The Pillars of Salem
Harold Carper
Copyright 2014, 2015 by Harold Carper
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The Pillars of Salem
By Harold Carper
“This was all in the adverts,” said a young man walking beside old Elkhanan Barlow, a rucksack on his back and a small, glossy black box in one hand. “I don’t know why anyone is surprised at having to take the Walk.”
Elkhanan peered at the young man through narrowed eyes. Thirty-five or forty off-world immigrants on this Walk, he thought. At least one of them isn’t a complete dullard.
“What is your name, young man?” he asked, his voice like a pencil on course paper.
“Yedi, sir,” he replied, looking over his shoulder as if to see if someone overheard.
“Don’t be embarrassed. Yedi is a fine name. Short for Yedidya if I am not mistaken. How old are you?”
“Yes, sir, it is. I’m eighteen standard. I’ll be nineteen in three months.”
As they walked, Sergeant Whitley, their guide to Salem, pointed to unusual trees, crops engineered for Tikvah’s soil and atmosphere, historic breeds of sheep and cattle, items that should have been of particular interest to people who have chosen to join a self-consciously agrarian culture.
Grumbling faded into footsteps and thin conversation as one hill blended into the next. They followed a narrow road with pavement arrayed in striated green and yellow. It contrasted just enough with the cultivated fields that a body wouldn’t lose his way, but not so much as to disturb the rustic elegance of the rolling fields. Tractors whirred or thrummed in the distance, depending on their load. Ballistic shuttles glinted high overhead, racing to schedules set by anonymous bureaucrats far away in Dobair or Tikvah City.
The temperature rose with the sun, and sweat soaked shirt backs and matted hair. Some of the walkers exchanged jackets for hats and water bottles. Elkhanan began to fall behind, Yedi still his ever present shadow. By the end of the second hour, Whitley, slowed the pace of the whole group to compensate.
Complaints rose again like a tide. What an absurd test this is! How much further? Will we have to do pushups next? What sort of insane place have we chosen to call home?
“Mr. Whitley, will you please make this older gentleman board the shuttle? He’s slowing everyone down.” Elkhanan heard the fat man in the hand-tailored trousers from across the irregular sea of heads and thought of the Hebrews crossing the wilderness and their interminable kvetching.
HaShem, is fire from heaven an option in this wilderness? He laughed, and when Yedi turned to see what the joke was about, he answered the younger man’s raised eyebrows with a waggle of his own.
“Sergeant Whitley,” answered the uniformed man. “Not Mister.”
“Fine. Sergeant Whitley, can you tell the old man to board the shuttle? This heat is killing me, and just look at my pants.”
“The old man is Mr. Barlow, and no, I cannot tell him to board the shuttle. I wouldn’t if I were able.”
“Why not? This exercise will take hours longer than necessary if he insists on walking the entire way. You have a family, sergeant. Don’t you want to be home with them?”
“Time and efficiency aren’t everything, Mr. Wooten.” It was the first time Elkhanan remembered hearing the pompous oaf’s name. “Age and experience carry a great deal of weight on Tikvah. You will do well to keep that in mind.”
Whitley called a break then, and some of the young children distributed water and a snack, a chewy cake which appeared to have been baked from scratch in someone’s kitchen.
Elkhanan walked around the group while others dropped wherever they found themselves. When he reached the front near Whitley, he sat on a rock beside the road to watch the children chasing each other about the pavement through an obstacle course of grownups. The fat man stalked by in the opposite direction, headed for the shade cast by the shuttle.
Elkhanan watched the young man, Yedi, a few paces off the road surrounded by a half-circle of young people. He gestured first this way at a large bird flying overhead, then that way at the base of a nearby tree, shifting his black box from one hand to the other. His eyes were alive with excitement, as if his whole young life they had looked forward to this moment and this place. One of his disciples, hands on his hips, nodded his head and watched the bird. A girl tilted her head just so and twirled a finger in her hair. Yedi didn’t seem to notice.
When they resumed walking, the young man was at Elkhanan’s side once more.
“A soaring eagle does not beat the air, nor a swift ship push against the sea,” Elkhanan said and winked at him.
“Excuse me, sir?”
Elkhanan pointed at a large bird flying high overhead.
“Watch the eagle as it flies. It does not see the air as an enemy to be defeated or even as a thing at all distinct from itself. It uses the air like an extension of its own wings and never gives it a single thought.” He laughed again. “Stay your course, young man. One day you’ll understand what I am telling you today.”
They walked in silence for a while, and when the old man continued, he spoke between pauses to catch his breath and compose his thoughts.
“I knew a girl once long ago. Pretty and so full of life. I was brash then, all lightning and thunder, primed to fight the world and maybe the whole galaxy. But if I was a storm, she was the sun. She brightened every room. Made everyone smile. She couldn’t help it. There have not been many like her.”
When he didn’t speak for a few minutes, Yedi asked where she was now. Elkhanan acted as if he hadn’t heard. He looked toward the top of the next hill, the lines on his face somehow deeper now.
“What is your name, young man? Your face is familiar.”
The boy paused and glanced away before answering.
“Yedi, sir.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing, sir. You just…I thought I heard something.”
“I’ve watched you with the others,” Elkhanan said. “There is a born leader in you. I’ll make sure the sergeant notices, but if I am any judge of men, he already has. You will do well here.”
A few minutes later he said, “You remind me of my son Martin. I wish he could have come.”
“Tell me about him,” Yedi said.
“Bah! You don’t want to hear an old man prattle about a stranger.”
“Please. I would like to hear it.”
Elkhanan gave token resistance but only a token. He told Yedi of a man who was a great soldier and leader of men, who fought for peace between worlds and nearly achieved it before he was murdered in the crowded chapel of a poor mining community on some unnamed, numbered rock orbiting a dying, red star. Two hundred innocents killed by a zealot from an old Earth sect who called themselves “Fire.” Those miners and their families had done nothing to warrant such violent hatred. Their great sin was allowing the visit of a man who wanted peace, and Fire wanted anything but peace.
Nothing ever changed. The war to end all wars lingered, a distant dream, no closer today than a thousand years ago. A man like Martin worked his whole life for peace, but what is a man against the universe. War was in the genes and the very souls of men, and the few who bent that evil inclination toward peace found themselves in the end swept away by the tides of history and divine decree.
“I carried a gun in my time, too, when Martin was still little. I have seen the things that men hide in their hearts. All men. A civilized man keeps his demons chained in the basement and brings them out only when necessary. Thos
e people of Fire carry their evil in their hands and on their foreheads like a badge of honor, as if a man should be proud to kill, to destroy peace wherever we find it.”
He wheezed, his air expended by talk and passion.
“What am I saying?” he said at last. “It is a beautiful day on Tikvah—every day is a beautiful day on Tikvah—and I sully it with such gloominess.” His cheeks balled up beneath his eyes as he smiled behind his bushy beard. “Martin was a good man,” he said and jabbed Yedi with his cane. “A great man. Yedi will be a great man also, because he is first a good man.”
Yedi grinned and looked up the road.
An afternoon wind brought dense, low clouds that blocked out the sun and brought some small relief from the heat of the early afternoon. But after darkening the sky, the wind died away again, and ghostly fingertips of a warm rain began to tap at the arms and faces of the walkers. A handful of personal shields came up with a telltale crackle and buzz which, after a few minutes, faded into the background of cicadas and locusts. Others donned the rain coats Whitley and Yedi handed around, while the fat man—what was his name again?—grumbled the louder and the day dimmed to near twilight.
A girlish yelp came from the opposite side of a cluster of fellow travelers, and Yedi was across the road in an instant.
“What happened?” he asked. It was the same girl who had hung on his every word earlier that day.
“Somebody’s out there, looking at us,” she said, pointing into the field to the
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