The Old Dispensation Read online

  … In the night, somebody tried to poison me.

  Three times shall you be besieged, assassin, and three times you shall be tested, the angel had said.

  I woke up with the dripping of liquid, close to my ear. I looked up, saw two yellow eyes stare at me from the ceiling. She was dressed all in black, and it took me a moment to realise just how inhuman she was, how her limbs were like a spider’s, and how the sack of bilious material that hung from her midsection was a sting, and it was pointed down at me.

  … I assumed the defensive Tchernichovsky position but there was nowhere to run. It is good for close quarter defence and attack but the creature above me, this Abomination, merely hissed. The dripping poison, I noticed with horror, had set the bedding alight. Flames began to billow and the thick smoke made it hard to breathe. I began to call for help. The creature hissed again, firing poison at me from her sting. I ducked and it hit the bars and melted them with a hiss. Then the Massadean guards were in the cell, and opening fire, and the Abomination was shredded into black ichor.

  Hands dragged me out as poison exploded all over the walls. It was nasty stuff – I had not run into a Treif species of this kind before, had no idea where in the rim it could have come from. How it could breach Massadean security, I had no idea either. Someone – more than someone – would pay with their head for this.

  I wasn’t happy about the way events were turning. After having a shouted argument with the Massadean colonel in charge of the base, I was finally let go. From there I made my way through empty, half-deserted streets to the edge of town and my original destination. The night had turned cold, and the alien stars shone down unobstructed. At that moment I missed New Jerusalem, its eternal lights which mask the view of the night sky. There were too many stars in the sky and they all felt like eyes, watching.

  I made my way to the pension, retrieved the pack that was waiting for me, as well as my escort, a sleepy youth from one of the desert tribes. Two of the lizard creatures called Zikit were waiting for us in the yard. We mounted them, and by dawn we had left the city of Akalton far behind.

  8.

  Our glittering eyes examine the bound prisoner. This was our servant, we marvel, this was the man we had sent out on our behalf. Yet something had happened to him, on our home planet. Something had changed him, had tested his loyalty to us.

  We … are… Exilarch!

  The fate of this entire universe and the chosen people within it rests with us. It has not always been thus, but we are they who were called the Resh Galuta: the ultimate authority in our exile.

  “Tell us,” we whisper. “Tell us the truth. Why do you deny it to us?”

  Shemesh screams. The screams last a long while. Our manipulating digits caress the many wounds inflicted upon his person, both old ones, and new. We poke and we twist.

  “Tell us!”

  The man, this Adjudicator, hangs there, broken, defeated.

  “Kill me,” he begs.

  But that will not do; not do at all. We scan and we sieve through this man’s mind, his various augmentations, we taste of his blood and we sample his tissues. We must understand. We absorb him unto ourselves. Things clear, gradually. A picture forms. Clouded at first, then more sharply defined. We know many things. We know that the second attacker, for instance, was a Lilith, a Treif species we had long thought extinct; servants of the Ashmoret Laila, they had terrorised countless planets in the Great Amalek Rebellion of 2500 A.E., swooping in the night, devouring the flesh and bones of all who stood in their way … they were poison, Abominations, Treif … but we had swooped down on the enemy with swords of flame, with Av-9 starships capable of mass destruction, and the enemy was beaten away, to the rim, and the Lilith were destroyed to the last … or so we thought.

  We had been wrong. This was disturbing. We magnify the image, construct a memory.

  We observe.

  9.

  The two men ride in the shadow of tall rising cliffs. The canyon floor is yellowish-red sand. For a moment we are filled with a longing for home…

  The lizards move slowly, slowly in the heat. The men seem half-asleep in their saddles. They have been riding a long time, we think.

  We zoom in on them. Lichen grows in cracks in the stone walls of the canyon. There is Shemesh, and there is his companion, whose name is Shlem. He is little more than a boy, really. We know his kind. A desert rat, of the tribes who throng this polar region, paying only lip service to the one true faith. They are a wilful peoples, stubborn, independent, unruly. The boy belongs to a tribe we have had transactions with. They are loyal, for a price. In the polar caves, we know, reside insurgents, escaped Treif, all manners of lawless man and beast. But we cannot police them, we can only contain. As long as they remain unseen, we pretend they are not there.

  The boy, all this meanwhile, is speaking. He speaks in a neverending stream, while the Adjudicator’s head nods, less in agreement than with the movement of the beast on which he rides. We tune in, to try and see if it has any relevance to what we need to know:

  “… in Tel Asher. She said she’d wait but it’s been two cycles and our caravans have not yet crossed again. Do you think it would be wrong to…? But you asked about the prophet, this Ishmael. Few have seen him, but word spreads. People come to see him, he speaks from the caves, and they come back transformed, speaking the word of rebellion. But you asked about Treif, yes, many pass through here, seeking refuge, in the caves, they say, are entire species thought lost. They are not of the chosen, and they are not people, and yet I met one, once, near human in shape, and comely, though there is a distinct sense of repulsion, too, of alienation emanating from them, and yet it spoke, in the common tongue, and she – it, it spoke well.”

  The boy blushes. The man, Shemesh, stirs. “And you, do you believe the word of this Ishmael, too?”

  “Do you mean, am I leading you to your doom?”

  “The thought had crossed my mind.”

  “I am loyal.”

  “But you have heard him speak?”

  The boy shakes his head; and yet the question seems to have struck him strangely mute. He stares elsewhere, at the shadows, and says nothing more. We zoom back, until they shrink into two tiny dots, crawling along the immense wall of the cliff. We track their progress. Night falls. The sun rises. It becomes hard to follow, where they go. There are odd phenomena in that polar region, magnetic interference, and though this is, we think, our agent’s recollection, there are odd gaps in it, and we find that we cannot trace the route he’d taken…

  They reach, at last, a wall, and stop. The beasts look nervous. The two dismount. The boy does something, we cannot tell exactly what. It’s galling! And we realise someone has interfered with this memory – though surely that should be impossible.

  Something changes. Something opens. Like an eye in the rock. Like the spiral of a snail. Like the head of a flower.

  An entrance – cunningly disguised.

  Shemesh looks at the boy. He speaks, but what he says, we cannot tell. The boy nods—

  And a figure rises in the air above them, a sword of flame held in its hands. Shemesh turns, draws a gun, fires. The sword swings. The boy raises his arm. His face registers shock. The angel’s face is beatific. We know him, he was one of ours, we thought him lost long ago, on Ashmoret I, our angelic child, the sword whispers through the air and slices through the boy’s neck and severs his head from his shoulders.

  Shemesh fires, again and again. His gun is a silver Birobidzhan, an item of forbidden technology, with Av-9 destructive capabilities otherwise confined to warships. How Shemesh ever got hold of one, we do not know. One bullet grazes the angel’s wing and he screams, though we get no sound. The sword of flame flashes forth and it misses Shemesh’s head and cuts through the canyon’s rock wall as though it were nothing. Then Shemesh fires once more and the bullet catches the angel in the chest and it falls, wounded, to the sand. Shemesh goes and stands over him, over our child, our angel. He points the Birobidz
han at the angel’s head.

  They speak, we think. But we cannot tell what they say.

  Shemesh points the gun at the angel’s head.

  He pulls the trigger.

  10.

  The Testament According To Shemesh, Part III

  I fled through the tunnels.

  Three times, the angel had warned me, and three times they’d failed. I began to think that this was intended, but I did not understand the needless sacrifice. It was cooler in the tunnels. They were dug into reddish stone, and seams of a gleaming, mercurial metal ran through the walls, providing faint illumination. At odd intervals, alcoves had been dug into the side of the tunnels. As the tunnels continued to widen around them, I began to discern the curious inhabitants of the polar caves.

  They were, mostly, of the chosen. Who they were I did not know. They stared at me from their alcoves, young, old, all those who had turned their backs on the outside world. Amongst their number I began to discern the Treif: alien species, indigenous to this universe, which never knew the Creator. They were creatures who had never received the Torah.

  None approached me. None challenged me. I kept walking, deeper and deeper into the caves.

  For caves they were, I realised. The tunnels themselves were mere blood vessels in what was an unimaginably huge subterranean structure. I passed through enormous caverns where the ceiling glittered with precious stones and seams of minerals high above, and I encountered underground rivers where, along the banks, there stood permanent villages, solid constructions in wood and metal.

  I saw entire stone cities dug into the walls.

  I saw glimmering vistas and shanty towns, crystal lakes, and red stone cemeteries where rows of graves went on and on until they disappeared deep within the recesses of the rock. I began to realise we had been wrong, grievously wrong to dismiss this place, to put it out of our thoughts. This was not an isolated, easily contained outpost of lawlessness – but rather, it was a major base of operations for the Ashmoret Laila.

  None of the Treif approached me. I saw the group-mind molluscs of Ashmoret III; the life force creatures of the Arpad system, leech-creatures of pure energy humming as their force fields hung in the air; the little termite things of Mazikeen-5; in one vast lake I saw a behemoth fighting, or perhaps mating with, a Leviathan; on and on they went, these creatures of the Ashmoret Laila, yet none attacked me, for all that I was helpless in their presence. Instead, they moved out of my way, and watched me, almost respectfully, as I passed.

  But where was I going? It began to occur to me that I had always been on this path, and that my route was pre-determined before ever I had left New Jerusalem. An unseen hand moved me like a puppet along this route, and I felt the pull of my invisible quarry lead me along, through this vast and subterranean world under the pole.

  … at last I came to a temperate valley, smelling of vegetation.

  A brook bisected this cavern and disappeared into the wall. By the side of the rock there was a small, makeshift hut, a little like a Passover sukkah. It is the holiday we celebrate for passing from the old universe to this one, so long ago, and the presence of the sukkah was incongruous in these surroundings. Here, amidst the hidden denizens of the Ashmoret Laila, our Passover was no cause for celebration, but for mourning; for what we call Passover, they inexplicably call Invasion.

  I approached the hut, which is when I saw him. He sat on a rock, by the stream, and looked into the water. At the sound of my approach he turned, and smiled. I had the Birobidzhan already in my hand and pointing at him. I looked him over.

  “So you’re the prophet,” I said.

  “… call me Ishmael.”

  I stared. He was not what I had expected…

  “I have been waiting for you, for someone like you. I have been waiting a long time.”

  I stared.

  “Well? Are you going to shoot me?” he said.

  11.

  There is something wrong with the memory, something profoundly wrong. The prisoner twists and turns on the chains above the mikveh. We try to tune the image, to sharpen it. Our tentacles grate into his skin. We cause him a great deal of pain, we think. His organic form is too delicate to withstand such pressures. His body is coming apart at the seams. Yet we keep him alive. We need him, what he carries.

  We magnify. We see.

  Though it has human form, it is no human being.

  An Abomination.

  The picture grows fuzzy, then clear. We can hear their voices now, tinny in our ears.

  Shemesh: “You’re a robot?”

  Ishmael: “Not … exactly.”

  He looks at Shemesh, and smiles; and we have the sudden and awful feeling that he – it – is looking at us. It has silver skin and a humanoid shape, an expressive mouth, sharp, twinkling eyes. We had thought its kind extinct; like the rest.

  Shemesh: “Then what are you?”

  Ishmael: “It was Rabbi Abulafia, in the first millennium A.E., who posited a heresy.”

  Shemesh: “Yes?”

  “Things were different in that time. The worlds were wilder, the chosen were fewer, the laws were less rigid. There was an Exilarch, but back then it was just a person with a title, not the… thing it has since become. At that time there were still the indigenous worlds, of what you, in your ignorance, call the Ashmoret Laila, those of the night. They were not yet confined to the rim, pushed from their home worlds, made to hide in places such as this, in the forgotten nooks and crannies of the universe.”

  Shemesh: “Thank you for that history lesson.”

  Ishmael: “Which you need. This history has been erased.”

  Shemesh: “It is a lie.”

  Ishmael: “At that time, relations were different. There was trade, there were even friendships. And then Rabbi Abulafia posited the heresy for which he would be condemned in generations to come. For he suggested that we were not, after all, Treif. That though we were different life forms, we were still God’s chosen, too, just as you were.”

  Shemesh: “I was sent to kill you.”

  Ishmael smiles. Can a robot smile? We wonder, uneasily. We try to focus on him – it. He seems so at peace.

  Shemesh: “What are you?”

  Ishmael: “Let me show you.”

  He reaches for his chest, and opens it.

  Inside we see a glistening, organic thing. A complex network of tubing and blood. We think of the mind-molluscs of Ashmoret III. We note Shemesh’s eyes widen.

  They speak to him, we realise. Telepathically. These Abominations, these creatures we would have die a thousand deaths.

  Treif! We scream. Prohibited!

  We will Shemesh to shoot. To press the trigger! Kill it, kill them all, as you did all the others, boy!

  Yet Shemesh stands frozen.

  12.

  The Testament According To Shemesh, Part IV

  The creatures had me then. Once more I was transported to my last mission, hunted under the moons of Ashmoret III; for endless nights I ran through the low-lying, humid swamps, seeking shelter in caves and hidden alcoves, as the Treif spoke into my mind, whispering words of love and forgiveness and sorrow, and saying that this was all folly. Endlessly I ran, firing, and they died, but more and more came. Then the Vey Is Mir arrived, to rescue me off-planet, but this was not real, I knew, it had the logic of dream. It flew in the speed of light, and I could see the whole universe spread out before me, in the great galactic dark: New Jerusalem at its heart, emanating forth its influence and power. One by one I counted them, Masada, Shayol, Golgotha, Macabea, the twin system of Kadesh-Barnea, Capernaum where the green Abominations lived, Migdal and Amalek and Endor, Sodom, Gomorrah: the worlds of the Ashmoret Laila on the rim, dark, dark against the light of the chosen. Then it all receded, farther and farther away and back in time, back through the centuries and the millennia, contracting to a single point of light: a window.

  And a new thought, so alien I did not understand the words.

  Deep under the Weizmann Inst
itute in Rehovot, just south of Tel Aviv. Deep down underground, in the secret caverns only those with the highest security clearances even know about, a test is in progress. The technicians run cables to the diamond-shaped device and, behind their monitors, the scientists twitch nervously, checking and rechecking readings and projections.

  It is nearly time.

  A hush slowly settles over those assembled. It is accentuated by the low hum of the computers, the thrum of the backup generators, the hiss of water, the cough of a solitary smoker, the shuffling feet of the posted soldiers.

  When it happens, it happens all at once.

  The diamond-shaped device explodes in shards of cold light, like the screen before a movie projector. It shudders and then stabilises. The light fades.

  It’s black. They all crane over to see. It is dark, and immense, and then one pinprick of light and then another begin to glow in the black velvety darkness, and someone – it is never clear, afterwards, who – lets out a loud breath of wonder.

  “My God,” they say. “It’s full of—!”

  “Now do you see?” Ishmael said; but I saw nothing, I was blind, I was afraid.

  This is the last will and testament of the Adjudicator, Shemesh. The creatures released their hold on me. My finger tightened on the trigger of the gun. Ishmael watched me. And I remembered what his name meant, at that moment.

  “God will hear”, in the old tongue, of the place we left behind.

  I pulled the trigger.

  13.

  No! we howl. No!

  We see it. We see it now. Too late. Our Adjudicator’s mutilated corpse hangs from the chains that bind him. The tiny, blind micro-organisms of Shayol crawl over his skin, in his blood. He is devoured. We see it, we see it now. Too late.

  The soft explosion.

  The robot, falling back. The spongy bio-matter in its chest, exploding. The silent, watching Treif.

  Shemesh, looking down. A bemused expression on his face. The spores, we want to shout, the spores! He turns. He leaves. And all over Low Kadesh Orbit, satellites come alive and begin transmitting.