archangel

by A. J. Rocca

He fell out of space down, down through the depths and into the shape of an eel. He wriggled his way into a secret reef nourished by four ocean currents, and there amongst corals and algaes of every hue he found the first two Mectopians. Their play was innocent; his adversary had gifted the pair with eight limbs apiece, and they juggled rosy-hued decapods back and forth. He lured off the female of the pair and led her to the oysters she was commanded never to pick. He told her that if she were but to pry open a shell and take its opalescent pearls, she would become wise like God, dividing the waters between saline and pure.

Lucifer fled out of the eel and broke the surface, titanic and winged, a halo of spray exploding in his wake. He ascended to the upper atmosphere and found his ally Urania waiting on the precipice of the void. Together they watched the four currents collapse and the waters of Mectopos’ far north turn ice. Urania congratulated him on his strike against their shared foe, and she told him of a new world she’d espied freshly seeded with life. She drew her wand to mark stars on the way to that far distant orb, and Lucifer spread his wings to catch the burning light off the nearby sun. He pushed off into the void.

Then a million years of solitude.

On Pseudopsaria, he became a creeping fungus. He stretched his mycelia through the soft soil and attached to the roots of the tallest angiosperm in the forest, white blossoms bursting open over her breadth. For a growing season, he whispered into her dreams of rain and wind. He told her that if she would but stretch out her vines into that sunspot forbidden her, she would become like God, growing to spread her canopy in the sky and measuring where falls light and shade.

Lucifer watched from a nearby asteroid as the planet’s firmament was stripped bare, leaving the Pseudopsars exposed to the raking of a blue-hot sun. In his flush of victory, however, a seed of humiliation: Lucifer had to wait for Urania to divine his next course through the stars. Before his fall, he was the brightest of the angels, and he could ride his own rays across the universe. Now he was divested, and all light was turned repellent to him; they’d made his own name a mockery. Out of this curse he’d devised a new way between worlds, but he was blind without Urania.

Finally she stepped forth from the void to congratulate him and plot his next mission. Urania told of a gas giant in a neighboring galaxy whose fourth moon was just beginning to crawl, and she marked out three crucial stars he could use to reach it. Lucifer caught a blast off Pseudopsaria’s savage blue sun, and he boomed out across the cosmos along the arc of her azoth-tipped wand.

Then another couple eons alone.

For the Citarions, he was a jelly, for the desert Katyushans a hop-mouse. From orb to orb he went, and every time he found his victims undefended. The empyrean host was always one step behind him. Lucifer sneered at the thought of fiery-faced cherubim arriving to defend fallen planets, nothing to do but shake their spears in useless fury at the ones they’d come to save. Cherished images such as these helped preserve him against the void. Space and time wore down on his senses like pumice stone, but Lucifer refused to let his revenge be eroded; his hell burned dark and hot within him as the adversary’s stars swept him across ancient night.

For the Takians, a sentient cloud. For the Zyanides, a throng of heartworms. He continued his slow streak of victories against the adversary. But between victories, the universe changed. He saw distant nebulae give birth to bright daughters. He watched icy-tailed comets come travel with him a ways before slugging back home to orbit. He felt thorny webs of radio waves get tangled in his wings and threaten to blow him off course. For a while as he approached the new galaxy, he tracked with interest a dying star. He watched it grow great and red, but it never exploded. It just grew older and colder and dimmer, and Lucifer felt a terrible kinship. The hell within him swelled and swelled, and despite his efforts, finally began to cool. With that abatement came questions: How had the Empyrean host never caught up to him? Why had the adversary allowed him to escape and cry havoc across the cosmos? Why had he not yet plucked the traitor Urania from her hideaway within the void?

It was on approach to Phi that Lucifer made his decision. He reached the edge of the star system, but he did not proceed to the topaz-colored planet in the fifth orbit that Urania had promised him. Instead, he alighted atop an icy planetesimal caught in the system’s outmost orbit. He folded his wings and waited. He sat for a few revolutions around Phi and watched her seven daughters dance—aphelion to perihelion, conjunction to opposition to conjunction again.

At last, he felt her presence behind him.

“Hail, Lucifer!”

Lucifer did not turn his gaze from the dance.

“Why are you sitting here?” Urania asked. “Have you lost your way?”

“Do you remember that third or fourth world you showed me to?” Lucifer asked. “That fleck of blue and green where I became the snake?”

“One of your canniest tactics,” said Urania.

“I should have been a bee.”

“A bee?”

“I saw them flitting through the garden,” said Lucifer. “I always wondered why he saw it fit to put a sting to them; what needs a bee to sting when she’s the best servant to the gardener? Maybe she gets some nectar, but who gets the fruit once it falls?”

Lucifer turned a lopsided smile to Urania, appreciating fully her dark, flowing gown of aether and night. “So come on. Which one are you?”

Urania did not answer. She rapped the end of her fire-tipped wand across her palm.

“Is it Raphael? Gabriel?”  Lucifer asked.

The fire from the wand burned bright and spread to consume the lady; out stepped Michael hefting sword and spear. His apeiron-forged panoply was heaven-bright, brighter than Phi, maybe even as bright as Lucifer himself was once. The near presence of such powerful light sizzled on the fallen angel’s skin and nearly blew him off the planetesimal, but he refused to surrender his seat.

“Ah.” Lucifer folded tight his wings and went back to brooding over the star system. The planetesimal thread its way through half an orbit in silence.

“Well?” Michael finally asked. Lucifer smirked, but kept silent. The commander of the Empyrean host was action incarnate, and it was not in his nature to wait. He hefted his sword, and Lucifer still remembered its edge from so many eons ago, but he felt no fear. What could Michael hope to do? Force him to sin?

Lucifer tortured his brother with a few more silent orbits around Phi. He meant to keep him there another thousand revolutions at least, but his swollen, cool-burning heart betrayed him.

“How did you feel when he ordered you to help me?” Lucifer asked.

“It’s not our place to question him.”

“And I’m sure you never did, but what did you feel? You must have felt something over all this time we’ve had together. And all this space.” Lucifer gestured his arms across the cosmic expanse, its constellations dotted with worlds they’d taught to suffer. “What was it like? You the devil’s handmaiden, showing me to new worlds to pollinate with sin.”

Michael’s light grew bright hot, and Lucifer savored the pain of it. Of all the angels the adversary could have set to this task, Michael was the cruelest choice. He was made like his sword: straight edged, simple.

“You present them a choice,” said Michael.

“And yet they keep making the wrong one. Again and again. Every single one of them,” Lucifer said. “Some choice.”

Michael gripped his shield and spear, and cracks ran all through the icy planetesimal. “Satan! You will not snare me with your lies. You did not before, and you will not now.”

“I’m not trying to ensnare you, brother. I’m trying to give you a gift.”

Lucifer rose from his perch and went to face Michael directly. It was all he could do to bear it. The light coming off Michael was a fierce gale ripping out across space.

“I’m going to free you from this hated task you’ve been yoked with,” Lucifer said. He could feel Michael’s rage in every filament of his being. “Go back to heaven and tell him I’m done pollinating his worlds. Tell him if he wants someone to work his garden, then he can do it himself.”

Lucifer spread his wings, and Michael’s light shot him off the planetesimal and straight out of Phi’s system. He flipped over and caught his balance, ready to resume his sojourn through the cosmos. For the first time in his existence, Lucifer did not know where he was going. He would avoid the topaz world hanging fifth out from Phi, but that left only a neat infinity of possibilities and the whole tide of time to turn them over: he could skate the edge of event horizons, dance upon the rings of gas giants, dive down to pluck molten gold from collapsing novae.

All Lucifer knew for certain was that he did not want to follow the adversary’s direction any longer. He could ride his brother’s fury for a while, but eventually he’d have to learn to catch the light off other stars.

~

Bio:

A.J. Rocca is a writer and English teacher from Chicago. He specialized in the study of speculative fiction while pursuing his M.A., and now he writes both SFF criticism as well as his own fiction. Some common themes in his writing include music, space, and cats. His work can be found collected at his website: ajrocca.com.

Philosophy Note:

This story was inspired by John Milton’s Paradise Lost and the hints that Milton throws in throughout the poem that God may have created other inhabited worlds besides Earth. In particular, I was inspired by a scene in Book III of the poem: after bumbling through space, Satan finally reaches Earth and looks down at it, and he’s so seized by envy that he averts his gaze to instead look around at the constellations, perhaps even briefly considering going to one of those other possible worlds the poet hints at. Of course Satan eventually continues on his way to precipitate the fall of man, but the briefly averted gaze to me is itself fascinating. What if Satan actually left for one of those other worlds, abandoning his role as the fiend and the long train of biblical history laid out before him? Can we even imagine an alternative trajectory for a character like that, and if not, then how are either Satan or his victims in any way possessing of free will? For my essay on this subject, see https://reactormag.com/john-milton-the-space-poet-early-traces-of-science-fiction-in-paradise-lost/