Children of God s-2

by Mary Doria Russel

  When Bhansaar arrived, Hlavin welcomed him without fear, as though the visit were merely a courtesy call. Selikat had succeeded in beating obliquity into him and, choosing wisely from his seraglio, the Reshtar of Galatna introduced his brother to several remarkable customs and, afterward, feted him with liqueurs and savories that Bhansaar had never tasted the like of. "Harmless novelties—charming really," Bhansaar decided. Somehow, in the midst of all the graceful, clever talk, with poetry that praised his own wisdom and discernment echoing in his mind as he fell asleep each night, it began to seem that there could be no legal reason to silence young Hlavin. Before he left Gayjur, Bhansaar even proposed— more or less on his own—that Hlavin’s concerts be broadcast, like state oratorios.

  "Indeed," Bhansaar ruled in his official finding, "that which is not forbidden must be permitted, for to find the opposite true implies that those who established the law were lacking in foresight."

  And surely that was a more subversive notion than merely allowing the Reshtar of Galatna to sing his own songs! What more innocuous pursuit could a Reshtar indulge in than poetry, after all?

  "He sings only of what can be had within Galatna: of scent, of storms, of sex," Bhansaar reported to his father and brother when he returned to Inbrokar. When they were amused, he insisted, "The poetry is superb. And it keeps him out of trouble."

  Thus Hlavin Kitheri was permitted to sing, and in doing so he lured freedom to his prison. Hearing his concerts, staggered by his songs, even firsts and seconds were inspired to shake off the tyranny of genealogy and join him in sublime and scandalous exile, and Galatna Palace became the focus for the gathering of men who would never ordinarily have come together. With his poetry, the Reshtar of Galatna now redefined legal sterility as purity of mind; cleansing his life of the tainted past and forbidden future, he made it enviable. Others learned to live as he did—on the cusp of experience, existing entirely within moment after ephemeral moment of rarefied sexual artistry, unmuddied by considerations of dynasty. And among them were men who did not simply appreciate Kitheri’s poetry but who were capable themselves of composing songs of startling beauty. These were the children of his soul.

  He meant no more than this: to be content, to live in the eternal present, triumphant over time: all elements in balance, all things stable, the chaos within him contained and controlled, like a woman in her chamber.

  And yet, when he had, at last, achieved that very desire, the music began to die in him. Why? he asked, but there was no one to answer him.

  He tried at first to fill the void with objects. He had always prized rarity, singularity. Now he sought and collected the finest and oldest, commissioned the most costly, the most highly decorated, the most complex. Each new treasure bought a holiday from hollowness, as he studied its intricacies and pored over its nuances, tried to find in it some quality that would summon the light, the flashing brilliance…. But then he would put the thing aside, the savor gone, the scent dissipated, the silence unbroken. He passed the days pacing and waiting, but nothing would come—nothing ignited any spark of song. His life had begun to seem not a poem but an incoherent collection of words, as random as a Runa domestic’s brainless chatter.

  What he felt was beyond boredom. It was a dying of the soul. It was a conviction that there was nothing anywhere in his world that could cause him to breathe in a full measure of life again.

  Into this night, like the gilding of first dawn, came a crystal flask of striking simplicity, containing seven small, brown kernels of extraordinary scent: sweetly camphoric, sugary, spiced—aldehydes and esters and pyrazines released in a sudden jolt of fragrance that rocked him as a volcano’s eruption rocks the ground, which he breathed in, first gasping, then crying out like an infant newly born. With the fragrance filling his head and chest came the knowledge that the world held something new. Something wonderful. Something that drew him back toward life.

  There was more: syn’amon, the merchant Supaari VaGayjur called the next consignment. Klohv. Vanil’a. Yeest. Saydj. Ta’im. Koomen. Sohp. And with each astonishing delivery, a promise of the unimaginable: sweat, oil, infinitesimal fragments of skin. Not Jana’ata. Not Runa. Something else. Something other. Something that could not be purchased except in its own coin: life for life.

  Here then was the complex dance of unprecedented scent and sound and sensation, the superb moment of agonizing sexual tension, the astonishment of unparalleled release. All his life he had sought inspiration in the despised, the unnoticed, the unique, the fleeting; all his life he’d believed that each experience, each object, each poem could be self-sufficient, perfect and entire. And yet, eyes still closed in climax, finishing with the foreigner that first time, he realized, Comparison is the source of all significance.

  How could he have been deaf to this for so long?

  Consider pleasure, he thought, as the foreigner was taken away. With a Runa concubine or a captive Jana’ata female, there was, inequality of a sort, certainly a basis for comparison, but it was obscured by the element of duty done. Consider power! To understand power, one had to observe powerlessness. Here, the foreigner was most instructive, even as the intoxicating scent of fear and blood began to dissipate. No claws, no tail, a laughable dentition, small, imprisoned. Defenseless. The foreigner was the most contemptible of conquests…

  … the embodiment of Zero, the physical manifestation of the starting point of experience…

  That night, Hlavin Kitheri lay still on his cushions, meditating on the absence of magnitude, on the cypher that separates positive from negative, on the nothing, on the No Thing. When such comparisons were made, orgasm became as inexhaustibly beautiful as mathematics, its gradations—its inequalities—sublimely arrayed for the highly trained aesthete to recognize and appreciate.

  Art cannot exist without inequality, which is itself established by comparison, he realized.

  He called for the foreigner again at first light. It was different the second time, and the third. He called together the best of the poets—the most talented, the most perceptive—and, using the foreigner to teach what he had learned, found that the experience was different for each of them. Now he listened with new understanding, and he was entranced by the variety and splendor of their songs. He was wrong about the possibility of pure experience—he knew that now! The individual was a lens through which the past looked on the moment, and changed the future. Even the foreigner was marked, changed, by each episode in a way that Runa concubines, that Jana’ata captives never had been.

  In the heady days following that first encounter, Hlavin Kitheri produced a philosophy of beauty, a science of art and its creative sources, its forms and its effects. All life could be an epic poem, with each moment’s meaning thrown into relief by the slanting light of past and future, of dusk and dawn. There must be no isolation, no random experience or any singularity! To raise life to Art, one must classify, compare, rank—appreciate the inequalities so that the superb, the ordinary and the inferior may be known by their contrast.

  After seasons of silence, the transcendent music of Hlavin Kitheri was heard again in an outpouring of artistic energy that washed over his society like a tidal wave. Even those who had ignored him previously, made uncomfortable by his outrageous interests and extraordinary notions, were now transfixed by the glory he seemed to shine upon unchanging verities.

  "How beautiful!" men cried. "How true! Our entire society, all our history, can be understood as a faultless poem sung generation after generation, with nothing lost and nothing added!"

  In the midst of this ferment, more foreigners came to the gate of Galatna Palace, with a young Runa interpreter named Askama, who said these were members of the foreigner’s family who had come to take him home.

  Hlavin Kitheri had by that time nearly forgotten the small seed of this vast florescence, but when his secretary approached him, he thought, Let no one be mured up. Let no one be confined by another’s wish or need. "The only prison is our own limitations!" the R
eshtar sang out, laughing.

  Swaying slightly from side to side, afraid to misunderstand, the secretary asked, "My lord: let the foreigner Sandoz go?"

  "Yes! Yes—let the chamber be opened!" Kitheri cried. "Let Chaos dance!"

  This, then, was the foreigner’s last service. For Hlavin Kitheri had been born into a society that imprisoned the spirit of all its people, that perpetuated dullness and ineptitude and indolence among the rulers, that enforced passivity among the ruled. Hlavin understood now that the entire structure of Jana’ata society was based on rank, but this was an artificial inequality, propping up the worst and enervating the best.

  "Imagine," the Reshtar urged his followers, "the spectrum of variation that might naturally be evident if all were released to battle for their place in an authentic hierarchy!"

  "He’s as mad as my mother," men began to say.

  Perhaps he was. Unblinded by convention, freed from all restraint, having no stake in what was, Hlavin Kitheri conceived of a world where nothing—not ancestry, not birth, not custom—nothing but ability, tested and proven, would determine a man’s place in life. And, briefly, he sang of this with a terrifying grandeur of imagination until his father and brothers realized what he was saying, and forbade the concerts.

  Who would not have been unbalanced? To have dreamt of such liberty, to have imagined a world without walls—and then to be imprisoned again…

  Hlavin Kitheri had true friends, genuine admirers among the poets, and some of them stayed on with him in this new and more awful exile. Prudent men, they hoped that he might find a way to be content once more within the small, exquisite territory of Galatna Palace. But when he began to kill the members of his harem one by one, and sat to watch the bodies rot, day after day, the best of them left him, unwilling to witness his descent.

  Then, the flare of light in the darkness: news that Jholaa had been successfully bred and was now carrying, news that the Reshtar of Galatna would be released from his exile and allowed back to Inbrokar City for a short time, to attend the ceremonies marking the inauguration of the Darjan lineage, the naming of his sister’s first child, and the ennobling of the Gayjur merchant who had brought him Sandoz.

  Hlavin Kitheri had measured and compared and judged the mettle of those who ruled and knew himself unmatched, unfathomed. "Why?" had been answered. All that remained were "When?" and "How?" and, knowing this, the Reshtar of Galatna smiled in silent ambush, waiting for the moment to seize liberty. It came when his absurd brother-in-law Supaari VaGayjur left Inbrokar with a nameless infant. That afternoon—with the sudden, certain rapacity of a starved predator—Hiavin Kitheri brought down everyone who stood in his path to power.

  He spent his final days as Reshtar in a series of death ceremonies for his murdered father and brothers, for his slaughtered nephews and nieces, for his defenseless sister, and the gallant but terribly unfortunate houseguest Ira’il Vro—all "foully attacked in the night by Runa domestics subverted by the renegade Supaari VaGayjur." Indeed, the entire domestic staff of the Kitheri compound was declared complicit and swiftly killed. Within hours, a writ of VaHaptaa status was laid on Hlavin Kitheri’s fleeing brother-in-law, authorizing summary execution of Supaari VaGayjur and his child, and anyone who aided their escape.

  Having swept aside obstacles like so many scythed flowers, Hlavin Kitheri began the elaborate ritual of investiture as forty-eighth Paramount of the Patrimony of Inbrokar, and prepared to set his people free.

  9

  Naples

  October- November 2060

  THE WHAT HER THAT OCTOBER WAS DRY AND WARM, AND THIS ALONE was enough to make a difference to Emilio Sandoz. Even after a hard night, sunlight pouring through his windows was curative.

  Using his hands gingerly because it was impossible to predict what would trigger the pain, he spent the earliest hours of each day neatening the apartment, determined to do as much as he could without anyone else’s collaboration or permission. After such a long seige of invalidism, it was pure pleasure to make a bed and sweep a floor and put away clean dishes on his own. By nine o’clock, unless the dreams had been very bad, he was shaved, showered and dressed, and ready to move to the high, safe ground of solitary research.

  In his work, he was the technical beneficiary of the nearly extinct American baby boom generation, whose senescence had created a huge market for equipment that aided the enfeebled and disabled. It took a week to train the system to recognize his speech patterns in the four languages he would use most often during this project, and then almost as long again to learn to subvocalize into the throat mike. Preferring the familiar, he also ordered a virtual keyboard and by the thirteenth of October, he had begun to pick up speed using handsets that allowed him to type with barely perceptible movement of the Angers.

  Robolinguist, he thought that morning, settling in with headset, braces and keyboard gear. Absorbed by the search for hyponyms and collocations in data radioed back from Rakhat, he didn’t notice the sound of knocking beyond the earphones, and so he was surprised by a woman’s voice calling, "Don Emilio?" Pulling apparatus off his head and hands, he waited, not quite knowing what to do or say, until he heard, "He’s not home, Celestina, but it was a lovely idea. We’ll come back another time."

  Deal with it now or deal with it later, he thought.

  He reached the door just as the child’s piping voice rose in insistence, and opened it to a woman in her thirties who looked harassed and tired, but who had Celestina’s Renaissance angel looks: brown eyes in an ivory oval, wreathed by dark blond curls.

  "I brought you a guinea pig," Celestina announced.

  Sandoz, unamused, looked at her mother and waited for an explanation.

  "I am sorry, Don Emilio, but Celestina has come to the conclusion that you require a pet," the woman apologized, gesturing impotence in the face of a juvenile onslaught that he surmised had been going on since the christening party. "My daughter is a woman of considerable moral stamina, once her mind is made up."

  "I am familiar with the phenomenon, Signora Giuliani," he said with wry courtesy, remembering Askama — for once with simple affection and no jolt of pain.

  "Please: Gina," Celestina’s mother said, dry humor overcoming her discomfort with the situation. "As I am to be your mother-in-law, I feel we should be on a first-name basis. Don’t you agree?"

  The priest’s eyes widened gratifyingly. "I beg your pardon?"

  "Celestina didn’t tell you?" Gina pulled a coiling strand of hair away from her mouth, blown there by the wind, and automatically did the same for Celestina, trying to make the squirming, resistant child look presentable. It was an uphill battle. "My daughter intends to marry you, Don Emilio."

  "I’m going to wear my white dress with the names on it," Celestina informed him. "And then it’s going to be mine forever. And you, too," she added as an afterthought. "Forever."

  The mother’s momentary distress registered, but Sandoz sat on the bottom step so he was eye to eye with Celestina, the curling halo around her face bright with the sunlight that fell just beyond his door. "Donna Celestina, I am honored by your proposal. However, I must point out that I am quite an elderly gentleman," he told her with ducal dignity. "I fear I am not a suitable match for a lady of your youth and beauty."

  The child stared at him suspiciously. "What does that mean?"

  "It means, carissima, that you are being turned down," said Gina wearily, having explained all this a hundred times, this morning alone.

  "I am too old for you, cara," Sandoz confirmed regretfully.

  "How old are you?"

  "I am turning eighty soon," he said. Gina laughed and he glanced up at her, his face grave, eyes alight.

  "How many fingers is that?" Celestina asked. Holding up four of her own, she said, "I’m this many."

  Sandoz held up both hands and slowly opened and closed them eight times, counting for the child in tens as the braces whirred.

  "That’s a lot of fingers," said Celestina, impressed
.

  "It is indeed, cara. A multitude. A plethora. A whole bunch."

  Celestina mulled this over, twisting a handful of hair around delicate fingers, small wrist braceleted with the last vestiges of baby fat. "You can still have the guinea pig," she decided finally.

  He laughed with genuine warmth, but then looked up at Gina Giuliani, the reluctance plain on his face, and shook his head slightly.

  "Oh, but you would be doing me a great favor, Don Emilio!" Gina pleaded, embarrassed but determined, for the Father General had encouraged Celestina’s notion of giving Sandoz a pig on the grounds that caring for the animal would provide a certain amount of physical and emotional therapy. Besides…. "We have three others at home. The whole family has been mobbed by the creatures ever since my sister-in-law brought the first one home from the pet shop. Carmella didn’t realize it was already pregnant."

  "Truly, signora, I have no way to keep or feed a pet—" He stopped. A classic blunder! he thought, remembering George Edwards’s advice to Jimmy Quinn at his wedding: Never give a woman reasons that can be argued with. Say no, or prepare for defeat.

  "We brought a cage," said Celestina, who, at four, already understood the principle. "And food. And a water bottle."

  "They are very nice pets," Gina Giuliani assured him earnestly, her hands on Celestina’s shoulders, holding the child near. "No trouble at all, as long as they don’t multiply beyond all reason. This one is quite young and innocent, but she won’t remain that way long." Seeing Sandoz’s resolve weaken, she pressed her attack with merciless melodrama. "If you don’t take her, Don Emilio, she will surely be subject to unspeakable acts—by her own brothers!"