Finally, however, Marshal spoke again.
“You’ll keep us updated,” he said in a low voice.
“I will,” Scratchard promised.
“And if there is an option to survive… you’ll take it. Eva is right, you know. Your value to this community is incalculable.”
“I’ll try,” Scratchard said, though he doubted such a thing was possible.
“Good.” For a moment, Marshal seemed uncertain what else to say, and the silence stretched for another full minute. “You know… I’m not sure if you’re a hero or an asshole, Scratchard. Or maybe you’re both. But… thank you.”
To his own surprise, Scratchard felt a lump in his throat.
“You’re a good man, Marshal,” he said. “A better man than I ever was. It’s been an honor to know you.”
“Likewise. Go with God.”
And just like that, the spell was broken, and Scratchard had to bark a laugh.
“ ‘Go with God?’” he repeated incredulously. “Honestly, Marshal, that’s the last person who I’d want on this trip. If I hadn’t beaten him to it, God would have tried to go, don’t you see? He’d see himself as the natural choice. He’d try to argue that, out of everyone, he’s the one with the greatest chance of sneaking a nuclear bomb up the organism’s nostrils.”
Feeling the cleansing power of the rant, he tossed back the rest of his glass and continued his explanation.
“That was when I realized I had to do something,” he said, shaking his head with horror. “They’re already telling all sorts of lies about him. Well… not lies, exactly, but drawing the wildest of conclusions from his peculiarities. You can practically taste it whenever he’s in the room! Some people are already half-convinced that he actually is God. Just imagine the impact on future generations if he was permitted to give his life for the people! Good Grief, they’d be burning human sacrifices and murdering each other by the millions over whether he did or did not eat pudding!”
“I think you need to calm down, professor,” Marshal said.
Scratchard laughed and poured himself another drink. As he reached for the bottle, he noticed in passing a shoulder bag, a pillow and a blanket, tucked up against the wall.
Immediately, he dismissed it.
“I am calm, Marshal,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe how sanguine I’m feeling at the moment. Knowing that I’ve intercepted a doctrinal forward pass down through the ages is like Prozac for the mind. If there was an afterlife for atheists, they’d all be high-fiving and cheering my name right about now.”
Again, his gaze was drawn to the bag, blanket, and pillow.
“I’m not eager to die, Marshal,” he continued, “but like anyone, if death is inevitable, your best hope is for it to matter…”
A… a blanket and a pillow? And who would leave their bag here?
“… and I get the doubled bonus of… of…”
“Scratchard?” Marshal’s voice showed a hint of concern. “Scratchard, are you okay?”
Oh. No. And all the blood drained from Scratchard’s face.
It can’t be, he thought.
The door to the washroom popped open, and the sounds of the toilet flushing could still be heard as the occupant exited and stepped into the room.
“Wow,” God said, still wiping his hands with paper towels. “I’d wait a while before going in there. Evil spirits. Hah. Oh! We’re flying! We’re already on our way? Fantastic!”
Scratchard just sat, dumbfounded, as God strolled across the room.
“This is so exciting!” he said, pushing his way into the co-pilot’s chair. “We’re off to see the array. The heart of an alien Swarm so large that it…Hah! Ha, ha! Do you know, I just thought of something. God is your co-pilot. Isn’t that hilarious? By the way… where is everybody? Is it just us two? Why-?”
“What in the hell are you doing here?” Scratchard shrieked.
A bit taken aback by the brevity of Scratchard’s shout, God looked uncertain for a few seconds.
“I’m… er, sitting down?” he said. “Was I wrong? Am I taking someone else’s chair? Who is it? Is it Marshal? Where is he?”
“There’s no one else!” Scratchard snapped. “There’s supposed to be no one else! Why are you here? Have you been hiding out in the washroom this whole time?”
“Home-made tacos,” God reported, looking slightly gray. “Cesar invited me and a few of his other friends over to his space for dinner. Very spicy! And… well… while I may be divine, my digestive system most certainly is not.”
“But… why… here?”
“Well, I had intended to sleep here,” God explained, stretching his neck upwards so that he could see the distant ground ahead. “I assumed that we’d be leaving in the morning, but either way, I intended to come along. Surely, you can understand why. I’m naturally immune to the organism, and thanks to your earlier attempt to murder me, I possess an insight to its behavior and strategies. Moreover, the importance of the mission makes-”
“Get out.”
God looked startled. “Excuse me?”
“You’re immune to the undead,” Scratchard said, standing up and grasping the wheel in a firm grip. “You can walk home from here.”
God took another glance over the window edge.
“Nicholas,” he said. “We’re floating over Lake Ontario.”
“How good of a swimmer are you?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” God said, looking slightly annoyed. “I’m not going anywhere, and you can’t make me. And if you try, Nicholas, you’ll be sorry. You may be a decade or two younger than me, but I promise I’ll give you a bloody nose. I’ve about had it with your irrational hatred for me.”
“Bah!” Scratchard said, jumping to his feet. “I was prepared to give my life away just to prevent this from happening. Do you think I fear your vengeance? Quite the opposite, sir, I welcome the opportunity to prove myself. Either submit, while I turn us around and put you ashore, or prepare to be thrashed.”
“Sit down, Nicholas,” God said, turning away.
With a shout, Scratchard tackled him, knocking him from the chair, and suddenly, they were both rolling about on the floor.
“Are you mad?” God shouted, fighting back by throwing his arms around his attacker in a bear hug. “Nicholas…! You’ve been drinking!”
“I shall pummel you into – oof!”
“I didn’t want to do that! Ow! Ow! Let go!”
“Arru’ ulf’” Smack! “Haff! Ul’ iffig gulfid!”
“My eye! And you’re biting my… Right! You leave me no choice.”
Whumph!
“GUHH! You… Ohmigod you hit me in the…”
“I can fight dirty when I have to,” God said. “Now, get off me.”
“OHHHNNNNNGGHHHRR!”
“It serves you right. My eye is absolutely throbbing.”
“Ohhh… I can’t believe you punched me in the groin.”
“You had it coming,” God snapped, pulling himself back into the co-pilot’s chair and holding one palm flat over one eye. “Honestly, Nicholas. You’re a grown man. What on Earth could I have done to you to make you hate me so much? And for that matter, if you don’t believe in me, how is it possible that I did anything to you at all?”
“I don’t hate you,” Scratchard growled, also regaining his chair and still in agony over God’s last punch. “If fact, other than your obvious insanity, you seem like a fairly decent human being. I even enjoy spending time with you. The lie that you represent, however… the exploitation of the gullible, the way it turns faith into a dirty word, the manner in which people use you as excuse to abdicate all moral responsibility… that I will despise forever.”
He flailed a punch onto God’s shoulder, which the deity seemed not to notice.
“And this is my fault?” God asked. “I don’t tell people how to worship. I don’t even want them to worship, but what are you going to do? It’s a sad fact of the human condition that they take something wonderful �
�� and this is something that they like, mind you – and thoroughly dissect, expose, prostitute, denigrate, reinvent, and ultimately destroy it through the simple act of worship. It’s nuts.”
“You’re…” Scratchard exhaled a deep, gusty breath as the pain slowly eased. “You’re unbelievable. Blame the victims, why don’t you? If you really were God, then you could stop it.”
“I’m sorry,” God said. “Did I hear you correctly? Have you ever had children?”
“If I did have children,” Scratchard said, “then I’d have a hard time living up to your example of absentee parenting. The whole world has gone to hell in a hand basket several times, and each time you sat your divine ass on the sidelines. I mean… look around you! Hello? Zombie apocalypse. Almost every last human on Earth has been eaten by an alien strain of amoeba, and look at you. Useless as usual.”
“There you go again,” God answered. “You’re still assuming that the purpose of life is to push bits of dirt around on this little mud ball. But reality is much, much more complicated than that. The conflict between competing forms of entropy alone are-”
“Blah, blah, blah,” Scratchard said, waving a hand in the air like he was swatting invisible birds. “Spare me the mad, unsubstantiated tales of the rules according to fantasy land. You’re insane. A reality check from you is like receiving a lecture on proper vegan diet from Hannibal Lector.”
“Fine,” God said, throwing up his hands. “Let’s play it your way. Hypothetically speaking, there’s an entity that we will confuse with God. This entity, like most living beings, desires children, so it makes them. What next? Let them loose in the neighborhood?”
Scratchard shrugged. “Why not?”
God glowered at him. “And you call me a bad parent. Would you let a baby go crawling out in the world on its own? A toddler? Or even a child?”
“Then don’t make them that way,” Scratchard said. “Make them fully prepared and complete. If you’re God, you can presumably do whatever you like.”
“Then I wouldn’t be making a person,” God said. “I’d be making a robot, complete with programmed thoughts, programmed beliefs, programmed dreams, and a programmed absence of personal identity. You can’t make a person. They have to grow, like trees. They have to become themselves. So. Try again. You make a baby. What next?”
“This is a stupid conversation,” Scratchard said, seizing the wheel and making a slight adjustment, “and I’m not going to have it with you.”
“Correct,” God said. “You teach the child what you can and then do for it the things that it cannot do for itself. You provide it shelter, protection, food and water. You give it a safe space to grow up in, to flourish and develop. In this artificial world, it can learn about pain, love, depression, ignorance, confusion, loneliness, desire… all the things that could destroy it, without actually being destroyed. In fact, in this artificial world – some might call it ‘school’ – these dangers can destroy them again and again. Over the course of time, the students learn to defend themselves. They discover all the tricks, like self-esteem, deduction, caution, humility, friendship, loyalty, self-control, self-awareness... in fact, a whole lot of things about themselves. It is, of course, vital that the parents not interfere during the process, however much they might wish to and however much the children may cry out. These lessons cannot be imposed. They can only be learned. Besides, if parents come in and write your tests for you, make your liaisons, outsmart your bullies, then why bother going to school?”
God shook his head with a look of regret.
“Do you think I don’t hear the pain? Do you think, when a mother cries over her dead child, I don’t hear her screams, or when a man looks up at the sky and finally understands how he’s ruined his whole life and everything that was good in it and begs me for a second chance… do you believe I can’t hear him? It is agony, listening to these cries of pain. But I know a secret. The child still lives, and there are millions upon millions of second chances. That is the whole point of school.”
“You’re comparing the trauma of a dead child to that of not being invited to the prom?” Scratchard asked.
“Good heavens, no,” God said. “And yet, consider the teenage daughter who tells her parents that her life is over simply because the other girls are telling stories about her. How can her parents convince her of the truth? Her passions and feelings are all so real. But later in life, when she looks back, she will realize how unimportant those girls turned out to be, and that it was little more than an eye blink in time.”
“And what is this final destination, then?” Scratchard asked. “What is so complicated that we require an entire lifetime to prepare?”
“Many lifetimes,” God said grimly. “The Hindus got that right. But now we’re back to discussing the Elephant again, aren’t we? What comes after graduation? Heaven. And contrary to popular belief, Heaven is a terrible place for anyone who isn’t truly a God. There, the possibilities are literally infinite, but then, when was the last time you were expected to count to infinity? You are all Children of God, and therefore, you are destined to grow up to be Gods yourselves. To a child, reading Genesis in nursery school, that may sound like a dream come true, like a ring of infinite wishes. But out there, in the void, Reality plays for keeps, and you live or die forever by the choices you make. There are… things out there in the dark. The true dark, not the imagined construct of shadow that your mind’s eye creates to fill in the gaps of what you cannot see. I am the light, and I have been protecting the universe as you know it from the true darkness for quite some time now. But when you become Gods, then the light must come from you.”
“How apocryphal,” Scratchard said. “And such colorful imagery too.”
“Yes, well, it sort of comes with the territory,” God said, looking a little embarrassed. “It’s not like we’re discussing a hockey game here. And as for being apocryphal, it’s all the same elephant. You just can’t see past the peanut shells.”
“How can I?” Scratchard asked. “It’s always been my opinion that religion is, at its heart, little more than a shell game anyway. And with all your talk today, all I’ve heard is just one more fancy theory that explains something that, if you’d just leave it alone, doesn’t need explaining. We’re born. We live. We die. That’s all there is to it.”
“Ah,” God sneered. “The skeptic. The false pretender to true science, whose discipline requires no rigor, no platform, no imagination, and no actual intelligence. It’s so easy and so empowering to stand above the ruminations of truth-seekers and laugh at their efforts. How superior that must make you feel.”
“Oh? So now you’re going to lecture me on the nature of science? Skepticism is science, you old fool.”
“Skepticism isn’t science,” God snapped, his voice full of scorn. “Skepticism is the opposite of science. True science is born from humanity’s endless imagination, which mechanism seeks to distil possibility and explanation from the raw mystery of the universe around us. Ideas, proposals, models, and theories, when they are young and untested, are fragile things, still putting together the skein of logic that creates their intrinsic viability. They are interesting, but like children, not yet to be taken seriously. However, into this growth period comes the child molester of skepticism, a pervert of presumed knowledge, an active unbeliever, which twists and warps the young hypotheses before throttling them in their sleep. It takes no special genius to disbelieve, no school of elevated thought to defecate on the ideas of others, however fanciful. It merely takes an unimaginative mind, caught up in the greasy pleasures of its own intellectual masturbation.”
In spite of himself, Scratchard burst out laughing.
“Don’t hold back, God,” he said. “Tell us what you really believe. That was such a masterful display of awe-inspiring contempt that I’d almost be willing to concede you the point. Unfortunately, you are also delusional. Skepticism, like most science, is a tool of elimination. Certainly, there is a joy to be found in wild theo
ries and impractical models, just as there is room in the human diet for deep-fried ice cream and chocolate-covered bacon. There may even be people who enjoy such vices. Most would call them lunatics. Skeptics, however, decide what food should and should not make up the main diet of scientific theory, and they are, as a rule, extremely picky. The bottom line is that, if you can convince a skeptic that your theory is valid, then you have crossed the Rubicon of provability and into the Empire of Science Fact, ghosts, fairies, psychics, and men without shoes and socks, not allowed.”
“But that is not what skeptics do,” God protested. “They create wild, unsubstantiated alternatives that are often more incredible than the theories they are attempting to debunk, and then claim it as a victory for science. They close off avenues of research that don’t meet their standards of proof, even when there remain still unexplained phenomena to be explored. They destroy reputations, dismiss evidence, ridicule theories, and choke off new discoveries, and they do it without using any act of science whatsoever. True science is the quest for evidence. Skepticism is about telling people not to look.
“And atheism is no better,” God continued, seeming to get angrier by the second. “They demand to see evidence before they can be made to believe. Well, how about a chronology of twenty thousand years of eyewitness accounts, across every known culture and in every class. Practical sense would tell you that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. But nope! The too-cool-for-school atheist can dismiss it all in the blink of an eye, while throwing thousands of first-hand accounts under the bus.”
“Yes,” Scratchard said, enjoying God’s discomfort immensely. “We can. It’s far more likely than-”
“But who are you to judge? Again, you create alternate theories and parallel belief systems with no basis for comparison, using junk logic that undermines the very credibility you cling to. But, okay, you need more proof? How about we bring Darwin up onto the witness stand? Two civilizations. One civilization believes in an imaginary person. In fact, not only does it believe in this imaginary person, it commits ten percent of all its resources to it. It kills off, either by sacrifice or in war, ten to twenty percent of its population, creates holidays, builds pointless monuments, and strangles its own scientific development, all in the name of this imaginary person.
From Oblivion's Ashes Page 98