Angels and Exiles (7 page)

“I’m not going away. I want answers of my own, and now.”

“You’re lucky not to have been taken to carcery, Confessor Moën. Your actions endangered the whole of this station and some Administrators wanted your head.”

“Fuck them.” Caspar started at the words. In Flikka’s mouth they took on an intensity they never had in Perle’s. “You know damned well I acted correctly. If it was a human who’d come down and killed left and right, we’d have had no recourse. Isn’t that right? That’s what I was taught in school: we serve starship crews, and their rights outweigh ours.”

“We’ve been through this already. Please go home now. You’ve had a very difficult time and—”

“Answer my questions, Administrator. What did you learn about this being? You must have tracked the ship when it left. What happened to it? Tell me. Or is it that you’re so low in the hierarchy that they didn’t bother to tell you?”

The Administrator’s mouth twisted in exasperation, a meaning which must have been plain to anyone. But then, surprising Caspar, she relented.

“It wasn’t a ship that came down. It was only a shuttle; but you probably guessed that. The ship itself . . . is fifteen kilometres long. It looks like nothing you could imagine. It can’t, or won’t, answer us. From time to time, it broadcasts gibberish at various EM frequencies. We have no idea what it wants, or where it’s from. We’re defenceless against it. That’s all we know. Now please, please go home, and keep this to yourself. People have already been panicking, and we’ve had six deaths too many.”

The mask had slipped from the Administrator’s face, and her weariness and concern were plain to see. Flikka lowered her gaze and left without further words, her hand linked with Caspar’s.

When they entered the Moën house, the family fussed about them to no end. Flikka recounted what had happened, but she refused to go into details. She seemed to have been won over to the Administrator’s opinion now, and her hands said she wished she could stay utterly silent. Finally she broke free from her mother and father’s attentions and went to her room, locking the door.

Caspar was left the focus of attention, something he found unpleasant. He was asked a few questions, but everyone soon gave up, lacking the Administrator’s persistence. When he was let go, he went to the standard-issue refrigerator and poured himself some juice, holding the pitcher in his left hand and clumsily steadying the glass with his crippled right. In the living room, his parents and grandfather were talking in lowered voices. From where he was, he could just see the painting in which Grandmother waited, waited, waited for the ball to reach her hands. Suddenly, with a queer shock, he remembered very clearly that, at one time, the ball hadn’t been in the picture.

He ran up to his own room then, feeling bone-tired. He found he was crying, not for the Security who had died, but, strangely, for all those who had lived. He did not understand. He thought then, for the first time, of reading his own body, to understand what he said to himself. He looked at himself in the mirror above his dresser, but he could not make sense of what he saw. In the end, he crawled into his bed and fell prey to a sleep full of nightmares.

And in the morning, before the sun even came over the rim of the horizon, Security came for him and Flikka. The shuttle had returned. They were wanted.

There were three of the aliens now. They were utterly identical: size, shape, and colours. But Caspar could tell them apart; two of them shouted pain and terror from their bodies, while the third was as unreadable as a piece of stone. By that, he thought to recognize the one he had helped yesterday. The aliens had been standing at the foot of the shuttle, almost motionless, until they saw Caspar and his sister. Then they came forward, and the absolved one spoke again in its music-like language.

And they proceeded as before. The aliens went with them to Flikka’s workhouse, and one, then the next, were chained, confessed, absolved of the human sins that weighted them. Flikka knew fear this time, Caspar saw; she was no longer overwhelmed by what she did, and she could fully taste the weirdness of it.

But it went well, and eventually it was done. Flikka collapsed in a chair, drained. The aliens made gestures and spoke words no one could interpret, Caspar least of all. Then the first one came to him, and took his crippled hand in his, and led the way out of the workhouse. The other two followed, and Security, and Flikka.

The aliens made their way back to the fishlike shuttle; then Caspar’s hand was let go, and the three went inside. “They’re going away, now,” said Flikka in a tired voice. “They’ll never come back, will they?”

Caspar did not know, and it hurt him deep inside, not to be able to know. It was as if some essential meaning had drained from the world. He waited in silence, along with the others, for the shuttle to lift off.

But then, the door opened again, and one of the aliens came back out. It carried a bag on a strap across its shoulder. It put the bag down, opened it. Took out six strange objects of metal and lights, a metre and a half high, and set them on the ground. The pattern they made seemed familiar; then Caspar understood that it was the pattern the bodies of the six dead Security had made.

Two more things the alien took out of the bag. One was carved from some sort of wood, crimson with gold veins. It might have been a musical instrument; it might have been something else. The alien stepped around the pattern it had built, and presented the wooden object to Flikka. She accepted it, keeping silent.

The alien took the last object from its bag then, and put it in Caspar’s arms. Flikka hissed in astonishment. Security shouted incoherently. Caspar, for the first time in his life, knew what it was to have one’s hair stand on end.

It was a doll, nearly a metre high. A slim young girl, dark-haired, wearing multicoloured robes and calf-high boots. She looked fully human, and she was warm to the touch.

Caspar looked up from the doll and saw the alien moving back into the shuttle, and then there was no more delay: the metal fish rose from the ground and sped off into the sky.

Once Aurinn had recovered, Flikka and Karl rented a small boat and took her, along with Caspar, on a brief cruise. On their first evening, when the sun had slipped below the horizon and the North Sea lay all about them, they sat down on deck. Karl lit a cigarette and gave one to Caspar. Aurinn was shocked, then amused: on Wolf’s Hoard, such practices were considered the depth of barbarity. Greatly daring, she tried a puff and coughed herself hoarse.

When Aurinn had stopped coughing, Flikka said suddenly and quietly: “I don’t think they were aliens.”

“How can you say that?” said Karl. “You saw them. No one except Caspar saw them from closer up. They weren’t human. You saw their ship. . . .”

“But we’ve all seen this.” And she pointed to Caspar’s doll, which was dancing slowly on the planks of the deck. The doll wasn’t just a manikin: it moved; it looked about; it danced at odd moments. The Administration had tried to take it from Caspar, but the doll had evaded their grasp, and finally, afraid of it, they had relented. Now it accompanied him wherever he went, a dream-toy, living and not.

“Karl, do you think they could have made such a thing in the few hours between our first meeting and their return? And even if it was possible, how can you explain that they looked so much like us? By any rational account they should have been completely different. We’ve both seen sinners who looked almost as strange. . . .”

“You think they were human,” said Aurinn. “But you said they didn’t speak. And the sin that, that almost killed me . . . it wasn’t a human sin.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Humankind is spread out so wide. Maybe somewhere they’ve been engineering themselves into something . . . new. Different. I think that’s what we saw: humans who’ve been altered so profoundly that we almost can’t recognize them. People who were isolated from the rest of humanity for so long that they forgot many things . . . I don’t know. We can’t really know, but that is what I think.”

“And what is this, then?” asked Karl. Caspar’s doll danced on the deck, long black hair flying, booted feet stamping a complex rhythm on the planks. “A toy? An idol?”

“Administration feared it was a spy; an information-gathering device. They thought it might be transmitting data back . . . somewhere. But what if it is, anyway? If we are coming into contact, whether it’s with aliens or with a long-forgotten branch of ourselves . . . isn’t it better that they learn more about us?”

“I’m sure Administration fears they’ll use the information against us.”

“I know. But the one that came down . . . one of only three crew for that huge ship . . . it only killed when it was blocked. Caspar guessed, somehow, what it had come down for. The same as all of our crews: to be absolved of the strange sins it had picked up crossing overspace. And when it dies, its soul will dissolve into overspace, and its sins will float there, waiting to be snagged by a living soul and perhaps then laid to rest at long last. . . .”

The doll danced on, oblivious to Flikka’s musings. Caspar rose, walked some way toward the prow. The doll followed him, still dancing. Caspar drew on his cigarette, let the smoke bubble up to his head. The doll spun and whirled, smiling, then slowed her dance into a courtly pavane. The others might speculate all they wanted, but Caspar knew what her purpose was. He knew that one day, she would be able to speak, and that on that day, the strangers would return.

He breathed in the smoke of the cigarette, and his dead tongue was loosened in his mouth. He spoke tobacco words to the doll. And, in the midst of her dance, she winked at him, to show that she understood.

For Ian McDonald

It’s night in Yerusalom, City of Miracles, Jewel of the Eldred, Bright Gift from the Stars; and in Yerusalom, even the dark shines with its own kind of light. It’s night in Yerusalom, City of Abominations, Newest Franchise of the Pit, Cosmic Corruptress; and in Yerusalom, even the brightest light carries its own shadow.

In Yerusalom, three dreamweavers stride along Faro Street in the luminous darkness, and all about them the multifarious sounds of the city blare and thunder. They’ve got soundsuits putting out their own personal music, and they’ve got neon-implants accenting the curves of their jaws with streaks of cold radiance, and they’ve got enhanced eyes, noses, ears, the better to soak up the surrounding world at the maximum possible intensity, and they’ve got hopes and fears roiling through their minds. Most importantly, they’ve got viable asset-slopes.

Edge Nain, tall and thin, his hair an upswept brush, walks point. He carries little protection, unshakeably convinced his wits and faith will see them all through. Ras hangs back several paces as always, his soundsuit unzipped to display his scarred chest; his head is a gleaming copper sphere, and his augmented muscles advertise he needs no weapon to defend himself and his companions from ill-meaning fools. Kel strides between them, nearly as tall as Edge Nain but, unlike him, ill-proportioned, his extremities too big for his body. Yet his features are startlingly beautiful, an angelic doll’s face set on a too-big skull, long-lashed eyes the blue-green of seawater.

As they walk, the three dreamweavers pray. Their belief is not the sharp and acid belief of those who fear, it is not the dull and musty belief of those who used to fear but no longer care; it is the hard and cold belief of those who
know
.

This is Ras’s prayer:
Sweet Jesu, make me a success at the performance, let me be noticed picked up contracted sold traded REMEMBERED
.

This is Edge Nain’s prayer:
Sweet Jesu, let it all go well; all I ask is for us not to go to pieces, even if we don’t make it, let us accept it in peace
.

This is Kel’s prayer:
Sweet Jesu, I want to meet a girl, a good girl, a hot one, but a true one, with a heart of flesh not gold, oh please, Sweet Jesu.
 . . . 

Set down in the Dust Belt of the North American plains, Yerusalom has fertilized the barren land with abstractions: money, hope, ambition, greed. Twenty-five years after taking root in Earth’s soil, it is surrounded with the pulsing life that is commerce. Streams of vehicles flow in and out of the city, carrying raw materials and finished goods, foodstuffs and drugs, liquid oxygen and dried seahorses, personal weapons and one-time encryption pads. Streams of data enter and leave, borne along superconducting wires, some even consigned to unbound photons blaring through the atmosphere, for anyone to intercept—if they dare.

The shadow and the light of Yerusalom have reached throughout the commercial sphere of Earth. Its presence has pulled its host nation out of a downward spiral, and by contagion the rest of the world has also benefited. Hard to say how many tens of millions owe their livelihood, if not their very life, to the shining alien city that endlessly consumes all that is poured into its brazen mouth. How could one then balk at a few hundreds of thousands dead of mysterious new diseases, the odd backward nation’s political collapse from economic pressures too intense to bear? Change, after all, always hurts. Adapt or die; it’s an old, old story.

The self-built edifices that border Faro Street come in every shape; their only constant is hugeness. Here a steep five-sided pyramid, three hundred metres high; there an arboreal structure rising from a central stem, recursively fanning out until a single two-metre wide room stretches to ten metres in height. A smoothly swollen dome, looking frozen in the act of erupting from the ground, squats across the street from a disturbingly not-quite-organic fortress that drips angular turrets, like an inverted Gaudi cathedral rendered at low resolution. All of the buildings shine with their own light, in great sheens of fluorescent colours. Windows open into their facades like geometric bits of the interstellar void. Above their doors, small digits flicker in red, indicating the one-time entrance fee, the visiting fee, the long-term residence fee. . . . In Yerusalom everything has a price—not even the air you breathe is free. Though at least it is unmetered: since it would not have been cost-effective to implant oxygen-usage monitors in every citizen, a flat breathing-tax is incorporated into the baseline living fee. Panting and gasping come at no extra charge.

In defiance of rational use of land space, a vast network of irregular alleyways, sunk in the shadows cast by secondary structures of unknown import, spreads between the buildings. Some assert this is necessary for the unseen machines and agents of the Eldred; some say this is where Sweet Jesu makes his lair. None know for sure, for few venture deeper than a few metres into the darkened maze: as soon as you enter it, your baseline living fee drops by a full forty percent, and if that is not a clear sign of a dangerous area, what is?

As the three dreamweavers pass yet one more opening into the underside of the city, three pairs of enhanced eyes flick to the right; detect quasi-random stirrings in the deep shadows, but no telltale signature of danger. Three pairs of enhanced ears absorb the sounds emanating from the alley, reaching far into the high-frequency domain, beyond thirty thousand cycles per second. Three enhanced noses sniff at the air, glomeruli both natural and synthetic discharging in response to airborne molecules. All three brains, presented with this mass of data, effortlessly integrate it and return the final verdict: nothing meaningful there, just a man groaning, perhaps passed out, maybe dying, maybe not. No threat to them, no concern of theirs.

In the alley, the old man lies on his back, praying, and this is his prayer:
Sweet Jesu, please make it so I eat tomorrow
.

In Yerusalom everyone prays, for it’s true, verified, and certified that Sweet Jesu Himself walks the streets of Yerusalom, Whore of Cities, and verily He goes about granting prayers, left and right. It has happened to Edge Nain himself: years ago, newly arrived in Yerusalom, he found himself cornered by a half-dozen predators, robbed at knife point. They could take nothing as essential as assets from him, only possessions, and Edge Nain had already resigned himself to this. But then one of his assailants began playing the tip of a blade along Edge Nain’s face, and he realized he stood to lose a lot more than mere belongings. In his heart rose a fervent prayer to Sweet Jesu, a simple one, nearly wordless. And even before he could repeat it, just as the ceramic blade had begun to cleave his skin, there came flashes of energy, screams, the noises of the gang fleeing. . . . Edge Nain found himself alone, his possessions scattered at his feet, a hot line of blood along his jaw the only sign of the attack. He heard receding footsteps in the distance, among the blurry washes of light, going, perhaps, toward the darkened jagged-walled alleyways; he thought to follow for an instant, then came to his senses, gathered up his stuff, and fled toward safer streets.

Though there are cranks and charlatans aplenty claiming they (they alone!) have the truth of the matter, no one in fact can claim to know Sweet Jesu’s face, His dress, His age, even His sex, for in these days, morphing oneself along the gender spectrum is something anyone with a few thousand assets can afford, and if Jesu Himself couldn’t be Herself once in a while, it wouldn’t make any sense, now, would it? And so most everyone treats other people kindly, for any one of them might be Sweet Jesu Himself, and your behaviour is being watched; yeah, friend, you’re on the line.

And this is the thought that passes through all three dreamweavers’ brains at the same time: that a sin of omission is a sin nonetheless and that, if they want their prayers answered, maybe they’d better be extra good tonight.

So they step back, of a common and unspoken accord, and enter a little way in the alley. Edge Nain in front, Ras in the rear, keeping a suspicious eye on the street they have left, in case this is an ambush. In the light shining from their neon-implants, which carries its own flickering darkness within it, they see the old man lying in the angle made by two vertical slabs of self-assembled stone. They see his stained and pitted skin, the blue auras at the corners of the eye, the tremble at the lips. Edge Nain, in a mostly failed attempt to increase his asset-slope, has sunk a sizeable sum into medical training in implant form. He recognizes the symptoms with an almost gleeful familiarity.

He says: “Hanley’s syndrome; ‘Azure Fever’. Late second stage.”

Kel: “So?”

“He needs food and warmth first. Then a course of treatment: antibiotics, targeted enzymatic flush. He’ll probably recover.”

Ras, from the rear: “And
we
pay, of course. How much?”

Edge Nain frowns, guesses: “About sixty thousand, more or less.”

Ras: “Sweet Jesu’s balls, Edge, sixty!”

The three dreamweavers look at one another in hesitation. Paying this much for the old man’s cure will dangerously deplete their balance. No matter how high your asset-slope, in Yerusalom, debt and death are more than just phonetically close. If at any moment you are unable to pay the baseline living fee, the city’s cybernetic bureaucracy will send a message through your asset-implant and terminate your abuse of the city’s precious resources. . . . They should let him lie in the alley, let his life extinguish itself; but they are committed now that they know of his plight.

The old man has opened his eyes, stares in confusion and fright at the trio. Edge Nain crouches down, lays his hand on the old man’s shoulder.

“It’s okay, Grandfather, my friends and I are going to take care of you. Can you stand up?”

The old man comes to his feet, wheezing and gasping, his legs trembling so badly Edge Nain has to hold him up. Thick saliva drips down from the man’s mouth, blue-tinted. Some say that this disease, as with others that have begun to haunt humankind in recent years, comes from the Eldred, that it is one mark, perhaps the most telling, of their foulness. Others object that the biochemistries of the two species are so mutually alien it is ridiculous to suggest a cross-species illness. The first then reply that the Eldred could very well have hatched human-specific viruses in their ships’ laboratories, and the conversation thereafter degenerates into a zero-sum match of paranoia versus denial.

The three dreamweavers lead the old man out of the alley, into Faro Street.

Kel: “What’s your name, heh?”

The old man: “Harold.” The name dates him more than anything else about him.

At a public terminal node, Edge Nain checks Harold’s asset balance. It hovers precariously in the positive, with a clear downward slope. Like so many others, he sought refuge in the alleyways, stretching his assets and thus his lifespan, but also condemning himself ultimately. Edge Nain transfers a little of his assets to Harold’s account and nods as the figures alter.

Harold: “Sweet Jesu bless you, young sir, you’re too kind. . . .”

Ras: “Yeah, yeah. Listen, Grandpa, we’ll take you with us to a place where you can get something to eat.” He checks the timepiece embedded in his wrist, inked digits blinking beneath the skin. “We don’t have time to take him to a hospital, right now. . . .”

Kel objects: “But we can’t just make him wait for us. That’s just as bad, isn’t it?”

Ras: “Brothers, the performance starts in less than forty-five minutes. We have just enough time to get Harold to the nearest dispensary. Or else we can kiss that competition goodbye.”

Edge Nain speaks in an imperative tone: “No. We take him to a full hospital, and now. If we hurry, we can make it in time. Sweet Jesu sees what we do, and He will make sure we get what we deserve.”

Ras growls in protest; his faith clearly is not as trusting as Edge Nain’s. But he yields to his friend’s authority, and the four of them set off. Kel summons a red-class taxicab—why quibble over a few tens of units when they’re about to burn tens of thousands? They pile in, request to be taken to the nearest full-service hospital. The self-piloting vehicle weaves its way among the brightly lit streets.

They are isolated in the cab; the three dreamweavers have silenced their soundsuits, extinguished their neon-implants. The outside sounds are muffled to a chaotic background percussion track, the bright lights filtered by the polarized windows. They travel so swiftly and in such a complicated course the brain balks at the idea that the streets and buildings are fixed; so much easier to assume this vehicle is the unmoving centre of all things, while the brightly lit outside swirls and jitters by. There comes upon Kel—youngest of the trio, born long after the Eldred had landed—a familiar feeling: that all of Yerusalom is a stage set, that the Eldred have recruited humanity for some absurdist play of theirs, incomprehensible to human minds. He has a vision of himself as a Pierrot wandering through a maze of streets, questing in vain for his Columbine, who lies all tangled up in her strings within some prodigious attic, beyond a door it costs a lifetime’s earnings even to open a crack. . . . Not a bad image, that; should they use it in their next dream? He will at least suggest it—but right now he should be concerned only with the dream they are going to perform when they reach the Proxima Theater. Assuming they do manage to get there in time for the competition. Seated at his left, Harold stares ahead blindly, weeping pale-blue tears.