Children of God s-2

by Mary Doria Russel

  "Don’t worry," his father told Sean the night before the firebomb. "It’s nothin’ to do with us."

  Bitterness was the backbone of Belfast, but Maura Fein was a philosophical woman who took her widowhood in stride. Sean had asked her once why she had not converted to Judaism when she married. "The great appeal of Jesus, Sean, is the willingness of God to walk among the benighted creatures He just can’t seem to give up on," she told him. "There is a glorious looniness to it—the magnificent eternal gesture of salvation, in the face of perennial, thickheaded human inanity! I like that in a deity."

  Sean had not inherited his mother’s basic cheer, but he did share her jaundiced enjoyment of divine lunacy. He had followed the banner of the Lord, heedless of the personal consequences, and accepted that it was now leading him to another planet, with not one but two sentient species to bollix up creation.

  Hand out free will, he’d think gazing at a crucifix, and look where it gets You! Bored with physics, were You? Plants too predictable, I suppose? Not enough drama in big fish eatin’ the littlies, eh? What on Earth were Y’ thinkin’ of! Or what on Rakhat, for that matter…

  Sean had been born into a world that took the existence of other sentient species for granted. He was fourteen when the first mission reports had come back from Rakhat; seventeen when they ended mysteriously. Twenty-two when he heard of the scandals and tragedies that surrounded Emilio Sandoz. He had merely shrugged, unsurprised. Humans and their ilk were God’s problem, as far as Sean Fein was concerned, and the Almighty was more than welcome to them.

  But if Sean Fein, chemist and priest, rarely found reason to approve the results of his God’s whimsical decision to bestow sentience on the odd species here and there, he could nevertheless admire the mechanics that ran the show. Iron and manganese, pried by rain from stone, swirled with calcium and magnesium in ancient milky seas. Small, nimble molecules— nitrogen, oxygen, water, argon, carbon dioxide—dancing in the atmosphere, spinning, glancing off one another, "the feeble force of gravity gathering them in a thin vapor around the planet," wrote chemistry’s psalmist Bill Green, "like some invisible shepherd, drawing together his invisible flock." Cyanobacteria—the clever little buggers—learning to break the double bonds that bind oxygen in carbon dioxide; using the carbon and a few other oceanic bits and pieces to produce peptides, polypeptides, polysaccharides; throwing off oxygen as waste, setting it free. Genesis for Sean was literal: Let there be sunlight to power the system, and the whole biosphere comes alive. God’s chemistry, Green called it, with its swimming, dancing, fornicating ions, its tangled, profligate undergrowth of plant lignins and cellulose, the matlike hemes and porphyrins, the helical proteins winding and unwinding.

  "Steep yourself in the sea of matter," the French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin advised. "Bathe in its fiery waters, for it is the source of your life." This was a glory Sean Fein could appreciate, this was a glimpse of Divine Intelligence that he could adore unreservedly.

  "The people you feel sorriest for are the fools who hope for justice and sense, and not just in the world to come," the Father General told him. "But God instilled in us a capacity to value mercy and justice, and it’s only human to hope for them, here and now. Maybe it’s foolish, but we do. This mission is going to teach you something, Sean. Compassion for fools? Perhaps even respect? Learn the lesson, Sean, and pass it on."

  "THIS INGWY, SHE’S A HIGH GODDESS, IS SHE?" SEAN ASKED SANDOZ when the others had cleared out of the commons after a quiet breakfast.

  Emilio set his coffee mug on the table, brace servos humming. There was still a fault in one of the electroelastic actuators, but he had learned to work around it. "I don’t think so. I had the impression she might be a personification of foresight or prophesy—just from context. Supaari was not a believer, but her name came up now and then." It was interesting, the way the drug took him. He felt almost like an AI construct, able to respond to requests for information, even to solve problems at times. On the other hand, it seemed impossible to learn anything new. No desire for mastery, he guessed. "There are others," he told Sean. "Wisdom—or Cunning, perhaps, also feminine. It wasn’t clear what the translation should be. He also mentioned a goddess of Chaos once. She is one of the Calamities."

  "Female deities," Sean said, frowning. "Odd, wouldn’t y’say? In a society dominated by males?"

  "There is perhaps an older belief system underlying the present culture. Religion is generally conservative."

  "True. True for you." Sean looked away, quiet for a time. "Did y’ever wonder then why Orthodox Jews count lineage through the mother’s ancestry?" Sean asked. "Strange, isn’t it? The entire Old Testament, filled with begats. Twelve tribes for the twelve sons of Jacob. But Jacob had a daughter, too. Remember? Dina. The one who was raped." There was no reaction from Sandoz. "And yet, there’s no Tribe of Dina. Patrilineage, all through the Torah! Religion is conservative, as y’say. So why? When was it declared that a Jew is the child of a Jewish mother?"

  "I have always hated the Socratic method," Sandoz said without heat, but he answered dutifully. "During the pogroms, to legitimize the Cossacks’ bastards."

  "Yes, so none of the children would be stigmatized as half-Jew or no Jew a-tall. And good for the rabbis, I say." Sean had spent a childhood being asked, "What are y’then?" Whatever he answered, the buggers’d laugh. "So. To legitimize the children of rape, when rape was so common the rabbis had to overturn twenty-five hundred years of tradition to cope with it. Good girls and bad. Virgins and whores. Young and old alike. Devout and indifferent and apostate. All done." He gazed at Sandoz with steady blue eyes. "And not a one of ’em ever got an apology from God, nor from the fackin’ basturd who done her."

  Sandoz didn’t even blink. "Your point is taken. I am neither the first nor the only person to be worked over."

  "So what?" Sean demanded. "Does it help to know that?"

  "Not a blind bit," Sandoz said in Sean’s own voice. He sounded irritable. It might have been the mimicry.

  "Nor should it," Sean snapped. "Sufferin’ may be banal and predictable, but it doesn’t hurt any less for all that. And it’s despicable to take comfort in knowin’ that others have suffered as well." He was watching Sandoz carefully now. "I’m told y’blame God for what happened on Rakhat. Why not blame Satan? Do y’believe in the devil, then, Sandoz?"

  "But that is irrelevant," Sandoz said lightly. "Satan ruins people by tempting them to take an easy or pleasurable path." He was on his feet, taking his mug and plate to the galley.

  "Spoken like a good Jesuit," Sean called to him. "And there was nothin’ easy nor pleasurable in what happened to you."

  Sandoz reappeared, empty-handed. "No. Nothing," he said, voice soft, eyes hard. " ’As fish are caught in a net and as birds are trapped, so are the children of men entrapped—this I experienced under the sun, and it seemed a great evil to me.’»

  "Ecclesiasticus. Omnia vanitas: All is vanity and chasing after the wind. The wicked prosper and the righteous get rooted up the hole, and is that all y’learned in a quarter of a century in the Company of Jesus?"

  "Fuck off, Sean," Sandoz said and moved toward the doorway that led to the cabins.

  Suddenly, Sean was out of his chair and, cutting him off, blocked the way out of the room. "Nowhere t’run now, Sandoz. Nowhere t’hide," Sean said, and he did not waver under the murderous glare he got for his trouble. "You were a priest for decades," Sean said with quiet insistence, "and a good one. Think like a priest, Sandoz. Think like a Jesuit! What did Jesus add to the canon, man? If the Jews deserved one thing, it was a better answer to sufferin’ than the piss-poor one Job got. If pain and injustice and undeserved misery are part of the package, and God knows they are, then surely the life of Christ is God’s own answer to Ecclesiasticus! Redeem the suffering. Embrace it. Make it mean something."

  There was no response except that stony stare, but the shaking was visible.

  "Yer feelin’ it now, aren’t you. Carlo stopped the Quell a
erosol he’s been pumpin’ into yer room while y’slept," Sean informed him. "There’s no way past the next forty-eight hours except through them. Y’watched a thousand babies die, slaughtered like lambs. Y’saw the bloody corpses of everyone y’loved. You were gang-raped for months and when you were rescued, we all assumed you’d prostituted yersalf. Well, the dead are dead. You’ll never be unraped. And you’ll never live out yer life with sweet Gina and her wee daughter. And yer feelin’ it."

  Sandoz closed his eyes, but Sean’s voice went on, with its hard r’s and the flat, unmusical poetry of Belfast. "Pity the poor, wee souls who live a life of watered milk—all blandness and pleasantry—and die nicely asleep in ripe old age. Water and milk, Sandoz. They live half a life and never know the strength they might have had. Show God what yer made of, man. Pucker up and kiss the cross. Make it your own. Make all this mean something. Redeem it."

  Sean noticed only then that Daniel Iron Horse was standing silently behind a bulkhead just beyond the commons. Danny came forward and stood now in plain sight. For a moment, Sean frowned, unsure of Danny’s intention, but then it came clear to him. "Here’s one thing y’can do to redeem the next two days, Sandoz. Y’can let this man witness them. Will y’ permit it?"

  Sandoz would look at neither of them, and remained silent. But he didn’t say no, and so Sean left and Danny stayed.

  SANDOZ SEEMED STUNNED IN THE BEGINNING BUT, BEFORE LONG, withdrawal began to work on him physically. Too tense to stay still, he needed to walk the pain out, and Danny followed him into the chilling silence of the lander bay, which was nearly thirty meters long and afforded him room to move, and privacy.

  For the first hours, Sandoz said nothing, but Danny knew the anger was coming and tried to brace himself for it. He believed that there was nothing Sandoz could say to him that he had not said to himself, but he was wrong. When Sandoz spoke at last, brutal mockery quickly escalated beyond rage to a pure moral fury, its expression informed by decades of Jesuit study. Tears, Daniel Iron Horse discovered that first morning, felt cold against skin flushed with shame.

  Then the silence settled in again.

  Danny left only twice on the first day, to go to the head. Sandoz paced and paced, and after a time, stripped off his shirt, sodden with sweat that leached the moisture from his body even in the numbing cold of the lander bay. A while later, he took off the braces as well and then sat down as far away from Danny as possible, near the exterior hangar-bay door, his back against the sealed stone walls, head resting on arms wrapped around raised knees, the nearly dead fingers twitching sometimes.

  In spite of himself and his intentions, Danny fell asleep as the hours passed. He woke once and saw Sandoz standing at the bay door, staring into the darkness through the small porthole. Danny dropped off once again, only to hear the words "Aqui estoy" sometime during the night. He was not sure of the language, but he remembered the words and, later on, asked the other priests if any of them understood. Both Joseba and John recognized the Spanish: Here I am. It was Sean who said, "That’s what Abraham answered when God called his name." But Sandoz had said it with a kind of beaten resignation, and Danny thought it might only have signaled the man’s recognition that he was stuck on the Bruno, with nowhere to go but forward.

  Or perhaps it was the resignation of Jonah realizing that God would find him and use him no matter where he was, even in the belly of a whale.

  There was no dawn to wake Danny in the morning, but the noise and movement inside the commons room came muffled through the lander-bay hatch. He sat up and then stood, stiff and miserable. Sandoz had not moved. Danny left again for a few minutes, but came back without eating, determined to take no food or drink while Sandoz went without. As the hours of the second full day crawled by, Sandoz remained motionless and silent, eyes fixed on distances no other man had seen. Vision quest, Danny thought, when the soul opened to whatever could be conveyed by the Great Mystery, Whose thoughts were not the thoughts of man, Whose ways were not the ways of man…

  He had not wanted to sleep. Danny had resolved to witness it all from start to finish, and so he woke on the third morning with a start, only to find himself looking into the obsidian eyes of Emilio Sandoz, sitting cross-legged on the lander deck, where he had waited for Iron Horse to wake up.

  "It must have been hard," Sandoz said after a time, his voice soft and unresonant in the echoing space of the bay.

  Danny wasn’t sure what he meant but, lately, nothing had been easy, so he nodded.

  "If you stare into the abyss," Sandoz reported, "it stares back."

  "Nietzsche," Danny said almost inaudibly, identifying the quote.

  "Two points." Waxen and exhausted, Sandoz got slowly to his feet and stood blankly for a while. "God uses us all, I suppose," he said, and walked to the hatch, banging on it with an elbow.

  In an instant, the sounds of pressure equalizers and locking mechanisms echoed emptily against the stone walls of the hull. When the door opened, Danny realized that John Candotti, too, had stood vigil during these three days. But the rest of the crew was there now as well, waiting.

  "He did what he had to," Sandoz told them, and stepped through the hatch without another word.

  For the first time since his mother died when he was sixteen years old, Daniel Iron Horse broke down and sobbed. The others stood and listened until John Candotti said, "Leave him alone," and the little crowd dispersed.

  After a decent interval, John ducked into the bay. He looked around and then retrieved Sandoz’s discarded shirt, offering it to Danny to blow his nose on. Danny accepted it, but reared away when he brought it closer to his face.

  "It’s pretty funky," John admitted. "If that’s the odor of sanctity, God help us all."

  Danny managed a small laugh and pulled up his own shirt, wiping his nose on the inside of the collar.

  "My mom always hated it when I did that," John said, sliding down the wall next to Danny until his bony legs stuck straight out in front of him.

  Danny wiped his eyes and cleared his throat. "Mine, too," he said almost soundlessly.

  They both sat staring at the far end of the bay for a while. "Well, hell," John said finally, "if it’s okay with Emilio, it’s okay with me, I guess. Pax?"

  Danny nodded. "I’m not sure it’s all that okay with him. But thanks," he said.

  John got to his feet and offered the other man a hand up. Danny, red-eyed and wrung dry, shook it gratefully, but he said, "I think I’ll just sit here awhile, ace. I need some time."

  "Sure," John said, and left Danny alone.

  27

  Great Southern Forest

  2061, Earth-Relative

  "— WAS RIPE TWO NIGHTS AGO— " — PON RIVER. BUT SOMEONE thinks — " " — no market anymore for—" " — stern campaign is undersupplied and if —" ("Uunnhh.") " — omeone is hungry! Who ha—" " — rakar fields are north of the—" "Spaj, Panar! Someone heard—" " — oo early. It ripens at—" " — focus instead on consolidating the—" ("Uuuunnhh.") " — nitarl pickers at Kran port—" "Sipaj, Djalao, surely you are hungr—" "We found more by the riv — " " — paari will be there soon—" " ("Uuuuuuuuunnhh.") " — weavers can’t use so—" " — ut if we go after the rakari are—" " — someone that bundle of ree—" " — nala, get Isaac to stop—" " "Scratch just there. No, lower! Ye—" ("Uuuuuuuuuuuuurmhh—")

  "Sipaj, Isaac! Stop!" Ha’anala shouted.

  Isaac sank to the ground, dizzy but satisfied, Spinning could transform the incomprehensible into a uniform blur, and if he made his own sound, he could sometimes drown the racket out, but best of all was when one voice cut through all the rest and made everyone quiet.

  "Sipaj, Isaac," Ha’anala said slowly, her voice pitched low. "Let’s go to the shelter." She waited the right amount of time before adding, "We’ll listen to music."

  Ha’anala had clarity.

  Isaac stood, clutching the computer tablet to his bare, bony chest, feeling its cool, flat, unblemished perfection. All around him: inconstancy, unpr
edictability, irrationality. His own body could not be trusted. Feet became more distant, arms wrapped further around the torso. Hair appeared in places where none had been before. Stones, smooth and faultless one time, might be covered by a leaf or flawed by the presence of a bug the next time he looked. Ears and eyes and mouths and limbs moved endlessly. Bodies sat and slept in different places. How could they expect him to understand what they were saying while he was still trying to figure out who they were? Plants sprang up and changed size and disappeared. Buds, flowers and withered things came and went. He could sit and stare for hours— days! But he couldn’t see this happen. He fell asleep and, in the morning, the old thing was gone and a new one was there and sometimes it acted the same way as before and sometimes it didn’t. There was no clarity.

  The computer held a world that was precisely the same every morning, except for his mother’s daily message—he knew now that she made small changes because she showed him how to do this. He complained, so she put all her messages in a separate file and that was all right because it didn’t change anything else in his other directories; Isaac was the only one who changed those. The computer was better than spinning—

  "Sipaj, Isaac. Come with me," Ha’anala said, each word distinct. She picked up his cloth—a silken blue square that could cover him from head to waist. His prayer shawl, Sofia called it with dispirited irony. "We’ll listen to music," Ha’anala repeated, tugging at his ankle with her foot.

  Isaac jerked away and muttered, "Now someone has to start over."

  Ha’anala lifted her chin and sat down to wait. Isaac couldn’t bear to have a thought interrupted and he had to begin at the beginning. If anyone disturbed him as he spoke, he would repeat the entire speech word by word until the end of what he’d meant to say. That’s why he spoke so little, she supposed. It was nearly impossible to complete a thought or a statement to his satisfaction when there were Runa around. Even at the risk of a fierno, the people couldn’t seem to remain silent long enough to suit him.