by Sharon Shinn
But when she opened her eyes, she had no idea what she was looking at. The world seemed a mishmash of white and chrome and blinking lights. She shut her eyes again quickly.
She lay there another moment or two, but she would learn nothing this way—not where she was, not what Jovah wanted from her. He was her god; surely he had not brought her here to harm her. She opened her eyes again and pushed herself to a sitting position.
She seemed to be in some kind of round room walled in white, though it was not constructed of stone or wood or even any metal that she could recognize. She was indeed on the floor, which seemed to be made of the same material used for the walls. In a near-perfect circle lining the interior of the room was a bank of screens much like the interface at Sinai, though the keyboards beneath the screens varied radically. Some were not keyboards at all, but consisted of a series of flashing lights arranged in colorful rows. Indeed, now that she examined the screens, most of them looked very little like the interface she knew: They displayed images of lines and dots in mysterious configurations, and as she watched, they altered.
She did not know where she was or how she had arrived here, but surely Jovah had sent her here for a purpose. Surely there would be a way for him to tell her what that purpose was. She made herself stand up and examine the screens more closely. And there was, as she had been sure there must be, an interface like the one she knew.
She approached it cautiously and examined the keyboard. Yes, laid out just like the one at Sinai. She breathed a soundless sigh of relief. Then Jovah was still available to her somehow. She positioned her fingers over the keyboard and typed, “Jovah, are you here?”
But the reply was not what she had expected. Sonorous, mighty, echoing from the round walls around her, a man’s deep voice replied, “Yes, Alleluia, I am.”
She shrieked and fell to her knees, weak with a primeval terror. She had wanted to touch the face of the god but she had not thought she could do it; and she had not thought his face would look like this. “Jovah!” she cried out, her hands cradling her head as if to shield herself from his sight. “Jovah, I am afraid!”
But the voice did not immediately speak again. Instead, even more terrifying, the texture of the air changed. A golden glow began to build up beside her in the chamber, a whirling luminescent cloud of ensorcelled dust. Crying out Jovah’s name again, Alleya flattened herself on the floor in supplication, and waited for the god to strike.
Caleb had never been to Sinai, or, indeed, any of the retreats of the oracles, so it had taken him a little time to navigate the echoing gray halls. “Alleya?” he had called out once or twice, but he could not bring himself to raise his voice to the level of a shout; there was something about this place that discouraged violence, even violent sound.
So he made a few fruitless investigations of small waiting rooms and obviously disused passageways before the hallway abruptly widened and he sensed that he was approaching the main living quarters. He quickened his pace and forbore to call out the Archangel’s name again.
When he moved into the great chamber that was clearly the heart of the maze, it took him only a few seconds to glance around and realize he had found his quarry. She was standing unnaturally still in the middle of the room, her head tilted as if she was listening to some voice inaudible to him. He took a deep breath and another step forward—and then stood frozen to the spot in horror. Alleya was enveloped in a mist of gold and topaz, and the look on her face was one of stark terror. “Alleya!” he screamed, bounding forward, but he did not reach her in time. “Alleya!”
She was gone. Where she had stood was nothing but gray, unimaginative stone, and not even a sparkle of the traitorous haze remained.
Frantic, he ran back and forth across the confines of the room, touching each wall, as if she could be lurking behind those solid stones, as if only the effect of mirrors or illusion had caused her to disappear. He hurriedly inspected a book room off to one side, peering around each shelf, as if she had taken shelter behind one, as if she was merely hiding. But she was gone. He had seen her vanish.
Well, this was the god’s waiting room, after all. Although Caleb could not even guess how she had been removed, surely Jovah’s had been the hand that had taken her. And he knew of only one instrument on Samaria that anyone could use to directly question the god.
Slowly, battling a mind-numbing fear, Caleb approached the glowing blue screen set into the far wall. The interface, that was what Alleya had called it. He forced himself to concentrate, to remember what little Alleya had told him about the machine. The oracle wrote a question on the screen and the god replied through the same medium. Fabulous technology, if indeed it worked, if indeed the god replied and the oracle did not just fabricate his own replies to awe and delight credulous visitors.
But now Caleb was almost willing to concede the existence of the god, if the god could help him retrieve Alleya.
He stood for a long time before the alien equipment, studying it, trying to analyze it. It did not much resemble either the music machine at the Eyrie or the listening device at Hagar’s Tooth, except it could easily have been constructed of the same materials and featured some kind of lighted display. The buttons on the panel below the screen were lettered with an unfamiliar alphabet; apparently, these were used to form the words and sentences that were then somehow relayed to the god.
Caleb surveyed the screen itself, even now offering him an unreadable message. It was clearly a question, however; the sentence ended with the same interrogative symbol Samarians still used in their written language. So the god was asking him—something. Asking him what had happened to Alleya. No, the god knew that. Asking him what he wanted to do next.
Asking him if he wanted to go where Alleya had gone.
How did he tell Jovah yes?
He dropped his eyes again to the arrangement of buttons on the lower panel. All but one were marked with a letter or a symbol that would seem to pass for a part of speech. On the left hand side of the panel was a large, square green key with an entire word printed on it. Not a word that Caleb recognized.
But green—that was the color that meant “proceed” or “in use” in the other pieces of early technology that Caleb had encountered. Green meant “go forward.” Green meant “yes.”
He glanced back over his shoulder to try to identify exactly where Alleya had been standing when he saw her melt away. Ah—she had marked the very location with a collection of textbooks. Certainly he must stand in the same place if he hoped to follow her. If indeed he could follow her. If he had guessed correctly.
He took a deep breath and pressed the green key. Then he sprinted for the marked spot in the center of the room. He fought down his dismay when nothing immediately happened; there must be a delay of some sort, because he had clearly seen Alleya’s face for a few moments before she was enveloped in the coruscating fire. But not a long delay. There would be no point.
He was afraid, but when the glittering veil fell around him and tickled his skin with needles, his predominant emotion was one of fierce elation. He would follow the Archangel to the lair of the god himself.
Nothing, not even her arrival in this fantastic place, had shocked Alleya as much as the sudden appearance of Caleb Augustus by her side. For a moment, while he overcame his dizzy disorientation, she could not even speak. She merely stared at him, marveling.
He recovered more quickly than she. “Thank the god I found you,” he exclaimed, scrambling to his feet and pulling her up into a fervent embrace. “When I saw you—disintegrate like that—before my very eyes—”
“What are you doing here?” she whispered. “How did you come to be here?”
“I followed you,” he said. “At the Eyrie, they told me you were coming here. And I arrived at Sinai just in time to see you—do whatever it is we have just done.”
She pulled back from him to stare at his face. She was still frightened, but less so; just his presence, no matter how helpless he might be, comforted her
to an amazing degree. “We have achieved teleport,” she said. “But I don’t know what that means.”
“Teleport,” he repeated, and, still holding her in the circle of his arms, looked slowly around him. Alleya watched him, wondering what his scientific mind might make of the screens and equipment arrayed before them. The son of Jeremiah. Well, the god had asked for him. The god must have expected him to feel an affinity for this foreign machinery.
“Where are we?” Caleb asked at last, his face a study in puzzlement tempered by eagerness.
“I can’t even guess.”
He released her and walked idly from station to station, examining each with a minute, fascinated attention. Evidently the symbols meant more to him than to her, for now and then he released a small, surprised grunt of recognition, and then moved on. Alleya pivoted slowly to watch him.
“So where are we?” she asked at last.
He was still gazing down at one of the keyboards. He had lifted his hand as if he wanted to stroke the keys, but his fingers were suspended inches above the panel, as if he didn’t quite dare. “At a guess, I would say we were in some technological nerve center directing the operations of a million engineering tasks at once,” he said. “This is monitoring equipment—this is navigational equipment—this looks like it’s simply a communications console…”
“Navigational equipment?” she queried.
He nodded. “Star charts, but more complicated than any I’ve ever seen, and not—” He hesitated. “They’re the Samarian constellations, but not taken from the horizons we know.”
She felt herself gasp. “From—from Ysral? The other continent?”
He looked over at her. His face was sober, but his eyes blazed with excitement. “I don’t think so. I’d almost say—taken from a vantage point far above the ground.”
She shook her head. “The stars look the same to me even when I’m flying.”
He nodded. “Higher than that. Hundreds of miles higher or farther away. Maybe as far away as the next star. You could never fly so far.”
She was bewildered. “But nothing could.”
“A machine could.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!”
“Of course it could. I showed you Noah’s traveling vehicle when we were in Breven. I’ve told you how I’ve tried to build wings for myself. There’s a way to do it—I haven’t figured it out yet—but there’s a way to build machines that fly. Fly from one city on Samaria to the next. And if they can fly across land, why can’t they fly through the atmosphere and to the stars?”
“Because they can’t! Because no one can build machines like that! Because—because it doesn’t make sense!”
“It makes sense,” he said. “I think we’re on just such a machine.”
Alleya stared at him and felt all the blood drain away from her face, squeeze from her heart, and puddle in tingling pools at her knees and elbows. “You’re saying we’re in some machine miles above Samaria?” she whispered.
He nodded. “That would be my guess. We could confirm it, I think, if we could find an outside window. Although there may be no such thing as a window on a vessel like this. Probably has to have an outside surface that can withstand—well, anything—pressure, storms, meteorites—”
“Wait—don’t—I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” she interrupted, shaking her head. Now she was beginning to feel nauseous and ill, and fearful all over again. “And none of that matters, really. We’re here to find out how Jovah wants us to help him.”
Now Caleb was the one to stare. “Jovah wants us to help him? Why do you—”
“The message on the screen at Sinai. It said, ‘Send help.’ And when I asked how, it said, ‘Teleport.’ And that’s how we got here. And now we need to find out how we can render assistance to Jovah.”
He glanced around again. “Is there anything here that looks familiar to you—looks like one of the interfaces?”
She nodded and pointed. “Yes, but when I used it before—”
His head whipped back. “Yes?”
“He spoke to me,” she whispered.
“Spoke? Aloud?”
She nodded.
“What did he say?”
“I had written, ‘Jovah, are you here?’ and the voice said, ‘Yes, Alleluia, I am.”’
“Has the god ever spoken to you before? Has he ever spoken to any of the oracles?”
She shook her head. “Not that I have ever heard.”
“Then—”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you sure it was Jovah?”
Now she felt a surge of impatience. “Who else would it be?”
“Who else, indeed…” He frowned down at the keyboard under the interface and then, without warning, lifted his head and addressed the empty air. “Jovah, can you hear me?”
Alleya did not even have time to catch her breath before the resonant voice replied, “Yes, I can.”
She was stricken, paralyzed in place, but Caleb seemed unfazed. “Do you know me?” he asked next.
“Your name is hidden from me,” the reply came. “Because the Kiss in your arm has been destroyed. If you told me your name, I could identify you.”
“I am called Caleb Augustus. My father was Jacob Augustus.”
“Ah,” said the rich, deep voice. “Caleb, son of Jacob, son of Zakary, son of Ruth, daughter of Tamar, daughter of Nathaniel, who was son of Jeremiah.”
The son of Jeremiah. Hearing the words aloud, Alleya could not repress a slight shiver. All the weeks of searching, and all this time, he was as close as her own hand.
“Can you tell us where we are?” Caleb asked next.
“You are aboard the spaceship Jehovah.”
“Spaceship?” Caleb asked sharply. “What is that?”
“It is a vehicle designed for transport across interplanetary distances. It is self-sustaining, self-renewing, powered by crystals which release their radioactive energy over a period of centuries, giving the ship an effective lifespan of several thousand years.”
“And how old is this ship?”
“It is entering its nine hundredth year of service.”
“And how did it come to be flying above Samaria?”
“When the members of the Harmonic Christers sect elected to leave their home planet, they chose this spaceship to carry them from Eleison to whatever world they might find and deem to be suitable. This planet, which they named Samaria, was the one selected.”
Caleb, whom Alleya was watching with an almost painful intensity, seemed to be half listening—and half remembering other stories. “Carried in Jovah’s hands to their new home,” he murmured. “Carried in Jovah’s hands—in Jehovah’s hands—in the spaceship Jehovah.”
Alleya stirred and put a hand on his arm. “No,” she said. “That is not how it happened. The god took us in his palm—”
“The settlers were carried in the spaceship,” the voice interrupted. “As Caleb Augustus says.”
Caleb covered Alleya’s hand with his to reassure her, but his mind was clearly locked into this particular investigative groove. “So they came here in the ship—and then what happened to the ship? It just stayed floating above Samaria for the next six and a half centuries? What a waste! What we could have learned from it!”
“Orbiting,” the voice said.
“What?”
“The ship was not floating, it was orbiting around the planet on a regular and calculated basis.”
“On some kind of schedule that had been programmed into its machinery before the settlers landed?”
“That is correct.”
“But why didn’t they—” Caleb gave a laugh of sheer frustration. “I mean, to have this incredible piece of technology so close, and then to cut themselves off from it completely—It makes no sense to me.”
“They did not cut themselves off completely. They installed computer interfaces at three stations on the planet which allowed them to communicate directly with the ship.”
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br /> “Interfaces,” Alleya whispered. “No—”
“To communicate—what?” Caleb asked.
“Information, mostly. Genealogical information about the population shifts on Samaria. Information about weather patterns and crop rotations. Information about technological advances and where they were centered.”
“Tracking us,” Caleb said below his breath. “Learning how quickly we were evolving.” He slapped his hand across the black Kiss in his arm. “Guessing—and pretty damn accurately, too—what bloodlines could be profitably mixed with others—” He refocused his attention on the point above his head, to the right, which seemed to be the source of the voice. “But how were the settlers benefiting from the ship’s continued orbit over the planet?”
“In many ways,” the voice replied. “For example, the weather on Samaria was a concern from the very beginning.”
Alleya felt her fingers bite into Caleb’s arm. “This is not true,” she said fiercely. Caleb hushed her, but the voice seemed not to notice.
“The ship is able, through a combination of chemicals and heat rays and solar mirror panels, to cause sudden and dramatic shifts in the wind and temperature patterns—”
“This is not true,” Alleya repeated, more loudly. “Jovah causes the weather to change, when the angels request it of him—”
“My dear child, who do you think is speaking to us?” Caleb whispered in her ear.
She snatched her hand back, took a pace away from Caleb when he reached for her again. “I don’t—it is a voice Jovah is using to speak to us—”
Still watching her sympathetically, Caleb lifted his own voice. “Who is addressing us in this conversation?”
“I am the voice of the computer that operates the starship Jehovah.”
“No,” Alleya said instantly just as Caleb asked his next question. “Computer? What is that?”
“A computer is an artificial, electronic brain. It is capable of performing myriads of complicated logical, logistical, mathematical and theoretical calculations that simulate the thought processes of human brains. Although it is more sophisticated than a human brain, boasts more memory than a human brain and can handle functions a human brain cannot.”