Adam Troy Castro by After the Protocols

Author:After the Protocols
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-01-26T00:37:04+00:00

The journey to Galilee, as the engraving had called it, took another four months.

They found a green and mountainous world, in a solar system on the outskirts of the territories human beings knew. It could not have orbited its sun at a better distance from its sun, or possessed a better atmosphere. The oceans were calm and blue, the fauna wide-eyed and unthreatening, the climate so gentle over most of its surface that everywhere Barque and Forrell went they felt the gathered weight of these past few years fall from their shoulders like a burden no longer required from anyone who walked this sweet and sunny place.

But there were no Jews here, either.

The Jews had been here. That much was clear. There were plenty of settlements and farms, enough between them to account for a population in the lower eight figures. But the farms had grown wild and the settlements were being reclaimed by wilderness.. The world had working power plants, all turned off; schools and theatres and places of worship, all deserted; roads, all unoccupied; vehicles, all motionless and awaiting new masters. There was no sign of warfare, or disease, or death on a mass scale: there was just a civilization, with everything it needed to thrive but actual people.

The two men returned to their ship once again, to devote orbit after orbit to a fruitless search for signs of a hiding population.

Forrell said, “They must have needed to flee here, too.”

“It’s possible,” Barque said. But somehow he didn’t think so. Surely the people who had survived the enmity of the Empire, and of Quracl, and of Kirajav, the people who had held Covilav for decades in the face of overwhelming opposition, would have done more to defend this world against any threat to their sovereignty. They could not have scurried away without leaving these hillsides marred by battle scars. He would not believe that of them.

Being disappointed by an enemy can raise a deeper wound than being betrayed by a friend.

After another hour spent studying the projected images of Galilean settlements, his disappointment was swept aside by the first stirrings of realization. “Hmph. That’s peculiar.”

“What?” Forrell asked.

Barque spent the next few minutes ignoring Forrell’s increasingly insistent questions while poring over the images of one abandoned village after another. At length, feeling the kind of excitement he had only known as a professional torturer whenever recalcitrant subjects surrendered both their dignity and their information, he said: “Look. All of these settlements look alike. You’d expect them to, right? They were all built in a hurry, by a fugitive people who needed places to live as quickly as possible. They didn’t have time to mess around with fancy municipal planning; they just built every town and village in a standard grid pattern, with all the houses the same size, all the streets set up to meet at perpendicular intersections, all the larger buildings, factories and synagogues in separate districts. See? Look here and here and here and here and here.

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