Jews vs Aliens

by Naomi Alderman

  ‘Sing louder, sing!’ Raizl urges her friends. She kicks Mendel. ‘Sing, goddammit!’

  And Mendel sings.

  The aliens burst out of their clothes; their flesh comes apart in shreds of light and patches of darkness.

  The pogromists back off, frightened by what they see.

  ‘But we will not be frightened from our path, By darksome prisons or by tyranny…’

  The alien fleshly form dissolves into a tangle of waves that boom in pain, deep dissolving throbs that makes the horses bare their teeth, shriek and turn and bolt.

  Meanwhile, other Jews emerge from defensive posts around the village. They move forward with sticks and guns ready to finish the job, even if they’ve had to share some of their enemy’s pain.

  Oleg and a few others tend to the injured on the ground.

  Have the aliens fled, taking their sound-score with them? Maybe they’ve decided this world is not a suitable place for their holidays after all.

  Or they could still be here in some form, lingering like the scent of a fish gone bad.

  The tavern keeper emerges with flasks of wine. ‘The mamzers have run away!’

  Samuel and Lev arrive with others from the synagogue, followed by a beaming rebbe.

  ‘It’s God’s doing, like the horns of Jericho,’ intones the rebbe, accepting the offer of wine after a brief blessing.

  But Raizl shakes her head and passes her wine to someone else. She remembers what she saw in the tunnel, the place where the sky crumpled and let in the alien light. Now she knows where Deborah’s gift of prophecy came from. When she opened the pathway, those other corridors showed her what-could-be. Deborah did not predict the future, but she looked into possible futures.

  Raizl can’t forget the burning synagogue, the smoke that must hide a horror more brutal than any pogrom. But how will she speak of this to others? Who will listen? She understands now that Deborah might have been much more accursed than the inhabitants of Meroz. And so is she.

  While the others toast and celebrate a victory, Raizl cannot join them.

  ALIEN THOUGHTS

  ERIC KAPLAN

  I

  The object had dropped from the sky and crashed into the forest behind the schul on Erev Shabbos. Schneerson, the doctor, had led a group of men to look at it, half buried in the dirt, a ring of luminous fungus around it glowing through the humus. A curse? the men he hired to dig it up wanted to know. A sign of a coming plague? A call for us to repent? No, Schneerson had assured them, the earth is one of many bodies hanging in empty space, flying through darkness. Sometimes they jostle each other. Sometimes they knock each other. This was one such body that had gotten a knock in its home in the vastness and come crashing down behind the schul. God hadn’t sent it.

  ‘Take a look at this, doctor,’ one of the men with shovels had said, standing up to his chest in the glass-lined pit the falling object had blasted in the forest floor.

  Schneerson had jumped in, pushed him aside and inspected it. Carved in the black metal was a letter ‘ח’.

  The doctor ate pork on Yom Kippur, had electric lights in his home, drank coffee and played chess with gentiles and now he was hiking through the woods to see Reb Yaakov, the wonder rabbi. Schneerson and Yaakov had been friends in cheder. Schneerson always took care to hide it from his teachers when he knew more than they did; not so Yaakov. By six he had memorized the Torah, by eight the Talmud. By twelve he could tell you if you pricked Rashi with a pin, what letter would be on the other side. At his bar mitzvah, his rabbi had told him that more than intelligence, God valued a kind heart, and he had called him an ignoramus in front of the whole congregation. Now he lived in a one-room shack six hours into the woods. Children sometimes hiked out to see his emaciated form rolling naked in the snow, 27, 39, 106 times, and he screamed at them, wild as a demon, calling them idolaters, prostitutes and donkeys.

  ‘Yaakov, it’s Mendel.’ The door opened. The rabbi was so emaciated,Schneerson could see the pulse in his neck. He has scurvy, the doctor thought. ‘I thought you might be angry at me.’

  ‘Because you eat pork? At least you’re consistent.’

  ‘Something strange has happened, Yaakov. An object fell from the sky. A meteorite.’

  ‘So? Chazal discuss this. It is a piece of the dome the stars are in.’

  ‘This was etched on the outside with letters as deep as my thumb.’ Schneerson took the paper on which he had copied the letters and handed it to Yaakov.

  The rabbi rippled like a cat smelling a herb, closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them. ‘Let’s go.’ He grabbed a threadbare coat and started running through the snow.

  The doctor closed the door and ran after him. ‘Do you know what the letters mean?’

  ‘They are rules for pronouncing the unspeakable name of God.’

  II

  Some of the workers had been reciting psalms and the rabbi dispatched them with a curse.

  ‘Mendel, my friend, do you know what I have been doing since my bar mitzvah?’ he asked Schneerson.

  ‘Praying?’

  ‘Asking Zaide in the sky for sweets? No. I have been studying the method of letter combinations of the rabbi Abraham Abulafia. I came upon a rare book, sold everything my father left me to buy it. But what is carved in this stone makes Abulafia seem like a child.’

  The doctor remembered something from his yeshiva studies before medical school. ‘Doesn’t whoever recites the name of God forfeit his share in the world to come?’

  The rabbi smiled. ‘I’m sorry, doctor. I shouldn’t laugh at you. This isn’t a decision one man should make for another. If you don’t want to follow the instructions on this object you don’t have to. Please tell the people in the town that this is contaminated – it will make them sick. I don’t want to be disturbed.’

  ‘No. I want to follow the procedures. I don’t believe in a world to come.’

  ‘Interesting. I do.’ And he read the names of God.

  Abulafia had described head motions for each vowel sign, and the method of permutations. This was the antechamber of the teaching inscribed in the rock, which instructed they go without food and sleep for three days, reciting the name in all its possible combinations. After three days the letters seemed to swim and move, teaching them new methods of combination. The doctor had taken a class in Cantor’s transfinite numbers at Cracow. It had been over his head but he was glad he had done it; he was able to lead the rabbi down some of the byways of the letters. It was as if the 22 were not letters but different angles from which to view infinity, and that as they got deeper into the recitations, and the specific dances that came with each one (although dance was a gentle word for what seemed to be closer to a spasm or fit), each of the 22 was simply an arbitrary point along a continuum of meaning. Or perhaps meaninglessness.

  He started awake. The rabbi was staring into his eyes. ‘What if it is from the other side?’ Yaakov asked.

  ‘I think it is from an other side,’ said the doctor. ‘If Laplace is correct and the universe is full of other worlds, on some of these worlds there may be races of intelligent beings like ours. I believe this is a message from one of these other races and it is teaching us to think like them.’

  ‘Laplace is wrong. It is not from a place in space.’

  ‘Heaven? You are looking at it as a religious man.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. The Sefer Yetzirah says reality is made of time, space and self. Space has six dimensions – north east south west up down, but time seemingly has only two. Maybe time has more and the rock came from them.’

  ‘I can’t imagine it.’

  ‘I can’t either. We’re like fish trying to fly, moths trying to reach the sun.’

  ‘Look,’ Schneerson said.

  The shifting letters were showing them two images made of alephs and bets: a human brain and a mushroom, one becoming the other, intertwined, limbs making love.

  ‘The fungus. It wants us to eat the fungus and alter the chemistry of
our brains,’ said the doctor. ‘There are ergots, moulds on rye that drive men insane. Do we listen to it? Does it have our interests at heart? Does it have a heart?’

  The rabbi was already on all fours, eating the phosphorescent fungus, his mouth foaming like a rabid dog. He started laughing and gambolling like a puppy, but his eyes were blasted open as if with something stronger than grief.

  ‘I can’t explain it to you, doctor. You have to eat of the fruit.’

  Schneerson ate it and looked at time and space knotted into one; the knot was the object; it beckoned him to untie it. He did.

  The rabbi and the doctor, childhood friends, slipped through the open loop.

  III

  Expel me?

  On the level of reality where S existed he was not a separate being, so how could he be expelled?

  Could he be purified out?

  Purify me out and choke on the poison you need to do so, he thought.

  Thought? Did he think?

  He was a not-thing, who was not-separate, who certainly had no thoughts.

  But what S’s no-thoughts were about, was hate.

  Expel me and I will return in full force, and I will spoil. I will hurt your tender ones, and put ulcers in the apple of your eye. I will reach out with my contaminated fingers across the boundaries of time and touch them, and trace madness across their minds.

  I will give you a sickness, but not to make you die, to make you search, search, search, search for the cure, and then just when you have given up hope of ever curing it, I will appear with the medicine. And it will be that medicine that will be the real poison.

  I will pollute you, Mister Rabbi, and make you insane, Mister Doctor, and I will tempt you and teach you how to do it, and through you your whole world/realm/universe/family/nest of souls.

  S would have thought, if S was the kind of thing that had thoughts.

  IV

  No words for the radiance on the other side. ‘These are called the hekhalot,’ said the rabbi. ‘These are called other dimensions of time,’ said the doctor. ‘Go back go back go back,’ said the guardians at the gates, and Yaakov and Mendel walked through.

  ‘It’s like a ship that travels through time and space,’ said Mendel.

  Through a – window? No – they saw the madman at the gates of Rome to convert the pope – Abraham Abulafia – and gave him the method. The method that Yaakov would sell his patrimony for.

  The traumatised slaves in the desert, with Moses away. They leaned out the – door? No – and showed them the golden shape of the spacecraft? No – and they made a golden calf and worshipped it.

  Through another window they saw the two hominid ancestors in Olduvai gorge holding hands.

  ‘We tell them to eat from the tree, the tree that we ate from.’

  From far, far away a woman’s voice is screaming.

  Yaakov is talking to them, telling them that they will be as gods.

  V

  ‘You have to wake up, you have to wake up.’ Mendel is being shaken by Itl, Yaakov’s younger sister. She is screaming, crying. Pink froth and vomit are in his mouth. He bit his tongue.

  ‘I’m all right. I had a seizure.’

  Her eyes say, not that. His eyes say – then what?

  ‘They’re shooting people. The special groups are here and are rounding people up in the forest and shooting them.’

  ‘I need to go back in.’

  He goes back in.

  Yaakov! Yaakov! It wants us to do it to ourselves! It did it to us before, but we could blame it. Now it wants us to do it to ourselves. Don’t tempt the woman.

  The rabbi stepped back from the window and shook off the bad dream.

  ‘You will save my sister? You will save Itl? You can get her out?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘He’ll just do it to us again. I have to trick him. Or he’ll just do it again.’

  ‘How can you trick him?’

  ‘I think I know how. Run, run, run.’

  VI

  Mendel and Itl ran from the sound of gunfire, ran from the village, the forest, hiding, disguises, a couple of hours of sleep in the potato cellars of the moderately tolerant. The old Jewish story.

  Yaakov went deeper into the bowels of the spaceship, past the guards, into the forge of universes. He learnt to weave and unweave the machine/spaceship/palace that S had sent to tempt him. He learnt the rules for making a new universe of time and space. He made it, and went inside.

  A deep but dazzling darkness. How to tempt S to follow him inside?

  Yaakov said – let there be light.

  Animals, plants, sun, moon, world. You can corrupt this to your heart’s content, you bastard. S followed him in; into the closet. You’d almost feel sorry for him. Idiot didn’t have a clue.

  Almost.

  Yaakov shut the door.

  VII

  In New York City one day, when Mendel and Itl had time to catch their breath some years later, he took a look at a siddur and noticed something different. The unspeakable name of God was spelled differently than it had been before. Instead of a yod and a chet and a vav and a chet – YACHAVAKAH-- where there had been chets there were now hehs. His friend had sent him a signal: that he had tricked the trickster, freed the captive and unloosed the bonds. From now on there would be a space in the name of God. From now on we would be able to slip through.

  THE RELUCTANT JEW

  RACHEL SWIRSKY

  The alien held up the yarmulke in its tentacle in what might have been a questioning way.

  ‘I don’t really care where you put it,’ Joseph muttered.

  The alien shoved the yarmulke onto a protuberance on what was probably its back.

  ‘This is the food,’ Joseph said, pointing to the sad trays of matzo, lox and so on, which sat next to a few bottles of Manischewitz. ‘But you probably can’t eat it.’

  ‘Sllrpppurrgle,’ said the alien.

  It wrapped a front tentacle around the wine bottle, picked it up, shook it like a maraca, and then set it down again.

  ‘Grrrpppllgggl,’ it continued, waving three lower tentacles in appreciation. Or possibly rage. Or possibly something else.

  The creature moved on.

  Joseph thumped his head on the table.

  It had begun yesterday when Lieutenant Breaker came into Joseph’s quarters, smiling.

  It was a bad sign when Lieutenant Breaker was smiling. She was the personnel officer and it was her job to manage their assignments and watch out for tricky things like morale. On Space Steps Corporation ships, the position had a reputation for attracting vicious personality types. Joseph’s personal theory was that the kinder ones got burned out by the impossibility of maintaining morale in the face of a fascist, interstellar company, and only those with a cruel streak survived.

  Joseph eyed Lieutenant Breaker suspiciously. He’d automatically crossed his arms and raised his shoulders in subconscious gestures of self-protection. But there was nothing he could do to protect himself against orders.

  ‘Guess what,’ Lieutenant Breaker said.

  Joseph waited for her to finish, and then realized that she was actually going to make him say it. ‘What?’ he grumbled.

  She thrust a tablet towards him. ‘You’re a Jew!’

  Joseph’s gaze flickered down to the tablet screen, which showed the branches of a family tree. He then looked back up at Lieutenant Breaker’s face. He hadn’t yet figured out how this apparently neutral statement of fact was going to backfire. ‘So?’

  Lieutenant Breaker tapped the screen for emphasis. ‘Your family tree. All the way back to pre-expulsion Spain.’

  ‘Mom talks family history occasionally,’ Joseph said. ‘But we’ve been atheists for, like, four generations.’

  ‘Plenty of atheist Jews,’ Lieutenant Breaker replied. ‘Fine tradition, atheist Jews.’

  Joseph finally decided to go the direct route. ‘What are you trying to tell me?’

  ‘Well,’ said Lieutenant Breaker,
‘as you know, we’ve been chatting up the Tentacle Heads so that they’ll give us mineral rights to the accretions on that lovely sea floor of theirs.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Turns out the Tentacle Heads are curious critters, and I don’t just mean they’re really, really weird. They wanted to read our library archive, so we sent it down, and now apparently they are obsessed with the concept of religion. So, we are setting up a multiculturalism fair in the mess hall. A table for every major religion. Congratulations, you’re the Jew!’

  She tossed the pad in his direction. Joseph caught it by dumb reflex.

  ‘But I’m not –’ he said. ‘I don’t –’

  Ignoring his stuttering, Lieutenant Breaker turned to leave. As she reached the door, she hesitated and turned back, ‘I should note that it is absolutely forbidden to call them Tentacle Heads. Remember, Ensign, they are the Usgul. I don’t want to hear you using that term again.’ She waved goodbye. ‘See you later.’

  Joseph roused himself enough to raise his head from the table. He rubbed his face.

  The hall looked as depressing as any other kind of ‘fair’ he’d attended. The matter printers had been busy making banners and models and other kitsch. There was a big Star of David behind him, along with a model of the Western Wall. The table in front of him was scattered with foods and other artefacts associated with Judaism, although Joseph got the impression that whoever had programmed the instructions into the matter printer had known approximately as much about Judaism as Joseph did, which was to say, not much. The level of accuracy and depth was probably, therefore, something around the level of two plus two equals fourish.

  Across the way, the Buddhist table featured a model of some mountain and a shrine. Ensign Cho did not look any more pleased than Joseph was.

  Another Tentacle Head glooped by the table. Or possibly it was the same Tentacle Head. This one was purplish instead of orange, but one of the science officers had said something about chromatophores, so who the hell knew.

  They looked a bit like stalks of broccoli, only with clusters of tentacles instead of green heads. Tentacles appeared to be their raison d’être. They ambulated around on dozens of squiggling tentacle feet. Their lower bodies were riddled with tentacles too, although they were finer, and most stuck invisibly to their flesh unless they were in use. Compound eyes, orifices, and various protuberances were stuck on randomly. Their planet’s evolution hadn’t gone in for symmetry.