A Rumor of Angels

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  “You know, there are camp stoves available that weigh almost nothing at all,” she offered ingenuously as he balanced the pot on the pile of crackling twigs.

  “Yes. I’m saving it for when we run out of wood.” He went on with his cooking.

  Run out of wood? She eyed the forest around them as if such a thing were inconceivable, then pursed her lips musingly. A month or so back, on Terra, having any wood at all would have been equally inconceivable. Only rich people had real wood. Now that it surrounded her in excess, she wondered, Is it possible to value a thing before it becomes scarce?

  Later, she huddled among the needles, arms wrapped tightly around her knees. She watched the tiny fire fade into coals and contemplated her insignificance at the feet of the forest giants. The darkness closed around her like a velvet blindfold. She slipped the stunner out of her pack and into her shirt. She would carry it there from now on. The alien lay in his sleeping bag a few yards away, yet as she struggled alone with her fear, it might have been miles, for he had no comfort to offer her. His presence was negative, as giving as polished steel, reflecting only the difference between them.

  The days led them relentlessly upward, through the sun-drenched forests, now choked with undergrowth that slowed their progress. Jude took a picture now and then, more dutifully than with enthusiasm. There were still no signs of other life. She longed for the wonders of Kramer’s and Langdon’s journals, regardless of the dangers they might bring. She was bored with trees, constantly tired, hungry and hot, too tired even to complain.

  On the fourth afternoon, as they approached the higher reaches of the foothills, she found a spot where the mountain granite poked through the ground cover in worn ledges carpeted with moss. She spent two film cartridges trying to capture what it was that moved her so in the sharp contrast of hard and soft, her tears all the while misting the viewfinder.

  There was little conversation to fill those long days, even if she had possessed the energy for it. Ra’an and his mules seemed tireless, while Jude waged subtle war with her body, driving it through the painful transition from classroom to the field. She was winning, gradually, but at times she feared the worst, that she couldn’t go on, that she would be left alone to die of exposure. The ground she must sleep on was harder than cement; the trail rations, which the alien insisted on preparing himself, were barely palatable. And he, a cheerless companion, offered no information and less sympathy, often refusing to answer what seemed to her the most innocent questions.

  Once she asked about the absence of animal life in the colony and the surrounding mountains. His reply was curt.

  “They cannot live up here any more than Terrans can.”

  “But the mules…”

  “They’re different.”

  “Different?”

  “Smarter.”

  She wasn’t sure if he meant smarter than other animals or smarter than Terrans, but she let it drop to avoid another racial argument. But there was one thought she did venture.

  “What about the gull-beasts?”

  She had his attention so fast it startled her. He made her describe what she had seen and when, but when she had finished, all he said was, “Try not to let your imagination run wild, Ms. Rowe. Not up here.”

  Somehow, she knew this was not a dismissal, but a specific warning.

  The eighth night out, they camped in the last hour of light in a high rocky clearing. Above the trees, the Guardians loomed in frigid splendor, as high as ever for all the upward miles so arduously traveled.

  Exhausted, starved but avoiding the meager excuse for a supper she would have to force herself to eat, Jude did her camp duties. She fed the mules, which for their own reasons would not eat the local grasses. She laid out the sleeping bags in the least rocky spot she could find, and watched Ra’an construct his little fire. It fascinated her, the meticulous precision with which he laid twig upon twig, each just slightly larger than the one before, the kindling placed just so. It was his ritual each evening, as if in honor of the arcane art of woodsmanship. The ritual accomplished, he hunched over his tin pot with concentration pulled up like a wall around him. The long dark hair, the russet skin, his trail boots with their wide soft laces wound around his legs, his easy crouch by the open fire… for all his claims of alienness, he reminded her of every photo or painting she had ever seen of the ancient Terran people called Indians. Here among the trees and pine needles he was centuries away from the sophisticated creature she had met in the colony, and she understood how people like Bill Clennan could consider these “Natives” primitive. Ra’an was both, primitive and urbane, but not in an even mixture. It was as if two natures lived an uneasy coexistence within one body, one or the other seizing complete control as the occasion required. Perhaps this is natural and proper for a Koi. But Jude didn’t think it too homocentric to suspect that no two selves, Koi or Terran, should be so unharmoniously meshed, and that psychoses like schizophrenia were probably universal among sentient creatures.

  Tiring of fireside psychology, she clambered across the clearing and up onto a jutting spur of rock. Through a break in the trees, she discovered the valley spread out beneath her. The distant colonial city sprawled in miniature, the high-rises along the lake, the incoherent jumble of the business district, the suburbs fanning out along the radial arms of freeway, reaching into the hills. A sullen yellow haze hung over it all, obscuring detail, and her bird’s-eye view brought home at last how large the spread really was. Farther beyond the buildings were acres of clear-cutting and torn earth, the telltale lesions of terraforming. That’s what makes the colony so reminiscent of Terra. The great earthmovers are down there gobbling up the alien dirt and spitting it out again as a Terran look-alike.

  She sighed, not entirely sure why this should bother her. So many things once familiar now seemed strange and distant. She was sleeping well nights, no longer bothered by the hard dry ground or the blackness of the night. She had discovered the stars, the alien stars, and Arkoi’s two little moons. Why hadn’t Bill Clennan thought to mention that Arkoi had two moons? Was that another of those items that gave tourists the creeps?

  She heard Ra’an’s quiet footstep behind her. He followed her gaze toward the valley.

  “You ought to point your camera at that,” he commented sourly. “Terra has a glorious future planned for Arkoi.”

  Jude groaned softly as visions of the gray Terran megalopolis filled the remaining green below and crawled up the hills toward the Guardians.

  “The idea does not appeal to you?” he challenged.

  “You know, Ra’an, sometimes I can’t figure out whose side you’re on. No, it doesn’t appeal to me.” How to explain it to him, when she herself was amazed that the familiar urban topography of her home world no longer beckoned? “I guess I never thought about preserving land on Terra because there isn’t any left. Oh, maybe a few thousand acres, scattered over the globe in parks, but not like this, not endless wilderness.”

  “All things have an end, Ms. Rowe.”

  “But it’s so vast!” she exclaimed with a sweep of both arms that halted halfway as if quailing before such scale. “If only you could see Terra, you would understand. Like… umm, well, the hospital complex I was born in was the size of that whole city down there, and there are thousands like it, just hospitals. I was raised in a creche—a government nursery; I was an unwanted child—with forty thousand other children who never saw the open sky except on a school trip now and then. No moon, no stars. We never had true darkness, or weather. Everything is inside, streets, stores, houses, everything, even some of the small parks, inside where the air is filtered and safe to breathe. There are some livable zones outside, for the rich and the bosses, but for most of us, it’s the inside, all our lives. Can you blame the tourists for streaming to Arkoi? Even if it’s only a week they can afford, once in their lives, it’s a week outside.”

  “One week times fifteen billion Terrans,” he added bitterly. “They crowd our land and litter an
d deface it and are not touched by it.”

  “Which tourists have done since time immemorial,” she admitted. “You have to stay longer than a week to get up the courage to reach beyond the tourist routine into the real nature of a foreign place.”

  “And you, Ms. Rowe? Do you have that courage?”

  She shook her head to his challenge. “Ra’an, hate if you must, but don’t do it blindly. Hate those who stand on that beautiful lake shore and see only a rising bank balance, the select few making their fortunes exploiting the fact that for most Terrans, no matter how badly they treat it in their ignorance, Arkoi is the Promised Land. Even if they never see it, its existence gives them hope, and that, on Terra, is in slim supply.”

  The alien was crumbling a stick between his fingers. “Very eloquent, but, I’m afraid, appallingly short-sighted.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to understand compassion,” she snapped, disgusted.

  “Compassion?” he retorted. “Where is their compassion? What is the good of a Promised Land to those who only know how to destroy exactly that which you claim they value so highly? It’s wasted on them!” His voice rose; the stick lay in shreds on the ground. “What about the Koi? Should their way of life be sacrificed to squeeze out some last feeble ounce of Terran hope? What good will hope do the Terrans when they have ruined this world as they have ruined their own?”

  Jude faltered. “In ruining Terra, we should have learned our lesson.” At least some of us. She had to believe that, that some lessons could be learned, or give up all belief in humanity… whatever that was. “Besides, there’s so much room here, Ra’an, and so few of you.”

  “Ah, yes,” he murmured, suddenly quiet. His face worked unreadably, his violet eyes fixed on her as if she herself were the danger. “And so many of you.”

  And Jude heard what his eyes were telling her. He might as well have said it out loud. For a moment, she held her breath. “There are Others,” she whispered.

  But Ra’an did not hear, following another thought. “I was a small child when you Terrans first arrived, a boy, impressionable. I listened then to such excuses. Do you think you are the first to offer them?”

  “Ra’an, there are Others, aren’t there?”

  “We learned what comes of listening to Terrans, of giving that inch that grew into a valley and soon will encompass our entire world if the Terrans have their way!”

  His words came sharp and hard, but Jude barely listened. “Where are they, Ra’an, the Others?”

  “The early ones who came, the pioneers, the visionaries, we were patient with them, because they were so vibrant, because they carried their beliefs like torches, because life burned in them so fiercely. It was only later that we realized the grimmer realities that their brilliance hid from us, and by then the damage was done.”

  “Ra’an…”

  “Now we do nothing but contain the disease, and we are dying… as they died.”

  Her insistent question froze in her mouth as a wave of grief enveloped her, Ra’an’s grief, heartsick despair that drained the strength from her limbs.

  “Dying of idealism,” he whispered. “Dying of good intentions.”

  She knew she did not understand, but the tears came anyway. She wanted to offer comfort, support, anything, an instinctive reaching out to a creature in such pain, when suddenly inspiration cried out inside her head. Jude held herself very still. Images came, images of a man, tall and eager, a shock of pale hair, a smile reminiscent of… who? A heavy pack slung carelessly across his back. And then a name. It floated unbidden to her tongue. “Daniel…” she murmured.

  The alien stiffened, the great violet eyes widening in anger, disbelief, some complex emotion she could not identify.

  “Daniel Andreas,” she repeated, amazed that her brain should play such tricks.

  “Enough!” he hissed through gritted jaws. “Who told you about Daniel?”

  Her face was blank, puzzled. “Nobody… I… the name… it just came into my head.”

  “You’d heard it before. Somewhere.” Every syllable was a pleading growl of pain.

  Jude shook her head fearfully, and Ra’an lifted his head to the shadowed mountains with a moan of anguish.

  “What is it, Ra’an? What did I do?”

  With a rush, he grabbed her arm, twisting, and threw her away from him. She stumbled backward against the rocks and fell. Should I have lied to him? What could I have said? She tried to scramble up, but he lunged after her.

  “You have no right!” he cried. “Not you, not a Terran!”

  Desperate, she turned to run. He caught her wrist and twisted again, hard. She went down among the jagged stones, gasping as he held her down. With her free hand, she fumbled at her waistband, where Clennan’s little stunner was strapped behind her belt. She tore it loose, struggling to push herself away from him, but he saw the gun and swore harshly, a quick Terran oath, and knocked it from her hand, crushing her down against the rocks with his knee until she could do nothing but whimper.

  “Should have left you out here days ago!” he raged. He caught up the stunner and leveled it at her, then suddenly let her go with a shove, threw the gun aside, and stood back. “There are fitter punishments,” he snarled, breathing hard, compressing his fury into a gorgon stare through slitted purple eyes. The slits shut. His body went rigid with effort.

  Jude screamed. Flame seared through her. Agony, hot and molten, burned into every fiber, every cell, boiled up through the marrow of her bones, up through her lungs, choking her screams. She collapsed and fell, into blackness.

  Chapter 14

  Clear morning light flowed past the plum blossoms outside the window onto a cool brick floor. Meron’s tawny bare feet left little prints in the moisture as she padded about the room, replacing a cup or a book in its proper niche.

  “You have turned this house inside out every day for nine days, Mitchell,” she said. “Soon I will think you are brooding. ”

  Verde slumped in a wicker chair, frowning reflexively at the pine-planked walls. “At some point I’ll understand why he did it.”

  “We don’t know that he has.”

  “Merry, Merry, benefit of the doubt is all very well and good, but… Ra’an vanishes, Clennan drives into the hills with the woman and comes back alone. Put two and two together. Clennan gave him a pass, he got through the border, and now he’s taking a Terran through the Guardians.”

  Meron looked unhappy, her childish face crinkling up like an old mans. “He has wanted to go back for a long time.”

  “I know, I know, so do you all! But only Ra’an would go and do a thing like this!” Verde rubbed his eyes viciously. “Can he make it through the Wall, do you think?”

  Meron’s eyes were drawn to the doorway, where the madman James stood peering in but refusing to cross the threshold. “Even for a Koi, the Wall is perilous,” she replied.

  “But the Wall is weakening.” Verde sighed, got up, opened and shut a cabinet. “He didn’t take much if he intends to stay.”

  The Koi clicked her fingers along a row of crude wooden spoons. The shelves held stacked wooden bowls and crockery plates. “These are colony things. He will not need them.”

  “It must be odd for you, being colony-born, I mean, to know so much about a place you’ve never seen.” He took her small hands between his own huge ones. “Someday, Merry. Someday.” Her eyes glistened as she nodded. Verde turned away, moved. He went to the bedroom door. The bed was neatly made, the shelves piled with dark clothing. “I don’t see Daniel’s old chessboard in its usual place. I guess Ra’an feels he needs that. He was always better at chess than opri, anyway. Like Daniel. One hell of a chess player, but he never did get the hang of opri.”

  “They are no ways the same,” said Meron, recovered. “Chess is a game. Opri is a process.”

  “More like a philosophical discussion, I’d say.”

  “Perhaps. Ra’an was not good at opri because he kept wanting there to be a winner.”

>   “Ah. Well. So do I. But not in games. In life.” He ran a finger across the black Terran-made wood stove dominating one corner. It was clean. Its brass fittings shone. “Daniel once told me this thing was over a hundred years old, and he’d always dreamed of building a house around it. I guess James should have the house now, with Ra’an gone.”

  Meron nodded toward the doorway. “I do not think he will come in here, Mitchell. It is a… what is it?… a haunted place for him.”

  “Umm.” Verde paced about a bit. “You know, you should have let Ra’an go a long time ago, let the Wall down just long enough to send him through, before he was angry enough to betray you like this.”

  Meron sat at the round wooden table, holding her hands in her lap like a gift. “For many centuries we have labored to bring ourselves away from what Ra’an has become in a short lifetime. You see how easily the Balance is upset? To live a proper life, the forces within us, our emotions, must be kept in Balance, but Ra’an’s anger, his hatred, is uncontrolled.”

  “He resents being shut out,” offered Verde.

  “But his own anger is the cause. There is great power in Ra’an tel-Yron, but his hatred has strangled it by tipping the Balance too far. To restore it, he must let some of that anger go. But he will not. He hoards it. And so it builds and builds until his mind can no longer contain it and it must leak out, causing pain to all of us. It is uncomfortable for a Koi to be around him.”

  “I didn’t like it much either,” said Verde dryly.

  “Since we have worked our way up from the black era of the towers, the Koi have come to take Balance for granted. But consider Ra’an, and you learn its terrible fragility, not only within a single mind, but among our people as a whole. Imagine us, each Koi mind, as the smooth and oiled parts of a great machine. That machine’s steady workings are the Balance. Then understand the damage that an abrasive, unbalanced object such as Ra’an could do if it were dropped into the works. This is why we have kept him in the colony.”

  “But that’s only made him worse, Merry.”