“Is that when the veil happened, and everything went onto autopilot?” Barry asked. “You said something about a long period, at the start, where Angels kept out of the way?”
“You were listening,” the Archangel remarked.
“Listening,” Barry said, “Not necessarily understanding. So all the Angels on Earth, inside this veil, turned up in the past two thousand years on the rubber stamp system?” Gabriel inclined his head. “Apart from you?”
“Correct,” Gabriel said quietly. “I was the lucky one.”
“So this happened at more or less the time of…” Barry nodded towards the crucifix dimly visible at the front of the church. Gabriel looked briefly – too briefly, Barry thought – and away again.
“Around then,” the Archangel said. “And yes, all on the rubber stamp system, if you like. But you, this time, it’s the first time it’s happened in even a slightly controlled way. Like I said – special place, special set of conditions. Your glorification was just as much a rubber stamp as the rest, but the stamp came down at a time and place that we could anticipate. And if it was a bit of a mess for all that – I still want to know where your robe is – then it was still a solid achievement.”
“Achievement,” Barry said blankly.
“Moskin Stormburg is a … a scholar, is the general assumption,” Gabriel explained, and his mouth twisted wryly. “A wise old Elf, if you like. He’s a theoretical metaphysicist, something like that. We don’t know, we just made most of this up. And – wherever he is, whatever he is – he’s worked it out.”
“Worked out how to make Angels?”
“Worked out that the veil wasn’t meant to be lifted, but it wasn’t meant to be impenetrable either,” Gabriel said, amber eyes bright. “He worked out that there’s not enough on this side of it – not enough resources, not enough space, not enough of the stuff that keeps us ticking – for us to survive. So there has to be a way to pierce it – to make air-holes, metaphorically speaking.
“The connection was never enough for us to exchange actual data, like I said,” Gabriel continued, “but enough that we can begin setting conditions on this side, and see what shakes loose. All of this has taken hundreds of years.”
“And I’m the fabulous culmination of your efforts?” Barry asked in a dry voice.
“So far,” Gabriel said placidly.
“What was supposed to happen when we all died?” Barry asked, then winced at the bluntness of his own words.
The Archangel didn’t seem to mind. “One of the people you died with – I was certain of this, just not certain which of you it was,” he said, “was … special.”
“Not me?”
“Actually, almost certainly you,” Gabriel said. “But even if it was, then the glorification didn’t do quite what it was meant to. We wanted to get a Pinian to manifest, so we could … boost our signal on this side.”
“Pinian?”
Gabriel shook his head. Later. “But what I seem to have ended up with is a plain old human. Or a Pinian’s human guise with all the Pinian filtered out and only the human guise left behind. Makes no real difference. No memories or knowledge of what came before, what needs to be done, no power,” he gestured around the shadowy little nave. “No way to turn these puddles of ours back into waterholes.”
“Sorry,” Barry said quietly.
“Don’t feel bad,” Gabriel told him, leaning back in the pew and interlocking his huge hands behind his head. “Nobody’s special like these three. They’re parts of God,” he glanced sidelong at Barry. “Sorry,” he added carelessly. “Parts of the rubber stamp.”
“The three – these Pinians – are what we need to get the right papers stamped? To get the veil lifted?”
“Not lifted,” Gabriel reminded him. “Air holes.”
“And were they all in the elevator with me?”
“Only one, probably,” Gabriel shook his head, unlaced his fingers and spread his hands, taking in the world in general. “They’re still in here somewhere. In human form. They slip away, they can’t get out any more than we can, so they just get recycled as humans, over and over again. I’ve come to the conclusion that they don’t even know they’re Pinians. As for the rest…” he put his hands back behind his head. “The rest is dependent on Stormburg’s Theorem being correct. So any clusterfuck that arose from your death and glorification can be put down to that. Like I say, it’s been centuries in development, so what’s a few bumps in the road?”
“Well, this bump in the road will do what he can to help,” Barry said.
“That’s the spirit,” Gabriel approved. “Only once we isolate them can we bring them out of their human coating. Activate them. If glorification doesn’t work, then something else.”
“Right,” Barry agreed.
“Right,” Gabriel chuckled. “Easy. Now,” he unfolded his hands again, and rubbed them together with a leathery rasp that echoed in the vaulted ceiling of the little church. “What else did you want to know? Quickly now, before your mortal wakes up,” he looked down at the limp figure, and frowned. “He held out longer than I expected him to,” he added. “I had to lean on him pretty hard.”
“You said something about Vampires,” Barry ventured.
“Right,” Gabriel said sourly. “Vampires.”
THE BAD COW
“Wherever you get humans in sufficient numbers and in a sufficiently pestilential saturation, you get Vampires,” Barry told his friends.
“Fuck me, at least let my pint settle before starting with the Vampires,” Little Phil complained, gesturing to his Guinness which was still snowing pale froth as the head separated from the thick black stout. Everybody knew you didn’t start to drink until the pint had settled. In Little Phil’s opinion, you didn’t start a conversation until the pint had settled.
Certainly not one about Vampires.
“Sorry, Cap,” Barry said easily.
Seam, who’d heard a little bit about this the previous night after waking up on the floor of Preston Point Anglican, sat back and sipped his own beer, which was a slightly lower-maintenance Emu. Gabriel had been gone when he’d woken up, but Barry had told him a bit about what they’d discussed. Enough for Seam to realise that their old pal Nails was now a lot more up-to-date on what was happening, and that there was a lot he wasn’t telling Seam.
He had, however, told him about the Vampires.
The other Sheepbreezers sat around the table on an assortment of stools and armchairs, alternately tending to their drinks and snacks or keeping a hawklike eye open for the cigar girl. She didn’t usually start doing the rounds until eight or nine, though, so they had a couple of hours to wait. The sun had gone down at half-past five and Barry had emerged from the little church across the road at six, which was about when most of the team had begun trickling in.
Seam, however, had started work at seven and finished at three, so he’d been at the Bad Cow since four. It had been a miserable day, since he’d only gotten home at about one in the morning and had barely slept for the somersaults his brain was doing, and when he had slept he’d had surrealist nightmares. Still, he’d resisted the urge to go directly to the church, because he’d promised Barry the night before that he wouldn’t. He’d come to the Cow, had himself a basket of fish and chips and washed it down with an Irish coffee, and waited for things to kick off.
Winston Arrowshot, figure of local myth and widely agreed to be the blokiest bloke ever to bloke the Earth, had founded a modest pub in the 1960s and it was now a proud cornerstone of the evolving bar scene that fused the Fremantle Cappuccino Strip and the emerging Irish and British theme pub-restaurant trend. Arrowshot, if he’d ever actually existed, had been a docker – a worker down at the Port of Fremantle, in days of yore – a breed classically defined by not having much time for fancy food and beverages.
The brief legend written on the back of the food and cocktail menu told that once, when forced to dine at an eatery offering just such undesirable fare, Arrowshot ha
d been confronted by a waiter who wanted to know how well-done he liked his steak. Winston Arrowshot had allegedly blasted the poor underpaid waiter out of his penguin suit with the immortal words: Just call it a bad cow and get out of my way.
And so the Bad Cow had been born.
The food was good, the selection of beers on tap was adequate without being wanky, and the cocktails were of precisely two varieties: X-and-coke, or else a towering fruit-and-umbrella-filled monstrosity that you’d better be buying for your girlfriend or on a dare, lest the ghost of Winston Arrowshot appear and give you a wedgie. As a matter of historical interest, in the bad old days of the ’70s and ’80s the cocktail had been dubbed ‘The Pride Parade’, but had in recent years grown a little more politically sensitive and was now just called ‘The Fruit Salad’. The sensitivity of this rebranding was, of course, entirely arguable and depended greatly upon one’s interpretation of the word fruit.
In the past year, the Bad Cow had also added couches and a selection of cigars on sale, which meant Seam’s arrival at four o’clock on Friday afternoon had been quite important to secure sufficient space for the whole team. The lounge filled up early on Friday and Saturday.
“Alright,” Phil said, picking up his fully-blackened pint, “you were saying?”
“Well,” Barry said, “Vampires are real.”
“Elves, too,” Seam said.
“Thank you, Seam,” Barry said calmly. “The Elves are all gone though.”
“Well good,” Tommo said, arriving back at the table with his diiner order. “Still want to hear about them.”
“Vampires first though, since they’re still around,” Little Phil said. “Apparently.”
“Here’s the thing,” Barry said, then paused to move his chair around to make room for Tommo and his Old MacDonaldburger,8 which took up a lot of tablespace.
Barry looked almost like his old self, although he still didn’t have a hat and he still gave off those invisible radiance-lines of un-Nailsian beauty and charisma. He was wearing a plain, rather baggy and short-at-the-cuff set of shirt and trousers and jacket, as well as some shoes and socks donated by the vicar at Preston Point Anglican, in the continuing absence of the ‘robe’ Gabriel had been expecting him to be wearing. His wings had required a certain amount of alteration to the shirt. Seam knew that Gabriel must have helped him with that in some way … but he had promised not to mention Gabriel until Barry did.
Considering the way he stood out like a beacon to Seam’s eyes, and considering the wings, Barry didn’t seem to be attracting any attention at all. The staff, many of whom had known Barry in life, barely appeared to notice him. The other patrons, already growing rowdy by half-past six, likewise didn’t seem to notice he was there. Barry settled back in his chair as best he could and seemed to blend into the heavy dark-wooden English-style décor. It was as though the part of the pub with Barry in it turned into a painting or a tasteful enlarged photograph, and Barry became a figure in that image, distinctive yet easily dismissed as part of the scenery. Seam had never really thought about the phrase he’s no oil painting before, and so had never really thought about what somebody who was an oil painting might look like. But there it was.
Barry Dell went better with his surroundings now, Seam thought, in ways that were only strange in certain circumstances. For example, he’d blended perfectly with the furnishings and atmosphere in the church – a big old mural with an Angel in it, after all, made perfect sense there – but in a pub, his inconspicuousness seemed jarring. He blended in jarringly, and that made no sense whatsoever.
Appearing to temporarily lose track of his thoughts after the chair-shift exercise, Barry raised his own pint to his lips and reduced it by a third. Seam, and presumably the others, had been unsure as to whether Barry ate, drank or slept now – well, the pint at least proved he did one of the three, although whether he was just doing it to fit in, Seam still hadn’t made up his mind. The jukebox was playing one of Midnight Oil’s latest, with the refrain who’s gonna save me? that seemed appropriate for an evening in the company of an Angel.
Barry set his pint down and looked around the steadily-filling pub with a slightly amused expression that Seam already recognised as his new default look. Nails – the old Nails – had also gotten that look on his face sometimes, when he was drunk or stoned and watching the crowds of a Saturday night while imagining himself beyond them and above them, a detached observer of weed-fuelled impartiality. He’d actually been a little insufferable, Seam reflected fondly. Now, he got the impression that this was a normal, and entirely unfuelled, state of mind for their strange new Nails.
“Here’s the thing,” Barry took up again. “At this moment in time, the atheists are right. There is no God, no higher power, no magic. There are laws of physics we’ve only just begun to study and a lot we still don’t understand, but anything we might be tempted to call supernatural,” at this point he gestured to himself a little self-consciously, “is actually just natural but temporarily undissected.”
“No God?” Tommo asked, trying too hard to be nonchalant and popping a chip in his mouth. Seam wasn’t sure whether he sounded disappointed, hopeful, outraged or on the verge of a stroke. It was a weird strangled-neutral sort of tone that usually set off alarms in a pub setting. It was a tone that usually meant someone was about to throw a punch or cop a glass in the face. With Barry sitting at the table, though, that outcome seemed laughable.
“Let me add disclaimers to that,” Barry said, raising his hands defensively. There were nervous chuckles. “Just now, on this planet, in this solar system, what you see is what you get. There are plenty of things we have yet to explain, plenty of forces we don’t understand, but ultimately everything can be explained scientifically. At the moment, whatever force it was that makes people into Angels is just that – a natural phenomenon that they haven’t thought of trying to replicate in a lab,” he gave a little shudder. “Or if they have, it hasn’t actually worked.”
“Are they trying–” Nutter started, and Barry raised his hands again.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I doubt it. Angels are mythology, I doubt the CSIRO or anyone’s trying to make a synthetic one. My point is, yes – there might well be a higher consciousness. It’s sort of depressing to imagine humans are it, after all. But a lot of the stuff they talk about in the scriptures … it’s been warped by hundreds of years of human agendas, and a lot of the oldest stuff is only talking about a set of conditions that no longer holds on this planet.”
“I either need to stop drinking or drink more,” Little Phil spoke for all of them. His pint, in the past minute or so, had drained to its final muddy brown centimetres, usually the point at which you order a new one if you want to keep drinking smoothly up to the point the fresh pint was placed in your hands. Nobody seemed likely to get up from the table now, though. Particularly those who were hemmed in by Barry on one side and Tommo’s monstrous burger on the other.
“The world,” Barry said, “is generally what the scientists say it is. If you fly up in a rocket, you’re not going to pop into Heaven. If you dig a deep enough hole, you’re not going to wind up in Hell. You guys say you saw me fall from the sky,” they all nodded; this much at least they were certain of. “Well, that was more of a metaphor than anything else.”
“A metaphor?” Little Phil said, profoundly unconvinced.
“I don’t know where I physically came from. But chances are I manifested on an atomic level as a result of a specific shift in energy forms here on Earth. All entirely explainable, even though it may not be something we can explain right now.
“And like I said, if there’s a guiding consciousness behind it, an intervening or even human-understandable God … the atheists are right. There’s nothing like that up there,” he pointed at the ceiling. “Not right now.”
“What do you mean, ‘not right now’?” Tommo asked around a mouthful of mixed meats worthy of Noah’s Ark.
“Conditions change,” Barry
said. “Right now, scientists can figure out how things were on Earth millions of years ago by digging up fossils and analysing the rock around them. They can figure out how things were in space billions of years ago by looking at the stars and picking up radiation waves or whatever. But it’s all just … just stuff that we’re finding, and then fitting into whatever sort of explanation works. We fit it together into a story and go ‘right, that’s the story’. Then some new piece of information comes up and we go ‘oh right, this is the story, that thing we thought was the story fifty years ago … ehh, not so much’. And that’s all we have to go on, for anything that happened before the oldest person on Earth was born, and anywhere but the places on Earth where we have been.
“When you look at it that way, it’s really like we’re sitting in a room with a bag over our heads and looking through a hole in the bag at something right up close that we can only see a little bit of…” Barry trailed off, shook his head, and reduced his pint by another 33%. “Sorry,” he went on. “Vampires.”
“What you’re saying is, there’s a ‘real Vampire’ sort of thing,” Seam said when Barry once again looked a little lost as to how he might proceed, “not really connected to all the myths and ghost stories and horror movies and shit.”
“Right,” Barry said gratefully, “exactly. Vampires have been around for a while on Earth, because – like I was saying – you get Vampires wherever you get humans in sufficient numbers and in a sufficient saturation.”
A sufficiently pestilential saturation, you said, Seam thought, but didn’t interrupt.
“Like rats?” Little Phil asked.
Bad Cow (Oræl Rides to War Book 1) Page 6