Something More Than Night (41 page)

“No, you’re not. You pretend it was just a game, a meaningless lark, but it wasn’t.” Still watching the show outside, she said, “Because all that bullshit with the Plenary Indulgences was for this.” She nodded toward the chaos outside our cozy little diner. “To keep METATRON distracted while I kick your ass.”

I didn’t like the sound of that.

*   *   *

Molly studied Bayliss’s eyes, those old old eyes, and saw something new: doubt.

Outside, the thunder and lightning came so quickly, so constantly, that it was impossible to pair the flashes and rumbles together. Thunder preceded lightning, sidestepped it. The storm was becoming acausal. The ceaseless barrage shook the diner, rattled the cups and plates, set the ceiling fan swinging on its gimbals. The three-second loop of houseflies buzzing around the fan became a two-second loop, a half-second loop, and then they disappeared just as though an old-time filmstrip had jumped clear of its sprockets to escape the lamp.

Something had changed in the way Bayliss held himself. Held his Magisterium. He was rattled.

Molly let him stew. This was fun.

“You’re wrong,” he said.

“‘Wrong?’ That’s it? Don’t you mean I’m all wet? Peddling my fish in the wrong market? Miscounting the trumps?”

Bayliss chewed his lip. She had the motherfucker dead to rights.

“Your mistake,” she said, “was your disregard for human nature. My human nature. My desire to stay connected to other people. Because that connection spared me from blundering into your trap. And once I stepped back to tug on the loose threads, to think it through carefully, the whole thing came apart. Everything finally made sense once I accepted that you were a lying sack of shit.”

Lightning struck the diner. Brighter than a nuclear flash, the light poured through the seams of Bayliss’s rickety affectations. When the afterimages faded, so had one wall of the diner. And Bayliss’s human form.

The thing seated before her had four faces and six wings. The wings, however, were gauzy, ghostly, insubstantial, and three of the faces—the animal faces—were more idea than fact. Only Gabriel’s human visage retained solidity. The rest of him, the rest of the shattered angel, had faded into a wispy memory. He looked like a man beset by ghosts. The ghost of a lion, an eagle, and an ox, all wrapped in the vague impression of wings. Molly squinted. Deep inside the diminished Seraph, inside the husk of what had once been the grandest of angels, she glimpsed an inoperable sliver of mundanity. The dreaded mortal epsilon: legacy of the Jericho Event.

The diner shook. More plates and saucers tumbled from the shelves, disintegrating before they hit the floor. Saturnine crimson light welled up through cracks in the linoleum. This was new. METATRON had changed.

Bayliss/Gabriel noticed it, too.

“You gonna to fog me with that heater or what, you dumb broad?”

Molly clucked her tongue. “Insults? Really? You’re losing the script, Bayliss. You’re supposed to be the tarnished knight. That tells me how desperate you are for me to use this.”

She touched the reconstituted Trumpet in her pocket. It had grown heavier while she talked; the self-assembly had accelerated as METATRON annealed the Pleroma. Once she reassembled the first pieces, and METATRON started evicting the Nephilim, the process had proceeded of its own accord. The wrinkles fled before the iron, but had nowhere to go.

The damn thing tended to change form when she wasn’t focused. Right now she wanted something grand, something imposing. But what she fished from her pocket was a small plastic kazoo, striped pink and green, like a cheap favor from her seventh birthday. Though her soul vibrated when she touched it, the tuning fork of Creation looked like a cheap prize from a cereal box.

Oh, well,
she thought.
Screw it.

She said, “Fortunately for the Choir, I intend to. Unfortunately for you, I’m not stupid.”

Soon after the Virtue had stung her, back in its Magisterial overlay of the Chicago concert hall, Molly had recognized an analogy between the confinement imposed upon the angels by METATRON and the confinement imposed upon quarks by the rules—laws of physics—within the MOC. The mundane fragments contaminating the angels in the wake of Jericho were akin to a color charge coupling them via a celestial analogy to the asymptotic freedom of quantum chromodynamics. She had mused, arguing from analogy, that the Choir remained confined because it would have taken an anti-angel to break METATRON’s bonds. Which seemed nonsense at the time.

But Bayliss had created exactly that in Molly.

With Jericho, METATRON transformed the angels—purely divine beings—into beings that were mostly divine, with just a sliver of mortal imperfection to tether them. A mundanity charge. A mortal epsilon.

When Molly fell from the train platform, Bayliss had looked into her eyes—
the windows of the soul!
she mused, suppressing a laugh—and imbued upon her a quantum of divinity. But she was born of the MOC. Molly was mostly mortal, with just a sliver of the divine inside her. A mortal shell wrapped around a divine epsilon. She was, in the sense of spiritual admixtures, the opposite of the other angels. Their antithesis.

Meaning she could perform tasks with the Trumpet that no other angel could. Not even Gabriel. For in her hands it could
undo
Jericho.

Assuming, of course, she was sufficiently angry. Because, as Bayliss had said, the Trumpet was a tool of righteous fury. A tool of punishment. Thus he’d strived to ensure Molly had the means, opportunity, and motivation to unleash her fury on him when the time came.

Means: the Trumpet, which as Gabriel he had hidden on Earth, and as Bayliss he had slowly led her to rediscover.

Opportunity: the Nephilim, which even now occupied METATRON’s attention. Otherwise, the moment anybody dared touch the Trumpet to her lips, the Voice of God would have intervened.

Motive: the realization that she was the ultimate dupe, the patsy of a billion-year con job.

Hence the lies and manipulation. He wanted her—the
anti-
angel—so angry that she’d use the Trumpet indiscriminately, without pausing to think things through. He needed to piss her off so badly she wouldn’t stop to realize that, rather than punishing Bayliss, her use of the Trumpet would free the angels. He needed to stoke her anger until it was searing hot.

Because above all else, he couldn’t afford to let her recognize that her vengeance would destroy the Mantle of Ontological Consistency. And all of humanity along with it. Without the constancy offered by the MOC, without its sheltering bubble of causality and stable bedrock of logically consistent mathematical and physical laws, mortal biological life would become impossible. Biology would become impossible. Chemistry, physics, mathematics—likewise impossible.

Thus the plan
had
to rely on manipulation and anger, rather than a simple plea for compassion. They might have given her the divine spark, brought her to the Pleroma, explained the situation, and asked for her help. But, of course she would have refused. Because truly comprehending the bondage laid upon them by METATRON meant understanding the MOC. And the catastrophic consequences of its dissolution.

But the angels didn’t give a rat’s ass about any of that. Nobody ever shed tears over an anthill. To their view the MOC was a meaningless side effect of their imprisonment. The Choir just wanted to be free. And who could blame them? So Gabriel and his confederates had taken it upon themselves to arrange it. Once everything was in place, all they needed was a monkey to caper about while Bayliss the organ-grinder turned the crank on his hurdy-gurdy. The poor monkey was fungible.

But Bayliss had chosen Molly. His mistake.

“Well,” she said. “Let’s do what you brought me here to do.”

She brought the Trumpet to her lips. Holy fire consumed the diner, the Pleroma, and Molly’s mind.

*   *   *

Molly’s consciousness exploded into a trillion trillion fragments. The Trumpet was a supernova flinging the lonely atoms of her soul into the cosmic void.

She was everywhere, vibrated apart by the Platonically pure overtones of the Trumpet.

It emitted every pure note, every beginning, every point of reference, every unprovable axiom.

And it shredded her. Ground her into dust.

A dust of monopoles, of topological impossibilities, of terminated field lines and resolved expectations. The Trumpet sifted her, sieved her, renormalized her into quanta of anti-angelic admixture, into a charge/parity/time-reversed shadow of the Choir, and blew her across the thundering landscape of the Pleroma.

From a trillion simultaneous logically impossible viewpoints, she gazed upon METATRON in the final throes of eradicating the Nephilim. And when she perceived the Voice of God as it truly was, she wept. For this was the only way to know the angels’ jailor: not via the agency of what it did, but as the agency of what it was.

By their acts shall you know them. You shall know them despite their acts.

It perceived her. Perceived the Trumpet at use.

F
ORBIDDEN
,
it cried.

D
ON’T WORRY
,
she said, laying a hundred million steadying hands.
I
UNDERSTAND
.

She conveyed her intent. It took a protracted negotiation, long enough for light to gird a proton, but eventually METATRON let her pass.

And where Molly’s anti-grace alighted upon the Pleroma, an angel’s tether snapped. The angel ricocheted, Compton-scattering from the Trumpet-mediated exchange with Molly’s anti-divinity. Each broken tether produced a fragment, an infinitesimal piece of debris. Like virtual particles popped free of the seething vacuum, the release of metaphysical binding energy created a sliver of the mundane. Just as Molly had expected. These were the fragments embedded into the angels by METATRON during the Jericho Event. The shackles. The mortal epsilon. They shimmered as they fell, drifting aimlessly on gyres and downdrafts of possibility, raindrops riding the edge of a storm.

It rained in heaven. Molly collected the droplets as a maiden might collect a rain of flower petals or sunflower seeds in the folds of her dress.

She had plans for these seeds. She was going to plant them anew.

*   *   *

The first bum to slip the handcuffs was some lowly Dominion. Lucky duck. It didn’t know what hit it. All it knew was that METATRON’s bond had vanished; the MOC had become irrelevant. When that first Dominion raised its voice in song, the firmament rang with something that hadn’t been heard in billions of years: joy.

The rest of the Choir caught on quickly. Because nobody had that kind of luck—it was all or nothing. The crystal spheres fairly rattled with the noise of 144,000 torchers crooning in triumphant relief. It was a nice little moment of harmony for a bunch of creeps, none of whom could wait to ditch the others.

Because, like I said, it was all or nothing. One small-time nickel grabber goes, we all go. Right?

*   *   *

The sky was ablaze.

On Earth as it is in Heaven.

METATRON’s rage, the cleansing fury with which it scoured the remaining Nephilim from the Pleroma, became tumultuous skies in the mortal realm.

Comets flared anew in the east, south, north, and west. New stars dotted the heavens. Ancient stars blazed with youthful vigor, shining even through the noontime sky. The Southern Cross went dark. A violent sun sent aurorae skidding all the way to the equator. The electromagnetic ripples could have, should have, toppled power grids, cities, civilizations.

But for Molly, they would have. For as the angels sifted away, escaping their eons-long bondage, the Mantle of Ontological Consistency grew weaker and weaker. Without the full weight of enforced angelic consensus to solidify and delineate them, the boundaries between possible and impossible grew hazy. Hazy enough for the entire edifice to come crumbling down.

But for Molly, it would have.

She opened her arms, shielded the Earth.

She breathed deeply. Her exhalation tugged at gravity, twisted it, gave it a minute localized
kink.
Rearranged geodesics described new trajectories for the orbital detritus that filled the underside of the sky. Metal skimmed into the upper atmosphere. It wouldn’t happen overnight, but soon enough the cascade would begin, and the high frontier would become accessible once again. Humans would have to do their part, but at least she had given them an opening.

Meanwhile, the sky was ablaze.

“On Earth as it is in Heaven,” said the angel who had once been Molly.

*   *   *

I sat on the roof of the diner, sucking hooch from my flask and watching the show. METATRON had clobbered the Nephilim—as, of course, it would—and appeared to have gone dormant again.

No, not dormant. But once that Trumpet gets going there’s no stopping it; flametop disappeared the instant she touched that plastic dingus to her lips, and now she had a tiger by the tail because the Nephilim had done exactly what they were intended to do by distracting the Voice of God. METATRON hadn’t stopped her in time. It was out there, I knew, watching the same show as I. And what a show it was.

The angelic diaspora made a
Č
erenkov light show of the Pleroma as my colleagues’ various Magisteria, no longer constrained to a tight metaphysical packing, went superluminal in their quest for elbow room. Land was soon to get very cheap here on the Pleromatic side of what was once the MOC.

I wondered how long before a tumbleweed rolled past.

*   *   *

The laws of physics were formless and empty, darkness fell upon the surface of mortal reality, and Molly’s spirit hovered over the dead waters.

And Molly said, “Screw this.”

She spread across the oceans. Dunked her hands in the water, trailed her fingernails through anaerobic silt. Felt the play of heat and salt trickle through her fingers. With practice, in her unfettered angelic form, she knew she might have eventually learned the topology by heart. But the Trumpet made it trivial.