“And so this—this vehicle has just stayed in the sky above us for all these years, all these centuries, and pretended to be a god?”
“I don’t think the spaceship has pretended anything. I think it has responded to the words of humans. Say it is a machine. Open your mind to that possibility for a minute. Say it responds to oral commands. Music—what you call prayers. Say it has been programmed to respond one way when it hears one particular combination of notes, and another way when it hears a different combination. So one ‘prayer’ calls down sunshine and another calls down thunderbolts. Conceptually, it’s very simple.”
“And, technologically, it’s impossible! You and your friends have just recently invented ways to carry sound from one city to the next. How can you expect anyone to have created a machine so complicated that it responds to such delicate and faraway commands?”
“The original settlers came from a place centuries more advanced than we are. If they could build a spaceship, they could build it to respond to aural cues.”
“But how do you explain away the Gloria? It’s the god who must hear the prayers sung every year, the god who wants proof that Samarians can live in harmony with each other. A machine wouldn’t care about that.”
“The Gloria is the easiest thing to explain away! Because it is so precisely orchestrated, don’t you see? The prayers—the musical cues—must be sung on a specific date, at a specific time, from a specific place. If all the requirements are not exactly met, a specific doom is meted out. Jared, it’s all mathematical! And machines function purely through math!”
“But there’s so much else,” Jared said, as if nothing Christian said had pierced his heart with a chill, as if the quick mind Christian admired hadn’t begun a rapid, ruminative clicking as soon as the other man began making his case. “The Kiss, for instance—”
Christian balled his fist so the glowing globe embedded in his right arm showed in more visible detail. “You know the answer to that one,” he said. “Electronic tracking devices so the machine can do head counts and genealogy charts.”
“And the oracles? The divine communications they receive from the god?”
“Have you visited an oracle lately?” Christian asked gently. “Taken a good look at those interfaces they use to ask the god questions? Those screens are built of glass and metal, but of a much higher caliber than anything we’ve come up with so far. Those interfaces were designed to send and receive electronic impulses. Why does a god need high technology? Unless he’s a god that’s a machine.”
Jared didn’t answer. Christian waited a moment, then went on. “Are you familiar with something called the Alleluia Files?”
“I’ve heard the term. I don’t know what it refers to.”
“But you know who Alleluia was.”
Jared nodded. “An insignificant interim Archangel who filled in for a few months while Delilah was injured.”
“But Alleluia went on to become an oracle of some distinction.”
Jared shrugged. “So?”
“The Jacobites believe that during the time Alleluia was Archangel, she discovered proof that Jehovah is a spaceship, and that she recorded this proof in some manner. Of course, she lived nearly a hundred years ago, before sound recording was theoretically possible—but her husband was Caleb Augustus, one of the founders of the Augustine school, and if anyone could have made a recording of someone’s voice, he would have been the man. The problem is, no one has ever been able to find a copy of this recording—what the Jacobites have named the Alleluia Files—and so no one has been able to recover the proof.”
“What proof?” Jared demanded. “What did she discover?”
“According to the legend,” Christian said slowly, “she found a way to transport herself to the actual spaceship. She stood on board it and conversed with the machine itself.”
“Not possible,” Jared said flatly.
“She was Archangel at the time,” Christian continued, as if Jared had not spoken, “and so the story goes that this visit to the spaceship tested her faith to an extreme degree. And it was hard for her to give up her vision of Jovah as a god. But she was converted—which is why Alleluia is so central a figure to the Jacobite movement. If an Archangel can accept the truth, then cannot any man’s eyes be opened?”
“A faux Archangel—a pretender,” Jared said quickly. “She only held her position a few months. The god found her wantmg—
“So much so,” Christian interrupted, “that he accepted her as oracle a few months later.”
Jared braced his hands on his knees and looked down blankly at the swept stone between his feet. Every muscle of his body had tightened in protest; it had taken all his self-control not to slap his hands over his ears, not to jump to his feet and stalk away. The Jacobites were all crackpots and troublemakers, everybody knew that; it was folly to give a moment’s credence to any of their lunatic theories. And yet Christian Avalone was one of the smartest men Jared knew. That he would even entertain such heretical thoughts, let alone use them to coolly explain away all of Jared’s most basic beliefs …
“Why are you telling me this?” the angel asked at last. “What is it you want from me? Surely not to propose to Bael that he lend a thoughtful ear to the ravings of the Jacobites.”
“I want you to look for the Alleluia Files,” Christian said.
At this, Jared did come to his feet, and stood staring incredulously down at his friend. “What?”
More leisurely, Christian also rose. “When Alleluia was Archangel, there did exist two places in Samaria where she could have heard recorded sound. The angel holds. In the Eyrie and Monteverde, there were pieces of equipment that the original settlers had brought in, music machines that were duplicated no place else on the continent. I think perhaps Alleluia—or her husband—found a way to use those machines to make yet one more recording. And where better to hide it than in the middle of all those other recordings?”
Jared was shaking his head, not in refusal but in dismay. “I can search at Monteverde, of course, and it probably won’t be that hard to get a look at the Eyrie’s music rooms, but—if I were to find this recording? What then? I don’t know that I’d bring it to you, after all.”
“You would want to keep such a great secret to yourself?”
“She did, if what you say is true. She must have had her reasons.”
“And perhaps they’re listed in one of the files. But you have incentives she did not for spreading the truth.”
“Those being?”
Christian spread his hands. “That people are dying for that truth. Or that great falsehood, whichever it turns out to be. But if proof exists, we need to find it. And stop Bael in his malicious zeal. And go forward armed with knowledge.”
“And if there is no proof? If the files do not exist, or you cannot find them?”
Christian smiled. “Then we find other ways to determine who exactly Jovah is.”
Jared left Semorrah in a profound state of shock. He could feel it drag at his wing tips, making his strokes slower and less efficient; he could feel it thickening the blood in his veins, making him grow chilly and uncomfortable in those high, familiar altitudes. It could not possibly be true, of course. The god was as he had always been, remote but real, as reliable a guide as the constellations overhead. No slick, persuasive argument could change Jovah’s essential nature, could alchemize him from the divine to the mechanical.
But.
He would go to Monteverde, and he would look. That much he had promised. He should, by rights, go straight to Bael and repeat every word of the conversation, and he wondered why Christian was so sure he would not. Mercy would have—or maybe she would have. Mercy may have been reluctant, as Jared was, to see Christian condemned to sudden and complete ostracism, for Bael was not a man to let such a treason fester. Surely—even if Bael was murdering all the Jacobites he could scare up, which of course Jared doubted—surely Bael would not have someone as visible as Christian summarily exec
uted.
But it made Jared uneasy to contemplate why Christian thought he was a safe confidant. It should have seemed like a mark of favor, but it did not. It made him feel gullible and easy to manipulate.
Unless Christian was telling the truth. Or believed that what he said was the truth. In which case, they were all on the downward slide into chaos.
At Monteverde, everything was peaceful. Here, there were no outrageous claims to make the normal world seem strange. His mother and his sister greeted him with their usual derisive affection. The petitioners gathered outside the principal receiving room, coming to ask for rain, for sun, for protection against the plagues. And of course, there were the usual Manadavvi visitors, here to ingratiate themselves with the angelic host or argue in the politest of terms about some tax they were quite sure was unnecessary….
Jared managed to elude them all, at least for the first day of his return, and set about his task. If he was a highly controversial recording that no one should be allowed to find, where would he hide? Not in the obvious place, of course, but that’s where he looked first: the music rooms.
Each of the three original holds had been designed with twenty or so of these chambers: completely soundproofed, acoustically perfect rooms fitted with the mysterious equipment that could play sacred music recorded by the first settlers of Samaria. Even today, those recordings outmatched anything later singers had been able to commit to disk; Hagar’s sublime soprano was so superior that no one even attempted comparisons.
When Samaria was first settled, all three holds boasted such rooms; but in the time of Archangel Gabriel, one of the original holds was destroyed. Thus a whole set of those rooms had been wiped out at the Jordana hold called Windy Point, and until recently, there had been nothing like them at Cedar Hills. Certainly not in Alleluia’s day. If those Alleluia Files were anywhere near a machine that could play them, they were here or at the Eyrie.
But they did not appear, after a whole day’s searching, to be at Monteverde. Jared went through each room, one by one, checking every disk in the storage cabinet, opening each cover to verify that what was inside matched the label.
“What exactly are you looking for?” Catherine asked him a few hours after his search started. “You’ve been in every music room in the hold.”
“Uriel’s recording of the Marvina Solo in B-flat major,” Jared replied without hesitation. “Have you seen it?”
“Well, not lately. Do you want me to help you look?”
Jared waved a hand. In fact, he had taken care to hide the recording in his room that morning, just in case anyone decided to be inquisitive. “Oh, no, that’s all right. I’m enjoying coming across a few titles I’d forgotten we even had.”
“Well, I’ll ask around.”
“Thanks.”
He then spent a couple of hours in the archives, a musty, poorly organized warehouse that held, apparently, every outdated book, map, census, or tax roll ever compiled in Gaza. If he found anything in here, it would be through sheer luck or doggedness, and he knew before he started that he was not about to devote his life to this investigation. If Christian wanted to search for fugitive disks in Monteverde, let him come here and look for himself.
So he drew a blank that first day, but he wasn’t surprised. If he had such volatile and inflammatory information on record, the last place he would hide it would be an angel hold where anyone could pick it up and listen to the contents. He would go to the Eyrie, because he had promised, but he didn’t expect any better results there. If the Archangel Alleluia had not been a madwoman—and if she had actually had the adventure ascribed to her—she would have been clever enough to come up with some other hiding place.
Jared spread his wings and slowly sank to the dusty floor. And if she wasn’t the mad one, perhaps Christian was. Murders and witch-hunts; could it really be true? Was Bael really hunting down and destroying the Jacobites? True, he had acquired the allegiance of a handful of Jansai warriors—an odd alliance in itself, since traditionally the Jansai, like the merchants and the Manadavvi, chafed against angelic dominance. And true, Jansai had never been above a little creative coercion in their long history of violence. But systematic extinction? Jared could not believe Bael capable of it.
One way to find out. He came decisively to his feet, brushing the dirt from his trousers and shaking out his wings. He would go to Ileah and see if there was any evidence of destruction. And then he would form some kind of idea of who to believe and what to do.
It was morning before Jared could get free of Monteverde. He had just emerged from the archive building when he was almost trampled by young Solomon Davilet, who was barreling down the path without glancing right or left. Jared jumped back, sweeping his wings behind him, and Solomon came to a quick halt.
“Jared! Just the man I was looking for! They said you were hiding somewhere, but I knew I’d find you.”
Tenacious; a trait all successful businessmen shared. “Well, here I am,” Jared said. “How can I help you?”
“I thought perhaps I was rude the other day,” Solomon said earnestly. “At Christian’s. When you asked about the transmitters. Of course I’d be glad to install a receiver in Monteverde. We’re hoping to get some concerts and other events lined up. And we’d be happy to set up a receiver here. Wouldn’t want to slight the holds in any way whatsoever.”
“Of course not,” Jared murmured. “But I don’t know that a transmitter is something we would absolutely require—”
“It would put you right at the forefront of the new technology,” Solomon said. “People would come from all over Gaza to hear the concerts. At least, we think they would. It would give you an incentive to draw visitors to the hold. And it would be good for us, too,” he added as an afterthought.
Jared considered telling the young man that he had often wished for a way to discourage visitors from flocking to Monteverde, the most accessible of the angel domains, but he let it slide. It might be no bad thing to know exactly what the technorevolutionaries were building next. Bael might squawk when he found out what Jared had invited into Monteverde, but he could explain it away, he thought. Or dismantle it, if it became all that troublesome.
“I appreciate your offer,” he said. “I’d be glad to accept one of your receivers. Come have dinner with me and tell me where we should set it up and what’s required. And what sorts of events we can expect to hear!”
So that had taken up most of the evening, and he had not been able to avoid spending half an hour having drinks with a few of the Manadavvi who had, apparently, camped out in Monteverde for the season. It was late before he escaped them and pointless to take off at midnight looking for a plot of ground he wasn’t sure he’d recognize by daylight, so he spent the night in his own room for a change. And in the morning, before anyone could stop him or inquire into his itinerary, he departed for central Jordana.
It was six hundred miles, more or less, to Ileah, too much terrain to cover in a day, so he broke his trip at a small town in northern Bethel. He’d had the forethought to consult a map before he left the Monteverde archives, so he had a fairly clear idea where Ileah should be. Accordingly, about ninety minutes east of Castelana, he sheered downward from flying altitude and continued at a low, cruising speed about a hundred feet over the land. Nothing much out here—not surprising, because a hundred years ago no one wanted to waste prime territory on an Edori sanctuary. But surely that was a cluster of stone buildings about two hundred yards ahead of him, and wasn’t that smoke coming from one of them? He dropped lower and circled for a landing.
A few moments later he spotted a solitary figure standing before one of the tumbledown huts. A woman, apparently. He raised a hand in a friendly wave but she stood frozen, staring at him in something like terror. Seconds after his feet touched the ground, she took off in a frenzied run, clearly bent on escaping him. Jared drove his wings down hard to regain momentum, and followed in pursuit.
CHAPTER SEVEN
He had neve
r seen anyone run so fast. With the slow, awkward downbeats required by lowterrain flying, Jared came after her, and he admired her speed. Just in case she had confused him with someone else, he called out to her a few times—“Hello, there! Don’t be afraid! Wait for me!”—but as he had expected, she didn’t even falter. Either she was afraid of angels, or she was afraid of everyone, because she kept racing away from him as fast as her feet would take her.
It wasn’t fast enough. Several times Jared closed with her, coming near enough to touch, and he felt the faint shock spark from his wing tips to his shoulders as his feathers brushed her skin. The sensation jolted her, too; each time she redoubled her efforts, straining ahead with desperate determination. It was hopeless, of course. Angels had incredible strength and unmatched endurance, and even the fleetest human could not expect to outrun a flying angel. She either didn’t know that, or could not rationally accept it. She ran. She ran.
“I’m Jared!” he called to her, catching up again. “From Monteverde. Don’t be afraid of me! I don’t want to hurt you!”
Once she looked over her shoulder, and the expression on her face was of such stark panic that he actually missed a beat and lost a few inches’ altitude. But he recovered quickly and came alongside her again. This was difficult, trying to match his pace to a human’s stride; he either overshot his mark or fell back every time he tried to draw even.
“I need to talk to you!” he shouted down at her. “Stand still for a moment and let me ask you—”
Now she veered abruptly to one side; effortlessly, he followed. Their new course placed the sun behind him and threw the shadow of his wings over her fleeing form. He heard a single great sob escape her before she expended all her strength in one last burst of speed, and then she fell to the ground, gasping.
He landed lightly a few feet away and stepped toward her. “I’m Jared,” he said again. “Please don’t be afraid of me. I want—”
Instantly, she was on her feet again, stumbling forward. He was aloft again in seconds, but she had managed to gain a few yards. He was upon her again in minutes, of course, but he was beginning to get severely annoyed.