Jovah's Angel (15 page)

He smiled back. “I'm Caleb Augustus. Is that who you were looking for?”

“Yes. I'm Alleluia, but no one calls me that.”

“I would not be so familiar, angela.”

“No, I meant—” She paused and shook her head, as if it was beyond her capabilities to explain. “It's such an odd name.”

“Is it? I think it's beautiful. As if there was much rejoicing when you were born.”

Now the quizzical look altered to something a little more sardonic. “Not exactly,” she said dryly, and then instantly changed the subject. “I came here because I heard you were an engineer with a special gift, and I have need of that gift.”

“I hope it is something I can help you with, then,” he said. All of a sudden he remembered his manners. “I'm sorry! I shouldn't keep you waiting out here! Come in, I'll give you something to drink and one of these rolls. They're really very good.”

He opened the door quickly, before she could demur (as she seemed about to do), and then thought he might have acted rashly. His place had been more of a mess in the past, but it was not at its best even so; he would have preferred the Archangel to see his habitation in a more pristine state.

But, “Too late,” he said aloud, and led the way in. She seemed amused rather than appalled as she stepped inside and glanced around the tangle of furniture and machine parts that constituted his main living quarters. “I'd like to say that it usually looks better than this, but—”

“Someone cleans my rooms for me, or they would look much like this,” she assured him. “Only yours is more interesting.” She walked to a rotary arrangement of metal blades and spun them slowly with her fingers. “For instance, what does this do?”

“It's supposed to cool the air,” he said. “But it doesn't. When you move it with your fingers, see, it creates a soft breeze.”

“I can scarcely feel it.”

“Right. Spinning it with your fingers doesn't make it move fast enough. Plus, who wants to stand there pushing it around for hours? The idea is to make it move on its own. But so far, every motor I've built generates too much heat. No net gain of cool air. I'm still working on it.”

She shook her head. “Where do you come up with such ideas?”

He tapped his forehead. “They just appear in there fully formed. Like dreams.”

“Whispered to you by the god.”

He shrugged. “Well, maybe. So, would you like something to drink? To eat?”

She seemed to debate a moment. “Yes, I believe I would.
People have been feeding me all day, you see, more or less against my will, but I'm starting to feel a little hungry again. Can I sit on this?” She had moved to the backless stool that Delilah had used on her first visit. Obviously the only piece of furniture in the place that would accommodate an angel.

“Certainly. I'll be back in a second.”

In the tiny kitchen, he poured juice and arranged the rolls on a tray, then carried it back to Alleluia. “This is the only food I have, so I hope you're not
too
hungry.”

“This is perfect. Thank you.”

He sank into a far more comfortable chair a few feet away and surveyed her. Even close up and after a few minutes of conversation, she still looked to him like one of those first angels set on Samaria, handcrafted by Jovah with extreme and loving attention. He voiced the thought that appeared (just like his inventions) fully formed in his head. “I believe I would have picked you for Archangel, too.”

She paused with a roll halfway to her mouth, looking even more amused now. “Would you? I was Jovah's second choice, and most would say a bad one.”

“I can't imagine why.”

She tilted her head a little to one side to examine him. “You know nothing about why Jovah chooses his Archangels or what the role entails, do you?”

“Very little,” he admitted. “I am going on looks alone.”

That surprised her, for her eyes widened briefly; then an expression of cool poise settled over her face again, “I'll take that as a compliment,” she said. “But looks have absolutely nothing to do with it.”

“I would guess the job is half negotiating with mortals and half praying to the god,” he said. “Which part do you feel un-suited for?”

Again, the flicker of the eyes; she was not used to such plain speaking. “I am unused to dealing with powerful and stubborn men who know very definitely what they want,” she said carefully. “I do not have the—charm—that Delilah had. I do not know how to persuade people that they're wrong without alienating them. Which Delilah was very good at. But I am fairly stubborn. And I'm learning.”

He sipped his drink. “And your singing?”

She smiled again. His imagination, surely, that the smile lit the room. “Some people like it,” she said modestly. “And the god
hears me. So you could say I meet that requirement.”

“I enjoy a beautiful voice,” he said. “Some day perhaps I can hear yours.”

“Come to the Gloria,” was her instant response. “Or—I forgot—you are not a religious man, are you?”

Now it was his turn to be surprised. “Not particularly,” he said. “But who told you that?”

“A man by the name of Thomas, down at the Edori camp. He said you were lacking in faith.” Her eyes were focused on his right arm, on the black lump that once had been the Kiss of the god. “And I see he was right. How did that happen?”

Automatically, his hand went to the smooth marble nodule in his arm, dead now, carrying no messages to the god. On Alleluia's bare arm he could see her living Kiss. “Like everyone else, I was dedicated to the god when I was born. My parents were—Well, my mother was as devout as anyone, I suppose, but my father was a questioner. Questioned everything—got it from
his
father, whose grandmother was—well, it's a long story. But he got it honestly. My father pioneered some of the research into electricity that has galvanized the world we live in today, although he didn't know nearly what we know now. Anyway, we worked together on an early project in which we hadn't yet learned how to direct that power. And it's a deadly power.”

He paused a moment. He couldn't remember the last time he had told this story. When he told Noah, perhaps. “And it went amuck. Killed my father, almost killed me. I saw the flame arc across my body like candlelight passing over a wall. The Kiss in my arm sizzled—and exploded. I cannot describe how agonizing… And my father was dead. And the fire was gone.”

Alleluia took a deep breath. “But you could have—I don't know that it's ever happened before, but you could have had the Kiss replaced. I know priests—”

“I didn't want to,” he interrupted gently. “What could be the point of being dedicated to a god who would let my father die?”

She watched him narrowly. “Death is always sad and rimmed with grief. But all men die. That is not a reason to forsake the god. That is a reason to trust him and love him, for it is to his arms you will be remanded when you too pass from this world.”

He made a conciliatory gesture with his hands. “It is true that all men die, and that death is a ridiculous reason to hate anything,” he acknowledged. “But I lost my faith at that moment, and I never regained it. I began to question, and I did not find
answers. Not with a god. I found them in science.”

She said softly, “But it was science that killed your father, and not Jovah. Why would you still trust
it
?”

He smiled crookedly. “Maybe I don't trust it. Maybe I want to tame it so I can understand what it did.”

“So who was your great-great-grandmother?” she asked.

He laughed at her quick, pouncing change of subject. “She was the lost daughter of Nathaniel,” he said. “Or have you never heard of her?”

She actually clapped her hands together like a schoolgirl. “The wicked Tamar!” she exclaimed. “Of course I have heard of her. Nathaniel and Magdalena were the only two angels ever allowed to intermarry by a special dispensation of the god. They had six daughters, five of them angels of spectacular voices and great sweetness of disposition. And then they had Tamar, who was born without wings and proved to be a great trial to them. Or so the histories say. Didn't she—I thought she died when she was very young, in some ill-fated boating accident or some disaster riding a horse.”

“No, she disappeared when she was in her early twenties, and they didn't see her again until Nathaniel was dying. At least, this is how the family history records it. Apparently they'd known she was alive all this time, because her Kiss was still active, and every once in a while they would have one of the oracles ask the god to track her. They say her mother, Magdalena, fainted when Tamar walked into the room—although whether from mortification or affection one hardly knows. I tend to vote for mortification. They say Magdalena was a silly woman.”

“So, you're descended from the first angels of Cedar Hills,” Alleluia said. “I would not have thought it.”

“It's a very distant connection,” he said. “And, as you see, I've moved pretty far down a different road. I don't trade much on my family background, but you did ask.”

“Well, I don't trade on mine at all,” she said, and then, as if afraid he would follow up on that opening, briskly turned to business. “But I didn't come here to swap tales of our ancestors. I came to offer you a job, if you'd be interested.”

“Anything that has sent you searching for me all the way from the Eyrie would have to be unusual enough to interest me,” he said. “Who told you to look for me, by the way?”

“An Edori engineer named Daniel who lives in Velora. Who told me to look for your friend Noah, who would direct me to
you. It was a little more tortuous than I anticipated, but now that I've found you—”

“I'm eager to hear about this job.”

“Have you ever been to the Eyrie or Monteverde?”

“No.”

“Then you haven't seen the machine I'm talking about. It's leftover technology from the original settlers, and it plays music—recordings of the masses sung by Hagar and some of the first angels. We have no idea how they made the recordings or how the equipment works, but there are—oh, three hundred masses and other pieces available to us. Except most of the machines at the Eyrie have failed in the past few months. Now there is only one operational, and my guess is that it too will break very soon. And I wondered if you might be able to fix one of them.”

He was wholly intrigued. “What powers these machines?”

“Powers them?”

“Makes them go. Supplies their energy.” She looked completely baffled, so he tried to explain. “Every inanimate object that acquires force, energy or motion has to have it supplied by an outside source,” he said. “For instance, that fan blade over there. You can move it with your finger or I can build a motor that turns it, but that motor is activated by electricity. All the factories in Breven are run on steam heat, but they require fire to create the steam which is compressed in a box until it whooshes out with tremendous force.” He flung his hands apart to illustrate. “Now, perhaps our ancestors knew of other sources of power, but to date, this is all we have—manual labor, steam and electricity.”

“What creates the electricity?” she asked. “It seems to come from nowhere.”

He smiled. “Mostly it comes from falling water,” he explained. “The Gabriel Dam on the Galilee River, for instance. Millions of gallons of water pass over it every day, and that motion creates another motion in equipment we have set up—” He paused; there was no simple way to explain this, and he didn't think she really wanted a lesson in hydroelectricity. “Think of the falling water as substituting for the energy you would supply if you pushed something very hard. Motion can always be translated into power.”

“I don't think we have anything like that at the Eyrie,” Alleluia said. “I don't know what makes the machines work. I was hoping you would.”

“I'd love to look at them, in any case. I've never seen any of the settlers' technology. It must be fascinating.”

“I worry about that. This sudden leap forward into science. I don't know that we were meant to discover—electricity—and falling water—and factories. Science is what sent the colonists from their home world to Samaria, you know—science and all its destructive power. Who knows that our scientific discoveries will not inevitably start us down the road that led them to disharmony and death?”

“Science is not evil! Name a single evil thing it has done.”

She turned one hand palm up in her lap. “Chased the Edori from their homes,” she said. “Created great stinking factories in Breven and the mining towns. I believe science is changing the face of Samaria, Caleb Augustus, making the villages cities and the farms wastelands. I wonder how we will turn back to a simpler way of life.”

“Why is it better because it is simpler?”

“Why is it better because it is more complex?” she countered. “What has electricity given you except sharper lighting and mass production? Those factories have completely changed the structure of buying, selling and making original goods. Is that a benefit? It does not seem so to me.”

“We are in the early days of science,” Caleb argued. “From the things we discover today we will learn amazing things. Travel, for instance. My friend Noah has already built this—contraption—a self-propelled vehicle that covers the ground two or three times faster than a man on horse. Someday maybe we shall build machines that can fly! We will—”

“Fly! Why should you want to do that?”

He laughed at her. “Because I can't! Because I know it is possible, and I want to know how it is done.”

“To what end? To get from Luminaux to the Manadavvi compounds in two days instead of ten? Why is haste so desirable? Why make the world revolve that much faster?”