Archangel Read online

  We had lain on a hiccup of a rise about a hundred meters downwind, the sawtooth grasses tickling in the breeze. A few stands of conifers embattled the horizon—not the dense, multilayer forests, the arboros that accounted for a substantial percentage of Ubastis’s biome types. Sweat stung my eyes. The cracx were popping like crazy, feasting on our human salt, and I knew we would find a rash of bites along our thighs and bellies that evening.

  A small group of axeheads grazed along the tributary, broad thick-toed feet squelching now and then in the mud. The sun burned down through the heavy atmosphere, polishing the reptiles’ hides to plates of carnelian. Yellow-throats swooped over the herd, catching the insects stirred up by the activity. The scent of the swampy ground and the sharp odor of the saurians suffused the air. I felt Zeeman about to sneeze and I kicked him in the calf. Obediently he buried his face against his arm and sneezed against his jacket, muting the sound. I took the opportunity to touch off a couple of pics for the slicks. Ever since I had the cam installed in a wristband, they’d been much happier with me, especially since I refuse to wear lenscorders on a hunt. The damn things irritated my corneas. Pics were enough.

  One of the larger axeheads was grazing several meters away from the others, on our side of the stream. My focus narrowed: this was a bull just past his prime, with a massive blade. He was muttering to himself in the wheezing, whistling grumbles of an older male who might consider a set-to with a young punk. The blade on his head flushed a dull indigo—looking for trouble, but not actively angry. Unfortunately he was maundering away from us, and I didn’t want to risk a three- or even two-shot kill.

  “Playtime, Zeeman,” I whispered. I leaned up from the ground, put two fingers in my mouth, and pierced the placid day with a whistle.

  The bull turned with bladder-emptying speed, tail whipping through the grass, head lowered, the blade brightening to angry turquoise. I touched off another pic, just as Zeeman fired. I barely had time to register the rifle’s bark before the axehead charged. Zeeman shot again, and this time, as I shouldered my Justin, I saw the splash of the bullet slamming into the marshy ground just in front of the reptile.

  Axeheads moved like lightning when they wanted to. There was nothing funny about their waddling gait, not when they bore down on you at better than thirty kliks an hour, pink mouth gaping, the teeth that looked so stubby when grinding a wad of grass seemingly grown about five centimeters.

  His hiss sounded like the screech of metal on stone. Zeeman fired another shot. It slapped into the saurian’s shoulder, driving through the plates. I took a step back, on the brink of exhaling, ready to squeeze the trigger—and my foot slid against the damn wet ground.

  I cried out in fury, and in fear. The gun went off wild into the air. Then the axehead was on me, one foot smashing my leg into the mud, jaws gaping open to bite—I could see the soft flower-hued tongue, glistening with saliva, the delicately ribbed arch of the mouth’s roof, the hot sweet stink of an herbivore’s breath gusting over me—and I jammed my Justin into that exquisite mouth and blew it to the next galaxy.

  The cam on my wristband touched off during that struggle. That night I reviewed the pics and felt a rush of ice through my gut as that one came up on my screen. It was blurred, showing the blunt shape of a tooth, looming in the foreground. In the background was a dark shadow that could only be the opening to the reptile’s throat.

  Not strong enough to drag the carcass from me, Zeeman had to heave up the animal’s chest while I cursed and flailed and finally rolled out of the muddy depression. His face was the color of plain tofu.

  “Dr. Loren, I’m so sorry,” he said as he hoisted me to my feet. “Oh, my God; are you all right?”

  “I’m alive, aren’t I?” I nodded to the axehead. “And he’s dead.”

  “I don’t know what happened—I thought I had it with the first shot—”

  I jerked my chin in the direction of the .675 Win. “How much have you practiced with that?”

  Zeeman looked away. “Never. The ammunition’s very difficult to acquire.” I drew in a deep breath, and he hurried on. “But I have another .675 that I’ve practiced with quite a lot. I thought I’d be fine.”

  “A .675 what?”

  “Varangar.”

  I groaned, just a little. The Varangar Arms Company made the heaviest slugthrowers known, as well as the proprietary cartridges. They had the dropping power of a sledgehammer—and all the forgiveness of one, too. With the weight of those slower bullets one had to be sure of the trajectory, the physical make up of one’s target, and adjust for recoil. I knew this first hand; I owned one.

  “I thought it would be too heavy for the trip—and I wanted to try the new rifle.”

  “Well.” I half-hopped, half-limped over to the axehead. The blade had faded to a somber pewter. “Now you know.” I knelt as best as I could and my hand slipped into the exit wound at the back of the head, just beneath the knob where the blade returned to the skull. I could have fit both my fists in there. My fingertips came away running with blood. Reverently I pressed them to my mouth, sucked the blood from them.

  I looked over my shoulder at Zeeman. Having hunted with me before, he knew what was to come.

  Patiently he helped me take my equipment out of the Tilden analog robots. I pulled on my old-fashioned gloves and activated my voca recorder. To look at, the voca appeared an antiquated filling in one of my molars. It was actually a slick little mic keyed to the band on my left wrist. In the field it certainly beat cumbersome headsets. Some of the First Wave explorers had incorporated their recorders into body piercings, but in the field these had a tendency to be ripped free of their fleshly housings.

  I murmured each finding as I measured, weighed, snapped innumerable pics; noted time of day, temperature, wind velocity and direction. Finally I hoisted the unwieldy processor to the field dolly where it hung, lens down, and slowly walked it over the axehead. It takes some minutes to do a good body wrap even in optimum conditions in a studio, with three processors and no outside stimuli. It took me about fifteen minutes to wrap the first side. Zeeman helped me turn the saurian over and I repeated the process.

  The last part of my studies sickened many of my clients. I unwrapped the laser scalpel and took samples: UBI had requested central nervous system tissue on this hunt, so I excised one eye, a good ten grams of brain tissue, and a meter of spinal cord. The scalpel cut through the plates—in places as wide as my hand—like a spoon through so much ripe melon. By the time I was done, my gloves dripped with the reptile’s blood. And I was hungry.

  Lasse had been fond of quoting, from his ex-Ranger days, An army marches on its stomach. He would follow that up with a grin: So do a hundred teenage scientists. Science, despite some peoples’ perceptions, took place in the dirt as much as it did in the laboratory; we explored with our feet and our skin and, yes, our stomachs as much as we did with scopes, tele and micro. Even now, out here with Zeeman, fifteen years later, I was exploring.

  It had been penguins that seduced me into science. As an adolescent, one day I found a palm of my father’s, a reproduction of an ancient vid about Earth birds. The big Emperor penguins made no sense to my ignorant child’s mind, but they fascinated my heart utterly, striking black and white animals that were as elegant and austere as their surroundings. I could not comprehend how something could wait on the ice in the desolation of the Antarctic winter (I who had never seen snow), its sole egg tucked beneath its soft belly and resting on its feet, its body the only solace from the constant blizzards. Blind, deaf, sensate of its fellow penguins by touch only, waiting for the spring when its child may hatch in safety. I would never see a penguin, nor any bird of Earth; yet that never stopped me from hungering to know the animal, know the creation, the thing itself, knock-knocking on the truth with the beak of my curiosity.

  Not until I was heavy with Lasse’s child, my own belly swollen from the egg sheltered within, did I understand.

  When Zeeman handed me my field dressing
knife, a longer, broader affair than my scalpel, he shook his head. “I could never tell my wife about this.”

  I pretended to misunderstand him. “What, that you hunt instead of visiting the fleshpots of the new Eden?”

  “Of course not.”

  I grinned.

  “I couldn’t ever tell her that on these trips I eat meat.”

  I scrubbed for a while, letting the heat of the water soak the stiffness out of my leg. I never wanted to get out of that shower. If it had not been for the softness of the ground, the axehead would have broken my leg, and Patrol & Rescue would have flown us out of there. That was a point of pride with me. Even when I myself had been a commander with P&R, I’d been flown out of the bush precisely once.

  Because of a Beast.

  I focused. Bore down. Finished my dictation with a last statement, so crucial to the clearance granted to me by the UBI and the Commonwealth. My political standing and my psychological status depended on it. “In accordance with Integral and Commonwealth laws, no other life forms were injured or slain.”

  Life forms. The forms of life. Form, from Latin forma, contour, shape. Life, from Old English lif. Lif and Lifthrasir the names Lasse and I gave each other an age ago.

  Half the tufa dwellings in New Albuquerque either bewildered the eye or pleased it, depending on one’s taste. The original creamy shades of the cones and spires jutting from the belt of eroded volcanic flow struck the eye as either soothing or monotonous. Over the last decade of scientific settlement, some couples and families had taken to decorating the exteriors of their homes with UBI-approved materials. Among a grove of tawny spires one could see the tower of the Idrisi family, like a green finger pointing towards the sky, laced with vines, falcons, spaceships filigreed with layers of stainless steel. The tufa mound where the Salazar trio lived sported a mural of Madonna Galactans playing soccer with La Virgen de Guadalupe. Die-cut figures of roses, valentines, and crescent moons hung in ascending spirals sparkled in the breeze.

  Even among the more vivid houses, everyone could find the Child Center. In imitation of their elders, each child who had passed through the doors of the Center had contributed with a paintbrush. On a white field, mothers with poached-egg eyes, fathers with bristles for beards, leering saurians, a hundred suns wound from the top of the first story down to the very base of the building. A plastic break shielded the play-yard from the worst of the wind, but the swings were spinning in the buffeting air as I walked up to the door. The storm would be here in a few hours.

  When I walked in, Selphanie was packing up her computer in its case. “I thought I was gonna have to call backup,” she said, her voice pitched below regular speech level but above the sibilance of a whisper. Selphanie would have made a good hunter. “Students aren’t going to wait.”

  I muttered something sheepish and apologetic. My option to work at the Children’s Center was dependent on Selphanie Gayle’s good opinion.

  Her lips pressed together as she surveyed me. “You want to teach my climatology rounds, you go on ahead. You going to see a doctor about that leg?”

  “Is it so noticeable?”

  “I saw you guarding the moment you came in here. Your lap is gonna be like a block of fiberboard to those babies.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  She frowned. “This is going to catch up to you. How about if one of these days you’re not so fast, so clever, and one of those animals takes a bite out of you? And how about if you want another baby?”

  That stung. If I wanted another baby? Psych evaluations, lifestyle inquiries, my whole past dragged out and rummaged through, that’s what that would mean.

  “Something you should think about, isn’t it? That girl of yours is like fire. Smart! Maybe think about applying for another one. UBI’d be all too happy to get another set of Dr. Undset’s DNA walking and talking on this planet.”

  “There’re years to think about that.”

  “Do it before we’re not around to look after ‘em.”

  “You mean before this one wears you and Bozana out.”

  Selphanie smiled. “She’s a mess, all right. Like her mama.”

  I tiptoed to the quiet-time area and eased the door open. The thick breathing of six small children filled the room. Some of the toddlers lay flung on their mattresses in abandon, some curled around their favorite blanket or cuddly toy.

  Bibi slept on her stomach, her ash-blonde hair obscuring most of her face except for her parted lips. Unable to resist the possibility of waking her, I scooped her into my arms and sat in the rocking chair. I tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, holding her to me the way I used to when I nursed her. She was a bigger armful now, legs dangling over my lap, diapered bottom solid on my uninjured thigh. With a sigh she turned her face into me, and slept on.

  Before Lasse’s death, when I was still in Second Wave, the HGC—Human Genetics Commission—had asked me for a selection of eggs. It was not an unexpected request. During the legalities, they asked me if I wanted to bank a couple of eggs for myself, if my donated ones passed analysis. Sure, I said. Furthermore, if the first ones meet requirements, call me for more donations.

  They were pleased with that. I certainly didn’t mind. It wasn’t as if I had been using them anyway, and considering that before the Club Egg and Sperm Spa programs, human fertility had been at an all time-low, I thought I should do my bit.

  That first egg of mine was now a rowdy little boy terrifying his parents three light-years away at Pachur Port. If he had turned out anything like his half-sib, he didn’t know the meaning of fear. Impossible to tell, though, whether that came from me or Bibi’s father.

  She squirmed a little in her sleep, smacking her lips, and murmured something incomprehensible, which might have ended in ‘mama.’ I looked down at her, wanting to trace the plumpness of her cheek, the solemn line of her brows, but not daring to wake her further. The wind blundered around the tufa building, sending shadows dappling over the jonquil-painted walls. Bending my head, I smelled her hair—Selphanie’s mild perfume and her own baby scent mingling. My lips touched her skull and I let myself slip into a doze.

  My work allotment had scheduled me at the Children’s Center for a few hours. I was glad of it, as I was reluctant to return to my rooms. I tried not to think about the Beast let loose in such a setting. Instead I woke the children up from their naps, cleaned them, fed them, and absorbed myself in the drama of messy hands and tears and silliness, while ticking over each individual child, each reaction to stimuli with a cataloger’s interest. Bibi ate anything that came her way; Mohammed refused everything except falafel nuggets; Umika objected by dropping each piece of unsatisfactory food on the floor.

  Romping with them in the play yard, mindful of my leg, I considered their future place on Ubastis. As we fingerpainted, I noted their subjects, their color use. Who would make a xenologist? Who would find himself tending the hydroponic fields? Who would design the next version of Tildens? I invented elaborate plans for them, telling myself stories as if to Bibi when bedtime came, postponing the inevitable.

  I tucked them in for their second nap of the day. I remained at the door to the room, watching them, when Selphanie’s hand came down on my shoulder.

  “You need to go,” she said. “You got work to do, and you’ll be seeing her soon enough.”

  “Can I put in a request for Bozana to watch her tomorrow night? Moira’s throwing a party.”

  The corners of Selphanie’s mouth turned down. “Freak show, you mean.”

  “Thanks very much, Selphanie, as I’m one of the freaks.”

  “You are, dear; but she don’t need to put you on exhibit that way.”

  I didn’t mind being on display, I thought, as I sat in front of the latest Source report, after a supper of sautéed tempeh, ginger, and broccoli. Moira’s penchant for stirring the social pot had always amused me more than anything else. Politics and science had thrown us together, and after a period of one-upmanship, we decided we c
ould complement each other rather than compete. Moira’s friendship had been the anchor that had helped keep me from becoming a hermit, pointed out by children who would whisper to each other, There’s the lady who kills animals. Mothers using me as a cautionary tale, teachers ignoring Bibi.

  Except now the social pot was about to be upset.

  The solemn holo-figures flashed through their prescribed space above the computer, candy-colored, meaningless. A name caught my attention: General Zhádāo.

  With all reluctance I brought her pic and the news item to the fore and loaded it. God knew what Zhádāo had been thinking when the pic had been snapped; it could have been nothing more malignant than a wish for looser bootlaces. It could have been the angle of the light, the way her piled hair contrasted against the pallor of her face, to be echoed in the hollow of her cheek and the slashed line of her upper eyelid. Both she and I possessed epicanthal folds, but had my eyes ever looked so avid, so insatiate?

  Even though most people viewed General Zhádāo as a hero and rightly deserving of her rank, she scared the crap out of me. Career military, from a long lineage of same, it was she who broke the back of the malignant corporations in the Elite Wars and engineered the demolition of the Beast Legions. She had decreased human participation in the Commonwealth forces since then—“Human life is my priority,” she’d said—and increased the reliance on drones and robotics. Twenty Earth years of my life had gone by during all her dashing about the galaxy making policy and promoting the human good, twenty years of her holding forth on the sacredness of human life. Standing against any restrictions on settlement. Whoever loved her, despised me. And Mohammad Tariq, my agent, had contracted with her for my next hunt.