Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction

Calcium

40.08

Angels of the Apocalypse

I was forging bones for a certain Eastern European dictator when the

Angels of the Apocalypse found me. Vlad, as I'll call him (that wasn't

his name), had a serious need for bones. Working from old dental and

medical records, I sculpted skulls and partial skeletons from liquid

calcium, to create atrocity sites that would discredit his political

opposition. Discredit them so thoroughly that no one would object when he

had them exterminated.

The Angels of the Apocalypse, however, had loftier goals. One of them?an

obese man, running to sweat?explained it to me.

"We need proof," he said. "Proof that the good Lord in His infinite

wisdom has not seen fit to lead us to."

"You need lies."

"In the service of Truth! We're not asking you to create anything

contrary to what we know to be true."

Three million dollars later, I was in Los Angeles, putting the finishing

touches on a tyrannosaur skeleton with stone spear points in his

vertebrae and a hominid skeleton impaled on his teeth. Out on Como Bluff,

a team of creationist geologists were prepping the site where they would

"find" it.

"Doesn't it bother you, employing lies and deceit like this?" I asked,

when the sweaty guy came to take delivery. "I doubt the founder of your

religion would approve."

"We have no choice! Darwinism must be disproved. Soon! The End Times are

upon us. We have only a few years before all life ends in total and

universal nuclear warfare."

I smiled. "That's a little extreme, don't you think? The Soviet Union is

dead. Who's supposed to start this nuclear war of yours? Pakistan? Korea?"

The fat man smiled back at me with the smug assuredness of the righteous.

"Oh, don't worry about that. We have agents at Los Alamos working on it

at this very minute."