I listed the angels presently in Heaven, starting with seamen and wetlanders; he nodded or pouted as I went along, rarely having to ask for details on one he didn’t know. I left out a few who were too old or sick, and I included Two-gray, whose broken leg was almost healed, and White-red-white, whom Quetti disliked.
By the end, his face was grim indeed. “Seven? Only seven of us?”
“You want rough-water sailors, them’s your choice.”
He muttered an oath, his blue eyes staring bleakly past me at unseen horrors. I felt very, very glad that I was not in his place. Seven men could never warn all of the wetlanders in time. They would get caught by the flood, and more than likely that mean Scroll of Honor. Another disaster Heaven had failed to prevent!
Blots, the scriptorium’s snortoise, had started slithering down a long slope. Saints muttered angrily as their light failed.
Quetti turned that cold glare on me and cocked an eyebrow.
“Fancy a little fieldwork for a change?”
I suppressed a shiver. “Oh, I’d love to help you out. But Michael just can’t bring himself to give me my wheels.”
My feeble attempt at humor was ignored. “I’m serious. This is going to be a bad one, Old Man.”
“You’re crazy!” I said hastily. “I’m no rough-water sailor.”
“I’ll cook breakfast while you’re learning.”
I told him firmly that if he wanted angels just so he could drown them, then we had a plentiful supply better qualified than me.
“Some may be seamen or wetlanders,” he said, “but you’re both! I know how fast you pick up things. Well, do this one for me—seven men and seven chariots for the mission. Double drivers to get them there faster. Three per cart coming back, naturally. How many to start?”
Was this some sort of trick? “Twenty-eight men and fourteen chariots, of course.”
His smile was almost lost in the gloom. “See? I tried to do that sort of sum all the way back from April, and I never came up with the same answer twice.”
Gabriel had adjourned the meeting. Daylight had gone, and candles were not allowed in the scriptorium. A saint nipped out to raise the flag over the door, an appeal for dogsleds. Quetti and I told the others to go ahead, being happy to sit and talk angel talk. With cherubim I talked cherub talk, and seraph talk with seraphim. I had no group of my own.
We two were the last. We went out to the porch and began pulling on damp-smelling furs. Judging by the racket outside, Blots had found a thick grove of dead trees buried in the snow of the valley bottom. He was likely to remain there for a considerable time, until complete darkness and falling temperatures triggered his primitive reflexes. Then he would go looking for the sunset again.
Without warning, Quetti said, “Roo? Why won’t you ask for your wheels? There’s so much to be done, and so few of us to do it!”
“Ah! Three-blue, you are treading close to one of Heaven’s great mysteries, one of Cloud Nine’s favorite philosophical debates! Is it even worth doing everything you can, when it amounts to so little compared to what’s needed? I’ve noticed that eager young cherubim never doubt. ‘Of course!’ they say. But the rheumy old saints and retired angels—they usually shake their heads. Men even older than me, each one of them looking back on a whole lifetime of achievement and seeing that it doesn’t really amount to anything at all. None of us is going to change the course of history, Quetti, so why—”
“Stop evading the question.”
I hauled at legging laces, doubled over and unable to speak.
“Knobil, you’d make a great angel,” Quetti said.
I unbent slightly. “You know why Michael couldn’t give me my wheels, even if I asked for them. Everyone knows, so you must.”
“That is plain idiocy!” Quetti said hotly. “You came to Heaven by pure accident. The Compact wasn’t designed to prevent accidents, it was designed to stop men setting up dynasties. Heavens, Roo, you’re not going to set yourself up as a king!”
I went back to my lacing without commenting.
“Have you asked him?” Quetti persisted.
I did not have to answer that either, because a dogsled came yelping and jingling over the snow, following Blot’s wide track. Quetti held the door for me to go first, and I stepped out on the platform, reaching for the rail at the top of the ladder. Far to the east, the sky was black and twinkling with stars, the Other Worlds. Rail and platform were both slick with black ice. Without warning or understanding, I was airborne.
Blots was one of the largest of the snortoises, a small mountain of unimaginable age. For scores of human lifetimes he had hauled his great bulk along, lubricated by snow, munching dead wood and fungus, heedless of anything except the direction of sunset. His roars were mere belching, not communication. He had no enemies, and if he had offspring, they were of no more interest to him than the scriptorium he bore on his back. In all my time in Heaven, I only once saw a snortoise mating, a procedure that demolished the paper mill and tilted the bakery almost vertical.
On the way down I had time to reflect that, although this was far from being my first fall in Heaven, I had never fallen from the very top of a ladder before and had never had time to wonder what I was going to land on. Dead trees tend to break off in very nasty spikes. I wondered also about the resulting damage—broken hips seemed about the minimum for starters. The ladder was at the snortoises rear, of course, because the flippers can crush a man quite easily, and the snow there would be rock-hard after Blots had slid on it. Anything I hit would probably smash me to pieces.
But no. With the sort of perfect timing a man could not repeat in three lifetimes, Blots saved me. What Heaven usually regarded as a rare but highly unpleasant threat proved to be my salvation, and I came down into an explosion of snortoiseshit.
Quetti and the seraph sled-boy dug me out, cleaned me up so I could breathe, and then rushed me over to Nightmare, which happened to be close. I woke up lying on my own bed, in the largest and most comfortable cubicle of the whole dormitory building, one I had appropriated long ago.
“Just lie still,” Quetti said. “The kid’s gone for a medic.”
What kid? Why did my ankle hurt? Then I began to remember and also to discover a whole world of additional bruises. Oddly enough, although I had been stunned, my head did not ache at all.
“I think I survived,” I said. “What is that appalling stink?”
“You stepped in something,” Quetti said. He was sitting close by my bunk, and even the flickering lamplight showed the concern on his face. I felt rather touched.
“I’m okay, really.” I reached out to clap him on the shoulder and caught a glimpse of my arm. I suddenly understood my miraculously soft landing. “Oh hell! I won’t be okay when the cherubim come back here! The place will never be habitable again.”
“The important thing is that you’re alive!” Quetti said. “It had to happen eventually, I suppose. Those gymnastics of yours give us all the willies. Your luck had to run out eventually.”
“I’d say my luck did all right.”
He nodded and swallowed and did not speak for a moment. I counted bruises and scrapes, moving limbs gently. Nothing too serious.
“Knobil!”
“Mmm?” I opened my eyes.
“You’re drowsy! Stay awake till the medic comes.” Quetti looked even more concerned than before.
“Minor concussion,” I said. “Talk to me.”
“You talk to me. Tell me why you stay around here? A man with no knees shouldn’t be running up and down ladders all day long.”
“No wings.” I did feel sleepy, now that he’d mentioned it.