Children of God s-2 Read online

  "Many moons go Choktaw…" Emilio intoned.

  "Turns out, he grew up in the suburbs of Winnipeg, and he must have gotten his size from the Swedes. But he’s got Black Hills written all over him, so he gets that shit all the time." John winced. "I pissed him off almost immediately, telling him about a guy I know out on Pine Ridge. He cut me off at the knees—’No braids, no shades, ace. I’m not a drunk, and I’ve never been in a sweat lodge.’»

  Sandoz whistled, eyes wide. "Yep—that counts as sensitive. So, that’s what he isn’t. What is he?"

  "One of the sharpest political scientists in the Society, from what I hear, and it’s not like we’re short of them. There’s been talk about him winding up General one of these days, but when Giuliani offered him Rakhat, Danny left a full professorship at the Gregorian without a backward glance. He’s pumped for this."

  "What about the others?" Emilio asked.

  "There’s a chemist from Belfast — he’s supposed to check out that nanoassembly stuff they do on Rakhat. I just met him last week, but Giuliani’s had these guys in training for months! Who knew? Anyway, get this: his name is Sean Fein." Sandoz looked at him blankly. "Think about it," John advised.

  "You’re joking," Sandoz said after a moment.

  "No, but his parents were. Daddy was—"

  "Jewish," Sandoz supplied, straight,faced.

  "Full marks. And his mother was political—"

  "Sean Fern, Sinn Fein," Emilio said sympathetically. "Not just a joke, but a lame one at that."

  "Yeah. I asked Sean if it helped at all to know that I went to high school with a kid named Jack Goff. ’Not a blind bit,’ was all he said. The most morose Irishman I’ve ever met—younger than I am, but he carries himself like he’s a hundred."

  "Sounds like a fun group," Emilio commented dryly. "Giuliani said he was sending out four. Who’s the other guy?"

  "Oh, you’ll love this—you asked for someone who spoke Basque, right?"

  "Euskara," Sandoz corrected him. "I just wanted people who were used to dealing with really different grammatical structures—"

  "Whatever." John shrugged. "Anyway, he walks in—this enormous guy with the thickest hair I’ve ever seen, and I’m thinking, Hah! So that’s where all mine went! And then he says something absolutely incomprehensible, with way too many consonants. I didn’t know whether to say hello or punch him! Here—he wrote it down for me." John dug a scrap of paper out of his pocket. "How the hell do you pronounce that?"

  Emilio took the paper in his right hand, still braced, moving it back and forth at arm’s length. "Playing air trombone! Can’t see small print worth a damn anymore," he noted ruefully, but then he got a bead on it. "Joseba Gastainazatorre Urizarbarrena."

  "Show-off," John muttered.

  "They say the devil himself once tried to learn the Basques’ language," Sandoz remarked informatively. "Satan gave up after only three months, having learned just two words of Euskara—both curses, which turned out to be Spanish anyway."

  "So what should we poor mortals call him?" John asked.

  "Joe Alphabet?" Emilio suggested, yawning as he unhinged the second brace. "The first name is just like Jose. It’s easy: Ho-SAY-ba."

  John tried it a couple of times and seemed satisfied that he could manage, as long as nobody expected him to go past the first three syllables. "Anyway, he’s an ecologist. Seems to be a nice guy. Thank God for small mercies, huh? Jeez—sorry! I forgot how tired you are," John said, as Emilio yawned for the third time in as many minutes. "Okay, I’m going! Get some rest."

  "I’ll see you tomorrow," Emilio said, moving toward his bed. "And, John—I’m glad you’re here."

  Candotti nodded happily and stood to leave, but paused at the top of the stairs and looked back. Emilio, too whipped to undress, had already fallen onto his mattress in a heap. "Hey," John said, "aren’t you going to ask me what’s in the box?"

  Emilio kept his eyes closed. "Say, John, what’s in the box?" he asked dutifully before muttering, "Like I give a shit."

  "Letters. And that’s just the paper stuff. Why don’t you ever check your messages?"

  "Because everybody I know is dead." The eyes popped open. "So who the hell would write to me?" Sandoz asked the ceiling in rhetorical wonderment. There was a hoot of genuine amusement. "Oh, John, I’m probably getting mash notes from male convicts!"

  Candotti snorted, startled by the idea, but Sandoz rose on his elbows, transfixed by the sheer delicious absurdity of it, his face vivid, all the tiredness draining away for a minute. "My dear Emilio," he started and, falling back on the bed, he began to improvise, obscenely and hilariously fluent, on the broad literary theme of prison romance in terms that rendered John breathless. Finally, when Sandoz had exhausted himself and his topic and John had wiped his eyes and caught his breath, Candotti cried, "You’re so cynical! You have a lot of friends out there, Emilio."

  "Indulge me, John. Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I’m presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money."

  Candotti laughed again and told Sandoz to say two rosaries for having spectacularly impure thoughts, and waved and started down the stairs. He was almost out the door when he heard Emilio call his name. Hand on the knob, still grinning, he looked back up toward Sandoz’s room. "Yeah?"

  "John, I… I need a favor."

  "Sure. Anything."

  "I—. There are going to be some papers I’ll have to sign. I’m out, John. I’m leaving the Society." Sucker-punched, Candotti sagged against the doorjamb. A moment later, Sandoz’s voice went on, quiet and hesitant. "Can you fix a pen so I can hold it? Like you did with that razor, yes?"

  John ascended the stairs partway and then halted, as unwilling as Sandoz to carry out this awful conversation face to face. "Emilio. Look—. Okay, I understand, I guess—as much as anyone else can. But are you sure? I mean, it’s—"

  "I’m sure. I decided this afternoon." Candotti waited and then heard, "I’m carrying a lot of shit, John. I won’t add fraud. Nobody can hate the way I do and claim to be a priest. It’s not honest." John sat heavily on a stair tread and rubbed his face with his hands as Emilio said, "I think— some kind of wedge-shaped thing that would hold the pen up at an angle, yes? The new braces are good, but I still haven’t got much of a precision grip."

  "Yeah. Okay. No problem. I’ll figure something out for you."

  John stood and headed back down the stairs, feeling ten years older than he’d been five minutes ago. As he shambled his loose-limbed way over to the main house, he heard Emilio’s call drift out the dormer window: "Thanks, John." He waved a hand dispiritedly, without looking back, knowing Emilio couldn’t see him. "Sure. You bet," John whispered, and felt a nasty crawling sensation on his face as wind off the Bay of Naples dried the tears.

  7

  City of In broker

  2046, Earth-Relative

  THE ERROR, IF THAT’S WHAT IT WAS, LAY IN GOING TO SEE THE CHILD. Who knows what would have happened if Supaari VaGayjur had simply waited until the morning and, unsuspecting, freed his child’s spirit to find a better fate?

  But the midwife came to him, sure that he would want to see the baby, and he was rarely able to resist the uncomplicated friendship the Runa always seemed to offer him. So Supaari strode toward the nursery importantly: heavy embroidered robe rustling as softly as his slippered footsteps, eyes focused on the middle distance, ignoring the Runa midwife’s chatter with his ears cocked forward, not deigning to reply to her pleasantries— all in conscious mimicry of an aristocratic Jana’ata crammed full of incorruptible civic virtue and monumental self-regard.

  Who am I to sneer? Supaari asked himself. A jumped-up merchant prone to unfortunate commercial metaphors in conversation with his betters. A third-born son from a backwater town in the midlands who made a fortune brokering trade among the Runa. An outsider among outsiders, who’d literally stumbled onto a pack of impossible foreigners from somewhere beyond Rakhat’s three suns, and parlayed that experi
ence into this exacting facsimile of nobility that nobody but the Runa believed in.

  He’d known from the moment the Reshtar agreed to his proposition that he would never be more than who he was. It didn’t matter. Isolation felt normal to him. Supaari’s life had always been an interstitial one, lived between the worlds of Runa and Jana’ata; he enjoyed the perspective, preferred observation to participation. He’d spent his first year among these exalted members of his own species studying the habits of the men around him as carefully as the hunter studies his prey. He came to savor the growing accuracy with which he predicted the snubs. He could anticipate who would refuse outright to attend a reception if he attended, and who would come for the sport of baiting him; who would fail to greet him entirely, and who would do so but with a gesture more properly due a second. Firsts preferred direct insult; seconds were more subtle. His eldest brother-in-law, Dherai, would push past Supaari through a door, but the second-born Bhansaar would merely stand as though Supaari were invisible and enter the room a moment later, as though it had just occurred to him to go inside.

  Inbrokar society, taking its cue from the Kitheri princelings, ignored Supaari or gazed at him contemptuously from corners. Sometimes the word «peddler» would rise above the general conversation, sinking a moment later beneath gentle waves of well-bred amusement. Privately entertained, Supaari had borne all this with courteous detachment and genuine patience: for the sake of a son and a future.

  The nursery was far into the interior of the compound. He had no idea where Jholaa was. The Runa midwife Paquarin had assured him of his wife’s health but added, "She’s worn to tatters, poor lady. It’s not like that for us," the Runao said thankfully. "For us, the babies come out as easily as they get in—it’s a mercy not to be a Jana’ata. And the Kitheri women are so small in the hips!" she complained. "Makes the job harder for a poor midwife." Paquarin admitted that Jholaa was upset by the birth, when Supaari asked. Naturally. Another reason for his wife to hate him: he’d gotten a deformity on her.

  Busy with his thoughts, it was only when Supaari heard soft, huffing Runa laughter and cheerful, harmless Runa chatter drifting out of the kitchen with the smell of spices and frying vegetables that he realized Paquarin had led him through the nursery and past it. Passing through one last louvered door and entering a barren courtyard at the back of the compound, he noticed a small wooden box pushed into a corner of the yard. This was what he’d been brought to see, and he stopped in midstride.

  No lavish embroidered nest net, no festive ribbons fluttering in the breeze to catch the child’s eye and train attention to movement. Just a rag from the kitchen draped over the crate to shade her, to hide her shame— and his own—from sight. It was not a new box, Supaari noted. It was ordinarily used for Runa infants, he supposed. A cradle for a cook’s child.

  Another man might have blamed the midwife, but not Supaari VaGayjur. Ah, Bhansaar, he thought. A hit. May your children become scavengers. May you live to see them eat carrion.

  He had not expected this, not even after a year of affinal insult and effrontery. He accepted that his daughter was doomed. No one would marry a cripple. She was more hopeless than a third, first-born but fouled. Of all the things he had learned of the foreigners’ customs, the most incomprehensible, the most unethical was the notion that anyone could breed, even those known to carry traits that would damage their offspring. What kind of people would inflict known disease on their own grandchildren? Well, not us! he’d thought. Not Jana’ata!

  Even so, Dherai might have overridden Bhansaar’s pettiness and allowed the child a decent nest in the nursery for her single night of life. Daughters who serve travelers, Supaari thought savagely. Cowards for sons, Dherai.

  He strode to the cradle, snatching the cloth away with a hooked claw. "It’s not the child’s fault, lord," the midwife said hurriedly, frightened by the acrid smell of anger. "She’s done no wrong, poor thing."

  And who is to blame? he meant to demand. Who put her in this detestable little—. Who brought her to this wretched—

  I did, he thought bleakly, gazing down.

  Bathed, fed and sleeping, his daughter had the fragrance of rain in the first moments of a storm. He was dizzy with it, actually swayed before kneeling. Studying her tiny perfect face, he raised his hands to his mouth and bit hard, six times, severing each long claw at the quick, bewitched by the need to hold her and to do so without harming her. Almost at the same moment, he realized that he’d just committed a humiliating and irreversible gaffe. Clawless, he would have to let Ljaat-sa Kitheri carry out the father’s duty after all. But his mind was not clear, and he lifted his child from the box, bringing her awkwardly to his chest.

  "Those Kitheri eyes! She’s a beauty, like her mother," the Runa midwife observed guilelessly, happy now that the Jana’ata had calmed himself. "But she has your nose, lord."

  He laughed in spite of everything and, careless of his robes, shifted on the damp clay tiles that were still shining from the morning’s drizzle, so that he could rest the baby in his lap. Aching, he ran a hand along the velvety softness of her cheek, his stubby fingertips feeling strangely naked, and as unprotected as his daughter’s throat. I was not meant to breed, he thought. Her twisted foot is a sign. I have done everything wrong.

  With all his considerable courage, his own throat tight, Supaari fumbled at the wrappings that concealed her, forcing himself to look at what had destined this child to die in infancy, taking all his hopes with her into darkness. What he saw pulled the breath from him.

  "Paquarin," he said very carefully, in a voice he hoped would not alarm her. "Paquarin, who has seen the child, besides you and me?"

  "The ranking uncles, lord. Then they told the Paramount, but he didn’t come to inspect her. Such a pity! The lady tried to kill the little one already," Paquarin reported thoughtlessly. But hearing her own words, she realized she’d done wrong. Jholaa wanted the baby dead even before its deformity was discovered. The Runao began to sway from side to side, but stopped suddenly. "The lady Jholaa says, Better to die at birth than to live unmarriageable," she told Supaari then, and truthfully, although Jholaa had said it some years ago. Pleased with her own cleverness in stitching this into the present, Paquarin rattled on righteously, "So it must be done. No one will have a cripple. But it isn’t right for the dam to do it. It’s the sire’s duty, lord. This helpful one saved the child for your honor."

  Still stunned, only half-hearing Paquarin’s chatter, Supaari looked at the midwife for a long while. Finally, making his face kindly and reassuring, he asked, "Paquarin, can you tell me, please—which foot is deformed? The right? Or the left?"

  Embarrassed, she flattened her ears and she swayed again, more rapidly, and fell into her native Ruanja. "Someone isn’t certain. Someone begs pardon. Runa don’t know of such things. It’s for the lords to decide."

  "Thank you, Paquarin. You are good to save the child for me." He handed the infant to the midwife, each movement as controlled and careful as those he would have performed in the next morning’s ritual. "It is best to say nothing to anyone else of my visit to the child," he told her. To be sure she understood, he said directly, in Ruanja, "Sipaj, Paquarin: someone desires your silence."

  Eyes closed, ears folded back in terror, Paquarin offered her throat, expecting he would kill her to obtain it, but he smiled and reached out to calm her with a hand on her head, as a Runa father might, and assured her once again that she was good. "Will you stay with her tonight, Paquarin?" he suggested. He did not offer money, knowing that natural affection would keep her in the courtyard: this woman’s line was bred to loyalty.

  "Yes, lord. Someone thanks you. The poor mite shouldn’t be alone on her only night. Someone’s heart was sad for her."

  "You are good, Paquarin," he told her again. "She shall have a short life, perhaps, but a proper and honorable one, shall she not?"

  "Yes, lord."

  He left Paquarin in midcurtsy and moved without unseemly haste through
the nursery. Heard the laughter and scuffling of Ljaat-sa Kitheri’s half-grown grandchildren, and decided that the boys’ noisy wrestling was the only sign of genuine life in this dead and stifling place, and wished them luck in killing their fathers early. Walked down narrow corridors, past empty staterooms, hearing muffled snatches of conversation behind closed and curtained doors. Strode past placid Runa porters standing vigil at each doorway, well suited to their job, too phlegmatic to notice boredom. Nodded to them as they opened the inner gates and the outer portcullis and saluted his passing. Escaped, at last, onto the quiet street.

  There was no sense of release, even beyond the compound. No feeling of being under the sky, inside the wind. Supaari glared up at the pierced-wood balconies and the overhanging eaves, seemingly designed to prevent the rain from ever washing the streets clean. Why does no one sweep here? he wondered irritably, ankle deep in blown litter, outraged by the compacted, cluttered heaviness of the place. Inbrokar was chained and hobbled by every moment of its convoluted, incestuous history. Nothing is made here, he realized for the first time. It was a city of aristocrats and advisers, of agents and analysts, forever ranking and comparing, manuevering endlessly in feverish self-promotion and predatory competition. Madness, to believe he could ever have begun something here. Folly, to rage against this city’s perpetual self-imposed darkness, its fibrous, matted preoccupation with position and degree.

  Moving through a city he had once found beautiful, he was greeted here and there with counterfeit deference by various Kitheri friends, acquaintances, hangers-on. Their condolences came rather too soon, the child brought to light this very day and its birth unheralded, but they were as properly composed as their authors’ faces. How long has this been planned? Supaari wondered. How many had been alerted to this delicious and elaborate joke, waiting out his wife’s pregnancy, as anxious as he had been for the appearance of an infant he was meant to kill?