Children of God

by Mary Doria Russell

  “My lady Suukmel wishes this most humble one to speak plainly to the most noble Paramount,” Taksayu said, but the humble one stood before the ruler of Inbrokar in her mistress’s stead, and so was calm and dignified. “My lady Suukmel asks the Paramount: Am I a child to be corrupted by gifts?”

  At her words, the celestial violet eyes snapped into focus, but Taksayu’s ears did not drop. “He will not kill you,” Suukmel had assured her. “He wants what he cannot take—what must be given freely or not at all.” For if Hlavin Kitheri had desired Suukmel’s bloodlines merely, he could easily have arranged the death of her husband. He could have taken her by force and gotten children on her the same way, even if it meant a war with Mala Njer. And so, the lady Suukmel had concluded, what he wanted from Suukmel Chirot u Vaadai was not her progeny but her self.

  Surviving the moment, Taksayu continued. “My lady asks: What might a man accomplish whose allies were his by force of love and loyalty? Far more, my lady believes, than men alone in the world, whose fathers are obstacles and brothers are rivals, whose sons only yearn for their deaths; whose sisters and daughters are used to bind subordinates or buy rank or placate enemies.” She paused. “My lady asks: Shall I continue?”

  Silently, the Paramount drew breath, and then lifted his chin.

  “Thus my lady Suukmel counsels the Paramount: First, may he take wisdom and skill from anyone of intelligence and talent, but especially from those ill matched to the station of their ancestors, for in these persons, the Paramount may inspire such loyalty as my lady Suukmel freely gives to her good husband, who has afforded her as much liberty as could be desired by a woman of honor. Further, she counsels: May the Paramount revive a custom of the earliest Paramounts of Inbrokar, old as the oldest songs, and take to himself a harem of third-born women to bear him children to be neutered and raised without inheritance. Their status would not distress the future children of his infant VaPalkirn bride, thus preserving the advantages of that alliance with the east. My lady asks: Shall I continue?”

  He was no longer looking at her, but said, “Go on.”

  “If it pleases the Paramount, my lady Suukmel says: The freeborn children of the harem might one day dance in daylight and glory in the suns, furthering their father’s desire for change better than even he can imagine. My lady says: May the Paramount consider who among his children might be taught to sing new songs. Send that child to the lady Suukmel for fostering, for in this she would be your partner, and such a child may be a bridge between what is and what can be. My lady asks: Shall I continue?”

  “Yes,” the Paramount said, but he heard very little of what the Runao said after that. Instead, Hlavin Kitheri felt in his mind the hot breeze of a courtyard, saw in thought the way soft wind would seek the edges of a silken tent and lift the translucent fabric a handsbreadth from the stones, unveiling soles as soft as dawn’s air. Envisioned the ankles briefly revealed—strong-boned, well-formed, ringed and jeweled. Imagined what it would be, to take then whatever he desired and not merely what she offered …

  Candor. Alliance. A mind the equal of his own. Not all that he had wished but all, he understood, that she would give him.

  “Tell your lady that she is everything rumor whispers of,” Hlavin Kitheri said, when the Runao fell silent. “Tell her that …” He stood and looked directly at Taksayu. “Tell her … that I am grateful for her counsel.”

  Giordano Bruno

  2063, Earth-Relative

  “I WANTED TO BE A TERRORIST WHEN I WAS A LITTLE BOY,” JOSEBA Urizarbarrena said. “It was a family tradition—both my grandmothers were ETA. We called ourselves freedom fighters, of course. Better?”

  “Yes,” Sandoz gasped.

  “Good. Let me try the other.” Sandoz held out his other hand and let the Basque steady the forearm against his raised knee. “This doesn’t always work,” Joseba warned, probing with his thumbs along the space between the two long bones until he reached the place where muscle refined to tendon. “My uncle lost most of his right hand when I was about eight. Do you know what they call it when a bomb goes off too soon? Premature disassembly.”

  Sandoz barked a laugh and Joseba was pleased. Even drugged, Sandoz found wordplay funny, although other forms of humor escaped him. “My aunt used to think he was lying about the pain to get sympathy,” Joseba said, pressing hard now. “Dead dogs don’t bite, she used to say. The hand’s not there anymore. How can something that’s not there hurt? My uncle used to tell her, Pain is as real as God. Invisible, unmeasurable, powerful—”

  “And a bitch to live with,” Sandoz whispered, voice shaking. “Just like your aunt.”

  “You’re right about that,” Joseba said fervently, bent over the arm. He adjusted the location of his thumbs and increased the pressure, a little astonished to find himself in this position. Clad only in his underwear, he’d gotten up at two in the morning with a full bladder, and found Sandoz pacing the commons room like an animal crazed by caging. “What’s wrong?” Joseba had asked and was initially snarled at for his trouble. Sandoz was not an easy man to help, but those were the kind who needed it most, in Joseba’s experience.

  Afraid he’d simply leave a bruise and dying now for a pee, Joseba was about to give up when he heard a single explosive sob. “Yes?” Joseba asked, to be sure before easing off.

  Sandoz didn’t move, eyes closed, face tight, not breathing. Joseba sat quietly, familiar with this suspense; it always took his uncle a few moments to believe the pain had really ended. Finally Sandoz let out a breath and his eyes opened. He seemed dazed, but said, “Thank you.” Then, blinking, he sat straighter and moved back in his chair, out of contact.

  “I don’t know why that works,” Joseba admitted.

  “Maybe direct pressure on the nerves higher in the limb disrupts stray signals?” Sandoz suggested, his voice still a little ragged.

  “Maybe.” And even if it’s only the power of suggestion, Joseba thought, what works, works. “If you’d told me about this before, I could have helped,” he scolded.

  “How was I to know you had inept bombers in your family?” Sandoz asked reasonably, his breathing steadier now.

  “My uncle used to cry. Just sit there and cry,” Joseba remarked. “You pace.”

  “Sometimes.” Sandoz shrugged and looked away. “Work used to be best.”

  “You don’t work now,” Joseba observed.

  “Can’t seem to care about working,” Sandoz said. “The Quell usually helps—about half of pain is fear. But it got bad this time.”

  Interested but at the outer limit of bladder control, Joseba stood. “Has it ever occurred to you,” he asked, pausing before he resumed his trip to the toilet, “that Matins was instituted by old monks with prostate trouble? Had to get up anyway, might as well pray, right?”

  With that, Joseba padded off like a bear, but when he returned through the commons, much relieved, Sandoz was still sitting in the dark. He’d have gone back to his cabin if he didn’t want company, Joseba thought. Taking a chance, he said, “I have been reading the Book of Job. ‘Hast thou seen the doors of deepest darkness? Canst thou bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion?’ ” Leaning against a bulkhead, the Basque gestured toward the enigmatic dark that surrounded them. “Man’s answer now would be: Almost. We have entered the springs of the sea and walked the recesses of its depths. We have comprehended the expanse of the Earth and stretched a line upon it. ‘Canst thou send lightnings? Hast thou commanded the morning?’ Here we are, between stars!”

  Joseba shook his head, genuinely amazed. Then he said, “The music changed, you know. After you were on Rakhat.”

  “I prefer Wolfer’s translation of Job myself,” Sandoz commented. “So. Why did terrorism lose its charm for you?”

  “Ah. The subject is changed,” Joseba observed equably. “It didn’t, not for a long time, anyway. Then Spain and France finally decided, To hell with the Basques—who needs them? So we fought among ourselves for a while. Gets to b
e a habit.” He stopped and looked at Sandoz. “Did you know Hlavin Kitheri’s voice was heard for less than a year after you left Rakhat, and then never again?”

  “Perhaps he died,” Sandoz suggested blandly, “of something unpleasant and prolonged. What did you do after terrorism ceased to be a viable career option?”

  “A lot of hunting, actually. We still hunt in the little corner of the world where I come from. I was outdoors all the time, surrounded by what’s left of nature in Europe. A hunter—a good one—often identifies very strongly with the prey. One thing led to another. I studied ecology at university.”

  “And how from there to the priesthood? You fell in love, perhaps, with God’s complex and beautiful creation?” The light, soft voice was curiously flat and uninflected in the gloom, all its music drained away, the empty face barely illuminated by the yellow and green readouts shining dimly from the bridge.

  “No,” Joseba said frankly. “It is difficult to see the complex beauty of creation these days, on Earth at least. Things got a lot worse while you were gone, my friend. Ecology has become a study of degradation. We mainly work backward now, trying to reconstruct systems thrown out of balance and wrecked. For each step forward, we are forced two steps back by the press of population. It’s not a cheerful discipline.”

  The Basque moved in the darkness across the commons and took a seat a little distance from Sandoz, the molded polymer chair creaking under his substantial weight. “When you see a system disturbed, it is a great joy to discover a single cause—the cure then seems simple. As an undergraduate, I would look at satellite images of the planet at night, and the connected concentrations of city lights looked to me like streptococcus taking over a petri dish. I became convinced that Homo sapiens was a disease that was ravaging its hostess, Gaia. The Earth would be well rid of us, I thought. I was nineteen, and the population had already gone from seven to fourteen billion in my lifetime. I began to hate this species that called itself wise. I wanted to cure Gaia of the sickness our species inflicted on her. I began to consider seriously how I might exterminate very large numbers of humans, preferably without being caught. I believed myself heroic and selfless—a solitary worker for the planetary good. I switched college majors at that time. Virology began to seem very useful to me.”

  Sandoz was staring at him. A good sign, Joseba thought. Even drugged, he is capable of moral judgment on some level.

  “As I said,” Joseba continued dryly, “terrorism did not lose its charm. I was living with a girl at the time. I broke it off. She wanted children, and I loathed children. Disease vectors, I called them. I used to look at people like Nico and think, There’s a botched abortion. One more useless human to consume the planet, capable only of eating and making more of himself.”

  Somewhere in the ship a compressor kicked in and its hum joined the soft splashing of the fishtank aerators and the constant hush of filtered fans. Sandoz did not move.

  “The last thing my girlfriend told me when we parted was that it was wicked to wish death on people whose only crime was to be born at a time when there are so many of us.” He sat for a while, trying to remember her face, wondering what she might look like now—a woman in her late forties, given the relativity effects. “She opened my eyes, although we never spoke again. It took a while, but eventually I began to search for a reason to believe that humans are more than bacteria. One of my professors was a Jesuit.”

  “And now you are going to a world where the sentient species do not degrade their environment. To see what it costs them?”

  “Penance for my sins, I suppose.” Joseba stood and moved toward the bridge, where he could stare out the observation port toward hard stars and unplumbed blackness. “I think sometimes of the girl I did not marry.” He looked back at Sandoz, but there was no reaction he could see. “I read somewhere an interesting suggestion. The nations of the world that most vigorously foul the planetary nest and those in possession of the most destructive arsenals ought to be governed only by young women with small kids. More than anyone else, such mothers must live in the future, and they also face each day the realities of raw human nature. This gives them a special insight.”

  Joseba stood up straight then, stretching and yawning, and disappeared around the bulkhead into the passageway to his cabin, calling, “Good night,” as he went. Emilio Sandoz sat alone in the commons for a long time, and then went to bed as well.

  “I’M NOT ARGUING, I’M JUST CONFUSED,” JOHN CANDOTTI HAD SAID TO the Father General, a few months before the mission was launched. “I mean, everybody else is some kind of scientist. My forte is more along the lines of weddings and baptisms. Funerals. School plays? Bailing guys out?” The question in his voice invited the Father General to jump in any time, but Vincenzo Giuliani simply looked at him, and other people’s silence tended to make John talk more and faster. “Writing the church bulletin? Reffing fights between the choir director and the liturgist? None of that is likely to come up, right? Except maybe funerals.” John cleared his throat. “Look, it’s not that I don’t want to go, it’s just that I know guys who would give a kidney to be on this mission and I don’t get why you’re sending me.”

  The Father General’s eyes left John’s face and rested on the olive trees and the stony hills that surrounded the retreat house. After a time, he seemed to forget Candotti was there and started to walk away. Then he hesitated and turned back to the younger priest. “They’re going to need someone who is good at forgiveness,” was all he said.

  So, John now supposed, it was his job to forgive Danny Iron Horse.

  Back in Chicago, John Candotti had been a notoriously easy mark in a confessional, the kind of priest who didn’t make a penitent feel like a three-year-old who’d had a potty accident. “We all screw up,” he would remind people. A lot of what people confessed to him had its origin in thoughtlessness, lack of empathy, indifference to others. Or idolatry—mistaking money or power or achievement or sex for God. John knew from experience how you could let yourself get swept up in something you’d regret, kidding yourself that you could handle some potentially harmful situation and weren’t about to step knee-deep into a pool of shit. He was skilled at helping people work through what they’d done and why, so they could make good—literally, make good out of bad.

  But Daniel Iron Horse hadn’t just screwed up. This wasn’t a mistake—it wasn’t even self-deception. It was deliberate, knowing collusion in an act that was illegal, unethical and immoral. Realizing later that Vincenzo Giuliani and Gelasius III must have been complicit only deepened John’s outrage, but those two weren’t available to be vilified. Danny Iron Horse was here, every day, every night, and his silence seemed to acknowledge John’s assessment: that he was an arrogant man, corrupted by ambition.

  For the first time in his life, the Mass failed John. He had always counted on the celebration of the Eucharist to be a time of renewal and rededication, especially among men who had given their lives over to be entirely at the disposal of God. Now, on the Giordano Bruno, the Mass was a daily reminder of division and hostility; the very word “Communion” seemed to mock him.

  John wanted desperately to talk to Emilio, but Sandoz treated him as he did all the crew members: with a distant, drugged courtesy. “I have given my word that I will not obstruct Carlo’s plans,” was all he would say.

  Joseba Urizarbarrena’s policy seemed to be one of strict nonengagement—staying in his quarters as much as possible, carrying food in, plates out, picking odd hours to come and go, so as to avoid the others, Jesuit and lay. “It’s hard to imagine how this could be justified,” Joseba admitted when John cornered the Basque in the galley one night. “But remember the name of the pirate who took Francis Xavier to Japan? Avan o Ladrao—Avan the Thief. I think perhaps God uses the tools He’s got, even the ones that are bent or broken.”

  When John’s protests persisted, Joseba advised, “Talk to Sean.” But when John asked directly for some kind of guidance, the Irishman told him with curt
irritability, “Mind yer own business.” For Sean, John realized, the matter was now under the seal of confession.

  Never one to back off from a fight, John decided in the end to go straight to Iron Horse. “My sins are my affair, ace,” Danny told him flatly. “You know the facts, so decide. Are the Pope and the Father General frauds? Or do you understand less than you think?”

  His way blocked, the dilemma tossed back in his face, his need to talk all this through becoming more pressing, John considered the others. He couldn’t quite decide if Nico was retarded, but the big man with the small head was unlikely to have much in the way of ethical insight, in John’s opinion. Carlo Giuliani was fond of quoting Marcus Aurelius, but the Caesar that John thought of was Caligula—all honeyed gorgeousness and self-deception: dangerous in more ways than John cared to count.

  Which left Fat Frans.

  “You’re asking me?” the South African cried, as John laid out his problem one morning when there was no one else in the commons except Nico, whom everyone mostly ignored. “Well, Johnny, you could do worse. I read philosophy at Bloemfontein—”

  “Philos—! How the hell did you end up piloting rocks for the Camorra?” John asked, astounded.

  Frans shrugged ponderously. “Philosophy, I discovered, is now more of an attitude than a career path—the job market has fallen off somewhat, since the Enlightenment. The Camorra, on the other hand, offers a competitive salary, excellent retirement benefits and very good health insurance,” Frans said. “Unless you turn state’s evidence—then they provide a very nice funeral.”

  John snorted, but went back to gnawing on one of the fingernails that constituted a substantial portion of his diet these days.

  “Now then,” Frans said amiably, in the clipped lilt of Johannesburg, “your problem is an interesting one. Personally, I have no firm opinion about God, but I must tell you that I do consider the entire Catholic Church a fraud, along with all its imps and elves, which would subsume the Black Popes, as specific cases of the general proposition.”