Angel Stations

by Gary Gibson

  When this is all over, Ursu thought to himself, I’m going to go home. I’m going to see if there’s anything left of the city. But I won’t be a priest this time. Perhaps Xan’s soldiers had already killed all the priests of Nubala in their desperate hunt for the Shecumpeh device. And perhaps that was just as well, since he couldn’t imagine Uftheyen or any of the other priests accepting what Ursu now knew to be true.

  The picture of a galaxy arose in his mind as he trudged along. Clouds of stars, thought Ursu, but that was all too much to take in. He shook his head, feeling irrationally angry.

  ‘All right, they live in the heart of the galaxy. And you’ve told me about them, but only that they oppose these creatures you call—’

  – Angels, yes, who imprisoned another race within the singularity that lies at the heart of the galaxy we inhabit. As the creature mentioned singularity, the word was translated in Ursu’s mind into something close to a comprehensible concept. A ball of rock, but the size of an entire world, being squeezed by enormous hands until its own internal heat ignited it into a star, then being crushed again, and again, reducing to the size of a mountain, of a house, until finally it sucked in all its own light.

  Then the Shai revealed the image of a great cloud of stars drawing rapidly closer to each other, eaten up by their own heat and density, squeezed together until they became something else – something terrible and dark that lay beyond the veil of stars Ursu saw nightly in the sky above him . . .

  But this was too terrible a concept to think about. He shook his head, as if to free his mind of it. It reminded him of the well he had been trapped in, but bottomless, so that you could fall forever, and ever, and ever.

  Ursu was now climbing upwards, nearing the crest of a steep hill that granted him a view of the distant ocean, now reduced to a thin silver line on the horizon behind him. He imagined he could make out ships pushing through blustery winds, on their way to distant ports. Nubala had been cold, but Ursu was here experiencing an intensity of cold that required an entire, undiscovered vocabulary to describe.

  The inhabitants of the last little town had been strange, small folk distinguished with broad, flat ears who spoke some dialect Ursu could barely make out. They had directed him inland to the east, towards the Northern Teive Mountains. They thought he was crazy, to travel alone so far into such a hostile land. It was the land, they warned, of white, icy death.

  ‘Why were the Angels at war with these other creatures?’ he pressed the Shai.

  – A philosophical disagreement. They did not communicate with anything you might recognize as a spoken language. Instead they communicated their ideas between themselves soundlessly, mind to mind.

  Ursu struggled to understand. ‘You mean mind-readers?’

  – Nothing so crude. They used technological means – directly.

  ‘I still don’t understand.’ Ursu watched his breath clouding in the crisp morning air as he came to the top of the craggy hill, and caught his first glimpse of the Northern Teive Mountains, those cruelly jagged cousins of the Southern Teive range.

  – Remember how the effigy spoke to you, when you still believed it was in itself a god. And how I speak to you now drawing on your memories and sensations. So much conflict on your world and mine arises from misunderstanding: a misheard word, a misinterpreted action. Breakdowns in communication can lead to wars and injustice, because, for all our skills at communicating with each other, we do not always do it as well as we should.

  – Well, the Angels recognized this fact, and found a means to communicate intent directly, in such a way that the recipient understood not only the message, but also the context of the message from the specific emotional or even social circumstances of the communicant.

  Ursu was struck by this. ‘You are saying the gods were created as facilitators, as a way of avoiding the possibility of misunderstanding.’

  – Yes, but they have other purposes too . . . as guardians, caretakers. The Angels realized an attack was coming.

  ‘They saw into the future?’

  – Something like that, yes.

  Ursu thought for a while. ‘You told me earlier that they had no free will.’

  – When the future becomes the present, in that eyeblink before it becomes the past, it becomes set, unchangeable. Nothing can alter it then. But if you look into the future, that act of seeing itself fixes the future in place. In a sense, the future is determined by the one with the greatest ability to perceive it. Sometimes, the mere act of looking at something is to change it.

  ‘And you can see the future?’

  – Yes.

  Ursu thought hard. ‘And just because you see it, it must become what you see?’

  – That is the essence of it, yes. However, I am not the only one with the ability, and that is where matters begin to grow complicated.

  There was a sparse forest in the valley ahead. It looked dark, forbidding, but he’d have to traverse it to get anywhere near the mountains.

  ‘So what will happen after all this is over?’ asked Ursu, finding his way down this side of the hill’s more gentle incline. In the distance, he could see tribal totems rising from the plain beyond the forest, great stone pillars maybe half as old as the world.

  – Ursu, as long as I and people like me exist, free will is gone from our lives and yours. To remove us completely from this existence is the only way to recover that free will. The Shai who is my enemy wishes to be a god. But I should think otherwise, and you are going to save your world.

  ‘And am I going to succeed?’

  This time there was no answer.

  Sam Roy

  He opened his eyes. The vision of the Kaspian ex-priest faded, to be replaced by the shelter he had dug from the snow. He had managed to drag himself away from the bottom of the cliff he had fallen down, a considerable journey still from where Ursu tramped north towards the Citadel.

  After he had initially betrayed Ernst, it had rapidly become clear to Sam that the man would have had a higher calling as a medieval torturer. When he wasn’t in too searing agony to think, Sam had been almost impressed with the range of carefully deliberated cruelty of which Ernst was capable.

  As Sam had landed at the bottom of the cliff, most of the bones in his body were smashed. He was still alive, however. Neither he nor Ernst ever knew just what it would take to actually kill them.

  After centuries of torment, Sam was sure his pain threshold must be as high as any in human history. It had become, by this time, merely a state of being.

  At least he was no longer manacled to the ball of rock. Though it had shattered on the long drop down, he was still left with the heavy steel chains fitted tight around his scrawny wrists. He painfully gathered them into his arms.

  Of course, he had known in advance for all these decades that this would eventually happen. Worse still, he had known that he would be dismayed and horrified by the even greater damage to his ruined body. Nor would this foreknowledge negate the fear and the doubt he would feel.

  When it occurred, his communication with the Kaspian god-machines had led him to certain conclusions suggesting why the Angels were no longer present in the universe. Except those self-same conclusions led to yet further questions, such as why the Angels had deliberately booby-trapped human DNA with the key to incipient godhood.

  He suspected the answer lay with the intelligence now imprisoned within the heart of the galaxy. In his farseeing conversations with the sentient machines, the Kaspian gods had seemed unclear on the precise nature of that intelligence. But that the answer lay in the Kaspian’s fabled city of Baul was a conclusion he had drawn for himself.

  Sam hadn’t ever lied to the young Kaspian priest, but the awful truth was that he didn’t really know how things would finally turn out. Had never known that, couldn’t know, however hard he tried to probe the future . . .

  He lay whimpering there, deep in his snowy cell, and waited for his bones to knit. His skin was blue with cold, but he still could not
attain the luxury of death. In a few hours from now, he’d struggle forth again . . . and then certain things would inevitably happen. But in Baul itself – the vast artefact that humans had named the Citadel – he didn’t know what would transpire, could only be vaguely sure of events leading up to the crisis.

  Beyond that point, he saw only a blackness, a void more terrifying, more innately disturbing, than any knowledge of the future he carried within himself.

  Roke

  When Roke had first set his eyes on them, he had been terrified of these creatures, the Shai.

  Communication was proving impossible with them, as they did not appear to have one of those small metal boxes the Shai Vaughn possessed, allowing them to respond back in one of the Kaspian tongues. When Roke addressed them, they reacted only in confusion.

  Roke had therefore gained the distinct impression that these three Shai were not connected to Vaughn, or at least were not nearly as powerful. Were there conclusions to be drawn from their sudden dramatic appearance? Roke had seen the ruins of the craft that had flown blazing over their heads, and the swathe of destruction it had cut through the forest. Were they fleeing from something? Roke couldn’t begin to guess. But the unexpected factor was their substantiality. They felt real to the touch: made of flesh and blood, not phantom creatures.

  He gave up pondering and decided to retire for the night. Roke had ordered a dozen of the guards to construct a holding pen for the creatures. Perhaps, if he persisted, he might still get to understand the role these three had to play in the Shai Sam’s plans for all of them.

  Kim

  ‘Now might be a good time to try the Books,’ said Elias.

  Vincent was showing more signs of life. He’d mumbled a few words, and he’d looked up at her for a few seconds, before seeming to drift into a more natural sleep. It was maybe a good sign, but he wasn’t out of the woods yet.

  ‘I was thinking that,’ Kim said quietly. It had been awkward, even strangely embarrassing for them, standing there with some kind of eminence amongst the Kaspians attempting to communicate with them. Hello, take me to your leader, she imagined his clicks and soft barks might be translated; but they had stood dumbfounded, unable to reply.

  ‘You understand, though, there are no guarantees,’ she said. ‘I might not be able to get anything out of it. And if anything sudden happens during the night—’

  ‘I don’t think it will,’ he replied. ‘They sleep at night, just like we do. That’s why they’ve got us in this . . . cage.’ He peered around in disgust.

  ‘If only we could figure out a way to talk to them, they might even be able to help us.’

  Elias looked at her incredulously. ‘Jesus, think about what you’re saying. Imagine if some of them had landed in medieval Europe. How long do you think it’d take before we’d stuck them on a bonfire.’

  ‘They haven’t yet shown any sign of intending us harm,’ she replied tightly.

  ‘Which makes them rather better than us, I guess, unless they’re thinking of eating us eventually.’ He shrugged away the hard look she gave him. ‘Okay, maybe not that bad, but they’re primitives, and forget that at your peril.’

  Kim pulled out the vial, and shook one of the last precious Books into the palm of her hand.

  She put it on the tip of her tongue, felt it began to dissolve, soon filling her mouth with that familiar sour taste. As she swallowed, she noticed Elias watching her with a curious expression. His eyes flicked away, and he sat in silence, crouching on the bare earth in a corner of the little wooden box confining them.

  Kim closed her eyes, daydreamed . . . daydreamed through another person’s eyes, in another time. She was seeing the world through Susan’s eyes. She was back in the Citadel again, far away. No, not so far away, now.

  She concentrated harder, trying to draw the Susan memories away from that time, that place.

  Back on Earth now; random, dream-like images flitted before her mind’s eye. She again experienced being Susan, learning about becoming an Observer, about the bioware technology. She sat in a comfortable room with a dozen others, a soft-screen writer by her arm.

  ‘Let’s be frank,’ the lecturer was saying. ‘There are a lot of ways to describe the process when an Observer consumes a Book, and how their bioware interacts with the complex molecules, and the information encoded on them. But let’s be frank.’

  The lecturer – a name came to Kim, but it meant nothing to her – surveyed the men and women seated in front of him. ‘Every such theory amounts to bullshit,’ he continued. ‘But it’s part of the human condition to give even the unknowable a rationale. By quantifying it, we give it the illusion of fitting it into some compartment of human knowledge. Yet nobody really knows how the implants work. And because they shouldn’t work, they are technically,’ he said with a broad grin, ‘an impossibility.’

  Kim frowned inwardly. Wherever the knowledge she was looking for was, it wasn’t here. Yet it was proving extraordinarily difficult to extricate herself from this scene. The lecturer was now looking at her directly.

  ‘The reality of what the Angels were, and what their bioware itself was, or is, lies somewhere with the secret of why the universe seems so silent of communication – of those alien radio signals we once assumed were flying between star systems.’ Kim/Susan stood and walked to the door. As she glanced back at the lecturer, he seemed to be in pain now. She was sure she could see blood staining his shirt and trousers, but his other students appeared to be oblivious to his distress.

  ‘So why the great silence during those long, pre-Angel years when we searched the skies for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence – while all the time it was right there, beyond the orbits of Pluto and Charon? Perhaps that was because we could not share the aliens’ concept of what it means to really communicate. Kim?’

  But before she could react to him addressing her by a name he should not have been using, she was already somewhere else. She was back on Earth in Susan’s private apartment – a place Kim remembered with the fondness of lost love tinged with regret.

  She knew instinctively that now she was in the right place. She recognized instantly all the printed books, the loosely stacked ream of smartsheets, packed with information about Kasper: information about its flora and fauna; observation and speculation about the Kaspians’ civilization.

  Now, crucially, she could taste that knowledge, letting it flood from the Book into her mind. Yet, at the back of her mind, she wondered what had happened earlier: at how she had experienced the illusion that something within the Book itself had spoken directly to her . . .

  She looked up and caught sight of herself/Susan in the mirror. Susan’s mouth was moving, speaking silently from the reflection.

  But there’s no one else here, thought Kim, her blood freezing in her veins. She looked around, feeling panicked, then back again to the mirror. To her horror, she now saw another figure reflected in the glass. Lurking in the shadows behind her, it was the same lecturer, but his body was now horribly distorted: his skin blue and waxy, criss-crossed with dozens of scars. All his teeth were blackened and broken, and a wave of nausea flowed over her.

  ‘But what does it mean to truly communicate?’ the mutilated image continued, as if still addressing his class. ‘Words are not enough, for to truly communicate ideas, you must first remove the barrier of spoken language, the barrier of our different experiences. To truly communicate, you must first become the other person, to gain a full understanding of them. Without that enhancement, communication – as the Angels understood it – is impossible.’

  Kim walked towards the door, too terrified to look behind her in case there really was something there. She had been under a lot of stress recently, and maybe hallucinations and make-believe were encroaching on her reality. She stepped out into a busy corridor, feeling lighter and stronger than she remembered experiencing on the homeworld. But then, as a native, Susan had no problem with the gravity.

  Then she noticed a mouthful of b
roken teeth grinning at her from along the corridor, and the lecturer’s monstrous form came loping and dragging itself towards her. She felt nauseous, and in the real world dropped her face against the strange-smelling Kaspian soil. She became distantly aware of Elias watching her, tight-lipped and tense.

  Her mind was filled again with the lecturer’s loathsome image. ‘I’ve had centuries now to study what remains in the Citadel,’ it continued unstoppably, ‘and that’s how I uncovered a tragedy. Those Books were a means for the Angels to understand each other – and other species – from a multitude of unique perspectives. The memories are not actually contained within the chemicals themselves. Instead they trigger something – not universal consciousness, not God, not anything that crude, but something for which no words exist.’

  She was running now, under the great bright spaces of an arcology’s vast atrium. Arctic sunlight spilled down from above, reflecting brilliantly off distant snowfields. She swallowed her fear. This is only a Book, she thought, not something real.

  She stopped, turned. It came closer. She felt her horror replaced by something more like pity mixed with revulsion. It was a man, but his injuries were so horrific it was like looking at some product of interac-generated imagery rather than anything that could be alive.

  She swallowed her panic. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘My name is Samuel Roy Vaughn. I live in the mountains to the north.’ And suddenly she was there too, in this man’s own memories, piloting a shuttle down from the Station in the hectic weeks after the Hiatus began, filled with a sense of holy purpose, of manifest destiny.

  ‘We came here because some of us had been created to foresee the course of the future.’ She suddenly remembered a childhood spent with other siblings, the regular tests that were carried out, the feeling of loss when one of them would fail a test and would be gone the next morning from their sunny dormitory, never to be seen again. ‘Like Elias, my genes were altered through experimentation with Angel biotechnology. But I, more than all but one, have seen the path of the future. Please understand.’