The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Ellen Datlow ed.

  Nur, who enjoyed the food and felt much better when the conversation moved from her work to other subjects, looked at the slopes of the Carmel and said, “Things aren’t bad here, either.”

  Eddie laughed. “Your Tirosh, he didn’t sound like a happy person, from what you quoted.”

  “He cared,” Nur said. “That’s what I like about him. The poetry sometimes fails, sometimes he can’t say exactly what he means. But he cares. Besides”—she shrugged and smiled—“of all the travelling and the marijuana he writes about, it sounds to me like he didn’t particularly suffer.”

  She tried not to rise to Eddie’s comment about recognising Tirosh’s name. Did not want to be disappointed so soon into her journey, but she felt the stirrings of excitement taking root in her heart.

  “If I remember,” Eddie said, “I’ll call you straightaway and let you know.”

  Nur raised her wineglass in salute, and Eddie raised his grape juice against her.

  “Cheers,” he said.

  “L’chaim,” Nur said, and they both laughed.

  Eddie called when Nur and Shulamit sat down with their coffee in the morning.

  “I remembered,” he said in victory. “I knew I recognised the name from somewhere.”

  “Where from?” Nur asked. She felt peaceful; since last night she was convinced that the contact would come, and now was not surprised.

  Eddie sounded embarrassed. “Look, I have a friend who would know a lot more than me. I spoke to him and he’d be glad to meet you.” He gave her the address, in Hachalutz Street, in the old quarter of Hadar.

  “Thanks,” Nur said, turning to Shulamit with a question in her eyes. Shulamit shrugged and whispered, “Haven’t a clue.”

  Eddie hung up—hurriedly, Nur thought—and she got up and put her coffee on the table. There was no point waiting; she decided to leave immediately and meet Eddie’s mysterious friend.

  Shulamit wished her luck and gave her a map of the Carmelit, and in a short time Nur had left the apartment and walked to the nearest station. She found her way to Hachalutz Street Station and there, surrounded by the smells of frying falafel, shawarma, and roasted eggplant which made her suddenly hungry, she walked up the street in search of the address, which turned out to be an apartment above a darkened bookshop that looked as if it had never been opened.

  She rang the bell. “Mr. Katz?”

  She waited, heard slow steps coming down hidden stairs.

  The door opened slowly.

  Mr. Katz was small of stature, with short silver hair and a dignified expression, like that of a lecturer on tenure.

  “Nur?” He didn’t wait for an answer but began climbing back up the stairs. Nur looked at Mr. Katz’s back moving away, painfully slow. As they said in the neighbourhood…nu. She shrugged and smiled to herself and followed him up the stairs.

  “Tea? Coffee?”

  Mr. Katz’s apartment was a temple of books. Old books hid in glass cabinets, were piled on the floor in between, sat in boxes, winked behind flowerpots, rested on the windowsill; and on the walls…there were yellowing posters there: of monsters and spaceships, djinns and bronzed Amazonian warriors, weird creatures and the views of strange, other worlds…

  “Mr. Katz?” Nur didn’t know what to say. “You’re not a poetry collector, are you?”

  “Poetry?” Mr. Katz turned and faced her. “Poetry?” The hand that held the coffee spoon shook. “My dear, I have not read poetry since I was forced, at the age of eight, to recite Bialik’s ‘To a Bird’ in front of the whole class. No, Ms. Husseini”—he stretched as high as he could—“I collect science fiction.”

  “I don’t understand,” Nur said. They sat by a table laden with books and drank coffee. Nur bit on a cookie. “Eddie said you’d know about Lior Tirosh.”

  “Lior Tirosh,” Mr. Katz said excitedly. “Of course. You say he wrote poetry, too? Interesting. Very interesting. I’m very glad to meet another person who’s interested in Tirosh. Fascinating.”

  “You say he also wrote science fiction?” Nur asked. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry; she didn’t know what to expect, but…she refused to admit to herself that she was disappointed.

  Mr. Katz’s hand reached under the table and returned with an ancient-looking magazine; he laid it gently before Nur. “Groteska number forty-eight,” he said fondly. “The longest-running magazine in the history of Israeli science fiction.” He said it with the importance reserved for lecturers on the ages of the Enlightenment or ancient Greece. “The only one to come out both Before and After. Sixty-one volumes, a mixture of translated and original fiction.” He smiled, as if to himself. “And, of course, Tirosh’s stories.”

  Nur opened the pages of the magazine. The table of contents included, among story titles such as “War in Zero-g,” “The Wolfmen of Tel Hannan,” and “The Passion Knights of the Purple Planet” (to which, she noticed, was attached a detailed illustration), a story titled “Where All the Waters Meet” and next to it, in small letters, the name of the author: Lior Tirosh.

  Nur felt dizzy. Up until now she had expected to find it had all been a mistake, that there were two people called Lior Tirosh, and that here was simply the wrong one. But she recognised the title of the story as a line from T. S. Eliot’s poem “Marina.” In hands that had become suddenly greedy she turned the pages until she reached the story. She read it, the coffee cooling beside her, a lone cookie floating on the murky liquid.

  The story told of an escaped convict, a murderer, who arrives by spaceship at a solar system where, in a giant asteroid belt revolving around the sun, lives a race of beelike creatures. The queen of the aliens is telepathic, and in her conversations with the hero she is revealed to him not as a ruler but as a sex slave, her only role that of producing offspring. The human hero and the alien queen fall in love and try to escape. They fail, and the hero remains, as a punishment, in eternal sleep on a wandering asteroid; doomed to meet his lover only in dreams, in the place where, as Eliot wrote, all the waters meet.

  Nur discovered her throat was dry. “How many stories did he write?” she whispered.

  “I never counted,” Mr. Katz said apologetically. “He appears in about half the volumes of Groteska, in all the volumes of Scanners in the Dark and The New Adventures of Captain Yuno, in one or two issues of The Tenth Dimension and of Travels Through Space and Time…I’m afraid you’ll need to go over them one by one. It’s also worth checking the other magazines, and there were also some original anthologies.” He stood up. “The apartment is yours,” he said. “I have to go open the shop. If I don’t have a choice I might even sell something.”

  He smiled, wished her luck, and turned to the stairs.

  Nur remained alone in the apartment, surrounded by books like walls.

  She didn’t know what she was looking for. A hint as to Tirosh’s activity, perhaps, who seemed to have abandoned the writing of poetry after the publication of his first book and turned instead to writing stories that found a home only in the yellowing pages of the science-fiction and fantasy magazines. An ex-boyfriend had tried to interest her in science fiction once, and gave her the al-Qaeda series of an American writer called Asimov, as well as some of the books from the Egyptian New Wave, but she had never been interested in that kind of writing: She preferred poetry, and autobiographies.

  Tirosh, she discovered, was indeed productive. His stories returned again and again to the subjects dealt with in his poetry, and if he did not document the places where he had been then he did the places that existed elsewhere, in his imagination. He returned again and again to human nature, to war and peace, addiction and pain, God and religion, the need for belief and for absolution.

  She moved her chair as the shadows migrated across the room, and read. Occasionally she prepared a cup of coffee. And read. Hours passed, and with them the day.

  The room had turned almost entirely dark, and rain began to fall outside, when she found the story. She turned on the light. And read.
<
br />   It appeared in volume thirteen of Groteska and was called, simply, “Shira.”

  In the story, Nur read, a woman wanders across the Middle East, restless and without direction. In a secondhand bookshop in Damascus she finds an old Hebrew poetry book whose title is Remnants of God. The poems awaken in her something she does not understand, and on the spur of the moment she goes on a train journey towards Israel. A kind of holocaust has taken place in Israel’s past; Tirosh avoided describing it in detail, but hinted that Jerusalem no longer existed, and that the nature of its destruction and the amount of pain it had caused brought, after a few years, a peace born of shared victimhood, creating in this way a new Middle East that collectively mourned Jerusalem.

  In the story, the heroine arrives in Haifa—which Tirosh called “the Replacement City”—and on a dark and moonless night meets a strange man who may or may not be the author of the collection of poems she found. They spend the night together, and in the morning the mysterious lover is gone. The ending was left ambiguous on purpose, the story ending the way it began, at a train station in the beginning—or perhaps the end of—a journey, leaving more questions than answers.

  Nur felt herself disappearing inside Tirosh’s fiction, and shook herself with effort. She thought about the maze he had created for her, of the route she followed…became lost in? “In your subjective time,” Tirosh wrote in Remnants of God, “like a tourist in Daedalus’s maze, I am lost. Still charmed, looking in all directions. Not yet knowing that the thread is missing. And that you are built into the maze, and that there are no exits and no entrances.” As if in response to the weight of the words in her head, light steps sounded climbing the stairs and she looked to the door with relief, expecting Mr. Katz’s lined face. She was about to call his name.

  But the face that appeared in the open door was not Mr. Katz’s. The man who stood in the doorway was of an average height, with dark, curly hair that had begun receding across his forehead. He had a nice smile, and he looked at her for a long moment with a gaze that made her blush.

  “What’s the story?” he asked.

  The question, with its dual meaning, made her smile.

  He smiled back. Lines had began to collect at the corners of his eyes, but the eyes themselves were clear and scrutinised her for a length of time. On the spur of the moment she rose and moved towards him, pulling him into the room through the open door. Nur, she whispered to herself. What are you doing? But in her heart she knew that the only way out of the maze is to walk it, until reaching the end.

  “‘Venus rises from the sea,’” he said, and leaned towards her. “‘Perfect every time she is revealed / Born anew into an old photograph.’” He knelt by Nur’s side and held her hand. “‘She brings with her the scent of salt,’” he whispered, the smile retreating to the corners of his mouth, “‘of drowned ships and ancient time / Venus calls in foreign tongues / cries only she understands.’”

  “‘She brings with her many things,’” Nur whispered, the words of the poem rising in her mind. “‘But mainly memories / no matter, she will hold, calm, stroke…’” She fell quiet, looking into the eyes of the stranger before her.

  His face was close to hers. His breath was warm, and he smelled of aftershave, and a little of sweat. “‘The clocks move slower, tonight,’” he said.

  “Who…?” Nur said. She didn’t know what to say, what to ask. She looked into his eyes; he had long lashes and eyes that were sometimes green, sometimes brown. He shook his head, a no without words.

  “‘What do you teach me,’” he said into the stillness of her face, his lips close, so close she could almost feel, taste them. “‘To hold hands in a crowd / your voice in the dark against my body, the nature / of thoughts is that they pass, I can’t / commemorate you, in poem or / story or image / or memory / for its nature is to pass to fade to die…’”

  “‘And finally forget you,’” Nur whispered. “‘Perhaps that composition called synesthesia, where the senses mix and merge, and sound becomes movement becomes taste/scent becomes touch/look.’” She bent close to him, unable to remove her gaze from his face. “‘All the things that needed saying have been said.’”

  “‘And a confusion of the senses, you said,’” he whispered, and leaned to kiss her, “‘is the most beautiful hell…’”

  Nur tasted his lips. She held him, passed her fingers through his hair.

  She undressed him slowly, stopping to breathe his body into her, to taste his naked skin; to preserve him in her mind.

  “‘I try to explain to myself the movement of the moon in water,’” he spoke into her shoulder and she shivered and pulled harder at his shirt, almost tearing it, “‘in the darkness your nipples were coloured dark, and your lips had the taste of light to them.’” He kissed her neck slowly. “‘Outside the rain fell, and in your movement of undressing there was the movement of the moon in water, your eyes drowned in flame…’”

  Nur held him. “No words,” she said.

  He smiled, and they kissed. “No words,” he agreed. The rain knocked on the window.

  Already, your reflection fades.

  Your image (breaking in the shop windows, in the fountains,

  In the Seine) disappears. The same moon shines on both of us

  In two different places.

  Your name is missing from all the telephone directories.

  She woke up in Shulamit’s guest room. The sun shone through the window, and Nur felt as if she had woken up from a long dream, a dream that lasted months and years.

  By the side of the bed was her creased copy of Remnants of God. She opened it.

  In an unclear handwriting it said, “We’ll always have Haifa.” She laughed and threw the book on the bed.

  In the living room, Shulamit welcomed her with a coffee.

  “Nu, did you find your man in the end?” she asked.

  Nur smiled. “Maybe I just stopped looking,” she said.

  “The morning rises,” Tirosh wrote. “Another train station.” Nur stood on the Damascus platform of the Haifa train station, the suitcase at her feet like a loyal puppy.

  The train arrived at the station and the doors opened. Nur climbed onboard and sat by the window, and waited for her journey to start.

  The Passion of Azazel

  Barry N. Malzberg

  Barry N. Malzberg’s latest collection of essays on science fiction, Breakfast in the Ruins, was published in the spring of 2007; the book conflates his 1982 classic Engines of the Night and all of the essays published since. His collection In the Stone House was published in 2000; several of his 1970s science-fiction novels have been reissued within the past half decade.

  Malzberg’s body of work includes a fair number of novels (The Cross of Fire) and short stories concerned with religion, but “The Passion of Azazel” is only the third work that has dealt with the Judaic. (Two 1970s short stories appear in Jack Dann’s anthology More Wandering Stars.) He has been publishing science fiction and fantasy for more than forty years; his first story, “We’re Coming Through the Windows” (Galaxy magazine, August 1967), was sold on January 11, 1967. With a fetching smile and an indescribable moué, Malzberg further notes that these last years of his seventh decade are becoming, unsurprisingly, a tortuous slog.

  With his inimitable cynic’s eye, Malzberg portrays a regular guy who decides to take control of his nightmares in an imaginative way, with results he certainly was not expecting.

  And the High Priest shall take two goats…one as an offering and the other as a scapegoat…And he shall kill the goat which is the offering and sprinkle its blood…and he shall lay his hands on the head of the scapegoat and confess upon it all of the iniquities of the Children of Israel and the goat shall be sent to the wilderness with a man who is in waiting…

  —LEVITICUS

  The High Priest dispatched the scapegoat to the wilderness, where it was driven off a rocky cliff until its bones shattered like a potter’s vessel…and the face of the High Priest
when he left the Holy of Holies…was like the lightning bolts emanating from the radiance of the heavenly host…

  —MUSSAF PRAYER, DAY OF ATONEMENT

  I believe you had a previous life as a scapegoat.” The hypnotherapist’s eyes were brooding but filled with sincerity and profoundly abstracted as if she were retreating into some inaccessible, entombed place. “Of course that is quite a daring assumption, Schmuel. Still, you are so convincing. Your recurrent nightmares of falling, of being hurled from mountains to rock, carrying the sins of your community. The memories that emerged during your hypnotic regression. This goes beyond the Orthodoxy you were raised with, beyond the usual Freudian interpretation of ‘falling dreams’ as sexual repression or anxiety. Of course”—with a little smile—“isn’t Orthodoxy simply institutionalized sexual repression and anxiety? But we won’t discuss that now.” She returned to her more serious tone. “A daring assumption,” she repeated.

  The knowledge, long deflected, was shocking. Schmuel the scapegoat! But a relief, too. Recognition. Meeting the enemy and discovering your oldest friend. Could this explain the flashbacks, the night sweats, the depression, the riotous, collapsing images of falling, the helplessness, the sheer animal passivity of that descent, the shattering of bone? “If this is so,” the hypnotist continued, “it would explain a great deal. Perhaps it would explain everything. Reincarnation is not charlatanry, you know. There is explicit scientific evidence, an impressive body of research that grows all the time.”

  She did not have to convince me.

  In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. And the Word was built from letters. Hebrew letters. The seventy-two letters of God’s Name. And from those letters, everything. The heavens and the earth. Mountains, rocks, trees. Mosquitoes, fish, human beings. Goats.