Fearful Symmetries Read Online Free

cryptoarchaeology and out the other side, into a version of the Creation so literally Apocryphal it would’ve gotten them both burnt at the stake just a few hundred years earlier. Because to hear Camberwell tell it, sometimes, when a Creator got very, verrry lonely, It decided to make Itself some friends—after which, needing someplace to put them, It contracted the making of such a place out to creatures themselves made to order: fragments of its own reflected glory haphazardly hammered into vaguely humanesque form, perfectly suited to this one colossal task, and almost nothing else.
    “They made the world, in other words,” Goss said. “All seven of them.”
    “Yeah. ’Cept back then they were still one angel in seven parts—the Voltron angel, I call it. Splitting apart came later on, after the schism.”
    “Lucifer, war in heaven, cast down into hell and yadda yadda. All that. So this is all, what . . . some sort of metaphysical labour dispute?”
    “They wouldn’t think of it that way.”
    “How
do
they think of it?”
    “
Differently
, like every other thing. Look, once the shit hit the cosmic fan, the Seven didn’t stay with God, but they didn’t go with the devil, either—they just went, forced themselves from outside space and time into the universe they’d made, and never looked back. And that was because they wanted something angels are uniquely unqualified for: free will. They wanted to be us.”
    Back to the fast-forward, then, the bend and the warp, till her ridiculously plausible-seeming exposition-dump seemed to come at him from everywhere at once, a perfect storm. Because:
misery’s their meat, see—the honey that draws flies, bi-product of every worst moment of all our brief lives, when people will cry out for anything who’ll listen. That’s when one of the Seven usually shows up, offering help—except the kind of help they come up with’s usually nothing very helpful at all, considering how they just don’t really get the way things
work
for us, even now. And it’s always just one of them at first, ’cause they each blame the other for having made the decision to run, stranding themselves in the here and now, so they don’t want to be anywhere near each other . . . but if you can get ’em all in one place—someplace like here, say, with seven bleeding, suffering vessels left all ready and waiting for ’em—then they’ll be automatically drawn back together, like gravity, a black hole event horizon. They’ll form a vector, and at the middle of that cyclone they’ll become a single angel once again, ready to tear everything they built up right the fuck on back down.
    Words words words, every one more painful than the last. Goss looked at Camberwell as she spoke, straight on, the way he didn’t think he’d ever actually done, previously. She was short and stacked, skin tanned and plentiful, eyes darkish brown shot with a sort of creamier shade, like petrified wood. A barely visible scar quirked through one eyebrow, threading down over the cheekbone beneath to intersect with another at the corner of her mouth, keloid raised in their wake like a negative-image beauty mark, a reversed dimple.
    Examined this way, at close quarters, he found he liked the look of her, suddenly and sharply—and for some reason, that mainly made him angry.
    “This is a fairy tale,” he heard himself tell her, with what seemed like over-the-top emphasis. “I’m sitting here in the dark, letting you spout some . . . Catholic campfire story about angel-traps, free will, fuckin’ misery vectors. . . .” A quick head-shake, firm enough to hurt. “None of it’s true.”
    “Yeah, okay, you want to play it that way.”
    “If I
want
—?”
    Here she turned on
him,
abruptly equal-fierce, clearing her throat to hork a contemptuous wad out on the ground between them, like she was making a point. “Look, you think I give a runny jack-shit if you believe me or not?
I know what I know
.