Archangel

by Marguerite Reed

  Haas slipped the one she was wearing from her ear. “If you don’t mind a little wax.”

  “Never.” I put it on and adjusted the angle of the filament. A shadow loomed below my eye; fingertips grazed my cheek. I flinched.

  “Your face,” Haas said. “By the Merciful, that’s going to be a bruise.”

  I nodded. “Loren here; Loren here,” I said. The comp, not recognizing my voice print as being keyed to this particular comlink, asked me for my code; I gave it. Made the request for a deployment of two P&R personnel to R5 of Medbay Quad North. Preference for Captain Kárpáti. He might be drunk by now, but he, like no other person in New Albuquerque, would understand.

  Not that any P&R carried lethals, not after Wadjet. Stun rounds and irritants usually did the trick. A well-placed butyl slug, however, could kill as well as an alloy one, if you knew where to aim.

  I watched the Beast from my end of the room while Haas hovered. “He’s not decent,” she said. “I should get him some clothes.”

  I daggered a look at her. “You go right ahead. In the spirit of experimentation. Is this the twenty-fourth-century version of Schrödinger’s cat?”

  “Which one’s the cat?” Haas said. She shrugged, and untangled the sheet from the bed. With her foot she pushed it across the floor to the Beast. “Go ahead. Wrap that around yourself until we can find something for you to wear.”

  The Beast sighed. Haas returned abruptly to our end of the room.

  “Not going to hurt anyone,” the Beast said. Even to my biased ears he sounded weary. He picked up the sheet and wound it around his waist.

  “What do you call what you did?”

  “You were . . . provoking.” He looked at Haas. “If she squeezed your tit, wouldn’t you be provoked?”

  It cost me great, great effort to keep my face still. No human effort, though, could prevent the wash of heat through my face.

  “I might be,” Haas said. “But not to the extent to which you seem to have been.”

  “And if she hit you in the face?”

  “I don’t believe I’d hit her as a matter of first resort.”

  The Beast’s face twitched, on the verge of a sneer. “You in love with her?”

  Haas made a violent, aborted movement. I touched her arm; she pulled away from me. “Did you only hit him the one time?”

  “Only once that made any difference.”

  “Pity.”

  The hiss of the door announced András’s arrival. What followed was short and ugly, and troubled my sleep for nights to come. The Beast never put up a physical protest. When András and his hard-eyed partner approached him, he backed up until his spine touched the wall. The partner trained her firearm on his head. They told him to turn and he did; they told him to hold his hands behind his back, and he obeyed. I could see the muscles beneath his skin turn to rock, as with enormous strain. The sighting’s red spot scrawled across his cheek as he craned to look over his shoulder. His gaze found mine above András’s head. I heard the snick of the shackles’ lock.

  “Don’t let them take us,” he said. To me. The teeth of his voice sawing in his throat. “You saved our life,” he said. “Please. Not in a cell again.”

  And he looked at me with the cheetah’s eyes.

  “Let me give you a tranquilizer,” Haas said. I stood in the center of the room, still, Lasse’s shirt wadded up in one hand. I did not see the sculpted walls, the bed, the lamp washing everything in forlorn blue.

  “I’m all right,” I said. “I just need air.”

  “Come on, then.” She put an arm around my shoulders and tried to steer me about. I cringed.

  “Don’t touch me. I’m sorry, but please don’t touch me.”

  She let me walk out of there, out of the medbay itself, without another word. She may have followed me for a little distance. I didn’t know. I walked. The tufa was warm beneath the gaily patterned soles of my feet.

  I walked up the long corridor, past doors and side hallways, past apartment complexes and the glass-walled agora for meetings and public celebrations. I climbed stairs, brushed past sleepy citizens who gave my stained, exquisite clothes an inquisitive glance and then stumbled on to their own midnight destinations. The higher I went, the fewer people, the less habitation. Most of New Albuquerque spilled onto the edge of the Big Tawny, clumping here and there in single, quadruple, octuple-dweller cones. Those who lived in the cliff itself preferred to live in the honeycombs closest to the city floor, away from the tableland that stretched for miles, overlooking the flatlands, the turbines, and the two extinct volcanoes in the distance.

  On, on. Motion for the sake of motion. I knew where my bare feet were taking me, though my head hadn’t planned it. Drilled into the basalt cap of the cliff were about a dozen doors, or hatches, which opened onto the sweep of the tableland. Citizens of New Albuquerque had discovered that the cliff made for a perfect site for launching hang gliders. The tableland also provided an excellent site for short and vertical takeoff craft. Only emergency flights were permitted at night, so the area would be deserted.

  Not for the first time I was grateful for the inclusion of stairways to the cliff top. The elevator would have been an impossibility for me—right now being alone in a cramped box would have reminded me all too much of the Beast.

  I ran. Fists loose, knees driving, pushing past my aching thigh. My steps staccato, to match my heartbeat. I whipped around each landing, hearing not only my own lungs’ labors but those words, those words, those damn words ground out in that basso voice.

  We were sent to help.

  And

  Not in a cell again.

  I could not outrun them.

  At the last landing waited the door. I stiff-armed it open and burst out into the night. Ah, God—the cool air such a relief, chilling my skin, cold where I had sweated through my clothes. It seemed that I could dip my hands into the night and lave myself with it. I ran my palms over my face, my fingers through my hair, pulling the coolness through to my scalp. I tipped my head back and let the black sky, clear of light pollution by UBI law, cleanse my sight.

  So great, and so dreadful. Black beyond thought, space, the void, the universe. Ubastis spun suspended in that endless night. Nothing but a bubble of happy accident, as Theta-12, happy enough for all its algae and muck, and Earth, the original gift, were bubbles. Motes. Tiny I stood upon a tiny planet, wheeling around a speck of light. Staring up into the well of oblivion, into the unmindful consideration of a million stars staring darkly down at me.

  I wanted to believe that the night sky was the Egyptian goddess Nut, arching her body from horizon to horizon. I wanted to believe the stars were the campfires of the dead; I wanted to believe they were the souls of the departed, watching, waiting for us to wing our way home. Perhaps they were, viewed from Earth. Surely the stars that had looked down on Shanidar, upon Troy, upon the Weddell Sea differed from these stars I saw. Ubastis was home to no human. No Olduvai Gorge existed on this planet.

  A meteor slid across the northern sky, trailing a wake of malachite brilliance. Nickel, burning in the atmosphere. The UBI Net would have already recorded the meteor, those monitoring the Net would have alerted any First Wave geologists in the area. My gaze followed it as my feet took me to the edge of the cliff. Nearly three hundred meters I stood above the open streets of the city, but my eyes were on the endless rim. Far across the slow and terrible plain I saw the dream of man waiting on nature’s reason.

  How long would it be before the time we’d bought collapsed under the weight of so much will? Did UBI have another five years, another fifteen, before the People’s Party won? Were we wrong to guard Ubastis with such vigilance? In two centuries, in just one, would it matter?

  Lasse had laughed once when I voiced my disgust at the gap between folk tale and science fact. Seething balls of hydrogen and helium, he had said. Very unpoetic. How do you know the dead don’t simply prefer something more spectacular than rubbing two sticks together?

&nb
sp; I had sulked. I like rubbing two sticks together.

  I like it too, he’d said. And who knows what happens when two souls are rubbed together?

  CHAPTER SIX

  Ubastis was the fourth and last planet out from the star 61 Virginis. Two of its siblings, Tamar and Arete, were gas dwarfs, the other one, Cavillica, spun out its life as a sphere of blasted rock. One large, low-density moon dubbed Mihos courted Ubastis at a distance of about four hundred thousand kliks. First Wave had determined its age to be roughly—very roughly—three billion years old.

  In the agora and in many private homes in New Albuquerque one found a holo globe of Ubastis. The hologram was permanent in the agora; in homes one might call it up with vocal or tactile command. The globes ranged in size from the two-meter wonder in the Hall to shining jewels one could cup in one’s palm. Six oceans, five continents. Blue traceries like veins wound through the opal greens and browns; sapphire shards, from no more than a splinter to irregular ellipsoids indicated thousands of cubic miles of water. Points of scarlet, winking here and there within the corrugation of the mountain ranges, signified live volcanoes.

  When one found pronouns in reports, dissertations, monographs, one found the third person neuter. Over fifteen years I had forced myself to do a lot of rewriting. Somehow the third person female always insinuated itself when I wrote about Ubastis. Colleagues and mentors chided me for succumbing to the millennia-old sexist and anthropomorphic paradigm. Own your perceptions, I was told, but don’t perpetuate the folly of centuries. Language is a tool.

  Language is our lens. “It.” “She.” When I designated the subject of my report an it, didn’t it become an object? Didn’t I give permission to everyone to usurp the position of subject and hand them a verb to inflict on it? It was what we did things to. It was the butt of every transitive verb; and when we finished with it, we found a new one.

  When I termed my subject she, I removed that permission. Others might have argued that she, historically, was just as bad as it. But she equaled me, and I’d be damned if I betrayed myself.

  Each time I spoke of the Beast, I had to think very carefully which pronoun to use.

  We sat in my living room for the appearance of ease: Numair, András, Laila, and I. I had walked Bibi to the Children’s Center early; I had linked Assignment and postponed my check-in. I would rather be walking the long lines of hydroponic flats, monitoring temperature, humidity, a hundred variables. No question there. But I would rather do it without such an infestation of doubts in my head.

  Laila, like myself, was one of the silent ministers of the Integral; like Numair, she was one of First Wave. A nicely balanced group, I thought, trying to remain dispassionate. Two First Wave, two Second Wave; two women, two men; two Christians, two Muslims. András, pale, with the eyes of a Fayyum portrait, kept throwing me jittery little glances while his fingers drummed on the arm of the couch. Numair and Laila, imperturbable as bronze, sat on the couch opposite.

  Four cups of strawberry tea, untasted, clumped on the table. “Has anyone asked it—him,” I said, “why he was sentenced to Mustaine?”

  “We haven’t asked him anything,” András said. “Pretty hard to get an answer out of someone tranqed to the gills.”

  Numair stroked his chin, liquid gaze focused on the distance outside my balcony door. Like many of the First and Second Wave men, he had continued to shave his head; they knew very well what effect this combination of elegance and savagery had. In his way Numair and his homely face dazzled as much as his wife did, gold earrings winking, lilac kurta like a shout in the pallid murmur of my apartment. “Moira,” he said, in the voice that rang like deep blue glass, “says it was murder.”

  The word hung in the room like a miasma. I, the other killer in the room, said, “Have you accepted Moira’s justification for bringing him here?”

  Another silence, in a conversation composed mostly of silences. “No,” Numair said finally. “It’s one thing to rescue an animal from termination sentenced through no fault of its own. It’s another thing entirely to intervene in the payment of a human’s debt. The animal has no understanding. The murderer has forfeited its right to exist in civilized society. Moira was more interested in flouting offworlders than exercising altruism.”

  Laila smiled. “We don’t truly know if the Beast is guilty.”

  “He’s a Beast,” András said. “Of course he’s guilty.”

  “Can’t a killer—if he is a killer—be reconstructed? Haven’t Beasts been rehabilitated before?”

  I leaned forward. “There is no record of Beast rehabilitation.”

  Numair’s attention swung away from the sky over the Big Tawny; while the other two muttered their surprise, he regarded me. “Are you sure?”

  “Chitra Persaud says not.”

  “If Chitra says, then . . .”

  “But what about all those viddies?” Laila asked. “Stories from the Source?”

  “Propaganda tapioca,” I said. “I’m sure if Chitra digs a little more she’ll find those viddies; those Source stories were all pumped full of Earth corporation bank.”

  This would be as good a time as any. “However—I was able to obtain something else. A viddie, not from the Source.”

  I levered the blinds closed and called the image up from my computer. Chitra had sent this to me a few days ago via an encrypted channel through blackspace. I had viewed it once; I was not looking forward to seeing it again.

  “What do you have for us, Vashti?” Numair asked. He looked more interested than apprehensive.

  “It’s smuggled footage from Salaam.” I went on as they winced. The experiment at Salaam had been as far from the structure of Ubastis’s colonization as it was possible to be. A grotesquely failed experiment, led by a merger of gigacorporations, it had been held up as a beacon of progress and then as a model of What Not to Do. When the merger had disintegrated, the two corporations had bypassed slicks, conferences, and gone straight to conventional war on each other, with the hired colonists caught in the middle.

  “I hope you won’t mind not being hungry for a while,” I said, and touched the play key.

  The footage was silent, a little shaky, the visuals garbled, as it had been unicast from an old retinal lens and then recorded at the destination. To me that fairly screamed covert material, as opposed to the smooth multicast stuff found on official reports from the Source or approved viddies.

  Whoever had sent these images was embedded in a crowd. Mostly we saw backs of heads: curly hair, straight hair, vulnerable napes emerging from collars, the armoring wall of hijab. Periodically the image changed to a seesawing pan of the people to the side and in back of the camcaster. Dressed in what we Ubasti would identify as reasonably modest clothing—modest for offworlders—they shuffled along some sort of passage. It was not a group of people on the way to work, or queuing up for an entertainment. Heads down. Shoulders slumped. Most of them carrying possessions, or children too little to walk.

  To the right of the flock rose a wall of stone, the basalt crust of Salaam. An ungodly amount of time and bank had been spent drilling a honeycomb of thoroughfares, dwellings, work spaces for the colonists working this asteroid. All wasted in a bloodbath funded with even more money.

  And now to the left our unknown camcaster showed us the shepherds of this miserable flock. Beasts.

  Bolted into exoskeletons, packing laser weapons, they dwarfed the humans, perhaps by as much as half a meter. I could tell they were Beasts by their resemblance to each other and by their size: not all their bulk was due to armor. No less than two bodies distant from our point of view, they formed a barrier of either protection or possession. From the camcaster’s vantage point we saw five Beasts clumping along, made graceless by the armor; past them yawned a wide expanse that I suspected to be a landing bay.

  Bursts of light splashed white across the images. Firing. Our field of vision pitched and rolled and descended, as if the camcaster had fetched against the tunnel wall and slid down
. Perhaps we might be grateful that we had a clearer view of what happened than if he or she had fallen over. Perhaps not.

  We saw men, women, children dropping to the ground, their eyes bulging or squeezing shut. Their mouths stretched open in impossible rictuses. Some of them balled up in fetal position, hugging themselves as if to keep their bodies coherent. Some of them vomited. Some of them spasmed, backs arched, pulling out masses of hair. Stains appeared on their clothes indicating that they had shat or pissed themselves. A writhing carpet of people, all in unendurable pain.

  I could not look at the children.

  And the Beasts? Their exoskeleton armor not only protected them against concussive hits but the plasma weapon as well. A version of a Faraday cage, I guessed, watching them swivel in unison and return fire with plasma weapons of their own, in a cannonade of white-violet light. I recognized this particular weapon—the end result would be a bubble of plasma that, when it hit, would spread an envelope of burning gas around the target.

  Incredible weapons, wielded by incredible weapons. The level of technology and money represented in this viddie beggared my imagination. The level of cruelty in using the radiation weaponry against civilians—children—I found even less comprehensible.

  When the image winked out, after a total of two minutes, no one spoke. Laila had her hands to her face. Numair had the look of a man dreaming awake.

  It took a moment for me to realize I was trembling all over. When András spoke, I flinched, hard. He met my gaze with an expression as bitter and amused as anything I’d ever seen on his face.

  “We have nowhere to send him,” András said. “We can execute him here, with documentation, and close the book on Mustaine and the Beasts forever.”

  “That’s both intriguing and loathsome,” Numair said. “Although Salaam was seventy years ago.”

  Laila finally took her hands from her face. “Vashti, I don’t understand. Why did you show us that vid? The technology is what was so awful, not the Beasts using it.”