A Plague of Angels

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “You forget. Werra was asked specifically if such a Gaddir child had been born recently.”

  “And he didn’t answer.”

  Ander made a face, the superior Ander face, lips pursed, eyes narrowed. “If the answer had been no, he would have answered. Think, Berkli! The very fact he didn’t answer tells us there is such a child. Gaddirs don’t tell lies, we know that. Besides, later he was asked, by no less a person than Jark Ellel the Third, Quince’s father, if such a hypothetical girl could provide a guidance system for the shuttle. Jark knew it would save us a generation, at least, if we didn’t have to build a system. And what did Werra say? He said hypothetically yes, she could.”

  “He said it unwillingly! Only when pressed!”

  “It’s the very unwillingness that makes us believe it! It’s all of a piece. Call it myth if you like.” Ander nodded, slipped a fan from his sleeve, and fluttered it purposefully “Such stories are often based in truth.”

  “They are as often based in wishful thinking,” Berkli muttered. He raised a hand in farewell and turned once more toward the annex, only to hear the sluff-sluff-sluff of Ander’s slippered feet restlessly following him.

  “How long now?” Ander called.

  Berkli turned, trying to control himself but failing. He threw up his hands in exasperation. “Ander, damn it, what is it with you and Ellel? Why ask me how long it will be? Ask the engineer in charge! Or ask Mitty. He’s the only one with any technical knowledge.”

  Ander smiled serenely. What Berkli said was untrue. Ellel had considerable technical knowledge, so she assured him, knowledge hard won by solitary struggle with old books, ancient records. No one except Ander knew of her capability, so she whispered, and he must keep her secret.

  “You were seen talking to the engineer yesterday. How long did he say it will be?”

  Berkli snarled, “According to Dever, the damned thing is almost finished. A few days or weeks, and it’ll be done! But as there’s still a great gaping hole where the guidance system is supposed to sit, and as building a guidance system is going to take years more, it doesn’t matter whether the rest of the shuttle is finished now or later!”

  Ander withdrew the fan from his sleeve once more, flipped it open, and ruffled the air before his long nose, pinching the nostrils slightly to show his annoyance. “Very little matters to you, Berkli.”

  Unable to maintain the calm he knew was wiser, Berkli let his anger show. “Well, the shuttle doesn’t matter unless you can make it go somewhere. And Ellel’s damned orphan doesn’t matter because she’ll never be found!” He turned his back upon Ander, stomping off toward the shining hallway that led to his own quarters, unable to resist one last taunt.

  “Because she doesn’t exist!”

  Orphan was unable to regain the peace of mind she remembered in her childhood. Though Oracle continued to be generous with her buttered scones, Orphan lost weight and began to show dark circles around her eyes. She was not sleeping well. The dreams awoke her more and more frequently. She noticed Oracle looking at her with concern and heard Burned Man fretting over her, though others in the village seemed to notice nothing amiss.

  Until one afternoon Orphan heard Fool howling like a dog, “Mama, Mama, Mama’s dead!” She looked out her window in time to see Bastard walking back from the Fool’s shack, a white ape’s grin showing below the red glitter of his eyes.

  Orphan went to get Oracle and found her outside her cavern holding her head in her hands.

  “Bastard told Fool his mother’s dead,” Oracle muttered deep in her throat, like a growl.

  “Why did Bastard do that?” asked Orphan. “Bastard did it because he’s a bastard,” said Oracle. “He’s angry at me for preventing his getting at you, angry at you for being out of reach, and angry at Hero for telling him what would happen if he tried it anyhow.”

  “What’ll we do!” Orphan cried, putting her hands over her ears to shut out Fool’s howling.

  “We’ll tell him his mother waits for him in heaven, I suppose.”

  “Is that a lie?”

  “It’s what we tell fools and children.” She sighed. “Postulating a heaven gives man an out for having been unable to retain the paradise he was given here on earth. What else can I do?”

  Oracle had become so accustomed to Fool, she had not realized how big and strong a man he was. Only his awkwardness saved her, for at first he would not let her speak. When she tried to speak of his mother, he struck at her, shrieking “Mama, Mama, Mama!”

  She murmured, and murmured, over and over and over At last he listened to her. At last he quieted. When she went back to him later in the day, he said, “Mama gone.” He said it, however, almost gloatingly, almost with satisfaction. “Mama gone. Mama said no, but Mama gone.”

  He hunkered down beside the fence, looking at Oracle out of the corner of his eye as she walked wearily away. He stayed there, once in a while looking over at Bastard’s House and whispering to himself.

  “Mama said no, no, no, but Mama gone,” Fool said.

  “I take what I want?” Fool said.

  “Through her window, with a knife,” Fool said, looking first at Bastard’s House, then at Orphan’s, his tongue feeling its way between his laxly parted lips.

  Orphan overheard him. His words went into her mind like a key into a lock, little doors opened, little cuckoos came out, fragments of this and that suddenly added up to more than their sum. She went to Oracle, though sadly, and told Oracle what she thought. Oracle put her hand to her forehead, shut her eyes for a moment, then agreed, also sadly, before going to Hero with the story. Hero was waiting when Fool tried to climb through. Orphan’s window with his knife Bastard must have given him the knife, for Fool had never had one that sharp.

  None of them felt it was really Fool’s fault. After Hero and the village Smith had buried Fool, Hero went to Bastard’s House to settle the matter, only to find Bastard gone Bastard had fled the village, as he had no doubt planned to do all along, hoping to leave wreck and tragedy as a monument behind him. Oracle was proven right once again: There were no acceptable solutions to some problems.

  It was only one day later that Orphan was wakened in the predawn hour by Oracle, who shook her and mumbled urgently into her ear.

  “Get up, girl. Get up. Your time’s run out. Oh, lag-about woman, your time’s run out! I’ve seen it in the smoke: Bastard talking and talking. It’s what he went to do; he’s done it. He’s told someone. They know you’re here, and now they’re coming!”

  “Wha when?”

  “Now. With the sun. Here. While you’ve dallied, I’ve been busy. I’ve sewn you a coat and bought you a pair of boots. Silver rats and silver mice in the linings of the pockets. Golden sparrows in the soles of the boots. It will make for heavy walking, but you’ve no choice at all!”

  The things thrust at her were a pair of high-cuffed boots that came above her ankle and a new coat, a flow of gray wool, warm and whole.

  “My underwear!” cried Orphan.

  “Well, put it on; it’ll keep the wool from scratching. Here’s the chemise, and here the pantaloons. Here are trousers and a shirt, with another set for spare, gray like the coat, to fade into the shadows. You can only take what you can wear or carry! Put these things on! Where’s your other blanket?”

  “I don’t know!” Orphan cried. “I aired them out on the fence some days ago, and one of them went missing.”

  “Well, take the one, and the coverlet I made for you Here’s a canteen to hang on your belt.”

  So there she was, wearing her chemise and panties under unfamiliar trousers and shirt, the new coat over that, her bedding and spare clothes in a bundle on one shoulder and the guardian-angel on the other, new boots on her feet and a sack thrust into her hand, containing, so Oracle averred, food for both angel and woman, including breakfast, for Orphan had no time to eat before she must go.

  “My animals!” cried Orphan. “Who’ll care for my squirrel, and my jay, and—”

&n
bsp; “I will,” grated Oracle. “I promise, Danger comes from that way,” she cried, pointing to the northern notch. “So you must go the opposite direction!”

  “Nothing there but mountains!” cried Orphan, half-hysterically. “And monsters. That’s what Hero says.”

  “So much the better. The men aren’t likely to go looking for you there. Take the path down by the pool. Say goodbye to Drowned Woman. She’d never forgive me if you left without doing that.”

  Orphan’s feet stumbled along the path as though by themselves. Drowned Woman was waiting at the poolside, her face very pale in the first light.

  “Oracle thought it would be soon,” she whispered. “You’re going.”

  “Oracle says—”

  “I know. She’s seen it coming. Creatures striding silent through her dreams, blades in their hands. She hoped it would change. Sometimes things do. But not this time. No. They’re bringing another Orphan, and they will make room for it.”

  “Make room?”

  Drowned Woman shook her head. “I don’t know. But someone’s coming, Oracle says. Someone with the authority to clear away one Orphan to make room for another. If you stay, you won’t survive it.”

  Orphan shivered. She wanted to cry.

  “Go, my dear. Go south, over the mountain. Move steadily along. There’s enough food in that sack to last you for some days. We can’t take time to cry over you. There’s only time for you to get gone and for us to clear every sign of you out of the hovel.” She made a grim line with her lips. “And for Oracle and Hero to be sure Bastard left nothing behind that will betray you, for it was he told them you were here! Go now, before it’s too late.”

  Orphan turned away and went weeping over the pool on the stepping-stones, up along the fall to the top where the canyon led upward into the mountain beside the warbling water, stumbling higher and higher, farther than she’d ever climbed before. The light was barely enough to see the path. Late summer blossoms crushed beneath her feet. The scent made her cry all the harder, but she didn’t stop.

  She had topped a ridge when the sun rose at last, and she turned from this pinnacle to see the village spread out beneath her like a quilt. Far off in the notch was the glimmer of sun on metal, as she’d seen it before.

  She could not go without seeing what happened! She knelt behind the stones and watched through a crack. Oh, a long procession this, and not a typical manland one. This had cultic folk in it, dancing and prancing. Drummers. Trumpeters. A litter, like last time, only this one held a woman naked to the waist with the traditional white cloth around her head and a baby at her breast. Not only an archetypal Orphan, but an archetypal Wet Nurse as well! Someone had a sense of drama, and the power to indulge it!

  The procession stopped at the door of Orphan’s hovel. Two helmeted creatures threw open the hovel door. Even from the height, Orphan could see the glitter of sun on their complicated helms and on the naked blades that they carried into the hovel and out again. Servants carried baskets inside, the Wet Nurse carried the infant inside, and the strangely helmeted creatures went striding through the village, stopping this one and that one, no doubt asking questions, but searching only one house.

  Bastard’s House. They went through it like a storm, into it and out of it again, shaking their heads at one another. No, no, they had found nothing. So Oracle and Hero had been right. Bastard had been—what? An informer? But for whom?

  Even from this height, Orphan knew the two questioners were not merely guardsmen or soldiers or any other thing she might understand by a simple label Oddmen, she said to herself, making her own name for them. Odd, for they moved with a terrible alacrity, a sinuous grace. They got where they were going too swiftly and returned too quickly. They moved like a snake striking from an unseen crevice, like a jab of sudden lightning from a clear sky. Unexpected. Even though she was watching them, looking right at them, each motion happened unexpectedly, in a direction or with a force that she could not anticipate.

  If she had been in the hovel when these men came, she would have been dead or captive by now Oracle had been right. These oddmen were not guarantors of the safety of the child they escorted; they were killers or abductors sent to clear the way. The child was a mere excuse, a sham. A feint. A mockery, perhaps, of Herkimer-Lurkimer, to say “See, here’s how you install an Orphan, old man!” Someone had told these creatures she was there. They had come for her, particularly. If she had been there when they came …

  But she hadn’t been. She was here. She was here, high above the fall. Because of Oracle, they hadn’t found her.

  Below her, the oddmen returned to the procession, which re-formed itself, turned about snakelike, and went back the way it had come. The sound of drums came like a rattle of gravel on a slope. Trumpets brayed, their triumph tattered by the wind.

  And she was Orphan no longer. She had been driven out. She wasn’t an archetype anymore. She was merely homeless, a wanderer woman, out in the wide world, no place to lay her head.

  And no idea in the world why those … creatures, those oddmen had wanted her, or wanted her dead.

  Quince Ellel’s father had been Jark Ellel III. Third Jark hadn’t been able to beget himself a son to carry on the tradition. Instead, he got him the one girl-child, Quince, whom he had babied and spoiled and called his Princess for as long as it amused him to do so. When it became apparent she was going to be the sum total of his posterity, however, he avowed his disappointment with life, left his daughter with the womenfolk, and moved into the apartment that his own father, Jark II, had ordered built in an annex of the Dome of Reflection.

  It was a wing where astronomers had worked once, comparing photographs of stars, recording data that came in from elsewhere, wearing out their eyes and their minds looking farther and deeper than anyone had looked before. Jark II had simply cleared the place out, had the space elaborated and complicated, and had then crowded the resultant rooms with handmade furniture and rugs and a hundred rarities from distant lands. To this initial complexity, Jark III had added exotic plants, a tank of brightly colored fish, a cage of flamboyant birds, hand-blown bottles full of fragrances, and a hundred different knickknacks he found on expeditions to buried cities as far away as the lands beyond High Mesiko. A great traveler was Jark III, a great digger-up of ancient things, and a great man to his daughter, Quince.

  When he had moved to the Dome, she had followed after him like a puppy, like a puppy putting her head where it might encounter his hand, just to feel petted, even though the hand might pinch or buffet or draw away as often as it stroked. She had longed for the touch of his voice, though that voice might curse or tease roughly as often as it called her Princess. She had told tales of him to her playmates, tales of wonder, for Jark III was a shining idol so far as she was concerned. Though she was disciplined for telling other lies, she was never even admonished for burnishing Jark’s reputation, no matter how much the glitter owed to fabrication.

  So matters had gone on until Quince Ellel was twentyish, at which time Jark III had announced his intention of departing on yet another journey of exploration. Quince had offered to go with him, so much was common knowledge, but he had refused her. That, too, was common knowledge, as was the fact that he had sneaked away in the dark hours with only one or two of his recently discovered walkers as companions. He had gone surreptitiously to spare her the pain of good-byes, so Quince Ellel had said.

  Whatever he sought to spare, he spared permanently, for he had never returned from the trip. When his absence stretched from one year to two, the Ellel clan had met to declare him officially dead and redistribute the Family offices. Confounding everyone’s expectations, daughter Quince had not grieved herself into a decline but had set about taking the reins of Family power into her own bony hands, managing this with such firmness—not to say vehemence—that she was elected to head the Family over the candidacy of several male cousins. The day following the election she moved into the quarters that had been built by Jark II and occupied b
y Jark III. It was her wish, she said over a discreet glimmer of sentimental tears, that everything in the place be kept precisely as her father and grandfather had arranged it.

  Thereafter, it was her place. She did not entertain there or welcome visitors there, but she existed there, as a kind of custodian of past glory—or at least, so said Ander, the only member of the Four Families who had ever entered those rooms.

  Quince’s solitude did not exclude servants. One of the first projects conducted by the Four Families after their arrival at the Place of Power had been the “recruitment” among neighboring tribes of persons to do the work the families preferred not to do. Over time these recruits and their offspring were trained to be useful and taught to be civil. Descendants of the original “recruits” were now the gardeners, mechanics, tool makers, engineers, maintenance people, computer programmers, and data analyzers who made up the preponderance of the population.

  Their numbers included Qualary Finch, who, in addition to her morning duties under the Dome, was also housekeeper for the Witch. On her first day, Qualary had found one of the bright birds dead and had been beaten for it When she found some of the fish belly up, she was beaten for that as well, and then beaten for moving something an inch from where it had been before, and beaten again for complaining about being beaten.

  Domer servants were not slaves, so the Domers self-righteously claimed. They were servants, paid for their labors, and moreover paid quite well. But still, servants could not be allowed to complain. Or quit. Or refuse to do the duty they were assigned. Servants had to know their place.

  So now, years after those initiatory bludgeonings, Qualary Finch always arrived at the apartments while the Witch was occupied elsewhere, which gave Qualary time to steel herself for the day’s duties Getting into the mood of the place, was how she thought of it Accustoming herself to junkiness and unattractive clutter. Then, too, some things had to be accomplished in Ellel’s absence, such as the removal of dead fish and sick or dead birds, both to be replaced, when possible, with healthy ones. Qualary maintained cages of birds and tanks of fish at her home for just this purpose.