Cookbook from Hell Reheated

by M. L. Buchman

  Eric turned to look up at Valerie’s gold-flecked eyes. “Uh, this may take a while.”

  DAY TWO

  And God made the firmament,

  and divided the waters which were

  under the firmament from the waters

  which were above the firmament.

  And God called the firmament Heaven.

  Chapter 2

  Michelle slapped the side of the computer screen.

  Hard.

  The screen flashed to life in an eye-searing array of blacks and greens. The old thing shimmered, strobed, and at long last stabilized. The computer terminal was the only object on her vast, black-obsidian desk other than a massive cup of coffee.

  Cut that out! The words etched onto the screen as if driven with chisel into stone one painful stroke at a time.

  She smacked it again. After all, she was the Devil, there was no way she’d let the universe’s software boss her around. She was so sick of it all. Hell, Heaven, Creation… All of it. And, while it made for a sad statement, if the Universal Software was the only thing left that she could feel superior to, she’d make the best she could out of browbeating it.

  One more whack.

  Hey! No slow etching this time. Couldn’t y’all just tap the space bar like everyone else?

  “Less fun,” Michelle typed. And it was. After fourteen billion years, her life had come to this, sad as it was. Harassing the Universal Software and waking up every morning in Hell.

  Of course, being the Devil Incarnate made the latter a common enough occurrence; she should be used to it by now.

  Well?

  She ignored the software for a while longer just to tick it off.

  Maybe she’d redecorate, if only she could think of something interesting to do with it all. The soaring palisades of black granite reached up into the unseeable darkness and wrapped all four sides of the immense marbled hall that was both her private office and Hell’s throne room. Waterfalls of raging fire cascaded down to crash into a burning moat that surrounded her vast office floor on all sides. The only break in the circle of fire was the pointed arch over the grand three-door entry that would dwarf the front entry of any Gothic cathedral ever conceived by man.

  Her obsidian-glass desk was centered in a rich-red oriental carpet, one of the only pieces that she’d liked enough to move into each incarnation of her office. It represented the height of Afghan weaving before it was destroyed by Alexander the Great, and again a millennia later by Genghis Khan. So, she’d offered the rug some extra protection that it had gladly accepted, and therefore still looked fresh from the weaver.

  Old man Gropius had stated that, “The whole place is a little ostentatious for an office.” Of course, for the travesty of creating Bauhaus architecture, he wouldn’t be leaving Hell anytime soon. What idiot wanted to live in a house of glass anyway? Damned exhibitionist.

  Some parts of life called for privacy and a touch of coziness not offered by his glass and steel. His offense at her suggestion had been so great that she’d created a Hansel and Gretel cottage built with heavy wooden beams decorated with homey trinkets, doilies, and curlicues. It had taken a half dozen demons to drag him through the door, which she’d then bolted from the outside. If she remembered, she’d let him out at some point in the next couple decades and see if he’d mellowed.

  “Tell me something new,” she typed into the terminal. “Anything.”

  Maybe she’d just get a haircut. The rippling mass of black was down past the middle of her back, after all. Or maybe she’d do that later.

  The computer started putting up a line of periods to indicate it was thinking about it.

  The screen was half full before it offered, Hector is kicking butt today.

  “That’s not new!” She hammered into the keyboard with her finest two-fingered typing. “He and that idiot Achilles have been trying to rehash the Trojan War for 3,500 years. I said NEW!!!!” Besides, she’d learned centuries before that brawn only took you so far. And that it wasn’t far enough.

  Again the stupid line of periods.

  Her office wasn’t Bauhaus, but neither was it cozy. It would be okay during winter, if there were winters here. But since it was hot as, well, Hell outside, her office was generally pretty unbearable. All she’d actually achieved with this place was a different way to create an unpleasant work environment, better than the cubical Hell that modern corporations so loved, but not by much.

  Redecorating sounded mildly amusing, even if not particularly inspiring. Total makeover. Bring in the wrecking demons and clear this place back to the pilasters of creation. Nothing much in here worth a damn anyway. But the change all sounded like just too much trouble to bother with.

  In American politics today—

  She whacked the screen hard.

  What?!

  “My fault,” though she didn’t really care. “New and not so Me-damned boring.” Why god would damn anything was beyond her, that was the Devil’s job anyway. Just one more thing he’d appropriated for himself.

  She always liked the capital “M” when using herself as a pejorative. It looked good on the screen. If himself got to use capital “G”s and “H”s and “I”s and “J”s and near enough every other damned letter in the alphabet, then bloody well so could she. She loved lower-casing him, because it really pissed him off. It was his only point of vanity, so she couldn’t resist needling it. She had a job title to uphold after all. She’d expected the fun of it to wear off after the first or second billion years, but it hadn’t yet and the universe’s fourteen billionth birthday was coming soon. Maybe she should get him a card.

  Of course that made her almost fourteen billion years old as well. Michelle didn’t like that thought at all. No card, sorry god. “god.” “himself.” Jehovah and Yahweh were more in the proper name category, so she’d leave those uppercase in her thoughts. For now. How many words had the man appropriated on his own behalf? It seemed she couldn’t complete a sentence without somehow referring to the almighty creator, bringer of light.

  Okay. How ‘bout this, pardner?

  The software had clearly watched too many old Westerns. It was totally addicted. Michelle shrugged. Guess everyone needed a hobby.

  She almost didn’t bother to read what the computer had to say. She knew it wouldn’t gain her interest any more than the rest of it. But she was weak and looked anyway.

  Y’all have a visitor.

  On the verge of asking who, a blast of trumpets roared from outside the walls blowing open all three sets of adamantine double doors as if they were Japanese rice paper screens. It rang and echoed off the granite cliffs, sounded off the unseeable ceiling. A mighty wind washed through the length of the hall, briefly snuffing several of the flaming waterfalls, though they soon rekindled from those around them. The wind burst into a thousand little breezes that smelled of honeysuckle and pudgy bumblebees. Of pine-scented forests and baby squirrels romping in dappled sunlight.

  Frankly, it stank of—

  “HEAVEN SENDS YOU GREETINGS OF GREAT JOY!”

  A massive voice, in a perfectly mellifluous baritone, roared past her desk to play with the echoes of the trumpet chorus that were still fooling around with themselves over in the corners.

  Yep! Totally stank of Heaven. Definitely lower case.

  The messenger strode through the flames. He, there was no doubting the gender of this boyo, handsome behind his mirrored shades, came forward until he stood on the other side of her desk.

  “WHAT HAPPENED TO THE THRONE?” His question boomed forth with such strength that the image on her computer screen shivered for a few moments, its electrons shuffled out of alignment by the sheer sonic energy.

  “Can we lose the voice?”

  “SURE, I— Sorry.” His tone suddenly modulated to a pleasant, if soft tenor, almost lost in the roar of the shattering impac
t of renewed fires upon the moat. Blond hair, almost Nordic in lightness, danced in gentle waves down to his broad shoulders. A toga of shining white wrapped about his body as if placed there by the hand of god himself.

  If she didn’t already know this Heavenly messenger far too well, he might peak her interest. Might cause her to wonder what Heavenly messengers wore beneath their togas. But she knew that in a few moments he’d just piss her off, and it wouldn’t be going Heavenward from there. Something about the mirrored shades that hid his eyes made his face hard to focus on. For one thing, she could normally tell if a guy was checking out her chest, it was a Hell of a chest after all, but she couldn’t tell with him.

  “The throne? I thought it was pretty.”

  Michelle glanced down the hall to where the dais had soared at the opposite end of her office. One of the Egyptian builders had fashioned it in tier upon tier of periwinkle and buttercup yellow crystal. Druid priests had carved in Celtic runes of fertility, Norse dwarves had etched in legends of the great debauches held in the heroes’ hall at Valhalla, and the Dravidic priests from the Indian subcontinent then added more than a few intensely pornographic carvings from their temples. Romulus had dropped by and topped it with a Grecian divan more appropriate to a Bacchanalia than a throne room. The Greeks always did know how to party.

  It had been a fantastic spectacle. When she lounged on it in a filmy negligee, men had a great deal of trouble speaking: mortal or immortal. Actually, most of the women too.

  “It had drawbacks.” Michelle looked away from the empty expanse of floor with a shudder. She wouldn’t even walk across the marble where it had once stood in case destroying the dais and scattering its bits across five continents, seven oceans, and the center of three suns had not been sufficient.

  Whether it was the carvings, the crystalline structure, or its position in the space-time continuum, the throne had focused all of a select category of prayers meant for Heaven directly into the subconscious of anyone who napped atop its pyramidal pinnacle. Rather than a position of luxury, it had acted like an Incan pyramid focusing evil in the name of holy sacrifice.

  The focus of prayers might have been tolerable, she could usually ignore background noise, especially those without proper preregistration codes attached. But her dais and the throne had collected and focused only the prayers from post-pubescent teenage girls wearing tennis skirts. One particularly long nap had left her body so charged up that it had required a decade to sate. That had led her to some serious mistakes in judgment she decided not to waste time remembering.

  She eyed the messenger and waited. At this point her boredom was so vast that even this Heaven-sent irritation ranked as a relief.

  “I COME BEARING—”

  “THE VOICE!” She shouted back with all the power of fourteen billion years of anger riding muster on creation and evolution. It boiled in her stomach like a foul brew worthy of the Hecate witches. She was so god-damned and Devil-damned sick of Heaven she could destroy this whole spiritual realm with a fireball that would burn until the final entropy of the universe’s collapse had faded away into eternal darkness.

  The burning firefalls fled back up the walls. Great slabs of the granite palisades shattered off and plunged into the moat with crashes that shook the vast floor and sprayed flaming rock chips throughout the room. The disaster rumbled back and forth down the length of Hell’s throne room, taking several minutes for the induced quakes to finally settle. Gaping chasms now revealed steaming depths where moments before you could have played a fair game of hockey on the smooth marble. The vast oriental rug remained unscathed and appeared to be the only undamaged area of the entire room. As per contract.

  Crap! She dropped back in her chair and scowled about the room. Now she’d have to redecorate. It was rather past the point of destruction that she could term as a “distressed ambiance.”

  The messenger did his best to brush away the smoldering rock chips that threatened to scorch his shining white toga. Then he wiggled his finger in his ears and worked his jaw to clear his hearing.

  “Sorry,” he resumed much more reasonably. “I come bearing an invitation.”

  “To do what?”

  “To dine.”

  “From…” she prompted him. Maybe if she put him on a rack and stretched him a bit, the words would leak out faster.

  “Um… THE LORD GOD—”

  She held up a finger, then aimed it at his chest.

  “Right, sorry again. There is an invitation for you to dine in Heaven. There’ll be minestrone, a nice salad, and a pasta Florentine that your host is rather pleased with.”

  Michelle leaned back in her chair and propped her feet up on the desk. She stared at the computer screen which bore a single question mark. It filled most of the screen, made up entirely of normal-sized question marks. As she watched, it shifted to an exclamation point, made up of miniature poodles for reasons she didn’t want to know.

  Clearly the Software that Runs the Universe had much the same feeling she did. She hadn’t been invited to Heaven since…the ash cloud of Pompeii?

  Or maybe that thing on the Nile? himself had taken a nap after making sure the baby Moses was launched on his way. (Would have caught a cold and died of pneumonia inside two weeks if Michelle hadn’t slipped in a swaddling blanket.) She’d taken god’s clothes while he napped and left god incarnate there to be found by the locals. Painting him blue had been completely an afterthought. That the dye had taken decades to wear off made it a good afterthought.

  Or was it…

  Well, it would get her out of Hell for an evening. Be worth it for that alone.

  “Sure! Why the Heaven not?”

  “EXCELLENT!” The messenger smiled like a boy of ten looking at a brand new bicycle even as he slapped his hand over his mouth. Between his fingers, he mumbled, “Around seven?”

  “Tonight?” she raised one eyebrow. It had taken practice, but she’d seen how effective it was watching Spock on Star Trek and decided it was worth the effort to master. It intimidated most men surprisingly well.

  Michelle wished she’d learned the eyebrow trick before facing down all those popes and bishops who claimed there’d been a horrible mistake when they’d arrived at Hell’s Gates In-processing Center. Not a one had received a jump-to-head-of-line pass, and those lines could take decades.

  Pope Joan still held the papal record. A thousand years ago, she’d cleared Hell’s queues in just under fourteen hours. One sharp lady. Her only real mistake had been giving birth while on papal Easter processional.

  “Learned that lesson the hard way,” Joan had told her one night over a nice glass of Merlot and sirloin pepper steaks. “The first contraction caught me by surprise and I fell off my horse and went into labor. If you’re living as a man for thirty years and have climbed to the pinnacle of the Church, the stupid masses think ‘demons’ rather than ‘child’ when you go into labor. Their solution, being stupid masses, is to tear you apart limb from limb. At least my girl made it out okay.”

  The joke was how the Catholic hierarchy had finally solved the issue.

  “So, for the next half dozen centuries, the papal inaugural procession was done on a chair with a hole in the bottom. At the start of the processional, an elder reaches under the chair to check, and then intones solemnly, ‘Duos habet et bene pendentes—He has two, and they dangle nicely.’ ”

  Michelle had nearly snorted her wine in laughter. Those had been good times. She missed having a friend.

  That stopped her cold. She dropped her feet to the floor. She hadn’t had a friend, a true friend she could just be herself with in ages. How had that happened?

  “Would another evening be better?” The Heavenly messenger inquired at her prolonged silence. “Did you have other plans tonight?”

  Not a damned one.

  Chapter 3

  Why are you bothering me, boy?
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  Watson Blue Gene. That’s all Eric Erikson could think. Watson Blue Gene was IBM’s machine designed to play and win at Jeopardy. Whatever had happened to Valerie’s computer was fast, and smart, and one of the greatest game demos he’d ever seen. How it ran on a squidgy little laptop sitting on an oak dining table in Seattle he couldn’t imagine. It should be on a mainframe buried deep in some secret lab. The program had no graphics, text only, so you could store a lot in a small space, but it still didn’t explain the simulated intelligence of the program.

  “I want the cookbook,” he typed. “That’s why I’m bothering you. And I’m not a boy.”

  You’re all young pups to me. You know the hills?

  “Which hills?”

  Which hills?! THE HILLS! The hills of cliché and song. Of tales tall, short, and in-between. Them thar hills over yonder, pardner. Hills alive with the sound of music. Those hills?

  Eric had learned to keep his laughter to himself. At first, because Valerie startled every time he did and came running to see if he’d fixed the computer. And now, because he’d discovered her passed out on the couch, actually at rest. He’d draped a blanket over her and returned to his battle to wrest control of the machine back from the game interface. It was either that or sit and stare like the village idiot at the face of the sleeping woman. At rest, The Mac was, well…

  “Distracting!” He thought as loudly as he could to refocus his attention. “Focus, Eric.”

  “Yes. I’m know ‘them thar’ hills,” he keyed in. He really had to meet the guys who’d programmed this. He’d poked around most of the big game sites, and a lot of the edgy little ones which were generally more interesting. He’d never run into a response system like this one. Giving it an Old West attitude was just the perfect bit of icing on the cake.

  Wellll, I’m a shitpotful older than them hills, and y’all better believe it. I’ll be fourteen billion next week by your ludicrous numbering system.