Transgression Read online

  TRANSGRESSION

  CITY OF GOD, Book 1

  R.S. Ingermanson

  Published by DitDat, Inc.

  Author’s Note

  There is a bit of real physics and real history behind this novel.

  Wormholes are horribly unstable, but if you somehow managed to create one, you really could travel back in time. Opinions differ on whether you could “change the past” when you got there.

  Probably in the year 57, an assassination attempt was made on the apostle Paul, who was visiting Jerusalem. Paul’s own nephew was in the thick of the plot.

  Two witnesses from the far future, Rivka Meyers and Ari Kazan, were there to see it all.

  A third person, Damien West, was there to make it happen.

  This is their story.

  Part I

  Virtual Unreality

  Summer, A.D. 2000

  There is much we still don’t know, such as what happens to objects and information that fall into a black hole. Do they reemerge elsewhere in the Universe or in another universe? And can we warp space and time so much that one can travel back in time? These questions are part of our ongoing quest to understand the Universe. Maybe someone will come back from the future and tell us the answers.

  Stephen Hawking

  In the foreword to Black Holes and Time Warps by Kip Thorne

  Prologue

  Rivka

  RIVKA MEYERS KNEW SOMETHING WAS wrong when she bumped into a wall that wasn’t there.

  “Ow!” She tugged at the virtual reality headset she had worn for the past half hour. “Dr. West?” she said. “How do I get this thing off?”

  No response.

  She fumbled with the straps at her chin. “Dr. West? Are you there? Hello?”

  The buckle popped loose in her hand. She pulled off the headset and blinked. The lab was much darker than she remembered, and it smelled musty. Why hadn’t she noticed that before?

  The game had defocused her vision. While she waited for her eyes to adjust, she put her hand against the wall. It felt rough, stony. Like limestone, said something deep inside her archaeologist’s brain.

  But that was impossible. She was in the back part of a physics laboratory. Rivka suddenly felt dizzy, nauseated.

  “Dr. West, what’s going on?” she asked in a loud voice. “I’m done playing your computer game.” Her voice echoed oddly in the stillness.

  “Dr. West!” She was shouting now, angry. What kind of a prank was he playing? She didn’t like it, and she wanted out. Now.

  Rivka turned her head in a slow semicircle, studying her surroundings. In one direction, she could see light from a rough-cut entrance. In the other direction—total darkness. She sniffed. It smelled like…a cave. But it couldn’t be. Not on the third floor of a physics building in downtown Jerusalem.

  “God, help me!” It wasn’t a prayer—just a figure of speech. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to try the real thing.

  Lord…help me get back to the lab. I need to find Ari…

  A bead of sweat ran down her back. Did she really want to see Ari again, after what he had said last night?

  A footstep scuffled at the lighted end of the room. A deep male voice said something muzzy and indistinct.

  Thanks, Father. Rivka turned to look.

  Right away, she saw that it wasn’t Ari. Nor Dr. West. At the moment, she didn’t care. Any human being would be welcome. “Excuse me!” she shouted in English and began walking toward the man. “Could you tell me how to get to Ari Kazan’s lab?” She repeated this in Hebrew.

  The light grew better as she got closer to him. He wore a black beard and rough garb much like a Bedouin’s…but different. Rivka couldn’t quite place his costume, although she had been in Israel for over a month now and had thought she had seen everything: Arabs in checkered kaffiyehs, Hasidic rabbis in black fur hats, Druze villagers in baggy shirts and pants, sabra girls in string bikinis. This man might well be the janitor or just as easily the department chairman.

  The man squinted in her direction. The nearer Rivka came to him, the more she slowed. Finally, she stopped. “Hello?” she said. “Shalom? Salaam?”

  He said something in a language she didn’t recognize. The vowel usage reminded her vaguely of Syriac—a notion so ridiculous that Rivka almost laughed out loud. Syriac had been a dead language for centuries.

  A little smile formed on the man’s face as he stared at her. His gaze ran up and down her body, seeming to peel away her T-shirt and cutoffs. His eyes lit up with an evil glow that needed no translation.

  Rivka’s heart double-thumped, then began a tap dance of panic in her chest. She stepped backward, clutching the virtual reality headset in her hands as though it were a shield. “Dr. West!” she shouted. “Help!”

  The man chuckled softly. He took a step toward her, his hands held out to either side to cut off her escape.

  “Who are you?” Rivka asked in a loud voice that grated in her own ears. She stepped back again. “Mi attah?” She couldn’t remember how to say it in Arabic.

  The man took another step toward her.

  Rivka backed rapidly away from him. “Don’t you dare touch me!” she said. “I’m an American! Ani Amerikait!” The words sounded foolish, but she had read somewhere that you had a better chance if you kept talking and put up a fight.

  The man gave a yellow smile and kept advancing, catlike.

  Rivka stepped back again, and the headset in her hand clunked against something hard. A wall. Her mind spun wildly now, out of control. The man was only a few paces away. Desperate, she lunged forward and screamed, “Get away from me!”

  She threw the headset at his face and dodged to her left.

  He batted the flimsy missile away with a hairy paw and scooted to his right, keeping between her and the exit. His eyes glowed with animal pleasure. He took another step.

  Rivka pulled a key out of her pocket and clenched it tightly. Improvise! Fight! She kept moving sideways, maneuvering for room. Please, Father, save me!

  The man feinted forward. She skittered sideways, tripped over a huge bump on the ground, staggered. Then her foot stepped on a marble-sized pebble, and her leg shot out from under her. She landed hard on her back in the dirt. Her key dropped into the loose dirt somewhere nearby.

  The man grunted in triumph and rushed at her.

  She dug her hands into the soft dust for balance and timed her kick perfectly.

  Almost perfectly. At the last instant, he twisted his hips. Not much, but enough.

  Her sandal thudded into a very solid thigh. The shock ran up her leg and into her spine. “No!” she screamed, and began kicking her feet in the air like windmills.

  His hands snaked at her ankles, caught them, locked them in an iron grip. He laughed softly and forced her feet to the ground. He pinned them down with one enormous hand and leaned forward. Rivka smelled his vinegary breath.

  She slashed wildly with her left hand, scratching at his eyes. He jerked his head away.

  Point-blank, Rivka flung a handful of fine dust into his eyes. He screamed, clawed at his face. Suddenly, Rivka’s legs came free.

  She rolled away from him. He lunged blindly for her, coughing, spitting.

  She scrambled up, grabbed another handful of dust, and pitched it into his gaping mouth.

  He choked and fell on his face.

  Rivka turned and ran. “Ari!” she screamed. “Help!”

  She raced outside into the sunlight, sprinted madly through a dark grove of trees with gnarled branches. Her heart pounded in her chest. Her ragged breath rasped in her ears. Was he following? Faster! Tears fogged her eyes. Her leather sandals tore at her feet. Trying to look back over her shoulder, she tripped and fell. Dust flew up all around her.

  Cough
ing, she clambered to her feet and dared to look back. The man was nowhere in sight.

  Rivka panted until she caught her breath. Her left wrist throbbed from the fall. She massaged it while she squinted into the trees, afraid that the man might be lurking in the shadows.

  Nothing happened.

  Finally, she turned around to get her bearings.

  She blinked twice and then stared.

  Across a small valley massive stone walls rose. Herodian masonry. Jerusalem limestone. Towering white walls. It looked like…

  But that was impossible. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply three times, and opened them again. Absurd. Had she gone loony or something?

  Rivka had visited the Temple Mount twice and studied hundreds of pictures during three years of graduate school. But she had never seen it looking like this.

  So pure.

  So spotless.

  So new.

  Part II

  Timeout

  Summer, A.D. 2000

  On the surface, Thorne’s mathematical reasoning is impeccable. Einstein’s equations indeed show that wormhole solutions allow for time to pass at different rates on either side of the wormhole, so that time travel, in principle, is possible. The trick, of course, is to create the wormhole in the first place.

  Michio Kaku

  Hyperspace, chapter 11

  Chapter 1

  Rivka

  RIVKA RAISED HER PICK HIGH overhead and swung it again into the hard-packed earth.

  Crack! She had heard that sound dozens of times in the two weeks she had been on this dig.

  “My friend, you are trying to break every pot on this site?” A broad grin covered the face of Dov Lifshutz, her coworker for the week. Dov was a graduate student from Hebrew University with a couple of years’ experience digging already. Though only about three years older than Rivka, he had spent those three years in the Israel Defense Forces. Service in the IDF aged soldiers like dog years.

  Rivka gave an innocent shrug and held up her tool. “This thing isn’t a toothpick, you know.” She had learned her first day on the job that you couldn’t help breaking things. Like it said in all the books, archaeology was destruction.

  She stood to her full height and dug a fist into the aching muscles in her lower back. They had been working half the morning in the middle of a square hole, five meters on each side and now almost a meter deep. Apparently, they were about to hit another layer from the late-Roman period.

  Dov knelt in the bare dirt and inspected the mark Rivka’s pick had made in the reddish earth. She dropped down beside him. In a minute, they would know if she had found another pot, or something more interesting. Together, they loosened dirt with their fingers and pulled it out of the small hole.

  “Can you see anything?” Dov asked.

  Rivka pushed her small hand in and plucked out a handful of dirt. Something flashed in the sunlight. Something blue. Rivka gasped. You didn’t find blue pottery in the Roman period.

  Dov lowered his face until his nose almost touched the dirt. “Tov me’od!” he said. Very good! He raised his head and hooted with glee.

  Rivka felt a sudden rush of adrenaline. “Is it what I think it is?”

  “It is never what you think it is,” Dov said. “That is the charm of archaeology.” He grabbed a triangular steel trowel from her bucket of tools and handed it to her with mock formality. “I leave the honors to you, my brilliant and lovely friend.”

  Rivka smiled and took the trowel. Carefully, she poked it into the earth around the hole, loosening the dirt. Archaeology was a funny business. You attacked the earth with heavy equipment—bulldozers, picks, shovels—until you hit something. The minute you made contact, you had to treat it like a family heirloom.

  When she had broken up the dirt a bit, Rivka began scooping it into a goofah, a makeshift bucket recycled from an old tire. Archaeology was a thrifty science, dependent on old tools and volunteer labor and the occasional wealthy donor. She wasn’t getting paid for this summer’s work; she was paying for the privilege. More precisely, her father was paying.

  Rivka took a broad paintbrush and whisked the loose dirt away from a smooth, flat surface, exposing an area the size of her hand. Tesserae—tiny tiles! The colors were still dull and indistinct, except for the brilliant blue crack she had made with her pick. She felt her insides trembling. This looked wonderful.

  “We must wash it.” Dov jumped up and got a Dixie cup full of water from the jug of ice water resting in the narrow strip of shade at the edge of the square. He handed it to Rivka.

  She poured a little onto the patchwork of tiny inlaid tiles and polished them with her wet finger. When she had poured out the whole cup, the edges were muddy but the center gleamed blue and white.

  “Beautiful,” Dov said. He raised an imaginary microphone to his mouth and made a theatrical gesture with his left hand. “Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the famous Rivka Meyers Memorial Mosaic!”

  Rivka laughed. “Memorial! That sounds a bit morbid.”

  “Morbid?” Dov said. “What means morbid?”

  “Mahalati,” Rivka said.

  “Miss Meyers, you amaze me,” Dov said, still using his mock formal tone. “When you started here, you still had your most charming American accent. Now you speak like a sabra, mostly.”

  “Thank you…mostly.” Rivka picked up the trowel again. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to uncover some more of the famous Lifshutz-Meyers mosaic.”

  Dov grabbed another trowel. “With your permission, I wish to join you.”

  Before he could begin, his cell phone buzzed. He pulled it out of his pocket and flipped it open. “Hallo, medaber Dov.” He listened for a moment. “Ken, Imma.”

  Rivka smiled. Cell phones were very big in Israel—much more so than in the United States. 1 It was both common and comical to see a tough-looking Israeli soldier standing on a street corner, an Uzi dangling from his shoulder, a phone pressed to his ear, nodding and saying exactly what Dov had just said. Yes, Mama.

  Rivka did her best not to listen. Dov’s reluctant tone and slouched posture told her that Dov’s mother was asking him to do something he didn’t like. Finally, he hung up.

  Rivka continued working in silence. Dov went to the water jug and poured two cups of water. “Rivka, you should take a break, please. It would be most unfortunate for you to become dehydrated.”

  She continued work for a full minute, then reluctantly decided the mosaic wouldn’t run away. “I guess you’re right.” Rivka dropped her trowel and took the cup he offered. They sat down in the sliver of shade on the north side of the square and drank.

  Dov crushed his Dixie cup in his hands and studied it minutely. “Did I ever tell you about my cousin Ari?”

  Rivka suppressed a smile. In Hebrew, Ari meant “lion” and Dov meant “bear.” “Did your grandparents own a zoo?”

  “No, they lived in one,” Dov said cryptically.

  Rivka waited for him to explain this remark.

  “So, as I was saying, my cousin Ari is a genius,” Dov said. “He teaches physics at Hebrew University. Very, very smart, but he studies too hard.”

  What was Dov driving at? “We all study too hard,” Rivka said. “The perils of academia.”

  “Okay, so let me finish, already,” Dov said. “Ari’s a nice guy, but he doesn’t get out much. So his mother gets worried, and she talks to my mother, and—”

  “And so your mother tells you, ‘Dov, find Ari a nice Jewish girl so he won’t be lonely.’” Rivka wanted to laugh. “Am I right?”

  “Not exactly,” Dov said.

  “Close?”

  “Something like that—”

  “Sorry.” Rivka stood up and dusted the seat of her cutoffs. “Not interested.”

  Dov laughed out loud. “Hey, little sister, you think I’m meshugah? Crazy? I know you have a most excellent gentleman friend back home, yes?”

  Rivka mumbled something that even she couldn’t hear clearly. Stefan was
neither excellent nor a gentleman nor a friend, but if Dov wanted to think so, where was the harm?

  “And anyway, you’re too short for Ari, my friend. I’m not asking you to go out with him, okay?”

  Rivka almost asked what height had to do with it but decided to skip it. “What are you asking me?”

  “I’m asking for a little help,” Dov said. “That’s all, yes?”

  “What kind of help?”

  “You’re a nice girl, and you know everyone on the dig.” Dov stood up and stretched. “You find another nice girl—somebody adventurous—”

  “And I suggest to this nice girl that she hitchhike to Jerusalem and meet a mad scientist for a little fling?” Rivka stared at him. “You think I’m crazy?”

  “Fling? What means fling?” Dov said. “Anyway, Ari isn’t a mad scientist. He’s a nice guy, only shy. And besides, who said anything about hitchhiking? We can take her in my car.”

  “We?” Rivka said. “Where do you get this we?”

  Dov’s face split into an enormous smile. “Ah, I’m forgetting the best part. You can come, too! To help melt the ice, yes? We drive up to Jerusalem for the weekend and stay in the youth hostel. On Shabbat, we can go to the Temple Mount, see the mosques. After Shabbat, we go out somewhere with Ari. Somewhere safe, okay? We eat at a nice café. Maybe we go dancing, or we go shopping in the shuq, or we look at some art, I don’t know. Then the next day, we see some archaeological sites in the Jewish Quarter. You’ve been to the Temple Mount?”

  Rivka nodded. “Once.”

  “But you would like to see it again? And the Burnt House? And the Wohl Archaeological Museum?”

  “Of course I’d like to see all that,” Rivka said. “I haven’t had time to visit the Burnt House.”

  “You’ll have lots of time,” Dov said. His face broadened into an engaging grin. “So! You’ll go?”