"Jack Dann - Jumping The Road" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dann Jack)

Jumping the Road
Jack Dann
It really isnтАЩt right that I should give you my name. True enough that
this is history, and history, if it is to be kept alive, must be recorded for
posterity. But the name of Isaac ibn Chabib of Philadelphia need not be
mentioned.
However, does not the Pirkei Avos, the Ethics of the Fathers, demand
that we repeat a saying in the name of the one who said it?
I will admit to being Isaac ibn Chabib, fool, hypocrite, rabbi, and
unregenerate disbeliever in miracles.
So for posterity, for all those who will listen, here is my story.



First of all, I should tell you that I didnтАЩt want to go to Tobias.
Tobias is not even the real name of the planet. The Jews who live there
call it Bharees, or Covenant, because the remnants of one of its moons
form a ring of dust and stones that appear as a gauzy rainbow in the night
sky. It is, I will admit, a beautiful sight; and as if thatтАЩs not enough, the
comets rain across the heavens and sheets of aurorae shimmer like tinted
crystal.
Everyone else calls the place Ulim, which means world. We named it
Tobias, after Martin Tobias, President of the United States of Canada. But
IтАЩm getting away from the point. The point is that all JewsтАФany Jews on
any planetтАФmust trace their cultural heritage back to Earth. There can be
only one Sinai, one Torah, one Adonoi.
If the Jews have scaly skin like alligators and yellow eyes and seven
fingers on each hand, thatтАЩs fine. Good for them; theyтАЩre converts. The
Torah doesnтАЩt discriminate. At some time, some adventurous Jews
colonized Covenant and converted the natives. Or the natives listened in
on our radio transmissionsтАФnot that Jews have so many programs on the
airтАФand decided to become Jewish. (Which just goes to prove that you
donтАЩt need to be human to be a masochist.) ThatтАЩs the only logical
explanation why the Good Will Traders discovered Jews on Covenant.
That was my argument, but the xeno-historians and cultural
anthropologists had written an Encyclopedia Galactica detailing that the
тАЬUlim JewsтАЭ were as indigenous to the planet as the electric cats and the
flimflams that soared in the sky like birds and burrowed into the earth like
worms. It seemed that Judaism had actually, impossibly, evolved
independently on a different planet. Oh, there were plenty of theories
about how such a thing could happen, but they were as wild and esoteric
as anything Leibniz or the Lurianic Kabbalists could have imagined:
ghostly quantum worlds splitting into imperfect copies of themselves (not
so different from the mysticтАЩs worlds of angels and demons), the
Copenhagen collapse, mirror universes, splitting universes, the Everett
Wheeler Graham metatheorem, the turbulent effects of chaos, the great
fractal chain, and who knows what else.
So now we are to believe in two SinaiтАЩs, two Torahs, and four Talmuds,
for like us, the Ulim Jews had two versions of Talmud, which, in case you
might not know, are chronicles of Jewish culture, law, and myth. They