Children of God

5 City of Inbrokar, Rakhat 2046, Earth-Relative

"THE CHILD IS DEFECTIVE."

Ljaat-sa Kitheri, forty-seventh Paramount of the Most Noble Patrimony of Inbrokar, delivered this bald news to the infant’s father without preface. Summoned by a Runa domestic to the Paramount’s private chambers just after the rise of Rakhat’s second and most golden sun, Supaari VaGayjur received the announcement in silence, and had not so much as blinked.

Shock or self-control? Kitheri wondered, as his daughter’s preposterous husband moved to a window. The merchant stared out at the jumbled angles of Inbrokar City’s canted, crowded rooftops for a time, but then turned and lowered himself in obeisance. "If one might know, Magnificence, defective in what way?"

"A foot turns in." Kitheri glanced at the door. "That will be all."

"Your pardon, Magnificence," the merchant persisted. "There is no chance that this was… malformation? Some slight insufficiency of gestational condition, perhaps?"

An outrageous remark but, considering the source, the Paramount ignored it. "No female in my lineage or my wife’s has been at fault lately," Kitheri said dryly, pleased to see the merchant’s ears flatten. "Lately," in this context and used by a Kitheri, implied a lineage older than any other on Rakhat.

Initially dismayed by his daughter’s improbable marriage, Ljaat-sa Kitheri had become reconciled to the match simply because a third line of descendants presented a number of unusual political opportunities. Now, however, it was clear that the whole affair had been a travesty. Which was, the Paramount thought, only to be expected given Hlavin’s involvement.

It was typical of Hlavin, who was himself a disgrace, that he would grant breeding rights to this Supaari person on a whim, simply to embarrass the rest of the family. From time immemorial, the legal power to create a new lineage had been entrusted to the Kitheri Reshtar, precisely because statutory sterility was the most notable aspect of his life. These hapless late-born males could normally be counted on to grant sparingly a privilege they themselves might never enjoy. But nothing about Hlavin had ever been normal, the Paramount thought with irritable distaste.

"Was it a son?" the merchant asked, interrupting the Paramount’s thoughts.

Curious merely, his tone said. Already putting the child in the past. Admirable, under the circumstances. "No. It was female," the Paramount said.

Surprising, really—the outcome of the mating. When the merchant arrived in Inbrokar to cover Jholaa, the Paramount had been relieved to see that he was a goodly man with a fine phenotype. Ears well set on a broad head that sloped nicely to a strong muzzle. Intelligent eyes. Good breadth in the shoulders. Tall, and some real power in the hindquarters—traits the Kitheri line could benefit from, the Paramount admitted to himself. Of course, it was impossible to predict how an outcross with untested stock would go.

Leaning back on a tail thick-muscled and hard, the Paramount folded his arms over a massive chest, hooking his long curved claws around his elbows, and came to the point. "In cases like this, there is, you understand, a father’s duty." Supaari lifted his chin, the long and handsome and surprisingly dignified face still. "There may be others," the Paramount offered, but they both knew Jholaa was almost unapproachable now. The merchant said nothing.

It was disconcerting, this silence. The Paramount sank onto a cushion, wishing now that he’d sent a protocol Runa to the merchant’s chambers to deliver the news.

"So. The ceremony will be tomorrow morning, then, Magnificence?" Supaari asked at last.

My ancestors must have done this, the Paramount thought, moved in spite of himself. Sacrificing children to rid our line of recurring disease, wild traits, poor conformation to type. "It is necessary," he said aloud and with conviction. "Kill one insignificant child now, prevent generations of suffering in the future. We must bear in mind the greater good." Naturally, this peddler lacked both the breeding and the discipline that molded those meant from birth to rule. "Perhaps," Ljaat-sa Kitheri suggested with uncharacteristic delicacy, "you would prefer that I—"

The merchant stopped breathing for an instant and rose to full height. "No. Thank you, Magnificence," he said with soft finality, and slowly turned to stare. It was a finely calculated threat, the Paramount decided with some surprise, serving silent notice this man would no longer be insulted with impunity, but nicely offset by the deferential mildness of Supaari’s voice when next he spoke. "This is, perhaps, the price one pays for attempting something new."

"Yes," Ljaat-sa Kitheri said. "My thoughts exactly, although the commercial phrasing is unfortunate. Tomorrow, then."

The merchant accepted this correction with grace, but left the Paramount’s chambers without the prescribed farewell obeisance. It was his only lapse. And, the Paramount noted with the beginnings of respect, it might even have been deliberate.

I HAVE SANDOZ TO THANK FOR THIS, SUPAARI THOUGHT BITTERLY AS HE swept through twisted corridors to his quarters in the western pavilion of the Kitheri compound. Throat tight with the effort to hold back a howl, he fell onto his sleeping nest and lay there in stunned misery. How could it all have gone so wrong? he asked himself. Everything I had — wealth, home, business, friends — all for an infant with a twisted foot. But for Sandoz, none of this would have happened! he thought furiously. The whole thing was a bad bargain from start to finish.

And yet, until the Paramount announced this disastrous news, it had seemed to Supaari that he had behaved correctly at every step. He had been cautious and prudent; reconsidering three years of choices, he saw no alternatives to his decisions. The Runa of Kashan village were his clients: he was obligated to broker their trade, even when that required doing business with the tailless foreigners from H’earth. Who was the obvious buyer for their exotic goods? The Reshtar of Galatna Palace, Hlavin Kitheri, whose appetite for the unique was known throughout Rakhat. Should I have stayed with the foreigners in Kashan? he asked himself. Impossible! He had a business to run, responsibilities to other village corporations.

Even when the foreigners taught the Runa how to cultivate food, and the authorities discovered the unsanctioned breeding in the south, and the riots broke out—even then, Supaari had regained control before Chaos could dance. The foreigners were strangers; they didn’t know that what they’d done was wrong. Rather than let the two surviving humans be tried for sedition, Supaari had offered to make them hasta’akala. Admittedly, it was a bad sign when one of them died almost immediately. Perhaps I should have waited until I knew more about them before having their hands clipped, Supaari thought. But he was intent on establishing their legal status before the government could execute them. How could he have known that they would bleed so much?

When Sandoz recovered, Supaari did his best to incorporate the little interpreter into the life of the Gayjur trading company. He urged Sandoz to spend time in the warehouse and in the offices, encouraged him to deal with the dailiness of commerce, but the foreigner remained despondent. Finally, having done everything he could with courtesy, Supaari resorted to the rude expedient of asking Sandoz directly what was wrong.

"Your unworthy guest is alone, lord," Sandoz had said with a movement of the shoulders that seemed to signal resignation. Or acceptance, perhaps. Indifference, sometimes. It was hard to be certain what such gestures meant. But then the foreigner offered his neck, to remove the hint of criticism. "You are more than kind, lord, and your hospitality faultless. This useless one is exceedingly grateful."

He longs for others of his kind, Supaari realized, and wondered if the foreigners were more like Runa than like Jana’ata. Runa affections were genuine but elastic, encompassing anyone who was near, contracting smoothly when someone left. Even so, they needed a herd. Oh, the females could tolerate some solitude and work with strangers, but males needed families, children. Isolated from kin and friends, some Runa men would simply stop eating and die. It was rare, but it happened.

"Sandoz, do you pine for a wife?" Supaari asked, blunt in his anxiety that this foreigner, too, would perish in his custody.

"Lord, your grateful guest is ’celibate,’ " Sandoz told him, using a H’inglish word, his eyes sliding away. Then he explained, in his charmingly awkward K’San, "Wives are not taken by such as this unworthy one."

"So! Your kind are like Jana’ata then, who permit only the first two children to marry and breed," Supaari said, relieved. "I too am this thing — celibate. You are third-born as I am?"

"No, lord. Second. But among such as your guest, any person may mate and have children, even fifth-born or sixth."

Five? Six! Litters? Supaari wondered then. How can they allow so many? He felt sometimes that he understood only one thing in twelve of what he learned about the foreigners. "If you are second, why did you not take a wife?"

"This unworthy one chose not to, lord. It is an unusual choice, among my species as among yours. Men such as your guest leave the families of their birth and do not form attachment to any single person nor make any children. Thus we are free to love without exclusion, and to serve many."

Supaari was shocked to learn this about the little foreigner, whom he had come to care for. "You yourself are a servant to many, then?"

"Yes, lord, this one was, when among his own kind."

But there are none of your kind to serve here, Supaari thought. Confounded, he fell back against the pile of dining cushions on which he had lingered as the leavings of his meal cooled, and thought wistfully of the days when his most perplexing problem was predicting next season’s demand for kirt. "Sandoz," he said, reaching out to grip some kind of certainty, "what is your purpose? Why did you come here?"

"Lord: to study the gifts of the tongue—to learn the songs of your people."

"Ha’an told me this!" Supaari cried, making sense at last of something Anne Edwards had once said. "You came because you heard the songs of our poets and admired them." He stared at Sandoz: not an interpreter bred to trade, but a second-born who chose to make no children, and a poet who serves many! No wonder Sandoz had shown no interest in commerce! That was when everything fell into place-it seemed brilliant, at the time. "Would it please you to serve among the poets whose songs brought you here, Sandoz?"

For the first time in a full season, the foreigner seemed to brighten. "Yes, lord. This would honor your most unworthy guest. Truly."

So Supaari set out to make this possible. The negotiations were delicate, intricate, delicious. In the end, he achieved a subtle and beautifully balanced transaction: the crowning achievement of a remarkably successful mercantile career. The foreigner Sandoz would be provided with a life of service to Hlavin Kitheri, the Reshtar of Galatna, whose diminishing poetic power might once more be lifted to greatness by inspiring encounters with the foreigner. The Reshtar’s younger sister, Jholaa, would be released from the enforced barrenness of her existence, as would Supaari himself, by their marriage and by the foundation of the new Darjan lineage with full breeding rights. Since Supaari VaGayjur’s own wealth would endow the Darjan, the Most Noble Patrimony of Inbrokar gained a third sept without any hint of unseemly inconstancy: an ideal multiplication of descent lines with no division of inheritance.

Agreement reached, the transfer of custody took place. Sandoz appeared to settle into the Reshtar’s household reasonably well after his placement in Galatna Palace. Supaari himself had overseen the foreigner’s presentation to the Reshtar; he was, in fact, a little unnerved by the pathetic, trembling eagerness with which Sandoz invited Kitheri’s attentions. But the merchant left Galatna Palace elated over his own good fortune, and believing that he had done right by Sandoz.

It wasn’t long before Supaari realized that there might have been some kind of misunderstanding. "How does the foreigner?" he inquired some days after the transfer, hoping to hear that Sandoz was thriving.

"Well indeed," was the reply. Even after his initiation, the Reshtar’s secretary reported, Sandoz was extraordinary: "Fights like a virgin every time." The Reshtar was pleased and had already produced a splendid song cycle. His best in years, everyone said. The puzzle, Supaari learned, was that the foreigner reacted to sex with violent sickness. This was disturbing but, Supaari thought, it was evidently normal for his kind. One of the other foreigners had been bred just before she was killed in the Kashan riot, and Sofia too had trouble with nausea.

In any case, the deal was done; there was no second-guessing it now. And the Reshtar’s poetry was lovely. So was Supaari’s new home, the city of Inbrokar; so was his new wife, the lady Jholaa.

But then the poetry took a very odd turn, and the Reshtar was silenced. And Inbrokar was maddeningly boring compared to the bustle of Gayjur. Jholaa, Supaari noted wryly, was not boring but she was, quite likely, mad. And Sandoz was gone now, sent back to wherever he came from by the second party from H’earth, which had itself disappeared. Returned to H’earth as well, most likely. Who knew?

In view of how the mating had turned out, Supaari was inclined to wish he’d never known any of them—Sandoz, the Reshtar, Jholaa. Fool: this is what comes of change, Supaari told himself. Move a pebble, risk a landslide.

It was then that Supaari realized with sickening certainty that if he was to sire another child to take this one’s place, his second encounter with Jholaa would be even uglier than the first. At this level of society, bloodlines were guarded like treasure, and it occurred to him that Jholaa had probably never even seen Runa bred, which was the way most commoners got their first instruction in sex. Supaari had initially approached the lady with a certain untraditional anticipation of the staggering erotic beauty defined and promised by the Reshtar’s poetry, but it had quickly become clear that Jholaa herself was unfamiliar with her famous brother’s more recent literary output. The child Supaari would kill in the morning had, on the occasion of her conception, nearly cost her sire an eye; he’d have funked the job entirely if pheromones and the irresistible scent of blood hadn’t taken over.

When the union was concluded, Supaari had retreated from it with relief, badly disillusioned. And he understood at last why so many Jana’ata aristocrats preferred to be serviced by Runa concubines—bred for enjoyment and trained to delight—the moment their dynastic duty had been accomplished.

SLEEPING NOW AND EXHAUSTED FROM THE STRUGGLE TO EXPEL HER husband’s brat, the lady Jholaa Kitheri u Darjan had always been more of a dynastic idea than a person.

Like most females of her caste, Jholaa Kitheri had been kept catastrophically ignorant, but she was not stupid. Allowed to see nothing of genuine importance, she was keenly observant of emotional minutiae— astute enough to wonder, even as a girl, if it was malice or simply thoughtless cruelty when, at her father’s whim, she was allowed beyond her chamber and permitted to recline silently on silken cushions in a dim corner of an awninged courtyard during some minor state gathering. But even on those rare occasions, no one came near or even glanced in her direction.

"I might as well be made of glass or wind or time," Jholaa had cried out at this indifference when she was only ten. "Srokan, I exist! Why does no one see me?"

"They do not see my most beautiful lady because she has the glory of the moons in her!" her Runa nursemaid said, hoping to distract the child. "Your people cannot look upon the moons, which live in truest night. Only Runa like your poor Srokan can see such things, and love them."

"Then I shall look upon what the others cannot," Jholaa declared that day, shaking off Srokan’s embrace, and gave herself the task of staying awake past second sundown, and then past the setting of Rakhat’s third and smallest sun, to see for herself these glorious moons.

There was no one to deny her this, no bar to her ambition except the powerful drowsiness of childhood and of species. It was as frightening as anything a Jana’ata could do, but Srokan was there in the courtyard with her, telling stories and sharing gossip, her fine hands stroking Jholaa: calming the girl as she lost sight first of blues and next of yellows, contrast fading to a gray lightlessness and then to a dense darkness as confining as an aristocratic woman’s life. The only things that staved off blind panic were Srokan’s voice and the comforting familiar scents of nursery bedding and incense, and the aroma of roasted meat lingering in the air.

Suddenly, Srokan gripped Jholaa’s arms and lifted her to her feet. "There! The clouds have run away and there they are!" she whispered urgently, holding Jholaa’s head so that the girl would look in the right direction—so she could see, like small cold suns, the glowing disks: moons in inky blackness, beautiful and remote as mountain snow.

"There are other things in the night sky," Srokan told her. "Daughters of the moons! Tiny sparkling babies." Jana’ata eyes were not made to see such things and Jholaa could only accept her nurse’s word that this was so, and not some silly Runa story.

This was the only memorable event of her childhood.

For a time, Jholaa shared isolation with the Kitheri Reshtar, her third-born brother, Hlavin. His title meant "spare," and like Jholaa, Hlavin’s purpose was simply to exist, ready to transmit the patrimony should either of their elder brothers come to nothing. Hlavin was the only one aside from Srokan who noticed Jholaa, telling her stories and amusing her with secret songs, even though he was beaten for singing when his tutor caught him at it. Who but Hlavin could have made her laugh as the wives of Dherai and Bhansaar filled nurseries with children who displaced Hlavin and Jholaa in the Kitheri succession? Who but Hlavin would have cried out for her, moved to keening by her story of the moons, and by her confession that as each new niece and nephew was born, Jholaa herself felt more and more like a moon child: invisible to her own people, sparkling, undreamt of, in the darkness.

Then Dherai’s own Reshtar was born, and then Bhansaar’s; the succession was deemed stable, and Hlavin was taken from her, exiled to the port of Gayjur to safeguard his nephews’ lives from a young uncle’s frustrated ambition. Even in exile, Hlavin found a way to sing to her, and sent Jholaa a radio receiver so that she could hear her own words about the moons’ daughters, riding on waves as invisible as stars, woven into a transcendent cantata sung during his first broadcast from Galatna Palace, which was allowed because he did not sing the traditional chants that belonged to those born first or second, but something new and wholly other.

The concert left Jholaa angry, somehow, as if her words had been stolen from her, not given as a gift. When the music ended, she swept the radio from its pedestal, as though it were to blame. "Where is Galatna?" she de- manded as Srokan bent to gather the wreckage.

"It is set like a jewel, on a mountain above the city of Gayjur, and that is by an ocean, my lady," Srokan told her. Srokan looked up, her blue eyes wide. "So much water, you can stand on its edge and look-look as far as you can, but there’s no end to it!"

"You lie. There’s no such thing as water like that. All Runa lie. You’d kill us if you could," Jholaa said with flat contempt, old enough, by then, to know a master’s fear.

"Nonsense, little one!" Srokan cried with good-natured surprise. "Why, Jana’ata sleep away the red sun’s time and true night, and no one harms you! This devoted one does not lie to her darling mistress. The moons were real, my lady. The ocean is real! Its water tastes of salt, and its air is of a scent no landsman knows!"

Resentment was, by then, the only leavening that could lift Jholaa from the torpor that immobilized her for days at a time. She had come to hate the luckless Runa domestics who were her only companions, despising their ability to go into the world, the shameless sluts, unveiled and unguarded, to see oceans and breathe scents Jholaa would never know. Holding an elegant claw to Srokan’s ear, Jholaa began to peel it from the woman’s head, relenting only when the Runao admitted she had not seen or tasted this ocean herself and had only heard stories from the kitchen help, who came from the south. Hlavin would have told her the truth of the ocean, but he was lost to her, so Jholaa allowed her nursemaid’s shaking hands to stroke and soothe her, and breathed in the salt scent of blood, not ocean.

Later that night, as Jholaa lay blind in the dark, useless light of Rakhat’s small, red sun, she decided to execute Srokan for thinking how she might murder Jana’ata in their sleep, and to have the woman’s children killed as well, to clear the line.

Srokan was old anyway. Stew meat, Jholaa thought dismissively.

Which was why there was no one to warn Jholaa or to prepare her for what would happen after her wedding: her domestics were frightened of her and none had the courage to explain why they were dressing her for a state ceremony. But Jholaa was used to being displayed on such occasions, and was not surprised to find herself taken to a stateroom filled with dazzlingly decorated officials and all her male relatives, who continued to chant, as though she were not there.

She stood quietly through the endless ceremonial declamations; these events tended to go on for days, and she had long since given up listening carefully. But when she heard her own name sung, she began to pay attention, and then she recognized the melody that sealed a marriage, and realized that she’d just been legally bound to a man whose lineal name she’d never heard before. Eyes wide behind her jewel-encrusted veil of gold mesh, she turned to ask someone—anyone—if she were being sent to another country, but before she could speak, her father and brothers surrounded her and moved Jholaa to the center of the room.

Her Runa maids reappeared and, when they began to remove her robes, Jholaa spoke up, demanding to know what was happening, but the men only laughed. Furious now and frightened, she tried to cover herself, but then the man whose name she could not quite remember came so close she could smell him, and dropped his own robe off his shoulders and he—. He did not merely look at her, but moved behind her and gripped her ankles and—

She fought, but her screams and struggle were drowned by the wedding guests’ roars of amusement and approval. Afterward, she heard her father comment with chuckling pride to the others, "A virgin! No one could deny it after all that!" To which her eldest brother replied, "Almost as much of a fighter as that outlandish foreigner Hlavin and his friends use…"

When it was over, she was taken through a courtyard made festive for the occasion to a small shuttered room where she sat, ripped and bewildered, and listened to poetry sung in honor of the fourth-born Jholaa Kitheri u Darjan: against all odds, bred to a third-born merchant who would never have sired a child at all but for the foreign servant Sandoz. And when at last Jholaa bore that child, its lineage was unquestionable; this was, she came to understand, the only reason for her own existence.

A similar fate, she believed, was all that awaited her daughter. The lady Jholaa never looked at her infant, after the first moments of its life, when she got a hand loose from the midwife’s grip and tried to slash the child’s throat, from pity and disgust. Later, when her brother Dherai appeared briefly in her room to tell her that the infant was deformed, Jholaa did not care.

"Kill it then," was all she said, and wished someone had done the same for her.