A Plague of Angels

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Pride or stupidity,” remarked Night Raven.

  “With the Wide Mountain Clan checking on us all the time, who’s allowed to be stupid?” laughed the other.

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” Abasio persisted.

  Night Raven shook his head at such ignorance. “Some men and women are healthy, some are not. Some women are good breast mothers, some are not. Some persons care for toddlers well. Some are good at educating older children. To insist on bearing children if one is not healthy, to insist on rearing children when one is unskilled at it, or on educating when one is ignorant—why, that is what animals do! That is how sheep behave! Every ram tries every ewe. Every ewe nurses her own lamb. Can the ewe see if the ram mounting her has runny eyes? Does the ram care that the ewe’s udder is collapsed? Does the bad mother among sheep give her lamb to another sheep that will mother better? No, for they are animals! A man or woman who acts so is no better than a sheep!”

  “That’s rather harsh,” Abasio offered.

  “Man must recognize his animal heritage before he can humanize himself,” snorted Tall Elk. “In the bad old days, man sentimentalized his animal nature. He acted like the sheep but called it love. If bearing unhealthy children is love when man does it, then it’s love when sheep do it too.”

  Both the old men laughed, almost silently.

  “But who raises you if your parents don’t?”

  Tall Elk tugged at one of his braids, as though stimulating thought. “First a breast mother. Then men and women who like raising little ones. Then men and women who like educating older ones.”

  “And you live with them?”

  “All our people, including little people, stay wherever they are happiest. We do not pull at people as though we owned them.”

  Abasio gestured toward the dance floor, where there were many youngsters of both sexes among the men. “What if a woman wants to do men’s kinds of things? Hunt, or be a shepherd, or dance?”

  Night Raven shrugged. “Some of the women’s households do those things. Most men enjoy one kind of thing, and most women enjoy another, but that does not mean all men and all women are alike. We are not archetypes. We are individuals.”

  “But this Mankind Management Group of yours makes your decisions for you.”

  The two old men looked at him with serious faces. Tall Elk reached out a bony old hand and shook him gently by one shoulder. “Listen, young dyemaster. Our Management Group makes only the decisions of where and how many! Think! These are the most important decisions men can make, yet before men went to the stars, no one ever made them! Each man fucked as he willed! Each woman bore as she would! Life, they said in that time, was holy, but they meant only their own lives, and so in many places all life died!”

  “We in Artemisia say no life is holy unless all life is holy!” commented the other old man. “Here, in the Land of the Sages, no town may overstress the land and its life. Each must be small enough that the inhabitants know one another by name. So is disruption and ugliness avoided! So does beauty and order surround us. The librarians tell us that in olden times people were anonymous and many, and evil was done without shame.”

  “But not here,” murmured Abasio.

  “No; in Artemisia, each of us is known. We wear our name upon our faces, in our costume, in our clan insignia. Each of us is responsible for what he does. He does not blame his heritage for what he becomes!”

  Olly seated herself carefully in the rawhide chair across from Arakny. She put her hands to her head, feeling the silvery cap with gingerly fingers.

  “It’s all right,” said Arakny. “It won’t hurt you.”

  Still, Olly hesitated.

  “I want to know,” she said plaintively. “But—”

  “But the idea of knowing scares you.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, surprised.

  “I know. It’s easier not to know too much. You can believe nice easy things if you don’t know too much Like, ‘good guys always win.’ And ‘generosity is rewarded.’ And ‘life is eternal.’ Stuff like that.” Arakny laughed. “We librarians tend to be cynics. We have to be brave.”

  Olly smiled tremulously. “I’ll try,” she said, taking the little box into her lap. She leaned back, her finger on the button, then turned it on.

  Arakny watched as Olly stiffened, as a startled look came into her eyes, then as consciousness fled away. She had gone inside herself, where all the information now was. It was scary. Scary to experience Scary to watch.

  Arakny lifted her cup and sipped her tea, eyes fixed thoughtfully on the girl sitting across from her. No two librarians ever found the same information, because no two ever asked precisely the same question. Even when the words were the same, the mental attitude toward the words was different, the experiences underlying the words were different, the need-to-know was different. So now, this girl would ask the same questions Arakny had asked, but she would not receive the same answers.

  Sometimes, when two librarians had explored a similar area of knowledge, they shared their perceptions with one another. Perhaps this girl would do the same.

  Olly stood upon mist, with mist around her. On every side, above, below, behind, the mist was a presence. It was there, tangible though tenuous, occupying all available time and space.

  “What is your question?” the presence seemed to ask. “You have reached the library. What is your question?”

  The question Oracle had told her to ask, of course.

  “Ask one only child,” she cried.

  One only children, dark and bright-eyed, blond and pale-eyed, fat ones, lean ones, laughing ones, crying ones, an endless river of only children flowed through her mind, great hordes of them, parented and orphans, familied and foundlings, abandoned nameless infants and sole heirs to great dynasties. None of them looked familiar to her. She did not find herself among them. She could not find herself in all this mob.

  “Thrones,” she thought. “One only child, and thrones.”

  The hordes disappeared as though they had been smoke. Now were thrones with their heirs presumptive seated upon them, princes, princesses, a procession of nobility, of majesty. Here waved the flag of a country, here sat a crown, a scepter, here were guardsmen and councillors and courtiers. Some thrones were ancient, of times and countries long past, and others were new as tomorrow, but none of them was the throne she knew, the gray throne, the great throne … one of three.

  “Three thrones!” she cried mentally, sending the plea into whatever and wherever the library was. “Three thrones, and one only child, and two who made her.”

  A moment’s vacancy, as though the mist sought within itself, and then they were there, as she had dreamed them long ago and often since. Thrones. Tall and gray, covered all over with strange carvings. Three of them standing side by side, ponderous and immemorial. Surely such things could not move, and yet they did. They shifted. The two at the sides moved behind the center one so that she saw only that one. Then they separated into three. Then they merged once more. One throne. Three thrones. Three that were, in some special way, alike. Three of the same kindred. Superimposed. Apart. Superimposed. One kindred Of one kind.

  She looked intently at the one, the single great gray chair where it stood solidly upon its four legs, its four feet. Huge legs. Monstrous feet. See how the feet changed, shifted, grew toes, extended claws that extended and reached. See how the legs lengthened and jointed themselves, bending beneath the throne as though to leap upward. But it wasn’t a chair any longer. The back of it had bent backward, bowed, become a neck, the end of it shaped itself into a head. Now it turned upon its great legs, its huge feet, so she could see its mighty head, its ears and mane and enormous glowing eyes. It had not actually been a chair at all. It had always been an ani—no. Not an animal, not a beast. A being. A huge, monstrously ancient being that now stood high upon its legs as it stalked out of its place, out of its cavern, out of its lair. See it walk onto the mountain peaks. It strides, oh, it strides.
It strides across the peaks, across the sky. It leaps from star to star, galaxy to galaxy, its fiery mane flowing behind, its great taloned feet tearing at the nebulae, its mighty shoulders thrusting aside the dark veils where nothing is and all is about to be.

  Ancient it is. Immortal it is. A servant of life it is, created in the dawn of time before life had yet emerged, to control that life and keep it within proper bounds.

  See how it returns across the sky and comes to rest, how it sits upon its feet, becoming only a chair once more, splitting to become two, or three, or more if more are needed. And see how living creatures come into the cavern where the thrones are, now one creature, now another, to bow down before they sit upon it, upon them. And those who sit upon the thrones, they rise, they go away, they do the thrones’ command and they return. And again they go to do the thrones’ command. And they return, to go again. Until at last they return and seat themselves but do not rise again, but melt instead, but flow, but become part of what it is they sit upon. Liquid substance absorbed into other substance making an alloy. Water flowing into water Fungible. Indistinguishable.

  “I have seen you before!” Olly cried. “I have seen you before. Did I sit there, upon you? Have you sent me away to accomplish some great thing? Am I to come back to you now?”

  No answer, only the chairs, three, then one, then three again.

  “The Place of Power,” she asked. “Where are the thrones? Where is the correct place of power?”

  Sunset over the mesa, a dome black against the sky, a high, blocky fortress to the right, a wall, gates, people coming away from the gates with the things they had traded for. Inside the wall, four families contending with one another and with a great, golden fortress. Outside the wall, green-robed women, green-and-brown-clad men, feathered warriors and women of Artemisia moving away from the gates and the sun sinking behind them as the stars pricked out, one by one.

  And a tide of walkers along the road. Black-helmed figures like ants, flowing into and out of the place of power, the earth charred beneath their feet, the vegetation dying where they walked.

  And from the fortress, a call, a summons, like the call of a mighty commander to an errant armsman: “Come! Now! Too long have you delayed! You are past time! Come now to my aid, before it is too late.”

  Dismayed, she asked something, something, something. The world around her melted into nothing.

  She saw the pattern. It emerged from what she knew, what she had been told, what she had seen and guessed and speculated about. It was like the patterns the dyer used. This block and that, joined in such a way.

  A long, long silence. A long time of learning.

  She looked up into Arakny’s eyes.

  “I took the cap off you,” she said. “You’ve been in there a long time, and you were drifting. Sometimes it does that to people. We never let a woman use the cap while she’s alone. You can get lost in there!”

  “Do you know what’s in there?” Olly asked, her voice sounding harsh and unaccustomed, as though she had not used it for several years.

  “You mean, do I know the answers to your questions? No. Even if I asked your questions, I would get different answers. I do know, in a general way, what’s in there: all the information from everywhere that the librarians of Artemisia have managed to collect in more than a hundred years. Everything anyone ever wrote or said or danced or painted or sculpted. Everything we know about people now. That’s what we’re for, we librarians. We catch everything in our webs.

  “And the machine—the … brain in there—it puts it all together to make more than the sum of its parts.” She laughed. “In a way, it’s smarter than we are. It can extrapolate better than we can People, you know, there are some solutions they won’t accept. The brain in this thing, it accepts everything.”

  Olly shook her head in wonder, in awe. “And they make this in the Edge?”

  “The device itself, yes. Empty, of course. What we put into it is our business.” She began to fold the cap.

  “Don’t put it away. I have to borrow it for a while.”

  “You haven’t found what you needed to know?”

  “Your Place of Power is the right one. I came from there. I must go there now, urgently.” She reached for the library, tugged at it.

  Something in Olly’s voice made Arakny release her grip on the library. “What is it, Olly Longaster?”

  Olly looked at the library in her hands, looked up past Arakny at the glowing sky, soft pink in the lowe of sunset. “Only a pattern, Arakny. Things I know without knowing how I know. But it is as important to you as it is to me. I do not ask for your library out of any trifling curiosity.”

  Arakny ran her fingers across her hair, undecided. “I’m not supposed to—”

  “I know. But if you ask. Wide Mountain Mother, she will tell you it’s all right.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Olly held up the library. “I know, that’s all.”

  Arakny stared at her for a long moment, then sighed.

  “Well, I’ll ask. Keep it for now. I think we’d both profit from a meal and a rest. We’ll go up the hill to join your.…”

  “I can’t take time to!” Olly rose to her feet. The sense of urgency in her had risen like a tide.

  Arakny shook her head. “No matter where you have to go, you can’t go now. You can’t travel in the dark. No one will guide you until tomorrow. You must take time to eat and sleep, and tomorrow you can go as fast as you are able.” She started toward the stream, beckoning imperatively.

  Coyote barked sharply.

  “Go on,” said Olly. “Let me take care of … my dog.”

  “Yes,” called Arakny. “Take care of … your dog.” She walked toward the river.

  “What?” demanded Olly of the animal behind the wheel.

  “I want to see the dances.”

  “You weren’t invited. But that’s all right. I’ll tell you about them.”

  Coyote growled. “Untie me at least!”

  She did that, suggesting that he lie still until they were gone. “There’s food in our food box. You can have all of it. No hunting in Artemisian chicken yards! I want to stay in their good graces.”

  Coyote snarled, “You’re leaving them. You’re going to the Place of Power! You said so!”

  “That’s where I have to go!” she cried in an agonized whisper. “I want to start now, but I suppose she’s right. There’s no way—”

  “That thing she had, that—library. Do you suppose I could try it?”

  Olly gave him a long look. “Coyote. I promise you. You’ll have a chance to try it.”

  Then she turned and trudged away after Arakny. She felt hollow inside. Perhaps it was only hunger. Perhaps it was something else again. The sound of that voice still rang in her mind: Now. Urgently. Before it is too late! And here she was, going to a dance!

  Still, Arakny was right. Big Blue needed to eat and rest. She and Abasio could not travel in the dark. Probably they needed a guide, would get there more quickly with a guide. So, early in the morning, then. As soon as it was day!

  She caught up with Arakny at the stream and followed her up the opposite slope. Above them the sound of drums and rattles welled and ebbed, voices rose, smoke blew down toward them smelling of meat and resin.

  As they neared the top, Arakny paused to say, “Usually the first dance of the season is one of thanksgiving for the return of the rains, and it’s followed by the mend-the-world hoop dance. I’ve heard they’re going to dance the return of elk and bear and bison tonight, if they have had time to make preparations.”

  “We saw elk on our way here,” said Olly in a preoccupied voice. “We think we saw bear.”

  Taking no notice of Olly’s preoccupation, Arakny said, “They’ve been wanting to do those dances for the last five years, but the Animal Masters said there weren’t enough animals yet. It’s not right to dance it until we’ve actually done it! Lord of all trees, what we went through! We had forests to repla
nt in certain places, to stop erosion, and the Sisters to Trees were in and out of here every week. Then the Guardians showed up to teach us how to clean the water. Then we had to improve meadows by adding certain forbs that had been wiped out. The Guardians provided seeds, but still, it was backbreaking work.”

  “After all that was done, we got our breeding stock from the Animal Masters. Then when the elk were breeding again, we had to protect the calves until the population was large enough to sustain itself. This meant raising sheep to feed the predators, to keep them alive also, for they are required in the mended earth just as the elk are required. We had to protect the calves from poachers from the cities too.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “Our men mostly ambushed them and killed them. The cities care nothing for a renewed earth, but our rule is, man may not eat what he does not protect!” She sounded so ferocious that Olly blinked.

  They made their way toward the porch, where they found Abasio seated between two elderly men, all three of them talking and nodding and laughing. Arakny and Olly joined the group, and Olly was introduced to Tall Elk and Night Raven.

  Before them, dancers turned and twisted in the light of the setting sun, light gleaming from their oiled skins, from the feathers they wore, dancing to the beat of the drums and the sound of the singers.

  “What are they singing?” Olly asked.

  Night Raven replied: “They sing in one of the old languages of the blue boy rain walking on the wind, of the yellow girl rain that comes with the sun of spring, of the black male rain that makes the arroyos flow, of the white woman rain that soaks the fields. They beg the rains to come again, to make this place their home, to regard us as their children.”

  The two visitors sat cross-legged, arms resting on their knees, quietly watching the dancers. After a time, Arakny signaled to one of the young people on the porch who brought them food on wooden trenchers: sliced meat and flat circles of bread and vegetables. Olly had never tasted before.

  “Beans,” Abasio whispered to her. “And tomatoes. Grandpa used to grow them sometimes, but our season wasn’t really long enough.”