Victor Koman - The Jehovah Contract

"Why?" He shouted over the whiz of bullets, stones, and electrons. " Why? "

"You lusted for a contradiction. You wanted us to love and accept You of our own free wills, yet You threatened us with ceaseless torment if we didn't. You provided for redemption at the last possible moment of life-before we have proof of Your existence-yet You made atonement impossible after death."

I knelt beside Him. "You confused us. You let others confuse us in Your name. You let us retain our faculties for logic, then asked us to worship You in the absence of any logical reason. You offered not even the merest shred of proof that You're something other than a demented prankster or cruel torturer. At least the back-alley thug who murders and rapes doesn't ask his victim to love him for it."

"Can I change?" He asked, hugging His rifle. The tears ran down his face, clearing the mud off in narrow streaks.

"It's too late," I said. "You've blown it. That I'm here at all, capable and willing to be Your assassin, proves that. That I could even consider killing God is proof that You're at the end of Your cycle."

He closed His eyes. " She ," He whispered. "If only She-"

Before He could finished, the flash of a hydrogen bomb turned everything around me to the purest of pure, hard white light. I felt what it was like to be a star.

I novaed.

I stood at the final doorway. It was one solid slab of ornately carved oak. I was about twenty pounds slimmer and wearing a well-cut double-breasted suit. I felt young. In command. I adjusted my hat and reached out to knock…

"Don't bother," said a tired, wasted voice. "You've got the key, Mr. Ammo. You've always had the key."

A light tap of my fingers pushed the door open. "Seems I don't need a key."

"You are the key."

"Cut the Hollywood pretensions," I said, looking around the study. All four walls were lined with bookshelves. The books were thick, leatherbound volumes. Though the room had no windows or lamps, light came from somewhere, soft and low. The sound of crashing waves reached in from outside.

I shut the door slowly behind me.

In the center of the room sat a high-backed chair on a fading rug, facing away from me. I stepped over to it.

"Tell me, Mr. Ammo," asked a voice from the chair, "how did an assassin ever come to be such a seeker after truth?"

I leaned on the back of the chair for a moment. "An assassin is one who doesn't accept myths, most notably the myth of power. He sees through the eyes of a hunter who is as mighty as his prey, yet is apart from the game being played. He participates in the events of history, turning them to his ends, yet he remains an objective viewer. That is, if he wants to stay in business. He sees clearly that any deified `leader' is as evil as any small-time hood-and a lot less honest."

I stepped around to the front of the chair to gaze into the eyes of a weary old man.

Neither lean nor fat, tall nor short, dark nor light. He looked like the commonest of the common men. Absolutely average. Except for His eyes. They bespoke the ennui of absolute power corrupted absolutely.

I felt myself drawn toward those eyes. Drawn downward. Sinking. Falling.

I shook it off.

He continued to look deeply into me. "A proud man." He nodded. "I made pride a sin."

"Having a good opinion of oneself should never be a crime."

"No man a villain in his own eyes, correct, Mr. Ammo?" He folded His hands, nodding lightly. "Why do you want to kill Me? Did you hate your father?"

"No," I answered truthfully. "Don't look to psychological roots in my actions. Look to my chosen values."

"You probably hated him," He continued. "Leaders are father figures."

"Proper fathers don't rule the lives of their children by force. My father never did. He never taxed me or tithed me or imprisoned me and said he was doing me a favor. He never made me feel guilty for being born his son."

"He never showed you anything to worship. He mocked your sense of wonder."

"It survived." I found a pack of Marlboros in the left pocket of my jacket. Not my brand, but they'd do. Matches were in the vest pocket.

"What about your mother?"

"I didn't know You were a Freudian." I lit up and waved the first puff of smoke around. "Why don't we talk about Your Mother."

He pounded on the leather arm of the chair with a tightly balled fist. "I never had a Mother. Understand? Never! I am God! I am self-created! I am the Alpha and the Omega."

I shrugged mildly. "I don't know," I said. "If I can descend from an infinite number of ancestors going back down the evolutionary trail, I don't see why there can't be an infinite regress of gods and goddesses evolving through time. Perhaps when I see You, I'm looking at the next curve of the ascending helix of my own evolution-"

"Evolution." He almost spat the word out. "How I fought it. Change. I don't know why I bother. I tried saving things." He stared up at me with an imploring gaze. "I tried to make amends, but…" His hand made a futile gesture, like a dying bird.

"Yeah," I said. "I know. Christ died for our sins and all that."

His face turned three shades of purple as He shouted, "Christ didn't die for your sins! He died for Mine! " He began to weep. "What I did with the Flood was wrong. What I did to Sodom and Gomorrah was wrong. I'd violated My own commandment. Things weren't going the way I wanted, and I got angry. I said I was jealous." He paused, staring at the floor. "Doesn't it even things out that I let you kill My only Son? He died as Jesus and as Osiris and as Tammuz and as a dozen others. Won't you ever forgive Me?"

He looked at me with eyes that sagged under the burden of unbearable remorse. The tears rolled down His cheeks. He didn't bother to wipe them away.

I had to be merciless. I had gone too far to surrender to pity. How could you pity a God who had screwed up so monumentally?

"Every time a child starves to death," I said, "a mother discards her faith. Every time a crop fails, a farmer curses You. You've given us no reason to have faith in You. You tried to convince us that all we had to do was believe in You to be freed from the turning of the Wheel."

"Don't," He murmured. "I beg of you."

"You're scared of the Cycle of Birth, Life, and Death. You deny it and seek to force us to deny the reality all around us. When people pray to You to intervene and nothing happens, pain and suffering result. To retain Your power, You made suffering a virtue, and Your ministers of love and truth became torturers. They instilled virtue with racks and spikes when they could, or, when they couldn't, they resorted to the subtler torment of guilt and fear."

He gave me a sour look. "Dostoevsky does not become you. Give me something new."

"Why? You never gave us anything new. You demand that we cease learning, that we repent of daring to know the difference between right and wrong, that we become fools again for You. You demand that we turn back the clock, reverse the Wheel, that we ignore Nature's laws while blindly obeying Your rules. You deny the existence of evolution, of change. You seek to rein in the Universe, when every natural inclination is to surge outward and up-"

"You're trying to assassinate me by talking me to death."

I ground the cigarette out on the rug. It was time for the kill.

"I'm not talking You to death. I'm thinking You to death. I had to crawl into my mind and that of every man and woman on Earth to root You out. Intelligent people already deny Your existence because You demanded that they deny theirs. You've lost Your most powerful allies. For what?"

He pounded on the chair with both fists. "Confusion to the enemy! I stopped Her!"