Sleeping Late On Judgement Day (44 page)

He gave me a look, mostly cynical, but with just enough interest to make me feel like a real bastard, because even I didn't believe any of my half-baked ideas had a chance of working. Too many variables, especially variables as crazy as whether Eligor could be trusted. Yeah, that's what I said. If we had even the tiniest chance to survive this, it would be because the archduke of Hell, who hated my guts and had already swindled me several times, would decide to do something that would help me. He'd accepted the deal I offered him in Five Page Mill, but that meant exactly nothing. In fact, since even if he fucked me again, Eligor himself would stay fat and happy, the odds were distinctly against his honoring his promise.

“Options? Tell me,” Sam said.

“Is it safe? Can all these people be trusted?” Clarence asked.

It was a fair question, but as I said, none of the Kainos-folk seemed to be listening. Still, I beckoned Sam and the kid to get up and move with me a little farther away from the camp. It wasn't until long afterward that I realized I never checked to see where exactly Ed Walker had gone.

“It's like this,” I said when we'd settled ourselves against an outcropping some distance away. “We really don't have a prayer—no pun intended—against our goddess friend if we're just going to try to trade shots with her.”

“We're not going to trade any shots, anyway,” said Sam. “You may have noticed that other than the Mecca cube, there isn't any technology here that would make a medieval peasant scratch his head. We've got arrows, spears, clubs. Shit, we haven't even got around to smelting bronze yet. So how are we going to fight You-Know-Who? This isn't Kansas, but it isn't the Emerald City, either. You could throw the world's biggest bucket of water on her, and it wouldn't do a thing.”

“I know. But I'm not just going to lie down and die, either. The bitch has been after me for months, sent that Smyler psychopath after me, brainwashed Walter Sanders and banished him to Hell—yeah, I know, kid, I haven't told you about that, but guess what, she did. Oh, and she murdered a really nice young woman who was a friend of mine. And now she wants you and me on a stick, Sam. You too, Clarence, since you're with us. She won't leave any witnesses.”

“Harrison,” he said.

“Huh?”

“You promised you'd stop calling me Clarence.”

“Shit, yeah, I did. Look, if we survive, I promise I'll do better.”

“That's so like you, Bobby,” he said, but without too much heat. “Give a promise you know you won't have to live up to.”

“The only kind worth making, my friend, the only kind worth making. Now, just let me spin out some stupid, hopeless ideas, and you guys can start shooting them down.”

“I'm too tired,” Sam complained. “Can't I just tell you now that you're full of shit, it won't work, and you'll get us all killed, so I can get some sleep?”

“Not a chance, big guy. We're all in this for the duration, but it may go down as soon as the sun comes up, so we need to do our talking now.”

Sam sighed. “Shit. You probably won't stop talking even if you
do
burn up.”

So, as the familiar and yet wildly foreign stars wheeled through the sky above us and the camp fell into silence and sleep, I explained to them the novel way I'd figured out to get us all killed.

Because who wants to die some boring, old-fashioned way?

I
T STARTED
snowing during the night, swirling tiny white flakes that stuck in hair and clothing but never came thick enough to make drifts on the ground. Not until the wind rose, anyway. After that it all moved pretty quickly into what you'd expect in the hills in midwinter back home, and that's basically where we were, even if this was a California that hadn't known a human footstep until recently.

I was finding it hard to sleep, so I got up and wandered through the camp and out to the edge where I could brood by myself. As I stepped out of the last knot of Kainos-folk sleeping huddled together for warmth, I saw a lone woman standing sentry, several layers of cloth and skins wrapped around her, a spear in one hand and something I couldn't quite make out in her other. I could see it, of course, because I have Super Angel Vision (a bit better than human normal, not really x-ray eyes or anything) but it was way too weird-looking to be any weapon I could think of. The sentry watched me approach without saying a word, but she seemed to make a small, strange noise as I passed. It took me a moment to realize it was the sound of her teeth chattering. I turned back.

“You sound cold. Can I take the watch for you?”

She stared. “You're an angel, aren't you?”

I had the feeling that we weren't quite as popular as we used to be, but I told the truth. “I am. Doloriel.” I stuck out my hand. “But back on Earth I'm called Bobby.”

She nodded, clearly quite used to the phrase, “back on Earth,” but she didn't look particularly thrilled to meet me. “An angel. Are you friends with Sammariel?”

“Years and years.”

She nodded again. “He's from San Judas, same as I am. A lot of us early ones were, like Ed.” Behind the very red tip of her nose was a young, intelligent face—everybody was fairly young here, at least in appearance—and a pair of dark eyes that looked like they'd seen things their owner wished they hadn't. “You know Ed?”

Now it was my turn to nod. “Only now, in the flesh, but yes.”

“Yeah, everybody knows Ed. He's kind of the mayor. Well, not really—that's Nathalie Weng, but only because Ed said if we elected him he wouldn't do it.”

I had become a little uncomfortable about Edward Walker. It was hard to reconcile the quiet, angry man I'd met with the well-known and apparently popular scientist and businessman whose life I'd studied. Still, there wasn't really any precedent for what he and the others had been through. “And you are?”

“Oh, sorry.” She stuck her spear into the ground, butt-first, and extended a hand in a fingerless glove of the burlap cloth I already thought of as “Kainos cotton.” “Lyra Garza—Lyra, like the star. My father was an amateur astronomer.”

I couldn't help smiling a little at the coincidence. My Counterstrike unit had been the
Lyrae
, nicknamed “the Harps.” “Where in Jude are you from? Because I'm from there, too.”

“Small world,” she said, then looked around. “Almost literally, at least the human population.” She shook her head. “A few hundred of us, max, with a whole world to explore and build in. Then this shit happens. Sorry. I was at Stanford. I lived in Barron Park, over by the university.”

“Downtown, me, usually somewhere within walking distance of Beeger Square. I've been meaning to ask you—what's that thing you're holding?”

She looked quickly from her spear to the weird, bulbous object. “Oh, this? It's a rattle. Dried oak gall, a big one, full of rocks. In case I have to wake everybody up. It's pretty loud.” She squinted at me as she pushed a wisp of hair from her face. “You offered to take my watch, didn't you? That was nice, but no. I want to do my part, and I'm not going to be much of a fighter if it comes to it.”

“I hope it won't come to it,” I said. “At least not for you and the rest of the . . .” I trailed off. “I forgot to ask Sam—what do you call yourselves?”

She smiled, and for the first time I saw her as something other than a poor soul shivering on a cold hillside. “We argued about that a lot at first. We spoke lots of different languages at home, and now we're all speaking . . . well, whatever it is we're speaking here, and the words have different meanings.” She laughed. “I'd love to study it, actually, this angelic language thing, and how it translates to all of us. That's a career study and more, right there. I was an etymologist—was, who am I kidding? Always will be. Anyway, you can imagine, lots of smart, freaked-out people. In the beginning we were much happier arguing than exploring or building, most of us. I think it was the . . . well, to be honest, the religious nature of what had happened to us that made us settle on ‘pilgrims'.”

“Pilgrims, huh? But you wound up being more the Plymouth Rock kind than the going-to-Canterbury kind.”

“A little of both of those, I think. But we're also the going-to-Lourdes kind.”

“Hoping for a miracle?”

“Well, we sure are now.”

 • • • 

I took a long walk, thinking about what Lyra said and a million other things. I wandered until I would have worried about finding my way back if I was a normal human, but my sense of smell and direction were both pretty good, so I located the camp again without trouble. Dawn was still a short time away, but most of the pilgrims were up and getting ready to move. Getting ready to walk toward danger and maybe even destruction. Talking to Lyra Garza had made it even clearer to me that even if I hadn't been involved in bringing them all here, as Sam had, I still wanted badly to keep these people safe. And if that unlikely circumstance actually came to pass, it would be interesting to see what happened with this little colony of pilgrim souls starting over again on what was, for all purposes, Earth Two—The Reboot.

In the cold, windy dark, Sam explained to the pilgrims what he thought should be done to ensure their chance at survival. There were questions, of course, lots of them, but I was surprised and pleased by how practical most of them were. A few were adamant about wanting to keep running, that they didn't want to take the kind of risks Sam and I were talking about. We told them they could go, but only a couple of dozen actually left. That surprised me, too.

Shortly after sunrise we started out. At least we hadn't needed to feed everyone. They say Earth armies march on their stomachs, but ours could survive on heavenly righteousness alone. At least until the serious shit started happening. Then all the righteousness in the world wasn't going to save us.

Clarence was way too chatty for this early, especially in a world where I couldn't get any coffee, so I sent him off to talk to various folk Sam had picked out to handle different parts of our plan. Besides, I wanted to chat with Sam in private, and privacy was already pretty damn hard to come by, surrounded as we were by nervous pilgrims.

The private talk didn't happen right away. First Sam and I had to have a long meeting with Nathalie Weng, an Anglo-Chinese woman from Shanghai with the self-confident air of a tiny General Douglas MacArthur. I liked her, and I liked her deputy as well, a thin, thoughtful young man named Farber, who had lived in Freiburg while he was alive. I say young, but he mentioned how a bomb had flattened his house “during the war,” and I don't think he meant the Gulf War since, as far as I know, that conflict never reached southern Germany. That was the thing about the Kainos people—they looked like the student-age counselors at a summer camp, but most of them had probably reached seventy or eighty before they died, some of them more.

Ed Walker stayed close to us but didn't actively participate. Still, he was a constant presence even when he was a dozen yards away, and it was clear that Walker had clout no one else did. Several times I saw Mayor Weng look over at him as if to make sure he agreed.

“Our people here are all hard workers,” Weng told Sam and me. “All achievers, and they've got young, healthy bodies, but we're a little short on engineers and military folk.”

“I'm hoping we don't need those things,” I said. “Other than the special volunteers, we're not planning anything that requires real expertise, just labor. In fact, after we get set up there, I want all your people who aren't actually involved to move as far away as possible.”

“You won't have much trouble convincing them,” she said. “We're all pretty shocked by what happened to the others. None of us wants to die again so soon.”

At last, all our mental lists cross-checked, Weng and Farber went off to do their own organizing and, I suspect, deliver a few pep talks. I finally had a chance to talk to Sam without an audience.

“What about the God Glove?” I said. “I asked last night, but you obviously didn't want to talk in front of Clarence.”

“No, I just didn't want to get into an argument in front Ed Walker and all those the other people. Kinda sucks for human morale, to watch angels call each other names. Because I can't use it, B.”

“It's the only real power we've got.”

“I thought I already told you about this. We all had them, all of us Magian angels. And when she did her Wicked Witch number, Phidorathon tried to use his glove against her. He burned up. Ed Walker was there—he saw the whole thing, but he didn't know what was really going on. He thought it was something Anaita did to Fred, but I know better. That's what happens when you try to use something like the God Glove against the Power that gave it to you.”

I tried to hide my disappointment, but he could see what I was feeling. We've known each other too long not to know things like that. “Can it at least let me make one private call on the Mecca cube?” I asked. “Without Anaita finding out?”

“Don't know. Maybe. But she's probably going to know about it.”

“Well, my idea would work anyway—not that it's
going
to work, but in a hypothetical sense it could all still work even if she intercepts the call. She'll still show up. But she'll be a lot harder to beat.”

“I'll do my best, B.” Sam punched my shoulder. It sort of hurt. “I say we think of it as an interesting challenge, a bunch of stone-age savages trying to take down a goddess.”

“They're not stone age.”

“But their technology is.
Our
technology, too, because that's all you and I have to work with. Let's face it, this is going to be one of those Butch and Sundance things.”

“Yeah,” I said. I hope I didn't sound as miserable as I felt. “I just hope the rest of these folks survive so someone will remember the cool things we said as we were blowing up.”

“Yeah. Me too. I was planning on, ‘Oh, shit!' How about you?”

“Well, now I'm going to have to think of a new one, since you're using mine.”

 • • • 

It was a long walk through the hills back to the house, and although everybody was reasonably young and fit, more than a few had sustained injuries in their initial escape from Anaita's deadly tantrum, so the line got a bit strung out. If it hadn't been for the cold air and snow flurries, and if I'd been wearing something warmer than a light jacket and t-shirt, it might have been a pleasant winter's walk in the California hills. Except, of course, this wasn't the same California, and back in the real one, autumn wasn't even technically over yet. There was definitely a time slippage between here and Earth, and it made me wonder about some of the other differences.

“Not that much, really,” said Sam when I asked him. “When we first got here, nobody died, of course. That's one of the reasons this group is so worried and fucked-up now. They thought of this as the afterlife, and afterlife usually means immortality.”

“What do you mean, nobody died. Should anybody have?”

“One of the men, African guy named Chima, had a tree fall on him when we were timber-cutting for the new houses. See, after the first few weeks it was pretty clear we were going to need more housing, so we made hand axes and started cutting down trees to make log cabins. None of the people here have really done this stuff, and some idiot planned his fall wrong. Chima couldn't get out from under it. He should have died on the spot—that was a couple of thousand pounds of hardwood—but not only didn't he die, his bones knit back together in about a week, and he was up and around again not too long after that. He didn't even limp. I'd introduce you to him, but he was one of the people near the house when Anaita showed up.”

“Shit. So he actually died three times.”

“Maybe. That would probably be the world record for humans, but since he hasn't come back this time, I don't know how proud he's feeling about it.”

“Anything else different here that we can use? People with odd abilities?”

“No. The mortals we brought here, the pilgrims as they call themselves, are just tougher than at home, but not stronger. Harder to kill—or they used to be.”