That was the day Mahmud introduced the pliers.
Back in the cell, Avi got to know his two fellow inmates in the way that is unique to people who spend all day and all night in each other’s company. Ehud was an agnostic, and Gershom was extremely religious, so there was some conversation there in between the endless guesswork about current events. By the second day, Gershom and Ehud both knew all the standard philosophical arguments for and against the existence of God backwards and forwards. Gershom surprised and delighted Avi by being a good student and coming up with all sorts of clever objections and counter-arguments.
Gershom started demanding a Siddur for his daily prayers in his interrogation sessions, and the guards eventually gave him one. They put it in the shared toilet in the back of the cell.
Gershom grimly fished the prayer book out of the toilet bowl, left it out to dry on the floor for a day, separated the pages and began to use it. They couldn’t say the prayers that required a minyan, but Ehud and Avi immediately and unquestioningly joined in the chanting every morning as a matter of solidarity. As soon as that was over, they would re-start the argument about the existence of God.
Once Avi was missing two of the fingernails on his right hand and one of the ones on the left, he pretty much figured the worst of the “interrogation” was over. He was wrong.
His little outburst about logic had resulted in a new line of verbal abuse, this one revolving around Mahmud’s contention that Avi “talked like a fucking queer.” The day before he was released, Mahmud told his two confederates to leave the room and announced with great pride that he’d talked to some people who’d met Avi at Al Quds. “Turns out you don’t just talk like one.”
If Avi had been less addled by the days of “interrogation” and sleep in the constant bright light of the detention cell, he might have had some idea of where Mahmud was going with this before the commander unzipped his pants.
“I guess that means you won’t even mind this, will you?”
When Avi was dumped back onto the streets at the end of the week, his first visit was to Sarah and David’s apartment. He had to fight down vomit when he saw the bruises covering Sarah’s face and neck, but he forced himself to be relieved that she was in one piece and not in a detention cell herself.
Sarah hugged him, hard, until he winced and she pulled back. She invited him in and held it together long enough to get him a cup of coffee. She didn’t even start crying until he asked whether David was still in detention.
Avi was a coffin bearer at his brother’s funeral, and from then on he attended the minyan at Gershom’s shul three times a day, praying with an intensity and devotion that rivaled the rabbi’s. He went through the motions of teaching his class for the remainder of the semester—his new rabbi had reminded him, after all, of the importance of honoring contracts—and went to services on the last Friday of the school year with his new intention fully formed.
He had discussed it with the rabbi, who was a member of the “Real JU” splinter faction, and he was far from surprised when the topic of that night’s sermon was the biblical story of Samson.
“Samson said, ‘Let me die with the Philistines!’ and pulled the temple down around those wicked men. This was a great mitzvah, and Samson was a hero of the Jewish people.” The Rabbi stared straight into Avi’s eyes as he said that part. For a moment, there seemed to be a flame dancing in the Rabbi’s glasses as pure and bright as the verses of the law, inscribed according to tradition in black fire on white fire in the mind of God.
Avi nodded, and his heart lifted in joy. He wept as he sang the prayer about the resurrection of the dead. When the Torah was passed around the congregation, Avi was the first to kiss it.
As he climbed the hill to the PDF checkpoint on the border of the neighborhood the next morning and waited for the civilians to pass through, Avi reflected that he still didn’t know whether an all-powerful being could create a door that He Himself could not open. He was, however, no longer bothered by the question.
He got to the checkpoint and began to whisper, suffused with the happy knowledge that in a few minutes all of the cards would be turned over, all of his questions answered, as his body was transfigured into a pillar of light.
“Shema, Yisroel . . . ”
Biographical Notes to “A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-planes” by Ben Rosenbaum
Benjamin Rosenbaum
On my return from PlausFab-Wisconsin (a delightful festival of art and inquiry, which styles itself “the World’s Only Gynarchist Plausible-Fable Assembly”) aboard the P.R.G.B. Śri George Bernard Shaw, I happened to share a compartment with Prem Ramasson, Raja of Outermost Thule, and his consort, a dour but beautiful woman whose name I did not know.
Two great blond barbarians bearing the livery of Outermost Thule (an elephant astride an iceberg and a volcano) stood in the hallway outside, armed with sabres and needlethrowers. Politely they asked if they might frisk me, then allowed me in. They ignored the short dagger at my belt—presumably accounting their liege’s skill at arms more than sufficient to equal mine.
I took my place on the embroidered divan. “Good evening,” I said.
The Raja flashed me a white-toothed smile and inclined his head. His consort pulled a wisp of blue veil across her lips, and looked out the porthole.
I took my notebook, pen, and inkwell from my valise, set the inkwell into the port provided in the white pine table set in the wall, and slid aside the strings that bound the notebook. The inkwell lit with a faint blue glow.
The Raja was shuffling through a Wisdom Deck, pausing to look at the incandescent faces of the cards, then up at me. “You are the plausible-fabulist, Benjamin Rosenbaum,” he said at length.
I bowed stiffly. “A pen name, of course,” I said.
“Taken from The Scarlet Pimpernel?” he asked, cocking one eyebrow curiously.
“My lord is very quick,” I said mildly.
The Raja laughed, indicating the Wisdom Deck with a wave. “He isn’t the most heroic or sympathetic character in that book, however.”
“Indeed not, my lord,” I said with polite restraint. “The name is chosen ironically. As a sort of challenge to myself, if you will. Bearing the name of a notorious anti-Hebraic caricature, I must needs be all the prouder and more subtle in my own literary endeavors.”
“You are a Karaite, then?” he asked.
“I am an Israelite, at any rate,” I said. “If not an orthodox follower of my people’s traditional religion of despair.”
The prince’s eyes glittered with interest, so—despite my reservations—I explained my researches into the Rabbinical Heresy which had briefly flourished in Palestine and Babylon at the time of Ashoka, and its lost Talmud.
“Fascinating,” said the Raja. “Do you return now to your family?”
“I am altogether without attachments, my liege,” I said, my face darkening with shame.
Excusing myself, I delved once again into my writing, pausing now and then to let my Wisdom Ants scurry from the inkwell to taste the ink with their antennae, committing it to memory for later editing. At PlausFab-Wisconsin, I had received an assignment—to construct a plausible-fable of a world without zeppelins—and I was trying to imagine some alternative air conveyance for my characters when the Prince spoke again.
“I am an enthusiast for plausible-fables myself,” he said. “I enjoyed your ‘Droplet’ greatly.”
“Thank you, Your Highness.”
“Are you writing such a grand extrapolation now?”
“I am trying my hand at a shadow history,” I said.
The prince laughed gleefully. His consort had nestled herself against the bulkhead and fallen asleep, the blue gauze of her veil obscuring her features. “I adore shadow history,” he said.
“Most shadow history proceeds with the logic of dream, full of odd echoes and distorted resonances of our world,” I said. “I am experimenting with a new form, in which a single point of divergence in
history leads to a new causal chain of events, and thus a different present.”
“But the world is a dream,” he said excitedly. “Your idea smacks of Democritan materialism—as if the events of the world were produced purely by linear cause and effect, the simplest of the Five Forms of causality.”
“Indeed,” I said.
“How fanciful!” he cried.
I was about to turn again to my work, but the prince clapped his hands thrice. From his baggage, a birdlike Wisdom Servant unfolded itself and stepped agilely onto the floor. Fully unfolded, it was three cubits tall, with a trapezoidal head and incandescent blue eyes. It took a silver tea service from an alcove in the wall, set the tray on the table between us, and began to pour.
“Wake up, Sarasvati Sitasdottir,” the prince said to his consort, stroking her shoulder. “We are celebrating.”
The servitor placed a steaming teacup before me. I capped my pen and shooed my Ants back into their inkwell, though one crawled stubbornly towards the tea. “What are we celebrating?” I asked.
“You shall come with me to Outermost Thule,” he said. “It is a magical place—all fire and ice, except where it is greensward and sheep. Home once of epic heroes, Rama’s cousins.” His consort took a sleepy sip of her tea. “I have need of a plausible-fabulist. You can write the history of the Thule that might have been, to inspire and quell my restive subjects.”
“Why me, Your Highness? I am hardly a fabulist of great renown. Perhaps I could help you contact someone more suitable—Karen Despair Robinson, say, or Howi Qomr Faukota.”
“Nonsense,” laughed the Raja, “for I have met none of them by chance in an airship compartment.”
“But yet . . . ,” I said, discomfited.
“You speak again like a materialist! This is why the East, once it was awakened, was able to conquer the West—we understand how to read the dream that the world is. Come, no more fuss.”
I lifted my teacup. The stray Wisdom Ant was crawling along its rim; I positioned my forefinger before her, that she might climb onto it.
Just then there was a scuffle at the door, and Prem Ramasson set his teacup down and rose. He said something admonitory in the harsh Nordic tongue of his adopted country, something I imagined to mean “come now, boys, let the conductor through.” The scuffle ceased, and the Raja slid the door of the compartment open, one hand on the hilt of his sword. There was the sharp hiss of a needlethrower, and he staggered backward, collapsing into the arms of his consort, who cried out.
The thin and angular Wisdom Servant plucked the dart from its master’s neck. “Poison,” it said, its voice a tangle of flutelike harmonics. “The assassin will possess its antidote.”
Sarasvati Sitasdottir began to scream.
It is true that I had not accepted Prem Ramasson’s offer of employment—indeed, that he had not seemed to find it necessary to actually ask. It is true also that I am a man of letters, neither spy nor bodyguard. It is furthermore true that I was unarmed, save for the ceremonial dagger at my belt, which had thus far seen employment only in the slicing of bread, cheese, and tomatoes.
Thus, the fact that I leapt through the doorway, over the fallen bodies of the prince’s bodyguard, and pursued the fleeting form of the assassin down the long and curving corridor, cannot be reckoned as a habitual or forthright action. Nor, in truth, was it a considered one. In Śri Grigory Guptanovich Karthaganov’s typology of action and motive, it must be accounted an impulsive-transformative action: the unreflective moment which changes forever the path of events.
Causes buzz around any such moment like bees around a hive, returning with pollen and information, exiting with hunger and ambition. The assassin’s strike was the proximate cause. The prince’s kind manner, his enthusiasm for plausible-fables (and my work in particular), his apparent sympathy for my people, the dark eyes of his consort—all these were inciting causes.
The psychological cause, surely, can be found in this name that I have chosen—”Benjamin Rosenbaum”—the fat and cowardly merchant of The Scarlet Pimpernel who is beaten and raises no hand to defend himself; just as we, deprived of our Temple, found refuge in endless, beautiful elegies of despair, turning our backs on the Rabbis and their dreams of a new beginning. I have always seethed against this passivity. Perhaps, then, I was waiting—my whole life—for such a chance at rash and violent action.
The figure—clothed head to toe in a dull gray that matched the airship’s hull—raced ahead of me down the deserted corridor, and descended through a maintenance hatch set in the floor. I reached it, and paused for breath, thankful my enthusiasm for the favorite sport of my continent—the exalted Lacrosse—had prepared me somewhat for the chase. I did not imagine, though, that I could overpower an armed and trained assassin. Yet, the weave of the world had brought me here—surely to some purpose. How could I do aught but follow?
Beyond the proximate, inciting, and psychological causes, there are the more fundamental causes of an action. These address how the action embeds itself into the weave of the world, like a nettle in cloth. They rely on cosmology and epistemology. If the world is a dream, what caused the dreamer to dream that I chased the assassin? If the world is a lesson, what should this action teach? If the world is a gift, a wild and mindless rush of beauty, riven of logic or purpose—as it sometimes seems—still, seen from above, it must possess its own aesthetic harmony. The spectacle, then, of a ludicrously named practitioner of a half-despised art (bastard child of literature and philosophy), clumsily attempting the role of hero on the middledeck of the P.R.G.B. Śri George Bernard Shaw, must surely have some part in the pattern—chord or discord, tragic or comic.
Hesitantly, I poked my head down through the hatch. Beneath, a spiral staircase descended through a workroom cluttered with tools. I could hear the faint hum of engines nearby. There, in the canvas of the outer hull, between the Shaw’s great aluminum ribs, a door to the sky was open.
From a workbench, I took and donned an airman’s vest, supple leather gloves, and a visored mask, to shield me somewhat from the assassin’s needle. I leaned my head out the door.
A brisk wind whipped across the skin of the ship. I took a tether from a nearby anchor and hooked it to my vest. The assassin was untethered. He crawled along a line of handholds and footholds set in the airship’s gently curving surface. Many cubits beyond him, a small and brightly colored glider clung to the Shaw—like a dragonfly splayed upon a watermelon.
It was the first time I had seen a glider put to any utilitarian purpose—espionage rather than sport—and immediately I was seized by the longing to return to my notebook. Gliders! In a world without dirigibles, my heroes could travel in some kind of immense, powered gliders! Of course, they would be forced to land whenever winds were unfavorable.
Or would they? I recalled that my purpose was not to repaint our world anew, but to speculate rigorously according to Democritan logic. Each new cause could lead to some wholly new effect, causing in turn some unimagined consequence. Given different economic incentives, then, and with no overriding, higher pattern to dictate the results, who knew what advances a glider-based science of aeronautics might achieve? Exhilarating speculation!
I glanced down, and the sight below wrenched me from my reverie:
The immense panoply of the Great Lakes—
—their dark green wave-wrinkled water—
—the paler green and tawny yellow fingers of land reaching in among them—
—puffs of cloud gamboling in the bulk of air between—
—and beyond, the vault of sky presiding over the Frankish and Athapascan Moeity.
It was a long way down.
“Malkat Ha-Shamayim,” I murmured aloud. “What am I doing?”
“I was wondering that myself,” said a high and glittering timbrel of chords and discords by my ear. It was the recalcitrant, tea-seeking Wisdom Ant, now perched on my shoulder.
“Well,” I said crossly, “do you have any suggestions?”
&nb
sp; “My sisters have tasted the neurotoxin coursing the through the prince’s blood,” the Ant said. “We do not recognize it. His servant has kept him alive so far, but an antidote is beyond us.” She gestured towards the fleeing villain with one delicate antenna. “The assassin will likely carry an antidote to his venom. If you can place me on his body, I can find it. I will then transmit the recipe to my sisters through the Brahmanic field. Perhaps they can formulate a close analogue in our inkwell.”
“It is a chance,” I agreed. “But the assassin is half-way to his craft.”
“True,” said the Ant pensively.
“I have an idea for getting there,” I said. “But you will have to do the math.”
The tether which bound me to the Shaw was fastened high above us. I crawled upwards and away from the glider, to a point the Ant calculated. The handholds ceased, but I improvised with the letters of the airship’s name, raised in decoration from its side.
From the top of an R, I leapt into the air—struck with my heels against the resilient canvas—and rebounded, sailing outwards, snapping the tether taut.
The Ant took shelter in my collar as the air roared around us. We described a long arc, swinging past the surprised assassin to the brightly colored glider; I was able to seize its aluminum frame.
I hooked my feet onto its seat, and hung there, my heart racing. The glider creaked, but held.
“Disembark,” I panted to the Ant. “When the assassin gains the craft, you can search him.”
“Her,” said the Ant, crawling down my shoulder. “She has removed her mask, and in our passing I was able to observe her striking resemblance to Sarasvati Sitasdottir, the prince’s consort. She is clearly her sister.”
I glanced at the assassin. Her long black hair now whipped in the wind. She was braced against the airship’s hull with one hand and one foot; with the other hand she had drawn her needlethrower.
People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy Page 23