Dave Hutchinson: Sleeps With Angels

Getting used to what she still thought of as her superpower took a little longer. Obviously, she had somehow developed a talent for manipulating the nanotechnology which by now must be infesting the Earth the way dust infests some homes. She experimented, learned its uses and limitations, and eventually found that it could be used for healing.

Word of the miracle worker of Eindhoven spread out into the deserted countryside and cities of Europe, and people started to turn up at the nunnery, most with simple illnesses and ailments that could be cured by a straightforward command to machines so small they couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. Others were afflicted with changes caused by the nano itself, and these were more tricky to fix.

From Peter, she knew that there were whole bewildering ecologies of nanotechnology, some industrial, some medical. Some of it powered itself by catalysing atmospheric pollutants; other types got their energy from blood sugar or the electrical potential of muscle fibres. All of it had, apparently, been reproducing unchecked and undirected in the fifteen years since La Silence , and some of it had begun to do unusual things.

Willem was one of those stricken by nano. A second, fully-functioning, head had grown from his waist. It was the head of a young man and it talked, on and on, all the time.

“I wouldn’t mind,” Willem said amiably, “but it just won’t shut up .”

Rae and the nuns discussed Willem. He didn’t know how much they discussed him. The nuns contended that the head was a sentient being and therefore had a soul, so it would be a sin to cure Willem. Rae argued that it was just an artefact of nanotechnology, a thing made by little machines that had spent far too long with no outside commands and had started doing things for themselves.

In the end, Rae prevailed. The nuns were still in awe of her. She healed Willem. The head withered and fell off and then dried up and crumbled. “Thank Christ,” he said. “Now maybe I can get some fucking sleep.”

He didn’t leave, though. He hung around the nunnery, doing odd-jobs for the Sisters. Some of the nuns were afraid of him — he was a spare, hatchet-faced whiplash of a man who made no secret of the fact that he had once been an enforcer for one of Amsterdam’s criminal families — but he refused to leave.

“I have nowhere to go,” he confided to Rae one day, walking in the nunnery’s physic garden. “I might as well make myself useful here.”

“You scare the Sisters, you know,” she told him.

“Rae,” he said with great seriousness, “you have no idea how scary they can be.”

And she laughed, and that was it. They were never intimate, but down the years they became close. He appointed himself her protector and confessor, and when two Polish nuns drove a battered ambulance up to the front door of the nunnery four weeks ago, there was never any question of him not going with her.

The stadium was beautiful. It sat in a kind of urban wasteland right next to the West Coast main line out of King’s Cross Station, all red and white and glass and steel in the morning sunshine. Sergeant Nutt drove them, along with a couple of Gottlieb’s men. He parked at the bottom of the steps and let them out. “That’ll be twenty-nine fifty,” he said, and guffawed.

“Keep the meter running, Sergeant Nutt,” Rae told him.

He laughed. “Will do, Miss,” he said.

Rae looked at Eddy Colorado, standing beside her on the pavement. “Ready?”

He swallowed, nodded.

She looked up at the stadium. The word ‘Emirates’ was painted in colossal red letters on the side of the huge building. “Well, let’s try and find a way in, shall we?”

There were those people who everybody knew by their first names alone, like Elvis and Madonna, and there were those people for whom you only ever used their full name, and Eddy Colorado was one of the latter. Nobody ever called him ‘Eddy’ or even ‘Mr Colorado.’ It was always ‘Eddy Colorado.’ Eddy Red.

He said he was ex-Belgian Special Forces, although he also said he had been Feyenoord’s reserve goalkeeper. They’d found him sitting at the roadside not far from Antwerp, a rucksack the size of a steamer trunk on one side of him and Tommiboy, a huge dirty-white Tisza , a Polish mountain dog, on the other. Tommiboy had not, it turned out, wanted to leave Continental Europe. While they were waiting in Boulogne for Willem to find them a ride across the Channel the dog had just wandered off and never came back. Eddy Colorado had spent a couple of days looking, but Tommiboy was nowhere to be found and eventually they had to move on. For a moment, Rae had thought Eddy Colorado was going to stay in France and try to find his dog, but as the convoy moved out the little Belgian threw his rucksack into one of the cars and climbed in after it. He’d been quiet for a few days after that, but he seemed to snap out of it after they left Folkestone.

Rae had never found out why he wanted to visit London. She’d assumed that once they arrived he would just wander off, like Tommiboy, and they would never see him again. It had never occurred to her that he might need her help.

They passed down corridors and up stairways and down stairways and along more corridors, and finally they came out into the sunshine halfway up a great raked sweep of seating overlooking a football pitch. A small flock of sheep was grazing in the middle of the pitch. Eddy Colorado looked about him and took a deep breath, let it out noisily.

Rae looked at him. “You okay?”

Eddy Colorado thought about it for a while. Finally he said, “My brother-in-law, I love that guy. Great athlete, really great guy. He was Arsenal’s reserve goalkeeper, before La Silence .”

Rae looked around the stadium. “Oh,” she said in a quiet voice.

“My sister died,” he went on. “Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. The club were great, they really were. The best specialists, the best treatment.” He shook his head. “All for nothing. They gave my brother-in-law a leave of absence. He’d just come back when…” He raised his hands gently to the sky. He looked at her. “What happened, Mrs Rae?”

Rae had found that you could tell a lot about a person from what they called the catastrophe that had overtaken Humanity. There were those who called it Rapture , and they were the ones who believed that God had taken His flock home to Paradise and left behind the unbelievers. God’s flock had turned out to be a lot bigger than anyone expected, and being Left Behind was actually rather pleasant.

Then there were those who said Singularity , and mostly they were the ones who believed that one or both of the world’s experimental quantum supercomputers had suddenly achieved sentience, bootstrapped themselves to godhood, and ascended to a higher plane of existence, taking with them the greater proportion of Mankind and a large number of Earth’s animals. Rae had thought about this and could see no substantive difference between it and the Rapture.

Aliens , said others, and Rae had mentally filed them away with the Rapture and Singularity people because they were, at bottom, all the same thing.

There were those who said nano , and they believed that Mankind had suffered a nanotechnological apocalypse, that the tiny machines had turned against the human race and almost destroyed it. That was harder to argue against, because nano was obviously involved somewhere along the line.

Then there had been that man in Eindhoven who believed that the universe had somehow split in two, like a document being copied, but most of the people had stayed in the original.

And there were those who believed that they were really dead, that this was Hell, or at least Purgatory.