“I want to die in peace and you are killing me with noise,” said a weak voice out of the darkness.
By infrared Golem saw the old man crumpled on the floor by the bed, filthy and half naked, with the shield control resting near his hand. He turned on light. The old man was nearly bald, wasted and yellowskinned, wrinkled, his rough beard tangled and clotted with blood.
“Zohar?”
Sam Begelman opened his eyes and saw a tremendous machine, multi-armed and with wheels and treads, wound with coiling tubes and wires, studded with dials. At its top was a dome banded with sensor lenses, and it turned this way and that to survey the room. “What are you?” he whispered in terror. “Where is my kaddish?”
He spoke in lingua, but O/G replied in Hebrew. “You know you are the last Jew in the known universe, Rav Zohar. There is no one but me to say prayers for you.”
“Then let me die without peace,” said Begelman, and closed his eyes.
But Golem knew the plan of the station, and within five minutes he reordered the bed in cleanliness, placed the old man on it, set up an IV, cleansed him, and injected him with the drugs prepared for him. The old man’s hands pushed at him and pushed at him, uselessly. “You are only a machine,” he croaked. “Can’t you understand that a machine can’t pray?”
“Yes, master. I would have told that to Galactic Federation, but I knew they would not believe me, not being Jews.”
“I am not your master. Why truly did you come?”
“I was made new again and given orders. My growth in logic now allows me to understand that I cannot be of use to you in exactly the way Galactic Federation wished, but I can still make you more comfortable.”
“I don’t care!” Begelman snarled. “Who needs a machine?”
“The Cnidori needed me to save them from the Unds when you shut them out, and they tried to call me Savior, Redeemer, master; I refused because I am a machine, but I let them call me Golem because I am a machine of deliverance.”
Begelman sniffed. But the sick yellow of his skin was gone; his face was faintly pink and already younger by a few years.
“Shmuel Zohar ben Reuven Begelman, why do you allow those helpless ones to call you Rav Zohar and speak in your language?”
“You nudnik of a machine, my name is not Samuel and certainly not Shmuel! It is Zohar, and I let myself be called Sam because zohar is ‘splendor’ and you can’t go through life as Splendor Begelman! I taught those Cnidori the Law and the Prophets to hear my own language spoken because my children are gone and my wife is dead. That is why they call me Teacher. And I shut them out so that they would be forced to make their own way in life before they began to call me Redeemer! What do you call yourself, Golem?”
“My designation is O/G5/842.”
“Ah. Og the giant King of Bashan. That seems suitable.”
“Yes, Zohar. That one your Rabbi Moshe killed in the land of Kana’an with all his people for no great provocation. But O is the height of my oxygen tolerance in Solthree terms; I cannot work at gravities of less than five newtons, and eight four two is my model number. Now Zohar, if you demand it I will turn myself off and be no more. But the people are within your gate; some of them have been killed and they must still be cared for.”
Zohar sighed, but he smiled a little as well. Yet he spoke slowly because he was very ill. “Og ha-Golem, before you learn how to tune an argument too fine remember that Master of the Word is one of the names of Satan. Moshe Rabbenu was a bad-tempered man but he did very greatly, and I am no kind of warrior. Take care of the people, and me too if your… logic demands it—and I will consider how to conduct myself off the world properly.”
“I am sure your spirit will free itself in peace, Zohar. As for me, my shuttle is broken, I am wanted nowhere else, and I will rust in Pardes.”
Og ha-Golem went out of the presence of the old man but it seemed to him as if there were some mild dysfunction in his circuits, for he was mindful—if that is the term—of Begelman’s concept of the Satan, Baal Davar, and he did not know for certain if what he had done by the prompting of his logic was right action. How can I know? he asked himself. By what harms and what saves, he answered. By what seems to harm and what seems to save, says the Master of the Word.
Yet he continued by the letter of his instructions from Galactic Federation, and these were to give the old man comfort. For the Cnidori he helped construct tents, because they liked water under their bellies but not pouring on their heads. With his own implements he flensed the bodies of the dead Unds, cleaned their skins, and burned their flesh; it was not kosher for Begelman and attracted bothersome scavengers. He did this while Rav Zohar was sleeping and spoke to the people in his language; they had missed it when he was ill. “Zohar believes you must learn to take care of yourselves, against the Unds and on your world, because you cannot now depend on him.”
“We would do that, Golem, but we would also like to give comfort to our Teacher.”
Og ha-Golem was disturbed once again by the ideas that pieced themselves together in his logic and said to Begelman, “Zohar, you have taught the Cnidori so well that now they are capable of saying the prayers you long for so greatly. Is there a way in which that can be made permissible?”
The old man folded his hands and looked about the bare and cracking walls of the room, as Golem had first done, and then back at him. “In this place?” he whispered. “Do you know what you are saying?”
“Yes, Zohar.”
“How they may be made Jews?”
“They are sentient beings. What is there to prevent it?”
Begelman’s face became red and Og checked his blood-pressure monitor. “Prevent it! What is there to them that would make Jews? Everything they eat is neutral, neither kosher nor tref, so what use is the law of Kashrut? They live in mud—where are the rules of bathing and cleanliness? They had never had any kind of god or any thought of one, as far as they tell me—what does prayer mean? Do you know how they procreate? Could you imagine? They are so completely hermaphroditic the word is meaningless. They pair long enough to raise children together, but only until the children grow teeth and can forage. What you see that looks like a penis is really an ovipositor: each Cnidor who is ready deposits eggs in the pouch of another, and an enzyme of the eggs stimulates the semen glands inside, and when one or two eggs become fertilized the pouch seals until the fetus is of a size to make the fluid pressure around it break the seal, and the young crawls up the belly of the parent to suckle on the teat. Even if one or two among twenty are born incomplete, not one is anything you might call male or female! So tell me, what do you do with all the laws of marriage and divorce, sexual behavior, the duties of the man at prayer and the woman with the child?”
He was becoming out of breath and Og checked oxygen and heart monitors. “I am not a man or woman either and though I know the Law I am ignorant in experience. I was thinking merely of prayers that God might listen to in charity or appreciation. I did not mean to upset you. I am not fulfilling my duties.”
“Leave me.”
Og turned an eyecell to the dripping of the IV and removed catheter and urine bag. “You are nearly ready to rise from your bed and feed yourself, Zohar. Perhaps when you feel more of a man you may reconsider.”
“Just go away.” He added, snarling, “God doesn’t need any more Jews!”
“Yes, they would look ridiculous in skullcaps and prayer shawls with all those fringes dragging in mud…”
Zohar, was that why you drove them out into the wild?
Og gathered brushwood and made a great fire. He cut woody vines and burnt them into heaps of charcoal. He gathered and baked clay into blocks and built a kiln. Then he pulled his sledge for 120 kilometers, and dug until he found enough pieces of the glider for his uses. He fired the kiln to a great heat, softened the fragments, and reshaped them into the huge scoops he had been deprived of. They were not as fine and strong as the originals, but very nearly as exact.