"Mmm?"

"Jane's lost ansible contact with the rest of her. Jehovah is working approximately like before, but we can't leave Samaria or talk to anyone outside it. I thought you'd want to know right away."

"Okay," says Micaiah. He hugs her some more.

Micaiah looks for her as soon as he hears.

Micaiah waits quite calmly for the fuss to be over.

Micaiah holds the baby. She yells at him, too. He laughs and kisses her little head and passes her to Rinnah.

Rinnah is good with babies! Or at least most babies. She rests Damaris on her back, arm between the wings, and rocks her and murmurs musical nonsense.

"Good idea," says Micaiah, snuggling her.

Damaris is a talkative little girl. She makes sounds, and the sounds gradually morph into words, and the words rapidly assemble into sentences. Her first word might be any of a number of things - her pronunciation lags behind her vocabulary, and many of her early utterances are open to considerable interpretation - but her first complete and adult-sounding sentence, when she's not quite two, is: "No, I want the smushy peas!"

"All right, my treasure," says Isabella, "you may have the smushy peas," and she produces smushy peas. Strictly speaking, the cafeteria was not serving these, but no one is likely to notice; these come in cans and are the sort of thing she could just have around.

"You are welcome! Aren't you polite," says Angela, pressing a kiss to Damaris's forehead.

Damaris hugs her mommy. This results in an unfortunate massacre of the remaining smushy peas.

"Oh dear," says Angela. "This is a bit of a mess. Are you still hungry, treasure?"

"They did exactly that," Isabella agrees. "We can go back to our room and clean up." She scoops up her treasure into her arms.

"Smush!" says Damaris.

"Smush! That is what smushy peas do," agrees Isabella. "They smush."

Angela improvises along with her. "Smushy peas, smushy peas," she warbles, up and down a scale.

"Smushy smushy smushy peeeeeeas," says Damaris, who has not learned to harmonize either.

"Smushy peeeeeas," Damaris sings, and she smushes some on her mother's face.

"Damaris my treasure, do you think I wanted to have peas on my face?"

"That's right," says Isabella. "I did not." She maneuvers Damaris into one arm and opens the door to the family quarters they've moved into. "And now they are there anyway."

"You could say I'm sorry, Mommy," suggests Angela.

"I'm sorry Mommy," she recites.

Damaris observes the soap-and-water process with fascination.

"There. Now there aren't smushy peas on us any more," says Isabella. "That's better."

"Better," echoes Damaris.

"Yes. Where do you suppose Daddy is at this hour?"

"He's not! He must be somewhere else. Let's go find him," says Isabella, picking up her treasure.

"Daaaaaaddyyyyyyyyy," says Damaris, helpfully.

Isabella laughs and goes out into the Eyrie to search for Micaiah the long way around.

Angela hums along as they prowl in search of Daddy.

"Daddy daddy daaaaaaaaaaddy daddy daddy," sings Damaris.

"Where, oh where, could Damaris's daddy be," trills Isabella.

"Daddy daddy daddy where oh Daddy," Damaris improvises.

"Is he in the music rooms?" Isabella wonders musically as they enter the hall on which such things are found.

"Is daddy in the music roooooms?"

Well, his name is on the sign-up sheet for this one and nobody is after it. Isabella knocks. "We will see if he is here," she sings.

"Here is Daddy, we have found him," Isabella sings to her treasure, after she returns the offered kiss.

"Daddy daddy daddy," sings Damaris.

"Our little one has found her singing voice," says Isabella. "And complete sentences."

"Now that we've found him what do you suppose we should do with him?" Isabella asks Damaris.

Daddy hugs Damaris.

"What a clever idea," says Isabella, transferring Damaris's weight to her daddy in the course of this hug.

Micaiah kisses Isabella on the forehead and hugs their daughter.

As is customary for little angels - or for that matter, mortals who grow up in an angel hold - this is approximately when she's enrolled in formal voice lessons. Rinnah teaches the youngest cohort, and her granddaughter is slotted right in with others of her age.

Damaris enjoys formal voice lessons! She does not have her mother's problem of singing too quietly. She does not have that problem at all.

That is good! Everyone likes to hear little angel voices. Rinnah is terribly proud of her. So is Isabella.

It makes Damaris very happy when Mommy and Grandma are proud of her!

Damaris is not sure how to feel about that at all.

Keziah's feelings on the matter seem to mostly come in the form of whimpery mewls whenever she is not being actively fed right then, or sleeping. She sleeps a lot.

Isabella doesn't think her darling Keziah is boring at all!

"But she doesn't do anything, Mommy," says Damaris.

"Not yet," says Isabella. "She's watching everybody around her so she can learn to do things."

"Oh," says Damaris. "Well, put her in front of interesting people, then, so she'll stop being boring quicker."

"Don't you think we're interesting?" laughs Isabella.

"I guess," says Damaris. "Good job, then! Should I sing her songs, will that help?"

"It might!" says Isabella. "We can sing to her together. But not when she's asleep. Babies need a lot of sleep."

"Okay," says Damaris.

"In a few years she'll be talking and singing, just like you."

"That's good!" says Damaris. "I want her to talk! She'll be less boring if she talks."

"It's true," agrees Isabella, laughing.

"I'll sing her songs and talk to her a lot," says Damaris, "and then she'll learn those things faster!"

"Quite possibly. She can only learn so fast, though, she is just one little angel and not six of them."

"Do six little angels learn faster than one?"

"Well," says Isabella, "they'd have to learn the same things, like how to walk and talk and use their hands and flap their wings, but if you count all of it separately, then yes, about six times as fast."

Isabella laughs. "Well, first of all, that would be very uncomfortable. You saw how big I got when I was pregnant with just Keziah; imagine if there were six of her! And second of all, that's not what I meant. Imagine you're drawing with chalk, a line on the floor from that wall to this one. If you draw six lines at once, with six pieces of chalk, then there will be six times as much chalk on the floor, but the lines will still only go from one wall to the other."

"But then that's not any faster at all!" says Damaris.

"More learning happens, in the same amount of time," says Isabella. "That's a kind of faster. The kind of faster you want is the same amount of learning in less time."

"The same in less time is what faster means," Damaris insists.

"Well, I suppose it all depends on how much you're trying to get done."

"What's that mean?"

"Well, let's suppose it takes three years for a little angel to become interesting," Isabella says, rocking a sleepy Keziah in her arms. "And let's say I'm only going to have two, that Keziah's going to be the last one. So when she's three, she'll be interesting, and if she could be interesting when she's two instead, then all my little-angel-interestingness would be done faster. But what if I'm going to have six of them? Then by the time the last one was interesting, you would be at least ten years old, if I had them one at a time. If they all were born at the same time then the same amount of little-angel-interestingness would be done faster, even if it still took them all three years."

"I'm not sure how many little angels we're going to have, but being done faster is not the point," says Isabella, amused.

"Why not?"

"If you sing a song twice as fast, you'll be done sooner. Why do we sing some songs slow anyway?"

"They sound nicer?" she guesses. "Do one-at-a-time babies sound nicer than twins?"

Isabella laughs. "No. All right - why do we sing at all?"

"Because it's fun!"

"And bringing up little angels," says Isabella, rocking sleepy Keziah and re-folding a limp wing, "is also fun."

"Even the boring part?"

"I wouldn't want to miss it."

"Okay," says Damaris, dubiously.

"Right now you are three," says Isabella. "Would you want to be magicked into being six instead, right now? And miss being four and five in between?"

"I don't know," says Damaris. "I've never been four yet!"

"Keziah hasn't been one year old yet," says Isabella. "I don't think it would be fair if she never got to try it, even if that would make her interesting faster."

"Oh," says Damaris.

"Besides, tiny babies are cute."

"Tiny babies are boring," says Damaris.

"Well, I suppose I thought so too when I was three."

"You were three?"

"Oh yes! I have been all of the ages from zero to twenty-three," laughs Isabella.

Damaris giggles.

"In order," Isabella adds, winking.

Damaris giggles more!

"Okay!" says Damaris, beaming. "What do you want to play?"

"A game!"

Keziah plays along with all the eptness and clumsy enthusiasm one might reasonably expect from a two-year-old.

That is okay. Sometimes when you're learning things you don't get them right away. Damaris will just have to keep on teaching her how to be interesting until she learns it properly.

Keziah is eager to be interesting!

That's good! Then they can both have lots of fun while she learns.

Micaiah turns out to be pretty good at solving people's problems, especially when the problem is that they need to air a grievance or don't feel listened to. Dealing with people just seems to come naturally to him.

Anything that makes a buffer between Isabella and all this work is appreciated. It's interpersonal enough that she can't just speed up and handle everything in her head and with magic, and people have already started noticing that she doesn't seem to set aside much time for sleep.

The hold's angels aren't quite thrilled about taking directives to go here or there for this or that from a mortal, which is the most common suitable response for petitions, but Isabella perfects a withering why did you drag me here just to repeat what my husband said look that usually keeps anyone from soliciting confirmation of his instructions twice.

And he is very nice and charming and not presumptuous about it, which helps.

[I guess we should,] he muses.

[Tonight after the other girls are in bed? If she takes it well - or if she takes it badly, if she's attached to the idea of Jovah by now - we can possibly tell Keziah soon too.]

[All right,] he says agreeably.

"Okay," says Damaris, blinking at her.

"Well, first of all," says Isabella, "it's possible you've noticed part of it already. Have you ever suspected that me and your father might be able to do more things than most people can?"

"Of course," she says. "You're the host leader. You do lots of things most people can't."

"I don't mean having permission or authority," Isabella says. "I thought you might have noticed that none of you girls have ever been sick, or hurt worse than a scraped knee, and that neither have we - that you might have heard the story surrounding Ithiel's birth; he's only a little older than you are - that I do not forget things, at all - that I don't sleep very much and I never seem tired - that your father and I can often coordinate very effectively with no obvious chance to speak to one another."

"Any guesses?" asks Isabella mildly.

"Jovah likes you best?" she suggests after a moment's contemplation.

"Well," says Isabella, "that's - not most of it, but -" She sighs. "You might also have noticed that I have been a little evasive about Jovah when I am not also carrying a tune."

"No," laughs Isabella. "Jovah is - not what everyone thinks he is, though." She sighs. "I didn't take it well when I found out, so I'm trying to come at the revelation slowly, but perhaps I'm not doing a very good job."

Damaris waits.

"When you were four I told you a bedtime story about a boat that could travel from star to star," says Isabella. "I didn't invent that idea. There are such boats. There is one traveling through Samaria's sky. It is piloted by a technology so advanced compared to what we have here that it can - almost, but not quite - think for itself. It can talk. It can hear, through technological ears it has planted here and there. It can change the weather, and it can shoot weapons that look like lightning, and it can drop seeds and medicine out of its cargo hold. And it addresses me as 'Captain'."

"...Jovah likes you best," Damaris concludes. "But how did the sky boat fix Ithiel?"

"It didn't. It couldn't. I did that, too, and I let everyone think it was Jovah, because everything I'm telling you now is a secret - can you keep it secret?"

She nods solemnly.

"When I was younger - just before I got pregnant with you, actually - your father and I found a magical door that led to another world. The door is gone now - it moves, and it doesn't always exist - but when we found it, we went through, and we met people who were a lot like us - only from other places."

"What was the other world like? Who were the other people?"

"The door led to a magical restaurant," Isabella says, "that attaches to many, many other worlds. And some of those worlds have people who are just like me apart from having different homes, and some of them have people who are just like your father except for the same thing. And in some of those worlds, magic exists."

"So you went there and you took their magic and brought it back and hid some here so you could use it for stuff," Damaris guesses.

"It was a little more complicated than that, but yes, your father and I have magic now."

"What's it do? Can I have some?"

"It can do almost anything - if we know what we want it to do. It is a little smart but not very smart. What would you do with it?"

"I don't know!" says Damaris.

"Then why do you want to have some?"

"In case I think of something to do with it?"

"How about," says Angela, "I teach you how your father and I can talk silently? You can talk to Alleluia and Caleb and Uncle Nathaniel the same way. And then if you think of something you can tell about it wherever we are."

"That's magic!" says Damaris. "I want it."

[Here you are, treasure.]

[Magic!] she says beamily, and she hugs her mother.

Hugs!

Enthusiastically huggy hugs! Damaris has magic of her very own now, and that is fantastic.

[You can use this magic to talk,] Isabella switches to text, [or write, and if you want to be left alone you just want it and you can have the magic tell everyone who tries to talk to you a message.]

Isabella laughs aloud.

Damaris giggles.

"We may tell Keziah soon, too. What do you think, is she ready to find out?"

"I don't know," says Damaris. "You're her mother, you figure it out."

Isabella laughs. "Do you think we should have told you earlier than we did?"

"I don't know," says Damaris.

"Well, I suppose we'll think about it. There's one more thing. In addition to the magic doors - which we haven't found any of in a long time, now - there used to be another way to get from world to world. But it's broken now," Isabella adds with a sigh. "It might unbreak, later, but we don't know when if ever that will happen."

"Who broke it?"

"We don't know how it broke. It might have died; it was a person. Her name was Jane, and she was an unusual sort of person who could reach into machines - like the interfaces at the oracles' retreats, or the spaceship - and become them. She became lots of machines on lots of worlds and connected them all together, and then she lost her connection - to here, or everywhere, we're not sure."

"Oh," says Damaris. "That's sad."

"It's very sad."

"That's a lot of yous," says Damaris. "And a lot of Daddys."

"Yes. The me's were called Bells. We didn't all have the same name, but all of our names had the sound 'bell' in them. The Daddies called themselves Jokers, after one of them who they thought was a particularly good example."

"Is Daddy not a good example of Daddy?" wonders Damaris. "I think Daddy is the best example of Daddy."

Daddy laughs.

"Daddy is the best example of Daddy. But the things he had in common with all the other versions of him were - most pronounced, in the one named the Joker. Closer to what seemed to be the template. Like a cookie cutter."

"Daddy, are you a messed-up cookie?" inquires Damaris.

"Yes I am," he says, ruffling her hair.

"He's a cookie with lots of frosting on," suggests Isabella, "so it's a little harder to tell what shape he is under all the tasty decorations." And she kisses Micaiah's cheek.

Damaris wrinkles her nose. "If you're going to start talking about how tasty Daddy is, I'm going to bed," she announces.

Isabella laughs. "Sleep well, my treasure."

"Goodnight," she says, and distributes hugs - one per parent - and goes to bed.

"That went well," Isabella remarks to Micaiah.

"Yeah, it did!"

"I think Keziah in six months or a year, perhaps."

"All right," he says agreeably.