When boredom made me decide that I needed a glass of wine and a quick snack more than I needed to sit there with my still-blank tablet, I found out there was hardly anyone even in the lounges. There was no familiar face. No one seemed to know where Sam was. And in the afternoon, the Collegium-Presidor, bowing to the inevitable, announced that the remaining sessions would be postponed indefinitely.
The day was a total waste.
I had a lot more hopes for the night.
Rachel greeted me with the news that Sam had sent a message to say he was detained and wouldn’t make dinner.
“Did he say where he was?” She shook her head. “He’s off with some of the other top people,” I guessed. I told her about the collapse of the convention. Then I brightened. “At least let’s go out for dinner, then.”
Rachel firmly vetoed the idea. She was tactful enough not to mention money, although I was sure Sam had filled her in on my precarious financial state. “I like my own cook’s food better than any restaurant,” she told me. “We’ll eat here. There won’t be anything fancy tonight—just a simple meal for the two of us.”
The best part of that was “the two of us”. Basilius had arranged the couches in a sort of V, so that our heads were quite close together, with the low serving tables in easy reach between us. As soon as she lay down, Rachel confessed, “I didn’t get a lot of work done today. I couldn’t get that idea of yours out of my head.”
The idea was Sam’s, actually, but I didn’t see any reason to correct her. “I’m flattered,” I told her. “I’m sorry I spoiled your work.”
She shrugged and went on. “I did a little reading on the period, especially about an interesting minor figure who lived around then, a Judaean preacher named Jeshua of Nazareth. Did you ever hear of him? Well, most people haven’t, but he had a lot of followers at one time. They called themselves Chrestians, and they were a very unruly bunch.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know much about Judaean history,” I said. Which was true; but then I added, “But I’d really like to learn more.” Which wasn’t—or at least hadn’t been until just then.
“Of course, Rachel said. No doubt to her it seemed quite natural that everyone in the world would wish to know more about the post-Augustan period. “Anyway, this Jeshua was on trial for sedition. He was condemned to death.’
I blinked at her. “Not just to slavery?”
She shook her head. “They didn’t just enslave criminals back then, they did physical things to them. Even executed them, sometimes in very barbarous ways. But Tiberius, as Proconsul, decided that the penalty was too extreme. So he commuted Jeshua’s death sentence. He just had him whipped and let him go. A very good decision, I think. Otherwise he would have made him a martyr, and gods know what would have happened after that. As it was, the Chrestians just gradually waned away… Basilius? You can bring the next course in now.”
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?”