The transponder in Silverman’s belt sounds as he steps over a modest rise, and the hidden skiff’s refraction field collapses. In the centre of a flat clearing the vessel stands on its tail, curved titanium hull catching the planet’s sun dazzlingly.
Silverman’s joy returns, it has no bounds. The Master of the Universe has extended him a reconciliation. He is fifty-five years old, and has been lost in despair and oppression for the last ten. It seems to him that in this year of our Lord 2040, quincentenary of his Order’s foundation under the Bull Regimini militantis ecclesiae, a reprieve has been proffered. Silverman will never purge the abomination of Southern Cross, that intolerable memory which crouches always at the shadowed fringes of his being, but now there is a kind of counterweight, and he feels the balance of his soul pivoting once more into light. For there is joy as well as grief in the lambent, empty City. In My Father’s house, yes, there are many mansions. The Jesuit smiles gladly within himself.
Without guidance the computer systems of the skiff find their alignment with the Monastery’s orbit. And Silverman is floating into the darkening bowl of the sky, balanced in a great arc with the natural forces of the planet. The stars come out, and the City’s world is a shimmering crescent beneath him.
‘We have reacquired your telemetry,’ an urgent voice tells him. Silverman knows that all his vital signs were instantly accessible to the Monastery’s computers the moment he came out from behind the City’s shield; they cannot fail to realize he is aboard the skiff, in perfect condition. Still, ancient habits place tension in the voice. ‘Father, we lost you as you went in. Are you all right?’
‘Fine,’ he assures them. ‘Never been better. It’s beautiful. Sorry if I alarmed you. It seemed sensible to take the opportunity to look around.’ He wonders if elation is apparent in his tone.
Above and beyond him, the vast light-jewelled Latin cruciform of the St Ignatius Loyola looms like Constantine’s pre-battle vision as the skiff falls up into docking orbit. The sight of the huge weightless icon enters Silverman’s heart with the force of a shaft of illumination from the collective unconscious; he expels his breath. Indeed, only Jung among all the tawdry interpreters of mind might have responded with insight to the wisdom which informed the star-ship’s builders. Crux and patibulum, stake and cross-piece, radiate in an archetypal mandala which tells at once of a Man hanged from a tree and a solstice sun reborn in seasonal resurrection. But the image causes a pang. It is too grand, lofty, austere; there is no authentic sense of home.
With lowly autonomic wisdom, the skiff takes itself into the shuttle niche. The bidellus is waiting behind the hermetic seal of his oversight cubicle as Silverman climbs from the lock. In his sleeveless gown, lacking the fabric wings which hang from the shoulders of the clerks-regular, the lay brother could be any stolid porter attending the gate of a Jesuit House on Earth prior to the suppression.
‘Laudetur Jesus Christus,’ Silverman says in greeting.
‘Semper laudetur,’ replies the porter. ‘The Father-General wishes to see you as soon as you’ve showered. If you’re hungry I could have some lunch sent up.’
‘Thank you, Brother. I think I’ll wait for dinner.’
Only simple decontamination is required for the skiff. For Silverman, more stringent measures are obligatory. Alien infestations are not welcome. Patiently he suffers the irradiations and sluicings which beat down on his filter-skin. Satisfied at grudging length, the computers permit him to peel away the suit and pass into a second snug ceramic chamber where he may attend to his personal hygiene. As always, the ambiance is slightly chilly. He rubs his hairy arms and chest with alcohol, cleaning off the gummy residue where life-sign telltales have been cemented. A gush of tepid water rinses his skin, and blasts of warmer air dry him off. He manages these motions without attention, murmuring the prescribed prayers as he dresses.
Ship-time is late afternoon. He has advanced ten hours in the leap to orbit, and the queasiness of readjustment will have its toll. Silverman considers the elevator but shakes his head minimally with regret. Planar gravity-effect within the Monastery is kept to three-quarters Earth normal due to structural constraints, and a metabolism designed for Earth needs all the extra exercise it can find. At the entrance to the main corridor on this level there is a rack of small-wheeled bicycles. The Jesuit heaves one down from its hook and mounts the saddle, tucking up his cassock, his calves protesting in advance. Like a village abbé displaced a century and a half and trillions of kilometres, he pedals off along the corridor for the ramps which climb five levels to the Father-General’s quarters.
The journey leaves him only slightly breathless; he has found a nice compromise between brisk exertion and that sedateness ordained in the Common Rule. Parking the bike, he uses his research-status prerogative to trigger the office door and goes straight in. Monsignor Alvarez, the General’s secretary, waves Silverman through with a cordial smile.
Niceto Cardinal Miguel Rodrigues de Madrazo y Lucientes, S. J., Father-General of the remnants of his Order, Prince of the Church, papal elector and councillor bound in duty and privilege to sit in consistory on High Earth yet barred from that assembly by secular ban, the pontiff’s legati a latere aboard the exiled starship, sits hunched before a holofiche reader, his intent eyes darting across the screen. Silverman contains himself in patience. A band of wires crosses the red zucchetto perched on his superior’s scalp, strobing alpha-frequency impulses to the cardinal’s temporal lobes, enhancing and focusing his attention. There will be no rousing him until the fiche is digested.
Madrazo is an aristocratic son of Alcalá, the Andalusian town which gave St Ignatius his first theologian, the fiery half-Jew Diego Laynez, second Father-General of the Order, and Silverman cherishes the remote link with his own ornate and bastard spiritual heritage. Now in his seventies, Madrazo retains an intellect certainly as fine as Silverman’s and an equanimity unbroken by the tragedy which has diminished his charges from fifty thousand to less than a hundredth of that number, all five hundred of them confined within the hull of Loyola.
‘Sit down,’ the General says abstractly. ‘I shouldn’t be a moment.’ Pale light from the screen dances in reflection from his cheeks, the blade of his nose, as words flicker frantically. Madrazo stabs with one finger and the light clears; the fiche pops up for replacement. Silverman blinks as dark eyes lift to seize him with electronically augmented force. ‘Father Silverman.’ The cardinal lifts the band away from his skullcap and settles back, but there is no perceptible dulling of his attention. He straightens his mozetta, the short cape which hangs from his shoulders over his scarlet cassock.
‘We’re all relieved that you came to no harm. Shall I wait for the digest, or is it worth a full personal report?’
‘Your Eminence,’ Silverman says, and finds something choking his larynx. ‘There’s a city down there.’
‘So.’ Madrazo props his chin on steepled fingers. His ring of office gleams like a living eye. The considerable shock he must feel elicits no more than a moue of interest. ‘I’ve just been studying the final sensor evaluations. They show a profusion of fauna and flora in stationary ecological equilibrium, but no evidence of intelligence. We surmise that the shielded anomaly is of extraplanetary origin.’
‘I don’t think so. The design of the city is absolutely integral to the mood of the planet.’
Acutely, Madrazo suggests, ‘The good stewards.’
‘Yes.’ Silverman hesitates. ‘It’s totally deserted.’
‘You can see no reason to prevent our sending a team into the ruins?’
His heart stills for an instant close to syncope. It seems that banners of light stream above him. The wonder of the City is a swelling organ note.
‘Eminence, there are no ruins. It is perfectly preserved.’ Without caution, his heart swollen with excitement, Silverman leans forward and presses his damp hands on the desk, ‘It looks as if it’s . . . waiting for someone.’
The
City of the angels calls him, calls him home.
~ * ~
II
The synagogue is a brothel, a hiding place for wild animals. No Jew has ever prayed to God; they are all possessed by devils. Instead of greeting them, ye shall avoid them as a contagious disease and plague.
St John Chrysostom, 349-407 cf.
~ * ~
Silverman’s earliest memory must be composite: layered and glazed from the complaints and resentments of those old enough for some density of accurate recall, a sfumato the reverse of Leonardo da Vinci’s, shade aching into shade, glowing with bitter depths of light. Spitefully, the officials had waited for Shabbos. Harsh kliegs crusted the street, empty canvas-clad trucks growled and coughed, bodies pressed sweating in hallways and on stairs, the candles guttering, legal imprecations in Russian and Yiddish, a man in uniform pushing past the puzzled children to jerk bedclothing from the parents’ mattress onto the floor, kicking it into a heap.
‘We cannot pack tonight, it is forbidden,’ Raphael’s father said, facing the man in a fury. ‘To save a life,’ the mother pleaded, pulling Rebbe Silverman’s arm, in tears, scooping up their belongings. ‘Master of the Universe, they’ll kill us all.’
‘You traitors sicken me,’ the policeman told them. Raphael wailed, clutching the mother’s legs. ‘Haven’t you been whining to leave for long enough? Hurry it up, there’s rain on the way.’
‘We have been Russian for three hundred years, you Cossack bastard,’ the Rebbe said. His face was blotched. ‘There is a higher allegiance.’
‘Your names are on the manifest. Eh? Here? My job is to get you into the truck. Conscious or unconscious doesn’t fuss me. Take as much junk as you can carry, but no animals.’
‘Why aren’t we being sent to Israel?’
‘I don’t care where you go, Jew. But I don’t suppose the Poles will want to keep you.’
Rebecca protested as the mother bundled away two of her dolls, leaving her the shapeless rag creature she loved best. Raphael gazed about blindly, located his brother David, toddled to him and shrieked in sudden, absolute terror.
Too many people, too little space, the skies weeping fat drops onto the tarpaulin and then opening in earnest to drench the trucks, tyres drumming, headlights streaked on the roads behind and ahead. ‘It is the Holocaust again,’ an old man said over and over. ‘Ribbono Shel Olom, why do You hate Your people?’
And that is all Silverman remembers. It was not the Holocaust again, not yet. Troop trains took them through Poland. At the border they waited for months while politicians and their masters diced. Finally the exiles crossed into Germany, into the reunited land of the beast which took them now grudgingly and gave them shelter while crowds bickered in the streets below their crowded apartments, with increasing boldness bore banners denouncing this imposition, and the Rebbe’s family lived double-outcast among the Hassidim in whose de facto quarter they were billeted, grim-faced, bearded men in shtreimel and bekesheh, women like black ghosts with disapproving eyes, the pious excess of their holy-day dancing and singing coming from the midst of this sober contempt like a slap to the face. Raphael was just old enough to enter the primary grade of yeshiva when they were moved again, to Randers in Jutland where the blond Danes offered Lutheran tolerance and allowed the Rebbe’s family to settle with the uprooted Hassidim while Israel made ready her tents for the millions who cried their dispossession at her gates.
Raphael remembers his first years in Denmark with a sweet longing. Most of all, though, he recalls a picnic in an ancient village outside Randers. The Protestant church in the village was old, older than any building he had ever seen, built in the golden age of Catholicism hundreds of years prior to the Reformation. Six years old, his exuberance quenched by some intimation of awe, Raphael stole into the church of the false moshiach. From a triumphal arch a faded painting shone in blues, cinnabar, lampblack, rusted green. Two women stood beneath a lamb. To the left, her eyes hidden by a scarf, hair cascading to her green dress, one of the lovely women stabbed a spear into the Iamb’s vulnerable throat. Even as the helpless animal’s life-blood gushed from the wound, the woman to the right held out a cup to catch it; regal, her coat was crimson as the fluid she preserved. The painting was inexpressibly beautiful, tender and cruel, and Raphael gazed up at it in a state near to trance.
The Rebbe was livid. ‘An ilui you might be, but what good is cleverness without obedience to your father?’
Flabbergasted and confused, the child said: ‘The ladies were so pretty. Who are they?’ And something secret within him crowed. Nobody before had ever told him he was a genius, even though he had learned to read long before starting at the yeshiva.
‘Do not speak back to your father,’ the mother told him. A certain gentleness removed the sting, but he was frightened by what she said next. ‘It is a filthy thing, that picture. A child should be spared such sights. It is from the sitra achra.’
The Other Side. The pitiless gulf of nothingness, of worse than nothingness, which rebuked the Master of the Universe. The matter was dropped: Raphael said his Krias Shema, head bowed, and the growing curls of his earlocks brushed his cheek like the soothing caress of the mother’s fingers.
Years later, still in Denmark, the mashpia of his school mentioned the ancient painting to the boys who were preparing for bar mitzvah. ‘The goyim hate us,’ he explained, ‘because they are taught that our people—the chosen people of God!—murdered the false moshiach. In the picture, their messiah is shown as a lamb. A woman in green represents the people of Israel, the synagogue. The other woman is the Christian Church. That painting came from the hand of the Angel of Death.’
It seemed as if that awful being had laid aside his palette and taken up the sword: on the following Easter, inflamed by the cruel anti-Israel embargoes of the Moslem petroleum nations, a mob of louts stormed the school erected by the Russian Jews and their bomb blew the Rebbe into bloody shreds. An old Hassid came to their house with the news. ‘We have had our differences,’ he told the weeping family, ‘but the Rebbe was a good man. Most of us,’ he said, taking Raphael against his knee, ‘must strive always against the lure of sin, for our souls are blind to the Mishnah and Gemara. Some few lead lives which are blameless in deed but whose thoughts remain snared by the world. Very rare is the tzaddik, who has mastered his own heart. Rebbe Silverman was of the tzaddikim.’
The Silvermans departed almost immediately for Israel. It came as a surprise to Raphael to learn that the family could have taken up residence in the Homeland years earlier, but that his father had found a higher duty among the outcasts in northern Europe. But now the flood was in full torrent: nobody wanted Jews, not the Americans or the Europeans. Oil and gasoline were drying up as the Jihad intensified; madmen ruled the Arab states, godstruck or venal, it hardly mattered which. It was politic to export Jews, before inflamed citizens recreated on a world scale the horrors of Kristallnacht.
Aviation fuel was under jealous rationing. The four Silvermans, with hardly more possessions than they’d taken from Russia, wallowed across the Mediterranean from Genoa in a stinking refitted tanker crammed with their fellows. Ashdod harbour was temporarily closed while police and army units sought a bomb that terrorists had planted in one of the warehouses. The tanker turned and sailed north, and berthed at the sprawling foot of Mount Carmel. Raphael stared at the clutter of pale apartment complexes and the endless accumulation of ma’abarot pinned to every spare hectare of soil between them: tents and tin shacks, hastily erected accommodation for the millions of Jews fleeing from the brooding, pent hatred of two hemispheres. On a high spur he could make out the monastery of the Carmelite Christian monks, and on another the shrine of science, the Technion. A ferocious excitement grasped him, a sap rising full and strong in his maimed, severed roots: it was a homecoming.
Almost immediately, his brother David was inducted into the Israel Defense Army, deferring his rabbinical studies for two years. The mother, despite her
burdens of grief, seemed somehow to blossom, organizing the neighboring immigrants, prettying their own rudimentary shack, allowing Raphael to run more freely on the leash—even gifting him, on his fourteenth birthday, with a handheld Japanese computer endowed with 100 meg of memory. Raphael let his study of Talmud slip, devouring science texts, crouching in the night over the tiny numerals, commanding them to dance for him, to sing, a chorale to the fecundity of the universe. His teachers were not slow to appreciate his precocity. On the day the family heard that David had been killed in combat on the border of the Islamic Theocracy, he was already deep into physics at the Technion.
A double blow sent his faith tottering. His brother’s slaying was not senseless, but it was unconscionable. Raphael raged, tore the yarmulka from his head and trampled it under his feet. Already the grounds of his apostasy had been established. He had walked in the streets of Jerusalem, the new city and the old, among the cypresses of the Mount of Olives, and beneath the Dome of the Rock where Muhammad had leapt into Paradise on horseback, and beside the Wailing Wall, and a slow horror at the multiple unreason had crept into his breast like a growing sponge. He had barely escaped without a beating from his tourist visit to the mosque, and that conjoint savagery and breathtaking beauty poisoned his ease with his fellow humans in a way the vile painting in Denmark had not.
The Dark Between the Stars: Speculative Fiction Page 20
