A Rumor of Angels

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  Clennan held the boy to his chest, soothing him with awkward pats. “There’s always a first time for this, kid,” he lied, for he had never lost a subject under interrogation. “You’ll get used to it. It wasn’t your fault.” That is, he’d never lost a subject until Lacey. What the hell was Ramos doing down there?

  When the tech had control of himself, Clennan sent him to quarters. He ducked into his office, sat down at his desk, and stared at the wall. He should check in with Ramos. He should report back for duty. Duty? He could barely move. Ramos is killing people in my interrogation room. My room.

  He lashed out at the air with a fist. I go down there, I’ll yell at him, I know I will, and that’ll be the end for me. Sent home in disgrace. He got up and stood by his open doorway as if there were bars across it. Distance—I need some distance.

  And so he avoided his superior, avoided the interrogation room, which he envisioned as blood-spattered, though he knew better. He took a back elevator down and climbed into the old jeep. He drove around aimlessly for a while, then headed for the detention camp. He had a sudden impulse to check up on the constant reports coming out of his interrogation sessions that conditions at the camp were intolerable.

  As he approached the steel enclosure, the stench hit him from a distance. He left the jeep at the gate and walked in. What he saw appalled him. Children and old people lay panting in the dirt under crude tarpaulin shelters. The tarps had been erected in close-set rows to maximize the amount of shade, but there were not enough to provide shelter for all. For most, there was only an edge of shadow, enough to protect their heads while their bodies must remain exposed to the blistering sun. For many others, there was no shade at all and they sat out in the open in collapsed heaps, or under little tents made from their own clothing. One corner of the corral had been isolated as a latrine. A cruel breeze blew across the camp, bringing odors of urine and sunbaked waste to mix with the acrid scent of unwashed sweating bodies.

  The silence unnerved Clennan as he paced along the crowded rows. He heard no moans, no complaints, not even a child crying, though he saw several asleep under the shelters. There was hardly any movement at all, an occasional arm being lifted in lethargic adjustment, a head turning hopelessly in his direction as he passed. A few lone figures moved from shade to shade with cups of water, speaking soft encouragement.

  Clennan realized he was scowling. He located the water barrels, knocked each one. Two were empty, the third nearly so. He took a plastic cup from a neat stack on top of a barrel and put it to the spigot for a test mouthful. It was hot and foul, and he spat it into the dust. He threw the cup down, then impulse made him retrieve it to replace upon the stack. That the Koi would maintain neatness in the face of such adversity further encouraged the shock of righteous outrage that set Clennan’s jaw and sent him stalking toward the gate, demanding to see the officer in charge.

  He was shown to one of the temporary domes set up to house the guards. When he found himself in the chill of airconditioning, the lingering poison of the water brought acid to his tongue. The scrub-faced officer was sure his career was over by the time Clennan finished with him.

  Trucks were dispatched for fresh water, for additional shelter, for portable toilets and showers. Men were sent to strip the unoccupied barracks recently built to accommodate incoming troops. Cots, towels, soap, camp stoves, utensils, everything was to be brought to the detention camp. Clennan called out a civilian medical unit, placed an order for the vegetable shipments lying untouched at the Transport Terminal to be brought in immediately, ordered milk and bread and eggs, and finally called in a dozen men from his own staff to make sure his orders were carried out. He was gratified when the man on the other end of the line volunteered immediately.

  He would have some explaining to do when Ramos found out. He did not really have the proper authority. The camp was not in his jurisdiction. But he no longer cared.

  He reentered the camp and went about offering assurances that help was on the way, first in Terran, then in whatever broken Koi he could muster. The dazed skepticism that met his promises was like salt in his wounds, but he could not blame them for their lack of faith. I have always been the enemy, he thought, why should they think any different now?

  He stared back toward the gate, the buoying energy of his rage deflated into depression. A face upraised, then quickly averted caught his eye. Of the several Koi moving around beneath the largest spread of tarp with water and wet rags, one looked familiar. As the Intelligence man approached, the Koi worked his way to the farther end of the canopy and bent over a prostrate woman, his back carefully turned in Clennan’s direction. His face was hidden by a shapeless hat, but something in the angular tension of his shoulders or the big sunburned hands on a little man’s body brought Clennan to full alert. He skirted rapidly around the outside of the shelter and grabbed the man’s free arm. The man froze, careful not to spill the water he was holding to the old woman’s lips.

  Clennan’s sweat-dampened fingers left streaks like claw marks on the man’s dust-caked forearm. Ashamed, he let go but hovered over him, half wary, half amazed. “Verde!” he said hoarsely. “My God, Verde, I can’t believe it!”

  The conservationist flicked him a cold glance. “Not in uniform, Clennan? Not showing off your medals like everyone else?”

  Clennan hardly heard. “You have no idea what I’ve been through trying to find you.”

  “I can see that for myself.” Verde waited until the old woman had drunk her fill, then straightened and turned on Clennan the sort of look normally reserved for maggots eating the dead. “We helped you out, and this is what we get?” He spat, with a sharp gesture around the camp.

  Clennan’s face went slack. “Now hold on a minute! I’m not responsible for this mess!”

  Verde’s red-rimmed eyes echoed the Koi’s weary disbelief. “I’m not buying the good-guy act, Clennan. You’re just another murderer to me.” He offered both wrists, one hand still gripping the grimy cup. “Do you haul me away now or do I get to finish what I was doing?”

  Clennan stepped back. They know about the dead one already? “I don’t know if I’m taking you at all,” he muttered. “Look, Verde, I feel as bad about this as you do.”

  Verde’s laugh was hard. “Sure.”

  “I’m trying to help, damn it!” Clennan was disconcerted by the desperation in his own voice. “I just spent an hour risking my job to make things a little more bearable around here!”

  “We don’t need your kind of help,” Verde snarled.

  “We need the help of anyone who sincerely offers it,” a reproving voice corrected. Luteverindorin limped in out of the sun, supporting himself with a broken tent pole. He faced Clennan squarely. “So this is our inquisitor.”

  “Executioner,” Verde revised.

  Clennan’s eyes took the old Koi in: the webbed fingers, the silvered skin His stare was tinged with wonder.

  “What help can you offer us, Mr. Clennan?” The glassmaker asked.

  Verde murmured a warning.

  “I’ve done everything I could on the spur of the moment,” Clennan began. He thought he detected a smile in the old Koi’s unblinking gaze.

  “Can you stop the questioning?” Verde demanded. “Can you stop the murder of innocent people?”

  Lute held up a gossamered hand. “I think Mr. Clennan means well enough, Mitchell.”

  Clennan’s face softened. Absurdly, the Koi reminded him of his father. “Yes, sir, I do.” He was riveted, like a small boy before a famous man.

  Verde watched, checking his rage. When Lute put on the mask of power, few could resist.

  “The question is,” Lute continued, “how much does he mean well.” Now he leaned his chin on his two hands grasping the top of his stick. “The thing we need most of all, Mr. Clennan, is to be free of this place, not necessarily all of us, but some of us.”

  Clennan shifted his weight, said nothing.

  “You see, Mitchell?” Lute crowed softly. “He�
�s thinking it over.” He reached with thin webbed fingers for Clennan’s arm. “If you will help me to walk a little, my boy, we will find a place to talk.”

  Chapter 34

  The arrival in Quaire’en was a kind of homecoming. Before Jude’s incredulous eyes spread the crystalline city that had haunted so much of her sleep since she had arrived on Arkoi. She saw it and understood how Ra’an could believe in James Andreas’ power to know the future.

  Quaire’en was both familiar and strange, shadowed by remembered nightmare but freshened by recognition and discovery. There was that same salt tang in the breeze, the same patient sighing of the waves, the sea-tinged light shifting through tiers of glass, and up above, the shanevoralin in flocks of hundreds, crying into an azure sky.

  The halm buzz inside her head, subliminal in Ruvala, now seemed nearly audible, an indication of the rich concentration of halm voices around her. Jude thought of the Wall, of the voices that had pursued her there. These were more mellow voices, companionable, but she would need to learn to turn them on and off, as she had learned to do with the softer buzz in Ruvala.

  Anaharimel will teach me that, as she will teach me to be free of James Andreas!

  The clear sun of Quaire’en filled her with anticipatory joy. The city’s beauty enchanted her. She took immediate possession and wanted to be nowhere else.

  A city of halm! Anaharimel, teach me to be part of this!

  She could not wait to get to the school. She could not wait to learn. Even so, she dawdled in the huruss station with Theis at her side, pondering her next step. This was more than an abstract problem, for five meters beyond her feet, the stone ledge under the huruss track gave out into a transparent sheet without visible support. A vault of similar transparency arched overhead. To either side and beneath, the city tumbled down the cliffs into the sea.

  Jude walked to the edge of the stone and looked down, unsure whether this glimmering floor was real or a time-past ghost. She looked into a prism, fractured images receding in a vertiginous plummet through layer after transparent layer to blue-green infinity. In the depths, color stirred, like pebbles at the bottom of a stream, the Koi walking among the tiers of the city, lives being lived, goods being traded, plant life swaying in the cool updrafts, water flowing, motion, sparkle, secret glimmers in the thousand facets of the jewel that was Quaire’en.

  Jude slid a foot out on the polished surface. Then she heard the click-click of nails on the glass as Theis trotted happily out and stopped in the middle, as if suspended in midair. Jude ventured another step. She floated breathlessly above the city. On the tier below, several Koi passed under her, carrying baskets of fruit.

  Theis led her to the top of a ramp that descended through the floor. They had a view of the entire city, cascading down the cliff in a fountain of glass, mile after mile of glittering rooftops and towers shaped like natural crystals, a hymn to geometry falling in cadence to the waves. In the distance, the cliffs curved sharply and dropped into the sea to break the surface farther out in white crags like a sand castle caught by the tide. It was too far to see clearly, but perhaps there were buildings there.

  Theis nuzzled her with benign impatience. They moved on to the level below, traversing an arcade of shops. Through the glass walls of any one shop, many could be seen, receding like an infinite reflection of diverse wares, of shoes and cookware and glass shelves stacked with bottles, of the shopkeeper and the shoppers, a multiple exposure of commerce. Quaire’en was like an artist’s solid expression of the phenomenon of endless pasts visible in the present. Intentional or subconscious? Jude wondered. She did not know the Koi well enough yet to answer that.

  The street, if anything one can see through can be called a street, bustled without pushing or noise. There were some dark-haired Koi, like the Ruvalans, and many more who reminded her of the plainsman Tekhon, solid and tawny, supporting enormous loads. Most, however, were unlike the Koi she knew. They were the locals, the sea-bred folk, with skin like the silvered side of a fish and silken hair so fine it seemed to float away from their faces like mermaid hair. As Jude made her way among them, they nodded with pleasant curiosity. She would feel the tickle of halm reaching for her untuned ears. Receiving no reply, their opalescent eyes would go to Theis and explanations would be exchanged. Then the Koi would smile perhaps a little distantly and pass on, leaving Jude unenlightened about how they felt at finding a Terran in their midst. The only clue was a subtle thickening in the halm buzz. Ah, very sly of you, Rya, to assign me Theis as a guardian without admitting that my reception in Quaire’en might be less casual without her, with news of James Andreas so fresh in the city’s halm web.

  The pair descended two more levels through the markets and came to where the street ended in a crystal lattice railing that ran around the four sides of a vast galleried court. Tall feathery trees rose up from the edge of a deep pool cut from the natural rock several levels below. The top of the court was open to the sky high above, so that a well of glass was formed, into which fell sunlight and air and little birds spiraling down to roost in the trees.

  Walking around the gallery, they found several stalls selling prepared foods. Hungry, Jude lingered by a counter stacked with steaming pastries. Rya had provided her with a kind of currency, little packets of the lai crystals, to be used in trade. She discovered that one packet provided for a more than adequate lunch for both the gria and herself.

  By midafternoon, they had descended deep into the city. The light took on a greenish tinge, the air was cool and moist. The streets were no longer laid out in orderly patterns but twisted around spurs of naked rock emerging through the glass floor. The rock was incorporated into complex structures of both clear and translucent material, some boldly geometric in design, others with a logic less easily perceived at first glance. Patches of white sand and broken shells opaqued the floor here and there. Tall reeds grew in colored pots, and overhead hung forests of fern.

  Jude worried that she was trespassing, for these were obviously dwellings. But no one challenged her. A small silver child darted by to vanish behind a facade that had before seemed perfectly transparent. Like the tree house in Ruvala, these homes were less a barrier against the outside than they were a refinement of space chosen for domestic use. Thus privacy was obtained without blatant shows of isolationism.

  Farther along, open canals appeared, where the waves surged in along the glass walls. The sea bottom was clearly visible through the floor. Jude saw a turtle the size of an armchair glide across the sand, nosing through a garden of seaweed.

  They came to a sort of intersection. Between two honeycomb dwellings was a space and a great roaring of water. Here the cliff face was exposed for a hundred meters, soaring toward a vaulted ceiling where a jagged cave spouted a torrent of water that dropped in a sparkling rush past bridges spanning the opening and into a foaming pool at the bottom. Groups of Koi sat around the pool, basking in the spray, content that their clothing was as wet as the rocks they sat on. Jude noticed several intense discussions in progress, and a glance or two in her direction as they passed. The halm buzz fairly roared. Even in this perfect city, tension walked the streets.

  Opposite the waterfall, a tunnel led still farther downward. Theis entered confidently. As if walking into an aquarium, they entered a long glass tube that ran along the sea bottom. The sunlight filtered through the shifting water was green and uncertain. Schools of fish careened among the eel grass on the other side of the glass, and beyond glided the gray shadows of the bigger fish. They met no one in the tunnel, heard nothing but their own footsteps and the faint echoes from the city behind them. After ten minutes of walking, the tube began to rise, then ended in a sand-floored cavern. Theis trotted to the center and sat. Jude shrank back at the entrance. The cavern was lit only by the eerie glow from the tunnel.

  “What now?” she asked aloud, peering into the dark recesses where she could hear water dripping. Her mind pictured dank pools slithering with threatening inhabitants, but she
knew exactly why her imagination had strayed so suddenly. Sea caves reminded her of James Andreas.

  “I’m not ready!” she cried out. Theis leaped to her feet in alarm, looking this way and that.

  A pale shaft of light sliced across the cave from an archway that had appeared in the far wall. A young girl stood silhouetted, beckoning. The gria’s head wagged. She crossed the damp sand into the light and waited beside the young girl until Jude collected herself and followed. As she passed beneath the arch into a long stair hall, the solid wall reformed behind her. Jude started, gasped. Her hands shot to her ears.

  Deaf! I can’t hear!

  But she could hear. She could hear the distant surf reverberating through the rock and the cry of gulls echoing down the stairwell. It was a halm silence that filled her head. Not since she had entered Arkoi had she known so utter a silence, which meant she had never been truly apart from the halmweb until now. The silence was both a relief and a desperate isolation.

  If this is the silence that Ra’an lives with daily, no wonder…

  The young girl waited patiently at the foot of the stairs, smiling as if she understood Jude’s confusion. Jude gripped the stiff hair on the gria’s back for support and moved down the hall in a daze. The girl led them up the stone steps, a long spiral that mounted toward a brilliance of light.

  They came out onto a white-columned portico overlooking the sea. Across a narrow strait of rough water, the city ascended the cliffs like a living jewel. At its feet, a white arc of beach stretched into invisibility. Jude made a moan that sounded like pain, and the girl turned and reflexively took her arm.

  The white beach! He comes!

  Jude stared at the beach, waiting for him to be there yammering in her head, sure that if he could predict this city and this beach, he could ferret her out in her place of refuge. But the silence held. She allowed herself to breathe again and looked down at her hands gripping the balustrade. The knuckles were white. She relaxed and allowed herself to be drawn away along the portico.