Checkmate, Death

by Cobyboy

  God is all-seeing, all-knowing. Most of that stems from the fact that He created the universe, but there are some small gaps in His view. He fills those in with His Agents. Like me, they can move freely between Heaven and Earth. Unlike me, they can go everywhere else that is off-limits to poor old Death. They can visit Hell at any time they choose, for example. And they can also visit any number of hidden dimensions that not even the angels know about.

  After I played my game of chess with Mahendra, and after my second visit when I discovered he was immortal, the agents were the first to know about it. I'm sure they raced off to Heaven to report to God that an immortal had risen on Earth. Before I was even finished talking to Mahendra, God already knew all about it.

  Upon my return to heaven at the conclusion of my daily reapings, I was paid a rare and unpleasant visit by the angel Zanus. As I approached my apartment he came strutting out like he owned the place. He gripped my arm, pulling me away down the street.

  "God wants a word with you," he said simply.

  I pulled away, breaking free of his grasp. Angels are strong enough; he could have kept me from pulling away if he wanted to. I guess he knew I would follow him anyway. You can no more ignore a summons by God than you can ignore an audit by the IRS.

  We walked along the heavenly boulevards, awash in the light of the sun and the celestial auroras above. All the way to the Celestial Palace, its spires rising like inverted icicles miles into the thin air far above our heads. Pennants flew from every zenith of the place, bearing the Celestial Emblem. Three orbs in a triangular formation, representing Heaven, Hell and Earth. One blue, one red, one green, linked together by a golden ring that could be seen as a halo. It's the only halo you will actually see in Heaven; angels do not wear them, no matter how badly you wish they would.

  The entry hall of the Palace was familiar to me, though not as intimately familiar as you would expect. For one thing, I had only set foot here ten or twelve times. Second, I was blackout drunk on at least half of those occasions. And I had also never seen it so empty. There was no party happening at the moment. I could actually see the floor, the vast and lavish carpets that covered it. A few cherubs flitted above, dusting the high ceilings and the chandeliers that dangled from it. Rather that a rich smell of wine, my nose caught only a faint scent of lemon. The place was breezy and cool. If not for the imposing and threatening paintings of God that hung everywhere, it would be a perfectly comfortable spot to spend a few hours in waiting.

  And it would be a few hours, I was certain. God, being timeless, has no reason to keep anyone waiting. He just likes to. Whether to keep you on your toes or for His own sick pleasure, I don't know.

  I tried to sit in my customary wing-backed chair, but Zanus kept walking. A few steps later, he looked back and gave me a look that said everything he had ever wanted to say about me. I quickly stood and ran to catch up.

  "No waiting?" I asked. "Isn't the big man busy with other matters?"

  "Not this time," said Zanus. "He made plain His desire to see you as soon as possible. He sent me to retrieve you as soon as you returned from Earth."

  The bastard had ambushed me right outside my apartment. In fact, he came walking out of it, blocking me from entering. He just as easily could have nabbed me at the pearly gates. What had he been doing in there? Snooping for something? It's no secret that Zanus would love to see me replaced, kicked out my position, sent to Hell if he had any say in the matter. It would be just like him to use an order from God to gather me up as an excuse to trawl my apartment for evidence that I was not fit for the job.

  He had found nothing. And he never would. In the history of jobs and people fit for them, there was never anyone fit for theirs like I am. If that makes any sense.

  Sorry, Zanus. I'm happy to disappoint you.

  But at that moment, as my nemesis guided me through the entry hall and into the antechambers beyond, I didn't have the stomach to revel in my victory over him. I was worried about God. It is almost never a good thing to be summoned by the big man. Especially not when you're me.

  In place of the usual waiting in the entry hall, God would make us walk as long as we possibly could to reach Him. He was in His Green Room, the one He went to when He desired a state of calm. To get there, we had to run the gamut of his ridiculous palace.

  First the anterooms where an endless display of fine cheeses and wine waited, where legions of fat and lazy Celestials wasted their way through eternity.

  I grabbed a bite of casu marzu as we passed. It is a cheese made in only two places; Heaven's vast kitchens, and the area of Italy known as Sardinia. Rather than being simply fermented like every other cheese, it is actually purposely guided through a process of decay and rot with the aid of fly larvae. The larvae stay in the cheese, wriggling around through the rotten goop as you eat it. I hate the stuff, find it repulsive, but it was worth suffering through it just to see the look on Zanus's face. Unfortunately, the taste lingered with me long after.

  After the anterooms we had a choice of directions. We could take the spiral stairs to our left and take a longer but much less psychologically imposing route through the libraries where every book that ever had been or ever would be written was stored. Or we could continue straight and take a walk on the wild side.

  Zanus took us straight. Like me with my maggot cheese, he found it acceptable to subject himself to the over-stimulation of the museum halls for the tradeoff of subjecting me to it as well. He once again underestimated the strength of my mind and willpower.

  A Celestial cannot die or be hurt. But we can feel everything, including pain; we simply can't sustain actual damage from it. It is a cruel necessity. We cannot be expected to govern the life of humankind without some level of understanding for what they experience. Because of these feelings, a walk through God's museum halls isn't very fun.

  The Celestial Palace looks huge from the outside. I guess from a human perspective it would seem to cover roughly the same area, horizontally and vertically, as a cluster of skyscrapers that covers three or four city blocks. But it's actually larger than that on the inside, in defiance of Euclidean geometry. Its rooms can be so large as to be virtually infinite. There are thousands of floors, some hidden, lost in folded and invisible geometry between two other levels. There are secret places that seem like they shouldn't exist, but there they are. You can walk through the Palace for a million years and never find your way back to where you came in. This is why it's so important to have an angelic guide with you at all times, if you plan on venturing past the entry hall.

  The Palace exists in such ridiculous dimensions for a good reason. Its rooms and decorations and fixtures are the palette for all of Earth. Even though the strange, endless dimensions of the Palace defy the use of such a word, you could say that the "majority" of its space is taken up by what you might call museum halls. They tell the tale of every age of Earth from the very beginning. From the primordial soup to the modern day and beyond (no, you are not allowed to see the beyond part). You can walk those halls and see every type of material and plant or animal life that ever existed. Also included are every virus, bacteria, microbe, or single-celled organism.

  I wouldn't know firsthand, but I hear that God likes to walk the museum halls sometimes, studying the breadth of his creation. He will stop before a pedestal containing a dish of Black Death and chuckle softly to himself. Or he will look upon the inquisitive face of an ageless Neanderthal, wandering about in a hundred acre pen.

  Zanus led the way through a door, and we found ourselves immersed in the tale of Earth.

  To my right, through the wall of a huge aquarium, I saw the pale underbelly of a great white shark. Scientific name carcharodon carcharias. I didn't know that off the top of my head; a little plaque on a pedestal near the aquarium told me. Nature's perfect predator, virtually unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.

  Through the murk of the tank I could see, in the distance, the faint forms of other swimming creatures. They mi
ght be sharks, or they might just be food for the sharks. The aquarium could be an entire ocean in size, containing all life forms from a single moment in history. They each would have their own plaques and displays elsewhere, with windows into this same aquarium. A pocket universe tucked just under the surface geometry of the palace, visible from many disparate places from an impossible array of angles. A house of mirrors, with a world contained beneath the surface of each.

  To my left, in a blessedly simple display, I was offered a view of the Amazon rainforest at some prehistoric date. A weird little monkey sat up in the branches and, as I watched, it grabbed a vine and swung down to land on Zanus's shoulder. The angel froze, moving only his eyes, trying to figure out what to do. Finally, he reached up to gently push the monkey away. It screeched once, sank its teeth into his hand, and jumped away, clambering back up its tree. Zanus howled in pain, reflexively sucking at his uninjured hand.

  "You had better hope that monkey doesn't have Ebola," I said with a laugh.

  Zanus seethed at me. "Idiot! Ebola is from Africa."

  I shook my head, blowing air out through my mouth in a simulation of wind.

  "What is that supposed to mean?" Zanus asked.

  "It's the sound of my joke going over your head," I said.

  Zanus turned around to continue walking. "Whatever. It wasn't a very good joke, anyway."

  We kept going. Zanus, now alert and on his toes after the monkey incident, was able to sidestep and dodge other attacks. As we passed, a surprising number of creatures both ancient and still-to-come made their brief forays onto the walkway to investigate us. A particularly frightening moment came when a Velociraptor crept up to give us a sniff. Under Zanus's advisement, I kept walking at the same pace without giving the dinosaur the time of day. It was a strange experience, to feel a blast of warm air from the nose of an animal who hadn't been seen on Earth for around seventy million years.

  The museum halls don't follow any rhyme or reason. There is no clear path through them. No linear journey through the annals of time. The displays are arranged wildly and randomly, a product of God's alienation from the general flow of time. For Him there is no difference between the Statherian Period or the Cretaceous. He can walk between them at will. He is the only Celestial who has the ability to actually travel through time, to see it as it is; a hidden spatial geometry.

  For God, it wouldn't seem odd to find a dairy crow grazing in a field directly beside the display for a giant sloth. Or to run from a curious lion and end up nearly falling face first into a vat of prokaryotes. But such strange experiences were found by Zanus and I as we trekked through God's collection.

  Finally we came to a section designated for plant life only. Our walk became a peaceful stroll through primeval forests, past giant toadstools and prairie grass that grew taller than my head. And ancient predecessors to the modern horsetail fern, reaching a hundred feet in height.

  It was the calm before the storm. And the storm stood beyond a door that we suddenly came to. God's Green Room stood behind that door. I swallowed hard. Though I was happy the frightening walk was over, I would gladly have done it another dozen times if it meant I wouldn't have to open this door and walk through it.

  But why delay the inevitable? I took a deep, brave breath and opened the door.

  The Green Room was not a room at all, other than the fact that it was accessible only by an interior door. It was a forest of indeterminate size, with a brilliant sky and a sun all its own. I found myself in the bamboo section of the Green Room, a little pocket of Asia. A clumsy panda, startled by my sudden appearance, went tromping away.

  I walked a little ways, following a random path. Zanus followed, but remained back far enough that he wouldn't have heard any insults I felt like tossing his way. But I couldn't think of any good ones. I felt very nervous. An hour ago I had been convinced that I had acted well within the acceptable parameters of my job in my dealings with Mahendra. As had been the plan from the beginning, I had introduced the game of chess to humankind. But with every step I took through the Palace and its weird realms my thoughts became more scattered, less logical. They became tinged with anxiety. By now I was certain that I had done something terribly wrong. I would be eating dinner in Hell tonight, and it probably wasn't going to taste very good.

  I heard the hoot of an owl up ahead, and I knew my time of worry was about to end either way. The moment of truth was here.

  Stepping around the huge trunk of a sequoia tree, I found God reaching out to let his favorite pet owl land on his arm.

  What do humans think God looks like? I guess the most common image is that of an old man with white hair and a huge beard and an immaculate toga or some kind of cloak.

  In reality, God looks like... everyone. Have you ever had a dream where you're with someone you love and they keep changing, smearing through various identities, but you still know who they're supposed be? God is like that. He can look different depending on the angle, the light, the mood you are in when you look at Him. Any number of variables can effect His appearance, and it never stays stable for very long. God is everyone. He is every human being. But no matter how He changes, you know you're looking at God.

  "Death," He said, reaching up to feed his owl a scrap of raw meat.

  "God," I said in response. "You wanted to see me?"

  "Would you be here if I didn't?" the big man asked. He turned to face me and for half a second he was beautiful.

  "Is it about Mahendra?"

  God nodded. "There is an immortal on Earth now."

  And that was all He said. The ball was back in my court. God has a frustrating way of pushing you right up to the edge of the psychological precipice and finally throwing you a lifeline at the last second.

  "I set the parameters of the game," I said. "I allowed him to win, so that the game would survive. I didn't realize he would become immortal as a result."

  "Did you write that book?" God asked.

  "Which one?"

  "Your book of death."

  "No. I didn't write it. You gave it to me."

  "Correct. And you see a faint marking of a name before you are to reap it. To seal the deal, you only need to trace that name. Correct?"

  "Yes."

  It was true. Before I ever write a name in my book, it first appears as a faint ghost. A vision of my own writing that I haven't yet made. The book, being a direct product of God, operated partially outside of time.

  "You're in control of nothing," said God. "Your actions are predetermined. It's the same with everyone else. Everyone but me. What happened with Mahendra was meant to happen. So you have no reason to worry. You're not in trouble."

  "Forgive me for saying," I replied, "but the only reason I'm worrying is because you called me to this meeting."

  "I know. So I wanted to make sure to assuage your fears. Therefore I asked Zanus to bring you here so that I could do so."

  I shook my head. "Excuse me, God, but that's a paradox. It makes no sense."

  "It does to me. But I didn't call you here just to talk about Mahendra. I wanted to talk about immortality as a whole. It's an important subject. You can tell it's important, because it's one of those things humans have been talking about since their time of birth..."

  "What about it?" I asked.

  With an uplift of his arm, God cast his pet owl out to hunt among the trees. The animal squawked and wheeled away, rising higher in the humid air.

  "The cosmic order doesn't disallow it, per se," said God. "Otherwise we wouldn't exist. The goal of all this... all of my creation... is to allow the birth of an intelligence greater than mine. Some day, billions of years past the age you've just stepped in from, the universe will die like all things die. That will be our end, finally. We Celestials are connected inextricably to this realm. As free as we often feel, as jealous as humans are of that freedom, it is still something of an illusion..."

  "We are not actually immortal," I said, nodding. "We will die with the universe. Our job
will be complete."

  "That's good enough that we can call ourselves immortal and get away with it," said God in return. "But there will come a time when we envy humankind. Or whatever it is that they will become. Eventually they will reach a point in their evolution, which I have foreseen, where they will no longer be in my image. They will be different, something new. At that point it will be plain to all that creation has surpassed creator, which is how it should always be. When the universe dies, the distant ancestors to come of the current humankind will find a way to escape and enter a universe of their own creation. They will become gods themselves, greater than I ever was. And it will be their job to somehow create a being more powerful than them in turn.

  "What I mean to say is, the predisposition for immortality is in humankind already. But the immortality they will achieve will be as a species, not as individuals. You see, it is fine for us Celestials to be immortal. But a human should not be. Because if humans stop dying, they will also stop evolving. Therefore, it is hardwired into all humans that death is inevitable. They will always seek it out, consciously or unconsciously. I will not interfere in the lives of whichever humans are somehow able to beat you in chess..."

  "I let him win," I quickly said.

  God wore a knowing smile. "Yes. Of course you did. Now I am going to tell you something which may be useful in the future. You have your game of Life and Death. Someone wins against you, they gain life everlasting. But if you return to re-challenge them, and play a second game against them... if you win... their immortality will be forfeit..."

  I apologize for all the ellipses. That's just how God talks. It's better for you to see a simple triple-dot pattern and insert your own pause. In reality, having a conversation with God often means waiting for thirty or more seconds between words while He does something inconsequential, such as wiping bird poop from the leaf of a tree. It's rather like speaking to a senile relative, except that you can't simply tune out and daydream while pretending to listen.

  "Your Indian friend," God said at last, turning to face me. His face, twisting between different identities and smearing as it turned, briefly resembled one of those weird people in a Picasso painting. "I'm not suggesting you revoke his immortality... he may come to you with such a request in the future... but you should know that you have the ability to revoke it. Simply get him to play another game with you. And this time, win."