Children of God

"Sipaj, Fia," Supaari’s daughter, Ha’anala, had asked her once, "are you not sad that your people left you here alone?"

"Everything happens for a reason," Sofia told the girl. "The Runa are my people now, and your people as well."

She said this with fierce, unfeigned conviction, for she had long since sunk her private, paltry sadness to the bottom of a pure and selfless outrage at the Runa’s bondage. She had discovered the purpose for her life on Rakhat. She had come here to teach a single word to the VaRakhati: justice.

All over Rakhat’s largest continent, inarticulate resentment had been given voice by Supaari VaGayjur and Djalao VaKashan and their followers. The ordinary weapons of the powerless—the specious compliance and counterfeit ignorance, the pilfering and petty obstructions, the foot-dragging and pretense of vacuous misunderstanding—all these were laid aside in favor of an astonishing and exhilarating strength. Like sleepers awakening from a dream of impotence, the Runa awoke to their own power and unleashed a force whose potential was previously understood only by the Jana’ata, who had rightly feared it.

After the first convulsion of revolt, after Gayjur and Agardi were liberated, fear and suspicion did a great deal of the work for them. A Jana’ata patriarch would wake in the morning to find his household deserted by its Runa staff, and a knife lying on the sleeping nest next to his throat. If he had any sense at all, he’d take his family and flee north. Oh, there was resistance. There were forays and challenges, even in the begi

She had provided schematics of advanced communications and data-processing equipment, and, more important, Sofia provided the awareness that such things could be manufactured: given the seed of an idea, the Runa were capable of elaborating on it quickly and creatively. Radio equipment, made by Runa hands, had once served Jana’ata governments; now it was modified to make use of the orbiting satellites put in place by the crew of the Stella Maris, allowing the entire army to communicate instantly. After a time, all young officers learned English—as unbreakable a code as Navajo had been in Earth’s second global war.

With the Magellan’s remote sensing and imaging capabilities, Sofia herself could survey the continent for nearly forty degrees of latitude on either side of the equator—only the southern ocean and land north of the Garnu mountains remained out of range. Hidden in Trucha Sai, she provided weather reports and river transport times; tracked the small, mobile detachments of Jana’ata troopers, who could be picked off when they entered terrain that suited Runa women, unhampered by any tradition of formal combat. As the Jana’ata pulled back on three fronts to more defensible territory, Sofia could locate the new enclosures where domestic and draft Runa were herded together. These could be targeted and stormed in redlight, at a stroke freeing captives and starving the djanada out, driving them further north.

"But do you not wish for others of your kind?" Ha’anala asked.

"I have you and your father. I have Isaac and the Runa," Sofia told her. "I have what I need."

"Truly, mother?"

"Truly!" Sofia cried. "I am grateful for what I have, Ha’anala."

She might also have said, Wishing for more is asking for disappointment. But Sofia Mendes had banished such thoughts long ago.

AND THERE WERE COMPENSATIONS FOR HER SITUATION, SOFIA WOULD remind herself. On Earth, her son would have been a tragedy, but here in the forest, protected by the watchful gaze of a hundred fathers, all the children were safe, damaged or whole, quick or halt. No one was discarded as too broken or too odd. Imperfection was permitted in Trucha Sai, the only place on Rakhat where this was so. The Runa asked nothing of Isaac. They did not judge him and find him wanting, did not care when he learned to control his bowels or that he went naked.

And if Isaac was deaf to the emotions of others, he was alive to this habitat of things. There were vines to swing on, downed w’ralia limbs to scramble over and climb, to march along with his strange perfection of balance. There was mud to pat and throw, to ooze between fingers or toes. Water to fling, to fall backward onto, to float in. Huge river-polished rocks to scoot down, over and over and over, flapping his hands in private delight; a smooth wealth of riverbed stones to collect and layout, row by row, in strict straight lines that Sofia realized with a start were grouped by prime numbers: 1,3,5,7, 11, 13, on and on. Here in Trucha Sai, the trees whispered to Isaac, the brook bubbled for him. Rain washed him clean. Animals sometimes came to him because he could be so still, so long.

"Sipaj, Fia: when can we go to a city?" Ha’anala would ask. "Do people there all have five fingers, or do some have only three?"

"It’s too dangerous for you in the cities," Sofia would tell her.

"The other girls go to the cities!"

"They’re soldiers. You’ll understand when you’re older."

"That’s what you said last time. Someone is older now! When will you explain?"

"Sipaj, Ha’anala, don’t make a fierno. Listen to that thunder!"

"You said people can’t really make the weather change!"

"And what does make the weather change?" Sofia asked, glad of the diversion.

IN THE MIDST OF WAR, SOFIA MENDES LEARNED THAT SHE MIGHT HAVE been a teacher, had her own childhood not taken such an ugly turn. Her clarity of mind and habit of organization, her ability to break any process down and present it to a novice step by step-all the skills that had once made her a superb AI analyst now served her many and disparate students.

The Runa children did best with the mnemonics that she created to help them remember the names of the suns and rivers and cities, chemical elements, multiplication tables. She let them teach her the botany their fathers taught by example and then, with the children, she created new taxonomies of use and of structure and of location, and watched with pleasure when they began to classify animals and sounds and words and stones, to make logical co

These Runa were noticeably quicker than the VaKashani children she had first known. In the begi

The djanada must have known, must have understood that this would stunt Runa minds as well, she realized. It was when such abominations were revealed to her that she would remember the poetry of the doomed Warsaw ghetto uprising: "The meat defiant, the meat insurgent, the meat fighting! The meat in full cry…" This time, she thought, the meat will triumph. We will loose the bonds of injustice and break every yoke, and let the oppressed go free! We are doing the right thing. We are.

And then, with renewed conviction, she would return to the task of teaching Runa children the lessons they would need to live well in the liberty their mothers fought for.

Even Isaac could be taught, she discovered. Or rather, he would learn if she was careful not to invade his world. She let the computer tablet carry her messages to him, across the secret barriers and invisible walls that shut him off from others; it was her surest way of reaching him aside from song. He liked the keyboard’s ordered ranks, and when she first showed him how to use it, he was wild with joy at the way it made the letters and symbols march across the screen in perfect, infinite rectilinearity. The Runa would complain in kind, tactful ways when Isaac flapped his hands and shrieked his bliss at this parade of letters; she learned that if she sat at his side and snatched the tablet away from him at the moment the fierno began, he quickly quieted. Within days, he was able to control the disruptive behavior that he understood would rob him of his treasure.