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 toride 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
“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 toride 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
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