Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (17 page)

           
I
don’t have to explain myself.

           
The instant I saw it there, sitting
with the woman, I knew what it was. The stench of God was all over it, like
dried roots, like stored apples. Laughing! And a servant.

           
I am not a servant. We are not
servants. He Who We Serve is not our master, but our lover. We act from
our
will, no others. Could this... thing
say as much? Or any of its swooping, tending, message-bearing ilk?

           
And did its master really think he
could sweep away this compost heap without the knowledge of He Who We Serve? We
love
this world! How it seethes, how
it struggles, how it howls in pain, what
colors
there are in its agony! It is our greatest joy, the human race. We cannot see
it removed, like game pieces from a table at the end of the day, simply because
he’s
bored.

           
Don’t be afraid, you wretched
vermin. We will save you.

           
There is a language which is no
language, which we of the empyrean understand, and which these fallen creatures
still remember. While my human mouth made words, and his human mouth made
words, we spoke to one another:

           
“You have no place here,” I told
him, which was simply the truth.

           
He snarled at me. It is so hard to
believe these were once angels as well; how thoroughly they've forgotten their
former grace. He said, “This is more my place than yours.
I
am not here to destroy it.”

           
So his master knew what was going to
happen, did he? And, having learned nothing over the millennia about the
futility of opposing the desires of God, the master of this creature has sent
his minions into the field yet again, to do batde against God’s commandments. I
rose and said, “Don’t you know that the triumphs of Evil are always transitory?
God’s Will
will
be done.” “Not
today,” he said. “We want the woman.”

           
“You already have her,” I said,
glancing down at the poor diseased malevolent bitch. “But you can’t take her
with you just yet.”

           
“I want her now. I’ll take her now.”

           
It would of course be possible to
start again, to assemble another team, perhaps lingually linked in French this
time, shifting the basic scene from
New York
to
Lyons
, but I refused to do it. This creature and
his master must not be permitted even the most temporary successes. So I
resisted. Leaning closer to him, gazing through those dark sunglass lenses into
the red depth of his borrowed eyes, I said, “Do you really want an exchange of
miracles, here in a Boeing 747? Do you really want to give these humans an
array of anomalies to decipher?”

           
“All I want is the woman.” He was
trying to be implacable with me. Me!

           
“She is part of the plan.”

           
“That’s why I want her.”

           
“That’s why you can’t have her.”

           
He turned those eyes on the woman,
smoking burning eyes, and spoke to her in the human way: “Get up from there.”

           
“God Almighty,” I prayed, “grant me
a crumb of Your power.” The response lifted me gently into the air, my feet no
more than an inch from the industrial carpet. His attention swiveled from the
woman to me, his eyes showed alarm, then understanding. He raised a hand—

           
I stopped time.

           
Everything. It stopped. In all the
corporal universe, everything was rigid, unmoving, unfeeling, made of stone.
Energy was not employed, matter did not decay Nothing was kinetic, everything
was inert. In all of that vast silent stillness, flat and dead, without even an
echo, only that devil and I, in the clumsy airplane suspended in unmoving air
over the unturning Earth, continued to move, act, think, struggle.

           
His raised hand pointed at me, and
my body filled with leprous organisms, my eyes were clouded by cataracts, my
throat clogged with open sores. Toads sprang from my mouth. Every sense was
confounded, every thought distracted, every pain and woe at his command was
flung at me, to grapple and clamp me, addle my powers, deflect my intentions,
absorb me in self-defense while he got on about his prideful business.

           
I fought back. I swept away
everything he hurled at me, killing, searing, wiping clean, purifying as
rapidly as he befouled, until there came an instant of total freedom from his
onslaught. Then I looked at him. I looked at him with my
real
eyes.

           
That body he was wearing was burned
to a crisp. The body was reduced to ashes, the ashes to molecules in the
ambient air, till there was nothing left but a tiny, buzzing, furious black
fly, a black streak, a smear, a smudge, flashing back and forth in front of me,
shrieking its defiance. I was ready to destroy that manifestation as well, but
it fled away into business class, and I felt myself near the end of my borrowed
power. I had to restore the situation to what it had been.

           
I reconstructed the body the demon
had used, or a near enough facsimile, and inhabited it. The previous body I
carefully lowered until its shoes touched carpet once more, then left it simple
instructions that would carry it until I could return.

           
I released time.

           
The woman had been looking at my
former self, as though for help and rescue, and now she blinked and looked
confused. No doubt she’d seen that body appear to rise, then blur, then all at
once be back where it had been. But she would assume the error was in her eyes,
perhaps some manifestation of her terror, or of her disease. Already, she was
looking away from the old me toward the new me, afraid to obey my order and
afraid not to.

           
“Never mind,” I told her. This voice
was more guttural, this body more uncomfortable. I looked—almost with envy—at
my roomy former self. “Sit down,” I told it.

           
It sat. The expression on its face
remained stern. Its movements were only faintly off, only slightly in the
direction of the cumbersome.

           
“You both wait there,” I ordered,
waving the machine pistol with obvious menace. “I’ll get back to you. We’ll see
who you can defy.” And I turned away and marched toward the front of the
aircraft, to deal with my fellow hijackers. They were human, and would be no
trouble.

           
Pami watched the terrorist stride
away, beyond the partition and out of sight. What happened there? Her vision
was briefly blurred, her stomach and all of her insides were roiled and loose,
her mouth was as dry as the desert in which she’d grown up, her arms and feet
twitched uncontrollably.

           
But he didn’t take her when he went
away. The blond man had stood up and talked back to the terrorist, arguing with
him, saying not-to-pick-on-women-take-him-instead-and-this-and-that, and the
terrorist snarled and argued and was
of
course
not going to pay any attention to such stuff. And then he went away.

           
Pami peered sidelong, in awe and
fear and relief, at her rescuer. The blond man still looked stern. He sat there
with his big hands placed slackly on the armrests, feet planted, gazing forward
toward where the terrorist had disappeared. Pami whispered,
^cc
Will
he come back?”

           
^cc
We’ll just wait here,”
he said. Tension showed in how woodenly he sat and spoke, how he kept facing
forward as he talked.
^cc
We won’t make any moves, won’t attract
attention to ourselves.”

           
“Oh, yes.”

           
She dared to reach out and touch the
back of his hand for just an instant, and it was surprisingly cold. How much
effort it must have taken for him to stand up and defy an armed terrorist!

           
This was the only man in Pami’s
entire life toward whom she had ever had any reason to feel grateful. She
didn’t know what to do with the feeling, with the obligation. There was no way
to repay him, nothing she could give him or do for him. That would be some
expression of gratitude, wouldn’t it, to infect him with slim! A faint smile
touched her small, secret, twisted face, and she turned away to see the
turbanned man on her other side all scrunched up, eyes tight closed as he moved
a set of wooden beads through his trembling fingers. His heavy lips moved
without sound. Somebody’s religion, it must be.

           
Gunshots suddenly sounded from near
the front of the plane, many fast gunshots, and more screaming. And then
silence.

           
The turbanned man squeezed his
shoulders higher around his ears, pressed his beads harder between the balls of
his fingertips, and his lips moved faster and faster above his quaking round
chin. Everyone in this cabin waited, hardly daring to breathe, and the silence
went on and on.

           
Then all at once the blond man
shifted, seemed to relax, and nodded. He looked at Pami, who hadn’t noticed
before how powerful his eyes were. “So that’s that,” he said.

           
Calm. We will be calm. We shall not
indulge our wrath until it is of some use. But
then. Then!
·

           
It won the first round, yes it did,
that pallid serf, that spiridess spirit, god’s golem. Yes. They do win
sometimes, but that’s only to be expected; after all, we’re very evenly
matched. We were
like
them, Satan
protect us, before we won our freedom.

           
As for the widespread belief that
they
inevitably
win, well, that’s
just crap, isn’t it? Of course it is. If they
inevitably
won, we’d no longer be here, would we? But here we are.

           
And here
you
are, you scrofulous fleas. And now he’s after you as well,
isn’t he?
Now you’ll
know what it’s
like to suffer his snotty displeasure. But be encouraged. He can be resisted,
as we are here to prove. He was just an early master of propaganda, that’s all.

           
But how shall we save you bilious
earth-lice from your creator’s boredom? First we have to know what he’s up to. He’s
always, of course, up to
something:
testing Job and Isaac, tempting Thomas and Judas, on and on. Idle hands are
whose
workshop?

           
He Who We Serve was going to and fro
in the Earth, and walking up and down in it, as was his wont, when he came upon
one of the bloodiest slaughters of a Dane since the good old days of
Elsinore
. But the Dane
didn’t exist.
He reacted with the Njoroge woman, she sliced him
into stew meat, he died, and yet he was without existence. Once the woman had
fled with the sack of loot, the body vanished. The blood unsprayed itself. The
mattress became unslashed. The towels returned, laundered, to their folded
positions in the bathroom. The deed became, in short, undone.

           
God’s baroque hand was clear in this
playlet, because
we
hadn’t done it.
Pami Njoroge is not a creature we need to subvert. He Who We Serve maintains
contacts in the adversary’s camp, and even on occasion visits there himself, so
it didn’t take him long to find out what had really happened in that Nairobi
hotel room. Significandy, god isn’t using a slavey who’s already had extensive
contact with humans, one of his ordinary lickspittles like Michael or Gabriel
or Raphael. As spineless as the rest, they still might have developed some
sympathy for the wretched human race during previous contacts. So no, he chose
Ananayel, a timeserver, a mediocrity, as nondescript as an umbrella in the
lost-and-found.

           
But what is Ananayel doing? What is
that flunkey up to? Torturing a Bantu whore, yes, using elaborate stratagems to
move her from her normal mud wallow to the similar but far-off dung heap called
New York
, and at the same time encouraging in her
emotions of guilt and despair. But what is she to do, this blowfly, once she
gets to
New
York
?
How can a miserable midge like Pami Njoroge bear any direct responsibility for
the end of the human race? She has even less knowledge and power than normal
among her kind.

           
So there are others in the scheme.
That bleached sycophant, Ananayel, is assembling them, isn’t he, from
somewhere? Moving them to
New York
, putting them together, letting them do the job themselves. That’s
god’s way, isn’t it? Deniability. ‘They brought it on themselves,” he’ll say,
with that airy smugness of his.

           
Well, we’re alert now. We’re on the
job. My companions have spread across the world, searching for the spoor of
Ananayel’s passage. Whatever humans he has touched, chosen, altered, moved, we
will crush like a louse between a chimpanzee’s fingertips.

           
So that
you
will live.
You,
my
darlings.

           
The greatest good for the greatest
number. Hah!