Bad Cow

by Andrew Hindle

  “Oh for goodness’ sake,” Aunt Agñasta said. “Silas, sit down.”

  “How about the really official story, Ash?” Ariel pressed. “Did the Union files have anything about psychic head-poppers?”

  “Classified,” Ash said. “But between you, me and the Archangel Gabriel, there were a few studies suggesting the suspect or suspects may have received formal training from some agency or other. Brainwashing, or other conditioning techniques, may have been used to get the victims to shut down and kill themselves – or sort-of kill themselves – the way they did. There was even talk of hypnosis, but there was such a range of victims…” she shook her head. “Nothing as simple as a hypnotist,” she concluded. “And since we’re talking about it now, I’m willing to guess not a disgruntled government or corporate agent, either. Although since we are talking about it now, I suppose ‘psychic head-popper’ is back on the table.”

  “There wasn’t really a range, though,” Gabriel said, “was there? Of victims?”

  “Geographically, culturally, genetically,” Ash said, tilting a hand back and forth. “All difficult vectors to adjust for, when inflicting chemical or psychiatric behavioural modifications. And these ones were successful across all those categories. But yes … seen from another point of view, they all did fit a profile which was enough to make it into a serial case.”

  “They were all industrialists, corporate presidents, government and religious leaders, rogue-national military generals,” Gabriel said. “Even more specifically, they were all widely believed to hold instrumental roles in shaping national and multinational policies, and they were all more or less untouchable. Unpopular, hated, but not answerable to any sort of board of directors or court of public opinion – or any other sort of court, for that matter. War-machine dictators, monopolists, the stock-holders of the status quo that was driving the planet towards disaster…”

  Jarvis became uncomfortably aware that everyone was studiously not looking at Roon. Roon was evidently also aware of it, because she sighed inaudibly.

  “Roon is … friends with Harlon Berkenshaw,” Ariel supplied, a little more delicately than the usual teasing tone that came into play when the subject of personal relationships arose between the sisters.

  Gabriel, who had been too preoccupied staring at the notebook in one hand and swirling his drink in the other to notice the little interplay, looked up and nodded in understanding. “Sort of a perfect case in point, though,” he said gruffly. “The old Synfoss Barons were … well, no offence meant to your beau, but they were your classic capitalist wealth-hoarding sons of bitches walking on the bent backs of the poor and lighting their cigars from the flames of burning national economies.”

  “Did he say ‘beau’?” Ariel asked in amusement.

  Gabriel ignored her. “Synfoss isn’t exactly good for the planet, and I admit I haven’t been paying much attention on that level,” he said, “but with the handover to Harlon there seems to at least be this sense of new blood, a bit of change, some consideration of the environment and the common people … all of that.”

  Roon nodded.

  “It’s Roon’s good influence,” Ariel said proudly, although Jarvis suspected from her grin that she was trying to find some way of using the word ‘beau’ in the conversation again.

  “Plus, he wouldn’t have been much more than a toddler during the Atonement,” Gabriel added. “In terms of global villains, not really on the map. The Atonement didn’t take out any innocents.”

  “And the same result is basically true for most other institutions toppled and reformed in the Atonement,” Ash agreed. “That’s generally believed to have been the point of it in the first place, which is why it was such a phenomenon. All those entrenched world leaders, corrupt heads of state, warlords, corporate pirates … they were all toppled from their perches when there was really no other way it could have happened, and new people took over with a certain amount of humility and trepidation.”

  “Because no bastard knew whether a new wave of deaths was going to hit,” Gabriel said in satisfaction, and then – to Jarvis’s vast amusement – gave Aunt Agñasta an apologetic grimace. “Pardon my language.”

  Aunt Agñasta didn’t seem to know quite what to say to this, so settled for nodding. The girls all grinned, and she turned a disapproving look on them for good measure.

  “It shaped a lot of foreign policy and corporate legislation,” Ash acknowledged. “The New Japanese Constitutional Protectorates as we know them probably wouldn’t exist without it,” she smiled bleakly, and didn’t need to complete her philosophy – that any international union born of a mass-murder could hardly be blamed for continuing to live by the same river of blood.

  “For a little while, it seemed like the biggest bad guys on the planet were actually getting punished,” Gabriel went on. “For a little while, the old bit of wisdom about only those not interested in power being allowed to wield it actually came true. Everyone paid attention for a second, out of self-interest. The thinkers, the innovators, the genuine philanthropists all began to venture back out into the public eye. It was – well, like I say, no offence meant, but it was glorious.”

  “Almost a thousand people were killed,” Aunt Agñasta said reprovingly, “and that was only the Atonement itself. Hundreds of thousands perished in the aftermath.”

  “Probably closer to millions,” Ash said, “depending on which events you want to define as ‘consequences’. And most of them were people whose only crime was living below the poverty line or having been forced into dependency on the power-brokers. Usually at a remove of several generations.”

  “True – it was a brutally costly step forward,” Gabriel said, and Jarvis thought the Archangel seemed genuinely saddened. Ash evidently felt the same way – she and Gabriel shared a soldier’s view of triage, perhaps – because she nodded, the eye not hidden behind its eye patch softening slightly.

  “And the upheaval continues to this day,” she said, philosophical agreement or not. “A vacuum might put out a fire, but it ultimately has to be filled with something.”

  “True,” Gabriel repeated, finished his first drink and put the glass down. He picked up the second. “It was like a biblical plague.”

  “Which is exactly what I’m guessing it actually was,” Ariel asked. “Right?”

  Gabriel sipped, looked down at the page in front of him with the sketch of the Godfang, sipped again. Thoughtfully, he said, “I guess it depends how you look at it.”

  “Almost a thousand mega-rich mass-murderers,” Ash summarised, “completely independent of one another and in rapid succession, stopped what they were doing, said ‘I am sorry. I have failed you all’–”

  “‘I am sorry. I have betrayed this world and its people’,” Jarvis and Aunt Agñasta said simultaneously, and shared a smile. It was funny, how some things stayed with you. In the early ’80s, when the Vandemar girls had been toddlers, those words had become something of a cultural catchphrase for people of his generation. You might occasionally fail to obey a traffic rule or claim a few too many expenses on your taxes, but at least you hadn’t betrayed the entire world.

  “Right,” Ash said. “They stopped in the middle of robbing poor people of their rights or sending children into battle against drug cartel armies, made a creepy little speech, then dropped into comas. And then died between a week and a couple of months later, brain activity just dropping away to zero without ever waking up in between.”

  “Yes,” Gabriel said quietly. “They atoned for their sins, and humanity’s headlong plunge off the cliff was halted by a desperately-clutched fistful of weeds.”

  “Okay,” Ariel said, “and what does that have to do with–”

  “It was you,” Gabriel said.

  ATONEMENT

  The Vandemar sisters, Gabriel was quietly pleased to see, took this news rather well.

  “You mean the Pinians,” Ariel said, cutting immediately to the nub of the matter. “That would have been the incarna
tion just before us? How does the maths work out, with pregnancy and rebirth and all?”

  “The Atonement was two years before we were born, but a little over a year before we were conceived,” Ash said.

  “You see, Ms. Vandemar,” Jarvis added smoothly, “when a mother and a father love each other very much–”

  “–and the ghost of an immortal disembodied piece of God is hanging around waiting for a new body to crash in–” Ash put in.

  “Yes yes,” Ariel said, “you’re both very clever.”

  “I thought so,” Ash smiled at the butler. “Didn’t you, Jarvis?”

  “Yes, Ms. Vandemar,” Jarvis replied, “I actually rather did.”

  “I guess it comes down to the way our reincarnation actually works,” Ariel went on determinedly.

  “And I can’t help you with that,” Gabriel apologised, “but that was more or less what I’d assumed. I wasn’t told much – our communication and support network is sketchy at best – but I figured it was either the tail end of the incarnation before you three, or…” he hesitated, not sure he wanted to put the alternative to words. And not precisely sure what was so distressing about it, either.

  Ariel voiced it for him. “Or a bunch of mini-incarnations in between,” she said. “Like, the old versions died, then we flitted around for a bit, and that’s when we somehow did the Atonement. And then we finished making everyone apologise, and we started putting these three fine specimens together,” she gestured gratuitously to herself.

  “That’s … more or less how my theory went,” Gabriel said, although he was fairly sure the famous Atonement speech had been directly from the Pinians themselves, an apology from them for the colossal fuck-up they had wrought upon God’s creation.

  “Pinians can do that?” Ash asked sceptically.

  Gabriel shrugged. “I couldn’t say for sure,” he replied. “But … you were on the cusp of reincarnation, you perhaps retained your anger over a prior lifetime spent watching Earth getting ground under the heels of these leaders, and so while you were disembodied – so to speak – you soul-journeyed. You … flitted around, as Ariel said. And instead of settling into a new incarnation and growing new bodies for yourselves, you spent a little while possessing the worst offenders, apologising to their victims, and quietly shutting their brains down.”

  “But you’re saying that’s possible,” Ash insisted.

  “All Firstmades can do it,” Gabriel said. “Like I told you – you invented these arts. Possession is a bit different to the art of the human guise that you three are examples of, but it’s related. And it’s dangerous, under normal circumstances. It’s generally not a good idea to let your soul float around, vulnerable. But here and now, there doesn’t seem to be much that can stop you. Humans, certainly, have nothing in their psychic or spiritual arsenal that can stand up to possession by a Firstmade. You would’ve walked into one of those warlords’ bodies like … like I could walk into a child’s room and toss her out by the scruff of the neck.”

  “That’s pretty mean,” Ariel said, although Gabriel could tell her heart wasn’t in it.

  “What happens to the human soul while it’s tossed out by the scruff of the neck?” Ash frowned.

  “Oh, it sort of hangs around,” Gabriel replied. “Most mortals don’t venture far from their bodies – they don’t have the equipment for a journey like that.”

  “And it’s dangerous, anyway,” Ariel added.

  “Right. So the displaced soul just sort of hovers there and waits for you to leave again, then takes back over. If you’ve shut down the body’s central nervous system in the meantime, of course – as was the case with the Atonement – then it takes back over a comatose shell just long enough to turn out all the lights and move on to a hopefully highly-unpleasant hereafter. Look, like I said, don’t ask me this stuff – I have no real idea how possession works. You’re the ones who know that side of it.”

  “That was my next question,” Ariel said. “I thought we didn’t know any of that stuff right now, and would have known even less in the previous incarnation.”

  “That’s true,” Gabriel said, “which is why I was working on the theory that you regained some sort of awareness in between incarnations, or that some instinct kicked in. You’ve had bursts of awareness and power all along, but it’s pretty random. One incarnation might have a dream about the outside urverse. One might get a nasty surprise and burn down half of London.”

  “Classic Ash,” Ariel remarked.

  “But a lot of it was to do with the focussing,” Gabriel explained, “the work going on to try to bring you back together and make you proper Pinians again. And as that progressed, so your control might have improved.”

  “And what does this have to do with that?” Ash asked, pointing at the notebook in Gabriel’s hand.

  Gabriel looked down at the sketch of the Destarion, and suppressed the urge to down his second drink in a single gulp.

  “Right,” he said, “that.”

  “What is it?” Ariel asked.

  “She’s a ship,” Gabriel said, “actually a defence platform – sort of a fancy way of saying ‘a warship, but more’.”

  “So … pardon me, sir, but…” the butler, Jarvis or Silas or whatever his name was, raised a hand. “We now have Angels, Demons, Vampires, immortal reincarnating Disciples … and now a … spaceship?”

  “Don’t forget the Elf,” Ariel added.

  “Was there an Elf as well, Ms. Vandemar?”

  “Apparently.”

  “She’s called the Destarion,” Gabriel said with as much patience as he could muster. “Her class of ships, the Category 9 platforms, were known as Godfangs, because … well, I guess because they looked like this,” he held up the paper again. “The Destarion was near Earth when the veil happened. I think she’s supposed to have been acting as a conduit, supplying Earth with clean power. You see,” he turned to Roon, “you were really close.”

  Roon nodded slowly.

  “And this … ship … is involved in this somehow?” Agñasta Mulqueen asked. “Is it … alien?”

  Gabriel almost chuckled at the way she said it, alien, like it was a dirty word. Then he remembered that, as far as these fine upstanding folks were concerned, it really was. Racelift advances may have done some strange things to cultural markers while they were helping prop up the human genome and get the species past extinction risk as the environment shat itself, but human tribalism was still alive and well.

  “Far from it,” he said. “She’s actually more of a local than humans are. The Category 9s, the Godfangs, were commissioned by the Pinian Brotherhood aeons ago, for conflicts on a scale you can’t even imagine, against enemies I don’t even remember. She’s carried humans. A long time ago, but yes. And yes, she was involved in the Atonement.

  “The Atonement wasn’t just the Pinians,” Gabriel went on, “and it wasn’t just this attempt to focus you back to normal. I think – I’m pretty sure … it was her.”

  “She can do that?” Ariel asked, echoing her sceptical query of a couple of minutes earlier.

  “I don’t know what she can do,” Gabriel, feeling the electronic device in his breast pocket seem to gain weight. Soon. “But from what I’ve put together, there was some contact between the Destarion and outside. She was in standby mode, but she woke up a bit. Then she used the same connection that we’ve been using to focus you to … activate you.”

  “Like sleeper agents,” Ash murmured.

  “More or less. She bumped you out of your previous bodies, or tuned in on one of you when you died and left your old body behind, and from there she got control of the network. If you can call it a network. Anyway, she sent you killin’. I don’t know if it was just one of you or all three, but I suspect it was all three.”

  “Because then we were all reborn at the same time,” Ariel said.

  “Exactly. Serving the focussing process at the same time. Another case of multiple interests being served in a single operatio
n,” he added, nodding at Roon as he reiterated one of the things they’d talked about in the Ballywise Tavern. Although to say ‘they’ had talked was something of an exaggeration … “Then she let you start over again,” he concluded. “In what was, by her standards, a safer and more stable world.”

  “Wow,” Ash said numbly.

  “It was you, but not you,” Gabriel said. “It was her. The Godfang. God, I hate that ship.”

  “‘Hungry’,” Ariel murmured.

  “Oh yes,” Gabriel replied fervently. “That’s one part Roon got exactly right.”

  “Let me see if I’ve understood this right,” Ash said. “It – she – can send Pinians out like ghost assassins to kill people at whim.”

  “No,” Gabriel said, although part of him thought it would have been nice to just agree. “Like I said, I can’t absolve you completely of blame. You must have gone along with it on some level. She’s not allowed to entrap and use souls that way. She’s not equipped for it, at least as far as I know. But Stormburg’s Theorem – that is, the whole plan to focus you back into Pinians – helped her find this approach. As for doing it on a whim – no. Your current situation is pretty unprecedented. I really think she was doing what she thought was the best, or the only, thing she could do. And I’m pretty sure you – the Pinians – agreed with her at the time. So, it happened.”

  “So, the Destarion did basically what the Demons are planning on doing,” Ariel said. “And you as well.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Aren’t you all planning on using us as a means of channelling power into the Earth to replace our dependence on Synfoss and everything,” Ariel said, “and to control the population when it gets rowdy?”

  “Well, that’s a fairly rough way of saying it … but okay. Sure,” Gabriel said. “I guess it depends on your point of view and your opinion of who are the good guys…” he noticed Ariel and Ash exchanging a humourless smile. “What?”

  “To the average person,” Ash said slowly, “there are good guys and bad guys.”