They arrived at a tall window, curtained. “Open it,” Echidna snapped at Samson. “I just want you to see this, Union man.”
Wylie realized that she had brought him close to a great, black wall with huge levers on it. Scalar controls, he knew, that worked the gigantic lenses that were deployed on two-moon earth. But then the curtains swept open, and he saw a lawn so bright green it must have been painted, awash in splendid people, some of them reptilian, others human, or seemingly so. There were politicians, of course, great, grinning hordes of them, military officers in the uniforms of a dozen countries, representatives of various royal families, rock stars, CEOs, television personalities, preachers, mullahs, gurus—in fact, every sort of human leader and person of power. Among them strolled naked seraph girls and boys, their scales bleached so white they looked new-minted, carrying trays loaded with barbecued fingers, ears and toes, and flutes of hissy champagne.
To one side was a line of elaborate gas grills, all black and chrome. He recognized that they were Strathmores from home, the brand he had on his own deck, except that these were limousine models, with twelve burners instead of the usual four. Most of them were rolling spits, and on them some of the victims still twisted and squirmed. Behind each grill hung a complete body molt on a tall spike, a pale skin attesting to the youth and therefore tenderness of the person under preparation.
Echidna pointed to an empty grill. “That’ll be you,” she said.
He wanted to try to run, anything to avoid what seemed inevitable. But there was more, because he saw that this party was not to celebrate his capture, or not only that, it was also to celebrate an enormous event that was unfolding in a valley behind the building.
In the center of this valley was a gigantic circular lens of purest black, its surface reflecting the wan midday sun. And around it, stretching to every horizon, were what must be millions and millions of seraph, ready to pour through the moment the signal was given. He saw men, women, children, heard the booming of syrinxes, the chatter and whoops of other animals, and above it all the excited, argumentative shrieking of the seraph themselves as they jostled for position and accused one another of trying to break the baskets of black, oblong eggs the women all carried.
He assumed that he would die here today. He’d been living for years in an extremely dangerous situation with a wiped memory, and that made you vulnerable—so vulnerable, in fact, that it was probably just a matter of time before you ended up going through the funny little door in the woods. He loved his poor family, though, his striving, brilliant, lovely family. What would happen to them? Could they shift, he wondered? Did they, perhaps in secret, the children under their covers at night, Brooke in the privacy of her early mornings?
Ann had sidled closer, and he thought maybe he could cause a little confusion. In this class-ridden society, she was bound to have some prerogatives. Time wasn’t on his side, obviously, but distraction might be.
He turned to her. “Must I?”
She squared her shoulders. “Of course you must.”
He went toward her, and thus also toward the wall behind her.
“Guards,” Echidna said mildly. “Stay with him.”
Samson came, and with him his heavily armed escort.
Wylie was still bound, of course, but he came to Ann Coulter and looked down at her. Her scales fluttered and surged, and a black substance that smelled of sulfur began to ooze from under her eyelids.
“Ann,” her husband hissed, “you’re compromising yourself.”
She was really steaming. She loved a man in bondage, that was clear.
Wylie saw that he had a moment, and only one, and it was this moment. He opened his mouth and drew his tongue along the backs of his teeth in the best imitation of a whore that he could imagine.
She tittered. Her breath had in it the flat muskiness of death.
“Will somebody please remove these children?” Mugabe shouted. A number of them had foregathered to watch the fun.
“Part of their education,” Echidna said. Her husband now joined her. Wylie had forgotten the name of this huge being, but he was peerlessly imposing in his sleek black suit, with his shimmering skin and brilliant, watchful eyes. Another ancient ruler riding the ages on a foam of clones.
He tilted his head and felt Coulter’s kiss invading his mouth like a soaked chaw of somebody else’s tobacco.
With all the power in him, his every muscle singing, his whole heart and soul and mind devoted only to this one movement, he sprang upward. These lizard forms were not as earthbound as human bodies. They didn’t feel as much, either, not pain, not love, not pleasure. But they were ferociously strong, and he was strong, he had kept himself well, understanding now the obsessive hammering away he had done at Gold’s in Wichita. He’d scared people, the way he would swim laps like a machine. He hadn’t known why his body was like this, just that he needed the swimming, the running, the boxing, the karate, all of it, needed it and devoured it.
The guard had made one mistake, early on. He’d seen him as human and bound him as human, careful of the delicate skin of a much more fragile creature than a seraph. He ripped his arms free with ease.
Unfortunately, the gun had gone. They’d left it with him only to amuse themselves with his disappointment when it was taken. “These sell for a nice price,” the guard had said as he removed it.
For a moment, there was nobody between him and the great control panel. He grabbed a lever, pulled it. Grabbed another, did the same. The action was so damn satisfying that he growled, he screamed, as he pulled another and another.
Echidna roared, her husband—Beleth, that was the name—leaped toward him—and came crashing into Mugabe, who threw himself into his path. Samson turned, and Ann Coulter slashed him with a molting hook, drawing his skin open and revealing the muscles beneath. He shrieked in agony. It felt good to draw off dry molt, of course, but raw like this, it was torment.
Coulter Union! Her human disguise was brilliant—a spokesman for the aims of the Corporation so extreme that she made them look ridiculous.
Wylie leaped, giving Beleth a head kick that he could feel smash the skull. Gabbling, his brains flying, he pitched back into his own onrushing guards.
“Samson’s aircar,” Ann shouted. “Go!”
“It’s ensouled!”
“Of course it is, you damn fool, go!”
There was a whispering crackle and Ann flew into a thousand red chunks. One of the guards now turned his weapon toward Wylie, who hit the floor as he pushed Echidna into the line of fire.
Her legs and bottom half, spurting fountains of blood, ran a few steps and collapsed at the feet of the surprised guard, while the top half, which had hit the floor smack on its bloody, waist-level base, uttered whistling gasps, waved its arms, and tore at its hair as shrieking, laughing children, who had mistaken the whole thing for a game, surrounded it, running in and pinching and squealing and then running away.
As Wylie crossed the floor, he heard the snicker of more guns. Then a dozen outriders came swinging down from above on webs like thick ropes dripping with glue. But he was outside now, and the aircar was waiting there, its now unattended motorcycle escort lined up neatly on the ground.
He kicked them over and dove into the interior. Expecting the car to resist the entry of what would be a known enemy, he yanked the door down with all his might.
“Hello, Brother,” the car said, and the voice hit Wylie with a shock like freezing water and the joy of the first morning of the world.
He hadn’t heard his brother speak aloud in over thirty years, but he recognized his voice instantly.
When Wylie was just a tiny boy, his beloved older brother had been killed by Corporation marauders and his soul kidnapped. His brother had been a great soldier. They’d kept his Medal of Valor and his various orders in a glass case in the family room, proud mementos. Wylie had gone to the human world because it took courage, and he wanted to show that he, also, had the ability to fight well for t
he Union.
They swept into the air. “Brother,” he said, “did they steal your soul?”
The car did not answer, and a flash of unease went through him. Abaddon was a place of deceptions, so maybe—
But then he looked down at what they were circling, and saw that the lens below him was now surrounded by as vast a crowd as he had ever seen. But things were not going well. The blackness of it had turned angry red, and it was boiling like a lava pool, and the surging crowd, in trying to escape, was instead falling in from all sides. Smoke and steam rose from the massive pyre.
“Are they dying?” Wylie asked.
“I think they’re going through. But it’s not right. It’s very not right.”
“Brother, has your soul been trapped in this car all this time?”
“Hell no, I stole the car yesterday. I’ve got a lot of bodies. I use them like scuba gear, to dig into the physical whenever I need to. And—uh-oh!”
There was an angry rattle against the vehicle, which proceeded to shoot upward so fast that Wylie blacked out momentarily. When he came to, flashes were speeding past the windows. “Pulse/Strider,” his brother said.
This was a weapon that delivered pulses of discrete superexcited electron plasmas that could instantaneously incinerate a car like this.
“Fly me, Brother.”
“Me? I don’t know how!”
“You were a hell of a pilot as a boy.”
“How could you know? You were…dead.”
“I’m an operative just like everybody else in the family. They were tricked into believing they’d captured my soul.”
Mean red light filled the car, and it tumbled wildly through the air.
“Brother, I need you to remember your piloting skills! Do it now!”
The words cause memory to flood Wylie’s mind, of being at the controls of a machine like this, of handling the twin sticks, of firing its weapons at sky targets, of having a glorious time in mock dogfights and evasion training.
He’d expected to be a pilot, but his aptitude tests were what had gotten him dragooned into intelligence. That, and he now also realized, the fact that his brother was already an agent. He remembered it all now, his whole life as a Union kid, his training…and something so poignant that he could almost not bear the recollection. He’d had a girl. He’d married her. He had a wife here on Abaddon, in the Union, the one good place that remained.
The car rattled, there was a flash, and this time the cabin filled with smoke and the fire alarm started.
“Fly me!”
Wylie gripped the controls. He swung the car from side to side, spotted the telltale sparkle of the Pulse/Strider installation on the ground. He turned hard, thrust the nose down, opened the throttle and slammed both sticks hard over.
The car shot like a diving eagle straight toward the installation. Pulses poured out. They would be forced to go on continuous triangulation, and his random jigging of the controls meant that not even he was sure of the trajectory.
He was nearly on top of them when they began to try patterns. Now, this was bad, this might work for them. “Are you unarmed?” he asked his brother.
“Of course I’m unarmed, I’m a sports car!”
“Just asking. Hold on!”
“My keel hurts, I can feel my keel going!” If an ensoulable machine’s nervous system was properly designed, the soul inhabiting it would sense it the same way it did a body.
Wylie leveled out. He was now speeding across open land, directly toward some aristo’s hunting estate. It was fashionable, he could see the house like something out of the English countryside. His brother said, “I see twelve bogies coming down on us.”
Wylie went into the forest, among the trees.
“You’ll wreck me!”
He took some advice from Martin’s son, Trevor. Just let yourself happen. His hands moved as they shot down a forest path, then up a stream. This far from the city, it wasn’t so polluted, not even on the Corporation side where mentioning global warming drew a death sentence. But then again, practically everything drew a death sentence. Executions were not only a form of population control, they kept the masses both entertained and fed.
Then he saw a wall. The wall, the one the Corporation had built around the Union. It was gray, immense, and dead ahead. He pulled back on the sticks and hopped it, and suddenly everything changed.
Here were fields of swabe and borogrove and orchards full of trees heavy with lascos and spurls and nape. Everything was green, the sky was dusty blue rather than dirty brown, and he knew that there would be stars at night, a few stars. Here, it was illegal not to mention global warming.
“I’ll take me back,” his brother said.
“Yeah, since I don’t know where I’m going.”
“I’m pulsing our code but we could get a look-see from the Air Force, so if we do don’t take evasive action. We are home, Brother.”
Wylie’s heart ached as he watched the rich green Union land speed below them. Home. And look at the houses, he could even see pretty shutters. Most unionists farmed. He had farmed, and he could see that the harvest was still coming in here and there. “Harvest is late.”
“Winter’s late, it’s too warm. If only an eighth of the planet fights the good fight, we can’t win, we can only lose slowly. The Gulf Stream stopped for four months this year. Avalon nearly froze while here in Aztlan, most of the maize crop burned.”
“What about the Corporation? They must be feeling it, too.”
“Farming’s illegal there now.” He paused for a long time. “I suppose you noticed what they’re eating.”
“I noticed.”
They came down on a pebble driveway before a modest old sandstone, its worn carved serpents of luck and joy barely visible in its ancient walls. But this was home, all right, a place he now realized that he had felt as an absence in his spirit for his whole time away.
He got out. “I wish you could come in, Brother.”
“When this tour’s over, I go back to my natural body forever, and I am looking forward to that, Wylie.”
“I don’t want to rattle around in the house alone!”
The arched wooden door opened. A figure stood back in the shadows, one lovely, tapering claw on the doorjamb.
Oh, it was impossible.
“Talia?”
“Aktriel?”
“Yes.” His response was so automatic that it required no thought. Aktriel was his real name, and he was a Department of Defense information officer. After pilot training, his work had been involved in the issuance of directives and proclamations, and he’d been sent to the human world because of his writing ability and his communications skills.
As she came out into the light, the car’s horn beeped twice and it took off into the sky, turned, then raced back toward Corporation territory. For a moment, Aktriel watched it go, watched sadly, wishing that his brother would come out, understanding why he could not bear to live in the freedom of his real body even for a short time, only to have to return to that miserable thing and go back to his hellish work.
She came to him, her eyes lowered, tears flowing. He took her in his arms, and truly he was home again, and from such a far, far place. “I’d forgotten everything,” he said.
She nodded against his shoulder.
“But where’s your husband, Talia? Your family? Surely you have one. It’s been years.”
Arm in arm, they went into the dim, comfortable interior of the house. Memory flooded him as he walked into the broad central room with its white walls and sky blue ceiling, and the climbing flowers painted everywhere. His mother’s hearth was here, his father’s tall harvest boots still by the closet where he’d always kept them. Beside them, smaller, shorter boots. When he’d waded for the tender swabe, he’d worn them.
“Do you still farm?”
“It will always be a farm.”
“Of course.” The Union’s goal of environmental balance meant that changing land use patterns was not
done without major reason.
She took his hand. “Do you want me?”
He threw his arms around her, felt her heart beating against his. This love—how had he ever managed to leave it? She was his dear, dear one, the alpha and omega of his soul. When he could have farmed here forever and never left her side, why had he ever gone?
Then he remembered his little Kelsey and proud, strong Nick, children of two worlds. His kids, and they were out there on the front line with their mom, and if he stayed here they would be abandoned.
It was as hard a moment as he had ever known. The beauty of his wife was stunning, her scales so tiny and so pale that she looked like a doll, her hair a wisp of delicate white smoke around her head, her eyes bluer than a fine earth sky, and deeper than the deepest ocean.
How he loved this woman, his friend of his youth and childhood, his dear companion.
But there were vows of the lips and vows of the blood, and his vow to those children on one-moon earth was a vow of the blood.
“I’m so glad it’s over,” she said. She gazed into his eyes. The Corporation seraph were remembered by man as nephilim, as archons, as demons. Mankind called Union folk angels or daikini, sky dancers.
“I’m glad it’s over, too.”
“But you sigh, husband.”
He drew her close to him. These were simple houses, a central great room, with kitchen, dining, and storage in one wing and sleeping quarters in the other. They had been living in these houses forever, almost literally. They had no age, nothing here did. The Union was with God. There was nothing to count.
But he had forgotten how good a woman’s hair could smell, sprinkled as hers was with the dust of flowers. It fell, sometimes, on that brilliant, glowing brow, that was almost as soft as human skin. She was almost as beautiful as Brooke, really, but the truth was that even to seraph, the humans were incredibly beautiful. It was why Corporation types had gone to rape them in the first place. It was why Unionists cherished and protected them as best they could. There was something about the humans that was close to God, very close, and you felt toward them both a desire to protect and a desire to worship.