Who Banged the Big One?

Who Banged the Big One?

Never get involved. It’s the cardinal rule for any angel coming to Earth. You arrive, you do what you came for, then you get out. How hard can it be? But once on Earth you’re human, you think like a human, and humans get involved with anything and everything. When their time is up they never want to leave, there’s always just one more thing to be done: they want to see their grandchild’s graduation, reach their next birthday, find out how Coronation Street finally ends. They can never let go.

I got involved, with a bloody sausage factory of all things, and now I can’t leave either. Who will look after my business? How can I trust anybody not to ruin my earthtime’s work? I’m caught in a trap of my own making.

Why sausages? That’s the embarrassing part. You see, when we’re preparing to come here we have to pack a human head with all we need for the trip. But there’s so little room. It’s as if you had to pack everything you needed for a year-long voyage in a suitcase no bigger than a handbag. There’s a trend among the younger angels to travel light, to pack only the essentials like the ability to speak, blow their noses and walk their legs, and rely on picking up the bulk of what they need when they arrive. It’s a mistake. Everybody else has a twenty-year head start on them and, with an empty head, all they’re fit for is to be a footballer or a Big Brother contestant.

I thought a little knowledge of common foodstuffs would come in handy, so I began with sausages. Just a few everyday types at first. But surely I should know about chorizo and boudin, bratwurst and kabanos, mettwurst and cervelat? What about kielbasa, siskonmakkara and sucuk? Germany alone has over a thousand types of sausage, so where do you stop? And what should I know about them? Just the names? What about how they taste, surely that’s pretty fundamental? Methods of manufacture, cooking and serving? Their history? The chemistry and microbiology of meat preservation? What could I safely leave out? By the time I arrived on Earth the only way I could support myself was to open a sausage factory, so that’s exactly what I did. I’m very proud of my sausages, I can tell you definitively that the world has never seen better, but now I’m involved and I can’t bear to leave.

Algy is asleep in my spare room. What can I say? If I had any sense I’d turn him in, but life at the sausage factory doesn’t offer much by way of excitement and I feel strangely elated to be harbouring a fugitive, even a complete ninny like Algy. A few times tonight I’ve looked outside to see whether the streets have got any meaner, but mine seems much the same as usual.

Earlier this evening we watched snooker on the TV. "I'd have played that shot differently," said Algy, thrilled with his new knowledge of an Earth game. "I'd have played it to make the ball go down the hole, not bounce out again."

Algy’s rule-breaking reminded me of my own brush with subversion. After telling Algy how to go to bed and what to expect from sleep, I went to my study and brought up on the computer screen a document I hadn’t looked at in years.

Q: Is there a God?

God told them it would probably work out okay but there was a slim chance they would all be turned into cheese mites. He winked at them as he said it. They rushed off to write how irresponsible God was, and how he had an eye tic just like a Bond villain, which proved he was up to no good. Their case was supported by a ‘leading deity’ who had bought his godhood on the celestialnet for a mess of pottage, and who nobody but the journalists had ever heard of.

A harmless piece of nonsense, you think? Far from it. The one thing God will not tolerate is anybody meddling with his experiments. If humans believe in gods, they must be gods they’ve invented themselves. If they believe there’s a purpose to life, they must work that out for themselves too. You don’t show the rats how the maze is constructed.

Nobody would take my nonsense seriously, of course, and the last two paragraphs were entirely made up to entertain a human audience. But suppose a scientist saw the first paragraph and started to wonder what the implications would be if there had been more than one big bang? Fine if they thought up the idea for themselves; disaster if I inadvertently gave them a leg-up. Four and a half billion years of experiment made worthless!

I shivered. I'd made up the ice robots, but God’s first universe hadn’t specifically been designed to create life, at the time he’d been more concerned with the infrastructure. He was most gratified when it spontaneously brought forth a bumper crop of bacteria. Life there never got beyond the single-celled stage though, and after a few tens of billions of years it was evident that nothing more interesting was ever going to happen.

The bang that created your universe was the fifth in the series, by the way, but you didn’t hear it from me. I should delete my nonsense before anyone sees it.