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Avenging angels are the cultural and historical bogeymen of the Vrashabh Empire.
No, that doesn’t say it strongly enough. Avenging angels are not merely the things that go bump in the night. They’re not simply stories we tell children. They’re more than the monsters hiding under our beds when we’re small, more than the cautionary tales we tell one another around the fire late in the night. Avenging angels inhabit the very heart of existential terror. They are an ancient legend, one we attempt to class along with those moon ships, and the Arthur Kennedy myth of betrayal and murder in Camelot, and the wastes of ancient ages. Avenging angels are the mistakes of the past come back to wreak havoc in the now.
Avenging angels are ancient humanity’s original and ultimate sin. The ancients had complicated stories about snakes and gardens and the dangers of pride, of being overly ambitious, of not knowing when to leave well enough alone, of poking the universe with a stick until the universe slaps us down. Avenging angels are our version of the same thing.
Of course, no one believes in them. They’re mostly something the Sinceres like to natter on about, which is always a strong indicator of raw bullshit. The Sincerity Church says avenging angels were a literal thing created by humankind in the last days of prehistory. Having largely thrown off the yoke of religion their gods placed on them—or they placed on themselves in the names of their gods—humanity tried to become gods in their own right by creating something new. The Sincerity Parables depict that as the time of creation for both Mannies and avenging angels. Most educated people assume this myth is a way of encoding into oral tradition the story of humankind’s discovery of genetic design, barbaric and ham-fisted and messy. I can’t imagine how crude those initial forays must have been or the monsters they surely created.
The ancients themselves had lots and lots of stories of their own science gone wrong. They were clearly as afraid of themselves as they were of everything else in the world. In the story of the Mannies and the angels, humankind creates two types of life, dominating one and falling to the vengeance of the other. Like I said, nobody literally believes these stories except for whackos like Obstinates or Deep Sinceres.
Crazies like that love to point out the ancients’ supposed records of avenging angels: visual and textual memoirs of their fearsome power and boundless aggression. They left behind photographs of great beings, half again as tall as an average Man Plus, muscular, chiseled, even beautiful, with great white wings covered in feathers the size of a football bat. They created stills of hundreds of them swarming, destroying the fortresses and weapons of the old world, driving humankind further into the darkness it had already created for itself. The ancients excelled at faking stuff like that, though. Disaster stories were some of their favorite forms of entertainment, and they got really good at representing them in various ways.
I once boned a historian who told me the hardest part of his job was figuring out the line between the ancients’ genuine beliefs and their elaborate morality tales, recorded and reenacted with equal fervor. Did they believe in demons? Did they believe in avenging angels? They certainly wrote and filmed and animated plenty of stories about both. But who could believe in something like that? You have to be pretty sick to want something like avenging angels to exist. That historian—whatever his name was, nice guy, though—felt the whole thing was an elaborate restatement of the collective guilt they felt for fucking over their own world. We know the ancients saw the end coming, and we know they didn’t do a goddamn thing to stop it. Imagine how fucked up they must have been.
That—all that—was the first thing that made me think Alejandro (hell, maybe every golem) was as crazy as a king. Saying he saw an angel was way worse than saying he suffered delusions, which at least are in the realm of the possible. To say he believed in the objective reality of them was like saying he believed in the objective reality of a fairy tale. He might as well say he believed in the old gods.
Like any religious doctrine, ultimately, this shit is and always has been a way to keep someone down. In our case, it’s the Mannies. The whole point is to remind everyone—especially Mannies themselves—that they were the creation of humankind, like something between a slave and a complicated pet. The Church uses it to justify their official position that Mannies will always be one step shy of fully human no matter how many nice things the Vrashabh Emperor or his bureaucrats say about them.
Our society is rigged to make sure that’s functionally true, too. The economic divide between the Plusses (and other Designed) and Mannies is, in most places, too great to allow real social or political equality. As I suspect, it has always been in human history, the gap—money, power, social standing—between people is kept wide enough for most on the bottom to be incapable of climbing up. So we get slums and the downtrodden and a working-class scraping to buy minor luxuries they can’t really afford so the upper class can scoff at them for their pretense at wealth.
It isn’t enough to put down the whole Empire’s most visible working stiffs, though. The avenging angel story is a reminder to the Plusses, too, to mind their place and don’t try to cut the queue of history. The avenging angels, it’s said, resented their creation by inferiors and thus attempted to overthrow them. It’s an old story, and it’s probably been around in some form since the second generation of primates started competing with the first. The moral of the myth of the angels is that we, modern humanity, should make sure our reach doesn’t exceed our grasp. The Sinceres are eager to remind even their most privileged faithful they’re not the top of the heap and never will be. There will always be something scarier to go bump in the night.
I’ve always imagined the Empire loves these legends for the way they keep the true believers feeling guilty for sins they didn’t commit. Beyond that, it can be used to push a more agnostic cultural “value” of humility in place of pride. It tells people they should shut the hell up and be grateful for their lot in life, no matter how bad, because if nothing else they aren’t a Mannie, and if they are, then at least an angel hasn’t crept into their room at night and murdered them with its blade of living fire.
People are dumb, especially in herds. Some days, it made me embarrassed to be human at all. Being hired by a golem to chase the monster at the back of the closet was crazy, but no crazier than what lots of people were doing with their lives. And I’d been hired for money. And I’d heard a story from a golem. There were worse ways to pass an afternoon.
The only really uncomfortable thing about it was that my gut told me there was something real to what Alejandro told me. I didn’t believe Alejandro had seen an angel, any more than I believed in fairies or vampires or Norlins, but I believed he saw something. I’ve had plenty of clients who told me crazy stories: some half-baked, some half-remembered, some halfway made up, sure. Nobody hires me to sell me a total lie, though. Nobody hires a detective to tell complete fabrications. Why bother?
What had Alejandro seen? I didn’t have a clue. Maybe he was like a person who gets the kiss of life and comes back with a story about that tunnel of light with their dead grandma at the end. Maybe he was like the trauma victim whose mind splinters into alternate personalities to cope with what they’ve seen, compartmentalizing it into something the executive personality pretends it never experienced in the first place. Maybe Alejandro’s memories were corrupted when they were transferred to his current body.
Another problem: Alejandro’s case was a ten-year-old disaster with few, if any, survivors. Splendor’s demise was like any other human tragedy: a lot of people tried to make money off of it before the fires were even out, and the truth got completely lost in the shuffle. Alejandro’s claim of surviving Splendor wasn’t the first I heard, and the others had all been exposed sooner or later as some sort of scam. Real survivors, if there were any, wanted to keep a low profile. Everyone’s heard of someone’s cousin’s best friend’s brother whose ex-dog survived the crash—and should never be asked about it—but all the people who got out
in public and bragged about seeing it firsthand turned out to be a fake with a book they were pushing.
Maybe Alejandro was partially lying. Maybe he changed some details. Maybe he embellished to get me on board. I couldn’t dismiss the notion Alejandro threw in mention of an avenging angel as a hook. What was on the other end of the line I couldn’t know without investigating the client, too, and not only the case he gave me. Like I told him, I have a professional obligation—and plenty of confirming experience—to assume nothing is as simple as it seems and that everything is probably simpler than the client says it is.
After Alejandro affirmed the contract and my non-interference policy about clients butting out while I work, then went on his way, I had a long talk with myself on these points and decided the thing to do was to go out into the City of Autumn and start trying to find someone who could answer my questions—any of them—because as lazy as I am, I also suffer from the worst of the maladies of being a detective, curiosity. Like a drunk with an empty bottle, my curiosity needed its fix. For that, I had to make a couple of personal visits and follow a couple of hunches.
The sorts of people I had to talk to were probably going to be really unpleasant, but that was true on any day at the office.
The Empire is a place with a lot of religion in it, and most of the time I think that is probably one of its greatest overall weaknesses. There’s a lot of piety and a lot of bullshit pie in the sky. A huge amount of escapism goes into and comes out of the religions we have these days. I suppose there’s an argument to be made that we at least aren’t trying to blow each other up the way people were back in the day—prehistory was basically one long religious war—but it doesn’t mean we’re holding hands and unlocking the apex of human potential, either.
One of the big advantages of having so much occupied surface area devoted to churches, though, is that churches are really damned good at writing things down and priests are really good at finding out secrets. I suppose most of them feel some mix of emotions at that: a little embarrassment and a little shame with an electrical jolt of titillation running through it from time to time. Maybe I should have become a priest. The pay would be steady, and they seem to get laid more.
The tragedy of the priesthood is all that valuable information goes into a black hole. In theory, they absorb it into themselves, converting it via the alchemy of their faith into an absolution so pure, so liberating, the sinner is able to run right back into the street and do it all over again without a second thought.
Not every priest is so good at making that conversion, though. Some of them let the frustration or the shock or the disillusionment bubble out into their earthly lives. They are the fine texture on the surface of faith where a creeping vine like me can gain purchase. They’re the knotholes the woodpecker of curiosity can attack.
One of those knotholes was a pervert bar called Misconceptions. It skulked in the back of an alley in the freight district of Autumn, out on the port edge, where—for reasons an engineer could probably explain to me—the weather is always a little colder and the mist a little oilier than elsewhere, even if it’s a slow day in freight. The puddles all have the beautiful iridescence of a chemical slick at sunset, and all the concrete looks shabby.
I genuinely love that part of town. I feel a little cleaner in comparison every time I go there.
Misconceptions isn’t strictly a gay bar, I should clarify. It’s really an “anything unusual” bar. There are certainly my fellow gays there, but a lot of times, they’re either the ones who are trying to hide from their religion or are trying to prey on those who are, because their guilt makes them easy pickings. It’s also a bar for humans who like Mannies and Mannies who like Mannies other than their own kind. It’s the sort of bar where you can find whatever you’re looking for as long as it’s something you wouldn’t want in the news.
There have been plenty of times my path has crossed those of other Misconceptions regulars. Our silent agreement not to speak of it, and thus protect one another from the prejudice of others, is about the only thing we all seem to have in common with everyone else who goes there. Inside Misconceptions, we tend to cluster into groups, either social groups or sexual ones. Mostly, we stick to our own kind while we try to work up the nerve to approach anyone else.
One of those cliques is a group of older Plusses who go and nurse drinks and sit together even though most of them won’t talk. If I’ve ever seen a group of priests who are bad at hiding in the wild, they’re them. Every newbie gets told who and what they are, but they like to pretend no one knows. We’re all very polite about it. Beyond the rumors, though, I’ve had occasion to confirm it for myself.
Specifically, I was once riding the steerless and couldn’t get a seat in the front, so I went to the back where the Mannies sit and simply stood at the edge between the two sections. There isn’t an Arties section. I’m supposed to sit with the Plusses, even though some of them look down on me and some of them try to worship me like god’s own third ball, but there weren’t any empty seats there. I have nothing against Mannies, because I’m not an Imperial–class asshole, but I didn’t want to push my luck with the operator, so I tried to split the difference by inhabiting the invisible boundary of social convention between the two.
No dice. I stood there approximately thirty seconds before a Sister of Sincerity got up out of her seat and offered it to me. I didn’t want to take her damned seat because I didn’t want her adulation. I didn’t want her self-righteousness. I didn’t want her to go back to nunnery that night and tell the other sisters about how she saw an Artisanal Human today and she gave up her seat for him and he looked like he might clean up well enough but isn’t it a shame the world doesn’t hand him a crown and a fucking scepter and a winning lottery ticket?
No—not on her life. I didn’t want any part of that. I ignored her offer, straight up pretending not to hear her. I continued ignoring her when she moved over and stood in front of me. Everyone was starting to get uncomfortable. The whole steerless had gone silent. Everyone was staring. I continued ignoring her. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of asserting her dogma. I’m a free citizen of the Empire, and I have the right to stand wherever the hell I want, including with the riffraff.
She reached out and took my upper arm in her hand—she was old, and her hand was frail, but her grip was like iron—and shook me once.
My impulse, and I’m not proud of this, was to backhand her across the face. I didn’t, though, because if anything could send her home with an even bigger god-boner than the one she got from giving up her seat, it would be getting a bruise from an ungrateful Artie in return. Instead, I smiled. “I recognize the humanity of all sentient species and reject the orthodox racism of an arbitrary barrier drawn between Humanity Plus, Artisanal Humans, and Human-Animal Hybrids.” Her face fell as I quoted Spiralist catechism at her. “I embrace the Double Helix and the potential it offers us to ascend together, hand in hand in paw, to a future where all combinations are possible and all life is valued.” I extended my hand to her, voice soft, “Sister, will you join me in Evolution?”
That powerful grip let go of my arm, and instead, she backhanded me, the birthstone in her Sincerity Vow slicing a thin line across my face. If you look very closely, in exactly the right light, you can still see the scar on my right cheek.
That was when the Sincerity Priest jumped up from his socially approved seat at the front of the steerless and ran up the aisle to put his hand on her wrist before she did it again. Only rarely have I seen firsthand a fury as great as hers: the rage of the fervent encountering the indifference of reality. This woman had, for whatever personal reasons seemed right to her, devoted her life to trying to build a world that elevated the original and unenhanced, the accidental, the incidental, instead of rewarding the designed. She was herself a Woman Plus, of course, but she didn’t seem to detect any hypocrisy in her choice of dogma. History is full of people who benefit from a past they condemn, and any number of tho
se persons was perfectly sincere. I had no reason to doubt her sincerity, either. She looked at me and saw what the world should aspire to, and I had replied by rejecting everything about that view.
As I say, I’m not actually a Spiralist, but sometimes I’m happy to talk the talk if it pisses someone off. I’ve done the same to Spiralists before, too.
The priest who stopped the sister from striking me again said in a soft voice, almost apologetic in tone, “Sister, let this young man be. Your point is made. The man does not wish to participate in our faith. We can always get off at the next stop.” His eyes met mine, and I recognized him as one of the old guys who drink in that corner at Misconceptions, and that was when I knew beyond rumor they really were all priests. I wondered how many of them were Sincerity, how many were Spiralist, and how many were the other countless religions of the Empire. Those are the two biggest, but there are hundreds of other ways to try to explain the problems of the world. I wondered what kink led him to Misconceptions in the first place: not because they were difficult to imagine but because there were so many from which to choose.
The absolute silence of the steerless made me uncertain if anyone was breathing. It may be no one was especially paying attention: crazy shit happens on public transit all the time, right? In my memory, though, she and he and I were the center of the known universe and every screen in that universe was tuned to us and to what was happening.
The Sister of Sincerity didn’t say anything. She looked at me, at the blood I could feel running down the side of my face, and with her free hand reached out to pull the emergency stop cable on the steerless. It slid to an abrupt halt, everyone thrown forward by the sudden loss of forward motion. The doors automatically flew open the moment we were stopped, and she unceremoniously pushed me out. She put a hand in the middle of my chest and pushed, simple as that, and her Woman Plus strength was no match for an Artie like me. One second, I was in the middle of the car, and the next, I was flat on my Artisanal ass on the sidewalk.
A Fall in Autumn Page 5