Free Happy Hour In Hell: Volume Two of Bobby Dollar by Tad Williams Page A

blurrier than that, less human. And the higher angels only occasionally look like they really have bodies underneath all that glow. More as if the bodies themselves are just another kind of glow. Hard to put into words, but if you were here you’d agree with me.
    “Angel Doloriel,” said Temuel. “God loves you. Are you well?”
    “Better now, yeah. But somebody did a major number on me, and it’s not going to be fun to put that body back on again.”
    “Of course.” Then the Mule went quiet for a long moment. I didn’t like the implication that it was no slam-dunk I’d be getting my body back. “We are wanted in the Hall of Judgement,” he said at last. “Come.”
    Which would have sent shivers up my spine if I’d been wearing my regular body, I can promise you. Probably would have hurt like hell with the broken ribs, too. I’d only been in the Hall of Judgement once, and generally the things that happened there fell into the category of Really Fucking Serious.
    Temuel reached out toward me and suddenly we were traveling. Or at least, we moved directly from Place A to Place B, which is how you travel through Heaven if you’re not interested in meandering around its airy, gleaming streets. The short trip didn’t give me any chance to ask questions, which may have been what the Mule wanted. He certainly didn’t seem very happy, so I wasn’t feeling that way either.
    The Hall of Judgement is about ninety times as awesome as you can imagine. The important places of Heaven always seem to have a strangely fascist scope to them, as if the main purpose of their creation was to make individual human souls feel tiny. And you know what? It works. Does it ever.
    The Hall is a bit like a human cathedral, but the proportions are so extreme, it’s obvious that earthly concerns like gravity, mass, and tensile strength didn’t come into the equation; a tower of nearly pure light, with only enough spiderweb-thin structure to let you know you’re inside something. At the center of it, surrounded by a space where literally hundreds of thousands could gather even under earthly constraints, stands a massive pillar of liquid crystal—liquid because it’s moving, crystal because it’s moving so slowly you’d never know it if you didn’t know it, if you see what I mean. This diamond waterfall with a zillion internal facets is called the Paslogion, and it’s a sort of clock, I think, or at least it represents the same kind of idea. As to how to read it, don’t ask me. I don’t know if it really even works or if it’s just some kind of big decoration like the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty. I do know it’s one of the most awesome things I’ve ever seen. Just looking at it, you feel that if you
did
understand it, you’d understand pretty much everything about how the entire cosmos works, and that infinity probably sounds like the entire catalogue of J. S. Bach all played at the same time and yet totally in harmony.
    All of this grandeur might have been less daunting if something was already going on when we appeared inside the Judgement Hall. But instead the place was empty except for me, Temuel, and the awesome Paslogion.
    “And here I leave you.” Without any more warning than that, Temuel vanished. I couldn’t help wondering why he was in such a hurry to get out of there, and I couldn’t come up with any happy answers.
    It’s hard to think negative thoughts in Heaven. Most of the time I’m there I feel like a baby seal brutally clubbed by joy, but I confess, my thoughts about Temuel going off and leaving me by myself were less than charitable.
    What about the consolation of religion for the condemned man
, I wondered.
Isn’t somebody supposed to at least hold my hand while I wait to be executed?
But if my superiors were finally going to clean up the mess I’d always been, why bother to bring me all the way here and then not even gather an audience? It would be easy enough to switch me off; for Heaven,