Corrupting Dr. Nice

by John Kessel

  Eventually her mother started coming home later and later. She would wobble into the room after twelve, push some Snooze into her arm to get herself to sleep and some Focus in the morning to get her up. Sometimes she wouldn't come home at all for a day or more. Finally she didn't come back at all. Gen didn't know what to do. She couldn’t call the police. Even if they found Ivy Faison, she would end up in jail, and Gen in some foster home. So Gen kept going to school, hoping each day that her mother would be there when she came back. Instead she had Max. For a month she lived alone in the apartment with her German shepherd, rent unpaid, the bills collecting and the food dwindling.

  One day at recess she saw a man watching her from outside the chain link fence of the school yard. At first she thought it might be a cop or one of her mother's boyfriends, and she tried to ignore him. But there was something familiar about he way he stood, and when he finally called out to her, "Genevieve!" she knew it was her father.

  She had never seen her mother again. Two years and a dozen scams later, Max died.

  Simon had said little to them since they'd left the palace, but Gen caught him giving her an occasional wary look. The awed expression on his face was out of keeping with his brusque manner. Was he attracted to her? But at times he seemed almost afraid. He took them down the street to a shop under a big painted sign:

  Fiery Furnace Sale!

  HONEST ABEDNEGO'S DISCOUNT ANIMALS

  Why waste Time? Why pay more?

  The building was one of the new sandfoam prefabs with a stucco front and a high tin roof that must drum like a demon when it rained. Simon nodded at the entrance but did not follow them inside.

  Both sides of the front room were lined with cages of animals: birds, snakes, lizards, cats, dogs. The place smelled of wood shavings, a trace of urine. Incense burned in an iron lamp stand. The HVAC system hummed above them. An open doorway in back led to a sunlit courtyard and a glimpse of paddocks containing horses, camels, oxen. The rear wall held racks of animal carriers. Most had wire mesh windows, but on display was a pearl gray metal quarantine carrier identical to the one Vannice had brought from the Cretaceous, hermetically sealed with an environmental readout on top.

  On the corner of the service counter rested a green lava lamp and a flatscreen playing the 2062 Sporting News. Though it was turned upside down to her, Gen recognized a clip of Babe Ruth swatting his latest homer for the Vancouver Sea Lions. A clean shaven man in a stained brown tunic came up to speak to them. "Yes, sir?"

  "I would like to purchase a dog," August said.

  August went off with the owner to examine a selection of Egyptian dogs, and Gen went back to where Simon stood under the shadow of the entrance.

  Outside a man had stopped in front of the baker's shop to pray. Several passersby stopped to join him. The baker came to his door to scowl at this impediment to his business, but did nothing to chase the man away. Simon watched, a sober expression on his face. The praying man wore a blue and tan shawl, a brown robe. On his left arm he wore a leather strap wound seven times around his biceps, from which dangled a leather cube. Another cube hung from a band around his forehead.

  "Coming with us must have disrupted your schedule," Gen said. "Will you have extra work to do when you return?"

  Simon turned his attention from the praying man. "There are more people who need work than jobs to do."

  "When does your shift normally end?"

  He only stared at her. He was shorter than she, and his dark brown eyes worked with powerful emotion. Despite herself, Gen stopped thinking of him as a source of information and saw him as a man. "You don't like to deal with us," she said.

  "I am a poor man. I do what I must."

  "What did you do before the people came from the future?"

  "Like my father, I was a weaver."

  "That is a difficult work, as I understand it."

  He looked at her as if trying to detect some insult. "Men call it women's work. Yet they would be without a cloak in the cold of winter were it not for weavers."

  "An injustice. Doesn't the change that we have brought offer you some hope?"

  He looked away.

  A band of teenaged boys came dashing up the street, shouting and hurling sticks. While one of them decoyed the owner's attention by throwing a fistful of pebbles onto the awning over the shop front, another of them snatched a loaf of bread from the baker's table. Simon stepped forward. "Samuel!" he shouted.

  One of the boys turned to them, while his companion ran off with the loaf. He saw Simon and Gen, hesitated, then dashed off down an alley. Simon took another step toward him. The baker glared. When Simon retreated, the baker turned on the Pharisee, and yelled at the man to move along. An argument started.

  "Who was that boy?" Gen asked.

  "That was my son. Running with thieves."

  "Why did he look at us like that?"

  Simon paused. "You carry yourself like his mother."

  Gen tried to think of something to say. "You must wish that she could keep him out of trouble."

  "His mother is dead. So while I spend my day working for foreigners, he slips away from me."

  Gen stood there in the shadow of Honest Abednego's sign, at a loss for words. Simon still would not look at her. In order to live Gen and August often had to impersonate historicals. But it was a small step from impersonating to sympathizing. Over the years Gen had perfected a double-think that made it possible for her to use historicals without compunction. But in the scant hour she'd known him Simon had slipped from a being prop in their con game to a man with a dead wife and a troubled son.

  "Genevieve?" It was August.

  "Come, help us," she said to Simon, and re-entered the shop.

  August held a slender silky-haired dog by a leash while the shopkeeper prepared the carrier. Gen knelt down next to the dog and scratched behind its long and delicately formed ears; it whipped its tail and sniffed her hand. "This is Pharaoh," August said.

  The Saluki slipped readily into the carrier and they sealed the door. While August paid the proprietor, Gen made Simon haul the carrier to the front. She could not estimate the degree of his resentment, and she tried not to think of it. The baker had given up trying to get the praying Pharisee to move, but now the life of the street went on around him, oblivious.

  SEVEN: A NIGHT AT THE HIPPODROME

  In the evening three trumpet calls from the heralds at the Temple summoned the faithful to prayer, while the magic light of sunset turned the narrow streets soft gold. Serge Halam could understand how, to the Jews, Jerusalem seemed the center of God's universe. It was little wonder that they hated the futurians who so casually told them this was only a backwater moment in an incomprehensible universe.

  He walked down the white stone street of the lower market, through crowds of pilgrims, priests, traders, thieves, anchorites. Jews, Greeks, Romans. A line of chanting Levites in white robes filed upward to the Temple. The smoke of the evening offering would soon rise. He passed a tailor, a worker in brass and copper, a shoemaker's shop. The shoemaker knelt before a low table in the shade of his wooden awning, pounding a piece of leather, a brass mortar in his deft hands. A letter writer with a reed pen stuck behind his ear crouched over an old-fashioned portable computer. Behind him a boy, no doubt his son, practiced writing Hebrew characters with a second reed pen.

  Outside the entrance to the Hippodrome a couple of Greek touts were taking bets on that night's baseball game between Jerusalem and Capernaum. Halam paid five asses for a ticket and headed through the turnstile. The Jerusalem squad was pathetic, the Capernaum team not much better. The players were all captives taken in war, slaves, or criminals, with a couple of impoverished freemen, coached by a retired major leaguer hired by the Saltimbanque Corporation's Cultural Improvement Office. The historicals were miserably awkward batters. The concept of the curve ball was beyond them. The heat vibrating off the artificial turf turned day games into an oven, and quite regularly somebody had to be hauled off the out
field in a dead faint. Now that the lights had been installed most games were played in the evenings. Since devout Jews would not go near such sports, let alone bet, the crowds were mostly Romans, Greeks and Syrians, but that didn't keep the Pharisees from protesting the corruption it was causing.

  It was probably a bad idea to try to introduce a modern sport into ancient Judaea, the brainchild of some PR flack with a newly minted social engineering degree who didn't bother to learn about the people he was trying to persuade. Or maybe the company wanted to cause friction, as an excuse to continue military rule.

  Halam bought a basket of fried locusts from a vendor and found his seat. His contact had not arrived, so he sat watching as the ground crew laid down the chalk around the batter's box. Behind the home team's dugout, just opposite first base, Pilate and his son were settling into their reserved box. The Roman Prefect had taken to baseball and was a regular at most home games. His son wore an absurdly large Jerusalem Scholars cap, under which his ears stuck out like two open doors on a cab.

  The game started and right away the Scholars fell behind. The pitcher walked the first two batters. The next hitter skidded a single into right center which the center fielder kicked to the wall; in the ensuing Marx Brothers routine between him and the right fielder both runners scored. The batter ended up on third. The crowd did not seem to mind, cheering every mishap wildly.

  In the top of the third, score 6-2 Capernaum, a man sat down next to Halam.

  "When we drive you invaders away we will have this place torn down."

  "It's just a game, Simon," Halam said. "Save your indignation for something that matters."

  Above the walls of the stadium, up on Herod's magnificent platform, the wall of the temple gleamed gold beneath a purple sky. "When I was a boy," Simon said, "I dreamed of escaping Galilee for Jerusalem. I longed to become a Levite, have my lot chosen to be the one, once in my life, to make the offering of incense. To walk before the great temple, to be vouchsafed a single glimpse of the Holy of Holies. That was before I saw the palaces the Sadducees built for themselves with the money collected from the poor."

  "Money draws corruption. You shouldn't expect otherwise. That's the way the world works."

  "Judaism is about purity."

  "You're not going to get rid of your conquerors by being pure."

  Simon spat onto the stone bench. "I don't know why I speak with you."

  "You speak with me because I get you assault rifles."

  "Once all you invaders are gone we'll destroy those rifles, and fling the pieces into the desert."

  Halam laughed.

  "Why do you laugh?"

  "You remind me of something the inventor of these weapons said. He was an immigrant to a country in the future, a place called the United States."

  "What do I care about this mythical country?"

  "It was an important place. It lasted a couple hundred years."

  "Israel has lasted a thousand. It will be here long after you have been driven away."

  "Perhaps. Anyway, this inventor said his family emigrated 'so they could worship God according to the dictates of their own conscience, and prevent others from doing the same.'" Halam finished the last of his locusts. "Better hold onto those rifles, Simon" he said. "You'll need them."

  A chant arose from the crowd as the Scholars mounted a rally. The Capernaum pitcher, a lanky Syrian who advertised his freeborn status with an impressive black beard, had already worn himself out and was lobbing gopherballs. The Jerusalem batter took a furious cut at a pitch, popping a high fly into foul territory outside first. The first baseman, a look of terror on his face, circled under it for what seemed like a full minute, then muffed the catch. The crowd cheered. Halam set down the empty paper dish and leaned forward. “Don’t overswing!” he shouted.

  "There's nothing in the Torah against virtual reality," he said to Simon. "Or about microwaves, or radio , or electricity. These things are just machines. They don't have any moral content."

  "You are worse than the Romans. You force your blasphemous images into everything."

  "We call it advertising."

  "'Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord.' Yet your women talk openly in public, and wear scandalous clothing, and fornicate. They should be stoned."

  "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

  Simon clenched his fists and glared at the ball field. "Yes, he said that. But he left us. You stole him away."

  "Save your money, take a tour to an unburned M-U. He's still there. Or visit the future. We've got several versions."

  "Yeshu is everywhere but here, where he's needed the most."

  "Why do you think he went? If he had stayed here he would be dead."

  "His death would have been our victory. In his name we would have ripped Herod from his throne, stuck Pilate's head on a pike, and swept the Romans into the sea."

  "My understanding is that he did not advocate violence. Perhaps you disagreed with him on this?"

  Simon said nothing. He was acting as hysterical as Jephthah.

  "Has something gone wrong?" Halam asked.

  The zealot looked up at the Temple again before answering. "My superiors at the hotel have been treating me as if I'm the only employee there. The sent me up to a room today where one of your tourists had some kind of demonic lizard."

  "You sure it wasn't a VR setup?"

  "I could smell it."

  "It was probably an iguana. Is that all that's bothering you?"

  Simon looked him in the eye. "I don't know where my son is."

  Halam sighed. This was more personal information than any one of the revolutionaries had ever trusted him with, and he didn't much like it. "You want my help?"

  "What I want is for you all to leave." There was more weariness than rage in Simon's voice.

  "Understand this," Halam said. "Your supporters in the future hired me because I like Jerusalem, but I think they're as deluded as you are. Even if you throw the corporations out, the time travelers will be here. I can give you self rule, but not keep them away forever."

  "What good is self rule if you tear us apart? Your drugs and your music and your games?"

  "Simon, your faith is immortal. But you can't stop change."

  A foul ball screamed off the bat, curling right at them. Simon, oblivious, would have been beaned had not Halam surged up and snagged it. Simon looked befuddled. Halam sat back down, tossed the ball up and caught it. "Hey, how about that! I've never caught one before in my whole life! All right now, straighten it out!" he yelled.

  "When can we attack?" Simon said.

  "Calm down." Halam saw that Simon was not going to be reasonable. Maybe the zealots could scour the effects of the time travelers out of Jerusalem, but then they'd only be back in the Roman world. But there was no point in his trying to explain it all again.

  The Jerusalem batter laced the next pitch into the left field corner. The man on second came around to score. The left fielder chased down the ball and came up throwing, a mile over the cut-off man and halfway up the first base line. The batter, arms flailing, rounded second and steamed toward third. The Capernaum first baseman kept the throw from going into the dugout, thought about throwing to third but held up. The batter ran through the stop sign at third and steamed toward the plate. The sparse crowd was up and screaming, Halam with them. As the catcher blocked the plate, the first baseman threw home. The ball and the base runner got there simultaneously. There was a huge collision.

  When the dust settled the umpire, leaning over, yelled “You’re out!”

  The crowd hurled curses down on him. The Jerusalem manager rushed out of the dugout and jawed with the ump, throwing his arms about like a madman. The ump turned purple and told him to shut up. The catcher and the base runner lay on the ground groaning. The Capernaum manager barged in to hurl in a few choice epithets. The pitcher raised his arms to the heavens, then rent the neck of his uniform shirt, which looked to have been torn and re-sewn
a dozen times already. The crowd hurled refuse onto the field. They began to chant, “Prefect! Prefect! Prefect!” Finally the umpire threw up his hands and turned to the Roman's box.

  Pilate stood from his seat, pulled his fine blue robe around him. He held out his hand, thumb parallel to the ground, and let the moment draw out. The crowd hushed. Then, with a little grin, he turned thumbs up. Safe.

  The crowd cheered, the Jerusalem manager helped up his player, the ump wiped his brow and the Capernaum skipper, muttering, stalked back to the dugout. The pitcher hung his head and kicked dirt from the mound.

  Halam checked his watch. “I’ve seen enough,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  Night was coming on and the streets lay in shadow. Simon led him down a narrow street to the river, then turned south down an even narrower street. Where it passed below the old wall of the City of David, near the Pool of Siloam, they loitered in the shadows. Halam lit a cigarette; Simon turned away in alarm, and Halam smoked quietly. Eventually a very handsome man in a brown cloak approached them.

  "Hello, Jephthah," Halam said. "Howya doing?"

  Jephthah stared at Halam's hand as if it were a dead fish; Simon grimaced, shifting from foot to foot. The instant the younger man had appeared Simon got even stiffer than before. Apparently it wasn't just the Saltimbanque staff that was bossing Simon around.

  "Okay, let's get down to cases," Halam said. "You've distributed those Model 25s?"

  "Model 25s?" Jephthah said, watching for passersby.

  "The Czech submachine guns."

  "We haven't been able to fire them near the city. The noise draws attention. But our men in Salim are getting some experience with these weapons right now."

  "What do you mean?"

  Jephthah looked suspicious. Simon broke in, "They're taking over the garrison there tonight."

  Halam shook his head. "That’s foolish, you know. You should keep quiet until the time comes. This way you’re only going to waste ammunition and get everyone jumpy."