A Rumor of Angels Read online

  Jude glanced over to locate that speaker. He was a small bearded man, prim manner, educated tones. Another political prisoner, no doubt, of the academic persuasion.

  “The travel brochures play up the sun-and-fun aspect,” he continued pedantically. “All the fresh air and greenery. But the truth is, the Arkoi colony is just as crowded as it is back home.”

  Murmurs of dissent greeted this statement.

  “No, really,” he insisted, warming to his lecture. “You’ve got a city in a basin, surrounded by enormous mountains that nobody seems to be able to cross, and people pouring in every day by the thousands. Land’s built up near to the limit, or eaten up in big tracts owned by the rich. I tell you, people don’t come here for space, they come to get scared. It’s exotic. It’s a little excitement to break up the boredom of their lives.”

  “No space? What do you call all these trees?”

  “A year or two,” said the academician with a grim wave of his hand, “this’ll all be bungalows.”

  “Why not send the tourists into the mountains, if they’re so eager for excitement?”

  “Armchair excitement, not the real thing. Nobody’ll go out there willingly anymore.”

  Pregnant silence settled for a while. Jude returned her attention to the remarkably endless forest. What else is out there besides trees? Beyond those trees, somewhere, must be the terrible mountains that they called the Mad Mountains, where the tourists said the Dark Powers held sway. But she had also read that the Natives referred to the mountains as the Guardians. Now there was grist for Ramos’ mill: guardians of, what? Could mountains alone drive people mad?

  Haltingly, a woman broke the silence.

  “I’ve heard some other stories, though.”

  The prisoners glanced at one another as if she had opened forbidden doors. They knew which stories she meant.

  “Yeah, and I suppose you believe them. We’re going out to find King Solomon’s Mines, right?”

  The prisoners shifted uncomfortably. Jude understood their ill ease. Nobody likes to expose his fantasies for others to tread over.

  “More tourist hype,” commented the academician sourly.

  The woman was insistent. “Then why’s WorldFed always squelching those stories if there’s nothing to them?”

  “First they make them up, then they pretend to squelch them. Adds credibility. What would build a tourist trade more quickly than rumors of mermaids and floating cities? Doesn’t everyone like to think that Eldorado is out there waiting just for them, if only they had the guts to go out and find it?”

  Jude curled more tightly into her corner. She had her own store of these illicit tales in dusty exile at the back of her brain. Which is where they will stay. They were too seductive, too achingly beautiful. How could a civilized imagination play such tricks on the heart? Easily, unless you keep a tight rein on it.

  “Crap,” she muttered to herself defensively.

  Suddenly, sunlight flooded the car. The train slowed and someone let out a low, unbelieving whistle.

  They had reached a ragged gap in the trees, a clearing, still and overgrown. In the center towered a ruined metal structure. The Terrans gazed at the alien thing in awe.

  It was huge, thirty or forty meters tall, a once-building, that was not rotting or broken down but worn smooth, without parts falling away, as if only the wind and rain of centuries were capable of undoing the builders’ intention that this monument should stand forever. Contours once drawn sharp and spare had softened, melted out of focus, until shape no longer communicated function. Yellow vines flowered up and down its length with fringed blossoms lying soft and bright against the polished metal. Grass waved solemnly on flattened ledges where dirt had gathered high above the ground. There was no sign of rust.

  Jude blinked. Her eyes were not seeing it clearly. There was an echo, as with transparencies overlaid and held up to the light. One layer stood solid and serene in the clearing. The other behind it wavered and swelled. Ghostly spires rose. The tangling vines coalesced into a web of hieroglyphs climbing cold, ageless walls. She thought it unrelenting, magnificent.

  “That ain’t no Terran building,” whispered someone.

  “Those scroungy little Natives built that?”

  Jude shivered. Uncontrollably, her body cringed before an irrational fear, as if the tower itself radiated ancient terror as palpable as an electric shock. She wrenched her eyes away and grappled for her camera, refusing to let her imagination run away with her for the second time in a single hour. It was a withdrawal hallucination, tranquilizer DTs, something easily explained. Her fingers fumbled with the snaps on the case and the smooth sides of the new equipment. She tore at the plastic wrapping of a film cartridge, could not break the seal. Oh, for the tranquilizer to calm this tremor in the hands, to lower the curtain of numbness again.

  The monorail picked up speed. Jude wrenched the packet open and shoved the cartridge into the camera. But the tower was disappearing behind the trees as the train slid from the clearing. With the camera lying useless in her lap and passages from Langdon’s journal raising bright phantoms in her head, she watched until it vanished completely, its menace evaporating in the green-golden air.

  Trees and trees. An age of trees. Looming pine and mossy-trunked hardwoods. Hidden thickets of broad-leafed jade and olive, tipped with the apple green of new growth. The cool flash of spruce and hemlock, and then, abruptly, the forest ended and there were the mountains.

  Straight up they rose from the valley floor, like a mammoth wall across a world, blotting out the horizon with a sawtoothed joining of darkness and light. Jude gasped and forgot her camera completely.

  The Guardians! The valley cowered in their shadow. Puffy fair-weather clouds misted their knees. Above, a tortured rampart of bright sheer cliffs and black crevasses. Higher still, a crown of frozen silver gleamed like armor. From the topmost ridges, the winds blew up a veil of snow to drift off like smoke into the hard blue sky.

  The other prisoners stirred.

  “Oh, brother,” breathed the scar-faced woman. Then she chuckled dismally.

  The Guardians, Jude repeated to herself. The Mad Mountains.

  The monorail sped across the valley floor and banked in a gentle curve to reveal a distant gleam ahead, silver against the dark mountain wall. On the edge of a vast lake, a city squatted, stacked along the shore in broad rectangles of flamingo, peach, and lemon yellow, spreading inland to the foothills in low-lying domes and irregular contours. As the monorail approached the lake, it glided above a wide boulevard that cut through a wedding cake of vacation bungalows. Miniature castles, pink confections of mosaic and transparent plastic, fat crenellated turret? dressed with banners that hung like limp dishrags in the hot still air. Overgrown gingerbread houses that sat like open jewel boxes, windows inlaid with rainbowed glitter. Jude decided she could do a great piece of photojournalism on the subject of vulgarity. Probably not what Ramos has in mind.

  An odd gaiety spread through the car, relief tinged with hysteria.

  “Look at that! Freeways! Good old hard-top roads. Takes me back.”

  “Man, you must be older than you look.”

  “They’d have aircars here if they could make them work.”

  “I used to have one that worked just fine.”

  “Not here. Up above a hundred feet, the instruments go bananas. You think we’re walking into the mountains for our health?”

  And the monorail swept into the business district. Jude waited patiently for something alien to appear, but it looked more and more like a Terran fantasy park. Tiny trees threw dry shadows on the red-and-white pavements from branches manicured into fantastical shapes: a great fish leaping, a dragon, a mermaid with snaking tail. Shops spilled cheap merchandise out among the crowds thronging the sunbaked streets. Shoppers drooped beneath cafe awnings. They clutched their cold drinks like lifelines, glancing up wearily as the monorail sped past.

  Now the tall colored prisms by the shore rose up
rapidly to meet them. Jude caught a glimpse of sand and green water, then the nearest wall swallowed them up, out of the sun into a cavernous dark interior. The monorail glided to a stop.

  “Hotel Celestial Sea,” a loudspeaker intoned. The doors to their car did not open.

  The prisoners sat back through a blur of hotels, flickering in and out of the brilliant day into lobbies they were too sun-blinded to see. Finally, the guards roused themselves and packed up their cards. At the final stop, the chill of air-conditioning invaded the car. The prisoners were herded out onto thick carpet masquerading as grass.

  “Hotel Amazon,” said the speaker.

  The Hotel Amazon was still being furnished. Workers bustled about carrying sofas and tools. The lobby was huge. It seemed to have no proper boundaries such as a room should have. The ceiling was shadowed, the walls were suspended panels of translucent smoky green. A clutter of scaffolding surrounded a vast chandelier that dripped mosslike from the upper reaches. Somewhere in the gloom, water gurgled. Jude eyed it all dubiously, as they were packed into elevators and taken to the fortieth floor, where they picked their way through ladders and drop cloths to a long green hallway free of workmen. The guards unlocked the first two doors and split up the group, six to a room. Jude was left standing alone with a guard at her elbow. He hauled her down the long corridor to a room at the end, shoved her inside, and locked the door.

  Chapter 4

  The room was a jungle-green box, with a full window wall of smoky plastic. The bedspread made the bed look as if it were hiding under a pile of leaves. If Jude had been in a laughing mood, that bed could have kept giggles coming for hours. But it was a bed. A real one with springs and a pillow. She sat down on it heavily, thankful it was not a prison bunk.

  So. Here we are. Here I am. Alone. Why do I get the isolation treatment? She rubbed a tired shoulder and sighed, unable to think clearly. She got up and wandered about the room. It was stuffy and still partially unfurnished, though the bathroom seemed in working order. Anticipating her first warm bath in six years, she found herself at the window, gazing abstractedly at dusk falling over the valley. Well, sunset. It’s been a long time. Far below, the quiet lake reflected the last light of the day. The sun sank in amber behind the dark mountain wall, melting freeways and buildings together into a shadowed abstract where lamps began to wink on like infant stars. Over the city, gulls flew wheeling and crying toward the hills.

  Jude smiled dreamily. Birds! At last! She squinted to make them out more clearly. One flew nearer, with an echoing cry that shrilled joyously through her.

  Oh! Look!

  The gull was furred, had tiny paws like a cat, curled beneath its breast. A native creature, an alien! Its cry was the sound she had heard earlier, back at the corridor.

  She stood transfixed, long after the creatures had soared off into darkness. A quiet rhythm of dying light led her gaze across the landscape to rest here and there without focus. Ebb and flow and wait and flow again… words half-formed… whispered thoughts and images murmured in her brain, rising and falling like the play of light across the flank of a sleeping animal. She breathed with it, let its rhythm become her own. Then, as some barely perceptible restraint deep within her began to slip, she panicked and backed away into the darkened room, to break the siren rhythm before it swallowed her completely.

  “I will not be crazy!” she choked aloud. And thought then that it was not her fault, that if it was not trank withdrawal, then there was something irrational in the very air of Arkoi. Aircraft that wouldn’t fly, mountains that would not be crossed, and this… overwhelming sense of… yes, that’s it, presence. Presence… everywhere.

  A sharp knock spun her around. She shrank against the wall, shaken and alert. The door opened and a man walked into the darkened room.

  “You decent?” he called out. “Turn a light on, for Christ’s sake.”

  Chapter 5

  The intruder touched a panel by the door. A balmy glow lit the room. He made a quick but thorough survey and shut the door behind him.

  Jude waited. No doubt he would explain himself. A man who lets himself into a locked room has specific reason to be there. But instead he looked her over brazenly, favoring her with a sloppy, calculating grin. His impeccably cut shirt was rumpled and zippered open at the throat to frame a muscled chest. Glossy brown hair fell in a conveniently dashing slash across a sun-flushed, handsome face.

  “Better than your pictures,” he commented finally.

  Her mouth tightened. “Pictures of me, or pictures I took?”

  His grin broadened approvingly. “That’s the spirit. Maybe Ramos did okay with you.” He moved in on her, circling. “I’m Bill Clennan. We’ll be working together, but first, I’m taking you to dinner. How long will it take you to get dressed?”

  Jude blinked. Things seemed to be happening too fast. “Dressed? This is all I have.”

  “Check out the closets. You think I want to be seen with a lady in prison duds? May be the latest fashion in the Wards, but…”

  Already, she disliked him. Big, confident, overbearing. Obviously used to trading on his clownish good looks. Obviously expecting her to be charmed by his offhand manner. No way, she assured herself. I know those jailer’s eyes.

  “I don’t recall any mention of partying in this deal,” she said quietly.

  “Consider it a surprise fringe benefit.” He took her arm and urged her across the thick carpet to a closet. He threw open the double doors. A riot of color and sparkle greeted them. Clennan fingered a backless peach evening dress. “How ’bout this one?”

  “I’d go into shock if I put that on.” She pretended to search for something she preferred. “What about the others—do they get in on this deal too?”

  “Others?” It was as if the word meant something different to him. “Oh, the others from the Wards.” Again the grin, lazy and smug. “You won’t be seeing much of them, no. They’re cannon fodder. You’re the talent. Or so Ramos tells me.”

  “He didn’t seem so impressed.”

  “Handled you himself. That’s an honor, from the chief.”

  Called that one at least. “And you?”

  “Local head, newly appointed.” He gave a mocking bow. “Some great assignment, eh? Here in vacationland? Little Billy Clennan’s playing in the big leagues at last.” His enthusiasm was disgusting. “Welcome to the team,” he beamed.

  “I always hated baseball.” Jude chose a dressy jumpsuit, the best she could do. At least it was merely brown. While she fled to the bathroom to change, Clennan lay back on the leaf-pile bed, whistling.

  The taxicar driver was jovial. His fat sweaty arm oozed over the back of the seat as he turned to shout above the traffic noise, simultaneously snaking a wicked line between vehicles and pedestrians.

  “Yep, this ole town’s gettin’ rougher every year. Yep, the more folks pilin’ in lookin’ for thrills, the harder it gets to keep ’em in line. Used to be a nice quiet burg, nothing but millionaires and science fellows, heavy tippers, y’know? Then the mines opened and the factories, and all the tourists, and well…” He lifted a stunner from the seat beside him and shrugged eloquently. “Just like home.”

  The setting of the sun had hardly diminished the heat. The cab called itself air-conditioned in bright letters on its side, complete with yellow exclamation points, but inside the passengers sweltered. Through the sealed window, Jude searched the crowded streets. It still looked like Terra, only gaudier, especially now that the darkness concealed the clear lake and the looming bulk of the Guardians. She did not want to talk to Clennan, but finally, she had to ask.

  “Where are the Natives everybody keeps talking about?”

  The driver overheard. “You won’t find ’em in this part of town,” he supplied with a smirk. “Gotta try the Quarter. You see someone running around in an orange tunic, that’ll be them.”

  “The orange is day regulation for the Natives,” Clennan explained. “By colonial law. After curfew, I guess they
can wear what they like.”

  “Do they always stay in the, ah… the Quarter?” Jude pursued.

  The driver’s smirk became a leer. “Some of the smart ones get out during the day to work in the shops and the farms in the hills, but it’s after curfew now. The Colonial Authority puts ’em under wraps at night to keep the tourists happy. Scared of ’em, you know? They want ’em where they can go look at ’em for a lark in nice safe daylight, not sitting next to ’em at dinner.”

  The cab drew to a stop where the crowds were heaviest, the lights brightest. They got out, and Clennan guided her firmly through the mob. Jude saw police everywhere, but the general hot night hysteria was friendly enough. Total strangers clapped each other on the back and offered drinks, dinner. Talk was boisterous, laughter shrill. Ahead, under a vast mural of neon, a tooth-shaped cleft opened into blackness that pulsated with music and the sounds of eating and drinking. Inside, a complex of cavernlike rooms dripped with stalactites and fish net, strewn with sequined starfish and pink seashells. The floor was checkered red and white. The air was smoky and close. Diners jostled each other cheerfully at tables knocked together out of rough planking. Real wood was no luxury on Arkoi, Jude noted.

  At a table wedged into a small crevice, Clennan flashed his smile and signaled the waiter for more wine.

  “You don’t look like a criminal,” he said.

  Jude did not smile back. “What does a criminal look like?”

  Clennan rested his chin on one hand, aiming the smile into her eyes. “I take it back. You look like a criminal… one who’s spent, what is it, six years in the hole?” He cocked his head. “What does that fuzz hair look like when it’s grown out?”

  “I always wore it short.”

  “To go with your temper, no doubt.” He reached to refill her salad plate. “All you need is a good meal or two, or ten. So what’d you think of the old Jewel?”

  Jude looked blank.

  “Ramos. The Colonel.” Clennan spoke through a mouthful of cucumber. “Julio. I thought everyone in the Wards knew about big bad Julie.”