Jovah's Angel

by Sharon Shinn

  “It can—think—and make decisions—and learn?”

  “No. It must be given instructions and directions in a manner that conform to its programming. Some rote, unchanging tasks it can perform on its own, according to existing programming, but it cannot, on its own, decide to interfere in weather patterns or release antibiotic doses or dispense grain seed.”

  “Or send down thunderbolts to smite mountains—unless it is directed to do so,” Caleb suggested.

  “Precisely.”

  Alleya took hold of Caleb by his forearms and shook him; but her grip was weak and her hands were trembling. “What you are saying—what you are suggesting—is that this, this spaceship is performing all the functions of the god… .”

  His expression was compassionate. He pulled his arms free and took her in a gentle embrace. “That’s what I’m saying. That’s what I believe to be true. The settlers traveled to Samaria on this very ship, and left it in orbit above us, and gave angels and oracles the ability to communicate with it, and gave it the ability to respond. And over the years, we, forgetting our technological roots—”

  She jerked back from him and stamped her foot. “No! That cannot be true! The god is not some—some machine left behind by Hagar and Uriel and the others. Not some mindless, soulless piece of equipment that floats in space and waits for some kind of—signal—to begin working. The god is—the god is the god. He is all-powerful. He knows everything. He loves everyone. He is real.”

  “This spaceship is real, Alleya,” Caleb said soberly. “You will never find anything more real. Look around you! This is science beyond anything we could have dreamed of, but you will admit it reminds you of technology you have seen before. It is technology our race had once, and deliberately lost, and now stands in need of again. This ship is skilled enough to travel more miles than we can count—powerful enough to scatter storms and strike down mountains. You want a god? The machine is the god, and more believable and less capricious than any deity I could imagine. You have always wanted to be close to your god. Well, you are looking straight into his lighted, unwavering eyes.”

  “No,” she said, and her voice was almost too soft to be heard. “No. I cannot believe in a god who was created by men—built by men to serve them, not to oversee them. Where is the challenge to the spirit in that? Who is to ensure that we live wisely, that we treat others fairly, that we perform our obligations and avoid temptations? If there is no one to punish us for wrongdoing, what is to prevent us from doing evil? What is to keep us honest and good? Who is to guard our souls, and gather us into his arms when we die? A machine? A machine built by men? How can this be the thing we have called a god for so many centuries?”

  “It does not matter what we have believed,” Caleb said. “What matters is the truth. And the truth is, we have been watched and defended and punished by a machine called Jehovah. And the further truth is that this machine has somehow broken. And the final truth is that we were brought to this machine to fix it. And may Jehovah correct me if I am wrong.”

  “No,” said Jehovah. “You are not wrong. I am in need of repair to my ancillary audio-coordinator. It is what enables me to pick up transmissions from the external satellites, but the circuitry became overburdened and has almost completely shut down.”

  “You haven’t been able to hear us,” Caleb clarified.

  “That is correct.”

  “I am not proficient in settler technology,” Caleb added. “Is this something I will be able to repair?”

  “Easily enough, if you follow my instructions. But the operation requires fingers, hands and a new circuit board, which I cannot insert on my own.”

  “But there is a new circuit board?”

  “There are dozens.”

  “Then direct me there.” He stepped forward, and turned back to the Archangel. “Alleya? Would you like to come with me and watch?”

  She shook her head. She had never felt so miserable and abandoned in her life, not when the storm flung her carelessly to the ground, not when her mother left her at Mount Sinai to learn the ways of the angels. She could not stand by and watch the guts of the god undergo profane surgery.

  “No,” she said. “I will wait for you here.”

  Caleb was gone for more than two hours. Alleya spent that whole time sitting motionlessly in one of the cushioned chairs set up in front of each of the lighted panels. Although the room was nearly silent, she could sometimes faintly catch the echoes of Caleb’s conversation with the ship’s computer, two or three rooms away. And the occasional beep and gurgle of machinery in this room now and then caught her random attention. But mostly she sat there, still and patient, deafened by the tumultuous storm raging inside her head.

  Jovah was a machine. Jovah was an electronic brain. Jovah was a starship named Jehovah that had traveled incalculable miles, carrying the original settlers in its chambers. She had not strayed from this small space, but she realized the ship must be unbelievably vast, the size of the Eyrie, perhaps, or one of the Manadavvi mansions, to shelter so many people for what must have been a journey of dozens of years. The existence of the spaceship, the mechanics of the trip—that she could understand, that she could accept. Jovah had carried them from another planet to this one, and he must have had some vessel with which to do so, and she was willing to accept this spaceship for the metaphor of his hands.

  But she was not willing to accept a computer for her god. Who had listened to her all those years, as she sang prayers of supplication and thanksgiving? Who had heard her voice above all other voices, given her faith in herself, faith in her god? There had been—something—some sentient presence receiving her words and responding to them. She believed that. She had felt that presence at the core of her heart as she had felt Caleb’s pulse beating against her own when he held her in his arms.

  She might have touched the face of Jovah, but she had not yet touched the face of her god.

  When Caleb returned, he was as excited as a boy.

  “You should see this place!” he exclaimed. “It’s huge! Like a small city, but laid out with such efficiency—the air ducts, the power outlets, the plumbing—And it all recycles. Nothing is wasted. You’d never run out of water or air or food—”

  She managed to smile up at him, though it took an effort. “You’ve been on a tour of the ship, then, I take it?”

  “Yes, the whole thing, or at least the living quarters. And, Alleya, you wouldn’t believe it! There are these entire farms of grain—wheat and soy and corn and a few I didn’t recognize—and there are these automatic harvesting arms, and bins for drying the grain, and silos for storing them, and hatches for ejecting them onto Samaria when we ask for them! I didn’t get a chance to inspect the—he called them heat guns, I wasn’t quite sure how they operated—anyway, they’re on the outside of the ship, so I couldn’t get to them. I’m sure they’re awesome.”

  “And what else did you learn?”

  “Well, he offered me a—text of some sort, a printout, he called it—of some of his engineering specifications, but then he said it was in the old language, which I don’t know, so I didn’t think it would benefit me much. And then I asked him how he was able to talk to us in our language if he was only programmed with the settlers’ original language, and he tried to explain it—something about predictable phonetic shift and the universal evolution of language, but I didn’t understand it.”

  “Well, he has been communicating with the oracles for all these years. Maybe he’s followed the language shifts through them.”

  “Maybe. And then I asked him about some of the old technology that I’ve seen on Samaria, and I told him about your failed music machines, and he directed me to some kind of storeroom where I found—these.” Caleb held out a small box holding maybe seventy little metal cylinders which he was regarding as if they were made of stamped gold. Alleya glanced from his hand to his face. She was so tired; it was an effort to think, an effort to group her thoughts into coherent speech.

 
; “And what are those?” she asked at last.

  “He called them batteries. Well, he called them something else first, then said I may as well just refer to them as batteries, although they were far more complex.”

  “And what’s a battery?”

  “As far as I can tell, stored energy which can be used to power something that doesn’t have an outside electrical or steam-driven source.”

  “Ah.”

  “Something like this is what ran your music equipment, till the energy was all drained. I got enough to replace the batteries in all of the machines, at the Eyrie and Monteverde. And I picked up a few extras.”

  “Why? What else can they be used for?”

  He was again studying his booty as if he’d discovered the last key to the mysteries of the universe. “I can think of lots of things,” he said to himself. “Lots of potential things. We’ll have to go back and try them out.”

  Alleya came to her feet. “I’m ready.”

  “Don’t you want to look around a little?”

  She shook her head. “I have had enough of miracles for one day. I don’t think I can absorb any more.”

  He laughed ruefully. “I don’t think I could ever be here long enough. But maybe if I come back—”

  “No!” she said fiercely. He narrowed his eyes at her, for the first time since his return seeming to focus on her completely.

  “You don’t want me to return here?”

  “Take what you need now,” she said. “If you need more time, then we’ll wait. But we are not coming back here.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we are not meant to be here. Because the settlers deliberately hid from their children and their children’s children the knowledge of this ship’s existence. Because we were placed on Samaria to found a society untainted by the corruption of technology, to see if men could live in harmony with men. You know the stories as well as I do, Caleb. The Christers came here from a planet that exploded from internal war shortly after they were able to escape it. They believed that science leads to self-destruction and they wanted Samaria free of that fear. They wanted us to evolve differently than their ancestors had.”

  “But that’s ridiculous! Technology in and of itself is not evil! Technology leads to music machines and electrical light and vehicles that can travel faster than a horse—”

  “And to factories which rearrange the whole manufacturing structure of the country and affect the entire population alignment—”

  “All right, progress breeds change, but change is so often for the better. Are you telling me that, right now, you would go to Breven and tear down the factories—you would go to Semorrah and Luminaux, and disconnect the power cords that give the cities their lights? You would halt technological advances—you would refuse to grow?”

  “No. I am saying that if we must have technology, we will discover our own. Perhaps the discoveries we make will be different than the discoveries made on Eleison. Perhaps we will not invent the same weapons of destruction, and so we will not be at risk. Perhaps everything we create will be like electricity and your friend Noah’s machine. But to ensure that, we cannot go back to the technology of our ancestors. We cannot, you and I, come to this ship for secrets. We must discover our own way. Write our own future, not steal from an unsavory past. Don’t you agree with me? Don’t you understand?”

  “I understand,” he said slowly. “But I don’t know that I agree. There is so much we don’t know—so much that this ship could tell us. We could circumvent decades of experimentation and failure with five minutes of examining the spaceship’s circuitry—”

  “You’ve had your five minutes,” she said calmly. “You are decades ahead of Noah and the other engineers on Samaria. You know what is possible. It is up to you to discover how to make it work.”

  “You’re serious,” he said. “You will never let me return to this ship.”

  “Not only that,” she said, “I want you to promise me—swear to me—that you will never mention to another living soul what you have seen here and what you have done.”

  “Why? If others know what I know—”

  “You may not believe in Jovah, in the existence of a god, but how many others do you know on Samaria who are doubters? Can you name me five? Can you name me one?”

  He appeared to think about it. She imagined he must be reviewing his Edori friends, his family members, maybe his fellow engineers. “I can name you one besides myself,” he said finally, “and even he believes there is a god. He is just not sure how much power the god can wield.”

  Alleya stepped toward him, as if she could, from a closer range, make her words more surely penetrate his brain. “What would happen to them, do you think, if you told them that their god was really a machine? Would they believe you? Would they stone you for a heretic? Would they curse themselves and their ignorance and the priests and the oracles who had lied to them? Would they still trust the angels to pray for rain and seed and medicine? If they turned against the angels, who would intercede for them with Jovah—for, god or machine, Jehovah the spaceship still hears the songs of the angels, does he not, or will now that you have repaired him? If people are told their god is a machine, how will they go on with their lives? The myth of Jovah is too strong in our society. He binds us all together.

  “If we do not come together for the annual Gloria, all peoples singing in harmony, will harmony cease to exist on Samaria? Will Jansai turn against Manadavvi, will farmers turn against the merchantmen? If we do not have a god, no matter how false, to keep us all in order, will we then fall into chaos? Caleb Augustus, think very hard about what it would mean to tell this world that there is no god. Are you willing to be the man who destroys Jovah?”

  He had bowed his head as she spoke and appeared to be listening intently, half in protest, half in agreement. When she finished, he raised his eyes to her, and his face was very sober. “The time will come,” he said, “when others will discover what Jovah really is. Even now, I know men who are experimenting with disks of glass that enable them to see farther distances than the human eye can manage. It is inevitable that they will train these instruments on the sky—that they will begin to see the stars more closely, or catch a glimpse of Jovah as he circles overhead.

  “And there are those besides Noah who are building traveling vehicles—and those besides me who are attempting to discover how to fly. Sooner or later, centuries from now, maybe, they will learn how to build spaceships and they will encounter Jovah, or extrapolate from what they’ve learned that a thing such as this ship must exist. Sooner or later, this great secret will be a secret no more. And then how will your society recover?”

  “By then, it will be a different society, and people will be used to marvels. By then, they will not be afraid of flying machines, and they will know how to make their own—batteries. By then, the world will run more on electricity than faith. Science will replace mysticism, but gradually. We would be fools to force it. And we would be wrong.”

  He was not entirely convinced; she could tell that by the set, stubborn look on his face. On the other hand, he was still listening. “Perhaps you are right,” he said slowly. “Perhaps the world is not ready for the bright knowledge we have uncovered. But what would have happened to us, to all of Samaria, if you and I had not stumbled upon the truth of this ship—if we had not teleported here, and repaired the circuits, and made it possible for Jovah to hear the angels again? We would have been lost to flood and disease—we would have been destroyed when the Gloria came round, for even ten thousand voices raised in harmony would not have reached the god’s ear. He would have thought we did not sing to him, and he would have released the thunderbolts that would have demolished the world.”

  “Jovah, is that true?” Alleya asked, for she had feared it long enough.

  “It is true,” the voice confirmed.

  “So you see,” Caleb said, his voice gathering energy, “the risks are just as great if no one knows the truth. As lo
ng as Jovah guards us, someone must know who Jovah is, and guard him as well.”

  Alleya nodded. “You’re right. And I believe that, until now, one of the oracles has always known who Jovah is and how to reach him. My guess is that the oracle Rebekah was the one with the knowledge in this generation, but she died before it could be passed on.”

  “So you will now tell one of the other oracles? You will share this incredible information with Job, or Mary, someone who will be shocked to his soul, but you won’t allow me to tell Noah or another engineer?”

  “One of the oracles must know,” Alleya said. “I will decide who.”

  “That’s a grave decision for one person to make.”

  “That is why Jovah chose me as Archangel,” she replied calmly. “To make such decisions.”

  Caleb spread his hands and turned away, defeated. “I cannot spread this news without your consent,” he said at last. “At the very least, I need your corroboration, because no one would believe me. Once I leave this ship, I may start to doubt it myself.”

  “Then are we ready to go?”

  Caleb looked around one last time, as if memorizing the placement of equipment and the pattern of lights. He sighed. “No,” he said. “I will never be ready to leave. But let us go now, anyway.”

  “Jovah, how do we return to Sinai?” Alleya asked.

  “Stand where you are, in the center of the room. When you are ready, merely say, ‘Teleport now.”’

  Alleya raised her eyebrows at Caleb; a question. He sighed again, nodded, and took her hand. “Teleport now,” she said.

  It was less frightening the second time but no less strange. She felt again that instantaneous, complete dissolution of her muscles and bones, the disconnection of skin to tissue, the unhooking of cell from cell. She felt her skull melt and her bones disintegrate and every part of her body vaporize, but still her fingers were caught fast in Caleb’s hand. And when, seconds later, her body re-formed in the pentagram carved in the stone floor of Mount Sinai, her hand was still locked in Caleb’s, and she believed he had never once relaxed his grip.