Unholy Land Read online

  Praise for Unholy Land

  “Lavie Tidhar does it again. A jewelled little box of miracles. Magnificent.”

  —Warren Ellis, author of Gun Machine

  [Starred]“World Fantasy Award winner Tidhar (Central Station) will leave readers’ heads spinning with this disorienting and gripping alternate history. Author Lior Tirosh, grieving a personal tragedy, travels home after years abroad and immediately has a series of strange encounters that pull him into a complex plotto destroy the border between worlds. He arrives in Palestina, the land that the Jews were offered on the Ugandan border in 1904, which both closely resembles and is profoundly different from the Israel of our world, and is followed by two government agents who are trying to stop the destruction of ‘borders,’ though it’s unclear whose side they are really on. Tirosh discovers a niece he had forgotten, is accused of murder, narrowly dodges threats to his life, and takes on the role of a detective from one of his own novels as he tries to understand what is endangered and by whom. ‘No matter what we do, human history always attempts to repeat itself,’ Tidhar writes, even as he explores the substantial differences in history that might arise from single but significant choices. Readers of all kinds, and particularly fans of detective stories and puzzles, will enjoy grappling with the numerous questions raised by this stellar work.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “Extraordinary, confronting, intriguing. Unholy Land is a dream of a home that’s never existed, but is no less real for that: a dream that smells like blood and gunpowder. It’s precisely what we’ve come to expect of Tidhar, a writer who just keeps getting better.”

  —Angela Slatter, author of the World Fantasy Award-winner The Bitterwood Bible

  “There are SFF writers. There are good SFF writers. And there is Lavie Tidhar. Unholy Land is a twisted piece of alt-history/geography that refuses to go where lesser writers would drive it. Bold and witty and smoky, it plays games and coquetries, makes dark dalliances, and will leave you dazzled and delighted.”

  —Ian McDonald, author of Time Was

  “Lavie Tidhar’s daring Unholy Land brilliantly showcases one of the foremost science fiction authors of our generation.”

  —Silvia Moreno-Garcia, World Fantasy Award-winning editor and author of Certain Dark Things

  “Lavie Tidhar takes us through a haunting, mesmerizing Judea, across multiple timelines into the promised night shelter in British East Africa. Here is an expedition at once proposed and taken, an alternate reality in which the holocaust is averted but the mechanics of displacement remain the same, where people are oppressed and oppressor at the same time. A genius, dreamlike fantasy for those who slip across might-have-been worlds.”

  —Saad Z. Hossain, author of Escape from Baghdad!

  “Lavie Tidhar has given us a mystically charged, morally complex vision of Theodor Hertzl's famous Jewish state that might have been.”

  —James Morrow, author of The Last Witchfinder and Shamblin Towards Hiroshima

  “Unholy Land is a stunning achievement. It is packed to the brim with engaging ideas and features a captivating story . . . beautiful and thought-provoking.”

  —The Speculative Shelf

  “Unholy Land is probably better than Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union.”

  —Bradley Horner, author of the Darkside Earther series

  Praise for Central Station

  2018 Neukom Literary Arts Award Winner

  2017 John W. Campbell Award Winner

  2017 Arthur C. Clarke Award Finalist

  2016 British Science Fiction Award Longlist

  NPR Best Books of 2016

  Amazon Featured Monthly Best Sci-Fi & Fantasy Books

  Barnes and Noble Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2016

  2016 Locus Recommended Reading List

  “Beautiful, original, a shimmering tapestry of connections and images—I can’t think of another SF novel quite like it.”

  —Alastair Reynolds, author of the Revelation Space series

  “A dazzling tale of complicated politics and even more complicated souls. Beautiful.”

  —Ken Liu, author of The Paper Menagerie and The Grace of Kings

  [Starred] “World Fantasy Award–winner Tidhar (A Man Lies Dreaming) magnificently blends literary and speculative elements in this streetwise mosaic novel set under the towering titular spaceport . . . Readers of all persuasions will be entranced.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  [Starred] “A fascinating future glimpsed through the lens of a tight-knit community.”

  —Library Journal, starred review

  “If Nalo Hopkinson and William Gibson held a séance to channel the spirit of Ray Bradbury, they might be inspired to produce a work as grimy, as gorgeous, and as downright sensual as Central Station.”

  —Peter Watts, author of Blindsight and The Freeze-Frame Revolution

  “A unique marriage of Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, C. L. Moore, China Miéville, and Larry Niven with 50 degrees of compassion and the bizarre added. An irresistible cocktail.”

  —Maxim Jakubowski, author of the Sunday Times bestselling Vina Jackson novels

  “A mosaic of mind-blowing ideas and a dazzling look at a richly-imagined, textured future.”

  —Aliette de Bodard, author of The House of Shattered Wings

  Other Books by Lavie Tidhar

  The Bookman (2010)

  Camera Obscura (2011)

  Osama (2011)

  The Great Game (2012)

  The Violent Century (2013)

  A Man Lies Dreaming (2014)

  Central Station (2016)

  Unholy Land

  Copyright © 2018 by Lavie Tidhar

  This is a work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the publisher.

  Afterword copyright © 2018 by Warren Ellis

  Cover art and design copyright © 2018 by Sarah Anne Langton

  Interior art copyright © 2018 by Sarah Anne Langton

  Interior and Map design by Elizabeth Story

  Tachyon Publications LLC

  1459 18th Street #139

  San Francisco, CA 94107

  415.285.5615

  www.tachyonpublications.com

  [email protected]

  Series Editor: Jacob Weisman

  Editor: Jill Roberts

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61696-304-0

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-61696-305-7

  First Edition: 2018

  To Eliot

  TACHYON | SAN FRANCISCO

  Years ago, prompted by the vague recollection of a childhood story, I visited the Wiener Library in London. There, stored on microfilm, I found the 1904 report of an ill-fated expedition to the Uasin Gishu region, in what was then British East Africa. The expedition was sent by Theodor Herzl, the ailing leader of the Zionist movement, due to an extraordinary offer extended to him by Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary at the time.

  The offer: a piece of land on the border of Uganda that would be set aside as a Jewish homeland.

  In the midst of a vigorous debate in the Zionist Congress—between the “Territorialists” who favoured any available land and the “Holy Landers” who were determined on settlement in then-Ottoman Palestine—Herzl saw fit to nevertheless commission a small expedition to the territory.

  In 1904, a young Russian Jew named Nahum Wilbusch departed Trieste on board the S.S. Africa, bound for the port of Mombasa. There he was joined by two unlikely companions: Major Alfred St. Hill Gibbons, a noted British explorer and old “Af
rica hand,” and Alfred Kaiser, a Swiss naturalist.

  The three men arrived in Nakuru, on the border of the proposed settlement, on the 18th of January. There they were delayed waiting for their luggage and while Gibbons attempted to round up porters for the expedition. It kept raining. By the 28th they had made camp in the territory.

  The expedition did not fare well. In their two months traversing the Uasin Gishu plateau, Wilbusch became lost and separated from the others, while a hostile force of Nandi attacked the men toward the end of the journey.

  Their reports are striking in difference: where Gibbons sees a pleasant, fertile land, Wilbusch sees no sign of water or pasture. Both reported the settlement of native tribes in the area.

  From Mombasa, Wilbusch travelled to Palestine. He returned an overwhelmingly negative report on the possibility of Jewish settlement in British East Africa, an offer seen, by its proponents, as a Nachtasyl, or “night shelter,” for the beleaguered Jews of Europe.

  By the time the members of the expedition returned their reports, Theodor Herzl was dead, and the “Holy Landers”—to whom Wilbusch, it seemed, had belonged all along—had won sway over the Zionist Congress. The plan for Jewish settlement in Africa was abandoned, and today remains merely a curious footnote to history. A perhaps apocryphal story tells of an aging Wilbusch flying over the territory many years later, ruefully reflecting that the Holocaust might never have happened had the plan gone ahead. But this is the nature of what-ifs: that they are merely flights of fancy, and not to be taken too seriously.

  A decade after I’d first read the Expedition’s report I was living back in Israel for a time. There we inhabited a small, cramped apartment a stone’s throw away from the old city of Jaffa. Set in the ruins of an old Arab cinema, it was joined together with the other flats by a small stone courtyard in which grew a solitary orange tree, planted there by the original owner many years before.

  We lived next door to the old Alhambra Theatre, a giant art deco building where Umm Kulthum and Farid al-Atrash both once performed. It stood abandoned for years and was now undergoing construction work. Twice we were woken up to the sound of gunfire. The first time someone had attempted to set the place on fire. The second, they tried to ram a truck full of explosives into the building. No one was entirely certain why this was happening.

  I walked through the Jaffa flea market nearly every day, stopping at a café on the corner by the old Ottoman clock tower, from where I could hear and smell the sea. Traffic moved sluggishly across the road in the heat. Once I arrived to find the waiter crying soundlessly, all the while carrying out his duties. I never did find out why.

  The flea market itself was vast, and filled with hard-lived people selling every manner of abandoned and unwanted things. It lay in the shadow of the old town and its ancient Egyptian fort on the hill. There was too much history all mangled together in that place.

  It was here that I picked up treasures of dubious provenance. Old Hebrew erotica and westerns, a Zionist romance pamphlet and an early adventure of David Tidhar: The First Hebrew Detective, from 1938 or so, with an advert at the back for the Landwer Café in Tel Aviv, for which the great draw was a new, electric radio.

  One night, it might have been spring, I dreamed of Palestina. It was a nation in a world that’s never been, a Jewish state founded in East Africa. I saw for myself the white buildings of Ararat City, the refugee camps across the newly-built separation wall in Nakuru, and the mercenaries fighting under the shadow of Mount Elgon as a herd of elephants silently trespassed under a full moon. The dream lingered in my mind.

  A few months later, I left Israel once again. By then they’d just arrested the man behind the attempted attacks on the Alhambra next door. He turned out to be a Jewish lawyer from north Tel Aviv, who’d hired a group of Arab bombers to carry out the job simply so that he could claim the extra money on the insurance. In the event, he wasn’t even convicted. Some things, I’m afraid, you just can’t make up.

  But by then I was living elsewhere.

  “The goal of our present endeavours must not be the ‘Holy Land’ but a land of our own. We need nothing but a large piece of land for our poor brothers; a piece of land which shall remain our property from which no foreign master can expel us.”

  —Leo Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation, 1882

  PART ONE

  _________

  ARRIVALS

  1.

  The flight from Berlin was delayed. Tirosh dawdled by the gate. He was wrapped in a light coat. The airport’s lines were cold and clean. The parquet floor gleamed. The glass walls let in a grey, diffuse light. Tirosh watched people go past.

  People in airports were travellers taken out of time. Their clothes did not match their geography, their tan or lack of it did not correspond to the sunlight or the season. Their languages came from nowhere and went elsewhere, bringing with them always the scent of other, more real places, of brine and hot rain, seared fat, crushed flowers. The airport by contrast had the comforting artificiality of a well-constructed null-point, a sort of reassuring void. Earlier, going through security, Tirosh was lulled by the by-now familiar rhythm of checks and scans. He stood in the line gladly, shuffled forward slowly with the others, removed his shoes with a sort of glad compliance, took off his belt, emptied his pockets, turned off and on his phone.

  The metal detector did not beep as he trod through it in his socks. Standing awkwardly by the conveyor belt, Tirosh reassembled those parts of himself that had been detached and scanned, put on his shoes, refilled his pockets, tied on his belt. For a time he wandered through the duty-free stores, amidst shelves filled with luxuries he had no interest in. In the bookshop he hesitated by the shelves densely packed with thrillers in which improbable men did improbable things. He did not find his own books there.

  At the checkout counter he paused by the newspaper rack. The first page of several of the leading papers carried the latest atrocity from back home, but the pictures of the dead were all the same after a while, and he had grown immune to them. A few months earlier, reluctantly, he had participated in a topical news show on Arte where the interviewer began, straightaway, by accusing him of writing fantasy, and wasn’t that an escape, to which he’d responded, somewhat defensively, that on the contrary, fantasy was the only way that allowed one to examine alternate realities, and wasn’t that an important thing to do, politically, under the circumstances—but really he supposed it wasn’t much of an argument. Mostly, Tirosh wrote a series of moderately successful detective novels, the sort that featured buxom girls and men in hats on the covers, the sort that used to sell in kiosks and petrol stations and pharmacies. He was not perhaps a hack, exactly: but after a promising start, he had abandoned his youthful ideals for the promise of a steady paycheque, and the writing of books which were delivered promptly and published cheaply and on time.

  Purchasing nothing, he checked the departure board with a sudden sense of impatience (Isaac on his hands and knees crawling with a sort of dumbfounded delight as fast he could go; Isaac with his finger tracing circles on an empty phone socket, again and again) but saw that the flight was delayed. The people coming and going between flights seemed to him like revenants or ghosts, haunting the terminal corridors with the same sort of cancerous, restless energy he himself felt right then. He thought about Isaac. There was not a day gone past when he had not thought about his son.

  He decided to keep moving, it was better that way. He found a café and ordered an overpriced orange juice and sat down to drink it. His telephone rang: his agent, calling from London.

  “Where are you?” his agent demanded.

  Tirosh said, “I’m still in Berlin. The flight keeps getting delayed.”

  “It will do you good to get away,” his agent said. Her name was Elsa, and besides Tirosh she represented several more or less successful footballers and glamour models turned novelists; a former circus performer whose sex-filled, tell-all memoir stayed for ten straight weeks at the top of the best-se
ller lists; and a gaggle of desperate-looking crime and fantasy writers: their only fantasy was that they were successful, and their only crimes were committed against literature, as Elsa sometimes, uncharitably, told him. Sometimes Tirosh wondered what she said about him when he wasn’t there.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I keep feeling it’s a mistake, that I shouldn’t go back. The place has probably changed beyond recognition by now.”

  “Nonsense,” Elsa said. “You’ll love it when you get there. All that sun and . . .” She cast about for something else to offer him. “I hear the street food is nice. Anyway it will do you good. How are you feeling?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, feeling irritated. “Why does everyone feel the need to mollycoddle me?”

  He knew why, of course. He just didn’t want to think it, and by thinking it to make it real.

  He heard her silence on the line, then her breathing as she decided to change tack.

  “Maybe you could do some articles while you’re there,” Elsa said. “I can speak to Der Spiegel, they’re always looking for good coverage of the political situation there.”

  “I saw,” he said, tiredly. “I’m not interested.”

  “Money’s good,” Elsa said. She always tried to get him to earn more. “Write a love story,” she said one year. “Write something funny,” she said a year later. “Everyone loves a comedy.” Finally Tirosh, a little drunk, said, “Why don’t I write a book about, I don’t know, Adolf Hitler as a private detective or something, is that the sort of thing you mean?” and Elsa took a sip of her wine, frostily, and said, “Well if you’re going to be like that, then forget it.”

  “It’s the sort of place everyone has an opinion about,” he said now, trying to justify himself and not really sure why. “But no one really cares.”

  “Do you still think of it as home?” Elsa said, perhaps a little sharply. Tirosh tried to formulate his thoughts. He glanced at the board. It said the flight was now, finally, preparing to board.