Bad Cow

by Andrew Hindle

  “I assume there’s more you need to show us,” Ash said slowly.

  “Little bit,” Gabriel said, a look of such incredible blandness on his creased face that Ariel had to suppress a shudder. “And you’re young, so there’s no immediate urgency or risk of me losing track of you – Ash’s military hijinks notwithstanding,” he went on.

  “I think I’m contractually obligated to object to you calling them hijinks,” Ash said, while Ariel spared a moment to be silently grateful Gabriel hadn’t turned up a couple of days ago. Ash normally managed to relegate her mission darkness to the vaults on her first raw, brutal night home, but the lingering shreds often flapped across her eyes for a day or two after the hangover wore off.

  “Sorry,” Gabriel said. “But by all means, hold onto your scepticism and wait for more information. I’m glad you’ve listened to even this much. And if there’s one thing this exile has taught me, it’s patience,” he hooked his right hand up over his head and scratched his tiny left ear. “Also groading,” he added reflectively.

  All three sisters looked at Aunt Agñasta.

  “I honestly have no idea,” Aunt Agñasta said, and Ariel didn’t need Ash’s professional experience to know she was lying. It wasn’t something sexual, though, because she would have reacted differently to the Archangel Gabriel admitting to knowledge of that.

  Fortunately for Aunt Agñasta, Jarvis chose that moment to groan and raise a hand to his head.

  “Goodness me,” he said. Roon helped him sit up, hefting him easily into a reclining position on the arm of the couch. “What happened?”

  “Four generations of enriched metal and recombinant plastic fibre, that’s what happened,” Gabriel growled, and looked at Aunt Agñasta. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I am fine,” she said in a firm voice. Ariel reflected fondly that even if Aunt Agñasta had passed out, she would have remained sitting-up and eyes-open rather than show it. May have even uttered a few sentences to throw everybody off.

  “I should make a start on clearing away the dishes,” Jarvis said, struggling to rise.

  “Silas,” Aunt Agñasta snapped.

  “I won’t take any more of your time,” Gabriel said, and Jarvis stared as the Archangel lurched to his feet. “For now, at least. I’ll be in touch, but for now … it’s been a while since I was here, and I’ve got some catching up to do before I turn in.”

  “Where are you staying?” Ariel asked.

  Gabriel shook his head. “Not really sure yet,” he replied. “Most of the places I knew are gone. Wadjemup’s underwater, which doesn’t make for comfortable sitting. I’ll probably fly back out to the eastern sprawl and rest up in one of the new multi-doms, but I’d rather not say which one precisely. Even if I knew, I wouldn’t want to risk…” he saw their politely puzzled expressions, and chuckled. “I need to be on holy ground by daybreak,” he explained. “I know it sounds stupid, but…”

  “There’s holy ground here,” Ariel said, once again not really giving much thought to the sense of what the creature was saying.

  “That’s true,” Ash said. “The south wing was converted out of a church in–”

  Gabriel was shaking his shaggy head.

  “St Mary of the Cross Catholic Church,” he said, “built on top of an older church, St. Cecilia’s I believe,” he glanced at Aunt Agñasta, who nodded. “Unfortunately, its holiness was stripped away in a minor Demonic incursion event in 1990.”

  “1990?” Ash echoed sceptically.

  “Afraid so.”

  “Demonic incursion?” Ariel said, since she felt the date was more or less immaterial.

  “Afraid so,” Gabriel repeated.

  “Another long story?” Aunt Agñasta guessed.

  “Afraid so,” Gabriel grinned.

  “If I might impose upon someone to please explain what the blazes is going on,” Jarvis said plaintively.

  “Later,” Gabriel said, stumping towards the entrance. “At least now that you’ve been a little bit desensitised, you should be okay in future. I do apologise for that, can’t be helped. I’ll do my best to keep my distance from now on, just in case your muirosia makes you susceptible to a relapse,” he let the sisters and Aunt Agñasta see him to the door. “I’ll come back early next week,” he said. “If you want to catch me before that, we can do it in public.”

  “Public?” Ariel asked, “are you serious?”

  “I’m okay in public places, if I need to be,” Gabriel said. “I wouldn’t send the whole pub into a mass faint, if that’s what you’re worried about. The more human minds are around to share the load … it seems to help. I think the more of you there are, the easier a time you have convincing yourselves things are normal.”

  “And this is an insight you’ve gained after how many seconds watching humanity?” Ariel asked.

  “Ariel,” Aunt Agñasta scolded.

  “Anyway, I was actually more interested in the idea of you in a pub,” Ariel went on.

  “I do pubs,” Gabriel replied in tones of mildly injured dignity. “You know, there was a nice one near here. Well, I say near…” he tipped a hand back and forth uncertainly. “I didn’t really go there when I had a chance, either, but I heard good things and always meant to go – it was a bit of a haunt for one of the other Angels and his friends, you see.”

  “An Angel and his friends used to drink in a pub around here?” Ariel said, and grinned at Ash. “Oh, we’ve got to go.”

  “It was called the Bad Cow,” Gabriel reminisced.

  “Oh,” Ariel blinked. “Which one?”

  “There’s … three, I think, in Perth,” Ash supplied. “A couple in the MACD,55 and one in Brisbane.”

  “The one in Fremantle,” Gabriel said.

  “You mean the Swan reclamation zone?” Ariel frowned. “The Freo Archipelago?”

  Gabriel nodded. “That’s where the original one was,” he said, “only it wasn’t underwater in the Twentieth Century,” he sighed heavily. “Lots of places weren’t underwater back then.”

  “I don’t think there’s a Bad Cow in the Arc’,” Ariel said, frowning. “But I haven’t been south of the river in ages. Not for drinkin’,” she smiled at Aunt Agñasta, who looked back at her levelly. “There aren’t really any pubs or clubs down there.”

  “Can’t say I’m sorry the clubs have gone,” Gabriel grunted. “Still … shall we say one of the others, then?”

  “Williams Street,” Ariel said. “I think it’s the main one, and I’ve been there a couple of times at least.”

  “Williams Street,” Gabriel said. They stepped outside. “I’ll find it. If we don’t meet there, I’ll drop back here on Monday or Tuesday.”

  “Aren’t you going to tell us not to talk about this?” Ariel asked as the Archangel rustled his wings. Everybody, regardless of age and subspecies, stopped and gave her identical incredulous looks. “Oh. Right.”

  Gabriel chuckled, then spread his wings…

  And plunged into the sky with a dry-underbrush rattle and a crump of collapsing air. A second later, the darkness swallowed him.

  “Recoilless vertical lift and nominal air displacement,” Ash said admiringly. “And that acceleration…”

  “Goodness sake,” Ariel said fondly. “Give it a…” she looked across at Roon and found that both of her sisters were staring speculatively up at the single-person engineless aircraft they’d just seen taking off from their front step. She looked wryly at Aunt Agñasta.

  “Incorrigible,” Aunt Agñasta said.

  Ash continued looking out into the darkness, her eyes narrowing. She often wore an eye-patch over her clouded right eye, particularly when she was on missions and – Ariel suspected – wanted to add to her already-legendary image. The eye worked, but she didn’t suffer any loss of efficiency for the handicap when she covered it. Ariel had never even seen her sister fumble due to the loss of depth perception she must suffer as a result of the patch.

  Tonight, though, she was bare-eyed. I
t made her look of clinical suspicion all the more apparent.

  “Hm,” Ash said.

  “What is it?” Ariel asked, although she was fairly sure she already knew.

  “There’s something he’s not telling us,” Ash said, then turned to meet her sister’s stare with a half-smile. “Aside from the obvious mountain of explanations about our identities, our past, and this whole ‘urverse’ thing.”

  “Obviously aside from that,” Ariel said lightly.

  Ash’s smile faded. “There’s something specific he’s not telling us,” she said, “and it’s not a gap in the information he’s started feeding us. That’s mostly gaps. No, there’s something missing from the underside of all of it.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  Ash’s scowl deepened. “Usually,” she said slowly, “when I get this sense at a preliminary briefing, it’s because I’m about to be sent on a mission by the bad guys.”

  THE SATURDAY AFTER AN ARCHANGELIC VISITATION

  The next day was a long, strange one. Roon had never really seen the point of Saturdays, since she was part of a family that traditionally eschewed the normal working week in favour of working almost constantly, or at random times according to requirements. If she had a weekend rhythm, it was solely a result of the assorted companies with which she cooperated having weekend rhythms.

  Normal people worked for five days and then stopped for two. Roon was never sure whether she pitied or envied them, but it certainly helped to keep the calendar from surprising you. In theory, anyway.

  Of course, that wasn’t all that made this Saturday strange. This Saturday was the first Saturday after Roon and her sisters had learned from the Archangel Gabriel that they were the reincarnations of three immortal beings with element-powers, and that – oh yes, the Archangel Gabriel seemed to really exist.

  “What gets me the most,” Ash said after they’d all spent a fitful rest-of-the-night with their thoughts and Jarvis was preparing breakfast and exchanging polite snipes with Aunt Agñasta, “is that the Intervangelists were right about the whole Caveman Angels thing,” she shook her head. “Maybe they didn’t worship in the precise way the Intervangies say they did, but the pseudoscience certainly checks out.”

  “What gets me the most is that Gabriel seemed to be saying we weren’t always girls,” Ariel said with fraudulent indignation. “That’s just not right.”

  “I would suggest it actually makes perfect sense, in order to live lives of consequence and prosperity at little effort through at least the past two or three thousand years of human society, Ms. Vandemar,” Jarvis noted, bringing out a tray of food and a pot of coffee, “as little as we may like to think about that.”

  “He’s right,” Ash said. “We couldn’t always have been scarified, body-painted Goddess-Mother temple priestesses chanting on top of piles of human skulls.”

  “Not in Elizabethan England, certainly,” Jarvis added.

  “I bet I could have,” Ariel declared.

  They all paused to enjoy this particular mental image.

  “We should make a church for him,” Aunt Agñasta said, emerging from the kitchen.

  “We should what?” Ash blinked.

  “Would it have a mountain of human skulls?” Ariel insisted.

  Aunt Agñasta ignored her. “The Archangel Gabriel mentioned that our property’s church, and the rest of the city’s holy ground was … fouled by Demons in the Twentieth Century,” she said, “so he cannot use them.”

  “Right,” Ash agreed.

  “The Twentieth Century,” Ariel marvelled. “Is it just me, or does that seem so much longer ago now that it’s the Twenty-Third Century? I wonder how long it takes to get used to saying Twenty-Third instead of Twenty-Second…”

  “How often do you even say which century it is?” Ash asked, then noticed Roon’s patiently meaningful look. “Oh,” she said, “right. I forgot you spent most of last year insisting that everybody keep calling it the Twenty-Second Century still.”

  “Two-two-hundred was the last year of the Twenty-Second Century,” Ariel insisted. “It ended at twenty-two. You don’t say a baby is a year old a week after it’s born. It’s only one after one year–”

  “See, the rest of us ignorami have a year’s head-start on you,” Ash grinned.

  “Ignoramuses,” Ariel countered. “Ignorami is a hypercorrection.”

  “Golly, those are big words.”

  Aunt Agñasta sat down and moved her empty coffee cup just firmly enough to make a debate-ending tap. “But Gabriel also said that he was going to be staying in one of the new multi-denominational churches in the eastern sprawl,” she went on serenely, “which were all built in the Twenty-First and early Twenty-Second Centuries. Which implies, to me, that after this Demonic incident rendered the existing churches uninhabitable, the newly-built churches were clean.”

  “You think we could consecrate a brand new church somewhere else on the property?” Ash said, returning to her look of surprise.

  “Ooh, Roon’s cultist boyfriend could bless it for us,” Ariel said enthusiastically.

  Roon rolled her eyes in amusement. This was old and familiar ground. Yes, she was more-than-professionally involved with Harlon Berkenshaw, twenty-nine-year-old scion of the vast and shadowy Synfoss Corporation. And yes, the Berkenshaws were a family – a dynasty – with a … questionable cultural background. Many didn’t understand the relationship between Roon and Harlon, especially considering that Synfoss was a conglomerate based solely around the production and distribution of an artificial alternative to the coal and oil once so vital in powering the industrial revolution – the industrial revolution, in fact, that had just been petering out the last time Gabriel had visited Perth. It was not one of the big companies for which Roon was contractually obligated to work. On the contrary, it was widely considered to be the worst possible solution to Earth’s energy crisis, and the fact that it had been flourishing and belching poison into the biosphere for centuries following this conclusion only made it more embarrassing.

  Still, in the fallout and confusion of the Atonement Harlon Berkenshaw had inherited the dynasty and the company, had turned his back on the strange faith of his forefathers, and since reaching adulthood had been doing his best to limit the damage Synfoss was doing to an already-irreparable world. Perhaps, with Roon’s help and the cooperation of the corporations she represented, the world could be repaired. Maybe if they pulled that off, Roon’s sisters would actually start to trust Harlon.

  Even before the arrival of the Archangel Gabriel at Tumblehedge’s door, Roon had never been afraid to think big. Quite honestly, her mind needed the space.

  “I believe I could prevail upon Cardinal Lursley to dedicate a construction for personal family use,” Aunt Agñasta said coolly. “There are already approvals and plans in the archives for such a job, after the conversion of St Mary of the Cross Catholic Church. I understand there was a special property tax exemption that we lost when the church was converted, but that exemption clause is still available in the event of…” she must have noticed the sisters’ amused expressions, because she drew to a dignified silence, shifted her cup once more, and grudgingly allowed Jarvis to pour her coffee. “Thank you, Silas,” she said, then addressed the table once more. “Regardless, the question is whether we ought to extend the Archangel Gabriel some form of hospitality, in allowing him a place to stay on this property rather than travel however far he needed to travel late last night or early this morning.”

  Ash glanced at Roon. Roon, feeling it was a reasonable thing to offer their exceptional guest, shrugged a shoulder and nodded. Ash nodded in turn.

  “Alright,” Ariel said, also sharing the exchange, “it seems fair enough. And it is the Archangel Gabriel, after all. Offering him a place to stay is probably the least we can do. And … I mean, if it’s going to save us property tax…”

  “Mm,” Ash agreed, sipping her own coffee deliberately. “Maybe we could even hire it out to weddings and th
ings in between Gabriel’s visits, just to help make ends meet.”

  “I have been feeling the pinch lately,” Ariel remarked.

  Aunt Agñasta sighed inaudibly.

  “It really depends how much of this property has been fouled,” Ash went on in a more serious tone, “and what that even means. And whether it’s enough to just build a new building and call it a church, and bless it. For that matter, couldn’t we build him a little bungalow with a home cinema, and consecrate that?”

  “And has he really been here twenty-two centuries without getting somebody to do that for him?” Ariel added.

  “Home cinema was rudimentary at best before the Nineteenth Century, Ms. Vandemar,” Jarvis noted as he swept around the table with breakfast. Ariel made a face at him. “Come to think of it, a village parish with regular sermons might have been the closest available equivalent.”

  “Passing off a bungalow and home cinema as a chapel might be a challenge,” Aunt Agñasta noted discerningly. “It may not satisfy the requirements for – why am I even concerned? Of course it will be fine if Ariel does it.”

  “Everything’s fine when Ariel does it,” Ash concurred without rancor. “We really should swap jobs some time.”

  “That’s what Jérôme56 keeps saying,” Ariel complained. “I think he has a thing for women in uniform.”

  There was no real question of waiting for Gabriel to show back up at Tumblehedge next week and share more information with them. All three of the Vandemar sisters, as well as Aunt Agñasta and Jarvis, were of one mind about that. They didn’t want to wait, and none of them wanted to make the Archangel Gabriel come back for them. This wasn’t the kind of negotiation that would gain them any sort of advantage or bonus for playing coy.

  Each of them went about acting on this decision in their own ways, though.

  Ariel went looking for the Bad Cows in Perth. There were actually four, she told them after some investigation – five if you included the brite-snuff wholesalers’ market that was the Nite Cow nightclub in Old Northbridge. Ever the party girl, at least as far as public opinion was concerned, she conscientiously checked out each place as thoroughly as possible through the virtuals.