Epilogue
The Oval Office, The White House, Washington D.C.
“There is no hope of reducing the defense budget?” The President sounded stricken at the news.
“No hope at all, Sir. We’re stuck at one-point-six trillion for years to come. The FY11 budget is set in stone and nothing can cut from that. As for FY12, simply controlling the areas we now hold are going to take most of our forces. Look at it this way, Sir, the combined land area of Heaven and Hell are three times the size of Earth. The HEA is the only force keeping both places reasonably stable at this time. How long that will be for is anybody’s guess. Secretary Warner shook his head. As usual, the politicians had thought the Army would crash in, defeat the enemy and the problems would all be over. Why would they never understand that defeating an enemy was just that start of a long and complicated situation? He knew all too well what the basic problems were. The armed forces had made defeating the enemy look so easy that the politicians assumed that all the other problems would be equally easy to resolve.
“But we have social programs, essential reforms that have been delayed by the war…” The President was genuinely dismayed at the apparently inevitable prospect of virtually his entire domestic program being flushed.
“Sir, when we got into the Salvation War, we assumed that it was going to last for decades and we geared up for that prospect. We’ve mobilized our economy and we’re on a war footing. Our industry is structured around supplying the armed forces, not just ours but other people’s as well, with what they need. We start slashing orders now, we’ll bring about an economic depression that’s unparalleled in our history. Forget about breadlines and soup kitchens, they’ll be for the better off. The ones who keep their jobs. The rest won’t even have those provisions to fall back on. We have to ease back, slowly and carefully. That’s assuming the situation in Heaven and Hell lets us do even that.”
A depressed sigh ran around the room. “You expect more trouble then?”
“Yes, Madam Secretary. The sheer shock of the daemonic defeat in Hell is wearing off down there. In some ways we’re to blame for that. The daemons were expecting us to overrun Hell with fire and sword. They thought we would massacre them all. Instead, we were pretty nice to them We fed them, looked after them, protected them. Now, I’m not saying that’s wrong and I will say that it has eased a lot of our problems. I’d say about seventy percent of the surviving daemons look on us pretty favorably. Another twenty five percent actively like us and want to learn from us.”
“That leaves just five percent.” The President pounced on the figure.
“Five percent, Sir. They’re swallowed up by hatred for us and a desire to hurt us. They see our treatment of them now that they are in our power as an example of weakness. They think they can exploit that and they’re right. To some extent, our hands are tied in dealing with them. If we go after them no-hold’s barred, we’ll alienate the ones who do support us. We learned a lot of lessons in Iraq along those lines. But Heaven’s the real problem. It’s strange but it’s the humans there that we’re worried about. The Jell… the angels appear to be pretty quiet. They haven’t got the suicidal guts the daemons have that’s for sure. But their human servants seem a lot more aggressive. We’ve had stone throwing incidents already.
“But for all that, it’s Hell that we’re really worried about. We’ve had word that there is a resistance movement staring up in Hell, possibly headed by Belial.”
“That wretched Baldrick tasks us.” The President’s voice was tinged with bitterness.
“He’s escaped us twice and all the reports we’ve had, from Heaven and Hell, stress that his hatred for us is surpassed only by that he has for Euryale. I wouldn’t like to be in her hooves if he gets hold of her. The point is, Mister President, we have a massive peacekeeping problem that has no easily-visible end to it.” Warner paused to take breath, “and to make matters worse, we have no real idea what is out there. We’ve only explored a tiny proportion of the land surface of Hell and even less of Heaven. There could be entire civilizations out there we haven’t even spotted yet.
“And that brings us to another problem. We know that there are other bubble-worlds in the new universe we have stumbled into. Some of their occupants have been on Earth in earlier days and either got run off by Yahweh and Satan or decided that we weren’t worth the effort of staying here for. Michael-Lan mentioned the Aesir and the Baals, we also have cause to believe that the Olympian pantheon has some foundation in reality. We know that Heaven and Hell were virtually stagnant but can we be sure that those others are? Might they have developed with the same speed as we have? If so they could be most formidable opponents.”
“If they are opponents.” Secretary Clinton made the point uncharacteristically tentatively.
“That’s right Hillary. They may well be benign; the stories about them certainly suggest they might be but how can we be sure. And if there is a basis of truth behind them, there might also be behind other pantheons. We wouldn’t, for example, like to run into the Aztec pantheon unprepared would we?”
There was a general shaking of heads at that. The President sighed. “One point six billion it is then. Hillary, what’s the feeling at Yamantau on this.”
“Much the same as Defense has outlined Sir. Too many responsibilities, too many potential and actual enemies, too many unknowns. All the other fourteen members are agreed, our present force levels have to be maintained, probably for at least a decade.”
The President’s air of general depression deepened. “Does the United Nations have much to say about that?”
Clinton smiles sadly at him. “Have you been there recently Sir? I wouldn’t be surprised if there are tumbleweeds blowing around the main assembly room. The U.N. just doesn’t count for much any more, not the main body of it anyway. Yamantau has taken its functions over almost completely. That’s not surprising though. It’s a much better war headquarters after all. Fifteen members can actually get things done. We have less to consider there as well. If a country wants to bring up an issue, it has to get one of the fifteen to present it for them. If they can’t convince one country of the virtues of their case, they shouldn’t be bothering people with it.
“Having said all that, the U.N. special agencies are healthy. UNESCO, World Bank, World Health Organization are all prospering. So much so that a couple of them are talking of changing their names to make the ‘world’ bit plural. The UNHCR is coordinating the rescue of people from the Hell Pit. But, for all that, as a policy-deciding organization, the U.N. has been sidelined. After all, in the final analysis, Yamantau has a massive army to back up its decisions. I have no doubt that Yamantau will change in the future but here and now, it’s the best approach to a world government we’ve got.”
“Damn.” The President’s word seemed strangely archaic, as if it belonged to a different era. It did, of course, that was all too true. Whole classes of expletives had become obsolete over the last two years and few had grown up to replace them. Not yet, anyway. “How are we going to pay for all this?”
“It’s much worse than just the amount by which we are overspending.” Timothy Geithner sounded almost amused by the depth of gloom in his own voice. “The ban on deceased First-Life people leaving their assets to themselves to fund their Second Life failed to get past the Senate. In fact, they voted it down 94 – 5 with one abstention. We should have anticipated that Mister President.”
This time, Geithner’s voice held disapproval and there was no trace of amusement in it. In his opinion, the President had committed the worst political sin of all; he had put both his personal credibility and the stature of his office into fighting a battle he wasn’t quite certain he would win. As a result, he had turned what would otherwise been a minor administrative matter, or at least something that could be spun as one, into a major defeat for his presidency. Geithner suspected that the resulting political blow was mortal.
“But it was the right thing to do. And the assets the dead are taking with them are bleeding resources from our economy.”
“That doesn’t matter Mister President. Really it doesn’t. What does matter is that opinions on the legislation were split down the middle by age. The older people were, the more they wanted freedom to take some or all of their First-Life assets with them. The younger people were, the more they saw those assets as their inheritance. Virtually the entire administration are in the former group. They saw this legislation as an attack on them. Frankly, Mister President, the Senate throwing this legislation out was probably a good thing. If they hadn’t, I suspect the Supreme Court would have tossed it out. That would have been even more embarrassing.
“That leaves us with the problem of course. My Department is working on a proposal for a death tax, one that should stand up to constitutional scrutiny provided it stops short of total confiscation. Death taxes are an accepted
