Children of God

"Faith is supposed to be a comfort, Father!" a bereaved mother had once cried to him, weeping over her child’s grave. "How could God let this happen? All those prayers, all that hope—it was just howling into the wind."

He was so young. A few weeks past ordination, all dewy and optimistic. It was his first funeral, and he thought he’d handled it pretty well, not stumbling over the prayers, alive to the grief of the mourners, ready to comfort them. "The disciples, and Mary herself, must have felt the same way you do now, when they stood at the foot of the cross," he’d said, impressed by his own gentle voice, his own loving concern.

"So fucking what?" the mother snapped, eyes like coals. "My kid is dead, and she’s not coming back in three days, and I don’t give a shit about the resurrection at the end of the goddamn world because I want her back now—" The weeping ceased, replaced by pure steely anger. "God’s got a lot to answer for," she snarled. "That’s all I can tell you, Father. God’s got a lot to answer for."

A father and a brother, he thought. Was that how it had started for Emilio? A Father he could count on, a Brother he could look up to. How long had he resisted the Spirit? John wondered. How long did he protect himself from the fear that God was just a bullshit story, that religion was just a load of crap? What kind of courage had it taken—summoning the trust that faith requires? And where the hell was Emilio finding the strength now to hope again that maybe it would all make sense? That if he could just bring himself to listen, maybe God would explain.

What if God did explain, and it turned out that what had happened was all Emilio’s fault? John wondered. Not the gardens—everyone on the Stella Maris crew had agreed to grow the gardens, and no one could have anticipated what happened because of them. But later—what if it was something Emilio said or did that was misunderstood on Rakhat?

Listen, John prayed, I’m not telling You what to do, but if Emilio brought the rapes on himself somehow, and then Askama died because of that, it’s better if he never understands, okay? In my opinion. You know what people can take, but I think You’re cutting it pretty close here. Or maybe—help him make it mean something. Help him. That’s what I’m asking. Just help him. He’s doing his damnedest. Help him.

And help me, John thought then. He reached for his rosary, and tried to empty his mind of everything but the rhythm of familiar prayers. He heard instead the rhythmic pounding on the treadmill: the sound of a small, scared, aging man, going the extra mile.

29

Central Inbrokar

2061, Earth-Relative

IT WAS PAST SECOND DAWN WHEN HA’ANALA WOKE TO DAYLIGHT IN HER eyes. She turned her face away from the glare and stared at Puska, still lax with sleep.

How can I tell Sofia? she asked herself miserably—her first thought on this new day identical to her last of the previous one. Sitting up, she looked at herself and grimaced: her fur was matted and muddy, and her teeth felt as thick as her head. Oh, Isaac, she thought hopelessly, getting up slowly, stretching each stiff limb. Her mind as blank as the flatlands that stretched out before her, she stared east over an immense plain, the lavender of its shortgrass blossoms pale in the bleached light of full day.

"Sipaj, Puska," she said. "Wake up!" She felt around with her tail and slapped Puska’s hip. Puska brushed her away. "Puska!" she cried, more urgently, not daring to move her head for fear of losing the plume. "He’s alive! I can smell him."

That brought the Runao to her feet in a swift roll. Puska stared in the same direction that Ha’anala was looking, but saw only emptiness. "Sipaj, Ha’anala," she said wearily, "there’s no one there."

"Isaac’s out there," Ha’anala insisted, making a quick attempt to brush dried mud from her coat. "It depends on the wind, but someone thinks he’s moving northeast."

Puska couldn’t detect a useful thing herself, except for some sintaron setting fruit nearby and a little patch of sweetleaf that might make a decent breakfast. "Sipaj, Ha’anala, it’s time to go home."

"We just have to catch up with him—"

"No," said Puska.

Shocked, Ha’anala glanced over her shoulder and saw equal parts of skepticism and regret in Puska’s face. "Don’t be frightened," she started.

"I’m not frightened," Puska said bluntly, too tired for courtesy. "I don’t believe you, Ha’anala." There was an awkward pause. "Sipaj, Ha’anala, someone thinks you have been wrong about all of this. He’s not out there."

They looked at each other for a long time: all but sisters, almost strangers. It was Ha’anala who broke the silence. "All right," she said evenly. "Someone will go on alone. Tell Fia that someone will find Isaac even if she must follow him all the way to the sea."

AS THE SOUNDS OF PUSKA’S RETREAT RECEDED, HA’ANALA CLOSED HER eyes and formed an image of the plume: diffuse and broad at its top, narrowing at the base toward a point she could not detect, but could infer from the taper. Not caring that Puska had given up, she said, "He’s out there," and followed the pillar of his scent into the wilderness.

In the first few hours, the wind played with the plume and she was twice forced to double back so she could arc across the trail to find the line strongest with his passing on the ground. But as the suns climbed and the wind stilled, her skill strengthened, and she had only to shift her head from side to side to gauge the gradient.

The plain was not empty, as it had seemed, but creased and furrowed with narrow streams swollen from the previous day’s rain. Many of the creeks were bordered by bushes bearing purplish fruits that Isaac had eaten, she noted, examining his spoor. Ha’anala herself was hungry a great deal of the time, but stayed alert for burrows along the banks where small prey whose name she did not know could be dug out or snagged on a claw when she thrust an arm deep into a den. Once, hot and dirty, she waded into a creek and sat on its stony bottom, hoping to be scrubbed clean and cooled by the rain-quickened current; to her astonishment, as she leaned back against her tail, some kind of swimmer blundered into the weir of her spread legs. "Ma

The land was full of wonders. She could see from one side of the world to the other, and on her sixth day of travel she had watched suns both rise and set, and understood at last why the colors of the sky changed. Her own body was an astonishment. Confined by dense vegetation throughout her childhood, she had never before felt the rightness of her natural gait. The rhythm of her steady stride sang to her: a poetry of walking, of silent space, of purpose. Leaning into a floating canter, tail level with the ground, she knew for the first time balance and speed, precision and grace, but she felt no need to hurry. She was gaining on Isaac, knew that he was alive and well. She was certain that he was happy, as she herself was.

She allowed herself a day of rest by a gullied stream, where she discovered hundreds of mud nests filled with infant somethings whose foolish parents had left them unguarded, and she fell asleep that evening with a full belly, secure in the belief that Isaac was not far ahead and that she could follow him even after a rain, and awoke the next morning, stiff-muscled but joyous.

She caught up to him at midday. He was standing on the edge of an escarpment where the plain fractured, its eastern half lower than the west by the height of a mature w’ralia tree. Isaac said nothing, but when she came to a halt some sixty paces away, he flung his arms wide as though to embrace all the empty fullness around him—not spi