Children of God

by Mary Doria Russell

  He said nothing more that day, but Ha’anala spent hours considering his words. A soul, she decided, was the most real part of a person, and to discover what is real requires privacy.

  In the village, every act, every word, every decision or desire was examined and commented on and compared, debated, evaluated and reconsidered—participated in! How could she tell who she was, when everything she did acquired a council of 150 people? If she so much as hid her eyes behind her hands or clamped her ears shut for a moment, a solicitous Runao would approach and inquire, “Sipaj, Ha’anala, are you not well?” And then everyone would discuss her recent meals, her stools, the condition of her coat, whether her eyes were hurting her, and if that might be because there had lately been more sunlight and less rain than usual, and if that meant the dji’ll harvest would be late this year, and how would that affect the market for k’jip, which was always combined with dji’ll …

  So Ha’anala thanked God that Isaac’s ability to tolerate the village commotion was even more limited than her own. She had never told Sofia about the things Isaac said during their times alone. This was a source of guilt. Ha’anala sometimes felt as though she had stolen something from Sofia, who wanted so much for Isaac to speak to her.

  Once, when Ha’anala heard Isaac yawn underneath his head covering, and knew that he was done reading and could tolerate a question, she had asked, “Sipaj, Isaac, why do you not speak to our mother?”

  “She wants too much,” he said tonelessly. “She rips away the veil.”

  Isaac had twice typed a message on the tablet to Sofia. “Leave this alone,” was the first. Their mother had wept at it: his only words to her a rebuff. But later, during the period of intense frustration and fear that occurred when he came to the end of some line of obsessive research, he had asked, “Will I run out of things to learn?” “No,” Sofia had typed back. “Never.” He seemed glad, but that single reassurance was all he wanted from her.

  Ha’anala sighed, saddened by the memory, and settled back against a sun-warmed boulder, closing her eyes. Midday heat and boredom joined with an adolescent carnivore’s physiology to conspire against consciousness, but her drowsiness that day was compounded by Isaac’s latest craze. He had set himself the task of memorizing every base pair in human DNA, having assigned a musical note to represent each of the four bases—adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine. He would listen to the monotonous four-note sequences for hours.

  “Sipaj, Isaac,” she’d asked when this jag started, “what are you doing?”

  “Remembering,” he said, and this struck Ha’anala as unusually pointless, even for Isaac.

  Even Sofia had become more distant in the past few years, often doing several things at once, listening to the Runa discussions while working through reports or preparing weather data for dissemination to the officers or coordinating the delivery of supplies to a salient. Over and over, Ha’anala tried to help, distressed by Sofia’s isolation, wanting to be her partner even while she resented her mother’s patent, unspoken needs. “It has nothing to do with you,” Sofia would say, closing Ha’anala out as effectively as Isaac could. Sofia seemed to come fully alive only when she spoke of justice, but as the years went by, even that topic elicited silence. None of the people welcomed Ha’anala’s interest in the war, and her questions were adroitly deflected—

  They are ashamed, Ha’anala realized. They wish me not to know, but I do. I will be the last of my kind. They have begun something that can end only one way. Sofia and Isaac might be right, she thought, drowsing. Stay distant, keep your heart hidden, don’t want what you can’t have …

  She had been asleep for some time when she heard Isaac’s blaring, toneless voice announce, “This is worse than red. Someone is leaving.”

  “All right,” she murmured, without really rousing. “Someone will meet you back at the village.”

  “SIPAJ, PEOPLE,” SOFIA CALLED OUT HOURS LATER, “IT’S ALMOST REDLIGHT! Has anyone seen Isaac and Ha’anala?”

  Puska VaTrucha-Sai separated from the knot of girls chattering about their assignments, and looked around curiously. “They left this morning for Isaac’s hut,” she reminded Fia.

  “Sipaj, Puska,” her father, Kanchay, called, “you will please us if you go out and bring them back.”

  “Oh, eat me,” Puska muttered, to the scandalized laughter of the other girls. Puska didn’t care. A year in the army was more than enough to coarsen a woman’s attitudes and language, and she had chosen the mildest of the vulgarities that came to mind—these recruits would learn the others soon enough. Puska smiled at the girls and said, “A good soldier is responsible,” with the exaggerated sincerity that covers rock-hard cynicism, and loped off to find Fia’s children.

  It took her perhaps twice-twelve paces to get beyond the shelters and storage huts, and again that many to pass out of earshot of the village noise. Puska had dreamed of home nearly every night of her first month in the city of Mo’arl; yearning for the forest’s peace and security, she’d sought refuge there in sleep when daylight was filled with shock and outrage and sadness. For a time, she’d envied Ha’anala, safe forever in the village. Now, Trucha Sai seemed cramped and limited, and Puska could understand why Ha’anala was so often bad-tempered and restless.

  The roofline of Isaac’s shelter came into view, a cha’ar past the settlement’s edge. Imantat’s work was not as sturdy as that of his father, who was a master thatcher, but the boy showed promise: the shelter had held up well during the last storm. Someone will need a husband soon, Puska thought, and made a mental note to bring this up with the council, for she had seen enough of war to know that babies should not be postponed, and the people would need a child to replace her if she fell in battle.

  “Sipaj, Ha’anala,” Puska called as she approached the hut, “everyone’s waiting for you! It’s almost redlight!” There was no response—the shelter was empty. “Stew,” she swore under her breath. Ha’anala couldn’t see in redlight and Isaac could see too well. He needed to get under the sleeping shelters, where he couldn’t see the red in the sky, or there’d be trouble. “Ha’anala! Someone will have to carry you back!” Puska teased loudly. “And Isaac will make a fierno!”

  “Over here!” Ha’anala yelled from a distance.

  “Where’s Isaac?” Puska shouted back, cocking her ears toward the sound, relieved to hear Ha’anala’s voice at last.

  Already losing contrast, hands out in front of her, Ha’anala moved uncertainly toward Isaac’s hut. “He’s not here,” she cried, lifting a foot to rub the opposite shin where she’d crashed into a fallen log a moment earlier. “Isaac left!”

  Puska’s ears came up. “Left? No—someone would have seen him. He’s not in the village and he wasn’t on the path home—”

  Stumbling over a root, Ha’anala snarled in frustration. “Sipaj, Puska: he’s left! Out into the forest! Can’t you smell it? He said he was leaving, but someone was sleepy—”

  Puska strode decisively to Ha’anala’s side and began to smooth the younger girl’s face, running her hands along the sides of Ha’anala’s long, thin cheeks. “Make your heart quiet,” she crooned, falling back into the habits of childhood. “A fierno won’t help,” Puska warned. “Bad weather will frighten everyone.”

  And it would wipe out Isaac’s scent, Ha’anala realized, before she could dispute the meteorological effects of emotional distress. She stood at full height. “We have to find him. Right away, Puska. His scent trail is very clear now, but if it rains, someone will lose him. He’ll be gone. Fia will—”

  “But you can’t see—” Puska started to protest.

  “Not with eyes,” Ha’anala said carefully. Evidence of Isaac’s passage fairly glowed for her: his footprints bright with scent, the leaves he’d brushed past powdered with shed skin cells and misted with his expelled breath. “It’s like firespore—remember? Like small points of light, along the path he took. Sipaj, Puska, someone can follow him if you will help. But we have to leave no
w, or the trail might stop glowing.”

  Puska swayed from side to side as she considered this. On the left foot: Isaac might be lost. On the right foot: she should go back to the village and get permission. On the left foot: it smelled like rain. On the right—

  “Sipaj, Puska,” Ha’anala pleaded, “someone’s heart will stop if she has to tell Fia that Isaac is gone! Someone thinks she can follow him, and when we two catch up with him, we shall be three, and we’ll be back before full night.”

  Which settled it for Puska. One person made a puzzle. Two people made a discussion. Three made a plan.

  “THE PEOPLE WILL BELIEVE THAT THE DJANADA GOT US,” PUSKA POINTED out, worried from the moment she awoke the next morning. She looked up at Ha’anala, who was a little distance away, poised on a tail and one leg. “Someone should have gone back to tell the others.”

  Ha’anala didn’t respond, afraid she’d alarm her breakfast, which was about to move within reach, directly beneath her suspended foot. Patience … patience … “Got it!” she cried, grasping a small, scaly lonat. “We don’t need help,” she told Puska firmly, pinching the animal’s neck between a pedal thumb and forefinger. “If we go back now, someone will lose the scent.”

  Puska’s face contorted, watching the lonat’s twitches subside into limp stillness. “Are you really going to eat that?”

  “Consider the alternative,” Ha’anala said, shooting a foot out to grip Puska’s ankle. “Oh, Puska! Someone was joking!” she cried when Puska jumped and wrenched her leg free.

  “Well, don’t. Don’t ever joke like that!” Puska shuddered. “If you’d seen what I’ve seen in Mo’arl—” Ha’anala’s mouth dropped open and Puska stopped, embarrassed by her own self-referential crudity. I really have gotten bad, she thought. “Sorry,” she apologized and held out a hand for the lonat, holding her breath as she scraped the scales from its legs. “Someone thinks such jokes are in very poor taste.”

  “Someone thinks lonati are in very poor taste,” Ha’anala muttered, biting off a nasty little haunch when Puska handed the thing back to her. The main virtue of lonati was that they were easy to catch. Both Ha’anala and her father were used to the small, poor prey they could sometimes capture to supplement offerings of “traditional meat,” as it was delicately referred to, but eating was always a hurried, furtive task.

  “What’s it like in the cities?” Ha’anala asked, trying to divert Puska’s horrified fascination with the tiny carcass.

  “You don’t want to know,” Puska told her with evident disgust, and left to find herself some rainberries for breakfast.

  THEY PRESSED ON, PUSKA INCREASINGLY EXASPERATED, HA’ANALA ALMOST as irritable. Traces of Isaac’s passing had been trampled by forest things—sweating, panting, defecating in the humid heat—and she lost the scent repeatedly as his path veered unexpectedly toward patches of fruiting bush. Even when she caught his course again, it was mingled with clouds of vraloj pollen and the stench of rotting plants, and difficult to follow. By their fourth day on the trail, Puska was complaining bitterly and continuously, and stopped to forage with resentful thoroughness while Ha’anala fumed and clawed under logs for bitter grubs, silent and ravenous and more determined with every passing moment to run Isaac to ground and haul him back by his ankle.

  “One more day,” Puska warned that night. “Then we’re going back. You are too hungry—”

  “Isaac will be even hungrier,” Ha’anala insisted, for she had never seen Isaac feed himself and had begun to hope that he would weaken so that they could overtake him.

  But his dung told her otherwise. In the absence of those who had cared for him since infancy, Isaac was managing rather well, Ha’anala realized. His bowels could stand a Runao’s diet and he had probably watched Runa foraging, attentively if obliquely; he understood what was edible and knew how to find it. So now he feeds himself, Ha’anala thought, remembering the stories about how Isaac had begun to walk one day and to sing one day and to type one day. He evidently rehearsed each new skill in his mind until he was certain he could do it, and then simply did.

  Has he been planning to leave? Ha’anala wondered that night as she drifted off to sleep. What does he think he’ll find? But then she thought, He’s not searching. He’s escaping.

  THEY SLEPT BADLY THAT NIGHT, AND AWOKE TO A THUNDERING DOWNPOUR that made travel impossible. Still unwilling to admit defeat, Ha’anala sat at the edge of the woods, staring disconsolately at a limitless plain, her nostrils flaring with the effort to retain Isaac’s scent even as it dissolved into the dirt, churned by fat drops and mixed with the scent trails of prairie herds. Even Puska was quiet.

  “Gone,” Ha’anala whispered that evening, as the wet, gray light dwindled. “Someone has lost him.”

  “He lost himself. You tried to find him,” Puska said softly. She put an arm around Ha’anala and rested her head on the Jana’ata’s shoulder. “Tomorrow we will go home.”

  “How can I tell Sofia?” Ha’anala asked the darkness. “Isaac is gone.”

  Giordano Bruno

  2066–2069, Earth-Relative

  “YOU’RE JOKING,” JOHN INSISTED.

  Fat Frans looked up balefully from his plate. “Is suicide still considered a sin?”

  “It depends—. Why?”

  “Well, for the sake of your theoretically immortal soul, I’ll give you some advice,” said Frans. “Never get into a plane piloted by Emilio Sandoz.”

  Colorful exaggeration, John thought, and pushed his own plate aside. “He can’t be that bad!”

  “I’m telling you, Johnny, I’ve never seen anyone with less natural ability,” said Frans, somewhat belatedly swallowing a mouthful of tilapia and rice. “Nico, tell Don Gianni how long it took you to learn to fly the lander.”

  “Three weeks,” said Nico from his seat in the corner. “Don Carlo says the landers practically fly themselves, but I had a hard time with the navigation programs.”

  John winced. Emilio had been working on this for a month.

  “His brain must be completely crammed with languages. As far as I can tell,” said Frans, adding some salt to the rice, “there is not one spare synapse available for flight training. Look, I admire perseverance as much as the next man, but this is pointless. Even D. W. Yarbrough gave up on him. Know what it says in the first mission’s records?” Frans paused, chewing, and then recited, “ ‘As a pilot, Father Sandoz is one hell of a linguist and a pretty fair medic. So I am taking him off flight training and assigning him to permanent passenger status, to avoid getting anybody killed.’ ” Frans shook his head. “I thought I had a better chance with him because the new landers are almost entirely automated, but Sandoz is so terrible, it’s eerie.” He scooped up another forkful of fish and peered over mounded cheeks at John. “Do something, Johnny. Talk to him.”

  John snorted. “What makes you think he’ll pay any attention to what I say? Apart from reaming me out for some damned mistake in Ruanja subjunctive, Emilio hasn’t said two words to me in the past eight weeks.” It was hard not to be hurt, actually. Drugged or sober, Sandoz would let no one near him. “Where is he now?” John asked Frans.

  “He practices in his cabin. I can’t even monitor him anymore—it’s too awful to watch.”

  “All right,” said John. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  THERE WAS NO ANSWER TO THE FIRST KNOCK, SO JOHN BANGED HARDER.

  “Shit!” Emilio yelled without opening the door. “What!”

  “It’s me—John. Lemme in, okay?”

  There was a pause, and the sound of the door latch rattling. “Shit,” Sandoz said again. “Open it yourself.” When John did, Sandoz was standing with the full-coverage VR visor shoved back on his forehead like a conquistador’s helmet.

  John slumped at the sight of him. He was encrusted with equipment, the VR gloves overlaying his braces, the skin under his eyes purplish with chronic fatigue. “Oh, for God’s sake,” John said, tact forgotten. “Emilio, this is stupid—”

&nb
sp; “It’s not stupid!” Emilio snapped. “Did Frans send you? I don’t give a damn what he thinks. I have to learn this! If I just didn’t have all this crap on my hands—”

  “But you do have all that crap on your hands, and I still can’t get that left brace to work right, and the controls in the lander are even harder than the VR sims! Why can’t you just let—”

  “Because,” Emilio said, cutting him off with soft precision, “I’d rather not depend on anyone else to get me off the planet.”

  John blinked. “Okay,” he said finally, “I get it.”

  “Thank you,” Emilio said sarcastically. “You may recall that the last time I was on Rakhat, the cavalry was a little late riding to the rescue.”

  John nodded, conceding the point, but still in the mood to argue. “You look awful,” he said, picking a fight. “Has it occurred to you that maybe if you got some rest, you might do better? When the hell do you sleep?”

  “If I don’t sleep, I can’t dream,” Emilio told him curtly, and shoved his door closed, leaving John alone in the passageway, staring at its blank metal surface.

  “Get some rest, dammit,” John yelled.

  “Go to hell!” Emilio yelled back.

  John sighed and walked away, shaking his head and talking to himself.

  WITHIN DAYS OF WITHDRAWING FROM QUELL, SANDOZ HAD BROKEN THE Jesuit monopoly on both Rakhati languages, insisting that Carlo, Frans and Nico become competent in basic Ruanja and K’San, even though Frans would remain on the ship for the duration of the mission. Soon he demanded that they all begin working together in increasingly rigorous classes. Day after day, night after night, he ordered them to interpret what he was saying in K’San or Ruanja, throwing his questions at them like bombs, criticizing their answers on every level: grammar, logic, psychology, philosophy, theology.

  “Prepare to be wrong. Assume that whenever you find something simple or obvious, you are wrong,” Sandoz advised. “Everything we thought we understood, all the most basic things we shared with them—sex, food, music, families—those were the things we were most wrong about.”