Angels and Exiles

by Angels

  Satan says quietly, in her hissing voice: “Maybe I am mistaken. But I am a High Administrator for my commercial sept, and it is my function to reach such understandings. I have dealt with three species before, and I have access to a thousand years of records. And it is my evaluation that any prolonged presence among you will destroy your species. The loss would be severe.”

  Edge Nain, after a pause: “You speak of financial loss, don’t you? If there was no question of profit involved, you wouldn’t care at all.”

  “That is correct. This is an aspect of us most humans do not seem to understand, despite our explanations; I am pleased that you do.”

  Ras speaks up: “You said you didn’t want our art. That soloist who died . . . I couldn’t believe you placed him second. But then, it didn’t matter how shitty his performance was, did it? You’ve never cared about the artistic value of dreamweaving.”

  “It has always been irrelevant. The soloist almost won because he showed us his naked mind, in all its terror. He was a good candidate for recording, but you three are in some ways even better.”

  Edge Nain: “Then, as long as you’re answering all our questions, tell me: why does Sweet Jesu walk our streets? Or do all of us simply imagine Him?”

  “He is real. We’ve made Him real. Since human cultures traditionally associate commerce with forces of evil, this was taken to be a necessary balance for our interactions with you. We have over twelve dozen teams of operatives monitoring the city constantly and striving to apply immanent justice to human endeavours. Indeed, without the intercession of one of those teams, you would not have been allowed to enter the theatre. Globally, however, results of the Jesu operations have been inconclusive.”

  Edge Nain blinks at the Eldred, then shuts his lids for a few seconds, withdrawing into a private darkness. He is not truly surprised, not really disappointed. It is not as if this hypothesis had not been floated in his hearing before, a hundred times. He knows the mystics’ answer also, that the real Jesu could choose to enlist the Eldred to work His miracles in Yerusalom. If the magician shows you the trickery he used, that does not prove he cannot truly work a spell. When Edge Nain opens his eyes again, he looks at Ras, who is smouldering with anger, at Kel, his youthful face like that of a bereft angel. And for a split second, like a pivot-point in a dreamweaving, he thinks to grasp the Eldred’s perspective on the Jesu experiment, and horror rises in him at what humanity has become. But then the epiphany leaves him, and he returns to his former bewilderment. He was five years old when the Eldred came down upon the Earth; their arrival spelled the ending of his childhood. He remembers, dimly, a time when his parents constantly squabbled about money, when they refused to let him play outside for fear of the gangs roaming the suburban streets. In front of him stands one of the race that brought his family, his entire country, out of despair. The Eldred are the core of his existence, those from whom all blessings flow. That they should also embody Sweet Jesu is unavoidable, is it not?

  Ras is saying, sullen: “What will you do with us now? Are you just going to give us money and let us go?”

  Satan: “As soon as you give me formal agreement on the contract. Kel already has; what about the other two?”

  Ras makes an angry gesture. “Sure, I agree.” Edge Nain whispers: “I accept.” He knows it is done, knows their asset balances have jumped up hugely, and feels how little it all means, now that Satan’s words have put it all in perspective.

  Satan: “I expect you will repeat our conversation to others. You may or may not be believed. I have run several simulations, but my models are still primitive. In this I advise you to use your instinct. People may well react violently to your message.”

  Kel speaks suddenly, his voice strangled by emotion: “Are you done? Then just let us leave. I don’t care about your stupid contract. I never wanted your damned money. I just want out of here; out of Yerusalom!”

  Satan nods abruptly, and this human gesture is so disconcerting the trio find themselves shuddering. A flyer appears over the rim of the roof, and noiselessly comes to rest a few metres away. Its hatch opens: the interior is richly decorated and, although dim, glows with a hundred tiny lights.

  Ras and Kel climb inside. Edge Nain stays behind, facing the Eldred.

  He asks: “It won’t be long, will it?”

  She: “No, not long. It may be too late already; we will not delay.”

  “If you keep one of us, keep Ras; he wanted it so much. Or Kel, at least: he was the one who believed the most.”

  “You mean you do not want us to keep you. Do not worry about that. You are the one we will certainly not keep.”

  And Edge Nain, who had felt again he was coming to understand something about the Eldred, now senses the gulf that has always yawned between them. Ice in his stomach, he joins his comrades aboard the craft.

  The hatch closes; through the smoky canopy they can see the top of the building, but the dark figure of the Eldred named Satan has faded against the darkness of the sky. As the flyer speeds away from the tower, there comes unbidden to Edge Nain a vision of the near future: of the self-constructed buildings of Yerusalom all taking to space in a glow of dark-bearing light, leaving behind a stunned humanity. Never, never, never to return.

  WITHIN THE MECHANISM

  RENDING

  Long after the Anubine had left, a pall of smoke still hung in the air above the surface of the Mechanism. Slowly it settled onto the metal skin and the small plot of earth and its vegetables; ashes rained down onto the tree that grew beneath the grating, and fouled the pool at the bottom of the hollow drum from which Berrin and Maddus drew their water.

  Berrin had been gone three days: a hunting expedition, faraway east along the metal aisles of the Mechanism, past the thicket of crisscrossing corroded beams they called the Hedge Forest and into the wild area beyond, where much soil had drifted into depressions of the surface. There, grass and trees grew, and birds and small animals were abundant.

  The hunting had been good; Berrin was skilled with her crossbow. Her bags now bulged with meat. She was quietly happy. She longed to be with Maddus again, in great and sudden bursts of feeling that left her with a dry mouth and a pounding heart.

  Her mind adrift in fantasies, she paid only cursory attention to her surroundings. Thus it was only when she was already very near her home that she finally grew aware of the devastation the Anubine had wrought. In sudden terror, she ran the rest of the way, not even thinking to draw the blade she wore strapped to her forearm.

  She had known, perhaps, from the moment she perceived the remains of the cloud roiling in the air. In fact, it seemed to her now that she had known before that moment; as the pain of a wound is later remembered to have begun before ever the flesh was cut. She had known that she was too late, that the Anubine had caught Maddus and overcome her. As if it could not have been otherwise.

  She found Maddus on the sloping plate behind the house. The Anubine had dismembered her and scattered her limbs about, a discarded puzzle of flesh. Dried blood stained the whole of the metal surface. The head had rolled to the bottom of the incline, and rested face up in the angle of the plate with the main floor. Its features were twisted; in surprise, in terror, in pain? Perhaps, thought Berrin, Maddus had been caught unaware and had not had enough time to be afraid. She doubted it.

  The trunk had been hewn in three pieces, and the poured-out innards had been slashed into ribbons. With Maddus’s blood the Anubine had drawn a complex symbol on the rear wall of the house. Doubtless it meant something to them, but to a Mere human it was unintelligible. Berrin ignored it as she began to gather the pieces of Maddus’s corpse, methodically, the way she used to tidy up their house; and then her numbed mind began to thaw, and she was able to scream at last.

  REBUILDING

  In the end, it surprised her how ordinary the whole thing seemed. For many long minutes, but far less than an hour by the horizon clock, she had raved and
gibbered. Then her emotions drained away, and her sanity returned. Always she had been like this, feelings coming after a brief delay in an explosive rush, and then utterly spending themselves, leaving behind a composure cold and hard, like the metal of the Mechanism in the night. Only happiness had been otherwise, a slow quiet building-up that did not pause or crest.

  Her lover was dead now; her happiness should be ended, but there was one way that she might yet attempt to recapture it. It was forbidden; all her youth in Town Dulade, she had heard the prohibition against invoking that gift of the Mechanism. But she had left Town Dulade years ago to be alone with Maddus, to live as they saw fit, faraway into the metal wilderness; she had discarded the prohibitions of her former home.

  She finished gathering the fragments of the corpse. She laid them one against the other, roughly recreating the pattern of Maddus’s body. Parts were missing or damaged beyond hope. Half the left hand was crushed to a pulp; the tendons of the right leg were shredded; part of the face had been torn off and flung away, and Berrin could not find it.

  Yet in the end, what she had assembled of Maddus was enough. She went into the house—what the Anubine had left of it. They had burst a wall, smashed the glass windows, demolished the furnishings; but they had in fact taken nothing, for stealing was not their way. Berrin found the heavy casket she was looking for; it was gashed and battered, but unopened. She fit her key inside the lock and opened the lid. Inside the casket were all the fragments she had gathered over the years. A vast selection, full of possibilities.

  So she set to work. Inside the casket were crimped needles with a point at either end, shards of gears, small toothed wheels, screws of bronze and nails of brass, clamps that looked like the heads of children with grotesque jaws, coils of barbed wire fine as hairstrands, icicles of melted glass, thin slabs of steel pierced with a myriad of holes almost too fine to discern, and much else. Patiently and with precision, Berrin reassembled Maddus. She stapled and sewed shut the tears in the internal organs; fitted metal caps onto the shattered ends of the spine and socketed them together; pinned the arms to the shoulders; to replace the missing fingers, she screwed lengths of coppery cylinders onto the carpal bones, and set steel cable inside the leg in lieu of a tendon.

  She worked until the sun had declined to the edge of the world and drowned her work in shadow. Then she stopped, spent. She might have made some light, but there was no need. She was finished. No matter the outcome, she had done her utmost.

  She kneeled, facing the half-disk of the sun, and prayed to the Mechanism, that it might grant her her heart’s desire. Under her legs she could feel the thrum of it, the slow energies still coursing through the vast expanse of dying metal, and she begged that they might come to her aid. As if to answer her, the horizon clock clanged out its evening call, and Berrin started. At that moment, Maddus drew a shuddering breath. Berrin went to her, took her into her arms, supporting her head.

  Maddus’s eyelids fluttered, drew open. The eyes rolled randomly, then fixed on Berrin’s face. There was no recognition in them. Maddus coughed long and hard, retched, and finally spat out a clot of blood; in the heart of it gleamed a steel needle.

  REMEMBERING

  She was like a child in some ways, an infant. She could not control her body, and her limbs would suddenly flail about convulsively, then settle back into immobility. From time to time, groans and whines forced themselves through her throat, random exhalations unrelated to anything else. The metal pins Berrin had set in her flesh were moving about slowly, like thorns in stirred clay. Twice already, a sharp projecting edge had scored Berrin’s flesh while she tried to restrain Maddus’s thrashing limbs.

  Toward dawn, Maddus began to quiet; her movements had lost some of their spastic quality, and she no longer gave voice. Berrin took some food from her pack and ate, then drank water from her gourd. After a moment’s hesitation, she offered some to Maddus, who proved able to swallow the liquid, but closed her lips tightly after a few mouthfuls.

  The sky lightened in the east, in the direction of the Hedge Forest. A tremor passed through the skin of the Mechanism: some huge weight shifting far below them, the beat of an escapement so vast its period was measured in years, the collapse of an entire substructure tens of kilometres away. . . . There was no way to tell. Maddus began to mutter indistinctly. Berrin smoothed the other woman’s hair away from her forehead; she scratched her palm on the tip of a pin that protruded from the temple.

  The distant clock, half-hidden by the northern horizon, its eastern rim gleaming orange, clanged once. The sun had risen in the sky, though they were still in the shadow of the Hedge Forest. Maddus opened her eyes, looked at Berrin. Her lips twisted and quivered; she said, in a voice that seemed to belong to an old man, “Dark it was, and so deep I thought all the lights would leave forever. Was it the Hand that sent for me?”

  Berrin shut her eyes and felt tears gather at their corners.

  Maddus spoke on, but her voice now was a young girl’s. “It came through the garden. The steel leaves, the thorns of gold—they didn’t stop it. It took me and . . . oh!” She convulsed suddenly in Berrin’s arms. Her limbs drummed on the ground; the metal fingers of her left hand jetted sparks as they screeched against the old steel. Maddus let out a howl of agony. Berrin tried to restrain her, but Maddus suddenly wrestled herself free and jumped to her feet. Her eyes were open wide, fixed on something that was not there. She pointed at it, spoke a name, whirled, and began to run. Berrin rose to pursue, but after a dozen strides, Maddus threw herself to the ground, clapped her hands over her head, and was still.

  Berrin knelt by her side and waited, stroking her back gently. After a time, she drew Maddus up to her feet and led her to what remained of their house. Maddus was now pliant, her face slack and her eyes glazed. Berrin made her sit on a gored cushion, gave her more water and a small amount of food.

  An hour or two passed. Maddus regained a measure of awareness. When Berrin offered the gourd, she took it in both hands and drank.

  Berrin said, “Maddus?” The other woman looked at her blankly. “What is your name?” said Berrin, smiling, though she knew the answer would break her heart.

  “Ah-wh . . . I down’t. . . .” said Maddus, words coming blurred and slow. She screwed up her face in concentration and said, “I am . . . Kaph.”

  REDEFINING

  Berrin had known she could expect no more, yet she had hoped that the mind of Maddus would survive, more or less intact. But mind is an outgrowth of the body; from a torn and patched-up body, nothing could emerge but a torn and patched-up mind. Maddus was gone; this woman who called herself Kaph had taken her place. Her memories were incoherent fragments, shards of dreams. They would have to be sorted, assembled, integrated. The work of weeks, months, a lifetime.

  To give Kaph a focus, a core of action to cling to while she rebuilt her identity, Berrin enrolled her in the repairing of their home. For two days they busied themselves at it. The destroyed wall could be reassembled, but a gaping tear remained. Some of the furniture was salvageable; other pieces could, with patience, be partially repaired. The vegetables in the plot had been uprooted, but not all the plants were dead.

  As a final gesture, the Anubine had set off a low-yield sunweapon at ground level, and a crater had been blasted not fifty metres from the house. Through the ruptured skin of the Mechanism could be seen a maze of intersecting pipes, around which glittering cables twisted in double helices. From the depths of the hole, a ratcheting sound could be heard, whirring up and down in frequency, sounding in its upper register like a man’s hoarse whine.

  Some fragments had jarred loose in the explosion, and those Berrin decided to scavenge; while Kaph held onto the end of a rope, Berrin lowered herself into the hole and gathered up what she could reach. Some of the pipes were burning hot to the touch; some were so cold Berrin lost a patch of skin to them.

  In the evening, Berrin set out her gleanings on the floor of t
he house. Kaph sat across from her, squeezing her metal fingers within her flesh ones. As long as she worked, she was calm, absorbed in the task at hand. When she became idle, she grew distressed. Berrin could see emotions flickering across her face and imagined the flow of disconnected images and thoughts passing through the other woman’s mind.

  She pointed to an odd piece of metal, shaped like a crescent. “What do you think this is, Kaph?” she asked, to distract her.

  Kaph’s eyes flicked to her face. Her mouth twisted, corners down. “I’d like to know who you are, please,” she said.

  Berrin looked at the floor. She had not guessed it would be so bitter. “My name is Berrin. You and I were lovers. We came from Town Dulade, a week’s march west of here. We knew each other in childhood, we were parted, and met again when I was twenty and you twenty-one. We fell in love and chose to make our life here, because we liked the wilderness and the solitude. And because we thought we had no need to fear the Anubine.”

  “I don’t remember this. I don’t remember you. I don’t have clear memories of anything. I lived in a garden when I was young, and when I was an old man, I ruled in a city high on a great turbine, and I had several children. . . . But I can’t have done all this. I’m not a man, I’m not old. I don’t know why you would lie to me, but I don’t remember any of what you talked about.”

  “You were killed, Kaph. The Anubine came upon you and killed you, and dismembered your corpse. I rebuilt you, but when you came back to life you were not the same. This is why it’s forbidden to reassemble the dead. I thought it wouldn’t happen that way, that the tales they told in Town Dulade were lies or legends. Now I know they weren’t. I am sorry to have brought you pain, but I loved you, and I wanted you alive again.” Berrin was playing with two small gears, knocking them one against the other, again and again, looking at nothing else.