Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2016

by Charlie Jane Anders

  Evelyn had drawn her knees up to her chin. The windows in this room were double-paned and thick, but she could hear wind outside. It made her think about the empty swimming pool overhead, the tarpaulin straining at its moorings, snow sheeting across it and slipping underneath, gathering over Leslie’s cooling tear ducts.

  “I’ve been trying to reach Miss Retson on her phone,” said Miss Erish. “She’s turned it off.”

  “No,” said Evelyn. She explained about the battery in Andrea’s phone. Miss Erish looked skeptical.

  “You have a daughter. Are you waiting on her now?”

  Evelyn said no, but Miss Erish didn’t believe that either.

  “Your phone has no battery problems. It is a-buzzing. Why don’t you check it?”

  Evelyn let her hand rest on the purse at her side, felt the rhythmic humming of the thing sure enough. Hands trembling, she reached inside and withdrew the phone.

  COME HOME MOM PLS, the text read, and she read it aloud when Miss Erish told her to. Miss Erish sat quietly for a moment, then delicately lifted the tablet so the yellow light from its screen climbed her torso like a dismal sunrise and finally illuminated her face, the eyes casting ravenously as if from the barren solitude of a tomb.

  “You were here earliest,” she said. “While the others were sleeping, you were awake and about.” She set the tablet on its back, so it lit the curtains, the ceiling. “Of all of them, even Mr. Allen … you arrived first.”

  Miss Erish looked down at the light. It seemed to grow brighter as she did so—as though the sensor had noted some competing glow, and automatically tuned the illumination higher.

  “Oh dear,” said Miss Erish. “Oh dear, oh damn.”

  Her voice sounded raw. It seemed to Evelyn as though she were crying. Evelyn’s thumbs hovered over the screen of her phone, and the little keyboard there. She felt as though she ought to respond to her daughter, but she could not take her eyes from Miss Erish, who trembled.

  “What do you think about Miss Retson? She pursued little Miss Wilson very swiftly. As though she were very worried … very worried. Might she … Might it be love? No. That cannot be. I shall send her a message. Instruct her—” Miss Erish’s fingers clacked furiously against the glass of her tablet. “Oh damn, damn.”

  Evelyn set her phone down. She reached her arms toward Miss Erish, slid forward on the bed, and Miss Erish joined Evelyn there. Miss Erish felt cool and brittle beneath her blouse, and left to her own inclinations, Evelyn would have recoiled at the inhuman touch of her.

  They sat like that for some time, listening to the wind outside as it howled across the highway, along the river—somehow growing colder themselves, in one another’s embrace.

  About the Author

  David Nickle is the author of the novels The ‘Geisters, Rasputin’s Bastards, and Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism, and co-author of The Claus Effect, with Karl Schroeder. His stories are collected in Knife Fight and Other Struggles, and Monstrous Affections. He is co-editor with Madeline Ashby of Licence Expired: The Unauthorized James Bond. He lives in Toronto, Canada, where he works as a journalist covering municipal politics. You can sign up for author updates here.

  Copyright © 2016 by David Nickle

  Art copyright © 2016 by Greg Ruth

  All prayers are answered, but sometimes the answer is no.

  And sometimes the answer is: “Let me talk to my manager and get back to you.”

  “Really,” the caller is saying, “I’ve been donating to the church for years. Going every Sunday. He wanted that. He wanted us to get married there. It’s legal now. Honestly, I expected better service, but I think persuading him to come home is the least you can do at this point.” The client’s voice shakes a little with frustration. “Amen,” he adds.

  “I understand your frustration,” I say. “I really do understand, and I appreciate your patience, Mr. Rimington-Pounder.”

  Across the desk, Grem, my cubicle buddy, collapses in a fit of silent laughter. Gremory is a demon, so he’s allowed to laugh at the unfortunate, including the unfortunately-named.

  I try to explain to Mr. Rimington-Pounder, as gently as possible, that prayer is not a vending machine, where you pop in a certain amount of devotion and miracles drop into your hands.

  “Is there—” the client moistens his lips. “Is there someone higher up the chain I can talk to?”

  “Certainly, sir,” I say, in my best friendly call center assistant voice. “Let me just put you on hold for a moment.”

  I press the mute button and roll my eyes at Gremory.

  “Let me guess,” says Grem, “Rimjob wants to speak to someone higher up?”

  I nod. Of course he wants to speak to someone higher up. Everyone wants to speak to someone higher up. But you can’t speak to the manager.

  The manager is absent.

  I take Mr. Rimington-Pounder off hold and adopt a different voice, a man’s voice. Something broad and comforting and Midwestern. Authoritative.

  “What can I do for you, sir?” I ask. The client is soothed by this voice. I let him talk. I follow protocol and offer a lot of unspecified redemption without actually promising anything at all.

  Human beings are generally confused. That’s where we come in. Mainly, as the floor supervisor explained in a recent slideshow presentation, humans are confused about wants and needs. They’re always on their knees begging for things they want rather than asking for things they need. It’s very important to steer them away from the wants and speak to the needs, not that we could solve them, because—as the supervisor explained—that would just be too easy.

  Wants and needs. Of all the indignities of flesh, I’m really glad that problem doesn’t apply to me.

  I know exactly what I want.

  That’s my problem.

  * * *

  Where is this place?

  Somewhere overhead. Somewhere between thought and memory. You might catch a glimpse of it from the window of an airplane, with the dawn burning in over the endless blankets of cloud and all the lights dim in the cabin. You might tell yourself you didn’t see what you saw.

  Do angels walk in the clouds?

  Not if we can help it. It’s damp and full of weather balloons.

  But can you peer through the mists rolling around the lower levels of heaven? Did you see the endless tower blocks of human resources tangle through the curds of cumulonimbus, in the deathless place where they serve Him night and day in His temple with monthly production goals and customer satisfaction surveys?

  Angels work. Of course we do. We’re all on zero-hour contracts. Time, after all, is a human idea.

  We get twenty-five minutes of it for lunch, with deductions for any bathroom or smoke stops we might have taken. Hating your boss is also a human idea.

  The day everything changes, I spend my lunch in the break room with Gremory. There are many rooms in my Father’s house, but only one with a functioning coffee machine.

  Gremory wears his hair long and shaggy, which is against regulations, but he has the highest client satisfaction rate on our floor. He has this ability to be nice to every caller without letting the slow grind of their daily trauma worry him too much. It’s a demon thing.

  Grem waves to me from behind his copy of Kerrang! They tell us it’s important to stay authentic, but Grem doesn’t need to try very hard at that. He’s sitting with his feet up on a swivel chair, reading his magazine and eating a ham sandwich.

  “You shouldn’t let it get to you,” he says, seeing my face. “I never let it get to me.” This is true. Every demon I know is a profoundly chilled-out individual. Our two spheres incorporated over a thousand years ago, and the merger has been a big morale boost all-round.

  “I hate not being able to do anything for them,” I say, grabbing a coffee from the machine. “The heartbroken ones, most of all. You shouldn’t laugh at them. It’s not their fault.”

  “Human hearts,” says Gremory, “are brittle, but also durable. I should
know; I’ve eaten thousands. You should never attempt to engage one while it’s still beating. I advise against it.”

  “You’re jealous because nobody wants to fuck you because you’re a demon.”

  “That,” says Gremory, pushing half a sandwich into his second mouth, “is a vile stereotype. I get mine. I just don’t like drama.”

  “I can’t bear the lovesick ones, though. They’re so pathetic. And they’re always killing themselves, or each other. My ones do, anyway.”

  “Your problem is that you keep trying to talk them through it,” says Grem. “I just tell mine to take a walk in the sunshine. It’s not like they remember the calls.”

  That’s not quite true. They remember the calls in snatches, like the dregs of dreams you can’t touch with your tongue, draining away. A sense of something profound, whether it’s redemption or frustration, vanishing on the edge of vision.

  Our repeat business is booming.

  “I submit to you,” says Grem, “that you are projecting, my friend. I submit to you that you’re getting stressed because you’ve been due another of your dramatastic love affairs for years, and you’re bored, and you need to learn to relax.” Grem wipes his hands on his untucked shirt.

  “If you will insist on romancing the doomed,” he says, “Go and fuck a panda.”

  I throw my empty coffee cup at him.

  * * *

  They tell you not to fall for human beings because they always die. For me that’s part of it. That’s their beauty and their tragedy—everything is always rotting, puckering and falling apart under your hands, and you claw at them with your kisses to slow the tug of time but you can’t. The panic in their eyes when they reach the age when they realize that, yes, it’s happening to them too.

  The way they swallow their breath at the point of orgasm.

  I can’t get enough.

  Some of us are perfectly happy counting dust motes in sunlight, or recording the little lives of the luminous creatures at the bottom of the ocean trenches who live and die and drift to the sea floor and know nothing but darkness.

  Not me.

  Loving humans is what got me demoted.

  A long time ago, before the current system, when there were far fewer of them, it was our job to walk among men and women and all the other human creatures and teach them things they needed to know. Writing and calculus and basic food hygiene. We were allowed to give real advice, back then, and we taught them a lot. But they taught us things, too.

  They taught us what it is to fear death and to nourish hope. They taught us about pleasure. And passion. And love. Love more than anything. I have always been drawn to the ones who burn with it, the ones who take their tiny lives in trembling hands and try to wring out all the juices before it’s too late.

  I love fucking human men.

  I love loving them, too, though if I’m honest, the fucking is quite a significant part of it. Nothing is ever just sex.

  I loved a scientist, once, in Babylon, in the land between the two rivers. His beard was slight and his eyes were black and fronded with long, long lashes, and it was the eighth century after they killed the Nazarene, and he found me in a decorative jar in the market, where a witch whose son I had seduced kept me prisoner for a decade.

  He took me home and broke the glass and out I blossomed, fully-formed and heavy-breasted, and he rushed for his notebooks.

  He was tortured by the impulse to understand everything. A fatal condition in humans. He was full of rage at his own ignorance, and the more he eked out through his art and philosophy and mathematics—which in those days were all part of the same discipline—the more he discovered he did not know, and the more that knowledge consumed him.

  I loved him for it, and he resented me. Even in our bed, he resented me. His fingertips would outline my contours as if I were drawn on a manuscript, searching for the secrets of my substance.

  It hurt him to love me because I was a door to the wisdom of eons that he couldn’t unlock. I knew the names of all the stars, and I wouldn’t tell them to him. I couldn’t. It would have driven him mad, and he would have ended up wandering the streets with the beggars and the crazed soothsayers.

  He told me that there were worse places to end.

  He longed to know the names of the stars, the true names that they only tell each other, how they were born, the exact latitude of this or that red giant. I told him that I had walked on a star once and it was nothing special. After that he didn’t fuck me for weeks.

  He liked me in feathers, though. One morning I found that he had plucked out all the filoplumes on my left side and was dissolving them in acid, trying to determine what I was made of. So I took him walking on a star. He didn’t like it as much as he thought he would.

  * * *

  After lunch, I spend the afternoon answering calls from the Gulf of Mexico, where the summer storms are the worst they’ve been in a generation, just like they were last year. And the year before that.

  The lines are going mad. Please protect my home. Please save my children from the water. Lord, let us get out in time. In your name, Amen.

  I hate telling them no.

  Those of us whose work is out in the world call the phone lines an easy job. I say, you try finding fifty different ways to tell people that all their prayers won’t save their home, their business, their kids. Try persuading those people to stay signed up to the long-term plan.

  I don’t like it when they shout at me, but I understand. That’s practically what we’re here for, to be shouted at. We’re here to sit and take all that fury and frustration and tamp it down into something manageable. Angry people boil over with life, raging and raging. They fascinate me.

  What I really dread are the quiet ones. The ones who say very little. Sometimes they cry very, very softly, hoping you won’t hear them, which just makes it worse.

  They all get through to us eventually. That’s why it’s important to know where they’re calling from. A Catholic with an urgent question about the propriety of cleaning consecrated wine off a good white carpet will get rankled if you quote the Koran by accident, and there you are and you’ve just lost a repeat client.

  So I talk to the flood victims in my gentlest voice for an average of ten minutes and twenty-three seconds each.

  Then I have a nice chat with a nun in Bolivia who really just wants Jesus to tell her where she’s left her glasses this time.

  I tell her they’re by the sink. Miniature miracles are allowed for those who’ve signed the lifetime plan. Nobody believes them anyway.

  Then there’s a Satanist kid in a hospital in Dallas, having his stomach pumped and calling on Lucifer and all his many minions to slaughter his enemies and bring him a dose of medical-grade morphine to get him through the night.

  I hand that one over to Gremory. He lives for this sort of thing.

  “Hello,” I hear him say, “my name is Legion. How can I help you?”

  Eventually he persuades the kid that he doesn’t need to call on Satan to destroy his squat-mates with fire and fetch him drugs, he needs to call his mother.

  Then we go for dinner. Grem has three hot dogs and reads me extracts from High Times.

  Grem is happy because on Thursday afternoons they play heavy metal over the main speakers, rather than the usual airport music. Apparently heavy metal is calming and improves our productivity. I have another coffee.

  “Are you there, God?”

  The next caller is six or seven years old at the most. Before answering, I wait for the standard message to play over the still, small song, remote and clear:

  Your prayer will be answered by the next available operative. Please note that we cannot take requests for miracles over the phone. Your orisons may be recorded for training and monitoring purposes.

  “You’re speaking to a member of the heavenly host. How can I help you tonight?”

  “Is that Jesus?” A little girl’s voice. I check the location: Cape Town. It’s morning there.


  “No,” I say, “but I’m— I’m friends with Jesus.” This is an acceptable lie to tell to children. Nobody has seen the Nazarene in two thousand years.

  “I’m friends with Jesus, too!” says the little girl. “Can I talk to him?”

  “Not just now,” I say, “but I can take a message for Jesus and he’ll definitely listen to it.”

  “Oh. Okay. I just wanted to ask about my cat. His name is Lemon. My name is Carla. I’d like Jesus to please look after Granny and Lemon and make sure they don’t die.”

  Why are children always the hardest? Adults know not to ask for that sort of thing directly.

  “Also, I’d like Jesus to kill Mr. George.”

  “You can’t really ask us to kill anyone, Carla,” I say. “That’s not very nice. Who is Mr. George?”

  “He’s Mummy’s boyfriend,” says Carla. “He hurts me sometimes. I was going to pray for him to go away, but then Mummy might go away too. So, really, it would be better if he just died.”

  You can’t fault her logic.

  We’re not allowed to smite wrongdoers with great vengeance, or even moderate vengeance. We’re not allowed to make calls to social services. Human beings are supposed to sort things out by themselves, even six-year-old girls. We’re just supposed to listen. That’s all.

  I hate my job sometimes.

  “I’m afraid I can’t kill Mr. George,” I tell her. “That’s not allowed.” Carla starts to cry very quietly, as if she’s worried someone might hear her.

  “I understand that you’re frustrated right now,” I say, reading lines off the on-screen handbook. “I’m just looking through your options for you. Hold the line, please.”

  I press the mute button, and I lay my head on the desk for a while. Then I pick up the phone again.

  “Well, Carla,” I say, “I’ve had a look, and unfortunately we’re not able to murder Mr. George for you today. What I can do for you, though, is make the bad feelings go away for a bit. I can make them go deep down inside you where they won’t bother you until you’re grown up. How does that sound?”