"Holly Lisle - Sympathy for the Devil" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

matter how foolhardy their desires. What does this one want?”
The angel brought the newest request up on the screen.
Dayne Kuttner—age 28—God’s sympathy for the
devil, and second chance for the denizens of
Hell—Status . . . Pending.
“Good heavens,” God murmured. “Is that a computer error?”
The angel typed in his query again, and the same data
reappeared on the screen.
“Twenty-eight? She’s really twenty-eight?”
“Yes, your Holiness.” The angel started typing again.
“Let me see all tens through history, petitioners older than
sixteen.”
The angel nodded; he had already queried the computer for that
information. In the thousands of years he had been record-keeper,
he had gotten good at guessing what the Most Holy would ask for
next.
Searching . . .
“This may take a while.”
It did take a while—Heaven had good computers, but
unfortunately a lot of its information was stored in corollary sources
which hadn’t yet been added to the easy-retrieval databases. After
a millisecond of real time—unconscionably slow by Heaven’s
clocks—the data started to come in. There was a ten from the first
Buddha, one from an undiscovered saint in the Congo in the
fifteenth century ad; there were the well-known tens from Moses
and Peter, and of course a few from adults praying for the welfare
of their children—the time and geographical distribution and religion
of petitioner on those varied widely; and there was one from
Abraham Lincoln. The angel remembered that one well.
Preservation of the nation he loved—offered to pay whatever price
was necessary if only his country could survive united.
There were others, too, but not many—thirty-seven all told since
the first human had prayed to an unseen deity.
This one, the thirty-eighth in the entire history of humanity, was a
humdinger. The angel had never seen anything even remotely like it.
“Bring up the full text as her soul phrased the request.”
“You said ask and believe. So now I’m asking. Let
them have the chance to repent, God. All of them.
Every single soul in Hell. Let them have the chance
to learn from the mistakes they made; let them into
Heaven if they repent.
“Until you do this, you can consider me a
conscientious objector, protesting the policies of
Heaven. When I die, you can send me to Hell,
because I won’t go to Heaven until every soul can
find a way there, God. Every soul. No matter who
they were, no matter what they did.
“Eternity is too long for a loving God to condone
the torture of his children.”
The angel brought up a real-time picture of Dayne as she