She laughed. “I wish there were ways to do it that were less troublesome. Did you know that the Secretary of State is going to fix up my new apartment for me? She says to save time, but I imagine it’s to keep an eye on me.”
“Interesting,” said Chiddy.
“So, maybe I’ll see you after I move in?”
“You will, yes. Have you any questions?”
“I have some, yes. One is … I didn’t realize you were depending on me to go on working with you, and I’ve told Simon I will work for him. I owe him my full-time effort, you know. If he’s paying me, it wouldn’t be ethical not to give him a fair day’s work.”
“What you do for us will be very simple, Benita. It will take very little time.”
“And . . . the money you gave me. I really didn’t need all that. I should give the rest of it back.”
“That is our standard payment for the kind of service you will be rendering. It doesn’t obligate you to do anything for us that your conscience finds abhorrent.”
“In that case, well, thank you.”
“No thanks needed. Do you have another question?”
“I don’t really understand just what the requirements are that we humans have to meet in order to be members of your Confederation. Since I’m the intermediary, I ought to understand them, shouldn’t I?”
“Yes, you should. The preliminary requirement is Neighborliness, as we have said. Learning to get along together without blowing up people or shooting children from cars or oppressing people because of perceived dissimilarities to oneself. Once that has been achieved, there are only a few formalities. First, we require a volunteer liaison person from your planet, someone who must be intimately connected to the process of mutuality. We call this person the Link. We will also need a profile person to travel among our various worlds while the members of the Confederation establish biological parameters for your race. This person, we call the Pattern.”
“Is that it?”
“Become neighborly, give us a Link and a Pattern, then a short probationary period, and that’s it. Does that answer your question.”
She wasn’t satisfied, but she didn’t know what would be more satisfying. “Yes, I think so. Thank you.”
“Thank you, Benita. We will be in touch.”
Jerusalem—THURSDAY
In Israel, first light had brought helicopter flights over the city of Jerusalem. The mile-deep hole followed the serrated polygon of the old city walls. Vanished were the Temple Mount, the Dome of the Rock, El Aqsa Mosque, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Via Dolorosa. Gone were the Citadel and the Antonia Fortress, the Zion Gate, the Jaffa Gate. Gone was the entire Old City: Arab Quarter, Jewish Quarter, Armenians, Greek Orthodox, odds and ends of vari-etal Christians and all.
When the sun got high enough to reflect off the inside lip of the chasm, large gold letters appeared just below the western edge in Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and Arabic. Further examination found other languages, ancient and modern, extending along the north and eastern sides. At midmorning, former residents of the Old City were seen approaching the city from various directions, on foot, most in their bed clothes. No one was hurt, though many were thirsty and hungry, and all said they’d left others out in the desert or along the roads or in the smaller towns or villages in which they themselves had wakened. The International Red Cross/Red Crescent arrived a few hours later, though the Israeli army had already set up a tent city for the displaced, divided by hastily erected barriers into areas for various religious or ethnic groups who might otherwise be expected to fall upon one another in a frenzy of mutual accusation.
The news was carried by CNN before full light, and was reprised every quarter hour thereafter as the country turned toward the sun, allowing more of the chasm’s southern and then eastern faces to be illuminated. As each new language appeared, an appropriate scholar was summoned to the CNN newsroom to pontificate upon the meaning of the words, though in each case the meaning was the same, whether in Latin, Coptic, Armenian, Aramaic, or various forms of ancient or modern Hebrew or Greek: “Jerusalem was to be a city of holy peace. Without peace, it is not to be.”