Children of God (10 page)

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 Reshtar 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.

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!"

There was a silence one was tempted to call pregnant. "You, signora, are ruthless," Sandoz said at last, eyes narrow. "I am fortunate to escape having you as my mother-in-law."

Laughing and victorious, Gina led Sandoz to her car, Celestina skipping beside them. Opening the back door, Gina reached in and passed the priest a bag of kibble, heedless of his hands, which she had decided to ignore. He juggled the bag ineptly for a moment, but managed to get a secure grip on it as Celestina chattered about how to hold and feed and water the animal, and told him that its mother was Cleopatra.

"Named in a salute to the Egyptian custom of royal incest," Gina remarked very quietly, so Celestina wouldn’t hear and demand an explanation. She lifted the cage out of the back seat.

"Ah," Sandoz said, equally quiet for the same reason, as they began the short walk back to his apartment. "Then this one shall be named Elizabeth, in the hope that she has followed in the footsteps of the Virgin Queen." Gina laughed, but he warned her, "If she is with child, signora, I shall not hesitate to have the entire dynasty returned to your doorstep."

They went upstairs and settled Elizabeth into her new home. The pig enclosure was a simple affair of lath and chicken wire, made to fit around a plastic orange crate. There was an overturned vegetable bin for the little animal to hide in. The cage was open at the top.

"Won’t she climb out?" Sandoz asked, sitting down and peering at the pig: an oblong lump of golden hair, with a white saddle and blaze, the size and approximate shape of a cobblestone. Its front end, he observed, was distinguished from the back mainly by two wary eyes, bright as jet beads.

"You will find that guinea pigs are not a mountaineering race," Gina said as she knelt to attach a filled water bottle to the cage. She lifted the animal momentarily so he could inspect the absurd little legs that supported the pig’s solid bulk and then she went to his kitchen for a dishcloth. "You will also find that a towel over your lap is a sensible precaution," she said, handing him the cloth.

"She’ll make peepee on you," Celestina told him as he accepted the animal from her mother. "And she’ll—"

"Thank you, cara. I’m sure Don Emilio can deduce the rest," Gina said smoothly, sitting in the other chair.

"It looks like little raisins," Celestina told him, relentless.

"And is quite inoffensive, unlike my daughter," Gina said. "Guinea pigs do enjoy being petted, but this one is still a little shy about being handled. Take her out for five or ten minutes now and then. Celestina is correct, if indelicate. Don’t rely upon a guinea pig’s continence. If you keep Elizabeth Regina in your lap for much longer than that, she is likely to take you for a Anglican convert and baptize you."

He looked down at the animal, which was instinctively trying to appear rocklike and decidedly inedible, in case an eagle flew overhead. There was a little V of black marking her forehead between silly folded-over ears the shape of scallop shells. "I’ve never had a pet," he said quietly. He retained feeling in the outer edges of his hands, where the nerves had not been severed, and now used an exposed section of his smallest finger to stroke the pig’s back from blunt head to tailless behind, a short but silken distance. "All right. I will accept your gift, Celestina, on one condition," he said severely, looking at the mother. "I find, signora, that I require a purchasing agent."

"I understand," Gina said hurriedly. "I’ll bring food and fresh bedding every week. At my own expense, naturally. I am very grateful that you’ll take her, Don Emilio."

"Well, yes, that too. But also some other things. If it will not inconvenience you too much, I need some clothes. I have no established credit and there are certain… practicalities I cannot manage yet." He carefully lifted the pig from his lap and put her back into the enclosure on the floor. The animal shot under the vegetable bin and remained there, motionless. "I don’t need you to pay for anything, signora," he said, straightening. "I have a small pension."

She looked surprised. "A disability pension? But you’re still working," she said, gesturing at the sound equipment.

"A retirement pension, signora. I myself find the legalities of this situation mystifying," he admitted, "but I was informed last week that Loyola’s Company is, in fact, operating in some regions as a multinational corporation these days, complete with health benefits and pension plans."

"And branch offices, instead of provinces!" Gina rolled her eyes, still amazed herself that the dispute had come to this. "The fault line was there for nearly a hundred years, of course, but it is remarkable how much damage can be done by two stubborn, uncompromising old men—both dead now, and not a moment too soon, in my opinion."

Sandoz grimaced. "Well, it’s not the first time the Jesuits have gotten too far out in front of the Vatican. It’s not even the first time the Society has been disbanded."

"But it was even messier this time," Gina told him. "About a third of the bishops declined to read the Bull of Suppression, and there are hundreds of civil suits over property still being litigated. I don’t think anyone really understands the legal status of the Society of Jesus right now!"

He shook his head and shrugged. "Well, John Candotti tells me that negotiations have reopened. He thinks there is room for movement on both sides, and there may be some sort of settlement soon —»

Gina smiled, her eyes amused. "Don Emilio, anyone in Naples will tell you that there are very few political puzzles a Giuliani cannot either finesse or bludgeon into resolution. The new Pope is wonderful, and just as wily as Don Vincenzo. Be assured: those two will work it out."

"I hope so. In any case," Emilio said, coming back to the more immediate problem, "there is no provision in the articles of incorporation allowing for the contraction of time that occurs when someone travels near light speed. As I am nearly eighty by the calendar, I find that I am legally due a pension from what used to be the Antilles province." Johannes Voelker, the Father General’s private secretary, had brought this to everyone’s attention. The Father General was intensely annoyed by the reasoning but Voelker, a man of rigid principle, had insisted on Sandoz’s right to the income. "So. Do they still make Levi’s?"

"Of course," she said, a little distracted as Celestina left the guinea-pig cage and moved off toward the photonics. "Don’t touch, cara! Scuzi, Don Emilio. You were saying? Levi’s?"

"Yes. Two pair, if you please. Perhaps three shirts? It is a very small pension." He cleared his throat. "I have no idea what the fashions or prices are now and I will rely on your judgment, but I’d prefer you didn’t select anything terribly—"

"I understand. Nothing extravagant." She was touched that he would ask her to do this for him, but kept her face businesslike, running her eyes over him with a tailorly efficiency, as though she did this kind of thing for priests all the time.

"One pullover sweater, I think—"

"No good," she said, shaking her head. "The braces will snag the knitting. But I know a man who makes wonderful suede jackets—" It was his turn to look doubtful, and she guessed at his objection. "Classic design in a durable material is never an extravagance," she told him firmly. "Besides, I can get you a good price. Anything else?" she asked. "I am a married woman, Don Emilio. I have purchased men’s underwear before."

He coughed and flushed, eyes sliding away. "Not at the present time, thank you."

"I am a little confused," she said then. "Even retired, don’t the Jesuits provide you with—"

"I am not just retiring from a corporation, signora. I am leaving the priesthood." There was an awkward pause. "The details have not been worked out. I will stay on here, as a contractor perhaps. I am a linguist by trade and there is work for me to do."

She knew a little of what he had been through; the Father General had prepared the family before bringing Sandoz to the christening. Still, she was surprised and saddened by the laying aside of vows, whatever the cause. "I sorry," she said. "I know how difficult a decision like that can be. Celestina!" she called, rising and gathering her daughter to her side. "Well," she said, smiling again, "we won’t trouble you any longer, Don Emilio. We’ve interrupted your work long enough."