by Ada Hoffmann
The human on the radio didn’t say anything heretical. He only paused, long and uncomfortable.
“I’ll talk to the council and see what I can do,” he said at last. “But I don’t know, I think you need to start working on ways to get by with the lights off.”
The only answer was an aggrieved sigh.
Elu turned the dial idly as he worked on the contours of a rag for Akavi to wear over his shoulders, something that might plausibly have once been a business jacket. He listened to conversations go past about supplies, and about the past week’s injuries and deaths – far fewer than at the beginning of the Plague, but still too many to dwell on. There was good news, too: births, reunions, informal marriages, music performed and art created. Rebuilding projects that went well, as often as the ones that went badly. He listened to conversations about those projects – carefully phrased, again, never to reveal any heretical components. Just tips and tricks, ordinary ways to use a spanner or a pulley or a tarp to put something useful together. People talked about the clothes they were painstakingly knitting or sewing, the meager food they’d lovingly cooked, the games they were playing to pass the time. People talked about relationships. People joked, as much as they dared without veering into heresy again, about how they were and weren’t getting by.
He whiled away a few hours like that, until, turning the dial aimlessly in the middle of working on pigmentation for that shoulder rag, a familiar voice startled him.
“–told you I don’t know what they’re up to,” said Qiel Huong. “But I can’t check it out for you today – it’s my turn to forage. Send Riid. He’s good with this stuff.”
Elu remembered Qiel. He’d heard her voice on this radio before. Normally it was friends of hers, passing on messages about Qiel said this or Qiel wants that. But sometimes Qiel ventured onto the airwaves herself, not for anything of particular importance, just getting a message to a friend. Qiel had become a figure people listened to.
He remembered meeting her in person, though, just after the Plague. She hadn’t been a local leader then; it had surprised him, seeing who naturally rose into those roles and who didn’t. She’d just been a girl from a wealthy family whose large house had stayed miraculously intact, and who’d opened it up for shelter to everyone she knew. He and Akavi had met her and her sister and cousin, fleeing from a monster, when they first touched down to explore the area near Büata. Enga had destroyed the monster and saved their lives. Qiel and Juorie Huong had been Akavi’s first source of real intel about the Chaos Zone, and they’d briefly offered their yard for his team to camp in.
Elu sternly turned the dial away. He didn’t want to think about those days, when he and Akavi had been normal angels doing, if not a normal mission, then at least a mission using normal tools within the chain of command. When, even though he longed for Akavi, the actual working dynamic between them was simple and functional. When it hadn’t felt like a lie.
He didn’t want to think about whether he was really better off now.
Hours later, with the first draft of the gone person disguise nearly complete in his head, he was still turning the dial.
“–loved the concert at Shenna Park, that string section really moved me, I–”
“–told you six bottles, not this–”
“–the kids really need other kids around, you know, not just a bunch of worried grown-ups who can’t–”
He didn’t know what he was looking for. Just noise, maybe. Enough impassioned discussion of some random, riveting topic to make him forget he was alone.
“–it’s just that he’s never around anymore, and I can’t–”
Elu paused.
“–I can’t manage the house all by myself,” the voice on the radio continued. It was an adult woman, soft-spoken, medium in pitch. It wasn’t anyone he recognized. “That sounds pathetic, doesn’t it? The world fell apart. We’re all supposed to be self-reliant now. If I can’t manage a hammer or a screw no matter how hard I try, that’s really on me, isn’t it? That’s a… deficiency.”
“We’re supposed to help each other,” the other voice counseled. Also female, similar in tone, soothing. “That’s not a deficiency. You do plenty of things he can’t do, don’t you?”
“Well, I cook,” said the first voice, uncertain.
“Have you talked to Fenne?” said the second voice. “Have you told him straight out that you need his help around the house sometimes?”
Elu should not listen. It was broadcast on the public channels, of course, but there was a delicate etiquette to these radio conversations. There were certain things it was polite to overhear in passing, but too personal to fixate on, like an eavesdropper in a café, leaning closer to pick up the details of some salacious exchange.
Something about it moved him, though. Elu wanted someone he could talk to like this. Not Akavi, not someone he loved like Akavi, just a friend who’d hear him out about his feelings. Was that selfish? Angels of Nemesis didn’t talk about their feelings much. But mortals did, and it was okay as long as you were willing to listen to the other person back.
“I don’t know what good it would do,” the first voice sighed. “I told him before that the porch is falling down because of those blue slug-things, you know, the burrowing ones. We really need to sit down at some point and actually name these different monsters, someone should make a committee, but never mind. He said he’d get to it, but he hasn’t yet. I don’t want to nag.”
“You should come over here to the compound,” said the second voice. “Just take a day trip, it’s not that far. We’ve got plenty of people over here who know their way around a hammer. You shouldn’t have to rely on just one person. That’s really not how things are here anymore.”
“I couldn’t impose,” said the first voice, uncertainly.
“Bring some of your cooking, then. I’d love to see you.”
“I don’t think Fenne would like that, though. Me just disappearing for a day like that. What if that was the day he did have time for me, and I wasn’t around?”
The second voice snorted. “What, so he’s allowed to leave for random reasons, but you’re not?”
Elu’s printed radio could be set to broadcast as well as receive. He’d never used that function, but he knew Akavi would ask him to do so eventually. He’d use the radio to further the mission of infiltration and influence. He’d speak to people winningly, earn their trust, subtly steer them towards discord and danger. Elu could do that, in theory, if the people involved couldn’t see his face.
It would mean he could talk to people who weren’t Akavi. It would give him another way to try to fill the lonely space in his head. There was something about the idea that he didn’t like, despite that. He’d never liked lying, which was one of the reasons he’d failed basic training; it was something every angel of Nemesis had to do.
But he wanted to close his eyes and jump in. He didn’t know what in the galaxy he’d say. Hi, me too, I miss someone who’s not around, too. The two women having this personal conversation wouldn’t like that. And there was no way to explain his situation without giving secrets away. It was a stupid idea. He just wanted someone to talk to him the way that second voice talked. To help him make sense of things.
Elu shut the radio off with a click.
He needed air. He stood up, fumbling through the Talon’s cabinets. Some time ago, he’d printed out a head covering, the type that bystanders often wore in the background of Akavi’s videos. They were becoming fashionable in the Chaos Zone, some wearers no doubt shielding their identities from prying angelic eyes, some only following a trend.
With the soft patterned cloth arranged correctly, the front part drooping forward until it barely revealed his eyes, Elu could look in the mirror and not see the titanium plates of an angel at his temples. He could go outside like this, if he was careful, without being recognized for what he was. It was dangerous to do that, but it wouldn’t be the first time he’d done it.
He threw on the
cloth and a light jacket, and he stepped out of the Talon into the boulders and trees, like an animal clambering in agitation out of its cage.
The greenery moved, winding and unwinding in patterns too complicated to be the result of the wind. Elu had grown accustomed to this. He sat on a waist-high boulder, his hands pressed to the stone underneath him, his feet in the undergrowth. The grove where they’d landed was shady and comfortable; it was winter now, but the area near Büata was in a subtropical climate and it never really got all that cold.
He took some deep breaths, watching the plants go about their business. He’d never figured out the purpose of all this movement. Outside seemed to make things move more often than it stopped things from moving. Did the plants gain something from moving in Outside ways, the way a flower gained something from turning its face to the sun? Were plants that moved this way somehow healthier, more robust, than those that didn’t? Did they work together, like the gone people, to achieve some obscure plant goal? Or was it the reverse? Was it detrimental, or a sign of distress, like the tremors and thrashings of a wounded animal?
The angels and sell-souls studying this place might have an answer by now. But Elu didn’t, despite how many times he’d come out here, desperate for fresh air and a change of scenery, breathing in the humid air as he watched other living things twine and untwine.
After a while he got up and started walking.
He’d never told Akavi that he left the Talon like this sometimes. It wasn’t a secret; he would have readily confessed, if Akavi ever asked. If Akavi had shown any curiosity as to what Elu did, besides following orders, when he wasn’t around. But Akavi could infer, if he thought about it, that Elu must do this. God-built printers didn’t create things ex nihilo; they needed material. To make food, clothing, and other organics, Elu needed to keep the cartridges filled with sources of all the common kinds of organic molecule. The Talon had a recycler in its supply room that could process almost anything, but, with Akavi taking so much material out, other material had to go in. The only sufficiently large source of material was the outside world.
Besides, he liked to go out. It was nice to remember that things around him lived. The trees and small animals here were like the voices on the radio. They didn’t fill the emptiness where the ansible nets had used to be, but they made it so the emptiness wasn’t all there was.
Elu came out here more often than was strictly necessary. He ventured a little further afield, some days, than Akavi might have liked.
He wandered through the trees, taking his time. Letting his emotions settle. Watching for interesting details: there was a new kind of bird in one of the trees, one that he didn’t remember seeing before. Elu didn’t have any naturalist software, but he had plenty of spare circuitry with which to record images. He’d whiled away many long nights quietly storing and classifying images of the different life forms here. This bird was no bigger than his fist, black with a bluish sheen on its wings, and a bright blue crest on its head. He’d seen the black-and-blue wings before, but not the crest; maybe this was a related species, or a different gender, or maybe the crest came out at certain times of year.
Beyond the bird, the trees ended and gave way to a rocky meadow. Something else glinted there in that same shade of blue, darkly luminous like a twilit sky. It was on the ground, nestled in the grass, and it looked like a series of small round shapes. Eggs? Curled creatures? Fungi, like the ones he’d been printing? Stones, gem-laden, or maybe just turned that color by the same Outside strangeness that had changed everything else?
He edged closer.
As he cleared the line of trees he could see that the blue shapes extended further, popping up at intervals in the yellow-green meadow grass, in more than one direction. He knelt to examine the closest one, its shape and texture half-hidden by the plants around it.
Someone coughed behind him.
He whirled around, alarmed. He had never seen another person out here before; he’d thought that the grove was private enough to let him wander safely. He tried to mask his nervousness. If he kept his wits about him and kept the head covering on, he could pass for just another survivor out foraging. As long as this was just another survivor, behind him, and not an angel.
It was not an angel. It was a young Riayin woman, looking at him with eyes almost as wide and perplexed as his own. She had, from the looks of it, also been foraging, with a pair of binoculars around her neck and a basket half-full of small edible plants and eggs.
“I know you,” she blurted. “You’re–”
Elu stared back at her, speechless, with a sinking feeling. He knew why she recognized him. She was Qiel Huong.
WARNING
The materials presented in the exhibits herein include unaltered examples of historical heresies, including heresies that caused the deaths of billions. We display these heresies for the purpose of education and preservation of our past: without a true effort to remember humanity’s mistakes, we will be liable to repeat them. For the express purpose of educational display, some of Nemesis’ regulations against the discussion of heretical ideas have been lifted. Display in this museum of any historical writing, utterance, or broadcast in no way constitutes endorsement of its views.
Reproducing or recording accounts of these heresies for any purpose, including educational, without formal written permission, may in itself constitute heresy. Educators in history and related subjects may ask a museum docent for information about the permission process.
– Official display at the front entrance of the Morlock Museum, Old Earth
CHAPTER 7
Now
Tiv had never been to Old Earth before, but she’d heard of it. Everybody learned in school about Old Earth. Deeply altered both by climate change and by the devastation of the Morlock War, it was now only an echo of the mother world it had once been. Old Earth had that in common with the Chaos Zone. It couldn’t go back to what it remembered, only forward. But in certain parts of Old Earth, under heavy supervision, remembrance was allowed in ways that it wouldn’t be anywhere else.
That was why Tiv was headed there now.
She’d closed her eyes, in the airlock, trying to remember as hard as she could an image she’d seen growing up. The city square, in a certain part of Old Earth, that contained the Morlock Museum. She’d hoped that the half-remembered picture would be enough for the meta-portal to pick up on her intent.
The Morlock War was the only conflict that had ever really harmed the Gods – the only conflict where any enemy had made headway against them at all. And that was the faint scrap of hope that Tiv clung to now. That, if she studied that war as hard as she could, she’d work out what on earth her team could hope to achieve in this one.
Apparently her mental image was enough for the meta-portal, because it spit her out into a city square so muggy it put all but the most sweltering equatorial regions of Jai to shame. The buildings were raised on concrete stilts, emerging from a soupy, buzzing swamp. It was a tourist area, large and grand despite its odd construction, with clusters of buildings in a variety of clashing styles: white domes and pillars here, glass-steel towers there. A melting pot of all sorts of humans thronged through its raised squares and walkways, dressed garishly, talking excitedly to each other and taking pictures. Electric trams slid by, occasionally coming to a platform where they disgorged more tourists. This place had once been the capital of an empire, and it had been resurrected in this stylized form to preserve some memory of what went before.
It was easy enough to blend into the crowd of tourists. Tiv had dressed the part, in an obnoxiously bright floral tunic, a straw hat to keep out the sun, and white trousers.
It was strange, setting her feet down on a planet with such history. Tiv’s own ancestors, many centuries ago, had come from Old Earth; everyone’s had. Most of Old Earth’s inhabitants had left the planet during the Morlock War, and they’d formed their own new ways of living elsewhere. The Gods hadn’t been keen to let them keep many cultura
l ties to the past. Those who stayed and survived the war had been allowed to keep a little more: a smattering of family and place names, cultural relics and traditions, so long as they gave up the heretical parts.
And in a few select places, such as the museums in this particular tourist city, they’d been allowed to keep the heresies. The simplest and most prominent were preserved under glass for the public. Ancient documents giving further details were contained in a connected archive, where historians could access them under strict supervision, for specific research purposes.
Tiv didn’t want the heresies themselves. She didn’t care what the Morlocks had believed. She wanted to know how they’d fought.
The security guards at the front of the building gave her a brief glance and opened her backpack, but there was nothing incriminating in there. She’d been careful to pack it only with a wallet and fake ID, an innocuous book, some maps and snacks, the sort of things an ordinary tourist would carry. They didn’t search long before waving her through, and she was abruptly plunged into the crowded darkness of the museum’s interior.
The Morlock Museum’s entrance vestibule was deliberately disconcerting, a chaotic, closed-in space in which it was difficult to see any exits. Ominous sounds played in the background: the shouting of a mob, the clanging of swords against shields, the tolling of bells. Frightening objects lurked in hidden alcoves, invisible until one nearly walked into them: grotesque sculptures that had once been objects of worship, altars with runnels for blood down the sides, implements of torture.
But the Gods tortured people too. Everyone knew They did it; Tiv had seen it. It was just that everyone believed that was different. It was calculated down to the last decimal place, that this blood and these screams were necessary for the greater good. That, somehow, it was different from what had gone before.
