I am not a servant. We are not servants. He Who We Serve is not our master, but our lover. We act from our will, no others. Could this... thing say as much? Or any of its swooping, tending, message-bearing ilk?
And did its master really think he could sweep away this compost heap without the knowledge of He Who We Serve? We love this world! How it seethes, how it struggles, how it howls in pain, what colors there are in its agony! It is our greatest joy, the human race. We cannot see it removed, like game pieces from a table at the end of the day, simply because he’s bored.
Don’t be afraid, you wretched vermin. We will save you.
Ananayel
There is a language which is no language, which we of the empyrean understand, and which these fallen creatures still remember. While my human mouth made words, and his human mouth made words, we spoke to one another:
“You have no place here,” I told him, which was simply the truth.
He snarled at me. It is so hard to believe these were once angels as well; how thoroughly they’ve forgotten their former grace. He said, “This is more my place than yours. I am not here to destroy it.”
So his master knew what was going to happen, did he? And, having learned nothing over the millennia about the futility of opposing the desires of God, the master of this creature has sent his minions into the field yet again, to do battle against God’s commandments. I rose and said, “Don’t you know that the triumphs of Evil are always transitory? God’s Will will be done.”
“Not today,” he said. “We want the woman.”
“You already have her,” I said, glancing down at the poor diseased malevolent bitch. “But you can’t take her with you just yet.”
“I want her now. I’ll take her now.”
It would, of course, be possible to start again, to assemble another team, perhaps lingually linked in French this time, shifting the basic scene from New York to Lyons, but I refused to do it. This creature and his master must not be permitted even the most temporary successes. So I resisted. Leaning closer to him, gazing through those dark sunglass lenses into the red depth of his borrowed eyes, I said, “Do you really want an exchange of miracles, here in a Boeing 747? Do you really want to give these humans an array of anomalies to decipher?”
“All I want is the woman.” He was trying to be implacable with me. Me!
“She is part of the plan.”
“That’s why I want her.”
“That’s why you can’t have her.”
He turned those eyes on the woman, smoking burning eyes, and spoke to her in the human way: “Get up from there.”
“God Almighty,” I prayed, “grant me a crumb of Your power.”
The response lifted me gently into the air, my feet no more than an inch from the industrial carpet. His attention swiveled from the woman to me, his eyes showed alarm, then understanding. He raised a hand—
I stopped time.
Everything. It stopped. In all the corporal universe, everything was rigid, unmoving, unfeeling, made of stone. Energy was not employed, matter did not decay. Nothing was kinetic, everything was inert. In all of that vast silent stillness, flat and dead, without even an echo, only that devil and I, in the clumsy airplane suspended in unmoving air over the unturning Earth, continued to move, act, think, struggle.
His raised hand pointed at me, and my body filled with leprous organisms, my eyes were clouded by cataracts, my throat clogged with open sores. Toads sprang from my mouth. Every sense was confounded, every thought distracted, every pain and woe at his command was flung at me, to grapple and clamp me, addle my powers, deflect my intentions, absorb me in self-defense while he got on about his prideful business.
I fought back. I swept away everything he hurled at me, killing, searing, wiping clean, purifying as rapidly as he befouled, until there came an instant of total freedom from his onslaught. Then I looked at him. I looked at him with my real eyes.
That body he was wearing was burned to a crisp. The body was reduced to ashes, the ashes to molecules in the ambient air, till there was nothing left but a tiny, buzzing, furious black fly, a black streak, a smear, a smudge, flashing back and forth in front of me, shrieking its defiance. I was ready to destroy that manifestation as well, but it fled away into business class, and I felt myself near the end of my borrowed power. I had to restore the situation to what it had been.
I reconstructed the body the demon had used, or a near enough facsimile, and inhabited it. The previous body I carefully lowered until its shoes touched carpet once more, then left it simple instructions that would carry it until I could return.
I released time.
The woman had been looking at my former self, as though for help and rescue, and now she blinked and looked confused. No doubt she’d seen that body appear to rise, then blur, then all at once be back where it had been. But she would assume the error was in her eyes, perhaps some manifestation of her terror, or of her disease. Already, she was looking away from the old me toward the new me, afraid to obey my order and afraid not to.
“Never mind,” I told her. This voice was more guttural, this body more uncomfortable. I looked — almost with envy — at my roomy former self. “Sit down,” I told it.
It sat. The expression on its face remained stern. Its movements were only faintly off, only slightly in the direction of the cumbersome.
“You both wait there,” I ordered, waving the machine pistol with obvious menace. “I’ll get back to you. We’ll see who you can defy.” And I turned away and marched toward the front of the aircraft, to deal with my fellow hijackers. They were human, and would be no trouble.
13
Pami watched the terrorist stride away, beyond the partition and out of sight. What happened there? Her vision was briefly blurred, her stomach and all of her insides were roiled and loose, her mouth was as dry as the desert in which she’d grown up, her arms and feet twitched uncontrollably.
But he didn’t take her when he went away. The blond man had stood up and talked back to the terrorist, arguing with him, saying not-to-pick-on-women-take-him-instead-and-this-and-that, and the terrorist snarled and argued and was, of course not going to pay any attention to such stuff. And then he went away.
Pami peered sidelong, in awe and fear and relief, at her rescuer. The blond man still looked stern. He sat there with his big hands placed slackly on the armrests, feet planted, gazing forward toward where the terrorist had disappeared. Pami whispered, “Will he come back?”
“We’ll just wait here,” he said. Tension showed in how woodenly he sat and spoke, how he kept facing forward as he talked. “We won’t make any moves, won’t attract attention to ourselves.”
“Oh, yes.”
She dared to reach out and touch the back of his hand for just an instant, and it was surprisingly cold. How much effort it must have taken for him to stand up and defy an armed terrorist!
This was the only man in Pami’s entire life toward whom she had ever had any reason to feel grateful. She didn’t know what to do with the feeling, with the obligation. There was no way to repay him, nothing she could give him or do for him. That would be some expression of gratitude, wouldn’t it, to infect him with slim! A faint smile touched her small, secret, twisted face, and she turned away to see the turbanned man on her other side all scrunched up, eyes tight closed as he moved a set of wooden beads through his trembling fingers. His heavy lips moved without sound. Somebody’s religion, it must be.