Odds and Gods (37 page)

‘Oh,’ said Bragi. ‘Does that mean we’ve won?’

Ahriman opened his eyes. He could see Carl, slowly getting up off the ground. He could see the traction engine, or at least the part of it which wasn’t embedded in the earth. He could see Thor bashing Odin over the head with a length of mangled driveshaft, while Frey made a show of dusting off his elbows. He could see Julian, standing up and walking swiftly towards the fire exit. He couldn’t see Lundqvist; but, since the sight of blood always made him feel faint, that was probably just as well.

‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Just because it was a pure fluke doesn’t mean to say it doesn’t count.’

‘Pure fluke?’

‘Act of God, you might say. Right, madam, just so much as another hiss and I’ll take you down the salon myself and see to it they give you a perm you’ll never forget, do I make myself clear?’

 

The immortal soul of Kurt Lundqvist stood up, brushed bits of body off its trouser knees, and looked down. Being an immortal soul, it had no lunch to bring up, which was probably just as well.

‘Hey,’ it yelled at the cosmos, ‘I was using that!’

No reply.

In the back of its residual consciousness, it could remember something it had once read in a Gideon Bible about how the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and it thought, Just my stinking luck. Come Judgement Day, and I’ll be the only one going round Eternity with a flat head, one foot at right angles to the other and carrying my left arm. Thank you very, very much.

Unless, it speculated, they patch you up first.

Yes, well, that might be something of a mixed blessing, bearing in mind the standards of celestial reconstruction work he’d seen recently. If Osiris was anything to go by (and he was a goddam
god
, remember, so presumably he merited the Grade A custom deluxe service) divine reconstitution would leave him looking like something brought home from school by a nine-year-old just starting pottery classes.

It ain’t so reliable, what they say in the Bible, it ain’t necessarily so. Or at least, the soul fervently hoped it wasn’t. It reckoned it had done its bit for these people, one way or another, and the thought of dwelling in the House of the Lord for ever as the human equivalent of a Skoda was not pleasant.

The gods as creators; the whole cosmos a Friday afternoon job if ever there was one. The imperishable part of Kurt Lundqvist shook its head and walked away.

 

The first thing we’ll do, we’ll kill all the lawyers.

No, Osiris reflected, that’s looking through the wrong end of the telescope. If we’re going to do this thing, we may as well do it properly.

He rose slowly out of Carl’s body and resumed his own. It was like stepping out of the water back into the air.

‘All right, people,’ he said, ‘gather round.’

The gods went into a huddle.

 

Nobody knows what actually happened to Julian Magus and the godchildren, although there are a number of extremely imaginative myths, most of which fail to convince simply because they were concocted by people who don’t actually know what brimstone is.

The truth is that Julian had made plans for this, as for all other contingencies; and, like ninety-nine point seven per cent of all Julian’s plans, this one worked flawlessly. Within ninety seconds of Lundqvist’s death he was clambering into a waiting helicopter clutching two suitcases full of uncut diamonds, while the in-flight plastic surgeon sterilised his instruments.

‘Alpha Centauri,’ he snapped to the pilot, ‘and step on it.’

There are places where even the gods won’t follow you; and, once you’ve come to terms with the fact that the beaches are blue and the ocean is yellow, and the combined power of all three suns isn’t enough to convert the first taramasalata pink on the shoulders and back into true California golden brown, the good life can be successfully synthesised as well there as anywhere else. Beware, however, of ninety-nine point seven per cent success. After Julian had been in Alpha City for just under three years he was waylaid by a smooth-talking financial services consultant who persuaded him to invest his entire capital in Amalgamated Heliconium 37½% Unsecured Loan Stock, and is now earning his living as a washer-up at Z[i4kh98/98fß
^***
sgwy’s Bayside Diner at the unfashionable end of Neutron Cove.

For the record, he’s never been happier; which only goes to show that where gods are concerned there’s no justice, but there is, occasionally, mercy.

 

It began to rain.

‘Be reasonable,’ Pan yelled, as the water started to seep through the seams of his oilskins. ‘What the hell are we going to need tarantula spiders for anyway?’

‘Two of them,’ Osiris replied, from the shelter of the covered wheelhouse. ‘Sharpish. And remember to get a male and a female.’

The level was rising fast. Pan growled, gripped the handles of his supermarket trolley, and squelched away.

When a god wants an ark in a hurry, he doesn’t muck about waking people up in the middle of the night and giving detailed specifications in cubits; he simply ordains, and there it is, riding at anchor, ready for the statutory whack round the gunwales with seventy centilitres of Moet. It was big, comfortable and well-equipped, which was a good thing in the circumstances; because this time, nobody was going to be left behind.

Sandra looked in to report on her inventory of the ship’s stores. ‘We’ve got,’ she said, ‘five hundred billion rounds of egg and watercress, seventy billion small cardboard cartons of orange juice, ninety billion Mars bars, forty-six billion packets of peanuts and twenty-seven billion cubic tons of freeze-dried Red Mountain coffee. Do you think that’ll be enough?’

Another good thing about being a god is that people do what they’re told. No sooner had the first big rain-drop splatted itself like a summer bluebottle against a windscreen than the human race, all of them fast asleep, began to form orderly queues at the designated embarkation points, whence they were collected in winged minibuses. The only small gnat in the ointment was the distinctly unethical behaviour of Mercury, god of thieves, who managed to get the fast food concession for the embarkation points by asking Osiris for it when he was busy with something else. Sad to say, not one human being got on to the ark without first buying a frankfurter in a roll, smeared with blood-red sauce.

‘Sugar?’

‘I knew I’d forgotten something.’

‘Never mind.’ To the gods all things are possible. ‘Let there be sugar. It doesn’t actually matter,’ Osiris went on, ‘because all this is all illusion anyway, but there’s no point in upsetting people unnecessarily. How about biscuits?’

‘The whole of C Deck is full of biscuits,’ Sandra replied. ‘If it’s an illusion, why bother?’

Osiris looked up from his charts. They were plain, unmarked blue, apart from a tiny dot representing the peak of Mount Ararat. ‘It’s like building an office block,’ he said. ‘You put up hoardings until the work is finished, so that people only see it when it’s complete. It looks better that way.’

‘Ah.’

Osiris shrugged, so that his yachting cap flopped down over his left eye. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘the other gods won’t believe in it unless we do it this way. You’ve got to remember that your average god is about as conservative as you can get, or otherwise how come they spent thousands of years making the crops grow on manual?’

The other gods spent the entire voyage on A deck, lounging beside the pool and throwing empty cans and bottles into the water. The New Mythology states that just before the waters subsided on the third day, all these bottles drifted together and formed the continent of Australia. One of the good things about the New Mythology is that it’s usually more convincing than the truth.

On B deck mankind spent the voyage bickering, going to work and fighting a few small wars over the possession of the deck quoits area. There was no point, Osiris argued, saving the human race just to have it die of culture shock thirty-six hours into the voyage.

In the engine room, black-faced, sweaty and up to their elbows in grease, Odin, Thor and Frey argued the whole time about whose job it was to lube the main drive shaft bearing. On the blueprint of the ship, Osiris had crossed out the words
Engine Room
and written in
Valhalla
.

On the third day, the waters subsided.

 

The dove circled.

It was confused. It had only nipped out to gorge itself on oil seed rape, crap all over a few parked cars and sit on a telegraph wire. All the sudden blue wet stuff was distinctly unfamiliar.

Doves have pretty near three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision, so their eyes have, properly speaking, no corners out of which to spot tiny specks of darkness in vast blue horizons.

After a few wary approaches to make sure the target area didn’t in fact conceal two men in camouflage clothing with shotguns and a flask of coffee, the dove put its wings back, glided down, turned into the wind and pitched on the branch of the olive tree that was, as far as it could tell, the only bit of perch space left in the whole world. It sat for a while, smugly congratulating itself, and then stretched out its neck and nibbled a leaf.

Yuk. Salty.

Don’t like it here.

With the leaf still in its beak, it spread its wings and flew away.

 

When the waters had all subsided, B deck awoke to find that, apart from a certain degree of residual dampness, the world was exactly as it had been; which was nice.

Except that it was clean. It had been a last-minute inspiration on Osiris’ part to dump sixteen billion tons of concentrated non-biological washing-up liquid over the side on the evening of day one, and an equivalent amount of fabric conditioner twenty-four hours later. By the time the oceans had receded back into their proper confines, you could have eaten your dinner off the pavement in Trafalgar Square without the unpleasant necessity of being a pigeon.

Behold, said the god to himself, I don’t make a new heaven and a new earth, because that would be wasteful and extremely traumatic for the inhabitants. I make the old heaven and the old earth, only rather less grubby.

Not that that’ll last; but one does one’s best, just as a mother always washes and irons regardless of a world full of mud, oil and chocolate. And this time, the god resolved, a little dirt and grime won’t matter very much.

This time, we will run things, but there’ll be a difference. We won’t let them know we’re doing it.

 

There were some gods, however, who had no wish to go back; and that wasn’t a problem, because there were always too many of them, even from the very beginning.

Understandable. It goes without saying that running the world is the ultimate in rotten jobs. It’s a god’s life, running the world.

For those gods who wanted out, behold he created a new Sunnyvoyde, far above the clouds in the temperate uplands of the Glittering Plains. The post of matron he gave to Sandra, who understood about gods (who are only people with an immunity to death, when all is said and done), shortly before sealing it off from the world below for ever. No reports ever filter down any more, except in very garbled form; but observers at the University of Chicopee Falls Department of Integrated Theology report that there is a seventy-nine-point-six per cent chance that rice pudding was reintroduced within six months of start of business, at the request of the residents.

 

The cloud wobbled slightly under him, and he grabbed at it. It was nothing but cloud. It righted itself and floated.

‘And what the fuck,’ Lundqvist demanded, ‘have you bastards done to my feet?’

Perfumed winds moved the cloud along, and there was a faint suggestion of the music of stringed instruments. Below, the world lay still and fresh, the sleep of the newborn.

‘What is this?’ Lundqvist wailed. ‘Leprosy?’

‘They’re your scales, mate,’
replied the Dragon King of the South-East, steering his cloud alongside.
‘Have a beer?’

Lundqvist shook his head. ‘What scales?’ he said. ‘Why have I got claws on the ends of my legs? And what are . . . ?’

He rose six inches or so into the air, panicked and flopped back on to the cloud.

‘Wings,’
replied the Dragon King.
‘You use them for flying and gliding mainly, though if you lie sort of on your side they make a really ace surfboard.’

‘Wings?’

‘What you need, my old mate,’
said the Dragon King,
‘is a mirror.’

Let there be a mirror. Lundqvist looked in it, blinked, closed his eyes and groaned.

‘I dunno,’
sighed the Dragon King,
‘bloody whingeing mortals. It’s really good being a dragon, you’ll see.’

‘How soon till it wears off?’

‘Shit.’

‘I think,’
asserted the Dragon King,
‘this is your reward for, like, saving the universe and allowing the powers of darkness to be defeated. You ought to be pleased, you ungrateful bastard.’

‘Pleased.’

‘Suit yourself, pal.’
The Dragon King frowned and spurred on his cloud. Lundqvist panicked.

‘Hold on,’ he shouted.

Lundqvist allowed his eyes to open again. ‘Just exactly what does this dragon thing involve?’ he asked. ‘I mean, what are dragons, for Chrissakes?’

The Dragon King preened himself and opened another can.
‘Dragons,’
he said, as if reciting a slowly learned lesson,
‘are the spirits of the blessed, endowed with the wings and the fish-arse cozzie and sent forth to supervise the smooth running of their alloted sector. I cover Australia,’
he added.

‘No kidding.’

‘Among my duties,’
the Dragon King continued,
‘are the dispensation of rain, particularly on cricket fields where the Aussies are losing, the regulation of the seasons and the protection of cattle against airborne diseases. Sort of like the Flying Doctor.’