Children of God

15 Naples July 2061

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."

"That’ll do for a start."

Giuliani sat on one of the garden benches and gazed upward, picking out the few bright constellations visible at twilight. "Ignatius once said that his greatest consolation was to contemplate the night sky and its stars," he said. "Since Galileo, space has been the domain of telescopes and of prayer…. Of course, Loyola and Galileo didn’t have to deal with light pollution from Naples. The sky must be astonishing on Rakhat. Perhaps the Jana’ata are right not to permit the artificial extension of daylight." He looked at Danny. "You wish to ask me how, in the face of that man’s joy, can the mission go forward as planned?"

"It is dishonest," Danny said with clipped exactitude. "It is arrogant. It is cruel."

"The Holy Father—"

"Stop hiding behind his skirts," Danny sneered.

"You are scrupulous," Giuliani observed. "There is a way out, Father Iron Horse—"

"And cede the Society to your kind?"

"Ah. My kind," the Father General said, almost smiling. The evening seemed oddly still. In his childhood, Vince Giuliani had loved the sound of swamp peepers, trilling in every low spot, filling the summer dusk with wordless song. Here in Italy, he heard only the treble rasp of crickets, and the night seemed poorer for it. "You are young, Father Iron Horse, and you have a young man’s vices. Certainty. Shortsightedness. Contempt for pragmatism." He leaned back, hands clasped and untrembling in his lap. "I only wish that I could live long enough to see what kind you turn out to be."

"That could be arranged. Would you care to exchange positions? Spend a year in transit to Rakhat. When you get back, I’ll be eighty."

"The proposal has a certain appeal, I assure you. Unfortunately, it is not an option. We are each alone before God, and cannot exchange lives. Shall I hang one of those ubiquitous Italian signs on the Gesù?" Giuliani offered, brows climbing. His light ironic tone was infuriating, and he knew it. "Chiuso per restauro: closed, until Daniel Iron Horse returns, for restoration."

"I hope to Christ that your job is harder than it looks, old man," Daniel Iron Horse hissed, before he turned on his heel to walk away. "Otherwise, there’s no excuse for you."

"It is. It is very hard," Vincenzo Giuliani said with a sudden ferocity that stopped Danny in his tracks and forced him to turn back. "Shall I confess to you, Father Iron Horse? I doubt. In my old age, I doubt." He stood and began to pace. "I am afraid that I have been a fool to live as I have lived and to believe as I have believed all these years. I am afraid that I have misunderstood everything. And do you know why? Because Emilio Sandoz is not an atheist. Danny, we have among us one of our own, whose life has been touched by God as mine has never been touched, and who believes that his soul has been laid waste in a spiritual rape—his sacrifice mocked, his devotion rejected, his love desecrated."

He stopped, coming to rest in front of the younger man, and spoke very softly. "I envied him once, Danny. Emilio Sandoz was everything I ever hoped to be as a priest, and then—this! I have tried to imagine how I would feel, were I Sandoz and had I experienced what he has." He looked away into the darkness and said, "Danny, I don’t know what to do with what happened to him—and all I had to do was listen to the story!"

And then he was moving again, the pacing an outward sign of the inward argument that had drowned out prayer and faith and peace for nearly a year. "In the darkness of my soul, I have wondered if God enjoys watching despair, the way voyeurs watch sex. That would explain a great deal of human history! My faith in the meaning of Jesus’s life and in Christian doctrine has been shaken to its core," he said, his voice betraying the tears that glistened now in the moonlight. "Danny, if I am to sustain my belief in a good and loving deity, in a God who is not arbitrary and capricious and vicious, I must believe that some higher purpose is served by all this. And I must believe that the greatest service I can do Emilio Sandoz is to make it possible for him to discover what that purpose may have been."

Giuliani stopped and, in the shadowed, shifting night, he searched the other man’s face for understanding, and knew that he had been heard, that his words had registered.

"Post hoc reasoning," Danny said, backing away. "Self-serving horse-shit. You’ve made up your mind and you’re trying to justify the unjustifiable."

"And for my penance?" Giuliani asked with a desolate amusement that mocked them both.

"Live, old man," Danny said. "Live with what you’re doing."

"Even Judas had a role in our salvation," Giuliani said, almost to himself, but then he spoke at last with the authority it was his duty to exercise. "It is my decision, Father Iron Horse, that the Society of Jesus will once again serve the papacy, as it was meant to—by its founder and by Our Lord. This tragedy of rupture will end. We will once again accept the authority of the Pope to send us on whatever mission he deems desirable for the good of souls. Once again, ’all our strength must be bent to the acquisition of that virtue we call obedience, due first to the Pope and next to the Superior of the Order—’»

" ’In everything that is not sin!’ " Danny cried.

"Yes. Precisely: in everything that is not sin," Vincenzo Giuliani agreed. "So I cannot and I will not order you to do what you find unacceptable, Danny. Your soul is your own—but others’ souls are at risk as well! Act in accordance with your conscience," he called as Danny strode away into the darkness. "But, Danny—remember the stakes!"

MOMENTS LATER, DANIEL IRON HORSE FOUND HIMSELF LOOKING UP AT the brightly lit dormer windows. He hesitated, half-turned, and then went back to the garage door and knocked. There were light, quick footsteps on the stairway and he heard the metallic snick of the hook being flicked out of its eye. Sandoz appeared and the two men stood silently for a time, adjusting their reactions, each having thought Gina might be on the other side of the door.

"Father Iron Horse," Emilio said at last, "you look like a man with something to confess." Danny blinked, startled. "I was a priest for a long time, Danny. I recognize the signs. Come upstairs."

Sandoz had been halfway to bed, but he put the braces back on and went to his cupboard for two glasses and a bottle of Ronrico, carefully pouring out a measure for each of them, his bioengineered dexterity now strangely graceful. He sat across the table from Iron Horse and inclined his head, willing to listen.

"I came to apologize," Danny told him. "For that crap I pulled on you last winter—when I said you might have brought back whatever Yarbrough died of. I knew that wasn’t so. I did it to see how you’d react. It was dishonest and arrogant and cruel. And I am ashamed."

Sandoz sat still. "Thank you," he said finally. "I accept your apology." He closed his hand around the glass and tossed the contents back. "That couldn’t have been easy to say," he observed, pouring himself another shot. "The end justifies the means, I suppose. You got me to pull myself together. I’m better off because of what you did."

"Do you believe that?" Danny asked with an odd intentness. "The end justifies the means?"

"Sometimes. It depends, obviously. How important is the end? How nasty are the means?"

Iron Horse sat hunched over his untouched drink, his elbows almost reaching both corners of his side of the table. "Sandoz," he asked after a little while, "is there anything that would persuade you to go back with us to Rakhat?"

Emilio snorted, and picked up his glass, taking a sip. "I honestly don’t think I could get drunk enough for that to seem like a good idea," he murmured, "but I suppose we could give it a try."

"Giuliani and the Pope both believe it’s God’s will that you go back," Danny persisted. "D. W. Yarbrough said that you were once wedded to God—"

"Nietzsche, of course, would argue that I am a widower," Emilio said crisply, cutting him off. "I consider that I am divorced. The separation was not amicable."

"Sandoz," Danny said carefully, "even Jesus thought that God had forsaken Him."

Emilio leaned back in his chair and stared now with the stony contempt of a boxer about to level an inadequate opponent. "You don’t want to try that with me," he advised, but Iron Horse would not drop his gaze. Sandoz shrugged: I gave fair warning. "It was all over for Jesus in three hours," he said softly, and Danny blinked. "I’m done with God, Danny. I want no more part of Him. If hell is the absence of God, then I shall be content in hell."

"My brother Walter’s daughter drowned," Danny said, reaching for the glass of rum and putting it at arm’s length. "Four years old. About six months after the funeral, Walt filed for divorce. It wasn’t my sister-in-law’s fault, but Walt needed someone to blame. He spent the next ten years trying to drink himself to death, and finally managed it. Rolled his car one night." Having made his point, he said, with no little compassion, "You must be very lonely."

"I was," Sandoz said. "Not anymore."

"Change your mind," Danny implored, leaning forward. "Please. Come with us."

Incredulous, Emilio gasped a laugh. "Danny, I’m getting married in twenty-five days!" He glanced at a clock. "And thirteen hours. And eleven minutes. But who’s counting, right?" His smile faded as he looked at Iron Horse; it was strangely affecting to see that big and unemotional man on the verge of tears. "Why is it so important to you?" Emilio asked. "Are you afraid? Danny, you and the others have so much more to go on than we had! Yes, you’ll make mistakes, but at least they won’t be the same ones we made." Iron Horse looked away, his eyes glittering. "Danny," Emilio ventured, "is there something else…?"

"Yes. No—. I don’t know," Danny said finally. "I–I need to think about this…. But—. Just don’t trust any of the Giulianis, Sandoz."

Confused, Emilio frowned. Danny seemed to think he was revealing some great secret, but everybody knew that the Father General’s family was Camorra. At a loss, and looking for a way out, Emilio could only change the subject. "Listen, John was asking me about some Ruanja syntax—I put together some notes for him this evening, but I know I was working on something similar just before—before the massacre. I told Giuliani to dump everything we sent back to my system, but I can’t find that file. Is there any chance that some of my stuff is stored separately?"

Danny seemed distracted, but dragged himself back to what Sandoz was saying. "It was at the end of the transmissions?"

"Yes. The last thing I relayed to the ship."

Danny shrugged. "Might still be in the queue waiting to be sent."

"What? Still on the ship? Why wouldn’t it have been transmitted?"

"The data went out in packets. The onboard computers were programmed to store your reports and send them in groups. If the Rakhati suns or Sol were positioned badly, the system would just queue everything until the transmissions could get through without being degraded by stellar interference."

"News to me. I thought everything went out as we logged it," Sandoz said, surprised. He’d paid almost no attention to technical considerations like that. "So it just sat in memory for over a year, until the Magellan party sent me back? Would there have been that much time between packets?"

"Maybe. I don’t know too much about the celestial mechanics involved myself. There were four stars the system had to work around. Wait—the people from the Magellan boarded the Stella Maris, didn’t they? Maybe when they were accessing the ship’s records, they disabled the transmission code." The more he thought about it, the likelier it seemed. "The last packet is probably still sitting in memory. I can pull it out for you if you want."

"It can wait until morning."

"No. You’ve got me curious now," Danny said, glad of something concrete to do. "It should only take a few minutes. I don’t know why no one checked earlier."

Together, the two men moved to the wall of photonics and Iron Horse worked his way into the Stella Maris library storage system. "Sure enough, ace," he said minutes later. "Look. It’s still coded and compressed." He reset the system to expand the data and they waited.

"Wow. There’s a lot of it," Sandoz remarked, watching the screen. "Some more stuff by Marc. Joseba will be pleased. Yes! There’s mine. I knew I’d done that work already." He stood silently a while longer, looking over Danny’s shoulder. "There’s something for you," Sandoz said as a new file scrolled by. "Sofia was working on trade networks…" His voice trailed off. "Wait. Wait, wait, wait. Go back! Can you stop it?"

"No. It’s going to decompress all of it…. There. It’s done," Iron Horse said.

Sandoz had spun away, breathing hard. "Not for the Society. Not for the Church," he whispered. "No. No. No. I saw her dead."

Danny twisted in his chair. "What are you talking about, ace?"

"Get out of the way," Sandoz said abruptly.

Danny vacated the desk chair and Sandoz sat down in front of the display. He seemed to settle himself, as though to take a blow, and then carefully spoke the ID and date stamp again, bringing up the last set of files held in the queue, which were logged, impossibly, months after his own final transmission, now some eighteen years in the past on Rakhat.

"Sandoz, what? What did you see? I don’t understand—" Frightened by the other man’s pallor, Danny leaned over Sandoz’s shoulder and looked at the file on the display. "Oh, my God," he said blankly.

During the past months, as he had studied the mission reports and the scientific papers sent back by the Stella Maris party, Daniel Iron Horse had sometimes, with a strange feeling of unfocused guilt, called up images of the artificial-intelligence analyst Sofia Mendes: digitized and radio-transmitted watercolors painted by Father Marc Robichaux, the naturalist on the first mission. The earliest of these was done on Rakhat, during Sofia’s wedding to the astronomer Jimmy Quinn; others were painted later, as pregnancy softened the classical lines of her face. When Danny had first seen these portraits, he thought that Robichaux must have idealized her, for Sofia Mendes was as beautiful as a Byzantine Annunciation in the last painting, done only days before her death in the Kashan massacre. But when, for comparison, Danny had pulled up one of the few archived photos of Sofia, he could only acknowledge the scientific accuracy of Robichaux’s draftsmanship. Brains and beauty and guts, everyone agreed. An extraordinary woman…

"Oh, my God," Daniel Iron Horse repeated, staring at the screen.

"Not even for her," Sandoz whispered, trembling. "I won’t go back."