Children of God

by Mary Doria Russell

  “Ecclesiasticus. Omnia vanitas: All is vanity and chasing after the wind. The wicked prosper and the righteous get rooted up the hole, and is that all y’learned in a quarter of a century in the Company of Jesus?”

  “Fuck off, Sean,” Sandoz said and moved toward the doorway that led to the cabins.

  Suddenly, Sean was out of his chair and, cutting him off, blocked the way out of the room. “Nowhere t’run now, Sandoz. Nowhere t’hide,” Sean said, and he did not waver under the murderous glare he got for his trouble. “You were a priest for decades,” Sean said with quiet insistence, “and a good one. Think like a priest, Sandoz. Think like a Jesuit! What did Jesus add to the canon, man? If the Jews deserved one thing, it was a better answer to sufferin’ than the piss-poor one Job got. If pain and injustice and undeserved misery are part of the package, and God knows they are, then surely the life of Christ is God’s own answer to Ecclesiasticus! Redeem the suffering. Embrace it. Make it mean something.”

  There was no response except that stony stare, but the shaking was visible.

  “Yer feelin’ it now, aren’t you. Carlo stopped the Quell aerosol he’s been pumpin’ into yer room while y’slept,” Sean informed him. “There’s no way past the next forty-eight hours except through them. Y’watched a thousand babies die, slaughtered like lambs. Y’saw the bloody corpses of everyone y’loved. You were gang-raped for months and when you were rescued, we all assumed you’d prostituted yersalf. Well, the dead are dead. You’ll never be unraped. And you’ll never live out yer life with sweet Gina and her wee daughter. And yer feelin’ it.”

  Sandoz closed his eyes, but Sean’s voice went on, with its hard r’s and the flat, unmusical poetry of Belfast. “Pity the poor, wee souls who live a life of watered milk—all blandness and pleasantry—and die nicely asleep in ripe old age. Water and milk, Sandoz. They live half a life and never know the strength they might have had. Show God what yer made of, man. Pucker up and kiss the cross. Make it your own. Make all this mean something. Redeem it.”

  Sean noticed only then that Daniel Iron Horse was standing silently behind a bulkhead just beyond the commons. Danny came forward and stood now in plain sight. For a moment, Sean frowned, unsure of Danny’s intention, but then it came clear to him. “Here’s one thing y’can do to redeem the next two days, Sandoz. Y’can let this man witness them. Will y’ permit it?”

  Sandoz would look at neither of them, and remained silent. But he didn’t say no, and so Sean left and Danny stayed.

  SANDOZ SEEMED STUNNED IN THE BEGINNING BUT, BEFORE LONG, withdrawal began to work on him physically. Too tense to stay still, he needed to walk the pain out, and Danny followed him into the chilling silence of the lander bay, which was nearly thirty meters long and afforded him room to move, and privacy.

  For the first hours, Sandoz said nothing, but Danny knew the anger was coming and tried to brace himself for it. He believed that there was nothing Sandoz could say to him that he had not said to himself, but he was wrong. When Sandoz spoke at last, brutal mockery quickly escalated beyond rage to a pure moral fury, its expression informed by decades of Jesuit study. Tears, Daniel Iron Horse discovered that first morning, felt cold against skin flushed with shame.

  Then the silence settled in again.

  Danny left only twice on the first day, to go to the head. Sandoz paced and paced, and after a time, stripped off his shirt, sodden with sweat that leached the moisture from his body even in the numbing cold of the lander bay. A while later, he took off the braces as well and then sat down as far away from Danny as possible, near the exterior hangar-bay door, his back against the sealed stone walls, head resting on arms wrapped around raised knees, the nearly dead fingers twitching sometimes.

  In spite of himself and his intentions, Danny fell asleep as the hours passed. He woke once and saw Sandoz standing at the bay door, staring into the darkness through the small porthole. Danny dropped off once again, only to hear the words “Aqui estoy” sometime during the night. He was not sure of the language, but he remembered the words and, later on, asked the other priests if any of them understood. Both Joseba and John recognized the Spanish: Here I am. It was Sean who said, “That’s what Abraham answered when God called his name.” But Sandoz had said it with a kind of beaten resignation, and Danny thought it might only have signaled the man’s recognition that he was stuck on the Bruno, with nowhere to go but forward.

  Or perhaps it was the resignation of Jonah realizing that God would find him and use him no matter where he was, even in the belly of a whale.

  There was no dawn to wake Danny in the morning, but the noise and movement inside the commons room came muffled through the lander-bay hatch. He sat up and then stood, stiff and miserable. Sandoz had not moved. Danny left again for a few minutes, but came back without eating, determined to take no food or drink while Sandoz went without. As the hours of the second full day crawled by, Sandoz remained motionless and silent, eyes fixed on distances no other man had seen. Vision quest, Danny thought, when the soul opened to whatever could be conveyed by the Great Mystery, Whose thoughts were not the thoughts of man, Whose ways were not the ways of man …

  He had not wanted to sleep. Danny had resolved to witness it all from start to finish, and so he woke on the third morning with a start, only to find himself looking into the obsidian eyes of Emilio Sandoz, sitting cross-legged on the lander deck, where he had waited for Iron Horse to wake up.

  “It must have been hard,” Sandoz said after a time, his voice soft and unresonant in the echoing space of the bay.

  Danny wasn’t sure what he meant but, lately, nothing had been easy, so he nodded.

  “If you stare into the abyss,” Sandoz reported, “it stares back.”

  “Nietzsche,” Danny said almost inaudibly, identifying the quote.

  “Two points.” Waxen and exhausted, Sandoz got slowly to his feet and stood blankly for a while. “God uses us all, I suppose,” he said, and walked to the hatch, banging on it with an elbow.

  In an instant, the sounds of pressure equalizers and locking mechanisms echoed emptily against the stone walls of the hull. When the door opened, Danny realized that John Candotti, too, had stood vigil during these three days. But the rest of the crew was there now as well, waiting.

  “He did what he had to,” Sandoz told them, and stepped through the hatch without another word.

  For the first time since his mother died when he was sixteen years old, Daniel Iron Horse broke down and sobbed. The others stood and listened until John Candotti said, “Leave him alone,” and the little crowd dispersed.

  After a decent interval, John ducked into the bay. He looked around and then retrieved Sandoz’s discarded shirt, offering it to Danny to blow his nose on. Danny accepted it, but reared away when he brought it closer to his face.

  “It’s pretty funky,” John admitted. “If that’s the odor of sanctity, God help us all.”

  Danny managed a small laugh and pulled up his own shirt, wiping his nose on the inside of the collar.

  “My mom always hated it when I did that,” John said, sliding down the wall next to Danny until his bony legs stuck straight out in front of him.

  Danny wiped his eyes and cleared his throat. “Mine, too,” he said almost soundlessly.

  They both sat staring at the far end of the bay for a while. “Well, hell,” John said finally, “if it’s okay with Emilio, it’s okay with me, I guess. Pax?”

  Danny nodded. “I’m not sure it’s all that okay with him. But thanks,” he said.

  John got to his feet and offered the other man a hand up. Danny, red-eyed and wrung dry, shook it gratefully, but he said, “I think I’ll just sit here awhile, ace. I need some time.”

  “Sure,” John said, and left Danny alone.

  Great Southern Forest

  2061, Earth-Relative

  “WAS RIPE TWO NIGHTS AGO” “PON RIVER. BUT SOMEONE thinks—” “—no market anymore for—” “—stern campaign is undersupplied and if—” (
“Uunnhh.”) “—omeone is hungry! Who ha—” “—rakar fields are north of the—” “Sipaj, Panar! Someone heard—” “—oo early. It ripens af—” “—focus instead on consolidating the—” (“Uuuunnhh.”) “—nitarl pickers at Kran port—” “Sipaj, Djalao, surely you are hungr—” “We found more by the riv—” “—paari will be there soon—” (“Uuuuuuuuunnhh.”) “—weavers can’t use so—” “—ut if we go after the rakari are—” “—someone that bundle of ree—” “—nala, get Isaac to stop—” “Scratch just there. No, lower! Ye—” (“Uuuuuuuuuuuuunnhh—”) “Sipaj, Isaac! Stop!” Ha’anala shouted.

  Isaac sank to the ground, dizzy but satisfied. Spinning could transform the incomprehensible into a uniform blur, and if he made his own sound, he could sometimes drown the racket out, but best of all was when one voice cut through all the rest and made everyone quiet.

  “Sipaj, Isaac,” Ha’anala said slowly, her voice pitched low. “Let’s go to the shelter.” She waited the right amount of time before adding, “We’ll listen to music.”

  Ha’anala had clarity.

  Isaac stood, clutching the computer tablet to his bare, bony chest, feeling its cool, flat, unblemished perfection. All around him: inconstancy, unpredictability, irrationality. His own body could not be trusted. Feet became more distant, arms wrapped further around the torso. Hair appeared in places where none had been before. Stones, smooth and faultless one time, might be covered by a leaf or flawed by the presence of a bug the next time he looked. Ears and eyes and mouths and limbs moved endlessly. Bodies sat and slept in different places. How could they expect him to understand what they were saying while he was still trying to figure out who they were? Plants sprang up and changed size and disappeared. Buds, flowers and withered things came and went. He could sit and stare for hours—days! But he couldn’t see this happen. He fell asleep and, in the morning, the old thing was gone and a new one was there and sometimes it acted the same way as before and sometimes it didn’t. There was no clarity.

  The computer held a world that was precisely the same every morning, except for his mother’s daily message—he knew now that she made small changes because she showed him how to do this. He complained, so she put all her messages in a separate file and that was all right because it didn’t change anything else in his other directories; Isaac was the only one who changed those. The computer was better than spinning—

  “Sipaj, Isaac. Come with me,” Ha’anala said, each word distinct. She picked up his cloth—a silken blue square that could cover him from head to waist. His prayer shawl, Sofia called it with dispirited irony. “We’ll listen to music,” Ha’anala repeated, tugging at his ankle with her foot.

  Isaac jerked away and muttered, “Now someone has to start over.”

  Ha’anala lifted her chin and sat down to wait. Isaac couldn’t bear to have a thought interrupted and he had to begin at the beginning. If anyone disturbed him as he spoke, he would repeat the entire speech word by word until the end of what he’d meant to say. That’s why he spoke so little, she supposed. It was nearly impossible to complete a thought or a statement to his satisfaction when there were Runa around. Even at the risk of a fierno, the people couldn’t seem to remain silent long enough to suit him.

  When Isaac was finished, he stood up straighter: his signal that he could move again. Ha’anala rolled to her feet and walked off toward the edge of the village clearing. Isaac tracked her tangentially, head up and tilted crazily, relying on peripheral vision, so he wouldn’t have to see her legs move. The people were already talking again. “—adio control of the—” “—pay, Hatna! Don’t make—” “—over two hundred bahli now!” “—new windbreaks for th—” “—is nice combined with k’ta—” “—torm coming in—”

  The conversation receded, only to be replaced by the patternless noise of the forest: squawking, buzzing, dripping. Shrieks and whistled arpeggios; snuffling, rustling. Nearly as bad as the village. The forest, at least, had no baffling jumble of talk and intonation, no half-grasped meaning shrouded by the next words.

  Impasto, Isaac thought. This is worse than red. The village is an impasto of words. The forest is an impasto of sounds. There is no clarity!

  He had found the word “impasto” in one of Marc Robichaux’s files. He looked it up in the dictionary and saw a naked hand with five fingers applying dabs of molten color in many layers, each one almost concealing the others beneath it. For a long time now, “clarity” had been his best word, but he liked “impasto” very much. He appreciated the nicety of its meaning, how neatly it fit his desire to label a perception. When he could focus on one word at a time, the meaning of things could come clear for him, like a high note rising out of a choir, and there was joy in that. But there was no clarity in the village and it was difficult to make the distractions go away long enough—

  Ha’anala stopped and sat just outside his little rectangular shelter. Isaac, too, stopped and rethought his thought about impasto from beginning to end. Then he handed Ha’anala his tablet without meeting her eyes and said, “Be careful with it.” He told her that every time, just as Sofia had told him that over and over, when she first let him have the computer. For a while, he thought becarefulwithit was the name of the computer. There were very few of these tablets in the world, he found out eventually, although the people had made other things they sloppily labeled computer even though such things were clearly different from his tablet and couldn’t be carried around; so this one was still precious, and not only to Isaac.

  He waited until Ha’anala said, “Someone will be careful,” and then he smiled, face lifted to the suns. She said that every time. Ha’anala had clarity. “The rule is: No Runa,” he said loudly.

  “Except Imantat,” Ha’anala replied dutifully. Imantat was a relatively quiet Runao who kept the rainroof thatched. Ha’anala herself stayed out of Isaac’s line of sight as he went to work removing all the detritus that had blown or fallen or grown into his little fortress since his last visit. It took some time. When everything was properly squared up, all the curves and mess done away with, he held out his hand and the tablet appeared in it without anyone having to say anything.

  It weighed less than before. Once it had taken all his thin-boned, six-year-old strength to heft it, but now it was so light he could grasp it easily with one hand. This gradual loss of weight was a sly betrayal that Isaac had not overlooked; he always inspected the tablet minutely, vigilant for other changes. Satisfied, he placed the computer tablet on a flat rock he’d brought here from the river, to keep the tablet out of the mud. Rain was no threat, but his mother had always told him to keep the tablet clean. With a special stick he kept for this purpose, he measured off the distance from each edge of the tablet to the shelter’s walls, so that it was perfectly centered.

  He held out his hand and this time the blue cloth appeared. Pulling this over his head, he sat down on the western side of the shelter and draped the shawl over the tablet as well. Oblivious now to the slanting shafts of three-toned light filtering through the canopy’s breeze-driven movement, he began to relax. Then: the feel of the latch against his thumb, the soft snick of the mechanism, the lovely arc of hinged movement describing in a single sweep—acute to obtuse—the unchanging geometry of the cover. The simultaneous whirr of power-on, the brightening of the screen, the familiar keyboard with its serried ranks.

  “Sipaj, Isaac,” Ha’anala said. “What shall we listen to?”

  She knew how long to wait before asking this question, and she always asked the same way, and he always chose the same piece: Supaari’s voice, the evening chant. First Isaac listened silently. Then again, singing harmony. Then again, with his own harmony and with Ha’anala joining in to double Supaari’s part. He followed the same pattern with the Sh’ma, Sofia’s voice solo, replayed so he could harmonize, and a third time with Ha’anala doubling Sofia.

  Finally he could move on, choosing from the Magellan’s stored collection of songs, symphonies, cantatas and chants;
the quartets and trios, the concertos and rondos; Gaelic jigs and Viennese waltzes; the lush four-part harmonies of a cappella Brooklyn doo-wop and the whining dissonance of Chinese opera; the modal and rhythmic shifts of an Arabic taqasim. Music entered Isaac’s heart directly and effortlessly. It slipped into his soul like a leaf settling into clear, still water, sinking silkily beneath the shining surface.

  Having purged the noise and confusion of the village and the forest, Isaac’s mind became as orderly and precise as the keyboard. He could begin again to explore the Magellan’s vast on-line library, reading steadily with emotionless concentration every item found in the Magellan catalog on whatever subject had snared his interest.

  “Clarity,” he sighed, and began to study.

  THE WHOLE VILLAGE WAS HAPPY TO SEE HA’ANALA LEAD ISAAC OFF when he became disruptive; they praised her for being so kind to him, for watching over him. “Ha’anala is a good father,” the people said, smiling a little at that. Even Sofia was grateful. But it was no sacrifice to accompany Isaac to this refuge, for if her brother craved clarity, Ha’anala was starved for privacy. It amounted to the same thing, she supposed.

  For years, Isaac had mostly echoed others and even Sofia had come to believe that he was all but incapable of direct speech. Then one day, wearied by the village noise, feeling fragmented and exasperated herself, Ha’anala had simply acted on an impulse. She was younger than Isaac, but far stronger if not taller, so when he began to spin and hum, she simply grabbed his ankle and marched him off to a place in the forest where it was quiet. She had expected silence from him, or at worst some meaningless phrase repeated over and over until it meant even less. Only later did Ha’anala realize that her own exhausted, petulant silence had permitted Isaac to complete a thought and then to repeat it aloud. And such a thought!

  “How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking?”