Robert Sheckley - An Infinity of Angels

Airlines hired angels to ride on their wingtips and warn of impending danger. Having an angel on your plane was better than radar.

In the first flood of enthusiasm, some countries made special concessions to the angels. The Vatican granted them a small portion of church owned property outside of Rome to use as they pleased, according to their own rules, granting them complete self-rule.

This was at a time when the new Pope, in a burst of perhaps naive enthusiasm, believed the living presence of angels was proof of the doctrines of his church, a belief that Herbie ridiculed from the beginning, and than none of the other Christian sects, or the Jewish and Moslem sects, for that matter, ever believed.

But in the early years, a number of religions fell into the Pope's error. The angels never claimed affiliation with any single group, though they never repudiated the possibility. They never claimed that any group had special access to heaven.

They never claimed that those without religion had no place in heaven.

Inevitably, there were people who fell in love with angels.

There is no evidence that this love was ever reciprocated.

Angels kept to themselves. The idea of mating and marrying with one particular human seemed to them amusing, but not to be considered as a possibility. Or at least that's what Herbie said.

But what did angels need with money? "It's of no use in heaven," Herbie admitted on their behalf. "But on Earth it can be useful."

They used it, apparently, to 'be like everyone else,' as Herbie said. And to buy the sorts of organic fruit and vegetables that seemed to constitute their entire diet.

One night around sunset I saw an angel flapping slowly across the swollen setting sun. He was singing something, a song without words, hardly even a melody, more a lament.

He looked so sad, flaping his way across the setting sun, sort of potbellied and clumsy, not like the bright clean-limbed young angels we'd been seeing, and I suddenly realized that angels age too, and this ageing of angels was a kind of curtain call.

When the angels are no more, it is the end of all of us.

It doesn't matter if there's a heaven or not. The question, the only question is, is there an Earth?

END