Children of God

4 Great Southern Forest, Rakhat 2042, Earth-Relative

SOFIA MENDES PULLED HERSELF TOGETHER DURING HER LAST MONTH of pregnancy, forcing the faces of the dead from her mind by concentrating on the unknown child within her. The turning point came several weeks after they arrived in Trucha Sai. "Someone thought: Fia is never without this," Kanchay said, handing a computer tablet to her one morning. "So someone brought it from Kashan."

Running her small hands over its smooth machined edges, feeling the well-known shape and heft, wiping off its photovoltaics, Sofia thanked Kanchay almost soundlessly and went off alone to sit against a downed w’ralia trunk, resting the tablet on her belly and drawn-up knees. After all the strangeness and fear, the confusion and sorrow, here was the ordinary, the familiar. Trembling, she called up the connect and gave a shouted gasp of relief when the Stella Maris library access appeared, patient and reliable as always.

She lost herself in the system, downloading data as she went. Childbirth, related terms: Childbirth at Home, Childbirth in Middle Age. Natural Childbirth. "My only option," she muttered. Then: "Underwater Childbirth!" she exclaimed aloud. Thoroughly mystified, she took a moment to pull the references up just to see what that could be about. Nonsense, she decided, and went on. Child Development—thousands of citations. She pulled out Infant Development—Normal, and, perhaps superstitiously, bypassed references on Autism, Developmental Disablement, and Failure to Thrive. Child-rearing—Maxims. Possibly useful, she decided, having no grandmotherly source of advice. Oh, Anne! Oh, Mama! she thought, but pushed them both away. Child-rearing— Religious Aspects—Jewish. Yes, she thought, and brought the Torah down as well. What will I do if it’s a boy? she wondered then, and decided she’d circumcise that problem if and when she came to it.

"There’s an angel behind every blade of grass whispering, Grow, darling, grow!" her mother told her when she was small and afraid of the dark. "Do you think God would take all that trouble for a blade of grass and not watch over you?"

Mama, I am a one-eyed pregnant Jewish widow, Sofia thought, and I am very far from home. If this constitutes being watched over by God, I’d be better off as a blade of grass. And yet…. A daughter, please, she prayed swiftly. A little girl. A small healthy girl.

But Sofia had never relied on God, who tended to be terse even when He was clearly on the job. Go to Pharaoh and free My people, He said, and left the logistics to Moses as a lesson in self-reliance. So she spent the next weeks reading and absorbing on-line books and articles, creating an AI obstetrician: synthesizing, laying out sequences, finding branch points, reducing as much as possible to "if (condition) then (action)" statements, wherever the action was feasible on Rakhat, among the Runa. She refined her explanations to simple sentences, graphic and plain; entered them in Ruanja so that she might look up her own or her baby’s distress and, without thinking, give instructions that might save them both. And in doing all this, she lost some of her fear, if not any of her hope.

THE CULLS WENT ON, ACROSS SOUTHERN INBROKAR—ANYWHERE THE gardens had been planted. Runa fathers in little groups of twos and threes continued to arrive with infants, bringing news as well. Once women from Kashan visited, led by the girl named Djalao, who was made much of by the men who’d heeded her warning that the djanada patrols were coming.

Aware now that Djalao VaKashan had saved her life and the lives of many others, Sofia took the girl aside to thank her during a brief lull in the murmur of Ruanja that filled the redlit evenings, when fathers gathered to talk children to sleep, arms over bellies, tails over legs, back against back. Ears high, Djalao accepted Sofia’s gratitude without embarrassment, and it was this as much as anything that prompted Sofia to take the conversation further.

"Sipaj, Djalao, why must the Runa go back to the villages at all? Why not simply walk away from the Jana’ata? Why not show your tails to them and live here!"

Djalao looked around the forest settlement, and it was only then that her ears dropped. Distressed by the sight of Runa living like animals, she told Sofia, "Our homes are back there. We can’t leave the villages and the cities. That’s where we live and trade. We—" She stopped and shook her head, as though there were a yuv’at buzzing in one ear. "Sipaj, Fia: we made the cities. To come here—for a time—is acceptable. To walk away from the art of our hands and the places of our hearts is not—"

"Even so, you could stop cooperating with the djanada," said Sofia. Startled by the idea, Djalao huffed at her, but Sofia did not give up. "Are they children that you should carry them? Sipaj, Djalao: the Jana’ata have no right to breed you, no right to say who has babies, who lives and who dies. They have no right to slaughter you and eat your bodies! Kanchay says it’s the law, but it’s only the law because you agree to it. Change the law!" Seeing the doubt—the slight, anxious swaying from side to side—Sofia whispered, "Djalao: you don’t need the djanada. They need you!"

The girl sat still, balanced and upright. "But what would the djanada eat?" she asked, ears cocked forward.

"Who cares? Let them eat piyanot!" Sofia cried, exasperated. "Rakhat is covered with animals that can be eaten by carnivores." She leaned forward and spoke with conviction and urgency, believing that at long last she had found someone who could see that the Runa need not collude in their own subjugation. "You are more than meat. You have the right to stand up and say, Never again! They have claws and custom on their side. You have numbers and—" Justice, she’d meant to say, but there was no word in Ruanja for justice, or for fairness, or equity. "You have the strength," Sofia said finally, "if you choose to use it. Sipaj, Djalao: you can make yourselves free of them."

Despite her youth and her species, Djalao VaKashan seemed not only able but willing to make up her own mind. Even so, when she spoke, her answer was merely, "Someone will consider your words."

It was a polite brush-off. Emilio Sandoz had always interpreted the formula "Someone will consider your words" to mean, "When pigs have wings, I’ll tell you about my grandmother sometime."

Sofia sighed, giving up. I tried, she thought. And who knows? Seeds may have been sown.

THE VAKASHANI VISITORS LEFT THE NEXT MORNING, AND LIFE IN Trucha Sai settled back into the routine of caring for babies, gathering food and preparing it, eating—always eating. It was a tranquil life, if not a challenging one, and Sofia blessed each uneventful day that passed, resisting panic as cramps came and went. Low and deep within her, they were not strong enough to be of consequence, she thought, but she held herself still and willed her womb to quiet.

The Runa, who found so little in the world to be amazed by, nonetheless found Sofia’s pregnancy remarkable for its duration and its effect on her. Bursting datinsa pods were mentioned once too often and, about four weeks before her due date, Sofia, whose back was aching and who was wretchedly uncomfortable in the steamy heat, proceeded at length to make it completely clear to everybody within a ten-square-kilometer area that she didn’t want to hear another word about anyone or anything popping open, thank you all very much. This was hardly out of her mouth when a roaring storm, with terrifying winds that bent trees nearly double, broke loose.

The rain came down so hard during the worst of the tempest, she was afraid she’d have to name her child Noah, and she could hardly have been wetter if she’d stood in the ocean. Her water must have broken sometime during the storm; there was no warning when the contractions started in earnest a few hours later. "It’s too soon," she cried to Kanchay and Tinbar and Sichu-Lan and a few others who crowded around her when she squatted, waiting for the contraction to let go.

"Maybe it will stop again," Kanchay offered, steadying her when the next wave came. But babies have their own agenda and their own logic, and this one was on its way, ready or not.

She had been through a great deal in her life, so the pain never overwhelmed her, but she was undersized and had not fully recovered from a nearly fatal injury only two months earlier. She paced a good deal of the time early in her labor because it made her more comfortable, but the walking wore her out; by sunrise the next day she was very, very tired and had stopped thinking about the baby. She just wanted to get through this, to be finished with it.

All the fathers had advice and opinions and observations and commentary. Before long, she found herself snarling at them to shut up and leave her alone. They didn’t; they were Runa, after all, and saw no reason to shun or abandon her. So they went on talking and kept her company, their long-fingered hands busy and beautiful, reweaving windbreaks and sections of thatch for roofing damaged in the storm.

By midday, exhausted, she gave up trying to control what was going on and fell silent. When Kanchay carried her to a small waterfall near the camp, she did not argue, and sat with him under water that beat coolly down on her shoulders, drowning out the irritating voices of the others with its steady roar. To her own surprise, she relaxed, and this must have helped her dilate.

"Sipaj, Fia," Kanchay said after a time, watching her with calm eyes of Chartres blue, "put your hand down here." He guided her fingers to the crowning head and smiled as she felt the baby’s wet and curling hair. There were three more crushing contractions and as the child emerged, she was swamped by the terror of a remembered nightmare. "Sipaj, Kanchay," she cried, before she knew if she had a daughter or a son. "Are the eyes all right? Do they bleed?"

"The eyes are small," said Kanchay honestly. "But that’s normal for your kind," he added by way of reassurance.

"And there are two," his cousin Tinbar reported, thinking this might have worried her.

"They’re blue!" their friend Sichu-Lan added, relieved because Fia’s strange brown eyes had always been a source of vague unease to him.

There was a silence as she felt the infant’s legs slip from her and she thought at first that it was born dead. No, she thought, it’s all the other noise — the talking and the waterfall. Then, finally, she heard the baby squall — jolted into breathing by the chilly water that had been such a comfort to its mother at the end of this stiflingly hot and endless day.

Kanchay brought leaves to wipe it down and Sichu-Lan was laughing and pointing to its genitals, which were external. "Look," he cried, "someone thinks this child is in a hurry to be bred!"

A son, she knew then, and whispered, "We have a little boy, Jimmy!" She burst into tears — not of grief or terror but of relief and gratitude— as strong warm hands lifted her from the cool water and the hot breeze dried her and the baby. With a shock, she felt again skin on human skin, and slept. Later, her son’s lips closed for the first time around her nipple: a gentle, almost lazy suckling, as sweet as Jimmy’s, as beautiful to feel, but feeble. There’s something wrong, she thought, but she told herself, He’s newborn, and premature. He’ll get stronger.

Isaac, she decided then, whose father had, like Abraham, left his home to travel to a strange land; whose mother, like Sarah, had out of all expectation borne a single child and rejoiced in him.

Sofia held her infant to her breast and gazed down at the wise owl eyes in a tiny elfin face capped by dark red hair. She respected her son more than she loved him at that moment and thought, You made it. The djanada nearly killed us and you were born too soon and you’ve gotten a bad start, but you are alive, in spite of everything.

It could be worse, she thought as she drifted off to sleep again, with the baby close, the heat of Rakhat as enveloping as a neonatal incubator, the two of them surrounded by the arms and legs and tails of whispering Runa. I am Mendes, and my son is alive, she thought. And things could be worse.