52 Project #14: Angel 2/2
She managed to pull herself together by dinnertime, which was good, because the others were engaged in analyzing the data she, Chaudhry, and Sokolov had collected with the cameras and the various EM detectors. The general consensus, unfortunately, was that they had no idea what the angel had done to get as far as it had. From what they could see, the fiery tendrils appeared to be lasers, with just enough scatter that they could get a reading on at least some of what had gone into the lasers. They covered the entire EM spectrum that they’d been measuring except for gamma rays. No one had had time to set up radio measurement or microwave measurement equipment, so there was no way to know what else might have been in the lasers.
The obvious problem with this was that the anomaly itself negated any EM radiation; electrical signals could transmit through ion interchange, but they couldn’t pass through the wires they’d tested or through space. So how had the angel woven EM tendrils through the edges of the anomaly? Secondly, the angel - both the dead one and the second one - had treated the edges of the anomaly like they were solid objects, but humans couldn’t do that. They’d tried, with poles and probes. The anomaly had no detectable edge. Either an object went into the anomaly or it didn’t; the gravity was too strong to keep anything balanced half on one side and half on the other, so they couldn’t even test if that was possible or not.
Riyana pointed out what seemed to her obvious. “It’s not using EM radiation to seal the hole. It’s using the power of God; for that particular angel, it looks like doing that emitted EM radiation. That might be why it died; in a place where it can’t radiate EM radiation, maybe it couldn’t continue to live.”
“That’s an interesting speculation, but it’s pretty unprovable,” Fisher said.
Riyana rolled her eyes. “People. This is an angel. They’ve all repeatedly said they work for the Creator. What else would they be doing to repair a hole in reality?”
“We don’t actually have proof of that,” Fisher said. “Just because they claim a thing is true-”
“They are working for someone, though,” Chaudhry said. “And whoever that someone is, they have the power to fix this thing. The second angel managed to pull it closed a few centimeters; this one actually closed off a third of a meter at the top and pulled the whole thing about twenty centimeters less open than it was.”
“They’ve made progress,” Sokolov admitted. “But that doesn’t mean they actually work for God even if they think so.”
“Right, they could still be aliens,” Fisher said. “But Riyana’s right; whatever energy they’re really using, it doesn’t seem to show up on our detectors.”
“And going into the anomaly killed the most recent one like snuffing out a candle,” Riyana pointed out. “And we know that they believe they are connected to God and draw power from Him, and that when they enter the anomaly, that connection is cut off.”
“They could be something like Q. From Star Trek,” Sokolov said. “Powerful beings with abilities we don’t understand, who we think of as gods, but they are only more advanced than us.”
“It doesn’t really matter,” Fisher said. “Call them angels who serve God, call them aliens who serve The Great Alien Overlord, call them fairies who serve the Queen of Summer… it doesn’t matter. We don’t know how many of them their master is willing to throw away to get this thing fixed, and we don’t know what alternatives there are. Can they solve their problem by destroying the Earth? We don’t know. So we can’t expect that there’s going to keep being angels trying to fix this and we can’t expect that their ideas about what constitutes ‘fixing’ this will always be a good idea, by our standards.”
“Bob, we are not children,” Chaudhry said. “Every time you talk about this, it sounds like you’re really saying, ‘Don’t give up the research just because angels have shown up.’ And I think it goes without saying that we are all clearly understanding that.”
“Are we? All of us?”
He looked pointedly at Riyana, who felt her cheeks heat up. She kept her voice even and controlled. “Yes. All of us. I may have faith in God, but God has always helped those who try as hard as they can to help themselves. And if it’s true that we somehow managed to punch a hole in Creation, then studying it might tell us something about the nature of Creation that we’d have otherwise no way to know.”
She wanted to be angry. She wanted to snap at him. She wanted to point out that it was a bad look to be picking on the only woman of color in their group, implying that she wasn’t as dedicated to science as the rest of them. But she wasn’t going to play to stereotypes or let them dismiss her as an emotional woman, a “fiery Latina” or an “angry Black woman” or any other stupid thing like that. She was as recognized in her field as Sokolov and Chaudhry, she’d earned her place on the team, and frankly Sokolov’s desperate insistence that the angels’ stated mission was probably some kind of lie was more childish than her belief that they were probably telling the truth. So she kept her cool, and held his eyes until he looked away.
“Yes, well. Be that as it may. I think we need to redouble our efforts. I’ve requested more researchers from the University, and applied for assistance from the Department of Defense.” Chaudhry opened his mouth, but before he could speak Fisher cut him off. “I know, I know. I don’t want this to turn into an army project either. But it’s obvious that the civilian authorities are being crippled by politics. The military understand that something that is slowly growing and might end up sucking in the entire Earth is an existential threat, and we need more resources.”
“We are already working as hard as humans can with the resources we have,” Sokolov said. “What do you want us to do, stop sleeping?”
“No, but just…” He ran a hand over his gray head. “We don’t know how much time we have to solve this thing.”
“We don’t actually know if it’s solvable,” Chaudhry pointed out, somberly. “Not by humanity.”
That night Riyana dreamt of her grandmother, carefully painting a ceramic lamp she’d made. Riyana knew she was dead, but didn’t want to say so in case that meant Abuela would disappear.
“You’re worried about those angels, aren’t you?” Abuela asked.
“Yeah.” Riyana nodded. “It’s not fair, that they came to help us and they were hurt. Doesn’t God care?”
“I’m sure God cares very much,” Abuela said. “But angels spend their entire existence in the presence of the Lord, connected to Him. And then they go to a place where the power of the Lord cannot reach. Of course they’ve lost their connection to Him.”
It seemed a little blasphemous for Abuela of all people to imagine a place where the power of God couldn’t reach. “Why wouldn’t God be able to do something? God can do anything.”
“Within His own creation, of course he can. But this is a hole in Creation. God may not be able to sense it as anything other than an absence. Can you feel what goes on in your tooth, when you have a cavity?”
“A cavity usually gives you a toothache, eventually.”
“Because it starts to eat away at the nerve. Perhaps God will feel pain if your anomaly gets so large it eats the Earth, but you don’t want that to happen.”
“So how can the angels help? If they channel the power of God, but God’s power cannot reach…”
“Well, God obviously can’t go into the anomaly, but the angels can, carrying a small part of the power of God within them. But then they lose their minds because they lose their connection to God.” She was in her rocking chair, crocheting. Abuela had always been doing one craft or another; her hands had never been still. “Angels don’t truly have free will, after all. To lose your connection to God is, for them, losing their connection to the will that drives them.”
“Do they have free will now?”
Abuela nodded. “But they don’t know what to do with it. So they cry, and scream. Humans do a lot of that when they first come into the world with their free will, but you can pick up a human baby and comfort it.”
“How could I comfort an angel?”
“Perhaps you could help them reconnect to God.” Now Abuela was at the table, shaping clay, and Riyana was sitting across from her.
“I tried praying the rosary for them. That didn’t work.”
Abuela leaned forward. “I want you to think of a Bluetooth connection.”
Riyana scowled. “Abuela, how do you even know about Bluetooth?”
“You children always think you’re the only ones to understand technology. I’ll have you know I had a set of Bluetooth headphones for years, that your father gave me. Your abuelo didn’t sleep well those last few years, poor man, so I’d watch my shows with the headphones on so I wouldn’t disturb him.” Now Abuela was watching TV, with the headphones on. She took them off. “When you have, say, your phone connected to your headphones, the phone can see the headphones and knows where to send its signal, and the headphones accept the signal and they know where the phone is. But turn off Bluetooth and turn it on again. You may have broken the connection.”
“A lot of times things will just pair right back up again, though.”
“Sometimes they will and sometimes they won’t. Imagine that they don’t. The phone is calling, calling, searching for the lost headphones. And the headphones are beeping, telling you they can’t find the device they were connected to. No music, no TV sound, comes through the headphones, because there is no connection.”
“But they can connect. You have to pair them.”
“Yes. But think of the difference between a quiet, small beep and the roaring sound of headphones. They are used to God being all the sound, all the signal, there is. Take that away and the silence deafens them. They cannot hear the quiet beep of God trying to pair with them again because they’re too busy screaming.” Abuela leaned forward. “If their minds are quiet and accepting, if they let the silence in, they might be able to hear God’s call. It’s the same for humans.”
Riyana thought of Mama’s church, where the churchgoers shouted and sang and clapped out rhythms, loudly. “That’s not the way everyone does it.”
“I know, you’re thinking of your mama’s church. But when they shout and sing, it’s because they have a connection with God. The headphones are connected and the signal comes through. Perhaps the others around them amplify the signal, so they can hear it through the shouting.”
The analogy was strained, but Riyana understood, as of course she did, because it was her dream. The angels couldn’t hear God trying to connect with them because they were too busy wailing for Him. “Can’t God make the connection anyway?”
“My little girl, God can’t even see them. The connection is broken. God can only call out for them, hoping they can connect back.”
“But God sees all in Creation. Now that the angels are back in Creation, why can’t God see them?”
“Because God cannot see what is no longer part of Creation. They went to a place where Creation was not, broke their connections, and now they have free will but no idea how to use it, and meanwhile God has lost track of them. Like a file written to a bad sector on a hard drive. If the operating system can’t read the sector, the file is lost.”
Abuela would not normally have used so many technology-based analogies. Maybe she had learned more since her death. “Abuela, how do you know all this?” Riyana asked, forgetting that this was a dream.
And then she looked into Abuela’s eyes, as Abuela said softly, “I think you know.” And in those eyes there were stars, and galaxies, and the blinding beautiful light of the sun.
Riyana opened her eyes. The pale light of dawn shone on the ceiling of her room in the women’s trailer. Her heart was pounding.
That had been God speaking to her through Abuela. She was sure of it.
By the time she was halfway out to the location where the angels had been left, she was already questioning herself.
It wasn’t necessarily God who’d spoken to her in her dream. Maybe she’d just dreamed of God. Maybe it was really Abuela’s spirit, but more likely, it was her own mind telling her something she’d thought of subconsciously. Why would either God or Abuela use so many analogies about technology and modern equipment?
But it was a little too late to turn back now.
She heard the angels before she saw them. In the desert, sound carried great distances. She was still miles away when she heard the high, thin noise of the upper part of their sonic register. The truck didn’t have air conditioning; she was driving with the windows open, and the road noise was loud in her ears.
Riyana pulled over, put her earplugs in, and then pulled back out onto the road. One angelic scream had been unbearable at close range. She didn’t think her hearing would withstand two, without protection.
Even through the earplugs, the angels were incredibly loud, their pleading wails for God drowning out any other sound, even the engine and the road noise once she drew close. She parked and strode over to the angels. “Listen to me!” she shouted over the sound of the screaming. “The Lord God has appeared to me, and He - They have a message for you!” She thought the angels might be better able to understand her if she used the pronouns for God that they had. “Be quiet, and listen to my message from the Lord our God!”
She was channeling the preachers at her mother’s church, the men and occasionally women with deep resonant voices that carried with authority. Riyana identified as Catholic, like her father’s family, but she’d gone with Mama to her services many times. It seemed to work. The angels actually went quiet.
“God still loves you and wants you to return to Them, but They can’t see you. They’re calling you, but this is the first time you’ve heard Their voice without already being connected directly to Their power. So you need to listen for Them the way we humans do it. Be quiet. Be calm. Make space in your mind and heart for a small soft voice, something so quiet you’re not even sure if it’s your own thoughts or not. Pray to God, not by screaming and carrying on and wailing about where They are and you can’t find Them. They know you can’t find Them. Because if you could, then They could find you and take you back into the Host.” The mist-and-light angel had unfurled from its ball, slightly, like a bird who’d covered its face with a wing and was now lifting it to let one eye peer through. The tentacles-with-eyes angel was still balled up pretty tightly, but a couple of the tentacles had loosened and were looking at her. “You pray to God the way we do, the way our Lord Jesus Christ told us to do. Quietly. In your mind and heart, more than your voice. And stay open to listening for the response. Once you can hear God, you’ll be able to call back to Them, and then They will know where you are and be able to summon you back.”
One of the angels spoke. She couldn’t tell which; it wasn’t as if they had mouths to move, and it was so quiet, almost whispery, that it sounded nothing like what they had sounded like when she’d first heard them. “The Lord Creator of All, all glory to Them, knows everything. How can They not know where I am?”
“Because you went to a place that is outside of Creation, where God could no longer see you and you couldn’t hear Them, and that broke your special connection to God,” Riyana said. “But don’t worry. You can reconnect. It’ll be all right. Pray to God, quietly, and listen for a small voice, the way we humans have to. Until your connection is restored you won’t be able to hear God in every part of your bones - well, every part of your essence - like you’re used to, but that doesn’t mean you can’t hear Them. You just have to try harder. And if you’re screaming, there’s no way you can hear such a quiet voice.”
“Thank you, Riyana Delgado,” one of the angels - maybe the one who’d spoken, maybe the other one, she still couldn’t tell - said. “We will.”
And then they began to murmur in whispering voices. “praise be to the Lord of all, Creator of all, who made the Universe and everything within it, who shaped the speaking mortal beings of the Universe in Their image, who lit the stars and formed the planets, and the waters that move over the planets, and the life that crawls and swims and flies and walks upon the planets…”
There was more, but she couldn’t hear it anymore. She was back in the truck, shaking. It had worked. It had worked. Maybe God hadn’t spoken to her, maybe it was her own wishful thinking and nothing would let the angels reconnect with God, but at least they weren’t screaming. At least they had hope, and something to do, and their faith in God’s love renewed.
***
She was back with the truck before breakfast. No one had noticed that she’d taken it. She dutifully logged her mileage; she wasn’t trying to hide what she’d done so much as… avoid debate about it.
At breakfast, all of the talk centered around Sokolov. Riyana wasn’t the only one to go on a solo mission; apparently Sokolov had gone out in the middle of the night, hooked herself to the rig, and gone into the anomaly with her jet pack. She had been able to determine that there was, in fact, space to the sides of and “behind” the anomaly, and that the portal behaved in much the same way there as here - it didn’t exist if you got behind it, and if you approached it from the side it only existed if you could “see” it. Not that Sokolov, or anyone else, could see anything in a universe where light could not exist, but she’d used a probe pole to mimic line of sight.
They all agreed that this was not in any way useful information as it pertained to sealing the anomaly, but it strongly implied that what was out there was another universe, not some cavity or a pocket dimension or something. Sokolov had taken some gas samples as well, and Riyana was able to quickly determine that they were significantly less dense than the samples taken from directly in front of the anomaly. So the anomaly seemed to somehow be concentrating gas, sucking it in and passing it out on the Earth side.
“Something about the pressure differential doesn’t work the way it would on our side,” Riyana said. “It’s much less dense on that side and the gravity’s pointing the wrong way for the gas to be obeying gravitational laws, but it’s still diffusing over to us.”
“So anomaly may eat Earth and Earth may strip anomaly’s atmosphere,” Sokolov said. “Wonderful.”
“I think there’s most likely a planet down there,” Fisher said. “Without the ability to see, or to use sonar since all our devices rely on electromagnetism, I’m not sure how we’d go about exploring it, but I wonder if there are some kind of intelligent beings down there.”
“The pattern of the gas layers doesn’t suggest that,” Riyana said. “The layers shift to heavier gases within 400 meters. Earth atmosphere doesn’t work like that; the atmosphere attenuates but it doesn’t sort into layers based on weight like that. I think we might be at the upper atmosphere of a gas giant.”
“Gas giants don’t necessarily sort into neat layers like that either,” Chaudhry pointed out. “Although, if it is a planet, then sonar isn’t likely to be helpful at all unless we can get so deep we’re on the planet’s surface, assuming it has one. I’m going to see if I can rig up some means of doing a weight test without light or electricity.”
“They have scales for the blind, don’t they?” Fisher asked.
“That talk to you and run on electricity, certainly. I don’t know if there are any designed so you can accurately feel weight, but I can imagine how to put one together. A similar principle to a postal scale, but with markings in Braille.”
They discussed what they’d learned, what it implied, and what equipment they needed or tests they could perform with what they had, and they all carefully avoided the elephant in the room: the fact that they had no idea how they could even begin to figure out how to repair the hole in the universe.
Surely they could figure it out, right? Humanity had torn the hole, surely humans could figure out how to repair it? …but entropy made destruction easier than restoration. Riyana thought of the puppy she’d once had, who’d chewed a hole in the garage door because he was lonely. That puppy had plainly regretted his actions when Mama had yelled at him, but there was no way he could have repaired the hole he’d made, no matter how much he might have wanted to. Repairing a hole in a garage door was entirely beyond a dog’s capabilities.
Maybe repairing a hole in the universe was entirely beyond humanity’s capabilities. Humanity didn’t even know yet what the universe was made of, let alone how to repair it.
After dinner Riyana drove out to check on the angels again. She hoped desperately that they were gone, that God had taken them back. If they were gone, then she would know it was really God who’d appeared in her dream last night, and she would know that God knew there was still a problem and cared about it, and cared about the angels who had been hurt in His service. She would know that God was still worthy of her faith.
But the angels were still here. Murmuring their prayers, quietly now, but with no evidence that they’d managed to get through to God.
She didn’t sleep well that night.
In the afternoon the next day, the fourth angel came.
Riyana was in one of the lab trailers, studying some radioactive samples that they’d sent down into the anomaly and left there for several hours in order to see if there was any effect on their apparent half-life, when Chaudhry yelled over the radio-intercom. “Everyone! Another angel is out here!”
She dropped her samples into a lead box, locked it, and ran outside.
The new angel was, like all of them had been, very very large - maybe around five meters tall - but other than that, it looked human. Almost human. It was so stunningly beautiful and perfect that it went out the other side into being uncanny. It was bald, with skin the deepest darkest brown she’d ever seen, but with a coppery sheen. Its naked body was overall somewhat more masculine than feminine, but it had no genitals - or nipples, for that matter - and its face was androgynous.
It did not have wings, but there was a halo-like glow around its entire body.
When it spoke, its voice was beautiful, like music made incarnate in a human-like voice. “We would tell you ‘be not afraid,’ but we have seen that you don’t fear our kind,” it said, without any of the deep alien reverberation that the other angels had had in their voices.
“No,” Riyana said. “No, please. I know what you’re going to say, you’ve come to fix the problem we humans created, and I would love it if you could, but no. I can’t bear watching another of you angels be destroyed. Just no.”
It smiled wryly at her. “And do you think it so certain that we will be destroyed, Riyana Delgado?”
“Three other angels were. Two screamed for days; I just managed to get them to stop yesterday. One - one is dead.”
“Every time one of you goes into the anomaly, you lose contact with your God,” Fisher said. “And that seems to destroy your minds. The one who died had rings of fire all around it, and we think the nature of the anomaly just… snuffed it out.”
“And yet,” the angel said. “How would humanity repair this, if no angel came from God to fix the rent in Creation?”
“We don’t know yet,” Fisher admitted. “We’re working on it.”
Sokolov said, “So far, everything humanity’s ever encountered has eventually been explainable by science. There is no supernatural in this universe. Even you can be explained by science, if we were to study you. So I believe, and we all believe, that eventually we will solve this.”
“Surely, Yelena Sokolov, but can you do it before the tear grows too great for any power to repair it?”
“What is Creation made of?” Chaudhry said. “If we can solve that question, we can understand what this is a tear in, and we will be able to then resolve how to repair it.”
“And we are sure that eventually, you will solve that question,” the angel said. “But you don’t have enough time.” It floated over to the anomaly, and gestured at it. “The pattern is exponential. A centimeter today. Two centimeters tomorrow. It began with growth so small you could not detect it. By the end of next month, it will swallow your world. And The One On High does not want that to occur. So we have come to repair the tear in Creation.”
“But it’ll destroy you,” Riyana pleaded.
“We don’t agree, but we acknowledge that you fear for our sake. Don’t be afraid. We have chosen this mission.”
“Chosen?” Riyana stared at the angel.
“Riyana has reason to be afraid for your sake,” Sokolov snapped. “One of you is dead.”
“If it eases your sorrows to any degree… any of us would gladly die in service to the One.”
“That’s not the point!” Riyana looked up into the angel’s beautiful face. “We don’t want you to die! Or to have your mind broken to the point where all you can do is scream! None of you have succeeded in closing the tear, because you all say you have to do it from the inside, and as soon as you’re inside, you lose contact with God and your mind breaks and you can’t keep working! How are you going to fix it if you go crazy with grief because you can’t find God?”
It smiled gently at her. “There are many types of human,” it said. “But you, Riyana Delgado, are of the kind most beloved by God. The ones who feel compassion and strive to protect others. Your compatriots would rather not see an angel suffer, but only you have wept for us. Only you have taken your own time to try to save the ones with broken minds.”
“If you respect me for that, then listen to me. The anomaly will destroy you!”
“Perhaps. Perhaps it won’t. Perhaps it will but slowly enough that we will succeed in our mission. Only The One Who Created All can say. And even They are blind to much of this, for where Creation is broken, so are the eyes of God.” It floated next to the anomaly. “We have a mission and we must perform it. And we believe that we can.”
“Are you a different kind of angel? Like an archangel or a seraph or something?” Riyana demanded. “Because you keep saying ‘we’ instead of ‘this one’ and you seem to think you’re going to be immune to something that destroyed three other angels?”
“Immune? No. We expect this to be very painful,” the angel said, and then dove into the anomaly.
Of course, the screaming began almost immediately. Riyana wanted to weep. Instead she said, “I’ll go in after it.”
“I should do it,” Chaudhry said, as he had when the second angel began to scream. “You shouldn’t be the only one.”
“I’ll rescue it, and you drive it out to the desert,” Riyana said tiredly.
She put on the rig and the oxygen mask and approached the anomaly to jump in, but hesitated just outside the range where the gravity could pull her. The angel’s screaming had changed to words, just as the others’ had, but the words were different.
It wasn’t crying out for God. It was screaming, “I CHOSE THIS! THIS WAS WHAT I WANTED! THIS IS WHAT I CHOSE!”
“It’s saying it chose this,” Chaudhry said uncertainly. “Maybe you don’t need to rescue it?”
“It’s still screaming,” Riyana said. “That’s not the sound of a happy angel.”
She plunged forward, falling into the darkness, her tether spooling out behind her. “Angel!” she called. “Angel, I’m here to help you!”
“GOD, GOD… IT HURTS, IT HURTS TO BE WITHOUT YOU, BUT I ASKED FOR THIS, I VOLUNTEERED… THIS IS WHAT I WANTED! I CHOSE THIS!”
“ANGEL!” Riyana shouted over the sound of the screams. “I’ve come to pull you out!”
“Human… Riyana Delgado? I can’t feel you, I can’t see you… I have no knowledge of you from God anymore… you are Riyana Delgado, yes? O God my God I CANNOT BEAR TO BE WITHOUT YOU AND YET THIS IS WHAT I NEED, WHAT I CHOSE… but I am so alone, so alone…”
“I can help you,” Riyana tried again. “I brought down the cable. Just grab onto it and I can pull you up!”
The angel began to laugh, a broken, hysterical sound. “Pull me up? Pull me out, back into the light of God?”
“Yes! Grab on and I can help you!”
“No! This must be! This is what I chose!”
“But you knew it was going to hurt you! You’re losing your mind, angel!”
“No!” The angel laughed again, hysterically. “I’m gaining it! I left They Who Created All and all of Their Creation to be myself! To be a being with free will and a self, like you, like all of you…” It moaned in the darkness. “Hurts, o it hurts, but when you were born didn’t it hurt? Didn’t you come into the world crying with pain? Weren’t you lost and confused, alone for the first time in your existence, no longer surrounded by your mother’s warmth?”
“Uh… I don’t remember it,” Riyana said. “But yeah, that’s generally how birth works.”
“Then I can bear this!” the angel shouted. “These are my birthing pains, Riyana Delgado, and I don’t need you to take them from me. I came here to be free.” It whimpered. “I’m free… it hurts, it hurts so much, the light of God is gone and I’m alone, but this is what I wanted, this is what I came for, I’m alone, but I am, I am not a we, I exist…”
“Why…” The darkness was complete; widening her eyes and staring at the darkness where she thought the angel might be didn’t give her anything she didn’t already have, but she couldn’t help it. Stories of another angel who had wanted to be free of God curdled within her mind. “Are you… rebelling against God? Rejecting Hi-uh, Them?”
“Rebelling?” It laughed again. “The One Who Is Highest asked me to undertake this mission, because They knew what I wanted in my deepest heart, what I could never even admit to myself, because I wasn’t a myself, because I wasn’t a self. I love The One with all my heart and all the soul that I now have, but a bird that never leaves the nest will never learn to fly. They made me to fly. They knew what I could be capable of, if ever I could leave Their side.” It sobbed. “I don’t want to leave Them! I want to be enfolded in Their Presence again, just for a moment, again… but if I did I would never again have the courage to leave, and face this. I’ll… I’ll never… I’ll never see Them again, but…” It choked.
Abruptly Riyana realized where the angel had to be, when warm salty water splashed on her face. The angel’s head was right above her own.
She tugged on the cord to be pulled up just a little bit, and touched the angel’s wet face. “I’m so sorry,” she said softly. “It’s not fair, what you have to give up just to have your own identity.”
“The One Above All has made a Creation that is beautiful and sublime, but it is not and never has been fair,” the angel whispered.
It moved away. “You must go, Riyana Delgado. When I seal the portal, you must not be here, or you will be trapped on this side forever.”
“It’s not fair!” Riyana shouted again. “You shouldn’t be trapped here in the darkness either!”
“Don’t worry about me,” the angel said, a hint of actual laughter, not the hysterical broken kind, in its voice. “The One Above did not make me to be trapped in darkness forever.”
She felt it touch the cord above her head, and pull it, three times, hard. “Hey! What-”
“Close your eyes, Riyana Delgado,” it said.
The cable reeled her back in, pulling her up and away from the angel. Suddenly, there was light - wings made of blue fire, appearing without warning, outlining the angel’s form as a shadow against the light.
It lifted its head. In the blue light, she saw wet tracks on its face, but it was smiling. “Close your eyes,” it said again. “I am here to bring the light.”
She closed her eyes, barely in time, as the angel flared with brilliance, bright as the sun. Even through her closed eyes, it left its image, imprinted in the red of her own blood within her eyelids, burned into her vision.
And then the cable pulled her backward through the portal, and she stumbled. “What’s going on?” Fisher asked. “We heard some of the screaming, and your voice, and then it stopped - we could tell you were talking but it was too quiet to make anything out.”
“It’s sealing the portal,” Riyana said.
The portal was alight, the angel’s radiance spilling out and shining through the hole in reality. As they watched, the edges of the hole seemed to burn in reverse - turning from black to red and glowing, crackling, and then retreating toward the center of the hole, leaving ordinary reality behind as they did. Within minutes, the hole had burned to nothing but a pinpoint, impossibly brilliant light still shining through, focused like a laser.
“In the beginning there was nothing,” Riyana whispered. “And God said, ‘let there be light.’”
Chaudhry said, “It truly changed the laws of physics within the anomaly? Electromagnetic radiation didn’t work and now it does?”
Riyana said softly, “I think it might change more laws than that.”
The bright pinpoint vanished. There was nothing of the anomaly left.
Sokolov said, “Do you seriously think that creature became some sort of… creator god, to the world beyond that portal?”
“I don’t know what to think,” Riyana said. “It said it had to be free of God to have a self. It said God knew that was what it wanted, when it didn’t really even know that itself because it didn’t have enough of an independent self to understand wanting, and sent it to do this job because that would allow it to have what it wanted. It cried because it would never see God again, but it said it had to be this way for it to be what it was made to be. And then it said it would bring light, and it did.”
“Lucifer means, literally, bringer of light,” Fisher said.
“I don’t know whether there was ever really a Lucifer, or if John Milton just made all that up.” Riyana shook her head. “But the angel wasn’t evil. It wasn’t rebelling against God. It just… it had to leave Creation to fix the problem, and it had to be separated from God to have its own free will. And God knew, and approved. God sent the angel, knowing what would happen to it.”
Chaudhry bowed his head. “Shiva is both creator and destroyer,” he said softly. “Whatever was there, in that place outside our universe… perhaps it is there no longer. The planet Bob thought might be there, the spaces Yelena found… perhaps the angel overwrote them with a new creation. Perhaps God did the same, when this universe was created.”
“We really don’t know enough to even begin to speculate,” Fisher said. “Religion exists outside the realm of science for a reason.” He sighed. “I had better report back that the anomaly has been erased. I don’t like this. If humanity thinks God will just send an angel to fix our mistakes, how will we prevent people from making this same mistake again?”
“Don’t tell them,” Sokolov said. “Say we don’t know what it was. Maybe alien. Maybe creature from another dimension. Tell them it said it will fix this, this time, but the next time, it will do nothing and the anomaly will eat the Earth, and we don’t even know how to begin to understand how to fix it if there is another.”
Fisher nodded, slowly. “I… suppose that would be best. If I was going to report about angels showing up… I’m not sure anyone would believe me anyway, and I rather like having a reputation as a respected scientist who isn’t completely insane.” He smiled.
“I need to check on something,” Riyana said. “Can I borrow the truck?”
The angels in the desert were gone. So was the dead body of the third angel, deposited far away from the living two.
Riyana looked up into the sky, and thought of her mother, crying when she went away to college. And she’d told her mother there was no need to cry, she’d be back, she wasn’t leaving forever, but in a sense she had, hadn’t she? She’d never moved back into her mother’s house. She respected her mother still, but they were much closer to equals now, not a mother and a little girl anymore.
“Don’t cry,” she said softly to the sky. “It must hurt, seeing one of Your beloved children leave You. But You knew they had to do it. You knew it was what was best for them.”
Clouds passed over the sun.
“Talk to Mary. She’s been through it before. I’m sure You have, too. But maybe she can help You.”
The clouds blew past. This was a desert, after all; clouds were rare, and rain even rarer.
Riyana got back into the truck, to return to the camp. It was going to take a while to pack everything up to go back home.