After the Protocols

by Adam-Troy Castro

Neither of the passengers in the back of the Presidential Transport was able to discern any sign of the capital’s supposed glory or grandeur. Like the Empire itself, its resources had been drained, its riches depleted, its influence reduced to a memory, its people transformed from the proud marchers in a mighty parade to the stooped and weary remnants of a civilization in the last stages of decline. The streets marked just another crumbling metropolis, gray with empty shops, pitted streets, and hungry people in clothes grown worn from age. Nor was there anything that inspired awe at the government building itself, which since the terrorist bombing that destroyed the old one was just a squat stone bunker at the center of a minefield enclosed by plasma fencing. It was less palace than prison, caging the tattered remnants of the administration’s power.

The men did not express their dismay. They didn’t dare. Such words were precisely the kind of thing that had doomed men with more careless tongues to protracted deaths in the interrogation rooms these men served. They remained silent even as they were brought to a cold room with flaking walls, and left to wait, for what they both fully expected to be their own inquisitors.

But then the President entered. He was a stoop-shouldered, hollow-eyed figure at least thirty years older than any of the images that appeared on walls, in newspads, or on banners at the frequent Compulsory Rallies. But there was still a dark fire in his eyes: the look native to any man accustomed to passing down death sentences for not just individuals, but entire local populations. “You are Nils Barque and Lostig Forrell. True?”

The two men murmured affirmation, afraid that an improper tone of voice might soon lead to their own interrogation under torture.

“You look alike, you two. Almost twins: both fine specimens of the ideal genetic model. You,” he said, pointing at Forrell: “your eyes are a little darker than Mr. Barque’s, but if you lightened them the pair of you would be almost identical. Are you certain you’re not related?”

Barque said, “Yes, sir.”

Forrell wore the sickly half-smile of a man who wasn’t sure whether he was being complimented or abused. “Not as far as I know, sir. We never even met before today.”

The President nodded, studied them some more, and said, “In any event, you were not chosen for your resemblance. I need expert gatherers of information. I am told that you are both as good at this endeavor as may be possible for any man to be. Also true?”

“Yes, sir.”

Another pause, and then with increased anger: “We have just had to halt construction of that bridge between the continents. It was our most elaborate public-works projects in centuries, designed to jump-start our economy and put our people back to work. But there wasn’t enough money in the treasury to pay for it. According to my on-site inspectors, it doesn’t matter anyway: the engineering is shoddy, the equipment’s antiquated, and our industrial sector’s been failing so fast that we wouldn’t have had enough raw materials to last past the end of the week anyway. The ripple effect of this shutdown is expected to leave another twenty million unemployed by the end of the year.

“The agricultural crisis, and the contamination of our seas, are expected to reduce our global food supplies another twenty percent, a crisis that’s going to mean another tightening of the triage policies. Food Riots have forced me to declare martial law in another thirty-two cities. Our offworld debt is now so overwhelmed by interest payments that most other planetary governments won’t trade with us except at ruinous terms. Every single aspect of our civilization, from the moral to the economic, is in a state of accelerating free fall. We’re dying. Do you understand me? We’re dying. And it’s not our own fault; it has never been our own fault. We need to seek out and punish the cause of all our troubles at their source.”

His black gaze bored into the eyes of the two veteran inquisitors, each of whom roiled with the relief that came from recognizing that this tirade had encompassed too much to climax with his own arrest for petty corruption. They were both corrupt men, of course. That was inevitable. Like most Inquisitors, they’d been presented with so many opportunities for personal enrichment that expecting them to refrain from accepting those opportunities would have been lunacy. Both men had taken bribes of both goods and services. Both men had wielded the powers vested in them to pursue their own personal grudges. Both had enjoyed a string of lovers more than willing to indulge any appetite in exchange for a moment’s mercy toward imprisoned husbands and children. Such petty corruptions were so natural, to their way of thinking, that they barely qualified as crimes. But knowing that they’d been summoned for their skills and not their crimes left both men feeling lighter, happier, and ever more determined to serve.

The President held their gaze just long enough for their renewed confidence to falter, then said, “At the height of our greatness we eliminated them from our society. We tracked them down, confiscated their wealth, exterminated them for sapping the energies of our people. For a time after that we knew the pre-eminence we were always meant to achieve. But the hard times have come upon us again, and because it cannot be our fault we know that it must be because there are more of them, plying their influence on other worlds. We must find them. You must find them.” He reached into his robes of office and pulled out a thin little booklet, the old-fashioned kind printed on paper instead of coded into files on hytex. It smelled of antiquity and worse things. But the President pressed the volume into Barque’s palm, met the interrogator’s eyes one last time, and said: “You can start with this. It’s all the information we have. But wherever it takes you, I want you on your way within twenty-four hours.”

“Yes, sir,” Barque said.

Then the President went away, leaving Barque to examine the unfamiliar little book, his lips moving as he puzzled out the antiquated lettering on its cover. Barque was not a skilled reader; he had always been taught that books were suspect and that people who read too many of them were parasites. But he was able to puzzle out the title, and consider its meaning.

Forrell asked, “What is it?”

Barque read the title out loud. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

The book, which according to the scholarly introduction dated back to the mother world, detailed a conspiracy of monstrous proportions: the plan of a small and despised people to infiltrate and weaken all of society’s institutions.

Both men had heard of the Jews. How could they have not heard of the Jews? Every child knew about the Jews. The stories about them presented a nest of paradoxes, impossible to reconcile: genetic inferiors who were nevertheless able to worm themselves into every conceivable position of power; freakish grotesqueries who were nevertheless able to pass unnoticed through every strata of society; repugnant degenerates who were nevertheless magnetic enough to seduce and thus destroy the most beautiful of women; clannish outsiders who nevertheless insisted on mixing with the superior races; overbearing intellectuals who were nevertheless intellectually inferior; money-grubbing parasites who were nevertheless dedicated to communism. They were, in short, an endless library of alleged sins, many contradictory, the only common element being their extraordinary talent for ruining whatever they touched, even when they weren’t present.

The Protocols presented the Jews testifying about themselves…and the malice on display there was so great that Barque could only rail at a universe that could have permitted such a people to exist.

There had not been any Jews in the Empire for a long, long time. There had been a war of ethnic cleansing, at which point they’d all been killed, or expelled, or something. It had happened so many years ago that many, once accused of lingering Jewish blood, were unable to provide even the semblance of an organized defense. The trials in such cases were just exercises in rhetoric, the verdicts hinging only on how much those in power wanted the defendants to disappear. It was a useful charge, when somebody needed to be disappeared..

But if the President was right, and there were still living Jews hatching their subversive schemes somewhere, then the joke was on the Empire itself. Because if even half of the traits attributed to those infamous figures was true, then it was no wonder that even worlds as great as this could teeter on the edge of ruin.

Barque considered the matter while Forrell secured their passage offworld on a freighter leaving the last of the Empire’s once-numerous spaceports. He considered it during the score of minor breakdowns that delayed their takeoff for hours, and later as a bad patch in the ship’s air-purification system burst before they left orbit, almost causing the asphyxiation of everybody aboard. He considered it even as the ship broke down again just before achieving warp. Forrell, receiving updates through the room’s terminal, grunted: “Offworlders. No sense of efficiency. No pride.”

Barque, who had been paging through the Protocols, added, “No spare parts.”

“What?”

“Did you even look at this ship at all, or did you just keep your eyes shut from the time we boarded until we reached our berths? Did you notice how old it is? How worn? How many of its parts don’t seem to match in manufacture or design? How many of its sections are sealed off as unsafe? The remarkable thing’s not how poorly it runs, but that it runs at all without killing everybody aboard.”

The cords in Forrell’s neck drew taut. “If you think you could have chosen better transportation —”

Barque held up his hand. “No, I’m not saying that at all. We could have done much worse.”

“Then what?”

“In my own personal experience, at least a dozen condemned men have tried to flee offworld before they could be arrested and brought to me. Some of those had friends in the Ministry and therefore up to a full day’s advance notice before their warrants came through. Some even succeeded in booking passage. But only a couple escaped Empire territory. The rest were all caught still on the ground, before takeoff, because the ships they tried to board were in such poor repair. These were all offworlder ships, mind you: all registered to governments other than the Empire, because we no longer have any. All were stopping here just because they had something to drop off or pick up. And wherever they came from, they were all old, all wretched, all just barely running, all patchworks, all held together by nothing but ingenuity and good intentions.”

He closed his eyes, as if trying to see past the bulkhead, past the vacuum that extended so many light years beyond, past anything he had ever seen and anything he had ever been allowed to consider. “If nobody out there’s building anything new anymore, not even spare parts, what do you think that has to say about the state of civilization in general? Has everybody out there fallen as far as we have?”

Quracl Home was a stark and icebound world with two inhabitable polar continents and one equatorial one that enjoyed gray skies and howling winds and a climate just barely warm enough to sustain human life. Most of her billions lived in teeming, overcrowded cities huddled along the narrow temperate zone, where the briefest possible spring and summer allowed a growing season sufficient to sustain the people in a state of constant simmering famine. Much of what lay north and south of that populated region was a vast pitted ruin, left by frenetic mining operations that had reduced the prior landscape to a patchwork of blackened scars. The sole oases of beauty on the entire planet were a series of desert islands along the coast; each enjoyed high-tech climate control, each was verdant with life, each was protected by well-fed armies, and each bore a cluster of palaces and mansions to house the sons and daughters of Quracl’s great Ruling Families.

There they were brought before the richest and most powerful being on Quracl Home, the great spiritual leader known as the Maric, Morning Star, Edifice of Humility, Golden Heart, Most Sacred Among the Sacred. On Quracl it was considered a capital offense for offworlders or commoners to even set eyes on the holy one’s blinding magnificence, but he declared an exception as soon as he found out that Barque and Forrell were here to gather information about Jews.

He sat cross-legged on a platform carried by four men whose mouths had been sewn shut and gave Barque and Forrell the kind of look reserved for insects and beggars. “I do not often speak to nonbelievers. They are less than human, deserving of naught but spit.”

Barque and Forrell had been warned of the dire consequences risked by any who spoke to the Maric without permission. They said nothing.

The Maric said, “It is said among us that the race of Men contains only Quracl, Vermin, Jews, and Those Who Might As Well Be Jews. I recognize you as Vermin. and normally you would be executed for being here. But I have heard of your world, and its visionary efforts to cleanse yourselves of Jewish influence. I find that history admirable. It occurs to me than in this matter our interests coincide.”

Barque and Forrell glanced at each other, engaging in silent debate over who should assume the precarious role of spokesperson. After a moment, Barque faced the Maric and asked, “What do you know of the Jews?”

The Maric’s already-stormy features went dark with additional clouds. “I have never seen one. And I have never wanted to see one.”

“Yet you know of them,” Barque said.

“Only from our histories of darker times, from the days when they walked among us. It was centuries ago. We were too wise to allow them to prosper, so we restricted them to a special district on the coldest of our four continents, forbade them any contact with the general population, and executed ten for every one who broke the many laws we passed to hobble them. And yet their influence continued to weaken us.”

“How?” Forrell asked.

The Maric narrowed his eyes. “There were problems. Public dissatisfaction with the current Maric’s leadership. A general loss of confidence in his sacred infallibility. Open debate, in places where there had been none. Effete intellectuals in universities, weakening the young with their decadent ideas. Other things. The kind of problems that rarely afflict a society as devout as ours.”

Forrell could only shake his head in confusion. “But if they were not allowed any contact with the rest of your people, how could they —”

“They were Jews,” the Maric said, with an emphasis that declared the mere word more than sufficient explanation. After a moment, he registered Forrell’s continuing puzzlement, and relented: “Imagine a great stone wall designed to hold back an ocean. It may be as solid as any wall ever built. But the water continues to weigh against it. It continues to press against every weak point, seeking out the smallest crack, digging deeper and deeper channels, until one day years later a man on the supposed dry side of the wall can place his hand against the stone and find to his consternation that it’s no longer dry to the touch, but damp. The Jews were like that. We could imprison them, we could impoverish them, we could cull their numbers with regular planned famines, but their degenerate, divisive ideas would always be weighing against that wall, eager to contaminate the greater world they had been denied. When my predecessor recognized that the criminal breakdown of order among his people marked them as less like his own people and more like the Jews, he judged by the wisdom inherent in his station that such a contamination must have taken place. Quarantine had clearly failed. The only solution was to remove the very source of infection.”

“Which meant killing them,” said Barque.

The Maric emitted a bitter laugh. “No. He killed a number, but left survivors. Of those he just confiscated half their wealth and ordered them to leave. They booked passage any way they could, and separated, bound for any port that would have them. By the end of a year they had as many destinations as the stars themselves.”

Barque could only feel horror at the irresponsibility of a ruler so contemptuous of the common good that he released such a threat to wander the universe at large. “And was that the end of your world’s troubles?”

“Look at us. We have stripped our surface of resources. We have bankrupted our culture. We cannot repair our own machines. We’re so short of wealth that we have to harass ships passing through our space with taxes high enough to qualify as piracy. We’re no longer leaders, but parasites stealing food in the night.” His shoulders trembled, and he seemed to fold in on himself, like a man trying to deny everything that existed anywhere outside his own skin. Then he faced the two offworlders again, and if his mien had been fearsome before, it was downright volcanic now. “Which is how I know that we did not drive them far enough.”

Forrell said: “Popular, aren’t they?”

“The Jews? Evidently not.”

“No, I mean the Quracls. Nobody likes them much, either.”

There was barely enough room in the transport capsule for the two of them. It was far too warm, and the recycling system couldn’t clean the air fast enough to spare them from having to smell each other’s stench. Still, uncomfortable as this was, it was still the best offworld passage the Maric had been able to offer, considering the reception an actual Quracl ship was likely to get in most territories.

“It’s their own fault,” Barque said.

Forrell sniffed. “Considering the way they treat any ship that comes anywhere near them, I would say so.”

“It’s more than that. They depleted their world of resources and acted surprised when their people were forced to live in poverty. They condemned their Universities and acted surprised when they lost all their practical knowledge. They took what they wanted from others and acted surprised when no other world wanted to know them. They drained themselves of all hope and acted surprised when their most prevalent emotion was despair. They jumped off a precipice and acted surprised when they saw the ground racing up at them.”

Forrell’s eyebrows knit in confusion. “How could the Jews arrange all that?”

Barque thought about that, and for just one moment, less than the duration of a heartbeat, probably less than the firing time of one neuron, felt the world as he understood it start to realign itself. He sensed a terrible, primal disillusionment threatening everything he had ever been taught to believe, and rejected it utterly. “I don’t know. But they’re subtle. But if we find them…we rob them of their power.”

The trail led from there to other similar places: a gray and impoverished world where Jews had once lived in tiny, remote villages, under regular assault by State Militia; a world of joyless religious orthodoxy where they had once been subject to regular interrogation under torture; a world of rigid discipline where the government kept halving and re-halving their allotment of land until they lived atop one another in a cage awaiting the armies tasked to take them away for extermination. There were worlds where they had lived among the rest of humanity without apparent penalty, worlds where they had prospered, worlds where they had lived in secret, even worlds where they had disguised themselves so well that even they had forgotten who they were. On all of these worlds the day had turned against them. On all these worlds they were but a reviled memory. On all these worlds, they were still held accountable for the decay and the misery the societies had known after they’d left.

But none of these worlds were able to provide Barque and Forrell with more than they knew already until the two men found their way to Kirajav.

Kirajav was dominated by a sect that had declared both the human face and the human voice obscenities despised by God. The streets of this world teemed with masked and robed figures who shuffled past each other in silence, communicating only in gestures. Barque and Forrell were required to don masks before being allowed onto the silent grounds of Kirajav’s greatest University, where by custom only the Instructors were permitted to speak. Even there they found only one member of the faculty who had dealt with offworlders before, and who was therefore not too sickened by their impiety to tell them what they needed to know.

He was Vorav Ligisjlan, an aged Professor Emeritus whose lack of active classes must have imprisoned him in silence for more years than even a citizen of his wordless culture could bear. As he led them into a vast room with bare walls and dusty corners, his own advanced age, and the unaccustomed novelty of visitors made him almost garrulous. “See those lighter patches on the walls? There were pictures there, once. Tapestries. Paintings. Centuries old, the lot of them. Then it was decided that artwork, of any kind, is an act of creation which by its very nature infringes on the Divine, so all the novels and all the painting and all the music needed to be destroyed. It was a good thing, of course, a very good and pious thing, which I as a representative of this University supported.” He sniffed. “Those of us who participated in the cleansing were taken aback when the inventories revealed just how much of the filth had been produced by Jews.”

“Is that why you expelled them?” Forrell asked.

“No, we didn’t need to expel them. With all rival religions outlawed, and the Jews in particular singled out for special condemnation, their welcome here was so precarious that they seized their first opportunity to leave.”

Forrell, who had heard an uncounted number of prior histories reach this turning point, heaved the exhausted sigh of a man certain that his own travails were never going to end. “And of course you don’t know where they went.”

“Why would you assume that?” Ligisjlan asked. “Of course we know where they went. I even remember them going. It was only seventy years ago, after all.”

Barque’s heart thumped, as this was the first time any of the stories they’d been told reflected a passage shorter than centuries. “Where did they go?”

“To one of the worlds our system’s original engineers had to abandon because of unsuitability for terraforming. You’ve done your research on this system, yes? You’ve seen that the terraforming program met at most a mixed degree of success, and left us with some worlds you wouldn’t wish on devils? Well, the only world anybody would let the Jews have was one of those.”

“Appropriate,” Forrell said, “since they are devils.”

“Of the biologically human ilk. They still need the same conditions as the rest of us, in order to stay alive. They were fond of saying that if you pricked them, they bled…as if this fact, by itself, was enough to excuse their existence.”

“So which world did they move to?” Barque asked.

“Covilav, the third of the borderline habitables. It was about as terrible a world as you can imagine: dry, hot, and stinking, with toxic soil and violent weather. There had been such a long history of disastrous colonization attempts that when the Jews obtained the permits, nobody saw any point in killing them. We all figured that their adopted home would do it for us.”

Barque heard ruefulness in the elderly man’s voice. “Only they didn’t die, did they?”

“No, they didn’t. Of course they didn’t. The second they landed they set about filtering the soil, calming the atmosphere, and repairing the environmental infrastructure. Within less than ten years conditions there had improved several hundred percent, and the Jews were not only supporting themselves but importing more of their kind from other systems. Before long , ships filled with Jews were arriving from every known system. We shot down as many as we could, but how many was that? Within another ten years it became clear to us that they must have negotiated for Covilav under false pretenses: somehow they’d sabotaged all the previous colonization attempts, knowing that it would make the world look unlivable, so that when the time came they could take possession without any of the many more deserving owners ever making so much as a claim.”

“And they’re still on Covilav?”

“No,” Ligisjlan said. “As soon as we saw that the world had value they had hidden from us, we formed an alliance with the other planetary governments and invaded.”

Barque thought of the solar system they had passed through on the way here: the shattered wheelworlds, the bristling orbital armaments, the planetary surfaces pocked and pitted from past bombardments. They hated each other, these people, and had probably hated each other for generations. Their willingness to join together against a mutual enemy struck him as vivid testimony to the seriousness of the Jewish threat. He said, “You wiped them out, then?”

Ligisjlan looked regretful. “No. They proved unnaturally talented at defending themselves. It took four wars over a period of thirty years just to get them to abandon Covilav. Where they went after that, I don’t know — but given how depleted their resources were by then, it could not have been far.”

Aware that this had become another dead end after all, and anxious to leave this world of oppressive silences, Barque and Forrell grabbed their things and got up to leave. They were almost out the door when Forrell froze, and turned to ask one last question: “Who’s living on Covilav now?”

Ligisjlan heaved a long and melancholy sigh. “Nobody. When the Jews left, the rest of us all claimed jurisdiction. We fought over it. We scoured its surface with bombs. The ecosystem was so ravaged by the time we were done that it may be a billion years before anything grows there again.” He shook his head with sheer disgust at the waste of it all, then brightened. “But at least it’s free of Jews.”

The wars to reclaim Covilav had ultimately not only leveled the Jewish colonies, but expunged them. Most of the artifacts the two men found there were either fragmentary or melted beyond recognition. They thought their luck had turned when they found a vault, buried in the wreckage of a city that otherwise resembled a sheet of blackened glass — but most of the contents were just books, densely packed with learning, and clearly useless in every way.

In seven years of searching, Barque and Forrell found only three items that seemed to offer any hope at all.

One was a tapestry, depicting various Jews at a meal of some kind, and bearing an oddly-lettered legend that Ligisjlan’s University was able to translate as “Next Year in Jerusalem.” This offered some evidence that the Jews had been planning their flight to a new bolthole on some world named Jerusalem, but no database was able to provide them with any planet by that name.

The second item, more promising, was a vid containing footage of a lecture by a man who seemed to be some kind of Jewish theoretical physicist. Most of what he said after thanking the audience for showing up was math. It was well above the heads of Barque and Forrell, as well as the most learned authorities on all the worlds the two men were able to consult. But indications of a great secret did flash, like bolts of transformative light, at odd moments throughout the speech that otherwise cast only impenetrable darkness — indications that the Jews of Covilav had invested a sizable chunk of their resources to a program they’d dubbed Exodus. This didn’t make any special sense to either Barque or Forrell, but they knew it must have meant something when the speaker closed three hours of mind-numbing, incomprehensible theory with the same phrase that had marked the tapestry.

The third item they didn’t find until they were otherwise ready to give up all hope.

It was the sole item in another vault, buried deeper than anything they’d excavated since their arrival: an engraving bearing three separate Helix.

One was a word in an unknown alphabet.

Another, in more recognizable lettering, read, “This is Where You Find Us.”

The third, which hit both Barque and Forrell with the force of a thunderbolt, was a forwarding address, with detailed directions.

Once again, Barque and Forrell required sponsorship. As their most recent benefactors had been the learned men of Kirajav, that’s who they petitioned once again. But those eminences had fallen on hard times, over the past few years, as the falling literacy rates rendered even the interest in education a passion of the lunatic fringe…so the petition was passed upward, to the Kirajav government itself.

Most citizens who sought an audience wasted their years and endless petitions. Of those, most died with their requests unheard. It was the best of all systems, for a government not interested in listening. Even with their own mission a matter of nigh-universal obsession, Barque and Forrell waited months before their old acquaintance Ligisjlan was dispatched to deliver the verdict.

“Our fleet’s been cannibalizing itself for spare parts for years. Most of our remaining vessels are only good for short hops, and some of those have been so badly stripped that it’s a wonder they’re still flying at all. But there’s still one, an antiquated two-man model in storage, that should be suitable for the kind of transportation you need. Its navigational systems are completely automated, so you won’t have to worry about learning to pilot it. Just input the information the Jews left behind and it should take you where you need to go.”

“Excellent,” said Forrell.

Ligisjlan averted his eyes for just a moment, then launched into an inventory of the ship’s provisions, specifying the store’s various provisions in such excessive detail that it soon became clear he found the list itself a welcome refuge.

None of the delaying tactics fooled Barque. He had been an interrogator for too many years, seeing through too many shallow evasions, enduring too many desperate lies, learning in a thousand nights of staining autopsy tables that truth lay less in what people were willing to say than in what they were desperate to avoid. A good interrogator learned to see through even most skillful liars, and Ligisjlan, native of a world where spoken conversations were rare, was hardly that.

Forrell didn’t seem to sense Ligisjlan’s dissembling. He just nodded. But then Barque wasn’t surprised by that; the other man had no imagination, little perception, and few positive attributes beyond his dedication to his mission and his persistent aptitude for always saying the most obvious thing. So the question became Barque’s to ask. “Professor? What are you trying not to tell us?”

Ligisjlan looked stricken. “Is it that obvious?”

“Yes.”

The old man studied the floor as if hoping for the sudden resurrection of a loved one buried there. “Very well,” he said. “You should know…several years ago, while you were just beginning your researches on Covilav, we used this very same ship to send two ambassadors to your homeworld, with a report on your progress. We considered that the proper thing to do, though I suppose I should admit that we also hoped for some economic aid.”

The very idea of the Empire, with so many grievous problems of its own, providing economic aid for somebody else, was ludicrous. The revelation that Kirajav’s economy had degenerated enough to require aid was worse. “What did they say?”

“They said nothing. They are not there. Your Empire has fallen, your cities are in ruins, your population is starving and perhaps a third of what you reported it to be. That which remains has fragmented into a hundred petty fiefdoms, each more primitive than the next, each only interested in eternal war with the others.”

“Impossible,” said Forrell. “You contacted the wrong world.”

“They contacted the right one,” said Barque, turning his back on foolish partner and trembling scholar, to seek solace in a blank wall long since purged of the polluting influence of art.

“There must be some mistake,” Forrell insisted. “The Empire was eternal.”

Barque, shutting him out, could only think: They did this.

These people whose homes had been burned, whose cities had been invaded, whose lives had been harried and tormented…these people who had spent so much time as fugitives that even the rumors about them were rumors…these people who should not have been expected to still harbor influence over anything…they had still found ways to destroy the places they’d fled. They operated in shadows and they existed in whispers, but they were still a contagion, as virulent in its own way as the worst plague that ever assaulted Mankind’s blood.

“Will you take the ship?” Ligisjlan asked.

Barque cast an eye at Forrell. The other man was trembling, not from shock at the loss of his home, but from the effort of continuing to deny it.

He decided. “We’ll take the ship.”

The journey to Galilee, as the engraving had called it, took another four months.

They found a green and mountainous world, in a solar system on the outskirts of the territories human beings knew. It could not have orbited its sun at a better distance from its sun, or possessed a better atmosphere. The oceans were calm and blue, the fauna wide-eyed and unthreatening, the climate so gentle over most of its surface that everywhere Barque and Forrell went they felt the gathered weight of these past few years fall from their shoulders like a burden no longer required from anyone who walked this sweet and sunny place.

But there were no Jews here, either.

The Jews had been here. That much was clear. There were plenty of settlements and farms, enough between them to account for a population in the lower eight figures. But the farms had grown wild and the settlements were being reclaimed by wilderness.. The world had working power plants, all turned off; schools and theatres and places of worship, all deserted; roads, all unoccupied; vehicles, all motionless and awaiting new masters. There was no sign of warfare, or disease, or death on a mass scale: there was just a civilization, with everything it needed to thrive but actual people.

The two men returned to their ship once again, to devote orbit after orbit to a fruitless search for signs of a hiding population.

Forrell said, “They must have needed to flee here, too.”

“It’s possible,” Barque said. But somehow he didn’t think so. Surely the people who had survived the enmity of the Empire, and of Quracl, and of Kirajav, the people who had held Covilav for decades in the face of overwhelming opposition, would have done more to defend this world against any threat to their sovereignty. They could not have scurried away without leaving these hillsides marred by battle scars. He would not believe that of them.

Being disappointed by an enemy can raise a deeper wound than being betrayed by a friend.

After another hour spent studying the projected images of Galilean settlements, his disappointment was swept aside by the first stirrings of realization. “Hmph. That’s peculiar.”

“What?” Forrell asked.

Barque spent the next few minutes ignoring Forrell’s increasingly insistent questions while poring over the images of one abandoned village after another. At length, feeling the kind of excitement he had only known as a professional torturer whenever recalcitrant subjects surrendered both their dignity and their information, he said: “Look. All of these settlements look alike. You’d expect them to, right? They were all built in a hurry, by a fugitive people who needed places to live as quickly as possible. They didn’t have time to mess around with fancy municipal planning; they just built every town and village in a standard grid pattern, with all the houses the same size, all the streets set up to meet at perpendicular intersections, all the larger buildings, factories and synagogues in separate districts. See? Look here and here and here and here and here. Five separate settlements, all erected beside rivers or natural ports, all so alike in every way that the residents would have needed street signs to tell one village from another.”

Forrell scowled. “So?”

“So look at this one.” Barque focused on another settlement, so small it barely qualified as a dot, hidden in the snow belt of Galilee’s northern hemisphere. This one was landlocked, in a region far from any rivers. There were no roads connecting it to local farms or anything else, and all of its streets had been laid out in concentric circles. A tiny monument, of some kind, occupied a small patch of land in the big empty space at its center. He said, “I don’t know what this place is for — but it’s special.”

Forrell squinted. “That’s obvious.”

Barque refrained from pointing out that it hadn’t been obvious at all until he had seen it first. He just said, “Which is exactly what bothers me about it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I get the feeling that we were meant to find it.”

Barque and Forrell landed beside the settlement different from all the others, and silently made their way past the circles of empty windowless buildings to the featureless gray cube at their center. Each side was as tall as a doorway, and as wide as a door laid on its side. Barque and Forrell found no obvious markings on its surface, no engravings to commemorate either the people who had built this place or the circumstances that had driven them to leave. But the wintry chill all around them, cold enough to torment both men despite their bulky survival gear, lent the thing a gravity that immediately distinguished it from all of this world’s other abandoned structures. This place, like no place else, reeked from the hands of a people loathed and despised on a thousand different worlds.

Barque and Forrell examined the cube from every angle, touching it, running their hands over it, searching every inch of the damned thing for a marking or a seam or an indication of its purpose.

Forrell said, “Maybe it means nothing.”

“I doubt that,” Barque said.

“No, think about it,” Forrell said. “Building a village so grossly different from all of this world’s other villages, designing it just to call attention to this great big pointless thing, making it seem testimony to a great and sinister purpose when it really has no purpose at all — wouldn’t that seem a fine trick to play on the first fool who came hunting for them?”

“A stupid trick,” Barque said. “How long could it possibly be meant to keep us occupied? Ten minutes? An hour? A few days? Sooner or later, even people as dedicated as ourselves would have to lose patience and look somewhere else. It makes no sense.”

“Maybe it made sense to them.”

“Only if they were stupid,” Barque said. “They weren’t stupid.”

“They were Jews. Who knows why they did anything?”

They circled the cube again and again, coming to despise the imperturbability of each blank and featureless face. In their eyes, the four faces came to resemble the faces of the hated people they sought: faces without features, without souls, without any persuasive reason to live.

It was Forrell who cracked first, muttering the very same words that must have escaped his lips ten thousand times during this endless pursuit of phantoms. “Damned Jews.”

The cube screamed.

It was a sound like mountains grinding against mountains, like boiling oceans, like icecaps crumbling to shards during the coldest of arctic nights. It was a sound like crying people, or would have been if there was anything human about it: a sound like every rusted lock of every door of every cage in every jail being snapped, all at the same instant, everywhere. It was a shriek of pain, and loss, and defiance, and of something else, something that neither Barque or Forrell had ever heard in their long and productive lives of wreaking torment on behalf of their state: triumph.

They stepped back just in time to avoid being crushed when all four sides of the cube swung downward, slamming against the pavement with an impact that left jagged lightning-cracks radiating along the ground in all directions.

The shock sent both interrogators tumbling to the ground.

Recovering, and terrified, they stared at the place where the cube had been.

What remained was an upright object that resembled a glass coffin, but which both men recognized as the kind of stasis capsule that spacefaring cultures had once used to preserve their colonists during long voyages.

The capsule was open, and the man who had emerged was a gnarled and gray-haired figure, so frail he seemed on the verge on imminent evaporation. He wore a sickly yellow jumpsuit the same shade as his jaundiced skin, and balanced himself on matchstick legs that didn’t seem strong enough to support even his wasted frame. The top of his liver-spotted head came only as high as Barque’s collarbone, and his features resembled a parchment drawing of a face crumpled into a wad and then imperfectly smoothed out again. He fell into a coughing fit almost the instant he emerged, the sounds wet and pulpy and vividly illustrative of a body crumbling from the inside out.

By the time he regained control of himself, both Barque and Forrell were staring at him with wild and disbelieving eyes.

He squinted at them. “Sorry. It was that way, with the old stasis chambers; they pumped so much Nothing into the lungs that it always took passengers a few minutes to grow used to ordinary air again. I’ll be able to tell you everything you want to know in a minute.” Another cough, and his voice went sandy. “Can I have some water?”

Forrell had a canteen. He approached on shaky legs, and held the vessel tight as the old man slurped it dry, without so much as a pause for breath. Then he stepped back, watching, an interrogator suddenly afraid to ask the central question of his life of an old man barely strong enough to stand.

The old man wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “It’s cold. There’s no reason to stand out here, freezing, when there are all these empty buildings about. We can go inside somewhere, get out of the wind, sit down and get comfortable while we talk. This is all right with you?”

The first rule of any interrogator’s job was to forbid subjects like this old man any input into the circumstances of their own interrogation. Subjects were supposed to be powerless on every level: they were to be allowed food, or water, or rest, or even the total surrender of their principles, at their interrogator’s discretion, not their own. Strictly speaking, the old man’s request for warmth should have prompted Barque and Forrell to strip him naked, pin him to the ground, and question him in the cold. But something about the old man’s demeanor — his utter lack of surprise or concern, his total willingness to make a statement — robbed the iron from their spines. They nodded and fell in alongside him, as he hobbled toward one of the many open doorways.

Even as they made their way toward that shelter, he said, “You two look alike. Not like brothers, though I’m sure others have said you look like brothers, but like creatures carved from the same clay. Like golems,” he said, using a strange word neither had ever heard. “Unless I’m wrong, you must both represent the physical ideal of the world where you were born, correct? Your mothers, if indeed they were two different women, must have been proud.”

Forrell could not stand the wait any longer. “We’re looking for Jews.”

The old man gave him the briefest glance. “Of course you are.”

“You expected us?” Forrell asked.

“Not necessarily you, but somebody like you. Sooner or later somebody like you would come to this world, this city, that vault, looking for Jews; and sooner or later that somebody would set me free, by doing the expected thing and cursing the Jews in its presence. That is how you opened the vault, of course. You showed your frustration by cursing the Jews. It was the best way to make sure that I was able to deliver my message to the right kind of people.”

There was an odd arrogance to the old man’s manner that Barque found unnerving. “And what kind of people would that be?”

“Anti-Semites,” the old man said, using another word that neither of the men had ever heard.

They reached the nearest of the open doorways. Entering, they found the structure entirely free of furnishings or interior dividers; it was just an empty hall, dusty and dim, its only feature a low wooden bench that lined the outer wall as if in preparation for a large number of guests prepared to gather in a circle. The old man sat with the relief of any being ancient enough to consider gravity his constant enemy. Barque and Forrell exchanged glances and after a moment’s silent discussion bracketed him, prepared to offer any inducement from emotional support to violent intimidation. The air remained heavy until Forrell, again tired of waiting, repeated: “We’re looking for Jews.”

“You’ve found one,” the old man said.

This should have been obvious. In the hiding place of the Jews, it made sense to find Jews. But the two interrogators had been hunting devils for so many years that the seeming humanity of the old man had thrown them. In his warm eyes, his vulnerable demeanor, and his utter lack of defining fear, he had struck them as less a Jew than yet another expert source on Jews. His unexpected confession, free of any attempt to exercise the infamous Jewish cunning, threw both Barque and Forrell so completely off balance that neither spoke until the old man added, “My name’s Isaac Stein. And yes, I’m a Jew.”

Forrell’s mouth worked. “And — you’re the only one left?”

The corner’s of Isaac’s lips curved upward. “You would like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Answer the question.”

“No, I’m not the only one left. There are many millions left. I’m just the only one left here. I volunteered to stay behind when the others moved on.”

“Why?” Barque asked.

“Is it really that hard to work out? We knew we were leaving, we knew that we’d finally found a place where none of you momsers would ever be able to find us, and we felt it appropriate that somebody with a big mouth and a grudge should stay behind, to share a few last thoughts with whoever came looking for us. You wouldn’t want to know how many of us wanted the job, since we’d become a veritable portrait of a people fed up with your crap. But I was the oldest, and the one closest to death, and the one who had lost the most in the last few massacres arranged by people like you. So I got the job. How am I doing so far?”

Barque’s astonishment may have paralyzed him until this moment, but Isaac’s insolence had succeeded in reviving the hatred burning inside him. He spoke his next words through gritted teeth. “Where did the others go?”

“Nowhere in this universe,” Isaac said, his genial smile just another crease on his pale and ancient face. “We’d learned, a long time ago, that there was no place in this Universe where we would not be blamed for everything other people did to befoul their own nests. We lived with others and they blamed us. We lived apart from others and they blamed us. We moved away and they followed us to blame us some more. We moved still further away and still they followed, blaming us. So a very wise man among us, a physicist, came up with an idea he called Exodus.”

“We know that word,” said Forrell. “We saw it on the way here.”

“It’s a code-word for a special application of the laws of this and that, which said that said if you don’t like one place, there is always another place. And so he found us another Universe, an alternate Universe, with no connection to this one, where we could live in peace, without any of that hanging over our heads.”

To Barque, at least, it had the terrible shape of truth. He could only sit, open-mouthed, as his mind constructed implications. But Forrell had always needed more time to accept the obvious, and so he pressed further: “You’re lying.”

“You’re free to think that, of course. You’re free to think anything you want. Of course, you won’t actually know we’re lying unless you prove us wrong, and you won’t prove us wrong unless you find us, which you won’t, so you can think what you want.”

“We’ll find you,” Forrell said.

Isaac coughed lightly, releasing a light wisp of vapor. “Not likely. Even if you find enough educated people among you to reconstruct the process, the number of possible Alternate Universes is more numerous by far than the grains of sand on every world that ever carved silicate to sand. You could search from now until the heat death of this Universe before managing to stumble onto the Universe in question — and even assuming you managed that miracle, you would still need to find in all of its vastness the one world my people selected among hundreds of billions of likely possibilities. Such a trick would require a miracle on top of a miracle on top of a miracle, multiplied to the infinite power — which is many more miracles than even your fanaticism could ever lead you to expect.”

Forrell had risen to his feet. “You will tell us!”

“Do you think I would place myself in your hands if I had such information to give you? Please. I was put in stasis before the destination was chosen. I know nothing.”

“Then we’ll find the notes!” Forrell cried, as if sheer volume could re-shape the world. “We’ll study the records!”

Isaac’s face shone with maddening complacency. “We destroyed anything that could help you. Trust us. Our new Moses learned everything he needed from the original. With God’s help he parted a sea for us. He led our people across the sea bed to the dry land on the other side. Then he let the waters flow. There’s no chance of you ever finding them, but by all means, please, knock yourself out looking.”

He shrugged, letting that thought drift on the air between them, and then, with a prodigal show of effort, forced himself to his feet. For a moment he swayed, in silent argument with the forces that have always turned robust young men into tottering old men who can stand only because they refuse to fall. “Either way, you won’t be able to work out your frustration on me. My people have been faced by sadists before, and made sure to provide me with a means of willing my own painless death the instant, and I do mean the instant, I have nothing more I want to say. So I won’t have to endure your hospitality. I won’t be burdened with the need to outlive the satisfaction of passing along one final message.”

Barque had been an interrogator all his adult life, asking the ugliest possible questions in the ugliest possible ways. He had seen, and participated in, more sheer depravity than most human beings could even imagine. He had never before this one moment encountered an answer he was afraid to hear. He did not want to ask. Given a choice, he would have preferred to leave the old man with his mysteries.

Forrell, damn him, did not. Forrell was too stupid to leave a bad question unasked. Forrell had to open his mouth and he gave Isaac what he wanted: “What message?”

Isaac’s smile turned bright enough to light up the world, as he spoke the last words he would ever speak, in this universe or any other.

“We wish you well,” the old man said. “But from now on? If something in your life goes wrong? Blame yourselves for once. Because you’re all you have left.”

Galilee was just a fading speck behind them, and they had not decided where to go next. Were they to return the ship to Kirajav? Journey back to the Empire, to see if it was as devastated as Ligisjlan had claimed? Crash-land somewhere, and put themselves out of their misery?

Forrell kept insisting that Isaac’s story had been a trick. “They’re Jews, remember. Lying is what they do. Cheating is something they invented. You ask me, it would be just like them to leave behind a crazy old man, with nonsensical stories about escaping to other Universes. You ask me, Isaac wasn’t even a Jew himself: just some senile bastard they tricked into spreading their lies. And they expected to fool us? Ha! You ask me, the very fact they tried proves that we finally have them on the run.”

And more. Hours worth, soon to stretch into days.

Barque, saying nothing, could only stare at this useless fool life had provided such a close resemblance to himself: a man who mistook truths for lies and saw their ultimate failure as just another reason to keep trying. He had long harbored contempt for the man, and shame at the genetic accident that had lent them similar faces. Spending so many years in close quarters with this mediocre creature of no vision and little intelligence was less like facing his own distorted image in a mirror than like seeing that image divested of everything that makes a man human.

Thinking about it, dwelling on every last idiot comment that spilled from Forrell’s lips over the long years of their quest, Barque found himself wondering if the Jews had ever been the true enemy after all.

Oh, they were corrupt and degenerate and malignant, all right: the Protocols proved that much. But they’d been caged in so many places, persecuted in so many places, even exterminated in so many places, that it was impossible to believe that they’d been the only culprits. After all, the damage they’d done on so many worlds had always seemed to progress long after they’d left; were they really so capable of continuing to manipulate events from afar? Or had they left behind accomplices, even more determined to tear apart everything their betters had built?

Another mongrel people, even more destructive, but far better at hiding their identities? A nameless people? A people who perhaps hid their vile activities behind a thin veneer of stolid, unimaginative incompetence?

People who placed themselves in the perfect position to make sure all walls crumbled into dust?

Forrell was still pacing back and forth trying to persuade Barque to continue their fruitless search for Jews. Obviously: he had to do that. Because as long as the hunt for Jews continued, the hunt for Forrell’s people could never begin. It was obvious, and simultaneously horrifying, that people like Forrell had thrived for years masquerading themselves as people like Barque.

But that would end as soon as Barque got things rolling.

He sat back in his chair, pretended to pay attention to the owner of that inferior set of eyes just a shade darker than his own, and contemplated the words he would use to incite a purging, in the world of newer Protocols.