Page 28 - Unlikely Stories 4

Garden Snake

“Yes, yes. Do you doubt my word?”
“Well, you tricked them. Not a good track record, in my opinion.”
And God decided then and there to pass a lot of the impending
blame on the snake ex post facto by rebranding it as a trickster. In
fact, he reflected, I will let this silver-tongued deceiver bear the onus.
The hapless humans will already believe he is inherently wicked, out
to ensnare hapless humans: the Devil. Very clever tactic: I’ll be the
first to formalize deflection of guilt in a cynical search for a
scapegoat! Too bad for the snake’s descendants, but they would be
collateral damage.
To his hench-reptile he said, “Trust me on this. Remember your
last job: I’m holding the position open in case you fail. The odds are
the bipeds’ anger will be directed at each other, enough to make them
do terrible things, and then come up with all sorts of theories about
the existence of evil and inevitability of death. I want to see how their
imaginations will work—not just my drawing-board theories.”
“But why the Tree of Knowledge?” wondered Ouroboros. “Won’t
they be able to figure out the truth? I mean, they’re going to swallow
that as well as a load of nonsense.”
“Ah, that’s what makes it interesting. The price of self-aware,
thinking brains is confronting misery. Either they approach it
rationally and do what they can in their limited way to ameliorate it,
or create a million odd stories to create and justify it, embracing self-
contradiction and paradox. That is what interests me. Enough
chatter! Time to launch you over the wall into the Garden. Any
objections?”
“None. But you will get more fireworks than you expected.”

27