Engineering Infinity (28 page)

“The whole library in one
crystal? You’re lying!”

“I’m wearing a truth ruby. You
can check. You can also check to see that I’ll give it to you a moment after I
have the name.”

“It is a deal. Turn my gloves
back on so that the city mind can record our handshake.”

“I thought Golgolundra was mad.”

“Faked. I wanted the angels not
to interfere with our internal computer sequences...”

A set of screams from outside
interrupt; there comes the clamour of explosions, the roaring thunder of
angel-flame cutting through walls.

Because Typhon’s gloves are
working, one of his radio-diamonds carries the noise of Lilimariah’s shriek.
Perhaps it is a sound of delight; perhaps a cry of pain.

Idomenes is already running down
the corridors, back.

Typhon’s little legs cannot keep
up.

“The library! Give me the library
- !” pants the boy, the ruffles of his clown-suit bouncing and flopping with
each step.

Idomenes does not turn his head,
but runs in swift lunging steps. “The name!” he shouts back.

Typhon falters and stops.

As Idomenes turns a last corner,
he hears the little boy’s weak voice behind him, trembling with malice: “Fool!
Fool! Who else can it be? Who else knows the angel’s fertility codes?”

Idomenes turns the corner just in
time to see, framed in the still-smoking rectangle of the doorframe, a man of
unearthly handsomeness, Lilimariah thrown across his shoulder, standing
balanced on the balcony rail. A golden light is all around him. His surcoat is
black, a colour the angels do not normally use. His wings unfold swanlike from
his shoulders, shivering with crackles and darts of energy. His eyes are filled
with light; he is looking upwards.

Lilimariah’s perfect bottom is
high in the air; her shapely legs are kicking, but Idomenes sees her smile
falter when she glimpses him over her shoulder.

The angel flees upward,
supersonically swift, a swirl of dust leaping after him.

The room is empty. A moment
later, a crack of supersonic noise rolls like thunder far overhead.

Idomenes stands staring at
nothing, while wave after wave of grief, and astonishment at how tremendously
he has been betrayed, sweep through him.

Typhon, panting, walks up behind
him. “Azaziel. His name is Azaziel. He’s the one who found my cryogenic coffin,
and brought me back here to my home. Just in time for my long-delayed birthday
party, eh? No regrets, though. Gave you guys an extra thirty some odd years to
prepare while I slept. Kind of like condemned women getting pregnant to delay a
hanging, isn’t it? One sleeping baby saving the world. Can’t believe how
foolishly my people here wasted this technology. It’s all so obvious. The
angels wouldn’t even be able to threaten us if we had kept our heads about
this. But hey! Give people a way to commit crimes without anyone finding out, I
guess they’ll do them, right? All sorts of gross crimes. I wish I was sure the
angels weren’t right about us after all. But, what the heck, you gotta root for
the home team if it’s your team, right? Anyway, that was Azaziel, Uriel’s
lieutenant. I don’t know what Lilly did for him. Maybe she told him the Ship’s
real reason for the Doomsday drownings.”

Idomenes makes a gesture, a flick
of a finger, no more. A large black diamond hops toward Typhon.

Idomenes speaks like a man in a
dream. “Here. The library.”

“Thanks. Where are you going?”

“I know where he must be headed.
There is only one place on Earth which will be preserved from drowning.”

Grief and fear are in Idomenes’
voice, uncertainty in his eye. He touches the gem in his head with a nervous
finger.

The little boy whispers: “You’re
afraid they’ll see, genes or no genes, that you still know what hate is. But
they won’t blame you for thinking about attacking a bad angel, will they? And
my daughter - don’t you have to rescue her? You’re the only one who knows where
Azaziel is going. You said so. Aren’t you a hero?”

This last comment is uttered with
a sneer.

A sneer that deepens after
Idomenes departs.

3.

Towards twilight, Idomenes sees
from afar Azaziel on the eastern side of Mount Neptushem, where the palaces and
museums of his father are.

Here is the place where Ducaleon
has brought all the works of man, gathered over years, to be preserved, and
made gardens and houses for the sustenance and delight of the expected hordes
of mankind deemed worthy enough to be spared.

Idomenes wonders why the streets
are empty.

Not quite empty. There are two
figures here.

The dark angel is standing on the
lip of a fountain, in the high square between the observatory and a
many-pillared archive. The third side is railing, overlooking far slopes below.

To the fourth side, behind and
above the fountain, the ground rises again, buttress upon buttress of white
marble and crystal windows flaming ever upward to a fantastic mountain.

Palace atop palace climb up the
manifold gentle crags looming here, delicate spires high above fragrant gardens
and grottos, blue pools reflecting fair sights, stands and arbours of trees
laden with golden fruit and crimson, shady walks delightful, and, higher still,
pine woods heavy with scented shadows.

The mountain-top, ringed by noble
minarets, is crowned above with a stepped pyramid of singular grace, whose
sides droop with hanging gardens, trailing trellises and lingering vines.
Little singing waterfalls fall shining down its many airy balconies.

Lilimariah is kneeling, her arms
embracing Azaziel’s leg, her cheek against his knee. Her hair flows around her
like long banners. She is not otherwise dressed.

Nor, it seems, is he. The black
surcoat that served him as badge of rank Azaziel has thrown away. Aside from
his own perfection, other clothes he desires none. His aura protects him
against rain and cold and deadlier things which might harm him.

Idomenes is remembering a time as
a child, when the angels dropped their auras, and walked naked in the garden
air of his father’s fields and lawns. But the Typhonides and others had filled
all the air with so many viral weapons specific to angels, nerve-toxins and
hallucinogens, that no angel dared shed his gleaming nimbus after.

As Idomenes climbs the wide
flights of ivory stairs toward them, the sight of the two lovers burning and
stinging in his eyes, an angry gesture twists his fingers. An old, old program
is opened in the memory of his assemblers, a military program, written by the
Sons of Typhon.

Assemblers make black clouds
around him as he strides in wrath up the slope, and draw carbon, hydrogen, and
oxides out of the air with such force that he walks as if in a gale.

When he passes the fruit arbours,
an articulated exo-skeleton embraces his form, with motors of shell and bone at
all joints.

When he passes the outer memory
shrines, heavy plates of black diamond armour have collected onto the moving
frame. The plate could not have stopped bullets, perhaps, but angels fought
with beams of laser flame.

As he passes around the corner of
the archive-house, long firing tubes and launchers have collected on his back,
and his magazines are filled with explosives.

The wiring grown inside his
armour is made of biological cable, like nerves, because his assemblers have no
copper or gold to work with. He is going through final firing sequence system
checks as he rounds the second corner and steps into the square where the
fountain is.

As he walks across the square
toward the angel, his heavy motorized footsteps booming on the flagstones, a
final touch of anger and pride makes him grow ornaments of nacre and pearl and
silvery horn along the hull of his black armour, and a tall gay plume sprouts
high from his helm.

He must look splendid, for
Lilimariah gazes at him with burning awe in her lovely eyes.

Idomenes sees she is surrounded
by the dark angel’s sentry-shield. The nimbus shimmers like gold in the air
along her bare skin.

Azaziel speaks: “Have you not
heard that only free men have the right to go armed? The cruelty of the angels
will destroy you if you raise weapons against your betters, little serf!”

“The Invigilators are not so
unjust,” Idomenes’ voice, amplified, rings out from his armour, which is
humming with power around him. “I am come to recover the girl you bewitch and
abduct. My cause is right; I will not be condemned for it.”

But he does not focus any aiming
lasers toward the black shining figure, and his weapons still hover on
stand-by.

“Not so unjust?” the dark angel mocks.
“Compared, I wonder, to what? Or do you call them fair because you dream you
will be spared?”

“Our race has a shameful history.
The Ship determined that that history must end. Has She not fulfilled every
appearance of justice? There was no need to grant our appeal. Her mind is not
mortal, not organic, works at a million times our speed, commits no errors, no
oversights! How could She be wrong? Yet still She returned to Canopus in Argo
for review; the world there is governed by a mind even more deep and wise than
Hers. The World-Minds of every world gathered in synod. The World-Minds called
upon the Star-Minds, each of whom guides many worlds; the Star-Minds called
upon energies we cannot imagine to link mind to mind across the stars and waken
the Will.”

Idomenes now speaks in a voice of
rolling power: “The thoughts of the Will are as infinitely wiser, deeper, more
sure, more pure, as the thoughts of the Ship are above mortal organic thoughts.
Perhaps you can doubt the wisdom of Ships, and Worlds, and Stars; but surely no
one can doubt the wisdom of the Will! Dare you, dare even you, who once served
the Will, doubt this? What can you set in your soul to guide yourself, once you
have rejected the guiding star of wisdom infinite?”

“I set up my pride,” says the
dark angel, and his wings are spreading as he speaks. “I will do no more
shameful things, no matter at whose behest; but shall henceforth do only that
in which I can take most pride.”

“You are intoxicated, perhaps
insane! Allow my assemblers to cleanse your system; see the light of truth; and
restore my true love to me.”

“The Will being so wise, why are
the innocent condemned? Those whose only crime is that they live on a world
with evil-doers? Guilt by dwelling nigh? And what of him whose only crime is
that his disordered passions burn within his blood, his genes ahowl with the
wrath and meanness of all his apish fathers? To be inclined to sin while
lingering sinless: We call this innocence.”

Idomenes is not sure how to
answer. Then he says grimly: “Those who are worthy shall be spared.”

“Worthy? Whose rule is so true to
measure it? Whose weights are so sound that they may weigh the souls of men?
The Ship cares little for the lives of little men: why else sleeps your father’s
city here deserted still?”

Idomenes, perhaps, feels a moment
of coldness. He cannot answer these questions. Instead, he points his finger at
the angel; aiming lasers follow his finger and lock on. The heavy weapons on
his back rear up on their jointed arms, hissing like snakes, and point their
deadly snouts where his finger points. “You have bewitched my love! Poisoned
her with neurochemicals and hypno-narcotics! Release her!”

Azaziel smiles down at the
beautiful woman at his feet. “Tell him, my pet, my plaything, you willingly
love me.”

Lilimariah says, “‘Tis true. His
child, I carry; no other’s. He is strong where you are weak. My father has
given him assemblers programmed to sculpt an asteroid into a working starship.
We will fly to the heavens without being anyone’s domesticated slaves!”

And she laughs. Idomenes’ soul is
flayed by that laughter. In his armour, he is shivering and sweating with rage.

“She but speaks under your
influence! Release her or I fire!”

The angel regards the human
weapons with amused contempt. He says: “What you describe is not an Invigilator
technology. I have done nothing to her. But I see by your gem that you are
sincere. Here. I withdraw my shield from her. Perform your tests. Then see,
then know, then confess to me how stupidly you have been wrong. This will
shatter your pride, and then you may crawl off somewhere to die. Do you still
think the Ship is so wise? By this act, by raising a weapon in anger, you have
violated your parole; the Invigilator law will drown you with the others!”

The golden glitter withdraws from
Lilimariah’s naked skin. She shivers in the air, and the fine, almost
invisible, hairs of her skin stand up, for it is growing now toward dusk, and
long shadows fall across the courtyard and fountain.

Idomenes makes a gesture. A slim
black diamond floats gently forward, touches her skin, pricks her.

“Ow!” She complains. She moves to
curl up to Azaziel, but his golden aura repels her.

“I am applying a counter-agent to
restore your normal neuro-chemical balance,” Idomenes says. “Just a moment...”

At that instant, a large black
diamond flies in from somewhere and shoots into Lilimariah’s arm, leaving a
small wound. She screams in pain and terror, and a host of her own assemblers
pour upwards out of ornaments in her hair into a defensive formation.

Azaziel shouts in astounded
anger, such a shout as angels cry, and throws his aura, like a cloak, around
Lilimariah’s shoulders. He spreads his wings to take flight.

Idomenes cries out in panic and
rage and hate to see his lover about to be carried away forever, and he lunges
forward, fingers curled.

He will tell himself later that
his gun-barrage went off by mere mischance, that his hand was perhaps jarred by
the sudden motion into the trigger-gesture. So he will tell himself.