The Unincorporated Woman (28 page)

On her exit, she was ambushed by a small group of children anxiously waiting for an autograph. As a matter of course, she scanned them for any concealed weapons. Once satisfied, she held up her pinkie and then pressed it firmly on the DijAssists held in their outstretched hands. She’d learned early on that the pinkie was for autographs; the thumb and index finger, for legal matters. She shooed the children away and then took the private lift to the Presidential suites.

Within moments, she arrived at the portal and stood stock-still, letting the scanners do their work. When she got the all clear from security, she continued down the hall until she stood in front of Rabbi’s suite. It informed her that he was accepting visitors, and so she stepped forward into the permiawall. It instantly melted around the shape of her bolt upright figure. She was momentarily surprised that the room’s ambient light hadn’t wavered—a typical result of a permiawall’s reconfiguration.
He must be alone,
she thought.

Sure enough, Rabbi sauntered out of his bedroom. He was wearing a large, white knitted skullcap and had a traditional Jewish prayer shawl wrapped over his shoulders. His left biceps had a small black box attached to it by way of thin black leather strap. The strap continued down his arm, encircling it from elbow to wrist seven times and ended up wrapped around the center of his hand. In his other hand, he held a small, palm-sized black box similar to the one on his arm. Two thin, black leather straps connected to that box hung loosely beneath his hand. Rabbi smiled warmly in her direction while beckoning her to have a seat. Agnes found a parlor chair and settled into it, but rather stiffly and at attention—back upright, hands on thighs. Without saying a word, Rabbi folded the thin straps in on themselves and tucked them beneath the small box in his hand. He kissed the box and placed it in a small pouch, then unwrapped the phylacteries on his arm and bundled that up, kissing and packing it in much the same way as the first. He then pulled the shawl from his shoulders, folded it neatly into a square shape, then slipped that too, with the phylactery pouch, into a larger, embroidered velvet bag. When he was satisfied that the ritual had been completed, he looked over to Agnes.

“Thank you for your patience,” he said.

Agnes tilted her head. She’d grown used to the man’s strange customs but couldn’t bring herself to respect them. The door remained open behind her because of his tribe’s “laws of modesty.” Damsah forbid she be in a room alone with him. Who knew what depravity she was capable of? She had to suppress a laugh at how ludicrous that notion was.

“Mr. Secretary. The President will be arriving earlier than originally planned.”

Rabbi gave a shrug. “I take it T-5 won out.”

“Yes.”

“May it be the worst setback she ever suffers,” he said, coming over to the parlor area and sitting down. “Mind if I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“A
personal
question?”

“Tell you what, Mr. Secretary—”

“Please, just ‘Rabbi’ in here. I understand you’ll need to stick to formalities in other settings.”

“Okay,
Rabbi
. I’ll make you a deal. Feel free to ask me anything you like. Just don’t expect to like every answer I give.”

He nodded, smiling bemusedly.

“I was wondering, then, if perhaps … if perhaps we are related.”

Agnes’s already rigid shoulder blades bent back farther, and her lips, which had been tightly pressed together, parted slightly in surprise. At least now she understood the reason for Rabbi’s earlier glances. It had been curiosity and not, as she’d earlier suspected, lechery. She loosened her shoulders, leaned back on the chair, and crossed her legs.

“Not many in our family ever came out here … well, not here specifically, but the Belt. It’s not impossible, though.”

“Yes, well, you may have misunderstood me. I suppose I should’ve been more direct. What I wanted to know was—” He paused. “—are you Jewish?”

Agnes laughed. “Am I what?”

“Jewish.”

“I’m not even sure I know what that means, much less if it’s something I am.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Sorry.”

“No need to apologize,” he said, exhaling heavily. “You see, it’s just that your name, Goldstein, well, it’s a very Jewish last name.”

“I’ll have to take your word, Rabbi, but no one’s ever said anything about it to me, one way or another.”

“I don’t suppose you’d know if anyone in your family was Jewish at some point.”

“Again, it’s possible, but even if it were true, not really something we’d want to advertise, stigma and all.” Agnes cocked her head. “Is this going somewhere, Rabbi?”

“Yes, but not quite how I’d planned. I’m sorry for wasting your time, Agent Goldstein. You don’t have to humor me. If you’ve got other things to do—”

“Rabbi, my job isn’t limited to making sure no one takes you down, and I can assure you there’s a fully functioning brain between these shoulders. In the few minutes we have left before the President arrives and sucks the air out of this room, I suggest you take advantage of it.”

Rabbi pulled at his beard and considered the offer. He looked up at Agnes and smiled sadly. “Why not?” he asked, letting his words hang. His usually inquisitive eyes were pensive. “My problem is one of survival.”

“Get in line, Rabbi.”

“Yes, I know, I know, but in my case, it’s not just
my
hide I’m worried about. It’s that of my people. There just aren’t that many of us left. Around forty thousand, to be exact.”

“Well, I’m sure there must be more now,” offered Agnes. “From the Astral Awakening alone, the numbers of newly faithful must be in the hundreds of millions.”

“Over a billion by last count,” confirmed Rabbi.

“Well, some of ’em gotta be yours, right?”

“A great deal, I suspect.”

“So,” she said, lips slightly pursed, “problem solved.”

“If only. The problem’s not with them, Agent Goldstein, it’s with us. We’ve never been what you’d call a proselytizing religion. Until now, that hasn’t really been a problem.”

“Now?”

“Alhambra.”

“Yes, of course. I’m so sorry.”

A long silence preceded Rabbi’s words. “I …
we
all lost many friends that day.” He sighed heavily. “A great many friends, I’m afraid. But it was a clarion call.”

Agnes leaned in. “For what?”

“Asteroids can be easily obliterated. Alhambra, a single rock with more people than there are Jews in the solar system, went in seconds. Seconds!” A long silence followed as he looked down at his feet and ran his fingers through the curls of his thick black hair. When he finally looked up, his eyes were sad and his smile, forlorn. “I may be the Secretary of Relocation, Agent Goldstein, but I have yet another, more important role: that of leader of my people. And if I don’t do something about the situation soon, it’s quite possible I will be their last.”

The two stared at each other in silent regard—the spy who’d, for a time, lost her identity and the rabbi desperately trying to save one.

A sudden look of determination burned fiercely in Agnes’s eyes. “Listen to me, Rabbi. You’re the effective head of one of the oldest known religions in the solar system at a time of a major religious renaissance. Of the billion you mentioned, there must be millions beating down your door.”

“Yes,” conceded Rabbi, “around ten.”

Agnes’s relief was palpable. “So?”

“It’s complicated. By law, if any one of those millions do decide they’d like to convert, it’s incumbent on us to dissuade them.”

“To what? How?”

“Well, for men, there’s the circumcision to consider. It must be done by hand, not by transformative nanobots. That usually clears out a bunch.”

“I would imagine! Surely, there are other remedies.”

“Yes, actually—there are. Find the Jews already out there. Jews who don’t know they already possess a birthright.”

Agnes cinched her brow.

“Since our law dictates the mother must be Jewish, we can determine matrilineal descent with phylogenetic testing.”

“Great! How many have you found?”

“One point five million, so far.”

“Well, correct me if I’m wrong, Rabbi, but one point five million’s a helluva lot better than forty thousand.”

Rabbi coughed uncomfortably and shot Agnes an apologetic look.

“What now?”

“Matrilineal descent is only as good as the matron who passes it down. For example, if that matron has fundamentally altered her genetic makeup, she is
Tuhmay
’ or impure and can no longer be considered Jewish.”

“But you said you tested them already!”

“Phylogenetically, yes. But that can only determine the efficacy of the matrilineal line. Once descent is confirmed, we test for genetic malfeasance.”

“To find what?”

“Well, something like Tay-Sachs disease.”

“Which is?”

“A particularly horrible disease endemic to the Jewish people.”

“Ah, I see. So if the matron didn’t remove it, you wouldn’t let her in.”

“No, if they
did
remove it, we don’t let them in.”

Agnes let out an exasperated grunt that sent Rabbi’s eyebrows flying upward.

“Are you all right, Agent Goldstein?”

“No,” she carped, frustration evident in her voice, “I’m not. But as Damsah is my witness, I’m not leaving here until I understand this crazy house of cards you seem to have built for yourself.”

“I have built nothing. I am a servant of God.”

“Fine, you’re a servant. So if you wouldn’t mind, will you
please
explain to me how it is that you … or God prefers to have babies born with an apparently horrible disease?”

“Oh no, not born with. God forbid. We have no problem correcting such horrors in utero.”

“What then?”

“Please understand, Agent Goldstein, the malady is inconsequential. If the matron corrected for baldness in the gene pool, or poor eyesight, those, too, would render her and her descendants ineligible.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

“Bear with me. Nobody experiencing the Black Death in the 1400s would’ve suspected the importance of cleanliness on health, or those who experienced the Slaughterhouse Plague in the twenty-first century, the insanity of overmedicated cattle. Ignorance in both cases led to the wide-scale deaths of untold millions. Yet God’s supposedly antiquated laws on cleanliness and kashrut preserved my people from both scourges. Likewise, I don’t know what God might have in store for a human being carrying the Tay-Sachs gene. For all I know, that one gene saves humanity fifteen generations from now.”

“But what of the child?”

“Because his life’s in immediate danger, we can fix it. But the gene itself, it must be allowed to move on. So please understand, Agent Goldstein, this process of testing is not purity for hubris’ sake, it’s purity for modesty’s sake.”

Agnes nodded her head and finally relaxed. “I get it.”

Rabbi’s face lit up warmly. “Thank you, Agent Goldstein. You don’t know how much that means to me.”

She tilted her head toward Rabbi and smiled. “So how many does that leave you?

“Fifty thousand.”

Agnes’s right brow rose slightly. “Okay, well, that gives you a good ninety thousand total. At a minimum, you’ve more than doubled your population.”

“Well…”

“Oh, for the love of Damsah. Now what?”

“Once it was explained everything they’d have to go through in order to be Jewish, some of them backed out.”

“Some of them?”

He smiled meekly. “Forty-eight thousand.”

Agnes threw up her hands. “From
ten million
you end up with two thousand? Are you guys
trying
to become extinct?”

Before he could answer, a ruckus was heard in the hallway. Agnes checked her DijAssist and saw that the President had arrived. Time to move her man.

Presidential Suite, Oberon’s Palace

The President, regal even in less-formal attire, waited a moment for the press, visitors, and mediabots to sort themselves out. When she saw that all were in place, she rose from her chair and casually made her way across the room to where Rabbi had been waiting.

“Mr. Secretary,” she began, “it’s good to see you again. Especially in a place where your leadership has done so much good.”

“You give me too much credit, Madam President.”

“Perhaps.” The President brushed past his denial. “However, Oberon Settlement’s logical and orderly movement to a superior and much-needed location is because of your wise counsel and patient intervention. Both I, as representative of the Outer Alliance, and the citizens of Oberon would like to show their appreciation by giving you this key to the settlement.” Sandra held out her hand as a large key was placed into it by an unseen assistant.

“Thank you, Madam President.” Rabbi took the key and held it up high for the press to see.

“Keep up the good work, Rabbi. And you might want to consider getting yourself a bigger key rack.”

There was a smattering of laughter.

Sergeant Holke appeared at the President’s side, leaned in, and whispered into her ear. The President nodded dutifully as she took in the information. She whispered something to the sergeant, who nodded and then turned around to impassively face the audience.

“Well, friends, it appears that the UHF Fleet, under the command of Admiral Trang, has just left Mars orbit.”

The room came to life in a flurry of gasps and whispers.

“Information is currently limited,” she added in a voice devoid of any panic, “but rest assured, the Blessed One, our very own Admiral Black, has the situation well in hand and, I’m informed, is within intercept distance. I realize it’s probably out of form to say this, but you’ll just have to chalk it up to my learning curve—Admiral Black, it is with great honor and pride that I say, go kick some UHF ass!” The room broke out into applause at a smiling President O’Toole. Sergeant Holke, in a calm but firm voice, informed the room that they would have to clear out immediately and further that anyone caught out of an approved sector would be considered an enemy and dealt with as such. The room cleared fast.