Children of God (32 page)

"SIPAJ, PEOPLE," SOFIA CALLED OUT HOURS LATER. "IT’S ALMOST REDLIGHT! Has anyone seen Isaac and Ha’anala?"

Puska VaTrucha-Sai separated from the knot of girls chattering about their assignments, and looked around curiously. "They left this morning for Isaac’s hut," she reminded Fia.

"Sipaj, Puska," her father, Kanchay, called, "you will please us if you go out and bring them back."

"Oh, eat me," Puska muttered, to the scandalized laughter of the other girls. Puska didn’t care. A year in the army was more than enough to coarsen a woman’s attitudes and language, and she had chosen the mildest of the vulgarities that came to mind—these recruits would learn the others soon enough. Puska smiled at the girls and said, "A good soldier is responsible," with the exaggerated sincerity that covers rock-hard cynicism, and loped off to find Fia’s children.

It took her perhaps twice-twelve paces to get beyond the shelters and storage huts, and again that many to pass out of earshot of the village noise. Puska had dreamed of home nearly every night of her first month in the city of Mo’arl; yearning for the forest’s peace and security, she’d sought refuge there in sleep when daylight was filled with shock and outrage and sadness. For a time, she’d envied Ha’anala, safe forever in the village. Now, Trucha Sai seemed cramped and limited, and Puska could understand why Ha’anala was so often bad-tempered and restless.

The roofline of Isaac’s shelter came into view, a cha’ar past the settlement’s edge. Imantat’s work was not as sturdy as that of his father, who was a master thatcher, but the boy showed promise: the shelter had held up well during the last storm. Someone will need a husband soon, Puska thought, and made a mental note to bring this up with the council, for she had seen enough of war to know that babies should not be postponed, and the people would need a child to replace her if she fell in battle.

"Sipaj, Ha’anala," Puska called as she approached the hut, "everyone’s waiting for you! It’s almost redlight!" There was no response—the shelter was empty. "Stew," she swore under her breath. Ha’anala couldn’t see in redlight and Isaac could see too well. He needed to get under the sleeping shelters, where he couldn’t see the red in the sky, or there’d be trouble. "Ha’anala! Someone will have to carry you back!" Puska teased loudly. "And Isaac will make a fierno!"

"Over here!" Ha’anala yelled from a distance.

"Where’s Isaac?" Puska shouted back, cocking her ears toward the sound, relieved to hear Ha’anala’s voice at last.

Already losing contrast, hands out in front of her, Ha’anala moved uncertainly toward Isaac’s hut. "He’s not here," she cried, lifting a foot to rub the opposite shin where she’d crashed into a fallen log a moment earlier. "Isaac left!"

Puska’s ears came up. "Left? No—someone would have seen him. He’s not in the village and he wasn’t on the path home—"

Stumbling over a root, Ha’anala snarled in frustration. "Sipaj, Puska: he’s left! Out into the forest! Can’t you smell it? He said he was leaving, but someone was sleepy—"

Puska strode decisively to Ha’anala’s side and began to smooth the younger girl’s face, running her hands along the sides of Ha’anala’s long, thin cheeks. "Make your heart quiet," she crooned, falling back into the habits of childhood. "A fierno won’t help," Puska warned. "Bad weather will frighten everyone."

And it would wipe out Isaac’s scent, Ha’anala realized, before she could dispute the meteorological effects of emotional distress. She stood at full height. "We have to find him. Right away, Puska. His scent trail is very clear now, but if it rains, someone will lose him. He’ll be gone. Fia will—"

"But you can’t see—" Puska started to protest.

"Not with eyes," Ha’anala said carefully. Evidence of Isaac’s passage fairly glowed for her: his footprints bright with scent, the leaves he’d brushed past powdered with shed skin cells and misted with his expelled breath. "It’s like firespore—remember? Like small points of light, along the path he took. Sipaj, Puska, someone can follow him if you will help. But we have to leave now, or the trail might stop glowing."

Puska swayed from side to side as she considered this. On the left foot: Isaac might be lost. On the right foot: she should go back to the village and get permission. On the left foot: it smelled like rain. On the right—

"Sipaj, Puska," Ha’anala pleaded, "someone’s heart will stop if she has to tell Fia that Isaac is gone! Someone thinks she can follow him, and when we two catch up with him, we shall be three, and we’ll be back before full night."

Which settled it for Puska. One person made a puzzle. Two people made a discussion. Three made a plan.

"THE PEOPLE WILL BELIEVE THAT THE DJANADA GOT US," PUSKA POINTED out, worried from the moment she awoke the next morning. She looked up at Ha’anala, who was a little distance away, poised on a tail and one leg. "Someone should have gone back to tell the others."

Ha’anala didn’t respond, afraid she’d alarm her breakfast, which was about to move within reach, directly beneath her suspended foot. Patience… patience… "Got it!" she cried, grasping a small, scaly lonat. "We don’t need help," she told Puska firmly, pinching the animal’s neck between a pedal thumb and forefinger. "If we go back now, someone will lose the scent."

Puska’s face contorted, watching the lonat’s twitches subside into limp stillness. "Are you really going to eat that?"

"Consider the alternative," Ha’anala said, shooting a foot out to grip Puska’s ankle. "Oh, Puska! Someone was joking!" she cried when Puska jumped and wrenched her leg free.

"Well, don’t. Don’t ever joke like that!" Puska shuddered. "If you’d seen what I’ve seen in Mo’arl—" Ha’anala’s mouth dropped open and Puska stopped, embarrassed by her own self-referential crudity. I really have gotten bad, she thought. "Sorry," she apologized and held out a hand for the lonat, holding her breath as she scraped the scales from its legs. "Someone thinks such jokes are in very poor taste."

"Someone thinks lonati are in very poor taste," Ha’anala muttered, biting off a nasty little haunch when Puska handed the thing back to her. The main virtue of lonati was that they were easy to catch. Both Ha’anala and her father were used to the small, poor prey they could sometimes capture to supplement offerings of "traditional meat," as it was delicately re — ferred to, but eating was always a hurried, furtive task.

"What’s it like in the cities?" Ha’anala asked, trying to divert Puska’s horrified fascination with the tiny carcass.

"You don’t want to know," Puska told her with evident disgust, and left to find herself some rainberries for breakfast.

THEY PRESSED ON, PUSKA INCREASINGLY EXASPERATED, HA’ANALA ALMOST as irritable. Traces of Isaac’s passing had been trampled by forest things—sweating, panting, defecating in the humid heat—and she lost the scent repeatedly as his path veered unexpectedly toward patches of fruiting bush. Even when she caught his course again, it was mingled with clouds of vraloj pollen and the stench of rotting plants, and difficult to follow. By their fourth day on the trail, Puska was complaining bitterly and continuously, and stopped to forage with resentful thoroughness while Ha’anala fumed and clawed under logs for bitter grubs, silent and ravenous and more determined with every passing moment to run Isaac to ground and haul him back by his ankle.

"One more day," Puska warned that night. "Then we’re going back. You are too hungry—"

"Isaac will be even hungrier," Ha’anala insisted, for she had never seen Isaac feed himself and had begun to hope that he would weaken so that they could overtake him.

But his dung told her otherwise. In the absence of those who had cared for him since infancy, Isaac was managing rather well, Ha’anala realized. His bowels could stand a Runao’s diet and he had probably watched Runa foraging, attentively if obliquely; he understood what was edible and knew how to find it. So now he feeds himself, Ha’anala thought, remembering the stories about how Isaac had begun to walk one day and to sing one day and to type one day. He evidently rehearsed each new skill in his mind until he was certain he could do it, and then simply did.

Has he been planning to leave? Ha’anala wondered that night as she drifted off to sleep. What does he think he’ll find? But then she thought, He’s not searching. He’s escaping.

THEY SLEPT BADLY THAT NIGHT, AND AWOKE TO A THUNDERING DOWNPOUR that made travel impossible. Still unwilling to admit defeat, Ha’anala sat at the edge of the woods, staring disconsolately at a limitless plain, her nostrils flaring with the effort to retain Isaac’s scent even as it dissolved into the dirt, churned by fat drops and mixed with the scent trails of prairie herds. Even Puska was quiet.

"Gone," Ha’anala whispered that evening, as the wet, gray light dwindled. "Someone has lost him."

"He lost himself. You tried to find him," Puska said softly. She put an arm around Ha’anala and rested her head on the Jana’ata’s shoulder. "Tomorrow we will go home."

"How can I tell Sofia?" Ha’anala asked the darkness. "Isaac is gone."

"YOU’RE JOKING,"JOHN INSISTED.

Fat Frans looked up balefully from his plate. "Is suicide still considered a sin?"

"It depends—. Why?"

"Well, for the sake of your theoretically immortal soul, I’ll give you some advice," said Frans. "Never get into a plane piloted by Emilio Sandoz."

Colorful exaggeration, John thought, and pushed his own plate aside. "He can’t be that bad!"

"I’m telling you, Johnny, I’ve never seen anyone with less natural ability," said Frans, somewhat belatedly swallowing a mouthful of tilapia and rice. "Nico, tell Don Gianni how long it took you to learn to fly the lander."

"Three weeks," said Nico from his seat in the comer. "Don Carlo says the landers practically fly themselves, but I had a hard time with the navigation programs."

John winced. Emilio had been working on this for a month.

"His brain must be completely crammed with languages. As far as I can tell," said Frans, adding some salt to the rice, "there is not one spare synapse available for flight training. Look, I admire perseverance as much as the next man, but this is pointless. Even D. W. Yarbrough gave up on him. Know what it says in the first mission’s records?" Frans paused, chewing, and then recited, " ’As a pilot, Father Sandoz is one hell of a linguist and a pretty fair medic. So I am taking him off flight training and assigning him to permanent passenger status, to avoid getting anybody killed.’ " Frans shook his head. "I thought I had a better chance with him because the new landers are almost entirely automated, but Sandoz is so terrible, it’s eerie." He scooped up another forkful of fish and peered over mounded cheeks at John. "Do something, Johnny. Talk to him."

John snorted. "What makes you think he’ll pay any attention to what I say? Apart from reaming me out for some damned mistake in Ruanja subjunctive, Emilio hasn’t said two words to me in the past eight weeks." It was hard not to be hurt, actually. Drugged or sober, Sandoz would let no one near him. "Where is he now?" John asked Frans.

"He practices in his cabin. I can’t even monitor him anymore—it’s too awful to watch."

"All right," said John. "I’ll see what I can do."

THERE WAS NO ANSWER TO THE FIRST KNOCK, SO JOHN BANGED HARDER.

"Shit!" Emilio yelled without opening the door. "What!"

"It’s me—John. Lemme in, okay?"

There was a pause, and the sound of the door latch rattling. "Shit," Sandoz said again. "Open it yourself." When John did, Sandoz was standing with the full-coverage VR visor shoved back on his forehead like a conquistador’s helmet.

John slumped at the sight of him. He was encrusted with equipment, the VR gloves overlaying his braces, the skin under his eyes purplish with chronic fatigue. "Oh, for God’s sake," John said, tact forgotten. "Emilio, this is stupid—"

"It’s not stupid!" Emilio snapped. "Did Frans send you? I don’t give a damn what he thinks. I have to learn this! If I just didn’t have all this crap on my hands—"

"But you do have all that crap on your hands, and I still can’t get that left brace to work right, and the controls in the lander are even harder than the VR sims! Why can’t you just let—"

"Because," Emilio said, cutting him off with soft precision, "I’d rather not depend on anyone else to get me off the planet."

John blinked. "Okay," he said finally, "I get it."

"Thank you," Emilio said sarcastically. "You may recall that the last time I was on Rakhat, the cavalry was a little late riding to the rescue."

John nodded, conceding the point, but still in the mood to argue. "You look awful," he said, picking a fight. "Has it occurred to you that maybe if you got some rest, you might do better? When the hell do you sleep?"

"If I don’t sleep, I can’t dream," Emilio told him curtly, and shoved his door closed, leaving John alone in the passageway, staring at its blank metal surface.

"Get some rest, dammit," John yelled.

"Go to hell!" Emilio yelled back.

John sighed and walked away, shaking his head and talking to himself.

WITHIN DAY OF WITHDRAWING FROM QUELL, SANDOZ HAD BROKEN THE Jesuit monopoly on both Rakhati languages, insisting that Carlo, Frans and Nico become competent in basic Ruanja and K’San, even though Frans would remain on the ship for the duration of the mission. Soon he demanded that they all begin working together in increasingly rigorous classes. Day after day, night after night, he ordered them to interpret what he was saying in K’San or Ruanja, throwing his questions at them like bombs, criticizing their answers on every level: grammar, logic, psychology, philosophy, theology.

"Prepare to be wrong. Assume that whenever you find something simple or obvious, you are wrong," Sandoz advised. "Everything we thought we understood, all the most basic things we shared with them—sex, food, music, families—those were the things we were most wrong about."

There were midnight exercises involving the drone lander, details of simulated Rakhati geography, a theoretical but statistically likely cyclone, and not one but two surface rendezvous sites. He would permit them two or three hours of sleep and then the klaxons would go off again, and he’d badger them in K’San or Ruanja to explain who they were, why they had come, what they wanted, dissecting each man’s answers publicly and without anesthesia, exposing weaknesses, blind spots, assumptions, stupidities, laying them open like frogs on a tin plate. It was brutal and insulting and very nearly intolerable, but when Sean dared to protest the ill treatment, Sandoz reduced him to tears.

And yet, even as the others trudged off to stuporous sleep after some grueling drill or interrogation, Sandoz himself would put in a few more kilometers on the treadmill. No matter how ferocious his program of training became for the rest of them, they had to admit its rigor was always exceeded by that of his own, despite the fact that he was the smallest man among them and nearly twenty years older than the youngest of them.

He even ate standing up. Nothing stopped the dreams.

"SANDOZ!" CARLO SHOUTED, SHAKING HIM. THERE WAS NO RESPONSE, so he shook the man harder, until the bruised eyes focused.

"iJesús!" Emilio cried, pulling violently away. "iDéjame—"

Carlo released Sandoz’s shoulders abruptly, letting him drop against the bulkhead. "I assure you that my intentions were strictly honorable, Don Emilio," he said with specious courtesy, sitting down on the end of the bunk. "You were screaming again."

Still breathing hard, Sandoz looked around his cabin blearily, trying to get his bearings. "Fuck," he said after a while.

"Now there’s a thought," said Carlo, eyes half-closed in speculation. "Versatility can be a virtue, you know." Sandoz stared at him. "It doesn’t have to hurt," Carlo suggested silkily.

"You come near me," Sandoz assured him wearily, "I’ll find a way to kill you."

"Just a suggestion," Carlo said, unruffled. He stood and moved to the desk, where he’d laid the paraphernalia out. "So, barring a more interesting avenue to relief and rest, what shall it be tonight? Quick oblivion, I hope. Perhaps I should have Nico move the treadmill into the sick bay so the rest of us don’t have to listen to you pounding away all night." He picked up the injection canister and turned, brows raised in inquiry. "You’re building up a tolerance to this, by the way. I’ve doubled the dosage over the past two weeks."

Sandoz, who had obviously been too tired even to undress before falling into bed, got out of his bunk, put on his braces and left the room, brushing past Nico, who always rose when Don Carlo did.

"Treadmill it is, then," Carlo observed. Sighing, he sat alone for a few minutes, waiting for the relentless sound of footfalls to begin. He could tell from the tempo that Sandoz had set the pace for a thirty-seven-minute ten-kilometer run, hoping to exhaust himself, wearing out the rest of the ship’s company in the bargain.

Determined to have things out, Carlo rose and walked to the small gym, moving to the front of the treadmill, where he stood with his hands behind his back, head cocked in contemplation. "Sandoz," he said, "it has come to my attention that you have commandeered the Giordano Bruno. The situation suits my purposes, although frankly I find your command style lacking in finesse." Amused black eyes returned his stare; Sandoz was back in control now, deigning to be entertained. "In the beginning," Carlo went on, "I thought, This is revenge—he’s getting his own back. Later I thought, This is an ex-Jesuit who has taken orders all his life. Now he gives them. He is drunk with power. Now, however—"

"Shall I tell you why you allowed me to take over your ship?" Sandoz offered, cutting him off. "Your father was right about you, Cio-Cio-San. If you ever finished anything, you could be judged, and found wanting. So you find a reason to quit and tell yourself lies about Renaissance princes. Then you move on to the next thing before you can demonstrate inadequacy. My coup d’état suits your purposes because now you have someone you can blame when this venture fails."

Carlo continued as though the other man had not spoken. "It is not power or revenge that drives you, Sandoz. It is fear. You are afraid, all day, every day. And the closer we get to Rakhat, the more frightened you become."

In superb physical condition now, sweat coming easily, Sandoz decreased the pace until the treadmill stopped. He stood still, his breathing hardly affected by the exertion; then he simply let the mask drop.

Carlo blinked, startled by the unexpected nakedness of Sandoz’s face. "You are afraid," Carlo repeated quietly, "and with good reason."

"Don Emilio," Nico said, coming into the room, "what do you see in your dreams?"

Carlo had asked this very question many times, in the hours before what would have been dawn, awakened night after night by the unnerving wail, with its burden of hopeless refusal, the cries of "No!" rising in intensity from denial to defiance to despair. By the time Carlo or John got to his cabin, Sandoz would be sitting up, jammed into the corner of his bed, back against the bulkhead, eyes wide open, but still asleep. "What do you see?" Carlo would demand when he’d shaken the man awake.

Always before, Sandoz had refused to talk. This time, he told Nico, "A necropolis. A city of the dead."

"Always the same city?" Nico asked.

"Yes."

"Can you see the dead clearly?"

"Yes."

"Who are they?"

"Everyone I ever loved," said Sandoz. "Gina is there," he said, looking at Carlo, "but not Celestina—not yet. And there are others, whom I do not love."

"Who?" Carlo demanded.

There was an ugly laugh. "Not you, Carlo," Sandoz said with cheerful contempt. "And not you, Nico. The others are VaRakhati. Whole cities of them," he said lightly. "The bodies change. I’ve seen them rot. I can smell them in my sleep. There’s a time, while the carcasses are decomposing, when I can’t tell what they were—Jana’ata or Runa. They all look alike then. But later, when it’s just the bones, I can see the teeth. Sometimes I find my own body among them. Sometimes not. It’s better when I do because then, it’s over. Those are the nights I don’t scream."

"Do you know how to use a sidearm?" Carlo asked after a silence.

Sandoz nodded in the Rakhati fashion—a short jerk of the chin upward—but held his hands out slightly, inviting Carlo to think it through. "I could probably get a burst off…"

"But the recoil would damage the brace mechanisms," Carlo observed, "and you’d be worse off than before. You will, of course, be under my protection, and that of Nico."

The derisive eyes were almost kindly. "And you believe you will succeed, where God has failed me?"

Carlo stood his ground, head back. "God may only be a fable, whereas I have an investment to watch over. In any case, my family has generally found bullets rather more reliable than prayer."

"All right," Sandoz said, smiling briefly and broadly. "All right. Why not? My experience with illusions has not been happy, but who knows? Perhaps—short-term—yours will help us both."

Satisfied with what he had learned, Carlo nodded to Nico. He turned to leave the exercise bay and saw John Candotti standing in the doorway. "Worried, Gianni?" Carlo asked blithely, as he brushed past him. John glared and Carlo backed away in mock alarm, raising both hands. "I swear: I didn’t touch him."

"Screw you, Carlo."

"Any time," Carlo purred as he and Nico retreated down the curving passageway.

Emilio was already back on the treadmill.

"Why?" John demanded, facing him.

"I told you, John—"

"No! Not that! Not just trying to pilot the lander! I mean, all of it. Why have anything to do with Carlo? Why are you helping him? Why are you teaching them the languages? Why are you willing to go back—"

" ’Night and day lie open the gates of death’s dark kingdom,’ " Sandoz recited, hiding behind Virgil, amused but by whom it was not clear. " ’To find the way back to daylight: that is work, that is labor—’»

"Don’t. Don’t shut me out like this!" John hit the treadmill power toggle so abruptly Sandoz stumbled. "Dammit, Emilio, you owe me something—an explanation, at least! I just want to understand—" He stopped himself, startled by the reaction. Shout at me, John thought, going cold, but don’t look at me like that.

Finally Sandoz willed the trembling to stop, and when he spoke, his eyes were so hard and his voice so soft that his words seemed to John a vicious insult. "Were your parents married?" he asked.

"Yes," John hissed.

"To each other?" Sandoz pressed, just as quietly.

"I don’t have to take this shit," John muttered, but before he could leave, Emilio turned and kicked the door shut.

"Mine weren’t," he said.

John froze, and Emilio looked at him for a long time. "One of my earliest memories is of my mother’s husband yelling at me for calling him Papi. I remember wondering, Maybe I should call him Papa. Or maybe Padre? Perhaps that’s when I became a linguist—I thought there was another word I was supposed to use! I would try saying it a different way, but he’d get even madder and knock me across the room for being a smart-ass. Usually he’d end up beating the crap out of my mother—and I knew it was my fault somehow, but I didn’t know what I’d done wrong! I kept trying to find the right way to say things. Nothing worked." He paused and looked away. "And there was my older brother. It seemed like he was permanently pissed off at me—nothing I did was right or good enough. And there was the way everyone would stop talking when my mother and I walked into a store or passed people in the street." Emilio’s eyes returned to John’s. "You know what puta means?"