The Alleluia Files (48 page)

But Reuben was still at her side. He motioned to one of the
young Edori boys who had crept close enough to touch Luanda’s wing. She flicked it nervously from his curious fingers. “Go tell Conran I’m here,” he said. “Tell him I’ve brought a friend who needs shelter. Tell him she is to be trusted.”

The boy nodded and darted off. Lucinda managed to slant a smile at her escort. “I didn’t know you were well enough acquainted with the Jacobites to call them by name and have them trust you,” she said.

He grinned back. He seemed completely at ease, not worried in the slightest that he and his companion might be repulsed. “Didn’t you say your aunt wanted you to seek out Conran?” he answered.

“Yes, but you spoke just now as if you know him.”

“Everyone knows Conran. He’s that kind of man.”

“I’m afraid,” she said suddenly.

Reuben reached out and took her hand in a warm, unbelievably comforting clasp. “If they won’t take you in, we’ll put you with the Edori,” he said. “My family’s tribe is traveling just now, but they’d gladly take you in. Neither Bael nor Omar would be able to find you if you were with them.”

In a few minutes the little boy returned, scampering in front of a small delegation.
These must be the Jacobites
, Lucinda thought, for they certainly were not Edori. They did not have the Edori’s unvaried dark coloring and smiling faces; this group, three men and two women, were mostly fair and uniformly suspicious. The leader appeared to be a stocky older man with grizzled hair and a look of lively intelligence. At any rate, the others let him precede them, and the Edori fell back to admit him through their ranks. Lucinda could not help herself. She edged behind Reuben and peered out at the Jacobites from behind his shoulder.

“Well, Reuben, this had better be good,” the leader said, coming to a halt a few paces from the new arrivals. His voice was clear and ringing, but he did not sound angry. Astonished, maybe, but not at all unprepared. He seemed like the sort of man who was never caught unprepared. “Bringing an angel to Sahala is much like setting a hawk among the rabbits.”

“Ah, Conran, you were never a frightened rabbit running for your life,” Reuben drawled in his usual lilting tones, and Conran’s face relaxed slightly into a grin. “Besides, I have a message from a lady who advised me to bring this angel to your
very doorstep. And I’ve never yet known you to scoff at any news that came from a woman’s mouth.”

“A lady?” Conran repeated, but his whole face had sharpened into anticipation. He tried to peer at Lucinda’s face, but she drew farther back behind her human shield. “And where have you just sailed from, my friend?”

“You’ve heard of the place, I’m sure,” the Edori said.

“Angel Rock,” Conran said. “And this particular package came from a lady named Gretchen.”

“You’ve guessed it,” Reuben said. “So now will you be willing to take her in? For that’s the request I’ll be making.”

Conran reached out a hand to draw Reuben to one side. Reuben was tall and well muscled, but the Jacobite had considerable strength, for his push dislodged the Edori. “And you must be Lucinda,” Conran said as the angel came into view. “I have wanted to meet you for a long time. Twenty-eight years, to be exact.”

He was strange and intimidating, but he exuded a powerful charisma for all that. Still nervous, but much more hopeful, Lucinda extended her hand. The Jacobite took it in a crushing grip. He studied her face with an unnerving intentness that slowly gave way to a sort of incredulous wonder.

“Yes,” he said at last. “You look very like her. There would be no mistaking you.”

Lucinda remembered suddenly that this man had known Rinalda in her age of wild passion. “My mother?” she said shyly. “I look like my mother?”

For a split second she thought he looked surprised. Well, who else could he have thought she resembled? “Yes, that you do,” he said.

“Did you know her well?”

“I did. A long time ago. I had heard that she bore two daughters, and I am pleased to meet this one at last.”

Lucinda sighed, inexplicably saddened. “Yes, two daughters, but my twin sister died.”

“She did?” Conran asked sharply. “I did not know that.”

“Oh, yes. As an infant. The story is very tragic.”

“Ah.” Conran looked briefly hopeful, then his face clouded over again. “Yes, I suppose she is dead, at that. A tragedy, indeed. But to have saved one of Rinalda’s girls—that is a triumph
in any case. Have you come to join the Jacobites, young lady? Or why are you here?”

“She is here because her aunt fears for her safety,” Reuben interposed. “Gretchen is afraid that Lucinda has drawn the attention of Bael and his son Omar. She wanted Lucinda away from Angel Rock.”

“Well, she can stay here as long as she likes,” Conran said. “We are not likely to deny refuge to anyone hunted by the Archangel.”

“And I want you to tell me everything,” Lucinda said. “Everything you know about my mother. Everything you know about the Alleluia Files. I want to understand it all.”

“I will tell you,” he said. “And if you become a believer, like your mother, I will count myself a fortunate man.”

He turned away to shout to four others who had followed him, waving them forward to meet the angel. Reuben added in a voice only Lucinda could hear, “He is fortunate anyway, merely to have you near him. That much I could tell him for myself.”

But once she had settled in to Sahala—and once Reuben was gone—her life did not materially change. There was no mysterious initiation into the Jacobite fraternity. She felt no sudden access of belief, no zealous devotion to the cause. Conran explained what she did not already know about the Jacobites, and the information intrigued her, but did not wholly win her over.

The most interesting piece of news was what Conran considered verification. Jacob Fairman, according to Conran, had long believed
Jehovah
to be a spaceship, not a god, and he claimed that the oracle Deborah had once assured him he was correct.

Lucinda frowned at this revelation. “An
oracle
also knew that the god was really a spaceship? That seems very unlikely.”

“Jacob said that Deborah had been charged by Alleluia to guard this secret with her very life and not to impart it until she, too, was on her deathbed. Because it was imperative that someone know the truth about
Jehovah
, but that the knowledge was too inflammatory for the whole world to learn. So Alleluia told Deborah, and one presumes that Deborah told Jecoliah—although, if that were so, I would have expected Jecoliah to have spoken up before now. Although perhaps she does not see the
slaughter of a few hundred Jacobites as significant enough to break a silence of a hundred years.”

“Why was it imperative that someone know the truth? If Alleluia found the truth so shocking, why not let it die with her?”

“
Jehovah
is a man-made piece of equipment. I don’t know how much experience you have with technology, but it always breaks down. I will grant that
Jehovah
must be more sophisticated than the trucks and radio transmitters our engineers have cobbled together, but no doubt it, too, needs periodic maintenance. So someone needs to know what it is so that someone can make sure the machine gets fixed.”

Lucinda was still frowning. “If I was an oracle who had guarded such a secret for most of my life, I don’t know that I would be sharing that information with any wild-eyed radical who showed up at my door. And then watch him stir the whole country into bloody controversy and not say a word to anyone else.”

“As to why she would have told him—well, Jacob Fairman was a very persuasive man. If anyone could have charmed confidences from an old spinster, it would have been Jacob. If you were to meet him today, I venture to guess you would be telling him your most cherished secrets within ten minutes. It was the effect he had. As to why she told no one else—she died shortly after this conversation took place. She was not in a position to tell anyone anything.”

“What made him think to ask her in the first place? Why did he even begin to wonder about the god?”

“There had been speculation in the scientific community for years about the true nature of
Jehovah
. Thirty years before Jacob Fairman began proselytizing, there were two young graduates of the Augustine school who postulated the idea that ‘Jovah’ was really a machine, based on their largely unproven theories of flight mechanics and weapons systems. Their ideas created quite a stir among the scientists and intellectuals of the time and were violently opposed by the angels. Nothing really came of their speculations, but from time to time, students would come across their papers and start the debate all over again. Jacob Fairman had been a student at the Augustine school, of course, so he’d heard all the theories. He just came to believe in them more devoutly than most.”

“And how did you come to believe?” Lucinda asked.

“I went to the Augustine school. I heard the whispers. And I had not been a particularly faithful man to begin with. Engineers, as a rule, are not. They look for the logical explanation behind the mystical event. For instance, we have spent some energy trying to determine why angels can fly.”

“We have wings,” Lucinda said with dignity.

“Ah, but in so many other ways you are completely human. In fact, current biological thinking says you’re mutants, but not naturally occurring ones. Someone tampered with your physical makeup some seven hundred and fifty years ago, and you’ve bred true ever since.”

“No one tampered with us,” Lucinda said coldly. “Jovah selected a few trusted men and women, and fitted them with wings. Back when the colonists first settled Samaria.”

“That’s what the Librera says,” Conran agreed. “But there are very old texts, written in the ancient language, that say otherwise. That talk about how the original angels were created by the scientists and biologists among the settlers. That even describe how clumsy the first angels were as they learned to fly.”

“How could you read such texts, even if they exist?” Lucinda demanded. “Only oracles know the old language.”

Conran grinned again. He radiated energy and confidence, and did not seem at all annoyed by her questions. Rather, he enjoyed knocking aside her skepticism with feasible answers of his own. “Ah, but one of the courses taught at the Augustine school is linguistics,” he said. “Some of the ancient engineering manuals that can be found even today in the archives of the angel holds are written in that tongue. And old Caleb Augustus, he got his hands on these books, and it just killed him that he couldn’t read them. So he had his wife the oracle teach him the words. And he set up a class to teach them to others.”

“That doesn’t seem right,” Lucinda said. “That’s holy knowledge.”

“All knowledge is holy,” Conran replied. “And all knowledge should be shared, or it becomes profane.”

Lucinda rubbed her temples. She was not entirely convinced, of course. As an angel, she had some responsibility to her god and to her people; she could not rashly abandon them for a few facile theorems. And yet Conran was even more plausible than Reuben, although he had not, she realized, given her any more
concrete evidence. He just had such a compelling voice that everything he said sounded true. It was hard not to leap to her feet and cry out, “Yes, I believe!”

“It’s all interesting,” she said at last. “And some of it makes a great deal of sense. But I would need more proof than this before I became a convert.”

“Fair enough,” he said amiably. “But it is good of you to ask—and to listen.”

She had not asked her questions of the other Jacobites. She was rather shy of them, for they were a strange, passionate, suspicious, and ill-kept lot. They looked like they had lived hard, lean lives, managing to survive by the scarcest combination of wits and luck. Despite Conran’s welcome, they all mistrusted her; and they had a peculiar habit of staring at her face as if they could not believe the precise arrangement of her features.

There were, in addition to Conran, about fifty Jacobites living in Sahala—the only survivors, he told her, of a band that used to be about four times as strong. She was shocked to learn of Bael’s campaign of extermination, though she found this easier to believe than tales of orbiting spaceships. Gretchen had hated Bael, though she had managed to conceal that violent emotion for most of Luanda’s life, and Reuben also had ascribed terrible crimes to the Archangel. Lucinda did not doubt that Bael had ferociously hunted down the Jacobites; he would have considered it his duty.

It was not surprising that those fifty survivors looked at her askance, and so Lucinda made little effort to get to know them. Oh, once or twice at Conran’s invitation, she joined them when the whole group assembled in the evenings, but she was fairly uncomfortable at these events. They spoke ardently about their beliefs, contemptuously of the complacent Samarians who were too thickheaded to listen to reason, idealistically of how they would bring the truth to every last soul on the mainland. Lucinda left these meetings even less in sympathy with their cause than she had been before. They were zealots, or possibly madmen; she trusted them very little more than they trusted her.

On the whole, she felt more at ease with the Edori. The house she lived in was an Edori house, owned by people who were in some remote manner relatives of Reuben. Then again, from what she could tell, all Edori considered themselves kin, so perhaps they did not in fact have blood ties. She had not completely
figured out how the inmates of the house were related. There were two older women who appeared to be in their sixties; a young woman about Lucinda’s age, who had a baby boy; and a young man who did not seem to be brother, son, or lover to any of the others. They treated each other with great affection mixed with hilarity. They loved nothing so much as a joke at another’s expense, though none of the tricks were ever cruel.

None of them were ever in the house if they could help it. They spent most of their time in the garden, in the town commons visiting their friends, or off on pursuits Lucinda had not yet identified. Though constructed solidly enough, the house had an impermanent feel, as if at any point its residents might dismantle its stones, cart its components along with them on some impromptu journey, and rebuild the whole thing somewhere else on a more satisfactory site. The furnishings were exotic, colorful, and completely unplanned, so that a red print sofa warred with the blues and grays of a handwoven rug. No one ever gave a thought to mealtime until someone in the house admitted to hunger, and then two or three of them would throw together a dinner from whatever ingredients happened to be in the cupboard.