Children of God

by Mary Doria Russell

  Danny seemed distracted, but dragged himself back to what Sandoz was saying. “It was at the end of the transmissions?”

  “Yes. The last thing I relayed to the ship.”

  Danny shrugged. “Might still be in the queue waiting to be sent.”

  “What? Still on the ship? Why wouldn’t it have been transmitted?”

  “The data went out in packets. The onboard computers were programmed to store your reports and send them in groups. If the Rakhati suns or Sol were positioned badly, the system would just queue everything until the transmissions could get through without being degraded by stellar interference.”

  “News to me. I thought everything went out as we logged it,” Sandoz said, surprised. He’d paid almost no attention to technical considerations like that. “So it just sat in memory for over a year, until the Magellan party sent me back? Would there have been that much time between packets?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know too much about the celestial mechanics involved myself. There were four stars the system had to work around. Wait—the people from the Magellan boarded the Stella Maris, didn’t they? Maybe when they were accessing the ship’s records, they disabled the transmission code.” The more he thought about it, the likelier it seemed. “The last packet is probably still sitting in memory. I can pull it out for you if you want.”

  “It can wait until morning.”

  “No. You’ve got me curious now,” Danny said, glad of something concrete to do. “It should only take a few minutes. I don’t know why no one checked earlier.”

  Together, the two men moved to the wall of photonics and Iron Horse worked his way into the Stella Maris library storage system. “Sure enough, ace,” he said minutes later. “Look. It’s still coded and compressed.” He reset the system to expand the data and they waited.

  “Wow. There’s a lot of it,” Sandoz remarked, watching the screen. “Some more stuff by Marc. Joseba will be pleased. Yes! There’s mine. I knew I’d done that work already.” He stood silently a while longer, looking over Danny’s shoulder. “There’s something for you,” Sandoz said as a new file scrolled by. “Sofia was working on trade networks …” His voice trailed off. “Wait. Wait, wait, wait. Go back! Can you stop it?”

  “No. It’s going to decompress all of it.… There. It’s done,” Iron Horse said.

  Sandoz had spun away, breathing hard. “Not for the Society. Not for the Church,” he whispered. “No. No. No. I saw her dead.”

  Danny twisted in his chair. “What are you talking about, ace?”

  “Get out of the way,” Sandoz said abruptly.

  Danny vacated the desk chair and Sandoz sat down in front of the display. He seemed to settle himself, as though to take a blow, and then carefully spoke the ID and date stamp again, bringing up the last set of files held in the queue, which were logged, impossibly, months after his own final transmission, now some eighteen years in the past on Rakhat.

  “Sandoz, what? What did you see? I don’t understand—” Frightened by the other man’s pallor, Danny leaned over Sandoz’s shoulder and looked at the file on the display. “Oh, my God,” he said blankly.

  During the past months, as he had studied the mission reports and the scientific papers sent back by the Stella Maris party, Daniel Iron Horse had sometimes, with a strange feeling of unfocused guilt, called up images of the artificial-intelligence analyst Sofia Mendes: digitized and radio-transmitted watercolors painted by Father Marc Robichaux, the naturalist on the first mission. The earliest of these was done on Rakhat, during Sofia’s wedding to the astronomer Jimmy Quinn; others were painted later, as pregnancy softened the classical lines of her face. When Danny had first seen these portraits, he thought that Robichaux must have idealized her, for Sofia Mendes was as beautiful as a Byzantine Annunciation in the last painting, done only days before her death in the Kashan massacre. But when, for comparison, Danny had pulled up one of the few archived photos of Sofia, he could only acknowledge the scientific accuracy of Robichaux’s draftsmanship. Brains and beauty and guts, everyone agreed. An extraordinary woman …

  “Oh, my God,” Daniel Iron Horse repeated, staring at the screen.

  “Not even for her,” Sandoz whispered, trembling. “I won’t go back.”

  Trucha Sai

  2047, Earth-Relative

  “SUPAARI, DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU’RE ASKING?” SAID SOFIA, “I can’t promise that anyone will ever bring you home—”

  “You home,” said Isaac.

  “I will not wish to come back! There is no reason to come back! I am nothing here. I am less than nothing—”

  “Than nothing,” said Isaac.

  “Then think of Ha’anala!” Sofia urged, the child in question then only a season old and asleep in her arms, a curled ball of fur and latent energy. “What kind of future can she have among my people?”

  “Mong my people,” said Isaac.

  Sofia glanced down, the rare error in pronunciation catching her attention. There had been a time when the sound of Isaac’s voice had flooded her with joy and relief; now she knew this was merely echolalia—compulsive, toneless parroting—meaningless, and intensely irritating.

  “I do think of Ha’anala,” Supaari cried. “She is all I think of!”

  “Think of.”

  Supaari rose abruptly from their leafy asylum and walked away, only to face Sofia again, his heavy tail sweeping a circular swath in the ground litter. He seemed completely unaware of the gesture, but Sofia had seen it often enough in the past few months to know that it was a mime of staking out territory. He meant to hold his ground in this argument. “No one will marry the child of a VaHaptaa, Sofia. And if we stay here among the Runa, Ha’anala is as dead. I am as dead—worse than dead! We are all four trapped here among people who are not our own—”

  Supaari stopped and inhaled, checking for scent.

  “Our own,” said Isaac.

  Sofia watched tensely as Supaari sampled the air. They listened, alert for the sounds of their Runa patrons waking up after the midday siesta, but there was nothing beyond the normal noise of biomass and the fecundity that enveloped the embowered hut where Sofia sheltered a few days a month, when her scent became temporarily obnoxious to the Runa. Sometimes she and Supaari came here simply to get away for a while; even in seclusion, they used English as a private language, the way Sofia’s parents had used Hebrew when she was a child in Istanbul.

  Only Isaac had followed them here today. It was the closest he came to expressing a desire to be near others—this willingness to walk along behind his mother and her friend, never looking at them, but matching their direction and speed, stopping when they did, sitting quietly until they moved again. He seemed oblivious to their existence, but Sofia was increasingly convinced that Isaac took in a great deal more than he let on, and this could be infuriating. It was as though he were refusing to speak, as though he wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of speaking because she wanted it so desperately—

  “Sandoz told me you have stupid meat on Earth,” Supaari said, breaking into her thoughts. “Meat of not-people—”

  (“Not-people.”)

  “Supaari, this place is rich with meat! You could eat piyanot. Or cranil—”

  (“Cranil.”)

  “And how shall I catch them?” Supaari demanded coldly. “Piyanot are too fast and cranil too big—they’d roll and crush a hunter who tried to take them! We have always only eaten Runa, who can be caught—” He shot a prehensile foot out and gripped Isaac’s ankle. “Do you see this?” Supaari snarled, in anger and in anguish. “We are made only for prey so slow as this child! If the Runa did not come to us to be killed, the cities would starve in less than a season. This is why we have to breed them. We need them—”

  “Supaari, let Isaac go.”

  The child’s habitual stillness had become utter immobility, but he did not cry out or weep in fear. Supaari released the boy instantly, his ears dropping in apology. There was no visible response from Isaac, but Sofi
a let out a breath and looked up at the Jana’ata looming over her. “Come back here and sit down,” she said evenly, and when Supaari did, she told him, “There are other ways to hunt! The Runa can build deadfalls for you. Or traps.”

  “Traps,” said Isaac, as tonelessly as before.

  “Take us back to your H’earth, and my daughter and I can eat without shame,” Supaari insisted. Kneeling, he stared at the baby lying in her arms, but then lifted his eyes. “Sofia, I can never go back to my people. I can never be as I was. But I don’t think I can stand to stay with the Runa,” he said with soft desperation. “They are good. They are honorable people, but …”

  “But.” They both noticed Isaac’s word this time, and it hung in the air with everything it implied left unsaid.

  She reached out to run the back of her hand along a lupine cheek. “I know, Supaari. I understand.”

  (“Understand.”)

  “I think I can live with your people. Ha’an. You. Your Djimi. Djorj. You were friends to me and I believe I could—” He stopped again, gathering courage, throwing his head back to look at her from the distance of his pride. “I wish also to find Sandoz and offer my neck to him.” She tried to say something, but he went on resolutely, before Isaac could mimic his words. “If he does not kill me, then Ha’anala and I will live with you and learn your songs.”

  “Learn your songs,” said Isaac. He glanced at the adults then: a momentary flicker of direct attention so fleeting that neither noticed it.

  “Whither thou goest, there go I, and thy ways shall be my ways,” Sofia was murmuring in rueful Hebrew. Mama, she thought, I know he has a tail, but I think he wants to convert.

  How could she say no? She had waited out these six endless, fruitless months on the bare chance that her radio beacon might bring a response from unknown humans. Right here, so close she could feel the heat from his body, was a man she knew and cared for, and was beginning to understand. Less alien to her than her own son, more like her than she could have imagined a few years earlier, just as ashamed to discover that his gratitude to the Runa was insufficient to overcome a gnawing need to think a single thought uninterrupted by endless talk, to make a single gesture disregarded and uncommented on, to be able to take a walk without incurring the gentle, insistent Runa dismay that followed any temporary escape from the group.

  “All right,” she said at last. “If this is truly what you think is best for Ha’anala. If you wish this—”

  (“Wish this.”)

  “Yes. I wish it.”

  (“Wish it.”)

  They sat a while longer, each sunk in thought. “We should get back to the village,” Sofia said after a time. “It’ll be redlight soon.”

  (“Redlight soon. Supaari sings.”)

  She almost missed it, so nearly immune was she to her son’s toneless voice.

  Supaari sings.

  She had to replay the sound in her head to be certain. My God, she thought. Isaac said, Supaari sings.

  She did not engulf her son in an embrace or scream or weep or even move, but only glanced at Supaari, as surprised as she and as immobile. She had seen too often the way Isaac drained himself away—became Not There in some mysterious fashion when he was touched. “Yes, Isaac,” Sofia said in an ordinary voice, as though this was a normal child who had simply made a comment for his mother to confirm. “Supaari sings at second sundown. For Ha’anala.”

  “Supaari sings at second sundown.” They waited, breathless in the heat. “For Isaac.”

  Supaari blinked, mouth open, so human in his reaction Sofia nearly laughed. His daughter in her arms, Sofia lifted her chin: For Isaac, Supaari.

  He stood then and went nearer to Isaac, alert to the smooth, small muscles, to the barely perceptible quiver that would precede flight. By some instinct never before exercised in such a manner, he knew that he should not face the boy, so Supaari knelt at Isaac’s side and sang to the child, softly and unseen.

  Sofia held her breath as the first notes of the evening chant floated out to join the forest choir of cries and hoots, of buzzing rasps and fluting whistles. Listened as Supaari’s bass—melodic and fluid—was joined by a child’s soprano, unerringly on pitch, word-perfect, but in miraculous harmony. Gazed with her one myopic, tear-blurred eye at her son’s face, incandescent in the roseate light: transfigured, alive—truly alive for the first time. And blessed the God of her ancestors, for granting them life, for sustaining them, for allowing them to reach this new season.

  When the chant drew to a close, she filled her lungs with air that seemed perfumed with music. Voice steady, face wet on one side, Sofia Mendes asked her son, “Isaac, would you like to learn another song?”

  He did not look at her but, standing with the uncanny steadiness and balance that had attended his earliest attempt to walk, he came closer. Head averted, her elfin son lifted a small hand and placed on her lips a single finger, delicate as a damselfly’s wing. Yes, please, he was saying in the only way he could. Another song.

  “This is what our people sing at dawn and sundown,” she told him, and lifted her voice in the ancient call, “Sh’ma Yisrael! Adonai Eloheynu, Adonai Echad.” Hear O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is One. When she was finished, the small finger brushed her lips again, and so she sang once more, and this time her son’s voice joined hers: word-perfect, and in harmony.

  When it was over, Sofia blew her nose on a handful of balled-up leaves and wiped one side of her face against a shoulder clad in one of Jimmy’s remaining T-shirts. For a few moments, she fingered the soft, worn fabric, grateful for some contact with Isaac’s father. Then she stood. “Let’s go home,” she said.

  SHE HAD LONG SINCE LOCATED THE MAGELLAN’S LANDER, USING THE ORBITING ship’s transponder to activate its beacon to the global positioning subroutines of the orbiting satellites, which relayed its coordinates to her computer tablet. The abandoned plane was only a few kilometers outside Kashan. As far as she could tell, tapping its onboard systems, it had been locked down properly, was sufficiently fueled to return to orbit, and seemed potentially operational. Activating communications now, she zeroed a time-date stamp, set the transponder for infinite repeat, and recorded a new message. “This is Sofia Mendes, of the Stella Maris party. Today is March 5, 2047, Earth-relative. I have waited 165 days local time for a response to my call from any human on Rakhat. This message serves notice that I am planning to leave this planet in fifteen days Rakhat-relative, using the Magellan’s lander to get to the mother ship. If you can’t get to the lander by that time, you will be marooned here. I regret this, but I cannot wait any longer.”

  She had found it difficult to tell Kanchay and the others of her plan to leave Rakhat but, to her relief, there was no great distress among the Runa. “Someone was wondering when you would go home,” Kanchay said. “You’ll need to bring goods back to your people, or they’ll think your journey was a failure.” The Runa, she was thus reminded, had always assumed that the Jesuit party from Earth had come simply to trade. Supaari’s sudden decision to go with her, they thought, was a sensible plan to do business abroad, where he was not under a death warrant.

  So this is what the Jesuit mission had come to, and Sofia was content with that; she was, after all, a practical woman and the daughter of an economist. Commerce was perhaps the oldest motive for exploration, and it now seemed entirely sufficient to her. Her grandiose thoughts of a higher purpose seemed revealed for what they were: a reaction to isolation, a desire for significance. Delusional but adaptive, she thought, a way to cope with the fear of dying here, alone and forgotten.

  Energized by the process of analysis and organization, Sofia had spent the months of waiting in thorough preparation for the journey home. In consultation with Supaari, she had drawn up lists of the light, compact trade goods and scientific specimens she thought most likely to be of financial or academic value at home: precious stones that were biological in origin, like pearls and amber, but unique to Rakhat; small and ordinary but exquisit
ely crafted bowls and platters carved from native shells and wood; soil samples, seeds, tubers. Textiles of dazzling complexity; polychrome ceramics of charm and wit. A plant extract that numbed wounds and seemed to speed healing, even for Sofia’s skin. Jewelry. Perfume samples. Vacuum-packed specimens of coatings that seemed impervious to weather; technical manuals from chemists, and formulas, and drawings that illustrated several manufacturing processes that Sofia thought unique to Rakhat. Enough to ensure financial independence, she believed, if there were still patent law and licensing agreements by the time they got to Earth.

  She and Supaari would also be able to sell intellectual property—knowledge of Runa and Jana’ata culture, interpretive skills, unique understanding and perspectives that could be added to the uncounted gigabytes of geological, meteorological and ecological data collected continuously and automatically by the Magellan and relayed home all these years. But Sofia was no fool and her own experience of her home planet did not inspire Panglossian optimism. They might be killed on sight, out of fear of disease and xenophobia. Their cargo might be confiscated and Supaari seized for exhibit in zoos. Her son might be institutionalized and she herself held incommunicado by whatever government they might first encounter.

  Or perhaps, God who has begun this will bring it to perfection, she thought, remembering Marc Robichaux. Perhaps there will be Jesuits to meet us at spacedock. Perhaps Sandoz—

  She stopped, stunned by what it would mean for her to see Emilio again, and for him to meet Supaari. Perhaps, she thought, he’ll have forgiven Supaari by then. Christians are supposed to forgive. It occurred to her that when her reports were transmitted and finally heard at home, Emilio might simply turn around and come back for her as soon as a new ship could be configured. It was just the sort of Quixotic gesture he was capable of. Unnecessary, of course, but typical. We might pass each other! she realized, shivering at the thought.