Greg Bear: Queen of Angels

In her own private activities she was equally spare. She practiced the five power centering disciplines including War Dance where self vied with self to pour out physical motion. This she did in a small empty room with white foam walls like a black calligraphic stroke against naked canvas.

Exercises finished, Mary put on her uniform carefully, sealing vital points in monomol mesh armor, drawing up support boots that kept her legs from getting tired during long waits. Her rank carried no weapons in daytoday. She was not expected to engage in regular combat. Physical violence in the USA had declined markedly in the past fifteen years. The therapied did not seek violence.

Her dark eyes were calm quiet yet neither empty nor unexpressive. Her transformed voice was deep yet sweetly feminine, powerful yet motherly. She could sing lullabies or growl a pd threat.

Quiet, centered, tall, night colored Mary Choy had everything she wanted but her past. Its residue lay embalmed in the corner of a single drawer in her bedroom dresser, a box of old family photographs, disks and memory cubes.

She stood by the dresser feeling a certain dread clear instinct about Theodora and fingered the drawer. Bent to stroke Loafer, her redstriped white cat. It rubbed against her boots, maroon eyes sage and patient, purring deep in its throat, the single living link to her girlhood; Mary’s parents had given it to her when she graduated from high school.

“Connection with Theodora Ferrero,” the manager said.

“Put me on vid,” Mary said. “I’ll take it in the living room.” She walked quickly to the phone, bent momentarily to adjust a wrinkle in the monomol, straightened, composed. “Hello, Theo. Months silent. Good to hear from you!”

Mary could not see her friend. Ferrero’s vid was turned off. “Yeah, thanks for the callback.” Voice tense. “I thought you’d like to know.”

“Did you make it?” Mary asked, certain Theodora had gotten the grade.

“Passed over,” Ferrero said. “Three times now, last chance. Recommended for further therapy.”

Mary looked surprised and sympathetic. “Tell me about it. Let me see you, Honey; my vid’s on.”

“I know,” Ferrero said. “I’m not taking it.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“I don’t want to see you, Mary. I don’t want to be reminded.”

“You’re pulling me dark, Theo. What happened?”

“I didn’t make it. That’s all and enough, don’t you think?”

“Theo, I’ve been through a rough. This big homicide, eight down. I’m a bit slow and I’m about to go back on duty.”

“I’m sorry to spill this now, but you have an edge over me and I refuse to compete, Mary.”

“What edge?”

“You’re a transform. You’re exotic and protected. The pd doesn’t dare tell you to go back for therapy or you cry on the temp and the feds investigate. They can’t touch you.”

“That’s nonsense, Theo.” Mary felt the burn spreading through her face; she could not show a blush but she could feel it.

“I don’t think so, Mary, and right now I’m on a pinker of just cutting you off.”

“Theo, I sympathize, but don’t take it out on me. We went through academy. You mean a lot to me. What did they want you to—”

“I don’t have to tell you that! You’re a fapping alien, Mary. I don’t have you on vid because I don’t want to see you. I don’t even want to talk to you. You’ve made it impossible for me to roll the grade. Enjoy your peak, Honey. ” The phone chimed cutoff.

Mary stood in silence before the small gray table that held the phone, gripping its edge. She looked down on her smooth black fingers, straightened them flexed them again, drew back. The tension in Theodora had been clear months before; still Mary had not expected this. A part of her said It’s obvious why the pd asked for more therapy and another part parried with a deeper Why.

To avoid such a question she crossed the living room and switched on LitVid. The nets were full of the AXIS messages finally being received after crossing the space between the stars; Mary stood before sharp simulations of the probe going into orbit around its chosen world. She watched without hearing, barely seeing, conflicting messages slowly crossing her own inner space.

Why did she do her transform and choose such an exotic design in the first place; to get advantage, or to match inner her with an outer appearance that had never satisfied?

Mary’s parents her brother and sister Mother Father had accepted the transform redandwhite cat yet not the later transform daughter. She had not heard from any of them in four years.

Now Theodora, whom she might once have called her best friend in a life of few such friendships.

She returned to the drawer, opened it and removed one envelope containing a single palm sized disk. Only when she had involved herself in some particular unpleasantness and needed to gain perspective did she go over her mementoes. Slipping the disk into her slate she called up picture number four thousand and twenty-one. In color but not in three d: still vid of a twenty year old woman height one hundred sixty-five centimeters skin pale face round and pleasant with a smile that seemed from this distance acquiescing. The young woman wore a mid-thirties green and blue patch suit showing one side of abdomen left shoulder most of right leg; a singularly unattractive fashion. Behind the young woman a white wood frame house in what was now jag five of the shade, Culver City. At the young woman’s feet a hunched Loafer thinner by two kilos. The original Mary Choy at twenty. Ambitious yet quiet; intelligent yet reserved. Working quietly in her scholastic specialty forensic research to build up sufficient temp credit to finance a transform against future salary.

Dark eyes narrow, lips taut, she returned the disk to the envelope.

Madhouse Earth such a treat no choice to be born here. We are all like in madness. By grace our madness likes us.

Standing, gaunt tense Richard Fettle leaned into the curve, straight knees knocking the bent knees of seated passengers. He still trembled, shocked by this morning’s anomaly.

Three stations ago the round little white autobus had filled with citizens of the shade young and old, a medieval assortment of widely different norms brothers and sisters common victims of the future. The bus did not board any more.

Light gilded them all secondhand through the goggling windows. Five suns glowed in the slow twisting gear meshing arms of the three towers of East Comb One, generous light bequeathed to the groundlings. + No good mood this day. Roughed and not deserving. Good tale though. Madame’s group heedful for five minutes. Some attention. Mind off Goldsmith. What he did. Did he? Man is the poet who kills, woman the angel who eats. What he said. Never wrote it down. Goldsmith is the poet who kills. Bringing me into it. Jesus I am a peaceful man.

The bus rolled behind a eucalyptus screen. The five suns leaf sputtered and were lost. He pulled a cord and the bus eased curbside at the gate to the upland valley estate of Madame de Roche.

He stepped down. The little bus hummed away on the patched unslaved asphalt lane. Richard stood on the root-heaved sidewalk head bowed eyes half closed composing and sorting. + How to tell it. Maximum purgation. Awful thing. They all knew him.

Red haired Madame de Roche, sixty, thought people a delightful phenomenon worth cultivating. She fed and entertained her faithful, provided beds and bathrooms, listened when they were unhappy, and offered all her faithful might need but the shared regard of equals, for she was not one of them. She might live in the shade but she was not of the shadows. Nor was she of the combs. She claimed to despise that “Rabble of coldhearted perfectionists.”