It was a small, rough tablet of clay, half as big as a credit card and three times as thick. The clay was dark and worn smooth at the corners. On one side you could make out the traces of some characters—Hebrew letters, I supposed—that had been cut into the surface with a stylus or pin.
At this point, after everything I’ve told you so far, I expect that you realize at once what the thing was, or what it purported to be. But at the time, years removed from Uncle Jack and Mr. Adler, from golems and my heritage real and imagined, I had no idea what it was supposed to be, only that holding it gave me a strange sense of uneasiness. My then wife and I were graduate students, and some of our friends were artists, and I figured that somebody was having a joke at my expense. My then wife walked in on me as I was staring at it, and before I could think about what I was doing, I threw the tablet into the trash, along with the junk mail and circulars from Thrifty Drug. For some reason I didn’t want her to see it.
About two years later, we had moved, trying to outrun the doom that was on us. We were living up in Puget Sound, on an island. It was a beautiful place, but I think I may have been, at the time, the only Jew living there; that, at any rate, was how I felt. One day when I drove into town to check our mailbox at the P.O., I found another small parcel awaiting me. It contained another small tablet. Actually, though I knew it was impossible, it seemed to be the same tablet, only this time the letters were so effaced as to be no more than scratches, nicks in the thing’s dusty surface. I had given no thought to that other mysterious gift since throwing it away in Laguna Beach, but I had been giving increasing thought—furtively, secretly, lying awake in the middle of the night with my goyish wife sleeping beside me—to my father’s words at the rehearsal dinner. The subject of children was beginning to come up, more and more insistently as my wife got older, and somehow, magically, every time it did we ended up having a painful, sticky, difficult argument—about religion! A subject I had never argued about with anybody in my life before! How can you tell me it’s important for our children to be Jewish, she would say with perfect justification, when it doesn’t seem to be at all important to you?
This time I recognized the tablet for what it was: a magic tablet for animating a golem, to be placed under its tongue by the hand of an adept. A reminder of Mr. Adler and his wishful lies, of the place where he claimed to have suffered. A reminder of all those who truly had died there, or at the next evil stop down the line. A reminder of all those generations of Jews, circling one another under the marriage canopy, intoning their spells, in order to bring into existence a golem, me, the embodiment of an ancient and simple wish: let there be more of us. Let us not disappear. I wondered who could have sent it—if perhaps old
Mr. Adler was out there somewhere, busily forging magic tablets and keeping track of my whereabouts. Or perhaps the culprit was my father. In any case, this time—my heart, my conscience, my thoughts weighed down by the golem-heavy burden of memory—I put the thing in my pocket. I carried it there as the marriage dissolved. I was carrying it when I met my present wife, Ayelet, herself the product of generations of Jews marrying Jews and no doubt, though my father has never said anything about it, a third cousin three times removed.
Brother, you’re thinking. All this nattering on about golems and wishes and lies, and in the end the point comes down to one of your own kind, stick to your own kind. But that isn’t the point. I don’t know what the point is. All I know is that one sunny afternoon, not long after we met, I found myself in Jerusalem with Ayelet, at Yad Vashem, the Israeli national museum of the Shoah, or Holocaust, and my heart was broken. I came out into the sunshine and burst into tears and just stood there, crying, and the weight of the thing I carried, that tablet compounded of wishes and lies, that five-thousand-year burden of mothers and fathers and the wondrous, bitter story of their lives, almost knocked me down.
Our next stop before coming home was, of all places, Prague. Duly we made our way down to the ghetto, or what’s left of it, and trooped around the old Jewish cemetery, with it snaggled headstones lying like teeth in a jawbone. That’s where they buried old Rabbi Judah, and his grave is now a kind of pilgrimage site, strewn with memorial stones and penciled notes and withered flowers.
I knelt down beside the grave there, and in a patch of dirt I formed the hasty outline of a man. Where his mouth would be I opened a hole, and worked the clay tablet down into it. Then I took Ayelet’s hand in mine and walked away.
I haven’t received another one since, though I’m still looking out for it in the mail. I’m still listening to my father, too, and wishing as he wished—as we all wish, Jews and non-Jews alike— to be part of something ancient and honorable and greater than myself. And, naturally, I’m still telling lies.
The History Within Us
Matthew Kressel
On a wrist-mounted computer, Betsy Haadama watched a six thousand-year-old silent film. It was grayscale, overexposed, two-dimensional, and chronologically jumbled. On the film: a mustachioed man doting over his young son at a crowded zoo. A woman vigorously combing the boy’s white hair beside a large piano. A family eating a large meal, candles burning on a table, men wearing yarmulkes, bodies shivering in prayer. A river, people swimming, women in white bathing caps and full-body suits. Men on rocks by the shore, pipes in mouths, smoke drifting lazily upward. A park, the boy looking down at a dead pigeon. Staring. Staring. Father picking him up, kissing him. In the sky, a bright sun.
A young sun.
“Pardon my intrusion in this time of ends,” a Twirlover said, startling her. The Twirlover’s six separate, hovering pink objects—like human knuckles—danced a looping, synchronized pattern in the air. “If it pleases you, will you share with me why you watch that flickering device so incessantly?”
In some parts of the galaxy one could be killed for being human. Betsy wasn’t sure if this Eluder Ship was such a place. But death was coming for all soon enough. So why fear it now?
“This is an ancient film of my paternal ancestor,” she said defiantly.
Puffs of air beat against her face as the Twirlover spun. “An ancient film? Indeed, such a rare treasure, an artifact of the past! If it pleases you, may we watch a portion together?”
She was about to tell it no, that she’d rather die alone, contemplating what might have been, when the alarm trilled down the cavernous halls of the Eluder Ship. A cold shiver ran down her spine as a cacophony of voices warned in ninety languages simultaneously, “Gravitational collapse imminent, my beloveds! Please take your positions inside your transitional shells!”
Angry rainbows flared across the floor and ozone and ammonia soured the air, warning those who communicated by color or smell. Betsy’s mind skipped and stuttered like the ancient film playing on her wrist as a warning to the telepaths skirted the fringes of her consciousness. Still more warnings she could not perceive with her natural senses no doubt flooded the chamber now.
Hundreds of creatures ran or flew or poured inside their transitional shells, strange cocoons fitted to their variform bodies. The Twirlover tumbled away as Betsy closed the cover of her shell. She hugged her knees and shivered as the glass cover sealed her inside with a hiss and a confirmation beep. A lifeboat or a coffin? She’d find out soon enough.
Transitional shells filled the gargantuan chamber of the Eluder Ship like arrays of soldiers preparing for battle, their noses pointed toward the red-giant star looming outside. Maera—“The Daughter Star”—one of the few still-burning stars in the galaxy. It seethed before all, a conflagration as large as a solar system, turning everything the color of blood.
Forty seconds.
This was a pitiful end, but it was this or slow starvation, privation, death. The galaxy had been laid sere. No planets to grow food. No stars to keep warm. It wasn’t fair. None of them deserved this. But then she remembered Julio, and what she had done to him at Afsasat.
I left you to die, Julio. And for that I deserve this.
Thirty seconds.<
br />
Soon now, Maera’s heart would cool by a fraction of a degree, and billions of tons of matter, no longer kept aloft by nuclear winds, would plunge towards its gravitational center at the speed of light. The star would collapse, go nova, and in its tortured heart the universe would tear. A singularity would form, a black hole, and Betsy Haadama and the thousands of others on this Eluder Ship would ride that collapsing wave into another universe. Their matter and energy, transmuted into pure information, would seed a new creation, the World to Come. Their consciousness, over long eons, would push matter into form, coerce dust to life. In some strange new way they would live on, gods reborn further down the corridor of infinity. And they had been doing this forever, would be doing this again and again until the end of time.
Or so the litany went.
The story soothed troubled minds. But the science behind the technology was just a theory. It could be proven only by first-person observation. Any object which crossed a black hole’s event horizon could never communicate with the universe again. Just as easily, she might be annihilated forever. To those witnessing from the outside, there would be no difference.
Twenty seconds.
She tried not to peer up at The Daughter, though its ember light corrupted everything with its hellish glow. Instead she watched the film on her wrist: men in fedoras, women in ostentatious hats at an airport, people descending a stairwell from plane to tarmac. A baby hoisted in the air. Smiles. Laughing. Cut to a park. The boy looking down at the dead pigeon, staring. Staring. Father picking him up, patting him on the shoulder. The boy, crying.
Why do you stare at the bird? Betsy thought. What are you thinking?
She looked up at the seething star. So beautiful, terrible, immense. A wonder that such a thing existed. A horn bellowed and Betsy screamed.
“False Alarm! Beloveds, the imminent collapse was a false alarm! Spurious readings caused us to make an erroneous conclusion. We estimate at least six hours before stellar collapse, based on present readings.”
The voice announced the message in multiple languages, simulcast with aggressive rainbows, smells, alien sensations.
I’m alive! she thought. I’m still here! It felt exhilarating, for a moment. Then she remembered she’d have to do this again.
Slowly, shells opened and creatures emerged. Betsy scanned the motley lot of them as her cover retracted. A zoo of sentient species escaping from their cages, creatures made of every color, texture, and temperament.
So much life, she thought. Snuffed out by the Horde. Crimes beyond forgiveness. And made all the more vile because the Horde had been the progeny of the human race.
Betsy activated inositol in her bloodstream via thought command in order to suppress her panic/flight response. It soothed her, but only just enough to notice the hairs on the back of her neck rising from an electrostatic charge as the Twirlover returned.
“That was exciting!” it said.
“I wouldn’t call it that,” Betsy said.
“To be so close to annihilation and then to come back again. It renews the sense of life!”
“Or the dread of living.”
“But the dread, if you explore it,” the Twirlover said, “reveals the miracle of existence out of nothingness. From out of horror comes life.”
The litany again. “Or out of life, horror,” she said.
It tumbled quietly for a moment. “Sometimes.” It moved closer to inspect her film. “That’s a child of your species, is it not?”
She glanced down at her screen. “No, that’s a rhinoceros.”
“Ree-Nos-Ur-Us. What a marvel of composition, all those rolling mountains of flesh. Does it still exist?”
“Extinct.”
The Twirlover whistled a mournful, descending arpeggio. “Like so much life in the galaxy. Like the once-glorious stars.”
The Horde had obliterated stars by the billions. They had wrapped the Milky Way inside a bleak cocoon of transmatter so that nothing, no ship, no signal—not even light—could pass. And then they vanished, leaving the galaxy to rot. Such was the legacy of humanity.
She wondered if the Twirlover would kill her outright if it knew what she was. Death by physical means might be preferable, she thought, to being flash-baked into quantum-entangled gamma rays. Six in one, really.
The film cut to a boy in a crib, bouncing. His mother lifting him, smiling for the camera. The boy laughing.
“That’s one of us,” she said. “My paternal ancestor.” Surprising herself, she felt pride.
“Ah, such wonderful protuberances!”
A wisp of dust coalesced above Betsy’s head. Winking diamonds swirled in yellow clouds. An aeroform creature. For a moment she glimpsed her own face of colored sparkles reflected back at her. But the aeroform being soon spiraled away, only to pause a few seconds later before a group of fronded Whidus who turned their mushroom-like eyes in her direction. Maybe they recognized her, knew what she was. Maybe they were plotting her demise.
A second, identical Twirlover approached Betsy and said to the first, “You know, my bonded-one, that we are about to die, do you not?”
“I was about to come back to you, my flesh-bond,” the first said. “And tell you about my sharing with this creature.”
“Indeed you were. I saw you tumbling towards me with great haste.”
“My flesh-bond, just take a good look at her smooth, auburn skin, the fine black threads that emerge from her head, the little valve at her peak where she modulates her words with a bacteria-laden pink muscle! And on her upper-left protuberance, that metal device which flicker-flashes with strange images. She watches it incessantly. She is curious, is she not?”
“There is something curious here, certainly.”
“My love, let us join so I can share my thoughts with you.”
“Indeed, I look forward to it!”
The two tumbled together into a single dancing, twelve-piece ring. Knuckles hopped, bounced, tumbled over each other. Music piped and whistled in Byzantine harmonies. There arose a great shriek about them, and soon after they separated again into six-pieced individuals. Betsy thought they might have interchanged pieces in the process.
“Not fair!” said the second. Or was it the first? Betsy couldn’t tell them apart anymore. “You playful trickster! You gave me your segment, so now I know your thoughts. But then, you sense my emotions too.”
“What joy it is to share mind with you, beloved! Yes, I feel your misplaced jealousy. And so much of it! What a waste of energy. Don’t you see? This creature is alone and needs to share with someone!”
“Perhaps, but does it have to be you?”
“Not me alone, but us together!”
“In this last hour, you would defile us?”
“Please!” Betsy interjected. “I’d prefer to be alone anyway—”
“One must never be alone!” the first said. “Share with us! Let us merge gloriously with your words.”
“Indeed, tell us,” the second said, “Did you have a bonded-one who abandoned you, who wandered off to have intercourse with strangers when you need him?”
‘Intercourse?’ she thought. Perhaps there was more to the Twirlover concept of sharing than she realized. “Actually, I left him.”
“Of course you did,” the second said. “Like attracts like.”
“Where did you abandon him?” the first said.
Interesting, the way it had interpreted her words. “I left him at the first nova,” she said. “The Mother Star. Afsasat.”
“You were at Afsasat and you didn’t go through the event-horizon?” the second said. “I don’t believe your story! Beloved, look how she defiles this union!”
“Surely,” the first said, “you are joking, trying to please us with paradox? Why would you do something so idiotic? Why not escape through Afsasat when you had the chance?”
She sighed and turned her attention to the film on her wrist. Mustachioed father and blond-haired son walking down a path. Father, smiling.
Boy running, falling. Crying. Father picking him up, kissing him. All better. All better.
“Did you hear our questions?” the first asked.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s just that it’s a very long story.”
“Our lives are stories. We are empty without them. Fill us so we may fill you.”
Strangely, she had stopped shivering. She even felt a little warm. If this was intercourse, then she was determined to be a good lover. “This film is part of ‘The Biography,’ ” she said. “A record of my ancestors’ lives that was encoded within my genes.”
“Such joy! I have heard of this technology, the sharing of such immensity,” the first said. “How far back do your records go?”
“About six thousand years.”
The second squealed.
“I told you, beloved,” the first said. “She is share-worthy.”
Her mother had told her the story in the quiet hours while drifting under the ash streams of the decimated Magellanic Clouds, or over stale, thrice-brewed tea, while the ice-blue rings of Cegmar rose above the horizon, or while her mother gently brushed her hair and chills trickled down her spine. When he turned seventy, the boy in the film digitized his aging childhood reels and then gave them to his son. His son added films, photos, and memorabilia and passed the collection to his offspring. His children added more history and passed this collection on again. This continued for generations. Eventually his descendants decided to encode this amalgamated history within their DNA, so it would never be lost or forgotten. Every child was thereafter born with the memories of their parents, and theirs before them, and theirs before them. And also in their bodily archives were the early records—the films, photos and keepsakes that started the tradition. The Biography was an ancient and unbroken chain that began with this black-and-white film playing on her wrist. The first.
People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy Page 41
