Archangel

by Marguerite Reed

  I wanted to make certain you were all right.

  Liar.

  Laughter. Maybe a little.

  Why did you watch? Why didn’t you let me know you were there?

  You made me hungry, Vash . . .

  Eventually I came to understand that the look on his face had never been repugnance, pity, prudish offense. It had been the face of the beggar on the banquet hall’s threshold.

  Now I was the beggar, languishing at the door that Lasse, by dying, had shut against me.

  CHAPTER THREE

  When the shuttle had finally come to rest on the tableland, the tremor of its engines vibrated at a low C. The engines’ voice resonated, rose, flowed over all perception. The suspense drew all our nerves to wire; I heard the click in someone’s throat as she swallowed.

  Somewhere we are still caught in that moment, I believe, between the time when the craft calmed and when Lasse opened the hatch, poised on the edge of possibility.

  Gray light spilled into the hatchway. Real light, from a real sky. Some of us wore goggles; some of us merely put our hands up before our faces and peeped through our fingers.

  The hundred of us walked down the ramp. Couples held hands, a few individuals wrapped their arms around themselves as if to keep from flying apart. I heard whimpering caught behind tight lips and the click of prayer beads. A fingertip of a breeze traced through our ranks.

  How to describe one’s first experience of open air, of limitless light? If I say that everything appeared gray, the shuttle, our skin, our clothes, that gives no true impression. This was not the gray of weariness, of defeat. This was the dreaming gray of dawn, the color of the silence before the beloved speaks, the color of the water-filled glass offered to parch long thirst. Overhead the sky’s clarity seemed to ring of itself.

  I remember it was a little cold. No one spoke. My skin tingled with gooseflesh. My lungs pulled in breath after breath of that air, fragrant with the exudations of unknown species. I heard others doing the same. A hundred and one of us.

  While we were in the last stages of orbit, there was still time to program our landing pattern. Do we want to land at the base? Lasse had asked. He smiled, seeing us puzzled. Or do we want to land somewhere else?

  Is it safe? someone asked.

  Lasse cocked an eyebrow at that. You’re about to drop through five layers of atmosphere in a shoebox.

  I know he saw how we looked at each other, that he perceived the excitement glimmering beneath the alarm.

  We’ll have to man-haul our stuff, one boy said disapprovingly.

  A girl turned on him. You’ll have to man-haul for ten years, Shank. No time like the present.

  Do you remember where your loyalty lies? Lasse asked. His expression had sobered.

  To you— somebody began, and Lasse cut her off.

  No. He rapped a knuckle against the tiny window. Down there. If it were my choice, I’d arrange it so there would be no lights, no noise, no back-slapping. I want your first sight to be without clutter. But it’s your decision.

  We decided that we should drop down ten miles east of the First Wave base. No sign of the pre-fab buildings, the water recyclers. We might have been the only humans on the planet.

  As far as the mortal eye could see, covering every rise, hillock, cleft, hollow like the pelt of an animal, ran the grass. Short, crisp grass, silver in the nascent day, on and on. Forever. Nothing, no viddie, no pics, no hallucination had prepared us for this. One of the boys dropped to one knee. Hand held flat, he caressed the springing blades with his palm.

  A few altocumulus clouds smeared across the sky down to the eastern horizon. Enthralled, we watched the world dilate with light. The clouds bloomed to iridescence. Slowly, slowly, whiter, wider, the band of gold at the edge of the new world crept upwards.

  And then the sun itself stepped onto the rim.

  I dropped to my knees. Behind me I heard others doing the same. The boy, stroking the grass as if it were his lover’s hair, was whispering a prayer.

  We’re not supposed to look directly at the sun, of course. Did we know it then? I don’t remember. I don’t know what damage I may have done to myself that morning, what blindness had been engendered as I gazed into the sun’s face. The only words I can remember thinking then, while the sun’s light poured across the morning, were: It’s true. It’s true.

  Noise jarred me awake. The comlink beeped. My daughter howled. The bedclothes had somehow turned to fabric kelp in the night and wound around my legs. “All right, all right!” I bawled. I rolled out of bed onto my knees. Bibi redoubled her wails.

  “Christ have mercy,” I growled. I tried to simultaneously stand and turn toward the door, lost my balance, and banged my head on the closet wall. I cursed. Tears sprang to my eyes. Bibi screeched as if she were trying to vomit a lung. The comlink beeped.

  I roared, “Weeping mother of God, would everyone just shut up a minute!”

  I stalked into my daughter’s room. “Wet!” she asserted, her face shiny with tears. “Mommy, my all wet!” I lifted her out of the crib, agreeing tersely with her, and peeled her out of her clothes. Orange and yellow pants, I noted. Lavender shirt.

  “You’re hurting Mommy’s eyes,” I said. “That’s what I get for dressing you in the dark.”

  “My have to go potty!”

  “You certainly do.” I patted her damp bottom. “Go on, go potty.”

  She trotted to the bathroom while I stripped her crib. I tried to be thankful that the bladder of a two-year-old is not as large as that of an adult. While my head cleared, I realized that the indefatigable beeping from the comlink had ceased. Maybe I could start this day decently after all.

  I opened the shade covering the glass door to the balcony. Another gorgeous morning. Cumulus clouds sailed across the limitless sky, reflected in the ablution fountain directly opposite my apartment balcony. Next to it reared the great clock that doubled as a muezzin’s tower, fashioned from a solitary tufa cone. The four statues cornering the clock faces gleamed. Hassan Taroush forever knelt to touch the earth of the planet he’d just set foot on, bronze tears on his bronze cheeks. Sumitra Kohli, resplendent as a Nike, ripped up the contract offered by the Profiteera. Muslimah Otokune raised a test tube in salute to the heavens. And Lasse Undset, quartering the west wind, held a gun in his right hand and cradled a tarsier to his chest with his left.

  UBI had asked me to design Lasse’s statue. The best image I owned for the purpose had captured him holding the tarsier, which gripped his shirt with soft fingers and toes.

  Since the Elias of London had run the first bioscan over Ubastis, the debate raged as to whether scientists should use Linnean taxonomy to classify extra-terrestrial life, or in fact, if a whole new system of taxonomy should be employed. I myself sympathized with both camps.

  Certainly there was still merit in determining whether a bioform was animal, vegetable, mineral; whether or not it had a spine, whether or not it had a placenta. Should we eventually discover a bioform that was constructed outside of all known classification systems, we could worry about taxonomy then. For now we might simply add a new subclass, of planet of origin.

  And yet . . . nothing native to Ubastis shared anything with Earth save the efficiency of evolution’s structures. The little being with a spinal cord, insectivorous, double-mammaed, five-digited, arboreal, could not be, correctly, the same Tarsiidae as the Earth prosimians. Yet in our nostalgia for Earth we referred to it as thus. The arboros of Cassene teemed with them. Integral xenologists studied them voraciously.

  Still the fruits of Ubastis were not those of Earth, the air not Earth’s, the dirt into which a million pseudo-tarsiers decomposed not Earth’s. It was not a creature of Earth—how could we then net it with terrestrial understanding? Kingdom phylum genus family species, we wrote, cocooning the galaxy with our glittering myths. Dead gods spun in the void. I began to realize the myths and legends we humans carried with us were not a carapace or the dead skin to be sloughed, but were mi
tochondria.

  In the picture used by the sculptor, standing to Lasse’s right, I had held the gun.

  A couple of techs stood on the tower’s catwalk, running a check for storm damage. Flyers soared and dipped in the near distance. Kilometers of golden steppe shimmered in the morning light, manifesting the reason for naming that expanse the Big Tawny.

  Bibi began singing in the bathroom. My cranked-up nerves relaxed. This was going to be a good day, I told myself. The big bad hunter had laundry to do, letters to write, a work roster to review. “And that damn party,” I muttered to myself.

  I wadded up the sheets into a tighter ball, and the buzzer at the door drilled through the apartment.

  I stifled my first impulse. If I shouted, the sensitive pick-up for the apartment computer would fail to register my request. I took a deep breath, then another, calming myself as I approached the door, then spoke in modulated tones: “Who is it?”

  Silence. Then, “Haas. Doctor—er, Commander Loren. May I come in?”

  Commander, yet! “Open,” I told the door. It slid open to reveal a clearer version of the woman I’d met the night before: pale brown hair cut shoulder-length, pale round eyes set above pale round cheekbones. At the sight of me, she glanced away. Reflexively, I thought; although she still managed a civil “Sabah al-khair.”

  “Sabah al-ward,” I returned. “Did you try to call me a moment ago?”

  “You’re not—I’ll wait here while you dress,” she said.

  “I am dressed.” I looked down at myself. Before going back to bed I had changed into an old kurta of Lasse’s. The voluminous garment draped more than enough, although it did stop above my knee.

  Little feet pounded up behind me. “Wipe me!” Bibi demanded. She caught sight of Haas and pointed at me. “That’s my mommy.”

  I laughed, an armful of pissy bedding on my hip, the pisser herself naked and damp and patting my half-bared thigh. “This is as dressed as I get, this time of morning. Won’t you come in, Doctor?”

  She sidled in, her gaze tracking over everything but me and my girl-child. Only last night she’d mentioned the relish with which her cohorts viewed my naked pic. A morning visit to an actual human being differed, I supposed, from an eyeful of a woman safely tacked to the wall of your relative’s workspace.

  With a gesture I indicated the couch, carved out of the tufa wall and bedecked with cushions. “If you’ll have a seat, Doctor?”

  She eyed the couch. Her already scant mouth thinned a bit, in disapproval or thought, I couldn’t tell. “I did try to call. There was no answer. Since I was already up and about, I thought I’d drop by. You did say—”

  “I did. Excuse us for a moment, won’t you?”

  Trying to dress Bibi this morning was like trying to squeeze a radiate into a containment bottle. For someone who had only four limbs, she managed to push, kick, wriggle, and defend herself against salwar and kamiz until I was reduced to hissing at her. “Stop it!”

  I swear she could turn around inside her own skin. “No! Want to be nakie!”

  I hoped Haas was not the nosy type, and pinned Bibi down with one knee, gritting my teeth through the screams. When I finally released her she ran wailing from the room—only to see the stranger she’d forgotten about. She caterwauled back to me and drove her head against my quadricep. Pain burst through the muscle; I bit back a curse and pushed her away gently—I hope it was gently.

  No wonder Haas had looked a little odd upon seeing me. The bruise stained the front of my thigh a cyanotic blue: visible, and then some, beneath the shirt’s hem. I forced my voice to sunniness. “Be right there, Doctor.” Lax as an offworlder, she must think me. For propriety’s sake I relented and threw on a robe, buttoning it from sternum to knees.

  When I came out, Bibi in tow, Haas was standing in the middle of the living room, hands clasped behind her back like a kid who’s been ordered not to touch anything. She turned in a slow circle, her gaze roaming the apartment. I strapped Bibi into her chair. She was as intent on our visitor as our visitor was on my things.

  “Have you eaten?” I asked.

  “I don’t see any pics of him,” she said.

  “There aren’t any.” I shoveled strawberry soygurt into a bowl for Bibi and placed it in front of her, only to be ignored. “No holos to pop up on such and such a day at precisely such and such a time, no lifesize statues I keep in a closet. No matter what the Commonwealth seems to think, he’s not a museum exhibit. Tea? Miso?” Without waiting for a response I poured two cups of chilled tea. When I handed one to Haas she took it without looking. She flinched as her hand closed around the cool ceramic.

  I smiled at her expression. “It’s a drink,” I said. “Sit down.”

  She lowered herself to the couch and perched on the edge. “Your guns,” she said, making no move to sample the tea. “You keep them out there in the open . . .” She waved toward the rifles racked on the far wall. The Justin. The Magdeburg. The Varangar, for the biggest game.

  “Think of them,” I said, “as a display.”

  She continued to stare at them, so, in the interests of experimentation, I sat next to her. She shifted infinitesimally away. I smiled. “How is it, Dr. Haas, our paths have never crossed? You’re not as fresh as all that, are you?”

  “I’ve signed up for a lot of rotation. You may simply have been out—hunting—when I was on my option here.”

  “What’re your opts?”

  “Below, mostly. In soy prep. If the fishery ever gets off the ground, I’d opt for that in a nano. And you? Hunting isn’t exactly—” She glanced at the guns again. “—an opt.”

  “I’d like to be back on Patrol & Rescue, but the hunting gig takes up the max time I’m away from my daughter. I split my time between maintenance and research.” As she still seemed fascinated by my apartment, I felt free to study her as well. The arrogant physician of last night was gone, replaced by a nervous—what? Fan? Tourist? Ambassador? I preferred the physician. “You’re interested in the fisheries, are you?” Dangerous territory. I tried to keep my voice neutral.

  She smiled. “I’d heard you opposed that.”

  “I don’t oppose it. I oppose them being constructed too soon. I oppose anything happening on this planet too soon.” I set my glass down. “Dr. Haas, why are you here?”

  “I’ve always admired you, Commander—”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  Her stare fell just shy of a gape. The skin stretched over those apple-hard cheeks reddened.

  “I’m not a Commander anymore.”

  “But your position—”

  “I owe to a dead man.”

  “With all respect, Comman—Doctor—”

  “It’s the vote, isn’t it? Dr. Haas,” trying to be as gentle, as modulated as I knew how, “are you with the People’s Party?”

  In a few months the vote was up again, whether or not to open up Ubastis for colonization ahead of the originally proposed schedule. Five years ago it had been soundly defeated by the Expansionists and a few of the more forward-looking of the People’s Party.

  “I,” she said tightly, “am for my fellow humans.”

  “I’m for the planet.”

  “Do you know what this planet could mean to thousands of people out there, stuck out there in damned space, recycled air to breathe, no room? There are children up there who’ve never—” She stopped. Took a deep breath. Drank her tea.

  Don’t blow up, I told myself. I’d heard this four hundred times before. So make this four hundred and one. “You’re passionate.” Complimenting her.

  She put the tea down and looked at her hands, fingers spread, the blue veins a map beneath the freckled skin. “My passion is humankind.” She turned them and her palms became cups. “When I read your work—saw that pic of you huge with your child—I thought your involvement was the same as mine, despite your affiliations.”

  I got up, to give myself time, and took Bibi from her chair. When I tried to wipe her face she twist
ed away. “Stop it!” I said. She remembered the stranger in the room and goggled over my shoulder, forgetting the towel’s swabs. I slung her up on my hip and returned to the couch.

  “This is the child I was huge with. Bibi, this is Dr. Haas. Dr. Haas, meet Dr. Undset’s daughter.” I reclaimed my seat next to her, sliding Bibi to my knee. I kissed my daughter’s cheek, her moist neck. She bore my attentions resignedly. When I looked back at Haas, a smile had warmed the doctor’s face.

  “Dr. Haas, you see a woman in her house, with a pretty child on her knee: the widow and half-orphaned daughter of a hero. A romantic picture. The weapons on the wall are a shame, aren’t they? They don’t fit. That’s one of the reasons why Moira took that pic of me with the cheetah and uploaded it to the Source. To keep the widow of the beloved Captain Undset in the public eye as some kind of sweet and fleshy Mother Goddess.”

  “You think me so unsophisticated as that—”

  “I don’t think you unsophisticated. I think you imagine to appeal to the better nature a mother should have. Tell me, Doctor, what do you think I can do?”

  “People listen to you. You may be a—” She glanced again at the guns, compulsively it seemed to me, as someone scratching a rash. “Not everyone agrees with what you do, but they watch you—”

  “Lovely.”

  “And in many ways they follow your path.”

  “Oho, don’t tell me they’re all mad to pick up a rifle now?”

  Distaste convulsed her expression. No hiding it. “If you show your support for the vote, other Expansionists will turn your way.”

  Bibi decided she had had enough. She pushed off of me, using her hand on my face for leverage. “Mommy, I’m boring.”

  “You certainly are. Go put your dishes in the cleaner, please.”

  “Me do that, Mommy!” She pounded across the room. I gave silent thanks she wasn’t screaming, as well. Toddlers, apparently, through what sonic-thermal exchange not yet understood, are noise-powered.

  When I looked back at Haas I erased the smile I felt on my own face. Was I being interviewed? Was there a cam or mic hidden in the embroidery decorating the collar of her coat? I said slowly, clearly, “I cannot influence any party. I can only say that I, personally, oppose the overturn of the hundred-year ban on immigration. This ban was not put into place to spitefully or maliciously deny the human race a chance to colonize a new planet, but to protect both planet and people until the dangers and resources have been studied exhaustively. The Decade Proviso was established to offer public discourse and opportunity to overturn this ban.”