Children of God s-2 Page 2

  With as fortifyingly deep a breath as an asthmatic could manage, Brother Edward heaved his portly self out of the car and trundled around it, opening doors for the Father General and for Sandoz, while Giuliani made their good-byes to the hostess and the other guests. The little girl said something, and Edward groaned when Emilio knelt to receive her embrace and return the hug as best he could. Despite—no, because of the tenderness of that farewell, Brother Edward was not a bit surprised by the quiet conversation that was going on between the two priests as they made their way alone to the car.

  "— if you ever do this to me again, you sonofabitch. Dammit, Ed, don’t hover," Sandoz snapped, climbing into the back seat. "I can close the door myself."

  "Yes, Father. Sorry, Father," Edward said, backing off, but actually rather pleased. Nothing like being right, he thought to himself.

  "Jesus, Vince! Kids and babies!" Sandoz snarled as they pulled out of the Giuliani drive. "This was supposed to be good for me?"

  "It was good for you," the Father General insisted. "Emilio, you were fine until the end—"

  "The nightmares aren’t bad enough? Now we’re trying for flashbacks?"

  "You said you wanted to live on your own," the Father General pointed out patiently. "Things like this are bound to come up. You’ve got to learn to deal with—"

  "Who the fuck are you to tell me what I have to deal with? Shit, if this starts happening when I’m awake—"

  Edward, wincing at the language, glanced into the rearview mirror when Emilio’s voice broke. Cry, Edward thought. It’s better than the headaches. Go ahead and cry. But Sandoz fell silent and stared out the window at the passing countryside, dry-eyed and furious.

  "There are at present some six billion individuals under the age of fifteen in the world," the Father General resumed peaceably. "It’s going to be difficult to avoid them all. If you can’t manage in a controlled environment like Carmella’s home—"

  "Quod erat demonstrandum," Sandoz said bitterly.

  "— then perhaps you should consider staying with us. As a linguist, if nothing else."

  "You crafty old bastard." Sandoz laughed—a short, hard sound. "You did this to me deliberately."

  "One doesn’t become Father General of the Society of Jesus by being a dumb bastard," Vince Giuliani said mildly, and went on, straight-faced. "The dumb bastards become famous linguists and get themselves buggered on other planets."

  "You’re just jealous. When’s the last time you got laid?"

  Brother Edward turned left onto the coast road, seeing through Emilio’s desperate bluff, marveling at the relationship between these two men. Born to wealth and unquestioned privilege, Vincenzo Giuliani was a historian and politician of international repute, still powerful in body and mind at the age of seventy-nine. Emilio Sandoz was the illegitimate child of a Puerto Rican woman who’d had an affair while her husband was jailed for trafficking in the very substances that had enriched an earlier generation of La Famiglia Giuliani. The two men had met over sixty years ago while studying for the priesthood. And yet, Sandoz was now only forty-six years old, give or take a bit. One of the many bizarre aspects of Emilio’s situation was the fact that he’d spent thirty-four years traveling at a substantial percentage of the speed of light, to and from the Alpha Centauri system. For Sandoz, only about six years had gone by since he’d left Earth—difficult years, granted, but very few of them compared to those that had passed for Vince Giuliani, now decades Emilio’s senior and his superior by several levels of Jesuit organization.

  "Emilio, all I’m asking for now is that you work with us—" Giuliani was saying.

  "All right. All right!" Emilio cried, too tired to argue. Which was, Brother Edward thought with narrowed eyes, undoubtedly the desired effect of the day’s activities. "But on my terms, dammit."

  "Which are?"

  "A fully integrated sound-analysis system linked to processing. With voice control." Edward glanced into the mirror and saw Giuliani nod. "A private office," Emilio continued. "I can’t use a keyboard anymore and I can’t work when people can overhear me."

  "And what else?" Giuliani prompted.

  "Dump all the Rakhati song fragments to my system—everything the radio telescopes have intercepted since 2019, yes? Download everything the Stella Maris party radioed back from Rakhat." Again, agreement. "An assistant. A native speaker of Déné or Magyar. Or Euskara—Basque, yes? And fluent in Latin or English or Spanish. I don’t care which."

  "And what else?"

  "I want to live by myself. Put a bed in the potting shed. Or the garage. I don’t care. I’m not asking for the outside, Vince. Just someplace where I can be alone. No kids, no babies."

  "And what else?"

  "Publication. All of it—everything we sent back."

  "Not the languages," Giuliani said. "The sociology, the biology, yes. The languages, no."

  "Well, then, what is the point?" Emilio cried. "Why the hell am I doing the work?"

  The Father General did not look at him. Scanning the Campano archipelago, he watched Camorra «fishing» boats patrol the Bay of Naples, grateful for their protection against media predators who’d do almost anything to question the small, thin man slumped beside him: the priest and whore and child killer, Emilio Sandoz.

  "You are doing the work ad majorem Dei gloriam, as far as I am concerned," Giuliani said lightly. "If the greater glory of God no longer motivates you, you may consider that you are working out your room and board, provided gratis by the Society of Jesus, along with round-the-clock security, sound-analysis systems and research assistance. The engineering that went into those braces was not cheap, Emilio. We’ve paid out over a million six in hospital bills and medical fees alone. That’s money we don’t have anymore—the Society is all but bankrupt. I have tried to protect you from these concerns, but things have changed for the worse since you left."

  "So why didn’t you just kick my expensive ass out in the first place? I told you from the start, I’m a dead loss, Vince—"

  "Nonsense," Giuliani snapped, eyes meeting Edward Behr’s briefly in the rearview mirror. "You are an asset I intend to capitalize on."

  "Oh, wonderful. And what are you buying with me?"

  "Passage to Rakhat on a commercial vessel for four priests trained in K’San and Ruanja using the Sandoz-Mendes programs, which are the exclusive property of the Society of Jesus." Vincenzo Giuliani looked at Sandoz, whose own eyes were closed now against the light. "You are free to leave at any time, Emilio. But while you reside with us, at our expense, under our protection—"

  "The Society has a monopoly on two Rakhati languages. You want me to train interpreters."

  "Whom we will provide to business, academic or diplomatic interests until that monopoly is broken. This will help to recoup our expenses in underwriting the original mission to Rakhat and will allow us to continue the work begun there by your party, requiescant in pace. Pull over, please, Brother Edward."

  Edward Behr stopped the car and reached toward the glove box for the injection canister, checking the dosage indicator before climbing out of the vehicle. By then Giuliani was kneeling next to Sandoz at the edge of the pavement, steadying Emilio as he vomited into the scrubby roadside weeds. Edward pressed the canister against Sandoz’s neck. "Just a few minutes now, Father."

  They were within sight of a pair of armed Camorristi. One of them approached, but the Father General shook his head and the man returned to his post. There was another bout of retching before Emilio sat back on his heels, disheveled and drained, eyes closed because the migraines distorted his vision. "What was her name, Vince?"

  "Celestina."

  "I won’t go back." He was almost asleep. The drug always knocked him out when administered by injection. No one knew why; his physiological status was still not normal. "God," he mumbled, "don’ do this to me again. Kids and babies. Don’ do this to me again…"

  Brother Edward’s eyes met the Father General’s. "That was prayer," he said firmly a
few minutes later.

  "Yes," Vincenzo Giuliani agreed. He beckoned now to the Camorristi and stood back as one of them gathered up the limbs and lifted the light, limp body, carrying Sandoz back to the car. "Yes," he admitted, "I’m afraid it was."

  BROTHER EDWARD CALLED AHEAD TO APPRISE THE PORTER OF THE SITUATION. There was a stretcher waiting for them when he pulled into the circular drive and parked at the front door of a large, sensible stone building, saved from austerity by the exuberant gardens that surrounded it.

  "It’s too soon," Brother Edward warned, as he and the Father General watched Emilio being carried up to bed. "He isn’t ready for this. You’re pushing him too hard."

  "I push, he shoves back." Giuliani raised his hands to his head, smoothing back hair that hadn’t been there in decades. "I’m running out of time, Ed. I’ll hold them off as long as I can, but I want our people on that ship." His hands dropped and he looked at the hills to the west. "We can’t afford another mission any other way."

  Lips compressed, Edward shook his head, his lungs whistling slightly. The asthma was always worst in late summer. "It’s a bad bargain, Father General."

  For a time, Giuliani seemed to forget he was not alone. Then he straightened, outwardly calm, and regarded the fat, little man wheezing next to him in the dappled shade of an ancient olive tree. "Thank you, Brother Edward," the Father General said with parched precision, "for your opinion."

  Edward Behr, put in his place, watched Giuliani stride away before getting back into the car to pull the vehicle into the garage. He plugged it in and locked up out of habit, although anyone who got past Camorra security would be interested in Emilio Sandoz, not in a car so outdated it needed recharging every night.

  One of the cats appeared, purring and stretching, as Edward stood in the driveway staring up at a bedroom window where a curtain had just been drawn shut. Edward admired the beauty of cats, but had learned to think of them as lithe and lethal dander-delivery systems. "Go away," he told the animal, but the cat continued to rub against Edward’s legs, as heedless of his concerns as the Father General seemed to be.

  MINUTES LATER, VINCENZO GIULIANI ENTERED HIS OFFICE, AND though he pulled the door closed with a quiet, controlled click, he did not so much sit in his chair as collapse onto it. Elbows on the vast walnut desk’s faultless, gleaming surface, he rested his head in his hands and kept his eyes closed, unwilling to look into his own reflection. Trade with Rakhat is inevitable, he told himself. Carlo is going, whether we help him or not. This way, we may be able to provide some sort of mitigating influence—

  He lifted his head and reached for his computer tablet. Flipping it open with a snap of his wrist, he reread the letter he’d been trying to finish for the past three days. "Your Holiness," it began, but the Father General was not writing for the Pope alone. This letter would become part of the history of mankind’s first contact with an intelligent alien species.

  "Thank you," he had written, "for your kind inquiry regarding the health and status of Emilio Sandoz. During the year since returning to Earth from Rakhat in September 2059, Father Sandoz has recovered from scurvy and anemia, but remains frail and emotionally volatile. As you know from media reports leaked last year by personnel at the Salvator Mundi Hospital in Rome, the muscles between the bones of his palms were stripped away on Rakhat, doubling the length of his fingers and rendering them useless. Sandoz himself does not fully understand why he was deliberately maimed; it was not intended as torture, although that is certainly what it has amounted to. He believes that the procedure marked him as the dependent or, perhaps, the property of a man named Supaari VaGayjur, about whom more later. Father Sandoz has been fitted with external bioactive braces; he has worked very hard to achieve limited dexterity, and can now manage most self-care."

  It’s time to wean him from Ed Behr, the Father General decided, and made a mental note about reassigning Brother Edward. Perhaps to that new refugee camp in Gambia, he thought. May as well put Ed’s experience in dealing with the aftermath of gang rape to work…. He sat up straighter and, shaking off distraction, returned to the letter.

  "In the view of his mission superiors," it continued, "Emilio Sandoz was responsible for much of the early success of first contact. His extraordinary skill and stamina as an interpreter aided all the other members of the Stella Maris party in their research, and his personal charm won them many friends among the VaRakhati. Moreover, the evident beauty of his spiritual state during the early years of the mission restored the faith of at least one lay member of the crew, and enriched that of his brother priests.

  "Nevertheless, Father Sandoz has been the object of virulent public condemnation for his alleged conduct on Rakhat. As you know, our ship was followed into space three years later by the Magellan, a vessel owned and operated by the Contact Consortium, whose interests were primarily commercial. Scandal sells; sensationalizing allegations against our people (and against Father Sandoz in particular) was to the Consortium’s economic advantage, since their lurid reports were radioed back from Rakhat for sale to a worldwide audience on Earth. In fairness, the crew of the Magellan was utterly unfamiliar with Rakhat when they arrived, and there is reason to believe that they were misled by Supaari VaGayjur about many facts. The subsequent unexplained disappearance of the Magellan party suggests that they, too, fell prey to the near impossibility of avoiding fatal mistakes on Rakhat.

  "Thus, of the eighteen people who traveled to Rakhat in two separate parties, only Emilio Sandoz has survived. Father Sandoz has cooperated with us to the best of his ability during months of intense questioning, often at the cost of great personal distress. I will provide Your Holiness with a complete set of the mission’s scientific papers and supporting documents, as well as verbatim transcripts of the hearings; here, for your consideration, is a brief outline of salient points uncovered during the hearings just concluded.

  "1. There are not one but two intelligent species on Rakhat.

  "The Stella Maris party was initially welcomed as a ’foreign’ trade delegation by the village of Kashan. The villagers identified themselves as Runa, which simply means ’People.’ The Runa are large, vegetarian bipeds with stabilizing tails—rather like kangaroos; they have high mobile ears and remarkably beautiful double-irised eyes. Placid in disposition, they are intensely sociable and communitarian.

  "Their hands are double-thumbed and their craftsmanship is superb, but some members of the Jesuit party suspected that the Runa in general were somewhat limited intellectually. Their material culture seemed too simple to account for the powerful transmissions first detected on Earth by radio telescope in 2019. Furthermore, the Runa were disturbed and frightened by music, which seemed anomalous, given that it was radio broadcasts of chorales that first alerted us to the existence of Rakhat. However, individual Runa seemed quite bright, and the tentative conclusion was that the village of Kashan was something of a backwater on the edge of a sophisticated civilization. Since there was so much to be learned in Kashan, the decision was made to remain there for a time.

  "To the great surprise of our people, the Singers of Rakhat were in fact a second sentient species. The Jana’ata bear a striking but superficial physical resemblance to the Runa. They are carnivorous, with prehensile feet and three-fingered hands that are clawed and rather bearlike. For the first two years of the mission, the Jana’ata were represented by a single individual: Supaari VaGayjur, a merchant based in the city of Gayjur who acted as a middleman for a number of isolated Runa villages in southern Inbrokar, a state that occupies the central third of the largest continent of Rakhat.

  "The Jesuit party had every reason to believe Supaari was a man of goodwill. If anything, their relationship with the Runa villagers was improved by Supaari’s intervention and aid, and Sandoz attributes much of his own understanding of Rakhat’s civilization to Supaari’s patient explanations. Supaari’s gross betrayal of Sandoz’s trust remains one of the great puzzles of the mission.

  "2. Humans make to
ols; the Jana’ata breed theirs.

  "The Runa are the hands of the Jana’ata: the skilled trades, the domestic staffs and laborers, even the civil service. But the differences in status between the Jana’ata and Runa are not merely those of class, as our people believed. The Runa are essentially domesticated animals—the Jana’ata breed them, as we breed dogs.

  "The Runa do not reproduce unless their diet reaches a critical level of richness that brings on a sort of estrus. This biological fact has become the basis of the Rakhati economy. The Runa ’earn’ the right to have children by cooperating economically with the Jana’ata. When a village corporate account has reached a target figure, the Jana’ata make a sufficiency of extra calories available to the villagers to allow for a controlled production of young, without risk of environmental degradation by overpopulation.

  "The core values of Jana’ata society are stewardship and stability, and in keeping with this, the Jana’ata also limit their own reproduction, maintaining their numbers at approximately 4 percent of the overall Runa population. Strict lines of inheritance rule a largely ceremonial life, and only the first two children of any breeding Jana’ata couple may themselves marry and reproduce. If later-born adults decline to be neutered, they are permitted to have sex with Runa concubines, since cross-species sex carries no risk of unsanctioned reproduction. Jana’ata thirds are most commonly involved in commerce, scholarship and, evidently, prostitution. In this context, it should be noted that Supaari VaGayjur was a third.

  "Moreover, and most shockingly, the Jana’ata have bred the Runa not just for intelligence and trainability, but also for meat. We have paid in lives for this knowledge, Your Holiness."

  It was there that Giuliani had stopped the night before, listening for a time to the sound of Sandoz’s footsteps above him. Five steps, pause; five steps, pause. At least when Emilio was pacing, one could be certain that he had not yet added his own life to the toll taken by the mission to Rakhat…. Sighing, Giuliani now returned to his task.