Servant of the Bones (27 page)

A white car came speeding to the spot, printed with red crosses and topped by swirling lights. The sirens were unspeakable. Might as well have been the picks through my ears, but there was no time to worry about my pain. She was still living, breathing, I had to tell her.

Into that car, they carried her, lifted high, like an offering over the crowd…Through the back doors she went inside, her eyes looking for something, for someone.

Gathering all my strength, I moved others out of my path. My hands—true and familiar and mine—hit the long glass windowed side of the white car. I looked into the glass. I felt my nose against it. I saw her! Her big sleepy eyes full of dreamy death, I saw her.

And she said aloud, I heard it, a whisper rising like a whiff of smoke.

“The Servant…Azriel, the Servant of the Bones!”

The door was open. The men ministering to her bent low.

“What is it, honey? What did you say?”

“Don’t make her speak.”

She stared at me through the glass, and she said it again, I saw her lips move. I heard her voice. I heard her thought. “Azriel,” she whispered. “The Servant of the Bones!”

“They’re dead, my darling!” I cried out. No one around me, pressing as hard as I pressed to see her, cared what I said.

She and I, we looked at each other. Then her soul and spirit blazed for one instant, visible and together, the full shape of
her body over her, hair like wings, face expressionless or turned away from the earth forever, who can know, and then she was gone, risen, in a blinding light. I ducked from the light, then tried to see it again. But it was gone.

The body lay an empty sack.

The doors slammed shut.

The siren split my ears again.

The car roared into the stream, forcing other engines out of its path, people shifted and sighed and groaned around me. I stood stock-still on the pavement. Her soul was gone.

I looked up. Knees pushed against my leg. A foot came down hard upon my own. I wore the same kind of dirty string shoe as my enemy. I was almost toppled from the shallow curb.

The car was beyond my sight, and the Evals dead not a hundred feet away, yet no one here in this melee knew, so crowded was it, and I thought—without context, without reason—of what was said about Babylon after Cyrus conquered it, that funny remark which the Greek historian Xenophon had made, or was it Herodotus, that so big was Babylon and so dense with people that it took two whole days before people in the middle of the city knew that it had been taken at all.

Well, not me!

A man said, “Did you know who that was?” This was English, New York talk, and I turned just as if I were alive and I were going to answer, only there were tears in my eyes. I wanted to say,

“They killed her.” Nothing came out of my mouth but I had a mouth and the man was nodding as if he saw the tears. My God, help me. This man wanted to comfort me. Someone else spoke:

“That was Gregory Belkin’s daughter, that’s who that was,” the man said, “That was Esther Belkin.”

“Belkin’s daughter—”

“…Temple of the Mind.”

“Temple of the Mind of God. Belkin.”

What did these words mean to me?

Master! Where are you? Name yourself or show yourself! Who has called me? Why have I been made to witness this!

“Gregory Belkin’s little girl, the Minders—”

Which way?

I began to fade. I felt it swift and terrible as it always is, as surely as if the Master had commanded all the artificial and gathered particles of me, as it is written,
Return now to your place
. Just for a moment, I clung to the storm of matter, commanding it to sheathe me, but my cry was a wail. I stared down at my hands, my feet, such filthy shoes, cloth and string and leather shoes, slippers more than shoes, shoes on the pavement:

“Azriel, stay alive!” came the voice from my mouth.

“Take it easy, son,” said the man beside me. And he looked at me as if he felt sorry for me. He lifted his arm to embrace me. I put my hand up. I saw the tears.

But the wind had come, the wind that comes for all spirits. I was losing my hold.

The man was looking for me and he couldn’t find me, and he didn’t know why, and thought it was his own confusion.

Then he and all those with him—and the great city—was gone too.

I was nothing now, nothing.

I struggled to see the crowd below, but I couldn’t find the spots where the Evals lay dead in their blood still or were being taken away with such care as the queen with her dark hair, the goddess who had died seeing me. She had said it, I heard it, she had said, “Azriel, the Servant of the Bones.” I had heard her as a spirit hears, though the man in the car with her might not hear something so small and tragic as her whisper.

The wind took me. The wind was filled with the wail of the souls, faces bearing down upon me, hands seeking to grip me, and turning my back on it as always, I let go. I saw the last dim outline of my hands for one instant; I felt the form of arms and legs; I felt the tears on my face. Yes, I felt that. Then I was a goner.

Into the bones, Azriel
. I was safe.

So there you have the picture! Masterless, risen, to witness
this, to avenge it? Why? The darkness overcame me like a drug. Safe, yes, but I didn’t want to be safe; I wanted to find the man who had sent those Evals to kill her.

T
ime passed.

I felt it more intensely than usual. I knew that I was listening. I was there. I knew what the world was now, more or less, as always. Bear with me. I knew what men and women knew—those whom I’d seen and touched in the New York street.

The particulars made a moral impression. Emotion gradually accompanied the synthesis of knowledge. Ghosts don’t have to interpret Ghosts don’t have to be amazed, or shocked.

But the mind of the ghost, unfettered by flesh, can gather to itself indiscriminately and perhaps infinitely the sum of what is shared or valued by nearby human minds.

Awake once more in the darkness, I grasped the general and the spectacular—that we were nearing the end of the twentieth century of what men call the common era, that fossil fuel and generated electricity were indispensable to the everyday methods of eating, drinking, sleeping, communicating, traveling, building, and fighting, that micromachines of exquisite circuitry could store information in abundance, and that vivid moving pictures in which people appeared and spoke could be transmitted by waves or over tiny delicate fibers more precious than spun glass.

Waves. The air was full of waves. Full of voices speaking both privately and publicly—from telephones, through radios, televisions. The world was as fully surrounded by voices now as it was by air itself.

And the earth was indeed round. Not a mile of it remained uncharted, unowned, or unnamed. No part of it lay beyond
communication because the mysterious waves of telephones, radios, and televisions could be bounced off satellites in space and back to earth again at any locale. Sometimes the television pictures and voices were of people and actions taking place at the very moment they were being transmitted: known as live TV.

Chemistry had reached unprecedented heights, achieving through extraction, purification, analysis, and new combinations all manner of new substances, materials, drugs. The very process of combining had been transformed so that there was now physical change, chemical change, chain reaction, chemical reaction, and fusion, to name but a few. Materials had been broken down and made into new materials and the process was without limit.

Science had surpassed the alchemist’s dreams.

Diamonds had found their way into the bits of drills, yet people still wore them as ornaments and they commanded millions of dollars, which was, apparently a preferred currency, American dollars, though the world was full of currencies and languages, and people from Hong Kong spoke to people in New York merely by pressing a few buttons. The catalog of synthetic materials and subsequent products had evolved beyond the memory or understanding of the common man so that almost nobody could define for you the ingredients of the nylon shirt he wore, or the plastic calculator in his pocket.

Of course some conclusions—even for me—were inevitable. A car or plane dependent on the combustion of fossil fuel can explode rather than move forward. Bombs can be sent without pilots from one country to another to destroy even the biggest cities with the highest buildings. Hardly anywhere in the world did the sea not taste just a little of gasoline.

New York was very far north of the equator, that was obvious, and one could say it was the capital, in this time, in the Western world.

The Western world. This is where I have found myself. And what is the Western world? Apparently, the Western world was the direct cultural legacy of the Hellenism of
Alexander the Great, its concepts of justice and purity infinitely amplified and complicated but never really subverted by Christianity of varying kinds—from crude screaming mystic acceptance of Jesus to dense theological sects which still argue over the nature of the Trinity, that is, whether or not there are three persons in one God. Scarcely a single part of the Western world had not been enriched and invigorated by an immensely creative and relentlessly spiritual Judaism. Jewish scientists, philosophers, doctors, merchants, and musicians were among the most celebrated of the era.

The drive to excel was taken for granted, as it was in Babylon. Even by those in despair.

Natural law and law arrived at by reason had become common values, revealed law and inherited law on the other hand had become suspect and subjected to argument, and all human fives now were “created equal.” That is, the life of a worker in the fields was as precious as the life of the titular Queen of England or her elected Prime Minister.

Technically, legally, there were no slaves.

Few were certain as to the meaning of life, as few today as there had been in those times when I was alive.

Once in the scriptorium as a human boy I had read in Sumerian the lament: “Who has ever known the will of heaven?” Any man or woman in the streets of New York today might have spoken the same words.

This Western world, this legacy of Hellenism, infused with ever evolving Judaism and Christianity, had flourished most dramatically in northern climes of the planet both in Europe and in America, harnessing somehow the tenacity and the ferocity of those taller, shaggier, and often fairer dwellers of the woodlands and the steppes, who did not learn to be humans in Eden, but rather in lands where summer was always followed by the brutality of cold and snow.

All the Western world, including its most tropical outposts, lived now as if winter might at any moment descend, isolate, even destroy.

From towns near the northern polar ice cap all the way down to the tip of the jungles of Peru, people thrived in
enclaves designed and sustained by machine, microchip, and microbiology, surrounded by surpluses of energy, fuel, finery, and food.

Nobody ever wanted to run out of anything ever again, and this included information.

Storage. Archives. Information banks. Hard disk, floppy disk, backup tape, hard copy—everything worth anything was somehow duplicated in one form or another and stored.

It was basically the same theory that had created the archives of tablets in Babylon which I had once studied. Not difficult to understand.

But in spite of all these dazzling advances, amid which Esther Belkin had somehow drawn me to her like a magnet, and seemed even now to draw my consciousness to her, there existed still “the Old World.”

Follow the stream into the marshes, into the mountains, into the desert.

“The East” was what they called it, or the Third World, or the Undeveloped Countries, or the Backward Countries, or the Primitive Areas—and it covered continents still where the bedouin in timeless white garments walked his camel through the sandstorm, happy as ever to live amid sun-bright desolation. Only now he might carry with him a battery-operated television set, and a can of a fire-making chemical called Sterno so that when he pitched his tent, he could listen to the Koran read over the television as his food was heated without the use of wood or coal.

In the rice paddies, in the fields of India, in the marshes of Iraq, in the villages the world over, men and women stooped to gather the crop as they had since the dawn of time.

Huge modern urban outposts had arisen amid the millions of Asia, yet the vast majority of tribes, fanners, weavers, vendors, mothers, priests, beggars, and children remained beyond the reach of Western invention, abundance, medicine, and sanitation.

Sanitation was key.

Sanitation involved the chemical purification of human waste and industrial waste, the purification of drinking water
and water for bathing—the nullification of filth in all forms and the maintenance of an environment in which one could be born, give birth, grow up, and die—in maximum security against human or industrial or chemical contamination of any kind.

Nothing mattered as much as sanitation. Plagues had vanished from the earth due to sanitation.

In the “West” sanitation was taken for granted; in the “East” sanitation was viewed with suspicion, or people were simply too numerous to be made to conform to the inevitable habits required by it.

Disease was rampant in the jungles; in the marshes; in the deep pockets of vast cities or in the wilderness where the peasants, the workers, the fellaheen, still lived as they always had.

Hunger. There was plenty and there was hunger. There was food thrown away in the streets of New York and there were those starving in Asia on television programs. It was a matter of distribution.

Indeed, that there was as much organization amid all of this change was the modern mystery—that so much could happen and that so much could remain the same.

Everywhere were dramatic contrasts which could both confuse and delight the eye. The holy men of India walked naked beside the roaring automobiles in the teeming streets of Calcutta. People in Haiti lay on the ground starving to death as they watched planes fly overhead.