Something More Than Night

by Tregillis, Ian

  Been a while since somebody dreamed up something the Choir couldn’t do. Since the Jericho Event, in fact. That old chestnut about the immovable object and the irresistible force? We licked that eons ago. The sound of one hand clapping? Please; countless are the realities where the substrate axioms would make a tax legislation read like a Zen koan.

  So that was the first of the revenants. After that, the Powers set up regular rotations to patrol the paths of Heaven. So far, they’d turned up two more of the lurkers. As with the first interloper, all attempts at communication with the new arrivals were about as useful as a glass hammer. One theory held they were humans embedded with a bit of the old divine spark, enabling them to access the Pleroma. That theory had so many holes it couldn’t strain dry pasta, but somebody decided the phenomenon needed a name, and “Nephilim” fit the bill. We’re big on proper names in the Choir, if you hadn’t noticed.

  Well, you could have knocked me over with a silver feather. Interesting times, as the monkeys say. No wonder the bulls had a case of the whips and jingles. It was a doozy, and I could see why Gabby was intrigued.

  My inner light stung when the fangs snapped free. I think they did that on purpose.

  “Okay,” I said, “thanks for the headlines. You ever consider that Gabby hadn’t found anything? Maybe you didn’t find any clues in his Magisterium because he hadn’t scratched anything out of the dirt.”

  “We didn’t consider that,” said a Throne, “because it’s not the case. Stop throwing spaghetti in our faces.”

  “Stop tempting me.”

  The other said, “Your monkey tried to break the law of METATRON. Can’t imagine why she thought she could get away with it. Unless somebody put her up to it.” It spun faster; the ice wafted a cold fog over me. I shivered. “Maybe you decided she’d be a good patsy. Maybe you thought you could use her to test METATRON’s defense of the MOC without getting any mud on your neck.”

  “Where do you bulls come up with this confetti?” See what I mean about the Thrones? They can’t accept anything straightforward. They’re so paranoid they probably take a different route to the john every time. “The one thing I tried to drill into her was that she should’ve lain low until she got the hang of things. Don’t rock the boat, I told her. I thought it would be reassuring. It’s all smooth angles, I said, so just go with the flow.”

  “Why didn’t she?”

  I laughed. “Brother, you spend five minutes with that bird, you’ll have your answer.” I shook my head, or what passed for it at the moment. “She’s screwy. I doubt she’s ever taken a piece of advice in her life. If anything, she does the opposite.” My chair squeaked when I tipped it back. They nudged the accretion disk in the Seyfert’s active galactic nucleus to keep the spotlight aimed at my face. It was giving me a headache. “It’s my fault she didn’t read the handbook. Cut her some slack.”

  “Where were you when Gabriel died?”

  Oh, brother. Get a load of these saps. “I’d tell you drips to go jump in a lake, but what’s the use? You’re already all wet.”

  Snap, snap, went the vipers. “Humor us.”

  “You know damn well where I was. I was down in the mortal realm, watching the light show and trying to find a replacement for Gabby.” I fished in my pockets for a pill. They’d taken my matches, though, so it dangled from the corner of my mouth, like a speed bump for my thoughts. Which were kicking along nicely now. “In fact, the way I do the math, regarding who put me up to it? You goons make the best candidates.”

  Imagine a wheel covered in eyes. Then imagine two of them. Now imagine them pausing in their peregrinations, just for a femtosecond, to give each other a Significant Look. Because that’s what they did. And they thought so little of me they didn’t try to hide it.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You know more about Gabby than you’re letting on. You have the secret police thing down cold, don’t you? Probably have the whole Pleroma bugged. If revenant Nephilim are possible, so is anything.” One Throne gyrated, the other precessed. Listening closely. I think they were impressed with my deductive reasoning skills. “I’d heard the rumors, the intimations of something bad coming down the line. Heard ’em a long time ago. And if a penny-ante player like me caught wind of it, you can’t tell me you roosters hadn’t, too. I’ll bet there’s nothing like a dead angel to poke you sad sacks in the silvery eyes.”

  And if anybody’s fear of METATRON would have them burning the midnight oil to put things right, it was the Thrones. All in all, a neat little package. Don’t know why I hadn’t fit the pieces together before. Is it possible I’m not as clever as everybody says?

  Scratch that. I do know why I hadn’t thought this through before now. Flametop kept me too busy chasing my tail to look at the big picture. Interesting. That cluck was one smooth operator. But the helpless dame act was getting a little stale. Still, she was my client, and I clung to my honor like lipstick clings to a happy lady.

  At this point the bulls were giving me the beady eye. A whole passel of beady eyes. They fell so quiet, I think I could actually hear the slow sublimation of ice from their rims. It gave my thoughts a chance to catch up with my mouth. When they did, I realized it wasn’t a big jump from suspecting the Thrones knew in advance somebody was marked to get rubbed to suspecting the Thrones were the ones doing the marking and the rubbing. I did not like the looks in those eyes.

  Oh, Bayliss. You smart little egg.

  “What’s the matter, Bayliss? Cat got your tongue?”

  “Yeah. Don’t stop on our account. We’re enjoying this.”

  I cleared my throat. “I was just wondering if you like the Nephilim for Gabby’s murder.”

  “Interesting proposition. Too bad we’re not inclined to share our investigation with you.”

  I wasn’t suggesting anything they hadn’t already kicked around the block. Anything to keep their attention off Molly and Santorelli’s Plenary Indulgence list, though. I wondered how she was coming on that.

  Tweedledee said, “Your bird skipped out. What’s she doing back in the mortal realm?”

  Nuts. “She had an appointment,” I said. “Getting her hair and nails done. Lots of upkeep, being a swell looker like that.”

  What a cutup. This act would have killed in the Poconos. Tweedledum liked it so much he brought the flat side of a telephone directory down on the back of my neck. The pill decided to jump ship. It took a header from my lips, rolled across the floor.

  His partner asked, “What’s she looking for? She have a line on the Trumpet?”

  Sooner or later they’d tire of flapping their gums at me. Then they’d go collar Molly. That’s something we both wanted to avoid as long as possible. The bulls would go easier on her if she had something to share with them. I needed a good yarn. Something that would lead the buttons a pretty dance until flametop dug up something useful. Too bad I was out of ideas. My head was emptier than an alderman’s promise. But not the rest of me; I still needed to use the can.

  “Maybe she’s moonlighting. Took a second job in a steno pool to make ends meet. It’s tough out there for a single girl.”

  Tweedledum wound up for another good swing with the phone book. I didn’t flinch. But the door opened before he could let fly. A warm, gentle light filled the supply closet, soft yet strong enough to knock the spotlight aside. The Thrones had loosened my fillings, and now they buzzed with a staticky music of the spheres.

  We looked up, all three of us, and saw six wings more luminous than sunrise on burnished platinum. For a moment I thought Gabby had returned to us. I wanted to dance a jig; our troubles were over. But then the Seraph’s lion visage yawned, and she used her flaming sword to pick at something in her teeth.

  Naw. This wasn’t Gabriel. He had more class than that.

  Uriel leaned in the doorway, still picking at a mouthful of predator’s teeth. Her ox muzzle snorted while her human pan said, “Hi there, boys. Mind if I cut in?”

  12

  FLOPHOUSE LULLABY


  She felt it now, the bondage laid upon her by the Voice of God.

  More rubber band than steel chain, it fell slack with her physical and ontological proximity to humans. A gossamer tether, a strand of celestial spider silk glimpsed in the corner of her angelic eyes. Prior to her encounter with the Virtue she hadn’t been aware of the confinement because she had hewn so closely to a mortal form, mortal thinking, mortal perceptions. But now she felt it, deep in the things that used to be her bones, how the more distantly she wandered—to an ancient galaxy glimpsed but dimly through a mortal telescope; to an exotic Magisterial bubble in the Pleroma far removed from the conditions of the Mantle of Ontological Consistency—the more relentless the pull would become. The chains grew heavier, the shackles stronger, with increasing distance from Earth in the mortal realm and increasing conceptual distance from the MOC in the Pleroma.

  METATRON’s confinement pulled the angels together, causing their spheres of influence to overlap. It forced the Choir to kneel to the primacy of the consensual basis of reality, thus creating the Mantle of Ontological Consistency. And the laws of physics. And what humans thought of as the universe. And, eventually, life.

  It was akin to the asymptotic freedom of quantum chromodynamics. She didn’t know how she knew that. The Virtue’s touch had unlocked something in the part of her that wasn’t human. She had what felt like an owner’s manual for the MOC in her mind. The entire basis of mundane reality was folded, origami-like, in her consciousness, waiting for a chance to unpack. Including multiple Nobel Prizes’ worth of particle physics.

  And so it was evident to her freshly expanded consciousness that the mortal epsilon METATRON had embedded into every angel was analogous to a color charge in QCD. Quarks could never escape their chromodynamic confinement with each other; energetically, it was always more favorable to generate a quark/antiquark pair than to sever the gluon bond. And, like quarks confined inside a hadron, no amount of energy—no amount of angelic willpower—could snap METATRON’s bond to create a truly free angel. But the Choir couldn’t reconfigure its bindings. There was no such thing as an anti-angel.

  Chromodynamics was a consequence of the MOC. Quarks. Penitentes. Space junk. On Earth as it is in Heaven, all the way from geosynchronous orbit to the minds of men to the gooey innards of a proton.

  No wonder Bayliss spent so much time on Earth. She had wondered why he took such an interest in Earthly things, even to the extent of donning a mortal persona, when there was a whole universe to explore. An infinite variety of possible universes to explore. But by his own admission he was a pretty lowly angel. Molly now understood that meant he lacked the mojo to stretch METATRON’s bond very far. Other members of the Choir, like those fucking Cherubim, or the Virtues, or, presumably, the Seraphim, could throw a greater metaphysical weight. They could pull harder, stretch the bond farther.

  Molly couldn’t. Her legs barely held her upright. She clutched the railing. Shivering and catching her breath, she leaned against the balcony while the crowd of concertgoers shuffled up the aisles and into the atrium. The last chords of the concert dissipated, devoured by the ravages of senseless entropy.

  The angels were trapped. A prison choir. Which cast Gabriel’s murder in a new light. He’d been the Trumpet’s guardian, the keeper of the instrument of their incarceration. Was this revenge against METATRON’s accomplice, or was he killed because somebody wanted to steal the Trumpet?

  Or … Is this a jailbreak? She chewed on that for a moment. More thoughts, more sparks, lit upon her tinder-dry mind, igniting it. Holy shit. What if it works?

  If somebody managed to untether the angels, to break their bonds, they would scatter instantly like the ends of an overstretched rubber band. They would shake the mud of the MOC from their feet with nary a backward glance, and flee each other’s company by putting as much physical and metaphysical distance between themselves as possible. The Choir would explode in an infinite number of ontological directions. Their spheres of influence would no longer overlap. There would be nothing to enforce consensus among the angels.

  The Mantle of Ontological Consistency would disintegrate.

  The behavior of the universe wouldn’t be determined by a single set of reigning physical principles. Instead it would become a plaything subject to the whims and whimsies of the Choir. It would be a random, unpredictable place.

  Incomprehensible. Uninhabitable.

  And that would be it for humanity. That would be it for mortal life anywhere.

  In the immediate aftermath of the Cherubic assault on her Magisterium, Molly had been overcome with the terrifying sense of being caught in the middle of an ancient debate. That feeling returned tenfold and she knew she was right. This wasn’t merely a murder. It was more than a jailbreak. This was an ideological schism within the Choir. This was about controlling the future of reality itself.

  Bayliss must have known all of this, and the implications of Gabriel’s murder, from the start. That ass. His tendency to forget important details was getting old. She’d have to have a chat with him about it.

  But what did any of this have to do with the Plenary Indulgences? There had to be a connection. Speaking of which—

  Molly peered over the railing. Pacholczyk was gone. Crap.

  She turned and ran for the stairs. But the swaying, shimmering staircase had become a bottleneck; it wasn’t designed with elderly concertgoers in mind. From her vantage on the nanodiamond landing she glimpsed Pacholczyk’s bald spot weaving through the crowd. He shed little vortices of wistfulness in his wake, along with fading sparks of muted aesthetic pleasure, more unique than the pattern of liver spots on his scalp. The residue of his marrow-deep weariness passed from the atrium to the foyer. He was leaving.

  Molly considered bulling her way down the staircase, but it was too narrow, and she didn’t know how people would contrive to clear a path for her. She didn’t want pensioners hurling themselves from the balcony level or dangling from invisible tethers of biosilk to clear a path for her. She fidgeted; the crowd on the stairs descended another step.

  She was being idiotic. Too limited in her thinking. Wings of light, she remembered. I had fucking wings.

  Screw this, she thought. Going down.

  She turned around, jogged toward the balcony railing, and vaulted over it. The screaming started before she hit the ground.

  The impact of her landing didn’t flutter a single page in the discarded handbills scattered on the floor. It didn’t jar her bones or rattle her teeth. Of course not; she conceived a gentle landing for herself. But she also didn’t conceive it causing any sort of commotion.

  So why was everybody staring at her? Why was the balcony above lined with so many pale faces and wide eyes, all pointed down? Why was that lady clutching her chest while an usher helped her to a seat? Why was that little boy pointing at her? Why were those people calling in an emergency on their earbuds? Why was that man forcing his way through the crowd?

  “Miss! Miss! Try not to move!”

  She had landed in a crouch. Molly stood, tugging on her jeans to straighten them. The ring of onlookers took a wary step back. At the same moment upstairs, half the crowd flew into a panic, driven by the idea she had tumbled from a collapsing balcony. New yells and screams filled the performance hall. Blind panic led to shoving. Somebody took a header on the stairs. The fear smelled like liquid zinc, and tasted like sand in the eye.

  “Oh my God. Was she pushed?”

  “No, she jumped, I saw it.”

  “… trying to kill herself?”

  “Move, move, it’s coming down!”

  “Could’ve hurt somebody…”

  “… gave me a heart attack…”

  “Get out of the way!”

  “… probably high on drugs…”

  Shit. What have I done now?

  She took in the panic on the balcony and the terrified faces on the people around her. “Hey, everybody, I’m fine. Just relax,” she said. “Just lost my footing, but I�
��m okay. Lucky break.”

  But nobody heard her. A middle-aged douchebag wearing a blazer with a heraldic symbol on the breast shouldered aside a woman who might have been his grandmother, and in so doing advanced one whole extra stair in the bottleneck descent. She tottered against the railing of the swaying staircase. An arm reached out of the scrum, caught her shoulder, and pulled her away from the edge.

  “HEY!” said Molly. Her voice billowed like a sail driven by the gale of her irritation. The word expanded, filled the concert hall, kicked entropy aside.

  “EVERYBODY CALM THE FUCK DOWN!”

  And they did. Ripples of stillness radiated from her body. Dust eddies abandoned their gyrations; the people nearest her went a little glassy-eyed. The commotion on the balcony became a slow but orderly shuffle. A silence, broken only by the faint creak of the swaying stairwell, fell over the concert hall. Molly had imposed her will upon the crowd, and it was good.

  “That’s better,” she said.

  “Excuse me, Miss.”

  Somebody touched her on the shoulder. She turned. It was a guy in a tuxedo. It didn’t fit him very well. He wasn’t built for soft clothes and gentle concerts.

  “Miss, could you come with me, please?”

  “I’m fine. I’m not hurt.”

  “Very good. Now, if you’d come with me.”

  “You’re kicking me out?”

  “Miss, I think it would be better for everybody if you departed. Let me assist you.”

  She’d spent enough time with her brother to know the code for, “We’re going to toss you into the alley.”

  “What, because I swore?”

  “Please come with me, Miss.”

  He reached for Molly’s arm. She knocked his hand away. A yelp wriggled past his lips. He doubled over, clutching his hand to his chest. She glimpsed a cherry-red blister and caught a whiff of burnt pork. She felt a little sick, but she refused to let it show.