Children of God

21

N’Jarr Valley, Northern Rakhat

2078–2085, Earth-Relative

DURING THE FINAL DAYS OF HIS LIFE, DANIEL IRON HORSE WOULD watch the tripled shadows on the walls of his stone house in the N’Jarr valley and think about the past. He was lucid until the end, but his mind would constantly take him back to the awful months spent on the Giordano Bruno. It would seem to him that he had existed then in a kind of silent limbo, aching for the end of his punishment, while the years rushed by on Rakhat.

His penance had begun at the moment he gave his assent to the abduction, and it was the very one he had laid on Vincenzo Giuliani—to live with what he had done. His own was the lighter sentence. There was, for Daniel Iron Horse, some hope that he might live long enough to know the answer to a question Giuliani would carry to his grave: What if I am wrong about everything?

Da

As far as his father’s family had come from the squalor and debasement of the reservations, as much as he himself publicly rejected the stereotypes and romance of his Lakota heritage, Daniel Iron Horse had taken secret satisfaction in it. From childhood, he had known himself to be the scion of men who rode with Crazy Horse and Little Big Man of the Oglalas, with Black Shield and Lame Deer of the Miniconjous, with Spotted Eagle and Red Bear of the Sans Arcs, with Black Moccasin and Ice of the Cheye

Just as strong a tradition: his family’s long association with the Black Robes, whose own beliefs upheld those same values. His five-times great-grandmother was among the first of the Lakota to be converted to Christianity by Pierre-Jean De Smet, a Jesuit of legendary charm and grace, whose utter fearlessness had afforded him unrivaled credibility among the tribes of the American West. The Lakota believed that all peoples, if not all persons, seek the divine; the Christian God’s call to universal peace was proclaimed as well by the White Buffalo Calf Woman. Blood sacrifice to the Wakan Tanka—the Great Mystery—was familiar as well. Even the crucifix was resonant: Jesus’s body, arms outstretched, pierced and hung from a cross, so like the pierced and suspended bodies of the Sun Dancers, visionaries who knew what it was to offer their own flesh and blood to God on behalf of their people—in thanks, in supplication, in terrible joy. At Masses celebrated by Jesuit friends, many Lakota had worshiped the sacred and incomprehensible power that watched over all, that listened to the prayers of those who offered sacrifice, not their own flesh and blood any longer—for Jesus changed all that—but bread and wine, consecrated in memory of ultimate sacrifice.

Surely, this was apprenticeship: the mixed nature of his making, the ma

He feared for them.

The people of the plains, too, had depended utterly on a single species of prey and they, too, had been been thought by outsiders to be a dangerous people who loved war. Da

Sometimes on the Bruno, late at night, the filter fans humming, the subaural rumble of the Bruno’s engines more felt than heard, Da

"We are closer to the old ways, you and I," Gelasius III had said to Daniel Iron Horse, in private audience. "We understand the need for sacrifice, to make our belief in God concrete, to offer God our faith entire: that if we align ourselves with His will, all will be well. Now you and I are called upon to offer a sacrifice that will test our faith, almost as Abraham’s was tested. It is harder than to offer our own bodies. You and I must offer Sandoz, bound like Abraham’s son Isaac. We must do what seems cruel and incomprehensible and, in doing so, prove that we trust in God’s plan and act as His instruments. We serve a Father Who did not flinch from Abraham’s sacrifice, Who required and permitted the crucifixion of His own Son! And Who sometimes requires that we also sacrifice that which we hold dearest, in service to His will. This I believe. Can you also believe this?"

What made him nod his unspoken acquiescence to an act he found abhorrent? Was it truly ambition? Da

Yes. Yes, all of that.

Did the Holy Father and the Father General have more than one reason for sending Sandoz back to Rakhat? Unquestionably. There would be desirable political, diplomatic, practical outcomes of this decision. Did those other motives outweigh the Holy Father’s unca

Daniel Iron Horse did not think so.

He didn’t know what he thought, what he believed anymore. He was sure of only one thing: it was beyond him to look into the eyes of Gelasius III and listen to his words and then to sneer, "Self-serving horseshit." For Jesuits are taught to find God in all things, and Da

And so, for the betrayal of his ethics and the sacrifice of his integrity, Daniel Iron Horse could only watch what he had helped make possible: to live with what he had done, and try to find God in it—to hope that the ends would someday justify the means.

ON THE BRUNO, TIME SEEMED A SENTENCE TO BE SERVED, BUT THAT WOULD change as Daniel Iron Horse grew old on the planet of Rakhat.

"In the begi