A Circle of Celebrations: The Complete Edition, page 8
Rachel looked him up and down, but hesitated before she spoke.
“Would you mind sitting at the center table? There are only eight Jews in the crew, and we need ten to form a minyan. You’ve been so supportive, I’d like to designate you an honorary member of the congregation for the seder.”
“I’d be happy to, Rachel. Thanks.”
She beamed and touched his arm. “Bless you.”
Debri sniffed and pushed past them. She went to a table at the farthest corner of the room and threw her equipment bag up against the wall next to the dishwashers. A few people followed her, all secular humanists or atheists in solidarity. They’d behaved the same way during Diwali, Chanukah, and Christmas, despite having the rest of the colony participate in HumanLight. Carter shot Rachel a rueful look and went to sit down.
“Now, if everyone will just download the Haggadah onto their tablets,” Rachel said, smiling at the assembly, “we’ll get started.”
She wore a small, blue silk skullcap pinned to her hair, as did the other seven members of the Jewish faith. Carter found one next to his plate and put it on his head. It didn’t look as though it would stay put, but it did. The other honorary Jew, Anjanette Henry, a big, busty, ebony-skinned geologist from Jamaica and devout Protestant, had pleated her skullcap and tucked it into her mass of dark hair over one ear as though it was a flower. Everyone reached for their ever-present flat-screen devices and tapped the new icon that had appeared under Documents. It opened up to display a split screen of Standard English and Hebrew. Carter scanned the English side. Syllable-by-syllable transliterations of the Hebrew prayers had been included for those like him who couldn’t read the foreign text.
He and Anjanette weren’t the only strangers at the inner table. Four of the Visitors, as most of the crew called them, were perched on the long benches across from the humans. It seemed odd to call them Visitors, since they were native to this world, and the humans weren’t, but that was the name that the commanding officer had started calling them. Carter felt a little ashamed of himself that he didn’t know any more about what was going to take place than they did.
The Visitors, eight feet tall and as skinny as ladders, with pebbled blue skin and mouths that opened vertically instead of horizontally, were always cheerful guests. With three tongues apiece, they took to new languages and musical styles like parrots. They had picked up Standard English far faster than any human had learned their language. Most of the landing party still relied on translator devices. The Visitors didn’t take that amiss. They came to regard the translators as fellow beings, and treated them with the same avuncular affection as they did the humans. They called themselves Llrrrt’dnn’iqq, a name that made sense when trilled against multiple hard and soft palates and definitely lost something in translation to the monthly reports home to Earth, hence the generic term “Visitors.”
“I feel as though I am learning something about the old world here on our new world,” Anjanette said, with a wry smile. “Look at this Passover plate—Pesach, Rachel called it.” She touched the items in the six dished compartments on the open china platter. “All of these are symbols of the will of God. Bone of the Paschal lamb, roasted egg, greens, horseradish, charoset—that’s apples, wine, and nuts—and matzoh.” The last was a stack of three flat square crackers a third of a meter across that filled the middle of the plate.
Carter broke off a corner of the top matzoh and ate it. It was dry and crumbly in his mouth.
“Doesn’t taste like much,” he said.
Rachel reached over and smacked his hand with her fingers.
“Listen and hear why,” she said, with a smile that took the sting out of the blow. “It’s part of our story.”
Although open fire wasn’t ordinarily permitted in any of the settlement quarters, an exception was made for candles for religious or celebratory purposes, as long as a fire extinguisher was close by. Rachel stood over a three branched candelabrum furnished with three white candles the length of Carter’s hand. She spread her hands above them and recited a prayer.
“Blessed are Thou, O Eternal, who has sanctified us with Your commandments, and commanded that we kindle the Yom Tov lights.”
The others chimed in, “Amen.” Carter hastily followed suit. Rachel lit the three candles.
“I want everyone to take a turn reading the explanations for the rituals,” she said, beckoning to a cluster of youngsters who had been roped in as attendants for the feast. “First, the washing of the hands.”
Two of the children, daughters of colony physician Natalie Li, brought an old-fashioned pitcher and bowl around to each of the congregants at the center ring. Carter dabbed his hands in the water and dried them on the woven towel. The white linen looked ancient, like textile displays he had seen dating back a thousand years. Embroidery in blue and red picked out the images of donkeys and flowers. He felt admiration for Rachel, who had to have packed all this gear in her shipping allowance from Earth.
Ippolita Daoud, an Israeli geologist, recited the text and prayer over eating green herbs in her guttural accent. Never good at extemporaneous reading, Carter sneaked an advance look at the file, and followed along as voice upon voice added to the explanation of the holiday of Passover. He’d never bothered with the Old Testament. His impressions, growing up in a nominally Protestant family, were that the early Jews had not really reached their pinnacle until the birth of Christ. The story of the Hebrews trapped in Egypt as a subject race proved to be painful to read, let alone voice. It gave him sympathy for the Jewish people he hadn’t really felt before. He shot Rachel a grateful glance.
“Now, the Four Questions,” Rachel said, smiling at the Visitors. “I’ve asked our new friends to participate, so they’ll learn more about my religion and culture.”
Mmm’ddk, the motherly leader of the most local family group, the Mmm’nnn’ilp, opened her sideways mouth.
“Mah nish-tanah ha lilah ha zeh, mi-kol ha laylot, shebachol ha lehlot …” she sang, her warm alto voice pure.
Carter looked surprised, but knew he shouldn’t have been. The Llrrrt’dnn’iqq had learned Standard English without a qualm. Hebrew was just another human language. The Jewish congregation answered in the same tongue. The sung prayers were in a minor key, which in his opinion, added to the melancholy of the underlying story. He had no trouble following along, but to his ears, brought up on classical and popular music, almost all of which was in major keys, Jewish prayers sounded as alien as the Llrrrt’dnn’iqq’s own trilling lingo. The only non-Jews who seemed comfortable with the prayers were of Earth-Asian descent. Carter recalled something about their traditional music being in a pentatonic scale.
“Now, we partake of the bitter herb, Maror, which reminds us of the bitterness of slavery,” Tom Rosenfield said, holding aloft a small pot of the bright fuchsia sauce like the substance on the seder plate. He spread some on a square of the matzoh from one of the baskets on the table, and ate it.
The aliens went along happily with everything. Every dish in the ritual meal had some symbolism, all of which was pointed out by various members of the small congregation. Carter tried a dab of the pink stuff. The fire on his tongue made him want to spit it out, but he swallowed instead, following it up with a drink of the unusually sweet grape wine. He had never been a fan of horseradish.
“May I have yours if you are not going to finish it?” Ddd’ohh asked. Carter always thought of the skinniest Visitor as a teenage boy. He never turned down food.
“No problem,” Carter said, pushing the small dish toward the Visitor’s long hand. Ddd’ohh lifted it to his middle tongue and lapped it with ululations of bliss from the upper portion of his mouth. Carter took another drink. At least a lot of wine was served during this celebration.
At last, which in Carter’s estimate was at least nine hours since they had begun, but in fact was only twenty minutes, Rachel put down her screen.
“Now, we have dinner,” she said, as the boxy silver roboservers emerged from the food preparation area laden with heavy rectangular pans. “Soup, gefilte fish, roast meat, carrot and prune tsimmes, kugel, salad, and, of course, more matzoh. Enjoy!”
“This is most interesting,” said Mmm’ddk, making room for the soup bowl and an adapted scooplike spoon that fit into the Llrrrt’dnn’iqq’s mouth. She ran a long manipulative digit down the computer file. “The Exodus, as you describe it. Human beings have such limited senses. Why did the Israelites not simply leave when they chose to?”
Rachel looked a little perturbed, her thin brows drawing down over her blunt nose. “It wasn’t so easy. The land itself was hostile. Egypt is one long, lush river valley surrounded by arid deserts. There would have been armed guards. The Israelites lived a subsistence life. They had little in the way of supplies or weapons. They were a captive population far from the land of their birth. They had small children and feeble elderly who would find the journey across the hostile sands difficult, if not impossible. When they left, it was in haste. The story of matzoh tells us that they had no time to cook, and no facility for storing food safely. The elders wanted to protect all of the people and get them safely out of Egypt. God held His hand over us and guided us safely out of Egypt.”
“Much of this seems strange and contradictory,” said Ll’ppp’rrr, the Father of Memory, or as Carter understood it, their historian. That drew a small smile from some of the group in the outer tables, until he added, “As do all of your sacred texts. Wishing for plagues does not make them exist.”
Rachel shrugged. “The Torah is full of storytelling, sometimes a long while after the fact. These texts are considered to be the word of God, received through His poor, imperfect creations, humankind. This story is historical. The Israelites were made slaves by a conquering force and made to live in a foreign land. It took miracles to free them from their oppressors. Only the plagues convinced the Pharaoh that it was no longer safe to keep the Israelites prisoners and to give them permission to leave. While there was almost certainly no possible connection between the death of Pharaoh’s eldest son and the Israelites, he came to consider them to be more of a problem than an asset, and let them go.”
“But some of the strictures seem very strange, if God is omnipotent. The marking of the doorways—could your God not tell the difference between his Chosen People and the ones he had not chosen?”
“I suppose,” Carter put in, over the embarrassed sputtering from the eight Jews, “He wanted to make sure they were obedient before he saved them. Like many things in the Bible, this might have been another test, like ordering Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac.”
“Humans are strange,” Ddd’ohh said, licking out another bowl of horseradish. He had pink streaks on his narrow blue cheeks. “But even most of your people do not see the importance of your stories.”
“It is in their holy books as well as ours,” Rachel said.
“So few of you agree, though.” Ll’ppp’rrr aspirated the word.
“That’s nothing!” Mikael Ashkenazi said, with a laugh that shook his round belly. “We’re used to arguing. The saying is that if you ask eight Jews a question, you’ll get twenty different answers.”
“You ask good questions,” Rachel said, with more aplomb than Carter would normally have given her credit for having, although in her role as a scientist, he considered her fair but fierce in defense of her research. “We’re making new traditions. Maybe some of these queries should be added to the Four Questions. It will help us explain God to those who have not grown up in a deistic culture.”
“Rachel, no!” Sidney Fehr protested, his dark eyes flashing under his heavy eyebrows. He was in charge of the colony archives, blog, and databases. “We don’t change the traditions.”
Rachel shook her head, a little sadly. “We always change, Sidney. I wouldn’t be a rabbi if we hadn’t changed some traditions. It’s how we survive.”
“Survive,” Mmm’dkk said, pushing aside her now-empty soup bowl. “I wished to speak of survival! Are you prepared to survive now?” She turned to Carter and Melody Chikungwe, the settlement’s co-commanders. “We have little time before you must move, or this settlement did not last.”
“Will not last,” Ll’ppp’rrr corrected her gently, with a trilling of the final T. “Your God works in ways that we do not understand. But you act with some logic. You reached out to us in friendship; let us do also. We postponed our own Exodus to the northlands to join you here. Come with us today, tonight! It is time and past time to leave this place for the season. The chh’nkh are coming. They will emerge soon from the deep swamps. Within two solar passes of their appearance, they birth their young. They will come through here soon. You must leave this place for that time. You knew of the dangers when you chose to put your homes here.”
Carter felt a chill race down his spine. Placing the settlement had been a matter of discussion and argument. This was a fruitful valley, suitable as far as matters of sunlight and water were concerned. In any case, no one wanted to live in the swamps. The Visitors warned them that it would have to be evacuated annually for a period of up to fifteen days as the predators used the valley as their hatching grounds. Then they retreated downriver with their newly borne young, not to be seen again until the next time.
The initial satellite survey of Nong had returned considerable footage of the primary predatory race. Chh’nkh reminded him of whale-sized velociraptors combined with the alien from Alien with its multiple jaws. Two of them had torn apart a browsing marsh reptiloid between them as though pulling a giant wishbone. The resultant gore had made a few of the scientists in the orientation hall run for the toilets.
“I thought we had more time,” Rachel said.
“No more,” Ll’ppp’rrr replied. “Please. It is dark now. We can escape if we hurry.”
“We have taken your warning into advisement,” Melody said, with a smile. “You have been generous friends. We are prepared to leave next week, as we discussed.”
“The rumblings have already started,” Ll’ppp’rrr said. “They are early, but must not be ignored. The chh’nkh will kill all beings that they see. If they fear for their nestlings, they will tear these habitats apart. You will not escape later.”
It was a solemn reminder to the scientists. During the first month of the colony, two of the xeno team had hidden themselves in a blind to observe the huge predators hunting for food. An unlucky noise at the wrong moment had brought the hungry herd down on them. They hadn’t survived. Carter had forced himself to view the bodies in the ruin of the shelter. It had been a horrifying mess. The only things left intact were specimen cases containing some biological artifacts and two chh’nhk eggs.
“We still have time,” Carter said. “We have plenty of hydrogen-powered craft to take us up into the safe zone. If we have to, we’ll load up the big shuttle, too. The chh’nkh are nowhere near us yet.” He beckoned to the head of geology, who sat at the next table. “Nina, didn’t you check the seismometer? We would hear the vibrations as they are tunneling upward.”
“Exactly,” said Nina Chessman. “The epicenter is kilometers from here.”
“From within the swamps, ninety-four links from here?” Ddd’ohh asked. A link was about two meters. Nina did the math in her head.
“No, in the sedimentary formations …” she stopped in horror. “The spongiform peat would absorb most of the vibrations of a closer approach.”
“We’ve been tracking the chh’nkh,” Sidney said. “All sightings so far are in the delta on the other side of the ridge. There’s only a narrow passage that the river goes through to the falls, and none of them have come that way. We’re ready to evacuate when they start to cross.”
“They won’t. They travel the underground rivers to the main nesting places,” Ll’ppp’rrr said, pointing to the far wall. In that direction, beyond the Lexan windows, were gentle rolling hills. Early in the settlement’s first few months, Ippolita had found abandoned and unhatched eggs in gravel nests that were now on display.
“Where are those?” Rachel asked.
Nina’s deep bronze cheeks paled. “Everywhere.”
A roar shook the dining hall. The colonists looked at one another in horror.
“That came from right under our feet,” Melody said.
“There’s an underground stream directly below the building,” Nina said. She pulled up a chart on her tablet and showed it to the colony chiefs. “The colony purification system draws from it for drinking water. Downstream, we drain waste into it. All the colony buildings are attached to the system. It’s a big channel. The chh’nkh could swim it. It would be upstream, but they’re strong.”
Melody looked at the Visitors. “We thought chh’nkh only traveled overland.”
“They stay below as long as possible,” Mmm’dkk said, almost apologetically, although Carter knew it was their own damned fault not to have asked for more empirical detail. “Only some come by way of the pass. Their skins do not like the hot sun, but it helps the eggs to hatch.”
The clattering of heavy metal brought everyone in the colony to their feet. Carter and a number of others rushed to the wide window and looked up the narrow valley. The bright orange solar-powered lights picked up movement at ground level. To his horror, the street near the hangar was heaving. The metal grid that served as a sewer cover shot into the air. A massive claw emerged and pawed the air. It withdrew, to be replaced by a massive, triple-jawed head with pebbled skin and wide, glassy eyes. The chh’nkh heaved and strained at the opening. The framework came away with a snap that echoed all the way along the valley. The enormous beast, twelve meters long if it was a centimeter, scrambled out of the new opening and shook itself. The metal ring hung around its neck like a torque. It shook its head. The metal contraption flew off and crashed into the wall of the laboratory building. As soon as its massive rump cleared the opening, dozens of smaller chh’nkh poured out into the valley behind it.
Chh’nkh resembled the Visitors in the same way that human beings resembled lorises. One could tell that they had descended from common ancestors, one with vertical jaws and blue skin, but had diverged long ago, with the chh’nkh evolving toward alpha predator, and the Visitors toward intelligent civilization. The chh’nkh were sheer power, killing machines made of muscle and bone. The Visitors had said that the beasts could shove aside boulders bigger than they were. It hadn’t dawned on him, not really, what that meant.
