Ian Tregillis - Something More Than Night

by Ian Tregillis

  Yeah. Somebody had barricaded the door.

  They’d constructed a bevy of razor-thin micro-Magisteria, laid down willy-nilly like the scales on a snake who’d overslept and didn’t have time to groom himself before slithering off to work. They fit together nice and tight, leaving just enough room between them for a whisper of Pleroma. No interpenetration; nothing to offend the consensual basis of reality. I knew there had to be seams, but I couldn’t find ’em without squinting. It was fine work. Green-label juju.

  Each magisterial sliver held a different arrow of time. Some didn’t keep to a single arrow; some had a whole damn quiver. Some used thermodynamic entropy to define it. Some used the passage of time as perceived by the beings that might have evolved on Earth had the amino acids ferried on the comets been right-handed rather than left-handed. Some used the expansion/contraction cycle of a two-pronged Carnot multiverse for a metronome. One dispensed with the arrow altogether for a zero-dimensional dot of time; another replaced the linear arrow with something that looked like the offspring of an octopus and a Klein bottle.

  No wonder I bounced. Somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to ensure nobody swiped Gabby’s silverware.

  But I’d been around the block a couple of times. I had a few tricks of my own.

  I shaved off a sliver of my consciousness, folded it over, and gave one end a few kinks. Then I wedged the thin end of my new hairpin into the first seam, sat back, and let it go about its business. It inched along, wiggling and limboing, until the view from inside the seams gave me what I needed. The lock popped. The scales, as the poets say, fell from my eyes. I was in.

  Funny thing about Gabby: you wouldn’t know it from looking at him, with his golden halo and platonic beauty, but the guy was something of a pack rat. He’d been collecting little odds and ends since at least the double-digit redshifts. The interior reality of Gabriel’s Magisterium burbled and shifted like convection currents in a star on the zaftig end of the main sequence. Because, I realized, that’s what they were. Dull dim light, from IR to X-ray, oozed past me like the wax in a million-mile lava lamp while carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen nuclei did little do-si-dos about my toes. Every bubble, every sizzle, every new nucleus, every photodissociation tagged something of interest to Gabriel. The heart of this star smelled of roses and musty libraries. Nuclear reactions unfolded with the calm susurration of solar wind upon Earth’s atmosphere, seeding cloud formation and rain. Convective cells furled about me with the low, slow, sonorous peal of cathedral bells mourning a monarch’s death. X-rays fizzed on my tongue like champagne bubbles; I loosened my tie, and felt the silky play of elemental gradients across my skin. Somewhere far below me, and just for a moment, the jangle of clashing nuclei became the faint chiming of a single silver bell.

  I wandered around, getting the layout of the joint. Gabby’s flaming sword leaned point-down in one corner. A work of art, that thing: the hilt of silvered starlight; the edge sharp as the now that separates past and future; each tongue of flame bright as the embers of Creation. It was dusty. Strange that he hadn’t been packing when he fell; whoever did him in must have been counting on that. Just for grins I took the hilt and gave the star a stir. But I put the sword down just as quickly. A few centuries hence, assuming the monkeys managed to fix their little junk problem and get working satellites back in orbit by then, the X-ray flare from the attendant coronal mass ejection would knock high-energy electrons screaming through the electronics. But probably not enough to cause more than a coverage brownout in geostationary orbit.

  From a wisp of magnesium (itself a sentimental remnant of an older star), Gabriel had hung fragments of conflicting realities like pearls on a string. Slivers of might-have-beens, universes with different fine structure constants, different electroweak coupling constants, different causality, no causality. Universes susceptible to mortal volition, universes impervious to it. Universes fine-tuned for complex life. Universes inimical to it. A reality where popcorn tasted like bitter wheatgrass and people sold brussels sprouts at the talkies. He’d also been thinking quite a bit about the monkeys. There was some speculation about different evolutionary paths within the MOC, but most of his interest seemed to focus on the fuzzy edges of life in those never-were universes. Looking to see where life had been possible, where intelligent life had been likely. He’d been charting the ontological boundaries of mortal existence.

  But amongst all the big picture meaning-of-life stuff, he’d been tailing one individual monkey through the mundane realm. He’d clipped a few forgotten seconds from the memories of a priest and set them playing on an infinite loop like the houseflies in my diner:

  The priest lays a wafer on a parishioner’s tongue while trying not to recoil from a puff of rancid breath. Poor Bill Fredricks has another rotten tooth. It’s cold in the church, a wintery draft gusting through the corner of a broken window, but pride in a good sermon is a golden warmth in the priest’s belly; so, too, is the pride in overcoming a recent temptation. But doesn’t pride go before the fall? He’s nervous, too, consumed by a low-level anxiety. Guilt over a deception, fear of being caught. The vestments itch; his dog collar chafes against his Adam’s apple; he has gas. The extra-dry communion wine makes his tongue feel as though it had been flensed with sandpaper …

  Such were the things Gabriel had lifted from the padre. Nothing of meaning or import. Just a snippet from one of countless meaningless, unremarkable mortal lives. But enough to know the man, and find him again. I tucked the memory fragment into my wallet.

  Along with a few others. These memories hadn’t been lifted with quite the same attention. A few janes, a few joes, each as unremarkable as little flametop had been before I put the whammy on her. But again: why Gabriel’s interest? I snatched these for later study, too.

  The silver bell chimed again. Louder this time. From my trousers. I fished through lint, my comb, the few bits of spare change in my pockets until I found the source of the music. Gabby’s feather hummed like a tuning fork, its fine silvered edges vibrating fast enough to dice my fingers. I set it adrift, wrapped my hand in a handkerchief, then picked it up again. The vibration sent a tingle through my thoughts, and the crystalline chiming resonated through my perceptions. It tasted like clover honey, smelled like a smooth single malt, and felt like the flat of an electric carving knife pressed against my brow.

  I drifted on a convection current of thermal nonequilibrium, trying to make sense of the feather. The current took me through the attic, past the shadow of a photodissociation zone. Gabby’s feather cranked up the volume and sliced my handkerchief to ribbons. The shadow passed. The feather took a breather.

  It wasn’t a tuning fork. It was a dousing rod.

  Didn’t take long to find the stash once I realized what I had. Gabby had hidden a few more mementos in a little pocket of fragile negative hydrogen ions in the photosphere, a delicate lacework supported by a curlicued nuance of atomic opacity, the kind of quirky consequence of the MOC that nobody ever bothers to notice. If Gabriel’s Magisterium had been a high-rise apartment, this spot would have been the wall safe behind the oil painting in the den. He’d squirreled away the impressions of another monkey where he didn’t want anybody to find them. I opened the bubble. The memory belonged to a little girl:

  She huddles beside a bedroom door, listening while her parents speak to each other in husky stage whispers. The girl has just learned a new four-letter word. She wants to hold it in, but she giggles, and the whispering stops, and the bedroom door flies open. The girl’s mother stands over her, angry and naked. She grabs the girl by the arm and hauls her off to bed.…

  That’s where the lost memory looped back on itself. But not before I got a good squint at the kid.

  It was Molly. I kicked the walls. The star burped.

  I knew there was something off about that dame. Who was she? The whole lousy thing stank of a setup. But who was the target? Me or her? I’d watched most of flametop’s life while the highlight reel flickered through her
embryonic Magisterium in the wake of her death; she wasn’t a knowing part of this. She was innocent as an Easter lamb. Yet there was a connection between flametop and Gabriel.…

  I wasn’t looking forward to that conversation. I just hoped the screwball cluck didn’t come at me with another baseball bat. Bad habit of blaming the messenger, that one. So maybe I’d hold on to this a little while and take a flutter at it when I wasn’t tired and sober. Why Molly? What had Gabriel found so important? Something about her, or her family?

  A crack like the first thawing of an ice age ricocheted through Gabriel’s Magisterium, louder than lightning. There came another crash, and then a sharp-edged jangle. I had company. Sounded like somebody had come to root through Gabby’s phonograph records and raid the icebox. I tucked Molly’s stolen memory into my wallet, alongside the priest’s. Then I drifted low, pushing upstream against escaping gamma rays, to investigate the racket coming from under the convective zone.

  The newcomers were rummaging Gabby’s collection of sonnets; he’d liked to carve them into the crusts of neutron stars. Next they’d be cutting the mattress apart and pouring out the coffee cans.

  There were two of them. Each girded the heavens with diaphanous wings more transparent than a rich widow’s grief. The heat from their faces washed through the joint. Even there, in the heart of the inferno, the shadows of their contemplation drew beads of sweat from my furrowed, hardworking brow.

  Cherubim. I hate Cherubim.

  “Hey, I know you bums.”

  They noticed me. My sweat turned to vapor. Didn’t care for it. But I kept to my script. I said, “I’ve been looking for you.”

  They ignored me. They set about ripping down the wallpaper and tearing up the carpet. I shifted, just enough to feel the reassuring weight of the wallet and feather in my pockets.

  I said, “Yeah. Word on the street says two fellas matching your descriptions tossed the place of a friend of mine. Left it in a real state. Her, too. What’s the big idea?”

  LEAVE.

  “Nuts to you, fella,” I said. “Nuts to both of you.”

  Last thing I needed was a snarling match with a pair of Cherubim. But flametop had needed it even less, yet this wrecking crew had left her with nothing but a handful of dust where the foundations of her being had been. And I’m the one who tossed her into the duck pond.

  But if this was a setup—and it swam and quacked like one—they’d want to give me the once-over, too. So I took my natural form. Been a spell since I’d done that. Didn’t seem to fit anymore. I remembered it being roomier. It wasn’t. Not that it made any difference to the loogans. They weren’t impressed. Compared to them I was so small-time I could do the backstroke in a pony glass. But I guess I had a reputation of sorts, too. I’m the guy who skipped town. They had my number. They saw the mud on my neck.

  “For the record,” I said, before things got awkward, “I go by Bayliss now.”

  YOUR PRESENCE IS UNNECESSARY. YOUR PRESENCE IS UNDESIRED. DEPART.

  I couldn’t tell which of them was doing the talking. It was like a ventriloquist act with two dummies.

  “I know your type,” I said, “tough guys like you. You put on a show, a bit of the flash, but you’re not independent operators. Nah. You’re just errand boys. So I figure somebody else is calling the shots.”

  DEPART. INSTANTLY.

  It got a little warmer in the churning heart of Gabriel’s Magisterium. All around us, squalling newborn babes of atoms crumbled into a cloud of hydrogen ash. I knew it was no use trying to get the connection to flametop. These muggs were just the muscle. If I wanted to connect the dots to Molly, I needed a line on their boss.

  “Who’s writing your checks? Who put the bee on my client?”

  They say persistence is a virtue. But they’ve never been worked over by a pair of Cherubim. The loogans’ disdain became irritation. They unfurled their wings, flexing and bending until I existed at the center of a cage of shadow and thought. I wondered how long it would take to put myself back together after they finished. But how I hate to stop when I’m on a roll.

  “The other thing I can’t quite figure,” I said, “is the harvest. You ran roughshod over my client’s Magisterium, and now you’re desecrating Gabriel’s memorial. Must be one big payday in your future to put you on the outs with the bulls like that.”

  That’s when they turned the full inferno of their contemplation upon me. I shriveled like a moth in a blast furnace. One hovered behind to anchor me in place. The other went to work with knuckle dusters and holy fire. The searing heat of angelic rage burned hotter than a blowtorch on butter. Somebody cried. Not me, though; I’m the strong, silent type.

  A few shots to the kidneys later, they traded places. “Somebody fed you boys a plate of spaghetti,” I groaned. “Whatever they told you about my client, it’s nothing but chewing gum.”

  No soap. These lugs enjoyed their work.

  Time passed. I wished whoever it was would quit his bawling. What a sad sack. It got on my nerves. And the Cherubim had my nerves a little raw. At least I’d have matching shiners. I tried to split off a piece of myself and send it ahead to my Magisterium to make sure Flo had a raw steak waiting for me in the fridge, but the Cherubim caught it before it could slither away. They shoved it back into place, and none too gently. I guess they got bored, because one of them, either Tweedledee or Tweedledum, said,

  THIS ONE DOES NOT POSSESS THE TRUMPET. IT DOES NOT EXIST HERE.

  Trumpet?… Son of a gun.

  Oh Bayliss, you smart little egg. Some shamus you are. You couldn’t find a virgin in a convent.

  Gabriel had been the guardian of the Jericho Trumpet. But if I understood my new pals, it went missing when Gabby kicked it. And flametop, being the cork sent to fill the hole he left behind, was the natural place to start looking for it. Tossing her place came up short. So they came here on the theory maybe he hadn’t had time to hide it before he met his fate. But that wasn’t going so well, either. Good thing I came along to cheer them up.

  This was bad news all around. Gabriel’s Trumpet wasn’t chicken feed. No wonder the whole Choir had turned out to throw a blanket over the damage caused by his death. We were looking down the barrel of another—

  A searing white light, the purest light possible, the light of Creation, scorched away everything but the fact of my existence. The Cherubim dropped me. They wrapped themselves in their wings; the sheeting flames of their faces shrank to feeble candle embers. I had just enough time to hit the deck before the thunder of a thousand Creations, a thousand Let There Be Lights, shook Gabriel’s Magisterium.

  And then the Pleroma was formless and empty, and a darkness was over the surface of the world. And then there was light, and I saw that the light hurt like a son of a bitch.

  Someone had awoken METATRON: the Voice of God.

  I knew that dame was trouble the minute I saw her.

  6

  ANGEL OF DEATH

  He’s a fallen angel. And he’s terrified.

  Bayliss exited the wreckage of Molly’s Magisterium by way of the cathedral in her pantry. The upside-down rain continued to fall, but the tangerine sky had darkened into bands of cinnamon and sienna. A pair of fingernail moons hung low in the sky like commas sent to punctuate the gloaming. Every step she took stirred up more butterfly dust; motes of scarlet and indigo sparkled in a ray of sunlight glancing across the bow of a cruise down the Rhine. The people on the boat wore old-timey clothes: plum-colored suits with wide lapels, paisley shirts, and blue jeans that flared at the bottom. Their party smelled of river water, beer, pot, and diesel fuel. The party cut a wide wake through air and water, and when Molly inhaled it she could sense the electric tingle of something that might have been cocaine. It sounded like they were having a good time. Molly despised them for it. She resented their ignorance.

  Turning in a slow circle, she surveyed the ruins of what had once been a place of perfect contentment. The attackers had trashed her Magisterium. The happies
t period of her life, the centerpiece of her emotional life as an adult, lay in fragments beneath the wreckage. The relentless aching heat of second-degree sunburn received by falling asleep on the beach during a spring break trip to Mexico sat where her first taste of scotch had been. The cap and gown of her college graduation dripped greasy dollops of rancid olive oil from a broken bottle in the cupboard six years later. Checking the mail on a Wednesday afternoon had become the silky taste of Belgian chocolate.

  Fixing this was going to take fucking forever. She’d have to relive her entire life just to put things back in order. Even then … what if she couldn’t do it? What if it was like this forever? She couldn’t even fix a small burn in the floorboards. How could she rebuild an entire life? She’d be stuck in this kaleidoscopic junkyard forever and ever, and nobody she loved would ever know she was here, and she’d never be able to escape, and they’d come for her and attack her again and she didn’t know why, and she couldn’t make sense of anything. Her breaths came faster.

  This was hell. She’d died and gone to hell. God … An icy fist of loneliness clutched her heart, squeezing until she moaned.

  Molly tried to take a steadying breath. It became a gulp. So did another. The gulps became sobs. She slid to her knees amidst the soft cushion of insect wings. She toppled to her side, crying. Her tears sizzled like acid, burning fragrant holes in the butterfly carpet.

  She’d been alive, with her own life, with a new job at the museum, and she was ready to start dating again and maybe even looking forward to it because she hadn’t even thought about Ria for a day or two; then Mom died, and they’d gone to Australia for the funeral, and she could tell Martin was backsliding, but it was just the two of them from now on, so she was going to help her big brother because she loved him, because he needed her help, and she had promised herself she wouldn’t be so distant from him and maybe other people, too. But then Bayliss showed up and now she was dead and nothing he said made any sense and somebody had been killed and she was assaulted, and all she had were her memories but those had been ransacked.