Tim Powers - Declare

“Why to you?”

“Because during the war I’d become one of the listed referees in the topics the documents dealt with-Volkov’s samples included aerial photographs of Mount Ararat, with maps of the mountain’s Ahora Gorge indicating the locations of what he called ‘drogue stones,’ which are-”

“Anchors,” said Mammalian.

Hale nodded uncomittally; then he went on, more easily than before, “Or the five points of a pentagram, say, if there’s a ring of these drogue stones, as there appeared to be on Ararat. A containment, an imposed ground state.” The sea breeze from the window was chilly on his sweaty face, but now he felt as though a fever had broken; and he recalled that he had felt this way with Ishmael too, after a few minutes of talking. “It was autumn of ’47 when the neglected Volkov prints were finally relayed to my office in the British Embassy at Al-Kuwait, and by that time I had got to know the local Bedu tribes-I had even traveled with the Mutair during the previous winter, and I had-”

Hale paused and took another sip of the candy-flavored drink. He was always vaguely but specifically humiliated to refer to experiences with the supernatural.

“I had by then met several of the oldest inhabitants of the desert,” he said flatly, not looking at Mammalian. “Do you know the creatures to whom I refer.”

He shivered as he remembered at times cowering before tall sandstorms that boomed out the old rhythmic syllables across the dunes, and remembered at other times actually conversing in cautious, archaic Arabic with depleted or confined members of the unnatural species: by means of radios carried down into wells too deep to receive human broadcasts, or with codes plucked by box canyon winds on Aeolian harps, or in flocks of caged birds that generally died in the stress of conveying vigorous answers to questions. Never surprise them, he had learned; never reason with them.

Mammalian reached across the hotel room desk to squeeze Hale’s shoulder with one big brown hand, and his bearded face was creased in a wincing smile. “They are angels, Charles Garner!” he said earnestly. “Fallen, yes, but they are nevertheless pure spirits, who must take up the physical matter at hand in order to appear to us at all. They are a bigger category of thing than we are, and their proximity must needs diminish and humble us, by comparison.”

Hale sat back in his chair, freeing his shoulder from the other man’s hand; sympathy in this, even companionship, seemed perverse. “I had seen one of them in the summer of ’45,” he said in a resolutely matter-of-fact tone, “in Berlin . And from my wartime studies I knew that the drogue stone that had drawn it there had ultimately come from Mount Ararat in 1883. So Volkov’s long-delayed information did two things for me: it bolstered my suspicions that a colony of djinn existed on Mount Ararat, and-”

“A kingdom,” said Mammalian.

“Very well, a kingdom of djinn. And it let me know that the most-secret agency of the Soviets was planning to go again to the Ahora Gorge on Ararat-perhaps to fetch out another of the creatures, perhaps to establish some diplomatic alliance with the whole tribe.” He smiled. “Perhaps both.”

“It is both,” said Mammalian. He looked away from Hale, out the window at the darkening sky. “And ultimately it will be an alliance with mankind, rather than with this nation or that. You, and even Kim Philby, and even myself, are in fortunate positions in this transcendent work. We will live forever, and we will be like gods.” He blinked several times, and then looked back at Hale. “Your Operation Declare-it was a frustrated attempt to kill the angels on the mountain. How was it intended to work?”

And here we are at last, thought Hale. “It was,” he began, and then he paused, waiting to see if God would provide an interruption; but the wind kept fluttering the curtains, the wire spools rotated steadily, and Mammalian simply stared at him. “Oh well.” He sighed deeply. “I was trying to forcibly impose upon the djinn the experience of death.”

“Yes, of course. But how?”

“It was a refinement of a technique the wartime French DGSS had used to try to kill the one in Berlin. Their scientists in Algiers had cut a cylinder from what was allegedly a Shihab meteorite, one of the spent ‘shooting stars’ that has knocked down and killed a djinn. Our SOE was able to get the specs on the operation, and the meteoric iron the French had used did have a peculiar internal structure: fine straight fissures-something like the Neumann lines that are found in ordinary meteorite cross-sections, and which result from interstellar collisions-but these were all at precise right angles, and the French had concluded that this configuration was a unique result of fatal collision with a djinn. The scientists believed”-how had poor old Cassagnac put it?-“that the iron ‘contained the death of one of these creatures,’ and that firing the death into the Berlin djinn would kill it.”

“We had not known all this,” said Mammalian softly. “We knew only that someone had fired some sort of gun at the angel.”

“And of course the DGSS bullet didn’t affect your angel at all. So I went back and studied the djinn. I read the oldest fragments of the Hezar Efsan, which was the core of the Thousand Nights and One Night; and in the Midian mountains of the Hejaz I found communities of Magians, fire-worshippers, and traded gold and medical-supply whole blood and thermite bombs for the privilege of witnessing their distressing mountain-top liturgies. And I found that in all the very oldest records, djinn are described as being killed by…trivial-seeming things: someone carelessly throwing a date-stone at one of them, or accidentally hitting one with a misaimed fowling arrow, or even by taking a sparrow out of a hidden nest. Eventually I decided that the way to kill a djinn was to change the shape of its animated substance in a particular way.”

“I am glad we stopped you on Ararat fourteen years ago,” said Mammalian, lifting his own glass and draining it in one gulp.

“I decided that a Shihab meteorite would comprise the death of a djinn-not in the stone’s internal structure, but in its melted and rehardened shape. The meteorites are always pitted with round holes, like bubbles, uniform in their dimensions but of all sizes, even down to microscopic; I concluded that the concavities in the surface of the meteorite are the imprint of a djinn’s death, repeated at every possible scale, and that if I could summon the djinn down from the mountain peak to the stone in the gorge, and then explode it in the midst of them, the pieces would be propelled into the substances of the creatures, forcing their stuff to assume the complementary convex shape.”

Hale paused. For the last several seconds he had been hearing a telephone ringing in some nearby room; but Mammalian hadn’t paid any attention to it, and now Hale realized that it had stopped.

“The djinn are supposed to have existed before mankind,” Hale went on, “and in many ways they are a more primitive sort of life, more crude. Their thoughts are kinetic macroscopic events, wind and fire and sandstorms, gross and literal. What the djinn imagine is done: for them to imagine it is to have done it, and for them to be reminded of it is for them to do it again. Their thoughts are things, things in motion, and their memories are literal things too, preserved for potential reference-wedding rings and gold teeth looted from graves, and bones in the sand, and scorch-marks on floors, all ready to spring into renewed activity again at a reminder. To impose-”