She makes a swaying, supple motion of her naked shoulders, perhaps intended as a shrug. "What do you have that the angels want to save? Some pretty angel-lass fall in love with you?"
The muscles twitch in the corners of his jaw. "You mock them too? When the Ship first came from the stars, She saved us from the devastation of the Wars. We begged Her to govern and guide us. The Ship showed us how we might remove all the vicious old structures from our brains and genes, madness and rage and panic and hate. The Ship made the Invigilators to show us how it was done. Were we grateful? Did we learn? Did we listen?"
"'Invigilators'? How quaint. You're so old-fashioned sometimes, lover. We call them angels of death."
"Do you think they want to kill? How many chances did we get? How many wars did we start, after how many warnings? How many people of the sea did we obliterate?"
"'Dolphins.' We call them 'Dolphins.' And there were complex reasons for the genocide-wars. Economic reasons and stuff. Turmoil. And why did the Ship make them members of the Galactic Will when humans were kept in protectorate status? Them! Them! We made them! And now we were second class citizens!"
"'Complex reasons'? Rage and jealousy and race-pride. Explain the complex reasons for the extermination camps and torture circuses."
"They were cutting into our trade with the Ship!"
"Maybe they were richer because they didn't kill each other all the time. As your people did mine. Was there a complex reason for that, too? Or was it just an expression of the rage and aggression your people will not remove from your brain-stem structures?"
"Some people think evil has survival value."
"It is the purpose of the Law to see that it will not." He speaks in a voice of dark majesty.
"Don't let's argue politics again!" she pouts. "That's all ancient history."
"Fifty years ago is hardly ancient."
"We never did anything to deserve this. No children!"
"The Ship sent a barrenness to all our women, yes, and sent plagues to sterilize the men, but that was for mercy's sake. There were to be no children when the world drowned. And now that Typhon's coffin is found and thawed, and he grows the last few weeks to become a man, it is done. There are no children left. No innocent lives. Today is Doomsday Eve! The hour is come!"
"And why are you here, lover?" she pouts and tosses back her head. "I hate long goodbyes. They bore me."
"I've come to save you. My love for you burns like a devastating fire. It conquers my will and heart and sense and soul! You are the fairest child of a condemned and evil race, but I cannot believe, and I will not, that such beauty hides a soul wicked past cure!"
His eyes are narrow slits of fire. Now he steps forward and seizes her fragrant shoulders with his hands. Some of his assemblers, misunderstanding the sudden gesture, fly up to either side and hover like wasps; a sight of terror. But either her nerves are steel (a common replacement) or she is drowned in hysteria. She throws back her lovely head and laughs.
He shouts "Stop laughing! You must want life! You must want my love! Such love as mine cannot go unanswered! It dare not." Then, more quietly, he says: "I will defy the Invigilators. They will be convinced by the force and ardour of my soul! If - if you were my wife - do you see what I am offering? - If you were a member of my household, the angels would not let me leave you behind!"
She gives him a cool, remote stare, her perfect lips hovering on the hint of a smile.
He steps back, deflated. As he draws his hands down, the deadly assemblers drop close to the floor and draw back.
Idomenes says, "Why this coldness? Tell me what you want."
She is on her hands and knees, her fingers knotted into the silken fabrics of the bedclothes. Lilimariah keeps the same small half-smile on her lips, but she trembles when she speaks: "I want to be forced. Kidnap me. Kill my father, burn his house. Take me by force. Take me."
"What a horrible thing to say. Are the angels right about us?"
She laughs. "That way I can't be blamed. Don't you understand women at all?"
"Sane women, I do." Idomenes looks at her oddly. "Are you drunk? Have you been intoxicated against your will? There may be neuro-operators interfering with your brain-chemistry."
He raises a finger and points at her. A black diamond flickers up from the floor, ready.
She screams, writhing backward. She is on her feet near the railing, perhaps ready to fall or jump.
He raises his hand, spreads his fingers. The black diamond falls back.
"Don't you dare interfere with my body!" she shouts.
"What is it - ?"
Silently, softly, she says, "I'm pregnant."
He says, dumbstruck, "No woman can be pregnant. We can make children artificially. The assembler technology was made for that. But no one but the angels knows what codes they used to force our biochemistry into sterile patterns..."
She says sharply, "Has it never occurred to the great Idomenes that there are assembler programmers better than even him?"
He snorts. "No. That thought I do not admit."
Now she steps forward, hips swaying, her eyes glinting with danger and pain. "And has it never occurred to you that I might have another lover? One who can give me the child you cannot?!"
Idomenes steps back, as if he has been slapped. "I thought you loved me..."
"Why?"
"You said..."
"I say a lot of things." She tosses her head.
"I thought it was that my father speaks with the angels; that my people were special, that you were attracted to my... my..."
"Your purity? Your righteousness? It is your worst fault."
"You wanted my knowledge of assemblies, then. Is that it? You thought I could crack the angel's code."
Lilimariah folds her hands on her belly. Her head is bowed forward slightly, so that her hair falls about her like smoke. "There are needs a woman has no man can understand, and duties..."
He turns and leaves at this point, his face drained and hollow, his expression something more horrid than anger. The door does not open swiftly enough to suit him. He points, flicks his fingers, makes a fist. Black assemblers rearrange the wood into nitroglycerine compounds and blow the door-panels out of their frame. The shrapnel and smoke that strike him leave blood mingled with burns on his face, but his footsteps do not slow.
He does not hear the end of her sentence: "...duties even stronger than love." Her hair hides her tears.
His assemblers re-knit his torn flesh and clean his skin before he goes down two corridors. He comes into an atrium. Here is what looks like a boy of eight or nine years, dressed as a harlequin, surrounded by a large flotilla of diamond assemblers.
Idomenes is in no mood to speak. He brings his hands together and makes a gesture. The Harlequin's assemblers tremble and drop to the floor, dead, before any signal can move.
"Wait!" shouts the boy. "I'm not a Synthetic! I'm real! Killing me would be murder!"
Idomenes is pointing his finger, and his black assemblers, like a little galaxy, crowns upon crowns around him, hang in the air, ready. "All the real little boys are grown up."
"I'm 21 today. I just made myself look this way because everybody hated me as I grew older."
Idomenes lowers his hand. The black assemblers spread out and drop lower, idling on stand-by.
"You're Typhon."
"I am also her father."
"You? Impossible."
"I made her when I was twelve. She grew up as I slept. You've studied assembler technology history?"
"The major advances in carbon, oxygen and nitrogen manipulators are credited to you. All between sixteen and twenty. A child prodigy."
"My first experiment was to stimulate my own neurochemistry to greater speed and intelligence. There was a danger of madness, it's true, but what's a little insanity between friends? I knew I had to live my life only in my youth, because my life was going to be the shortest one of all. Imagine being the one child the execution of the whole planet w
as waiting for! Imagine being responsible for that!"
Idomenes' voice shivers with pity: "It's really not your fault."
Typhon snarls. "What do you know of it, gentle boy? What do you know of guilt and hate? They cleaned your genes of all those bad thoughts, didn't they? That's why you get to live, eh? But this is the city of the Typhonides. All the folk of Golgolundra are based on patterns of mine! Battle-lust and killer-instinct at its best! We'll see whose survival strategy is better: wild or domestic!"
Idomenes raises his hand and spreads his fingers. Black diamonds swirl upward, forming little clusters in the air around him. "I don't wish to fight you. I believe fighting is evil."
"But you want to murder the one who stole my daughter from you, don't you, gentle boy?"
"Don't tempt me."
"I know who it is."
"The matter does not concern..."
"Didn't you think she was acting strange? I know you stung her with an analyser, quick, from behind, while she was jumping off the bed. Sneaky and curious, aren't we? Maybe there's hope for you yet, eh? Look at the blood read-out."
Idomenes now closes a fist and holds out a pinkie. One slim black diamond touches his glove's fingernail, hovering. A unit in his thumb projects images into his eyes. "She is under a love-potion. Drunk. It's affecting her oestrogen levels and parasympathetic nervous system. And... and..."
Idomenes lowered his hand. The assembler, forgotten, tinkles to the marble floor. "...She really is pregnant."
Then he straightens: "But someone used a mind-altering technique on her..."
The little boy steps forward. "Let me see."
Idomenes points his thumb at Typhon.
To their eyes the atrium is gone. They float in a world of gigantic molecular chains, complex diagrams, brain patterns, nerve-energy comparisons, biochemical formulae.
Idomenes says, "The glamour is using a combination of neurotransmitters to trigger a sexual response, affect pulse and respiration, with this chain here used to receive a coordinating signal."
"Note the decentralized structure of the hypnogogic state-inducers in the hypothalamus." Typhon comments.
"Mm. Clever work."
They nod at each other, in mutual admiration of craftsmanship. Idomenes highlights one of the imaged strands: "Here we have the same information architecture governing the internal nerve-body reactions in the cerebrum and upper brain-stem. The destruction of any part of the love potion is insufficient; it holographically restores itself."
"Unless you know the key control sequences. Unless you know who sent it."
"You know. You keep her watched. Who?"
"I will tell you for a price..."
"On the world's last day? You'll tell me or..."
"Or what? I'll live to regret it? Don't threaten me, gentle boy! You've had your killer-instincts removed!"
Idomenes banishes the vision so that Typhon can see the menacing circle of black assemblers that have formed a circle around him.
Idomenes says, "A man can do by deliberation what his instincts don't allow. Talk."
"Hoo! Ha! But your precious purity of soul goes sour if you play rough. One slap and the Angels let you drown with the rest of us. And you can't hide the crime while you wear that ruby in your head. Domesticated animals have no secrets, remember?"
"But then I can't make a deal, either."
"But what I want, the angels won't care. Information."
"Speak."
The little boy says softly, "Your father has a complete genetic library of all the human and hominid races of the Earth. The angels helped him to collect it. They gave him a program for his wife, Pyrrha, so that her children will carry all racial characteristics in their inferons, to emerge in later generations and alter them. One woman with the ability to restore the entire race to full genetic diversity! I want a copy of that program."
Idomenes taps a finger on his palm. One larger black diamond swims forward out of the swarm and hangs in the air before Typhon's eyes. "Here it is."
"The whole library in one crystal? You're lying!"
"I'm wearing a truth ruby. You can check. You can also check to see that I'll give it to you a moment after I have the name."
"It is a deal. Turn my gloves back on so that the city mind can record our handshake."
"I thought Golgolundra was mad."
"Faked. I wanted the angels not to interfere with our internal computer sequences..."
A set of screams from outside interrupt; there comes the clamour of explosions, the roaring thunder of angel-flame cutting through walls.
Because Typhon's gloves are working, one of his radio-diamonds carries the noise of Lilimariah's shriek. Perhaps it is a sound of delight; perhaps a cry of pain.
Idomenes is already running down the corridors, back.
Typhon's little legs cannot keep up.
"The library! Give me the library - !" pants the boy, the ruffles of his clown-suit bouncing and flopping with each step.
Idomenes does not turn his head, but runs in swift lunging steps. "The name!" he shouts back.
Typhon falters and stops.
As Idomenes turns a last corner, he hears the little boy's weak voice behind him, trembling with malice: "Fool! Fool! Who else can it be? Who else knows the angel's fertility codes?"
Idomenes turns the corner just in time to see, framed in the still-smoking rectangle of the doorframe, a man of unearthly handsomeness, Lilimariah thrown across his shoulder, standing balanced on the balcony rail. A golden light is all around him. His surcoat is black, a colour the angels do not normally use. His wings unfold swanlike from his shoulders, shivering with crackles and darts of energy. His eyes are filled with light; he is looking upwards.
Lilimariah's perfect bottom is high in the air; her shapely legs are kicking, but Idomenes sees her smile falter when she glimpses him over her shoulder.
The angel flees upward, supersonically swift, a swirl of dust leaping after him.
The room is empty. A moment later, a crack of supersonic noise rolls like thunder far overhead.
Idomenes stands staring at nothing, while wave after wave of grief, and astonishment at how tremendously he has been betrayed, sweep through him.
Typhon, panting, walks up behind him. "Azaziel. His name is Azaziel. He's the one who found my cryogenic coffin, and brought me back here to my home. Just in time for my long-delayed birthday party, eh? No regrets, though. Gave you guys an extra thirty some odd years to prepare while I slept. Kind of like condemned women getting pregnant to delay a hanging, isn't it? One sleeping baby saving the world. Can't believe how foolishly my people here wasted this technology. It's all so obvious. The angels wouldn't even be able to threaten us if we had kept our heads about this. But hey! Give people a way to commit crimes without anyone finding out, I guess they'll do them, right? All sorts of gross crimes. I wish I was sure the angels weren't right about us after all. But, what the heck, you gotta root for the home team if it's your team, right? Anyway, that was Azaziel, Uriel's lieutenant. I don't know what Lilly did for him. Maybe she told him the Ship's real reason for the Doomsday drownings."
Idomenes makes a gesture, a flick of a finger, no more. A large black diamond hops toward Typhon.
Idomenes speaks like a man in a dream. "Here. The library."
"Thanks. Where are you going?"
"I know where he must be headed. There is only one place on Earth which will be preserved from drowning."
Grief and fear are in Idomenes' voice, uncertainty in his eye. He touches the gem in his head with a nervous finger.
The little boy whispers: "You're afraid they'll see, genes or no genes, that you still know what hate is. But they won't blame you for thinking about attacking a bad angel, will they? And my daughter - don't you have to rescue her? You're the only one who knows where Azaziel is going. You said so. Aren't you a hero?"
This last comment is uttered with a sneer.
A sneer that deepens after Idomenes departs.
&
nbsp; 3.
Towards twilight, Idomenes sees from afar Azaziel on the eastern side of Mount Neptushem, where the palaces and museums of his father are.
Here is the place where Ducaleon has brought all the works of man, gathered over years, to be preserved, and made gardens and houses for the sustenance and delight of the expected hordes of mankind deemed worthy enough to be spared.
Idomenes wonders why the streets are empty.
Not quite empty. There are two figures here.
The dark angel is standing on the lip of a fountain, in the high square between the observatory and a many-pillared archive. The third side is railing, overlooking far slopes below.
To the fourth side, behind and above the fountain, the ground rises again, buttress upon buttress of white marble and crystal windows flaming ever upward to a fantastic mountain.
Palace atop palace climb up the manifold gentle crags looming here, delicate spires high above fragrant gardens and grottos, blue pools reflecting fair sights, stands and arbours of trees laden with golden fruit and crimson, shady walks delightful, and, higher still, pine woods heavy with scented shadows.
The mountain-top, ringed by noble minarets, is crowned above with a stepped pyramid of singular grace, whose sides droop with hanging gardens, trailing trellises and lingering vines. Little singing waterfalls fall shining down its many airy balconies.
Lilimariah is kneeling, her arms embracing Azaziel's leg, her cheek against his knee. Her hair flows around her like long banners. She is not otherwise dressed.
Nor, it seems, is he. The black surcoat that served him as badge of rank Azaziel has thrown away. Aside from his own perfection, other clothes he desires none. His aura protects him against rain and cold and deadlier things which might harm him.
Idomenes is remembering a time as a child, when the angels dropped their auras, and walked naked in the garden air of his father's fields and lawns. But the Typhonides and others had filled all the air with so many viral weapons specific to angels, nerve-toxins and hallucinogens, that no angel dared shed his gleaming nimbus after.
Engineering Infinity Page 20
