by Angels
“Are you going to be done soon?”
“Just a little bit longer, sister. How do you feel?”
“All right . . . b-but it’s like I want to cry.”
“That’s good. Everyone gets that. If you want, let it come. You’ll feel better afterwards.”
“But it’s not a sin. I don’t have any sins. I felt fine all through the voyage. . . .”
“I know. And you never felt . . . strange in any way?”
“No, I told you.” On the screen, lines had appeared, strange lines, curved and recurved. They flickered, on and off. Strange lines in shimmering colours. Flikka twisted dials, pushed a button, and let one hand stray to the torso restraint. Caspar watched, wide-eyed.
“Tell me, little sister, just so I can finish the scan: did you do anything yourself that you’re embarrassed about? Any sins of your own? You know I can’t repeat them to anyone, so any secret is safe with me.”
Aurinn started to blush. “Well . . . just once. I was supposed to be on watch from ten thousand to twelve thousand, and I . . . I skipped the last three hundred. There was nothing to watch for, it was just pointless, so . . .”
“Of course. Just a little tiny thing. Not really a sin, if you ask me. Everyone does it.” Though her tone remained calm, Flikka looked at the screen in alarm. She swung a metal hemisphere into position above Aurinn’s head, then grasped the end of a restraint with one hand. Caspar understood the meaning of the gesture and clumsily took the end of the other strap in his crippled right hand.
Aurinn gasped. Her eyes opened, full of tears. “What’s happening?” She breathed faster and faster. “What are you doing to me?”
“Nothing, sister.” Flikka yanked on the restraint and drew it tighter. Caspar tried to copy her gesture, but the strap slid out of his grasp.
“Don’t! Stop that!”
“I’m afraid you do have a sin on your conscience, little sister. It has to come out.”
“No! I don’t have anything! I told you I didn’t. . . .” Aurinn tried to raise her arms, but they were held by the restraint. “Take the leads off! Take them off!”
“Don’t fight it, sister. Don’t fight it, or it’ll hurt.”
“No . . .” Aurinn’s words strangled to a halt. Her eyes grew fixed, and suddenly a scream tore out of her. Her legs, only loosely held by the restraint, shuddered; her heels drummed on the mattress. Flikka cursed and tightened the restraint. Caspar tried to pull away, but his hand was held in Aurinn’s, which was clenched so tightly he thought she might break his fingers.
Aurinn began to scream out words, one after the other, like an incantation torn from the depths of her being. Caspar could not understand the words; and what frightened him more was that he could make no more sense of her body’s language. She yowled, as if she’d been cut by a blade, and suddenly there was a fecal stink as she voided her bowels. She screamed again, and urine began to stain the front of her trousers.
Flikka swore in panic, hit the emergency switch that summoned Medical. Caspar, desperate, tore his hand out of Aurinn’s grasp and retreated to a corner of the room. Aurinn’s face was an inhuman mask. And it said nothing, nothing intelligible to him.
And then words rushed out in a stream, words almost as meaningless as all that had preceded them:
“O forgive me, forgive me, great spirits of the Eld! I took my brother’s life, I took it before our time was done, I took it and held it to me, and though he searched for it, I withheld it from him! I took his life and held it to me, and it was done out of envy, this I do swear!”
And when the last word had left the girl’s lips, she went completely limp. It was Caspar’s turn to scream then, for her slack limbs said death, death. He forced air out of his throat, over his dead tongue, and out came a strangled mewling, and again and again. Then he put his crippled hand before his eyes and crouched in the corner. He heard the door open, people rushing in, a rapid-fire exchange of information, diagnostics, orders. “Heartbeat has resumed.” “Give me pure oxy.” “Pressure rising.” “The ambulance is on its way.” After a little while, more people came in, then it seemed everyone left.
He didn’t want to take his hand away from his eyes, ever. But then his wrist was grasped gently, and his hand drawn away. Flikka took him in her arms and held him tight.
“You’ve been very brave, Caspar. Don’t worry, she will live. Medical got to her in time.”
Caspar trembled and coughed weakly.
“If you hadn’t brought her to me, the sin would have killed her,” said Flikka, as if she had understood the words he could not speak. “It would have struck all of a sudden, and she wouldn’t have had any chance to live. You did right.”
She wiped the tears from his eyes, and together they walked home under a sky that was once again filling up with clouds.
The next days were strange for Caspar: his life seemed to have acquired a shape, something it had always lacked before. Hours were no longer something to be spent at random; now he had purpose. In the morning, alone or with Flikka, he went to visit Aurinn in the hospital, only for an hour at a time. The girl was unconscious, tubes and wires stuck in her. The doctors told him that she would live, and their hands said that they spoke the truth. But they also said that they found her case unusual, disturbing.
Aurinn’s ship departed after three days. It could not, of course, afford to wait for an ailing crewmember. When Aurinn recovered, she would have to take hire on some other ship. Things would work out, Caspar told himself, and though he believed it, still he felt worry.
Afternoons he would spend with Flikka. She had requested a suspension of her duties from Administration and gotten it. The way she brushed her hair added that she had told them something important. Caspar supposed it had to do with the strange sin Aurinn had been saddled with.
Flikka and he played cards again, but her mind was never on the game. Caspar understood she waited for something, or rather someone. When Karl finally returned with the fishing fleet, Flikka’s relief became obvious.
She went to the docks to welcome him home, accompanied by Caspar. Karl seemed exhausted from the voyage, but when Flikka greeted him with a passionate kiss, he shed his fatigue in an instant.
He insisted on treating Flikka and Caspar to a visit to the casino. Even Flikka could tell it mattered to him, and she accepted gracefully. Caspar, even though he never concerned himself with money, knew she earned several times as much as Karl did, and should by tradition have been the one paying. But Karl needed to show happiness by pleasing others. He bought Caspar a small stack of chips. Caspar bet them one at a time and lost again and again, but with the next-to-last chip, he won fifty times his bet. Karl burst out laughing and cashed in the chips, putting every last bill into Caspar’s hand, despite his mute protestations. Caspar resolved he would buy Aurinn a gift with the money, when she recovered.
They parted outside the casino. The way Flikka knotted her fingers said she wanted Karl to ask to visit the next day; but his shy smile said that the memory of his last visit was still too fresh in his mind, and he dared not.
“So . . . maybe I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said.
“I’d like that.”
Flikka kissed him goodbye, then went off. Caspar started to follow her, but Karl held him back. He whispered in his ear “Does she really want to see me?”
Caspar grinned, and nodded vigorously.
“Then I’ll come over to your house around midmorning, okay?”
Caspar nodded again. Karl grinned in turn, then lowered his gaze and spread his fingers, which meant he wanted to give Caspar something to reward him. At a loss for anything better, he pulled out a crumpled cardboard pack and handed Caspar the last cigarette left in it. Caspar hurried to catch up to Flikka, hiding the cigarette in his pocket. He turned around, once he’d reached her side; Karl had gone away into the night.
The next morning, he went to the hospital to s
ee how Aurinn was doing. Flikka came with him. They were told that her condition had improved. She had regained consciousness the night before, but her grip on it was precarious. Lying on her bed, Aurinn was still stuck full of tubes and wires, but she breathed easier. They stayed with her a short while; she was not aware of their presence. The movement of her eyes under the half-closed lids asked again and again what? what? what? Caspar found it unnerving, but he knew it for an improvement.
He was thinking it was time they left, when an alarm bell sounded throughout the building. Caspar thought it meant fire. Flikka opened the door of the room; they went out into the corridor, looking for the closest exit.
There was a low-ranked Security man at the emergency exit. He had stuck a bar through the handle to prevent the door from opening. “Please go back,” he told them. “Everyone has to stay inside.”
Flikka was taken aback. “Isn’t there a fire?”
“No. No fire. Security has given orders: everyone in town is to stay inside.”
“What’s going on?”
“They haven’t told me, sister. But a code one-eight-eight means external threat. My guess is we’re under attack from space. Now will you go quietly into your room and stay inside?”
Flikka and Caspar retreated to Aurinn’s room and sat down. They looked at one another, astonished. “I don’t believe him,” said Flikka. “He said that just to get us back inside. It doesn’t make any sense. If there was an attack, we’d be able to see or hear something. . . .” But her eyes said she wasn’t convinced of the truth of her own words. And faintly, from outside, they could hear something: the same warning bell that pealed inside the hospital was echoed throughout the rest of the town.
Caspar went to the window. The hospital was built close to the landing field. Caspar could look out over the field, along the receding perspective of the landing strip, into the cloudy horizon. When he saw a dot in the sky, at first he took it for a speck in his eye; but soon it had swelled into the silhouette of an incoming shuttle. He pointed it out to Flikka, who hissed between her teeth.
“No one was told about a landing. What the hell is this? Hey, look!”
There were Security at one end of the landing field, where normally townspeople would be standing to welcome the sinners.
“This is insane,” said Flikka. “What the hell can they do against a spacecraft? Maybe it’s a ship of criminals, and Security wants to arrest them. . . .”
The shuttle swelled in size, faster and faster; but there was no wash of sound, no glare. It glided to a stop in perfect silence and touched down not a hundred metres distant. It didn’t look like a shuttle. It looked like a fish from the North Sea, grown monstrous and cast in metal.
A door opened in the fish’s flank, and a single figure jumped to the ground. It was the strangest sinner Caspar had ever seen: huge and proportioned all wrong. The sinner began to run across the field, toward the hospital, moving in such a strange way it reminded Caspar of a cartoon. After a few seconds he understood why: the sinner’s knees bent backward instead of forward.
“My God,” breathed Flikka, “this thing isn’t human. Oh God, this is an alien.”
It was like a geometric caricature of a human being. Its knees bent backward; its shoulders were like huge spheres; the torso was a truncated cone, melding into a dumbbell pelvis. The head was like a bullet, the features flattened and distorted. It had dead-white skin and wore dull-green skin-tight clothes. The feet were housed in supple gloveboots; they had a short palm and three long toes.
“We’re not safe here,” Flikka said suddenly. “We have to get into the basement.”
Caspar shook his head no. Flikka pulled him away from the window. “Let’s go, Caspar! We’re in danger!”
But Caspar freed himself from her grip. He was staring at the alien, and a shiver passed through him: he could understand its body. It said Help Pain Pain Oh Help Pain.
Then Security caught up with the alien, barely ten metres from the hospital. Flikka, overcome by the spectacle, ceased trying to pull Caspar away.
There were six men and women, and each carried a short baton. By the law of the Fleet, no one on Station could carry a weapon, so that ship crews need never fear harm from Station personnel. The alien carried no visible weapon, but it was nearly half again as tall as a human, and massively built. It slowed its progress, halted. Caspar could read the way it held its arms. It spoke of confusion, pain so great it twisted the mind nearly to rupture.
The Security people tried to form a ring around the alien. Their postures spelled uncertainty and desperate courage. The alien sprang into movement suddenly, smashed its arm into the chest of the nearest man. The man fell to the ground like a broken toy. The alien opened its mouth then, and moaned like a bassoon, a weirdly beautiful sound. Its knees pumped up and down, and they said Pain Oh Please Pain Help Help.
And Caspar understood suddenly that this being was a sinner. A sinner overwhelmed by the sins it had picked up during the passage through overspace. A sinner driven to madness by the weight on its soul. Who would kill and kill again, unless it could confess and obtain absolution. And no one else could tell; no one else could read the being like he could. They only saw a monster from nightmares, something whose purpose could only be to destroy.
He wanted to explain this to Flikka, but his tongue was a dead strip of flesh in his mouth, and there was no way his hands could speak the words for him. He could have written it down if he had ever bothered to learn how. He had been a stupid boy all his life. It was too late to make up for it.
The five remaining Security had bunched up in a tight line, trying to protect the entrance to the hospital. The alien moved toward them slowly, birdlike, one step at a time. Why couldn’t they see they were going to die if they kept blocking its way?
Caspar felt his shame inside his belly, like a piece of metal weighing him down. He had to do something or more people would die, and it would be his fault. He had to speak, somehow. In desperation, he took Karl’s cigarette from his pocket, struck a crimped match, and lit the cigarette. He took a long deep drag, let the smoke fill his lungs and bubble up to his head. Outside, the alien pounced on a woman, raised her off the ground, and threw her against the wall, five metres away. The last four Security tried to rush it, were scattered in all directions, torn and bloody.
Flikka finally snapped out of her horrified fascination. She grabbed Caspar and pulled him out of the room. He let himself be carried away. He was trying to talk to Flikka, but she couldn’t understand his tobacco words.
Outside the room, there was confusion in the corridor. The Security man was now at the end, away from the emergency exit. He was trying, and failing, to keep order. Caspar’s mind was working fast, but strangely. For the first time in years, there was no longer that little watcher inside his skull that heard all his thoughts and judged them. He knew what he had to do, but not how he knew it.
He gauged his time, and when the right moment had come, he yanked his crippled hand out of Flikka’s grasp, then ran down the corridor toward the emergency exit. He reached it in a few seconds, pulled the bar out of the handle, and opened the door. He heard Flikka’s cry superimposed over the electronic wail triggered by the door opening. Then he was outside, just around the corner from the alien. Caspar took a last drag on the cigarette, then threw it away. He ran to the corner, then slowed down and rounded it carefully.
The alien was fifteen metres away, battering at the main doors to the hospital, still moaning musically. The Security personnel were scattered all around it. All the bodies said death. Caspar made himself ignore them and walk forward to meet the alien.
Behind him, he heard Flikka screaming and running. He knew she would risk anything to take him out of danger; he had only a few seconds.
He spoke out loud to the alien, with tobacco words. He came to it walking not running, palms held forward, trying to smile.
The bullet-shaped
head turned toward him. The alien’s body still shouted Help Pain Oh Pain. It faced him then, and suddenly it bounded forward, and its huge hands grabbed him under the shoulders and raised him high. Caspar knew suddenly that he would be killed, thrown against the wall or torn apart. But it did not happen. The alien held him high, motionless. Caspar spoke again, in a thin strangled voice, all the tobacco words that filled his head. He promised the alien it would be helped, that his sister would free it from its sins. Hhuunnh, ahhuunnh-hah, hunnh, hunnh-hah.
And the alien lowered him to the ground, gently. Still its body shouted Pain Pain Help. It took Caspar’s crippled hand in its own and looked at him with startling eyes, blue eyes, human eyes. It opened its mouth and spoke in turn, a succession of vowels with just the hint of consonants.
“Caspar . . .” Flikka’s voice, behind him. Caspar did not turn around to look at her. He pulled on the alien’s hand gently, going toward the town. And the alien followed, towering over him, a figure from nightmare, its clothes speckled with human blood, yet tame, for the moment.
Caspar stretched out his whole left hand, beckoned Flikka with a twitch of the fingers. And after a few paces, he felt her hand in his. The alien turned to look at her, but did not otherwise react.
Now Caspar saw people coming from the town, more Security. He looked to Flikka, terrified that the alien would panic. She glanced back at him. He did not need to speak any tobacco words; this time she understood him. She cupped a hand to her mouth and shouted out: “Stand back! Let us pass! Don’t come close!”
Security wavered, stopped, but did not disperse. They would still bar their way into the town.
She asked: “Caspar, where are we going? Do you know?” He nodded yes, vigorously. “Where? Where do you want to take it? Why is it following you? What did you do to it?” The questions came in a rush, betraying Flikka’s terror at what might have happened to him. Caspar tried to say Slowly. Ask me the right questions only.
