Mister B. Gone (26 page)

“This is not a game,” the Angel Hannah said grimly. The colors in the pool of robes in which she floated darkened, reflecting her change of mood. Blue went to purple, gold to crimson. “You know how important this is. Why would your masters send you here?”

“Not just masters,” the Archbishop replied with a sultry tone. “I had mistresses, too. Oh, and they are cruel.” His hands went to his groin. I could not see what he was doing but it clearly offended all of Heaven’s representatives. Nor had the Archbishop finished. “Sometimes I deliberately make a punishable error, just to earn myself the reward of their torments.

They know by now, of course. They must. But it’s a game. Like love. Like . . .”

He dropped his voice to a skinned whisper. “
War.”

“If that’s what you want, demon, it’s yours for the asking.”

“Oh now, listen to yourself,” the Archbishop chided her.

“Where’s your sense of priorities? And while you’re mulling that over, ask yourself why we of the Demonation would care about having control of a device that makes insipid copies of books whose only claim to significance in the first place was their rarity? I couldn’t imagine a more pointless reason for the two halves of our divided nation to set upon one another, than this.” He looked at Gutenberg. “What’s it called?”

“A printing press,” Hannah said. “As if you didn’t know. You don’t fool anybody, demon.”

“I tell the truth.”

“Insipid copies!”

“What else can they ever be?” the Archbishop protested mildly.

“You sound as if you care,” Hannah observed.

“I don’t.”

“Then why are you ready to go to war for this thing you can’t even name?”

“I say again: We don’t need to be at one another’s throats over what Gutenberg had made. It’s not worth fighting over, and we both know it.”

“Yet you don’t return to the comforts of your palace.”

“It is scarcely a palace.”

“It is scarcely less.”

“Well, I won’t stoop to trivialities,” the Archbishop said, waving this fruitless exchange away. “I admit, I came here because I was curious at the beginning. I was expecting, I don’t know, some kind of miracle machine. But now I see it, and it isn’t very miraculous at all, is it? No offense to you, Herr Gutenberg.”

“So you
are
leaving?” the Angel Hannah said.

“Yes. We’re leaving. We have no further business here. And you?”

“We are also leaving.”

“Ah.”

“We have business above.”

“Pressing, is it?”

“Very.”

“Well then.”

“Well then.”

“We are agreed.”

“We are, indeed, agreed.”

That said, stillness fell. The Archbishop peered at his warty knuckles. Hannah stood staring into middle distance, her attention absented. The only sound I could hear was the soft murmur of the fabric that surrounded Hannah.

The sound drew my gaze towards it, and I was surprised to see that there were strands of black and red passing through the otherwise placid color and motion of the Angel Hannah’s robes. Was I the only one in the chamber noticing this? It was evidence, surely, that for all her calm composure the angel couldn’t help but let the truth show itself, even if it was only for a few seconds.

Now, from somewhere, perhaps the workshop behind me, I heard another sound. That of a clock ticking.

And still nobody moved.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

And then, at precisely the same moment—as though they were more alike than not when it came to matters of patience and politics—both the Archbishop and Hannah stood up.

Both set their hands down, knuckles first, on the table and leaning forwards both begin to talk at one another, their voices in their righteous anger so alike that it was difficult to separate one from the other, the words simply one endless, incomprehensible sentence:

—
for why you the haven’t been the holy oh yes you can holy isn’t
you right what’s swords and this business be harvesting not books aren’t
we don’t futile yellow don’t blood on this whole yes gone entirely—

And on and on it went like this, with everybody in the room doing exactly what I was doing, concentrating their attention upon either the Archbishop or upon Hannah in the hope of deciphering what they were saying, and by doing so making it easier to comprehend the other party’s contribution to this crazy exchange. If others were having any luck with the tactic, they showed no sign of enlightenment. Their expressions remained puzzled and frustrated.

Nor did the Demon Archbishop and the Angel Hannah show any sign of mellowing their vehemence. Indeed their fury was escalating, the power their rage and suspicion generated causing the geometry of the room, which had seemed to me flawless when I’d just taken it in, to warp out of true. The way it did so may sound crazy, but I will tell you what my eyes told me, as best I can, hoping that the words I use don’t crack beneath the paradoxes that I’m obliged to describe.

They were approaching one another—the Devil and the Angel—their heads swelling prodigiously as they did so, the space between their hairlines and their chins easily three or four feet now and growing larger with every heartbeat. But even as their heads grew to such grotesque a size they also narrowed, until it seemed to my outraged eyes that they were barely two or three inches wide, the tips of their noses no more than a finger’s length apart. The words they continued to spew out emerged from their grotesquely misshapen mouths like spurts of smoke, no two of the same color, which rose up to form a layer of dead speech on the ceiling. Yet at the same time as this bizarre spectacle was going on—I warned you that some of this would be perilously close to the ravings of a madman—my eyes also reported that they were both still sitting in their seats as they had been all along, unchanged.

I have no explanation for any of this, nor do I understand why, having listened to their vehement exchange for two or three minutes without comprehending a single argument made by either side, my brain now began to decode portions of their dialogue. It wasn’t a casual conversation they were having, needless to say, but neither were they spitting escalating threats at one another. I slowly realized that I was listening to the most secret of negotiations. The Angel and the Demon, their species, who had once been joined in celestial love, now enemies. Or so I had understood. Their hatred of one another, I’d been taught, was so deeply felt that they would never contemplate peace.

But here they were—adversaries so familiar that they were almost friends—laboring to divide up control of this new power that, despite the Demon’s claim that Gutenberg’s press was of no great consequence, they all knew to the contrary. The press would indeed change the shape of the world, and each side wanted to possess the lion’s share of its creations and their influence. Hannah wanted all holy books to be under Angelic license, but the Archbishop wasn’t any more ready to give that up than was Hannah willing to give up all printed materials that related to the erotic impulse of Humankind.

Much of what they were arguing over were forms of writing that I had never heard of: novels and newspapers, scientific journals and political tracts; manuals, guides, and encyclopedias. They traded like two of your kind buying horseflesh at an auction, their bargaining getting faster as some portion of this immense agreement approached closure, the words only agreed upon if some other part of this division of spoils was successfully resolved. There was no system of high-flown principle shaping those parts of the World According to the Universal Word that Hannah pursued, nor was there any special ferocity in the way the Archbishop pursued works in arenas I expected Hell to pursue: lawyerly writings, for instance; or works by doctors and assassins, spreading their wickedness. The Angel fought vehemently for control over the confessions of whores, both male and female, and any other writings designed to inflame the reader, while Hell fought with equal force to possess power over the licensing and distribution of all printing fabrications that their authors had written in such a way as to suggest that they were, in fact, the truth. But then, Hell countered, what happened if the author of such a work of invention happened also to be or to have been a whore?

And so it went on, back and forth, the pair of advisors each Power had brought to the table offering their own subtle qualifications or verbal manipulations to the principals’ exchanges.

There were references back to earlier arbitrations. To The Matter of the Wheel and to The Threshing Impasse. As for Gutenberg’s great work—the reason why Heaven and Hell were so close to war—was dispassionately referred to as The Subject Under Review.

Meanwhile, as the argument became even more complex, the bewildering spectacle of the demon’s and the angel’s heads swelling and narrowing had become still more elaborate; dozens of extrusions emerging from their ballooning craniums, as thin as finger-bones, wove between one another, their elegant intertwining reflecting, perhaps, the escalating intricacies of their debate.

Everyone continued to watch them as they carved up Humankind’s future, but with so much of the negotiation beyond me, the whole thing, for all its Great Significance and so on and so forth, was actually beginning to bore me. The lavish complexities of their interwoven heads were an entirely different matter: They beggared the inventions of my dream-life, seeing the woven heads continue to find new ways to reflect each proposal and counterproposal, each successful barter and failed assault. So elaborate had the process of the argument been, and so exquisite the interweaving of demonic and angelic flesh, that their heads now resembled a tapestry, “Portrait of a Debate Between Heaven and Hell in Order to Prevent War.”

Here was a Secret that made Gutenberg’s Press a footnote.

I was watching the power at work behind the face of the world.

What I had always assumed to be a calamitous unseen war, waged in sky and rock and on occasion invading your human world, was not a bloody battle, with legions slaughtering one another; it was this endless fish-market bartering. And why? Because it was the
profit
that came of these newfound forms that fueled the negotiations. The Angel Hannah was utterly indifferent to the way all this “printed matter,” as she dubbed it, might poison or impoverish the spiritual lives of Humankind. Nor were the Demon Archbishop and his advisors concerned that they possess ways the Word might be used to corrupt innocents.

It was the pursuit of word power gained from word wealth that moved both sides, inspiring maneuvers of such complexity that the due performance of every tiny portion of this knot of agreements and arrangements was dependent upon the performance of every other part. Far from behaving like enemies, the two sides were making what was doubtless just another marriage contract between their opposing factions, occasioned by the creation of Gutenberg’s press. It would make money, this press.

And it would control minds at the same time. At least that was as much as I understood of their convoluted talk.

My weary eyes strayed to Quitoon, and they came upon him at the very moment that his wandering gaze found me.

From the expression of shock on his face it was obvious he’d assumed I was long since dead. But the fact that I wasn’t pleased him, I could see, the realization of which gave me hope. Quite what of, I can’t truly tell you.

No. I can try. Perhaps I hoped that our both getting here, to the end of the world as it had been, and to the beginning of what it was to become, courtesy of Johannes Gutenberg, tied us together, for better or worse, for richer, for—

I never finished reciting these silent vows of devotion because one of Hannah’s advisors, sitting next to her on the other side of the table to Quitoon, had seen the look on his face and realized there was a suspicious trace of happiness flickering through his features.

The angel began to rise from its seat in order to better see whatever Quitoon was staring at with such pleasure.

Quitoon was looking at me, of course, looking at me and smiling, the way I was now allowing myself to smile as I looked at him.

Then the angel screamed
.

In the beginning was the Word, says John the Christ-lover, and the Word was not only
with
God, it
was
God. So why isn’t there a word, or a sentence ten thousand words long, that would come anywhere even near to describe the sound of an angel screaming?

You’ll just have to take it from me that the angel did indeed scream, and that the sound that emanated from it was such that every scintilla of matter in that room convulsed, hearing the cry. Eyes that had been devoted to an obsessive study of the Principals were suddenly jolted free by the violence of the convulsion. And inevitably several of those in the room saw me.

I had no time to retreat. The entities that filled the room (most likely even the matter of the room itself ) were infinitely more sophisticated creatures than I. When their gazes were turned on me, I felt their scrutiny like a bruising blow delivered to every single part of my body at the same time, even the soles of my feet. Their brutal gazes ceased as suddenly as they had begun. The removal should have been a relief but, consistent with the paradoxical nature of the entire room, the aversion of their gazes brought its own strange order of pain, that which comes when the hurt induced by a higher being ceases, and all connection with that being is removed.

But my presence here was not as inconsequential as the removal of their scrutiny might have implied. A quarrel now arose around the table as to whether my presence here was proof of some conspiracy against Gutenberg or his invention, and if so, by which side. There was no attempt to ask my own account of events. They were only concerned that I had witnessed Heaven and Hell’s complicity. Whether I had simply seen the Secret in progress, as they knew I had, or whether I was part of a grand Conspiracy against the safety of the Secret was irrelevant to them. I had to be silenced. The only point of contention, apparently was what to do with me.

I knew that I was the problem under debate, because every now and again I heard a fragment of dialogue relating to me and my dispatch.