Дэймон Найт - Orbit 6

The kabbalist had grown warm in discussion, eagerly inscribed circles in the air with downhooked thumb apart from fist, “ ‘. . they have the forms of men and also they have the lusts of men,’ “ he quoted.

“You are telling me what every schoolchild knows,” protested Faroly. “But from which of the other three of the four worlds of Emanation, Creation, Formation, and Effectation — from which do they come? And why more often, and more and more often, and more and more and more often, and—”

Face wrinkled to emphasize the gesture of waving these words away, Kaplánovics said, “If Yesod goes, how can Hod remain? if there is no Malchuth, how can there be Quether? Thus one throws away with the hand the entire configuration of Adam Qadmon, the Tree of Life, the Ancient of Days. Men tamper with the very vessels themselves, as if they don’t know what happened with the Bursting of the Vessels before, as though the Husks, the Shards, even a single shattered Cortex, doesn’t still plague and vex and afflict us to this day. They look down into the Abyss, and they say, ‘This is high,’ and they look up to an Eminence and they say, ‘This is low.’. . And not thus alone! And not thus alone! Not just with complex deenim, as, for example, those concerning the fluxes of women — no! no! but the simplest of the simple of the Six Hundred and Thirteen Commandments: to place a parapet around a roof to keep someone from falling off and be killed. What can be simpler? What can be more obvious? What can be easier?

“—but do they do it? What, was it only three weeks ago, or four? a Puertorican boy didn’t fall off the roof of an apartment house near here? Dead, perished. Go talk to the wall. Men don’t want to know. Talk to them Ethics, talk to them Brotherhood, talk to them Ecumenical Dialogue, talk to them any kind of nonsenseness: they’ll listen. But talk to them, It’s written, textually, in the Torah, to build a parapet around your rooftop to prevent blood being shed — no: to this they won’t listen. They would neither hear nor understand. They don’t know Torah, don’t know Text, don’t know parapet, roof— this they never heard of either—”

He paused. “Come tomorrow and I’ll have prepared for you a kamea against goslins.” He seemed suddenly weary.

Faroly got up. Sighed. “And tomorrow will you also have prepared a kamea against goslins for everyone else?”

Kaplánovics didn’t raise his eyes. “Don’t blame the rat,” he said. “Blame the rat-hole.”

Downstairs Faroly noticed a boy in a green and white skullcap, knotted crispadin coming up from inside under his shirt to dangle over his pants. “Let me try a sortilegy,” he thought to himself. “Perhaps it will give me some remez, or hint. .” Aloud, he asked, “Youngling, tell me, what text did you learn today in school?”

The boy stopped twisting one of his stroobley earlocks, and turned up his phlegm-green eyes. “ ‘Three things take a man out of this world,’ “ he yawned. “ ‘Drinking in the morning, napping in the noon, and putting a girl on a wine-barrel to find out if she’s a virgin.’ “

Faroly clicked his tongue, fumbled for a handkerchief to wipe his heatprickled face. “You are mixing up the texts,” he said.

The boy raised his eyebrows, pursed his lips, stuck out his lower jaw. “Oh indeed. You ask me a question, then you give me an answer. How do you know I’m mixing up the texts? Maybe I cited a text which you never heard before. What are you, the Vilna Gaon?”

“Brazen face — look, look, how you’ve gotten your crispadin all snarled,” Faroly said, slightly amused, fingering the cinctures passed through one belt-loop — then, feeling his own horrified amazement and, somehow, knowing. . knowing … as one knows the refrigerator is going to stop humming one half second before it does stop, yet—”What is this? What is this? The cords of your crispadin are tied in pairs?”

The filthgreen eyes slid to their corners, still holding Faroly’s. “Hear, O Israel,” chanted the child; “the Lord our God, the Lord is Two.”

The man’s voice came out agonyshrill. “Dualist. Heresiarch. Sectary. Ah. Ah ah ah — goslin!”

“Take ya hands outa my pants!” shrieked the pseudo-child, and, with a cry of almost totally authentic fear, fled. Faroly, seeing people stop, faces changing, flung up his arms and ran for his life. The goslin-child, wailing and slobbering, trampled up steps into an empty hallway where the prismatic edge of a broken windowpane caught the sunlight and winkyflashed rainbow changes. The goslin stretched thin as a shadow and vanished into the bright edge of the shard.

Exhausted, all but prostrated by the heat, overcome with humiliation, shame, tormented with fear and confusion, Faroly stumbled through the door of his home. His wife stood there, looking at him. He held to the doorpost, too weary even to raise his hand to kiss the mazuzah, waiting for her to exclaim at his appearance. But she said nothing. He opened his mouth, heard his voice click in his throat. “Solomon,” his wife said. He moved slowly into the room. “Solomon,” she said.

“Listen—”

“Solomon, we were in the park, and at first it was so hot, then we sat under a tree and it was so cool —”

“Listen. .”

“… I think I must have fallen asleep. . Solomon, you’re so quiet. . Now you’re home, I can give the Heshy his bath. Look at him, Solomon! Look, look!”

Already things were beginning to get better. “And the High Priest shall pray for the peace of himself and his house. Tanya Rabbanan — and his house. This means, his wife. He who has no wife, has no home.” Small sighs, stifled sobs, little breaks of breath, Faroly moved forward into the apartment. Windows and mirrors were still, dark, quiet. The goslin day was almost over. She had the baby ready for the bath. Faroly moved his eyes, squinting against the last sunlight, to look at the flesh of his first-born, unique son, his Kaddish. What child was this, sallow, squinting back, scrannel, preternaturally sly—? Faroly heard his own voice screaming screaming changeling! changeling!

— Goslin!

The end of the world has come with a bang; there has been little time for whimpering. Three survivors, two men and a woman, stand on a low knoll beside their newly returned Moon ship and survey fields and forests and the sea, a scene which is, except for them, almost totally devoid of land-based chordate life. The gas has dissipated; the residual radiation has dropped to a safe level; already the grasses and coniferae have begun to recover. There are fresh green shoots everywhere, and it is only two months since Earth had blazed up in the lunar night. The survivors know they will not starve even if they stay clear of the blackened stumps of the cities, where canned foods must still exist relatively undamaged.

Because she sunburns easily, Celia Bingham sits on the ground in the ship’s shadow. It is shortly after noon, and the April sun paints a Dali landscape. Celia is happy to be free of the confinement of the ship and its oil-taste air. She does not share the dazed despair of her companions, principally because she has nearly all her life found her center and her focus in a concentration on the memory of her stern father. He had died of prostate cancer when she was twelve — after four or five years of obsessive attention to her — and her mother had thereafter increased both the frequency and the variety of her lovers. He had been a dentist in Skokie, Illinois.