The Day After Judgement Read online

  THE DAY AFTER JUDGEMENT

  James Blish

  www.sf-gateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain's oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language's finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Epigraph

  The Wrath-Bearing Tree

  So Above

  Come to Middle Hell

  The Harrowing of Heaven

  Website

  Also by James Blish

  Dedication

  Author Bio

  Copyright

  After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

  T. S. ELIOT

  The Wrath-Bearing Tree

  Woe, woe, woe to me inhabiters of the earth by reason of the other voices of the trumpet of the three angels, which are yet to sound!

  Revelation 8:13

  The Fall of God put Theron Ware in a peculiarly unenviable position, though he was hardly alone. After all, he had caused it – in so far as an event so gigantic could be said to have had any cause but the First. And as a black magician he knew better than to expect any gratitude from the victor.

  Nor, on the other hand, would it do him the slightest good to maintain that he had loosed the forty-eight suffragan demons upon the world only at the behest of a client. Hell was an incombustible Alexandrine library of such evasions – and besides, even had he had a perfect plea of innocence, there was no longer any such thing as justice, anywhere. The Judger was dead.

  ‘When the hell is he coming back?’ Baines, the client, demanded suddenly, irritably. ‘This waiting is worse than getting it over with.’

  Father Domenico turned from the refectory window, which was now unglazed, from the shock wave of the H-bombing of Rome. He had been looking down the cliff face, over the half-melted pensioni, shops and tenements of what had once been Positano, at the drained sea bed. When that tsunami did arrive, it was going to be a record one; it might even reach all the way up here.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re saying, Mister Baines,’ the white magician said. ‘From now on, nothing can be over with. We are on the brink of eternity.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ Baines growled.

  ‘Of course, but if I were you, I’d be grateful for the respite… It is odd that he hasn’t come back yet. Dare we hope that something has after all interfered with him? Something – or some One?’

  ‘He said God is dead.’

  ‘Yes, but he is the Father of Lies. What do you think, Doctor Ware?’

  Ware did not reply. The personage they were talking about was of course not the Father of Lies, the ultimate Satan, but the subsidiary prince who had answered Ware’s last summons PUT SATANACHIA, sometimes called Baphomet, the Sabbath Goat. As for the question, Ware simply did not know the answer; it was now sullen full morning of the day after Armageddon, and the Goat had promised to come for the four of them promptly at dawn, in ironical obedience to the letter of Ware’s loosing and sending; yet he was not here.

  Baines looked around the spent conjuring room. ‘I wonder what he did with Hess?’

  ‘Swallowed him,’ Ware said, ‘as you saw. And it served the fool right for stepping outside of his circle.’

  ‘But did he really eat him?’ Baines said. ‘Or was that, uh, just symbolical? Is Hess actually in Hell now?’

  Ware refused to be drawn into the discussion, which he recognized at once as nothing but Baines’s last little vestige of scepticism floundering about for an exit from its doom; but Father Domenico said,

  ‘The thing that called itself Screwtape let slip to Lewis that demons do eat souls. But one can hardly suppose that that is the end. I expect we will shortly know a lot more about the matter than we wish.’

  Abstractedly, he brushed from his robe a little more of the dust from his shattered crucifix. Ware watched him with ironic wonder. He really was staging a remarkable recovery; his God was dead, his Christ was exploded as a myth, his soul assuredly as damned as that of Ware or Baines – and yet he could still manage to interest himself in semi-Scholastic prattle. Well, Ware had always thought that white magic, these days as always, attracted only a low order of intellect, let alone insight.

  But where was the Goat?

  ‘I wonder where Mister Ginsberg went?’ Father Domenico said, as if in parody of Ware’s unspoken question. Again, Ware only shrugged. He had for the moment quite forgotten Baines’s male secretary; it was true that Ginsberg had shown some promise as an apprentice, but after all, he had wanted to learn the Ars Magica essentially as a means of supplying himself with mistresses, and even under normal circumstances, his recent experience with Ware’s assistant, Gretchen – who was in fact a succubus – had probably driven the desire out permanently. In any event, of what use would an apprentice be now?

  Baines looked as startled as Ware felt at the question. ‘Jack?’ he said. ‘I sent him to our rooms to pack.’

  ‘To pack?’ Ware said. ‘You had some notion that you might get away?’

  ‘I thought it highly unlikely,’ Baines said evenly, ‘but if the opportunity arose, I didn’t mean to be caught unprepared.’

  ‘Where do you think you might go where the Goat couldn’t find you?’

  No reply was necessary. Ware felt through his sandals a slow shuddering of the tiled floor. As it grew more pronounced, it was joined by a faint but deep thunder in the air.

  Father Domenico shuffled hastily back to the window, Baines close behind him. Unwillingly, Ware followed.

  On the horizon, a wall of foaming, cascading water was coming towards them with preternatural slowness, across the deserted floor of the Tyrrhenian Sea. The water had all been drained away as one consequence of the Corinth earthquake of yesterday, which itself might or might not have been demonically created; Ware was not sure that it made much difference one way or the other. In any event, the tectonic imbalance was now, inexorably, in the process of righting itself.

  The Goat remained unaccountably delayed… but the tsunami was on its way at last.

  *

  What had been Jack Ginsberg’s room in the palazzo now looked a great deal more like the cabinet of Dr Caligari. Every stone, every window frame, every angle, every wall was ou
t of true, so that there was no place to stand where he did not feel as though he had been imprisoned in a tesseract – except that even the planes of the prison were crazed with jagged cracks without any geometry whatsoever. The window panes were out, and the ceiling dripped; the floor was invisible under fallen plaster, broken glass and anonymous dirt; and in the gabinetto the toilet was pumping continuously as though trying to flush away the world. The satin-sheeted bed was sandy to the touch, and when he took his clothes out of the wardrobe, his beautiful clothes so carefully selected from Playboy, dust fumed out of them like spores from a puffball.

  There was no place to lay clothes out but on the bed, though it was only marginally less filthy than any other flat surface available He wiped down the outside of his suitcase with a handkerchief, which he then dropped out the window down the cliff, and began to stow things away, shaking them out with angry coughs as best he could.

  The routine helped, a little. It was not easy to think about any other part of this incredible impasse. It was even difficult to know whom to blame. After all, he had known about Baines’s creative impulse towards destruction for a long time and had served it; nor had he ever thought it insane. It was a common impulse: to one engineer you add one stick of dynamite, and in the name of progress he will cut a mountain in half and cover half a country with concrete, for no better real reason than that he enjoys it. Baines was only the same kind of monomaniac, writ large because he had made so much money at it; and unlike the others, he had always been honest enough to admit that he did it because he loved the noise and the ruin. More generally, top management everywhere, or at least back in the States, was filled with people who loved their business, and cared for nothing else but crossword puzzles or painting by the numbers.

  As for Ware, what had he done? He had prosecuted an art to his own destruction, which was traditionally the only sure way a life can be made into a work of art. Unlike that idiot Hess, he had known how to protect himself from the minor unpleasant consequences of his fanaticism, though he had turned out to be just as blindly suicidal in the end. Ware was still alive, and Hess was dead – unless his soul still lived in Hell – but the difference now was only one of degree, not of kind. Ware had not invited Baines’s commission; he had only hoped to use it to enlarge his own knowledge; as Hess had been using Baines; as Baines had used Hess and Ware to satisfy his business and aesthetic needs; as Ware and Baines had used Jack’s administrative talents and his delight in straight, raw sex; as Jack had tried to use them all in return.

  They had all been things, not people, to each other, which after all is the only sensible and fruitful attitude in a thing-dominated world. (Except, of course, for Father Domenico, whose desire to prevent anybody from accomplishing anything, chiefly by wringing his hands, had to be written off as the typical, incomprehensible attitude of the mystic – a howling anachronism in the modern world, and predictably ineffectual.) And in point of fact none of them – not even Father Domenico – could fairly be said to have failed. Instead, they had all been betrayed. Their plans and operations had all depended implicitly upon the existence of God – even Jack, who had entered Positano as an atheist, had been reluctantly forced to grant that – and in the final pinch, He had turned out to have been not around any more after all. If this shambles was anyone’s fault, it was His.

  He slammed down the cover of his suitcase. The noise was followed, behind him, by a fainter sound, about halfway between the clearing of a throat and the sneeze of a cat. For a moment he stood stock-still, knowing very well what that sound meant. But it was useless to ignore it, and finally he turned around.

  The girl was standing on the threshold, as before, and as before, she was somewhat different. It was one of the immemorial snares of her type; at each apparition she seemed like someone else, and yet always, at the same time, reminded him of someone – he could never think who – he had once known; she was always at once mistress, harem and stranger. Ware ironically called her Gretchen, or Greta, or Rita, and she could be compelled by the word Cazotte, but in fact she had no name, nor even any real sex. She was a demon, alternately playing succubus to Jack and incubus to some witch on the other side of the world. In theory only, the idea of such a relationship would have revolted Jack, who was fastidious, in his fashion. In actual practice, it did indeed revolt him… insufficiently.

  ‘You do not make me as welcome as before,’ she said.

  Jack did not reply. This time the apparition was blonde again, taller than he was, very slender, her hair long and falling straight down her back. She wore a black silk sari with gold edging, which left one breast bare, and gold sandals, but no jewellery. Amidst all this rubble, she looked fresh as though she had just stepped out of a tub: beautiful, magical, terrifying and irresistible.

  ‘I thought you could come only at night,’ he said at last.

  ‘Oh, those old rules are gone for ever,’ she said, and as if to prove it, stepped across the threshold without even one invitation, let alone three. ‘And you are leaving. We must celebrate the mystery once more before you go, and you must make me a last present of your seed. It is not very potent; my other client is thus far disappointed. Come, touch me, go into me. I know it is your need.’

  ‘In this mess? You must have lost your mind.’

  ‘Nay, impossible; intellect is all I am, no matter how I appear to you. Yet I am capable of monstrous favours, as you know well, and will to know again.’

  She took the suitcase, which was still unfastened, off the bed and set it flat on the floor. Though it was almost too heavy for Jack when fully loaded, handling it did not appear to cost her the slightest effort. Then, lifting one arm and with it the bare and spiky breast, she unwound the sari in a single, continuous sweeping motion, and lay down naked across the gritty bed, light glinting from dewdrops caught about her inflamed mound, a vision of pure lubricity.

  Jack ran a finger around the inside of his collar, though it was open. It was impossible not to want her, and at the same time he wanted desperately to escape – and besides, Baines was waiting, and Jack had better sense than to pursue his hobby on company time.

  ‘I should have thought you’d be off raising hell with your colleagues,‘ he said, his voice hoarse.

  The girl frowned suddenly, reminding him of that fearful moment after their first night when she had thought that he had been mocking her. Her fingernails, like independent creatures, clawed slowly at her flat abdomen.

  ‘Dost think to copulate with fallen seraphim?’ she said. ‘I am not of any of the Orders which make war; I do only what would be hateful even to the damned.’ Then, equally suddenly, the frown dissolved in a little shower of laughter. ‘And ah, besides, I raise not Hell, but the Devil, for already I have Hell in me – dost know that story of Boccaccio?’

  Jack knew it; there was no story of that kind he did not know; and his Devil was most certainly raised. While he still hesitated, there was a distant growling sound, almost inaudible but somehow also infinitely heavy. The girl turned her head towards the window, also listening; then she looked back at him, spread her thighs and held out her arms.

  ‘I think,’ she said. ‘that you had better hurry.’

  With a groan of despair, he fell to his knees and buried his face in her muff. Her smooth legs closed about his ears; but no matter how hard he pulled at her cool, pliant rump, the sound of the returning sea rose louder and louder around them both.

  So Above

  Haeresis est maxima opera maleficarum non credere.

  HEINRICH INSTITOR AND JAKOB SPRENGER: Malleus Maleficarum

  1

  The enemy, whoever he was, had obviously been long prepared to make a major attempt to reduce the Strategic Air Command’s master missile-launching control site under Denver. In the first twenty minutes of the war, he had dumped a whole stick of multiple hydrogen warheads on it. The city, of course, had been utterly vaporized, and a vast expanse of the plateau on which it had stood was now nothing but gullied, vitrified and rad
ioactive granite; but the site had been well hardened and was more than a mile beneath the original surface. Everybody in it had been knocked down and temporarily deafened, there were bruises and scrapes and one concussion, some lights had gone out and a lot of dust had been raised despite the air conditioning; in short, the damage would have been reported as ‘minimal’ had there been anybody to report it to.

  Who the enemy was occasioned some debate. General D. Willis McKnight, a Yellow Peril fan since his boyhood reading of The American Weekly in Chicago, favoured the Chinese. Of his two chief scientists, one, the Prague-born Dr Džejms Šatvje, the godfather of the selenium bomb, had been seeing Russians under his bed for almost as long.

  ‘Nu, why argue?’ said Johann Buelg. As a RAND Corporation alumnus, he found nothing unthinkable, but he did not like to waste time speculating about facts. ‘We can always ask the computer – we must have enough input already for that. Not that it matters much, since we’ve already plastered the Russians and the Chinese pretty thoroughly.’

  ‘We already know the Chinese started it,’ General McKnight said, wiping dust off his spectacles with his handkerchief. He was a small, narrow-chested Air Force Academy graduate from the class just after the cheating had been stopped, already nearly bald at forty-eight; naked, his face looked remarkably like that of a prawn. ‘They dropped a thirty-megatonner on Formosa, disguised as a test.’

  ‘It depends on what you mean by “start,”’ Buelg said. ‘That was already on Rung twenty-one; Level Four – local nuclear war. But still only Chinese against Chinese’

  ‘But we were committed to them, right?’ Šatvje said. ‘President Agnew told the UN, “I am a Formosan.”’

  ‘It doesn’t matter worth a damn,’ Buelg said, with some irritation. It was his opinion, which he did not keep particularly private, that Šatvje, whatever his eminence as a physicist, in all other matters had a goyische kopf. He had encountered better heads on egg creams in his father’s candy store. ‘The thing‘s escalated almost exponentially in the past eighteen hours or so. The question is, how far has it gone? If we’re lucky, it’s only up to Level Six, central war – maybe no farther than Rung thirty-four, constrained disarming attack.’