Chapter 3
The front door opened and Lucky, our chocolate Labrador retriever, rocketed through and bowled me over. He straddled me, tail wagging like a jet-propelled windshield wiper. He expressed his joy in a thorough tongue washing of my face. He also laughed.
Yeah, dogs laugh, but because of my empathic ability, I’m the only one who can hear them. Lucky thought knocking me down in greeting was hilarious.
Our ginger tabby, Einstein, looked out the door at me, meowed once, and disappeared. Cats laugh, too. But dogs laugh with you; cats laugh at you.
I hugged Lucky then pushed him away. I missed him as much as he missed me. We had the twelve-year-old dog for almost half my life. Our time together had been limited since I’d gone away to school.
I rose and faced my smiling parents in the doorway. My mother opened her arms, and I hugged her before we moved inside. “Sit,” my mother commanded. “We want to hear all the details of what has happened. This whole business is quite extraordinary.”
I picked at a hangnail as I spoke. “This is an honor. Because I’m at the top of my class, I’ve been appointed Assistant Registrar for Recruiting for the Academy College of Veterinary Medicine. The university wants offworld students. There haven’t been any in recent years, and they need the revenue.” I had to convince my folks that the whole thing was kosher; Reb Levi ordered me to say nothing about the Inquisition or the threat against my parents. “They chose me because I’m a good speaker.”
Mom and Dad looked at one another. Their skepticism was tangible. They well knew my political leanings.
“Assistant Registrar,” Dad repeated. “Sounds fancy enough. But will you have the opportunity to practice medicine? That’s something I know is important to you. You’ll be giving up your own plans.”
“I’ll run an interstellar veterinary service in a ship outfitted as a mobile clinic. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m told it has great equipment.”
“Mazel tov, darling. I’m sure that will be exciting. How long will you be gone? Will you be able to return home regularly?” Mom looked at me expectantly, but concern leaked through her happy façade.
My dad’s steel gray eyes probed me as I answered, as if he sought something beneath my words.
“I’m not sure what the schedule will be. I haven’t been given an itinerary. But I’ll send you hyperwave transmissions whenever I can. Promise.”
“I’m sure you will,” Dad said. He stood. “Come with me. Let’s have a drink while your mother gets dinner on the table.”
I followed him into his study. In an age where most databases were digital, an impressive library of cloth and leather-bound books covered the shelves. This was where I got my love of literature. He motioned me to one of two leather-covered armchairs and doled out a couple of glasses of schnapps.
“Okay, let’s have the truth. Who put the thumbscrews to you?”
I choked on my schnapps. “Wha-what do you mean?” A vision of The Wall skewered my brain. How could he know—?
“I don’t need your empathic talent to know what you told your mother and me is drek. You did not get chosen because you’re an expert speaker or because you’re a good student. This is mishegas. It makes no sense.”
Mom and Dad were among the few people who knew about my empathic ability. I sensed the emotions of animals and my empathic connection allowed me to soothe stressed beasts. I also perceived human emotions—I sensed what I call auras, for lack of a better term. Rarely, powerful human emotions came through as a fleeting vision, but I was not a telepath. I did not read minds. I certainly couldn’t influence people in the way I could animals.
Animals’ emotions caused both physical and psychological reactions, but people were worse. If I let them through, strong emotions caused nausea, vertigo, and headaches. A psychiatrist, a family friend, helped me learn to deal with my ability, but I had to develop my own mental shields by trial and error, and they were not perfect. In the inevitable fistfights of youth, I was doubly handicapped. Along with any physical beating, I got an emotional one from the anger of my opponent. While I avoided reading human emotions, leakage was all too common. One of my veterinary college professors knew of my empathy for animals, but kept the secret. I did not want other faculty and students to see me as a freak. After reading Asimov’s Foundation books, I worried I would be looked at like his Mule character, and that people would fear and shun me. So I kept my secret close.
However, I never could hide anything from my parents, and I often wondered if they had some of the same talent and could read me as well as I read them.
“But that’s it…” I came to a halt under my father’s hooded stare. “Dad, please. I can’t say anything more.”
“You’re in trouble again, aren’t you?” He sighed. “What did you do this time?”
I hunched my shoulders, but looked him in the eyes as I answered in a small voice. “I blew it. I shot my mouth off in front of some rebbes.” I held up my hands, palms forward. “I didn’t know they were there.” I knew that was a miserable excuse and dropped my eyes. “Now, the Council wants me out of their hair—way out.”
My father’s lips thinned. “I’ve told you a hundred times, Cy: All the intelligence in the world is useless without common sense. You know the Test-Lits don’t tolerate dissent.”
Yeah, I knew. For the past eighty years, the fundamentalist Testamentary-Literalist party ruled our planet with an iron hand and had become an oxymoron, an evangelistic Judaic tyranny—with an Inquisition, yet. Our people left Old Earth more than a thousand years ago, refugees from an oppressive Islamic world government. The age-old enmity between Hebrews and Muslims became intolerable and forced what Jews hoped would be the final stage in the Jewish diaspora.
My voice shook. “Reb Schvartz is a member of the Rebbinical Council. He…he threatened me with the Inquisition—you and Mom, too—if I don’t do as he says.”
Dad’s face creased with pain. “Reb Schvartz. From what I’ve heard, he’s the most sadistic of the Inquisitors.” He shook his head. “You really know how to pick them.”
“How can they justify what they do?” I cried. “The Inquisition was a church tribunal to torture heretics, particularly Jews. To have Jews use it to torture their own people..?”
Dad frowned. “The Test-Lits’ use of the term Inquisition is deliberate. Even two thousand years later, the original Inquisition echoes in the fears of Jews throughout the galaxy.” He opened his arms.
I stood and stepped within his embrace. Tears filled my eyes. I felt his strength. I had attained his above average height, but not his muscular physique. I stepped back and looked at him. I saw myself in his reddish brown hair, his gray eyes, his chiseled face, and the hook of his prominent nose—the latter, unfortunately, even more exaggerated on my face.
“One more thing,” I said. “Reb Schvartz is going with me.”
Dad’s rush of fear washed over me, roiling the small amount of schnapps I had managed to swallow.
“That is a dangerous man, Cy. You need to keep your wits about you. You need to control your quick temper.”
“I can take care of myself.”
Dad shook his head. “I know you are a fighter. We had to pull you out of enough scrapes as a kid. But I’m not talking about your martial arts training. You can’t let it come to something like that. You cannot antagonize Schvartz. Promise me, son. Don’t start a fight you can’t win.”
I swallowed hard and nodded.
“Say nothing of this to your mother. Come. It’s time for dinner.”
It was Friday night and we lit the candles and recited the shabbos prayers. I no longer attended synagogue—the Test-Lits brand of religion had put me off that—but the traditions I had been raised with meant more to me now than they had at any time in my life. Mom had prepared my favorites: matzoh ball soup, brisket with potato kugel, and rugullah pastries for dessert. Dinner sat in my stomach like lead.
On Saturday morning, I promised my folks that I would visit before I shipped out. I merged my land drone onto the autoroad, let the autopilot connect with the road’s traffic system, and sat back. I watched the pastoral scenery flow by. Golden grain fields and hay meadows stacked with bales were interspersed with verdant pastures dotted with cattle, goats, and sheep. Those animals and chickens came from earth during the diaspora in the giant, multi-generation seedships. They allowed Dovid’s World to develop as a self-sustaining agricultural ecology. Even now, other than the roads, vehicles, and farm machinery, much of our world would have been familiar to Terrans of a thousand years ago.
Since the takeover by the Test-Lits, the latest technology was difficult to come by for the average citizen. The government and military restricted the use of winged aircraft, whirlydrones, and hovercraft to approved personnel. Antigravity propulsion technology was even more restricted, and space travel was out for all but the military. Most people made do with wheeled land drones. The Test-Lits monitored movement between local districts to keep tabs on revolutionaries, who were always thorns in the side of the government despite official pronouncements that they were of no concern.
Even as I thought this, my vehicle slowed for the first of a half dozen military checkpoints I would negotiate before I reached Jerusalem City. A camouflage-clad Zionist Guard member motioned me to roll down my windscreen. I wondered at the ubiquitous camouflage uniforms of the military. Did they hope someone might miss them standing in the middle of the road so they could unlimber their blasters to fry some rebel?
He stuck out his hand. “Papers.”
I guess military mothers never taught their kids to say please. I handed over my documents. The guard looked at the folder, looked at my face, glanced back at the papers, and then returned them. Without another word, he waved me through.
The fields blended to an aureate blur and I closed my eyes. I wished I could be more like my dad, stoic and wise, never one to speak without careful forethought rather than the impulsive idiot I tended to be.
At school, I had never missed the opportunity to show off my smarts, which antagonized most other kids. My ability to read human emotions went beyond facial expressions and body language. I sensed what lay deep within, feelings no one was willing to show. This was more a curse than a blessing, since I perceived the hostile vibes I engendered. I learned that even supposed friends harbored negative feelings.
I isolated myself because I did not know how to deal with the perceived antipathy, and the resulting constant queasiness and headaches were intolerable. As an only child, I became a loner and a compulsive reader and watcher of Old Earth books and vids when I didn’t have chores.
Almost everything ever written and filmed was preserved in digital format. Fortunately for me, that included even bad vids: some of those were a kick to watch, particularly the old science fiction flicks predicting the future I now inhabited. I laughed at the Fourth-of July sparkler spaceships of Flash Gordon, the ubiquitous and clunky robots, the inevitably big-headed aliens. I marveled at the predictions of the writings of Verne, Wells, Clarke, and Gibson. I shed tears at Simmons’s portrait of a father watching his daughter aging backwards in Hyperion.
I remained a loner and, in some ways, looked forward to the isolation of space travel, though the thought of Reb Levi as my companion made my heart pound all the way to Jerusalem City.
***
Levi lectured me on my assignment in his office at his headquarters. I had never been in Government House. The Palmach storm troopers in every hallway sent shivers through me, but at least it was not the Inquisition prison. Levi’s office was less intimidating than the interrogation room. It even included a generic landscape painting and a potted plant—no torture instruments, thankfully. He sat in a chair in front of a window, a black silhouette against the light.
“You will pursue your clinical duties and recruit students for the Academy on each world that we visit. I will tell you where to go. Our ship is well-equipped, so I expect you to impress the worlds we visit with veterinary medicine on Dovid’s World. I will set the fees for these services, after all, we must pay for our travels.
“I will be your veterinary assistant, but remember I am in charge. You will obey my orders without question. You are responsible for what happens to your parents. Is that clear, Berger?”
I could only nod. The man had no clue as to what a veterinary assistant’s job entailed. I looked forward to his education: how to collect urine and fecal samples and how to express infected anal sacs, among other grisly tasks.
My hospital ship—a converted space yacht from a time when private citizens could have space yachts—looked a bit like a giant, inverted “T,” with the engines at the bottom of the crossbar. It had been fitted with the latest antigravity drive for use within planetary atmospheres, an anti-matter drive for interplanetary travel, and an interstellar hyperspace jumpdrive. This voyage was obviously important to the Test-Lits. No way would we ever pay off the cost of this thing with veterinary services and new students. I puzzled over that quite a bit, especially since I assumed most human-settled worlds would already have veterinarians.
A wheeled land drone chassis with a rear compartment fitted as a combined examination room, surgery suite, and laboratory would give me mobility on planets. On the side of the spaceship and on the side of the land drone cabin was the symbol of veterinary medicine: the letter V super-imposed on the staff of Aesculapius. It overlaid a picture of a spiral galaxy and blood red letters surrounded this: Galactic Circle Veterinary Service.
The name seemed a bit presumptuous, but I liked it nonetheless. I thought of the ship as the GCVS. If not for the specter of Levi and the Inquisition, I would have been ecstatic. As it was, I felt like an ancient cartoon character I had seen: a man with a permanent thundercloud over his head who was the earth’s greatest jinx.
***
As I nursed a drink in my favorite tavern, Furoletto Cohen asked to join me. I had not seen him since my arrest.
After some small talk, he said, “I worried about you after the night we met.”
I told him about my opportunity. I did not mention the Inquisition, of course.
“That’s remarkable. It says something about your abilities that they will speed up graduation and send you off on a mission of such importance. Congratulations.” He looked at me with a furrowed brow. “But I’m confused. That night in the tavern, a member of the Rebbinical Council tore into you for your heresy. Why the change in heart?”
I took note that he recognized Reb Levi, but I brushed that aside and gave him part of the story, otherwise it would look as phony as a three-dollar bill, as the ancients used to say. “The Council decided I was better off someplace where I couldn’t spread my seditious ideas. This was a way to get me out of their hair without making a martyr out of me. But it is a great chance for me to get experience.”
Fur smiled. “I’m glad you didn’t get targeted by the Inquisition.”
“Um, yeah. Lucky, I guess.”
Fur pursed his lips and tugged at his beard. “I almost envy you.”
I snorted. “Yeah. Envy the fact that I am exiled—” I snapped my mouth shut. It had overridden my brain once again.
Fur leaned back in his seat. When I looked away and fiddled with my beer mug, he spoke. “Okay, you’ve got my attention.”
“An experiment. That’s what I meant. It’s an experiment sending a new graduate on such a mission.” My phony grin felt more like a grimace.
Fur stared at me.
I blinked first. Something about the big man’s general demeanor and aura inspired my confidence, and I made a snap decision. I hoped I would not regret it as I did with my decisions all too often. In a low voice I said, “I’m being exiled. My parents and I have been threatened with the Inquisition if I don’t do as they say.”
Fur sat forward. “But why are they outfitting you for this space voyage?”
My hands trembled as I rolled my mug between them. “I’ve thought a lot about that. I’m guessing that it’s a ploy to get a rebbe to other worlds as a spy. Reb Levi Schvartz is going with me as my assistant.”
Fur’s lips twisted in a grimace. “You might be right. Political representatives from Dovid’s World have been persona non grata on other planets since the Test-Lits’ attempt to subjugate Sammara.” He referred to the only other inhabited planet in our solar system.
Too late, my caution kicked in and I started to panic. I grabbed his arm. “Please, don’t say anything. I’m not supposed to tell anybody. I don’t know what they’ll do to me or my folks if Levi finds out.”
Fur’s paw covered my hand. “Don’t worry. I won’t get you in trouble.” He let me have my hand back and shook his head. “Schvartz, huh? Not the most companionable of traveling partners.”
I looked over my shoulder. Paranoia closed in on me. “You obviously recognized him. How well do you know Schvartz?”
“By reputation only.”
“What have you heard?”
“That he’s the top man in the Inquisition. He’s a nasty piece of work. I knew a guy who was pulled in and interrogated. They thought he was a member of the resistance.”
“Was he?”
“No, but he was crippled by the time they released him.”
That did not ring true. Fur was not telling me something. I wondered if the guy in his story was connected to the resistance. Either way, the story gave me the creeps. Reb Levi was pure evil. I shuddered.
We spoke a bit more about the trip before I needed to leave for an appointment. As I rose, Fur asked if we might meet again. I sensed a strange excitement behind his words. I agreed.
The next couple of weeks, the Associate Dean for recruiting kept me busy. I had to learn all about the finances of the Academy, how students were selected, and how I was to act as the Academy’s agent on the worlds that we would visit. I found that it was far more complicated than I had realized. The Associate Dean gave me speeches for different audiences. My spiel to students would be different from those I gave to school officials or local veterinary societies. I was not nearly as thrilled about that aspect of my job as I was about the real medical challenges I would face. After all, veterinary medicine is what I had studied for the past four years, not how to sign up new students. The Associate Dean finally cut me loose saying I was as prepared as I could be. That remained to be seen.
***
When I met Fur again, he seemed nervous. He finished his beer and lowered his voice, not an easy thing for him. “Cy, I-I have a request of you.”
“Yeah?”
He looked around the room, then back at me. “Ten years ago I enrolled in the vet college, but I dropped out after two years. I decided that there were more important things than becoming a veterinarian. Family matters, you know? I settled for being an assistant.”
I nodded, though I detected evasion in his thoughts.
“I’ve been working at a private clinic as a veterinary technician. I’m a damned good one, too. I want to go with you.”
“It’s not up to me—”
“I’ll never get this opportunity again.”
“I don’t know.”
“I can watch your back.”
Astonished and not sure what to say, I sat silently for a few moments, but some of his excitement rubbed off on me. “Let me ask about it.”
We finished our drinks over small talk and exchanged commlink data. I promised to get back to him.
I gave his offer lots of thought. I wondered what motivated the big guy. There was a deeper story than he was telling. If he knew that Levi was a sadistic son-of-a-bitch, why would he subject himself to a space voyage with the rebbe? On the other hand, it was easy to make the case for a real veterinary assistant besides Reb Levi. I would train and utilize the rebbe for routine tasks, but I doubted he would meet all the needs of my practice. I still needed someone like Fur to hold animals, to assist in surgery, to run the lab, and more, like watch my back. I checked into Fur’s background and confirmed his story about vet school and his job as a veterinary technician. His references were outstanding. He was the perfect choice; he had the background and there were few animals the big guy couldn’t handle—or so I thought.
Levi remembered him from our tavern debate and was thrilled to have someone else along who saw eye-to-eye with him, at least with respect to religious matters. Fur passed the Rebbinical Council’s screening, so I gained a real assistant and a badly needed ally. Maybe someone to keep Levi’s venom from poisoning the whole trip.
***
Our spaceship had a brand-new Artificial Intelligence, although the ship itself was a reconstruction job. I guessed that was okay. They wouldn’t put an expensive new AI and fancy drives in a questionable hull, I hoped.
As the first with access to the AI, I programmed and customized the interface. I added something that I did not tell anyone about: an override that would make the AI accept only my commands in case it came to a battle between me and Reb Levi, something I feared. I also named the AI Ruthie and gave her a seductive female voice to annoy the stiff-necked Levi.
“That is not acceptable,” he fumed at me. “This is a computer. Computers do not have names.”
Before I could respond, Ruthie chimed in. “But Cy gave me a name and I like it,” she said in an excellent approximation of a whine.
Shit. That did not help. I switched off the AI’s voice circuit. “A name will make it easier to give the ship commands,” I argued. “Saying ‘computer’ all the time is awkward.”
Levi scowled at me, but I did not back down, and the name stuck. I hoped I would not pay for that victory somewhere down the line, but I could not resist pulling his chain to achieve even a minuscule quantum of control.
The three of us, Levi, Fur, and I, took a crash course in operation of all the ship’s systems. Although the AI handled everything, there was the outside chance that we humans would have to intervene. What if the AI failed? That fear lost me one night’s sleep to a dream where the ship flew into the sun while Ruthie seduced me. “We will go out in a blaze of orgasmic glory,” she said in her sexy contralto.
My first erotic nightmare, and I hoped the last.
Fur was more mechanical-minded than me. He said he had grown up fixing all the machinery on his farm, and been good enough that neighbors frequently enlisted him for help. He had also operated and repaired the medical equipment at his clinic. Levi came in a distant third in that regard. We sat around a small table in a room at the spaceport.
Levi pointed to a parts schematic of the air-processing unit. “What is this, here?”
His voice grated on my nerves. The trip hadn’t even started yet and already his sour disposition and unpleasant aura bugged me. “That’s the grabmitz valve.”
I sensed Fur suppress a laugh at the name I’d pulled out of thin air.
“What does it do?” Levi asked.
“It’s critical for the freebwhanil to scrub carbon dioxide out of the recycled air. If the freebwhanil fails, we suffocate to death.”
“Suffocate?” Levi’s voice rose as his eye twitched. He looked at Fur. “Can that happen?” He looked back at me, black eyes probing. “Is this one of your jokes, Berger?”
Fur remained mute as if to let the tension ratchet up a bit then jumped to my rescue. “It’s no joke, Reb Levi. If the air scrubbers fail, carbon dioxide levels would rise and the air would become toxic.”
He omitted reference to the grabmitz valve and freebwhanil because they did not exist. “The main thing we need to know is the oxygen-carbon dioxide ratio. That shows on the screen over here.” He pointed to the drawing. “If that’s good, we don’t have to worry about the workings of the equipment. I’ll handle repairs in case of a problem.”
Levi nodded. “That is good. I will be busy with spiritual matters. They are just as important as the mechanical ones.”
Right. I would grab the extra oxygen tank while he prayed for deliverance.
***
Reb Levi had to make some major changes to accommodate his new role. It began with a clothing change, no more Darth Vader black-on-black like the old vids. He wore a white shirt, dark gray suit, and an over-the-top splash of color—a dark blue tie. His new look included a shave, but he looked uncomfortable shorn, and his scar stood out even more. However, his head was never without his fedora or a yarmulke, both black of course.
Levi’s lessons as a veterinary assistant took place in the laboratory of the GCVS.
I motioned for Levi to move closer.
He flinched when I raised a scalpel to his face. “What are you doing?”
“Relax. I’m just going to take a skin scraping, for God’s sake.”
He scowled and adjusted his yarmulke. “Your continued use of our Lord’s name in vain does you no good, Berger.”
“Sorry. Just hold still.”
I scraped the greasy, blackhead-dotted skin beside his nose. Nauseating, but worth the effort, I hoped. I had him place the scrapings on a slide and instructed him in further preparation of the sample. He examined it under the dual-headed microscope. I wondered that he could even focus through the eyepieces, his left eye twitched so violently.
“What is that?” He recoiled from the microscope.
“Those are mange mites. The Demodex mite is a common inhabitant of the skin of people and animals. Ugly little things, aren’t they?”
“They were in my skin?” His mouth turned down at the corners.
“They creep around in there and feed off your dead cells.”
His ruddy face paled.
“Now let’s take a look at the cultures you prepared from your skin a couple of days ago.”
I brought out the Petri dishes from the incubator. Numerous bacterial colonies in sickly whites, yellows, browns, and blues dotted the gelatin surfaces of the plates.
As he stared at them, his face paled even more. “Yech,” he mumbled.
His almost palpable queasiness delighted me even though I felt it as he did. I showed him how to make smears and stain them. At the microscope again, I said, “Those little round guys in chains are streptococci,” as he peered into the lenses. “They can cause sore throats and meningitis.”
His cheeks puffed out, fighting back his nausea.
“The round ones in bunches are staphylococci. They cause abscesses with thick nasty yellow pus.”
I could hear faint gurgling in his stomach.
“Those rod-shaped ones are E. coli. You know, fecal bacteria?”
That did it. He stood, slammed his hand to his mouth, and rushed out of the lab.
Fur, who had observed us, said, “Our rebbe is not the only one with a sadistic streak, you know that? Be careful you don’t take it too far.”
“I don’t know how else to fight back.” I swallowed hard to remove the acid taste in my own mouth; my actions to gross out Levi was not without its side effects on me.
I sensed a rush of indecision from Fur, as if he were on the cusp of a major decision to reveal something, but it receded as quickly as it came.
Whatever that meant, he was right. Inconsequential triumphs like these did nothing but feed my need for revenge against Levi, and that could spell trouble for everyone.
***
My final visit to my parents was short, but difficult. Mom could not stop her tears no matter how I tried to assure her things would be fine. I wondered how much Dad had told her about my predicament.
My stomach squirmed and my head ached as I envisioned my failure to protect my folks. The thought of them subjected to torture made me fight to keep my own tears under control.
Mom forced a smile. “Just take care of yourself, darling. We’re going to miss you at graduation.”
Dad put his arm around her. “Cy is not going to be gone forever. He’ll be back before we know it.”
She looked up at him, then at me, bleary-eyed, as if uncertainty and fear clouded her mind.
Dad hugged Mom with one arm. “The college will present your diploma to us in your stead, but it’s unfair not to have you there. They could have delayed your trip for another month.” A touch of anger colored his thoughts. His eyes told me to say nothing more.
As I left, Mom cried in my dad’s arms.
Would I ever see them again? My breath caught at the real possibility that I might never return home. I desperately wanted to turn back, to stay with them, protect them, but I was powerless. The lump in my throat did not leave for a long while. I prayed there would be no further reasons for Mom’s tears.