Children of God

by Mary Doria Russell

  “Fuck you, too,” John said pleasantly, and went back to his nail.

  “A gentleman and a scholar,” Frans observed, raising an espresso in salute. “Well, then, perhaps we should look for an axiom upon which we can agree.” He studied the ceiling for a while. “You feel the need to discern some kind of hidden meaning here, am I correct? Something that will redeem the sorry mess you find yourself in.”

  John grunted, working on an index finger.

  “But that shouldn’t be hard,” Frans declared encouragingly. “If your perspective is broad enough, or your sense of history deep enough, or if you are sufficiently imaginative, you can find some kind of deeper meaning in almost anything. Take dreams. Ever hear of the Libro della Smorfia?” John shook his head. “Neapolitans, even educated ones, sleep with a book of dreams next to their beds. First thing every morning, even before they take a leak, they look up their dreams. Long journeys, dark strangers, dreams of flying—everything means something.”

  “Superstition,” John said dismissively. “Tea leaves and tarot cards.”

  “Don’t be rude, Johnny. Call it psychology,” Frans suggested, grinning, dewlaps swagged around his mouth. “It is a scholar’s task to find patterns in nature or cycles in history. Initially, it’s no different from finding portraits of animals and heroes in the stars. The question is, Have you discovered a preexisting truth? Or have you imposed an arbitrary meaning on whatever it is you’re considering?”

  “Yes. Maybe yes, to both,” John said. “I don’t know.” He stopped chewing and realized one of his fingers was bleeding.

  “Ah. I don’t know: a truth we can rally to.” Frans smiled beatifically, small teeth ivory in the pastel face. He adored conversations like this, and years of chauffeuring thugs and stiffs around the solar system had afforded very few of them. “This is delightful. I am playing devil’s advocate for a Jesuit! Perhaps,” he suggested slyly, “Abraham invented God because he needed to impose meaning on a chaotic, primitive world. We preserve this invented god and insist he loves us because we fear a large and indifferent universe.”

  John stared at him and then examined his own response, but before he could say anything, the forgotten Nico surprised them both by remarking, “Maybe when you’re frightened, you can hear God better because you’re listening harder.”

  Which was an interesting notion, except that it certainly hadn’t worked that way for John Candotti, waiting in the lander bay to be blown into space with nothing but bloody death on his mind. “I don’t know,” he repeated finally.

  “The human condition.” Frans sighed dramatically. “How we suffer in our anxiety and ignorance!” He brightened. “Which is why food and sex are so nice. Have you eaten?” he asked and, with that, got up and lumbered into the galley, leaving John to suck blood from a mangled nail bed.

  CANDOTTI WAS GONE WHEN FRANS CAME BACK TO THE TABLE WITH HIS lunch. Frans smiled at Nico, sitting serenely in his corner, humming “Questa o quella” from Rigoletto—the only opera Frans really liked.

  “Nico,” Frans announced as he sat down to eat, “I have spent the past few weeks in careful observation of our little band of travelers, and in marked contrast to Candotti’s existential angst, I myself have reached an inescapable conclusion. Would you like to hear it?” Nico stopped humming and looked at him: not expectant but polite. Nico was always polite. “Here is my conclusion, Nico: it’ll be a fucking miracle if anyone comes back from this run alive,” Frans told him around a mouthful of paglio fieno that he washed down with a swallow of moscato d’Asti. “You know what a Runao is, Nico?”

  “A kind of old car?”

  Frans took another bite. “No, Nico, that’s a Renault. A Runao is one of the Runa—the people who live on Rakhat, where we’re going.” Nico nodded and Frans continued. “A Runao is, for all practical purposes, a cow with an opinion.” He chewed for a while and swallowed. “His magnificence, Don Carlo, is a megalomaniac whose grand ambition is to rule over a nation of talking cows. To carry out this glorious mission, he has gathered together a circus freak, a dimwit, four priests and a goddamn cripple you had to beat half to death to get onto this ship.” Frans shook his head in amazement but stopped, still disgusted by the way his jowls and chins moved out of phase with his skull. “The priests think they’re going to Rakhat to do God’s work but do you know why you and I are here, Nico?” Frans asked rhetorically. “Because I am now so fucking fat I will never get laid again in my life anyway, so what the hell? And you are too dumb to say no. Carlo couldn’t get anybody else to come.”

  “That’s not true,” Nico said with bland conviction. “Don Carlo decided to go because he found out his sister Carmella was going to be boss.”

  Frans blinked. “You knew about that?”

  “Everybody knew, even the Yakuza in Japan,” Nico confided. “Don Carlo was very embarrassed.”

  “You’re right,” Frans admitted. Besides, there was no sense in stirring up trouble. Carlo was the padrone and Nico was devoted to him—he’d damned near killed a guy who’d given Giuliani a hard time over a bar bill. “And I apologize for saying you were dumb, Nico.”

  “You should take it back about the Runa, too, Frans.”

  “I take it back about the Runa,” said Frans promptly.

  “Because the Runa aren’t cows. They’re the good ones,” Nico informed him. “Those Jana people are the bad ones.”

  “I was only trying to be funny, Nico.” Years of experience to the contrary, Frans still hadn’t given up hope that Nico would learn to recognize irony and sarcasm. Which just goes to show who’s dumb, Frans thought, scooping up another forkful of pasta. “Are you a praying man, Nico?” he asked, changing the subject.

  “In the morning, and before I sleep. Hail Marys,” Nico told him.

  “Like the sisters taught you in the home, eh?”

  Nico nodded. “My name is Niccolo d’Angeli. ‘D’Angeli’ means from the angels,” he recited. “That’s where I came from, before the home. The angels left me. I say my prayers in the morning and before I sleep. Hail Marys.”

  “Brav’ scugnizz’, Nico. You’re a good boy,” Frans said aloud, but he was thinking, The angels who dropped you off must have been short a few last names in their genealogy, my friend. “You believe in God, then, do you, Nico?”

  “Yes, I do,” Nico affirmed solemnly. “The sisters told me.”

  Frans chewed for a while. “I have a little hypothesis about God, Nico,” he said, swallowing. “Want to hear my hypothesis?”

  “What’s a hy …?”

  “Hy-po-the-sis,” Frans said slowly. “An idea. A testable guess about the way something works. You understand, Nico?” The little skull nodded uncertainly. “Now here’s my idea. There’s an old story about a man and a cat—”

  “I like cats.”

  Why do I try? Frans asked himself, but soldiered on. “The man was a famous physicist named Schrödinger—don’t worry, Nico, you don’t have to remember his name. Schrödinger said that a thing isn’t true unless there’s someone to observe that it’s true. He said that observing actually makes an event turn into being true.”

  Nico looked miserable.

  “Don’t be worried, Nico. I’ll make it easy for you. Schrödinger said that if you put a cat in a box with—okay, let’s say with a plate of good food and a plate of poison food, and then you close the box—”

  “That’s mean,” Nico observed, glad to be back on concrete.

  “So is beating the crap out of ex-priests, Nico,” Frans told him, taking another bite. “Don’t interrupt. Now: the cat’s in the box, and he may have eaten the good food or the bad food. So he might be alive or he might be dead. But Schrödinger said that the cat isn’t actually alive or dead unless and until the man outside opens the box to see that the cat is alive or dead.”

  Nico thought that over. “You could listen to hear if it’s purring.”

  Frans stopped chewing for a moment and pointed at Nico with a fork. “That’s why you’re a
thug, and not a physicist or a philosopher.” He swallowed and went on. “Now here’s my idea about God. I think we’re like the cat. I think that God is like the man outside the box. I think that if the cat believes in the man, the man is there. And if the cat is an atheist, there is no man.”

  “Maybe there’s a lady,” Nico suggested helpfully.

  Frans choked on a piece of pasta and coughed for a while. “Maybe so, Nico. But here’s what I think. I think because you believe in God, maybe there’s going to be a God for you, when you get out of the box.” Nico opened his mouth and then closed it again, and appeared about to cry. “Don’t worry about it, Nico. You’re a good boy, and I’m sure God is there for good boys.”

  Frans got up and waddled back to the galley for something sweet. “That’s why I need you to pray for something,” he called as he rummaged through the bins. “Because God is there for you, but He might not be there for people who aren’t sure if they believe in Him.” He came back to the table with a generous portion of Black Forest cake. “I want you to pray for a miracle. Okay, Nico?”

  “Okay,” Nico agreed with utter sincerity.

  “Good. Now here’s my problem. Do you know why I’m so fat, Nico?”

  “You eat all the time.”

  “I’m an Afrikaner, Nico,” Frans said wearily. “Eating is our national sport. But I ate all the time before, remember? And I wasn’t like this two years ago! Sometimes when you’re out in space, your DNA—the instructions that make your body work, understand? Your DNA gets nicked by a few atoms of cosmic dust. That’s what happened to me, Nico—a random speck of shit just passing through on its way to the rim of the universe hits some critical piece of biological machinery and all hell breaks loose …”

  Suddenly, whatever he ate was used and used and used, every last erg of energy torn from each molecule of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen, and stored away in miserly, paranoiac fat cells waiting for a famine of mythic proportions to call upon them for heroic rescue of the body they were slowly, inexorably suffocating. “I fought it, Nico. In the beginning, I fought it. Exercised like a maniac. Starved myself. Spent all my time Earth-side going from doctor to doctor,” Frans told him.

  He had taken any drug anyone would prescribe or sell, looking for a cure or even just some hope, and became grosser and grosser, more and more a stranger to himself, scared shitless by the prospect of congestive heart and kidney failure.

  There was a sort of poetic justice in it, he supposed, and Frans Vanderhelst was nothing if not philosophical about such things. For years, he himself had profited from other people’s pathetic belief in a miracle cure. Carlo had run the scam for almost a decade before the insurance companies caught on. He preyed like a wolf on the weak—selecting only the richest and sickest, the most desperate and suggestible marks, assuring his hopeful, hopeless half-dead passengers that if they went fast enough, time would slow down for them and when they got back, medical advances on Earth would have caught up with their diseases and they’d go home to be cured. Convincingly sympathetic to their plight, Carlo explained how they would pay nothing now, that it was only necessary to list the Angels of Mercy Limited as the beneficiary to their life insurance policies.

  It was bullshit, of course. Frans just took them up and ran the engines at quarter-power for a few weeks, far from the unblinking gaze of medical ethics boards and police surveillance. The marks themselves never knew the difference. Most of them died on their own; Carlo’s drunken, defrocked doctors made sure of the rest.

  But now, Carlo had parlayed a scam into something real and Frans Vanderhelst actually was on his way to Rakhat—accelerating at an increasing percentage of the speed of light. And this time Frans himself was the poor, dumb fuck who hoped that during the four decades of his projected absence from Earth, someone would figure out how to make his body right again. Because, underneath an ever-thickening pad of adipose, behind now piggish eyes peering over puffed and pasty cheeks, Frans Vanderhelst was only thirty-six, a man in his prime. And Frans wanted very much to live.

  “So, here’s the miracle you should pray for, okay, Nico?” Frans said, laying down his fork. “Pray that we get back to Earth alive and pray that when we get there, someone will be able to fix it for me, so I can eat and still be normal? You got that, Nico?”

  Nico nodded. “Pray so we get back alive and you’re normal.”

  “Good, Nico. That’s good. I appreciate it,” said Frans as Nico went back to Verdi, picking up the Duke of Mantua’s aria where he’d left off a few minutes earlier.

  Frans sat for a time, thinking about Pascal’s wager. It was then that he realized he really did appreciate Nico’s prayers. After all, he thought, the one thing an agnostic knows for sure is: you never know.

  N’Jarr Valley, Northern Rakhat

  2078–2085, Earth-Relative

  DURING THE FINAL DAYS OF HIS LIFE, DANIEL IRON HORSE WOULD watch the tripled shadows on the walls of his stone house in the N’Jarr valley and think about the past. He was lucid until the end, but his mind would constantly take him back to the awful months spent on the Giordano Bruno. It would seem to him that he had existed then in a kind of silent limbo, aching for the end of his punishment, while the years rushed by on Rakhat.

  His penance had begun at the moment he gave his assent to the abduction, and it was the very one he had laid on Vincenzo Giuliani—to live with what he had done. His own was the lighter sentence. There was, for Daniel Iron Horse, some hope that he might live long enough to know the answer to a question Giuliani would carry to his grave: What if I am wrong about everything?

  Danny had asked himself that question over and over, as the weeks in Naples crawled by in the presence of the man they intended to harm irreversibly and, perhaps, for no good reason. He lived with that question for months on the Bruno in the company of men who could hardly stand the sight of him. He accepted their judgment. Pride was his sin, the worm at the core—a surefooted drive, powered by a lifelong and quite possibly deluded sense of having been prepared by God to do something extraordinary.

  As far as his father’s family had come from the squalor and debasement of the reservations, as much as he himself publicly rejected the stereotypes and romance of his Lakota heritage, Daniel Iron Horse had taken secret satisfaction in it. From childhood, he had known himself to be the scion of men who rode with Crazy Horse and Little Big Man of the Oglalas, with Black Shield and Lame Deer of the Miniconjous, with Spotted Eagle and Red Bear of the Sans Arcs, with Black Moccasin and Ice of the Cheyennes, and with Sitting Bull of the Hunkpapas—heroes who led the finest light cavalry in history in defense of their families and their land, who had fought to preserve a way of life that valued, above all else, courage, fortitude, generosity and transcendent spiritual vision.

  Just as strong a tradition: his family’s long association with the Black Robes, whose own beliefs upheld those same values. His five-times great-grandmother was among the first of the Lakota to be converted to Christianity by Pierre-Jean De Smet, a Jesuit of legendary charm and grace, whose utter fearlessness had afforded him unrivaled credibility among the tribes of the American West. The Lakota believed that all peoples, if not all persons, seek the divine; the Christian God’s call to universal peace was proclaimed as well by the White Buffalo Calf Woman. Blood sacrifice to the Wakan Tanka—the Great Mystery—was familiar as well. Even the crucifix was resonant: Jesus’s body, arms outstretched, pierced and hung from a cross, so like the pierced and suspended bodies of the Sun Dancers, visionaries who knew what it was to offer their own flesh and blood to God on behalf of their people—in thanks, in supplication, in terrible joy. At Masses celebrated by Jesuit friends, many Lakota had worshiped the sacred and incomprehensible power that watched over all, that listened to the prayers of those who offered sacrifice, not their own flesh and blood any longer—for Jesus changed all that—but bread and wine, consecrated in memory of ultimate sacrifice.

  Surely, this was apprenticeship: the mixed nature of his making, t
he manner of his education, the talent and energy and insight that Daniel Iron Horse brought to maturity. It was all preparation for the day when he first opened the Rakhat mission reports and read the accounts of what the Stella Maris party had seen and learned. He came to believe, with a conviction that grew stronger and more unshakable as he read, that he was meant to go to Rakhat, for of all those who might have been sent, only Daniel Iron Horse would truly understand the fragile beauty of Jana’ata culture.

  He feared for them.

  The people of the plains, too, had depended utterly on a single species of prey and they, too, had been been thought by outsiders to be a dangerous people who loved war. Danny knew that was true, but only a small crooked part of the truth. And he came to believe that if he went to Rakhat, he might somehow redeem the heartbreaking losses that had befallen the Lakota by helping the Jana’ata find a new way of life—one that would preserve the highest virtues of the warrior, and of the hunter, and of the Jesuit: courage and fortitude, generosity and vision.

  Sometimes on the Bruno, late at night, the filter fans humming, the subaural rumble of the Bruno’s engines more felt than heard, Danny would recall the thought that had come to him as he read the Rakhat reports: I would do anything to go. He had meant it only as a figure of speech but God held him to a Faustian bargain.

  “We are closer to the old ways, you and I,” Gelasius III had said to Daniel Iron Horse, in private audience. “We understand the need for sacrifice, to make our belief in God concrete, to offer God our faith entire: that if we align ourselves with His will, all will be well. Now you and I are called upon to offer a sacrifice that will test our faith, almost as Abraham’s was tested. It is harder than to offer our own bodies. You and I must offer Sandoz, bound like Abraham’s son Isaac. We must do what seems cruel and incomprehensible and, in doing so, prove that we trust in God’s plan and act as His instruments. We serve a Father Who did not flinch from Abraham’s sacrifice, Who required and permitted the crucifixion of His own Son! And Who sometimes requires that we also sacrifice that which we hold dearest, in service to His will. This I believe. Can you also believe this?”