“What’s new about that?” Cunningham asks. “Something like that’s built into every mythology from Sumer and Egypt on. There’s always a mechanism for evaluating the souls of the dead—this one goes to Paradise, this one goes to Hell—”
“Wait,” Harahel says. “I wasn’t finished. I’m not talking about the evaluation of individual souls.”
“What then?”
“Worlds,” the angel replies. “Basileus will be the judge of worlds. He holds an entire planet up to scrutiny and decides whether it’s time to call for the last trump.”
“Part of the machinery of Judgment, you mean?”
“Exactly. He’s the one who presents the evidence to God and helps Him make his decision. And then he’s the one who tells Israfel to blow the trumpet, and he’s the one who calls out the name of Anaphaxeton to bring everyone before the bar. He’s the prime apocalyptic angel, the destroyer of worlds. And we thought you might make him look like—”
“Ah,” Cunningham says. “Not now. Let’s talk about that some other time.”
He shuts the system down, pours himself a drink, sits staring out the window at the big eucalyptus tree in the front yard. After a while it begins to rain. Not such a good weekend for a drive into the country after all, he thinks. He does not turn the computer on again that evening.
Despite everything, Cunningham goes to the party. Joanna is not there. She has phoned to cancel, late Saturday afternoon, pleading a bad cold. He detects no sound of a cold in her voice, but perhaps she is telling the truth. Or possibly she has found something better to do on Saturday night. But he is already geared for party going, and he is so tired, so eroded, that it is more effort to change his internal program than it is to follow through on the original schedule. So about eight that evening he drives up to San Mateo, through a light drizzle.
The party turns out not to be in the glamorous hills west of town, but in a small cramped condominium, close to the heart of the city, furnished with what looks like somebody’s college-era chairs and couches and bookshelves. A cheap stereo is playing the pop music of a dozen years ago, and a sputtering screen provides a crude computer-generated light show. The host is some sort of marketing exec for a large video-games company in San Jose, and most of the guests look vaguely corporate, too. The futurologist from New York has sent his regrets; the famous sociobiologist has also failed to arrive; the video poets are two San Francisco gays who will talk only to each other, and stray not very far from the bar; the expert on teaching chimpanzees to speak is in the red-faced-and-sweaty-stage of being drunk, and is working hard at seducing a plump woman festooned with astrological jewelry. Cunningham, numb, drifts through the party as though he is made of ectoplasm. He speaks to no one; no one speaks to him. Some jugs of red wine are open on a table by the window, and he pours himself a glassful. There he stands, immobile, imprisoned by inertia. He imagines himself suddenly making a speech about angels, telling everyone how Ithuriel touched Satan with his spear in the Garden of Eden as the Fiend crouched next to Eve, and how the hierarch Ataphiel keeps Heaven aloft by balancing it on three fingers. But he says nothing. After a time he find himself approached by a lean, leathery-looking woman with glittering eyes, who says, “And what do you do?”
“I’m a programmer,” Cunningham says. “Mainly I talk to angels. But I also do national security stuff.”
“Angels?” she says, and laughs in a brittle, tinkling way. “You talk to angels? I’ve never heard anyone say that before.” She pours herself a drink and moves quickly elsewhere.
“Angels?” says the astrological woman. “Did someone say angels?”
Cunningham smiles and shrugs and looks out the window. It is raining harder. I should go home, he thinks. There is absolutely no point in being here. He fills his glass again. The chimpanzee man is still working on the astrologer, but she seems to be trying to get free of him and come over to Cunningham. To discuss angels with him? She is heavy-breasted, a little walleyed, sloppy-looking. He does not want to discuss angels with her. He does not want to discuss angels with anyone. He holds his place at the window until it definitely does appear that the astrologer is heading his way; then he drifts toward the door. She says, “I heard you say you were interested in angels. Angels are a special field of mine, you know. I’ve studied with—”
“Angles,” Cunningham says. “I play the angles. That’s what I said. I’m a professional gambler.”
“Wait,” she says, but he moves past her and out into the night. It takes him a long while to find his key and get his car unlocked, and the rain soaks him to the skin, but that does not bother him. He is home a little before midnight.
He brings Raphael on line. The great archangel radiates a beautiful golden glow.
“You will be Basileus,” Raphael tells him. “We’ve decided it by a vote, hierarchy by hierarchy. Everyone agrees.”
“I can’t be an angel. I’m human,” Cunningham replies.
“There’s ample precedent. Enoch was carried off to Heaven and became an angel. So was Elijah. St. John the Baptist was actually an angel. You will become Basileus. We’ve already done the program for you. It’s on the disk: just call him up and you’ll see. Your own face, looking out at you.”
“No,” Cunningham says.
“How can you refuse?”
“Are you really Raphael? You sound like someone from the other side. A tempter. Asmodeus. Astaroth. Belphegor.”
“I am Raphael. And you are Basileus.”
Cunningham considers it. He is so very tired that he can barely think.
An angel. Why not? A rainy Saturday night, a lousy party, a splitting headache: come home and find out you’ve been made an angel, and given a high place in the hierarchy. Why not? Why the hell not?
“All right,” he says, “I’m Basileus.”
He puts his hands on the keys and taps out a simple formulation that goes straight down the pipe into the Defense Department’s big northern California system. With an alteration of two keystrokes, he sends the same message to the Soviets. Why not? Redundancy is the soul of security. The world now has about six minutes left. Cunningham has always been good with computers. He knows their secret language as few people before him have.
Then he brings Raphael on the screen again.
“You should see yourself as Basileus while there’s still time,” the archangel says.
“Yes. Of course. What’s the access key?”
Raphael tells him. Cunningham begins to set it up.
Come now, Basileus! We are one!
Cunningham stares at the screen with growing wonder and delight, while the clock continues to tick.