Saviors 101

Prologue the Second

Prologue the Second

still 21 years (and 9 months) until Armageddon

“We need to send another Messiah,” Michelle announced to the gathered cohort of CABER.

That certainly got everyone’s attention, mostly as a roar of denial.

She’d gotten a full half-dozen to attend aside from herself. The days when CABER commanded a hundred or more deities per meeting were long past, thankfully. Those meetings had led to many arguments and little progress. Over the centuries the attendance had tapered off to what she preferred to think of as an Executive Committee.

The Buddha sat quietly, contemplating the richness and depth of the universe, or maybe he was simply smart enough to keep his mouth shut. Apollo, the Greek Sun God, and his buddy Shiva, the Hindu God of Beginning and Ending, she could always get to come by telling the other one that his pal would be there. Neither ever thought to check with each other to see if she was lying, which being the Devil of course she was, so that worked. Dionysus, the Greek God of the grape, always showed up just because he was a good sport.

She’d managed to balance these with three women, Isis, the founding Goddess of Egypt, and Parvati, Shiva’s wife. She used the friend trick with them as well. Though they’d seen right through Michelle’s lies, they showed up pretty consistently to humor her anyway. Mary Magdalene might not be a God in her own right, but she’d married the Son of God, and was a good friend who was always willing to help Michelle.

“I don’t see why we need to keep trying. They’ll figure it out on their own. Or not.” Mary Magdalene sat back in her chair and crossed her arms over the chest that had mesmerized the son of God. Her hair flowed like a fountain of gold and her blue eyes would put gem-quality stones to shame.

“Those are your husband’s words. So, he’s not coming?”

Mary scowled a moment longer and then laughed, a trickling sound that made everyone around the table smile a bit, except for Apollo and Shiva who had made being grouchy into an immortals’ Olympian contest. Michelle knew that Mary didn’t have enough anger in her entire soul to last more than a few seconds.

“You know him too well. You know what he’d say about Messiah-hood, ‘Been there. Done that.’ I get so tired of hearing that he’s ‘paid his dues.’ He tried using it to avoid doing the dishes, but I shut that down right away.”

The first Messiah. Another of Yahweh’s botched jobs. Michelle had tried to intercede, but there wasn’t much you could do with the Romans of that day.

“Okay, so that’s one of our lessons learned the hard way, Ancient Rome was not the best place to send a Messiah. What else have do we have for the post-project analysis of the first Messiah project?”

“Well, the media wasn’t quite in place for him.” Apollo the Greek Sun God glowed from his seat by the window, which happened to open onto a view of the surface of the sun.

“Something you’d know all to well.” Shiva growled, from his seat to Apollo’s left, the gold medal in the immortal grouch competition nearly in his grasp.

“Can I help it if you’re a little Indian dweeb who cut off his own son’s head?” The glittering God of gold prodded.

Just as everyone expected, that set off the Hindu God of Beginning and Ending.

“I’d been busy, how was I supposed to know that the boy sleeping in my wife’s arms was our son grown? I was only gone for, what, a decade and a bit.”

“But an elephant’s head? Did you have to replace our son’s head with that of an elephant?” Parvati, a bountifully voluptuous mortal who’d have driven Paul Rubens to his grave—actually, maybe she had—achieved her Godhood through marriage. Though Michelle doubted if Shiva had gotten the time of day, much less any s*x, since he’d beheaded their son. She sat to Apollo’s right and leaned forward to glare around him at her husband.

“We were discussing the First Messiah,” Michelle fought for control. “C’mon gang, time to bring the focus back. Anything else on the subject of sending a New Messiah?”

“Well, the media is ready now.” Apollo rapped the pommel of his flaming sword on the table. It worked to break up the scowls crossing back and forth in front of him.

He did have a point. It was more than a decade after the crux of the second millennium after all. And television and the Net did carry electronic preachers, religious jihads, Britney Spears, and innumerable tawny teenage tennis pros.

An awkward silence rattled around the table looking for somewhere to roost. Was she the only one here who thought about these things?

“Okay,” Michelle nodded a thanks to Apollo.

He glowed at the praise. One reason he was placing out of the medals in the Grumpiest God competition, he was, on occasion, a decent guy.

“In summary, the problems facing the Nazarene were manifold. He’d arrived when the Jews were oppressed perhaps a bit less than usual. When the Romans were dictators, but fairer than most who had come before and a welcome relief from the disorganization and constant city-state wars of the Greeks.

“Even the Gods were doing fairly well back then. Egypt still prayed to Isis, Amun, and Re. The Greeks had their pantheon and the Romans theirs.” Though she’d leave out that the Greek Gods were constantly bickering, but only among themselves so no one else much minded. And that the Romans, who were mostly genetic clones of the Greek and Egyptian Gods, were little better.

Yahweh, being the first monotheistic God in the whole Mediterranean, was the butt of innumerable jokes around that time, but it was all just friendly teasing and occasional pranks which he laughed off good-naturedly enough.

“So, the whole reason the First Messiah was sent—the salvation of humanity—rapidly devolved into a complex bollix of cult worship and misunderstandings. For one thing, his literal words became sacred, rather than the content. For another, having more people killed in his name that any other over the next two millennia wasn’t even close to being proper protocol.”

“The whole ‘virgin birth’ concept didn’t work out so well for anyone,” Mary noted. “Almost no one believed my mother-in-law. Then the moderns invented parthenogenesis to explain away that miracle. I think we finally proved it as a failed methodology for introducing a Messiah with Guinevere.”

The night before he was supposed to start on his Messianic mission, Guinevere’s son by virgin birth, Stephen, was beheaded by King Arthur for Stephen’s discovering the king performing a less than virtuous act with a trio of chamber maids. His beheading was the lost historical fact that had sent Guinevere into Lancelot’s arms for solace, causing the whole age of Camelot to collapse before it had a chance to really get going.

“Moving along, that brings us to the failed concept of sending a Messiah who could write their own words.”

“I thought we tried that.” Dionysus raised a waggling head from his close attention to the flagon of wine before him. Michelle never let him drink until after the meetings had collapsed. He simply couldn’t drink without singing and there was no way to run a serious meeting when his gorgeous baritone voice was rippling its way through Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs.

“There was Jeffrey,” Parvati supplied.

Jeffrey had died of writer’s cramp during the First Dark Ages because nobody was doing nothing no how in those times. Too few were educated enough to read the first-ever novels. Perhaps if he’d chosen to write in a genre other than romance. Or maybe it was just that the quill and parchment was a complete and painful failure as a mechanism for a mute to spread the words of the Gods. The worst bit, they’d accidentally dropped him off where he’d had to do it in a painfully primitive language called English. The language simply hadn’t evolved sufficiently to properly highlight the message of peace and sisterhood. It was solely suited to the blood, guts, and mead of Beowulf. Not that English was all that much better now.

“And Dante,” Shiva added, not wanting to be one-upped by his wife.

Beatrice had Virgil lead Dante down into the Inferno, but Virgil forgot to bring him back, so the whole Messiah as a third-party method was discarded after that.

“And poor Marlowe,” Michelle listed the last writer they’d sent.

Elizabethan England had been a time of immense turmoil. CABER sent a playwright and poet of unique skills in both the spoken and the written word. A Messiah who could set their own words down properly rather than the illiterate son of an illiterate carpenter made sense even if it hadn’t worked out. Faust was just the first level warm-up exercise. Who knew that he would manage to get himself stabbed to death at twenty-nine over an unpaid bar bill.

“Maybe it’s time we sent a woman again.” Isis had launched the entire Egyptian civilization from her loins, giving her a rather feminist view of all creation.

“Look at what your church did to women in the Bible back in the fourth century.” Isis warmed up to her argument, her low, sexy voice impossible to not pay attention to. “Those weaselly old men were scared to death of strong women. They dumped tens of thousands of words out of the Bible—most which would have helped Jesus—right down the holy bidet because it made the women seem too powerful. Mary, your marriage to Jesus, flushed. All of his brothers and sisters? No, that might imply she wasn’t a virgin mother, flushed. Like there’s any way Joseph could have kept his hands off your gorgeous mother-in-law once she was done birthing the Son of God.”

“A woman.” Michelle rolled the sound of it over her tongue. No one had suggested that in a long, long time. Not since Cassandra had been sent to Troy, accidentally cursed with the twin gifts of perfect prophecy and the inability to make anyone believe her. A quick glance at Apollo caused him to look away quickly and scowl at everyone. To his credit, he’d tried to remove his curse on Cassandra any number of times to no avail.

Isis nodded emphatically, her golden ankh necklace sliding up and down her deep cleavage of lush olive skin as she did so.

“A normal birth. Give her a mother, a father, and a normal birth right down to the hospital birthing room, the Mozart CD, and the epidural. You’re the Devil, you could give them a big mortgage to cheer you up.”

Michelle considered it for a long moment, but decided she wouldn’t intentionally add to the new Messiah’s burdens. Maybe she’d even set up a college fund.

The Buddha cleared his throat, and they all turned to pay attention. On the rare occasions he spoke, it was almost invariably wise, something Michelle really wished she could pull off with a little more frequency.

“We have not addressed the topic of foreknowledge. I think that one of Jesus’ greatest challenges was being born with the full knowledge of what was happening to him right down to his betrayer and the date of his death. It was a mistake for his sake, if not for history’s.” He looked around the table. “We should at least give the kid a break until her twenty-first birthday. No foreknowledge until then.”

Everyone nodded, especially the mothers.

“So it’s decided.” Michelle didn’t even bother calling for a show of hands, a method of getting meetings to agree to her own consensus that had worked very well for her over the eons.

“And,” Loki’s smooth baritone made everyone twitch and turn to the door. Except Dionysus, who continued to gaze longingly upon his wine flagon.

“Late as usual, Loki.” Michelle wasn’t the only one who disliked the Norse Demi-God of mischief and fire. No matter how smooth and handsome, he wallowed in his own agenda, and his rich baritone had led more than one of these immortals into harm’s way. People were still wondering what had happened to Wotan after Valhalla burned, but they were all afraid to ask.

He bowed deeply. His bright red Lycra bodysuit left little to the imagination, and it was all complimentary. His narrow face, neat goatee, and fashion choice had created the popular image of the Devil that Michelle had been burdened with for the last millennium or so. He insinuated himself into the room and managed to oust the Buddha from his seat between the lush Isis and the curvaceous Parvati without apparent effort or obvious intention.

“You must give her the right career for this historical moment. An unemployed carpenter was a poor choice for that time or any other.”

The two women edged as far away from his heat as they could. Parvati was forced to lean far closer to her husband Shiva than she had in centuries. But he was apparently too worried by Loki to notice. It was Loki who’d forced him to dance forever on one foot for fear of putting down the other and ending all creation. A nasty prank, with no basis in reality, but a myth that neither Shiva nor anyone else wanted to test, just in case.

“And you have a specific suggestion?”

“I do.” He was enjoying himself far too much as he leaned back and inspected the bosoms of the women on either side of him before turning his focus fully upon Michelle as if to say, “these are pretty, but you, my dear, are spectacular,” which she knew was a crock, but the heat, the sheer animal magnetism Loki radiated, was hard to ignore.

She resisted the urge to cross her arms in front of herself. Or ram a flaming trident up his backside.

CABER had been at a loss since the Marlowe disaster. Several muses had quit, Music had run off with Dance and joined a lesbian colony. Disco had been born into the resulting vacuum. The four poets had departed for sunnier shores leaving behind rap. Astronomy, Tragedy, and History still showed up on occasion, though poor Clio was on anti-depressants for the events she must record when she did.

“The Second Messiah needs but one true gift to aid her mission on Earth. You must make her a master of words, both written and spoken.”

“A novelist again?” Michelle cringed all the way down to her Birkenstocks hoping she guessed wrong.

“We must send a politician.”

Parvati fainted, Isis broke into tears, and Dionysus took a long drink straight from the flask without any singing afterward.

All Michelle could think was, “Please, God, no.”