Something More Than Night (39 page)

She couldn’t face it a second time. It would be worse the second time. So much worse. Her first death had been unforeseen, unanticipated. What would it be like to die as an angel, perceiving the moment with ten thousand nameless senses, already knowing death intimately from her final human experience?

But those were her only choices: eternal loneliness or a second death immeasurably worse than the first.

Martin’s wall display emitted a loud
zap
of static electricity. Bluish smoke wafted from a crack in the wall.

He started. “What the hell?”

“Sorry,” she said. “That kind of stuff happens when I get upset.”

He started at the broken display. “Wow.”

“I have to go soon. I don’t know when I’ll be back.” She pulled away, then stood. “It might be a long time.”
I might end up like Gabriel.
The thought gave rise to a nagging sensation at the back of her mind. She pushed it aside for the moment. “But hey. At least we get to have a proper good-bye this time.”

“You’ve already come back from the dead once. I don’t know much about much,” said Martin, “but I know better than to say good-bye.”

She tried to give a reassuring laugh, but it turned into a hiccup, then another sob.

He said, “I can tell something’s wrong.”

“Just tired. And a little frightened about what the future might bring.” She pulled him to his feet. “But that’s a problem for later. Right now, I want to try to do something for you. Do you trust me?”

“You know I do.”

Thanks to her interference, Martin had gone long enough without a fix that he was well on the way to recovery. But he’d always think of himself as a hopeless, broken failure unless she made a show of fixing him. She had to give him a tangible reason to believe better of himself.

“Close your eyes. I’m going to reach in and take something out of you. It won’t hurt.”

He knew what she meant. He didn’t object.

*   *   *

The game on the radio was just getting interesting—bases loaded, DiMaggio stepping into the box—when Sam returned. I don’t know if Joltin’ Joe made the grand slam because the play-by-play faded into a staticky bossa-nova rendering of the Chords of Creation.

The Powers have crummy timing. Ask anybody.

“You couldn’t have waited until the end of the inning?”

Sam enveloped a stool beside me in a roiling cloud of lightning-bright ash. “You’d be more angry if I waited.”

There was a hitch in its voice, a hiss or gurgle in that rasp of melting sapphires. I set down my cup. The dregs were cold anyway.

“Skim it,” I said. “Just give me the cream.”

“Your monkey just entered the Pleroma,” said Sam. “Not her Magisterium. She’s in the between-spaces, heading for the Nephilim.”

I tapped a pill on the counter. Flicked a paper match into life with my thumbnail. “You sure?”

Sam said, “Whatever comes of your experiment, she isn’t subtle. She leaves a wake.”

Okay. So their timing is lousy. But I still have a soft spot for the Powers and their holographic ontologies. Plenty useful, these jaspers.

“What’s she doing out there?”

“My guess?” A sulfurous fume roiled across the countertop. Flo swooned. “She’s close to piecing it together. Suspicious.”

I lit the pill and treated myself to a long draw. Savoring the taste of my instincts paying off like a long-shot trifecta, I said, modestly, “That’s why I picked her.”

Sam’s smoke plume glowed white and blue with a constant flicker of electrical discharge. Back in the kitchen, the cook slapped the radio a couple of times. Sam said, “Don’t break your arm, patting yourself on the back like that.”

I tapped cigarette ashes into one of Sam’s plumes. The look it gave me should have crisped my eyebrows.

“Don’t worry. I haven’t lost the big picture.” I ground out the pill in my saucer. “Okay,” I said. “The Nephilim have been stewing long enough. Let’s do it. Pull the trigger.”

Another flutter, this like the hiss of sizzling rubies. Sam said, “You sure?”

I mulled the angles for a microsecond. What point in a last-minute adjustment? If flametop was lamping the Nephilim, she’d received the telegram I sent courtesy of that dish librarian. Meaning any moment she’d realize she’d been played for a prize sap. And then she’d really hit the roof. I couldn’t do any more without muddying the waters.

No need for corrections. She was right on course.

“I’m sure. Let’s send our girl packing while she’s still spitting nails.”

22

DOING THE MATH

The raw Pleroma bore no resemblance to her expectations. How could she have anticipated this? It was exactly what Bayliss had described.

Prior to this, she’d only experienced slivers of it via those pieces encapsulated in Bayliss’s Magisterium, the Virtue’s, and her own. Bayliss’s explanations—everything always came back to motherfucking Bayliss—cast the pure Pleroma as nothing more than a cosmic transit hub, the angelic equivalent of a Grand Central Station providing connections between the Choir’s various Magisteria. He had, in his nearly incomprehensible way at times, waxed poetic about a bleak and featureless domain punctuated by the interesting regimes where individual angels imposed their will within a Magisterial sphere of influence. Having heard this, and knowing he was a lying sack of shit, Molly had taken it for granted the raw Pleroma would prove to be something entirely different. Something that would put the lie to Bayliss’s affected boredom. A place of magnificence. Of blinding metaphysical grandeur.

But it wasn’t a lie. The raw Pleroma had all the charm of a public school gymnasium. In fact, it reminded her of nothing so much as a cavernous gym hosting an awkward junior-high dance. Large, empty, not particularly festive, filled with scattered clumps of girls and boys too shy, or afraid, to mingle outside their immediate circle. Except here the awkward non-dancers eyeing each other were angels, and the stereo had been playing the same tune since the Big Bang. Here and there, the ghostly outlines of a shimmering Magisterium peppered the expanse.

Closer to the mortal realm, physically and ontologically, the packing of those Magisteria became tighter and tighter until they overlapped. Even here, a short conceptual distance from the boundaries of her former life, METATRON’s bond tried to drag her into that resented realm where the overlapping interference fringes fuzzed into the Mantle of Ontological Consistency.

Standing in the wide-open Pleroma, outside the MOC and free of the constraints of a host Magisterium, Molly dropped her human form and turned her senses—she lost count at 1,440—across the vista, across the behind-the-scenes topology of reality. Across uncountable mutually inconsistent potential realities. Across a formless void.

The angels built their Magisteria in the Pleroma for much the same reason people used to build flour mills and sawmills alongside rivers. The Pleroma was the raw material for their whims; the supply that energized the expression of their will. The Pleroma was a superposition of every imaginable Magisterium. It was the wellspring. The foundation of everything. The subbasement of the Universe.

Her excursion did differ from what Bayliss had primed her to expect in one crucial way: nobody accosted her. No angels attacked her, no beguilingly twisted denizens of the Choir sought her out. Nobody tried to mug her. Nobody tried to rifle through her pockets for the Trumpet. Not even her friends the Cherubim.

Here and there, clusters of Archangels and Principalities harmonized like the celestial equivalent of dueling barbershop quartets. The Pleroma shivered with the high notes and reverberated with the low notes. Nearby (a mere parsec or so, by mortal reckoning) huddled a cluster of Powers, their turbulent clouds chained together by intertwined forks of lightning. Something with the wings of a bat and wearing armor that appeared to have been chiseled from an immense gemstone pulled the foamy substrate of Pleroma about itself, like a cloak, and disappeared. It had stepped into its own Magisterium, out of phase with the rest of the Choir. Maybe it wanted some peace and quiet.

She could see all these angels. They could see her. Nobody cared.

It was enough to make a woman feel unloved.

Or like a goddamned fool.

All along she had avoided the Pleroma like herpes after Bayliss convinced her it was a dangerous place. She’d believed that various factions in the Choir would seek her out; blame her for the instability and uncertainty brought about by Gabriel’s murder; try to use her to obtain the missing Trumpet. So she’d stayed on Earth and followed the threads of investigation that Bayliss had spooled out for her.

But now here she was, literally stretching her wings in the milky, jewel-bright surf of a billion maybes. And nobody gave two shits.

Because, of course, it had all been a lie.

So … Why didn’t Bayliss want her gallivanting about the Pleroma like a newborn colt? What didn’t he want Molly to see?

Molly expanded her perceptions. She searched for a kink, a burr of topological imperfection in the tapestry of the divine. It came to her as a faint pulse in the fabric of the Pleroma. She visualized the murdered Plenary Indulgence recipients, imagined how the transmogrified Trumpet had wrought its spiritual alchemy on their mortal beings. Still concentrating on the Trumpet, she reimagined her form as something with pockets. From those pockets she pulled Anne’s memory fragment, her resentful remembrance of receiving an Indulgence. Molly brought her new understanding of the Jericho Trumpet—a thing whose essence was its purpose, a process of metaphysical transformation—in contact with Anne’s memory.

The memory changed. Like a supersaturated solution exposed to a seed crystal, it solidified. Condensed. What had been a memory of spiritual transformation was now a fragment of the catalyst: the Trumpet. Her breath caused it to chime like a tuning fork. So low was the note, so pure the melancholy, it might have been the death rattle of a dark galaxy.

Another Power scurried along on its hundred thousand legs of lightning. She hadn’t seen it approaching, but it ignored her like all the others. It joined the other Powers in their huddle.

Molly waited for some distant corner of the Pleroma to resonate with sympathetic vibrations. Gently, she pinched the Trumpet fragment just enough to perturb its harmonics, then listened to the beats of slightly mismatched frequencies. It wasn’t sonar, but it worked. Soon she coiled around a featureless granule embedded in the fabric of the Pleroma. Heaven’s kidney stone. It was surrounded with the celestial equivalent of the yellow police tape that had cordoned the site of Molly’s death. A steady stream of onlookers had etched a footpath in the surrounding Pleroma. A few loitered nearby. Mostly creepy Virtues, though one onlooker was even stranger. Bayliss’s description hadn’t done justice to the Thrones. Molly averted her gaze from all the eyes.

The Nephil had been wrought from a unique individual human being. Yet the Trumpet had melted and recast his or her essence, reconstituted their soul, alloyed the divine and mundane until the resulting Nephil betrayed no evidence of its progenitor.

Molly hopped the cordon. The Throne rolled to intercept. But before it could reach her, she touched the crystallized ex-memory fragment to the Nephil. The impossible wrinkle in the Pleroma shrank, while the Trumpet fragment grew. She held them together until the last hint of distortion evaporated and the underlying Pleroma thrummed like a drumhead. She tasted hoarfrost and ancient iron. The Throne skidded to a halt.

“Shit,” said Molly. “How easy was that?”

Easy enough to be frightening. Because if Molly understood how to eliminate the Nephilim, surely other angels did as well. They might have lacked the catalyst memory fragment with which to begin the process, but nevertheless … Who among the Choir would have understood the true nature of the Nephilim? Who should have known enough about the Jericho Trumpet to recognize its work?

The Seraphim. Gabriel’s comrades.

Who knew the Trumpet better than anybody? Who would have known how to pull a trick like this, stapling apparently indelible imperfections into the Pleroma?

Gabriel.

Which angels had made a big show—according to Bayliss—of trying and failing to evict the Nephilim?

The Seraphim.

And … prior to Molly’s arrival, who in the Choir understood mortals better than anybody?

Bayliss.

Molly hopped to the next Nephil, and the next, and the next, reassembling the Trumpet as she went. The Nephilim, she came to understand, were unrealized potentials. Wave functions awaiting measurement, hovering on the brink of collapse. A superposition of the mortal and the immortal, the mundane and the divine. But the Trumpet had been used imperfectly—deliberately so—to render each Nephil a topological defect. The deceased Plenary Indulgence recipients had become monopoles where domain boundaries met, like the fractures created inside an ice cube when the water in the tray begins to freeze in several places at once and the crystals don’t join up smoothly. Scars. Remnants of an imperfect phase transition.

Only, what transition? The Nephilim appeared to be effects awaiting their cause.

But that was human thinking. Time meant nothing here. It wasn’t linear. It wasn’t even one-dimensional.

If the Nephilim were wave functions awaiting collapse, then what was the measurement? For what observer had they been designed? Only one answer made sense. In fact—

The cluster of Powers broke apart with a mountain-cracking bang. Across the Earth, a network of robotic telescopes swiveled to document the fading glow of a newly discovered gamma ray burst. The Powers reconfigured themselves into a hypersphere. The sphere became an ontological boundary within which the Pleroma roiled and buckled. Molly tasted rank desperation, fear, illicit excitement. Nervous energy raked her like a tornado of broken glass.

The Powers’ bubble grew. It rolled downhill, along the residual potential gradient embedded in the Pleroma by the Jericho Event. What the hell were they doing? Was this the angelic equivalent of bowling?

But the Powers had constructed their shared Magisterial bubble from alien mathematics. It was grossly inconsistent with the Mantle of Ontological Consistency.