by Mick Farren
“Most of the nuns are just behaving like fans, gushing compliments and making themselves ridiculous. A few want favors, dispensations, or forgiveness for their sins. The Aimee half of the McPherson sisters has totally lost it, and she’s berating him as though he were an unfaithful lover. The hooker called Trixie, who turned herself into Bernadette, is boasting about all the sinners she’s sent to the pods on his behalf, and he and Doc are discussing the finer points of single-malt scotch.”
“That’s a pretty neat trick.”
“I think he’d rather dispense with the rest and just be talking to Doc.”
“And what’s Semple doing?”
“She’s keeping quiet. She seems a little bemused.”
“I’m sorry, Aimee, but you have fallen for the same self-delusion as hundreds of thousands before you. You humans constantly operate under the assumption that I, God, give a rat’s ass about the petty comings and going of a species of big-brained, overdeveloped, and rather violent monkeys. It’s just plain absurd. Some of you start praying to me when you lose your bloody car keys. Okay, a prayer is a prayer, and I don’t mind fending off the odd holocaust or arranging a cancer remission if it’s in a good cause, but car keys? Football games? Lotto? The two-thirty at Aqueduct? Give me a break. It’s nothing more than theological junk mail. All it makes me do is want to put as much distance between myself and humanity as I can. Yes, bad things do happen to good people. And no, Aimee, there is no Santa Claus. It’s a cruel and random universe, full of black holes and entropy, where all manner of terrible things happen, deserved or not. And contrary to popular opinion, I didn’t make it, either in a week or two billion years, so you can’t blame me when shit comes to pass. Poor little crippled children are a DNA freakout, not a result of any malice on my part. Ebola was a result of you morons cutting down the rainforest, not my divine bloody judgment. I only added a few of the finishing touches—orchids, woodpeckers, and, to my eternal shame, you nasty humans. Believe me, as far as the rest goes, the math is far too complicated. The universe was originally put together by a consortium of forces that I can only just understand and you couldn’t even begin to take my word for. Have you any idea what the numbers for the Theory of Everything look like? They make quantum mechanics look like two plus two.”
“But it says in the Bible—”
“I’m God, so please don’t quote the Bible to me. That’s another of the great fallacies. I didn’t write that ridiculous book. You think I have nothing better to do with my time than sit around writing inane dietary laws, accounts of primitive battles, and long, boring lists of who begat whom? There’s a Gideon Bible in every hotel room only because MKULTRA put microchips under the gold leaf on the cover. The hippies who used to use the pages to roll joints with when they ran out of skins had the right idea. The damned Bible was cobbled together by a bunch of ancient, too-long-in-the-sun psychopaths sitting in caves in the stinking desert, finished up by a conspiracy of patriarchal prehistoric sheep herders who wanted to believe that, somewhere in the sky, there was some Great Shepherd who would take care of them the way they took care of their blasted sheep and goats. And don’t look at me like that, Mr. Thomas. I have nothing against goats; in fact, I number them among my more likable creations. It’s the shepherds I have the quarrel with. I mean, they only had to see a bloody bush catch fire and they were off and running. Do you know just how stupid the original Moses was? It took the fool forty years to get across the bloody Sinai. T. E. Lawrence did it on a camel in less than a week and he took time off to kill one of his boyfriends on the way by dropping him in quicksand.”
Aimee was floundering. She would have liked to believe that this so-called God was some preposterous impostor, but she knew in her heart that she was talking to the real deal and her heart was plunging to the sub-basement. Just to make matters worse, each time she opened her mouth, it sounded like the blurt of an imbecile. “You mean Lawrence of Arabia?”
God nodded. “The very same. I thought O’Toole played him very nicely.”
“But what about Jesus? Didn’t you send him to save us all from original sin?”
“That’s what he told you, wasn’t it? Actually, I just wanted to get him to leave home. The kid was a pain to be around.”
“But the Jesus that was here—”
“That homicidal idiot. I don’t know if he was the genuine article or not. It’s been so long, I’ve actually lost track. Either way, that boy was a born troublemaker. I take it you crucified him yet again? It’s usually the best thing for him. It gets him out of the way for a while. The only trouble is, he comes back twice as nasty. He was actually quite well-meaning the first couple of times around. But then the power started to get to him. Loaves and fishes weren’t good enough. Oh dear me, no. First he got into starting wars and pogroms; now the latest fad seems to be old movies and serial killing.”
“But he might have really been your son?”
“Who can tell these days, with so many impostors coming out of the pods? Either way, he’s certainly better off crucified.”
The Persian cat continued to look at Jim. “You see what I mean about multiple conversations?”
Jim nodded. “I’m beginning to get the picture.”
“Aren’t you glad you’re well out of it?”
“I surely am.”
“Now, listen, Trixie . . . ”
“I’m not Trixie anymore. I’m Bernadette.”
God gestured impatiently. “Yes, yes, I know all about that. You fancy yourself as Bernadette, the Hammer of God. Well, I’m sorry, lovey, I’m God and I have absolutely no need of a hammer. I have no desire to hammer in either the evening or the morning, and if I did, I’d go to the ironmongers and buy one.”
“But I—”
“Please don’t interrupt.”
“But I was—”
“I said, don’t interrupt. As it is, I’m not particularly pleased with you, and if you keep interrupting, I may have to do something judgmental. Don’t you think I’ve had to deal with your kind before? It’s really all about sex, isn’t it. Sex and more bloody sex. That’s all you overblown chimps seem to have on your minds. I know what those machine guns and phallic blasted missiles are all about. I’ve seen hundreds like you before, and you never fail to annoy me. I blame it all on that absurd prude Saint Paul. The repressed Syrian tentmaker fouled everything up. The man was completely obsessed with sex. He couldn’t stand the very thought of it. Hated women more than he probably hated himself. Started all those fish-smell jokes. I never encountered such a rancid mind in anyone who managed to get himself canonized. And, believe me, there were some foully rancid saints. And then there were all the bloody Popes that came after him, and those repulsive fools Ferdinand and Isabella, not only putting up the money to find America when it wasn’t lost in the first place, but also forking over the cash for the disgusting Inquisition so people could be branded with hot irons and have their eyeballs gouged out and be hanged and burned alive, and all in my name. I’m God, damn it! I absolutely don’t care what people do in the privacy of their bedrooms, or even out in the street, for that matter, as long as they don’t annoy the horses. I think Tennessee said it best when he had Blanche Dubois deliver the line, “I’m never disgusted by anything human as long as it isn’t unkind or violent,” or words to that effect, I don’t remember it all that well. My recent trouble with Marlon has quite put the exact text of Streetcar out of my mind. Unfortunately, most of what your kind do is very unkind and ultraviolent. Do you really think that, if I wanted human beings to be celibate, I would have given them genitals and the urge to use them in the first place?”
He halted in his holy tirade and looked hard at Bernadette. “You’re not taking any of this in, are you?”
“I’m trying to.”
God sniffed. “I’m not sure you’re trying hard enough.”
“I’m still a little confused.”
“Yes, and you’ll probably stay confused for all of eternity, so I suggest you go aw
ay, think about it, and stop bothering me.”
He clapped his hands once and Bernadette/Trixie vanished into thin air. God then turned and looked at Jim.
“And what about you, Morrison? You don’t have much to say for yourself?”
“I didn’t think there was much point in adding to the babble.”
“That’s right—you used to be a poet, didn’t you? I’m glad you still have the magical hearing, even if you refuse to do anything with it.”
“There’s also the small matter that I never really believed in you.”
God laughed. “And now you feel a little sheepish, with me standing here in all my glory?”
Jim spread his hands and half-smiled. “Something like that.”
“What was that line? ‘You cannot petition the Lord with prayer’?”
“That’s what I wrote.”
God smiled. “And never was a truer line written. Do you know how irksome it can be getting prayed at all the time? I was just telling Aimee McPherson all about it.”
“I had teenage fans when I was a rock star.”
“Then you do have a vague idea. Is something else bothering you?”
Jim hesitated. “There is one thing that’s puzzling me.”
“And what’s that?”
“I thought you claimed you were the only God. ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me,’ and all of that stuff.” Jim gestured to the screen in the middle of the lake. “And yet you seem to have no trouble getting along with those guys.”
God grinned slyly. “That’s because I lied.”
Jim was amazed. “You lied?”
“You think God doesn’t lie?”
“I kind of assumed you were perfect.”
God blinked. Now it was his turn to be surprised. “If deception was an imperfection, Shakespeare would have been a tax collector. You, if anyone, ought to know that.”
“So why the big deal about being the one and only? It kind of set things up for a whole mess of intolerance.”
God shrugged. “Maybe. But as I was just attempting to explain to the truly confused Trixie, humans hardly need an excuse to torture, slaughter, and generally victimize each other. It’s a thing with us gods. You either join a pantheon or you avoid complications by putting it around that you’re the one true deity. I couldn’t really handle a pantheon. I believe I’m what sociologists call unclubable.”
God turned his attention from Jim, looked around at everyone present, and raised an authoritarian hand.
“If you’ll be so kind as to simmer down for a moment, I have a few general remarks that I’d like to address to all of you.”
God waited and the babble slowly died away in Jim’s head. Then God took a deep breath. “Thank you.”
He paused to scan the faces that were now giving him their undivided, and, in some cases, very apprehensive attention. “As you’ve all probably gathered by now, I’m not overly enamored of the human race. When the Cro-Magnons started in slaughtering Neanderthals, I pretty much knew that, as a species, you were well off the rails already. I wanted to flood you all out, but I allowed that wretched Noah to talk me into letting him build his ark because he promised to save the giraffes and the rhinoceroses. A little later, I seriously believed that the aliens where going to nuke you all to extinction, but all they did was fry Sodom and Gomorrah, which I guess only tends to confirm how wrong I can be when it comes to humanity. I didn’t much like the Roman Empire; the Dark Ages were a mess; I suppose the Renaissance was okay, but then the Industrial Revolution started the whole fossil fuel greenhouse thing going and I knew it would only be a matter of time before you turned it all over to the roaches. What you might call the last straw, the thing that really pissed me off, was that Time cover story. There it was, white out of black—GOD IS DEAD—in damned great letters, and I decided to give up on the whole pack of you. If you chose to think I was dead, so be it. I was history. You had a gang of oily evangelists to address your needs to worship, and I was about to take a cab.”
At this last statement, Aimee colored beet-red. God treated her to a raised eyebrow and then continued. “In fact, I was very tempted to destroy the whole planet: fire, pestilence, plagues of frogs, every volcano going off at once. The entire apocalyptic works. I was even toying with the idea of making the sun go nova, or at least dropping a large asteroid in the Pacific Ocean. About the only thing that stopped me is that I’m still inordinately fond of giraffes and rhinos—and also cats and whales, harp seals, dolphins, bears, and penguins—so I refrained. Why should they vanish without a trace just because you bipedal bastards are unable to behave yourselves? Oh yes, I know you built some very nice cathedrals, and I really liked Marilyn Monroe and fettuccine alfredo. But they were, in turn, canceled out by your concentration camps, Queen for a Day, and man-made neurotoxins. In some respects, I suppose I only have myself to blame. Right back at the beginning, I should have made the entire Earth fireproof. If you’d never discovered fire, your kind would have remained a bunch of monkeys standing up to peer over the tall grass. My only excuse is that I didn’t imagine you would be cunning enough to go from rubbing two sticks together to a thermonuclear weapons capability in little more than the flutter of a cosmic eyelash.”
God paused to pet the white Persian cat, who was growing restless. “Thus, right or wrong, I decided against wiping you all out, and resolved instead simply to wash my hands of the great majority of you. For some time now, I’ve been happily going about my business with no inclination to worry about the human race. Your prayers all went into the shredder and, for the first time in about fourteen thousand years, I was without a care. Then, unfortunately, a deputation of my peers and colleagues came to me to appeal to my better nature.”
God gestured to the Mystères on the big screen. “These good Voodoo people of the Island, plus also Wotan, Krishna, Isis, the White Goddess Sofia, Oogachaka, Crom, Head 58, the Lord Bacchus, Snireth-Ko the Dreamer, and even the Buddha—although he seemed a lot more preoccupied with his next earthly incarnation—all prevailed on my good graces to help them try to find a solution to the human problem. Wotan was talking about a final solution, but having decided once not to wipe you all out, I didn’t think it was good policy to go back on my word. Also, the old boy is a little addled from all the drinking in Valhalla and he couldn’t really grasp how decimating your numbers on the lifeside would hardly have helped what was really bothering them.”
Again God paused. He lifted the cat down from his shoulder and placed it on the ground beside him. It rubbed against his leg and then looked up at him. “You know we’re supposed to be at the meeting with Stephen Hawking? The one about trying to encourage dark matter to do something useful?”
God glanced down at the cat. “Professor Hawking has a very flexible appreciation of time. He won’t mind if I’m a little late. Besides, I still have a few more choice remarks to deliver.”
He looked back to the small multitude in the ruins of Heaven. “Since my friend here informs me that I’m late for my next meeting, I’ll give you all the Reader’s Digest version. In a nutshell, we gods are angry. Not being content with gratuitously overpopulating your life-side planet to the point where it will be almost completely uninhabitable by a week from Thursday, you are streaming into the Afterlife in such numbers that the infrastructure cannot possibly support you all. The Great Double Helix is currently groaning under the weight of all the extra pods and shorting out its primary circuits. That’s why we couldn’t allow Wotan to go ahead with his Day of Ragnarok extermination plan. The influx of the dead would be so massive it’d red-line the macroboard, the Helix would unravel, and that would be the Fat Lady’s aria for just about everything. We’d be left with another bloody singularity, then Big Bang II, and that is much too expensive a price for mankind’s inability to control its numbers. Do I make myself clear so far?”
Some of the nuns nodded. Others simply avoided God’s eyes.
“It was thus resolved that, as unpalatable as it might be, a
deal would have to be struck with Yog-Sothoth the Unspeakable to begin to filter the human dead into a rented and previously underused section of his Black Dimension. Obviously it will not be too pleasant until those who first arrive make a few adaptations, but it will at least relieve the strain. And let’s face it; if you people will voluntarily elect to go to Gehenna, you’ll pretty much adapt to anything. The only stumbling block to this contingency plan was the energy drain created by the complex environments set up by some of you humans, and the quasi-divine status that was being claimed by some of the rulers of these environments. This directly challenged our own godhood and our ability to negotiate with Yog-Sothoth, who is a devious devil at the best of times. Without a negotiated settlement, the end result could be interdimensional territorial warfare, and all because of you damned irresponsible monkeys and your ridiculous birth rate. And if I ask you what an interdimensional conflict means, don’t nod your heads like a flock of bloody silly sheep, because you absolutely don’t have a clue and never will have.”
He paused once more and gestured to Jim, Doc, and Semple. “Fortunately, some of the worst of these phony gods have now been neutralized. We have to thank Semple McPherson, Jim Morrison, and Doc Holliday for their help, albeit unwitting, in neutralizing Anubis, the phony Moses, Aimee McPherson, and the recently departed Trixie, and also alerting Lucifer and Kali to their greater responsibilities, and perhaps even convincing the aliens that they should start minding their own business and stop writing obscenities in the waving fields of grain. In other sectors, we have also arranged, via similar agents, the downfall of three fake Hitlers, one ersatz Haile Selassie, a faux Hammurabis, two Alexander the Greats, a completely implausible Ivan the Terrible, and a gang of very nasty Essenes.”
Jim shook his head in bewilderment. “So we’re actually secret agents of God, are we? Even though it was a secret from us as well and we didn’t have a clue what we were doing?”
