Aeon Ten

by Aeon Authors

  To my stupefied surprise, she comes to me and kisses me on the lips. I can say nothing for several breaths.

  "Take me back to that couple, please,” I ask her.

  "It has spread further,” she tells me. “We are going to join it too. That will leave you alone. Will you be all right?"

  She actually cares for me? The thought beats at my defenses, and I repel it. “I will live,” I say. “Just leave me the cart with the wheels. Now take me to the couple you showed me before."

  They trundle me out to the understreet, and everything there has changed again. The walls and ceiling are living flesh, heads and sleeping faces pushing out from the stone surface like plant growths. Different skin tones span long reaches of the walls, making swirls of contrast here and there; a few stubby hands hang limp from the tissue-mass, evidently unneeded. It has happened faster than I imagined it could.

  I push my way to a sleeping face. It was once an andro woman, pale-skinned; now she is a webbed smear of white among many darker colors. “Talk to me,” I say.

  Her eyes open. “What?"

  "Talk to me!"

  "What do you want?” Her eyes start to sag shut again.

  I slap what was once her cheek. A ripple passes out from the slap as in the water in a pond. All over the street, eyes pop open and peer out.

  They are all interconnected.

  I scan down the street. Few bare stretches of stone exist any more; it is as if the whole street has become one being.

  I lean closer to the andro woman's face. “Are you hooked to everyone else?"

  She answers without opening her eyes. “We are one. The wires and pipes are a part of us."

  "Who are you?"

  "I am part of the comm system,” she says drowsily. “Once I was a sex toy. Now I live everywhere. In this street I care for the wires and lightpipes. It is good."

  "It is good.” Voices chorus from up and down the street.

  Frustration burns in me. The andro genes, capable of fusing nerve tissue and photonic and electronic linkages, must have done this. I thrust my cart forward, reach up to a man's sleeping face, seize it by the nose, and twist. “And what is your job?"

  At my abuse of him, the wall quivers and surges back and forth. “I am the air regulator. I control the oxygen level here in the City's depths. I have many faces. It is good."

  "It is good,” comes the chorus again. I cover my ears, too late. The chorus rises in a welling of celebration.

  "I am the waste transport."

  "I am the wall anchor for this street."

  "We are the lamp regulators."

  "I grow blood-food in my belly."

  "We dream for the City."

  The babble of voices rises, and then coalesces into a croon, a random song that harmonizes itself and soars through the City air. I sit stunned. They must be lying. Their freedom is gone; how can they be other than vegetables, their awarenesses dulled somehow? I rub my hand along the skin of something that was once a human being, but then I realize that it is little Furusi, the plates of stiffened colored paper still clinging to his flattened chest as he stands now against the wall, a part of it. I stare at him. He giggles.

  Mama Jones comes to me, and kneels down so that our faces are on the same level. She turns to Furusi and kisses him, and caresses his face and forehead. He laughs a soft, musical carol of childish glee, and turns his face from side to side a little, as far as he can before his wall-connected skin restricts his movement. “Come, Mama,” he says to her.

  At this moment I wonder if I looked this way when I was in my wall-prison. No, I decide, I never smiled the way he is doing.

  I don't understand. How can they abandon their free movements, their lives, their independence? Their humanity? For this, to become City plumbing for human filth? I fought so long to attain what they had, and they gave it up to me and became what I had been.

  "They are all fools,” I say to Mama Jones. “Now they are prisoners in the walls, and they can never be free."

  "That is not what they tell me. They play in the space in their heads. They all share in it."

  The andro space! How did they get it, unless ... Of course. Some of those who caught my plague must have been andros. With the shared circulatory system and my immunoharmonizers, the viruses must have passed along the reconstructive information necessary for the andro brain changes. So now they all have andro genes, and andro organs. That means they travel in the inner space that andros share.

  Now these bodies are only their roots, in a space much greater, as vast as the sky far outside this capsuled city in stone. In that inner universe they grow wings and fly, soar beyond the air itself into starlit blackness, morph themselves at the touch of a thought, savor the scents and tastes and feel of fruits drooping from trees of imagination.

  All this was once the andro reward for total slavery. Now it is free.

  Mama Jones looks thoughtful. “They tell me it is beautiful. I didn't believe them for a long time, but they have stayed happy. They are building new streets and homes and places in the City. Come with me."

  Before I begin my protests she trundles me off to an aswal, one of the thousands of street-crossing domes in the City, and stops under the center of the dome. She points upward.

  Long millennia ago, and up to a few short months ago, this place had been a confluence of stores and shops, festooned with climbing ivies and filled with birdsong. Store signs and logos flashed and sang everywhere, and the smell of cooking morsels filled the flower-tinged air.

  Now I see long, leafy vines hanging from the dome in patterns irregular and beautiful, their many colors shifting and shimmering with the light from the lamps, skins pale green, brown, pink, deep umber, rich violet, orange. Along each vine partway down its length grows a head. Some heads are round, others long and flat and narrow, like so many exotic fruit. The leaves are former hands and feet and ears, and even neatly-gathered plaits of hair.

  These vines are people. They speak in drowsy murmurs to each other, sometimes shifting and swinging a little in the mild air-currents of the dome.

  At the center of the dome a patch of flesh shifts, and a cracking sound reveals a crevice being opened above us. Some wall-dweller is opening a new space in the City's infinite stone. Voices carol, chant, and then rock fragments fall to the floor of the crossing. Fragrances fill the air; I recognize a thousand florals, rose and lilac and iris and orchid, and some gentle intoxicants and flavorings.

  The shelves and aisles of every shop teem with growth. A new commerce is here, done in vascular fluids and hormones, the fresh-minted currency of a single-bodied City.

  The girl Mama Jones is smiling, and her ruby eyes are soft and open. “You have given us a gift. My children have found a home now. Please come with us and join the City. It will be good."

  The walls nearby croon echoes, “It will be good."

  I back away on my wheeled cart. Words refuse to come. This girl looks nothing like Alayre, not now; she is instead alien to me, and awesome. I do not understand. All this beauty is utterly other, and my words fail to defend me against it.

  "You will be cared for,” she says. “There is love for all of us."

  Love! The word itself stabs me. I have to return to my lab, to develop some new entertainments for myself, to wield some new weapon against the people who—

  The people who ... my thoughts sag, my fury dissipates in a fog of frustration. Those people are long gone. “Go,” I say to her. “Take your children and join the City."

  "Come with us,” they say.

  "No,” I say. “I am Jono. I have work to do.” And I turn and trundle away alone, back toward my hideaway, the walls of my mind scrawl-painted with living words like “love” and “gift". As I approach the entrance to my corridor, I turn and look back. They are watching me, expectant, hopeful. The girl reaches out a hand in a last gesture of appeal.

  As if she had cast a weapon at me, pangs of agony strike my chest. Now I find I cannot turn either way, and
I sit legless in my cart, hanging in stillness in this city of living human walls, hanging between longing and rage.

  My eyes are closed. I do not know how long I sit in the living corridor, where now a dim color-shifting light glows out of broad panels of what once was skin, and the sounds and scents are of a dream of paradise. How fast it all evolves! A throb fills the air, like the drums of the City's many festivals, but deeper, surer; the skins of the walls pulsate with it, and I realize it is the beat of all the hearts, as one.

  A dream of paradise. How do I remember what is paradise?

  Thousands of years of hate stand in me, a convoluted city in which I am now lost and free, a stone place of my own delving. Paradise? Was there once a place by that name? Those I destroyed now weep in my mind. They will never stop.

  A hand touching my shoulder makes me look up. The girl.

  "Come,” she says. With a soft cloth she touches my cheeks, one, two; tears have rivered my stolen face, the face for which I have murdered casually. The tears run itching and hot down into my clothing. “They say you have much work to do."

  I nod. “I have done many things I can't repair."

  "They know. They say you will do new things."

  Now my fear is only of myself. “What things?"

  She waves around us. “More of this. They want more. What can you not do?"

  I want to say, “I cannot love,” but I stop the words. Instead I say, “Will you show me what to do?"

  "Yes,” she says.

  "Yes,” say the living walls.

  "Then, yes,” I say. Fear grips me, and a wild energy sings through my mongrel pillaged body. Young hands turn my wheeled cart, and we move off together, into this growing living underground forest of flesh, flesh now grown into something more and still so strange.

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  Angels Over Israel: Three Slides by Lavie Tidhar

  Author's Note: “I was sitting on an Israeli writers’ panel at Icon, the annual Israeli SF convention, and the final question was, to each of us: ‘What do you need in order to write the other's stories?'

  'Easy,’ my friend Guy Hasson said when they all got around to discuss what makes a Lavie Tidhar story. ‘It needs to have angels in it, and something to do with Israel, and—'

  'You know,’ I said, ‘you've just given me an idea for a story.'

  So this is it—them, for there ended up being three, in the end—written in Hebrew, and first published on the Israeli webzine Bli Panika (www.blipanika.co.il). They were 500 words each in the Hebrew version, slightly longer in English, and I had fun writing them. Though I'm kind of laying off the angel-dust, for the moment at least..."

  Hunting Angels in the Yard

  MICHAEL SAW THE ANGELS wherever he turned. Tiny in size, the angels hovered in the unmoving summer air, their wings rippling in the sun's blaze.

  Like butterflies, thought Michael before he tried to pet one of them. The winged creature attacked him then, its little face twisting in an animalistic mask of anger. Long sharp teeth bit into Michael's finger and returned bloodied.

  I won't cry, Michael told himself over and over again, I won't cry. And then surprised himself with the composure with which he hit the angel until the tiny body fell to the pavement. Then Michael stepped on it.

  He remembered the sound the angel's body made, like a balloon emptying gradually of air. His foot rose and fell until a black, oily stain remained alone on the ground. Michael had to wash his shoes in the tap of the housing estate's great yard: but very quickly he found out it didn't matter, since no one knew about the angels and could not see them, or their remains.

  Since that first time Michael repeated his actions many times: he wandered the great yard and hunted angels.

  Michael's mother, Mrs. Tavori, worked long hours. His father, Mr. Tavori, was killed in the line of duty. Michael remembered the embarrassed-looking officer who used those words one late-night hour in the flat's small living room. He stood in the small room, his face tired, his black hair thinning. But how Mr. Tavori—a shoe-seller whose military role was as a supply sergeant—was killed, that the officer could not explain. There was a firing accident, he said, but how and why, that he couldn't say.

  Killed in the line of duty. The words became a kind of rosary in Michael's head, the syllables beads he moved from side to side. He remembered the sound the angels’ bodies made against the window: they rose in a cloud at the sound of the words and tried to break into the flat, beating themselves against the glass. He collected a heap of bodies from the grass the next morning, fallen angels.

  In the mornings Michael prepared breakfast for himself and then went down to the yard to play. The old automobile lying on its back, lacking wheels or windows, was first, followed by the brook that ran from the estate into an invisible underground tunnel. Michael played in the brook despite the smell that sometimes rose from the black water.

  Sometimes he submerged the angels he had caught in the water, holding them against the bottom until they stopped fighting and became silent dolls in his hands.

  He played with the dolls, creating worlds in which angels fought each other like winged knights, and others where they were fighter planes that left curving lines of smoke across the sky.

  Michael's nights were dark. The same officer who reported his father's death now visited his mother in the nights. His face remained embarrassed. In the darkness of night his grunts changed to the coughs of a long-term smoker. The angels penetrated the flat then and circled in the air like drunks, suffusing Michael's room with the scent of purity.

  Michael hit at them but they would not leave him alone, and finally he hid underneath the blanket and tried to not believe in angels. He knew most people believed in them even though they couldn't see them. It did not occur to him to ask who the angels themselves believed in.

  In the mornings Michael prepared himself breakfast and then went down to the yard to play. He hit the angels with a broken table leg, the bat whispering through the air before hitting. He collected the silent bodies and made them into dolls.

  Michael played with the silent angel dolls; and he dreamed of a world where he himself was an angel, and he floated alone in the blue skies, holy and pure, and hunted clouds.

  A Year of Angels

  THE BLIND ANGEL stood on the corner of Rehov Ha'atzmaut, Independence Street, his fingers spread before him in a silent plea for help. A chasid walking past threw a coin into the offered hand absent-mindedly, and the angel's blind, pale face turned and followed him as he passed through the crowds of people.

  It was a good year for army officers and politicians; a bad year for angels.

  The angel's face turned now towards the sun, and he began to march down the street, the stumps of his wings moving helplessly. As much as it can be said, he felt frightened amongst the crowds.

  Perhaps he remembered earlier days, years that came and went like pine needles falling. Remembered the forced assembly, the soldier who hit his brother, Raphael, with the butt of an Uzi. Gabriel's public hanging in the square, his delicate neck broken inside a rolled-up New Party flag. Perhaps he remembered an attempt to escape: to spread wings and fly into the open sky.

  Perhaps he remembered the helicopters that waited for them there, in the sky. Remembered, maybe, the bullets that severed his wings, and his final fall to earth.

  The soldiers began calling them, the survivors, the fallen. From a legend, a myth, an ancient story they have become a joke. Lame, they were no longer scary, became subject to ridicule, things children pointed at in the streets and sometimes threw stones.

  But those were other times, and who knows, after all, the way an angel's alien mind works? Who knows what he thought of, if he tho
ught at all, while he made his lonely way through the human streets, searching ... for what? A place to sleep at night? A covered entrance to a block of offices or flats, where he could lie covered in newspapers? Who knows what they want, those refugees from God.

  The angel, anyhow, remained expressionless, but—perhaps instead of an answer—began to climb the Carmel. How and when that king of the skies became a resident and beggar of the city of Haifa I do not have an answer for. But he began to march, heavily, stubbornly, up the mountain, and as became obvious almost immediately, he was not alone. As he climbed more and more angels joined him, appearing from every hidden corner, putting scars and ravages on display.

  It was the first time since the end of the war that such a crowd of angels had gathered. The authorities became concerned. Haifa University at the summit of the Carmel was evacuated immediately, but a small group of students remained behind and reported on the unfolding events with an ancient radio transmitter.

  Past the university it seemed as if whole nation of angels had appeared out of nothing at the heights of the Carmel. That same army now began to march down the road towards the Druze village of Osafiah.

  Helicopters, some of them media, appeared at this stage, circling in the sky like bees, and army units that a mere half-hour ago were on a training exercise on the slopes of the mountain now surrounded the army of angels but didn't stop it.

  The angels marched down the village and continued on their way. They did not stop in Osafia and not in Daliat-al-Carmel: and only slowly did it become apparent to the watching audience what their ultimate destination must be.

  It was a good year for television presenters and journalists. A bad year for angels.

  The army evacuated the angry monks before the angels reached the Muchraka. The soldiers waited amidst the trees and looked nervously towards the ancient monastery that sat at the top of the Carmel, in the place where, it was said, the Prophet Elijah fought with the priests of Ba'al.