Archangel

by Marguerite Reed

  “No doubt,” replied Dr. Haas. “Yet isn’t it sad that in the twenty-fourth century we’re still relying on Audobonian methods of data-gathering? Shouldn’t we be concentrating our efforts on developing further methods of biological research that isn’t intrusive? That isn’t deadly?”

  The Ubasti man who had not cursed me shook his head. “Of course BGSI is working on that very goal. But until those methods have been perfected, you’re not going to get King Anak to open up so you can count all those teeth, or a horned archelon to hand you over his neurological systems for the polite asking.”

  DeBeers looked uncomfortable. “Then perhaps such research should be put off until a more humane means is established.”

  I smiled sweetly at him. “And therefore colonization would also be put off.”

  “I don’t follow,” he said.

  “Because you are a profiteer,” Captain Hussein barked. “Not only do you not care about the integrity of the planet, but you don’t care about what dangers your precious immigrants might run into because of lack of research.”

  “What danger are they? They’re only animals—” DeBeers began, then stopped. Both Dr. Haas and the auburn-haired woman gave him pained looks.

  “To whom do you refer?” said Laila. “The fauna of Ubastis, or the immigrants?”

  “The fauna, of course!” DeBeers shot back.

  I shrugged. “There we have it. Out of your mouth, Senator. Obviously there’s no real concern about the safety of the native species, and this hearing is just a sham.”

  “Not so fast, Dr. Loren,” Dr. Haas said. Our gazes clashed and held, and in her I read as grim an opponent as ever I’d faced down the barrel of a rifle. “I say right now there’s nothing further to be gained from prolonging this evaluation.”

  “And how heartily I agree with you, Honored Guest!” I said.

  She went on, our eyes still focused on each other. “Therefore I move that we present our decision now, the better to cease this frivolous sparring.”

  “So my offer?” I said, though I could guess the answer. “Reinstate my privileges, allow me to continue my valid activities, in return for my voice supporting a one-time accession to the quota?”

  “No,” she said.

  “No,” said the auburn-haired woman.

  “Absolutely not,” said DeBeers.

  “No,” said Salvator, not looking at me.

  “It’s an interesting idea,” Laila said, “but I’m not sure it would be well-received.”

  “La’a,” said Captain Hussein, rudely, and the other Ubasti man shook his head.

  Unanimous. Unhappy adrenalin envenomed my guts. Get a grip, I told myself. For all their hurtful words, they’d done nothing yet.

  “We’re not talking about that decision,” the auburn-haired woman said with a wave of her hand. “That wasn’t even a consideration. The real reason, however . . .”

  “No time to deliberate?” Laila sounded surprised.

  “I think not, do you, Dr. Haas?”

  Dr. Haas smoothed her already sleek hair with both hands and then stood, holding her notes. Nervous, I thought. But not fazed.

  “Dr. Vashti Loren, sometime Commander in the Ubasti Patrol & Rescue Corps, Minister of the Ubastis Bionomist Integral, you have been evaluated by a panel of your peers—”

  I wanted to sneer at DeBeers.

  “—as regards your psychological fitness for command, your psychological fitness for the retention and application of deadly force, and your psychological fitness for custody of the minor female—”

  “You can’t do that! Not Bibi!”

  She ground on. “The minor female known as Bibi Undset.”

  I sat there shaking, hands over my mouth. Tears started in my eyes. Bibi. The weight ripped from my arms. Now it came. Out of the corner of my vision I saw that the Ubasti were shocked as well.

  “This was not part of the evaluation,” Laila said. “Nothing in our briefing even hinted this was up for assessment!”

  “And as such this hearing is now illegal,” Captain Hussein said. “Every damn thing that has been done over the last three hours is now null and void, and for what? For what?”

  “I beg to differ,” the auburn-haired woman said smoothly. “If you’ll examine the history of the court proceedings of Idaho Port, you’ll see there’s precedence set for the introduction of a previously non-disclosed action.”

  “Inadmissible,” the other Ubasti man said immediately. “That was against a corporation, not an individual.”

  “But it’s still precedence.”

  “A vulnerable one. I think Dr. Loren’s agent could successfully argue against it.”

  She gave him a scornful look. “On what grounds?”

  “Well, prejudice, for one. This has not been an impartial panel.” He nodded to Laila and Hussein. “You’ll correct me, Comrades? I think it’s safe to say that even if we were to reach the same conclusion as the four of you with regards to Dr. Loren’s mental suitability for the admittedly grave responsibilities she carries, that we would still abstain.”

  The auburn-haired woman flushed to her scalp. “That’s illegal.”

  “There’s precedent for it,” said Captain Hussein, and grinned like a boy.

  I began to breathe again, and wiped the tears from my eyes.

  “Nevertheless,” said Laila, “I do think it wise—no, hear me out, my brothers—that even though we may disagree—stridently—on how this hearing has proceeded, that Dr. Loren should continue psychiatric care, given her depression and her potential for self-harm.”

  “Self-harm? It’s not a question of harm to herself that we’re—”

  I stood, once more. They fell silent. “This is a sham and you know it, Honored Guests,” I said. “This was decided by you before we ever convened in this room. You would bicker over me, over Ubastis until you look up and find history has left you in its wake.” I felt as if I were going to fall down or vomit. The time had come.

  “Honored Guests. My fellow citizens of Ubastis. Having been invested with all appropriate powers by the Ubasti Bionomist Integral, so do I now declare the planetary entity of Ubastis to be an independent and sovereign entity, freed of colonial status. We are no longer an experiment, Honored Guests. We are Ubastis.”

  I turned and walked out.

  The steel door cut off querulous cries behind me. The security staff nodded to me as I to them, and then I stalked down the hallway, fists clenched, vision still swimming.

  War, war, war pounded in my temples. Had I been a good tool for them all down there? Had I played my role well enough to put the hilt of the sword, the butt of the gun, the detonator of the missile into their hands?

  I passed a few of the Lazarette crew, but no one moved to stop me. Any moment now someone would be running after me, reprimanding me, hauling me back.

  Bibi. My Bibi. Ya Allah, I had not foreseen that. My chest started to hitch and I savaged my nails into my palms again. Stop it. Stop it. You won’t do any good by crying.

  I couldn’t see how I could do any good anyway. Had my offer been so utterly stupid, selfish, self-serving? They should’ve jumped at the chance to get people onto Ubastis, if the People’s Party stood behind their propaganda. And to salve my own moral pride, if I said yes to ten thousand Beasts, how could I deny a like number of immigrants?

  And now, what had I done to the world?

  It had been a while since I’d been to L5, but it seemed my feet remembered the way. The number of people I passed increased—from two or three to five, ten—for a moment this surprised me. And then I remembered where I was. The hallway I’d been marching down expanded into the public lobby for offworlders, people new to Ubastis, tourists. Low-light holograms shimmered against two walls, one depicting the green halls of the arboros, the other portraying the cliffs of the Meretseger range, glowing amber against an amethyst sky. Vendors’ booths in the style of the New Albuquerque agora market created bottlenecks throughout the wide space.

 
; From the muted atmosphere of the Lazarette, even this rude imitation shocked my senses to the fore. Color: lengths of synthetic silk and cotton hung in a rainbow striation behind my messenger Roldán. Music: Maryam and her cautious friend sat on a pair of styrofoam boulders, one woman cradling an oud, the other whirling a tipper against the taut head of a bodhran. Light, and fragrance: across the larger room an orange flicker created silhouettes out of a group of bystanders; and I smelled food frying.

  Curious despite my misery, I approached that group. Once they caught sight of me, they flinched aside from me, wide-eyed, startled. Not until I saw what had drawn their attention did I understand their reaction.

  When the image fluttered around the edges, I realized it was a hologram—but a damn good one. Vashti Loren squatted next to a campfire, Tilden and computer and other field gear strewn about. Snub nose, crow braids, stocky body clothed in work pants and sleeveless shirt that strained across the breasts. A rifle (my nice little Justin, not the monster Varangar) was slung over her back. She held a pan, stirring what looked—and smelled—like seitan, ginger, and garlic.

  To one side of the computer bulked a theropod skull. I had studied a few of these before, and I knew that I was looking at a mature adult—one that I myself had shot, most likely, as it was rare to find a corpse in the wild. This skull would measure a full meter in length, I reckoned. The orbital sockets that could enclose a big man’s fist, the complex arches and tunnels of the sinuses turned the bone into airy architecture. Miraculous, even to the teeth. The front curved canines gleamed in mottled arcs; the smaller slicing teeth winked at me. All of them perfectly designed for gripping and piercing the scales, plates, bones, of animal armor. I had seen what they could do.

  Ignoring the cries and murmurs of shock (a sound I was getting more and more used to, it seemed), I strode through the lovely light-painting of myself, knelt, and put my hands on the skull. No hologram this. As real bone does, it felt warm, a little rough, a little fragile. The theropod might’ve been dead eight, ten years; if so, it would’ve been my first. In the shuddering light and shadow from the false fire the hollow eyes in the skull regarded me. How often had I seen the living eye watching me as I moved deeper into the green, the silence of the arboros—round-pupiled eye fixed upon round-pupiled eye, copper upon blue.

  If I pressed just hard enough, the delicate arches would splinter. I braced myself, got my hands under it, and lifted.

  Some woman muffled a little screech. It must have been a bizarre sight, seeing the woman standing next to herself, the one in offworld clothes, the other in archetypal Ubastis dress, cradling an enormous animal skull in her arms.

  “I’m Vashti,” I said, trying to catch as many of their gazes as possible. “What you see here—” I nodded at the hologram “—is a not inaccurate depiction of some campsites I’ve been at while doing field work. I am a real person, not a story or a vid. And that, down there, is a real planet, a real home for billions of living things. It is not our home. We are guests. And if we’re not careful, we’ll either kill everything that lives there or die there ourselves.”

  A girl pointed at the skull. “Did you kill that?”

  “I certainly did,” I answered. “I took a very rich man hunting, and he paid the Ubastis Bionomist Integral for the pleasure of it. That means we had the money to import food we needed, and chemical phages for the toilets, and parts for our wind turbines.”

  “Satisfying a pretty deviant taste,” one man offered.

  I shrugged. “But it also allowed us to be able to make significant biological studies. Which will help possible immigration eventually. Now if you’ll excuse me? I need to get this very fragile display piece to a safer place.”

  The therapod skull was unwieldy but so light in my arms. I leaned my cheek against it as I walked, my thin hemp kamiz catching here and there on the rough bits with every movement. I thought some of them followed me out of curiosity, as my inquisitors had not, but I did not—could not, comfortably—look over my shoulder.

  Beyond the multihued light of the imitation agora gaped a doorway, a dark mouth. I did not read the letters on the lintel; I had come this way often enough, years ago. Into the dark throat I stepped. Mutters of perturbation sounded behind me, and some fell away. For a moment the black danced with phantoms of color as my eyes strained for any iota of light.

  I felt the darkness give way as if it were a torn veil. Finally, ahead of me, I saw a glimmer. A few long strides more brought me to a greater light, but not by much: the room this artfully darkened (meant to discourage all but the most pious) corridor led to was my husband’s burial chamber.

  The only light that illuminated this room came from the long window that looked out onto Ubastis. Blue-white, rose, darkening to hematite, and lightening from saffron to blue-white again, every ninety minutes, as Lazarette 5 orbited the planet. The synth-marble floor reflected every routine glory.

  In the center of the room stood my husband’s tomb. I crossed the gleaming floor and set the theropod skull at the foot of the coffin. In the Middle Ages often noblemen, kings, were buried in sarcophagi that had been chiseled to depict them with favored hounds at their feet. Saints and bodhisattvas, gods in more easterly regions were portrayed as dancing on demons. I knew this animal was no dog to heel at Lasse’s feet, or demon for him to conquer. Yet I could not see that glorious bone head out there amongst the trampling dozens, vulnerable to a careless foot or some dumb show of buffoonery. So in here, a place for only the reverent, the theropod would stay, bones whole and not destroyed. Preserved.

  As my husband had been too well preserved.

  The coffin stood at hip level on me. It reflected the diamond show outside even better than the polished surface of the floor: they had lain my husband to rest in a glass casket.

  Lasse’s grave was space. Like the true Horus he hovered over the land; the sun his right eye, the moon his left. The brilliance of stars crawled across his body like the embrace of Nut, goddess of the night, her skin writ with constellations as if by a fiery pen. The glass was very cool to the touch.

  I swung myself up onto the beveled surface. Below me the corpse of Lasse lay, preserved. Not even dessicated, but arrested. He had been washed, sewn, disembowled, exsanguinated. Never to rot, never to decay, never to become one with the world he had loved so much. The only gift of his body had been the blood shed in the dirt of Wadjet.

  He had been going just a little gray when he was killed. Wisely the embalmers had not dyed his hair. Almost he looked as if he were sleeping, although a little harder, a little older than his forty-three years. The flesh of his face had fallen away minutely, although the eyelids remained unsunken—the eyeballs removed and replaced with padding.

  Eleven years we’d had together. Only eleven. It was nothing matched against the void we spun in, nothing when set against the massive rhythms of the place we’d both loved and sought to protect. A wingbeat of time.

  Would he hate me if he knew what I was going to do? Would he call me a traitor? Did I hate him for the choice he’d set before me? I shuddered, gazing down at him; a tear smacked the glass, then another.

  A voice, out of the dark, out of memory.

  “Vash. Don’t cry. Please don’t cry.”

  His words. Not his voice. I lay my length down on the coffin and wept. Arms embracing it, cheek sealed to the glass with my tears. When they removed his heart and set him here they had torn mine out as well. The hollow was too great to fill, and every day I felt the pain from being ripped away. My love, my mate, my life, my soul.

  Sunk in grief, I did not move when I felt the air shift at my side. Nor did I flinch when a hand touched my back in kindness.

  “Vashti.”

  My lips formed the word. Beast.

  “Vashti, what did they decide?”

  “Don’t know,” I croaked. “I left. I don’t care anymore.”

  Memory made me a liar. “Bibi.” I pushed myself back up to a sitting position and wiped my eyes and nose on
my sleeve. “They threatened to take Bibi away.”

  “They can do that.” It was not a question. Ubastis’s light slid over him, sparking in his dark eyes. If anyone knew what horrors modern bureaucracy was capable of, it was the Beast.

  “No,” I said. “I won’t let them.”

  “And how are you going to stop them, ya nur?”

  I drew one shuddering breath of resolve. Forgive me, Lasse. “Ubastis must set her own rules now,” I said.

  I knew, saying that, there would be no peaceful detachment. Any declaration of self-governance would be met with consternation of the highest degree. Ubastis would be judged with extreme prejudice.

  “All you did was ask,” he said.

  “No. I declared. I demanded.” I watched the serene jewel of the dawn sea give way to the brass and bronze and nephrite of the continent. “We denied them.”

  “Can one woman convince thousands of people to revolt? Do you believe you can do this, Vashti?”

  In his way he looked as earnest as Roldán, begging me not to sell Ubastis to ten thousand strangers. Ah, but Roldán, Lasse already did.

  “You believe it. From what you say, Lasse believed it.” I sneered through a fresh fall of tears. “I’m finally moved to wreck so much, just for one child.”

  “Look again,” the Beast said. He gestured with his chin towards the window. “There’s your child.”

  My child. Even as I thought that, as I gazed at the planet, my body yearned, my breasts ached. Ghostly memories of Bibi, of course, but again I felt that womb-deep mother call in me. My child, my other love.

  We watched, while I perched on my husband’s tomb and my enemy stood silent beside me. We watched the little sun sink down through ringing bands of gold and blue on the edge of the horizon, glass bangles on the wrist of a girl dancing at the edge of the universe.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  So many people go into the writing of a novel—not only family or helpful readers and folks offering resources, but also those friends who simply made life a little easier. If you know me but don’t see your name here, write it in. You made a difference.