“Conran,” the Jacobite replied with the big warm smile that most people found irresistible. “Actually, I’m looking for information. Perhaps you can supply it. Which of these houses is the one where the angel Alleluia grew up?”
“Oh, the Wellin house! But none of her family owns it anymore, you know. Alleluia never lived here after her mother died, and the house passed into the hands of one of Hope Wellin’s closest friends. Her name was Mara Lanette, but of course she’s been dead since before I was born. It’s her granddaughter that lives there now, and I believe her granddaughter lives with her. She’s quite old, you know. Can’t hear a word. All the Lanettes have been born deaf—except this youngest granddaughter. Now, she can hear, though it’s my belief she reads lips as much as hears the words. Sometimes if you call out to her when she’s walking down the street, she passes on by as if you haven’t said a word.”
A lot of stupid gossip that no one could care about, Jared thought. But Conran was nodding wisely, as if all this talk of deaf women and great-granddaughters was precisely what he had come to Chahiela to hear. Jared was amazed that the woman would volunteer so much information to a total stranger, but then again, maybe she was not used to having a listening audience. Not everyone in Chahiela was blind, after all; it had been named silence for another reason.
“This woman who lives in the Wellin house now,” Conran said. “What’s her name? Do you think she’d mind if we came by to visit?”
“No, she’d be delighted to have company. She’s the nicest lady. If you want to talk to her, you’ll have to ask her granddaughter to interpret, of course, but she’s a good girl. She won’t mind.”
“And their names?”
“Maretta Lanette—she was named after her grandmother— and Caley Boster. Caley’s mother married that Boster boy, but it didn’t really work out. But it worked out for Maretta, because now she’s got Caley living with her and it’s made everything so much easier for her.”
“And the house? Can you point it out to me?”
“Why, it’s right over there.” And she indicated a small, two-story stone house with a painted white fence and a meticulously maintained lawn. Maretta and her devoted granddaughter certainly spent a lot of time in their yard, Jared thought cynically. Of course, they didn’t have to waste all day listening to the inane chatter of their neighbors, so no doubt they were able to accomplish more than most of the residents. He admired Conran for his undiminished cheerfulness and the seeming sincerity with which he thanked their informant. After two more interminable exchanges, they were on their way again, all nine of them, to the house where the oracle Alleluia had been born.
The woman who answered the door was slim, dark, exhausted, and young, so Jared assumed she was the long-suffering granddaughter and not the elderly Maretta. She seemed startled to see so many strangers appearing on her doorstep at once, though she couldn’t summon the energy for true astonishment. “Can I help you?” she asked doubtfully.
“My name’s Conran. These are my friends. We wanted to ask your grandmother some questions.”
“All of you? Who are you?”
“We are researchers looking for biographical information about the angel Alleluia. The oracle Alleluia. We understand this is the house she was born in, and we thought there might be some—artifacts—here that would be useful to us.”
“Well, there are lots of old boxes and things in the cellar,” Caley said without enthusiasm. “I suppose you could look through those.”
“We were hoping to talk to your grandmother. She might know where to find what we’re looking for.”
“Oh. Well. I guess that would be all right.” She surveyed their little group again, and some of their tension must have communicated itself to her, for a little briskness came to her voice. “Why don’t you come into the parlor and I’ll go fetch her?”
So they tumbled in after her into the narrow hallway, Jared wondering how any angel could have endured living in such close quarters. His own wings brushed the walls on either side. The parlor was clean but sparsely decorated with somewhat worn furnishings; Caley and her grandmother certainly did not live a lavish life. There were not enough places to sit, and none of the chairs would accommodate angel wings. Jared and the other young men stood; Conran and the women sat.
Five minutes later Caley returned, with a smiling old woman in tow. Maretta Lanette was everyone’s vision of the perfect grandmother, with curly gray hair, rosy cheeks, a knitted shawl thrown over her shoulders to ward off whatever chill the air might hold.
Caley led the old woman straight to Conran, who got rather stiffly to his feet. “My name’s Conran,” he said. “My friends and I are researching the life of the oracle Alleluia.”
Maretta continued smiling, but her eyes had gone to her granddaughter’s hands. Caley was weaving her fingers in the air, repeating Conran’s message in the silent language of the deaf. Jared watched with interest because, although he had heard of such communication, he had never seen it performed. When Caley was finished, Maretta asked her a question in the same language.
“My grandmother says, what do you want to know? What are you looking for?”
“Can she read lips?” Conran asked the girl.
“If you look straight at her and speak very slowly. But she usually likes to have me interpret anyway.”
Conran nodded and stared at Maretta. “We are looking for memoirs that Alleluia may have left behind here when she was an old woman. Something she would have wanted your grandmother to keep for her safely. Something she would not want many people to see. We don’t know what form these memoirs are in, but we think they were recorded somehow. They are very important to us.”
Maretta watched him intently, nodding once or twice, then looked over at Caley, who quickly sketched in the details. Maretta’s hands asked a question; Caley repeated it.
“But if she left them here to keep them safe, is there any reason I should give them to you now?”
Conran grinned broadly. “She has been dead sixty years,” he said. “It cannot possibly matter to her now what we may learn about her.”
“They say she was a secretive woman,” Maretta said through Caley’s mouth. “But my grandmother adored her.”
“Learning some of her secrets now may save a number of lives,” Conran said gently. “Do you know where we might find these memoirs I have described to you?”
“In her old room. There is something—I cannot describe it— a piece of equipment. It might hold the information you’re looking for.”
“A piece of equipment?”
“We found it eight or nine years ago when we had to do repairs to that room. It was behind a false wall. Caley guessed that it was meant to play music, but as I cannot hear it, I have never turned it on. It may have belonged to Alleya.”
“Alleya?”
“That is what the people here called the angel Alleluia,” Caley said.
“Charming,” Conran said. He had spoken slowly and calmly till now, but Jared could sense his excitement building. “May we see this equipment? May we listen to any recordings that are there?”
Maretta gazed at Conran for a long time while Caley watched impassively. Had Jared been the one to undergo such a searching gaze, he would have tried to make his eyes limpid and his expression saintly, but Conran stared back at her with all the intensity at his command. It was as if he was willing her to acquiesce, winning her over by the strength of his desire.
Finally, Maretta nodded once, sharply, and everyone from Conran on back let out a sigh. “This way,” Caley said, and everyone turned to follow her back into the cramped hallway. Maretta made no move to join them. Conran held out his hand to her.
“Won’t you come with us?” he asked, but she shook her head.
“She can’t hear what the machine says, so she sees no need to come,” Caley said.
“You could interpret for her.”
Caley smiled briefly, a pretty flash of mischief across her tired face. “She
doesn’t like secrets. She says no secret revealed ever did anybody good.”
“This one will. That I am sure of.”
Caley led the way upstairs and into a small, featureless room with a single window and drab decor. Faded wallpaper covered three walls; the fourth, once presumably hidden behind the false front, was of rough brick. There were really only three pieces of furniture in the room: a narrow bed covered with a thin coverlet, a rickety old chest of drawers with a cracked mirror leaned on top of it—and a bulky metal box studded with gauges and knobs.
A clench of unbearable excitement tightened Jared’s stomach almost to the point of nausea. Recording equipment. It looked nothing at all like the sleek black transmitters he had seen in Luminaux and at Christian’s, but in an odd way it resembled the machinery in the music rooms at the angel holds. And when Caleb Augustus built this piece of equipment—for who but that rogue engineer would have constructed such, a thing?—the only recorders he had encountered had been those ancient, mysterious systems brought in by the original colonists.
Caley gestured at the metal box. “Is this what you’re looking for?” she asked. “I have no idea how it works.”
Conran was on his knees before it, and Duncan and Sal hovered behind him, but it was young Wyman who was the only mechanic of the group. Or so Jared surmised. When Wyman said, “Let me see,” the others fell back. He bent over the box and studied the controls.
“Hunh,” he said, and began touching dials and switches. Everyone tried to remember to breathe, but clearly the room was airless; they were all pale from lack of oxygen, from excitement, from fear. There might be nothing inside this old, bulky music box; there might be everything.
“Ah,” was Wyman’s next pronouncement, and the lid of the contraption flew open and almost struck him in the chin. Everyone jumped back a pace. Jani stepped on Jared’s wings, which caused him to bite back a yelp of pain and move hurriedly to the back of the room. Strange clickings were emanating from the old equipment; it sounded like a piece of metal heating up to a sizzling pitch.
“Well. I see. If that … no, that one,” Wyman said, and his voice was laced with satisfaction. “Okay. Hold tight. I think this may be the ‘go’ button.”
He turned a knob, and the room was filled with the sound of a woman speaking. Jared was caught first by the utter sweetness of that voice, chime-sweet, child-sweet, beguiling as birdsong on the first day of spring. There was nothing this woman could have said to him that he would not have believed absolutely; nothing she would have asked from him that he would not have gladly done. He had heard of speakers blessed with hypnotic voices but he had never, till this moment, encountered one, and certainly would not have expected any recorded voice to have such power, divorced from the speaker’s spirit by six decades of death.
It was therefore a few sentences into her speech before he registered what she was saying—and the words were just as astonishing as the voice.
“… Such knowledge, while important, has such calamitous and far-reaching effects that I fear to share it with the rest of Samaria. Our society lives by the rules set down by our god— our world maintains its graces and its civilities primarily because these have been ordained by Jovah. If the god were to be removed from our calculations, I do not know how our society would continue to function. I do not know. I am afraid to find out.
“And yet, having been taught to revere truth, I cannot in conscience fail to correct a lie. I will tell only one living soul what I have learned, but I will leave this record for future generations who may deal more hardily with knowledge than my own. If Jovah has taught me one thing, it is that a truth will be revealed when that truth is desperately needed, and so I hope this secret becomes known when the time is right.
“The god Jovah is in reality a space-going vessel called the Jehovah. It ferried us here from Eleison more than six hundred years ago, and it still orbits above us today. It is built from unimaginable technology and stocked with priceless commodities—seeds, chemicals, potions—that the ship can release to us upon request. It is also armed with powerful weapons, weapons so terrible and so precise that they can strike down a man standing in a crowd of men or destroy the whole world we call Samaria.
“It is voice-activated. It hears the angels’ prayers and responds to the cadence of our songs. When we sing for rain, it sprays chemicals into the clouds to make them gather overhead. When we pray for medicine, it releases drugs that we do not even know how to decode.
“When we gather every year to perform the Gloria, it counts our voices and calculates our numbers. If we were to remain silent, it would smite us with all the destructive power at its command. It has no malice for us. It has no love for us. It is programmed to act in this way. It is a machine.
“But it is a machine that controls our lives. One of the great engineers of my time has said he cannot see a way to dismantle it. Thus we cannot disregard it. We cannot, for instance, cease singing the Gloria simply because we do not raise our prayers to a god. In fact, a god might be more merciful than Jehovah.
“But Jehovah is also a wonderful, fabulous thing. It has stored in its memory banks all the knowledge of the universe. It has taught me more than I could ever record here, and I have not asked it one-one-thousandth of the questions it could answer. It can tell us how our bodies are formed, how our minds work, where our ancestors were born, and where people just like us live on other planets orbiting other stars. It can tell us how to build machines just like it, that would carry us elsewhere, to new worlds beneath different suns. It would tell us all this, but we are not yet ready to understand the answers. Or so I believe.
“How do I know all this? How can I be so sure? Because I have stood face-to-face with Jehovah. I have traveled to the interior of this ship, and heard the voice of its electronic brain speak to me as I am speaking to you now. I have touched its keyboards and controls—I have walked its vast white halls. I have stood there and despaired, because my god was a machine. And I have stood there and rejoiced, because I learned the truth.
“There is a way—a simple way—for any man or woman to transport himself to the interior of the spaceship as I have done. I have left those instructions elsewhere, in other trusted hands. Forgive me if I am being too careful. I have guarded this secret with my life, for so much of my life, that I am afraid to have said as much as I already have. But I believe that if you are meant to find the rest of the puzzle, you will find it. And if not, you can do very little harm.
“I have asked Jehovah, who is wiser than any human I know, when the time might be right for Samarians to learn the truth about their god. He gave, as he sometimes does, a cryptic reply. He said, “That day will come when the twinned destinies of angel and mortal become one.’ Perhaps that answer will mean more to you than it does to me.
“I have no more to say, but I beg you to use the knowledge you have gained only for the good of the world. I am the oracle Alleluia, and I bid you farewell and amen.”
The recording ran for another full minute, making a quiet little whirring noise in the heart of the machine, but there was not another sound in the room. Jared felt heat at all the junctures of his body, a breathless pressure across his chest, and he had not spent his life looking for this very revelation. He could imagine how stunned the Jacobites were, how elated, how their very blood must be reveling in their veins and whirling their brains into ecstasy.
Caley was the first to speak, and her voice was amused and a little ironic. “She must have given quite a speech. I don’t believe one of you has breathed since she started talking.”
All the Jacobites looked at her, still too choked to reply, and Jared said, “You could not hear her?”
Caley shook her head. “Isn’t that strange? They say almost everyone could hear Alleya, even those who had been born deaf and never heard another voice in their lives. But my great-great-grandmother Mara never heard Alleya’s voice, and I cannot catch it either. I can hear you. I can hear most others. But not Alleluia
.”
“You have missed—an incredible performance.”
“That’s what he said, too.”
“That’s what—who said that?”
Jared saw Conran’s head whip around, although the other Jacobites did not seem to be paying attention. They had begun to move now, in careful, fractional gestures, and to speak in voices scarcely above a whisper. They appeared to be shaking themselves loose from near-fatal comas and describing their experiences in awestruck tones.
But Conran stepped a pace closer to Caley and repeated Jared’s question. “Who said that? Someone else has heard this recording?”
Caley nodded. She appeared surprised. “Oh, yes. About five years ago. It took him much longer to convince my grandmother to let him up to this room, though.”
Conran and Jared shared glances of alarm. “Who was he? What was his name?”
“I don’t remember his name,” she said. “He was an angel, though. Older. With—” She fluttered her fingers around her head. “Silver hair, kind of wild. And a silver beard. He had the most beautiful voice. I could hear every word he said.”
Jared felt his lips mouth the word but he could not say it aloud. Conran was staring at him, shaking his head very slightly. It was not possible. Was it possible? Had the Archangel been here five years ago, successfully solving the riddle the Jacobites had puzzled over for decades? Had he heard the oracle Alleluia proclaim that the god was a spaceship, swear it in a voice so calm and so convincing that no one could disbelieve it? Had he not believed her?
Had he believed her?
Was that why he had so venomously attacked the Jacobites? Had he, ruthlessly and with complete knowledge, set out to exterminate the reckless band of rebels who sought to shed a searing, terrible light on their entire world? Had he done it to save Samaria, to protect it from the confusion and turmoil that would overturn every law of their society once the truth was made public?
Or had he done it because he alone wanted the power that would come with knowledge? If there was no god, how could the god care who was Archangel? Why could Bael not remain Archangel for another year—another ten years—for the rest of his life? Who would stop him? Who would limit him? Who would challenge him?