"I WANTED TO BE A TERRORIST WHEN I WAS A LITTLE BOY," JOSEBA Urizarbarrena said. "It was a family tradition—both my grandmothers were ETA, We called ourselves freedom fighters, of course. Better?"
"Yes," Sandoz gasped.
"Good. Let me try the other." Sandoz held out his other hand and let the Basque steady the forearm against his raised knee. "This doesn’t always work," Joseba warned, probing with his thumbs along the space between the two long bones until he reached the place where muscle refined to tendon. "My uncle lost most of his right hand when I was about eight. Do you know what they call it when a bomb goes off too soon? Premature disassembly."
Sandoz barked a laugh and Joseba was pleased. Even drugged, Sandoz found wordplay funny, although other forms of humor escaped him. "My aunt used to think he was lying about the pain to get sympathy," Joseba said, pressing hard now. "Dead dogs don’t bite, she used to say. The hand’s not there anymore. How can something that’s not there hurt? My uncle used to tell her, Pain is as real as God. Invisible, unmeasurable, powerful—"
"And a bitch to live with," Sandoz whispered, voice shaking, "just like your aunt."
"You’re right about that," Joseba said fervently, bent over the arm. He adjusted the location of his thumbs and increased the pressure, a little astonished to find himself in this position. Clad only in his underwear, he’d gotten up at two in the morning with a full bladder, and found Sandoz pacing the commons room like an animal crazed by caging. "What’s wrong?" Joseba had asked and was initially snarled at for his trouble. Sandoz was not an easy man to help, but those were the kind who needed it most, in Joseba’s experience.
Afraid he’d simply leave a bruise and dying now for a pee, Joseba was about to give up when he heard a single explosive sob. "Yes?" Joseba asked, to be sure before easing off.
Sandoz didn’t move, eyes closed, face tight, not breathing. Joseba sat quietly, familiar with this suspense; it always took his uncle a few moments to believe the pain had really ended. Finally Sandoz let out a breath and his eyes opened. He seemed dazed, but said, "Thank you." Then, blinking, he sat straighter and moved back in his chair, out of contact.
"I don’t know why that works," Joseba admitted.
"Maybe direct pressure on the nerves higher in the limb disrupts stray signals?" Sandoz suggested, his voice still a little ragged.
"Maybe." And even if it’s only the power of suggestion, Joseba thought, what works, works. "If you’d told me about this before, I could have helped," he scolded.
"How was I to know you had inept bombers in your family?" Sandoz asked reasonably, his breathing steadier now.
"My uncle used to cry. Just sit there and cry," Joseba remarked. "You pace."
"Sometimes." Sandoz shrugged and looked away. "Work used to be best."
"You don’t work now," Joseba observed.
"Can’t seem to care about working," Sandoz said. "The Quell usually helps—about half of pain is fear. But it got bad this time."
Interested but at the outer limit of bladder control, Joseba stood. "Has it ever occurred to you," he asked, pausing before he resumed his trip to the toilet, "that Matins was instituted by old monks with prostate trouble? Had to get up anyway, might as well pray, right?"
With that, Joseba padded off like a bear, but when he returned through the commons, much relieved, Sandoz was still sitting in the dark. He’d have gone back to his cabin if he didn’t want company, Joseba thought. Taking a chance, he said, "I have been reading the Book of Job. ’Hast thou seen the doors of deepest darkness? Canst thou bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion?’ " Leaning against a bulkhead, the Basque gestured toward the enigmatic dark that surrounded them. "Man’s answer now would be: Almost. We have entered the springs of the sea and walked the recesses of its depths. We have comprehended the expanse of the Earth and stretched a line upon it. ’Canst thou send lightnings? Hast thou commanded the morning?’ Here we are, between stars!"
Joseba shook his head, genuinely amazed. Then he said, "The music changed, you know. After you were on Rakhat."
"I prefer Wolfer’s translation of Job myself," Sandoz commented. "So. Why did terrorism lose its charm for you?"
"Ah. The subject is changed," Joseba observed equably. "It didn’t, not for a long time, anyway. Then Spain and France finally decided, To hell with the Basques—who needs them? So we fought among ourselves for a while. Gets to be a habit." He stopped and looked at Sandoz. "Did you know Hlavin Kitheri’s voice was heard for less than a year after you left Rakhat, and then never again?"
"Perhaps he died," Sandoz suggested blandly, "of something unpleasant and prolonged. What did you do after terrorism ceased to be a viable career option?"
"A lot of hunting, actually. We still hunt in the little corner of the world where I come from. I was outdoors all the time, surrounded by what’s left of nature in Europe. A hunter—a good one—often identifies very strongly with the prey. One thing led to another. I studied ecology at university."
"And how from there to the priesthood? You fell in love, perhaps, with God’s complex and beautiful creation?" The light, soft voice was curiously flat and uninflected in the gloom, all its music drained away, the empty face barely illuminated by the yellow and green readouts shining dimly from the bridge.
"No," Joseba said frankly. "It is difficult to see the complex beauty of creation these days, on Earth at least. Things got a lot worse while you were gone, my friend. Ecology has become a study of degradation. We mainly work backward now, trying to reconstruct systems thrown out of balance and wrecked. For each step forward, we are forced two steps back by the press of population. It’s not a cheerful discipline."
The Basque moved in the darkness across the commons and took a seat a little distance from Sandoz, the molded polymer chair creaking under his substantial weight. "When you see a system disturbed, it is a great joy to discover a single cause—the cure then seems simple. As an undergraduate, I would look at satellite images of the planet at night, and the connected concentrations of city lights looked to me like streptococcus taking over a petri dish. I became convinced that Homo sapiens was a disease that was ravaging its hostess, Gaia. The Earth would be well rid of us, I thought. I was nineteen, and the population had already gone from seven to fourteen billion in my lifetime. I began to hate this species that called itself wise. I wanted to cure Gaia of the sickness our species inflicted on her. I began to consider seriously how I might exterminate very large numbers of humans, preferably without being caught. I believed myself heroic and selfless—a solitary worker for the planetary good. I switched college majors at that time. Virology began to seem very useful to me."
Sandoz was staring at him. A good sign, Joseba thought. Even drugged, he is capable of moral judgment on some level.
"As I said," Joseba continued dryly, "terrorism did not lose its charm. I was living with a girl at the time. I broke it off. She wanted children, and I loathed children. Disease vectors, I called them. I used to look at people like Nico and think, There’s a botched abortion. One more useless human to consume the planet, capable only of eating and making more of himself."
Somewhere in the ship a compressor kicked in and its hum joined the soft splashing of the fish-tank aerators and the constant hush of filtered fans. Sandoz did not move.
"The last thing my girlfriend told me when we parted was that it was wicked to wish death on people whose only crime was to be born at a time when there are so many of us." He sat for a while, trying to remember her face, wondering what she might look like now—a woman in her late forties, given the relativity effects. "She opened my eyes, although we never spoke again. It took a while, but eventually I began to search for a reason to believe that humans are more than bacteria. One of my professors was a Jesuit."
"And now you are going to a world where the sentient species do not degrade their environment. To see what it costs them?"
"Penance for my sins, I suppose." Joseba stood and moved toward the bridge, where he could stare out the observation port toward hard stars and unplumbed blackness. "I think sometimes of the girl I did not marry." He looked back at Sandoz, but there was no reaction he could see. "I read somewhere an interesting suggestion. The nations of the world that most vigorously foul the planetary nest and those in possession of the most destructive arsenals ought to be governed only by young women with small kids. More than anyone else, such mothers must live in the future, and they also face each day the realities of raw human nature. This gives them a special insight."
Joseba stood up straight then, stretching and yawning, and disappeared around the bulkhead into the passageway to his cabin, calling, "Good night," as he went. Emilio Sandoz sat alone in the commons for a long time, and then went to bed as well.
"I’M NOT ARGUING. I’M JUST CONFUSED," JOHN CANDOTTI HAD SAID TO the Father General, a few months before the mission was launched. "I mean, everybody else is some kind of scientist. My forte is more along the lines of weddings and baptisms. Funerals. School plays? Bailing guys out?" The question in his voice invited the Father General to jump in any time, but Vincenzo Giuliani simply looked at him, and other people’s silence tended to make John talk more and faster. "Writing the church bulletin? Reffing fights between the choir director and the liturgist? None of that is likely to come up, right? Except maybe funerals." John cleared his throat. "Look, it’s not that I don’t want to go, it’s just that I know guys who would give a kidney to be on this mission and I don’t get why you’re sending me."
The Father General’s eyes left John’s face and rested on the olive trees and the stony hills that surrounded the retreat house. After a time, he seemed to forget Candotti was there and started to walk away. Then he hesitated and turned back to the younger priest. "They’re going to need someone who is good at forgiveness," was all he said.
So, John now supposed, it was his job to forgive Danny Iron Horse.
Back in Chicago, John Candotti had been a notoriously easy mark in a confessional, the kind of priest who didn’t make a penitent feel like a three-year-old who’d had a potty accident. "We all screw up," he would remind people. A lot of what people confessed to him had its origin in thoughtlessness, lack of empathy, indifference to others. Or idolatry— mistaking money or power or achievement or sex for God. John knew from experience how you could let yourself get swept up in something you’d regret, kidding yourself that you could handle some potentially harmful situation and weren’t about to step knee-deep into a pool of shit. He was skilled at helping people work through what they’d done and why, so they could make good—literally, make good out of bad.
But Daniel Iron Horse hadn’t just screwed up. This wasn’t a mistake— it wasn’t even self-deception. It was deliberate, knowing collusion in an act that was illegal, unethical and immoral. Realizing later that Vincenzo Giuliani and Gelasius III must have been complicit only deepened John’s outrage, but those two weren’t available to be vilified. Danny Iron Horse was here, every day, every night, and his silence seemed to acknowledge John’s assessment: that he was an arrogant man, corrupted by ambition.
For the first time in his life, the Mass failed John. He had always counted on the celebration of the Eucharist to be a time of renewal and rededication, especially among men who had given their lives over to be entirely at the disposal of God. Now, on the Giordano Bruno, the Mass was a daily reminder of division and hostility; the very word «Communion» seemed to mock him.
John wanted desperately to talk to Emilio, but Sandoz treated him as he did all the crew members: with a distant, drugged courtesy. "I have given my word that I will not obstruct Carlo’s plans," was all he would say.
Joseba Urizarbarrena’s policy seemed to be one of strict nonengagement—staying in his quarters as much as possible, carrying food in, plates out, picking odd hours to come and go, so as to avoid the others, Jesuit and lay. "It’s hard to imagine how this could be justified," Joseba admitted when John cornered the Basque in the galley one night. "But remember the name of the pirate who took Francis Xavier to Japan? Avan o Ladrao—Avan the Thief. I think perhaps God uses the tools He’s got, even the ones that are bent or broken."
When John’s protests persisted, Joseba advised, "Talk to Sean." But when John asked directly for some kind of guidance, the Irishman told him with curt irritability, "Mind yer own business." For Sean, John realized, the matter was now under the seal of confession.
Never one to back off from a fight, John decided in the end to go straight to Iron Horse. "My sins are my affair, ace," Danny told him flatly. "You know the facts, so decide. Are the Pope and the Father General frauds? Or do you understand less than you think?"
His way blocked, the dilemma tossed back in his face, his need to talk all this through becoming more pressing, John considered the others. He couldn’t quite decide if Nico was retarded, but the big man with the small head was unlikely to have much in the way of ethical insight, in John’s opinion. Carlo Giuliani was fond of quoting Marcus Aurelius, but the Caesar that John thought of was Caligula—all honeyed gorgeousness and self-deception: dangerous in more ways than John cared to count.
Which left Fat Frans.
"You’re asking me?" the South African cried, as John laid out his problem one morning when there was no one else in the commons except Nico, whom everyone mostly ignored. "Well, Johnny, you could do worse. I read philosophy at Bloemfontein—"
"Philos—! How the hell did you end up piloting rocks for the Camorra?" John asked, astounded.
Frans shrugged ponderously. "Philosophy, I discovered, is now more of an attitude than a career path—the job market has fallen off somewhat, since the Enlightenment. The Camorra, on the other hand, offers a competitive salary, excellent retirement benefits and very good health insurance," Frans said. "Unless you turn state’s evidence—then they provide a very nice funeral."
John snorted, but went back to gnawing on one of the fingernails that constituted a substantial portion of his diet these days.
"Now then," Frans said amiably, in the clipped lilt of Johannesburg, "your problem is an interesting one. Personally, I have no firm opinion about God, but I must tell you that I do consider the entire Catholic Church a fraud, along with all its imps and elves, which would subsume the Black Popes, as specific cases of the general proposition."
"Fuck you, too," John said pleasantly, and went back to his nail.
"A gentleman and a scholar," Frans observed, raising an espresso in salute. "Well, then, perhaps we should look for an axiom upon which we can agree." He studied the ceiling for a while. "You feel the need to discern some kind of hidden meaning here, am I correct? Something that will redeem the sorry mess you find yourself in."
John grunted, working on an index finger.
"But that shouldn’t be hard," Frans declared encouragingly. "If your perspective is broad enough, or your sense of history deep enough, or if you are sufficiently imaginative, you can find some kind of deeper meaning in almost anything. Take dreams. Ever hear of the Libro della Smorfia?" John shook his head. "Neapolitans, even educated ones, sleep with a book of dreams next to their beds. First thing every morning, even before they take a leak, they look up their dreams. Long journeys, dark strangers, dreams of flying—everything means something."
"Superstition," John said dismissively. "Tea leaves and tarot cards."
"Don’t be rude, Johnny. Call it psychology," Frans suggested, grinning, dewlaps swagged around his mouth. "It is a scholar’s task to find patterns in nature or cycles in history. Initially, it’s no different from finding portraits of animals and heroes in the stars. The question is, Have you discovered a preexisting truth? Or have you imposed an arbitrary meaning on whatever it is you’re considering?"
"Yes. Maybe yes, to both," John said. "I don’t know." He stopped chewing and realized one of his fingers was bleeding.
"Ah. I don’t know: a truth we can rally to." Frans smiled beatifically, small teeth ivory in the pastel face. He adored conversations like this, and years of chauffeuring thugs and stiffs around the solar system had afforded very few of them. "This is delightful. I am playing devil’s advocate for a Jesuit! Perhaps," he suggested slyly, "Abraham invented God because he needed to impose meaning on a chaotic, primitive world. We preserve this invented god and insist he loves us because we fear a large and indifferent universe."
John stared at him and then examined his own response, but before he could say anything, the forgotten Nico surprised them both by remarking, "Maybe when you’re frightened, you can hear God better because you’re listening harder."
Which was an interesting notion, except that it certainly hadn’t worked that way for John Candotti, waiting in the lander bay to be blown into space with nothing but bloody death on his mind. "I don’t know," he repeated finally.
"The human condition." Frans sighed dramatically. "How we suffer in our anxiety and ignorance!" He brightened. "Which is why food and sex are so nice. Have you eaten?" he asked and, with that, got up and lumbered into the galley, leaving John to suck blood from a mangled nail bed.
CANDOTTI WAS GONE WHEN FRANS CAME BACK TO THE TABLE WITH HIS lunch. Frans smiled at Nico, sitting serenely in his corner, humming "Questa o quella" from Rigoletto—the only opera Frans really liked.
"Nico," Frans announced as he sat down to eat, "I have spent the past few weeks in careful observation of our little band of travelers, and in marked contrast to Candotti’s existential angst, I myself have reached an inescapable conclusion. Would you like to hear it?" Nico stopped humming and looked at him: not expectant but polite. Nico was always polite. "Here is my conclusion, Nico: it’ll be a fucking miracle if anyone comes back from this run alive," Frans told him around a mouthful of paglio fieno that he washed down with a swallow of moscato d’Asti. "You know what a Runao is, Nico?"
"A kind of old car?"
Frans took another bite. "No, Nico, that’s a Renault. A Runao is one of the Runa—the people who live on Rakhat, where we’re going." Nico nodded and Frans continued. "A Runao is, for all practical purposes, a cow with an opinion," He chewed for a while and swallowed. "His magnificence, Don Carlo, is a megalomaniac whose grand ambition is to rule over a nation of talking cows. To carry out this glorious mission, he has gathered together a circus freak, a dimwit, four priests and a goddamn cripple you had to beat half to death to get onto this ship." Frans shook his head in amazement but stopped, still disgusted by the way his jowls and chins moved out of phase with his skull. "The priests think they’re going to Rakhat to do God’s work but do you know why you and I are here, Nico?" Frans asked rhetorically. "Because I am now so rucking fat I will never get laid again in my life anyway, so what the hell? And you are too dumb to say no. Carlo couldn’t get anybody else to come."
"That’s not true," Nico said with bland conviction. "Don Carlo decided to go because he found out his sister Carmella was going to be boss."
Frans blinked. "You knew about that?"
"Everybody knew, even the Yakuza in Japan," Nico confided. "Don Carlo was very embarrassed."
"You’re right," Frans admitted. Besides, there was no sense in stirring up trouble. Carlo was the padrone and Nico was devoted to him—he’d damned near killed a guy who’d given Giuliani a hard time over a bar bill. "And I apologize for saying you were dumb, Nico."
"You should take it back about the Runa, too, Frans."
"I take it back about the Runa," said Frans promptly.
"Because the Runa aren’t cows. They’re the good ones," Nico informed him. "Those Jana people are the bad ones."
"I was only trying to be funny, Nico." Years of experience to the contrary, Frans still hadn’t given up hope that Nico would learn to recognize irony and sarcasm. Which just goes to show who’s dumb, Frans thought, scooping up another forkful of pasta. "Are you a praying man, Nico?" he asked, changing the subject.
"In the morning, and before I sleep. Hail Marys," Nico told him.
"Like the sisters taught you in the home, eh?"
Nico nodded. "My name is Niccolo d’Angeli. ’D’Angeli’ means from the angels," he recited. "That’s where I came from, before the home. The angels left me. I say my prayers in the morning and before I sleep. Hail Marys."
"Brav’ scugnizz’, Nico. You’re a good boy," Frans said aloud, but he was thinking, The angels who dropped you off must have been short a few last names in their genealogy, my friend. "You believe in God, then, do you, Nico?"
"Yes, I do," Nico affirmed solemnly. "The sisters told me."
Frans chewed for a while. "I have a little hypothesis about God, Nico," he said, swallowing. "Want to hear my hypothesis?"
"What’s a hy…?"
"Hy-po-the-sis," Frans said slowly. "An idea. A testable guess about the way something works. You understand, Nico?" The little skull nodded uncertainly. "Now here’s my idea. There’s an old story about a man and a cat—"
"I like cats."
Why do I try? Frans asked himself, but soldiered on. "The man was a famous physicist named Schrodinger—don’t worry, Nico, you don’t have to remember his name. Schrödinger said that a thing isn’t true unless there’s someone to observe that it’s true. He said that observing actually makes an event turn into being true."
Nico looked miserable.
"Don’t be worried, Nico. I’ll make it easy for you. Schrödinger said that if you put a cat in a box with—okay, let’s say with a plate of good food and a plate of poison food, and then you close the box—"
"That’s mean," Nico observed, glad to be back on concrete.
"So is beating the crap out of ex-priests, Nico," Frans told him, taking another bite. "Don’t interrupt. Now: the cat’s in the box, and he may have eaten the good food or the bad food. So he might be alive or he might be dead. But Schrodinger said that the cat isn’t actually alive or dead unless and until the man outside opens the box to see that the cat is alive or dead."
Nico thought that over. "You could listen to hear if it’s purring."
Frans stopped chewing for a moment and pointed at Nico with a fork. "That’s why you’re a thug, and not a physicist or a philosopher." He swallowed and went on. "Now here’s my idea about God. I think we’re like the cat. I think that God is like the man outside the box. I think that if the cat believes in the man, the man is there. And if the cat is an atheist, there is no man."
"Maybe there’s a lady," Nico suggested helpfully.
Frans choked on a piece of pasta and coughed for a while. "Maybe so, Nico. But here’s what I think. I think because you believe in God, maybe there’s going to be a God for you, when you get out of the box." Nico opened his mouth and then closed it again, and appeared about to cry. "Don’t worry about it, Nico. You’re a good boy, and I’m sure God is there for good boys."
Frans got up and waddled back to the galley for something sweet. "That’s why I need you to pray for something," he called as he rummaged through the bins. "Because God is there for you, but He might not be there for people who aren’t sure if they believe in Him." He came back to the table with a generous portion of Black Forest cake. "I want you to pray for a miracle. Okay, Nico?"
"Okay," Nico agreed with utter sincerity.
"Good. Now here’s my problem. Do you know why I’m so fat, Nico?"
"You eat all the time."
"I’m an Afrikaner, Nico," Frans said wearily. "Eating is our national sport. But I ate all the time before, remember? And I wasn’t like this two years ago! Sometimes when you’re out in space, your DNA—the instructions that make your body work, understand? Your DNA gets nicked by a few atoms of cosmic dust. That’s what happened to me, Nico—a random speck of shit just passing through on its way to the rim of the universe hits some critical piece of biological machinery and all hell breaks loose…"
Suddenly, whatever he ate was used and used and used, every last erg of energy torn from each molecule of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen, and stored away in miserly, paranoiac fat cells waiting for a famine of mythic proportions to call upon them for heroic rescue of the body they were slowly, inexorably suffocating. "I fought it, Nico. In the beginning, I fought it. Exercised like a maniac. Starved myself. Spent all my time Earth-side going from doctor to doctor," Frans told him.
He had taken any drug anyone would prescribe or sell, looking for a cure or even just some hope, and became grosser and grosser, more and more a stranger to himself, scared shitless by the prospect of congestive heart and kidney failure.
There was a sort of poetic justice in it, he supposed, and Frans Vanderhelst was nothing if not philosophical about such things. For years, he himself had profited from other people’s pathetic belief in a miracle cure. Carlo had run the scam for almost a decade before the insurance companies caught on. He preyed like a wolf on the weak—selecting only the richest and sickest, the most desperate and suggestible marks, assuring his hopeful, hopeless half-dead passengers that if they went fast enough, time would slow down for them and when they got back, medical advances on Earth would have caught up with their diseases and they’d go home to be cured. Convincingly sympathetic to their plight, Carlo explained how they would pay nothing now, that it was only necessary to list the Angels of Mercy Limited as the beneficiary to their life insurance policies.
It was bullshit, of course. Frans just took them up and ran the engines at quarter-power for a few weeks, far from the unblinking gaze of medical ethics boards and police surveillance. The marks themselves never knew the difference. Most of them died on their own; Carlo’s drunken, defrocked doctors made sure of the rest.
But now, Carlo had parlayed a scam into something real and Frans Vanderhelst actually was on his way to Rakhat—accelerating at an increasing percentage of the speed of light. And this time Frans himself was the poor, dumb fuck who hoped that during the four decades of his projected absence from Earth, someone would figure out how to make his body right again. Because, underneath an ever-thickening pad of adipose, behind now piggish eyes peering over puffed and pasty cheeks, Frans Vanderhelst was only thirty-six, a man in his prime. And Frans wanted very much to live.
"So, here’s the miracle you should pray for, okay, Nico?" Frans said, laying down his fork. "Pray that we get back to Earth alive and pray that when we get there, someone will be able to fix it for me, so I can eat and still be normal? You got that, Nico?"
Nico nodded. "Pray so we get back alive and you’re normal."
"Good, Nico. That’s good. I appreciate it," said Frans as Nico went back to Verdi, picking up the Duke of Mantua’s aria where he’d left off a few minutes earlier.
Frans sat for a time, thinking about Pascal’s wager. It was then that he realized he really did appreciate Nico’s prayers. After all, he thought, the one thing an agnostic knows for sure is: you never know.