Pantheocide

Chapter Twenty

Human Slums, Eternal City, Heaven

Another name crossed off a list, another contact dismissed as a meaningless acquaintance. More time wasted, more effort unproductive. Lemuel-Lan-Michael had heard that on Earth, human police were sometimes called “flat-feet” and now he understood why. His feet ached and his wings were stiff, all for nothing. And it was all the responsibility of the bottle of elixir that he’d found during the arrest of Ishmael. If he hadn’t been so attentive to his duty, he could have avoided all this. Perhaps his instincts had been wrong, perhaps the bottle was associated with the First Conspiracy. That’s what he had decided to call the network that was split up into cells.

He shook his head, every instinct he had said that the bottle wasn’t part of that group. The first few discrete arrests had confirmed his initial impressions, the First Conspiracy was all about doctrine and beliefs. After adequate ‘persuasion’, the detainees had confessed to spreading heresy and blasphemy. They had maintained their loyalty to The One Above All though, claiming that He had been led astray by misguided and corrupt advisors and if those advisors could be swept away, The Eternal Father would see how he had been mislead and everything would be made right. Lemuel was prepared to bet that the leaders intentions were quite different but that’s what the lower ranks thought and a bottle of elixir just didn’t fit with that pattern. There had to be a Second Conspiracy.

He flung the door of the slum open. Like the one he and his agents had raided earlier, this one was of better quality, made of wood rather than straw-reinforced mud. He looked down at the human female who was cowering against the wall at the opposite end of the entrance. By Inviolable Rule, all structures had to be large enough to allow the entry of Angels and that requirement diminished her apparent size still more.

“You are Almedha?” Lemuel read the name from his list. “Daughter of Brychan?”

“I am, Noble One.” Her voice was quivering, whatever the humans had expected when they were granted access to Heaven, it wasn’t what they had found. ‘Salvation’ consisted of eternal menial servitude to the Angels, a group who regarded the humans as being of little account and even less value. “How may I be of service to you?”

“I wish to discuss with you, some matters of importance. In particular, your relationship with a human called Ishmael.”

That comment struck home. The woman was still frightened of him but now there was something else in her attitude, a guardedness, a determination not to reveal anything. “I know of nobody by that name.”

“Do not lie to me, Almedha, daughter of Brychan. Lying is a sin and one that brings down punishment upon you. Do you want to experience the punishment that the League of the Holy Court deems appropriate for those who lie to it?”

“No peerless one. But I know not of any called Ishmael.”

Lemuel-Lan shook his head sadly. “Your deceit means I must caution you again and in doing so my patience with you grows thin. I must tell you, Ishmael was arrested not so long ago by agents of the League of the Holy Court and he has made a full confession. He has admitted to apostasy, blasphemy, to heresy and sacrilege and to crimes so black that they have no name.”

“No! He… ” Almedha tried to stop herself but it was too late.

“And how would you know if you had never met him?” Lemuel landed the verbal blow quietly and deftly but its effect was still shattering. Almedha slumped back against the wall, her face white. Even so, her jaw was thrust out with her determination not to say anything. Lemuel sighed quietly to himself, why were humans so obstinate? He needed to look around this house but it was obvious he couldn’t leave Almedha free to leave. There really was no choice. He took a golden set of shackles from his belt, fastened a cuff around one of her wrists and another around a convenient post. As he left her to search the house, it never even occurred to him that he’d left her with her feet barely touching the floor.

The house itself was remarkably devoid of interest. Before their deaths, ‘saved’ humans had made much of the alleged virtues of simplicity and abstinence. On reaching Heaven they found out that those ‘virtues’ were greatly overrated, especially when they lasted for eternity. The fact that the Angels didn’t share their opinions hadn’t helped much either. The fact was, that while the angels lived in unparalleled luxury, the fate of the ‘saved’ was one of eternal grinding poverty. Again, the irony there never entered Lemuel’s consciousness, nor did any thought that the situation could, in any way, be considered unjust. Lemuel methodically searched the rooms, turning up nothing other than the few paltry possessions he’d expected. Finally he checked out the kitchen and there he found what he had been looking for. A small jar, one labelled ‘McCormick Granulated Garlic’. Another Earth elixir.

“And how do you explain this?”

Almedha shook her head, she couldn’t have answered even if she’d wanted to. Her mind was concentrated on ways of taking the strain off her wrist. Lemuel shook his head sadly and released the cuff from the sconce it had been attached to and dragged her towards him. “It pains me that you should be so obstinate. You leave me no choice but to take you to the League of Holy Court.”

Interrogation Chambers, League of the Holy Court, Eternal City

Lemuel-Lan-Michael pushed Almedha into the room. The two interrogation specialists jumped to their feet as he entered. ” At ease,” he said. “We need some information from this one.”

It took slightly longer than he expected. By the time Almedha broke, the interrogators had run through three buckets of water, her face and hair were saturated and she was choking amid a barrage of deep, racking coughs. It took her some minutes to get the story out, but when she did, it would have been mundane were it not for its significance. Ishmael had brought her the garlic as a gift. She had found the plain, bland food available to humans in Heaven dull to the point of being unpalatable and the garlic had seasoned it to provide a touch of interest. Lemuel shook his head, humans didn’t even have to eat, let alone want anything more than plain gruel. Why would seasoning be so important to them?

“Are you finished with her?” One of the interrogators nodded towards the sobbing woman secured to the table.

“For the moment, yes. We’ll keep her detained for a while.” The interrogators nodded at each other and Lemuel caught a glimpse of their eyes. There was something there, something that reminded him of a sight long, long ago. It took him time to place it but when he did, the memory shook him. The look in the interrogators’ eyes had been the same as that in the eyes of daemons taken prisoner in the war so many millennia before. That caused him to think a single, unmentionable question. Were there daemons in Heaven, even though they looked like Angels?. And then that led to another question. And was he one of them?

Lemuel-Lan-Michael left the interrogation chamber and went off down the long corridor that would, eventually, take him back to the surface, his mind troubled by the questions inside it. Halfway towards the first junction he thought he heard a human woman screaming from the interrogation chamber he had just left but he dismissed it. Just the strange sounds that filled this place sometimes, a product of wind and tunnels through stone.

Conference Room, DIMO(N) Headquarters, The Pentagon, Washington

“And now we have a problem with dates.”

“How do you mean?”

“From what we have been able to learn, the Great Celestial War took place some four and a half to five million years ago. But, the information we have from Luga speaks of fighting on Earth and the legends of that remaining in human memory as folk tales. That means they must be much more recent than that.

“Simple explanation. Luga’s lying. It’s not as if that’s an entirely unfamiliar concept to her. She tries to play us all the time. To be honest, its so much part of her nature than I doubt if she’s even aware that she’s doing it. Playing to the audience to get her way and turn things to her advantage is what she does. That’s why she’s such a hit on network television.”

“Just like a few other so-called stars I can think of.” Colonel Paschal spoke reflectively. “It might he worth checking through some of their antecedents and see if we come up with any demonic connections.”

“Would you like the job? Or are you still in thrall to our Luga?” Doctor Surlethe put the question with a bouncing lack of tact.

“I told you, I didn’t… ” The denial was interrupted by a barrage of coughing around the room. Paschal sighed to himself, he was never going to live this down. “Oh, never mind.”

A satisfied and slightly triumphant chuckle replaced the coughing. “I don’t think the history of the performing arts is useful at this time, anyway, the fact that the daemons knew virtually nothing about us suggests that any contact they had with us in the last three or four centuries must have been cursory in the extreme.”

“I agree.” General Schatten nodded as he spoke. “Anyway, Colonel Baylor picked up on the time discrepancy. He tasked Luga with it and she confirmed that the Great Celestial War took place from about five million years ago, when Satan tried his coup-de-main assault on Heaven. An assault that came very close to succeeding by the way, he actually broke into the Eternal City but his Army was pushed out by Michael-Lan-Yahweh. It ended, sort of, about half a million years later with both sides too exhausted to fight on. In our terms, it’s pretty obvious Satan actually won that war, he got his independent kingdom which was his objective all along. However, fighting went on for a long, long time after that. Not the live-or-die, win-or-lose fighting there had been in the Great Celestial War but more like border skirmishing. That ended abruptly, about 60,000 years ago and its from then that our folk-memories of the war originated.”

“Why did it end so abruptly?” Colonel Paschal was curious. “To fight for more than five million years and then just stop dead?”

“He asked Luga why, didn’t get an answer. There was something she didn’t want to speak about and didn’t. But, Baylor says, she was frightened. Even talking about why scared her. Just the way daemons are scared of us.”

“I think I can offer an opinion there.” Hillary Clinton spoke up for the first time at one of those meetings. “I was speaking with President Sarkozy during the recent summit, when he wasn’t preoccupied with checking out some Brazilian girl of course, and he told me something curious. Apparently some of the French and German troops in Hell, either referred to Satan as “the Devil” or called daemons, devils. The result was strange. The baldricks made themselves absent, very quickly. Strong negative reaction.”

“Could it have been an abusive nickname, you know like Hun or Frog?”

“That would imply anger or offense and we know Baldricks react strongly to that. This was something else, it was fear, as if even mentioning the word could bring about a disaster.” Clinton drew breath. “I don’t think daemons and devils are the same.”

“All the books say they are.”

“And all our books are wrong, we know that. How much mythology is standing up to the discoveries we’re making every day? I think that Daemons and Devils are separate things and whatever the Devils are, the Daemons are afraid of them.”

“A threat to us?”

General Schatten thought for a second. “I doubt it, if they were then they’d have taken down the Baldricks as quickly as we did.”

“Can we rely on that?”

Schatten thought again. “No, but it’s the best way to bet given what we know. Look, in intelligence and knowledge terms, we’re way out of our depth here. We’re crossing a river blindfold, feeling a way with our feet and hoping we don’t step into a pothole or a nest of cottonmouths. All we can do is play the odds.”

“So there might be a third force out there we’ll have to deal with in due course?”

“Third? There may be dozens. The cosmology Doctor Kuroneko is developing suggests that there might be millions of bubble-worlds like Hell out there. All of different ages, just like the stars in our Universe are all of different ages. By the way, he’s come up with a fascinating theory that might explain a lot. Our Universe is expanding, everybody knows that. But he thinks that the dimension, the next stage of existence, whatever we want to call it, that contains Heaven, Hell and all those bubble worlds is shrinking. He thinks that explains where the light in Hell and the energy that keeps the human souls alive there comes from. That’s why they don’t have to eat.”

“But Daemons eat.” A slight shudder swept around the room at the thought of Luga’s table manners. A few of the participants grinned sympathetically at Paschal. The Colonel thought about the rumors of Luga’s combined eating and mating habits. The recollection made his testicles scream in terror and try to climb inside his body for protection.

“And that means that… “

“Baldricks – and presumably Angels – aren’t native to the bubble-worlds either. They come from somewhere else as well.”

“That might change a lot of things.” Schatten thought carefully. “Could they come from other bubble worlds?”

“We can’t tell.” Surlethe thought carefully, the whole situation had aspects buried within aspects. “It may be that the no-eating rule only applies within their native bubble. Or it may be they come from outside the bubble-level completely. But all that’s getting away from the point. We have some evidence that there’s a third group of beings out there and we may run into them at any time.”

“Third?” Hillary Clinton’s voice was derisive. “There could be hundreds of them, thousands even. Have you any idea how many religions there have been? Or are now? Suppose they are all correct, suppose at one time or another, beings found their way here from other bubbleverses and got worshipped as Gods. And Yahweh and Satan were the two that eventually won out down here? They got the upper hand over the rest, perhaps by means of the portal warfare that Lugasharmanaska talked about, and drove them out. The ‘devils’ that we’ve been talking about may just have been one of those other groups, probably the one that was the most difficult to defeat. If we consider continuing to explore the bubbleverses, we’re going to run into them.”

“And that raises another question, an important one. When we do, how do we react?”

“That’s for the council of 15 to say. They’ll make up their mind.”

“Not the United Nations?” The question came from a corner of the table, the speaker unidentified. The response was a contemptuous guffaw from the main participants.

“No, not the United Nations. They’re irrelevant, been ever since Wong shot down the first Daemon Herald. They’re still there but they’re just the talking shop for people who can’t contribute to the HEA. The real decisions are taken at Yamantau.” Clinton thought carefully. “My guess will be, and this will be the position of the United States at Yamantau, we’ll work on a do-as-they-do basis. If they approach us with friendship and respect, we’ll do the same to them. If they make war on us, we’ll do it to them. With every weapon we have.”

“General Petraeus, do you have any comment on that?”

General Petraeus, present only on the view-screen at the end of the room looked up from the display he was consulting. It was showing the developing situation on the Thai-Myanmar border and he found it professionally fascinating. The Thai Army simply didn’t fight the way the U.S. Army did. What they were doing was, to his eyes, downright weird. “We’d be advised to keep as many options open as possible but in essence, I agree with the Secretary of State. If we run into any such bubbleverse groups that are friendly, we get friendly. If not, then we defend ourselves. And that means eliminating our opponents.”

“That’s genocide.” It was the same unidentified voice that had spoken about the United Nations.

Hillary Clinton looked back contemptuously. “No. That’s pantheocide.”