Children of God

36 Rakhat October 2078, Earth-Relative

THERE WAS MORE: TALK OF TRADE GOODS WITH THE SMOOTH ITALIAN voice, discussion of coordinates and flight paths with the pilot. Tentative plans were made for landfall near the Pon river, as were agreements to check in daily, to question and confirm, to reconsider and adjust. An awkward good-bye to Sandoz, and then… she was back on Rakhat, by herself again, in a quiet room, hidden away with her memories, apart from the bustle and talk.

There were no mirrors now in Galatna Palace. Without any reminder of the reality Sandoz would see, Sofia Mendes could, for a time, believe herself thirty-five: straight-backed and strong-minded, clear-eyed and full of hope. The hope at least had remained—. No, had been fulfilled. There are wars worth fighting, she thought. Deaths redeemed. It was all for a reason…. Oh, Sandoz, she thought. You came back. I knew all along that you’d come back—

(Come back.)

Isaac, she thought, going still. Ha’anala.

She sat for a long time, summoning everything she had in her soul. Was it courage, she wondered, or stupidity, to expose her heart to chill air, and wait once more through silent days for hope to wither?

How can I not try? she asked herself. And so, she did.

"READ THIS," ISAAC SAID.

It was waiting for him, as other pleas had waited over the years. He always checked his mother’s file first thing in the morning because checking was what he did, but he never responded. He had nothing to say.

Another man, in somewhat similar circumstances, might have spared his sister the heartache of these messages begging beloved children to come home, or simply to reassure their mother that they were both alive. Isaac didn’t understand heartache. Or regret or longing or divided loyalties. Or anger or shattered trust or betrayal. Such things had no clarity. They involved expectations of another’s behavior, and Isaac had no such expectations.

Sofia’s messages were always addressed to both of them, in spite of everything that had happened during the long years since they’d left the forest. After she’d read the latest, Ha’anala closed the tablet carefully. "Isaac? Do you want to go back?"

"No." He didn’t ask, Back where? It didn’t matter.

"Our mother wishes it." There was a pause. "She is old, Isaac. She will die someday soon."

This was of no interest. He held his hands close to his eyes and began to make patterns with his fingers. But he could see Ha’anala looking at him, even through his fingers. "I won’t go back," he said, dropping his hands. "They don’t sing."

"Isaac, hear me. Our mother sings. Your people sing." She paused, and then continued, "There are others of your kind, Isaac. They have come here again—"

This interested him. "The music I found is right," he said, not with triumph or wonder but flatly: clouds rain, night follows day, the music was right.

"They may not stay, Isaac. Our mother may go back with them." A pause. "Back to where your species comes from." A longer pause, to let him hear this. "Isaac, if our mother decides to return to H’earth, we will never see her again."

He tapped his fingers against his cheeks, on the smooth place where the hair didn’t happen, and began to hum.

"You should say good-bye to her at least," Ha’anala pressed.

"Should" had no clarity. He’d looked «should» up, but he found only noise about responsibility to others, obligations. He did not understand emotion that required two or more persons. His emotions took cognizance of his own state. He could be frustrated, but not frustrated by. He felt anger, but not anger at. He experienced delight, but not delight in. He lacked prepositions. Singing broke this pattern. He understood harmony: to sing with. That was how Ha’anala had explained her marriage to Shetri: "We are in harmony."

Isaac cranked his head back on his neck to look up at the tent fabric, studying the sunlight that made each tiny pixel between warp and weft glow. He had refused a new stone house because the tent was familiar and he liked the color. It moved, but not like leaves. He glanced down and saw that Ha’anala had not left, so he held out his hand and waited for the weight of the tablet to settle into his palm. The tent was a veil that no one pulled away. The tent kept dust and leaves out, unless there was a big storm. Even so, he got his sticks to check the rectangle, to be certain it still had the correct proportions.

Then: the feel of the latch against his thumb, the soft snick of the mechanism, the unchanging geometry of the cover. The whirr of power-on, the brightening of the screen, the keyboard with its serried ranks. A few keystrokes and a few words, there it was again, precisely as he’d left it, each note perfect and precise. He thought, I was born to find this.

He was, in his own way, pleased.

THE WIDOW SUUKMEL CHIROT U VAADAI NO LONGER HAD A FIRM OPINION about which god ruled her life.

In her youth, she had been inclined toward the more traditional deities: old, fussy goddesses who took pains to keep the suns in their proper paths, the rivers in their banks, the rhythms of daily life reliable. After her marriage, she had become rather fond of Ingwy, who ruled fate, for Suukmel knew the evils of lucklessness and was grateful to have been vouchsafed a husband who valued her. Many godlings took up residence in her untroubled household: Security, Luxury, Purpose, Balance. It was a rewarding life. Suukmel had seen daughters well married to husbands who met her private requirements, as well as those dictated by their lineal position and contemporary politics. She herself had scope for quiet accomplishment, and genuine contentment.

Then, in her middle years, Chaos ruled her. Chaos, dancing. Chaos, singing. Not a goddess but a man who had sent her treasure: life lived with an intensity that often frightened her, but from which she would not, could not turn away. Power came to her. Influence. She tasted the exhilaration of the forbidden, the unpredictable. Chaos demanded not the death of Virtue in her life but the birth of Passion. Joy. Creation. Transformation.

And now? Who rules me now? Suukmel wondered idly, watching as Ha’anala abruptly left her strange brother’s tent. A light breeze carried information confirming observation: Ha’anala was furious. Sweeping sightlessly past Suukmel, she strode beyond the confines of the settlement without a word to anyone, pausing only to snatch up the straps of a huge basket with one short hooked claw and sling it over her shoulder.

For a time, Suukmel simply gazed at the younger woman as she climbed jumbled glacial scree, and held her breath, hoping Ha’anala would not fall, balance thrown off and strength sapped by her fourth pregnancy. Sighing, Suukmel rose to follow, picking up her own basket and a tough old tarpaulin, heavy with wax and dirt and recent rain. Ha’anala seemed to welcome the attacks of the kha’ani when she was in this mood; Suukmel preferred to do her maurauding under the protection of a tarp.

There were a multitude of rocky outcrops in the mountains that surrounded the N’Jarr valley, and these crags were the favored nesting sites of the settlement’s most abundant source of permissible food. At the end of Partan, when the rain’s power diminished, the kha’ani bred early and often, in staggering numbers. Adults, darting and dodging, could rarely be caught, but during the dry season, their eggsaks were easy prey—leathery oval bags of protein with generous lashings of fat; that which nourished kha’ani embryos could also sustain Jana’ata if eaten in sufficient quantity. It was a monotonous diet and rather tasteless, but adequate and reliable, and it was varied now and then by other prey more worthy of the term, but also far more dangerous.

"Be warned," Ha’anala called, sensing Suukmel’s approach. "I am not fit company."

"When have I required you to be convivial?" Suukmel asked, coming close. "Besides, I’m here to harass kha’ani, not you." Suukmel hooked her claws into the tarp and gave it a vigorous flap, driving some startled adult kha’ani off, and then slipped under it herself, quickly rolling sak after sak into her basket in the yellowish filtered light of the fabric, humming as she worked.

"What am I to do?" Ha’anala demanded, her voice mixing with the kha’ani shrieks, and coming muffled to Suukmel under her protective covering. "What does she expect? Am I to walk into Gayjur with Isaac? Do you know what she said? All will be forgiven. She forgives me! They forgive! How dare she—"

"You’re right. You aren’t fit company," Suukmel observed, sweeping another nestful of saks into her basket. "Whom are you vilifying, if I may know?"

"My mother!"

"Ah."

"Three times we’ve opened negotiations, and three times our emissaries were killed on sight over six hundred cha’ari outside of Gayjur," Ha’anala fumed, flinging another sak into her basket, ignoring the shrieks and nips of the kha’ani who swarmed around her. "She speaks of trust! She speaks of forgiveness!"

"You’re going to burst the saks at the bottom if you fill that basket much more," Suukmel pointed out, emerging from her tarp. An outraged kha’an launched a flying counterattack and Suukmel took a swipe at it before shouldering her basket and hurrying a few paces away to a patch of grass. The little brutes were vigilantly territorial, but couldn’t see very well. We all have our weaknesses, Suukmel thought, commiserating with her prey’s parents.

She sat in the rare sunshine, warming herself, and took out a few eggsaks. "Come and eat with me, child," she called to Ha’anala.

Ha’anala stood for a time, making an easy target for the kha’ani, but finally lugged her basket over and dropped it next to Suukmel, who serenely kneaded an eggsak until its contents were well mixed. It had taken her some time, but she had worked out a way to manage these things neatly. You had to be deft. Compress the tough, fibrous outer covering in one hand to make the sak taut, and force a claw from the other hand into one end. Then suck out the contents quickly while being careful not to put too much pressure on the sak. Squeeze too hard and you’d have albumin all over your face.

"Sit and eat!" she ordered more firmly this time, and handed a sak to Ha’anala before starting her own breakfast.

"Suukmel, I have tried to understand her," Ha’anala insisted, as though her older friend had argued. "I have tried to believe that she did not know what was happening to us—"

"Sofia was at Inbrokar," Suukmel pointed out.

"So she herself saw that slaughter." Ha’anala downed the eggsak’s contents, oblivious to its taste. "She knows now—even if she didn’t plan it herself from the beginning. She knows how few we are!"

"Unquestionably," Suukmel agreed.

Ha’anala lowered herself to the ground, making a tripod of her legs and tail, belly swelling out before her. "And yet she expects me to forget all this, to leave my people, and come to her!" Ha’anala cried. "We have paid in lives for every attempt to find some kind of understanding or to make some kind of agreement!" Suukmel put out a hand and gently pulled Ha’anala over until she lay down, head in Suukmel’s lap, wrapping her tail around herself like an infant. "Maybe Shetri’s nephew Athaansi is right. We’re fools to keep on hoping…"

"Perhaps," Suukmel allowed.

"But it’s Athaansi’s raids that feed their fear! Every time his men bring down a Runao for his settlement, they eat their fill for a few hours and Athaansi is a hero—"

"And for every Runao who is killed, there is a whole village freshly convinced that the only way to live safely is to begin the war again," Suukmel pointed out.

"Exactly! The imaging satellites are too far south on the horizon to see us, and the Runa can’t track us, but they are not stupid! One day Athaansi, or someone like him, will lead them back to the valleys! I’m sure of it, Suukmel. If they ever find us, they’ll finish us! I have tried and tried to make Athaansi see that he multiplies our enemies faster than we can make children—"

"Athaansi is trapped in his own politics, child. He can’t rule without the VaPalkirn faction, and they will defend tradition at any price." Suukmel’s legs were cramping and she took Ha’anala firmly by the shoulders, lifting her to a sitting position, noting as she did so the narrowness of Ha’anala’s hips so late in pregnancy, the thinness of her tail, the dullness of her coat. "It must be admitted that the mothers of Athaansi’s valley are well fed," Suukmel said gently, "and they bear healthy children regularly."

Ha’anala glared down at the N’Jarr, where lean women bore fewer children every year, no matter whom they mated with. "If any wish to leave here, they may go!" she declared recklessly. "Athaansi will welcome the numbers."

"Undoubtedly," Suukmel said, watching Ha’anala’s gallantry fade. There had been no births during the past year, and few before that. Sofi’ala was a sturdy child who looked likely to survive childhood, but Ha’anala had lost a spindly toddler to the lung blight Shetri’s herbs could not stave off, and had borne another son dead.

"Maybe Athaansi is right," Ha’anala said, almost soundlessly.

"Possibly. And yet," Suukmel pointed out with wonderment, "we stay with you, and there are Runa who stay with us."

"Why?" Ha’anala cried. "What if I’m wrong? What if it’s all a mistake?"

"Eat this," Suukmel said, handing Ha’anala another eggsak. "Be glad for abundance and sunshine when they come." But Ha’anala simply let her hand fall listlessly, too distracted and dismayed to be heartened by a day when dense northern clouds parted around thin, silvery light. "Once, long ago," Suukmel told her, "my lord husband asked Hlavin Kitheri if he never worried that it might have been a mistake to do as he had done. The Paramount answered, ’Perhaps, but it was a magnificent mistake.’»

Ha’anala stood and walked to the edge of the rocks, the breeze riffling through her fur. Suukmel stood then herself and walked to Ha’anala’s side. "I have heard the songs of many gods, child. Silly gods, powerful gods, and capricious gods, and biddable gods, and dull. Long ago, when you first welcomed us to your household, and fed us and gave us shelter, and invited us to stay, I listened to you say that we are all—Jana’ata and Runa and H’u-man—children of a God so high that our ranks and our differences are as nothing in his far sight."

Suukmel looked out over the sweep of the valley, dotted now with small stone houses and filled with the sound of voices high and low, home to Runa and to Jana’ata and to the single outlandish being whom Ha’anala called brother. "I thought then that this was merely a song sung by a foreigner to a foolish girl who believed nonsense. But Taksayu was dear to me, and Isaac was dear to you. I was willing to hear this song, because I had once yearned for a world in which lives would be governed not by lineage and lust and moribund law, but by love and loyalty. In this one valley, such lives are possible," she said. "If it is a mistake to hope for such a world, then it is a magnificent mistake."

Ha’anala dropped to her knees and put her hands to the rock, to hold herself up. The keening was soft at first, but they were alone on this hillside, far from those whose faith could be undermined by a leader’s failure of nerve. Now was as good a time as any to give in to tiredness and worry; to hunger and responsibility; to yearning for lost parents and mourning for lost children, and for all that might have been and wasn’t.

"Rukuei came home," Ha’anala said finally in a tiny voice, face pressed now into Suukmel’s belly. "That’s something. He’s seen everything, and been everywhere. He came back here. And he has stayed…"

"Go back down the mountain, my heart," Suukmel advised serenely. "Listen to Isaac’s music again. Remember what you thought when you first heard it. Know that if we are children of one God, we can make ourselves one family in time."

"And if God is just a song?" Ha’anala asked, alone and frightened.

Suukmel did not answer for a while. Finally she said, "Our task is the same."

"LISTEN TO THEM!" TIYAT VA’AGARDI WHISPERED, AMAZED. "WOULD YOU have guessed that djanada were capable of arguing like that?"

"Just like the old days," Kajpin VaMasna agreed, "except now it’s them and not us." She listened to the wrangling for a while and then lay back to watch the clouds roll over the valley. It had been a long time since Kajpin herself had required agreement before making a decision—a character flaw she was no longer embarrassed by. She looked over at Tiyat. "I say we give them until second sunrise, and then we go."

Tiyat gazed affectionately at her companion. A former soldier, sickened by killing, Kajpin VaMasna had come north by herself, and since then had helped to ease the lives of VaN’Jarri of both species by raiding Runa trade caravans. Tiyat was just a domestic in the old days. She’d held a position of trust and responsibility even then, but she still sometimes hid in the middle of the herd, and admired Kajpin, who did not abase herself but still got along with everybody.

When the news about the new foreigners spread through the community, it was Kajpin who suggested that she and Tiyat should go south and bring a human back to the N’Jarr, touching off the fierno that was still raging. Most of the Runa had gotten bored and gone off to find something to eat, but the Jana’ata showed no signs of consensus.

"Ha’anala," Rukuei was saying, "I’ve studied all the records! Yes, there is a great deal I don’t understand. Too many words and ideas I can’t make clear to myself," he admitted. "But the foreigners first came here because of our music, and now they’ve come back. We have to know them—"

"And if all this talk of God’s music is nonsense?" Ha’anala demanded, trying to ignore Isaac’s humming, which was getting louder and more insistent by the moment. "If we are wrong—"

Tiyat spoke up for the first time. "It’s not nonsense! Someone thinks—" She stopped, shy but ashamed of taking cover, especially on this point. Tiyat loved the music Isaac had found; it was the only kind of music she had ever been able to listen to, and it had changed her. "I say we should let the other foreigners hear it. They’re part of this!"

"And there may be ways they can be useful to us—as honest brokers, for example," Suukmel pointed out, with the practicality that had once served two governments. "They could go back to the south and open negotiations on our behalf—"

("Uuuunnhh")

"Why would they agree to come here in the first place, let alone help us?" Ha’anala objected. "Sofia has poisoned their minds against us! They will believe us nothing more than murderers and thieves and—"

"They don’t have to agree," Shetri said, glancing at his collection of narcotics.

Ears toppling, Ha’anala cried, "Abduction is hardly the way to make allies!"

("Uuuuuuuuunnhh")

"I have been everywhere but to the south," Rukuei said over Isaac’s noise. "I need to see the others in their own place. If I am to understand, I must hear their words spoken freely—"

"Besides," Shetri said, with a slight edge to his voice, "Rukuei has had plenty of practice at deception. Who lies more convincingly than a poet who makes songs out of hunger and death?"

Ha’anala looked up sharply, but refused to be sidetracked. "This is crazy, Shetri," she said flatly. "It’s uselessly dangerous for you and Rukuei. Let Tiyat and Kajpin do this—"

("Uuuuuuuuuuuuunnhh—")

"For solving problems, two kinds of mind are better than one," Tiyat pointed out, mild eyes sweeping around the gathering. "If two kinds are good," she said again, "then three are better yet, so we should go get a foreigner."

("Uuuuuuuuuuuuunnnnnnhh—")

Yellow light now flared in the southeast, but the chill hardly lessened, even as the second of Rakhat’s suns rose. Kajpin stood and yawned, stretching her legs and shaking off boredom. "Just keep your mouths shut and your boots on and your hands in your sleeves," she advised Shetri and Rukuei. "If you’re exposed, then Tiyat and I are constables bringing in a couple of VaHaptaa."

"Kajpin can lie as well as a poet," Tiyat noted solemnly, and got slapped with her friend’s tail for her trouble.

"What goes wrong can be turned to advantage," Suukmel said. She looked down at the Runa toddler squirming in her lap—Tiyat’s son, who resembled his mother: good-tempered, but resolute when thwarted. This child would never question his right to say «I» to any person he met. He would always feel himself the equal of any soul: something all the VaN’-Jarri wished for their children. "Let them go, Ha’anala. It will be well. Let them go."

Ha’anala, holding Sofi’ala close, said nothing. A contest, she was thinking, between Ingwy and Adonai. Fate against Providence, in a place where Fate had ruled so long…

She realized then that Isaac had stopped humming. He was naked as always, but never seemed to feel the cold. Or perhaps he did, but had no interest in it. For a flashing moment, he looked into Rukuei’s eyes.

"Bring back someone who sings," was all he said.