a minor screw-up-this is a
He was right, of course. Things like this didn’t happen. Ever. “Okay, okay, you call your supervisor, I’ll call mine. We’ll get it all straightened out.”
But even before the words were out of my mouth angels and demons started popping out of the air on all sides, more Zippers opening than half-price night at the Nevada Cottontail Ranch. Security had been breached bigtime, and now the emergency troops were showing up. This wasn’t just a problem, I realized, it was an actual, honest-to-front-office
I suppose I’d better take a few moments to explain how some of this angel stuff works. It’s a little different than what you learned in Sunday school, and it definitely comes up short on harps and clouds.
First of all, don’t bother asking me about what my life used to be like when I was alive or how I died, because I don’t know. None of the folks I work with do. We might always have been angels but we tend not to think so, since our memories only go back a few decades at most, and we all feel pretty comfortable inhabiting living bodies and hanging around in the actual world. The oldest angel I ever met in terms of service time was my first boss, Leo, who could remember working all the way back in the 1940s. That doesn’t prove anything, of course. They might recycle us like glass bottles for all I know, steam us out each time and then fill us up again, century after century. When you’re an angel of the Lord you just have to get used to certain ambiguities.
There are tons of angels, and not just in Heaven. For one thing, every single man, woman, and child on this planet has a guardian angel. You can’t see ’em, feel ’em, or usually even sense ’em, but they’re right there with you from your first slap on the backside until the moment you take your last breath…and a little bit beyond. Some people think they also work to keep you safe from physical danger and from the snares of the Opposition, which could be true, but I haven’t heard anything for certain about that. Anyway, it’s not my jurisdiction. As you may have gathered, I’m an advocate.
Okay, so at one per living soul that means there’s got to be seven billion guardians at any one time. I’m assuming when they finish with one person’s life they start on another’s, but again, this is all guesswork. We advocates are a bit more rare. Me and Sam and Monica and the others each seem to work about five deaths a week, so let’s call it 250 or so per year per angel. At a rate of 50 million or so deaths worldwide every year that makes work for about 200,000 advocates (assuming everyone in Timbuktu and Katmandu is on the same afterlife system as us, which is far from certain). For every ten or so there’s also one or two working field support for the others, but other than Chico the bartender (and did I mention Alice?) you haven’t met any of those yet.
I know, I know, numbers are not what you’re interested in, except those of you who are engineers. No, you want to learn how it all
All of us Earth-based angels, guardians and advocates and even special ops (don’t ask because I’m not telling), report to archangels. The archangels report to Principalities, who also judge individual souls, as you’ve seen. Together we’re called the Angels of the Third House, which is Earth inside Time.
There are at least two other Houses, or spheres, each with three more types of angels, but this isn’t Sunday school so I’ll save that for another time. Above it all is the Highest. I haven’t met Him yet. I understand He’s pretty busy, what with making the universe work like perfect clockwork and yet keeping His eye on the sparrow and all that. And as I think I said, I’ve never known anyone else who’s met Him either (or else none of them bothered to mention it to me).
We advocates are expected to live among the folks we’re going to be defending, to know them and understand their ways, which is why we have bodies. They’re not our real bodies, I’m told-not that anyone knows that for certain, but as I said, I’ve never been recognized by a relative or an acquaintance and I don’t know anyone else who has either. Anyway, between being part of a small group (by comparison to the guardians or the Holy Host or whatever) and living and working on Earth, being an advocate is a bit like getting sent to one of those backwater colonial outposts: after a while, you couldn’t move back to the old country if you tried. I sure as heck couldn’t live in the Celestial City for very long. Too bright. Too many people singing. And a distinct lack of distilled spirits, the only kind I really like.
On the negative side, we’re among the few angels who actually have to deal with the Opposition on a day to day basis, really get to know them, and it’s pretty much as unpleasant as you’d think. For one thing, most of the Hell-folk take the struggle really,
Why don’t haters get tired as fast as the rest of us? There’s a question you’d think the afterlife would have answered for me, but no.
Meanwhile, there are also a few odd souls from both sides who’ve dropped out of the game altogether: tweeners and renegades. Most of them sell information to survive and so most of them have some kind of price on their heads. We advocates deal with them, from time to time. I even like some of them in a guarded sort of way.
Put it all together and it’s more than a bit like the Cold War used to be-deadly dangerous but invisible to most of the living, and we’re all expected to play our part in the struggle. My job is to make certain that as many souls as possible make it into Heaven, and like my friend Sam I’m pretty good at what I do, which is one reason why, even though my attitude sucks, my bosses mostly leave me alone.
Another reason, as I was about to discover, was that even the big boys up at the House don’t know everything. That was a lesson I would rather not have learned.
So there I was, standing in the Outside version of Edward L. Walker’s driveway while various heavenly and infernal minions fresh in from headquarters made themselves useful (or at least busy). Some were drawing glittering golden lines in the air or scrying with instruments of black glass. Grasswax gave me a look of quite impressive hatred from his place at the center of it all, then snatched a small, sticky-looking thing out of the air, which I assumed was Hell’s version of Walker’s guardian angel, and carried it to one side where the two of them proceeded to enjoy a spirited conversation-“spirited” meaning that Grasswax shook the Hell-minion around like someone trying to flick snot off his finger as the minion squealed out its innocence.
“He was here, Master, he was here! We was with him when he died!”
“Then where
“We doesn’t know! We is confused!”
“Curse you. I’ll have to call Scorchscar.” The prosecutor produced a handful of fire and held it up before his face and said, “Prosecutor to Prosecutor’s Office, put me through to the inquisitor immediately.” He scowled at me, his cheek-holes pulsing wetly. The weird thing was, Grasswax was more scared than he was acting, or at least that’s how it seemed to me. Not that I’m an expert on infernal psychology. “By the Master’s hot, pimpled arse-I’ll be stuck here for hours!” he snarled at me. “This is all your fault somehow, you fucking little cloud-jockey, and I’ll make you pay for it. Don’t you try to sneak off!”
I turned away with the prosecutor’s charming voice still ringing in my ears: I had my own call to make. Just because the house in old Palo Alto was now so full of shining angelic presences that it looked like a Christmas display didn’t mean I could assume everybody knew who needed to. I took out my phone, which in its Outside form appeared as a rod of silvery light. A moment later Temuel was in front of me, although nobody else could see him or hear him.
“You’re joking, right?” he said when I told him the situation, but the Mule didn’t sound quite as dumbfounded as I would have expected. “No? Then I’ll get a fixer out there right away.” Then the magnitude of it apparently began to set in. “This is bad, you know. This is very, very bad, Doloriel. Hang tight and don’t say anything to the Opposition.”
“Not even, ‘Let go of my balls?’ Because I can promise you, Grasswax is squeezing pretty hard at the moment.”
“Just do your job.” And that was all. He was gone. But if Temuel hadn’t known about the missing soul then where had all these heavenly functionaries come from? Not to mention all the nasty little things from the Opposition side? I put the question away for later, because just then a new, extra-shiny Zipper flared beside me and the Mule’s
