Children of God

by Mary Doria Russell

  “They were sure I wasn’t carrying anything,” Sandoz said, as much to himself as to the others.

  “They were sure,” Iron Horse confirmed softly. “You okay now? You want some more water?” Joseba took the glass from him and refilled it silently.

  “Yes. No. I’m okay.” Emilio wiped his face on his sleeves, still shaken but better. “Jesus. It’s only that …”

  “It’s only that y’had yersalf all nerved up about resigning,” Sean finished for him, looking at Iron Horse with hard blue eyes. “And Danny Boy comes up with this crap about being sick. Y’got scared for the little girl, that’s all.”

  Iron Horse shrugged and with self-deprecating humor cheerfully declared himself “Big Chief Shit for Brains.” John, who had watched this performance with increasing suspicion, folded his arms and stared. Shit for brains, John thought. Like hell.

  “Candotti, you cook Italian?” Iron Horse asked, with a disarming smile.

  John nodded, refusing to be charmed. “Yeah, I can cook.”

  “Well, then! Sandoz, if you can cook beans and rice, you can make spaghetti. You like macaroni and cheese? That’ll put some weight on you. Macaroni and cheese was invented here in Naples. Pizza, too, eh? Did you know that?” Emilio shook his head. Iron Horse stood up decisively and moved toward the stairway. “You have never eaten until you’ve had real Neapolitan macaroni and cheese, right, Candotti? Tell you what. You guys start the water boiling and I’ll go get some groceries from the refectory and we’ll teach Sandoz here how to cook himself some decent food.”

  Then, with a big man’s surprising quickness, he brushed past Joseba at the head of the stairs and was gone.

  “SHATTERED LIKE A WHISKEY BOTTLE HITTING MAIN STREET IN FRONT of the Hotel Bell,” Daniel Iron Horse said that evening. “I’m telling you: he’ll be a liability out there. He will fall apart at the wrong time and somebody’ll get killed! Let’s just use him as a resource and then put the poor bastard out to pasture.”

  “Danny, we’ve been over this. We can’t afford to waste him. What he knows cost us billions and three priests and four good laypeople, not to mention all the damage that was done to the Society because of the bad publicity.”

  “Hell, we were already in deep shit when that hit the fan. Point is, what’d it cost Sandoz?”

  “Everything,” Vincenzo Giuliani admitted with prompt precision, but he didn’t turn from the window of his office. Staring into the darkness beyond the courtyard, or perhaps at his own reflection in the mullioned glass, he added, “I don’t need you to remind me of that, Father Iron Horse.” He left the window and moved behind the shining walnut desk, but did not sit. “For what it’s worth, the Holy Father insists that Sandoz is meant to return to Rakhat,” Giuliani said in a tone that left his own opinion of this matter strictly out of the discussion. “His Holiness points out that six ships have attempted to reach Rakhat in the past forty years, and only the two directly concerned with Sandoz have made it. Gelasius III sees Providence in this.”

  Booted feet stretched far in front of him, a heavy-bottomed crystal tumbler in one large languorous hand, Iron Horse watched the Father General circle the room, moving soundlessly over priceless antique Orientals. “So what does His Holiness propose?” Danny asked, amused. “We prop Sandoz up on the dashboard of our spaceship like a plastic Jesus and use him to ward off collisions with interstellar debris? Bundle up his little bones with some bird feathers in a medicine pouch and hope the hull doesn’t crack apart?”

  “Are you finished?” Giuliani asked lightly, pausing in his circuit. Iron Horse nodded, unabashed and unrepentant. “The Pope believes Sandoz must return to Rakhat to learn why he was sent there in the first place. He believes Emilio Sandoz is beloved of God.”

  Danny pursed his lips judiciously. “Like Saint Teresa said: If that’s how God treats His friends, it’s no wonder He’s got so few of them.” Iron Horse lifted his glass to eye level and contemplated the contents before taking a last sip of single malt—leaving, as he always did, precisely one finger’s worth of alcohol at the bottom of the glass before setting it aside. “This is prime liquor. I admire your taste,” he remarked, but his next words were uncompromising. “Sandoz is medically fragile, emotionally unstable and mentally unreliable. The mission doesn’t require him and I don’t want him on it.”

  “He is the toughest man I’ve ever known, Danny. If you had seen what he was like a year ago, even a few months ago. If you knew what he’s—” He stopped, astounded that he was arguing. “He will be on that ship, Father Iron Horse. Causa finita. The matter is closed.”

  Giuliani moved to leave, but Iron Horse remained where he was, immobile as the Grand Tetons. “Do you hate him that much?” Danny asked curiously as Giuliani’s hand touched the door. “Or does he just scare you so bad, you don’t even want to share a planet with him?”

  The Father General, mouth open slightly, was too amazed to walk out.

  “No. That’s not it.” Iron Horse paused, the speculative look on his unlovely face replaced by serene certainty. “Taking Sandoz back to Rakhat is the price of getting the Suppression lifted, isn’t it. All we have to do is humor the Pope! Put one poor, old, broken-down ex-Jeb on the next ship out, and win, lose or draw—the prodigals shall be welcomed back to the bosom of Peter, with Vatican bells ringing and a glory of angels shouting hosannah.” There was a low appreciative chuckle. “The Dominicans will be furious. It’s a beautiful deal, Father General,” Danny Iron Horse said, smiling with all the warmth and good humor of a timber wolf at the end of a bad winter. “Why, this time, you’ll be the one making history.”

  There had been a fad for a while, Giuliani recalled while standing at the door, for housing domestic photonics in folksy-looking pine cabinetry with iron-work hinges, all cozy and warm on the outside and pure highspeed calculation on the inside. “You are a first-class sonofabitch, Danny,” Giuliani said pleasantly, as he walked out the door. “I’m counting on that.”

  Daniel Iron Horse sat still as the old man’s footsteps receded. He stood then and retrieved his glass from the heavy silver service tray, for once in his life draining the contents, while Vincenzo Giuliani’s ambiguous laughter echoed down the stone-paved hallway.

  Village of Kashan

  2046, Earth-Relative

  “SUPAARI HAS BROUGHT SOMEONE HOME!” KINSA CALLED JOYFULLY AS the barge tied up briefly at the Kashan dock.

  The cliffside village was not quite one day’s travel south from Kirabai, and Supaari had been content to spend that time drowsing on the sun-warmed boards of the barge deck with the Runa passengers, planning no plans, thinking no thoughts, holding the baby Ha’anala, and chatting with Kinsa and the others. Off-loading his own baggage, he glanced up as the Runa poured out of their cut-stone dwellings and smiled as they cascaded like a spring torrent down the rocky paths toward the riverside.

  “Sipaj, Kinsa: they were worried about you,” he told the girl, before acknowledging the shouted farewell of the barge pilot as the vessel disappeared around the southern branch of the river.

  But it was Supaari himself whom the VaKashani crowded around—all of them swaying, the children keening. “Sipaj, Supaari,” was the most common refrain, “you are not safe here.”

  With an effort, he restored some kind of order to the gathering, speaking loudly over the chaotic Runa babble, persuading them finally to go back up to their largest meeting room, where he could listen to them properly. “Sipaj, people,” he assured them, “everything will be peaceful. There is nothing worth making such a fierno about.”

  He was wrong, on both counts.

  The proclamation had reached his hometown of Kirabai only hours after he’d left, received when the storm-downed radio tower was repaired. The Inbrokari government had declared him renegade. Hlavin Kitheri, now Paramount Presumptive, had called Supaari’s life forfeit for the murder of the entire Kitheri family and of some man named Ira’il Vro, whom Supaari had never heard of. Already, a bounty hunter had come here t
o Kashan. “Sipaj, Supaari,” one of the elders told him, “the midwife Paquarin sent us word. She used your money to send a runner.” “So we knew why the hunter came,” another woman said, and then the others began again to talk all at once. “Sipaj, Supaari. Paquarin is gone now too.”

  Of course, he thought, eyes closing. She knew I didn’t do it—not that Runa testimony would have made a breath of difference.

  “A hunter took her,” someone said. “But her runner saw, and came to us.” And the cry went up again, “You are not safe here!”

  “Sipaj, people! Someone must think!” Supaari pleaded, ears folded flat against the uproar. Ha’anala was hungry and rooted near Kinsa’s neck, but the frightened girl was swaying witlessly. “Kinsa,” he said, laying a still-blunt hand on her head, “take the baby outside and feed her, child. There’re provisions in the luggage.” Turning back to the elders, he asked, “The hunter who came here—where is he now?”

  The sudden silence was startling. A young woman broke it. “Someone killed him,” said Djalao VaKashan.

  If she had burst into song, he could not have been more dumbfounded. Supaari looked from face to face, saw the shuffling, swaying confirmation in their bodies and thought, The world’s gone mad.

  “The djanada say there must be balance,” said Djalao, ears high. She was perhaps seventeen. Taller than Supaari himself, and as powerful. But clawless. How had she …? “Birth by birth,” Djalao was saying. “Life by life. Death by death. Someone made a balance for Paquarin.”

  He fell back against his tail like a random-bred drunk. He had heard the stories—there were other Runa like this, who had dared to kill Jana’ata, even after most of the rebels had been culled. But here? In Kashan, of all places!

  Sinking onto the stone floor, he began to think the business through. He was known to have traded with Kashan and Lanjeri. None of the southern towns would be safe. He had been seen on the barge, so the river-ports would be watched. Pieces of his bedding would be distributed to all the checkpoints: his scent would be known wherever he fled.

  “Sipaj, Supaari,” he heard someone say. Manuzhai, he realized, looking up and seeing him for the first time since the death of the man’s daughter, Askama, almost three years earlier. “Can you not become hasta’akala?”

  “Sipaj, Manuzhai,” Supaari said quietly. “Someone is sorry for your loss.” The VaKashani’s ears dropped listlessly. Supaari turned back to the others, as the impossible idea of making him hasta’akala rippled through the crowd. “No one will take this one for hasta’akala,” he told them. “When someone was made Founder, he gave everything he had to endow the new lineage. Now there is no property to compensate the sponsor.”

  “Then we will sponsor you,” somebody cried, and this idea was taken up with enthusiasm.

  They meant well. A man in trouble could barter his property and titles for immunity to prosecution if he could find someone to take him on as a dependent and keep him off the public stipend rolls. In return for lodging and provision, the hasta’akala yielded everything he possessed to the sponsor and had his hands clipped—a lifelong guarantee against his becoming a VaHaptaa poacher. Supaari stood so they could all see him clearly. “Someone will explain. The sponsor must be able to feed the one taken hasta’akala. You would not be able to feed this one,” he said as gently as he could.

  They understood then. Runa had no access to state meat allowances, and obviously no right to hunt. There was a soft thudding of tails, raised and dropped to the ground in gestures of dismay and pity, as the talk fell off to an unhappy silence.

  “Sipaj, Supaari,” Manuzhai said then, “we could feed you ourselves. Someone is ready. Someone’s wife and child are gone. Someone would rather be yours than a stranger’s.”

  Other voices joined Manuzhai’s: “Sipaj, Supaari, we can make you hasta’akala.” “The VaKashani could sponsor you.” “This one, too, is ready to go.” “We can feed you.”

  To the end of his days, Supaari would remember the sensation of the ground moving under his feet, as though there had been a minor earthquake. For an instant, it felt so real that he looked around at the Runa in astonishment, and wondered why they did not flee to open ground, to escape the rockfall sure to follow.

  Why not? he thought then. Runa had been bred since beyond remembering to serve Jana’ata in life and to sustain them in death. Manuzhai was clearly pining away from loneliness; if the Runao didn’t want to live—. Again, Supaari felt the sensation of movement. Even now, he would have eaten the supply of food he’d brought with him from Kirabai without a thought! But that wasn’t … people like these. He had never taken meat from his own villages or household compound. Indeed, he had never killed his own prey. He was a city man! He collected his meat already butchered, never thinking—. There was nothing wrong with it; it was perfectly natural. Everything dies. It would be a waste if …

  People like these.

  Walking out to the edge of the meeting hall’s terrace, where the rockface dropped away steeply to the river below, Supaari stared into the distance and would have keened like a child if he had been alone. No, he thought, looking back at the VaKashani, seeing them all with new eyes. Better to starve. Thinking this, he realized at long last why Sandoz, whom Supaari knew to be carnivorous, had obstinately insisted on eating like a Runao while in Gayjur. Well, I cannot eat like a Runao, he thought angrily. And I will not scavenge!

  Which left one honorable course open to him and his child. The dream cave, he thought, and saw himself, lost, with his daughter in his arms.

  When he spoke, it was firmly. “Sipaj, people, this one cannot accept your offer.”

  “Why not?” the cry went up. He shrugged: a movement of the shoulders that he had learned from Sandoz, a foreigner trapped in a situation he could not escape and hardly understood. The Runa were a practical folk, and so Supaari fell back upon plain facts.

  “As hasta’akala, someone’s hands would be clipped. This one would not be able to … take the meat, even when it is offered with such generosity of heart.”

  It was Manuzhai who said, “Sipaj, Supaari, we can make you hasta’akala and Djalao can take the meat for you. She knows how. The rest of us could learn!”

  Again there was a burst of cheerful agreement, the VaKashani pressing forward to pat his back, pledging him their support, delighted by their solution to his troubles, happy to help this Jana’ata merchant who’d always been kind and decent. It was nearly impossible to resist them, but then he met the eyes of Djalao, standing apart from the others.

  “Better to die for a good reason,” said Djalao, holding his gaze like a hunter, but it seemed that she was offering death to Supaari himself, not to Manuzhai.

  The others took up the notion happily; no VaRakhati—neither Runa nor Jana’ata—had ever yet said, “Better to live.”

  Supaari turned his head away, unable to bear Djalao’s stare. He agreed to consider their offer, and promised a decision in the morning.

  RUNA BLADES WERE OF VOLCANIC GLASS, SHARPER THAN ANY STEEL, with a knapped edge so fine that Supaari would hardly feel its work. There would be a few quick, neat strokes through the fleshless webbing between his fingers, and the short, thick-muscled digits would fall free almost bloodlessly. In some ways, he had already adapted to the reduction in function, having severed his own claws days before. He expected that his hands would be clumsier than ever, but he had always had Runa to take care of his clothes, to write for him and open doors and groom his coat and prepare his food. To be his food.

  Physically, the hasta’akala was a trivial procedure, but the permanance of it! The irrevocable change in status! Always before, Supaari had met adversity with the conviction that he could turn it to advantage somehow, but if he accepted the hasta’akala, he conceded guilt. He was marked forever as a dependent—of Runa! And though he now admitted to himself that he had always been dependent on Runa—even so, it was bitter.

  Apart from Sandoz, Supaari had never known a hasta’akala. Once accepted by
a sponsor, such men were of no further interest to the government and there was nothing to prevent them from traveling abroad except shame. Now Supaari understood why Jana’ata who submitted to the procedure most often withdrew from society, sequestering themselves like women, loath to be seen. He himself could hardly stand to be with the elated Runa villagers who continued to talk blithely through the evening of their plans to care for him, discussing the order in which Djalao could slaughter the elders …

  Sometime that night, during the endless blind misery that sleep did not curtail, he realized that their scheme was well meant, but it couldn’t work. If the village corporation fed Supaari and Ha’anala, it wouldn’t make its quota to the state. It was unprecedented, that a Runa corporation would take on the sponsorship of a hasta’akala. A Runao culling another Runao—it might be illegal. There was no telling what a court would make of it. The arrangement probably wouldn’t hold up under legal scrutiny and, even if it did, Hlavin Kitheri could annul the hasta’akala contract by decree.

  By first sunrise, he had resolved to walk into the wilderness and die there with his child. “Sipaj, people,” he called out, when the Runa roused and his vision sharpened. “You are not safe if someone stays here. This one can only be a danger to Kashan and all who live here. Someone will take Ha’anala and leave, to keep you safe.”

  They would not simply let him go; they were Runa, and nothing could be done without consensus. The discussion seemed to him interminable and he was frantic to leave, truly frightened now by what could happen if he were discovered here.

  In the end, it was Djalao who dropped a tail and said without emotion, “Take him to Trucha Sai.”

  Naples

  December 2060—June 2061

  “WHY NOT?” CELESTINA ASKED.

  “Because he has asked us not to come, cara,” Gina Giuliani said very clearly, beginning to lose patience on the fourth time through this particular line of interrogation. It was hard enough to manage her own disappointment without dealing with Celestina’s over and over. The story of my life these days, Gina thought, and tried not to sigh as she drained the pasta.