Children of God s-2

by Mary Doria Russel

  "Khimali," Djalao said shortly, coming forward, standing next to Sofia. She wanted to stop this odd behavior, he knew. Wanted to draw Supaari away to a place where she could pick through his coat, wanted to crush the revolting little creatures between her fingers and be done with this. "They are dangerous," she snapped. "They’re making you sick. Please, allow this one—"

  But Supaari called, "And what are khimali?"

  "Parasites!" Djalao answered, exasperated, staring at him now. "Sipaj, Supaari, why do you—?"

  "And what are parasites," he asked, still looking past her to the others, "but those who take their sustenance without benefit to the host? Those who draw their lives from the lives of others and give nothing back?" Most of the Runa looked around uncertainly, shifting from foot to foot. But Djalao straightened, and met his eyes. She knows, he thought. She understands.

  "And what," he asked her softly, "must we do to rid ourselves of parasites?"

  "Kill them," she said as softly and as certainly. "Kill them, one by one— until they trouble us no longer."

  23

  Giordano Bruno

  2064, Earth-Relative

  JOHN, I’M SORRY, BUT I DON’T SEE A LOT OF ALTERNATIVES HERE," Emilio Sandoz remarked mildly. "What are you suggesting? Mutiny on the Bruno?"

  "Don’t patronize me, Emilio! I’m serious—"

  "No, I’m not certain that you are serious," Emilio said, pouring reconstituted scrambled eggs into a pan. Quell seemed to improve his appetite, and he’d awakened at five in the morning, ship’s time, ravenous. When he went to the galley to fix himself something to eat, John Candotti had been lying in wait, all cranked up with plans to take over the ship and go home. "You want some of this? I could make enough for two."

  "No! Listen to me! The longer we wait, the farther we are from home—"

  "So what are you going to do? Cut Carlo’s throat while he’s asleep?"

  "No!" John whispered urgently. "But we could lock him in his cabin—"

  "Oh, please!" Emilio sighed, rolling his eyes as he stirred his eggs. "Get me some juice, will you?"

  "Emilio, he’s only one man! There are seven of us—"

  "Have you talked to any of the others about this, Mistah Christian?" he asked, relying on Charles Laughton to make his attitude clear.

  John flushed at the mockery. He opened a storage cabinet and got out a mug for the juice, but went on resolutely. "I came to you first, but I’m sure—"

  "Don’t be," Emilio said flatly. Without the distracting noise of emotion, political realities were obvious, and he understood why rioting prisoners would give up a losing battle when Quell was fired like tear gas into a lockup. "The count is seven to one, but you’re the one, John."

  Dumping the eggs onto a plate, Sandoz carried it to the table and sat with his back to the galley. John followed him, lips compressed, plunking the mug of orange juice down belligerently and sitting across the table from him. Emilio ate under his friend’s withering glare for a time before pushing his plate aside.

  "Look. John. Face facts," he advised finally. "No matter what you think of him or his motives, Danny Iron Horse has already staked his soul on this mission, yes?" He stared, level-eyed, until John nodded reluctantly. "Joseba has his own reasons for wanting to go on to Rakhat, regardless of anyone else’s. Sean—I don’t understand Sean, but he seems to think that cynicism about human nature is an adequate response to sin. He won’t take a stand."

  John’s eyes hadn’t dropped, but it was beginning to sink in. "As for Nico," Emilio said, "don’t underestimate him. He is not as dim as he looks, and he has been thoroughly inculcated with the notion of loyalty to his padrone. Attack Carlo, and you will have Nico to deal with, and I warn you: he is very good at his job." Emilio shrugged. "But let’s say Sean stood out of this, and you could co-opt Danny and Joseba, and overcome Carlo and Nico somehow. You’d still need Fat Frans to pilot the ship back to Earth—"

  "Right, and Frans is a shameless mercenary! So we buy him off! And anyway, he thinks Carlo is crazy—"

  "Frans has a wonderful gift for colorful exaggeration." Emilio sat up and rested his arms on the table. "John, Carlo is cold and unscrupulous and completely selfish, but he is a long way from crazy. Even if he were barking mad, I wouldn’t count on Frans’s cooperation with your plan, such as it is." John bristled, but Emilio continued, "The Camorra has a long reach and a longer memory. Frans would be running a great risk to buck Carlo—"

  "An excellent analysis, Sandoz!" cried Carlo as he walked into the room. "Positively Machiavellian. Really, Candotti," Carlo said dryly when John jumped at the sound of his voice, "secrecy is the first principle of conspiracy! The commons room is hardly the place for this sort of thing." He turned his merry gray eyes from John’s now roseate face to Sandoz’s, lined and still. "And you, Sandoz? Have you no wish to return to Gina and my daughter?"

  "What I wish is irrelevant. The fact is, I was a part of their lives for only a few months." John gasped, and Emilio turned to him. "Years are passing at home, John. Even if we were to come about and return now, I could hardly expect to drop back in on them as though I’d been away on a business trip."

  John looked stricken, but Carlo beamed. "I may assume then that you have reached a decision regarding my proposals—"

  They would remember later that the impact sounded like a rifle shot.

  There was a single unresonant bang, followed by an instant of utter silence in total darkness, and then the shouts and cries throughout the ship of men tumbling blindly when the engines cut out and they lost the gravity provided by acceleration.

  The emergency lighting came on almost immediately, but with restored vision came the screaming of klaxons signaling a hull breach and then the high-pitched whine of compartment doors rolling shut and locking themselves down, endeavoring with mechanical efficiency to isolate regions of atmospheric pressure loss. A moment later, the spin imparted by the collision took over and every loose object in the ship was now flung away from the ship’s center of mass. John was thrown into the table’s edge, the breath driven from his lungs. Emilio, knocked sideways when the ship lurched, was now pinned against a bulkhead, the outline of an air intake square against his back. Ears ringing from the blow when his head hit the wall, he watched the Wolverton tube with wide-eyed fascination, as plants and soilmix ripped loose and whirled, propelled by a tornado within the transparent cylinder that had been a vertical garden moments before.

  "That’s the axis… in the tube!" Carlo yelled. He was spread-eagled, back against the bulkhead opposite Sandoz. The sensation was like that of an amusement park ride that had thrilled him when he was a child—a large padded cylinder that spun faster and faster until centrifugal force held people against the walls and the floor dropped out from under them. It was hard to breathe against a force that wanted to flatten him, so he kept his phrases short but calm. "Sandoz, there is a… red control button… to your left—. Yes. Be so kind… as to press that, please?"

  Carlo tensed in sympathy while Sandoz struggled to inch a leg toward its target, and tried to move his own leg, just to see what it was like: very difficult indeed, with these G forces. There wasn’t enough strength in Sandoz’s ankle alone; working with his whole body, he arched away from the wall to bring the edge of his foot down on the button. The klaxon was silenced. "Well done," Carlo said, with an involuntary sigh of relief echoed by Candotti.

  But now they could hear more ominous sounds: the creaking of the ship’s stony substance, the sound of water gushing from some pipe, the cyclonic hissing whistle of escaping air and the moan of stressed metal, like the mournful song of humpback whales.

  "Intercom: all transceivers on," Carlo said, in a normal tone of voice, activating the ship’s internal communications system. One by one, he called the names of the men he could not see. One by one, Frans, Nico, Sean, Joseba and Danny reported in. Above and below the center deck, the spin had pinned each man to an unaccustomed surface, and they were now sealed in their cabins b
y AI emergency programs that turned each compartment of the ship into a lifepod.

  "This is like… our drills," Nico’s voice gasped cheerfully. "We’re… going to be fine."

  Face pulled toward the tabletop, John’s eyes bulged sightlessly at that sanguine pronouncement, but from somewhere in the ship came Frans’s voice, crying, "Brav’ scugnizz’, Nico!"

  Carlo, too, continued to sound serene. "Gentlemen," he called, knowing he could be heard throughout the ship, "I believe… the Giordano Bruno must have struck a micrometeorite. Since… we have not been reduced to… mineral dust and a haze of organic… molecules, we may deduce that whatever we hit… was very small. But we are… moving very quickly, which accounts for… the result of that impact." He began to find his rhythm, his breathing easier now. "Ah! You see, Sandoz?" Carlo asked, gray eyes moving in his immobilized head, "the vacuum is sucking dirt from… the Wolverton tube… through the channel… drilled by the particle. It has now been clogged with plant debris… and sealed itself off."

  The hissing stopped, and the tornado inside the transparent tube was suddenly replaced by an apparently solid mass of soilmix, flung with a thud against the walls of the cylinder, just as Sandoz and Carlo were themselves pinned against the outer walls of the common room.

  Rolling his eyes wildly, John could just glimpse Carlo at the edge of his field of vision. "You mean… all that’s between… us and space is… dirt?" John gasped frantically.

  "That, and the… love o’ God," came Sean Fein’s strained voice over the intercom.

  Carlo somehow managed to laugh delightedly. "If there is anyone among our passengers… who is so inclined, you might consider… praying to the soul of James… Lovell, patron saint of hard-luck spacefarers! He… was surely watching over us this morning, my friends. Listen!" he ordered, hearing the photonics systems powering on and resetting themselves. "Get ready to fall. If all goes well, the inertial guidance system will… begin firing the attitude rockets soon—"

  There were short, heartfelt prayers and curses—both consisting entirely of the name of Jesus—and more cries of fear, startlement and pain as the AI guidance system began firing its jets, which automatically registered their own effects on the stability of the ship and readjusted the Bruno’s pitch and roll and yaw with brief thrusts. In the commons, globules of orange juice formed up in momentary spells of weightlessness, and the carnival ride gave way to a nauseating kaleidoscope of scrambled eggs and dust, with Emilio’s fork spinning crazily near a floating plate. In the cabins, anything left loose—computer tablets, razors, socks, bedding, rosaries—danced with men’s bodies to the erratic forces of the ship’s motion, which changed instant by instant. Everywhere, boluses of spit and vomit and tears—briefly held together by surface tension—were now added to the mess, shattering as they splashed against surfaces or collided with some other object or were struck by the frantic movement of a man’s arms and legs seeking purchase.

  Within endless minutes, the spin stabilized and they were pulled back toward the ship’s periphery but now with far less force. "Do you feel that, Don Gianni?" Nico called, apparently concerned by the fear he’d heard in John Candotti’s voice. "Feel it? It’s starting to slow down—"

  "All right," Carlo said, cool as ever, "start moving toward the floor as the centrifugal force decreases."

  "Do you understand, Don Gianni?" Nico asked helpfully, without a trace of irony. "The ship is going to let us go now."

  "When the engines fire," Carlo warned, "we’re going to have full power—"

  Which meant full, normal gravity. Floors abruptly reestablished their claim on Down, and anyone who had not made it to the bottom of his wall while the guidance system slowed and stopped the spin acquired a few more bruises for his tardiness.

  "Well!" Carlo cried cheerfully, picking himself up with the almost magical self-satisfaction that handsome Italian males acquire in middle age. "That went about as well as could be expected. Will everyone please report to the commons?"

  AGAINST ODDS, THE MEN OF THE GIORDANO BRUNO WERE ALL CAPABLE of staggering out of their compartments when the emergency lockdown was released, and presented themselves one by one, naked or in undershorts. Frans, amply padded and phlegmatic, had come through without injury, and Nico’s inability to imagine how much danger they’d just been in had served him well. Joseba was silent and breathing hard, but otherwise intact. Sean was visibly shaken, but Danny Iron Horse was focused and alert. Carlo himself knew exactly where each Newtonian law of motion had been demonstrated on his body, but was fully functional. John, too, insisted he was okay and was already at work; having located a galley water pipe that had burst under torsion, he had cut off the main valve and was going through the plumbing supplies with Nico, looking for what he needed to fix it. Sandoz was calm, of course, saying only, "One of my braces is damaged. It looks repairable."

  Apart from cuts and bruises, there were no injuries, perhaps because most of them had been in bed. Allowing no time for anyone to give way to post-traumatic panic, Carlo handed out assignments with a brisk, businesslike dispatch. "I want everyone in pressure suits until we are certain the ship is stabilized. Nico, after you have your suit on, you’ll be cleaning up for us. Start in the galley. Make a list of what needs to be repaired for Don Gianni. Sean, help Sandoz get into his suit, then put on your own—"

  "My hands are useless in a suit," Sandoz objected. "I can’t…"

  "Just until we’re certain we’ve got the ship stabilized," Carlo said. Sandoz shrugged: resigned or indifferent. "Frans, as soon as you’re ready, take Sandoz with you to the bridge. Sandoz, you’ll be helping with a complete review of the photonics—check the ship’s status, system by system. That can be done with voice control, and as soon as the emergency passes, we can dispense with the pressure suits. Candotti," he called, "leave the swabbing for Nico—check out the plumbing on the other levels. There may be damage elsewhere and we don’t need anything shorting out. Sean! Wake up! Help Sandoz into his pressure suit."

  When the others had gone, Carlo spoke to Joseba and Danny. "After the ship is sound, the priority will be to reactivate the biological air and waste systems." It was only then that Joseba and Danny looked at the Wolverton tube in the center of the commons and stared, horrified, at the battered and torn plants that had been ripped from their moorings. "This is not fatal, gentlemen," Carlo insisted. "We can maintain air quality with scrubbers and we have backup oxygen generators, but I don’t like to lose redundancy in any system, so we need to salvage as many plants as we can—that’s your job," he told Joseba. "Even if they’re all dead, we’re carrying seeds on board, and we can reestablish the tube in a couple of months. When Sean is capable, put him to work on the fish tanks, Joseba. They’re sealed, but have him check for leaks and cracks. I imagine the tilapia survived the ride, but the tanks and filters themselves will need to be checked over and thoroughly cleaned at the very least."

  Joseba stood there dumbly for a moment, but finally moved off toward his cabin to suit up, and to make sure Sean and Sandoz were doing the same.

  "Hail, Caesar!" Danny Iron Horse said to Carlo when they were alone. "Very cool, ace."

  One hand raised, palm inward, the other laid gracefully upon his chest, Carlo struck a pose implying an invisible toga. "I am not cold, unscrupulous and selfish," he declared, brows raised imperiously. "I am a philosopher-king, and the embodiment of Stoic detachment!"

  "In a pig’s eye," Danny said affably. "You Giulianis are stone-hearted bastards to a man."

  "So my father tells me," Carlo said, unruffled. "My mother denied everything and demanded DNA tests. Suit up. You’re coming with me. We need to check out the hull and see how bad the damage to the landers is. I think we’ll all sleep better if we seal those pinholes with something a bit more reliable than clumps of dirt."

  "Duct tape?" Danny suggested as they walked toward the spiral stairs that led to their cabins below. Carlo laughed, but before he could go through the hatch, Iron Horse put out an imposi
ng arm, blocking his way.

  "Just how close was that?" Danny asked curiously, black eyes steady.

  "I won’t know for certain until I inspect the hull," Carlo said, but Danny wouldn’t let him pass so Carlo took a step back and stood quietly, hands behind his beautiful back, classical head cocked, gray eyes speculative. His contemporaries found him surprisingly fastidious: Carlo Giuliani rarely used vulgarities unless the situation genuinely seemed to demand them. "So fucking close," he said very gently and very distinctly, "that the only reason we can possibly be alive is that the Pope and Don Vincenzo were right—God wants Sandoz on Rakhat."

  They looked at each other for a long time. Dropping his arm, Danny nodded and started down the stairs.

  ENCASED IN PRESSURE SUITS FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, DANNY AND Carlo met again in the passageway beyond their cabins and moved from room to room, surveying the damage. Carlo’s orders to keep every loose item stowed and secure had been fairly well complied with, even in private spaces, and this had undoubtedly decreased the severity of the injuries sustained. Mostly they saw a jumbled mess but ignored that, pushing bedding and clothing aside to inspect the walls, floors and ceilings of each room.

  The surfaces were coated with a stress-crackle polymer on which the effects of twisting were evident. It was most severe on the outer walls, but research and experience had shown that in-line collisions were the only survivable scenario, so Carlo had chosen an asteroid and configured it with that in mind. Cracks in the outer shell were still a possibility-it would take sonar soundings to discover those. But the life-supporting central cylinder of the Bruno, it seemed, was in no immediate danger of splitting apart.