Bad Cow

by Andrew Hindle

  “Humans,” the Destarion said bleakly, “simply cannot be depended upon to run a world alone. They lack the capacity to care about anything for long enough. Their pathological self-interest and short lifespans interferes catastrophically with long-term administration. The next generation doesn’t matter. Every new cycle of leadership tears down the previous one’s work and starts again, and on such ludicrously short timescales there can be no progress. They can’t build up momentum. Every few years they reset. This is why humans have to be guided by Molren, or Elves, anything with a lifespan of centuries or millennia. That’s why the guidance of the Disciples and the Angels is so important, and that’s why it’s falling apart now.

  “I am close to coordinating the recovery of the Disciples. I think I will be able to affect a full recovery in the next two human lifespans.”

  Moskin and Blacknettle continued to stare at each other, as they often did when the Elevator made her declarations.

  “That is … amazingly good news,” Moskin stammered.

  “Less fortunately,” the Destarion said, implacable, “the planet will not last another two human lifespans. Not even two grotesquely foreshortened ones. It may already be too late, but humans are adaptive and resilient for all their flaws. And their self-interest can level mountains. They recovered from the relegation of their world into this star system, with a vengeance. It is possible that they can turn back from the precipice they are charging towards.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “Then I imagine the last piece of the exiled realms will die,” the Destarion said carelessly. “With no more humans to reincarnate into, the Disciples will be cut adrift. Perhaps the Ghååla will let them rot in here for a few more millennia, drifting like ghosts amidst the ruins of their dominion with only tattered Angels and mad, shadow-blighted Demons for company. Then, most likely, Limbo will relent and fold the scoured flatworlds back out below Heaven. The Disciples will be permitted to kneel before God and take on new forms. Rebuilding will begin. Life will go on, for them. They are Firstmades.”

  “What about the entity apparently trapped with the revered Disciples?” Moskin asked. “That the Archangelic court referred to?”

  “I have found no evidence of it,” the Destarion said, “and I would not have expected to. That does not mean it isn’t in here, but at present it doesn’t seem to be a significant variable.”

  “I hope,” Moskin said, “that you have found a way to buy us the time required to restore the Disciples to useful condition. Because sitting back and watching the deathlights dwindle away is not how I imagined spending my autumn years.”

  The Elevator chuckled warmly. “You have been fortunate in your allies, Bayn Taro,” she said.

  “I rather like him,” Bayn replied, while Blacknettle smiled.

  “Yes, I have a delaying tactic,” the Destarion said. “It will stop the human race in its tracks for a short time, and force them to re-evaluate their viral consumption and toxic apathy. A wake-up call, if you like.”

  “It sounds ideal,” Moskin said cautiously.

  “It will also serve another purpose,” the Elevator went on. “In order to do this, I will need to manipulate the Disciples’ souls – not directly, but using what connection I have thus far managed to forge. Like your initial interception of the Second Disciple, this is likely to destroy the bodies of the current incarnations, or at least indirectly lead to it.”

  “All three of them?” Moskin whispered.

  “If I can calibrate to influence all three of them using this method, I will,” the Destarion said. “It will greatly accelerate our timetable and simplify things. If all three Disciples lose their current human bodies, you see, we can encourage them to reincarnate into a more cohesive unit. The three Disciples reincarnating together, in approximately the same time and place, will make them more likely to recognise one another, feed off one another, spur one another to wakefulness.”

  “The stories always tell of the Pinians doing their greatest work when they are united,” Moskin said.

  The Destarion gave a gentle snort. “They also caused the greatest trouble when united,” she said, “but it is the best we can hope for. This is our last hope for sustaining the exile as anything other than a large-scale mystical execution.”

  “I understand,” Moskin said.

  “It may also be worth pointing out, although perhaps it ought to be obvious by now,” the Destarion went on, “that the Disciples’ guises aren’t going to be the only humans to die as a result of this. I can promise considerable accuracy, so these will be far from accidental collateral fatalities … indeed, they are vital.”

  Moskin frowned. “We have previously debated the value of a large-scale reduction in population…”

  “No,” the Destarion said, “to perform a cull would cause untenable damage to an already-overburdened biosphere. What I propose is a series of scalpel incisions, firebreaks … but an event that even a species as self-centred and oblivious as the human race will be unable to ignore.”

  “If you’re certain this is our best hope, or even our only hope,” Moskin said, “I trust in the fact that you have tactical abilities far beyond my own. What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to help the Disciples atone for their neglect,” the Godfang said.

  PART THREE: THE MODEL, THE MECHANIC

  AND THE MURDERER

  - - - North of the river - - -

  - - - Bad Cow - - -

  - - - Osrai - - -

  BIBBIDI-BOBBIDI-BOO

  Ariel entered the bar the way she entered any room, which was approximately the way a fairy godmother entered a narrative. She was suddenly there, and everyone’s personal universes subtly shifted to allow for the fact that she must have always existed even if they hadn’t been aware of it before. One was required to subconsciously acknowledge that something powerful and sort of unfair had just changed the rules by which one lived. It changed people’s lives so they would never be the same again and yet nobody minded because bibbidi-bobbidi-boo.

  People who’d heard of Ariel tended to be polarised between those who hated her on general principle because of the very concept of fashion models43 and nobility,44 and those who had seen and heard her actually talk. Those people loved her, no matter how staunchly opposed they were to the fashion game, the shallowness and objectification, the unrealistic body image reinforcement and the physical and psychological unhealthiness of the whole thing. Because once you’d actually seen Ariel, heard her – talking, for example, about the fashion game, the shallowness and objectification, the unrealistic body image reinforcement and the physical and psychological unhealthiness of the whole thing – it was over. You couldn’t bear witness to her for more than a few seconds and go on hating her.

  It was glamour, in the oldest sense of the word.

  She was physically attractive, of course, in the fashion of her time – a fashion, in fact, that she had helped to define and to impose on popular culture – but not in any particularly freakish or unjust way. Indeed, by the weird modern standards of her catwalk buddies she was rather plain, and entirely healthy and well-adjusted. It was this very refreshing divergence from the unhealthy norm that had assisted in propelling her to the heady pinnacle of the sociocultural pyramid.

  And there, with due acknowledgement of what had historically happened to humans at the top of pyramids, she had stayed.

  She was a former athlete, having represented her country in the swimming pool before finishing high school, but it had really just been something to do. She just loved to swim. And it hadn’t turned her into one of those depressing hyper-toned Amazons you see in the magazines. The swimming, the running, the boats and cars and bikes and planes, it was all just a series of games and people loved her for playing them.

  Ariel called it the Great Celebrity Paradox. She wanted to give away the ludicrous amounts of money she got paid, all the vast wealth of her family and the investments and holdings that made more money in in
terest each year than a reasonable person could spend in a lifetime. She did give a huge amount of it away, both publicly and in private, but she would have been just as happy leaving herself with barely enough to pay the bills. And yet, if she did that, it would reduce her popularity. People would think she was holier-than-thou, preachy, smug. They would have accused her of sanctimonious poverty-porn, or some other distasteful social crime with a pithy name.

  And so instead she had a functioning, state-of-the-art replica of the Vasa built, named it the Werelemming, and the public adored it.

  She’d never been airbrushed, filtered or photo-edited in any publication. She’d never been surgically or cosmetically altered. It was part of her standard contract and in making it so she had reinvented a huge element of the concept of modelling. It was her two sisters who were the freakishly unrealistic traffic-stopping lookers of the family, but they stayed out of the public eye.

  One of them was sitting across the bar now, alone, bottle of scotch and tumbler in front of her and a cold, remote expression in her one visible eye. Ariel headed directly towards the table, and was intercepted by a polite but determined waiter.

  “Excuse me, ma’am, but I was…” he paused, and performed the usual pale-faced double-take. “Wait, are you–?”

  “Yep, hi,” Ariel said cheerfully, then leaned in and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial mutter. “Look, between you and me – she gave you a big tip to make sure everyone left her alone tonight, right?” the waiter looked uncomfortable. “I know you stand to lose the second half of the outlay if you mess up. I also know she will have said I might show up, and encouraged you to put up a good fight, and get a bribe out of me before eventually letting me sit down. How much did she say you’d be able to squeeze me for?”

  “Couple of hundred,” the waiter said, against the impetus of considerable awe.

  “Cheeky bastard,” Ariel said warmly, and swiped a pair of hundred markers onto his virtual tipping plate. “Here.”

  “I–”

  She gave him a friendly pat on the arm, sidestepped him, and approached the table.

  Ashley Vandemar, as previously mentioned, was beautiful. Like her sister, however, it was one of those characteristics that immediately became laughably insignificant once you got to know her – not that that was easy to do. It was just a reality of her existence. It was a physical attribute that was somehow enhanced, rather than diminished, by the vivid scar running from her clouded-but-functional right eye to the corner of her mouth. She’d had the scar all her life, in fact, but it had been little more than a strange seam in her face and a single missing tooth until extremists had done their work on her at the age of fourteen.

  Ariel reflected – and was surprised as always by the fact – that almost ten years had passed since that day in the ambassadorial compound.

  She slipped into the seat opposite her sister. “That was the last of my cash,” she said, “for real. I got dragged out to that dumb expo with Roon this afternoon and she got me to buy a whole bunch of engine parts. I think she’s building a clockwork army. You’ll be out of a job when she gets them all wound up,” she smiled winsomely. “Have you finished brooding yet?”

  Ash tilted her head, hiding her damaged eye still more thoroughly behind her dark hair and examining the far-from-empty bottle. Where Ariel had warmth and affability, Ash had grimness. And then some more grimness. She also had a dark sense of humour and a penchant for smartarsery and practical jokes, but none of that was on display tonight. Tonight, it was grim all the way down. “Obviously not.”

  “Good, I was worried I might have missed it.”

  Ash swirled her glass. The ice clinked. She was halfway through the scotch, and her cubes had barely lost their corners. Ash’s ice never melted – not as fast as anyone else’s, anyway – until she was done with her drink. Whenever anyone mentioned this, she chuckled and pointed out how slowly everyone else drank.

  “Nope,” she concluded.

  “How many did you kill this time?”

  “Thirty,” Ash teetered a hand back and forth, “forty million.”

  “Uh huh. And subtract the insultingly self-absorbed histrionics–”

  “Gosh, those are big words.”

  “–carry the angst–”

  “Isn’t there a pair of undies somewhere that need you to lounge around in them?”

  “How many did you personally execute?” Ariel demanded.

  “Nineteen.”

  “Nineteen. And were they all bad guys?”

  “That’s a completely meaningless–”

  “To you it’s meaningless. To the average person, there are good guys and bad guys and did you kill any good guys?”

  “No, but–”

  “Right, because ‘no, but’ sentences are worth listening to and don’t make you sound whiney at all. Good job. It was a human trafficking ring, that’s what you said before you shipped out.”

  “If the government keeps on running covert ops in Southeast Asia–”

  “–sooner or later there’s going to be consequences and the nations will unite and the big powers of the ASEAN45 and the Floods won’t come to help us no matter what loyal little lapdogs we’ve been forever and no matter how much sweet, sweet uranium we have in our national parks, yeah, you’ve said all that before a few times. Tell it to the people whose families you saved from just about the most horrible thing human beings can do to each other,” Ariel shook her head. “And you’re sitting here feeling sorry for yourself.”

  “I’m not–”

  “Oh please. I’m just surprised you haven’t got their jukebox playing My Vainglorious Darlin’ on a loop.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Shut me up.”

  Ash’s hand tightened momentarily on the tumbler, then relaxed again. “For every mission I accept on behalf of my team, there are twenty we turn down that still get–”

  “The Übersharts of the planet Fucknuts eat their own babies,” Ariel said. “You gonna take the blame for them too?”

  Teeth gleamed as the right side of Ash’s mouth lifted in a grin. They were top-shelf, so you’d never be able to tell the lateral incisor, canine and first bicuspid were all false. The acid-dipped shard of glass that had burned her face had also tightened the gum away from that part of her mouth, and the teeth on either side of the already-false canine had simply fallen out. “Can’t do that,” she said. The darkness melted away, just like that. Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo. “They’re good eatin’.”

  GETTING HOME BY THURSDAY

  Ash insisted on finishing the bottle before they left the bar. It was practically a tradition. Ariel drove her back to Tumblehedge in the brilliant turquoise Margliotta she’d nicknamed ‘Thursday’ because for the first couple of months she’d owned it she’d seemed to drive it only on Thursdays even though, as it happened, that night was Tuesday night or, more accurately, Wednesday morning.

  “I wish you wouldn’t smoke those,” she said, opening her window a crack and the sun-roof all the way as Ash lit up a cigar.

  “If you ever had a car long enough to lose its new-car smell,” Ash said, letting the draft blow out the match before tossing the stick out through the sun-roof, “I wouldn’t need to take such drastic measures,” she puffed cheerfully. “Besides, you always said you liked the smell of smoke in the upholstery.”

  “They’ll kill you.”

  Ash chuckled. “That’ll be an interesting day.”

  They’d talked – or Ariel had talked, while Ash had sipped and delivered occasional one-line responses – for some hours. Ash hadn’t cried. She hadn’t cried at the bottom of a bottle of scotch since she was nineteen. And after that, there was no more talk of the operation. It was finished, relegated to the past. Not forgotten, but done with, moved into that deep dark vault with every other act of silently-government-sanctioned butchery Ashley St.Claire Vandemar had committed since shortly before her fifteenth birthday.

  Tumblehedge had originally been called Tambleigh Heath, b
ut Roon had renamed it when the three sisters had moved back into the huge edifice under the care and guardianship of their Aunt Agñasta and the inimitable family butler, Jarvis.46 Damaged, frightened and alone, the girls had returned from abroad by way of hospitals, child psychiatrists and intelligence agencies, and had huddled in the vast, stately family home like … well, like nothing quite so much as what they were: three lost orphans forced to bear witness to the destruction of their family, their security, their very lives. Bear witness to it, and contribute to it.

  Roon rarely spoke, so when she explained the funny dream she’d had about a lonesome God and His unassuming home in the countryside which hid a multitude of dreadful secrets – an unassuming home that He apparently called Tumblehedge – the sisters adopted it immediately and unquestioningly. It seemed somehow provident, a perfect summary of the house and everything within its walls, a message from the deep psyche or perhaps somewhere even deeper, wilder, and more mysterious.

  “Well,” Ariel said, pulling up in the wide gravel driveway, “just remember to take the butt with you. Bin it, or eat it, or do whatever you do, but I don’t want to find it in my car, and if Aunt Agñasta finds it on the drive…”

  “Why are we stopping here?” Ash looked out the window. “What’s wrong with the garage?”

  “I wasn’t kidding about Roon and that expo,” Ariel said. “She came back with trailer-loads of junk, and she’s expanded her workshop into another garage. There’s no room for Thursday. I actually had to move a bunch of the other cars and things out of there. I think anything left in there was going to be considered fair game for her to start dismantling. And melting down,” she added for emphasis. “She’s got the forge fired up and everything.”

  “Fair enough,” Ash shrugged, and opened the door. “You have too many toys anyway. It’s healthy to have someone like Roon around to thin out their numbers,” she paused, looking back at her sister. “Is it … worse than usual?”