The Day of Atonement

by Breck England

  “I already ordered your favorite. Almond pudding with rosewater,” she smiled tentatively.

  “Excellent. But let’s get the worst out of the way now.”

  Rabia shrugged unhappily and pulled her GeM from her bag. She propped it up and a series of charts appeared on the white enamel of the table. Her eyes were cast down. “It’s not important for you to read these, but I brought them for you if you want them. Essentially they say that things are about to change for you.”

  “When?”

  “Perhaps a month. A little more if we do transfusions. I’m afraid it’s gone too far for gene therapy. The damage is too great. I am so sorry I didn’t see the signs earlier.”

  “He hid it from everyone.” Nasir smiled sadly at her. “Will it be painful for him?”

  “We will make it as painless as possible.”

  “It was the Turkish cigarettes?”

  “They didn’t help. You must stop now too,” she said, only half smiling.

  “And there is nothing left to do?”

  “Nothing.”

  They sat quiet for a moment. Their food arrived but neither touched it. Nasir pretended to examine the charts that still blazed on the table but neither could nor wanted to make anything of them. Although he had known this day would come, he was trying not to cry.

  Switching off the GeM, Rabia cleared her throat and asked, “What about Amal?”

  “Amal will be fine, God willing. I’ll look after him.”

  “But there have always been the three of you, you, Amal, and your father, and you are very busy now.”

  “He’s nearly grown.”

  She looked at him doubtfully, and after a moment she said, “And who will take care of him while you are…settling accounts?”

  “Rabia, things are about to change for me. As you know. I will need help.”

  Rabia sighed, pulled her rainbow scarf tightly around her head, and crossing her hand over his, she touched his gold ring with her finger. “You will always have it.”

  The Cathedral of Chartres, 1015h

  As in her nineteenth year, Maryse instantly felt again the cool of the cathedral that had transfigured her life. At that time she had trusted Mortimer—she had always felt more at home with older people than with people her own age—and longed to know what he knew.

  “After Henry Adams visited Chartres many times, he gave a warning that you should hear,” Mortimer had said to her, all at once sober. “’A tourist never should study, or he ceases to be a tourist.’”

  But Maryse had insisted on it, and Mortimer had agreed with a handshake and a shrug to teach her what he knew. How right Mortimer—or rather Adams—had been! Sometimes she wished she had remained a tourist.

  First, he had led her to the center of the nave. “The cathedral builders began by laying out a perfect square on the ground. Each side of this square is 16.4 meters, or almost exactly fifty-five Roman feet, which is the key measure used by the Gothic architects. The number 55 signifies the totality of creation, as Pythagoras taught; and Aristotle divided the universe into fifty-five concentric spheres. Thus, the center of the cathedral is a perfect square that stands for the very center of existence.”

  “From here, the building’s plan and elevation grew.…”

  “Wait,” she stopped him. “The number 55? The totality of creation? Where did you get this?”

  “I told you. Pythagoras, my dear. In Plato. The dialogue of Timaeus. You know your Plato, surely.…”

  But Maryse did not know her Plato. At university she had prided herself on having read more and remembered more than everyone else in her year. Now she was about to discover how little she really knew.

  It had gone on like that for weeks. Plato, Aristotle, the Talmud, Herodotus, St. Augustine, Averroes, Avicenna, Aquinas, Maimonides, Bernard of Clairvaux, Descartes, Newton. Maryse would spend hours in the cathedral with Mortimer and then scour her tablet at night to become, as he put it, “Googly educated.” “You don’t know enough,” he kept telling her. “Don’t know enough even to talk about these things. Of course, very few do,” he muttered.

  “I’m surprised how much they knew,” she replied one day. “I mean, the people in the Dark Ages.”

  “The Dark Ages,” Mortimer snorted. “So, they lived in the dark? They needed darkness to see light more clearly, didn’t they? To look deep.”

  And that was how her real education began. All her studies with her father, her reading at Cambridge, were just prologue to this. The cathedral became a teaching machine for her, an encyclopedia of the universe that explained its calculations, its motions, and its meanings. Sometimes she felt as if she were walking inside a vast computer, its lights glistening like gems.

  She felt that way again now, only more urgently, as she and Ari followed Mortimer into the nave. Whatever the cathedral had to teach her, she needed it now. The bright sun outside broke into colored stars inside the black interior sky, the dominant red turning those stars into bloody droplets. Hundreds of candles glowed from the bays encircling the nave. And all this light fell into a flickering lake on the floor.

  Something was missing. The ranks of caneback chairs had been removed, leaving the vast space empty. And there were no people—no tourists, no worshipers. All was silent except for the echo of the wind. She looked curiously at Mortimer, whose eyes glistened back at her.

  “I told them I needed an hour.” His voice resounded like a thin trumpet, as it did when he led groups of tourists; but there was a difference in the tone. He was no longer play-acting.

  “Monsieur Davan, today is the feast day of St. Bruno, founder of the Carthusian Order. I had these candles lit in his honor. Bruno was a teacher, a scholar, a clergyman yet a man of the world. The year was 1080. His bishop was a monster, an impious and profane thug. Now Bruno, when he realized that such men ruled not only in the world but in the Church as well, withdrew from it all. He climbed into the Alps, built a cell, and remained there in silence and prayer awaiting the end of this world.”

  Irritated but intrigued, Ari said, “Your point? And what did you mean when you said the world will end on Monday?”

  “Let’s get to the point, then,” Mortimer chuckled and strode into the nave, stopping abruptly and turning. “Here it is,” he said, his finger indicating the floor.

  “What?” Ari saw that Maryse was now smiling too.

  “The point!

  “It’s the midpoint of the labyrinth,” Maryse explained. “The center.”

  Ari looked all around and realized that the huge labyrinth spread out in concentric brownstone circles from where Mortimer stood. “This is the end of the world,” the old man intoned.

  “You said the center of the labyrinth represented Jerusalem, The Holy City. That the Christians came here to walk the labyrinth because they couldn’t afford the pilgrimage.”

  “To the medieval mind, allegory was reality. Read your Apocalypse…or, rather, as a Jew, read your Ezekiel. The Holy City is the world to come promised by God to his ancient prophets. They all longed for it, crawled on their knees to get to it. Few have their minds fixed on it today—that is our tragedy. And some of those who do, shall we say, are too full of passionate intensity. It is ‘the center that cannot hold.’ Yeats.”

  “And Monday?”

  “Of all people, you should not be surprised at that,” the old man chuckled again.

  Maryse saw Ari’s impatience and began to explain. “This Monday is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.”

  “What’s that to do with anything?”

  “There’s been quite a lot of flutter about it lately. Haven’t you seen it? In the tabloid media, mostly. It’s the end of the 120th jubilee.”

  Ari shook his head.

  “Best start at the beginning, Maryse,” Mortimer encouraged her.

  “All right. It’s said that the labyr
inth traces all of history from the beginning of the world to the end. It is 740 Roman feet from start to finish—the Roman foot was the unit of measurement the builders used. It is also thirty-seven Roman feet in diameter. The ratio of the length of the path to its diameter is 50, and there are twelve concentric paths which must be traversed to get to the center.”

  Ari stared at her. “I’m sorry, but I’m lost.”

  Maryse sighed. “The labyrinth is like a giant clock counting down to the end of the world. The Psalms teach that to God one day is as a thousand years. At the end of six thousand years.…”

  “Messiah will come,” Ari interrupted. “I know about this. It’s in Talmud. The Messiah of David will appear at the end of the last jubilee. A jubilee is fifty years, and 6000 years divided by fifty is 120 jubilees.”

  “Right,” Maryse nodded. “God commanded Moses to celebrate every fiftieth year as a jubilee year, at the end of a period of seven times seven years. The fiftieth year was a sabbatical year to symbolize the world to come when there would be peace.”

  “And the jubilee begins on Yom Kippur. I think I’m beginning to see. So, each of the twelve layers of the labyrinth represents ten jubilees…or 500 years…”

  She nodded. “Five hundred multiplied by twelve layers gives 6000 years. Once you’ve navigated the labyrinth, you’ve traveled through the 6000 years of the world’s continuation.”

  “Okay, but how do they arrive at this year being the end of the 120th jubilee?” Ari asked.

  Maryse went to stand by Mortimer on the center of the labyrinth. Beneath their feet was a brownstone pattern like a blooming flower in the floor. She looked at the old man, who nodded, and then began.

  “The ninth chapter of Daniel says, ‘From the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven sevens.’ In Daniel’s time, Jerusalem had been destroyed, but he prophesied it would be restored and rebuilt.

  Mortimer interrupted. “And Daniel prophesies that ‘seven sevens’ after the rebuilding, Messiah would come to end the world. Obviously, he couldn’t have meant seven weeks or seven years, so what did he mean by ‘seven sevens?’”

  “Seven sevens of jubilees?” Ari asked. “You mean, like, forty-nine jubilees?”

  “Exactly,” Maryse was eager now. “The king of Persia ordered Jerusalem to be rebuilt sometime in the middle of the 400s BCE. Counting forward forty-nine jubilees from 423 BCE, or the next jubilee year after the king’s command, gives us 2027—this year.” She grinned at Mortimer, who was chuckling.

  “That would mean we have only four days left. But this is fantasy. Who came up with all of this?” Ari asked.

  Maryse and Mortimer stopped laughing and looked at each other. Maryse finally spoke.

  “Sir Isaac Newton.”

  Technion, Haifa, 1145h

  Shimon Tempelman shut off his GeMscreen and sat back in his sunny little office. He finished his cheese and grapes and thought about what to do next. It was the sort of thing he shouldn’t discuss on the telephone; no—it would be best handled face-to-face. He made a quick call, then took his golf cart to the Nanoelectronics building for the second time in two days.

  Catriel Levine met him as she got off the lift and led him to one of the glassy conference rooms on the main floor. He chuckled to himself; obviously, he was not to be allowed near her old man.

  “You said you had news. Has the object been found?” she asked. Her face was pale; she had lost some of her urbane look. No makeup covered the shadows under her eyes. Still, she was a striking woman, he thought.

  “No. Haven’t found it yet. The police, as usual, are running off in all directions. It’s remarkable how unfocused they become. In my opinion it’s a sort of panic reaction that sets in when people actually expect something from them.”

  She looked at him distastefully. “You’re a policeman yourself.”

  “Not really. I’m a policy man. There is a certain relation between those two things; but police work is done in nasty places. Policy work is done in pleasant places—carpeted restaurants, golf courses, quiet glass-enclosed conference rooms.”

  She was impatient. “So, we’re here to talk about policy, then?”

  “Yes, indeed. Intellectual property law, to be specific.”

  “That’s my area,” she said, looking down at the table now. “Is there something I can help you with?”

  “While I was having my little entretien with the head of Interpol yesterday, I began asking myself, why would someone steal the lattice when there is so little at stake?”

  “So little?”

  “Yes. So little. Quantum-dot technology has been around for years. Its commercialization was only a matter of time—lots of people are working on it. Stealing it seems an absurd way to get the jump on a competitor. Besides, it wouldn’t work, I told myself. Cate Levine has, I’m sure, made Technion property rights ironclad. Theft would do nothing to abrogate those rights.” He smiled broadly.

  “Ridiculous. There’s a great deal at stake,” she rejoined. “The theft of the object is catastrophic. In my business, nothing is ironclad. The object is all that certain parties need to start producing it on a mass scale.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” he continued to smile. “Stupid of me, I know. But I got interested in the patent applications anyway, and this morning I started looking through them. Quite closely.”

  “And you saw that all the commercialization rights belong to the Institute.”

  “Yes, just as you say. You know, as ambassador to Interpol I happened to work on a number of intellectual property projects—only matters of policy, you understand—and I became quite conversant with some of the issues. So, just as a matter of professional interest, I wondered if I could ask you a question?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’ve heard of reciprocal piracy?”

  “Yes. It occurs when a claimant threatens to sue a second party for pirating intellectual property but holds off if the second party agrees to share the proceeds from the piracy with the claimant.”

  “A sort of legal blackmail.”

  “From a certain point of view, I suppose it is,” she sighed. “What makes you so interested?”

  “Another question? And then I’ll answer yours.”

  “All right.”

  “Is it possible to obtain a patent for a new invention but not for the software that runs it?”

  “Of course. That’s been decided years ago. If you could patent the software as well, companies with deep pockets could employ legions of lawyers to track down every item of code used by every competitor and keep smaller, more inventive companies tied up in court.”

  He flicked on his GeMscreen and an electronic document appeared on the table. “This is the template you’ve used to file a patent on the lattice. Do you realize it’s more than twenty years old? That it predates the decisions you just mentioned?”

  Catriel’s iron look faltered almost imperceptibly. “Yes. It’s a classic document. I used it because I wanted our claim to the new hardware to be as strong as possible. This document does that.”

  “Doesn’t it also allow for someone to patent the software and not the hardware?”

  Catriel stood up sharply. “Mr. Tempelman, this is my field. I’ve worked in it for years. I’m a recognized expert. If the Institute lacks confidence in my work, they can seek different counsel.” She unlocked the door and warm air streamed into the glass room. “But I don’t think they will. Excuse me now, I’m very busy upstairs.”

  Tempelman still sat but languidly called after her. “Oh, another thing. What can you tell me about the Mishmar?”

  Catriel turned with an inert smile. “You should ask Jules Halevy about that. He can give you much more information than I can.” And then she was gone.

  Chartres Cathedral, 1115h


  “Sir Isaac Newton? Gravity? Apple-on-the-head Newton?” It was Ari’s turn to laugh.

  “Precisely,” Mortimer sniffed. “The great Sir Isaac Newton.”

  “People don’t know that Newton was more than a scientist or a mathematician. He was a student of the Bible—perhaps the greatest who ever lived,” Maryse explained. “He obsessed over the predictions in the Book of Daniel about the coming of the Messiah and spent most of his career trying to interpret them.”

  “Most of his career? What about all the science he did? He came up with the calculus, didn’t he? And the law of gravity?”

  “He did,” she went on. “But most people don’t know why he did those things. He wasn’t doing science for its own sake. For example, to understand what the ancient Jews meant by the time measurements they used—say, the length of a day or a year—he had to do astronomy. He needed to know how to calculate the positions of the sun and moon so he could tell how many years in the future these prophecies would be fulfilled. There was no way to do that, so he invented his own method. Today we call it calculus.”

  Ari was trying to understand. “That’s why his law of gravity…to predict the motions of the stars and the planets so he could understand the Jewish calendar?”

  “Right. He needed precision.”

  “He understood, as Aristotle did,” Mortimer said, “that a slight error in the beginning, if not corrected, leads to a great error in the end.”

  Ari looked down at the labyrinth in the pool of light on the floor, then up at the jeweled ceiling high above. So, the cathedral was a giant observatory for taking bearings on the cosmos. All at once he could see pure geometry all around him: soaring bays like pillars of the sky, the quartered cross-vaulting of the roof, the West Rose Window like the wheeling heaven overlaid with the points of the clock, the whole church a vast orrery frozen in stone.