Children of God

by Mary Doria Russell

  They all waited, tense and silent, as Sandoz walked a little distance away and stood with his back to them. Even so, they could hear his side of the conversation clearly in the still morning air. “Mendes? No, listen to me! We’re all right—. Oh, God. Don’t cry, Sofia! I’m fine. Truly.… Yes. Everything is fine.… Calm down, okay?” He looked at the others and winced, shaking his head slightly: never tell a woman to calm down. “No, Sofia, listen! That was just a froyil that Joseba shot! Yes—we barbecued it! I decided we should move camp so the blood wouldn’t put the escort off. We’re not far away.”

  “Relative to Earth,” Joseba muttered.

  “I don’t know what to tell you about that signal north of the rendezvous site,” Emilio said then.

  “Not one lie so far,” Sean whispered, impressed.

  “Maybe the implants are defective?” Sandoz suggested, pacing now. “Or the software’s no good?” A pause. “Well, it doesn’t matter, because we’re fine, okay? Listen, Mendes, we were up kind of late last night and everybody’s pretty tired, so we’d like to get a little more rest before we—. Sure! Yes, have them wait right there for us! That’s perfect!” he cried, standing still, eyes wide with relief. “You, too. Go back to bed—. Then have breakfast!” he said, smiling now. “Are you all right? Sure? Don’t worry about us! We’ll be in touch.”

  “Christ,” Sean breathed as Sandoz returned to their circle and sank to the ground. “Remind me never to play poker with you again.”

  BACK ON THE SHIP, DANNY SHRUGGED, “D. W. YARBROUGH ALWAYS SAID Sofia Mendes could think too damned quick for her own good.”

  But Frans Vanderhelst was looking at Carlo. “There’s nothing wrong with those implants.”

  “Oh, yeah?” said John. “Look at the screen.”

  The fourth trace had just gone dead.

  “I’M SORRY, DON EMILIO,” NICO REPEATED AS JOSEBA POUNDED THE GPS transponder to pieces between two rocks. “Frans said—”

  “It’s all right, Nico, I understand. You meant well,” Emilio muttered, “for all the difference that ever makes.”

  “The army is coming,” Kajpin said. “They think we’ve taken you hostage—”

  “And they know where we are right now,” Joseba told them.

  “But Sandoz bought us some time,” Sean pointed out. “They think we’re safe and camped somewhere near the rendezvous site—” Then his face fell further than it normally hung, and he stared balefully at the remains of the GPS implant. “Fack.”

  Joseba, rock still in hand, went motionless and then closed his eyes, realizing the deception had just been revealed. Only Sandoz had a clue as to what he said for the next few moments, but the burden of his speech was clear even to the VaN’Jarri. “Apologies,” he said finally, his face flushed with shame. “I acted in haste.”

  “Go on without us,” Sean urged the VaN’Jarri then. “We’ll go back and meet the escort. It’s us they’re concerned about. Soon as they know we’re all right, they’ll relax. We can figure out how to get to the N’Jarr later—”

  “How much farther is it to Inbrokar?” Sandoz asked Rukuei quietly.

  “We could be there by second sunrise today, if we move fast.”

  “It takes time to mobilize troops,” Sandoz said. “We’re three days away from the rendezvous site, and it will be farther for them, because they’ll have to come overland the whole way, won’t they?”

  “No, they can use troop barges, but that’s slow, too,” Kajpin said.

  Tiyat began to sway. “They don’t need the troops—there’ll be militia alerted all over the country. We’re cooked.”

  “I’m sorry,” Nico said again. “But—what if we told Signora Sofia that we’ll bring back her son? We tell her, Don’t follow us. If you do, the deal is off. You cooperate, your boy comes back to you, no harm done.” He looked around, hopeful that he had redeemed himself.

  “It might work,” Sandoz said after a time. He started to laugh, but then sobered and lifted his chin thoughtfully, grew somehow heavier and older before their eyes, and when he spoke it was in the hoarse tones of Marlon Brando, resurrected in the Rakhati sunlight. “We make her an offer she can’t refuse.”

  Joseba looked at Sean, who shrugged, and then put the call through to the Bruno. Emilio took the transceiver and cut off John’s demands to know what the hell just happened to that fourth implant. “Don’t ask, okay? Just don’t ask. I’m going the extra mile, John. I can’t tell you more than that. Have Frans put me through to Sofia.”

  The others watched while he waited, still grinning, for Sofia’s connection, but the sense of fun died almost immediately. Reluctant to threaten, he began with an appeal to friendship and trust, but met an icy wall of objection.

  “You’re right, Sofia,” he said. “Absolutely. But we are not under duress—. Listen to me!”

  Instead he listened, letting her warn him, plead with him, threaten him, condemn his judgment. “Sofia,” he cut in finally, “I have to do this. There is something I have to see for myself. All I’m asking is that you give me some time to work this through—a couple of weeks, maybe. Please. I never asked you for anything before, Sofia. Just this one thing, okay? Give me a chance to see for myself …”

  There was no reasoning with her; there never had been. He turned to look at the VaN’Jarri—their faces tight with anxiety, pinched with hunger—and listened to the uncompromising words of a woman he had known long ago.

  “Sofia, you leave me no choice,” he said finally, hating himself. “I believe I can locate Isaac and bring him back to you, but only on the condition that we are not followed. That’s the deal, Mendes. Back off, and I’ll do what I can to bring your son home to you.”

  He closed his eyes as he listened to her tell him what she believed he had become. He didn’t argue. Mostly, she was right.

  AT MIDDAY THEY CRESTED A LOW RISE THAT GAVE OUT ONTO A FIELD rank with weed, and from that vantage the ruins of Inbrokar could be seen in the milky haze of prairie heat. For a time, Emilio gazed silently at the blackened rubble. It was not the city of his dreams, but the charred gates seemed familiar, and if he closed his eyes, he could almost picture the chiseled stone walls that had once given an illusion of safety. “Can you smell it?” Rukuei asked him.

  “No,” Emilio said. “Not yet.” Then—a faint sweetness: corruption’s ghost. “Yes. I smell it now,” he said, and turned to meet Kitheri’s eyes: beautiful, haunted, and as weary as his own. “Wait here,” Sandoz told the others, and walked with Rukuei down the sloping hill onto the battlefield.

  “I was twelve,” Rukuei said, measuring his stride to the pace of the small person beside him. “The war was as old as I was. Thirty thousand men died here in a single day, and then a city full of refugees. Within another year or two—a civilization.”

  Weather and the work of scavengers had made dust or dung of all but the densest elements of bone, but of these, there were many. “ ‘Their blood has been shed like water, round about Jerusalem, and there was none to bury them,’ ” Sandoz murmured. Here and there, the glint of fragile rusted metal caught the eye as they walked. Bending to examine a helmet, Sandoz saw a single tooth, flat-crowned and broad. “Runa,” he remarked, with some surprise. “When did they start wearing armor?”

  “Toward the end of the war,” Rukuei said.

  “I’ve heard it said: Choose your enemies wisely, for you will become them,” Sandoz told him, and was moved to apologize for frightening the young man so badly at their first meeting, but fell silent when he saw Rukuei stiffen.

  “My father wore silver and gold,” the Jana’ata said quietly, walking toward a gleaming scrap of metal. A finely wrought fastener, ripped loose, trampled into the mud, concealed from gleaners for years, weathering out again sometime during the last rainy season. Rukuei bent to pick it up, but stayed his hand when he noticed something white nearby. The tough, compact bone of an opposable toe, perhaps. And there, a fragment of the heavy nuchal crest from the base of a skull. “We—we cremat
e our dead,” Rukuei said, straightening, looking at the ruins now to escape the sight of scrappy remnants lying on the ground. “So, in some ways, it seemed acceptable that so many died in the fires, after the battle.”

  But this, he thought. This …

  The mechanical whirr of the foreigner’s hands brought him back to the present, and Rukuei saw in flesh what had once been merely dream—Emilio Sandoz, on the battlefield of Inbrokar. Stooped over, reaching for the bits of bone and teeth. Carefully picking each small piece up, gathering the remains methodically: Runa and Jana’ata, mingled in death.

  Without speaking, Rukuei joined him in this task, and then the others came to help—Kajpin and Tiyat, Sean Fein and Joseba Urizarbarrena, and Shetri Laaks, silently bringing the anonymous dead together. Nico removed his shirt, spreading it out to collect the relics, and soon the quiet was broken by the plaintive melody of “Una furtiva lagrima.” As fragmentary as the remains were, there was too much scattered across too broad a field to do right by it all, so when the makeshift shroud was filled, they counted themselves done, and carried what they had gathered to a place inside the ruins, where the smell of weathered char was stronger. They added to it with a smoky pyre built of half-burnt wood pried from what had once been a storage building near the Embassy of Mala Njer.

  “What I remember most clearly is my small sister’s voice,” Rukuei told them as the fire crackled. “All the Paramount’s freeborn children were in the embassy—he must have known how it would end, but hoped that there would be perhaps some respect for diplomats.” Rukuei laughed—a short, hard sound—at his father’s naïveté. “My sister was somewhere in the fire. As we ran from the city, I could hear her call my name. A silver wire of sound: Ru-ku-eiiiii …”

  That evening, as the light died, he sang for them a poetry of wounds, of loss and of regret and of yearning; of the concentration and intensification of such hurts with each new injury to the soul; of the slackening and rarefaction of pain and sorrow in the dance of life and in the presence of children. In the midst of this, Shetri Laaks stood and stumbled blindly away, hoping to escape the songs’ pain, but when he came to rest a good distance from the pyre, he heard a foreigner’s footsteps behind him, and knew from the scent that it was Sandoz.

  “Tell me,” Sandoz said, and his silence was a void that Shetri felt compelled to fill.

  “He doesn’t mean to hurt me,” Shetri whispered. “How can he know? Rukuei thinks children are hope, but they’re not! They’re terror. A child is a limb that can be torn from you—” Shetri stopped, and tried to slow his breathing, to force it into an even rhythm.

  “Tell me,” Sandoz said again.

  Shetri turned toward the foreigner’s voice. “My wife is pregnant, and I fear for her. The Kitheris are small, and Ha’anala nearly died during the last birth—the baby was large in the hindquarters, like a Laaks. Ha’anala hides a great deal. This pregnancy has been very hard. I fear for her, and for the baby. And for myself,” he admitted. “Sandoz, shall I tell you what my daughter Sofi’ala asked me when she learned her mother was pregnant again? She asked, Will this baby die, too? She has lost two younger brothers. She expects babies to die. So do I.”

  He sat down where he stood, heedless of the mud and ash. “I was once an adept of Sti,” said Shetri. “I was third-born, and content. Sometimes I long for the time when there was nothing in my life but still water, and the chants. But six must sing together, and I think the others are all dead now, and there is no one who can be spared to learn the ritual. I once believed myself fortunate to become a father but now—. It is an awful thing to love so much. When my first son died …”

  “I am sorry for your losses,” Sandoz said, sitting down next to him. “When is the new baby due?”

  “In a few days, perhaps. Who can tell with women? Maybe it’s come already. Maybe it’s over.” He hesitated. “My first son died of a disease of the lungs.” He tapped his chest, so the foreigner understood. “But the second—” He fell silent.

  “Tell me,” said the foreigner softly.

  “The priests of Sti are known—were known for our medicines, our knowledge of how to heal wounds and help the body overcome illness when it was fitting to do so. I could not stand to watch Ha’anala die, so I tried to help her. There are drugs to ease pain …” It was a long while before he could finish. “It was my fault that the child was stillborn,” he said at last. “I only wanted to help Ha’anala.”

  “I, too, watched a child dear to me die. I killed her,” Sandoz told him plainly. “It was, I suppose, an accident, but I was responsible.”

  There was lightning to the east; for a moment Shetri could see the foreigner’s face. “So,” Shetri said with a soft grunt of commiseration. “I grant parity.”

  They listened for a time, waiting for the low rumble of thunder to reach them. When the foreigner spoke again, his voice was soft but clear in the darkness. “Shetri, you risked a great deal to come south. What did you expect us to do? We are but four men, and foreigners! What do you want from us?”

  “Help. I don’t know. Just—some new idea, some way to make them listen! We’ve tried everything we can think of, but.… Sandoz, we are no danger to anyone anymore,” Shetri cried, too desperate to be ashamed. “We wanted you to see that, to tell them that! We’re not asking them for anything. Just leave us alone! Let us live. And—if we could just move a little farther south, where the cranil and piyanot are, I think we could feed ourselves decently. We’ve learned ways to take wild meat—we can support ourselves without taking any Runa. We could even teach Athaansi’s people, and then they’d stop the raiding! If we could just get someplace warmer—if we could keep the women better fed! The mountains are killing us!”

  Nico was singing now: “Un bel dì,” the notes lifting on the night breeze.

  “Shetri, hear me. The Runa love their children, as you do,” Sandoz said. “This war began with the slaughter of Runa infants by Jana’ata militia. How do you answer this?”

  “I answer: even so, our children are innocent.”

  There was a long silence. “All right,” Sandoz said at last. “I’ll do what I can. It probably won’t be enough, Shetri, but I’ll try.”

  “GOOD MORNING, FRANS,” EMILIO SAID THE NEXT DAY, AS THOUGH nothing much had occurred since his last transmission. “I’d like to speak to John and Danny, if you don’t mind.”

  There was a slight delay before John’s voice was heard. “Emilio! Are you safe? Where the hell have you—?”

  “Listen, John, about that extra mile I was prepared to walk,” Emilio said lightly. “If you and Danny don’t mind coming down here to give my friends and me a lift, I think I’d rather fly.”

  “Not without an explanation, ace,” said Danny Iron Horse.

  “Good morning, Danny. I’ll explain in a moment—”

  Carlo cut in. “Sandoz, I’ve had quite enough of this. Mendes will give us almost no information and I’m certain she’s lying when she does!”

  “Ah, Don Carlo! I trust you slept better than I did last night,” Sandoz said, ignoring the sounds of irritation. “I find that I must ask you for the loan of a lander. There’s no money in this venture, I’m afraid, but I can get a very good poet to write an epic about you, if you like. I don’t want the drone. I want the manned lander—with Danny and John—and I want it empty, except for a case of cartridges and Joseba’s hunting rifle.”

  “What’s the ammunition for?” Danny asked suspiciously.

  “First principles, Danny: we intend to feed the hungry. The situation on the ground is not as we expected. If our information is correct, there remain only a few small enclaves of Jana’ata, and some of them are presently starving. Joseba believes the entire species may be on the brink of extinction.” He waited for the clamor on the Giordano Bruno to die down. “He and Sean are determined to find the truth, as am I. I want Danny and John down here as neutral witnesses. I’m afraid Sean and Joseba and I are not generating much in the way of objectivity anymore.”


  Frans said, “Sandoz, I’ve got a fix on your transmission site near what looks—”

  “You needn’t mention the coordinates, Frans. We may be overheard,” Emilio cautioned. “I need an answer, gentlemen. There’s not a lot of time to waste.”

  “An epic, you say?” Carlo asked, self-mockery plain. “Well, perhaps I can work out something more lucrative later. I’ll send the lander, Sandoz. You can pay me back when we get home.”

  “Don’t tempt me,” Emilio warned him with a small laugh, and they made arrangements for the landing.

  N’Jarr Valley

  October 2078, Earth-Relative

  HA’ANALA HAD TWO DREAMS THAT NIGHT. HER THIRD CHILD—THE unnamed stillbirth—appeared at the doorway, small and fetal but cheerful, his face full of mischief. “Where have you been?” Ha’anala cried when she saw him. “It’s nearly redlight! You shouldn’t stay out so long!” she scolded affectionately, and the baby answered, “You shouldn’t worry about me!”

  She roused briefly, with a sensation of tightness across her belly, but the visit from her dream son was reassuring and she drifted back to the heavy sleep that had characterized this pregnancy. The second dream was also of a dead child but, this time, she relived the last few minutes of Urkinal’s life and awoke with a start, the hiss and rattle of his tiny lungs in her ears.

  Suukmel, who had moved in with her while Shetri was gone, came awake in an instant. “Is it time?” she asked quietly in the thin light of dawn.

  “No,” Ha’anala whispered. “I had a dream.” She sat up with a graceless lurch but as carefully as she could, not wanting to wake Sofi’ala, sleeping in the nest beside her. Another gray day, she noted, peering out through cracks in the stonework. There was no sound yet from the other houses. “The children came to visit again last night.”

  “Someone should tie ribbons on your arms,” Suukmel said, smiling at the superstition. But Ha’anala shuddered, as much from the chill of the sunless morning as from the memory of a small rattling chest. “I wish Shetri hadn’t gone. Was Ma with you when your daughters were born?”