Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (240 page)

With soap from their copias, they washed the grime and sweat off and returned to the land to dry themselves with other towels. Mix watched Bithniah. She was a short dark woman with a full bosom, a narrow waist and shapely legs, but with too broad hips. She had long thick glossy blueblack hair and a pretty face, if you liked long noses. Her eyes were huge and dark, and even during the flight they had given Mix some curious glances. He told himself that Yeshua had better watch her; she looked to him like an alleycat in mating season.

Yeshua now, he was something different. The only resemblance he had to Mix was physical. He was quiet and withdrawn, except for that one outburst against Kramer, and he seemed to be always thinking of something far away. Despite his silence, he gave an impression of great authority—rather, of a man who had once had it but was now deliberately suppressing it. Or, perhaps, of a man who rejected all claim to authority.

“You know,” Mix said to Yeshua, “shortly before I came to Kramer’s territory, something puzzling happened to me. A little dark man rushed at me crying out in a foreign tongue. He tried to embrace me; he was weeping and moaning, and he kept repeating a name over and over. I had a hell of a time convincing him he’d made a mistake. Maybe I didn’t. He tried to get me to take him along, but I didn’t want anything to do with him. He made me nervous, the way he kept on staring at me.

“I forgot about him until just now. I’ll bet he thought I was you. Come to think of it, he did say your name quite a few times.”

Yeshua came out of his absorption. “Did he say what his name was?”

“I don’t know. He tried four or five different languages on me, including English, and I couldn’t understand him in any of them. But he did repeat a word more than once. Mattithayah. Mean anything to you?”

Yeshua did not reply. He shivered and draped a long towel over his shoulders. Mix knew that something inside Yeshua was chilling him. The heat of the daytime, which reached about 80 degrees at high noon (there were no thermometers), faded away slowly. The high humidity of the valley retained it until the invariable rains fell a few hours after midnight. Then the temperature dropped swiftly to an estimated 65°, and stayed there until dawn. Sergeant Charming led them to their residences. These were small one-room bamboo huts with roofs thatched with the giant leaves of the irontree. Inside each was a table, several chairs, and beds, all of bamboo. Charming bade them good night and walked off, but Mix knew that he would probably give orders to sentinels stationed out of sight nearby.

IV

Mix fell asleep at once but wakened as soon as the rays of the sun fell on his face through the open window. He rose, put on his kilt, and splashed water from a broad shallow fired-clay basin on the table. He did not have to bother about shaving, for all men had been resurrected permanently beardless.

He took a roll of paper (the copias provided this, too), and found his desired destination by following his nose. This was a long bamboo hut built over a deep ditch.

He found that, if daily bathing was not widespread, other sanitary customs were observed. The deposits were hauled up at regular intervals to be dropped in a deep canyon (aptly and directly named) in the mountains. Mix asked if there was any sulfur in the area. He was told that there was none. That explained to him why these people did not extract nitrate crystals from processed excrement and mix it with charcoal and sulfur to make gunpowder. In other areas of the valley, bombs and rockets in bamboo cases were common.

On returning to his cottage, he intended to invite Yeshua and his woman to go with him to the nearest charging stone. A few paces from their door, he halted. They were arguing loudly in their heavily accented English, Later, he wondered why they did not use Hebrew or Aramaic, which would have been ununderstandable to any overhearer. Discreet inquiry would reveal that Bithniah did not know Aramaic. Also, her Hebrew was too archaic and had too many Egyptian and colloquial words, which later had dropped out of the language. Moreover, Yeshua knew Hebrew only as a liturgical and scholarly tongue and could converse in it only with hesitation. The only common speech to both was 17-century English, and then-use of it was, to Tom Mix, a half-garble.

“I will not go up with you to live in the mountains!” Bithniah said. “I don’t want to be alone, to sit on top of a rock with no one but a walking tomb to talk to. I love people, and I love to talk. No, I will not go!”

“I won’t stop you from going down into the plains to talk,” Yeshua said. “Now do I plan to live entirely as a hermit. I’ll have to work, probably as a carpenter, but I don’t…”

* * * *

Here Mix couldn’t understand the next few sentences. He had no trouble comprehending most of Bithniah’s retort, however.

“I don’t know why I stick to you! But I know why you want me around! It’s just because I knew Mosheh and Aaron and I was on the march from Egypt! Your only interest in me is to drain me of all I know about your great hero Mosheh! Well, let me tell you, Yeshua, he was a louse! He was always preaching against adultery and strange women, but I happen to know what he practiced! Believe me, I was one of the women!”

Yeshua said, “I am interested in what you have to say about your life, although there are times when I wish I’d never heard a word of it. But great is the truth.”

Here he continued in Hebrew or Aramaic, evidently quoting something.

“Stick to English!” Bithniah screamed. “I got so fed up with the so-called holy men always quoting proverbs and the holy writings, and all the time their own sins stank like a camel! Furthermore, you know all about me, you told me nothing about yourself. All I know is that you were a holy man, or you claimed to be. Maybe you’re telling me the truth. I think that your religion ruined you. Certainly you’re no good except when you take that dreamgum and you’re out of your mind. What kind of a man is that, I ask you? Personally, I think…”

Yeshua’s voice, suddenly so low that Mix could not make out the words, interrupted Bithniah. Mix strained to hear, then shrugged. He glanced at the sun. A few minutes more, and the stones would give up their energy. If they did not hurry, they’d have to go breakfastless, unless they wanted to eat fish, of which he was very tired.

He knocked loudly on
the door. The two within fell silent. Bithniah swung the door open violently, but she managed to smile at him as if nothing had occurred. “Yes, I know. “We’ll be with you at once.”

“Not I,” said Yeshua. “I don’t feel hungry now.”

“That’s right!” Bithniah said loudly. “Try to make me feel guilty, blame your upset stomach on me. Well, I’m hungry, and I’m going to eat, and you can sit here and sulk for all I care!”

“No matter what you say, I am going to live in the mountains.”

“Go ahead! You must have something to hide! Who’s after you? Who are you that you’re so afraid of meeting people? Well, I have nothing to hide!”

* * * *

Bithniah picked up her copia bhy the handle and stormed out. Mix walked along with her and tried to make pleasant conversation. But she was too angry to cooperate. As it was, they had just come into sight of the nearest mushroom-shaped rock, located between two hills, when blue flames soared up from the top and a roar like a lion’s came to them. Bithniah stopped and burst into her native language. Obviously she was cursing. Mix contented himself with one short word.

“Got a smoke?” she said.

“In my hut. But you’ll have to pay me back later. I usually trade my cigarettes for liquor.”

“Cigarettes? That’s your word for pipekins?”

He nodded and they returned to his hut. Yeshua was not in sight. Mix purposely left his door open. He trusted neither Bithniah nor himself.

Bithniah glanced at the door. “You must think me a fool. Right next door to Yeshua!”

Mix grinned. “You never lived in Hollywood.” He gave her a cigarette. She used the lighter that the copia had furnished: a thin metallic box which extended a whitely glowing wire when pressed on the side.

“You must have overheard us,” she said. “Both of us were shouting our fool heads off. He’s a very difficult man. Sometimes he frightens me, and I don’t scare easily. There’s something very deep—and very different, almost alien, maybe unhuman, about him. Not that he isn’t very kind or that he doesn’t understand people. He does, too much so.

“But he seems so aloof most of the time. Sometimes, he laughs very much, and he makes me laugh, for he has a wonderful sense of humor. Other times, though, he delivers harsh judgments, so harsh they hurt me because I know that I’m included in the indictment. Now, I don’t have any illusions about men or women. I know what they are and what to expect. But I accept this. People are people, although they often pretend to be better than they are. But expect the worst, I say, and you now and then get a pleasant surprise because you don’t get the worst.”

“That’s pretty much my attitude,” Mix said. “Even horses aren’t predictable, and men are much more complicated. So you can’t always tell what a horse or a man’s going to do or what’s driving him. One thing you can bet on. You’re Number One to yourself, but to the other guy, Number One is himself or herself. If somebody acts like you’re Number One, and she’s sacrificing herself for you, she’s just fooling herself.”

“You sound as if you’d had some trouble with your wife.”

“Wives. That, by the way, is one of the things I like about this world. You don’t have to go through any courts or pay any alimony when you split up. You just pick up your bucket, towels and weapons, and take off. No property settlements, no in-laws, no kids to worry about.”

“I bore twelve children,” she said. “All but three died before they were two years old. Thank God, I don’t have to go through that here.”

“Whoever sterilized us knew what he was doing,” Mix said. “If we could have kids, this valley’d be jammed tight as a pig-trough at feeding time.

He moved close to her and grinned. “Anyway, we men still have our guns, even if they’re loaded with blanks.”

“You can stop where you are,” she said, although she was still smiling. “Even if I leave Yeshua, I may not want you. You’re too much like him.”

“I might show you the difference,” he said, but he moved away from her and picked up a piece of dried fish from his leather bag. Between bites, he asked her about the Mosheh she had mentioned in her quarrel.

“Would you get angry or beat me if I told you the truth?” she said.

“No, why should I?” he asked.

“Because I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut about my Earthly life. The first time I told about it, I was beaten badly and thrown into the river. The Englishmen I was talking to were, what were they called? Oh, yes, Puritans! They were outraged; I was lucky not to have been tortured and burned.”

“I’d like to hear the real story,” he said. “I could care less if it’s not what I learned in Sunday school.”

“You won’t tell anybody else around here?”

“Cross my heart and promise to fall off Tony.”

V

She looked blankly at him, then decided that he was giving a twentieth-century oath. She was, she said, born in the province of Goshen of the land of Egypt. Her tribe was that of Judah and they were not, technically, slaves. The Hebrews had originally come in to work for the state under contract. Conditions were not as bad as those depicted in the Book of Exodus.

She had never, of course, read this book or any of the Judaic scriptures. The first she had heard of them was from the inhabitants of the area of the rivervalley in which she had been resurrected.

There was a mixture of religions in the several tribes of Goshen. Her mother worshipped El, the original god of the Hebrews, among others. Her father favored the gods of Egypt, but he occasionally participated in the rites of El. She knew Mosheh (or Moses, as the English called him). She grew up with him. He was a wild kid (her own words), half-Hebrew, half-Egyptian. When Mosheh was about ten he had been adopted by an Egyptian priest who had lost his two sons. Five years later, Mosheh was back with the Hebrews. His fosterfather had been arrested and charged with practicing the forbidden religion of Aton, founded by the accursed Pharaoh Akhnaton. The fosterfather was executed.

Years later, Mosheh announced that the Hebrews had been taken under custody by an unknown god, Yahweh of the Midianites. This came as a surprise to the Hebrews, most of whom had never heard of Yahweh. But Mosheh was a man who had seen a vision; he seemed truly to burn as brightly with the light of Yahweh as the burning bush of which he told. And he offered them release from their bondage.

“What about the plagues, the river of blood, the slaying of the firstborn of the Egyptians?”

Bithniah laughed. “I saw nothing like that. There was a plague raging through the land, but it was killing as many Hebrews as Egyptians.”

“What about the tablets of stone?”

“Mosheh did write the commandments on two tablets, but I couldn’t read them. Three-fourths of the tribe couldn’t. I never learned to read or write anything except a few simple Egyptian signs.”

* * * *

Mix wanted to question her further, but he was interrupted by a soldier. Stafford wanted to see the three of them. Yeshua came out of his hut at the summons and followed them without saying a word.

They entered the Council Hall and were greeted by Stafford. He asked them pointblank if they intended to stay.