Rudolph! (7 page)

"Who says we can't?"

I looked up at Rudolph. The reindeer's eyes were dark and light like shutters were blowing open on the furnace inside his head. "Oh no," I said. I knew what he was thinking. Santa may have wanted to see me, but Rudolph came to fetch me for something else entirely. "No way. I'm not going back there."

"Why not? We know the way. What more can they do to us?"

"You're out of your mind."

Rudolph laughed, and I flinched. Rudolph wanted to go back to purgatory. He wanted to make another raid on heaven for another soul.

Santa's soul.

II

I
went outside to clear my head. Specifically, I went up on the roof.
The angelic balloon hovered perfectly over the North Pole, its white fire halo bleaching the landscape. There was a line keeping it in place, and I traced the thin thread—losing it several times—down to the rooftop of the Residence.

On the far side of the climate control tower and the row of satellite dishes was a small lean-to made from bubble wrap and the plastic rods we got in bulk from a German weapons manufacturer. The same stuff that goes into those new H&K replicas carried by all the latest action figures. A worn lawn chair sat beneath the ragged structure, and a portable heater was partially submerged in a pool of tepid water beside the chair. A deep-sea fishing rod rested in a brace, and the line from the rod went straight up into the sky.

A man dressed in a long, white cloak was sitting in the lawn chair, reading a paperback novel. He looked up as I approached and gave me a dazzling smile that was more teeth than lip. His hair was cut close to his scalp, and his skin was a dark bronze. His eyes danced in his face like tiny sparks, and his fingers were long and finely boned. He reminded me of a wet seal.

"Hello," he said cheerfully, dropping a bookmark in place.

I nodded in return. The last time I had run into angels, they had been trying to kill me. I was—understandably—a little cautious.

"I didn't realize any of the little folk were left," he said breezily. "I had heard that most of you went to Alaska for the salmon fishing season."

"One assembly line to another," I murmured.

He shrugged. "Some are more suited to it than others. I'm glad they found work."

"How about Santa?" I asked. "You glad about him?"

The angel caught the edge in my voice and raised an eyebrow. "I'm sorry. I don't think I quite understand."

"Santa's dead."

Something flashed in his eyes, and his lips pressed firmly against his teeth for an instant. "Ah."

"You can get the hell out of here now," I said. "Your job's done."

The angel shook his head. "I'm afraid not."

My hands balled into fists. "What's left, you parasitic leech? The North Pole has been shut down, everyone's been driven off, and Santa's dead. What's left for you to pick through?"

He pointed skyward. "Orders from on High. You've been placed under Holy Quarantine. This whole area is subject to enforcement. You can go about your life if you like, but the office of Santa Claus has been shut down until further notice."

"How long is that?" I asked.

"Further notice?" he shrugged. "Substitute the word ‘eternity' if you need a little help on the bigger picture. Do I have to quote chapter and verse for you?"

"But why?"

"You might ask yourself that question, Mr. Bernard Rosewood. The last elf to be Senior Elf in Charge of Operations." He smiled at the expression crawling across my face. "Yes, I know who you are. You're a bit of a celebrity in heaven."

His fingers folded around themselves in a manner that seemed to bend space, and when they stopped, he was holding a folded sheet of paper. He held it out for me to see that it was not unlike the FBI's Most-Wanted posters you see in the Post Office. There were two pictures on the page: one of me, and one of Rudolph. Rudolph looked like someone had just slapped him with a salmon, and I looked like I was auditioning for
Sesame Street
. Typical.

"You were on duty that night, weren't you?" he asked. "It was your responsibility to avert crises, forestall disaster, head off certain catastrophe."

"But I did—"

"What did you do?" He caught me trying to read the fine print on the page, and his fingers did that trick again, making the paper vanish.

"I . . . I helped, I guess," I said.

"Bingo, Button Boy. And as an official Little Helper—" He flashed his grin at me again. "You still have your pin, don't you? As a Little Helper, you go down with the ship. So to speak."

I took a menacing step towards the seated angel. "Now just a minute. We were helping. We were bringing light. Not like you. Not like you towel-wrapped, feather-dusted, blood sucking—"

The angel clapped his hands. "Ooh. Name calling. This is grand. Are you going to hit me next?"

I stopped, my clenched fist dropping to my side. Taking a swing at him wouldn't solve anything. And anyway, he could blow me off the roof with even his tiniest exhalation.

I had wandered aimlessly out of the infirmary; Mrs. C and Rudolph hadn't tried to stop me. I was in shock. I was hurt and angry, and I wanted an explanation. My feet had brought me to the roof in search of that explanation, and my hands wanted to wring it from the angel. But my brain kept trying to be rational.

My eyes rested on the paperback in the angel's lap. It was a thriller by a famous writer who had died recently, but I didn't recognize the title. "I don't think I've read that one," I said conversationally, trying to resurrect that feeling of languid torpor that I had been trying so hard to perfect at the hotel.

"You haven't," the angel smiled. "He just finished it last week." He leaned forward, his voice dropping to a whisper. "There are no long publishing lead times in heaven."

My spine wanted to melt into my shoes, but I tried to keep the quaver out of my voice. "Maybe I could borrow it when you're done." I tried to affect a bored yawn, though it felt like my jaw would crack and fall off.

The angel laughed. He held out his hand. "We haven't properly met. I'm Ramiel."

I stared at his outstretched hand. Rational brain or no, I wasn't going to take that hand. We had gone toe-to-toe with the Host and had made them look bad. So, okay, maybe we had been asking for it by busting David Anderson out, but there was no way I was going to be that civil. Santa was . . . well, yeah, what was the point of being civil now, right?

I thrust my hands behind my back so he couldn't see how tight my fists were. "Okay Ramiel, now that we're on a first name basis, why don't you tell me the ‘chapter and verse' version of why you're here."

Ramiel cast his eyes heavenward in a ‘give me strength' manner. "Which ‘thou shalt not' would you like to hear first? Okay, let's start with ‘Thou shalt not worship any images but Mine.' I realize most of you don't remember much of the Old Testament, much less which Commandment that is, but the basic problem is that you performed a miracle last Christmas. On the day before the birthday of Jesus Christ, you performed a resurrection. How many people hoped that you would go one better and bring back the King of Glory on his birthday?"

"Elvis?" Rudolph interjected. He had come up like a silent fog and was standing in the snow behind me.

"The other King," Ramiel said politely, though his tone was crisp. "The point is that Santa performed a capital-M Miracle. Now, there are some things that you can get away with: being out of range of your dog when it shakes itself dry, making a parking meter stick, winning the lottery twice in a row, always getting the short line at the grocery store, and so on. But a resurrection is an entirely different class of miracle, and those are reserved for direct agents of the Man Upstairs." Ramiel spread his hands. "I barely get to influence parking, and I'm one of the Seven. Santa Claus is, let's face it, a minor deity. At best. This effected a huge swing in the balance of belief structures.

"What do you think would have happened this coming Christmas if we let you go unpunished. ‘What did you get for Christmas?' Suzy Anderson's schoolteacher asked her after the holidays. ‘I got my Daddy back,' she said. And after the school psychologist called Suzy's house and actually talked to dear old Dad, little Suzy brought him in for Show-and-Tell."

Ramiel waved his arms and dropped his voice an octave. "‘Hello kids, my name is David Anderson, and I was brought back to this mortal plane of existence by Santa Claus and his reindeer as my little girl's Christmas present. Does anyone have any questions about the afterlife?'"

"So what's your point?" I asked just to be difficult. I wasn't that dense. I had gotten the point pretty clearly, but somewhere during Ramiel's monologue I had snuck a peek at Rudolph, and I could tell from his body language that it was going to be impossible to talk him out of his damn fool plan. The one that required me to drink the same Kool-aid. If I let Ramiel ramble on enough, then maybe Rudolph would see the futility of his plan and back down. They might not have been expecting us the first time—God's attention to detail notwithstanding—but there was no way we were going to catch them by surprise a second time. And without that precious element, I didn't see how we had any chance at all. Less than a snowball's chance, in fact.

Ramiel was enjoying having an audience. If we were in grade school, he would have been the big kid who would have talked about what he would do to you if he had the time, but since recess was only fifteen minutes long, he was going to have to settle for beating your head against the tetherball pole for twelve of those precious minutes. But those other three? He would definitely fill them up with as much self-aggrandizing prattle as possible.

"My point is this," Ramiel said. "You minor leaguers have always coattailed on the important dates for the majors. And you couldn't be satisfied with that. You got a little greedy." He lifted his hands. "I can understand that. Hubris can happen to anyone. Just ask the guy who took the Long Drop. But you were supposed to have learned from his example; instead, here you are, trying to horn in on our territory like some overzealous vacuum cleaner salesmen."

"What if we apologize?" I asked, out of sheer curiosity more than any real hope. "A big press release apology. And, you know, a couple thousand Hail Marys and six lifetimes worth of community service? Can we get Santa back?"

Ramiel shook his head. "It's too late for that. Even if Santa was returned to this plane, what do you think is going to happen the day after Thanksgiving?"

"There won't be any parking at the mall?" Rudolph tried.

"No, it'll be the first day that the Church of Santa Claus will be open for business. And every mall across America—across the world—will have their own little altar and High Priest for you to visit and deposit your little prayer—your little tithe for something ‘extra-special' to come your way. What'll it be next year? Loved ones two years gone? Your favorite cat—Fluffy—get hit by a car? No problem, just drop on by the First Church of Claus and put in an order to get them back. Don't you worry your pretty little head about a thing. Santa always delivers. Who cares if your grandmother's been dead ten years. Santa always comes through for good little girls."

Ramiel leaned forward. "Look, I'm not trying to downplay what you guys did. It was a splendid thing. But you acted without thinking about the consequences. There's an order to this universe. There is a Plan. Didn't either of you read Revelation? Bringing back the dead has always been part of the agenda. It may seem like you did a little thing, but in ten years, will it be so little anymore? Where does it end? Who decides what Santa can't bring you for Christmas?"

I felt something crack in my spine. "What? You couldn't just come down and talk about it? You couldn't drop by and ask Santa to keep his gift-giving to more secular fare. Who gave you the right to shut us down and kill Santa? Is that justified by what we did? Is God that much of an asshole?"

Ramiel refused to get ruffled. "There's no need to be rude about it."

"Oh? We're just supposed to take this? We're just supposed to roll over and say ‘thank you' for this display of wisdom and justice?" The venom in my spine flooded my body. I realized I had been holding a lot of things back since that circus sideshow that had been the NPC investigation. First I lost my union card, and now Santa was gone. The venom flushed through my cheeks. "I did my job. Do you think that mattered? Do you think anyone cared? I lost everything—my apartment, my pension, my union card, my life—everything!—because I wanted to bring some happiness to someone's life. That little girl was hurting!" I was shouting now, screaming at the angel. "Hurt and lost and she wanted someone to help her. She turned to us. Why did she turn to us? Because no one else would listen to her. No one did anything to help this little girl's pain. What were we supposed to have done?"

Ramiel's voice was like steel beneath a bolt of silk. "Maybe nothing at all. Did you think of that?"

I jumped him. Rationally, I knew he was immortal and invulnerable and all those other ‘i' words that you use to describe angels, but I wanted to be sure. And if we were all wrong, then I wanted to be the one who broke his nose first.

III

I
sat in Mrs. C's private office and nursed my black eye. She had
a new computer—one with lots of RAM and a giant widescreen monitor—and I had a dozen windows open on a dozen different systems scattered across the world. Last time I had been going for stealth; this time I was using brute force. My code was busy gathering zombie machines and rerouting services, and there was nothing for me to do in the meantime but sulk and try not to fuss too much with the ice pack.

Rudolph had yanked me off the angel before things had gotten too out of hand, though Ramiel had totally taken a cheap shot as the reindeer hauled me away. A little sucker punch right in the face, burying a knuckle right in the corner of my left eye socket. Maybe he had been trying to egg me on, trying to get me to do something stupid enough that he could toss me off the building with impunity, but Rudolph lowered his horns, and the angel had backed off.

I had resisted at first, but when the pain from the angel's love tap forced its way through my anger, I relented and allowed Rudolph to lead me back to the stairwell down into the Residence. I had stopped at the door and looked back at the angel. Ramiel had never even gotten up, and he was calmly reading his book as if nothing had happened.

"I'm in," I had said to Rudolph. "Let's go find Santa."

"Give us some coordinates, Bernie," he had said. "We'll do the rest."

I had hacked into purgatory's system once. I could do it again.

Naturally, the Network Jockeys had forced a system wide password change as soon as we had gotten back last year, and some middle manager somewhere had been given a task force and a mandate to crawl all of the code to make sure there weren't any backdoors into the Elfnet. My fall from grace had been spectacular enough that someone had thought to be proactive and make sure I couldn't get all spiteful afterward. They had done a good job too. I couldn't fault them for missing the drop box in a Miami post office as well as a Platinum American Express card—the payments for which were coming like clockwork out of a union slush fund that no one remembered setting up. They had been worried about internal security, after all.

Like I said, I hadn't been planning on coming back. And while they could take away my union card, I was due a decent retirement plan. I gave a lot for the cause, after all.

It only took me a half hour to hack the electronic trail from that credit card account to the NPC accounts payable system, which was such a freaking black box that I knew none of the NJs or anyone in Technology Management had any idea what went on in the guts of that system. Which is where I had hidden my back door.

Spiteful? Me? No, just a careful planner. Like Rudolph said: always be prepared.

I had to assume that heaven's IT staff had done the same sort of audit after my last excursion, which meant a sledgehammer approach had a better chance of success this time around.

Ramiel had mentioned hubris, and I suppose you could apply that word to my
the world is a nail and I've got a planet-sized hammer
approach. But it's not my fault, truly. I blame technology. Technology screwed everything up. Sure, there are some truly labor saving devices out there (and I'm not talking about the Segway), and medical science has done a great deal in assisting humanity to a more prosperous, idyllic life on this planet, but, mostly? We've invented a lot of tech that does nothing but facilitate a ridiculous indifference to the world around us. Not to mention a rather unbecoming avarice and self-absorption.

It had happened to Santa, after all. If you want to talk about hubris, let's be honest about what happened last year. But it goes back farther than that, really. Back when your parents' parents were children, technology was a little slipperier. In fact, Santa was just coming out of what could be considered the Slippery Age. Christmas, more often than not, didn't happen overnight. It took anywhere from a couple of days to three weeks, depending on the surface mail or whatever horse and buggy routine the local carriers used. It was easier when half the world didn't believe in Fat Boy. Sure, the popular mythology says that bad kids got coal, but the way it actually worked was that bad kids (read kids who didn't believe) got nothing. It was easy, it was simple, and it drove the point home. If you believed, if you allowed yourself that tiny smidgen of imagination, then you made Santa's List. Well, the world got smaller, and the List got bigger, and the old methods weren't going to cut it anymore. Not only did these kids believe, but they believed that it happened on the night of December 25th. We didn't have the luxury of spreading it out over a week or two anymore.

We needed an angle, and the Trinity explosion in July of 1945 gave us that. We had a team inside Los Alamos, and while everyone was going all googly-eyed about the explosion in the desert, we were trying to figure out how to harness it. And with the help of a couple of big-brained pranksters from the labs, we did: we built the Nuclear Clock.

You remember
Miracle on 34th Street
? The film starring Maureen O'Hara and John Payne? You want to know the real reason it did so well when it came out in 1947? Well, think about it. The first time the Nuclear Clock had been used was the 1946 Season. Boom! Presents everywhere in one night! Santa's popularity exploded quicker than it takes small children to unwrap all of their presents under the tree. Sure a lot of social historians like to claim that the war being over was the root cause of all that festive year, but come on, the real reason? Santa Claus.

And when the Clock slipped in 1964, did we roll up the shutters and slink off? No. We made another clock—a better one—and kept going. Yeah, we lost some reindeer, and Rudolph became the strange thing that he is, but Christmas kept coming. Year after year after year. Nothing could stop Santa. The tech got better and better, as did the ability to deliver exactly what each and every kid wanted for Christmas. Capital M miracles aside, we were in the wish fulfillment business, and we got really good at it.

So good in fact that when the impossible request came in, Santa hadn't balked. We had gone into heaven and gotten a soul back. Because he could. Because he had the technology to do the job.

And that was why he died. Technology killed him.

If the world had been a simpler place, then it would have remained populated by simpler minds. And, frankly, simpler minds accept the mysterious and inscrutable as being just that: mysterious and inscrutable. They don't poke and prod and try to peek behind the curtain. You let the brain swell to fill the available space in the skull, and it starts to dream all sort of big dreams. Giant telescopes that can see to the edge of the expanding universe. Microscopes that look so far in the other direction that the fabric of reality can be measured. With these marvels, simplicity is left dead by the roadside, and the only companion you've got left in the vehicle is Complexity and his buddy, Fatal Error.

My windows started beeping, signaling that the code each had been running was finished. I had my army of slaved processors. I moused over the nearest window and typed the command that would launch my unified assault on the firewalls of purgatory. But my finger hovered over the ‘Enter' key for a second, not quite ready to commit to this course. I was about to launch such a denial of service assault that no one would be able to stream anything anywhere for at least an hour. All so that heaven's attention would be on their firewalls, and no one would notice the extra payload being slipped through on the back of the normalized data packets.

Complexity. Fatal Error. Hubris. While my zombie horde was tromping through the front part of the house, breaking the furniture and making a mess of the rugs, I would be casually perusing the books in the library, looking for a very specific volume.

There was still time to walk away. Still time to tell Rudolph that we weren't meant to do this—that we had been given a warning and left alive as an example to others.

But I knew what he would say: we were meant to make a different example.

And with that in mind, I pushed the button.