Andreas gave a hollow laugh. “That question has no answer, Kirial, you know that. You ask it only to hurt me, and I am beyond that.”
“I ask it to know if there were Terrans alive whom you love as you did Daniel, would you sacrifice them to your vengeance?”
“You are my enemy after all, Kirial, for you assume that there is no one that I love.” The madman’s thin shoulders drooped. “I am sorry that you misunderstand me so completely.”
Kirial turned away curtly, but Andreas laid a hand on his robed arm. “My question to you, Kirial. Where is my brother? Are you keeping him from me?”
“Your brother?”
“Your son.”
“Ah.” Kirial shook off the hand coolly. “I would have thought to find him your chief henchman, as eager as you to spill Terran blood.”
“This is not an answer.”
“We don’t know where he is, James. What Ra’an has in his mind you would know better than I.”
“So I thought,” Andreas murmured, almost to himself, turning for another glance down the long beach. His attention drew inward, as if Kirial had ceased to exist. The Ruvalan moved off, his face grim. He stood alone in the sun momentarily, then made his way across the sand toward Jude.
“Judith,” he said gently as he came up to her. He held out his hand Terran-style.
Jude rose to meet him and took the hand, grateful for the support implicit in his firm grip. I must ask him now. She wished she felt as confident as her formality made her sound. “Kirial, with my teacher Anaharimel as my sponsor, I request permission of the Council to join in the Gathering.”
Over Kirial’s shoulder, she saw Andreas slowly swivel to stare at her. He doesn’t like this. He doesn’t want me getting lost in the halm web. He wants me where he can get at me. Why? But it encouraged her to have caught him by surprise again. If Andreas meant her harm, then joining the Gathering seemed to be the right move. But she did not know for sure that he meant her harm. She watched him, using Kirial as a shield between them. He seemed about to protest but had himself invalidated his best excuse. He could not disqualify her from the Gathering for being Terran without disqualifying himself. As he stared at her, all remnants of whimsy, all the erratic gentleness that she had found to like in him, drained away, as if he had died while she watched, yet remained erect and staring, a rag-draped skeleton.
Jude knew both fear and the anguish of loss. “James,” she whispered.
Unnoticing, Kirial smiled. “All halm is welcome in a Gathering, especially when it is supported by determination and courageous opinion.”
Determined? Courageous? Ah, Kirial, I will only disappoint you.
But she kept to herself her intentions to use the Gathering as a refuge rather than a pulpit. Kirial leaned and lightly kissed her forehead, then straightened.
“We will begin,” he announced, and crossed the sand to resume his place with the Council.
Andreas lowered himself to the ground, sitting stiffly, his back to the multitude. His eyes strayed for a final time toward the southern beach.
Jude’s eyes followed his. Beyond the ranks of waiting Koi faces, the beach was empty.
The Gathering began.
Bill Clennan shoved back his chair and faced his computer whiz, “I guess that’ll have to do us. One-ten. I’ll get to the radio station by one thirty-five… cutting it close, but…” He rose, stretching. “How long until the central computer notices your off-limits pattern?”
The tech brushed at his hair, though it was too short to fall anywhere near his eyes. The gesture was Clennan’s. “Forty-five seconds to put the pattern together, another fifteen to broadcast a systems alert.” He patted the keyboard as if it were a show dog. “This terminal will stay on line for another minute or so before Central discovers its address.”
“The station terminal will go down with the alert?”
The tech took a drag on a dying cigarette, nodding. “But you can still broadcast as long as the power lasts. Central can’t get to that, not after what I did yesterday.”
“Right. So you’ll wait till the last possible second to plug us into the transport network. Now, don’t panic, kid, ’cause if you go too early, they’ll have us for sure. The Jewel’s never far from a terminal.”
The boy exhaled ruefully. “Oh, he’ll be the first to know, all right.”
Clennan paced a little. He toyed with the zipper at his throat. He wished for darker clothing to blend with the night, but he had purposely worn his usual to avoid arousing suspicion. “On present corridor schedule, there’s a one forty-five departure. Plug in at one forty-four fifteen. If the com network reports they’re on schedule, link up with me at the station. I’ll broadcast the go five seconds after the departure.”
“Not much leeway, Bill.”
Clennan shot him a dark grin from the door. He gestured at a heavy file cabinet. “Lock the door behind me and drag that in front. Then sit tight until we tell you it’s okay to show your face.” He took a last look around the little room. “See you in the next world, buddy. Let’s just hope it’s ours!”
With Kirial’s call, silence descended over the white beach. The shanevoralin ceased their crying to circle on muted wings.
Jude readied herself to enter the Gathering.
It is like the ocean, Anaharimel had said. You know how to swim, don’t you?
Jude eased herself into that ocean cautiously. The impact of a hundred million minds all present on one wavelength was profound in ways not even Anaharimel could have prepared her for. In observing the thousands crowding the beach, she had allowed herself to forget that the rest of the population who were not present in body would be still vitally present in the halmweb.
The ocean was warm and alive. Where she expected a chaos of voices, she discovered that a hundred million thoughts were not so disparate. Thoughts formed currents, some major, some minor. They flowed in and out of each other smoothly, testing each other’s strength and temperature without conflict. She was aware of personalities surfacing and fading and surfacing again. It was like swimming, like swimming in an endless crowd, pausing now and then to touch and exchange a nugget of life with an open-faced stranger. Like a novice swimmer, Jude was awkward, roiling the ocean around her with her earnest thrashings until she learned confidence from the buoyancy of other minds. With confidence came control and soon she was floating free, learning that she must make her own separate current, for in this ocean she was unique. Like a land animal who has acquired gills, she would always carry the memory of the time when the water was not her home.
But running with the tides, Jude knew she was saved. There were depths in this ocean to hide her from the gray threat of Andreas that glided sharklike through the web. As his presence asserted itself, she stilled and settled to the shadowed bottom. The Gathering had been called to make a decision, and this required a formal presentation of the sides. As James Andreas began to argue his case, Jude discovered why Anaharimel had warned about the halm of madmen.
His aura dominated the web. She was mistaken to have ever thought him sane. His thoughts were not currents, they were riptides. Their whirlpool undertow was treacherous. His halmspeech came not in words but images. Words would have confined him within human limitations, and he wished to work his lunatic magic on a mythic scale. He began placidly, indulging in the heightened lyricism of a nineteenth-century landscapist, lulling the listening web with the poetry of mountains and forested valleys, painting a sentimental portrait of grassy fields along the shore of a sparkling lake. It was Menissa as he had known it in his youth, as yet unaltered by the Terran presence. Then black clouds loomed above the mountains and Andreas reared back and slammed in with nightmares to trample his pure paradise in a tumult of destruction. Jude heard her own cry of despair echoed throughout the web. Like a demonic holographer, Andreas surrounded them with a descent into hell. Machinery squealed, sirens keened, pumps and furnaces roared. The stench of traffic and industry invaded the web, and when every mind
was reeling, he heaped on still more, waste and garbage, blood and rotting flesh, fevered horror strobing into a hundred million brains, a writhing desperate heartbeat of horrors the color of fire and smoke. It was Terra he showed them, his own delirious version of Terra, whose pale men and women, as bloated as insect larvae, streamed shoulder to shoulder down endless urban canyons under skies sodden with poison. It was a vision of riot and rape, of the knife ripping the gut, of the flesh charred by laser fire, the madman’s own horsemen of the Apocalypse howling across a land that in his vision became Arkoi; where mountains were gobbled up by mines, forests were leveled, and rivers grew sluggish with chemical infection. A hundred million Koi minds swayed with nausea, unresisting as Andreas drew them into himself and held them captive while through his eyes the Terran mob stalked them down the burning streets. Glass shattered at their ears, and helpless, they watched the flash of orange tunic and the upraised bottle slashing down, saw the livid splatter of blood on the blond head of a dying Koi.
He released them, spat them out to drift in isolation, withdrawn in numbness and dread from the halm contact that could have solaced them. Currents washed aimlessly against each other. The ocean stilled.
Overhead, the sun beat down on the beach and shanevoralin wheeled and screamed anew.
But within Jude a rebellious voice was rising. She fought it but could not silence it, even for her own safety. As if an old friend considered lost, even dead, had shown up unannounced, she was surprised to meet it here on this alien beach, to recognize it as her own. It was the voice that had long ago guided her down a dark and dusty air duct with a camera strapped to her belly, the same voice that had stirred under Ra’an’s accusation of cynicism, stirred but not wakened, waiting for the proper time.
The time is now, the voice in her insisted. Now, while Ra’an hides out in Ruvala’s forests, abdicating responsibility. Now, when some voice, any voice, must be raised against a Terran tyranny as pernicious as any in the colony. Now is not the time to hide.
And so Jude’s voice rang out in the web against the tyranny of James Andreas.
Destroyer! What you would do is no better than the horror you show us!
Suddenly she was no longer invisible on the ocean bottom. She was in the center of an arena, alone. Her challenge echoed against sheer sunlight walls, matching the roar of the beast-that-was-Andreas as it charged out of the black tunnel in pursuit.
Soft halm voices urged Jude to run, hide, seek the safety of the stands where she could lose herself among the crowds.
Destroyer! Extermination is Terran practice! Genocide is Terran history! Do you bring this bloodlust to the Koi so they can become like Terrans? Is this your mission, Andreas? So that when you are done, the Koi will do with Arkoi what the Terrans, would have done anyway?
Her halm voice quivered. It was ragged and shrill. She could not articulate in this new language the passion that fired her recklessness.
James… can this truly be your mission?
The beast circled, mute and drooling. There was no longer a doubt that it meant her harm. Jude turned to face it, because not facing it, she feared it more.
Revenge is not justice, Andreas!
She circled as it circled, avoiding but unable to flee.
Help me, I cannot do this alone!
She looked to the throng, gathered at a safe distance.
Will no one stand with me?
Her resolution crumbled. She called out unheeding.
RA’AN!
The beast faltered as if reined by an invisible leash, but pulled itself free with a snarl. Jude edged backward, retreating before its charge.
I can’t! I’m not strong enough!
And then, she was no longer alone.
—Far stronger than you know, child.
The clear resonance of Anaharimel sang beside her.
—There are yet a few, James Andreas, to whom Balance is more precious than vengeance!
And Rya was there, and Dal and the girl Pe’eva. Kirial added his voice, and solid Tekhon, and their defiance grew stronger with numbers, drawing others, strangers, who gained courage from their example. Their fused compassion was magnetic. Opinion reversed its flow to surge toward them in grateful retreat from the heat-sickness of the madman’s harangue.
The beast-that-was-Andreas answered with a petulant shriek of rage. He called Hrin to him, and those who had followed him through the mountains. He summoned the Diamo. Like a barbarian general, he rallied his faithful in phalanx around him. His call to arms thundered through the web.
—LISTEN! OUR POWER RISES LIKE THE WAVE! THERE SHALL BE NO RETREAT INTO PITY. THE TIME TO STRIKE IS NOW!
Hrin echoed the cry, then others, in deafening fusillade.
Protests from the Council members coalesced into a single voice of outrage.
—The Gathering has not decided! No action will be taken without a consensus!
—I AM YOUR CONSENSUS! I AM THE DESTROYER AND THE MOMENT IS MINE!
Abandoning all protocol and with it the fiction that he would abide by the decision of the Gathering even if it went against him, Andreas launched a systematic purge of the web, clearing all resistance to him. His ferocious hatred was a weapon deadlier than a laser. Centuries of peace had left the Koi unskilled in mental combat. They had no means to fend off the agony of his attack other than to raise the protective halm barriers that also cut them off from each other. Andreas met with no counterassault. None could stand against him. One by one, Jude’s allies were driven from the web, Rya, Kirial, Tekhon, all the others, hammered into submission and flight. The web contracted around her with each loss, the Destroyer’s battle cry ringing in her ears. Andreas burned brighter as his forces swelled. They fed off his searing energy and gathered their own weapons of hatred to strike out at the Terrans across the mountains. Jude was in the arena again, with only Anaharimel beside her and the mad throng screaming for her head. The beast charged, out of control, and Anaharimel raised her defiance before it like a sword. In her calm was a suicidal determination. The beast faltered in its charge, a voice cried out.
—No! You will be needed!
Jude heard and knew that inside the ravening monster, the soul of James Andreas was still alive.
Anaharimel rejected his mercy.
—Not in the world that you would create!
—Halm teacher, he will need you!
—He?
—Stand aside. Alone, you have not the strength to stop me.
The beast edged closer, dancing in frustration.
What is he doing? Who will need her? Jude had an image of gnashing teeth, the beast momentarily leashed as Andreas sweated through a flash of lucidity.
James, who will need her?
—Ra’an will need her!
The mood of sacrifice was contagious. Jude thrust herself in front of her teacher’s shield.
Protect yourself. Ana.
—But I do, child, that part of me that matters. I’ve no wish to be left alive when this horror of his is done, knowing that I did nothing to stop it.
But, Ana, you do not understand…
—Do you, child?
The beast lunged against its restraint. Andreas’ buried voice was choked with effort.
—I knew it would come to this, halm teacher. You will be silenced without harm and thank me later.
With a final massive exertion, Andreas hauled back on the beast that was himself and gasped out a halm signal. The henchman prepared in hiding at the school slid forth to overpower the old woman as she sat in her chair on the whitewashed terrace. A drug smothered her into unconsciousness, and as surely as if she had died, Anaharimel’s strong presence vanished from the web. The madman’s moment of reason slipped away exhausted. Released, the beast grabbed control and shook itself angrily.
Jude stood alone before it, hopelessly vulnerable. She felt herself go calm with rage, and found that in that calm a new and heady power. Her halm voice no longer shrilled. Fear paled to a petty emotion beside the
outrage building inside her. With her mind still meshed within the web, she grew aware of her body, standing, planting its feet in the sand. Considerations of strength or weakness, courage or fear, were pushed aside. As if fitting herself into the niche where she was always meant to be, she thrilled to the purity of unambiguous alignment. She understood at last what had really brought her to the beach. It was not to hide in the web. She could have done that within the physical safety of the halm school. It was not to speak out for the Terrans just because she also was Terran. She might weep for the murder of five million, even share the burden of guilt, but would not risk her life merely for the sake of theirs. What fired her, finally, was the sheer injustice of the situation: that the will of the one, or even the few, would be imposed on the many, without a chance for the many to offer up their own arguments. Under the pressure of the Destroyer’s attack, the core of her value structure exerted itself. She knew at last what her cause was.
Fueled by outrage, she abandoned caution. She screamed at the beast, moving closer, taunting, as if eager for the end.
I will not be ruled against my will! Strike me down for that if you must!
The beast roared, tossed its head. Its spittle lashed her face.
Strike, you bastard, you nothingness, you negation! What are you waiting for?
But the beast did not strike. It charged and knocked her aside as if she were straw and stormed off on a new rampage through the web. It circled and circled, whipping its troops into a frenzy of bloodlust. Their voices broke overhead like thunder. The Destroyer gathered their strength to forge his weapon. Yet through the rising chaos beat a faint echo.
—There is still time for him, time yet for him to come, still time…
Jude heard it, the dying whisper of James Andreas, heard his pain and what it cost him to continue to broadcast his last desperate hope through the beast’s cry to genocide. Is it possible? she wondered dizzily. Could he be right after all? Could Ra’an somehow be the solution?
And the beast still circled, winding the spring tighter, tighter building the pressure toward an orgasm of violence, priming its troops for the slaughter of millions.
A Rumor of Angels Page 31
