by Neil Clarke
“Not fatally, but enough to keep you from getting home, so you’d have to seek shelter in the caravan, and then fall prey to my sister’s undeniable charms. Worked, didn’t it?”
“Only someone in the Diocese could have done that.”
“It’s the Machinehood. They’re everywhere, right? Seems they see themselves as the next phase in evolution, and the Order’s how they’re gonna subjugate humanity without anyone noticing. They do it to most of the priests fresh out of the seminary, is what Indrani reckons—set them up for a fall and watch it happen.”
“They knew.”
“What?”
“The other priests. They knew what had happened to me. I assumed it was because my lies weren’t very convincing. I never stopped to think something similar might have happened to them as well.”
“Old Ivan was right, priest.”
“What?”
“You really were green.”
They reached the waiting ornithopter. Sergio opened the cockpit, frantically adjusting the seat to make room for a passenger behind him, ratcheting it forwards. “Think you can squeeze in there? It’s a long flight back to Vikingville.”
“Hopefully we don’t have that far to go.”
Sergio followed him into the enclosure, slamming the canopy down and bringing the little flying machine to sluggish life, its wings quickening with shivers of excited chitin. “Let me get this straight,” he said, fingers dancing over the controls. “They set us up for a fall and some of us take one. They learn about it through our catechists—and then we can always be controlled, if we threaten to turn against the Order.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
They were aloft.
“It’s elegant. Cynical, but elegant. But it wouldn’t work without outside assistance.”
“Ways and means,” Haidar said. “With Indrani, it was just another form of blackmail. The clan was in hock to the Asymmetrists—we depended on their consecrated machines to make a living. Someone from the Order—someone who must have been working for the Machinehood—contacted Indrani and let her know what was expected of her, and what would happen if she failed. That her family would be ruined. That she’d probably starve.”
The ornithopter’s shadow grew smaller, wings beating furiously to gain altitude, each thrust sending rainbow moiré patterns down their length.
“How did you infiltrate the Order?”
“There are tunnels under the sand, left over from the wars. Some of them reach beneath the dome. Being good clanfolk, we know all about ’em. And my disguise only had to fool the machines from a distance.”
“Bellarmine was suspicious.”
“Couldn’t read me like the others. Must have crossed his mind that I was someone really high up, or a new faction amongst the Machinehood. Either way, bad news.”
They punched through the polymer now; a lurch of resistance and then freedom. Sergio risked a look around at the receding Temple, watching as the defensive gargoyles opened their mouths and their little eyes ignited.
A voice chirped in his head. It might once have been the voice of God, but the damaged catechist reduced it to an irritating buzz, like a bluebottle trapped in a thimble.
“I think they’re threatening us,” Sergio said. “They might try shooting us down. They’d rather I never returned to Vikingville, even though they can discredit me. Too much risk of failure, I imagine.”
“Just fly it, priest.”
The sky on either side of the cockpit flared red, like a sudden bright dusk. Lasers stabbed past them, and then knifed closer, converging, so that the ornithopter was encased in a tunnel of linear red beams.
Again the buzzing in his skull.
The beams touched the wings, their veined skin vanishing in a puff of ionised chitin, leaving only a blackened skeletal subframe. The nose of the ornithopter pitched down as if in prayer.
“I think we’re going to crash,” Sergio said, with what struck him as astonishing calm. He grasped for what remained of his faith, not entirely sure that there was anything left to salvage.
And then hit the ground.
There was light, and blackness, and a period of unguessable time—perhaps comparable to the limbo that the Founder had experienced aboard the Kiwidinok ship, during his flight to Perdition. Yet when it ended, Sergio found that he had barely travelled. He was face-down in sand, unutterably cold, his lungs engulfed in the pain of inhalation. The snapped wreckage of the ornithopter was visible in his peripheral vision, like a toy crushed by an indolent child. Haidar was looming over him.
“I think you’ll live, priest, but you have to move, now.” The brother spoke with an ease Sergio now found unimaginable. He remembered that many of the clanfolk were better adapted to the Martian atmosphere than those who lived in Vikingville and the other cities. Sergio tried moving and felt several daggers readjust themselves across his chest.
“I think I’ve broken some ribs.”
“If you don’t move, you’ll have a lot worse to worry about. We have to get over this.”
Behind Haidar, a dune reached halfway to the zenith. “You want me to climb that?”
“They’re coming after us,” Haidar said, pointing towards the Temple. Almost convulsing from the effort, Sergio adjusted him self until he could see the view clearly. Mirror-faced Apparents were emerging from the central spire, dashing across the terrazzo. One of them had a fist projecting from his face.
“I’m not sure I can make it,” Sergio said. “I’m pretty hurt—maybe you should just—”
The brother hauled him to his feet, a movement that set off an agonised fireworks display inside his chest. Strangely, though, when he was standing, the pain eased. “If you have broken your ribs, you’ll feel better—less pressure on your ribcage now that you’re standing. Think you can make it?”
“You risked a lot to help me, didn’t you?”
He shrugged, as if it was of no consequence. “I owed it to Indrani. She’d have done it herself, except there was no way I was going to let her. For some reason she thinks she loves you, priest, even after nine years. Me, I don’t pretend to understand women.”
Sergio planted one foot in front of the other. “What will we find on the other side of this dune?”
“More clanfolk than you’ve ever seen, if a few good people keep their word. And I don’t think they’re going to be in a party mood.”
And as he spoke, something arced across the sky, from the dune’s summit to the central spire of the Asymmetrist Temple. It was a weapon—a small missile—something salvaged by the clanfolk; a relic of the wars that had raged across Mars before and after the Synthesis. Where it hit, a shard of the spire dislodged and crashed to the ground, smashing through layers of underlying masonry as it fell.
“He said it’d be a jihad,” Sergio said. “A holy war.”
“He was right,” Haidar said. “And I think it’s just begun.”
Lavie Tidhar’s latest novel, Central Station, is out now to rave reviews. He is the author of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize-winning A Man Lies Dreaming, of the World Fantasy Award-winning Osama, and many other books and short stories. He lives in London.
THE OLD DISPENSATION
LAVIE TIDHAR
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.” —The Book of Revelation
1.
The Yom Kippur–class Adjudicator Starship Vey Is Mir left the planet of New Jerusalem at twelve oh five hundred hours Temple Mean Time, en route to the planet Kadesh.
2.
This much we know. This much is logged. Much of what transpired is guesswork.
3.
“What do you remember?” we ask the man suspended over the sacrificial water of the mikveh. We are deep under the Exilarch’s palace.
Shadows flit in the dim red light of the stones set deep into the walls
. The air is humid, like a swamp. We think of Capernaum where the green Abominations live. There should be no secrets between us, not here. This is a safe place.
The prisoner is suspended in chains above the murky water. Tiny microscopic organisms swim in that polluted pool, Shayol bacteria, and the prisoner squirms. He knows what they are, what they do. He is afraid.
The prisoner is naked. We examine his body, dispassionately, in the dim red light. His body is a map of old scars, whip and burn marks, gouging and bullets. His body, too, has been modified in past years, in accordance with the forbidden teachings of Rabbi Abulafia, the heretic. This was done by pontifical consent, for did not the Mishna say that the Shabbat may be broken when life is at stake? By which we mean, that this man, who we call Shemesh, was duly blessed by us as an Adjudicator with a license to spoil the Shabbat, by which we mean, well, you follow our drift, we are sure. Certain forbidden technologies were embedded in his flesh, for though he was himself an Abomination nevertheless he performed a holy task in our name.
We are the Exilarch.
We say, “We are most concerned.”
The bound man, suspended upside down over the water where the murderous little creatures of Shayol swim hungrily, makes a rude sound. He uses a rude a word. We are displeased. A scan of his brain pattern reveals disturbing new alignments. We must love him very much, we think, for he is still alive, awaiting our displeasure.
We sigh.
“Child . . . “ we say. “Go to Hell.”
“But we have been there, to that awful planet,” we say, laughing. “And the Treif of Hell-2 will be dealt with as well, in due course. Let us go back, Shemesh, dear Shemesh. Let us go back to when we last saw you.”
“I can tell you nothing,” he says, “that you do not already know.” We are troubled, but we try not to show it. “Please,” he says. “Let me down.” “Tell us about Kadesh.”
His face twists in pain. “It orbits too close to its sun,” he says. “There is no water, no shade. Nothing good ever came of Kadesh.”
“We,” we say, mildly, “were born on Kadesh.”
The man laughs. His laughter is not demented nor tortured, but seems genuine, even pleasant. It upsets us. We lower him down and he stops laughing when the water touches the top of his skull. The tiny little organisms swarm over his scalp and into his ears and his nose and he begins to scream. We lower him further, submerging him in the water, until we choke off the sound.
4.
The man called Shemesh came to the Exilarch’s palace before he left for Kadesh. It is a beautiful place, our palace, we think, less a building and more of a small, bustling town in the heart of New Jerusalem, a complex of offices and temples, housing and stores. It is the very heart of this most holy glorious Intermedium of ours, and the Holy of Holies within is more than 5000 years old, and is a remnant of the old place, of the world we left behind. But you must not know yet of such Mysteries. That place can be visited only by an Exilarch, and we are 3956th of that title.
We received Shemesh in our private offices. Our Massadean guards escorted him into the presence and withdrew. We admired them, these hardy warriors of ours, in their armour with the red Star of David enclosed within a circle. We have many enemies, both within and without. We are ever vigilant: against rebels and Abominations, Obscenities, Treif . . . For beyond the light of the Intermedium, ever present, is the shadow of the Ashmoret Laila and we must guard, always we must guard against incursions.
“Exilarch.”
He performed a perfunctory bow.
“Shemesh. Thank you for coming to see us.”
“I serve at the pleasure of the Exilarch,” he said. He was not a man given to many words, you understand. We hadn’t fashioned him this way. This man, this Shemesh, was an instrument, or so we saw it, of our will.
“A small matter has risen,” we said, smoothly.
“Of course.”
“When was your last mission?”
“Three cycles ago,” he said. “Ashmoret III.”
“Ah, yes,” we said. “You did well there.”
“I was hunted for nights under the seeing moons,” he said, “while the Treif whispered into my mind, a soft and unified whisper of humility and prayer . . .”
“Do you doubt?” we said, sharply. Perhaps we regret it now. Perhaps, like any good tool, he merely needed to be re-sharpened.
“I slaughtered them,” he said, simply; and that satisfied us.
“On the planet Kadesh,” we said, “there is rumour of a holy man. Deep in the caves near the north pole, in the human zone of habitation, he resides. A holy man, and yet he speaks the loshon hora, the evil speech: and he defies the word of the Intermedium.”
“Your word,” he said.
“Our word, yes,” we agreed; a little testily. This is the problem with Adjudicators. They are not . . . whole. They are damaged by definition. And so they tend to mock and question, even their superiors.
Even us.
We tolerate it, on the whole. They have their uses, our tamed assassins, our eyes and ears. We needed Shemesh. The situation on Kadesh was troubling, yet such things are not uncommon, after all. The worlds are filled with false prophets and the speakers of evil tongues. Mostly, a simple procedure heals the body politic. Think of us as surgeons, with a knife.
“We wish for you to travel to Kadesh,” we said. “And ascertain the truth or otherwise of these allegations. Do what you must.”
We waved one of our hands to dismiss him, but he remained put.
“You wish me to spoil the Shabbat?” he said.
“Spoil,” we said, “with extreme unction.”
5.
The Yom Kippur–class Adjudicator Starship Vey Is Mir left the planet of New Jerusalem at twelve oh five hundred hours Temple Mean Time, en route to the planet Kadesh. This much we know. Much of what transpired is guesswork.
She was a relic of the Second Maccabean War. A swift old war bird, she was equipped with a Smolin Drive, which was engaged as soon as it passed the heliosphere. It attained light speed and shot into the dark of galactic space.
Light, we understand, does not travel at quite the same speed here as it did in the place we left behind. The journey between planets is swift, here. It took the ship forty-five hours to reach Kadesh orbit. What Shemesh did in that time, we do not know. We hope he prayed—but we rather doubted it.
Perhaps he slept. Perhaps he studied the dossier of the man he had to kill. We knew little of this preacher, but that he called himself Ishmael. A choice of a name well fitting a renegade. We ourselves, before we became Exilarch, were born in Akalton, the second largest of the planet’s settlements, to which Shemesh himself was headed. Our childhood was happy, we remember. We loved the desert, the dry heat. New Jerusalem’s a colder place, and we have never stopped entirely marvelling at rain.
Rain! Water that falls down from the sky! In Akalton our mother was a trader in water futures. Our father sold breeds of Zikit, the hardy lizard-like creatures native to that planet, on which we rode and hunted and transported our goods. One feels very close to God, on Kadesh. Many of our predecessors came from that planet, but equally many false prophets emerge there, then and still, and we must always watch for trouble from that region. Our Massadean forces keep a permanent base on Kadesh, but in truth, there is little they can truly do on that harsh world, where communities are ever mobile, and where the ancient polar caves provide a shelter to any manner of galactic outlaw . . .
But this is not our story, this is the recording of minutes concerning the expedition of Shemesh, who is suspended over the sacrificial water, back in the air, breathing, as our appendages probe the forbidden interface that lies in the base of his brain, painfully extracting information.
6.
THE TESTAMENT ACCORDING TO SHEMESH, PART I
The ship began to slow as we entered the Kadesh-Barnea system. Beside the habitable planet, there are two gas giants in the outer system, orbited by many moons, and between them
and the planet Kadesh, nearby space is filled with habitats of all kinds. On Kadesh they grow the Artemisia judaica, and it is the source of much of their trade. A non-native plant, it came from that place we left behind, yet changed in the crossing. The breeds they grow on Kadesh are valued as medicine throughout the Intermedium and even in the forbidden worlds of the Ashmoret Laila on the rim; and though Kadesh is a harsh world, it is also a rich one.
This explained, then, the profusion of habitats throughout the system, and transport ships swarmed in nearby space. Around the planet itself, in orbit, I observed numerous small satellites, way stations, and docking bays. The Vey Is Mir, however, is adapted for planetary landing, and in short order I arrived in Akalton City, where my Adjudicator badge let me pass through quarantine.
It is a strange and melancholy place . . . the reddish-brown buildings looked as though they were built of the desert itself. The world smelled of dried thyme, cinnamon, and salt, for the area around the settlement was home to many salt mines, and it was this commodity, rather than the Artemisia, that was most on display as I walked through the quiet streets. Though buildings seldom came higher than two stories, nevertheless the streets, having been built close together, formed a narrow maze that felt oppressive, at times dangerous. The sun had set, and the first stars came out. It is always a shock, the first time one encounters a new sky, no matter how often one visits new planets. It provokes the strongest sense of dislocation, almost of loss.
Wonder, too, though the sense of wonder soon fades, and one is left mostly with unease at the alien stars.
Since the stars came out, the streets filled with people heading to temple, though many stood and prayed outside their shops or homes for Ma’ariv. The people of Kadesh wore long, flowing robes, their faces covered against the sand that always blew through the air. Many wore elaborate air filtration systems over their faces, and thus robed and masked they passed through the narrow streets of that town.
