They're better known by several more poetic names, including Outer Angels, Angel's Robes, and spinthistles. Or simply angels. On Pluto, they are called BFODs: Big Fucking Orbital Disks. Those rascally Plutonians. Honestly.
Let's settle on angels, shall we?
Their origins are obscure, but it is known they are man-made. The dominant theory is that they are the creation of some demented biohacker with an illegal lab somewhere in the outer planets. When they first showed up there was considerable alarm about them, but so far they have proven harmless. That was about a century ago, maybe a bit longer, so I'd say the case was pretty well closed. Plenty of people would like to know more about them, to be sure they're not up to something, but angels are traditionally hard to study, and these won't sit still any more than the Biblical variety.
Space angels dissolve when you get close to them. Some people think it's a protective reflex, because what's left of them apparently form sporelike structures, trillions of them, of which only a few will survive. Others think it is contact itself that blows them away, like thistledown. Ships can only approach within ten thousand miles or so. A man in a spacesuit can get within maybe a hundred miles. Then they go pop, like soap bubbles. They are made of a mix of animal and vegetable protein. They are transparent, and probably one molecule thick. The little ones are one hundred thousand miles in diameter.
The big ones go up to ten million miles.
That's crazy, of course. There must be angels smaller than one hundred thousand miles across. They can't just spring into being. But even the big ones don't show up on radar, and finding the small ones when we know most of them spend most of their lives above and below the solar plane, where hardly anyone ever goes, is almost impossible. Maybe they breed out there.
If you read up on them, you will find that I've told you just about everything that is known, and you'll notice I've used a lot of maybes.
Two more things. They move about like sailboats, flying before the solar wind and light pressure. And they survive by sweeping up the extremely thin matter between planets. One reason scientists would like to capture one is they suspect angels might be sweeping up magnetic monopoles, whatever those are.
So there is the physical rundown. The reality was more colorful. I saw them when I woke up. I'd say there were fifty or sixty of them, which meant there were probably a lot more since you only see them when they're oriented such that the sun's light is reflected toward you. There is no way to tell how big each one was, or how distant. One moment an angel would seem truly vast and impossibly distant; the next, I'd convinced myself it was the size of a coin, and only inches from my face. There is no sense of scale. But they flashed and fluttered all around me, and I was enchanted by the rainbow of colors. One seemed to fill a quarter of the sky. It was a pale gold, and I could see stars through it.
Then we hit one.
No sound, no impact. No warning at all. One moment I was watching the distant disks, and the next the universe was bisected by an infinite plain of multicolored light.
It was a sight few people have been granted. The only way to touch an angel is to hit it at high speed. If you decelerate, the force of your engines will destroy it long before you get there. But at the speed we were traveling, the ship punched right through its diaphanous body without warning. I don't think the crew had any idea it was in front of them. How would they? It was between us and the sun, and we could only see it after we'd gone through. Not that they could have done anything if they had been aware of it.
At our speed, any object of reasonable size would be there and gone before your eye could register it. Not the angel. There it was, stretching away to infinity, shrinking not at all as I watched.
Its surface was a fractal swirl of every color of the rainbow. It was like a drop of oil on water, or the surface of a soap bubble. Or something like an aurora I once saw on Mars, but frozen.
Except for one spot. That spot was no color at all, and it seemed to be centered in the endless plain. Well, of course it would be. I could never tell if we'd hit the angel dead center or near the edge, but it was so vast that unless we were very near the edge, it just didn't matter. It was endless in all directions.
The spot was like a hole in space, full of blackness, but then I began to see stars at the bottom of it. It seemed to be getting bigger slowly. It finally dawned on me that I was seeing the hole the ship had punched through the surface of the angel, and considering the speed at which we were leaving it behind, the hole was growing at a monstrous rate.
It kept growing for the twenty minutes or so that I watched it, and then, as suddenly as it appeared, the angel was gone. All at once, from edge to edge.
It must have taken a considerable time for the hole to consume the entire angel. What had happened was we had moved far enough that the sun's light no longer reflected from the angel. It was still there, though going away to wherever punctured angels go.
The whole thing made me quite happy for a time. I hardly tasted the awful stuff I was chewing on. But eventually reality intruded again, and I knew it was time to get back to sleep. I really didn't want to, I sort of wanted to skip over what was coming next.
And it was history, after all. Over and done with. In the past.
Oh, poor Sparky.
The Daewoo Caterpillar lurks in cold, airless tunnels far beneath the Lunar surface. Some say the Breathsucker is the worst thing that can happen to you, the worst way you can die. Dodger knew better. Even the Breathsucker was afraid of the Daewoo Caterpillar.
He had encountered the beast twice before. He never got a good look at it, not that he minded. This time he feared he might have to look directly into its dreadful countenance. He was sure it was the last thing his living eyes would see.
Once more Dodger was a toy balloon, hurrying to keep up with his father's headlong progress down the deserted corridor. Deserted? Abandoned, actually. Here and there were piles of steel rods and ceiling panels and other, mysterious building blocks, some under plastic tarps, all of it dusty. It was entirely possible that no one but Dodger and his father had been down this corridor in the last ten years.
Dodger had been down it twice before. He didn't want to get to the end of it again.
His father was holding his hand too tightly. But that was the least of his problems.
He searched for the words that would bring them to a halt.
To be or not to be.
Friends, Romans, countrymen.
Now is the winter of our discontent.
But, soft!
It was useless. He knew all the words, and none would do him any good, because this wasn't about learning, this wasn't the bathtub. This was the Breathsucker, and the Daewoo Caterpillar. This was as bad as it gets.
"Please," he whispered. He tried not to, but the word had just come bubbling from his mouth. He felt a string of spit rolling down his chin, and he wiped at it with his free hand. "Please, what?" his father said. "Please, Father. Please don't."
Those weren't the words; his father kept up his relentless progress toward the end of the corridor. He could see it now, in the widely spaced work lights hanging from strings overhead. The end of the world.
"I'll tell him," he burst out. "I'll tell him how wrong I was. I'll tell Mr. Peppy I'll wear the pants." No reaction. Only a few more yards to go now.
"Let's... let's just go to Mars! Let's forget the whole thing. We have lots of money now. We—"
Suddenly his father's face was before him, filling the whole universe. Those beloved ice-blue eyes. Eyes that flashed now, eyes that glistened with sincerity, eyes that could be bottomless pools of love, eyes you could swim in, warm eyes. But eyes that now betrayed their sadness, that told Dodger he had let his father down. Mad eyes.
John Valentine spoke barely above a whisper.