Matthew Barash Science Fiction / Fantasy

email the author at: mbarash at lookatusgo.com

PROLOGUE THE FIRST
            -21 years ago next Thursday- 

Very few thought that letting Escher into heaven was a mistake, but many questioned her decision to put him on the architectural committee. The Devil Incarnate admired the result of her coup. This meeting room was his masterpiece. Few immortals shared her feelings, some couldn’t even form a coherent sentence while here.

She dropped into the plush red leather chair at the head of the table.

“Michelle.” Her name echoed nicely in the empty room. It translated out of the ancient Hebrew as “Who is like God?” A joke few understood anymore, nonetheless she gleefully answered her echo.

“Me!”

She followed the path of the second echo as it bounced around the room.

The others she’d managed to contact would be along soon. Most, she suspected, checked their deity-ID and chose to risk her wrath rather than pick up the damned phone. If half-a-dozen immortals showed up, she’d be lucky.

She’d been better at waiting during the early millenia of creation, cleaning up after God’s various disasters. He’d made a fine primordial soup but couldn’t have gotten life out of it to save His soul. The crucial impetus, as usual, had been up to her. The image of life’s progress since that moment was depicted in intricate mosaic above the chair to her left. Primordial ooze, single-cell colonies, swimmers, crawlers, walkers, and eventually tawny teenage tennis pros in short, white skirts endorsing soft drinks.

The Celestials Association for Better Redemption, CABER was coming apart. The council’s title had been invented by the batty Celtic goddess Sheela Na Gig who liked watching burly men tossing telephone-pole sized logs. Of course once they witnessed the sport, many of the other goddesses admitted old Sheela had a point about caber tossing. Even in modern times, it was a popular outing among the female deities to go to Highland games and watch strong men in kilts grunting over something besides women.

And Escher’s design didn’t help appease the hundred thousand petty rivalries. The long, white table folded back upon itself in such a way that no immortal was ever more than two seats from any other, no matter how many were in attendance. It was awkward to carry on a decent grudge by ignoring an immortal enemy when they were sitting elbow-to-elbow. The table looked normal enough as long as you didn’t think about it too hard. But that wasn’t what invoked the most complaints.

Nor was it the mosaics that covered walls, ceiling, and floor in a mind-bending cacophony of color. In addition to evolution, which had called upon the god of science as its defender, the history of every religion that had a recognized god or goddess was laid out in the miniscule tiles.

And all these flowed together until each turned into the other and almost every one turned into the same tawny teenage tennis pros in short, white skirts endorsing soft drinks. And there was no way to separate them from Zeus. Of course he’d been a rabid womanizer since birth so this wasn’t as unlikely as your average shmoo supposed. He hadn’t been spotted since entering a go-go bar in November of 1966. Not that anyone missed the old bastard.

Escher’s portrait always made her smile every time she tracked it down in the ever-shifting mosaic. Two hands taller than Yahweh, they stood near each other, but not too close. The short, round man, the creative artist who had thought up so many cool and beautiful ideas.

And herself, the tall woman with long dark hair and the tiniest chips of green for her eyes. Not a slip of a woman, but neither Rubenesque. Just a good solid woman, with a figure that had made many a mortal weep. And more than a few immortals when she’d set her mind to it. The portrait showed a woman of stamina rather than a frail wallflower. A woman with muscles made strong by cleaning up the messes Yahweh had left down the ages.

But it wasn’t this map of religion and creation that made the brains of the immortals really hurt and go begging for a god-sized dose of salicylic acid.

The feature that really twisted up most of them also happened to be Michelle’s favorite part of Escher’s design. The long rows of arched windows that looked down upon all creation. The varied angles could be disconcerting at first. Out one window, the rolling meadows of Heaven spread forever. The next revealed the Big Bang in that silent instant when pure dark was giving way to pure light but no sound had yet been heard. Another looked down upon a hummingbird’s nest in a lilac bush somewhere along the Oregon coast. A close-up view down the throat of a volcano on the Juptier’s moon Io made the Hell that she’d developed look like a toddler’s paradise.

What really bugged most gods was that they could walk the length of the room in a few dozen steps, no chair was more than two seats away from their immortal enemy, but the windows went on forever without limit. And there was still plenty of wall space for the ever-entwining mosaic. And each one of that infinite series of windows was different. It made the most controlling gods downright twitchy. The few who liked it either depended on a sense of humor, as she felt herself prone to do, or were so connected with the Cosmic All that they found it beguiling.

Those not so equipped made a point of ignoring the aesthetic trappings of the room by staring fixedly at the table. A blank white slate that begged to be the notepad for having the future scribbled in colored crayons, preferably the full 64-color set with the sharpener in the back.

Among the ones who could stand to inspect the room, it was often debated how a mortal like Escher could have been so insightful. Michelle knew that he was so stoned when he died that he’d remain in that state for another few centuries at least. They’d be a while waiting for a coherent answer, assuming he could give one once he was dried out.

She slouched down in her favorite chair, kicked off her sandals and rested her feet on the table. She let her eyes idly rest upon a view of the moon buggy for Apollo 16 sitting idly at the foot of the Descartes Mountains. A brilliant practical joker had turned it around in the direction opposite to the way the astronauts had parked it, but it seemed unlikely anyone would notice. She, at least, appreciated her own humor.

Being the Devil Incarnate had its perks.

CHAPTER 1

By the time Dana Murphy was five, she knew her mother was different. It wasn’t the distracted air that sometimes had them eating steaming hot meatloaf with baked potatoes and broccoli for breakfast and cold, syrup-sodden pancakes sliding out of her Lisa Frank lunchbox at daycare.

Nor was it that they sang while in the shower together, though it was always the same bit about washing that man right out of their hair. No matter how she looked, she couldn’t see any tiny men there. Her mother’s carrot-top red curls turned chestnut red with the soap and water, her own long, dark waves turned black as they sang and danced in the narrow tub. Her own eyes green, her mother’s blue.

It wasn’t even the piano that played itself in the living room, though she’d never been able to find where it plugged in, or where the batteries went. All it had was pedals and scrolls of paper.

The first really weird thing was that there was no television or video games in the house. Her first after daycare playdate at Theresa’s had included Barney and “Super Mario Brothers” which had greatly shaken her firm views on the sensibility of her universe. She hadn’t gotten over it until six weeks later when she’d managed to whip Theresa’s behind at her brother Sam’s “Super Car Racer III.”

In fact, the only modern device her mother owned other than a buzzing wand, that got boring really quickly, was a CD player which held five discs at a time and played music incessantly.

During her entire childhood, the house was never quiet.

She’d wake in the middle of the night to hear Frankie Avalon give way to Frankie Lane then Frank Sinatra and finally Frank Zappa.

She’d learned her alphabet organizing her mother’s massive collection by the artist’s first name, and her mother played them in order from one end of the collection to the other. For the rest of her life Tina Turner’s pelvis-thumping tones were a natural segue into Tiny Tim’s ukulele. When they reached “Zydeco, the Last Twenty Years,” she knew that dancing together to ABBA was not far away.

Dana never got over the foreign feel of libraries, as if she’d walked into a world where the last-name-first shelving order had been designed by Salvador Dali.

No, what was really different about her mom was the quiet stream of people who came to visit her. Whispered counseling sessions in the back room that had been converted to a cozy office.

Dana’d learned early on, short of arterial blood or a significant outbreak of fire, she wasn’t supposed to enter the rose-colored office when the door was closed.

That didn’t mean she was above spying.

The old house had simple floor vents to heat the upstairs bedroom. The metal grates opened a hole into the ceiling of the room below as if that was enough to heat the upstairs. She would lie for hour upon hour on the hardwood floor spying down on her mother’s work. Buried beneath the big black quilt from her bed, she’d stare down into the vague puff of warm air on her face.

All the scents her mother used would waft upward and tickle at her nose. Lavender candles. Almond massage oil. Incense. Burning sage between sessions.

Sometimes Mama’s patients were partly clothed. Sometimes naked. Sometimes they were poked with needles. Sometimes smeared with salves. And sometimes, which were Dana’s favorites, they lay there, fully clothed with a cloth over their eyes.

Mama would shed her loose flowing robe until she stood bare and radiant and beautiful at their side. The candlelight would make her pale skin and freckles all rich and warm. No jewelry. Her hair in its usual snarled ponytail behind her like a chestnut mare’s mane snarled by the wind, and she would wave her hands slowly above the person. Never touching them.

The people would relax, tense, twitch, just like Dana’s string puppets, but she couldn’t ever see the strings no matter how she squinted. Not until one night when her eyes had been really tired from a long afternoon of whipping Theresa’s behind on “Doom” did she see the strings.

Her mother was unsnarling a long line of snagged white light above Mrs. Crane’s left hip. She could see how it was all stuck right where there was a break in the bone. But Dana knew the bone was whole.

When she’d asked Mama later, she’d tried to change the subject. But five-year old persistence paid off.

Mrs. Crane had never gotten over a hip that she’d broken as a little girl that had healed wrong. Mama was straightening out the mess it had made in her energy.

She knew that Theresa’s mom, who served healthy snacks and whose dinners always tasted dinnerish, would never understand. And after Theresa had called her a liar and told her how gross it must be to see her mother naked, she hadn’t mentioned her mother again.

To anyone.