Children of God

"Or resting in the bosom of Jesus," Da

"What have you found so far?" Carlo asked Frans.

"We’re blind in one eye," Frans informed him, serious again. "When you go forward, look near the starboard sensor panel."

Lucky, Carlo thought. Very lucky indeed. But he said, "All right. Iron Horse: go check on Sean and Joseba—see how the biologicals came through. Then take a look at the landers yourself. I’m going forward to see what the hull looks like. Frans: monitor me."

"THE CHIEF SOURCE OF ALL EVILS TO MAN," WROTE THE STOIC EPICTETUS, "as well as of baseness and cowardice, is not death but fear of death."

Carlo Giuliani had read those words at the age of thirteen, a week after one of the many funerals he attended as a child. A cousin had been blown to bits by a car bomb; there was nothing much to put in the coffin, but two hundred vehicles had followed the nearly empty box as the cortege wound its way through Naples. Carlo had not personally witnessed that particular demise, but he had been spattered with blood and gobbets of brain at the age of seven—an uncle that time—and so had contemplated mortality from an early age.

Another boy might have gone into the priesthood; certainly, there was ample precedent for that in the family—there was even a fourteenth-century stigmatic surnamed Giuliani. But there were far too many martyrs in Christian hagiography to suit Carlo. With an adolescent’s romantic sense of self-importance, he focused not on Jesus Christ but on Marcus Aurelius. It took the greatest of the caesars, a hero of monumental self-control and fearlessness, to shore up the fragile courage of a boy who would be fair game soon, should a rival famiglia need to target a low-risk victim for a revenge execution.

Aurelius proved a difficult role model. Carlo strove for a Stoic’s rationality and courage, only to be dragged down into the strange Neapolitan mire of pre-Christian superstition and rococo Catholicism. He had grown up both cosseted and reviled, outrageously overindulged and viciously undermined. He remained in some ways his mother’s disastrously spoiled son, enraged by the slightest opposition; like his father, he could be all but blind to the desires of others, except insofar as they meshed with his own. Nevertheless, he knew these characteristics to be flaws and fought them. "The noblest kind of retribution," wrote Marcus Aurelius, "is not to become like your enemy."

"I have learned from my predecessors’ mistakes," Carlo had told Emilio Sandoz. This was no idle boast but the touchstone of his life, and the Giordano Bruno was proof that his struggles had not been without consequence. The ship was configured within a large, solid, unusually symmetrical rock—virgin mineral, with no prior mining to weaken its structure. Its interior cylinder was carefully assayed, sounded, and drilled out by mining robots. Top-of-the-line crew quarters were sealed into the center, well shielded from cosmic radiation. The entire outer surface of the asteroid was pressure-treated with resilient self-healing foam. All photonics, life-support and guidance systems were triply redundant, controlled by exhaustively tested artificial intelligences programmed to respond to any unscheduled interruption of function with automatic power-on sequences and stabilization procedures, even if the crew was incapacitated.

It had cost a fortune. Carlo had made his arguments to his father in commercial terms and his sister Carmella had backed him up, of course— the project would remove him as a potential rival while the bitch consolidated power. But, as his sister pointed out, money spent up front to increase the chances of a successful voyage would pay a satisfying return on a long-term financial investment. That this might also result in the return of Domenico Giuliani’s son was, that estranged son suspected, an acceptable risk, given that Domenico would not be around to deal with it personally.

Rot in hell, old man, Carlo thought, his own breathing loud in his ears as he climbed through the central access core of the ship to find out precisely how close he had come to joining his father there, two hours earlier.

There was a fine coating of black dust everywhere inside the ship’s forward utility bay, where the remote sensing equipment was housed. Following the fanlike spray of dirt to its origin in the floor, he brushed at a miniature Vesuvius with a booted foot and then bent to clear the rest of the fine dust with his glove. He found a hole. Straightening, he stepped back and looked now to the ceiling, which was the ship’s bow when it was under power, and found the entry wound, also plugged with sieved soilmix sucked into the breach by the vacuum of space and held there by friction. He knew without looking that there would be identical exit holes at the other end of the ship.

Trusting in physics for the time being, he left the plug alone and mentally charted the collision. A particle of matter—a speck of iron perhaps— got in their way and drilled a narrow column from bow to stern…

It was not a good moment. If the drill hole had been a bit more off-center, the spin would have been more violent and the ship would have gone to pieces; even if it held together, its passengers might have been pulped. If the micrometeorite had been much larger, the ship would have been destroyed. If the collision had occurred at their maximum velocity, an impact like this would have vaporized them before they knew anything had happened, and the Giordano Bruno would have joined the list of ships mysteriously lost en route to Rakhat.

He almost giggled, giddy at last, when he heard himself thinking, A novena for the Virgin when I get home…. No—a whole church, filled with treasures from Rakhat! Rationality, he was finding, took a poor second to religion after a morning like this.

He roused himself, and looked at the sensor box just to starboard of the drill hole. Careful not to disturb the dirt that stood between him and the void, Carlo pulled the box out of its housing and gently shook out a diaphanous shower of fine particles—it was fouled by soilmix. There were two more sensor packs stored below. He would replace this box, but decided to put Candotti to work reconditioning the one in his hands.

We may yet need this one as a backup, Carlo thought. "The safest course," Seneca taught, "is to tempt fortune rarely." Which probably ruled out relying on miracles more than once a week.

24

Trucha Sai

2047–2061, Earth-Relative

FOR YEARS AFTER SHE WAS MAROONED THE SECOND TIME, SOFIA MENDES dreamed of home. She hated this, and ended her transmissions to Earth, believing that to sever this last tie would end the dreams, but they continued.

Most often, she was in an airport, waiting for her flight’s departure to be a

She lay in the rustling, dripping noise of the forest that night, eyes open, sorting out the shards of reality from which this was constructed. The coffee shop was in Cleveland, of course. How long ago had she first met Sandoz there? she asked herself. Then, with urgency, she wondered, How old am I? Nearly fifty, she realized with a jolt. Seventeen years here, thought. Longer than I lived in Istanbul. Longer than I’ve lived anywhere.