Children of God

by Mary Doria Russell

  “It can,” she said finally, confused. “But not for Marc and Dee and Meelo. For them, to serve meant to give help freely to others. To give food to the hungry, to make lodgings for.… Wait—serves many? Oh, my God. You created a market? Supaari, what happened to Emilio!”

  IN THE ROSY LIGHT THAT FOLLOWED SECOND SUNDOWN, SOFIA SAT AND watched Supaari sleep, too worn out to feel much more than resignation. It took hours to get the whole story straight and toward the end, Supaari seemed to invite her contempt. “I was proud of my cleverness! I made myself stupid with my wish for children, but I thought, This Supaari, he is a fine, clever man. I should have understood!” he cried, exhausted and distraught. “These were Jana’ata. My own people. I made great harm to Sandoz. Perhaps now the other foreigners also have been harmed the same way. And now, you shall hate me.”

  We meant well, she thought, looking up at a sky piled with cumulus clouds turning amethyst and indigo above the clearing. No one was deliberately evil. We all did the best we could. Even so, what a mess we made of everything …

  Sitting with her back against Kanchay’s, she reached out to stroke her sleeping son’s auburn curls, and thought of D. W. Yarbrough, the father superior of the Jesuit mission to Rakhat, now almost five years gone, buried near Kashan with Anne Edwards, his companion in sudden death.

  Sofia Mendes and D. W. Yarbrough had worked together closely during the long months of preparation for the Jesuit mission to the planet of the Singers. Many who watched their partnership develop and deepen thought them proof that opposites attract, for D. W. Yarbrough, with his cast eye and his meandering nose and that unruly mob of anarchic teeth, was as outlandishly ill-favored as Sofia Mendes was startlingly, classically beautiful. A few understood the sanctuary of uncomplicated friendship Sofia and D.W. could offer one another, and those few were privately pleased that these two souls had been brought together.

  It was not long before the Sephardic Jew and the Jesuit priest established a working routine; within weeks, it was their habit to end each long, difficult day of compilation, analysis, argument and decision with dinner and a couple of Lone Star beers at a quiet bar near D.W.’s provincial residence in New Orleans. The talk sometimes went late into the night, turning to religion more often than not. Sofia was defensive at first, still clinging to a certain amount of historical hostility to Catholicism, but embarrassed by how little she knew of Judaism. Yarbrough was aware of how abruptly and how badly her childhood had ended; an admirer of Judaism on its own terms and not merely as a precursor to his own religion, he became both a goad and a guide in her rediscovery of the tradition she was born to.

  “There’s a fine fierceness to Jews that I like a whole lot,” the Texan told her one night, during a discussion of the Virginal intercessions and saintly go-betweens, of the baroque hierarchy of priests and monsignors and bishops and archbishops and cardinals and pope that lay between God and the Catholic soul, which Sofia found pointless and mystifying. “Most people, now, they don’t like to go straight to the top, not really. They need to sidle up to a proposition, come at the thing a little off-center. They feel better with a chain of command,” D.W. said, an old Marine squadron commander whose years in the Jesuit order had done nothing to diminish his tendency to think in military terms. “Got a problem, you ask the sergeant. Sergeant might go to a captain he knows. Most folks would have a hell of a time getting up the nerve to bang on the general’s office door, even if he was the nicest fella in the world. Catholicism makes allowances for that in human beings.” He’d smiled then, teeth and eyes askew, the ugliest and most beautiful man she’d ever met. “But the children of Abraham? They look God straight in the face. Praise. Argue! Dicker, complain. Takes a lot of guts to deal with the Almighty like that.” And she had warmed to him, feeling it the highest accolade he could have given her and her people.

  They agreed on many things during those midnight conversations. There was, they decided, no such thing as an ex-Jew or an ex-Catholic or an ex-Marine. “Now why is that?” D.W. asked one night, after noting that ex-Texans were hard to come by, too. It was, he thought, crucial to get at your recruits when they were young and impressionable. Pride in tradition was part of it as well, Sofia pointed out. But most important, D.W. said, was the fact that all these groups based their philosophies on the same principle.

  “Talk is cheap. We believe in action,” Yarbrough said. “Fight for justice. Feed the hungry. Take the beach. We none of us sit around hopin’ for some big damn miracle to fix things.”

  But for all his emphasis on action, D. W. Yarbrough was a highly educated and conscientious man who was well aware of the cultural and spiritual damage missionaries could do, and he had laid out strict rules of engagement for the Jesuit mission to Rakhat. “We don’t preach. We listen,” he insisted. “These’re God’s children, too, and this time we’re gonna learn what they got to teach us ‘fore we go around returnin’ the favor.”

  Of all the members of the Stella Maris crew, Sofia Mendes had been the most relieved by that clear-eyed humility and reluctance to proselytize. It was superbly ironic, then, that this afternoon, against all probability, it had fallen to Sofia Mendes herself to speak of God to a VaRakhati.

  “Who are ‘god’?” Supaari had asked.

  I don’t know, she thought.

  Not even D.W. was willing to make a statement of full faith. He was tolerant of skepticism and doubt, at home with ambivalence and ambiguity. “Maybe God is only the most powerful poetic idea we humans’re capable of thinkin’,” he said one night, after a few drinks. “Maybe God has no reality outside our minds and exists only in the paradox of Perfect Compassion and Perfect Justice. Or maybe,” he suggested, slouching back in his chair and favoring her with a lopsided, wily grin, “maybe God is exactly as advertised in the Torah. Maybe, along with all its other truths and beauties, Judaism preserves for each generation of us the reality of the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, of Moses—the God of Jesus.”

  A cranky, uncanny God, D.W. called Him. “A God with quirky, unfathomable rules, a God who gets fed up with us and pissed off! But quick to forgive, Sofia, and generous,” D.W. said, his voice softening, eyes full of light, “always, always in love with humanity. Always there, waiting for us—generation after generation—to return His passion. Ah, Sofia, darlin’! On my best days, I believe in Him with all my heart.”

  “And on your worst days?” she had asked that night.

  “Even if it’s only poetry, it’s poetry to live by, Sofia—poetry to die for,” he told her with quiet conviction. He slouched in his chair for a time, thinking. “Maybe poetry is the only way we can get near the truth of God.… And when the metaphors fail, we think it’s God who’s failed us!” he cried, grinning crookedly. “Now there’s an idea that buys some useful theological wiggle room!”

  D. W. Yarbrough had taught her that she was the heir to an ancient human wisdom, its laws and ethics tested and retested in a hundred cultures in every conceivable moral climate—a code of conduct as sound as any her species had to offer. She longed to tell Supaari of the wisdom of Hillel who taught, a century before Jesus, “That which is hateful to you, do not do unto others.” If you would not live as the Runa must, stop breeding them, stop exploiting them, stop eating them! Find some other way to live. Love mercy, the prophets taught. Do justice. There was so much to share! And yet, the history of her home planet was one of almost continual warfare, and with tragic frequency, war’s taproot was set deep in fervent religion and unquestioning belief. She longed to ask D.W., If it was right for us to learn from the VaRakhati, isn’t it right for them to learn from us?

  I don’t know what to do, she thought. Even the laws of physics resolve to probabilities. How can I know what to do?

  “God who has begun this will bring it to perfection,” Marc Robichaux always said. Emilio Sandoz told her once, “We are here because God has brought us here, step by step.” Nothing happens by chance, the Jewish sages taught. Perhaps, she thought, it was to bring th
is wisdom to Rakhat that I have been left here. Perhaps this was why I was the only one of us to survive on Rakhat …

  And perhaps I have lost my mind, she thought then, startled to be taking such a notion seriously.

  It had been a grueling day. She didn’t dare think about what might have been, if only Supaari had realized she was alive. Be glad for what you have, she told herself, settling down near Kanchay, in sight of her strange son’s sleeping face; near Supaari and his tiny, beautiful Ha’anala; surrounded by Sichu-Lan and Tinbar and all the others who had made her welcome.

  It was dawn the next morning when Supaari’s words came back to her. “The others—” She sat up, breathing unevenly, and stared into the darkness. Others. Other people had come.

  “Sipaj, Fia! What are you doing?” Kanchay asked sleepily. He too sat as she rose onto her knees and began to feel around the edge of the shelter. “What do you seek?”

  “The computer tablet,” she said and hissed as she cut herself on a knife left carelessly in a pile of platters.

  “Agh, Fia! Stop that!” Kanchay cried disgustedly, as she cursed and sucked the thin, salty line of pain on her hand. There was a general outcry of dismay from the others, awakened by the sudden spurt of blood scent that roused them as a shout might have roused humans, but Sofia continued to rummage through the storage area around the perimeter of the shelter.

  “Emilio was sent home on the Stella Maris,” she muttered. “That’s why the signal went dead three years ago.” Her hand touched the edge of the tablet and she clutched it to her chest, picking her way through the huddled mass of bodies and moving outside, where the sky was half golden, half aquamarine. They must have gotten here the same way we did, she thought. They had a mother ship and they had a lander. Supaari wasn’t sure if anyone but Sandoz had actually left Rakhat. The other ship might still be up there. Their lander might still be somewhere on the planet. There would be fuel. “If they haven’t left …” she said aloud. “Oh, God, oh, please …”

  The satellite network put in place over eight years earlier by the Stella Maris crew was still functional. Working rapidly, she reprogrammed the radio relays to carry out a systematic broadband search for any active transponder currently in orbit around Rakhat. Once the software was altered, the search took only minutes: 9.735 gigahertz. “Yes!” she shouted, weeping and laughing, but then fell silent again, ignoring the Runa who now pressed around her, their questions falling on her ears as meaninglessly as rain.

  There was no answer to her hail, but there were standardized navigation routines, interfaces established by the U.N. Space Agency when near-Earth traffic had become dense enough to be hazardous. Like a harbor pilot taking over a freighter, Sofia took control of the Magellan’s computer system and then hacked her way into its logs. There was no record of the ground party’s return to the ship. There had been no transmissions for nearly three years. Their lander must be somewhere on Rakhat, maybe near Kashan.

  She began to broadcast a repeating message on the Magellan downlink to all land-based nodes, asking any respondent to reply through the Magellan return path. She listened, heart hammering, waiting for some response, any indication that she and Isaac were not the only human beings on Rakhat.

  It was well past second dawn when she was able to sit back and think. The lack of reply was not proof that the others were dead. They might be separated from their transponders. Supaari believed they might still be alive but in captivity, as Emilio had been. Six months, she decided, her eye burning from the intensity of the work she’d just done. She owed the others that much. She would not abandon her own kind here without a serious attempt to find them.

  Six months.

  But then, by the God whose poetry was forgotten now, she would steal their lander and their ship. Then, by God, Sofia Mendes would take her son and go home.

  Naples

  July 2061

  THERE WAS NO FORMAL PROPOSAL. SITTING ON THE HUGE STONE OUT-CROPPING near the beach that had been his sanctuary when churches held out no hope to him, Emilio was watching Celestina play on the shore, talking to Gina about nothing in particular when he asked, after a companionable silence, “Would you object to a civil ceremony?”

  “That would certainly be nicer than shouting abuse at one another,” Gina replied, straight-faced, which, along with a settling into the hollow of his outstretched arm, served as an assent. “When?”

  “You and Celestina are going to the mountains with your parents at the end of August, yes? So: first weekend in September.”

  Gina nodded agreeably. “Maybe late in the afternoon?” she suggested after a few minutes, smiling toward the sea. “That way, if the marriage doesn’t work out, we won’t have wasted the whole day.”

  “Ten o’clock,” Emilio said. “Ten in the morning. September third, the Saturday after you get home.”

  The means to this end had been buried like treasure in the boxful of letters collected by Johannes Voelker in Rome and delivered to Sandoz by John Candotti.

  Although hardcopy was routinely scanned for bombs and biologicals, all mail could conceal words with the power to inflict more pain. Emilio knew himself defenseless against this, and had refused to look at any of it, but Gina loved him, and believed that others must share her opinion of him. So one day in early July, while Emilio worked at the other end of the room and Celestina played house with Elizabeth and a stuffed dog named Franco Grossi, Gina sat on the swept wooden floor of his apartment, separating the messages into four piles: hateful, sweet, funny and interesting. When she finished the first pass through the box, she and Celestina took a walk over to see Brother Cosimo in the kitchen and watched him burn the hateful ones in the bread oven. Cosimo, who was among those who approved of the couple, sent the ladies back with three hazelnut gelati and a plate of leftover salad greens for Elizabeth.

  “Sweet” was composed mainly of letters from Emilio’s students, the earliest of whom had been boys of fifteen when he’d taught them Latin I and were now men in their mid-sixties with enduring and fond memories of his classroom. Several—jurists, attorneys—offered to file suit on Sandoz’s behalf against the Contact Consortium for slander and defamation. Gina was cheered by their loyalty, but Emilio still believed himself guilty of some of what he’d been charged with in absentia. So she put the letters aside, thinking, Someday perhaps.

  “Funny” included several from women whose grasp of reproductive biology was less firm than their grip on the basics of blackmail, and who attributed the paternity of their children to a celibate who wasn’t even on the planet at the time of conception. Emilio read one of these, but he found it less amusing than Gina had, so that pile too was consigned to the bread oven.

  Which left “Interesting.”

  Most of these, she believed, would be rejected out of hand: requests for interviews, book contracts, and so on. There was, however, a letter from a legal firm in Cleveland, Ohio, written in English, and this envelope included a copy of a handwritten note dated July 19, 2021, signed with a name Gina recognized: Anne Edwards, the physician who had gone, along with her husband, the engineer George Edwards, to Rakhat as part of the first Jesuit mission. Emilio had spoken of Anne, briefly and with difficulty, so Gina hesitated before reopening this wound. But concerned that this was a matter of legal importance, she brought the letter to Emilio and saw his color vanish as he read.

  “Caro, what’s wrong? What does it say?”

  “I don’t know what to do with this,” he said, shaking his head, throwing the papers down on his desk. He stood and walked away, clearly upset. “No. I don’t want it.”

  “What? What is it?” Celestina asked, sitting on the floor. Alarmed, she looked from one grown-up’s face to the other’s, and dissolved into tears. “Is it another divorce paper, Mamma?”

  “Oh, my God,” Emilio said and went to the child, kneeling to offer her his arms. “No, no, no, cara mia. Nothing like that, Celestina! Nothing bad.” He looked up at Gina, who shrugged unhappily: what can we do? �
��It’s just something about money,” Emilio told the child then. “Nothing important, cara—just money. Maybe it’s good, okay? I have to think about this. I’m not used to having other people to think of. Maybe it’s good.”

  The note from Anne was short, written on a sunlit day during the excitement of the preparations for the first mission to Rakhat, with mortality only a vague theoretical notion. “It can’t buy happiness, darlings. It can’t buy health. But a little cash never hurts. Enjoy.” She and George had set up trust funds for each member of the Jesuit party and, with over forty years to accumulate, the law firm informed him, the individual portfolios had done handsomely. In addition, Emilio Sandoz had been named a beneficiary of the Edwardses’ personal estate, along with Sofia Mendes and James Quinn. In the judgment of the law firm, Sandoz was also legally due one-third of that estate. The terms of the will stipulated that while Sandoz remained a member of the Society of Jesus, he would be invited to serve on the board of trustees to help oversee distribution of the funds to charities benefiting education and medicine. However, if he decided for any reason to leave the active priesthood, the money was his to use as he saw fit.

  Frightened by the bequest, ignorant of its management, he lost sleep over it that first night. But in the morning, he contacted Brother Edward Behr, who’d been a stockbroker before joining the Society, and mulled Ed’s advice over, gradually getting used to the fact that he was now a remarkably wealthy man. The decision came a week or so after first reading Anne’s note. Getting out of bed, he accessed listings for antique furniture dealers in the Rome and Naples region, eventually logging a request for estimates on availability and price for one item. That done, he went back to bed. He fell asleep the moment his head touched the pillow, and took that for a good omen.