"No!" I shouted. "Don't go up there! Michael is ... Michael is ... sleeping."
Eion stared intently at the grapes and oranges on the tray, a strange smile playing on his lips. "Okay," he said to my surprise. Clearing his throat, he added, "Maybe you'd like to come down to the rectory, have some lunch ... or take a shower or something?"
"Yeah," I said. "A shower would be nice."
The shower restored my sanity. My fear gurgled down the drain with the warm, reviving water. Relaxed, I joined Eion in the refectory. Wrapped in a black terry-cloth robe with the papal heraldry of Saint Denis emblazoned over my heart, I sucked orange juice from my fingers. Eion sat across from me, his hands folded neatly on the wooden kitchen table. A few curious priests poked their heads in, but before I could even wave "hello" they disappeared.
"Probably don't get a lot of women in the rectory, eh?"
"Of course not," Eion sniffed with a practiced offense. "We're Roman Catholic, remember, not one of those heathen American Catholics."
I laughed, flicking an orange peel across the table.
"No, Eion, I can't exactly see you as me handing-out-condoms type."
"Dee!" Eion lifted the peel out of his lap gingerly. He placed the offending item on the tray. "Please remember where you are."
"I'm in the lunchroom, Eion. This is hardly sacred ground. Condom isn't a dirty word. Besides, I've got it on good authority that sex isn't a sin." My smile faded. I wondered what possessed me to say that. I could feel my carefully constructed world rock just a little. I gripped the edge of the table to steady myself.
"Forget I said that," I told Eion's shell-shocked expression that I was certain mirrored my own.
"I think I'd better," Eion said.
I shook my shoulders out and let go of the edge. I lined up another bit of orange rind between my fingers. "Come on, be the goal."
"No, now stop it!" Eion waved his hands. "I have something serious I want to talk to you about."
The peel was aimed perfectly, my fingers poised to deliver a hard flick. "I don't think I can handle any more seriousness right now, bro. Come on, play with me instead, huh?"
"Deidre, I had a vision."
I sputtered at his words. The orange peel bounced off the fruit tray. I straightened the collar of the robe and gave Eion a hard look. "What do you mean, like another LINK-angel?"
"No, Dee, nothing like that – it was beautiful. I was in the middle of Matins when it came to me." The lines on Eion's face smoothed out, reminding me of the stained-glass angel's peaceful gaze. "It wasn't at all like the LINK-angels ... it was less clear, more like a dream – very symbolic."
I nodded. Everyone around me had gone completely insane. "Okay," I murmured. "What did you see?"
"You." Eion's fingers reached out to recover the out-of-bounds orange peel. He placed it on the tray with the others.
"Me?"
I watched him in silence. Finally, he looked up at me. "Yeah, isn't that odd?"
"I'd say," I agreed. I ran my fingers through my damp hair and rocked back in the wooden chair. "When you say 'vision,' you're not talking about, like, a daydream. You mean something more biblical, right?"
"I'm quite certain it wasn't a daydream. And ..." His eyes slid away from mine again to stare at the fruit bowl. "With our visitors, and, well, everything that's happened today, I'm sure it is some kind of portent."
"I don't want to hear this, Eion. Things are already too weird."
"Nothing like this has ever happened to me, either, Dee," Eion said. "None of this. I'm afraid if I tell my colleagues about this, they'll think I'm completely insane."
"Maybe you are," I said quietly. "Maybe we all are."
"You're wrapped up in something big, Deidre. I know I haven't been supportive during all of your trauma. But ..."
I snorted, "That's an understatement."
"... But," he continued, ignoring my jab, "this vision ... I saw you in an apple orchard with a seraphim. You were holding a lily."
"I am the archangel Michael." Another voice, chiding me: "Remember me."
I tasted citric acid in the back of my throat. "A lily?"
"Um?" Eion looked at me, as if suddenly realizing he was talking to a layperson and not another priest. "Oh, well, it's an old-fashioned icon, but standard enough. Old hard-copy of images of the Visitation always show the Virgin Mary holding a lily. A dew-draped lily represents an active male ... well, you have more experience with that sort of thing than I. Surely, you can see the resemblance."
"Some things done in the name of love have a bitter edge."
"The Visitation," I repeated. My stomach flopped. "Eion, you can't be serious."
"I don't know what else to make of it."
I stood up so suddenly that the chair crashed to the floor. Eion jumped.
"I need to borrow some of your clothes," I demanded, my voice thin with hysteria. "Where's your room?"
"What?" Eion started at my sudden change of mood. "Why ... ?"
I was close to grabbing him by that little white collar and shaking him. Instead, I balled my fists at my sides.
"Eion!" I cut him off. "I have to get out of here right now. Show me your room, or I swear I'll rip those clothes right off your back."
"Going?" Eion's eyes glittered with panic. "Where?"
Morningstar had said in the church: "I could kill her now, ruin all your plans... Your plans." So, I thought with a sneer, it was determined all along.
"Dee?" Eion's voice was thin. "What should I tell Michael?"
My lips pressed into thin, hard resolve. "Tell him I've left him in your 'capable hands.' "
* * *
LINK site path – LINK-angels, what are they, what are your experiences with them...
The nature of angels, a Unitarian perspective: by Darcy O'Donnell
Like everyone, I experienced the LINK-angels on a very personal level. Phanuel appeared to me while I was out in the "back-forty," as I like to call the far end of my urban garden, picking aphids off my William Baffin roses. I'd been absently listening to International Public Radio via the LINK, and suddenly, the angelic visage peered at me between the slats of my wrought-iron fence. We stared at each other, me with my crushed-aphid carcass-encrusted gloves, and he with his absent, worm-eaten eye sockets. Then, like any good Unitarian Universalist minister, I attempted to engage him in a philosophical debate.
It's the oldest joke about Unitarians, of course. When faced with the diverging paths on the road to enlightenment, one with a sign reading, "This way heaven," and the other with, "This way to a discussion about the existence of heaven," the Unitarian always picks the latter.
So, although I stared right into the face of a LINK-angel, possibly a portent of the empirical existence of God, I said to it, "If you're a real angel, why do you only appear on the LINK? Why, when I see you, is my heart filled with dread? Shouldn't even the angel of death fill me with radiance?" Then, true to my doubting nature, I attempted to touch it, and it faded away.
Since then, I have been thinking about angels. I dusted off my King James version of the Bible, my copy of the Torah, the Koran, and a whole slew of other religious books, and went looking for passages and information about angels. What I found surprised me. The first biblical mention of angels is in Genesis 19:1-3, "The first time angels appear in the Bible, they are fully human. The two angels arrived at Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gateway of the city. When he saw them, he got up to meet them and bowed down with his face to the ground. 'My lords,' he said, 'please turn aside to your servant's house. You can wash your feet and spend the night and then go on your way early in the morning.' 'No,' they answered, 'we will spend the night in the square.' But he insisted so strongly that they did go with him and entered his house. He prepared a meal for them, baking bread without yeast, and they ate."
Here are angels acting like men. They argue, they eat, they need a place to spend the night. Later in Genesis, Jacob also greets angels of the Lord as if they were
men and invites them to stay in his house. The Hebrew word for angel, "Malach," means, simply, "a messenger." In the Koran, though the angels are clearly spiritual beings early on (we see them in The Cow 2:3 at creation speaking directly to God), in The Family of Imram 3:39, they act as messengers to Mirium for Allah. It has been postulated by more learned scholars than I that the Israelites were influenced in their thinking about the spiritual nature of angels when they intermixed with Arabic peoples (see Jeffrey Burton Russell's series about the history of Satan.)
The Septuagint renders the Hebrew into aggelos which also has both significations – holy and secular messengers, as the original was written. By the time the Bible is translated into Latin, however, the divine or spirit-messenger is separated from the human, rendering the original in the one case by angelus and in the other by legatus or more generally by nuntius. Even if you believe the hand of God inspired the Bible, the division between these concepts was created wholly by human decision-makers.
As a Unitarian, I have always believed that if there is a God and he does directly influence Earth via messengers such as angels, he would probably do so through real people, like Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King, Jr., etc. So why electronic angels, why such an obvious move from God...
Chapter 13
The shoes were too big for me, and they rubbed the backs of my heels raw. As I'd left the church, Eion had reminded me that impersonating a priest was a federal crime that carried the death sentence. I didn't care. Each jab of pain kept me anchored – kept me from thinking too hard. I was too angry for rational thought, anyway.
I leaned up against a wall. My fingers scraped against the concrete for support. The smell of urine and rotting garbage wafted on the breeze. Picking up my head at the odor, I began to wonder where my feet had taken me. Suddenly, I realized I was walking on the street and not in the skyway.
Less than two blocks away loomed the glass city. I could see the outer rim of a blast line. The skyline glittered like a forest of crystal. Straight edges of buildings, windows, and high-rises burst with prisms of color. Thanks to the traffic tubes, it had been a long time since I'd seen unfiltered sunlight. Here, in the old city, there were none. The apartment complexes, once gray and drab, now reflected the blues and whites of the sky. Only a hint of color could be seen under the sheath of the Medusa bomb's glass, unifying everything in a shimmering whiteness. Hulks of ancient cars stood like enormous jewels in the glassy road.
I gave up standing in favor of slumping against the wall. No wonder my feet were sore; I must've walked for hours to make it as far as the glass city. I tried to rub some life back into my toes, then took a long breath – probably my first calm one in hours. I pulled up my knees and wrapped my arms around them, hugging myself. The crumbling asphalt warmed the soles of my feet, too bad the sun did nothing for my soul. I rubbed at my shoulder, willing it to hurt. Despite my efforts, the pain refused to come. The miracle stubbornly clung to my body like a parasite.
I shook my head sadly. So much for going for a short, ten-minute walk. Michael would have to wait. I wasn't ready to talk to him yet. I wondered if I ever would be.
My thoughts ground like gears. Michael couldn't leave me with child; his body was a shell of air, impotent. Eion hallucinated the connection to the Visitation; or maybe the fact that we dreamed the same thing was coincidence. Anyway, if I recalled my Sunday school lessons correctly, it was the archangel Gabriel who spoke to ...
A gear derailed, crunch. I hid my face in my hands as I remembered Jibril, rather Gabriel, offering Michael advice about me: "I've been there, you know." Michael responding, "Who could forget!"
"Jesus Christ!" Then, to banish the thought, "No! No. No."
Despite my protests, my mind conjured an image of a black Madonna and the chocolate-skinned Jibril naked and sweaty. I wondered: did she have to coax him?
The engines came back on-line with a lurch. These weren't biblical times. I was certainly no virgin, nor especially worthy. I was excommunicated, a disgrace to the Church. What Michael and I did back in the belfry was not sacred. It was good sex, but hardly miraculous.
My shoulder twitched. Okay, maybe there was a miracle involved, but it still bore little resemblance to the holy virgin birth. Besides which, I didn't want the job. I've never been exactly maternal. I didn't own a dog or a cat, not even a goldfish. I wasn't responsible enough to raise any kid, much less the second ... an angel's kid.
Moreover, I couldn't afford it. The price of raising a child was enormous. If I didn't get some new clients soon, I was going to have to live in my office. I was still excommunicated, even if I did have access to the LINK. That meant I didn't have health insurance. What, was I supposed to have this child in a ... "Barn?" I groaned. "Oh, God."
I pulled my face out of my hands with effort. The sun glistened across the rooftops of the glass city. The black of Eion's robes absorbed the warm light. I frowned. There wasn't a cloud in the sky. Yesterday's storm had purged the air of much of its usual foulness.
Rubbing my aching feet, I felt a blister on my heel. This wasn't how things were supposed to happen. Angels didn't walk around in painted-on jeans. But then, what did I know? Most of my images of angels had come from artists' renditions, stained-glass windows, Sunday school, and the LINK-angels. I tried to remember angels in the Bible, and all that came to me was lyrics from the Christmas song, "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing." I could no longer distinguish between folklore and fact, and probably even the "facts" of the Bible had been diluted.
I sighed, and leaned my head against the warm bricks of the crumbled warehouse. A fishy river odor drifted above the smell of garbage and human waste. Letting the warm sun batter my face, I shut my eyes and tried to think.
I might not be pregnant. I played "Vatican roulette" with Michael, but I'd been lucky before. I knew my body pretty well. Still, the child could be Michael's one miracle. It was possible that his purpose here was to impregnate me. All the contraceptive planning in the world couldn't stop a cosmic plan.
Michael told me that he kept running afoul of the concept of freewill. Presumably that meant that I had a choice in all of this. Perhaps there was something I could do about it. Thanks to the New Right, abortion was considered murder, and, if convicted, I could face the death penalty. That was only if I was convicted. I used to be a cop; I knew how to avoid detection. I could do it, and I could get away with it.
But, if Michael risked turning to impregnate me, then he would certainly risk more to see me take the child to term. I could probably avoid secular detection, but could I run away from God?
"You're a long way from the nearest mission, priest lady."
I started at the voice. Dirty, ripped jeans hung loosely around a thin waist. The heavy-duty flak jacket still held someone's name and rank. I would've mistaken the man before me for the original owner if it wasn't for the shoulder-length silver hair and matching eyes. I was face to face with a ... "Gorgon." I whispered.
Gorgons were possibly the ugliest by-product of the Medusa bomb. Once human, they had lived too long in contact with the glass city. The Medusa bomb worked by beginning an organic-like chain reaction of crystallization that moved through physical objects. Even though the blast had occurred twenty-one years ago, the reaction was still "hot" inside the transformed glass, and anything or anyone that touched it was infected. That residue "radiation" caused tissue damage and mutation. Gorgons were that mutation – each generation being born, maturing and dying in the span of a few short years. They had a culture that was both childlike and brutal.
The Gorgon crouched down to take a better look at me. He sniffed the air like a wild animal testing my scent. He smiled, showing me his sharpened incisors. "Insults are hardly necessary ... Human." He mocked my horrified whisper.
"Your English is very good," I told him, hoping to appeal to his childlike nature. All cops were trained in the language the Gorgons used among themselves, but it changed every generation. I was out of touch, and Gorgons didn't l
ive particularly long. "Are you a passer?"
"I'm as much of a passer as you're a priest." He tossed his silver mane about his shoulders. "Fraid the hair is a giveaway. It went some time ago. That ended my passing quick." He poked me in the shoulder playfully. "You smell like a Joey."
"Still?" I smiled, willing myself to take deep, even breaths. "I left the force over a year ago."
"Gun oil," he explained. Then, cocking his head at me quizzically, he pointed to my forehead. "What are you doing here if you have a map in your head?"
I touched my temple reflexively. The receiver's lump was warm beneath my fingers. I could almost imagine the thrum of activity dancing beneath my skin. "I turned it off."
"Not very smart." The Gorgon eyed me suspiciously. Not many turned off all of their LINK functions. Most people stayed in constant connection with the weather and directional satellite. When I shut down the urgent message override command, I'd also disconnected minimum service.
After all, Mouse was the best hacker there was. If he wanted to bounce a message through the weather channel relays, he could find a way, and if Mouse could do it, someone else might be able to follow him. With the cops and the FBI on my trail, I couldn't take that risk.
The Gorgon sniffed the air. I wondered if he could smell my fear. "You're running away," he pronounced. With a cock of his head, he changed his mind. "Or are you hiding like the others?"
"What others?"
He shook his head. "It's a secret. They give us outside food if we keep the secret. What we hunt here just makes us sicker. Of course" – he gave me another toothy grin and a tenderizing poke – "your meat isn't contaminated yet."
"Oh." My smile faded. Curiosity had momentarily suppressed my fear. At the Gorgon's veiled threat, a lump returned to my throat. "Um, I thought that was an urban myth."
"Depends on how you define cannibalism. We don't eat our own kind ... Human." The silver in his eyes glittered menacingly. He licked his lips for effect. I heard a faint whoosh; then, suddenly, a spring-loaded stiletto appeared in his hand.
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