"My name is Cam, and you summoned me. Hilariously accidentally, it would seem. Do you need a demon for anything, as long as I'm here?"

"A demon? I should warn you," Hank's demeanor changes, "I am the most powerful magician in existence at the moment. The charlatan Merlin will admit I once removed a demon that he pronounced impossible."

"...I would be very impressed with this feat of hocus-pocus if I didn't know how summoning worked. If you just want to get rid of me, go ahead, I'll go home and catch up on my reading and try not to be too mopey about how not even accidental non-binding summoners appreciate my commitment to nonviolence."

"A commitment to what? You're the first person I've met in years who didn't take violence as a divinely ordained fact of life. Until I told them otherwise, anyway. Are you sure you're a demon?"

"Are the wings not a dead giveaway? And the tail? Where is this, anyway?"

"...What year is this?" Cam asks.

"536 or thereabouts. Were you expecting something else?"

"And, just to clarify, are you a historical reenactor such that actually if I hop out the window and fly for a while I will find skyscrapers and spaceports and such?"

"Skyscrapers? No, not yet I'm afraid; I haven't got that far. How do know about those, anyway? And what's a spaceport?"

"...The year I was expecting," says Cam, "would be 2159."

"Grand. And now you have time-travel summoning powers, aren't you proud of yourself. How did you get to 536 or thereabouts?"

"Okay. Seems likely to be an improvement, considering, I think they had the rudiments of germ theory and so on by 1895, etcetera. So do you need a demon for anything? ...You don't know what demons are for, do you. Demons make stuff. Arbitrary stuff. Including stuff from 2159."

"Make...stuff...? I have factories if that would help."

Cam smiles. And conjures up a tortilla chip loaded with guacamole, which he eats. "No factories required."

"Who's in trouble?"

"The Republic of England. All fifty-three of its members. They can probably defend themselves indefinitely, but they're under siege and could use a miracle or two."

"Definitely don't be a demon. I thought I had cured the superstition from these people, but the church has its tentacles on them tight, or else the lot of them are cowards. Anything that even makes them think the word 'demon' and they'll break out the torches and pitchforks."

"And torches and pitchforks could mildly inconvenience me. Okay. Have you got someplace to burn these or whatever once I've taken 'em off?" he asks, waggling a wing. "I don't think I'd better try just layering feathers on top, easier to copy angel wings wholesale. I could do without entirely, I guess, but my balance is for crap sans wings."

"This entire castle is vacant; we can dispose of them easily and no-one will know. Getting them off sounds like the hard part."

"Nah. A little messy, though. Hmmm, probably no one in 536 expects angels to wear jeans, either."

"You could wear anything you like and they'd believe whatever they're told. But I suppose a robe and halo would reinforce the message."

"Right. Unfortunately, I can't do the proper halo the way angels really do, because they do it by changing bits of their skulls into magnets to make the halos float, and I'd be looking at major surgery. Wings, I can do." He reaches over his shoulders, hooks his fingers into thin wires that are suddenly there, and yanks. The wings flop to the floor. Cam does the same thing to his tail, then starts unpeeling spontaneously-appeared gauze and tape and the blood thereon from his back.

"Good for it. Right, big white feathery wings sound good to you?" inquires Cam, removing further gauze from the location of his former tail and dropping that down the chute too. "I'm thinking swan-style feathers."

"Do those enable you to fly? In my magician persona I get often asked about flight, but alas it is more than thirteen centuries away."

"Yeah, I can fly - I might be a little clumsy with the new wings at first, like if you were learning to walk digitigrade, but I should be able to get off the ground. I can't hover, though."

"Then you might not even have to tell people you're an angel for them to believe it."

"You don't think I should throw in, oh, warm cedar-scented wind prefacing my approach, and a choral background, and descend from dramatically sculpted clouds?"

"I can't imagine why not. Can you do all those things?"

"Sure. Air is a thing, so I can make it, complete with little cedar particles. Teeny little music players are things, so I can make 'em. Clouds are things, so I can make 'em, although I can't get rid of preexisting clouds, so this might be an activity for a sunny day if we want to do it properly."

"And then we can tell them... what? That we come to usher in the Millennium with no mortal king? The Church would object to that even in the face of a whole choir of angels."

"I'm admittedly not up on theology, it has not been a focus and I imagine it's changed some in sixteen hundred years. So we should compose me a speech, or I suppose I can just land and introduce all of the recalcitrant types to the modern equivalent of - have you got chloroform when you're from?"

"Yes, but we usually use ether for anesthetic purposes. It's safer, and if we wanted the knights dead we could let them walk into our electric fence."

"Yes, I said 'modern equivalent of', I do not know when chloroform fell out of common use except that it was well before I began peering at medical textbooks. I can knock people out nice and safe, is my point. I will also be fine if they decide to shoot directly at me or something."

"I think I would like a general rundown of what you have been up to since your head injury."

"Sorry, I missed the part of the story where you married some lady from Camelot...? Whatever, I suppose that's relatively unimportant. Have you considered faking your death?"

"Yes, but if I stay dead then the country goes back to sixth-century feudalism. I don't know if the abolition of slavery would survive the next king's reign, let alone the idea of representation. And if I don't stay dead, then nearly everyone would try to remedy that."

"Well, you could go to France and industrially revolutionize France, if England is so keen on being a backwater. I would be happy to periodically steal large quantities of slaves for manumission overseas."

"The Church recognizes borders, but supersedes them when convenient. My adversary of Canterbury would have no qualms about asking his colleagues to extend the Interdict."

"Okay, I'll put you and your family in a little spaceship and we can go industrially revolutionize the Chinese."

"That would work, if you can magic some translations. But I would not abandon these people so unless there is no other choice."

"I can... sort of magic translations, in the sense that when I'm summoned I get my summoner's languages. I don't have sixth century Chinese, but I have a few dialects of modern and could muddle along, and if we can talk a Chinese person into re-summoning me I'll be all set. That does of course assume that in spite of the time travel slash alternate universe business I can be dismissed and resummoned as normal. But sure, you're entrenched, we can try the angelic proclamation business. Is England Catholic right now? Should I go appear to the Pope?"

"Okay. And, contrary to the spirit of Biblical angels alas, I should probably be presenting a consistent message."

"Was Arthur really that great? I mean, we have Arthurian legends where I'm from, but they're mostly about how his wife cheated on him, he overreacted, he may or may not have slept with his sister, and generally England had to wait around for the Magna Carta before things could be called progressive."

"Speaking of the best one's century can produce," says Cam, looking Hank over, "I'm sort of curious about what 1895 spat out. I'm tentatively impressed, especially when you didn't blink much about the idea of industrializing China, but I feel like maybe I want to quiz you a little bit before taking your advice as read."

"Quiz about what, exactly? Because if it comes to it I'm still trying to look past the fact that you're a demon who thinks Biblical angels are inconsistent and I'm a Presbyterian."

"Yes, you're being impressively non-racist about the demon thing, but I assure you my species has no effect on my moral tendencies. So, as a for instance, in your Republic, can women vote and hold office?"

"Good for you. Hmmm, current events I'm most recently familiar with are things I couldn't possibly expect you to have an informed opinion on. Pan-Lunar independence movement and such. Enh. Okay, full speed ahead, but I'm not sure I want to appear as an angel to people who think angels are angelic and tell 'em that King Arthur was the best of the best. It's possible I should in fact read the entire Bible before attempting to impersonate an actually-angelic-angel. ...Do they even have the King James version yet? I know Hebrew but not Aramaic."

"I expect kings to object more if you try to rub their tummies and be much worse at catching mice. You know, in my time, there still exists a British monarchy. It has only ceremonial power and the ability to make journalists squeal at high pitch; meanwhile the actual governing is accomplished principally by the parliament and the European Union."

"It doesn't go away in the next two and a half centuries? I was hoping it would. But at least if it's making people squeal at high pitch and not governing, it's still only doing things that that other aristocracy would be able to handle."

"There's an argument to be made that it's good because it distracts people from having stupid opinions about the actual business of legislature, if they can squeal about kings and queens and princes and princesses. But that's a little beside the point, if Arthur's dead and there's not a decent successor stashed in a broom cupboard." Cam experiments with various ways of folding his wings and finds one he likes. "Look, generally speaking, I am disinclined to lying. Playing merry hell with implications, sprouting feathers and descending from dramatic cloud formations sillhouetted by burning magnesium and announcing myself with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir crooning in Latin in surround sound, telling people that industrial revolutions are lovely and they should want one, yes; claiming Arthur was totally great you guys, you're going to have to sell me harder on that one."

"Where do people think you came from, anyway?"

"As far as they know, I'm just a magician. Better at it than Merlin or Morgana, but nothing that upsets their world view."

"Could Merlin or Morgana do anything? For that matter, can you? Where I'm from humans can do little teeny 'parlor tricks' - legit magic, just useless and slow and clumsy, you want to summon a daeva for a big job."

"I'm proud to say I have no magic at all. Nothing but hard work and cleverness. Other magicians would love to have those parlor tricks, though. I haven't seen any of them do anything that couldn't be sleight of hand, but a reputation in this sort of thing is surprisingly easy to keep up."

"Okay. Let's see, other reasons to end the monarchy. Last king they got turned up a little too prematurely dead? There is reason to believe that the winner of a prolonged succession battle at this time would serve his people poorly?"

"Categorical opposition to one man being set above another by reason of his birth?"

"That wouldn't be very consistent with the divine right thing, but I'm happy to proclaim it if you think it'll go down easy."

"Since I am a demon disguised as an angel, my ability to produce evidence to the contrary is limited, although I'm not exorciseable and won't burn on exposure to crosses or holy water or anything. And genuine angels just have slightly different magical powers and aesthetics and reputations, that's all, so summoning one won't help."

"Yes, but it would be unfortunate if they arrived at a technically correct conclusion through bad theology."

"Yeah. It's a pity Arthur probably wasn't a summoner or you could try summoning him. Some daeva are dead summoners. Little fair warning in case it happens to you in spite of alternate universe time travel shenanigans."

"Well, I was always expecting an eternal reward, and abilities like that don't sound too bad. But it's a long way off yet, I hope."

"Even if you turn into an angel there's no sign of God," warns Cam. "According to the angels to whom I have spoken."

"You'll forgive me if I don't take you at your word. Even if you are much less evil than I would have expected."

"Sure. Maybe when this Camelot business has settled down I'll show you how to summon a bona fide angel and you can ask them. But we do keep getting distracted from the topic of whether there's anything less patently false I can say to justify the end of monarchy than 'yaaaaay Arthur'."

"Well, that might be a little awkward in a thousand years. Incidentally, if you're operating on my afterlife system instead of having your own alternate universe one, Arthur's in Limbo."

"There are other words for the place, but the English one I use is Limbo. Angels live in Heaven, demons live in Hell, fairies live in Fairyland, and dead humans who never summoned any of the above loiter in Limbo and don't get any of the cool magic powers apart from indestructibility. Speaking of indestructibility, I'm immortal, and I might want to still be wandering around periodically saying things in a thousand years, if dismissal and resummoning works all right."

"I don't know if it will work as it should from an alternate universe. But usually I'll be dismissed if you die, or will me away for about a minute, and you can draw this," he produces a piece of paper, "finish the circle part of it last, in any material, on the floor, with space for me to stand in, to get me back."

"I imagine testing it is a bad idea if summoning you back might not work."

"Yes, but if there's some sort of emergency - for instance, if you are about to die and I am for some reason very far away, but you have access to a piece of charcoal, a floor, and two minutes, you may as well try to dismiss and resummon me to where I can help with the 'about to die' thing."

"Actually, the longer I think about this the more I'm wondering why democracy is such a great plan anyway. But I'm betting you'd stop being so admirably nonracist about my demonhood if I expressed an interest in kinghood and I did just tell you how to get rid of me."

"Suppose you did become king, and convinced everyone to accept you. They would then believe that you were infallibly placed over them because it is your rightful place. They would not be able to comprehend the idea that you might be wrong or that they might ever have a duty to disobey you or that they might have any rights against whatever you choose to do to them. I have no doubt that you would be better than whatever other king they might suffer under, but it would nevertheless be a grave blow against equality."

"You really don't have a very high opinion of these people, do you. Democracy's very good at some things, but - not at all things. I suppose it's a reasonable start, anyway, if it comes down to it after Earth is nice and industrial I'll fly off and terraform Mars and take immigrants with a slightly more sophisticated understanding of how monarchy actually works... Right, fine, I will angel it up and declare an end to kings of England. I'll be the Emperor of Mars if I get that far."

"I think I have an advantage over anybody trying to run England in your time, given that I don't have to worry about economic scarcity of necessities and foreigners will not be able to visit unless they manage to get ahold of one of the spaceships I personally manufacture. So I should be able to do at least that well."

"Mmm - can I just say 'until Arthur returns' rather than specifying an estimated time of revival?"

"I don't see why not. After all, the point is merely to sound like we're not undermining divine right of kings."

"Sure. Am I going to have a drastic language barrier? I know only a tiny bit of Old English and that only because I got summoned by a linguistics department one time."

"To be honest I have no idea why I can speak with people here. But I can, so you more likely than not can as well."

"I'm not certain that's a safe assumption. Anybody I can chat with first as a test? Or something written down so I can see how well I can read it?"

"Okay, so I can probably talk to them but I should cut way down on the casual register and the idiom."

"Probably. My speech is largely my own, but I am widely known to be strange and don't need to seem conventionally credible. The same would apply to an apparent angel. The only danger is that your speech has more in common with mine than with theirs."

"I know Latin, I could throw in Latin here and there."

"Definitely a good idea when issuing revelations to the Church; they use it for all their theology. For everyone else, it can't hurt as long as you also speak in the vernacular."

"Okay. I suspect I ought to have a prepared speech, here, but one thing I have not done in my hundred and seventy-two years is attempt to co-write public speaking notes, how shall we go about that?"

"Yeah, what's up with that, Hell's really nice, it's only that it's tacky." He reads the paper. "Do I loiter and take questions or fly away at the end?"

"I suppose it should depend on whether people seem to understand the message. Angels taking questions would be unusual, but not unheard-of. Not that anyone outside the Church has been doing much hearing-of anyway."

"Okay. This is going to be a serious challenge to my self-restraint, but I think I can do it. Next question is timing and location."

"That's easy enough. My fifty-odd Republicans are fortified against siege in a certain cave, and we need not go to the knights of Britain if we know where they are coming to us. My information is dated from three days ago, and estimates that the army could reach them within the week. Any time in the next few days we can tell tens of thousands of knights at a stroke."

"So shall we go visit your friends now?"

"Can do - how good are the roads or lack thereof? Little spaceship is probably more noticeable than a motorcycle."

"The roads are barely suitable for proper carriages or bicycles. If your motor-vehicles need better roads than those, we're better off trying to get a train running."

"Nah, I can make it off-road quality - I could also just make us a little traincar and fuel it by magic, though, if it runs to a convenient place."

"The cave we're going to is near a station. It'll be fortified, though, and they might have destroyed part of the track. There are almost certainly mines on the more obvious roads, too."

"...Aaaand how big of a deal is it if somebody sees a small metal object flying through the air between here and there?"

"I could also just give you a set of wings, but it takes a while to learn to fly, people at point B would notice, and you're a human so you won't heal clean when they come off even if I make 'em so it doesn't hurt like I did my own. I'm leaning spaceship. I'll be basically fine if we hit a mine, but if you get hurt I can't necessarily patch you up all the way myself and if you die, boom, I go home, game over."

"I'm not going to turn down the chance to ride a flying machine. Never tried to navigate from the air before, though, so I might miss it at first pass."

"Yeah, that's fine. Where's a good takeoff point? It goes vertically but it's going to be about fifteen feet long."

"The courtyard is nearest. Just down those stairs."

Down those stairs goes Cam, trailing big white faux angel wings. "Should I change into something more angelic before we get there or will it be fine to appear in jeans to your friends?"

"Once we tell them it's a trick and you're not really an angel, appearance won't matter a bit. I'd recommend not using the word 'demon,' but we shouldn't need to hide anything else."

"I could tell them I'm an apsel. That's my most fluent demon language's word for demon. Means 'maker'."

"That's much better. And more accurate, if your 'angels' and 'demons' have nothing in common with religious ones but the names."

"I can take these wings off just as easy as the last set. My balance is kind of terrible without wings at all, though, they help a lot - even being without the tail is throwing me off. I think once you have stuff under control here I'll go someplace without so much Christian iconography and just be a dude with wings and a tail." Cam opens the door and slides into the pilot's chair. "Build my Mars colony, make humanitarian visits to aboriginal Australians."

"The distance is greater when you're not flying, but yes, I had the same reaction. Would you believe an armed and armored knight can travel faster on a bicycle?"

"...Okay, that's hilarious."

"The motorcycle I mentioned is like a bike with an engine. I don't know what a penny-farthing bicycle is. Is it one of those hilarious ones with the different sized wheels? Because that just improves the armored knight mental image about tenfold."

"Do yours have the same size wheels? How do you avoid having to pedal inhumanly fast to go the same speed? That would just be undignified. Those poor twenty-third century knights."

"I have not extensively studied bicycles but suspect gears are involved. Remind me when we've got a spare minute and I'll make one for you to take apart. Also, knights, not such a thing in the twenty-third century."

"Oh, good. They do exist where I'm from, but you mostly get the title by earning it, which is much more palatable."

"You have a lot of very strong political opinions, don't you."

"I wouldn't say political. Just that everyone ought to be judged by what he can do and not by how he was born. This is rather a vexing century to be in, and I'm glad the future is better."

"Mm-hm. Bet with enough poking and prodding and demon magic we can get it better on relevant axes by the time the year eight hundred rolls around."

"If it takes us that long I'll be sorely disappointed!"

"There's a lot of world in the world."

"Yes, but once we have the first place upgraded, it should spread easily enough. Every nation wanting to keep up with its neighbor ought to make our job easier."

"Unless that just starts wars."

"I'm sort of worried about it, because it sounds like some of those twenty-five thousand knights would've died."

"Well, yes, it's a battle. Still, thousands of attackers dying because they're superstitious and not because they're evil is a good thing to avoid."

"What I was getting at is that part of what I'm construing as my job - it's up to you if it's yours - is to prevent any wars from breaking out in the first place. Which job may not be simplified by international competition."

"I, on the other hand, am likely to distribute books. Although I suppose I could just skip straight to computers and load everything up with fancy crypto."

"I think you've lost me there. Is that something that people would be able to use if you distributed it? Literacy is extremely low, even in Britain."

"That'd be another reason to skip to computers, I s'pose, avoiding having to teach everyone to read first - although it'd break my heart to actually bypass universal literacy in favor of speech recognition..."

"I'll continue working on literacy unless you're very sure it's unnecessary. Because it is necessary for the sort of society I can build, and I don't know yet how reliably your computers can replace it."

"Reliability's up to scratch when I'm from, but text's still faster and more searchable. Are you keeping an eye on the ground so we know when to land?"

"Yes, the entrance to the cave is in the Torpenn Howe—that's a hill; it'll be just past a ruined tower along the road below us."

"Mmkay. Oh man, I bet you will love computers. I am pretty sure you are not familiar even with basic computers unless I have some dates mixed up and you were personally acquainted with Babbage or something."

"I've only heard of computers meaning individuals skilled at arithmetic. I take it your computers are something more than a machine that does the same?"

"Well... they're sort of machines that are very skilled at arithmetic. It turns out if you put a ludicrous amount of arithmetic in a glowy box it can do amazing things."

"I can imagine arithmetic telling you how to do existing things better, figuring the precise proportions of alloys for the strongest steel or things of that sort, but I can't think how a box of arithmetic could do anything you couldn't do without it. How does it work?"

"Mmm - have you invented radio yet?"

"Sure I can." He does. "Radio's not a precursor to computers, it's just really handy when combined with them - oh, wait, I might've got my invention timeline mixed up, I think phones, telephones, the kind with wires, may have been first? Do you know those?"

"Well, I can produce textbooks and magically generate the infrastructure," says Cam. "Since I don't need to know all the underlying physics to conjure things up, I've concentrated on other areas of study, but I've got enough of a library to help you along. But the really cool thing is when you combine a computer with a phone-like thing. The social effects of being able to instantly talk to anybody anywhere, and send them the computer equivalent of books and - do you have movies? Silent ones, even? - and pictures and 3-D printing templates and so on are pretty special. Oh, and fiat money doesn't stop working when you turn it into a digital representation instead of a paper one, that's also big."

"...One of the benefits of going from telephone to internet is making one-to-many communication universally available. Anyone can set up a publicly accessible repository of - whatever. Writing or art or anything at all. It's also browsable - you don't know anybody in New Zealand now, but if there were a good search engine, you could find that exactly whatever thing you wanted to find happened to be produced by somebody there, and it'd be at your fingertips."

"Be my guest. I will be your oddly dressed angelic tagalong."

"Mm - these are your guys, I think I'll leave that up to you." Follow follow follow.

"Hello," says Cam, smiling. He flutters his wings.

"Both!"

"It doesn't make very much difference to me how you think I'm doing things as long as you understand that I can do them - and if necessary acknowledge the small number of constraints I'm operating under, whether you're assuming they're technical or magical. Should I bother describing what I can do or are you just going to be sort of irritatingly skeptical if I explain?"

"Sure."

"I'm planning to appear to the recalcitrant parties accompanied by music, dramatic cloud formations, burning magnesium, and possibly other frippery - while dressed in something other than a pair of jeans, probably, I'll work out some kind of toga arrangement perhaps - and, while looking thus angelic, produce a speech about the virtues of democracy and how very unkind it is to prevent people from receiving their sacraments whenever they should care to have same. Did your school not admit girls?"

"So where are your other students?"

"Okay then. Hello, teenage boy contingent, I'm Cam, it's nice to meet you."

"Whoa, whoa, I can do a lot of things, but I don't have super hearing. I heard a few of those. I came from my house, which is above a city with many names, one of which is Amblamire. I can fly, I'm indestructible, and I can conjure up arbitrary matter wherever I want to put it, and know a lot about different things that may be useful to conjure up, sort of like your Boss knows what would be useful to build but more so. The current plan does not involve me being king. Whether you can set me up with your sister depends a lot on your sister but I'm going to tentatively guess no."

"I should probably pick out my dramatic music and where to put the speakers - I'm leaning towards a specific hymn but I'm open to advice. I will need to decide on an angle of approach, and the dramatic cloud formation will be more dramatic if I choose a moment when the sky is clear. And figure out something more angelic to wear. Other than that, no, I think I'm good. You guys aren't starving or anything while besieged, are you?"

"I can't make a halo float unless I want to saw off part of my skull first, which would be highly uncomfortable. D'you guys want to hear the hymn? It's just in Latin, it should be less weird than jeans except for the part where a disembodied choir will sing it."

"Awesome. Universalis it is. The lyrics are appropriate, too!"

"Why, what do they mean?"

"Loosely, minding that I'm not a professional translator - glory, glory be to God who shall save each and every one, who forbids that any soul shall perish for ever, universal salvation, universal salvation, glory, glory and then on like that in various combinations and the bridge has a bit about Jesus and what a swell fair-minded guy he was. And then the end is just alleluias."

"That could not possibly be better tailored for this audience. I may disagree theologically, but it's easily an improvement. I wonder if it'll cause a schism."

"I mostly just think it's pretty. I suspect trying to discuss the theology would accomplish nothing useful."

"Mm - sure, I'll set up a remote control instead of just appearing them in the on position. Show me?"

"Sure, no problem," says Cam.

On the way to the flying machine, Hank asks "What kind of scale can you create things at? If I give you the blueprints, could you cover Britain with telephone and railway networks at a stroke, or would you have to make each machine separately?"

"If you give me blueprints I can make things over very large scales - the problem is when there's already stuff in the way. I can make stuff in such a way that it shoves preexisting matter out of the space, such as railroad spikes, but if I don't know what's in the way of each railroad spike I can't do it especially intelligently, and even if I do do it advised of the conditions on the ground you still occasionally run into problems more or less analogous to tree roots destroying sidewalks, just faster. So you'd want to have somebody picking out paths for me that were made of dirt, not rock, and unobstructed by too many plants. It might actually be easier to do the entire thing on a raised monorail; then you'd only need to pick places for stops and columns. If you're willing for it to take a little longer I can make some robots that do tunneling and give you a subway network - or you could summon an angel or three to do the tunnels, but since there's time travel involved and we don't yet know whether I can be dismissed in the first place, let alone resummoned, probably you want to save that for something a little more keenly urgent that can't be solved with robots. Phone system I'd be inclined to do with satellites. It'll scale better to extension to other countries and the phones'll be portable."

"Satellites are small objects that orbit the Earth, sort of like the moon does, but much closer. Remember how phones work wirelessly? The satellite bounces the signal from the one phone to as many intermediate satellites are necessary and then to the receiving phone. You'd probably better let me design that one myself."

"I have always wanted to terraform Mars! It's going to be so much fun."

"I will not add enough stuff to Mars to substantially perturb its orbit, let alone Earth's. Just air and topsoil and plants and some water features."

"Mars is big enough to hold atmo if I give it some extra magnetics and a few other things. Thin atmo, and very chilly in places, but not worse than being up a mountain once I'm done, and it can be cozy as anything indoors with some pressurization and heating. Plan sounds good to me."

Cam reconstructs it. In the form of an ornate scroll, with the text in calligraphy. "Here we are. Any last-minute changes to the plan? Do we like the spark halo? Should I be deepening my voice with sulfur hexafluoride?"

"Deeper voice sounds like this," says Cam, on sulfur hexafluoride. "It will be sort of uncomfortable to keep up if I'm doing questions-and-answers afterwards." He produces a toga sort of thing, which attaches behind his neck on a golden chain, drapes over his chest, and leaves his wings undisturbed where it loops around his waist. He takes the jeans off from under it, and then tosses them and flicks a bit of plasma at them to set them on fire.

"You're certainly under no obligation to stay if it does get uncomfortable. You can 'return to the heavens' at any time. Maybe appear copies of the scroll next to some of them? I don't think I've ever seen quite that material before, so it'll seem nice and otherworldly to fit with the rest of the apparition."

"This is just - well, I'd just call it paper but I suppose paper composition has changed with everything else." (The sulfur hexafluoride voice is gone for now.) "Are there going to be enough of them that I should relay my voice to the speakers that are going to do Universalis during my descent? To be heard?"

"Tens of thousands, unless they've split up for some reason. We'll need a lot of speakers. How hard is it to hide them?"

"Not. They're little. We'll find the place, I'll case the area and place them."

"Sounds like we've got a plan."

"Sure. Marble arch to land on. I'll drop you off in your hiding place and then flap up and hover - well, circle, I don't know these wings well enough to be sure I can properly hover - and when I see 'em coming I'll make my clouds and descend."

"Ooh, there's an idea. I could hide a little video camera in the marble arch and stream it at your phone."

"It can be pretty small and pretty hidden. And hard to get to, I'll make a nice tall arch - hmm, I could put a layer of mirror and put the camera behind that, the effect could be nifty. I'll try to avoid having to address anyone by name but it will make a nice fallback."

"'Universal Salvation' in every human language I know?" suggests Cam. "Mind, I know the twenty-first and twenty-second century dialects of all of same."

"Perhaps not, then. English is comprehensible even if it shouldn't be, but I wouldn't want to count on other languages working the same. It would be mildly embarrassing if it appeared to have been written in other languages badly."

"I'll just do it in Latin, then. Maybe the lyrics from the song."

"At this rate we'll be here all day quibbling over terminology like 'human rights'. I'd suggest putting in goodies like the speed of light but I don't really want to shore up the theology against mature evidential nitpicking that well. I'll leave my arch blank."

Cam takes advantage of the hubbub to breathe some oxygen. When questioned, he's back on the sulfur hexafluoride. What an awkward question. Maybe he should have flown away. "Arthur is beyond the turn of mortal days," he says. "Waste no time awaiting him."

"Many could be but none ought. Any who tries now to be king over you is an usurper."

"Go home and faithfully relay my message," Cam charges them, "without omission or addendum. And prepare yourselves for great and marvelous changes in the world around you."

"I can fly as long as I want. I don't get very tired. I'm glad nobody asked for my name. The most plausible non-lie I could've come up with would have been my middle name, and 'Mark' isn't really very angelic. I suppose I could have said 'Campbell' and hoped all the many thousands of them managed to hear something more like 'Camiel'. I could've said 'Revelation' but that is not supposed to be anybody's name and involves a few more creatures with too many faces than I wanted to evoke, in the biblical origin."

"Is it easier to lie about being an angel than to make up a stage name on the spot? If it matters, we can ask people to call you Camiel and it'll become true in short order."

"Coming up with lies unprepared takes longer than it ought to take anybody to produce their name. Anyway, I didn't actually say I was an angel. And I do not want people to call me Camiel. I prefer Cam."

"I think the angel wings are probably a good compromise between going wingless and looking demonic. If I wind up teaching a lot of people how to summon, it'll come out what I am anyway just based on the kind of magic I use, but I'll keep these for the time being, not like I have a swimming pool to get waterlogged in here. The halo and the voice are too much hassle for everyday though."

Cam dives and lands near the parked ship. "Yeah. I could change a few things about my face, but I don't really want to do that, either."

"We'll just have to try to make it as short a time as possible until we're not depending on today's message. Once the Republic is up and running and obviously enough of an improvement that going back is unthinkable, it won't really matter if people guess that the angel was a fake."

"If I go as far away as Mars you will not be able to get ahold of me in a hurry except by dismissal and resummoning, which we don't currently know to work normally even on top of the time travel. But I could go see how my Chinese stacks up against what's currently being spoken and make some friends there, leave you the phone and make another and a slew of satellite relays, and be out of the way of anybody likely to draw conclusions about the angelic messenger if they get a good look at me. Since you've already got some progress underway here."

"Would you be able to hold off on flying to China until we extend the communication and transportation lines to cover the rest of Britain? It'd be hard to manage a nationwide election otherwise."

"Yeah, sure. I'll hole up with your teenage boy contingent for a bit, you can draw up some plans for where you want a monorail to go, and I can overfly the island putting it all in place before I go into space and make satellites and touch down in China. Or maybe someplace that speaks Arabic. Arabic has probably been held to some consistency because of hangups about translating the Koran."

"Ideal conditions would have an angel - a real one - helping me, but I'm not sure if you should summon one. We don't know yet if you can send me home. So, yes, clear the space." Cam gets into the ship's pilot seat.

"If I try to send you home and it works, is there much of a risk that I can't just summon you back? If the sending doesn't work, we'd at least know not to try any angels."

"I have been a curious sort of individual, dwelling in Hell, taking summons routinely, for a hundred fifty years. I've never heard of anybody time traveling when summoned. I don't know why it happened this occasion. I don't know if it'll behave like summons normally do only with added time travel; I don't know if it'll interact with you having also time traveled, such that I go home and find that it's your original time, or this calendar year, or a version of my usual time in which all the things we have been up to are recorded history, or what. So, yes, I'd say there's a risk that you can send me home but not get me back, especially because I didn't actually exist yet during this time or yours in my own timeline - but I don't know how big the risk is."

"Sounds good." Cam takes off and heads back the way they came. "There are good economic reasons not to counterfeit currency, at least in large amounts, but that sort of problem doesn't apply as much to things with direct uses of their own, so if you run short of economic wherewithal I can conjure anything commonly bartered. Although if you have me doing livestock it's going to be excruciatingly stupid livestock; demons are terrible at minds."

"There are hard limits on range but they're astronomical in scale - I could make a star without diving into it or having to move around to get at various angles. But to make something in a specific place relative to other stuff, I need to be operating off plans that refer in detail to the other stuff, or directly sensing the other stuff myself. So I can't just appear a letter on the kitchen table of every house in the country."

"I can rain leaflets over a large area if I get airborne first to have a look at the large area. I will even make them biodegradable."

"This seems a bit like overkill for what's essentially a short-term job posting. I'm all for it."

"Well, we could also include other information on the leaflets."

"Duplicating the next edition of the paper would be ideal, since of course the lead story will be our little stunt today, but most of the places that we can't deliver papers to the normal way will have never seen one before. Not sure what effects that might have."

"Will the places that haven't seen one before contain literate people at all?"

"Certainly priests, often someone who isn't. The priests wouldn't take kindly to this issue."

"Yeah. I could also drop little audio thingies if we recorded an audio message, but those do not biodegrade."

"Mundanity is your department."

"The backup plan is to use the existing telephones and railroads to get as much of a head start as possible, then send messengers from there. It'll work, but there's little real chance of completing the project before the news that there's going to be a nationwide election spreads the sixth-century way."

"I'm pretty impressed that you were able to nonmagically reinvent phones and trains, have I mentioned? When you weren't even planning to time-travel, at that."

"Well, thank you. I was a factory foreman back in Connecticut; had to know how things are put together. I have to say, though, the create-anything-imaginable approach has quite a bit of appeal."

"Oh, yeah, I don't envy you one bit. I'm just impressed."

"I tend to assume that society progressed enough that most anyone from my century would be the best and brightest here. The things I know how to do are probably the most dramatic, but a teacher or a lawyer would be no less the best this Britain had ever seen. Either of them could work the same scale changes, if slower."

"Unless they weren't a people person and got burnt at the stake."

"I don't think most people want to change the world that much. Given motivation levels like yours or mine, probably, you could do a lot with nothing more than germ theory and high school math. Although, I think a fair number of them would probably have gotten smallpox or something, and died before they could do anything. In 1895 have you got rid of smallpox yet? I know that happens before daeva are public knowledge but not exactly when."

"Vaccines had been around for almost a century when I left, but the disease wasn't eradicated yet. That was easier here, with smaller and more command-able populations. I was immune when I came here, but I suppose if you don't have it at all then nobody would bother with the immunity."

"Right. I mean, I won't get it, but that is because I am a demon, not because I am from the future."

"Would you be able to immunize someone by looking at them? Create the antibodies by looking at them or some such? Cowpox infections are far better than the alternative, but not exactly pleasant."

"I can make antibodies, yeah. Or just a rack of state-of-the-art vaccines."

"That sounds like an excellent idea. The state of the art has changed little in the last hundred years, but I imagine it might in the next three."

"Quite a bit. Although smallpox in particular didn't get a lot of development after it was eradicated."

"Mm - I have textbooks, what I don't have is a lot of knowhow about how to make things without directly making them. I have never studied vaccine-crafting while not, you know, being a demon."

"Neither have I. This is one of those points where a factory foreman is exactly the wrong sort of person to have."

"Well, the population of Earth proved itself equal to similar tasks with less help in the past. Or rather, the future."

"It's a question of when. We ought to be able to accomplish the same in a tenth the time, one way or another."

"Oh yes."

"Of course first we'll have to get past the minor obstacle of neither of us being omniscient. Or even being able to understand all the instruction manuals you can create."

"And various infrastructure and human capital deficits. Yep."

"Difficult but manageable. I expect when the social and legal structures are no longer holding them back, the people of this Britain will be perfectly capable of gaining a few centuries' worth of skills."

"Or at least their kids. The ones who are adults today are probably not at their best for various traumas of childhood malnutrition."

"I can make you some nifty vitamins and fancy seeds, but relying on me for a primary direct calorie source probably isn't Plan A."

"I'd like to minimize how much we rely on miracles, but anachronistic crops sound nice and self-perpetuating."

"They do tend to require a lot of fertilizer to reach their full potential, since fertilizer is cheap in the future."

"Not especially, but I don't see any obvious pitfalls in involving mules regardless, unless the mules are participating in some very bizarre way."

"The seeds should do all right even under suboptimal conditions, anyway, compared to less thoroughly domesticated varieties."

"If I were a farmer I'd think the seeds were a big deal too."

"As would I, but I'd rank them below things like 'if the lord hangs me for no reason then someone will probably frown at him.' This century needed a lot of improvement."

"No arguments there."

"How would you go about fixing it if you had to start from the ground up? If it doesn't overlap what I did too much, additional basic starting points can only help."

"If I'd, what, been summoned by accident by a crawling baby who couldn't possibly dismiss me or contribute to any plans until later? I'd probably start by going around without wings on for a while, eavesdropping, making sure my language skills sufficed, connecting my extremely limited knowledge of history with what was going on, doing Good Samaritan type stuff when I came across obvious opportunities. Based on what you've told me about the culture and its intense dependence on religion I might have appeared to the Pope before I did anything very large-scale. Although I am not at all sure I would get along with a Pope under ordinary circumstances, I might get along with a Pope who thought I was a divine messenger."

"It would be marginally all right for the church to increase in legitimacy if it also increased in, like, decency, by a lot and very fast. I probably cannot encourage mass atheism on any reasonable time frame, and I'd be losing a lot of useful person-coordination power that I could co-opt instead, if I could and did."

"Well, for the Catholic population. If I hadn't landed near you I might not have started work anywhere near Europe. I can't get any free languages without being resummoned by people who speak them, but a combination of fancy software and what I landed with would let me set up in other places, possibly more comfortably."

"The Catholic population is essentially all of Europe. I don't know if there are any other individuals who control continents at the moment, but if so then subverting them would be equally powerful."

"Yeah, I'd need to look up some history, find out how long China's been doing the emperors thing."

"Do you know if they'd have any obvious ways to get an emperor to take orders? The angel trick is a bit culture-specific."

"This would also require the eavesdropping for a while thing. I think China might do a mandate of heaven thing? I'm not sure who is supposed to communicate about said mandate, though. Likely nothing as easily imitable as an angel. So I might've started in Europe after all, or I'd see what was going on in the Muslim world - I think Islam is currently pretty new, and they do angels?"

"Islam does angels, but I don't know whether it exists yet. And international information is slow, so all I can say is that if it does it's recent. Maybe you could start it."

"I do not really want to start Islam. I have no idea what Mohammed looks like, for one thing."

"No, see, remember I don't like lying to people? I'd rather appropriate a preexisting network of falsehoods with a few well-targeted misleading appearances than start Islam. If I decide to start something I will go somewhere without a history of copious monotheism, show off some magic, and start making pronouncements without much in the way of surrounding theology."

"I'm not unable to lie. I just don't like it. If I need someone to think I'm an angel and I get asked point blank I'll tell them I am."

"If I screw with people, but never lie with my exact words," says Cam, hopping out of the ship, "then later, if I need to, I can point that out to them, and they'll know that my exact words, when I utter them plainly, are probably reliable."

Cam grins and fluffs his wings happily.

"I'd like to have a look at the story, but the plan went off as described plus some last minute details."

"I can get you a copy. Or more accurately my notes; the final version is being edited over there. What was added?"

"I landed on a marble arch, I put a mirror on the arch to hide some electronics, I," sulfur hexafluoride! "talked like this the entire time, and I took a few questions you can't have anticipated ahead of time. Don't bother getting me a copy; I can make my own when the editing's done."

Cam makes a copy of the geographical survey they completed in 534.