Job: A Comedy of Justice (45 page)

Daytimes we swam and sunbathed and rode horseback and picnicked out in the hills. In making this enclave Jerry had apparently pinched off many square miles; we appeared to be able to go as far as we liked in any direction.

Or perhaps I don’t understand at all how such things are done.

Strike out “perhaps”—I know as much about operations on the God level as a frog knows about Friday.

Jerry had been gone about a week when Rahab showed up at the breakfast table with my memoir manuscript. “Saint Alec, Lucifer sent instructions that you are to bring this up to date and keep it up to date.”

“All right. Will longhand do? Or, if there is a typewriter around, I guess I could hunt and peck.”

“You do it longhand; I’ll do a smooth draft. I’ve done lots of secretarial work for Prince Lucifer.”

“Katie, sometimes you call Him Jerry, sometimes Lucifer, never Satan.”

“Alec, He prefers ‘Lucifer’ but He answers to anything. ‘Jerry’ and ‘Katie’ were names invented for you and Marga—”

“And ‘Sybil,’” Sybil amended.

“And ‘Sybil.’ Yes, Egret. Do you want your own name back now?”

“No, I think it’s nice that Alec—and Marga—have names for us that no one else knows.”

“Just a minute,” I put in. “The day I met you, all three of you responded to those names as if you had worn them all your lives.”

“Mom and I are pretty fast at extemporaneous drama,” Sybil-Egret said. “They didn’t know they were fire-worshipers until I slipped it into the conversation. And I didn’t know I was a witch until Mom tipped me off. Israfel is pretty sharp, too. But he did have more time to think about his role.”

“So we were snookered in all directions. A couple of country cousins.”

“Alec,” Katie said to me earnestly, “Lucifer always has reasons for what He does. He rarely explains. His intentions are malevolent only toward malicious people…which you are not.”

We three were sunbathing by the pool when Jerry returned suddenly. He said abruptly to me, not even stopping first to speak to Katie: “Get your clothes on. We’re leaving at once.”

Katie bounced up, rushed in and got my clothes. The women had me dressed as fast as a fireman answering an alarm. Katie shoved my razor into my pocket, buttoned it. I announced, “I’m ready!”

“Where’s his manuscript?”

Again Katie rushed in, out again fast. “Here!”

In that brief time Jerry had grown twelve feet tall—and changed. He was still Jerry, but I now knew why Lucifer was known as the most beautiful of all the angels. “So long!” he said. “Rahab, I’ll call you if I can.” He started to pick me up.

“Wait! Egret and I must kiss him good-bye!”

“Oh. Make it snappy!”

They did, ritual pecks only, given simultaneously. Jerry grabbed me, held me like a child, and we went straight up. I had a quick glimpse of Sans Souci, the Palace, and the Plaza, then smoke and flame from the Pit covered them. We went on out of this world.

How we traveled, how long we traveled, where we traveled I do not know. It was like that endless fall to Hell, but made much more agreeable by Jerry’s arms. It reminded me of times when I was very young, two or three years old, when my father would sometimes pick me up after supper and hold me until I fell asleep.

I suppose I did sleep. After a long time I became alert by feeling Jerry sweeping in for a landing. He put me down, set me on my feet.

There was gravity here; I felt weight and “down” again had meaning. But I do not think we were on a planet. We seemed to be on a platform or a porch of some immensely large building. I could not see it because we were right up against it. Elsewhere there was nothing to see, just an amorphous twilight.

Jerry said, “Are you all right?”

“Yes. Yes, I think so.”

“Good. Listen carefully. I am about to take you in to see—no, for you to be seen by—an Entity who is to me, and to my brother your god Yahweh, as Yahweh is to you. Understand me?”

“Uh…maybe. I’m not sure.”

“A is to B as B is to C. To this Entity your lord god Jehovah is equivalent to a child building sand castles at a beach, then destroying them in childish tantrums. To Him I am a child, too. I look up to Him as you look up to your triple deity—father, son, and holy ghost. I don’t worship this Entity as God; He does not demand, does not expect, and does not want, that sort of bootlicking. Yahweh may be the only god who ever thought up that curious vice—at least I do not know of another planet or place in any universe where god-worship is practiced. But I am young and not much traveled.”

Jerry was watching me closely. He appeared to be troubled. “Alec, maybe this analogy will explain it. When you were growing up, did you ever have to take a pet to a veterinarian?”

“Yes. I didn’t like it because they always hated it so.”

“I don’t like it, either. Very well, you know what it is to take a sick or damaged animal to the vet. Then you had to wait while the doctor decided whether or not your pet could be made well. Or whether the kind and gentle thing to do was to put the little creature out of its misery. Is this not true?”

“Yes. Jerry, you’re telling me that things are dicey. Uncertain.”

“Utterly uncertain. No precedent. A human being has never been taken to this level before. I don’t know what He will do.”

“Okay. You told me before that there would be a risk.”

“Yes. You are in great danger. And so am I, although I think your danger is much greater than mine. But, Alec, I can assure you of this: If It decides to extinguish you, you will never know it. It is not a sadistic God.”

“‘It’—is it ‘It’ or ‘He’?”

“Uh…use ‘he.’ If It embodies, It will probably use a human appearance. If so, you can address Him as ‘Mr. Chairman’ or ‘Mr. Koshchei.’ Treat Him as you would a man much older than you are and one whom you respect highly.
Don’t
bow down or offer worship. Just stand your ground and tell the truth. If you die, die with dignity.”

The guard who stopped us at the door was not human—until I looked again and then he was human. And that characterizes the uncertainty of everything I saw at the place Jerry referred to as “The Branch Office.”

The guard said to me, “Strip down, please. Leave your clothes with me; you can pick them up later. What is that metal object?”

I explained that it was just a safety razor.

“And what is it for?”

“It’s a…a knife for cutting hair off the face.”

“You grow hair on your face?”

I tried to explain shaving.

“If you don’t want hair there, why do you grow it there? Is it a material of economic congress?”

“Jerry, I think I’m out of my depth.”

“I’ll handle it.” I suppose He then talked to the guard but I didn’t hear anything. Jerry said to me, “Leave your razor with your clothes. He thinks you are crazy but he thinks I am crazy, too. It doesn’t matter.”

Mr. Koshchei may be an “It” but to me He looked like a twin brother of Dr. Simmons, the vet back home in Kansas to whom I used to take cats and dogs, and once a turtle—the procession of small animals who shared my childhood. And the Chairman’s office looked exactly like Dr. Simmons’ office, even to the rolltop desk the doctor must have inherited from his grandfather. There was a well-remembered Seth Thomas eight-day clock on a little shelf over the doctor’s desk.

I realized (being cold sober and rested) that this was
not
Dr. Simmons and that the semblance was intentional but not intended to deceive. The Chairman, whatever He or It or She may be, had reached into my mind with some sort of hypnosis to create an ambience in which I could relax. Dr. Simmons used to pet an animal and talk to it, before he got down to the uncomfortable, unfamiliar, and often painful things that he had to do to that animal.

It had worked. It worked with me, too. I knew that Mr. Koshchei was not the old veterinary surgeon of my childhood…but this simulacrum brought out in me the same feeling of trust.

Mr. Koshchei looked up as we came in. He nodded to Jerry, glanced at me. “Sit down.”

We sat down. Mr. Koshchei turned back to His desk. My manuscript was on it. He picked it up, jogged the sheets straight, put them down. “How are things in your own bailiwick, Lucifer? Any problems?”

“No, Sir. Oh, the usual gripes about the air conditioning. Nothing I can’t handle.”

“Do you want to rule earth this millennium?”

“Hasn’t my brother claimed it?”

“Yahweh has claimed it, yes—he has pronounced Time Stop and torn it down. But I am not bound to let him rebuild. Do you want it? Answer Me.”

“Sir, I would much rather start with all-new materials.”

“All your guild prefer to start fresh. With no thought of the expense, of course. I could assign you to the Glaroon for a few cycles. How say you?”

Jerry was slow in answering. “I must leave it to the Chairman’s judgment.”

“You are quite right; you must. So we will discuss it later. Why have you interested yourself in this creature of your brother’s?”

I must have dropped off to sleep, for I saw puppies and kittens playing in a courtyard—and there was nothing of that sort there. I heard Jerry saying, “Mr. Chairman, almost everything about a human creature is ridiculous, except its ability to suffer bravely and die gallantly for whatever it loves and believes in. The validity of that belief, the appropriateness of that love, is irrelevant; it is the bravery and the gallantry that count. These are uniquely human qualities, independent of mankind’s creator, who has none of them himself—as I know, since he is my brother…and I lack them, too.

“You ask, why
this
animal, and why me? This one I picked up beside a road, a stray—and, putting aside its own troubles—much too big for it!—it devoted itself to a valiant (and fruitless) attempt to save my ‘soul’ by the rules it had been taught. That its attempt was misguided and useless does not matter; it tried hard on my behalf when it believed me to be in extreme danger. Now that it is in trouble I owe it an equal effort.”

Mr. Koshchei pushed his spectacles down His nose and looked over them. “You offer no reason why I should interfere with local authority.”

“Sir, is there not a guild rule requiring artists to be kind in their treatment of their volitionals?”

“No.”

Jerry looked daunted. “Sir, I must have misunderstood my training.”

“Yes, I think you have. There is an artistic principle—not a rule—that volitionals should be treated consistently. But to insist on kindness would be to eliminate that degree of freedom for which volition in creatures was invented. Without the possibility of tragedy the volitionals might as well be golems.”

“Sir, I think I understand that. But would the Chairman please amplify the artistic principle of consistent treatment?”

“Nothing complex about it, Lucifer. For a creature to act out its own minor art, the rules under which it acts must be either known to it or be such that the rules can become known through trial and error—with error not always fatal. In short the creature must be able to learn and to benefit by its experience.”

“Sir, that is exactly my complaint about my brother. See that record before You. Yahweh baited a trap and thereby lured this creature into a contest that it could not win—then declared the game over and took the prize from it. And, although this is an extreme case, a destruction test, this nevertheless is typical of his treatment of all his volitionals. Games so rigged that his creatures cannot win. For six millennia I got his losers…and many of them arrived in Hell catatonic with fear—fear of me, fear of an eternity of torture. They can’t believe they’ve been lied to. My therapists have to work hard to reorient the poor slobs. It’s not funny.”

Mr. Koshchei did not appear to listen. He leaned back in His old wooden swivel chair, making it creak—and, yes, I do know that the creak came out of my memories—and looked again at my memoir. He scratched the gray fringe around His bald pate and made an irritating noise, half whistle, half hum—also out of my buried memories of Doc Simmons, but utterly real.

“This female creature, the bait. A volitional?”

“In my opinion, yes, Mr. Chairman.”

(Good heavens, Jerry! Don’t you
know?)

“Then I think we may assume that this one would not be satisfied with a simulacrum.” He hummed and whistled through His teeth. “So let us look deeper.”

Mr. Koshchei’s office seemed small when we were admitted; now there were several others present: another angel who looked a lot like Jerry but older and with a pinched expression unlike Jerry’s expansive joviality, another older character who wore a long coat, a big broad-brimmed hat, a patch over one eye, and had a crow sitting on his shoulder, and—why, confound his arrogance!—Sam Crumpacker, that Dallas shyster.

Back of Crumpacker three men were lined up, well-fed types, and all vaguely familiar. I knew I had seen them before.

Then I got it. I had won a hundred (or was it a thousand?) from each of them on a most foolhardy bet.

I looked back at Crumpacker, and was angrier than ever—the scoundrel was now wearing my face!

I turned to Jerry and started to whisper urgently. “See that man over there? The one—”

“Shut up.”

“But—”

“Be quiet and listen.”

Jerry’s brother was speaking. “So who’s complaining? You want I should put on my Jesus hat and prove it? The fact that some of them make it proves it ain’t too hard—seven point one percent in this last batch, not counting golems. Not good enough? Who says?”

The old boy in the black hat said, “I count anything less than fifty percent a failure.”

“So who’s talking? Who lost ground to me every year for a millennium? How you handle your creatures; that’s your business. What I do with mine; that’s my business.”

“That’s why I’m here,” the big hat replied. “You grossly interfered with one of mine.”

“Not me!” Yahweh hooked a thumb at the man who managed to look like both me and Sam Crumpacker. “That one! My Shabbes goy. A little rough? So whose boy is he? Answer that!”

Mr. Koshchei tapped my memoir, spoke to the man with my face. “Loki, how many places do you figure in this story?”

“Depends on how You figure it, Chief. Eight or nine places, if You count the walk-ons. All through it, when You consider that I spent four solid weeks softening up this foxy schoolteacher so that she would roll over and pant when Joe Nebbish came along.”