Children of God

by Mary Doria Russell

  And help me, John thought then. He reached for his rosary, and tried to empty his mind of everything but the rhythm of familiar prayers. He heard instead the rhythmic pounding on the treadmill: the sound of a small, scared, aging man, going the extra mile.

  Central Inbrokar

  2061, Earth-Relative

  IT WAS PAST SECOND DAWN WHEN HA’ANALA WOKE TO DAYLIGHT IN HER eyes. She turned her face away from the glare and stared at Puska, still lax with sleep.

  How can I tell Sofia? she asked herself miserably—her first thought on this new day identical to her last of the previous one. Sitting up, she looked at herself and grimaced: her fur was matted and muddy, and her teeth felt as thick as her head. Oh, Isaac, she thought hopelessly, getting up slowly, stretching each stiff limb. Her mind as blank as the flatlands that stretched out before her, she stared east over an immense plain, the lavender of its shortgrass blossoms pale in the bleached light of full day.

  “Sipaj, Puska,” she said. “Wake up!” She felt around with her tail and slapped Puska’s hip. Puska brushed her away. “Puska!” she cried, more urgently, not daring to move her head for fear of losing the plume. “He’s alive! I can smell him.”

  That brought the Runao to her feet in a swift roll. Puska stared in the same direction that Ha’anala was looking, but saw only emptiness. “Sipaj, Ha’anala,” she said wearily, “there’s no one there.”

  “Isaac’s out there,” Ha’anala insisted, making a quick attempt to brush dried mud from her coat. “It depends on the wind, but someone thinks he’s moving northeast.”

  Puska couldn’t detect a useful thing herself, except for some sintaron setting fruit nearby and a little patch of sweetleaf that might make a decent breakfast. “Sipaj, Ha’anala, it’s time to go home.”

  “We just have to catch up with him—”

  “No,” said Puska.

  Shocked, Ha’anala glanced over her shoulder and saw equal parts of skepticism and regret in Puska’s face. “Don’t be frightened,” she started.

  “I’m not frightened,” Puska said bluntly, too tired for courtesy. “I don’t believe you, Ha’anala.” There was an awkward pause. “Sipaj, Ha’anala, someone thinks you have been wrong about all of this. He’s not out there.”

  They looked at each other for a long time: all but sisters, almost strangers. It was Ha’anala who broke the silence. “All right,” she said evenly. “Someone will go on alone. Tell Fia that someone will find Isaac even if she must follow him all the way to the sea.”

  AS THE SOUNDS OF PUSKA’S RETREAT RECEDED, HA’ANALA CLOSED HER eyes and formed an image of the plume: diffuse and broad at its top, narrowing at the base toward a point she could not detect, but could infer from the taper. Not caring that Puska had given up, she said, “He’s out there,” and followed the pillar of his scent into the wilderness.

  In the first few hours, the wind played with the plume and she was twice forced to double back so she could arc across the trail to find the line strongest with his passing on the ground. But as the suns climbed and the wind stilled, her skill strengthened, and she had only to shift her head from side to side to gauge the gradient.

  The plain was not empty, as it had seemed, but creased and furrowed with narrow streams swollen from the previous day’s rain. Many of the creeks were bordered by bushes bearing purplish fruits that Isaac had eaten, she noted, examining his spoor. Ha’anala herself was hungry a great deal of the time, but stayed alert for burrows along the banks where small prey whose name she did not know could be dug out or snagged on a claw when she thrust an arm deep into a den. Once, hot and dirty, she waded into a creek and sat on its stony bottom, hoping to be scrubbed clean and cooled by the rain-quickened current; to her astonishment, as she leaned back against her tail, some kind of swimmer blundered into the weir of her spread legs. “Manna!” she cried, and laughed into the sunlight.

  The land was full of wonders. She could see from one side of the world to the other, and on her sixth day of travel she had watched suns both rise and set, and understood at last why the colors of the sky changed. Her own body was an astonishment. Confined by dense vegetation throughout her childhood, she had never before felt the rightness of her natural gait. The rhythm of her steady stride sang to her: a poetry of walking, of silent space, of purpose. Leaning into a floating canter, tail level with the ground, she knew for the first time balance and speed, precision and grace, but she felt no need to hurry. She was gaining on Isaac, knew that he was alive and well. She was certain that he was happy, as she herself was.

  She allowed herself a day of rest by a gullied stream, where she discovered hundreds of mud nests filled with infant somethings whose foolish parents had left them unguarded, and she fell asleep that evening with a full belly, secure in the belief that Isaac was not far ahead and that she could follow him even after a rain, and awoke the next morning, stiff-muscled but joyous.

  She caught up to him at midday. He was standing on the edge of an escarpment where the plain fractured, its eastern half lower than the west by the height of a mature w’ralia tree. Isaac said nothing, but when she came to a halt some sixty paces away, he flung his arms wide as though to embrace all the empty fullness around him—not spinning to blur the world, but turning with ecstatic slowness to see it all. When he had come full circle, his eyes met her own. “Clarity!” he cried.

  “Yes,” she called, elated, for a moment knowing everything hidden in his strange, secret heart. “Clarity!”

  He swayed slightly: naked, tall and tailless. Ha’anala followed his gaze to the vast sky. “Red is harmless,” he declared with fragile bravery, not knowing himself how wrong he was. After a time, blinking, and beginning to shiver, he said, “I won’t go back.”

  “I know, Isaac,” Ha’anala replied as she walked toward him—Sofia and the Runa forgotten, all her life before now lost to view. “I understand.”

  He fell silent, which was no surprise, but as Ha’anala drew close her own quiet became speechlessness. Isaac was the color of blood, his poor pale skin blistered and swollen. What could have done this to him? she wondered, ears flattened. He sat abruptly next to his two possessions, the computer tablet and his fraying blue shawl, but did not draw the cloth over his head and shoulders as was his custom even in the forest, where the canopy had shielded him from the suns’ power. “Tha’s all,” she heard him say, the muttered words slurred.

  Not knowing what else to do, she felt compelled to ask, “Sipaj, Isaac, are you not hungry?” And cursed herself for uselessness.

  “Listen,” he said, trembling, the tension in his narrow, nearly hairless body visible. “Music.” She didn’t move, paralyzed by the oozing sores, the smell of corruption.… “Listen!” he insisted.

  Thus commanded, she went motionless, ears high and open. Above her, she heard the slow beat of some large thing’s wings as it climbed to meet a thermal that would lift it out over the rim of the escarpment. Below, at the base of the cliff, the crash of water and alarming bellows that diminished into comic squeals or a ponderous trill of grunts. Westward, the fluting whistles of some kind of herd keeping itself gathered as its long-necked members grazed, heads to the ground. Nearby, tiny scratchings, wind hissing in grass. A soft popping noise that drew her eye: seedpods cracking open as some critical shift in temperature or humidity swelled or shrank their cells.

  “God’s music,” she breathed, her own heartbeat loud in her ears.

  “No,” said Isaac. “Listen. There are others who sing.”

  Others! she thought then, hearing the notes of the evening chant, thin and distant, coming in fragments with the fitful wind. Others who sing. Djanada—Jana’ata!

  Isaac thrust his thin arms out to support the treacherous weight of his head and shoulders, which seemed to him to have become heavier just now, and leaned at the edge of the precipice. Seeing him rapt and heedless of his wounded skin, Ha’anala crept nearer the brink, listening to a well-known melody sung uncertainly by two voices, their harmony unfamili
ar but beautiful. A mixed multitude, Ha’anala thought, looking down on them. Jana’ata and Runa, but a puzzling collection of ages and sexes. Djanada babies riding the backs not of their own fathers but of female Runa, who were huddled together, ears clamped against the song. A few veiled and robed persons. Then she spotted the singers—a man wearing metal clothing, and a boy a little younger than Ha’anala herself.

  Momentary mourning came like a cloudburst: she wanted to be here alone with Isaac, to be as solitary as two stones, side by side. She wanted to ask him one question each day, and to take the whole of the world’s turning to think about his answer. She wanted to know what he had heard as he walked. Was there a kind of poetry in his legs too? Did the wind roar wordlessly in his small ears?

  Not yet! she thought, anguished. I don’t want any others!

  WHICH WAS THE VERY THOUGHT PRESENTLY PASSING THROUGH THE mind of Shetri Laaks, who had caught the scent of a female, and looked up just in time to catch a glimpse of yet another refugee peering down at him from the escarpment that divided the grasslands.

  No more! he thought, appealing to any deity who’d listen. I don’t want any others!

  As if in accordance with his prayer, the girl’s unveiled head disappeared. Even so, Shetri Laaks was thrown sufficiently off balance by her unwelcome appearance to stumble over the evening chant’s concluding verse, thus earning another of his nephew Athaansi’s insolent smirks. I never wanted any of this, you superior young stud, Shetri wanted to snarl at Athaansi. Take the damned armor and my obstinate sister and the wretched chants and just go on by yourselves, and may Sti dance on your bones!

  To date, Shetri Laaks had sung the evening chant all of ten times. This was, not coincidentally, the exact number of days he had been taking his little mob of women and children north.

  No matter what his resentful young nephew thought, Shetri Laaks had never aspired to anything but the quiet life of an apothecary specializing in the Sti canon. Indeed, until informed by a novice that his second-born sister, Ta’ana Laaks u Erat, and her entire household had just appeared at the gate, Shetri Laaks had been only vaguely aware of the revolt in the south, and had certainly never expected to be affected by it—only draft Runa were allowed anywhere nearby. Adepts like Shetri lived simply, their provisions periodically supplied by their natal families, occasionally supplemented by the offerings of those hoping to have ailments declared un-inheritable or injuries deemed minor enough to be treated without iniquity. Now and then, widows bought the right to prepare for a serene death by witnessing the water ritual. Otherwise, the adepts were left alone, and that had suited Shetri admirably.

  “Our brother Nra’il has been killed in combat,” Ta’ana had informed him without preamble when he presented himself to her in the visitors’ shelter ten days earlier. “All his people are murdered. My husband, as well.”

  Shetri had stared dumbly for a time, still hoping that his sister and her entourage would prove an unusually convincing hallucination. Why are you telling me this? he thought. Go away.

  “I cannot travel alone,” Ta’ana had insisted then, despite the fact that she had come this far unaccompanied by an adult male relative. “The north is defensible. It is your duty to take us there.”

  “Not possible,” he’d muttered, barely able to speak. He held up his claws, stained with pigment from the spoiled rite Ta’ana had called him away from. He had only recently mastered the full body of the canon, and hadn’t built tolerance to the inhalants used during the water ritual. “The drugs will be in effect for days,” he told her, blinking. She smelled of smoke and was wearing a smudged veil that fell to her feet; it was shot through with silver threads and its hem was embroidered with a lattice pattern that seemed to Shetri to be crawling. “There are visual disturbances,” he reported.

  “It is your duty,” she repeated.

  “And what of the duty of your husband’s brother?”

  “Dead,” she said, not burdening him with superfluous detail or herself with the telling of it: her calm was brittle. “You are my son’s regent now. There is no one else. The armor is yours until Athaansi is trained.”

  “I’m old enough,” Athaansi had snarled with a fifteen-year-old’s reflexive ferocity. “This is insult. I will fight you, Uncle!”

  Ta’ana whirled and cuffed the boy violently, stunning the three of them—mother, son and uncle. Athaansi broke the silence with a shuddering gasp and began to sob. “Control yourself,” Ta’ana ordered, finding her own voice. “If you give way, the others will too. Go sit with your sister.” Then she’d further scandalized the adepts, who were watching from a barely polite distance, by gathering up her veil and raising it with both hands so she could stare unimpeded at her surviving brother. “Focus!” she snapped. “Would I have left my walls if there was anyone alive to defend my honor? You are regent, Shetri,” she said in a tone that he was obliged to consider persuasive. “The armor is in the wagon.”

  So he had pulled off and laid aside his plain gray robe and called upon skills indifferently learned during his days of training as a young reshtar of barely respectable rank. Whether it was the drug or genuine forgetfulness, he couldn’t picture how to put on the armor. Athaansi, red-eyed and humiliated, found solace in contempt, turning the shin plates right side up for his hapless uncle, to the silent amusement of the Runa valet who fastened the buckles.

  “We must walk. Wear boots,” Ta’ana had told him as he struggled with the breastplate. The navigable rivers south of Mo’arl were now wholly controlled by Runa rebels. “And bring ointments for burns.”

  He was too befuddled to argue that his feet were used to the ground—he walked every day, collecting psychotropic herbs and the minerals that could be ground for pigment; he did not think to ask who was burned.

  With brilliant color still pulsating around every solid object, Shetri Laaks had begun the trek north, nominally in command of his sister’s household while following the directions of a Runa maid, who was actually leading the way. Farce, he’d thought with every step of his first day’s travel. This is farce.

  But by the end of the second full day on the road, Shetri had seen enough to recognize his elder sister’s laconic courage, for he had learned why the ointments were needed. Ta’ana had remained in her burning compound until the last moment, gathering her dependents and organizing an orderly retreat by firelight with an audacity born of desperation. The entire town had been fired—even the quarters of Runa domestics, whose goodwill and affection Ta’ana had nurtured and won, anticipating a day when war would find her. She and her children were alive only because their household Runa had smuggled them out of the burning Laaks compound in a false-bottomed wagon—prepared long ago in expectation of such a night—apparently loaded with loot, but actually packed with food and the family’s valuables, including Nra’il’s dented, blackened armor.

  The half-marked path the housemaid knew passed within sight of several other smoldering towns. No male Jana’ata over the age of sixteen breathed; here and there, a wailing child or a bewildered woman was found wandering. Some were too badly burned to save; to these Shetri gave quietus, using the embers of their own compounds to light pitiably ineffective pyres. The rest he treated for burns as he had his sister, and Ta’ana made every one of them part of her migrant household, without regard to lineage or birthrank.

  “We can’t feed any more,” Shetri would declare as each new refugee joined their band.

  “We won’t starve,” Ta’ana insisted. “Hunger is not the worst thing.”

  But their progress was slowed, and they had gathered more people than could be fed with the provisions packed in the wagon. Nights were always broken by someone’s dream of flames; in the mornings, exhaustion fought fear to determine their pace. By the fifth day, Shetri was thinking clearly enough to realize that he could slaughter one of the draft Runa. By the ninth, they had left the wagon behind. Everyone, master and domestic, carried a child or food or a bundle of essentials.

  Now, afte
r days of flight and still far from safety, the numbers of Jana’ata and Runa in their little party were dangerously unbalanced. The more refugees Ta’ana took on, the slower they traveled and the sooner they had to butcher; two more Runa domestics had snuck off the previous night.

  At this rate, we’ll never get to Inbrokar City, Shetri thought, looking up at the cliff edge where the newest girl was hiding. He turned to his sister, hoping that she hadn’t noticed the latest refugee, but Ta’ana was standing, veil off, ears cocked forward.

  “Get her,” Ta’ana said.

  “It’ll be dark soon!”

  “Then you’d best go now.”

  “Come down, girl!” he yelled, turning cliffward. There was no response. Shetri glanced at his sister, who stared uncompromisingly back. “Oh, all right,” he muttered, flicking an ear at the valet, who came to unburden him of the armor. Ta’ana had earned obedience; Shetri, not much in the habit of leadership anyway, gave it to her.

  Free of the armor’s weight, he picked his way carefully across the rocky riverbed, trying not to attract the attention of a pair of cranil snuffling and squealing in the shallows upstream, and then stood looking upward toward where this inconvenient girl had last showed herself. The escarpment was not a sheer drop. Blocks of stone had fallen toward the water, and these presented a fair approximation of a stairway for the first two-thirds of the distance before giving way to an increasingly uncongenial verticality. Mere expectation of a ludicrous death yielded twice to near certainty, so Shetri Laaks was in a thoroughly unhappy frame of mind—and in the midst of a wide-ranging and almost sincere curse calling down plague, deformity, insult, diarrhea and mange on every living creature east and west of the Pon River and all its tributaries—when he came face to face with what simply had to be a lingering effect of the Sti drugs.

  “Don’t fall,” the girl advised as he crested the cliff, his lungs and feet straining for air and purchase respectively.