He spoke of rebuilding the temple, of finding the builder’s stone lost since the time of Solomon. As he looked out over his audience he saw Sarah stand and leave the congregation. One of his followers left as well, a man named Aaron.
He stopped, the words he had been about to speak dying before they left his mouth. For a moment he could not go on. The people stirred in their seats.
He hurried to an end. After the service he ran quickly to the house the rabbis had given him. Sarah was already there.
“What were you doing here?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” she said. Her expression was innocent, unalarmed.
“I saw you leave with Aaron.”
“With Aaron? I left to come home. I didn’t feel well.”
“You were a whore in Poland, weren’t you?” he asked harshly. “Was there a single man in the country you didn’t sleep with?”
“I was a nobleman’s daughter,” she said. Her voice was calm. He could not see her heart; she held as many mysteries as the Kabbalah.
“A nobleman’s—” he said. “You were his mistress. And what did you do with Aaron? What did you do with all of them, all of my followers?”
“I told you—”
“Don’t lie to me!”
“Listen. Listen to me. I did nothing. I have not known a man since I came to Cairo.”
“Then you admit that in Poland—”
“Quiet. Yes. Yes, I was his mistress.”
“And Aaron? You want him, don’t you? You whore—you want them all, every man you have ever known.”
“Listen,” she said angrily. “You know nothing of women, nothing at all. I was his mistress in Poland, yes. But I did not enjoy it—I did it because I was an orphan, and hungry, and I needed to eat. I hated it when he came to me, but I managed to hide my feelings. I had to, or I would have starved.”
“But you wanted me. On our wedding night, you said—”
“Yes. You are the only man who has ever made me feel safe.”
A great pity moved him. He felt awed at the depths to which her life had driven her, the sins she had been forced to take upon herself. Could she be telling the truth? But why would she stay with him, a man of no use to her or any other woman?
“You lied to your nobleman,” he said carefully. “Are you lying to me now?”
“No,” she said.
He believed her. He felt free, released from the jealousy that had bound him. “You may have Aaron, you know,” he said.
“What?”
“You may have Aaron, or any man you want.”
“I don’t—haven’t you heard me at all? I don’t want Aaron.”
“I understand everything now. You were a test, but through the help of God I have passed it. With the coming of the kingdom of God all things are allowed. Nothing is forbidden. You may have any man, any woman, any one of God’s creatures.”
“I am not a test! I am a woman, your wife! You are the only man I want!”
He did not understand why she had become angry. His own anger had gone. He left the house calmly.
From Jerusalem he traveled with his followers to Smyrna, the place where he was born. There are those who say that he was banished from Jerusalem too, that the rabbis there declared him guilty of blasphemy. He does not remember. He remembers only the sweetness of returning to his birthplace in triumph.
Thousands of men and women turned out to greet him as he rode through the city gates. Men on the walls lifted ram’s horns to their lips and sounded notes of welcome. People crowded the streets, cheering and singing loudly; they raised their children to their shoulders and pointed him out as he went past.
He nodded to the right and left as he rode. A man left the assembly and stepped out in front of the procession.
Shabbetai’s horse reared. “Careful, my lord!” Nathan said, hurrying to his side. Nathan was one of the many who had joined him in Jerusalem, who had heard Shabbetai’s message and given up all his worldly goods.
But Shabbetai had recognized the fat, worried-looking man, and he reined in his horse. “This is my brother Joseph,” he said. “A merchant.”
To his surprise Joseph bowed to him. “Welcome, my lord,” he said. “We hear great things of you.”
Shabbetai laughed. When they were children he had told Joseph about his visions, and Joseph had beaten him for lying. Seeing his brother bent before him was more pleasing than Shabbetai could have imagined. “Rise, my friend,” he said.
In the days that followed the city became one great festival. Business came to a standstill as people danced in the streets, recited psalms to one another when they met, fell into prophetic trances proclaiming the kingdom of God.
Only Sarah did not join in the city’s riot. He urged her to take a lover, as so many people in the city were doing, but she refused. When he called for an end to fast days she became the only one in the city to keep the old customs.
Despite her actions he felt more strongly than ever that he was traveling down the right road, that he was close to the fulfillment of his mission. He excommunicated those who refused to believe in him. He sang love songs during prayer, and explained to the congregation the mystical meaning behind the words of the song. He distributed the kingdoms of the earth among his followers.
His newly-made kings urged him to take the crown intended for him, to announce the date of his entrance into Constantinople. He delayed, remembering the evil vision of the dark prison.
But in his euphoria he began to see another vision, one in which he took the crown from the sultan. He understood that history would be split at Constantinople, would travel down one of two diverging paths. He began to make arrangements to sail.
Two days before they were to leave Sarah came to him. “I’m not going with you,” she said.
“What do you mean?” he asked. “I will be king, ruler of the world, and you will be at my side, my queen. This is what I have worked for all these years. How can you give that up?”
“I don’t want to be queen.”
“You don’t—why not?”
“I don’t feel safe with you any longer. I don’t like the things you ask me to do.”
“What things?”
“What things? How can you ask me that when you tell me to lie with every one of your followers? You’re like the nobleman, passing me around when you get tired of me.”
“I did nothing. It was you who lusted after Aaron.”
“I didn’t—”
“And others too,” he said, remembering the glances she had given men in the congregation. She had pitied him, and hated him too, just as he had always thought. “Do you think I didn’t notice?”
“I’ve done nothing,” she said. “I—”
“I won’t grant you a divorce, you know.”
“Of course not. If we’re married you still own me, even if I’m not there. That dream you told me about, where you took Jerusalem as your bride—you want to master Jerusalem, make her bow to your will. You want to control the entire world. But have you ever thought about how you will govern once you have the sultan’s crown? You want to be ruler of the earth, but what kind of ruler will you be?”
“What do you know about statecraft, about policy? I have been ordained by God to be king. And you—you have been chosen to be queen.”
“No,” she said. “I have not.”
She turned to leave. “I excommunicate you!” he said, shouting after her. “I call upon God to witness my words—you are excommunicated!”
She continued walking as if she did not hear him.
He watched her go. Perhaps it was just as well that she was leaving. He had known for a long time that she could not grasp the vastness of the task he had been given; she had never studied Kabbalah, or had visions of the light of God. His work in the world was far more important than her private feelings, or his.
He and his followers set sail on December 30, 1665. Word of his departure had gone before him. His boat was intercepted in the Sea o
f Marmara, and he was brought ashore in chains.
* * * *
He sits in his prison in Gallipoli and waits for the light. He has not had a vision in many days; perhaps, he thinks, they have left him. He wonders if they have been consumed by the great fires he has seen in the future.
What had gone wrong? He and his followers had been so certain; he had seen the signs, read all the portents. He was destined to be the ruler of the world.
He puts his head in his hands and laughs harshly. Ruler of the world! And instead he sits in prison, waiting to be killed or released at the whim of the Turkish sultan.
The light of God is broken, dispersed throughout the world. And like the light his own mind is broken, splitting.
There is a knock on the door, and Nathan enters. “How did you find me?” Shabbetai asks.
Nathan appears surprised. “Don’t you know?” he asks.
Shabbetai says nothing.
“I bribed a great many people to get you here,” Nathan says. “Are you comfortable?”
“I—yes. Quite comfortable.”
“The sultan has returned from Crete,” Nathan says. “There are rumors that he will want to see you.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Soon, I think. He is alarmed by the support you have among the people of Turkey.” Nathan pauses and then goes on. “Some of your followers are worried. They don’t believe that we can hold out against the combined armies of the sultan.”
“Tell them not to fear,” Shabbetai says. He is surprised at how confident he sounds. But there is no reason to worry Nathan and the others, and perhaps the visions will return. “Tell them that God watches over me.”
Nathan nods, satisfied.
* * * *
A few days later Shabbetai is taken by guards from Gallipoli to Adrianople. They pass through the city and come to a strong high wall. Men look down at them from the watchtowers.
Soldiers with plumed helmets stand at the wall’s gate. The soldiers nod to them and motion them through. Beyond the gate is a courtyard filled with fountains and cypress trees and green plots of grass where gazelles feed.
They turn left, and come to a door guarded by soldiers. They enter through this door and are shown before the sultan and his council.
“Do you claim to be the Messiah?” a councilor asks Shabbetai.
“No,” he says.
“What?” the councilor says, astonished.
“No. Perhaps I was the Messiah once. But the light has left me—I see no more and no less than other people.”
The sultan moves his hand. The councilor nods to him and turns toward Shabbetai. “I see,” he says. “You understand that we cannot just take your word for this. We cannot say, Very well, you may go now. Your followers outside are waiting for you—you have become a very dangerous man.”
“We are prepared to offer you a choice,” the sultan says. “Either convert to Islam or be put to death immediately.”
The light returns, filling the room. Shabbetai gasps; he had begun to think it lost forever. The light breaks. Two paths branch off before him.
On one path he accepts death. His followers, stunned, sit in mourning for him for the required seven days. Then Nathan pronounces him a martyr, and others proclaim that he has ascended to heaven.
His following grows. Miracles are seen, and attested to by others. An army forms; they attack the Turks. A long and bloody war follows. The sultan, the man sitting so smugly before him, is killed by one of his own people, a convert to what is starting to be called Sabbatarianism.
After a decade the Turks surrender, worn out by the fighting against the Sabbatarians on one side and the Venetians on the other. Shabbetai’s followers take Constantinople; Hagia Sophia, once a church and then a mosque, is converted a third time by the victorious army.
The Sabbatarians consolidate their power, and spread across Europe and Asia. First hundreds and then thousands of heretics are put to death. Holy wars flare. Men hungry for power come to Constantinople and are given positions in the hierarchy of the new religion.
Finally, using the terrifying tools of the far future, the Sabbatarians set out to kill everyone who is not a believer. The broken light that Shabbetai saw in his vision shines across the sky as city after city is laid waste. Poisons cover the earth. At the end only a few thousand people are left alive.
Shabbetai turns his gaze away from the destruction and looks down the other path. Here he becomes a convert to Islam; he changes his name to Aziz Mehmed Effendi. The sultan, pleased at his decision, grants him a royal pension of 150 piasters a day.
His followers are shocked, but they soon invent reasons for his apostasy. Nathan explains that the conversion was necessary, that the Messiah must lose himself in darkness in order to find all the shards of God hidden in the world.
Over the years his followers begin to lose hope. Sarah dies in 1674. Two years later he himself dies. Several groups of Sabbatarians continue to meet in secret; one group even survives to the mid-twentieth century.
He turns back to the first path. Once again he is drawn to the vision of annihilation. An end to breeding and living and dying, an end to the mad ceaseless activity that covers the earth. Perhaps this is what God requires of him.
He remembers Sarah, her desire to lie with him. She thought him powerless; very well, he will show her something of power. Flame will consume her descendants, all the children he had been unable to give her.
The moon spins before him, fragments into a thousand pieces. He understands that his vision is not an allegory but real, that people will become so strong they can destroy the moon.
His head pounds. He is not powerless at all. He is the most powerful man in the world. All the people he has seen in his travels, the bakers and learned men and farmers and housewives and bandits, all of them depend for their lives on his next word.
He thinks of Sarah again, her tangled hair, her breath warm on his cheek. If he lets the world live all her children will be his, although she will not know it. Every person in the world will be his child. He can choose life, for himself and for everyone; he can do what he was chosen to do and heal the world.
The light blazes and dies. He looks up at the sultan and his men and says, calmly, “I will choose Islam.”
* * * *
Copyright © 1994 by Lisa Goldstein.
JAMES PATRICK KELLY
(1951– )
Apparently, everyone wants to claim Jim Kelly as one of their own. He’s certainly affable and articulate, good on a panel, an interesting conversationalist—and a terrific short story writer—but over the years it’s been claimed that he was a cyberpunk writer, an anti-cyberpunk humanist, and a writer of pure hard SF, for instance. It’s not that he hasn’t done any of those things: Jim’s story “Solstice” appeared in Bruce Sterling’s anthology Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1985), and he was a part of the humanist Sycamore Hill Writer’s Workshop, and “Think Like a Dinosaur” is as hard as an SF story can be. But none of those things really defines him, other than a tendency to be free-thinking and use a variety of stylistic approaches in his writing well enough to have won two Hugos.
After graduating from Notre Dame with a degree in English Literature, Jim worked as a proposal writer for five years, until he was able to write full-time. He attended Clarion twice, in 1974 and 1976; his first story sale fell in between the two: “Dea Ex Machina” to Galaxy in 1975. He didn’t sell another story until “Death Therapy” in 1978, but since then he’s been published consistently. Although he primarily writes stories and essays (he has a regular column in Asimov’s Science Fiction), Jim has written four novels, Planet of Whispers (1984), its sequel Look into the Sun (1989), Freedom Beach (1985, with John Kessel); and Wildlife (1994). He’s also written poems and plays, and co-edited a number of anthologies with John Kessel.
Recently, he’s been posting two weekly podcasts, Free Reads and James Patrick Kelly’s StoryPod.
Jim is heavily involved in work
ing with new writers. He’s on the faculty at the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. He frequently teaches and participates in workshops, such as Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop and Viable Paradise, and he is vice chair of the Clarion Foundation, which oversees Clarion. He has also served on the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts since 1998, and chaired the council from 2003–2006.
“Think Like a Dinosaur” is Jim’s most famous story, and a Hugo Award winner. The story is a direct response to Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations (p. 396).
THINK LIKE A DINOSAUR, by James Patrick Kelly
First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 1995
Kamala Shastri came back to this world as she had left it—naked. She tottered out of the assembler, trying to balance in Tuulen Station’s delicate gravity. I caught her and bundled her into a robe with one motion, then eased her onto the float. Three years on another planet had transformed Kamala. She was leaner, more muscular. Her fingernails were now a couple of centimeters long and there were four parallel scars incised on her left cheek, perhaps some Gendian’s idea of beautification. But what struck me most was the darting strangeness in her eyes. This place, so familiar to me, seemed almost to shock her. It was as if she doubted the walls and was skeptical of air. She had learned to think like an alien.
“Welcome back.” The float’s whisper rose to a whoosh as I walked it down the hallway.
She swallowed hard and I thought she might cry. Three years ago, she would have. Lots of migrators are devastated when they come out of the assembler; it’s because there is no transition. A few seconds ago Kamala was on Gend, fourth planet of the star we call epsilon Leo, and now she was here in lunar orbit. She was almost home; her life’s great adventure was over.
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