Children of God

Emilio snorted, and picked up his glass, taking a sip. "I honestly don’t think I could get drunk enough for that to seem like a good idea," he murmured, "but I suppose we could give it a try."

"Giuliani and the Pope both believe it’s God’s will that you go back," Da

"Nietzsche, of course, would argue that I am a widower," Emilio said crisply, cutting him off. "I consider that I am divorced. The separation was not amicable."

"Sandoz," Da

Emilio leaned back in his chair and stared now with the stony contempt of a boxer about to level an inadequate opponent. "You don’t want to try that with me," he advised, but Iron Horse would not drop his gaze. Sandoz shrugged: I gave fair warning. "It was all over for Jesus in three hours," he said softly, and Da

"My brother Walter’s daughter drowned," Da

"I was," Sandoz said. "Not anymore."

"Change your mind," Da

Incredulous, Emilio gasped a laugh. "Da

"Yes. No—. I don’t know," Da

Confused, Emilio frowned. Da

Da

"Yes. The last thing I relayed to the ship."

Da

"What? Still on the ship? Why wouldn’t it have been transmitted?"

"The data went out in packets. The onboard computers were programmed to store your reports and send them in groups. If the Rakhati suns or Sol were positioned badly, the system would just queue everything until the transmissions could get through without being degraded by stellar interference."

"News to me. I thought everything went out as we logged it," Sandoz said, surprised. He’d paid almost no attention to technical considerations like that. "So it just sat in memory for over a year, until the Magellan party sent me back? Would there have been that much time between packets?"

"Maybe. I don’t know too much about the celestial mechanics involved myself. There were four stars the system had to work around. Wait—the people from the Magellan boarded the Stella Maris, didn’t they? Maybe when they were accessing the ship’s records, they disabled the transmission code." The more he thought about it, the likelier it seemed. "The last packet is probably still sitting in memory. I can pull it out for you if you want."

"It can wait until morning."

"No. You’ve got me curious now," Da

Together, the two men moved to the wall of photonics and Iron Horse worked his way into the Stella Maris library storage system. "Sure enough, ace," he said minutes later. "Look. It’s still coded and compressed." He reset the system to expand the data and they waited.

"Wow. There’s a lot of it," Sandoz remarked, watching the screen. "Some more stuff by Marc. Joseba will be pleased. Yes! There’s mine. I knew I’d done that work already." He stood silently a while longer, looking over Da

"No. It’s going to decompress all of it…. There. It’s done," Iron Horse said.

Sandoz had spun away, breathing hard. "Not for the Society. Not for the Church," he whispered. "No. No. No. I saw her dead."

Da

"Get out of the way," Sandoz said abruptly.

Da

"Sandoz, what? What did you see? I don’t understand—" Frightened by the other man’s pallor, Da

During the past months, as he had studied the mission reports and the scientific papers sent back by the Stella Maris party, Daniel Iron Horse had sometimes, with a strange feeling of unfocused guilt, called up images of the artificial-intelligence analyst Sofia Mendes: digitized and radio-transmitted watercolors painted by Father Marc Robichaux, the naturalist on the first mission. The earliest of these was done on Rakhat, during Sofia’s wedding to the astronomer Jimmy Qui

"Oh, my God," Daniel Iron Horse repeated, staring at the screen.

"Not even for her," Sandoz whispered, trembling. "I won’t go back."