Mercury Rises (2 page)

Noncommittal murmurs arose from the men.

Mercury tried again. "Anyone want to clue me in about what challenges we're facing with level seven? The first six levels seemed to go smoothly. Level seven is pretty much more of the same if I remember the plans correctly. No judgments here, just trying to get an idea of any special challenges we might have with level seven so I can make sure to give you all the resources you need. My goal is to provide an atmosphere of empowerment."

Still no one spoke up.

"Hold on, I think I've got a copy of the plans with me," said Mercury, riffling through a satchel hanging off his shoulder. "Yep, here we go. Hmmm. Yeah, nothing special for level seven. Sun-baked clay bricks on the inside, fire-glazed bricks on the outside walls, same as the other six levels. And you'll only need about half as many bricks as you did for the last level, on account of the fact that we're building a pyramid. Volume decreases geometrically as we go up, as you'll recall. I don't mean to tell you your business. We're all professionals here."

Grunts and mutters.

"OK," said Mercury. "It's cool. I'm sure you guys are tired. Why don't you take the rest of the day off and we'll meet back here first thing in the morning? I'll have Tiamat swing by in case you're more comfortable talking to her."

Suddenly the men leaped to their feet and all began talking at once. Mercury could make out nothing in the cacophony of voices.

"Whoa, hold on," he chided. "One at a time. You, Nabu. Tell me what's going on."

Mercury hated playing the Tiamat card. He took appealing to her authority as a personal failing as a manager. Besides preferring positive motivation over negative and feeling that he should be able to handle the men without appealing to an external authority, he was secretly afraid the men would someday call his bluff. He had a better chance of summoning a thunderstorm than getting Tiamat to show up.
¹
Never a hands-on leader, Tiamat rarely even bothered these days to make the occasional unscheduled appearance to berate the laborers for their stupidity and laziness and throw a few over the edge as an example for the others. That left Mercury to rally the men on his own, a difficult enough task even when he wasn't being called off on Heavenly errands every other week.

Nabu, one of the group foremen, launched into a litany of grievances: shoddy brickmaking, lack of proper burial arrangements for workers who fell to their deaths (Tiamat had recently decreed that only one funeral would be allowed per week no matter how many men had died and no matter how hot the weather was), preferential treatment for the Amorites, and on and on. But the root problem was one Mercury knew well: an ailment he called
almost-finished-ism
.

The men had been laboring toward the completion of the ziggurat for nearly a generation, but now that it was nearly done, they feared the change its completion would bring. There would be other ziggurats, that much was certain---Tiamat's assurances that this was "most likely the last one" had always proved false in the past. But relocation was difficult on men with families, and starting over was always a bit demoralizing.

"Some of the men and I were talking," Nabu was saying. "We were thinking, why build another ziggurat when we could just make this one taller? I mean, a pair of two-hundred-foot-tall ziggurats is impressive, but wouldn't one three-hundred-foot ziggurat be better? Imagine that, a three-hundred-foot ziggurat!"

Mercury sighed. "Admittedly a three-hundred-foot ziggurat would be a sight to behold," he said. "But you understand that a ziggurat is essentially a
pyramid
, right? It's a fundamental geometric shape. The height is a function of the size of the base. You can't, you know, decide when you're ninety percent done to make it
taller
."

"Right, right," said Nabu. "But here's what we were thinking: what if we excavate, say fifty feet deep all the way around the base of the ziggurat, to a distance of a mile or two? And then we cover up the dirt at the base with more bricks? I mean, who would know we didn't just build it fifty feet higher? Pretty clever, eh?"

Mercury managed a pained smile. "Yes," he said, doing some quick estimating in his head. "Moving eight hundred thousand cubic feet of sand does
sound
like an attractive option. But here's the thing: ziggurats are meant to look impressive from a distance. You'll notice that we deliberately built it on a hill, and we even brought sand in to raise some low spots in the middle of the site before we started construction. In fact, right over there, if I'm not mistaken, is where your father died of heat stroke twenty-five years ago while carting in buckets of sand one beautiful summer day. The point is, we'd have to excavate several miles out for it to do any good. It might take a hundred years, and we'd be digging up all the work your father did---and probably your father himself, if I'm remembering what we did with the corpses that day."

Nabu was quiet for a moment. Mercury could tell he was still trying to think of a way to make his excavation idea work, so he pressed the attack.

"Also, there's the flooding problem. Remember last year when your brother-in-law died in that flash flood because he couldn't get out of the limestone quarry in time? Basically you're talking about making all of Babylon into one big limestone quarry. Whenever it rained, we would all have to flee to the surrounding hills where we had dumped all the sand from the excavation. And there we'd sit, looking down on our pitiful ziggurat sticking out of the mud. No, Nabu, I'm afraid it's no good. We just need to finish this thing and move on. So what do you say, guys? We start bright and early tomorrow morning on level seven?"

The men grumbled assent. Mercury thanked them for their hard work and trudged back down the steps. "I'm not cut out for this job," he muttered to himself. "Bloody ziggurats. Where's the point?"

TWO

Some four thousand years later a demon called Eddie Pratt sat alone in a pub in Cork, Ireland, nursing a pint and massaging his left hand. He had been writing (and drinking) almost nonstop for the past six weeks, and he was very close to completing his opus. Stacks of papers littered the booth that had become his office, by virtue of the fact that Eddie seemed to have an inexhaustible thirst for Guinness (and a wallet that miraculously always had a few more pounds in it)---and the fact that no one wanted to clean it.

"Another pint, Eddie?" asked the bartender, a dour-faced old man who went by the name Cob.

Eddie, his eyes still fixed blearily on his work, held up the empty glass in answer. Cob took it and returned a moment later with a refill of stout.

"Och, what's all that?" he asked.

"Same as always," Eddie grunted. "Report."

"Aye," said Cob. "But what are all those ticks? Tick, tick, tick. Every line more ticks."

"Those are quote marks," replied Eddie, tiredly. "It's dialogue."

"Och, I know," said Cob. "Too much dialogue. People hate all those ticks. You need more action."

"You're a writer now?" Eddie asked, peering up skeptically at Cob.

"Ah, no. But I know what I like. Reading all those ticks would drive me to drink."

"You don't read the ticks. They're punctuation. And you're a bartender, Cob. That's not much of a drive."

"Tick, tick, tick," repeated Cob.

"This isn't easy, you know," grumbled Eddie.

"Och, I'm sure not."

"Are you familiar with Plato?"

"Aye."

"You realize that the work of Plato is one of the cornerstones of Western civilization, and that everything he ever wrote was dialogue?"

"Everything who wrote?"

"Plato. You said you were familiar with him."

"Och, I thought you said, 'Play-Doh.'"

"No, you imbecile.
Plato
. The disciple of Socrates. Plato believed that all of the things we experience are really just impressions of some greater, ultimate reality that underlies the Universe."

"Impressions?" said Cob doubtfully. "I think you may be thinkin' o' Silly Putty. Remember, you could pick up pictures from the funny pages. Darned if I could read 'em though, 'cause they were all backwards. Kind of a dirty trick, making the words backwards, don't you think?"

Eddie gritted his teeth and went back to work.

"Tick, tick, tick," said Cob again. "Too much talking."

"You got that right at least," said Eddie.

"Sod off," grunted Cob, and returned to the bar.

A moment later, the door to the pub opened and an attractive woman with stern, vaguely Asian features walked in. By her clothes and demeanor, Eddie judged she was American. When she opened her mouth to reveal perfectly straight, gleaming white teeth and a propensity for over pronouncing the letter
r
, his suspicion was confirmed. She walked straight up to him and said, "Eddie Pratt?"

Eddie grimaced. There were only a handful of reasons for an attractive American woman to be seeking him out in a pub in Cork, and none of them were good.

"Mind if I have a seat?" she asked.

Eddie shrugged, as if to say, "If you can
find
a seat, you can have it."

Carefully relocating several stacks of papers, the woman sat down across from him. "Mr. Pratt," she said, "my name is Wanda Kwan. I'm not sure exactly how to broach this subject, so I'll just say it: I know who you are."

Eddie winced. Could it be? Had he somehow been found out? If someone had figured out that he was an angel exiled on Earth---which was bad enough in itself---they might suspect he had something to do with the recent horrific events in Southern California. He was in no physical danger, of course; Eddie, like all angels, had at his disposal the miraculous power of the interplanar energy channels, which would keep him out of any prison designed to hold mortals. What he feared wasn't imprisonment or torment by humans; it was the loss of face among angels.

The worst thing that can happen to an angel on the Mundane Plane---particularly an agent of the Mundane Observation Corps, an organization whose activities are supposed to remain completely invisible to humans---is to be outed as angel. Beyond embarrassing, it's akin to the feeling that overcomes a substitute teacher who has been outsmarted by a class of third graders. Despite his current exile, Eddie still hoped to someday leave this plane, and if he ever wanted to show his face in Heaven again, he would have to find a way out of this bind.

"So," Eddie replied, trying to appear nonchalant. "What do you want, exactly?"

Wanda smiled. "Good, yes, let's get right down to it. What I want is you. Your gift, that is."

Eddie nodded slowly. "My gift," he repeated.

"Yes," said Wanda. "We---the company I work for, that is---we're aware of your abilities, and we need your help to take care of a certain thorny problem. The job will pay very well, but before I say any more, I need you to assure me that you can be discreet."

What the hell? thought Eddie. What is this, rent-a-cherub? Where do people get these crazy ideas?

"Hmm," said Eddie. "Here's the thing. I'm not really interested in money. That is, it's useful on occasion, but I have ways of making a few pounds here and there. Let's just say my wallet always has enough money in it for what I need."

"That sounds like a very sensible way of looking at things," said Wanda. "But it does make me wonder, if you weren't doing it for the money, what was in it for you in your deal with Katie Midford?"

Eddie frowned. How did this woman know about that? How could anyone know he had agreed to nudge Harry Giddings toward the Apocalypse in exchange for extraction from the Mundane Plane? And why the hell would she bring that up, considering that Katie Midford never lived up to her side of the deal?

He said, "The deal with Katie Midford didn't work out so well for me. Our arrangement was supposed to be my ticket out of this place, and as you can see..." He trailed off, gesturing at his surroundings.

Wanda replied, "If you need a visa, I'm sure we can help with that as well. My company is connected with some very important people."

A
visa
? thought Eddie. What the blazes was she talking about?

"In fact," she went on, "I believe we can get you a temporary work visa right away. We'll put you up in the finest hotel in Los Angeles. A suite, of course, so you'll have a dedicated place to write."

Eddie stared at her dumbly, trying to make sense of what she was saying. "To write?" asked Eddie. "Yes, I'll need a place to write. What, ah, am I going to be writing, exactly?"

Wanda appeared puzzled. She motioned toward the stacks of papers. "Why,
this
, of course."

"This?" he replied. "Why would you be interested in the adventures of a rogue angel named Mercury on the brink of the Apocalypse?"

"Oh, I'm sorry," said Wanda, "I assumed this was, you know"---her voice dropped to a whisper---"
the last book
."

"The last book," repeated Eddie, uncomprehendingly.

"You know," said Wanda, "the final book in the Charlie Nyx saga."

"Ah..." replied Eddie, not knowing what else to say.

Wanda went on, "Before she...disappeared, Katie told us that she was nearly done with the final book in the series. We all knew, of course, that...well, Katie was a smart gal and all, but it was pretty obvious she didn't have the follow-through to write a three-hundred-page book, let alone seven of them. We knew she was fronting for someone, but she was a rather secretive person, as I'm sure you know, so we could never figure out who the real author was. We eventually decided that if the real author of the Charlie Nyx books wanted to remain outside of the limelight, and if he or she had come to some mutually beneficial arrangement with Katie Midford, well...who were we to upset the applecart, as they say? But when Katie disappeared after that whole tragedy in Anaheim, our connection to the real author disappeared with her. Fortunately we have some investigative resources at our disposal, and we were able to ascertain that an employee of Katie's paid you several visits in this very pub shortly before her disappearance. When our sources reported that you spent all of your time in this pub, writing, well, we knew we had our man."