Children of God

35 Giordano Bruno October 2078, Earth-Relative

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?"

"No, I most certainly do not. But I could really use some coffee," she admitted. "It’s been a long time between buzzes."

"Well, we brought plenty, but I’m afraid it’s decaf." There was an appalled silence. "Sorry," he said unhappily. "Nobody cleared the cargo manifest with me." The silence was now broken by little horrified noises. "It was a clerical error," he told her with earnest distress. "I’m really sorry. I’ll have everyone involved executed. We’ll put their heads on pointy sticks—"

She started to laugh. "Oh, Sandoz, I think I’ve always loved you."

"No, you didn’t," he said huffily. "You hated me on sight."

"Did I? Well, I must have been a fool. That was a joke about the decaf, wasn’t it?" she asked warily.

"Would I joke about a thing like that?"

"Only if you thought I’d fall for it." There was a small space, and when she spoke again, it was with the kind of calm dignity that he had always admired in her. "I am glad I’ve lived to speak to you again. Everything is different. The Runa are free now. You were right, Sandoz. You were right all along. God meant for us to come here."

Behind him, there were the sounds of the others reacting to what she had said, and he felt John grip his shoulders and whisper fiercely, "Did you hear that, you shithead? Did you hear it?" But his own vision seemed to lose focus, and he found that he couldn’t breathe well, and lost the thread of what she was saying until he heard his name again. "And Isaac?" he asked.

The silence was so abrupt and went so long, he twisted in the seat to look at Frans. "Connection’s still open," Vanderhelst told him quietly.

"Sofia?" he said. "The last we heard, Isaac was very young. I didn’t mean to—"

"He left me a long time ago. Isaac was—. He went off on his own years ago. Ha’anala followed him and we had hoped—. But neither of them ever came back. We tried and tried to find them, but the war went on so long—"

"War?" Danny asked, but Sandoz was saying, "It’s all right. It’s all right, Sofia. Whatever happened—"

"No one expected it to go on so long! Ha’anala was—. Oh, Sandoz, it’s too complicated. When can you come down? I’ll explain everything when you get to Galatna—"

It felt like a blow to the stomach. "Galatna?" he asked almost inaudibly.

"Sandoz, are you there? Oh, my God," she said, realizing. "I–I know what happened to you here. But everything is different! Hlavin Kitheri is dead. They’ve both—. Kitheri’s been dead for… years," she said, voice trailing away. But then she spoke firmly. "The palace is a museum now. I live here, too—just another piece of history!"

She stopped, and he tried to think, but nothing would come. "Sandoz?" he heard her say. "Don’t be afraid. There are no djanada south of the Garnu mountains. We-and-you-also are safe here. Truly. Sandoz, are you there?"

"Yes," he said, getting a grip. "I’m here."

"How soon can you come down? How many of you are there?"

Brows up, he turned to Carlo and asked, "A week perhaps?" Carlo nodded. "A week, Sofia." He cleared his throat, tried to put more strength behind his voice. "We are eight here, but the ship’s pilot will stay on board. There’ll be four Jesuits and two… businessmen. And me."

She missed the implication. "You’ll have to land southeast of Inbrokar City to get beyond the gardens. Have you seen them? We call them robichauxs! There are competitions for the most beautiful and productive designs, but there are no prizes, so no one gets porai. I’ll send an escort for you. It’s safe, but I don’t get around too well anymore and finding your way through the garden mazes is impossible unless you’re a Runao—. Listen to me! I’ve lived with the Runa too long! Sipaj, Meelo! Did someone always chatter like this?" she asked, laughing. She paused, took a breath, slowed down. "Emilio, don’t expect who I was. I’m an old woman now. I’m a ruin—"

"Aren’t we all?" he said, getting his bearings. "And if you are a ruin," he said softly, "you will be a splendid one—Mendes, you will be the Parthenon! All that matters is that you are alive and safe and well."

He found that he meant it. At that moment, it was truly all that mattered.