Only Human (20 page)

The woman smiled. ‘Oh, I'm not so sure about that. After all, when you're hanging in a gallery all day with people walking up and down staring at you, it must be virtually impossible to remember
all
the faces.'

‘I—' Maria suddenly couldn't think of anything to say.

‘Madrid,' broke in the right-hand man suddenly. ‘That's it, Madrid. September or October 1571.You were between a fake Botticelli and some Dutch thing that looked like a fight in a pickled-egg factory.' As Maria continued to look mystified, he explained, ‘You know what they say about beauty being only skin-deep, and not judging by appearances? Well, we're fortunate, I suppose. You may be parading around in fancy dress pretending to be a human, but we can see you're really a painting in drag, as it were. Nice outfit, but it's not going to fool us. And isn't it a bit draughty in the cold weather?'

Maria sagged. Even in defeat, though, she considered the portable keyboard on the seat behind her, and started integrating it into her original plan of action. ‘How could you know that?' she said. ‘About me being hung in that horrible damp house in Madrid? I was only there a week as security for a loan.'

‘Like I said,' the man told her. ‘I saw you there. Long time ago.'

‘My, how you've grown,' added his male colleague. ‘In all three dimensions, too. Personally, and I don't care what he says, I think it suits you better than a thin layer of dried paint. More
you
, really.'

‘Thank you,' Maria said cautiously. ‘So you know who I am, then. What of it?'

‘Ah,' said the woman. ‘Nothing unpleasant, really. We just wanted to offer you a job.'

 

Daylight filtered through the curtains like rain seeping through the ceiling below a leaky roof. Some of it dripped on Artofel's eyelids. He rolled over, grunted and woke up.

‘Huh?' he mumbled. ‘Oh. Blast.'

In his dream, he'd been back in Flipside, lounging behind his desk (which his imagination had changed into something made of exquisitely figured walnut and only slightly smaller than Arizona), entering figures into a smiling computer that made little simpering, gasping noises every time he tapped the keys. Waking to find himself in a bed in a vicarage on Earth was rather like being someone's bespoke pigskin travel accessory, inadvertently misdirected to Nairobi by the baggage handlers.

As he brushed his teeth - not that they were his teeth, but a well-mannered visitor leaves his body as he would expect to find it - he looked carefully at the strange creature in the mirror, and wondered whether there was really any realistic chance of getting out of it.

Probably a perfectly normal appearance for a vicar; a cross between a garden gnome and a comfortable armchair, with more than a hint of a benevolent version of Captain Mainwaring. Curious, he reflected, that anybody could ever believe that bodies like these housed Heaven's front-line troops in the battle against the forces of evil. Just as well for all concerned, he assured himself, that that particular phoney war wasn't ever going to come to anything; because if it did, Good would be on the proverbial hiding to nothing. And nobody wanted Evil to win, particularly not the instruments of darkness.

Just as, in politics, there are some elections you're only too pleased to lose, so the battle between light and darkness. Because if darkness won, it'd sooner or later have to form a government, and it didn't want to do that, in roughly the same way that a sensible lamb doesn't really want to have to form a sheepskin coat. Lack of power without responsibility has always been the ideal for the Satanic hosts; because, if it's been ordained in two covenants and the world's number-one all-time bestseller that you're always going to lose, meeting your performance targets is never going to be a problem you lose sleep over. The staff of Hell are, first and foremost, public servants. They like it that way.

Whereas (Artofel reflected, spitting minty froth down the plughole) the other lot, of whom I am currently one, have all the aggro of winning, which must take all the fun out of everything. Consider that; because victory never ends with winning. Winning is only the start. The overwhelming majority of it is staying won, the art of balancing on the very top of a rapidly turning Ferris wheel. Infinitely better to be perpetual losers, gaining the moral victory every single time - however soundly beaten you may be, everybody's going to assume you could have won but threw the match. Hence, no more devoted advocates of the status quo and the established order than the inhabitants of Flipside.

Presumably.

Having scrubbed his teeth and cleaned out the sink (cleanliness is next to devilishness) he was on his way through to the kitchen when the phone rang. He stopped, and looked at it.

An ambivalent figure, Alexander Graham Bell, claimed by both sides in the Great Debate as one of their own. Bell, claims Heaven, must be one of ours because thanks to him people can talk to one another the length and breadth of the world, easily and reasonably cheaply, at any hour of the day or night, exchanging views, sharing information, communicating as never before. Exactly our point, replies Hell. That's our boy.

Artofel picked up the receiver, trying hard as he did so to remember the name he was supposed to be answering to. ‘Hello?' he said carefully.

‘Hello,' replied the telephone. ‘Can I speak to Artofel, please?'

Ah, thought the Duke of Hell, finding himself calmer and more resigned than he'd expected. Here we go. ‘Speaking,' he said.

‘Splendid, splendid,' replied the voice. ‘Now then, you don't know me but I'm in a position to do you a favour if you do me a favour. I take it you're interested.'

Artofel removed the receiver from under his chin and looked at it as if it had just bitten his ear. ‘Who is this?' he asked.

‘Believe me,' replied the voice cheerfully, ‘you don't want to know.What you
do
want is to go home. Am I right? Of course I am.'

Allowing himself a moment for reflection, Artofel considered whether anybody, however highly motivated, would bother to ring him up from Hell just to try and sell him double glazing. Unlikely, he concluded. The tone of voice, however, argued strongly to the contrary. ‘What do you want?' he asked.

‘A few minutes of your time, that's all. Oh, and your body.'

‘?'

‘Not
your
body,' the voice continued smoothly. ‘
Your
body's down here, safe and sound except for being under close arrest in the VIP lounge. Don't worry,' it added, as Artofel made a funny noise, ‘they aren't
doing
anything to it. Not yet. Set your mind at rest on that score.'

‘Uh.'

‘For now, anyway. No, it's the body you've got on at the moment we want. Absolutely no skin off your nose. His maybe, but not yours.'

‘Ack?'

‘Think about it,' said the voice, reasonably. ‘We bring you home, reunite you with your own flesh and blood, what do you care about the body of some mouldy old vicar up on the Surface? Couldn't give a damn. After all, they're the enemy, aren't they?You'd be doing your patriotic duty.'

It was at more or less this point that Artofel's logic circuits cut back in and allowed him to smell essence of rodent. ‘You could say that,' he replied. ‘What do you want it for?'

‘None of your business, my friend. Now, are you interested, or do we take our proposition elsewhere?'

Artofel's logic circuits were making up for lost time. While he was telling the voice that he was very interested and of course he wanted to go home, his mind was playing angel's advocate. A voice from Hell that thought vicars were the enemy, that wanted the vicar's body, that claimed to be able to take him out of the vicar's body and send him home but seemed to need his agreement before it could do it. Like the bill for a meal shared by nine students, it just didn't add up.

‘Perfectly painless,' the voice was saying. ‘Well, for you perfectly painless, 'cos you'll be well out of there before we even start. So, the sooner the better, wouldn't you say? After all, the work's starting to pile up a bit on your desk; you know how it is, wouldn't even occur to anybody to do anything while you're away, just let it form snowdrifts in the in-tray. Just so long as they've got room to get the office door open to bring the post in, they're not bothered.'

Now that, Artofel conceded, was no lie; it was also, however, a universal truth. In other words, it wasn't necessarily evidence that whoever he was talking to actually came from Hell, just that at some point in his life he'd worked in an office. ‘So what's the plan?' he said.

‘Leave that with us,' said the voice. ‘We'll get right back to you as soon as we've tied up a few loose ends with the rest of the project. Shouldn't take too long.'

‘Right.'

‘Meanwhile, enjoy your holiday. Or at least, try not to have too horrible a time. Okay?'

‘Okay.'

‘Great. Ciao for now.'

Click, said the phone, and Artofel put it back. Food for thought was putting it mildly; at this rate, Thought would soon have enough raw material to open its own chain of takeaways. The salient points were straightforward enough; it was the
why?
that he couldn't quite get his head around. Probably be no problem if he had
his
head . . .

Crash!
went the penny, suddenly and violently dropping. Scrolling back through his recollections, Artofel closed in on the phrase - what was it? - ‘a few loose ends with the rest of the project'. Surely not.

No. It'd mean . . .

Cast your mind back to when you used to do jigsaw puzzles; and you'd done roughly the first third, and there's this one piece which fits perfectly in what you're convinced is the wrong slot. So you try it everywhere else, and it won't go. Or consider the crossword clue that can't be what it obviously is, because that'd throw out everything else.

‘Oh my God,' Artofel muttered. It wasn't really an exclamation. More a sort of prayer.

D
ermot Fraud crawled out of the phone box, a broken lemming.

In a sense, he reflected, it was the story of his life. All that effort, that hard work, that furious energy and desperate ingenuity, in order to scramble up into a very high place; only to find, once he was actually there, that nobody could hear him or understand what the hell he was trying to say to them.

Ascending to a great height. You don't have to be a lemming, but it helps.

He'd heard the inner voice again, during that moment of blank despair just after the Home Secretary had rung off, taking Fraud's only coin with him. Go on, the voice had urged him, do the sensible thing and jump.What are you, a lemming or a man?

He hadn't jumped; instead, he'd crawled, scrambled, bumped and slithered his way back down again - much,
much
harder than getting up there in the first place - and now here he was, back on the ground where he'd started, with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

How long he wandered aimlessly, where he went, what risks he ran, he never knew. Didn't care. Couldn't give a damn. As far as he was concerned, any car that ran him over, any cat that ate him, would be doing him a favour and saving him a job.

Eventually, however, he realised that he was very tired; and, since he stood just as good a chance of getting squashed or eaten asleep as awake, he might as well get his head down for an hour or so before finally finding some way to pack it all in. Further consideration led him to form the view that if he was going to sleep, he might as well do so in relative comfort, preferably out of the heavy rain that was just starting to fall. Raindrops hit you harder when you're five inches long. Fortunately, he hadn't gone far when he found himself staring upwards at a vaguely familiar shape.

Lorry.

From where he was huddling, of course, it didn't look much like a lorry; more like some vast alien spacecraft hovering noiselessly in the air. He observed that the tailgate was down, and the driver was busy hauling something off a fork-lift. No trouble at all to scuttle up the ramp, find a nice cosy fold of a tarpaulin at the back of the cargo compartment, snuggle down and close his eyes.

When he opened them again, there was daylight streaming in through the open tailgate, and huge men with great clumpy boots shifting wooden crates. Realising that he must have been asleep for the whole duration of the journey, he sat up, planned a relatively safe course that'd get him to the back of the lorry and scuttled.

Down the ramp, steering well clear of human feet and the wheels of slow, ponderous trolleys, and out into the open air. There was a big pallet of boxes not far away; he sprinted over, squirmed into the gap at the foot of the pallet and settled down to listen and observe.