The Alleluia Files (11 page)

“No, but he will,” Jecoliah said calmly. “He always does. And we ask him who will be angelica or angelico to the Archangel. And we report to him events that transpire so that he can interpret them for us—perhaps not for this generation, but for
the next one and the one that follows. We tell the god the details of Samaria, and he tells us how to live.”

It sounded complex and mysterious to Lucinda, and she decided not to pursue it further. “Did you know my mother as well as my father?” she asked.

Jecoliah shook her head. “Very little. Only well enough to see what everyone saw, that she was passionate and hard to hold. And to be angry that her life ended as wretchedly as it did.”

“Old tales. Old wounds,” Omar murmured, but there was a warning note in his voice. Lucinda looked directly at him.

“I know the story of how my mother lived and died,” she said. “Don’t be afraid of what she’ll tell me.”

He smiled at her with a certain rue, and she liked him better than she had for the last twenty minutes. “Any tale of pain and betrayal stirs the emotions when it’s told, whether for the first time or the hundredth,” he said. “I’ve no doubt you’ll hear it more than once during your sojourn in Samaria. Just remember that it was long ago, and no one suffers anymore, and nothing you feel can change it.”

“And you remember that I am not a child,” she said softly.

He nodded. “Then we will deal well enough together.”

Lucinda stayed another ten minutes talking to the oracle and the Archangel’s son, but that last exchange with Omar lingered in her mind more than the rest of the conversation. She felt uncharacteristically broody as she left the table and continued wandering through the fairgrounds, or maybe it was just that she was getting tired. The week had been a long one, after all, and this day had started before dawn and been packed with events. So she was actually relieved when she spotted Gretchen’s thin, tall form moving stiffly through the crowds, obviously on the lookout for someone, most likely herself. And she was more surprised than excited to learn that she and her aunt had been invited to spend a few days at the angel hold in Jordana, and that Gretchen had accepted.

The trip to Cedar Hills took three days, though Lucinda and any of the other angels could have completed it in less than half that time. But they moderated their pace to accommodate the caravan that traveled below them on the paved highways of Samaria.

When Lucinda learned how her aunt and the other mortals from Cedar Hills were to be transported, she almost decided to
ride with them. She had never seen anything like the huge, rumbling vehicles with their great exposed engines and long hollow bodies designed to carry human cargo over great distances. These particular vehicles, so the angel Jonas informed her as they waited for the journey to begin, were luxury accommodations. They were specially fitted on the interior with padded seats and comfortable footrests and both heating and cooling systems to keep the air temperature bearable.

“And this is the
only
way to travel, if you’re not going to fly,” he said. “The Jansai transport trucks—Jovah save me. They’re open-air vehicles, nothing to shield passengers from the wind or the sun or the rain, and they’re noisier than the river falling over the Gabriel Dam. They’ll take you over the ground three times faster than you could go on horseback, but it’s a miserable way to achieve speed.”

“And those are your only choices? The Jansai trucks and these?”

Jonas bobbed his head from side to side in an equivocating way. He was a good-looking, friendly young angel whom she knew from his past visits to Angel Rock (when she was flirting with him), and he seemed willing to tell her every bit of information she didn’t know.

“Well, there are the public buses, and they fall somewhere in between in terms of comfort. But they take days and days and
days
to cross a hundred miles, because they stop at every little town along the way. Now, a few Luminaux engineers have been working on designs for smaller vehicles—cars that might carry only three or four passengers at a time—but the concept has been pretty much derided as inefficient. And Bael has not been a friend to locomotive advances. He has resisted funding any new scientific projects, and he discourages the universities from developing much new technology. So nobody’s done much toward modifying passenger vehicles. But maybe next year, or the next year, with a new Archangel in place—”

She’d already heard that phrase more times than she could count.
When the new Archangel is installed … When Bael’s replacement is found
… Since no one knew who the new Archangel would be, everyone was free to indulge in the most optimistic hopes about what that person would accomplish.

“So, you think the new Archangel will be more of a friend to technology?”

“Depends on who’s chosen. For myself, I don’t care much, but there are a lot of people who do. There are many who’d like to see the Augustine University back in Samaria—or who’d like a chance to see what the Augustine researchers have come up with lately.”

“What’s the Augustine University?”

“Well, it used to be the most advanced scientific research institute and teaching facility on the continent. Based right at the foot of Mount Sinai. Started by a man called Caleb Augustus and an Edori named Daniel sia Calasinsa. It flourished during Delilah’s day, and for twenty or thirty years after that. Credit them with virtually all the electronic amenities we have today. But, like Bael, Archangel Joel was no fan of technology, and he tried more than once to shut the school down. Eventually, the professors just moved the whole place to Ysral. Where only the Edori are benefiting from the new marvels of science.”

“So they’re the ones who built these trucks and buses?”

“The prototypes. The early models.”

“And what is it that Bael has against science?”

Jonas smiled. “You must know your history better than that.”

“Samaria was founded by settlers escaping a brutal war on a planet far from here,” she recited in a childlike singsong. “Technological advances had brought this world to the brink of destruction with weapons so powerful they could not be withstood. Our forefathers prayed to Jovah, and he took them in his hands and carried them to Samaria, where he instructed them to live in harmony all their lives.”

“Very good!” he applauded. “So Bael’s fear, theoretically, is that if we encourage any scientific advancement, we will eventually build whatever weapons these other ancestors discovered, and destroy ourselves and the whole planet. He’s not the only Archangel to have felt that way, of course. That’s why we as a society have not crept very far down the road of progress in the last hundred years.”

“Maybe it’s a slow road.”

“Maybe we have no incentives to make it a faster one.”

They might have continued debating for the next half hour, but at that point the rumble of the big engines grew to a deafening level and the big buses shuddered to life. Around them, the air was suddenly patterned with a massive interleaving of angel wings as the contingent from Cedar Hills took flight. Jonas
and Lucinda flung themselves aloft and began the long journey southward.

Lucinda loved to fly. It was something of a guilty pleasure, because Gretchen hated to see her take wing, constantly fearing that she would meet with an errant breeze and go cartwheeling down into the beautiful, treacherous acres of the sea. Early on, she had promised her aunt that she would never fly so far away that she couldn’t see the green–and–tan contours of Angel Rock—which had severely limited the scope of her travels. The idea of flying for hundreds of miles, without pausing, without circling back, made her giddy with anticipation.

She drove her wings down sharply, repeatedly, gaining altitude as fast as she could, till she was far above the ground, the trucks, the other angels. She saw Jonas glance up at her and rise a few yards, but nowhere near her level. A few of the other angels also turned their faces up to her, calculating her speed and her distance. They seemed to be smiling.

This high up, the air was frigid and full of devious, sometimes dangerous currents. The cold did not bother her; like all angels, her body was built to withstand the icy temperatures at high altitudes, and indeed, she was often uncomfortable in a warm room. As for the malice of the wind, well, that was an adversary she had faced time without number; she had had no other real opponent in the past twenty-eight years, and so she had sharpened all her skills on it.

Now came a sudden uprush of air, swift and powerful; she pulled her wings closer to her body and let herself glide on its back. It stopped abruptly and she fell, loving the breathtaking drop, the sensation of speed in the moments before she spread her wings again and eased herself from side to side to slow her descent. For a few minutes she coasted, then she arced upward again, higher than before. She flew forward as fast as she could for as long as she could stand the pace, outdistancing both the trucks on the ground and the angels in the air. Then, once more, she folded her wings to her sides and plummeted toward the earth in a dizzying, blinding drop. Unfurling her wings with a snap, she felt the shock of arrested motion along every nerve and bone in her body. She hovered for a moment in place, and laughed out loud.

A few minutes later Jonas caught up with her. Lucinda had
rarely had an opportunity to fly beside someone; she liked this camaraderie, and waved at him gaily.

“How far are we going today?” she called over to him. “Do you want to race me to the next resting point?”

“I don’t think so,” he called back. “I’ve come to tell you to display a little more decorum. You’re causing much concern behind you.”

She glanced back, but faces were invisible from here. “My aunt?”

“I would guess she’s already dead from fear. No, Mercy herself asked me to try and calm you down. This is not at all the kind of behavior we expected from the demure young girl from Angel Rock.”

Lucinda grinned. “There wasn’t much else to do for fun when I was growing up. Of course, I had to make sure I was somewhere Aunt Gretchen couldn’t see me. Don’t tell me you can’t take a dive like that.”

“Well, I can, but I don’t like to. The few times I’ve been accidentally cast down by the wind, I have merely prayed to come out alive.”

“You should try it when there’s nothing below you but ocean.”

“Thank you, I think not.”

She laughed at him, but she settled down. It surprised her to learn that the other angels were so much more sedate—she would have thought anyone with wings would have practiced the same acrobatics—but it was not in her to deliberately upset anyone who seemed to have her interests at heart. So she dropped to a lower altitude, slowed into a more regular pace, and in this unremarkable fashion covered the rest of the miles of the trip.

They spent two nights on the road in hotels only slightly grander than their own on Angel Rock. Gretchen noted this fact with some smugness; she prowled the corridors of each inn, jealously on the lookout for amenities she had not thought of or could not offer. The two of them shared a room both nights, and Gretchen talked more than usual, almost exclusively of the personalities they had encountered, both at the Gloria and on this trip. She mentioned names of people Lucinda could not remember and did not think she’d met. It seemed to her Gretchen was reminding herself of the life she had once lived,
briefly and completely immersing herself in it one more time, either to regret it forever once she left or to reassure herself that she was better off now. It was hard for Lucinda to tell. In any case, she wasn’t required to make many replies to Gretchen’s ruminations, and so she listened sleepily and drifted quietly into dreams.

On the third day, they arrived at Cedar Hills. The angel hold was an open, inviting place, a charming muddle of short buildings and tall ones, residences and shops, pathways and garden plots and sudden sprays of fountains. Angels and mortals mingled together on the streets and in the restaurants, and to Lucinda’s eye, at least, they all seemed happy and industrious.

Mercy showed Lucinda and Gretchen to their quarters, a suite of rooms in a long, low building that seemed to be some kind of dormitory. “This is where most of the unattached angels sleep,” Mercy told them. “We have other quarters for the residents with families, but this is generally quieter, since there aren’t children screaming up and down the hallways. My rooms are in that red building—over there—and most of the grand functions are held in that big white building we saw as we came in.”

“This is lovely,” Lucinda said, looking out the window at the open square. In the fresh spring sunlight, everything appeared newly washed and cheerful.

Mercy smiled at her. “You like it? I confess to a certain partiality myself. I was brought up at the Eyrie, of course, and it has a majesty that Cedar Hills doesn’t possess—but that was the point of Cedar Hills. When they built it, they wanted it to be accessible to everyone, a place no one would hesitate to come with a grievance or a problem. It’s much newer than the Eyrie and Monteverde, of course, since it was built—oh, in Gabriel’s time. Two hundred and fifty years ago. So it hasn’t seen quite the wear and tear of the other holds!”

Gretchen was looking about her with a face so full of emotions it was hard to sort them out. Unlike Mercy, Gretchen had been raised at Cedar Hills and, until she took her niece away twenty-five years ago, had rarely left it. Lucinda watched her, wondering what she was thinking. Was she glad to be back or sorry? She had abandoned so much and missed so much and could never recapture any of those lost years. For almost the first time in her life, Lucinda wondered what passion had driven
Gretchen to leave a home she loved, carrying a small child in her arms, and retreat to the most isolated spot in their entire world. The question made her feel a little cold, despite the sunlight. She put her hand lightly on her aunt’s arm.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s unpack our stuff and then get some lunch. You can show me everything.”

“What I remember,” Gretchen said, but she allowed herself to be turned toward the closets. Mercy watched them a moment, a thoughtful expression on her face, before she turned and left them alone in the room.