"Do you have any whiskey?" Herb Asher said.

"Oh fine," Rybys said bitterly. "You can get drunk but can I? With M.S. and some kind of baby inside me? There I was"- she glared hatefully at Elias Tate-' 'picking up your thoughts visually on my TV set, and I imagined in my deluded folly that it was a corny soap opera dreamed up by writers at Fomalhaut -pure fiction. Arachnids were going to decapitate you? Is that what your unconscious fantasies consist of? And you're Yahweh's spokesperson?" She blanched. "I spoke the Sacred Name. Sorry."

"Christians speak it all the time," Elias said.

Rybys said, "But I'm a Jew. I it'ould be a Jew; that's what got me into this. If I was a Gentile Yah wouldn't have picked me. If I'd ever been laid I'd-" She broke off. "The Divine Machinery has a peculiar brutality to it," she finished. "It isn't romantic. It's cruel; it really is."

The Divine Invasion

"Because there is so much at stake," Elias said.

"What is at stake?" Rybys said.

"The universe exists because Yah remembers it," Elias said.

Both Herb Asher and Rybys stared at him.

"If Yah forgets, the universe ceases," Elias said.

"Can he forget?" Rybys said.

"He has yet to forget," Elias said elliptically.

"Meaning he could forget," Rybys said. "Then that's what this is about. You just spelled it out. I see. Well-" She shrugged and then reflexively sipped at her cup of tea. "Then I wouldn't exist in the first place except for Yah. Nothing would exist."

Elias said, "His name means 'He Brings into Existence Whatever Exists.' "

"Including evil?" Herb Asher asked.

"It says in Scripture," Elias said, "thus:

So that men from the rising and the setting sun

May know that there is none but I:

I am the LORD, there is no other;