Better Angels by Howard V. Hendrix

Author:Howard V. Hendrix
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: science fiction, sci-fi, high tech, space opera, angels
ISBN: 9781434448453
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2012-07-10T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

TIME’S SLOWLY HARDENING AMBER

The Allesseh had begun taking a different tack with the visitors from Earth, it seemed to Jacinta. The consciousness of that great ‘interdimensional node’ had grown distant, aloof. Instead, its now were visited daily by its angels—and only the most “angelic” looking among them. Out of all the winged creatures in its Great Co-operation, only those of hominid or most nearly hominid form were sent to visit the guests.

Initially (and now seemingly forever ago), Jacinta had been struck by how the wings of these creatures had looked less like the traditional human depictions of feathered oars for pushing aside air, than like hovering, sensitive flames in the stream or field of an invisible power. Up close, however, the white of reflection and glow made the wings seem more shining than either fiery or feathery.

Their “angelic” visitors had been happy to demonstrate the intricacy of their wings, which continued seamlessly from visible to invisible to the smallest of submicroscopic scales. Jacinta could understand their construction only as a species of fractal nanotechnology—at once more transcendently beautiful and more mundanely functional than any artist had ever understood angel’s wings to be.

As she had noted upon arrival, the winged ones did not come and go but flashed into and out of existence, through a sort of quantum angelical travel. The glow that surrounded the angelic travelers was a field of force both florescent and fluorescent. The wings were certainly energy collectors—and much more. Life-support and locomotion were the most ordinary of their attributes, however. In their design, the technological seemed to have passed into the theological.

“They are so beautiful,” Jacinta said to Kekchi and Talitha. The three of them watched their strange winged hosts walk among some of the younger tepuians, telempathically answering the young people’s questions, beautiful angels among beautiful children. “Yet there’s something about the way they move in groups—that schooling-fish, flocking bird coordination—that disturbs me.”

Kekchi nodded but did not glance away from the angels.

“Perhaps they have lived too close to the Allesseh for too long,” the Wise One said. “They move like its thoughts, rather than themselves.”

Jacinta thought about that and glanced at Talitha. The other “day”—given how time worked here—the young woman had innocently pointed out that Jacinta’s darkening honey-blond hair was starting to streak with gray. Jacinta noticed then that, here in Allesseh-land, she had seen no mirrors. Perhaps it had taken her so long to notice not only from the strange way time flowed here but also because she hadn’t really expected to find full-length mirrors in a pastoral landscape. Now that she thought about it, however, she realized that all the pools here were kept constantly stirred up by fountains and cascades—never still enough for reflection. When she had tried to order up a mirror via concentrated thought, the Allesseh had seemed purposely obtuse, as if reluctant to produce it. She found that curious at the time, but it was beginning to make more and more sense.

“I think that’s exactly what has happened,” Jacinta said thinking also of what Kekchi had said of the angels.

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