Angels! Read online

  "What then?"

  "Worlds," the angel replies. "Basileus will be the judge of worlds. He holds an entire planet up to scrutiny and decides whether it's time to call for the last trump."

  "Part of the machinery of Judgment, you mean?"

  "Exactly. He's the one who presents the evidence to God and helps Him make his decision. And then he's the one who tells Israfel to blow the trumpet, and he's the one who calls out the name of Anaphaxeton to bring everyone before the bar. He's the prime apocalyptic angel, the destroyer of worlds. And we thought you might make him look like—"

  "Ah," Cunningham says. "Not now. Let's talk about that some other time."

  He shuts the system down, pours himself a drink, sits staring out the window at the big eucalyptus tree in the front yard. After a while it begins to rain. Not such a good weekend for a drive into the country after all, he thinks. He does not turn the computer on again that evening.

  Despite everything, Cunningham goes to the party. Joanna is not there. She has phoned to cancel, late Saturday afternoon, pleading a bad cold. He detects no sound of a cold in her voice, but perhaps she is telling the truth. Or possibly she has found something better to do on Saturday night. But he is already geared for party going, and he is so tired, so eroded, that it is more effort to change his internal program than it is to follow through on the original schedule. So about eight that evening he drives up to San Mateo, through a light drizzle.

  The party turns out not to be in the glamorous hills west of town, but in a small cramped condominium, close to the heart of the city, furnished with what looks like somebody's college-era chairs and couches and bookshelves. A cheap stereo is playing the pop music of a dozen years ago, and a sputtering screen provides a crude computer-generated light show. The host is some sort of marketing exec for a large video-games company in San Jose, and most of the guests look vaguely corporate, too. The futurologist from New York has sent his regrets; the famous sociobiologist has

  also failed to arrive; the video poets are two San Francisco gays who will talk only to each other, and stray not very far from the bar; the expert on teaching chimpanzees to speak is in the red-faced-and-sweaty-stage of being drunk, and is working hard at seducing a plump woman festooned with astrological jewelry. Cunningham, numb, drifts through the party as though he is made of ectoplasm. He speaks to no one; no one speaks to him. Some jugs of red wine are open on a table by the window, and he pours himself a glassful. There he stands, immobile, imprisoned by inertia. He imagines himself suddenly making a speech about angels, telling everyone how Ithuriel touched Satan with his spear in the Garden of Eden as the Fiend crouched next to Eve, and how the hierarch Ataphiel keeps Heaven aloft by balancing it on three fingers. But he says nothing. After a time he find himself approached by a lean, leathery-looking woman with glittering eyes, who says, "And what do you do?"

  "I'm a programmer," Cunningham says. "Mainly I talk to angels. But I also do national security stuff."

  "Angels?" she says, and laughs in a brittle, tinkling way. "You talk to angels? I've never heard anyone say that before." She pours herself a drink and moves quickly elsewhere.

  "Angels?" says the astrological woman. "Did someone say angels?"

  Cunningham smiles and shrugs and looks out the window. It is raining harder. I should go home, he thinks. There is absolutely no point in being here. He fills his glass again. The chimpanzee man is still working on the astrologer, but she seems to be trying to get free of him and come over to Cunningham. To discuss angels with him? She is heavy-breasted, a little walleyed, sloppy-looking. He does not want to discuss angels with her. He does not want to discuss angels with anyone. He hold his place at the window until it definitely does appear that the astrologer is heading his way; then he drifts toward the door. She says, "I heard you say you were interested in angels. Angels are a special field of mine, you know. I've studied with—"

  "Angles," Cunningham says. "I play the angles. That's what I said. I'm a professional gambler."

  "Wait," she says, but he moves past her and out into the night. It takes him a long while to find his key and get his car unlocked, and the rain soaks him to the skin, but that does not bother him. He is home a little before midnight.

  He brings Raphael on line. The great archangel radiates a beautiful golden glow.

  "You will be Basileus," Raphael tells him. "We've decided it by a vote, hierarchy by hierarchy. Everyone agrees."

  "I can't be an angel. I'm human," Cunningham replies.

  "There's ample precedent. Enoch was carried off to Heaven and became an angel. So was Elijah. St. John the Baptist was actually an angel. You will become Basileus. We've already done the program for you. It's on the disk: just call him up and you'll see. Your own face, looking out at you."

  "No," Cunningham says.

  "How can you refuse?"

  "Are you really Raphael? You sound like someone from the other side. A tempter. Asmodeus. Astaroth. Belphegor."

  "I am Raphael. And you are Basileus."

  Cunningham considers it. He is so very tired that he can barely think.

  An angel. Why not? A rainy Saturday night, a lousy party, a splitting headache: come home and find out you've been made an angel, and given a high place in the hierarchy. Why not? Why the hell not?

  "All right," he says. "I'm Basileus."

  He puts his hands on the keys and taps out a simple formulation that goes straight down the pipe into the Defense Department's big northern California system. With an alteration of two keystrokes, he sends the same message to the Soviets. Why not? Redundancy is the soul of security. The world now has about six minutes left. Cunningham has always been good with computers. He knows their secret language as few people before him have.

  Then he brings Raphael on the screen again.

  "You should see yourself as Basileus while there's still time," the archangel says.

  "Yes. Of course. What's the access key?"

  Raphael tells him. Cunningham begins to set it up.

  Come now, Basileus! We are one!

  Cunningham stares at the screen with growing wonder and

  delight, While the clock continues to tick.

  Angelica

  by

  Jane Yolen

  One of the most distinguished of modern fantasists, Jane Yolen has been compared to writers such as Oscar Wilde and Charles Perrault, and has been called "the Hans Christian Andersen of the twentieth century." Primarily known for her work for children and young adults, Yolen has produced more than sixty books, including novels, collections of short stories, poetry collections, picture books, biographies, and a book of essays on folklore and fairy tales. She has received the Golden Kite Award and the World Fantasy Award, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award. In recent years she has also been writing more adult-oriented fantasy, work which has appeared in collections such as Tales of Wonder, Neptune Rising: Songs and Tales of the Undersea Folk, Dragonfield and Other Stories, and Merlin's Booke, and in novels such as Cards of Grief, Sister Light, Sister Dark, and White Jenna. She lives with her family in Massachusetts.

  In the subtle little story that follows, she shows us that sometimes even angels must do, not what they want to do, but what they have to do.

  Linz, Austria, 1898

  The boy could not sleep. It was hot and he had been sick for so long. All night his head had throbbed. Finally he sat up and managed to get out of bed. He went down the stairs without stumbling.

  Elated at his progress, he slipped from the house without waking either his mother or father. His goal was the river bank. He had not been there in a month.

  He had always considered the river bank his own. No one else in the family ever went there. He liked to set his feet in the damp ground and make patterns. It was like a picture, and the artist in him appreciated the primitive beauty.

  Heat lightning jetted across the sky. He sat down on a fallen log and picked at the bark as he would a scab. He could feel the fog imprint itsel
f on his backside through the thin cotton pajamas. He wished—not for the first time—that he could be allowed to sleep without his clothes.

  The silence and the heat enveloped him. He closed his eyes and dreamed of sleep, but his head still throbbed. He had never been out at night by himself before. The slight touch of fear was both pleasure and pain.

  He thought about that fear, probing it like a loose tooth, now to feel the ache and now to feel the sweetness, when the faint came upon him and he tumbled slowly from the log. There was nothing but river bank before him, nothing to slow his descent, and he rolled down the slight hill and into the river, not waking till the shock of the water hit him.

  It was cold and unpleasantly muddy. He thrashed about. The sour water got in his mouth and made him gag.

  Suddenly someone took his arm and pulled him up onto the bank, dragged him up the slight incline.

  He opened his eyes and shook his head to get the lank, wet hair from his face. He was surprised to find that his rescuer was a girl, about his size, in a white cotton shift. She was not muddied at all from her efforts. His one thought before she heaved him over the top of the bank and helped him back onto the log was that she must be quite marvelously strong.

  "Thank you," he said, when he was seated again, and then did not know where to go from there.

  "You are welcome." Her voice was low, her speech precise, almost old-fashioned in its carefulness. He realized that she was not a girl but a small woman.

  "You fell in," she said.

  "Yes."

  She sat down beside him and looked into his eyes, smiling. He wondered how he could see so well when the moon was behind her. She seemed to light up from within like some kind of lamp.

  Her outline was a golden glow and her blond hair fell in straight lengths to her shoulder.

  "You may call me Angelica," she said.

  "Is that your name?"

  She laughed. "No. No, it's not. And how perceptive of you to guess."

  "It is an alias?" He knew about such things. His father was a customs official and told the family stories at the table about his work.

  "It is the name I . . ." She hesitated for a moment and looked behind her. Then she turned and laughed again. "It is the name I travel under."

  "Oh."

  "You could not pronounce my real name," she said. "Could I try?"

  "Pistias Sophia!" said the woman and she stood as she named herself. She seemed to shimmer and grow at her own words, but the boy thought that might be the fever in his head, though he hadn't a headache anymore.

  "Pissta . . ." He could not stumble around the name. There seemed to be something blocking his tongue. "I guess I better call you Angelica for now," he said.

  "For now," she agreed.

  He smiled shyly at her. "My name is Addie," he said. "I know."

  "How do you know? Do I look like an Addie? It means . . . "Noble hero," she finished for him.

  "How do you know that?"

  "I am very wise," she said. "And names are important to me. To all of us. Destiny is in names." She smiled, but her smile was not so pleasant any longer. She started to reach for his hand, but he drew back.

  "You shouldn't boast," he said. "About being wise. It's not nice."

  "I am not boasting." She found his hand and held it in hers. Her touch was cool and infinitely soothing. She reached over with the other hand and put it first palm, then back to his forehead. She made a "tch" against her teeth and scowled. "Your guardian should be Flung Over. I shall have to speak to Uriel about this. Letting you out with such a fever."

  "Nobody let me out," said the boy. "I let myself out. No one knows I am here—except you."

  "Well, there is one who should know where you are. And he shall certainly hear from me about this." She stood up and was suddenly much taller than the boy. "Come. Back to the house with you. You should be in bed." She reached down the front of her white shift and brought up a silver bottle on a chain. "You must take a sip of this now. It will help you sleep."

  "Will you come back with me?" the boy asked after taking a drink.

  "Just a little way." She held his hand as they went.

  He looked behind once to see his footprints in the rain-soft earth. They marched in an orderly line behind him. He could not see hers at all.

  "Do you believe, little Addie?" Her voice seemed to come from a long way off, farther even than the hills.

  "Believe in what?"

  "In God. Do you believe that he directs all our movements?" "I sing in the church choir," he said, hoping it was the proof she wanted.

  "That will do for now," she said.

  There was a fierceness in her voice that made him turn in the muddy furrow and look at her. She towered above all, all white and gold and glowing. The moon haloed her head, and behind her, close to her shoulders, he saw something like wings, feathery and waving. He was suddenly desperately afraid.

  "What are you?" he whispered.

  "What do you think I am?" she asked, and her face looked carved in stone, so white her skin and black the features.

  "Are you . . . the angel of death?" he asked and then looked down before she answered. He could not bear to watch her talk. "For you, I am an angel of life," she said. "Did I not save you?" "What kind of angel are you?" he whispered, falling to his

  knees before her.

  She lifted him up and cradled him in her arms. She sang him a lullaby in a language he did not know. "I told you in the beginning who I am," she murmured to the sleeping boy. "I am Pistias Sophia, angel of wisdom and faith. The one who put the serpent into the garden, little Adolf. But I was only following orders."

  Her wings unfurled behind her. She pumped them once, twice, and then the great wind that commanded lifted her into the air. She flew without a sound to the Hitler house and left the boy sleeping, feverless, in his bed.

  Angels

  by

  Bruce McAllister

  Bruce McAllister published his first story in 1963, when he was seventeen (it was written at the tender age of fifteen). Since then, with only a handful of stories and a few novels, he has nevertheless managed to establish himself as one of the most respected writers in the business. His short fiction has appeared in Omni, Asimov's Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, In the Field of Fire, Alien Sex, and elsewhere. His first novel, Humanity Prime, was part of the original Ace Specials series. His most recent novel is the critically acclaimed Dream Baby, and he is at work on several other novel projects. McAllister lives in Redlands, California, where he is the director of the writing program at the University of Redlands.

  In the powerful and unsettling story that follows, he unveils the compelling story of a woman who, no matter what the cost, is determined to create Heaven-on-Earth—or one of its inhabitants, anyway . . .

  The creature she'd had them make cost her the last piece of forest outside Siena. The one with the little medieval chapel in it, the tall umbrella pines shading a forest floor no tourist had ever walked upon.

  It cost her the two rocky islands just south of Elba, and the lead mines at Piombino, which she had never cared about, and the villa on Lake Garda, which she had, because, so small and intimate, it had been one of her father's favorites.

  When she ordered the doctors from Milan to alter the creature's spine and shoulder blades to accept the remarkable wings, it cost her the thirty-meter ketch as well—the one with the artificial brain that trimmed the sails perfectly—the one she had used only once, forty years ago, and had never really wanted anyway. And when the wings did not take, when the doctors needed to try again, it cost her the two altar paintings of angels by Giotto from her father's hunting lodge outside Siena, where she had spent her childhood with her brother and sisters, and which her father had loved. She had not wanted to sell the paintings, but selling them had helped her to remember him—to see him standing in the long hallway of the lodge, on the green Carrara marble floor, looking down at her and smiling in the gray suit he
always wore. He seemed to be laughing, to be saying: Yes, you may sell them!

  It was the wings, she realized—the sale of the ketch through an electronic brokerage in Nice—that had alerted her older brother, who found her one day in her apartment in Lucca and in his rage shouted: "What are you doing, Pupa? What do you imagine you are doing?" She knew he meant: You are doing this to hurt us. We know you are.

  She had taken a room in the old walled city of Lucca, near the ancient university there, above a store that still sold wood-pulp books, but Giancarlo found her nevertheless and shouted at her, as always. As did her sister Olivia the very next week, while Francesca, the youngest at ninety-three, sent a letter instead. "How can you be doing this?" they all asked her, when they actually meant to say: How can you be doing this to us, Pupa? How?

  They did not know she knew what they had done to her children, and this gave them the courage to ask, she told herself.

  They were afraid, of course, that she would continue to sell her possessions until everything their father had left her was gone. They were so afraid, in fact, that they were arranging, even now, for doctors from Rome and Turin to testify about her "illness," this madness of hers, in court. These doctors had not interviewed her in person, no, but that did not matter. What she was doing, her lawyers said, was enough—enough for doctors with reputations like theirs to testify against her. "This thing you are having made for you, Egregia Signora, is quite enough," they'd told her.

  At these words the world felt a little darker, and she had to remind herself that this was why she was so willing to leave it.

  The first time she was allowed to see him, she found she could not look at him for long. He wasn't yet finished; that was all. A woman of childbearing age, chosen by the doctors from a list, had carried the fertilized ovum for her. At one month they'd removed it. It was not like a fetus, the way an infant grew. There were ways to make it grow quickly outside a woman. It would take six months, they'd said.