Queen of Angels

by Greg Bear

  “We’ve also designed it with a built in and very strong desire to communicate with others, besides its builders; AXIS will be social in a unique new way. It will want to meet and communicate with strange new intelligences, should there be any.”

  David Shine: “Right now, it looks as if AXIS will have its chance…In brief, our scientists have made a simulacrum of a human being, better than human but not fully human—a challenge for philosophers—and sent it on its fifteen year journey to Alpha Centauri. Those decades of effort and travel have returned a discovery that may change the way we think of ourselves, of life, of all that is important.

  “We are not alone, Frankly, we at LitVid 21 believe it is time to celebrate…But AXIS scientists urge caution. AXIS has almost certainly discovered life. But the towers that AXIS has seen may yet prove to be something other than buildings or cities.

  “What do you believe? Cast your votes on our turnaround link and send your home vid comments care of your account number. Perhaps your opinion will make it to the entire LitVid 21 audience…”

  17

  Mary Choy debarked from a pd interjag minibus and glanced up briefly at East Comb One, upright stack of narrow horizontal mirrors with four sectors aligned into silver verticals, preparing to reflect hours from now the lowering westerly sun on the sixth jag where E Hassida lived. The city lay beneath uniform pewter clouds pushing in from the sea, decapitating the combs. There might be no usable sun this evening perhaps even rain but still the combs arranged themselves as if motivated by guilt for their shadowing presence.

  Mary stood on the porch waiting for the home manager to announce her. Ernest Hassida opened the dark oakpaneled door and smiled warmly; short and muscular and round faced with sad eyes balanced by naturally amused lips and round cheeks. Mary smile back and felt the worst of the week slip away in the glow of his silent welcome.

  He stepped aside with gallant sweep of arm and she entered, hugging him, his head level with her breasts. He nuzzled the black uniform there briefly pushed away with a shake too much for him grinning broadly small even white teeth gleaming, incisors projecting tiny roses. He gestured for her to sit.

  “May I dytch?” she asked.

  “Of course,” he said voice soft as velvet. “In a rough?”

  “There’s been a nasty murder. And a Selector jiltz. In a while I’m off to Oversight to make a query.”

  “So. Not a smooth. Not at all.”

  E Hassida seldom tracked the nets or LitVids yet he was certainly not averse to technology. His small ancient bungalow was filled with choice equipment that often dazzled her. Ernest was a technical wizard at scrounge and integration, pushing disparate elements into harmony at a tenth the cost: music from all around at a gesture. Dancing art light could transform walls into operatic backdrops, dinosaurs could peer into windows grin wink; angels floated above the bed at night singing soft lullabies while ancient Japanese sages advised on the mahayana, heads like long melons, wise eyes crinkling with cosmic humor.

  He stood back bowed returned to his visual keyboard and sat down to work again as if she were not there. More relaxed in his presence, Mary began the long impromptu t’ai chi dance, arms twisting, as she had the morning before but with more grace assurance fluidity. She thought herself a lake a river a fall of rain over the city. She found her center hung still for a moment there and opened her eyes.

  “Lunch?” Ernest asked. The three wide flat screens mounted behind his keyboard revealed fearsome faces long angular barely human tracking them with eyes like glowing coals of ice. Neon drew their edges, child’s chalkgritty tempera colors filled them in. One sported for a nose the skull of an animal, cat or dog

  “Frightening,” she commented.

  “Aliens,” he said proudly. “Borrowed some details from barrio holograffiti.”

  E Hassida specialized in aliens. Half Japanese half Hispanglish, he alternated between bright primary colors of Mayan/Mexican motifs and the calm earth pastels of old Japan; between landscapes and transformed pop. His work frightened and exalted. Mary would have accepted Ernest without his talent; with it he complemented her perfectly, disruptive disturbing enlightening, opposed to her administration calmness worldliness.

  “Can you talk about it?” he asked, sitting next to her on edge of couch, gesturing machine sign language his own invention for food to be brought. Three foundscrap arbeiters shaped into graceful abstractions urceolate curves and cubist edges of black and gray rolled and spun into what served as kitchen and nursery for nano projects.

  “I’m probably going to Hispaniola,” she said. “Clearances are being arranged in advance. Suspect flight.”

  “Suspected of what?”

  “Eight murders. One night orgy.”

  Ernest whistled. “Poor Mary. You take these hard.”

  “I hate them,” she said.

  “Too much sympathy. Look; you’ve dytched but you’re stiff again.”

  She uncurled her fingers and shook her head. “It’s not anger, it’s frustration.” Her black eyes searched his face. “How can they do this? How is it possible for something to go so terribly wrong?”

  “Not everybody is as balanced as you…and me,” Ernest said with a small smile.

  She shook her head. “I’m going to find the son of a bitch.”

  “Now that sounds like anger,” Ernest said.

  “I want it to be all over. I want us all to be grown up and happy. All of us.”

  Ernest clucked doubtfully. “You’re pd. Like a surgeon. If everybody is well adjusted, you’re jobless.”

  “I wouldn’t mind. You…” Mary groped for words, found none. Display of her doubts and weaknesses. Ernest had been her wailing wall for two years. He played the role calmly, her own mental surgeon solace. “I don’t even have time for love today.”

  “Given a choice of lunch or love, you take my lunch?”

  “You’re a good cook.”

  “You’ve been on for how many hours?”

  “Too many. But I had a break, and I’m having another now. Don’t worry. Ernest, have you heard of Emanuel Goldsmith?”

  “No.”

  “Poet. Novelist. Playwright.”

  “I’m a visual man, not a lit.”

  “He’s the suspect. A big man. Lived in a comb foot. Suspected of killing eight young followers. No motive. He’s vanished and I think he might have fled to Hispaniola. He has an open invitation from Colonel Sir John Yardley. You once told me you knew some people from Hispaniola.”

  Ernest scowled. “I won’t be happy if you go there, Mary. If you want to learn about Hispaniola, why not go to the pd library and look it up? I’m sure it has all you need…”

  “I’ve already done that but I still need an insider’s view. Particularly somebody from the underside.”

  He squinted one eye. “I have friends who know people who worked there. Not nice people. They trust nobody.”

  She caressed his cheek smooth black hand against thinly bearded brown face. “I’d like to talk to your acquaintances. Can you arrange?”

  “They’re out of work, untherapied, soon illegal—even so, they’d leap at a chance to see you. You’re entertainment, Mary. But they’re here under Raphkind entry laws. They were deserted by Hispaniola when the egg dropped in Washington. They fear being sent back. They’re running from immigration and from Selectors too.”

  “I can turn a blind eye.”

  “Can you? You sound like an angry woman to me. You might want them put away, therapied.”

  “I can control myself.”

  Ernest looked down at his work gnarled hands. Nano scars. He did not show due caution with some of his materials. “How soon?”

  “If I don’t trace Goldsmith in this country by tomorrow, I’m off to Hispaniola the next day.”

  “I can talk with my friends. But if you’re not going, we’ll forget it.”

  “I always need contacts in the shadows,” she said.

  “Humor me. You don’t need these.�
��

  The arbeiters brought out lunch, urceolate arbeiter leading with tray of two wine glasses, cubist rolling behind carrying a tray heaped with sandwich delicacies.

  “Mary, you know I adore you,” Ernest said as they ate. “I’d give up a lot to be with you lawbond.”

  Mary smiled, then shivered. “I’d like nothing better, but I don’t want either of us to give up anything. We haven’t peaked yet, professionally. After we peak.”

  Ernest had seen her shiver. “Don’t joke with me. I might give up and clink a barrio sweet.” He poured her a cup of tamarindo. Ernest drank no alcohol took no drugs. “But I say that almost every time, don’t I?”

  They toasted each other. Mary lifted her hand and stared at it as if it were detached.

  “So what else is wrong?” Ernest asked softly.

  “Theo called.”

  “Nervous Theodora,” Ernest said. “Does she have her heart’s desire?”

  Mary shook her head. “She was passed over again. Third time.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Ernest said.

  “Oh?”

  “You tell me she’s your friend, Mary, but I never saw such a friend. She reflects off you. Doesn’t love you. Wants to be like you, but hates you for being different.”

  “Oh.” She put down her glass.

  “Did she cry on your shoulder?”

  “Your lunches are like love,” Mary said after a pause. “I sincerely regret not being able to stay longer.” She lifted in salute an exquisite lacework bread cage filled with herbed farm shrimp.

  Citizen Oversight occupied the first seven floors of an early twenty first commercial tower rising from Wilshire in old Beverly Hills. The waiting rooms on the second floor made no pretense at decor; they were minimal uncomfortable white and harshly lighted.

  Mary waited patiently as the minutes advanced past her appointment. Three other pd from Long Beach and the Torrance Towers waited with equal patience across from her. They said little to each other. They were not in their element.

  Oversight controlled information pd could not get through a court order. Getting such information was an art not unlike politics. Individual pd or pd districts who asked too often were marked as greedy.

  Throughout the USA vid monitors and other sensors tracked citizen activity in private cars buses trains aircraft even walkways, wherever citizens used public concourses or buildings. Private service company records financial records medical records and therapy records all went into Oversight and new officials were publicly elected every year in each state to administer the information so gathered.

  Oversight had proven its worth a hundred times over in giving social statisticians the raw data necessary to make plans track trends understand and serve a nation of half a billion people.

  When first proposed and created Oversight had been absolutely forbidden from releasing any data involving individual citizens or even specific groups of citizens whatever their activities to the judiciary or pd. But even before Raphkind the wall between Oversight and the courts and pd had thinned. During Raphkind’s seven years in office the walls had thinned even more, been breached, and information had flowed freely to the pd and federals. Now in pendulum swing Oversight offered scant pickings to pd on a strictly regulated basis.

  There were now stiff financial penalties and even incarceration awaiting Oversight officials who made errors in releasing data. Consequently each query by pd was a battle of wills. Wills against won’ts Mary thought of it; she had never been granted information in her four attempts at making queries. She did not expect to get information now, despite the severity of the crime she was investigating.

  The arbeiter in charge of the front desk called her name. She passed her ticket through the slot and took a short flight of stairs into a small office cubicle with two doors on opposite walls and an empty desk acting as barricade between. There were no chairs. The relationships here were adversarial not comfortable.

  Mary stood and waited for her contact to enter through the other door.

  A middle aged man dressed in casual blue midsuit, hair thinning, entire attitude proclaiming physical lack of pretension and weariness, entered and looked at her resentfully. “Hello,” he said.

  She nodded and stood her ground, arms folded before her parade rest.

  “Lieutenant Mary Choy, investigating the murder of eight people in the third foot of East Comb One,” the contact said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve looked over your request. This is an unusual case in a comb or anywhere for that matter. You wish to know if citizen Emanuel Goldsmith has been oversighted anywhere within the USA during the last seventy two hours. You would use this information to narrow your search to some locale or to travel outside the USA to continue your search.”

  “Yes.”

  The man looked her over impartially not judging just looking.

  “Your request is not out of line. Unfortunately, I cannot release full information due to conflicting assessments in three of our districts. There is insufficient public need. In our judgment, you will capture the murderer without it. However, I have been authorized to tell you that we do not have a record of Emanuel Goldsmith conducting any financial or other personal transactions outside of the city of Los Angeles, within the United States of America, within the last seventy two hours. You may appeal again after twenty four days on this same subject. Appeal before that time will be rejected.”

  Mary did not react for several seconds. The oracle had told all that it would. She relaxed slightly dropped her arms and turned to leave.

  “Good luck, Lieutenant Choy,” the weary man said.

  “Thank you.”

  Old dark men with gray

  Beards Execute tribal justice Teeth rotten

  Eyes yellow Fingers stiff Minds

  Dreaming Man steals other’s Wife

  Land Cattle Finger gone or scar on

  Forehead mark of thief or

  Shariya forfeit right Hand

  Gray wigs black robes sonorous sleepy

  Rooms with wood same old

  Dark men with gray Beards

  Yellow Eyes Better Teeth.

  18

  Martin Burke inserted the card into his phone. Paul Lascal’s face appeared saying, “Yes. Hello.”

  “Burke here.”

  “Good to hear from you, Mr. Burke. Any decision?”

  Martin’s lips were numb and dry. “Tell Albigoni I’ll do it.”

  “Very good. Are you free this afternoon?”

  “I’ll never be free again, Mr. Lascal.”

  Assuming irony, Lascal laughed.

  “Yes, I’m free this afternoon,” Martin said.

  “I’ll have a car at your door at one o’clock.”

  “Where will I be going?”

  Lascal coughed. “Sorry. Please allow us this much discretion.”

  “This much and more,” Martin said cheerily, the voice of hired help. “Oh, and Mr. Lascal…I’ll need every scrap of information you can give me about our subject. It’s all right to inform him about the procedure—”

  “He’s given his permission.”

  Martin was surprised into silence.

  “I’ll arrange to have all bio and related material available on your arrival,” Lascal said.

  Martin stared at the blank screen for a time, empty of thoughts, rubbing his hands on his knees. He stood and walked to the window to look out at shabby genteel La Jolla, still dreaming of a glory fled to the north to the monuments or west across the broad sea.

  He had come to love La Jolla. He had no ambition to regain the monuments or God forbid the LA combs. Yet if all went as planned as conspired he would soon be very far from here, back in a place if such it could be called that he loved even more than this, in the Country and with Carol as well.

  “I can look on all this as an adventure,” he said aloud, “or I can be afraid.”

  Martin perused his shelves and gathered up the necessary disks and cubes, ins
tructed the home manager and as afterthought called his attorney to let him know where he might be found if after a week he was not back at his apartment. The last edge of suspicion.

  A long midnight blue private car the size of a minibus arrived curbside on time and opened its door to receive him into soft gray and red lounge comfort. The car hummed through La Jolla streets crowded by gaily dressed lunch throngs. It quickly found the Fed-5 slaveway entrance, speeding north.

  Ten minutes to Carlsbad between late twentieth checkerboard condos crowding the slaveway like cliff houses, now tenements for those living below Carlsbad’s kilometer high inverted pyramid. A turn east at the pyramid and off the slaveway onto smooth concrete county road twisting through the hills and across fields spotted with stacked coin haciendas, villas, mosques, glass domes, blue ocean tile far from the sea, miniature lakes, golf courses, half timber brick tudor estates: havens of the eccentric old rich who preferred to be away from the ostentation of the monuments and the bourgeois haunts of the littoral minded.

  Viewed from the sea California’s southern coastline resembled the wall of a vast prison or some careless gaily colored wrinkle of basalt cast up by the Earth, cooling into cubes and tubes and hexagons and towers filled with lemmings gathered from around the world: Russian colonies of expatriate exploiters of the natural wealth of the Siberian masses from the decades of Openness with their shoreside bistros; Chinese and Korean colonies come too late to buy extravagant land; old rich Japanese and the last Levantine families of the oil century that had sold their land for yet more fortunes to the builders of monuments, all clutching their allotted rectangular boxes. These competed with a few discouraged outnumbered old Californios, their déclassé ribbon-wall habitat now overshadowed by these same monuments and newer larger combs.