A Rumor of Angels

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  “How long?” she asked faintly, gazing ahead.

  “Forever, if we went that way.” He pointed off left to a range that differed from others only in being somewhat closer. “That way.”

  “How do you know all this if you’ve never been up here? Is this the way you came as a child?”

  “Hardly,” he replied but would not elaborate further than to say, “Nature provides many effective compasses, and I do know where I want to get to. I’ve put together a sort of map over years of listening to this conversation and that.”

  “Look how that big cloud band cuts all the way across the mountains. That must be one hell of a snowstorm.”

  Whatever he was about to say, he thought better of it. He waited for the mules to catch up, then moved off down the rubbled slope.

  Late afternoon led them around a high, weatherbeaten spur. Trudging along behind the mules, Jude saw Ra’an pull up sharply at the top of a low rise, and reach out a hand to steady himself against a boulder.

  “What is it?” she called.

  “Come and see for yourself.”

  She scrambled up to where he stood. On the other side of the spur, a narrow canyon dead-ended into the mountainside. Bits of grayish foliage clung to its scarred walls. Under the rush of wind in her ears, she heard the muffled chatter of water running through rock. Pockets of mist floated in the shelter of overhanging ledges, very still despite the wind howling in the upper reaches.

  Dropping her eyes to the canyon floor, she saw what he was staring at. Traces of buildings, so broken-down that at first she did not pick them out from the natural rubble. Fragments of masonry walls scaled the canyon’s steep sides, flanked with crumbling steps cut into the natural rock, ending at the canyon’s mouth in the scars of an avalanche. Scattered about among the ruins were bits of metal objects, some rusted beyond recognition, some of more recent manufacture: a bent tent frame with shreds of yellow plastic still clinging like battered pennants, a tumbled-down windbreak built from the stones of more ancient buildings, a fireplace half-standing, washed clean of soot.

  Slowly, Ra’an made his way down until he stood amid the debris. Jude followed closely, glancing about as if she expected voices to challenge them for trespassing. The wind screeched at the canyon mouth.

  Ra’an stooped, picked up a rusted tin cup. Its handle fell away in his hand. He tossed it aside, and it landed with a soft crunch. He went from piece to piece, examining each with slow care, and moving on to the next. Over the wreckage of the fireplace, he grunted softly and dug among the stones, uncovering a flat case of still-lustrous metal. He tried the lock. It held. With tools from his pack, he battered the lock, then pried it open, working at the lid with a rusted length of steel pipe.

  The folded papers inside crackled as he drew them out, hand-drawn maps, yellowed sheaves of figures, printed tables, and computer printouts. They had notes and measurements scribbled in their margins, and their seams gave as he unfolded them gingerly. There were two pencils, much worn down, a red and a blue; a compass; a brass metric scale; and a drawing pen caked with ink. Farther down, a faded photo of a child, a credit book with the name McAllister stenciled on the cover. Finally, a penciled duty roster, which Ra’an stared at for a long time. Jude peered around his arm and read the names columned under the duty headings:

  Survey Site Patrol Com Mess

  Amato, D. Kleinst, I. Kramer, D. Andreas, J.

  Drucker, M. Kreeger, L. Segovia, C. Yung, P.I.

  LeFevre, P. Trilling, R.

  McAllister, A.

  Peety, R.

  Kramer! Andreas! The lists continued, but Jude could read no further. She could see only sad eyes above a whimsical smile.

  Ah, Poor James! She turned away as Ra’an continued to gaze at the paper, then carefully refolded it and replaced it in the case, which he stowed away in a pocket of his pack. Then, his mouth set in a hard line, he began to scour the campsite in widening circles. Jude shadowed him silently, unwilling to be left sitting alone in the wind. They moved gradually outward toward the canyon walls, where they found two large piles of stones, and a third, smaller, farther on.

  “The lucky ones,” Ra’an remarked tightly over the stone piles. “There was still someone left to bury them.” He moved on toward the boulder-choked head of the canyon, and the mist-drenched walls closed in around them. The gurgle of water echoed above their heads. For Jude, it was like walking eyes open into the airless corridor of old nightmares, timeless, silent but for the sound of water, running endlessly.

  Ahead, Ra’an hesitated before the rising jumble of rocks. His fingers twitched and fisted around his belt. “Wait here,” he ordered, though she thought he had forgotten she was there.

  She watched him disappear over the rocks into the gorge, and was seized with terror the moment he was gone from view. Alone, her phantoms played their tricks at the corners of her vision. Looking up, she could see only the mist hanging leaden above her. Not for anything would she have looked behind her.

  She waited frozen for a ten-minute eternity, until at last his dark head reappeared above the boulders. His face had death scrawled across it, but his shoulders sagged with something like relief. Whatever he had found, it was not the one he feared to find. Jude felt a rush of gratitude that she was no longer alone with her dread, and thought then that she had never seen anyone look so drawn and tired as this man who stood balanced on the rocks, gazing behind him. The awkwardness between them forbade her the offering of the sympathy she yearned to give, one human to another, yet she wished him comfort with all her heart, and relief from his loneliness and the suffering he laid upon himself, and he stopped as he climbed down through the rocks and turned to her a face softened with confusion and surprise. They regarded each other uneasily, the moment of touching shimmering between them, he amazed, embarrassed, she embarrassed and drifting in a complex current of emotion.

  Then he frowned and set his face again, and came down to her, his eyes on the ground. He held his hand out, palm up. A thin gold circlet lay there, a woman’s finger ring.

  “This one was not so lucky,” he said, and closed his hand around the ring with abrupt finality. Moving back down the canyon, he stopped by a length of masonry, pensively fingering the ancient smooth stones.

  “What was this place?” asked Jude in a whisper. “I mean, before Kramer and…”

  “Many things. A long-ago crossroads, a center of learning, what you might call a retreat, but more properly a confrontation. Most recently, a ruin and a place of ghosts, where Terrans learn answers to questions they never meant to ask.” Then, with resignation and a long slow glance around him, he said, “I am glad that Daniel was spared this death at least.”

  “Spared?”

  He raised the ring again between two fingers, turning it in the late cold light. “Far better to lie in some unmarked gully out there somewhere, anywhere, than to die in this place, alone yet not alone. And where a son can later come to find you… as I found this one.”

  Chapter 18

  When at last they halted and Jude had fallen into numbed sleep, the dream she could not recall from nights before came stalking her in earnest.

  It began as her colony dreams always had, sun-washed and pristine, but now less vivid than before, the music and gull-beast song dimmed as if with distance, the crystalline landscape obscured by a thickening mist that clung to her outstretched fingers like cobweb when she tried to brush it aside.

  She turned and found the mist encircled her. She was trapped in a cylinder of cloying white, in silence as utter and suffocating as a layer of earth. She knew her eyes must struggle to pierce that fog, that her ears must listen as hard as they could in that silence that was like a fog, though her body ached with the effort of it and her blood roared at her temples. Over the storm noises of her body, she strained to hear, and there it was, far off, a voice calling, over the grinding approach of heavy machinery. It was not a random voice. It was almost remembered, soft and sane, and it called her name. She
leaned toward it willingly, weak with terror as the background squeal of engines quickened. The voice approached and enveloped her like a lover promising salvation, and she surrendered to it, only to find herself wrenched about in sudden violence, forced to face the coming thunder of the machines. Bright lights flashed through the fog, searching, and out of the whiteness loomed the giant robot claw of a terraforming tractor. The voice reproved her, lectured. There was a lesson to be learned here. But she knew only her terror as a dozen razored spikes glittered overhead and the mist caught at her limbs, shackling her writhings until she could only watch and scream as the spikes sank inexorably toward her.

  Then there was a slap across her face from nowhere and she bolted up. She was wound up in her sleeping bag, and the night hung dark and quiet. A shadow moved to her side as a match flared and faded into the soft glow of a lantern. Ra’an crouched beside it, watching her.

  “Drink this. It will help,” he said, holding out the silver top of his flask to her. She took it with hesitant shaking hands. The liquid smelled sweet and vaguely familiar. It was not the brandy she had expected.

  “What is it?”

  “Sedative. A home brew. Drink it. I’m not going to poison you.”

  Jude drank gratefully. Waking, a sense of threat enveloped her still, a compulsion to spill her dream out Cassandra-like, but the alien’s cold, stern look prevented her.

  “I’m sorry I woke you,” she said inanely.

  “I’m surprised it took this long,” he answered obscurely. “You’ll get a dose of this every night from now on. You need the sleep.”

  “You must think I’m a terrible coward.”

  Ra’an grunted softly. “The Guardians demand something other than courage from those passing through their gates. Those back there”—he gestured behind him—“were not lacking in courage.”

  “What, then?”

  His voice was low, almost gentle. “Knowledge. Conviction that a thing is what you think it is, not what it appears to be.”

  “What if you have no idea what it is in the first place?”

  He took the silver cap from her, rinsed it with water from his canteen, refilled it with brandy, and drank. “Believe the compass in your head. It will always tell you which way is up and down if you listen hard enough.”

  “Not so easy when the fear is yowling inside you.”

  “I know.” He capped the flask. “But that, Ms. Rowe, is the essence of survival. Remember that when we get to the Wall.”

  The drug was working. Jude yawned. The cold night seemed soft and comforting. “Ra’an, I…” She yawned again.

  “What?”

  “Uh… thanks.” It was all she could express of her sudden urge to reach out and curl up against the security of him.

  Distantly, Ra’an shrugged and snuffed the little lantern.

  In the morning, Jude felt more alive than she had in many days, alive enough to wish vainly for a bath and a change of clothes. In the Wards, a certain perennial grubbiness had seemed in keeping with the environment, but out in this wind-purified wilderness, she found it increasingly offensive. Wetting her shirttail with a few precious drops from her canteen, she dabbed fretfully at her grime-streaked hands, glad that she could not see her face, then gave up and stretched. Ra’an was awake, wandering among the contents of the mule packs, spooning mush into his mouth and counting quietly to himself. She watched as he set the cup aside with an air of decision and stuffed one of the packs with the simple trail gear they had used all along, and loaded it onto the nearest mule. The remainder, all the winter and mountain gear, over half the food, and various other equipment that had provided her with an illusion of preparedness, he gathered into a pile, then laid the tarp over it, fastening the corners down with climbing pitons. As she saw her camera case disappear beneath the tarp, she realized he intended to leave all this behind.

  She struggled up from her sleeping bag. “My cameras!”

  Ra’an looked up and seemed to sigh. “Still holding on to that pretense? You haven’t taken a picture in days.”

  Jude bridled. The cameras were her last link with her former self. “That doesn’t mean I won’t want to!”

  He chuckled dismally to himself and pulled back the comer of the tarp. “Help yourself.”

  She temporized. The heavy camera pack did not look so tempting. “What about the rest of this stuff?”

  “We won’t need it, and we need the extra weight even less. Had to bring it this far so no one would find it.”

  “Why bring it at all?” Maybe if I took just one? But what about film?

  He raised his eyes to the cloudbank lying thick along the upper ridges and pointed toward the peaks that towered beyond. “I never said we were going over the mountains, but I had to make your friends think we were.”

  She realized that she could not leave her cameras behind yet. She hauled the pack out and strapped it to her back.

  That day’s long climb brought them to the edge of the clouds. Suppressing the echoes of her dream that the white mist wakened.

  Jude swallowed her capful of golden liquid and slept soundly.

  At dawn, the mist formed a ceiling above their heads. Ra’an loaded their packs on the mules, then shook loose a coil of rope and knotted one end around his waist, measured out a pace or two, passed it around Jude’s, then tied the mules together in a line behind. He moved about his preparations with a quick, nervous efficiency, a true hint to Jude that the hard part of the journey was now beginning.

  When he had finished, he spoke to her sternly, and the mules gathered around with their ears cocked.

  “We’ll eat as we go. There’ll be no stopping until we are through this. I don’t know how long that will be, but we’ll go without sleep if we have to.” He pulled a small plastic packet out of a pocket. “These will help keep you awake. Now. Listen to me as you have never listened before. In there…” He paused and glanced over his shoulder at the mist as if it were something living, something resistant, like marsh water or a jungle. “I can’t warn you specifically what you will find. That’s why I haven’t wasted my breath explaining things to you. It is possible that the explanation would be more frightening than the reality. What I do know is that you will witness the fabric of your reality being stretched to the breaking point, perhaps beyond. You must not fight it. Let it wash over you, forget about logic, accept anything. Reason won’t help you in there.”

  Jude smiled wanly. “The compass in your head.”

  “Just so.”

  “Sounds like advice for getting through a bad trip,” she joked nervously.

  “If that helps you, use it. Above all, concentrate on where you’re going. Know where your foot is going to land every time.” He turned to face the mist.

  “Ra’an… you haven’t said it, but this is the Wall, isn’t it?”

  He nodded seriously. “This is the Wall.”

  They pushed into the mist. At first, Jude found it rather pleasant. It was warm and windless, as if they were indeed inside. And it was silvery. The mist laid a metallic luster on everything it touched, the round smooth stones, the sleeve of her jacket, the swaying length of Ra’an’s long hair moving in front of her. More like a cocoon than a wall, she thought, as the mist closed around them and they walked into stillness like the surface of a lake at dawn, mirrored, waiting, where a scattered pebble set up a rattling in the bones.

  Soon, Jude could not help it. Her dream floated back to her. She caught herself trying to listen for sounds that weren’t there. And then, as she listened, there were sounds there. Not the machine noise she dreaded, but a muttered whisper, close behind her. Reflex turned her head, but behind, there was only the mist. The whispering stopped. She took a deep breath and resolved not to fall prey to a siren imagination. She fixed her eyes to the path and the slim rope that tied her to her one remaining reality, the tall alien who led her deeper into the mist.

  The murmur came again, from her left, and again, a few paces farther, from her righ
t. Jude ignored it. Or tried. After an hour of trying, an entire conversation raged around her, within range of hearing but too muffled to be understood. The tone was clear enough, however, and it was distinctly unpleasant, especially as the voices seemed familiar, as if all her worldly acquaintances had lined up on the other side of the mist to pass around insulting remarks about her.

  Jude worked harder to ignore them. She thought about Terra, tried to remember it as home, to recall the good moments. Gray images of the Wards crowded her head. She called up Bill Clennan, tried to distract herself with visions of his grinning, handsome face, but could only see the traitorous stunner spinning through the air into the dark forest. She thought of Ra’an and could only remember his cold, violent anger. Only the darker side of her mind thrived in this mist. Thoughts flowed backward and stopped where she did not want them to, and the voices nagged like a cloud of insects, growing piercing, insistent, distinct enough for her to pick out phrases, whole sentences. Listen. Her heart was pounding. Listen. She focused her attention on the alien’s straight back a rope’s length ahead, seeking calm in the regularity of his stride. She gave up trying to blot out the voices, and instead absorbed their judgments as passively as she knew how.

  There. That was her creche mother’s exasperated sigh. Another bad report. “… I don’t think she cares if she has any friends…”

  And that. A cutting laugh from the leader of her cadre in the underground. “… never could trust her with anything, you know, important. She’s only in it for something to do…”

  Another, unfamiliar. “… but then all photographers are voyeurs, don’t you think? Living off other people’s lives…”