A Plague of Angels

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Tom also noted the slight tremor in the hands that held him. Well, he told himself, assuring himself he was calm, if they’d all been built about the same time, it stood to reason they’d all break down at more or less the same time. Which, if his luck held, wouldn’t be for a few days yet.

  “I came to see Qualary Finch,” he said in a quiet, authoritative voice. “But she has a guest, so I left.”

  “What are you doing here?” the walker asked again.

  He repeated his words, still quietly.

  “What are you doing here?”

  He thought for a moment, feeling the hands tighten painfully upon him. “Ellel wanted me to come here,” he said at last. “Ellel wants me to be friendly with Qualary Finch.”

  Still the tremor, but the hands loosened.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Ellel wants me here.”

  The hands released him, the figures stepped back. As he walked slowly and carefully away from them, he heard one of them asking the other, “What are you doing here?”

  Abasio, Arakny, and their guides arrived at the top of the canyon late in the morning. They had passed the separate mesas with their deeply riven canyons. They had come by scree slopes dotted with juniper below deep-pocked, horizontally striped walls of gray and ochre. They had looked up at crenellated rimrock rising like shield walls and, behind that, vast tablelands thrusting massively against the sky, layer on layer on layer, a gargantuan earth-cake cut through to show its very foundations. Gradually, the scarred cliffs had closed in on either side, pink and pitted pillar stones fronting shadowy side-canyons, the wall before them looming taller the closer they came. Now they were only ants crawling at its base, unnoticeable ants against the immemorial stone, feeling their own insignificance with every step they took.

  This was true of Arakny and Abasio, at least. The animals did not seem in the least awed. Their destination was, as Abasio had suspected it might be, the entrance to a mine. Not a mine, Coyote said. No, Bear agreed. Nonetheless, it looked like a mine, a cobwebbed hole framed in tilted timbers, damp-mottled and gray with age.

  Inside they found a sandy cave, both warm and dry, with a pen where horses or burros had been kept, complete with a manger and a stack of sweet-smelling hay.

  “Horse,” muttered Bear, pointing with one paw.

  Obediently, Abasio turned Big Blue into the pen, removed his bridle, and filled the manger.

  “Water,” grunted Bear, from behind a buttress of stone.

  Abasio found Bear with his nose in a bucket set beneath a dripping crevice in the moss-grown wall. When Bear had finished, Abasio took the bucket to the pen and hung it by its handle over a post where it would not be kicked over.

  “Now what?” asked Arakny.

  “Now you wait,” said Coyote.

  “For what?”

  “For somebody to come.”

  “Who?”

  “I imagine Herkimer-Lurkimer.” Coyote grinned.

  Abasio sat down on a chunk of stone and asked, “Would this Herkimer-Lurkimer by any chance be your hermit?”

  “I said my hermit died.”

  “That’s what you said. Was it a fiction?”

  “It was the story of my life. My story. Bear has a story, and Rabbit, and King Buffalo. Stories don’t have to be absolutely true, just essentially true.”

  “All of the storied beings can talk?” asked Arakny.

  “Of course. How can we explain things to men otherwise? How can we convince them of our intelligence, our brotherhood?”

  “No,” remarked Bear. “Brothers too close.”

  Coyote laughed. “Cousinhood then,” he agreed “We are at least distant cousins.”

  “My people don’t need explanation!” Arakny exclaimed as she sat down next to Abasio. “We understand the kinship of life without animals talking human talk!”

  Bear shrugged, a very human gesture. “You tell stories. Children listen. In stories, animals talk.”

  Abasio said, “He’s right. We all tell animal stories where the animals talk. Why do we do that?”

  “Same as trees,” said Bear. “Same as mountains. Cousins.”

  Arakny nodded slowly. “I suppose it would be harder to kill off a whole species if you were accustomed to having conversations with it. Easier if you depersonalize it first.” Seeing Coyote’s laughter, she demanded, “You’re not a mutation. What are you?”

  “A hungry animal, waiting for Herkimer-Lurkimer.”

  “Are you flesh? Or are you like those walkers?” Abasio asked.

  “Flesh,” said Coyote “Oh, yes. Flesh.”

  “Hungry flesh,” remarked Bear. He went out into the daylight and wandered off among the trees, where they saw him ripping up a dead stump to get at the grubs within.

  “Me too,” said Coyote, slipping out into the light. “Be patient. We’ll be back.”

  Arakny opened her packet of food and offered it wordlessly to Abasio. “What are they?” she asked.

  He took a piece of bread, bit off a mouthful, and chewed it thoughtfully before he answered, “My guess is they’ve been created to talk to men. So men will stop killing them.”

  “But we had stopped!” she spluttered through a mouthful of bread and cheese. “We’ve reduced our numbers appropriately. We kill only what we need as part of the food chain.”

  “Still, we could forget again,” Abasio commented.

  “That’s the problem with civilized behavior,” said a voice from behind the pile of hay. “It has to be constantly reinforced if you want it to persist!”

  Both Abasio and Arakny jumped to their feet as the hay pile slid forward, toppling away from the wall. From behind it appeared a round-faced fellow brushing hay from his hair.

  “Tom Fuelry,” he said, grasping Abasio’s hand firmly between his own. “Sorry I’m late. I knew you were coming, but I wanted to check on the girl before I met you.”

  “Olly?”

  “Is that her name? She’s unharmed. She looks a little tired, but otherwise quite all right.”

  “She’s safe!” cried Abasio, clutching at Arakny.

  Tom shook his head. “I didn’t say she was safe, I said she was unharmed. At the moment, none of us is safe.”

  Abasio stepped away from his companion, becoming angry as suddenly as he had become elated. “But Coyote said—Herkimer-Lurkimer. What was all that about?”

  “Herkimer-Lurkimer? That’s one of Seoca’s jokes. It’s what he calls himself sometimes. He’d like to have met you himself, but he can’t manage the ladder anymore. He’s waiting up above.”

  “Coyote?”

  “Coyote has his own way in. Come along.”

  Wordlessly, they followed him behind the pile of hay where a narrow door stood open. Tom stopped to pull the hay against the opening before shutting the door, hiding the way they had come. Then he led them down a dimly lit tunnel with branches extending on either side.

  Arakny made a noise as though she’d been struck.

  Abasio skidded to a stop beside her. She glared into one of the side-tunnels where shadowy forms stood against the wall. The closest one regarded them from half-opened eyes, its feet dangling limply beneath long skirts.

  Fuelry came back to where they were standing. “Sorry. I should have warned you. It’s deactivated, don’t worry about it.”

  Abasio went into the side-tunnel for a closer look. The thing they had seen was only one of many. “Who? What?”

  Fuelry fidgeted. “This is a bit-part storage tunnel. The one you’re looking at is a Spinster Sister. The one next to it is a Faithful Sidekick, then there’s a Sycophant and a Termagant/Gossip. Bit-part players.”

  “From archetypal villages?” Abasio asked. “But I thought the people there were real!”

  “Most of them are,” soothed Fuelry. “But many of them require ancillary bit-part players, and it’s often difficult to fill the role. We don’t think it’s fair to ask someone with larger capabilities to spend their lives with half a d
ozen lines of dialogue and no extemporaneous actions.” He nodded toward the Spinster Sister. “She needs only housecleaning and cookery skills plus a few hundred basic words and phrases. ‘Dinner’s ready, John. Wipe your feet, John. Close the door behind you, John. Are you busy, dear?’ She’s basically interchangeable with the Author/Artist’s Wife/Mistress model except for the sexual-compliance chip.”

  “We?” asked Abasio. “Who is we?”

  “We people in Gaddi House,” said Fuelry “We people who set up and manage the archetypal villages. Among other things.”

  He led them rapidly along the wider way until they encountered a vertical shaft lit at the top He gestured Abasio to lead the way up the metal rungs protruding from the stone.

  “There are lifts,” he said. “But they’re huge, and we’d have to turn the power on I’ll come last. To catch you if you get dizzy.” He bowed to Arakny.

  Arakny did not get dizzy, though she had to pause twice to rest on the way up. At the top they stepped out into another tunnel, furnished with a complicated door that Fuelry opened with a slow scream of rasping metal.

  An old man sat outside in a wheelchair, holding out his hands to Arakny and Abasio while the young woman at his side watched him as a mother watches a child.

  “Welcome to Gaddi House,” he said. “I’m Herkimer Lurkimer. Thank you for taking such good care of my Orphan.”

  Qualary was told to bring Olly to the meeting room at the Dome for a briefing.

  “Briefing?” asked Olly “What’s a briefing?”

  “It means informed,” said Qualary. “They’ll talk at you. If you’ll take my advice, don’t say much. Just listen. It’s probably better to say you don’t understand something than to ask questions about it.”

  “Better to appear stupid than contentious, is that it?” Oracle had said that about olden times, that the basic strategy of women and slaves had been to appear stupid rather than contentious. Those in power would allow stupidity because it verified their unflattering view of women and other races.

  Qualary gave her a startled look. Indeed, that was it, but it had taken Qualary years to get to the point of understanding it. Olly’s perspicacity was somewhat disconcerting.

  “I wish I weren’t so dirty,” Olly said, looking at her clothing with disgust. “I stink of smoke and sweat.”

  “We’re about the same size,” offered Qualary. “I’ll find you something clean to wear while you have a bath.”

  While Olly rejoiced in the novelty of washing herself in warm water inside a warm house, something she had last experienced at Wise Rocks Farm, Qualary went through her own garments and selected a shirt and trousers in sunset colors Olly, gazing at herself in the mirror, relished the unfamiliar silkiness of the fabric in a color that made her skin glow and showed off the shining darkness of her newly washed hair.

  The transitory pleasure lasted only until they reached the street. While Qualary expressed surprise that the mobs of walkers had been reduced to a few hundred, still those hundreds parted only reluctantly before them, red eyes following every step they took. The air was redolent of them, a mephitic stench that made Olly gag. She swore under her breath.

  “Just a little way,” Qualary murmured, giving her arm a reassuring squeeze. “They won’t follow us inside the Dome building.”

  And they did not Once. inside, the air became clear, the corridors were empty; the reception room itself appeared airy and orderly. The four Domers she had seen previously—even.

  Berkli, who had run away in such a hurry— waited for her in one corner together with a scatter of other people to whom she was not introduced. Their dress alone separated them into four groups, one of which wore long, patterned sleeves that could have been done by no one but Wilfer Ponde. Or herself.

  “Domer Family members,” muttered Qualary, without moving her lips.

  “Sit there,” Ellel directed Olly, pointing to a chair. She was standing commandingly still, one arm extended Obviously, this was the Ellel her own people knew best. Calm. Efficient. Knowledgeable.

  Olly sank deep into a boneless chair while Qualary faded into the draperies along the wall, her head lowered. The Four Family heads sat behind a table, as though they sat in judgment.

  At the right, Ander held a full glass in one hand and an almost-empty bottle in the other. Next to him was Ellel, then Mitty, with Berkli at the left. The other Family members stood around and behind these four, many of them staring curiously at Olly, who returned the stares, examining their faces, keeping her own expressionless. When uncertain how to behave, Hero had told her, give the impression of uninvolvement or affability, for threat begets threat and anger begets anger. It was much the same thing Oracle had said: Be affable. Be stupid.

  Olly’s attention was drawn from them when Berkli asked in a kindly voice:

  “Have you had something to eat? Have you had a chance to rest?”

  Ellel snorted. Olly simply nodded “Now that you’re settled in,” said Ander in a much- slurred voice, “we thought it would be a good idea to let you know what we es-espect of you.” He cocked his head and waited Olly looked attentive, but said nothing.

  “That is,” he murmured indistinctly, put off by her silence, “if you’re interested.”

  Ellel laughed harshly. “Interested or not, she will be told what is expected.”

  Murmurs from those in attendance, some approving, some not. A few of the older persons present shook their heads at Ellel, as though she were guilty of some breach of manners. One or two threw similar glances in Ander’s direction, but he merely filled his glass once more and drank thirstily.

  Ellel did not seem to notice. She leaned forward in her tall-backed armchair and held out one hand, finger extended, a pointer that said more clearly than words, attend.

  “When men went to the stars, they left behind them a space station, moon settlements, at least one partially finished shuttle, and, it is said, a starship under construction. In addition, enormous quantities of equipment and supplies were left here on earth, much of it carefully stored. Some of us believe our kindreds’ outward migration was intended to be only the first wave of a continuing process.

  “We believe that we, too, may go to the stars.”

  “If we wish to do so,” Berkli interrupted with a studiously impersonal expression on his face, as though he dared her to object.

  She’s talking to her people, not to me, Olly thought. It’s them she has to convince. As for him, he’s like a cat, teasing a snake to make it strike. Did he know what poison the snake carried?

  Ellel turned on him with elaborate forbearance, every word chosen carefully to sway those in the room to her own opinion. “Of course, Berkli. But even if we choose not to migrate outward, we have already chosen to continue man’s upward progress here on earth. The first step in either alternative is to take a look at the space station and the moon settlements to see what vital information and materials have been left for us there.”

  She turned back toward Olly, as though expecting a comment. Olly contented herself with silence.

  Ellel waited. When it became apparent that Olly intended no comment, she went on. “The shuttle is virtually complete except for its guidance system.” She waited again, this time fingers tapping impatiently.

  Olly looked at each of them, seeking a clue. What did they expect her to say? That she’d be delighted to serve as their guidance system? She felt hysterical laughter building up inside herself.

  “I’m sure she understands,” said Berkli quietly. Olly nodded at him gratefully.

  The Ellel onlookers nodded similarly and smiled. Good. The system understood what was expected of it. Some few others, standing in corners, frowned in dismay.

  “Werra tole us ’bout you,” said Ander. “You”—he took a deep breath and pulled himself together—“you’re the one. The only … child.”

  “The one what?” asked Olly, totally forgetting Qualary’s warning.

  Ellel’s face flushed, her mouth twist
ed, but before she could speak, Berkli rose and put his hand on her shoulder, restraining her. She shook him off, angrily.

  “Ellel,” Berkli said softly. “Surely she has the right to know what Ander means.” He leaned across the table, saying, “The residents of Gaddi House used to mix freely with the people here in the Place. My father told me of seeing Hunagor. Many of my generation remember meeting Werra and Seoca. It was Werra who said that a Gaddir child would have the ability to guide ships in space.”

  Did he think she didn’t know? Well, perhaps he didn’t know about the chair in Ellel’s quarters. Perhaps he hadn’t been told about all the other girls who had sat in that chair. She started to speak, only to be quelled by a warning glance from Berkli as he went on:

  “Some years ago, Ellel obtained cell samples from one or more of the Gaddirs.”

  “From Werra,” Ellel confirmed, “and Seoca.” Mitty spoke up. “So if Ellel has established that you are of their lineage, I think you can rely on that information. And that’s what Ander meant when he said you were the only Gaddir child. You may not be the only one in existence, of course, but you’re the only one we’ve found.”

  Berkli sat back, every line of his face warning her. The room simmered silently, a pot just on the boil that might, with only a bit more heat, boil over. If it did, Olly thought, it would disclose something terrible below that steamy surface.

  Mitty coughed and said in a conciliatory tone: “I’m sure none of us expects you to guide the ship tomorrow. I would expect you’d need. a time of familiarization. You’ll need to see the ship itself. You’ll need to talk with the engineers. If you have this ability.”

  “She has it,” said Ellel, an edge of anger audible in her voice. “I’ve told you that!”

  “But she is unpracticed in using it,” Mitty interjected, with a meaningful look at Olly. “If you were expected to guide a ship today, would you be able to do it?”

  So. That was where they were tending. Mitty and Berkli were conspiring to give her time. Not escape, which they might be unable to arrange, but time. She shook her head firmly and spoke clearly. “No Not safely. To do it safely, I will need more information.”

  Silence again. Ellel’s eyes snapping with anger. Mitty keeping a quiet face. Everyone else watching, waiting.