"You mean you couldn't have appeared to me on Earth in your angelic form?"
"Not without a lot of argument and pleading, and frankly I didn't want to do it," he said. "It's too overwhelming. It would have weighted everything too much in my favor. In this form, I look too inherently good. I can't enter Heaven without this form; He doesn't want to see the other form, and I don't blame Him. And frankly, on Earth, it's easiest to go about as the Ordinary Man."
I stood up shakily, accepting his hand, which was firm and warm.
In fact, his body seemed as solid as Roger's body had seemed near the very end of Roger's visitation. My body felt complete and entire and my own.
It didn't surprise me to discover my hair was badly tangled. I ran a comb through it hastily for comfort, and brushed off my own clothes—the dark suit I had put on in New Orleans, which was full of tiny specks of dust, and some grass from the garden, but otherwise unharmed. My shirt was torn at the collar, as if I myself had ripped it open hastily in an effort to breathe. Otherwise, I was the usual dandy, standing amid a thick and verdant forest garden, which was not like anything I'd ever seen.
Even a casual inspection indicated that this was no rain forest, but something considerably less dense, yet as primitive.
"Not in Time," I said.
"Well, moving through it as we please," he said, "we are only a few thousand years before your time, if you must know it. But again, the men and women roaming here won't see us. So don't worry. And the animals can't harm us. We are watchers here but we affect nothing. Come, I know this terrain by heart, and if you follow me, you'll see we have an easy path through this wilderness. I have much to tell you. Things around us will begin to change."
"And this body of yours? It's not an illusion? It's complete."
"Angels are invisible, by nature," he said. "That is, we are immaterial in terms of earth material, or the material of the physical universe, or however you would like to describe matter for yourself. But you were right in your early speculation that we have an essential body; and we can gather to ourselves sufficient matter from a whole variety of sources to create for ourselves a complete and functioning body, which we can later shatter and disperse as we see fit."
We walked slowly and easily through the grass. My boots, heavy enough for the New York winter, found the uneven ground no problem at all.
"What I'm saying," Memnoch continued, looking down at me— he was perhaps three inches taller—with his huge almond-shaped eyes—"is that this isn't a borrowed body, nor is it strictly speaking a contrived body. It's my body when surrounded and permeated with matter. In other words, it's the logical result of my essence drawing to it all the various materials it needs."
"You mean you look this way because you look this way."
"Precisely. The Devilish body is a penance. The Ordinary Man is a subterfuge. But this is what I look like. There were angels like me throughout Heaven. Your focus was mainly on human souls in Heaven. But the angels were there."
I tried to remember. Had there been taller beings, winged beings?
I thought so, and yet I wasn't certain. The beatific thunder of Heaven beat in my ears suddenly. I felt the joy, the safety, and above all the satisfaction of all those thriving in it. But angels, no, I had not noticed.
"I take my accurate form," Memnoch continued, "when I am in Heaven, or outside of Time. When I am on my own, so to speak, and not bound to the earth. Other angels, Michael, Gabriel, any of those can appear in their glorified form on earth if they want to. Again, it would be natural. Matter being drawn to them by their magnetic force shapes them to look their most beautiful, the way God created them. But most of the time they don't let this happen. They go about as Ordinary Men or Ordinary Women, because it's simply much easier to do so. Continuously overwhelming human beings do not serve our purposes—neither our Lord's nor mine."
"And that is the question. What is the purpose? What are you doing, if you're not evil?"
"Let me start with the Creation. And let me tell you right now that I know nothing of where God came from, or why, or how. No one knows this. The mystic writers, the prophets of Earth, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Hebrew, Egyptian—all recognized the impossibility of understanding the origin of God. That's not really the question for me and never has been, though I suspect that at the end of Time we will know."
"You mean God hasn't promised that we will know where He came from."
"You know what?" he said, smiling. "I don't think God knows. I think that's the whole purpose of the physical universe. He thinks through watching the universe evolve, He's going to find out. What He has set in motion, you see, is a giant Savage Garden, a giant experiment, to see if the end result produces beings like Himself. We are made in His image, all of us—He is anthropomorphic, without question, but again He is not material."
"And when the light came, when you covered your eyes in Heaven, that was God."
He nodded. "God, the Father, God, the Essence, Brahma, the Aten, the Good God, En Sof, Yahweh, God!"
"Then how can He be anthropomorphic?"
"His essence has a shape, just as does mine. We, His first creations, were made in His image. He told us so. He has two legs, two arms, a head. He made us invisible images of the same. And then set the universe into motion to explore the development of that shape through matter, do you see?"
"Not quite."
"I believe God worked backwards from the blueprint of Himself.
He created a physical universe whose laws would result in the evolution of creatures who resembled Him. They would be made of matter. Except for one striking and important difference. Oh, but then there were so many surprises. You know my opinion already. Your friend David hit upon it when he was a man. I think God's plan went horribly wrong."
"Yes, David did say that, that he thought angels felt God's plan for Creation was all wrong."
"Yes. I think He did it originally to find out what it would have been like had He been Matter. And I think He was looking for a clue as to how He got where He is. And why He is shaped like He is, which is shaped like me or you. In watching man evolve, He hopes to understand His own evolution, if such a thing in fact occurred. And whether this has worked or not to His satisfaction, well, only you can judge that for yourself."
"Wait a minute," I said. "But if He is spiritual and made of light, or made of nothing—then what gave Him the idea for matter in the first place?"
"Ah, now that is the cosmic mystery. In my opinion, His imagination created Matter, or foresaw it, or longed for it. And I think the longing for it was a most important aspect of His mind. You see, Lestat, if He Himself did originate in Matter . . . then all this is an experiment to see when Matter can evolve into God again.
"If He didn't originate Matter, if He proceeded and it is something He imagined and desired and longed for, well, the effects upon Him are basically the same. He wanted Matter. He wasn't satisfied without it. Or He wouldn't have made it. It was no accident, I can assure it.
"But let me caution you, not all the angels agree on this interpretation, some feel the need for no interpretation, and some have completely different theories. This is my theory, and since I am the Devil, and have been for centuries, since I am the Adversary, the Prince of Darkness, the Ruler of the World of Men and of Hell, I think my opinion is worth stating. I think it's worth believing in. So you have my article of faith.
"The design of the universe is immense, to use a feeble word, but the whole process of evolution was His calculated experiment, and we, the angels, were created long before it began."
"What was it like before Matter began?"
"I can't tell you. I know, but I don't, strictly speaking, remember.
The reason for this is simple: When Matter was created, so was Time. All angels began to exist not only in heavenly perfection with God but to witness and be drawn into Time.