Children of God Read online

  Sandoz’s apartment was a mess, Lopore noted happily as he picked a discarded towel off the nearest chair and tossed it onto the unmade bed, and then sat without ceremony.

  “I—I’m sorry about all this,” Sandoz stammered, but the Pontiff waved his apology off.

  “One of the reasons We insisted on having Our own car was the desire to visit people without setting off an explosion of maniacal preparation,” Gelasius III remarked. Then he confided with specious formality, “We find We are thoroughly sick of fresh paint and new carpeting.” He motioned for Emilio to take the other seat, across the table from him. “Please,” he said, dropping the plurals deliberately, “sit with me.” But he glanced at Giuliani, standing in the corner near the stairway, unwilling to intrude but loath to leave. Stay, the Holy Father’s eyes said, and remember everything.

  “My people are Dodoth. Herders, even now,” the Pope told Sandoz, his Latin exotic with African place-names and the rhythmic, striding cadences of his childhood. “When the drought came, we went north to our cousins, the Toposa, in southern Sudan. It was a time of war and so, of famine. The Toposa drove us off—they had nothing. We asked, ‘Where can we go?’ A man on the road told us, ‘There is a camp for Gikuyu east of here. They turn no one away.’ It was a long journey and, as we walked, my youngest sister died in my mother’s arms. You saw us coming. You walked out to my family. You took from my mother her daughter’s body, as gently as if the baby were your own. You carried that dead child and found us a place to rest. You brought us water, and then food. While we ate, you dug a grave for my sister. Do you recall now?”

  “No. There were so many babies. So many dead.” Emilio looked up wearily. “I have dug a lot of graves, Your Holiness.”

  “There will be no more graves for you to dig,” the Pope said, and Vincenzo Giuliani heard the voice of prophesy: ambiguous, elusive, sure. The moment passed and the Pontiff’s conversation became ordinary again. “Every day of my life since that one, I have thought of you! What kind of man weeps for a daughter not of his making? The answer to that question led me to Christianity, to the priesthood, and now: here, to you!” He sat back in the chair, amazed that he should meet that unknown priest half a century later. He paused and then continued gently, a priest himself, whose office was to reconcile God and man. “You have wept for other children since those days in the Sudan.”

  “Hundreds. More. Thousands, I think, died because of me.”

  “You take a great deal on your shoulders. But there was one child in particular, We are told. Can you speak her name, so that We may remember her in prayer?”

  He could, but only barely, almost without sound. “Askama, Your Holiness.”

  There was silence for a time and then Kalingemala Lopore reached across the small table, lifting Emilio’s bowed head with blunt, strong fingers, and smoothing away the tears. Vincenzo Giuliani had always thought of Emilio as dark, but with those powerful brown hands cupping his face, he looked ghostly, and then Giuliani realized that Sandoz had nearly fainted. Emilio hated being touched, loathed unexpected contact. Lopore could not have known this and Giuliani took a step forward, about to explain, when he realized that the Pope was speaking.

  Emilio listened, stone-faced, with the quick shallow movement of the chest that sometimes betrayed him. Giuliani could not hear their words, but he saw Sandoz freeze, and pull away, and stand and begin to pace. “I made a cloister of my body and a garden of my soul, Your Holiness. The stones of the cloister wall were my nights, and my days were the mortar,” Emilio said in the soft, musical Latin that a young Vince Giuliani had admired and envied when they were in formation together. “Year after year, I built the walls. But in the center I made a garden that I left open to heaven, and I invited God to walk there. And God came to me.” Sandoz turned away, trembling. “God filled me, and the rapture of those moments was so pure and so powerful that the cloister walls were leveled. I had no more need for walls, Your Holiness. God was my protection. I could look into the face of the wife I would never have, and love all wives. I could look into the face of the husband I would never be, and love all husbands. I could dance at weddings because I was in love with God, and all the children were mine.”

  Giuliani, stunned, felt his eyes fill. Yes, he thought. Yes.

  But when Emilio turned again and faced Kalingemala Lopore, he was not weeping. He came back to the table and placed his ruined hands on its battered wood, face rigid with rage. “And now the garden is laid waste,” he whispered. “The wives and the husbands and the children are all dead. And there is nothing left but ash and bone. Where was our Protector? Where was God, Your Holiness? Where is God now?”

  The answer was immediate, certain. “In the ashes. In the bones. In the souls of the dead, and in the children who live because of you—”

  “Nothing lives because of me!”

  “You’re wrong. I live. And there are others.”

  “I am a blight. I carried death to Rakhat like syphilis, and God laughed while I was raped.”

  “God wept for you. You have paid a terrible price for His plan, and God wept when He asked it of you—”

  Sandoz cried out and backed away, shaking his head. “That is the most terrible lie of all! God does not ask. I gave no consent. The dead gave no consent. God is not innocent.”

  The blasphemy hung in the room like smoke, but it was joined seconds later by Jeremiah’s. “He hath led me and brought me into darkness, and not into light. He hath set me in dark places as those who are dead forever. And when I cry and I entreat,” Gelasius III recited, eyes knowing and full of compassion, “He hath shut out my prayer! He hath filled me with bitterness. He hath fed me ashes. He hath caused me disgrace and contempt.”

  Sandoz stood still and stared at nothing they could see. “I am damned,” he said finally, tired to his soul, “and I don’t know why.”

  Kalingemala Lopore sat back in his chair, the long, strong fingers folded loosely in his lap, his faith in hidden meaning, and in God’s work in God’s time, granitic. “You are beloved of God,” he said. “And you will live to see what you have made possible when you return to Rakhat.”

  Sandoz’s head snapped up. “I won’t go back.”

  “And if you are asked to do so by your superior?” Lopore asked, brows up, glancing at Giuliani.

  Vincenzo Giuliani, forgotten until now in his corner, found himself looking into Emilio Sandoz’s eyes and was, for the first time in some fifty-five years, utterly cowed. He spread his hands and shook his head, beseeching Emilio to believe: I didn’t put him up to this.

  “Non serviam,” Sandoz said, turning from Giuliani. “I won’t be used again.”

  “Not even if We ask it?” the Pope pressed.

  “No.”

  “So. Not for the Society. Not for Holy Mother Church. Nevertheless, for yourself and for God, you must go back,” Gelasius III told Emilio Sandoz with a terrifying, joyful certainty. “God is waiting for you, in the ruins.”

  VINCENZO GIULIANI WAS A MAN OF MODERATION AND HABITUAL self-control. All his adult life, he had lived among other such men—intellectual, sophisticated, cosmopolitan. He had read and written of saints and prophets, but this.… I am in over my head, he thought, and he wanted to hide, to remove himself from whatever was happening in that room, to flee from the awful grace of God. “Let not the Lord speak to us, lest we die,” Giuliani thought, and felt a sudden sympathy for the Israelites at Sinai, for Jeremiah used against his will, for Peter who tried to run from Christ. For Emilio.

  And yet, one had to pull oneself together, to murmur brief, graceful explanations and soothing apologies, and to accompany the Holy Father down the stairs and out into the sunshine. Courtesy demanded that one offer His Holiness lunch before the drive back to Rome. Long experience allowed one to show the way to the refectory, chatting about the Naples retreat house and its Tristano architecture. One pointed out the artwork: an excellent Caravaggio here, a rather good Titian there. One was able to smile good-humoredly at
Brother Cosimo, stupefied at finding the Supreme Pontiff in his kitchen, inquiring about the availability of a fish soup the Father General had recommended.

  There was, in the event, anguilla in umido over toast, served with a memorably sulphurous ‘49 Lacryma Christi. The Father General of the Society of Jesus and the Holy Father of the Roman Catholic Church ate undisturbed at a simple wooden table in the kitchen and sat amicably over cappuccinos, toying with sfogliatele, each smiling inwardly at the unmentioned fact that they were both known as the Black Pope: one for his Jesuit soutane and the other for his equatorial skin. Neither did they mention Sandoz. Or Rakhat. They discussed instead the second excavation of Pompeii, about to be undertaken now that Vesuvius seemed satisfied that Naples had learned its latest lesson in geologic humility. They had mutual acquaintances and swapped stories of Vatican politicians and organizational chess matches. And Giuliani gained additional respect for a man who had come to the Holy See from the outside and was now deftly turning that ancient institution toward policies that struck the Father General as hopeful and wise, and very shrewd.

  Afterward, they strolled out toward the Pope’s Fiat, their long shadows rippling over uneven stone pavement. Settling into his vehicle, Kalingemala Lopore reached toward the starter, but the dark hand hovered and then dropped. He lowered the window and sat looking straight ahead for a few moments before he spoke. “It seems a pity,” he said quietly, “that there has been a breach between the Vatican and a religious order with such a long and distinguished history of service to Our predecessors.”

  Giuliani became very still. “Yes, Your Holiness,” he said evenly, heart hammering. It was for this, among other reasons, that he had sent Gelasius III transcripts of the Rakhat mission reports and his own rendering of Sandoz’s story. For over five hundred years, allegiance to the papacy had been the pole around which the Jesuits’ global service had revolved, but Ignatius of Loyola had aimed for a soldierly dialectic of obedience and initiative when he founded the Society of Jesus. Patience and prayer—and relentless pressure in the direction the Jesuits wished decisions to go—paid off time after time. Even so, from the beginning, the Jesuits had championed education and a social activism that sometimes verged on the revolutionary; clashes with the Vatican were not uncommon, some far more serious than others. “It seemed unavoidable at the time, but of course …”

  “Things change.” Gelasius spoke lightly, reasonably, with humor, one man of the world to another. “Diocesan clergy may now marry. Popes from Uganda are elected! Who but God knows the future?”

  Giuliani’s brows climbed toward where his hair had once been. “Prophets?” he suggested.

  The Pope nodded judiciously, mouth pulled down at the corners. “The occasional stock market analyst, perhaps.” Taken by surprise, Giuliani laughed and shook his head, and realized that he liked this man very much. “It is not the future, but the past that separates us,” the Pontiff said to the Jesuit General, breaking years of silence about the wedge that had all but split the Church in two.

  “Your Holiness, we are more than prepared to concede that overpopulation alone is not the sole cause of poverty and misery,” Giuliani began.

  “Fatuous oligarchies,” Gelasius suggested. “Ethnic paranoia. Whimsical economic systems. An enduring habit of treating women like dogs …”

  Giuliani took a breath and held it a moment before stating the position of the Society of Jesus, and his own. “There is no condom that prevents pigheadedness, no pill or injection that stops greed or vanity. But there are humane and sensible ways to alleviate some of the conditions that lead to misery.”

  “We ourselves have experienced the death of a sister, sacrificed on Malthus’s altar,” Gelasius III pointed out. “Unlike Our learned and saintly predecessors, We are unable to discern evidence of God’s most holy will in population control carried out by the forces of war, starvation and disease. These seem to a simple man blind, and brutal.”

  “And inadequate to the task, for all that. As are human self-control and sexual restraint,” Giuliani observed. “The Society merely asks that Holy Mother Church make allowances for human nature, as any loving mother does. Surely, the capacity to think and to plan is a divine gift that can be used responsibly. Surely, there is no evil in the desire that each child who is born be as welcomed and cherished as was Christ the Child.”

  “There can be no question of tolerating abortion—” Lopore said decisively.

  “And yet,” Giuliani pointed out, “St. Ignatius advised that ‘we must never seek to establish a rule so rigid as to leave no room for exception.’ ”

  “Neither can we abet systems of birth control as inflexible and cruel as the one Sandoz describes on Rakhat,” Gelasius continued.

  “The middle way is always the most difficult path to follow, Your Holiness.”

  “And extremism the simplest, but—. Ecclesia semper reformanda!” said Gelasius with sudden vigor. “We have studied the Jesuit proposals, and those of our Orthodox Christian brethren. There is good to be achieved! The question is how.… It will be a matter, We think, of redefining the domains of natural and artificial birth control. Sahlins—you have read Sahlins? Sahlins wrote that ‘nature’ is culturally defined, so what is artificial is also culturally defined.” The hand moved, the starter hummed and the Pope made ready to leave. But then the dark-eyed gaze returned to Vincenzo Giuliani’s face. “To think. To plan. And yet—what extraordinary children come to us unplanned, unwanted, despised! We are told that Emilio Sandoz is a slum-bred bastard.”

  “Harsh words, Your Holiness.” Supplied no doubt by Vatican politicians who had moved smoothly behind the throne of Peter when that spot was vacated by exiled Jesuit antecedents. “But technically correct, I understand.” Giuliani thought a moment. “Numbers 11:23 comes to mind. And Sarah’s unlikely child, and Elizabeth’s. Even Our Lady’s! I suppose that if Almighty God wants an extraordinary child born, we may trust Him to arrange it?”

  The gleaming brown eyes shone in a still face. “We have enjoyed this conversation. Perhaps you will visit Us in the future?”

  “I’m sure my secretary can make the arrangements with your office, Your Holiness.”

  The Pope inclined his head, lifted his hand in blessing. Just before he blanked the Fiat’s one-way windows to outside view and rolled out onto the ancient stone-paved road that led toward the autostrada to Rome, he said again, “Sandoz must go back.”

  Great Southern Forest, Rakhat

  2042, Earth-Relative

  SOFIA MENDES PULLED HERSELF TOGETHER DURING HER LAST MONTH of pregnancy, forcing the faces of the dead from her mind by concentrating on the unknown child within her. The turning point came several weeks after they arrived in Trucha Sai. “Someone thought: Fia is never without this,” Kanchay said, handing a computer tablet to her one morning. “So someone brought it from Kashan.”

  Running her small hands over its smooth machined edges, feeling the well-known shape and heft, wiping off its photovoltaics, Sofia thanked Kanchay almost soundlessly and went off alone to sit against a downed w’ralia trunk, resting the tablet on her belly and drawn-up knees. After all the strangeness and fear, the confusion and sorrow, here was the ordinary, the familiar. Trembling, she called up the connect and gave a shouted gasp of relief when the Stella Maris library access appeared, patient and reliable as always.

  She lost herself in the system, downloading data as she went. Childbirth, related terms: Childbirth at Home, Childbirth in Middle Age. Natural Childbirth. “My only option,” she muttered. Then: “Underwater Childbirth!” she exclaimed aloud. Thoroughly mystified, she took a moment to pull the references up just to see what that could be about. Nonsense, she decided, and went on. Child Development—thousands of citations. She pulled out Infant Development—Normal, and, perhaps superstitiously, bypassed references on Autism, Developmental Disablement, and Failure to Thrive. Child-rearing—Maxims. Possibly useful, she decided, having no grandmotherly source of advice. Oh, Anne! Oh, Mama! sh
e thought, but pushed them both away. Child-rearing—Religious Aspects—Jewish. Yes, she thought, and brought the Torah down as well. What will I do if it’s a boy? she wondered then, and decided she’d circumcise that problem if and when she came to it.

  “There’s an angel behind every blade of grass whispering, Grow, darling, grow!” her mother told her when she was small and afraid of the dark. “Do you think God would take all that trouble for a blade of grass and not watch over you?”

  Mama, I am a one-eyed pregnant Jewish widow, Sofia thought, and I am very far from home. If this constitutes being watched over by God, I’d be better off as a blade of grass. And yet.… A daughter, please, she prayed swiftly. A little girl. A small healthy girl.

  But Sofia had never relied on God, who tended to be terse even when He was clearly on the job. Go to Pharaoh and free My people, He said, and left the logistics to Moses as a lesson in self-reliance. So she spent the next weeks reading and absorbing on-line books and articles, creating an AI obstetrician: synthesizing, laying out sequences, finding branch points, reducing as much as possible to “if (condition) then (action)” statements, wherever the action was feasible on Rakhat, among the Runa. She refined her explanations to simple sentences, graphic and plain; entered them in Ruanja so that she might look up her own or her baby’s distress and, without thinking, give instructions that might save them both. And in doing all this, she lost some of her fear, if not any of her hope.

  THE CULLS WENT ON, ACROSS SOUTHERN INBROKAR—ANYWHERE THE gardens had been planted. Runa fathers in little groups of twos and threes continued to arrive with infants, bringing news as well. Once women from Kashan visited, led by the girl named Djalao, who was made much of by the men who’d heeded her warning that the djanada patrols were coming.