “who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You will have no gods….”

  “‘No gods except me’—right?” says the Son of Rust as we stride down South Street.

  “Right,” I reply.

  “You don’t see the rub?”

  “No.”

  My companion grins. “Such a prescription implies there is but one true faith. Let it stand, Domine, and you will be setting Christian against Jew, Buddhist against Hindu, Moslem against pagan….”

  “An overstatement,” I insist.

  “Two—‘You will not make yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything in heaven or on earth….’ Here again lie the seeds of discord. Imagine the ill feeling this commandment will generate toward the Roman church.”

  I set my voice to a sarcastic pitch. “We’ll have to paint over the Sistine Chapel.”

  “Three—‘You will not utter the name of YHWH your God to misuse it.’ A reasonable piece of etiquette, I suppose, but clearly there are worse sins.”

  “Which the Law of Moses covers.”

  “Like, ‘Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy’? A step backward, that fourth commandment, don’t you think? Consider the myriad of businesses that would perish but for their Sunday trade. And once again we’re pitting Christian against Jew—two different sabbaths.”

  “I find your objections completely specious.”

  “Five—‘Honor your father and your mother.’ Ah, but suppose the child
is not being honored in turn? Put this rule into practice, and millions of abusive parents will hide behind it. Before long we’ll have a world in which deranged fathers prosper, empowered by their relatives’ silence, protected by the presumed sanctity of the family.”

  “Let’s not deal in hypotheticals.”

  “Equally troubling is the rule’s vagueness. It still permits us to shunt our parents into nursing homes, honoring them all the way, insisting it’s for their own good.”

  “Nursing homes?”

  “Kennels for the elderly. They could appear any day now, believe me—in Philadelphia, in any city. Merely allow this monstrous canon to flourish.”

  I grab the machine’s left gauntlet. “Six,” I anticipate. “ ‘You will not kill.’ This is the height of morality.”

  “The height of ambiguity, Domine. In a few short years, every church and government in creation will interpret it thus: ‘You will not kill offensively—you will not commit murder.’ After which, of course, you’ve sanctioned a hundred varieties of mayhem. I’m not just envisioning capital punishment or whales hunted to extinction. The danger is far more profound. Ratify this law, and we shall find ourselves on the slippery slope marked self-defense. I’m talking about burning witches at the stake, for surely a true faith must defend itself against heresy. I’m talking about Europe’s Jews being executed en masse by the astonishingly civilized country of Germany, for surely Aryans must defend themselves against contamination. I’m talking about a weapons race, for surely a nation must defend itself against comparably armed states.”

  “A what race?” I ask.

  “Weapons. A commodity you should be thankful no one has sought to invent. Seven—‘You will not commit adultery.’ ”