Visitants-Stories of Fallen Angels and Heavenly Hosts

by Stephen Jones (ed)

  “All right. I had my story then and there. I had to write about angels as though I had spent my whole life conversing with them and knew them all by their first names. But I stockpile oddball reference books for just such moments, and among them was a copy of Gustav Davidson’s Dictionary of Angels. (Due credit is given in the story.) I began to leaf through it. Very quickly I read on past ‘Gabriel’ and ‘Michael’ and ‘Raphael’ into the more esoteric ones like ‘Israfel,’ who will blow the trumpet to get the Day of Judgment under way, and ‘Anaphaxeton,’ who will summon the entire universe before the court. Once I had found them, I knew that I had the dramatic situation around which to build my plot. The Day of Judgment! Of course, I saw right away that I’d have to invent a few angels of my own to make things work out, but that was no problem; inventing things like angels is what I’m paid to do, and I’m probably at least as good at it as some of the people who had invented the ones who fill the pages of Gustav Davidson’s immense dictionary.

  “What about the computer stuff, though? Me, with my manual typewriter? So I had a few conversations with that all-knowing computer expert Jerry Pournelle, and he not only explained the whole business to me but sent me a twenty-page letter, telling me what to look for when I went computer-shopping.

  “And so I wrote ‘Basileus.’

  “I managed the job in four or five days. In fact, it was the last work of fiction I would ever write on a typewriter. A few weeks later I was a full-fledged computer user at last, embroiled in the intricacies of my giant-lobster story, ‘Homefaring,’ and praying each hour that the damned machine would do what I wanted it to do.

  “You know to whom I was praying, of course. Israfel. Anaphaxeton. Basileus.”

  IN THE SHIMMERING lemon-yellow October light Cunningham touches the keys of his terminal and summons angels. An instant to load the program, an instant to bring the file up, and there they are, ready to spout from the screen at his command: Apollyon, Anauel, Uriel and all the rest. Uriel is the angel of thunder and terror; Apollyon is the Destroyer, the angel of the bottomless pit; Anauel is the angel of bankers and commission brokers. Cunningham is fascinated by the multifarious duties and tasks, both exalted and humble, that are assigned to the angels. “Every visible thing in the world is put under the charge of an angel,” said St. Augustine in The Eight Questions.

  Cunningham has 1,114 angels in his computer now. He adds a few more each night, though he knows that he has a long way to go before he has them all. In the fourteenth century the number of angels was reckoned by the Kabbalists, with some precision, at 301,655,722. Albertus Magnus had earlier calculated that each choir of angels held 6,666 legions, and each legion 6,666 angels; even without knowing the number of choirs, one can see that that produces rather a higher total. And in the Talmud, Rabbi Jochanan proposed that new angels are born “with every utterance that goes forth from the mouth of the Holy One, blessed be He.”

  If Rabbi Jochanan is correct, the number of angels is infinite. Cunningham’s personal computer, though it has extraordinary add-on memory capacity and is capable, if he chooses, of tapping into the huge mainframe machines of the Defense Department, has no very practical way of handling an infinity. But he is doing his best. To have 1,114 angels on-line already, after only eight months of part-time programming, is no small achievement.

  One of his favorites of the moment is Harahel, the angel of archives, libraries and rare cabinets. Cunningham has designated Harahel also the angel of computers: it seems appropriate. He invokes Harahel often, to discuss the evolving niceties of data processing with him. But he has many other favorites, and his tastes run somewhat to the sinister: Azrael, the angel of death, for example, and Arioch, the angel of vengeance, and Zebuleon, one of the nine angels who will govern at the end of the world. It is Cunningham’s job, from eight to four every working day, to devise programs for the interception of incoming Soviet nuclear warheads, and that, perhaps, has inclined him towards the more apocalyptic members of the angelic host.

  He invokes Harahel now. He has bad news for him. The invocation that he uses is a standard one that he found in Arthur Edward Waite’s The Lemegeton, or The Lesser Key of Solomon, and he has dedicated one of his function keys to its text, so that a single keystroke suffices to load it. “I do invocate, conjure and command thee, O thou Spirit N, to appear and to show thyself visibly unto me before this Circle in fair and comely shape,” is the way it begins, and it proceeds to utilize various secret and potent names of God in the summoning of Spirit N—such names as Zabaoth and Elion and of course Adonai—and it concludes, “I do potently exorcise thee that thou appearest here to fulfil my will in all things which seem good unto me. Wherefore, come thou, visibly, peaceably and affably, now, without delay, to manifest that which I desire, speaking with a clear and perfect voice, intelligibly, and to mine understanding.” All that takes but a microsecond, and another moment to enter in the name of Harahel as Spirit N, and there the angel is on the screen.

  “I am here at your summons,” he announces.

  Cunningham works with his angels from five to seven every evening. Then he has dinner. He lives alone, in a neat little flat a few blocks west of the Bayshore Freeway, and does not spend much of his time socializing. He thinks of himself as a pleasant man, a sociable man, and he may very well be right about that; but the pattern of his life has been a solitary one. He is thirty-seven years old, five feet eleven, with red hair, pale blue eyes, and a light dusting of freckles on his cheeks. He did his undergraduate work at Cal Tech, his postgraduate studies at Stanford, and for the last nine years he has been involved in ultra-sensitive military-computer projects in Northern California. He has never married. Sometimes he works with his angels again after dinner, from eight to ten, but hardly ever any later than that. At ten he always goes to bed. He is a very methodical person.

  He has given Harahel the physical form of his own first computer, a little Radio Shack TRS-80, with wings flanking the screen. He had thought originally to make the appearance of his angels more abstract—showing Harahel as a sheaf of kilobytes, for example—but like many of Cunningham’s best and most austere ideas it had turned out impractical in the execution, since abstract concepts did not translate well into graphics for him. “I want to notify you,” Cunningham says, “of a shift in jurisdiction.” He speaks English with his angels. He has it on good, though apocryphal, authority that the primary language of the angels is Hebrew, but his computer’s audio algorithms have no Hebrew capacity, nor does Cunningham. But they speak English readily enough with him: they have no choice. “From now on,” Cunningham tells Harahel, “your domain is limited to hardware only.”

  Angry green lines rapidly cross and recross Harahel’s screen. “By whose authority do you—”

  “It isn’t a question of authority,” Cunningham replies smoothly. “It’s a question of precision. I’ve just read Vretil into the database, and I have to code his functions. He’s the recording angel, after all. So to some degree he overlaps your territory.”

  “Ah,” says Harahel, sounding melancholy. “I was hoping you wouldn’t bother about him.”

  “How can I overlook such an important angel? ‘Scribe of the knowledge of the Most High,’ according to the Book of Enoch. ‘Keeper of the heavenly books and records,’ ‘Quicker in wisdom than the other archangels.’”

  “If he’s so quick,” says Harahel sullenly, “give him the hardware. That’s what governs the response time, you know.”

  “I understand. But he maintains the lists. That’s database.”

  “And where does the database live? The hardware!”

  “Listen, this isn’t easy for me,” Cunningham says. “But I have to be fair. I know you’ll agree that some division of responsibilities is in order. And I’m giving him all databases and related software. You keep the rest.”

  “Screens. Terminals. CPUs. Big deal.”

  “But without you, he’s nothing, Harahel. Anyway, you’ve always been in charge of cabinets,
haven’t you?”

  “And archives and libraries,” the angel says. “Don’t forget that.”

  “I’m not. But what’s a library? Is it the books and shelves and stacks, or the words on the pages? We have to distinguish the container from the thing contained.”

  “A grammarian,” Harahel sighs. “A hair-splitter. A casuist.”

  “Look, Vretil wants the hardware, too. But he’s willing to compromise. Are you?”

  “You start to sound less and less like our programmer and more and more like the Almighty every day,” says Harahel.

  “Don’t blaspheme,” Cunningham tells him. “Please. Is it agreed? Hardware only?”

  “You win,” says the angel. “But you always do, naturally.”

  Naturally. Cunningham is the one with his hands on the keyboard, controlling things. The angels, though they are eloquent enough and have distinct and passionate personalities, are mere magnetic impulses deep within. In any contest with Cunningham they don’t stand a chance. Cunningham, though he tries always to play the game by the rules, knows that, and so do they.

  It makes him uncomfortable to think about it, but the role he plays is definitely god-like in all essential ways. He puts the angels into the computer; he gives them their tasks, their personalities and their physical appearances; he summons them or leaves them uncalled, as he wishes.

  A god-like role, yes. But Cunningham resists confronting that notion. He does not believe he is trying to be God; he does not even want to think about God. His family had been on comfortable terms with God—Uncle Tim was a priest, there was an archbishop somewhere back a few generations, his parents and sisters moved cozily within the divine presence as within a warm bath—but he himself, unable to quantify the Godhead, preferred to sidestep any thought of it. There were other, more immediate matters to engage his concern. His mother had wanted him to go into the priesthood, of all things, but Cunningham had averted that by demonstrating so visible and virtuosic a skill at mathematics that even she could see he was destined for science. Then she had prayed for a Nobel Prize in physics for him; but he had preferred computer technology. “Well,” she said, “a Nobel in computers. I ask the Virgin daily.”

  “There’s no Nobel in computers, Mom,” he told her. But he suspects she still offers novenas for it.

  The angel project had begun as a lark, but had escalated swiftly into an obsession. He was reading Gustav Davidson’s old Dictionary of Angels, and when he came upon the description of the angel Adramelech, who had rebelled with Satan and had been cast from Heaven, Cunningham thought it might be amusing to build his computer simulation and talk with it. Davidson said that Adramelech was sometimes shown as a winged and bearded lion, and sometimes as a mule with feathers, and sometimes as a peacock, and that one poet had described him as “the enemy of God, greater in malice, guile, ambition and mischief than Satan, a fiend more curst, a deeper hypocrite.” That was appealing. Well, why not build him? The graphics were easy—Cunningham chose the winged-lion form—but getting the personality constructed involved a month of intense labor and some consultations with the artificial-intelligence people over at Kestrel Institute. But finally Adramelech was on line, suave and diabolical, talking amiably of his days as an Assyrian god and his conversations with Beelzebub, who had named him Chancellor of the Order of the Fly (Grand Cross).

  Next, Cunningham did Asmodeus, another fallen angel, said to be the inventor of dancing, gambling, music, drama, French fashions and other frivolities. Cunningham made him look like a very dashing Beverly Hills Iranian, with a pair of tiny wings at his collar. It was Asmodeus who suggested that Cunningham continue the project; so he brought Gabriel and Raphael on line to provide some balance between good and evil, and then Forcas, the angel who renders people invisible, restores lost property and teaches logic and rhetoric in Hell; and by that time Cunningham was hooked.

  He surrounded himself with arcane lore: M.R. James’ editions of the Apocrypha, Waite’s Book of Ceremonial Magic and Holy Kabbalah, the Mystical Theology and Celestial Hierarchies of Dionysius the Areopagite, and dozens of related works that he called up from the Stanford database in a kind of manic fervor. As he codified his systems, he became able to put in five, eight, a dozen angels a night; one June evening, staying up well past his usual time, he managed thirty-seven. As the population grew, it took on weight and substance, for one angel cross-filed another, and they behaved now as though they held long conversations with one another even when Cunningham was occupied elsewhere.

  The question of actual belief in angels, like that of belief in God Himself, never arose in him. His project was purely a technical challenge, not a theological exploration. Once, at lunch, he told a co-worker what he was doing, and got a chilly blank stare. “Angels? Angels? Flying around with big flapping wings, passing miracles? You aren’t seriously telling me that you believe in angels, are you, Dan?”

  To which Cunningham replied, “You don’t have to believe in angels to make use of them. I’m not always sure I believe in electrons and protons. I know I’ve never seen any. But I make use of them.”

  “And what use do you make of angels?”

  But Cunningham had lost interest in the discussion.

  He divides his evenings between calling up his angels for conversations and programming additional ones into his pantheon. That requires continuous intensive research, for the literature of angels is extraordinarily large, and he is thorough in everything he does. The research is time-consuming, for he wants his angels to meet every scholarly test of authenticity. He pores constantly over such works as Ginzberg’s seven-volume Legends of the Jews, Clement of Alexandria’s Prophetic Eclogues, Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine.

  It is the early part of the evening. He brings up Hagith, ruler of the planet Venus and commander of 4,000 legions of spirits, and asks him details of the transmutation of metals, which is Hagith’s speciality. He summons Hadraniel, who in Kabbalistic lore is a porter at the second gate of Heaven, and whose voice, when he proclaims the will of the Lord, penetrates through 200,000 universes; he questions the angel about his meeting with Moses, who uttered the Supreme Name at him and made him tremble. And then Cunningham sends for Israfel the four-winged, whose feet are under the seventh earth, and whose head reaches to the pillars of the divine throne. It will be Israfel’s task to blow the trumpet that announces the arrival of the Day of Judgment. Cunningham asks him to take a few trial riffs now—“just for practice,” he says, but Israfel declines, saying he cannot touch his instrument until he receives the signal, and the command sequence for that, says the angel, is nowhere to be found in the software Cunningham has thus far constructed.

  When he wearies of talking with the angels, Cunningham begins the evening’s programming. By now the algorithms are second nature and he can enter angels into the computer in a matter of minutes, once he has done the research. This evening he inserts nine more. Then he opens a beer, sits back, lets the day wind to its close.

  He thinks he understands why he has become so intensely involved with this enterprise. It is because he must contend each day in his daily work with matters of terrifying apocalyptic import: nothing less, indeed, than the impending destruction of the world. Cunningham works routinely with megadeath simulation. For six hours a day he sets up hypothetical situations in which Country A goes into alert mode, expecting an attack from Country B, which thereupon begins to suspect a pre-emptive strike and commences a defensive response, which leads Country A to escalate its own readiness, and so on until the bombs are in the air. He is aware, as are many thoughtful people both in Country A and Country B, that the possibility of computer-generated misinformation leading to a nuclear holocaust increases each year, as the time-window for correcting a malfunction diminishes. Cunningham also knows something that very few others do, or perhaps no one else at all: that it is now possible to send a signal to the giant computers—to Theirs or Ours, it makes no difference—that will be indistinguishable from the impulses that an a
ctual flight of airborne warhead-bearing missiles would generate. If such a signal is permitted to enter the system, a minimum of eleven minutes, at the present time, will be needed to carry out fail-safe determination of its authenticity. That, at the present time, is too long to wait to decide whether the incoming missiles are real: a much swifter response is required.

  Cunningham, when he designed his missile-simulating signal, thought at once of erasing his work. But he could not bring himself to do that: the program was too elegant, too perfect. On the other hand, he was afraid to tell anyone about it, for fear that it would be taken beyond his level of classification at once, and sealed away from him. He does not want that, for he dreams of finding an antidote for it, some sort of resonating inquiry mode that will distinguish all true alarms from false. When he has it, if he ever does, he will present both modes, in a single package, to Defense. Meanwhile he bears the burden of suppressing a concept of overwhelming strategic importance. He has never done anything like that before. And he does not delude himself into thinking his mind is unique: if he could devise something like this, someone else probably could do it also, perhaps someone on the other side. True, it is a useless, suicidal program. But it would not be the first suicidal program to be devised in the interests of military security.