Jovah's Angel

by Sharon Shinn

  He gazed upward again, wondering what had excited them so, and just then the angel dropped a few yards closer. Those black-tipped wings, that night-dark hair; suddenly he, too, recognized the vision overhead. “Delilah,” he whispered just as someone around him shouted out her name. In minutes, the whole crowd was chanting. Delilah, Delilah, Delilah…!

  There were hundreds of people in the plaza, or so it seemed, but when she finally drifted down for a landing, they parted spontaneously to give her room. Even after her feet touched the rock of the plateau, she seemed to be floating; she sparkled with her own inimitable combination of urgency and delight.

  Samuel and Asher were the first to approach her. Everyone else seemed too awestruck to come any nearer. Caleb edged his way through the crowd just to hear what they would say to her; the smile on his face was as wide as the one on her own.

  “It is a miracle,” Samuel said, his voice quavering. Caleb realized the old man was actually crying. “You were broken, and Jovah has made you whole.”

  “Yes, the god has been good to me and I thank him daily.”

  “But when did this happen?” Asher demanded. “Why haven’t you come back to us sooner?”

  She laughed at him and laid a hand affectionately on his shoulder. “Just days ago,” she said. “I have been learning how to fly again, learning everything. I wanted to be sure I was whole before I returned, before I came to you, before I told you all—”

  “What?” Samuel said, and the sudden caution in his voice gave Caleb his one brief moment of warning. The angel’s next words left both Samuel and Asher dumb, stunned the crowd, turned Caleb sick and dizzy.

  “I have returned to the Eyrie to be Archangel again.”

  Alleya spent more than a week in Chahiela, but there was not enough silence in that place to satisfy her. The children, even the wordless children, managed to be noisy and demanding, and everyone found a way to ask her questions both trivial and unnerving. Even Hope’s house, which she remembered as the quietest and most solitary of places, seemed overfull of visitors.

  Her mother was not one to ask questions, of course, not even why Alleya had returned to this village so soon after leaving it, looking as though she had seen precipices crumble away beneath her feet. Hope did not ask how long she planned to stay, what she was interested in for dinner, if she would care to sing in the evenings. Certainly, Hope did not ask her daughter to address any of the larger issues that might be thought to concern her.

  Have you found the man the god wants you to marry? Have you discovered why the god has turned his face from the angels—and have you learned how to recapture his attention? Indeed, how do you find Jovah these days—warm and loving, or cold, efficient and mechanical?

  Hope asked Alleya none of these things. No one did. Still, the questions clamored in her head.

  Now and then, during those four days, it nagged at Alleya that she really should be back at the Eyrie. It was now so close to the Gloria that there would be hundreds of petitioners at the holds, bringing special prayers for the angels to present to the god. And she had spent so much time away from the Eyrie lately that these petitioners—indeed, her own angels—could justifiably be annoyed with her for not being present now. And she must learn music, and make arrangements with the vendors who would organize supply tents on the Plain of Sharon, and oversee plans for the pavilion the Eyrie residents would set up for their comfort during the Gloria. And no doubt there were other matters to attend to—storms blowing in over the Galilee River, plague flags raised in the middle plains—the simple day-to-day business which she had neglected so shamefully of late.

  But Jovah could hear all the angels again, so there was no special need for her to raise her voice; and until Caleb sojourned to the Eyrie to choose his Gloria mass, there was no need for her to practice any other music. And she needed time to think, to gather her scattered wits, and she could not do that at the Eyrie.

  But soon enough it became clear that she could not do that at Chahiela, either.

  In fact, she knew of only one place in all of Samaria quiet enough to allow her to think.

  So on the evening of her tenth day, Alleya told her mother she would be leaving in the morning. Hope took the news with neither reproach nor surprise.

  “I’ll see you again, then, when you come back,” her mother said.

  “Yes. Thanks for letting me stay here so long.”

  “Of course.”

  In the morning, she took off at first light, heading northeast through sublimely cloudless skies in the direction of Mount Sinai. The weather was flawless for that entire trip, the wind still, the sun apparently motionless, the color of the heavens an unwavering blue. Alleya felt the first true heat of spring settle across the feathers on her back. The sensation warmed her all the way to her bones.

  She was back at Sinai early in the afternoon. Instantly, she felt a beneficent peace gather around her. She had been driven by a sense of urgency to get here as quickly as she could, but now that she had arrived, she became slow-paced, lackadaisical. What did she need to accomplish, after all? She was merely here to relax and sort out her thoughts. There was certainly no timetable for that.

  Lazily, she wandered through the corridors of the retreat, glancing into rooms she had not explored before, noting how big the place really was, large enough to accommodate the oracle, the acolytes, visitors, a few servants. All hallways led to the main chamber, of course, but she refused to linger in there more than a moment or two. She had no business in this room, no interest at all in the gleaming blue screen, faintly pulsing, seeming with an almost sentient presence to watch her every time she crossed the floor. She escaped it a few times by ducking into the archives, lingering there to read passages from various books (now that she could read any volume in the library), studying the mystifying maps on the walls. But always when she emerged, there was the living interface, intent, relentless, beckoning.

  She had nothing more to say to the god. Nothing to ask him, nothing to relay. Not through this medium, anyway. She would not go near the screen.

  The day whittled down to evening. She found the room she had shared with Caleb and went to bed early, falling into a deep exhausted sleep the minute she closed her eyes. When she woke, her senses told her it was the following morning, but she had no great desire to roll immediately out of bed. She lay there an hour or more, feeling relaxed and at ease.

  Perhaps she should have gone to Hagar’s retreat instead of coming here. That was a still, solitary place with no disquieting instrument of the god overseeing her every move. Instrument of the spaceship, she corrected herself, and got out of bed.

  She fed herself, continued exploring, continued her investigation into the archives. But every time she walked through the main chamber, she turned involuntarily to glance at the interface; and every time she looked at it, she lingered longer.

  And took a few steps closer.

  Until finally she was standing before it, close enough for her fingers to touch the keyboard, wondering what Jovah would say to her if she asked him any of the questions revolving ceaselessly in her head.

  It didn’t matter what he would have to say. He was a man-made machine, nothing but a collection of circuit wires and electrical impulses. He could give her no divine guidance; he was no more brilliant than Caleb, than Noah, than Uriel or any of the first settlers who had colonized Samaria. Men had built him, men had taught him to speak; and men could not give her the answers she so desperately needed.

  But very smart men had built him, a voice in her head unexpectedly interjected. Men who knew more about the world, about the universe, than you will ever know. Men who had traveled who knows how many thousands of miles, through acres of stars, through oceans of unlit space, to come to this one world and declare it home. This machine knows everything they knew. That is the knowledge you want. That is the one thing worth having.

  She had come here planning this, which she only now realized. She had not even moved the marker books fr
om the pentagram on the floor. She typed in a single word, which appeared in bold letters on the bright screen, and pressed the Enter key. This time she did not hurry as she walked to the center of the room. This time she did not gasp or grimace as she was enveloped in that golden haze and split into her smallest invisible components. This time she arrived on her feet as she teleported into the main communication center of the spaceship Jehovah.

  The quality of silence here was different than anywhere else she had ever been. It was a living silence—not like the silence at the Eyrie, when everyone paused to formulate a private, unvoiced prayer; not like the silence of Sinai, where even the empty hallways echoed with remembered conversations. Here, no one spoke or breathed, but everywhere was the clatter and hum of machinery at work, strange clicks, intermittent muffled chirps. It was an industrious silence, she decided at last, or a thoughtful one; it was like listening to the incessant calculations of a very productive mind.

  Which, of course, she was.

  “Jovah, can you hear me?” she asked, into that waiting stillness.

  “Yes, Alleluia. I can hear you from any point in this ship.”

  “So you remember me.”

  “Your Kiss identifies you.”

  She fingered the marble coolness embedded in her arm. It had meant something so different to her for all of her life. “So it is true, what the priests say,” she said. “That you are only aware of those who have been dedicated. That unless a person wears the Kiss, you cannot tell who he is and how he fares.”

  “Or if he exists at all,” Jovah acknowledged. “It is true. But there are other ways to gather information about those living on Samaria. For instance, many oracles have, over the centuries, fed me information about the Edori—clan names, births, deaths, alliances. This has allowed me, although in an imperfect fashion, to track the fortunes of various tribesmen and to understand how they fit into the world.”

  “So if I were to tell you everything I know about the Edori living today, you would then record their existence and—what? What would that tell you? Why would you need to know?”

  “It would help me deduce how far they have traveled along certain predictable evolutionary paths. It would help me gauge their population growth as it relates to the rest of Samaria, and how long they are likely to remain what is essentially a separate race. Even now, for good or ill, they are being absorbed into the mainstream Samarian population.”

  “Not for long,” Alleya said. “They are planning to migrate.”

  “Ah,” said Jovah. “I did not know that. That is the sort of useful information only an oracle can feed me.”

  She had been making a slow circuit of the consoles as she spoke, trailing her hands experimentally along the curves and surfaces of the keyboards. “What does this do?” she asked suddenly, tapping her fingers against an opaque white screen.

  “It monitors the nearest star systems to decode any interesting space activity.”

  “What does that mean?” she asked impatiently.

  “Exploding suns, planets that have shifted orbit, space debris that might somehow head this way. As well as any potential human or humanoid space travel or long-distance transmissions, indicating well-developed life on one of these nearby planets.”

  She digested that a moment in silence. “We came—our ancestors came to Samaria from another planet. From Eleison. On this ship,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I always thought—well, I never thought about it. It never occurred to me that there were other planets where men lived. But there are?”

  “Oh, yes. Maybe a hundred that men had colonized by the time they had settled on Eleison. By now, maybe a hundred more. And men are not the only intelligent beings living in the universe. There were, when the ship left Eleison, sixty-five identified advanced alien species, and hundreds more at a level so unsophisticated that it seemed unlikely they would ever develop to a human level of intelligence.”

  This was hard to grasp; she felt her mind crunch down in concentration. “Wait. So—so all over the universe there are planets populated by men and women just like us. And more planets with people who aren’t really people. Who are—well, what are they?”

  “The species vary too widely to make a generalization. Some are carbon-based, like you. Some are silicon-based. Some have a basic structure of head, body, limbs. Some have no physical characteristic that you would recognize. Most intelligent species have some kind of functional brain, recognizable as an organ that directs and controls the rest of the operations of the body and that is capable of sustained and logical thought.”

  She waved her hands to silence him, probably a useless gesture since she had no idea if he could see her. “Stop. It doesn’t matter. I don’t care about them. But humans. There are humans on hundreds of planets? Did they all come from Eleison?”

  “Oh, no. Eleison is a minor planet colonized several centuries after men first discovered space travel. Human life originated on Terra in the Milky Way galaxy. That was several million generations before colonization on Eleison.”

  “And did they leave Terra too because of war and hatred and self-destruction?”

  “Well, war and self-destruction were certainly part of life on Terra, but the original space explorers were motivated more by a desire for knowledge than a need to escape the home planet. Historically, once a race becomes completely at ease with its own environment, it seeks to conquer or at least explore unfamiliar ones—whether those are new continents or new worlds.”

  She thought of the Edori, setting off any day now on a chancy, ill-equipped voyage. “That’s the only reason they leave? To explore?”

  “Oh, no. If a continent, or a world, has become too crowded to sustain all the life forms extant, some members of the species will go off in search of more land, more room to grow. Many colonists are seeking religious freedom and a chance to live life on their own terms. Some, like your own, seek to escape intolerable conditions. But no exploration is possible without adequate technology.”

  “So the settlers left Eleison looking for a place they could design to suit them,” she said. “Why did they choose Samaria?”

  “Because it was compatible with their life form. It had the right oxygen mix and a soil base they were comfortable with and a specific gravity that was similar to the one on Eleison. Its only real drawback was the violent weather, but once I was modified to create shifts in the air masses, upon request, that was easily controlled.”

  “And once the angels were created to communicate with you,” she added softly.

  “Yes, that, too. I can hear the angels most clearly when they are aloft, but in fact my satellite receptors are sensitive enough to pick up the general prayers of ground-based citizens as well.”

  “So. The angels. How were they created?”

  “Biological alterations. One of the scientists on board, Dr. Hoyt Freecastle, had been an expert in artificial limbs and tissue regeneration back on Eleison, and he had long been interested in the theory of creating a human being that could fly under its own power. Once the colonists realized how essential it would be to communicate with the ship on a regular basis, they allowed Dr. Freecastle to experiment on a few volunteers to see if he could graft wings to their backs. When the operation was successful, he created a whole host of angels and, indeed, altered their genetic makeup so the wings would be passed on biologically to future generations.”

  “I wonder if they knew,” she said, more to herself than to the ship, “what would happen next. That we would forget how the angels came about. That we would forget how we came to Samaria. That we would forget… everything. Even who Jehovah was.”

  “Oh, they knew,” the ship replied, startling her somewhat. She had not been expecting an answer. “At least, they theorized. As you know, the colonists deliberately withheld technology from future generations. They cut almost every direct link with me, and they destroyed what few technological marvels they had brought with them planetside. They sought a simp
ler, more primitive, perhaps more innocent lifestyle for themselves and their children. But more than one sociologist in the group speculated that ritualistic observance of such events as the Gloria, and the creation of superior beings you call angels, would lead to a theistic belief in the existence of an all-powerful being. In effect, a personalized god.”

  “And that’s what they wanted?”

  “No. They had their own religion, of course, which had nothing to do with spaceships, and most of them believed that this was the religion that would persist after colonization. In fact, it died out within two generations.”

  Alleya felt her interest sharply revive. “And what was their religion? Was it the true one?”

  “The true one?” Jehovah repeated. “I do not understand.”

  She made another impatient gesture. “My whole life, I have believed that Jovah is a god, a supreme being that watched over me and heard my prayers. And now I learn that Jovah is a machine, built by men, a thing, a—a computer. But I cannot erase from my heart the belief that somewhere there is a god who watches over me, who hears my prayers, who knows my name. Perhaps the colonists knew who he was. Perhaps he is the one who sent them safely from Eleison to Samaria.”

  “Perhaps, but even on Eleison there was more than one religion, and fealty to more than one god. Those you call the Edori, who believe in a nameless god who oversees the universe, have a religion that is relatively close to the basic tenets of the faith the Christers brought with them from Eleison. But that is not to say their religion is the true one. And throughout the universe, from planet to planet, there exists such a diversity of divinity that to set one aside and call it the true religion is a task no sage or philosopher has been wise enough to achieve.”

  Alleya felt herself sag against one of the pristine white consoles. “But then—no one knows who the god is, and if there is one? Everywhere—in the whole universe—there are people who believe they worship the correct god, but have no proof—people who may not even know that their god is false, or one of many?”