Children of God

"Still no music?" Da

"Not a note," Emilio confirmed as he left the bridge.

He was doing nearly all the translation work now, but Da

He didn’t know what to make of the absence of K’San now, any more than he understood what the acceptance of agriculture implied, so he left Joseba and Da

"Thanks," Emilio said, glancing over his shoulder. "It’s not as bad as it used to be, John."

"Yeah. I’ve noticed that. But I’d rather not startle you if I can help it." John didn’t come into the cramped room, but stood in the doorway. "No response to the hails, I guess. You’d have mentioned it, right?"

"Of course." Emilio turned around, holding the cup with both hands. When he spoke next, it was in Sean’s voice. "The fine thing about ex-pectin’ the worst is, when it happens, y’have the satisfaction of bein’ right."

"She might not be listening, you know," John said. "I mean, she’s not expecting visitors, right? She could still be alive."

"It’s possible." Maybe her computer tablet had deteriorated. Or it might have been lost or stolen. Or she might have simply given up using it. Face it, Emilio told himself. She’s dead. "The odds against Sofia’s survival were pretty bad," he said aloud, carrying his coffee out to the table, where he sank into a chair.

John followed and sat across from him. "She’d have been over seventy by now, I figure."

Emilio nodded. "Which is about thirty years younger than I feel." He yawned again and rubbed his eyes against his shoulders. "Jesus, I’m tired. This was a long way to come just to listen to crop reports."

"It’s strange, isn’t it," John said. "We might not have come the first time if we’d heard that stuff instead of the music."

Emilio slid down until his head rested against the chair’s back and his chin rested on his chest. "Nah, we’d have come," he said, smiling at John’s unconscious use of the Jesuit "we." "I probably would have talked myself into believing that the shipping schedules were a litany of the saints." Emilio rolled his eyes. "Religion—the wishful thinking of an ape that talks! You know what I think?" he asked rhetorically, trying to distract himself from yet another death. "Random shit happens, and we turn it into stories and call it sacred scripture—"

John was very still. Emilio glanced up and saw his face. "Oh, God. I’m sorry," he said, sitting up wearily. "Emilio Sandoz, the human toxin! Don’t listen to me, John. I’m just tired and foul-tempered and—"

"I know," John said, taking a deep breath. "And I am willing to concede that you’ve got a black belt in pain and suffering, okay? But you’re not the only one who’s tired, and you’re not the only one who’s foul-tempered, and you’re not the only one who wanted Sofia to be alive! Try remembering that."

"John, listen! I’m sorry, okay?" Emilio called as Candotti left the room. "Christ," he whispered bleakly, alone in the commons. Elbows on the table, braced hands on either side of his cup, he stared down into the mug. What year is it? he wondered irrelevantly. How the hell old am I now? Forty-eight, maybe? Ninety-eight? Two hundred? After a while he realized that he could see his own reflection in the black, still surface of the coffee: a thin face etched by bad years, the evidence of their passing pain. Nothing he could say would shake John’s faith—he knew that, but he slumped back in the chair, cringing anyway. "Nice play, ace," he sighed.

Hating himself, and John, and Sofia, and everyone else he could think of, he went back to work mentally, to escape. It came to him that he should probably give up listening directly to the monitored radio signals— just scan for changes in language at a higher playback speed. Why didn’t I think of that before? he wondered. Not exactly operating at peak efficiency…

A moment later, the drop of his head woke him, and he roused himself, opening his eyes and seeing the coffee mug in front of him on the table. His arms felt leaden, too heavy to reach for it. I’m way past caffeine anyway, he thought, sitting up a little. Time for some of Carlo’s magic pills.

This wasn’t the first time he’d forced himself to live this way; he’d discovered long ago that he could function fairly well on three or four hours of sleep a night. He felt like hell all the time, but that was nothing new. You ignore it, he told himself. You get used to the way your eyes burn, the constant dull headache. It isn’t that you forget the tiredness or the fear or the grief or the anger, he observed, or that anything is better or easier. But the fact is, you can work in spite of it. You just stay on your feet, keep moving…

Because if you sit down for a moment, he thought, waking again, if you let yourself rest…. Well, you don’t. You keep working, because the alternative is to enter the city of the dead, the necropolis inside your head. So many dead…

… he was trying to straighten them, to lay the corpses out. It was night, but there was moonlight from every direction, and the bodies were almost beautiful. A

That was the worst, he knew in his dream. If God is the enemy, then even the dead are in danger. All the ones you loved might be with Him, and He was not to be trusted, not to be loved. "All that lives dies," Supaari was telling him. "It would be a waste not to eat them." But the city was burning again, the smell of charred meat was everywhere and it wasn’t moonlight, it was fire and there were Jana’ata everywhere and they were all dead, all dead, so many dead—

Someone was shaking him. He woke with a gasp, the stench still in his nostrils. "What? What is it?" He sat up, disoriented, terror still alive in him. "What! Shit! I wasn’t dreaming!" he lied, not even knowing why. "Is there—"

"Emilio! Wake up!" John Candotti stood above him gri

"Oh, Christ, John," Emilio moaned, falling back against the chair. "Jesus! Don’t fuck with me—"

"She’s alive," John said. Emilio stared at him. "Sofia. Frans finally raised her on the radio about ten minutes ago—"

Sandoz was up and moving, pushing past John and headed for the bridge. "Wait, wait, wait!" John cried, grabbing his arm as Emilio went by. "Relax! She’s broken the co

"She’s all right, then?" Emilio asked.

"Evidently. She sounds fine."

Emilio sagged back against a bulkhead for a moment, eyes closed. Then he headed for the radio, leaving John Candotti smiling beatifically in his wake.