Only Human

by Tom Holt

  There was a long, rather unpleasant silence, disturbed only by Artofel sniggering and the rasp of teeth on steel as the Prime Minister tried to gnaw through the bars of the cage.

  ‘Bother,’ said the fifth demon.

  ‘Don’t listen to her,’ the female said. ‘That’s human logic talking. Gods don’t think like that. Do they?’ she added.

  ‘Want to bet?’ Maria replied aggressively. ‘I seem to remember something about being created in somebody else’s image. I’d invite you to look at it more as a case of Him having a very ugly picture of himself in his attic Or, if you prefer, ask yourself who’s taking away whose sins? All the things He didn’t want to be, shoved off on a bunch of expendables? And you’re asking His equivalents in the dimension next door to lay out good money for a new line in the raw materials of religion -’

  ‘Canon fodder,’ Artofel mumbled.

  ‘- who’re going to be fully justified in turning round when He forgives them and forgiving Him right back.With brass knobs on. Not an inspired investment, if you ask me.’

  ‘Paintings,’ said the female demon icily, ‘should be seen and not heard. If I’d wanted a talking picture, I’d have kidnapped Mickey Mouse. Let’s get these three minced up and add the fourth one later, shall we?’

  Her four colleagues looked away, shuffling their executive-shod hooves.

  ‘Seems to me the marketing side of this project’s not been thought through properly,’ Buffy said. ‘Perhaps before we do anything totally irrevocable—’

  ‘Buffy!’

  ‘Yes, but hang on,’ the male demon objected. ‘Before you start playing Frankenstein-meets-Delia-Smith with Government property—’

  ‘Buffy!’

  ‘Look, I’m not trying to be difficult or anything, it’s just that what she’s just been saying does make a tenuous sort of sense, so if you could possibly see your way clear to explaining . . .’

  The female demon’s brows met in a thundery black line. ‘Buffy . . .’ she said ominously.

  ‘Ah. Right. I see. Why didn’t you say so before?’

  In the middle of a continuum of slowly moving particles roughly analogous to a river, a float bobbed.

  ‘Dad! You’ve got a bite!’

  The older of the two fishermen pushed his hat on to the back of his head, grabbed his rod off its forked stand and began to turn the handle of his reel. The float ducked under the surface of the continuum. The line went taut.

  ‘About ruddy time too,’ the fisherman said. ‘How many days’ve we been here?’

  The younger fisherman frowned. ‘That’s not the point, though, surely. I thought the point was for you and me to spend some quality time together, just the two of us, give us a chance to revitalise our relationship by talking meaningfully about things we’d otherwise find it hard to discuss in our everyday environment . . .’

  ‘Shut up, I’m trying to concentrate.’

  ‘Sorry, Dad.’

  With a deft flick of his wrist, the older fisherman whipped his prize up out of the continuum; a long shiny silver fish, wriggling and arching its length in the choking air. The fisherman smiled fiercely, swung the fish towards him and reached for the short brass club, the sort invariably referred to as a priest, that lay in the top compartment of his tackle box.

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘What’re you doing?’

  ‘What’s it look like I’m doing,’ the older fisherman replied.

  His son looked worried. ‘You’re not going to . . . to kill it, are you?’

  ‘No, I’m going to lend it money so it can start up its own family-run dry-cleaning business. Course I’m going to kill it.’

  ‘But you can’t. Dad, it’s alive . . .’

  ‘Son, maybe I’ve neglected your education in a number of pertinent areas. I know the perishing thing’s alive.That’s why I’m going to kill it. Where the Flipside would be the point of killing it if it was already dead?’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘It’s all right, really,’ said the fish.

  ‘Keep out of this, you.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  The younger fisherman was staring. ‘Dad,’ he said, ‘that fish is talking.’

  ‘I know. Luckily, we can do something about that.’ He raised the little club, searching for the best place to strike.

  ‘I forgive you,’ said the fish.

  ‘Oh nuts!’ Petulantly, the older fisherman flung his rod down on the grass. The fish flolloped a few times, gasping, and managed to flip itself back into the water. ‘Would you flaming well believe it?’ he growled.

  ‘Well,’ ventured the younger fisherman, ‘faith, together with hope and love, is one of the cornerstones of the true way . . .’

  ‘Finally,’ the older fisherman went on, biting through the line with his teeth, ‘after sitting on this damp, incredibly boring river-bank for I don’t know how long, finally I get one lousy miserable bite, and before I can bash the bleeder’s brains out, it has to go and forgive me. It’s all your fault, with your incessant ruddy moralising.’

  ‘Dad . . .’

  ‘It’s more than that, even. You know what, son? You’re always ruddy well preaching at me. Holier-than-thou attitude. Well, I’ve had enough, understood?’

  ‘Dad . . .’

  The older fisherman stood up and started flinging tackle angrily into his box. ‘Ruddy silly idea in the first place,’ he said, ‘coming here when I’ve got a business to run. Anyway, that does it. We’re leaving.’

  The younger fisherman sighed. ‘Yes, Dad.’

  I forgive you, Karen said.

  Nobody could hear her (presumably something to do with her being dead) but she said it anyway. It seemed the right thing to do, somehow.

  To forgive, divine. Define divine—

  (Well, that’s one good thing. I’d never have been able to say that if I was still alive.)

  Define divine. Let me see - immortal, invisible, ineffable, all the in-words. Do I qualify?Yes, yes and presumably yes, though I’m not really sure I know what ineffable means. Is that all there is to it? Dunno. Wasn’t there something about being omnipresent—

  (And as the thought crossed her mind, she happened to glance down and noticed the Golden Gate Bridge, the Sydney Opera House, the Great Wall and ever such a lot of houses and fields and things, all apparently sharing the same bit of space with Kennington tube station. Ah, she muttered, no wonder this place gets crowded in the rush hour.)

  And omnipotent—

  (Well, I’m not that, for certain.There’s all sorts of things I can’t do. Like fly, and see all the kingdoms of the Earth, and drift through walls. Oh. All sorts of other things I can’t do . . .)

  And - what were the other ones? Ah yes, the compassionate, the merciful.

  Oh.

  She had a horrible feeling that it was all starting to make sense; and although she had nothing against sense as such, she couldn’t help resenting the fact that she’d had to get squashed by a train first. For pity’s sake, where was the logic in some innocent person having to get killed before everybody could be forgiven?

  No sense at all.

  It’s design faults like these in the fabric of theology that put the mess in Messiah. Query: can you have a girl Messiah? A Missiah? Oh, whyever not? When you think about it practically, the job description - someone who comes along when the system’s tied itself in knots and has to be sorted out - turns out to be remarkably similar to that of, say, a helpline girl. There was also a rather ghastly symmetry to it all: divine error, human rectification.

  To err is divine, to forgive is human? Taking away the sins of Heaven? Surely not.

  Or at least highly improbable. But the odds against are no greater than, for instance, the odds against a regular commuter on a routine journey getting pushed under a tube train.

  Oh, she said to herself. Oh well, fair enough. If only my old Sunday-school teacher could see me now, wouldn’t she be surprised?

  Meanwhile, up abo
ve, the sun came out.

  ‘Robot.’

  ‘Yes, boss?’

  ‘You’re sure we’re going the right way?’

  ‘Just following the directions the gook gave me, boss.’

  ‘Oh.’ Len shrugged. ‘What’s a gook?’

  ‘This is, boss.’

  The demon on the other end of the robot’s titanium-clawed hydraulic arm squealed and wriggled, to no effect. As the only member of the snatch squad to survive, it knew it was frightfully lucky. It was also just beginning to realise that not all luck is necessarily good.

  ‘Oh. Right. Just seems to be taking rather a long time, that’s all.’

  He tutted, and looked at his watch. It had taken him rather longer than he’d anticipated to adapt the Shipcock & Adley universal milling and turning machine for light-speed travel, largely because at a crucial moment he hadn’t been able to remember where he’d put the three-eighths Whitworth spanner. Now that they were up and airborne, acceleration to light speed was proving a tedious business. Nought to 669,599,999 m.p.h. in 12.7 seconds; then they’d hit the damn flat spot in the power band. That’s what comes of rushing into a job without thinking it through first.

  ‘Coming up on the light speed now, boss.’

  ‘At bloody last. All right, stand by.’

  It had been fortuitous, to say the least, that a few seconds after he’d beaten the directions out of the one remaining demon, the sun had come out, thereby providing him with light to travel faster than. As an exercise in futility, playing chicken with relativity in pitch darkness competes with the Times crossword and learning to love policemen.

  ‘Light speed, boss.’

  Len nodded and threw the switch, crossing his fingers and hoping that the stellite-reinforced bracing cradle would hold.

  The engine went into reverse.

  Light doesn’t hang about; few and far between are the buses it’s too slow to catch, the egg-and-spoon races it enters without being fairly sure of winning. The same goes for its opposite number. To break through the dimensional barrier between the mortal world and Hell, you have to travel faster than darkness.

  ‘Now!’

  The gap can only be theoretical; and pretty ropy theory at that. For what it’s worth, the hypothesis states that between the zooming photon and the hotly pursuing darkness behind it there must be some sort of interval, no matter how tiny, or else light and dark would get all mixed up at the back edge and start to smudge like two lots of wet paint. It’s not an overwhelmingly convincing argument; don’t rely on it for a renewal of your research grant unless you want to run the risk of spending the rest of your scientific career testing safety cages for the Volvo corporation. On the other hand . . .

  ‘Yes!’

  . . . if it works, don’t knock it. Directly underneath the machine, Len could see a burning ocean, towering brimstone-spewing volcanoes, a ghastly red horizon and a big notice:HELL WELCOMES CARELESS DRIVERS

  ‘We did it!’ the robot. ‘Isn’t that something?’

  ‘Depends on what you mean by something,’ Len replied, preoccupied. It had just occurred to him that he didn’t actually know where in Hell he was supposed to be going.

  The fiery ocean parted abruptly into two blazing rivers separated by a mole of burning ice. Across the mouth of each river was a gantry sign. One said:GREEN CHANNEL

  Nothing to abandon

  and the other:RED CHANNEL

  Abandon hope here

  ‘Customs,’ Len muttered. ‘We haven’t got time for all this.’

  He hauled back on the joystick, lifting the machine well clear of both gantries. ‘Now which way?’ he demanded.

  ‘I’m trying to make sense of this map,’ the robot replied. ‘I reckon our best bet’d be to try and find the ring road. At least that’d keep us clear of the one-way system while you’re making up your mind where exactly it is we’re heading for.’

  Appropriately enough, Hell has some of the most advanced traffic calming systems in existence. Its sleeping policemen (made, needless to say, with the real thing) have to be gone over at incredibly high speeds to be believed; and if your suspension’s still functional after that, you’ve got the sleeping lawyers, politicians and tax inspectors to look forward to. Most visitors, in fact, leave their vehicles at the Park and Ride and take the metro, which is rather more salubrious than most human cities’ underground railway systems and smells considerably better.

  ‘Hunch time,’ Len said. ‘This way.’

  ‘Would this be a good time to point out that there is no free hunch?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘Right you are, then. Follow this for a bit, then when we reach Good Intentions Boulevard, take a left.’

  ‘Why? I haven’t the faintest idea where I’m going in any case.’

  ‘Why don’t we stop and ask somebody?’

  ‘Because . . .’ Len paused and shrugged. ‘All right, then. See if you can find somebody to ask.’

  He slackened off the throttle and pushed the stick forwards until they were cruising twenty-five yards or so above the sulphur-crested waves of the incandescent torrent. In the distance, Len could just make out a dark speck. He headed for it.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  The man in the midst of the fire looked up. ‘Hello?’ he said.

  ‘I wonder if you could help me. I’m looking for some very bad people.’

  The man scratched his head with the charred stumps of fingers. ‘You sure you’ve got the right place?’ he said.

  ‘Well, actually, no. If it’s any help, we want the staff toilets on Level - damn, I’ve forgotten. Here, you.’ He leaned back, waggled a mole wrench under the captive demon’s nose and scowled. ‘Which level did you say it was?’

  ‘Thirty-Six, and please don’t . . .’

  ‘Thirty-Six,’ Len repeated, swivelling back to face the man in the fire. ‘Any idea where that is?’

  The man nodded. ‘Carry on the way you’re going till you come to a huge mouth full of big teeth. That’ll take you down the levels. When you get to Thirty-Six, ask again.’

  ‘Cheers.’ Len bit his lip, wondering whether to ask the question that was intriguing him. ‘’Scuse me,’ he said, ‘but what’re you in for?’

  The man sighed, marked the place in the book he was reading and closed it. ‘While I was still alive,’ he said, ‘I was a great reader. Always reading books, I was.’

  ‘Fair enough. Even so . . .’

  ‘It wasn’t just that,’ the man replied. ‘I used to love going to meet the authors, too.’

  ‘Really?’ Len raised an eyebrow. ‘Still, I’d have thought help, rather than actual punishment . . .’

  ‘I haven’t finished yet. When I actually got to meet authors, I’d smile and shake ’em by the hand and say what a pleasure it was and so forth.’

  ‘Must’ve cost you a fortune in rubber gloves, that.’

  ‘Money isn’t everything. And then,’ the man went on, ‘I’d say what a great fan I was of their early work.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And wasn’t it a pity they didn’t write ’em like they used to.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘And how I’d borrowed their latest from the library, but it wasn’t a patch on their first book.’

  ‘Gosh.’

  ‘I know,’ the man replied sadly. ‘Shouldn’t have done it. Ah well, if you’ll excuse me.’ He opened his book. ‘I’ve just got to the bit where the tourist meets the wizard. I like that bit.’ He frowned. ‘Or at least, I used to. The seventy-five millionth time, maybe it’s starting to lose a bit of its sparkle.’

  Len eased the stick back, and the machine carried on into the red shadows. ‘Robot,’ he asked after a while, ‘what was all that about?’

  ‘Tell you later. Ah, this looks like the place.’

  Ahead of them, a vast mouth gawped up at them out of the fire. Fighting back an urge to stop and look around for a little mirror on a stick, Len directed the machine at the middle of the ope
ning and closed his eyes.

  Dermot Fraud huddled down inside his own fur, and whimpered.

  How long it had been since he’d been snatched from the lemming parliament and brought to this cold, dark place, he had no idea. All he knew was that he didn’t like it much. There was barely enough room to lie down, and nothing to lie down on except damp, musty sawdust. Three sides and the ceiling of the prison were sheer plywood; the fourth side was a wire mesh, on which he’d already broken a tooth in a vain attempt to gnaw his way to freedom. In one corner of the cage was a bottle-top containing a little brackish water; in the other a large, hateful-looking treadmill, the sort of thing prisoners and slaves get condemned to walk round inside for the rest of their lives. Without wanting to be unduly pessimistic, he couldn’t really see any good side to this situation. It was worse than being appointed Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.

  ‘Cheer up,’ said a voice in the darkness to his left.

  It wasn’t a comfortable voice; it was high and scratchy, with a sinister whine that put Fraud in mind of grand viziers and wicked uncles. He backed away until he was close up against the treadmill.

  ‘Hello?’ he quavered.

  ‘I said cheer up,’ said the voice. ‘No point letting it get to you.’

  ‘Isn’t there?’ There was another sound now beside the voice, a disturbing kind of scuttling. Never before, not even the time long ago when he was interviewed by Robin Day, had Fraud felt so helpless and claustrophobic. He peered into the dark, but there was nothing to see.