Angels and Exiles

by Angels

  As they walk, the three dreamweavers pray. Their belief is not the sharp and acid belief of those who fear, it is not the dull and musty belief of those who used to fear but no longer care; it is the hard and cold belief of those who know.

  This is Ras’s prayer: Sweet Jesu, make me a success at the performance, let me be noticed picked up contracted sold traded REMEMBERED.

  This is Edge Nain’s prayer: Sweet Jesu, let it all go well; all I ask is for us not to go to pieces, even if we don’t make it, let us accept it in peace.

  This is Kel’s prayer: Sweet Jesu, I want to meet a girl, a good girl, a hot one, but a true one, with a heart of flesh not gold, oh please, Sweet Jesu. . . .

  Set down in the Dust Belt of the North American plains, Yerusalom has fertilized the barren land with abstractions: money, hope, ambition, greed. Twenty-five years after taking root in Earth’s soil, it is surrounded with the pulsing life that is commerce. Streams of vehicles flow in and out of the city, carrying raw materials and finished goods, foodstuffs and drugs, liquid oxygen and dried seahorses, personal weapons and one-time encryption pads. Streams of data enter and leave, borne along superconducting wires, some even consigned to unbound photons blaring through the atmosphere, for anyone to intercept—if they dare.

  The shadow and the light of Yerusalom have reached throughout the commercial sphere of Earth. Its presence has pulled its host nation out of a downward spiral, and by contagion the rest of the world has also benefited. Hard to say how many tens of millions owe their livelihood, if not their very life, to the shining alien city that endlessly consumes all that is poured into its brazen mouth. How could one then balk at a few hundreds of thousands dead of mysterious new diseases, the odd backward nation’s political collapse from economic pressures too intense to bear? Change, after all, always hurts. Adapt or die; it’s an old, old story.

  The self-built edifices that border Faro Street come in every shape; their only constant is hugeness. Here a steep five-sided pyramid, three hundred metres high; there an arboreal structure rising from a central stem, recursively fanning out until a single two-metre wide room stretches to ten metres in height. A smoothly swollen dome, looking frozen in the act of erupting from the ground, squats across the street from a disturbingly not-quite-organic fortress that drips angular turrets, like an inverted Gaudi cathedral rendered at low resolution. All of the buildings shine with their own light, in great sheens of fluorescent colours. Windows open into their facades like geometric bits of the interstellar void. Above their doors, small digits flicker in red, indicating the one-time entrance fee, the visiting fee, the long-term residence fee. . . . In Yerusalom everything has a price—not even the air you breathe is free. Though at least it is unmetered: since it would not have been cost-effective to implant oxygen-usage monitors in every citizen, a flat breathing-tax is incorporated into the baseline living fee. Panting and gasping come at no extra charge.

  In defiance of rational use of land space, a vast network of irregular alleyways, sunk in the shadows cast by secondary structures of unknown import, spreads between the buildings. Some assert this is necessary for the unseen machines and agents of the Eldred; some say this is where Sweet Jesu makes his lair. None know for sure, for few venture deeper than a few metres into the darkened maze: as soon as you enter it, your baseline living fee drops by a full forty percent, and if that is not a clear sign of a dangerous area, what is?

  As the three dreamweavers pass yet one more opening into the underside of the city, three pairs of enhanced eyes flick to the right; detect quasi-random stirrings in the deep shadows, but no telltale signature of danger. Three pairs of enhanced ears absorb the sounds emanating from the alley, reaching far into the high-frequency domain, beyond thirty thousand cycles per second. Three enhanced noses sniff at the air, glomeruli both natural and synthetic discharging in response to airborne molecules. All three brains, presented with this mass of data, effortlessly integrate it and return the final verdict: nothing meaningful there, just a man groaning, perhaps passed out, maybe dying, maybe not. No threat to them, no concern of theirs.

  In the alley, the old man lies on his back, praying, and this is his prayer: Sweet Jesu, please make it so I eat tomorrow.

  In Yerusalom everyone prays, for it’s true, verified, and certified that Sweet Jesu Himself walks the streets of Yerusalom, Whore of Cities, and verily He goes about granting prayers, left and right. It has happened to Edge Nain himself: years ago, newly arrived in Yerusalom, he found himself cornered by a half-dozen predators, robbed at knife point. They could take nothing as essential as assets from him, only possessions, and Edge Nain had already resigned himself to this. But then one of his assailants began playing the tip of a blade along Edge Nain’s face, and he realized he stood to lose a lot more than mere belongings. In his heart rose a fervent prayer to Sweet Jesu, a simple one, nearly wordless. And even before he could repeat it, just as the ceramic blade had begun to cleave his skin, there came flashes of energy, screams, the noises of the gang fleeing. . . . Edge Nain found himself alone, his possessions scattered at his feet, a hot line of blood along his jaw the only sign of the attack. He heard receding footsteps in the distance, among the blurry washes of light, going, perhaps, toward the darkened jagged-walled alleyways; he thought to follow for an instant, then came to his senses, gathered up his stuff, and fled toward safer streets.

  Though there are cranks and charlatans aplenty claiming they (they alone!) have the truth of the matter, no one in fact can claim to know Sweet Jesu’s face, His dress, His age, even His sex, for in these days, morphing oneself along the gender spectrum is something anyone with a few thousand assets can afford, and if Jesu Himself couldn’t be Herself once in a while, it wouldn’t make any sense, now, would it? And so most everyone treats other people kindly, for any one of them might be Sweet Jesu Himself, and your behaviour is being watched; yeah, friend, you’re on the line.

  And this is the thought that passes through all three dreamweavers’ brains at the same time: that a sin of omission is a sin nonetheless and that, if they want their prayers answered, maybe they’d better be extra good tonight.

  So they step back, of a common and unspoken accord, and enter a little way in the alley. Edge Nain in front, Ras in the rear, keeping a suspicious eye on the street they have left, in case this is an ambush. In the light shining from their neon-implants, which carries its own flickering darkness within it, they see the old man lying in the angle made by two vertical slabs of self-assembled stone. They see his stained and pitted skin, the blue auras at the corners of the eye, the tremble at the lips. Edge Nain, in a mostly failed attempt to increase his asset-slope, has sunk a sizeable sum into medical training in implant form. He recognizes the symptoms with an almost gleeful familiarity.

  He says: “Hanley’s syndrome; ‘Azure Fever’. Late second stage.”

  Kel: “So?”

  “He needs food and warmth first. Then a course of treatment: antibiotics, targeted enzymatic flush. He’ll probably recover.”

  Ras, from the rear: “And we pay, of course. How much?”

  Edge Nain frowns, guesses: “About sixty thousand, more or less.”

  Ras: “Sweet Jesu’s balls, Edge, sixty!”

  The three dreamweavers look at one another in hesitation. Paying this much for the old man’s cure will dangerously deplete their balance. No matter how high your asset-slope, in Yerusalom, debt and death are more than just phonetically close. If at any moment you are unable to pay the baseline living fee, the city’s cybernetic bureaucracy will send a message through your asset-implant and terminate your abuse of the city’s precious resources. . . . They should let him lie in the alley, let his life extinguish itself; but they are committed now that they know of his plight.

  The old man has opened his eyes, stares in confusion and fright at the trio. Edge Nain crouches down, lays his hand on the old man’s shoulder.

  “It’s okay, Grandfather, my friends
and I are going to take care of you. Can you stand up?”

  The old man comes to his feet, wheezing and gasping, his legs trembling so badly Edge Nain has to hold him up. Thick saliva drips down from the man’s mouth, blue-tinted. Some say that this disease, as with others that have begun to haunt humankind in recent years, comes from the Eldred, that it is one mark, perhaps the most telling, of their foulness. Others object that the biochemistries of the two species are so mutually alien it is ridiculous to suggest a cross-species illness. The first then reply that the Eldred could very well have hatched human-specific viruses in their ships’ laboratories, and the conversation thereafter degenerates into a zero-sum match of paranoia versus denial.

  The three dreamweavers lead the old man out of the alley, into Faro Street.

  Kel: “What’s your name, heh?”

  The old man: “Harold.” The name dates him more than anything else about him.

  At a public terminal node, Edge Nain checks Harold’s asset balance. It hovers precariously in the positive, with a clear downward slope. Like so many others, he sought refuge in the alleyways, stretching his assets and thus his lifespan, but also condemning himself ultimately. Edge Nain transfers a little of his assets to Harold’s account and nods as the figures alter.

  Harold: “Sweet Jesu bless you, young sir, you’re too kind. . . .”

  Ras: “Yeah, yeah. Listen, Grandpa, we’ll take you with us to a place where you can get something to eat.” He checks the timepiece embedded in his wrist, inked digits blinking beneath the skin. “We don’t have time to take him to a hospital, right now. . . .”

  Kel objects: “But we can’t just make him wait for us. That’s just as bad, isn’t it?”

  Ras: “Brothers, the performance starts in less than forty-five minutes. We have just enough time to get Harold to the nearest dispensary. Or else we can kiss that competition goodbye.”

  Edge Nain speaks in an imperative tone: “No. We take him to a full hospital, and now. If we hurry, we can make it in time. Sweet Jesu sees what we do, and He will make sure we get what we deserve.”

  Ras growls in protest; his faith clearly is not as trusting as Edge Nain’s. But he yields to his friend’s authority, and the four of them set off. Kel summons a red-class taxicab—why quibble over a few tens of units when they’re about to burn tens of thousands? They pile in, request to be taken to the nearest full-service hospital. The self-piloting vehicle weaves its way among the brightly lit streets.

  They are isolated in the cab; the three dreamweavers have silenced their soundsuits, extinguished their neon-implants. The outside sounds are muffled to a chaotic background percussion track, the bright lights filtered by the polarized windows. They travel so swiftly and in such a complicated course the brain balks at the idea that the streets and buildings are fixed; so much easier to assume this vehicle is the unmoving centre of all things, while the brightly lit outside swirls and jitters by. There comes upon Kel—youngest of the trio, born long after the Eldred had landed—a familiar feeling: that all of Yerusalom is a stage set, that the Eldred have recruited humanity for some absurdist play of theirs, incomprehensible to human minds. He has a vision of himself as a Pierrot wandering through a maze of streets, questing in vain for his Columbine, who lies all tangled up in her strings within some prodigious attic, beyond a door it costs a lifetime’s earnings even to open a crack. . . . Not a bad image, that; should they use it in their next dream? He will at least suggest it—but right now he should be concerned only with the dream they are going to perform when they reach the Proxima Theater. Assuming they do manage to get there in time for the competition. Seated at his left, Harold stares ahead blindly, weeping pale-blue tears.

  The performer’s doors of the Proxima Theater are closed when the three dreamweavers rush out of the red-class taxicab. They run across the street, their coats flapping behind them, ascend the three steps, slam their bare hands onto the doors with desperate cries. Kel wails in frustration; Ras gives Edge Nain a murderous look. Edge Nain has been praying, deep in his heart. And so it does not truly surprise him when the doors suddenly yield, swing inward, let them in. The trio stagger into the backstage lobby of the Proxima. The entry fee is deducted from their accounts; and, starting this instant, every additional minute they remain within the building will cost them 1.8 assets.

  In the lobby stand nearly a dozen groups of dreamweavers. Most are made up of three or four people; one group boasts nine members, while two flamboyant individuals are going it alone. An Eldred carrying a palm-node greets the trio; by the pattern of jewels embedded among her scales, they think to recognize her as one they have dealt with before, whom they learned to call Sumyuru.

  Sumyuru: “Friends, you have come to participate in the competition?”

  Ras: “Yes, we have. We’re registered under ‘Brothers of Enceladus’. Are we too late?”

  Sumyuru raises a hand and spreads her six digits, the Eldred equivalent of a smile, or so it is believed. “No. There was a small delay on our part, and you are still on time. I have confirmed your participation. In one minute we will announce the order in which the performances will be given. There will be a ten-minute period to rehearse, after which all performers will be required to enter the auditorium and attend the others’ performances. If you wish, mood-enhancers and hallucinogens are available at self-service dispensers; rates are posted above the machines.”

  Kel shakes his big-boned head in contempt. He has a pathological aversion to drugs, believes only in the purity of the dreamweaving experience. While Ras and Edge Nain are not so puritanical as he, neither of them considers using the proffered substances. They see one of the soloists at the drug dispensers, obviously mentally trying out combinations, checking the total price. He comes to a decision, punches in his choices, and four varicoloured pills drop into his outstretched hand.

  Kel: “That fool’s going to burn out every neuron in his brain. I can’t let him do this.”

  Before the other two can hold him back, Kel strides over to the soloist, urges him not to take the drugs. The other becomes instantly suspicious, demands to know why Kel is so concerned about his welfare. Next instant, before any answer can be given, he takes a swing at Kel, who ducks back and retreats toward his friends, under a torrent of invective. The soloist does not pursue, probably aware that he has already been heftily fined for attempted violence and that actual assault might well bankrupt him on the spot.

  Ras: “Give it a rest, Kel. It’s his choice if he wants to take them.” Ras forebears to add that if the soloist does burn out, it will increase their own chances. He knows that his soft-hearted friend would be deeply offended by such a remark, though it is no more than the truth.

  Sumyuru’s hissing voice rises in the lobby, instantly evoking silence. She reads out the schedule for the competition. The Brothers of Enceladus will be fifth out of eleven, a good spot. They will have time to calm down, but they will not have to wait too long and risk losing their concentration.

  Everyone takes advantage of the ten-minute rehearsal period. Small side-rooms are made available to the performers, at a nominal charge. Kel groans in anguish when he sees the soloist swallow all the pills at once before going into a room. The trio chooses a room and goes through warm-up exercises. They do not evoke anything they will be using in their performance, for fear of killing the spontaneity. Instead, they work on standard effects, striving to achieve a meshing within the first few seconds, gauging each other’s mood. The ten minutes pass by quickly; at the end, they are as relaxed and comfortable as they’ll ever be.

  A bell rings, and all the dreamweavers gather, enter the auditorium. The human audience is assigned seats on the parterre, while the Eldred are seated in a single high box. No efforts have been made to conceal the box’s security equipment: sensors and weapons gleam in the lights. Exclamations rise from the human section as the dreamweaving teams make their way to their bank of seats close to the stage, separ
ated from the rest of the parterre by five metres of empty space and a softly glowing line. Edge Nain recognizes more than a few people in the crowd, including a woman he would never have expected to see again, not after her friend was gunned down by theatre security at the Brothers’ last performance for having tried to cross the line separating performers from audience. Sweet Jesu, prays Edge Nain as he grasps the relayer-bar set in the armrest of his seat, please let everyone here keep their head tonight.

  The first group, Noncortical, steps onto the stage to the raucous cheering of their supporters in the audience. It is a quintet, with three inexperienced youngsters and only two old hands in their mid-thirties to keep them in check. Edge Nain knows one of them, Syrna; worked with her in fact, five years ago, when he was just starting out. He smiles briefly, remembering the dreams their group shaped in those days. The smile turns into a slight wince as Noncortical’s performance starts. Within a few seconds, Edge Nain is swept into an adventure within an endless jungle, along with a band of friends he has known forever. . . . The dream is brash, energetic, but it lacks focus; frequently, the thread is lost, sounds and images clash with the moods: the sense of purpose, which is so important, fades away. Five years, and Syrna’s dreams have not changed. Maybe if she allowed herself to act her age, if she went after experience instead of raw youth in her partners . . .

  The dream lasts the full five minutes allowed and concludes abruptly when the inducers power down at the command of their timing units. Noncortical leaves the stage to polite applause. Immortality will not be for them this night, and everyone knows it. Even their fans’ enthusiasm now sounds forced.

  Three more performances before it is the trio’s turn. Between each performance, they empty their heads of the others’ dream. This is the risk they all run: being contaminated by the other weavers’ material. If it echoes in their own performance, they will show themselves to be weak, easily influenced.