Not Quite an Angel

Adam didn't hear her soft protest. He was on fire, filled with smug triumph, an artist at seduction.

Between one breath and the next, the pain hit him in the groin. It lasted an eternity that was only fifteen seconds on the dashboard clock. Gasping for breath, he dared to straighten up, terrified the pain would strike again.

“I think maybe we ought to go back now,” he said, trying to prepare himself for the next attack.

“Adam?” Sameh's voice was tentative. “There's nothing wrong with you. I just wanted you to let me go, but you wouldn't listen. Even in this time in history, you should know to pay attention to what the other person is saying. I used an energy bolt, just a small one, really. I aimed at your arms, but I guess I'm not very good at it.”

Adam felt exhausted and confused. If he had the sense God gave a goat, he'd cut and run—fast. Instead, he said, “Will you have dinner with me on Monday?”

Dear Reader,

Some would say I'm a dreamer. Others label me an incurable optimist, because I believe in love and happy endings. I also believe that whatever happens is exactly right for growth, and I try to incorporate that belief into my writing. And if that philosophy should involve a man rooted in the present and a woman not quite from this planet, hey, what better combination than growth and romance in one explosive package?

Not Quite an Angel
is my personal, tongue-in-cheek fantasy about the future. Sameh Smith may be a klutz, but she's an
evolving
klutz. Adam Hawkins can't figure her out. He tries to be cynical, but with Sameh around, cynicism just doesn't work. Neither do any of the other tried-and-true investigative methods he's perfected as a P.I.

I had such fun writing this story. It made me laugh, but it also touched my heart. I hope it does both for you. You can e-mail me at [email protected] or drop me a note via Harlequin Reader Service. I'd love to hear from you.

Very best, always,

When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed;

When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed:

When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see:

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson from “Locksley Hall”

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

2500 A.D.

A
S SHE CLIMBED
the stairs to the Central Awareness building, Sameh's stomach gurgled under the new silver tunic she'd put on especially for this meeting. Her stomach was empty because she'd been too nervous this morning to join the other students for breakfast; she hadn't wanted to see any of them before she met with the tutors.

All her blockmates knew about it, of course; it had been posted on the audio computer yesterday. They'd all been able to read her aura and see the anxiety she was feeling last evening. If she'd seen them this morning, they'd all have commiserated with her—telepathically, of course—and in spite of the love and encouragement each one of them would freely extend, Sameh knew she'd end up feeling even more like an alien and a failure than she already did, as well as good and annoyed with the whole lot of them. Sometimes it seemed that their concern bordered on the sanctimonious.

Sameh Smith, cancel that thought. It's not worthy of you, and you know what power thoughts have.

The echo of Great-Grandmother Kendra's admonishing voice reverberated in Sameh's head, the way it always did when she let her petulant temper get the best of her.

“Cancel, cancel,” she reiterated, but some stubborn demon in her mind went right on being negative in spite of the reprogramming. Well, she had a right to be annoyed,
she told herself, pressing her lips together and frowning. After all, she was the only one who'd been summoned to the tutors' joint session this morning, and she was pretty sure it wasn't because they wanted to tell her she was doing well. She snorted at the thought.

Emphatic negative. Quite the opposite of doing well. She was the class failure, no competition. Not that her fellow students ever compared themselves to anyone else—such behavior was unthinkable among awareness devotees, but she knew that every one of them had mastered Wisdom 101 and Early Psychokinesis long before they had the three decades she did. Not that three decades were much; Great-Grandmother Kendra had twelve decades, and she didn't seem to be planning to leave her body for a good long time yet, thank the stars. Still, Sameh was despondent with her own slow progress in the disciplines.

She brushed at a spot on the thigh-high skirt of the shimmering tunic, wondering distractedly how she'd managed to get dirty between Omega Compound and Tutors' Pavilion. She should have taken the moving sidewalk instead of the path through the park. But the morning was pretty, so she'd wandered over along the path by the inner lake where an Aggie robot was planting lilies. She adored lilies. Maybe she should have enrolled in Agriculture instead of Awareness. She had to smile at the thought, imagining the horrified expression on Great-Grandmother's face if she had.

Great-Grandmother had always made it very plain she wanted Sameh to follow in her footsteps, in spite of the fact that ever since Sameh was a child, it was history that fascinated her, not awareness. Fine as a hobby, Great-Grandmother had insisted. But for a life's work… History was better left to men. Women needed to prepare themselves for managing the planet.

Sameh reached the top step of the Tutors' Pavilion and
paused a moment, drawing in a deep, calming breath to dispel the butterflies in her stomach. Like most of her other attempts at reality creation, it didn't seem to work. She presented her ident fingerprint to the robot at the door, and walked slowly inside.

“Come in, Sameh.” The voice was deep and infinitely soothing, and its very timbre dispelled at least some of her nervousness, just as it was designed to do. All the tutors had perfected voice-cell interaction, using sound to influence emotion. It was one of the few subjects Sameh was good at, although of course she hadn't reached anywhere near the level of the tutors. And it wasn't something she'd learned, anyway; she'd simply inherited Great-Grandmother's compelling, husky voice, and an intuitive understanding of phenomonics, the individual soul notes to which each person responded.

Of course the tutors knew telepathically the exact instant she arrived in the anteroom, and the wall slid open before she could touch the control with her mind. Not that her attempt at telekinesis would work, anyhow; she succeeded only about once in every ten tries at opening doors or windows with her mind, and even then, the strangest things tended to go wrong. Sometimes the doors slammed shut too soon as if a gale was passing through, and last week there'd been that window she'd opened in the classroom that insisted on going up and down like some demented perpetual-motion device.

Well, her problems at the disciplines were undoubtedly why she was here this morning. The tutors wanted to help, she knew that; they were also totally nonjudgmental, but still, just being called in to see them meant they were concerned about her progress, didn't it?

Well, she was concerned herself about her progress, damn it to Pluto. She hadn't mastered precognition or telekinesis.
She was only moderately, sporadically good at teleportation—sporadically being the operative word. And as far as healing went—well, her efforts had been nothing short of catastrophic. And it was healing that really appealed to her, which was also probably why trying to master it scared her almost catatonic. Healing made so much more practical sense than some of the other disciplines.

Like retrocognition, for instance. So far, she'd only been able to recall two of her past lives, and both of them were nothing to boast about. What good calling up all that old garbage did her was beyond her perceptions, Sameh concluded. As far as she could figure, she'd spent an inordinate amount of both past incarnations pursuing bodily pleasures in the most embarrassing fashion, not learning the lessons she needed in order to progress.

That was exactly why Great-Grandmother had pulled rank to get Sameh enrolled in Higher Awareness this lifetime. In the eternal scheme of things, Great-Grandmother Kendra proclaimed, chances for advancement were limitless, but Sameh seemed to have already wasted a deplorable amount of opportunity. This incarnation, didn't she want to progress?

Sometimes Sameh wondered about that. So far, progression hadn't been a heck of a lot of fun.

“Sameh, dear child, come in.” The three tutors, two female, one token male, all greeted her with hands outstretched, and she felt loving reassurance flow through their fingers into hers—positive energy projection, another subject that was pretty much hit-and-miss with her.

She knew they were scanning her aura, and there wasn't a damn thing she could do to hide her apprehension and her sense of inadequacy; her innermost feelings were right there, in her colors, plain as day for them to read. She could sense jagged edges and flashes of scarlet with touches of gray surrounding her, and she also sensed the tutors smoothing
her aura with their minds, calming her down, replacing the shocking evidence of her recent thoughts with clean, glowing pink.

She suppressed a sigh, and Alpha smiled at her, radiating sympathy and support. Beta waved her to a chair, and Gamma teleported a soothing cup of herbal tea toward her, not spilling a single drop. Sameh remembered her own most recent clumsy attempts at teleportation and shuddered as she retrieved the brimming cup out of the air and took a long, reviving drink.

She'd tried to teleport a plate of vegetable analog, marinated in a rather oily sauce, to the communal dinner table a few nights ago. Jenko, her good-looking male tablemate, had made her giggle. She'd lost concentration, and the plate had tipped halfway across the room, and before she managed to right it, four of her tablemates were liberally oiled down—and not particularly amused, although of course they weren't angry with her.

Anger was residual fear that students of awareness worked at eradicating, but sometimes Sameh guiltily longed for a good honest dose of rage in her fellow students. Turning her own bouts of anger to understanding was just one more thing she hadn't yet mastered.

“Sameh, the tea…” Gamma's gently amused voice roused her. Once again, her attention had wandered, and a stream of tea had slopped on her tunic. She hiked the hem up enough to cover the stain, at least while she was sitting down. Gamma couldn't possibly be looking at her legs, could he?

“We're concerned for you, Sameh,” Beta began. “We realize you're experiencing frustration, which of course is blocking your progress in almost every endeavor. We're here to help, and we thought that perhaps together we could
come up with a more positive approach to awareness attainment for you.”

“We have a suggestion,” Gamma chimed in. Sameh had always felt most comfortable with Gamma, even though he was male. He was the youngest of the tutors by at least fifty decades, and there was a definite sparkle in his clear green eyes when he smiled at her. She knew the tutors had evolved beyond sexual desire, but she sensed that Gamma liked her, in a purely platonic, fatherly fashion, of course. They all
loved
her; they were masters of universal love, but to Sameh, Gamma's
like
was something special.

“I'd welcome any help you could give me,” she said with humble dignity, feeling both relieved and grateful. Her edginess and bad temper had all but disappeared, thanks to their subtle manipulations of her aura, and she was able to relax in the floating contour chair. Swinging one leg back and forth, she recalled being a child on a swing, back on the agrofarm where she'd grown up….

Like magic, the clear, vibrant colors surrounding the tutors became visible to her. If only she could relax more often; she knew the major part of her problem was trying too hard, which produced resistance. This naturally blocked the flow of psychic ability.

“You're absolutely right,” Alpha said, reading her thoughts and then nodding her curly dark head. “One of the most difficult lessons is learning not to try.”

Sameh reminded herself how transparent she was around these three. Unless she threw up a block, they knew what she was thinking every moment. And a block would just further convince them that something was wrong. “Maybe I'm just not a candidate for awareness,” Sameh blurted out. “I have the desire, but I can't seem to master the techniques.”

Confessing seemed to lift a heavy weight from her shoulders.

“Desire is all,” Beta intoned in her mellow tones. “Ask and you shall receive instruction.”

“I do ask,” Sameh said with a plaintive note to her husky voice. “But then I'm always afraid I won't understand the answers. And usually I don't, either.”

“The answers are there, inside you, waiting for you to discover them. All you need is confidence,” Alpha reminded her a trifle sternly.

Easy for her to say.

“We have a suggestion,” Gamma said once again. “Of course it's entirely up to you. As you know, we never do more than suggest.”

Alpha nodded agreement, and Sameh wished they'd just get on with it. Gamma grinned at her, that flash of mischief in his eyes. “We are a tiny bit sluggish at getting to the point, I agree.” Sameh blushed. “Well, Sameh, the consensus we've reached is that we feel you'd progress much better after a respite in a totally different environment. Constantly trying defeats the very purpose of your studies, and we sense a weariness in you, child. Depletion of the vital energies can lead to—”

Alpha interrupted. “Yes, yes, she knows all that, Gamma. Let's cut to the kernel here. Now, Sameh, you've heard of our Reachback program, of course?”

Sameh nodded, mystified at what seemed an abrupt change in topic.

Reachback was a program she'd been fascinated with, because it involved history. The techies had experimented with sending advanced graduates back to the late twentieth century in an effort to accelerate the awareness development of certain groups living at that period and perhaps avert some of the environmental problems that had proved so dif
ficult to clean up over the centuries. It involved fooling around with probable realities, which was a discipline Sameh hadn't yet encountered in her studies. But for some reason the program hadn't been a success. She'd heard on the gossip network that it had been abandoned.

“That's absolutely accurate, Sameh.” Beta nodded her golden head. “The idea was sound, the technique foolproof, but we underestimated the impact that our students would have on that era. It was just before the New Age Revolution, you see, and awareness was viewed almost as an aberration in those days. After several bizarre incidents, we came to the conclusion that sending advanced graduates back there wasn't the best idea. They tended to frighten even the early seekers for truth, to say nothing of the general populace.”

Beta was somber, but Sameh caught the flickers of amusement on Gamma's face. “The nineties people began to think our Adepts were angels, you see,” he explained. “And unfortunately one of the Adepts became so caught up in the frenzy, he began to believe his own PR. It was a fiasco, and of course we couldn't have that, not at the very dawning of the era of self-determination. They were all recalled.”

Sameh felt a pang of sympathy for the citizens of the 1990s. She knew all too well how inadequate a bunch of Adepts could make a person feel. And
she
even had a working knowledge of some of their techniques, which at least kept her from mistaking them for angels.

Again, Gamma had monitored her thoughts. “Your understanding of that problem is exactly why we wondered if maybe you might like to take a little trip back to those times, Sameh. That, and your fascination with history.”

It took a moment for Gamma's words to register, and then Sameh's heart gave such a lurch she could actually feel the tunic over her breasts flutter. She sensed her aura expanding,
pulsing and glowing with excitement, and her breathing became quick and shallow. A trip. A trip back in time. Holy miracles, was she hallucinating?

The tutors watched the effect of their suggestion. “We do have an assignment for you,” Gamma added, “so the journey won't be entirely free of responsibility. It involves research. You know I'm working on detailed biographies of the seminal people of the New Age?”