Something More Than Night

by Tregillis, Ian

  Sam’s smoke plume glowed white and blue with a constant flicker of electrical discharge. Back in the kitchen, the cook slapped the radio a couple of times. Sam said, “Don’t break your arm, patting yourself on the back like that.”

  I tapped cigarette ashes into one of Sam’s plumes. The look it gave me should have crisped my eyebrows.

  “Don’t worry. I haven’t lost the big picture.” I ground out the pill in my saucer. “Okay,” I said. “The Nephilim have been stewing long enough. Let’s do it. Pull the trigger.”

  Another flutter, this like the hiss of sizzling rubies. Sam said, “You sure?”

  I mulled the angles for a microsecond. What point in a last-minute adjustment? If flametop was lamping the Nephilim, she’d received the telegram I sent courtesy of that dish librarian. Meaning any moment she’d realize she’d been played for a prize sap. And then she’d really hit the roof. I couldn’t do any more without muddying the waters.

  No need for corrections. She was right on course.

  “I’m sure. Let’s send our girl packing while she’s still spitting nails.”

  22

  DOING THE MATH

  The raw Pleroma bore no resemblance to her expectations. How could she have anticipated this? It was exactly what Bayliss had described.

  Prior to this, she’d only experienced slivers of it via those pieces encapsulated in Bayliss’s Magisterium, the Virtue’s, and her own. Bayliss’s explanations—everything always came back to motherfucking Bayliss—cast the pure Pleroma as nothing more than a cosmic transit hub, the angelic equivalent of a Grand Central Station providing connections between the Choir’s various Magisteria. He had, in his nearly incomprehensible way at times, waxed poetic about a bleak and featureless domain punctuated by the interesting regimes where individual angels imposed their will within a Magisterial sphere of influence. Having heard this, and knowing he was a lying sack of shit, Molly had taken it for granted the raw Pleroma would prove to be something entirely different. Something that would put the lie to Bayliss’s affected boredom. A place of magnificence. Of blinding metaphysical grandeur.

  But it wasn’t a lie. The raw Pleroma had all the charm of a public school gymnasium. In fact, it reminded her of nothing so much as a cavernous gym hosting an awkward junior-high dance. Large, empty, not particularly festive, filled with scattered clumps of girls and boys too shy, or afraid, to mingle outside their immediate circle. Except here the awkward non-dancers eyeing each other were angels, and the stereo had been playing the same tune since the Big Bang. Here and there, the ghostly outlines of a shimmering Magisterium peppered the expanse.

  Closer to the mortal realm, physically and ontologically, the packing of those Magisteria became tighter and tighter until they overlapped. Even here, a short conceptual distance from the boundaries of her former life, METATRON’s bond tried to drag her into that resented realm where the overlapping interference fringes fuzzed into the Mantle of Ontological Consistency.

  Standing in the wide-open Pleroma, outside the MOC and free of the constraints of a host Magisterium, Molly dropped her human form and turned her senses—she lost count at 1,440—across the vista, across the behind-the-scenes topology of reality. Across uncountable mutually inconsistent potential realities. Across a formless void.

  The angels built their Magisteria in the Pleroma for much the same reason people used to build flour mills and sawmills alongside rivers. The Pleroma was the raw material for their whims; the supply that energized the expression of their will. The Pleroma was a superposition of every imaginable Magisterium. It was the wellspring. The foundation of everything. The subbasement of the Universe.

  Her excursion did differ from what Bayliss had primed her to expect in one crucial way: nobody accosted her. No angels attacked her, no beguilingly twisted denizens of the Choir sought her out. Nobody tried to mug her. Nobody tried to rifle through her pockets for the Trumpet. Not even her friends the Cherubim.

  Here and there, clusters of Archangels and Principalities harmonized like the celestial equivalent of dueling barbershop quartets. The Pleroma shivered with the high notes and reverberated with the low notes. Nearby (a mere parsec or so, by mortal reckoning) huddled a cluster of Powers, their turbulent clouds chained together by intertwined forks of lightning. Something with the wings of a bat and wearing armor that appeared to have been chiseled from an immense gemstone pulled the foamy substrate of Pleroma about itself, like a cloak, and disappeared. It had stepped into its own Magisterium, out of phase with the rest of the Choir. Maybe it wanted some peace and quiet.

  She could see all these angels. They could see her. Nobody cared.

  It was enough to make a woman feel unloved.

  Or like a goddamned fool.

  All along she had avoided the Pleroma like herpes after Bayliss convinced her it was a dangerous place. She’d believed that various factions in the Choir would seek her out; blame her for the instability and uncertainty brought about by Gabriel’s murder; try to use her to obtain the missing Trumpet. So she’d stayed on Earth and followed the threads of investigation that Bayliss had spooled out for her.

  But now here she was, literally stretching her wings in the milky, jewel-bright surf of a billion maybes. And nobody gave two shits.

  Because, of course, it had all been a lie.

  So … Why didn’t Bayliss want her gallivanting about the Pleroma like a newborn colt? What didn’t he want Molly to see?

  Molly expanded her perceptions. She searched for a kink, a burr of topological imperfection in the tapestry of the divine. It came to her as a faint pulse in the fabric of the Pleroma. She visualized the murdered Plenary Indulgence recipients, imagined how the transmogrified Trumpet had wrought its spiritual alchemy on their mortal beings. Still concentrating on the Trumpet, she reimagined her form as something with pockets. From those pockets she pulled Anne’s memory fragment, her resentful remembrance of receiving an Indulgence. Molly brought her new understanding of the Jericho Trumpet—a thing whose essence was its purpose, a process of metaphysical transformation—in contact with Anne’s memory.

  The memory changed. Like a supersaturated solution exposed to a seed crystal, it solidified. Condensed. What had been a memory of spiritual transformation was now a fragment of the catalyst: the Trumpet. Her breath caused it to chime like a tuning fork. So low was the note, so pure the melancholy, it might have been the death rattle of a dark galaxy.

  Another Power scurried along on its hundred thousand legs of lightning. She hadn’t seen it approaching, but it ignored her like all the others. It joined the other Powers in their huddle.

  Molly waited for some distant corner of the Pleroma to resonate with sympathetic vibrations. Gently, she pinched the Trumpet fragment just enough to perturb its harmonics, then listened to the beats of slightly mismatched frequencies. It wasn’t sonar, but it worked. Soon she coiled around a featureless granule embedded in the fabric of the Pleroma. Heaven’s kidney stone. It was surrounded with the celestial equivalent of the yellow police tape that had cordoned the site of Molly’s death. A steady stream of onlookers had etched a footpath in the surrounding Pleroma. A few loitered nearby. Mostly creepy Virtues, though one onlooker was even stranger. Bayliss’s description hadn’t done justice to the Thrones. Molly averted her gaze from all the eyes.

  The Nephil had been wrought from a unique individual human being. Yet the Trumpet had melted and recast his or her essence, reconstituted their soul, alloyed the divine and mundane until the resulting Nephil betrayed no evidence of its progenitor.

  Molly hopped the cordon. The Throne rolled to intercept. But before it could reach her, she touched the crystallized ex-memory fragment to the Nephil. The impossible wrinkle in the Pleroma shrank, while the Trumpet fragment grew. She held them together until the last hint of distortion evaporated and the underlying Pleroma thrummed like a drumhead. She tasted hoarfrost and ancient iron. The Throne skidded to a halt.

  “Shit,” said Molly. “How easy was that?�
��

  Easy enough to be frightening. Because if Molly understood how to eliminate the Nephilim, surely other angels did as well. They might have lacked the catalyst memory fragment with which to begin the process, but nevertheless … Who among the Choir would have understood the true nature of the Nephilim? Who should have known enough about the Jericho Trumpet to recognize its work?

  The Seraphim. Gabriel’s comrades.

  Who knew the Trumpet better than anybody? Who would have known how to pull a trick like this, stapling apparently indelible imperfections into the Pleroma?

  Gabriel.

  Which angels had made a big show—according to Bayliss—of trying and failing to evict the Nephilim?

  The Seraphim.

  And … prior to Molly’s arrival, who in the Choir understood mortals better than anybody?

  Bayliss.

  Molly hopped to the next Nephil, and the next, and the next, reassembling the Trumpet as she went. The Nephilim, she came to understand, were unrealized potentials. Wave functions awaiting measurement, hovering on the brink of collapse. A superposition of the mortal and the immortal, the mundane and the divine. But the Trumpet had been used imperfectly—deliberately so—to render each Nephil a topological defect. The deceased Plenary Indulgence recipients had become monopoles where domain boundaries met, like the fractures created inside an ice cube when the water in the tray begins to freeze in several places at once and the crystals don’t join up smoothly. Scars. Remnants of an imperfect phase transition.

  Only, what transition? The Nephilim appeared to be effects awaiting their cause.

  But that was human thinking. Time meant nothing here. It wasn’t linear. It wasn’t even one-dimensional.

  If the Nephilim were wave functions awaiting collapse, then what was the measurement? For what observer had they been designed? Only one answer made sense. In fact—

  The cluster of Powers broke apart with a mountain-cracking bang. Across the Earth, a network of robotic telescopes swiveled to document the fading glow of a newly discovered gamma ray burst. The Powers reconfigured themselves into a hypersphere. The sphere became an ontological boundary within which the Pleroma roiled and buckled. Molly tasted rank desperation, fear, illicit excitement. Nervous energy raked her like a tornado of broken glass.

  The Powers’ bubble grew. It rolled downhill, along the residual potential gradient embedded in the Pleroma by the Jericho Event. What the hell were they doing? Was this the angelic equivalent of bowling?

  But the Powers had constructed their shared Magisterial bubble from alien mathematics. It was grossly inconsistent with the Mantle of Ontological Consistency.

  It was bait.

  Crap.

  She looked around. The other angels had made themselves scarce.

  The Powers’ conflicting model of reality approached the MOC—

  —Molly crouched, covered her ears—

  FORBIDDEN, screamed the universe.

  The Powers had rattled the cage to summon the warden. The Voice of God shook Heaven’s rafters.

  Yet Molly could still think, still move. METATRON paused in the midst of throttling the Powers, like an avalanche deciding halfway down the mountain to pause and consider its options.

  Molly glanced at the remaining unconverted Nephilim. They were growing. One by one their wave functions collapsed in a rippling domino effect. Because METATRON was their catalyst. Their long-awaited measurer.

  No longer vague and no longer inert, they took the forms for which they had been designed. The Nephilim were wooden stakes driven deep into the heart of the Pleroma. They weren’t a threat to the MOC—they were a feint at the heart of the divine.

  And irresistible to METATRON.

  METATRON would win, of course. For the Nephilim were the work of mere angels, but METATRON was something greater, something feared by even the Choir. Even Bayliss.

  But that didn’t mean they couldn’t bring down seven shades of shit before METATRON sorted them.

  Heaven trembled. A trio of massive stars on the far side of the galaxy went off like a chain of firecrackers. One-two-three. Pop-pop-pop. If not for the obscuring bulge of the galactic center, the resulting flare of radiation might have sterilized the Earth in sixty thousand years.

  As the Nephilim changed, so did the Trumpet fragment.

  Molly slipped out the back.

  * * *

  Thunder and lightning shook dust from the rafters. Sheets of rain lashed the windows. We huddled in the diner to ride out the storm. Me, Flo, the shyster brush salesman, the muggs in the window booth, the sheik and his girl. It was a night for staying in and catching a show on the radio.

  I sat at the counter and concentrated on providing a good home to a second plate of eggs. They looked lonely.

  The next bolt of lightning hit so close the tines of my fork bristled with static electricity. I dropped it. I like my eggs as much as any bo, but I don’t get hazard pay. The peal of thunder came at the same moment, so enthusiastic it knocked a pile of dishes from the shelf behind the counter. The roundheels shrieked. So did the salesman. I always knew he’d be one to melt when the heat was on.

  I tapped my cup for a refill. Flo stepped over a pile of broken crockery and treated me to the dregs of the pot.

  The door slammed open. Rain squalls rode a gust into the diner. The wind swirled through the diner, casing the place. But this joint wasn’t worth knocking over so it hit the road. Flametop leaned against the door to close it. Nobody ever needed a new hairbrush as badly as she did at that moment.

  I raised my cup in greeting. “Flametop.”

  “Hello, Gabriel,” she said.

  23

  THE END

  “About time,” said Flo. “Took her long enough.”

  She doffed the dish towel that had hung over her shoulder since I put it there long, long ago and headed for the kitchen. Along the way she peeled off her apron and tossed it on the counter. How glad I was to have wheedled a last refill. She wasn’t coming back from this smoke break.

  The brush salesman tossed a few coins on his table. Then he packed his display case, taking care that each brush fit snugly into its own slot. He followed Flo through the kitchen. So did the muggs, the tomcat, and his steady.

  The cook clicked off the radio. He left it on the counter, under the wheel where Flo stuck the orders. He removed his apron, too, and joined the others where they lined up by the cellar door. He left a pile of corned beef hash and a few strips of bacon sizzling on the grill. Thoughtful guy. Flo opened the door. One by one, the constructs filed down the stairs into the cellar that had filled the space below the original diner, back in the day, but which I’d never bothered to re-create in my Magisterium.

  And that was the end of that. So long, kids. Write if you find work.

  After that, flametop and I had the joint all to ourselves. Maybe I should have tidied up. Thunder sifted a steady fall of dust from the ceiling. It made long, gritty streamers of the cobwebs. Lightning strobed the windows, giving everything a metallic ozone tingle, like chewing face with an electric socket. The atmosphere in the diner would have smelled of onions, bacon, and burnt coffee if not for flametop and her righteous fury. Rafter dust flared incandescent when it sprinkled into her aura, filling the joint with the odor of singed dirt.

  “Your timing ain’t too swell, angel. Flo just punched out. You’ll have to serve yourself if you’ve come for a cup of joe.” More thunder rattled the cups under the counter. I gestured at the rain-lashed windows. “Park the body. Watch the show.”

  She didn’t, of course. Nobody hated me as much as she did in that moment. The heat came off her in waves, leaking from the furnace of her rage. It rippled the linoleum and sent that coppery mop writhing like Medusa’s best hair day. It was a beautiful thing.

  But I kept to my script. For old times’ sake. “What’s the score, angel? Something’s got you doing figure eights.”

  She stepped closer. Crossed her arms. Leaned against the counter. I prete
nded to not notice the way her coat pocket swung with extra weight. She was rodded. Good.

  “You had me believing this all started with a murdered angel on the night I died,” she said. “But that wasn’t true. There was no murder.”

  Had I been wearing my hat at the moment, I’d have tipped it to her. I felt like a proud father. “I always knew you were one brainy betty.”

  She rolled the tip of her tongue along the inside of her lips. Maybe she was thinking it over. Maybe she wanted me jealous of her lips. Smart money said she already knew the angles, and this was just for show. Crafty frail.

  Flametop said, “But this couldn’t have worked if Gabriel were still around in all his glory. Because the Seraphim truly are load-bearing members of the MOC. You had to create a hole, because you needed a cork.”

  “Don’t leave me hanging.”

  “The only thing that makes sense,” she said, “is if he split off a shitty little piece of himself—the tiniest, grubbiest, weakest possible fragment: you—and then committed suicide.”

  “Better get some nails, doll. Your math isn’t bad but that last step is loose. Someone’s going to trip on it.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he had help. The other Seraphim were in on it, too. How did you describe them? Thick as thieves? They throw a lot of weight—”

  “Carriage trade, those swells.”

  “—So if Gabriel envisioned a reality built around the termination of his own existence, while the others envisioned a shared reality where Gabriel didn’t exist…” She lifted her hand to her mouth, fingers curled over her palm. She breathed on her hand and opened her fingers, as though freeing a butterfly. “And the rest of the Choir went apeshit, because the very notion of embracing mortality was so alien, so impossible, to them. They can conceive of anything but their own deaths.”

  She waited for another barrage of thunder to subside; in the meantime, another drift of burning dust limned her aura. She ran a hand through that fluttering hair. Even disheveled and spitting fire, she still made the joint look suitable for a soirée with the red-carpet crowd.