be a futile occupation, though, from your own point of view. There are many souls in the world, alas, that might be won with far less trouble than mine.”
“This is not a contest,” the Devil said, seeming a little more at ease now that the evening star was shining brightly and the atmospheric dust in the west had taken on the color of blood. “There was no war in Heaven, and there is no war on Earth for the souls of humankind. You conceive of yourself as a battleground in which a higher self of faith of virtue, aided by a guardian angel, is ceaselessly at war with a lower self of insatiable appetite and uncontrollable passion, provoked by mischievous imps, but all of that is mere illusion. If solitude really allowed you to look into yourself more clearly, you would know that you are less divided than you imagine, and that the world is not as you imagine it to be.”
“Excellent,” said Anthony. “Nothing can warm a man more, in the absence of tangible heat, than the labor of cutting through sophistry. Sit down, my enemy, I beg you. Let’s make ourselves as comfortable as we can, given the hardness of the ground and the aching within.”
“Oh no,” the Devil said, seeming to grow larger as the night advanced, and now unfurling wings like those of a gigantic eagle. “I can do better than that, my friend, by way of distracting us from our mutual plight.”
Anthony had observed that the Devil, in what he took to be the dark angel’s natural form, was not well-adapted for sitting. His goatish limbs were not articulated like a humans; even squatting must be awkward for him. Anthony had not expected compliance when he made his teasing offer—but neither had he expected to be carried away.
The Devil did not grow claws to match his wings; indeed, the wings themselves refused to coalesce into avian feathers, but continued to grow and to change, as if they were intent on attaining the pure insubstantiality of shadow. By night, it seemed, the Ape of God and the Adversary of Humankind had more freedom to formulate himself as he wished—and what he wished to be, it seemed, was a vast cloud of negation.
Anthony felt himself caught up by that cloud, but he was not grabbed or clutched, merely elevated towards the sky. The cloud was beneath him and all around him, but it was perfectly transparent—more perfectly transparent, in fact, than a pool of pure water or the unstirred desert air.
Anthony tried to resist the sensation that he could see more clearly through the cloud of absence than he had ever been able to see before, but his eyes were unusually reluctant to take aboard his conviction and he had to fight to secure the dictatorship of his faith.
He saw the walls of the fort shrink beneath him, until the ruin was a mere blur on the desert’s face. Then he saw the coastline of North Africa, where the ocean was separated from the arid wilderness by a mere ribbon of fertile ground. Then he watched the curve of the horizon extend into the arc of a circle, and he saw the sun that had set a little while before rise again in the west, as the edge of the world could no longer hide it.
“You cannot trouble me with that,” he told the Devil. “I know that the world is round.”
The Devil no longer had eyes to reflect his anguish, nor a leathery tongue with which to form his lies, but he was not voiceless. He spoke within Anthony’s head, like an echo of a thought.
“Fear not, my friend,” the voice said, softer now than before. “I have brought air enough to sustain us for the whole night long—and if, by chance, you would like to slake your thirsts, I have water and blood enough to bring you to the very brink of satisfaction.”
“I have drunk my fill of the Lord’s good water,” Anthony told him, “and human blood I will never drink, no matter how my Devilled thirst might increase. I can suffer any affliction, knowing that my Lord loves me and that my immortal soul is safe for all eternity.” While he spoke, Anthony observed that the world as spinning on its axis, and moving through space as if to describe a circle of its own around the sun. The moon and the world were engaged in a curious dance, but the sun—whose disk seemed no bigger than the moon’s, when seen from the land of Egypt—seemed to have become far more massive as the cloud moved towards it.
“Were you expecting a sequence of crystal spheres?” the Devil whispered from his hidden corner of Anthony’s consciousness. “Were you unmoved by my promise of air because you never believed in the possibility of a void? Did you think that you could breathe the quintessential ether as you moved through the hierarchy of the planets towards the ultimate realm of the fixed stars?”
“There is but one Lord,” Anthony replied, “and I am content to breathe in accordance with His providence.”
“Alas, you’ll have to breathe in accordance with my providence, for a little while,” said the Adversary of Humankind. “There is neither air nor ether outside this nimbus. Can you see that the world is but one of the planetary family, toiling around the central sun? Do you see how small a world it is, by comparison with mighty Jupiter? Can you see that Jupiter and Saturn have major satellites as big as worlds themselves, and hosts of minor ones? Do you see how the space between Mars and Jupiter is strewn with planetoids? Can you see the halo from which comets come, beyond the orbits of worlds unseen from Earth, unnamed as yet by curious astronomers?” Anthony, who was familiar with the story of Er, as told in Plato’s Republic, looked for the Spindle of Necessity and listened for the siren song of the music of the spheres, but he was not disappointed by their absence.
“I am riding in a cloud formed by the Master of Illusion,” he said, not speaking aloud but confident that the Devil, cornered within him, could hear him perfectly well. “You cannot frighten me with empty space and lonely worlds. If the Earth is indeed a solitary wanderer in an infinite void, I shall feel my kinship with its rocks and deserts more keenly than before.”
“The Master of Illusion is sight constrained by faith,” the Devil told him. “I am an Iconoclast, committed to breaking the idols that filter the evidence of your Earthbound eyes. I do not seek to frighten you but to awaken you. Do you see the stars, now that we are moving through their realm? Can you see that they are not fixed at all, but moving in their own paces about the chaos at the heart of the Milky Way? Do you see the nebulae that lie without the sidereal system? Can you discern the stars that comprise them—systems like the Milky Way, more numerous by far than the stars they each contain?”
“It is a pretty conceit,” Anthony admitted. “Evidence, I trust, of your sense of humor rather than your sickness of mind.”
“It is the truth,” said the voice within him.
“If it were real,” Anthony retorted, “it would not be equal to the millionth part of the greater truth, which is faith in the Lord and His covenant with humankind.” He knew, however, that while the Devil was lurking inside him, borrowing the voice of his own thoughts, he had no means of concealing the force of his realization that perhaps this was the truth, and that the world really might be no more than a mediocre rock dutifully circling a mediocre star in a mediocre galaxy in a universe so vast that no power of sight could plumb its depths nor any power of mind calculate its destiny.
Curiously enough, however, the Devil did not appear to be privy to that unvoiced thought, formulated more by dread than doubt. “It was not always thus,” the Devil said. “In the beginning, it was very tiny—but that was fourteen thousand million years ago; it is expanding still, and has a far greater span before it, until the last fugitive stars expend the last of their waning light, and darkness falls upon lifelessness forever.”
“The Lord said ‘Let there be light’,” Anthony reminded the Adversary. “He did not say ‘Let there be light forever’—but what does it matter, since our souls are safe in his care?”
“Our
