Children of God Read online

  Aware now that Djalao VaKashan had saved her life and the lives of many others, Sofia took the girl aside to thank her during a brief lull in the murmur of Ruanja that filled the redlit evenings, when fathers gathered to talk children to sleep, arms over bellies, tails over legs, back against back. Ears high, Djalao accepted Sofia’s gratitude without embarrassment, and it was this as much as anything that prompted Sofia to take the conversation further.

  “Sipaj, Djalao, why must the Runa go back to the villages at all? Why not simply walk away from the Jana’ata? Why not show your tails to them and live here!”

  Djalao looked around the forest settlement, and it was only then that her ears dropped. Distressed by the sight of Runa living like animals, she told Sofia, “Our homes are back there. We can’t leave the villages and the cities. That’s where we live and trade. We—” She stopped and shook her head, as though there were a yuv’at buzzing in one ear. “Sipaj, Fia: we made the cities. To come here—for a time—is acceptable. To walk away from the art of our hands and the places of our hearts is not—”

  “Even so, you could stop cooperating with the djanada,” said Sofia. Startled by the idea, Djalao huffed at her, but Sofia did not give up. “Are they children that you should carry them? Sipaj, Djalao: the Jana’ata have no right to breed you, no right to say who has babies, who lives and who dies. They have no right to slaughter you and eat your bodies! Kanchay says it’s the law, but it’s only the law because you agree to it. Change the law!” Seeing the doubt—the slight, anxious swaying from side to side—Sofia whispered, “Djalao: you don’t need the djanada. They need you!”

  The girl sat still, balanced and upright. “But what would the djanada eat?” she asked, ears cocked forward.

  “Who cares? Let them eat piyanot!” Sofia cried, exasperated. “Rakhat is covered with animals that can be eaten by carnivores.” She leaned forward and spoke with conviction and urgency, believing that at long last she had found someone who could see that the Runa need not collude in their own subjugation. “You are more than meat. You have the right to stand up and say, Never again! They have claws and custom on their side. You have numbers and—” Justice, she’d meant to say, but there was no word in Ruanja for justice, or for fairness, or equity. “You have the strength,” Sofia said finally, “if you choose to use it. Sipaj, Djalao: you can make yourselves free of them.”

  Despite her youth and her species, Djalao VaKashan seemed not only able but willing to make up her own mind. Even so, when she spoke, her answer was merely, “Someone will consider your words.”

  It was a polite brush-off. Emilio Sandoz had always interpreted the formula “Someone will consider your words” to mean, “When pigs have wings, I’ll tell you about my grandmother sometime.”

  Sofia sighed, giving up. I tried, she thought. And who knows? Seeds may have been sown.

  THE VAKASHANI VISITORS LEFT THE NEXT MORNING, AND LIFE IN Trucha Sai settled back into the routine of caring for babies, gathering food and preparing it, eating—always eating. It was a tranquil life, if not a challenging one, and Sofia blessed each uneventful day that passed, resisting panic as cramps came and went. Low and deep within her, they were not strong enough to be of consequence, she thought, but she held herself still and willed her womb to quiet.

  The Runa, who found so little in the world to be amazed by, nonetheless found Sofia’s pregnancy remarkable for its duration and its effect on her. Bursting datinsa pods were mentioned once too often and, about four weeks before her due date, Sofia, whose back was aching and who was wretchedly uncomfortable in the steamy heat, proceeded at length to make it completely clear to everybody within a ten-square-kilometer area that she didn’t want to hear another word about anyone or anything popping open, thank you all very much. This was hardly out of her mouth when a roaring storm, with terrifying winds that bent trees nearly double, broke loose.

  The rain came down so hard during the worst of the tempest, she was afraid she’d have to name her child Noah, and she could hardly have been wetter if she’d stood in the ocean. Her water must have broken sometime during the storm; there was no warning when the contractions started in earnest a few hours later. “It’s too soon,” she cried to Kanchay and Tinbar and Sichu-Lan and a few others who crowded around her when she squatted, waiting for the contraction to let go.

  “Maybe it will stop again,” Kanchay offered, steadying her when the next wave came. But babies have their own agenda and their own logic, and this one was on its way, ready or not.

  She had been through a great deal in her life, so the pain never overwhelmed her, but she was undersized and had not fully recovered from a nearly fatal injury only two months earlier. She paced a good deal of the time early in her labor because it made her more comfortable, but the walking wore her out; by sunrise the next day she was very, very tired and had stopped thinking about the baby. She just wanted to get through this, to be finished with it.

  All the fathers had advice and opinions and observations and commentary. Before long, she found herself snarling at them to shut up and leave her alone. They didn’t; they were Runa, after all, and saw no reason to shun or abandon her. So they went on talking and kept her company, their long-fingered hands busy and beautiful, reweaving windbreaks and sections of thatch for roofing damaged in the storm.

  By midday, exhausted, she gave up trying to control what was going on and fell silent. When Kanchay carried her to a small waterfall near the camp, she did not argue, and sat with him under water that beat coolly down on her shoulders, drowning out the irritating voices of the others with its steady roar. To her own surprise, she relaxed, and this must have helped her dilate.

  “Sipaj, Fia,” Kanchay said after a time, watching her with calm eyes of Chartres blue, “put your hand down here.” He guided her fingers to the crowning head and smiled as she felt the baby’s wet and curling hair. There were three more crushing contractions and as the child emerged, she was swamped by the terror of a remembered nightmare. “Sipaj, Kanchay,” she cried, before she knew if she had a daughter or a son. “Are the eyes all right? Do they bleed?”

  “The eyes are small,” said Kanchay honestly. “But that’s normal for your kind,” he added by way of reassurance.

  “And there are two,” his cousin Tinbar reported, thinking this might have worried her.

  “They’re blue!” their friend Sichu-Lan added, relieved because Fia’s strange brown eyes had always been a source of vague unease to him.

  There was a silence as she felt the infant’s legs slip from her and she thought at first that it was born dead. No, she thought, it’s all the other noise—the talking and the waterfall. Then, finally, she heard the baby squall—jolted into breathing by the chilly water that had been such a comfort to its mother at the end of this stiflingly hot and endless day.

  Kanchay brought leaves to wipe it down and Sichu-Lan was laughing and pointing to its genitals, which were external. “Look,” he cried, “someone thinks this child is in a hurry to be bred!”

  A son, she knew then, and whispered, “We have a little boy, Jimmy!”

  She burst into tears—not of grief or terror but of relief and gratitude—as strong warm hands lifted her from the cool water and the hot breeze dried her and the baby. With a shock, she felt again skin on human skin, and slept. Later, her son’s lips closed for the first time around her nipple: a gentle, almost lazy suckling, as sweet as Jimmy’s, as beautiful to feel, but feeble. There’s something wrong, she thought, but she told herself, He’s newborn, and premature. He’ll get stronger.

  Isaac, she decided then, whose father had, like Abraham, left his home to travel to a strange land; whose mother, like Sarah, had out of all expectation borne a single child and rejoiced in him.

  Sofia held her infant to her breast and gazed down at the wise owl eyes in a tiny elfin face capped by dark red hair. She respected her son more than she loved him at that moment and thought, You made it. The djanada nearly killed us and you were born too soon
and you’ve gotten a bad start, but you are alive, in spite of everything.

  It could be worse, she thought as she drifted off to sleep again, with the baby close, the heat of Rakhat as enveloping as a neonatal incubator, the two of them surrounded by the arms and legs and tails of whispering Runa. I am Mendes, and my son is alive, she thought. And things could be worse.

  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 w
ere 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?”