Something More Than Night (43 page)

Authors: Ian Tregillis

BOOK: Something More Than Night

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“I’m sure they will.”

Molly glanced at the harmonica again. Willed it into another form. Then she let the seeds run through her fingers, sifting them into the Trumpet’s bell. She lifted the Trumpet to her lips.

“Don’t I get a blindfold and a cigarette? I believe that’s traditional.”

“Shut up and try to appreciate the irony.” Then she took Bayliss’s advice: she put her lips together, and blew.

The note went on, and on, and on. Somebody screamed. It wasn’t Molly.

When the smoke cleared, Bayliss stood at the center of a million-dimensional spiderweb. A hundred thousand gossamer threads punctured his angelic form, which was indistinguishable from his human form now. Even the ghostly hint of wings had vanished. Previously, a single mundane sliver had been enough to shackle him. Now his coupling constant was thousands of times stronger; his color charge covered the rainbow from infrared to X-ray.

He was more mundane than Molly had ever been. And just a tiny bit divine. Just enough.

The threads dragged him through the Pleroma, down the ontological gradient toward Earth and the mortal realm. He dug his heels in the sand. The tethers thrummed. He bent double with the effort to arrest his slide.

Through gritted teeth, he said, “What happens now?”

“Now you go about your very long life. Get drunk. Catch a ball game. Hire hookers. I don’t care. Build another Magisterium if you have enough strength to access the Pleroma. If you do it’s going to be damn close to the MOC, though, given all those hooks in you. I doubt you’ll be putting much metaphysical distance between yourself and the mortal realm from now on.”

Bayliss grunted with the effort to stay put. “Try … not to … sound so broken up about it.”

“The MOC needs a caretaker. From now on, that’s you. You’ve got so much mundanity crammed inside you now that the ins and outs of the mortal realm will be second nature. I bet that sooner than later you’ll start finding it difficult to imagine the world as anything other than what we monkeys have always known.” She clapped again. “Congratulations, Bayliss. You’re a one-man Mantle of Ontological Consistency.”

The tethers gave another tug. Bayliss moaned. He sank farther, through more ontological layers. “You’re just ribbing me, right? Tell me this is a gag.”

Molly shook her head. “Nope. And you’re going to do a better job than the Choir. Those fuckwads didn’t care. They let the whole thing go to hell. Uh-uh. Not anymore. You’re going to keep the wheels spinning. And you’re going to take your job seriously.”

Bayliss slipped farther. He was waist-deep in the mortal realm now. “What about you?”

Molly brandished the empty Trumpet. “I borrowed this from somebody. I need to return it. After that, who knows? But don’t worry. I’ll check in from time to time.”

“Like hell you will.”

“Like hell I won’t.”

The Jericho tethers pulled him to the very edge of mundane ontology. Bayliss dangled by his fingertips. He looked like the guy in one of those ancient black-and-white silent movies, hanging from the hands of an enormous clock.

She wiped her hands on her blue jeans. “Well, I’d say it’s been swell, but…”

She walked away. Turned. Peered down at his sweating face, his trembling fingers.

“And, Bayliss? Don’t take any wooden nickels.”

* * *

The view wasn’t bad: Earth below, multiverse above. The Earth’s onion-skin atmosphere shimmered with the incandescent flares of space junk reentry. It followed the temporary pattern Molly had imposed.

They were all down there, Molly’s human connections: Anne, Martin, Ria … She wondered if they would ever understand how important, how crucial, their influence had been to Molly. To everything. More than connections, they were Molly’s human credentials, and the world owed them. Maybe they’d look to the sky, and the sea, and read her handiwork there. Read her thanks and farewell.

She hoped so. She couldn’t go down and tell them herself. Her old mortal form no longer fit.

She’d miss them. For a while.

After all,
she
hadn’t died. Not really. Why should they? Though the new arrangement would keep her very busy for an extremely long time.

She could already feel it starting. A new fragment, a new divine epsilon, a new sliver of herself peeled away at a rate of just over once per second; over a hundred thousand people died every day. She had given the angels their freedom, and they had scattered to the far-flung corners of the infinite. But the diaspora wasn’t for her. She couldn’t roam, couldn’t explore, couldn’t wander. Her fate was a long, slow disintegration. Such was the deal Molly had struck with METATRON.

There was a long-term plan at work: she’d perceived it, sizzled with the blistering truth of it, when she activated the Trumpet. The Jericho Event was merely the beginning of a greater design. But Molly had just punched a wicked dent in thirteen million millennia of preparation.

The plan wasn’t ruined. Not completely. But salvaging it also meant accelerating it. After all, under the original timeline, mortals wouldn’t have transcended into an afterlife for another few million years. So Molly had volunteered herself. It was the price for METATRON’s nonintervention as she freed the angels and embedded Bayliss as the MOC’s sole guardian.

Thus an infinitesimal diminishment of herself each time another mortal died. But eventually, over eons, she would decay until the final sparks of her divinity transformed the last mortal humans. Martin, and Anne, and Ria, and all the others from now until humanity became something more and fulfilled its purpose—they would witness and participate in the culmination of METATRON’s intent.

But Molly wouldn’t get to share forever with them. Just a very, very long time. And, considering how things might have turned out, she was comfortable with that. It didn’t feel like much of a sacrifice.

* * *

I landed in an alley that stank of rotting dim sum and hot dust, as though the empty corners of the world had been scorched by something moving very fast. Nobody noticed me. They were too busy ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the sky. They poured from gin mills and topless bars, their shiny upturned eyes lit by aurorae and the flicker of antique neon. A dry night, drier than my throat; guess I no longer rated a commemorative snowfall.

I felt my age. That ain’t peanuts when you’re older than the universe.

I needed to dip the bill. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t also feel the need for a sympathetic ear just about then. Another first, that. But the only ears who could’ve understood were long gone. They’d scrammed like shysters chasing a fast wagon, leaving me alone in this one-horse burg. And thanks to flametop, I was the horse.

I tried to ditch this dive for my Magisterium but came up with a double handful of nothing. It would have been easier to jitterbug in granite galoshes. The Pleroma could have been a billion miles away for all the good it did me. I loosened my collar. When did this mortal joint get so cramped?

Worst of all, worse than the desperate need to drown my tonsils, was the incessant itch at the back of my mind. My thoughts kept sliding in unwelcome directions. If this is what the monkeys called a conscience, they could keep it.

Was this how she felt after she died on the rails? Cold, alone, fearful, and lost? Or—heaven help me—was this how it always felt to be human? No thanks.

I shook my head—my
only
head now—and gave the alley a once-over. It seemed to me I knew this place. Couldn’t quite place it. But then the double ding of a tram dopplered up the lane.

Nice one, angel. What a scream.

I lit a pill and settled in to watch the light show overhead. Later, if I could conjure up some cabbage, I’d wander into a watering hole. I knew a tapster who poured a mean shot of rye. And brother, did I have a story for him.

I knew that dame was trouble the minute I saw her.

TOR BOOKS BY IAN TREGILLIS

Bitter Seeds

The Coldest War

Necessary Evil

Something More Than Night

About the Author

I
AN
T
REGILLIS
is the author of a triptych of alternate history novels, the first of which,
Bitter Seeds,
won such praise as “A combination of Alan Furst’s brand of historical espionage with the fantastical characters of graphic novelist Alan Moore” (
New Mexico
magazine). Tregillis lives near Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he works as a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. In addition, he is a member of the George R. R. Martin Wild Cards writing collective.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

SOMETHING MORE THAN NIGHT

Cover art by Will Staehle

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Tor
®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Tregillis, Ian.

Something more than night / Ian Tregillis.—First Edition.

p. cm.