Hell on High

by Holly Lisle

  Jack looked at the time and decided that stray phone number that had bounced into his mind when he'd been trying to solve the reinforcement problem had been a sign. Like a motion to adjourn, pizza was always in order. Not Domino's, though. Something authentic. He saved his work and headed for the hall. Behind him, as he closed the door, his printer burped.

  Chapter 45

  "Good idea, Jack," Rhea told him as the waitress set their pizza down and the aroma wafted up. The fiction that their relationship was platonic had died a fast and very public death at Celestial, and they'd decided early on they might as well be open about it. So they had left for lunch together. So far their involvement hadn't caused any problems.

  "I think the Greeks understand pizza even better than the Italians," Rhea said. She lifted out one of the thick slices, broke the trailing ribbon of mozzarella, and put it down on her plate.

  Jack did the same. The pepperoni were cooked crisp under the light sheen of olive oil, and the crust cut with a satisfying crunch. "I think so," Jack agreed. "In fact, I had a friend once with the theory that the only really American foods were things like Greek pizza, Mexican fish and chips and Polish eggrolls."

  Rhea shuddered. "I don't think I'd go that far," she said.

  "Well," Jack said, "he also had the theory that the federal tax system is voluntary. So you can take that with as many grains of salt as you need to." He paused and counted. "I think he should be out in about another three years."

  Rhea laughed around a mushroom. "You run with some interesting company, don't you?" she asked.

  "I've known some choice ones," Jack agreed. "Sometimes the wrong choice." He sprinkled crushed red pepper on his slice and took a bite—not as good as sex, but it could give drugs and rock and roll a run for the money.

  Somehow Rhea was already on her second slice. "Tell me about Carol," she said as she pushed an olive towards the exact geometrical center.

  He didn't really want to. It wasn't one of the high spots of his life, but then, he was the one who had mentioned the name in the first place.

  "Not much to tell," he said. "You know, Myrtle Beach used to be a whole different place before the Unchaining. It wasn't a metropolis until all those Tarheels moved south over the state line. We had lots of tourists in the summer, of course, but as far as the locals were concerned, it was a small town, with all the small town cliques and social circles." He took a sip of tea, and Rhea nodded.

  A pleasant-looking young man came in the door and went to the takeout counter. There was something familiar about him, Jack thought. "You have a large, half double anchovy/pineapple/garlic, half edible?" the man asked. The countergirl nodded and handed it to him at arms' length, as though she didn't want to be associated with it. Jack caught Rhea's eye and grimaced. "I'd take the Polish eggroll first," she confirmed.

  "Anyway," Jack continued, "after Natsu moved, I started going out with Carol. Well, actually, she didn't really notice me at all until I fixed her car one day when it was broken down in beach traffic on 501 during a tropical storm. Then I was kind of an honorary part of her circle, and socially, they were all top dogs. She was a cheerleader; Mother and Daddy belonged to the right country club; and she rode horses. Thoroughbred-Arabian crosses, as a matter of fact. I distinctly remember that that mattered. On top of everything else, she was smart and funny. My buddies tried to tell me she was one stuck-up girl, but that wasn't ever the way I saw her act, and I didn't want to hear it."

  "Hmm. I think I sense a little foreshadowing here," Rhea said.

  "Well, I didn't. We were both going to Clemson, so it seemed kind of natural to continue the relationship once we got there." He stopped as the slice he had just picked up folded under the weight of too many toppings and dangled limply under the outer crust.

  "That's not an omen for tonight is it?" Rhea asked, pointing.

  "Well, I've never dropped my toppings yet," Jack said. He put the offending slice down and attacked it with his fork. "Carol was in the best sorority, of course, and they had lots of parties. A lot of them were formal, which I really hated, but I put on the monkey suit because it made her happy. The last one was a really big deal. She had finessed being put in charge of a big Southeast-wide dinner and dance for all the different chapters of the sorority, with a couple thousand people planned to attend. Carol got to emcee the whole thing, and she and the other organizers got to sit at the head table with their dates."

  "So you were up there with a couple thousand people staring at you?" Rhea looked amused. He supposed being on display was easy for her.

  "Yeah, which is pretty close to my idea of Hell, anyway," he continued. "There'd been parties in hotel rooms all day before the main event, so things started off rowdy and went downhill from there. I think each table basically got as much wine as they could drink, even before the meal. It was kind of funny seeing all these girls in evening dresses sloshed half to the gills. Carol was having her share, too.

  "I was ready to go home by the time Carol was supposed to introduce the head table and start making presentations, and we still had the dance to get through afterwards. Anyway, she went up to the podium and started talking. She wasn't too focused by then, and she was making dumb jokes and dragging it out forever—I was just kind of tuning it out until she got to me."

  Jack took another sip of tea. He noticed his knuckles were white and he eased his grip. He could tell Rhea had seen too. "You don't have to go on," she said gently. "I didn't know it still upset you."

  He shook his head. "No, that'd be like coitus interruptus. Besides it doesn't upset me—it just makes me mad." He went on while she pondered that distinction. "The way I remember it, the exact words she said were, 'And here's my date for the evening, Jack Halloran. Would you believe I had to steal him from a slant eyed slut? And doesn't he clean up nice?'

  "I felt like a ton of bricks had fallen on me. I couldn't do anything at first—I was paralyzed. Then I knew what I had to do. I stood up and said, 'Excuse me, I don't think I need to be here,' and I walked out.

  "I had to go all the way across the ballroom. It was completely silent; everyone was watching me." He shuddered. "While I was walking, I realized two things: One, I'd never seen Carol talk for more than two seconds to anyone who wasn't white. Of course she was always nice; everyone she associated with was white and well-to-do. And two: She was always happiest when she'd talked me into doing something I didn't really want to do.

  "By the time those doors had closed behind me, I'd looked at the whole history of our relationship without the rose-colored filter. I didn't like it, and I didn't like what it had done to me." He shrugged. "We never spoke after that. I understand I humiliated her in front of her peers, and she kind of dropped to the bottom of the sorority's pecking order after that, but I really can't say I'm sorry. You think you know someone, but do we ever really?" He decided not to mention the semesters of slashed tires and mysteriously missing mail. After all, there was never anything he could prove.

  The pizza was cold when he tried the next bite. "Sorry," he said. "I guess I talked your ear off."

  Rhea looked troubled. "No," she said, "I appreciate your telling me the details. In a lot of ways, it helps me get a better look at you." She pushed her pizza aside. "But I think we could both definitely use some dessert."

  "Now you're talking!"

  Chapter 46

  Back at the office, Jack stared at his printer again. The situation was getting pretty ridiculous. He really did need to make printouts, and he needed them to be reliable. No one else in the building had their own personal gremlin, much less a gargoyle. Rhea had seemed so sure that the Hellspawn would leave him alone, and he'd figured if she made the comment, it must have been because she had some experience with the problem; if she ever ventured an opinion, she could always back it up with facts and experience. But she'd been wrong this time. He hadn't mentioned it, though—she had enough on her mind, and he didn't want her thinking he was trying to show her up. And nobody knew much about the H
ellraised. He would just have to find an engineering solution. Printer Degremlinization. If he came up with something really snappy, maybe he could publish.

  He sat down and pondered. He didn't really have the time to fool around with it, but on the other hand, could he afford not to?

  He accessed the World Wide Web and pulled up the Unchained home page. Someone at the NC State anthro department had started it a year ago, pulling together all the net's resources concerning the denizens of Hell both in myth and reality. Jack sifted through screenful after screenful, pausing only to mark links he wanted to come back to. A lot of the information came from the Unchained themselves, and was notoriously unreliable and contradictory, but that didn't mean it wasn't helpful in its own way.

  The sun was low on the horizon when he brought back all the links he had flagged and put them on screen side by side. Belief and religious symbols: That was one common element to the driving out of demons. Jack rubbed his chin and felt the rasp of five o'clock shadow. He had to meet Rhea for supper—and other things—soon, but maybe he had something here. Christianity, Judaism and Islam all had a tradition of successful confrontations with Hellspawn, as long as the confronter believed in the symbols of his faith. Doubtless there was some crossover from vampiric lore, and the indications for faiths not derived from Judaism were less clear, but the indications were there. The symbols alone weren't enough, though; there had been several instances of the Unchained infiltrating churches and even posing as ministers since they came to the state.

  Jack sighed. He'd been reared High Church Episcopal, but these days he tended more towards a sort of agnostic deism, the Unchaining notwithstanding. He didn't think he could muster the necessary sincerity to do a successful exorcism on his printer.

  He closed out the web viewer, then sat back, struck by a thought. Maybe it didn't matter who or what did the believing. Artificial intelligence was a lot like power from nuclear fusion: it was always twenty years in the future. There were isolated islands of success, though, like neural nets—circuit arrays that exhibited what could only be termed patterns of learning, or, perhaps, belief.

  He walked over to his parts shelf. He ought to have a few net chips; they were useful in fuzzy logic controllers. He found one, hiding under the obsolete husk of a Pentium. It was harder to find the programming interface box—that was in the popcorn maker tucked away on the top shelf. He took it and plugged it into his workstation's interface bus, thought for a minute, then keyed in a short multi-entity scenario. He created a container entity representing his lab, with two smaller entities inside, one representing the gremlin, and one representing the neural net chip. He put the chip in learn mode and ran a training sequence over and over, one where the arrival of the chip in the room inevitably resulted in the gremlin's leaving.

  While the sequence was running, he mounted a boilerplate driver circuit board and a small battery on a cruciform T-square. When he figured the chip was as convinced as it was going to get, he popped it from the programming box and into the socket on his makeshift cross. He flipped a microswitch and the small power LED lit. Jack struck a dramatic pose holding the assembly in front of him, and began to approach his printer. He was surprised at how uncomfortable he felt. Apparently his parents had imprinted him more deeply than he had thought, or maybe it was one thing to have doubts about religion and another to use its symbols cynically. He shrugged the feeling off and touched the cross to the printer. The gremlin popped out, but it didn't run. Instead it leaped and grabbed the T-square, sprawling across it until it looked like a Catholic crucifix. It closed its eyes, and moaned. It didn't seem to be distressed, though. As far as Jack could see, it was in some kind of feeding frenzy.

  He was too confounded to drop the square as the gremlin writhed there in ecstasy. After the first throes died down, it opened its eyes, put two fingers in its mouth and gave a shrill whistle. Instantly two more gremlims appeared on the printer with small pops of displaced air. "I keep money, yes?" the gremlin, his gremlin, shrilled. The other two nodded, and the original beckoned with an arm gesture. The new arrivals jumped to join the first like grade-school looters at a candy store.

  Jack had had enough. He shook the T-square to dislodge the gremlins, but they were holding on too tightly. He reached gingerly through the seething mass of small limbs and plucked the battery from the driver board. The writhing stopped, and his gremlin gave him a sour look and the finger. It dropped back into the workings of the printer; the other two scurried for the corners of the office.

  Jack looked at the T-square. "Great, Halloran," he said to himself, "just great. Now you've got three of them." There were other uses of symbols and belief in the demonic tradition, perverse uses. He might just as well have mounted the cross upside down and lit black candles. His radio came on suddenly, tuned to a station he particularly hated. He walked over and pulled the plug. He didn't think he was going to mention this little incident to Rhea or anyone else for a long, long time.

  He was in the parking lot before the thought penetrated: the little gremlin had said, I keep money?

  What on Earth did that mean?

  Chapter 47

  When Mindenhall got back with the pizza, Glibspet was poring over more old insurance records. Craig set the box down on the table in the outer office. "Here," he said, "you open it." He stood well back while Glibspet got up and lifted the lid. The aroma rolled over him like a fog bank, and he inhaled deeply, savoring it.

  "My car is going to smell like anchovy for a week. How can you eat that stuff, Dom?"

  Glibspet considered answering because I'm a fiend from Hell, but thought better of it. He'd only been living with Craig for about a week now. The man wasn't dependent enough on him yet to make breaking cover truly worthwhile. Besides, the sex was pretty good.

  "I'm doing my part for the environment," he responded readily.

  Mindenhall approached the pizza warily, like a dog circling a spoofing possum. The initial odor blast had dissipated, and he was able to get close enough to snag one of the normal slices. He took a bite and chewed thoughtfully. "How's that?" he asked from around the mouthful.

  Glibspet took one of his own slices and tasted it. Not bad, especially considering that he couldn't have the toppings he really wanted. Not while Craig was around. "Well," he said, "have you ever tried anchovies?"

  Mindenhall nodded.

  "And you found them completely disgusting, and a potential threat to the continuance of life on Earth, right?"

  Mindenhall nodded again.

  "Well then," Glibspet concluded, "you can hardly oppose anything that removes this many anchovies from the environment, can you now?"

  "I suppose not," Mindenhall said, "but I think you should have to get an EPA permit."

  "No problem," Glibspet said. "I have a set of nice of eight-by-ten glossies that let me get anything I need from the EPA. The local EPA chief and her young nephew have such a charming close relationship. It's always nice to see a family getting along."

  Mindenhall frowned. "Don't joke about that, Dom," he said. "You know how often we get accused of that pedo crap. It's sick and it's not funny."

  Glibspet shrugged. "Hey, hold your fire," he laughed. "they can't all be gems." He resolved to have another look at the pictures later in the evening. It was always fun to go through his photo files: People behind closed doors did the most interesting things for a teleporter's camera.... He rummaged through the clutter on his desk. "Here," he said, handing Mindenhall a much scribbled on printout. "These are ten names from old insurance reports. These people are dead, supposedly, and their claims have been paid, but aside from that, I can't find out anything about them anywhere."

  Craig took the paper. "Meaning?" he asked.

  "Don't know," Glibspet replied. "Could be just completely obscure people who never left the house, never borrowed any money, never subscribed to anything and never had an obituary, could be insurance fraud, or maybe they're people who never quite finished the formalities of dying by vi
rtue of not being dead."

  Chapter 48

  Conference on Hadocentrism Convenes

  Chapel Hill—Raleigh News & Courier

  The first annual conference on Hadocentrism convened at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill yesterday. The scholarly movement, which holds that Hell has been unfairly maligned during centuries of Celestiocentrism, and that the most successful early societies were Hadocentric, is especially strong in North Carolina academic circles. The weekend conference is chaired by Dr. Charles Blassius, the first Unchained to gain full professorship and tenure in the UNC system. In his opening remarks, Dr. Blassius stated his gratitude to the participants, and the belief that the conference would "usher in a new age free of the hegemony of Heaven, and the oppression of Heaven-mandated forms of conduct."

  The conference is not universally popular with UNC faculty, although one prominent opponent of Hadocentrism welcomed the gathering. "This is great," said Dr. William Poundstone. "Now they can get their own building, and the rest of us can get back to work bringing new currents into the mainstream, not forming separate puddles."

  * * *

  "Dear Rhea," the note had read, "meet me at my place 6 a.m. tomorrow. It's time for a road trip!"

  She thought about it as she showered. She'd seen all the Earth's wonders at one time or another, so as far as she was concerned, the best kind of trips Jack could take her on involved movement in small distances only—generally in an up and down direction. Still, he couldn't know that, and it was sweet of him to try to surprise her. Things were going well at work: The ship was nearly done, and they had two MULEs off the line already. Nobody was likely to need her presence on a Saturday.