The Apex Book of World SF

by Mahvesh Murad

  I am my father’s son. I have stood at the top of the tower and had my blood infected by the warmth of the sun and my eyes made impure by the colors of the world beyond the walls of grey. I am afflicted by chaos. Now the grey seems so dull not even the moon light adds any shine to it. Now the walls seem so stifling. I am questioning the ideas of the Man. Were there really others who were out to finish us using colors and chaos? Would it be so bad to live under chaos and color?

  The other day, I arrived right on time for a meeting. I extended my greeting for an extra five seconds, refusing to let go of the other man’s hand even as the seconds counted on. From Grandmother’s old things, I found a scarf that was a different shade of grey and I wrapped it around my neck. I found the contrast with my coat delicious. Soon, they will come for me, as they came for my father, as they came for Grandmother. I have become an agent of color.

  Joke number 4—Things hardly ever change. These are strange times.

  I had even made up my own ‘joke’.

  Like a Coin Entrusted in Faith

  Shimon Adaf

  Translated by the author

  Shimon Adaf was born in Israel to parents of Moroccan origin. He has published three collections of poetry and eight novels. Amongst his numerous awards are Israel’s Sapir Prize for his novel Mox Nox and the Yehuda Amichai Poetry Award.

  1

  THEY WAKE UP Sultana the midwife at the dead of night. Poundings on the door, which she disguises in her sleep. Hides them within the symbolism of the dreams. But her consciousness arises at last. She identifies the knocking, the intervals between knockings. And she is alarmed. The alarm is not shaped yet. She covers herself quickly. Out of habit. Ties her headdress and goes out. In spite of the urgency of the knocks, the man is standing with his back to her hut. Almost indifferent, his small cart, tied to a grey ass, in the starlight of the beginning of autumn in Morocco, is also cut from the landscape.

  Afterwards she remembers the light gallop of the ass and the cart on the slope, the rustle of the world she senses whenever she leaves the hamlet, out of the protective imagination of its inhabitants. The wind is warm still, unexpected warmness, and the lucidity of the air. She smells the sea in it, Essaouira’s daily commotion caught in it even at midnight. But they circumvent the city. She already recognised the driver, Shlomo Benbenishti. It’s been years since she’s last seen him. He hurries the ass. He tells it, run like the storm, my beauty, and laughs. She does not understand the laughter. A shred of shyness is apparent in it. Maybe nervousness.

  The road becomes steep. The ass brays, even neighs. Shlomo turns to her. He says, do not eat or drink anything in the house at which we are about to arrive. Had dar hadi fiah Jnoon1(1 There are demons in this house (Jewish Moroccan)). The Moroccan is light on his tongue, and his Hebrew heavier, the heritage of the synagogue. He knows that she understands Hebrew, though she’s a woman. She nods. Now she grasps the nature of her alarm. The moon is a thin etch in the thickening darkness, thickening more and more as they near their destination. The moon still breathes his first breaths of the month. That is the alarm. Why was she summoned now? The time is the ten days of repentance.

  2

  The mother died with a scream. Her face was veiled and the scream was almost silenced. Sometimes they are marked; the demon leaves his marks on their cheeks. A scar of a bite. Every now and then, when Sultana hands them their baby, they remove the veil and she sees. But the woman died while delivering. She twisted and turned with spasms when Sultana came in. Sultana imagined her nails burrowing into the flesh of the hand. A small lamp threw light on her round belly, about to burst. Shlomo stayed outside. Inside, close to one of the dark hut’s clay walls stood a man she couldn’t make out clearly. She said she didn’t want to deliver the baby, that they shouldn’t have called her during the ten days of repentance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The man insisted. He switched to Hebrew, he said, what is forbidden within the boundaries of the land of Israel, isn’t forbidden in foreign lands. Is he Jewish? she thought to herself. The accent was strange, but his voice, she knew the voice, where from?

  The mother shuddered at her touch. Her cries begun. The newborn fought, Sultana could tell. She lifted the woman’s dress. She saw the little egg-shaped skull, through the widened lips of the vagina, smeared with blood and liquids of the womb. She pressed on the belly. He was blue, the baby, his skin, his hair, his eyes when opened shortly. The irises filled the sockets. She couldn’t figure out if he was blind. A spark of intelligence burned in his eyes, curiosity almost. She shook. When she severed the umbilical cord the newborn shook, too, and went still.

  The man told her to put the dead baby alongside his mother’s corpse. I told you, she said. Her voice broke a little. He didn’t react. Shlomo’s head peered from the entrance and he called her name delicately. She followed him. Anger grew in her during the journey back. When he stopped near her hut, she said, why are you working for them, why? He asked her, with his former softness, why they sent for you, you tell me.

  3

  From: Tiberia Assido

  To: Doron Aflalo

  RE: Rose of Judea

  Say, what is this nonsense you’ve been sending me? You promised to report what you’ve been discovering about Rabbi SBRJ. Instead you’re telling me some made-up tale about the days Rabbi Shlomo was young? I realize that stories about demon births were widespread in the villages in Morocco. My mother told Akko and me a similar tale once. Akko couldn’t sleep that night. But what has that to do with the Rose of Judea? If I recall, you claimed that evil spirits are nothing but a story intended to cover up the involvement of Externals in Jewish history. You also claimed that they aren’t born, but are some kind of Jews who’ve been mutated in a distant future, didn’t you?

  Akko is advancing with the development of “Solium Salomonis”, at least with parts I’m exposed to. He makes me talk daily with the software. A little scary. When we started the output was confused (look at me, writing as if I had the first clue about computing), without any relevance to the sentences I typed. Now, half of the time she answers my questions.

  BTW, it’s beautiful here in Massachusetts. Thanks for asking. And I enjoy being around Akko, even though he kept all his annoying habits from when we were children. He still won’t talk to me about his sexuality. It’s beneath him to show any interest in such an inferior human activity. He also forgets to eat. Anyway, he needs as detailed information as possible, not stories.

  What about you? Haven’t gone crazy yet from staying at your parents’ place in Mevoe-Yam?

  T.

  4

  But certain stories are sometimes the only way to give someone a key. The stories of my father were left hidden. My mother forgot. Only Miriam, once, told me a real horror story. The birds’ song, she said, is full of razors. When she’s passing by, they sing about it to her. Not the content of the song, but the song itself, the way it slashes through the air and reaches her ears. That’s the razor. It cuts reality. In the following days I ceased listening. Like I turned toward other voices. The world called my name.

  Years went by before I figured out that it’s not what we fear that frightens us. What frightens us lurks at the edges, behind the gates of cognition. The fear we know is nothing but a defense mechanism against this, the thing. How to explain? Maybe that I understood that Tel Aviv fell on New Year’s Eve of the year 5767 to creation. Suddenly I saw only parts of the reality of the city. On the stairs leading to the university, on Jaffa pier, on Allenby. They peered through the shroud of the city. What is reality if not the memory of others leaping from you when you look? Their life, their bodies that created in their movement the space you occupy, gave it meaning. Yet, woven in this weave of remembrance, you are left to your own devices; you have a resting place, a place of becoming. And the city was lost, as Miriam was lost, washed into the abyss from which only a choked, undecipherable sound is coming back. And the stupid dreams of the Tel Aviv dwellers preserved the city, a dull copy un
der the sun of Israel.

  5

  Sultana remembered Shlomo. She remembered him when she lay awake on her bed, and she remembered him afterwards, when she slouched to the cave at the break of dawn. He was a Yeshiva student, who came from a community in Istanbul with a recommendation letter from the community’s rabbi. She was about to get married and didn’t pay him much attention, even though her father, the rabbi of the newly formed community in Essaouira, whose members retired from one of the communities in Fez, took him in.

  For a while he was her father’s protégé. He was rumored to be extremely gifted. He knew many tractates from the Babylonian and the Jerusalem Talmud by heart, and was versed in the writings of the Geniuses and Maimonides; he even read the prohibited book. He was exchanging epistles with an Israeli sage, Rabbi Yosef Karo, and her father let his pride be known at Sabbath meals, when she and her husband came to visit, and she was carrying a child in her womb. But something changed. She was only able to get some parts of the story. The young lad Benbenishti and her father were becoming estranged. She couldn’t attend to it; her husband fell ill and she was about to give birth. When she returned to her parents’ home, after her husband’s death, her father wouldn’t hear about Shlomo Benbenishti. He wasn’t welcomed anymore.

  6

  Her mother told her, when Shlomo appeared one day famished at the kitchen entrance of their house. Her mother fed him somewhat fearfully, as if he were a leper, and made Sultana stand watch at the doorway to the house, to warn her if her father or one of her younger brothers was approaching. Shlomo couldn’t make a living. No member of the community would hire him. Occasionally he would work for Arabs, to drive a cart, to run errands, to sell in the market, to whitewash houses.

  Shlomo would pursue issues best left alone. He asked about corpses coming back to life: are they still infused with the profanity of the dead, can they be cleansed by bathing in a mikveh? Is the tent in which a body is vitalized clear of its impurity, the tent and every object within its space? What was the status of the children revived by Elijah and Elisha? Were they still in need of red-cow ashes? What was the meaning of the Jerusalem Talmud argument that the dead live among the dew? And so on, and so forth. Her father, who detested any discussion of the sort, was convinced he was possessed, God forbid, La Yister.2( 2 May God protect us (Jewish Moroccan))

  The memory flooded her—no, slashed her. That day, when the males of the family went to pray mincha, the afternoon prayer, and the soft light anticipated the coming of the evening. Shlomo sat in front of her mother and her in the kitchen, munching leftovers of couscous and meat, his eyes darkly sleep-deprived, haunted.

  7

  From: Tiberia Assido

  To: Doron Aflalo

  RE: Rose of Judea

  Doron,

  I’m a murderess, murderess. I know the term is a bit melodramatic, but it describes well my shock. I’ve killed Akko’s software. I’ve already named it in my mind: Malka. You know how you’ll ascribe human features to everything that shows a will or imitates life, like pets or toys, when you’re child? When I was eight, one of the girls in the neighborhood got a talking doll. Akko coveted it so much that I helped him steal it. It made me feel sick when he took it apart to see its inner workings. I heard her crying in my head, begging me to stop the torture. Now, thinking back, I think the doll’s owner was Malka. Or maybe I’m rewriting the recollection to make it meaningful.

  I wasn’t doing it on purpose. I just held my daily conversation with her. And I couldn’t resist. I quoted, half joking, the dubious exegesis my father taught Akko, about King Solomon’s throne (solium salomonis) and the kings of Edom and the Externals fighting over it, and I asked Malka her thoughts on the matter (I was tired and bored). She crashed. Akko claims that restarting her won’t do us any good, that the backups won’t help, because she’ll only crash again. He says I need to start training a blank module anew, and that he hasn’t much time to deal with it at the moment.

  Poor Malka, I’ve destroyed her. How can I raise another module, to see it grow, develop a consciousness?

  And Akko won’t tell me why he’s so adamant about me being the one who raises it. True, it’s crucial to him that the software language be Hebrew. He has this hypothesis that Hebrew is prevalent all over the Worlds, that it’s the Ur-language. No, that in each and every one of the Worlds, a version of Hebrew came to be out of a family of languages similar to it. That’s why Hebrew is the closest to the Ursprechen. But why the hell me? He can hire an Israeli student. They are fucking everywhere nowadays.

  So you have time to get serious with your investigation. Yet, why is your story so indirect? Why do you suspend the information? What’s your point, really?

  T.

  8

  Sultana remembered. She stood in the cave, in whose depths her son was kept, and he failed to appear, even when she called out his name. Hosea.

  9

  When your son shows signs of a mysterious illness, which brought down his father, an illness gnawing his organs while the spirit stays sane, trapped in the cage of flesh, it is easy to prevent his death. All you need is a device to stop time.

  But there’s a setback; there’s always a setback. Time-halting objects aren’t as widespread as they used to be. Let’s say Moses’ wand. Or Joshua’s Shofar.

  10

  And there’s always a price, evidently.

  11

  She’d been told there was an Arab who lived on a mountain. He was a master of the dying. She walked many miles. Wore out two pairs of shoes. Her son was with her, riding a donkey, his life force leaking.

  The Arab gave her a ring made of a bone of the upupa epops that was passed down from King Solomon’s hand to the hands of the Kahlif Harun El Rashid, and lastly came to his possession. The ring radiated decay and corruption and gangrene. He commanded her to change her name, to leave her parents’ house without speaking to them. He told her to dwell in a certain hamlet, outside of Essaouira, and study how to serve as a midwife. He said that she would be called for, that he for long has waited for a Jewish woman to come his way.

  12

  1. All conscious creatures are sentenced to die.

  1.1 But not all of them are sentenced to perish.

  1.1.1 The consciousness may linger after the death of the body; parts of it may. A knot of memories and sentiments. The ghost is best suited to depict this sort of lingering.

  1.1.2 The body, a complex system of appetites and cravings, may survive alone, without the bridles of consciousness. The vampire, one can argue, is the representation of this sort of lingering.

  1.1.3 What is the third variation of outliving death that’s illustrated by the zombie? In contrast to the other two, the zombie is devoid of memory, identity, passion. The living entity was erased. Only a blind instinct is left, the will of another that possesses it whole. It has been devoured.

  1.2 The livings are constantly thrown into mourning.

  1.2.1 Which means the complete collapse of the means of expression.

  1.2.2 Nevertheless, every culture aspires to endow loss with meaning, to tame it through rituals.

  1.2.3 All of human experience is characterized by the tension between the urgent need to be expressed and the failure of language to fully express it.

  1.2.4 The greatest and most unbearable tension is to be found in grief. And in the mystical experience. That’s why those two are the ones driving humans to the highest degree of creativity, to a multitude of forms of expression.

  1.2.5 For a while, therefore, there’s an identity between the two.

  2. A categorical border divides the living from the dead.

  2.1 The ability to experience the border from both sides is the mystical ability in itself.

  13

  From: Tiberia Assido

  To: Doron Aflalo

  RE: Rose of Judea

  You ask what I did with Malka before I quoted her the exegesis. (Malka! Suddenly I get that Malka, queen, is the Hebrew word Sultana.
What was her name before she changed it? Please don’t tell me it was Malka. What is it, one of your exaggerated poetical devices? But you couldn’t have known it’s the name I chose for the module. Are all coincidences this dreary?)

  Akko has also asked me.

  I quoted her some of my poems. Not The Artificial Child that refers to Akko and solium salomonis. It was the first time Malka was exposed to the term. Do you think the system in the whole became intelligent enough that, through the quote, she realised she was made-up, might have understood her raison d’etre: to uncover the Ursprechen in which the Name-givers hold the Worlds? That she understood it is the task of (the) Rose of Judea? It seems far-fetched.

  I told Akko my suspicions. I don’t know how the other modules of the project function. He said he couldn’t be bothered. An Israeli writer wrote him to inquire about the part of exegesis I mention in The Artificial Child. It’s funny someone still reads that magazine we published.

  (Do you still write poetry? I have to ask, even if you’d give the same answer all over again, that poetry per se isn’t enough for you.)

  Anyhow, Akko did say he was bothered by the timing. Do you get it? He is bothered by the timing and not by months of work gone down the drain for no apparent reason. I never am going to get this kid.

  I know he’s already a man, but for me he’s the kid with the grumpy manners, who closed himself in the garage with his computers. The same kid who became hard all of a sudden, distant. The kid I’m the only human he can show emotions toward.