“This,” he murmured slyly, “is one of the things you Terrans do very well.” He filled the cap and handed it over to her. She sipped gingerly, not quite trusting. It was brandy.
“Where did you get this?”
“In a store,” he replied tartly. “We do have them in the Quarter, you know.” His accent faded as he slid into skillful parody. “How else could we make our living ripping off the tourists?”
“I refuse to be goaded,” she said, and smiled as the brandy warmed her throat. “Tell me your story.”
He raised the flask to his lips and took a healthy swallow. His voice assumed a brittle tone, his eyes veiled: the mask of the raconteur. “So. One sunny day nearly thirty years ago, we all woke up and found aliens in the Menissa Basin. Yes, it has a name, a Koi name of its own. And this peculiar occurrence was the first prospect of major change in a world that had existed unchanged for hundreds of years.
“My mother and father, a biologist and our equivalent of a sociologist, respectively, were sent out from Ruvala to help deal with what has come to be called the Arrival. What Terran historical accounts refer to as ‘an insignificant Native population’ was actually a reconnaissance team of fifty-three, mixed in with the local community of some nine hundred who happened to be living in the basin already.
“They were committed to a five-year study period, during which the policy was to be friendly, passive, and above all uninformative, even misleading, until such a time as the aliens were judged to be responsible enough to be introduced to the rest of the population… which, according to the census of that year, numbered around another hundred million or so. But as you may have guessed, that time never arrived.
“I was four years old at the Arrival, too young to be left behind in Ruvala, so my parents carried me with them into exile.”
“At least they cared enough to bother,” Jude commented wistfully. “Mine just dumped me when I got in the way.”
“Such is not our way, though life in Menissa after the Arrival could never be lived our way. If we make it to Ruvala, you will see for yourself how great the sacrifice really was.
“Schooling, for instance. My parents were kept very busy. It was an emergency situation.” He stared thoughtfully at the flask in his hand. “I don’t think they knew it could ever be too late for me, and if they did, I never would have listened.”
“Too late for what?”
“I should have been in school with the local children of Menissa, but when you are a stubborn boy, the future holds no immediate reality. For me, the aliens were far more fascinating. You see, halm skill is traditionally developed during early adolescence, in the classroom, like any other academic discipline. What tradition doesn’t tell you is that if you don’t learn it then, you may never learn it.”
“Why? If it’s a skill, it should be learnable at any age.”
Ra’an shifted, irritated by her interruptions. A brief unquestioned recitation could skate along the surface where it was less painful. “The brain learns certain skills in stages. It’s the same with language. I have read of the phenomenon of wild children in ancient Terra.”
“Not so ancient. We have them still, a new urban variety found in the underground service mazes. But it is not clear whether those children have no language because they didn’t learn it at the right time or because of some brain damage. Besides, it’s not the same. They can’t communicate at all. When one is as articulate as you, Ra’an, telepathy is a luxury.”
“Not in a telepathic society,” he insisted. “Your society is built around the assumption that people can talk to each other. The deaf, the dumb, all those who can’t, are disadvantaged and must exist outside of that society, one way or another. Koi society is constructed around halm, and the same principle holds true.”
“But is the isolation as complete?”
Ra’an’s jaw tightened. “Oh, yes. Do you think I am outcast by choice?”
“No, of course not. But it still seems that there must be some way of awakening a talent you were born with.”
“We’re all born with it, dammit, Terrans too, apparently!” He was becoming exasperated. “It takes teaching at the right time to develop it.”
“I never had any teaching, but…” She found herself speaking of the incredible as if it were a reasonable reality.
“I’ve tried everything!” he snapped. “I am shut off from my own people, my own relatives perhaps! Halm is total communication, and I am denied it!”
Encouragement was only making him angrier. She changed her tactic. “Maybe they will be able to help you in Ruvala.”
He ceased his ranting and collected himself with another swallow from the flask. “Yes. I do have hopes of that.”
“Please,” she soothed. “Go on.”
He looked away as if he regretted beginning the conversation, rubbing his forehead in tired resignation. “Well. So there were all the Terran scientists going busily about their digging and scraping and analyzing, and there was I, racing around after them. They seemed so harmless to me then, and probably, if the scientists had been the only ones to come from Terra, there would be fewer problems even now. They wanted answers, yes, but not our world for their own, most of them. Still, my elders were wary around them, and disapproving of the amount of time I spent with them, which I did not understand then, since the Terrans mostly ignored me. Except for Dr. Andreas.
“Daniel had a son my age, you see. His colleagues thought he was crazy to bring a small child along on a scientific expedition, but Daniel had that boy collecting rocks before he could talk. There were no other Terran children for him to play with, and I was there, so we learned our Terran together—me, gangling and eager, hauling Daniel’s specimen cases around, and James, always scrambling behind me to keep up with me.”
“He was a geologist, Andreas?”
Ra’an nodded. “Like the others, a compulsive discoverer. But somehow, of all those who came and went in those early years, he seemed the least strange—alien—to us, perhaps because when he discovered our geology to be identical to his own, he did not slink home disappointed. He decided to discover us instead.
“When he moved out of the Terran base camp and into our village, his colleagues gave him up for lost. Even the anthropologists went home to their air-conditioned domes at night.
“The process of codiscovery was exciting for a while, but after the fourth year, relations began to disintegrate. The Terrans grew bored with Menissa. Their sights broadened. Uniforms were seen with increasing frequency about the camp, which didn’t worry us until we found out what they signified. Many of the scientists gave up and went home. The developers moved in. The first explorers ventured into the mountains too poorly equipped and unused to true wilderness travel to get very far, fortunately for us. Machinery and building supplies were imported to construct what the Terrans considered to be proper buildings. Once they had all the dangers worked out of the transport process, more Terrans poured through the corridor every day. We began to realize they intended to stay.”
He sipped again from the flask, a delicate gesture of punctuation. “In the fall of the sixth year, a small delegation, my parents among them, were dispatched in secret to report home on what was decided to be a seriously worsening situation, bad enough to require them to present the evidence in person. They left me in Menissa, thinking they would return. They never did. Three weeks later, the Terrans sent out their first major expedition to explore the mountains commanded by Duncan Langdon. It disappeared without a trace.”
“What happened?” Jude asked breathlessly.
“Based on the delegation’s report, the decision had been made back home to apply a final defensive measure. From a secret location within the Quarter, a barrier of halm was raised around the entire colony, to imprison the Terrans without their knowing who or what was responsible.”
“A barrier? Like a wall?”
“We call it that. Actually, it’s an area, a zone of psychic disorientation, hallucinations,
of…”
“Madness,” she whispered.
“Yes. I’m told it can be a rather pleasant way to die.”
“Is there such a thing? Where is this barrier?”
He nodded behind him, toward the mountains. “Out there. We’ll reach it soon enough.”
“You mean we have to go through it?”
He found some dark amusement in her stirrings of panic. “I told you the dangers were more than geological. If it’s any comfort to you, knowing what the Wall is is half the battle.”
“Out of the frying pan…” she muttered. “It’s not true that Langdon’s expedition vanished without a trace. I’ve read his journal, or pieces of it.”
“Brought back by another expedition’s mad survivors. I’ve read it also. I remember Langdon vaguely. He was a religious fanatic.”
Jude told herself that it was only the cold that made her shiver so. She wrapped her blanket tighter. “It all seems a bit extreme.”
He grunted harshly. “One sure way to deal with a contagion is to isolate it, or so we thought. It has not been easy for the Koi who have maintained the Wall day in and day out for twenty-three long years. It is mentally exhausting, and a barrier like that does not permit the passage of halm through it, so we in the colony have been cut off from the rest of our people since the moment it was raised.”
“So you haven’t seen or heard from your family since you were, ah, ten? That’s worse than never having known them at all, like me. What did you do?”
Ra’an welcomed the digression from the subject of the Wall. “Daniel took me into the house he had built in the Koi village. He involved himself less and less with the Terran colonists and their burgeoning city. He became the father I had lost, and James the brother I had never had. It worked as a family unit for a while, the other Koi accepting his presence graciously if still warily. But as the years went by, he grew moody. He would keep me up late at night questioning me about where my parents had gone—it seemed he alone among the Terrans had noticed their absence, my fault perhaps. After he had exhausted himself and me and gone to bed, I would lie awake tortured by the secrets I kept from the man I loved more than anything else.” He paused to raise the flask once more, then shook it gently, assessing how much remained. “Nine years we kept that up, loving and hating like any father and son, I suppose, but with one difference. He knew I was keeping something from him, and with all his great capacity for forgiveness, he could not forgive me that. He never told any Terran his suspicions. Some insight and his love for the Koi held his tongue. But it became a private preoccupation. His moods grew worse year by year until it made our life together impossible.
“My nineteenth birthday arrived. That is the age of majority for a Koi, and we celebrated, but it was more of an argument than a celebration. Daniel got drunk, I got drunker, in the course of which painful insanity, I broke down and told him everything I knew, which was precious little, my association with Terrans being rightly considered a security risk. But my childhood memories were enough.”
He took the empty silver cup from Jude’s frozen hands and capped the flask, turning it over in his hands and tracing the tooled initials absently. “He disappeared two days later. Left me a note about taking care of James. He’d left. Without me. Walked off alone into the mountains.”
Jude shivered inside her blanket, unable to speak.
Tonelessly, he continued, as if by mere reflex. “Of course, they took James away from me. Sent him to relatives back in Terra, though his home was in the Quarter and he was old enough to decide for himself. They insisted. But he came back. Six years ago, in uniform. Came to visit me in the Quarter. It was an awkward reunion… full of silences. He told me he was going out the next day with the Kramer expedition. I tried to dissuade him, knowing… but too much distance had grown between us. He blamed me for our… his father’s disappearance.
“He wouldn’t even stay in the Quarter that night. As he left me, he stood in the door of his father’s house and swore to me that he’d find Daniel or hold me accountable.” Ra’an ended his recitation, drained, with a face as old as the rocks beneath them. The night and its winds pressed in about them. The mules shuffled uneasily.
“I’ve read Kramer’s journal, too,” Jude whispered hoarsely. “James came back once more, didn’t he?”
Ra’an nodded dully. “That journal was all he had with him. And now they turn him loose in the streets to scare the tourists.”
“I have met him,” she added after a while, not really sure he was still listening, so lost and far away did he look on his side of the fire. “In a restaurant. It was odd, really. He singled me out of a crowd and played at riddles with me. I liked him.”
“Ah,” he murmured.
“He said some very strange things… as if he could see into the future or something, as if he knew who I was, but he kept insisting it was who I would be.”
“Ne’e carel atha, veruth de’ir na celeratha,” Ra’an intoned.
“What?”
He sighed, staring into the dying flames. “There is a sect among the Koi, called the Diamo, who believe that the future is knowable—but their idea of how to decipher it is rather obscure. That is a favorite saying of theirs: ‘The future foretold by the madman is the holiest.’ ” He shook his head. “James. I killed them both, you see.”
“Not you,” she said quickly, soothingly, wary of his somber mood. “Their dreams killed them. They were caught in the throes of a vision more compelling than reality. That’s the stuff martyrs are made of. There’s never any way you can stop them from destroying themselves as they charge out in search of their brave new worlds, despite all your reasoned advice.”
Ra’an looked at her as if she had misunderstood his entire tale. “Ms. Rowe, the ‘brave new world’ that the Andreases sought is a real one. It’s waiting, over these mountains, and I couldn’t help them to it.” He glowered into the fire, remembering. “I knew I had to get out of the colony the day they brought James down from the foothills.”
“Why did it take so long?”
He shrugged. “Timing. The Terrans are not the only ones trapped in the colony, remember. The great border fence was installed soon after the fate of Kramer’s party was learned. Besides, I didn’t try too hard at first. Neither Daniel nor his colleagues had prepared me for those who would come after them, and I had thought I could find a place among the Terrans. It took me a while to recognize that the new Terrans didn’t care how well I spoke their language or how Terran my upbringing had been. To them I was a ‘Native,’ and thus feared and despised.
“My own kind were even worse, in a way. Lacking halm, I was treated like some kind of deranged child, whom they felt uncomfortable with but owed special care. I couldn’t bear being the object of their infinite patience, knowing that through their sympathetic smiles, they were speaking among themselves in that secret language I would never know.” He threw her a shielded look, half guilt, half defiance. “As you yourself have experienced, the one thing I could express was my growing anger. Or rather, the anger expressed itself, spilling over at the slightest provocation. Only by the most rigid discipline did I learn some control over it… some. Not enough. It was easier just to avoid those to whom my presence was painful… Do you really want to hear this?”
“Yes. If you don’t mind.”
He gave a tired, impatient sigh and his words came like the rattle of distant gunfire. “Fourteen years I lived alone in Daniel’s house, the last six of them scheming for a way to escape. I watched helplessly as the city spread like a blight across the basin, hating the Terrans more each day but knowing they were my only way out. I performed the occasional secret favor, nothing that would compromise the Koi, but enough to win the trust of the Terran Alien Division. I was aiming at a border security rating, and then… you came along.” He flicked her a cold, pained look. “Well, you got me the pass, I should be grateful for that. But understand my bitterness when the first being with whom I might be able to halmspeak
turns out to be a Terran!”
Halmspeak. She grasped at the word as if it could explain the mystery. “Perhaps your Terran upbringing encourages it,” she reflected quietly.
“Perhaps,” he replied, his jaw setting stubbornly. “But at least understand the injustice of it.”
Jude pursed her lips, a gentle tightening against his complaint. “Ra’an, it’s going to be hard to be sympathetic if you insist on Creating me as a lower form of life, but I do understand. I’m an outcast, too, remember. As for justice, you talk as if it were some sort of birthright. All I can say is that if you’ve ever known real justice, you’re one up on me. Justice is another one of those martyr’s dreams.”
“Very cynical,” he reproved without a great deal of conviction, as if the passion behind his plea for justice were more artificial than he cared to admit. “Why did they put you in the Wards?”
Jude walked right into his snare. “I was involved with the underground. I got caught.”
He arched an eyebrow. “A political dissident who doesn’t believe in justice?”
“In the impossibility of ever obtaining any.”
“Yet you went to jail for it.”
Jude uncurled her stiff legs and stretched them in front of her. “I don’t think I had fully considered the risks until it was too late. I don’t see myself as martyr material.”
The fire had died. She heard him move, a shadow lighter than the blackness, saw the pinpoints of coals scatter as he kicked them apart. “There is a certain freedom in cynicism,” said his voice pensively. “A passivity that frees you from responsibility… and anger, once you’ve decided that neither will get you anywhere. Cynicism is a comfortable retreat, is it not, Ms. Rowe?”
She did not exactly want to agree with him, for his tone made it an accusation, but she was too tired to think out her own conflicts between her present limbo-like passivity and her onetime impulse toward social justice. “Cynicism is survival,” she said, trying not to sound defensive.
“Yes,” he said heavily, and she could not tell if he spoke in acceptance or regret. His boots ground the coals into the rock, and the wind blew hot ash into her face.
A Rumor of Angels Page 11