A Rumor of Angels

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  A Rumor of Angels

  M. Bradley Kellogg

  In loving memory of

  Hal R. Kellogg

  and Jarvis, his son

  The author is grateful for the support and guidance of Antonia D. Bryan and Barbara L. Newman, and to Sarah Jane Freymann, who took the chance.

  Chapter 1

  “… and in those golden, dew-kissed mornings, I open unbelieving eyes and swear that I am still dreaming. But if this alien paradise, this Arkoi, if it were my mind’s creation, I would have surely fallen prey to a more heroic imagining. Titans would walk the paradise of my soul, but here, divinity hangs about the land casually, like a favorite shirt on the bedpost. It is a divinity accessible even to the most hardened rationalists among us. We pursue our daily scientific duties like sleepwalkers, each lost in his own wonderings. We travel each day enraptured, full of awe from walking among the blessed…”

  “Crap,” muttered the prisoner, lifting the yellowed page to expose an attached photograph. It was a landscape, a brown stretch of grassy plain, mountains behind, without a sign of human habitation. The colors were faded and the edges of the photo crumbled as she fingered them. The mountains interested her briefly, and the utter emptiness, so unfamiliar. She squinted for signs of retouching, then let the top page fall back in place She blinked and yawned, and because it was in front of her, read the passage again. It was handwritten on a lined sheet torn from an old-style spring-bound notebook. Pale, crabbed letters were strung together in an awkwardly leisured scrawl, as if the writer were half asleep, or drugged.

  Drugged. She remembered the wrinkled apple she had purloined three days ago from the communal mess, before she had been thrown into solitary. Fruit was one of the few things the warders found too troublesome to add the tranquilizer to. She reached beneath the bare mattress and pulled it out. It was mealy and slightly flattened where she had rolled on it, but as she bit into it slowly, even its bitterness was ambrosia, because she knew it was free of the drug. She intended to make it last, the whole night if she could, at least for that period that she had decided was probably night. She would allow herself one bite an hour, as best as she could estimate. Such games dulled hunger’s ache.

  She placed the apple, with a single bite removed, where the pillow would be if there had been one, and stared at the pile of papers in her lap. She was unable to work up anything so passionate as hatred, but she surely resented them. They were taking up too much room. Sitting cross-legged on the sleeping shelf, she could touch opposite walls of the cell. There was the shelf, room to stand at the water spigot or the waste hole, a door so faceless even its locks didn’t show, and four sweating metal walls. She swallowed saliva flavored with apple, and admitted that the real reason she resented the papers was that they were requiring her to think. With deliberate malice, she flicked them one by one onto the damp cell floor. Then, shielding her eyes from the ceiling’s fluorescent glare, she lay back and wondered what time it really was.

  Mountains. Wilderness. Arkoi. The prisoner tried to blank her mind and could not. Arkoi intruded, Arkoi in dusty photos, old maps, the flowery prose of an old journal, the hard weight of mineral reports and surveys. Three days ago, she’d known no more about Arkoi than any schoolchild knew, few facts, mostly rumor, though the name carried a connotation she had learned somewhat later than school, in those secret corners of the city where her emerging politics had led her. There Arkoi was a symbol of oppression: the rich man’s escape, a playground for the privileged scientific community, a fantasy forever out of reach of ninety percent of the population. In actuality, it was a fantasy come true, that often dreamed-of impossibility, a parallel world. It was Terra’s sister a dimension or so removed, discovered thirty years earlier, quite by accident. That she remembered. It had happened the year she was born. But she’d known that she would never go to Arkoi, unless a client sent her, and her clients were never the kind who could afford that. So, as a self-kindness, she had cultivated her ignorance. Now, she knew more about it than she ever cared to know, and still it all added up to mysteries and will-o’-the-wisps.

  “Why me?” she growled. The warden herself had delivered the bulging armloads of photos and documents, thrusting them at her like a weapon, with orders to commit it all to memory. All of it? The prisoner gave the mirthless ghost of a laugh. If this was some new kind of psychological torture the warders were testing, she was ready to vouch for its efficacy: Isolate a prisoner without warning or explanation from the security of a daily routine, force-feed a lot of irrelevant information, then leave the poor fool alone to wonder what’s the point or even if there is one, all the while waiting for the ax to fall.

  Of course, the worst of it was the photographs. Not so much looking at them as touching them, especially the newer ones. The pain, as the glossy paper slicked through her fingers, was nearly physical. This caught her off guard. She had thought that wound closed, but knew now that she had merely denied it for the six years of being separated from her cameras.

  Six years in this place… six and what? Four months, maybe? So deny it some more. Got a lot of years to go.

  She flopped over on her stomach and tried to breathe as little of the hot stale air as possible.

  Should have known better tonight. Should have eaten that old protein mash. That’s always good for a heavy dose of trank. Why fight it?

  A muffled clanging sounded outside in the corridor, approaching, slowing. Two vicious clicks at the door announced the loosing of the locks. The prisoner sat up. What? Now? At this hour? The metal door slammed aside in its tracks. Two security robots flanked the opening, armed with prods and stunners. A single celled transport awaited the prisoner’s entry.

  She rose grudgingly from the mattress, refusing to look concerned. The left-hand robot blocked her way. It pointed a plastic joint at the littered floor.

  “Bring it all,” it ordered.

  She gathered the papers slowly, knowing it was foolish, because you could not irritate a robot. But you could run over your allotted time, and soon the shock sticks were raised threateningly. She clutched the disordered pile to her chest, rose, and slouched into the transport. The closing door brought total darkness and a moment of panic.

  She had once been lured by darkness, easily fond of mystery. Had that been what had encouraged her to carry her camera like a banner into the night streets, to the forbidden places? She could no longer recall that original reckless impulse. Darkness was no longer her lover. In the Wards, warrens of perpetual light, darkness meant punishment or, worse, a systems breakdown that could leave the cells without light or fresh air for hours.

  The transport lurched squealing down the corridor, its rusty wheels fighting the rails. The interior smelled of urine and the fear of past occupants. The prisoner wondered what her own fear smelled like. She tried to count turns in the corridor, to fill the waiting, though you could never know where you were in the Wards, up, down, day, night, with no point of reference but yourself.

  After a black and sweating eternity, the transport jarred to a halt. The door clanged open, sticking halfway. The prisoner had to squeeze her way out. She faced another door, chipped gray paint, unlabeled. The right-hand robot punched its ID code into the lock. The door shuddered and inched open regretfully. The doors in this place have lost the habit of opening, the prisoner noted. The other robot grabbed her arm and shoved her brusquely inside.

  She looked around a low-ceilinged cubicle, a cell converted into a temporary office. The sleeping shelf was massed with papers. The four walls lined with photographs called up a painful memory of her own tiny studio. In the middle was a battered metal desk, too large for the room. Behind mounds of file folders and computer printout sat a muscular, balding man in WorldFe
d army fatigues. A single straight-backed chair waited opposite him. The only sound was his wet, congested breathing and the steady hum of the portable computer terminal at his side.

  He looked up from his reading. His appraisal was brief and authoritative. He glanced quickly back at the file he’d been studying.

  “Rowe. 338171 TE? That you?” He seemed mildly incredulous. Like the desk, his voice was too big for the room.

  “That’s me.” She did not take the waiting chair.

  The army man had big features, a wide mouth full of square teeth lined up like a tile wall. He shrugged. “Well, says here you’re the youngest. Hope you’re healthier than you look. If I’d taken a look at you first…” He snapped the folder shut. “First name?”

  Does it matter? “Judith… Jude,” she supplied listlessly.

  The big man dabbed at his upper lip with a sodden handkerchief. “Okay, Jude. I’m Julio Ramos. I’ll be briefing you. You’ve read through the material?”

  Jude nodded, faintly sullen. Army. Not the police. Her mind rumbled. He had mentioned no rank. Briefing me?

  Ramos mopped his lip again and blew his nose wetly. “Always this hot in this place? What’d you think?”

  “Think?” she repeated dully, as if it were the most extraordinary question. She sank down in the hard chair. The big man’s energy was like an assault.

  “Clennan’ll have his hands full getting you in shape,” Ramos complained, impatient. The prisoner lowered her blank gaze to the heap of papers in her lap as he looked her over more carefully.

  “City-born and -bred, eh?” he commented.

  Her skin was indoor-sallow, long years indoors, more than a mere six in the Wards. Her hair was a clipped brown fringe around a fine-boned face devoid of expression. Standing at the door, she had looked tallish and scrawny. Hunched in the chair, she looked merely scrawny, a poor specimen. “The living dead,” Ramos intoned as if she weren’t there. “What’d they expect if they give me this to work with?” He repeated himself with patient sarcasm. “What did you think of your complimentary reading matter?”

  Her shoulders moved somewhere beneath her shapeless prison coverall. Her voice sounded scratchy, unused. “Does it matter what I think?”

  Ramos regarded her darkly, his thumbnail tapping intricate staccatos of irritation on the steel edging of the desk. “Oh, yes Rowe. Contrary to current Ward policy, it does matter, for your sake and mine. You’re not being tranked anymore, so I advise you to start having an opinion.” He coughed lengthily as he fished among the folders with manicured hands, tanned sunlamp brown. He pulled one over in front of him. “Now. ’91. The Discovery. You know about that, so we won’t bother to review it. Just keep in mind that Arkoi’s still unique. Since you’ve been inside, there have been dozens of attempt? to duplicate the original accident, none even vaguely successful. We’d be happy with a dozen Arkois to colonize, but for now, we’ve got to go with one. At any rate, our present concern starts with the Langdon expedition… ah, here. Duncan Langdon… blah, blah… April, 1997: first expedition into the mountains after initial exploration of the discovery sight… blah, blah, blah… Is this all familiar? Here we go. Langdon’s journal. Your material included a few pages of it.”

  He slapped a weathered notebook on the desktop and flipped through it. A page ripped loudly, and he pulled back as if burned, then proceeded more gingerly. The prisoner wet her lips. The notebook’s fragility was somehow touching. Maybe they want it copied. Some clerical work to reward my placid behavior over the years? But how would that involve the army?

  Ramos read from the journal. “Eleventh day out. This is the last entry: The clouds smile at us this morning. The crystal city glimmers in the distance…’ ” He grunted nastily. “Didn’t get far, this one. Off the deep end. All this divinity nonsense.” He grunted again, searching his handkerchief for a dry corner. As he turned, a gleam on his collar caught the prisoner’s eye: the brushed-steel I of WorldFed Intelligence. Again, no rank insignia.

  Ho. Wait. So much for that fantasy. Intelligence wouldn’t be doling out clerical work to a political prisoner.

  The big man attacked a second bulging file. “Later expeditions, all fatal, except for the loonies… the establishment of the Terran colony at the discovery site… you’ve memorized all this, of course? Ah. Yes. Kramer’s notes from the last expedition before the frontier was closed.” His sigh said he was glad to be back on steadier ground. “These notes are much more exact. Less inclined toward, shall we say, personal observation.”

  Jude arched a thin eyebrow but remained silent. An Intelligence chief should appreciate the value of reading between the lines. What makes me so sure he’s a chief? If objective fact is his only concern, he’d take lousy pictures.

  Ramos read to himself but commented out loud. His voice boomed in the tiny room. “Good old Kramer. I knew this guy. Kept his head. Coherent all the way.” He shoved the handkerchief into a pocket and began tossing tattered documents around the desk with building energy. “Readable maps, good mineral reports, minute details concerning terrain and flora, etc., etc., and then, poof! He breaks off right in the middle of a weather report!” He slapped the emptied plastic folder against one balled fist. “Right in the goddam middle!”

  He rose and paced along the wall behind the desk, jabbing an accusing finger at photo after photo. “Langdon, Elias, Kiyama, and Roth. Kramer!” he declaimed. “And the others. Seventeen years of money and equipment down the drain, the best of a generation of scientists, all dead or in the loony bin! All with one thing in common. It runs through all these journals and notes and studies: a consuming need to carry on about how beautiful it is out there in those mountains, how it’s a paradise… Langdon actually calls it Shangri-la!” Ramos halted and leaned over the desk. The prisoner sank against the hard back of her chair. The jabbing finger now aimed at her. “What kind of paradise leaves you dead or crazy? You tell me that. And if it is such a paradise, how come it looks so piss-poor in the pictures? Look at this trash!”

  Jude looked, half expecting a blow if she did not. The photos again. She attempted objectivity, as he seemed to be asking her professional opinion. Mentally, she divided them by subject. There were the wide-angle plains shots, noteworthy for their lack of buildings but otherwise bland, even where an attempt to compose the frame was evident. The mountain vistas also stared back unimpressively. That’s wrong. Mountains! How can mountains look so dull? While Ramos fidgeted, she studied one shot in detail, squinting, tilting her head. She could find nothing technically wrong with the photograph. It was simply… boring.

  Something off about the color, too. Doesn’t look real.

  “And these?” Ramos directed her attention farther down the wall.

  Ah yes, the cloud studies. Row after row of them, with the self-consciousness of inferior portraiture. Details of cloud formations floating in blue skies too oddly clear to be Terran skies. There was a certain spark in the contrast of pure blue and white, but the most arresting aspect was their sheer numbers.

  Ramos fixed the wall with a dogged eye. “What the hell did they see up there?”

  Jude recalled her young photographer’s drug-art phase, the obsessing on a single subject or detail while aesthetic distance went out the window. The process was always more stimulating than the result. But, come on, they can’t have all been doing drugs… several different photographers on several different expeditions.

  “ ‘The clouds smile at us,’ ” Ramos quoted dismissingly. “What bullshit. Move on to these.”

  Where the wall turned, a border of space surrounded a huge photo of the Kramer party: ten women, nine men, in mountain gear, smiling stiffly into the camera. Below, a ragged strip of paper mounted on a card. Jude thought she recognized Kramer’s neat print recording date, location, camera information, names of party. Only in the end had Kramer failed in his compulsive recording. Stapled to the bottom of the card was a page from his journal. Ramos tore it off and read it aloud. It was a descriptio
n of the landscape, in which even the dispassionate Kramer waxed poetic, attempting to paint with his scientist’s vocabulary a resounding vision of a wilderness Eden such as remained nowhere on Terra.

  The big man took a breath. “Well?” he demanded.

  Jude blinked. Her instincts were aroused, but she was cautious. What does he want from me? Fact? Opinion? “The photos…” she ventured.

  “Yes, yes?”

  “They’re kind of… lifeless. They look like cheap studio work.”

  “Right. And?”

  “Ah…” She backed off. “Technical problems?”

  “You don’t believe that.” Ramos leaned over her. “They had the best equipment available, and what kind of self-respecting pro blames his equipment?”

  “I was avoiding the obvious,” she replied carefully. Just give me a clue… The Kramer expedition had gone out about the time she was arrested, so if there had been gossip about this problem along the photographers’ network, she would have missed it.

  “No, no, no,” Ramos pursued impatiently. “All these guys took plenty of good pictures before they ever went to Arkoi!”

  Jude wished he would move farther away and wondered if he would know a good picture if he saw one. “You can’t very well blame the subject, can you?”

  “Ah-ha!” It was as if she had stumbled upon the hidden treasure. He actually smiled, and his smile, feral and greedy, was like a glimpse through a curtained window. He whirled to the opposite wall and ripped off one photo, then another, thrusting them onto her lap. “Take a look at these.”

  She had not seen these photos before. The top one was a shot of a towheaded child, or what seemed to be a child, pale and bedraggled, with the face of an old man. The other showed a group of equally downtrodden figures, apparently just standing around. Typed labels, added later by some army research department, read simply: “Native population.”

  These are the natives? Jude postponed her disappointment and studied the photos more carefully, searching out some element of the exotic. She found none.