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“Why Swindon anyway?” asked Friday. “In the National Sinful City Stakes, Swindon sits only fifty-seventh.”
“The cleansings aren’t always just about sin,” said Joffy quietly. “Sometimes they’re about unimaginative architecture, poor restaurants or even an overly aggressive parking-fine regime. This time it’s none of those. I think He aims to hit Swindon because He knows it’s my hometown and wants to make a point.”
“What sort of point?”
“I’m not sure. It’s all very mysterious.”
Joffy was my eldest and only surviving brother, and he was supreme head of the Church of the Global Standard Deity, a sort of homogeny of faiths that hoped to bring peace and prosperity, consensus, harmony, tolerance of diversity and social inclusion to all His creations. Joffy had decided many years before that the problem with religion wasn’t religion itself but its flagrant misuse as an absolutist argument against narrow tribal agendas. Joffy argued—as had many before him—that one religion would be a much better idea. But instead of going on a murderous ideological rampage to bend others to his will, he used arguments of such clarity and reasoned debate that even the most hardened nutjobs finally came over to his way of thinking. It had taken him and his network of fearless Unifiers only thirty years to accomplish, a staggering achievement that most would agree “could only possibly exist in fiction,” if they hadn’t seen it with their own eyes.
The other big plus of Global Religious Unification was for collective-bargaining powers. Before, dialogue with the Almighty was unclear and centered on unworthiness and mumbling inside large buildings, but following unification the GSD was in a strong position to ask clear and unambiguous questions of the Almighty, such as “What, precisely, is the point of all this?”
Unfortunately, this angered His Mightiness, as theological unity was emphaticallynot part of His plan, and a series of cleansings took place around the globe—mostly as a warning to His creations that messing with the Big Guy’s Ultimate and Very Important and Unknowable Plan was not going to be tolerated.
“We’re in talks with the Almighty to bring Him to the negotiating table,” said Joffy, “but we’re not prepared to talk until He agrees to stop incinerating the unrighteous in an all-consuming column of cleansing fire.”
“Maybe He doesn’t have a plan and there is no answer,” said Landen. “Perhaps that’s why He appeared to all those different religious leaders with subtly different messages—in order to divide mankind and keep us from adopting a united front to demand an answer to the question of existence.”
“Even if there is no answer to the riddle of existence and we are all random packets of replicating cell structure in a dying universe devoid of meaning,” added Miles, “we have a right to know that. Five thousand years of prayer, conflict, self-sacrifice and being tested daily must count for something.”
“I always thought His plan for mankind was ‘Let’s just muddle through and see what happens,’ ” said Friday. “And historically speaking, it’s a sound one—it’s worked on thousands of occasions.”
“There must be more to the ultimate meaning and purpose of existence than muddling through,” said Tuesday with disdain. “If that’s all it was, there’s no reason for the eternal quest for knowledge and every reason for celebrity biographies and daytime soaps.”
“So religion could trump science after all,” said Miles with a smile. “That’ll be one for the books.”
“Mind you,” added my father, “at least you forced His hand into revealing His existence.”
“Thatwas unexpected,” admitted Joff y. “A nd very welcome— the billion or so former atheists now on board really boosted the membership and bargaining powers.”
“Didn’t Dawkins shoot himself when he found out?”
“Yes,” replied Miles sadly, “a great shame. He would have been excellent GSD bishop material. Single-minded, a good orator and eyebrows that were pretty much perfect.”
“So why destroy Swindon just to annoy you?” I asked. “It doesn’t sound like a very responsible use of resources.”
“I think it’s probably more to do with setting the tone of our first meeting. We’ve been trying to get Him to the negotiating table to thrash out our grievances, and I think He just wants to show who’s boss and to set the ambience for the meeting—like when criminal overlords have their hideouts in hollowed-out volcanoes. Highly impractical and the heating bills astronomical, but good for the overall ambience.”
“And when might this meeting take place?” asked Tuesday.
“A fortnight, perhaps,” said Miles. “Winged messengers can be pretty vague.”
“Would you put in a good word for Polly?” asked my father. “Her sciatica is acting up again.”
“I’ll be honest with you,” said Joffy. “The agenda has one point two billion items on it, and it’ll be most likely lunch before we even get around to item one: ‘What, precisely, is the point of all this?’
We all thought about this for a moment.
“Tuesday,” added Joffy in a quiet voice, “just how close are we to success with the Anti-Smite Defense Shield?”
Everyone looked at Tuesday. This, we knew, was pretty much the reason Joffy and Miles were here—to see whether she could overcome the many technological hurdles in time to avert Swindon’s partial destruction.
Tuesday pulled a face. “We’re having a few . . . teething troubles,” she said, “but it’s mostly of a mathematical nature. I simply need to find the upper and lower limits of the constant Uc.”
“Is there an easier way for you to explain it?” asked Miles. “It’s kind of important. If we can’t get the defense shield up, we’re going to have to reluctantly agree to a backup plan.”
“Okay,” said Tuesday. Like many scientists, she had become obsessed with the science itself and not its intended purpose. She took a deep breath, got up and with a felt pen drew a schematic of an anti-smite tower on the wall.
“Field research has indicated that a Wrath-Inflicted Deity Groundburst is a five-or six-second burst of high-energy particles concentrated on a circular pattern with a blast radius of about half a mile. The high-energy particles arrive so fast and with such force that there is no material we know of that can withstand the bombardment. A defense shield made of tungsten, steel, concrete—useless. Which is why we must meet energy with mass.”
