Mister B. Gone

did so, the space between their hairlines and their chins easily three or four feet now and growing larger with every heartbeat. But even as their heads grew to such grotesque a size they also narrowed, until it seemed to my outraged eyes that they were barely two or three inches wide, the tips of their noses no more than a finger's length apart. The words they continued to spew out emerged from their grotesquely misshapen mouths like spurts of smoke, no two of the same color, which rose up to form a layer of dead speech on the ceiling. Yet at the same time as this bizarre spectacle was going on — I warned you that some of this would be perilously close to the ravings of a madman — my eyes also reported that they were both still sitting in their seats as they had been all along, unchanged.

I have no explanation for any of this, nor do I understand why, having listened to their vehement exchange for two or three minutes without comprehending a single argument made by either side, my brain now began to decode portions of their dialogue. It wasn't a casual conversation they were having, needless to say, but neither were they spitting escalating threats at one another. I slowly realized that I was listening to the most secret of negotiations. The Angel and the Demon, their species, who had once been joined in celestial love, now enemies. Or so I had understood. Their hatred of one another, I'd been taught, was so deeply felt that they would never contemplate peace. But here they were — adversaries so familiar that they were almost friends — laboring to divide up control of this new power that, despite the Demon's claim that Gutenberg's press was of no great consequence, they all knew to the contrary. The press would indeed change the shape of the world, and each side wanted to possess the lion's share of its creations and their influence. Hannah wanted all holy books to be under Angelic license, but the Archbishop wasn't any more ready to give that up than was Hannah willing to give up all printed materials that related to the erotic impulse of Humankind.

Much of what they were arguing over were forms of writing that I had never heard of: novels and newspapers, scientific journals and political tracts; manuals, guides, and encyclopedias. They traded like two of your kind buying horseflesh at an auction, their bargaining getting faster as some portion of this immense agreement approached closure, the words only agreed upon if some other part of this division of spoils was successfully resolved. There was no system of high-flown principle shaping those parts of the World According to the Universal Word that Hannah pursued, nor was there any special ferocity in the way the Archbishop pursued works in arenas I expected Hell to pursue: lawyerly writings, for instance; or works by doctors and assassins, spreading their wickedness. The Angel fought vehemently for control over the confessions of whores, both male and female, and any other writings designed to inflame the reader, while Hell fought with equal force to possess power over the licensing and distribution of all printing fabrications that their authors had written in such a way as to suggest that they were, in fact, the truth. But then, Hell countered, what happened if the author of such a work of invention happened also to be or to have been a whore?

And so it went on, back and forth, the pair of advisors each Power had brought to the table offering their own subtle qualifications or verbal manipulations to the principals' exchanges. There were references back to earlier arbitrations. To The Matter of the Wheel and to The Threshing Impasse. As for Gutenberg's great work — the reason why Heaven and Hell were so close to war — was dispassionately referred to as The Subject Under Review.

Meanwhile, as the argument became even more complex, the bewildering spectacle of the demon's and the angel's heads swelling and narrowing had become still more elaborate; dozens of extrusions emerging from their ballooning craniums, as thin as finger-bones, wove between one another, their elegant intertwining reflecting, perhaps, the escalating intricacies of their debate.

Everyone continued to watch them as they carved up Humankind's future, but with so much of the negotiation beyond me, the whole thing, for all its Great Significance and so on and so forth, was actually beginning to bore me. The lavish complexities of their interwoven heads were an entirely different matter: They beggared the inventions of my dream-life, seeing the woven heads continue to find new ways to reflect each proposal and counter proposal, each successful barter and failed assault. So elaborate had the process of the argument been, and so exquisite the interweaving of demonic and angelic flesh, that their heads now resembled a tapestry, 'Portrait of a Debate Between Heaven and Hell in Order to Prevent War.'

Here was a Secret that made Gutenberg's Press a footnote. I was watching the power at work behind the face of the world. What I had always assumed to be a calamitous unseen war, waged in sky and rock and on occasion invading your human world, was not a bloody battle, with legions slaughtering one another; it was this endless fish-market bartering. And why? Because it was the profit that came of these newfound forms that fueled the negotiations. The Angel Hannah was utterly indifferent to the way all this 'printed matter,' as she dubbed it, might poison or impoverish the spiritual lives of Humankind. Nor were the Demon Archbishop and his advisors concerned that they possess ways the Word might be used to corrupt innocents. It was the pursuit of word power gained from word wealth that moved both sides, inspiring maneuvers of such complexity that the due performance of every tiny portion of this knot of agreements and arrangements was dependent upon the performance of every other part. Far from behaving like enemies, the two sides were making what was doubtless just another marriage contract between their opposing factions, occasioned by the creation of Gutenberg's press. It would make money, this press. And it would control minds at the same time. At least that was as much as I understood of their convoluted talk.

My weary eyes strayed to Quitoon, and they came upon him at the very moment that his wandering gaze found me.

From the expression of shock on his face it was obvious he'd assumed I was long since dead. But the fact that I wasn't pleased him, I could see, the realization of which gave me hope. Quite what of, I can't truly tell you.

No. I can try. Perhaps I hoped that our both getting here, to the end of the world as it had been, and to the beginning of what it was to become, courtesy of Johannes Gutenberg, tied us together, for better or worse, for richer, for —

I never finished reciting these silent vows of devotion because one of Hannah's advisors, sitting next to her on the other side of the table to Quitoon, had seen the look on his face and realized there was a suspicious trace of happiness flickering through his features.

The angel began to rise from its seat in order to better see whatever Quitoon was staring at with such pleasure.

Quitoon was looking at me, of course, looking at me and smiling, the way I was now allowing myself to smile as I looked at him.

Then the angel screamed.

In the beginning was the Word, says John the Christ-lover, and the Word was not only with God, it was God. So why isn't there a word, or a sentence ten thousand words long, that would come anywhere even near to describe the sound of an angel screaming?

You'll just have to take it from me that the angel did indeed scream, and that the sound that emanated from it was such that every scintilla of matter in that room convulsed, hearing the cry. Eyes that had been devoted to an obsessive study of the Principals were suddenly jolted free by the violence of the convulsion. And inevitably several of those in the room saw me.

I had no time to retreat. The entities that filled the room (most likely even the matter of the room itself) were infinitely more sophisticated creatures than I. When their gazes were turned on me, I felt their scrutiny like a bruising blow delivered to every single part of my body at the same time, even the soles of my feet. Their brutal gazes ceased as suddenly as they had begun. The removal should have been a relief but, consistent with the paradoxical nature of the entire room, the aversion of their gazes brought its own strange order of pain, that which comes when the hurt induced by a higher being ceases, and all connection with that being is removed.

But my presence here was not as inconsequential as the removal of their scrutiny might have implied. A quarrel now arose around the table as to whether my presence here was proof of some conspiracy against Gutenberg or his invention, and if so, by which side. There was no attempt to ask my own account of events. They were only concerned that I had witnessed Heaven and Hell's complicity. Whether I had simply seen the Secret in progress, as they knew I had, or whether I was part of a grand Conspiracy against the safety of the Secret was irrelevant to them. I had to be silenced. The only point of contention, apparently was what to do with me.

I knew that I was the problem under debate, because every now and again I heard a fragment of dialogue relating to me and my dispatch.

'No blood should be spilt in here,' the Angel Hannah decreed.