Queen of Angels

QUEEN OF ________ ANGELS _______

BY ____ GREG BEAR

this one is for Alexandra From before she is born, until long past 100000000000

B O O K

O N E

1100-10111-1111111111

Exercise One: Picture a pattern of trees, stark and black against an ashen sky. Their branches are etched sharp against the drab neutrality. Their pattern is fixed and will not change. The gray has no quality, not even the vibrancy of sight behind closed eyes. More than winter, this is certainty; the final image found rn the eyes of a dead man. Now ask: do you want peace and quiet?

Exercise Two: There it a fwld of grain, each stalk perfect, which it a field of men. There is that which is perfect in all men, common to all, and to find that thing and touch it is to transform all men. Now ask: is perfection certainty, and are we only perfect when we are dead?

1

Orca shiny in water, touched by mercury ripples, Mary Choy sank into her vinegar bath, first lone moment in seventy two hours. The sour sweet rice smell tickled her nose. She held the official deluxe paper handbook from Dr. Sumplers office and referred to the index for Discoloration, Mild, Under Stress, to learn why the crease of her buttocks was turning gray in the universal deep black. Have you been taking your vinegar baths every two weeks? the handbook chided. Yes, Dr. Sumpler. She had come to enjoy the acrid half hour. Continuing hydroacetic therapy may be accelerated if stress discoloration occurs Custom melanin replacement is fed from above and below, from vitamin supplements and from epidermal uoumhment. Discoloration may be due to excesswely tight clothing (loosen or change styles); it may also be due to poor nutrition habits, which are not always correctable through vitamin therapy. Do not won3 about discolorations lasting only a few hours or a day; these are common in the first years of your adjusted body. Glorious. Dr. Sumpler had not warned her about such minor piebaldness. Mary shut the handbook and lifted it onto the tiled washbasin, then tilted her head back to soak hair, rid it of the airgrime and sweat of three unrelieved days. She could not wash away the sight of eight young comb citizens in various stages of disassembly. Last night, the first investigation team had gone to the third foot of East Comb One in response to neighborhood medical detectors picking up traces of human decay. In the first two hours the team had mounted a sniffer, performed assay and scanned for heat trails. Then the freezers had come and tombed the whole apartment. Senior in her watch, Mary had been assigned this rare homicide at seven hundred. Spin of the hour. Layer by cold solid layer, forensics would now study the scene corpses and all and take as long as they wished. From the large scale to the microbial everything would be sifted and analyzed and by tomorrow or the day after they would know something about everyone who had been in and out of the apartment during the past year. There would be lists of skin flake, hair and spittle traces to match with medical records now fair game under the Raphkind amendments, bless the bastard; she could track suspects through microbe population deviances and projected points of origin as fine as rooms in a suspects apartment, bless evolution and mitochondrial DNA. With eyes closed she saw again the corpses hard and still, covered with a thin layer of rime, their blood clotted in dark cold lakes lives and memories fled. A grisly meat puzzle for masters to riddle. Mary Choy had been a pd for five of her twenty eight years. Competence and the laws banning discrimination against voluntary transforms (bless the libs before Raphkind) had moved her on the sly spin to full lieutenant in supervisory investigation in three and a half years. She had remained an investigator by choice, specking this to be her slot in life. She did not love death. She loved mystery and capture. She loved finding the social carnivores, the parasites and untherapied misfits. Mary still believed she helped hold the line against the Selectors and others who would exact retribution beyond the law. Their way lay unbelievable misery for all. Her way lay swift decisive justice and forced therapy or incarceration. Ninety five percent of all crimes could be solved; leave itto the therapists to find and erase the perverse drives and motivations. Two hours after her arrival at the scene, pd ensigns had brought her a possible witness, a tall gaunt graying male R Fettle, friend of the apartments owner E Goldsmith. Mary had not then seen the interior of the apartment but she had been fed by the on scene techs; suspicion was falling heavily on the owner. interrogated, Fettle had had little to tell and had been released. His reaction stuck in memory: deeply puzzled like a fish dragged into air stuttering denial shocked by her suggestion he might be prosecuted for not revealing Goldsmiths need for therapy. Real fear. At first she had felt contempt for this jag denizen, all unfocused uprooted thinking. She lifted an arm and watched the water bead and slide in thin rivers down her dolphin-slick skin. Now she felt sorry for Fettle. She had been tro shink harsh on him; Mary was not used to homicides. Fettle knew nothing. Yet how could a friend not know murder was potential? Enough vinegar. She emerged from the black plastic tub and toweled herself, humming pop twelve-tone. The small jade colored arbeitera Chinese model purchased after her last temp mandated ramp in salarymet her with a pressed and folded uniform. At Marys whistle the home manager read her messages. Its masculine voice followed her through three rooms as she searched for a lost curl of mineral silver to wrap around her ear. Theres a call from junior Lieutenant Theodora Ferrero, no message, the manager concluded. She had not heard from Ferrero for three months; Ferrero had been up for promotion and Mary had assumed the cram had absorbed her friends time. They had become close in academy; Ferrero had just come out of minor therapy and had seemed balanced but vulnerable. Mary, having just completed her transform, with a similar softshell feeling, had taken to the fellow cadet immediately. Times since had been more rocky. Theodora had frozen at junior lieutenant, been passed over twice. Answer the call. Interrupt me if completed, she said. Unlike two thirds of the millions who aspired to the combs and high paying temp jobs, Mary Choy had succeeded without therapy. In a frame by the front door hung hcr most recent department therapy need evaluation. She was a natural; she had passed the temp agency tests on her first try and each yearly LAPD exam with equal ease. The evaluation was a smooth ascending cross, a printout of brain locused circles each in its proper place each pointing to a well balanced and proportioned personality subpersonality agent or talent. Thoughts poised, ego trim and fit, she knew who she was and what she was capable of; she knew how to stand tall and straight within her head and recover from the inevitable trips and stumbles without trauma; she was a mature young woman and ripe for promotion. So the printouts showed, but Mary in her introspective moments reserved final judgment. While her wages were high she did not splurge. Her only ostentation was an apartment high on the ankle of the second foot of North Comb Two. Spare and stylish, warm grays and velvet purples and blacks, Marys home was a perfect blind for her gloss midnight. She could be absorbed in it and lose this assured self, vanish into decor, take her sunlight firsthand through wide uncurtained windows. There was little need for baubles. She did not pursue art or literature, did not begrudge those who did, but her life was devoted to hunting not celebrating human spirit. In her own private activities she was equally spare. She practiced the five power centering disciplines including War Dance where self vied with self to pour out physical motion. This she did in a small empty room with white foam walls like a black calligraphic stroke against naked canvas. Exercises finished, Mary put on her uniform carefully, sealing vital points in monomol mesh armor, drawing up support boots that kept her legs from getting tired during long waits. Her rank carried no weapons in daytoday. She was not expected to engage in regular combat. Physical violence in the USA had declined markedly in the past fifteen years. The therapied did not seek violence. Her dark eyes were calm quiet yet neither empty nor unexpressive. Her transformed voice was deep yet sweetly feminine, powerful yet motherly. She could sing lullabies or growl a pd threat. Quiet, centered, tall, night colored Mary Choy had every-thing she wanted but her past. Its residue lay embalmed in the corner of a single drawer in her bedroom dresser, a box of old family photographs, disks and memory cubes. She stood by the dresser feeling a certain dread clear instinct about Theodora and fingered the drawer. Bent to stroke Loafer, her redstriped white cat. It rubbed against her boots, maroon eyes sage and patient, purring deep in its throat, the single living link to her girlhood; Marys parents had given it to her when she graduated from high school. Connection with Theodora Fen-ero, the manager said. Put me on vid, Mary said. Ill take it in the living room. She walked quickly to the phone, bent momentarily to adjust a wrinkle in the monomol, straightened, composed. Hello, Tbeo. Months silent. Good to hear from you! Mary could not see her friend. Ferreros vid was turned off. Yeah, thanks for the callback. Voice tense. 1 thought youd like to know. Did you make it? Mary asked, certain Tbeodora had gotten the grade. Passed over, Ferrero said. Three times now, last chance. Recommended for further therapy. Mary looked surprised and sympathetic. Tell me about it. Let me see you, Honey; my vids on. I know, Ferrero said. Im not taking it. Im sorry, what? I dont want to see you, Mary. I dont want to be reminded. Youre puffing me dark, Theo. What happened? 1 didnt make it. Thats all and enough, dont you think? Theo, Ive been through a rough. This big homicide, eight down. Im a bit slow and Im about to go back on duty. Im. sorry to spill this now, but you have an edge over me and I refuse to compete, Mary. What edge? Youre a transform. Youre exotic and protected. The pd doesnt dare tell you to go back for therapy or you cry on the temp and the feds investigate. They cant touch you. Thats nonsense, Then. Mary felt the burn spreading through her face; she could not show a blush but she could feel it. I dont think so, Mary, and right now Im on a pinker of just cutting you off. Theo, I sympathize, but dont take it out on me. We went through academy. You mean a lot to me. What did they want you to I dont have to tell you that! Youre a fapping alien. Mary. I dont have you on vid because I dont want to see you. I dont even want to talk to you. Youve made it impossible for me to roll the grade. Enjoy your peak, Honey. The phone chimed cutoff. Mary stood in silence before the small gray table that held the phone, gripping its edge. She looked down on her smooth black fingers, straightened them flexed them again, drew back. The tension in Theodora had been clear months before; still Mary had not expected this. A part of her said Its obvious why the pd asked for more therapy and another part parried with a deeper Why. To avoid such a question she crossed the living room and switched on LitVid. The nets were full of the AXIS messages finally being received after crossing the space between the stars; Mary stood before sharp simulations of the probe going into orbit around its chosen world. She watched without hearing, barely seeing, conflicting messages slowly crossing her own inner space. Why did she do her transform and choose such an exotic design in the first place; to get advantage, or to match inner her with an outer appearance that bad never satisfied? Marys parents her brother and sister Mother Father had accepted the transform redandwhite cat yet not the later transform daughter. She had not heard from any of them in four years. Now Theodora, whom she might once have called her best friend in a life of few such friendships. She returned to the drawer, opened it and removed one envelope containing a single palm sized disk. Only when she had involved herself in some particular unpleasantness and needed to gain perspective did she go over her mementoes. Slipping the disk into her slate she called up picture number four thousand and twenty one. In color but not in three d: still vid of a twenty year old woman height one hundred sixty-five centimeters skin pale face round and pleasant with a smile that seemed from this distance acquiescing. The young woman wore a mid-thirties green and blue patch suit showing one side of abdomen left shoulder most of right leg; a singularly unattractive fashion. Behind the young woman a white wood frame house in what was now jag five of the shade, Culver City. At the young womans feet a hunched Loafer thinner by two kilos. The original Mary Choy at twenty. Ambitious yet quiet; intelligent yet reserved. Working quietly in her scholastic specialty forensic research to build up sufficient temp credit to finance a transform against future salary. Dark eyes narrow, lips taut, she returned the disk to the envelope.

Madhouse Earth such a freak, no choice to be born here. We are all like in madness. By grace our madness likes us.

2 Standing, gaunt tense Richard Fettle leaned into the curve, straight knees knocking the bent knees of seated passengers. He still trembled, shocked by this mornings anomaly. Three stations ago the round little white autobus had filled with citizens of the shade young and old, a medieval assortment of widely different norms brothers and sisters common victims of the future. The bus did not board any more.

Light gilded them all secondhand through the goggling windows. Five suns glowed in the slow twisting gear meshing arms of the three towers of East Comb One, generous light bequeathed to the groundlings. + No good mood this day. Roughed and not deserving. Good tale though. Madames group heedful for five minutes. Some attention. Mind off Goldsmith. What he did. Did he? Man is the poet who kills, woman the angel who eats. What he said. Never wrote it down. Goldsmith is the poet who kills. Bringing me into it. Jesus I am a peaceful man. The bus roiled behind a eucalyptus screen. The five suns leaf sputtered and were lost. He pulled a cord and the bus eased curbside at the gate to the upland valley estate of Madame de Roche. He stepped down. The little bus hummed away on the patched unslaved asphalt lane. Richard stood on the root-heaved sidewalk head bowed eyes half closed composing and sorting. + How to tell it. Maximum purgation. Awful thing. They all knew him. Red haired Madame de Roche, sixty, thought people a delightful phenomenon worth cultivating. She fed and entertained her faithful, provided beds and bathrooms, listened when they were unhappy, and offered all her faithful might need but the shared regard of equals, for she was not one of them. She might live in the shade but she was not of the shadows. Nor was she of the combs. She claimed to despise that Rabble of coldhearted perfectionists. Madame de Roche no more resembled her guests than she did her garden or her cats, which she also cared for with grace and understanding. + Reduce it to a performance a tale. Artificial but one way of salvaging a rough hour. That I might be a murderer. Eight die that I might live five minutes to tell a tale that happened to me to all of us for we all knew Goldsmith. Accusations of not turning him in; knowing his need for therapy which I did not; I did not. Begin the story before she arrives. She will ask for it to be repeated then. Hear it all. Longer in the spot glare. Richard shivered. +jesus. I am a peaceful man. Forgive me but I have earned this story. He walked two steps at a stride up the wide stone stairway ignoring cracked concrete lions of another age imitating yet another age, into the deceptively Spanish portico entrance of the mansion. In a white enameled wrought iron cage a fine large red and blue bird preened its feathers and blinked at him, one chafed claw showing silver. + New addition. Forty years antique and very valuable; real birds much cheaper. Macawnical. The door knew him. With a polite nod to its heavy wood face, Richard entered and was absorbed into a great commonality of the untherapied. Fourteen of Madame de Roches faithful pooled around the stairs, their slippers padding or hard plastic soles tapping on the cool red granite floor: three young longhaired collegiate women admiring an early Shilbrage in an alcove; two tuxedoed men discussing sharp trade transactions in the shadows banks; a ring of four denimed poets admiring each others handprtnted broadsides. Dressed their best except where philosophy demanded less they cradled drinks in mannered fingers and nodded as he passed; Richard was not senior, not this month. + Friends but would not lift a digit if I fell. Petronius would know them. Lord spare me theyre all I have or deserve. In a chair away from this spreading pool sat Madames appointed favorite this month, Leslie Verdugo of ancient family, a lovely white haired wraith whom Richard had never addressed out of shyness perhaps but more probably because she smiled all the time, ether-seeing, and this did not attract him. Sitting across a glass topped occasional table from her was Geraldo Francisco a New Yorker who specialized in printmaking using ancient methods. Approaching them diffidently was Raymond Cathcart who called himself an ecologist and wrote poetry that occasionally stirred Richard but more often bored him. Breaking away from the poets to join this new attractor was Siobhan Edumbraga, an exotic female in speech and manner but clumsy in all physical acts and occasionally sharply rude, an innocent of no talents he could discern. She had made up her name; he did not know her real name. Richard found his place in the ring of poets and leaned over them, somber eagle face and liquid gray eyes betraying no eagerness, biding patiently. News of some late progressive insult to the arts nano or another outraging medium compelled them all to laugh, full of hate and envy. Resources of the combs made them look like children playing with Plasticine. They were individualists and they cherished their untherapied dishonesties or skewed perceptions; they thought natural blemishes necessary to art. Richard shared this belief but did not take it seriously. There was after all the majesty of accomplislunent in the combs compared to a clutch of ilmannered broadsides in the sweaty hands of low poets. + To love ones self is to be therapied. Self-hatred is freedom. Richards not often so late in line, said Nadine coming out of nowhere outside the circle and behind him, dressed in red. Nadine Preston was his age but only recently escaped by messy divorce from the privileges of the combs. Her smooth face and black hair wreathed a lovely childs smile. He saw her slender body in flash memory. Sweet three quarters and one quarter mascaraed harpy. When sweet she was his last sexual solace, but Richard did not stay for her tantrums. I have had an adventure, he said softly, gray eyebrows raised. Oh? Nadine urged but the ring was not having it; their conversation rivered on. + Was this Nemesis, come to balance my books? Good line. Emanuel Goldsmith is missing, he said deep voice still soft but clearly audible. He is being sought by the LAPD. The poets turned their heads. He had seconds to hook them fast. The public defenders spoke with me about him, Richard said. Eight people were murdered two nights ago. I came to Emanuels apartment in the third foot of East Comb One. The lift was blocked and pd were there and all manner of arbeiters. The room was being frozen. The most stunning Madame de Roche came down the stairs in a quick saintly glide, blue chiffon trailing, red hair gentle on her shoulders. Richard paused and smiled showing his large uneven teeth. Such a lovely group, she greeted, beaming. Without apparent discrimination she fixed her faithful with sapphire eyes wrapped in naturally acquired wrinkles in that motherly face, features arranged to show good humor and loving sympathy though she did not actually smile. Always a pleasure. Pardon my lateness. Do go on. Nadine said, Richard has been at the scene of a crime. Really? Madame de Roche said at the bottom, ivory hand on ebony wooden ball. Leslie Verdugo joined her and Madame beamed briefly on her then turned all attention to Richard. I was interrogated by the most stunning woman a pd in uniform, black as jet but not negroid. I think at first she wanted to accuse me of the crime, or at least of public recklessness for not turning Emanuel in. I wondered: was this Nemesis, come to balance my books? Do start again, Madame de Roche said. I believe Ive missed something.