think a single, unmentionable question. Were there daemons in Heaven, even though they looked like Angels?. And then that led to another question. And was he one of them?
Lemuel-Lan-Michael left the interrogation chamber and went off down the long corridor that would, eventually, take him back to the surface, his mind troubled by the questions inside it. Halfway towards the first junction he thought he heard a human woman screaming from the interrogation chamber he had just left but he dismissed it. Just the strange sounds that filled this place sometimes, a product of wind and tunnels through stone.
Conference Room, DIMO(N) Headquarters, The Pentagon, Washington
“And now we have a problem with dates.”
“How do you mean?”
“From what we have been able to learn, the Great Celestial War took place some four and a half to five million years ago. But, the information we have from Luga speaks of fighting on Earth and the legends of that remaining in human memory as folk tales. That means they must be much more recent than that.
“Simple explanation. Luga’s lying. It’s not as if that’s an entirely unfamiliar concept to her. She tries to play us all the time. To be honest, its so much part of her nature than I doubt if she’s even aware that she’s doing it. Playing to the audience to get her way and turn things to her advantage is what she does. That’s why she’s such a hit on network television.”
“Just like a few other so-called stars I can think of.” Colonel Paschal spoke reflectively. “It might he worth checking through some of their antecedents and see if we come up with any demonic connections.”
“Would you like the job? Or are you still in thrall to our Luga?” Doctor Surlethe put the question with a bouncing lack of tact.
“I told you, I didn’t… ” The denial was interrupted by a barrage of coughing around the room. Paschal sighed to himself, he was never going to live this down. “Oh, never mind.”
A satisfied and slightly triumphant chuckle replaced the coughing. “I don’t think the history of the performing arts is useful at this time, anyway, the fact that the daemons knew virtually nothing about us suggests that any contact they had with us in the last three or four centuries must have been cursory in the extreme.”
“I agree.” General Schatten nodded as he spoke. “Anyway, Colonel Baylor picked up on the time discrepancy. He tasked Luga with it and she confirmed that the Great Celestial War took place from about five million years ago, when Satan tried his coup-de-main assault on Heaven. An assault that came very close to succeeding by the way, he actually broke into the Eternal City but his Army was pushed out by Michael-Lan-Yahweh. It ended, sort of, about half a million years later with both sides too exhausted to fight on. In our terms, it’s pretty obvious Satan actually won that war, he got his independent kingdom which was his objective all along. However, fighting went on for a long, long time after that. Not the live-or-die, win-or-lose fighting there had been in the Great Celestial War but more like border skirmishing. That ended abruptly, about 60,000 years ago and its from then that our folk-memories of the war originated.”
“Why did it end so abruptly?” Colonel Paschal was curious. “To fight for more than five million years and then just stop dead?”
“He asked Luga why, didn’t get an answer. There was something she didn’t want to speak about and didn’t. But, Baylor says, she was frightened. Even talking about why scared her. Just the way daemons are scared of us.”
“I think I can offer an opinion there.” Hillary Clinton spoke up for the first time at one of those meetings. “I was speaking with President Sarkozy during the recent summit, when he wasn’t preoccupied with checking out some Brazilian girl of course, and he told me something curious. Apparently some of the French and German troops in Hell, either referred to Satan as “the Devil” or called daemons, devils. The result was strange. The baldricks made themselves absent, very quickly. Strong negative reaction.”
“Could it have been an abusive nickname, you know like Hun or Frog?”
“That would imply anger or offense and we know Baldricks react strongly to that. This was something else, it was fear, as if even mentioning the word could bring about a disaster.” Clinton drew breath. “I don’t think daemons and devils are the same.”
“All the books say they are.”
“And all our books are wrong, we know that. How much mythology is standing up to the discoveries we’re making every day? I think that Daemons and Devils are separate things and whatever the Devils are, the Daemons are afraid of them.”
“A threat to us?”
General Schatten thought for a second. “I doubt it, if they were then they’d have taken down the Baldricks as quickly as we did.”
“Can we rely on that?”
Schatten thought again. “No, but it’s the best way to bet given what we know. Look, in intelligence and knowledge terms, we’re way out of our depth here. We’re crossing a river blindfold, feeling a way with our feet and hoping we don’t step into a pothole or a nest of cottonmouths. All we can do is play the odds.”
“So there might be a third force out there we’ll have to deal with in due course?”
“Third? There may be dozens. The cosmology Doctor Kuroneko is developing suggests that there might be millions of bubble-worlds like Hell out there. All of different ages, just like the stars in our Universe are all of different ages. By the way, he’s come up with a fascinating theory that might explain a lot. Our Universe is expanding, everybody knows that. But he thinks that the dimension, the next stage of existence, whatever we want to call it, that contains Heaven, Hell and all those bubble worlds is shrinking. He thinks that explains where the light in Hell and the energy that keeps the human souls alive there comes from. That’s why they don’t have to eat.”
“But Daemons eat.” A slight shudder swept around the room at the thought of Luga’s table manners. A few of the participants grinned sympathetically at Paschal. The Colonel thought about the rumors of Luga’s combined eating and mating habits. The recollection made his testicles scream in terror and try to climb inside his body for protection.
“And that means that… “
“Baldricks – and presumably Angels – aren’t native to the bubble-worlds either. They come from somewhere else as well.”
“That might change a lot of things.” Schatten thought carefully. “Could they come from other bubble worlds?”
“We can’t tell.” Surlethe thought carefully, the whole situation had aspects buried within aspects. “It may be that the no-eating rule only applies within their native bubble. Or it may be they come from outside the bubble-level completely. But all that’s getting away from the point. We have some evidence that there’s a third group of beings out there and we may run into them at any time.”
“Third?” Hillary Clinton’s voice was derisive. “There could be hundreds of them, thousands even. Have you any idea how many religions there have been? Or are now? Suppose they are all correct, suppose at one time or another, beings found their way here from other bubbleverses and got worshipped as Gods. And Yahweh and Satan were the two that eventually won out down here? They got the upper hand over the rest, perhaps by means of the portal warfare that Lugasharmanaska talked about, and drove them out. The ‘devils’ that we’ve been talking about may just have been one of those other groups, probably the one that was the most difficult to defeat. If we consider continuing to explore the bubbleverses, we’re going to run into them.”
“And that raises another question, an important one. When we do, how do we react?”
“That’s for the council of 15 to say. They’ll make up their mind.”
“Not the United Nations?” The question came from a corner of the table, the speaker unidentified. The response was a contemptuous guffaw from the main participants.
“No, not the United Nations. They’re irrelevant, been ever since Wong shot down the first Daemon Herald. They’re still there but they’re just the talking shop for people who can’t contribute to the HEA. The real decisions are taken at Yamantau.” Clinton thought carefully. “My guess will be, and this will be the position of the United States at Yamantau, we’ll work on a do-as-they-do basis. If they approach us with friendship and respect, we’ll do the same to them. If they make war on us, we’ll do it to them. With every weapon we have.”
“General Petraeus, do you have any comment on that?”
General Petraeus, present only on the view-screen at the end of the room looked up from the display he was consulting. It was showing the developing situation on the Thai-Myanmar border and he found it professionally fascinating. The Thai Army simply didn’t fight the way the U.S. Army did. What they were doing was, to his eyes,
