Angel’s Egg by Edgar Pangborn (Galaxy, June 19511) opens with an exchange of letters between the FBI and local police about the death of a Dr Bannerman—and which also discusses his diary, an unsettling (or possibly crazed) account of the days and months before his death: this opens with a brief mention of a possible flying saucer sighting before reporting on the annual nesting activities of Bannerman’s favourite hen, Camilla:
This year she stole a nest successfully in a tangle of blackberry. By the time I located it, I estimated I was about two weeks too late. I had to outwit her by watching from a window—she is far too acute to be openly trailed from feeding ground to nest. When I had bled and pruned my way to her hideout she was sitting on nine eggs and hating my guts. They could not be fertile, since I keep no rooster, and I was about to rob her when I saw the ninth egg was nothing of hers. It was a deep blue and transparent, with flecks of inner light that made me think of the first stars in a clear evening. It was the same size as Camilla’s own. There was an embryo, but I could make nothing of it. I returned the egg to Camilla’s bare and fevered breastbone and went back to the house for a long, cool drink.
Later the egg hatches to reveal an “angel”, a tiny female humanoid covered in down and with wing stubs on her shoulders. Bannerman brings the angel inside that evening and, over the next few days, Bannerman discovers that it can communicate mentally with him while they are touching (when he holds her in his hands, etc.). To begin with this is takes the form of vague feelings, but she is soon sending him images of her home world and then, days later, more complex information:
It was difficult. Pictures come through with relative ease, but now she was transmitting an abstraction of a complex kind: my clumsy brain really suffered in the effort to receive. Something did come across. I have only the crudest way of passing it on. Imagine an equilateral triangle; place the following words one at each corner—“recruiting,” “collecting,” “saving.” The meaning she wanted to convey ought to be near the center of the triangle.
I had also the sense that her message provided a partial explanation of her errand in this lovable and damnable world.
Later (in amongst material that provides more background information about her people, how they travelled through space, their biology, and much more), she reveals that there are others like her on Earth (including her dying father). We eventually learn (in an oblique narrative) that they are here on Earth to help steer mankind away from self-destruction.
The second part of the story (spoiler) sees the angel’s father die and, when Bannerman asks what she is going to do next, she presents two choices: she can stay with Bannerman, and teach and counsel him (and, when the angels learn more about human biology, possibly greatly improve his health—Bannerman has a spinal deformity2). Or he can have his life memories recorded and stored by her, and used by the angels to better understand and help humankind:
It seems they have developed a technique by means of which any unresisting living subject whose brain is capable of memory at all can experience a total recall. It is a by-product, I understand, of their silent speech, and a very recent one. They have practiced it for only a few thousand years, and since their own understanding of the phenomenon is very incomplete, they classify it among their experimental techniques. In a general way, it may somewhat resemble that reliving of the past that psychoanalysis can sometimes bring about in a limited way for therapeutic purposes; but you must imagine that sort of thing tremendously magnified and clarified, capable of including every detail that has ever registered on the subject’s brain; and the end result is very different. The purpose is not therapeutic, as we would understand it: quite the opposite. The end result is death. Whatever is recalled by this process is transmitted to the receiving mind, which can retain it and record any or all of it if such a record is desired; but to the subject who recalls it, it is a flowing away, without return. Thus it is not a true “remembering” but a giving. The mind is swept clear, naked of all its past, and along with memory, life withdraws also. Very quietly. At the end, I suppose it must be like standing without resistance in the engulfment of a flood time, until finally the waters close over.
Bannerman chooses to have his life “saved” (a term puzzlingly used by the angel to describe Camilla the hen when she dies earlier in the story), and the last part of the story see his memories stripped away over a three week period (during which Bannerman’s old dog Judy is also “saved”):
For it seems that this process of recall is painful to an advanced intellect (she, without condescension, calls us very advanced) because, while all pretense and self-delusion are stripped away, there remains conscience, still functioning by whatever standards of good and bad the individual has developed in his lifetime. Our present knowledge of our own motives is such a pathetically small beginning!—hardly stronger than an infant’s first effort to focus his eyes. I am merely wondering how much of my life (if I choose this way) will seem to me altogether hideous. Certainly plenty of the “good deeds” that I still cherish in memory like so many well-behaved cherubs will turn up with the leering aspect of greed or petty vanity or worse.
In Bannerman’s last moments the other angels visit and let him “see” (a vivid memory of the father if I recall correctly) the two moon night on their planet; then Bannerman gives up his final memories and dies.
Overall, this is a noteworthy piece, but the first half of this story has its problems: the angel material is, at times, a little on the fey side (occasionally the angel seems more like a fantasy fairy) or it is just plain clunky (we get a lot of genre detail about the angel’s world and biology—space travel while encysted, etc.—than we really need) and, around the midway point, it starts becoming dull. That said, it picks up again when the angel’s father dies and Bannerman is presented with the two choices, and the ending is very strong—a long and reflective section, profound even, on the shortcomings of humans individually and as a society.
I’d note that, even given all the genre elements in the piece, this feels like more of a mainstream piece (it is quite descriptive and introspective), certainly when compared with other SF stories of the period. I’d also note that there is also a noticeable religious subtext to the story (angels, sacrifice, saviours, the flood, etc.).
***+ (Good to Very Good). 15,300 words. Story link.
1. Damon Knight made these comments about the first publication of the story in his essay, Knight Piece, in Hell’s Cartographers, edited by Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss:
Gold had an incurable habit of overediting stories: as Lester once said, he turned mediocre stories into good ones, and excellent stories into good ones. He bought Edgar Pangborn’s beautiful ‘Angel’s Egg’ and showed it to several writers in manuscript, then rewrote some of its best phrases. He changed the description of the ‘angel’ (a visitor from another planet) riding on the back of a hawk ‘with her speaking hands on his terrible head’ to ‘with her telepathic hands on his predatory head’. According to Ted Sturgeon, when the issue came out and the story was read in the printed version, three pairs of heels hit the floor at that point and three people tried to phone Gold to curse him for a meddler. Sturgeon got in the habit of marking out certain phrases in his manuscripts and writing them in again above the line in ink. Gold asked him why he did that, pointing out that it made it difficult for him to write in corrections. ‘That’s why I do it,’ Sturgeon replied. p. 132
I read what looks like the non-Gold version in The Arbor House Modern Treasury of Science Fiction.
2. I wonder if Bannerman—which can also mean “standard bearer”—is a metaphor for humanity, and whether his twisted nature (the spinal deformity) is a metaphor for the human condition.