Only Human (35 page)

‘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.

 

Distressing was putting it mildly. One minute, Karen had been engrossed in the search for a way to save God, the next she was loading the contents of her desk into a cardboard box and promising the loathsome Jenny from the next office down the row but one that they'd keep in touch. Strange, she said to herself as she waited for the lift, how quickly things can change.

What had done it? she wondered. About the only sudden and unexpected factor was the eclipse, which had now been going on for so long that she had difficulty remembering what it had been like before. A messy sort of white stuff poured over everything like custard, if memory served her, and a big shiny thing up in the sky. She wasn't even sure she could recall exactly what the shiny thing had looked like; in her mind's eye it had somehow merged with the stylised yellow blob from a child's painting. Now, when she tried to remember the sun, the image that came to her mind was more like luminous fried egg than anything that had ever existed for real.

Unlikely, though, that the eclipse had done for Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits; which only really left the abrupt and unheralded entry of God into its corporate life. Coincidence? Yeah, sure. And you could use her other leg for an emergency door-bell.

Anyway, she told herself, as she struggled with her cardboard box on the packed underground like a stereotype refugee, now it's none of my business and I can stop worrying about it. I can dismiss it from my mind and get on with the absolutely pathetically simple task of finding a new job.

Like hell.

Yes, that was all very well, but how was she supposed to continue the search, with no manual, no computer, no way of contacting Kevin Christ and absolutely zero chance of being believed by anybody she went to for help? If she couldn't crack it with all the resources of KIC to call on, she couldn't really expect to do better with nothing more sophisticated at her disposal than one of the early-Victorian coal-burning Amstrads and the Ladybird book of computer fault diagnosis. Forget it, Karen. You've got problems enough of your own.

Yes, but . . .

Yes but nothing. Out of my hands now. He's the
Almighty
, for pity's sake; big enough and ugly enough to take care of himself.

Yes. But.

Some clown bumped into her as she tried to scramble off the train at Waterloo, spilling the contents of her box and then darting off with only the echo of a mumbled ‘Sorry' hurled over his shoulder. By the time she'd picked up her fugitive property, which had rolled and bounced away between the feet of her sardine-packed fellow passengers, the train had moved on. Great. She'd have to get off at the next stop, change platforms, wait for the northbound train, go through all this again. It was things like this made her love the human race.

Human race.
Human
. First real lead you've had all along.

How dumb (she asked herself as she shoved through to the doors just before they closed) can you get? All those hours she'd spent trying to find a way of bypassing the computer's defences, and it hadn't occurred to her that she was trying to solve the wrong problem. Sloppy thinking. Human thinking. Not appropriate to a superhuman problem.

She sat down on a bench on Kennington station platform, and worked it out a step at a time. The key to it all was a simple formula, one she'd known ever since she was a kid. So obvious . . .

To err is human, to forgive divine. When human beings make mistakes, they worry away at them trying to put things right, trying to stick the pieces back together again with glue. Occasionally they succeed, sometimes they fail utterly and make things worse, frequently they half solve the problem and then leave it while they try and cope with the mess they've caused for themselves while they were trying to fix the original problem. That's the human way. That's what she'd been trying to do. Wrong.

The denizens of Heaven don't solve problems or fix mistakes; they forgive them. Confronted with the theft in the Garden of Eden, God didn't try and stick the apple back on the branch with Araldite or fill in the bitten-out chunk with fine-grade Polyfilla; he simply forgave, and that was that, problem solved. It'd be a nice trick, if you could manage it; simply forgiving the front door for sticking in the damp weather, or the carburettor for being flooded, sitting down with a blocked sink trap and talking it through like sensible, mature adults - quicker, easier and ever so much cheaper. But backed-up sinks and cars that won't start aren't divine problems: not usually.

More to the point, you've got to be divine to make it work, which explained why it hadn't actually solved anything when she decided to forgo her moral right to break the arm of the pillock who upset her cardboard box on the train. It was no use her forgiving the wretched computer; big deal. Somebody else was going to have to do that, and from what she knew of the situation the only person with the necessary qualification was sitting under a big umbrella on a river-bank somewhere. Still, what she didn't know about the precise way in which Heaven works could be written on a medium-sized Universe in letters the size of a hydrogen atom. Let them work out the minor operational details for themselves; she'd done the important part. Now all she had to do was tell them . . .

A task in respect of which the phrase
piece of cake
wasn't immediately appropriate. Phone the Pope? Go into Westminster Abbey and ask if they could forward a letter? Dammit, she shouldn't
have
to get in touch with them, they should come to her.

With a rumble of thunder like Thor after a hot curry, the train appeared out of the tunnel. The platform was crowded, and it wasn't easy to move about with her arms full of cardboard box. In fact, if she wasn't careful, she might end up getting shoved off the platform and under the train, which wouldn't help anybody.

Oddly enough, that was exactly what happened.

It was probably just as well that she was so preoccupied with righteous indignation against the second clumsy oaf she'd had the misfortune to be bumped into in the space of less than an hour that she didn't hear the
scrunch
as the train ran over her, let alone the rather nauseating fizz as all those busy volts ran up and down her nervous system, ringing bells and running away. In fact, she'd been dead for nearly a second and a half before she noticed, and that was only because she'd reached out for her a-present-from-Florence paperweight and found that her hand passed clean through it.

Oh, she said.

Telltale signs - the fact that she was looking down at the roof of the train rather than up at its chassis, that sort of thing - confirmed her initial suspicion. Oh
damn
. Well, that's that, then. And of all the blundering, careless idiots—

From her vantage point in the upper air she could see the blundering, careless idiot quite clearly. He looked as if he was having the worst moment of his life; quite probably, he was. Without even thinking about it, she forgave him.

And somehow, without having the faintest idea how she knew, she was aware that it had worked. She had forgiven him, he had been forgiven.

Problem solved.

In a manner of speaking, of course; it still left her quite undeniably dead for one thing, and it would have been nice if the omelette could have been made without her having to be the egg that got broken. Still, no point crying over spilt milk. Or, come to that, spilt anything else.

To forgive—

And then she knew.

 

Len woke up.

He had been dreaming; the long, silent, majestic dreams of machines, full of straight lines and right angles, of things that fitted exactly into other things, of keyways frictionless and true and the sharp, clean shine of newly cut metal. It was a beautiful dream; the sort of vision that might inspire a god to create a world.

‘Urgh,' he said. ‘Wassafuxat?'

Someone was bashing the workshop door. Len stood up, quickly trying to remember what he'd recently learned about balance and self-propelled biped movement. Why should anybody want to smash his door in at half past one in the morning?

‘Lock,' he said.

‘What's going on?'

Len scowled. Locks aren't the sensible person's immediate choice when information's needed in a hurry. As is only to be expected from mechanisms whose whole purpose is to be exact and to respond only to a perfectly correct key, they tend to be pedantic and fussy.

‘Who's bashing your door and why?' Len amended. ‘Any ideas?'

‘Ah,' Len said, as his brain fumbled for its trousers and put its teeth in. ‘Well, try and keep them out.'

‘Cheers, lock.'

‘Oh go on,' Len muttered, testing the three big Stilson wrenches for weight and balance. ‘Give it your best shot.'

‘Thanks anyway. Robot!'

‘Go 'way 's middle of night.'

‘Oh for . . .' Len had an idea. ‘Recalibrate your timescale for Hong Kong time. Robot!'

‘Here, boss!' At once the robot (for whom it was now 9 a.m.) shot out from its storage space under the bench and stood to attention, its facial mechanisms arranged in a beaming cybersmile. ‘Sleep okay, boss?'

‘Like a top. Robot, there are five heavies trying to smash the door down.'

‘Yes?'

‘Don't just stand there,' Len fumed. ‘Stop them.'

‘Um.'

For a moment, Len couldn't believe his ears. ‘What the devil do you mean, um? You're a robot, dammit.You don't know the meaning of fear.'

The robot shuffled its feet. ‘Actually, I do. Fear, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary
—'

‘Don't muck me about, robot. I gave you a direct order.'

‘I know.' The robot simpered. (How did it learn to do that? Len wondered. I don't remember fitting a simper relay.) ‘There's a problem. I can't.'

‘What?'

The robot bit its lip, or at least it tried to. There was a grating noise and a few sparks. ‘EC Directive 463837/99 on safety of machinery. Says machines aren't allowed to hurt people. Sorry.'

‘
What?
'

‘EC Directive 463837/99,' the robot repeated miserably. ‘All new mechanical appliances now have to conform to the specifications laid down by this directive, which states, and I'm paraphrasing slightly here, hurting people is wrong. For heaven's sake, you wouldn't want me to break the law, now would you?'

Len would have replied Yes at this point, if it hadn't been for the door giving way and the workshop suddenly filling with large, fast-moving bipeds. Even Len, whose experience of human beings was still rather limited, could tell that these weren't standard production-model
Homo sapiens
; too many head and claws, eyes in the wrong section of the anatomy, that sort of thing. They looked as if they'd been thrown together out of the contents of the leftovers in Frankenstein's spares box with a few bits from a car boot sale thrown in for good measure, and they were holding implements which, although unfamiliar, probably came under the heading of generic weapons.