Terminal World (2 page)

‘Damn thing must have been alive almost all the way down,’ he said. ‘This was a controlled landing, not a crash.’

‘What a way to go,’ Gerber said. ‘You think it was suicide, or did it just, you know, lose its way?’

‘Maybe there was a fault with its pack,’ Cultel said, fingering the hard, alien alloy of the angel’s propulsion harness. ‘Hell, who knows? Cover all the angles, then we’ll get it zipped up and into the van. Sooner this is off our hands the better.’

They got the angel bagged and tagged, taking care not to worsen the damage to the wings or break any of the creature’s stick-thin limbs. Lifting the bag, Cultel could easily manage it on his own. It was like carrying a sack of bones and not much else. They didn’t even need to hose down the ground. The angel hadn’t shed a drop of whatever passed for blood in its veins.

The other van hadn’t arrived when they called back to the dispatcher.

‘Sorry, Cultel. Had to send them over to the boundary with Steam - had a report that the zone was shifting around again.’

‘Well, you might want to rethink that. We got the smear.’ He glanced at Gerber, grinning in the moment. ‘You ready for this? It’s an angel.’

‘No reports of anything falling down from the Levels, three oh seven.’

‘This one didn’t fall. It must have flown almost all the way. Then died.’

‘As they do.’ He could hear the practised scepticism in the dispatcher’s voice. Didn’t much blame him, either. It wouldn’t be the first time an angel corpse had been faked up for someone’s twisted amusement. Might even be the kind of sick joke someone in Hygiene and Works would play on another clean-up crew, to see how gullible they were.

But Cultel knew this was a real one.

‘You want us to squeeze the angel in, we will. Might get a little crumpled in there, but we’ll manage. Just so you understand, I’m not taking responsibility for any breakages. I take it you’d like us to ship this thing over to Third?’

‘If you think it’s the real deal.’

‘I’ll take the fall if it isn’t.’

‘Fine; stop by at Third. But remove anything technical. Bag them separately, and we’ll box them over to Imports.’

Cultel hung up.

‘Why Third? We never deal with Third,’ Gerber said.

They secured the angel, closed up the van and flywheeled back up the access ramp. It was another twenty-minute drive to the Third District Morgue, dodging through short cuts and back alleys, winding their way a little further up the spiralling ledge. The building was an ash-grey slab with a flat roof and a frontage of small square windows, lower than any of the office and apartment blocks crowding in around it. They drove to the rear and backed the van up to the dock, where a white-coated receiving clerk was waiting for them.

‘Dispatch phoned through,’ the clerk said as Cultel unlocked the van’s rear doors. ‘Said you had something juicy for Quillon.’ He scratched a pen against his nose. ‘Been a while, you know. I think he was starting to wonder if you’d forgotten about the arrangement.’

‘Like we’d forget,’ Cultel said, countersigning the delivery form.

‘What’s this all about?’ Gerber asked.

‘Quillon likes to get first dibs on anything freaky,’ the clerk explained. ‘Kind of a hobby of his, I guess.’

Gerber shrugged. ‘Each to their own.’

‘Suits everyone,’ the clerk said. ‘Quillon gets his kicks. The other morgues don’t have to wade through a ton of paperwork - and there’s always a lot of triplicate when one of these things comes in.’ He peered at the bagged form as Cultel and Gerber eased it onto a wheeled stretcher. ‘Mind if I take a look?’

‘Hey, be my guest,’ Cultel said.

The clerk zipped the bag down half a span. Wrinkled his nose at the dead, pale, broken thing inside.

‘They look so beautiful flying around up there, wings all lit up and glowing.’

‘Cut him some slack.’ Cultel zipped the bag tight. ‘He’s not been having the best of days.’

‘You sure it’s a he?’

‘Now that you mention it—’

‘Wheel it through to Quillon if you want,’ the clerk said. ‘Take the freight elevator to the third. He’ll be up there someplace. Gotta wait down here to see in another delivery.’

‘Busy night?’

‘Busy week. They say the boundary’s getting itchy feet again.’

‘What I heard,’ Cultel said. ‘Guess we’d better batten down the hatches and get our watches wound.’

They pushed the wheeled stretcher into the building. It was all green walls, stark white tiles and the chlorine reek of industrial cleaning solution. The lights in the ceiling were turned down almost to brown. Most of the staff had gone home for the day, leaving the morgue to the night shift and the ghosts of former clients. Cultel hated the place, as he hated all morgues. How could anyone work in a building where all they did was cut open bodies? At least being on the clean-up crew got him out into fresh air.

They took the freight elevator to the third floor, heaved open the heavy trelliswork door and rolled the stretcher out into the corridor. Quillon was waiting at the far end, flicking the butt of a cigarette into a wall-mounted ashtray. It had been three or four years but Cultel recognised him straight away. Which wasn’t to say that Quillon hadn’t changed in all that time.

‘When I heard there was a delivery coming in, I was hoping it was the new medicines,’ Quillon said, in his slow, measured, slightly too-deep voice. ‘Cupboards were any barer, we’d have to start turning away dead people.’

‘We brought you a present,’ Cultel said. ‘Be nice.’

‘How’s work?’

‘Ups and downs, Quillon, ups and downs. But while there’s a city and corpses, I guess you and I don’t have to worry about gainful employment.’

Quillon had always been thin, always been gaunt, but now he looked as if he’d just opened his eyes and climbed off one of the dissection tables. A white surgical coat draped off his thin-ridged shoulders as if it was still on the hanger and a white cap covered his hairless skull. He wore glasses, tinted slightly even though the lights in the morgue were hardly on the bright side. Green surgical gloves that still made his fingers look too long and skeletal for comfort. There were deep shadows under his cheekbones and his skin looked colourless and waxy and not quite alive.

No getting away from it, Cultel thought. The guy had picked the ideal place of employment.

‘So what have you got for me?’

‘Got you an angel, my friend. Came down on the ledge.’

Quillon’s reaction was hard to judge behind the glasses. The rest of his face didn’t move much, even when he spoke. ‘All the way down from the Celestial Levels?’

‘What we figured. Funny thing is, though, there’s not much sign that this one was going fast when it hit.’

‘That’s interesting.’ Quillon said this in the uninflected tones of someone who’d be hard pushed to think of anything less interesting. But Cultel wasn’t sure.

‘Had some gadgetry on it, we removed all that. What you’ve got is essentially just a naked corpse with wings.’

‘That’s what we deal with.’

‘You ... um ... cut many of these things open, Quillon?’ Gerber asked.

‘The odd one or two. Can’t say they drop in with great regularity. Have we met?’

‘I don’t think so. What is it about them you like so much?’

‘I wouldn’t say “like” comes into it. It’s just a speciality, that’s all. We’re set up for it here. Got the positive-pressure room, in case anything toxic boils out of them. Got the blast-proof doors. And once you’ve done one, the paperwork’s fairly routine.’

‘Takes the pressure off the other morgues,’ Cultel said.

Quillon flexed his scrawny neck in a nod. ‘Everyone’s a winner.’

There was an awkward moment. The two of them by the trolley, Quillon still standing there with his green-gloved hands at his sides.

‘Well, I guess we’re done here,’ Cultel said. ‘Docket tells you everything you need to know. Usual deal: when you’re through with the bag, send it back to Hygiene and Works. Preferably hosed down.’

‘I’ll see to it.’

‘Well, until next time,’ Cultel said, backing into the still-open freight elevator.

‘Until next time,’ Quillon said, raising a forearm by way of farewell.

‘It’s been great meeting you,’ Gerber said.

Cultel closed the elevator doors. The elevator descended, the motor whining at the head of the shaft.

Quillon stood still at the end of the corridor until the panel over the door told him that the elevator had reached the ground floor. Then he walked slowly up to the stretcher, examined the docket and placed one gloved hand on the black zip-up bag containing the angel.

Then he wheeled it into the examination room, donned a surgical mask, transferred the bag onto the dissection plinth and carefully removed the angel from the bag.

It seemed to Quillon to be beautiful even in death. He had placed the angel on its back, its eyes closed, the ruined wings hanging down on either side so that their tips brushed the tiled floor, the floor’s sloping runnels designed to channel away bodily fluids. Under the hard lights of the dissection plinth, it was as ghost-pale, naked and hairless as a rat foetus.

Not expecting to be disturbed, he took off his glasses.

He pushed a squeaking-wheeled trolley next to the table, pulling aside the green sheet to expose an assortment of medical tools. There were scalpels, forceps, bone-cutting devices, gleaming sterile scoops and spatulas, and an array of glass and stainless-steel receptacles to receive the dissected tissue samples. These tools had once struck him as laughably crude, but now they fell to hand with an easy, reassuring familiarity. A microphone dangled from the ceiling; Quillon tugged it closer to his face and threw a heavy rocker switch in its side. Somewhere beyond the room, tape reels started whirring through recording heads. He cleared his throat and enunciated clearly, to make himself heard through the distorting mask.

‘Doctor Quillon speaking. Continuation of previous record.’ He glanced up at the row of clocks on the far wall. ‘Time is now ... six-fifteen p.m. Beginning autopsy of a corpse, docket number five-eight-three-three-four, recently delivered to the Third District Morgue by the Department of Hygiene and Public Works.’ He paused and cast his eyes over the corpse, the appropriate observations springing to mind with a minimum of conscious effort. ‘Initial indications are that the corpse is an angel, probably an adult male. Angel appears uninjured, save for impact damage to the wings. There are some longitudinal bruises and scars on the limbs, together with marked subepidermal swelling - recent enough to suggest they might be contributory factors in the angel’s death - but the limbs appear otherwise uninjured, with no sign of major breaks or dislocations. Indications are that the angel’s descent was controlled until the last moment, at which point it fell with enough force to damage the wings but not to inflict any other visible injuries. Reason for the descent is unknown, but the likely cause of death would appear to be massive maladaptive trauma due to sudden exposure to our zone, rather than impact onto the ledge.’ He paused again, letting the tape continue recording while he reached for a syringe. He punched the needle into a small rubber-capped bottle - one of the last dozen such bottles in the morgue’s inventory - and loaded the tube, taking care not to draw more than was strictly necessary.

‘In accordance with protocol,’ he continued, ‘I am now administering a lethal dose of Morphax-55, to ensure final morbidity.’ He tapped the glass until there were no more bubbles, then leaned over to push the needle into the bare skin of the angel’s chest.

In the six years that he had been working as a pathologist, Quillon had cut open many hundreds of human bodies - victims of accident, homicide, medical negligence - but only eleven angels. That was still more than most pathologists saw in their careers.

He pressed the tip of the syringe against skin.

‘Commencing injection of—’ he started.

The angel’s left arm whipped over to seize his hand.

‘Stop,’ it said.

Quillon halted, but it was more out of reflex than a considered response to the angel’s actions. He was so startled that he almost dropped the syringe.

‘The angel is still alive,’ he said into the microphone. ‘It has exhibited comprehension, visual awareness and fine motor control. I will now attempt to alleviate the subject’s suffering by ...’ He hesitated and looked into the dying creature’s eyes, which were now fully alert, fully and terrifyingly focused on his own. The angel still had his hand on Quillon’s wrist, the syringe hovering dagger-like above the angel’s sternum.

‘Let me do this,’ he said. ‘It’ll take away the pain.’

‘You mean kill me,’ the angel said, speaking slowly and with effort, as if barely enough air remained in his lungs to make the sounds. His eyes were large and blue, characteristically lacking visible structures. His head rolled slightly on the dissection table, as the angel took in his surroundings.

‘You’re going to die anyway,’ Quillon said.

‘Break it to me nicely, why don’t you.’

‘There’s nothing nice to break. You’ve fallen out of the Celestial Levels into Neon Heights. You don’t belong down here and your cells can’t take it. Even if we could get you back home, too much damage has already been done.’

‘You think I don’t know that?’ The angel’s piping, childlike voice was just deep enough to confirm him as male. ‘I’m fully aware of what’s going to happen. But I don’t want your medicine. Not just yet.’ The angel let go of his hand, allowing Quillon to place the syringe back on the trolley. ‘I need to ask you something.’

‘Of course.’

The angel was looking at him, the blue eyes windows into an alien soul. His head was only a little smaller than an adult human’s, but almost entirely hairless, beautiful and unworldly, as if it were made of porcelain and stained glass rather than living matter and machines. ‘You must answer me truthfully.’