Transgression Read online

  Hana threaded a bone needle and began sewing rapidly, her mouth pursed in concentration. Rivka decided that she liked Hana, despite her bluntness. She was a straight shooter, and she just might have saved Rivka from a stoning—or something worse.

  Rivka’s mind spun wildly. She owed a great debt to her new friend. How in the world was she ever going to repay Hana?

  How?

  She would find a way, she decided. But she would not become a zonah to do it.

  Chapter 8

  Damien

  DAMIEN WALKED SWIFTLY THROUGH THE cave toward the light at the far end. He felt good, now that he had committed. It was the waiting that twisted your guts. Once you jumped, everything was fine.

  Usually.

  Outside, the sunlight momentarily blinded Damien. He blinked and waited for his eyes to adjust. He had visited this very cave weeks earlier—or was it thousands of years in the future? On his personal world-line, it was in the past. The difference leaped at all of his senses.

  The brilliant blue sky dazzled his eyes. The natural sounds of a preindustrial age soothed his ears. The warmth of the sun warmed his skin. The unpolluted air smelled clean. The Industrial Revolution had not yet spoiled the taste of planet Earth. This was what the Unabomber had been looking for, if only he had had the brains to figure it out.

  Damien smiled at the irony. Use technology to destroy technology. The perfect self-referentialism.

  He shrugged his duffel bag higher up on his shoulder and began walking toward the city. Somewhere, less than twenty miles away and moving closer every minute, was Paul of Tarsus. Sometime in the next week, his world-line would intersect with Damien’s, and then—

  A shouted challenge brought him up short. He turned.

  A man approached him. Dirt smeared his face. In his hand, he clutched a virtual reality headset.

  Uh, oh. It looked like Rivka hadn’t got much of a welcome when she arrived.

  Damien smiled at the man and said one of the phrases he had learned from his Hebrew language tapes. “Shalom. Ani rotzeh l’hagia l’Yerushalayim.” He mentally back-translated to be sure he’d got it right. Hello. I wish to arrive to Jerusalem.

  The man stared at him and then cut loose with a torrent of unintelligible words.

  Damien stepped back a pace. “Tislakh li, Adoni. Attah medaber Ivrit?” The tapes had prepared him decently, he thought. Excuse me, sir. Do you speak Hebrew?

  The man replied with a question. At least, it sounded like a question from the rising intonation. Not a word of it made any sense to Damien.

  So this was ancient Hebrew? Damien suddenly wanted to laugh out loud. Those stupid Israelis thought they were so clever in building modern Hebrew on a base of ancient Hebrew. Wouldn’t they be disappointed to find out that their language didn’t sound a thing like the old days?

  He made a gesture to the man, intended to signify, Sorry, I can’t understand you.

  The man’s eyes grew wide, and an offended look spread across his face. He spat out a challenge, dropped the headset, and charged at Damien.

  At the last possible second, Damien dodged left, planted hard and lashed out a foot, catching the man just below the kneecap.

  The man squealed like a slit pig and staggered to his knees.

  “Sorry about that,” Damien said. “Next time, pick on someone—”

  The man lunged at him, flailing with his fists.

  Damien threw up his arms to ward off the blows.

  A fist slipped through and smacked him in the eye.

  Damien swore at him. Up to now, he had been mostly playing. But eyes were precious. For that, this creep would pay. Damien had a policy of always taking revenge. It was good insurance for the future. Besides, it was fun.

  Damien stopped his opponent with a stiff arm to the chest, then jabbed a stiffened thumb into the man’s jugular vein.

  The attacker screeched and stumbled backward.

  Damien charged in and body-slammed him into the dirt.

  The man huddled on the ground, clutching his throat.

  Damien walked around behind him and kicked him in the kidneys. Hard. “Have a nice day,” he said in English.

  He turned and strode away toward the south end of the city. He had found a book in the university library that claimed to map out “Jerusalem, City of Jesus.” According to the maps, the best way to get into the city was at the southeast corner. He would test that claim now.

  After a short walk, he found the road. Soon it joined up with another one. This one was crowded with people, as he had expected. A Jewish feast was coming up two days from now, on Sunday. There would be lots of visitors from out of town. Including one named Paul.

  Nobody paid Damien any attention at all. He took that as a sign that he had chosen his costume well. As he looked around him, though, he could see nobody in an outfit like his—which just proved that all the Sunday school pictures were wrong, as he had always suspected. But his clothes didn’t look too out-of-place. Jerusalem was a big city, and lots of foreigners visited. He ought to be able to blend in.

  The language would be a problem, though. He had counted on being able to make himself understood with his pidgin Hebrew. It looked very much like that wouldn’t work. He wasn’t bad at languages. He had studied German in high school and passed a language exam in both German and Russian in grad school. And he had learned enough modern Hebrew to get by. But a language took time, and he didn’t have much right now. No way he could pick up the local lingo in the next week. That gave him two options.

  Either he could try to get along by sign language—at the risk of offending the locals. Or he could find an interpreter.

  Rivka Meyers.

  They taught ancient languages in archaeology school, didn’t they? How else could anyone read the inscriptions? Presumably, Rivka had studied whatever they spoke here. And hadn’t Ari mentioned what a terrific linguist she was? Hardly any accent at all in her voice, he claimed.

  Plus, with a name like Rivka, odds were she was Jewish. Damien had never met a Jew who cared much for Paul of Tarsus. Most of them blamed Paul for all the crap Christians had dumped on them for the last two thousand years. It was a sure bet Rivka Meyers would be only too happy to help track down Paul and do him justice.

  Damien smiled. Another problem solved.

  But that led to two more. Where could he find Rivka? And what kind of cock-and-bull story could he give to explain her presence here?

  The answer to the first question was as plain as the great wall of limestone rising up into the sky on his right. In that Avatar game, Rivka had gone straight for the Temple Mount. Another sure bet. If you wanted to find an archaeologist in ancient Jerusalem, skip the yellow pages. Just head straight for the Temple.

  On the way, he would figure out some lie to explain how she got here. The stork brought you, sweetie. Or something like that.

  * * *

  Ari

  Ari stumbled up the stairs of the physics building. His pulse pounded out an unholy rhythm in his skull, thanks to his binge last night. He ought to have stayed home today, but he wanted to ask Damien’s advice about Rivka. Damien knew a bit about women. He had been married at one time, and he had broken off with his latest girlfriend shortly before coming to Jerusalem for the summer.

  Ari pushed open the door of the lab. “Damien?”

  No answer. He looked at his watch. After nine. Damien must have gone to the bathroom or down the hall to the laser printer. He would probably laugh in Ari’s face when he heard about how he had made a fool of himself last night.

  A beeping sound came from the back of the lab. The computer. Ari walked over to see what was going on. A dialog box filled the screen. It had a horizontal bar showing the progress of whatever operation Damien had set it to. Ari glanced at it idly.

  He froze. Wormhole will collapse to Planck size in approximately 45 minutes.

  “Oh my…!” Ari said. Then he realized that it had to be a prank. Damien was a bit of a joker. “Very funny!�
�

  The dialog box changed. Wormhole will collapse to Planck size in approximately 44 minutes.

  Damien must have gone to a bit of work. He had probably gotten bored this morning and hacked something out in Visual Basic. Ari moved around the table and went to see if Damien had finished putting the guts of the pulsed-power driver back together yet.

  Everything looked okay. All the cables were in place and appeared to be connected. Ari was not an experimentalist, and he always felt a bit queasy when dealing with electrical apparatus. Especially things Damien had wired. The man was a genius, but sloppy.

  Ari stopped in mid-stride. The red power light glowed.

  Another joke? Or had Damien gotten impatient and tried the machine early this morning? If so, Ari would wring his neck. They had agreed that they would both be present for all shots—just in case the thing actually worked.

  The best he could tell, the device was really conducting current. Damien was going to pay for this. He had no right! Ari heard a knock at the door.

  He walked carefully back to answer it. His head felt like he had an axe buried in his skull and his eyes were as gritty as a three-day beard. When he reached the door, he found Dr. Hsiu, the new postdoc from China, standing outside.

  Dr. Hsiu handed him two sheets of paper and smiled timidly. “Laser printer working now,” he said. “I find and bring to Dr. West. Nice man.”

  Ari looked at the top page. A standard cover sheet for a print job, with Damien West’s name plastered all over it. Ari looked at the second sheet—a spreadsheet with eight rows and five columns in a weird mix of numbers, letters, and abbreviations. None of it made any sense.

  He looked back at the postdoc. “Dr. Hsiu, have you seen Dr. West today?”

  “Yes, yes,” said Dr. Hsiu. “Hour ago. Maybe less. He not here?”

  “I haven’t seen him,” Ari said. He held up the two pages. “Thanks. I’ll give him these.” He took them over to Damien’s desk and left them there where he would be sure to find them.

  Ari went back to look at the workstation.

  The dialog box now claimed the wormhole would shrink down to the Planck size in 39 minutes.

  An insane thought struck him.

  He strode to the doorway into the closet where they had planned the wormhole to form. He yanked the door open, hoping to see the inside of a closet.

  He saw deep emptiness. The blackness of a highly diffusive object, just like the theory predicted. A wormhole.

  Ari’s knees went wobbly. “I don’t believe it.” He threw the door shut and raced back to the workstation. He scanned the dialog box until he spotted a Cancel button at the bottom. He clicked on it with the mouse. The dialog box disappeared, revealing another one beneath it. Ari scanned it. Sweat slicked his hands and his eyes kept playing tricks on him, causing the screen to look jiggly. Where had that control panel come from?

  He would kill West for this. Ari didn’t know how Damien could have put the device back together so quickly, but that question could wait. Right now, he had to stop the wormhole from collapsing. If it went down, it would be gone for good.

  It took him ten minutes to figure out how the controls worked. Each time he adjusted the power setting on the screen, he heard the loud pop of electrical sparks inside the guts of the power supplies. Damien’s seat-of-the-pants wiring. Finally Ari straightened up and massaged his aching temples. Now he could do nothing but wait. If he had guessed correctly, the wormhole would stay open, but it would take some time to find out.

  Ari noticed a cup of coffee on Damien’s desk. He walked over and stuck his finger in the coffee. Tepid. Damien had not been gone long. Had he actually gone through the wormhole, or was he still in the building somewhere? Ari walked around to sit in Damien’s chair.

  There, hidden under the desk, lay Rivka’s backpack.

  Ari sucked in his breath. What was she doing here? Had she been here with Damien? Had she seen the wormhole?

  Even worse, had she...gone through it?

  He forced himself to breathe deeply. Rivka was intelligent. She would know better than to go off through a time portal into the past, wouldn’t she?

  Ari jumped up, unable to sit still any longer. Then he saw the personal computer in the corner. He recognized the Avatar software. He strode over and stared at the screen.

  It showed the interior of the Temple.

  He grabbed the mouse and clicked on the Status menu.

  A window popped up. One line leaped out at him. Current user: Rivka.

  Rivka had been here, and now she was not. She had been playing this game, and now she was not. Ari felt sick with fear.

  He scanned the status window. Current playing time: 1:25. Rivka had started this game an hour and a half ago. Dr. Hsiu had seen Damien West here an hour ago.

  Ari pounded his fist on the table. Then he jerked his cell phone out of his pocket and speed-dialed a number.

  Four rings later, he heard a sleepy voice. “Yes?”

  “Dov, this is Ari.” He clenched his fists and tried to will his heart to stop racing. “I’m afraid something may have happened to Rivka.”

  “To Rivka?” Dov suddenly sounded wide-awake. “Has there been a bombing?”

  “Maybe worse,” Ari said. “I’m in the lab, and Dr. West appears to have created the wormhole without my consent. Both he and Rivka are missing.”

  “I am on my way instantly.”

  Ari hung up. Think calmly. He went back to check the workstation. The readings looked wrong. He adjusted the power setting again.

  A crackling noise issued from the power supply.

  Now he would have to wait for things to settle down. He left the computer, went back to Damien’s desk, and pulled out Rivka’s backpack. Something small and hard bulged under his sandal. He reached down and picked it up. A silver coin. Ancient, by the look of it. Since when had Damien West been interested in coin collecting?

  Damien’s laptop computer lay closed on the desk. Ari flipped it open and hit the spacebar. Good. Damien had left it in sleep mode. Ari stared at the screen, seeking inspiration. If Damien had printed that document, he had either done it from this laptop or one of the other computers in the lab. The document looked personal, though, like something Damien wouldn’t keep on a semipublic machine. Most likely, it had come from the laptop. What else was on this machine?

  Ari fired up the word processor and checked the File menu. It showed a list of the last five documents Damien had opened. The first on the list was labeled “Manifesto.” Ari clicked on it.

  A dialog box popped up, asking for a password. Ari stared at it for a minute. If this document was important enough for Damien to protect, then it was vital for Ari to read. But how?

  What was Damien’s game? What was the weird spreadsheet all about? And how did Rivka fit in? Had Damien taken her through the wormhole with him?

  Ari hunched forward in the chair and closed his eyes. The thought made him nauseated. Last night, he had never wanted to see Rivka again. He had almost hated her. Rather, he hated what she stood for—two thousand years of violation of his people. And yet, there was something about her. He cared about her. Was crazy after her, as the saying went.

  He could make her understand that, if only he could talk to her one more time. This time, with logic. But would she give him a second chance? Or would she cut him off before he could start up?

  Start up. Something clicked in Ari’s brain. A fragment of a conversation he had had with Damien a month ago. Start up.

  Ari grabbed the mouse of the laptop, hardly daring to hope.

  Chapter 9

  Rivka

  “NOW YOU MUST TRY IT on,” Hana said. She held up the tunic she had made for Rivka. “Take off those terrible things you are wearing.”

  Rivka wished she had brought her backpack so she would have a place to stow her clothes until she went back to the wormhole. She pulled her T-shirt and shorts off, slipped the tunic over her head and let it drop down around her body. The rough wool scrat
ched her skin. “Can we go to the Temple this afternoon?” She tugged the tunic into place. “I would like to watch the sacrifices.”

  Hana shrugged. “I do not enjoy watching animals bleed and burn, but as you wish. Or we could go tomorrow—on Shabbat there will be more sacrifices, if that is what you want to see.”

  “Shabbat?” Rivka felt disoriented. “What day is today?”

  Hana gave her a very strange look. “The sixth day, of course. What day did you think it was?”

  Rivka felt her face reddening. Where she had come from, yesterday was Shabbat. Today ought to be the first day of the week. Obviously, she had left on a Sunday, arrived on a Friday. Weird.

  Hana repeated her question.

  “I’ve been traveling lately,” Rivka said. “You can lose track of time when you’re on the road.”

  “I have never gone further than Bethany,” Hana said.

  Two miles away. Incredible.

  “We should be leaving for the Temple soon,” Hana said.

  Rivka’s stomach growled. She had eaten only a bagel for breakfast and nothing since. “What about…lunch?” she asked. She didn’t want to impose, but she was hungry.

  “What is lunch?” Hana asked.

  Rivka had used the modern Hebrew word. She tried to think how to explain. “Don’t you eat something at midday?”

  Hana looked puzzled. “No. Do you? Why do you not eat in the evening?”

  “I do,” Rivka said. “In my country, we eat in the morning, at noon, and in the evening.”

  “How very strange,” Hana said. “Are all people in your country wealthy?”

  Rivka remembered reading that most people in primitive agricultural cultures lived on two meals a day…when they had food. “Yes, many of our people are wealthy,” she said.

  “Then why do you have no money?” Hana asked.

  “I lost it,” Rivka said, thinking of her backpack, still in Ari’s lab. She went to the door and opened it. “Shall we go? I would really like to see the Temple.”