Children of God Read online

  “That would be very nice,” he said in a serious voice. “I think I could use a kiss.”

  She leaned forward and kissed his cheek. Her cousin Roberto, who was nine, said kissing was stupid, but Celestina knew better. “This is a new dress,” she told the man. “I got chocolate on it.”

  “It’s still very pretty. So are you.”

  “Cece had babies. Want to see them?”

  The man looked up at Don Vincenzo, who explained, “Cece is a guinea pig. Having babies is what guinea pigs do.”

  “Ah. Si, cara. I’d like that.”

  He stood, and she went to take his hand so she could bring him outside, but remembered about the machines. “What happened to your hands?” she asked, pulling him along by the sleeve.

  “It was a sort of accident, cara. Don’t worry. It can’t happen to you.”

  “Does it hurt?” Vincenzo Giuliani heard the child ask, as she led Emilio Sandoz down the hall toward a door to the backyard.

  “Sometimes,” Sandoz said simply. “Not today.”

  Their voices were lost to him after he heard the back door bang shut. Vincenzo Giuliani stepped to the window, listening to the late afternoon buzz of cicadas, and watched Celestina drag Emilio to the guinea-pig pen. The child’s lace-pantied bottom suddenly upended as she leaned over the wire enclosure to grab a baby for Emilio, who sat smiling on the ground, black-and-silver hair spilling forward over high Taino cheekbones as he admired the little animal Celestina dumped in his lap.

  It had taken four priests eight months of relentless pressure to get Emilio Sandoz to reveal what Celestina had learned in two minutes. Evidently, the Father General observed wryly, the best man for the job can sometimes be a four-year-old girl.

  And he wished that Edward Behr had stayed to see this.

  BROTHER EDWARD WAS AT THAT MOMENT IN HIS ROOM IN THE JESUITS’ Neapolitan retreat house some four kilometers away, still astounded that the Father General had chosen a baptism as the occasion for Emilio Sandoz’s first venture out of seclusion.

  “You’re joking!” Edward had cried that morning. “A christening? Father General, the last thing in the world Emilio Sandoz needs right now is a christening!”

  “This is family, Ed. No press, no pressure,” Vincenzo Giuliani declared. “The party will be good for him! He’s strong enough now—”

  “Physically, yes,” Edward conceded. “But emotionally, he is nowhere near ready for this. He needs time!” Edward insisted. “Time to be angry. Time to mourn! Father General, you can’t rush—”

  “Bring the car around front at ten, thank you, Edward,” the Father General said, smiling mildly. And that was that.

  Having dropped the two priests off at the church, Brother Edward spent the remainder of the day back at the Jesuit house, stewing. By three in the afternoon, he had convinced himself that he really ought to leave early to fetch them back from the party. It was only sensible to allow time for security checks, he told himself. Regardless of how well known the driver was, no vehicle got near Giuliani real estate or the retreat without being carefully and repeatedly considered by swarthy, suspicious men and large, thoughtful dogs trained to detect explosives and ill will. So Edward allowed forty-five minutes for a trip that might otherwise take ten, and was questioned and sniffed and inspected at every intersection of the road that paralleled the coast. It wasn’t entirely wasted time, he noted, as the car’s undercarriage was mirrored at the compound gate and his identification studied a fourth time. He had, for example, learned some remarkable things from several dogs about where weapons might theoretically be concealed on a tubby man’s body.

  However questionable the probity of the Father General’s Neapolitan relatives, it was a comfort to know that Emilio Sandoz benefited from their thoroughness, and Edward was eventually allowed to pull into the driveway of the largest of the several houses visible from the front gate, its loggia festive with flowers and balloons. Emilio was nowhere to be seen, but before long, the Father General separated from a little crowd with a young blond woman. Giuliani raised a hand in acknowledgment to Behr and then spoke to someone in the house.

  Emilio appeared moments later, looking stiff-backed and exhausted, a dark amalgam of Indian endurance and Spanish pride. There was a small girl in a very rumpled party dress at his side. “I knew it!” Edward muttered furiously. “This was too much!”

  With as fortifyingly deep a breath as an asthmatic could manage, Brother Edward heaved his portly self out of the car and trundled around it, opening doors for the Father General and for Sandoz, while Giuliani made their good-byes to the hostess and the other guests. The little girl said something, and Edward groaned when Emilio knelt to receive her embrace and return the hug as best he could. Despite—no, because of the tenderness of that farewell, Brother Edward was not a bit surprised by the quiet conversation that was going on between the two priests as they made their way alone to the car.

  “—if you ever do this to me again, you sonofabitch. Dammit, Ed, don’t hover,” Sandoz snapped, climbing into the back seat. “I can close the door myself.”

  “Yes, Father. Sorry, Father,” Edward said, backing off, but actually rather pleased. Nothing like being right, he thought to himself.

  “Jesus, Vince! Kids and babies!” Sandoz snarled as they pulled out of the Giuliani drive. “This was supposed to be good for me?”

  “It was good for you,” the Father General insisted. “Emilio, you were fine until the end—”

  “The nightmares aren’t bad enough? Now we’re trying for flashbacks?”

  “You said you wanted to live on your own,” the Father General pointed out patiently. “Things like this are bound to come up. You’ve got to learn to deal with—”

  “Who the fuck are you to tell me what I have to deal with? Shit, if this starts happening when I’m awake—”

  Edward, wincing at the language, glanced into the rearview mirror when Emilio’s voice broke. Cry, Edward thought. It’s better than the headaches. Go ahead and cry. But Sandoz fell silent and stared out the window at the passing countryside, dry-eyed and furious.

  “There are at present some six billion individuals under the age of fifteen in the world,” the Father General resumed peaceably. “It’s going to be difficult to avoid them all. If you can’t manage in a controlled environment like Carmella’s home—”

  “Quod erat demonstrandum,” Sandoz said bitterly.

  “—then perhaps you should consider staying with us. As a linguist, if nothing else.”

  “You crafty old bastard.” Sandoz laughed—a short, hard sound. “You did this to me deliberately.”

  “One doesn’t become Father General of the Society of Jesus by being a dumb bastard,” Vince Giuliani said mildly, and went on, straight-faced. “The dumb bastards become famous linguists and get themselves buggered on other planets.”

  “You’re just jealous. When’s the last time you got laid?”

  Brother Edward turned left onto the coast road, seeing through Emilio’s desperate bluff, marveling at the relationship between these two men. Born to wealth and unquestioned privilege, Vincenzo Giuliani was a historian and politician of international repute, still powerful in body and mind at the age of seventy-nine. Emilio Sandoz was the illegitimate child of a Puerto Rican woman who’d had an affair while her husband was jailed for trafficking in the very substances that had enriched an earlier generation of La Famiglia Giuliani. The two men had met over sixty years ago while studying for the priesthood. And yet, Sandoz was now only forty-six years old, give or take a bit. One of the many bizarre aspects of Emilio’s situation was the fact that he’d spent thirty-four years traveling at a substantial percentage of the speed of light, to and from the Alpha Centauri system. For Sandoz, only about six years had gone by since he’d left Earth—difficult years, granted, but very few of them compared to those that had passed for Vince Giuliani, now decades Emilio’s senior and his superior by several levels of Jesuit organization.

  “Emilio,
all I’m asking for now is that you work with us—” Giuliani was saying.

  “All right. All right!” Emilio cried, too tired to argue. Which was, Brother Edward thought with narrowed eyes, undoubtedly the desired effect of the day’s activities. “But on my terms, dammit.”

  “Which are?”

  “A fully integrated sound-analysis system linked to processing. With voice control.” Edward glanced into the mirror and saw Giuliani nod. “A private office,” Emilio continued. “I can’t use a keyboard anymore and I can’t work when people can overhear me.”

  “And what else?” Giuliani prompted.

  “Dump all the Rakhati song fragments to my system—everything the radio telescopes have intercepted since 2019, yes? Download everything the Stella Maris party radioed back from Rakhat.” Again, agreement. “An assistant. A native speaker of Déné or Magyar. Or Euskara—Basque, yes? And fluent in Latin or English or Spanish. I don’t care which.”

  “And what else?”

  “I want to live by myself. Put a bed in the potting shed. Or the garage. I don’t care. I’m not asking for the outside, Vince. Just someplace where I can be alone. No kids, no babies.”

  “And what else?”

  “Publication. All of it—everything we sent back.”

  “Not the languages,” Giuliani said. “The sociology, the biology, yes. The languages, no.”

  “Well, then, what is the point?” Emilio cried. “Why the hell am I doing the work?”

  The Father General did not look at him. Scanning the Campano archipelago, he watched Camorra “fishing” boats patrol the Bay of Naples, grateful for their protection against media predators who’d do almost anything to question the small, thin man slumped beside him: the priest and whore and child killer, Emilio Sandoz.

  “You are doing the work ad majorem Dei gloriam, as far as I am concerned,” Giuliani said lightly. “If the greater glory of God no longer motivates you, you may consider that you are working out your room and board, provided gratis by the Society of Jesus, along with round-the-clock security, sound-analysis systems and research assistance. The engineering that went into those braces was not cheap, Emilio. We’ve paid out over a million six in hospital bills and medical fees alone. That’s money we don’t have anymore—the Society is all but bankrupt. I have tried to protect you from these concerns, but things have changed for the worse since you left.”

  “So why didn’t you just kick my expensive ass out in the first place? I told you from the start, I’m a dead loss, Vince—”

  “Nonsense,” Giuliani snapped, eyes meeting Edward Behr’s briefly in the rearview mirror. “You are an asset I intend to capitalize on.”

  “Oh, wonderful. And what are you buying with me?”

  “Passage to Rakhat on a commercial vessel for four priests trained in K’San and Ruanja using the Sandoz-Mendes programs, which are the exclusive property of the Society of Jesus.” Vincenzo Giuliani looked at Sandoz, whose own eyes were closed now against the light. “You are free to leave at any time, Emilio. But while you reside with us, at our expense, under our protection—”

  “The Society has a monopoly on two Rakhati languages. You want me to train interpreters.”

  “Whom we will provide to business, academic or diplomatic interests until that monopoly is broken. This will help to recoup our expenses in underwriting the original mission to Rakhat and will allow us to continue the work begun there by your party, requiescant in pace. Pull over, please, Brother Edward.”

  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 us
eless. 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.