People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy
Page 16
As I write this, I have at hand the drawing I made for my Papa and Niels Bohr, sixty years ago. It is yellowed and cracked from age and over-handling. Today, as on many days, I have taken it out to consult it, to make refinements, to seek inspiration, or simply to remember.
Beneath the drawing sits a recent letter from the Nobel Academy, congratulating me for the work I did in the seventies on the topological analysis of 10-dimensional quantum-observor interfaces. In recent years, the neuroscientists have appropriated that work, as part of a fundamental new theory of consciousness. My father’s gift to the world.
Soon I will return to Sweden for the first time since that night. I will go by way of Denmark, to visit the one who sleeps beneath Kronborg Castle. In Stockholm I will shake hands with a King. For a few moments the world will be mine. The world will listen.
When I speak, it will not be of physics, or Kabbalah, or the nobility of science, or the power of faith. I will speak of my father, Rabbi Itzak Josef Goldblum, and my other father, Niels Henrik David Bohr. I will speak of my debt to them, and how my life and work have been nothing, nothing but my effort to be worthy of them both.
The Tsar’s Dragon
Jane Yolen & Adam Stemple
The dragons were harrowing the provinces again. They did that whenever the Tsar was upset with the Jews. He would go down to their barns himself with a big golden key and unlock the stalls. Made a big show of it.
“Go!” he would cry out pompously, flinging his arm upward, outward, though, having no sense of direction, he usually pointed towards Moscow. That would have been a disaster if the dragons were equally dense. But of course they are not.
So they took off, the sky darkening as their vee formation covered a great swath of the heavens. And as they went, everyone below recited the old rhyme, “Bane of Dragons”:
Fire above, fire below,
Pray to hit my neighbor.
Well, it rhymes in the dialect.
Of course, the Jews were all safe, having seeded their shtetls with a new kind of drachometer—an early-warning device that only they could have invented. The Tsar should have listened to me when I told him to gather the Jewish scientists in one place and force them to work for him. Away from their families, their friends. Use them to rid ourselves of the rest. But no, once again I was not heeded.
So deep inside their burrows, the Jews—safe as houses—were drinking schnapps and tea in glasses with glass handles . . . which always seems an odd combination to me, but then, I am not Jewish, not even seven times down the line, which one must prove in order to work for the Tsar.
Balked of their natural prey, the dragons took once more to raking the provinces with fire. This time, it cost us a really fine opera house, built in the last century and fully gilded, plus a splendid spa with indoor plumbing, and two lanes of Caterina the Great houses, plus the servants therein. Thank the good Lord it was summer—all the hoi plus all the polloi were at their summer dachas and missed the fun. The smoke, though, hung over the towns for days, like a bad odor.
I pointed all this out this to His Royal Graciousness High Buttinsky, but carefully, of course. I know that I’m not irreplaceable. No one is. Even Tsars, as we all found out much later. And I wanted my head to remain on my shoulders. At least until my new wife wore me out.
Bowing low, I said, “Do you remember, gracious one, what I said concerning the Jewish scientists?”
The Tsar stroked his beard, shook his head, mumbled a few words to the mad magician who danced attendance on the Tsaritsa, and left abruptly to plan his next pogrom. It would have as little effect as the last. But he was always trying. Very trying.
Have I mentioned how much Tsar Nicholas is constantly upset with the Jews?
Now the mad magician and I had this in common: we did not think highly of the Tsar’s wits. Or his wishes and wants. This did not, of course, stop us from cashing his chits and living at court and finding new young wives at every opportunity, our own and other men’s. But where we differed was that Old Raspy thought that he knew a thing or three about dragons. And in that—as it turned out—he was terribly, horribly wrong.
Some twelve feet below the frozen Russian surface, two men sat smoking their cigarettes and drinking peach schnapps next to a blue-and-white-tiled stove. The tiles had once been the best to be had from a store—now long gone—in the Crimea, but in the half-lit burrow, the men did not care about the chips and chinks and runnels on them. Nor would they have cared if the stove were still residing upstairs in the house’s summer kitchen. They were more concerned with other things now, like dragons, like peach schnapps, like the state of the country.
One man was tall, gangly, and humped over because of frequent stays in the burrow, not just to escape the dragons either. He had a long beard, gray as a shovelhead. With the amount of talking he tended to do, he looked as if he were digging up an entire nation. Which, of course, he was.
The other was short, compact, even compressed, with a carefully cultivated beard and sad eyes.
The taller of the two threw another piece of wood into the stove’s maw. The heat from the blue tiles immediately cranked up, but there was no smoke, due to the venting system, which piped the smoke straight up through ten feet of hard-packed dirt, then, two feet before the surface, through a triple-branching system that neatly divided the smoke so that when it came into contact with the cold air, it was no more than a wisp. Warm enough for wolves to seek the three streams out, but as they scattered when there were dragons or Cossacks attacking the villages, the smoke never actually gave away the positions of the burrows.
“You ever notice,” the taller man, Bronstein, began, “that every time we ask the Tsar to stop a war—”
“He kills us,” the other, Borutsch, finished for him, his beard jumping. “Lots of us.” Bronstein nodded in agreement and seemed ready to go on, but Borutsch didn’t even pause for breath. “When he went after Japan, we told him, ‘It’s a tiny island with nothing worth having. Let the little delusional, we’re-descended-from-the-sun-god-and-you-aren’t bastards keep it. Russia is big enough. Why add eighteen square miles of nothing but volcanoes and rice?’ ”
Bronstein took off the oval eyeglasses that matched his pinched face so well and idly smeared dust from one side of the lenses to the other. “Well, what I mean to say is—”
“And this latest! His high mucky-muck Franz falls over dead drunk in Sarajevo and never wakes up again, and all of a sudden Germany is a rabid dog biting everyone within reach.” Borutsch gnashed his teeth at several imaginary targets, setting his long beard flopping so wildly that he was in danger of sticking it in his own eye. “But why should we care? Let Germany have France. They let that midget monster loose on us a century ago; they can get a taste of their own borscht now.” “Yes, well—” But Borutsch was not to be stopped. “How big a country does one man need? What is he going to do with it? His dragons have torched more than half of it, and his ‘Fists’ have stripped the other half clean of anything of value.”
“Wood and grain,” Bronstein managed to interject. The only things worth more than the dragons themselves, he thought. Wood in the winter and grain in the spring—the only two seasons Russia gets. The nine aggregate days that made up summer and fall didn’t really count.
“Yes. So he sends us to fight and die for a country we don’t own and that’s worth nothing anyway, and if we happen to survive, he sends us off to Siberia to freeze our dumplings off! And if we complain?” Borutsch pointed his finger at Bronstein, thumb straight. “Ka-pow!”
Bronstein waited to see if the older man was going to go on, but he was frowning into his schnapps now, as if it had disagreed with something he’d just said.
“Yes, well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Pinches.”
Borutsch looked up, his eyes sorrowful and just slightly bleary from drink.
“I’ve got an idea,” Bronstein said.
Borutsch’s lips curled upward in a quiet smile, but his eyes remain
ed sad. “You always do, Lev. You always do.”
The mad monk was not so mad as people thought. Calculating, yes. Mani-pulative, yes. Seductive, definitely.
He stared speculatively at himself in a gilded mirror in the queen’s apartments. His eyes were almost gold.
Like a dragon’s, he thought.
He was wrong. The dragons’ eyes were coal black. Shroud black. Except for the dragon queen. Hers were green. Ocean green, black underwater green, with a lighter, almost foamy green color in the center. But then the mad monk had never actually been down to see the dragons in their stalls, or talked to their stall boys. He didn’t dare.
If there was one thing that frightened Rasputin, it was dragons. There had been a prophecy about it. And as calculating a man as he was, he was also a man of powerful beliefs. Peasant beliefs.
He who fools with dragons
Will himself be withered in their flames.
It is even stronger in the original Siberian.
Not that you can find anyone who speaks Siberian here in the center of the Empire, the monk thought. Which is where I belong. In the center. He’d long known that he was made for greater things than scraping a thin living from the Siberian tundra, like his parents.
Or dying in the cold waters of the Tura, like my siblings.
Shaking off these black thoughts, he made a quick kiss at his image in the mirror.
“Now there’s an enchanting man!” he said aloud. His own face always did much to cheer him—as well as cheer the ladies of the court.
“Father Grigori,” said a light, breathy child’s voice in the vicinity of his hip. “Pick me up.”
The mad monk was not so mad as to refuse the order of the Tsar’s only son. The boy might be ill, sometimes desperately so. But one day soon, he would be Tsar. The stars foretold it. And the Lord God—who spoke to Father Grigori in his dreams of fire and ice—had foretold it as well.
“As you wish and for my pleasure,” he said, bending down and picking the child in his arms. He bore him carefully, knowing that if he pressed too hard, bruises the size and color of fresh beets would form and not fade for weeks.
The boy looked up at him fondly, and said, “Let’s go see Mama,” and Father Grigori’s mouth broke into a wolfish grin.
“Yes, let’s,” he said. “As you wish and for my pleasure.” He practically danced down the long hall with the child.
So having been balked once again of my chance to persuade the Tsar of the foolishness of his plans, I thought to go back to my apartment and visit with my young wife. We had met not a year earlier at the Bal Blanc, she in virginal white, her perfect shoulders bare, diamonds circling that perfect neck like a barrier. I was so thoroughly enchanted, I married again, less than a year after my last wife’s death. It was only much later that I discovered the diamonds were her sister’s. It was only much, much later that she discovered how little money I actually have.
Now, early afternoon, she might be napping. Or she might be entertaining. I hoped she would be available and not with some of her admirers. The problem with taking someone so young to wife is getting one’s turn with her. Nights, of course, she is always mine, but who knows what she is doing during the day.
Suddenly realizing that I didn’t want to know, I turned abruptly on my heel, my new boots on the tiled floor making a squealing noise that was not unlike the sound a sow makes in labor. I have watched many of them at my summer farm.
I’d made a decision, and I made it quickly. It’s one of the things the Tsar likes about me since he has so many ditherers around him. Old men, old aristos, who cannot come down on one side or another of any question. Much like the Tsar. I think it’s in the bloodlines, along with the many diseases. Inbreeding, you know.
This was my decision: I would go down to the stalls and visit the dragons. See if I could figure them out. There is a strange, dark intelligence there. Or maybe not exactly intelligence as we humans understand it, more like cunning. If only we could harness that as well as we have harnessed their loyalty—from centuries of captivity and a long leash. Much like the Cossacks actually. With a bit of luck, I might figure out this harrowing business. The Tsar might finally make me a Count. New blood might appeal to him. He’d listen to my plans. Then my young wife, Ninotchka, would be available in the afternoons, too. I strode down the hallway smiling. Making decisions always lifts my spirit. I breathed more deeply; my blood began to race. I felt fifty years old again.
It was then that I saw the mad monk, halfway down the hall and coming toward me, carrying the young prince. He’s the only one who dares do that without soft lambs’-wool blankets. That child’s skin is like old china. It can be smashed by the slightest touch.
“Father Grigori,” I said, my hand to my brow in salute. He may be just a muzhik by birth, he may be as mad as they say he is, but I would be madder still to neglect the obeisance he demands. He has the ear of the young Tsar. And the young Tsar’s mother, Alexandra. Maybe more than just her ear, if you believed the rumors.
He glanced at me, my name ashes in his mouth. He never uses my title. Then he smiled, that soft, sensual smile that drives the women wild, though to me it looks like a serpent’s smile. “Commend me to your young wife.”
It was then that I knew what I had only feared before. My own Ninotchka had fallen under his spell. I would have to kill him. Alone or with others. For Ninotchka’s sake, as well as my own. But how?
The answer, I felt, was down in the stalls with the dragons. So, down I went.
You always smell the dragons long before you see them. It is a ripe musk, fills the nostrils, tastes like old boots. But it’s not without its seductions. It is the smell of power, a smell I could get used to.
The door squalled when I opened it, and the dragons set up a yowling to match, expecting to be fed. Dragons are always hungry. It has to do with the hot breath, and needing fuel, or so I’d been told.
I grabbed a handful of cow brains out of a nearby bucket and flung it into the closest stall.
There was a quick rustling of their giant bat wings—three or four dragons share a stall because it calms them down. I wiped my hands on the towel hung on the peg for just that purpose. I would need to wash before going back to my apartment, or Ninotchka would never let me touch her tonight.
The Tsar’s dragons were slimmer and more snakelike than the Great Khan’s dragons from whom they’d been bred. They were black, like eels. Their long faces, framed with ropy hair, always looked as if they were about to speak in some Nubian’s tongue. One expected Araby to issue forth instead of curls of smoke.
I gazed into the eyes of the largest one, careful not to look down or away, nor to show fear. Fear only excites them. Prey show fear. His eyes were dark, like the Crimea in winter, and I felt as if I swam in them. Then I sensed that I was starting to drown. Down and down I went, my eyes wide open, my mouth filled with the ashy water—when suddenly I saw the future breaststroking towards me: hot fires, buildings in flames. The Russias were burning. St. Petersburg and Moscow buried in ash. The gold leaf of the turrets on Anichkov Palace and Ouspensky Cathedral peeling away in the heat.
“Enough!” I said, hauling myself away, finding the surface, breaking the spell. “I will not be guiled by your animal magic.”
The dragon turned away and nuzzled the last of the cow brains at his feet.
I’d been wrong. There’d be no help from these creatures. And I’d be no help for them.
The dragons finally gone, the drachometer signaled the all clear, a sound like cicadas sighing. Bronstein and Borutsch crawled out of the burrows and into a morning still thick with dragon smoke. The two squinted and coughed and nodded to the other folks who were emerging besmirched and bleary from their own warrens.
No one exchanged smiles; they were alive and unharmed, but houses had been burned, businesses ruined, fields scorched through the snow. A stand of fine old white birch trees, after which the town was named, were now charred and blackened stumps. And perhaps the
next time, the drachometers would fail and there would be no warning. It was always a possibility. Drek happens, as the rabbis liked to say.
The babuschkas were not so full of bile, but they were realists, too, as they told of the old times before the drachometers, when Tsars with names like “Great” and “Terrible” savaged the lands with their dragons and their armies. The Jews had been nearly wiped out then, and only the invention of the first drachometer—a primitive device by today’s standards—had saved them. Borutsch’s old grandmother often said, “We live in the better times.”
“Better than what?” he would tease.
Hearing the old women’s stories, the children shuddered at the wanton destruction while the young men scoffed and made chest-puffed proclamations of what they would or wouldn’t have done had they been faced with sudden, fiery death from above.
But not Bronstein. He’d always listened intently to the stories and tried to imagine what it was like in the far-off days when you had no time to get safely underground and you had to face the dragons in the open: flame, tooth, and claw against man’s feeble flesh. Because he realized something that the other young men seemed not to: technologies fail, or other technologies supplant them, and the contraption you count on one day can be useless the next. In this, the rabbis are right, he thought. Drek really does happen. There was only one thing you could really count on, and it certainly wasn’t a sheep-sized gadget that ran on magnetism and magic and honked like a bull elk in rut when a dragon came within ten miles.
It was power.
Those who have it stand on the backs of those who don’t, and no amount of invention or intelligence could raise a person from one to the other. No, to get power you had to grab it by force. And to hold it, you had to use even more force.
We Jews, Bronstein thought, as he led Borutsch out of town, are unaccustomed to force. Then, frowning, Except when it’s used against us.
As they climbed the hills outside the shtetl, both men began to breathe heavily, their breath frosting like dragon smoke in the chill December air. Borutsch shed his outer coat. Bronstein loosened his collar. They walked on. Entering the forest at midday, they moved easily through the massive cedars and spruce, grown so tall as to choke out the undergrowth and even keep the snow from falling beneath them.