by Dan Simmons
“Your Excellency …” cried Sol after he had shrugged off the first man’s hands. The three other exorcists came to assist with the equally brawny lectors hovering nearby. The bishop had turned his back and seemed to be staring into the darkness.
The outer sanctuary echoed to grunts and the scraping of Sol’s heels and to at least one loud gasp as Sol’s foot made contact with the least priestly parts of the lead exorcist. The outcome of the debate was not affected. Sol landed in the street. The last ostiary to turn away tossed Sol’s battered hat to him.
Ten more days on Lusus achieved nothing but more gravity fatigue for Sol. The Temple bureaucracy would not answer his calls. The courts could offer him no wedge. The exorcists waited just within the doors of the vestibule.
Sol farcast to New Earth and Renaissance Vector, to Fuji and TC2, to Deneb Drei and Deneb Vier, but everywhere the Shrike temples were closed to him.
Exhausted, frustrated, out of money, Sol ’cast home to Barnard’s World, got the EMV out of the long-term lot, and arrived home an hour before Rachel’s birthday.
“Did you bring me anything, Daddy?” asked the excited ten-year-old. Sarai had told her that day that Sol had been gone.
Sol brought out the wrapped package. It was the collected Anne of Green Gables series. It was not what he had wanted to bring her.
“Can I open it?”
“Later, little one. With the other things.”
“Oh, please, Dad. Just one thing now. Before Niki and the other kids get here?”
Sol caught Sarai’s eye. She shook her head. Rachel remembered inviting Niki and Linna and her other friends to the party only days before. Sarai had not yet come up with an excuse.
“All right, Rachel,” he said. “Just this one before the party.”
While Rachel ripped into the small package, Sol saw the giant package in the living room, secured with red ribbon. The new bike, of course. Rachel had asked for the new bike for a year before her tenth birthday. Sol tiredly wondered if she would be surprised tomorrow to find the new bike here the day before her tenth birthday. Or perhaps they would get rid of the bike that night, while Rachel slept.
Sol collapsed onto the couch. The red ribbon reminded him of the bishop’s robes.
Sarai had never had an easy time of surrendering the past. Every time she cleaned and folded and put away a set of Rachel’s outgrown baby clothes, she had shed secret tears that Sol somehow knew about. Sarai had treasured every stage of Rachel’s childhood, enjoying the day-to-day normalcy of things; a normalcy which she quietly accepted as the best of life. She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things—the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.
Sol found Sarai in the attic, weeping softly as she went through boxes. These were not the gentle tears once shed for the ending of small things. Sarai Weintraub was angry.
“What are you doing, Mother?”
“Rachel needs clothes. Everything is too big. What fit on an eight-year-old won’t fit a seven-year-old. I have some more of her things here somewhere.”
“Leave it,” said Sol. “We’ll buy something new.”
Sarai shook her head. “And have her wonder every day where all of her favorite clothes have gone? No. I’ve saved some things. They’re here somewhere.”
“Do it later.”
“Damn it, there is no later!” shouted Sarai and then turned away from Sol and raised her hands to her face. “I’m sorry.”
Sol put his arms around her. Despite the limited Poulsen treatments, her bare arms were much thinner than he remembered. Knots and cords under rough skin. He hugged her tightly.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated, sobbing openly now. “It’s just not fair.”
“No,” agreed Sol. “It’s not fair.” The sunlight coming through the dusty attic panes had a sad, cathedral quality to it. Sol had always’ loved the smell of an attic—the hot and stale promise of a place so underused and filled with future treasures. Today it was ruined.
He crouched next to a box. “Come, dear,” he said, “we’ll look together.”
Rachel continued to be happy, involved with life, only slightly confused by the incongruities which faced her each morning when she awoke. As she grew younger it became easier to explain away the changes that appeared to have occurred overnight—the old elm out front gone, the new apartment building on the corner where M. Nesbitt used to live in a colonial-era home, the absence of her friends—and Sol began to see as never before the flexibility of children. He now imagined Rachel living on the breaking crest of the wave of time, not seeing the murky depths of the sea beyond, keeping her balance with her small store of memories and a total commitment to the twelve to fifteen hours of now allowed her each day.
Neither Sol nor Sarai wanted their daughter isolated from other children and it was difficult to find ways to make contact. Rachel was delighted to play with the “new girl” or “new boy” in the neighborhood—children of other instructors, the grandchildren of friends, for a while with Niki’s daughter—but the other children had to grow accustomed to Rachel greeting them anew each day, remembering nothing of their common past, and only a few had the sensitivity to continue such a charade for the sake of a playmate.
The story of Rachel’s unique illness was no secret in Crawford, of course. The fact of it had spread through the college the first year of Rachel’s return and the entire town knew soon after. Crawford reacted in the fashion of small towns immemorial—some tongues wagged constantly, some people could not keep the pity and pleasure at someone else’s misfortune out of their voices and gazes—but mostly the community folded its protective wings around the Weintraub family like an awkward mother bird shielding its young.
Still, they were allowed to live their lives, and even when Sol had to cut back classes and then take an early retirement because of trips seeking medical treatment for Rachel, the real reason was mentioned by no one.
But it could not last, of course, and on the spring day when Sol stepped onto the porch and saw his weeping seven-year-old daughter coming back from the park surrounded and followed by a pack of newsteeps, their camera implants gleaming and comlogs extended, he knew that a phase of their life was over forever. Sol jumped from the porch and ran to Rachel’s side.
“M. Weintraub, is it true that your daughter contracted a terminal time illness? What’s going to happen in seven years? Will it just disappear?”
“M. Weintraub! M. Weintraub! Rachel says that she thinks Raben Dowell is Senate CEO and this is the year A.D. 2711. Has she lost those thirty-four years completely or is this a delusion caused by the Merlin sickness?”
“Rachel! Do you remember being a grown woman? What’s it feel like to be a kid again?”
“M. Weintraub! M. Weintraub! Just one still image, please. How about you get a picture of Rachel when she was older and you and the kid stand looking at it?”
“M. Weintraub! Is it true that this is the curse of the Time Tombs? Did Rachel see the Shrike monster?”
“Hey, Weintraub! Sol! Hey, Solly! What’re you and the little woman going to do when the kid’s gone?”
There was a newsteep blocking Sol’s way to the front door. The man leaned forward, the stereo lenses of his eyes elongating as they zoomed in for a close-up of Rachel. Sol grabbed the man’s long hair—which was conveniently tied in a queue—and flung him aside.
The pack brayed and bellowed outside the house for seven weeks. Sol realized what he had known and forgotten about very small communities: they were frequently annoying, always parochial, sometimes prying on a one-to-one level, but never had they subscribed to the vicious legacy of the so-called “public’s ri
ght to know.”
The Web did. Rather than have his family become permanent prisoners to the besieging reporters, Sol went on the offensive. He arranged interviews on the most pervasive farcaster cable news programs, participated in All Thing discussions, and personally attended the Concourse Medical Research Conclave. In ten standard months he asked for help for his daughter on eighty worlds.
Offers poured in from ten thousand sources but the bulk of the communications were from faith healers, project promoters, institutes and free-lance researchers offering their services in exchange for the publicity, Shrike cultists and other religious zealots pointing out that Rachel deserved the punishment, requests from various advertising agencies for product endorsements, offers from media agents to “handle” Rachel for such endorsements, offers of sympathy from common people—frequently enclosing credit chips, expressions of disbelief from scientists, offers from holie producers and book publishers for exclusive rights to Rachel’s life, and a barrage of real estate offers.
Reichs University paid for a team of evaluators to sort the offers and see if anything might benefit Rachel. Most of the communications were discarded. A few medical or research offers were seriously considered. In the end, none seemed to offer any avenue of research or experimental therapy which Reichs had not already tried.
One fatline flimsy came to Sol’s attention. It was from the Chairman of Kibbutz K’far Shalom on Hebron and read simply:
IF IT BECOMES TOO MUCH, COME.
* * *
It soon became too much. After the first Few months of publicity the siege seemed to lift, but this was only the prelude to the second act. Faxsimmed tabloids referred to Sol as the “Wandering Jew,” the desperate father wandering afar in search of a cure for his child’s bizarre illness—an ironic title given Sol’s lifelong dislike of travel. Sarai inevitably was “the grieving mother.” Rachel was “the doomed child” or, in one inspired headline, “Virgin Victim of the Time Tombs’ Curse.” None of the family could go outside without finding a newsteep or imager hiding behind a tree.
Crawford discovered that there was money to be found in the Weintraubs’ misfortune. At first the town held the line, but when entrepreneurs from Bussard City moved in with gift shops, T-shirt concessions, tours, and datachip booths for the tourists who were coming in larger and larger numbers, the local business people first dithered, then wavered, then decided unanimously that, if there was commerce to be carried on, the profits should not go to outsiders.
After four hundred and thirty-eight standard years of comparative solitude, the town of Crawford received a farcaster terminex. No longer did visitors have to suffer the twenty-minute flight from Bussard City. The crowds grew.
On the day they moved it rained heavily and the streets were empty. Rachel did not cry, but her eyes were very wide all day and she spoke in subdued tones. It was ten days before her sixth birthday. “But, Daddy, why do we have to move?”
“We just do, honey.”
“But why?”
“It’s something we have to do, little one. You’ll like Hebron. There are lots of parks there.”
“But how come you never said we were going to move?”
“We did, sweetie. You must have forgotten.”
“But what about Gram and Grams and Uncle Richard and Aunt Tetha and Uncle Saul and everybody?”
“They can come visit us any time.”
“But what about Niki and Linna and my friends?”
Sol said nothing but carried the last of the luggage to the EMV. The house was sold and empty; furniture had been sold or sent ahead to Hebron. For a week there had been a steady stream of family and old friends, college associates, and even some of the Reichs med team who had worked with Rachel for eighteen years, but now the street was empty. Rain streaked the Perspex canopy of the old EMV and ran in complex rivulets. The three of them sat in the vehicle for a moment, staring at the house. The interior smelled of wet wool and wet hair.
Rachel clutched the teddy bear Sarai had resurrected from the attic six months earlier. She said, “It’s not fair.”
“No,” agreed Sol. “It’s not fair.”
Hebron was a desert world. Four centuries of terraforming had made the atmosphere breathable and a few million acres of land arable. The creatures which had lived there before were small and tough and infinitely wary, and so were the creatures imported from Old Earth, including the human kind.
“Ahh,” gasped Sol the day they arrived in the sun-baked village of Dan above the sun-baked kibbutz of K’far Shalom, “what masochists we Jews are. Twenty thousand surveyed worlds fit for our kind when the Hegira began, and those schmucks came here.”
But it was not masochism which brought either the first colonists or Sol and his family. Hebron was mostly desert, but the fertile areas were almost frighteningly fertile. Sinai University was respected throughout the Web and its Med Center brought in wealthy patients and a healthy income for the cooperative. Hebron had a single farcaster terminex in New Jerusalem and allowed portals nowhere else. Belonging to neither the Hegemony nor Protectorate, Hebron taxed travelers heavily for farcaster privilege and allowed no tourists outside New Jerusalem. For a Jew seeking privacy, it was perhaps the safest place in three hundred worlds trod by man.
The kibbutz was more a cooperative by tradition than in operation. The Weintraubs were welcomed to their own home—a modest place offering sun-dried adobe, curves instead of right angles, and bare wood floors, but also offering a view from the hill which showed an infinite expanse of desert beyond the orange and olive groves. The sun seemed to dry up everything, thought Sol, even worries and bad dreams. The light was a physical thing. In the evening their house glowed pink for an hour after the sun had set.
Each morning Sol sat by his daughter’s bed until she awoke. The first minutes of her confusion were always painful to him, but he made sure that he was the first thing Rachel saw each day. He held her while she asked her questions.
“Where are we, Daddy?”
“In a wonderful place, little one. I’ll tell you all about it over breakfast.”
“How did we get here?”
“By ’casting and flying and walking a bit,” he would say. “It’s not so far away … but far enough to make it an adventure.”
“But my bed’s here … my stuffed animals … why don’t I remember coming?”
And Sol would hold her gently by the shoulders and look into her brown eyes and say, “You had an accident, Rachel. Remember in The Homesick Toad where Terrence hits his head and forgets where he lives for a few days? It was sort of like that.”
“Am I better?”
“Yes,” Sol would say, “you’re all better now.” And the house would fill with the smell of breakfast and they would go out to the terrace where Sarai waited.
Rachel had more playmates than ever. The kibbutz cooperative had a school where she was always the welcomed visitor, greeted anew each day. In the long afternoons the children played in the orchards and explored along the cliffs.
Avner, Robert, and Ephraim, the Council elders, urged Sol to work on his book. Hebron prided itself on the number of scholars, artists, musicians, philosophers, writers, and composers it sheltered as citizens and long-term residents. The house, they pointed out, was a gift of the state. Sol’s pension, though small by Web standards, was more than adequate for their modest needs in K’far Shalom. To Sol’s surprise, however, he found that he enjoyed physical labor. Whether working in the orchards or clearing stones in the unclaimed fields or repairing a wall above the city, Sol found that his mind and spirit were freer than they had been in many years. He discovered that he could wrestle with Kierkegaard while he waited for mortar to dry and find new insights in Kant and Vandeur while carefully checking the apples for worms. At the age of seventy-three standard, Sol earned his first calluses.
In the evenings he would play with Rachel and then take a walk in the foothills with Sarai as Judy or one of the other neighbor girls watched their s
leeping child. One weekend they went away to New Jerusalem, just Sol and Sarai, the first time they had been alone together for that long since Rachel returned to live with them seventeen standard years before.
But everything was not idyllic. Too frequent were the nights when Sol awoke alone and walked barefoot down the hall to see Sarai watching over Rachel in her sleep. And often at the end of a long day, bathing Rachel in the old ceramic tub or tucking her in as the walls glowed pinkly, the child would say, “I like it here, Daddy, but can we go home tomorrow?” And Sol would nod. And after the good-night story, and the lullaby, and the good-night kiss, sure that she was asleep, he would begin to tiptoe out of the room only to hear the muffled “ ’Later, alligator” from the blanketed form on the bed, to which he had to reply “ ’While, crocodile.” And lying in bed himself, next to the softly breathing and possibly sleeping length of the woman he loved, Sol would watch the strips of pale light from one or both of Hebron’s small moons move across the rough walls and he would talk to God.
Sol had been talking to God for some months before he realized what he was doing. The idea amused him. The dialogues were in no way prayers but took the form of angry monologues which—just short of the point where they became diatribes—became vigorous arguments with himself. Only not just with himself. Sol realized one day that the topics of the heated debates were so profound, the stakes to be settled so serious, the ground covered so broad, that the only person he could possibly be berating for such shortcomings was God Himself. Since the concept of a personal God, lying awake at night worrying about human beings, intervening in the lives of individuals always had been totally absurd to Sol, the thought of such dialogues made him doubt his sanity.
But the dialogues continued.
Sol wanted to know how any ethical system—much less a religion so indomitable that it had survived every evil mankind could throw at it—could flow from a command from God for a man to slaughter his son. It did not matter to Sol that the command had been rescinded at the last moment. It did not matter that the command was a test of obedience. In fact, the idea that it was the obedience of Abraham which allowed him to become the father of all the tribes of Israel was precisely what drove Sol into fits of fury.
