Fallen Brew
1992
I was off doing reconnaissance in a remote sector of the universe when the goat guy flew by. I suppose "remote" isn't exactly meaningful when you can be anywhere you want just by thinking about it, but this place was way north of West Bumfuck, so I was naturally kind of mystified when I heard someone shout "Hey, you!".
I looked around and saw an odd-looking being with the torso of a human and the bottom part of a goat, nether-regions and all, floating there in hard vacuum with me. I raised my eyebrows and pointed at myself. "Me?"
"Yeah, you," he said. "Who else do you think I'd mean?"
I shrugged in return. It seemed as likely he'd be talking to a nearby planetoid as to me.
"Want some beer?" he asked me.
"Huh?" I was confused. I didn't know yet what "beer" was. Remember, this was a long time ago. A long time. The goat-man held up a box with six bottles in it. "Is that 'beer'?" I asked.
"Yeah, this is a six-pack. You don't know what beer is?" he leered.
I shrugged again, ruffling my feathers. "C'mon, what do I look like, anyway?"
He handed me the six-pack and I accepted it, letting it dangle aimlessly at my side.
"You drink it," he smiled at me, encouragingly, and flew off.
Right, I thought. Sure. I had some rounds to do, checking up on the garden planet He had planted recently, and looking up some of His more recent attempts at genetic engineering, so I headed off that way.
The planet was a beautiful place, full of plants and animals, and our first two humanoids -- you know, two arms, two legs, two eyes, one nose, one mouth. These were the pre-nipple models; nipples would wait till He got around to sexual reproduction. Despite the inability to reproduce, they certainly frolicked (in a nipple-less manner, of course), and I settled into a treetop and watched them while they ran about, tossing one another down on the ground and generally having their way with one another and the world around them. Some things never change, some do.
I removed a bottle from the box. Nice contours, brown glass, smooth and cool to the touch. Though glass is a fluid, I took it that the goat-man didn't mean for me to try to drink the bottle, so I tried to observe its contents. It was capped by a scrap of metal, and had a rich brownish liquid within. I thought the cap away and sniffed carefully the aroma of the "beer". Mmmm. Rich, yeasty smell, a touch of something a bit sharp. I tasted it. I tasted it some more. I kicked back on a branch and enjoyed the afternoon sun, the breeze, the warm air, and before I knew it, the bottle was empty, so I emptied another. And another.
Somewhere during the third "beer," I let loose a monumental burp, a burp unlike any other ever heard in the universe, yea, the primordial burp, the first burp, the burp to begin and end all other burps. I covered my mouth hastily, but too late -- I'd attracted the attention of the two humanoids. I thought about flying off, not thinking about them seeing me - they're not supposed to see angels - and started to stand. They were frolicking their way up the tree when I slipped and sat down hard, knocking an apple off its stem and right into the female's head.
"Ouch!" she cried as she lost her grip and she and the male fell to the ground and sat in a heap. I saw her pick up the apple and point to her mate and say something about them falling at equal rates, despite their difference in mass. That must've been when I passed out.
I don't think they found me, they were too excited by the apple to climb the tree again, and I woke much later in a sweat -- night had gone by and I was going to be late for morning star duty. I buzzed out to my position in the sky, better late than never, and made sure the correct star was lit properly.
I took a break after that, my head was pounding, and though His wisdom be infinite, He hadn't gotten around to creating aspirin yet. I settled down by a quiet brook when suddenly I caught the unmistakable odor of toe jam, and turned around to see the Supreme Deity standing next to me, all hundred or so feet of Him, with one rather large Foot in particular intruding on my personal space.
"Ah," He mumbled, "Lucifer, um..."
The Lord towered over me, odorous Feet bare, blue robes unwashed, Hair and Beard unkempt and untamed, and stared off into space (quite literally) while trying to complete His sentence. I was sure that He was going to chastise me for the humanoids' discovery, or for being late for morning star duty.
"Um, could I have a beer?" He asked.
I decided to pretend that I didn't hear Him. Maybe He'd go away. I only had three left. I started telling him about a colony of slime-molds a galaxy or two away, trying to distract Him. He was having none of it.
"Um," He shuffled and kicked me with His left big Toe. "Can I have a brew?"
He stared down at me now, and I knew that any minute clouds were going to form around His Forehead and lightening bolts wouldn't be far off. I sighed and passed up my fourth bottle.
"Ah," He breathed contentedly as He pried off the top with His greasy Fingernails, "thanks."
It was gone in an instant, and He was shuffling around again, getting ready to ask for another.
The He distinctly said: "Oh My," made a loud POP noise and disappeared rather hastily. The empty bottle tumbled to the ground, where I picked it up and sniffed it. Smelled like "beer" to me. I wondered why he'd taken off.
I returned to my rounds and forgot about the "beer" for a while. Things were going rather more smoothly than usual when I started hearing reports from some of the other angels about problems, disturbing problems in the substrate, the foundation of reality; quantum threads that tied everything together were unraveling, fraying around the edges.
After the drinking incident, He remained missing.
I took a crack team of analyst angels to the site and they looked at some traces there and determined that He had not simply disappeared; He had downright disintegrated, falling to the ground like cosmic dandruff.
Personal hygiene was never His strong point.
The task fell to me, as His effective second-in-command, to hold things together. Working with Gabriel, Uriel, Michael and the others, I dispatched squadrons of angels to repair the decaying outer fringes of reality. Gabriel was concerned at first that the Customers weren't getting Their money's worth, and They might ask for a refund. We held things together well enough that we didn't lose many, and a lot of Them were very amused by what happened to Him, anyway.
After a few millennia, I learned that not all angels were as unimaginative as I'd thought. Most were -- they couldn't figure their way out of a pinhead, let alone come up with clever ideas about how to stop protons from decaying. A few, however, were a bit too clever for their own good, and went about burning bushes and performing all manner of ersatz miracles, sometimes in His Name, sometimes mistaken for some other godling. Several angels demonstrated a definite perverse desire for humanoid women and procreation. Throughout all, the Creator remained missing.
During this time, I settled into the responsibilities of the Supreme Deity, and they really weren't all that strenuous. Like many CEO's, He was overpaid and underworked. Mostly organizational work, directing the angelic corps hither and yon, making sure the Customers were kept happy. One other duty I took upon myself -- tracking down that goat being who had given me the "beer" in the first place.
He found me before I found him. I had just finished supervising the repair of some causality loops when I heard somebody yell "Hey, you!". I looked around for the source of the page. "Yeah, you with the wings!"
I rolled my eyes and flew over to him. "I have a few questions for you, uh..." I started saying, realizing I didn't know his name.
"Pan," he said. "You can call me Pan. That was some trick we pulled on Him, wasn't it?"
"What was in those bottles? It certainly wasn't beer; beer doesn't make Supreme Deities disappear," I asked him.
"Ah, the mystery ingredient. That was real beer all right, but it had the mystery ingredient in it."
"Mystery ingredient. Right." I was becoming impatient. My brow clouded (a good trick that came with the job).
"Mystery ingredient," he hurried, a bit nervously. "Lose a Supreme Deity fluid. Only affects Supreme Deities. Disintegrates them. That's why it didn't affect you when you drank it --"
"What do you mean it 'didn't affect me'; I got tipsy and passed out!" I said angrily. "I helped the humanoids discover gravity millennia earlier than they should have!"
"That was alcohol, not the fluid," Pan answered. "But I shouldn't drink any beer with it in it now that you're running the show."
He winked and disappeared, leaving behind a distinctly goat-like odor.
I had a headache. It wasn't the primordial headache, the singular headache, the headache to begin and end all headaches, the headache of the Lord as He sneezed out the universe (a nasty rumor, that, anyway). It was, however, an Excedrin headache well before we'd created Excedrin. I returned to headquarters in the center of the universe.
Headquarters wasn't what it used to be. Once it was a gleaming silver city, full of gleaming silver angels. Like all things, it was a bit tarnished now. It looked more like guerrilla headquarters for reality terrorists. Phones ringing constantly. Messages moving through its switching substrate. Quantum devices and memetic tools hanging on the walls. Errant angels in the lock-up, some wandering the halls.
One errant angel in particular stopped me, annoyed me, got in my way. He called himself Jesus and claimed to be His only son. The Creator did a lot of things, but He never got (or beget) in some human woman's pants. Or fig leaf. Or dress. Or whatever. Jesus was being particularly obnoxious this time, however, insisting that he be taken where his Father was, wanting to see the books, pestering me to no end.
We sat down in my office and I tried to calm him down, remind him of his proper station and get him off my back. It didn't work. He launched into a tirade about how if his Father was gone then he was now running the show, he was now the Supreme Deity. I have to admit, I liked the fringe benefits, I enjoyed the station, I didn't particularly want to give it up. I didn't think this Jesus fellow had much of a case, anyway. But when he stopped babbling for a moment, and asked me: "Um, could I have a beer?"
Maybe there was a bit of the old Creator in him after all. If you could only have seen me, if we only had some sort of recording device, if you'd only seen the gleam in my eye, the self-restraint I exerted, when I smiled and pointed at the box and remaining bottles and said: "Help yourself."
copyright 1992 by John Romkey
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
Last modified: Thu Oct 19 12:01:29 EDT 2006
