Archangel

by Marguerite Reed

She shook her head. “You’re it. And this—” nodding toward his immobile form “—has been it for him. When we turn off the lights, he lies down on the floor—the bed’s too small for him—and when the lights come on he sits.”

  “Does he eat? Has he been exercised?”

  “Three of us walk him to the gym every other day. He does two hours of weights, an hour of cardio. Not much for a big walad like him. He doesn’t eat much.”

  “Doesn’t he?”

  “No. You’d think, huh? My perception’s that he’s depressed.”

  “Aw, that won’t last long.” I could not have stopped my grin even if I’d wanted to. “All right, let him see us.”

  Z. Ismail hit the second button. The electrified filament shimmered with a brief, hissing noise and cleared once more. The Beast looked up, his expression one of polite incuriosity; but I saw the fabric across his arms smooth suddenly with the bulge of muscle beneath.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  In the diffuse light his eyes shone an innocuous hazel. His brows looked tidy enough to have been tattooed on, but the stubble on his scalp was only now beginning to show in a skullcap shadow. Slow growth from Q—no follicle stimulant had been wasted on him.

  No have you eaten, no peace be upon you. I got right to it. “Have you ever been planetside before, or is all your experience in false G or asteroid constructs?”

  “All three,” he said, voice a baritone growl, metallic from the mic inside his cell.

  I glanced a look at Z. Ismail. Her brows had shot up and she shifted the foam thrower in her grasp.

  “He hasn’t spoken, either, I take it,” I murmured.

  She shook her head.

  Never mind the subtlety of the remote; I wish I’d brought the Varangar. “Good,” I said. “Do you have any experience with slugthrowers? Specifically—”

  He got to his feet in a sudden dilation of flesh and silk, and only years of hunting animals that outweighed me by a ton kept me from jumping back. “Listen,” he said. He held his hands open, palms toward me, pleading. “Please listen to us.”

  “Relax.” My own hand up, in answer, making a suppressing motion. Back off. “I’m getting you out of here.”

  His hands dropped to his sides and he stared at me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “So sit down, and shut up while I ask you some questions. I need to make sure you’re not going to get killed the moment you set foot out in the bush.” I retreated a couple of steps, all nonchalant cool, hoping I remembered how far back the bench was. I was lucky, this time. I sat, crossed my legs, ankle on my knee. Z. Ismail slid back to the wall next to me, her face smoothed to blank vigilance.

  The Beast did not sit but altered his posture into what looked like a parade rest, feet apart, hands behind his back. “Experience: slugthrowers, plasma rifles, sonic cannon, radiation guns, laser packs.”

  Radiation guns. Those horrible pain-dealing weapons we’d watched destroy the Salaam colonists. “And, of course, hand-to-hand.”

  “Yes. Commander.” He shrugged. “Shorin ryu. Jujitsu. Sebakkha.”

  “As well as plain dirty fighting.”

  “When the situation calls for it.”

  “Does it usually?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “We didn’t use it much until Mustaine.”

  “And another thing—why do you always say ‘we?’”

  “Clone cant. We—we meaning all of us—” a widearm sweep “—say ‘we.’ Use the first person plural. Instead of the other one, the first person singular.”

  “I.”

  “Yes. That one.”

  For the first time the thought occurred to me how lonely he must be. I pushed it away. “The solidarity goes so deep, then?”

  He shook his head. “We are incapable of the word. Post-gestation, that speech center is terminated.”

  “So no je, no yo, no anaa, no mayn.”

  “Not in any language. Standard protocol to eradicate the word for—” He patted his chest.

  On one hand, it was laughable, seeing him knocking at his pectorals like a bad two-D actor. Me Jane, I could’ve said in cruel mockery. And yet the calculated practice of such behavior modification stunned me.

  But I grilled him. For an hour I kept him on his feet while I lounged on the bench, spine a comfortable curve, hand loosely cupping my ankle.

  “Why is an analog robot more satisfactory than other robots in the field?”

  “The least expensive robot that can learn. The only robot that becomes more efficient over time. They’re also tougher and can be more easily repaired on the spot. Or programmed, if it comes to that.”

  “When you’re hunting in mountainous country, how do you use time of day and convection to your advantage?”

  “In the morning, hunt uphill of your prey. The rest of the day, hunt downhill.”

  I asked him about food prep, recyclers, amount of grain to caliber. Everything that I could think of that would allow me to estimate how much of a liability he might be. He bore it all, for an hour, and every answer he gave me was correct. The majority of my clients were far less aware. In a different time, in a different incarnation, he might even—as much as it galled me to admit it—be useful.

  At the end of the hour I could detect no fatigue on his part; he stood in precisely the same place, in precisely the same pose. I, however, felt cross from hunger and nerves.

  “Ismail,” I said, “I hate to ask this, but—”

  “Commander?”

  “Goddammit, if I hear that one more time—it’s Loren. Or Vashti. Or Doctor, if you have to be formal.”

  She slanted me a look that I’d bet Bibi had seen on my own face. “How may I be helpful, Doctor?”

  “Could you get us something to eat? All of us?”

  She flicked her gaze from me to the Beast and back again. “Of course,” she said, and thrust the foam thrower at me. Reflexively I took it.

  “I’ll need my hands free,” she said.

  The door hissed shut behind her before I could point out that the lanyard attached to the weapon’s stock could easily be slung over her shoulder. I stood up and hefted it, testing its weight. A bulky, ugly, heavy weapon, it possessed none of the vitality of the Varangar, or any of my other weapons; but I could not deny its value as part of the less-lethal arsenal of Patrol & Rescue; and it felt more at home in my hands than the one I’d brought with me.

  I looked at the Beast. “You ever shoot one of these?”

  He shook his head. “No. Doctor.”

  “Ever been shot by one of them?” I leveled the muzzle, experimentally. He watched me, his face utterly still. “Could you break out of the foam once it hardened?”

  “We were sent to warn you,” he said. “Please, listen to us—Doctor, Commander, Vashti—”

  I crossed the space between us in one long stride and smacked my palm against the mic control.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  His hand went to his forehead in a gesture of pure frustration, palm tented, rubbing his brows with his thumb and forefinger. I watched him. Would he continue talking, in the hope I would turn on the mic? Would he display in his cell? He could kick and hit all he liked, and the walls would never dent. The only inconvenience might be that he would hurt himself, or that he would have to be tranquilized. Had it been an antique cell, with bars or chain restraining him, I could have fired the foam thrower if he decided to become violent.

  He did neither. He moved right up to the edge of his cell until he was barely a centimeter from the field. Less than half a meter of air and charged filament separated us.

  “I’ll turn it back on,” I said, “when you decide to say something I want to hear.”

  Slowly, deliberately, he raised his hand to the space between us.

  “You can’t,” I said, half-laughing. “It’s a horrible shock.”

  He took a breath, lips tightening, like a man about to dive into deep water, and touched the barrier.

  Electricity fulminated in a hissi
ng white chrysanthemum and I flung up one hand to cover my eyes. Sparks bit my face, my throat, my hands, snapping and crackling; the field howled; the smell of aggrieved ozone stung my sinuses. I could not resist peeking through my fingers. And in the flaring tungsten light I saw the Beast punch his hand through the mesh and hold it out to me, palm up.

  The Lazarette techs scheduled General Zhádāo’s drop for four hours past midnight, an hour and a half before dawn in this season. Starport lay twenty minutes outside of New Albuquerque as the magrail went, so it was a sleepy group that shuffled through the station—checkpoint after checkpoint—and finally into the gleaming little car.

  When the five of us finally settled into our seats, the aberrance of the situation jolted me afresh. At another time András alone would have been in uniform. Today he and I both wore P&R green, UBI-approved sidearms on our belts, turbans wrapped with just the right combination of snug and slack. Numair’s turban was similar; Mieu swathed herself in the orange dupatti I remembered from Moira’s party. Only the Beast did not cover. One of the train techs brought us cups of caffeinated tea, his smile genuine for Numair, Mieu, András, and myself, but slipping perceptibly when he got a good look at the Beast.

  I smiled as blandly as I knew how at the train tech, and Mieu, after looking from him to me and back again, took the fifth cup.

  “I’ll bring the carafe,” he said.

  “It’s tea,” Mieu said helpfully and leaned across the aisle to hand the cup to the Beast. “Perhaps you didn’t have any in—”

  The quality of the Beast’s voice did not lend itself to dryness, but he compensated in other ways. “The wardens did let us have a ration of ethyl alcohol once a week. When we ran out, we’d lick the sweat from our bodies for a buzz.”

  Mieu goggled. “Ethyl alcohol? But that’d—”

  “Kill an ordinary man,” I interjected. “But our Beast isn’t an ordinary man, are you, Beast?”

  The fight. The evulsed eyeball protruding past the lids and lashes. And that creature on his feet, still fighting.

  His eyes over the rim of the cup held no expression. More eloquent, to me, was the hand in which he held that cup. Gloved in porous hemp, which itself was lined in non-adhesive gauze permeated with melaleuca gel, his hand articulated with no stiffness or guarding. He switched the cup to his other hand, though, and I saw him flex the fingers, opening and closing in a fist.

  I knew it hurt him. The current had broken after he’d ruptured the integrity of the mesh, but the spark burns had blistered across fingers and palm. I’d examined the hand for degree of severity myself, rubbing the skin and checking for Nikolski sign.

  When he hissed at my touch, I’d looked up at him. “You’re not going to kill yourself on my watch,” I’d said.

  “We’ve had worse,” he’d said.

  “I thought so.”

  Had his hand been extended in any other fashion, I would’ve reached for the remote. But it had been as eloquent as a dancer’s gesture, a plea, like my glimpse of Mumtaz in his eyes.

  I could imagine fewer worse places to be burned, but as a Beast, he must have sustained wounds the rest of us might only suffer nightmares about. It would not, unfortunately, make him easier to kill.

  “My perceptions are still somewhat hazy on your reasons for being here,” Mieu said. She had never taken well to unexpected teasing. “Surely you understand that an . . . individual of your background might not experience the warmest reception.”

  The hand flexed. His green-blue-brown eyes fixed on her, as if sizing up an objective area. “Dr. Loren has reviewed those issues with us.”

  I winced. Christ, he’s smart.

  Numair smiled. “We’re hosting an ambassador of sorts, Mieu. Our guest here represents a certain faction who may be able to offer advice concerning a hitherto unexplored facet of our colonization.”

  András laughed, and said, “That’s why you’re governor, because you’re the only one who can talk like that all the time,” while Mieu looked pointedly from András to me, and then at our holstered weapons.

  “He looks more like a prisoner to me.”

  Abruptly the car trembled, coming to life as the magnets engaged. A tinny ping! over the speaker announced the chief engineer. Her voice suffused the car, first in Arabic, then in English. “Good morning and welcome to BittaBrite Magrails. BittaBrite donated all magrails used on the planet, connecting each city to its spaceport. With the addition of Qetta into the Integral, BittaBrite engineers will soon be dropping to Ubastis to construct yet another of the galaxy’s most peerless commuter systems. Fast, clean, and light, that’s BittaBrite.” A pause. “Sorry for the grammar, Citizens. I don’t write the script. Sit back and relax, enjoy the flatscreen displays. Catch up on twenty minutes of news from the Source, access landscapes from Theta, Earth, and our own beloved Ubastis, or catch the realtime scene with the above-ground monitor.”

  I looked a query at Numair. “By all means,” he said.

  “Anyone have a preference?” I asked, and collected a response of shrugs. Perfect. I made my request using the keypad inset into the sill, and sat back, watching not the screen, but the Beast. I knew what the screen would show.

  Earth, mid-twentieth century. The scapes soared through a staggering number of bionomes, far more than young Ubastis, all lovely enough to knock the eyes from one’s head. Dark green conifers blanketing mountainsides. Sweeping grasslands that made the Big Tawny look no bigger than a dupatti. Rivers so clear one could count the fish. The oceans tumultuous with life.

  And stupor universi, the lifeforms. Face after face after face, snouted, tusked, trunked, billed, mandibled, flashed in a montage that left me a little dizzy every time I saw it. Eyes in every shade of brown, from brilliant gold through amber to chocolate to jet, staring at me over the gulf of centuries, of light-years. Their eyes my eyes.

  Whether the images impressed, or moved him, I could not tell. Certainly he seemed rapt, even, at one point, reaching up a hand to briefly touch the screen with his fingertips. An odd gesture—indicative of ignorance—or affection.

  “It’s not Ubastis, is it?” he asked, never taking his eyes from the screen, and I could not have asked for better timing. The serene face of the leopard staring blindly out at us dissolved into horror.

  Vistas of cracked, salt-crusted earth. Surf the color of shit washed filthy beaches. People stood in water queues, each carrying a three-liter tote. Those same mountainsides were littered with blackened stumps, the topsoil washed away, leaving clay to bake in the smog-shrouded sun. No fish swam in the rivers, shallow and silty, clogged with algae.

  “No,” I said. “It’s not Ubastis. It never will be.”

  “Insh’allah,” Numair said.

  I shot him a look, still half-blind from the images. “God may will it, Governor, but we’d better make sure we’re toiling right along with Him.”

  Splitting my attention irritated me. On a hunt I had to keep aware of a hundred different indicators but, except for my prey, I focused on them at a secondary level of consciousness. At Starport would need to divide my concentration between the Beast and the general. All my regard should have been on the General, but always at my side I felt the Beast looming over me.

  In the hour before dawn, Starport was the brightest thing for miles around. Rows of LED utility lamps stalked the landing platform. The maintenance hangar hid the platform itself from us, so that all we saw was the silhouette of the building black across the diffuse light. Just over the roof I glimpsed the curve of the shuttle’s fuselage, and that wide pale arc haloed by the glimmering mist allowed me the illusion that the Ubasti moon had descended from the sky.

  Architects had decorated Starport in imitation of the Lazarettes, an attempt at visual acclimatization, to make the transition from space culture to Ubastis culture less of a shock, using the palette of very pale pinks, grays, off-whites used in interior spacecraft design. While the interiors of the buildings of New Albuequerque were usually the creamy color of the
soft rock, everything else to an offworlder’s eye would be a jangle of color.

  General Zhádāo and a man I did not know descended the steps from her VIP waiting bay. Slim, tidy, slightly taller than I, with an efficient comeliness about her face that was informed more by bone structure than by any use of cosmetics, the general surveyed us a good deal more coolly than we her.

  Behind me the Beast grunted. As well he might. How I wanted to look back at him—but I knew his expression would offer me nothing. And yet how could nothing be going on inside, at the sight of the person who had interred him and all his brothers?

  Zhádāo was less guarded, but not by much. She did come to a full stop for a moment, her gaze hard on a point just over my head. That and the live coal spark in her eyes told me more than the tightening of her mouth, the lift of her eyebrows. A breath; she moved on, towards us, her gaze tracking right and left.

  How much more peculiar Ubasti citizens must appear to an offworlder, than they to us. Brilliant, in comparison to the black and gray of the General’s uniform; voluminous—prudish, even, set next to her male companion’s skintight garb.

  The man’s mouth was open as a child’s. The filament of a voca recorder angled along his jaw. He turned his head to look at something, and the fish-eye surface of a retinal cam glinted in the light. Aha, the reporter I requested, I thought.

  “Be nice,” I said through my smile. “We’re being archived.”

  “Is that legal here?” the Beast asked.

  “Yes,” Mieu answered, her voice low. “Dr. Loren doesn’t like it, but it is legal.”

  “Oh, I might like it this time,” I said. “They show their friends, I get commissions, UBI gets money.” I sighed and turned my smile up a few lumens.

  Out of long habit we dropped back—the Beast took his cue—and let Mieu come to the forefront. Dupatti fluttering, she swept forward, arms open in a gesture of welcome.

  “General Zhádāo,” she called, and closed the circle of her embrace, palms together, punctuating the gesture with a little dip of her chin. “Welcome to Ubastis.”

  General Zhádāo inclined her head. “I’m glad to arrive.”