He, She and It (6 page)
The public debate is held on a Sunday before a large crowd. What Judah has to do is try for a tie in front of a hostile and rabid audience. This is exactly what he achieves, by a fingernail’s grace, counterpunching, attacking, but always breaking off the assault before victory. It is a long dance in the sun of the crowded square, a dance of swords and fire. A dance that becomes ever more technical, so that the crowd begins to dwindle as the Maharal coaxes Thaddeus from the perch of rhetoric into the gnarly labyrinth of philosophy, theory, quotation, arguments about translations. Thaddeus is seduced into quarrels about ever finer details propped by quotations and petty distinctions. By the time he pulls free, the time agreed upon is over. No one has won, and Thaddeus is furious, for too late he recognizes the Maharal’s strategy—to entice him into technical arguments boring to a crowd that longs for blood, to entice him into academic argument that treats the Maharal as an equal rather than as Satan personified. The crowd came for a tournament and witnessed a seminar.
The Maharal has no time to rejoice in his muted victory. Easter is a dangerous time, and Easter is coming. Mobs often form at Easter and attack. At Easter prominent Jews may be seized and tortured till they confess or die.
Judah prays and he fasts and he aligns himself with the highest spheres according to the disciplines of the kabbalah, through the rungs of all the emanations toward the all that is nothingness, the Ein Sof. Thaddeus was angry and will find his revenge. In Judah the tzaddik—the righteous—and the hasid—the pious—come together. A mystic and a doer, active, passionate, driven, Judah can never close himself in his meditation and forget the community. He prays and fasts and fasts and prays for an answer to the danger he can smell, can taste.
Then on the seventh day of his fast, the Maharal falls asleep at his desk piled high with Hebrew pages, old and new books and fair-copied manuscripts from fifty scholars. He dreams he is standing in the Jewish cemetery, crammed with its tilted stones like the pages falling open of a fat book. Everywhere people are wailing and hastily digging graves. He sees a hill of pale bodies all flung on each other. He is facing the graceful Pinkas synagogue, and as he stares at its wall, a hand of light traces the word
GOLEM
. Right to left it keeps tracing that word.
Then a voice that burns his ears calls his name once, twice. “Judah, you must make a golem of clay to rise and walk the ghetto and save your people. Do not falter. Rise and make a golem.”
Yod, the ability to see visions is one of those human talents that flourishes when rewarded by a society and withers in most of us when punished by society. That is, whether the ability to see the hand of ha-Shem writing on the wall secures you pleasant notice for your religious and prophetic acumen, or whether it gets you locked up in the local nut bin, will determine how many people in a society form the habit of seeing what other people are wont to think is not really there. The Maharal has developed his ability to see visions, for they enable him to meditate, to clear his mind, to grasp what he considers higher truth. But like most Jews in his tradition, oftener he hears voices, and the voices instruct him on his duty.
What is the golem he hears the voice commanding him to make? A being in human form made not by ha-Shem but by another human through esoteric knowledge, particularly by the power of words and letters. The Sefer Yezirah, the mystical Book of Creation, is supposed to contain what you must master to form a golem with the power of the Names of G-d and the power of letters and numbers. Kabbalistic tradition tells us of many sages and saints who created a golem, not for any use but as a mystical rite. They would make and unmake these moving clay men, joining themselves to the power of creation, and, in the chanting and the act, achieve ecstasy. It is one of the crowns of glory a truly holy person might wear. We are also told of occasional sages who made a golem for some private use—running messages, cleaning the house—such as we use robots for, and these golem were both mute and stupid.
What is original is that Judah’s golem isn’t to be invented to prove the rabbi’s mastery of esoteric knowledge. He believes himself commanded to create a golem to fight, to police, to save. Therefore this golem must be formed with intelligence and the power of speech. He is to become a one-man army. From the moment Judah first sees the hand writing “golem” and hears the voice calling to him to rise and create this creature, he asks himself, Am I really going to do this? Once he has framed the possibility, he knows that he must keep the project secret. He harbors no desire to be tortured as a sorcerer, always an open possibility for a polemical sharp-tongued rabbi.
As one who has been engaged in a secret project for the last two years, I identify with his hesitations. At any moment in
history, certain directions are forbidden that lie open to the inquiring mind and the experimental hand. Not always is the knowledge forbidden because dangerous: governments will spend billions on weapons and forbid small sects the peyote of their ecstasy. What we are forbidden to know can be—or seem—what we most need to know.
Further, for a human being to make another is to usurp the power of ha-Shem, to risk frightening self-aggrandizement. It is to push yourself beyond the human. It is dangerous to the soul, dangerous to the world. As soon as the mind conceives of a possibility, it wants the possible to be actualized. It wants to be doing, no matter what the cost or the damage. The Maharal is preconsciously aware of human frailty. He does not sleep and scarcely drinks a little water. He cannot decide wherein lies the correct path: is his vision from ha-Shem or from his own ego, his desire to prove himself as learned, as holy, as powerful as the rabbis before him who had created golems?
The Maharal goes on debating inside himself for an entire week whether the vision that had come to him is a temptation or true instruction, a real mitzvah to be carried out. He wavers. Never before has such a febrile indecision burned him. He is afraid to act. He keeps finding reasons to preserve his skepticism.
Once years ago I met my daughter Riva secretly in the depths of the Glop, that jammed fetid slum where most people live. She spoke to me then, huddled in that loft full of damaged and abandoned machinery, about the temptation of danger: how sometimes the near impossibility of carrying out an action makes it irresistible. She must do it because she cannot do it, because it is both forbidden and held to be unachievable. That was when she began to move from pure data piracy toward something more political and even more dangerous. It was then she began her crusade of liberating information from the multis. The Maharal, lying awake as I lie awake, is fearful, as afraid of the remedy he imagines risking his life to carry out as he is afraid of the danger gathering for those who live in his care. Unable to decide, he lies supine to the night and the event, awaiting a further sign.
FOUR
Through the Burning Labyrinth
On April Fools’ Day, Shira, incongruous in her backless suit, joined the hundred thousand day laborers taking the eastbound tube. The escalators to the tube station were twelve across right outside the dome, where the blast of five o’clock heat leaned its scorching weight on her as she shuffled in line. She was wearing a white suit because she had had to check out of Y-S officially. Inbound night workers were lined up out in the still dangerous late sun to pass into the dome by palming the ID plates, but there was no ID required to leave. If you wanted to pass out of safety into hell, it was your business. No one could walk away into the Nebraska desert.
Shira was taking the tube across the country, jammed in a hot crowded car. She only hoped her luggage would arrive eventually, but the chances were, thieves would grab it en route. Her hands clutched the harness holding her into her seat. The tube car was windowless, as there was nothing whatsoever to see underground. She traveled for two hours before she changed at Chicago; she spent the night locked in an eight-by-six cube in the Chicago tube station, for she’d never make it safely across the Glop after dark.
The next morning she had two more hours to Boston. She did not want to think about Ari on a platform one third of the way to the moon with his father. Crying? Still wondering where she was, why she had not come, if she would ever come for him? She felt torn open. Would Josh watch out for early signs of ear infection? She had tried to call Pacifica, but Josh had refused a link.
She could not imagine what it would be like working with Avram, she could not imagine what it would be like returning to live with her grandmother. She had left home at seventeen, and a week was the longest she had visited since. Then she had been delivered from corporate enclave to free town by zipplane, from total fortress security to fragile peace in just over an hour, avoiding the densely inhabited slum of the Glop. Now her life felt like a crystalline structure shattered into bright dangerous
shards that left her bleeding. Everything she had worked to create and sustain, everything into which she had poured her perhaps too abundant energy—her marriage, Ari, her work—was smashed or stolen from her. The temperature in the tube hovered near forty. She gasped for breath in the bad air.
Shira stumbled out of the tube exhausted and suffering from lack of oxygen. The small of her back hurt, and her sinuses burned. She had a headache that blistered her skull. Here she was in the Glop and there was no time to worry about small pain if she was to stay alive and intact. She pulled over her backless business suit the thin black covering almost all women and old people and many men wore in the streets. It covered age, class, sex, and made all look roughly the same size. She had not worn it in her years at Y-S, for there were no gangs in the multi enclaves. She pulled on metal woven gloves to cover her hands, though she was perfectly aware that although they might discourage a casual slasher with only a sticker, any real hand-hacker could laser right through the protective mesh. If only she could wear a sign indicating how low her credit was, she would be safe. Her hand was almost worthless today. Malkah would have transferred enough to help her home; otherwise she was flat.
Day workers and gang niños and the unemployed lived in the Glop—the great majority of people on the continent. Most of the remainder were citizens of some multi enclave. The free towns were exceptions, as were Rural Zones. Most people who lived in free towns like the one she had grown up in could have sold themselves to a multi directly, instead of contracting for specific jobs, but elected to stay outside the enclaves because of some personal choice: a minority religion, a sexual preference not condoned by a particular multi, perhaps simply an archaic desire for freedom.
The garment smelled stale as it billowed about her. It had deteriorated during its years of lying folded in the bottom of a storage cube, but she felt immediately safer in it as she joined the crowd on the movers, most wearing black cover-ups so they appeared like sinister nuns. She fumbled for her filter mask as she reached the upper levels of the station. Goggles, mask, cover-up, cooler: she had everything she needed to make herself ready for the street, helped by an edge of amphetamine from the capsule she stopped to buy from a vendor and popped as the mover chugged her along, once she had checked its content with her pocket scanner. It honed her paranoia enough to help her navigate the labyrinthine station where hundreds camped
and slept in the filthy decaying passages that mumbled day and night of distant voices, muffled screams, drumming, zak music, running sewage, the hiss of leaking coolant. In some of the passages stores sold clothing, vat food, fast food, stimmies and spikes. Spikes were outlawed in the Y-S enclave. They were more vivid than stimmies. Instead of experiencing what an actor saw, felt, touched, was touched by, the user was projected into the drama and the sensations were more powerful—so she had heard. People told of kids found dead who had replayed favorite adventure or porn scenes until they starved to death.
Few multis permitted recreational drugs, unless issued by the company. In the Glop, every invented drug was sold by street vendors. In other corridors, vendors were hawking all the jetsam of the times: trash carted from the enclaves, junk of the last century turned into furniture, clothing, weapons, the wired-up skeletons of extinct exotica like robins and warblers, cannibalized parts built into makeshift robots. She noticed a knife made of an organic-based resin that would not show up on detection devices.
“How much betty for the sticker?”
“For you, duke?” Behind the metal mask, bloodshot eyes glittered. She winced. Duke was someone with money. She could not talk the Glop talk, and at once they identified her as a grud, a multi employee. “Cuarenta dos. Forty-two. This a sticker don’t cry under rays.”
“Treinta. Thirty.” She let the knife drop back into the display.
They bargained ritually for another five minutes. She paid thirty-six. He had a regular credit box. Stripping the glove, she inserted her hand gingerly. He had his box rigged so that instead of just the amount and approval, her balance appeared.
