“I’ll take you all around. It’ll be terrific. And you can cheer me up when I’m depressed and reassure me when I’m scared. OK?”
“OK,” he said, and felt, for her, great love.
“When you get out here, tell me what I do right in my music and what I’m doing wrong. But tell me most of all that I’m going to make it. Tell me I’m not going to fail, like I think I am. Tell me that the Dowland is a good idea. Dowland’s lute music is so beautiful, the most beautiful music ever written. You really be- lieve, then, you’re sure that my music, the kind of things I sing will take me to the top?”
“I’m positive,” he said.
“How do you know these things? It’s as if you have a gift. A gift that you in turn give to me.
“It is from God,” Herb Asher said. “My present to you. My confidence in you. Accept what I say; it is true.”
Gravely, she said, “I sense magic around us, Herb. A magic spell. I know that sounds silly, but I do. A beauty to everything.” “A beauty,” he said, “that I find in you.” “In my music?” “In you both.” “You’re not making this up?”
“No,” he said. “I swear by God’s own name. By the Father that created us.”
“From God,” she echoed. “Herb, it scares me. You scare me. There is something about you.”
Herb Asher said, “Your music will take you all the way.” He knew because he remembered. He knew because, for him, it had already happened.
“Really?” Linda said.
“Yes,” he said. “It will carry you to the stars.”
CHAPTER 18
The small animal, released from its cage, crept into Emman- uel’s arms. He and Zina held it and it thanked them. Both of them felt its gratitude.
“It’s a little goat,” Zina said, examining its hooves. “A kid.”
“How kind of you,” the kid said to them. “I have waited a long time to be released from my cage, the cage you put me in. Zina Pallas.”
“You know me?” she said, surprised.
“Yes, I know you,” the kid said, as it pressed itself against her. “I know both of you, although you two are really one. You have reunited your sundered selves, but the battle is not over; the battle begins now.”
Emmanuel said, “I know this creature.”
The little goat, in Zina’s arms, said, “I am Belial. Whom you imprisoned. And whom you now release.”
“Belial,” Emmanuel said, “My adversary.”
“Welcome to my world,” Belial said.
“It is my world,” Zina said.
“Not anymore. The goat’s voice gained strength and author- ity. “In your rush to free the prisoners you have freed the great- est prisoner of all. I will contend against you, deity of light. I will take you down into the caves where there is no light. Nothing of your radiance will shine, now; the light has gone out, or soon
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will. Your game up to now has been a mock game in which you played against your own self. How could the deity of light lose when both sides were portions of him? Now you face a true adversary, you who drew order out of chaos and now draw me out of that order. I will test the powers that you have. Already you have made a mistake; you freed me without knowing who I am. I had to tell you. Your knowledge is not perfect; you can be surprised. Have I not surprised you?”
Zina and Emmanuel were silent.
“You made me helpless,” Belial said, “placed in a cage, and then you felt sorry for me. You are sentimental, deity of light. It will be your downfall. I accuse you of weakness, the inability to be strong. I am he who accuses and I accuse my own creator. To rule you must be strong. It is the strong who rule; they rule the weak. You have, instead, protected the weak; you have offered help to me, your enemy. Let us see if that was wise.”
“The strong should protect the weak,” Zina said. “The Torah says so. It is a basic idea of the Torah; it is basic to God’s law. As God protects man, so man should protect the disadvantaged, even down to animals and the nobler trees.”
Belial said, “This runs contrary to the nature of life, the na- ture you implanted in it. This is how life evolves. I accuse you of violating your own biological foundations, the order of the world. Yes, by all means, free every prisoner; loose a tide of murder- ers on the world. You have begun with me. Again I thank you. But now I leave you; I have as much to do as you have- perhaps more. Let me down.” The goat leaped from their arms and ran off; Zina and Emmanuel watched it go. And as it ran it grew.
“It will undo our world,” Zina said.
Emmanuel said, “We will kill it first.” He raised his hand; the goat vanished.
“It is not gone,” Zina said. “It has concealed itself in the world. Camouflaged itself. We cannot now even find it. You know that it won’t die. Like us it is eternal.”
In the other cages the remaining imprisoned animals clamored to be released. Zina and Emmanuel ignored them; instead, they
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looked this way and that for the goat whom they had let out-let out to do as it wished.
“I sense its presence,” Zina said.
“I, too,” Emmanuel said somberly. “Our work is undone already.”
“But the battle is not over,” Zina said. “As it said itself, ‘The battle now begins.’
“So be it,” Emmanuel said. “We will fight it together, the two of us. As we did in the beginning, before the fall.”
Leaning toward him, Zina kissed him.
He felt her fear. Her intense dread. And that dread lay within him, too.
What will become of them now? he asked himself. The people whom he wished to free. What kind of prison will Belial contrive for them with his endless ability to contrive prisons? Subtle ones and gross ones, prisons within prisons; prisons for the body, and, worse by far, prisons for the mind.
The Cave of Treasures under the Garden: dark and small, without air and without light, without real time and real space- walls that shrink and, caught tight, minds that shrink. And we have allowed this, Zina and I; we have colluded with the goat- thing to bring this about.
Its release is their constraint, he realized. A paradox; we have given freedom to the builder of dungeons. In our desire to eman- cipate we have crushed the souls of all the living.
It will affect every one of them in this world, from the highest to the lowest. Until we can return the goat-thing to its box; until we can place it back within its container.
And now it is everywhere; it is not contained. The atoms of the air are now its abode; it is inhaled like vapor. And each creature, breathing it in, will die. Not completely and not physi- cally, but nonetheless death will come. We have released death, the death of the spirit. For all that now lives and wishes to live. This is our gift to them, done out of kindness.
“Motive does not count,” Zina said, aware of his thoughts.
Emmanuel said, “The road to hell.” Literally, he thought. in this case. That is the only door we have opened: the door to the tomb.
I pity the small creatures the most, he thought. Those who have done the least harm. They above all do not deserve this. The goat-thing will single them out for the greatest suffering; it will afflict them in proportion to their innocence . . . this is its method by which the great balance is tilted from rectitude, and the Plan undone. It will accuse the weak and destroy the helpless; it will use its power against those least able to defend themselves. And, most of all, it will devour the little hopes, the meager dreams of the small.
Here we must intervene, he said to himself. To protect the small. This is our first task and the first line of our defense.
Lifting off from his abode in Washington, D.C., Herb Asher joyfully began the flight to California and Linda Fox. This is going to be the happiest period of my life, he said to himself. He had his suitcases in the back seat and they were filled with everything that he might need; he would not be returning to Washington, D.C. and Rybys for some time-if ever. A new life, he thought as he guided his car through the vividly marked transcontinental traffic lanes. It’s like a dream, he thought. A dream fulfilled.
He realized, suddenly, that soupy string music filled his car. Shocked, he ceased thinking and listened. South Pacific, he real- ized. The song “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair.” Eight hundred and nine strings, and not even divided strings. Was his car stereo on? He glanced at its indicator light and dial. No, it was not.