Children of God

27 Great Southern Forest 2061, Earth-Relative

"— WAS RIPE TWO NIGHTS AGO— " — PON RIVER. BUT SOMEONE thinks — " " — no market anymore for—" " — stern campaign is undersupplied and if —" ("Uunnhh.") " — omeone is hungry! Who ha—" " — rakar fields are north of the—" "Spaj, Panar! Someone heard—" " — oo early. It ripens at—" " — focus instead on consolidating the—" ("Uuuunnhh.") " — nitarl pickers at Kran port—" "Sipaj, Djalao, surely you are hungr—" "We found more by the riv — " " — paari will be there soon—" " ("Uuuuuuuuunnhh.") " — weavers can’t use so—" " — ut if we go after the rakari are—" " — someone that bundle of ree—" " — nala, get Isaac to stop—" " "Scratch just there. No, lower! Ye—" ("Uuuuuuuuuuuuurmhh—")

"Sipaj, Isaac! Stop!" Ha’anala shouted.

Isaac sank to the ground, dizzy but satisfied, Spinning could transform the incomprehensible into a uniform blur, and if he made his own sound, he could sometimes drown the racket out, but best of all was when one voice cut through all the rest and made everyone quiet.

"Sipaj, Isaac," Ha’anala said slowly, her voice pitched low. "Let’s go to the shelter." She waited the right amount of time before adding, "We’ll listen to music."

Ha’anala had clarity.

Isaac stood, clutching the computer tablet to his bare, bony chest, feeling its cool, flat, unblemished perfection. All around him: inconstancy, unpredictability, irrationality. His own body could not be trusted. Feet became more distant, arms wrapped further around the torso. Hair appeared in places where none had been before. Stones, smooth and faultless one time, might be covered by a leaf or flawed by the presence of a bug the next time he looked. Ears and eyes and mouths and limbs moved endlessly. Bodies sat and slept in different places. How could they expect him to understand what they were saying while he was still trying to figure out who they were? Plants sprang up and changed size and disappeared. Buds, flowers and withered things came and went. He could sit and stare for hours— days! But he couldn’t see this happen. He fell asleep and, in the morning, the old thing was gone and a new one was there and sometimes it acted the same way as before and sometimes it didn’t. There was no clarity.

The computer held a world that was precisely the same every morning, except for his mother’s daily message—he knew now that she made small changes because she showed him how to do this. He complained, so she put all her messages in a separate file and that was all right because it didn’t change anything else in his other directories; Isaac was the only one who changed those. The computer was better than spinning—

"Sipaj, Isaac. Come with me," Ha’anala said, each word distinct. She picked up his cloth—a silken blue square that could cover him from head to waist. His prayer shawl, Sofia called it with dispirited irony. "We’ll listen to music," Ha’anala repeated, tugging at his ankle with her foot.

Isaac jerked away and muttered, "Now someone has to start over."

Ha’anala lifted her chin and sat down to wait. Isaac couldn’t bear to have a thought interrupted and he had to begin at the beginning. If anyone disturbed him as he spoke, he would repeat the entire speech word by word until the end of what he’d meant to say. That’s why he spoke so little, she supposed. It was nearly impossible to complete a thought or a statement to his satisfaction when there were Runa around. Even at the risk of a fierno, the people couldn’t seem to remain silent long enough to suit him.

When Isaac was finished, he stood up straighter: his signal that he could move again. Ha’anala rolled to her feet and walked off toward the edge of the village clearing. Isaac tracked her tangentially, head up and tilted crazily, relying on peripheral vision, so he wouldn’t have to see her legs move. The people were already talking again. " — adio control of the—" " — pay, Hatna! Don’t make—" " — over two hundred bahli now!" " — new windbreaks for th—" " — is nice combined with k’ta — " — torm coming in—"

The conversation receded, only to be replaced by the patternless noise of the forest: squawking, buzzing, dripping. Shrieks and whistled arpeggios; snuffling, rustling. Nearly as bad as the village. The forest, at least, had no baffling jumble of talk and intonation, no half-grasped meaning shrouded by the next words.

Impasto, Isaac thought. This is worse than red. The village is an impasto of words. The forest is an impasto of sounds. There is no clarity!

He had found the word «impasto» in one of Marc Robichaux’s files. He looked it up in the dictionary and saw a naked hand with five fingers applying dabs of molten color in many layers, each one almost concealing the others beneath it. For a long time now, «clarity» had been his best word, but he liked «impasto» very much. He appreciated the nicety of its meaning, how neatly it fit his desire to label a perception. When he could focus on one word at a time, the meaning of things could come clear for him, like a high note rising out of a choir, and there was joy in that. But there was no clarity in the village and it was difficult to make the distractions go away long enough—

Ha’anala stopped and sat just outside his little rectangular shelter. Isaac, too, stopped and rethought his thought about impasto from beginning to end. Then he handed Ha’anala his tablet without meeting her eyes and said, "Be careful with it." He told her that every time, just as Sofia had told him that over and over, when she first let him have the computer. For a while, he thought becarefulwithit was the name of the computer. There were very few of these tablets in the world, he found out eventually, although the people had made other things they sloppily labeled computer even though such things were clearly different from his tablet and couldn’t be carried around; so this one was still precious, and not only to Isaac.

He waited until Ha’anala said, "Someone will be careful," and then he smiled, face lifted to the suns. She said that every time. Ha’anala had clarity. "The rule is: No Runa," he said loudly.

"Except Imantat," Ha’anala replied dutifully. Imantat was a relatively quiet Runao who kept the rainroof thatched. Ha’anala herself stayed out of Isaac’s line of sight as he went to work removing all the detritus that had blown or fallen or grown into his little fortress since his last visit. It took some time. When everything was properly squared up, all the curves and mess done away with, he held out his hand and the tablet appeared in it without anyone having to say anything.

It weighed less than before. Once it had taken all his thin-boned, six-year-old strength to heft it, but now it was so light he could grasp it easily with one hand. This gradual loss of weight was a sly betrayal that Isaac had not overlooked; he always inspected the tablet minutely, vigilant for other changes. Satisfied, he placed the computer tablet on a flat rock he’d brought here from the river, to keep the tablet out of the mud. Rain was no threat, but his mother had always told him to keep the tablet clean. With a special stick he kept for this purpose, he measured off the distance from each edge of the tablet to the shelter’s walls, so that it was perfectly centered.

He held out his hand and this time the blue cloth appeared. Pulling this over his head, he sat down on the western side of the shelter and draped the shawl over the tablet as well. Oblivious now to the slanting shafts of three-toned light filtering through the canopy’s breeze-driven movement, he began to relax. Then: the feel of the latch against his thumb, the soft snick of the mechanism, the lovely arc of hinged movement describing in a single sweep—acute to obtuse—the unchanging geometry of the cover. The simultaneous whirr of power-on, the brightening of the screen, the familiar keyboard with its serried ranks.

"Sipaj, Isaac," Ha’anala said. "What shall we listen to?"

She knew how long to wait before asking this question, and she always asked the same way, and he always chose the same piece: Supaari’s voice, the evening chant. First Isaac listened silently. Then again, singing harmony. Then again, with his own harmony and with Ha’anala joining in to double Supaari’s part. He followed the same pattern with the Sh’ma, Sofia’s voice solo, replayed so he could harmonize, and a third time with Ha’anala doubling Sofia.

Finally he could move on, choosing from the Magellan’s stored collection of songs, symphonies, cantatas and chants; the quartets and trios, the concertos and rondos; Gaelic jigs and Viennese waltzes; the lush four-part harmonies of a cappella Brooklyn doo-wop and the whining dissonance of Chinese opera; the modal and rhythmic shifts of an Arabic taqasim. Music entered Isaac’s heart directly and effortlessly. It slipped into his soul like a leaf settling into clear, still water, sinking silkily beneath the shining surface.

Having purged the noise and confusion of the village and the forest, Isaac’s mind became as orderly and precise as the keyboard. He could begin again to explore the Magellan’s vast on-line library, reading steadily with emotionless concentration every item found in the Magellan catalog on whatever subject had snared his interest.

"Clarity," he sighed, and began to study.

THE WHOLE VILLAGE WAS HAPPY TO SEE HA’ANALA LEAD ISAAC OFF when he became disruptive; they praised her for being so kind to him, for watching over him. "Ha’anala is a good father," the people said, smiling a little at that. Even Sofia was grateful. But it was no sacrifice to accompany Isaac to this refuge, for if her brother craved clarity, Ha’anala was starved for privacy. It amounted to the same thing, she supposed.

For years, Isaac had mostly echoed others and even Sofia had come to believe that he was all but incapable of direct speech. Then one day, wearied by the village noise, feeling fragmented and exasperated herself, Ha’anala had simply acted on an impulse. She was younger than Isaac, but far stronger if not taller, so when he began to spin and hum, she simply grabbed his ankle and marched him off to a place in the forest where it was quiet. She had expected silence from him, or at worst some meaningless phrase repeated over and over until it meant even less. Only later did Ha’anala realize that her own exhausted, petulant silence had permitted Isaac to complete a thought and then to repeat it aloud. And such a thought!

"How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking?"

He said nothing more that day, but Ha’anala spent hours considering his words. A soul, she decided, was the most real part of a person, and to discover what is real requires privacy.

In the village, every act, every word, every decision or desire was examined and commented on and compared, debated, evaluated and reconsidered—participated in! How could she tell who she was, when everything she did acquired a council of 150 people? If she so much as hid her eyes behind her hands or clamped her ears shut for a moment, a solicitous Runao would approach and inquire, "Sipaj, Ha’anala, are you not well?" And then everyone would discuss her recent meals, her stools, the condition of her coat, whether her eyes were hurting her, and if that might be because there had lately been more sunlight and less rain than usual, and if that meant the dji’ll harvest would be late this year, and how would that affect the market for k’jip, which was always combined with dji’ll…

So Ha’anala thanked God that Isaac’s ability to tolerate the village commotion was even more limited than her own. She had never told Sofia about the things Isaac said during their times alone. This was a source of guilt. Ha’anala sometimes felt as though she had stolen something from Sofia, who wanted so much for Isaac to speak to her.

Once, when Ha’anala heard Isaac yawn underneath his head covering, and knew that he was done reading and could tolerate a question, she had asked, "Sipaj, Isaac, why do you not speak to our mother?"

"She wants too much," he said tonelessly. "She rips away the veil."

Isaac had twice typed a message on the tablet to Sofia. "Leave this alone," was the first. Their mother had wept at it: his only words to her a rebuff. But later, during the period of intense frustration and fear that occurred when he came to the end of some line of obsessive research, he had asked, "Will I run out of things to learn?" "No," Sofia had typed back. "Never." He seemed glad, but that single reassurance was all he wanted from her.

Ha’anala sighed, saddened by the memory, and settled back against a sun-warmed boulder, closing her eyes. Midday heat and boredom joined with an adolescent carnivore’s physiology to conspire against consciousness, but her drowsiness that day was compounded by Isaac’s latest craze. He had set himself the task of memorizing every base pair in human DNA, having assigned a musical note to represent each of the four bases—adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine. He would listen to the monotonous four-note sequences for hours.

"Sipaj, Isaac," she’d asked when this jag started, "what are you doing?"

"Remembering," he said, and this struck Ha’anala as unusually pointless, even for Isaac.

Even Sofia had become more distant in the past few years, often doing several things at once, listening to the Runa discussions while working through reports or preparing weather data for dissemination to the officers or coordinating the delivery of supplies to a salient. Over and over, Ha’anala tried to help, distressed by Sofia’s isolation, wanting to be her partner even while she resented her mother’s patent, unspoken needs. "It has nothing to do with you," Sofia would say, closing Ha’anala out as effectively as Isaac could. Sofia seemed to come fully alive only when she spoke of justice, but as the years went by, even that topic elicited silence. None of the people welcomed Ha’anala’s interest in the war, and her questions were adroitly deflected—

They are ashamed, Ha’anala realized. They wish me not to know, but I do. I will be the last of my kind. They have begun something that can end only one way. Sofia and Isaac might be right, she thought, drowsing. Stay distant, keep your heart hidden, don’t want what you can’t have…

She had been asleep for some time when she heard Isaac’s blaring, toneless voice announce, "This is worse than red. Someone is leaving."

"All right," she murmured, without really rousing. "Someone will meet you back at the village."

"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."