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Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.
Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here.
It has been five days since my last confession, father, and I have sinned…Except I don’t believe in God or priests, despite the fact Marty does, and my “father” was my mother, too, and s/he flung me out across the universe, a gigantic seed pod insulated against the vacuum, to fall where I would, my decaying orbit bringing me to this distant planet where I gradually grew into an awareness of myself…and of the angels.
Gabriel came to me not long after my last entry. He was unhappy with my surveillance progress. He seemed suspicious of my lies about why I had been unable to extract information from Marty the lighthouse keeper.
“Use the luna moths to occupy her brain. Extract any information directly from the cortex,” he told the mountain that had in fact been in full retreat from any action that might be considered invasive where Marty was concerned.
I told him I would and then Gabriel pointed out another reality nearby. “Don’t worry, Mormeck—we can always put you on another surveillance track.” This mountain had to stop from shuddering at the thought of being separated from Marty.
I knew this other reality—I had surveiled it briefly before. On that alt-Earth, a vast civilization pushed south from the Arctic, sending ahead their floating ghost-whale spirit weapons. These floating ghost-whales glided across the surface of the world and anyone they touched, anyone who came within the influence of their wallowing bodies, faded into the past of another, random reality—ceased to exist in the present. They emitted whale-song as they came, a deceptively sonorous psych-weapon that could break eardrums and brought fear to the invaders. The invaders had come from across the sea and had misjudged everything that could be misjudged. They had occupied territory and torn up the land while dismissing indigenous tech that was not inferior but simply different because it existed across dimensions, requiring only unity of purpose to bring forth. Those who retreated did so for strategic not tactical reasons. Now the invaders fell back in disarray, still unable to grasp the scope of their mistake.
But this Earth also existed in a kind of temporal hiccup where everything kept happening over and over again. The spirit-whale advance would reach a certain point, re-set, and begin again—so many times that now the commanders of the northern armies headed south, and their civilian leaders, knew like an echo of an echo in their brains what was happening—a subconscious message received from the near future—and in a thousand minute ways were intent on altering their decisions to try to effect some sort of change. Gabriel had told me that eventually the hiccup would feel the combined psychic pressure of this and it would end…but not even the angels knew if that reality would then proceed normally or cease to exist.
Sometimes the angels hid their wings and traveled there and let the spirit whales dissolve them into the past as a kind of strange jest or joke. The most adventurous would wait until the very second of the temporal hiccup before diving in, and thus be subject to any number of dangerous and random possibilities. Those who survived their comrades would find and bring back and restore their memories. It may have been meant as some kind of adventure, even some sort of rite of passage, but I thought there was a hint of desperation and sadness to it. That the angels, Gabriel included, really wanted to forget, but had to disguise that impulse as play.
But what did they need to forget? The cruelty of decisions they said they made for the greater good? Something much worse?
I am beginning to think I don’t believe in angels, either.
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Award-winning writer Jeff VanderMeer's final novel in his Ambergris Cycle, Finch, has just been published in the the UK from Atlantic's Corvus imprint. His writer guide Booklife and associated Booklifenow website focus on sustainable creativity. Forthcoming books include The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities and The Steampunk Bible. His short fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Library of America's American Fantastic Tales, and several year's best anthologies. He writes nonfiction for The Washington Post Book World, Omnivoracious, The New York Times Book Review, the B&N Review, and many others. If you like the blog, please consider