Jovah's Angel

by Sharon Shinn

  “That is correct,” Jovah said.

  “But that is—that is disastrous!” she cried. “I thought you would know—I thought you would be able to tell me—who the god was we had forgotten and how we could reach him after so many centuries of neglect. But if there is no god, or no god that anyone can identify—then what holds the world together? What binds the stars and the suns, what turns the seasons, what gives any of us the will to live?”

  “These are questions that, over the millennia, have concerned a great number of men and women,” the ship replied. “People with far more education than you in far more advanced societies have despaired when uttering those same queries. And like you, they believed there was an answer somewhere—that there was a god, whose wisdom knew no boundary and whose strength could not be measured. They believed he was an infinite being and their own abilities were finite, and so they could never know him, or define him, or limit him.

  “If it comforts you,” he continued, while Alleya listened intently, “in every society, on every planet, whether humanoid or alien, some form of religion exists. Some members of every sentient species believe that there is a divine being, who, as you say, guards them and listens to them and knows their names. They have different names for these gods—and some of them have more than one god, and some have gods who are cruel and some have gods who are benign. But they believe their fates are not entirely in their own hands, and they believe their souls do not go wandering undefended after they die.”

  “It comforts me. A little,” she said slowly. “But perhaps they have been as deluded as we have. Perhaps there were forces directing them that were just as bizarre and inexplicable as—as a spaceship so complex they would not be able to comprehend it if they saw it. Perhaps they just wanted to believe that someone cared for them, and believing made it so. Perhaps they have all created their own gods.”

  “Indeed, you will find essayists and scientists on every planet who make exactly those same arguments. One of them has said that religion is the soothing opiate of the common people. Another has said that god is an advanced form of desire. Men have always, through the centuries, found ways to create what they did not find in the natural order. And men have always, through the centuries, sought to put themselves in the context of the universe. The universe has remained too vast for them to quantify. Thus they hypothesize an entity even more vast as a vessel to contain it. Men are, in the final analysis, agoraphobic. They want a roof and a fence and a definable boundary. Otherwise, they are too afraid of what lurks outside.”

  Much of what he said made no sense to Alleya; she wasn’t sure if that was because he used too many unfamiliar words from that foreign language or if her brain just refused to accept too many new concepts at once. But one statement she clung to, as if it were the only truth in a sea of lies: Everywhere in the universe, men and women believed in a god. It was not the same god, or at least, not a god in the same contours; he bent to amazing molds, took on radically different identities. But from planet to planet, star to star, he extended; and his fingers touched every believer’s heart.

  “I wish I knew more,” she said aloud. “I wish I knew all the names the god went by, and all the ways he was worshiped.”

  “I have all that information, if you wish me to download it,” Jovah said. “It is all in the Eleison tongue, but you have mastered that, have you not?”

  “You mean, the language the oracles use to speak with you? Oh, yes.”

  “In fact, you can call up the files from the interface on Sinai, if you wish. It is more material than you could read in a lifetime, but I can guide you to the texts you might find most interesting.”

  She felt a spurt of gratitude toward him, much akin to the warm glow of fellowship she had used to feel toward Jovah, back when he listened to her voice alone, back when she had thought he was a god. It would be hard to remember that this voice belonged to a machine, that every act she had considered divine had been programmed into a computer by human hands. And yet, perhaps it would not be wrong to consider this electronic brain, in some sense, a friend. He had in many ways befriended her over the years—as she had befriended him.

  “Tell me,” she demanded. “Why is it you could hear my voice and no other before Caleb repaired your circuit board?”

  “The pitch was specific and singular, and could still be read by my receptors,” was the immediate answer. Which, again, made no sense. And was not what she had wanted to hear.

  She smiled a little sadly. “Oh. I thought it was because I had some special place in your heart.”

  “I am not constructed with emotions such as humans have. I do not have what you would consider a ‘heart.’ I thought you understood that.”

  She sighed. “I understood. It was a stupid question.”

  “But you are, if it makes you feel more appreciated, unique. At least, your voice is unique. It resonates at a particular level that I have not seen replicated, and I have heard every singer on Samaria for the past six hundred and fifty years.”

  “Yes, that does make me feel better,” she said, smiling more brightly. “Although I would not have expected it to.”

  “Every Kiss has a unique electronic pattern as well,” he continued. “Which is how I am able to track and identify everyone who has been, as you call it, dedicated. But that is a different thing entirely from voice identification.”

  “And do you really cause Kisses to flare when true lovers meet for the first time?”

  “In a manner of speaking. I am usually able to calculate, almost from birth, which offspring bear gene clusters that I think would be valuably combined with another person’s gene clusters. For instance, your friend Caleb Augustus inherited remarkable abilities from the first genetic combination of angels—”

  “Nathaniel and Magdalena,” she supplied.

  “Yes. And it was inevitable that, several generations later, a man with a predisposition to scientific discovery would be created from that gene pool. It could have been the generation before or the next generation. These things are not exact.”

  “And you thought that would be valuable? To facilitate the birth of a man who was a natural engineer?”

  “It seemed likely that some of my mechanical functions would begin to fail sometime in this century, and I thought it would be beneficial if someone on Samaria had been bred to correct those problems.”

  “Do you always—breed people like that? With a specific goal in mind?”

  “Not always. Sometimes.”

  “For what goals?”

  “They vary.”

  “But is there—some kind of overall plan? For the development of the entire race on Samaria?”

  “Nothing so grandiose. Sometimes I want to pair men and women of obvious intelligence merely to ensure that some genius is still produced in this world. Other times I seek to strengthen failing bloodlines or eradicate inherent diseases. But men and women are too unpredictable and contrary to mate and reproduce according to some great scheme of mine. They do what they will. Now and then I urge them along.”

  “So if—for instance—the Archangel did not marry the man or woman you selected, what would be the consequences?”

  “Merely, offspring that were not as vital and gifted as they might otherwise have been.”

  “But you would not—again, for instance—display your wrath by sending down thunderbolts if the wrong angelico sang at the Gloria?”

  “Is that what the angels believe?”

  “Oh, yes. It is what motivated Gabriel to search all over Samaria to find Rachel, a hundred and fifty years ago.”

  “I did not realize the dictum carried such weight, although I believe your world is better served if angels heed my words. In any case, only one Archangel has not sought and followed my advice about who to marry.”

  “Delilah,” Alleya guessed.

  “Precisely.”

  “And she sang with Levi at her side, and the world did not end, so his voice must have pleased you,” she add
ed. “And her voice must have pleased you as well, if you selected her.”

  “I expected a difficult decade or so, for I knew my circuits were burning,” he said. “I believed Delilah had the strength of will to shepherd fractious contingents through a great trial. I still believe I was right, though she had physical disabilities that eventually rendered her unfit for the position.”

  “Would you know,” Alleya asked, “if she suddenly regained the ability to fly?”

  “Is that likely?” he returned.

  “It’s possible,” she amended.

  “If she takes wing again, yes, I will know. I will be able to judge by the variances in the pressure on her Kiss.”

  “Watch for it, then,” Alleya said. “It may occur.”

  There was a moment of silence while Alleya brooded over all the things the computer had told her in a few short minutes. Almost too much to take in; and yet, in some strange, unforeseen way, deeply exciting. In a few sentences, her world had expanded to the size of a universe, densely populated and unimaginably diverse.

  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?”