Children of God

by Mary Doria Russell

  “And Isaac? Did you show him? DNA sequences for all three species?”

  “Not directly. Isaac was often nearby when I taught Ha’anala. I had the impression he was listening sometimes. He must have been, I guess. I didn’t realize how closely he was paying attention. Or perhaps he went back to the tutorials on his own. Autistics of normal or superior intelligence sometimes read very deeply on one subject at a time.” It must have seemed to him to be the perfect reduction of life’s chaos and noise to its constituent elements, she thought. Simple, neat, explanatory. Adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine—that was all you needed.

  There was a long silence. Maybe Danny’s mind wandered as well, Sofia thought. “Mrs. Quinn,” he said after a time, and she smiled sightlessly. How quaint, to be called that now, here, after so many years … “Did you ever suspect, about Isaac? Was there anything that made you think that he might be …?”

  No one could say the word. It was too frightening. “No,” she said. “Not until I heard the music. I had no idea. But I knew from the beginning that Ha’anala was something special. Once, when I was trying to explain to her about the war, I told her the story of the Exodus. I meant for her to learn about the liberation of the Hebrew slaves, so that she could understand why the Runa were fighting, but she couldn’t get over the VR displays of Egypt, and the hundreds of gods of Egypt. A few days later, Ha’anala said, ‘The Egyptians could see their gods. If you wanted to talk to the god of the river, you dressed well, made yourself ready and went to him. He saw you only at your best. The God of Israel can’t be seen, but he sees us—when we are ready, when we are not ready, when we are at our best or at our worst or paying no attention. Nothing can be hidden from such a God. That’s why people fear Him.’ ”

  “A remarkable insight,” Danny Iron Horse observed.

  “Yes. She was an extraordinary child—” Sofia stopped, struck by a thought. Perhaps Ha’anala wasn’t extraordinary. Perhaps she was just what others of her kind could have been, but Sofia hadn’t known any others. Except Supaari. And now.… So many dead, she thought, her small, arthritic hands curled on her thighs. So many dead …

  That was when the other priest spoke up. Sean Fein. “And what did y’tell her about the God of Israel?” he asked.

  How long has he been listening? Sofia wondered irritably. John Candotti always tells me when he’s here. Why don’t people speak up? Then she thought, Maybe Sean did, and I forgot. “I told her, That is why my people fear God, but also why we love Him, because He sees all we do, knows all we are, and still loves us.”

  As was so often the case these days, she drifted away then, to spend her time with people who were long gone, who were more real to her than these new ones. “Even if it’s only poetry, it’s poetry to live by, Sofia—poetry to die for,” D. W. Yarbrough had told her—when? Fifty years ago? Sixty? And she herself was so old, so old. She didn’t know if there was an afterlife, but she had begun to hope so, not because she feared oblivion, but simply because she wanted to know if she had done the right thing.

  It might have been a minute, or an hour, or a day later when she spoke again. “Once I told Ha’anala about the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah,” she said, and waited for some response.

  “I’m right here, Sofia,” John told her.

  “I told her how Abraham bargained with God for the lives of ten righteous men who might have lived there. She said to me, ‘Abraham should have taken the babies from the cities. The babies were innocent.’ ” Sofia turned her face toward John’s voice. “I wasn’t wrong to tell her the stories,” she said. “I don’t believe that I was wrong.”

  “You did the right thing,” John Candotti told her. “I’m sure of it.”

  She slept then. John’s faith was enough.

  Giordano Bruno

  2065, Earth-Relative

  “WHAT? WHAT IS IT?” SANDOZ ASKED, SHIELDING HIS EYES AGAINST THE sudden light with an arm thrown across his face.

  “You were screaming again,” John told him.

  Emilio sat up in his bunk, puzzled, but not distressed. He squinted at John, who was standing half-naked in the cabin doorway. “Sorry,” Emilio said blandly. “Didn’t mean to wake you up.”

  “Emilio, this can’t go on,” John said tightly. “You’ve got to make Carlo take you off this drug.”

  “I don’t see why, John. It helps with my hands, and I’ve been over-amped so long, it’s kind of nice not to give a damn about anything.”

  John gaped at him. “You’re screaming damned near every night!”

  “Yeah, well, the nightmares have been bad for years. At least now I don’t remember them when I wake up.” Moving back to lean against the bulkhead, he studied John with an infuriatingly tolerant amusement. “If the noise bothers you, I could move back into the sick bay—that room’s soundproofed.”

  “Jesus, Emilio—it’s not my sleep I’m worried about!” John cried. “I looked this Quell shit up, okay? You are going into debt, man. You don’t feel anything directly, but the bill is coming due! Look at how you’re breathing! Pay attention! Your heart is racing, right?” Sandoz frowned, and then nodded, but shrugged. “Quell’s only supposed to be used for a couple of days at a time. You’ve been on it for almost two months! You’ve got to come back to reality some time, and the sooner the better—”

  “Jeez, John, relax, will you? Maybe you should try this stuff—”

  John stared at him, openmouthed. “You’re not thinking straight,” he said flatly, and with that, he touched off the light and left, closing the cabin door behind him.

  EMILIO SANDOZ SAT FOR A TIME PROPPED AGAINST THE BULKHEAD, ruined hands limp and nerveless in his lap, as his body cooled. He tried to reconstruct the nightmare that had jarred John awake, but was content when it stayed just beyond his mind’s reach.

  Nocturnal amnesia was quite possibly the best part about being doped, he decided.

  He had always paid attention to dreams. Early in formation, he’d made a habit of thinking about the last one of the night, probing for anxieties and hidden concerns that hadn’t yet surfaced in his waking life. But for the past three years, his dreams had rarely required interpretation. Terrifying in their unadorned verisimilitude, his ordinary nightmares were plain and simple reenactments of incidents during his last year on Rakhat. Even now, drugged and placid, he could see it all: the slaughter, the poets. Not needing to dream, he could hear the sounds of massacre and of violation. Taste the meat of infants. Feel the unbreakable grip, the hot breath on the back of his neck. Watch from a distance as he shouted God’s name and heard nothing but his own sobbing and a rapist’s labored groan of satisfaction …

  Night after night, he’d awakened from such dreams nauseated to the point of vomiting. The screaming was new. Had the nightmares themselves changed? he wondered, and answered himself: Who cares? Screaming beats the hell out of throwing up.

  John was probably right—he’d have to return to reality sometime, he supposed. But reality didn’t have a great deal to recommend it these days, and Emilio was quite willing to exchange whatever message was embedded in these new dreams for the artificial tranquility of Quell.

  Chemical Zen, he thought, as he slid back down under the covers of his bunk, submerging again in the drug’s quietude. Cops’re probably handing this crap out on the street corners like candy.

  Just before he dozed off, he wondered idly, Christ—what kind of dream would it take, to make me scream? But, like Pius IX after the Mortara boy’s kidnapping, ipse vero dormiebat: he slept well after that.

  NO ONE ELSE DID.

  John Candotti went directly from Sandoz’s cabin to his own, where he activated the intercom codes needed to speak to everyone but Emilio. “Commons. Five minutes,” he said, in a voice that left no doubt that he would personally drag each of them out of bed if they didn’t come voluntarily.

  There was a certain amount of grumbling, but no one could pretend they hadn’t been startled awake again by the screams, so, one by one, they appear
ed as summoned. John waited silently, arms over his chest, until Carlo finally strolled in, fresh-looking and beautifully dressed, as always, with Nico in his wake.

  “Okay,” John said with tight and quiet courtesy, looking at each of them in turn, “you’ve all got your reasons. But he’s no good to anybody if he’s psychotic, and that’s where this is heading!”

  Sean nodded, rubbing his prematurely drooping jowls with both hands. “Candotti’s right. Y’ can’t fack with the man’s neurochemistry forever,” he told Carlo. “This’ll get worse.”

  “I have to agree,” Joseba said, raking fingers through the snarled mess of his hair and studying Iron Horse. He stretched and yawned. “Whatever the motive for drugging him in the beginning, it’s time to deal with the consequences.”

  “I imagine he’s over his sulk by now,” said Carlo, shrugging ersatz indifference, for his own dreams lately had been of falling alone through black places that appeared under his feet and had no bottom. It was difficult not to be unnerved by Sandoz’s nightmares. “Your call, Iron Horse,” he said lightly, quite willing to let Danny take the rap.

  “It’s not just the Quell,” John warned, glaring at Danny. “It’s having his life wrecked—again. It’s being screwed over—again, and this time by people he should have been able to trust. There’s a lot to answer for.”

  “Lock up the knives,” Frans Vanderhelst advised cheerfully, his pale belly lunar in the dim light of a shipboard night, “or the Chief is going to get it in the back.”

  Nico shook his head. “There will be no fighting on the Bruno,” he said firmly, pleased when Don Carlo nodded his approval.

  “I’ll speak to him, then, Danny, shall I?” Sean Fein asked.

  Iron Horse nodded and left the commons, without having said a word.

  “FOR YOU, CHEMISTRY IS HOLY ORDER AND SACRED BEAUTY,” VINCENZO Giuliani had remarked on the day he’d assigned Sean to the Rakhat mission. “Humans simply fuck things up, don’t they, Father Fein.”

  And there was no point in denying the observation.

  Sean Fein was only nine when he received his first imperishable lesson in human folly. The movement that made an orphan of him had gotten its start in the Philippines in 2024, the year he was born, but by the time it reached its peak in 2033, he was old enough to be concerned. It had seemed that Belfast, for once, would not get caught up in the craziness; having concentrated venomous attention on the hairsbreadth of difference between its Catholic and Protestant citizens, the town seemed not to notice the odd Jew here and there in its brick mazes. And yet there had been great expectation that the second millennium since the Crucifixion would end with the Second Coming of Christ. When Jesus failed to materialize on the millennialists’ timetable, the rumor began that it was the Jews’ fault because they didn’t believe.

  “Don’t worry,” his father told Sean the night before the firebomb. “It’s nothin’ to do with us.”

  Bitterness was the backbone of Belfast, but Maura Fein was a philosophical woman who took her widowhood in stride. Sean had asked her once why she had not converted to Judaism when she married. “The great appeal of Jesus, Sean, is the willingness of God to walk among the benighted creatures He just can’t seem to give up on,” she told him. “There is a glorious looniness to it—the magnificent eternal gesture of salvation, in the face of perennial, thickheaded human inanity! I like that in a deity.”

  Sean had not inherited his mother’s basic cheer, but he did share her jaundiced enjoyment of divine lunacy. He had followed the banner of the Lord, heedless of the personal consequences, and accepted that it was now leading him to another planet, with not one but two sentient species to bollix up creation.

  Hand out free will, he’d think gazing at a crucifix, and look where it gets You! Bored with physics, were You? Plants too predictable, I suppose? Not enough drama in big fish eatin’ the littlies, eh? What on Earth were Y’ thinkin’ of! Or what on Rakhat, for that matter …

  Sean had been born into a world that took the existence of other sentient species for granted. He was fourteen when the first mission reports had come back from Rakhat; seventeen when they ended mysteriously. Twenty-two when he heard of the scandals and tragedies that surrounded Emilio Sandoz. He had merely shrugged, unsurprised. Humans and their ilk were God’s problem, as far as Sean Fein was concerned, and the Almighty was more than welcome to them.

  But if Sean Fein, chemist and priest, rarely found reason to approve the results of his God’s whimsical decision to bestow sentience on the odd species here and there, he could nevertheless admire the mechanics that ran the show. Iron and manganese, pried by rain from stone, swirled with calcium and magnesium in ancient milky seas. Small, nimble molecules—nitrogen, oxygen, water, argon, carbon dioxide—dancing in the atmosphere, spinning, glancing off one another, “the feeble force of gravity gathering them in a thin vapor around the planet,” wrote chemistry’s psalmist Bill Green, “like some invisible shepherd, drawing together his invisible flock.” Cyanobacteria—the clever little buggers—learning to break the double bonds that bind oxygen in carbon dioxide; using the carbon and a few other oceanic bits and pieces to produce peptides, polypeptides, polysaccharides; throwing off oxygen as waste, setting it free. Genesis for Sean was literal: Let there be sunlight to power the system, and the whole biosphere comes alive. God’s chemistry, Green called it, with its swimming, dancing, fornicating ions, its tangled, profligate undergrowth of plant lignins and cellulose, the matlike hemes and porphyrins, the helical proteins winding and unwinding.

  “Steep yourself in the sea of matter,” the French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin advised. “Bathe in its fiery waters, for it is the source of your life.” This was a glory Sean Fein could appreciate, this was a glimpse of Divine Intelligence that he could adore unreservedly.

  “The people you feel sorriest for are the fools who hope for justice and sense, and not just in the world to come,” the Father General told him. “But God instilled in us a capacity to value mercy and justice, and it’s only human to hope for them, here and now. Maybe it’s foolish, but we do. This mission is going to teach you something, Sean. Compassion for fools? Perhaps even respect? Learn the lesson, Sean, and pass it on.”

  “THIS INGWY, SHE’S A HIGH GODDESS, IS SHE?” SEAN ASKED SANDOZ when the others had cleared out of the commons after a quiet breakfast.

  Emilio set his coffee mug on the table, brace servos humming. There was still a fault in one of the electroelastic actuators, but he had learned to work around it. “I don’t think so. I had the impression she might be a personification of foresight or prophesy—just from context. Supaari was not a believer, but her name came up now and then.” It was interesting, the way the drug took him. He felt almost like an AI construct, able to respond to requests for information, even to solve problems at times. On the other hand, it seemed impossible to learn anything new. No desire for mastery, he guessed. “There are others,” he told Sean. “Wisdom—or Cunning, perhaps, also feminine. It wasn’t clear what the translation should be. He also mentioned a goddess of Chaos once. She is one of the Calamities.”

  “Female deities,” Sean said, frowning. “Odd, wouldn’t y’say? In a society dominated by males?”

  “There is perhaps an older belief system underlying the present culture. Religion is generally conservative.”

  “True. True for you.” Sean looked away, quiet for a time. “Did y’ever wonder then why Orthodox Jews count lineage through the mother’s ancestry?” Sean asked. “Strange, isn’t it? The entire Old Testament, filled with begats. Twelve tribes for the twelve sons of Jacob. But Jacob had a daughter, too. Remember? Dina. The one who was raped.” There was no reaction from Sandoz. “And yet, there’s no Tribe of Dina. Patrilineage, all through the Torah! Religion is conservative, as y’say. So why? When was it declared that a Jew is the child of a Jewish mother?”

  “I have always hated the Socratic method,” Sandoz said without heat, but he answered dutifully. “During the pogroms, to le
gitimize the Cossacks’ bastards.”

  “Yes, so none of the children would be stigmatized as half-Jew or no Jew a-tall. And good for the rabbis, I say.” Sean had spent a childhood being asked, “What are y’then?” Whatever he answered, the buggers’d laugh. “So. To legitimize the children of rape, when rape was so common the rabbis had to overturn twenty-five hundred years of tradition to cope with it. Good girls and bad. Virgins and whores. Young and old alike. Devout and indifferent and apostate. All done.” He gazed at Sandoz with steady blue eyes. “And not a one of ‘em ever got an apology from God, nor from the fackin’ basturd who done her.”

  Sandoz didn’t even blink. “Your point is taken. I am neither the first nor the only person to be worked over.”

  “So what?” Sean demanded. “Does it help to know that?”

  “Not a blind bit,” Sandoz said in Sean’s own voice. He sounded irritable. It might have been the mimicry.

  “Nor should it,” Sean snapped. “Sufferin’ may be banal and predictable, but it doesn’t hurt any less for all that. And it’s despicable to take comfort in knowin’ that others have suffered as well.” He was watching Sandoz carefully now. “I’m told y’blame God for what happened on Rakhat. Why not blame Satan? Do y’believe in the devil, then, Sandoz?”

  “But that is irrelevant,” Sandoz said lightly. “Satan ruins people by tempting them to take an easy or pleasurable path.” He was on his feet, taking his mug and plate to the galley.

  “Spoken like a good Jesuit,” Sean called to him. “And there was nothin’ easy nor pleasurable in what happened to you.”

  Sandoz reappeared, empty-handed. “No. Nothing,” he said, voice soft, eyes hard. “ ‘As fish are caught in a net and as birds are trapped, so are the children of men entrapped—this I experienced under the sun, and it seemed a great evil to me.’ ”