Mary Russel: Children of God

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.