Paul gives Imelda a guilty glance. The girl is crying silently, her face sticky with tears. Occasionally she lets out a small piteous snivel. Traumatized though she is, he still cannot grant her the comfort of oblivion. There is one question he still has to ask. ‘I don’t like being forced to do what’s right,’ Paul says. ‘Not this.’
‘Right,’ Ziggy says. He slides the dead foetus into a flash furnace, eradicating the last trace of the angel’s attempt to subvert their world.
Paul leans over Imelda. ‘One final thing,’ he says, ‘and this will all be over.’
Fear squeezes yet more tears from her eyes.
‘Did you know you were pregnant?’
The distraught girl opens her mouth and cries out in anguish. ‘Yes,’ she sobs.
Studying her face, Paul knows she is telling the truth. There will be no need to use drugs or other stronger methods of enquiry. ‘Thank you,’ he says. At last he activates the sleep inducer, and her weary eyes flutter shut.
‘We’ll need a replacement foetus,’ Paul says. ‘I can wipe tonight’s memories from her, but if we take away that entire week she spent screwing Erik and the angel she’s going to know something happened; that kind of gap can’t be covered up. A doctor will find our tampering.’
‘Not a problem,’ Ziggy says. ‘We’ve got both of them, I can fertilize one of her eggs and re-implant before morning. She’ll still have lover boy’s baby. There’ll be nothing for anybody to be suspicious about.’
‘Apart from their new friend vanishing.’
Ziggy shrugs. ‘Kids their age, it’s hardly unusual. They all have a dozen relationships a year, more if they can. Erik was desperate to bring more girls back to the angel’s apartment. You said he was always going on about it; he wanted to bed Imelda’s sister for a start. Horny little devil.’
‘Yeah,’ Paul says. ‘It’s about time Erik learned he has responsibilities.’
Erik Horovi was a perfect opportunity for the angel. Quite a good-looking lad, but still mildly introverted, which left him susceptible to any girl who befriended him. The angel shifted over into full female mode and spent half a day talking to Erik, who was first nervous, then delighted that such a beauty could show any interest in him. He screwed up his courage and asked her out for a date, trying desperately to disguise his surprise when she readily said yes.
The beer and mild aerosol narcotics legitimately available in Kuhmo’s bars had a big effect on Erik’s inexperienced bloodstream, making him pleasantly inebriated early on in the evening. He talked more easily than he really should have about the Viatak sisters, especially Imelda, the eldest, and how he’d worshipped her from afar. But his alluringly gorgeous new date didn’t seem to mind talking about another girl, she was, she said with an eager smile, very liberal when it came to her own sexuality. The haze of subtle chemicals in Erik’s head did nothing to dampen his arousal as they both smiled at each other knowingly.
Imelda met the angel the very next day; its memory of the event comprised a confused montage of faces flitting across the main quad in the college campus, bursts of conversations, scent of the nearby roseyew bushes that decorated the quad. The scent of flowers in full bloom was a strong one leading Paul onward through the memories until he was somehow walking through a city of soaring towers and delightful parks with vegetation that was sweetly reminiscent of Kuhmo’s public gardens. Silver-white regrav capsules slipped silently overhead as the pink-tinged sun shone at the apex of a cloudless purple sky. It was Teleba, one of the earliest planets to be settled, now nestling right at the heart of the Central Commonwealth. A world of Higher culture, where there were no urban areas decaying like the entirety of Kuhmo, no economic hardship or market fluctuations to perturb the population, no crime, for little was forbidden or withheld — except for the angel’s own purpose, but even that was open to its peers. It strode along a boulevard lined by semiorganic treesculptures whose prismatic ever-shifting leaves were modelled on New York’s unique ma-hon tree. Information and thoughts from the superdense planetary cybersphere whirled into its mind like particles of a multicoloured snowstorm to be modified or answered, its own questions and suggestions administered into the pervasive flow of knowledge, arguing its ideal and ethic to those who showed an interest. Agreement and disagreement swirled around it as it crossed a plaza with a great fountain in the centre. It felt invigorated by the debate, its own resolution hardening.
The enlightened informed process was the democratic entitlement of all Highers. People didn’t have to strive, with their material requirements supplied by Neumann cybernetics and their bodies supported by biononics they could devote themselves to their uniqueness. Human thought was the pinnacle of terrestrial evolution, Earth’s most profound success. Now each mind was yoked into the Commonwealth unisphere, collecting, arranging, and distributing information. Whole districts of the city were given over to institutes that delved into science and art, multiplying into thousands of sub-disciplines. Their practitioners communed in mental harmony. Higher culture was reaching for the Divine.
Paul had to wrench his thoughts away from the guileful desire Trojan. Even in its crippled state the angel’s brain was dangerous. There were many elaborate traps that remained empowered amid the waning neurones, quite capable of ensnaring the unwary. He pushed his own mind back into the memories of Imelda and Erik.
There were long lazy evenings spent in the angel’s secluded apartment. Bottles and aerosols were imbibed slowly, their contents complemented by a chemical designed to neutralize any standard female contraception troche. The lights were dimmed, the lovers’ thoughts sluggish and contented, bodies inflamed. Paul experienced Erik in congress, his youthful body straining hard against the angel. There were loud, near-savage cries of joy as he climaxed successfully.
Deep inside the angel’s complicated sexual organs Erik’s spermatozoa were injected with a biononic organelle.
Imelda’s smiling, trusting face as she rolled across the jellmattress underneath the now very male angel, unruly hair spreading across the soft pillows. Her sharp gasp of delight at the impalement. Wicked curl of her mouth at the arousal, and piercing cry of fulfilment. A fulfilment greater than she knew as the modified semen was released inside her.
Under the angel’s tutelage the eager youngsters experimented with strenuous and exciting new positions night after night. Bodies writhed against it, granting each other every request that was whispered or shouted before granting its single wish. Each time it focused their arousal and ecstasy to one purpose, the creation of its beloved changeling.
Imelda arrives home in the dead of night after staggering some unknown distance along the street outside. The house recognizes her and opens the front door. She has clearly had a lively evening, her movements lack any real co-ordination; she squints at most objects unable to perceive what they are; her electronic emissions are chaotic, nonsensical. Every now and then she giggles for no reason. At the bottom of the stairs her legs fold gracelessly under her, and she crumples into a heap. She begins snoring.
This is how her parents find her in the morning. Imelda groans in protest as they rouse her; she has a hangover which is surely terminal. Her parents fuss, and issue a mild chastisement about the state she is in; but they are tolerant liberals, and understand the impulses which fire all adolescents. They are not worried, after all, this is the Greater Commonwealth, citizens are safe at night even in dear old worn-down Kuhmo. Imelda is helped upstairs to her bed, given water and some vitamins, and left to sleep off her night of youthful excess.
When she wakes up again, around midday, she quickly calls Erik, who himself is still recovering from his narcotic sojourn. Their questions are almost identical: ‘What did we do?’ As are their answers: ‘I don’t remember.’
‘I think we met up in the Pathfinder,’ Imelda says uncertainly. ‘I remember going there, but afterwards I don’t know…’
Erik jumps on this, relieved that one of them has some memory of the evening. ‘We must have struck a bad aerosol,’ he claims immediately.
‘Yeah right,’ Imelda agrees, even though the voice of doubt is murmuring away inside her head. But accepting that easy explanation is so much more comfortable than examining ideas that may have unpleasant outcomes. ‘You
