The Woman Who Died a Lot

My father had also worked in the time industry, but unlike Friday, who now no longer had the future he was going to have, my father no longer had the past to which he was entitled. ChronoGuard agents who were active during the shutdown were offered a replacement past career to replace their theoretically unsustainable ones, and most chose something in the arts, sciences or politics. My father, ever the maverick, had opted for a fifty-seven-year career in plumbing. The reason, he stated, was so his new memories would have him at home as much as possible, to better reminisce about his family. This worked well for him, but not for us—we retained only those memories of his first career as a time-traveling knight-errant. As far as we were concerned, he’d turned up the day after the time engines were shut down, full of fond memories of us that we couldn’t remember but he could— sort of like having an aged parent with a bad memory, only the other way round.

“Challenging is good,” said Dad. “I used to take your mother and her brothers on long hiking holidays in Scotland. Now, that was challenging. Do you remember that time when we got lost on Ben Nevis, Thursday, and had to be rescued by several men in beards, all of whom smelled of pipe tobacco and York Peppermint Patty?”

“No.”

“I saw a few posters up in town about the smiting,” said Landen. “The city council doesn’t seem to be taking it very seriously. Are we sure it’s still on?”

Joffy and Miles exchanged nervous glances.

“It’s on, all right,” replied Miles. “When He announced the smiting to a state-registered Meek Person in a lonely gas station in the small hours, He had the Meek write it down so he wouldn’t forget and then went and told another Meek just in case. After that He reiterated His plans in the pips of a cucumber and burned them into the side of Haytor on Dartmoor.”

“He’s kind of done with ambiguity, isn’t He?” I said.

“Pretty much,” said Joffy. “Since His Revealment He’s kind of ditched the idea of subtle signs or obscure clues. Burning His intentions into granite is a lot more direct, and it certainly makes people take notice, although the Dartmoor Parks Authority was none too pleased. But there it was: Swindon will be hit with a Grade-III Smite on Friday at midday.”

We all fell silent. It kind of sounded more ominous coming from Joffy, even if a Grade-III was not the worst. More to do with cleansing fire and none of the mass murder, lava and pillar-of-salt stuff.

“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.”