“Are you . . . ?”
“Yep.”
“All five of you are?”
“Yep.”
“Mr. Muninn, too?”
“I think we established that when we established that he’s one of us five brothers.”
My head is going funny again. My stomach twists. I’m swamped by a fascination and anger that I’ve been carrying around a lot longer than the eleven years I spent Downtown.
“Muninn lied to me. I thought he was one of the few people I could trust.”
“Calm down. He didn’t lie to you. He just didn’t come up and say, ‘Hi, kid. I’m God. How’s tricks?’ Would you have believed him? I wouldn’t, and I’d know he was telling the truth.”
“At least I can call him Muninn. What am I supposed to call you? Santa Elvis?”
“How about Neshamah? That’s one I think you can pronounce without breaking your jaw.
“What are you doing down here?”
He holds out his hands.
“Surveying my handiwork.”
I lean on the wall with him and look out over the city. Something explodes a few blocks north. A fire starts in a building down the block. I guess the Kissi with the matches got his wish.
“If this was my Erector Set, I’d return it and get my money back,” I say.
Neshamah shakes his head and shrugs.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this, you know. Eleusis was a beautiful place once. The whole universe was. We . . . well, it was still I back then . . . were building perfection, but it went wrong.”
"0"r="#000“Did you invent understatement back then or did you come up with it later?”
“At least we, I, dreamed big. What do you dream about?”
“You know exactly what I dream about. It’s why I’m here.”
“A dunce on a white horse tilting at windmills. Very original. You know what my brothers and I did? We invented light. And atoms. And air.”
“If you get the credit for light, you deserve the credit for skin cancer, too, so another bang-up job on that one.”
He puts his head in his hands in an exaggerated gesture.
“Cancer. Damn, you people are a mess.”
“You made us, so what does that make you?”
He watches smoke rising from the nearby fire as it drifts up to meet the burning cloud of the sky.
“We were so sure we got you right the first time. Then there was the whole Eden debacle and it was all downhill from there. But don’t worry, the new ones are a lot better.”
“You’re done with us and on to Humanity 2.0?”
“Oh, we’re way beyond 2.0. The new ones are nearly perfect. Nearly angels. You’d hate them.”