31.11

 

And it remembers her. In flashes of the mantle’s memory, Roisin sees a land crowded with fruits and animals and in plants that she barely recognises, yet knows they can be cut and roasted for food, or that can be harvested and ground up for bread, and in this lush kingdom, guarded by four angels at the cardinal points, stand, or rather lie, two bipedal, furless animals; the first mating pair of a new species they have been instructed to call ‘man,’ although the larger of the two is clearly female. One the Creator has called Adam and the other, Lilith, though they seem to be arguing about something until Adam turns on his heel and walks away. Outside the circular walls of the garden lies a wasteland, it soils thin as bread over the underlying bedrock. No animals grazed here; no Bedouin, no good, sweet natured Christian men (for this was long before the christ came), but hordes of Palestinians, Egyptians, Sumerians… All starving as she trod among them, performing the Creator’s will and his vision of a utopia.

Another flash; Adam and a second woman fleeing from the walled garden, scattering seeds from loincloths and an angel giving them a flaming sword for protection against the men and wild beasts outside the cultivated habitat. She remembers riding ahead of them, bringing the winds and sands to cover those tribes who would give them succour, and help them to forget the anger of the Creator in a rebirth of life with a new civilisation.

She remembers the shape she once held; the resonance of her soul as she served the Creator’s will. She remembers the way the mantle carried her across the lands, the seas, the skies; the way she and the mantle were one in mind, soul and body. She remembers that the mantle is part of her, and she is part of it. She remembers how she carried it — not as punishment, but as a mark of the highest honour.

Roisin feels it reaching for her. It is neither demanding now pleading, just inviting; a warm house after a cold walk from the university; a cool shower after the heat of a seventh-floor studio; the embrace of strong arms after a bad tutorial.

It is inviting her to join with it once more, to ride the skies as one being. To see the Creator’s Will be borne aloft once again across the holdings of man and beast, fish and bird, weakening souls for the caress of her brother’s tender kindnesses.

 She flinches. “I don’t want to be that again.”

Astaroth’s expression softens. “You wouldn’t have to be. Not if that’s not what you want.”

Roisin frowns, glancing up at Steve in the doorway, who seems as perplexed as she is. “What does that mean?”

Astaroth places a hand on her chest. It is neither warm nor cold, but has the potential to be both at once, and could have the pressure of the vacuum of space or ten miles below the ocean’s surface. Just his touch alone could bring the ecstasy of a hundred orgasms or the agony of a thousand bone-deep cuts. “You are unwritten now. Unanchored. Outside the script written for you before the dawn of time.” He nods toward the mantle. “If you take it, it will not make you what you were. It will become what you are now.”

Roisin’s breath catches as her brow furrows, the concept of Creation without a Creator to guide it, malleable under the will of those able to shape it to a new ideal. “The mantle would change?”

Astaroth smiles, shaking his head. “No. It would evolve. The choice before you is not between the power to do His will and the powerlessness to do otherwise, but the ability to stop being buffeted by the winds of those with greater power, and instead to be the immoveable object they rail against without result.”

Roisin looks at the mantle again. It pulses; once, twice, like a heartbeat. Like her heartbeat.

Steve steps forward from the relative safety of the doorway, his voice shaking. “You don’t have to do this, Roisin. You tried once already and were almost destroyed. There’s no need to prove yourself to the worlds about us.”

Paul nods. “You don’t owe the universe anything. It owes you, for fuck’s sake. Eugenic manipulation? That sounds like something out of a fascist playbook.”

Roisin closes her eyes as she realises something: They’re right, the universe owes her the life she could have led without this knowledge.