by Angels
And they lived happily ever after.
The man falls silent. The angel watches him fixedly, the lump of metacoal still held tightly in its hands. Feeling a sudden spasm of unreasoned fear—water moistening the surface of the sand—the man rises to his feet, goes forward to check on the locomotive.
But all is well. In the depths of the furnace, the metacoal nuggets catalyze the cool fusion of light nuclei; as they become exhausted, they disaggregate and fall to a fine powder that is evacuated and dispersed beneath the engine, coating the rails as with gold dust. The hopper is full, the reaction temperature squarely within the green portion of the alarm spectrum; the cybersystem murmurs softly “all is well.” The nameless man is not needed; he is still on his Hour-long break. The sun will not set for a long time yet.
He returns to the tender. To his surprise, the angel is still there. Dimly, the man feels there may yet be something to be accomplished. What more does the angel expect?
—Now I will tell you a story, Other, says the angel. (Its face is set in a strange expression that might be sadness, or even grief.)
The man settles down uncomfortably. He does not think he wants to hear a story. He thinks of telling the angel this, but holds his tongue. He realizes that the angel is not paying him back, but rather that he is bound to listen to its tale, that he is the one making the payment.
THE TALE OF THE ANGEL
Some of us were present when the Others first came to Earth in ships of metal that flew without wings. We were puzzled and somewhat afraid. A few conquered their fear and went to observe more closely, perhaps to speak with the Others, if they should know how to speak.
Those were captured and put in cages. The Others did not listen to their talk; they only talked among themselves, and then they cut their prisoners with metal knives and wounded them with needles. Later, our captive brethren escaped; when they bore their tale to the rest of us, it was decided never to approach the Others again.
At first we thought it would be easy; but the Others grew in numbers, as more and more dropped down from the sky; and they built castles of metal, and surrounded them with gardens under glass.
And soon something strange happened: the land around the castles of the Others became poisonous. Plants withered, animals died, and when we ventured there, we could not breathe the air for long.
What could we do to change things? There was nothing that could be done to the metal and glass of the Others. So we retreated to the high mountains, where the air was thin, but still pure. And from the mountaintops we watched the Others spread onto the world like a bloodstain.
One day a ship without wings came to one of the mountains where we lived. Many were afraid and said this was the end: the Others had come to take us all and cut us apart with their metal. Many said nothing, but gathered up their hunting bows and their best blades.
The ship was not so large as the first ones we had seen. It landed on a plateau, and a door opened in its side like a hut’s. An Other walked out, and it was naked. Several of us had come out of their caves, and they now pointed their bows at it, and drew.
The Other looked them in the eye, calmly. Then it spoke. It said, in the male mode, What do you want with those weapons? Please do not harm me. Do you speak?
Later we understood he did not know the meaning of the words he had spoken. He had merely repeated the sounds one of our captive brethren had made when he had tried speaking with the Others who were about to cut him. Thus we would know he was the Prophet.
We began to talk with him. He pointed at himself and gave his name, which is too holy to repeat. We gave him our own names, and then he made a gesture, and a second Other came out of the ship. She was his mate. And thus it all began. It proceeded slowly, but we had all of time.
Eventually we understood one another. The Prophet told us why the Others were the Enemy. He explained how the poisoning would one day kill all of us. He said he had come to teach us the Others’ magic, if we would learn it. That, this way, we could fight them. He used a word: sabotage. He said that the castles were fragile, that the metal way for trains could be destroyed, that we could regain our land, one day.
We knew that he was holy, for nothing he said made sense, and at the same time, we felt it was deeply true. So we let him live and began to learn from him.
It took years. He taught us better ways to count, and to measure distances, and so many other things that our souls could not hold them all. Every day, he taught us. He filled us with the magic of the Others, and when we were full, we started the war.
What we liked best was to make bombs, to place them next to the castles or the rails, and to make them explode. Soon the Others installed weapons that threw bullets at us, but they could not protect all the rails, and where they were not protected we destroyed them easily.
Careful as we were, many of us were injured by the Others’ defences, and some died. So we began to make young again, to readjust our numbers.
One day the Prophet went to witness one of our young being made into an adult. When we performed the Time rite, he inquired what we did.
We answered, We do not know how the Others do it, but this is how we make her undying.
He repeated, Undying? But all things grow old and die.
At this we were stunned. But we do not, we said. Don’t the Others know how to work that magic?
He had us explain. We showed him our magic, how we changed a person’s twin fires with our souls, how we made them keep always in balance, neither one devouring the other. He was amazed. He named our magic psychokinesis. He demanded that we prove our claims.
So we did. We showed him how we could make a leaf whither with our souls, driving one of its fires hard and repressing the other. We showed him the rock mice, how by reaching with our souls we could make them die or live longer, although it demanded more effort and more care, as they were very different from us.
The Prophet went away into the ship by himself then; even his mate could not speak to him. When he came out, he began to explain more things to us. The way stuff is made of tiny balls, and how our souls made them shake, and how the shaking changed the fires in ourselves. And when he was sure we understood as much as we could, he asked us to make him eternal.
We were very worried that it might not work; but he had showed us many things that explained how the Others were different from us, and so those whose souls were strongest among us gathered and performed the rite of Time.
It worked. After it was done, the Prophet looked inside himself with the machines he had brought and said he would live forever.
At this his mate grew frightened; she said things to him in their language, which many of us spoke, by that time. She accused him of leaving her to die, and many other things. He answered he did not want her to be exposed to the risk, because he did not want to be parted from her. He was holy: what he said was both very right and very wrong.
In the end he did the only thing he could do, and our wise ones performed the rite upon the Prophet’s wife.
But with her, it failed. There are little strings in the middle of the cells, where life resides. The strings of the Wife’s cells were unravelling, falling apart into little bits. It is a thing that sometimes happens with our kind; we call it the Rot. Once it starts, the only merciful thing to do is to destroy the afflicted one. But the Prophet would not lose his mate. He used all the magic he had, yet he could not stop the unravelling.
So, in desperation, he went inside the ship and spoke to the Enemy, to bargain with them. He would give himself up to them, forever end his war, if they agreed to save his mate. The Enemy swore to the compact.
I remember how it was just before he left us. He held the Wife in his arms as he carried her inside the wingless ship. She was white as snow; her flesh was coming loose in clumps. He took her inside, then he came back to speak to us. His words made no sense, and too much. His eyes leaked water as he spoke. He asked
us to forgive him, as if he had done something wrong. And to continue the war, never to stop. And then he spoke of a future when we would live at peace with the Enemy, a time which he had seen inside his soul. And then he stopped suddenly, and retreated inside the flyer, took off and went to the Enemy.
He was very holy.
The Enemy were true to their word. They had promised they would save his mate; but the Rot was too far upon her, and her body’s destruction could not be halted. So they worked their magic and took her soul and put it into a metal box.
And then they took their full revenge upon the Prophet. They did not kill him; instead, they opened his head and maimed his brain, to shackle his soul. They made him their slave and put him in charge of running the trains that we used to sabotage, because they knew we could not destroy the tracks that he would be crossing.
And so they think they will win. But they will not. We fight on. We will not stop. We will live forever. He will live forever. We wait for him. He will come back for us. We have all of Time.
The nameless man stares at the angel. He does not understand the story. But he knows that he should not have listened to it. All the pain that he had held dispersed under the sand is bubbling to the surface.
He puts his hands to his head. His eyes are full of tears. He staggers away from the angel, going to the control cabin, going to his duties, going to make the pain stop.
He hears the great stiff wings being deployed behind him; as the angel is swept away by the wind of their passing, it shrieks like someone dying in pain.
The nameless man stumbles into the cabin. He turns to the meters and gauges, checks and rechecks every one, performs a hundred minute adjustments by hand. The pain is slowly losing its hold on him as he drowns in his work. The man flips the switch that allows communication with the cybersystem.
—Increase speed, he tells it. I want maximum!
—Understood and complying, the cybersystem replies in a toneless voice.
He opens the hatch to the hopper and shovels metacoal inside until the hopper is brimming. He shuts the hatch, checks the meters again, attentive to the slow movements of the needles, the flickering of the blue digits, as the train gathers yet more speed. Through a window he sees the steel arms become a blur of motion. The howl of the wind gathered inside the mouth rises to a near-shriek.
Night has fallen. The pain has left him now. He cannot clearly remember what caused it—perhaps he fell asleep on his break and neglected his tasks. That cannot be allowed. He must never run late. He has a duty to the Company.
The cybersystem indicates all is well. The nameless man goes out into the night, to breathe cooler air. He sits down on a small gray-painted metal seat. He reaches for the bottle and takes a slug of vodka, stoking the furnace of his body. He absently scratches the scar that cinctures his head, left to right to left. On the horizon, the hard pinpricks of light of Sternstadt have become visible. The train roars on; the woman who is the locomotive swallows the night with her screaming mouth.
TOBACCO WORDS
When it rained over the town, Caspar would open his mouth to let the drops fall in and wet his dead tongue. He ran through the streets, his head tilted back, staring at the roil of clouds, letting the rain fall into his mouth and his eyes.
He would run down sloping Boar Street and reach Maar Square, where he would let his accumulated speed bleed away in bone-jarring steps until he was strolling, his head still tilted as far back as it could be. He would wander to the left, navigating by the sight in the corners of his eyes. Passersby stared at him, but he did not notice; he was too used by far to being stared at.
Of all places in the town, he liked best the street that opened to the left of Maar Square, because it was a narrow and twisting street, and it was full of tiny workhouses for the town’s confessors. Every workhouse had a big window in front. By tradition the confessors sat at the window, in their extravagant confessors’ clothes.
When his sister wasn’t busy, she’d open the door of her workhouse and let him in, give him a tiny mug of hot chocolate to drink. She would pat his head when he was done, and tell him to go home before he got too cold.
Once as she was letting him out, he almost ran into a sinner, a man wide as three normal men and nearly twice as tall, with a face like a tape star’s perched atop it all.
“What’s this, sister, you do little boys, now?” The man’s voice was deep but melodious.
“He’s my brother, and you’ll apologize now if you want absolution.” He had never seen his sister truly angry before; he was fearful that the sinner wouldn’t apologize, and of what she would do then. But the big man had said, “Y’r pardon, little master. No offence meant.” Caspar had nodded in acknowledgement and left.
Looking over his shoulder, he had seen the door closing on the sinner’s huge shadow, the window opaquing a second later. He had lingered, curious. He had heard laughter from behind the door after a while, and then screams, and then sobbing. Then he had run for home, not wishing to meet the man again.
Home was one of the two hundred and fifty identical houses in the town. Grandfather, who had owned it all his life, had refused to alter its exterior. Very much a man of regulations was Grandfather, a man who took very seriously his duty to the Fleet, even though he had been retired twenty years and more; and official regulations of the Fleet stipulated that the houses of the Town remain unchanging through the years. In practice, people made subtle alterations, which the Town censors did not object to. But Grandfather was a man of principles.
Even inside, regulations dictated much of the decor. Standard-issue furniture, standard-issue conveniences, kept nearly pristine from constant maintenance. Walk into the Moën house, and you could not tell when you stood in time.
The only exception to the rule was the large painting that hung over the chimney in the living room. It showed a group of people standing in what seemed a clearing. They were talking, some laughing. One was about to catch a large ball that had been thrown to her from a point outside the frame. The metallic wall of a large building could be seen to the left. No one’s house held such a painting, and for many years it had been to Caspar a source of disquiet and obscure pride both.
The painting had as a matter of fact been a source of conflict within the family. Caspar’s father objected to it, but never in words. Caspar, perhaps because he was without speech himself, could read his father’s thoughts and feelings plainly enough in the set of his shoulders and the play of his face.
Matters had stood at equilibrium for some time when Karl came into their lives and troubled the waters. Karl was Flikka’s admirer, and he courted her with all due process. He seemed like a fairly good match: he had been cleared to breed if he chose during the next ten years, and was a kind and gentle man. Flikka acted cool toward him, yet Caspar could tell she was really interested.
However, when Karl finally won an invitation to dinner with the family, he saw the painting and made the error of trying to work it into the conversation.
“Herr Moën, that is a very nice work of art you have on display in the living room.”
Grandfather lifted his eyes from his soup and said in a very dry voice:
“That’s not a work of art.”
“I don’t understand,” said Karl, and all the while, Flikka said shut up, shut up please with her eyes and chin.
“It is a live video feed from a ship,” said Caspar’s father. “Maintained constantly, at a high cost.”
“A cost I choose to bear,” said Grandfather.
“A live feed? But the image is completely motionless.”
“Their time-slope is almost vertical,” said Caspar’s father. “It currently stands at something around one second to the year, and it’s steepening. They’ve been on their way for over thirty years, local time. A voyage of exploration outside the Galaxy. You see, my father’s wife is on that ship. That’s her, about to catch the ball. If you waite
d another year you’d see it make contact with her hands. Wonderful, isn’t it?”
“You will close your mouth, Diet,” said Grandfather. He had been Security and his voice kept the overtones of command.
But Caspar’s father had rebelled against Grandfather when he’d chosen to become Maintenance, and he replied: “No, I won’t. Your stupid wife is dead, dead to you as if she’d been drowned in the North Sea.”
Grandfather had risen from his seat then, white moustache bristling. He might have been funny if everything in his body had not shouted with a rage so vast it could not be encompassed. Caspar’s father rose in his turn, threw his bowl of soup into a corner, where it smashed with an explosion of steaming liquid, then stalked out of the room.
“Please leave, Karl,” said Flikka. “I don’t want to see you inside this house again.”
Karl rose and left the room in turn. Caspar, as if obeying the dictates of a complicated dance, followed him out, leaving only his mother and his sister at the table.
The young man had stopped on the porch; his fidgeting said he was confused, reluctant to go down the steps to the street, and thus admit defeat. When he saw Caspar come out, he grunted with something like relief. He sat down on the second step from the bottom and motioned for Caspar to join him.
The boy sat on the third step, so he was even with Karl. It was getting cold already, and his crippled hand hurt him. He cradled it in his whole one, rubbing the twisted fingers gently to ease the ache.
Karl lit a cigarette, drew on it. “She’s a strange girl, your sister,” he said. Caspar shook his head no. “Well, maybe you know her better than I do. Think she’s gonna stay mad at me?” Again Caspar shook his head no. “I don’t think so either.”
Karl sighed. Caspar was looking at him with an imploring expression on his face. “What?” said Karl. Then he understood and handed him the cigarette. Caspar took it carefully in his left hand and brought it to his lips. He took a drag, let the smoke fill his lungs, and bubble up to his head. He did it once again before Karl took the cigarette back.
