Dead Man's Hand: An Anthology of the Weird West

The High Frontier had only been discovered four years back. Who had built the silver castles, no one knew. How the cities of stone floated in the clouds was also a mystery. Angels lived there -- scrawny girls with wings, ethereal in their beauty. But they were feral creatures, barbaric, and it was said that when the first explorers had entered the silver city, the angels were roosting over the arches -- little more than filthy pigeons. Some thought that it had once been an outpost, that perhaps angels had once been wiser, more civilized, and that they rested here while carrying messages back and forth between heaven and Earth. One guess was as good as another. But a new territory was opening up, and folks were eager to be the first to see it.

The tinkerman smiled in satisfaction. "Perfect." Somehow, the pronouncement scared him. Would the clockwork gambler that he was hunting be "perfect?" It sounded presumptuous. Morgan wondered at that. He said, "When God made man, he only allowed that his creation was 'good.'" The tinkerman glanced up, lips tight in anger, eyes twinkling. "God, sir, was not a perfectionist. He failed as an organism We superseded him." "Superseded?" The tinkerman smiled cruelly. "He drove Adam from the Garden of Idunn. In some tales, afterward, Adam made a spear and sneaked up on God while he was sleeping..." Morgan woke, wondering. He`d heard in the war that God was dead. He never heard any legends, though, about how it happened.