"SACUL."
"Special authorization Scifantasy, gamma-gamma-omega. Accept incoming file and dispatch all available agents."
"Major, what in the name of..."
"Do. Not. Ask. Just fix it."
click
Sci walked down the street, music and lyrics refusing to leave his head. He had taken the liberty of slipping out into the city, now that things had quieted down. After all, it wasn't as if he had anyone out looking for him. Or if they'd recognize him if they were. And since he had left everything that could connect him to Terra Group back at their "stronghold"--comlink, blaster, insignia, vibroblade, to name a few--he couldn't be easily identified as anything other than another tourist.
But boy, did he need the space. After the flight over, the lightfights, seeing Sylvana go into a sort of Elenari bloodlust, the interrogation of the infuriating Eti Neris--though that would have been far worse without Naira there--a partial debriefing from the rest of his team, and the everpresent, job-defined worry about everybody within a planetary radius, he was in incredible need of a few hours' distance of anyone he knew.
Sci wasn't religious. Well, not very. Major holidays, yes. His religion was his because it was his parents' and their parents' and their parents'. This wasn't very surprising, and actually rather typical of his generation. He'd be willing to bet that several members of Terra Group were similar.
Similar, but not identical. It was a different religion, after all. Sci chuckled, wondering if any of his team even knew he was Jewish, how much this city meant to his people.
How much it hurt to be here, with all that was going on.
Half-remembered lyrics of famous songs flitted through his head. Sci wasn't usually the type to express his innermost thoughts through other people's music, but nonetheless, he knew he could hear two specific songs resonating in his brain. Noisy they were, too. He whistled softly, half-remembering the beautiful Hebrew lyrics, words he would rarely attempt to sing, as he considered his own voice insufficient to express the feelings.
"Yerushalayim Shel Zahav," or "Jerusalem Of Gold," was written in 1967 and spoke sadly of the loss of Jerusalem to the Jewish people some two thousand years before. About a month later, during the Six-Day War, the city was recaptured by the Israeli Defence Force--all singing "Yerushalayim Shel Zahav." The song was considered something of a second national anthem of Israel.
"Hatikvah," "The Hope," actually was the national anthem of Israel. The hope in question was the same hope that ran through all of Zionism--the hope for a Jewish homeland in the ancient land of Canaan again.
Sci was never good at just wandering. He tried for a while, but between his constant unconscious desire for focus and his wish to not get completely lost in the traces of the Old City, he eventually decided to stop deluding himself. He'd only been "wandering" because he wasn't sure he wanted to go to the only place there was to go to.
He stopped at a falafel stand and bought a pita-ful, munching as he thought. Finally he shrugged, finished off the food, and went West.
He passed through the security checkpoint easily enough, thanks to his lack of any extraterrestrial technology. He slowly entered and walked towards the only surviving wall of the Second Temple of the Hebrew people.
The Temple Mount, the place where the Temple itself stood, still existed, but it was considered one of the holiest places in the Islamic religion, the Dome of the Rock, and besides, that was just a location marker. This was a physical reminder.
Sci had seen the pictures of the paratroopers standing before the Western Wall, the first Israelis to do so in nearly twenty years, and they had almost brought tears to his eyes. He had even been here once before, in a time so long ago that it seemed a lifetime, before he had joined Project Boussh.
And here he was again, looking over at the wall that had stood for almost two thousand years, hearing prayers, supplications, cries of torment, and, in the last fifty years, gunshots, explosions, and violence between the descendants of a pair of half-brothers, descendants who shared more than what divided them. Sci thought of his own friendship with Araniethel, a Muslim, as he walked towards the Western Wall.
As millions of Jews before him had, and as millions would again, Sci donned a kippah, approached the wall and put his right hand over his eyes.
Shema Yisrael, Adonai elohaynu, Adonai echad.