“No, no,” Peter shook his head. “It’s his third law.”
Michelle looked up at the really old apple tree’s overarching branches as she pondered which law was which. Still no snake among the branches nor any falling apples to conk Sir Isaac on the head. She did spot a robin’s nest though, mom and dad working away at the little twinkle light decorations. Someone was expecting.
“Something about equal areas of an elliptical orbit?”
“No, that was Kepler. God rested on the seventh day, you know that?”
“Lazy bugger rested a lot as I recall.” If he’d been left to his own devices, creation never would have happened. Nor evolved so much if she hadn’t been there to poke and prod it along. That primordial soup of his, which even she had to admit was pretty cool, would have been utterly useless until she’d figured out how to make life from the mess.
Actually, god hadn’t so much been lazy as easily distracted by bright, shiny objects. He started a billion projects, and hadn’t properly finished a one on his own that she could think of. He hadn’t even remembered to lead his chosen people out of the desert, leaving them to wander for forty years before Michelle stumbled upon them and gave them a map and a compass.
“You know the old George Carlin joke?” Peter freshened his tea. “The one that if God is all powerful can he create a rock so heavy that he can’t lift it?”
Michelle shrugged her assent.
“Well,” Peter dabbed one last time at the stains on his chest. “He rested after Newton invented his third law, and that was it.”
Could Peter be more obscure if he tried?
“Wait, rested. That’s one of Newton’s laws, isn’t it? Objects at rest remain at rest.”
Peter hung his head and then gave a small nod.
“god rested, and is stuck there?”
Again the small nod.
“So wake him up.”
“It doesn’t work that way. He rested. He’s the most powerful object there is and He was stuck at rest. Nothing I tried could get Him moving again.”
Michelle would miss the old bugger if he’d gone and died. More than miss him. he was the only one who went back as far as she did. Up until the Early Cambrian, she and god had kinda been it.
The trilobites’ gods had been pretty awesome but they were wiped out along with all of their believers at the end of the Paleozoic by a programming bug, not the comet impact all of today’s scientists thought. The Universal Software had been very apologetic.
The dinosaur’s gods were pretty lame. Creation of the first birds hadn’t even been their idea, she was the one who’d come up with wings as a practical joke. She’d never expected any of them to actually fly.
“When did god lay himself down to sleep?”
Peter pulled out a pocket calendar and flipped through a couple pages. “Here it is. God rested in mid-December, the year of our Lord Jesus Christ 325 A.D.” He snapped it closed and tucked it back in his sleeve.
Three-twenty-five. There was something nasty about that date, she’d remember in a moment.
“He said something about the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea so sickening him about the state of humankind that he had to go lie down.”
That was it. Michelle felt grim, a total travesty in religious history.
“Well, I can tell you that the three hundred-and-eighteen cardinals from that council will never escape the deepest pits of Hell.” They’d written women out of the Bible, turned Mary from wife to whore, and she was such a nice lady, too. A bunch of power-mad men thinking they could control the next few thousand years of human consciousness by twisting Peter’s founding of the Christian church. The truly sad statement was how right they’d been about their power, at least on earth. In Hell? In Michelle’s version of Hell? Not so much.
“Good.” Peter also looked grim.
“So,” she noticed the lengthening shadows across God’s garden and didn’t like them one bit. “God has been resting for eighteen-hundred years. No wonder I haven’t heard from him. He must have been way behind on his sleep, but he’ll be raring to go when he wakes up.”
Peter set aside his cup and walked away from the table. At first she thought he was just pacing, but everywhere he stepped, the brown and brittle grass broke off, and shoots of bright green began poking up into the late afternoon sunshine. Though he didn’t appear to notice.
“I was worried. I put Him on spirit support, but, well, nothing.”
“What do you mean nothing?”
“Nothing. He didn’t revive. Then his wife left and…”
“Hold it!”
Peter stopped in the center of a particularly brown patch of lawn which slowly rejuvenated as he stood upon it and looked at her in surprise.
“god got married?” How in Hell had she missed that? Not even an invitation to the wedding?
“Well, I don’t know if they technically married. But about a century after Jesus was crucified, Hera moved in.”
“Hera, as in the mother of the Greek gods?”
Peter nodded. “Zeus is a real jerk. And she was always such a sweet and elegant lady.”
“Hell,” a patch of the barely-recovered grass moaned softly and wilted again. “We all knew that from the beginning. From the moment of his creation, Zeus was an old adulterous asshole, impregnating mortals and spawning demi-gods at every chance.”
Peter shrugged, “He was before my time. All I know is that Hera divorced him and no one else wanted him. Last I heard he was living on some Greek island and had bought an old fishing boat that keeps sinking out from under him. Anyway, Hera left. Then I finally had this idea. I figured that the ultimate immovable object, God, could be knocked loose by the ultimate unstoppable force.”
Michelle swallowed hard. She had an image of bloody little bits of god spread all over his bedroom walls.
“Uh, what did you hit him with?”
“The software.”
Right. She’d forgotten that about Peter. He was the only person in history to hack his way out of Limbo and straight into Heaven without any sojourn in Michelle’s unhappy realm. Not being an idiot, god had realized that the best security to guard the entry gates of Heaven should be provided by the best criminal. God had immediately promoted St. Peter to the head of the software division.
“I needed an unstoppable force, and the software fit the bill. So I wrote a routine and let it loose.”
Michelle could barely coax the software to reply to a civil question, and Peter had programmed it to let him into Heaven. And now he was using it to awaken god. Maybe he’d give her classes.
Peter, too nervous to stand still, had almost disappeared beneath the apple tree’s branches.
Michelle set aside her teacup, and went and snagged him by the arm. Hooking a hand through his elbow, she led him down the garden path among the rose bushes, thornless of course. The path opened near a hedge maze cut low so even a child could solve it.
Actually, it was a labyrinth made of boxwood. She scanned the neatly trimmed lines and noted that it was the same path as the one in Chartres cathedral, or perhaps the one in Chartres was the same shape as this one.
She turned in at the hedge knowing that its meandering paths would be enough to keep Peter’s need to pace confined to a limited space. She started him on his way then stepped over the hedges until she reached the five-petaled center and sat by the small fountain that burbled there.
Peter, sure enough, began wending back and forth along the convoluted path that led in only one direction.
“What happened after you aimed the software at god?”
The winding path led him close beside her as he paced along in meditative silence.
“Peter?” the path brought him closer until he was just a narrow, knee-high hedge away from her.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
He began winding his way away from her, back and forth, staying inside the lines and following all the little rules.
“The software blew through all of the portals of the spirit support machine and went zipping out the far side.” Left turn then right. “I finally gathered all of the greatest doctors, both physical and metaphysical.” Right then left. “And when we opened the machine, there was nothing there! God was gone!”
“Did the software kill him?”
“No, I checked. It turns out that there was nothing there before I started the wake-up routine. Empty. Gone.” The path doubled back on itself and sent him almost back to the beginning.
Michelle dipped a hand into the fountain and wiped the cool water across her fevered brow.
That couldn’t be true. Or maybe she just didn’t want it to be? If the old boy was toast, she might have to start giving him the upper case he actually deserved. That “He” actually deserved. She didn’t like the way that sounded very much.
She puzzled at it for a while. Drilled questions at Peter whenever the labyrinth led him close enough to hear her.
Night had fallen upon them. Gently, but dark as Hell. The stars in the Heavens weren’t so bright at the moment.
Peter’s pilgrimage had finally led him to the final straightaway that brought him directly to where she sat by the fountain. His white toga was all that revealed him as a dim silhouette.
“And the software is gone, too. That’s my other problem. I haven’t seen it since I initiated that subroutine to revitalize God. It had seemed so on board with the code set I’d built, then it was gone. I think it missed God more than I realized.”
Michelle puzzled at that, she’d been conversing with it just this morning.
“When was all this?”
“It’ll be two hundred years the day after tomorrow that the software ran off. I’ve been holding Heaven together with string and sealing wax. The angels are so overworked that their wings are actually molting. I finally gave up and closed that gates of Heaven this week so that everyone could get some rest. No one is getting in right now, and because of the slowdown at in-processing without the software’s assistance, Limbo and Purgatory are already crowded hip to elbow.”
Michelle opened her mouth, then closed it again. She’d bet the exit lines in Hell were getting a little feisty after stalling for a week. Didn’t really matter though. After all, Hell was supposed to be hellish.
St. Peter might be asking for her help, but Heaven and Hell had never had a treaty for cozy cooperation. She’d continue protecting her trade secrets until she knew a little more about what was going on.
But one thing was becoming clear.
And even though she whispered it, she could feel, somewhere across the night-shrouded garden, an old apple tree shiver. Nietzsche was right.
“god is dead.”
Chapter 10
Eric felt utterly ridiculous as they stumbled along Ravenna’s wet sidewalks toward Valerie’s apartment.
“All I did was trip.”
“You were so involved with what you were talking about that you walked square on into a perfectly innocent maple tree and fell over backwards into a mud puddle.” Another laugh rippled out of Valerie’s mouth. “How did you even find a mud puddle? We live in the middle of a city.”
“It’s a construction site. There’s mud. There’s crap on the sidewalk. I fell.” He spit again to get the grit out of his mouth. The problem was that the rain, which had returned in force after the brief sunbreak while they’d been in the deli, kept washing more of the mud out of his hair and down his face. Every time he opened his mouth, more mud dribbled in.
She held the street door to the big Victorian apartment building open for him. “Don’t touch anything. You can use my shower, just don’t touch anything between here and there.”
He hobbled out of the rain into the lobby and barely resisted the urge to shake like a wet dog.
“Is it okay if I drip on the hardwood?”
Valerie stood in front of him, fists on hips and a wicked smile on her face, looking up at him. “We’d prefer if you didn’t. Can you please resist until you get in my shower?”
“Is that an invitation?” For just an instant he felt a surge of heat, but it was overridden by a deep chill. Had he just made a pass at his boss? Please, he hadn’t been that stupid. Had he?
“Not when you look like that,” she answered with a laugh and her smile remained.
Okay, maybe he’d just made a good joke.
She started up the stairs.
He was careful not to touch the banister.
“Straight in. I don’t want your mud all over my apartment either. Your clothes need a good rinse just as badly as you do.”
“And what do I wear afterward?”
That one did it. She stumbled on the top step, almost turned to look at him, then didn’t. “I’ll, uh, think of something.”
Embarrassed?
No way. Not The Mac. If she was, that meant she might have some image of him like the ones he’d been having of her since the moment he’d spotted the blue silk underclothes on the floor. Actually, truth be known, since the damned job interview a year ago, though she’d been married and definitely out of bounds.
Now, she’d been single for over six months. Had she been hanging around his desk more lately? Or was he just more and more aware of her each time she was there? He couldn’t tell. He’d always been a little slow on the uptake about women.
His older sister had asked him more than once, whatever happened to that girl who’d been chasing him. Each time he’d had to ask, “What girl?”
One of his family’s running jokes.
But with Valerie, it was as if he truly saw her from the first moment. Not the crazy, hyper-intense overachiever. Rather the beautiful and intelligent woman who had a heart-deep smile. But she was only visible when The Mac was distracted for a moment and Valerie shone through.
He tried to tip-toe to the bathroom, catching muddy drips from the tip of his chin in his open palms.
Chapter 11
Michelle brushed aside angels and sycophants alike as she hurried down the pleasant valley of Heaven. The soft lighting of the perfectly fitted octagonal cobbles made their passage easy. The night jasmine scented the air thick with an invitation to slow down and enjoy herself, which Michelle totally ignored.
Peter hustled along behind her. She’d always wanted a handsome, broad-shouldered man with flowing blond locks to chase her, but if he didn’t hustle a bit harder she’d leave him behind.
“Look, Peter,” she spoke to the man hurrying along in her wake. “I spoke to the software this morning. Just because you haven’t been able to access it for the last couple centuries doesn’t mean that it’s gone. Just because god isn’t lying around the house and napping on the divan doesn’t mean something’s wrong. He’s just not in Heaven.”
“So where are we going?” he panted as she dodged around a large Heavenly choir that was really rocking an old Sly and the Family Stone number, then raced past the tourists tossing silvered coins into the circle of a golden halo that lay on the ground in front of the choir.
“We’re going to talk with the software. It will know where god is. We’re going to Hell.”
“Oh,” was all he managed.
She breezed past the pair of door guardians outside the Heaven-and-Hell border conference room. Only one of them was foolish enough to try and stop her. She sent it flying into a hydrangea, without the use of its wings. The great double door that opened into the jungle conference room shone with a vibrant, fire-engine red, perhaps the only use of that particular color in all Heaven. It shouted, “This way to Hell.”
She slapped it open.
Or tried to. It didn’t budge in the slightest and only jarred her arm.
“Someone open this damn thing.”
“We, um, don’t know how.” She turned to face the second mid-sized angel, the other door guardian was still fluttering about in the hydrangea. He was tapping desperately on one key of his keyboard. “It’s not working.” He continued tapping away faster and faster the longer she looked at him.
She finally grabbed his wrist to still the woodpecker-rapid sound of useless keystrokes. His screen was blank, not even a line of periods on the screen.
Then she turned to face the great red door. No handle. No manual release panel to either side. Nothing mechanical. Heaven had become much too reliant on their technology.
She had a solution to that. At the beginning of time, god alone had been given all of the Create privileges. That still pissed her off today. Well, she had Delete privileges and she’d do a little deleting right now.
Michelle took a deep breath, filling her lungs to capacity. She could hear Peter behind her shouting for everyone to cover their ears and clear the room.
She took three steps back.
Then, on a slow exhale, she ran to the door, jumped in the air, and delivered a massive kick, dead center where the two halves of the mighty door met.
The door flew open, one side flying clean off its hinges, the other one twisted past any possible future use.
“Bruce Lee taught me that one.” She’d have to remember to thank him next time they got together for a game of handball.
She and Peter wended their way through the jungle vines, passed the conference table that hummed a couple bars of music in hopes of enticing the two of them to stop for tea, and reached Hell’s gate.
A short demon who had been sleeping on the job as any self-respecting demon should be, jumped up at her approach, and shouted at a group in tattered thousand-dollar suits curled up on the floor. A dozen eternally damned souls, all American corporate CEOs, clambered to their feet, lifted a massive, rusted chain, and really leaned into it to haul the mighty iron door open. Now that was what Michelle called reliable technology.
St. Peter followed her into Hell. Once they were through, she could hear the moaning of the CEOs as they struggled to close it against the Heavenly breeze now blowing across the jungle conference room from Heaven’s broken doors.
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