"It was a bloodless Creation and without sacrifice," I said. My voice was dull but my mind had never been more alert. "That is what you're saying. But He does believe suffering is sacrosanct or can be. Nothing is wasted. All things are used."
"Yes. But my position is that He took the awful flaw in His cosmos s—human pain, misery, the capacity to suffer unspeakable injustice—and He found a place for it, using the worst superstitious beliefs of Men."
"But when people die—what happens? Do His believers find the tunnel and the Light and Loved ones?"
"In the places where they have lived in peace and prosperity, generally, yes. They rise without hate or resentment directly into Heaven. And so do some who have no belief in Him whatsoever or His teachings.
"Because they too are Illuminated."
"Yes. And this gratifies Him and expands His Heaven, and Heaven is ever enhanced and enriched by these new souls from all quarters of the world."
"But Hell is also full of souls."
"Hell so far exceeds the size of Heaven as to be laughable. Where on the planet has He ruled where there has not been self-sacrifice, injustice, persecution, torment, war! Every day my confused and embittered pupils are increased in number. There are times of such privation and horror that few souls ascend to Him in peace at all."
"And He does not care."
"Precisely. He says that suffering of sentient beings is like decay; it fertilizes the growth of their souls! He looks from His lofty height upon a massacre and He sees magnificence. He sees men and women never loving so much as when they lose their loved ones, never loving so much as when they sacrifice for others for some abstract notion of Him, never loving so much as when the conquering army comes down to lay waste the hearth, divide the flock, and catch up the bodies of infants on their spears.
"His justification? It's in Nature. It's what He created. And if battered and embittered souls must fall into my hands first and suffer my tutelage in Hell, so much the greater will they become!"
"And your job grows heavier all the time."
"Yes and no. I am winning. But I have to win on His terms. Hell is a place of suffering. But let's go over it carefully. Look at it; what He did: "When He threw open the gates of Sheol, when He went down into the gloom of Sheol, like the god Tammuz into the Sumerian hell, the souls flocked to Him and saw His redemption and saw the wounds in His Hands and Feet, and that He should die for them gave a focus to their confusion, and of course they flooded with Him into the Gates of Heaven—for everything they had suffered seemed suddenly to have a meaning.
"But did it have a meaning? Can you give a sacred meaning to the cycle of Nature simply by immersing your Divine Self in it? Is that enough?
"What about the souls who shrink in bitterness, who never flower as the heels of warriors walk over them, what about the souls warped and twisted by unspeakable injustice, who go into eternity cursing, what about a whole modern world which is personally angry with God, angry enough to curse Jesus Christ and God Himself as Luther did, as Dora did, as you have done, as all have done.
"People in your modern world of the late twentieth century have never stopped believing in Him. It's that they hate Him; they resent Him; they are furious with Him. They feel. . . they feel. . . ."
"Superior to Him," I said quietly, keenly aware that he was saying now some of the very words I myself had said to Dora. We hate God. We hate Him.
"Yes," he said. "Yes, you feel superior to Him."
' 'And you feel superior.''
"Yes. I can't show them His wounds in Hell. That isn't going to win them over, these victims, these grieving, furious sufferers of pain beyond His imagining. I can just tell them that it was the Dominican Fathers in His Name who burnt their bodies alive, thinking them witches. Or that when their families and clans and villages were annihilated by Spanish soldiers, it was all right because His bleeding Hands and Feet were on the banner which the men carried to the New World. You think that would get somebody out of Hell, finding out that He let it happen? And lets other souls ascend without suffering one drop of pain?
"If I were to begin their education with that image—Christ has Died for You—how long do you think the Hellish education of a soul would take?"
"You haven't told me what Hell is or how you do teach there." "I run it my way, of that I can assure you.
"I have put my throne above His throne—as the poets and the redactors of Scripture say it—because I know that for souls to attain Heaven, suffering was never necessary, that full understanding and receptivity to God never required a fast, a scourging, a crucifixion, a death. I know that the human soul transcended Nature, and needed no more than an eye for beauty to do this! Job was Job before he suffered! Just as after! What did the suffering teach Job that he didn't know before?"
"But how do you make up for it in Hell?"
"I don't begin by telling them that for Him, the human eye expresses the perfection of creation when it looks with horror upon a maimed body, just as it expresses the perfection of Creation when it looks in peace upon a garden.
"And He persists that it's all there. Your Savage Garden, Lestat, is His version of Perfection. It all evolved from the same seed, and I, Memnoch, the Devil, fail to see it. I have an angel's simple mind."
"How do you fight Him in Hell and still win Heaven for the damned, then? How?"
"What do you think Hell is?" he asked. "You must have a surmise by now."
"First of all, it is what we call purgatory," I said. "No one is beyond redemption. I understood from your argument on the battlefield. So what must the souls of Hell suffer to be fully qualified for Heaven?"
"What do you think they should suffer?"
"I don't know. I'm frightened. We're about to go there, aren't we?"
"Yes, but I'd like to know what you expect."
"I don't know what to expect. I know that creatures who have robbed others of life—as I have—should suffer for it."
"Suffer or pay for it?"
"What would be the difference?"
"Well, suppose you had a chance to forgive Magnus, the vampire who brought you into this, suppose he stood before you and said, 'Lestat, forgive me for taking you out of your mortal life and putting you outside Nature, and making you drink blood to live. Do with me what you will so that you can forgive me.' What would you do?"
"You chose a bad example," I said. "I don't know that I haven't forgiven him. I don't think he knew what he was doing. I don't care about him. He was mad. He was an Old World monster. He started me on the Devil's Road on some warped, impersonal impulse. I don't even think about him. I don't care about him. If he has to seek forgiveness from someone, then let it be from the mortals he killed when he was in existence.
"In his tower was a dungeon filled with slain mortal men—young men who resembled me, men he'd brought there to test, apparently, and then killed rather than initiated. I remember them still. But it's just one form of massacre—heaps of bodies of young men, all with blond hair and blue eyes. Young beings robbed of potential and of life itself. His forgiveness would have to come from all those whom he robbed of life in any fashion—he would have to gain the forgiveness of each one."
I was beginning to tremble again. My anger was so familiar to me. And how angry I had become many a time when others had accused me of my various flamboyant attacks upon mortal men and women. And children. Helpless children.
"And you?" he said to me. "For you to get into Heaven, what do you think would be necessary?"
"Well, apparently working for you will do it," I said defiantly. "At least I think it would from what you've said to me. But you haven't really told me precisely what you do! You've told me the story of Creation and the Passion, of Your Way and His Way, you've described how you oppose Him on Earth, and I can imagine the ramifications of that opposition—we are both sensualists, we are both believers in the wisdom of the flesh."