by Angels
“Wait, wait.” Flikka bit her lip, calmed herself. “You said you know where we’re going. Did it tell you where it wanted to go?” No. “So you’ve decided?” Yes. “You want to take it someplace; someplace I know?” Yes, yes. “Our home?” No! “A public place.” No.
Then it hit her. Her eyes widened. “You want me to confess it.” Caspar nodded yes, weeping in relief. “Caspar, that’s crazy.” She spoke softly. Still the alien followed behind Caspar, a nightmare twice as tall as the boy who led it. Caspar signed no. “You think it’s bearing a sin? But—oh God, oh God, wait, now I know. Oh God, you’re right. Of course . . .”
They were approaching Security. Still they stood in their way. Flikka raised her voice. “Let us pass. I am taking this being to confession.”
“You’re crazy,” said the Security leader. “We won’t let you into town.”
“Our station was built to provide services to overspace crews. This being came down to be healed of the sins it accumulated in transit. By Fleet law, we can’t refuse to confess it.”
“This isn’t a human being, and it’s killed six people already.”
“If you don’t let us pass, it’ll kill me and my brother, and you’ll be next. For God’s sake, man, think!”
Caspar felt panic. He told the alien it would be all right, it was being taken to be confessed. The huge body began to quiver with tension. The grip of the fingers that held his crippled hand tightened to a painful intensity.
At the last instant, Security moved aside and let them pass. They formed a semicircle in back of them and followed their progress. Flikka said, in a commanding voice: “I need ten metres of strong chain for restraints, and have Medical on standby, for what it’s worth. Do it now.” Caspar was astonished to see a Security man dash off to do her bidding.
Soon they reached Maar Square and went into the twisty street of the confessors. All the while, Caspar spoke to the alien, tried to reassure it. It had relaxed when Security let them pass, but it had been tensing up again.
Finally they were at Flikka’s workhouse. Flikka opened the door for them. Caspar went inside; the alien bent its huge frame to enter. It saw the confession machines and uttered a terrifyingly musical scream. It loosed Caspar’s hand, laid its body onto the bed; the frame had been built to accommodate even very large sinners, and only the lower half of its legs stuck out. Flikka came inside, staggering under the load of the chains. Moving purposefully, she passed length after length around the alien’s body. She held her head at an angle that said she no longer felt any fear: her duties occupied all of her thoughts.
The alien suffered itself to be bound tightly. Panting, Flikka secured the chains with a heavy lock and went to activate the equipment. Her fingers depressed keys, adjusted sensors. A pattern of tangled lines emerged on the main screen.
“All right,” said Flikka out loud, speaking to an invisible audience. “You see what I see. I’m picking up standard signs of accumulated sins. Potential very high, no structural anomalies.” Caspar suddenly understood she must have activated a relay to Administration. “I’m going to follow standard procedure, except without any verbal contact with the subject. Activating probe.”
She swung the metal hemisphere into position over the alien’s head. Its features twisted around; it looked at her with its human eyes and it made a flutelike gasping sound. It repeated the sound as she adjusted the controls. “Matrix responding normally. Potential still very high. I’m drawing the first one out.”
When the first scream came, Caspar’s eardrums felt it like a metal blade stabbing into his ears. Once he had been deafened, the rest were easier to take. The alien twisted inside its bonds, but they did not break. Its motions shook the bed, but the steel frame held. And after a moment Caspar realized that the constrained spasms were intelligible to him, far more clearly than the general posture. They spoke complete sentences.
I told a lie about someone I knew, so I could get a job in his place. And he had been the one who had told me about the opening. I’m so very sorry.
It was a human sin, weighing on an alien’s soul. While Aurinn’s sin, and the sin Perle had confessed, they were alien sins weighing on human souls.
The alien confessed another sin, then another, and another, and when the last sin had come out, it went limp and closed its eyes.
“Process complete.” Flikka’s voice was frayed, but strong. “Potential zero. Absolution has been obtained.” She paused for a second or two, then added, “I’m removing the restraints.”
Then, moving quickly, she undid the length of chain. Caspar helped her. The effects of the cigarette had faded by now, and his mouth was empty of all words.
When they had removed half the chain, the alien opened its eyes and helped free itself. It rose from the bed, then took Flikka’s hand in its own and made a gesture with the other hand. Caspar could not understand it; in fact, he could not interpret the alien’s body language at all anymore. It was like looking at a statue.
The alien released Flikka’s hand and went out of the workhouse. Flikka and Caspar followed, uncertain. Outside were thirty Security, looking determined. The alien halted, spread its arms wide, hung its head, raised one foot then the other, alternately.
The ring of Security left one opening, leading outside. After a while, the alien stopped its display, looked around itself. It moaned gently, like a snatch of song, and began slowly going back toward the landing field. Security closed up behind it and let it return to the metal fish. Caspar and Flikka trailed the procession, unwilling to let the being out of their sight. It did not look back at them; Caspar did not know if he wished it had, or not. No one prevented the alien from going aboard. The access door shut behind it, and then the shuttle took off in an astonishing fashion, floating five metres off the ground without any thruster firing, then suddenly rising in a steep parabola, up toward orbit.
Caspar and Flikka were taken to confer with Administration. Flikka told all she had seen, repeated it several times. Caspar was questioned also, a long and unpleasant process. His neck soon began to ache from all the nodding and head-shaking. Flikka protested on his behalf, but the interrogator did not relent.
After a long while, the questions ceased. The Administration woman heaved a sigh, shut off the audio/video recorder.
“Thank you for your cooperation,” she said. “Please return to your residence now. If there is anything more, we will contact you.”
Flikka’s body had been speaking anger louder and louder throughout the interrogation. Now she let her words take over.
“I’m not going away. I want answers of my own, and now.”
“You’re lucky not to have been taken to carcery, Confessor Moën. Your actions endangered the whole of this station and some Administrators wanted your head.”
“Fuck them.” Caspar started at the words. In Flikka’s mouth they took on an intensity they never had in Perle’s. “You know damned well I acted correctly. If it was a human who’d come down and killed left and right, we’d have had no recourse. Isn’t that right? That’s what I was taught in school: we serve starship crews, and their rights outweigh ours.”
“We’ve been through this already. Please go home now. You’ve had a very difficult time and—”
“Answer my questions, Administrator. What did you learn about this being? You must have tracked the ship when it left. What happened to it? Tell me. Or is it that you’re so low in the hierarchy that they didn’t bother to tell you?”
The Administrator’s mouth twisted in exasperation, a meaning which must have been plain to anyone. But then, surprising Caspar, she relented.
“It wasn’t a ship that came down. It was only a shuttle; but you probably guessed that. The ship itself . . . is fifteen kilometres long. It looks like nothing you could imagine. It can’t, or won’t, answer us. From time to time, it broadcasts gibberish at various EM frequencies. We have no idea what it wants, or where it’s
from. We’re defenceless against it. That’s all we know. Now please, please go home, and keep this to yourself. People have already been panicking, and we’ve had six deaths too many.”
The mask had slipped from the Administrator’s face, and her weariness and concern were plain to see. Flikka lowered her gaze and left without further words, her hand linked with Caspar’s.
When they entered the Moën house, the family fussed about them to no end. Flikka recounted what had happened, but she refused to go into details. She seemed to have been won over to the Administrator’s opinion now, and her hands said she wished she could stay utterly silent. Finally she broke free from her mother and father’s attentions and went to her room, locking the door.
Caspar was left the focus of attention, something he found unpleasant. He was asked a few questions, but everyone soon gave up, lacking the Administrator’s persistence. When he was let go, he went to the standard-issue refrigerator and poured himself some juice, holding the pitcher in his left hand and clumsily steadying the glass with his crippled right. In the living room, his parents and grandfather were talking in lowered voices. From where he was, he could just see the painting in which Grandmother waited, waited, waited for the ball to reach her hands. Suddenly, with a queer shock, he remembered very clearly that, at one time, the ball hadn’t been in the picture.
He ran up to his own room then, feeling bone-tired. He found he was crying, not for the Security who had died, but, strangely, for all those who had lived. He did not understand. He thought then, for the first time, of reading his own body, to understand what he said to himself. He looked at himself in the mirror above his dresser, but he could not make sense of what he saw. In the end, he crawled into his bed and fell prey to a sleep full of nightmares.
And in the morning, before the sun even came over the rim of the horizon, Security came for him and Flikka. The shuttle had returned. They were wanted.
There were three of the aliens now. They were utterly identical: size, shape, and colours. But Caspar could tell them apart; two of them shouted pain and terror from their bodies, while the third was as unreadable as a piece of stone. By that, he thought to recognize the one he had helped yesterday. The aliens had been standing at the foot of the shuttle, almost motionless, until they saw Caspar and his sister. Then they came forward, and the absolved one spoke again in its music-like language.
And they proceeded as before. The aliens went with them to Flikka’s workhouse, and one, then the next, were chained, confessed, absolved of the human sins that weighted them. Flikka knew fear this time, Caspar saw; she was no longer overwhelmed by what she did, and she could fully taste the weirdness of it.
But it went well, and eventually it was done. Flikka collapsed in a chair, drained. The aliens made gestures and spoke words no one could interpret, Caspar least of all. Then the first one came to him, and took his crippled hand in his, and led the way out of the workhouse. The other two followed, and Security, and Flikka.
The aliens made their way back to the fishlike shuttle; then Caspar’s hand was let go, and the three went inside. “They’re going away, now,” said Flikka in a tired voice. “They’ll never come back, will they?”
Caspar did not know, and it hurt him deep inside, not to be able to know. It was as if some essential meaning had drained from the world. He waited in silence, along with the others, for the shuttle to lift off.
But then, the door opened again, and one of the aliens came back out. It carried a bag on a strap across its shoulder. It put the bag down, opened it. Took out six strange objects of metal and lights, a metre and a half high, and set them on the ground. The pattern they made seemed familiar; then Caspar understood that it was the pattern the bodies of the six dead Security had made.
Two more things the alien took out of the bag. One was carved from some sort of wood, crimson with gold veins. It might have been a musical instrument; it might have been something else. The alien stepped around the pattern it had built, and presented the wooden object to Flikka. She accepted it, keeping silent.
The alien took the last object from its bag then, and put it in Caspar’s arms. Flikka hissed in astonishment. Security shouted incoherently. Caspar, for the first time in his life, knew what it was to have one’s hair stand on end.
It was a doll, nearly a metre high. A slim young girl, dark-haired, wearing multicoloured robes and calf-high boots. She looked fully human, and she was warm to the touch.
Caspar looked up from the doll and saw the alien moving back into the shuttle, and then there was no more delay: the metal fish rose from the ground and sped off into the sky.
Once Aurinn had recovered, Flikka and Karl rented a small boat and took her, along with Caspar, on a brief cruise. On their first evening, when the sun had slipped below the horizon and the North Sea lay all about them, they sat down on deck. Karl lit a cigarette and gave one to Caspar. Aurinn was shocked, then amused: on Wolf’s Hoard, such practices were considered the depth of barbarity. Greatly daring, she tried a puff and coughed herself hoarse.
When Aurinn had stopped coughing, Flikka said suddenly and quietly: “I don’t think they were aliens.”
“How can you say that?” said Karl. “You saw them. No one except Caspar saw them from closer up. They weren’t human. You saw their ship. . . .”
“But we’ve all seen this.” And she pointed to Caspar’s doll, which was dancing slowly on the planks of the deck. The doll wasn’t just a manikin: it moved; it looked about; it danced at odd moments. The Administration had tried to take it from Caspar, but the doll had evaded their grasp, and finally, afraid of it, they had relented. Now it accompanied him wherever he went, a dream-toy, living and not.
“Karl, do you think they could have made such a thing in the few hours between our first meeting and their return? And even if it was possible, how can you explain that they looked so much like us? By any rational account they should have been completely different. We’ve both seen sinners who looked almost as strange. . . .”
“You think they were human,” said Aurinn. “But you said they didn’t speak. And the sin that, that almost killed me . . . it wasn’t a human sin.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Humankind is spread out so wide. Maybe somewhere they’ve been engineering themselves into something . . . new. Different. I think that’s what we saw: humans who’ve been altered so profoundly that we almost can’t recognize them. People who were isolated from the rest of humanity for so long that they forgot many things . . . I don’t know. We can’t really know, but that is what I think.”
“And what is this, then?” asked Karl. Caspar’s doll danced on the deck, long black hair flying, booted feet stamping a complex rhythm on the planks. “A toy? An idol?”
“Administration feared it was a spy; an information-gathering device. They thought it might be transmitting data back . . . somewhere. But what if it is, anyway? If we are coming into contact, whether it’s with aliens or with a long-forgotten branch of ourselves . . . isn’t it better that they learn more about us?”
“I’m sure Administration fears they’ll use the information against us.”
“I know. But the one that came down . . . one of only three crew for that huge ship . . . it only killed when it was blocked. Caspar guessed, somehow, what it had come down for. The same as all of our crews: to be absolved of the strange sins it had picked up crossing overspace. And when it dies, its soul will dissolve into overspace, and its sins will float there, waiting to be snagged by a living soul and perhaps then laid to rest at long last. . . .”
The doll danced on, oblivious to Flikka’s musings. Caspar rose, walked some way toward the prow. The doll followed him, still dancing. Caspar drew on his cigarette, let the smoke bubble up to his head. The doll spun and whirled, smiling, then slowed her dance into a courtly pavane. The others might speculate all they wanted, but Caspar knew what her purpose was. He knew that one day, she would be able to speak, and that on t
hat day, the strangers would return.
He breathed in the smoke of the cigarette, and his dead tongue was loosened in his mouth. He spoke tobacco words to the doll. And, in the midst of her dance, she winked at him, to show that she understood.
IN YERUSALOM
For Ian McDonald
It’s night in Yerusalom, City of Miracles, Jewel of the Eldred, Bright Gift from the Stars; and in Yerusalom, even the dark shines with its own kind of light. It’s night in Yerusalom, City of Abominations, Newest Franchise of the Pit, Cosmic Corruptress; and in Yerusalom, even the brightest light carries its own shadow.
In Yerusalom, three dreamweavers stride along Faro Street in the luminous darkness, and all about them the multifarious sounds of the city blare and thunder. They’ve got soundsuits putting out their own personal music, and they’ve got neon-implants accenting the curves of their jaws with streaks of cold radiance, and they’ve got enhanced eyes, noses, ears, the better to soak up the surrounding world at the maximum possible intensity, and they’ve got hopes and fears roiling through their minds. Most importantly, they’ve got viable asset-slopes.
Edge Nain, tall and thin, his hair an upswept brush, walks point. He carries little protection, unshakeably convinced his wits and faith will see them all through. Ras hangs back several paces as always, his soundsuit unzipped to display his scarred chest; his head is a gleaming copper sphere, and his augmented muscles advertise he needs no weapon to defend himself and his companions from ill-meaning fools. Kel strides between them, nearly as tall as Edge Nain but, unlike him, ill-proportioned, his extremities too big for his body. Yet his features are startlingly beautiful, an angelic doll’s face set on a too-big skull, long-lashed eyes the blue-green of seawater.
