Children of God (16 page)

Celestina, she thought. Who never stopped moving, who never stopped talking, who exhausted her mother before breakfast, who would have driven the Holy Mother herself to consider hiring a hit man. Whose face in sleep still showed the profile of a newborn, whose small fingers still held her mother rapt, whose knotted navel still traveled the coiled route to another belly in spirit. Who had quickly learned not to mention Papa’s new friends to Mamma.

Gina sighed and turned, and saw Emilio leaning against the door frame, watching her with a still face and eyes that hid nothing. He held his arms slightly away from his body, as he did for Celestina’s hugs, to keep from scratching the child with the hardware of his braces when she came to him for an embrace. So Gina came to him.

The edge of her lower lip was as fine as the rim of a chalice, and the thought almost stopped him, but then her mouth rose to meet his and there was no turning back, nor any wanting to. After all the years, the effort, the anguish—it was, he found, all very simple.

She removed his braces and helped him with his clothes, and then took off her own, feeling as familiar with him as if they had always been together. But she did not know what to expect and so she braced herself for a failure of nerve, or for brutal urgency, or for weeping. There was instead laughter, and she too found that it was simple. When the time came, she took him into her and smiled over his shoulder at the small sound he made, and nearly wept herself. Naturally, he came too soon—what could you expect? It didn’t matter to her, but a few moments later she heard his muffled chagrin next to her ear. "I don’t think I did that quite right."

She laughed as well, and told the air above him, "It takes practice."

He went motionless and she was afraid then that she’d hurt his feelings, but he rose on his elbows and looked down at her, face amazed, eyes merry. "Practice! You mean we get to do that more than once?"

She giggled as he collapsed on her again. "Get off me," she whispered after a while, still smiling, hands drifting along his back.

"I don’t think so."

"Get off me! You weigh a ton," she lied, kissing the side of his neck. "All that macaroni and cheese!"

"No. I like it here," he told the pillow under her head.

She put a finger into his armpit. He exploded and rolled away as she laughed and shushed him and whispered, "Celestina!"

"Soy cosquilloso!" he said, astonished. "I don’t know what that is in Italian. What do you call it when there’s a reaction to touch like that?"

"Ticklish," she told him and listened, amused, as he guessed at the verb and quickly conjugated it. "You sound surprised."

He looked over at her, chest quiet now. "I didn’t know. How would I find that out? People don’t tickle Jesuits!" She looked at him, massively skeptical in the dark. "Well, some people tickle some Jesuits," he admitted indignantly, "but I assure you, madam, that no one tickled me."

"Not even your parents? You weren’t always a priest."

"No," he said curtly.

Oh, God, she thought, realizing she’d wandered into some new mine-field, but he rose up on one elbow and draped an arm over her belly. "I hate macaroni and cheese," he confessed. "There were no dragons to slay for my beloved, but I ate macaroni and cheese for you. I want credit."

She smiled up at him, wholly content. "Wait," she said as he went to kiss her. "Go back to that part about ’beloved.’ " But his lips dropped once more onto her mouth, and this time he did better.

They were discreet, for Celestina’s sake, and he was gone before dawn. It was as difficult as anything he’d ever done, to say good-bye to her and leave. But there were other days at the beach that wore Celestina out early, and other nights that wore them both out late, and as that summer passed, she made him whole again. There was no memory of bestiality that she did not efface with beauty and gentleness, no humiliation that was not eclipsed by her warmth. And sometimes, when the dreams came, she was with him: salvation in the night. Before the summer was over, while the days were still far too long and the nights all too short, when the fragrance of lemon trees and oranges had deepened and drifted each night through her bedroom window to scent the sheets and her hair, he began to give back to her some of what she had given him.

He had a sense, sometimes, of flawless peace. The words of Donne seemed perfect: "For I am every dead thing / In whom love wrought new Alchemie." Attacked by hope, he could no longer resist belief in the goodness of having a future, and felt the past’s grip loosen. It’s over, he would think now and then. It’s finally over.

SOFIA MENDES DID NOT LACK COMPANIONSHIP IN TRUCHA SAI. THE VILLAGE population stabilized at about 350, and there were other settlements nearby; visits were common and festive. She shared chores and meals with many people, and soon it felt natural to pass the time weaving the swordlike leaves of diuso trees into mats, windbreaks, umbrellas, cooking packets for steaming roots, baskets for collecting fruit. She participated in the seasonal round of ripening, and learned the location and identification of useful plants, the ways to avoid dangers, and how to find one’s way in what had first appeared impenetrable jungle.

She was becoming a competent Runa adult—a knowledgeable field botanist, a useful member of the community—and found a certain satisfaction in that. But during the early months of her exile, the orbiting Stella Maris library system was the nearest thing she had to an intellectual companion. She could not reach the ship physically, but she spent much of her day in radio contact with the library. After she had polished and edited them, she poured her observations of Runa life and her private thoughts into its memory, rather than leave them logged only on her own computer tablet. This habit made her feel less isolated, as though she were sending messages, not making entries in a diary. Someday her words would reach Earth, and she could believe herself a solitary scientist, contributing to her own society with her research. Still human. Still sane.

Then, when Isaac was only fifteen months old, the morning came when she called up the access routines and was greeted by an unyielding silence. Staring at the laconic error message on her screen, she felt the physical jolt of a ship whose mooring rope has suddenly given way. Had the onboard systems become corrupted somehow? Perhaps the ship’s orbit had degraded and the Stella Maris itself had burned up in the atmosphere or fallen into the Rakhati sea. There were endless possibilities. The only thing she did not consider was what had actually occurred: a second party from Earth, traveling under the auspices of the United Nations, had in fact arrived on Rakhat. Some twelve weeks after landfall, the Contact Consortium had located Emilio Sandoz. Believing him the sole survivor of the Jesuit mission, they had sent the Stella Maris on its automated way back to Earth, navigated by Sofia’s own artificial-intelligence programs, carrying Emilio Sandoz home alone to infamy.

There were many kinds of loneliness, she discovered. There was the loneliness that came from understanding but not being understood. There was the loneliness of having no one to banter or argue with, no one to be challenged by. Loneliness at night was different from the daylight loneliness that sometimes overwhelmed her in the midst of a crowd. She became a connoisseur of loneliness, and the worst kind of all, she discovered, came after a night when she dreamed of Isaac laughing.

A tiny infant, long and fatless, he had slept away his early weeks with a heavy unresponsiveness that frightened her. She recognized that sleep was his way of concentrating his meager resources on survival, so she fought the desire to rouse him, knowing it to be a sign of her own need for reassurance. But even when he was awake, he could not meet her eye for more than a moment or two without going gray under his papery skin, and though he suckled more strongly as the weeks passed, he often vomited her milk. No matter what she told herself about a preemie’s undeveloped digestive system, it was difficult not to feel this as a heartbreaking rejection.

At six months, Isaac remained birdlike and remote, always looking into the distance, intent on some far-off mystery of leaves and light and shadow. By his first birthday, he had an otherworldly dignity, a tiny quiet unsmiling boy with deep-set elvish eyes, who spent a great deal of his time examining the kaleidoscope of his own fingers, entranced by the patterns they made. She began to hope that his silence had its roots in deafness, for he did not babble, did not turn toward her when she called his name, seemed not to hear the Runa children around him as they squabbled and played and teased and huffed in breathy laughter. But one day, he said, "Sipaj," and repeated it endlessly until the word for "Hear me!" became as meaningless as a mantra for all who listened. Then the silence closed in again.

As his second birthday approached, he seemed to have achieved a state of unassailable self-containment: a precocious Zen master without needs, without desires. He would nurse when Sofia placed her nipple in his mouth; later, he would eat when food was placed on his tongue, drink if water were brought to his lips. He would allow himself to be picked up and held, but he never raised his arms to anyone. Carried about by his Runa playmates as though he were a doll, he would wait unmoving and unmoved for the interruption of his reverie to cease; put down, he would return to his meditation as though the incident had not occurred.

Inside his invisible citadel, it seemed, there was a perfection from which the outside world could not distract or tempt him. He sat for hours, still and well balanced as a Yogi, his face sometimes transformed by a smile of shattering beauty, as though privately pleased by some secret, sacred thought.

Sofia did not have to ask what would have been done with a Runa baby so abnormal. Like a Spartan exposing his deformed infant on a wolf-prowled hillside, a Runa father would have given a defective child up to the djanada—veal for Jana’ata aristocrats. Perhaps the Runa did not realize there was anything wrong with Isaac, or perhaps they didn’t care; Isaac was not Runa and so the rules for him were different. As far as Sofia could tell, they simply accepted Isaac’s solitary silence as they accepted his lack of tail and his hairless body, as they accepted nearly everything in their world: with placid good humor and unruffled calm.

So Sofia, too, tried to accept her son as he was, but it was not easy to watch her child stare for hours at his hands or sit patting the ground with a quiet unchanging tattoo as he listened to some inner melody. As beautiful and inhuman as an angel, Isaac would have been difficult for any mother to love, and Sofia Mendes’s life had provided little opportunity to practice loving.

In the most hidden region of her soul, she felt an unspeakable relief that her son desired so little of her. For years, the only measure she had of how deeply she felt the loss of her parents was the unreasoning terror that swept through her at the mere thought of dying young and orphaning a child of her own. There were some compensations for Isaac’s condition, she told herself. If she died, he’d hardly notice.

She would realize later how close she’d come to madness. She’d looked over the edge of it, dizzy and careless at the brink, by the time Isaac was four years old. It was then that Supaari and his infant daughter arrived in Trucha Sai, brought there by Djalao and several other VaKashani women. The forest Runa showed no amazement at his unexpected appearance in a haven they had always kept a secret from their Jana’ata masters; it was their nature to accept things without much questioning, and Supaari VaGayjur had always been different from other djanada. But if the Runa were as calm as ever, Sofia Mendes was rocked by the strength of her emotions. Supaari was Jana’ata and yet, when she first saw him, she did not think of riot or death, of oppression or exploitation or cruelty, but only of friendship and an end to loneliness.

It was the first time since Isaac’s birth that she had found something to thank God for.

"THEY TOLD ME YOU WERE DEAD," SUPAARI SAID IN H’INGLISH, STARING at the tiny foreigner. Horrified, he spun away and walked a few paces and then returned to her, like a scavenger returning to a carcass. He reached down toward Sofia’s face, disfigured by the tripled scar, and felt even more ashamed when she seemed to flinch away from his touch. "I would have looked for you," he said, pleading for understanding. "The VaKashani told me you were dead!"

Because he expected it, he saw hatred and blame in her face. Exhausted from his journey and all that had gone before it, staggered by the sheer majestic variety of ways he had managed to be wrong about things, the Jana’ata sank by degrees, weight shifting from feet to tail to knees to haunches until at last he slumped on the ground, head down between hands sunken into the forest humus. Her wordless reproach—her very existence—seemed to him a killing blow and he was fervently wishing for some quick death when he felt her small hands on each side of his head, lifting it.

"Sipaj, Supaari," she said, kneeling so that she could look into his eyes, "someone’s heart is very glad you have come here."

Bleakly he thought, She didn’t understand me. She has forgotten her own language. "Someone thought you were gone," he whispered. "Someone would have tried to find you."

He rolled heavily into a sitting position, knees akimbo, and looked around: sleeping shelters, with their graceful sloping thatched roofs, creaking and flexing in the breeze; woven windbreaks decorated with flowers and ribbons; raised sitting platforms paved with beautifully made cushions. Runa, going about their lives, untouched by Jana’ata law or custom. Apart from the awful disfigurement, the little foreigner appeared well.

"Sipaj, Sofia," he said finally, "someone has a great talent for error. Perhaps it was better for you to be free of his help."

She said nothing and he tried to read the expression on her face, to make sense of her scent, her posture. It was unnerving, this inability to be sure of what anything meant, knowing now how little he had understood Sandoz, wondering if he had even been wrong to believe that Ha’an had cared for him. "I think," he said slowly in K’San, for Ruanja did not have what he needed and he believed Sofia had forgotten H’inglish, "I think that you will hate me when you know what I have done. Do you understand this word, ’hate’?"

"Apologies." She joined him on the ground, sitting’cross-legged on the low grassy herbage that covered the clearing. "Someone has forgotten your language. Someone knew only a little." She could see how tired he was and the long, handsome face seemed thin to her, its elegant bones more prominent than she remembered. "Sipaj, Supaari, such a long journey you have made," she began, the Ruanja formula as natural to her now as if she had lived with it all her life. "Surely, you are hungry. Will you—"

He stopped her with a single stubby claw pressed gently against her lips. "Please," he said in a tone that Anne Edwards had interpreted as wry. "Please, don’t offer." He threw his head up and away from her. "How can I eat?" he asked the sky in K’San. "How can I eat!"

From out of the crowd surrounding Supaari’s VaKashani escort, Djalao came forward, having heard his cry. She was carrying the sturdy basket she had packed with provisions for him and his child and dumped it abruptly on the ground. "Eat as you always have," she said quietly, but with a hardness that Sofia had never before heard in a Runao’s voice.

Some kind of unspoken understanding passed between Djalao and Supaari then, but it was beyond Sofia’s ability to read from their body language. The children—scampering and chasing one another, excited by the visitors and the break in routine—became louder and more unruly by the minute, and before Sofia could call out a warning, Kanchay’s daughter Puska took advantage of her father’s absorption in adult talk to leap onto his back, instantly pushing off it with an arching joy-jump that tipped Supaari’s basket over. Unruffled, Kanchay separated himself from the adults’ conversation, repacking the basket’s contents quickly before the children could catch the scent, and then tore off, bent over and arms flung wide, gently barreling into the little mob of youngsters, sweeping them into a delighted, squirming heap.

Smiling, Sofia looked around for Isaac, concerned that he had wandered off while everyone was preoccupied. But there he was: lying on his back, watching winged seeds spiral down toward his face from the w’ralia above him. Sofia sighed and returned her gaze to Supaari, sitting dazed on the ground.

"Sipaj, Fia. Everything has changed," he said. He glanced up at Djalao VaKashan, and his ears flattened. "Someone didn’t understand!" he cried. "Someone knew but didn’t understand. Everything has changed."

"Sipaj, Supaari," Djalao said, standing above him. "Eat. Everything remains as it was."

Not what—who is in the basket? Sofia thought, realizing now that Kanchay had repacked it quickly to protect the children from an early understanding. Chilled, staring at Supaari, she thought, He eats Runa. He is djanada.

It was a long time before any of them could speak. "Sipaj, Supaari, we are what we are," Sofia said at last with the simple Runa logic that was, for the time being, all she could muster. Standing, she grasped the Jana’ata’s arm in a token effort to lift him to his feet. He looked up at her, distracted. "Come and eat. Life goes on," she said, tugging on his arm a little. "We-and-you-also will think of problems later."

SUPAARI GOT UP AND TRIED TO CARRY THE BASKET AWAY FROM THE clearing so he could eat downwind and beyond the lines of Runa sight. He must always have known what he was doing at some level; even before, it had seemed unconscionable to eat meat in the presence of Runa. Snarling softly, he struggled with the basket—the handles of which were, after all, suitable only for a Runao to carry—and felt even worse when Kanchay climbed out of the tangle of children to help him.

The girl Kinsa, neither adult nor child herself, had sat murmuring to Ha’anala all this time, not quite sure where she belonged. Seeing Supaari move off, she decided to follow along, carrying the baby on her back. Sofia, walking beside her, reached out and put a finger under the infant’s tiny curved claws. "Supaari!" she cried. "Yours? But how? Someone thought—"

"It is a long song," he said, as Sofia took Ha’anala in her arms and Kanchay calmly unpacked a portion of meat. "When someone arrived in Kashan after the riot—" He paused, looking again at her terrible scarred face. "You understand this word, ’riot’?" Sofia looked up from the baby cradled in her lap and lifted her chin in affirmation. He went on, "The VaKashani were in a great confusion. So many were gone and among them, most of the Elders. There was no one to tell it clearly and there was everywhere fierno, even days after the culling. Your ’lander’ was still there, but the VaKashani said that all the foreigners were gone. The carcasses were eaten, they said."