People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy
Page 25
I wondered how my hero would view the chain of events in which I was embroiled. With derision? With compassion? I loved him, after a fashion, for he was my creation. How would he regard me?
If only the first and simplest form of causality had earned his allegiance, he would not be placated by such easy saws as “bad things come in threes.” An assassin, and a pirate, and an uncommunicative war-city, he would ask? All within the space of an hour?
Would he simply accept the absurd and improbable results of living within a blind and random machine? Yet his society could not have advanced far, mired in such fatalism!
Would he not doggedly seek meaning, despite the limitations of his framework?
What if our bad luck were no coincidence at all, he would ask. What if all three misfortunes had a single, linear, proximate cause, intelligible to reason?
“My lady,” I said, “I do not wish to cause you further pain. Yet I find I must speak. I saw the face of the prince’s killer—it was a young woman’s face, in lineament much like your own.”
“Shakuntala!” the princess cried. “My sister! No! It cannot be! She would never do this —” she curled her hands into fists. “No!”
“And yet,” I said gently, “it seems you regard the assertion as not utterly implausible.”
“She is banished,” Sarasvati Sitasdottir said. “She has gone over to the Thanes—the Nordic Liberation Army—the anarcho-gynarchist insurgents in our land. It is like her to seek danger and glory. But she would not kill Prem! She loved him before I!”
To that, I could find no response. The Hiawatha shuddered around us—some battle had been joined. We heard shouts and running footsteps.
Sarasvati, the prince, the pirates—any of them would have had a thousand gods to pray to, convenient gods for any occasion. Such solace I could sorely have used. But I was raised a Karaite. We acknowledge only one God, austere and magnificent; the One God of All Things, attended by His angels and His consort, the Queen of Heaven. The only way to speak to Him, we are taught, is in His Holy Temple; and it lies in ruins these two thousand years. In times like these, we are told to meditate on the contrast between His imperturbable magnificence and our own abandoned and abject vulnerability, and to be certain that He watches us with immeasurable compassion, though He will not act. I have never found this much comfort.
Instead, I turned to the prince, curious what in his visage might have inspired the passions of the two sisters.
On the bulkhead just before his lips—where, before, I had wiped away the sign of his last breath—a tracery of condensation stood.
Was this some effluvium issued by the organs of a decaying corpse? I bent, and delicately sniffed—detecting no corruption.
“My lady,” I said, indicating the droplets on the cool metal, “he lives.”
“What?” the princess cried. “But how?”
“A diguanidinium compound produced by certain marine dinoflagellates,” I said, “can induce a deathlike coma, in which the subject breathes but thrice an hour; the heartbeat is similarly undetectable.”
Delicately, she felt his face. “Can he hear us?”
“Perhaps.”
“Why would she do this?”
“The body would be rushed back to Thule, would it not? Perhaps the revolutionaries meant to steal it and revive him as a hostage?”
A tremendous thunderclap shook the Hiawatha MacCool, and I noticed we were listing to one side. There was a commotion in the gangway; then Chippewa Melko entered. Several guards stood behind him.
“Damned tenacious,” he spat. “If they want you so badly, why won’t they parley? We’re still out of range of the war-city itself and its big guns, thank Buddha, Thor, and Darwin. We burned one of their launches, at the cost of many of my men. But the other launch is gaining.”
“Perhaps they don’t know the hostages are aboard?” I asked.
“Then why pursue me this distance? I’m no fool—I know what it costs them to detour that monster. They don’t do it for sport, and I don’t flatter myself I’m worth that much to them. No, it’s you they want. So they can have you—I’ve no more stomach for this chase.” He gestured at the prince with his chin. “Is he dead?”
“No,” I said.
“Doesn’t look well. No matter—come along. I’m putting you all in a launch with a flag of parley on it. Their war-boat will have to stop for you, and that will give us the time we need.”
So it was that we found ourselves in the freezing, cramped bay of a pirate longboat. Three of Melko’s crewmen accompanied us—one at the controls, the other two clinging to the longboat’s sides. Sarasvati and I huddled on the aluminum deck beside the pilot, the prince’s body held between us. All three of Melko’s men had parachutes—they planned to escape as soon as we docked. Our longboat flew the white flag of parley, and—taken from the prince’s luggage—the royal standard of Outermost Thule.
All the others were gazing tensely at our target—the war-city’s fighter launch, which climbed toward us from below. It was almost as big as Melko’s flagship. I, alone, glanced back out the open doorway as we swung away from the Hiawatha.
So only I saw a brightly colored glider detach itself from the Hiawatha’s side and swoop to follow us.
Why would Shakuntala have lingered with the pirates thus far? Once the rebels’ plan to abduct the prince was foiled by Melko’s arrival, why not simply abandon it and await a fairer chance?
Unless the intent was not to abduct—but to protect.
“My lady,” I said in my halting middle-school Sanskrit, “your sister is here.”
Sarasvati gasped, following my gaze.
“Madam—your husband was aiding the rebels.”
“How dare you?” she hissed in the same tongue, much more fluently.
“It is the only —” I struggled for the Sanskrit word for ‘hypothesis’, then abandoned the attempt, leaning over to whisper in English. “Why else did the pirates and the war-city arrive together? Consider: the prince’s collusion with the Thanes was discovered by the Aryan Raj. But to try him for treason would provoke great scandal and stir sympathy for the insurgents. Instead, they made sure rumor of a valuable hostage reached Melko. With the prince in the hands of the pirates, his death would simply be a regrettable calamity.”
Her eyes widened. “Those monsters!” she hissed.
“Your sister aimed to save him, but Melko arrived too soon—before news of the prince’s death could discourage his brigandy. My lady, I fear that if we reach that launch, they will discover that the Prince lives. Then some accident will befall us all.”
There were shouts from outside. Melko’s crewmen drew their needlethrowers and fired at the advancing glider.
With a shriek, Sarasvati flung herself upon the pilot, knocking the controls from his hands.
The longboat lurched sickeningly.
I gained my feet, then fell against the prince. I saw a flash of orange and gold—the glider, swooping by us.
I struggled to stand. The pilot drew his cutlass. He seized Sarasvati by the hair and spun her away from the controls.
Just then, one of the men clinging to the outside, pricked by Shakuntala’s needle, fell. His tether caught him, and the floor jerked beneath us.
The pilot staggered back. Sarasvati Sitasdottir punched him in the throat. They stumbled towards the door.
I started forward. The other pirate on the outside fell, untethered, and the longboat lurched again. Unbalanced, our craft drove in a tight circle, listing dangerously.
Sarasvati fought with uncommon ferocity, forcing the pirate towards the open hatch. Fearing they would both tumble through, I seized the controls.
Regrettably, I knew nothing of flying airship-longboats, whose controls, it happens, are of a remarkably poor design.
One would imagine that the principal steering element could be moved in the direction that one wishes the craft to go; instead, just the opposite is the case. Then, too, one would expect these brawny and
unrefined air-men to use controls lending themselves to rough usage; instead, it seems an exceedingly fine hand is required.
Thus, rather than steadying the craft, I achieved the opposite.
Not only were Sarasvati and the pilot flung out the cabin door, but I myself was thrown through it, just managing to catch with both hands a metal protuberance in the hatchway’s base. My feet swung freely over the void.
I looked up in time to see the Raja’s limp body come sliding towards me like a missile.
I fear that I hesitated too long in deciding whether to dodge or catch my almost-employer. At the last minute courage won out, and I flung one arm around his chest as he struck me.
This dislodged my grip, and the two of us fell from the airship.
In an extremity of terror, I let go the prince, and clawed wildly at nothing.
I slammed into the body of the pirate who hung, poisoned by Shakuntala’s needle, from the airship’s tether. I slid along him, and finally caught myself at his feet.
As I clung there, shaking miserably, I watched Prem Ramasson tumble through the air, and I cursed myself for having caused the very tragedies I had endeavored to avoid, like a figure in an Athenian tragedy. But such tragedies proceed from some essential flaw in their heroes—some illustrative hubris, some damning vice. Searching my own character and actions, I could find only that I had endeavored to make do, as well as I could, in situations for which I was ill-prepared. Is that not the fate of any of us, confronting life and its vagaries?
Was my tale, then, an absurd and tragic farce? Was its lesson one merely of ignominy and despair?
Or perhaps—as my shadow-protagonist might imagine—there was no tale, no teller—perhaps the dramatic and sensational events I had endured were part of no story at all, but brute and silent facts of Matter.
From above, Shakuntala Sitasdottir dove in her glider. It was folded like a spear, and she swept past the prince in seconds. Nimbly, she flung open the glider’s wings, sweeping up to the falling Raja, and rolling the glider, took him into her embrace.
Thus encumbered—she must have secured him somehow—she dove again (chasing her sister, I imagine) and disappeared in a bank of cloud.
A flock of brass-colored Wisdom Gulls, arriving from the Aryan war-city, flew around the pirates’ launch. They entered its empty cabin, glanced at me and the poisoned pirate to whom I clung, and departed.
I climbed up the body to sit upon its shoulders, a much more comfortable position. There, clinging to the tether and shivering, I rested.
The Hiawatha MacCool, black smoke guttering from one side of her, climbed higher and higher into the sky, pursued by the Aryan war-boat. The sun was setting, limning the clouds with gold and pink and violet. The war-city, terrible and glorious, sailed slowly by, under my feet, its shadow an island of darkness in the sunset’s gold-glitter, on the waters of the lake beneath.
Some distance to the east, where the sky was already darkening to a rich cobalt, the Aryan war-boat which Melko had successfully struck was bathed in white fire. After a while, the inner hull must have been breached, for the fire went out, extinguished by escaping helium, and the zeppelin plummeted.
Above me, the propeller hummed, driving my launch in the same small circle again and again.
I hoped that I had saved the prince after all. I hoped Shakuntala had saved her sister, and that the three of them would find refuge with the Thanes.
My shadow-protagonist had given me a gift; it was the logic of his world that had led me to discover the war-city’s threat. Did this mean his philosophy was the correct one?
Yet the events that followed were so dramatic and contrived—precisely as if I inhabited a pulp romance. Perhaps he was writing my story, as I wrote his; perhaps, with the comfortable life I had given him, he longed to lose himself in uncomfortable escapades of this sort. In that case, we both of us lived in a world designed, a world of story, full of meaning.
But perhaps I had framed the question wrong. Perhaps the division between Mind and Matter is itself illusory; perhaps Randomness, Pattern, and Plan are all but stories we tell about the inchoate and unknowable world which fills the darkness beyond the thin circle illumed by reason’s light. Perhaps it is foolish to ask if I or the protagonist of my world-without-zeppelins story is the more real. Each of us is flesh, a buzzing swarm of atoms; yet each of us also a tale contained in the pages of the other’s notebook. We are bodies. But we are also the stories we tell about each other. Perhaps not knowing is enough.
Maybe it is not a matter of discovering the correct philosophy. Maybe the desire that burns behind this question is the desire to be real. And which is more real—a clod of dirt unnoticed at your feet, or a hero in a legend?
And maybe behind the desire to be real is simply wanting to be known.
To be held.
The first stars glittered against the fading blue. I was in the bosom of the Queen of Heaven. My fingers and toes were getting numb—soon frostbite would set in. I recited the prayer the ancient heretical Rabbis would say before death, which begins, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is Our God, the Lord is One.”
Then I began to climb the tether.
Alienation and Love in the Hebrew Alphabet
Lavie Tidhar
Aleph
An apple tree. A little girl standing beside it.
The apples are small and bitter, like old men; they are wizened and sour.
Somewhere, a chime sounds, a wind blows leaves on the ground.
Somewhere, the hiss of escaping air.
Bet
Where have you been?’ Mother says. Anger makes her brow damp and she fights the dark hair that sticks to her skin. ‘I told you not to go off on your own. You could have met anyone. Anyone! Sometimes I don’t know what to do with you.’
The little girl smiles, but it is a private smile, an inward smile, one that Mother cannot, will not, see.
‘Well?’
The little girl mumbles something. Mother snorts and moves her hair to behind her ears.
‘Spacemen and spaceships! Honest, I don’t know what to do with you. Go and watch television. I have to go.’
The girl goes upstairs. A few minutes later she hears the front door bang. Mother going out. She will be back late.
There is a window in her room. Beyond the window lie fields, hills, forests; in the horizon lights begin to appear from distant towns.
In the darkening skies more lights begin to appear.
Gimel
There are less apples on the tree. Around the trunk the cores of eaten apples lie like unmoving ants.
There are footsteps in the wet earth, large and asymmetrical. They lead away, down to the valley, to the brook, and disappear beyond it.
The girl examines the marks in the ground. she is becoming used to marks in the ground—the W-shape of birds’ feet, the branded footsteps of children, the wide, linear marks of vehicles—and these are new.
Experimentally, she picks an apple from the tree and bites it, but it tastes disgusting, unripe and bitter, and she lets it drop to the ground uneaten.
Then Mother, calling for her from the house, and she has to go back.
Daled
She watches the lights play in the sky.
In her new language, the word for star is kochav, the middle sound throaty like a smoker’s cough. At least, that’s what Mother says, and she cries when she says it, and says they should never have come here, to this place called a kibbutz and to a man called Nathan, who works in the factory now. When Mother met him in Canada Nathan was on holiday, away from the kibbutz for a year, and he had painted such a lovely picture of the place that when he asked Mother to come there with him she agreed almost at once.
“Look at this place!” she says to her daughter. “What was I thinking?” she had cut her hair short—’because of the heat,’ she said—and her ears stick out, making the girl smile. ‘Do you know what they want me to do now? Work in the dining room! Wash dishes!’ her voice turn
s ugly as she mimics the voice of the man responsible for allocating jobs on the kibbutz, a short, dark man with too-tight shorts and a belly that hangs over them, covered in a checkered shirt like many of the men on the kibbutz. ‘There are no bad jobs. All jobs are equal. All jobs are important. And after all, what skills do you have? Singing won’t feed the sheep. Singing won’t make the wheat grow. I’m sorry, but if you want to stay here you must work.’
The girl nods, but she isn’t listening. She is thinking about the apple tree, and the marks in the ground.
Later, Nathan arrives, a quiet man carrying himself well, carrying also a bunch of flowers for Mother.
“From my garden,” he said.
“They’re lovely,” she says.
They go out arm in arm, leaving the girl alone to her thoughts.
Heh
The brook is shallow and smells of soap; she has been warned not to drink the water, that the kibbutz’s shampoo factory needs to dump waste into it, otherwise where will it go?
The footsteps lead to the water’s edge and disappear.
Crossing the brook isn’t easy. There are stones left in equal lengths, stepping stones, but her legs are too short and she slips and falls into the water, briefly, and then gives up and just strides across, shoes filling up with water.
On the other side the footsteps disappear. She sees a long, curving mark in the ground, and thinks it must have been made by a snake. Somewhere in the bushes, a frogs harrumphs.
She doesn’t like frogs.
She walks farther, past the squat building that holds the water drill; the walls are graffitied with army marks.
She picks blackberries from the thick bushes growing by the brook, picking the red ones, the ones that haven’t ripened yet. Those are sour, not sweet, and taste delicious.
She knows she shouldn’t be walking here by herself, but she has no one to go with. Mother is away, gone to the nearest city with Nathan, and the other children avoid her. She can’t speak the language yet and when she does try they laugh.
She rounds a bend and reaches the beginning of a forest. The pine trees are all equally spaced, and there is a sharp scent in the air, of the amber liquid that comes out when a tree is cut.