Children of God

25 City of Gayjur 2082, Earth-Relative

"WHEN DID ISAAC FIRST BECOME INTERESTED IN GENETICS?" DANIEL IRON Horse would ask Sofia, near the end of her life.

She was all but blind by then, one eye clouded by a cataract, the other gone; bent nearly in half by a lifetime without the calcium her bones had needed. A crone, she thought. A ruin. But she said aloud, "It was when we were all still living in Trucha Sai, Isaac and Ha’anala and I. Isaac was twenty, I think. Perhaps twenty-five, by your count—the years are longer here. It was just before he left." She sat for a time remembering. "He became, I think, increasingly unsuited to life among the Runa. The constant talk—. Well, you get used to it. You learn to tune it out. But Isaac couldn’t do that, and the noise seemed almost painful to him. When he was younger, he would press his fingers into his ears and moan—just make his own noise to drown the talk out. But he simply couldn’t stand it as he got older. He spent more and more time by himself, and one day he disappeared."

"And Ha’anala followed him?"

"Yes."

The priests were always so patient with her when she stopped speaking. Sometimes she simply forgot what they had asked and got lost in her own thoughts, but not this time. This was simply difficult to face, and she found it necessary to approach it from a distance. "You see, the Runa children had questions about the weather and the suns and moons, and about plants," she told Danny. "Where does rain come from? they wanted to know. Why do the moons change shape? Where do the suns go at night? How do little seeds make giant w’ralia trees? Good questions. I had to work hard to answer them, to keep up with those children. They kept my mind alive. But they never asked about human differences, about differences among the species." She paused, still struck by this. "It was Ha’anala who asked those questions. Why don’t you and Isaac have tails? What happened to your fur? She wanted to know, Why do I have only three fingers, not five like everyone else?"

"What did you tell her?" Danny asked gently.

Such a quiet man, Sofia thought. So careful with her, so loath to judge. When she was very young, Sofia had thought of priests as condemning and punitive. Whatever made me believe that? she wondered. Not knowing any priests, perhaps. That was the root of so much fear and hatred, she realized. Not knowing any…

You’re drifting, Mendes, she told herself, and came back to his question. "Well, at first, I told her what Marc Robichaux always used to say about things like that: Because that’s the way God likes it." She reached out, to feel Danny’s face, to see if he was smiling. The beardless skin was so smooth…. Keep to the point, Mendes, she scolded. "Ha’anala understood the difference between God and science, that there were different ways— parallel ways—to think about the world. So. There were very good AI genetics tutorials in the Magellan library, of course. We downloaded those. There were graphics of the DNA helices for humans, and my own tablet’s memory had the work on VaRakhati genetics that Anne Edwards and Marc Robichaux did. So I showed her those data as well."

"And Isaac? Did you show him? DNA sequences for all three species?"

"Not directly. Isaac was often nearby when I taught Ha’anala. I had the impression he was listening sometimes. He must have been, I guess. I didn’t realize how closely he was paying attention. Or perhaps he went back to the tutorials on his own. Autistics of normal or superior intelligence sometimes read very deeply on one subject at a time." It must have seemed to him to be the perfect reduction of life’s chaos and noise to its constituent elements, she thought. Simple, neat, explanatory. Adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine—that was all you needed.

There was a long silence. Maybe Danny’s mind wandered as well, Sofia thought. "Mrs. Quinn," he said after a time, and she smiled sightlessly. How quaint, to be called that now, here, after so many years… "Did you ever suspect, about Isaac? Was there anything that made you think that he might be…?"

No one could say the word. It was too frightening. "No," she said. "Not until I heard the music. I had no idea. But I knew from the beginning that Ha’anala was something special. Once, when I was trying to explain to her about the war, I told her the story of the Exodus. I meant for her to learn about the liberation of the Hebrew slaves, so that she could understand why the Runa were fighting, but she couldn’t get over the VR displays of Egypt, and the hundreds of gods of Egypt. A few days later, Ha’anala said, ’The Egyptians could see their gods. If you wanted to talk to the god of the river, you dressed well, made yourself ready and went to him. He saw you only at your best. The God of Israel can’t be seen, but he sees us—when we are ready, when we are not ready, when we are at our best or at our worst or paying no attention. Nothing can be hidden from such a God. That’s why people fear Him.’»

"A remarkable insight," Danny Iron Horse observed.

"Yes. She was an extraordinary child—" Sofia stopped, struck by a thought. Perhaps Ha’anala wasn’t extraordinary. Perhaps she was just what others of her kind could have been, but Sofia hadn’t known any others. Except Supaari. And now…. So many dead, she thought, her small, arthritic hands curled on her thighs. So many dead…

That was when the other priest spoke up. Sean Fein. "And what did y’tell her about the God of Israel?" he asked.

How long has he been listening? Sofia wondered irritably. John Candotti always tells me when he’s here. Why don’t people speak up? Then she thought, Maybe Sean did, and I forgot. "I told her, That is why my people fear God, but also why we love Him, because He sees all we do, knows all we are, and still loves us."

As was so often the case these days, she drifted away then, to spend her time with people who were long gone, who were more real to her than these new ones. "Even if it’s only poetry, it’s poetry to live by, Sofia—poetry to die for," D. W. Yarbrough had told her—when? Fifty years ago? Sixty? And she herself was so old, so old. She didn’t know if there was an afterlife, but she had begun to hope so, not because she feared oblivion, but simply because she wanted to know if she had done the right thing.

It might have been a minute, or an hour, or a day later when she spoke again. "Once I told Ha’anala about the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah," she said, and waited for some response.

"I’m right here, Sofia," John told her.

"I told her how Abraham bargained with God for the lives of ten righteous men who might have lived there. She said to me, ’Abraham should have taken the babies from the cities. The babies were innocent.’ " Sofia turned her face toward John’s voice. "I wasn’t wrong to tell her the stories," she said. "I don’t believe that I was wrong."

"You did the right thing," John Candotti told her. "I’m sure of it."

She slept then. John’s faith was enough.