Children of God

by Mary Doria Russell

  Giordano Bruno

  2061–2062 Earth-Relative

  “REALLY, SANDOZ, I WOULD HAVE THOUGHT THAT SULKING WAS BENEATH your dignity,” Carlo Giuliani remarked with cool amusement, watching as Nico d’Angeli checked the blood chemistry readouts before adjusting the IV line running into Sandoz’s arm. “It’s your own fault, you know. You were given every opportunity to volunteer. This attitude will get you nothing but bedsores and a bladder infection.”

  Leaning with elegant composure against the soundproofed bulkhead of the Giordano Bruno’s sick bay, Carlo studied the still, dark face. He saw nothing of coma’s slackness or sleep’s easing. This was sheer obstinance.

  “Do you enjoy opera, Sandoz?” Carlo asked curiously when Nico, humming “Nessun dorma,” started the sponge bath. “Most Neapolitans are mad for opera. We love the passions, the conflict—life lived on a grand scale.” He waited for a moment, watching the man’s closed eyes as Nico lifted the unresisting limbs, wiping down the armpits and groin with gentle efficiency. “Gina never cared for opera,” Carlo recalled. “Grandiose nonsense, she called it. A thoroughly boring little housewife, Gina. You should thank me, Sandoz. I have saved you from a stifling fate! You would not have been content for long to sit at home with her, eating pasta together and getting fat. You and I were meant for greater things.”

  Finished with the bath, Nico set aside the washcloth and covered Sandoz with the sheet for a few minutes, to let the dampness subside before reapplying the electrodes. In no hurry, Carlo waited until the heart monitor had begun its steady ping before speaking again. “We have a great deal in common, you know—even apart from our use of Gina,” he suggested, and smiled with satisfaction at the raggedly quickened tempo of the pinging. “We were both despised by our fathers, for example. Papa used to call me Cio-Cio-San. The allusion is to Madama Butterfly, of course. To call me Cio-Cio-San was to accuse me of flitting from one thing to another, do you see? Since the day of my birth, I have been a bitter disappointment to my father. Like yours, my father saw in my face only evidence of his wife’s infidelity. There, perhaps, our experience differs: my mother was falsely accused. But it has always been easier for Papa to assume that I am not his than to accept that I am not he.”

  Unable to work without singing, and partial to Bellini, Nico went on to Norma: “Me protegge, me difende …”

  “I have always been good at anything I put my hand to,” Carlo reported without false modesty. “Every teacher I studied with took an interest in me. Each assumed I’d be a protégé—an engineer or biologist or pilot. When I refused to follow in their footsteps, they blamed my inconstancy and disloyalty, rather than recognize their own disappointed desire for acolytes. But I am no one’s disciple. My life is my own, and I follow no one else’s path.”

  Nico moved to the foot of the bed to change the urine bag. It was a tight fit in the cramped space at that end of the medical bay, but he was a methodical and careful person who did one thing at a time, in a set order, and he had learned how to accomplish this maneuver with a minimum of disturbance.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Sandoz: delusions of grandeur,” Carlo continued soberly. “Men like you and my father excel in a narrow field of endeavor. You are intent from your youth on one thing, and achieve a great deal early in your lives, and you scorn those who are not similarly focused. My father, for example, took over Naples before he was thirty—it was quite a remarkable rise to power,” Carlo admitted. “By the time he was forty, he controlled businesses accounting for eighteen percent of Italy’s gross national product, with an annual income greater than Fiat. At forty-two, only a year older than I am now, Domenico Giuliani was the head of an empire with tentacles reaching into the whole of Europe, South Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean and the Americas. An empire larger than Alexander’s—my father would remind me of this at breakfast, nearly every morning.”

  Carlo fell silent for a time. Then he drew himself up and shrugged. “But true greatness is in part a matching of the man and the times, Sandoz. Versatility can be a virtue! I’d have done well in the Renaissance, for example. A merchant prince! Someone who could write a song and wage war and build a catapult and dance well. Even my father had to admit that launching this venture required talent in many fields. Politics, finance, engineering …”

  Finished with his chores and two arias, Nico looked to his padrone. “Well done,” Carlo said, on cue. “You may go now, Nico.” He waited for Nico to leave before standing and moving to the bedside. “You see, Sandoz? Knowing your frailties as well as your strengths, I have even provided you with a very fine nurse. Not one as delightfully accommodating as Gina, perhaps, but quite adequate to his task.”

  He glanced at the readouts, but this time Gina’s name provoked no change in the life-sign data now flowing to the monitors. “An extraordinary situation, is it not?” said Carlo Giuliani, looking down at the man who’d very nearly married his own ex-wife. “Unforeseen and unfortunate. You may believe that I have taken you away from Gina out of some romantic Neapolitan fury but I assure you, I was finished with her. The simple fact is that I need you more than she does.” He opened the sick-bay door, standing there for a time without leaving. “Don’t worry about Gina, Sandoz. She’ll find someone new, now that you’re gone.”

  It was not until the sick-bay hatch was shut and locked from the outside that the readouts changed.

  CARLO HAD SENT THREE OF THEM FOR HIM. THEY KNEW HE’D BEEN A priest and were, perhaps, complacent in that knowledge. They could see that he was small. They were told he had been sick and that his hands were essentially useless. What they did not know was that he was a veteran of a hundred emetic nightmare reenactments of this very experience. Over and over, he relived it and what came afterward. This time, there was no hesitation, no foolish hope, and he did damage before, inevitably, they overpowered him. For weeks afterward, he would remember with satisfaction the feel of a cheekbone giving way under his heel when a face came within striking distance, would recall with pleasure the nasal cry of the man whose nose he broke when he got an elbow loose.

  He marked them. This time, he made himself felt.

  He had been beaten before and there was no novelty in it. He rolled with as much as he could, kept tensed and braced for as long as possible, and finally took a savage satisfaction in the silence that would become his principal weapon against them. Unconscious during the trip to the launch site, he was kept under sedation for a time, even after they were on board the Giordano Bruno.

  But he had sampled product when he was a kid; familiar with the doped drift between dream and waking, it did not frighten him. Slack and boneless whenever anyone was near, he let them think the dose was enough to put him under, and waited. A chance came while the crew was occupied with the final preparations for leaving high Earth orbit. Ripping the IV line out of his arm with his teeth, he lay motionless until his head cleared a little, watching his blood mix with the saline and glucose and medication from the pumpwell, dispersing evenly throughout the compartment in a pale iridescent haze that suddenly sank to the floor as the engines fired and the ship began to accelerate. He struggled out of the zero-G moorings that had held him in place; stood, wobbling slightly; made his way with the careful balance of a self-conscious drunk to the system access panel in the sick bay. What he could not stop, he could sabotage. A minute error in navigation would be enough to throw them years off course and he meant to change a single number in the navigation calculations.

  He was caught, and there was another beating, fueled this time by fear of what he’d almost done. There was blood in his urine a few days afterward, and they did not find it necessary to restrain him that week.

  It occurred to him that if he had taken this kind of abuse a year ago, it would have killed him. Timing, he thought bitterly, is everything.

  Throughout the days that followed, he lay still, hating in silence. Sometimes, for a moment, when the sick-bay door opened, he would hear voices. Some were well known. Othe
rs were new to him, most notably that of a tenor: unschooled and a little nasal, with a slightly sanded quality that took the brilliance off his top notes, but true and often lovely. He hated them all, without reservation and without exception, with a pure and incandescent outrage that sustained him and replaced the food he would not take. And he resolved to die rather than be used again.

  THERE WERE, OF COURSE, MANY WAYS TO OBTAIN COOPERATION. CARLO had, at one time, considered having Gina and Celestina killed, to loosen Sandoz’s ties to Earth, but had rejected the idea. Sandoz was more likely to commit suicide under those circumstances than to work out his grief in space. Studying his quarry, Carlo settled on a judicious combination of direct force, modern chemistry and traditional threat.

  “I will come straight to the point,” Carlo said briskly, entering the medical bay one morning, after Nico had reported that Sandoz was dressed and calm, and prepared now to discuss the situation rationally. “I would like you to consider working for me.”

  “You have interpreters.”

  “Yes,” Carlo conceded readily, “but without your breadth of experience. It will take the others years to develop the knowledge of Rakhat that you carry—consciously and unconsciously. I have waited a long while to come into my own, Sandoz. Decades will pass on Earth while we make this journey. I have no intention of wasting additional time.”

  Sandoz looked faintly amused. “So. What deal am I offered?”

  His speech was a little slurred. Carlo made a mental note to reduce the dosage. “I am a reasonable man, Sandoz. For a mere cessation of hostility to the mission, you will be allowed to send a message back to Gina and my daughter. If, however, you attempt to undermine my plans or harm me in any way, now or in the future,” Carlo Giuliani warned regretfully, “I’m afraid John Candotti will die.”

  “Iron Horse, I presume, suggested that particular carrot and stick.”

  “Only indirectly,” Carlo confided. “Interesting man, Iron Horse. I don’t envy him. He was placed in a difficult position. Isn’t that what they used to say about the Jesuits? They stood between the world and the Church, and got shot at by both sides. Speaking of difficult positions, by the way, Candotti is in the lander hangar now. If I don’t countermand my instructions within ten minutes, my people will vent it to vacuum.”

  There was no reaction but, after a time, Sandoz asked, “And for active cooperation?”

  Carlo leaned toward a mirrored medicine cabinet for a moment of contemplation, his long-nosed, high-boned face serious under a cap of golden hair, cropped but curling: Apollo come to life. “There will be money, of course, but—” He shrugged an acknowledgment of the paltriness of such a motive; in any case, Sandoz had money. “And a place in history! But you have that as well. So,” he continued, turning back to Sandoz, “for active cooperation, I am prepared to offer you an opportunity for revenge. Or justice, depending on how you look at it.”

  Sandoz sat for a time, staring at his hands. Carlo watched with unconcealed interest as the man straightened the fingers and then let them drop, their fall from his wrist bones almost beautiful, the ribboning scars faded to ivory. “The nerves to the flexors were destroyed, for the most part. As you see, the extensor muscles are still fairly well innervated,” Sandoz pointed out with clinical accuracy: he had cross-trained as a medic for the first mission, and was quite knowledgeable about hand anatomy now. Over and over, the fingers straightened and dropped. “Perhaps it’s a sign,” he said. “I can’t grasp anything. All I can do is let things go.”

  How very Zen, Carlo thought, but he didn’t say it. Not that Sandoz would have been angered—nothing could anger him now, although Carlo had taken the precaution of stationing Nico just outside the door.

  “Cooperation in what?” Sandoz asked, coming back to the point.

  “Simply stated, my goal is to establish trade with the VaRakhati,” Carlo said. “The cargo Supaari VaGayjur sent back with you on the Stella Maris was remarkable in many ways, not least of which was the price that even the most insignificant item of Runa manufacture brought from museums and private collectors. Imagine what could be accomplished if the cargo were chosen with its intended market in mind, rather than according to the tastes of a Jana’ata merchant. I expect this enterprise to make me immensely wealthy, and completely independent of the opinions of others.”

  “And what do you bring in trade, Don Carlo?”

  Carlo shrugged. “Most of it is quite innocuous, I assure you. Pearls, perfumes. Coffee, of course. Botanicals with distinctive scents—cinnamon, oregano. Belgian ribbon- and lace-manufacturing equipment that can produce multiple colors, patterns, varying weaves. Given the Runa taste for novelty, I should do quite well.” Carlo smiled disarmingly and waited for the obvious question, Then why do you need me?

  The maimed hands quieted and basilisk eyes lifted to meet Carlo’s own. “You mentioned revenge.”

  “You prefer that term to justice? Perhaps we can do business after all,” Carlo cried good-humoredly. Sitting in the sickbay chair, he rested an ankle on his knee, watching his man carefully. “I have studied the relationship between predators and prey, Sandoz. It interests me. I would argue that the human species came into its own when it stopped being prey, when it turned on its predators and made itself master of its own fate. There are no wolves in the streets of Moscow or Rome,” he pointed out. “There are no pumas in Madrid or Los Angeles. No tigers in Delhi, no lions in Jerusalem. Why should there be Jana’ata in Gayjur?” He stopped, his gray eyes unreadable. “I know what it is to be prey, Sandoz. As do you. Be honest: when you watched the Jana’ata slaughter and eat Runa infants, it wasn’t like watching bear eat salmon, was it?”

  “No. It wasn’t.”

  “Even before you left Rakhat, some Runa had already begun to fight back. The Contact Consortium reported that there were minor rebellions all over southern Inbrokar after your party demonstrated that tyranny could be resisted.” He paused, genuinely puzzled. “The Jesuits seem ashamed of this! I cannot imagine why. Your own Pedro Arrupe said that injustice is atheism in action! No human society has ever wrested liberty from its oppressors without violence. Those in power rarely give up privilege voluntarily. What was it you said at the hearings? ‘If the Runa were to rise against their Jana’ata masters, their only weapon would be their numbers.’ We can change that, Sandoz.”

  “Command-and-control communications equipment?” Sandoz suggested. “Weaponry adapted to Runa requirements, and manufactured on site.”

  “I am certainly prepared to provide such technical support,” said Carlo. “What is more important, I would not hesitate to suggest the ideology necessary to wrest liberty, equality and justice from their Jana’ata overlords.”

  “You wish to rule.”

  “As a transitional figure only. ‘For all things fade and quickly become legend, soon to be lost in utter forgetting,’ ” Carlo recited, quoting Aurelius grandly. “There is, nevertheless, a certain appeal to the notion of being immortalized in Runa mythology—as their Moses, perhaps! With you as my Aaron, speaking to Pharaoh.”

  “So. Not just southern Italy,” Sandoz observed. “Not just Europe, an old whore, corrupted long ago, but a whole virgin planet. Your father will never know, Carlo. He’ll be dead before you return.”

  “Now there’s a cheerful thought,” Carlo remarked comfortably. “Almost makes one glad for hell. I’ll tell him all about it when I arrive. Do you believe in hell, Sandoz, or are ex-Jesuits too sophisticated for that kind of melodrama?”

  “ ‘Why this is hell, nor am I out of it: Think’st thou that I who saw the face of God am not tormented with ten thousand hells?’ ”

  “Mephistopheles!” Carlo cried, amused. “My role in the drama, surely, although you look the part. You know, I’ve always thought it was a tactical mistake for God to love us in the aggregate, when Satan is willing to make a special effort to seduce each of us separately.” Carlo smiled, Apollonian beauty transformed by what he knew to be a devastating little-boy grin. �
��An inspiration!” he announced joyfully. “Shall we amuse ourselves? Shall we plumb our depths? Surely, even on a journey such as this, the greatest adventure is the exploration of the human soul. I offer you a bargain: you may decide whether or not we liberate the Runa! We shall pit my thirst for operatic grandeur against your moral strength. An interesting contest, do you agree?”

  Sandoz lifted his head away from the bulkhead and gazed at Carlo from a drug-mediated distance. “John must be anxious,” he said. “I should like a little time to consider your proposal in full. For now, I give my word not to interfere with your business arrangements. I agree to nothing further, but perhaps that will do as earnest money on what’s left of my soul?”

  “Nicely,” Carlo said, smiling benignly. “Very nicely indeed.”

  THEY LEFT THE SICK BAY, AND EMILIO FOLLOWED CARLO ALONG A CURVING hallway and up the spiral of a ship’s ladder. He had the impression of a hexagonal plan, the chambers fitting together like the space-efficient cells of a remarkably luxurious beehive: carpeted, quiet, beautifully appointed. There were at least three levels, stacked up, and undoubtedly storage bays he couldn’t see.

  Making a turn around a final bulkhead before coming to the central commons room, he glanced into a bridge, off to one side, and saw a bank of photonics glowing with graphics and text. He could hear the thrumming of fans and filter motors and the musical splash offishtank aeration and the faint grinding sound of mining robots shunting slag to the mass drivers, which provided acceleration and gravity simultaneously. Like the Stella Maris, this ship was based on a partially mined asteroid and much of its fundamental equipment was recognizable. The air-and-waste system included a Wolverton plant tube in the central cell. Full marks to God, Emilio thought. Plants still do a better job of making air than anything humans have invented.