The Book of Joby (122 page)

“
Was
he dead?” the Creator asked Gabe, patiently.

“He was,” Gabe said. “I saw him on the path, myself.”

“There you are.” The Creator shrugged, turning back to Lucifer. “He was dead, but now he’s not. . . . You seem to have a lot of trouble with that concept.”

Lucifer began to tremble like a broken steam engine. “Surely,” he protested, “You’re not going to pretend this contest was anything like fair!”

“On that, I must agree.” The Creator nodded. “It was hardly fair to anyone but you, who could do anything you liked, while all the rest of us were required to sit bound and gagged, just watching.”

“Are You
pretending
anybody actually
did
as so
required
?” Lucifer shrilled.

“I did,” said the Creator. “And your wager was with Me. We’ve been over all this before. If you’ve nothing new to say, I’d like to move along to more pleasant matters.”

“Oh no,” Lucifer growled. “No indeed. There are still some very
unpleasant
things to tend to, and if You think I’m going to walk quietly away with even one of them undone, You’re not half as omniscient as You claim.”

“Believe Me, Lucifer,” the Creator sighed, “you’re the last one I’d expect to leave an unpleasant thing undone. What is it that you think is left?”

Lucifer blinked, and stared. “You may think to get away with claiming victory where none was had,” he said in righteous indignation, “but at the very least, I have some damages to collect before I go. Their souls belong to me now! All three of them, by indelible rights far older than any wager we have ever made! You know how long You’ll last if You violate those rules. You’ll have no authority at all! You’ll be as impotent—”

“As you,” the Creator finished for him coldly. “I’m aware of that.”

“Well?” Lucifer demanded, breathing hard and smiling most unpleasantly. “You speak of truth and fairness, of rules and technicalities meticulously observed. Now it’s time,
My Lord,
to demonstrate Your vaunted
impartiality
and
justice
or give up any pretense of the moral authority that is Your only claim to rule. I want them
damned,
just as
I
was damned, for disobeying Your will.”

“Did they?” the Creator asked levelly, his wide gray eyes fixed unapologetically on Lucifer’s incredulous face.

Lucifer looked around at all the other gaping faces in the clearing as if expecting them to share his outrage. “Don’t be absurd! Everyone here is well aware of the countless times Your two pet angels and this hoary old enchanter have violated Your command against uninvited intervention!
That one,
” he spat whirling to point at Merlin, “has been at it since masquerading as a hag clear back in Berkeley!”

Gabe saw Joby give his grandfather a startled look.

“Ah, then as you, yourself, admit,” the Creator said, “it was only my
command
they violated. Not my
will.
” He shrugged. “I will concede that, had they disappointed me by doing otherwise, I doubt you
could
have lost this wager, Lucifer.”

Gabriel turned to stare in confusion at his Master, as did everyone else in the clearing—even his unflappable brother, Michael.

“What kind of . . .
insanity
. . . is
that
?” Lucifer choked out.

“When you first proposed this wager at that café in New England,” the Creator said with frightening severity, “you suggested—no,
insisted
very firmly—that my creation was inherently corrupt. ‘The rot in this insufferable contrivance of Yours has gone clear to the core.’ I think those were your
exact
words. I disagreed, as you’ll recall, and when you proposed your wager, saw My chance to settle what seemed to Me a very important question. Was the core of My creation inherently corrupt?

“While you set out to prove that, if I let you bring all Hell down on the shoulders of one barely suspecting boy, for half a lifetime, without any interference, he’d do something very naughty, I chose to wager something more
imaginative. I
was betting that,
at the core,
My creation was so
soundly
imbued with the laws of love and faith, compassion and
real
justice, that even if I, Myself, should command it to ignore those laws, it
would still not do so.
”

The Creator smiled at everyone around the clearing with unbearable affection and . . . was that gratitude? “At your urging, Lucifer,” the Creator said quietly, “for the first and only time in all of time, I uttered a command that did
not
express My
will
. And not one person in this clearing violated My
will
to keep that command.” The Creator turned first to Michael, then to Gabriel, and said, “Not even you, my angels, who have so seldom been required to think for yourselves in all these many eons.”

“But, Lord,” Gabriel stammered, “if You wanted us to think for ourselves, why didn’t You just ask us to?”

The Creator looked at him, a bit nonplussed. “Ah well,” he sighed. “As I recall, Rome was not built in a day.” He smiled at Gabriel with great fondness and sympathy, and said, “You are often much too anxious, my beloved friend, but I am very grateful to you for having been so quick to put love before blind law. Never give yourself to despair again, Gabe. I do not abandon anyone who has not very clearly wished Me to.”

Seeming unable to summon words sufficient to the occasion, Lucifer released a gurgling shriek, and began to jump up and down like an angry child, stamping flat the grass beneath his feet. “But, it’s not
fair
!” he raged. “You can’t let them all go when You threw all of us in Hell for—”

“I know you’re very disappointed,” the Creator said, as one might try to soothe a child, “but don’t you see it—still? These others only disobeyed My command because they
love
all that I love.” A deep sadness crossed the Creator’s face. “You, on the other hand, have always
hated
what I love, even on those rare occasions when you do obey My commands, and you know very well I didn’t make the Hell you live in.”

When Lucifer opened his mouth to object, the Creator waved a finger. “Don’t waste the breath. The others I cast to earth with you made of their confinement this very paradise that surrounds us now. You could easily have done the same, and still may do so, if you
will.
Even now, I make you the offer I made them. You could all return to Heaven once again.”

“If you are referring, Sir,” Lucifer sneered through clenched teeth, “to that offensive invitation to surrender my divinity for the paltry honor of
mingling
with the
hoi polloi
at your
little club,
my answer remains the same. I will never suffer
death,
” he proclaimed defiantly, “nor validate the kind of imperfection You indulge. I’ll persist until I have succeeded in prying open those
loving eyes
of Yours to the truth about how flawed, and, yes,
inherently corrupt,
this anthill of yours is! Then,
You
will owe
me
an apology!”

“Very well.” The Creator sighed. “But, since you’re so concerned with
perfect observances,
I
will
hold you to every last detail of what we wagered, including your offer to abort those
‘messy, messy,’
conflicts you were planning.”

“Have I any power to refuse?” Lucifer replied stiffly.

The Creator shook his head. “You’d better go then. I’m afraid you have a pretty
messy
house awaiting
you.
By way of friendly warning, there are some among your minions who feel you acted rather precipitously when you killed
Joby several years ahead of schedule. They seem to think your
timing
was a little off.”

Lucifer turned in smoldering rage to face the others in the clearing. “You were all in this together from the start, and I will make certain no one is left in Heaven or Hell who doesn’t see very clearly what you have done!”

“That’s very generous of you,” the Creator said. “Now, if you’ll leave without further histrionics, I
won’t
tell your
loyal
servants back in Hell what you’d have done with
them,
had they succeeded in helping to secure your victory.”

Lucifer paled, and vanished in an instant.

“My Lord,” said Michael deferentially, still on one knee when Lucifer had gone, “we are . . . none of us, to be . . . punished then?”

“What for?” said the Creator. “Failing to sacrifice all that I love most, even to spare yourselves damnation? What kind of employer would punish such behavior?” He shook His head. “Punishment has rarely much to do with justice anyway.”

Gabriel sat heavily on the mossy bowl behind him, so weak with inexpressible relief that, were angels capable of unconsciousness, he might well have fainted.

“None of you can know how long I’ve waited for this day!” the Creator chuckled. “Michael, stand, and look at Me.” When Michael did so, He said, “The love I know you’ve always born Me, dear old friend, is at last truly
perfected.
Can you not see that?”

Michael gazed at him a moment, then turned back to look at Merlin, who was grinning like a simpleton. Then both of them were laughing, though Michael’s laughter soon faltered, and he turned back to face his Master. “There were children that I should have saved,” he said, with obvious remorse.

“Yes, there were,” the Creator replied gravely. “You did not know that at the time, and you do know now that they are well provided for and happy where they are.”

To Gabe’s surprise, his Master turned to Joby then, and said severely, “Stop that now. The time for such lies is past.” When Joby looked up startled, the Creator said more gently, “Of course I hear you. I have never, for a second, ceased listening to your heart. Not in all these years. Ben had suffered much graver injuries than a pair of broken legs, Joby. If not for your desire that he should live, he would have died much earlier that night. His life had
run its proper course. The Cup had shown him this, though he didn’t understand until that moment all of what he’d seen. He already knew then who all of you had been before, and knew he mustn’t stay to put Guinevere through all of that again. The choice was his that night, despite you, Joby, as it should have been.” As He reached out to embrace Joby, the young man buried his face in the Creator’s robes and cried as freely as a child. “You’ve been trained to think in such disastrous ways,” the Creator said in quiet sadness. “And yet you never ceased to try, through so much disappointment, so many twisted outcomes. Everything My fallen angel ever taught you about yourself is lies, My beloved champion. You did very, very well.”

“But I saved nothing,” Joby wept. “Ben, and Laura, Hawk and Gypsy, all of Taubolt. Everything I ever loved is lost. I did nothing but survive!”

“Sometimes,” the Creator said, “just surviving takes far greater strength and courage than winning glorious victories does. Sometimes just surviving is the greatest victory anyone can ask. Now, though, it is time to heal the wounds you’ve suffered in My service. Stay here with Me awhile in this Garden, and feed your heart, Sir Joby.”

Joby idly arranged the objects on his desk again, though they’d been straightened countless times already. It had been a maddeningly quiet day at the counseling center.

Gazing out his office window, Joby started picking out people on the street and trying to imagine what their lives were like. So many of them, he supposed, must have wives or husbands to whom they said, “hello,” each morning, and “good night,” each evening; children who jumped into their arms when they got home. Maybe that one had played basketball or soccer back in high school, confident and content with himself as he’d gone off to college. Had he enjoyed a normal sex life, found a normal job, fallen normally in love and had a normal family—and taken his marvelously normal life all for granted? Objectively, Joby knew that all these people’s lives were composed as much of loneliness and frustration as of brighter things; and a great deal more boredom than he himself had been subjected to for quite some time. Still, he couldn’t lose the feeling that being normal must be more wonderful than anyone who’d been so ever suspected. At the very least they all
belonged
in so many ways that Joby never would.

Turning from the window, Joby had to concede that his life had not been dull or meaningless. How many people could claim to have helped save the world, or had their lives explained to them, face-to-face, by God? He was
sure that most would gladly throw their
normal
lives right out the window to have anything at all explained to them by God. But they didn’t really know what that would mean, did they, any more than he would ever really know what being normal meant to them.