A Plague of Angels

by Sheri S. Tepper

  The third Amen had been the final response. Silence gathered.

  “Go,” Ellel murmured, the whisper as clear as the ritual cries had been.

  The creatures rose silently and departed as silently. Their feet made no sound as they crossed the cracked pave, ebon and gold and bloodred strings of them flowing like beaded serpents, slithering out among the arches. They spiraled and eddied as they departed. Even Qualary could not keep her eyes from them. They were like oil on swirling water. The patterns were different every time.

  Besides, they were going away. The only tolerable thing about them was when they went away.

  The Witch stood watching until only a few were left, those retained for the day’s duties. Ignoring Qualary, she sat upon the automatic lift chair and swirled her way along the spiraling track, past the little mezzanine with its information console, around the cylindrical walls to the floor. Left behind upon the balcony, Qualary wrapped the book and put it away, then plodded slowly downward, careful step by careful step, holding tight to the railing. The track wasn’t made for feet, but Ellel didn’t care about that Ellel was quite capable of telling Qualary to fly, then beating her when she didn’t immediately sprout wings.

  Halfway down the long spiral, Qualary heard the creatures below as they greeted their mistress.

  “Ellel, Empress,” they chanted together in their metallic, uninflected voices.

  “My faithful followers,” the Witch returned the greeting in a voice not unlike their own. “Have you found me the child?”

  Far northeast of the Place, Abasio and Golly trundled quite slowly past the last of the Edge, where the walls bent away east and west to make a circle around the city, then across a strip of wasteland along the shallow river and up onto the bridge that crossed it. Though Abasio had kept an eye out for the walkers, he hadn’t seen them. Either they’d moved faster than the truck, or they’d turned off somewhere.

  When they got right up on the top of the bridge, Golly stopped his truck again and just sat there, twiddling his toes against the pedals, thinking.

  “Whatso?” asked Abasio, impatiently. It had been a day for delays!

  “Well, boy, before we go on in, I was just considerin’. Did your folks tell you about IDDIs?”

  Abasio flushed and muttered, “My ma did.”

  “Well then,” said Barefoot Golly. “Well then, you think on what she told you, boy. Just you think on it.” He went on twiddling his toes, moving not an inch.

  “You mean now?” Abasio asked, incredulously.

  “I do mean now. Just you sit there and think what she told you.”

  Though considerably annoyed, Abasio cast his mind back to the time Ma’d told him about IDDIs. It had been about a year ago, summertime, like now. They’d eaten their supper outside under the willow tree, and there in the dusk with the stars pricking out overhead, Abasio, who was even then thinking about running off, had asked his ma why she’d come back from the city.

  “I was pregnant with you,” she’d said. “And it’s not good for babies there. Sure not good for women.”

  Then she’d looked him straight in the face, using the dusk as a kind of veil to hide her blushes, and she’d told him about IDDIs, slowly, painfully, as though she had to force each word out against her will.

  Abasio hadn’t known where to look, or what to say. He hadn’t known even whether to believe her! Maybe it was just horrible talk, to scare him, to make him stay home.

  But Grandpa nodded the whole time she talked, and when she’d finished, he’d said, “Believe her, boy. Every word she says is true.” Then he’d pointed eastward, where Orion was heaving himself up over the horizon, the huntsman of the heavens. “I’ve always believed our kinfolk went to the stars partly to escape the IDDIs. No IDDIs among our brothers on Betelgeuse. They were smart to get away, smart to go.”

  Abasio had been hearing about mankind going to the stars since he was a tiny baby, but he’d rather talk about that than what Ma was talking about!

  “When did they go, Grandpa?”

  “Oh, in my great-great-grandpa’s time, boy. A hundred years, maybe a hundred fifty.”

  “Why didn’t they take us with them, Grandpa?”

  “We weren’t born yet. Some people chose not to go, and we’re descended from those folks.”

  Abasio wished he had been born then. If he’d been born then, he’d have chosen to go! There’d have been no problem with seeking adventure. Going to the stars was adventure, all right!

  Still, Grandpa said the important thing was that men had gone. He puffed out his chest when he said that. Whenever Abasio thought about it, it made him puff up like a cockerel, too, just to think that men had gone. Men like him. Even though he hadn’t gone with them, he still owned the stars sort of by proxy. If men had gone to the stars, there was nothing they couldn’t do!

  So now, sitting on the bridge beside Barefoot Golly, he felt a familiar confusion: danger and sex all mixed up in his adventure. So it was too late to go to the stars, but it wasn’t too late to see the world. But Ma had warned him, and Grandpa had warned him, and now here was this trucker warning him. He, Abasio, was no fool. They didn’t need to keep telling him the same thing over and over. He knew about IDDIs!

  “All right, I thought on it,” Abasio growled. “I thought on everything Ma said about it.”

  Golly gave him such a speculative look that Abasio thought he might have to come right out and tell what he knew about IDDIs, but after a minute the trucker grunted and let the truck roll down the incline of the bridge toward the city.

  Despite Abasio’s attempt at nonchalance, his first view of Fantis came as a shock. At the foot of the bridge were half-fallen buildings, walls that went nowhere, exposed floors teetering over cracked and littered streets, surfaces painted in gaudy colors and contorted patterns, steel grills over doors and windows, a wildly disintegrated scene that Abasio’s eyes took in but his brain refused to interpret. Nothing seemed to connect to anything else. He felt his bowels clench and grab, not quite letting go but almost.

  The truck stopped at the side of a virtually intact building, and Barefoot Golly got out, waving at somebody inside.

  “Is this it?” Abasio asked in a voice that didn’t sound like his own. It was nothing, nothing like he’d thought it would be!

  “This is it, boy,” Barefoot told him, giving him a look up and down and then heaving a sort of sigh. He moved in on Abasio, coming very close, talking quietly so nobody could hear what he was saying but Abasio himself. “Look past my shoulder, boy. You see those men down there at the corner. There’s some in green, and some in other colors, you see?”

  Abasio saw.

  “Those are what you call recruitment teams. Any young ones come to Fantis, male or female, they got to go that way to get on into town. This’s all neutral territory along here, but if you don’t have a pass, you’ve got to hook up with somebody. Try and stay away from the Greens, Abasio Cermit. That’s all I’ll say to you, but it’s meant in friendship. Try to stay away from them.”

  Then he was gone, and there were men swarming over the truck, unloading the cases of batteries and the heavy weapons boxes with BATTLE SHOP all over them in big black letters.

  Abasio took a deep breath and started for the corner When the green-clad men with the long green-dyed braids came toward him, he moved quickly and got himself among some other men, nearest to two with high purple hair crests and purple tattoos all over their hands.

  “New to the city, boy?”

  “Come meet the family, boy.”

  A quick glance over his shoulder showed him the Greens snarling and showing their teeth like farm dogs, so he said yes quick. The two purple men put him into a flashily painted vehicle that spouted black smoke as they drove past streets painted in blue and green and red before getting to a street where all the paint was purple.

  “Purple House!” one of his guides said unnecessarily. It was four stories of decaying brick with snaky designs in lavender and win
e and deep violet covering it from broken sidewalk to curly shingled roof.

  “Whatso?” called a guard from the front stoop.

  “This here’s Basio,” announced one of his guides. “Come to have supper with us.”

  “Welcome to Purple House.” The guard smiled around his gap teeth. “You enjoy yourself now.”

  It wasn’t what Abasio expected at all. Not that he was exactly sure what he expected. Sometimes when Ma described the city she said one thing, another time she’d say something else. What it really was, this first night, was him, Basio, sitting on the floor on a mattress while people brought him food and gave him stuff to drink he’d never had before. On the mattress beside him was a girl wearing, so far as he could tell, only two scarfs, one around her top and the other one sort of between her legs.

  “What’s your name?” he asked her.

  She shook her head, opened her mouth as if she were trying to say something, only no words came out. The man on the other side of her said something to her, low and hard, and the girl grabbed on to Abasio as if she were drowning and he were a log that’d keep her afloat. She still didn’t say anything.

  “You like her?” the man on the other side of him asked.

  “Sure,” Basio said, his tongue so thick and his lips so unmanageable, he was scarcely able to get the word out. “Sure She’s fine.” He’d thought a city girl would be more fun, somehow, and she didn’t seem to be able to talk, but otherwise … she was fine.

  “She’s yours, for tonight,” the man whispered. “Enjoy.”

  Later he and the girl were in a little room together, only she scuttled away from him and crouched in a corner like a whipped pup.

  “I’m not … not gonna hurt you,” he said.

  “I ain’t never,” she wept. “I ain’t never. They had no right!”

  “What you talking about?”

  “My daddy had to sell me,” she wept. “And they bought me To raise up tots for the Purples. But I ain’t never, and I’m scared.”

  Abasio whispered to her he hadn’t never, either, but he’d watched dogs and cats and sheep, and there didn’t seem to be much to it He was right, there wasn’t. It didn’t take him anywhere near as much time as it did dogs, not any of the times he did it. By the third or fourth time, she even quit crying about it and just let him. It was pretty much how he’d thought it would be. Some of the books he’d read said it was like a miracle or marvel or wonder, but it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t all that different from doing it himself, because she just shut her eyes and held her breath and waited for it to be over.

  Next day they were still half-asleep when the two Purples showed up again to drag him out to see the arena and the market and all the homegrounds of the Purple Stars and Blue Shadows and Green Knives and Renegades. At first, all Abasio could see was the dirt. Dead animals. Sometimes dead people. Puddles of stuff in the streets and alleys, stuff he didn’t want to step in even though he had his boots on. Turds everywhere, where dogs or people had just squatted and let go, and on the turds masses of flies that rose up in clouds and stuck to his lips and around his eyes until he thought he’d have a fit getting rid of them.

  The Purples he was with didn’t seem to notice. They just brushed the flies away, not even stopping whatever it was they were saying. They were full of stories about the Purples, the battles they’d fought, the victories they’d won over the Renegades and the Blue Shadows and the Green Knives. “You gotta watch out for the Greens,” they told him. “They torture prisoners. Their Chief, Wally Skins, he likes doin’ it.”

  “Why do they call him that?” Abasio wanted to know.

  “ ’Cause he wears prisoner skins. Fresh ones, usually.”

  “Who’s in charge of the Purples?”

  “Soniff, he’s warlord. Old Chief Purple, he got him so much money he bought him a place out in the Edge Said he was retirin’ from the binness and Soniff should take over.”

  “Jus’ ’til Old Chief’s boy Kerf grows up,” said the other, with a snigger. “Little Kerf.”

  “Watch your mouth,” warned the first, turning Abasio’s attention away from this remark by pointing out the sights. “That there’s the Battle Shop, Basio. Man named Sudden Stop, he runs it, and he runs the shows at the arena too. He’s got the best weapons, new ones all the time.”

  Abasio blinked. Twice on the road, and now here, he’d heard that name. Three times is meant, the old adage ran, so he took a good look. The Battle Shop was big and fairly clean. It had glass windows without any bars over them and enough weapons piled up inside to wage a pretty good war.

  After a few days, Abasio had to admit Grandpa and Ma had been right about a lot of things. At the farm there’d been a windmill to pump water right to the house, but here in the city the only water came from the water-men’s water-truck that arrived every few days and pumped the tank on the roof full, just enough for cooking and pot washing and the like. Dirty clothes went to the neighborhood laundry, and people went to the neighborhood baths. Both of them had water piped in from the river, and filters to clean it, with slave teams stoking the boilers and walking the treadmills to keep the water moving. When Purple women went to the baths, Purples went along to guard them. Purples escorted the tots to and from school, too, keeping the kids from getting too close to dead bodies and from being stolen by other gangs.

  The first day Abasio was on escort duty he got jumped by Blue Shadows. It made him so mad, he didn’t even have time to be scared. When he came to himself, there were two Blue Shadows on the sidewalk and two more running and his fellow escorts clapping him on the back, crowing like cocks. That night they asked Abasio if he’d like to join the Purple Stars. Basio had his doubts, but he wasn’t silly enough to be disrespectful and refuse the honor. People who were disrespectful didn’t last any time at all. His fight against the Blues got counted as First Fight. They showed him the Book of the Purples and gave him a copy to memorize; they added his name to the roll of honor on the wall; they pricked the first of his tattoos onto his hands, then everybody got buzzed.

  Two days after that, he was on his way out back to the privy, when he heard a sound from one of the back rooms He’d been past that room a hundred times before, but the door had always been shut. This time it was open, so he looked in: three beds with men on them, a hag washing bloody rags in a basin.

  The hag looked up at him. “You don’t want to come in here,” she whispered.

  Abasio’s memory was trying to tell him something while he stood there stupidly with his mouth open. Wounds were treated upstairs. He’d seen knife cuts being sewn up and bones being set up there. They had a special hag to do all that, one who’d had lessons from a real doctor.

  “What’s wrong with them?” he asked the hag.

  “You don’t want to know,” said one of the men. He had great black lumps sticking way out from his neck. His mouth bled He had no teeth. When he spoke, the blood in his mouth made a shiny red bubble on his lips. He looked old, but Abasio knew he wasn’t.

  The hag shooed Abasio out, muttering at him, “Fool boy. Why you think they gave you that new little girl? Why you think, stupid?” He was on his way back from the privy before he realized what he’d seen. It was what Ma had warned him about, what the trucker had tried to tell him.

  “Those men in the back room, they got IDDIs?” he asked one of the men he’d been on escort with. “They goin’ to die?” He thought he knew, but he wanted verification. The reality of what he had seen was nothing he’d ever imagined, and he had to be sure.

  “Yeah, well,” the man said, looking over Abasio’s shoulder at nothing. “Maybe they been here in the house too long.”

  The next day the door was open and the room was empty and stinking with some strong chemical smell.

  Ma had seen men die like that, She’d told him so, or tried to, Dying like that was what she’d run away from. Men dying like that, and kids, and women too. If the mother or father had it, babies even, born with an IDDI—an immune deficie
ncy disease, Grandpa said. It hadn’t meant much to Abasio until now. Now, having seen, it was all different. Having seen and having heard what the hag muttered at him: Why you think, fool boy? Why you think they gave you a new girl? A girl who hadn’t, ever. A girl they thought probably wasn’t infected. Why, fool boy?

  So she’d get pregnant with a healthy baby, he answered himself. So the baby wouldn’t die before it was born, the way IDDI babies often did. So the Purples could raise up some healthy tots, to make them strong.

  The girl they’d given him got pregnant right away, so they took her upstairs to women’s quarters and she wasn’t available anymore. Though she’d been his first, Basio decided she was going to be his only. No point seeking adventure if all it did was get you dead! The other Purples laughed at him. They called him Basio the Cat, because when the gang went to the songhouses, Basio would go along, but he wouldn’t get his feet wet, though they weren’t talking about his feet. They were talking about cock-hole. “Cuckle,” they said. “What good’s a man without cuckle and chuckle.” Or fuck and luck. Or screwin’ and doin’.

  “Short life and wild!” they cried. “Cuckle and chuckle until you buckle!” and “Nobody lives forever!”

  No matter how they said it, Abasio wouldn’t. Sometimes he woke up sweating, hearing that voice through its bubble of blood: “You don’t want to know.” No, he didn’t want to know. He wanted more than cuckle and chuckle. Something more. A lot more, though he didn’t know exactly what that might be.

  • • •

  Young Kerf, the Old Chief’s son, was younger than Abasio by a couple of years, but he already had a woman of his own, one Elrick-Ann, a virgin girl from the Cranked-Up gang, bought for Kerf by his daddy when the boy was only ten. As far as anybody knew, she was a virgin still and was likely, so some of the Purples whispered to each other, to remain that way forever.