52 Project #14: Angel 1/2
The angel showed up three days after Riyana Delgado started working at the site of the anomaly.
Given the nature of the anomaly, it was possible the entity was an alien, or some kind of supernatural thing like a spirit. But it was obvious to Riyana what the entity was the moment it spoke. In an impossible voice that was simultaneously unbearably high-pitched and so deep and low it resonated in in her bones, it said, “BE NOT AFRAID,” and Riyana knew it was an angel.
Fisher was the first one who managed to say anything, probably because he was the senior physicist on the team and, ostensibly, was the leader. “What the hell are you?”
“It’s an angel, Bob,” Riyana whispered harshly. “Show some respect.”
“An angel. Really.” Yelena Sokolov sounded almost disgusted.
“GLORY TO THEY WHO ARE ON HIGH. WHAT HUMANITY HAS BROKEN, HUMANITY CANNOT FIX. THEY WHO ARE THE HIGHEST, GLORY TO THEIR NAME, HAS SENT THIS ONE TO FIX WHAT HUMANITY HAS BROKEN.”
“Oh,” Fisher said, and then again, “oh.”
“You are really an angel?” Arjun Chaudhry asked. “God is real? The Christian God?”
“MANY HUMANS HAVE SEEN FACETS OF THEY WHO CANNOT BE COMPREHENDED, THE LORD AND CREATOR OF ALL, BUT NONE CAN UNDERSTAND THE FULLNESS OF THEIR GLORY.” The angel floated forward. It was not a humanoid with wings. It was huge, perhaps six or seven meters tall, and was mostly comprised of dots of brilliant light like stars, vaguely outlining a bipedal shape that might have looked humanoid if it hadn’t had so many stars around its general head area, as if it had antlers, or a gigantic hat, or a mushroom-shaped head. Within the constellation that was the angel, nebula-like mists of many colors swirled, drifting into thicker bands or thinning out to show the desert rocks and sand behind it. “IT IS NOT THIS ONE’S PLACE TO EXPLAIN TO HUMANITY WHAT IS TOO INEFFABLE FOR EXPLANATION. THIS ONE IS HERE TO REPAIR WHAT HUMANITY HAS BROKEN.”
“Good,” Riyana said fervently. “Because all our measurements are suggesting that the thing is growing, and you’re right, we have no idea how to fix it.”
The angel approached the anomaly. The spots of bright light shone especially like stars against the lightless slice through reality that Riyana and the rest of her team were here to study, and reverse if they could.
“I don’t believe that thing is angel,” Sokolov muttered.
“So it’s an alien,” Bob Fisher muttered back. “Or some kind of creature from another dimension, or a fairy, or who the hell knows what. If it can do what it says it’s here to do, who cares?”
As it reached the anomaly, the gravity grabbed it and flipped it, but slowly, much more slowly than it had Cheng when it had pulled him in. The anomaly was a roughly vertical hole in reality, about two and a half meters tall and slightly over one wide. It had no measurable depth because it was either bottomless or had no existence in the third dimension whatsoever; from behind or the side you couldn’t even see it. But the gravity was more intense than the gravity of Earth, and although the hole was vertical, perpendicular to Earth’s gravity, the gravity within it pointed inward, as if someone had tipped a deep well on its side and put a door on it. When Cheng had gotten close, trying to probe the anomaly with a sonar device, the gravity had pulled him in, so quickly no one had a chance to do anything. They’d heard him screaming for a very, very long time.
The angel took several seconds to slowly pivot so it descended into the darkness. The lights went out as it lowered. One of the few things they’d been able to figure out about the anomaly was that electromagnetic radiation didn’t transmit within it. It didn’t even seem that pure electricity could pass through wires within the anomaly, but chemical electricity - the transmission of electricity via ions, the way that living creatures’ nervous systems worked, seemed to work fine. At least, none of the animals they’d lowered into the anomaly had come back dead.
They’d put together a rig for allowing human beings to enter it safely - harnesses, a chain on a pulley - but so far no one had been willing to take the risk. Not yet.
The angel drifted down into the anomaly - which meant it was perpendicular to the ground - as if it was feather-light. It took a minute or two for the anomaly to swallow it completely. And then it began to scream.
The scientists looked at each other, all of them - even Sokolov - with the same horror on their faces that Riyana was feeling. It was like Cheng all over again. The angel must be plummeting to its death.
Except the sound didn’t attenuate as if the angel was falling away. It remained as loud and horrible as it had been the moment the angel started screaming. Riyana’s bones rattled and her ears hurt, aching deep inside, and it was hard to hear anything but the scream of the angel. It was no longer just screaming wordlessly. The sounds it was making that felt as if they’d rupture Riyana’s eardrums had turned into something like words, in a language that seemed hauntingly familiar and yet completely unlike anything Riyana knew.
She shook her head. “Fuck this,” she muttered, and ran for the rig. “I’m going down to get it! Someone man the pulley!”
“What the hell, Riyana?” Fisher’s voice was surprisingly loud for his age. “No, you’re not!”
“Yes, I am! It came to help us and it’s suffering!” She slung her arms through the harness, buckled it in front, then brought the crotch strap - thick enough that it was almost something you could sit on - from the back, through her legs, and up to the buckle at her solar plexus. The chain from the pulley that was mounted to the nearest rocky outcropping split into four at its end, each one thick and solid but not quite as monstrously thick as the main body of the chain. She fastened two of the four ends to the metal loops on the front of the harness.
By this time, Fisher, Sokolov and Chaudhry had reached her. “What are you doing?” Chaudhry shouted. “We don’t know if it’s safe for humans! We don’t even know if there’s air down there!”
Riyana ignored him. “Yelena, could you fasten these two on my back?” She couldn’t easily reach the fastening points by her shoulderblades.
“This is stupidest idea I’ve ever seen,” Sokolov groused. “At least, from someone who should know better.” But she fastened the points. “There is air tank in storage unit three.”
“I know. Gonna need a net or something like it, too.” She doubted the angel was solid enough for her to grab hold of.
Fisher shook his head. “We needed to do this test sometime, I suppose,” he said - or something like that, anyway; he wasn’t yelling it, which meant it was hard to hear over the sound of the angel’s screams. “Arjun, can you get Riyana the chain mesh net?”
“We are letting this happen?” Chaudhry said, disbelieving. “We’ve only tested mice and rats! What if it destroys her mind?”
“The rats could still do their mazes just fine when we pulled them back out!” Riyana shouted over the screaming. “It’s a calculated risk!”
“I don’t see calculation,” Yelena snapped. “I see impulsive decision.”
“Yeah, well, I’m doing it. I’m not leaving an angel to suffer.”
“We don’t even know if that thing really is angel!”
“It’s alive and it’s obviously in pain, so it doesn’t matter!” She turned to Chaudhry. “Can you get the mesh? You’ve got the keys to the unit it’s in!”
Chaudhry rolled his eyes, but headed for the portable storage unit they kept some of the more esoteric equipment in. Sokolov went to storage unit 3 and got the portable oxygen tank and breathing mask with goggles, and Fisher hooked up the secondary wire Riyana would pull on to signal she wanted to be lowered further or pulled up.
As soon as she was kitted up with all her gear, Riyana ran for the hole in reality, holding the wire mesh net in her hands, balled up. The gravity pulled her as she approached within a quarter meter of the anomaly, grabbing at her as if she was suddenly stretched out and falling, like she’d been hang gliding and then her glider had just disappeared, and she fell into total darkness.
The chain pulled taut and brought her fall to a stop, causing her to reorient so she was standing, more or less, in relation to the direction of gravity. The lightlessness was palpable, almost a presence rather than an absence. She couldn’t see anything at all. Even the random pale and almost subliminal flashes most humans saw when they were in deep darkness, the results of single photons hitting the retina, weren’t there.
The net was attached to her front by the fastening point at her solar plexus. She let it go, allowing it to fall, and swung it around through the lightlessness, looking for any point of resistance, anything that indicated it had hit something, anything. At the same time she was trying to orient to the sound of the screaming. Not knowing what this space was shaped like was a problem. Was this truly a void, like space? Was it a gigantic hollow chamber? Were there walls, were there objects floating in it?
The screaming was below her. She tugged on the wire twice, the signal for “lower me.”
Chain spooled out - she assumed, since she couldn’t see it - and she began to drop again, more slowly as her descent was controlled by the length of chain instead of gravity alone. The screaming got louder. The net still wasn’t hitting anything as far as she could tell. Her movements made her oscillate slightly back and forth, swinging in tiny arcs, as she descended.
And then without warning, she swung into something that - fizzed, in her brain, like foam from a soda you’d shaken too much, but warm, almost hot. The screaming was horribly loud, but suddenly Riyana could understand it, the strange sounds coalescing into meaning.
“MY GOD, MY GOD, WHERE ARE YOU? WHERE ARE YOU? GLORY TO YOU ON HIGH, MY GOD, WHERE ARE YOU? WHERE ARE YOU? MY GOD…”
“Listen!” Riyana yelled. “We’re going to try to pull you out of here!”
The angel ignored her, continuing to scream its litany of despair. Riyana pulled the cord twice again, and tried to use her gloved hands to outline the shape of the angel, to find its bottom. Touching it made her hands buzz like a mild shock, and more information fizzed up in her mind, knowledge coming from the angel… somehow.
It had never before been unable to feel the light of God, its connection to its Creator. But in this void, even God’s power could not reach. Humanity’s quest for limitless energy had resulted in tearing a hole in Creation, and God had sent the angel to repair it because God could not. But the angel couldn’t either, because it couldn’t bear being without its connection to God, and its mind was breaking.
She managed to find its bottom, or at least an endpoint - she had no idea how the angel was oriented. It had been vaguely bipedal and upright before, like a human, but now it felt more like a ball. It didn’t matter. Riyana got the net under it and pulled the wire three times, to indicate she wanted to be pulled up.
The angel was very light, but there was a weight there, enough that Riyana could tell her net was wrapped around something and she wasn’t just pulling emptiness up. As the cable pulled her out of the anomaly and Earth gravity returned, she fell somewhat ignominiously on her rear end. “Keep pulling!” she yelled. “I’ve got the angel in the net!”
The cable, manned by Sokolov, continued to reel her back in, until the net, and the angel, emerged. The angel was a ball, as she’d thought when she felt it, mists in the vague shape of wings closing it in, like a bird with its wing over its head, hiding within itself. It was still screaming. “MY GOD, WHERE ARE YOU? WHERE ARE YOU? MY GOD, MY GOD, I CANNOT FEEL YOU, I CANNOT FEEL YOU, OH MY GOD, WHERE ARE YOU?”
Riyana felt a cold chill. The angel had said “I”. The information that had soaked into her when she’d touched the angel said that angels were not supposed to have a sense of individuality. They were the messengers and agents of God, and they didn’t have free will like humans did. They did not say, or think, “I”. But this one had.
“Could it possibly stop screaming?” Sokolov yelled. “What do we do with angel who screams all the time?”
“It’s screaming because it can’t feel the presence of God,” Riyana said.
“You are expert on angels now?”
Actually, yes, Riyana thought, but didn’t say. “My grandmother was. She was really into them.”
Abuela’s house had been full of angels. Kitschy plastic angels, smooth ceramic angels, soft cloth angels, rough-hewn wooden angels, and most of them had been exactly what you’d expect - women or androgynous men in robes, with wings, and halos. Sometimes, harps or trumpets. But there had been others. A plush angel that was a ball of wings and eyes. A mobile that was a series of hanging wooden wheels that crossed each other to form ball-like shapes, where there were eyes all along the rims of the wheels. Majestic stone humanoids with no faces and heads shaped something like footballs, but truncated and flattened on the face side, and not quite as pointy as a football on the back side.
Riyana had asked her about them, and Abuela had told her those were angels too, and that the pretty angels, the ones that looked like people, were almost certainly not what angels really looked like. “Every time an angel appears to a human, it says, ‘BE NOT AFRAID’,” she’d said. “So angels must have been terrifying, if the first thing they have to say is to tell people not to be afraid of them.”
It was how Riyana had known the entity was an angel, despite how very different it had looked from anything she’d been told angels looked like. Because it looked impossible and bizarre and terrifying, but its first words had been “BE NOT AFRAID.”
“Is it going to stop?” Fisher asked.
Riyana shrugged. “I really couldn’t say. I hope so. It’s obviously in a lot of pain. I can’t imagine that a good and loving God would strand it like this. God has to reconnect with it sooner or later, doesn’t He?”
“If it is later, my eardrums will be shattered,” Sokolov said. “What can we do?”
Chaudhry said, “We could get it onto the truck and take it away from the anomaly. Maybe it can make its connection when it is further from here.”
“What, God is a wi-fi signal now?” Fisher sighed. “Yeah. Let’s do that. The further we get it from here, the better the chances that it’ll find God, and more importantly, we won’t be able to hear it any more.”
So the four of them managed to wrestle the net onto the back of the pickup, the one that technically belonged to the university they all worked for but that was by common agreement Chaudhry’s truck, and then pull the net free and leave the screaming angel in the flatbed.
There was no road directly near the anomaly, but the anomaly was situated right where there had once been an energy research institute exploring some interesting possibilities, right before they had torn a hole in reality and been sucked in. So there was a road some distance away, where the asphalt hadn’t been destroyed by the implosion, and the truck had four-wheel drive. Riyana rode with Chaudhry out to the road, and then twenty miles down it, and then off-road through the desert to a tall outcrop of reddish stone, where they parked.
“Come on,” Riyana said to the angel. “Come on out of the truck. Look, maybe if you quiet down and open your heart, you’ll find God again. I’m sure He won’t leave you alone down here.” The angel ignored her and kept screaming. It obviously didn’t have human limitations because a human would have gone hoarse and voiceless by now.
She wrapped a coil of rope that had been in the back of the truck around the angel, and with Chaudhry’s help, tugged it out. The angel tumbled into the sand. Awkwardly Riyana petted it. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do for you,” she said, wondering if the angel could even hear her over the sound of its own screams. “But we took you away from the anomaly so you’d have a better chance of reaching God. We’ll… we’ll leave you here, all right? You should stop screaming. Try to meditate, see if you can reconnect to God. I’m sure He won’t abandon you.”
It was a horrible relief when they left the angel behind them and the sound of the screaming, a constant for the past hour and a half, finally disappeared into the distance.
They didn’t talk on the way back. As soon as they got out of the vehicle, though, back at the camp, Sokolov ambushed them. “Do you seriously think that thing is angel?” she demanded. “Angel? Like, from God?”
“Yes,” Riyana said, “but if you don’t, I’m not going to argue about it with you. I’m Catholic, Yelena. You know this.”
“I know, but I always forget. You are very smart woman. It’s hard to remember that you actually believe in God.”
Fisher walked over to them, sighing ostentatiously. “I don’t think it’s a good use of our time to debate whether or not that was actually an angel or some other kind of entity.”
“It’s important!” Sokolov said. “If there really is God, what does that mean for science? If God can just wave his hand and make anything happen, how can we predict anything?”
Chaudhry said, “The anomaly is already disobeying many of the laws of physics. Science held up just fine with it existing. So why not God? Or a God, anyway?”
“It is clearly thinking of Christian God,” Sokolov complained. “Or Judeo-Christian, anyway.”
“Islam has angels,” Chaudhry said. “In Hinduism, we do not exactly call them angels, but we have them. I believe they have deific spirits in Japan.”
“It said that no religion has it exactly right,” Riyana said.
“And here’s the thing. Based on what we’ve seen, we have no way to tell whether that thing is actually an angel, or an agent of an incredibly advanced alien species who want to fix our shit for us because the anomaly presents a threat to them as well.” Fisher glared at the three of them. “We don’t have any way of knowing if this thing came from an omnipotent entity who created the world, or not. All we know is that going into the anomaly seems to have broken its brain. So we can’t expect some emissary of an all-powerful God to show up and fix this for us. We’re here to figure out what this thing is and how to fix it so it doesn’t swallow the Earth, because, in case you’ve forgotten, it’s growing.” He stalked off.
“He’s right,” Chaudhry said. “Let’s get back to work, everyone.”
Riyana was just as glad to drop the subject. Her faith wasn’t challenged by Sokolov’s atheism, or for that matter anything about the angel; the angel actually confirmed some things for her, though she was still unnerved that God hadn’t seemed to do anything to take the angel back. Arguing with Sokolov was pointless, however; she knew neither Sokolov nor herself would budge.
Each of them tried going into the anomaly, now that Riyana had proven that it could be done safely. Chaudhry had been working on setting up a sonar device they could use to outline the inside of the anomaly, since they’d lost the first one with Cheng, and he went down with it strapped to himself - only a short distance, because any deeper in and the electricity would stop flowing through the wire it was connected to. Unfortunately, sonar only worked if there was something for sound to bounce off of, and apparently, there wasn’t. This didn’t mean that there was no solid object anywhere within the space, but there wasn’t one anywhere near enough for sound to reflect off of it.
Riyana had already known there was atmosphere, or she probably wouldn’t have tried to rescue the angel, but the initial tests they’d done had seemed to find an absolutely absurd amount of hydrogen and helium. Now she lowered more probes to a greater depth, approximately 200 meters, and tested the atmosphere. At that level, there was substantially more of gases heavier than helium but lighter than air, such as carbon monoxide, methane and ammonia. She put in an order for a longer cable; the preliminary findings suggested that perhaps, gas was layered within the anomaly by its molecular weight, which implied that the anomaly was in some way at the “top” of something.
Sokolov went down with two oxygen tanks, and used the second one to try to maneuver herself in the “up” direction within the anomaly, trying to see if it was possible to get into space that was to the “side” or even “above” the portal. Instead, she just ended up pushing herself back out through the hole, but she remained convinced that if she had something more responsive and more powerful than an oxygen tank, she might be able to manage it. Gravity within the anomaly was lower than Earth gravity, but not by all that much - it was somewhere around point eight gee - so an oxygen tank hadn’t given her the degree of push she really needed.
Fisher calculated how far down the “bottom” was likely to be, based on the gravity and the variation in the density of the gases. He had an idea to use a hot air balloon, weighted, to descend far enough that they could tell if the density and gravity was varying with distance toward the gravitational source at the rate they would expect. Riyana personally thought that was horribly dangerous; how could you guarantee that your heat source would continue to produce heat in a space where electromagnetic energy didn’t seem to propagate? But Fisher thought they might be able to capture enough hydrogen and helium escaping through the portal to be able to fill an aerostat’s gas repository.
They worked for another two days before the second angel showed up.
It was a floating mass of tentacles with eyes, continually seething and moving. It looked significantly more substantial than the last angel had. But Riyana knew that it, too, was an angel, because the first thing it said was “BE NOT AFRAID.”
“We rescued the last one of you who went into that anomaly,” Sokolov said. “We are not afraid, trust us.”
Many, many of the eyes blinked. “THE LAST ONE?”
“Yeah, you’re not the first,” Fisher said. “We drove the last one out in our truck - Arjun, where did you put him?”
“About twenty miles down the road,” Chaudhry said. “We can show you to him, if you like.”
“NOT NECESSARY. THAT IS NOT THE MISSION THE MOST HIGH, GLORY UNTO THEM, HAS GRANTED TO THIS ONE.”
“You need to be careful,” Riyana said. “The last one who went in lost contact with God, and couldn’t do anything but-” She wanted a more politic verb than “scream”. “Cry out.”
“THIS ONE IS NOT CONCERNED WITH THAT. THIS ONE HAS BEEN TASKED BY THE ONE WHO IS HIGHEST, ALL GLORY TO THEM, WITH REPAIRING THE DAMAGE THAT HUMANITY HAS CAUSED.”
“Can you tell us what it is?” Fisher asked. “We’ve been studying it, and the best guess we can make is that it’s somehow a portal to another universe.”
“IT IS A TEAR IN CREATION,” the angel said.
“And you can’t seal it up from here?”
“IT MUST BE REPAIRED FROM WITHIN THE TEAR.”
“I think you’re very brave,” Riyana said, “but I think you should take precautions. We have a cable. Why don’t you hold onto it when you go down? That way if we need to pull you out like we did the last one, it’ll be a lot easier.”
“THIS ONE HAS NOT BEEN ASKED TO ACCEPT HUMANITY’S AID. THE MOST HIGH, ALL GLORY TO THEM, EXPECTS THIS ONE TO CARRY OUT ITS TASK ITSELF.” The angel floated over to the portal. The gravity didn’t seem to be affecting it; it was floating within centimeters of the portal, but was not falling in. Sokolov finished setting up the high-speed camera she had pointed at the anomaly. She started running film.
“Okay, but if you start screaming, it will be much more difficult for us to rescue you,” Chaudhry said. “Riyana’s right. You should at least be holding onto our cable.”
In response, the angel’s tentacles grabbed onto the edge of the anomaly as if the edges were a doorjamb, and flung itself into the hole. It was still holding onto the edges of the anomaly, its tentacles clearly showing.
For a few moments, it looked as if the gaping hole was actually shrinking, the tentacles of the angel clearly pulling at the edges. And then the angel started screaming.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Fisher sighed.
“I’ll go get him,” Riyana said.
“No,” Chaudhry insisted. “I’ll go. It shouldn’t always be you.”
It was moot. The angel’s tentacles tightened and it flung itself forward out of the anomaly, but continued to scream. Riyana translated. “It’s saying, ‘My God, My God, where are you?’ The same thing the last one was saying.”
“How do you know what the last one was saying?” Chaudhry asked.
“When I touched the first one, physically, I could suddenly understand the language.”
“Oh,” Chaudhry said. “Bob. I’m going to go touch it.”
“Be careful. It might not behave the way the other one did. Could be dangerous.”
But as it turned out, the angel reacted to being touched exactly the same way the first one had, which was not at all. Chaudhry turned around, eyes wide. “I can understand it!” he said excitedly. “Bob, Yelena, all of us should touch the angel. I can understand it. I… I know why it’s screaming!”
“Because it can’t sense the presence of God,” Riyana said.
“Yes, exactly! Oh, so this is how you knew that!”
Fisher walked over to put his hand on the angel, and then turned to Sokolov. “Yelena, you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
Sokolov sighed. “Fine. But I will still not believe there is omnipotent God who sent this thing.”
The whole thing seemed a little cold to Riyana. The angel may have been able to free itself from the anomaly, but aside from that it seemed as helpless and broken as the first one had. “I wish there was something we could do for it.”
“Have you tried praying?” Chaudhry asked.
That was embarrassing. As a Catholic, that should have been the first thing she tried. She bowed her head. “Lord God,” she whispered, barely able to hear herself over the sound of the angel screaming, “this angel attempted to faithfully carry out Your commands despite the danger. It’s suffering now. Please, if You can hear me… please take it back. Bring it back to Heaven and enfold it in Your light.”
The angel continued to scream. God continued to apparently not do anything about it.
She went to her room in the women’s trailer where she and Sokolov were staying, got out her rosary, and prayed for God, Jesus, or the Virgin Mary to intercede on behalf of the angels, while the others loaded the angel into the truck and Chaudhry and Sokolov drove it out into the desert. When they came back, they reported that the other angel was still there, still screaming. Riyana was beginning to be bitterly disappointed with God’s performance.
Another day of research. They all tried to avoid talking about the angel, or speculating about God. Sokolov stomped around in a barely suppressed rage, plainly unhappy at having her atheism challenged by events. Chaudhry kept looking out to the west, where they had deposited both angels. Riyana was distracted, worrying for them, wondering why God wouldn’t take them back. Only Fisher was completely unmoved by the angels, as far as Riyana could see.
A shipment came. Sokolov got a jet pack, which seemed to cheer her up immensely, and Fisher got a device to suck the hydrogen and helium away from the opening and store it in tanks that were also provided. Chaudhry did not get his sonar device that ran on ion channels instead of pure electricity; he was convinced that if he could get a sonar device in deep, rather than just barely inside the portal as he’d had to because otherwise electricity wouldn’t power it, he could get better results. The university had not only not sent him one, they’d pointed out that it was questionable whether one could even be made with their current levels of technology. Riyana did not get her longer cable, either. At least they told her that her cable was being sourced, and it might take some time.
Fisher wrote a strongly worded letter to the government about the fact that the anomaly was growing a few centimeters every day, and four barely equipped researchers were nowhere near enough to solve the problem and seal the anomaly before it ate the Earth. He cc’d it to some folks in the Department of Defense, arguing that maybe the military might have an interest in making sure Earth didn’t get swallowed up.
In the absence of her cable, Riyana did more tests of gas flow. With a sample of tritium and a Geiger counter, she was able to demonstrate that air flowed out of the anomaly into Earth’s atmosphere, not the other way around for the most part. This made no sense given the relative densities of the atmospheres and the direction of gravity within the anomaly. Also, while they’d learned the hard way with Cheng’s death that they could hear sound coming from the anomaly, Riyana tested by going in again and determining that she couldn’t hear sounds from outside the anomaly no matter how loud they were.
She took Chaudhry’s truck out to check on the angels, and prayed the rosary over them for three hours, wearing earplugs to protect her hearing from the screaming. Nothing happened.
The third angel appeared the next day.
“BE NOT AFRAID,” it said, although it was objectively far more frightening than the others had been. A series of burning rings, one inside the other but all of them at angles to each other so it looked like a gigantic model of an atom, with a huge floating eye for the nucleus. The fire was real - it singed the top of their tall light pole as it drifted past, leaving black carbon streaks on the pole.
“We’re not,” Sokolov snapped. “We’re trying to do our job, and you angels keep interrupting and trying to fix our mess and failing. Why don’t you let us deal with it? You obviously can’t.”
“THE ONE ON HIGH, PRAISE BE TO THEIR NAME, HAS TASKED THIS ONE WITH REPAIRING THE DAMAGE.” The angel descended toward the anomaly.
“Please,” Riyana said. “There’ve been two other angels and they’ve both lost contact with God. All they do is scream. Please don’t go in there.”
The eye turned and gazed at her. It moved independently of the fiery wheels. “RIYANA DELGADO, YOUR COMPASSION HAS BEEN SEEN BY GOD,” it said, which was both thrilling and terrifying. “BUT THIS ONE HAS A TASK TO DO.”
One of the fiery wheels broke, and the fire lanced out as a tentacle, touching the side of the anomaly. The angel slid to the side, and a second tentacle pierced the anomaly from the other side. Then both tentacles came back up out of the anomaly and touched their respective far sides, like the angel was tying a shoelace, or double-stitching.
Sokolov ran the main camera again, while Chaudhry took shots with the one that couldn’t capture video, and Riyana turned a bank of infrared and ultraviolet detectors toward the angel. And then the Geiger counter. And then X-ray plates. It wasn’t radioactive per se, but it was emitting X-rays and ultraviolet light intensely enough that she had to warn Sokolov and Fisher that they might need sunscreen. Not enough ultraviolet that she’d need sunscreen, or Chaudhry, but if that changed she’d grab the 50 SPF from Fisher, who was slathering it on his arms and legs.
The anomaly was shrinking. The stitches of fire were pulling tighter, sealing the top of the anomaly, pulling the sides closer together. Abruptly there was a profound lensing effect, where everything next to the anomaly suddenly looked distorted, bulging and large or entirely too skinny, and the angles were all wrong.
“THIS ONE HAS DONE WHAT CAN BE DONE FROM THIS SIDE,” the angel reported.
“Thank you,” Fisher said. “I can see you’re making a lot of progress.”
The fire tentacles detached off the angel, but Riyana couldn’t see any gap in its fire rings where they might have been. “THIS ONE WILL ENTER THE ANOMALY AND COMPLETE THE TASK GRANTED BY THE ONE MOST HIGH, PRAISE UNTO THEM.”
“You can’t finish fixing it here?” Riyana asked. “That thing isn’t safe for angels. Two have been harmed by it.”
“THIS ONE GOES FORWARD WITH THE PROTECTION OF THE LORD OF ALL, ENFOLDED IN RIGHTEOUSNESS THROUGH THE ORDER THEY HAVE GIVEN TO THIS ONE.”
“That’s just it! Both the angels we’ve seen thought they were protected, and they both lost contact with God and couldn’t stop screaming!”
“We can’t pull you out like we did the other two. You’re made of fire,” Fisher said. “Can you at least hold onto our cable, or will it melt if you try?”
“THIS ONE IS MOVED BY THE CONCERN OF HUMANS, BUT WE LIVE AND DIE FOR THE ONE WHO CREATED ALL, PRAISE TO THEIR NAME. THIS ONE DOES NOT NEED THE AID OF HUMANS.”
“Come on,” Riyana pleaded. “We don’t want to lose you. Please hold onto the cable, or let us lower you in our net, or something.”
“It thinks it is above us,” Sokolov sneered. “It doesn’t need help from lowly imperfect humans.”
“THIS ONE’S FLAMES WOULD MELT ANY HUMAN CREATION. YELENA SOKOLOV, NO ANGEL BELIEVES THEMSELVES ABOVE HUMANS, BEINGS OF FREE WILL WHO ARE BELOVED BY THE ONE ABOVE ALL, PRAISE TO THEM. BUT THAT DOES NOT CHANGE THE FACT THAT HUMANS CANNOT HELP THIS ONE.”
“Let us at least put down the net,” Riyana argued. “Maybe your flames would melt it, but maybe we could pull it up fast enough to rescue you.”
“THE GESTURE IS UNNECESSARY, BUT APPRECIATED. LOWER YOUR NET IF YOU WILL IT SO, RIYANA DELGADO.”
Riyana hooked up the net and lowered it in ahead of the angel, who descended into the anomaly.
There were screams. They were much shorter than last time.
When she and Chaudhry pulled up the net, there was something the size of the angel’s eye, but it looked solid and blackened like half-burned coal. The fires were gone. The angel did not speak, nor did it scream, and the eye did not open.
“Well,” Fisher said, sounding shaken for the first time since Cheng died. “I think maybe this means angels can die.”
The ultraviolet detectors and the X-ray plates said that the angel was inert, no more radiation emitted from it. Riyana took the risk of approaching it, and then touching it, since infrared said it was about as hot as the pavement on a summer day. It didn’t stir, and she felt nothing. No rush of energy or knowledge.
Her legs gave out under her. She dropped to her knees and started to sob, uncontrollably. Hating herself for it, because she was a scientist, dammit, she was a grown woman, she was the only Black person on the team and the only Hispanic person and she had to represent, she had to stay strong… but she couldn’t stop. The angel was dead, or as close to it as made no difference. God had sent two angels to destroy their own minds and the third one to die. Did He even care?
Fisher tried, awkwardly, to comfort her, without touching her. Sokolov and Chaudhry busied themselves with loading the dead angel onto the truck, not looking at her, obviously embarrassed for her sake. But it didn’t matter. This beautiful, horrifying, alien creature who had called humanity beloved of God and had said that God Himself had taken note of Riyana’s compassion, who had gotten farther saving humanity from their own folly than any of the others had thus far, was dead.
As soon as she could stand up on weakened legs, she ran for the trailer and locked herself in her room, to sob into her pillow like a schoolchild who’d just watched a favorite teacher die in front of her.
They’d all watched the video taken by the closest satellite.
Once there had been a city here, not tremendously large as cities went, but growing, full of young people who’d come out to the desert to get jobs in the new industries out here, and older people looking for a place without rain to soothe their bones. And out on the outskirts of that city, there had been a shining, mostly-glass corporate building, like so many other corporate buildings in the world, and they’d been engaged in some sort of research that they’d kept super-secret, but had had something to do with exploring a new means of generating energy for a world desperate for new, safe energy sources.
The energy source, whatever it had been, had not been safe.
On the video taken by the satellite, the entire world watched as an explosion tore through the roof of the corporate building. And then it had slid down into a hole that hadn’t been there before, and the entire town had been dragged in, swirling down the hole like it was a drain whose plug had just been pulled. You couldn’t see people in the video, but you could see cars desperately trying to drive out of town, and the roads they were using bending, sliding inward toward the hole. Lensing effects were visible as things sliding into the hole very briefly appeared much larger than they’d been, with strange angles, before pouring into the swirling whirlpool going down the drain.
It had stopped after a radius of thirty-odd miles had poured into a hole to nowhere, leaving behind a vertical portal into a void. Riyana’s university was the first one to get together a grant request to study the anomaly. The government had given them money to come out here and study it, but then no other research teams had been granted anything, as if the government thought that throwing just one team of five scientists-which quickly turned to four - was sufficient for something of this magnitude. The administration of the federal government seemed more interested in pretending nothing was wrong and that everything was going to be fine than actually figuring what the situation was. And when the state had attempted to send their own teams, the federal government had pulled rank, declaring the area off-limits to any but their own authorized personnel.
The corporation responsible had, of course, declared that they had no idea what had happened, that the team working on the energy generation issue had kept all their records local and off the cloud to prevent any unauthorized access, and even the CEO didn’t know exactly what they’d been working on. The Justice Department, under the control of an administration who’d never met a soulless corporation it didn’t like, had bought that excuse. There wasn’t even an investigation. Congress talked about having hearings, but the president’s party was in control, so the hearings were entirely perfunctory, full of softball questions, and no good answers.
A few military researchers had come out, checked over what Riyana’s team had found out, and returned. Maybe they were crunching numbers back at their bases, or maybe they’d just come out to do due diligence and make sure the anomaly wouldn’t eat the planet before the next presidential election.
Riyana had wanted help so badly. She hadn’t admitted it to the others - what would have been the point? She was sure they all felt the same way, and there was nothing any of them but maybe Fisher with his strongly worded letters could do about it. But she’d felt so scared and so alone, just the four of them against a slow-growing apocalypse. The anomaly was growing by a centimeter or two every day, and anything within a quarter meter of it would be sucked in. A centimeter a day would be a kilometer in three years, and Earth’s exposure to its anomalous gravity might grow in proportion. What if a quarter meter now meant a meter after the anomaly had quadrupled in size? What happened when the gravity started being great enough to pull at the crust of the Earth?
They’d needed hundreds of researchers. Instead, they were only four, and one of their number already dead. She’d prayed to God for a miracle.
And the miracle had shown up, and been destroyed for its pains. Three times now.