Bad Cow

by Andrew Hindle

  Jarvis did his best to treat the wingèd apparition to a piercing does-sir-know-what-time-it-is head-to-footer, but even as he performed the action he felt it turning into a respectful – nay, deferential – bow.

  “Can I help you, sir?” he asked, recovering as best he could from his stumble into disproportionate reverence.

  “Evening,” the extraordinary stubble-faced gorilla-man with wings said in a mushy, gravelly voice. “I’m here to see the Vandemars.”

  “Indeed,” Jarvis said, trying once again to wrap himself in butlery armour but silently certain, on some deep-down level of his brain that hooked directly into the large muscles of his body without any approval process from his higher consciousness, that if the creature told him to go and stand outside in the garden while he murdered the entire household, Jarvis would do it unquestioningly. Although he might muster up a sarcastic rejoinder when the bloodstained intruder left again. If it left again.

  Oh, but to be a fly on the wall when this poor thing tried to murder Ash. Or, for that matter, Aunt Agñasta.

  “Yeah, indeed,” the apparition said. “You going to let me in, Loadsworth?”

  Jarvis thought about it for a few moments, his treacherous feet trying to walk out from underneath him all the while. The glorious, horrible ape-Angel stood and squinted up at him with deep amber eyes, its leathery black face worn and folded and almost infinitely sardonic.

  “Loadsworth was the head footman,” he heard himself say weakly, “the butler in Putnam-Finchley Common was just called ‘The Butler’ and never actually appeared on–”

  “Yeah, no shit,” the creature said. “Why do you think I went with ‘Loadsworth’? Look, I think I should be getting credit for delivering a cultural joke from the right century at this point.”

  Jarvis turned slightly as he heard a footfall behind him, and was mildly surprised to see Roon stranding in the entranceway. He was also mildly surprised that his half-turn extended into a veritable reel and required him to put a highly unprofessional hand on the heavy doorframe.

  “Gabriel,” he heard Roon say.

  He blacked out.

  GOZU GOA, YALA PINIAN

  Roon came back into the dining room with Jarvis cradled in her arms like a great gangly baby. While she was slightly smaller and more delicate-looking than her two sisters, she was easily the strongest of the three. Ash had once seen her lift a hundred-and-thirty-kilogram engine block out of a Husky van without apparent effort when she thought nobody was watching.

  Aunt Agñasta rose quickly to her feet. “What in–”

  That was when their guest shambled in behind Roon, with swinging arms and flaring wings. If he’d been slightly more severely bowed under the apparent weight of the great grey-black limbs, he would have been able to prop himself up with his knuckles.

  Ash was already up, feeling a strange numb disconnection from events as she moved towards her sister and their friend. He was unconscious, her immediate reading of the situation and Roon’s body language told her, not dead. She stopped short when the sombre-suited stranger with the forehead and the arms and the wings appeared in the entrance to the dining room behind Roon and Jarvis. Ash registered dispassionately that something strange, something circumstances-altering strange, was happening … but it didn’t completely pass here-and-now scrutiny.

  At first glance, and doing one’s best to ignore the euphoric subconscious swell that was rather similar to being hit with a dose of cryptoadiplase,54 their guest looked like the victim of a bad racelift. Some people, particularly those who were in their sixties and seventies now and had gotten the beta version of ethnicity reallocation surgery in the 2150s, wound up degenerating severely as the alterations were rejected by the body. She’d never seen a racelift this caricature-extreme, nor had she seen one go this bad, but it was the first and only comparison that leapt to mind.

  Then, of course, the full extent of the new arrival’s not-quite-humanity became apparent, and the glamour shone out with renewed ferocity, and the huge ragged sweep of the wings imposed themselves on the background. No, they seemed to say directly into Ash’s head, you didn’t imagine us. You’re not getting off that easily.

  “Who are you?” Ariel asked. She’d risen to her feet a bit more smoothly than Aunt Agñasta – standing up, Ash was unable to avoid fondly reflecting, being very much one of Ariel’s three or four main professional talents – and had not dropped back down into her seat the way Aunt Agñasta had when the intruder’s aura of indefinable majesty had buffeted her.

  “Please don’t be alarmed,” the heavy-browed, black-leather-faced creature said in a low, rough voice that sounded like it was being forced through a palate more accustomed to howling and screeching.

  “I’m not alarmed,” Ariel said, eyes narrowing.

  “What did you do to Jarvis?” Ash demanded.

  “It shouldn’t have hit him that fast,” the swarthy little figure said, scowling mightily and letting its wings open and close. “He must have been suffering from low blood sugar or … what’s that stupid new disease called…?”

  “He suffers from muirosia,” Ariel confirmed sternly, while Roon moved through into the lounge room and set Jarvis on a couch, Aunt Agñasta went on staring at the intruder in disbelief from her seat at the dinner table, and Ash did her best to assess the situation as it unfolded. Like it was an honest-to-goodness actual real tactical or combat situation. Well, she had to start somewhere. “And it’s not a disease,” Ariel went on, “it’s a disorder of the kidneys and it shouldn’t cause that sort of reaction unless–”

  “It’s poisoning is what it is,” the strange, beautiful creature growled. “Pollution-clogged internal organs, and okay, my appearance and intensity wouldn’t have done him any favours, but he’ll be fine unless he’s Stage 3, and he doesn’t look to have silver fingernails so he’s not Stage 3,” it looked up at Ash, who had moved to the vicinity of the wide doorway from the dining room to the lounge, to keep both Jarvis and the intruder in view. “You’re alright?”

  “It’s time for you to tell us who you are,” Ash said.

  “Fine,” the creature grumbled, “but can I just…” it cleared its throat with a sound like a distant, and very soggy, avalanche. “Gozu goa, yala Pinian?” it asked.

  “Nope,” Ash said. “No idea. Identity.”

  “Damn it,” the gnarled figure said in a low grumble. “Worth a try. Alright, let’s do this, one more time. I’m the Archangel Gabriel,” it spread its long, suit-clad arms in an inviting gesture, wings flaring behind. Now she was looking at them, Ash couldn’t help but feel like they seemed ragged and somehow dusty, even though there was still some indefinable splendour to them. “Go,” it said. “Fire away. Haven’t revealed myself to a non-Angel in a while, clergymen notwithstanding. Let’s hear it.”

  Ash looked at her sisters, keeping ‘Gabriel’ in her peripheral vision. ‘Gabriel’, for its – his – part, had moved to the opposite side of the living room entrance, and seemed concerned about Jarvis. This, as far as Ash was concerned, was a sign in his favour although it was still possible he was just keeping an eye on his victims and assessing their ongoing threat status. While Ash and Roon were very private people, particularly when they were at home, Ariel got some weird and very determined stalkers.

  “I believe him,” Ariel said with a shrug.

  “You do?” Ash and Agñasta said simultaneously.

  “Well look at him,” Ariel said reasonably. “The suit’s a bit much, but who would pretend to be the Archangel Gabriel while looking like … like…”

  “Like Rock Thongo?” Gabriel said.

  Ash frowned. “Who?”

  “The Heavy Metal Caveman,” Aunt Agñasta spoke up from the table. “The Thongo Dossier.”

  Gabriel pointed at Agñasta, while still alternating his deep-set gaze between Ariel, Ash, Roon and the unconscious Jarvis. “Thank you.”

  “That is a very old serial,” Agñasta said.

  “It wasn’t my first choi
ce because I didn’t think anyone here would get it,” he scowled again, face folding deeply. “And what’s wrong with my suit?”

  “Nothing,” Ariel said, “but if you wanted to call attention to the three-day growth on your neck and the backs of your hands, you could have accessorised with some flashing neon epaulettes and cufflinks.”

  To Ash’s surprise and acute discomfort, the Archangel Gabriel snorted out a laugh that became an extremely phlegmy sob.

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” he said, and wiped his huge flared nose to the accompaniment of an unthinkable suction-noise. “It’s really you.”

  Ash glanced at Ariel, then Roon, then Aunt Agñasta. Aunt Agñasta was rising slowly to her feet again.

  “Maybe we should go into the lounge,” Ariel suggested, “and take this sitting down.”

  “Alright,” Ash said, “but I’m taking food,” she started towards the table, still keeping the snuffling Archangel in her sights and very much aware that she’d just thought of herself as keeping an Archangel in her sights. Roon, over in the lounge room, snapped her fingers and raised two when Ash glanced at her. Ash nodded, and began loading up Roon’s plate as well as her own.

  Aunt Agñasta tsked. “You girls are incorrigible,” she said. “At least offer our guest something.”

  “How rude of us,” Ariel said. “Would you like some dinner, Archangel Gabriel?”

  “Thanks, I don’t actually need to ingest food very often on account of being dead already, but it’s been a long evening,” he glanced inquisitively at the table. “Are they pork patties?”

  “Meel,” Ash replied.

  Gabriel shuddered. “I take it back,” he said, shaking his head, “the evening hasn’t been that long. I thought you were rich.”

  “So we should eat food made out of pigs?” Ariel raised an eyebrow.

  “Well, yes,” Gabriel snapped. “That’s sort of been the defining characteristic of rich people since the fall of Rome,” he shook his head again. “Never mind. It’s actually very laudable, you eating low-impact. I fully support it, I was just surprised. You’d better sit down, ma’am,” he added to Aunt Agñasta, who was already crossing to the lounge. She gave him a moderate-to-pointed look as she settled in an armchair close to Jarvis’s head. “It’s possible that you will experience the same symptoms as Loadsworth in just a little while, even if you’re not a muirosiac. Nothing to worry about, I just want you to be ready.”

  Aunt Agñasta nodded, her expression softening. “This is what a gentleman looks like, ladies,” she said, pointing.

  “Oh that’s what it looks like,” Ash said.

  “I was way off,” Ariel agreed.

  Gabriel looked like he was about to tear up grotesquely again, so Ariel ushered him to a seat while Ash quickly finished loading her two plates. She entered the lounge room in time to admire the muscle-memory economy of motion as the stocky Archangel hefted himself into an armchair and settled his wings behind and to either side of his body. The armchair suddenly looked rather like a throne belonging to some Dark Lord of pulp tradfan.

  “So,” Ash said, passing one plate to Roon and sitting down on the end of a couch near Gabriel’s armchair, “you’re an ancient-model type of person, aren’t you? You don’t get to update your look according to the body-hair and forehead fashions of the time?”

  “No,” Gabriel said dryly, “I lack that particular skill, unlike some,” before she could get to the bottom of this remark, Gabriel squinted at Ash, then looked at Ariel, then Roon. “You’re sisters,” he said.

  “Yes – except for her,” Ash angled her head towards Aunt Agñasta, and grinned slowly when she heard the elderly woman’s face pinch disapprovingly.

  “Triplets?”

  “That’s right,” Ariel said. “I came first–”

  “Then Ashley, then Roon,” the Archangel guessed.

  “That’s right,” Ariel repeated, blinking in surprise.

  “And now you’re going to explain how you knew that,” Ash added patiently.

  “It was a guess, to be honest,” Gabriel said. “I mean come on, it’s a fifty-fifty … alright, but it was an educated guess, based on what I do know. Public knowledge of the three of you, before you get upset,” he added. “I wasn’t – no offence, but I wasn’t expecting you to be female,” he chuckled and shook his head. “Not entirely sure why. No real reason for you not to be.”

  “I know I couldn’t think of one,” Ariel said, wide-eyed.

  “That…” he paused. “You’re being facetious.”

  “He really does know you,” Ash remarked, then twirled her fingers at the Archangel. Aunt Agñasta disapproved again.

  Gabriel sat in quiet thought for a moment before answering.

  “In the late Twenty-First Century, the first cases of Binarthism began appearing,” he said eventually. “Superstrokes. Metabolic fissuring events. Ulster Syndrome. The works.”

  “They called them genetic stress fractures,” Aunt Agñasta said. She was something of a historian, although she wasn’t formally educated in the discipline.

  “That’s right. I think they eventually laid the blame on a whole new family of highly-developed resistant and adaptive ultramicrobacteria, or synthetic viruses – back when there were actually divisions between all those things. They got into the human genome, caused a whole new slew of hereditary disorders and diseases. A lot of them were cut off at the source, so virulent they didn’t manage to keep their hosts alive long enough to pass their genes down. Some … well, the latest attempt to correct for third- and fourth-generation Binarthism was–”

  “Racelifts,” Ariel said. “Ethnicity reallocation surgery. I thought you’d copped a bad case of that, when I first saw you.”

  “Me too,” Ash admitted.

  Gabriel grunted. “I get that a lot,” he said. “It’s actually made my life a bit easier, although the militant nonjudgementality of the mid-Twenty-First was better. They’d digitally assassinate you for saying I looked like a monkey. My point is, the species ran into some seriously rocky shallows there for a few decades, and the full extent of it is still unknown. You three, though … well, you all seem fine.”

  “They said my scar was a recessive fracture,” Ash commented, very much against her better judgement which was telling her to demand the Archangel get to the damn point. “Before the injury exacerbated it, it was there already–”

  Gabriel waved a massive hand. “It’s not Binarthic,” he said. “The Second Disciple has had that scar forever. Well, not forever, but since the last Dominion of Nnal at the very least.”

  Ash shivered, and saw her sisters reacting in the same way although Aunt Agñasta remained unmoved and politely baffled. Ash narrowed her eyes as she realised that Gabriel was watching her closely. Noticing her discomfort at what he’d just said.

  “You know we have no idea what you’re talking about,” Ariel said.

  “Your sister picked up some special wounds,” he said, “trophies, really … and they followed her through the incarnations,” he chuckled and shook his head once more. “I actually started out, after we first lost track of you, trying to find three people – any three, as long as one of them had a scar like that. I didn’t know for sure if every iteration would have the scar, after that first one. And then I realised that you weren’t even turning up together anymore, so it got even more difficult. After a while I figured the whole thing was stupid, so I stopped looking. I didn’t see that scar again until Barry Dell.

  “When the sickness in this world started polluting the gene pool, it was actually something I thought would help,” he said. “Call it a silver lining to the cloud, maybe. Or call it cold-blooded pragmatism if you like. I thought, if things degenerated further, the three of you would start to stand out – emerge from the general populace. Especially as the formula took shape and it started to look as though we could predict the cycle of reincarnation, maybe even control it.”

  “Still have no idea what you’re talking about,” Ariel said
. “Except you’re obviously saying we three are reincarnations of three other people. And one of them has a scar like Ash’s.”

  “It was theorised,” Gabriel said, “by another of the Angels, that you could … guide the formation of the human bodies you were using to hide yourselves. Not only centre your immortal selves around a newly-extruding soul and incorporate it into your chain, but take control over the gestation itself, to some degree. It was probably entirely unconscious, at the early stages of the focussing.”

  “The focussing?” Ariel frowned.

  Gabriel grimaced. “That’s … a long story.”

  “I get the feeling that the more we try to hurry you, the more tangents you’re going to break off into and the more long stories we’re all going to wind up needing to hear,” Ash said. “So maybe just start with the part where we, or someone, can make our own bodies?”

  The Archangel looked obscurely approving. “That’s an even longer story,” he admitted. “And I don’t understand it on any but the most superficial level. Imagine an immortal entity, in three parts. Actually somewhat more than three parts, but let’s keep this as simple as possible.”

  “Please let’s,” Ariel said.

  “Imagine that entity only inhabits flesh,” he went on. “Inhabits very intimately, yes, but ultimately it just … wears bodies like clothing. It does so for the length of lifetimes, usually extremely prolonged lifetimes, but ultimately when it loses the flesh to some mishap or other, it’s able to just move into a new shell. Normally, those shells are durable and highly exclusive, specially made to order, functionally everlasting. But then – imagine the entity is exiled. Its wardrobe confiscated. No longer permitted to have bodies of this sort.

  “Exiled among humans.

  “Now, all the entity-or-entities have to work with is human biology. When each body ages and dies, the entity moves on and finds a new disguise – not displacing an existing human soul, but starting from conception and making itself a new … well, self.”