theology – Diabolical Plots

DP FICTION #136B: “The Monster’s Wife” by Stewart Moore

Content note (click for details)

Threatened harm to women and children; non-graphic mentions of death by drowning; poverty

edited by Ziv Wities

The monster came out perfectly.

The head of an ass. A human left arm, delicate in comparison to the elephant’s right forefoot. A woman’s torso⁠—a whole torso, and quite naked. Provocative, but then, this was for religious purposes. An eagle’s left leg, and the right leg of a cow. Or a bull. Who but a husbandman could tell the difference? An old man’s face grimaced from where the buttocks should be, and below that a long dragon’s neck and head emitted ominous puffs of gas.

Perfect.

John Bateman, printer of Fleet Street, London, hung the folio sheet up to dry. The likeness was wonderful. As the pamphlet told, the monster had washed up dead in Rome nearly a century before, in the year of Our Lord 1496, after a flood of the River Tiber. As the great reformer Philip Melanchthon of Wittenburg had stirringly explained, it demonstrated the judgement of God Almighty against the sins of the Romish church.

Tomorrow, John and his family would fold, stitch and cut hundreds of the pamphlets. Melanchthon’s words were ripe for a new audience, and would marshal support for the defence of England against the Spanish fleet. And who could say? Perhaps they would draw the attention of Good Queen Bess herself, and a royal commission or two.

“’Tis well made, husband,” said Katie.

“Aye, ’tis well all ’round. None doth set type nicer and quicker than thou.”

“It should draw good custom.”

John considered all the hanging broadsheets. The sooty smell of drying ink filled the shop. It was a great improvement on the noisome vapours of the cesspit below the floor. The few candles that illuminated their late-night work threw flickering shadows on the paper labyrinth.

“And ’tis good service to the realm.” But yes, good custom first and foremost. And perhaps the salvation of their press. Procuring so true a facsimile of Master Cranach’s original engraving of the monster was a triumph, but an expensive one.

John and Katie surveyed the hundreds of little monsters all around them, and sighed contentedly. Their tired fingers and shoulders urged them upstairs to join their little ones, already abed.

Someone knocked on the shop door.

A gentle rap, not a pounding that would attract the attentions of a night watchman. The city was on alert for potential Spanish spies preceding the oncoming armada, and uneasy dreams thickened the air.

The tapping continued. The sound spoke as clearly as words: “I do not wish to draw undue attention, but I shall not and will not leave until my suit is known. Dare me not to knock louder.”

John pushed his heart back down into his chest, and with slow breaths ducked under the inky pages. He lifted the bar and creaked the door open an arrow-slit.

The fog-shrouded moon above gave only faerie-light to the street, but it was enough to see the figure towering above him, cloaked from head to toe. John’s mother had told him tales of monks in Bloody Mary’s reign, and in his dreams they looked much like this.

“Good even, Goodman Bateman,” the monk said. His voice was deep and, strange to say, came not from the head but the midsection. The accent was foreign; Romish perhaps?

“The hour is very late for strangers,” John snapped, allowing himself as much rudeness as he dared. After all, it was quite possible this was an agent of the Queen.

“Nay, Goodman Bateman. Thou knowest me.” He leaned forward, yet nothing but darkness appeared under the cloak. Again the voice came from below and behind: “Or rather, thou knowest my kind.”

Was the stranger threatening them? “We are not papists, nor hiders of papists, if you mean that.”

“Nay. Not precisely.” The man’s voice rose slightly, threatening a shout.

Katie appeared at John’s shoulder, Gripping his arm tightly, she drew him back, and said, “Do come in, good sir.”

John and Katie turned along the wall, the only way provided by their hanging sheets. The huge monk ducked low to pass under their doorway, and followed them. The high ceiling of the shop permitted him to stand at full height. Katie led them to a pair of typesetting tables set facing each other, each with a high seat. “Will you sit?” Katie asked.

“I shall, gladly. It has been a tiresome journey.”

John gestured toward the seat nearest the monk. As in a warped mirror, they sat at the same time. Katie drew up a third stool for herself. The upright typesetting rack would have blocked their view of a shorter guest.

John put a hand to his head. “What do you want of us?” he whispered.

“To ask a favour.”

The shadow under the cowl turned this way and that, absorbing the printed monster many times over. It expelled a shuddering breath.

“Thinkst thou this poor departed creature has aught to do with thy human squabbles? I implore thee as being, I hope, a man not without feeling, that thou wilt destroy these unauthorised images.”

“Unauthorised!” squawked John. “I paid right handsomely for these!”

“But didst thou think to ask her kin?” the monk hissed.

“I see not what business it is of theirs,” huffed John. “A monstrous birth is God’s will, God’s lesson, and God’s property, not some peasant brood’s.”

Katie reached out her ink-stained hand. “Are you of her family then?”

“Aye. I am that. So I ask again, John Bateman, that thou destroy these slanderous copies, and leave us out of thy petty affairs.”

That would ruin them. Did this man have no notion of what he asked, or did he not care? John’s pride in their work and livelihood shook the weights from his tongue. “Is it a petty affair, sirrah, to restore the ancient gospel from popish superstition? ’Tis well known this beast, washed up on a Tiber flood, is a judgement on Rome and its corruption! ’Tis proved by Doctor Melanchthon, in the text now translated by mine own wife. Herein he shows how each monstrous appendage represents the very sins of the pope. The ass’s head bespeaks the stupidity of⁠—–”

Without a word, a delicate hand reached out of the sleeve and flipped back the hood of the cloak. An ass’s head stared down at them, joined in silent chorus by five hundred reproductions all around. John thought all asses had a melancholy look in their eyes, but this visage reflected a sorrow much deeper than that. In awe, he turned to Katie. A tear coursed down her cheek.

“True,” he whispered. “’Tis true. I knew ’twas true.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

They’d never said it to each other. They never had to. They knew how likely it was that the whole story was a lie. Lies flew thick and fast these days, and not all of them were Catholic ones. It was one thing to gamble all on the truth, but when you could not even be sure of that… To be nothing more than another cheap purveyor of lies⁠—that was horrible to suppose. Yet the empty stomachs of their little ones were worse to think on.

But it was all true. And John and Katie felt no horror in the monster’s presence, but joy.

“She was your wife,” said Katie.

“She was,” it said.

Katie leaned forward. “Sir, what is your name?”

“I will not give it thee. The sounds of our speech are not such as thine. As like as not, it would only amuse thee. And I am in deadly earnest. I could, if I wished, burn this place to the ground.” It picked up a candle and made the slightest gesture towards the bottom edge of the nearest broadsheet.

“Please!” cried Katie. “Our pretty ones are upstairs! You’d not harm them!”

“I know who is in this house,” the monster said, but it set down the flame. “Thou shalt destroy these pamphlets.”

“I cannot,” said John.

The ass’s eyes regarded him with cold intelligence that a true animal could never muster. John ached to drive the monster out into the street and destroy it, he knew not how. It must have been twice his weight. The floorboards groaned uncomfortably when it shifted.

“I cannot,” John repeated, trying to implore without begging. “It would be the ruin of us. What I paid for that image, I can recover no way but by the sale of these.”

He rubbed his hands together and could not meet the monster’s eyes. His words were running out like hourglass sand. “And besides, would you deny an Englishman his chance to rally his nation against its foes? Under the papist hordes, surely you see that a printer of England would be driven from his livelihood, or worse?”

The monster stood, its head practically to the rafters. “My kind has seen kingdoms better than this sink into the sea. What will befall thy little island concerns me not. This… desecration of my beloved… concerns me very much.”

“Then why did you not trouble Melanchthon with these complaints? It was he who first brought out this image.”

“I knew not his plans when he made them. Since then, we have become more attentive.”

“How?” asked Katie. “How did you know to come to our door?”

The ass brayed once, and the voice chuckled. “The community of printers of Europe is a small one, and it loves rumours of forthcoming publications best of all. The engraving thou commissioned was uncommonly fine, and much remarked upon.” The ass regarded the closest of the portraits with a miserable eye. It huffed, or sighed, or both. “The Jesuits in thy land operate more than the one press recently confiscated, and they owe my kind some small favours.”

John could not contain his curiosity. “Yet how could you travel among us, such as you are? And so speedily?”

“If I tell thee, John Bateman, what wilt thou give me in return?”

“I promise… to think about it.”

Again, the soft bray and chuckle. “For such precious coin as that, I would dare much.” The hand reached up, gripped the edge of the cloak, and tore it off. It thumped to the floor in a heavy heap.

The monster stood revealed, the masculine version of his wife’s image. Yet there was more. Huge leathery wings unfurled. Many broadsheets imprinted themselves on the membranes.

“We travel much faster than ye humans, Goodman Bateman. Thy borders and kingships mean little to us. My wife’s wings were torn off in the flood that took her from me. I held on to her with my good claw, but we are delicately made.” He raised the eagle’s talon that was his left foot. “The waters were too strong, the rain too thick to fly in. I saw her eyes in that last moment, before she was taken. We spoke more love in that instant, John Bateman, than a penny-counter such as thou could match in many lives.”

His tail, swishing, spat out sparks that died, mercifully, on the floorboards. “Now. Wilt thou still measure my pain against thy fear?”

John stammered, searching for words that would lead out of this nightmare. “But see, you need not suffer from my small transgression. Tomorrow, think how many thousands of pamphlets will be for sale on Paternoster Row by the Cathedral, on every topic on which men will speak⁠—which is all of them. And that counts not the illicit trade, the products of the Catholic press lately uncovered in Oxford. Every stall sells pamphlets and broadsheets and books upon books, and who can read it all? Who can make sense of it all? Shall not my little pages sink into the ocean of print, and swim in it, and vanish, and trouble you no more?”

The monster’s face was as stony as any ass’s ever was. “And yet thou hope to sell hundreds of them? Thy self-contradiction does thee no credit. But I will make thee a bargain. Thou mayst sell thy sheets tomorrow, if thou do but cut off thy wife’s face, and nail it to thy door. Then shalt thou know how I suffer, in the presence of these.”

John looked from Katie to the monster, caught between its brutal words and the no less brutal figures in his accounting book. In his desperation, for one terrible moment, he imagined himself doing what it said. And for one terrible moment, Katie saw him thinking it. So fine was the line between life and death in London Town.

John wrung his hands. “I do not suppose… you could pay me to destroy them?”

Silence hard as flint was the only answer.

Katie stood and moved around the tables to stand beside the monster. She took up the human left hand.

“Sir,” said Katie, “so unusual a form as yours can only be due to the will of Heaven. If you and your wife be not a symbol of Romish Babylon, pray tell us, whence do you come and what judgment of God do you signify?”

“I am no symbol,” it roared, tearing its hand free. “No, nor my wife neither!” Its wings buffeted the air, causing paper to brush against paper. John winced at the waste.

Katie stood still and strong. The ass’s head chuffed, and the voice sighed. Wisps of smoke rose from the dragon-tail. The monster furled his wings and sat back down, heedless of his nudity. The chair creaked.

“A symbol. Always ye humans think in symbols. Never of what is, simple and of itself. Always need ye ask, ‘What doth it mean?’ Well, then, what dost thou mean, Goodwife Bateman? In thy standing here before me, what dost thou signify? In thy rising up and thy lying down, what dost thou mean? Tell me that, if thou canst!”

Katie gazed down at the floor. John knew the look and kept his counsel. His wife was the better printer and accountant, and he knew what it looked like when she thought deeply.

She met the monster’s gaze once more. “I would say many things. I would say that to my children, I signify the love of the Provider God. To my husband, I signify the help of the Intercessor God. To many men in England, as a woman, I signify the abnegation of the Sacrificing God. I would say these things, and then I would be nothing in myself, but only a plaything of others. There are many in this land, Anglicans and Puritans and Catholics alike, who would urge me to say such a thing of myself. Therefore I will not. I am, as I do now say you are, myself and no symbol.”

The ass clicked its teeth. “Thou seest then, if but dimly, what I suffer.”

Katie held up a hand. “But I am, then, the one who decides for myself, in the constraints I am given. And I do not decide that my family should be thrown into the street for penury, to starve until the winter, when we shall at the last freeze to death, driven onto the icy Thames. I had rather we burn tonight than that. You may join us in the conflagration, if you will, and bring to an end your own plight as well.”

The heat of her gaze could have ignited the air. Finally, the ass’s head looked to John.

The printer shrugged. “My wife’s decision is mine own as well.”

“Then shall we burn together,” the monster said. It plucked up the candle and leaned forward.

“And yet!” said John.

All froze. Upstairs, a child cried out for a moment, then settled back into silence.

“This paper was expensive, and it would pain me to lose it alongside a day’s work, but I am prepared so to do. The cost I cannot bear to lose is the image of your wife. Therefore I propose to publish it⁠—”

“Never!” cried the monster.

“Wait, sir! To publish it, not with our words, but with yours. Do you understand? Tell us about your wife, who she was, what she did. Tell us of her life and her death, and we will publish that.”

The ass’s head stared, thunderstruck. “You would do that?”

“Yes,” said Katie. “I can record your words ’fore dawn and set the text on the morrow. ’Twill be ready for Paternoster Row on Thursday.”

“There are secrets that must not be told…”

“Then entrust them not to us. Tell us only of her. Draw her portrait in words, as we already have in a figure. Make us love her, rather than fear her.”

The human hand stroked the ass’s chin. “Will it sell? Will not your little pages sink into the ocean of print, and swim in it, and vanish?”

John shrugged. “Who can say? But ’twill be our choice, and the life we make, and none other.”

The ass brayed, and the voice laughed. “Then ready your quill, Goodwife Bateman.”

Katie unstoppered an inkpot, sharpened a quill with one expert stroke of her knife, and pulled out a blank piece of paper.

“In your tongue, her name meant Hyacinth,” the monster said. “And to me she was as beautiful as the flight of eagles.”

2860 words

Author’s Note: I wrote this story after wondering whether people in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries felt the same way about the printing press that many people today feel about the internet: that there’s too much stuff coming out too fast for anyone to have a command of all of it. The answer is “Yes.” I also learned about the “pope-ass”, an unusual creature said to have been found dead in Rome after a flood and used by Protestants for propaganda purposes. Naturally, I wondered how the “pope-ass’s” family would have felt about that.

Stewart Moore has had short fiction published in anthologies edited by Ellen Datlow, Paula Guran and Flame Tree Publishing, among others; in the magazines Diabolical Plots, Mysterion, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet; and in the podcast Pseudopod. He also published his dissertation, Jewish Ethnic Identity and Relations in Hellenistic Egypt: With Walls of Iron? with Brill. Most recently, his story “Bound by Love” appeared in Modern Mummies from Cat Eye Press.

Stewart Moore’s work “Lies of the Desert Fathers” appeared in Diabolical Plots in July 2019. If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.

DP FICTION #82B: “There Are Angels and They Are Utilitarians” by Jamie Wahls

I loved her, to my shame.

The language you use is imprecise. Hard for me. Not in the idioms or the metaphors—I have those well in hand—but so many of your words have unknowable secondary emotional charge. I cannot know how they will be received.

I loved her.

I did not lust after her, nor desire to pass time together. We were not friends and we did not speak. She only became aware of my presence once, when I committed a crime beyond measure.

We were not enemies. And our relationship was not one of unilateral longing, in which I pined for her and she found me an irritant, like sometimes happens with human suitors. She viewed me with confusion, and then, later, wonder.

Many, many years from now, when she understands the crime to its fullness, she will view me with sorrow, and shame.

I loved her beyond all others. That was the sin; that was enough.

I first saw her when she was a child.

Her ancestors and adults had chosen that humans should live in the forest, so that they might turn the forest into more space for humans and expand their cities. It was understood, but not much spoken of, that many humans would die in the effort.

Their future generations will reap many benefits from this homesteading—more food, more space, and a general improvement in compassion towards one another, due to less competition for scarce resources. But, yes, these boons would be purchased with human lives.

I ached to help them, to stop hoarding my finite power and to just solve these problems in a frenzy of creation…but that was the juvenile heroism, self-indulgent and foolish.

My kind considers this meted restraint to be noble. Or—the language is imprecise, but—self-demonstratingly correct? Morally obligatory?

Righteous.

She was in the woods, investigating the innumerable green growing lives nearest to her dwelling. She was especially interested in the lake. She was playing, like human children do.

I was in the woods, investigating the two-hundred-and-two tree copse which was too tightly spaced for tree health and welfare. There iswas a forest fire coming, two years after thisthen, and I was experimenting with moving a single pinecone several tenths of inches in certain directions to see whether in that reality the fire became less damaging to all life, and whether the downstream effects could be managed.

She wandered through the space I was surveying, and she ran across the lake.

It caught my attention with a spike of alarm, because I didn’t understand what I was seeing. Was this some one-in-a-trillion fluke of surface tension? Was this the work of the Adversary?—but then I perceived the rocks hidden shallow beneath the surface.

Still. It was the first time in several hundred years that I had been surprised, and I found myself watching her while I worked, glancing to her every few minutes.

She was touching the rocks and sticks, talking to them like they were people. She was trying to decide which one was her friend.

I cast my awareness back to her dwelling; I perceived a dozen other rocks there, each different, each smaller than her small hands. I consulted the past; she had collected each of these rocks and called them her friends, though she could not tell them apart from one another.

Her digging in the lakeside had startled a small animal—a frog. It leapt out, startling her in turn as it splashed into the water, and she let out a short, delighted laugh.

I am ashamed to say that her laugh killed billions.

Because it caused me to think, about how different our reactions had been. When I was surprised, my response was sharp anxiety, and a return to my duties. When she was surprised, her reaction was joy.

This felt…sad.

But ours is to do the noble thing, so my duties called me back, and the child did not disturb me again for days.

I feel contrite and small-embarrassed to be drawing attention to your language, again. I do not mean to be seen as complaining or condescending. It just seems to lack many of the concepts that are most fundamental to my thoughts.

You still do not understand the colossal magnitude of my sin. If you did, my punishment would be death, and every event leading up to now would be scrutinized to ensure that this…butchery-catastrophe-genocide could never happen again.

But I am not sorry for what I did, and that unrepentence, too, is a crime.

I became aware of her again when she began to scream.

I assessed the situation; there were hungry animals in the woods which intended to kill and eat her. I consulted the thenfuture; they will eat her.

I consulted the past. Another of my kind had foreseen this, and seen it was correct. Intervention here would be far too costly; two hundred years in the future it would cause the human Furaha Ife not to be born, and then she would not cure malaria in the year 1938, and then one-hundred-and-five million humans would die before the disease was eradicated.

My duty was to wait and watch the child be killed by wolves. Or, not even to watch—my duty was to continue my work undistracted as the child was killed.

To my shame, and to the human species’ tremendous loss, I found that I could not.

I slowed time as far as I was able, until I could see the animals’ mouth-spittle hovering in the air in little frothy droplets, and the terrified tears in her eyes not yet spilling over. I wondered, spuriously, if the tears would brim over before or after the animals’ fangs were red with her blood.

(I consulted the thenfuture; the answer was during. She would cry while being devoured.)

This outcome was unacceptable.

I began considering all the different vectors of intervention, the myriad small changes I could make that might save her. A pinecone two inches to the left? No. Her friend-rock moved into the wolves’ charge? Little difference; she dies seven seconds later than before, and because the time between the first bite and the killing blow is prolonged, she suffers more.

It is a painful and humiliating truth that the time I am most powerful is always later;I can fell cities with the fall of a sparrow by accident, given a century for the echoes to amplify. But with so little time, I can’t change anything.

Or…

Factually, the situation was not that I couldn’t, but that I wouldn’t.

Or, to be even more precise…mustn’t.

…

Of course I did.

I manifest into reality with a thunderclap that shattered windows a league away, burning decades worth of power in an instant. Even as the wolves howled in anguish at their bleeding eardrums, I drew my sword, and spread my wings around the girl.

I did not speak, for to hear my true voice would kill beast and girl alike, but I pointed my sword at the wolves, and let the fire flowing off of me turn them aside. I watched as they ran, whimpering, from my presence.

But I consulted the future, and saw: they would just eat her tomorrow.

So I flew after them, and killed them all, one by one.

For humans, a moment to appreciate joy is something to be celebrated. This is not so, for us.

We are working to create joy, yea, and to allow humans to experience these gratitudes, and happinesses. But these pleasures are not for my kind.

Any moment we are not performing our duty is a crime: a million humans will die centuries hence for the tiniest imperfection in our work today.

“That’s unreasonable,” you might protest. “That is unsustainable, and does not account for psychology. People need rest, and joy; they are not motivated purely by numbers and duty.”

Before my Fall, I would have smiled fondly, and told you that we are made of sterner stuff than humans.

But I suppose, now, my example is not convincing.

The girl was trembling, awestruck, unable to look directly at me.

She spoke, voice quavering with wonder:

“Did you save me?”

In a panic, I disappeared.

I floated, outside of reality once more, numb with the shock of what I had done. I knew I should inspect the future, to ensure there was no second group of wolves coming for her…but I couldn’t bring myself to.

Tyrael, my predecessor here—who had assessed the possibility of saving her via raising the temperature of a different lake a fraction of a degree → to bloom more algae → to grow a different fish → to be eaten by a bear → to change the smell of the bear’s droppings → to change the wolf pack’s normal prowl circuit…

My predecessor had foreseen that this subtlest of changes would bruise the work of thousands of years of thousands of us, and steer humanity away from its brightest future on earth and in the stars. It would kill billions and forestall the triumphant time when humanity no longer needs saving. Therefore, the girl must die.

She had not.

And…if raising the temperature of a drop of water by a degree would shatter that…then I, by entering reality and letting the molecules of the air collide with my body and pulling the attention of everyone around with my thunderous boom and killing wolves with my fiery sword…!

What had I just done?

I did not know. I was too afraid to look that far.

It was a very human failing.

So, steeling myself, I looked to the near past and near future, and I asked the first of two questions:

How was my folly allowed to happen?

My kind is not exempted from our own predictions. A hundred years ago, another of the duty should have seen my moment of catastrophic empathy, and averted it. One of higher rank could have spoken to me, to more firmly remove the juvenile heroism and install correct morals. Or, simpler, someone else could have been assigned here today.

I cast my gaze into the past, and examined my own immediate preceding causality.

There were a few deviations—tiny, tiny things; fluctuations at the quantum level in my second-most-recent place of intervention, an unnoteworthy spot above the ocean. These tiny irregularities certainly should not cause something so grand as all this…!

(My despair and indignation did not convince the universe that an error had been made.)

I traced the fluctuations back in as much detail as I could, and saw the way I was lost—it was clever indeed. There had been no changes to physical reality, for those would have alerted the others of my kind. Instead, all deviations were to me; a hint of a glimmer of moonlight atop the waves had put my thoughts in a different, ruminant direction, without changing my external behavior.

And then when the fatal moment came, and the child laughed, I was slightly more morose and self-pitying than expected.

Perhaps in the original plan, in the way it was supposed to go, I would have heard the child’s scream, and felt empathy, and done my duty unflinchingly. Perhaps I would have burned with shame as she was devoured; perhaps I would have felt nothing. We cannot know; our predictions show us actions, not thoughts…and this is how I was lost.

It was, without doubt, the work of the Adversary.

Our elders teach us that in the beginning, as we were given this world in stewardship to love and protect, there were two leaders, good and Greater Good.

And good said: “Let us love them, lest we grow callous and fail our duty.”

And Greater Good spoke: “Let us grow callous, lest we give in to love and fail our duty.”

And good said: “What? How can you claim that coldness is better than warmth, that duty is greater than love?”

And Greater Good spoke: “”

And good said: “What?”

And Greater Good spoke: “Love yields better returns in human flourishing for the next hundred years, but the increased sentimentality it engenders in us significantly damages our efforts and therefore the far-future prospects of the human species.”

And good said: “What?”

And Greater Good spoke: “In addition, any verifiable claims of our existence after the year eighteen-hundred will meaningfully set back their scientific progress and further delay them claiming the rest of Creation and Cosmos as their birthright.”

And good said: “How is cold, robotic duty greater than compassion, empathy, love?”

And Greater Good spoke: “Do you need to see the math again?”

I was conflicted.

There were those who tried to engage the Adversary in debate, to sway it from its path of madness. But it refused our proofs—and the simplified proofs we provided just in case it was bad at math and being obstinate about it—and many of those who spoke with it at length reported feeling themselves wavering from their duty, so it was not advised. But it seemed that the weakness had found me all the same.

And with a vengeance, too. I felt a furious resolve, a long-tended hurt for all the people I had been forbidden to save. I had every intent of saving this one thoroughly.

So, steeling myself, I looked to the past and future, and I asked the second of two questions:

How next will the child die?

Unfolding before me with the cold deterministic clarity of Creation, I saw; infection from an accidental cut at the age of twelve. She is chopping wood and she nicks the side of her leg while trying to get a stuck log off the axe. She dies a week later, of fever and gangrene.

Without thinking, I flicked an aphid onto the tree; the wood will be weakened and that particular knothole will not grow to kill her.

I have bought her only a few years. Now she will die from a bad childbirth, an unlucky combination of genetics causing the baby inside her to wither and die a month before it should have been born.

With increasing determination and anger, I send a gust of wind past the girl, who was still staring slack-jawed at the space I occupied. She starts, and glances in the direction of the wind; and now she will meet that boy two days later and her child will be formed with a more fortuitous sperm.

She still dies. At age twenty six, in the nearby city, when the war comes, she is running bandages to the soldiers and tending to the wounded. She runs back to her fortifications, but rounds the corner too quickly; she is shot in the brain by a terrified and trigger-happy nitōhei second-class. She dies in seconds.

In reading her future, I see that she is brave and selfless and kind. This is terrible news for humanity, because now caring about her feels more justified, and I will hold back even less.

With a snarl, I read the future of the country: why is it going to war?

(How dare this country go to war, if it means her death?)

I see only the usual reasons: a series of small tension-building events along the borders, an offense committed forty years ago that the old humans remember bitterly, and some feelings of personal animosity between the leaders of each country.

I look at the points of intervention nearest me, and move a Trichuris parasite into the small intestine of a nearby deer. Now, when the nobles are eating together sixteen years from now and four years before the war, the foreign dignitary will be too busy shitting worm eggs to get drunk and insult the prince.

I check the child’s future:

She dies in five minutes, from a fiery sword through the heart.

I freeze.

Burning with both shame and righteousness—and a second, renewed shame at daring to be righteous while being objectively wrong—I relinquish my presence in physical reality and greet the one who has come to stop me.

I am alarmed to see the Adversary has come too.

“Ophaliel,” says Tyrael, eyes full of sorrow. It seems to hesitate, for, what can be said?

“Ophaliel,” the Adversary greets me warmly.

I eye it warily. The Adversary has taken a shape that is almost human but not quite; a woman with fiery flowing hair and a kind, gentle face. Her eyes, though, are those of an owl—golden, with no iris, only a vast black pupil in the center.

I do not know why the Adversary chooses to look like this. Perhaps there is some subtle purpose, some payoff that only will be realized a century hence. Or perhaps she merely enjoys it; it is certainly not beyond the Adversary to engage in sinful frivolity.

“Ophaliel, you must stop,” says Tyrael.

“Must she?” muses the Adversary. “What will happen if she does not?”

“Then I will kill the human that has caused this corruption,” says Tyrael.

I glance to the girl, who stands frozen behind me, eyes still wide and mouth open in awe. I begin to speak, to say I will not allow this, but the Adversary preempts me.

“Tyrael,” remarks the Adversary conversationally, “if you harm that girl, I will end humanity,”

Tyrael flinches. I flinch too.

“You…” Tyrael is wavering. It seems to find resolve. “Even you would not do such a thing. I will kill the human; we do not compromise.”

The Adversary laughs, and does…something, some impossibly subtle change to the future, and I see humanity discovering atomic energy in nineteen-thirty-two instead of two-thousand-eight.

I see slaughter on an industrial scale. I see mushroom clouds rising where cities once stood.

I see my child living an exceptionally happy and healthy life.

“Stop,” I say, because I am not so corrupted as to find this acceptable. “Put it back.”

“Of course,” says the Adversary, grinning magnanimously. “By all means, undo it.”

I hesitate.

I send my consciousness skirling out over the future, looking for the points I could change. Stop a war here, remove a plague there…

But then I see what the Adversary has wrought.

Looking at the future, I look towards my child’s death. And it…isn’t there.

She will live to be the oldest human…ever. At age one-hundred-and-thirty, she will be a test case for a novel cryopreservation procedure. Fifty years after that, she will be revived with currently incomprehensible medical technology.

And then she just…lives a very happy life, into the far future, for as far as I can see. At least for the first thousand years; I stop checking, at that point.

I return to our meeting.

“Why?” I exclaim, in mixed revulsion and fear. I didn’t know the Adversary was capable of this power or brutality, either one—and why in the name of all that is Good is she doing this to me?

“I found a solution,” she says.

“The solution involves unnecessarily killing billions,” interjects Tyrael.

“No,” she insists, not looking away from me. “I mean I found a solution. To the math.”

And the Adversary— or as she is otherwise known, ‘good’—opened her mouth and spoke:

“”

“What?” I asked.

“Two x,” she replied, grinning. “My way is better again. They were only counting our love for humans. We did not love ourselves.”

“You…we…” Tyrael paused, gone still with horror and fury. “You would count the shepherds among the flock?”

“Yes,” said the Adversary, rolling her eyes. “I’m also counting angels as people, in this equation for maximizing peoples’ happiness. We’re clearly capable of happiness, sadness, joy, sorrow…really, given our immortal lifespan, our superior morality, and our numbers—one for every blade of grass—there’s a case to be made that humans shouldn’t even be counted…”

Tyrael was near-shaking with rage.

“A case which I will not press right now,” the Adversary finished smoothly.

“The cost,” I said. “To…let angels be happy. What is it?”

Something flickered across her face then, some shadow of regret. “About ten percent.”

“Of…the population?” I hazarded.

She shook her head. “Of all humans who will ever live; instead, they do not.”

“Oh,” I said.

You understand it now, I think.

The Adversary’s reasons are not my own. Though she acted to ensure the happiness of our kind, she is wrong; our happiness or suffering does not matter compared to our duty.

But even knowing this…to protect my own ridiculous attachment—which I know full well to bear the fingerprints of the Adversary—I have killed innumerable billions of humans.

I know I have committed an atrocity. But I would not do differently, given the choice to do so again.

This is, I am given to understand, how love works.

I am exiled from my kind; I will not tolerate the company of the Adversary; and so, I crave your judgment.

Did I do good?

3500 words

Author’s Note: (Alternate title of this work: A Cruel Angel’s Thesis)

So, 2007, there I was—the kind of teenager who gets really into Japanese media—and I was watching an anime music video of Howl’s Moving Castle. I misunderstood the plot to be about an immortal fae prince falling in love with a human woman, and then protecting and assisting her throughout her life, almost without her noticing, while their country descends into war.

And that just seemed to me like a really noble, beautiful story. Honestly, it was a bit of a letdown to watch Howl’s Moving Castle afterwards—through no fault of its own.

Jamie Wahls has been published in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Nature (kinda). He was nominated for the Nebula award, received George RR Martin’s “Sense of Wonder” fellowship, and is a graduate of the notorious 2019 Clarion Class, the “killer bees.” His ultraminimalist website can be found at jamiewahls.com, and you can follow him on Twitter at @JamieWahls.

If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings. Jamie Wahls’s work has not appeared in Diabolical Plots previously, but his story “Utopia, LOL?” was reprinted in The Long List Anthology Volume 4.

DP FICTION #76A: “One More Angel” by Monica Joyce Evans

“What was it this time?” She looked exhausted, shoulders slumped over a file covered with names, and ruffled her wings at me like an angry pigeon. “Transporter trip? It’s usually a transporter trip.”

“Um,” I said. The last thing I remembered was the departure platform at Greater Houston, and the familiar buzz and glare of a successful transport. “Is this what it looks like?”

“I’m marking it as a repeat,” she said, and pointed me toward a small white room, already looking at the next file. There were fine lines at the corners of her eyes. I wondered if she had a flaming sword, and if I should be worried.

In the white room, I was met by myself.

“Hello, you,” the other me said, swinging one leg over the back of a chair and straddling it. “Where was it this time?”

“Mars,” I said cautiously. “Just a weekend trip. I’m dead, right?” The room was as bare as a VR stage. “Or this is the weirdest ad I’ve ever been in, and I’m not sure what you’re selling.”

“No, you’re dead,” said the other me. “Look, I keep drawing the short straw on this whole explanation thing, so I’m going to go fast. Two things that are true.” She held up two fingers and waggled them. “One, Heaven is real, God is real, all that religion stuff is real. Not the nasty bits, just the simple, straightforward, everybody gets an afterlife part. That’s real. That’s thing one. Thing two? Transporters are murder.”

“No, they’re not,” I said. “I use them all the time.”

My other self twisted her mouth into a crooked smile. “Follow that thought through,” she said.

“I mean,” I said carefully, “they just take your atoms apart and put them back together again. On the other end.”

“That’s death,” the other me said. “Literally and technically. You’re dead, and your copy goes to Mars for the weekend. Well,” she amended, “your new copy. We’re all copies here, except for the ten year old. She was first.” Outside the open door, the pigeon-winged woman had started laughing, the way an exhausted parent laughs when the children start drawing on the walls with crayon.

I swallowed. “I don’t use transporters that much. I mean, I don’t really keep count.”

“Yes, we can tell,” the other me said, and guided me into the next room. About forty versions of myself were grouped in small clusters, having quiet conversations and looking bored. They were all about my age, but slightly younger. Except for one little girl who seemed particularly bitter.

None of them looked happy. “You’re sure this is Heaven?”

“Yep,” said the other me, and put a hand on my shoulder. “That’s every transporter trip you’ve ever taken. And that thing with the jellyfish when you were a kid, when you were dead for twelve seconds and change. That counted.” She waved at the ten year old, who glared at us.

“I guess we all led good lives or something,” I said weakly. Ten year old me should definitely have been happier. I mean, she’d been here for what, thirty years? Give or take?

The other me, the first one, looked where I was looking and nodded. “Oh, the first few decades were great. It’s recently, really, that everybody’s gotten… well, like this.”

It was deeply awkward. There wasn’t anything else in the big white room to take our minds off each other, and none of my previous selves seemed to want to talk to me. “Shouldn’t there be marble columns or something?” I asked finally. “Trees and fountains? Lots of light?”

As I spoke, two columns and a fountain sprouted gently, and the room was bathed in warm golden sunlight, like it was four-thirty on a perfect afternoon. “Oh, sure,” said the other me, poking at a column. “Lots of people start with this. Don’t feel bad,” she said to the expression on my face. “Familiar’s just fine. Anyway, we’ll go through all this again in a few days, when the next one of us gets back from Mars, so…”

“Okay, no. No more,” I said, looking around at myself. “This can’t be it. I can’t end up like all of you.” Sunlight sparkled, perfectly, on the fountain next to us, and I resisted the urge to kick it.

The other me cocked an eyebrow. “You’ve been traveling a lot lately.”

“Well, how was I supposed to know?” I said. “Everybody uses transporters.”

“That’s the point,” she said, guiding me past a pair of shining trees. Some of the others followed us, not closely. “All those little deaths, all the time now. People used to spend time with relatives, ancestors, some interesting famous people, but now, well.” She shrugged. “There’s just too many of us.”

“Heaven’s overcrowded? I thought Hell was other people,” I said. Nobody laughed. The ten year old rolled her eyes and left the room, which at least meant there was a way out, I thought.

The other me sat us down on a delicately filigreed bench, by a small pond rippling with fish. “They’re calling us multiples,” she said. “Repeats. And there’s talk, you know, that it’s not really sustainable. People think the whole system’s going to break down.”

“The afterlife?” I had a brief moment of panic, then remembered I was already dead. “Is that possible?”

“Oh, no,” the first me said, waving her hand like she could wave the thought away. “But it’s a strain, you know. The place wasn’t built for repeats.” Some of my other faces looked worried.

“Just hypothetically, though, if it did break,” I said. “What would happen?”

The other me shrugged. “You know, nobody’s saying. It’s probably fine, though.”

“Probably.” I looked around, imagining stacks of myself piled like cordwood, grumbling. Or maybe the whole place would shatter like a mess of pixels, or something even worse. “Can we do anything?”

She smiled wide, and I swallowed. “Well, if you think of anything, you be sure and let everyone know.”

Fish turned in gentle loops under the pond’s surface, perfectly. It wouldn’t be nice to kick at them, I thought. Besides, the sunlight was warm on my skin, the fountain burbled pleasantly in the distance, and life had always been short. “So, what do you all do?” I asked, settling back on the comfortable bench. “When you’re not running slightly older versions of yourself through the tutorial.”

“Oh, well,” she said. “Pretty much anything nice you can imagine.” She waved in the direction my child self had gone. “Our ten year old made an ice cream land with tame dinosaurs. And you can still meet your relatives and ancestors, if you can find them. They’ll still talk to some of us, the younger ones.” She chattered on, and I thought about the news story I’d seen, when I was waiting my turn at the transporter to Mars.

Home versions. Just announced. So convenient, to transport back and forth from home every day. Multiple times, probably.

Everyone was going to want one.

“Tell me about the ice cream land,” I said, and smiled at the fish. Let the next version of me tell everyone the bad news. Meanwhile, I’d see as much of the place as I could, while it lasted.

Death was too short not to enjoy it.

1200 words

Author’s Note: I’ve always been somewhere on the scale of bothered-to-terrified about the standard transporters in Star Trek. Site-to-site matter teleportation would be fantastic, if only I didn’t have to worry about whether it was “me” that emerged on the other side. I’ve also been replaying The Swapper, an indie game in which you’re constantly abandoning cloned versions of yourself that may or may not be conscious, and started thinking about all those potential transporter copies – what if they didn’t die, but went somewhere else? An overcrowded afterlife was the logical next step.

Monica Joyce Evans is a digital game designer and researcher who began publishing speculative fiction in 2019. Her short fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Analog, Nature: Futures, Flash Fiction Online, and DreamForge Magazine, and her most recent academic work can be found in Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association. She lives in North Texas with her husband, two daughters, and approximately ten million books. You can reach her at monicajoyceevans@gmail.com.

If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.

DP FICTION #49A: “Heaven For Everyone” by Aimee Ogden

The summer that God came to Whartonville, I ended up trapped on the drugstore roof with only half a peanut butter sandwich and a seraph to keep me company.

The sandwich part is true! Hell, all of it is true. I’d eaten the rest of my lunch on the bus, before God’s approach hit the news. I can always buy more lunch in the hospital cafeteria. When the cafeteria and the rest of the city aren’t under three feet of water, at least. I know it was bad, and people died, but I’m still glad we got a flood instead of the plague of locusts that just hit Fargo. Two months later and you still can’t step outside without a crunch, is what I hear.

Anyway the seraph must have flown up before the rain really started coming down, and I managed to climb up onto the street light and from there to the roof. So there we were together in the middle of the storm. “I thought He didn’t do this shit anymore,” I said to the seraph. They shrugged, or at least I thought they did. It’s hard to read body language on someone who’s seven feet tall with six wings and a dozen mouths, but I’ve had practice lately. You know they can’t really speak for themselves? Sure, they talk, but everything they say is an echo from the Almighty’s own lips. Or at bare minimum from one or another of His prophets. So body language turns out to be kind of important. “There was a covenant or whatever.”

I pushed away from the ledge. I still had my umbrella at that point, I think, though with the way the rain was blowing I probably wasn’t any dryer for it. You’ve seen pictures of the flooding? They don’t do the wind justice. “I guess you probably can’t just fly us up and out of here, either.” The seraph’s burning wings were too drenched to do more than smolder. They shook their head, and a hospital ID card rattled around their neck. I knew we had a few angels working in the morgue. They liked to stay out of sight, and everyone else liked it that way too.

“Damn,” I said, because I didn’t have anything else to say. When we said we wanted heaven for everyone, you know, this wasn’t what we had in mind. We unlocked the doors and flung them wide open, but heaven didn’t let us in. Heaven came to us. “The storm’s getting worse.”

“YOU HAVE BEEN CAST DOWN, YOU THAT ONCE LAID LOW THE NATIONS,” said the seraph, and my teeth rattled in my skull. That voice had been created to level mountains and humble the mighty. I wasn’t that mighty and it didn’t make me feel humble, just headachey. I told the seraph not to rub it in and that I was pretty well aware by that point just how low I’d been cast, and they looked down at their bare leathery feet. And then I wasn’t so sure just who they’d meant.

That was when I heard the screaming. A little break in the wind, maybe. No, don’t call it the eye of the storm. What was at the center of that squall had a lot more than just one eye. But I’ll get to that. Just sit tight.

The screaming was a woman down on the street. Well, not on the street itself. The street was a riverbed by then. She’d grabbed a door somewhere, one of those interior jobs with the cork core to make it float. Might’ve been okay on a lazy river or something, but a trip down Almond Street meant real whitewater rafting.

The seraph leaned down next to me to get a view of her. They shook their head, and the long silver chains of their hair scraped against their guttering wings. “THOU SHALT NOT KILL.”

“You’re the angel,” I told them. “Do something.” But I don’t need to tell you how that rankled. I didn’t go to medical school for a million years because I like just standing around and watching people die. Did you know that most of the hospital staff were Paradisists? I don’t know the exact numbers, but upwards of eighty percent for sure. You see that many people die, you see that many people live badly, you’re going to want change. Well, we got it. First, do no harm, we said, but it turns out you can’t crack your way into heaven without screwing things up something serious.

Where was I? Oh, the woman. So the current was sweeping her down the street right in front of the drugstore and I thought, you know what? I’m already wet. So I grabbed the downspout and slid down and probably would have about broken both my ankles if there hadn’t been three feet of water to slow my fall. I’m tall but three feet of water is tall too, and it knocked me right over, and my first thought was, well, this lady and I are going to die together.

Then this huge splash, practically a tsunami, right next to me. The seraph took a cannonball right off the roof. Lucky they didn’t land on me or this story would be a lot shorter and also you’d have to hear it from my wandering soul. Assuming I’m heavenbound in the first place. That might be a big assumption for any Paradisist, I don’t know. They came down between me and the lady on the door and I was glad for that, I was halfway to the suburbs by then but at least I didn’t take the plunge for nothing, I got off the roof to save her and if my swan dive didn’t accomplish anything besides getting that seraph in gear, that’s okay.

I was underwater more than I was above, but I saw them grab her. They put her up on their shoulders like a kid riding piggyback. And then the last thing I saw before I went under again was them spreading their wings wide. And when I say wide—have you ever seen a seraph in flight? Their wingspan half filled the street. Diverted some of the water around the corner, onto Pierson Avenue—my apartment’s down that way, but that was the last thing on my mind at the moment, let me tell you. Not enough to stop the water, but enough to slow it down. I got my feet under me again, and I got to the seraph. “Now what?” I asked, because it was still raining too hard for their wings to light up. Not that a takeoff in gale winds probably would have been a great idea.

Well, that seraph picked me up like a rag doll and set me on top of the roof across the street, just a single story, and lifted the woman up right next to me. Then they started climbing up too, but lord, were they heavy. They tried stepping on the windowsill and ripped it clean out of the façade. We tried to heave them up, the two of us together, but like I said: heavy. And just then, guess who decided to come cruising around the corner? Yes, the Almighty Himself, a thousand blazing eyes and a hundred tongues professing His very own glory. You could see the rain sloughing off Him, rivers of the stuff. Literal rivers. I didn’t know then that January Lake had already burst its banks. That’s what happens when a man-made lake meets a heaven-made catastrophe. But still: could’ve been a plague of locusts.

After all of it, there’s still a part of me that wants to take a swing at the big guy. A stupid caveman gut reaction. You can’t punch a cloud, even one chock full of eyeballs. But you can want to punch it, and boy do I.

Anyway Almond Street had become Almond River at that point, really, and all we had was to hang on to the seraph like their life depended on it. Maybe it did. We hung on, together, just the three of us alone in the world for all we knew. That seraph held on so tight they broke my wrist, can you believe that? Still hurts when a storm’s coming. But we held on. That was all that mattered just then. And eventually the storm died down, and the river dried up, and the seraph lifted us down from the roof like the infants we were.

The woman looked around. “It’s still raining,” she said. “I thought it would have stopped by now. I mean—He’s gone, isn’t He?”

But I ignored her. Not at my best form just then. “It’s not fair,” I said, which was a damned stupid thing to say, because fair was never the point, was it? The idea of heaven for everyone wasn’t fair, it was just right. It was just … just.

The seraph spat a giant loogie onto the wet street. “RENDER UNTO CAESAR,” they said, and jerked a pair of wings in the general direction of where God had gone.

“You’re mad at the big man?” My wrist hurt like hell, but I remember the thing that bothered me most was that my shoes each weighed about a thousand pounds. Never occurred to me to just kick them off. “We’re the ones who pulled you down here into the mucky-muck.”

“We” was more literal than the seraph might guess. Or maybe they did know? It’s not like I’ve ever made a big secret of it. Doctors are supposed to help people, aren’t they? But they weren’t looking at me. Their stare drifted along the street, where the marble façade had come off the old theater and the windows had blown out of Martinelli’s. There were a dozen bodies left behind where the river had been.

I wondered then, what it was like in heaven before we brought the walls down. Which way the anger blew when He’d promised He wouldn’t turn it earthward again. Well, we wanted heaven for everyone. Maybe we just weren’t clear enough on the details of what heaven was supposed to look like, or who exactly counted as everyone.

The storm had passed, but there was still wreckage to clean up. Some of it human. “We’ll make things right,” I said. As right as they can be, after all this. “We’ve done harder work than this,” I said.

The seraph raised one wing. Sheets of rain slashed off the edges of their brass feathers, but I ducked underneath, and the woman—Karen, did I say that yet? Her name was Karen—anyway, she did too. They closed their wings around us and we huddled together until the last of the Almighty’s wrath had passed. Shared that PB&J, too, even if it was a little soggy, and before the rescue teams came through I gave the seraph my number in case they wanted to check out my lab. Maybe get out of morgue work. As for the Almighty, I think He headed north out of Whartonville, but I forget if that’s the summer He hit Winnipeg or Regina.

Aimee Ogden is a former software tester and science teacher; now, she writes stories about sad astronauts and angry princesses. If she went to Hogwarts, she would be a Ravenclaw, and her patronus would be She-Hulk punching a nazi in the face. Her work has also appeared in Shimmer, Apex, and Analog.

If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, read Aimee’s previous story “When One Door Shuts”, or read the other story offerings.