Gabriel would have been more than happy to ask Rhea the same question, had he known she was asking it. Not for the reasons he would have predicted when the Glorious One took off in search of the perfect wave, or whatever it was he was doing.
To Gabriel's surprise, almost all the archangels had pitched in from the start. In that first emergency meeting, they'd debated the merits of keeping God's little vacation a secret, but they hadn't been able to find any real merits—other than avoiding a general panic—and they'd decided that they'd do a lot better if everyone in all the Heavens knew what was going on and knew that Eternity was being run—temporarily, of course—by amateurs.
To Gabriel's even further surprise, there hadn't even been a general panic. Just about everyone in all the Heavens thought the Almighty was due for a bit of time off, and in that we're-all-in-this-together way common Upstairs, had divvied up chores and rallied round in a chin-up, stiff-upper lip way that was positively British.
In Valhalla, the Teutonic lesser deities had put Wagner's Ring Cycle on endless replay and revved up mead production in the Heroes Halls, and now everyone was getting a regular supply of some extraordinary mead; the Catholic sector of Christian Heaven was loaning out a lot of its not-so-well-known saints to the other sectors of the afterlife for emergency prayer request duty; the Buddhists and the eclectic pagans had gone together on a clever training and orientation group for newly arrived souls that also doubled as a briefing group for their folks' souls which were headed back down—an elegant and economical solution, and very popular throughout the Heavens, though a bit of a shock to those arriving souls who were destined for nonreincarnating sectors.
Mostly, everyone had been creative, supportive, and wonderful. Mostly, everyone was wondering why God hadn't taken a vacation long ago. Mostly.
And then there were the problems. The few rabble-rousers who wanted to complain; the occasional mislaid prayers; the afterlife assignments that somehow went astray . . .
And two AWOL archangels who'd disappeared twenty-four hours after God went on vacation, and who hadn't resurfaced yet.
Gabriel had been able to track their energy to North Carolina, but hadn't been able to pin them down any more definitely than that. They were shielding themselves, and somehow seemed to be linked to Hellish influences, and they seemed to be involving themselves in human affairs. He got one or two memos per day of Hellish plans foiled by "supernatural means—unmarked angel in vicinity."
He kept hoping they'd get back before the Holy of Holies returned . . . but as the weeks dragged on, he was beginning to give up hope. And what God was going to say about angels AWOL and without orders right in the midst of His big Hell experiment, when all along His Perfection had maintained a policy of absolute nonintervention . . . well, Gabriel didn't want to think about it. He'd heard the lectures on interfering with mortal free will. Over and over and over, he'd heard them. That interference was what caused the First Rift.
He hoped there wasn't going to be a second.