Children of God

"And there may be ways they can be useful to us—as honest brokers, for example," Suukmel pointed out, with the practicality that had once served two governments. "They could go back to the south and open negotiations on our behalf—"

("Uuuu

"Why would they agree to come here in the first place, let alone help us?" Ha’anala objected. "Sofia has poisoned their minds against us! They will believe us nothing more than murderers and thieves and—"

"They don’t have to agree," Shetri said, glancing at his collection of narcotics.

Ears toppling, Ha’anala cried, "Abduction is hardly the way to make allies!"

("Uuuuuuuuu

"I have been everywhere but to the south," Rukuei said over Isaac’s noise. "I need to see the others in their own place. If I am to understand, I must hear their words spoken freely—"

"Besides," Shetri said, with a slight edge to his voice, "Rukuei has had plenty of practice at deception. Who lies more convincingly than a poet who makes songs out of hunger and death?"

Ha’anala looked up sharply, but refused to be sidetracked. "This is crazy, Shetri," she said flatly. "It’s uselessly dangerous for you and Rukuei. Let Tiyat and Kajpin do this—"

("Uuuuuuuuuuuuu

"For solving problems, two kinds of mind are better than one," Tiyat pointed out, mild eyes sweeping around the gathering. "If two kinds are good," she said again, "then three are better yet, so we should go get a foreigner."

("Uuuuuuuuuuuuu

Yellow light now flared in the southeast, but the chill hardly lessened, even as the second of Rakhat’s suns rose. Kajpin stood and yawned, stretching her legs and shaking off boredom. "Just keep your mouths shut and your boots on and your hands in your sleeves," she advised Shetri and Rukuei. "If you’re exposed, then Tiyat and I are constables bringing in a couple of VaHaptaa."

"Kajpin can lie as well as a poet," Tiyat noted solemnly, and got slapped with her friend’s tail for her trouble.

"What goes wrong can be turned to advantage," Suukmel said. She looked down at the Runa toddler squirming in her lap—Tiyat’s son, who resembled his mother: good-tempered, but resolute when thwarted. This child would never question his right to say «I» to any person he met. He would always feel himself the equal of any soul: something all the VaN’-Jarri wished for their children. "Let them go, Ha’anala. It will be well. Let them go."

Ha’anala, holding Sofi’ala close, said nothing. A contest, she was thinking, between Ingwy and Adonai. Fate against Providence, in a place where Fate had ruled so long…

She realized then that Isaac had stopped humming. He was naked as always, but never seemed to feel the cold. Or perhaps he did, but had no interest in it. For a flashing moment, he looked into Rukuei’s eyes.

"Bring back someone who sings," was all he said.

37

N’Jarr Valley

2085, Earth-Relative

"SHETRI, I THINK, MIGHT HAVE MANAGED TO MAINTAIN HIS ANONYMITY, but there was something unmistakably Jana’ata about my foster son," Suukmel told Sean Fein many years later, recalling Rukuei’s account of that journey. "So they fell back on Kajpin’s story: that Rukuei was a follower of Athaansi Erat, captured while attempting to prey on a village. They claimed Shetri was a bounty hunter—a man who traded his tracking abilities to the police in exchange for meat from executed Runa felons. They were bringing Rukuei to Gayjur to be questioned about the location of the northern raiders."

Some Runa the party encountered took the opportunity to fling stones at a safely vanquished enemy, or to shout abuse. Still others let fly random kicks that Tiyat and Kajpin fended off with casual efficiency but no great emotional heat that would give the deception away. Before they reached the northernmost navigable tributary of the Pon river and had taken a short-term lease on a private powerboat, Rukuei had tasted the salt of his own blood from a broken tooth. But there was an old man, a Runao, who followed the four of them for a long time. Curious, they decided to wait for him one morning.

"He told them that he had never known he could get so old," Suukmel remembered. "Rukuei was very moved by this."

"Someone’s bones hurt," the old man had said. "Someone’s children went off to the cities. Let the djanada take this one!" this Runao begged Tiyat. "Someone is tired of being alone, and of hurting."

Tiyat looked at Kajpin, and they both turned to Rukuei, who had not eaten Runa for years. Kajpin’s hand shot out and pushed Rukuei theatrically forward along the road. "Right," Tiyat agreed loudly, dismissing the old one. "Let the djanada starve." But Rukuei felt it would uncover no lie if he called out to the old man, "Thank you. Thank you for offering—" and stumbled again as Shetri cuffed him.

"There were genuine allies in some places," Suukmel told Sean. "Now and then, people offered a night’s shelter, or hid them in a shed and told Rukuei and Shetri of some long dead Jana’ata who had been kind. But there were few, very few of these. Mostly there was indifference. Vague curiosity occasionally, but commonly a bland inattention. My foster son was very impressed by this: the Runa were living their lives as though we had never existed."

"The people of the third Beatitude have well and truly inherited the world, my lady, and they acquired a grand, high opinion of themselves while they were at it. You Jana’ata spoil the illusion," Sean told her. "So they pretend that you were never important to them."

The Jana’ata are alone, Sean thought then, like godlings whose believers had become atheists. In his own soul, he knew with sudden certainty that it was not rebellion or doubt or even sin that broke God’s heart; it was indifference.

"Don’t expect gratitude," he warned Suukmel. "Don’t even expect acknowledgment! They’re never going to need you again, not like they did before. A hundred years from now, you may be nothing but a memory. The very thought of you will fill most of them with shame and loathing."

"Then we shall truly be gone," Suukmel whispered.

"Perhaps," this hard man said. "Perhaps."

"If you have no hope for us, why have you stayed?" she demanded. "To watch us die?"

Perhaps, he almost said. But then Sean remembered his father, eyes shining with the unadulterated glee that Maura Fein had loved and shared, shaking his head at some ignominious example of the human capacity for boneheaded, self-inflicted calamity. "Ah, Sean, lad," David Fein would say to his son, "it takes an Irish Jew to appreciate a cock-up this grand!"

Sean Fein gazed for a time at the pale northern sky, and thought of the place where his own ancestors had lived. He was a Jesuit and celibate, an only child: the last of his line. Looking at Suukmel’s drawn, gray face, he felt at long last compassion for the fools who expected fairness and sense—in this world, not the next.

"My father was the son of ancient priests, my mother the daughter of petty kings long gone," he told Suukmel. "A thousand times, their people might have died out. A thousand times, they nearly killed themselves off with political bickering and moral certainty and a lethal distaste for compromise. A thousand times they might have become nothing but a memory in the mind of God."

"And yet they live?" she asked.

"Last time I looked," he said. "I can’t swear to more than that."

"And so might we," Suukmel replied, with frail conviction.

"Shit, yes, y’might at that," Sean muttered in English, remembering Disraeli’s wee couplet: How odd of God / to choose the Jews. "My very much esteemed lady Suukmel," he said then in his strangely accented K’San, "one thing I can say for certain. There’s just no telling whom God will take a liking to."