Demons

by Gardner Dozois

  And so she was made aware of the full measure of his jest, and his fastidious disdain, the one she had tempted with a rope of gold.

  Jaspre had flown, a weightless butterfly in a waste of granite. Then there came a waste of coldness, where frost formed on her wings. They presently snapped off from her like broken shutters, and she smote the stony floor of Hell and crawled about there. But then there came the waste of a great and blazing light, and Jaspre opened her eyes upon a blanched sun with the face of a skull, and against this sun huge fleshless hands stretched out in supplication or in hate.

  She had been cast out into the wood of dead trees, which seemed to her to be all the world there was for her now. Her hair had been sheared, coarse sacking covered her skin. Bracelets of agony held her wrists. Her hands were numb and flaccid, and there was no strength in her, not even the strength to lament. So she lay and watched the white sun creep across the fingertips of the trees. The earth was not as he had told her, her lover, yet she loved him only the more for his lies, which had been beautiful and kind. And if she must die here in the wilderness of the bone trees, she did not care, if he should only continue to live happily in some dream or magic place he had conjured.

  "But I will take you there, my child," he said, his voice, for her, like music.

  And she smiled with joy, supposing she imagined it, until he lifted her in his arms.

  For a few moments she lay against him as the pain melted from her wrists and body and a warmth and strength flowed like wine through her limbs, her heart, her reverie, and then she raised her head and looked at him. She knew him immediately, no other but the wanderer who had found her in her garden, the young man she had loved. She knew him also as he truly was, since now he had set aside the screen of illusion. Tall and pale, his hair blacker than blackness, appareled in the dark of the moon and gemmed with its light, his eyes the oceans and the shores of night, his face no longer hidden, more wonderful than the face of any statue.

  She was not afraid. Love cannot fear. She asked him nothing.

  But as he held her now, the bandaging upon her healed wrists turned to jewels, the sacking robe to velvet. And as in her dream, her hair grew like a wind and poured over like a tide, a streaming silver that was gold, until it brushed the ground.

  The bleached trees parted and darkness ran through. A black horse, flamed with a sapphire mane and tail, and hung with stars, stood against the sinking moon.

  He mounted Jaspre before him.

  "The soil, the roots of the trees, will open," he said. "My land lies there, beneath the earth. Whatever the woman told you of it you must unremember. The country is not as once it was, nor as you have seen it."

  Then the horse danced on the ground and the ground gave way. Far off, Jaspre glimpsed—not darkness—but a glimmering multicolored luminescence, the flowering trees of an endless spring, the towers of a rainbow city, more beautiful than in any book, and winged with a gilded morning, there in the black pit of the world.

  "And this is your kingdom," the young girl sighed.

  "This is my kingdom," said the Prince of Darkness.

  And to this they went.

  Basileus

  by

  Robert Silverberg

  In Christian lore, demons are literally "fallen angels," angels who have opted against God. The differences between demons and angels are thus purely doctrinal differences . . . so that one might fairly say that a demon is just an angel with a Bad Attitude, one who has declared for evil rather than for good.

  Count them together or count them separately, though, one thing that is certain about demons and angels is that there are a lot of them. One rough count, by Kabbalists in the fourteenth century, estimated that there were 301,655,722 angels. Fallen or not, that's quite a few angels to keep tabs on, so many that perhaps the best way to keep track of them all would be to use a computer—

  Or perhaps that would turn out to be a very bad idea indeed. . . .

  One of the most prolific authors alive, Robert Silverberg can lay claim to more than 450 fiction and nonfiction books and over 3,000 magazine pieces. Within SF, Silverberg rose to his greatest prominence during the late sixties and early seventies, winning four Nebula Awards and a Hugo Award, publishing dozens of major novels and anthologies—1973's Dying Inside, in particular, is widely considered to be one of the best novels of the seventies—and editing New Dimensions, perhaps the most influential original anthology series of its time. In 1980, after four years of self-imposed "retirement," Silverberg started writing again, and the first of his new novels, Lord Valentine's Castle, became a nationwide best-seller. Silverberg's other books include The Book of Skulls, Downward to the Earth, Tower of Glass, The World Inside, Born with the Dead, Shadrach in the Furnace, Lord of Darkness (a historical novel), and Valentine Pontifex, the sequel to Lord Valentine's Castle. His collections include Unfamiliar Territory, Capricorn Games, Majipoor Chronicles, The Best of Robert Silverberg, and At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party. His most recent book is Tom O'Bedlam's Song, a novel.

  In the shimmering lemon-yellow October light, Cunningham touches the keys of his terminal and summons angels. An instant to load the program, an instant to bring the file up, and there they are, ready to spout from the screen at his command: Apollyon, Anauel, Uriel, and all the rest. Uriel is the angel of thunder and terror; Apollyon is the Destroyer, the angel of the bottomless pit; Anauel is the angel of bankers and commission brokers. Cunningham is fascinated by the multifarious duties and tasks, both exalted and humble, that are assigned to the angels. "Every visible thing in the world is put under the charge of an angel," said St. Augustine in The Eight Questions.

  Cunningham has 1,114 angels in his computer now. He adds a few more each night, though he knows that he has a long way to go before he has them all. In the fourteenth century the number of angels was reckoned by the Kabbalists, with some precision, at 301,655,722. Albertus Magnus had earlier calculated that each choir of angels held 6,666 legions, and each legion 6,666 angels; even without knowing the number of choirs, one can see that that produces rather a higher total. And in the Talmud, Rabbi Jochanan proposed that new angels are born "with every utterance that goes forth from the mouth of the Holy One, blessed be He."

  If Rabbi Jochanan is correct, the number of angels is infinite. Cunningham's personal computer, though it has extraordinary add-on memory capacity and is capable, if he chooses, of tapping into the huge mainframe machines of the Defense Department, has no very practical way of handling an infinity. But he is doing his best. To have 1,114 angels on line already, after only eight months of part-time programming, is no small achievement.

  One of his favorites of the moment is Harahel, the angel of archives, libraries, and rare cabinets. Cunningham has designated Harahel also the angel of computers: it seems appropriate. He invokes Harahel often, to discuss the evolving niceties of data processing with him. But he has many other favorites, and his tastes run somewhat to the sinister: Azrael, the angel of death, for example, and Arioch, the angel of vengeance, and Zebuleon, one of the nine angels who will govern at the end of the world. It is Cunningham's job, from eight to four every working day, to devise programs for the interception of incoming Soviet nuclear warheads, and that, perhaps, has inclined him toward the more apocalyptic members of the angelic host.

  He invokes Harahel now. He has bad news for him. The invocation that he uses is a standard one that he found in Arthur Edward Waite's The Lemegeton, or The Lesser Key of Solomon, I and he has dedicated one of his function keys to its text, so that a single keystroke suffices to load it. "I do invocate, conjure, and command thee, O thou Spirit N, to appear and to show thyself visibly unto me before this Circle in fair and comely shape," is the way it begins, and it proceeds to utilize various secret and potent names of God in the summoning of Spirit N—such names as Zabaoth and Elion and, of course, Adonai—and it concludes, "I do potently exorcise thee that thou appearest here to fulfill my will in all things which seem good unto me. Wherefore,
come thou, visibly, peaceably, and affably, now, without delay to manifest that which I desire, speaking with a clear and perfect voice, intelligibly, and to mine understanding." All that takes but a microsecond, and another moment to read in the name of Harahel as Spirit N, and there the angel is on the screen.

  "I am here at your summons," he announces expectantly.

  Cunningham works with his angels from five to seven every evening. Then he has dinner. He lives alone, in a neat little flat a few blocks west of the Bayshore Freeway, and does not spend much of his time socializing. He thinks of himself as a pleasant man, a sociable man, and he may very well be right about that, but the pattern of his life has been a solitary one. He is thirty-seven years old, five feet eleven, with red hair, pale blue eyes, and a light dusting of freckles on his cheeks. He did his undergraduate work at Cal Tech, his postgraduate studies at Stanford, and for the last nine years he has been involved in ultrasensitive military-computer projects in northern California. He has never married. Sometimes he works with his angels again after dinner, from eight to ten, but hardly ever any later than that. At ten he goes to bed. He is a very methodical person.

  He has given Harahel the physical form of his own first computer, a little Radio Shack TRS-80, with wings flanking the screen. He had thought originally to make the appearance of his angels more abstract—showing Harahel as a sheaf of kilobytes, for example—but like many of Cunningham's best and most austere ideas, it had turned out impractical in the execution, since abstract concepts did not translate well into graphics for him.

  "I want to notify you," Cunningham says, "of a shift in jurisdiction. " He speaks English with his angels. He has it on good, though apocryphal, authority that the primary language of the angels is Hebrew, but his computer's audio algorithms have no Hebrew capacity, nor does Cunningham. But they speak English readily enough with him: they have no choice. "From now on," Cunningham tells Harahel, "your domain is limited to hardware only."

  Angry green lines rapidly cross and recross Harahel's screen, "By whose authority do you—"

  "It isn't a question of authority," Cunningham replies smoothly. "It's a question of precision. I've just read Vretil into the data base, and I have to code his functions. He's the recording angel, after all. So, to some degree, then, he overlaps your territory."

  "Ah," says Harahel, sounding melancholy. "I was hoping you wouldn't bother about him."

  "How can I overlook such an important angel? 'Scribe of the knowledge of the Most High,' according to the Book of Enoch. 'Keeper of the heavenly books and records.' 'Quicker in wisdom than the other archangels.' "

  "If he's so quick," says Harahel sullenly, "give him the hardware. That's what governs the response time, you know."

  "I understand. But he maintains the lists. That's data base."

  "And where does the data base live? The hardware!"

  "Listen, this isn't easy for me," Cunningham says. "But I have to be fair. I know you'll agree that some division of responsibilities is in order. And I'm giving him all data bases and related software. You keep the rest."

  "Screens. Terminals. CPUs. Big deal."

  "But without you, he's nothing, Harahel. Anyway, you've always been in charge of cabinets, haven't you?"

  "And archives and libraries," the angel says. "Don't forget that."

  "I'm not. But what's a library? Is it the books and shelves and stacks, or the words on the pages? We have to distinguish the container from the thing contained."

  "A grammarian," Harahel sighs. "A hairsplitter. A casuist."

  "Look, Vretil wants the hardware, too. But he's willing to compromise. Are you?"

  "You start to sound less and less like our programmer and more and more like the Almighty every day," says Harahel.

  "Don't blaspheme," Cunningham tells him. "Please. Is it agreed? Hardware only?"

  "You win," says the angel. "But you always do, naturally."

  Naturally. Cunningham is the one with his hands on the keyboard, controlling things. The angels, though they are eloquent enough and have distinct and passionate personalities, are mere magnetic impulses deep within. In any contest with Cunningham they don't stand a chance. Cunningham, though he tries always to play the game by the rules, knows that, and so do they.

  It makes him uncomfortable to think about it, but the role he plays is definitely godlike in all essential ways. He puts the angels into the computer; he gives them their tasks, their personalities, and their physical appearances; he summons them or leaves them uncalled, as he wishes.

  A godlike role, yes. But Cunningham resists confronting that notion. He does not believe he is trying to be God; he does not even want to think about God. His family had been on comfortable terms with God—Uncle Tim was a priest, there was an archbishop somewhere back a few generations, his parents and sisters moved cozily within the divine presence as within a warm bath—but he himself, unable to quantify the Godhead, preferred to sidestep any thought of it. There were other, more immediate matters to engage his concern. His mother had wanted him to go into the priesthood, of all things, but Cunningham had averted that by demonstrating so visible and virtuosic a skill at mathematics that even she could see he was destined for science. Then she had prayed for a Nobel Prize in physics for him; but he had preferred computer technology. "Well," she said, "a Nobel in computers. I ask the Virgin daily."

  "There's no Nobel in computers, Mom," he told her. But he suspects she still offers novenas for it.

  The angel project had begun as a lark, but had escalated swiftly into an obsession. He was reading Gustav Davidson's old Dictionary of Angels, and when he came upon the description of the angel Adramelech, who had rebelled with Satan and had been cast from heaven, Cunningham thought it might be amusing to build a computer simulation and talk with him. Davidson said that Adramelech was sometimes shown as a winged and bearded lion, and sometimes as a mule with feathers, and sometimes as a peacock, and that one poet had described him as "the enemy of God, greater in malice, guile, ambition, and mischief than Satan, a fiend more curst, a deeper hypocrite." That was appealing. Well, why not build him? The graphics were easy—Cunningham chose the winged-lion form—but getting the personality constructed involved a month of intense labor and some consultations with the artificial-intelligence people over at Kestrel Institute. But finally Adramelech was on line, suave and diabolical, talking amiably of his days as an Assyrian god and his conversations with Beelzebub, who had named him Chancellor of the Order of the Fly (Grand Cross).

  Next, Cunningham did Asmodeus, another fallen angel, said to be the inventor of dancing, gambling, music, drama, French fashions, and other frivolities. Cunningham made him look like a very dashing Beverly Hills Iranian, with a pair of tiny wings at his collar. It was Asmodeus who suggested that Cunningham continue the project; so he brought Gabriel and Raphael on line to provide some balance between good and evil, and then Forcas, the angel who renders people invisible, restores lost property, and teaches logic and rhetoric in Hell; and by that time Cunningham was hooked.

  He surrounded himself with arcane lore: M. R. James's editions of the Apocrypha, Waite's Book of Ceremonial Magic and Holy Kabbalah, the Mystical Theology and Celestial Hierarchies of Dionysius the Areopagite, and dozens of related works that he called up from the Stanford data base in a kind of manic fervor. As he codified his systems, he became able to put in five, eight, a dozen angels a night; one June evening, staying up well past his usual time, he managed thirty-seven. As the population grew, it took on weight and substance, for one angel cross-filed another, and they behaved now as though they held long conversations with one another even when Cunningham was occupied elsewhere.

  The question of actual belief in angels, like that of belief in God Himself, never arose in him. His project was purely a technical challenge, not a theological exploration. Once, at lunch, he told a co-worker what he was doing, and got a chilly blank stare. "Angels? Angels? Flying around with big flapping wings, passing miracles? You aren't seri
ously telling me that you believe in angels, are you, Dan?"

  To which Cunningham replied, "You don't have to believe in angels to make use of them. I'm not always sure I believe in electrons and protons. I know I've never seen any. But I make use of them."

  "And what use do you make of angels?"

  But Cunningham had lost interest in the discussion.

  He divides his evenings between calling up his angels for conversations and programming additional ones into his pantheon. That requires continuous intensive research, for the literature of angels is extraordinarily large, and he is thorough in everything he does. The research is time-consuming, for he wants his angels to meet every scholarly test of authenticity. He pores constantly over such works as Ginzberg's seven-volume Legends of the Jews, Clement of Alexandria's Prophetic Eclogues, Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine.

  It is the early part of the evening. He brings up Hagith, ruler of the planet Venus and commander of 4,000 legions of spirits, and asks him details of the transmutation of metals, which is Hagith's specialty. He summons Hadranel, who in Kabbalistic lore is a porter at the second gate of Heaven, and whose voice, when he proclaims the will of the Lord, penetrates through 200,000 universes; he questions the angel about his meeting with Moses, who uttered the Supreme Name at him and made him tremble. And then Cunningham sends for Israfel the four-winged, whose feet are under the seventh earth and whose head reaches to the pillars of the divine throne. It will be Israfel's task to blow the trumpet that announces, the arrival of the Day of Judgment. Cunningham asks him to take a few trial riffs now—"just for practice," he says, but Israfel declines, saying he cannot touch his instrument until he receives the signal, and the command sequence for that, says the angel, is nowhere to be found in the software Cunningham has thus far constructed.