Something More Than Night

by Tregillis, Ian

  She said, “But you … After splitting off, you came to Earth. And you spent enough time here to conceptualize mortality. Which made it possible for Gabriel and the others to do what they had to do. That’s how I knew you had to be a fragment, once I saw things in the right light.”

  “You spin a wild yarn, kid. Don’t stop just when it’s getting good.”

  “Penitentes. They’re the key. All the other angels doing work on Earth had to hide inside mortal shells, otherwise their unshielded glamours would drive people mad. Or break them. Even kill them. Too much of that would run the risk of drawing METATRON’s attention. But you…” Her upper lip curled in the same way it might have done if she had found something disagreeable on the sole of her shoe. “You’ve spent plenty of time on Earth, elbow to elbow with mortals. And unless you made an effort, nobody would think you anything more than an eccentric prick. Which tells me you’ve been diminished.”

  I clapped. “Well done, doll. You win the wristwatch.”

  She frowned, then tapped herself on the forehead, something between a benediction and an admonishment. “Duh. You know, all that sexism of yours just made me realize something else. Even without the connection to Gabriel, I still should have realized you were a Seraph crumb.” She crossed her arms again. “Because the Seraphim are the only angels with a definite gender. Ain’t that so, wise guy?”

  I fished out my flask and topped off my cup. “Sure you won’t join me?” But she was too busy climbing the walls to answer. I shrugged, saluted her with my cup. “Here’s mud in your eye.” Rye fumes stripped the paint from my sinuses again.

  Flametop said, “Why me?”

  “Wrong place at the wrong time. I had to choose somebody in that alley. And you, doll, you were the head of the class.” I reached over with a finger to tweak her nose. She looked ready to bite it off. I refrained. “I needed somebody with a little spark. That’s you. No offense to big brother, but he wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire, was he?”

  “Leave him out of this.”

  “I did, you crazy wren. I dropped him like a week-old halibut when I saw you watching the sky. You didn’t know what you were seeing, but you knew it was something special.” I took a sip. “That’s when I knew you were the one. Course, if you had known from the outset you were chosen for a purpose, it would have scotched the whole enterprise. So I fed you a little white lie about the accident. And, like the perfect patsy, you swallowed it. Oh, dollface, where had you been all my life?”

  She didn’t share in the laugh. Some twists just can’t take a gag. I shrugged again.

  “Relax. I’m just ribbing you. Keep sneering and your face’ll get stuck like that.”

  Another gust of wind blew the door open. METATRON and the Nephilim were busting up the furniture. Horizontal rain sprinted across the diner to spritz my seat. I flicked my wrist; the door closed. I’d spent enough time standing in the rain on this job. While I was at it, I turned off the grill. The bacon was smelling nice and crisp. What a shame I’d never get to enjoy it.

  To herself, she whispered, “Wrong place. Wrong time.” Wheels turned, somewhere under all that hair. She said, “There was no memory fragment connecting me to Gabriel.”

  “Now you’re getting sloppy. There was. I showed it to you. I lifted it in those first moments after you punched out. Your whole mayfly life was passing before your eyes. I figured you wouldn’t miss a few seconds. And it did the trick, didn’t it? ‘Verisimilitude,’ I think it’s called.”

  “You killed Santorelli.” She said it not as a question, but as a statement of fact. Which it was.

  “He wasn’t what you’d call a green-label bagman. Too much hand wringing, that dope. Would’ve botched everything, had he a chance to spill his guts at you.”

  Her aura blazed anew. My coffee was getting cold, so I held the cup in her direction. A few seconds in proximity to all that rage had it boiling.

  “You divided the Trumpet and used it to corrupt the Plenary Indulgences. That poor priest. You took advantage of his confusion. You manipulated his failing faith to create the Nephilim.”

  I blew a raspberry. “Somebody sold you a bill of goods. Santorelli knew those Indulgences were more crooked than a three-dollar bill.”

  “You coldhearted son of a bitch. What about the people who received those crooked Indulgences? They were killed on your orders. But they had nothing to do with any of this.”

  I let that one slide.

  The thunder was almost continuous now, one blast of lightning following close on the heels of the next as the Voice of God got down to brass tacks. So stark was the light—METATRON’s light—it illuminated every strand of hair on her head like burnished copper. After all this time she still clung to her mortal form like a security blanket. But she was a superposition now, an admixture of the divine and the mundane. Like the rest of us. Somewhat.

  She watched the light show. I considered lighting a pill, but she was in a right lather now, so I figured I wouldn’t have time to savor it. She looked fit to sock me in the kisser. I’d known plenty of dames in my time, but never one so keen to bat me around. Any second she’d put the maulers on.

  Good. I’d been waiting long enough.

  But she focused on the show outside. And the battle wouldn’t last forever. Even now METATRON was cleaning their clocks. What was she waiting for, an invitation? Maybe she needed one more poke, a little nudge over the cliff. They all carry it, the monkeys, that secret dark yearning for redemptive violence. Some might hide it better than others, but it’s always there. Never let anybody tell you otherwise.

  So I trotted out the biggest lie of all. A real lulu. I’d been waiting a billion years to toss this one out. Waiting for something sufficiently intelligent to evolve inside METATRON’s precious MOC.

  I said, “Thanks for the laughs, doll.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Was I too quick with the praise a minute ago, or have you taken a couple to the noggin since last we talked? Spend a few billion years watching the paint dry and you’ll be ready for a diversion, too. And you were the most fun we’ve had in millennia.”

  That did it. Now she was ready to fog me with that heater. Her hand snaked into her pocket. Didn’t take a wise-head to know what she kept in there. Part of me wanted to smile, part of me wanted to cringe. I split the difference and gritted my teeth. This would be worth all the trouble, but wouldn’t hurt any less for it.

  The light show grabbed her attention. She shook her head. “If I didn’t know any better,” she said, “I’d think you were going out of your way to piss me off.”

  “Just telling it straight, angel.”

  “No, you’re not. You pretend it was just a game, a meaningless lark, but it wasn’t.” Still watching the show outside, she said, “Because all that bullshit with the Plenary Indulgences was for this.” She nodded toward the chaos outside our cozy little diner. “To keep METATRON distracted while I kick your ass.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that.

  * * *

  Molly studied Bayliss’s eyes, those old old eyes, and saw something new: doubt.

  Outside, the thunder and lightning came so quickly, so constantly, that it was impossible to pair the flashes and rumbles together. Thunder preceded lightning, sidestepped it. The storm was becoming acausal. The ceaseless barrage shook the diner, rattled the cups and plates, set the ceiling fan swinging on its gimbals. The three-second loop of houseflies buzzing around the fan became a two-second loop, a half-second loop, and then they disappeared just as though an old-time filmstrip had jumped clear of its sprockets to escape the lamp.

  Something had changed in the way Bayliss held himself. Held his Magisterium. He was rattled.

  Molly let him stew. This was fun.

  “You’re wrong,” he said.

  “‘Wrong?’ That’s it? Don’t you mean I’m all wet? Peddling my fish in the wrong market? Miscounting the trumps?”

  Bayliss chewed his lip. Sh
e had the motherfucker dead to rights.

  “Your mistake,” she said, “was your disregard for human nature. My human nature. My desire to stay connected to other people. Because that connection spared me from blundering into your trap. And once I stepped back to tug on the loose threads, to think it through carefully, the whole thing came apart. Everything finally made sense once I accepted that you were a lying sack of shit.”

  Lightning struck the diner. Brighter than a nuclear flash, the light poured through the seams of Bayliss’s rickety affectations. When the afterimages faded, so had one wall of the diner. And Bayliss’s human form.

  The thing seated before her had four faces and six wings. The wings, however, were gauzy, ghostly, insubstantial, and three of the faces—the animal faces—were more idea than fact. Only Gabriel’s human visage retained solidity. The rest of him, the rest of the shattered angel, had faded into a wispy memory. He looked like a man beset by ghosts. The ghost of a lion, an eagle, and an ox, all wrapped in the vague impression of wings. Molly squinted. Deep inside the diminished Seraph, inside the husk of what had once been the grandest of angels, she glimpsed an inoperable sliver of mundanity. The dreaded mortal epsilon: legacy of the Jericho Event.

  The diner shook. More plates and saucers tumbled from the shelves, disintegrating before they hit the floor. Saturnine crimson light welled up through cracks in the linoleum. This was new. METATRON had changed.

  Bayliss/Gabriel noticed it, too.

  “You gonna to fog me with that heater or what, you dumb broad?”

  Molly clucked her tongue. “Insults? Really? You’re losing the script, Bayliss. You’re supposed to be the tarnished knight. That tells me how desperate you are for me to use this.”

  She touched the reconstituted Trumpet in her pocket. It had grown heavier while she talked; the self-assembly had accelerated as METATRON annealed the Pleroma. Once she reassembled the first pieces, and METATRON started evicting the Nephilim, the process had proceeded of its own accord. The wrinkles fled before the iron, but had nowhere to go.

  The damn thing tended to change form when she wasn’t focused. Right now she wanted something grand, something imposing. But what she fished from her pocket was a small plastic kazoo, striped pink and green, like a cheap favor from her seventh birthday. Though her soul vibrated when she touched it, the tuning fork of Creation looked like a cheap prize from a cereal box.

  Oh, well, she thought. Screw it.

  She said, “Fortunately for the Choir, I intend to. Unfortunately for you, I’m not stupid.”

  Soon after the Virtue had stung her, back in its Magisterial overlay of the Chicago concert hall, Molly had recognized an analogy between the confinement imposed upon the angels by METATRON and the confinement imposed upon quarks by the rules—laws of physics—within the MOC. The mundane fragments contaminating the angels in the wake of Jericho were akin to a color charge coupling them via a celestial analogy to the asymptotic freedom of quantum chromodynamics. She had mused, arguing from analogy, that the Choir remained confined because it would have taken an anti-angel to break METATRON’s bonds. Which seemed nonsense at the time.

  But Bayliss had created exactly that in Molly.

  With Jericho, METATRON transformed the angels—purely divine beings—into beings that were mostly divine, with just a sliver of mortal imperfection to tether them. A mundanity charge. A mortal epsilon.

  When Molly fell from the train platform, Bayliss had looked into her eyes—the windows of the soul! she mused, suppressing a laugh—and imbued upon her a quantum of divinity. But she was born of the MOC. Molly was mostly mortal, with just a sliver of the divine inside her. A mortal shell wrapped around a divine epsilon. She was, in the sense of spiritual admixtures, the opposite of the other angels. Their antithesis.

  Meaning she could perform tasks with the Trumpet that no other angel could. Not even Gabriel. For in her hands it could undo Jericho.

  Assuming, of course, she was sufficiently angry. Because, as Bayliss had said, the Trumpet was a tool of righteous fury. A tool of punishment. Thus he’d strived to ensure Molly had the means, opportunity, and motivation to unleash her fury on him when the time came.

  Means: the Trumpet, which as Gabriel he had hidden on Earth, and as Bayliss he had slowly led her to rediscover.

  Opportunity: the Nephilim, which even now occupied METATRON’s attention. Otherwise, the moment anybody dared touch the Trumpet to her lips, the Voice of God would have intervened.

  Motive: the realization that she was the ultimate dupe, the patsy of a billion-year con job.

  Hence the lies and manipulation. He wanted her—the anti-angel—so angry that she’d use the Trumpet indiscriminately, without pausing to think things through. He needed to piss her off so badly she wouldn’t stop to realize that, rather than punishing Bayliss, her use of the Trumpet would free the angels. He needed to stoke her anger until it was searing hot.

  Because above all else, he couldn’t afford to let her recognize that her vengeance would destroy the Mantle of Ontological Consistency. And all of humanity along with it. Without the constancy offered by the MOC, without its sheltering bubble of causality and stable bedrock of logically consistent mathematical and physical laws, mortal biological life would become impossible. Biology would become impossible. Chemistry, physics, mathematics—likewise impossible.

  Thus the plan had to rely on manipulation and anger, rather than a simple plea for compassion. They might have given her the divine spark, brought her to the Pleroma, explained the situation, and asked for her help. But, of course she would have refused. Because truly comprehending the bondage laid upon them by METATRON meant understanding the MOC. And the catastrophic consequences of its dissolution.

  But the angels didn’t give a rat’s ass about any of that. Nobody ever shed tears over an anthill. To their view the MOC was a meaningless side effect of their imprisonment. The Choir just wanted to be free. And who could blame them? So Gabriel and his confederates had taken it upon themselves to arrange it. Once everything was in place, all they needed was a monkey to caper about while Bayliss the organ-grinder turned the crank on his hurdy-gurdy. The poor monkey was fungible.

  But Bayliss had chosen Molly. His mistake.

  “Well,” she said. “Let’s do what you brought me here to do.”

  She brought the Trumpet to her lips. Holy fire consumed the diner, the Pleroma, and Molly’s mind.

  * * *

  Molly’s consciousness exploded into a trillion trillion fragments. The Trumpet was a supernova flinging the lonely atoms of her soul into the cosmic void.

  She was everywhere, vibrated apart by the Platonically pure overtones of the Trumpet.

  It emitted every pure note, every beginning, every point of reference, every unprovable axiom.

  And it shredded her. Ground her into dust.

  A dust of monopoles, of topological impossibilities, of terminated field lines and resolved expectations. The Trumpet sifted her, sieved her, renormalized her into quanta of anti-angelic admixture, into a charge/parity/time-reversed shadow of the Choir, and blew her across the thundering landscape of the Pleroma.

  From a trillion simultaneous logically impossible viewpoints, she gazed upon METATRON in the final throes of eradicating the Nephilim. And when she perceived the Voice of God as it truly was, she wept. For this was the only way to know the angels’ jailor: not via the agency of what it did, but as the agency of what it was.

  By their acts shall you know them. You shall know them despite their acts.

  It perceived her. Perceived the Trumpet at use.

  FORBIDDEN, it cried.

  DON’T WORRY, she said, laying a hundred million steadying hands. I UNDERSTAND.

  She conveyed her intent. It took a protracted negotiation, long enough for light to gird a proton, but eventually METATRON let her pass.

  And where Molly’s anti-grace alighted upon the Pleroma, an angel’s tether snapped. The angel ricocheted, Compton-scattering from the Tru
mpet-mediated exchange with Molly’s anti-divinity. Each broken tether produced a fragment, an infinitesimal piece of debris. Like virtual particles popped free of the seething vacuum, the release of metaphysical binding energy created a sliver of the mundane. Just as Molly had expected. These were the fragments embedded into the angels by METATRON during the Jericho Event. The shackles. The mortal epsilon. They shimmered as they fell, drifting aimlessly on gyres and downdrafts of possibility, raindrops riding the edge of a storm.

  It rained in heaven. Molly collected the droplets as a maiden might collect a rain of flower petals or sunflower seeds in the folds of her dress.

  She had plans for these seeds. She was going to plant them anew.

  * * *

  The first bum to slip the handcuffs was some lowly Dominion. Lucky duck. It didn’t know what hit it. All it knew was that METATRON’s bond had vanished; the MOC had become irrelevant. When that first Dominion raised its voice in song, the firmament rang with something that hadn’t been heard in billions of years: joy.

  The rest of the Choir caught on quickly. Because nobody had that kind of luck—it was all or nothing. The crystal spheres fairly rattled with the noise of 144,000 torchers crooning in triumphant relief. It was a nice little moment of harmony for a bunch of creeps, none of whom could wait to ditch the others.

  Because, like I said, it was all or nothing. One small-time nickel grabber goes, we all go. Right?

  * * *

  The sky was ablaze.

  On Earth as it is in Heaven.

  METATRON’s rage, the cleansing fury with which it scoured the remaining Nephilim from the Pleroma, became tumultuous skies in the mortal realm.

  Comets flared anew in the east, south, north, and west. New stars dotted the heavens. Ancient stars blazed with youthful vigor, shining even through the noontime sky. The Southern Cross went dark. A violent sun sent aurorae skidding all the way to the equator. The electromagnetic ripples could have, should have, toppled power grids, cities, civilizations.