Job: A Comedy of Justice (44 page)

“Now it’s your turn. Your God did it to you. Will you curse Him? Or will you come wiggling back on your belly like a whipped dog?”

I was saved from answering that impossible question by an interruption—and was I glad! I suppose every man has doubts at times about God’s justice. I admit that I had been much troubled lately and had been forced to remind myself again and again that God’s ways are not man’s ways, and that I could not expect always to understand the purposes of the Lord.

But I could not speak my misgivings aloud, and least of all to the Lord’s Ancient Adversary. It was especially upsetting that Satan chose at this moment to have the shape and the voice of my only friend.

Debating with the Devil is a mug’s game at best.

The interruption was mundane: a telephone ringing. Accidental interruption? I don’t think Satan tolerates “accidents.” As may be, I did not have to answer the question that I could not answer.

Katie said, “Shall I get it, dear?”

“Please.”

A telephone handset appeared in Katie’s hand. “Lucifer’s office, Rahab speaking. Repeat, please. I will inquire.” She looked at Jerry.

“I’ll take it.” Jerry operated without a visible telephone instrument. “Speaking. No. I said, no. No, damn it! Refer that to Mr. Ashmedai. Let Me have the other call.” He muttered something about the impossibility of getting competent help, then said, “Speaking. Yes, Sir!” Then He said nothing for quite a long time. At last He said, “At once, Sir. Thank you.”

Jerry stood up. “Please excuse Me, Alec; I have work to do. I can’t say when I will be back. Try to treat this waiting as a vacation…and My house is yours. Katie, take care of him. Sybil, keep him amused.” Jerry vanished.

“Will I keep him amused!” Sybil got up and stood in front of me, rubbed her hands together. Her western clothes faded out, leaving Sybil. She grinned.

Katie said mildly, “Sybil, stop that. Grow more clothes at once or I’ll send you home.”

“Spoilsport.” Sybil developed a skimpy bikini. “I plan to make Saint Alec forget that Danish baggage.”

“What’ll you bet, dear? I’ve been talking to Pat.”

“So? What did Pat say?”

“Margrethe can cook.”

Sybil looked disgusted. “A girl spends fifty years on her back, studying hard. Along comes some slottie who can make chicken and dumplings. It’s not fair.”

I decided to change the subject. “Sybil, those tricks you do with clothes are fascinating. Are you a graduate witch now?”

Instead of answering me at once, Sybil glanced at Katie, who said to her: “All over with, dear. Speak freely.”

“Okay. Saint Alec, I’m no witch. Witchcraft is poppycock. You know that verse in the Bible about not suffering witches to live?”

“Exodus twenty-two, eighteen.”

“That’s the one. The Old Hebrew word translated there as ‘witch’ actually means ‘poisoner.’ Not letting a poisoner continue to breathe strikes me as a good idea. But I wonder how many friendless old women have been hanged or burned as a result of a sloppy translation?”

(Could this really be true? What about the “literal word of God” concept on which I had been reared? Of course the word “witch” is English, not the original Hebrew…but the translators of the King James version were sustained by God—that’s why that version of the Bible [and only that one] can be taken literally. But—
No!
Sybil must be mistaken. The Good Lord would not let hundreds, thousands, of innocent people be tortured to death over a mistranslation He could so easily have corrected.)

“So you did not attend a Sabbat that night. What did you do?”

“Not what you think; Israfel and I aren’t quite that chummy. Chums, yes; buddies, no.”

“‘Israfel’? I thought he was in Heaven.”

“That’s his godfather. The trumpeter. This Israfel can’t play a note. But he did ask me to tell you, if I ever got a chance, that he really isn’t the pimple he pretended to be as ‘Roderick Lyman Culverson, Third.’”

“I’m glad to hear that. As he certainly did a good job of portraying an unbearable young snot. I didn’t see how a daughter of Katie and Jerry—or is it just of Katie?—could have such poor taste as to pick that boor as a pal. Not Israfel, of course, but the part he was playing.”

“Oh. Better fix that, too. Katie, what relation are we?”

“I don’t think even Dr. Darwin could find any genetic relationship, dear. But I am every bit as proud of you as I would be were you my own daughter.”

“Thank you, Mom!”

“But we all are related,” I objected, “through Mother Eve. Since Katie, wrinkles and all, was born while the Children of Israel were wandering in the wilderness, there are only about eighty begats from Eve to Katie. With your birthdate and simple arithmetic we could make a shrewd guess at how close your blood relationship is.”

“Oh, oh! Here we go again. Saint Alec, Mama Kate is descended from Eve; I am not. Different species. I’m an imp. An afrit, if you want to get technical.”

She again vanished her clothes and did a body transformation. “See?”

I said, “Say! Weren’t you managing the desk at the Sans Souci Sheraton the evening I arrived in Hell?”

“I certainly was. And I’m flattered that you remember me, in my own shape.” She resumed her human appearance, plus the tiny bikini. “I was there because I knew you by sight. Pop didn’t want anything to go wrong.”

Katie stood up. “Let’s continue this outside; I’d like a dip before dinner.”

“I’m busy seducing Saint Alec.”

“Dreamer. Continue it outdoors.”

Outside it was a lovely Texas late afternoon, with lengthening shadows. “Katie, a straight answer, please. Is this Hell? Or is this Texas?”

“Both.”

“I withdraw the question.”

I must have let my annoyance show in my voice, for she turned and put a hand on my chest. “Alec, I was not jesting. For many centuries Lucifer has maintained
pieds-à-terre
here and there on earth. In each He had an established personality, a front. After Armageddon, when His Brother set Himself up as king of earth for the Millennium, He quit visiting earth. But some of these places were home to Him, so He pinched them off and took them with Him. You see?”

“I suppose I do. About as well as a cow understands calculus.”

“I don’t understand the mechanism; it’s on the God level. But those numerous changes you and Marga underwent during your persecution: How deep did each change go? Do you think the entire planet was involved each time?”

Reality tumbled in my mind in a fashion it had not since the last of those “changes.” “Katie, I don’t know! I was always too busy surviving. Wait a moment. Each change did cover the whole planet earth and about a century of its history. Because I always checked the history and memorized as much as I could. Cultural changes, too. The whole complex.”

“Each change stopped not far beyond the end of your nose, Alec, and no one but you—you two—was aware of
any
change. You didn’t check history; you checked
history books.
At least this is the way Lucifer would have handled it, had He been arranging the deception.”

“Uh—Katie, do you realize how long it would take to revise, rewrite, and print an entire encyclopedia? That’s what I usually consulted.”

“But, Alec, you have already been told that
time
is never a problem on the God level. Or space. Whatever was needed to deceive you was provided. But no more than that. That is the conservative principle in art at the God level. While I can’t do it, not being at that level, I have seen a lot of it done. A skillful Artist in shapes and appearances does no more than necessary to create His effect.”

Rahab sat down on the edge of the pool, paddled her feet in the water. “Come sit beside me. Consider the edge of the ‘big bang.’ What is there out beyond that limit where the red shift has the magnitude that means that the expansion of the universe equals the speed of light—what is beyond?”

I answered rather stiffly, “Katie, your hypothetical question lacks meaning. I’ve kept up, more or less, with such silly notions as the ‘big bang’ and the ‘expanding universe’ because a preacher of the Gospel must keep track of such theories in order to be able to refute them. The two you mention imply an impossible length of time—impossible because the world was created about six thousand years ago. ‘About’ because the exact date of Creation is hard to calculate, and also because I am uncertain as to the present date. But around six thousand years—not the billion years or so the big-bangers need.”

“Alec…your universe is about twenty-three billion years old.”

I started to retort, closed my mouth. I will not flatly contradict my hostess.

She added, “And your universe was created in four thousand and four B.C.”

I stared at the water long enough for Sybil to surface and splash us.

“Well, Alec?”

“You’ve left me with nothing to say.”

“But notice carefully what I did say. I did
not
say that the world was created twenty-three billion years ago; I said that was its age. It was created old. Created with fossils in the ground and craters on the moon, all speaking of great age. Created that way by Yahweh, because it amused Him to do so. One of those scientists said, ‘God does not roll dice with the universe.’ Unfortunately not true. Yahweh rolls loaded dice with His universe…to deceive His creatures.”

“Why would He do that?”

“Lucifer says that it is because He is a poor Artist, the sort who is always changing His mind and scraping the canvas. And a practical joker. But I’m really not entitled to an opinion; I’m not at that level. And Lucifer is prejudiced where His Brother is concerned; I think that is obvious. You haven’t remarked on the greatest wonder.”

“Maybe I missed it.”

“No, I think you were being polite. How an old whore happened to have opinions about cosmogony and teleology and eschatology and other long words of Greek derivation; that’s the greatest wonder. Not?”

“Why, Rahab honey, I was just so busy counting your wrinkles that I wasn’t lis—”

This got me shoved into the water. I came up sputtering and spouting and found both women laughing at me. So I placed both hands on the edge of the pool with Katie captured inside the circle. She did not seem to mind being captive; she leaned against me like a cat. “You were about to say?” I asked.

“Alec, to be able to read and write is as wonderful as sex. Or almost. You may not fully appreciate what a blessing it is because you probably learned how as a baby and have been doing it casually ever since. But when I was a whore in Canaan almost four millennia ago, I did not know how to read and write. I learned by listening…to johns, to neighbors, to gossip in the market. But that’s not a way to learn much, and even scribes and judges were ignorant then.

“I had been dead nearly three centuries before I learned to read and write, and when I did learn, I was taught by the ghost of a harlot from what later became the great Cretan civilization. Saint Alec, this may startle you but, in general throughout history, whores learned to read and write long before respectable women took up the dangerous practice. When I did learn, brother! For a while it crowded sex out of my life.”

She grinned up at me. “Almost, anyhow. Presently I went back to a more healthy balance, reading and sex, in equal amounts.”

“I don’t have the strength for that ratio.”

“Women are different. My best education started with the burning of the Library at Alexandria. Yahweh didn’t want it, so Lucifer grabbed the ghosts of all those thousands of codices, took them to Hell, regenerated them carefully—and Rahab had a picnic! And let me add: Lucifer has His eye on the Vatican Library, since it will be up for salvage soon. Instead of having to regenerate ghosts, in the case of the Vatican Library, Lucifer plans to pinch it off intact just before Time Stop, and take it unhurt to Hell. Won’t that be grand?”

“Sounds as if it would be. The only thing about which I’ve ever envied the papists is their library. But…‘regenerated ghosts’?”

“Slap my back.”

“Huh?”

“Slap it. No, harder than that; I’m not a fragile little butterfly. Harder. That’s more like it. What you just slapped is a regenerated ghost.”

“Felt solid.”

“Should be, I paid list price for the job. It was before Lucifer noticed me and made me a bird in a gilded cage, a pitiful sight to see. I understand that, if you are saved and go to Heaven, regeneration goes with salvation…but here you buy it on credit, then work your arse off to pay for it. That being exactly how I paid for it. Saint Alec, you didn’t die, I know. A regenerated body is just like the one a person has before death, but better. No contagious diseases, no allergies, no old-age wrinkles—and ‘wrinkles’ my foot! I wasn’t wrinkled the day I died…or at least not much. How did you get me talking about wrinkles? We were discussing relativity and the expanding universe, a really high-type intellectual conversation.”

That night Sybil made a strong effort to get into my bed, an effort that Katie firmly thwarted—then went to bed with me herself. “Pat said that you were not to be allowed to sleep alone.”

“Pat thinks I’m sick. I’m not.”

“I won’t argue it. And don’t quiver your chin, dear; Mother Rahab will let you sleep.”

Sometime in the night I woke up sobbing, and Katie was there. She comforted me. I’m sure Pat told her about my nightmares. With Katie there to quiet me down I got back to sleep rather quickly.

It was a sweet Arcadian interlude…save for the absence of Margrethe. But Katie had me convinced that I owed it to Jerry (and to her) to be patient and not brood over my loss. So I did not, or not much, in the daytime, and, while night could be bad, even lonely nights are not too lonely with Mother Rahab to soothe one after waking up emotionally defenseless. She was always there…except one night she had to be away. Sybil took that watch, carefully instructed by Katie, and carried it out the same way.

I discovered one amusing thing about Sybil. In sleep she slips back into her natural shape, imp or afrit, without knowing it. This makes her about six inches shorter and she has those cute little horns that were the first thing I had noticed about her, at the Sans Souci.