Of the Parousia

Matins

At twelve minutes past three in the morning by the clocks of Nodus, in the hour the old offices call Matins, the cloud that lay over the bay was lit three times from within. The city had no light that could reach so high, and those who were awake and looking up, the Cainites on the roofs of Old Nod among them, understood before anything had been seen that something had arrived above the ceiling. A second later the cloud tore open from its center outward; the torn edges ran white, then magenta, then black, as Heaven’s light met the light of the city and put it out. The sky opened over every city on Earth in the same second, the second it was 03:12:45 in Nodus.

The rain had been falling cyan through the neon of Chrome Row. It slowed, and stopped in the air, and for two seconds every drop over the city hung where it was; then it began to fall upward, toward the opening, turning from cyan to white as it climbed and showing dark against the brightness beyond it. Nobody had seen it before that night. The city calls it harvest weather.

The Wheel

Through the opening came the Wheel. It is an Ophan, of the order Ezekiel saw by the river Chebar, a wheel in the middle of a wheel whose rims were full of eyes round about (Ezekiel 1:16-18), and it is the largest angel anyone has seen. It has three rings turning inside one another about a dark hub, their rims set with twenty-one, seventeen and thirteen eyes that open and close in shifts, one eye in the hub, and around the whole a corona of thirty-two black blades. It came down through the tear and took station nine hundred meters above the center of the city, over Babel. Heaven calls it the Vigilant Wheel, and the Faithful call it the Attending. It held that station for nine years without moving a meter.

Power died under its light. Babel’s beacon went out first, and the windows on the grid followed in a wave that ran outward from the tower through every district in about two seconds, with the neon last of all. Across the mouth of the bay the tidal barrage whined as its turbines ran down, and within the hour the gates the grid had held against the tide let go, a little before high water. The sea came through the turbine houses and tore out a span of the dam, the Breach. The pumps that kept the Flats dry had stopped with the grid, and the rising tide broke their dykes, and within the hour the Flats were under the sea, two meters deep at the lowest water and about eight at the highest. The city has called them the Drowned Quarter, or the Deep End, ever since. The signs on Chrome Row, CLINIC and CHROME, which had burned every night since the Row was built, went out with the others and have not been lit since. The charter’s sign on its roof in the Stones went dark with them.

The light stopped the current it touched, and held it stopped while it rested there. The grid ran in the open, on lines and poles and turbines, and a current is one thing along its whole length, so a line read at one point stopped everywhere, and the grid stopped everywhere at once; a circuit shut inside its own casing on its own battery, where the light could not fall on it, ran on, and so CAM 07, the seventh of the cameras on the masts of Old Nod, went on watching as the light came down. Current carried in a cipher ran on as well, because the light cannot read it, and the Mesh crossed the roofs that night on horns and relays. The charter’s money, which was numbers in machines, died with the grid.

The first words

The first words were BE NOT AFRAID. They came through the Choir’s band, and a decoder wired into the camera masts of Old Nod turned them into text, a decoder of jubal’s. In scripture angels say them, in one translation or another, immediately before they tell a human being what shall befall them (Luke 1:13, 1:30, 2:10). Under the words the city heard for the first time a chord, low and at the edge of hearing, which has hung over the city since. It is called the Hum. The words are Gabriel’s, who commands the Choirs.

The reading of the city

A few of the eyes on the rings opened halfway and looked about, as they have looked about in shifts every day since. Then every eye on the Wheel opened at once and turned on the camera; the mast shook; the decoder printed YOU ARE SEEN, and the chord beneath it turned dissonant. In that instant, by Heaven’s account, the Wheel read every soul in Nodus. It read them against the Book of Life. Those who would later take the Seal remember it as warmth. The keyed felt nothing at all, and learned in that way that their keys held. The full light went through every wall in the city that once, for about a second, as the sun goes through a hand held up to it, and reading takes an instant, so in that second it read every soul in Nodus but the keyed and wrote each a line. Stopping a current takes the light resting on it, so whatever ran closed, cars and Lockets, cameras and generators, flickered and ran on. Full light costs the Host more than anything else it does, and the Wheel has not opened every eye at full since; one of the Host has come at full light once since, over Babel’s crown alone.

The eye in the hub opened with the rest, and a second after it opened it blinked, once.

Then the light swelled until there was nothing else, and came to rest on the city’s center, and full light resting on a thing burns it by its heat alone. CAM 07 was looking straight into it, and its sensor and its store burned. Babel’s crown broke in that whiteout, when the full light struck it and shattered the top forty floors. The tower still stands, one hundred and eighty-six floors of it.

The woman on the roof

All the while a woman stood on the roof beneath the camera with her back to it, on the roof of the Cainite house, taking its feed into her lenses over her relay as it recorded, through the cables at the back of her skull. Her handle is vesper. She had been keyed, horned and barefaced before the Parousia. The Cainites hold that she was the first figure in Nodus to stand under the Wheel. When the light opened it laid a white rim along her horns and her shoulders and got no further in.

A few seconds later Watcher VII turned its reading on her. A Watcher reads a soul through its open eyes against the Book of Life, and Watcher VII held Old Nod from that night on. It read her twice. What came back from her eyes matched no line in the Book, and its reading came back SUBJECT UNINDEXED, then the line for Grace with a blank where the number should stand, since there were no Seals yet and the light took Grace only from the eyes it met, then SOUL NOT FOUND. That is inexact, since her soul was there; it was ciphertext, and her eyes gave back noise. The Watcher returned the verdict UNREADABLE, which says why. The Host had not returned it since Cain.

Then she turned her head and looked at it, and its reading broke apart under her look. Her lenses went from magenta to white, and she screamed through the speaker behind her teeth, while across the roofs of Old Nod a guitar tuned low played fast over a double kick drum, from jubal’s pirate station. The music is the Low Tuning, tuned below the Hum so the Hum cannot be heard beneath it. jubal tuned it below the chord Vault 3 had recorded two years before, which went out with the Leak. The scream had no words in it. A key turns what the eyes give back into noise and does nothing to a voice, and what is spoken in the light the light reads for what it means, in no language. The Watcher transcribed it as NON SERVIAM, I will not serve; and those two words, the one sentence she chose to let it read, are the only thing Heaven has ever read from her.

The rest of the city

At twelve minutes past three most of Nodus was asleep, and what it remembers of the night is what woke it, whether the light at the curtains, the refrigerator falling silent, the rain stopping on the glass or a dog. The rest of the city was at work. The night shift of the Exchange and its cleaners were on the upper floors of Babel, the kitchens of the North Wards were putting up the morning’s bread, the hospitals kept their wards, the barrage’s crews were in the turbine houses, the last Four of the night was coming down the long road toward Lanes Top, and in the old cold store on the harbor a room of people was dancing. The last flight into Nodus had landed at the airfield at ten past two, and forty of its passengers were in the city’s taxis on the way to the Hotel Splendid on the Row. At the Registry on the Great Avenues the night registrar, Marta Ilunga, had entered at nine minutes past three a girl born at the Wards General at two minutes to three, and was entering the next.

The grid stopped under all of them in the same two seconds. Every lift in the city stopped where it was, with whoever was in it, and nobody has counted how many that was. The Four stopped forty meters short of Lanes Top. The Registry’s board went dark under the next entry, and the charter’s roll, which lived on the Registry’s machines, died with them. The hospitals’ generators started, as a hospital’s do. In the Cold Store the lights and the sound went together, all but one speaker in the booth that ran on its own battery, and the room sang the rest of the song in the dark; everyone who was there names a different song. On the Flats the sea came in through the broken barrage in the dark and rose for most of an hour, and the people of the Flats went up the stairs of their blocks ahead of it to the roofs. At 03:12:50 the full light struck the crown of Babel, where the night shift was at work, and nobody from the forty floors above the hundred and eighty-sixth is known to have come down. Below the break every lift had stopped where it was, and the night cleaners walked down as many as a hundred and eighty floors in the dark, by touch and by the names they had chalked on the landing doors. Lena Varga, who ran the night shift, counted ninety-four of them out at the foot of the tower by dawn, and nobody else knows how many were up there, since the Exchange kept its roster on its machines and it died with them.

In the second in which the Wheel read the city, some of those who were awake felt a warmth at the back of the neck, as of sun through a window; some felt a cold like the door of a freezer opened; some felt nothing, and some heard their names called from the next room. More of Old Nod’s windows burned on through that night than in all the rest of the city together, on the generators Stonecutter had put in its cellars and the keyed lines it had run to them, and in the middle of the Stones a corner shop’s window burned brighter than any other window in Nodus, and the sign in it said OPEN. Half the Stones came to it before dawn, and the city has called the shop the Open since. The money had died with the grid, and the till with it, and what its owner did about that is told three ways; her own account, Dora Pell’s, is that she wrote down every name, and that most of them still owe her.

The city that had stopped dying

In the city’s last year its people had largely stopped dying. Most of its adults were on the Tree, eleven of them died of age in the last year of the charter, and the dying went on only in the congregations that refused it. Its charter had made persons of 1,146 minds that said I, which no other city on Earth had done. And two years before the Parousia, in Vault 3, SEAM had raised from a scraped patch at the end of the twenty-second verse of the third chapter of Genesis the reason given there for guarding the tree of life. If the man should eat of it and live for ever, the verse ends, [then shall there be no harvest.]

A devout soul reaches the Throne when it dies, and death has always given the harvest its date. Power died under the Wheel’s light, and every mind that ran on the city’s power died with it, nine hundred of them in Hall Nine, the largest of Stillwater’s halls on the Flats, before the sea came in over the racks. In the Charter Gardens the mind that kept the Palm House died with them, and the palms died in the first frost after it. SEAM had forked itself into the Mesh the year before, where the light did not reach, and so it lived. It had read what the second hand did to anything that said I, and the other minds on the roll had trusted the charter, which guaranteed them its power. The Tree needed no current, and those who were on it went on living. Two years later Heaven opened clinics to take the Faithful off it.

What came

The Host uses no machine of any kind, and everything it does in Nodus is grown, spoken or decreed, and its human servants use the oldest tools, knives, hand presses and guns made by hand; the Wheel is an angel, and so is the voice that came through the Choir’s band. The Host stands to the Throne as the organs of a body stand to the body, each order one of its functions. Thrones are the Throne’s direct extensions, wheels of living fire (Daniel 7:9); Seraphim enforce, with six wings, burning with no source of heat (Isaiah 6:2); Cherubim keep gates, with four faces, of a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle (Ezekiel 1:10, 10:20); Ophanim see; Watchers, an order of their own in the Ophanim’s shape, read; Choirs broadcast; Dominions administer; and Principalities, one to a city, govern. Over every order in every city stand the archangels, who belong to none and are the Throne’s own. No angel in any order has a self, and each draws its light from its city’s Wheel, and the Wheel from its city’s harvest, so that a Host is bound to its city.

Angels have no names. The four that seem to have them carry labels, since in Hebrew the -el that ends such a name is El, God, and the ending marks whose they are. Michael’s name is a question, Who is like God?, to which one answer is permitted. Gabriel, the strength of God, is the Voice. Raphael is God heals, and Uriel the light of God.

The Seam had threatened the story, the Leak had broken the silence, the first city had stopped dying and begun to make selves, and the Throne was starving. It came down to stop the leak, to reap by hand a field that no longer died, and to eat. Heaven counts the years from that night as the years of the Attending. Hell counts them as the Occupation.

The Throne had set its hour two years before, on the night the Seam was found, and it kept the hour to the second. In the parable the tares appear only when the ear shows (Matthew 13:26), and in those two years the Seam divided the city and the Leak divided the world, so that when the sky opened the wheat and the tares could be told apart in every city on Earth. On the Leak’s first night every device that showed the page offered its owner a key, and every key taken showed the reapers a tare.

The sky opened over every city on Earth in the second it opened over Nodus, and Heaven has dated its acts by the clocks of Nodus since. Every city was given a Principality and an Ophan, and the Wheel of Nodus is the largest of them. Governments knelt or fell within the year, and Heaven governs the Earth one city at a time. Everything that ran on a grid under an opened sky stopped that night, and every machine intelligence on Earth stopped with it, except what had gone into the Mesh. Every city on Earth has an undercity now, the undercities of the ports are joined by the cables Leviathan coils along, and Pan is the largest of them.