Mercury Rises

by Robert Kroese

  Mercury winced. "Yeah, I wouldn't recommend that," he said.

  "Thank God it's somewhere in remote Africa," Christine said. "At least, it was the last time I saw it."

  Mercury and Uzziel exchanged worried glances. "We'd better tell her," Mercury said. "She has a right to know."

  Uzziel nodded. He went on, "The other thing about anti-bombs is that they get more powerful as they ripen. A fully ripe anti-bomb is roughly a thousand times as powerful as a young one like the one that destroyed Anaheim Stadium. If what you saw really was an anti-bomb, it won't matter where it is when it goes off. If it's anywhere on the Mundane Plane, it will create a shockwave that will be felt across the globe. Earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes...it will make that Anaheim implosion look like a firecracker. Er, an imploding firecracker."

  "Then we have to stop it," Christine exclaimed. "We have to retrieve the anti-bomb and get it somewhere safe...some other plane where there aren't any people."

  "Yes," replied Uzziel. "But first you have to tell us where it is."

  "I'll tell Mercury," said Christine. "Not you."

  "Mercury doesn't have the resources to deal with a ripe anti-bomb, Christine," said Uzziel. "Just tell me where you saw it, and I'll dispatch someone to retrieve it."

  "No way," said Christine. "I don't trust you."

  "Please, Christine," Uzziel chided. "This isn't the time to be bargaining for Mercury's freedom. There are larger matters at stake. Earth itself is on the verge..."

  "Yes, Earth is on the verge of destruction. Again," Christine said. "And if it's destroyed, what do you think is going to happen to your precious Apocalypse Bureau? Not to mention Prophecy Division and probably a hundred other branches of the bureaucracy that I've never heard of. As much as you angels look down on us mortals, your whole bureaucracy seems to be built around manipulating and controlling us. When there aren't any mortals to push around anymore, what's going to happen to you?"

  Uzziel shifted nervously in his chair. "Well, we always knew that Mundane history would someday come to an end," he said. "We've been assured that when that happens, our resources will be redirected to other---"

  "Yes, I'm sure there's some kind of plan in place," Christine said. "There always is. But if I'm not mistaken, your plans all revolve around the orderly execution of the Apocalypse, and this missing anti-bomb isn't part of the plan. If it goes off, it will short-circuit all your grand plans. There's no telling what will happen to you then. Maybe God, or these 'Eternals' that I've heard about, will decide that angels aren't all they're cracked up to be. Maybe He, or They, will just erase you all from existence."

  Uzziel was noticeably troubled by this line of thinking. "I'll tell you what," he said. "If you tell me where the anti-bomb is, I'll assign Mercury to retrieve the Cases. I can't have him dealing with an anti-bomb; it's too sensitive. But if I can convince the higher-ups that we're dealing with a crisis even bigger than the missing Attaché Cases, they probably won't make an issue out of Mercury being assigned to retrieve them."

  "I'll take it!" Mercury exclaimed, obviously relieved to be assigned to anything other than Transport & Communications.

  "You do realize that if you fail," Uzziel went on, "you'll be blamed for any havoc caused by the Cases, on top of all of the other charges against you. We're talking about a whole new level of trouble you'd be in. They'd annihilate you."

  "Annihilate?" asked Christine.

  "Angels don't die," Uzziel replied. "But they can be annihilated. Wiped out of existence. Erased, as you put it."

  "Oh," said Christine quietly. "Well, maybe if you have someone else...someone whose wits aren't strained by a can opener..."

  "No, I want to do it," said Mercury. "Damn the consequences. I can't let those Cases run rampant on Earth. I mean, think of all the snowmen."

  "All right, if you insist," said Uzziel. "But don't say I didn't warn you. Now tell us where this supposed anti-bomb is, Christine."

  Christine told them everything she knew about the glass apple and Horace Finch. They had heard of Finch, of course; as one of the richest men on the Mundane Plane, his fame had even reached Heaven.

  "It's no wonder we had no record of a missing anti-bomb," Uzziel said. "That thing has probably been sitting inside that mountain for seven thousand years. We had no idea there were any of that vintage left."

  "I should have just left it alone," Christine moaned.

  "If you had, it would have detonated eventually," Mercury said. "That volcanic eruption would have set it off for sure."

  "Yeah," Christine said, "except that I got the feeling we were sort of the cause of the eruption. I mean, I know it sounds crazy, but it seemed like the goat sacrifice angered the gods or something. Otherwise, how do you explain the fact that the volcano just happened to erupt during the ceremony, after being dormant for seven thousand years?" She looked at Uzziel. "Unless somebody in Heaven had something to do with it."

  Uzziel shook his head decisively. "No way," he said. "There's no chance somebody could have gotten away with an unauthorized miracle of that scale in the current political climate. I've got to get three signatures before I scratch my ass these days. Figuratively speaking."

  "In any case," Mercury went on, "it's good you retrieved it. It would have detonated eventually, maybe tomorrow, maybe a hundred years from now. An overripe anti-bomb can be set off by the slightest tremor. Better we know about it now when we actually have a chance to stop it."

  "I'll see that it's taken care of," said Uzziel, pulling a file folder from his desk drawer. He handed the folder to Mercury. "Here's all the intelligence we have on the missing Cases. Pestilence was last spotted at the World Health Organization's headquarters in Switzerland. The information on Famine is a little more sketchy, but I'd suggest starting with Pestilence. If we get any more info on Famine, I'll send you an update over Angel Band."

  "Great," said Mercury. "Open a portal and we'll grab that baby."

  Uzziel shook his head again. "It'll take too long to get authorization for the portal. I'm telling you, the days of opening up a quick temporary portal to the Mundane Plane are over. You're going to have to use the Megiddo portal. It's only a few hundred miles from there to Switzerland anyway. Better get moving."

  Christine and Mercury made their way back to the portal that would take them to the planeport. Christine considered returning to the Floor to take the portal back to her condo, but for some reason she couldn't peel herself away from Mercury. It wasn't beyond the realm of possibility that she felt some small amount of affection for him, but she was fairly certain that her primary motivation was her lack of faith in the good intentions of angels. Mercury was certainly clever, but he wasn't the most empathetic cherub; she still wasn't convinced that his idea of saving the world completely jibed with her own. If, on the off chance he were presented the choice between saving all of the human beings in the world or all the snowmen, for example, he might not necessarily make what she would consider the appropriate choice. As for Uzziel, she didn't trust him not to pull the plug on the Mundane Plane tomorrow if he thought it would make an effective Power-Point Presentation. In any case, it seemed to her that at least one human should be around to keep tabs on the angels, and no one else was volunteering.

  "So you turned yourself in," Christine said, as they walked. "I wouldn't have expected that."

  "Yeah, well, I've been thinking," said Mercury.

  "Thinking about what?"

  "Oh, you know, angel stuff. My place in the Universe."

  "Really."

  "Yeah, and I was thinking, I've been playing the system for, like, six thousand years now, getting by on my wits, trying to find a way out..."

  "A way out? Of what?"

  "Of...I don't know, everything. It's different for angels, you know. You people, you putz around for a few decades trying to figure out what the hell is going on, you fail, and then you die. But for us, man, it just goes on and on, you know? It's like one of those movies based on a Saturday Night Live ske
tch. You've got like two minutes of solid material but it drags on for two freaking hours. Except that instead of two hours, it's seven thousand years."

  "Mercury, what on Earth are you talking about?"

  They blinked through the portal to the planeport without even pausing in their conversation. This interplanar travel stuff was becoming old hat to Christine.

  "Immortality," answered Mercury. "It sounds great on paper, but holy crap does it not live up to the brochure. Angels are supposed to find some sense of purpose in their place in the Heavenly bureaucracy, but that's never really worked out for me. So I do what I'm told, more or less, but I rebel in a hundred different little ways. But then it occurred to me, you know, that maybe the reason I wasn't content with my place is that I never really accepted my place to begin with. I never really committed to my job, you know? So I thought, OK, I'll turn myself in, throw myself on the mercy of the court and whatnot, and then do my best to fulfill my God-given purpose."

  "Your God-given purpose?"

  "Yeah, you know, my job. My place in the Divine Order. You said yourself that I'm the most capable agent in the Apocalypse Bureau. Maybe if I really apply myself, I can get promoted to management in a few hundred years. And after that, well, who knows?"

  They turned down the concourse that would take them to the portal to the Mundane Plane.

  Christine frowned. "Mercury, it's true that I've grown to appreciate your talents, but honestly, I don't think climbing the corporate ladder is your thing. Ambition for ambition's sake is a dead end. You're never going to find contentment that way. There's always going to be someone higher than you."

  "Then what? I can't run forever, and I can't keep halfheartedly committing myself to my job at the Bureau. I've got to have something. Some reason to go on."

  "Of course you do. We all do. But has it occurred to you that maybe your discontentment with your situation is itself an indication of your purpose, your true place in the Divine Order? You act like your only options are to flout the bureaucracy or to give in to it, but what if you're supposed to do both? What if your existence is supposed to be in the tension between doing what you're told and doing what you feel like doing? I mean, it has to be, doesn't it? If you were just a tool of the bureaucracy, you might as well be a machine, or a robot, rather than an angel. And on the other hand, if you just gave in to whims at every instant, you'd just be an animal, living your life on instinct. It seems to me that for angels, and human beings, too, life is a constant state of tension between the robot and the animal."

  "Huh," Mercury said. "So God wants me to be some kind of half-robot, half-animal, like those Transformers that can turn into dinosaurs."

  "Yes, or you could remain a complete jackass, like you are now. What I'm saying is that you shouldn't feel like you're not fulfilling your Divine Purpose just because you ruffle the feathers of some Seraphim once in a while."

  They had reached the portal to Megiddo.

  "Ladies first," said Mercury.

  Christine stepped onto the shining pattern, with Mercury close behind.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Circa 1,800 B.C.

  Even after the floodwaters had begun to recede, problems with the ziggurats persisted. On the first day back to work on the almost-finished ziggurat, Tiamat was summoned to the Courts of the Most High for an emergency meeting of the Seraphic Council. When she returned after three days, she seemed irritable but also somewhat relieved. She had suspected (not without reason) that she was being summoned to answer for her numerous violations of the bylaws of the Seraphic Civilization Shepherding Program, but this worry turned out to be misplaced. The Council, it seemed, had bigger problems to worry about.

  "Can you believe that?" she asked Mercury. "The archangel Michael abducted by agents of Lucifer. Man, that has got to be embarrassing for Heaven."

  "So what happened?" Mercury asked. "Did they get her, I mean him, back?"

  "Oh, they got him back," Tiamat replied, evidently not having noticed Mercury's slip. "But there will be Hell to pay."

  "Meaning what, exactly?"

  "Sorry, it's classified," answered Tiamat smugly. "I shouldn't even have told you about the abduction. Anyway, Lucifer struck a deal with Heaven. I didn't think they were going to go for it, but in the end, the Council caved. I voted no on the deal, for the record. I figured it served Michael right for getting nabbed. The Council shouldn't be negotiating with Lucifer in any case. Although the guy's got balls, I grant him that much."

  "Hm," Mercury answered. Damned seraphim and their secret schemes. He had half a mind to tell Tiamat that he knew all about the abduction, but he knew it would accomplish nothing. Better to keep that information to himself.

  The real problem, Tiamat went on, was that the overseers of the Seraphic Civilization Shepherding Program had decided that some of the participants in the program were maintaining too high a profile on the Mundane Plane. They were threatening to scrap the program if Tiamat and some of the other angels didn't start acting more like shepherds and less like despots.

  "What we need," Tiamat announced, "is a figurehead."

  Up until this time, Tiamat's strategy had been to manipulate local princes, often pitting them against each other in an effort to keep any one of them from becoming too powerful. As long as she was the linchpin between the warring provinces, the local rulers were willing to kowtow to her demands---and these days, she didn't demand much other than a steady supply of slave labor to build ziggurats.

  Her superiors had evidently decided, however, that this was no way to build a civilization, and she had to admit that the constant bickering between the provinces had grown tiresome after three hundred years. She had been tempted on numerous occasions in the past simply to assert her authority over the whole area,10 but she knew Heaven would never let her get away with it. What she needed was someone who could rein in the rival princes but still owed his allegiance to her.

  They found their figurehead in the form of an ambitious young Amorite prince named Sumu-Abum. Tiamat received an unquestioning oath of loyalty in exchange for her assisting Sumu-Abum in vanquishing the rival provinces and creating a unified Babylonian Empire.

  The plan worked well at first: Sumu-Abum focused on military victories while Tiamat continued to build ziggurats. But Sumu-Abum's attempts to unify Babylon were hampered by rumors that he was receiving assistance from the wicked Tiamat. It was Mercury who suggested a solution.

  "What we need," he said, "is a redirect. As much as I hate to say it, Sumu-Abum needs to declare his allegiance to Marduk."

  "Marduk!" Tiamat spat. "We've almost gotten people to forget about that idiot, and now you want to make our handpicked figurehead the president of the Marduk fan club?"

  "Think about it," said Mercury. "Right or wrong, Marduk is popular. He evokes thoughts of a golden age, when Babylon was guided by a benevolent god. And you, well..."

  "I what?" Tiamat demanded.

  "I'm just saying, it's easy to idealize the past. Marduk's not around, so people don't blame him for all their problems. They associate Marduk with everything good that happens, and they associate you with everything bad that happens. What we need to do is convince them that Marduk is somehow indirectly working through Sumu-Abum. That way, we solve the problem of your affiliation with him, and every action he takes is lent an air of divine provenance."

  As much as she hated Marduk, Tiamat had to admit it was a sound plan. And Mercury turned out to be right: once Sumu-Abum started claiming to be an agent of Marduk, consolidation of the kingdom became much easier. After Sumu-Abum died in an unfortunate gardening accident, Tiamat selected a new king, Sumu-la-El. Tiamat stuck with the agent-of-Marduk strategy with great success through five kings. The sixth, however, ended up being a bit of a handful.

  "Hammurabi's all right," Mercury insisted. "He just has too much energy."

  Hammurabi had, over the course of a few years, conquered nearly all of Mesopotamia, and now was anxious to move into Phoenicia, to the west. Tia
mat opposed the idea, as Phoenicia was too distant to be a reliable source of laborers for the ziggurats, and in any case she had no shortage of workers these days. Further, she felt that the need to defend the Phoenician territories would stretch the Babylonian military too thin, making them vulnerable to attack from the Hittites and Assyrians.

  "The guy needs a hobby," said Tiamat.

  "He has one," replied Mercury. "He collects city-states."

  "He needs a hobby that's not going to get Babylon overrun by Hittites," said Tiamat. "Can you get him to take up the lyre or something?"

  Mercury sighed. "I'll see what I can do."

  The next day, Mercury met with Hammurabi, who excitedly related his plans for a surprise attack on the Phoenicians.

  "Surprise?" asked Mercury doubtfully. "I think you may have lost the element of surprise at the Battle of Elam, where you yelled, "Next stop, Phoenicia!"

  Hammurabi rubbed his beard thoughtfully for a moment, and then crossed out the word SURPRISE in front of ATTACK.

  "Good thing the clay wasn't dry yet," he said.

  "Hmm," replied Mercury. "Have you considered your legacy?"

  Hammurabi appeared puzzled. "What do you mean? I'm going to take over the entire Fertile Crescent. I'll be the greatest emperor the world has ever known!"

  "Well, sure," said Mercury. "But then what?"

  "What do you mean, 'then what?' I'll be the most powerful man in the world! I'll be immortal!"

  "Mmmm no," said Mercury. "I'm pretty sure it doesn't work like that."

  "Well, not literally immortal, like you and Tiamat. But still, I'll be famous forever."

  "Listen, Hammy," said Mercury. "Talking as someone who is literally immortal, you've got to believe me when I say that the point of life isn't just getting more and more and more. Quantity doesn't equal quality. Whether you have all of eternity at your disposal or the entire world at your command, there's no shortcut to finding meaning or purpose. I mean, there's no question that you've done well as the king of Babylon; you're head and shoulders above every other ruler in the area. But what does it all mean in the end?"