The Mammoth Book of Angels & Demons (18 page)

Just a bad dream.

Now, Max gazed at the griffin and shivered, hoping the rest of the dream wouldn’t come along with the griffin. He hadn’t liked the rain of blood at all.

Max blinked, expecting the griffin to vanish. It remained, gleaming. Fulsome. Something hungry . . .

The griffin noticed Max watching. It straightened, fluttered its two-meter wingspread, wingtips flashing in the morning light slanting through the broad picture window, and said, “Well, what do you want of me?” It had a strangely musical, male voice.

“Whuh?” said Max blearily. “Me? Want with you?” Was it a holograph? But it looked so solid . . . and he could hear its claws rasping the bedpost.

“I heard your call,” the griffin went on. “It was too loud, and then it was too soft. You really haven’t got the hang of mind-sending yet. But I heard and I came. Who are you and why did you call me?”

“Look, I didn’t . . .” He stopped, and smiled. “Sandra. Sandra Klein in Special Effects, right? This is her little cuteness.” He yawned and sat up. “She outdid herself with you, I must admit. You’re a marvel of engineering. Damn.” The griffin was about a meter high. It gripped the bedpost with metallic eagle’s claws; it sat on its haunches, and its lion’s forepaws – from a lion of some polished argent alloy – rested on its pin-feathered knees. The pin feathers looked like sweepings from a machine shop. The griffin had a lion’s head, but an eagle’s beak replaced a muzzle. Its feathered chest rose and fell.

“A machine that breathes . . .” Max murmured.

“Machine?” The griffin’s opalescent eyes glittered warningly. Its wire-tufted lion’s tail swished. “It’s true my semblance is all alloys and plastics and circuitry. But I assure you I am not an example of what you people presume to call ‘artificial intelligence’.”

“Ah.” Max felt cold, and pulled the bedclothes up to cover his goose-pimpled shoulders. “Sorry.”
Don’t make it mad
. “Sandra didn’t send you?”

It snorted. “Sandra! Good Lord, no.”

“I . . .” Max’s throat was dry. “I saw you in a dream.” He felt odd. Like he’d taken a drug that couldn’t make up its mind if it were a tranquilizer or a psychedelic.

“You saw me in a dream?” The griffin cocked its head attentively. “Who else was in this dream?”

“Oh there were –
things
. A rain of blood. A castle that was there and wasn’t there. A man – it looked like he was made of . . . of hot metal. And his head was all of wire. I had a series of dreams that were . . . Well, things like that.”

“If you dreamed those things, then my coming here is ordained. You act as if you honestly don’t know
why
I’m here.” It blinked, tiny metal shutters closing with a faint
clink
. “But you’re not much
surprised
by me. Most humans would have run shrieking from the room by now. You accept me.

Max shrugged. “Maybe. But you haven’t told me why you’re here. You said it was – ordained?”

“
Planned
might be a better word. I can tell you that I am Flare, and I am a Conservative Protectionist, a High Functionary in the Fiefdom of Lord Viridian. And you – if you’re human – must be wild talent. At least. You transmitted the mindsend in your sleep, unknown to your conscious mind. I should have guessed from the confused signal. Well, well, well. Such things are outside the realm of my expertise. You might be one of the Concealed. We’ll see, at the meeting. First, I’ve got to have something to eat. You people keep food in ‘the kitchen’, I think. That would be through that hallway . . .”

The griffin of shining metal fluttered from the bedpost, alighted on the floor with a light clattering, and hopped into the kitchen, out of sight.

Max got out of bed, thinking: He’s right. I should be at least disoriented. But I’m not. I
have
been expecting him.

Especially since the dreams started. And the dreams began a week after he’d taken on the role of Prince Red Mark. He’d named the character himself – there’d been last moment misgivings about the original name chosen by the scripters, and he’d blurted, “How about ‘Prince Red Mark’?” And the producer went for it, one of the whims that shape show business. Four tapings for the first two episodes, and then the dreams commenced. Sometimes he’d dream he was Prince Red Mark; other times a flash of heat lightning; or a ripple of wind, a breeze that could think and feel, swishing through unseeable gardens of invisible blooms . . . And then the dreams became darker, fiercer, so that he awoke with his fists balled, his eyes wild, sweat cold on his chin. Dreams about griffins and rains of blood and sieges by wretched things. The things that flew, the things with claws.

He’d played Prince Red Mark for seven episodes now. He’d been picked for his athletic build, his thick black hair and his air of what the PR people called “aristocratic detachment”. Other people called it arrogance.

Max Whitman had found, to his surprise, he hadn’t had to act the role. When he played Prince Red Mark, he
was
Prince Red Mark. Pure and simple . . . The set-hands would make fun of him, when they thought he couldn’t hear, because he’d forget to step out of the character between shootings. He’d swagger about the set with his hand on the pommel of his sword, emanating Royal Authority.

This morning he didn’t feel much like Prince Red Mark. He felt sleepy and confused and mildly threatened. He stretched, then turned toward the kitchen, worried by certain sinister noises: claws on glass. Splashings. Wet, slapping sounds. He burst out, “Damn, it got into my aquarium!” He hurried to the kitchen. “Hey – oh, hell. My fish.” The griffin was perched beside the ten-gallon aquarium on the breakfast bar. Three palm-sized damselfish were gasping, dying on the wet blue-tile floor. The griffin fluttered to the floor, snipped the fish neatly into sections with its beak, and gobbled them just as an eagle would have. The blue tile puddled with red. Max turned away, saddened but not really angry. “Was that necessary?”

“It’s my nature. I was hungry. When we’re bodied, we have to eat. I can’t eat those dead things in your refrigerator. And after some consideration I decided it would be best if I didn’t eat
you
. . . Now, let’s go to the meeting. And don’t say, ‘What meeting?’”

“Okay. I won’t.”

“Just take a fast cab to 862 Haven, apartment 17. I’ll meet you on their balcony . . . wait. Wait. I’m getting a send. They’re telling me – it’s a message for
you
.” It cocked its head to one side as if listening. “They tell me I must apologize for eating your fish. Apparently you have some unusual level of respect in their circle.” It bent its head. “I apologize. And they say you are to read a letter from ‘Carstairs’. It’s been in your computer’s mail sorter for two weeks under ‘Personal’ and you keep neglecting to retrieve it. Read it. That’s the send . . . Well, then . . .” The griffin, fluttering its wings, hopped into the living room. The French doors opened for it as if slid back by some ghostly hand. It went to the balcony, crouched, then sprang into the air and soared away. He thought he heard it shout something over its shoulder at him: something about Prince Red Mark.

It was a breezy morning, feeling like spring. The sun came and went.

Max stood under the rain shelter in the gridcab station on the roof of his apartment building. The grid was a webwork of metal slats and signal contacts, braced by girders and upheld by the buildings that jutted through the finely woven net like mountaintops through a cloud field. Thousands of wedge-shaped cabs and private gridcars hummed along the grid in as many different directions.

Impatiently, Max once more thumbed the green call button on the signal stanchion. An empty cab, cruising by on automatic pilot, was dispatched by the Uptown area’s traffic computer; it detached from the feverishly interlacing main traffic swarm and arced neatly into the pick-up bay under the rain shelter. Max climbed inside and inserted his Unicard into the cab’s creditor. The small terminal’s screen acknowledged his bank account and asked, “Where to?” Max tapped his destination into the keyboard: the cab’s computer, through the data-feed contacts threaded into the grid, gave the destination to the main computer, which maneuvered the cab from the bay and out onto the grid.
You are to read a letter from Carstairs
, the griffin had said.

He’d met Carstairs at a convention of fantasy fans. Carstairs had hinted he was doing “some rather esoteric research” for Duke University’s parapsychology lab. Carstairs had made Max nervous – he could feel the man following him, watching him, wherever he went in the convention hotel. So he’d deliberately ignored the message. But he hadn’t gotten around to deleting it.

As the cab flashed across the city, weaving in and out of the peaks of skyscrapers, over the narrow parks that had taken the place of the Avenue, Max punched a request to connect to his home computer. The cab charged his bank account again, tied him in, and he asked his system to print out a copy of the email from Carstairs. He scanned the message, focusing first on: “. . . when I saw you at the convention I knew the Hidden Race had chosen to favor you. They were there, standing at your elbow, invisible to you – invisible to me too, except in certain lights, and when I concentrate all my training on looking . . .” Max shivered, and thought: A maniac. But – the griffin had been real.

He skipped ahead to: “. . . You’ll remember, perhaps, back in the last century, people were talking about a ‘plasma body’ that existed within our own physiological bodies, an independently organized but interrelated skein of subatomic particles; this constituted, it was supposed, the so-called soul. It occurred to some of us that if this plasma body could exist in so cohesive a form within an organism, and could survive for transmigration after the death of that organism, then perhaps a race of creatures, creatures who seem to us to be ‘bodiless’, could exist alongside the embodied creatures without humanity’s knowing it. This race does exist, Max. It accounts for those well-documented cases of ‘demonic’ possession and poltergeists. And for much in mythology. My organization has been studying the Hidden Race – some call them plasmagnomes – for fifteen years. We kept our research secret for a good reason . . .”

Max was distracted by a peculiar noise. A scratching sound from the roof of the cab. He glanced out the window, saw nothing and shrugged. Probably a news sheet blown by the wind onto the car’s roof. He looked again at the letter. “. . . for a good reason. Some of the plasmagnomes are hostile . . . The Hidden Race is very orderly. It consists of about ten thousand plasmagnomes, who live for the most part in the world’s ‘barren’ places. Such places are not barren to them. The bulk of the plasmagnomes are a well-cared-for serf class, who labor in creating base plasma fields, packets of non-sentient energy to be consumed or used in etheric constructions. The upper classes govern, study the various universes and, most of all, concern themselves with the designing and elaboration of their Ritual. But this monarchist hierarchy is factioned into two distinct opposition parties, the Protectionists and the Exploitationists: they gave us those terms as being the closest English equivalent. The Protectionists are sanctioned by the High Crown and the Tetrarchy of Lords. Lately the Exploitationists have increased their numbers, and they’ve become harder to police. They have gotten out of hand. For the first time since a Protectionist walked the Earth centuries ago as ‘Merlin’ and an Exploitationist as ‘Mordred’, certain members of the Hidden Race have taken bodied form among us . . .”

Max glanced up again.

The scratching sound from the roof. Louder this time. He tried to ignore it; he wondered why his heart was pounding. He looked doggedly at the letter. “. . . The Exploitationists maintain that humanity is small-minded, destructive of the biosphere, too numerous, and in general suitable only for slavery and as sustenance. If they knew my organization studied them, they would kill me and my associates. Till recently, the Protectionists have prevented the opposition party from taking physical form. It’s more difficult for them to affect us when they’re unbodied, because our biologic magnetic fields keep them at a distance . . . Centuries ago, they appeared to us as dragons, sorcerers, fairies, harpies, winged horses, griffins, angels, demons . . .”

Max leaned back in his seat and slowly shook his head. Griffins. He took a deep breath. This could still be a hoax. The griffin
could
have been a machine.

But he knew better. He’d known since he was a boy, really. Even then, certain Technicolor-vivid dreams—

He tensed: the phantom scrabbling had come again from overhead. He glimpsed a dark fluttering from the corner of one eye; he turned, thought he saw a leathery wingtip withdraw from the upper edge of the window frame.

“Oh God.” He decided it might be a good idea to read the rest of the letter. Now. Quickly. Best he learn all he could about them. Because the scratching on the roof was becoming a grating, scraping sound. Louder and harsher.

He forced himself to read the last paragraph of the letter. “. . . in the old days they manifested as such creatures because their appearance is affected by our expectation of them. They enter the visible plane only after filtering through our cultural psyche, the society’s collective electromagnetic mental field. And their shapes apparently have something to do with their inner psychological make-up – each one has a different self-image. When they become bodied, they manipulate the atoms of the atomic-physical world with plasma-field telekinesis, and shape it into what at least seem to be actually functioning organisms, or machines. Lately they take the form of machines – collaged with more ancient imagery – because ours is a machine-minded society. They’re myth robots, perhaps. They’re not magical creatures. They’re real, with their own subtle metabolism – and physical needs and ecological niche. They have a method of keeping records – in ‘Closed-system Plasma Fields’ – and even constructing housing. Their castles are vast and complex and invisible to us, untouchable and all but undetectable. We can pass through them and not disturb them. The Hidden Race has a radically different relationship to matter, energy – and death. That special relationship is what makes them seem magical to us . . . Well, Mr Whitman, we’re getting in touch with you to ask you to attend a meeting of those directly involved in plans for defense against the Exploitationists’ campaign to—”