Basileus
by Robert Silverberg
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 toward 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 fulfill 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 read in the name of Harahel as Spirit N, and there the angel is one the screen.
“I am here at your summons,” he announces expectantly.
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 ultrasensitive 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 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 data base, and I have to code his functions. He’s the recording angel, after all. So, to some degree, then, 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 data base.”
“And where does the data base 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 data bases 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 godlike 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.