Children of God

2 Trucha Sai, Rakhat 2042, Earth-Relative

SOFIA MENDES HAD KNOWN FROM THE VERY START THAT THE MEMBERS of the Jesuit mission to Rakhat would be an endangered species on that planet.

The Stella Maris had begun with a crew of eight. Alan Pace died within weeks of landfall, and then they were seven. D. W. Yarbrough, the Jesuit superior, became ill a few months later and never recovered, although he survived an additional eighteen months, in declining health. Understandably, having no research facilities and no colleagues, the physician Anne Edwards was never able to understand either illness, although her care undoubtedly prolonged D.W.’s life. Later, Anne herself was killed, along with D.W., and their deaths were a staggering blow to the tiny band they left behind.

In the face of misfortune, the Jesuit party had rallied repeatedly. When a simple miscalculation in the aftermath of a serious accident resulted in the crew being marooned on Rakhat, they had adapted, establishing a garden to supply themselves with food, becoming part of the local economy by providing exotic trade goods. They were accepted by the villagers of Kashan, even to the point of being called by kinship terms by many families. And there were times of great joy, most notably Sofia’s own wedding to Jimmy Quinn, and the announcement that they were awaiting a birth—just before it all went wrong.

Like so many Jewish children, Sofia Mendes had grown up with nightmare images of Egyptian slavemasters, of Babylonians and Assyrians and Romans, of Cossacks and inquisitors, and the SS coming to kill; she had vanquished a child’s intense, impotent fear by imagining herself fighting back, repulsing would-be conquerors. So when the Jana’ata patrol had arrived at Kashan and burned the foreign garden and demanded that the VaKashani Runa bring their babies forward and then, systematically, began to kill the children, Sofia Mendes had acted without hesitation. "We are many. They are few," she called out to the VaKashani and lifted a Runa infant to breasts swollen with her own pregnancy.

"We," she said, and cast her fate with the Runa—with the untermenschen of Rakhat.

Her gesture, briefly, turned the tide; her own fall, under the bludgeoning sweep of a Jana’ata arm, stiffened the resistance. Then, believing that they could not win, Runa fathers fell over children to shield them with their bodies; Runa mothers sacrificed themselves to Jana’ata fury, absorbing the violence to save the rest. When it was over, there were scores of carcasses, heaped and bloody, most of which were quickly butchered.

When the patrol left, terror and the unprecedented exhilaration of momentary triumph made consensus impossible. The village of Kashan had fissioned, in violation of the most basic Runa strategies for survival: stay together; circle to protect the greatest number; act in concert. Close to panic, individuals searched for anyone who shared some identifiable emotion, forming small, less vulnerable clusters as quickly as possible. Those whose families had been killed added sinuous scented ribbons to their arms and necks, too stunned to react. Most did little more than hope life would return to normal, now that all the foreigners except Sofia were gone and most of the illegal babies dead. Their impulse was to hand Sofia over to the Jana’ata government as proof that Kashan was once again within the law. "Spend one, buy many," they cried.

"But Fia didn’t harm us! The djanada did this!" a girl named Djalao countered. Barely grown, she had no authority, but in the confusion, there were those so hungry for direction that they listened. "Warn as many other villages as possible. Tell them what happened in Kashan," Djalao told the runners in the aftermath of the massacre. "The djanada patrols are coming, but tell the people what Fia said: We are many. They are few."

Kanchay VaKashan was as confused as anyone, but it was his daughter Puska whom Sofia had saved, and he was grateful. So when a handful of men with surviving infants decided to wait until redlight and flee to the safety of the southern forest, he took Sofia as well.

Of their journey to sanctuary, Sofia herself remembered only the occasional thin keening of Runa infants; the swaying, fluid stride of Kanchay, who carried her on his back for days; the sounds of savannah changing to forest. At first, her face hurt so much she could not open her mouth, so Kanchay reduced food to a paste for her and mixed it with rainwater, drizzling this gruel through her clenched teeth. She took as much nourishment as she could that way. The child, she thought. The child needs it. Bled white, stupid with pain, she concentrated on her own baby, who was not yet lost to her like all the other people she had dared to love. She focused her life’s blood on her center, where the child still lived, and felt each vague fetal movement as fear, each strong kick as hope.

She slept heavily in the beginning and even later dozed a great deal, warmed by three suns’ light filtering through the forest canopy. When awake, she lay still, listening to the rhythmic, rasping slide of long, tough leaves the shape of samurai swords—bent and woven, bent and woven— as the Runa settled into a clearing made efficiently beautiful with sleeping platforms and windscreens. Nearby she heard the splash of creek water tumbling over smooth stones. Above, the booming groans of w’ralia trunks bending in the breeze. Everywhere, the soft, swooping vowels of Ruanja, the constant hum of Runa fathers loving babies who had not been meant to live.

When she was stronger, she asked where she was. "Trucha Sai," she was told. Forget Us. "The Runa come to Trucha Sai when the djanada smell too much blood," Kanchay explained, speaking simply as though to a child. "After a while, they forget. We-and-you-also will wait in the forest until then."

It was more than an explanation, she understood. Kanchay had chosen his words with intent. "There are two forms of first person plural," Emilio Sandoz had once told the other members of the Stella Maris party. "One is exclusive of the person addressed, yes? It means we-but-not-you. The other is we-and-you-also. If a Runao uses the inclusive we, you may be sure it is significant and you may rejoice in a friendship."

From all over the southern provinces of Inbrokar, Runa refugees joined the VaKashani in Trucha Sai. Each man carried a baby, each baby born to a Runa couple whose diets had been supplemented with plentiful food grown in gardens like that of the foreigners—couples who had come into season without Jana’ata supervision, who had mated without Jana’ata permission, who had circumvented Jana’ata stewardship with unthinking cheer, unintentional defiance. The Trucha Sai settlement slowly filled with men whose backs were raked with long, tripled, half-healed scars, gaily pink and waxy, that sliced through dense, buff-colored coats.

"Sipaj, Kanchay. It must have hurt you to carry this one here," Sofia had said one day, looking at those scars and remembering the journey to the forest. "Someone thanks you."

The Runao’s ears dropped abruptly. "Sipaj, Fia! Someone’s child lives because of you."

That’s something, she’d thought bleakly, lying back again and listening to the forest symphony of calls and shrieks and rustling leaves dripping with misty rain. The Talmud taught that to save a single life is to save the whole world, in time. Maybe, she thought. Who knows?

NOW, A MONTH AFTER THE MASSACRE THAT HAD KILLED HALF THE RUNA village of Kashan, Sofia Mendes believed herself the last of her kind on Rakhat, the sole survivor of the Jesuit mission. Mistaking bloodless lethargy for calm, she believed as well that she felt no grief. With practice, she told herself, she had come to accept that tears were no remedy for death.

Her life had been blessedly unburdened by happiness. When some period of fleeting contentment ended, Sofia Mendes did not register it as outrageous, but merely noted a return to life’s normal condition. So, as the first weeks after the massacre passed, she simply counted herself lucky to be among others who did not weep and wail for the dead.

"Rain falls on everyone; lightning strikes some," her friend Kanchay observed. "What cannot be changed is best forgotten," he advised, not with callousness, but with a certain quality of practical resignation that Sofia shared with the Runa villagers of Rakhat. "God made the world and He saw that it was good," Sofia’s father had always told her when she complained of some injustice during her brief childhood. "Not fair. Not happy. Not perfect, Sofia. Good."

Good for whom? she had often wondered, first with juvenile petulance and later with the weariness of a woman of fourteen, working the streets of Istanbul in the midst of an incomprehensible civil war.

She had almost never cried. Child to woman, Sofia Mendes had never gotten anything by crying except a headache. From the time she was able to talk, her parents dismissed tears as the cowardly tactic of the weak-minded and schooled her in the Sephardic tradition of clear argument; she got her way not by sniveling, but by defending her position as logically and persuasively as she could, within the limits of her neurological development. When, barely pubescent and already hardened by the realities of urban combat, she had stood over her mother’s mortar-mangled corpse, she was too shocked to cry. Neither did she cry for the father who simply failed to come home one day or ever again: there was no particular time to pass from anxiety to mourning. Nor did she sympathize with the other destitute young whores when they cried. She held herself together and did not spoil her looks with a puffy, blotched face, so she ate more regularly than the others and was strong enough to jam a knife between ribs if a client tried to cheat or kill her. She sold her body, and when the opportunity eventually presented itself, she sold her mind—for a much better price. She survived, and got out of Istanbul alive with her dignity intact, because she would not yield to emotion.

She might not have mourned at all, had it not been for a nightmare in her seventh month of pregnancy, when she dreamed that her baby had been born with blood pouring from its eyes. Waking horrified to the solid heaviness within her, she wept first with relief, realizing that she was still pregnant and a baby’s eyes could not bleed that way. But the dike had crumbled, and she was at long last engulfed by an oceanic sadnesss. Drowning in a sea of loss, she wrapped her arms around her taut, round belly, and wept and wept, with no words, no logic, no intelligence to shield her, and understood that it was this—this terror, this pain—that she had fled from all her life, and with good reason.

As unfamiliar as she was with tears, it was a terrible thing to cry now, and feel only one side of her face wet—and with that realization, grief became hysteria. Alarmed by her sobbing, Kanchay asked anxiously, "Sipaj, Fia, have you dreamt of the ones who are gone?" But she could not answer or even lift her chin in assent, so Kanchay and his cousin Tinbar swayed and held her, and looked to the sky for the storm that would surely come now that someone had made a fierno. Others came to her as well, asking after her dead and donating ribbons for her arms, as she cried.

In the end, her own exhaustion saved her when no one else could. Never again, she vowed as she fell asleep, emptied of emotion at last. I will never let this happen to me again. Love is a debt, she thought. When the bill comes, you pay in grief.

The baby kicked, as if in protest.

SHE WOKE IN KANCHAY’S EMBRACE WITH TINBAR’S TAIL CURLED OVER her legs. Sweating, her face asymmetrically swollen, she disentangled herself from the others and rose awkwardly, lumbering big-bellied toward the creek with a dark chaninchay, newly made from the broad, shallow shell of a forest pigar. She stood for a few moments, then lowered herself carefully, reaching out into the stream to fill the bowl. Kneeling, she dipped her hands over and over into the cool pure water, sluicing it over her face. Then, filling the bowl once more, she waited for the black water to still before using it as a mirror.

I am not Runa! she thought, amazed.

This strange loss of self-image had happened to her before; several months into her first overseas AI contract in Kyoto, she was startled each morning to look into a bathroom mirror and discover that she was not Japanese like everyone around her. Now, here, her own human face seemed naked; her dark, snarled hair bizarre; her ears small and inadequate; her single-irised eye too simple and frighteningly direct. Only after she had come to grips with all this did the rest sink in: the slanting, three-tracked scar that sliced from forehead to jaw. The blind, cratered… place.

"Someone’s head hurts," she told Kanchay, who had followed her to the creek and sat down beside her.

"Like Meelo," said Kanchay, who had witnessed Emilio Sandoz’s migraines and considered headache a normal foreign response to grief. He settled back onto a thick-muscled, tapering tail and made a tripod with his upraised legs. "Sipaj, Fia, come and sit," he suggested, and she held out her hand so he could steady her as she moved to him.

He began to tidy her hair, combing through it section by section with his fingers, untangling knots with a Runao’s sensitive touch. She gave herself up to this, and listened to the forest grow quiet in the midday heat. Occupying her own hands as little Askama always had while sitting in Emilio’s lap, Sofia picked up the ends of three ribbons tied around her arm and began to plait them. Askama had often braided ribbons into Anne Edwards’s hair and Sofia’s, but none of the foreigners had ever been offered body ribbons to wear. "Probably because we wear clothes," Anne had thought, but it was just a guess.

"Sipaj, Kanchay, someone wonders about the ribbons," Sofia said, looking up at him, turning her head to see from her left side. She was a little shortsighted in that eye. A pity, she thought, that the Jana’ata who’d half-blinded her hadn’t been right-handed—he’d have taken the bad eye instead.

"We gave you this one for Dee, and this is for Ha’an," Kanchay told her, lifting the ribbons, one by one, his breath perfumed with the heathery scent of the njotao greens that formed the bulk of their diet this week. "These, for Djordj and for Djimi. These, for Meelo and Marc."

Her throat closed as she listened to the names, but she was done with crying. It came back to her then that Askama had tried to tie two ribbons on Emilio after D.W. and Anne were killed, but he had been so sick. "Not for beauty, then," Sofia asked, "but to remember the ones who are gone?"

Kanchay chuffed, the breathy laughter kindly. "Not to remember! To fool them! If ghosts come back, they’ll follow the scent, back into the air where they belong. Sipaj, Fia, if you dream of those ones again, you should tell someone," he warned her, for Kanchay VaKashan was a prudent man. Then he added, "Sometimes ribbons are just pretty. The djanada think they’re only decoration. Sometimes that’s true." He laughed again and confided, "The djanada are like ghosts. They can be fooled."

Anne would have followed up with questions about why ghosts come back, and when and how; Emilio and the other priests would have been delighted by the ideas of scent and spirit and congress with an unseen world. Sofia picked up the ribbons, running the satiny smoothness through her fingers. Anne’s ribbon was silvery white. Like her hair, perhaps? But no—George’s hair was also white, and his ribbon was bright red. Emilio’s was green, and she wondered why. Her husband Jimmy’s was a clear and lucent blue; she thought of his eyes and raised it to her face to breathe in its fragrance. It was like hay, grassy and astringent. Her breath caught, and she put the ribbon down. No, she thought. He’s gone. I will not cry again.

"Why, Kanchay?" she demanded then, finding anger preferable to pain. "Why did the djanada patrol burn the gardens and kill the babies?"

"Someone thinks the gardens were wrong. The people are meant to walk to their food. It was wrong to bring the food home. The djanada know when it’s the right time for us to have babies. Someone thinks the people were confused and had the babies at the wrong time."

It was rude to argue, but she was hot and tired, and irritated by the way he talked down to her because she was the size of a Runa eight-year-old. "Sipaj, Kanchay—what gives the Jana’ata the right to say who can have babies and when?"

"The law," he said, as though that answered her question. Then, warming to his topic, he told her, "Sometimes the wrong baby can get into a woman. Sometimes the baby should have been a cranil, for example. In the old times, the people would take that kind of little one to the river and call out to the cranils, Here is one of your children born to us by mistake. We’d hold the baby under the water, where the cranils live. It was hard." He was silent for a long time, concentrating on a knot in her hair, gently teasing it apart, strand by strand. "Now when the wrong child comes to us by mistake, the djanada do the hard things. And when the djanada say, This is a good child, then we know all will be well with it. A mother can travel again. A father’s heart can be quiet."

"Sipaj, Kanchay, what do you tell your children? About giving themselves up to the Jana’ata to be eaten?"

His hands paused in their work and he gently brought her head to rest against his chest, his voice falling into the soft murmur of lullaby. "We tell them, In the old times, the people were alone in all the world. We traveled anywhere we liked without any danger, but we were lonely. When the djanada came, we were glad to see them and asked them, Have you eaten? They said, We’re starving! So, we offered them food—you must always feed travelers, you know. But the djanada couldn’t eat properly and they wouldn’t take the food we offered. So the people talked and talked about what to do—it’s wicked to let guests go hungry. While we were talking, the djanada began to eat the children. Our elders said, They’re travelers, they’re guests—we have to feed them, but we’ll make rules. You must not eat just anyone, we told the djanada. You must eat only the old people who are no good anymore. That’s how we tamed the djanada. Now all the good children are safe and only old, tired, sick people are taken away."

Sofia twisted around to look up at him. "Someone thinks: this is a pretty story for children, so they will sleep well and not make fiernos when the cullers come." He lifted his chin and began again to comb out her hair. "Sipaj, Kanchay, someone is small, but not a child who must be shielded from truth. The djanada kill the very old and the sick and the imperfect. Do they also kill the ones who make trouble?" she demanded. "Sipaj, Kanchay, why do you let them? What gives them the right?"

His hands stilled momentarily as he said with prosaic acceptance, "If we refuse to go with the cullers when it’s time, others must take our places." Before she could reply, he reached down to stroke her belly as he would have his own wife’s. "Sipaj, Fia, surely this baby is ripe by now!"

The subject was officially changed. "No," she said, "not yet. Perhaps sixty nights more."

"So long! Someone thinks you will pop like a datinsa pod."

"Sipaj, Kanchay," she said, with a nervous laugh, "maybe so."

Fear and hope, fear and hope, fear and hope, circling endlessly. Why am I so afraid? I am Mendes, she thought. Nothing is beyond me.

But she had also been—however briefly—joyously Quinn: happy for a single summer of nights and days, the unlikely wife of an absurdly tall and comically homely and wondrously loving Irish Catholic astronomer. And now, Jimmy was dead, killed by the djanada—

Feeling Kanchay’s fingers working through her hair once more, she leaned back against him and looked across the clearing to the others of his kind: talking, cooking, laughing, tending babies. It could be worse, she thought then, remembering Jimmy’s habitual good-natured response to crisis, and gasping at his baby’s kick. I am Sofia Mendes Quinn, and things could be worse.