Children of God (18 page)

I don’t know what to do, she thought. Even the laws of physics resolve to probabilities. How can I know what to do?

"God who has begun this will bring it to perfection," Marc Robichaux always said. Emilio Sandoz told her once, "We are here because God has brought us here, step by step." Nothing happens by chance, the Jewish sages taught. Perhaps, she thought, it was to bring this wisdom to Rakhat that I have been left here. Perhaps this was why I was the only one of us to survive on Rakhat…

And perhaps I have lost my mind, she thought then, startled to be taking such a notion seriously.

It had been a grueling day. She didn’t dare think about what might have been, if only Supaari had realized she was alive. Be glad for what you have, she told herself, settling down near Kanchay, in sight of her strange son’s sleeping face; near Supaari and his tiny, beautiful Ha’anala; surrounded by Sichu-Lan and Tinbar and all the others who had made her welcome.

It was dawn the next morning when Supaari’s words came back to her. "The others—" She sat up, breathing unevenly, and stared into the darkness. Others. Other people had come.

"Sipaj, Fia! What are you doing?" Kanchay asked sleepily. He too sat as she rose onto her knees and began to feel around the edge of the shelter. "What do you seek?"

"The computer tablet," she said and hissed as she cut herself on a knife left carelessly in a pile of platters.

"Agh, Fia! Stop that!" Kanchay cried disgustedly, as she cursed and sucked the thin, salty line of pain on her hand. There was a general outcry of dismay from the others, awakened by the sudden spurt of blood scent that roused them as a shout might have roused humans, but Sofia continued to rummage through the storage area around the perimeter of the shelter.

"Emilio was sent home on the Stella Maris," she muttered. "That’s why the signal went dead three years ago." Her hand touched the edge of the tablet and she clutched it to her chest, picking her way through the huddled mass of bodies and moving outside, where the sky was half golden, half aquamarine. They must have gotten here the same way we did, she thought. They had a mother ship and they had a lander. Supaari wasn’t sure if anyone but Sandoz had actually left Rakhat. The other ship might still be up there. Their lander might still be somewhere on the planet. There would be fuel. "If they haven’t left…" she said aloud. "Oh, God, oh, please…"

The satellite network put in place over eight years earlier by the Stella Maris crew was still functional. Working rapidly, she reprogrammed the radio relays to carry out a systematic broadband search for any active transponder currently in orbit around Rakhat. Once the software was altered, the search took only minutes: 9.735 gigahertz. "Yes!" she shouted, weeping and laughing, but then fell silent again, ignoring the Runa who now pressed around her, their questions falling on her ears as meaninglessly as rain.

There was no answer to her hail, but there were standardized navigation routines, interfaces established by the U.N. Space Agency when near-Earth traffic had become dense enough to be hazardous. Like a harbor pilot taking over a freighter, Sofia took control of the Magellan’s computer system and then hacked her way into its logs. There was no record of the ground party’s return to the ship. There had been no transmissions for nearly three years. Their lander must be somewhere on Rakhat, maybe near Kashan.

She began to broadcast a repeating message on the Magellan downlink to all land-based nodes, asking any respondent to reply through the Magellan return path. She listened, heart hammering, waiting for some response, any indication that she and Isaac were not the only human beings on Rakhat.

It was well past second dawn when she was able to sit back and think. The lack of reply was not proof that the others were dead. They might be separated from their transponders. Supaari believed they might still be alive but in captivity, as Emilio had been. Six months, she decided, her eye burning from the intensity of the work she’d just done. She owed the others that much. She would not abandon her own kind here without a serious attempt to find them.

Six months.

But then, by the God whose poetry was forgotten now, she would steal their lander and their ship. Then, by God, Sofia Mendes would take her son and go home.

THERE WAS NO FORMAL PROPOSAL. SITTING ON THE HUGE STONE OUTCROPPING near the beach that had been his sanctuary when churches held out no hope to him, Emilio was watching Celestina play on the shore, talking to Gina about nothing in particular when he asked, after a companionable silence, "Would you object to a civil ceremony?"

"That would certainly be nicer than shouting abuse at one another," Gina replied, straight-faced, which, along with a settling into the hollow of his outstretched arm, served as an assent. "When?"

"You and Celestina are going to the mountains with your parents at the end of August, yes? So: first weekend in September."

Gina nodded agreeably. "Maybe late in the afternoon?" she suggested after a few minutes, smiling toward the sea. "That way, if the marriage doesn’t work out, we won’t have wasted the whole day."

"Ten o’clock," Emilio said. "Ten in the morning. September third, the Saturday after you get home."

The means to this end had been buried like treasure in the boxful of letters collected by Johannes Voelker in Rome and delivered to Sandoz by John Candotti.

Although hardcopy was routinely scanned for bombs and biologicals, all mail could conceal words with the power to inflict more pain. Emilio knew himself defenseless against this, and had refused to look at any of it, but Gina loved him, and believed that others must share her opinion of him. So one day in early July, while Emilio worked at the other end of the room and Celestina played house with Elizabeth and a stuffed dog named Franco Grossi, Gina sat on the swept wooden floor of his apartment, separating the messages into four piles: hateful, sweet, funny and interesting. When she finished the first pass through the box, she and Celestina took a walk over to see Brother Cosimo in the kitchen and watched him burn the hateful ones in the bread oven. Cosimo, who was among those who approved of the couple, sent the ladies back with three hazelnut gelati and a plate of leftover salad greens for Elizabeth.

"Sweet" was composed mainly of letters from Emilio’s students, the earliest of whom had been boys of fifteen when he’d taught them Latin I and were now men in their mid-sixties with enduring and fond memories of his classroom. Several—jurists, attorneys—offered to file suit on Sandoz’s behalf against the Contact Consortium for slander and defamation. Gina was cheered by their loyalty, but Emilio still believed himself guilty of some of what he’d been charged with in absentia. So she put the letters aside, thinking, Someday perhaps.

"Funny" included several from women whose grasp of reproductive biology was less firm than their grip on the basics of blackmail, and who attributed the paternity of their children to a celibate who wasn’t even on the planet at the time of conception. Emilio read one of these, but he found it less amusing than Gina had, so that pile too was consigned to the bread oven.

Which left "Interesting."

Most of these, she believed, would be rejected out of hand: requests for interviews, book contracts, and so on. There was, however, a letter from a legal firm in Cleveland, Ohio, written in English, and this envelope included a copy of a handwritten note dated July 19, 2021, signed with a name Gina recognized: Anne Edwards, the physician who had gone, along with her husband, the engineer George Edwards, to Rakhat as part of the first Jesuit mission. Emilio had spoken of Anne, briefly and with difficulty, so Gina hesitated before reopening this wound. But concerned that this was a matter of legal importance, she brought the letter to Emilio and saw his color vanish as he read.

"Caro, what’s wrong? What does it say?"

"I don’t know what to do with this," he said, shaking his head, throwing the papers down on his desk. He stood and walked away, clearly upset. "No. I don’t want it."

"What? What is it?" Celestina asked, sitting on the floor. Alarmed, she looked from one grown-up’s face to the other’s, and dissolved into tears. "Is it another divorce paper, Mamma?"

"Oh, my God," Emilio said and went to the child, kneeling to offer her his arms. "No, no, no, cara mia. Nothing like that, Celestina! Nothing bad." He looked up at Gina, who shrugged unhappily: what can we do? "It’s just something about money," Emilio told the child then. "Nothing important, cara—just money. Maybe it’s good, okay? I have to think about this. I’m not used to having other people to think of. Maybe it’s good."

The note from Anne was short, written on a sunlit day during the excitement of the preparations for the first mission to Rakhat, with mortality only a vague theoretical notion. "It can’t buy happiness, darlings. It can’t buy health. But a little cash never hurts. Enjoy." She and George had set up trust funds for each member of the Jesuit party and, with over forty years to accumulate, the law firm informed him, the individual portfolios had done handsomely. In addition, Emilio Sandoz had been named a beneficiary of the Edwardses’ personal estate, along with Sofia Mendes and James Quinn. In the judgment of the law firm, Sandoz was also legally due one-third of that estate. The terms of the will stipulated that while Sandoz remained a member of the Society of Jesus, he would be invited to serve on the board of trustees to help oversee distribution of the funds to charities benefiting education and medicine. However, if he decided for any reason to leave the active priesthood, the money was his to use as he saw fit.

Frightened by the bequest, ignorant of its management, he lost sleep over it that first night. But in the morning, he contacted Brother Edward Behr, who’d been a stockbroker before joining the Society, and mulled Ed’s advice over, gradually getting used to the fact that he was now a remarkably wealthy man. The decision came a week or so after first reading Anne’s note. Getting out of bed, he accessed listings for antique furniture dealers in the Rome and Naples region, eventually logging a request for estimates on availability and price for one item. That done, he went back to bed. He fell asleep the moment his head touched the pillow, and took that for a good omen.

Entering his Neapolitan office during one of his periodic visits several days later, Vincenzo Giuliani was startled to find in it a superb seventeenth-century table, its highly polished and intricately inlaid surface gleaming in the sunlight that poured through tall, mullioned windows. The table was not, the Father General noted, an exact match for the one Emilio Sandoz had wrecked eleven months earlier, but it was close enough. On it was an envelope containing a paper confirmation of the transfer to the Society of Jesus of a breathtaking sum of money, drawn on the private account of E. J. Sandoz. All of which elicited from the Father General a lengthy and meditative curse.

Debts paid, in possession of more than sufficient funds to shelter himself and to hire his own bodyguards and support a family, Emilio Sandoz was at forty-seven an independent man, ghosts laid to rest, guilt fading, God renounced.

It’s not too late to live, he thought. So it was decided: a civil ceremony, on the morning of September 3, with a few friends in attendance.

THAT SUMMER, DETAILED REPORTS OF WHAT GINA GIULIANI AND Emilio Sandoz had every right to believe was a purely private matter rose along the lines of hierarchy in three ancient organizations, reaching at various velocities the Father General of the Society of Jesus, the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church and the Neapolitan Capo di Tutti Capi, each of whom was interested for different but dovetailing reasons. In the face of this unfortunate new circumstance, their collective decision was to accelerate preparations for the latest attempt to reach Rakhat.

The ship chosen for this voyage was now fully configured for interstellar travel. Carlo Giuliani had christened it the Giordano Bruno, after a Florentine priest burned at the stake in 1600 for suggesting that the stars were like Sol, and might be orbited by other planets where life could exist. The Bruno was highly automated; her crew was small but competent and experienced. Her Jesuit passengers’ training was nearing completion. Food, trade goods, medical supplies and communications and survival gear were already being ferried to the Bruno, now in low Earth orbit. Navigation programs were locked in for launch in mid-September of 2061.

There was no need to convey any urgency to Sandoz. Indeed, the Jesuits assigned to the mission were very nearly exhausted by the pace he set, for he meant to finish the K’San analysis by August 31 if it killed them all, and threw himself into the project with astonishing energy.

Bedridden less than two years earlier, the linguist’s first word to John Candotti had been a bewildered question: "English?" Now Emilio was in nearly constant motion, pacing the length of the library, explaining, reasoning, arguing, gesturing, shifting with lightning suddenness from K’San to Latin to Ruanja to English; then, he was suddenly still, thinking, dark hair falling over his eyes and tossed back with a jerk of the head as the answer to some puzzle came to him, and the pacing began again.

Gina, fuel for this engine, came each evening at eight to pry him out of the library, and in some ways the other men welcomed her arrival as much as Emilio did. Without her intervention, Sandoz would have gone on hours more, and the bigger men were usually famished by the day’s end and looked forward, in spite of themselves, to hearing Celestina’s piping voice call to Don Emilio and her small footsteps clattering down the long hallway from the front door.

"Christ! Look at them. Gabriel and Lucifer, with a wee cherub in attendance," Sean Fein muttered one night, watching the three of them leave. He turned from the window, face sour, his features a collection of short horizontal lines: a small, lipless mouth, deep-set eyes, a snub nose. "Whoredom," he quoted lugubriously, "is better than wedlock in a priest."

"St. Thomas More could hardly have had Emilio’s situation in mind," Vincenzo Giuliani commented dryly, walking into the library unexpectedly. "Please—sit down," he said, when the others got to their feet. "The old orders have retained our vow of celibacy, but diocesan priests may marry now," he pointed out reasonably to Sean. "Do you disapprove of Emilio’s decisions, Father Fein?"

"The parish men may marry because ordainin’ women was the only alternative to changin’ the rule," said Sean with luxurious cynicism. "Hardly a ringin’ endorsement of familial love, now, was it?"

Giuliani bought himself time by strolling through the library, lifting reports from desks, smiling a greeting to John Candotti, nodding to Daniel Iron Horse and Joseba Urizarbarrena. As troubled by the situation as he was personally, Giuliani decided it was time to address the issue.

"Even when I was young, more men left the Society than stayed," he told the others lightly, sitting with a window at his back so that he could see their faces clearly in the waning light, while his own was obscured. "It is better for everyone if only those who feel truly called to this life remain in it. But there was a time, long ago, when we treated a resignation as though it were a suicide—a death in the family, and a shameful one at that—particularly if a man left to marry. Friendships that had endured decades would rupture. There were often feelings of betrayal and abandonment, on both sides."

He paused, and looked around as the younger men shifted uncomfortably in their chairs. "How does it make you feel, to see Emilio and Gina together, I wonder?" the Father General asked, brows up with mild curiosity.

The Father General was looking at Daniel Iron Horse as he said this, but it was Sean Fein who threw his head back and closed his eyes with schoolboy earnestness. "Persistence in celibacy requires a firm sense of its value in making us perpetually available for God’s good use of us," he recited in a loud monotone, "as well as a desire to uphold an ancient and honorable tradition, and the sincere hope of drawing on a source of divine grace that enables us to love the presence of God in others, without exclusion. Otherwise, it is pointless self-denial." Having delivered himself of this statement, Sean looked around with theatrical melancholy. "Then again, pointless self-denial was half the fun of Catholicism in the old days," he reminded them, "and I, for one, regret its passing."

Giuliani sighed. It was time, he decided, to unmask the chemist. "I have it on good authority, gentlemen, that Father Fein is a man capable of describing the hydrogen bond as being, and I quote: ’like the arms of Christ crucified, flung wide, holding all life in an embrace.’ I am assured by Sean’s Provincial that when you know poetry lurks in his soul, it is somewhat easier to put up with his bullshit." Noting with aesthetic pleasure the way Sean’s pink flush was set off by his blue eyes, Giuliani returned to the task at hand without missing a beat. "You do not shun Emilio Sandoz, and none of you begrudges him this happiness. And yet it must raise questions for you, and it should. Which of us is doing the right thing? Has he thrown away his soul or have I thrown away my life? What if I’m wrong about everything?"

It was Joseba Urizarbarrena who put the problem in its starkest terms. "How," the ecologist asked quietly, "in the face of that man’s joy, can I go on alone?"

John Candotti’s eyes dropped, and Sean snorted, looking away, but the Father General’s gaze remained on the mission’s father superior. "The stakes are enormous: life, posterity, eternity," Giuliani said, looking directly at Daniel Iron Horse. "And each of us must discern the answers for himself."

For a long time, the quiet was unbroken by any sound elsewhere in the house. Then the silence was ripped by the the abrasive squeal of wooden chair legs grating against the stone floor. Danny stood looking at Vincenzo Giuliani for a few moments, his small, black eyes hard in the broad, pitted face. "I need some air," he said, throwing down a stylus, and left.

"If you will excuse us, gentlemen?" Giuliani said mildly, and followed Iron Horse out of the room.

DANNY WAS WAITING FOR HIM IN THE GARDEN: CONSCIENCE INCARNATE, a massive presence in the deepening darkness. "Allow me," the Father General said placidly, when it became obvious that Iron Horse would not give him the satisfaction of speaking first. "You find me contemptible."