Only Human

by Tom Holt

  As he brushed his teeth - not that they were his teeth, but a well-mannered visitor leaves his body as he would expect to find it - he looked carefully at the strange creature in the mirror, and wondered whether there was really any realistic chance of getting out of it.

  Probably a perfectly normal appearance for a vicar; a cross between a garden gnome and a comfortable armchair, with more than a hint of a benevolent version of Captain Mainwaring. Curious, he reflected, that anybody could ever believe that bodies like these housed Heaven’s front-line troops in the battle against the forces of evil. Just as well for all concerned, he assured himself, that that particular phoney war wasn’t ever going to come to anything; because if it did, Good would be on the proverbial hiding to nothing. And nobody wanted Evil to win, particularly not the instruments of darkness.

  Just as, in politics, there are some elections you’re only too pleased to lose, so the battle between light and darkness. Because if darkness won, it’d sooner or later have to form a government, and it didn’t want to do that, in roughly the same way that a sensible lamb doesn’t really want to have to form a sheepskin coat. Lack of power without responsibility has always been the ideal for the Satanic hosts; because, if it’s been ordained in two covenants and the world’s number-one all-time bestseller that you’re always going to lose, meeting your performance targets is never going to be a problem you lose sleep over. The staff of Hell are, first and foremost, public servants. They like it that way.

  Whereas (Artofel reflected, spitting minty froth down the plughole) the other lot, of whom I am currently one, have all the aggro of winning, which must take all the fun out of everything. Consider that; because victory never ends with winning. Winning is only the start. The overwhelming majority of it is staying won, the art of balancing on the very top of a rapidly turning Ferris wheel. Infinitely better to be perpetual losers, gaining the moral victory every single time - however soundly beaten you may be, everybody’s going to assume you could have won but threw the match. Hence, no more devoted advocates of the status quo and the established order than the inhabitants of Flipside.

  Presumably.

  Having scrubbed his teeth and cleaned out the sink (cleanliness is next to devilishness) he was on his way through to the kitchen when the phone rang. He stopped, and looked at it.

  An ambivalent figure, Alexander Graham Bell, claimed by both sides in the Great Debate as one of their own. Bell, claims Heaven, must be one of ours because thanks to him people can talk to one another the length and breadth of the world, easily and reasonably cheaply, at any hour of the day or night, exchanging views, sharing information, communicating as never before. Exactly our point, replies Hell. That’s our boy.

  Artofel picked up the receiver, trying hard as he did so to remember the name he was supposed to be answering to. ‘Hello?’ he said carefully.

  ‘Hello,’ replied the telephone. ‘Can I speak to Artofel, please?’

  Ah, thought the Duke of Hell, finding himself calmer and more resigned than he’d expected. Here we go. ‘Speaking,’ he said.

  ‘Splendid, splendid,’ replied the voice. ‘Now then, you don’t know me but I’m in a position to do you a favour if you do me a favour. I take it you’re interested.’

  Artofel removed the receiver from under his chin and looked at it as if it had just bitten his ear. ‘Who is this?’ he asked.

  ‘Believe me,’ replied the voice cheerfully, ‘you don’t want to know.What you do want is to go home. Am I right? Of course I am.’

  Allowing himself a moment for reflection, Artofel considered whether anybody, however highly motivated, would bother to ring him up from Hell just to try and sell him double glazing. Unlikely, he concluded. The tone of voice, however, argued strongly to the contrary. ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

  ‘A few minutes of your time, that’s all. Oh, and your body.’

  ‘?’

  ‘Not your body,’ the voice continued smoothly. ‘Your body’s down here, safe and sound except for being under close arrest in the VIP lounge. Don’t worry,’ it added, as Artofel made a funny noise, ‘they aren’t doing anything to it. Not yet. Set your mind at rest on that score.’

  ‘Uh.’

  ‘For now, anyway. No, it’s the body you’ve got on at the moment we want. Absolutely no skin off your nose. His maybe, but not yours.’

  ‘Ack?’

  ‘Think about it,’ said the voice, reasonably. ‘We bring you home, reunite you with your own flesh and blood, what do you care about the body of some mouldy old vicar up on the Surface? Couldn’t give a damn. After all, they’re the enemy, aren’t they?You’d be doing your patriotic duty.’

  It was at more or less this point that Artofel’s logic circuits cut back in and allowed him to smell essence of rodent. ‘You could say that,’ he replied. ‘What do you want it for?’

  ‘None of your business, my friend. Now, are you interested, or do we take our proposition elsewhere?’

  Artofel’s logic circuits were making up for lost time. While he was telling the voice that he was very interested and of course he wanted to go home, his mind was playing angel’s advocate. A voice from Hell that thought vicars were the enemy, that wanted the vicar’s body, that claimed to be able to take him out of the vicar’s body and send him home but seemed to need his agreement before it could do it. Like the bill for a meal shared by nine students, it just didn’t add up.

  ‘Perfectly painless,’ the voice was saying. ‘Well, for you perfectly painless, ’cos you’ll be well out of there before we even start. So, the sooner the better, wouldn’t you say? After all, the work’s starting to pile up a bit on your desk; you know how it is, wouldn’t even occur to anybody to do anything while you’re away, just let it form snowdrifts in the in-tray. Just so long as they’ve got room to get the office door open to bring the post in, they’re not bothered.’

  Now that, Artofel conceded, was no lie; it was also, however, a universal truth. In other words, it wasn’t necessarily evidence that whoever he was talking to actually came from Hell, just that at some point in his life he’d worked in an office. ‘So what’s the plan?’ he said.

  ‘Leave that with us,’ said the voice. ‘We’ll get right back to you as soon as we’ve tied up a few loose ends with the rest of the project. Shouldn’t take too long.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Meanwhile, enjoy your holiday. Or at least, try not to have too horrible a time. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Great. Ciao for now.’

  Click, said the phone, and Artofel put it back. Food for thought was putting it mildly; at this rate, Thought would soon have enough raw material to open its own chain of takeaways. The salient points were straightforward enough; it was the why? that he couldn’t quite get his head around. Probably be no problem if he had his head . . .

  Crash! went the penny, suddenly and violently dropping. Scrolling back through his recollections, Artofel closed in on the phrase - what was it? - ‘a few loose ends with the rest of the project’. Surely not.

  No. It’d mean . . .

  Cast your mind back to when you used to do jigsaw puzzles; and you’d done roughly the first third, and there’s this one piece which fits perfectly in what you’re convinced is the wrong slot. So you try it everywhere else, and it won’t go. Or consider the crossword clue that can’t be what it obviously is, because that’d throw out everything else.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Artofel muttered. It wasn’t really an exclamation. More a sort of prayer.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Dermot Fraud crawled out of the phone box, a broken lemming.

  In a sense, he reflected, it was the story of his life. All that effort, that hard work, that furious energy and desperate ingenuity, in order to scramble up into a very high place; only to find, once he was actually there, that nobody could hear him or understand what the hell he was trying to say to them.

  Ascending to a great height. You don’t have to be a lemming, but it helps.
>
  He’d heard the inner voice again, during that moment of blank despair just after the Home Secretary had rung off, taking Fraud’s only coin with him. Go on, the voice had urged him, do the sensible thing and jump.What are you, a lemming or a man?

  He hadn’t jumped; instead, he’d crawled, scrambled, bumped and slithered his way back down again - much, much harder than getting up there in the first place - and now here he was, back on the ground where he’d started, with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

  How long he wandered aimlessly, where he went, what risks he ran, he never knew. Didn’t care. Couldn’t give a damn. As far as he was concerned, any car that ran him over, any cat that ate him, would be doing him a favour and saving him a job.

  Eventually, however, he realised that he was very tired; and, since he stood just as good a chance of getting squashed or eaten asleep as awake, he might as well get his head down for an hour or so before finally finding some way to pack it all in. Further consideration led him to form the view that if he was going to sleep, he might as well do so in relative comfort, preferably out of the heavy rain that was just starting to fall. Raindrops hit you harder when you’re five inches long. Fortunately, he hadn’t gone far when he found himself staring upwards at a vaguely familiar shape.

  Lorry.

  From where he was huddling, of course, it didn’t look much like a lorry; more like some vast alien spacecraft hovering noiselessly in the air. He observed that the tailgate was down, and the driver was busy hauling something off a fork-lift. No trouble at all to scuttle up the ramp, find a nice cosy fold of a tarpaulin at the back of the cargo compartment, snuggle down and close his eyes.

  When he opened them again, there was daylight streaming in through the open tailgate, and huge men with great clumpy boots shifting wooden crates. Realising that he must have been asleep for the whole duration of the journey, he sat up, planned a relatively safe course that’d get him to the back of the lorry and scuttled.

  Down the ramp, steering well clear of human feet and the wheels of slow, ponderous trolleys, and out into the open air. There was a big pallet of boxes not far away; he sprinted over, squirmed into the gap at the foot of the pallet and settled down to listen and observe.

  Not that he could see an awful lot from where he was cowering: Tarmac, the back tyres of the lorry, the occasional passing boot. He could, however, hear the men talking, and it was disconcerting to find that they weren’t speaking English. No linguist, he couldn’t make out what the language was. That in itself strongly suggested that he wasn’t in England any more. Either that or he was on Tyneside; and even God couldn’t hate him enough to send him there, surely.

  No, the strange language wasn’t Geordie; too many vowels. He twitched his whiskers thoughtfully. Unlikely that he’d been asleep long enough to have left Europe; that narrowed it down a little. Other data? Well, for one thing it was perishing cold, which might help him to rule out Spain and southern Italy. Northern Europe, maybe? Scandinavia?

  Scandinavia; well, there’d be a certain malicious logic to that. If Destiny really was out to get him (and if there’s one thing you do learn in politics, it’s that all conspiracy theories are true), it was so obvious as to be boring. After all, where else would Fate send a born-again lemming?

  So. So what? Did it really make any difference where he was so long as he was what he was?

  A fork-lift rumbled by, drenching him in oily mud. As he winced and shook the worst of it out of his fur, he rationalised; and the answer was, quite definitely, yes. In fact, you’d have to be thick or a back bencher not to have seen it coming from the word go.

  Lemmings are native to Scandinavia. Lemmings are also gregarious; intensely, lethally so. And they crave leadership, in the same way and to the same effect as humans do. And here he was.

  A leader.

  It’s fairly true to say that most great leaders start off with a sense of having a mission, something that they very much want to do in order to make the world a better place. It’s equally true, or more so, that by the time this idealistic zeal has powered its bearer to the pinnacles of achievement, it’s undergone a few drastic changes, to the point where making the world a better place and not getting slung out at the next election are so irrevocably fused together in the subject’s mind as to render him about as likely to improve the lot of his fellow man as a bad outbreak of plague. But what if (Fraud reasoned) Fate were to give a truly great leader a second chance? After all, to the Almighty the lives and wellbeing of rodents are probably just as significant as those of human beings. Perhaps this was where his real mission had been, right from the very start. Perhaps he’d been destined all along to be a truly great leader of lemmings . . .

  The lorry he’d come on fired up its engine and growled away, showering him with small stones and further supplies of muddy oil in the process. He scarcely noticed. At last, like a homing pigeon in Trafalgar Square, his destiny had finally muddled through and found him out. So that was all right. Now there was nothing left to do but go forth and meet his people.

  Cowardice being the better part of discretion, he waited until all the boots and fork-lifts and other big heavy obstacles had cleared off before he crept out, by which time it was dark and even colder than before. In fact it was starting to snow; and it doesn’t take a heavy snowfall to bog you down when you’re toe-high to a wellie. He struggled along doing Good King Wenceslas impressions for a while, reflecting as he did so that it was an awfully long time since he’d had anything to eat and he owed it to his electorate to keep his strength up. Fortunately he found an abandoned pot noodle lying above the snowline; he crawled in, gobbled until he felt vaguely sick, and set off again, making progress through the deepening snow like a one-seventy-second-scale snowplough. To begin with, it was all highly symbolic and really quite romantic. Then it was bloody hard work. By the time he’d gone three feet he was comprehensively knackered.

  ‘Hello,’ said a voice.

  ‘Uh?’ Fraud replied. He’d have liked to be able to turn his head to see who was talking to him, but it was wedged between two moraines of snow and he didn’t have the strength.

  ‘Why are you doing that?’ the voice said.

  ‘Wha?’

  ‘I said, why are you doing that?’ The voice sounded tolerantly bemused. ‘None of my business, of course. Are you in training for something?’

  ‘Hoozat?’ Fraud croaked.

  ‘Haven’t seen you in these parts before,’ the voice went on. ‘New round here, are you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Fraud grunted. ‘Help.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Help. Help. Help. Help.’

  ‘Oh, you want me to help you out of there, is that it? Right you are. Be with you in a jiffy.’

  Although his ears were as deeply frozen as a packet of Sainsbury’s prawns, Fraud fancied he could just make out a pattering noise, like distant elves morris-dancing inside a packet of soap powder. Hallucinations, he told himself. Captain Oates and all that. Hey, if this is being a great leader of lemmings, you can stuff it.

  ‘All right, lads,’ said the voice. ‘Gently now. Poor devil’s frozen solid. Now, when I say heave . . .’

  He was too numb to feel anything much; but he was vaguely aware of snuffling and pattering all around him, soft noses prodding his sides and back, rodent jaws clamping shut in his fur; and then he was being lifted, carried, dragged across the top of the snow by a group of fawn-furred animals of approximately his own size and build.

  ‘Lemmings?’ he squeaked faintly.

  ‘Who else? Right, mind his head on the roof. No, down your side . . . Never mind. Okay, put him down, let the poor bugger thaw out a bit.’

  The rescue party had brought him into some sort of cover or shelter; he couldn’t see what it was, since it was pitch dark, but the strong smell of petrol suggested it was an oil drum. He tried to move his limbs, but couldn’t. The fact that they were starting to hurt, however, suggested that he was just beginning to defrost; thanks, no doubt,
to all the warm, furry bodies pressed up against him. It was like being in an underground compartment full of people in mink coats; chucking out time at the Royal Opera House, something like that.

  Belay that thought. Best not to dwell on fur coats in the present company. A tiny voice in the back of his mind did suggest that if he ever got out of this and back into the mortal body of Dermot Fraud, there was one hell of a commercial opportunity here; but he filed it away for future reference and cleared his mental desk.

  ‘Thanks,’ he muttered.

  ‘Anything for a fellow lemming,’ replied a jovial voice behind his left shoulder.

  ‘Pleased to be able to help,’ said another, just due south of his backside.

  ‘That’s what friends are for,’ added a third, directly ahead of him. It occurred to Dermot Fraud that his new-found companions shared with his previous close acquaintances the knack of being able to say the same thing over and over again in slightly different ways. Perhaps he’d stumbled on some sort of lemming parliament. On the other hand, the fact that, having found him helpless and alone, they’d saved his life rather than tearing him into small pieces suggested that that wasn’t the case.

  Which reminded him. Somewhere in the upper air, Destiny was yawning and drumming its fingers. Mustn’t keep Destiny waiting.

  ‘So,’ Fraud said. ‘You’re lemmings.’

  Short, mildly baffled silence. ‘Yes. We know. So are you.’

  Oh Christ, so I am, I’d forgotten. ‘That’s right,’ Fraud said quickly. ‘I’m one of us, definitely. Ich bin ein Lemming.’ He paused, struggling to reunite his train of thought. ‘And lemmings united,’ he added tentatively, ‘can never be defeated.’

  ‘Yes we can,’ said a voice to his right. ‘Quite easily.’

  For a moment, Fraud found himself speculating as to whether Destiny had got the wrong number. ‘Yes, but—’ he said.

  ‘United,’ the voice went on, ‘we’re an absolute pushover. It’s when we all split up and run about in different directions that the predators get confused and go away. About the only thing we do when we’re united is jump off—’