Archangel

by Marguerite Reed

Now I prayed my rosary of springs, plungers, locks. The deliberate movements, the metallic snicks and chuckles soothed—though each piece infected me with memory. Once I took it apart, I put it back together again. Apart; together; I let my thoughts slip their moorings while my hands kept busy.

  So Moira thought to establish a military—how did importing this—this endocrine soup of a criminal—aid her? I digested the information that Chitra had sent. Built to buck the laser packs endorsed by Senator DeBeers, Beasts had been deployed as a combination of heavy infantry, guerrilla, special forces. I thought about how a platoon of Beasts—all those clones—armed with lasers and pulse rifles would look to a group of striking miners, rioting colonists.

  Rioting colonists.

  One didn’t build a military with just one soldier, even if you were Hannibal. True, the Beasts—according to Chitra’s file—routinely scored half again over the average human, Enhanced or Natch, but all the brainpower in the galaxy couldn’t create a military from nothing.

  What dragon’s teeth did Moira plan to sow?

  I focused, rifle in my lap, and wrested the pros of a Ubasti military from my reflexive repugnance. With a true military (alas for thee, Patrol & Rescue) could some of the bank-draining technology used to keep Ubasti citizens safe in their beds at night be relaxed? Perhaps, but the financial surplus would be diverted only to the development and maintenance of bodies and weapons. At what price? And what price would we pay if we did not develop it?

  Like a siren, the question enticed me: would the establishment of Ubastis as a military power—as a planet with sovereignty—abolish the need to guard our borders with the kiss-ass expedience of a constantly renewing treaty? Whoever thought the votes would always go in our favor was either stupid or too virtuous to live.

  I tried to imagine the logistics, the immense cost of bleeding in enough Beasts to forge a military large enough. I could not see any of our citizens in this dream military; the recruiters for Patrol & Rescue had a difficult enough time finding people. Genetic technology had ultimately domesticated human aggression in those Enhanced individuals that now populated space. Social pressures had done the rest. And like any culture that tried to eradicate some portion of its past, we were disgusted—and fascinated—by it: violence, combat, anything that smacked of the struggle to spill blood. We just refused to get it up to do it ourselves.

  Hence the safaris. Perhaps this also explained Moira’s interest in a military. What other plans had she made? How could she convince Numair? How was she planning to convince the rest of us? Whispers might follow me as I passed—people might look up to me, as Haas suggested—did Moira think to wield me as a rallying point for this campaign? I could not let her use me this time; I could not make myself a willing tool in her hands.

  Tell me what to do, Lasse.

  She could not build if her tools were broken. She could use neither me nor the Beast if we were removed from her equations.

  Laila’s voice echoed. You went in there to die.

  My hands stilled on the rifle.

  An image rose before my darkened eyes: of the welcoming arboros. I saw the light sift through the tremendous corridors of silent vegetable bodies, the slow and subtle shifts of bole and branch as if sentient of respiration.

  Here was peace; here was an end to pain.

  Enormity, terror, hit me—such finality!

  In my mind, all the bans against suicide clamored. Coward, to run; faithless, to flee; arrogant past comprehension, to close the door to God.

  Vashti Loren was waiting to die. My brain had been spent a long time ago, and my body had scurried around, nothing but adrenal stimulation and electrical impulse.

  The realization was bitter velvet drawing across my senses, blacker than the darkness in which I sat. The thought streaked across my brain that I could kill myself right here: load dear Varangar, put my mouth over the muzzle, and mist my brains all over the tufa wall.

  I rejected it. Repudiated the thought with not only my mind, but my body; I felt my breath coming faster, and my hands had seized like a corpse’s on the gun.

  To take care of the Beast out there, though—my muscles tensed in fear and excitement, as if striving toward orgasm; I could sense terrible release, just beyond the hill of time left to scale. Despite all my assurances to others, I could kill the Beast out in the arboros. No Fury would haunt me after that.

  I felt the bolts of my being slide home, springs and levers snug in their housings. The Varangar and I reassembled, I rose to my feet and invoked the living room light. I would have to tidy up loose ends, and I had less than a month to do it. For now, I would sleep—the restlessness had vanished.

  I padded into Bibi’s room, gathered her up, and took her to my bed. I cradled her diapered bottom against my stomach while we curled in my nest of a bed. Her scalp smelled of milk and young animal. I pressed my nose to her skull and let the odor of gun oil be eclipsed by her scent. All I could wish for now would be the pressure of other, phantom arms around me.

  “Explain it to me again,” Mohammad Tariq said. His image stared at me, through me, at nothing. Every Ubastis year he changed his wrap, wanting to reassure his clients that he was on top of things, a beat ahead of any legislation any organization could throw out. His sherwani was cut as severely as a priest’s soutaine and glittered with black crystal beads at wrists and neck. Whoever had scanned the wrap altered it slightly so that a fleck of white sparkled right in his pupils. Faux Mohammad’s gaze pierced.

  “We do this every time, Mohammad. Every time I go on a hunt. I’m changing only one thing . . .” I spread my hands in futile body language and tried to put as much of a shrug as possible into my voice. “I simply don’t feel comfortable naming Moira and Numair as Bibi’s guardians anymore.”

  “And you feel—comfortable—leaving her to an unpaired male whose op is decidedly dangerous?”

  “He checks out with Eval, right? I bet he’s even got an application for reproduction cleared and just waiting for the time when he can’t stand the procreative pressure.” Smooth, take it smooth, Vash, I told myself. This is no big deal. “Hell, I’m unpaired.”

  “Captain Kárpáti isn’t—wasn’t paired with Captain Undset.”

  Memory flickered: a much younger András—forever startle-eyed, close-mouthed—upon discovery of my entanglement with Lasse. We all love him, Vashti. But you get to fuck him.

  “Neither am I, anymore,” I said.

  He let the appropriate amount of time pass. “I’m sorry, Commander—”

  “You can drop the Commander bit.”

  “But the fact of the matter is that you were a special case, and in light of certain considerations, laws were relaxed.”

  A thought struck me. “Mohammad, if I applied for a reproduction permit again, would it get cleared?”

  The voice was as polished as the wrap. “Under particular circumstances.”

  “If I used Lasse’s sperm, right?”

  “I think I can say with a reasonable amount of certainty that would be cleared.”

  “And if I used someone else’s sperm?”

  Silence. “Of course the choice of genetic material would be very carefully evaluated.”

  “How if it were someone who’d already been cleared?”

  “Why would the situation even arise? Legally you’re the only one with any rights to Lasse’s sperm. We’ve seen what a lovely child came from that union, and I’m sure any application for another from your biological material and his would go through in a nanosecond. The horrors of unlimited procreation are a thing of the past—but let me share something with you.” I imagined him leaning forward, bestowing his confidence. “I have it on the best authority that any fertilization of your eggs with Lasse’s sperm will be sanctioned. Even past your childbearing years. You want implantation in an artificial uterus, you got it. You want a farm girl to carry it, say the word. You could even have more than one going at the same time, if you request.”

  I grimaced. No matter
what happened to me out there, I would still be capable of contributing to the gene pool. “What’s my file say about posthumous children?”

  Post, after; humous, from the Latin humus, earth.

  “You’ve not signed anything permitting posthumous fertilization, implantation, anything.”

  I thought about that for a while. Long enough that Mohammad had to offer up a discreet little cough. “Three,” I said at last.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Let’s give Bibi three sibs. In the event of my death, start the process on fertilization of three of my eggs.”

  “To be carried by?”

  “I’ll get back to you on that. While we’re on the subject—what can we do to tie up seizure of my firearms?”

  “A minute . . . yes, here it is. ‘Upon my death, all firearms, sights, and ammunition are to be removed to the station at Lagrange point five of Ubastis, known as Lazarette 1, to be surrendered to the provenance of the Tactile Museum of Ubasti Settlement.’ Yes?”

  “Upon my death, is that all? Nothing if I’m incapacitated, in a coma, sent to re-education, captured?”

  “All very unlikely events.” Another long moment of charged silence passed. “Has something come up that you should inform me of? Commonwealth law requires me to remind you, Doctor, that all of this is being recorded and may be used as evidence in any instance of criminal behavior.”

  I groaned. “Oh, come on, Mohammad. Any damn thing can happen out there. Not just just dying. I’m thirty-two years old and unEnhanced, and there’s always some asshole out there with a weapon who thinks we owe him.”

  Bibi chose that moment to toddle in, rumpled from my bed. Her pants had mysteriously disappeared, and her diaper was swollen to Jovian proportions. I leaned over and ran my finger down the line of her thigh. She pulled away with a distracted giggle, eyes on Mohammad’s wrap. I looped an arm around Bibi’s middle before she could stick her hand through Mohammad’s image, and scooped her into my lap.

  “All right. Your request is noted. I’ll begin the process and send you the documents to DNA-sign.”

  “Shokrun, Mohammad. It’s for the best, believe me.”

  “You’ll have to tell them yourself. I won’t play the my-agent-your-agent game.”

  “I’ll tell everyone who needs to know.”

  “When?”

  “Before I leave with General Zhádāo.”

  “That gives you a month.”

  Less than a month; three weeks. Three weeks of calmness—some might say anesthesia. My decision to kill smoothed utterly every care, every path: all of the rocks and roots of the process of existing from one day to the next were graded flat.

  I whistled on my walk to Assignment, I bellowed along with the tunes chirping from the speakers. More than one person commented on my smile. Murderers did not cry.

  Bibi and I lay in my bed, playing little-big body parts.

  She held up her hand to the light.

  “Little hand,” I said, then slid my hand to hers. My callused palm dwarfed her dimpled knuckles, stubby fingers. “Big hand.”

  She stuck up her pink wedge of a foot, grinning open-mouthed, watching me for the prescribed move.

  “Little foot.” I lifted mine, the arc of my instep cupping her whole foot. “Big foot!”

  The laughter that I loved to hear shook up from her belly. “Little leg—big leg.” She convulsed with giggles as I continued, patting her bottom, then mine. “Little butt—big butt. Little girl-place—big girl-place. Little tummy—big tummy!”

  “Do more, Mommy!’

  She would go all the way to comparing pituitary glands, if she could. We played that, we played tea party in the bath; the soapy water transformed into every tea imaginable, and some that weren’t—yet she always earnestly informed me that we were “out of joe.”

  The Children’s Center and the agriculture vaults adjusted my schedule as they always did when I prepared for a hunt to allow more time with Bibi, training days with my replacements. I cleaned; I packed; I invited András to supper almost every night.

  On the first evening he ate with us, he was a perfect guest—playful with Bibi, witty, amiable. As soon as I packed my daughter off to bed, however, he handed me a glass of hemp beer, and skewered me with a glare.

  I sighed. “Let’s go out to the balcony.” Outside the air hung pregnant with humidity. The thunderstorm of a few days ago had been the emissary of the summer rains. General Zhádāo had better be right on time, I thought, or we’d lose the last of the brilliant weather to a morass of daily downpours, mud, and vanished game.

  András, bless him, wasted no time. As soon as we sat, he pounced. “What’s going on, Vash?”

  “Mmm,” I said, and sipped the beer.

  “You’ve been even-tempered all evening. Not one peep about Moira, not one peep about that genetic müsli still stashed in D-block. You finally break down and start smoking?”

  I rolled the glass between my palms, watching the reflected starlight. The still-foamy head, tipping this way and that, shone like surf. “I’m taking care of the genetic müsli.”

  After a few heartbeats, I looked at him. He was staring out over the rail to the horizon beyond, although I had no idea whether or not he actually saw it. He licked his lips once and again; he could have been savoring the complex taste of the beer.

  “No assimilation?”

  “No.”

  “No execution?”

  I shrugged. “Not formal.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  The words came haltingly. “Moira—made some plans that I disagree with. Outside of UBI parameters. She wanted me complicit with her.”

  “So Moira finally crossed the line with you, huh? I wondered when that would happen.”

  “Moira’s been very good for us. She’s pulled in a lot of bank.”

  András gulped the last of his beer, set the glass down on the floor, and dug into the pocket of his trousers, bringing up a pack of sticks. With a flick of his wrist he shook one out and offered it to me. “We both could use one.”

  I hadn’t gotten laced up since before Bibi’s birth. András lit mine, then his with a little silver-finished lighter coil, and sank back in the chair. I copied his long inhale, feeling the smoke burn the back of my throat. Despite my best effort at trapping the smoke in my lungs, a series of coughs burst up from my chest.

  András slid a look at me. “Been a while.”

  I waved away his comment with my beer glass. “Beautiful night.”

  Feet propped up on the railing, we smoked in silence for a while, watching the stars. When I shut my eyes I could feel their light upon my face, pinpoints of silvery cool on nose, cheeks, chin, eyelids. I loosed a deep sigh and felt all the linchpins of my joints yield half a centimeter. In similar surrender, the words tumbled out of my mouth. “I’m tired of thinking about it. Ever since I saw that bastard in the Q pod. Going to do what you suggested. Going to take the Beast out and dispatch him.”

  Murzim glittered on the horizon, heralding the approach of the Dog Star. “I was wondering when you’d move on him,” András said finally. “Surprised it took you this long.”

  “There’s a long step between dreaming about doing something and making the actual plans.”

  He shrugged.”I won’t do anything now, but when you come back, I’ll have to take you in.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s no joke. Based on what you’ve told me tonight, I’ll have to testify against you.” His look was cold. “What about Bibi?”

  “I want you to take her.”

  Now it was his turn to cough. “Me?” It came out as a squeak and I felt a smile spread across my face. “Why me? I thought you already had a guardian named.”

  “It was Moira. I changed it.”

  “Why not Mieu, or Chitra?”

  The night suffused my pores. I uncrossed my ankles and stretched luxuriously. My tongue caressed the words: “Because you loved Lasse too.”

  �
�A lot of people loved Lasse.”

  Christ, András, quit fighting me. I preferred to let people keep their secrets, and loyalty to a friend was a difficult habit to break. But someone would have to know what was coming—and I wanted no more discussion about my plans. I took a deep breath.

  “Moira wants to start a military. With that Beast.”

  “She can’t.”

  “No, she can’t. Patrol & Rescue is as much military as we poor colonists are allowed to have.” Brokenly, with many long pauses, I told him everything she’d said to me, while he stared at me as if he’d taken a head wound.

  András swore for some seconds after I finished. “You’re planning to kill him, correct?” I exhaled dreamily. “Yeah . . . maybe that will stop her until she gets another crazy notion.” I took another long drag and held it.

  Time slid sideways. For a raw moment the smells of gunpowder, blood, shit, the fecund earth enveloped me. I felt the kick of the gun in my hand. For pure self-flagellation’s sake I tried to call to mind the face of the creature who’d killed Lasse—but all I saw were the specters of the dark tremendous trees.

  I closed my eyes and with a languid finger I traced a line from the hollow of my throat down into the deep neck of the kurta. Every sensation astonished me. Colors bloomed behind my eyelids; when I opened them, the darkness dazzled.

  No wonder András went right for the bud when he came in from a P&R run.

  The orange tip of the stick arced to the floor. He jumped to his feet, looming over me. “You’re deluded. You don’t smoke this stuff regularly, you’re not a drunk, you’ve never touched Pure that I know of—but you’re sure gaffed on some kind of mess, because your brains have turned to fucking tapioca.”

  I blinked up at him. “András, how much Natch is left in you? I think you’re demonstrating a certain level of aggressive behavior.”

  He barked an inarticulate sound of rage and swung a leg over my knees to straddle them, leaning down and gripping my forearms. “You think he’s just going to let you kill him without a fight?”

  The pale skin of his cheek, roughened with stubble, fascinated me. I lifted one hand to stroke it. Thoughtlessly I slid my hand along his jaw to the back of his neck and pulled, craning up to catch his lips with mine. For a second I savored the touch of heat, of silk.