Only Human

by Tom Holt

  ‘We’ll be back for the picture in a minute,’ one of them said over his shoulder. ‘Right then, to me, mind the bleedin’ door . . .’

  The picture . . .

  Time, Maria realised, to act quickly and decisively. She therefore spent the next four minutes standing on first one foot and then the other trying to puzzle out what to do. It was only the thump of boots in the corridor that snapped her out of it.

  They’re coming back. They’re coming for the picture. They’re coming for me.

  Within all of us, the hypothesis runs, no matter how droopy and wet we may appear, there is in fact a coiled spring of instinctive action just waiting for the moment when it can find release. Some of us, indeed, make full use of this latent facility, to the extent that we stop acting like people and become hard to tell apart from hyperactive cuckoo clocks. Others never even suspect, which makes the explosion all the more astonishing when it actually happens.

  At the very moment when the door handle began to turn, Maria vaulted over her desk, grabbed the picture in both hands, lifted it (they may be taking the furniture but they haven’t disconnected the alarm systems; drat), located the window and jumped.

  Furthermore, the hypothesis states, it’s worth bearing in mind that seven times out of ten the things we do under the influence of the uncoiling spring of instinct are in fact incredibly stupid. Such as, for example, jumping through a fifteenth-storey window. The hypothesis doesn’t make any allowance for whether the jumper is or is not holding a fourteenth-century painting at the time; presumably because that was more or less the time when the research funding ran out and the researchers had to pack it in and go find themselves proper jobs.

  Ah, said Maria to herself, as the world was suddenly filled with an awful lot of fast-moving Down. Not so clever, after all.

  In fact, she was wrong. Instinct would probably have explained it to her, if only she’d had the wit to ask. You’re going to be all right, Instinct would have told her, because immediately before you’re due to hit the ground and go splat! a squadron of winged demons will snatch you out of the air and carry you off bodily to the Fourth Circle of Hell. If only you’d asked, it would add, I could have set your mind at rest.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The eclipse was starting to get boring. No change is virtually never news, particularly if it has to compete with BROOKSIDE STAR IN LOTTERY SEX SCANDAL and the latest food scare. Mad dogs and Englishmen were getting used to going out in the midday darkness; it was like the dark mornings and long evenings of winter, when nobody gets to see the sun because they’re cooped up in the office or the factory. Light is, after all, a bit like freedom; take it away gradually and people won’t notice it isn’t there any more. And if they notice, get the papers to tell ’em it gives you cancer. That’s how elections are won.

  Where Artofel came from there isn’t any daylight at the best of times, with the result that he moved through the darkened streets with the smug skill of a blind man in a power cut. He found a discarded copy of that morning’s Dependent in a litter bin; the previous owner had removed the only good thing there’d been in it, leaving behind a few grains of salt and traces of vinegar, but the financial section was still just about legible. From it he learned of the fall of Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits. I did that, he reflected; me and a bishop, the forces of light and darkness pulling together as a team. As the thought crossed his mind he couldn’t help glancing upwards, to where a similar joint venture was still very definitely in progress. Difference is, he mused, that’s just two sources of illumination standing in each other’s light; two rights making a wrong. Different kettle of worms, that. Not to mention someone else’s problem.

  In any event, we did what we set out to do; now let’s find out if there was any point to it. Flush ’em out, we reckoned. Maybe we didn’t really think it through properly at the time. Seemed like a good idea; but that’s not a good enough excuse for someone who comes from a place where the Highways Department use good intentions instead of concrete slabs and Tarmac. Artofel winced; if it proved to be the case that he’d killed a major company for nothing, he’d have it on his conscience for ever.

  Oh bugger, he muttered to himself, screwing the newspaper up and returning it to the bin. And all I wanted was to do the right thing.

  The mathematics of it was interesting, nevertheless. Two wrongs don’t make a right; two rights make a wrong. Given enough blackboard space and a computer the size of Jupiter, he could probably work that up into a theorem. Maybe even get his own TV show.

  The logical course of action was to go and have a drink, and fortuitously he found that he was standing opposite the doorway of a public house. It turned out to be one of those cheerful places where the regulars look like they’ve been slung off a pirate ship for antisocial behaviour, and there are inexplicable claw marks all the way down one side of the pool table. People who stroll through the door in mid-afternoon wearing clerical collars tend to get noticed.

  ‘Large Scotch,’ Artofel said, sliding on to a bar stool, ‘no ice. And a packet of those dry roasted peanuts the young lady on the display card’s wearing. No, not that packet, the one next to it on your left.’

  Four Scotches later, Artofel resumed his study of the problem in hand. If the consortium of rogue Flipsiders had been using KIC as some sort of vehicle for whatever it was they were up to, what would they be likely to do now that he’d trashed the company? Give up? He doubted that. The maxim If at first you don’t succeed, put someone else’s initials on the worksheet only really applied to the purely administrative grades of Hell. The operational side were rather more persistent in their approach. Compared to a demon with a fixed objective and nothing much else in particular to do, Robert the Bruce’s spider was an early quitter. Likewise, he’d evaded capture once so far, but that didn’t mean anything. Just because you narrowly avoid being hit by a bus, it doesn’t mean you’re immune to buses for ever afterwards. It was a fairly safe bet they’d come for him again some time soon. If he gave them the slip a second time, all he’d be doing was running up legal fees with the lawyers of averages. Much better to try and use what time he still had to get his rabbit-punch in first.

  ‘Another?’

  Artofel nodded. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘can I ask you something?’

  The barman looked at him. ‘Depends,’ he said.

  ‘No big deal,’ Artofel assured him. ‘It’s just that I’m on the run from a conspiracy of demonic powers hell-bent on doing something incredibly evil. If you were me and you had just the one 10p coin, who’d you phone?’

  The barman shrugged. ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘God, maybe. If you want money for the payphone, I can change you a quid.’

  Artofel shook his head. ‘I tried Him,’ he replied. ‘Or at least I tried a bishop. All that happened was that we destroyed a major corporation and I nearly got caught and dragged back to Hell. No, I was thinking more along the lines of somewhere I could keep out of sight for a bit. Any ideas?’

  ‘How about Broadmoor? I reckon you’d fit in well up there.’

  ‘Sorry, can’t say I’ve heard of it. Is it far?’

  ‘Get lost.’

  ‘I probably will if you don’t tell me how to get there.’

  Before he could say anything else, the barman was called away to fill an order at the other end of the bar, leaving Artofel to reflect on the strange fact that if you want people to regard you as a lunatic and give you a wide berth, the surest way is to tell them the truth.

  Well, now. By now he was fairly certain there was no way he’d be able to outwit or outrun this horrid consortium by using any of the resources he had by virtue of being a Duke of Hell; after all, for all he knew they all had strings of titles and two-page entries in Crowley’s Peerage as good as his or better. The so-called proper channels weren’t even worth considering. It was all very well, this idea that if some wicked person breaks the Infernal Law, the honest citizen has only to step into a handy phone booth, dial 666 and ask for the Old Nic
k; in practice it doesn’t work that way any more Flipside than it does on mortal Earth. If he were to do that, Artofel knew perfectly well, his chances of getting away with merely making things slightly worse for himself were as slim as an aerobics instructor on a hunger strike. All that was left to him was finding some human way of dealing with the problem; something humans can do that devils and angels can’t.

  Such as?

  Ten minutes of methodical self-enquiry left him with a list of uniquely human abilities that consisted of precisely one entry. They could die. Apart from that, it was a case of anything you can do, with horns on.

  What about that, though?

  Maybe it wasn’t as silly as it sounded. The body he was in was mortal, but he wasn’t; it by no means followed that if the body died, he’d have to go with it. After all, just because your socks wear out, it doesn’t mean you have to follow them to the grave like the wives of some barbarian chieftain. Now, then; if the consortium needed him for this peculiar deal of theirs, it’d snooker them proper if he killed himself and wasn’t available for research purposes as a result. It was also the best chance he could see of getting back home, to his office and his in-tray and his filing cabinets and the framed Hieronymus Bosch print on the wall above his familiar chair. Certainly worth considering—

  He finished his drink and called for another. It arrived, with the absolute minimum of involvement from the barman. At least one thing he’d tried in the last few days had worked like it should.

  Worth considering, but out of the question, because it wasn’t his body. If he killed it, there’d be this poor homeless vicar with no flesh-and-bone overcoat to come back to once this was all over. Bad enough for the poor chap to have spent the last few weeks locked up in the cells as an enemy alien; no, he couldn’t do it. It’d be wrong. Besides, suicide was a sin, and there was a little matter of demarcation to think about.

  So what else do humans do that we don’t? In practice, that is, as opposed to in theory. There must be something . . .

  Well of course, there’s . . .

  Nah.

  Surely not.

  But it wasn’t as if he was exactly spoilt for choice. Sure, it wasn’t something exclusively human; birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it. But not the forces of darkness. Absolutely positive about that.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  ‘Now what do you want?’

  ‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ Artofel said to the barman, ‘but in order to save the human race, not to mention the entire cosmos and quite possibly God, it’s rather imperative that I fall in love at once. Since I have no previous experience of the process, can you give me any basic advice?’

  The barman looked at him for a moment.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Piss off before I bash your head in.’

  Artofel’s forehead creased in a slight frown. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Should I take that as a definite no, or . . .?’

  ‘Out.’

  ‘Because, you see,’ Artofel went on, ‘if I do something really out of character, something that’s fundamentally at odds with my true demonic nature, it’ll mean I’m not really a proper demon any more and I won’t be any use to this diabolic consortium I was telling you about. And without me, I rather get the impression they can’t do anything . . . So you see, it’s really rather vital that I—’

  About a fifteenth of a second later he hit the pavement, bounced off a dustbin and a parked car and came to rest in the gutter outside the pub.

  ‘Blast,’ he said.

  He opened his eyes; and found that he was staring at something rather out of the ordinary. The most he could make of them was that they weren’t feet. More like tentacles, except that no octopus he’d ever heard of had tentacles shaped like that.

  ‘If you’re who I think you are,’ he said without looking up, ‘those things aren’t regulation issue.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Stick to the cloven hooves, son,’ Artofel sighed. ‘The Service is no place for designer footwear.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ repeated the voice, with a slightly different inflection, ‘but I’m from another planet, and I was wondering if you could spare me a few moments to tell me about your idea of the Supreme Being.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I assume you have one,’ the proprietor of the not-quite-tentacles continued. ‘There’s a lot of references to a Supreme Being in your cultural matrix. For instance, who is God?’

  Slowly Artofel lifted his head and looked up at what the pseudopods were attached to. It gave him a nasty turn.

  ‘Did you say you’re from a different planet?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ whatever it was replied. ‘I’m doing a preliminary report on your planet for the folks back home, and this is one aspect of your civilisation I haven’t covered yet. Now then, this God. Am I to understand that as you perceive Him, your Supreme Being is three in one?’

  Artofel shook his head. ‘I think you’ll find that’s a kind of penetrating oil,’ he replied. ‘Actually, you’ve come to the right place, because I work for Him. In two capacities,’ he added, wincing.

  ‘I see. This is fascinating. Please go on.’

  Quite possibly, Artofel said to himself, I’m not the first person to see something like this after being thrown out of this particular pub. Chances are I won’t be the last, either. What I resent is knowing that it’s not just a hallucination. ‘It’s rather difficult to explain,’ he went on. ‘Basically, you see, I work for the forces of Evil, but right now I’m on secondment to Good. Like a sort of exchange visit, if you follow me. See how the other half lives, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the alien, clearly perplexed. ‘Now, excuse my asking, but why did you just fly out through that door at high speed and land uncomfortably on the ground?’

  ‘I was chucked out. For being a nuisance.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘But that’s just a sort of temporary diversion. Now I’ve got to go and find someone to fall in love with.’

  ‘I see. Now then, your conception of the Supreme Being—’

  ‘Right,’ Artofel said. ‘He’s about so high, a bit broader across the shoulders than me, white hair, long beard, got this way of looking at you out of the corner of His eye. I can give you His address, but I think He’s away from home at the moment.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ the alien interrupted. ‘You speak as if you’ve seen Him.’

  ‘Of course I have,’ Artofel replied. ‘We all have. I mean, I’m not saying I know Him personally, in any real sense. I was introduced to Him once at a garden party, but just to say hello.’

  ‘Let me see if I’ve got this straight,’ said the alien. ‘You’re telling me you’ve actually met your Supreme Being.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘And talked to Him.’

  ‘Just a few words, like I said.There was a whole queue of us, you see, waiting to be introduced, quick handshake and out again. Still, it’s all good public relations, isn’t it?’

  ‘Pardon my saying this,’ said the alien cautiously, ‘but you don’t sound as if you were, well, particularly impressed.’

  Artofel shrugged. ‘Can’t say I was. Nothing against Him, mind; perfectly pleasant He was, not standoffish or anything, very polite. I suppose it’s all the practice He gets, because he’s doing that sort of thing all the time.’

  ‘Your God spends a lot of time being polite to His subjects?’

  Artofel nodded. ‘A certain amount of basic showmanship goes with the territory,’ he said. ‘You know what they say: keep the little people happy and the big people will follow suit. And anyhow, we’re all on the same side, so . . .’

  ‘You are? Oh. Right.’ The alien shuffled its pseudopods thoughtfully. ‘You mentioned just now that you have to go and jump in something. What was—?’

  ‘Not jump,’ Artofel corrected. ‘Fall. In love.You see, it’s rather complicated but I’ve got to fall in love in order to save the human race and the entire divine
hierarchy. I could explain,’ he added, ‘but it’d take rather a long time.’

  ‘Quite. When you say save—’

  ‘From a bunch of low-lifes who’re out to get Him. Talking of which, I’d love to stay here chatting but I’d better be getting on. All the best with your researches.’

  ‘Thanks.Yes. Right.’ Artofel couldn’t be sure, because as far as body language went, the alien didn’t half talk funny; but it gave the impression of pulling itself together with extreme difficulty. ‘Thank you for your time. You’ve been most . . .Yes. Thank you. Goodbye.You did say love, didn’t you? I thought so. Sorry, I think my translator unit’s malfunctioning, because . . . Yes, well, anyway. Bye.’

  When the alien had squelched away, Artofel got up, dusted himself off and looked around for someone to fall in love with. Can’t be difficult, he reassured himself. If they can do, so can I.

  Oh well. Here goes.

  He caught sight of a briskly moving figure on the other side of the street and followed after it. About forty-five seconds later there was a flurry of conversation which ended in a loud crunching noise and the howl of a Duke of Hell suddenly afflicted with pain in parts of his anatomy he didn’t know he had. A few minutes later, the same sequence of events was repeated. A few minutes after that, the same.

  Brimstone, Artofel reflected, as he sat on the steps of a bank waiting for the pain to subside. And yet this is how these losers are supposed to reproduce. Beats me how come there’s so many of them, let alone why they bother. Still, here we go again—

  This time, the sound of stockinged knee on worsted was so loud it rattled the windows. Which goes some way towards explaining why, when the commando of Infernal stormtroopers he’d only recently escaped from caught up with him a few minutes later, he had neither the strength nor the willpower to run.