Children of God

by Mary Doria Russell

  It was only after taking in the general layout of the room that he looked at the six men who now stood or sat staring back at him.

  “You knew,” Sandoz said to Danny Iron Horse. Joseba Urizarbarrena turned, open-mouthed, toward Danny. Sean Fein’s expression was already beginning to harden into censure. “A sin of omission,” Sandoz commented, but Danny said nothing.

  “Your braces are in storage, Sandoz,” Carlo said. “Would you like them now?”

  “After I get John, thank you. Where is the hangar hatch, please?”

  “Nico!” said Carlo, “show Don Emilio the way.”

  Nico stepped forward and led Sandoz through a corridor. “Two landers, Sandoz!” Carlo called out while the air pressures between the crew quarters and the cavernous hangar were being equalized. “Both with fuel efficiency and range vastly improved over the lander that failed you in the first mission. And one of mine is a drone that can be operated remotely. I have learned from my predecessors’ mistakes! The crew of the Giordano Bruno shall not be marooned on the surface of Rakhat!”

  There was a sighing hush as Nico unlocked the hatch. “Per favore,” Sandoz asked, “un momento solo, si?”

  Nico looked back down the passageway to Carlo for permission. This was granted with a regal nod. Stepping out of the way, Nico held the hatch open for Sandoz.

  He stepped through, the heavy steel door closing behind him with a metallic clang that would have been terrifying if he weren’t doped to the gills. Working his way around the landers, he stopped to check the tie-downs and the cargo doors. Everything was secure. Even the engines’ bell housings were clean. Then he spotted John. Candotti was sitting on the uneven surface of the floor, his back against the roughly sealed bulkhead, just behind the drone.

  Gray as the stone guts of the asteroid that formed the Bruno’s hull, John looked up as Emilio ducked under the lander fuselage and stood above him. “Oh, my God,” John moaned miserably. “Just when I thought things couldn’t get worse.”

  “Take it from a man who knows,” Emilio said, voice slightly blurred. “Things can always get worse.”

  “Emilio, I swear, I didn’t know!” John said, starting to cry again. “I knew Carlo had somebody in the sick bay, but I didn’t know who or why—. I should have tried—. Oh, Jesus …”

  “It’s okay, John. There was nothing you could have done.” Even drugged, Emilio knew how to go through the motions: what to do and what to say. “That’s better,” he said, kneeling next to Candotti, using his wrists to pull the larger man’s head to his chest. “It’s better to cry,” he said, but he didn’t feel anything, not really. Odd, he thought numbly, as John sobbed. This is what I wished for, all those months before Gina …

  “I couldn’t pray,” John said in a small voice.

  “It’s okay, John.”

  “I sat here by the door so I wouldn’t make a mess and foul up the landing gear,” John said, sucking in snot and trying to get a grip on himself. “Carlo told Nico that if he didn’t come back in ten minutes, vent the bay! I couldn’t pray. All I could think about was raspberry jam.” He made a sound like an explosion and grinned wetly, eyes raw. “Too many space vids.”

  “I know. It’s okay.” His hands were bad, but he let John cling to him in spite of that, and realized with detached interest that the pain was easier to tolerate because he couldn’t seem to worry that it would be permanent this time. A useful lesson, he thought, looking over John’s head at the exterior hangar doors. They were free of dust and had been cycled recently. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go inside. Can you stand?”

  “Yeah. Sure.” John got to his feet on his own and wiped his face, but flopped against the sealed rock wall, looking even more loosely strung together than usual. “Okay,” he said after a time.

  When they got to the hatch that led back into the living quarters of the ship, Emilio motioned for John to bang on it, not wanting to jar his own hands. “Don’t give ‘em anything, John,” he said as they waited for the door to be reopened. John looked blank at first, but then nodded and stood straighter.

  “Words to live by,” Emilio Sandoz said quietly, not seeing John anymore. “Don’t give the bastards a goddamned thing.”

  IT WAS NOT NICO BUT SEAN FEIN, LOOKING LIKE THE WRATH OF GOD, WHO reopened the door for them and silently took charge of John, shepherding him around a bulkhead toward the upper-deck cabins. Carlo was nowhere to be seen and Iron Horse was gone as well, but Joseba’s voice, demanding and insistent, could be heard indistinctly from somewhere below the commons.

  The braces were waiting on the table, where Nico was eating lunch with a square and fleshy person whose gross bulk made a remarkable contrast to his flowery Impressionist coloring: jonquil-yellow hair falling lankly over skin of rosebud pink and eyes of hyacinth blue.

  Sandoz sat down and dragged the braces closer, drawing his hands into them, one by one.

  “Frans Vanderhelst,” the fat man said, by way of introduction. “Pilot.”

  “Emilio Sandoz,” his table companion replied. “Conscript.” Hands in his lap, he regarded the huge young man who sat next to Frans. “And you are Nico,” Sandoz acknowledged, “but we have not been formally introduced.”

  “Emilio Sandoz: Niccolo d’Angeli,” said Frans obligingly, around a mouthful of food. “He doesn’t say much, but—chizz è un brav’ scugnizz’—you’re a good boy, aren’t you, Nico? Si un brav’ scugnizz’, eh, Nico?”

  Nico dabbed at his mouth with a napkin before speaking, careful of his nose, which was faintly discolored. “Brav scugnizz,” he affirmed obediently, liquid brown eyes serious in a skull that was a little small for a man of his size.

  “How’s your nose, Nico?” Sandoz asked without a hint of malice. “Still sore?” Nico seemed to be thinking hard about something else, so Sandoz turned to Frans. “Last time we met, you were helping Nico kick the shit out of me, as I recall.”

  “You were fucking with the navigation programs,” Frans pointed out reasonably, taking another bite. “Nico and I were only doing our jobs. No hard feelings?”

  “No feelings at all, as far as I can tell,” Sandoz reported amiably. “I presume from your accent that you are from … Johannesburg, yes?” Frans inclined his head: very good! “And from your name, that you are not a Catholic.”

  Vanderhelst swallowed and made an offended face. “Dutch Reformed agnostic—very different from a Catholic agnostic, mind you.”

  Sandoz nodded, accepting the observation without comment. He leaned back in his chair and looked around.

  “The best of everything,” Frans pointed out, following Sandoz’s gaze. Every fixture, every piece of equipment was shining, dustless and neatly stowed or properly in use, Frans noted with pride. The Giordano Bruno was a well-run ship. And a hospitable one—Frans raised his nearly invisible yellow eyebrows, along with a bottle of pinot grigio. Sandoz shrugged: Why not? “Glasses’re stowed on the second shelf above the sink,” Frans told him, going back to his meal. “You can get yourself something to eat if you’re hungry. Plenty to choose from. The boss sets a nice table.”

  Sandoz stood and moved to the galley. Frans listened to him unlocking pot lids and opening food storage compartments to look over the possibilities, which were dazzling. A few minutes later, Sandoz returned with a glass in one robot hand and a plate of chicken cacciatore in the other. “You do pretty well with those things,” Frans said, motioning at the braces with his fork.

  “Yes. Takes practice,” Sandoz said without emotion. He poured himself some wine and took a sip before starting on the stew. “This is excellent,” he said after a time.

  “Nico made it,” Frans told him. “Nico is a man of many talents.”

  Nico beamed. “I like to cook,” he said. “Bucatini al dente, grilled scamorza, pizza Margherita, eggplant fritatas …”

  “I thought you didn’t eat meat,” said Frans, as Sandoz chewed chicken.

  Sandoz looked down at his plate. “I’ll be damned,” he remarked mildly.
“And my hands are killing me, but I don’t seem to care about that either. What am I on?”

  “It’s a variant of Quell,” said Danny Iron Horse, just behind him. He moved noiselessly around the table and stood behind Nico, across from Sandoz. Frans, feeling very happy, looked from one face to the other like a spectator at Wimbledon. “It’s generally used to control prison riots,” Iron Horse said. “Leaves cognition intact. Emotion is flattened.”

  “Your idea?” Sandoz asked.

  “Carlo’s, but I didn’t try to talk him out of it.” Danny might have been doped on Quell himself for all the emotion he showed; Frans began to be disappointed.

  “Interesting drug,” Sandoz commented. He picked up a knife, examining its edge idly, and then glanced at his plate. “The smell of meat has nauseated me ever since the massacres, but now …” He shrugged, raising his eyes from the blade to Iron Horse. “I believe I could cut out your heart and eat it,” he said, sounding vaguely surprised, “if I thought it would buy me ten minutes with my family.”

  Iron Horse remained impassive. “But it wouldn’t,” he said. Frans was smiling again.

  “No. So I may as well make the best of things as they are.”

  “I was hoping you’d see it that way,” said Iron Horse, and he turned to leave.

  “Danny?” Sandoz called, as Iron Horse was about to disappear.

  If the bulkheads hadn’t been treated with a polymer that made them resistant to rupture, the knife would have sunk a good way in; instead, it bounced off the wall next to Danny’s face and clattered to the floor.

  “Amazing how old skills come back when you need them.” Sandoz smiled, cold-eyed. “I would like to have seen one child grow up,” he said in that awful, ordinary voice. “How long have we been under way, Mr. Vanderhelst?”

  Frans realized that he’d stopped breathing and shifted his bulk in the chair. “Almost four weeks.”

  “I was never able to understand why time contracts this way. Kids change so quickly, especially when their daddies are traveling at relativistic speeds. Why, Danny? The means are very nasty indeed. May I know the ends that justify them?”

  “Tell him,” Sean Fein snapped wearily, entering the commons after having seen Candotti safely into his cabin. “God knows what day it is on this forsaken tub, but it must be Yom Kippur on some calendar or other. A rabbi would tell you it isn’t enough t’beg God’s forgiveness, Danny. You must ask pardon of the man y’wronged.” When Danny remained silent, he snapped, “Tell him, dammit, for Jesus’ sake and the good of your miserable soul.”

  Back stiff against the bulkhead, Daniel Iron Horse spoke, the hollowness of his voice matching that of his rationales. “The reversal of the Suppression of the Society of Jesus, with all suits and countersuits dropped or settled out of court. A position of influence from which programs of birth control and political action on behalf of the poor will be implemented throughout the sphere of Church authority. The transfer from the Camorra to the Vatican of evidence establishing the identity of priests corrupted by organized crime, as well as those who are known to be incorruptible, so that the Church can be purged of elements that have undermined the moral authority of Rome. The means for the Society of Jesus to return to Rakhat and to continue God’s work there.” He paused, and then gave the only reason that mattered. “The salvation of one soul.”

  “Mine?” Sandoz asked with amused detachment. “Well, I admire your ambition, if not your methods, Father Iron Horse.”

  “They wouldn’t have hurt John,” Danny said. “That was a bluff.”

  “Really?” Sandoz shrugged, mouth pulled down in thought. “I’ve been kidnapped and beaten senseless twice in a month,” he pointed out. “I’m afraid I’m inclined to take Carlo’s threats seriously.”

  Wretched, Danny said, “I am sorry, Sandoz.”

  “Your sorrow is of no interest to me,” Sandoz said softly. “If you want absolution, go to a priest.”

  Disgusted, Sean went to the galley. When he returned to the table with a glass and a bottle of Jameson’s, Danny was still standing there, bleak eyes locked on Sandoz. “And what about Candotti?” Sean snapped at Iron Horse. Danny drew in a breath and turned to leave, but not before picking up the knife and laying it down in front of Sandoz.

  Which, in Frans’s opinion, must have taken a fair bit of nerve. The Puerto Rican was unsteady from weeks of confinement to bed and, of course, his hands were crippled, so it was hard to distinguish inaccuracy from intent, but Frans had the impression that Sandoz could have nailed Danny to the wall if he’d felt like it. Carlo had Candotti for insurance, but the Chief was on his own …

  “Well, now, like it or not, here we all are,” Sean said, pouring himself a drink. He tossed it off before looking at Sandoz with humorless blue eyes. “It’s just a guess, but I’m willin’ t’bet nothin’ in God’s wide universe would make that man feel worse than your forgiveness. It’d be coals on his head, Sandoz.”

  “Well, now,” Sandoz said dryly, mimicking Sean’s accent, “that’s worth considerin’.”

  Frans was hugely entertained. “You play cards?” he asked Sandoz.

  “I wouldn’t want to take unfair advantage,” Sandoz demurred, unruffled by the drama. He stood and carried his dishes back to the galley. “I have always heard that the Dutch Reformed aren’t much for cards.”

  “We aren’t much for liquor either,” Frans pointed out, pouring another round for everyone but Nico, who didn’t drink because the sisters had told him not to.

  “This is true,” Sandoz said, returning to the table. “Poker?”

  “It’ll make a change from that bloody scopa,” said Sean.

  “How about you, Nico?” Frans asked, reaching for a worn deck that was always on the table.

  “I’ll just watch,” Nico said courteously.

  “I know, Nico,” Frans said patiently. “I was only being polite. It’s okay, Nico. You don’t have to play.”

  “I’d like to send a message home first, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble,” Sandoz said.

  “Radio’s right through that hatch, to your left,” Frans told him. “It’s all set up. Just record the message and hit ‘send.’ Yell if you need help.”

  “Not bloody likely,” Sean muttered as Sandoz left the commons.

  He sat down in front of the communications equipment and considered for a while what he would say. “Fucked again,” came to mind, but the message would arrive when Celestina was still very young, and he rejected the remark as too vulgar.

  He settled on eleven words. “Taken by force,” he said. “I think of you. Listen with your hearts.”

  City of Inbrokar

  2047, Earth-Relative

  “I WON’T HAVE IT,” THE AMBASSADOR FUMED, CLAWS CLICKING AS HE paced from one end of the embassy’s innermost courtyard to the other. Ma Gurah Vaadai came to rest in front of his wife, his ears cocked, and defied her to argue. “I’ll resign before I give my daughter to that beast. How dare he ask for a child of mine!”

  “My lord, Hlavin Kitheri hasn’t asked for our Sakinja,” soothed the lady Suukmel Chirot u Vaadai as she lifted a graceful hand and with a gesture of melting beauty, pulled a simple silken headpiece back into place as though she were wrapping her soul in calm. “His invitation was simply-”

  “He is a coward,” Ma snarled, swinging away from her. “He assassinated his whole family—”

  “Almost certainly,” Suukmel purred as he stalked away, “but unproven.”

  “—and then lied about it! As though anyone would believe that vaporous nonsense about a merchant—a midlands peddler!—bringing down the whole of a lineage like the Kitheri. And now he dares to ask for my daughter!” Face twisted with disgust, Ma turned to his wife. “Suukmel, he buggers animals—and sings about it!”

  “Admittedly.” She did not object to her husband’s vulgarity. It was an ambassador’s daily burden to speak always with forbearance and tact; Suukmel was happy to afford Ma this small relief. “Hlavin Kitheri is,
as my lord husband points out, many remarkable things,” she continued with pacific confidence, “but he is also a man of admirable breadth of view, a great poet—”

  “That rubbish!” the ambassador muttered, glaring past her in the direction of the Kitheri palace, dominating the center of Inbrokar. “He’s mad, Suukmel—”

  “Ah, forgive your poor wife, my gracious lord, but ‘madness’ is a word used imprecisely, and too often. A careful person might say discontented or desperate or extraordinary instead,” Suukmel suggested. “Have pity on anyone whose nature is not well suited to a role decreed by birth, for it is a difficult life.” She rearranged her gown and settled into a new posture, more graceful but subtly more commanding as well. “Hlavin Kitheri has acceded to his Patrimony, my lord. Whatever his past, whatever the circumstances of his rise, whatever your private reservations about his character, it is your public duty as Mala Njer’s ambassador to treat the forty-eighth Paramount as the legitimate ruler of Inbrokar.”

  Her husband growled at that, but she continued thoughtfully. “Kitheri is a man worth studying, my lord. Even apart from the poetry, his years of exile in Galatna Palace do not appear to have been wasted. He has, shall we say, intimate contacts all over his territory?” Ma grunted, amused, and she continued smilingly, voice light. “Men of ability and energy, men who now bring to Kitheri information and insight. Ideas. Perspective. Already, in the first season of his reign, he has created new and unprecedented offices and appointed such men to them, even thirds, and he has done this almost without opposition from those who cherish tradition.”

  Ma Gurah Vaadai’s prowling ceased and he turned to stare at his wife. Her eyes dropped becomingly only to return to his with a gaze that seemed both direct and curious. “It is interesting, is it not? How has he managed this?” she asked in a voice full of wonder. “Perhaps my dear lord will discover something of value in your observation of him at court?” she suggested. “In any case, Kitheri is no longer looking for a wife.”