More Wandering Stars

by Jack Dann (ed)

  “The Last Days are at hand!” Nicky called. “The Last Days are coming, man. The Lord is coming to our town, and the wicked will be left behind, man. The Lord is coming.” Nicky shoved a leaflet into someone’s hand and the someone shoved it right back. Nicky shrugged. “Come to the Lordhouse tonight, brothers and sisters! Come and get your soul together.” Someone paused, hesitated, took a leaflet. “Spare change? Spare change for the Lord’s work? Every penny does the Lord’s work …”

  The morning passed, and it grew colder. About half of Nicky’s leaflets were gone, although many of them littered the sidewalk a few paces away, where people had discarded them once they thought that they were far enough from Nicky not to be noticed doing so. The sun had been swallowed by clouds, and once again it looked like it was going to snow, although once again it did not. Nicky’s coat was too small to button, but he turned his collar up, and put his hands in his pockets. The stream of tourists had pretty much run dry for the moment, and he was just thinking about getting some lunch, about going down to the hot dog stand on the comer where the black dudes stood jiving and handslapping, their giant radios blaring on their shoulders, he was just thinking about it when, at that very moment, as though conjured up by the thought, Saul Edelmann stepped out of the stand and walked briskly toward him.

  “Shit in my hat,” Nicky muttered to himself. He’d collected more than enough to buy lunch, but, because of the cold, not that much more. And Father Delardi, the unfrocked priest—the unfairly unfrocked priest—who had founded their order and who ran it with both love and, yessir, an iron hand—Father Delardi didn’t like it when they came in off the streets at the end of the day with less than a certain amount of dough. Nicky had been hoping that he could con Saul into giving him a free hot dog, as he sometimes could, as Saul sometimes had, and now here was Saul himself, off on some dumb-shit errand, bopping down the street as fat and happy as a clam (although how happy were clams anyway? come to think about it), which meant that he, Nicky, was fucked.

  “Nicky! My main man!” said Saul, who prided himself on an ability to speak jivey street patois that he definitely did not possess. He was a plump-cheeked man with modish-length gray-streaked hair, cheap black plastic-framed glasses, and a neatly trimmed mustache. Jews were supposed to have big noses, or so Nicky had always heard, but Saul’s nose was small and upturned, as if there were an Irishman in the woodpile somewhere.

  “Hey, man,” Nicky mumbled listlessly. Bad enough that he wasn’t going to get his free hot dog—now he’d have to make friendly small talk with this dipshit in order to protect his investment in free hot dogs yet to come. Nicky sighed, and unlimbered his shit-eating grin. “Hey, man! How you been, Saul? What’s happenin’, man?”

  “What’s happening?” Saul said jovially, responding to Nicky as if he was really asking a question instead of emitting ritual noise. “Now how can I even begin to tell you what’s happening, Nicky?” He was radiant today, Saul was, full of bouncy energy, rocking back and forth as he talked, unable to stand still, smiling a smile that revealed teeth some Yiddish momma had sunk a lot of dough into over the years. “I’m glad you came by today, though. I wanted to be sure to say good-bye if I could.”

  “Good-bye?”

  Saul’s smile became broader and broader. “Yes, good-bye! This is it, boychick. I’m off! You won’t see me again after today.”

  Nicky peered at him suspiciously. “You goin’ away?”

  “You bet your ass I am, kid,” Saul said, and then laughed. “Today I turned my half of the business over to Carlos, signed all the papers, took care of everything nice and legal. And now I’m free and clear, free as a damn bird, kid.”

  “You sold your half of the stand to Carlos?”

  “Not sold, boychick—gave. I gave it to him. Not one red cent did I take.”

  Nicky gaped at him. “You gave your business away, man?”

  Saul beamed. “Kid—I gave everything away. The car: I gave that to old Ben Miller who washes dishes at the Green Onion. I gave up the lease on my apartment, gave away my furniture, gave away my savings—if you’d’ve been here yesterday, Nicky, I would’ve given you something too.”

  “Shit!” Nicky said harshly, “you go crazy, man, or what?” He choked back an outburst of bitter profanity. Missed out again! Screwed out of getting his yet again!

  “I don’t need any of that stuff anymore, Nicky,” Saul said. He tapped the side of his nose, smiled. “Nicky—He’s come.”

  “Who?”

  “The Messiah. He’s come! He’s finally come! Today’s the day the Messiah comes, after all those thousands of years—think of it, Nicky!”

  Nicky’s eyes narrowed. “What the fuck you talkin’ about, man?”

  “Don’t you ever read the paper, Nicky, or listen to the radio? The Messiah has come. His name is Murray Kupferberg, He was born in Pittsburgh—”

  “Pittsburgh?” Nicky gasped.

  “—and He used to be a plumber there. But He is the Messiah. Most of the scholars and the rabbis deny Him, but He really is. The Messiah has really come, at last!”

  Nicky gave that snorting bray of laughter, blowing out his rubbery lips, that was one reason—but only one reason—why he was sometimes called Nicky the Horse. “Jesus is the Messiah, man,” he said scornfully.

  Saul smiled good-naturedly, shrugged, spread his hands. “For you, maybe he is. For you people, the goyim, maybe he is. But we’ve been waiting for almost three thousand years—and at last He’s come.”

  “Murray Kupferberg? From Pittsburgh?”

  “Murray Kupferberg,” Saul repeated firmly, calmly. “From Pittsburgh. He’s coming here, today. Jews are gathering here today from all over the country, from all over the world, and today—right here—He’s going to gather His people to Him—”

  “You stupid fucking kike!” Nicky screamed, his anger breaking free at last. “You’re crazy in the head, man. You’ve been conned. Some fucking con man has taken you for everything, and you’re too fucking dumb to see it! All that stuff, man, all that good stuff gone—” He ran out of steam, at a loss for words. All that good stuff gone, and he hadn’t gotten any of it. After kissing up to this dipshit for all those years … “Oh, you dumb kike,” he whispered.

  Saul seemed unoffended. “You’re wrong, Nicky—but I haven’t got time to argue with you. Good-bye.” He stuck out his hand, but Nicky refused to shake it. Saul shrugged, smiled again, and then walked briskly away, turning the corner onto Sixth Street.

  Nicky sullenly watched him go, still shaking with rage. Screwed again! There went his free hot dogs, flying away into the blue on fucking gossamer wings. Carlos was a hard dude, a street-wise dude—Carlos wasn’t going to give him anything, Carlos wouldn’t stop to piss on Nicky’s head if Nicky’s hair was on fire. Nicky stared at the tattered and overlapping posters on the laundromat wall, and the faces of long-dead politicians stared back at him from among the notices for lost cats and the ads for Czech films and karate classes. Suddenly he was cold, and he shivered.

  The rest of the day was a total loss. Nicky’s sullen mood threw his judgment and his timing off, and the tourists were thinning out again anyway. The free-form jazz of the communist coffeehouse band was getting on his nerves—the fucking xylophone player was chopping away as if he were making sukiyaki at Benihana of Tokyo’s—and the smell of sauerkraut would float over from the hot dog stand every now and then to torment him. And it kept getting colder and colder. Still, some obscure, self-punishing instinct kept him from moving on.

  Later in the afternoon, what amounted to a little unofficial parade went by—a few hundred people walking in the street, heading west against the traffic, many of them barefoot in spite of the bitter cold. If they were all Jews on their way to the Big Meeting, as Nicky suspected, then some of them must have been black Jews, East Indian Jews, even Chinese Jews.

  Smaller groups of people straggled by for the next hour or so, all headed uptown. The traffic seemed to have stopped completely, even t
he crosstown buses; this rally must be big, for the city to’ve done that.

  The last of the pilgrims to go by was a stout, fiftyish Society Hill matron with bleached blue hair, walking calmly in the very center of the street. She was wearing an expensive ermine stole, although she was barefoot and her feet were bleeding. As she passed Nicky, she suddenly laughed, unwrapped the stole from around her neck, and threw it into the air, walking on without looking back. The stole landed across the shoulders of the communist xylophone player, who goggled blankly for a moment, then stared wildly around him—his eyes widening comically—and then bolted, clutching the stole tightly in his hands; he disappeared down an alleyway.

  “You bitch!” Nicky screamed. “Why not me? Why didn’t you give it to me?”

  But she was gone, the street was empty, and the gray afternoon sky was darkening toward evening.

  “The Last Days are coming,” Nicky told the last few strolling tourists and window-shoppers. “The strait gate is narrow, sayeth the Lord, and few will fit in, man.” But his heart wasn’t in it anymore. Nicky waited, freezing, his breath puffing out in steaming clouds, stamping his feet to restore circulation, slapping his arms, doing a kind of shuffling jig that—along with his too-small jacket—made him look more than ever like an organ-grinder’s monkey performing for some unlikely kind of alms. He didn’t understand why he didn’t just give up and go back to the Lordhouse. He was beginning to think yearningly of the hot stew they would be served there after they had turned the day’s take in to Father Delardi, the hymn singing later, and after that the bottle of strong raw wine, and his mattress in the rustling, fart-smelling communal darkness, oblivion …

  There was—a sound, a note, a chord, an upswelling of something that the mind interpreted as music, as blaring iron trumpets, only because it had no other referents with which to understand it. The noise, the music, the something—it swelled until it shook the empty street, the buildings, the world, shook the bones in the flesh, and the very marrow in the bones, until it filled every inch of the universe like hot wax being poured into a mold.

  Nicky looked up.

  As he watched, a crack appeared in the dull gray sky. The sky split open, and behind the sky was nothingness, a wedge of darkness so terrible and absolute that it hurt the eyes to look at it. The crack widened, the wedge of darkness grew. Light began to pour through the crack in the sky, blinding white light more intense and frightening than the darkness had been. Squinting against that terrible radiance, his eyes watering, Nicky saw tiny figures rising into the air far away, thousands upon thousands of human figures floating up into the sky, falling up while the iron music shook the firmament around them, people falling up and into and through the crack in the sky, merging into that wondrous and awful river of light, fading, disappearing, until the last one was gone.

  The crack in the sky closed. The music grumbled and rumbled away into silence.

  Everything was still.

  Snowflakes began to squeeze like slow tears from the slate gray sky.

  Nicky stayed there for hours, staring upward until his neck was aching and the last of the light was gone, but after that nothing else happened at all.

  More Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction 1999 First Jewish Lights Classic Reprint Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  2013 First Digital Edition

  The permission acknowledgments on page 181 constitute an extension of this copyright page. All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  The editor regrets that Woody Allen's short story “The Scrolls” cannot be included in this and forthcoming editions.

  Copyright © 1981 by Jack Dann

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  More wandering stars : an anthology of outstanding stories of Jewish fantasy and science fiction / edited by Jack Dann.—1st Jewish Lights classic reprint ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-58023-063-6

  1. Science fiction, American—Jewish authors. 2. Fantasy fiction, American—Jewish authors.

  3. Jews—Fiction. I. Dann, Jack.

  PS648.S3 M6 1999

  813'.0876088924 21—dc21

  99-045347

  ISBN 1-58023-063-6 (Quality Paperback)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Cover design: Bronwen Battaglia, Bridgett Taylor

  Cover art: Joseph’s Dream (© 1997) was created by Michael Bogdanow, an artist, lawyer, and musician living in Lexington, Massachusetts. It is based on Joseph’s dream of the sun, moon, and eleven stars bowing down to him (Genesis 37:9), and is part of Bogdanow’s “Visions of Torah” series of contemporary, spiritual paintings and reproductions inspired by Judaic texts. The original is an acrylic painting on canvas in the private collection of Alex and Donna Salamon.

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  Acknowledgment is made for permission to print the following material:

  “Camps” by Jack Dann. Copyright © 1979 by Mercury Press, Inc. From The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Copyright reassigned to the author. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Celestial Orchestra” by Howard Schwartz. Copyright © 1980 by Howard Schwartz. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Disciples” by Gardner Dozois. Copyright © 1981 by Penthouse International Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Virginia Kidd.

  “Dress Rehearsal” by Harvey Jacobs. Copyright © 1974 by Mercury Press, Inc. From The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, by permission of the author.

  “Forcing the End” by Hugh Nissenson. Copyright © 1969 by Hugh Nissenson. From In the Reign of Peace by Hugh Nissenson, reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Hebrew Source” by Isaac Asimov. Copyright © 1981 by Nightfall, Inc.

  “Isaiah” by Barry N. Malzberg. Copyright © 1973 by Ultimate Publications, Inc. From Fantastic, reprinted by permission of the author.

  “A Lamed Wufnik” by Mel Gilden. Copyright © 1975 by Mercury Press, Inc. From The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, by permission of the author.

  “The Last Demon” by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Copyright © 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964 by Isaac Bashevis Singer. From Short Friday by Isaac Bashevis Singer, reprinted with permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.

  “Leviticus: In the Ark” by Barry N. Malzberg. Copyright © 1975 by Mercury Press, Inc. From The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, by permission of the author.

  “The Mazel Tov Revolution” by Joe W. Haldeman. Copyright © 1974 by The Condé Nast Corporation. From Analog, by permission of the author.

  “Mom” by Harlan Ellison appeared in the author’s collection Strange Wine. Copyright © 1976 by Harlan Ellison. Reprinted by arrangement with and permission of the author. All rights reserved.

  “Tauf Aleph” by Phyllis Gotlieb. Copyright © 1981 by Phyllis Gotlieb.

  “Warm, Dark Places” by Horace L. Gold. Copyright © 1939 by Street & Smith for Unknown Worlds; copyright renewed 1967 by Condé Nast.

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