Children of God

by Mary Doria Russell

  There were midnight exercises involving the drone lander, details of simulated Rakhati geography, a theoretical but statistically likely cyclone, and not one but two surface rendezvous sites. He would permit them two or three hours of sleep and then the klaxons would go off again, and he’d badger them in K’San or Ruanja to explain who they were, why they had come, what they wanted, dissecting each man’s answers publicly and without anesthesia, exposing weaknesses, blind spots, assumptions, stupidities, laying them open like frogs on a tin plate. It was brutal and insulting and very nearly intolerable, but when Sean dared to protest the ill treatment, Sandoz reduced him to tears.

  And yet, even as the others trudged off to stuporous sleep after some grueling drill or interrogation, Sandoz himself would put in a few more kilometers on the treadmill. No matter how ferocious his program of training became for the rest of them, they had to admit its rigor was always exceeded by that of his own, despite the fact that he was the smallest man among them and nearly twenty years older than the youngest of them.

  He even ate standing up. Nothing stopped the dreams.

  “SANDOZ!” CARLO SHOUTED, SHAKING HIM. THERE WAS NO RESPONSE, so he shook the man harder, until the bruised eyes focused.

  “!Jesús!” Emilio cried, pulling violently away. “!Déjame—”

  Carlo released Sandoz’s shoulders abruptly, letting him drop against the bulkhead. “I assure you that my intentions were strictly honorable, Don Emilio,” he said with specious courtesy, sitting down on the end of the bunk. “You were screaming again.”

  Still breathing hard, Sandoz looked around his cabin blearily, trying to get his bearings. “Fuck,” he said after a while.

  “Now there’s a thought,” said Carlo, eyes half-closed in speculation. “Versatility can be a virtue, you know.” Sandoz stared at him. “It doesn’t have to hurt,” Carlo suggested silkily.

  “You come near me,” Sandoz assured him wearily, “I’ll find a way to kill you.”

  “Just a suggestion,” Carlo said, unruffled. He stood and moved to the desk, where he’d laid the paraphernalia out. “So, barring a more interesting avenue to relief and rest, what shall it be tonight? Quick oblivion, I hope. Perhaps I should have Nico move the treadmill into the sick bay so the rest of us don’t have to listen to you pounding away all night.” He picked up the injection canister and turned, brows raised in inquiry. “You’re building up a tolerance to this, by the way. I’ve doubled the dosage over the past two weeks.”

  Sandoz, who had obviously been too tired even to undress before falling into bed, got out of his bunk, put on his braces and left the room, brushing past Nico, who always rose when Don Carlo did.

  “Treadmill it is, then,” Carlo observed. Sighing, he sat alone for a few minutes, waiting for the relentless sound of footfalls to begin. He could tell from the tempo that Sandoz had set the pace for a thirty-seven-minute ten-kilometer run, hoping to exhaust himself, wearing out the rest of the ship’s company in the bargain.

  Determined to have things out, Carlo rose and walked to the small gym, moving to the front of the treadmill, where he stood with his hands behind his back, head cocked in contemplation. “Sandoz,” he said, “it has come to my attention that you have commandeered the Giordano Bruno. The situation suits my purposes, although frankly I find your command style lacking in finesse.” Amused black eyes returned his stare; Sandoz was back in control now, deigning to be entertained. “In the beginning,” Carlo went on, “I thought, This is revenge—he’s getting his own back. Later I thought, This is an ex-Jesuit who has taken orders all his life. Now he gives them. He is drunk with power. Now, however—”

  “Shall I tell you why you allowed me to take over your ship?” Sandoz offered, cutting him off. “Your father was right about you, Cio-Cio-San. If you ever finished anything, you could be judged, and found wanting. So you find a reason to quit and tell yourself lies about Renaissance princes. Then you move on to the next thing before you can demonstrate inadequacy. My coup d’état suits your purposes because now you have someone you can blame when this venture fails.”

  Carlo continued as though the other man had not spoken. “It is not power or revenge that drives you, Sandoz. It is fear. You are afraid, all day, every day. And the closer we get to Rakhat, the more frightened you become.”

  In superb physical condition now, sweat coming easily, Sandoz decreased the pace until the treadmill stopped. He stood still, his breathing hardly affected by the exertion; then he simply let the mask drop.

  Carlo blinked, startled by the unexpected nakedness of Sandoz’s face. “You are afraid,” Carlo repeated quietly, “and with good reason.”

  “Don Emilio,” Nico said, coming into the room, “what do you see in your dreams?”

  Carlo had asked this very question many times, in the hours before what would have been dawn, awakened night after night by the unnerving wail, with its burden of hopeless refusal, the cries of “No!” rising in intensity from denial to defiance to despair. By the time Carlo or John got to his cabin, Sandoz would be sitting up, jammed into the corner of his bed, back against the bulkhead, eyes wide open, but still asleep. “What do you see?” Carlo would demand when he’d shaken the man awake.

  Always before, Sandoz had refused to talk. This time, he told Nico, “A necropolis. A city of the dead.”

  “Always the same city?” Nico asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you see the dead clearly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Everyone I ever loved,” said Sandoz. “Gina is there,” he said, looking at Carlo, “but not Celestina—not yet. And there are others, whom I do not love.”

  “Who?” Carlo demanded.

  There was an ugly laugh. “Not you, Carlo,” Sandoz said with cheerful contempt. “And not you, Nico. The others are VaRakhati. Whole cities of them,” he said lightly. “The bodies change. I’ve seen them rot. I can smell them in my sleep. There’s a time, while the carcasses are decomposing, when I can’t tell what they were—Jana’ata or Runa. They all look alike then. But later, when it’s just the bones, I can see the teeth. Sometimes I find my own body among them. Sometimes not. It’s better when I do because then, it’s over. Those are the nights I don’t scream.”

  “Do you know how to use a sidearm?” Carlo asked after a silence.

  Sandoz nodded in the Rakhati fashion—a short jerk of the chin upward—but held his hands out slightly, inviting Carlo to think it through. “I could probably get a burst off …”

  “But the recoil would damage the brace mechanisms,” Carlo observed, “and you’d be worse off than before. You will, of course, be under my protection, and that of Nico.”

  The derisive eyes were almost kindly. “And you believe you will succeed, where God has failed me?”

  Carlo stood his ground, head back. “God may only be a fable, whereas I have an investment to watch over. In any case, my family has generally found bullets rather more reliable than prayer.”

  “All right,” Sandoz said, smiling briefly and broadly. “All right. Why not? My experience with illusions has not been happy, but who knows? Perhaps—short-term—yours will help us both.”

  Satisfied with what he had learned, Carlo nodded to Nico. He turned to leave the exercise bay and saw John Candotti standing in the doorway. “Worried, Gianni?” Carlo asked blithely, as he brushed past him. John glared and Carlo backed away in mock alarm, raising both hands. “I swear: I didn’t touch him.”

  “Screw you, Carlo.”

  “Any time,” Carlo purred as he and Nico retreated down the curving passageway.

  Emilio was already back on the treadmill.

  “Why?” John demanded, facing him.

  “I told you, John—”

  “No! Not that! Not just trying to pilot the lander! I mean, all of it. Why have anything to do with Carlo? Why are you helping him? Why are you teaching them the languages? Why are you willing to go back—”

  “ ‘Nig
ht and day lie open the gates of death’s dark kingdom,’ ” Sandoz recited, hiding behind Virgil, amused but by whom it was not clear. “ ‘To find the way back to daylight: that is work, that is labor—’ ”

  “Don’t. Don’t shut me out like this!” John hit the treadmill power toggle so abruptly Sandoz stumbled. “Dammit, Emilio, you owe me something—an explanation, at least! I just want to understand—” He stopped himself, startled by the reaction. Shout at me, John thought, going cold, but don’t look at me like that.

  Finally Sandoz willed the trembling to stop, and when he spoke, his eyes were so hard and his voice so soft that his words seemed to John a vicious insult. “Were your parents married?” he asked.

  “Yes,” John hissed.

  “To each other?” Sandoz pressed, just as quietly.

  “I don’t have to take this shit,” John muttered, but before he could leave, Emilio turned and kicked the door shut.

  “Mine weren’t,” he said.

  John froze, and Emilio looked at him for a long time. “One of my earliest memories is of my mother’s husband yelling at me for calling him Papi. I remember wondering, Maybe I should call him Papa. Or maybe Padre? Perhaps that’s when I became a linguist—I thought there was another word I was supposed to use! I would try saying it a different way, but he’d get even madder and knock me across the room for being a smart-ass. Usually he’d end up beating the crap out of my mother—and I knew it was my fault somehow, but I didn’t know what I’d done wrong! I kept trying to find the right way to say things. Nothing worked.” He paused and looked away. “And there was my older brother. It seemed like he was permanently pissed off at me—nothing I did was right or good enough. And there was the way everyone would stop talking when my mother and I walked into a store or passed people in the street.” Emilio’s eyes returned to John’s. “You know what puta means?”

  John nodded slightly. Whore.

  “I’d hear that when my mother and I were out together. From kids, yes? You know—just kids, trying to be real witty and bold. I didn’t get it, of course. Shit, I was what? Three, four years old? All I knew was there was something going on and I didn’t understand it. So I kept looking for an explanation.” He stared at John for a time and then asked, “Ever been to Puerto Rico?” John shook his head. “Puerto Rico is really mixed. Spanish, African, Dutch, English, Chinese, you name it. People are all different colors. For a long time it didn’t strike me as odd that my mother and her husband and my older brother were all light-haired and fair-skinned, and here I was, this little Indio, like a cowbird in a warbler’s nest, yes? But one day, when I was about eleven, I slipped and called my mother’s husband Papa. Not to his face—I just said something like, When did Papa come home? He always got ugly when he was drunk, but that time—Jesus! He really took me apart. And he kept yelling, Don’t call me that! You’re nothing to me, you little bastard! Don’t ever call me that!”

  John closed his eyes, but then opened them and looked at Emilio. “So you got your explanation.”

  Emilio shrugged. “It still took me a while—Christ, what a dumb kid! Anyway, afterward, when they were putting the cast on my arm, I was thinking, How can a son be nothing to a father? Then it hit me, so to speak.” There was a brief bleak smile. “I thought, Well, he’s been telling me I was a bastard all along. I was just too stupid to realize he meant it.”

  “Emilio, I didn’t mean to—”

  “No! You said you wanted to understand. I’m trying to explain, okay? So just shut up and listen!” Emilio sank onto the edge of the treadmill. “Sit down, will you?” he said wearily, neck craned. “Everybody on this goddamned ship is so fucking big,” he muttered, blinking spasmodically. “I feel like a dwarf. I hate that.”

  For an instant John could see a skinny little kid, huddled up and waiting for the beating to be over; a small man in a stone cell, waiting for a rape to end.… Jesus, John thought, sitting on the floor across from Sandoz. “I’m listening,” he said.

  Emilio took a deep breath, and started again. “See, the thing about all this is, when I finally worked it out, I wasn’t angry, okay? I wasn’t ashamed. I wasn’t hurt. Well, I was hurt—I mean, the guy put me in the hospital, right? But I swear: my feelings weren’t hurt.” He watched John carefully. “I was relieved. Can you believe that? I was just so fucking relieved”

  “Because things finally made sense,” said John.

  Emilio inclined his head. “Yes. Things finally made sense. They still sucked, but at least they made sense.”

  “And that’s why you want to go back now. To Rakhat. To find out if things make sense?”

  “Want to go back? Want to?” Emilio cried. The bitterness was sharp but short-lived, replaced by simple tiredness. He looked down at the floor of the exercise bay, and then shook his head, the bone-straight hair, more silver than black now, falling over eyes almost bloody with fatigue. “I keep thinking of that line: if you are asked to go a mile, go two. Maybe this is the extra mile. Maybe I’ve got to give it all another chance,” Emilio said quietly. “I can tolerate a great deal if I just understand why.… And there’s only one place I can find that out.”

  He was silent for a long time. “John, when you arrive on Rakhat, all you will have are the knowledge and skills you and your companions can bring to bear on problems you cannot imagine or anticipate—problems you cannot pray or buy or bluff or even shoot your way out of. If I withhold information from Carlo and his people and if something happens because of their ignorance, I will be responsible. I’m not willing to take that chance.”

  He pulled in a breath and held it before asking “Did you hear what Carlo said? Before? That I’m frightened?” John nodded. “John, I’m not just scared, I’m probably fucked up for life,” he said, laughing at how awful it was, the glittering black eyes held wide with the effort to contain the tears that had not yet spilled. “Even with Gina—. I don’t know, maybe it would have gotten better, but I still had nightmares, even with her. And now—Jesus! They’re worse than ever! Sometimes I think, maybe it’s better this way. The screaming would have scared Celestina, you know? What kind of life is that for a little kid, growing up with her stepfather screaming every night?” he asked, the sound wrung from his voice. “Maybe it’s better for her, this way.”

  “Maybe,” John said doubtfully, “but that’s not much of a silver lining, is it?”

  “No, it’s not,” Emilio agreed. “I’ll take what I can get, I guess.” He glanced at John, infinitely grateful that there had been no platitudes, no half-assed attempt to make him feel okay. He filled his lungs shudderingly, and got a grip on himself. “John, I—. Listen, you’ve been—”

  “Forget it,” John said, and thought, That’s what I’m here for.

  SANDOZ STOOD UP AND STEPPED BACK ONTO THE TREADMILL. AFTER A time, John got to his feet as well and went to his cabin, where he flopped onto his bunk in a loose-limbed heap and put his hands over his eyes.

  He thought of all the ways of coping with undeserved pain. Offer it up. Remember Jesus on the cross. The bromides: God never gives us a burden we cannot bear. Everything happens for a reason. John Candotti knew for a fact that the old sayings worked for some people. But as a parish priest, he had often observed that trust in God could impose an additional burden on good people slammed to their knees by some senseless tragedy. An atheist might be no less staggered by such an event, but nonbelievers often experienced a kind of calm acceptance: shit happens, and this particular shit had happened to them. It could be more difficult for a person of faith to get to his feet precisely because he had to reconcile God’s love and care with the stupid, brutal fact that something irreversibly terrible had happened.

  “Faith is supposed to be a comfort, Father!” a bereaved mother had once cried to him, weeping over her child’s grave. “How could God let this happen? All those prayers, all that hope—it was just howling into the wind.”

  He was so young. A few weeks past ordination, all dewy and optimistic. It was his fir
st funeral, and he thought he’d handled it pretty well, not stumbling over the prayers, alive to the grief of the mourners, ready to comfort them. “The disciples, and Mary herself, must have felt the same way you do now, when they stood at the foot of the cross,” he’d said, impressed by his own gentle voice, his own loving concern.

  “So fucking what?” the mother snapped, eyes like coals. “My kid is dead, and she’s not coming back in three days, and I don’t give a shit about the resurrection at the end of the goddamn world because I want her back now—” The weeping ceased, replaced by pure steely anger. “God’s got a lot to answer for,” she snarled. “That’s all I can tell you, Father. God’s got a lot to answer for.”

  A father and a brother, he thought. Was that how it had started for Emilio? A Father he could count on, a Brother he could look up to. How long had he resisted the Spirit? John wondered. How long did he protect himself from the fear that God was just a bullshit story, that religion was just a load of crap? What kind of courage had it taken—summoning the trust that faith requires? And where the hell was Emilio finding the strength now to hope again that maybe it would all make sense? That if he could just bring himself to listen, maybe God would explain.

  What if God did explain, and it turned out that what had happened was all Emilio’s fault? John wondered. Not the gardens—everyone on the Stella Maris crew had agreed to grow the gardens, and no one could have anticipated what happened because of them. But later—what if it was something Emilio said or did that was misunderstood on Rakhat?

  Listen, John prayed, I’m not telling You what to do, but if Emilio brought the rapes on himself somehow, and then Askama died because of that, it’s better if he never understands, okay? In my opinion. You know what people can take, but I think You’re cutting it pretty close here. Or maybe—help him make it mean something. Help him. That’s what I’m asking. Just help him. He’s doing his damnedest. Help him.