Aeon Ten Read online

  With no words the angels passed through the open gate and climbed the stairs, to the open observatory on the monastery's roof. Their bare feet moved in silence across the cold stone floor.

  The blind beggar marched forward with his brothers. What did he feel, there, in the place where heaven and earth meet? Did he raise his hand, to touch the skies? Did he spread his broken wings and try, together with his brothers, to take to the sky one last time, to touch God?

  The TV helicopters waited for an answer, and in the forest the soldiers, too, waited. It was a good year for drama, and for military courts.

  The blind angel turned to the angel beside him. “Be'ezrat Ha'shem,” said the angel. With the help of God.

  It was the year the angels...

  Angel Kind

  THE FLIGHT FROM CYPRUS was fifty minutes late. Ze'evi stepped between the doors of the airport to the hot air outside, lit himself a cigarette and dreamed of a shower. An angel with drooping wings, his white feathers faded to a dirty brown, stood leaning on a Subaru with a similar colour and called out to him, arousing from his thoughts. “Need a taxi?"

  "Yes,” said Ze'evi. Something in the angel's face affected him. He had a demure, innocent expression—the expression of an angel. He threw the cigarette on the pavement and entered the taxi, sitting in front by the driver. “Tel Aviv,” he said, and gave the angel an address in the centre. Not just a flat—a house. Ze'evi was a successful man, after all, but the recent situation with the business ... not to mention his wife.

  "Where did you come back from?” asked the angel. He drove fast through the airport gates, his wings pressed against the seat. They pressed against the seat like birds trying to escape, and every so often the nearest wing to Ze'evi jerked so passionately that the feathers reached to delicately tickle his cheek.

  "Cyprus,” said Ze'evi, and into the driver's silence added, “big sale of water meters."

  "Cyprus, huh?"

  "Cyprus,” said Ze'evi.

  Silence settled in the car. The angel's feathers continued to stroke Ze'evi's skin. Their touch made him feel alternately hot and cold.

  "How long have you been working in taxis?” he asked.

  "A few months.” He hesitated and looked at Ze'evi with eyes open and clear, full of infinity. “When I don't drive clients I dance at the Fallen Angel."

  Silence settled again, broken only when the taxi stopped and Ze'evi asked, hesitantly, “How much do I owe you?” and the driver answered him, and Ze'evi paid.

  "The Fallen Angel?” he asked quietly, leaning through the car window, his face close to the driver's.

  The angel nodded. “Come tomorrow, Friday. I'll be there,” he said and drove off, leaving Ze'evi alone on the pavement.

  * * * *

  All day Ze'evi thought about the angel, and at night, when he could no longer take the silence at home, the whiskey bottle and the single glass on the table, the dire television programs, he stood and decided to go for a ride in the car. Without any pre-conceived plans he nevertheless found himself at the entrance to that same seedy club, the Fallen Angel, in that area where Ibn Gvirol St. meets the stench of the Yarkon river.

  He paid the entrance fee and entered the darkened building. A heavenly choir filled the club's air and with it came cigarette smoke and the faint whiff of purity. He sat by the bar and ordered himself a glass of Glenfiddich, a double shot with one single, lonely ice cube—he was a successful man, Ze'evi, and knew how to behave—and watched the dancers that crowded the stage before him.

  The angels circled like drunks on the packed stage, their naked bodies rippling in the light of the rays that suffused them in unexpected bursts. Their wings tried to open their length but failed, and the feathers of one angel stroked those of another and passed through them a kind of excited current that made the experience of watching them greater. Ze'evi watched the angels, hooked, his fingers moving in rhythm with the heavenly choir, the drink forgotten by his side.

  "You came."

  He heard the voice close to his ear. Breath on the back of his neck made him turn. Beside him stood the angel from the taxi, naked but for a pair of short, torn jeans.

  "I came,” said Ze'evi, and in the silence that seemed to him to be the opening of a door that had been closed all his life, let his private angel take him by the hand, and lead him without effort towards the private cabins at the back.

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  The Art of Memory by Howard V. Hendrix

  "The Art of Memory” first appeared in EOTU, June 1989.

  Author's Note: “The rise of religion-based intolerance and forced conformity in the USA during the last quarter of the twentieth century pops up in my novels Standing Wave and Better Angels, but its genesis was in this story. Someone once told me that such a theocracy could never happen in America and I was wrong to suppose it could. He lived in Berkeley. I have lived in places much less insulated—places where a candidate can't even hope to be elected without the imprimatur of the local big box warehouse church. Places where the establishment of a ‘faith-based initiatives’ office in the White House itself is greeted with cheers rather than trepidation.

  Maybe the theocracy is already here, after all. Or maybe I've just read the Constitution too often to feel at ease in today's America."

  IN THE ORCHARD gentle rain falls, wet blackness on tree trunks. Autumn. Some trees persist in their old green confusion, some have turned to fire, some to bare branched ashes. Tense expectancy fills the air. Everyone in the orchard is waiting.

  No one knows what to do. So everyone is waiting.

  A woman picking apples looks up.

  "A sky out of the dark ages,” she says.

  Her male companion nods.

  In the northern quarter of the sky from another time, dark specks like rags of cloud are moving swiftly, becoming figures, man shapes flying in low over the trees and fields. Shock troops in rocket packs and stealth combat armor. The man and woman run shouting through the aisles of trees. “Take cover! Take cover!"

  But it is too late. The faceless stealth-armored soldiers land with gunfire and death. The apple pickers run, are gunned down, spill their baskets of bright red apples everywhere.

  "Hey, Captain!” one of the troopers calls over his helmet battlecom as he perforates a family of four seeking refuge in nearby thickets. “What kind of heretics we got here?"

  "Brunists,” Captain Will Acton responds, reducing a farm wagon and its passengers to blood and splinters, wood and bone, with a round from a smart mortar. “But that's not your need to know. They're cultists. Good enough?"

  "Yessir!"

  Acton's men fan out, lobbing cluster and fragmentation grenades into groups of fleeing pickers. Concussion and implosion bombs unbuild in an instant the cabins and cottages on the hillsides above the orchards and fields. The platoon's heavy munitions man fires a semi-nuke at the commune's main hall. Laser-guided and smart, the projectile does not miss. The high hall erupts in a ball of fire and is gone.

  Acton carefully observes his platoon's efficient battle dance. His wardogs in action possess a certain terrible beauty, and their choreography is particularly beautiful today. He has trained them well.

  "Begin mop-up operations,” he commands over his battlecom. “We'll regroup this side of the stream, where the plank bridge crosses it."

  His men break up into two-man patrol units, flying low over the trees and brush. Sporadic gunfire is heard—all from his men. No fire returns from the ground below.

  * * * *

  Acton flies above the field where lie corpses clad in bloody jeans and flannels and bullet-holed homespun. He comes at last into the broad meadow, where he will establish his command post beside the stream and its bridge. On the battlecom he hears Lieutenant Dalke, the platoon's second in command and Reverend
Morals Officer, blessing the carnage.

  "Thank you, Lord! Praise be your glorious name! Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus!"

  Surveying the broken bodies scattered among the trees, Acton sees that a few of the heretics are not dead—only fatally wounded and crying out in pain. But he hears none of their agonies. The sensors in his smart armor automatically filter out all information not relevant to battle.

  "Bloody mess, eh Rev?” Acton tightbeams to Dalke when the Reverend Lieutenant lands beside him.

  "And glorious, sir!” Dalke says, out of breath. Even in his battle armor, Dalke is clearly overweight. “I estimate the number of apostate dead at two hundred and fifty."

  "Glorious?” Acton shrugs. “I'm not so sure about that. Not much fight to these Brunists. They're duller than last week's Quakers."

  "But even greater heretics,” Reverend Lieutenant Dalke reminds him fervently. “Followers of the pernicious doctrines of the heresiarch, Giordano Bruno."

  Acton watches the command tent deploying itself automatically. “Can't say I know much about the man."

  "The Catholics burned him at the stake over four hundred years ago.” Dalke breaks down his armor's built-in flamethrower, scratches carbon residue from it. “He denied the divinity of Jesus, declared that the Bible was mythical in nature, said that all its books could be boiled down to ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you'—and the rest could be thrown away."

  Acton turns and strides toward the stream. “Still,” he says over his shoulder, “I'd feel better if there'd been more fight to them. Taking them out was easier than shooting doves in the high desert. Used to do a lot of that when I was a boy."

  Lieutenant Dalke looks up from the hot end of the flamethrower he's cleaning. “Respectfully, Sir, I must remind you that how much or how little ‘fight’ they put up is not important.” The Lieutenant's voice betrays only the slightest hint of irritation. “What's important are the crimes of these cultists against our holy state. Bruno's occult Art of Memory is obviously still contaminating minds. What's worse, it's gotten thoroughly mixed together with a lot of other heretical claptrap: Earth Mother Goddess worship, witchcraft, magic, pantheism, druidism—all that cultishness.” Dalke, flamethrower cleaning finished, punctuates his comments with quick short blasts of fire. “Heaven knows these people deserve death. I have it on good authority that many of them were drug users or homosexuals or both."

  Acton stares at the chocolate-grey confusion of the turbulent stream. “Well, Lieutenant, you'd know more about that than I would."

  Beneath Acton's reflection in the shallows, a crayfish is wriggling its pale self loose from an exoskeleton it has outgrown. Acton watches, fascinated that the creature should have chosen to molt now, when the stream is so turgid. Finished at last, the crustacean scurries away again into the chaos of the rain-swollen flood.

  Rising from his squatting position on the streambank, Acton sees that Dalke has gone. The rain, now ending, is snow in the mountains.

  He remembers living in those mountains, remembers the forests being stripped for firewood as more and more people moved in all the time. Be fruitful and multiply. He remembers the landslides, the rockslides, the erosion that came with every rain, the silt-choked streams. And God gave Man dominion over the Earth.

  Heresy, these thoughts. Never to be voiced. He's got to fly low and under radar, or one day he'll wake up and find designer chemicals or gay porn planted in his bunk—all the “good authority” needed to end debate and find for guilt.

  Spotty sunlight splashes gold on the peaks above the clouds. The rain has ended. Shafts of late afternoon light slant down out of the clouds. “Angel slides,” his mother called them when he was a boy. The only angels sliding down them today are his soldiers.

  He remembers briefings by his own “good authorities,” who reported ... many things. Of the three spies sent to infiltrate the Brunists, each reported only for the first month or so—and then went mysteriously native. Yet even in their fragmentary reports there abounded tantalizing suggestions of a hidden power in this remote place, a remnant left over from the Old Government's secret projects. What that power might be the spies unfortunately never got around to saying, but speculation at Service Command ranged from a perfect brainwashing chemical to (on the wild fringes) the suggestion that the Brunists might have among them a Starburst—the name persistent rumor gives to the mythical shield-telepaths of the equally apocryphal Project Medusa Blue.

  Watching his men returning from mop-up operations, the Captain recognizes the source of his disappointment with the battle now. He expected to confront brainwashed but well-armed hordes, even illusions projected against him in the skies. He expected to fight against an invisible hand reaching inside his mind, trying to flick off the switch labelled “Duty.” Instead he has found no noble contest at all—only routine death and mundane destruction. The Brunists never had a chance.

  Reverend Lieutenant Dalke takes two men and begins IDing the bodies, flamethrowing the fruit trees of the orchard, torching the dry cornstalks in the fields. Smoke billows up into the westering sun. Acton wonders how much Dalke knows about the spies’ fragmentary reports. Morals officers are Intelligence's watchdogs, but the reports are Service Command property—zealously turf-guarded. Curious, he tunes in on Dalke's words to his subordinates.

  "...feast of Samhain among the pagans,” Dalke says over the intermittent roar of the flamethrower. “Festival of the Harvest Moon. A night when the worlds of the dead and the living were supposed to be especially close, with a lot of commerce back and forth between them. Even after nominal Christianity came in, the pagan feast still survived into modern times as a Satanic remnant called Halloween—."

  The Captain tunes it out. He is old enough to remember the “Satanic remnant” His mother, a plump devout woman with shining eyes and very pale skin, dressed him in a child's “Full Armor of God” costume and, as a little Christian soldier, he had paraded the chill October streets, proclaiming “Trick or treat” at every door he came to. People smiled or shrank back in mock fright, then gave him the candy he would stuff himself with over the following days.

  When he was eleven his mother told him how glad she was that the New Government had banned Halloween. The New Order could do no wrong as far as his mother was concerned, but news of the banning left him almost despondently sad. His glance falls on the Cross and Stripes patch on his combat armor. He is old enough to remember what came before that, too. Old enough to remember when there were still many white stars on the field of blue.

  Perhaps he remembers too much. Dalke and the rest of his men begin to fall into formation before him. His men are young; they have never really known anything other than life under the New Government. They do not have his memories, his questions.

  "...only spirits gonna be hoverin’ round here tonight is the souls of dead heretics,” one of the men says. Dalke laughs. The men come to order.

  "Mop-up operations completed, sir,” the Lieutenant says, coming forward and saluting. “All the heretics accounted for except seven women. According to Intelligence, one of the missing, a Diana Gartner, was an important witch among them. The other women may well be her attendants. Probably all of them were absent at the time of our arrival, Sir, but I suggest we bivouac here tonight and continue light patrols in the morning, on the off-chance we may still come across them."

  "Very well, then,” Acton nods. He looks over his armor-clad men. “I had planned to bivouac here in any case. Men of the 337th Guardian Air Assault, you may stand down. Take a break, wardogs."

  The helmets come off and the men have faces again, young faces, baby faces, bland faces, squeaky-clean faces. Dalke, his short blond hair slicked back above a visage round as the full moon, bites into an apple he has filched from the spilled basket of a dead woman. Some of the troops deploy shelters, some break down weapons and check armor, some stand talking. Though no one smokes or drinks, conversations grow spirited nonetheless.

  * * * *<
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  The twisted skein of the stream leads Acton away from the camp, into the deepening twilight, alone. Helmet under his arm, he walks with no particular objective in mind, only a vague uneasiness with the day's events, a desire to be by himself. Behind him he hears the men being led by Lieutenant Dalke in a prayer of thanksgiving for their great victory.

  As he walks on, his armor seems unusually burdensome. He knows he's supposed to admire the technology that makes possible this suit, but somehow he does not. The science that makes the soldier faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, has also made the human being inside the armor almost completely superfluous.

  He strikes off up a side branch of the stream, one that plunges down out of rocky, tree-lined slopes. The water is calmer here. In places below rumbling falls the stream broadens into calm pools. He sits down on a log beside one such pool, scrutinizing in the water's surface his reflected face: stubbled, dark, weary. Night begins to fall. He takes off his armor slowly, then, once naked, dives quickly into the pool. The water is so cold it shrivels up his groin, knocks the air from his lungs. It is all he can do to keep from letting out a loud shocked whoop.

  Crouched in the muscle-aching cold of the water, a stillness descends around him. The moon rises. From further upstream he hears a sound, unclear at first but growing clearer, until it sounds like female voices, women softly singing.

  Leaving the water, he grabs the HK pistol from his gear and scrambles up the rocky gorge, toward the sound. His bare knees bash against boulders, his feet scrape on stones, water beads on his cold flesh under silver moonlight—and it is wonderful.

  A mad thrill of the blood drives him on toward the source of the sound, the source of the stream. The singing grows louder, more insistent. The moonlit world blurs past him, fluid, swaying, as if he's running beneath the waves of a crystalline sea.

  Suddenly, so suddenly, he comes upon them. He instinctively raises his gun. Unknowingly he has darted into the broad entrance of a cave, an arching roof of rock above him, a mountain spring bursting forth from one side, a broad pool with sedgy grass near the entrance, for sunlight, catching only moonlight and firelight now. By the torches of six young women standing about the pool he sees it all—and the seventh woman too, in the center of the pool, beautiful and nude, torchless yet glowing.