Archangel

by Marguerite Reed

  Sublimating like crazy, I was.

  My pores, my sinuses bathed in the fecund humidity. The smell of vegetation and the nutrient broth circulating among the roots saturated the long, low room. In unconscious imitation of the glass along the agora, one end of the room boasted splashes of cool color: a wall of minute fluctuations measured in Fahrenheit, millibars, grams, pH—luckily it was crystal rather than LED, or the whole room would have been suffused with strobes of pink and aquamarine. At the apex of the ceiling, in between the banks of fluorescent lights, someone had wired a speaker. Programmed music burbled smoothly from it—the kind of stuff musico-psychs had designed to stimulate positive human response. Insidiously bouncy, the kind of cheerful tunes one found oneself vocalizing as one poked along a tray of mute crop item. Good for the CO2.

  The tomato-growing facility comprised seven fields, each ninety meters long and forty-five meters wide. The yield every year came to over twenty-five thousand kilograms, and given each person’s allotment, that provided each citizen of New Albuquerque with about thirty-six kilograms of tomatoes per year—three kilograms per month. Grossly inadequate, given our restrictions. The facility was being enlarged, though, and it was hoped that by the beginning of next year another two rooms would be online.

  The space available had been carefully expanded during Second Wave’s ten-year recon mission. In addition to the tomato fields, the hydroponics complex contained facilities for cucumbers, strawberries, radishes, spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, melons, and sweet potatoes. One small contingent had argued for Brussels sprouts but had been shouted down. Garlic had proved difficult to grow in hydroponics, and a lively barter system had sprung up.

  Soybeans—the great galactic crop without which humans could never have begun significant space exploration—we consumed in mind-boggling amounts. Within the next ten years the Integral hoped to set up soy plantations for every settlement; but for now we still imported soy from the massive farm stations. This was why Caspian Younglove held such significance: his machinations supplied the markets of New Albuquerque, Enheduanna, Arzachel, Shuv Kamnei, Novkiev, and now Qetta with the stuff of life. Why, without soybeans, the thousands of humans on the planet would have to resort to eating . . . meat.

  The same companies which created human organs in the lab had tried to create meat in the lab in an attempt to assuage those who argued that carnivorism was wrong because it involved killing. The vegetarian meme, though, had evolved with such strength that this well-meaning experiment was doomed as soon as the Source got the story. The adverts, starring luscious Kitty Cromwell and Pandita Patel chirping “Now you can finally indulge your carnivore heritage without guilt! One hundred percent lab-created prime rib!” never made it into the Net. I had seen the stolen copy as a kid, though, and watched incredulously when Kitty stabbed her fork into a pink-centered cube of flesh and guided it to Pandita’s cooing mouth. The two women rolled their eyes with every shocking bite; and, to a soundtrack of voluptuous moans, the cam zoomed in until the slab of meat looked like a geologic anomaly.

  I later heard that Kitty developed severe bulimia after the shoot; while Pandita—who had the kind of beauty that made me believe my eyes had developed salivary glands—gave up a burgeoning career as a sex worker to become a minister in the Church of Vegetarians in Christ.

  Ah, but the question of meeting adequate nutrition for human needs was a thorny one, more controversial than actually difficult. For generations before intragalactic travel, vegans and vegetarians simply took supplements. Once space travel became possible and the vegan movement intensified, genetic manipulation intensified. In the strains of soy grown in space, geneticists tinkered for decades to introduce a gene that would allow the human body to synthesize its own B12—and at length turned to genetic modification of food plants.

  But on Ubastis meat could be had for the taking. One couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a source of nutrition. Highly digestible protein, iron, minerals, and the all-important B12 vitamin were walking, running, scampering around.

  Besoras had a dark, pungent flesh that tolerated very little cooking time, due to the lack of fat. Axeheads yielded beautiful steaks, although with a distractingly fishy flavor, much improved by strawberry vinegar. Tree-dwelling verani, slow among the branches of the arboros, but lightning-fast on the ground, tasted delicately of the fruit that made up the bulk of their diet.

  This information did not find its way into my reports to UBI. If word leaked to UBI, I’d have to report for examination. My license to carry a lethal weapon would be re-evaluated. Last night’s little contretemps had already been entered into the deebee of documented physical aggression. Not unexpected in a Natch, of course—unmodulated aggression levels ensured that I had my own file.

  Oh, God—I did not want to think about Moira, yet every thought I had seemed to lead to her. I imagined her pacing the cell—the most a prisoner could get out of it was one and a half, maybe two strides on the diagonal. She would be an anomaly in that ten-by-ten room, all cinnabar mane and lavender drapery against the ceramic-lined walls. Images of her crying or cursing, I rejected. Likely she was plotting a way to make contact with the P&R guard monitoring the vids. Pretty hard to sweet-talk someone with the sound damped, though, and anything blatantly manipulating the guard’s sensibilities would bring a team of compassionate re-evaluators down on her head like a pack of wulanghari to a corpse. So, no baring her breasts, no banging her head on the floor, no messages on the wall in her own shit.

  Please. Not in a cell again.

  No telling what the Beast might do.

  In the end, of course, I went to see her. I had to press my thumb on more identipads than I cared to count, and it took some time to blink away the word cleared dancing in lurid green on my retina. My spine kept trying to hunch; I found myself constantly looking over my shoulder. Too many small rooms in too short a time.

  The guard, a pleasant man whose tag read Kumakiri J., keyed in the codes that would retract the door and charge the electric field between the jambs. I knew I would find Moira composed and controlled, as the guard had warned her—as UBI law dictated—that she was going to have a visitor.

  The solid ceramic whisked into the wall; the buzz of the field whined at the upper limits of my hearing. On the cell’s one piece of furniture, that served as bench and cot, Moira lounged, as comfortable as a cat. Her shoes stood primly, side by side, on the floor beneath. Even the dupatti over her hair lay without so much as a wrinkle.

  Her gaze met mine: expressionless, devoid even of cold. Her anger, the last time we had spoken, had been more welcoming than this. Repelled, I took a step back. And then the very slight fold at the outer corners of her eyes, the tightening of her mouth, beckoned me back in.

  Did you stop to think that perhaps this is not about you? “Are you all right?”

  She slid off the cot and crossed the room, two steps on the median. The field hummed between us. “I knew you would ask me something like that,” she said. Her smile broke open.

  “I only found out this morning. I came as soon as I got off of Assignment—Jesus Christ, Moira—I’m so sorry—”

  “What are you sorry for? They’re just going to question me. Like they did when I got Mumtaz.”

  “You never went to detention for Mumtaz!”

  “Not that you know.” She chuckled. “No, I never did—although I remember a cozy session in my home with a few people from UBI. ‘Ms. Ximenez, you’re aware of the biological ramifications of bringing in a foreign species? Ms. Ximenez, may we remind you of the example of sciurus carolinensis, tamarix aphylla?’ Sounded like you when you get all upset. It’s not as if Mumtaz could breed.”

  No, poor creature, the sole member of her species on a planet whose largest mammalian predator stood no higher than my kneecap. “But a Beast, Moira?”

  “This isn’t just a case of execution.” She lifted a hand, as if to touch me; the field buzzed hungrily. “Vash—all these Beasts bred up by the military and by corp
orations—there were over seven generations, with I don’t know how many clutches per generation incepted—that’s thousands of them.”

  I felt nauseated. She pressed on.

  “Where did they all go? Do you think, that even despite all the conflicts fought by heavy infantry over the past centuries, that they were all killed in battle? At the height of their use, Beasts made up maybe half of the military—”

  “The half that went in first—”

  “And three-quarters of the corporation muscle. You know by now that the rumor of rehabilitation is just that—a rumor. What happened to them all?”

  “For all I care the military could finish them off as miners. Give them Cissokho, send them on the sweeps through Bok Globule or Beta Pictoris. Give them their own goddamn planet and let them reinvent the wheel.”

  “And why not? Whyever not, Vashti?”

  “Now you’re starting to sound like an Expansionist,” I said.

  Her gaze was so hard to read that my skin prickled. I imagined the green of her eyes mutable, shifting even as the recoded proteins worked to maintain the new color.

  “Vash—what do you think Mustaine was?”

  “A prison—”

  “A biological dumping ground. An oubliette. ‘Who’s in the oubliette? I forgot,’ goes the joke. I’ll tell you who was in the oubliette. Mustaine had a population of fifteen thousand prisoners. Fifteen thousand—that’s as many as a large-sized generations ship. And about ten thousand of those were Beasts.

  “They killed them, Vashti. Even before the reactor accident. The United States or Syrincon or FedSpace closed down a base, or retired a clutch because a better one was developed, and dumped them. What were they going to do, set them up with forty acres and a mule? You can’t kill ‘em outright, so you trump up charges on them and put them in a hole. And if you can get around the legalities of capital punishment, you can have them put to death. Get ‘em on murder. Who cares? If they’re soldiers, they’ve all killed.” She took a breath and released it in a long, inelegant exhale from those finely flared nostrils. “That reactor explosion—was expedient.”

  “What were you going to do, bring them all here, Moira? Ten thousand walking talking envelopes of testosterone? Because you felt sorry for them?”

  “I could give a shit for them—”

  “That’s more like it.”

  “—But we could’ve used them. No one else gave a shit for them either.”

  “And do they all come with the burst control remotes?”

  She looked away. “I was meaning to tell you about that.”

  Now I was glad for the barrier between us. “Don’t say it.”

  “That remote was a ruse.”

  “A ruse—a lie, you mean? You lied to me about that? About something that I thought could save my life, or someone else’s?”

  “To give you a crutch, Vashti—to help you get used to him.”

  “Well, I don’t want to ‘get used to him!’ What if he attacked me?”

  Moira snapped to her feet. “He’s not going to attack you; haven’t you figured that out by now? If he was going to attack anyone, he would’ve done that by now. But no one has told him to, and that’s how his kind operate!”

  “And how would you know how ‘his kind operate?’”

  “I told you. We could’ve used them.” Her voice dropped to a pleading tone. “Come on, you yourself hate wasting a resource. This would have been a landmark recycling project. Workers whom no one wanted, who would be grateful . . . loyal . . .”

  “At what price? There isn’t any work on Ubastis that needs that kind of muscle—”

  “I’m talking about our military.”

  All my anger funneled into shock. Did I hear her correctly? Had I lost my mind? Had she lost hers? The moment UBI established a military was the moment we lost our status as a non-lethal and neutral colony. That was the moment we entered the galactic community as a fully armed entity.

  Moira’s voice rose, her words raced: “I knew you’d be upset, come on, Vash, hear me out. It’s only a matter of time before the profiteers put their heads together and decide that they’re above any treaties, verdicts, agreements, what have you. And you think dinky Patrol & Rescue—”

  “Shut up.”

  “—is going to have the slightest effect? What good is UBI’s famous planetwide Net going to be? I can throw another party while we all watch the battleships land!”

  I could not face her. I sank to a squat, hands over my face. A military. An actual honest-to-Christ military. And what then? What then? Merely another drain on resources UBI had sworn to husband? A message to the galactic community that we meant business? Or an invitation to take it square on the chin?

  My hands muffled my voice. Perhaps she heard my words; perhaps she heard only a growl of pain. “Praise be to God the decision’s out of our hands!”

  She dropped to her knees beside me, a handsbreath between us. “Is it, Vashti? Can you imagine what we could’ve done? No more interlopers. No more smugglers, no more squatters.”

  Her whisper fused with the insidious hum of the electric field. “What would it be like to declare independence, Vash? To never have to wait in fear for someone else’s vote? Someone else who’d never set foot here and had no idea what was at stake? No one knows the balance more than you, Vashti.”

  “But not with a military,” I managed.

  “Yes. With a military. And if UBI had asked who should be in charge of such a military? I’d say ‘I know the best person for that job.’”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I was not greatly surprised that I could not sleep that night.

  I sat on the floor of my living room, every light in the apartment extinguished. Bibi could do without her nightwink for an hour or so. Before me on a swath of hemp canvas rested the Varangar.

  I put my hand on it. The alloy barrel was cool to the touch. Somehow it should have felt like a dead thing—rather, something that had never been alive—but to me it never did. That may have been a perception fueled by the micron-deep layer of oil that coated the metal, which gave the barrel a peculiarly pre-resilient, sentient impression. For that alone I might have loved this gun.

  Blind, I took the massive rifle into my lap as if it had been my child, and proceeded to field strip it. I pulled back the bolt until it came to rest against the boltstop, then slid my fingers along the receiver to the lever that released the boltstop. I eased it open until I could remove the bolt, and placed it onto the canvas in front of me. Not without a little effort, even after ten years of ownership, I rolled the gun over: the barrel was almost twice as long as Bibi was tall, a fraction over 5 centimeters in diameter; and though both the stock and the barrel were made from the lightest materials still practical, the whole thing weighed several kilos. I depressed the release plunger in front of the trigger guard and held it down while prompting the floorplate a fraction of a centimeter back. The follower spring pushed the floorplate away from its niche, and I plucked out the floorplate, follower, and spring. These went on the canvas as well.

  When I first got the Varangar and was learning to strip it, I always forgot to put the parts aside in specific order. Lasse had to step on my hand to break me of that.

  Easy way to lose a part. Are you the one your mates are waiting on when they’ve got to jump on a nest of smugglers? Because you couldn’t keep everything in order?

  We had been in the Cassene biome again, in the middle of the dire tropical summer, when the act of breathing itself caused a sweat to break out. Modesty reigned still, albeit peculiarly: we covered from neck to ankle, but in cloth so thin I could practically read through my sherwani. I felt sticky, sodden, and put-upon. I had set my jaw, refusing to speak or to shake my head, hating him at that moment.

  It’s not about looking nice, he’d said. It’s not about you. It’s about everyone else in the unit.

  I remember I shot him a murderous glare. I’m worried about speed.

  Then pay attention.

/>   He took the Varangar away from me and stripped it. Each piece he set out in precise order. He assembled it, stripped it, and assembled it once more, in the space of a handful of minutes, while I sulked. Now do that, he said, thrusting the rifle into my hands. You’re going to practice until you can do it with your eyes shut, and I’m going to watch you. And if I see you get sloppy, I’ll break one of your fingers.

  Catch me first, I muttered.

  He’d thrown me a look, and my lip drew up in a snarl. I shoved the rifle aside to pounce on him. Laughing, he caught me and rolled with the momentum, dizzying me.

  You break my fingers, I’ll break something of yours, I gasped.

  We struggled on the floor, half war, half lust, until I caught him in a lackadaisical headlock. Break what, now? I said.

  He turned in my sweat-loosened grasp, hands slipping beneath my clothes, and skimmed his fingers up my bare skin.

  Forty minutes later I was stark naked, smelling of sex and sweat and gun oil, breaking the Varangar down. I hadn’t misplaced a piece since.

  And now I did it in the dark. That had once been a party trick of mine, when someone—Moira, if it was her party, or Mieu—would time me. Even blindfolded, I felt the spectators’ dismayed fascination. No matter to whom I offered the rifle, no matter who I offered to teach, I was politely denied. I made the suggestions for form’s sake. Had someone accepted, it would have felt like an impiety.