Jovah's Angel (56 page)

And, for her, largely theoretical.

“Caleb said this ship was fantastical,” she said suddenly. “May I look around? Will you tell me what everything means and does?”

“Certainly,” Jovah replied. “Just ask me about anything that seems unclear to you.”

Alleya laughed. “Everything will seem unclear.”

She started with the rest of the consoles in the chamber she was in (the communications bridge, he told her), which he explained to her item by item. They moved on to the next room, which appeared to be a kind of casual anteroom to the bridge, and then outward to the other corridors and levels of the ship.

There was too much to take in; soon enough, Alleya felt her mind begin to haze over, to resist more marvels, and she merely nodded as the disembodied voice bid her look at this special feature and that compact invention. In the central levels, where most of the living had been done, she viewed room after room designed for sleeping or washing or play, until the walls and the furniture began to blend in her head and she wondered how anyone could find his way to the proper suite if he journeyed too far from his own door.

About half of the lower levels had been turned into vast greenhouses, farm fields sown with standard crops like corn, wheat, barley and oats in all stages of growth and maturity. From a hallway window, she watched a slim mechanical arm harvest row after row of ripe yellow corn which, the computer told her, would be processed and dried and stored for seed against the time Samarians
might request it. “And then an angel prays for grain, and you release this over our farmland,” she said.

“Precisely,” Jovah replied.

She glanced in only the most cursory way at the locks and storage holds located in the very bottom of the ship, and felt she was better off not attempting to examine the crystal core that powered the ship and that could be found behind a locked door which, Jovah assured her, he could open at will. But it was not something she needed to see. Her head was stuffed full of wonders.

Surely it was her imagination, but the civil voice sounded a little disappointed when she requested directions back to the communications bridge. Hard to believe that a ship could feel loneliness; but Jovah had had very few visitors in the past six and a half centuries.

Back on the bridge, where she felt almost at home by now, Alleya did one last slow pivot to look around. She had told Caleb he could never return here, and she had sworn that she herself would never come back, but now she was not so sure. There was so much knowledge here, more than she would ever think to ask about.
Could
she just allow the ship to orbit austerely overhead, rich with gifts, but untouched and unremembered? True, that had been the colonists' original intention, to separate themselves and their children from every taint of technology; but hundreds of years had passed since that decision had been made. The world was a different place, inhabited by personalities not even Jovah had been able to predict. Was it right to assume that this society could not be trusted with advanced scientific knowledge? Was it fair to withhold that information if it was available? Eleison had destroyed itself using sophisticated weaponry, but did that mean Samaria would do the same thing if the same tools were available?

She remembered again the angry meetings with the Manadavvi councilors, the sly conspiracy between the merchants and the Jansai and the Manadavvi elect. If they were not forced by their belief in a vengeful god to act in harmony with angels, with all peoples of Samaria, would they do so? If they believed there was a way to circumvent Jovah's wrath, would they not instantly attempt it? If any kind of weapon were to be put in their hands, would they not use it?

She thought of the factories in Breven, dreary and desolate and worked by exhausted, hopeless wraiths. Who would reap the benefits
of any technology she was able to translate from the ship's circuitry to Samarian electronics? Not the independent farmers, not the Manadavvi serfs, not the Jansai work force.

She had been suspicious of technology all her life, resentful of its displacements, horrified at its outright ugliness. Jovah was not frightful nor usurping nor homely; it was tempting to allow his very existence to seduce her into changing her lifelong beliefs. And yet, even Jovah was a product of a world gone to war, and his efficient beauty had been fertilized in a noxious bed.

Perhaps all science bloomed amid such dismal waste; perhaps all progress was founded in squalor and gradually reshaped itself into something sleek or even beautiful. She was looking at both ends of the spectrum now. It was hard to determine if what was beginning as a Breven factory would be transmogrified into something as elegant and breathtaking as the spaceship
Jehovah
.

Or merely into the last fierce war on Eleison.

They were a different people on Samaria now, but their fathers were the same, or their fathers' fathers. They were guided, no doubt, by the same primeval impulses and led by the same fears and desires. She had no proof that the centuries had changed them. She had no reason to believe they could maintain harmony on their own.

“Jovah,” she said aloud, her words slow, “when you were combining gene clusters and breeding for intelligence, did you ever think to breed for something better? Gentleness, for instance, or at least an aversion to violence. Did you seek to create men and women who would be less and less likely, with each generation, to want to kill each other or destroy their entire planet?”

“I did not know a way to breed aggression from the human race,” he said, and his voice sounded almost regretful. “There does not seem to be a gene for pacifism, even a recessive one.”

“Then perhaps I would do best not to hurry this along,” she said at last. “Soon enough, as Caleb says, we will reach the point where you will be a mystery no longer. And then—farewell the ordered life on Samaria. No more god, no more Gloria, no more harmony among all peoples. I hope I do not live long enough to see it.”

“It's doubtful,” the ship said. “Given the current level of technology your generation has achieved, I would expect a hundred years or more to pass before men of science are able to build or even theorize the existence of an object like myself. You will be dead long before that.”

She laughed faintly. “As always, you offer grim comfort.”

“It is no more than the truth.”

So—decision made. Another incredibly difficult one. She grimaced, remembering her arrogant words to Caleb:
That is why the god named me Archangel
. Although in fact he had named her Archangel merely because of the way her voice resonated on his… receptors. It had nothing to do with her ability to reason, or control the fate of an entire nation. She sighed.

“Is there something else you would like to know?” the ship inquired after she had been silent for more than ten minutes.

“Not at the moment. Anything else I wish to ask you I presume I can ask through the interface at Sinai?”

“Yes, although at times it is more difficult for me to communicate through the written word. That programming was left deliberately primitive so that oracles did not accidentally stumble upon knowledge too vast for them to bear, and so my range of responses is limited.”

“I'll remember that. And if I need to know something that you cannot answer over the interface—well, perhaps I will come back. But perhaps I won't. It would be an addictive pleasure, I think, and I should not indulge myself where I refuse to admit others.”

“Then we will communicate as best we can. Be sure to remember to tell me how the Edori fare on their migration.”

She sighed again. “I wish—I wish there would be some way to know if they arrived safely. I wish there was some way to know if Ysral exists so I could know if they have a chance to actually find it.”

“Ysral,” Jovah repeated. “I assume you mean the small continent on the far side of the planet?”

“You are aware of it?”

“Oh, yes. This world has only two principal land masses, and the settlers originally considered colonizing the other one—Ysral, as you call it. But it was significantly smaller than the one they chose, and had much less diversity of terrain, and they felt that Samaria would better answer their needs in the long run.”

“Can you—do you know—is there some kind of map you could give me, showing where Ysral is in relation to this continent? We have nothing but legends to tell us that Ysral even exists.”

“Certainly, I can print out detailed navigational charts for you. The scientists mapped out the entire world when they were first exploring. There will have been some geological shifts, you understand,
which will have affected ocean currents and even some submerged land masses, but in general, these charts should give the voyagers a fairly comprehensive guide to their destination.”

She was lit by a wild elation and shaken by a sense of relief so great it made her momentarily faint. “And will there be any way to let me know if they make it safely to Ysral?”

“Only if one of them is dedicated. I can roughly track the physical location of that person's Kiss and relay the information to you.”

She thought hard. At the moment, she could remember no Edori who wore a Kiss in his arm, but there must be one or two in that assortment of people who had been, long ago, dedicated to the god. If not, surely she could persuade Thomas or one of the others to submit to having a Kiss implanted, if she explained why she asked for the favor.

“Thank you, Jovah,” she whispered. “You are very good.”

“I exist to do your will,” he said.

She smiled a little. “And all this time, I thought angels existed to do yours. The world is not at all as I had believed it.”

“Yet the world is the same as it always was. It is merely that you see with new eyes.”

“And might I live long enough to see the world yet again as a place completely different, through eyes that see another truth not yet revealed?”

“I have given you the truth as I know it,” Jovah replied. “I cannot predict what else you might learn.”

“I will try not to be afraid of it, whatever it is,” she said, moving slowly to the center of the bridge. She did not want to think too closely about how soon, if ever, she would return to this place, and she did not want to linger too long, memorizing details against the possibility that she would never come back. “Have you finished my map yet?”

“The navigational charts? Yes, they have been deposited in the silver basket by the power reactor gauge.”

She looked quickly for the silver basket and found a neat pile of papers that carried an impressive array of numbers and diagrams. “I wonder if these will make sense to my Edori,” she murmured.

“I have included a simple map, drawn to scale, which anyone should be able to read,” he told her. “There are also star charts taken from a land-based position, which any navigator should be able to decipher. They will do some good, I believe. You will
have to translate the words, of course, before you pass them along.”

“That I believe I can do,” she said, moving back to the middle of the room. “And now, one final request, Jehovah.”

“And what is that, Alleluia?”

“Teleport.”

Alleya spent the whole next day seated before the Sinai interface, typing in names of the Edori and anything she could remember about individuals and families. When she looked away from the sapphire screen, her eyes saw pink rectangles on the cool stone walls. Twice, she took long breaks, rubbing away the soreness in her neck and her fingers, shaking the stiffness from her knees. She should have dictated all this information while she was still aboard the ship; it would have been much faster and at least as accurate.

She had thought she would feel impatience at this slow, awkward method of speaking to Jovah, now that she knew how easy it was to ask a question and have him respond; but in fact, she rather liked the distance created by the flat screen and the buttons on the keyboard. This gave her time to think, helped her reassess her own place in the order of the world. This was a task, no matter how specialized, that seemed right and familiar. This was how Samarians were supposed to communicate with Jovah.

When she had told him all she knew, she asked if he had any questions for her, and he did not. He then asked if she had any questions for him, and she did, but only one.

“Who should be angelico to the Archangel?” she typed in.

His response was immediate, the name she had most hoped to see. She smiled and turned away from the screen. She must be on her way to Breven in the morning. And after that, to the Eyrie.

Where Caleb would be waiting.

Later, Caleb heard the story told with much embellishment, some of it ridiculous, but all of it eerily catching the flavor of the event. For he was there, and it did seem a momentous occasion, and he was not surprised to hear it described as if it were an event from the Librera itself.

“And there was a crowd that day on the main plateau of the Eyrie, right where the grand staircase empties. For word had spread throughout Velora, throughout the three realms, that Delilah was whole again and claimed her right to be Archangel. And there had been much anger and much speculation, for there were many who had never cared for Alleluia and would be glad to see her gone, and just as many who felt Delilah had lost her place and had no right to try to take it back.