Queen of Angels

by Greg Bear

  “I need to ask questions of whoever is in charge.”

  “Oh, he’s in charge,” Madame Roach says. “Ever since the funeral he’s taken command.”

  “Where is Emanuel Goldsmith?”

  “Aren’t you him?” Sir asks. “Or his twin?”

  “No. I’m not him.”

  “You must mean the Mayor.” The broad faced man laughs. “The young mayor. He died of himself. I didn’t touch him. He just fell down stairs by himself.”

  Martin feels sick. “I need to see him.”

  The broad faced man rises, takes Martin Emanuel’s outstretched adolescent hand, opens the palm out, points to a spot of blood on the palm, smiles, shakes his head, leads him through another bead curtain into a room. A coffin sits on a bier in the middle of the room. The broad faced man roughly pushes Martin Emanuel up to the coffin. “There’s the Mayor. That’s what the funeral’s all about, didn’t she tell you?”

  Martin reluctantly peers over the lip of the coffin. The white satin pads contain an impression of a body. But there is no body visible.

  “Weak and puny. Insipid gros bon ange. Always was. Just faded away,” says Madame Roach.

  “How could he die? He was primary.”

  “He feared he was white,” Madame Roach says. “He thought he was white as dawn and never did believe in who he really was.”

  “He wasn’t white, was he?” Martin asks.

  “He was black as night, black as the heart of an uncut tree, black as the legs of a mountain, black as an undiscovered truth, black as a mother’s breast, black as fresh love, black as coal where the sun hides its treasure, black as a womb, black as the sea, black as the sleeping Earth. He just didn’t believe in himself. Not from the time he had to cut up Sir.”

  Martin turns to look at the broad faced man. He sees the face of Colonel Sir John Yardley and then the cadaver in the jar.

  “I tried to teach him,” the broad faced man says. “I beat him and beat him to make him into a man. All pain no gain, I’d say, all pain no gain that boy. Life took him like acid in a tight metal groove. He was weak. I was stone, he was mud. He killed me and now I’m back and punishment is too good for us all.”

  Martin touches the edge of the coffin, reaches for the impression in the satin and finds cold flesh instead. He draws his hand back quickly then forces himself to touch the invisible form again, finds outlines of a youthful face, lightly bristle-bearded, eyes closed, lips slack.

  “Now he’s truly white,” Madame Roach says. “White as air.”

  Martin turns to face Sir. “How long have you been in charge?” he asks.

  “Always, I think,” Sir says. “Even when he cut my throat, the little bastard, I’ve been in charge.”

  “You’re lying. You’re nobody,” Martin says, using not just his voice but Carol’s as well. “You’re not a primary. You can’t be…You can’t be anything more than a subpersonality or a bad memory.”

  “I control the river,” Sir tells him and spreads his arm until the room fills with shadow figures, each wearing a cracked ceramic mask. “I control the ocean.” The ceiling is covered with dark clouds. “How can I be nothing?”

  “Because,” Madame Roach says quietly, “the Mayor is dead.”

  Margery inspected the displays. The triplex had made another violent circuit of the mapped loci, this time in just a few seconds. As she watched, the probe gyrated again. She frowned; now she knew something was wrong. There was no precedent for this kind of activity.

  She checked Burke’s metabolism and brain chemistry. He showed extreme emotion. Neuman seemed to have entered a state of neutral sleep and that was completely unexpected.

  “Something’s wrong!” she called out.

  Erwin had gone to the other side of the theater to observe Goldsmith and balance his balky neutral sleep. She looked at her watch. Burke and Neuman had been in Country for an hour and a half. “I’m getting bad readings.”

  Erwin came around the curtain and confirmed her interpretation. “All right,” he said, taking a deep breath. “We cut the connections.”

  “What about latency?” Margery asked.

  “This is pretty bad. Burke’s in panic. Neuman’s out of things completely. I don’t think we have much choice. Sever them.” He circled the curtain and stood beside Goldsmith. “Everything’s reading stable on this end. How do you want to do it—disconnect before the interpreter, or at Goldsmith’s junction?”

  Margery bit her finger, trying to judge the consequences either way.

  “I’d feel much better if we sent David and Karl in to find out what’s happening,” Erwin said.

  “I disagree,” Margery said. “I’ve never seen Burke in a panic and we’ve never had an investigator enter neutral sleep during a probe…I wouldn’t want to go up Country under those circumstances. I say cut them off. And soon. Jesus, Jesus,” Margery said under her breath. She reached for the connector on Burke’s neck. “I’m going to cut before the interpreter. Come over here. I want to sever Neuman and Burke together.”

  Erwin rejoined her and placed his hand on Neuman’s cable junction. “All right?”

  “Do it together,” she said. “On count of three. One, two—”

  A massive snakelike whip struck Martin squarely in the back, bit in with metal fangs and jerked him away from the dark room and the coffin. His passage was horribly painful; he could not breathe and he could see only a cascade of burning sparks.

  Then just as abruptly he stood in the middle of a street in a small town. Unslaved cars from before the teens drove around him slowly. Pleasant faced drivers looked at him with expectant complacency as if he were a signpost. He rubbed his face with his hands, fully disoriented, then walked across one lane, dodging the slow cars, to reach the concrete sidewalk.

  Warm sun, asphalt streets with white crosswalk lines, small one or two story buildings on both sides of the street, family owned businesses. He could not read any of the signs—they were stylized gibberish—but he knew this place. A small town somewhere in California. His grandparents had lived in just such a town not far from Stockton.

  He stood in front of a hardware store. Across the street was a vacuum cleaner dealership. His grandfather had run such a business—a drycleaner’s shop. One summer Martin had helped him work a new ultrasound cleaning machine.

  Goldsmith’s Country could not possibly provide anything so familiar. Where was he, then? He felt dizzy. Turning to find a place to sit, he saw black afterimages trail the people and buildings. He was in the Country still—but not Goldsmith’s, of that he was sure.

  He sat abruptly on the curb, his vision spinning. When the images settled again he felt something standing behind him, warm as a tiny sun. Glancing over his shoulder he saw a sandy haired young man looking down with a solicitous smile.

  | You okay? the young man asked.

  | I don’t know.

  | You don’t look like you’re doing too well, is why I ask.

  Familiar voice. A reasonable midwestern drawl, self assurance minus self assertion. Martin shaded his eyes against the sun without really needing to—the brightness was not painful—and examined the young man more closely.

  Familiar features. Short nose, brown eyes under silky red brows, generous mouth with well-defined dimples.

  | Dad? Martin asked. He stood, tottering again as the images wavered. My God, Dad?

  | Nobody’s called me Dad before, the young man said. Not anybody as old as you, surely.

  Martin reached out to touch the young man, pinched the cotton fabric of his shirt between his fingers and felt the solid flesh beneath. The young man shrugged Martin’s hand loose inoffensively. | Anything I can do to help?

  | Do you know a Martin Burke? Martin asked.

  | We have a fellow named Marty. Young fellow. About nineteen.

  Martin knew where he was. He had long since learned in his dreams, in his deep meditations, that his own internal image—the image his primary personality assumed—was fixed at abo
ut age nineteen.

  He had been fed back into his own Country of the Mind.

  He had no idea how such a thing could happen. The implications were more than he could absorb, fresh from his fear and disorientation. He had circled back and emerged in his deepest core, something he did not believe was possible.

  The sandy haired young man’s features contorted and his skin paled. He looked over Martin’s shoulder and pointed a finger. | Who’s that?

  Martin felt a chill at his back like a spike of ice absorbing all heat. Martin turned.

  The broad faced bald headed man stood in the middle of the street, blind white eyes directed at him, gashed throat bleeding in spurts onto the center line of the pavement.

  | Who is that? the young man repeated, alarmed. Rime grew on his red brows and hair, and his skin turned blue as ice.

  “They’re not coming out of it,” Margery said. “We’re still getting traces like they’re up Country.”

  Erwin grabbed his own wrist and chafed it, mumbling, then tapped the displays with three fingers. He bowed and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never done this before. We’ve never severed before.”

  “Is this the latency?” Margery asked.

  “It’s been four minutes. I have no idea how long the processing lasts—”

  “Burke said it could take minutes, even hours,” Margery said.

  “I hope to God it doesn’t,” Erwin said. “Look at Neuman’s traces. She’s diving below neutral sleep. I think she’s pushing into deep dream sleep.”

  “Do you think Goldsmith did something to them?” Margery asked.

  “If I knew what was going on I’d be a fapping genius,” Erwin snapped. “Let’s try bringing them to consciousness.”

  I can eat you as surely as I’m standing here. I’ve eaten the boy, the twins. I’ve eaten your blond woman. She lives in my gut now. I can eat this—

  Sir swept both arms at the California town.

  Martin glanced at the cold still image of his young father—a subpersonality, part of his own deep self regard. He loved that image and loved what it said about himself—that no matter how much he had been compromised or how far he had strayed he still had this strength inside him.

  Sir’s presence had frozen the image. Ice had built up on its face and hands.

  Martin returned his attention to the green wrinkled corpse of Sir. | You’re way out of bounds, he said. You have no meaning here.

  | Just a short step across a bridge, Sir said. I can live wherever I’m invited.

  The image of Sir pulled back its upper lips and revealed sharp wolf teeth. The teeth lengthened into needlelike tusks.

  Corpse with fangs. Goes anywhere he’s invited.

  Martin knew what he was looking at. He remembered the drunken sketch in the ceremonial copy of his atlas of the brain. The blood dripping fangs and the arrows pointing to several points in the olfactory centers and upper limbic system. He had been musing on vampires and werewolves, signs of deep contents welling up from the Country, where they represented routines connected with survival and violence.

  Complex of the hunter. The internal killer as old as spinal cords, linked to the scent, seeker after blood, master of fight or flight. In nightmares the dark dead beast rending and tearing, defending against all external forces but never itself alive or aware; voiceless, isolated, despised.

  In Emanuel Goldsmith that subroutine had taken the shape of Sir, the father, now linked with Colonel Sir John Yardley. It had moved up in rank from voiceless subroutine to mask of subpersonality to master of the Country, representative of Goldsmith himself—the Mayor/King who had died.

  The dark dead beast had learned to talk. Now it stood in Martin’s Country where it had no right to be, as vile as any transmitted disease.

  Martin took one last look at the frozen sandy haired young man and turned to face Sir squarely. He raised his arms and clenched his fists.

  | Get the fuck away from me.

  If there was to be a war Martin thought he could at least give as good as he would get. If he did not purge this demon he could not guess what it might do to his psyche. This was a new game, a new war. It was fought on his own turf however, and he had one mighty weapon—an awareness of where he was and what he was.

  | I’m all over you, Sir said. There isn’t a thing you can do.

  Martin lifted his hand and pointed his finger. From a distance he drew a trench in the pavement, the asphalt cracking and caving wherever he pointed. He circled the trench around and behind Sir. With an emphatic push of his palm against the air he forced a fire hydrant across the street to snap off. A tall white fountain of water shot up. Curling his finger, he directed the water to the trench. The fountain bent like a swaying tree, doubled over, splashed along the pavement and poured itself into the trench. The trench filled with muddy water.

  Sir stood encircled, blood on his neck glowing bright red against his dead skin, sightless eyes unperturbed. But Martin knew the power of his metaphorical plan in a place where metaphor and simile were all. Breaking the scent. If the dark beast could not cross running water, if it could not smell its way across, then it had no territory and no power.

  He was about to snap iron theftproof bars from nearby windows and make a cage, but the snakewhip came again from nowhere and fastened into his back, sinking its metal teeth deep, squeezing out a scream. It lifted Martin high above the town and held him there for the slightest moment; looking down, he saw Sir in the middle of the turbid waters, arms crossed, blind eyes staring at nothing in particular and everything.

  The fanged corpse stepped over the trench and laughed.

  Martin’s screams filled the theater. He struggled to pull free of the straps and glared at Margery and Erwin as if they were monsters. Margery adjusted the settings on the couch to induce a state of calm but Martin’s traces were too strong. She could only slightly subdue his frenzy.

  “Let me back! He’s still inside me! Oh, sweet God, let me go back!”

  Erwin bent over Carol, adjusting her inducer controls, moving up and down the scales to no effect. “She won’t come out of it,” he said.

  “I can’t send you back, Dr. Burke,” Margery said. Tears ran down her cheeks. “I don’t even know where you were.” She kept shooting desperate looks at the other couch. Martin twisted his head and saw Carol beside him. Her eyes were closed; she was lost in dreaming sleep.

  “What’s wrong with her?” he asked, still shaking but falling away from his own hysteria.

  “I can’t bring her up!” Erwin shouted. He pounded the side of the couch with his hand, dipped his head and pushed away in frustration. “She won’t respond.”

  Martin lay back, closed his eyes and flexed his wrists. He took a shuddering deep breath and looked inward, seeing only the blank dark wall between the conscious primary personality and what lay beneath. He opened his eyes again and began to cry. “Untie me,” he said between sobs, pulling against the restraints. “Let me help.”

  But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.

  —The New Testament, Romans 7:23

  57

  Richard Fettle felt as a mummy might, unwrapped from three thousand years of bandages. The actual smell of his malaise had passed away; he looked at the bright morning sunshine with a rapture he had not felt in decades.

  In his hand he held a flat picture of Gina and Dione. His fingers traced the contours of his wife’s face. Gradually he moved the finger to his daughter’s face, then put the picture down on the table and leaned back against the couch.

  He heard Nadine stirring in the bedroom. Water ran in the bathroom. She emerged in a skewed robe, wearing a puzzled, irritated expression. She had pulled her hair back and tied it into a bizarre six inch pillar on top of her head, a hair phallus. Richard smiled at her. “Good morning,” he said.

  She nodded abstractedly and blinked at the sunshine. “
What’s wrong?” she asked him. “You didn’t sleep?”

  “I slept enough.”

  “It’s late. I slept too long,” she said. “I’m cranky. Have we eaten all the breakfast stuff?”

  “I don’t know,” Richard said. “I could look.”

  “Never mind.” She squinted at him suspiciously. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it? Tell me.”

  Richard shook his head and smiled again. “I feel much better.”

  “Better?”

  “And I’d like to apologize. You’ve really helped me. I had a dream last night. A very odd dream.”

  Her suspicion deepened. “I’m glad you’re feeling better,” she said without conviction. “Want some coffee?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “You really should eat,” she said over her shoulder, padding into the kitchen.

  “I know,” Richard said. His rapture approached giddiness; he felt some concern that he might lose his sense of wellbeing and plunge back but the mood held steady. He stood and entered the kitchen, seeing as if for the first time the scuffed tile floor, the thickpainted wood cabinets and ancient plaster walls.

  Nadine peeled a tangerine by the sink and chewed each segment, staring thoughtfully out the window. “What about your dream?” she asked.

  “I dreamed about Emanuel,” he said.

  “Wonderful,” she commented wryly.

  “I remembered him doing a good thing, a very kind thing. I remembered him helping me after Gina and Dione died.”

  “That’s nice,” Nadine said. The sharpness of her tone puzzled him. She flung the last of the rind and pith of the tangerine into the sink, gathered up her robe and confronted him. “I try to help you and nothing happens. Then Goldsmith comes and it’s all right. Thanks a lot, Richard.”

  Richard’s smile froze. “I said you’d helped me. I appreciate what you’ve done. I just had to work my way through some stupidities.” He shook his head. “I felt there was a string between Goldsmith and myself. I could feel him inside me. I’m not sure if there was anything…”