The Complete Afternet: All 3 Volumes In One Place (The Afternet)

by Peter Empringham

  “No. Suffer.”

  “Well, thanks for that.”

  “Everywhere we’ve been, Marcel. Everywhere. All is peace and quiet and then you kick off. Why?”

  “I just hate gods. They wind me up.”

  “Oh, gods? And people. You take it out on people too.”

  “Well, ok, I hate people. And gods.”

  “And animals.”

  “Don’t mind animals.” He was looking down, the demeanour and voice of a twelve-year-old schoolboy up before the Head. “Depends how they’re cooked.”

  She suppressed her smile. She needed to stay on mission, find somewhere to hide this man who could be charm itself for hours and throw it all away with a few moments of explosive vitriol or violence.

  “I give up, Marcel. Really. I just can’t think of anywhere I can take you that you won’t cause mayhem.”

  “Why did you ask me if I love you?” He had raised his eyes from their stare at the floor, and now they focussed darkly on her. She felt a shiver, managed to keep it inside.

  “I was drunk. I’m not even sure that’s what I said.”

  “It was.”

  Oh, he was good. He leaned forward on the table, the voluminous silk sleeves of his tunic pressing against the table. He pulled the cloth from his face to show the swollen eyebrow, the small cut, and most of all the bottomless staring eyes. She tore her gaze away, looked up to the extravagant inverted bowls of the towers on the Basilica, glinting in the sun. She breathed in deeply, and regretted it, since it appeared that in the interests of Heaven authenticity the aroma of the canals had been retained.

  “We need to find somewhere to chill.” she said, not to him, but to the lion atop the Column of San Marco.

  “You’re avoiding the question.” Oh, that Gallic curve on his words.

  “Somewhere the gods won’t go.”

  “Still. Avoiding.”

  “I can’t believe how many there are. Gods, I mean, not Heavens. And most of them have been redundant for centuries so I kind of get why they fancy a bit of a run out somewhere nice. Why don’t they just go to Magaluf like everyone else who wants to get pissed and have a shag?”

  “Are you going to answer?”

  She turned from the beauty of the sparkling edifice of the Basilica and back to Marcel, squinting a little in the sunlight.

  “What if I said I love you?” He asked. “What then?”

  “Then,” she said, “I would assume you were talking to yourself.”

  14

  “So,” said God, “how’s it going?”

  He was lying on a tanning bed, eyes covered by a tiny pair of very dark glasses, and had, disconcertingly, eschewed the customary paper underpants. Sun Tzu, baking in his heavy warrior’s garb, was gazing into the far top corner of the room in an exaggerated attempt to avoid a view of the Divine genitalia, even though it would have been something to tell the grandkids.

  Sun sighed. “They aren’t the sharpest tools in the box, are they?”

  “Not really a pre-requisite for entry to the upper echelons, Sun. You don’t see gods of intelligence anywhere, do you? It’s all fire and explosion and roiling oceans; they’re much more interested in noise and threat than learning, or empathy. Still, I suppose since I’m supposed to know everything, having another bunch of deities running around having great thoughts would be a bit redundant, wouldn’t it?”

  “Are you actually all-knowing?” asked Sun.

  “I don’t know really.” God answered, confusingly. “Probably, but just because all of the information’s in there it doesn’t mean I can retrieve it at will. It’s like when you know the bottle opener is in the cutlery drawer but buggered if you can lay your hands on it when you want a cold beer. Anyway. Accepting that I might have monopolised common sense, how’s it going?”

  Sun explained that he was only really getting involved with the first four groups for long enough to stop them fighting each other, and that the only really good ideas seemed to be coming from the distaff side of the heavenly equation.

  “Hmm.” God swung his legs over the side of the sunbed and peeled off the dark glasses, Sun staring fixedly at the floor as though an answer had suddenly appeared there written in flame. “Makes sense, I suppose. When your portfolio is centred on small animals, or flax, perhaps you welcome the opportunity to get involved in something a bit more fundamental. Do you think they could come up with an answer?”

  “I think there’s a reasonable chance.”

  “Do you know what it is?” asked God.

  “What?”

  “The answer.”

  “No, do you?”

  “No, unfortunately” the all-knowing God said, thankfully now wearing a long white robe. “Well, see if you can prod them along. Let the others carry on doing whatever they’re doing.”

  “Making paper aeroplanes and giving each other Chinese burns, mainly.”

  “That’s ok. Stops them blowing things up.”

  The goddesses were working hard to try to find a way to make use of The Devil’s intrinsic vanity in order to tilt the conflict in God’s favour. They were on the right track, as Sun had discerned, because when the leader of the opposition has a weakness, that is what you have to exploit, and if that weakness is vanity and arrogance, it gives you a chance to put a challenge to him outside his area of strength, since he will believe that he can triumph there too.

  The difficulty was in finding a field of battle that in any way suited God and his soldiers, whether Christian or otherwise. Apart from praying, singing, and being pious, they were struggling to find advantage, and even a vain opponent was unlikely to rest the future of mankind on a Barbershop Quartet competition.

  “So,” Sun suggested, “if we can’t find an actual area of advantage, try to find one that takes away his main strengths but will still appeal to his arrogance. What are his main strengths?”

  Atanue was at that time chairing the meeting (a role they rotated on an hourly basis), and she turned over some sheets on the flip chart until she found the one she wanted.

  “Well,” she said, tapping the marker pen on the sheet as she spoke, “first we thought numbers. He’s got legions, we, at least as far as gods go, are relatively few. Then there’s motivation. His mob tend to act as, well, a mob. We’ve all kind of got our own responsibilities, and I think you’ve seen from the other work-groups that we don’t always work together well. And then there’s specificity. I’m dawn and the rivers. That’s what I do. Don’t ask me to make any thunder because I haven’t had the training. The Devil’s followers are generalists. Basically just all-round nasty bastards .”

  “So can we find something that takes away the numbers?” asked Pinga, the Inuit goddess of the hunt, steaming in a massive polar bear fur coat. “Kind of solo combat?”

  “What, like David and Goliath kind of thing?” said Aphrodite. “I’ve met David, and even he thinks it was a bit of a lucky shot.”

  “I think you’ve got something there, though,” this from Flora, “but it would have to be bigger than one fight to appeal to Him. He would want a big show. You know, a crowd, atmosphere. You’d have to make it an event, and two blokes in sandals throwing stones at each other wouldn’t cut it. I think.”

  “I’ve got an idea.” They turned to look at the slim dark girl, Saramama, whose voice was the whisper of the cornfield. “Does anyone have an Afternet terminal?”

  It had taken a little time to find the right item on the Afternet terminal, not least because everyone had been checking their Faithbook pages. This inevitably spawned pop-ups offering ‘horny gods in the local area looking for love’, and adverts for penis extensions. Saramama got there in the end, though, and everyone had gathered around to watch an episode of Jeux Sans Frontières filmed in 1994 in the grounds of Edinburgh Castle. Her date with Poseidon was not entirely wasted, it turned out.

  In truth they watched for longer than research required, bursting into peals of laughter, holding hands to their mouths at the embarrassing
awfulness of the proposition.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it.” said Sun, who had seen a lot of things.

  “It’s not a bad idea. I don’t know anything about vanity, but I have to say it might well appeal to him.”

  They all looked at Aphrodite in shock. She did not live up to her billing as the goddess of beauty, a fact of which she was blissfully unaware. She spent half the time in the work-group brushing her greasy hair and applying colour to her duck-like lips, the unfortunate outcome of the injection of fillers three thousand years before anyone else had thought of them.

  This was not an audience to be easily surprised. They had been around, by and large, for millennia, had seen Empires rise and fall, come to know more about humanity than, perhaps, they really wanted to. What they watched was an extraordinary manifestation of conflict as drawn by Hieronymus Bosch, in which tasks were set for ordinary people who were encumbered by hideous applications of latex and polystyrene; that plunged them repeatedly into freezing water or vats of non-specific gloop; that demanded progress and then restricted it through the application of grease and strong rubber. All of this was conducted to the mad barking commentary of sadists who revelled in the failure of the contestants, and in front of a baying mob who took inordinate pleasure in their misfortunes.

  “So,” breathed Saramama, “the teams are of limited numbers. Equal numbers, not millions of them and a few of us. The skills required are hard to define, but in general only minimally rely on brute strength and a capacity for wanton violence. There’s a bit of it, bashing people with foam sticks and stuff, but we’ve got the odd brute, too.”

  “But,” Sun intervened, “will it appeal to the vanity and arrogance of the Devil?”

  “It will if we broadcast it.” Said Saramama. “Look at this.” She brought up another edition of the programme, this from the British version, “It’s A Knock-Out”. The concept was the same, although the budget was noticeably smaller and relied as much on the obvious inclemency of the weather and coldness of the water into which players were plunged as the elaborate costumes of the earlier episode. The contestants were buffoons with cut glass English accents, prancing around in medieval dress and braying with laughter at each other’s misfortune.

  “My God,” said Atanue, “who on earth are these people?”

  “These are the Royal Family of Great Britain and The Commonwealth.”

  “Didn’t they rule over one of the biggest Empires of the modern world? Why on earth are they doing this?

  “Vanity.” Said Saramama. “Millions of people may have looked up to them as rulers by Divine Right, but stick a TV camera in front of them and they are only too willing to dress as buxom wenches and wandering minstrels and push each other into swamps.”

  They all stood silently for a moment, contemplative, the screen before them frozen on a picture of The Princess Royal plummeting into a vat of feathers (no tar, alas).

  “What do you think?” asked Saramama.

  “I think it might just work.” Sun replied, setting off a string of whoops and deific high-fives.

  It’s reasonable to say that Sun Tzu’s audience with his employer to present back the conclusions of the working groups (in effect the results from one working group, since the others had really only spent time doodling, talking about holidays and comparing the size of their penises) was not entirely the kind of encounter he had expected, nor the proposal God had thought might emerge. It didn’t help that He was hanging upside down from a high bar, secured by large hooks attached to bands around his ankles. This was disconcerting.

  “It’s for my back.” Said God.

  “Oh. Have you got a bad back?”

  “I’m God. I haven’t got a bad anything, but you can’t be too careful, what with the poor design of office furniture these days.”

  The Supreme Being had asked Jesus to sit in on the meeting, moved to do so by the new-found interest in events he had demonstrated since his gleeful dissection of the mores of trumped up religions. Jesus found new motivation in the sheer range of people finding new ways to worship Him; He spent the first few minutes of the audience flicking his hair back and picking the scabs on his feet.

  “So. What have you got for me?” asked God. It was off-putting. His hair hung down almost to the floor and all of his features sagged, gravity being inescapable, even for him.

  “Ok.” Sun sighed. He had experience of presenting his proposals for strategy and tactics to Emperors, people who saw themselves as benign whilst sending out their militias to suppress the poor and destroy their enemies; men, women, and children cut off to ensure the security of the line and stability of the state. He had none, however, in offering radical options to God. Few have.

  “I need you to hold in your head that feeling of desperation that came over you when you lost at Armageddon 15 for the umpteenth time and realised that it was horribly accurate. The realisation that you simply did not have the army to fight the Devil in a face-to-face conventional battle. Do you remember that?”

  “Of course I remember that!” God’s vigorous response set him swinging beneath his perch. “I remember everything! I remember Adam, horny bastard that he was. Serpent my arse.”

  “Right.” Sun said, adopting his bad news voice to attempt to calm the situation. “Of course you do. Well, we agree.”

  “That’s it?” Jesus looked up, incredulous. “You spend all that time proving dad was right, which in fact is an a priori truth? What are we paying for?”

  “Well, you’re not actually paying, are you?”

  “Metaphorically.” Jesus studied the wound in his side.

  “Not even that.” The Son of God pursed his lips and sniffed.

  “So.” Sun said. “I’m doing this because I think I should. Some enlightened self-interest, admittedly, because I really like my Heaven, and I guess that if the final battle went the wrong way, we could all find eternity a little less attractive. But overall, because He asked me, and I’m not sure you really tell God you’re a bit busy trying to learn a back-flip, do you?”

  Jesus sniffed again, and God stopped swinging, although his face was beginning to look very red.

  “I heard that it was suggested we cheat.” God said. “I’m not sure about that.”

  “Well, I understand your moral resistance to that proposal-“

  “Oh, don’t worry about that. I just don’t know how it would work.”

  “Ah. Well, there’s cheating and cheating. In this instance I took it to mean that we just don’t do what the Devil wants; we lead him onto a field of battle that doesn’t suit him and for which he is unprepared. There’s no point getting into a massive fight, because he has more armies, more vitriol, more weapons. We cheat by taking him onto an arena where those factors are neutralised.”

  “How?”

  “Well, he’s not a very complex bloke, is he? Sees things in black and white. Mainly black.”

  “He’s just evil,” said Jesus, “ that’s the point.”

  “As I said, not complex. So our view is that we just need to press some of his buttons to get him to play somewhere that gives us a puncher’s chance. The greatest victory is that which requires no battle, so we’re going to find a way to beat him without a battle. We can’t fight him. He has too much force. We can’t outnumber him. We actually have nowhere to take him on that gives us an advantage, unless he agrees to a choral showdown.”

  “No chance of that?”

  “None. So if we can’t get him onto our area of strength, let’s take him to a place where the advantage is neutralised, where the numbers are even, where any skill is learned rather than innate. And where luck plays an inordinate part. It’s the best shot we’ve got.”

  God piked up to the horizontal bar and grasped it, flipping the hooks away and unwinding to a gentle touchdown on the floor. He began some cool down stretching exercises, concentrating on his groin and quads. Sun’s discomfort was unrelenting.

  “What kind of thing were you thinking of?
” His voice emerged muffled from downward dog.

  Sun considered for a moment the inherent risk of what he was about to say, proceeding with fingers crossed. “I need you to concentrate on what I am going to say. It’s not an entirely simple thing to explain.”

  God raised himself, and Jesus stood, as though the worst kind of insult had been hurled at the Corleone family and they were going to exact retribution.

  God stared at him, and it was only now that Sun realised he still had no idea what He looked like. He had spent some time in His presence, in a number of briefings and meetings, and always assumed he could easily pick him out in a crowd. In fact, though he racked his brains he could not conjure up a picture of any kind. He was standing before him, and although His face was clear and defined, Sun had no more idea of what He looked like than he had of the operation of a microwave oven.

  “It’s the face, isn’t it?” asked God. “That old line about ‘no-one shall see me and live.’?”

  “It’s not a phrase I know. You’re not even my God, really.”

  “I think you’ll find I am. Anyway, the face thing, well I just had that written by some scribe when I was in bandages from a few nips and tucks. After that I decided it was best for me just to kind of shimmer. Best that no-one knows what I really look like or I’d never be able to go to Burger King, would I? Anyway, we’re all ears, aren’t we, J?”

  Sun looked at the indistinct face and tried to figure whether He was serious. What was Burger King? He decided to press on.

  15

  This was it, she was sure. Here was a place they could finally lie low. When they left St Mark’s for a walk along the canals, not hand in hand or anything, you know, just casual, they came to the conclusion that what the gods wanted was to be in a place where they would be seen.

  “Look.” He said. “Think of it like this. You’re…” he whirled his arm, tilted back his head, “Kondole. Let’s say you are Kondole. He’s the Australian aboriginal God who invented the first whale. Tough gig after that. Your role is to invent the first whale; pregnant one, I guess. You’re done. It’s finished. That was ages ago. What does he do, sit in a room like ours, chin on his hand, waiting for something to do? The door opens, he looks up, excited, thinking ooh I can make another whale. Sorry, says the person at the door, thought this was stationery. It opens again it’s…I dunno, erm, Ajbit, the Mayan who claimed to have created humanity from maize-“