Children of God (33 page)

John nodded slightly. Whore.

"I’d hear that when my mother and I were out together. From kids, yes? You know—just kids, trying to be real witty and bold. I didn’t get it, of course. Shit, I was what? Three, four years old? All I knew was there was something going on and I didn’t understand it. So I kept looking for an explanation." He stared at John for a time and then asked, "Ever been to Puerto Rico?" John shook his head. "Puerto Rico is really mixed. Spanish, African, Dutch, English, Chinese, you name it. People are all different colors. For a long time it didn’t strike me as odd that my mother and her husband and my older brother were all light-haired and fair-skinned, and here I was, this little Indio, like a cowbird in a warbler’s nest, yes? But one day, when I was about eleven, I slipped and called my mother’s husband Papa. Not to his face—I just said something like, When did Papa come home? He always got ugly when he was drunk, but that time—Jesus! He really took me apart. And he kept yelling, Don’t call me that! You’re nothing to me, you little bastard! Don’t ever call me that!"

John closed his eyes, but then opened them and looked at Emilio. "So you got your explanation."

Emilio shrugged. "It still took me a while—Christ, what a dumb kid! Anyway, afterward, when they were putting the cast on my arm, I was thinking, How can a son be nothing to a father? Then it hit me, so to speak." There was a brief bleak smile. "I thought, Well, he’s been telling me I was a bastard all along. I was just too stupid to realize he meant it."

"Emilio, I didn’t mean to—"

"No! You said you wanted to understand. I’m trying to explain, okay? So just shut up and listen!" Emilio sank onto the edge of the treadmill. "Sit down, will you?" he said wearily, neck craned. "Everybody on this goddamned ship is so fucking big," he muttered, blinking spasmodically. "I feel like a dwarf. I hate that."

For an instant John could see a skinny little kid, huddled up and waiting for the beating to be over; a small man in a stone cell, waiting for a rape to end…. Jesus, John thought, sitting on the floor across from Sandoz. "I’m listening," he said.

Emilio took a deep breath, and started again. "See, the thing about all this is, when I finally worked it out, I wasn’t angry, okay? I wasn’t ashamed. I wasn’t hurt. Well, I was hurt—I mean, the guy put me in the hospital, right? But I swear: my feelings weren’t hurt." He watched John carefully. "I was relieved. Can you believe that? I was just so fucking relieved."

"Because things finally made sense," said John.

Emilio inclined his head. "Yes. Things finally made sense. They still sucked, but at least they made sense."

"And that’s why you want to go back now. To Rakhat. To find out if things make sense?"

"Want to go back? Want to?" Emilio cried. The bitterness was sharp but short-lived, replaced by simple tiredness. He looked down at the floor of the exercise bay, and then shook his head, the bone-straight hair, more silver than black now, falling over eyes almost bloody with fatigue. "I keep thinking of that line: if you are asked to go a mile, go two. Maybe this is the extra mile. Maybe I’ve got to give it all another chance," Emilio said quietly. "I can tolerate a great deal if I just understand why…. And there’s only one place I can find that out."

He was silent for a long time. "John, when you arrive on Rakhat, all you will have are the knowledge and skills you and your companions can bring to bear on problems you cannot imagine or anticipate—problems you cannot pray or buy or bluff or even shoot your way out of. If I withhold information from Carlo and his people and if something happens because of their ignorance, I will be responsible. I’m not willing to take that chance."

He pulled in a breath and held it before asking "Did you hear what Carlo said? Before? That I’m frightened?" John nodded. "John, I’m not just scared, I’m probably fucked up for life," he said, laughing at how awful it was, the glittering black eyes held wide with the effort to contain the tears that had not yet spilled. "Even with Gina—. I don’t know, maybe it would have gotten better, but I still had nightmares, even with her. And now— Jesus! They’re worse than ever! Sometimes I think, maybe it’s better this way. The screaming would have scared Celestina, you know? What kind of life is that for a little kid, growing up with her stepfather screaming every night?" he asked, the sound wrung from his voice. "Maybe it’s better for her, this way."

"Maybe," John said doubtfully, "but that’s not much of a silver lining, is it?"

"No, it’s not," Emilio agreed. "I’ll take what I can get, I guess." He glanced at John, infinitely grateful that there had been no platitudes, no half-assed attempt to make him feel okay. He filled his lungs shudderingly, and got a grip on himself. "John, I—. Listen, you’ve been—"

"Forget it," John said, and thought, That’s what I’m here for.

SANDOZ STOOD UP AND STEPPED BACK ONTO THE TREADMILL. AFTER A time, John got to his feet as well and went to his cabin, where he flopped onto his bunk in a loose-limbed heap and put his hands over his eyes.

He thought of all the ways of coping with undeserved pain. Offer it up. Remember Jesus on the cross. The bromides: God never gives us a burden we cannot bear. Everything happens for a reason. John Candotti knew for a fact that the old sayings worked for some people. But as a parish priest, he had often observed that trust in God could impose an additional burden on good people slammed to their knees by some senseless tragedy. An atheist might be no less staggered by such an event, but nonbelievers often experienced a kind of calm acceptance: shit happens, and this particular shit had happened to them. It could be more difficult for a person of faith to get to his feet precisely because he had to reconcile God’s love and care with the stupid, brutal fact that something irreversibly terrible had happened.

"Faith is supposed to be a comfort, Father!" a bereaved mother had once cried to him, weeping over her child’s grave. "How could God let this happen? All those prayers, all that hope—it was just howling into the wind."

He was so young. A few weeks past ordination, all dewy and optimistic. It was his first funeral, and he thought he’d handled it pretty well, not stumbling over the prayers, alive to the grief of the mourners, ready to comfort them. "The disciples, and Mary herself, must have felt the same way you do now, when they stood at the foot of the cross," he’d said, impressed by his own gentle voice, his own loving concern.

"So fucking what?" the mother snapped, eyes like coals. "My kid is dead, and she’s not coming back in three days, and I don’t give a shit about the resurrection at the end of the goddamn world because I want her back now—" The weeping ceased, replaced by pure steely anger. "God’s got a lot to answer for," she snarled. "That’s all I can tell you, Father. God’s got a lot to answer for."

A father and a brother, he thought. Was that how it had started for Emilio? A Father he could count on, a Brother he could look up to. How long had he resisted the Spirit? John wondered. How long did he protect himself from the fear that God was just a bullshit story, that religion was just a load of crap? What kind of courage had it taken—summoning the trust that faith requires? And where the hell was Emilio finding the strength now to hope again that maybe it would all make sense? That if he could just bring himself to listen, maybe God would explain.

What if God did explain, and it turned out that what had happened was all Emilio’s fault? John wondered. Not the gardens—everyone on the Stella Maris crew had agreed to grow the gardens, and no one could have anticipated what happened because of them. But later—what if it was something Emilio said or did that was misunderstood on Rakhat?

Listen, John prayed, I’m not telling You what to do, but if Emilio brought the rapes on himself somehow, and then Askama died because of that, it’s better if he never understands, okay? In my opinion. You know what people can take, but I think You’re cutting it pretty close here. Or maybe—help him make it mean something. Help him. That’s what I’m asking. Just help him. He’s doing his damnedest. Help him.

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.

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 unfamiliar 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 uninheritable 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.