" 'God,' I prayed. 'What do I do? What this woman has said is true! But I am no God. You are God. What do I do?'
"No answer came from Heaven, not to my ears, not to my heart, not to my cumbersome and elaborate brain.
"As for the crowd of listeners, whom I judged to be about thirty- five, exclusive of all the children, no one spoke. Everyone was considering this. No one was quick to accept it. No one was going to jump forward and challenge it either. Something in my manner and posture held them aloof.
"No surprise. I certainly didn't cower or shiver or evince what I was suffering. I had not learnt to express angelic suffering through flesh. I merely sat there, aware that by their measure I was young, comely, and a mystery; and they were not brave enough to try to hurt me as they so often hurt others, to stab, or pierce, or burn me as I had seen them do enough times to their enemies, and to their own despised.
"Suddenly the whole group burst into murmuring. A very old man rose to his feet. His words were even simpler than hers. I would say he had perhaps half of her working vocabulary. But this was enough to express himself and he asked of me simply: 'What do you have to say for yourself?'
"The others reacted as if this question were an expression of sheer genius. Maybe it was. The woman pulled very close to me at that moment. She sat down beside me and with an imploring look, she embraced me.
"I realized something—that her fate was connected to mine. She was slightly afraid of all these people, her kindred. And she wasn't afraid of me! Interesting. That is what tenderness and love can do, and marvels also, I thought. And God says these people are part of Nature!
"I hung my head, but not for long. Finally, I rose to my feet, bringing her up with me, my mate, as it were, and, using all the words known in her language, some even that the children had been adding already in this generation that the adults didn't yet know, I said:
" 'I mean you no harm. I came from Heaven. I came to learn about you and to love you. And I wish you only all good things under God!'
"There was a great clamour, a happy clamour, with people clapping their hands, and rising to their feet, and the little ones jumping up and down. It seemed a consensus emerged that Lilia, the woman I had been with, could now return to the group. She had been cast out to die when she had come upon me. But she was now surely upheld.
And she had returned with a god, a deity, a sky being . .. they aimed for it with many syllables and combinations of syllables.
" 'No!' I declared. 'I am not a god. I did not make the world. I worship, just as you do, the God who did.'
"This, too, was accepted in jubilation. Indeed, the frenzy began to alarm me. I felt the limits of my body keenly with all these others dancing and screaming and shouting and kicking at the wood in the fire, and this lovely Lilia clinging to me.
" 'I must sleep now!' I said suddenly. And this was no more or less than the perfect truth. I had scarce slept an hour or more at any one time in my three days in the flesh and was bone weary and bruised and cast out of Heaven. I wanted to turn to this woman, and bury my sorrow in her arms.
"Everyone gave their approval. A hut was prepared for us. People ran hither and thither gathering the finest skins and furs for us, and the softest chewed leather, and we were ushered into this place in silence, and I lay back down on the fur beneath me, the skin of a mountain goat, long and soft.
" 'God, what do you want me to do!' I asked aloud. There came no answer. There was only the silence and the darkness in the hut, and then the arms of a Daughter of Men around me, luscious and loving and full of tenderness and passion, that mystery, that combination, that purely living miracle, tenderness and lust rolling and rolling into one."
Memnoch stopped. He seemed exhausted suddenly. He rose and again walked to the bank of the sea. He stood in the soft sand and pebbles. I saw the outline of his wings flash for a moment, perhaps exactly the way the woman had seen it, and then he was merely the large figure, with his shoulders hunched as he stood with his back to me, his face apparently buried in his hands.
"Memnoch, what happened!" I said. "Surely God didn't leave you there! What did you do? What happened the next morning when you woke up?"
He gave a sigh and turned around finally. He walked slowly back to the boulder, and sat down again.
"By morning, I had known her a half dozen times and lay half dead, and that in itself was another lesson. But I had no thought whatsoever on what I might do. While she'd slept, I had prayed to God, I had prayed to Michael and to the other angels. I had prayed and prayed, asking what I should do.
"Can you guess who answered me?" he asked.
"The souls in Sheol," I said.
"Yes, precisely! Those are the spirits who answered. How could you know? Those are the spirits—the strongest souls of Sheol who heard my prayers to the Creator and heard the impetus and essence of my cries and my excuses and my pleas for mercy and forgiveness and understanding—heard all of it, absorbed it, drank it up, as they did the spiritual yearnings of their human and living children. And by the time the sun rose, by the time all the men of the group had started to gather, I knew one thing only:
"Whatever happened to me, whatever was the will of God, the souls of Sheol would never be the same! They had learnt too much from the voice of this Angel fallen into Matter who had thoughtlessly cried to Heaven and to God.
"Of course the full impact didn't hit me. I didn't sit there reasoning it out. The strongest souls had had their first glimpse of Paradise. They knew now of a Light which made an Angel weep and beg in desperation, because he was afraid he would never see that Light again. I didn't think of it. No.
"God had left me here. That is what I thought. God had left me. I went out into the crowd. The encampment was overflowing. In fact, men and women were coming from all the nearby encampments to see me.
"And we had to leave the enclosure and go out into the open, into one of the fields. Look down to the right, where the land slopes? You see down there where the field spreads out and the water turns...."
"Yes."
"That's where we gathered. And it was soon clear that all of these men and women were expecting something of me, that I speak, that I work marvels, that I sprout wings, something, but what I didn't know. As for Lilia, she clung to me as ever, enticing and beautiful, and filled with vague wonder.
"Together we climbed onto that rock ... you see there, the boulders left there by the glaciers millions of years ago. There. We climbed up and she sat down and I stood before these people, and then I looked to Heaven and I opened my arms.
"With all my heart, I begged God to forgive me, to take me back, to climax this intrusion with my merciful disappearance, that is, to let me take my angelic shape, invisible, and rise. I willed it, I pictured it, I tried in every conceivable way to assume my former nature. No luck.
"In the heavens above I saw what men saw. I saw the blue of the sky, and the willowy white clouds blowing eastward, and I saw the faint daytime moon. The sun hurt my shoulders. It hurt the top of my head. And something became known to me then in all its horror: that I was probably going to die in this body! That I had forfeited my immortality! God had made me mortal and turned his back.
"I thought this over a long time. I'd suspected it from the first moment, but now with the haste of a man I became convinced of it. And in me a deep anger rose. I looked at all these men and women. I thought of God's words to me, to go with those I had chosen, with the flesh I preferred to Heaven. And a decision came into my head.
"If this was to be my finish, if I was to die in this mortal body as all men die, if some days or weeks or even years were left to me—whatever this body could hope to survive amid the perils of life—then Imust do with it the very finest thing that I knew. I must offer to God my finest. I must go out like an Angel, if going out is what I had to do!" 'I love you, my Lord,' I said aloud. And I racked my brain for the greatest acts I could perform.