Chapter 34
Eric looked around. To his right sat a large grizzly bear. About fifty feet away another bear sat beneath a small stand of trees at the base of a tall cliff. Must be Ron. Eric sighed and raised a front leg, sure enough it was big, powerful, and covered in brown fur. He was tired. Beyond tired, his bones ached with weariness. He’d lost track around fourteen incarnations and that had been some time ago. Well, there sure wasn’t going to be any software stashed here anymore than the hippo’s wallow Ron had just drowned in.
“Peter?”
“Yes, Eric.”
“I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” Eric scuffed at the dirt with his paws. “How much longer do we have to keep going?”
Peter was clearly struggling to sound cheerful despite his own worries, “We need that software. We can do this.”
Ron was moving around among the rocks. He scrabbled at the ground a bit before lying down in the shade.
Peter dropped heavily onto the ground and rested his head on his paws, “Sleep. After that we’ll feel better.” He closed his eyes.
Eric lay next to him with a loud thump and a deeply unhappy sigh that sounded self-pitying even to him. He scrabbled in the dirt a bit with his claws, not drawing anything really. Maybe it was a fish. Of course, what else would a bear draw.
“I can’t relax and I don’t know why.”
Peter whacked Eric on the nose with his paw causing Eric’s fish to grow a gill all of the way back to its tail.
“Ow. Hey, what did you do that for?” Eric turned to him and snarled, baring his teeth.
“Jesus used to tell us to cherish the obvious. I can still hear his words, ‘And sometimes the best way to teach the obvious is with a good smack on the head.’ ” Then Peter smacked him again.
“Hey!” Eric swatted back, catching Peter hard enough on the shoulder to roll him over onto his side.
Peter laughed, which coming from a grizzly bear sounded a bit like a lethal challenge and a bit like a ton of gravel being dumped on someone’s head.
“What? What’s so obvious?”
“Valerie. You dolt,” Peter rose and head-butted Eric in the side hard enough to smack him into a very stout tree.
“What good would it do? I blew it with her. It’s over.”
“You can’t even see what’s right in front of you you’re so blind. I don’t understand why Valerie cares about you.”
That did it. Eric rose on his hind legs. Peter scrambled quickly to his own hind feet and growled right back. Eric had to admit that it was a pretty fearsome sight. Peter had really serious claws and teeth, but he didn’t give a damn. He smacked Peter hard across the face, sending him flying backward into a boulder.
“What is it that I’m too blind to see?” His growl was coarse with anger. Must be some of the bear hormones running through him. He was sure feeling it.
Peter got right up in his face and shouted at a full roar. “You’re too blind to see how much she loves you.”
That stopped him. He stood there with his claws out all ready to attack but nothing was making sense. The anger left and all he felt was confused.
“She does?”
A noise sounded. A sharp crack, high up in the air. Up the cliff, a chunk of rock the size of a small car broke loose after holding on for a thousand years. Ron looked up in shock as the cliff face above him became a rock avalanche he had no hope of outrunning.
Lesson: Right Concentration. Remaining at rest and peaceful is not always the right answer. Bang!
Peter took the moment before they popped out of existence to smack Eric’s snout good and hard.
“Duh!” He shouted as they evaporated.
# # #
Michelle took a deep breath and called out loudly.
“Hey. Angels. I want to talk with you. C’mere.”
The garden was immediately filled to bursting with angels of every shape and size, from the giants who announced the birth of Christ to the more normal, Clarence-sized ones down to the little poll-takers. They rose choir upon choir across every garden path and fluttering so thickly overhead that the sun was blotted out and Michelle could barely see.
“Oops. I forgot my voice would carry across all creation. I simply wanted to find out who’s in charge here.”
Every angel pointed at another. She looked at Valerie and Mary, “Any bright ideas?”
“No one out there pointing at themselves now is there?” Mary’s voice sounded as if she were talking to a three year old, not all of the angels in Heaven.
After a few moment’s of silence a small voice said quietly, “I didn’t mean to be.”
“Is Henrietta your spokesangel?” A little one who barely came to Michelle’s knee wandered forward.
In answer all the others disappeared.
Michelle pointed at her, “You’re it.”
“Well, I didn’t mean to be,” she looked around slowly, even peeking under a nearby bush for any other possible spokesangel, but they’d all taken flight. She finally shrugged her wings and sat on the ground, a columbine bobbing around her halo.
Michelle tried to suppress her smile, “Maybe if you sat on the table.”
Valerie leaned forward, “Hi, I’m Valerie. I didn’t know angels had names.” She held out a finger which the angel solemnly shook.
Michelle smiled. If you’d told the woman forty-eight hours before, that she’d be talking to angels, she’d have freaked. Or maybe not. There was a steady core about her. Michelle had taken a surprisingly strong liking to this mortal. To this friend, she corrected herself. For she felt that was what they were truly becoming.
“We aren’t supposed to have names. We’re simply ‘angels’. Sort of amorphous, you know.”
“How about ‘Babe’?” Michelle teased her. “You’re a pretty melancholy little angel.”
“If your referring to Frank Sinatra,” the angel crossed her arms over her chest. “It’s Melancholy Baby, not Melancholy Babe, and if you’re referring to the pig, he is inherently cheerful.” She nodded sharply as if proving her point, it just wasn’t quite clear what that might be.
The angel flapped her diminutive wings and floated gracefully up to land next to a teacup Mary set for her.
“But God used to call me Henrietta. I always liked the sound of it. It’s kind of cheerful and all.”
“Good enough. How did this mess start? Any ideas?”
Henrietta took a sip of the tea. The cup was nearly as large as her head, “Yes. We do have group consciousness, sort of. Actually, to be honest, we don’t have a clue what each other is thinking. I know how it started, because I did it.” The tiny angel blushed deeply, but didn’t pause or need prompting to continue.
“I was talking with Mary about something, I think it was what flowers we should plant for her upcoming coronation. I had started…”
Valerie clasped her hands together in mock excitement. “Mary? You were going to be coronated?”
Henrietta didn’t give her a chance to protest, “Of course she is. You can’t sit on a throne and not be coronated. I started out by planting some perky yellow nasturtiums, they’d go very nicely with her hair don’t you think, but she seemed to feel that marigolds were better. Suddenly she said, ‘I don’t even want this job much less be coronated into it.’ I was shocked. We were planting flowers, rounding up sacred lambs, and all sorts of preparations.”
“Could we come a little closer to the point?” Michelle added some lemon to her tea and wished it was whisky.
“Sorry, I thought I was. I tried to ask again. I’d been put in charge of the flowers after all and I wanted them to be precisely the right shade. It is sad when flowers conflict with the color of someone’s hair during a coronation, you know. If her gown brings out a golden tint then clearly the nasturtiums were the right choice… This is when she stopped me and said
she hadn’t even chosen a gown.”
The tiny angel lay a hand on her tiny chest and gasped with the remembered shock of the horror.
“This, of course, was a great problem and I immediately summoned all thirty-four hundred decoration angels and the three hundred and fifty host legion in charge of different aspects of her gown. She became quite upset.”
“No, really?” Valerie was clearly having fun teasing the little angel.
“Yes. Believe it or not. She,” Henrietta, almost squeaking in her deeply felt dismay, pointed at Mary, “She said, and I quote, ‘I’ve made enough decisions for other people. I’m done.’ ”
Mary held up her hands as if stopping traffic, “Well, I have. They were all being so silly about it, I told them to just be sensible.”
Henrietta waved her tiny index finger at Mary, “She did. I could hardly believe my ears. ‘If you want a decision go ask someone else,’ she said. Who were we to ask? She wouldn’t answer. She left us and came into this garden. We aren’t allowed in here unless we’re invited. We couldn’t ask each other, decision making isn’t exactly our forte. I decided we should ask the occupants of Heaven.”
“What questions?” Valerie leaned forward.
“We started asking about gowns and flowers, of course. This led to color and size of animals, guest’s attire, and so on.”
“Didn’t you realize that the answers might conflict?”
“We aren’t meant to make decisions. We’re meant to meet needs. The problem is that we all have Heavenly power to implement the decisions made for us. The stranger the answers became, the more questions we had, and that led to stranger answers.”
Something clicked in her head. Michelle leaned forward, “What would happen if I made the decision that you had to fix the software?”
Henrietta shook her head, “Nothing. We angels are simply low level subroutines, sort of. At least that’s what our powers would look like in a programmatic structure diagram. I mean we clearly have higher thought processes, language, intelligence, consciousness and so on. But our powers are actually quite strictly limited. We can’t affect the higher computing functions even when they aren’t missing.”
There was a huge crash from the direction of the throne room, making them all jump. It was followed almost immediately by another and a lot of yelling. Everyone rushed to see what was going on, except Henrietta. Michelle looked around and noticed she was gone. Time enough to find her later.
Chapter 35
“Oh no.”
Eric looked toward Peter.
Crabs.
They were rock crabs.
He waved his claws around in front of him. “Great. Exactly what I always wanted to be. A bottom-mucking carrion eater. I’ll bet the software is here somewhere. If I were a demented Hungry Ghost I’d store the universe’s control system in some safe oceanic basin. Wouldn’t you? We’re running out of time, Peter.”
“Clearly it’s not going to be here. Relax. I know time is short, but we don’t have any choice. We have to follow him. I’ve come to have faith in Ron, at least in his ability to learn quickly and move along the wheel.”
Eric stopped and scuttled sideways to look at him. After a moment his claws drooped to the sand. “You’re right. We can count on him to die quickly and painfully. Starting to feel sorry for the sucker despite him having stolen from us and scaring the crap out of Valerie.”
A large cage descended out of the murky water above. Within moments of its thudding onto the bottom, a dozen crabs were climbing in through the cage doors and immediately began fighting over a splendidly disgusting bit of rotten chicken.
Ron must not have smelled it as he wandered off over the shadowy sand, weaving in between low patches of sea grass. Tracking him was now an automatic reaction requiring little thought or attention.
“Your evil twin isn’t the brightest crab in the ocean.” Clearly Peter’s sharp intelligence had not been transferred to the Buddhist software along with his physicality and desperate need to control the software.
“I could almost envy Ron, he appears to simply live through each cycle until fate nails him. I have always been driven to pursue relentless perfection. Jesus kept telling me that I was full of it and no such thing existed. ‘Good is triumph enough for anyone,’ he always used to say. Should have gotten that one into the Bible.”
“Maybe if you stood back and got some perspective this wouldn’t all seem so bad.”
Eric scuttled backwards a few feet and Peter moved beside him.
“There now we have perspective. I don’t think it’s helping much.”
Eric heard the rushing sound at the last moment. Another crab pot smacked onto the bottom mere inches away. It crushed Ron instantly. Maybe stepping back did help.
Bubble, bibble, bobble, bibble. Bloop! the system software burbled at them in varying pressure waves through the water.
What had Ron learned this time? To be careful of objects falling from Heaven? Watch where you stand, so that you can have the “right view” of the world?
The universe could certainly be perverse at times.
# # #
Michelle looked out upon the sea of supplicants filling the throne room. Fights had broken out and rippled back and forth across the crowds. Dozens of battles, any one of which would have overflowed the largest Hollywood-movie saloon brawl.
Valerie and Mary stood by her side with their jaws hanging open.
She pulled Valerie out of the way as a chair smashed into the doorjamb where she’d been standing. A roar of triumph off to the right drew her attention. One of the great statues lining the hall had been pushed over. It slowly gained speed as it swung down into the crowd. There were several high screams that were cut short by the crashing sound.
Mary stepped into the crowd to help people, scattered about the floor bleeding and groaning. She was the only spot of calm in the entire mêlée.
The mob headed toward the throne. Michelle would be damned if an unruly mob was going to topple god’s throne. She pushed through the crowd vaguely aware of Valerie close behind her. They leapt up the steps, knocking people down to clear a path as they went. Finally she stood before them next to his footstool.
She took a deep breath just the way Caruso had taught her.
“BACK OFF!” Everyone in front of her collapsed to the floor and covered their ears.
It was even louder than she’d expected. Then she noticed the shape of the walls behind the dais and how they might act as a natural amplifier. She could feel herself smiling as she turned to face the mob struggling to its feet in the aftershocks.
At least the walls hadn’t come tumbling down, his throne room must be built of sterner stuff than hers.
Valerie was waving a broken chair leg at a few die-hards who were still struggling up the stairs.
One of the people crouching a few steps down yelled out, “Who in Heaven do you think you are?”
Michelle tempered her voice, but still spoke loudly enough for the nearer members of the crowd to wince, “I am the Devil Incarnate. I am now in charge of Heaven. If you have a problem with that you are welcome to leave. Now!” The final blast sent the closest dozen people tumbling down to the bottom of the green marble stairs.
“Leave? And where are we supposed to go?”
“I don’t much care.” She raised her voice a little, “Everyone. Get out of this room. And don’t come back until you’re invited.”
They all left quietly except for the ones that Mary recruited to minister to the wounded out on the floor. The damage wasn’t too bad, this time. Perhaps they’d all be dead in the next few days and it wouldn’t matter. She turned to see Valerie standing by God’s throne with her chair leg still tight in her hand.
She returned Michelle’s smile shakily, and her knuckles were still white where they gripped the piece of wood.
Valerie’s phone rang. She appeared unable to make her hands work, so Michelle pulled it out of her pocket and they read the message together.
Elephants in India. Lesson: Right Speech. And remember to watch your temper especially when messing with people carrying big guns. Bang!
And a smiley face.
Michelle returned the phone and looked around the wrecked throne room.
This wasn’t going well at all.
Chapter 36
“Come quick. Trouble. Trouble.”
Plato opened his eyes and quickly closed them again. A little demon was tugging madly at his arm. He shook him off. They were worse than alarm clocks.
“I’m taking a nap. Go away. You’re bothering me,” he curled back down into Michelle’s bed, rolling away from the demon. It was the only bed in the house that had sheets on it. He’d been so tired that he decided to collapse first and make apologies later.
Her smell was a part of the satin sheets and had somehow slid into his dreams. The only quiet ones he’d had in twenty-three hundred years. Even though they had never shared this bed, lying here made him feel she was nearby. And he was finding that he liked that.
He looked out of one eye, the other one buried in the down pillow. This room was not as he would have imagined it. The double bed had a huge skylight over it, with a curtain he’d closed to block the midday sun leaking in around the edges.
The surprise was that it was such a mess. The rest of the house was pin neat, even the books in the living room were neatly organized on their shelves.
But in the Devil’s bedroom, piles of trash novels cascaded across the floor into mounds of worn clothes. A few musical instruments were hung on the walls along with an autographed Elvis poster. Narrow paths led through the detritus from the hall door to the bed and beyond to one of the most decadent bathrooms it had ever been his pleasure to use.
The strangest thing of all was the rose-colored sheets with embroidered edges. It added a feminine air to the room that the rest of the house lacked. It was a side of the Devil he’d never expected.
Cookbook from Hell Reheated Page 20
