The Alleluia Files (64 page)

“And others before them?”

“From time to time. Not often, once the planet was colonized.”

“And is it true that you control the weather? And that you can dispense seeds and drugs when they are asked for? Is it true
that you can track the lives of all Samarians by the Kisses that we wear in our arms?”

“I cannot precisely control the weather, but I have the capability of altering weather patterns if the angels sing a certain combination of notes that signal me to perform functions that will affect air temperature and wind formations on the planet below us. It is true that, again when my reactors are triggered by specific sound patterns, I can release my accumulated stores of grain and medicine. It is also true that I use the Kisses to follow the numbers of mortals and angels being bred on Samaria, and they are a useful source of data to me.”

She took a long, shaky breath. “Is it true you will destroy the world if the Gloria is not sung?”

“I am so programmed.”

“And what does
that
mean?”

“Certain functions have been laid down unalterably in my circuits. If this occurs, I must react in this way. I have no independent will. If an angel prays for a particular kind of rain, I respond with a prescribed combination of chemicals. If the Gloria is not sung, I respond with a blast of destructive energy. I cannot control these functions. Only you and the other angels can do so.”

“Well, maybe, but it’s nothing like control if we have to go along with what you’ve already been programmed to do,” said Reuben in his most colloquial voice. “What if the angels and the mortals living on Samaria today decided they no longer wanted to come together to sing the Gloria? Could your circuits be altered? Could those commands be undone?”

“That is not a piece of knowledge I am equipped with,” the spaceship replied, sounding almost prim. “As my circuits were programmed by men, I assume those instructions can be reworked by other men. But perhaps there is a fail-safe device built in which would prohibit the circuits from ever being tampered with. I do not know. I was not informed.”

“Fail-safe. That’s just what you’d expect from the sort of men who would design the likes of you in the first place,” Reuben muttered. “I wonder where I might look to find that information? Just for curiosity’s sake, you understand.”

“In a minute,” Lucinda said. She was not through with her interrogation of the spaceship. “You can hear angels from any
point on Samaria, can you not? For instance, you could hear me when I sang from Angel Rock.”

“Yes,”
Jehovah
acknowledged.

“Then why must the Gloria be sung from the Plain of Sharon?”

“In point of fact, it could be sung from anywhere on the planet and I would hear it. But there are special receptors buried under the Plain that carry voices to me most clearly, and your ancestors wanted to be sure that, if I heard no other music, I heard the Gloria as it was sung every year.”

“And it sounds like music? Like words? Like the conversation we are having now? It is that distinct?”

“Yes. If you like, I can open my receivers and allow you to overhear what is transpiring on the Plain even now, so you can experience exactly what I hear.”

“But there’s nobody on the Plain right now, is there?”

“Indeed, some kind of commercial event is being held there this entire week. A farmer’s fair, I believe. There are many voices upraised, though most of it is unimportant chatter.”

“Yes, I would like to hear this,” Lucinda decided. “Just so I can say I stood beside the god and heard the talk of mortals.”

Almost before she had finished speaking, the chamber around them was filled with an unbridled commotion. For an agricultural fair, Lucinda thought, the event seemed to have stirred a lot of tempers. The noises were so clear and so perfectly translated that she could catch the sounds of running footfalls, squealing horses, and rumbling motors over the confusion of angry discussion. Lost in amazement, it took her a moment to sort out individual voices, their words—and their meanings.

“That’s Bael,” she said suddenly. “Can’t miss that voice. And he’s—sounds like he’s threatening somebody.”

For over the ship’s invisible speakers came the proclamation:
Jacobites, pray, if you have any remnants of faith left in your god. For you are about to die at that god’s hands
.

“Wait—what is he saying?” Lucinda demanded, aghast and disbelieving. “Reuben, did he say—”

“Hush,” said the Edori, listening intently. Both of them heard Conran’s defiant reply.
We may die at your hands, but it is a machine you call to, and not a god!

Lucinda stared at Reuben, stark terror in her eyes. “What’s
happening? Why are they all on the Plain of Sharon? What is Bael going to do?”

“He’s caught them,” Reuben said, speaking more soberly than she had ever heard him. “I’d guess he’s planning to kill them all now. Right there on the Plain of Sharon.”

A sob caught in Lucinda’s throat. She felt as if her body was being scorched, her brain seared. “Tamar,” she gulped. “Sweet Jovah singing, Tamar is with them—”

Another voice filled the chamber around them, rising over the muttering of whatever crowd had gathered to witness the Jacobites’ destruction.
You cannot so summarily convict and execute us. Give us a day—give us till sundown. Let our arguments be heard.

“It’s Jared,” Reuben said suddenly. “He’s with them.”

Lucinda felt a spasm of hope, so brutal it left her lungs bruised. “Can he help them? Can he save them?”

“I don’t know, mikala,” Reuben said very gently. “It doesn’t sound like Jared is arguing from a position of power.”

“But then—but—he can’t kill them! Reuben, he—dear god, dear god, and Tamar is with them—”

Reuben stepped forward to put his arms around her, but she tore herself away. No comfort, not now, not ever again. She had to hear every last word, every plea, every pardon. Surely there would be a pardon.

“Jovah,” she whispered, for how could there not be a god, now when she needed one most? “Spare them, save them, Jovah teach me how to protect them….”

But of course there was no god. She stood at the very heart of the spaceship
Jehovah
, solid proof that the god she had always loved had never existed. If there was no god to intervene, Bael would kill them all. Beat them, burn them, run them through with bayonets, and she could not say a word that would save them.

And then, eerie and magnificent in this sleek echoing chamber, the Archangel’s voice came pouring in, raised in song, raised in prayer. Lucinda felt her heart stutter to a halt.

“What is that?” Reuben demanded. “What is he singing?”

“The prayer for destruction. Thunderbolts—lightning. The end of the world …”

“Can’t he be stopped?
Jehovah
, can he be stopped?” Reuben called out. “Can we countermand him?
Jehovah
, tell us!”

But the ship did not reply. And its fussy, murmurous silence went on and on.

Jared had believed till this very moment that something would save them. That Christian and Mercy would swoop down, snatch Bael away; that the heavens would erupt with angels, vengeful and furious. He had believed he could reason with Bael, stall him, charm him. He had chosen death, but he had not believed he would die.

Until Bael began singing the prayer for annihilation. Then his body flooded with adrenaline, then his brain rioted with fear. “Get down!” he shouted at the Jacobites, and they all fell to the floor, hands covering their ears, cowering before the awful might of that song, that simple prayer. Bael’s rich, magnificent voice filled their cage, liquefied their brains, ran through their arteries like silver flame. Jared flung his body across Tamar’s, covered her from head to toe with the frail shield of his wings. Not that it would save her, not that anything could save her, Bael would murder her and every last one of them. Yet he clung to her for all that. If the god miscalculated, if the thunderbolt fell an inch too short, perhaps Jared’s bones would deflect just enough of Jovah’s rage so that Tamar would survive, scarred and witless, perhaps, but alive, alive….

And he had never, at any point in his life, been so astonished as when she shoved him away with all her strength and pushed herself to a sitting position.

“Sing,” she said fiercely, and began to do so herself.

Jared stared at her.

It was the wordless, repetitive little tune she had taught him that day in the Marquet hotel, the music she had said she could hear in her head. Even here, even now, the pure, untrained sweetness of her voice caught at his heart and made him silly with wonder. He felt the erratic flicker in his Kiss and knew without looking that it trembled with fire.

She had closed her eyes, as if she was listening, as if she matched her voice, her tempo, to the unseen metronome of someone else’s performance. For a moment Jared could only watch her helplessly, marveling at the clean, devout contours of that upraised face, thinking she looked like a priestess, a holy woman, an angel, on her knees in supplication to her god.

And then, because he could not bear to do otherwise, he lifted his voice and laid it alongside hers. Instantly, she skipped upward an interval, twining her harmony around his melody, decorating his voice with her own. They wove the notes back and forth, warp and weft, embroidering the air with jeweled threads and fringes of gold. He drew strength from their braided voices and poured that power back into the song. Almost without his volition, he rose to his feet, pulling Tamar with him, and the song ascended with them. He felt his lungs filling over and over with each separate, momentous note; he felt each one rush through his throat, burst from his mouth, explode in the air with a shower of sparks. Choirs filled his head. The heavens chorused back. They would die singing this paean to a careless god, but they would be gloriously extinguished.

But the thunderbolt did not fall.

Jared could not hear Bael’s voice anymore, though he could see the Archangel furiously delivering his prayer. The god could hear Bael’s song, no doubt, and was even now shaping the lightning he would hurl to the earth below. Jared sucked in another great gust of air and plunged into his melody again.

And still the thunderbolt did not fall.

The air was so still it seemed to have evaporated, drained pantingly into the vacuum of the sky. Jared’s skin crackled as if he stood before a fire; the hair on his arms was polarized with electricity. The world seemed breathless with portent as if the skies overhead prepared to convulse into destruction.

But the thunderbolt did not fall. As if Jared’s song had made the god reconsider, as if Tamar’s lilting harmony had pleased Jovah more than the Archangel’s malevolent request. Nothing moved, nothing breathed, the world did not even spin as the angels sang and the god weighed their motley prayers.

Then suddenly the heavens were split with a great light, an opalescent fireball swirling with amber and saffron. Through this maelstrom an angel burst forth as if born of that crystal blaze. Her white wings were tipped with crimson; a vivid scarlet nimbus flared around her head. Her outstretched hands dripped coins of flame, and her feet were shod in fire.

Shock made Jared mute, and the Archangel fell to his knees with a single heartbroken cry. The fairgoers and the Jacobites all gaped upward, struck dumb. Into that eerie silence two voices continued to rise and fall, twinned, inseparable, singing the beseeching, haunting melody that Jared and Tamar had offered to
the god. It was Tamar’s voice, even now, joined with the voice of that avenging angel who hovered above the plain in a slowly dimming sphere of light. Two voices, so similar they could have been one, descant against melody, a harmony so perfect the brain could not divide it, and the god could not help but prefer it.

Tamar … and Lucinda.

Lucinda, whom they had left behind in Ysral, had appeared from nowhere out of a golden cloud. Singing a strange, unarticulated prayer that had forced the Archangel to the ground and persuaded the god not to strike. Jared himself dropped slowly to his knees, speechless with wonder, while the women repeated the song another time, and another. Perhaps they would sing till the world ended. He would not mind listening for just that long.

But now fresh trouble was boiling up on the plain, for he could hear the growl of high-powered motors and the shouts of new arrivals. Above them, the air was suddenly alive with angels, maybe a hundred of them, crowding together in a kaleidoscope of overlapping wings and gesticulating arms. Lucinda and Tamar fell silent, but these fresh spectators created enough noise to drown out any prayer Bael might make, should he dare to raise his voice again. Jared stared at them, trying to make out familiar figures. Was that Mercy? Were those the angels of Monteverde?

Before he had identified more than three faces, there was a sudden tumult much closer to hand. Raised voices, angry shouting, an invasion of bodies pushing through the crowd of farmers and Jansai ringing the Jacobite truck. There was the smash of wood against metal, fist against flesh, as fierce fighting broke out between the watchers, the guards, and the rescuers. More furious voices joined in the general chaos. Jared had thrown himself against the walls of his prison and was clinging to the bars of the cage, straining to see who had arrived. Bael had jumped up and whipped around to face this new onslaught, calling out to his son and his Jansai raiders to form a circle of safety around him.

But it was useless. Five minutes later a band of rivermen wearing Christian Avalone’s livery broke through the mob of farmers and Jansai, wielding clubs and knives. Three of them descended on the Archangel and forced him back to the ground, hands behind his back, face almost in the dirt. Two of them had
captured Omar and dragged him, swearing and screaming, around the side of the truck. It was a coup so rapid, ruthless, and effective that Jared had a moment’s grave misgiving. If the prestige of the Archangel could be so swiftly overcome, could Samaria ever return to faith in Jovah and his angels?

But so much of the world was overturned already. How would it be possible to put any of it to rights?