Bad Cow
Page 52
They stood together for a moment, looking into the goo as if it could tell them the future. Roon would have settled for it telling her the present … but she wouldn’t have believed anything it said.
“If I’m being honest,” Gabriel said, talking swiftly and sounding surprised at his own words, “I considered dropping you in it,” he raised his hands. “Not seriously,” he hastened, as though she’d drawn a gun rather than raising a single eyebrow. “Like I said, I don’t know what it would do. I suspect what it would do would be to send the Pinian on to her next incarnation, while the human remains…” he looked thoughtful. “Do you know, it’s sort of a Pinian Disciple already, in there.”
Roon spread her hands and stared at him in exasperation. As if there was any way she could know anything about any of this. Gabriel chuckled.
“Yeah,” he went on reminiscently, “an earlier attempt to bring the Pinians out of hiding resulted in … well, we’re not really sure. A slice of the Pinian – the Second Disciple, actually; your sister Ash – was cut free and wound up outside the veil, while the meat stayed behind and died. Then they sent the Disciple-bit back through … the full Second Disciple had already reincarnated by that point … so what we ended up with was an ordinary Angel with no memory of his life as a Pinian, and a Pinian back in hiding. A fuck-up from beginning to end, really. Oh, and a Demon got made as a byproduct.”
Roon glanced questioningly at the sludge. Gabriel nodded.
“Right,” he said, “they got into it, and this is how that particular experiment ended. Here lies a glorified piece of surgically-extracted Second Disciple, and a diabolised American teenager named Troy.”
Roon nodded, not really understanding, but piling the data points carefully in an increasingly crowded corner of her mind for later.
“So I think what it would do to you or your sisters would be much the same,” he went on. “The Pinians would be merrily reborn elsewhere, while some poor fully-human meat-shadow of you would be dissolved into this mess. It would live forever, technically … but it might be just as accurate to say it would die in there but not be allowed to cease. It would just live, and boil, forever. Practically.
“No. This stuff … we don’t really understand it, since human science cannot yet quantify it and neither human nor Angel, Demon nor Pinian can touch it. It’s not even really real, it’s … it’s the shade through which Demons swim. It’s nothingness, made real, and made toxic. It cannot be borne by this world, and so it boils. Held here by the physical persistence of the Angel and the Demon. Our bodies aren’t flesh, aren’t meat … they’re solid expressions of the souls we were.”
They stood in reflective silence again for a time. Roon wondered what would happen if she threw a chair, or her unfinished glass of wine upstairs, or a sensor assembly into the stew. She wondered why it wasn’t dissolving porcelain, but apparently dissolved organic matter.
She stored it all away.
Then, distracted by the thought of dropping furniture into the sludge, she stepped over to the dusty little table in the corner. She touched the envelope that lay there. Nails: Eulogy 2, it read in faded but impeccably tidy olde-worlde lettering.
“That belonged to Dale Waddington,” Gabriel said while Roon was still trying to decode the envelope’s cryptic legend. “Or Seam, he usually insisted on being called. He was a … friend of the Angel who’s churning away in that tub. Barry Dell.”
Roon looked up from the picture. Gabriel nodded.
“That’s the one,” he said. “The Pinian. Second Disciple, like I said … Barry died, then his echo came back as an Angel, and your sister-to-be was born as some other human baby in the nineteen nineties, and poor old Barry wound up in that,” Roon gestured queryingly at the envelope. “They called him ‘Nails’,” Gabriel explained, “because he worked in a nail factory. Nicknames were a big deal in Australia before the Online Anonymity Act and the whole thing got ugly.”
Roon nodded. The good old days of the Benevolent Web had come flaming down around everyone’s shoulders in a series of hacks, collapses, culturequakes, government acts, wars in teacups. By the time the wreckage cleared and this scarcely-understood megaweapon was brought under control, people wondered how a generation that had lived with the atom bomb had ever managed to underestimate its technological successor. How they’d ever failed to see it.
By then, information was whatever the shredded remains of the data supersystems said it was. Only material wealth and superstition survived. Economies were revealed as the fiction they had always been.
“He left that letter for Barry, obviously,” Gabriel went on. “As if he’s ever likely to come clawing out of the ooze with Haussman in irons,” he saw her look. “That was the Demon’s name,” he added. “Troy Haussman.”
Roon nodded again. She no longer wanted to look at the table and itsage-discoloured envelope. It hurt her obscurely. She looked up at the lights instead. She vaguely recognised the tech, although she was fairly sure the tubes hadn’t been in production in a century. Even stored, even vacuum-sealed, they couldn’t have lasted as long as these ones seemed to have done. Could they? They must be facsimiles, she mused, although why was just another meaningless question on top of all the rest. Perhaps there was some feature of the room, something in the evidently noxious fumes sizzling off the surface of the Angel-Demon soup, that was replenishing them? Or maybe the environment of the Freo Arc’ was perfect for preserving fluorescents.
Roon recognised that she was trying to distract herself from the idea that some lost and lonely echo of herself, or at least of her sister Ash, might be boiling in eternal torment in the tub in front of her. Even without that personal connection – strange though it was – it was an almost unbearably distressing thought. She looked up again, and then gestured around at the room, letting her bafflement show on her face. Even if she’d been inclined to speak, the question was just too big, too vague. It was a huge and all-encompassing what.
“You’d be surprised how many forgotten little corners one can become owner of, as the centuries go by,” Gabriel, obviously opting to take her query at its simplest and most literal level, said with a smile. “The old club – where the whole thing happened in the first place – was shut down for a long time and then it was demolished in the floods, so we bought this property. It was easy after the legal hootenanny with the Bad Cow chain, and with all the other shady stuff that was going on. But the whole thing with the Demons, well, it sort of ties into the job I’ve got for you, too.
“This … okay, look,” he said, chuckling again when Roon just twirled her hand lazily for him to continue. “Demons don’t fly the way Angels do. They get around through a separate sphere of reality … or possibly unreality, or possibly some more exotic sphere, like a spare universe that never initiated and acquired laws of physics of its own … anyway, the shorthand we use for it is God-space. Because, at least according to the stories, it’s how Gods get around. And it’s not really safe for non-Gods.”
Roon nodded, the swirling tank of glistening black pain mercifully forgotten for the time being. Fast and fuel-efficient transportation methods were, obviously, part of her sprawling area of interest. Whether it was the ever-growing demand of people to get from one place to another across the alternately scorched and waterlogged surface of the globe, or the increasingly fanciful notion of achieving space exploration, the solution to humanity’s transportation problem was greatly sought-after. Faster-than-light travel, instant teleportation … call it what you like, it was an elusive dream.
Gabriel seemed to recognise her thoughts. “You know more about physics on a purely instinctive level than I’ve managed to learn in the past thousand years,” he said with a grunt. “And I could have learned it all from scratch, since the humans went back to basics after the hard reset the veil caused. If there’s anything humans have figured out about God-space, you’d be the one who knew about it.”
Roon spread her hands. To be honest, the search for any such technolo
gy was a hobby of hers, but not one she’d put much serious work into. It was as if she knew, on some level, that nothing could come of it. Nothing good, anyway. Had that disregard come from her buried Pinian knowledge, telling her there was no safe way to move mortal humans through such dangerous wilds of physics? Or had it been the knowledge that there was nowhere for any of them to go?
Because she’d known about the veil, hadn’t she? In some way. She may have just considered it another weird dream, a notion of fleeting interest but no real applicability to her work, and yet underlying everything. She’d known. She’d known in the same way as she’d known about the other Tumblehedge, the strange dwelling of an unknown God-in-hiding. Was that also true? If, again, one took the preposterous founding premise of the Archangel Gabriel’s story to be true, then it was looking increasingly likely, wasn’t it?
Things sleeted through Roon’s mind, and some of them hit receptors and others didn’t. Some of them struck chords. Tumblehedge, now that she was thinking of herself and her sisters as immortals hiding in plain sight among mortals in their rambling old mansion … yes, that chord was loud and it shook her to her core.
“Pinians might have been able to use God-space with no ill effects,” Gabriel was continuing, “but that’s mostly because they got God to carry them. Otherwise, they used vehicles like everyone else. God-space isn’t the sort of thing you want to traverse without a patron. If you do – and Demons do, and Demons are still pretty much mortal in comparison to Gods and Firstmades – then sooner or later the bill comes due,” he gestured at the tank, dragging her attention unwillingly back. “This is what I think that looks like – at least when your body is too permanent to dissolve entirely. Or at least when there’s two such bodies, playing off each other and locking against one another in some way…”
Suddenly, but with a raw abruptness she was used to from her school and professorial tuition days, she was unable to take any more. She had to stop stacking data willy-nilly into her head. She had to rest, process, categorise it all. She couldn’t fit this new information into her existing intellectual framework, so she had to construct a new framework. And that was only going to get more difficult the more information Gabriel handed her.
Because soon, she wouldn’t be able to stop taking it if she tried.
Turning and striding out without a word – not that she supposed the Archangel was really expecting one, by now – Roon ascended back into the Ballywise Tavern, strode out past the empty chairs and the grubby bar with the battered arch of the scanner-talker sitting placidly lopsided behind it, and took to the streets.
She returned home, stopped in the house just long enough to convince everyone she was back in one piece and had to be alone for a while before launching into another agonisingly extended debate over what they’d learned and what they should do next, and then retreated into the carport.
She crossed to a mostly-clear workbench with a bookshelf arranged along the rear edge, and sat. She absently brushed away some components she’d been testing proto-infinite compression loops on. Most of them were brittle wreckage, fired from within to a sort of glazed grey amber. She was still trying to establish whether that made them failed experiments, or successful ones she just hadn’t figured out how to unpack again yet. It didn’t matter now.
Pulling out a pen emblazoned with the ubiquitous Synfoss logo,58 she snicked it open and reached for a battered journal tucked between electrical engineering textbooks on the shelf.
It was part dream diary, part idea-box for those notions that were just too off-the-wall to warrant an exercise book of their own. Ideas with no potential for mathematical proofs or academic papers. The fake leather cover was scuffed, and she had long ago written Tumblehedge on the little title panel.
She’d started to write in the book at fourteen, when they had first returned to the estate following the deaths of their parents. She opened it to its last completed page. In the nine years since starting, she’d worked her way through little over two thirds of the book.
POWER, CONNECTION, RECEIVER/TRANSMITTER, POTENTIAL,
–the last disjointed collection of notes read. She’d had a dream, she remembered, after spending too many sleepless days and nights on a junk-food diet in the attempt to pin down an idea she’d had about ambient universal energy, and its extraction or distillation.
SPOKES, BEAMS, WEB, NETWORK. POWER SOURCE?? ALIEN TECH
The last couple of words were scribbled out, and–
HUMAN TECH? SORT OF, OLD, LOST. RECEIVER. SLEEPING, WAITING? SLEEPING. ELEVATOR? GOD’S TOOTH? HUNGRY
She frowned as she skimmed past the final confused jumble of notes and the crude, meaningless sketches, shook her head, drew a line across the page, timestamped it, and started to write in no particular order.
ARCHANGEL GABRIEL: UNDEAD, NEAR-MORTAL, WINGS, PROTOHUMAN / HOMINID (CAVEMAN ANGEL)
DEMON: SAME AS ANGEL, TELEPORTATION. GOD-SPACE
ANGEL & DEMON COME TOGETHER, COLLAPSE INTO MUTUAL CANCELLATION, BLACK FLUID – NOT BLACK, ANTICOLOURED? – ETERNAL NOTHING, ANY HUMAN OR ANGEL CONTACT RESULTS IN ABSORPTION, PAINFUL, NO ESCAPE (BUT NOT DEATH?)
BLACK SUBSTANCE, CORROSIVE TO ORGANIC MATTER, END-STATE AFTER EXPOSURE TO GOD-SPACE? WOULD DISSIPATE BUT ANGEL/DEMON BODIES IMMORTAL / UNPHYSICAL, CANNOT DISSOLVE, LEAVE REMAINS, PIN HUMAN INTO MIX ON CONTACT
PINIANS: IMMORTAL, DIE AND RESURRECT, OCCUPY BODIES, BUILD BODIES ON CELLULAR LEVEL? UNCONSCIOUS / CONSCIOUS – LOST, TRAPPED, EXILED, FORGOT SELVES
THREE, CONNECTED, REBORN IN HUMAN BODIES, MECHANISM TO BE CLARIFIED
Her head bent patiently over the page, she wrote on.
ASH
Late Sunday morning, Ash climbed behind the wheel of bright turquoise Margliotta Thursday, and purred into the eastern sprawl.
It wasn’t really a place to go alone, much less in an expensive car. The crime rate in the vast expanse of low-cost partition-housing wasn’t so much high, as inapplicable to other, sane parts of the city. It might as well have been a different world to a secure area like the neighbourhood of Tumblehedge. The sprawl was a mass of intersecting zones and jurisdictions, different subcultural regions with their own unwritten bylaws and thresholds. It was difficult to quantify how much violent crime occurred from district to district when what constituted a violent crime varied, so much went unreported, and often the only sane way to defend oneself was to break the law anyway.
Ash became aware of a pincer-formation of carjackers moving in on her location as she passed by an otherwise gleaming bank of commercial buildings with unlit signs and empty, neglected windows. They didn’t even pretend to conceal their intent or their approach. Ash was, of course, accustomed to more dangerous terrain and more subtle attacks – and more blatant ones – but she couldn’t see how even a normal civilian could be caught off-guard by such a clumsy approach. On a moment’s reflection, though, she realised it made sense. Obviously, it didn’t matter if a normal civilian saw them coming. And they would want to make sure that anyone with superior training did see them coming, to avoid the sort of situation that might have occurred if they’d actually tried to attack Ash.
Still, she sighed lightly as she sent her military credentials, training profile and approximate arms manifest onto the sketchy virtuals supported by the district’s database. She didn’t regret not being drawn into an armed conflict, but she didn’t approve of the general attitude of lazy opportunism. There were plenty of sheep to fleece, the would-be carjackers were declaring through their actions. There was no benefit in trying to fleece a wolf.
It was possible to fake the authentications she put up for them to read, but the sort of person with access to that level of virtual forgery was likely to be at least as much trouble as a special forces soldier. Someone with the capacity to throw around high-grade fake manifests and identity tags was likely to represent a criminal syndicate or corporation. The pincer fell apart and its members dissolved back into the shabby back streets. She didn’t see any more crews.
The multi-dom reverend, a smiling middle-aged man with a pouchy face and a quaint old-fashioned green mohawk, met her at the doors.
“If you’re here for the morning call, you’re a little late,” he said in a jovial voice. “If you’re here for the evening call, you’re a lot early,” he whistled appreciatively, looking past her at the car. “What a beaut’. Pre-war Tesla?”
“Margliotta,” Ash said with a smile. “Synfoss guzzler from birth.”
“Ah,” the reverend nodded. “‘The only good battery is assault with battery’. Wasn’t that the campaign slogan for the first-gen Margliottas?” Ash shrugged one shoulder easily, and the reverend chuckled. “Of course, as a man of the cloth I am duty-bound to tut and tsk over such violent messages, but I do have a soft-spot for a good-looking car.”
“You’re only human,” Ash joined him in the doorway, standing close enough to roughly evaluate his condition. He seemed robust and unaffected by faintness or nerves, but he was definitely hiding something. Of course, in this area it could just as easily be a wegg hatchery or a Ra lab as an under-the-radar supernatural creature, but she felt confident of her conclusions. “Of course, the same can’t quite be said of the Archangel Gabriel, can it?”
The reverend body-language-screamed you’re right, I’m harbouring the Archangel Gabriel and I was really disconcerted to find that he looked like a missing link but now I’m even more disconcerted to find that you know about him.
“I suppose not,” he said amicably, and Ash had to award him points for steadiness of voice. “The Archangel Gabriel according to the various scriptures is a Heavenly entity, of course, so even in a metaphorical sense he would–”