Angelmaker

by Nick Harkaway

“Primate,” Joe tells it, waggling his hands. “Tool user. Opposable thumbs.” The Parasite glowers, and stalks out. Having thus inaugurated Victory Over The Cat Day, it is in the nature of his world that he should immediately be overtaken on the ladder of mammalian supremacy by a dog.

“It makes angels out of men.” And when Joe does not immediately look as if he understands, Sholt continues. “It is an arrow, fired at the temples of Moloch and Mammon. It makes the world better, just by being. Isn’t that wonderful?”

Love is more than tidy.

In front of her is a rather grim Victorian manor or farm—if your idea of farming is waking at ten and walking along the hedges saying things like “I say, Jock, the wheat looks very fine this year, well done!”

It really is too bad: this Mr. Hitler seems quite the wrong sort, although I understand he is vegetarian and so not getting his protein.

Wherever he goes, in whatever ridiculous foreign court he walks, he walks in the warm shadow of Henry V and Queen Victoria, in the palm of the hand of Shakespeare, and let the heathen take heed.

“Ambassadors should avoid makin’ war and nuns ain’t supposed to drink; fishermen are silent, not to mention ministers are selfless and judges are incorruptible. Surprisin’ how often all of us slip up, though.”

It’s as if he’s telling a very dirty joke. All of us over the age of consent here, eh? Don’t mind a bit of engineering, do we?

But that was the other thing you got used to in S2:A—the person who came along and took over when things were bad was you.

She just knew, as meat knows salt.

Joe is about to explain that any item which can remain functional for forty years by the seaside, which is made furthermore of gold, and which is purportedly an engine of revolutionary change constructed on the principles of arcane mathematics, ought to be immune to lint.

It’s not horror-movie screaming, designed to rattle the chandelier. It’s something else entirely, a mammalian noise. Alarm. Alert. There are tigers. I am taken. I am down.

“I need something, Tam. It’s not anything big.” Tam glowers. “You’re just like him. He used to say that just before he said something like ‘Tam, old friend, it seems to me the Countess of Collywobble has too many diamonds and we have too few, so get your crampons, we’re off to scale the north face of Mount Collywobble Hall!’

He has fended off a gregarious Dutch couple intent on sharing their bag of sunflower seeds and pine kernels (the husband addressed him with a generous bellow of “Would you like to eat my nuts?”)