Children of God s-2

by Mary Doria Russel

  "You’re very good at that," Gina observed, glancing over her shoulder at his handiwork as she rooted in a bureau drawer for underwear her mother would not be disgusted by.

  "Dazzling," he agreed and added, "I used to work in the house laundry. Would you like me to come with you to the mountains?"

  She straightened slowly, astonished. "And if you’re recognized?"

  "I’ll wear dark glasses and a hat and gloves," he said, looking up from the suitcase.

  "And a trenchcoat?" she suggested dryly. "Caro, it’s August."

  "All right, what about a veil?" he asked airily, going back to the clothes. "Nothing flashy—not an embroidered silk veil hung with gold coins. Something tasteful!" There was a pause. "Silver coins, perhaps." He blew it off, laying blouses in her bag. "If I’m recognized, I’m recognized! I’ll deal with it."

  They could hear the two little girls’ shrieking laughter out in the yard. The house itself seemed very still. Gina walked to the bed and sat down, watching his face. Finally, he sat next to her. "Okay," he admitted, the cockiness gone, "maybe it’s not such a great idea."

  "You’ve got to finish the K’San project for the Jesuits. They’re leaving soon," she pointed out. "Maybe next year for the mountains?"

  Head down, hair over his eyes, he probed the hurt places, judging himself. "The Society is going to release the scientific papers in October," he said, serious now. "I have been thinking that perhaps the best way to handle it really is to call a news conference. Spend a whole day, if necessary. As long as it takes. Be done with it. Answer every damned question they throw at me—"

  "And then come home to your family." She reached over and took his face in her hands and looked into the dark eyes, watching the doubt and the fear recede.

  "Do people still dance?" he asked suddenly. "Someday, I would like to take you dancing."

  "Yes, caro," she assured him. "People still dance."

  "Good," he said, and leaned forward to kiss her, but then just closed his eyes in resignation and rested his forehead against hers as the kitchen door crashed open and a tidal wave of noise rolled down the hallway toward them.

  Celestina skidded to a halt at the bedroom door, hair wild and face rosy with the heat. "We’re starving!" she cried dramatically and demonstrated this by collapsing semi-gracefully into a pitiable heap at their feet.

  "Note, if you will," Emilio pointed out to the dying swan’s mother, "that she made sure to fall onto the bedroom carpet, rather than the tiled floor of the hall." Celestina giggled, eyes closed.

  "Will you make us macaroni and cheese again?" Pia begged Emilio, hopping up and down, hands pressed together in supplication. "Just like last time? Please, please, please. Extra soupy? With lots of milk?"

  Gina smiled at her lap, shaking her head, as Emilio was borne off to the kitchen by two boisterous little girls. "Pia, call your mother," she could hear him say in his very best papa voice. "And ask if you may stay for supper. Celestina, you set the table. Lots of milk, the lady says! Why is it you can never find a cow when you need one…"

  FINALLY, THE TIME CAME TO PUT CELESTINA TO BED AND, AS GINA touched off the light and tucked the child in, Emilio cleared a space to sit amid the doll-and-stuffed-animal populace. From out of nowhere, he produced a small silver box that one of the Camorra guards had purchased for him in Naples and held it up for Celestina’s perusal.

  "Is it for me?" she asked, her yearning naked.

  "Who else?" he asked, smiling at Gina, enjoying her obvious perplexity. "This is a magic box, you know," Emilio confided then, face grave, eyes alight, as Celestina examined the tiny, perfect flowers that decorated its lid. "You can keep words in it."

  The child looked up at him, massively skeptical in the dark, and he smiled at her remarkable resemblance to her mother. "Take the top off for me, if you please," he said. He had planned to do this himself, but small precise movements were sometimes excruciatingly hard. No matter, he thought, I can adapt the act. "Now. Get ready because you have to put the top back on very quickly after I say the words." Caught up in the game, Celestina tensed and held the box to his lips. Eyes on Gina, he whispered, "Ti amo, cara," and then cried, "Quick! Get that top on!" Squealing, Celestina clamped the lid down as quickly as she could. "Whew! That was close. Now," he said, taking the box from her, "tap the top and count to ten."

  "Why?"

  "Why, why, why! We don’t beat this child enough," he complained to Gina, who was smiling broadly. "In my day, kids did as they were told, no questions asked."

  Celestina was not impressed. "Why?" she insisted on knowing.

  "To let the words know they’re supposed to stay inside," he told her in an exasperated tone: any silly would know that! "Do as you’re told. Tap the top and count to ten!" he repeated, holding the box out in what was left of a palm, balancing it on the brace strap. She no longer saw his hands, he realized. Even Pia was used to them now.

  Celestina, mollified, tapped and counted. He handed the box to her. "Now, open it, and put it right next to your ear."

  Small fingers pried the lid off and her oval face, the mirror of her mother’s, became still as she thrust the box into blond tangles near a golden ear sprinkled with summer freckles. "I don’t hear anything!" Celestina declared, skepticism confirmed. "I think you’re goofing me."

  Emilio looked indignant. "Try it again," he said, but he added, "This time, listen with your heart."

  In the magical silence of a little girl’s bedroom, they all three heard his words: Ti amo, cara.

  BEFORE IT WAS OVER, CELESTINA HAD ASKED FOR A DRINK OF WATER AND reminded her mother about the night-light and told Emilio she was going to keep the box under her pillow and asked for one last trip to the toilet, and then tried to initiate a discussion of monster-under-the-bed behavior that had the potential for delaying "Good night" five more minutes, but didn’t work.

  Finally, pulling the door almost closed, they left Celestina with "Sweet dreams," and Gina caught her breath, feeling vacuumed of energy but happy. "You are going to be the greatest papa in world history," she said with quiet conviction, putting her arms around Emilio.

  "Depend on it," he told her, but she could tell something was wrong. He made no move toward their bedroom and finally told her wryly, "You could save me a lot of embarrassment if you had a headache tonight."

  She stepped back. "Your hands?" There was a small shrug and he looked away. He started to apologize, but she stopped him with a finger on his lips. "Caro, we have our whole lives for it." And to tell the truth, she’d felt faintly queasy all day anyway, so she changed the subject as they headed for the kitchen table. "Don Vincenzo told me they found another surgeon for you last May, but you wouldn’t see him. Why not, caro?" Emilio slumped into a chair opposite her, face stony, his breathing shallow. "You heal well enough now. They can do amazing things, Emilio. Re-glove the hands with artificial skin, reposition some tendons to take advantage of the nerves that weren’t cut. You’d have much better function afterward."

  "I’m used to the braces." He sat up, half defiant. "Look. I’ve had enough, okay? I don’t want to start all over learning how to use my hands."

  That much he had told the Father General. She waited, giving him time to say the rest himself. When he didn’t, she answered the unspoken objection, and knew she’d guessed correctly when his eyes slid away. "The phantom neuralgia won’t be any worse afterward—it might even be better."

  There was no answer for a time. "I’ll think about it," he said, blinking. "Not right away. I need some time."

  "Maybe after New Year’s," she suggested gently.

  "Maybe," he said. "I don’t know. Maybe."

  There was no rush, apart from her own desire to see him made whole, so Gina let it go. He’d had scurvy when he first came home and, for a long time, his connective tissue had simply been too fragile to permit surgery; the longer he waited, the healthier he would be and the faster he would heal. The damage to his hands was already three years old. Another six months
would make no difference clinically.

  The last thing they talked about before he walked back to his apartment was the arrangement he’d made with the law firm in Cleveland and the bank in Zurich, giving Gina free access to all his accounts.

  "Don’t you want to wait until after the wedding?" she asked, standing in the doorway.

  "Why? Are you going to run away with the money?" he replied. She could barely see him in the dark. "No, I just want you to take your parents out for dinner a few times. Someplace nice, yes? And tell them it was my idea! I want credit. A son-in-law has to think about this kind of thing."

  She laughed and watched until he disappeared into the moonless night.

  THEY WERE IN TOUCH DAILY WHILE GINA WAS GONE, ALTHOUGH TOWARD the end of the second week, Emilio was swamped, wrapping up the final details of the K’San programs, trying to meet his own self-imposed deadline at the end of the month. By the time she and Celestina got back to Naples, it had been a couple of days since they’d spoken. She called the minute she walked in her door, but the number was disconnected. She tried again to be sure she hadn’t touched the wrong code, then drove over to his apartment as soon as she’d brought the luggage in from the car and taken care of Celestina’s immediate needs for a toilet and lunch, telling herself all the while that what she knew must be wrong.

  The main retreat house was not deserted, as she had irrationally feared, but no one she knew was in residence. The lay brother who’d taken Cosimo’s place in the refectory was Vietnamese and she couldn’t make out a word of his Italian. The door to Emilio’s apartment over the garage was locked, and the geraniums were gone from his unshuttered windows. She demanded explanations, wept, screamed, accused, and everywhere met omertà—the silence of the South. Her second daughter was nearly ten years old before Gina understood the whole of it.

  18

  Giordano Bruno

  2061–2062 Earth-Relative

  "REALLY, SANDOZ, I WOULD HAVE THOUGHT THAT SULKING WAS BENEATH your dignity," Carlo Giuliani remarked with cool amusement, watching as Nico d’Angeli checked the blood chemistry readouts before adjusting the IV line running into Sandoz’s arm. "It’s your own fault, you know. You were given every opportunity to volunteer. This attitude will get you nothing but bedsores and a bladder infection."

  Leaning with elegant composure against the soundproofed bulkhead of the Giordano Bruno’s sick bay, Carlo studied the still, dark face. He saw nothing of coma’s slackness or sleep’s easing. This was sheer obstinance.

  "Do you enjoy opera, Sandoz?" Carlo asked curiously when Nico, humming "Nessun dorma," started the sponge bath. "Most Neapolitans are mad for opera. We love the passions, the conflict—life lived on a grand scale." He waited for a moment, watching the man’s closed eyes as Nico lifted the unresisting limbs, wiping down the armpits and groin with gentle efficiency. "Gina never cared for opera," Carlo recalled. "Grandiose nonsense, she called it. A thoroughly boring little housewife, Gina. You should thank me, Sandoz. I have saved you from a stifling fate! You would not have been content for long to sit at home with her, eating pasta together and getting fat. You and I Were meant for greater things."

  Finished with the bath, Nico set aside the washcloth and covered Sandoz with the sheet for a few minutes, to let the dampness subside before reapplying the electrodes. In no hurry, Carlo waited until the heart monitor had begun its steady ping before speaking again. "We have a great deal in common, you know—even apart from our use of Gina," he suggested, and smiled with satisfaction at the raggedly quickened tempo of the pinging. "We were both despised by our fathers, for example. Papa used to call me Cio-Cio-San. The allusion is to Madama Butterfly, of course. To call me Cio-Cio-San was to accuse me of flitting from one thing to another, do you see? Since the day of my birth, I have been a bitter disappointment to my father. Like yours, my father saw in my face only evidence of his wife’s infidelity. There, perhaps, our experience differs: my mother was falsely accused. But it has always been easier for Papa to assume that I am not his than to accept that I am not he."

  Unable to work without singing, and partial to Bellini, Nico went on to Norma: "Me protegge, me difende…"

  "I have always been good at anything I put my hand to," Carlo reported without false modesty. "Every teacher I studied with took an interest in me. Each assumed I’d be a protégé—an engineer or biologist or pilot. When I refused to follow in their footsteps, they blamed my inconstancy and disloyalty, rather than recognize their own disappointed desire for acolytes. But I am no one’s disciple. My life is my own, and I follow no one else’s path."

  Nico moved to the foot of the bed to change the urine bag. It was a tight fit in the cramped space at that end of the medical bay, but he was a methodical and careful person who did one thing at a time, in a set order, and he had learned how to accomplish this maneuver with a minimum of disturbance.

  "I know what you’re thinking, Sandoz: delusions of grandeur," Carlo continued soberly. "Men like you and my father excel in a narrow field of endeavor. You are intent from your youth on one thing, and achieve a great deal early in your lives, and you scorn those who are not similarly focused. My father, for example, took over Naples before he was thirty—it was quite a remarkable rise to power," Carlo admitted. "By the time he was forty, he controlled businesses accounting for eighteen percent of Italy’s gross national product, with an annual income greater than Fiat. At forty-two, only a year older than I am now, Domenico Giuliani was the head of an empire with tentacles reaching into the whole of Europe, South Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean and the Americas. An empire larger than Alexander’s—my father would remind me of this at breakfast, nearly every morning."

  Carlo fell silent for a time. Then he drew himself up and shrugged. "But true greatness is in part a matching of the man and the times, Sandoz. Versatility can be a virtue! I’d have done well in the Renaissance, for example. A merchant prince! Someone who could write a song and wage war and build a catapult and dance well. Even my father had to admit that launching this venture required talent in many fields. Politics, finance, engineering…"

  Finished with his chores and two arias, Nico looked to his padrone. "Well done," Carlo said, on cue. "You may go now, Nico." He waited for Nico to leave before standing and moving to the bedside. "You see, Sandoz? Knowing your frailties as well as your strengths, I have even provided you with a very fine nurse. Not one as delightfully accommodating as Gina, perhaps, but quite adequate to his task."

  He glanced at the readouts, but this time Gina’s name provoked no change in the life-sign data now flowing to the monitors. "An extraordinary situation, is it not?" said Carlo Giuliani, looking down at the man who’d very nearly married his own ex-wife. "Unforeseen and unfortunate. You may believe that I have taken you away from Gina out of some romantic Neapolitan fury but I assure you, I was finished with her. The simple fact is that I need you more than she does." He opened the sick-bay door, standing there for a time without leaving. "Don’t worry about Gina, Sandoz. She’ll find someone new, now that you’re gone."

  It was not until the sick-bay hatch was shut and locked from the outside that the readouts changed.

  CARLO HAD SENT THREE OF THEM FOR HIM. THEY KNEW HE’D BEEN A priest and were, perhaps, complacent in that knowledge. They could see that he was small. They were told he had been sick and that his hands were essentially useless. What they did not know was that he was a veteran of a hundred emetic nightmare reenactments of this very experience. Over and over, he relived it and what came afterward. This time, there was no hesitation, no foolish hope, and he did damage before, inevitably, they overpowered him. For weeks afterward, he would remember with satisfaction the feel of a cheekbone giving way under his heel when a face came within striking distance, would recall with pleasure the nasal cry of the man whose nose he broke when he got an elbow loose.

  He marked them. This time, he made himself felt.

  He had been beaten before and there was no novelty in it. He rolled with as
much as he could, kept tensed and braced for as long as possible, and finally took a savage satisfaction in the silence that would become his principal weapon against them. Unconscious during the trip to the launch site, he was kept under sedation for a time, even after they were on board the Giordano Bruno.

  But he had sampled product when he was a kid; familiar with the doped drift between dream and waking, it did not frighten him. Slack and boneless whenever anyone was near, he let them think the dose was enough to put him under, and waited. A chance came while the crew was occupied with the final preparations for leaving high Earth orbit. Ripping the IV line out of his arm with his teeth, he lay motionless until his head cleared a little, watching his blood mix with the saline and glucose and medication from the pumpwell, dispersing evenly throughout the compartment in a pale iridescent haze that suddenly sank to the floor as the engines fired and the ship began to accelerate. He struggled out of the zero-G moorings that had held him in place; stood, wobbling slightly; made his way with the careful balance of a self-conscious drunk to the system access panel in the sick bay. What he could not stop, he could sabotage. A minute error in navigation would be enough to throw them years off course and he meant to change a single number in the navigation calculations.

  He was caught, and there was another beating, fueled this time by fear of what he’d almost done. There was blood in his urine a few days afterward, and they did not find it necessary to restrain him that week.

  It occurred to him that if he had taken this kind of abuse a year ago, it would have killed him. Timing, he thought bitterly, is everything.

  Throughout the days that followed, he lay still, hating in silence. Sometimes, for a moment, when the sick-bay door opened, he would hear voices. Some were well known. Others were new to him, most notably that of a tenor: unschooled and a little nasal, with a slightly sanded quality that took the brilliance off his top notes, but true and often lovely. He hated them all, without reservation and without exception, with a pure and incandescent outrage that sustained him and replaced the food he would not take. And he resolved to die rather than be used again.