Angels! Read online

  ANGELS!

  EDITED BY

  JACK DANN & GARDNER DOZOIS

  ANGELS!

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1995 by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois.

  Cover art by Den Beauvais.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part,

  by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

  ISBN: 0-441-00220-X

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-137-5

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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  Electronic Version by Baen Ebooks

  "Basileus," by Robert Silverberg, copyright © 1983 by Agberg, Ltd.; first appeared in The Best of Omni Science Fiction No 5 (Omni Publications International, Ltd., 1983); reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Angelica," by Jane Yolen, copyright © 1979 by Ja{te Yolen; first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fictidn, 1979; reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Angels," by Bruce McAllister, copyright © 1990 by Davis Publications, Inc.; first published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, May 1990; reprinted by permission of the author.

  "If Angels Ate Apples," by Geoffrey A. Landis, copyright © 1993 by Bantam Doubleday Dell Magazines; first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, June 1993.

  "Alfred," by Lisa Goldstein, copyright © 1992 by Bantam Doubleday Dell Magazines; first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, December 1992.

  "A Plethora of Angels," by Robert Sampson, copyright © 1989 by Robert Sampson; first published in Full Spectrum 2 (Doubleday); reprinted by permission of the author's estate.

  "The Man Who Loved the Faioli," by Roger Zelazny, copyright © 1967 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation; first published in Galaxy, 1967; reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Upon the Dull Earth," by Philip K. Dick, copyright © 1954 by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc.; first published in Beyond #9, 1954; reprinted by permission of the author's estate and the agents for the estate, Scott Meredith Literary Associates, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10022.

  "Angel," by Pat Cadigan, copyright © 1987 by Davis Publications, Inc.; first published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, 1987; reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Curse of the Angel's Wife," by Bruce Boston, copyright © 1993 by Bantam Doubleday Dell Magazines; first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, August 1993; reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Sleepers Awake," by Jamil Nasir, copyright © 1993 by Bantam Doubleday Dell Magazines; first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, July 1993; reprinted by permission of the author.

  "And the Angels Sing," by Kate Wilhelm, copyright O 1990 by Omni Publications International, Ltd.; first published in Omni, April 1990; reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Grave Angels," by Richard Kearns, copyright O 1986 by Mercury Press, Inc.; first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1986; reprinted by permission of the author.

  "All Vows," by Esther M. Friesner, copyright O 1992 by Bantam Doubleday Dell Magazines; first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, November 1992; reprinted by permission of the author.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The editors would like to thank the following people for their help and support:

  Susan Casper, Janeen Webb, Janet Kagan, Ricky Kagan, George Zebrowski, Peter Nicholls, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Michael Swanwick, Ellen Datlow, Sheila Williams, Ian Randal Strock, Scott Towner, and special thanks to our own editors, Susan Allison and Ginjer Buchanan.

  Basileus

  by

  Robert Silverberg

  Robert Silverberg is one of the most famous SF writers of modern times, with dozens of novels, anthologies, and collections to his credit. Silverberg has won five Nebula Awards and four Hugo Awards. His novels include Dying Inside, Lord Valentine's Castle, The Book of Skulls, Downward to the Earth, Tower of Glass, The World Inside, Born with the Dead, Shadrach in the Furnace, Tom O'Bedlam, Star of Gypsies, and At Winter's End His collections include Unfamiliar Territory, Capricorn Games, Majipoor Chronicles, The Best of Robert Silverberg, At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, and Beyond the Safe Zone. His most recent books are Nightfall and Child of Time, two novel-length expansions of famous Isaac Asimov stories; the novels The Face of the Waters and Kingdoms of the Wall; and a massive retrospective collection, The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume One: Secret Sharers. For many years he edited the prestigious anthology series New Dimensions, and has recently, along with his wife, writer Karen Haber, taken over the editing of the Universe anthology series. He lives in Oakland, California.

  In Christian lore, demons are literally ` fallen angels," angels who have opted against God. The difference between demons and angels is thus a purely doctrinal difference . . . so that one might fairly say that a demon is just an angel with a bad attitude, one who has declared for evil rather than for good.

  Count them how you will, though, one thing that is certain about angels, fallen or not, is that there are a lot of them. One rough count, by Kabbalists in the fourteenth century, estimated that there were 301,655,722 angels. That's quite a few angels to keep tabs on, so many that perhaps the best way to keep track of them all would be to use a computer—or perhaps, as the story that follows demonstrates, that would turn out to be a very bad idea indeed…

  In the shimmering lemon-yellow October light, Cunningham touches the keys of his terminal and summons angels. An instant to load the program, an instant to bring the file up, and there they are, ready to spout from the screen at his command: Apollyon, Anauel, Uriel, and all the rest. Uriel is the angel of thunder and terror; Apollyon is the Destroyer, the angel of the bottomless pit; Anauel is the angel of bankers and commission brokers. Cunningham is fascinated by the multifarious duties and tasks, both exalted and humble, that are assigned to the angels. "Every visible thing in the world is put under the charge of an angel," said St. Augustine in The Eight Questions.

  Cunningham has 1,114 angels in his computer now. He adds a few more each night, though he knows that he has a long way to go before he has them all. In the fourteenth century the number of angels was reckoned by the Kabbalists, with some precision, at 301,655,722. Albertus Magnus had earlier calculated that each choir of angels held 6,666 legions, and each legion 6,666 angels; even without knowing the number of choirs, one can see that that produces rather a higher total. And in the Talmud, Rabbi Jochanan proposed that new angels are born "with every utterance that goes forth from the mouth of the Holy One, blessed be He."

  If Rabbi Jochanan is correct, the number of angels is infinite. Cunningham's personal computer, though it has extraordinary add-on memory capacity and is capable, if he chooses, of tapping into the huge mainframe machines of the Defense Department, has no very practical way of handling an infinity. But he is doing his best. To have 1,114 angels on line already, after only eight months of part-time programming, is no small achievement.

  One of his favorites of the moment is Harahel, the angel of archives, libraries, and rare cabinets. Cunningham has designated Harahel also the angel of computers: it seems appropriate. He invokes Harahel often, to discuss the evolving niceties of data processing with him. But he has many other favorites, and his tastes run somewhat to the sinister: Azrael, the angel of death, for example, and Arioch, the angel of vengeance, and Zebuleon, one of the nine angels who will govern at the end of the world. It is Cunningham's job, from eight to four every working day, to devise programs for the interception of incoming Soviet nuclear warheads, and that, perhaps, has inclined him toward the more apocalyptic members of the angelic host. He invokes Harahel now. He has bad news for him. The invocation that he uses is a standard one that he found in Arthur Edward Waite's The Lemegeton, or The L
esser Key of Solomon, and he has dedicated one of his function keys to its text, so that a single keystroke suffices to load it. "I do invocate, conjure, and command thee, O thou Spirit N, to appear and to show thyself visibly unto me before this Circle in fair and comely shape," is the way it begins, and it proceeds to utilize various secret and potent names of God in the summoning of Spirit N—such names as Zabaoth and Elion and, of course, Adonai—and it concludes, "I do potently exorcise thee that thou appearest here to fulfill my will in all things which seem good unto me. Wherefore, come thou, visibly, peaceably, and affably, now, without delay to manifest that which I desire, speaking with a clear and perfect voice, intelligibly, and to mine understanding." All that takes but a microsecond, and another moment to read in the name of Harahel as Spirit N, and there the angel is on the screen"I am here at your summons," he announces expectantly.

  Cunningham works with his angels from five to seven every evening. Then he has dinner. He lives alone, in a neat little flat a few blocks west of the Bayshore Freeway, and does not spend much of his time socializing. He thinks of himself as a pleasant man, a sociable man, and he may very well be right about that, but the pattern of his life has been a solitary one. He is thirty-seven years old, five feet eleven, with red hair, pale blue eyes, and a light dusting of freckles on his cheeks. He did his undergraduate work at Cal Tech, his postgraduate studies at Stanford, and for the last nine years he has been involved in ultrasensitive military-computer projects in northern California. He has never married. Sometimes he works with his angels again after dinner, from eight to ten, but hardly ever any later than that. At ten he goes to bed. He is a very methodical person.He has given Harahel the physical form of his own first computer, a little Radio Shack TRS-80, with wings flanking the screen. He had thought originally to make the appearance of his angels more abstract—showing Harahel as a sheaf of kilobytes, for example—but like many of Cunningham's best and most austere ideas, it had turned out impractical in the execution, since abstract concepts did not translate well into graphics for him.

  "I want to notify you," Cunningham says, "of a shift in jurisdiction." He speaks English with his angels. He has it on good, though apocryphal, authority that the primary language of the angels is Hebrew, but his computer's audio algorithms have no Hebrew capacity, nor does Cunningham. But they speak English readily enough with him: they have no choice. "From now on," Cunningham tells Harahel, "your domain is limited to hardware only."

  Angry green lines rapidly cross and recross Harahel's screen, "By whose authority do you

  "It isn't a question of authority," Cunningham replies smoothly. "It's a question of precision. I've just read Vretil into the data base, and I have to code his functions. He's the recording angel, after all. So, to some degree, then, he overlaps your territory."

  "Ah," says Harahel, sounding melancholy. "I was hoping you wouldn't bother about him."

  "How can I overlook such an important angel? `Scribe of the knowledge of the Most High,' according to the Book of Enoch. `Keeper of the heavenly books and records.' `Quicker in wisdom than the other archangels.' "

  "If he's so quick," says Harahel sullenly, "give him the hardware. That's what governs the response time, you know."

  "I understand. But he maintains the lists. That's data base." "And where does the data base live? The hardware!"

  "Listen, this isn't easy for me," Cunningham says. "But I have to be fair. I know you'll agree that some division of responsibilities is in order. And I'm giving him all data bases and related software. You keep the rest."

  "Screens. Terminals. CPUs. Big deal."

  "But without you, he's nothing, Harahel. Anyway, you've always been in charge of cabinets, haven't you?"

  "And archives and libraries," the angel says. "Don't forget that."

  "I'm not. But what's a library? Is it the books and shelves and stacks, or the words on the pages? We have to distinguish the container from the thing contained."

  "A grammarian," Harahel sighs. "A hairsplitter. A casuist." "Look, Vretil wants the hardware, too. But he's willing to compromise. Are you?"

  "You start to sound less and less like our programmer and more and more like the Almighty every day," says Harahel

  "Don't blaspheme," Cunningham tells him. "Please. Is it agreed? Hardware only?"

  "You win," says the angel. "But you always do, naturally."

  Naturally. Cunningham is the one with his hands on the keyboard, controlling things. The angels, though they are eloquent enough and have distinct and passionate personalities, are mere magnetic impulses deep within. In any contest with Cunningham they don't stand a chance. Cunningham, though he tries always to play the game by the rules, knows that, and so do they.

  It makes him uncomfortable to think about it, but the role he plays is definitely godlike in all essential ways. He puts the angels into the computer; he gives them their tasks, their personalities, and their physical appearances; he summons them or leaves them uncalled, as he wishes.

  A godlike role, yes. But Cunningham resists confronting that notion. He does not believe he is trying to be God; he does not even want to think about God. His family had been on comfortable terms with God—Uncle Tim was a priest, there was an archbishop somewhere back a few generations, his parents and sisters moved cozily within the divine presence as within a warm bath—but he himself, unable to quantify the Godhead, preferred to sidestep any thought of it. There were other, more immediate matters to engage his concern. His mother had wanted him to go into the priesthood, of all things, but Cunningham had averted that by demonstrating so visible and virtuosic a skill at mathematics that even she could see he was destined for science. Then she had prayed for a Nobel Prize in physics for him; but he had preferred computer technology. "Well," she said, "a Nobel in computers. I ask the Virgin daily."

  "There's no Nobel in computers, Mom," he told her. But he suspects she still offers novenas for it.

  The angel project had begun as a lark, but had escalated swiftly into an obsession. He was reading Gustav Davidson's old Dictionary of Angels, and when he came upon the description of the angel Adramelech, who had rebelled with Satan and had been cast from heaven, Cunningham thought it might be amusing to build a computer simulation and talk with him. Davidson said that Adramelech was sometimes shown as a winged and bearded lion, and sometimes as a mule with feathers, and sometimes as a peacock, and that one poet had described him as "the enemy of God, greater in malice, guile, ambition, and mischief than Satan, a fiend more curst, a deeper hypocrite." That was appealing. Well, why not build him? The graphics were easy—Cunningham chose the winged-lion form—but getting the personality constructed involved a month of intense labor and some consultations with the artificial-intelligence people over at Kestrel Institute. But finally Adramelech was on line, suave and diabolical, talking amiably of his days as an Assyrian god and his conversations with Beelzebub, who had named him Chancellor of the Order of the Fly (Grand Cross).

  Next, Cunningham did Asmodeus, another fallen angel, said to be the inventor of dancing, gambling, music, drama, French fashions, and other frivolities. Cunningham made him look like a very dashing Beverly Hills Iranian, with a pair of tiny wings at his collar. It was Asmodeus who suggested that Cunningham continue the project; so he brought Gabriel and Raphael on line to provide some balance between good and evil, and then Forcas, the angel who renders people invisible, restores lost property, and teaches logic and rhetoric in Hell; and by that time Cunningham was hooked.

  He surrounded himself with arcane lore: M. R. James's editions

  of the Apocrypha, Waite's Book of Ceremonial Magic and Holy Kabbalah, the Mystical Theology, and Celestial Hierarchies of Dionysius the Areopagite, and dozens of related works that he called up from the Stanford data base in a kind of manic fervor. As he codified his systems, he became able to put in five, eight, a dozen angels a night; one June evening, staying up well past his usual time, he managed thirty-seven. As the population grew, it took on weight and subs
tance, for one angel cross-filed another, and they behaved now as though they held long conversations with one another even when Cunningham was occupied elsewhere.

  The question of actual belief in angels, like that of belief in God Himself, never arose in him. His project was purely a technical challenge, not a theological exploration. Once, at lunch, he told a co-worker what he was doing, and got a chilly blank stare. "Angels? Angels? Flying around with big flapping wings, passing miracles? You aren't seriously telling me that you believe in angels, are you, Dan?"

  To which Cunningham replied, "You don't have to believe in angels to make use of them. I'm not always sure I believe in electrons and protons. I know I've never seen any. But I make use of them."

  "And what use do you make of angels?"

  But Cunningham had lost interest in the discussion.

  He divides his evenings between calling up his angels for conversations and programming additional ones into his pantheon. That requires continuous intensive research, for the literature of angels is extraordinarily large, and he is thorough in everything he does. The research is time-consuming, for he wants his angels to meet every scholarly test of authenticity. He pores constantly over such works as Ginzberg's seven-volume Legends of the Jews, Clement of Alexandria's Prophetic Eclogues, Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine.

  It is the early part of the evening. He brings up Hagith, ruler of the planet Venus and commander of 4,000 legions of spirits, and asks him details of the transmutation of metals, which is Hagith's specialty. He summons Hadranel, who in Kabbalistic lore is a porter at the second gate of Heaven, and whose voice, when he proclaims the will of the Lord, penetrates through 200,000 universes; he questions the angel about his meeting with Moses, who uttered the Supreme Name at him and made him tremble. And then Cunningham sends for Israfel the four-winged, whose feet are under the seventh earth and whose head reaches to the pillars of the divine throne. It will be Israfel's task to blow the trumpet that announces, the arrival of the Day of Judgment. Cunningham asks him to take a few trial riffs now—`just for practice," he says, but Israfel declines, saying he cannot touch his instrument until he receives the signal, and the command sequence for that, says the angel, is nowhere to be found in the software Cunningham has thus far constructed.