I watched with interest as Basilius complied. It turned out to be larks and olives! I approved, not simply for the fact that I liked the dish. The “simple meal” was actually a lot more elaborate than she had provided for the three of us the night before.
Things were looking up. I said, “Can you tell me something, Rachel? I think you’re Judaean yourself, aren’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Well, I’m a little confused,” I said. “I thought the Judaeans believed in the god Yahveh.”
“Of course, Julie. We do.”
“Yes but—” I hesitated. I didn’t want to mess up the way things were going, but I was curious. “But you say ‘gods’. Isn’t that, well, a contradiction?”
“Not at all,” she told me civilly enough. “Yahveh’s commandments were brought down from a mountaintop by our great prophet, Moses, and they were very clear on the subject. One of them says, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ Well, we don’t, you see? Yahveh is our first god. There aren’t any before him. It’s all explained in the rabbinical writings.”
“And that’s what you go by, the rabbinical writings?”
She looked thoughtful. “In a way. We’re a very traditional people, Julie. Tradition is what we follow, the rabbinical writings simply explain the traditions.”
She had stopped eating. I stopped, too. Dreamily I reached out to caress her cheek.
She didn’t pull away. She didn’t respond, either. After a moment, she said, not looking at me, “For instance, there is a Judaean tradition that a woman is to be a virgin at the time of her marriage.”
My hand came away from her face by itself, without any conscious command from me. “Oh?”
“And the rabbinical writings more or less define the tradition, you see. They say that the head of the household is to stand guard at an unmarried daughter’s bedroom for the first hour of each night; if there is no male head of the household, a trusted slave is to be appointed to the job.”
“I see,” I said. “You’ve never been married, have you?”
“Not yet,” said Rachel, beginning to eat again.
I hadn’t ever been married, either, although, to be sure, I wasn’t exactly a virgin. It wasn’t that I had anything against marriage. It was only that the life of a sci-rom hack wasn’t what you would call exactly financially stable, and also the fact that I hadn’t ever come across the woman I wanted to spend my life with… or, to quote Rachel, “Not yet.”
I tried to keep my mind off that subject. I was sure that if my finances had been precarious before, they were now close to catastrophic.
The next morning I wondered what to do with my day, but Rachel settled it for me. She was waiting for me in the atrium. “Sit down with me, Julie,” she commanded, patting the bench beside me. “I was up late, thinking, and I think I’ve got something for you. Suppose this man Jeshua had been executed, after all.”
It wasn’t exactly the greeting I had been hoping for, nor was it something I had given a moment’s thought to, either. But I was glad enough to sit next to her in that pleasant little garden, with the gentled early sun shining down on us through the translucent shades. “Yes?” I said noncommittally, kissing her hand in greeting.
She waited a moment before she took her hand back. “That idea opened some interesting possibilities, Julie. Jeshua would have been a martyr, you see. I can easily imagine that under those circumstances his Chrestian followers would have had a lot more staying power. They might even have grown to be really important. Judaea was always in one kind of turmoil or another around that time, anyway — there were all sorts of prophecies and rumours about messiahs and changes in society. The Chrestians might even have come to dominate all of Judaea.”
I tried to be tactful. “There’s nothing wrong with being proud of your ancestors, Rachel. But, really, what difference would that have made?” I obviously hadn’t been tactful enough. She had turned to look at me with what looked like the beginning of a frown. I thought fast, and tried to cover myself. “On the other hand,” I went on quickly, “suppose you expanded that idea beyond Judaea.”
It turned into a real frown, but puzzled rather than angry. “What do you mean, beyond Judaea?”
“Well, suppose Jeshua’s Chrestian-Judaean kind of — what would you call it? Philosophy? Religion?”
“A little of both, I’d say.”
“Religious philosophy, then. Suppose it spread over most of the world, not just Judaea. That could be interesting.”
“But, really, no such thing hap—”
“Rachel, Rachel,” I said, covering her mouth with a fingertip affectionately. “We’re saying what if, remember? Every sci-rom writer is entitled to one big lie. Let’s say this is mine. Let’s say that Chrestian-Judaeanism became a world religion. Even Rome itself succumbs. Maybe the City becomes the — what do you call it — the place for the Sanhedrin of the Chrestian-Judaeans. And then what happens?”
“You tell me,” she said, half-amused, half-suspicious.
“Why, then,” I said, flexing the imagination of the trained sci-rom writer, “it might develop like the kind of conditions you’ve been talking about in the old days in Judaea. Maybe the whole world would be splintering into factions and sects, and then they fight.”
“Fight wars?” she asked incredulously.
“Fight big wars. Why not? It happened in Judaea, didn’t it? And then they might keep right on fighting them, all through historical times. After all, the only thing that’s kept the world united for the past two thousand years has been the Pax Romana. Without that — why, without that,” I went on, talking faster and making mental notes to myself as I went along, “let’s say that all the tribes of Europe turned into independent city-states. Like the Greeks, only bigger. And more powerful. And they fight, the Franks against the Vik Northmen against the Belgiae against the Kelts.”
She was shaking her head. “People wouldn’t be so silly, Julie,” she complained.
“How do you know that? Anyway, this is a sci-rom, dear.” I didn’t pause to see if she reacted to the “dear”. I went right on, but not failing to notice that she hadn’t objected. “The people will be as silly as I want them to be — as long as I can make it plausible enough for the fans. But you haven’t heard the best part of it. Let’s say the Chrestian-Judaeans take their religion seriously. They don’t do anything to go against the will of their god. What Yahveh said still goes, no matter what. Do you follow? That means they aren’t at all interested in scientific discovery, for instance.”
“No, stop right there!” she ordered, suddenly indignant. “Are you trying to say that we Judaeans aren’t interested in science? That I’m not? Or my Uncle Sam? And we’re certainly Judaeans.”
“But you’re not Chrestian-Judaeans, sweet. There’s a big difference. Why? Because I say there is, Rachel, and I’m the one writing the story. So, let’s see — “ I paused for thought — “all right, let’s say the Chrestians go through a long period of intellectual stagnation, and then — “ I paused, not because I didn’t know what was coming next but to build the effect — “and then along come the Olympians!”
She gazed at me blankly. “Yes?” she asked, encouraging but vague.
“Don’t you see it? And then this Chrestian-Judaean world, drowsing along in the middle of a pre-scientific dark age — no aircraft, no electronic broadcast, not even a printing press or a hovermachine — is suddenly thrown into contact with a super-technological civilization from outer space!” She was wrinkling her forehead at me, trying to understand what I was driving at. “It’s terrible culture shock,” I explained. “And not just for the people on Earth. Maybe the Olympians come to look us over, and they see that we’re technologically backward and divided into warring nations and all that. and what do they do? Why, they turn right around and leave us! And. and that’s the end of the book!”