I lifted a book from a shelf at random to have something in my hand and stepped over to her table. Pausing across from her, like I was a client at her desk, I waited for her to look up. When she did, she was clearly cross. Someone dared approach a scholar at the top of the Ark? She was ready to make sure it didn’t happen twice.
Her features didn’t exactly soften when she recognized me, but she did smile a little. I pointed at an empty chair nearby and raised my brows. She shook her head to discourage me from sitting: here was not the place to have a conversation, no matter how softly. Instead, she stood, nodded in a direction across the library floor, and started walking at full speed. If I wanted to talk, I would have to keep up.
Clodia ducked into the pollies, and I hesitated to follow her. After seeing she was holding open the door, I stepped in, and she closed it behind me. With a practiced motion, she set the privacy bar. Maybe this wasn’t Clodia’s first time using the pollies as a private office.
Speaking of, I chucked a thumb at the row of birds. “Our conversation needs to be more private than this,” I said. “I’d hate one of these guys to remember what we discuss.”
She lifted both eyebrows, and the corner of her mouth threatened a sneer. “Come now, M. Bakhoum. That’s impossible.”
I shook my head in a flat negative. “No way. I’m not running the risk of being the one in a million that creates a permanent imprint.”
With a little sigh of being tired with me already, Clodia opened the door and we were back out in the hallway and charging down toward one of the fire escape stairwells. Clodia barreled through the door, holding it open for me to follow. When I did, she shut it behind me and turned to face me on the landing at the very top of the stairs. “Will this do? No birds to blabber impossibly after reset.”
I peered over the handrail of the landing and down into rapidly deepening darkness. The lights below hadn’t sensed us and turned on; only the ones at the top came to life. I didn’t like having to trust no one was down there in the dark, but it beat nothing. As she said, it beat a room full of birds bred to remember and repeat spoken language. “Sure.”
She folded her hands in front of her and waited for me to speak.
Suddenly, I felt deeply silly. “I need to know if avenging angels are real.” I swallowed some air. “I have a client who claims to have seen one, and I need to know if that’s possible—and everything else you know about them.”
Clodia failed to roll her eyes. In fact, she narrowed them. I got the feeling I was being assessed like one of those writings she studies. “It’s easy enough to determine if they saw one.” Her thumbs tapped against one another. “What color did he say its wings were?”
“White,” I answered. “‘White as polar snow.’ Does that make it real?”
Clodia answered with another question. “And how big were its wings?”
“Five meters, tip to tip.”
She nodded. “And its teeth?”
“Two rows, like a shark.” I shuddered suddenly. The stairwell wasn’t heated, and sometimes it gets cold in Autumn in random places, and I told myself this was one of them. I jumped ahead of myself and of her. “It had some human accomplices, too.”
She smiled softly. “He’s lying.” It sounded like an apology.
I blinked. I was surprised, and a little disappointed, and a part of me was surprised at my own disappointment. “Why?”
“Angels have only been recorded attacking alone. That is one of the things about them: they are solitary creatures. One reason many disbelieve angels’ existence is the question of species continuity. If there were more than one, why would they not mass their forces to attack? Why only ever attack solo?” She was warming up to the subject now, and she gestured with one hand as though there was an illustration nearby. “Yet they do not, suggesting there is only ever the one. If they do not live or work in groups or pairs, how do they reproduce? I fear simple biology gives the lie to the whole concept. Recall, M. Bakhoum, they were believed to be a product of the ancients’ experiments.”
“There was Andreas, two hundred years ago, right? That was two angels, if you believe the story.” I shrugged, and it was a lame one. My heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t believe any of the stories. At least, I didn’t think I did. I certainly didn’t want to believe them.
Clodia rolled one shoulder. In anyone else, it might suggest ambivalence, but Clodia’s mind was made up. She was not considering all possibilities. She was guiding me to her own conclusions. “There are sufficient reasons to believe that was a manufactured explanation for a natural disaster. A powerful earthquake is statistically more likely. History contains numerous instances of a disaster with no agency behind it, spawning a desire to create explanatory myths. Saying two angels descended and struck the Earth so hard in two places it rippled like the surface of a pond: that is one example. Unlikely explanations, by definition, defy logic. That is their emotional appeal. No one can disprove them as long as they account for the facts on hand. The ancients knew Sanfro was prone to that kind of disaster. Some fraction of their descendants made up a cause, satisfying their need to have someone or something to blame.”
I thought about it for a moment. “If they were the products of the ancients tinkering with biology, as you say, maybe they reproduce by cloning. Maybe they reproduce by some sort of extreme genetic manipulation.” I shrugged. I was no scientist, but it made sense to me.
Clodia shook her head. “Too complicated for one being to do all on its own and in secret. Specialized equipment, space for the equipment, and time, a lot of time, is required.”
I didn’t like that answer, but I didn’t have facts to counter it. “But do you believe there were any real attacks by avenging angels?”
“I do. Descriptions vary here and there, as expected from any two persons’ account of the same event, but overall, an internal consistency exists lending credence to the reports. Indeed, attacks have been recorded, and I’ve found it hard to believe anyone would or could fake them all.” She considered for a second, looking past my left shoulder. “Yes. I do believe there were avenging angels. I am not convinced there were as many as have been claimed through history, but I think there is some evidence of their reality. If they were ever real, however—and this is a major ‘if’—then they are long gone. The facts don’t support their continued existence. A small population of them may have existed many millennia ago. If so, they survived long enough to take root in the primitive folklore of the post-Fall times of barbarism. A handful may have even survived into the early Imperial era. But they’re gone now. They were real. Not anymore. And when they were real, if they were real, they attacked alone.”
“No human accomplices.” My voice was flat and dead.
“Zero.” She shook her head. “Look at the reports we have that seem reliable: an angel appears over a population center, declaims something damning about revenge against humankind, and begins laying waste to everything in sight. That is not a complicated plan. That is not subtle. It involves no attempts at subterfuge. Even if we remove the angels’ reported attempted murder of each and every human they encounter, a kind of speciesist dogma remains. The angels of our stories live—or exist—outside of society and seek to destroy what our society creates. When they act on that desire, they do so in the most direct and uncomplicated means possible. Sometimes, they get chased away, very rarely they are killed (though no corpses have been preserved or discovered), and never are they captured. More often than not, they seem to become bored and leave. This is behavior equal to a child throwing a tantrum. These stories show no sense of planning or style or intention. Accomplices would not only be unnecessary: they run directly counter to the quality of reported experiences.”
“My client also said it didn’t look like a person. He said it looked like a ‘chim pansy.’” I shrugged again.
Clodia laughed. I’d rarely heard her laugh, and despite her professorial tone and her King Midas eyes, that laugh was delightful. That laugh could mak
e a dumb joke funny again. When I didn’t laugh with her, she offered an explanation: “They were an ancient primate. An animal closely related to homo sapiens. Our genetic predecessors—your very distant cousins, if you will, only they ate almost nothing but exotic, co-evolved fruit.”
I smirked. “Cousins, you say? I already don’t like them.”
Clodia allowed a small and very patient smile. “They used to be used in research. The ancients were very conflicted about the appropriateness of doing so because of the animals’ suspected intelligence levels. They’ve been extinct for thousands upon thousands of years.” She looked abruptly wistful. “There were journals at the time of the collapse, diaries and field reports written by researchers. Natural preservation had become a concern because they were damaging the biome in every way imaginable. Some researchers spent their whole careers simply documenting the erosion and destruction of the world that had produced humankind. Observations after the collapse showed a brief flourishing of hope for any number of threatened life forms. In the end, though, they died in the chaos like eighty percent of all phylum.”
She was gazing elsewhere, internally, backward across the many dozens of centuries between the collapse and modern times. She looked sad. I’d only seen that on her face once, and it had been at the conclusion of the case for which she hired me. That case was deeply personal for her, and it didn’t end well, and I could tell the drawn-out demise of the ancient world hit her as hard as did the relatively small matter she had me investigate. When Clodia looked back at me, she could see the uncertainty in my eyes.
“Imagine it,” she said, with a whisper of reverence. “All the millennia of knowledge they must have acquired. I don’t believe their machines were as advanced as some do, and I don’t think any of the ancients are going to return from beyond the sky or some secret base somewhere and give us the gifts of their great machines. Those who await the salvation of their return are dreaming. I do not share their delusion. But, I know the ancients had their own legends of even more ancient lands, long lost, and of peoples whose technologies were akin to magic. They even believed those people—and that magic—might be out there still, tucked away somewhere, waiting for the right moment to appear. How many times, M. Bakhoum? How many times has humankind lost itself like that, forgotten itself entirely, and struggled back out of some self-imposed dark age to rebuild from the very beginning?” Clodia clucked her tongue in frustration.
“Anyway,” she said, coming back to the here and now, “you mispronounce it. You say it like two words. It’s one. Say ‘chimps’ if that is easier.” A ghost of a smile. “But what does it matter? The centuries that would have known that are gone, and I am probably the only person alive even capable of noticing.”
“They’re lucky they grabbed your attention.” A part of me might have wanted to lift her out of her thoughtfulness, but I’ve learned in my short life that a thoughtful reverie is worth a hundred meaningless smiles. I said it anyway, because I also meant it. “The ancients hit the jackpot in terms of having someone be interested in what they did. Maybe none of them are here to thank you, but it beats being dead and forgotten.”
I grimaced abruptly, drawing my arm in against my side.
“Are you alright, M. Bakhoum?”
I gritted my teeth for a second. There had been a brief, stabbing pain in my abdomen, which happened once in a while, like a metronome keeping time for the whole slowly dying thing. I sucked air between my teeth, forced a false smile on my face, and waved it off with my other hand. “I’m fine. Something I ate.”
Again, I was weighed in the scales of Clodia’s mind. “If you say so,” she replied. Note to self: never lie to Clodia when it matters.
“So, there’s no record of an angel looking like an animal?”
“Again,” she said, “Zero. Avenging angels are always humaniform. Often, they presented distended versions of human physiological structures or exaggerated features, but they never appeared to be other creatures entirely. They seemed to have their origin in humanity.”
“You really believe in them, don’t you?” I tried not to smile because a part of me knew this wasn’t funny anymore, any of it, my knee-jerk refusal least of all.
“Yes. The ancients devoted too much time to them. It’s that simple.” She shrugged.
Again, I surprised myself: I realized I, too, believed now. Maybe saying I “believed in them” isn’t right. Maybe instead I should say I realized they had become real to me. I’d still never seen one myself, and I wasn’t in a hurry to do so, but I couldn’t think of them as a fairy tale anymore. Even if they weren’t factually, objectively, scientifically true, there were people in the world whose decisions were made in reaction to their own belief in avenging angels: kids who heed a mother’s warning to come home on time, and believers who kneel to pray in earnest fervor, and old women whose tea cups clatter because in their mind they’re still a child watching an angel kill hundreds on a whim. That was a kind of being real, wasn’t it? Maybe the only kind of being real that matters in the end.
“Huh,” I said. “And what about a Mannie? Could an angel be a Mannie, too?”
Clodia winced at the pejorative, but it was my mouth and I could dirty it up however I wanted. She shook her head. “No. There are…” She paused to choose the precise word. “There are legends they have some sort of shared origin, but obviously, they are very different kinds of creations. If one believes angels had their origin in genetic experimentation on the part of the ancients—and I do—then they clearly started out as human with additions. Man-Animal Hybrid Persons, however,” and she was nice enough not to light up and make blink the sign she hung around my casual slur with her use of the term of greater respect, “clearly started as lower creatures with enhancements added.”
I arched one eyebrow at her. “Really? Clearly?”
She nodded. “Of course. It’s much easier to make a canine stand and speak syllables than to give a human a dog’s physiognomy.”
That made sense. “So, they came from different places.”
“I think it’s obvious. Not everyone agrees.”
“So, for the sake of argument, let’s say there’s an angel around Autumn right now. Let’s go further and say it’s a weirdo who has a plan of action with forethought, and accomplices, and the whole stack of jacks. Where would I find him?”
Clodia looked away from me, the wheels in her head spinning. “Okay, if you wanted to chase the impossible, I would start…” She trailed off and shook her head. “I don’t know where for an individual, not with the present non-limiting suppositions. But the only good method developed for revealing hidden groups—like a terror cell, which is what you describe—is to discover the pattern created by their communications. Section 4 can probably tap their communications directly to get the content, but you can’t. You don’t need to, though. You need to discover a pattern of a certain set of actors communicating with one another. They may not always communicate the same way, or in the same order, or with initiation of communication coming from the same party, but once you have a list of names who are routinely in communication with one another in some way, you’ve probably found a hidden group.”
“Or a group of people who get together to play cards.”
“Which are, in fact, a kind of hidden group. You don’t know they play cards. I don’t know. Only they know. They don’t announce upcoming games to others. They schedule them and get together.”
I nodded. It made sense. I’d certainly solved plenty of other cases by detecting a pattern in a subject’s behavior. This was different, though. In other cases, legit cases, I’d been given a target from the start. I needed to think of a behavior they necessarily engaged in: something predictable and regular and required. “Gives me something to think about. Thanks.”
Clodia nodded. “Doitashimashite, M. Bakhoum. I will now return to my work.” Her tone was polite but very firm. She was not being nice. She was being the minimal necessary degree of rude.
; I got out of there, down the grand stairs of the Ark, just in time to hit the Lower Market Market for dinner. I managed to get half of it down before my guts threatened to twist. All in all, it had been a damn good day so far.
8
After eating, I decided to take a walk around the Lower Market’s district and give myself some time to think. I needed an idea, and they don’t generally come out of sitting down and waiting for them to appear. New ideas are rarely, in fact, new. More often, they’re more like two old ideas bumping into each other in the hallway. I needed to get out into the world and give myself some sensory input if I wanted to give my brain some time to churn and something to chew on while it did.
Lower Market is nothing but glowsigns and tinny music playing from those cheap bamboo speakers they grow in Zhong. Some people meditate by going into the mountains and isolating themselves from the crush of humankind. I do that, too, on occasion. Times like this, though, I needed to get where the cacophony could turn into a buzz of sensory input so overwhelming and overlapping it could become one continuous onslaught of sounds too complex to be differentiated and then, with time, recede into a hum. I needed to be a part of the humaniform hive.
I pulled my hat down over my eyes and tucked my hands into the pockets of my jacket. The night was cool again, but it didn’t feel bad. The briskness nudged me inward, away from the wash of sound and light. There were hookers of every breed and gender working a few street corners, nails/claws/etc. painted red and their lipstick smudged and their harnesses too tight in all the right places. I knew a few of them from one thing or another. I stopped to chat, checked around to see if any of the ones I knew had faded from the streets but not from memory, and offered to buy a steamed bun for one of the hustlers I’ve known since old times. It wasn’t a come-on, simply a way of being friendly. A part of me was worried I wouldn’t have too many chances left.
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