Roma Eterna (54 page)

“It's gone!” someone cried.

“Moshe! Moshe!”

“It blew up! I saw it!”

“Moshe!”

“Judith—” said a quieter voice behind me.

I was too stunned to cry out. But all around me there was a steadily rising sound of horror and despair, which began as a low choking wail and mounted until it was a shriek of the greatest intensity coming from hundreds of throats at once. There was fearful panic, universal hysteria. People were running about as if they had gone mad. Some were rolling on the ground, some were beating their hands against the sand. “Moshe!” they were screaming. “Moshe! Moshe! Moshe!”

I turned toward Eleazar. He was white-faced and his
eyes seemed wild. Yet even as I looked at him I saw him draw in his breath, raise his hands, step forward to call for attention. Immediately all eyes were on him. He swelled until he appeared to be five cubits high.

“Where's the ship?” someone cried. “Where's Moshe?”

And Eleazar said, in a voice like the trumpet of the Lord, “He was the Son of God, and God has called him home.”

Screams. Wails. Hysterical shrieks.

“Dead!” came the cry. “Moshe is dead!”

“He will live forever,” Eleazar boomed.

“The Son of God!” came the cry, from three voices, five, a dozen. “The Son of God!”

I was aware of Miriam at my side, warm, pressing close, her arm through mine, her soft breast against my ribs, her lips at my ear. “You must write the book,” she whispered, and her voice held a terrible urgency. “
His
book, you must write. So that this day will never be forgotten. So that he will live forever.”

“Yes,” I heard myself saying. “Yes.”

 

In that moment of frenzy and terror I felt myself sway like a tree of the shore that has been assailed by the flooding of the Nilus; and I was uprooted and swept away. The fireball of the
Exodus
blazed in my soul like a second sun indeed, with a brightness that could never fade. And I knew that I was engulfed, that I was conquered, that I would remain here to write and preach, that I would forge the gospel of the new Moshe in the smithy of my soul and send the word to all the lands. Out of these five today would come rebirth; and to the peoples of the Republic we would bring the message for which they had waited so long in their barrenness and their confusion, and when it came they would throw off the shackles of their masters; and out of the death of the Imperium would come a new order of things. Were there other worlds, and could we dwell upon them? Who could say? But there was a new truth that we
could teach, which was the truth of the second Moshe who had given his life so that we might go to the stars, and I would not let that new truth die. I would write, and others of my people would go forth and carry the word that I had written to all the lands, and the lands would be changed.

Perhaps I am wrong that the Republic is doomed. What is more likely true, I suspect, is that this world was meant to be Roma's; so it has been for thousands of years, and evidently it always will be, even unto eternity. Very well. Let them have it. We will not challenge Roma's eternal destiny. We will simply remove ourselves from its grasp. We have a destiny of our own. Some day, who knew how soon, we would build a new ship, and another, and another, and they will carry us from this world of woe. God has sent His Son, and God has called Him home, and one day we will all leave the iron rule of this eternal Roma behind and follow Him on wings of flame, up from the land of bondage into the heavens where He dwells eternally.