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Smaller groups of people straggled by for the next hour or so, all headed uptown. The traffic seemed to have stopped completely, even the crosstown buses; this rally must be big, for the city to’ve done that.

The last of the pilgrims to go by was a stout, fiftyish Society Hill matron with bleached blue hair, walking calmly in the very center of the street. She was wearing an expensive ermine stole, although she was barefoot and her feet were bleeding. As she passed Nicky, she suddenly laughed, unwrapped the stole from around her neck, and threw it into the air, walking on without looking back. The stole landed across the shoulders of the communist xylophone player, who goggled blankly for a moment, then stared wildly around him—his eyes widening comically—and then bolted, clutching the stole tightly in his hands; he disappeared down an alleyway.

“You bitch!” Nicky screamed. “Why not me? Why didn’t you give it to me?”

But she was gone, the street was empty, and the gray afternoon sky was darkening toward evening.

“The Last Days are coming,” Nicky told the last few strolling tourists and window-shoppers. “The strait gate is narrow, sayeth the Lord, and few will fit in, man.” But his heart wasn’t in it anymore. Nicky waited, freezing, his breath puffing out in steaming clouds, stamping his feet to restore circulation, slapping his arms, doing a kind of shuffling jig that—along with his too-small jacket—made him look more than ever like an organ-grinder’s monkey performing for some unlikely kind of alms. He didn’t understand why he didn’t just give up and go back to the Lordhouse. He was beginning to think yearningly of the hot stew they would be served there after they had turned the day’s take in to Father Delardi, the hymn singing later, and after that the bottle of strong raw wine, and his mattress in the rustling, fart-smelling communal darkness, oblivion…

There was—a sound, a note, a chord, an upswelling of something that the mind interpreted as music, as blaring iron trumpets, only because it had no other referents with which to understand it. The noise, the music, the something—it swelled until it shook the empty street, the buildings, the world, shook the bones in the flesh, and the very marrow in the bones, until it filled every inch of the universe like hot wax being poured into a mold.

Nicky looked up.

As he watched, a crack appeared in the dull gray sky. The sky split open, and behind the sky was nothingness, a wedge of darkness so terrible and absolute that it hurt the eyes to look at it. The crack widened, the wedge of darkness grew. Light began to pour through the crack in the sky, blinding white light more intense and frightening than the darkness had been. Squinting against that terrible radiance, his eyes watering, Nicky saw tiny figures rising into the air far away, thousands upon thousands of human figures floating up into the sky, falling up while the iron music shook the firmament around them, people falling up and into and through the crack in the sky, merging into that wondrous and awful river of light, fading, disappearing, until the last one was gone.

The crack in the sky closed. The music grumbled and rumbled away into silence.

Everything was still.

Snowflakes began to squeeze like slow tears from the slate gray sky.

Nicky stayed there for hours, staring upward until his neck was aching and the last of the light was gone, but after that nothing else happened at all.

More Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction 1999 First Jewish Lights Classic Reprint Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

2013 First Digital Edition

The permission acknowledgments on page 181 constitute an extension of this copyright page. All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The editor regrets that Woody Allen’s short story “The Scrolls” cannot be included in this and forthcoming editions.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

More wandering stars: an anthology of outstanding stories of Jewish fantasy and science fiction / edited by Jack Dann.—1st Jewish Lights classic reprint ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 1-58023-063-6

1. Science fiction, American—Jewish authors. 2. Fantasy fiction, American—Jewish authors. 3. Jews—Fiction. I. Dann, Jack.

PS648.S3 M6 1999

813’.0876088924 21—dc21

99-045347

ISBN 1-58023-063-6 (Quality Paperback)

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover design: Bronwen Battaglia, Bridgett Taylor

Cover art: Joseph’s Dream (© 1997) was created by Michael Bogdanow, an artist, lawyer, and musician living in Lexington, Massachusetts. It is based on Joseph’s dream of the sun, moon, and eleven stars bowing down to him (Genesis 37:9), and is part of Bogdanow’s “Visions of Torah” series of contemporary, spiritual paintings and reproductions inspired by Judaic texts. The original is an acrylic painting on canvas in the private collection of Alex and Donna Salamon.

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Acknowledgment is made for permission to print the following materiaclass="underline"

“The Last Demon” by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Copyright © 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964 by Isaac Bashevis Singer. From Short Friday by Isaac Bashevis Singer, reprinted with permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.