by RABE, JEAN
“Academy?” Mackenzie asked. I’d been speaking too loudly, and she’d overheard my last words. “You guys are here for the conference?”
“Sort of,” I said, I said, and hazarded a guess. “You’re attending?”
“Sort of,” she said, echoing my words. “The dean said I could audit a session. I’m Engineering now, but I might change my major. I always liked numbers.” She paused. “Hey, is everything okay?”
Everything wasn’t. I felt as if the world was slipping away a second time, and it must have been shown on my face.
Mackenzie was the reason that Sizemore had sent Mark. By chance, I had brought them together!
Even as I made the connection, he did, too. His mouth opened and his cheeks went pale, and the boyish cast of his features abruptly fled. He looked away from Mackenzie, as if ashamed of what he was thinking.
“Everything’s fine,” I said slowly. Part of me wondered how many times I’d said those words. My whole life seemed to be made up of things I had to do again and again.
“How about you?” she asked, turning to Mark. “You look like you just saw a ghost!”
Under the table, I prodded him with my foot, using enough force to command his attention. “Manners,” I said pointedly.
“I-I-Everything’s great!” Mark said. Like I’d told him to earlier, he made eye contact and even managed a pro forma smile. “Really!”
“Well, okay,” Mackenzie said, dubious. She set our check on the table’s Formica surface. “I can take this for you, or you can pay up front. Maybe I’ll see you two at the conference?”
“Maybe you will,” I told her. Once she was out of earshot, I continued. “How about that, Mark? Isn’t it nice to have somebody pretty smile at you?”
“Shut up,” he said, eyes narrowing.
“Mackenzie seems pretty bright and lively for someone who was dead and dust long before you were born, doesn’t she?”
“Shut up!” he said and I felt sorry for him. It’s hard enough to think about killing someone you’ve met, let alone a pretty someone who’s smiled and given you food and asked how you felt.
Even so, I pressed the issue. “She’s young and looks healthy, Mark,” I said. “Probably has a lot of years ahead of her. I wonder what she’ll do with them?”
He slapped the tabletop hard enough to make the glassware dance, and looked away from me. “Shut up, I said! I don’t want to hear it!”
I shut up. I shucked the paper wrapper from my plastic drinking straw and speared the root beer float. Melting ice cream had turned the soda thick and rich, and the bubbles tickled my tongue as I drank. Mark followed suit without prompting. Too shaken to light up the way he had with his first taste of fresh salad, he still obviously liked what he tasted. Long moments passed in silence that was broken only by the clink of metal spoons against glassware.
“What’s the Academy?” he finally asked.
“Hmm?” I said, still eating. I may not have finished my sandwich, but I never, ever let good ice cream go to waste.
“The Academy. You said that Sizemore wanted to save the Academy.”
“Of course he did. He was the Senior Professor of Applied Chronal Studies.” I managed a snicker. “His job was on the line.”
“Not my Sizemore,” he said sadly. “His title was Duke of Trans-Temporal Physics.”
My Sizemore. He’d figured it out.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“You’re not me, are you?” he asked, plaintive now. “I thought at first you were a later me, that something else had happened and Sizemore sent me back again to help. But you’re not.”
“I’m not you,” I agreed. “I could have been, though. Same genes. I was born in ’48, and Sizemore sent me back in ’73. I was born later than you and I came back further when I was older, but I could have been you. I’ve been here eight years, local time.”
“Eight years,” he said softly.
“It was supposed to be thirty-two hours at most,” I said.
“What was your assignment?”
“Keep someone from being born.”
“How?”
I hated that question. I always do. “Something bad,” I said. “Something I’m ashamed of. But it didn’t work. The kind of tailored changes Sizemore wants don’t seem to be possible. There are just too many variables. And too many old patterns that reassert themselves.”
“Oh.” His straw gurgled as he drew down the last of the root beer.
I told him about my timeline, about the Revolution Academe and all the rest. The broad outlines were all that I offered up; the details didn’t matter anymore. Besides, I’d forgotten most of the story. The only place that my specific past lived now was in my memories, and eight years is enough time to forget a lot.
“That doesn’t make sense,” he said when I finished, but the protest was half-hearted. He was nearly into the acceptance phase now. “It can’t happen that way. That kind of socio-economic elitism—”
“It won’t happen that way, but it did,” I said. I wasn’t in the mood for political rhetoric. “It seems to happen that way about half the time, but it happens other ways, too. Your Imperium, for example. And don’t get me started on the Cadre.”
“But you and I—”
“You and I are like the rest of the future. We happen a lot of ways, but we happen again and again. We’re near-constants, the same bloodline expressed across multiple histories.”
“That’s a hell of a coincidence,” he said.
I shrugged. Sometimes, shrugging is all you can do. “Sure, but it happens,” I said. “Look at Sizemore. There’s no such thing as fate, but there are patterns that play themselves out again and again. The Academy rises, dominates the world, then falls to be replaced by something worse. The Cadre does, too. The same thing, only different.”
Eight years had been long enough to read a lot of the local literature. Much of it was very good. One writer I particularly admired had likened the future to a booted foot, smashing down into an unprotected human face. He’d been right, but what he hadn’t known was that the style of the boot would vary, even if the foot and the face stayed pretty much the same.
Mark continued. “But for our parents to meet over and over, and our grandparents, and—”
His words trailed off into silence, and I shrugged again. “It happens.”
“What now?” he asked. “If I can’t go home again, I mean.”
“You can’t. Home’s gone, Mark, even if something almost exactly likes it happens instead.” We were almost finished. I pushed my empty glass aside and reached for the slip Mackenzie had left. “And after a while, you’ll be glad you can’t go back,” I said. “I sure am.”
The diner was an old-fashioned place, even by the standards of the day, and the check was handwritten. Mackenzie had dotted the i in her name with a little cartoon heart. Mark watched as I added up the numbers in my head.
He really did have a lot to learn, but he’d manage. “What am I going to do?” he asked, echoing my thoughts.
“Do? You’ll do what I did. You make a place and a life for yourself,” I said. “I can get you a new name and show you how the world works. I’ve done it before.”
I left some bills on the table, enough money to cover the check and a healthy tip. With well-honed waitress skills, Mackenzie looked up from working another table and waved to us as we left. She really was a sweet girl. Mark waved back and I smiled; there was hope for him yet.
Even so, I have to admit that I was relieved when we stepped outside and those two were no longer in the same room.
By now, it was midafternoon. The sky was clear and the air was fresh and clean. I knew next to nothing about Mark’s world, but this one had to be better, even if the seeds of the Academy and the Cadre and the Imperium were already sprouting. I was sure that Mark would come to agree. He already liked the food, which was a good start.
Life gets lived best lived in the present. The futures could take care of themselves.
> “You’ll like it here,” I told him. “We always do.”
“You keep referring to others,” he said, as if he’d just realized it. “I’m not the first? After you, I mean.”
Now that the hard part was over, now that I’d explained the situation and kept another me from making the same mistake that I had, I could manage a laugh.
“No,” I said. “You’re not the first. You’re not even the first one this week.”
YESHUA’S CHOICE
Nancy Virginia Varian
Old man, old man. Every joint and sinew groaned the words. Old man.
On the day of his leaving, Yeshua grunted when he bent to ladle water from the wide-mouthed clay jug; he couldn’t help it, old men get thick in the belly, no matter if they eat modestly and they work all day. He was not very thick, but the leanness of youth had long ago become hidden. He lifted the ladle high, upending it, sighing with pleasure as the cool water poured over his head. It ran in rivulets through his silver hair, down his neck. It chased through the ugly channels of tortured flesh made by the old scars of an ancient scourging.
Again he bent, again he poured, and now he took up an old linen cloth and washed sweat and sawdust from his shoulders, arms, his thick chest and that old man’s paunch.
Old Man Yeshua.
On this day of his leaving, he was older than most in his little village, younger than most of his storied line. Those people of David’s house, men and women of legend who were said to have lived miraculous numbers of years.
By Adonai’s grace, he thought, for they had been given miraculous deeds to perform.
As, once, I had been given.
Yeshua barely flinched when he thought that. His was the loss of the abandoned; the loss of the orphaned.
Only last night, a hot night when people of Natzeret did as they always did and went up to the rooftops to spread their bedding and sleep, one of Yeshua’s neighbors heard a cry go up: Eli! Eli! Sh’vak toni?
My God, why have you abandoned me?
A child, suddenly wakened, called to her mother. Lying in silence, his own words still echoing in his mind, Yeshua heard the woman tell the little one that their carpenter dreamed and his dreams weren’t for others to talk about.
“Now come here and sleep beside me, child . . .”
They were protective of Yeshua in that little town. He had grown up there, had traveled far and then come home to stay. For a time he had been their rabbi. He was now their carpenter, and a good man for all the strangeness of him.
This nightmare, as others before it, had been spurred by the terrible news being carried up and down the roads like the cawing of ravens.
But this dream had not left in the morning. It had lingered, and through the day he’d heard the words Yerushalayim, Yerushalayim. Yerushalayim!
He felt the words as a drumbeat, he recalled all he’d heard about the fate of Holy City, news brought by those who’d fled her gates. Murderers drove them out, and war drove them out; from both sides the people had reason to dread, and the latest word was that Titus the Roman had left the city in ruins, taking four thousand prisoners with him to be sold as slaves in Rome. Like wolves, factions of Jewish zealots had torn the city apart between them like beasts fighting over a corpse. When not one of those factions could triumph over another, the man Eleazar, descendant of a long line of rebels, took his folk by the hundreds out of the city to go and sit upon the rock that had once been the palace and fastness of Herod the Great—the place known now only as Masada, the Fortress.
“These are days,” said the priests, “like the days of Babylon. These are the dark days before the storm.”
It had been said that for a year a star shaped like a sword had hung over Yerushalayim. Few, it seemed, had seen that as an evil omen, most had thought it a sign of Adonai’s protecting hand.
Only days after the blade star vanished, Titus and his legions had fallen upon the city.
As in the days of Babylon, now the Holy City, the great Temple, was a place where men were as butchers and dogs fed in the streets, the courtyards, in the gardens like wolves.
Some of Yeshua’s neighbors, the ones who had heard the tale from their own fathers, recalled that thirty or more years ago their own carpenter had prophesied this terror.
But had it been prophecy, or had their carpenter cursed the city?
Some wondered, Yeshua saw it in their eyes now.
He wondered, too. In his dream last night he’d heard the sound of his own voice as it had been on a day long ago atop the Mount of Olives. He’d stood looking down at the city, the place where he was to die—and did not die—and said to men who had been his friends that the time was near when not one stone of the great Temple would stand upon another.
He had spoken as he always did, confident that what he said was true. How could it not be? Every breath he took, every word he spoke came into him from Eli, Adonai, Abba. His Father sat beside him when he spoke with his friends, stood at his shoulder when he addressed the multitudes; the breath in his lungs, the blood in his veins, the words in his mouth. Abba.
But Abba was gone now . . . he had long ago withdrawn his spirit and left but this mortal shell behind.
Yeshua snapped out the damp, grimy towel he’d used to wipe away the day’s sweat, hung it on the window sill, then took a clean one from the basket near the door. This he folded neatly, smoothing the creases just so and set it upon the small table he’d today finished making.
Placing it, he heard in memory his foster-father’s admonition when, adolescent and high-headed, he’d challenged the good old man for going against time-honored tradition by using a fresh towel.
“Yes, yes,” Yosef had said. He’d spoken impatiently, for who is not often impatient with the youth who purports to know so much more than his elders? “I know the tradition, boy. Tradition says you place the towel you wipe off with. You offer the sweat of your labor as well as the product. Tell me—” He’d run his hands along the curve of the chest’s lid. “—would you give this to the woman wanting it for her daughter’s carefully woven dowry goods with the grime of your sweat and flecks of sawdust still clinging?”
He’d been a man to honor every tradition, had Yosef. Most he had honored in his own practical way.
And the boy Yeshua, moved by the image of a maiden weaving her dowry, perhaps gathering the lavender from her garden and braiding the slender stalks into fragrant wands to tuck between the linens, had come to follow this tradition in the same way his foster-father had.
He had never called Yosef “Abba,” but his mother’s husband had acted in all ways as a father and didn’t seem to regret the name.
Now, on the day of his leaving, Yeshua touched the table, the cloth, then looked around his little shop. The tools he’d inherited from Yosef hung neatly upon pegs, the floor thick with sweet-smelling sawdust and fat curls of wood from the plane. All was well, as it should be.
When Rivka the smith’s daughter came by in the morning to see the little table inside his workshop with the towel neatly folded and placed she would recognize the carpenter’s simple message: the work is complete.
What she would have paid him, Yeshua hoped she would put to charitable use, for he would not be there to receive it.
On this day of his leaving Yeshua was bound for Yerushalayim, a city whose downfall he had foretold, the city he hadn’t entered in more than thirty years.
No, he didn’t know why he was going. He only knew he must go without delay.
The way from Natzeret took an old man’s time to travel. Yeshua needed to rest often, and so he stopped whenever he could to take advantage of the shade of a cedar grove or the companionable overhang of stone.
Ah, but in his younger days it had been different, for he’d traveled the land on a journey to a fate ordained from birth.
No. Ordained from before birth. There had been the angel, the messenger sent to his mother from Abba.
Fear not.
“Thy will be done,” the maid
en Miryam had murmured.
So had Yeshua murmured, for much of his early life. When he left his family’s home and began to teach, when the crowds came to follow him and name him Reb Yeshua, each night he’d lie down to sleep and murmur, “Thy will be done.” When the lame walked and the dead awoke and tottered out of their tombs; when the multitude had been fed on a few loaves and fishes . . . he had said, “Father, thy will be done.”
Saying so, he would feel Abba’s presence, the spirit of his Father near.
When in Yerushalayim for the Passover of his thirty-third year, when his friends had deserted him and left him to the scourge and the mockery of a purple robe and a bloody crown of thorns, he’d murmured, “Abba, thy will be done.”
And his Father was near, the breath in his lungs, the beat of his heart.
When he’d been bound like a thief and taken back and forth from the court of Pilate to the court of Herod and back to Pilate again, judge to judge, pillar to post, he’d accepted the will of his Father.
He’d been like a man who’d read a scroll bearing a verdict and learned the sentence before any other: this man will die, and it will be a terrible death.
Fear not.
And he hadn’t been afraid. Abba would stand beside him in all his trials. Abba would see and he would judge the sacrifice of his son’s life sufficient to the Redemption of the benighted race of men. And when he was dead he would do great deeds, flinging down the gates of Sheol and showing all the worthy the way to his Father’s house of many mansions.
All this had been foretold since before the time of David.
Men would raise crosses upon the Mount of Skulls, two to bear thieves, one to bear Yeshua the Sacrifice, the Lamb of God. From Sheol the worthy dead would be called home at last.
But the Redemption had not happened that way. Redemption had not happened at all, and the gates of Sheol stood strong and unbreached.
By the will of a woman, freely given to her by her Maker, the race of mankind fell. By the will of a woman, freely used, the Son of the Father was born to redeem what had been lost with the sacrifice of his life.