part of the portfolio so applying them should be no problem. If we make the tax applicable only to the monies that a person takes into their Second Life, I think it might be a compromise people will accept. The First Lifers will still get an inheritance and the Second Lifers still get their seed money.”
“What about a flow of resources from Heaven and Hell?”
“Heaven is pretty much a bust Sir. Thomas Vilsack sounded regretful. “They really haven’t got much that we want other than agricultural produce and most of the production there is used to keep The Eternal City fed. A city that size is a massive liability and resources sink. If we take any significant level of their present production, we’ll start a famine.”
“I though angels and daemons didn’t need to eat.”
“They don’t need to eat for regular sustenance meaning they won’t starve the way we do if deprived of food. As far as we can make out, they do need to eat if their energy consumption goes beyond a specific level. Then, the nourishment they get from food makes up the difference.” Doctor Surlethe frowned, “but there’s still so much we don’t understand about this.”
“As for Hell, we are getting resources from there.” Vilsack sounded pleased about that. “Oil particularly; Hell is absurdly oil-rich. The bottleneck is refining the stuff.”
“Let me guess.” The President lifted a finger in the traditional gesture of sudden enlightenment. “Gaius Julius Caesar is building an oil refinery.”
A laugh ran around the room. “Yes Sir, he is. In fact, he was the first person to start building one. He’s in partnership with Sunoco on that. If it’s any consolation, things aren’t going entirely smoothly there. The idea was to build some parts in New Rome and bring others in from Earth. Only, there’s problems matching the parts up. Hell- built and Earth-built don’t go well together. Anyway, we are getting crude from there and a lot of valuable minerals as well.”
“There’s one good thing Sir.” Kathleen Sebelius spoke up, grimly determined to be cheerful. “Health care costs are showing a marked decline. It’s the big ticket items that are showing the largest fall. Now people know what lies after death, they aren’t fighting it so hard. Rather than use massively expensive treatment to delay their death by a few days or weeks, they’re now letting go. Why live for a few months hooked up to tubes and meters and suffering every day of that time when one can go to Hell – or even Heaven – and have a healthy reborn body?”
“What about the costs of treating refugees from the Hell-Pit.”
“Not high Sir. Most of the work there is done by volunteers and the dead ones don’t need to eat of course. So, its lower than one might think. However, there is a long-term problem here in that some of the refugees are in really bad shape. Hell wasn’t a very kind place Sir.”
“Do we know why people go to Heaven rather than Hell?” The President was curious.
“No.” Doctor Surlethe rather wished the subject hadn’t come up. “We have only a very thin trickle of new bodies turning up in Heaven, one or two a day at most. We can identify no pattern behind their selection. It seems to be completely random. At the moment, the Army unit we have stationed at the Heavenly Gates is looking after them. Actually, they’re shipping them to the reception center at Hell and processing them like all the others when they wake up. We’re watching the ones that came back through Heaven of course; but at the moment we’re showing nothing of any significance. Which leaves us with the problem of who lives in Heaven and who stays in Hell.”
“Sort of related to that, I’ve placed a moratorium on the use of the death penalty.” Eric Holder had a degree of defiance in his voice. “I can’t see that it performs any useful function at this time. Life imprisonment without possibility of parole remains a viable punishment. Keeping a person locked up for the rest of their life is a penalty all right. But killing them just gives another escape route. They get away with their offence cold and just get to start their Second Life a little earlier.”
“We could always arrange to meet them when they get reborn and whack them again.”
Raymond LaHood made that suggestion tentatively yet it caused Holder to bristle and respond aggressively. “That would be an unconstitutional exercise of double jeopardy as well as being morally reprehensible. I will not allow it.”
“Moderate your tone Eric.” The President spoke calmly. “Raymond has a valid point even if you disagree with it. Do we carry over offenses committed in the First Life to people in their Second Lives? And Eric, the Cabinet has collective responsibility. It allows or disallows things, not you. When we reach a decision on that issue, you can either support that decision or resign. I trust I make myself clear?”
Holder nodded, resentfully and reluctantly. The President looked at his and nodded slightly before continuing. “That issue also gives rise to a related one. What happens when one of the great monsters of history is found? Pol Pot died quite recently I believe; he may well turn up quite soon. And what about Hitler? Or Idi Amin?”
“We’re been really lucky.” General Schatten, the new Director of Celestial Intelligence spoke firmly. “So far, the issue hasn’t come up. Most of the people we’ve recovered have been common people, very few of any distinction have re-appeared. Partly that may be because the rings we are emptying fastest, the first ring for example where they starved in a desolate wasteland or the second where they were either blown about by great winds or pushed giant rocks around, were the easiest to get people out of. The rings get progressively harder to explore and recover as we go down and I suspect that the more distinguished of our ancestors are down there. We do have evidence that a certain degree of private vengeance is already taking place though. When Belial’s fortress fell, one of his human assistants was an SS guard from Majdanak concentration camp. An Israeli officer, most of whose family died in that camp, took him away and is believed to have killed him. Again. Both we and the Israelis are trying to find him but no luck so far.”
“A nightmare lies that way.” Hillary Clinton spoke reflectively, her voice penetrating the silence that had dominated the room. “We go after people, our enemies come after ours, we could end up fighting a war that will kill us all. Haven’t enough people died in this war already?”
That caused the silence to deepen. The death toll from the Salvation War was indeed enough. Millions of humans were dead, almost all civilians. The death toll in the daemons and angels was much, much greater. Most of their dead had been warriors, victims of the massive disparity in sheer, raw firepower that had dominated the war. From a military point of view, it was true that the humans had shattered their enemies without breaking into a sweat over it. Economically and socially, the cost had been so much higher. Even now, with the super-hurricanes and super-tornados a thing of the past, it would take decades for the south east cost to recover. The dust storms and the tornados had made the great plains a liability, one that would be put right eventually of course but the short term consequences were still there. The United States was actually a net food importer this year and would be next as well. Another economic fact to be considered. And that brought the meeting full circle.
The President walked over to the great windows that dominated the room and stared out at the world beyond. There had been so much he had wanted to do, so much that he had felt needed to be done and none of it was going to happen. He was quite sure of that. In his heart, he guessed that he was a one-term President and his time in office was already more than half done. It would be for others to take up the dreams he had nurtured and turn them into reality. It would be years before that could happen, the briefing he had just received made that painfully clear.
Ideals and dreams could be gods as well. They were a part of a pantheon just as much as the more tangible ‘gods’ had been. This had been a war where the human war machine had ruthlessly killed all the gods that had stood in its path. The Pantheon of ideals and dreams had proved no more resilient than the rest.
