Children of God (38 page)

"No, don’t try to pick them up! Just kick the stones along!" Rukuei heard her call merrily to her husband, Shetri, who was staggering clumsily with a small boulder in his arms. "Look at Sofi’ala! Roll them!" Their first-born daughter was doing just this with a little rock, the child bent comically in half, short tail in the air, tiny face stiff with concentration. "See how my darling is working!" Ha’anala cried, naked and grunting like a stevedore. "Good girl, helping others!"

Outraged, Rukuei strode up behind Ha’anala and gripped her ankle, hauling her around, pulling her off balance. "You are Kitheri!" he screamed at her, at his father, at himself. "How can you degrade yourself this way? You drag your own child down! How dare you—"

In the space of a breath, the indifferent soldier Shetri Laaks was on top of the boy, and would have torn his throat out, had not Ha’anala stopped him with a shouted warning. She took her husband’s shoulders and moved him aside and knelt down to look questioningly at Rukuei with eyes she had no right to—eyes that should be dead.

"We are close kin," Rukuei snarled, glaring at her from the stony ground where he had stumbled under Shetri’s weight. "Your dam was my sire’s sister!" Her face brightened, confused but happy. He wanted nothing more in all the world than to smash that happiness. "My father killed yours," he told her with blunt brutality, "twice-twelve days past."

He was delighted by the silence his words imposed, glad to make someone else gasp with loss, joyful to see her face go slack with pain. "Your father did not die alone. The plain of Inbrokar is heaped with dead, and when I last saw him, my father lay next to yours. Killed by such as these!" he howled, arm flung wide with indictment, at all the Runa who surrounded them. "You speak of choices. So choose, woman! Who shall die to restore the honor of the dead?"

There was no sound but their own breath, and the wind, and the far, thin bugling of some mountain animal heedless of the moment, and the high wail of Isaac, spinning and spinning on the edge of the crowd.

Ha’anala rested a hand on her belly and got to her feet, and he saw here in full daylight that she was not sleek with her pregnancy, but raw-boned and tired. Wearily, she looked around at the Jana’ata who had chosen to remain in the N’Jarr valley.

"My choices are the same as yours," she told them. "Survival or revenge. I choose to live." She stared down at Rukuei, and pointed to a stony trail that led east, to a pass between two mountains. "There are others like you, who choose death. Three days’ walk that way. Ask for my husband’s nephew, Athaansi Erat. They eat well in his camp," she said, raising her voice so all could hear her. "Or should I say, they eat plenty. Everything they choose is death. They avenge their losses and pay death with death, and they will die bloody but with full stomachs. You will be welcomed there, cousin. I shall honor the dead by living, and by teaching those who will listen that there is valor in this choice."

Isaac’s wail fell off to a moaning that was joined by the keening of a bereft Jana’ata man-child. Sitting at his side, Ha’anala rested her head against Rukuei’s, putting a thin arm around his shoulders and holding him near. "Our fathers are dead," she whispered as the boy wept. "We are not. Live with me, cousin. Live…"

Mesmerized by the drama, the villagers stood swaying or staring until Shetri shepherded them away. Finally, there was no one left but the two cousins, and Isaac, whose spinning gradually slowed.

Older now and steadier, less vulnerable to turmoil if it was quickly brought under control, Isaac did not understand or even notice the emotions at work on his sister and her cousin. But he did what he could to bring clarity.

"I have something to say," he announced in a loud, flat voice. He would not look at Rukuei, and certainly would not approach someone so demonstrably unpredictable, but Isaac told him, "Your work is to learn songs." He waited a moment and then added, "And to teach them."

The quiet persisted, so Isaac was able to finish. "I’ll teach you one someday," he told the boy. "It’s not ready yet. You can leave for a while, but come back."

"I STAYED WITH HA’ANALA AND MY FOSTER MOTHER, SUUKMEL, UNTIL I was fourteen," Rukuei Kitheri would tell Emilio Sandoz years later. "I learned to sing with Isaac, and sometimes he would say the most extraordinary things. I came to trust his… judgment. He was very strange, but he was right: I was born to learn songs and to teach them. I spent nearly five years wandering through the Garnu mountains—I needed to hear and remember the story of each Jana’ata who had lived through those last days. I hungered for the lullabies and the literature. I wanted to understand the laws and the politics, and the poetry, to preserve some small portion of the intellect and art of a world that had died before my eyes."

"But eventually you went back to the valley," Sandoz said. "To Ha’anala and Isaac?"

"Yes."

"And by then, Isaac was ready to let you hear the music he found."

"Yes."

Isaac had met Rukuei at the mouth of the pass. Naked as ever, the ragged parasol high over his head, he did not look at Rukuei or greet him, or ask about his travels. He simply stood in the way.

"I know why you’re here," Isaac told him finally. "You came back to learn the song." A pause. "I found the music." Another pause. "It doesn’t have words yet."

There was no emotion in his voice, but driven by some inner dismay in the face of unresolved disorder, Isaac began to spin, and hum, and flap his hands.

"What’s wrong, Isaac?" Rukuei asked, schooled by then in others’ pain.

The spinning stopped abruptly, and Isaac swayed, dizzy. "The music can’t be sung unless it has words," he said at last. "Songs have words."

Rukuei, who had learned to care for his cousin’s bizarre brother before he’d left on his own journey, felt moved to comfort him. "I’ll find the words, Isaac," he promised.

It was a vow made in youth and ignorance, to be lived out in maturity and full understanding. Rukuei Kitheri would never regret it.

LOOK AT WHAT THEY’VE DONE," JOSEBA URIZARBARRENA BREATHED, first with awe and then in mourning, as the images began to pour in. "Look at what they’ve done!"

"My God," John Candotti whispered, "it’s so beautiful…"

"Beautiful!" Joseba cried. "How much has died to make this happen?" he demanded, gesturing angrily at the display. He stopped, stricken, afraid that Sandoz had heard and would take this accusation personally, but the linguist was absorbed in his own work at the far end of the bridge, monitoring the radio transmissions they could now listen to directly.

"Joseba, what are you talking about!" John sputtered. "It’s gorgeous! It’s—it’s—"

"It’s a catastrophe!" Joseba whispered fiercely, shaking with helpless outrage. "Don’t you see? They’ve totally disrupted the ecology. Everything has been changed!" He stood and turned away from the displays, despairing. "Agriculture!" he moaned, face in his hands. "Another planet, gone to hell—"

"I think it’s pretty," Nico remarked politely to Sean Fein, who was also leaning against the bridge bulkhead, watching as the system updated and repainted multiple displays, scan by scan.

"So it is, Nico," said Sean. "So it is."

First blurred, then emerging from the mist of atmosphere and the fitful concealment of cloud, becoming clean-edged and brilliant with color, composite images of Rakhat had revealed upon the arrival of the Giordano Bruno in lowering orbit a world transformed: raw Paradise made formal garden. The change was most extensive in the midlatitudes of the northern hemisphere, where the largest continent’s southern cities—first identified by Jimmy Quinn and George Edwards and Marc Robichaux forty years earlier—embraced coast and river. Superimposing old and new images, it was still possible to discern the outlines of urban centers. But now, where untouched savannah or jungle or fen or montane forest once lay, there was instead an exquisite lacework of plantation—colossal parterres laid out in interlocking knotted designs like Celtic jewelry: husbandry, geometry, artistry on a grand scale.

"Look keenly at it," Sean Fein recited quietly, remembering a twelfth-century scholar’s description of the Book of Kells, "and you will penetrate to the very shrine of art. You will make out intricacies, so delicate and subtle, so full of knots and links, with colors so fresh and vivid, that you might say all this was the work of angels and not of men."

"They must be using satellite images to plan the layouts," Frans Vanderhelst said prosaically. "I don’t think you could do that without seeing it all from above."

"Perhaps," said Carlo. "But you can do a lot with ropes and stakes. Simple surveying tools…" He leaned forward over Frans’s vast shoulder and traced a curving line of mountain that formed a template for exuberant terracing. "Some of the design is coming directly from the geology." He turned to Sandoz, tucked into a corner of the bridge, oblivious to the visuals, concentrating on the radio chatter. Carlo waved to draw his attention. "Take a look at this new survey, Sandoz. What do you think?" Carlo asked him when he’d pulled the earphones off.

Sandoz stood with a groaning stretch before joining Danny, Sean and Nico against the wall, where they could take in the bank of screens. "Jesus," he said, stunned. "The Jana’ata must have decided gardening was a good idea for the Runa after all." He stared for a time, watching as sequential images added resolution and brought out finer detail in composite frames. "How does the infrared look?"

Joseba went to a false color display. "Even worse! Look at the heat signature in these cities." He brought up an overlay with comparison data from the Stella Maris library. "My God. This has got to be, what? Thirty-five percent population growth, in two generations!"

"Don’t exaggerate," said Danny, doing the estimate in his head. "I make that heat increase closer to twenty-nine percent, overall. And you can’t be sure it’s from population growth. Could be changes in the industrial base—"

"But look here," Carlo said. "There are new settlements along the rivers. More roads than before." Following the terrain, he noticed. Not like the Romans’ roads—ramming straight through from point A to point B—but roads nonetheless. Good for business, he thought. "Anything new from the radio data?" he asked Sandoz.

Emilio shook his head. "Trade quotes, market analysis. Weather reports, crop yields, shipping schedules. Endless announcements of meetings! All in Ruanja," he said with a shuddering yawn. "I’ve got to take a break. This is putting me to sleep."

"Still no music?" Danny Iron Horse asked.

"Not a note," Emilio confirmed as he left the bridge.

He was doing nearly all the translation work now, but Danny had the more difficult task. There were decades of transmissions relayed from Rakhat to the Magellan to Earth, samples of which were routed back to the Bruno; those had to be reconciled with what the Bruno had intercepted from the Magellan while in transit and what they could hear directly now. Emilio’s mind went white amid the tangle of time sequences, but Danny seemed able to cope with it. There were big shifts in content signaled by vocabulary that Emilio had never heard and could only guess at—and, of course, they were only getting scraps and partials. Even so, for a time the samples had featured a heartening mixture of languages, song and news, and he had begun to think that perhaps something really had changed for the better.

He didn’t know what to make of the absence of K’San now, any more than he understood what the acceptance of agriculture implied, so he left Joseba and Danny’s growing argument about industrial development behind, and headed to the galley for coffee. He was pouring it when, behind him, John cleared his throat in warning.

"Thanks," Emilio said, glancing over his shoulder. "It’s not as bad as it used to be, John."

"Yeah. I’ve noticed that. But I’d rather not startle you if I can help it." John didn’t come into the cramped room, but stood in the doorway. "No response to the hails, I guess. You’d have mentioned it, right?"

"Of course." Emilio turned around, holding the cup with both hands. When he spoke next, it was in Sean’s voice. "The fine thing about ex-pectin’ the worst is, when it happens, y’have the satisfaction of bein’ right."

"She might not be listening, you know," John said. "I mean, she’s not expecting visitors, right? She could still be alive."

"It’s possible." Maybe her computer tablet had deteriorated. Or it might have been lost or stolen. Or she might have simply given up using it. Face it, Emilio told himself. She’s dead. "The odds against Sofia’s survival were pretty bad," he said aloud, carrying his coffee out to the table, where he sank into a chair.

John followed and sat across from him. "She’d have been over seventy by now, I figure."

Emilio nodded. "Which is about thirty years younger than I feel." He yawned again and rubbed his eyes against his shoulders. "Jesus, I’m tired. This was a long way to come just to listen to crop reports."

"It’s strange, isn’t it," John said. "We might not have come the first time if we’d heard that stuff instead of the music."

Emilio slid down until his head rested against the chair’s back and his chin rested on his chest. "Nah, we’d have come," he said, smiling at John’s unconscious use of the Jesuit "we." "I probably would have talked myself into believing that the shipping schedules were a litany of the saints." Emilio rolled his eyes. "Religion—the wishful thinking of an ape that talks! You know what I think?" he asked rhetorically, trying to distract himself from yet another death. "Random shit happens, and we turn it into stories and call it sacred scripture—"

John was very still. Emilio glanced up and saw his face. "Oh, God. I’m sorry," he said, sitting up wearily. "Emilio Sandoz, the human toxin! Don’t listen to me, John. I’m just tired and foul-tempered and—"

"I know," John said, taking a deep breath. "And I am willing to concede that you’ve got a black belt in pain and suffering, okay? But you’re not the only one who’s tired, and you’re not the only one who’s foul-tempered, and you’re not the only one who wanted Sofia to be alive! Try remembering that."

"John, listen! I’m sorry, okay?" Emilio called as Candotti left the room. "Christ," he whispered bleakly, alone in the commons. Elbows on the table, braced hands on either side of his cup, he stared down into the mug. What year is it? he wondered irrelevantly. How the hell old am I now? Forty-eight, maybe? Ninety-eight? Two hundred? After a while he realized that he could see his own reflection in the black, still surface of the coffee: a thin face etched by bad years, the evidence of their passing pain. Nothing he could say would shake John’s faith—he knew that, but he slumped back in the chair, cringing anyway. "Nice play, ace," he sighed.

Hating himself, and John, and Sofia, and everyone else he could think of, he went back to work mentally, to escape. It came to him that he should probably give up listening directly to the monitored radio signals— just scan for changes in language at a higher playback speed. Why didn’t I think of that before? he wondered. Not exactly operating at peak efficiency…

A moment later, the drop of his head woke him, and he roused himself, opening his eyes and seeing the coffee mug in front of him on the table. His arms felt leaden, too heavy to reach for it. I’m way past caffeine anyway, he thought, sitting up a little. Time for some of Carlo’s magic pills.

This wasn’t the first time he’d forced himself to live this way; he’d discovered long ago that he could function fairly well on three or four hours of sleep a night. He felt like hell all the time, but that was nothing new. You ignore it, he told himself. You get used to the way your eyes burn, the constant dull headache. It isn’t that you forget the tiredness or the fear or the grief or the anger, he observed, or that anything is better or easier. But the fact is, you can work in spite of it. You just stay on your feet, keep moving…

Because if you sit down for a moment, he thought, waking again, if you let yourself rest…. Well, you don’t. You keep working, because the alternative is to enter the city of the dead, the necropolis inside your head. So many dead…

… he was trying to straighten them, to lay the corpses out. It was night, but there was moonlight from every direction, and the bodies were almost beautiful. Anne’s hair, silver in the lunar glow. The ebony limbs of a Dodoth boy’s small sister—delicate and fragile—her perfect little skeleton revealed and lovely, but so sad, so sad…. Except that her suffering was over, and she was with God.

That was the worst, he knew in his dream. If God is the enemy, then even the dead are in danger. All the ones you loved might be with Him, and He was not to be trusted, not to be loved. "All that lives dies," Supaari was telling him. "It would be a waste not to eat them." But the city was burning again, the smell of charred meat was everywhere and it wasn’t moonlight, it was fire and there were Jana’ata everywhere and they were all dead, all dead, so many dead—

Someone was shaking him. He woke with a gasp, the stench still in his nostrils. "What? What is it?" He sat up, disoriented, terror still alive in him. "What! Shit! I wasn’t dreaming!" he lied, not even knowing why. "Is there—"

"Emilio! Wake up!" John Candotti stood above him grinning, face lit up like a Halloween pumpkin’s. "Ask me what’s new!"

"Oh, Christ, John," Emilio moaned, falling back against the chair. "Jesus! Don’t fuck with me—"

"She’s alive," John said. Emilio stared at him. "Sofia. Frans finally raised her on the radio about ten minutes ago—"

Sandoz was up and moving, pushing past John and headed for the bridge. "Wait, wait, wait!" John cried, grabbing his arm as Emilio went by. "Relax! She’s broken the connection. It’s okay!" he said, his face shining, their brief estrangement forgotten. "We told her you were asleep. She laughed and said, ’Typical!’ She said that she’s been waiting for almost forty years to hear from you and she can wait a few more hours, so we shouldn’t wake you up. But I knew you’d kill me if I didn’t, so I did."

"She’s all right, then?" Emilio asked.

"Evidently. She sounds fine."

Emilio sagged back against a bulkhead for a moment, eyes closed. Then he headed for the radio, leaving John Candotti smiling beatifically in his wake.

BY THE TIME SANDOZ GOT TO THE BRIDGE, EVERYONE WAS CROWDED around the entry as Frans put through the connection a second time.

"What language is she speaking?" Emilio asked.

"English, mostly," Frans reported and got ponderously out of the way, ceding the console to Sandoz. "Some Ruanja."

"Sandoz?" he heard as he sat. The sound of her voice jolted through him: lower and grainier than he remembered, but beautiful.

"Mendes!" he cried.

"Sandoz!" she said again, her voice breaking on his name. "I thought— I never—"

Dammed emotion crashed through barriers they had both believed insuperable until that moment, but the sobbing was soon leavened with laughter and chagrined apologies and finally with what was clearly joy, and they began to argue, as though no time had gone by, over who had started crying first. "Anyway," Emilio said, deciding to let her win, "what the hell are you doing alive! I said Kaddish for you!"

"Well, I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid you wasted a prayer for the dead—"

"It didn’t count anyway," he said dismissively. "No minyan."

"Minyan—don’t tell me you speak Aramaic now, too! What’s the count?"

"I’m up to seventeen, I think. I’ve picked up some Euskara, and I’ve learned how to be rude to Afrikaners." There was some static, but not much. Not too much for him to feel as though they were somehow, madly, just two old friends, talking on the phone. "But no Aramaic, I’m afraid. I just memorized the prayer."

"Cheater!" she said, with the familiar husky laugh now free of tears. He closed his eyes and tried not to thank God that her laugh had not changed. "So, Quixote," she was saying, "have you come to rescue me?"

"Of course not," he replied indignantly, astounded at how well she sounded. How elated…. "I just stopped by for a coffee. Why? Do you need rescuing?"