She studied the screens, cocking her head and frowning. She had to weigh her decision against everything else she was juggling. But the most important part of it had to be if my appearance would have the right effect on the Linneans.
“All right. I like it. That’ll work. One second—” She conversed a few moments with her comm-set, then came back to Alex. “Smiller had something different in mind, but this will work just as well, if not better. And we don’t have time to change it anyway.” She turned to me. “We’ll do it your way, Kaer. This look has a—a look to it. Very Linnean. An earthy look. But spiritual too. Sensual. Innocent. Even a little sexy. And the nudity makes it a lot harder for someone to turn you into an icon or a totem or a symbol of something later on. You make a good angel, Kaer. Thank you.” She turned away abruptly. “Oh, Alex, do something about the feet. Pretty them up somehow. Give them some radiance or make them go translucent or something. Same with the hands. Make them glow. Good. Oh, and blur out the genitals. You know, they’ll look at the crotch—men always do.” She pointed at the screen. “Give them a ripple effect here so they can’t tell male or female, but maybe both or neither or back and forth. You know what I mean?”
Alex was typing busily. He stopped just long enough to scratch his eyebrow. “Stop there, Byrne, or I won’t have time to do it all.”
“Uh—I have nothing else to say.” She lifted her hands up as if taking them off an invisible keyboard, as if saying, “It’s all yours and I’m outta here.” She glanced up to me. “You look gorgeous, Kaer. You’ll do great. I have a couple other things to take care of.” She glanced at her watch, then flashed her spread out fingers three times. “We go live in fifteen. I’ll come back in five, and we’ll do a quick rehearsal.”
“All right,” said Alex, preoccupied with his screens. “Let’s get the streamers on.”
“Make them flickery,” I reminded.
“I hear you, five by five,” he said without looking up.
Da stepped up onto the stage with the streamer part of the costume. It was like a robe, but it wasn’t—it was more like a curtain of sparkly beads and cellophane kite-tails. I lifted my hair so he could bring it around under. As he fastened it around my neck, I adjusted the falls of curls front and back, shaking my head to make them fall more naturally. As soon as da stepped away, I called to Beck. “Hair all right?”
She gave me a thumbs-up. “Perfect. You look great. I need to get on station now. Break a leg, Kaer.”
“You too! I mean—”
“I got it, thanks!” And she was gone, somewhere across the boulder.
I called across to Alex. “Do you need to calibrate anything with these?” I held up a spray of beads.
“Already did it, while you had your makeup done.” He tapped his own throat to indicate the fastener around my neck. “Click it,” he said. I did, and the beads began twinkling. Whenever I moved, the beads flashed and the kite-tails shimmered. “Move around a little bit,” he ordered. I practiced going down on one knee, then back up again. I spread my arms around like Byrne had shown me.
“That looks good,” Alex said, bending to his controls. “But I think we want to fade them out a bit.” He typed. “Yes. That looks better. We want you to have a radiant look. We don’t want you to look like a neon sign.” He laughed. “Botticelli would love this. Angel rising from the sea . . . from the sea of grass. All right, let’s plug in the background.” He stepped away from the computers and indicated the screens to da. “What do you think?”
Da shook his head in amazement. “Amazing. Just amazing. Astonishing even.” He looked up to me. “Kaer, you’ll love this. You’ll see the tape. You look so good, I can’t begin to say.”
“Thank you, da—”
“All right, enough compliments. We have work to do.” Byrne came bustling back, wheeling up a cart with three display panels on it. They were set in a row, so when she turned the cart sideways, all three of the screens were facing me. They showed the caravan, as if from ahead and above. “We’ve just put the helis in place,” she said. “We have a go.” She adjusted the angles and the positions of the display panels. “See the red lights on the monitors here? Whichever one lights up, you look at that one. Easy—right? That way we’ll keep you looking at the whole caravan, the way I explained before. Back and forth, back and forth.”
Beside his work-station, Alex was angling a parabola-mike at me. “I need a voice-level, Kaer?” To Byrne, “I need quiet for a background level—”
“Quiet on the set!” Somewhere overhead, a bell rang. Instantly, the noise-level everywhere dropped to near-zero.
“I wish I could do that at home,” I said.
“Shh, Kaer,” Alex said, listening to his headphones. “I need to get a background level.”
I shut up, embarrassed. And waited in silence. A few more seconds passed.
“All right,” he said to Byrne, “I’ve got most of the air-conditioner motor noises cancelled. Now let’s try it with the fan.” He reached over to his control board and flicked a switch. Beneath me, something began to whirr—and sudden jets of air puffed up around me, fluttering the beads and my hair.
“Does that bother you?” Byrne asked.
“No. It feels good. It feels cool.”
“We need your image to have visible interaction with the rising smoke. The fan gives us the illusion that the rising smoke is blowing through your hair, ruffling it as it rises.”
“Byrne, shh,” said Alex. Another few seconds of silence passed, while Alex twiddled his pots. “All right, good. Kaer?” Without looking up from his boards, he waggled a finger at me. “I need a voice level please.”
“Let my people go,” I said. “Let my people go. Let my people go. . . . Let my people go!” Alex waved his hand in a keep going gesture. I said it a few more times while he adjusted the settings on his sound-board. I tried it all three ways, especially the angry way, and Byrne gave me a happy thumbs-up.
“All right, I’ve got the voice,” said Alex. “Thank you, Kaer.” To Byrne, “I’ve got ten db of noise-canceling on the truck motors, the air-conditioners, and the fans. I can push the focus on Kaer’s voice and pump the s/n for another ten. The music and sound effects will mask the residual. But I can’t mask the noises of the onsite vehicles from here. They’ll have to run on fuel cells only in the target zone.”
Byrne nodded and spoke to her comm-set. She turned back to Alex. “You got it.” Then she listened to her comm-set again. “We have a hold at thirty seconds. Second vehicle hasn’t moved up yet. Quiet on the set, people! Don’t fall apart on me.” The bell rang again. An exclamation point—two short bursts. The noise-level everywhere dropped again.
“I really want a bell like that. . . .” I said.
“No more chatter, Kaer.” Byrne’s voice in my ears.
“We didn’t get to rehearse,” I said. “Not enough.”
“Don’t go there,” she said. “We don’t have time for jitters.” She moved into position just behind the center monitor, where I could see her clearly. “All right,” her voice came softly in my ear. “Show me the first position.” She put her hands up to her heart. I echoed the move. “Perfect. See? You can do it. Now open your hands. Do like this.” She brought her hands gently forward. I did the same. “Lower than that. Lower. . . . Good!”
We went through the whole cycle of movements, stopping only once while Byrne conferred with someone on her comm-set. “We’re having our dress rehearsal,” she said. “Give me three more minutes? Two? Fine. Thank you.”
“Can I have a pad for my knees?” I asked. “The metal grillwork hurts when I go down—”
Even before I finished the request, Alex grabbed the cushion off his chair and tossed it up to me. “Don’t worry, I’ll make it disappear.”
Byrne finished her conversation with her comm-set and turned back to me. “All right, show me the gathering up. Hands a little wider. Good. Same position—now open your hands to make a tunnel. Turn loose the angry little soldiers. Lo
ok angry. Don’t overdo it—not that much. Good. All right, now stand up slowly. Look up and ascend to heaven. Perfect. You’ve got it. No problem.” To her comm-set. “Houston, we have an Angel.”
The Angel Appears
I had the best view of anybody. The monitors at my feet were the big high-resolution ones—two meters across—so it was just like looking down into three big windows. The images were enhanced, so everything was as clear as daylight. And Byrne was doing a running commentary in my ears, so I knew exactly what I was looking at. She had monitors of her own to look at, though not as big as mine. At the moment, the center monitor was focusing on a close-up of the “rails.” The track looked like a narrow brick road with wide grooves for gutters. The grass pressed in close on either side. The view zoomed out then and I was looking at a caravan of three trains.
“Come on, Alex—get that camera synced.”
“Done,” he called.
On her console, Byrne activated a pointer—so now we had a yellow circle moving around on the screens. The three monitors cut to a panoramic view and Byrne began directing my attention to different parts of the caravan.
“Can I have some sound please? So I can hear the Linneans?”
“Alex?”
“Sorry. I thought I’d plugged it in.”
Almost immediately, the sounds of great-horses grunting at rest came floating up to me. And the calls of men arguing with each other as they hammered at a broken wheel. “Too loud. I can’t hear Byrne.” I waved my hand downward, as if pushing the volume of the sound lower.
“Copy that,” Alex replied crisply, and the sound level receded. Now I could hear Byrne again.
The camera view shifted to reveal three trains of wagons. Each train had three or four cars, pulled by four great horses, two on each side of the tracks—so as they moved through the grass, they flattened it away from the train. Byrne’s pointer moved down the line of cars. “They’ve unhitched the horses to feed them. Bit of luck there. They’ve got them all on the north side of the tracks. Bit of bad luck there. Better for us if they’d put them on the south. Not a real problem though.” She began counting off the cars, identifying their separate functions. “Lead wagon here. . . . Comfort wagon. . . . Another comfort wagon. . . . Supply wagon. . . . The second train has the prisoners. Four armored cars, nothing else.”
I studied the wagons, as if trying to see which one held Jaxin. They were heavy-looking and ugly.
“The third train has supplies for the troops,” Byrne continued. The arrow moved, the view shifted. “We’ve got twenty armored great-horses carrying a hundred and twenty soldiers—”
“Huh?? I thought they withdrew.”
“We thought they would—it looked like they would, but they didn’t. They haven’t yet. Whatever, the boffili didn’t spook them.” The images came back to the front of the train—what the Angel would see. “We’ll just have to deal with it.”
“But, how—? The plan! I mean—”
“Stay with me, Kaer. This will get tricky enough. I don’t need you losing it now.” She held up a hand. “Don’t panic. We’ve allowed for this.” She held her clipboard high, so I could see it. “We’ve got a lot of alternate scenarios, to cover every possibility. If we have to, I’ll feed dialog to you. You’ll just take it slow and easy, understand? Slow and easy, no matter what. We don’t need to rush. We’ll do fine.
“We don’t know what will happen when you appear. Maybe the troops will panic and run, maybe the Magistrates will too. And if they don’t,—we’ll deal with that.”
“You mean people will get hurt?”
She looked annoyed. “Yes, that could happen.”
“Can’t we—?”
“Wait? No. We can’t. We have to do this now. We won’t get another chance, certainly not a better one. Just stay with me, Kaer, we’ll walk through this together. We’ll do fine. All right?”
“All right,” I said.
Byrne sounded more nervous than me. All I had to do was be an Angel. She had to coordinate with Smiller and Jorge. Smiller was in the control booth in Bus-Tractor One. Jorge was out in the grass with the assault teams. Byrne turned away, listening to her comm-set.
“Okay, people—!” Byrne’s voice in my ear. “All units have taken their positions. We have begun pumping smoke! The clock resumes ticking on my mark. Three, two, one—we go live in thirty! No more talking!”
I looked past Byrne to da. He smiled at me and gave me a happy thumbs-up gesture. Then he blew me a kiss.
Byrne rang her bell, three times now. “Holding for smoke, holding. . . . Live in ten. Nine, eight, seven, six—” She didn’t count off the last five digits aloud. Instead, she flashed them with her fingers and mouthed the words. “—three, two, one—!”
She pointed at me, and together, we both put our hands up to our hearts. She nodded, satisfied. “Look at the monitors,” she whispered in my ears.
I looked at the center one. The rail-wagons had suddenly come alive with people falling out of doors or climbing ladders up to the railed decks atop the wagons to stare up at me. Magistrates in long red robes, novices in yellow kilts and painted faces. They all looked horrified. In my ears, I heard anticipatory music. A series of rising triads. . . .
The red light blinked, became an arrow pointing right. I looked slowly to the right monitor, where kilted troops were just rushing up to gape at the Angel rising in their midst. Like all the Linneans I’d seen so far, they were all big men. They were followed by another Magistrate and his brawny bodyguards behind him.
Now the red light turned into an arrow pointing left. I turned my attention slowly to the left monitor. More men there, mostly troops, buckling on armor or waving their shields above their heads as if to hide from my terrifying gaze. As big as they were, they’d never confronted anything like me before. “Good, Kaer. Good. Don’t smile. Take your time, just keep looking back and forth. We want them to come forward, as close as possible. We want them all to have a good look at you before you do anything—”
So far, this was easy. The fan ruffled my hair, the beads, and the streamers—and I studied the images in the screens like a very sad God. I wondered what would happen if I pointed my finger at someone and said “zotz!” Would he be struck with lightning? That would be a nice feature to add. Very un-Motherly, but great fun in a video game.
I pushed the thought away. These huge men were real people—and very scared. Some of them stood awestruck, staring up at me, amazed and astonished. Others dropped to their knees, pleading and praying. Still others prostrated themselves on the ground. Some of them were sobbing in fear. A couple ran into the grass. Then a few more.
“Just keep watching, Kaer,” Byrne whispered. “Don’t say anything yet. We want to see what the troops will do.”
I wanted to say that they looked like they were about to retreat in panic, but I knew I couldn’t.
Then I had an idea. I cocked my head slightly as I peered to the right. Then I bent slightly forward as I peered to the center. I narrowed my eyes as I looked to the left—as if I were focusing on specific individuals. A wordless chorus added itself to the music.
“Great, Kaer! Great!” Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Byrne holding a high thumbs-up. I ignored it and kept on doing what I was doing. I focused first on one, then the next, then a third. I looked from one to another as if I were tallying up who had been naughty and who had been nice—and none of them had been nice. . . .
The sounds of their prayers and sobbing came to my ears as if from a great distance. I almost felt sorry for them. What a terrible trick we were playing on them—but they were doing a terrible thing too. And at least we weren’t hurting them. Just . . . waking them up a little bit.
And then, on the monitor to my left, something started happening—a commander of some kind came striding up through the troops, barking orders and yanking them to their feet, forming them into a ragged skirmish line. Byrne saw it too. “Shit,” she said.
I felt the same way, b
ut I had to stay in character. I cocked my head and stared at the troops on the left monitor. I held my expression still as they lined up. I knew they couldn’t hurt me. One or two of them lifted their crossbows defiantly. I focused on those soldiers and narrowed my eyes. It worked—they lowered their crossbows almost immediately.
“Good, Kaer. Now we’ve demonstrated interaction. We have relationship. Never mind—all right. Let’s go to position one. Watch me now.”
I lifted my glance to Byrne. She was right behind my center monitor, so I barely had to shift my eyes. To the watchers below, it would seem as if I were looking across the caravan of trains behind them.
Byrne leaned forward toward her own displays, focusing her attention on her center monitor. I did the same. The troops were just lining up across the tracks. They were all big men. Burly and brawny like all Linneans—but these men were solidly muscled, and their strength looked scarred by experience. The commander who’d had the presence of mind to assemble them took his place in the center of the track, glowering up at me. He was short and stocky and had a nasty scar across one eye. He looked like a ticking bomb. What a brave little bastard.
Behind him a cluster of Magistrates huddled nervously. Novices cowered behind the edges of the wagons, peeking out like children. With their red and blue makeup, they looked like clowns—or mandrills. Behind them, the soldiers of the church were quietly forming up. They didn’t seem terrified at all—as if they’d seen this before. Or had been warned. I didn’t like that thought.
“All right, Kaer. Watch me. I want you to go down on one knee. Be careful not to put yourself into an uncomfortable position. Go down on both knees if you have to. You’ll have to hold it for a bit, and we don’t want you to wobble.” I watched how she did it and did the same. I had to do it gracefully. Angels were graceful.
“Good. Now put your hands out slowly. Watch me. Just like this.” She leaned her body forward, she unfolded her arms, and opened her hands to the displays in front of her in a gesture of friendship. She spread her palms wide, but not too wide. “Slowly now. Do the same thing.”
Child of Grass: Sea of Grass, Book Two Page 26