“Hardly,” Luas said. “Why did God promise not to flood the earth again?”
A puzzled expression flashed across my face.
“Come now,” he said, removing a pipe and a pouch of tobacco from his jacket pocket and packing the bowl. “Surely you know the story. Things only got worse after the fiasco in Eden. Cain murdered Abel, and later one of Cain’s children murdered a young child. Humans began mating with animals and engaging in every sort of debauchery. God was furious-and rightly so. He decided to destroy the lot of us, as justice demands, but when the flood waters receded, He felt remorse. Imagine that. God regrets what God’s done. Strange. He makes a promise: ‘I’ll never do it again,’ He says, hanging rainbows from the clouds as a reminder. One day extermination of the human race is the final solution-to borrow an ugly phrase-but as soon as humanity has been driven to the brink, all is forgiven and our survival is guaranteed, even if we return to our wicked ways. Why the change of heart? Why even spare Noah in the first place?”
“I guess because Noah was the only one who obeyed,” I said.
Luas paused to strike a match and light his pipe. “Yes,” he said, “and if Noah had disobeyed?”
“He would have been killed with the others.”
“Correct,” Luas said between puffs. “Divine justice. A good case could be made, could it not, that God is the greatest mass murderer of all time and Adolph Hitler was a petty criminal by comparison? Hitler was once a presenter here, by the way. One of the best.”
“Adolph Hitler was here?”
“Yes, but let’s stick to the point; we’re talking about God now, and there’s still the matter of His last-second change of heart. It’s because of this astounding about-face that beyond those doors at the end of the corridor, inside the Urartu Chamber, there will be argument for many souls today that they have a place in the Light and, for those same souls, the Dark. They’ll learn their fates today and greet their eternities. You see, every birth on earth is a potential crime and a pending trial. It’s the Urartu Chamber, not a pot of gold, that sits at the end of God’s rainbows. God promised us those rainbows would guarantee a place for man in the world of sun and clouds, but He said nothing about the worlds to come.”
Luas rose from the bench and gestured for me to follow.
“Of course,” he continued, puffing on his pipe, “we do not deal here with bodhisattvas or saints, caitiffs or fiends. The conclusions for them are foregone, the judgments obvious and unassailable. Our concern here in the Urartu Chamber is for the rest of humanity-the good people who sometimes cheat, the bad who sometimes do good, the billions who failed to sacrifice everything to become priests or prophets but resisted the temptation to become demons or demigods. We put on no false airs here. We do not ask whether there has been renunciation for the Hindu, awakening for the Buddhist, reckoning for the Muslim, salvation for the Christian, or atonement for the Jew. These are mere obfuscations of Divine Law. There is only one question to be answered during the Final Judgment of every human soul, and it is the same question that concerned God before the Great Flood: What does justice demand?”
We approached the doors at the opposite end of the corridor.
“Accounts rich and grave are reconciled beyond these doors, Brek Cuttler,” Luas said. “Could you speak honestly of yourself there? Could you damn yourself if damning is what you deserved, setting aside fear and hatred for truth? Could you stand before the Creator of energy, space, and time and save yourself? Could you pass through those doors knowing your experience of eternity would be forever shaped by what you said and left unsaid? Could you explain what, during your entire life, defied explanation?”
I began to panic. I couldn’t have made up these words if my brain had been knocked around inside my skull during a car accident or riddled with cancer and fever. And I couldn’t have made up the memories I experienced passing through the train shed either-they were too vivid, exotic, real. The possibility of my own death was becoming more inescapable.
“You’re taking me to be judged, then?” I said, backing away. “I really am going to hell for putting my arm in a manure spreader?”
“Judged? You?” Luas said, genuinely surprised by my question. “Of course not! I told you all that was forgiven long ago. I’m taking you to receive your heavenly reward, Brek, not to send you to hell. You’ve always hoped and prayed you would come here. Shemaya has been the motive behind your every decision, the basis of your every interaction from the first moment of your life to the last; it has been your longing and your dream, just as it has been the longing and dream of almost every human being since the beginning of time. You knew it most vividly after your accident, when you realized you suffered not because you would never again be able to dangle from monkey bars on a playground or swing a softball bat or play a violin, but because it was unjust that millions of other girls could.”
Luas removed his hands from my shoulders and puffed his pipe.
“A member of the bar, not the clergy, offered you justice after the accident, isn’t that right? And so you discovered at an early age that the legal system provides the redemption religion can no longer afford, and that lawyers are the true priests and judges the true prophets. You craved justice more than anything else in your life. Growing older, you felt the same sting when somebody cut you off in traffic or said an unkind word, as when a drunk driver wiped out a family or a tornado flattened a town. Although different by degree and implication, you knew in your heart neither of these was more or less capricious, and neither was more or less unjust.
“On the day your childhood friend, Karen Busfield, told you she was accepted into a seminary to become an Episcopal priest, you were filled with despair, not joy. You were already in law school by then. Do you remember how you mocked her while cross-examining her motives? You said: ‘When a child with bruises all over her body tells you her father did it, Karen, what will you do? Ask her to pray and put it in God’s hands? And when she tells you she’s been praying every night for ten years, but the beatings still continue, what will you say then? God’s hands can’t be bothered with children, Karen! If you really want to save people’s souls from sin-not just the sin of hating others and themselves but the sin of hating the God who breathed life into them and then abandoned them-you won’t pray for them, Karen. You’ll give them one of my business cards and tell them to call me.’”
I stared at Luas, trying to understand how he could possibly know all these things.
“And do you remember Karen’s reply?” Luas continued. “She said you didn’t let her finish; she was planning to join the Air Force, like her father, and become a military chaplain. ‘The Air Force doesn’t call lawyers when somebody misbehaves, Brek,’ she said. ‘They drop bombs on them. Now that’s justice.’ And you said to her: ‘They’ll never take you, Karen. They’ll see right through you.’” Luas puffed his pipe. “You understood the great truth of life, Brek Cuttler. You understood that the pursuit of justice is the purest form of religion and the highest human aspiration. You became a disciple of justice. Now, as I said, the time has come for you to receive your reward. You have been chosen to join the elite lawyers of Shemaya who defend souls at the Final Judgment. I was being facetious when I asked you if you could defend yourself in the Urartu Chamber. That always gets the attention of new arrivals; one’s own jeopardy helps focus the mind. No, the only question now is whether you can walk through those doors if someone else depends upon what you say and leave unsaid? If you speak for humanity, not yourself. But this question was answered about you long ago, was it not? My job is not to assess your fitness but to show you the way.”