Children of God

by Mary Doria Russell

  Most often, she was in an airport, waiting for her flight’s departure to be announced, or in some train terminal; in these dreams, she believed that Jimmy was waiting for her somewhere. Sometimes she would be walking on a once-familiar city street in Tokyo or Warsaw. More often, she was in some chimerical dream-place that merely stood for Earth. She was nearly always alone in her dreams but, once, she was sitting in a coffee shop, listening to conversations around her, when Sandoz walked in—late, as usual. “Where were we?” he asked, and sat across from her in the booth. “We were in love,” she answered, and startled herself awake by saying in dream what had never been spoken in daylight.

  She lay in the rustling, dripping noise of the forest that night, eyes open, sorting out the shards of reality from which this was constructed. The coffee shop was in Cleveland, of course. How long ago had she first met Sandoz there? she asked herself. Then, with more urgency, she wondered, How old am I? Nearly fifty, she realized with a jolt. Seventeen years here, she thought. Longer than I lived in Istanbul. Longer than I’ve lived anywhere.

  “Sipaj, Fia,” Supaari’s daughter, Ha’anala, had asked her once, “are you not sad that your people left you here alone?”

  “Everything happens for a reason,” Sofia told the girl. “The Runa are my people now, and your people as well.”

  She said this with fierce, unfeigned conviction, for she had long since sunk her private, paltry sadness to the bottom of a pure and selfless outrage at the Runa’s bondage. She had discovered the purpose for her life on Rakhat. She had come here to teach a single word to the VaRakhati: justice.

  All over Rakhat’s largest continent, inarticulate resentment had been given voice by Supaari VaGayjur and Djalao VaKashan and their followers. The ordinary weapons of the powerless—the specious compliance and counterfeit ignorance, the pilfering and petty obstructions, the foot-dragging and pretense of vacuous misunderstanding—all these were laid aside in favor of an astonishing and exhilarating strength. Like sleepers awakening from a dream of impotence, the Runa awoke to their own power and unleashed a force whose potential was previously understood only by the Jana’ata, who had rightly feared it.

  After the first convulsion of revolt, after Gayjur and Agardi were liberated, fear and suspicion did a great deal of the work for them. A Jana’ata patriarch would wake in the morning to find his household deserted by its Runa staff, and a knife lying on the sleeping nest next to his throat. If he had any sense at all, he’d take his family and flee north. Oh, there was resistance. There were forays and challenges, even in the beginning. But knowledge is power, and with Sofia Mendes’s help, the Runa had become very knowledgeable indeed.

  She had provided schematics of advanced communications and data-processing equipment, and, more important, Sofia provided the awareness that such things could be manufactured: given the seed of an idea, the Runa were capable of elaborating on it quickly and creatively. Radio equipment, made by Runa hands, had once served Jana’ata governments; now it was modified to make use of the orbiting satellites put in place by the crew of the Stella Maris, allowing the entire army to communicate instantly. After a time, all young officers learned English—as unbreakable a code as Navajo had been in Earth’s second global war.

  With the Magellan’s remote sensing and imaging capabilities, Sofia herself could survey the continent for nearly forty degrees of latitude on either side of the equator—only the southern ocean and land north of the Garnu mountains remained out of range. Hidden in Trucha Sai, she provided weather reports and river transport times; tracked the small, mobile detachments of Jana’ata troopers, who could be picked off when they entered terrain that suited Runa women, unhampered by any tradition of formal combat. As the Jana’ata pulled back on three fronts to more defensible territory, Sofia could locate the new enclosures where domestic and draft Runa were herded together. These could be targeted and stormed in redlight, at a stroke freeing captives and starving the djanada out, driving them further north.

  “But do you not wish for others of your kind?” Ha’anala asked.

  “I have you and your father. I have Isaac and the Runa,” Sofia told her. “I have what I need.”

  “Truly, mother?”

  “Truly!” Sofia cried. “I am grateful for what I have, Ha’anala.”

  She might also have said, Wishing for more is asking for disappointment. But Sofia Mendes had banished such thoughts long ago.

  AND THERE WERE COMPENSATIONS FOR HER SITUATION, SOFIA WOULD remind herself. On Earth, her son would have been a tragedy, but here in the forest, protected by the watchful gaze of a hundred fathers, all the children were safe, damaged or whole, quick or halt. No one was discarded as too broken or too odd. Imperfection was permitted in Trucha Sai, the only place on Rakhat where this was so. The Runa asked nothing of Isaac. They did not judge him and find him wanting, did not care when he learned to control his bowels or that he went naked.

  And if Isaac was deaf to the emotions of others, he was alive to this habitat of things. There were vines to swing on, downed w‘ralia limbs to scramble over and climb, to march along with his strange perfection of balance. There was mud to pat and throw, to ooze between fingers or toes. Water to fling, to fall backward onto, to float in. Huge river-polished rocks to scoot down, over and over and over, flapping his hands in private delight; a smooth wealth of riverbed stones to collect and lay out, row by row, in strict straight lines that Sofia realized with a start were grouped by prime numbers: 1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, on and on. Here in Trucha Sai, the trees whispered to Isaac, the brook bubbled for him. Rain washed him clean. Animals sometimes came to him because he could be so still, so long.

  “Sipaj, Fia: when can we go to a city?” Ha’anala would ask. “Do people there all have five fingers, or do some have only three?”

  “It’s too dangerous for you in the cities,” Sofia would tell her.

  “The other girls go to the cities!”

  “They’re soldiers. You’ll understand when you’re older.”

  “That’s what you said last time. Someone is older now! When will you explain?”

  “Sipaj, Ha’anala, don’t make a fierno. Listen to that thunder!”

  “You said people can’t really make the weather change!”

  “And what does make the weather change?” Sofia asked, glad of the diversion.

  IN THE MIDST OF WAR, SOFIA MENDES LEARNED THAT SHE MIGHT HAVE been a teacher, had her own childhood not taken such an ugly turn. Her clarity of mind and habit of organization, her ability to break any process down and present it to a novice step by step—all the skills that had once made her a superb AI analyst now served her many and disparate students.

  The Runa children did best with the mnemonics that she created to help them remember the names of the suns and rivers and cities, chemical elements, multiplication tables. She let them teach her the botany their fathers taught by example and then, with the children, she created new taxonomies of use and of structure and of location, and watched with pleasure when they began to classify animals and sounds and words and stones, to make logical connections and find clever solutions to the problems they set themselves.

  These Runa were noticeably quicker than the VaKashani children she had first known. In the beginning, she took credit as their teacher, but as time passed, she understood that their intelligence was due in part to the fact that they were all adequately fed—not kept on short rations by Jana’ata breeders who wished to control their reproductive status and their labor and their lives—

  The djanada must have known, must have understood that this would stunt Runa minds as well, she realized. It was when such abominations were revealed to her that she would remember the poetry of the doomed Warsaw ghetto uprising: “The meat defiant, the meat insurgent, the meat fighting! The meat in full cry …” This time, she thought, the meat will triumph. We will loose the bonds of injustice and break every yoke, and let the oppressed go free! We are doing the right thing. We are.

  And the
n, with renewed conviction, she would return to the task of teaching Runa children the lessons they would need to live well in the liberty their mothers fought for.

  Even Isaac could be taught, she discovered. Or rather, he would learn if she was careful not to invade his world. She let the computer tablet carry her messages to him, across the secret barriers and invisible walls that shut him off from others; it was her surest way of reaching him aside from song. He liked the keyboard’s ordered ranks, and when she first showed him how to use it, he was wild with joy at the way it made the letters and symbols march across the screen in perfect, infinite rectilinearity. The Runa would complain in kind, tactful ways when Isaac flapped his hands and shrieked his bliss at this parade of letters; she learned that if she sat at his side and snatched the tablet away from him at the moment the fierno began, he quickly quieted. Within days, he was able to control the disruptive behavior that he understood would rob him of his treasure.

  Each night, Sofia would add some tiny element to her son’s virtual world: sound that gave a letter’s name when it appeared, over and over; then whole words, written and spoken, to match pictures. He taught himself to read that way, to her astonishment. It was, she thought, more like learning Chinese ideographs than like reading phonetically, but it worked for him somehow. Sofia showed him the file that displayed Marc Robichaux’s detailed and beautiful drawings of Rakhati plants and animals, and for these she supplied names in Ruanja. She wept the day he appeared at her side with a real leaf to match one on the screen, but she did not embrace him. Love for Isaac had to be on his terms. On his own or by obliquely watching Sofia with Ha’anala, he learned to call up the Magellan library and find his bookmarked nodes. He learned where the music was kept and would take the tablet off to a quiet corner to listen. The rapt look that came over him then reminded Sofia forcefully of her own mother’s face when she lost herself in a nocturne at the piano. When he listened, Isaac seemed not merely normal but transcendent, transfixed.

  In this creeping, incremental way, she came to know that some of what she valued in herself and admired in Isaac’s father had been passed on: intellect and a love of music. Isaac was, she realized, very bright, or would have been if—

  No, she decided, he is bright, but in his own way: a truly alien intelligence.

  “He is like an angel,” Sofia had mused when Ha’anala was only seven. They clung together watching Isaac stand, long-boned and slender, at the edge of the river, oblivious to anything but the water. Or perhaps a rock in the water. Or perhaps simply oblivious. “An angel, pure and beautiful and remote.”

  “Sipaj, Fia,” Ha’anala had asked. “What is an angel?”

  Sofia came to herself. “A messenger. A messenger from God.”

  “What is Isaac’s message?”

  “He can’t tell us,” Sofia said, and turned away, dry-eyed.

  EVENTUALLY THE TIME CAME FOR THE OLDEST OF THE TRUCHA SAI girls to leave. Sofia asked that the brightest of them be allowed to stay in the forest, to become teachers in other villages like Trucha Sai—filling with young Runa as the front lines expanded and fathers fell back to raise their children far from the fierno of war. The answer was almost always, “No. Boys can teach. It is the women’s way to die for children.”

  Sofia understood this, and did not weep when girls were judged ready to join the struggle, and left the forest to be devoured not by djanada but by revolution. It was, she realized, just as well that she could love the Runa as a people, but rarely mourned them as individuals.

  Her mistake, if that was what it was, lay in loving Ha’anala.

  HA’ANALA: HER FATHER’S DAUGHTER—QUICK AND DECENT AND FULL of energy, who repaid with intellectual interest all that Sofia Mendes could offer a child, who wanted more of an answer to “Why should I be good?” than “Making a fierno brings thunderstorms.” Ha’anala, who could hold in her mind both science and song, fact and fable; who could, as young as nine, move easily from the Big Bang to “Let there be light.”

  I am making a Jew of her, Sofia thought one day, alarmed. But then she asked herself, Why not? Ha’anala loved the stories that Sofia told to satisfy the child’s hunger for authoritative answers. So Sofia freely drew upon ancient parables to teach enduring morals, with slight emendations to allow for local conditions. The story of the Garden was a favorite because it seemed so like the forest in which they lived. Following Isaac on his solitary wanderings through the trees, it was easy to believe that they were all alone, with no one but God and each other for companions.

  But Ha’anala was her own person and drew her own conclusions and one day, she stopped in her tracks and said, “Sipaj, Fia: God lied.”

  Startled, Sofia stopped as well and looked back at her, her eye moving nervously between Isaac, who continued on his way, and Ha’anala, who stood her ground.

  “The wife and husband didn’t die, and they knew good and evil,” Ha’anala said in English, looking up at Sofia with her head cocked back, the image of her father about to issue a declaration. “God lied. The longneck told the truth.”

  “I never thought of that,” Sofia said after a moment. “Well, they did die eventually, but not that day. So, both God and the longneck told part of the truth, I suppose. They had different reasons for what they did.” Which led, as they began to walk again, to a long, delicious discussion of complete honesty, partial truth, tact, and deliberate deception for personal gain.

  Sofia would report all this to Supaari in their daily radio contacts, sharing stories of his daughter’s insights, of her cleverness and creativity, her mischief and essential goodness. His reaction told Sofia a great deal. If he had been behind Runa lines for a time, he would soften and laugh and ask questions. But if he had been in a city, among the Jana’ata, steeped in Runa scent, dressed as a Runao, silently accepting humiliation and unthinking slights as he spied on fortifications and the strength of a garrison, then stories of his daughter’s squandered splendor would fuel his anger.

  “They wanted her dead,” he would say, with a cold fury that Sofia understood and shared. “They wanted such a child dead!”

  And yet, he hardly ever visited Ha’anala. Sofia understood this, too. He could not let himself be weakened. He needed to focus on war’s clean and uncomplicated emotions. It was necessary that his daily companion be not a child of bright promise with no future but a Runao whose reputation for ferocity of devotion to the making of a new world matched his own—Djalao VaKashan.

  It seemed quite likely that they were lovers. Sofia knew that this was both possible and accepted, among VaRakhati of both species. Djalao had taken no husband. “The people are my children,” she said. Sofia understood as well what Djalao represented to Supaari: respect earned and acceptance given, recognition that this one djanada was worthy to be called one of the People. Supaari shared danger with Djalao, Sofia told herself, and dreams and work. Why not share respite as well? She did not begrudge them that small comfort.

  Another woman might have been jealous, but not Sofia Mendes. She had, after all, survived a great deal by blocking out emotion—her own and others’. And love was a debt, best left unincurred.

  City of Gayjur 2082, Earth-Relative

  “WHEN DID ISAAC FIRST BECOME INTERESTED IN GENETICS?” DANIEL IRON Horse would ask Sofia, near the end of her life.

  She was all but blind by then, one eye clouded by a cataract, the other gone; bent nearly in half by a lifetime without the calcium her bones had needed. A crone, she thought. A ruin. But she said aloud, “It was when we were all still living in Trucha Sai, Isaac and Ha’anala and I. Isaac was twenty, I think. Perhaps twenty-five, by your count—the years are longer here. It was just before he left.” She sat for a time remembering. “He became, I think, increasingly unsuited to life among the Runa. The constant talk—. Well, you get used to it. You learn to tune it out. But Isaac couldn’t do that, and the noise seemed almost painful to him. When he was younger, he would press his fingers into his ears and moan—just make his own noise
to drown the talk out. But he simply couldn’t stand it as he got older. He spent more and more time by himself, and one day he disappeared.”

  “And Ha’anala followed him?”

  “Yes.”

  The priests were always so patient with her when she stopped speaking. Sometimes she simply forgot what they had asked and got lost in her own thoughts, but not this time. This was simply difficult to face, and she found it necessary to approach it from a distance. “You see, the Runa children had questions about the weather and the suns and moons, and about plants,” she told Danny. “Where does rain come from? they wanted to know. Why do the moons change shape? Where do the suns go at night? How do little seeds make giant w’ralia trees? Good questions. I had to work hard to answer them, to keep up with those children. They kept my mind alive. But they never asked about human differences, about differences among the species.” She paused, still struck by this. “It was Ha’anala who asked those questions. Why don’t you and Isaac have tails? What happened to your fur? She wanted to know, Why do I have only three fingers, not five like everyone else?”

  “What did you tell her?” Danny asked gently.

  Such a quiet man, Sofia thought. So careful with her, so loath to judge. When she was very young, Sofia had thought of priests as condemning and punitive. Whatever made me believe that? she wondered. Not knowing any priests, perhaps. That was the root of so much fear and hatred, she realized. Not knowing any …

  You’re drifting, Mendes, she told herself, and came back to his question. “Well, at first, I told her what Marc Robichaux always used to say about things like that: Because that’s the way God likes it.” She reached out, to feel Danny’s face, to see if he was smiling. The beardless skin was so smooth.… Keep to the point, Mendes, she scolded. “Ha’anala understood the difference between God and science, that there were different ways—parallel ways—to think about the world. So. There were very good AI genetics tutorials in the Magellan library, of course. We downloaded those. There were graphics of the DNA helices for humans, and my own tablet’s memory had the work on VaRakhati genetics that Anne Edwards and Marc Robichaux did. So I showed her those data as well.”