ANGELMAKERS

Snow sugared thickly the steeply sloping winter-dead lawn behind the great organically sprawling autonohouse, a white canvas scribbled over with small oblate bootprints and the sharp parallel tracks of sled blades, as well as the shallow worm furrows of lofter saucers. At regular intervals, black-leaved trees with precisely choreographed branches sucked every impinging photon from a December sun pale as a circle of overwashed bleached cotton pegged at the zenith.

Around the house, no activity save routine maintenance and materials-acquisition manifested itself. The house’s adults remained busy inside at their ludic labors. Human presence in the landscape consisted of a still line of a dozen children by the edge of the broad frozen river that demarcated the extensive lawn’s lower edge. The children on the shore flanked a set of runner tracks that extended onto the ice and terminated at a jagged hole filled with water as coarse and grey as steel wool.

The children wore colorful jellied unisuits thin as pressed-fruit strips, revealing the unisex lines of their pre-adolescent bodies. Their warmly rosy hands appeared bare, save for outlines of shivering air. Perched on their heads, upright or askew, squishy caps exhibited the silly geometries of mirror worlds. Holding their sleds and saucers, or standing beside them, the children silently contemplated the ice-surfaced river and its anomalous disfiguration.

A gentle-looking boy spoke. “She’s been under some time now. A minute almost. There are snags down there, I know.”

His statement elicited some nervous shuffling and visible expressions of empathy from his peers, except for one rough lad who taunted, “If you don’t trust the angels, Rand, dive in yourself.”

An exceedingly thin and nervous-looking girl said, “Maybe we should. Or maybe we should call Fabiola’s parents.” She fingered the rim of the ceramic communion wafer bonded to her wrist without touching its responsive surfaces. “What if the angels are too busy elsewhere?”

“Have you ever known the leucotheans to fail, Shelly?” demanded the second boy.

“No, but I feel so helpless just standing here. I want to do something.”

“Fabiola won’t thank you if you spoil the story of her drowning by horning in on things.”

The boy named Rand said defensively, “Are you saying Fabiola planned this, Brewster?”

Brewster made a dismissive wave. “Of course not. Who’d be that daft? But now that it’s happened—”

At that moment another child shouted, “Look!” The crowd followed the sentry’s outstretched finger with their massed gaze.

As if from directly out of the consumptive sun, a silhouetted figure had detached itself. Swelling from antlike dot to doll-like cutout to human-scaled apparition as it dropped lower, the angel was swiftly upon them. Without hesitation, the angel plunged through the hole in the ice, sending a geyser of cold water upward, droplets bespattering the children. Too thrilled to care, they gave an instinctive collective shout of excitement and relief.

Within seconds the angel emerged from the jagged-edge opening, bearing an unconscious child. Skimming low, the angel landed amidst the children, set the body of Fabiola down in the snow, and kneeled beside the bare-headed blonde girl with the gelid blue face.

Unhesitatingly, the children formed a tight clot around the tableau of kneeling angel and child. Closest by an inch or two, the girl named Shelly peered intensely, her concentration fixed more on the angel than on her unbreathing friend.

The wingless angel was whiter than the ambient snow: platinum hair, ivory limbs. The angelic body displayed no sex, although the angel was completely unclothed. The face of the angel was composed in neutral lines from which perhaps only a depthless sadness, if any emotion whatsoever, could be teased. The angel’s eyes were featureless marbles, spheres seemingly composed of polished bone set in the ocular orbits.

The angel kneeled beside Fabiola, but applied no conventional mode of resuscitation. Instead, one arm and hand attentuated ectoplasmically, then snaked through Fabiola’s mouth and, apparently, down the girl’s throat. The angel’s other rarefied hand plunged into the child’s chest over her heart like fog through cheesecloth.

Fabiola’s body instantly arced like the tensioned arm of a loaded catapult, head and heels digging into the snow. The stolid angel remained seemingly unmoved, but withdrew those intrusive extensions, which resumed humaniform solidity. Fabiola spewed river water, gagged, then sucked in a shuddering breath, while the angel ran soothing hands up the girl’s frame, ending with hands clasping the girl’s head on either side.

Fabiola’s eyes snapped open. Her gaze locked with the angel’s blank fixity. At the same time Shelly strained forward, as if she were a bob on an invisible elastic line connecting victim and rescuer. The tableau held for a few eternal seconds, then shattered as the angel let the snowy depression again receive Fabiola’s head. Somehow the angel leaped directly from a kneeling posture into the sky.

Fabiola sat up weakly; both Rand and Brewster moved to support her, and the other children clustered closer to hear the first words from their revivified peer, a weak “I’ve come back.”

All except Shelly. Shading her eyes, the wan girl watched the angel until that never-speaking being had long disappeared.

* * * *

In coupling class, Rand and Fabiola lay sated on mussed white sheets draping a low carnalounge. Fabiola’s newly mature body had developed along her chosen lines of feminine curvature. Rand’s form likewise had fructified into a desirably ripe, slim-hipped maleness. Together, langorous limbs entangled, they resembled one of the three-hundred-year-old Bouguereaus they had studied last quintmester in art-history class. In ranks across the copulatorium, other couched couples replicated their easy indolence.

Adjacent to Fabiola and Rand on their own divan, Shelly and Brewster were lone exceptions to the class’s ruling somatopsychic fulfillment. Brewster, his innate truculence now compounded by an overdeveloped physique, rested on his back, a frown dragging his face down, arms folded across his inordinately hairy chest. Her slim lily of a body the least mature among her classmates, Shelly reclined on her side, spine convexed toward her partner, arms bowed over her head. Now Brewster spoke more loudly than was deemed polite within the copulatorium. Rand and Fabiola could not help overhearing.

“Damn it, girl. A little enthusiasm wouldn’t be out of place.”

A soft “I’m sorry” wisped out from the cage of Shelly’s arms like an escaping ghost.

Rand was not placated. “Sorry won’t cut it anymore. Why, if you were my only partner, I’d have a knot the size of houseroot in my libido.” The burly youth swung his feet to the floor and stepped over to the neighboring lounge. “On your way, Rand. I’m cutting in.”

Both Fabiola and Rand graciously consented. Her spill of golden hair whispering on the sheets, the lush Fabiola accepted the impetuous Brewster into her embrace, while Rand slipped onto the couch where Shelly still cringed. As Fabiola and Brewster began to engage, Rand slid a comforting arm around Shelly’s shoulder. She spun about and relaxed into the offered cradle of his shoulder and chest, pressing her face against him.

“Want to talk about anything?” asked Rand quietly. “Something special bothering you?”

“I just worry all the time, Rand. I can’t explain it, but it interferes with everything, not just sex.”

“What concerns you? Your future? It’s perfectly natural for young people our age to be a little worried about exactly what playwork we’ll eventually choose.”

“No, it’s not my personal future. I’m fairly clear about that. I want to be a theresan.”

Rand forebore to comment on this rather unconventional choice. “What then?”

Shelly gripped Rand’s waist tightly. “I—I worry about the people I care for. Their health, their safety—their lives. It’s all I can think about, ever since—ever since Fabiola drowned.”

For several seconds, Rand said nothing. Then: “But that was five years ago, Shelly.”

“You needn’t remind me! I’ve lived every hellish preoccupied minute of it!”

“Well, it’s just—don’t you think you should seek a detangling?”

“If I remain knotted much longer, I will. But I just want to puzzle it out by myself for a while yet.”

“It’s so odd, though.” Rand sounded genuinely perplexed. “To have such an archaic fear in this age of angels.”

At the mention of angels, Shelly stiffened. “They’re the problem. They make our mortality more real at the same time they guard us from accidents. We’ve all come to rely on them so much, that we’ve lost a lot of old instincts of self-preservation. What if their perfection is flawed? Considering where they come from—‘such base and hybrid clay.’”

Rand balked at entering that seldom-trodden territory, the origin of the angels, and swerved instead into literary criticism. “You’re quoting Athanor. He’s not to my taste.”

Beside them, Fabiola and Brewster were noisily climaxing. The communion wafer on Fabiola’s dangling wrist clacked rhythmically against the tiled floor. Rand found himself aroused. Upon Shelly’s shy acknowledgement of his condition, he began to caress her. Quickly, they started to move together.

Their formal evaluation at the end of class cited as a demerit only Shelly’s postcoital tears.

* * * *

Alternately steamy and chill, cleansing mists billowed from the wallpores of the dimly lit freeform sauna. Subtle restorative natural fragrances and amygdaloids rode the droplets: balsam, vanilla, altozest. Self-segregating instinctively by sex, boys and girls clustered mostly in separate grottoes, as if after the intimacies of coupling class certain male and female intrabonding required reinforcing. Giggles and laughter interspersed boisterous talk.

Seated on the absorptive floor, Shelly braced her back against a pliable wall, drew her knees up to her chin and crossed her ankles in front of her sex. She made no move to join in any of the conversations around her. She passed most of the sauna session in contemplative silence, until Fabiola approached her. The smiling blonde girl dropped down gracefully beside the somber dark-haired one. Shelly’s tentative expression mixed a faint welcome with a nearly palpable disinclination to talk. Fabiola ignored the look.

“I hear you’ve decided on a career,” said Fabiola.

Visibly surprised, Shelly answered, “Why, yes, I have.”

Fabiola paused, then said, “Being a theresan seems an awfully—well, a harsh and stringent path.”

Shelly’s face now expressed an indignation matched by her tone. “How can you say that? Devoting yourself entirely to the spiritual welfare of others? It’s the most fulfilling career I can imagine.”

“But the libido-dampers, the vow of minimal consumption—it all seems so purposelessly self-denying in the face of our abundance.”

“Maybe so. Maybe people nowadays have all the sex and food and toys they need. But there’s still suffering. Death and mortal dissatisfaction resist all unknotting. The vows are real, but also symbolic. They focus our attention, help us concentrate on our mission of relieving pain. The theresans are only one step below the angels themselves.”

Fabiola evinced nervousness at such a comparison. “Well, I won’t pretend you aren’t suited for such a life, Shel. Ever since we were little, you’ve inclined that way.”

Shelly neither affirmed nor denied this characterization. Suffused in soothing veils of moisture, the friends rested wordlessly side by side for a minute. Then Fabiola spoke.

“Don’t you want to know what I’ve chosen for my playwork?”

Shelly brightened. “Of course. I hadn’t realized you’d decided yet.”

“I’m majoring in exobiological research, specializing in Leucothean lifeforms with a concentration on hybridology.”

“Will you have to go discontinuous to visit Leucothea?”

“Of course, if I choose to travel at all, which I probably will. How else would I cross all those lightyears?”

Shelly shuddered. “I could never put myself through such an experience, even if it is temporary. Losing your body that way—”

Fabiola laughed off her friend’s apprehensions. “It’s perfectly safe. Just a matter of not being where you were for a while until the universe is tickled into agreeing you’re ready to be elsewhere.” Changing the subject, Fabiola asked, “Who do you like better, Rand or Brewster?”

A look of bemused consternation squalled across Shelly’s features. “Rand is so kind to me. There’s no denying that, or his charm. But Brewster has something that pulls at me, a demanding quality that’s almost frightening.”

“You should be nicer to him then. More appreciative.”

“I try. But I get distracted too often.” Shelly bit her underlip. “Fabiola—do you ever recall your death?”

Fabiola laughed easily. “My death? I’m right here beside you! How could I have ever died?”

“But you did. You drowned. Your heart was stopped until the angel restarted it.”

Ignoring Shelly’s speech, Fabiola fluffed up her abundant damp curls. “The sauna always butchers my hair! I’m definitely going to speak to the mockie-proctors about altering the proteinoid mix in the final rinse.”

* * * *

From across the form-strewn chamber, as if across a vision of some steam-cloaked afterlife, a desultory Elysian Fields, Brewster and Rand more or less discreetly watched the two girls. In relaxed fashion, Rand stood leaning against a wall, arms folded across his hairless chest; contrarily, Brewster twisted energetically from the waist up in an exaggerated display of calisthentics, snapping his limbs about.

“Gaia!” exclaimed Brewster. “Fabiola gets me so primed! Look at her breasts arch as she primps her hair! What a kick.”

Rand’s tone was dry. “You two certainly seemed on the same protocol in class. Do you expect to see much of her after graduation?”

Brewster ceased swivelling and began to trot in place, coincident with a blast of cold. “Not likely. The one drawback with Fab from my point of view is her excessive brains. She’s off for more schooling, which is certainly not the case with me.”

Rand straightened away from the wall, plainly intrigued. “Oh? This is news. I had no idea your future plans were so solid. Tell all, please.”

“I’ve already signed on with the Rewilderness Institute. They promised me my choice of assignment after a short training stint. I’m leaning toward the Sacramento Rainforest.”

“A noble mission.”

“Noble my prickly arse! I just can’t stand being cooped up in these prissy modern safety zones any more. I want to be surrounded by some wildness, to use my muscles more than my head.”

“Engineered wildness. And of course the angels will still be watching over you and your mates.”

Brewster snorted like a guard minotaur. “Don’t remind me. There’s no place free from their intrusive ways. The damn seraphian layer girdles the whole globe like a straitjacket, put into place long before our generation had a say in it.”

Rand smiled. “An interesting comparison. Most people compare the turbulent home of our angel friends to a vital safety net.”

“Most people are lazy, complacent fools. A warm autonohome, uninterrupted entertainment, and the cackle of the flock. That’s enough to make them happy.”

“Cheep, cheep.”

Brewster stopped jogging. “Be fair now, you know I don’t mean you. You’re a good friend, Rand. You and me, Fabiola and Shelly—we have some kind of special bond among us. I predict we’ll always hang together somehow.”

“Sentimentality and a nod toward the future. This must be that ‘maturity’ I’ve heard so much about.”

“Joke all you want, dummy. And by the way, I haven’t learned your plans yet. Maybe you and Fabiola have some kind of zingy co-hab agreement.”

“Not at all. But we are going to the same school next year.”

“A-ha! Don’t tell me you’re going to muck about with squirmy aliens too.”

“No. Not unless you count Jovian volatiles as such.”

Brewster shouted his approval and slapped Rand on the back hard enough to cause the slighter boy to stagger a step. “So it’s to be mining after all! Congratulations! And you let me rave on about my shirt-pocket wilderness! Out among the stars, there’s the real frontier.”

Rand spoke modestly. “Oh, most of the work is done from Earth via d-links. And on-site autonoclaques handle much of the rest. I doubt I’ll find myself in space more than a few times a year.”

“More than most of the rest of us. Well, if it weren’t for needing to feel the wind on my face, Rand, I’d join you in a minute.”

Rand quoted their secular scripture only half-archly: “‘Each seeker his own guide.’”

Brewster delivered the expected well-circulated parody: “‘Each thrillseeker his own androgyne.’”

* * * *

The roof of the school was generally off-limits. Its attractions were minimal—a perch from which to pelt innocent passersby with popbeads from the pepper trees, a generous view of the landscaped community and the river where Fabiola had nearly met her end—and consequently, so was any tempation to trespass. But this evening, with the end of the official commencement celebrations at midnight, the lure of the forbidden drew some dozen graduates unwilling to call an end to their revelry.

Rand concentrated on jiggering the school’s heuristics, chattering at the building in high-level autonopidgin. At his back, his festively dressed companions shuffled and whispered. Tristan and Alana, a pair of lovers bound for the Black Gang, kissed with professional abandon. A fellow named Ewen let out a fart, saying, “Let the school parse that!”

Rand worked intently despite the distractions. “Damn stubborn mockie— There! We’re in.”

Everyone gave a cheer then, heedless of discovery. All the young men and women exhibited varying degrees of amygdaloid intoxication—nothing illegal, but more than was perhaps wise of the permitted stuff. Half the intruders raced up the stairs, vieing with those in the lofter shaft to be first; the two factions burst out onto the node-studded roof almost simultaneously. Above, a wealth of stars prickled. June breezes carried the scents of water and grass. The happy trespassers rushed to the low parapet edging the roof, the only real focus of the scene. Some ten meters below, the well-lighted town slept.

Rand encircled Fabiola’s bare midriff with his left arm. She pressed her hip against him. Brewster and Shelly stood rather stiffly side by side, although holding hands. Squirts full of wine circulated; by the time one reached Brewster, its overused muscles, at the ebb of their refreshing cycle, refused to work, and only a couple of drops escaped the living valve. Brewster threw the squirt down squishily in exaggerated disgust.

“Bah! Who needs alcohol on a night like tonight? Just to be free of this dump forever is intoxicating enough!”

Releasing Shelly’s hand, Brewter leaped atop the parapet and began to dance like a marionette proxied by someone being tickled to death. Everyone cheered and applauded except Shelly. Even in the dim starlight and backscattered radiance of the street illuminants her expression of alarm shone like a young moon.

“No, Brewster! It’s dangerous! Come down!”

As if his imaginary strings had been dipped in liquid nitrogen, Brewster instantly froze. He stared meanly at Shelly for a few interminable seconds, then said, “You don’t own me, Shel. And there is no danger anywhere anymore.”

With those words, he hurled himself backwards off the roof.

Shelly screamed, as did several others, not including Rand or Fabiola. Craning forward, the young men and women watched Brewster plummet.

Halfway in his swift fall, an angel materialized beneath him. The alabaster being caught Brewster easily and lowered him safely to the ground.

Rand spoke precisely, in the parodic tones of a lecturer, but failed entirely to mask deeper feelings. “Unlike our long-range, machine-based d-links, the angels of course can go discontinuous organically and at will. However, the energy-burden such actions place on them limit them to one or at the most two ionosphere-to-troposphere jumps between downtimes back in the seraphian layer—”

His humorous pedanticism went disregarded, as his peers clambered to the parapet and jumped in squealing imitation of Brewster. Each of course met midair rescue. The flock of enigma-faced marmoreal angels flew away conventionally as each jumper was grounded. Finally, only Shelly, Rand and Fabiola remained on the roof. Rand exhibited a cool disdain, while Fabiola’s eyes shone with an aloof excitement. Shelly, though, quivered with rage and the aftermath of her fear.

Rand moved to embrace her, saying, “Juvenile behavior, of course—really wasteful of seraphian resources—but you have to make some allowances—”

Shelly bucked out of his offered consoling clutches. “I hate him! I hate you all!” She raced off down the stairs, out the school and down the streets.

Fabiola watched her go, then said, “Hardly the proper attitude for the start of her career as a martyr.”

* * * *

Fabiola’s office-cum-playlab occupied a congeries of expandable Hoberman spheres in the middle of Los Angeles, conveniently close to the main So-Cal d-link offworld transit center. Currently, the complex swelled half-again as large as it nearest neighbor: the Leucothean Institute had mounted a new expedition recently to underexplored regions of the distant world whence came the objects of Fabiola’s researches.

When the building announced a visitor that morning, Fabiola paused abruptly in the middle of her work as if the significant yet unexpected name had jarred her concentration.

“Send her up.”

Waiting for the arrival of her visitor, Fabiola closed down the experiment she had been working on that morning. Tapping stacatto codes into her communion wafer with her stylus nail, she induced quiescence in the leucotherarium inhabitants. Behind the glass walls of the sealed alien environment, amorphous shapes, their metabolisms damped, pooled on their moss-furred cage floor like heaps of coddled egg-whites.

Fabiola stepped from playlab to outer office. She entered just in time to greet her visitor.

Shelly appeared thinner than when Fabiola had last seen her childhood friend. Under the libido-blockers, her body seemed to have devolved to pre-adolescence wispiness, as if time’s arrow had reversed for her alone. A cloud of anxiety fogged her features.

Fabiola swiftly and heartily embraced her friend. “What a pleasant surprise, Shel! It’s been what, three years? Here, take a seat.”

Unresponsive to Fabiola’s pleasantries, Shelly collapsed into a chair. “I’ve been dropped from the theresans, Fabiola. Me and hundreds of others.”

“Oh, that’s awful! But why?”

“Reduced call for our services. A happier world needs fewer empathetic companions—or so people delude themselves into thinking. Dealing with the shrinkage, the order has applied a strict ‘last in, first out’ policy. Frankly, I’m surprised the axe didn’t fall on me last year at this time.”

Taking a seat beside Shelly, Fabiola grasped her hand. “I’m so sorry. What will you do now?”

Shelly pinned Fabiola with the intensity of her gaze. “I can’t simply abandon my calling, just because I’ve lost institutional support. But I can’t continue on my own either. So I’ve applied to the angelmakers. The demand for their services, at least, is still strong.”

Fabiola’s face registered baffled incredulity. “I don’t understand.”

“How much more clearly can I say it? I’ve put my name in to become an angel.”

Clearly agitated, Fabiola stood up. “Along with criminals and the incorrigibly suicidal? You’re neither of those, are you, Shelly? How could you do such a thing?”

Grimly thinning her lips, Shelly countered, “Every year a few sane and responsible individuals make the same choice. It’s not unprecedented.”

Fabiola began to pace. “This news upsets me terribly. You’re throwing your individuality away. And for what?”

“If I can’t save people’s souls, at least I can still safeguard their bodies. That’s all they seem to care about anyway.”

Growing more distressed, Fabiola asked, “Why are you telling me all this? It’s an incredible burden! I almost wish you had just vanished.”

Shelly smiled for the first time. “You think mere knowledge of my choice is a burden? Well, I’m about to ask for much more. I want you and Rand and Brewster to be present at the transformation. It’s my privilege to have three witnesses.”

Color bled from Fabiola’s face. “Witness it? I—I can’t!”

“Why not? You deal with leucothean lifeforms every day.”

“But not hybrids!”

Shelly got up awkwardly from her seat. “Too bad your sensibilities are so refined, dear. I enjoin you to be there, and I know you won’t refuse. I assume you’re still in contact with the men.”

“Yes, of course. I saw both of them just last month.”

“I expect to find you all there then. I’ll send the particulars as soon as I learn them.”

Shelly moved toward the door. Automatically, Fabiola accompanied her. At the door, Shelly turned, gripped Fabiola by her upper arms, and brought her face to within inches of the other woman’s.

“You’ve often claimed you loved me, Fab. Prove it now.”

Shelly kissed Fabiola fiercely, released her, and left.

Fabiola wiped her lips as if they burned.

* * * *

Sealed from outside contamination—or interior escape—the operating theater was staffed only by sophisticated mechanisms, partly autonomous, partly telefactored by the hidden, anonymous cadre of angelmakers. Now alertly inactive, the mobile surgical units awaited their initiating commands. The sole human inhabitant of the theater lay naked upon a comfortable monitor-and-assist platform. As yet untouched, Shelly’s thin pale body—stark ribs, hairless mons, composed expression—seemed already well on its way to angelhood. Arms resting laxly along her sides, she stared upward with concentrated fixity.

Beside the patient an opaque sealed canister sat in isolation from the other equipment, a grail-like focus of vision for the assembled watchers.

The ceiling of the lighted theater was transparent. Beyond this barrier, in cloaking darkness and ringing the edge of the theater, seats with full non-interventionist telemetry held medical students, professors, and Shelly’s three witnesses. Fabiola was flanked by her two friends. Rand, to her left, held her hand. On her other side, Brewster sat with arms folded like logs across his chest. Rand’s expressive face revealed an inner tumult mixing fascination, dismay and a sorrowful nostalgia. Fabiola’s countence expressed pure despair. Brewster exhibited an angry scowl, as if personally affronted. Amidst the murmurous audience, his sudden exclamation registered as an egregious slap.

“Damn her! She’s deserting us! Is she really that weak?”

“‘That weak?’” Rand repeated. “Why not ‘that strong?’ Could you undergo such a transformation?”

“Why not ask if I could have my legs sawed off for no good reason? It’s not bravery in either case, just masochistic stupidity.”

Fabiola’s voice was pitched higher than normal. “Will you two just shut up! Show some respect for Shelly’s committment. Please.”

Brewster opened his mouth to reply, then obviously thought better of such a move. He braced his implacable arms more firmly. Rand squeezed Fabiola’s hand more tightly and pecked her brow with a kiss, but she seemed to esteem his solictious affection no more highly than she did Brewster’s truculence.

The machines in the theater suddenly stirred to life. Ignoring the offered close-up telemetry, Fabiola bent forward, as if only unmediated vision across the shortest possible distance could sanctify this transaction. Unwittingly, Rand and Brewster mimicked her.

Below, Shelly had already received a local sensory block across her sternum that still left her completely conscious. Surely her light-swamped eyes could not discern any of the watchers above, yet her expectant gaze seemed locked on theirs. Now clamps and blood-flow inhibitors came into play, as a small incision was lasered into her side, revealing the common human scarlet wetness.

As if unable to interpose a censor between his thoughts and his speech, Rand whispered, “Buddhists claim Shakyamuni was born of such a wound in his mother’s side. But Christians honor the piercing of a spear in the torso of a crucified Jesus.”

The sealed canister now resided in a mechanical grip. Obedient to the application of a security code, the canister top began to unscrew itself, as if its living contents sought egress on their own. The spatulate limb of a mechanical poised itself above the lid, ready to cap the vessel. When the lid had fully disengaged and the spatulate blocker had slid into place, the container was brought nearly into contact with Shelly’s incision. Then the intervening shield-hand withdrew.

The observers saw in the tiny slice of space between the vessel and the body the merest suggestion of a sentient pulsing gelatinous influx. Quickly, the container was pulled away, while at the same time a transparent shell rose up from within the M&A platform to fully enclose the patient.

Beneath this perspex carapace, Shelly began instantly to metamorphose.

The lips of her incision drew closed of their own volition. Her stomach swelled noticeably, then just as significantly concaved, as the leucothean lifeform introduced into her abdomen swiftly absorbed organs, bloated, then shrunk into extensions that blew through her like a wind of pure somatic change. The expression on Shelly’s face betokened no pain, just shock, and then, amazingly, a species of bliss. Her eyes rolled back into their sockets; when they revolved again a full minute later, they revealed themselves transmuted into the flinty optic roundels of all angels. Attenuating and wavering, her limbs went through various test modes of ectoplasmic configuration before settling down to the angelic perfection of human similitude.

Most astonishingly, Shelly’s body began to float above the M&S pedestal, constrained only by the clear lid.

Above, in the observation galley, Fabiola began to retch. Brewster struck the dome of the theater a resounding blow. Rand sought tranquility in dull recitation of facts.

“The imago will automatically seek the global seraphian layer and the company of its kind. The canopy prevents its flight until it can be brought into the open. Already the new angel is part of the leucothean group mentation, able to detect and respond to human distress in all its forms via contact with our wafers along non-local dimensions—”

Fabiola turned and slapped Rand’s face. Brewster restrained her from further assault, but needlessly, for she slumped into her seat in tears.

Rand massaged his rubescent cheek. “Such a simple operation in theory, but fraught with more than its share of emotional complications.”

* * * *

Rand beneath her, Brewster above, Fabiola performed slow gyrations upon the twin fleshy impalements of their cocks thickening inside her. Brewster had his inner elbows locked beneath her axillaries, hands clamped behind her neck; Rand cupped her pendulous breasts. Entrained in lubricious synchronous routines, the threesome resembled in their fluid unity some tripartite hybrid not entirely dissimilar to the dualistic being which had come into life just hours ago in the surgical theater beneath their rapt gaze.

The trio’s movements accelerated with their growing urge toward completion. Inter-responsive sounds escaped the participants: from Fabiola, a cascade of panting mewls; from Brewster, coarse-grained grunts; from Rand, soothing wordless encouragements. Within speedy minutes, their orgasms spilled over the barrier separating potential from actualized, guttural howls an operatic accompaniment to the release. Brewster slumped sideways over onto the mattress, pulling Fabiola with him and thus levering Rand onto his side: six legs tangled like the limp fronds of sea plants.

For a time, until they regained an ease of breathing, they did not speak. Then Brewster broke the silence.

“I should have been kinder to her. I see that now. But I was an ignorant brute.”

Unlinked from her lovers, Fabiola rolled over onto her back, pulling the men into a cradling embrace on either side. She said, “Kinder? Perhaps. But I doubt that any of us could have dissuaded Shelly.”

Brewster growled. “Of course, I blame the angelmakers too. They should have refused her as an unstable volunteer.”

“What other kind would they ever get?” Rand wryly asked.

Fabiola suddenly said, “No one’s innocent. We’re all angelmakers.”

Brewster rose up on one elbow, glaring. “What?”

“I mean that the four of us had a unique dynamic that drove Shelly to her fate. And also that our society as a whole demanded her transformation. We planted a slow virus of ideation within her during childhood, and it finally came awake and transcribed itself.”

Brewster dropped back down. “I don’t know if I buy that, Fab.”

“It’s true nonetheless.”

Rand’s voice held a genuine perplexity. “Do you remember, Brew, something you said years ago, when we were still in school? That the four of us made a whole? Why don’t I feel a missing part now?”

“I suppose because Shelly’s still out there in some form.”

Fabiola volunteered, “The findings are still imprecise regarding how much individual mentation remains after hybridization.”

Rand shuddered. “Not much I hope.”

Brewster sat up suddenly, as if struck by inspiration. “Let’s memorialize this day. I propose that every year on the anniversary of Shelly’s ascension, we spend a holiday together.”

“I second the motion,” said Rand.

Fabiola gripped both their hands. “It’s unanimous. In memory of Shelly, a school reunion each year.”

Brewster wedged his big hand into her wet crotch, enfolding her whole sex back to her anus. “And you’ll be our homecoming queen.”

“And you the jester,” suggested Rand.

They all laughed before they all kissed.

* * * *

Brewster seemed as proud of the Sacramento Rainforest as if he himself had planted each of its towering black-leaved trees, artfully draped each of its sensate lianas, animated each of its animals, programmed each of its buzzing bugs. Conducting Fabiola and Rand down one of the region’s many public trails, hot sunlight butterscotching their bare arms, he lectured in an earnest manner most unlike his bluff self outside this artificial wilderness, delivering anecdotes, statistics and philosophy.

“You’d never believe you were walking through what was once a metropolitan concentration, now would you? Just carting away the demolition debris to the plasma incinerators took the better part of a decade. But currently you won’t find more than a few score people at any given time within a hundred-mile radius. A handful of daytrippers, some hikers and overnight campers, and a smattering of guides such as myself. One minute.”

Brewster had halted by a tree with a diseased limb. He bent to its base and began scraping away dead leaves from around the trunk. After a few swipes, he exposed the tree’s inset partner to the communion wafer in his wrist. Mating his wafer to the wood-rimmed one, Brewster internalized the feed, then stood.

“Nothing out of the ordinary. Just planned rot.”

Rand effortlessly shrugged off his bulky pack, revealing a patch of sweaty shirt fabric beneath. “Lofters may have solved the weight problem, but I’ve yet to wear a pack that truly breathes.”

Fabiola chimed in with her own complaint. “My feet are absolutely aching. How much farther, Brew?”

“Just a mile or so. I swear, you two youngsters should apply for early systemic reboots. I had a couple of ’booters in here last week—ninety years old if they were a day—and they didn’t chaff me as much as you two.”

Rand pulled his pack on again with an exaggerated show of self-sacrifice. “Can we help it if desk-play has made me and Fab soft? We can’t all spend every day slogging through the muck and mire like you do. Some of us have a civilization to run.”

Brewster snorted. “Poking alien slimebags in cages in one case, and guiding giant gasbags into orbit in the other. Such noble pursuits. Let’s go, and no more bitching.”

Brewster’s “mile or so” proved closer to five. But the sight at the end proved inspiring: a luxuriant greensward rolling at a slight inclination toward a posted but unbarricaded cliff edge.

Brewster tapped his wafer with quick codes. “I’ll shut off the warnings from those posts while we’re here. I think we’re all mature enough not to tumble over the edge.”

Shucking their packs onto the lawn, the three friends strolled toward the land’s edge. Attaining this stanchion-dotted terminus, they saw the boulder-studded Sacramento River churning turbulently some fifty feet below, a muddy snake writhing in digestion, death or birth.

“The Rewilderness Institute has upped the flow for rafting season. If you two could have spared me more than a single day—”

“But we couldn’t,” said Fabiola decisively. “So let’s enjoy our picnic and not spoil it with ‘might have beens.’”

They retreated several yards from the dropoff and began to spread a feast from the contents of their packs. Soon, a large blanket played host to a dozen dishes, hot and cold. Rand popped the cork on a bottle of champagne, and poured portions into the glasses outheld by his companions. After filling his own, he proposed a toast.

“To Shelly, now five years gone, wherever she may be.”

Glasses clinked, and were drained off. Fabiola swiped a finger past the corner of one eye, then smiled and said, “I’m starving. Let’s eat.”

Sprawled laughing on the blanket with his friends, Rand had a chicken leg halfway to his mouth when he froze as if an icicle had replaced his spine. He touched his wafer uselessly. “Oh sweet Gaia…”

The others reacted to his alarm. “What is it, Rand?” “Spill it, boy!”

Rand stood up, his face pale. “It’s a call from my Institute. All off-duty personnel to report immediately. But there’s no point. You’ll learn why any minute yourself.”

The general alert came through to Brewster and Fabiola within seconds. Rand nodded at their dismay.

“Billions of tons of Jovian volatiles on a collision course with the planet. An unprecedented d-link misreception. Estimated area of impact, middle of the North American west coast. Estimated energy release, two point five tunguskas. Estimated time of atmospheric entry, ninety seconds.”

They had no time for any action save throwing themselves to the ground and hugging each other.

A noise like the fabric of spacetime ripping assaulted them. The horizon lit up as if a second sun had been born. A hot wind from a hotter hell arrived, and the ground flapped like a bedsheet hung out in hurricane.

Torn treelimbs whipped past the three people. Ripped apart, the humans themselves rolled toward the cliff edge.

A stanchion caught Fabiola in the gut. Frantically she clawed at it, managing to wrap her arms around it. It tilted out of its socket, but held at a rakish angle.

The shaking earth eventually ceased its convulsions. Warily, Fabiola released her grip on the pole, crawled a few inches away from the cliff, and stood. She spit an oyster of bright blood, then looked about for Rand and Brewster.

The men were nowhere in sight.

She advanced cautiously but anxiously to the crumbling edge of the greensward. In the river, she thought to discern two bobbing heads and an occasional flailing arm.

Fabiola looked into the sky. “The angels,” she murmured. Then, louder, demandingly, “The angels. Where are the angels?”

She mumbled the answer as soon as it occured to her. “Helping the millions of others hurt in the cities. But surely there’s just one angel free for us.”

She screamed then, a single name.

“Shelly!”

Not discontinuously, but riding the gravitic fluxlines of the planet, an angel swiftly descended. Arrowing for the water, it pulled up short of the surface and did something Fabiola had never seen an angel do.

It hesitated.

“Go!” Fabiola yelled.

The angel dropped like a stone into the torrent. Seconds later, it emerged, grasping a human form like an eagle with its prey. Within moments, the dripping angel and its burden hovered above Fabiola.

An unconscious Brewster dropped a few inches to the earth with a sodden thud.

“I’ll help him! Get Rand! Get Rand!”

The generic angel turned its emotionless iconic countenance to the human woman, then back to Brewster. Ignoring Fabiola’s orders, the angel plunged its resuscitory hands into Brewster’s chest.

Fabiola began beating the angel’s unyielding back. “No, no, I’ll revive him. Help Rand!”

The angel persisted in its fixed course of action. Only when Brewster puked and shudderingly began to breathe unassisted did the angel rise and fly back to the river.

It returned five minutes later with Rand’s corpse.

Fabiola supported Brewster half-sitting; the big man seemed only half-cognizant of his surroundings, stunned by the treachery of his paradise. Fabiola looked up at the floating angel that bore Rand in pieta formality.

Fabiola spoke with a stern sadness. “He’s brain-dead, you fool. There’s nothing you or I can do for him here. Go discontinuous and bring him to a medical center. They might be able to do a neural reweave.”

Instead of obeying, the angel deposited Rand’s body at Fabiola’s feet and scooped up Brewster. They vanished together.

Fabiola stroked Rand’s brow and wept.

“Was that you, Shelly? Was that you? You didn’t wait for me to answer your question. It felt just awful to die beneath the ice. It hurt worse than tongue can tell. But now it hurts much worse to live.”