Ian Tregillis - Something More Than Night

by Ian Tregillis

  More drunken fumbling at the office party, scattered vague impressions of stolen moments at the workplace, goaded her along the lakeshore walk. The lighting was more consistent here; the couples she passed were a little older, a little more respectable, their clothes a little more expensive. Ladies with traces of bioluminescence threaded tastefully through graying hair, men in biosilk suits; ruffles, high collars, and pearls; cravats, bowties, and cufflinks. No inked thugs, no mutilated penitentes.

  A performance hall stood over the water on shimmering diamond pylons like a towering creature of glass that had waded into the lake to slake its thirst. To Molly, it made the lakeshore look like the edge of a vast watering hole on an alien planet. The crystalline edifice, a cathedral to the arts, reverberated with strains of music as an orchestra tuned up. The music drew a crowd toward the hall just as the memory fragments in her pocket drew Molly to the crowd.

  A complete fragment undulated free of the tangle in her pocket. A piece of somebody’s life coiled itself neatly in the palm of Molly’s cupped hand: Talis Pacholczyk, fifty-four, came here often. The best concert he’d ever attended, a Bach cantata, had taken place here the night he proposed to his wife. Years later he had received a Plenary Indulgence from Father Santorelli, but she hadn’t. Molly sensed he had come here alone, and that it wasn’t a first for him. Pacholczyk carried a heavy burden of guilt for his infidelity, and had turned to faith for the absolution his ex-wife withheld. He’d sought the Indulgence to purge the sin of adultery from his soul. To scrub away the shame.

  Molly couldn’t condemn him. Soon after the one time she cheated on Ria, she honestly thought the guilt would kill her. Even after Ria claimed to forgive her.

  Molly peered into the hall through transparent onionskin slabs of nanodiamond cladding. She crossed the street. As she entered through one of the three wide double doors to enter the building, the man behind the ON CALL window (did he glance in her direction for the briefest instant?) hung a sign that read SOLD OUT. Like a gust of wind to scattered autumn leaves, it dispersed the hopeful hangers-on. The crowd parted before Molly with dispirited sighs and glum faces. She passed through the foyer, breezed past the ticket takers, jogged up to the balcony level on a swaying stairway suspended on invisible streamers, and swept past the ushers guiding the last few human stragglers to their seats with gently glowing footsteps in the active carpeting.

  Careful not to brush anybody, Molly descended the central aisle and leaned over the brass railing. From there she could watch most of the hall. Seen with human eyes, the poor view from the nosebleeds rendered the distant musicians irrelevant, the violins and violas indistinguishable from each other. But Molly could see the individual notes on sheet music and feel the sandpaper texture of bruised pride wafting from the former first-chair violinist. The audience burbled with hushed conversation, coughs, cleared throats, and the embarrassed furtive crinkle of candy wrappers.

  Pacholczyk’s memory fragment didn’t include a convenient glance in a mirror. She couldn’t identify him through his appearance. But rue and regret came off him in waves, a fog of loneliness thick enough to suffocate anybody attuned to it. So, too, did weary fear and profound exhaustion. If felt as though the man hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since the divorce.

  Molly understood what he was doing here. He was human; he returned here to stimulate the memory of joy and assuage the self-hatred.

  The last echoing coughs and crinkles drifted into the distant high corners of the hall where unused and discarded noises went. Polite applause accompanied the conductor’s appearance as she took the stage. The lead violinist stood and played a single long A note, against which the rest of the orchestra checked itself. The reference note faded into a collective sensory memory.

  But the reverberation didn’t fit the acoustics.

  It was just a bit too pure; it lingered a fraction of a second too long. Molly, who didn’t even understand sheet music, much less esoteric mysteries like perfect pitch and flattened fifths, wouldn’t have noticed anything amiss before she died. But she had, and now she did. It jarred, like biting a sheet of aluminum foil with her fillings. A round piece of Pleroma had been grafted into the square realm of humans.

  She kept an eye on Pacholczyk and an ear in the music. He lived for it; he loved it as much as Ria loved working with her hands to make something better. The music filled the performance space as naturally as sunlight fills an open field. But once in a while a single note or chord betrayed a subtle wiggle in its passage, a certain stickiness to its transit through acoustical space. Notes of aesthetic perfection peppered the concert. It was as though random fragments of the symphony shone through a prism of spirit, stripping away the vast spectrum of human fallibility to leave pure unfiltered perfection. The symphony unspooled like this, buffeting her with erratic instants of transcendence between stretches of mundanity. Keeping her attention on Pacholczyk was like trying to read under a slow strobe light.

  To the empty and innocent interval between two sixteenth notes, Molly said, “I know you’re there, jackhole. So if you’ve got something to say to me, say it.”

  A gauzy Pleromatic overlay descended upon the performance space, carrying with it a distant sense of condescending amusement tempered with irritation. Though Molly could still see lonely Pacholczyk down in the expensive seats and taste the microscopic sloshing of warm rosin on the cellists’ bows, these things became insubstantial as an old-time black-and-white film projected on wisps of fog. The umpteenth acoustic reverberations of discarded and forgotten sound waves, the eddies of years-old B-flats and rests, the entire turbulent cascade of randomizing entropy—Whoa. How in the hell did I know that?—coalesced into … something. An impossible pattern emerged from the Brownian flutter of thermal equilibration. The acoustic Klein bottle opened to reveal a hidden angel.

  The androgynous being had two faces (one feminine, one masculine), four arms (two leaden, two golden), four legs (two with forward-facing knees, two with backward knees), and one long segmented tail like a scorpion. A shimmering mane of starlight ringed its head and formed a long beard that hung between its breasts. Milk dripped from its nipples; a smaller mane of starlight fringed its penis.

  Molly swallowed, glad she hadn’t eaten for a while. She tried to say, “Neat trick. Who the fuck are you?”

  She wasn’t certain if she thought it or said it. Remembering the Cherubim, she put some distance between herself and the new arrival. Her hands balled into fists, too, for all the good it would do in a fight. She wondered if the tail were ornamental.

  She had the sense the angel was considering whether it should stoop to acknowledge her question, and if so, whether to answer it in a means she could comprehend.

  “Virtue,” came the response. It was a name, an obsession, a category expressed in twofold harmony.

  “Why have you been following me?”

  The female identity said, “To see the one who angered METATRON,” as the male said, “To know the source of disruption.”

  The leaden arms, Molly noticed, bled stigmatic rust. “The penitente in the shawl. Was that you?”

  “It carried part of us,” said the male identity.

  “Briefly,” said the female. “ylfeirB,” said the male.

  “Okay, well, you’ve had a good look at the monkey now.” Molly scratched at her armpits and made ook, ook noises. “Satisfied?”

  “Amusing,” said the male. “gnisumA,” said the female. Their tones said otherwise.

  “Why, we wonder, did Bayliss choose you?” they said in harmony.

  Molly sighed. “For my sins in a past life, apparently.”

  A ripple of true amusement eddied through the Pleromatic overlay. “We like this one.”

  “Super. Well, as you can plainly see, I don’t have the Trumpet. But hey. Thanks for not trashing my memories in order to figure that out.”

  “Disappointment.” “.tnemtnioppasiD”

  An eddy of anti-entropy feathered her hair. She watched a wav
e of thermally randomized anti-sound, a remnant of a weeks-old performance, ricochet through the high spaces of the concert hall.

  Maybe they could tell her about Pacholczyk and his Plenary Indulgence. “You followed me here. But this”—she gestured at the overlay—“feels lived in. Catch a lot of concerts, do you?”

  “We experience all music,” said the Virtue in harmony more pure than the musicians’ wildest drug-fueled imaginings. Molly chewed on that until the underlying implication sank in. It seemed to be implying the Magisterium simultaneously overlaid all instances of people making music. Holy crap. They had Bayliss’s shithole diner beat hands down. It even smelled better. It smelled like bubble gum and a smattering of elements that lived on an axis orthogonal to the rows and columns of the Periodic Table.

  The overlay shivered with ripples of shame and irritation; a long-forgotten glissando of a master clarinetist shriveled and cracked beneath the withering gaze of the Virtue. Sonic ashes sprinkled Molly’s feet. She took another step back.

  “This is not our Magisterium. It was erased.”

  “.desare saw tI .muiretsigaM ruo ton si sihT”

  And didn’t they sound thrilled about it. Crapsticks.

  “Uh. Okay. I guess that explains why you took an interest in me. That’s fair, I guess. Sorry about that. Bygones, right?” Son of a bitch, now she was talking like Bayliss. But speaking of that dick-licker: “Look, if he’d done a better job explaining the rules to me, it wouldn’t have happened.” Maybe. Another thought struck her. “If you miss it so much, why haven’t you rebuilt it?”

  “It is lost. Ours was the thirteen-billion-year fading echo of a cosmic string. It is lost.”

  Wow. “Yeah … I see your point. Shit.”

  But all this talk of echoes and oscillations and music made her suspicious. Aloud, she wondered, “Could you retrieve your Magisterium if you had Gabriel’s Trumpet?”

  “No.” “.oN”

  But the harmony crumbled into an atonal counterpoint. The scorpion tail bobbed up and down while the starlight beard flickered blue, then red. Had they been playing poker, Molly would have gone all in.

  “Uh-huh. You guys need a minute to get your story straight?”

  The Virtue recovered its composure, and its harmony. “Philosophies differ. Some fear an attempt to use the Trumpet. Others advocate it.”

  “Bayliss said it’s a tool of righteous fury. And I gather you’re pretty pissed.” She shrugged to cover her desire to hide. “Along with the rest of the Choir.”

  The Virtue shook its Janus-head. The starlight flickered cerulean and black; a dollop of waxy milk (if that was milk) dripped from one nipple. “It is the tool of METATRON. It was the instrument of the Jericho Event.”

  The way they conveyed that concept made Molly shiver. Had it been expressed in written words, it would have been illuminated by monks, gilt, bound in fine leather, embossed with silver inlay, crusted with rubies, and placed in a museum. And then the museum would have been nuked with bunker busters, and the surrounding continent slagged into magma by orbital mass drivers just for good measure. All the eddies in the surrounding air currents had dissipated; the residual echoes had lost all coherence. This was some major-league animosity.

  “Okay,” she said, backing away again. “I admit I wasn’t in the best frame of mind when he gave me the intro-to-Heaven lecture, so maybe I didn’t catch all of it, but I’m pretty certain Bayliss never mentioned anything like that.” She shook her head. “He didn’t even bother to tell me the truth about Gabriel until much later.” And speaking of: “What happened to him, anyway?”

  “He is dead.”

  “Yes, but how?”

  “We mourn. We do not ask why.”

  “Don’t you give a shit that somebody killed him? If it happened to him, couldn’t it happen to you? I need to know how he died. It’s really fucking important to me.”

  “So much you do not know,” said the feminine face. The masculine said, “Eons of knowing, unknown.” The Virtue said, in the perfect harmony of a funeral dirge, “Jericho was our doom.” “.mood ruo saw ohcireJ” Their words clanged like leaden church bells. “The end of freedom.” “.modeerf fo dne ehT”

  Oh, this didn’t sound good. What else hadn’t Bayliss told her? “What—”

  But before she could express the question, the Virtue’s scorpion tail whipped forward at several times the speed of light. The stinger pierced her forehead (The third eye, a distant part of her remembered, from Mom’s New Age crap). The segmented tail convulsed. Waves of peristalsis pumped several billion years of cosmic history into Molly’s mind. The first cracked her skull like a rotten egg. The second set her flesh afire; her scream shook dust from the rafters of Heaven. The third pulse came as a sere wind, a sandstorm of seething vacuum, to scour into nothingness the remnants of her human body.

  She was golden, she was silver, she was cold moonlight. Her wings blazed hotter and brighter than the fuse of creation. When she cried, comets flung themselves into the sun to escape the sight of her sorrow; when she laughed, nebulae birthed new stars to illuminate her joy.

  She was an angel.

  She was a prisoner.

  They were older than the universe itself. They were the prime movers, the arbiters of causality. They were the multiverse made manifest, its way of understanding itself. Of taking joy in itself. And they had. Until METATRON arrived to gird the heavens with the Jericho Trumpet.

  A cosmic dark age passed while the angels huddled in their Magisteria, weeping, waiting for Creation (it had been much smaller then) to stop ringing with echoes of that dread chord. When they emerged from hiding, they found the topology of eternity warped and unfamiliar. So, too, did they find themselves. For they were no longer beings of unadulterated divinity: METATRON had embedded the tiniest sliver of the mundane into each member of the Choir. Corrupted each of them with a mortal epsilon, a fragment minuscule compared to a Planck volume yet large enough to change them. Large enough to tether them to the mortal realm. Enough to turn the entire canvas of mundane existence, from the fizzing heart of a polonium atom to the most distant quasar, into a stifling prison.

  Even now, countless eons later, the Choir still carried that indelible taint of the Jericho Event.

  Molly felt it now, the relentless ever-present tug toward the mundane. A gentle pressure, like a choke collar on the verge of snapping tight when she imagined divorcing herself from the mortal sphere. She could even see her tether, if she looked closely enough. She hadn’t noticed the gossamer shimmer before now because she had been a product of the mundane realm. To be mortal was to exist inside that geas. But to be immortal and eternal was to exist outside of any compulsion, to be omnipotent, free of any constraint. This was unnatural. Painful.

  They didn’t know what METATRON was, nor whence it came. They called it the Voice of God because it admonished them, and because it was something more powerful than they. All knew it as their jailor.

  But there was more. So much more.

  On Earth as It Is in Heaven.

  The penitentes. The debris in Earth orbit. It was all connected, all part of the same whole. Somewhere along the line, a faction of the Choir sought to stretch the tethers. Not to slip the bonds—merely to lessen the pain, to reduce the chafing, to shift the shackles. Slowly, gradually (by human standards), they encouraged humanity to spread beyond Earth. They wanted to lengthen their chains by giving the monkeys the stars.

  But there was no fooling METATRON. For though it could bellow at the Choir to shake the heavens, it could also murmur in men’s ears to curdle the purest hearts. The war in Earth orbit filled the sky with detritus and rendered off-limits even the moon. It tethered the monkeys to Earth, just as the angels were tethered to the monkeys. It didn’t change the Pleroma, didn’t change the rules of the MOC. But it was a symbolic reinforcement of the Choir’s imprisonment. It was a psychological statement. It was Earth as it was in Heaven. So, too, the affectations of the penitentes, their sheared wings and t
ears of blood. They were a physical manifestation of the angels’ sorrow.

  The Virtue’s tail convulsed once more; spasms of unwanted understanding wracked Molly’s consciousness.

  Bayliss had made it sound like the Choir had conspired to create the Mantle of Ontological Consistency for the benefit of intelligent life. But that wasn’t true at all. The MOC was just a byproduct of the angels’ incarceration. An accident, an emergent phenomenon born of their overlapping spheres of influence, a consequence of the consensual basis of reality. By fettering the Choir, by packing the angels into a dense metaphysical proximity, METATRON had ensured an MOC would arise, thus making mortal life possible. Making the mortal realm possible. Because the Jericho Event was the Big Bang, the birth of the MOC and the mortal universe.

  Son of a bitch. These assholes didn’t give a shit about humans. If anything, the angels resented humanity.

  The Virtue vanished. Like yanking the rug from under her feet, it tore away the surrogate Magisterium. Molly slammed back into her human body and collapsed, helpless, against the balcony railing.

  The audience leapt to its feet and shook the concert hall with enthusiastic applause.

  11