Departures (37 page)

He threw on a battered corduroy jacket and was on his way down the hall when Ruth called “Where are you going?” from the den.

Sheepishly (under the circumstances, he thought, that was
not quite the right word), he explained. He stayed right where he was; at that moment he didn’t feel much like facing her.

“You told him his pigs were kosher,” she said in a voice so flat he could make nothing of it.

“Yes, and this is what it got me.” He heard her get up. “What are you doing?” he asked in some alarm.

“Getting a hat.”

“What for?”

“So I can come with you, of course.”

He was still gaping when he stepped into the hall. He finally found his tongue. “What are you coming with me for? You were the one who told me to say the R strain was
trafe
and have done with it. You can’t want to go eat pork with me.”

“But it’s not pork, or that’s what you told Delahanty.”

“But to you it is.”

“Who’s the rabbi in this house?” she said, and laughed at his thunderstruck expression. “Besides,” she added softly, “it’ll be easier if you’re not alone.”

“Thank you,” he said. That wasn’t nearly strong enough. He went over and hugged her. “Have I told you any time lately I think you’re wonderful?”

“Yes, but I never mind hearing it again. Come on; let’s get this over with.”

Traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway never moved fast. Old gasoline-fueled cars, alcohol-burners, and electrics crawled along together. Kaplan had just about decided to make his next car, somewhere in the indefinite future, an electric. With more and more fusion plants coming on line, they were definitely the coming thing. Smog was down, too; not out, but down.

They drove past billboards in Spanish, English, Korean, Japanese, and Hindi. Every decade, it seemed, some new group of immigrants settled in southern California in droves. Kaplan’s neighborhood supermarket stocked nine different chutneys and seventeen curries.

With their superior climate, Westwood and Santa Monica had long dominated the L.A. area, leaving the old downtown to stagnation again after its rebirth in the 1970s. Skyscrapers flung long afternoon shadows across the San Diego Freeway as Kaplan and his wife swung north.

The parking garage in the building that housed the headquarters of Genetic Enterprises went down eleven levels under
ground. The elevator’s surge was like a rocket lifting off, but it was not the only reason the rabbi’s stomach had for lurching.

Genetic Enterprises kept its labs elsewhere in the city, where rents were lower. This was where the executives worked. When Kaplan opened the door to the receptionist’s office, a delicious smell rolled over him like a wave. It was not really unfamiliar; one could not live in Los Angeles without coming across it now and then. But it had never had anything to do with him before.

Delahanty came out almost at once to shake his hand. “Good to see you again,” he said, politely adding, “A pleasure to meet you,” when Kaplan introduced him to Ruth.

“Shall we get on with it?” she said harshly.

“Of course,” Delahanty said. “Thank you for coming, both of you. I understand how difficult this must be for you.”

You don’t begin to
, Kaplan thought, but he and his wife followed Delahanty back into his office. On the desk lay a meat-filled platter. “Blade-cut por—uh, chops,” Delahanty said. “Here, let me heat them up for you.” He popped them into a microwave oven, which obviously had been brought in for the occasion.

As the microwave hummed, Kaplan sighed inaudibly to himself. Perhaps even without meaning to, Delahanty had eliminated a possible last-ditch excuse to chicken out—another inappropriate phrase, the rabbi thought ruefully. He might have begged off by saying that the beast now reheating had not been slaughtered by a
shokhet—any
ritual butcher would have laughed himself silly at the notion of practicing his skill on a pig. But Kaplan did not insist that his beef and mutton come from the
shokhet’s
knife; he bought them at the supermarket. And so he could not honestly apply a standard to the R strain different from the one by which he judged other acceptable meat.

But he did avoid cuts from the hindquarters of the carcass. The section of meat through which the sciatic nerve passed was not kosher, in memory of the laming blow the angel of the Lord had inflicted on Jacob when they wrestled through the night. Blade-cut chops, though, came from far forward on the beast.

The reverie was done long before the microwave turned itself off. When it chimed, Delahanty took out the platter and produced some plastic cutlerly from a desk drawer. “Would you like me to step out for a few minutes?” he asked.

“No, that’s all right,” Kaplan began, but Ruth broke in, “Yes, please.”

“Of course,” Delahanty said quietly, and shut the door behind him as he left.

The fantasy that flitted through Kaplan’s mind this time was frankly paranoid: he wondered if this was all an elaborate practical joke to get him to eat forbidden food.

He and Ruth looked at the gently steaming chops and at each other. Gathering his pride, the rabbi said, “Me first,” and picked up knife and fork. The meat was tougher, grainier than veal, which to his eye it most closely resembled. He speared it with his fork and brought it toward his mouth.

Chapter 92 of the
Shulkhan Arukh
dealt with laws concerning one dangerously ill and one forced to transgress a precept. Karo wrote, “If one who is dangerously ill requires meat, and only forbidden meat is obtainable, an animal should be slaughtered for his sake in order not to feed him with forbidden meat, as it is apprehended lest he will become aware of having been fed on forbidden meat and he will become nauseated thereby.”

Kaplan had come across that passage before. Now he had no doubt it described something real. When a couple of hours of theoretical knowledge came up against forty years of ingrained practice, distress was inevitable.

He clamped his jaw shut to hold down his gorge, then realized he could not eat that way. He took a deep breath, chewed, swallowed, then set his jaw again.

“Well?” Ruth demanded. “How is it?”

He laughed shakily. “You know, it’s just like the time I ate bacon and eggs when I was a kid. I have no idea what it tasted like.”

“Well, let’s find out, shall we?” Ruth cut a large piece and chewed with deliberation. “Not bad,” she said reflectively. “Nothing to write home about, but not bad.”

The second bite, Kaplan found, came much easier than the first. This time he too, was able to consider the flavor of the—of the R strain, he told himself firmly. “Different,” he agreed.

They ate a chop apiece, not with any great speed or relish, but steadily. Looking at the meat still on the platter, Kaplan asked, “Still hungry?”

“Not especially.”

“Neither am I. Even honestly believing that was acceptable food, it was harder than I ever thought it would be.” Ruth nodded. “You did very well.” “Thanks. So did you, and thanks for that, too.” He hugged
her again. “Shall we give Delahanty his office back and show him the dreadful deed is done?”

“Just a second.” She took a tissue from her pocket and brushed at his beard. “Now.”

“Okay.”

Not surprisingly, the head of Genetic Enterprises had been hovering just outside in the hallway. He hurried in, saw the bones on the platter. “Rabbi, Mrs. Kaplan, thank you very much,” he said, shaking hands with them both.

“It’s all right,” Kaplan said. “You’ve given me one of the more, ah, interesting afternoons of my life, that I can tell you.”

“I really didn’t mean to pressure you,” Delahanty said. But, like any scientist, he was curious by nature and could not help asking. “How did you like it?”

“We got through it,” Kaplan said.

Later, driving home, he wondered if he had been short with the man. Then he thought of twenty-five hundred years of history, of conquest and captivity under Babylon; persecution by the Greeks; savage and futile war against Rome; European ghettos and Christian mobs; Dreyfus; the Holocaust, still too appalling for any sane mind to take in; round after round of war in the Middle East, and no end in sight. No end to Jews in sight either, though.

Without much thought, he had managed to sum up the history of a people in four words. That wasn’t bad.

He changed lanes.

This one is in large measure my wife Laura’s fault. She gave me the ending. Of course, I’m partly to blame, too, because I’m the one who went and wrote a story around it.

MIOCENE ITALY. TO BE PRECISE, A SWAMP IN
miocene Italy, in what would be Tuscany ten million years from now, give or take a few thousand. It certainly
smelled
like a swamp, Harvey Cutter thought as he squelched through the mud to check his latest trap.

The smells of mud, stale water, and rotting vegetation never changed much, the hunter thought as he scraped his hip boots one after the other on a branch. Or was that
never would change
? Despite a hundred years of commercial time travel, English tenses remained ill-adapted to the phenomenon.

The branch on which he’d cleaned his boots was part of a myrtle shrub. Maybe an uptime botanist could tell the difference between it and its modern equivalent, but Cutter couldn’t. The mosquitoes, he thought resentfully as one bit him on the arm, also hadn’t changed much.

But he wasn’t hunting plants and he wasn’t hunting mosquitoes, even if they were hunting him. He was hunting primates for the San Diego Cenozoic Zoo, and he wasn’t having a whole lot of luck.

Things had been easier on his last run, when he’d brought back a dozen
Notharctus—
plenty to start a breeding colony—from Eocene North America.
Notharctus
looked like a lemur and wasn’t much smarter than a squirrel. He could have caught a hundred if he’d wanted them.

Now he was after larger—and smarter—game. Hominoids, even offbeat Miocene hominoids like the ones he was after now, were nobody’s fools. That wasn’t surprising; people and the great apes were the survivors of the hominoid clan.

Something squealed in pain and terror out on the firmer ground farther east. Cutter’s head whipped around.
A Diceratherium
was down and kicking, with several wolfish
Cynodesmus
scrambling over its bulky body and already beginning to feed.

Cutter was glad
Cynodesmus
preferred dry ground. They would have attacked him just as cheerfully as they had the big, rhinolike
Diceratherium
. They had no fear of man. In the Miocene, primates—any primates—were prey, not predators.

Calling
Cynodesmus
wolfish and
Diceratherium
rhinolike did not really do the beasts justice, Cutter knew. Unlike the plants and the bugs, Miocene mammals resembled their modern equivalents about as much as would clay models made by a talented ten-year-old with a little more imagination than he really needed.

As if to prove the point, a small herd of
Syndyoceras
daintily picked their way around the gorging pack of
Cynodesmus
. They looked something like deer and something like antelopes, with their striped hides resembling those of zebras, but they had two horns above their eyes and two more halfway down their noses, which made them different from anything that had gotten past the Pleistocene.

Cutter squelched on. He could see the stand of willow where he’d set this new trap. He could see the net too, undeployed and empty. He said something rude under his breath. He got up to the trap and saw footprints by the fat juicy red apple he’d set out as bait. They were the right kind of footprints. He said something rude out loud, loud enough, in fact, to scare a flock of Miocene more-or-less sparrows off their perches. They flew away, chirping angrily.

“Hell with it,” he said out loud. He looked around for a reasonably dry patch of ground, took out a ration pack, and ate lunch. He scattered paper and cellophane over the landscape with reckless abandon. All the wrappers were aggressively biodegradable; none of them would show up in the seam of lignite that would memorialize this landscape in the distant present.

Temper somewhat restored, he examined the footprints round the snare again. They were the prints of his quarry, all right: marks about half as big as his own bare feet would have made, and of the same general shape. The imprints of the beast’s opposable great toes, though, were slightly set off from those of the others, and not quite in line with them. Only men and their immediate ancestors had feet fully adapted to walking erect.

The hunter started off toward the next stand of willows, a couple of miles away. That one was bigger than this little outpost, and held his camp and three traps. None of them had
caught anything, either, though one had been robbed the day before yesterday.

Several sluggish streams ran between the two copses. Cutter forded them with care. The other day, he had watched a crocodile drag a young ancestral hippo off a stream bank and into the water. He corrected himself: the little hippo hadn’t lived long enough to be ancestral to anything.

He got to the base camp without being bitten by anything more ferocious than more mosquitoes. Then he checked his traps in this strap of trees. They were all unsprung, though two of them had fresh prints nearby. No wonder the Italian hominoid had a reputation for being hard to catch, Cutter thought.

He found droppings under a big, shaggy willow and set another trap there. When he suddenly looked up in the middle of the job, he saw brown eyes watching him through the leaves. A moment later, they were gone.

He walked back to his camp. That was really too dignified a name for it, he thought. It was just a clearing where he’d pitched a light tent to keep the rain off his sleeping bag. The sun was still in the sky, but he decided to eat anyway.

He got out another ration pack. But for the degradable packaging, he knew, the packs were adapted from old military food: P-rations, T-rations, something like that. He didn’t remember the letter. If they’d made soldiers eat stuff like this all the time, he thought disparagingly, no wonder nobody’d fought a war in a long time.