She turned to the vid feed and her voice rose to majestic proportions. "And the angel of the annunciation came unto Mary herself, our Virgin Mother, and said 'Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now you will conceive in your womb and bear a son and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.' And so it is writ in the gospel of Saint Luke and so it has been."
The reverend gave Lilia a stern glance. "There are angels, Lilia, of this we have no doubt, and further, they are the emissaries of God. What message did the angels bring to us from our Lord the Most High?"
Everyone in the lobby seemed to be listening, waiting for the divine wisdom to spill from Lilia's lips to their ears.
It seemed a bad time to admit that there had been no message.
Or that Lilia hadn't thought to ask for one.
All the same, the reverend expected an answer.
Lilia debated the merit of "Eat more fiber" or even "Peace be unto you." "Love your neighbor" had some potential given the Good Samaritan reference, but seemed a bit thin, especially seeing as two angel-shades had been entrusted with its delivery.
That alone seemed to require a certain weight, message-wise.
"Um." Lilia stalled for time, quite badly. "I'm not sure I should just say it."
"Of course not!" someone interjected in an imperious tone.
Was salvation at hand?
Someone pried the reverend's fingers from Lilia's shoulder. The interrupter tut-tutted, which gave a hint of her identity.
Lilia remembered that tut.
"A message of this import is for the ears of the highest officials, first and foremost, and must be considered carefully before it is disseminated amongst the masses." Dr. Willielmina Olsendatter seized Lilia's shoulder with her own iron grip and tut-tutted again. "Really, Reverend, you must show an increment of social responsibility."
Before the reverend could recover from the fact that she had been chided on vid—by a stranger—Dr. Olsendatter swept Lilia away.
"Demure," she snorted. "I thought about abandoning you when you said that. You couldn't be demure to save your life. It's part of what I like about you, dear."
"Sorry. And thanks." Lilia felt as if she'd jumped from the fat into the fire. Dr. Olsendatter was heading to the hotel café, dragging Lilia into a restaurant thick with hungry Nuclear Darwinists.
Lilia upgraded her assessment: being snagged by the oldest living professor on the face of the earth was worse than being beaten up by S&D or cornered by a vid-evangelist on a mission.
The day could only get better.
"Fool woman," Dr. Wilhelmina Olsendatter grumbled. She hailed a wait-shade, demanded two orders of the largest breakfast platters on the menu, then picked up her rant where she'd left off. "How utterly predictable that she would edit the verses she recounts."
"Excuse me?"
"That bit from Timothy about women being submissive has a verse in the middle of it, declaring that women shall not teach: 'Let the woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first...' etc., etc. But then, that would be problematic for a female evangelist, wouldn't it?"
Doc Mina, as her students had been instructed to call her, lowered her voice somewhat. Everything was relative: Doc Mina had one of those high voices that carried well over long distances. "That is, as you must know, one of the verses most often cited against the notion of ordaining women as priests."
Lilia didn't know that, so she pretended otherwise. "Of course."
"It's nonsense, naturally," Doc Mina fumed. "We've known for more than a hundred years that Paul didn't compose either of the gospels called Timothy. They're simply not coherent in terms of style or references to the letters that he did write, but that doesn't stop people from making references to them as if they were, well, gospel." Doc Mina smiled at her own joke.
The reverend's voice carried from the lobby. She was expounding upon the wisdom of God in sending the light of his word into the deepest darkness. Lilia supposed that was a reference to the low incidence of religious devotion among Nuclear Darwinists.
The fire was definitely a better choice than the fat, so Lilia settled in. She'd always liked Doc Mina. Because so few Nuclear Darwinists took an interest in "the dovetailing of religious belief with historiography in the wake of nuclear destruction," Doc Mina had always been thrilled to find anyone in her lectures.
To be present and conscious merited an instant A.
Lilia had received a flurry of messages from Doc Mina after the angel-shades had been revealed but she had been ducking her old prof. After the argument with Gid over Armaros and Baraqiel, Lilia hadn't been ready to go toe to toe with any other experts.
Doc Mina, however, could trigger guilt like a forgotten maiden aunt and served some up right on cue. "Now, Lilia, I've had the very devil of a time getting hold of you. Did you receive my messages?"
"Well, yes—" Lilia thought she improvised brilliantly "—but I didn't want to be offhand about something so important."
"Ah! Well, you might have acknowledged receipt. I had always believed you to be a woman with an increment of good manners."
"I've misplaced them, in the field."
She gave Lilia a stern look. "Well, you certainly must realize the importance of this discovery to my own research. Why, it's remarkable and yet so utterly predictable."
"Excuse me?" Lilia was sure she'd heard incorrectly.
"In terms of human mythology, of course. Even the Reverend Billie Jo knows that angels are the traditional bearers of messages from the divine source itself, or Himself, depending upon your choice of terminology. Myself, I've always thought of the divine as sexless—I mean, really, wouldn't you expect a cosmic force to have evolved beyond mere biology?—but to each, his or her own."
Doc Mina spread her napkin across her lap as the meals came. It looked like three eggs over easy with sausages, fruit salad, and toast, but Lilia knew better. The eggs were too gelatinous to be real and she was deeply suspicious of the sausages.
They could have been biologic foam.
"Faux flesh and extruded fruit." Doc Mina sighed, then frowned at the black liquid optimistically labeled "tea." "You'd think they'd just go with supplements. I so dislike compromise. Go one way or the other, is what I say, don't dither about in between."
"Real tea, if less of it." Lilia had gotten spoiled by the contraband readily available at the circus—this stuff tasted so foul that she wanted to spit it out.
Doc Mina nodded. "Exactly. Like the opening keynote lecture. They should have booked something different when Paul fell ill, as I'm sure I wasn't the only one looking forward to his anecdotes. But no. This person from the labs is stepping in and won't be nearly as entertaining as Paul."
"Paul?" Lilia had forgotten about Doc Mina's tendency to meander from topic to topic.
"Paul Cosmopoulos," Doc Mina chided. "You remember him, of course. Director of the Institute's Research Labs? Paul would have sparkled, making the most painfully dry material fascinating. Doubtless the substitute will drone on about research results and drug patents, which is so boring even though it is important, of course, to both the Society and society at large." She shook her head and chewed on her "toast." "The revenue from such things funds my own research, of course, although it's vulgar to say so."
Maybe it was better that there was a little social vacuum around them. Lilia knew from experience that Nuclear Darwinists didn't take kindly to suggestions that their research was dull.
"They should have fetched Paul and compelled him to come, or canceled the talk. Enough compromise!" Doc Mina boomed this last bit, which created more space around them as more Nuclear Darwinists moved farther away.
"It's not like you to be so critical," Lilia said car
efully, distrusting this new sense that she had an ally in the Society.
"I'm tired of pretending," Doc Mina said with a snort. "And there's not much more they can do to me now. They've given me a smaller office and cut my salary."
Lilia was surprised. "What's going on?"
"Oh, it's all the old nonsense about my courses not being relevant to the curriculum." Doc Mina chomped through her "sausage" with gusto. "It seems that I've been classed as a 'frill.' Ernest Sinclair, you know, insisted that Nuclear Darwinists embrace a broad range of studies, not just science and research, in order to make them more balanced individuals and thus better scientists, but no one seems to remember that."
"Are they going to fire you?"
She shrugged, her brave posture not fully hiding her disappointment. "Anything is possible, of course, once the Council gets involved. I'm sure they'd rather I just quit. Can you believe that students hate my course and find it irrelevant?" She looked at Lilia, obviously needing verification that this was madness.
Unfortunately, Lilia knew it was true.
So she changed the subject. "The Council? Do you mean the Council of Three? I thought they didn't exist."
Doc Mina snorted. "Of course they exist, they'd just prefer that you weren't sure." She jabbed her butter knife in Lilia's direction. "You worry about whether they exist and speculate upon who they are, instead of concerning yourself with what the hell they're doing. That's how this kind of travesty gets as far as it does. Who do you think makes all of the decisions? The Board of Governors?" Doc Mina laughed uproariously at her own joke. "They can't even find the restrooms on their own."
"I didn't know."
"You didn't pay attention."
"Well, who is the Council of Three?"
"There you go, worrying about who they are instead of what they're doing." Doc Mina wagged a slice of toast at Lilia, changing the subject herself. "Which reminds me, Lilia, you must tell me all that you can about the angels, especially since you've been ignoring my messages."
Lilia felt a smidgen of guilt. "What do you want to know?"
"Begin at the beginning, my dear. How did you find them?"
"You know, it almost seemed that they found me."
"Of course. Angels are said to be, if not omniscient, then far closer to that divine perfection of knowledge than mere mortals. What was the first thing they said?"
Lilia didn't even have to think about that. " 'Do not be afraid.' They stole my line, if you must know."
"Classic," Doc Mina muttered. "Were you afraid?"
"Startled." Lilia took a bite of her cultivated fruit. "And they were ... bemused."
Doc Mina laughed. "Oh, that is simply too perfect."
Lilia felt the need to set her former prof straight. "Doc Mina, you do understand that they aren't actually angels, not really messengers from the divine. Theirs is a rare mutation, but they're shades, not angels."
Doc Mina was unpersuaded. "How do you know?"
"Because there's no such thing as an angel."
"Is that so?"
"Armaros and Baraqiel exhibit an extremely rare mutation ..." Lilia tried to argue, but didn't get far.
Doc Mina, after all, was giving her a weapons-grade glare. "What did you call them?"
"Armaros and Baraqiel."
Doc Mina was so intent upon Lilia that she put down her toast and her fork. "Who gave them those names?"
"They already had them. They told me their names."
"Interesting." Doc Mina gnawed through the rest of her breakfast, then glanced down at her empty plate with surprise. Lilia pushed her own toast plate closer to the professor.
"You must have researched those names," she said slowly.
Lilia knew she'd made a mistake. "No. I never thought of it."
"Lilia, Lilia." Doc Mina tut-tutted. "Word was that you'd never made a good Nuclear Darwinist but I had hopes that you would make a decent scholar. Armaros and Baraqiel are the names of two of the fallen angels, two of the angels accounted by the Essenes to have been Watchers or Grigori"
"Fallen angels? Don't you mean demons?"
"No, no, no. Keep your sources straight, my dear. The Essenes were a Jewish religious sect, most active around the time of Jesus himself. Demonology really didn't come into its own until the middle ages, after angelology had been exhausted by theologians."
"Oh."
She pounced on Lilia's toast, margarined each slice with gusto, and launched into lecture mode, spewing bread crumbs as she did so. Evidently no one had ever told Doc Mina that it was inappropriate to eat and lecture simultaneously.
Lilia wasn't going to be first.
"To fully understand, we must return to the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, put there by God to tend the garden, instructed as they were to not touch the fruit of the central tree, the Tree of Knowledge. The Latin Christian tradition insists that Eve, tempted by the serpent, ate of the fruit then shared it with Adam. In so doing, the pair became aware of their nakedness, and when God learned of their disobedience, they were expelled from the garden, forced to work the land to feed themselves. Eve, for her transgression, was cursed with pain in childbirth, a legacy to all women. And so, because of this defiance of God's will, the garden is lost to mankind for all time."
"I've heard that story before."
"Of course you have. We all have. It's almost as old as time, and has its parallels in many other cultural traditions. What is important here is that the story had other variations, before this official version was decided upon." She chewed the last of the toast, looking around for more fuel. Lilia surrendered the rest of her faux fruit and Doc Mina began to devour it.
"Did those variations include the Watchers?"
"Funny you should ask. I was just thinking about them this morning, for some reason."
"Armaros and Baraqiel."
"Very good, Lilia. We'll make a scholar of you yet. Those were the names of two of the Watchers, as recorded in the First Book of Enoch. These angels descended to the earth to teach important skills to mankind, skills which God would have preferred to deny to man, just as He denied us the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge."
She looked at the ceiling of the hall. "Let's see now. Armaros was said to have taught men to free themselves from enchantment, which one wouldn't have thought was a problem until someone knew how to cast enchantments. Maybe that was the job of another Watcher. I forget. Baraqiel taught men the secrets of astrology. There are others, of course, a dozen or so all together, but you get the idea. The Watchers were given credit for teaching mankind what passed for science several thousand years ago." Doc Mina licked her fork. "Few divinities are fond of those who challenge their edicts, so these angels came to be described as 'fallen' and equated with evil."
"But did they really mean to be good, or just to be defiant?" Lilia asked, fully able to identify with the urge to challenge expectations for a just cause.
Doc Mina smiled. "It is written that they felt lust for the daughters of men, and that was why they descended to earth. After they had had their pleasure, then they shared some of what they knew."
"Not everything?"
"We'd know a lot more than we do, if they'd done that."
Lilia was intrigued by all of this. "You don't really think that Armaros and Baraqiel are these same Watchers, do you? I mean, that would make them several thousand years old."
And angels, immortal beings made of light.
Impossible.
"Angels are immortal, my dear, or close to it. At the very least, they mean to put us in mind of those old stories."
"But why?"
Doc Mina sighed. "It's interpreted as a sign of the end times, of course. The angels gathering, the Antichrist making one last bid for the souls of men, blah blah blah. You'd think that over the millennia, we could have come up with some new stories, but we keep fiddling around with the same old themes and elements. I'm surprised, actually, that you don't have more people like the Reverend Billie Jo following yo
u around."
"You sound skeptical."
"Well, the world has been scheduled to end so many times and failed to do so that I've lost count. It seems to be much more resilient than one might have expected. Just look at what we've done to it in the last century, never mind what we've done to each other." She winked. "I'll wait until the Devil himself shows up for his last cameo appearance before I get worried."
Lilia picked at the rest of her breakfast, thinking.
Doc Mina cleared her throat. "I do have to wonder, Lilia, why these angels appeared to you. I mean no offense, but why you? If they'd appeared to the reverend, she would have asked after their message to mankind. And if they'd appeared to me, well, they'd have saved my academic career." She fixed Lilia with an accusatory glance. "You could have at least given me a first interview."
Lilia thought that if angels had any foresight, then they would have seen her as their best bet for survival. There had to be some advantage in not being sliced and diced for research purposes when on a mission from God. Lilia tried to think of a way to express that politely, given present company, but failed.
Doc Mina gestured toward Lilia's plate with her fork, indicating the two faux-flesh sausages left on it. "Are you going to eat the rest of that, dear?"
Lilia stepped out of the hotel with relief. That sense evaporated when she saw someone who resembled the most annoying cop in the Republic, apparently waiting for her.
But looking—if it were possible—even more delicious than Montgomery had looked the night before. This man had the same build, the same handsome features, but he was dressed like a norm.
Well, a norm with pizzazz.
He wore a black faux leather greatcoat that was halfway to being a cape, one that was faced with velvet and trimmed with faux fur and would swing with flair when he strode. And he would stride. Mere walking wouldn't be sufficiently debonair for this vision of masculinity.
His tall black boots were remarkably similar to the ones the cop-Montgomery had worn the night before, and his tapered black trousers showed his muscled legs to as much advantage as the pseudoskin had. There was a froth of lace at his throat, one that made him look all the more of a male animal for the contrast, and he wore dark gloves.
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