Jovah's Angel (20 page)

He walked around her to come face to face again. “But won't you tell me what's wrong?” he coaxed. “I can't stand to see you crying and not be able to help.”

She laughed shakily. “I think my problems are insoluble,” she said, “ranging as they do from great to small. Today just featured
too many in succession. I don't ordinarily give in to them like this, however.”

“It's reassuring to know you do.”

“Reassuring? In what possible way?”

He was smiling. He had a marvelously inviting smile, filled with complicity and sympathy; if she was not careful, she would find herself telling him every thought in her head. “It makes you seem more human. More approachable. I find you just a little intimidating, you know.”

She laughed in sheer disbelief. “Me? Intimidating? Most people are more likely to find me—obscure. Insignificant.”

He surveyed her with a closeness that once again made the blush rise. “Maybe intimidating was the wrong word. You seem remote, hard to reach, as if you were standing in a marble chamber very high above the world and the rest of us called out to you in voices that you heard only distantly, if at all. It makes me feel as if I were addressing a painting of an angel and not a real person. But when I come in to see you crying—well, then, you're right down on the trampled earth with the rest of us.”

Her flush intensified, partly to be told such a thing, partly because she was unnerved at how well he had described the way she often felt. But: “I wish I could find that high, quiet chamber today,” she said a little tartly. “Believe me, I would hide myself there and never come back down.”

“And so what are the problems great and small that have reduced you to tears?” he asked. “Maybe I can help.”

“Oh, let me see. A quarrel between the cook and the butcher, a delegation of unhappy Jordana farmers, threats from the river merchants, complaints from the Manadavvi, rebellion among my angels—and, just now, my last music machine seemed to break. That was the final disaster, I think, the mishap that pushed me to the edge. A minor problem in comparison with the rest, but—”

“It seems to be working now,” he said, swinging around to examine the equipment with careful fingers. “What a beautiful song. Who is this singing?”

“Hagar. The first angelica. Her voice could make the most mundane music seem sublime. They say that Rachel had a voice as brilliant as Hagar's, but of course we no longer know how to record singers—and anyway, I don't believe it. No one else could sing like this.”

“How was it recorded? May I see?”

So she stopped the music and extracted the small silver disk.
It was completely featureless except for its shape and color; it bore no ridges or markings. Caleb turned it toward the light to watch the reflection glitter along its surfaces, front and back.

“Amazing,” he said. “I don't even know what this material is.”

“Do you think you can figure out how the equipment works?”

“I don't know. Not if it's as foreign as this.”

“What kind of tools do you need?”

He pointed to his shoulder; he was, she realized, wearing a bulky backpack. “Brought them all with me. Should I start with this machine, or one of the machines that is already broken?”

“One of the broken ones!” she answered swiftly, and he laughed. “Well, but as long as this one is still working—”

“I understand perfectly. Show me where I should begin.”

For the next hour, Alleya watched the engineer dissect one of the failed machines. It would not have been, ordinarily, the sort of pastime she enjoyed, for she had no aptitude for electronics—or interest in them, either. But there was something about Caleb Augustus and his complete absorption in his task that made her feel a certain sympathetic kinship. Just so did she feel when she was lost in the labyrinth of a melody or keeping her balance on the rippling arpeggio of a duet. He could not have appeared more entranced.

While he was too engrossed to notice her, she studied him. He looked like nothing so much as a farmer's eldest son, dressed up (but only slightly) for market day in the biggest town for a hundred miles. He was a little bigger than the average man but not brawny; his features were strong and intelligent. His sandy hair was cut close enough to stay out of his way but with no special attention to fashion; though his clothes were clean, they showed much wear. He was a man who liked to be comfortable, she decided, but who rarely worried that he would be otherwise. He looked as though he found the world nearly always a welcoming place. Not surprising; she was glad to have him here. She imagined most people were pleased to see him.

She was even able to restrain her impatience to know what he learned, so she did not bombard him with questions about how well his task was going. In fact, she just sat there, leaning one shoulder against the wall, and watched him. He had pried off the glass and metal faceplate that guarded the inner workings of the
player, and exposed a whole range of wires and circuits that would have sent her into instant despair. He had only looked more intrigued, and had begun to cautiously poke at each gleaming joint and intersection.

Now and then he murmured aloud, though she had no illusions that he was addressing her. “Well, if
that's
a moving part, what's moving it? Although—I don't see why this one should have to move, and it seems to—and where the hell is the power coming from?”

He had extracted the oddest array of tools from his pack, and with these he slowly began disassembling the machine. She bit back an automatic protest (“Don't, you'll break it!”); what more harm could he possibly do? But she could not resist one question. “Do you think you'll be able to put it back together?”

“Uh-huh,” he said abstractedly, still completely focused on his work. “But I don't know if I'll be able to put it back so it works.”

“Is there anything I can get you?”

“Some water would be nice.”

“For the machine?”

At that he did give her his attention, flashing her a quick grin. “No, for me.”

She was embarrassed, but how could she know what a piece of equipment might require? “Would you rather have wine? Tea? Juice?”

“Whatever's handiest,” he said, and went back to his work.

So she fetched him a snack tray—wine, water and pastries—returning to find dozens of unidentifiable parts arranged precisely on a white rag laid on the floor. The hole in the wall had become deep enough for Caleb to insert his head.

“How about some kind of light?” he asked, not even withdrawing his head when he heard her enter. “I can't see everything in here.”

“You mean a candle?”

“Is that all you've got?”

“We don't have any electric-powered lights.”

“Well—make it an oil lamp, then. I don't want wax falling anywhere inside here.”

So then she left to find him a lamp with a glass shade, but the shade was green and he asked if she could find something clear. Because the color made it difficult to ascertain which wire was which. So she left again, returning with the requested item.

“It'll have to do,” he said, fitting the shade over the brass
casing. “Can you stand here and hold it for me? No, a little higher. The light has to shine in. Yes, that's right. Hold still.”

So she stood there another hour, motionlessly as possible, and thought that this was the pleasantest hour of the day that she had passed so far. It didn't seem to occur to Caleb Augustus that this particular brand of menial labor ranked far below the general run of responsibilities that fell to the Archangel, and obviously she could have assigned someone else the task.

But she liked watching him work.

It was quite late in the day by the time he laid aside his last tool, pulled himself gingerly from the cavern he had excavated, and shook his head. Alleya set the lamp down and rubbed her arm.

“Well?” she asked. “Can you fix it?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I can tell what's wrong, I think, but I don't know if I can compensate for it.”

Her heart sank; she had been convinced he could help her. “So what's wrong?”

He held up a small cylinder, about the size of his little finger. “As far as I can tell, this is the power source of the machine. I've never seen anything like it. I can't imagine how it works, but somehow it seems to hold stored energy. And when the machine is turned on, this little item releases enough energy to make all the parts go around. But all the energy seems to have been drained away. Therefore, no moving parts. No music.”

“So can't you just—do something else to make the things move?”

“That's what I've been trying to determine. But it's a very delicate balance in here. My wires are thick and clumsy things next to theirs—like a rope compared to a length of thread. I could rig a motor that would generate the power you need, but I don't know if I could conduct that power inside the machine without hopelessly tangling up everything inside. Plus—my motor would be fuel-generated, and create fumes and noise, and so you wouldn't want it in the room. Can't really appreciate the sound of Hagar singing when she's competing with a motor making all kinds of racket.”

Alleya felt blank. “But then—you're saying—there's nothing you can do?”

“Well, I can try to set up a motor in the hallway, say, and run the wires in, and see if I can generate the juice. You'd have to be careful not to dislodge anything—not trip over anything—and
you'd still probably hear some of the noise from the hall.”

“The rooms are acoustically perfect,” she said automatically. “They deaden all outside noise.”

“Well, you wouldn't be able to close the door all the way.”

“Ah.”

“And if
that
worked—Have you ever considered having the entire hold wired for electricity?”

She just looked at him for a moment. It was as if he'd asked her if she had ever considered pulling out all her wing feathers, one by one. “It's not—it never crossed my mind one way or the other.”

“Well, there would be a lot of advantages,” he said. “You could get rid of your gaslight, for one thing. That's always a danger, you know, gas. It can kill a man in a few minutes.”

“So can electricity,” she answered with asperity, then remembered his father, and wished she hadn't.

But he grinned. “Right. Power is always inherently dangerous. You pick your devils, I suppose. But if you wired for electricity, you could do all sorts of things, not just with lighting. You could have powered lifts to haul items up the mountain, just for instance. One of the Semorrah merchants is having a friend of mine outfit his vaults with electronic locks that can only be opened by himself.”

“Well,” Alleya began dubiously, “you know I'm not convinced that widespread technology is always a benefit.”

He held up the silver music disk as if it were something incalculably precious. “If we understood the principles behind this little gadget, and if we understood how this entire piece of equipment operated, think what you could do then! You could record your
own
music! These disks are, what, six hundred years old? Hasn't there been other splendid music written in the past six centuries? But you have no way to record it for other generations to hear, do you? It's all”—he waved his hands—“passed on from one generation to the next. Oral history.”

“Well, there are ways to write the music down so that you can learn it without having heard it performed—”

He shrugged; clearly an inferior method. “But you don't get that nuance, do you? You don't get to hear the quality of the singer's voice.”

“Well, no,” Alleya admitted.

“If we could understand this technology”—he turned again to admire the disemboweled machine—“we could record your
voice. Delilah's. Think of the possibilities! You wouldn't even have to attend the Gloria in person. You could record your mass some day when the weather was good and all your best singers were in attendance, then set up your machine in the middle of the Plain of Sharon, hit a button—and suddenly, all the music of the angels would come pouring out.”

Alleya was shocked to her soul. “You couldn't do that!”

“No,” he confessed. “Not only do I not know how to record the music, we have a very hazy understanding of how sound is transmitted in the first place. It travels, of course, like a rock ricocheting off a canyon wall, but—”

“I meant, even if the technology existed, you couldn't have—a
machine
singing the prayers to Jovah!”

That stopped him from a digression into the nature of noise. “What? Why not? I would think it would be a tremendous savings of time and effort.”

“But time and individual effort is what the Gloria is all about!” she exclaimed. “It's not just the music—it's what the music represents. All the people of Samaria coming together in harmony, working in concert, proving to the god that they are living in peace. Even
if
he could be fooled by some mechanical reproduction of those voices—even
if
that were so, the very thought of such a thing is sacrilegious. Is blasphemy. The idea of the Gloria is not to trick the god. The idea of the Gloria is to keep men from falling into war and destruction.”

Her vehemence had pulled him up short. Now he gave her a slow smile and shook his head. “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to rouse such passion,” he said. “You forget you're not talking to a god-fearing man. I don't tend to think of the divine aspects of things.”

“And you forget you're talking to the Archangel,” she said tartly. “Jovah is always present in my thoughts.”

“I'm constantly amazed at how convinced people like you can be—angels, and most of the Edori, and many other men,” he said. “You don't even question. You don't even wonder. You merely say, ‘Jovah is there,' and that is the end to it. No doubt or speculation.”