Greyblade

by Andrew Hindle

  You can’t trust them. You can never know, with aliens. They’re just too different. Sure, there are some good ones, but how do you tell the good ones from the bad ones? Best to just keep them all out, right? Isn’t that the safest and most sensible course?

  Surely, the rapidly-dwindling voices of moderation said, surely we can tell the good ones from the bad ones by the fact that the bad ones are trying to kill or enslave us?

  But how many have to die first? How do you screen them? How do you know they won’t start planning, won’t go bad, how do you know which ones are the bad ones before it happens? Which ones aren’t part of some sort of slow plot, taking over, changing our culture from the inside, gradually?

  But that happens to cultures when they mingle, said the last generation of enlightened humans. It’s not a bad thing. It’s actually pretty vital to prevent stagnation. It would be nice to live in perfect static balance, cut off from everything – there are groups that do that. But you can’t do that and be progressive and cosmopolitan and, ultimately, advanced. You can’t do that and expect to be relevant. Do we want to be relevant, to wider Pinian culture? To the Corporation?

  As it had turned out, most humans preferred to have someone to blame than someone to thank. Preferred the illusion of safety to the prospect of relevance. Preferred to convince themselves they were unique than to risk trying – and failing – to stand out from a crowd.

  The Pinians had tried. They’d stuck with humanity and had only walked away when the humans started making soul weapons. The Burning Knights had also stopped fighting on either side, and for that they were called cowards, declared deserters and traitors and enemies. They were relentlessly dragged into the demonisation machine of Earth’s big media cultures, and the machine made of them what it would.

  The puppeteers whispered of perversions, atrocities, war crimes. After a few years, it took quite a lot of scrutiny to pinpoint the difference between a Burning Knight and a Damorak, a Grób and an Argothmod, Áea-folk and Worm Cultists. Because the difference – that one group were friends and the other foes – was apparently far easier to ignore than the fact that they were all aliens.

  And so Snowhome was born.

  There were places on Earth, by the end of the year 2620 AD,59 where people either didn’t know aliens were real, or didn’t believe it. Or talked about them in the same breath as monsters and demons. And it was increasingly difficult to tell the difference between ignorance and delusion. They had stopped talking about the urverse. They had stopped sharing information about the Corporation, or were gleefully sharing misinformation so as to make the truth seem like just another ludicrous conspiracy. The humans who remembered were steadily dying off, their lines being steadily bred out. And the areas of Earth that didn’t really believe in anything but Earth, and humans … those areas were growing.

  Oh, they believed there were invaders, enemies. Always. The occupation, the Dark Realms, Nnal’s Imp, the Worm Cult, the war were all open wounds in the psyche of the Hathal Moga’threta. They knew just enough to continue enabling the state of isolation and fear to which they had been bent. But the details … the details were slipping away.

  They knew, intellectually, that there was a Heaven up there. And a Hell below. They knew the stairs in Amazônia Capital went down as well as up. They knew about Jalah and the Pinians, for purposes of crowd control. They had, however, conveniently forgotten the immediate aftermath of the Last War of Independence. They’d forgotten what ‘independence’ meant, and that it didn’t overlap at any point with the toxic spirit of self-reliance and blind egotism with which they’d made it synonymous. They’d had to forget, to protect themselves.

  And time was trickling away from them. Humans were mortal. Short memory and disastrous attention span came with the territory.

  Pinian worship was still huge. In fact, it was bigger than ever – bigger, in a lot of ways, than it had been before the Flutter when the Pinians had entertained all sorts of amusing guest religions from their numerous allies. Worship of the Disciples was a booming franchise. Especially Ildar, since her stewardship of fire when the First and Third Disciples had gone a-wandering … but all three, really, had their places. Pinian worship on Earth was huge, and ugly, and false. And it was getting bigger and louder and more intense, and you didn’t need the Drake’s data net to figure out it correlated perfectly with those places where people had forgotten about aliens or other worlds in any factual sense. And the fact that they could believe in it, while at the same time not believing it, really said it all.

  The Last War of Independence had ended in 2585, but it had never really gone away.

  Because once you’ve driven away all the things you were told were causing you harm, how do you explain the fact that you’re still being harmed?

  CLEARING THE STAIRS

  The Angels – Gabriel, Kozura, Transcendus Excelsius Macabre, Athé and to a far lesser degree Blacknettle – were enjoying a therapeutic complaint session. It was, Magna had long since noted, their go-to alternative. After all, once you’d drawn your fiery sword and started cutting down the wilfully ignorant like so much wheat, it was probably really difficult to figure out where to stop.

  “Humans,” Gabriel growled. “Never in my life have I seen a species that thinks it’s so fucking tough, but is so fucking afraid of everything.”

  “They’re not all going to listen to sense,” Athé said. “That is why they’re on the stairs in the first place.”

  “Never mind sense,” Gabriel grumbled. “I’ll settle for consistency. If you’re going to be afraid of something, at least have the decency to be afraid of it all the time so we can use it as a spur.”

  “I’d like to find the person who first described human faiths as a flock,” Mac said. It usually took a lot to get the greenwing complaining, but when he started he was usually pretty good at it. “There’s nothing remotely sheeplike about them.”

  “You’re clearly not very familiar with sheep,” Kozura said. So far, Magna had yet to see the Municipal Representative Third Grade even start complaining about the situation, but he wasn’t above a good round of human-slapping in the name of solidarity. “They have this charming bucolic reputation for following each other and doing what they’re meant to without making a fuss, but they’re fearfully thick animals and just when you think you know what one is going to do, that’s when it digs in and does something else.”

  “And we won this whole thing so hard,” Gabriel exclaimed. “The Damoraks and the Argoes and the rest of the Master Races. The occupation. All of it. It took so long for the humans to realise that there were real enemies they could unite against.”

  “The trick isn’t getting humans to unite against an enemy,” Athé said. “It’s getting them to stop.”

  “Ah, humans and their opinions,” Kozura agreed. “And their rights, and their freedom. All wonderful things, to be sure, but so hopelessly naïve in the face of an Elder Race like the Damoraks. What’s the point of mutual respect, and of hearing each other’s viewpoints, when as far as a Damorak is concerned a human’s viewpoint is just an amusing twittering noise it makes before you burn it?”

  “It’s like humans go immediately to the all-or-nothing violent response every time, except when they actually need to,” Gabriel said. “And when they should be pursuing the extreme approach, that’s when they go ‘oh hey, let’s hear both sides, let’s talk it over, violence doesn’t solve anything’,” he snorted. “Fucking unbelievable.”

  “Should I leave?” Magna asked.

  “No,” Mac replied, “you’d freeze out there.”

  “I … thanks, I guess?”

  Gabriel chuckled.

  They were in a small guest habitat-bubble on the outskirts of a town the name of which Magna had forgotten. Some ten steps up, close enough to the point at which they were planning on severing the Eden Road without actually bringing undue attention to the actual spot, and in the thick of Milky Way Cultist territory. It was freezing outside, and
the atmoplane was practically nonexistent. More breathable air came from the lichen on the stone than came from the worlds above and below. The bubble, for reasons almost certainly unrelated to the community to which it was currently attached, was sanctified so the Angels could spend the day there.

  It was new year’s morning,60 2622 AD, which was why Magna was still awake at all. In a few short months, Sir Greyblade of the Ladyhawk would have been gone for seven years. Magna wasn’t sure how much longer they should wait before assuming he was never going to return – Beyond the Walls was a long way away, and his mission had been dangerous61 – but there were still preparations to be made. She supposed that, once they’d finished making said preparations and the Burning Knight had not returned with the sisters of prophecy, there would be an awkward moment of reckoning.

  “Alright,” Gabriel said, “but all bitching and moaning aside, what do we do about these morons? Much as I’d love to stampede the Ogres across them and just drive the survivors down the stairs, that’s only going to bring guns up here and set off the whole war all over again.”

  “There are two types of Milkies,” Athé mused.

  “Only two?” Gabriel retorted.

  “You mean per family?” Mac added enthusiastically.

  Athé ignored them both. “One, the fundamentalists, won’t listen to anything,” she said with a slow shift of her great mismatched wings. “They don’t want to do anything, just live with their stubborn belief – or lack thereof. They won’t accept any sort of world. Even if Earth turned out to be a ballworld and the Milky Way came back, they wouldn’t be happy. Even if everyone else in the turning urverse lined up and told them they were sorry to have tried to mislead them, they wouldn’t be happy. No explanation for the world as it is will satisfy them, so no change in the world will satisfy them. There aren’t many of them in this area, because they’re … not particularly likeable.”

  “Go on,” Gabriel scoffed.

  “They won’t relocate because it would mean accepting help or advice from outsiders,” Athé continued. “Not to mention providing some measure of acknowledgement and validation to a world structure they are deeply invested in denying.”

  “I hope the second type of Milkies is less depressing,” Magna said.

  Blacknettle, who had been standing at the habitat-bubble’s bunker-like window and looking out at the frozen night-time stepscape with a thoughtful expression on her flawless porcelain face, glanced back over her wing at Magna and smiled. Then she turned back and resumed looking out the window. She was staring towards the settlement, and appeared troubled by something. But it was hard to tell, with Blacknettle.

  “They are,” Athé replied. “They’re not unreasonable – in fact they’re not even wrong, really.”

  “Is that important?” asked Mac.

  “Obviously. These moderate Milky Way Cultists – they take a dim view of being called Cultists, by the way–”

  “You surprise me, Athé,” Kozura murmured.

  “They are dedicated to the ancient science of the old world, and that is still perfectly workable,” Athé went on.

  “In the top half of the Void Dimension,” Magna said.

  “Exactly. Stellar space and the celestial universe, barring a few little inconsistencies that their scientific method is perfectly capable of dealing with. It all works. They’re happy with that.”

  Magna frowned. “Why don’t they go there?” she wondered aloud.

  “They would, I think,” Athé replied. “They just need a little push.”

  “Don’t talk about pushing Milkies while we’re a thousand kilometres up. Too tempting,” Gabriel said, although he seemed to have cheered up and this was now simply background cantankerousness talking. “The Destarion could lift them to the outermost star systems in Cursèd’s Playground’s nearest arm. Easy. There’s a hospitable world there, Dec … Decla … ?”

  “Declivitorion,” Kozura said.

  “Right. Few Elves and other random people there already, the Brotherhood’s been dumping scraps in the Playground forever. The Milkies’d probably be happy to relocate there and live a normal existence on a nice convenient ballworld,” Gabriel said. “Right?” Athé shrugged, then nodded. “What about the fundamentalists?”

  There was a thoughtful silence around the sparse little chamber.

  “This may or may not be appropriate to the situation,” Magna raised her hand, “but how does ‘fuck ‘em’ strike you as an approach? Let them live or die depending on how well the severing of the Eden Road goes. If it goes badly, they die and – sorry – improve the species. If it all goes well, they can go on being miserable pricks up here away from everyone.”

  “Actually, if it all goes well, they’ll be paved over by Lucifer’s Eden Road revitalisation program,” Kozura said, while the other Angels sat and looked surprised. “Which is, if anything, an even more satisfying thought.”

  “Isn’t this about saving as many humans as possible?” Magna asked. “Not saving the ones that are actively making it impossible?”

  “I approve of the pragmatism,” Athé said, “although perhaps we can consider other solutions before the moment of truth.”

  “Sure,” Magna said. “I’m always ready to have my faith restored.”

  “You enjoy saying things like that in a room full of Angels,” Athé said in amusement, “don’t you?”

  “A little,” Magna smiled, and rose to her feet. “For the time being, though, I’ve seen enough of 2622. I’m going to bed. See you in the evening.”

  “Sleep well, Cara-Magna,” Kozura said for the group.

  Magna managed to keep her feet from dragging as she left the main hab segment and headed to the cosy heated chamber they’d set aside for her sleeping quarters. It had been a long day, and she’d never been much of a late-night partier. She changed into her nightclothes and climbed gratefully into bed.

  No more than four hours later, she was woken up by the sound of the door chime. By the time she’d dressed and stepped out into the main room, a very nervous-looking man in a dark blue uniform was sitting in the main room, peeling off his breather mask with shaking hands and staring wide-eyed at the collection of Angels around him.

  “…don’t know what came over me,” he was saying. “Sudden temperature change, maybe,” his expression melted into almost pathetic relief when he saw a person without wings enter the room. He tried to stand up, then wobbled and fell back again.

  “It will pass, officer,” Magna said. “Mild physiological overload from the presence of electromagnetically enhanced organisms,” this was almost a scientific explanation and was as close as she could get without abandoning the stunted science of the Milkies.

  “Oh. Um, well as I was saying, I’m sorry to call on you so early,” he said, “and, um, happy new year … do you celebrate the new year at this time of, um, well, year?”

  “It’s new year’s day on the standard calendar, officer,” Magna said patiently. The Milkies were equal parts earnestly interested in cultural differences, and gratingly obtuse about it. “Can we help you?”

  “We have a man in holding who says his brother is here,” the officer said apologetically, and cast another fearful look around the room. “Does anyone here know a…” he pulled out an electronic pad and consulted it. “Çrom Skelliglyph?” he pronounced laboriously.

  “Çrom is here?” Gabriel said sharply. For some reason, the Archangel turned to look at Blacknettle, who was still standing by the window. The pale, silent Angel turned to look over her wing again, smiling.

  “I knew it,” she whispered exultantly.

  CRIMES AGAINST SOVEREIGNTY

  Since the Angels were stuck in the sanctified bubble until nightfall, it fell to Magna to follow Officer Gomes – “call me Ed” – out to his little skimmer car and ride across the settlement to the lockup that was constructed on the very edge of the step. Its placement above the thousand-kilometre drop was a little too coincidental for her liking, but Ed assured her
that they’d never thrown a prisoner off.

  This jovial assertion was a little undermined by the sign on the inner door of the breathers-and-outdoor-gear antechamber, reading PRISONERS WHO MISBEHAVE EXIT BY THE BACK DOOR. Magna glanced at Ed after reading this, but he seemed oblivious.

  The police lockup was quiet, as you might expect at barely six in the morning on new year’s day in such a small community. A couple of officers were sitting at workstations nursing cups of naka,62 and barely looked up when Ed and Magna entered.

  “He was taken into custody almost a week ago,” Ed explained, “but he refused bail arrangements and was consequently denied recourse to communications. Um, he overheard some of us talking last night, um, about the – the enhanced organisms.”

  “I see,” Magna said. It would never cease to amaze her how difficult some people made it for themselves. You’d think Angels would be pretty difficult to deny, when five of them showed up in your neighbourhood. “And then he acquiesced to legal proceedings?”

  “Actually no,” Ed said, looking embarrassed as he showed her through to the lockup area. “He is still refusing bail arrangements and so is being held on the maximum charge of crimes against sovereignty … but he invoked a very obscure old regulation regarding family contact on world-recognised holidays. Frankly I’m still not sure he’s got an enhanced organism for a brother, but it’s not our place to decide people’s families. Legally we were obligated to reach out.”

  Magna had only met Çrom Skelliglyph once, and she’d been little more than a girl at the time. The man sitting on the hard bench of the lockup – by the feet of a snoring drunk who was occupying most of the bench – looked considerably younger than she recalled. But this, she was forced to concede, was only because she was now looking at him through the eyes of a much older woman. The man had not changed a bit. She supposed that really shouldn’t shock her – but of course it did.