Greg Bear - Queen of Angels

“Ah, fry that!” Yermak spat, leaping away from the table and knocking his chair back with a clatter. “Fap me my green and knock my words, I knew he had it in him, the fart.” Raspberry. “Say I to concern.”

“Sit down,” Jacob Welsh ordered. Yermak righted his chair and sat eyeshifting, nose aimed like a dog under his trainer’s whistle. “Pardon my friend’s enthusiasm but he has an overstated point.”

“I will admit,” Ultrima said, “Goldsmith has not charmed much lately. Nor shown his face.”

“He killed them,” Richard said. “He was one of us and he killed them. Are we not concerned for our own?”

“Not one of me. I am one ,” Yermak said, face contorted. “May I quote the fart, ‘I do not aspire. I be.’”

“You’ve read and memorized,” Ultrima accused with a glow smile.

“We have all,” Yermak said at Welsh’s nod. “I regret my callow. Richard, we admire your concern and age but it hardly matters what Goldsmith has done. He abandoned us even while he walked here, left us behind for the adulation of the combs, and no shady can ever respect him again, not even you.”

“He was a friend,” Richard said.

“He was a whore,” Welsh said, demonstrating again that the unseen rope between himself and Yermak carried more than physical tension.

Richard looked around the small group. Two who had not spoken yet, sisters Elayne and Sandra Sandhurst, seemed content to sip their tea and listen warily. Richard saw in Welsh’s and Yermak’s eyes something he should have sensed already; here was anger that had not existed before he brought the news. Here was fear that their connection with Goldsmith would bring them trouble from the pd and the city from where the power really lay in this land—the combs, the therapied.

+ Madame de Roche said it wouldn’t be but the pd may not share her opinion. I have already been accused. Perhaps again? Sharp and clear: quicksand harassment isolation pain. I’ve avoided these pictures since Gina and Dione.

+ I’ve been asleep fifteen years.

The sharp awareness faded and he closed his eyes for a moment bowing his head. “He was a friend,” Richard repeated.

“Your friend,” Yermak observed with false calm.

“Richard is our friend,” Elayne Sandhurst said.

“Of course,” Yermak agreed irritated they might believe he thought otherwise. He glanced reprovingly at Richard.

+ Thinks I bring discord weaken his place. Their places here are all so weak. They feel helpless.

“My apologies,” Richard said.

“Apologizing for what?” Jacob Welsh asked abruptly. “We’re certainly not sorry you told us. We are never sorry to have our opinions confirmed.”

Sandra Sandhurst lowered her knitting to her lap and drew her lips together. +Norn in judgment; only valid judgment the cutting of our threads.

“He is a world famous writer, and we all knew him. He was good to all of us.”

Yermak raspberried again. “He slummed, condescended.”

Elayne said, “He did not slum.”

Yermak stood up and knocked his chair down again.

“Such drama,” Elayne said. She turned away disdainfully.

“Fap you,” Yermak said blithely. Jacob Welsh leaned his head back and stretched.

“We’ve had enough, my friend,” he warned Yermak with barely concealed approval. “Two upheavals are quite enough.”

“I will not sit again not with these,” Yermak said.

“Time to leave then.” Welsh stood. “Your news is useful, Richard, and I suppose that’s enough. Your loyalty is admirable but we do not share it.”

“I don’t think it’s loyalty,” Richard said. “If he’s murdered he should be therapied—”

“But we don’t therapy even our worst enemies, Richard,” Yermak intoned, leaning over him. “I wouldn’t put anybody through that. Better he were dead. Better still if he had never come near us.”

Richard nodded not in agreement but to wish them off.

“Don’t forget the reading,” Elayne Sandhurst said cheerily. “Bring your best.”

“I don’t write anymore,” Yermak said, sneering.

“Then read something from your dark past,” Ultrima suggested. When Welsh and Yermak had left she turned to Richard. “Honestly. Such children. We’ve never really liked them here…they are so close, so weird.”

“Like brothers or lovers yet they are neither,” Elayne Sandhurst said.

“They need help,” Sandra suggested and at that all but Richard laughed. Help was not something the untherapied sought. Help was a kind of death to those who cherished their flaws.

+ We should all live in shade not in the sun. Like insects.

My first name means god is with us. My last name means worker in gold. I choose words instead; they are much more valuable for being so common, and so misused and misunderstood. As for having god with me; I don’t think so somehow.

Elevating alongside South Comb Two Mary Choy watched the great mirrored arms rotate to focus the low sixteen sun on Pasadena. She took an external expressway, spending one of her municipal emergency transit credits to get a car to herself.

Exploring the Colonel Sir John Yardley connection would be perilous. She knew enough of federal politics to see the Janus face the United States turned toward Yardley. Embraced by Raphkind, openly shunned now but in the closet perhaps still silky. Yardley might be federally useful and ultimately LAPD answered to the federals. The department was more than half funded by the National Public Defense. To go any further without departmental approval would not be politic. Mary wanted that approval before the day was over.

Los Angeles Public Defense Command occupied a three tier block on the favored west side of South Comb Two. The long beanpole of the expressway, in proportion very like a taut stretched human hair, with no visible means of support but its own ten meter hexagonal cross section, carried three express elevators. These stopped at levels chosen only by their passengers, unlike most of the internal arteries of elevators and transports within the comb.

She took her seat in the carefully cushioned chair and endured the rapid acceleration. In the moments before the door opened as the elevator slowed she felt as if she were floating. This was only slightly less unpleasant than the weight.

The west side looked out across the old communities of Inglewood Culver City and Santa Monica, now covered with great reddish brown slashes as the old city was leveled and new combs encroached upon shadow. In the max-dense hills of Santa Monica layer upon layer of what some netwit thirty years before had called insulas grew like cave wall crystals, dazzling white at noon but now blue gray in the onset of evening. Here and in the stabilized deep sunk pads of Malibu was where the notyetchosen waited for vacancies within the combs. Vacancies were becoming more and more rare as rejuvenators plied their controversial trade, turning good citizens into multicentenarian eloi.

Mary Choy was too young to attract a rejuvenator’s pitch but she had gone on eloi busts and seen the interiors of many platinum comb domiciles.

She withdrew from the elevator and walked purposefully into the lobby. From the acrophobic view of the city to this large inner directed self contained cavern, horizontal slit windows at hip-level affording little relief, was always a small shock to her. Mary felt it as an abrupt discontinuity like a change of key or even scale in music. Arbeiters moved purposefully on narrow paths near the walls leaving the center open for foot traffic. A central circular desk occupied by two young men in green office uniforms jutted from the floor. Overhead an apse sparkled with sheets and curling ribbons of peaceful light in the cathedral quiet.