Tad Williams: The Dirty Streets of Heaven

“Kephas means ‘rock,’” I said, remembering what Fatback had told me. “As in, ‘On this rock I will build My church…’”

Sam nodded. “The higher angels, they like that old school stuff.”

Clarence snorted at this. “Betraying Heaven is old school?”

Sam gave the kid a cold look. “You wouldn’t know about it, Junior, but me and Bobby saw a lot of ugly stuff when we were in the Harps. Stuff they don’t teach you in the Records department-”

“Yeah, yeah, it was hell out there,” Clarence interrupted. “Spare me the justifications, Sam. You didn’t like what our superiors gave you to do, so you decided to find some nicer bosses.”

Sam shook his head again, not in negation but in something more like resignation. “It was our old top-kicker Leo who first got me thinking, actually. He was always talking about the politics, the stuff going on behind the scenes, wondering who was really in charge.”

“Another paranoid.” But Clarence sounded like he might be trying to convince himself more than us.

“Said the undercover spy to his ex-partner.” Sam forced a sour grin. “After awhile, what Leo said began to make sense; whoever’s really in charge, they don’t seem to have our interests at the top of their priority list. I couldn’t ignore that any longer. And then Leo died-the real death, the final kind. I didn’t think it was an accident. Still don’t. Maybe I said a few things afterward that drifted around Upstairs, I don’t know. Whatever tipped them off, the Third Way group found me. Kephas was their representative, and he, she, whatever it is, asked me if I wanted to do something to make Heaven better.” Sam then repeated most of the stuff I’d already heard in Walker’s quasi-suicide letter about the Third Way, their belief in the need for an alternative to Heaven and Hell, their willingness to try to do something about it. “They weren’t ready to move yet-this was years ago-but I couldn’t take being in the Harps any longer.” He turned to me. “It was beginning to feel like a lie, Bobby-all that talk about how we were the only bulwark against Hell’s evil on Earth, but there we were doing all that awful shit.”

“Don’t apologize,” I said. “I might have listened, too.” But I wasn’t certain about that. I don’t like chaos. I don’t like secrets. And I sure as hell didn’t like the idea of people as powerful as Karael and his friends being angry at me.

“So I quit the Harps,” Sam went on, “took an informal leave of absence, and for a while I just…well, sort of bummed around. Settled here in San Judas and tried to figure out what I was doing. Made friends-mortal friends, even. One of them was Reverend Habari.” The tone of Sam’s voice said this was important to him. “I really wish you’d known him, Bobby. He was a good man. Truly good. He wasn’t just a community political activist, he would take in homeless folk and feed them and let them stay until he could get them into a shelter. He marched in all the marches, but he also stayed up late supervising the night basketball league in Sierra Park. Visited shut-ins. Read to sick folks. And then he got cancer and died. And all I could think was, ‘And that’s the end of a good man. He’s gone.’”

“What do you mean?” Clarence sounded outraged. “He died. If he was as good as you say, then he went straight to Heaven!”

Sam’s voice rose. “For what? To become what? Our masters have made certain we don’t know anything for sure, kid. The only angels we know are like us-ciphers with their memories wiped, working for the Man down here on Earth or our bosses in Heaven. Is that what happened to Moses Habari? They just erased everything and started him over, like us? Or is he one of those poor fools square-dancing in the Fields of the Blessed with about as much of his personality left as a psychiatric patient pumped full of happy drugs?”

“It’s not like that!” The barrel of Clarence’s needle gun wavered, but he kept it on Sam. “We’re angels ! We work for God!”

“Well, see, that’s something I’m not as sure about as you, son. All that stuff you used to ask me, ‘Why this, why that…?’ Well, I asked those questions for real. In fact, I’m not sure if we’re working for God the Highest or for somebody else entirely.”

“That’s enough,” Clarence said. “I don’t need to hear any more blasphemy, Sam. I’m sorry-you’re a good man, I really believe that, but you’re no angel. Not anymore. It’s time for you to come back to Heaven. Maybe you can get some help…”

I had distanced myself from Sam, in part just to make it harder for Clarence to shoot both of us, and as I moved closer to the kid I said, “Not yet, please. Not until I find out what happened to the souls they took. Did it work, Sam? Did you find a place to hide them where they’d be safe?”

“That was the hard part,” he admitted. “We couldn’t stash souls on Earth without somebody noticing, but the Tartarean Convention set things up so that at the very least, a high-ranking angel and an equally high-ranking demon had to agree on making any new territory outside the Earthly bounds, no matter how small. My Third Way bosses had other recruits like me, and they were ready to fit us all out with fake identities and fake bodies. I probably should have just invented a name, but I wanted to pay back Dr. Habari, at least in a small way…” He trailed off. “Anyway, apparently the Third Way folk got a tip that Grand Duke Eligor might make a deal-for reasons of his own that I don’t know. And he did.”

As Sam had been talking, I moved a little closer to Clarence, and now I quietly slipped my empty gun out of my belt.

“…so because of that deal, we had our site,” Sam finished. “It exists. It’s real!”

I punctuated this fascinating revelation by hitting Clarence hard on the base of the skull with my gun butt. The kid didn’t even make a noise, just dropped like a sack of apples. I didn’t want to kill him, although I had no doubt that if I did he’d be resurrected again post-haste by our bosses, but I wasn’t going to stand there and see Sam get dragged off either. At least not until I’d heard the rest of the story. I took the smooth little needle gun out of Clarence’s hand, then turned back to my oldest friend.

“Okay, Sammy,” I said. “It’s just the two of us now. Convince me.”

“Convince you of what? That it works? That’s easy. Follow me.”

I stopped to check Clarence’s breathing, then turned him onto his side so if he puked he wouldn’t choke on it. Not a good way to go, even if you’re getting shunted into another body afterward.

“How hard did you hit him?” Sam asked as we made our way out past the outdoor pools.

“He’ll be out for awhile, but I don’t think the damage will be permanent.”

“Glad to hear it. I kind of liked him. At first I thought he was too obvious an outsider to really be a plant.”

“They double-bluffed you,” I said. “Temuel got me that way, too. Does that mean he was in on Clarence?”

“Maybe. Or maybe the Mule didn’t find out that Clarence was actually working for some of the higher-ups until after he asked you to keep an eye on the kid. It’s always wheels within wheels, B.”

“Heaven is one sneaky bastard, all right.”

We fell silent as we made our way up the Grand Promenade toward Merryland and its ruined attractions, as if we were two souls traveling not to some new third destination but floating through good old Limbo, out of time, out of space. I wondered if Sam and I would ever walk side by side this way again. And no more meals at Boxer Rebellion? Really?

I had no idea what I was going to do next. I didn’t really want to think about it.