Children of God

by Mary Doria Russell

  “Rukuei came home,” Ha’anala said finally in a tiny voice, face pressed now into Suukmel’s belly. “That’s something. He’s seen everything, and been everywhere. He came back here. And he has stayed …”

  “Go back down the mountain, my heart,” Suukmel advised serenely. “Listen to Isaac’s music again. Remember what you thought when you first heard it. Know that if we are children of one God, we can make ourselves one family in time.”

  “And if God is just a song?” Ha’anala asked, alone and frightened.

  Suukmel did not answer for a while. Finally she said, “Our task is the same.”

  “LISTEN TO THEM!” TIYAT VA’AGARDI WHISPERED, AMAZED. “WOULD YOU have guessed that djanada were capable of arguing like that?”

  “Just like the old days,” Kajpin VaMasna agreed, “except now it’s them and not us.” She listened to the wrangling for a while and then lay back to watch the clouds roll over the valley. It had been a long time since Kajpin herself had required agreement before making a decision—a character flaw she was no longer embarrassed by. She looked over at Tiyat. “I say we give them until second sunrise, and then we go.”

  Tiyat gazed affectionately at her companion. A former soldier, sickened by killing, Kajpin VaMasna had come north by herself, and since then had helped to ease the lives of VaN’Jarri of both species by raiding Runa trade caravans. Tiyat was just a domestic in the old days. She’d held a position of trust and responsibility even then, but she still sometimes hid in the middle of the herd, and admired Kajpin, who did not abase herself but still got along with everybody.

  When the news about the new foreigners spread through the community, it was Kajpin who suggested that she and Tiyat should go south and bring a human back to the N’Jarr, touching off the fierno that was still raging. Most of the Runa had gotten bored and gone off to find something to eat, but the Jana’ata showed no signs of consensus.

  “Ha’anala,” Rukuei was saying, “I’ve studied all the records! Yes, there is a great deal I don’t understand. Too many words and ideas I can’t make clear to myself,” he admitted. “But the foreigners first came here because of our music, and now they’ve come back. We have to know them—”

  “And if all this talk of God’s music is nonsense?” Ha’anala demanded, trying to ignore Isaac’s humming, which was getting louder and more insistent by the moment. “If we are wrong—”

  Tiyat spoke up for the first time. “It’s not nonsense! Someone thinks—” She stopped, shy but ashamed of taking cover, especially on this point. Tiyat loved the music Isaac had found; it was the only kind of music she had ever been able to listen to, and it had changed her. “I say we should let the other foreigners hear it. They’re part of this!”

  “And there may be ways they can be useful to us—as honest brokers, for example,” Suukmel pointed out, with the practicality that had once served two governments. “They could go back to the south and open negotiations on our behalf—”

  (“Uuuunnhh”)

  “Why would they agree to come here in the first place, let alone help us?” Ha’anala objected. “Sofia has poisoned their minds against us! They will believe us nothing more than murderers and thieves and—”

  “They don’t have to agree,” Shetri said, glancing at his collection of narcotics.

  Ears toppling, Ha’anala cried, “Abduction is hardly the way to make allies!”

  (“Uuuuuuuuunnhh”)

  “I have been everywhere but to the south,” Rukuei said over Isaac’s noise. “I need to see the others in their own place. If I am to understand, I must hear their words spoken freely—”

  “Besides,” Shetri said, with a slight edge to his voice, “Rukuei has had plenty of practice at deception. Who lies more convincingly than a poet who makes songs out of hunger and death?”

  Ha’anala looked up sharply, but refused to be sidetracked. “This is crazy, Shetri,” she said flatly. “It’s uselessly dangerous for you and Rukuei. Let Tiyat and Kajpin do this—”

  (“Uuuuuuuuuuuuunnhh—”)

  “For solving problems, two kinds of mind are better than one,” Tiyat pointed out, mild eyes sweeping around the gathering. “If two kinds are good,” she said again, “then three are better yet, so we should go get a foreigner.”

  (“Uuuuuuuuuuuuunnnnnnhh—”)

  Yellow light now flared in the southeast, but the chill hardly lessened, even as the second of Rakhat’s suns rose. Kajpin stood and yawned, stretching her legs and shaking off boredom. “Just keep your mouths shut and your boots on and your hands in your sleeves,” she advised Shetri and Rukuei. “If you’re exposed, then Tiyat and I are constables bringing in a couple of VaHaptaa.”

  “Kajpin can lie as well as a poet,” Tiyat noted solemnly, and got slapped with her friend’s tail for her trouble.

  “What goes wrong can be turned to advantage,” Suukmel said. She looked down at the Runa toddler squirming in her lap—Tiyat’s son, who resembled his mother: good-tempered, but resolute when thwarted. This child would never question his right to say “I” to any person he met. He would always feel himself the equal of any soul: something all the VaN’Jarri wished for their children. “Let them go, Ha’anala. It will be well. Let them go.”

  Ha’anala, holding Sofi’ala close, said nothing. A contest, she was thinking, between Ingwy and Adonai. Fate against Providence, in a place where Fate had ruled so long …

  She realized then that Isaac had stopped humming. He was naked as always, but never seemed to feel the cold. Or perhaps he did, but had no interest in it. For a flashing moment, he looked into Rukuei’s eyes.

  “Bring back someone who sings,” was all he said.

  N’Jarr Valley

  2085, Earth-Relative

  “SHETRI, I THINK, MIGHT HAVE MANAGED TO MAINTAIN HIS ANONYMITY, but there was something unmistakably Jana’ata about my foster son,” Suukmel told Sean Fein many years later, recalling Rukuei’s account of that journey. “So they fell back on Kajpin’s story: that Rukuei was a follower of Athaansi Erat, captured while attempting to prey on a village. They claimed Shetri was a bounty hunter—a man who traded his tracking abilities to the police in exchange for meat from executed Runa felons. They were bringing Rukuei to Gayjur to be questioned about the location of the northern raiders.”

  Some Runa the party encountered took the opportunity to fling stones at a safely vanquished enemy, or to shout abuse. Still others let fly random kicks that Tiyat and Kajpin fended off with casual efficiency but no great emotional heat that would give the deception away. Before they reached the northernmost navigable tributary of the Pon river and had taken a short-term lease on a private powerboat, Rukuei had tasted the salt of his own blood from a broken tooth. But there was an old man, a Runao, who followed the four of them for a long time. Curious, they decided to wait for him one morning.

  “He told them that he had never known he could get so old,” Suukmel remembered. “Rukuei was very moved by this.”

  “Someone’s bones hurt,” the old man had said. “Someone’s children went off to the cities. Let the djanada take this one!” this Runao begged Tiyat. “Someone is tired of being alone, and of hurting.”

  Tiyat looked at Kajpin, and they both turned to Rukuei, who had not eaten Runa for years. Kajpin’s hand shot out and pushed Rukuei theatrically forward along the road. “Right,” Tiyat agreed loudly, dismissing the old one. “Let the djanada starve.” But Rukuei felt it would uncover no lie if he called out to the old man, “Thank you. Thank you for offering—” and stumbled again as Shetri cuffed him.

  “There were genuine allies in some places,” Suukmel told Sean. “Now and then, people offered a night’s shelter, or hid them in a shed and told Rukuei and Shetri of some long dead Jana’ata who had been kind. But there were few, very few of these. Mostly there was indifference. Vague curiosity occasionally, but commonly a bland inattention. My foster son was very impressed by this: the Runa were living their lives as though we had never existed.”

>   “The people of the third Beatitude have well and truly inherited the world, my lady, and they acquired a grand, high opinion of themselves while they were at it. You Jana’ata spoil the illusion,” Sean told her. “So they pretend that you were never important to them.”

  The Jana’ata are alone, Sean thought then, like godlings whose believers had become atheists. In his own soul, he knew with sudden certainty that it was not rebellion or doubt or even sin that broke God’s heart; it was indifference.

  “Don’t expect gratitude,” he warned Suukmel. “Don’t even expect acknowledgment! They’re never going to need you again, not like they did before. A hundred years from now, you may be nothing but a memory. The very thought of you will fill most of them with shame and loathing.”

  “Then we shall truly be gone,” Suukmel whispered.

  “Perhaps,” this hard man said. “Perhaps.”

  “If you have no hope for us, why have you stayed?” she demanded. “To watch us die?”

  Perhaps, he almost said. But then Sean remembered his father, eyes shining with the unadulterated glee that Maura Fein had loved and shared, shaking his head at some ignominious example of the human capacity for boneheaded, self-inflicted calamity. “Ah, Sean, lad,” David Fein would say to his son, “it takes an Irish Jew to appreciate a cock-up this grand!”

  Sean Fein gazed for a time at the pale northern sky, and thought of the place where his own ancestors had lived. He was a Jesuit and celibate, an only child: the last of his line. Looking at Suukmel’s drawn, gray face, he felt at long last compassion for the fools who expected fairness and sense—in this world, not the next.

  “My father was the son of ancient priests, my mother the daughter of petty kings long gone,” he told Suukmel. “A thousand times, their people might have died out. A thousand times, they nearly killed themselves off with political bickering and moral certainty and a lethal distaste for compromise. A thousand times they might have become nothing but a memory in the mind of God.”

  “And yet they live?” she asked.

  “Last time I looked,” he said. “I can’t swear to more than that.”

  “And so might we,” Suukmel replied, with frail conviction.

  “Shit, yes, y’might at that,” Sean muttered in English, remembering Disraeli’s wee couplet: How odd of God / to choose the Jews. “My very much esteemed lady Suukmel,” he said then in his strangely accented K’San, “one thing I can say for certain. There’s just no telling whom God will take a liking to.”

  Rakhat: Landfall

  October 2078, Earth-Relative

  EVEN IF SEAN FEIN HAD HARBORED ANY ILLUSIONS ABOUT THINGS MAKING sense on Rakhat, he’d have lost them all to the near oblivion he achieved during the hours before the Giordano Bruno party made landfall.

  As beautiful as he found the laws and workings of chemistry, the physics of flying defeated him, and Sean always expected his innate pessimism to be rewarded by the flaming crash of whatever aircraft he was on. So he had hoarded his last bottle of Jameson’s for this occasion, and spent his final hours on the Bruno preparing himself spiritually to meet his Lord and Savior with an apology for the whiskey on his dying breath.

  Weightlessness and chill dominated the first stage of the descent from the vacuum of space. There was a brief, blessed interval of low gravity and growing warmth, but that was followed by perceptible acceleration. As they entered the atmosphere, the lander began to vibrate, and then to buck like a small boat in a dirty sea.

  Alcohol failed him. Nauseated and cotton-mouthed, Sean spent the balance of the flight alternately invoking the Virgin’s intercession and chanting, “Fack, fack, fack,” like a litany, with his eyes closed and his palms stinking. Just when it seemed it couldn’t get any worse, they hit a wall of bad air left over from the last tropical storm to move through the region, and as the entry heat grew in ferocity, his body fought crazily with its own autonomic nervous system: ice-cold with terror and sweating to stave off fever.

  Which is why the first man from the Giordano Bruno to set foot on Rakhat was not Daniel Iron Horse, who was the mission’s superior, or Joseba Urizarbarrena, an ecologist aching for his first glimpse of this new world; not Emilio Sandoz, who knew the place and would react most quickly to danger, or John Candotti, determined to be at his side, in case disaster struck again; nor was it the would-be conquistador Carlo Giuliani or his bodyguard Niccolo d’Angeli. It was Father Sean Fein, of the Society of Jesus, who pushed his way to the front of the queue and exited the lander the moment the hatch opened, stumbling forward a few steps and falling gracelessly to his knees, where he threw up for a good two minutes.

  They might have hoped for a more auspicious beginning to their stay. Sean at least managed to arrange for the first words spoken by a member of their mission to be a kind of prayer. “Dear God,” he gasped, when things slowed down, “that was a shameful waste of good liquor.”

  IT WAS ONLY WHEN SEAN SAT BACK ON HIS HEELS AND HAWKED AND SPAT and caught his breath that any of them looked beyond his distress to the high plateau south of Inbrokar City, which Sofia Mendes had recommended as their landing site.

  “I had forgotten,” Emilio Sandoz whispered, walking as they all did now away from the lander’s ticking-hot hull, away from the stench of burnt fuel and vomit, into the redolent wind. “I had forgotten.”

  They’d meant to come earlier, just after the first of Rakhat’s suns had risen, before the steaming heat of full day, but the weather was more than usually unstable this time of year and storms had delayed landfall twice. Finally, Frans had identified a break in the rains and Carlo had decided to go down, even though it would be close to second sunset when they landed.

  So they had by accident arrived on Rakhat at the most beautiful time of day, when the late afternoon chorale of wildlife announced its existence to an unheeding world intoxicated with its own luxuriance. To the east, the far landscape was veiled by sheets of gray rain, but there were two suns low behind them, just above the white limestone escarpment that helped contain the Pon river, and these lit up the near country brilliantly, making an immoderate world sparkle like a pirate’s jewel box: all diamond raindrops and golden clouds, its wanton foliage amethyst and aquamarine and emerald, its extravagant blossom citrine and ruby and sapphire and topaz. The very sky flared like opal: yellow and pink and mauve, and the azure of the Virgin’s robes.

  “What is that scent?” John asked Emilio, standing next to him.

  “Which one?” Joseba cried, agriculture’s depredations forgotten in the languorous panorama of lavender savannah. There was a lifetime’s work within a few paces of where he stood. The soil alive with tiny vertebrate fauna, the air teeming with flying things, membranous wings flashing as they wheeled in the sunlight. Overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data, Joseba could hardly keep himself from staking out a square meter and beginning the research that very moment; he needed to contain it somehow—divide it, tame it, know it.

  “It’s like a perfume shop!” said Nico.

  “But there’s one scent, especially,” said John, searching for words. “Like cinnamon, except—more flowery.”

  “Yes, exquisite,” Carlo agreed. “I recognize it—there were ribbons with that scent in the shipment the Contact Consortium stowed on board the Stella Maris when they sent Sandoz back.”

  Emilio looked around and then walked to a patch of low-growing bushes a few paces away. He picked a trumpet-shaped blossom, its petals the hallucinatory scarlet of a poppy, and held it out to John, who leaned forward to inhale. “Yeah, that’s what I’m smelling. What’s it called?” John asked, offering the blossom to Sean, who backed away, still feeling rocky.

  “Yasapa,” said Emilio. “And yasapa means?”

  John pulled the pieces apart. Ya s ap a … “You can make tea with it!” he translated triumphantly.

  Pleased with his pupil, the linguist nodded as Carlo reached for the flower, carrying it with both hands to his face and inhaling deeply. “The Runa fill a glass jar w
ith the blossoms, cover them with water and set it in the sun—too sugary for my taste,” Emilio said, “but they add sweetleaf to the tea as well. If you leave it long enough, it ferments. You can distill that for a kind of brandy.”

  “Just as I predicted!” Carlo crowed triumphantly. “We’ve been here less than half an hour and you have already paid for this entire expedition,” he told Sandoz, looking at the blossom. “Beautiful color—” He paused, and then sneezed violently.

  “Crisce sant’,” Nico intoned.

  Carlo nodded, and tried again, “Is the brandy th—” He stopped, mouth open, eyes closing, and this time there was a series of sneezes, with Nico blessing each small detonation. “Thank you, Nico, I think I’m sufficiently sanctified,” Carlo said. “Is the brandy this color?” he finally managed to ask before sneezing again. “God,” he cried, “I can’t be coming down with a cold!”

  “It’s that damned flower,” said Sean, lip curled at the cloying odor.

  “Or the lander fumes,” Danny suggested.

  Carlo shook his head in amazement, and managed to continue his thought. “Is the brandy this color as well? The demand would be huge—”

  “Just don’t let the Jebs in on the deal,” Danny warned as Carlo abandoned himself to an artillery barrage of sneezing. “The only time we ever tried to run a winery, we lost money on it. On the other hand, it might be fun to give the Benedictines a little unhealthy competition—”

  Carlo was now staggering backward, as though jet-propelled. “Possa sa’ l’ultima!” he gasped with his hands over his mouth, which felt bizarrely numb. His eyes were starting to itch and water. “Drop the flower,” he heard Sean say. “Get it away from your face!” Sandoz ordered. And Carlo did so, but the sneezing continued unabated, and his eyes were swelling shut …

  “This is the last time I go on a package tour with you guys,” John was griping. “Sean throws up, Carlo’s allergic to flowers—”