She wonders dreamily—as she has before, many times—at the necessity of being seduced back into life when one has been dead such a very long time. Is it ninety-six years again?
Warm but exhausted by this near approach to living, the body dozes once more as the needles go on pulsing, making muscles and tendons tense and relax and tense again. Though not all strength is lost while deeply frozen, still it will take some time before the body feels like normal flesh. This body is now Nell, and Nell will sleep. Real sleep. Sleep that allows the dream, the one dream that returns during every waking.
In the dream she sees the shelter. Jerry is there among the meticulous stacks of supplies that fill all the space beneath beds, on top of cupboards, wherever there is a cubic inch unused. The children are there, still dressed in swimsuits, just home from the lake where Jerry takes them to swim. Nell herself is there, an observant mote hanging in the camera’s eye. She knows what is coming, but they haven’t been near a television all day. They haven’t heard the news…
“Daddy, when’s the meedeors coming?” Michy flops herself on the top bunk and punches her pillow. “Are we going to stay all night?”
“Don’t want to,” Tony, whining his pro-forma objection to life itself.
“Don’t have to,” Jerry replies, He can’t see Nell, he doesn’t know she’s there. Each time she wakes, she has to remind herself that she is not, was not actually there, that she had already gone to join the sleepers.
Jerry says, “We’ll just stay until the meteors stop coming down, Tony.”
“Why isn’t Mommy here? Won’t she get hit?”
“They have a shelter at Big Eye.”
“Where she washes the stars,” Tony says, with satisfaction. “Mommy’s a portant washer.”
“Mommy’s a very important watcher,” Jerry agrees, with a finality that means, yes she is, but now she’s away, good riddance. The dreamer watches during a brief period of ordinary living filled with ordinary doings: yawnings, scratchings, and gapings by the children while Jerry neatens and stacks, all interrupted by…
“Whas that?” Michy asks. “That noise.”
Each time she dreams this, Nell is surprised, for she had not actually expected to hear it, not this far from the ocean where the Bitch was expected to land. Obviously, Jerry hadn’t expected to hear it either. His face shows shock first, then horrified surprise. He has been confident that nothing will happen to him and the children. He has put himself in God’s hands, sure that nothing will happen, but the sound is happening, building like an unbraked train careening down steep tracks, a rattling roar one recognizes mostly from old movies. He darts to the air lock and slams both doors. The shrill screaming is like steam engines, too, and like wheels trying to stop and the whistle going, all at once, only this one goes on and on and on, louder and louder, and the crash, when it comes is a greater sound than human ears can tolerate.
Jerry is facedown on the cot, pillows around his head, trying to block the sound. The ping lens trembles as does the room. The water tank bounces among its heavy springs, a weighty plumb bob, signifying unimaginable forces begun five, six thousand miles away.
Jerry raises his head, looking for Michy. She’s on the floor, blood trickling from her ears. Tony is where? There, under the cot, pillows around his head. He is the younger, but he is the one who always has to do what Daddy does.
Jerry pulls the children onto the cots, packs comforters and pillows around them. Michy’s eyes are open and her lips move, but he cannot hear her. The world is totally filled by the groaning of monstrous powers rending the earth, forces Jerry has never believed will touch him. The camera is hidden inside a box of Nell’s personal supplies; it sees through a pinhole lens.
It is only a coincidence that Jerry is now facing the camera, his mouth drawn into a rictus of fury! He is not yet as frightened as he will be in a day or so, but, oh, he is raging with anger! In the dream her insect voice admonishes him. “You should have believed me, Jerry…”
He doesn’t hear her as she hangs there, staring at that furious face, those wide, angry eyes, those lips curled back to show bared teeth. Over the vast, underground grinding, the sound changes, very gradually, and now she can hear the sound of water, a heavy downpour, as though the house had been moved beneath a waterfall. The salty ocean that had been displaced now falls upon them. Jerry struggles to the door to the airlock, to one of the listening posts, flexible pipes, one leading up into the house, one to the outside world with a rain cap at the end of it, put there so the ones inside could hear what was happening without opening the airlock.
When he takes off the inner seal, the sound of rain is a roar, a deluge. Rain trickles out the end of the tube. Jerry stares at the water stupidly. She sees his realization that this is the tube that went up into the house. The water is coming from where a house was, a dribble of liquid dark with ashes. She reads the understanding on his face: the house is gone. His world is gone. He lies down between the children while all around them the world moans like some gargantuan animal, wounded unto death but unable to die without interminable agonies.
He lies there in the yellow light of the lantern, hands clenched, still raging at the chaos around him. Though the exterior noise drowns his words, she can read his lips as he cries, “Oh, God, I turn away from you. Damn you. I turn away from you if you treat me like this…!”
Nell had first seen the event ninety-six years after it had been recorded. After that, each time she wakened, she relived it before she could go on. There had been later images, as well, one of them leaving the shelter, one of the children half-grown accompanied by a bearded Jerry and a small band of refugees; still another of a gray-haired Jerry leading a much larger group as they barricaded their shelter against monsters, and last of all, a lengthy recording of Jerry as a white-bearded magus, raging upon his followers like Moses down from the mountain. They were Turnaways, he cried. They were followers of the Rebel Angels who had spared them from destruction.
In each case, pings had recorded the images. Pings were the eyes of Omega site. Thousands of them, tiny and self-contained, many of them still functioning after all this time. Through them she knew that her husband and children had survived. At the end of his life, he was patriarch of a multitude that went on wandering and growing, eventually settling in Bastion, a place not far from where Jerry had begun his trek and not far from where Nell had been sleeping. Wonderful, she had thought at the time it happened. Wonderful and strange. And now that she has had the dream once more, she can rest and become flesh yet again.
22
officers and gentlemen
General Gowl, Over Colonel Bishop Lief Laron, Doctor Jens Ladislav, and Major Mace Marchant–Comador, from Apocanew, were gathered in the officers’ dining room late one afternoon, sharing drinks and talking about one thing and another. Also present was Captain James Trublood–Turnaway, an ambitious youngster being proposed by the bishop as an aide to the doctor. The bishop felt there was something twisty and un-Regimic about Colonel Doctor Jens; a certain bull-headed dedication to saving people’s lives in the body instead of just bottling them in the interest of efficiency; a certain smiliness that wasn’t always appropriate; a lack of respect, and young Captain Trublood seemed an ideal spy to plant on the doctor, particularly inasmuch as he might also make a good husband for one of the bishop’s older daughters.
The group was discussing the first “missionary” teams that had already crossed the border to make converts, and the army, which was already stronger than it had been a span or so ago. This turned their thoughts to the existing agreement between the Spared and the demons, which was the only obstacle preventing further action.
“Why don’t we just conquer them?” Captain Trublood asked, his face flushed with enthusiasm. “Then we can go out of Bastion whenever we want to!”
“We used to go out whenever we wanted to,” said Major Marchant, reprovingly. “On salvage trips. Then the outsiders started targeting the officers, and none of them
made it back. It got to the point that no one wanted to lead salvage expeditions anymore. That’s when the demons offered us a deal, and we’ve more or less stuck with it ever since. They give us the things we need in return for our staying peaceably within Bastion.”
“But now we mean to do more than merely salvage,” the captain said. “We’re going to conquer the world. If we’re going to do that, we have to conquer the demons first.”
“There’s a slight problem,” murmured the doctor. “They happen to be stronger than we are.”
“That’s heresy!” exclaimed the captain. “The Rebel Angels are at least as strong as any demons, and they’re on our side.”
“While your statement is doctrinally true, young man, it is practically irrelevant,” interrupted the bishop, glancing at the general. “The general has not mentioned any commitments on the part of the angels.”
“What angel was it?” demanded the captain.
The doctor said, reprovingly, “The general met a being who resembled one described by Hal P’Jardas, the discoverer of Bastion. In that case, the being named herself as Tamlar of the Flames. A Lady of the Silences was also mentioned.”
“Angel of the Silences,” corrected the bishop.
“I’ve never heard about that.” The young captain flushed but held his ground. “What Angel of the Silences?”
It was the doctor who answered. “It’s in the Archives, Captain. Look it up under Hal P’Jardas.”
The bishop murmured, “The being didn’t call itself an angel. P’Jardas wasn’t specific, he just thought it was.”
“Or we thought he thought it was,” murmured the doctor.
“How mysterious,” said the captain, with a slightly sinking feeling. “A little…well, daunting.”
“Yes, I imagine angels could be intimidating—to ordinary men,” murmured the bishop, “but we Spared must remember we are set apart from ordinary men.”
“But when you say we can’t be specific…You’re not implying angels are an invention?” asked the captain, in a worried voice. “A fiction?”
Major Marchant bridled, saying in a monitory tone, “Of course they’re not fictional, Captain…”
“Except,” murmured the doctor, “in the sense that all human discourse upon the supernatural must be, in a sense, fictional. Supernatural creatures are by definition unknowable, and when we start being specific about essentially unknowable beings, we risk being to some extent untruthful. So, we need to be careful in our talk, careful not to say what supernaturals are, how they are named, what they do, or why they do it, because anything we say about them is clearly an assumption. We don’t even know if angels are differentiable, one from the other. They may all be aspects of the same thing.”
The bishop snarled silently. Leave it to Jens Ladislav to confuse the troops! He nodded ponderously, his jowls swinging. “It’s possible that all angels may be uh…aspects of one being whose name we don’t know. But it doesn’t matter. The error is…”
“Insubstantial?” offered the doctor, irrepressibly.
“A matter of terminology,” growled the bishop. “Our Dicta teach us that The Art works by invoking angels, and we know that’s true because the people who actually do magic always start out by calling on Volian or Hussara or one of the others.” He turned his glare at the young captain who was somewhat losing luster in his eyes. “Does that clarify it?”
Despite being both confused and set back, Captain Trublood held his peace. The conversation returned to the question of the demons.
“I’ll meet with a delegation of them,” growled the general. “I’ll tell them if they stay out of our way, we won’t harm them. If they get in our way, we’ll run over them.”
The gathering broke up shortly thereafter leaving Doctor Ladislav and Captain Trublood to go down the stairs together.
“Join me for a drink?” suggested the doctor.
“I’d be honored, sir,” the captain replied. They had already drunk quite enough, but the doctor had a certain look in his eye.
“Tell me, young man,” he said, when they were seated and served in one of the taverns on the ground floor of the Fortress. “What do you and your fellows think about demons?”
“Think, sir? You mean, do we believe?”
“Exactly. Do you believe in demons?”
“Well,” the captain turned his glass somewhat uncertainly. “We do and we don’t. Some of us laugh at demons when we’re here in the Fortress, but the people who are sent on missionary duty tell me they worry about demons.”
“Have any of the people you’ve talked to ever seen a demon?”
“No, sir. We know they exist, of course, because we trade with them for chairs and bottles, and we know there are times we face away from certain places because they might be there and if we don’t see them, we won’t aggress because we have the non-aggression agreement with them.”
The doctor attempted to look sorrowful, succeeding only from the nose up, for his lips could not evert their usual smile. “Here in Bastion a cart loses a wheel and the carter utters an aversive prayer to drive off the demon who broke it. That doesn’t fix the wheel, so he calls a local carpenter who probably prays for angelic intervention. That doesn’t fix the wheel, either, so he drags it off to a wheelwright, who fixes it without invoking anyone.”
The captain smiled. “Oh, sir, that’s just human nature. Angels won’t intervene with stuff we can do ourselves. That’s in the Dicta.”
“Which is the point. We’re getting less and less able to do things for ourselves as we get further and further away from the time when our machines were designed and built. What will happen to our population when we use up the last preserving jars, the last wheels, the last drill bits and metal cog wheels? We don’t make steel, we salvage it. We don’t make glass, we salvage it, that’s why our windows have those tiny little panes made out of old bottles. So far we’ve kept going by stealing from the past. What happens when there’s nothing left to steal?”
The captain said severely, “What you’ve just said is totally unorthodox, Colonel Doctor. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you’d been touched by Scientism!”
“Ah. Scientism. One of the heresies. How would you define Scientism, Captain?”
“A heretical belief that men once did the things you’ve mentioned through their own efforts, without angelic assistance. The Dicta teaches us that our ancestors depended upon angels for their power, just as we will when we rediscover The Art.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want to be taken for a heretic, Captain, but I’m a physician, and I spend a lot of time learning how to better heal people. A few times when I’ve been up near the border, I’ve even met some people who might have been outsiders.”
“Unless you’re on a mission for the Regime, that’s against standard rules of behavior, sir!”
“It is. Quite right. But the general has been kind enough to overlook it because there are many things we don’t known about healing, and some outsiders have known about herbs and cures that really work.” He sighed. “They’ve kept the general and the bishop alive, as they wouldn’t be if I’d stuck to the standard rule of behavior.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t get where this conversation is going!”
“It’s not necessarily going anywhere, Captain. If you’re going to be my assistant, as Over Colonel Bishop Lief Laron has suggested, I need to know how you feel about things. You already know that even though standard rules of behavior say we’re to have no contact with demons, we do get all our Chairs from demons.”
“I know that, yes.” He flushed, started to speak, thought better of it.
“So you acknowledge there are exceptions? Well, from time to time I ruminate on how our lives might be improved if we made some other slight exceptions. For instance, if we saved some of what we trade for chairs and bottles, couldn’t we support a medical school? I’ve been told they have such schools, out there.”
The captain frowned. “We wouldn’t want to
copy anything they have out there. Even though the general’s vision told him there are Spared people out there, the general population is still mostly heretical or demonic, and they use dark arts. We can’t be involved with the dark arts.”
The doctor ruminated for a considerable time before asking, “Don’t you think we are involved with dark arts? Some of us? Perhaps only the very trustworthy ones?”
The captain paled. “You’re coming close to The Disease, sir. The Spared eschew the dark arts. I learned that in kindergarten. And we don’t deal with the outside, because we won’t risk the possibility of contagion.”
“The Chairs come from outside.”
“But the Chairs are exemplary and life-ful. We can use imports if they’ve been made to our order, exemplifying our purity and faith. You know that, you’re a doctor!”
“I’m a doctor,” agreed Jens Ladislav, “and I know we’ve lost a lot of ground. Our maternal death rate is high…”
“But not a single mother dies all at once! Every one who gets in trouble in childbirth gets bottled, doesn’t she? And the baby, too.”
“We’re unable to do tissue transplants…”
“Then why do we accept organ donations,” the younger man asked, his voice challenging. “Why do we go on accepting organ and limb donations from people with The Disease if we won’t be able to use them? We can’t use the tissue of the dead. It has to come from the living…” His voice trailed off and he glared at the doctor, his face very pale except for flushed bars across his cheekbones.
“Ah, you see the implications,” murmured the doctor. “Well, there could be a good reason for taking the organs and not using them. Prisons are expensive and the Regime would have to pay for prisons. Cripple a man and he’s less likely to be a troublemaker, and Chairs are a lot cheaper than cells, and the sinner’s family pays the expenses.”