Some of the beings at the loading gate cried out curses and many machines began to push and beat at him. But O/G pulled in his limbs and planted his sucker-pods and did not stir. He had been built to work in many gravities near absolute zero under rains of avalanches. He would not be moved.
Presently uniformed officials came and took away those beings and their cargo, and said to O/G, “You too must come and answer questions.”
But he said, “I was ordered by Galactic Federation to board this ship for Tau Ceti IV, and you may consult the legal department of Colonial Relations, but I will not be moved.”
Because they had no power great enough to move him they consulted among themselves and with the legal department and said, “You may pass.”
Then O/G took his assigned place in the cargo hold of the Aleksandr Nevskii and after the ship lifted for Pardes he turned down his logic because he had been ordered to think for himself for the first time and this confused him very much.
The word pardes is “orchard” but the world Pardes was a bog of mud, foul gases, and shifting terrains, where attempts at terraforming failed again and again until colonists left in disgust and many lawsuits plagued the courts of Interworld Colonies at GalFed. O/G landed there in a stripped shuttle which served as a glider. It was not meant to rise again and it broke and sank in the marshes, but O/G plowed mud, scooping the way before him, and rode on treads, dragging the supplies behind him on a sledge, for 120 kilometers before he came within sight of the colony.
Fierce creatures many times his size, with serpentine necks and terrible fangs, tried to prey on him. He wished to appease them, and offered greetings in many languages, but they would only break their teeth on him. He stunned one with a blow to the head, killed another by snapping its neck, and they left him alone.
The colony center was a concrete dome surrounded by a forcefield that gave out sparks, hissing and crackling. Around it he found many much smaller creatures splashing in pools and scrambling to and fro at the mercy of one of the giants who held a small being writhing in its jaws.
O/G cried in a loud voice, “Go away you savage creature!” and the serpent beast dropped its mouthful, but seeing no great danger dipped its neck to pick it up again. So O/G extended his four hinged limbs to their greatest length and, running behind the monster seized the pillars of its rear legs, heaving up and out until its spine broke and it fell flattened in mud, thrashing the head on the long neck until it drove it into the ground and smothered.
The small beings surrounded O/G without fear, though he was very great to them, and cried in their thin voices, “Shalom, shalom, Savior!”
O/G was astonished to hear these strangers speaking clear Hebrew. He had not known a great many kinds of living persons during his experience, but among those displayed in the corridors of the Library basement these most resembled walruses. “I am not a savior, men of Pardes,” he said in the same language. “Are you speaking your native tongue?”
“No, Redeemer. We are Cnidori and we spoke Cnidri before we reached this place in our wanderings, but we learned the language of Rav Zohar because he cared for us when we were lost and starving.”
“Now Zohar has put up a barrier and shut you out—and I am not a redeemer—but what has happened to that man?”
“He became very ill and shut himself away because he said he was not fit to look upon. The food he helped us store is eaten and the Unds are ravaging us.”
“There are some here that will ravage you no longer. Do you eat the flesh of these ones?”
“No, master. Only what grows from the ground.”
He saw that beneath the draggling gray moustaches their teeth were the incisors and molars of herbivores. “I am not your master. See if there is food to gather here and I will try to reach Zohar.”
“First we will skin one of these to make tents for shelter. It rains every hour.” They rose on their haunches in the bog, and he discovered that though their rear limbs were flippers like those of aquatic animals, their forelimbs bore three webbed fingers apiece and each Cnidor had a small shell knife slung over one shoulder. All, moreover, had what appeared to be one mammalian teat and one male generative organ ranged vertically on their bellies, and they began to seem less and less like walruses to O/G. The prime Cnidor continued, “Tell us what name pleases you if you are offended by the ways we address you.”
“I have no name but a designation: O/G5/842. I am only a machine.”
“You are a machine of deliverance and so we will call you Golem.”
In courtesy O/G accepted the term. “This forcefield is so noisy it probably has a malfunction. It is not wise to touch it.”
“No, we are afraid of it.”
Golem scooped mud from the ground and cast it at the forcefield; great lightnings and hissings issued where it landed. “I doubt even radio would cross that.”
“Then how can we reach Zohar, Golem, even if he is still alive?”
“I will cry out, Cnidori. Go to a distance and cover your ears, because my voice can pierce a mountain of lead ore.”
They did not know what that was, but they removed themselves, and Golem turned his volume to its highest and called in a mighty voice, “Samuel Zohar ben Reuven Begelman turn off your forcefield for I have come from Galactic Federation to help you!!!”
Even the forcefield buckled for one second at the sound of his voice.
After a long silence, Golem thought he heard a whimper, from a great distance. “I believe he is alive but cannot reach the control.”
A Cnidor said, trembling, “The Unds have surely heard you, because they are coming back again.”
And they did indeed come back, bellowing, hooting, and striking with their long necks. Golem tied one great snake neck in a knot and cried again, “Let us in, Zohar, or the Unds will destroy all of your people!!!”
The forcefield vanished, and the Cnidori scuttled over its border beneath the sheltering arms of Golem, who cracked several fanged heads like nutshells with his scoops.
“Now put up your shield!!!” And the people were saved.
When Golem numbered them and they declared that only two were missing among forty he said, “Wait here and feed yourselves.”
The great outer doorway for working machines was open, but the hangar and storerooms were empty of them; they had been removed by departing colonists. None had been as huge as Golem, and here he removed his scoops and unhinged his outer carapace with its armor, weapons, and storage compartments, for he wished to break no more doorways than necessary. Behind him he pulled the sledge with the supplies.
When his heat sensor identified the locked door behind which Zohar was to be found, he removed the doorway as gently as he could.
“I want to die in peace and you are killing me with noise,” said a weak voice out of the darkness.
By infrared Golem saw the old man crumpled on the floor by the bed, filthy and half naked, with the shield control resting near his hand. He turned on light. The old man was nearly bald, wasted and yellowskinned, wrinkled, his rough beard tangled and clotted with blood.
“Zohar?”
Sam Begelman opened his eyes and saw a tremendous machine, multi-armed and with wheels and treads, wound with coiling tubes and wires, studded with dials. At its top was a dome banded with sensor lenses, and it turned this way and that to survey the room. “What are you?” he whispered in terror. “Where is my kaddish?”
He spoke in lingua, but O/G replied in Hebrew. “You know you are the last Jew in the known universe, Rav Zohar. There is no one but me to say prayers for you.”
“Then let me die without peace,” said Begelman, and closed his eyes.
But Golem knew the plan of the station, and within five minutes he reordered the bed in cleanliness, placed the old man on it, set up an IV, cleansed him, and injected him with the drugs prepared for him. The old man’s hands pushed at him and pushed at him, uselessly. “You are only a machine,” he croaked. “Can’t you understand that a machine c
an’t pray?”
“Yes, master. I would have told that to Galactic Federation, but I knew they would not believe me, not being Jews.”
“I am not your master. Why truly did you come?”
“I was made new again and given orders. My growth in logic now allows me to understand that I cannot be of use to you in exactly the way Galactic Federation wished, but I can still make you more comfortable.”
“I don’t care!” Begelman snarled. “Who needs a machine?”
“The Cnidori needed me to save them from the Unds when you shut them out, and they tried to call me Savior, Redeemer, master; I refused because I am a machine, but I let them call me Golem because I am a machine of deliverance.”
Begelman sniffed. But the sick yellow of his skin was gone; his face was faintly pink and already younger by a few years.
“Shmuel Zohar ben Reuven Begelman, why do you allow those helpless ones to call you Rav Zohar and speak in your language?”
“You nudnik of a machine, my name is not Samuel and certainly not Shmuel! It is Zohar, and I let myself be called Sam because zohar is ‘splendor’ and you can’t go through life as Splendor Begelman! I taught those Cnidori the Law and the Prophets to hear my own language spoken because my children are gone and my wife is dead. That is why they call me Teacher. And I shut them out so that they would be forced to make their own way in life before they began to call me Redeemer! What do you call yourself, Golem?”
“My designation is O/G5/842.”
“Ah. Og the giant King of Bashan. That seems suitable.”
“Yes, Zohar. That one your Rabbi Moshe killed in the land of Kana’an with all his people for no great provocation. But O is the height of my oxygen tolerance in Solthree terms; I cannot work at gravities of less than five newtons, and eight four two is my model number. Now Zohar, if you demand it I will turn myself off and be no more. But the people are within your gate; some of them have been killed and they must still be cared for.”
Zohar sighed, but he smiled a little as well. Yet he spoke slowly because he was very ill. “Og ha-Golem, before you learn how to tune an argument too fine remember that Master of the Word is one of the names of Satan. Moshe Rabbenu was a bad-tempered man but he did very greatly, and I am no kind of warrior. Take care of the people, and me too if your … logic demands it—and I will consider how to conduct myself off the world properly.”
“I am sure your spirit will free itself in peace, Zohar. As for me, my shuttle is broken, I am wanted nowhere else, and I will rust in Pardes.”
Og ha-Golem went out of the presence of the old man but it seemed to him as if there were some mild dysfunction in his circuits, for he was mindful—if that is the term—of Begelman’s concept of the Satan, Baal Davar, and he did not know for certain if what he had done by the prompting of his logic was right action. How can I know? he asked himself. By what harms and what saves, he answered. By what seems to harm and what seems to save, says the Master of the Word.
Yet he continued by the letter of his instructions from Galactic Federation, and these were to give the old man comfort. For the Cnidori he helped construct tents, because they liked water under their bellies but not pouring on their heads. With his own implements he flensed the bodies of the dead Unds, cleaned their skins, and burned their flesh; it was not kosher for Begelman and attracted bothersome scavengers. He did this while Rav Zohar was sleeping and spoke to the people in his language; they had missed it when he was ill. “Zohar believes you must learn to take care of yourselves, against the Unds and on your world, because you cannot now depend on him.”
“We would do that, Golem, but we would also like to give comfort to our Teacher.”
Og ha-Golem was disturbed once again by the ideas that pieced themselves together in his logic and said to Begelman, “Zohar, you have taught the Cnidori so well that now they are capable of saying the prayers you long for so greatly. Is there a way in which that can be made permissible?”
The old man folded his hands and looked about the bare and cracking walls of the room, as Golem had first done, and then back at him. “In this place?” he whispered. “Do you know what you are saying?”
“Yes, Zohar.”
“How they may be made Jews?”
“They are sentient beings. What is there to prevent it?”
Begelman’s face became red and Og checked his blood-pressure monitor. “Prevent it! What is there to them that would make Jews? Everything they eat is neutral, neither kosher nor tref, so what use is the law of Kashrut? They live in mud—where are the rules of bathing and cleanliness? They had never had any kind of god or any thought of one, as far as they tell me—what does prayer mean? Do you know how they procreate? Could you imagine? They are so completely hermaphroditic the word is meaningless. They pair long enough to raise children together, but only until the children grow teeth and can forage. What you see that looks like a penis is really an ovipositor: each Cnidor who is ready deposits eggs in the pouch of another, and an enzyme of the eggs stimulates the semen glands inside, and when one or two eggs become fertilized the pouch seals until the fetus is of a size to make the fluid pressure around it break the seal, and the young crawls up the belly of the parent to suckle on the teat. Even if one or two among twenty are born incomplete, not one is anything you might call male or female! So tell me, what do you do with all the laws of marriage and divorce, sexual behavior, the duties of the man at prayer and the woman with the child?”
He was becoming out of breath and Og checked oxygen and heart monitors. “I am not a man or woman either and though I know the Law I am ignorant in experience. I was thinking merely of prayers that God might listen to in charity or appreciation. I did not mean to upset you. I am not fulfilling my duties.”
“Leave me.”
Og turned an eyecell to the dripping of the IV and removed catheter and urine bag. “You are nearly ready to rise from your bed and feed yourself, Zohar. Perhaps when you feel more of a man you may reconsider.”
“Just go away.” He added, snarling, “God doesn’t need any more Jews!”
“Yes, they would look ridiculous in skullcaps and prayer shawls with all those fringes dragging in mud …”
Zohar, was that why you drove them out into the wild?
Og gathered brushwood and made a great fire. He cut woody vines and burnt them into heaps of charcoal. He gathered and baked clay into blocks and built a kiln. Then he pulled his sledge for 120 kilometers, and dug until he found enough pieces of the glider for his uses. He fired the kiln to a great heat, softened the fragments, and reshaped them into the huge scoops he had been deprived of. They were not as fine and strong as the originals, but very nearly as exact.
He consulted maps of Pardes, which lay near the sea. He began digging channels and heaping breakwaters to divert a number of streams and drain some of the marshes of Pardes, and to keep the sea from washing over it during storms, and this left pools of fresher water for the Cnidori.
Sometimes the sun shone. On a day that was brighter and dryer than usual Begelman came outside the station, supporting himself on canes, and watched the great Golem at work. He had never seen Og in full armor with his scoops. During its renewal his exterior had been bonded with a coating that retarded rust; this was dull gray and the machine had no beauty in the eyes of a Solthree, but he worked with an economy of movement that lent him grace. He was surrounded by Cnidori with shovels of a size they could use, and they seemed to Begelman like little children playing in mud piles, getting in the way while the towering machine worked in silence without harming the small creatures or allowing them to annoy him.
Og, swiveling the beam of his eyecell, saw an old, white-bearded Solthree with a homely face of some dignity; he looked weak but not ill. His hair was neatly trimmed, he wore a blue velvet skullcap worked with silver threads, black trousers, and zippered jacket, below which showed the fringes of his tallith katan. He matched approximately the thousands of drawings, paintings, and photographs of dignified
old Jews stored in Og’s memory: Og had dressed him to match.
Begelman said, “What are you doing?”
“I am stabilizing the land in order to grow crops of oilseed, lugwort, and greenpleat, which are nourishing both to you and the Cnidori. I doubt Galactic Federation is going to give us anything more, and I also wish to store supplies. If other wandering tribes of Cnidori cross this territory it is better to share our plenty than fight over scarcity.”
“You’re too good to be true,” Begelman muttered.
Og had learned something of both wit and sarcasm from Begelman but did not give himself the right to use them on the old man. His logic told him that he, the machine, had nothing to fear from a Satan who was not even a concept in the mainstream of Jewish belief, but that Zohar was doing battle with the common human evil in his own spirit. He said, “Zohar, these Cnidori have decided to take Hebrew names, and they are calling themselves by letters: Aleph, Bet, Gimmel, and when those end at Tauf, by numbers: Echod, Shtaim, Sholosh. This does not seem correct to me but they will not take my word for it. Will you help them?”
Begelman’s mouth worked for a moment, twisting as if to say, What have these to do with such names? but Cnidori crowded round him and their black eyes reflected very small lights in the dim sun; they were people of neither fur nor feather, but scales that resembled both: leaf-shaped plates the size of a thumb with central ridges and branching radials; these were very fine in texture and refracted rainbow colors on brighter days.
The old man sighed and said, “Dear people, if you wish to take names in Hebrew you must take the names of human beings like those in Law and Prophets. The names of the Fathers: Avraham, Yitzhak, Yaakov; the Tribes: Yehuda, Shimon, Binyamin, or if you prefer female names, the Mothers: Sarai, Rivkah, Rakhael, Leah. Whichever seems good to you.” The Cnidori thanked him with pleasure and went away content.
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