The Signature of All Things

of my new education.”
    “What did he teach you?” Alma asked.
    “The mercy of Christ, firstly. Secondly, English. Lastly, reading.” After a long pause, he spoke again. “I was a good student. I understand that you were also a good student?”
    “Yes, always,” said Alma.
    “The ways of the mind were easy for me, as I believe they were easy for you?”
    “Yes,” said Alma. What else had Ambrose told him?
    “The Reverend Welles became my father, and since then I have always been my father’s favorite. He loves me more, I daresay, than he loves his own daughter and his own wife. He certainly loves me more than he loves his other adopted sons. I understand from what Ambrose told me that you were your father’s favorite, as well—that Henry loved you even more, perhaps, than he loved his own wife?”
    Alma started. It was a shocking statement. She felt wholly unable to reply. What loyalty did she feel toward her mother and toward Prudence across all the years and miles—and even across the divide of death—that she could not bring herself to answer this question honestly?
    “But one knows when one is the favorite of our father, Alma, don’t we?” Tomorrow Morning asked, probing more gently. “It transfers to us a unique power, does it not? If the person of most consequence in the world has chosen to prefer us over all others, then we become accustomed to having what we wish for. Wasn’t that the case with you, as well? How can we not feel that we are strong—people like you and me?”
    Alma searched herself to determine if this was true.
    But of course it was true.
    Her father had left her everything—the entirety of his fortune, at the exclusion of everyone else in the world. He had never allowed her to leave White Acre, not only because he had needed her, she suddenly realized, but also because he had loved her. Alma remembered him gathering her ontohis lap when she was a small child, and telling her fanciful stories. She remembered her father’s saying, “To my mind, the homely one is worth ten of the pretty one.” She remembered the night of the ball at White Acre, in 1808, when the Italian astronomer had arranged the guests into a tableau vivant of the heavens, and had conducted them into a splendid dance. Her father—the sun, the center of it all—had called out across the universe, “Give the girl a place !” and had encouraged Alma to run. For the first time in her life, it occurred to her that it must have been he, Henry, who had thrust the torch into her hands that night, entrusting her with fire, releasing her as a Promethean comet across the lawn, and across the wide open world. Nobody else would have had the authority to entrust a child with fire. Nobody else would have bestowed upon Alma the right to have a place.
    Tomorrow Morning went on. “My father has always regarded me as a sort of prophet, you know.”
    “Is that how you regard yourself?” she asked.
    “No,” he said. “I know what I am. For one thing, I am a rauti . I am a haranguer, as my grandfather was before me. I come to the people and chant out encouragement. My people have suffered a great deal, and I push them to be strong again—but in the name of Jehovah, because the new god is more powerful than our old gods. If that were not true, Alma, all my people would still be alive. This is how I minister: with power. I believe that on these islands the news of the Creator and of Jesus Christ must be communicated not through gentleness and persuasion, but through power. That is why I have found success where others have failed.”
    He was quite casual, revealing this to Alma. He almost shrugged it off as an easy thing.
    “But there is something more,” he said. “In the old ways of thinking, there were known to be intermediary beings—messengers, as it were, between gods and men.”
    “Like priests?” Alma asked.
    “Like the Reverend Welles, you mean?” Tomorrow Morning smiled, looking again at the mouth of the cave. “No. My father is a good man, but he is not the sort of being to which I refer here. He is not a divine messenger. I am thinking of something other than a priest. I suppose you could say . . . what is the word? An emissary . In the old ways of thinking, we believed that each god had his own emissary. In emergencies, the Tahitian people wouldpray to these emissaries for deliverance. ‘Come to the world,’ they would pray. ‘Come to the light, and help us, for there is war and hunger