Something More Than Night (20 page)

I had thought everything went haywire when Gabby punched out. I remembered that moment down in the laneways when the mortal plane skipped like a phonograph needle bounding across a scratched record; sure as I’m handsome, his death hadn’t done the Pleroma any favors. But what I learned from the buttons just then was that there had been signs of trouble in paradise before Gabriel’s death nearly tore a hole in the fabric of the MOC. Because that’s when the first of the Nephilim appeared in the Pleroma.

Nephilim, revenants, lurkers on the blurry edges of existence … Lots of names but no understanding. And that’s saying something. It isn’t often we hit something beyond our ken. But this counted.

They weren’t members of the Choir. Not even like our gal Molly—she was still a category all her own, the doll. And yet they made their digs in the Pleroma. The first encounter report had come from some weak-tea
heiligenschein
type charting the edges of the quantum information paradox in realities with anisotropic causalities. (Kids these days. Whatever happened to popping down to Earth to play burning bush to a roving band of shepherds?) Lurking silent as a mute shark with an acute case of bashfulness, that first revenant just hovered in the far reaches of the Pleroma, watching. It didn’t react to the angel, who wouldn’t have noticed it at all if the kid hadn’t tripped over the intruder. There must have been some red faces after that one. The lurker caused nary a ripple in the MOC, and didn’t spin its own Magisterium. It existed in the implied spaces of the Pleroma, and made about as much impression as the shadow of a candlelit alabaster window makes on a sheet of diamond. Not the slightest whiff of sulfur wafted from its formless presence; it shed not the tiniest gyre of warped reality. It was, seemingly, a dormant consciousness tossed adrift on currents of non-reality like so much spiritual jetsam.

It’s a mistake,
I figured, while the Throne’s viper gathered itself for another pulse of venomous knowledge. An oversight, or a joke. Somebody left a piece of themself behind, a crumb of consciousness too small to sustain itself, too weak to find its way home. That’s how I saw it. And so did the rest of the Choir, once they chose to see the truth behind the lowly angel’s report.

Until they tried to dislodge it. The revenant was embedded in the Pleroma: a topological defect in the structure of divine cosmology. Expelling the revenant made about as much sense as trying to eject the inside from a circle—you can do it, but you don’t have a circle any longer. Of course, there are plenty of ways to construct a reality where something like that makes no end of sense … but that would require building a Magisterium around the revenant. And it was too firmly embedded in the substrate of the Pleroma for that. I gather some of the big money players took a flutter at it, too, but fell flat on their pretty faces.

Been a while since somebody dreamed up something the Choir couldn’t do. Since the Jericho Event, in fact. That old chestnut about the immovable object and the irresistible force? We licked that eons ago. The sound of one hand clapping? Please; countless are the realities where the substrate axioms would make a tax legislation read like a Zen koan.

So that was the first of the revenants. After that, the Powers set up regular rotations to patrol the paths of Heaven. So far, they’d turned up two more of the lurkers. As with the first interloper, all attempts at communication with the new arrivals were about as useful as a glass hammer. One theory held they were humans embedded with a bit of the old divine spark, enabling them to access the Pleroma. That theory had so many holes it couldn’t strain dry pasta, but somebody decided the phenomenon needed a name, and “Nephilim” fit the bill. We’re big on proper names in the Choir, if you hadn’t noticed.

Well, you could have knocked me over with a silver feather. Interesting times, as the monkeys say. No wonder the bulls had a case of the whips and jingles. It was a doozy, and I could see why Gabby was intrigued.

My inner light stung when the fangs snapped free. I think they did that on purpose.

“Okay,” I said, “thanks for the headlines. You ever consider that Gabby hadn’t found anything? Maybe you didn’t find any clues in his Magisterium because he hadn’t scratched anything out of the dirt.”

“We didn’t consider that,” said a Throne, “because it’s not the case. Stop throwing spaghetti in our faces.”

“Stop tempting me.”

The other said, “Your monkey tried to break the law of METATRON. Can’t imagine why she thought she could get away with it. Unless somebody put her up to it.” It spun faster; the ice wafted a cold fog over me. I shivered. “Maybe you decided she’d be a good patsy. Maybe you thought you could use her to test METATRON’s defense of the MOC without getting any mud on your neck.”

“Where do you bulls come up with this confetti?” See what I mean about the Thrones? They can’t accept anything straightforward. They’re so paranoid they probably take a different route to the john every time. “The one thing I tried to drill into her was that she should’ve lain low until she got the hang of things. Don’t rock the boat, I told her. I thought it would be reassuring. It’s all smooth angles, I said, so just go with the flow.”

“Why didn’t she?”

I laughed. “Brother, you spend five minutes with that bird, you’ll have your answer.” I shook my head, or what passed for it at the moment. “She’s screwy. I doubt she’s ever taken a piece of advice in her life. If anything, she does the opposite.” My chair squeaked when I tipped it back. They nudged the accretion disk in the Seyfert’s active galactic nucleus to keep the spotlight aimed at my face. It was giving me a headache. “It’s my fault she didn’t read the handbook. Cut her some slack.”

“Where were you when Gabriel died?”

Oh, brother. Get a load of these saps. “I’d tell you drips to go jump in a lake, but what’s the use? You’re already all wet.”

Snap, snap, went the vipers. “Humor us.”

“You know damn well where I was. I was down in the mortal realm, watching the light show and trying to find a replacement for Gabby.” I fished in my pockets for a pill. They’d taken my matches, though, so it dangled from the corner of my mouth, like a speed bump for my thoughts. Which were kicking along nicely now. “In fact, the way I do the math, regarding who put me up to it? You goons make the best candidates.”

Imagine a wheel covered in eyes. Then imagine two of them. Now imagine them pausing in their peregrinations, just for a femtosecond, to give each other a Significant Look. Because that’s what they did. And they thought so little of me they didn’t try to hide it.

“Yeah,” I said. “You know more about Gabby than you’re letting on. You have the secret police thing down cold, don’t you? Probably have the whole Pleroma bugged. If revenant Nephilim are possible, so is anything.” One Throne gyrated, the other precessed. Listening closely. I think they were impressed with my deductive reasoning skills. “I’d heard the rumors, the intimations of something bad coming down the line. Heard ’em a long time ago. And if a penny-ante player like me caught wind of it, you can’t tell me you roosters hadn’t, too. I’ll bet there’s nothing like a dead angel to poke you sad sacks in the silvery eyes.”

And if anybody’s fear of METATRON would have them burning the midnight oil to put things right, it was the Thrones. All in all, a neat little package. Don’t know why I hadn’t fit the pieces together before. Is it possible I’m not as clever as everybody says?

Scratch that. I do know why I hadn’t thought this through before now. Flametop kept me too busy chasing my tail to look at the big picture. Interesting. That cluck was one smooth operator. But the helpless dame act was getting a little stale. Still, she was my client, and I clung to my honor like lipstick clings to a happy lady.

At this point the bulls were giving me the beady eye. A whole passel of beady eyes. They fell so quiet, I think I could actually hear the slow sublimation of ice from their rims. It gave my thoughts a chance to catch up with my mouth. When they did, I realized it wasn’t a big jump from suspecting the Thrones knew in advance somebody was marked to get rubbed to suspecting the Thrones were the ones doing the marking and the rubbing. I did not like the looks in those eyes.

Oh, Bayliss. You smart little egg.

“What’s the matter, Bayliss? Cat got your tongue?”

“Yeah. Don’t stop on our account. We’re enjoying this.”

I cleared my throat. “I was just wondering if you like the Nephilim for Gabby’s murder.”

“Interesting proposition. Too bad we’re not inclined to share our investigation with you.”

I wasn’t suggesting anything they hadn’t already kicked around the block. Anything to keep their attention off Molly and Santorelli’s Plenary Indulgence list, though. I wondered how she was coming on that.

Tweedledee said, “Your bird skipped out. What’s she doing back in the mortal realm?”

Nuts. “She had an appointment,” I said. “Getting her hair and nails done. Lots of upkeep, being a swell looker like that.”

What a cutup. This act would have killed in the Poconos. Tweedledum liked it so much he brought the flat side of a telephone directory down on the back of my neck. The pill decided to jump ship. It took a header from my lips, rolled across the floor.

His partner asked, “What’s she looking for? She have a line on the Trumpet?”

Sooner or later they’d tire of flapping their gums at me. Then they’d go collar Molly. That’s something we both wanted to avoid as long as possible. The bulls would go easier on her if she had something to share with them. I needed a good yarn. Something that would lead the buttons a pretty dance until flametop dug up something useful. Too bad I was out of ideas. My head was emptier than an alderman’s promise. But not the rest of me; I still needed to use the can.

“Maybe she’s moonlighting. Took a second job in a steno pool to make ends meet. It’s tough out there for a single girl.”

Tweedledum wound up for another good swing with the phone book. I didn’t flinch. But the door opened before he could let fly. A warm, gentle light filled the supply closet, soft yet strong enough to knock the spotlight aside. The Thrones had loosened my fillings, and now they buzzed with a staticky music of the spheres.

We looked up, all three of us, and saw six wings more luminous than sunrise on burnished platinum. For a moment I thought Gabby had returned to us. I wanted to dance a jig; our troubles were over. But then the Seraph’s lion visage yawned, and she used her flaming sword to pick at something in her teeth.

Naw. This wasn’t Gabriel. He had more class than that.

Uriel leaned in the doorway, still picking at a mouthful of predator’s teeth. Her ox muzzle snorted while her human pan said, “Hi there, boys. Mind if I cut in?”

12

FLOPHOUSE LULLABY

She felt it now, the bondage laid upon her by the Voice of God.

More rubber band than steel chain, it fell slack with her physical and ontological proximity to humans. A gossamer tether, a strand of celestial spider silk glimpsed in the corner of her angelic eyes. Prior to her encounter with the Virtue she hadn’t been aware of the confinement because she had hewn so closely to a mortal form, mortal thinking, mortal perceptions. But now she felt it, deep in the things that used to be her bones, how the more distantly she wandered—to an ancient galaxy glimpsed but dimly through a mortal telescope; to an exotic Magisterial bubble in the Pleroma far removed from the conditions of the Mantle of Ontological Consistency—the more relentless the pull would become. The chains grew heavier, the shackles stronger, with increasing distance from Earth in the mortal realm and increasing conceptual distance from the MOC in the Pleroma.

METATRON’s confinement pulled the angels together, causing their spheres of influence to overlap. It forced the Choir to kneel to the primacy of the consensual basis of reality, thus creating the Mantle of Ontological Consistency. And the laws of physics. And what humans thought of as the universe. And, eventually, life.

It was akin to the asymptotic freedom of quantum chromodynamics. She didn’t know how she knew that. The Virtue’s touch had unlocked something in the part of her that wasn’t human. She had what felt like an owner’s manual for the MOC in her mind. The entire basis of mundane reality was folded, origami-like, in her consciousness, waiting for a chance to unpack. Including multiple Nobel Prizes’ worth of particle physics.

And so it was evident to her freshly expanded consciousness that the mortal epsilon METATRON had embedded into every angel was analogous to a color charge in QCD. Quarks could never escape their chromodynamic confinement with each other; energetically, it was always more favorable to generate a quark/antiquark pair than to sever the gluon bond. And, like quarks confined inside a hadron, no amount of energy—no amount of angelic willpower—could snap METATRON’s bond to create a truly free angel. But the Choir couldn’t reconfigure its bindings. There was no such thing as an anti-angel.

Chromodynamics was a consequence of the MOC. Quarks.
Penitentes.
Space junk. On Earth as it is in Heaven, all the way from geosynchronous orbit to the minds of men to the gooey innards of a proton.

No wonder Bayliss spent so much time on Earth. She had wondered why he took such an interest in Earthly things, even to the extent of donning a mortal persona, when there was a whole universe to explore. An infinite variety of possible universes to explore. But by his own admission he was a pretty lowly angel. Molly now understood that meant he lacked the mojo to stretch METATRON’s bond very far. Other members of the Choir, like those fucking Cherubim, or the Virtues, or, presumably, the Seraphim, could throw a greater metaphysical weight. They could pull harder, stretch the bond farther.

Molly couldn’t. Her legs barely held her upright. She clutched the railing. Shivering and catching her breath, she leaned against the balcony while the crowd of concertgoers shuffled up the aisles and into the atrium. The last chords of the concert dissipated, devoured by the ravages of senseless entropy.

The angels were trapped. A prison choir. Which cast Gabriel’s murder in a new light. He’d been the Trumpet’s guardian, the keeper of the instrument of their incarceration. Was this revenge against METATRON’s accomplice, or was he killed because somebody wanted to steal the Trumpet?