Bad Cow

by Andrew Hindle

  The chain was one of the oldest in the country, only a couple of decades younger than global monsters like MacDonald’s. It had been around for well over two hundred years – which explained why Gabriel had even known about it, really – and had gone through a lot of changes in ownership and style in the course of its long and speckled life.

  Now, of course, with the extinction of the cow in 2196 AD, it had taken on a new dark-nostalgia-fuelled vitality. The two most recent pub-restaurants had been opened in ‘98 and ‘99. Its new mascot, who danced around you in the virtuals and showed you items of interest from the menu and even poured redeem-for-real free drinks from its udders, was a chubby green cow with a thermometer in its mouth. Why anyone would want to drink a pint of lager from the udder of a terminally-plague-ridden cow was anyone’s guess. Ariel, closer than any of them to the world of marketing and trends, admitted to being baffled and slightly sickened.

  The Cow on Williams Street was the largest and, if you didn’t count the skanky Nite Cow, oldest establishment and remained very popular. If you wanted to eat there, you had to book several days in advance – several weeks if you wanted to do so on a weekend. Another of those strange weekend-rhythm things that Roon didn’t understand. Still, reservations were, to Ariel, things that happened to other people and they were fairly sure the Archangel Gabriel wouldn’t be too concerned with it either.

  Ash, in the meantime, identified all the churches in the eastern sprawl and began prioritising each one according to its likelihood of being the Archangel’s base of operations. How she could possibly estimate something like that, Roon had no idea. She supposed, based on the single head-spinning conversation they’d had with the strange old creature so far, that Ash was using some of her almost limitless military experience and instinct to determine relative distances, nearby services, defensibility, and a bunch of other things Roon hadn’t even thought of. And then assuming that Gabriel, thousands and thousands of years old, had acquired some measure of the same instincts and practices.

  Still, Ash didn’t go looking for Gabriel. Not immediately. Roon understood that she just needed to do something. Her sister was a bit like that. Come to think of it, they all were.

  Roon had her own quiet certainty where the Archangel would be spending his nights, and it wasn’t in any place that hadn’t been here the last time he’d been in Western Australia. A lonesome immortal, she felt in her bones, would seek familiarity and solace not in people, but in architecture. Not that gruff, no-nonsense Gabriel would ever describe it that way.

  And so, in between continuing her component-construction work in the carport, Roon did some research of her own. Aunt Agñasta helped, with an eye to the history of the Fremantle Archipelago.

  BALLYWISE

  The Fremantle Archipelago wasn’t really an archipelago so much as a series of reclaimed and reconstructed land, levees, and canals between the old port and inland residential blocks. The Swan reclamation zone residences had been planned as upscale and high-value housing for a new upper class that was supposed to rise in the Red Gold Rush of the reclamation’s new winery region. The vineyards had failed, however, adding a new desolation to the area in the form of salt-encrusted grapevine skeletons, and the residential boom had trailed off sadly in the aftermath.

  There were a few islands to give the Arc’ its name, but they were paved and interconnected so thoroughly that the line between close-set islands and canal-separated city blocks was unclear. The whole area was pretty utilitarian, grimy concrete in the massive industrial gothic style of the late Twenty-First Century, and a large swath of the residential-utopia-that-could-have-been was given over to Synfoss storage, shipping and decontamination facilities.

  There was a Bad Cow down in the Arc’, but it wasn’t part of the franchise for some reason and it was no longer called the Bad Cow – it was called Ballywise Tavern and it had no real theme; no menu or target clientele beyond the vague ‘whoever shows up’ that seemed to be the standing mission of the Swan reclamation zone; no virtual presence. There had been some disagreement between the reclamation committees and the original owners of the franchise, and when the old port city of Fremantle had drowned in the Indian Ocean, the original Bad Cow had drowned with it.

  Ballywise Tavern was what had crawled from the sodden, salty ashes.

  Jarvis, with a placid obliviousness to Aunt Agñasta’s disapproving glares, made sandwiches and tea for everybody at lunchtime, and discussion turned to which Bad Cow they should go to – the new one, the original one … or should they go looking for answers elsewhere altogether?

  The solution was obvious to Roon, but it took the others a while to get there. She was fairly sure that they’d arrive at the same conclusion eventually.

  “Split up?” Ash frowned when Ariel floated the idea. It was a considering frown, though, not a sign of imminent dismissal.

  “Why – are we thinking there’s any danger?” Ariel asked, then rolled her eyes when Ash looked at her steadily. “Well, obviously you’re always thinking it, because you’re you. But we’re not dealing with a military or corporate-civilian force here – we’re talking about a supernatural agency.”

  “Probably,” Ash stressed.

  Ariel rolled her eyes again. “Probably talking about a supernatural agency,” she amended. “Or maybe a civilian enemy who put together a Caveman Angel hoax and a cock-and-bull story about reincarnating immortals for some reason…”

  “I don’t think Gabriel is dangerous – not directly,” Ash said. “But I think that when he showed up, when he decided to show himself to us … he’s come to us now, after so many years – and that’s even before you consider the possibility that he’s been chasing us for lifetimes – for a reason. He’s pretending there’s no big rush to get us to accept this crazy story of his, and that may be true, but…”

  “But there’s probably so much more to it, it may as well be a lie,” Ariel said, looking at Roon. Roon nodded.

  “And when he found us, a clock started ticking,” Ash went on. “We may not need to accept the story, but we need to accept enough to understand the job he has for us – and start it. On some level, we need to be on board.”

  That evening, as the sun was setting over the sluggish waters of the reclamation and the ocean beyond, Roon took the ancient chute-trolley across the bridge complex and into the Arc’. Jarvis had wanted to drive her, but she’d ignored him. Alone, armed only with the portable defence system she’d designed using ‘accidentally’ misplaced pieces of otherwise illegal weaponry of Ash’s,57 she navigated the brine-and-algae stink of the canals and elevated streets until she reached Ballywise Tavern.

  It was dingy, autophosphorous neon signage pulsing nastily in time with the music within and any passing traffic or gust of wind without. Roon stepped inside to a blast of tin-smelling air-conditioning that didn’t so much mask the reek of the Arc’ as layer it in palate-sharpening veins that left one’s nose incapable of adjusting to and blocking out the smell. The music, coming from a wall-mounted boomcube framed in a jagged plaster of ostensibly biodegradable drinks labels, was heavy technowaltz of the worst kind. If the greasy-plastic-sheathed interface panel was anything to go by, though, with its blackened and burned-out sensors, nobody was actually choosing the music.

  In fact, there didn’t seem to be anybody in the pub at all. The bartender was an arch-shaped scanner-talker that looked like it had been punched one time too many by a frustrated customer for the crime of rejecting their credit. It, too, had been mâché’d over with soggy-looking drinks labels, and it had a drunken lean that might have looked jaunty if it hadn’t been so desolated. As she stepped up to it, it went whaaaaablrblrb oka-oka mate.

  “I’m reasonably sure that means ‘what can I get you, mate?’,” Gabriel’s rough voice came from the shadows – well, the whole place was a shadow, but some were deeper than others – in the corner. His voice carried effortlessly over the boomcube’s crass honking.

  Roon smiled faintly, stepped up
to the bar and let the tilted scanner-talker get a look at her. Then she tapped the manual interface to order herself a glass of what was whimsically called Arc’ Red. What piped out of the heavily-locked, who-knew-how-old storage chambers and gurgled into the scuffed perspex glass that popped out of the countertop was a mostly-synthetic deep-crimson fluid with an alcohol content of exactly 17% and an aftertaste of burnt blood. The bartender made an actual clattering sound as it processed her transaction details, almost convincing her that it was running on spinning datatapes somewhere down where the booze was stored. As she picked up the glass and turned towards the corner where she’d heard Gabriel’s voice, the bartender said whaaaaAAAAblrblrblrblrb.

  She raised an eyebrow at the Archangel as he emerged from the gloom and she took a seat opposite him. He grinned.

  “I have no idea what that means,” he said, and raised his almost-full pint of soapy-looking stout. “He didn’t say that to me. Maybe I’m not pretty enough to warrant a waaaaar-blub-blub-blub,” Roon politely clinked glasses – or tapped plastics, at least – with the Archangel and they shared a grimace as they sipped their drinks. “I miss monastery breweries,” Gabriel said unhappily. “Mass-produced hopstitute just isn’t the same.”

  Roon put her glass down and glanced at her watch, then raised her eyebrows – first at Gabriel’s pint, then at the Archangel himself. He grinned again.

  “Wondering how long I’ve been here?” he asked. “I flew in right after sundown, just settled here about ten minutes ago. To be honest, I was sort of expecting you to be here already.”

  She gestured at herself innocently.

  “Yes, you specifically,” Gabriel growled good-naturedly. “I expected your militant sister to come barrel-rolling into my church this afternoon already, and I suspect Ariel will be politely staking out the Bad Cow we actually agreed on meeting up at. But it was you I was expecting to meet here.”

  Roon nodded thoughtfully, then folded her arms and waited.

  Gabriel chuckled and shook his head. “Clever,” he said, “sitting you down in front of me first. Was it a conscious decision of all three of you, or just…?” he chuckled again as Roon sipped her wine. “I recall the Third Disciple being quiet and meditative,” he said, “but I don’t know that he was ever quite so totally silent,” he raised his glass and squinted through its muddy lens. Catching her eye again, he shrugged. “Yeah, sorry,” he went on, “the Pinians … well, like I say, you’re usually described using an ungendered language, and I’ve fallen into bad habits,” he met her polite gaze again, and laughed. “If you even had anatomy, it was outside my jurisdiction.”

  Roon smiled, sipped, waited.

  “The Disciples probably weren’t responsible for what happened to Earth in the first place,” Gabriel eventually said, after thinking for a time. “Although yes, they – you – were likely responsible for the quite literally biblical clusterfuck that occurred afterwards. The Pinians were great lovers of life, and they got pretty stupid about it. I don’t really remember those last few years before the veil, and the few decades afterwards were a blur. We lost track of each other after … after it happened, more or less.”

  That hadn’t been what the Archangel had been going to say about what they’d lost track of each other ‘after’, Roon was certain. But she let it pass for now.

  “I believe, to this day,” Gabriel continued, “that what’s happened to this world has happened for a deeper reason than just another wrist-slapping for the misbehaving Firstmades.”

  Roon gestured, intrigued.

  “Something bad was going to happen,” Gabriel said. “Something bad was here, and sealing it in, taking God out of the picture – God, and basically all the accompanying magical power and potential, neutering the priesthood, even sending the Disciples to slumber – was the best way to contain it. And provide a bit of a lesson to the Firstmades. And lock things down until the immediate danger had passed. And by ‘immediate’, I’m talking on theological timescales, if not genesis-level. Anyway, it was a case of multiple interests being served in a single operation. Your sister would approve,” Roon tilted her head and Gabriel rolled his eyes. “The second sister.”

  Roon sipped her wine and nodded. It made sense, if you took the preposterous founding premise as true. If there were immortals and magic and Angels and Gods, then the world Roon had always thought of as the real world required some serious explanation. Having it cut off from the outside, from the authorities on high … it was still preposterous on its face, but it was at least a start.

  She gestured at Gabriel.

  “Me? Yes, well,” the Archangel shrugged. “I admit that I think there’s another interest that might be served here,” he said. “Those eleven billion scabby little lost souls that everybody except muggins here has unaccountably managed to forget about these past twenty-two centuries.”

  Roon looked around. This dingy tavern was probably not a great example, indeed the whole Arc’ could be completely depopulated for all she knew – had she ever been in an empty pub on a Saturday night? – but the human race seemed to be doing alright from where she was sitting.

  Gabriel nodded, seeming to read her thoughts from the surface of her eyes. “Humans are more than capable of taking care of themselves,” he said, “as long as they’re given a fighting chance. That’s all I’m working for here.

  “I don’t know how long this exile will last. I don’t know if the others can get you – the full Pinians, the real you – back again. In this life or the next. I don’t know if that will be enough to keep everything running smoothly for the next two thousand years. But I know that if this keeps on going much longer – ah,” he smiled, seeing that she’d leaned forward. “You noticed that, eh? Yes, there are others working on this.”

  She leaned back again, pointed at his wings, raised her eyebrows.

  “Other Angels, yes. Sort of. There’s at least one, on the other side of the veil. Yes, and an Elf, too. I, and the other Angels on this side, do what we can to carry out their instructions … but it’s not my primary mission. Not anymore. My mission is to get the humans to the end of the exile alive. Getting the Pinians there will be easy. You don’t die.”

  Roon spread her hands.

  “What, then,” Gabriel mused. “Yes. That’s the question I’ve been asking myself for a long time. If we can’t bring the veil down and end the exile, how do we keep the human race from Dutch-ovenning itself to extinction?”

  Roon grimaced at that, but sat and waited while Gabriel sank into a deep, scowling reflection. It was almost as if he was considering this problem for the first time, but she realised he was trying to figure out how to best cover it with her. That, she allowed sympathetically, might just have been a first for the Archangel.

  “Come with me,” he said suddenly, rustling to his feet. Roon shrugged and followed him. Frankly it was a relief to leave the wine behind.

  He stumped out through a small secondary lounge area that was even grimier with disuse and even heavier with the smell of everything that could possibly die and rot in water. There was a set of mouldering couches, a scattering of dusty tables and chairs, and a second stripped-bare bar that hadn’t even been fitted out with autonomic functions. From there, the Archangel led her through a mould-stained side door and down a set of concrete stairs. She shifted the defence unit on her shoulder but acknowledged that there was really little she could do against a supernatural mugger.

  Gabriel politely pretended not to notice her caution, and led her down the stairs, through another door, and into a basement that was paradoxically drier and better constructed than the rooms above, despite the fact that it was most likely below the reclamation zone’s waterline. There, in a stark and dusty concrete room carpeted in threadbare industrial matting, two objects sat under the strange blue-white glare of truly ancient fluorescent lights. One of the objects was a table with something on it, the other was…

  It looked like a tank, or large square bathtub. The construction material
looked like old electrical resistor-ware, or some of the heavy-duty corrosive-containment material she’d seen in a couple of the labs she’d worked in. And the stuff inside the tub certainly lent weight to that guess.

  She stepped cautiously closer to the seething, greasy black surface of the stuff. It came less than halfway up the side of the tub, depending on the thickness of the tank bottom, but it was in constant sluggish motion and threatened to slip up the sides at any time. It had a sheen, as if it was reflecting the lights in the ceiling … but somehow Roon could tell the glistening highlights weren’t coming from the room she was standing in. Not exactly. Nor was it lit by its own internal luminescence.

  On top of these alarming characteristics, Roon noticed that Gabriel was warily keeping his distance. As a precaution, she held position a pace or two farther back than he was standing. Even from there, the thick black fluid was audible as a low, ant-nest hissing. A thin, mulchy stench rose off the surface, making her want to core her sinuses free of all sensory receptors.

  If raw, first-stage synfoss was alive, it would look and sound like this … but at least it would smell better. Synfoss still stank, but not like this did.

  “Yeah,” Gabriel grunted, “probably a good idea to stay back from it. Not entirely sure what it’d do to a not-quite-Pinian.”

  She stared at the Archangel, then at the black goo, then back at the Archangel, aghast. Even if she made a habit of talking, she would have been incapable at that moment.

  Gabriel gestured towards the tank, a motion so unnecessary it seemed a parody of itself. “This is what happens when an Angel and a Demon meet,” he said. Roon unwillingly looked back at the surging surface, and took an even less willing step closer. “Don’t touch it!” he snapped, putting a hand on her arm. She turned to look at him in frank disbelief, and he shrugged wryly. “Reflex.”