A Rumor of Angels

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  Clennan strode toward the door, his brain changing gears. Now that Lacey was on ice, he’d track down Verde himself. Give Murphy a rest. He touched his bandaged cheek thoughtfully. Verde’s right on one score: One of these days, we’ve got to do away with this Dark Powers bullshit. Superstition is not a reliable tool for civil control.

  He winced as he stepped out into the street. So late in the day, it was still like walking into a steam room. Sweaty, musty heat. Clennan loosened his collar. It even smells like madness out here, he decided. The heat alone could drive you nuts.

  He commandeered a cab and directed it to the Quarter. The shop-lined streets were a mess but quieting, as the rioters regrouped in the bars to slake the thirst of a long day’s destruction. The few surviving maintenance robots puttered around sucking up broken glass and litter. As he rode, Clennan reviewed his strange encounter at Montserrat’s: There had been the blackout, the first riot, that weird seance thing, with Verde waiting as if he knew exactly what was going on, then the implication that some momentous decision had been made, enough to prompt Verde to rat on the kid Lacey, supposedly one of his confederates, even though it involved some other kind of risk to do so. Obviously, the kid knows something that Verde and the natives don’t want to get out. What? When I question the kid, how will I know what to look for? A talk with Verde could give me a hint.

  The orange sun ball fell behind the Guardians as the cab moved through the entertainment district. The driver slowed to a crawl to nudge through the crowd. The power was still out here. Without the usual blare of neon and floodlights, the streets were darkly unfamiliar. Doors and windows gaped. Signs hung at wounded angles. The fighting and looting had abated, leaving the area in a state of ambiguously cheerful anarchy. Torches made of chair legs and clothing soaked in alcohol were carried high amid sharp-pitched shouts. A group mentality had invaded the streets. No one was out alone. Raucous singing emerged through the flung-open doors of the candlelit bars. The cab was turned away at one corner by a police roadblock and made a six-block detour to get itself headed toward the Quarter again. Peering through a cracked window, Clennan told himself that he was just as glad he hadn’t seen the outside of the Intelligence Complex in five days. The colony looked more than ever like Terra tonight. He yawned. The soup had made him sleepy, and he still tasted cold coffee.

  The cab driver swore sharply, and Clennan was thrown forward as the car pulled up short with a screech of tires. A man had backed out into the street in front of them. Thin arms hung stiff at his sides, fingers splayed out in panic. From the sidewalk, a mass of people yelled at the man, taunting him. Pale hair whirled about his face as he whipped his head from side to side, eyes fixed wide on his tormentors. He began to back across the street.

  “One of the loonies,” supplied the cabbie over his shoulder. “Why don’t they leave the poor jerk alone?”

  The man backed himself up against the display window on the far side of the street. The crowd jeered and dug one another in the ribs with manic glee. Bottles were raised and passed, insults flowing freely with the liquor. Then, from the midst of them, an arm wheeled up. A bottle flew. The window behind the terrified madman shattered. Liquid and glass sprayed all over him. He fell to his knees with a howl, covering his head with his arms. The crowd cheered and began to dance across the street toward him.

  Clennan snapped a tired order to the cabbie. “Radio the police and get moving. There’s nothing we can do.”

  The cab nosed its way into the mob. A woman hoisted herself onto the hood and waved back at the cabbie’s irate gesticulations. Grinning drunken faces fastened themselves to the windows, fists pounded at the roof. The cabbie gunned his engine.

  But suddenly the faces were withdrawn. A gust of hysteria swept down the street. The clamor surged to a fevered pitch. Clennan glanced back to glimpse a small orange blur racing toward the stricken madman, to throw protective arms across his chest, to plead and push frantically at his assailants as they crushed in around him. Blond head, familiar. Clennan started. Wait! That’s… Verde’s little Native kid! His hand shot to the door handle. With a shout to the cabbie, he was out and running, not knowing quite why or what he planned to do single-handed against an angry mob. He beat his way in, grabbing arms and shoulders and flinging them aside until he spotted, between the thronging bodies, the madman cowering on the sidewalk and Meron rearing up above him to face the crowd. Clennan had almost reached her when a man in front of him cried out in desperate pain, staggered, and collapsed. Meron swayed and clenched her eyes shut, and another attacker screamed and doubled over in the middle of a lunge. The mob roared. Clennan shoved aside an arm that swung at him and felt his nerves go taut at the cracking of glass against the pavement. He looked, saw a hand raised, clutching the jagged neck of a bottle. The mob surged violently around him and roared again in unison as the hand ripped downward, then up and down again. The madman shrieked like a soul in hell. Clennan tore his stunner from his belt and fired point-blank ahead of him. Bodies stumbled and fell. A woman clawed at his face, her nails raking the bandage from his newly healing jaw. His free hand whipped out. He slashed it across her mouth. He found himself against the wall, leveling the stunner at the howling crowd, bawling at them to back off, as the squeal of sirens hit his ears.

  The police stormed in with heavy stunners and sticks. The mob broke in all directions. Clennan flashed an ID, yelling for an ambulance, then lowered his gun and stared, frozen, at the fragile body sprawled on the concrete. Blood was matting already in the golden hair. As he stared, the madman crawled over to take the broken head in his lap. He bent over it, rocking and weeping. Dark ribbons dripped along his knee.

  Clennan turned his back. He wiped his mouth and there was blood again, the taste of it on his tongue, mixing with cold stale coffee. The madman keened and keened.

  An officer elbowed through the cordon to pull Clennan aside. “Got someone here who claims to be a relative, but…” He indicated a fair-haired woman in an orange tunic.

  “Let her through,” Clennan snarled breathlessly. “Where’s that fucking ambulance?”

  “On its way, sir. They’re busy tonight.”

  The woman knelt beside the body, touched the bloodied hair just once, ever so gently, then turned to Clennan. “Let us take her home.”

  “Lady!” the officer broke in. “She’s got to get to a hospital, and fast!” He shook open a blanket. “These people don’t understand about hospitals, Mr. Clennan.”

  The Intelligence man shot out a restraining hand. “Let them go,” he ordered. “It’s too late anyway.”

  “There’ll have to be an investigation, sir…”

  “Let them go!” Clennan helped the madman to stand and lifted Meron into the cradle of his thin arms, then turned to the Koi woman. “If he’s too weak, I’ll carry her,” he began, then wondered what had made him offer what he knew would be refused. The answer came to him too fast. Guilt.

  But the woman regarded him without rancor. “No, thank you, Mr. Clennan. James can manage.” They turned to go.

  “What was this all about?” asked the officer blandly, recorder in hand.

  Clennan stared past him at the retreating forms balancing their sad burden up the street. “Xenophobia,” he muttered, and the word rang in his head as if newly minted.

  The officer shrugged. “Oh, yeah?” he said and walked away mumbling into his recorder. An ambulance drew up. White-coated orderlies piled out to dump the injured inside, slam the doors, and speed off. The remaining crowd was herded down the street, grousing at the end to their excitement. Clennan thought he heard an occasional drunken laugh. There’s no way I’m going hunting for Verde in the Quarter tonight, he mused numbly, as yellow streetlights flicked on along the pavement.

  “You want a ride, Mr. Clennan?” The officer waited at the door of his cruiser. The cabbie had long fled, but Clennan shook his head. The officer nodded dubiously and drove off.

  Bill Clennan stood alone on the glass-strewn street for a
long moment, looking at the blood drying on his sleeve. Then, telling himself all the while that he was going soft, yes, for sure, he leaned against the wall and retched until he had barely strength to breath.

  Chapter 22

  The deep-cellars of the Native Quarter were the masterwork of thirty years in exile. Thirty years before, an ancient tunnel passed under the lakeside village of Menissa, the huruss route across the basin. Now that tunnel ended under the foothills of the Guardians, its continuation hastily filled in by the Koi to prevent discovery by the Terrans as they blasted into the rock to erect their high-rises. But under the Quarter, a section had been left open, and above it and below it, the Koi carved out the deep-cellars.

  The upper levels, the least secure, were earthen-walled, shored with wooden beams, carefully doctored to look older than they were. These were used as cellars might be expected to be used, for storage and curing. Sacks of potatoes and other root crops waited along the walls. The shelves were lined with ceramic crocks. The middle levels, which began the descent into the bedrock, were an empty and diffuse warren of dead-end passages, littered with the refuse of unfinished digging, meant to imply a task abandoned incomplete. Actually it was an intricate maze, a defense against intruders. If the signposts were known, a path could be found through the maze that led to the lower sanctuaries, where the Koi had burrowed out of solid rock a complex of halls and living quarters large enough to secure the entire population of the Quarter, twelve stories below the surface.

  Here, beneath the weavers’ cooperative known as Stahl House, was concealed the workroom of the true “Guardians” from which the Wall was generated.

  The deep-cellars now also hid twelve Terrans, who received the news of Lacey’s capture over the colony’s public radio station with a mixture of relief and dread.

  “At last!” Verde paced, terrierlike. For five days, he had haunted the radio, straying from it only to eat or grab a few hours of fitful sleep. Luteverindorin had been concerned about the radio, fearing detection of the cable, but Verde had pleaded for some direct link with the events outside, and his companions had been grateful as well, for he would have driven them crazy without something to keep him occupied.

  “At last!” he repeated. Now he could move on to his next worry.

  The two other men in the lantern-lit cavern exchanged glances. Ron Jeffries pushed his cabbie’s hat back on his scarred forehead and stabbed a needle through the shirt he was repairing. “Bunch of morons. Five days, for crissakes. Shit, did I overestimate them.”

  “Or underestimated Lacey,” put in Damon quietly, rising from his crouch by the radio. He maneuvered his bulk gracefully to a crate and picked up a notebook and pencil.

  “Nan,” said Jeffries. “Young Mark knows his stuff. I tried to tell you that. His old man and I worked demolition in the Army Engineers before I joined Intelligence. He was good, but the kind of guy to pass a skill on to his boy without thinking what the kid would do with it.”

  Verde moved around in the shadows restively. “Now we wait and see how much they pry out of him. Dammit, I want to get up there, get the feel of it. I can’t do any, good sealed in down here!”

  “You can keep your mouth shut down here,” returned the black man with uncharacteristic brusqueness. “Lissa said there’s been some Intelligence guy in the cafe every day looking for you.”

  “Yeah. Murphy. Who the hell’s Murphy?”

  “Another moron,” Jeffries supplied.

  Verde grinned in spite of himself. “Ron, you’re one hell of an advertisement for your old employer.”

  Jeffries nodded slyly and went on sewing.

  “Is Clennan a moron?” Damon asked.

  Jeffries considered. “Maybe half a moron. Nah, I don’t know. More interested in getting ahead than in being a good eye, as I remember. I could name you more than one head Bill Clennan stepped on on his way up, but he’s clever about it—you know, the glad hand, the big smile, and most of the jerks never notice the bootprints on their skulls.”

  Verde rubbed a palm against the chiseled rock wall as if trying to will it away. “Lute said this morning that the Wall is down to half strength/’

  “They shortened the duty shifts again yesterday,” added Damon. “Hrin came by while you were asleep, looking like death itself. He said fighting the interference from the rioting is draining even the strongest of them.”

  “With Lacey out of action, that should quiet down a little,” said Verde without much hope.

  “I wish I understood this halm stuff better/’ Jeffries mourned.

  “If the Wall is like a radio signal,” Damon explained simplistically, “the random psychic energy of the mob is like static jamming it.”

  “It’s not just the rioting, it’s the sheer numbers of Terrans in the colony now. Even standing still, they generate interference.” Verde leaned against the rock with an explosive sigh of frustration. “Lacey, Lacey, if only you’d listened.”

  A wistful grin lit Jeffries’ eyes. “Maybe, if we get lucky, and they don’t find us or blow us up trying, maybe the Koi will evacuate us to the Interior. I’d like that.” The lantern hanging by his head threw his weatherbeaten face into harsh relief. He looked like a wiry little gnome bent over a bit of mischief.

  “No,” Verde chastised. “We have to stay where we’re needed.”

  “For what? You yourself said we weren’t doing any good down here, and up there we’ll all be marked men when Lacey gets through singing his song.”

  Verde’s frail back straightened. “The Koi have been living in exile for thirty years.”

  “Not all of them.” Jeffries’ red beard framed a dreamy gnome-smile. “When I was a kid back on Terra, there was still a little preserve near Inverness that I went into a lot, just to wander. Oh, it was all rock and heather, land they just hadn’t gotten around to building on yet, but I had this fantasy, you see, that one day, if I wandered long enough and far enough, I’d find a place that nobody else knew about. Something untouched. A stream, full of white stones and ripples, a little pool with grassy banks, dappled with the sun or bright in the full moon. Something like that. My place, you know? Where I could stay forever, safe, and no one would bother me.” His grin broadened. “Such dreams I had as a kid.”

  “Not an uncommon fantasy for a Terran kid,” said Verde dryly, guarding his own sun-dappled inner visions.

  “True. But someday,” and Jeffries’ eyes were serious over his grin, “I’ll find that place, Out There.”

  “I hope you do, Ron,” said Damon.

  “That’s running away.” Verde’s tone was hard.

  “Ah, perhaps, but you were running, too, when you first came here. We all were. Where’s the shame in running if there’s no hope left where you are?”

  “There’s always…” Verde broke off as the canvas at the entrance was drawn aside with a heavy rustle. “Lute! Sneaking up on us again!” He waved a relieved welcome. “They caught Lacey, did you hear?’

  “Yes.”

  The strangeness in the old glassmaker’s manner brought them up short, the unnatural stiffness of his ancient back, the pause as he waited for their attention. Damon rose uneasily. Jeffries laid his needle down.

  Verde wet his lips. “What is it. Lute? What’s happened?”

  Lamplight flickered across Lute’s silvered face, glimmered in the tears gathered in the corners of his eyes. He moved aside, holding back the door drape, and James Andreas stepped into the room. He carried in his arms a limp bundle wrapped in the sheer yellow linen woven by the Koi for one purpose only.

  Verde’s blood thinned to an icy trickle. He reached out a hand, let it fall. “Who is it?” He saw now, behind James, Lissa waiting, and behind her Hrin and many others of the Quarter, filling the twisting dark corridor as far as he could see. James bowed his head over the shrouded form in, his arms.

  “It’s Meron,” he whispered.

  Verde turned pleadingly to the old man, begging a denial, but Lute nodded, and his tears began, ge
ntly, to wet the furrows in his cheeks. Damon murmured a prayer in his ancestral tongue. Verde was conscious only of the anger wrapping its claws around his heart.

  “How?”

  “The mob. She tried to rescue James. They killed her instead.”

  Jeffries bowed his head, while Damon wept unashamedly. Verde moved close and, in the silence of death that fell among them, folded back the linen around the head. The sight of her numbed him, the tawny still face, flaxen hair washed clean, the bloodless white-edged gashes across cheek and throat. He traced his thumb along the line of her jaw and drew the linen back in place, then raised his head to exchange a look of misery with the one who carried her, and found not misery or madness but cold hard sanity, staring with sudden authority out of the ravaged face of James Andreas. A dim primal reflex trembled in Verde’s gut.

  “James…?”

  The gray stare was unblinking. “Yes. I am here.”

  “My God.” The trembling descended to his legs. He backed up a step, but Andreas’ eyes held him like a vise.

  “First we must mourn her,” Andreas murmured, but Verde heard it as an order.

  “Yes.” He mastered his trembling with his grief. Remembering the broken child within the shroud, he put aside his awe, for there were last honors to be paid and farewells to be said before he could grapple with the miracle he saw now burning in the eyes of James Andreas.

  “Damon,” he said, his tongue like dust in his mouth. “Call the others.”

  Down the winding vaulted stairs the solemn procession moved, nearly three hundred strong, Andreas tall and stately in the lead, Hrin beside him raising high a torch that glistened on the silvered head moving in step behind them. Down, down, and through a natural cavern where their sandaled footsteps echoed with the dry rustle of the autumn wind and the torch flames lit the walls with winter amber. Koi and Terran, they crossed the floor in a long flickering line. Before the farthest wall, Hrin lowered his torch. Luteverindorin stepped forward to fit his palm into a hollow in the rock. The opening appeared. Quenching their torches one by one against the stone, the line passed through, Hrin waiting at the door like a solemn angry god until the last had gone. Then he followed, and the opening sealed itself behind him.