Other Covenants

Chapter 4

“In the name of God, wake up.”

Then a grinding crash, followed by a series of mechanical clicks.

He had been rising to consciousness slowly, turning gentle somersaults in the workshop and letting the varied voices of Metatron filter through the background noise of the station. But it was that crash that pulled him fully awake.

“Perfect timing, Rabbi Oberman, Oberman,” said Metatron. “Nicely done, done.”

He was still wearing his spacesuit. The voice of Metatron crackled from the station’s speakers and from his helmet’s radio. There should have been no time lag, but they were out of sync, giving him the feeling that there were other people in the station. Voices overlapping.

He muted the module’s speakers and strained to hear something else. Fans whirred and the coolant pipes rattled. Then a series of distant clangs towards Zenith. Sound where there should be no sound.

His headset crackled again: “It is 10:16 Jerusalem time, and we are looking good on ISA composition five-six-four, three-two, one-one.”

He kicked off clumsily, his limbs sluggish, and rose from the workshop towards the sukkah module. Passing through a connective corridor choked in cabling and freeze-dried food, he braced himself in the doorway and halted his rise to survey the room.

The sukkah was marked by the dried palm fronds strapped to the wall. High-powered fluorescents chased away any shadow—there was nowhere to hide. He counted one fold-out table. One bedroll velcroed opposite the palm leaves. One unlit menorah safely in its combustion chamber. Two pictures held in place by magnets: a faded family snapshot from Gordon Beach, and a black-and-white photograph of President Einstein with his inauguration quote, “Let us remember our past, but turn to our future.”

One red marker pen drifted loose over the table, the only object out of place.

He returned the pen to its sheath on the wall.

Had he heard something? Solitude bred odd fears, but he couldn’t help but remember the Talmud’s warning that space was hostile to God, and home to monsters.

Beyond the sukkah module was a cheap plastic curtain that shielded the toilet cubicle. There was room for someone in there.

He reached out his glove and twitched aside the curtain.

Empty. The suction tube was crusty with old urine in the depths of the nozzle. He should clean that. Hygiene was important, though not his priority.

He was still alone. Of course he was. He let the curtain fall.

“Are you secure, Rabbi Oberman?” asked Metatron.

He nodded to the camera.

There was a long pause, during which he let himself drift, meditating on the whir of the fan. Then Metatron spoke again.

“We’ll begin the sculpting.”

He had work to do. He gripped the edges of the doorway to launch himself, and swam back up to the workroom at Nadir.

Aboard the Maharal, every movement could be interpreted as a rise or a fall, but he liked to think of himself as always ascending. He spun as he rose to the cupola, so that the hexagram of viewing windows rotated above him. The windows looked out onto 2100 Ra-Shalom, a C-Class asteroid gripped tight in the Maharal’s robotic pincers. Blasted out of its parent body, the asteroid was only thirty meters across, but it filled most of the view.

Beyond Ra-Shalom and currently drenched in sunlight—the Earth. What would it have looked like from up here, during the Creation? Shifting colors against the darkness as the waters gave way to land, and the land bore fruit.

He could just barely make out Israel, a narrow strip of green between the desert and the sea. A nation forced to launch its Shavit rockets west, against the rotation of the Earth, for fear of provoking its neighbors. It was a tiny, fragile place that could be wiped out in an instant.

The station reflected the homeland in that way.

He felt protective, but there was nothing he could do for the community down there except pray. His work was up here with Ra-Shalom, and the fifty-three creatures built from it.

They were barely visible, black on black, the asteroid devouring itself. In total silence, the crawling golems scraped at the regolith. The mining eroded their hands faster than it did the rock, but the golems could work down to their elbow nubs, and were an endlessly replenishable resource. Silicates, iron and nickel were kicked up into the dust canopy, from where they could be filtered into the Maharal.

His little children. Were they content? He thought they probably were. They were doing exactly what they were made to do—something few enough of God’s creatures could boast. And through their labor the children of Israel would dominate the Heavens as they had never been able to dominate the Earth.

“Recording on, we are launching ISA ritual one-two-two, three-one, seven-two: testing remote prayer with in situ assembly,” declared Metatron. “Simulating total isolation. Is our maker pure and undefiled?”

“Purity...check,” confirmed another of the voices.

“Okay, Oberman, it looks good. Proceeding.”

The rock and dust from Ra-Shalom was loaded into exterior chutes from where it was crushed, sieved, and deposited into an internally accessible drawer. He pumped some air in to break the vacuum seal, then pulled open the bin of regolith.

Unformed substance, leftover from Creation. Primarily clay and silicate rock, with a smattering of iron and nickel. Much weaker than terrestrial kaolinite, and in a gravity field it could never be made to hold its own weight. Here in the Heavens, however, it would do.

He took a water pack from among the fifty-one strapped to the workroom walls. It was stamped with an ideogram of Mt. Hermon, marking it as sourced from the mountain’s snow, launched by Shavit rocket and transferred to the Maharal by golem, without ever touching human hands. Pure.

He tilted the pack over the bin of regolith and squeezed gently. A drop of water appeared at the nozzle and swelled until it was the size of his fist and quivered with tension. He cupped the water in his gloves and eased it free, then guided the ball of water towards the bin of powdered rock. He had to press it down carefully, wetting the surface so he could mix the water and earth without sending a cloud of debris up into the module.

Once he had kneaded the snowmelt and regolith into a gritty paste, he began to rub it back and forth between his gloves. The mud rose in a tube from his hands, swaying back and forth in front of his face. He tried a forty-degree bend, and hairline cracks spread at the curve—more water needed.

The cylinder grew and twined around him in the weightless cabin. When he had fifteen handspans he tore off a good chunk from the top and swam to the worktable where he could lock his boots into two grips on the floor. Braced in place, he slapped the mud against the tabletop.

He kneaded the shapes quickly, joyfully. It wasn’t easy sculpting with insulated gloves, but the long tapering fingers had been designed with craftwork in mind. He formed, weighed, and created, while sunset flared briefly across the planet and they rotated into night. Ra-Shalom fell dark.

Metatron was silent, except to mark the time.

“Ten minutes.”

“Twenty minutes.”

At thirty minutes he had made the shape of a man, about a meter high. Its legs were proportionally short, its head sunken into the torso, its mouth gaping open to receive the Word. Clay fingers were too fragile for manual work, so the hands were just a paddle with an opposable thumb.

It was as practical as he could manage without breaking the outline of the human form. A golem’s material didn’t matter—any inorganic would do—but the form was everything. God created man in his own image, and something in that initial Act had set the laws governing creation forever after.

Satisfied, he poked two eyeholes into the clay and released his little man to drift up to the cupola, limbs splayed. That was the easy part.

“We have first stage completion, Rabbi. Well done! We’ll begin composition now.”

He glanced at the laptop clipped beneath the window. The letters of the previous composition still glowed on its screen, VavYud-BeitSamekh-PeiKaf (Thinking-Working, Wisdom-Sleep, Dominion-Life). Now they flashed and rearranged as new instructions arrived.

The workroom printer chattered, and from its slot he pulled a square of tissue-thin paper printed with Hebrew letters. Two hundred and thirty-one pairs, arranged in thirty-three rows of seven columns.

Five millennia of rabbinical experimentation had uncovered only a few working rituals. The Sweeper. The Echo. The Guardian of Rabbi Loew. In the pre-modern era, a composition like this would have taken a master rabbi a day of painstaking work, and a single misshapen stroke would have rendered it unusable. Today, the ISA’s computers could spit out a perfect recipe in seconds, and their software was faster than any scholar at identifying successful patterns.

He studied the Word. Today’s composition was only a slight variation on Tzadok’s 1867 formula for industrial work. The familiar string of MemGimel-MemYud-YudDaleth (Earth-Wealth, Earth-Working, Working-Fertility) held the key position in the seventeenth row, modified by Kushner’s 1981 AlephZayin (Air-Walk) for zero-gravity. Together, that cluster formed the lynchpin of Israel’s offworld mining technology.

After memorizing the formula, he painstakingly rolled the composition into a tight cigar and pushed it into the slick mouth of the unfinished golem. Once it was securely lodged inside, he pinched the lips closed.

“Things are looking good in there,” said Metatron approvingly.

The cameras watched his every move. Even if the composition were successful, it could be tricky to replicate. Every sound and gesture would need to be studied by the ISA’s future rabbis.

There was a click on the radio, and then a new, expressionless voice. A recording of a solemn male voice, his pronunciation perfect.

“Aleph-Shin... Lamed-Kaf...”

Creation was the chokepoint. At best, a traditional craftsman could compose two golems in a day, barely keeping pace with the loss rate. But if the compositions could be automated and the golems sourced from local material, then a single artisan could found a colony.

He closed his eyes, and began to rotate himself clockwise.

He spun in a vessel which spun around a planet which spun around its star. The universe was always spinning, and God was the tether. He reflected on this, as the computerized chant wove together the energies of creation.

“Aleph-Ayin...”

Aleph was the beginning and end, the sum of life.

“Hey-Zayin...”

E=mc2. Mass is a form of energy. The First President had used those Latin letters to describe Creation, but only Hebrew had the power to channel it.

“Reish-Yud... Vav-Tav...”

There were twenty-two letters, from aleph to tav. Through them, God formed all beings which are in existence, and all those which will be formed in all time to come.

“Chet-Tav... Pei-Tav...”

Picture the twenty-two letters arranged on a sphere. There are 231 lines that can be drawn between the letters, linking each to each. These combinations of pairs are the gates of knowledge. All 231 gates must be spoken, and their sequence defined the capacity of the golem.

“Samekh-Beit...”

Two hundred and thirty-one gates could be combined in more ways than there were grains of sand in the universe, and only one in ten thousand compositions had any discernible effect at all. For millennia, the best a scholar might hope for was to discover one successful composition in his lifetime. But then came the digital age. Coding advances and biogenetics had sparked new techniques for deciphering the letters of creation, and vice versa.

There was no end to learning.

“Reish-Nun...”

The gates had been spoken, the recorded voice fell silent. He became aware again of the whirring and clanking of the Maharal. Metatron came back on the radio, speaking reverently. “The patterning is complete. Awakening.”

He wrapped an arm around the golem’s back and pulled it close. The clay was hardening quickly in the dry air, but with his free hand he scored the final inviolate word into the golem’s forehead. The first, middle, and last letters of the alphabet. Aleph Mem Tav: EMET.

Truth.

Where did truth come from, he wondered? Was our knowledge passed to us in the letters of the books, the letters of genetics, or the letters of God? Were the golems imprinted by their makers’ personalities, or humans by God? Did God feel fear, anxiety and wonder? Could you feel wonder at your own creation?

The golem stirred and opened eyes still wet with snowmelt, and he decided that yes, yes you could.

The room filled with applause. “Congratulations Rabbi! Life has begat life!”

Another successful composition, another step towards perfection, but he felt blank. It didn’t feel like a world-changing moment to him.

But the personnel down at Metatron were celebrating, not listening to him. “This opens up everything! A full cradle-to-grave assembly station...”

Cocooned in cheers, he watched the squat, awakened golem test its limbs, making little star jumps that sent it cartwheeling harmlessly into the viewing window. It took new ones a while to find their feet.

His gaze shifted from the golem diligently pumping its legs in a circle, to the darkness beyond the windows. There was a figure in a spacesuit, standing on the asteroid. A man.

It stood still, ignored by the golems at its feet, seeming more real with every passing moment. He became horribly aware of how clearly the thing could see him—framed in the hexagram, lit up brightly against the darkness of the void. He swam for the controls and switched off the fluorescents.

The station fell dark, leaving only a few LEDs to outline the bulkheads and console in green half-light. The cheers on the radio died away. A long pause, then: “Are you alright, Rabbi? What’s happened to the lights?”

Ignoring them for the moment, he pressed himself back to the viewing window. The figure was gone.

An old story came to his mind. In the age of Rabbi Akiva ben Joseph, four righteous men had descended into the realm of darkness. One went mad, one died, one became a heretic, and only Rabbi Akiva returned safely home. He said that he had met himself.

Something touched him from behind. He jolted away, but then in the phosphorescent light, he saw it was only his new golem, still drifting loose across the workshop.

“Rabbi, what’s happening in there?” asked Metatron again.

He was sure he had seen it. A man in a spacesuit, full height. But the Maharal held only one person. There were no other missions, and the last Shavit capsule had arrived two weeks ago. Nobody could have got out there.

Unless something had been there the whole time. Nahmanides wrote in his commentaries that spirits lived in cold and desolate wastes, and what was more desolate than an asteroid? What if something had lain spreadeagled against the rock for billions of years, until the agency had hauled it into low-Earth-orbit. A clinging spirit, which had stolen the form of a man.

A dybbuk.

“Oberman?”

He hesitated. The Israeli Space Agency was a rabbinical organization, but he still didn’t want to report a dybbuk without evidence. This could even be some kind of stress test they had devised, to measure his psychological soundness.

He couldn’t launch an EVA without authorization, but he needed to know what was going on outside. He turned back to his golem.

The clay man floated patiently while he gouged out enough of a hole in its chest that he could press a torch into it. Then he strapped a wrist-camera to its head, secured like tefillin. He linked the feed to a monitor built into the arm of his suit, and tugged the golem down with him to the airlock.

With a little push, the golem drifted slowly into the airlock, feebly waving its arms and legs. He slammed the hatch on it with a bang, and tapped the controls to begin the slow process of depressurization. The hatch bolts clicked into place and the hiss of escaping air filled the module.

Like all the golems, its instincts for its environment were sound. Once the airlock was in full vacuum it opened the outer hatch itself and climbed out onto the external trusses. He watched its camera feed on his arm-monitor. The lights of Earth hung upside down beneath it.

The golem pulled itself arm over arm down the spine of the Maharal, past the darkened solar sails where its brothers floated up and down, weaving a web of silicon to extend their reach and glory. He could hear its progress as well—little tap tap taps through the thin walls—and he drifted in sympathy with it, following its progress along the station.

Where was it? The golem was panning the camera across the surface of the asteroid, but its narrow torch beam picked out no sign of an intruder.

“Oberman, are you getting this?” asked Metatron. “We’ve lost visual.”

The golem resumed its examination of the trusses. Illuminated in the circle of its torch was an ISA tether, clipped securely to the Maharal’s rail.

It turned around, and the dybbuk filled the frame, clinging to the side of the Maharal. He glimpsed a faceplate, smooth and black like a mirror, then it launched itself with a hand outstretched. The visual-feed spun madly, he couldn’t understand what was happening. He rose to the cupola, and in the light of the stars he saw the dybbuk wrestling silently with the little golem, the pair of them tangled in the tether only a few meters from the window.

Metatron was shouting, a senseless cacophony of overlapping voices. It was impossible to issue commands from inside the module, but golems had the instinct to defend their territory. It unclipped the dybbuk’s tether at its belt, so that the struggling figures began to drift free from the cord. The dybbuk tried to snatch it back, but now the golem had wrapped itself around its face and was hammering away at its head.

The dybbuk gave up on the tether and seized the golem, tearing its leg away at the hip. Weakened, the golem was helpless to stop its further dismemberment, and then the dybbuk flung its broken little body out into space. It waved its last arm in farewell as it fell toward the darkened Earth, its chest torch shrinking to a pinprick.

The recoil from the throw had pushed the dybbuk into a spin, and the distance between it and the Maharal was growing. But it fired a series of short nitrogen busts from its backpack to right itself, and managed to get close enough to Ra-Shalom to snatch hold of the dust canopy.

It crawled upside down until it could rotate and settle onto the regolith, its boots kicking up puffs of dust. The golems at its feet went busily about their tasks, ignoring it.

The radio crackled again, and now Metatron sounded more panicked than he had ever heard. “Rabbi, you have to act, it’s endangering the station.”

They had seen it too, then. His hand strayed to the servo-controls. If he decoupled the Maharal from Ra-Shalom, he could send the creature back into the void. But only at the cost of disrupting the entire Israeli off-world mining project—and abandoning his children.

It was too late. The dybbuk launched itself silently from Ra-Shalom, glided across the gap, and disappeared out of sight of the cupola. A second later the Maharal resounded with a clang as it crashed into one of the trusses above.

Clank. Clank. It was scuttling around the outside of the ship, looking for a way in.

He pushed off the cold windowpane and glided silently backward into darkness. His priority was to defend the Maharal from anything that could threaten Israel’s military secrets, whether it be natural or supernatural.

One clang, two clangs—heading towards Zenith. Then everything fell silent. He hung watchful in the dark.

The whirr of the fans picked up as they started pumping more air through the station. The creature was repressurizing the airlock. It was going to come inside.

He cast about for a weapon, but the Maharal had been designed with safety in mind. And if it was a dybbuk coming inside, what weapon could stop it?

Rabbi Eleazar had driven out spirits with the words of Solomon and a basin of pure water. He didn’t have a basin, but there were still fifty packets of ritual-grade water in the workroom. He tossed a dozen down the length of the station and swam after them, gathering them up outside the airlock at Zenith. Through the porthole on the airlock door he could see a shadow shift in the darkness.

Metatron was chattering still, but he had stopped listening. He aimed the first pack down at the door and squeezed it hard, so that a ropey tube of water spurted out and splattered against the door. He tried again more gently. The water formed a hovering ball between him and the airlock.

The dybbuk was watching him through the porthole, and the barometer had climbed to 60 percent. He snatched water packs and pushed their nozzles into the growing ball of water, squeezing out their contents so that the quivering sphere swelled larger and larger. Its surface shimmered with pinpoint reflections of the station’s emergency lights.

The wheel began to turn in sixty-degree arcs. Finally, the hatch bolts released loudly, and the dybbuk sprang.

Through the distorting lens of the blessed water, he saw a spaceman without a face, rising up from the darkness. His perceptions tumbled as he shrank back, and now he cowered in the depths of a deep well. The demon was falling towards him, its hands outstretched and gesticulating.

The dybbuk dove into the water without hesitation, and for a moment it hung frozen inside the fragile sphere. Then it burst through the surface, sending droplets spraying in every direction. The blessed water had failed. He had missed his moment.

He spread his legs to brace himself against the corridor and pushed back to collide with the dybbuk in the sukkah module. The world spun and they crashed together into the miniature Torah ark.

“Oberman, be careful, careful!” Metatron was shouting, the voices echoing from every direction.

They wrestled in the murky green light, pawing at each other as they careered through modules strewn with empty water packs. His gloves left streaks of clay on the dybbuk’s shiny spacesuit. The demon was trying to undo the catches of its helmet, but he didn’t want to see its face. He had to protect the work, it was endangering the work.

“It’s run amok! Shut it down Oberman, Oberman!”

They fell together through the darkness, helmets knocking together. He glimpsed piercing eyes, a dark beard. He locked his legs around the dybbuk’s torso and had raised his fists to bring down onto its faceplate, when he was transfixed by seven shafts of light.

Sunrise, through the star window of the cupola. The Maharal had crested another dawn.

Now he could clearly see that the dybbuk wore an ISA regulation space-suit, the same as his. Its tinted faceplate shone gold in the glare, and reflected his own identical helmet. Except, written in red marker above his own visor, he saw the mirrored word EMET.

He loosened his hold, and the dybbuk lashed out at his face, knocking his tinted visor up. He looked into his reflection and saw... nothing. His helmet was empty.

The form of a man. A hollow man.

He released his hold and flexed his empty gloves. “Wait,” he tried to say, but he could not speak.

The other figure passed its hand across his helmet and drew back a thumb stained red. It had smeared away the letter aleph, so that his Word now read MET. Death.

His arms and legs went rigid. The intruder drifted back, unclipped its helmet, and revealed a narrow face framed by two floating, sweat-slick ringlets.

“Congratulations, Rabbi, Rabbi.” said the voice of Metatron, echoing from both suits’ headsets.

His mind was a fading echo. All matter is part of God’s creation. And all matter returns gladly to God. He had done what he was made for, he realized, as he crumpled inwards. Israel was safe, and the balance tipped towards merit.