Sympathy for the devil Read online

  Business was looking bad. And fornication used to be such a fun line of work.

  What I need, he thought, is a miracle.

  Unfortunately, miracles were hard to come by in Hell.

  Chapter 4

  Pitchblende, Lucifer's executive secretary, placed the most recent marketing reports on the Archfiend's glossy lacquered red desk.

  Lucifer glanced through the hefty sheaf of papers—Vice, Usury, War, Disease, Famine, Telephone Solicitation . . . all the big evils were there.

  The Lust and Fornication American Quarterly report showed good movement in the Lust Department. Mini-skirts and see-through blouses were back in, sexual harassment suits were on the rise, and Agonostis had opened some very clever new markets by taking advantage of cutting-edge technology—pornographic CD-ROMs, computer sex-games, and online sex services were skyrocketing. Agonostis' R&D people were doing wonders with virtual reality technology, too, and expected to have their full-sensory-stimulus products on the market even before any practical VR applications became available.

  Lucifer frowned when he saw the Fornication numbers, though. Fornication had been the blue-chip market since time began—an absolute sure thing guaranteed to produce steadily increasing revenues no matter what else was going on in the world. As long as there were more people (and there were always more people) fornication kept right on increasing. Yet Agonostis' numbers were down—markedly down. If Lucifer remembered correctly, they had trended downward in the past two quarters as well.

  The Archfiend tapped a few keys on his keyboard to bring up Quick'N'Dead, Hell's soul-accounting program, then ran through the graphs for Fornication for the last year, then the last three years, and finally the last five. He grew angrier with every new set of graphs. He should have checked this earlier—Agonostis had managed to counterbalance his Fornication numbers with his Lust numbers so that his reports still showed a net damnedsoul increase, but Lucifer discovered Fornication had been dropping off in fits and starts for five straight years. A five-year drop in a blue-chip asset could only come from poor management.

  It was about time to remind Agonostis that not all jobs in Hell were desk jobs.

  Lucifer nibbled on one long, pointed talon and contemplated risky, difficult field assignments.

  Agonostis needed one.

  Chapter 5

  Dayne stripped out of her scrubs and threw them in a pile on the floor. She fished through the dryer and found a T-shirt, a pair of shorts and a pair of thick socks; she tugged those on angrily, then stormed around until she managed to locate her sneakers. She didn't pet either of the cats that twined around her ankles hoping for attention. She didn't check the messages on her answering machine, though the blinking light indicated that there were four—more than usual.

  She ran up the stairs two at a time to the second floor of her two-story apartment, into the spare bedroom that she used as a gym, and moved the setting on her stair-stepper up to FAST.

  She was furious—angrier than she had ever been. She was angry with Dr. Batskold, with herself, with the universe in general. She climbed on the stair-stepper, checked her watch, and started off at a running pace.

  Mrs. Paulley had died twice more on the same shift. Both times, Dr. Batskold managed to get her back, and both times he gloated as if he'd done something wonderful.

  Dayne's other patient, a young man who'd tried to kill himself with household chemicals and who didn't have any kidneys anymore, had gone into withdrawal from the other drugs he apparently had been taking without anyone knowing. She didn't even want to think about what she'd had to do to him. He'd sobbed and cried and begged her to just let him die—and she'd kept right on working on him, because it was her job, because she was a nurse and that was what nurses did. The Nazis had used the same excuse when questioned—they'd been following orders.

  "Just like me. I feel like a damned Nazi. No I don't—I feel like Hell's chief torturer," Dayne snarled, pumping on the stair-stepper. She ran upstairs for twenty minutes, as fast as she could push the machine, then jumped off, sweating and breathing hard, and dropped to the floor. She did a hundred push-ups military-style, rested a moment, did a hundred more, rested a moment, and did a third set. She got up and settled onto the Roman chair, and did Roman chair sit-ups, two hundred and fifty at a time.

  It didn't help. The anger still burned in her belly, hot and steady and real. She wasn't just angry about the things that had happened that day; the torture she'd put her patients through had wakened that other, older anger. And as mad as Dayne was at Batskold, she was madder at God. She blew through bench presses and flyes and lat pulldowns and rows and squats, pushing herself harder and harder, trying to take herself to a place beyond the anger—but there was no place inside her that the anger didn't touch.

  She put the weights down at last and stood in the center of the room, breathing hard, and she faced the fears that ate at her.

  More than once, she'd looked at herself as a torturer—as the person who did terrible things to nice little old ladies and to sweet old men, to people who were helpless and hopeless. She was only half joking when, talking with friends, she referred to her job as the job from Hell. One thing kept her in nursing—the fact that sometimes the terrible things she did to her patients made them better. Sometimes she was able to make things right.

  But Dayne believed in Hell—in a real, literal Hell where the souls of the damned went to be tormented for eternity. She believed in Heaven, too, but thoughts of Heaven hadn't given her much solace in the four years since her husband Torry died.

  She'd loved him. He drank, he ran around on her, he got into trouble, he was a failure as a husband and as a human being—but for the whole three years they were married, she'd loved him.

  He died the way he'd lived—driving fast, stone drunk, with a woman who was not his wife in the car with him. He'd smashed into a telephone pole going at better than a hundred miles an hour, and he and his most recent girlfriend had flashed out of existence before they'd had a chance to know what happened to them.

  And right now, Dayne thought, down in Hell, someone was torturing Torry.

  She stood in the center of that room, thinking of the pain she inflicted—and the fact that she inflicted it as gently and quickly as she could, and of the fact that it ended—that no matter how badly she hurt the people she cared for, their pain ended. Dr. Batskold couldn't make them live forever, even though he tried. Sooner or later they would die and escape.

  Torry couldn't escape. And when the universe blew out of existence and all of Time came to an end, someone would still be torturing Torry.

  He'd been twenty-four when he died—young and beautiful and foolish. His fundamentalist parents had jammed religion down his throat until he'd thrown it up; he'd come to despise churches and religion and everything he connected with them, and his life had been one big attempt to spit in God's eye. Dayne had loved him anyway—not wisely, but with her whole heart.

  In spite of everything, she still loved him—and for four years, she'd gotten up every morning and gone to bed every night, thinking of Torry in Hell.

  This day, this hellish day that had come hard on the heels of a week of hellish days, had brought thoughts of Torry to the front of her mind, and heated up her anger until she couldn't hold it in anymore.

  She looked up toward Heaven, and with her eyes wide open, she said, "Okay, God. I've had it. I've thought about this until I can't stand to think about it anymore, and now we're going to have to do something about it. You said that whatever we asked of you, if we had faith, you would give to us." She took a deep breath, and her hands clenched into fists.

  "Hell is all wrong. You claim that we have free choice—the choice to love you or not, to follow you or not. But there isn't any choice to it. If a thief held a gun to my head and told me to give him my car keys or he'd kill me, I'd give him my keys . . . but nobody would say I did so of my own free will. And if he stuck the same gun to my head and told me to love him or else, I might
pretend to love him . . . at least until I got hold of the gun.

  "You're holding a gun to our heads, God. You're saying `Love me or writhe in torment for eternity' and eternal torment is a pretty damned big gun for anything a person could do in eighty years.

  "You claim to be a God of love. I say that only a sadistic, spoiled child would torture someone for eternity, no matter what reason he had."

  She exhaled slowly, and her eyes narrowed. "You said ask and believe. So now I'm asking. Let them have the chance to repent, God. All of them. Every single soul in Hell. Let them have the chance to learn from the mistakes they made; let them into Heaven if they repent.

  "Until you do this, you can consider me a conscientious objector, protesting the policies of Heaven. When I die, you can send me to Hell, because I won't go to Heaven until every soul can find a way there, God. Every soul. No matter who they were, no matter what they did.

  "Eternity is too long for a loving God to condone the torture of his children."

  Sweat ran down Dayne's face, mixing with her tears. She stood defiant, with her back straight and her head high, holding her own soul over the abyss, because her soul was the only thing she knew for sure God valued. She held her challenge up to God. She meant every word she said, with everything inside of her. And she believed.

  Chapter 6

  Klaxons blared, and the golden creature at the computer looked up from his work and said, "We have an incoming ten, your Holiness."

  "A ten? Really? What was the last ten we received?"

  "One Mary Beth Patterson, age eleven. Request for a horse." The angel grinned and shook his head ruefully.

  "Of course. Request answered in a timely manner?"

  "Absolutely, your Holiness."

  "A horse." The Almighty Creator sighed.

  The angel understood. Tens were requests asked in perfect purity and sincerity and belief, by people whose minds and souls were focused only on what they asked.

  "Perhaps that was a poor example." The angel ran a quick search through Heaven's databases for all tens in the past five years, then brought the results up on the computer screen. The data scrolled out, glowing gold letters in a neat calligraphic hand on a background as richly black as infinite space.

  Kerahatma Qrishi—age 7—request to spare mother's life—Granted

  Miguel Savarronda—age 9—job for father—Granted

  Caitlan O'Shaunessy—age 10 1/2—a border collie—Granted

  Brian Boucher—age 8—little brother healed of leukemia—Granted

  Peter Derstman—age 9 1/2—principal punished for unfair punishment he gave—Granted

  "That takes us through the last five years." The angel looked up at God and said, "I could run through the near-tens if you'd like. We have slightly more of those."

  "No. That isn't necessary. My children ask with sincerity and pure hearts, and believe I will listen, and I always answer them, no matter how foolhardy their desires. What does this one want?"

  The angel brought the newest request up on the screen.

  Dayne Kuttner—age 28—God's sympathy for the devil, and second chance for the denizens of Hell—Status . . . Pending.

  "Good heavens," God murmured. "Is that a computer error?"

  The angel typed in his query again, and the same data reappeared on the screen.

  "Twenty-eight? She's really twenty-eight?"

  "Yes, your Holiness." The angel started typing again.

  "Let me see all tens through history, petitioners older than sixteen."

  The angel nodded; he had already queried the computer for that information. In the thousands of years he had been record-keeper, he had gotten good at guessing what the Most Holy would ask for next.

  Searching . . .

  "This may take a while."

  It did take a while—Heaven had good computers, but unfortunately a lot of its information was stored in corollary sources which hadn't yet been added to the easy-retrieval databases. After a millisecond of real time—unconscionably slow by Heaven's clocks—the data started to come in. There was a ten from the first Buddha, one from an undiscovered saint in the Congo in the fifteenth century AD; there were the well-known tens from Moses and Peter, and of course a few from adults praying for the welfare of their children—the time and geographical distribution and religion of petitioner on those varied widely; and there was one from Abraham Lincoln. The angel remembered that one well. Preservation of the nation he loved—offered to pay whatever price was necessary if only his country could survive united.

  There were others, too, but not many—thirty-seven all told since the first human had prayed to an unseen deity.

  This one, the thirty-eighth in the entire history of humanity, was a humdinger. The angel had never seen anything even remotely like it.

  "Bring up the full text as her soul phrased the request."

  "You said ask and believe. So now I'm asking. Let them have the chance to repent, God. All of them. Every single soul in Hell. Let them have the chance to learn from the mistakes they made; let them into Heaven if they repent.

  "Until you do this, you can consider me a conscientious objector, protesting the policies of Heaven. When I die, you can send me to Hell, because I won't go to Heaven until every soul can find a way there, God. Every soul. No matter who they were, no matter what they did.

  "Eternity is too long for a loving God to condone the torture of his children."

  The angel brought up a real-time picture of Dayne as she prayed—she stared straight at them out of the monitor, her eyes flashing, her jaw clenched, her expression one of both purity and fierce determination.

  "We never appreciate the requests for ponies and puppies when we have them, do we?" God mused. He pointed at the "Status . . . Pending" notation at the end of Dayne Kuttner's request, and sighed again, then chuckled. "She's a real firecracker, isn't she? Gave me an in-your-face chin-up challenge, too. I like that—no mealy-mouthed lukewarm bet-hedging there." God glanced over the angel's shoulder at the routing details appended to the request. "North Carolina, USA. And only a nominal Christian, though she certainly believes in me." The Almighty chuckled again. "I like to be sure of the ground rules before I act."

  The angel cleared his throat. "Holy of Holies—the Fallen can be redeemed and released from Hell at any time if they only ask for forgiveness. So too can each and every damned soul. The Christian milieu is set up that way."

  "I know that, but quite obviously Dayne Kuttner doesn't know that."

  "If her request is granted even before she asks, what further action could possibly be necessary?"

  God rested one hand on the angel's shoulder and said softly, "This young mortal has, in total seriousness, offered her soul up as a bartering piece to force me to give the Fallen a second chance. She doesn't know all the rules we operate by here, and she has no way of anticipating how I'll react. And yet, she believes with everything in her that I will listen, and she is using the only thing she knows for sure I value to make me care. That's no empty gesture. That's real love . . . a human who loves the worst and vilest of my sinners but hates the sin. I find that magnificent." God paused and tugged thoughtfully at his beard. He always wore a beard when he was in the Christian sector of Heaven—his Christian children expected one. "Not terribly well thought-out, perhaps, but magnificent.

  "Hold her request in the buffer for me. I don't imagine we're going to get another ten in here any time soon, and I want to decide how to implement this. People who offer challenges to God should expect challenges themselves."

  God laughed suddenly, and the angel shivered. God was known for his sense of humor; what few realized but the angel knew was that God was the first and perfect practical joker. And sure enough, God said, "Besides, this is a perfect opportunity to stir things up a little. A few Hellish paroles might make them think. The world has become far too complacent about me lately."

  "You're granting her request then, your Glorious Holiness?"

  "Of course I'm gr
anting it. I always grant tens. It isn't as if I think Lucifer and his filthy hordes are going to come crawling on bended knee after all this time, anyway. But I reserve the right to implement tens as I see fit—and this one requires a careful study of the limitations I need to impose, and the benefits Heaven can gain from what will surely be perceived as a broad stroke. So just hang onto it. I'll be back to you when I've had a chance to work out the details."

  The angel watched the Creator stalk away, head lowered in thought. Then he turned his attention back to the computer and deleted the "Pending" notice. He typed in the words, "Granted—implementation in progress."

  Then he nibbled thoughtfully on his lower lip and stared off into the glorious infinity of heaven. He had a few dear friends who'd gotten involved on the wrong side of that first political disagreement—friends he hadn't seen in eons. With paroles on the way, he wondered if there might be some hope of getting back in touch.

  Chapter 7

  Friday night at nineteen hundred and thirty hours EDT on Hell's big clock, the imp on the soul radar yelped like an air raid siren and began bouncing around its station. It grabbed the mike and howled, "Holy Tarheels, Your Bat-Winged Arch-Fiendishness! Bogie on the big board! Bogie on the big board! And it's a whopper!"

  Lucifer rose slowly from his work and stalked through the lined rows of desks, glowering, scattering secretaries with every step. When he walked, the rest of Hell went face down and shivered until the ground beneath it ceased to tremble with the passing of its lord. Flames curled up where Lucifer had stepped, and the stench of brimstone hung in his wake.

  He reached the imp, and from his great and terrifying height, he looked down. Into the vast silence in the office, silence that came not of deference, but of dry-mouthed, unthinking fear, the Lord of Darkness growled, "What do you mean, doomed imp?"

  The imp pointed to a swirling dot of white spinning against the deep red background of the soul-board. "Right there, O Foul Putrescence." The imp switched from doing Robin the Boy Wonder to doing Chuck Yeager. "Right smack in the heart of Charlotte, North Carolina—we got us a four-point-seven-nine plus-soul crosscurrent intersecting on the material plane with a triple-A hardcase bearing zero-zero-ninety and carrying an unidentified soul-cargo anomaly aimed straight at us, Roger Wilco, over and out."