"Your Holiness, we are more than prepared to concede that overpopulation alone is not the sole cause of poverty and misery," Giuliani began.
"Fatuous oligarchies," Gelasius suggested. "Ethnic paranoia. Whimsical economic systems. An enduring habit of treating women like dogs…"
Giuliani took a breath and held it a moment before stating the position of the Society of Jesus, and his own. "There is no condom that prevents pigheadedness, no pill or injection that stops greed or vanity. But there are humane and sensible ways to alleviate some of the conditions that lead to misery."
"We ourselves have experienced the death of a sister, sacrificed on Malthus’s altar," Gelasius III pointed out. "Unlike Our learned and saintly predecessors, We are unable to discern evidence of God’s most holy will in population control carried out by the forces of war, starvation and disease. These seem to a simple man blind, and brutal."
"And inadequate to the task, for all that. As are human self-control and sexual restraint," Giuliani observed. "The Society merely asks that Holy Mother Church make allowances for human nature, as any loving mother does. Surely, the capacity to think and to plan is a divine gift that can be used responsibly. Surely, there is no evil in the desire that each child who is born be as welcomed and cherished as was Christ the Child."
"There can be no question of tolerating abortion—" Lopore said decisively.
"And yet," Giuliani pointed out, "St. Ignatius advised that ’we must never seek to establish a rule so rigid as to leave no room for exception.’»
"Neither can we abet systems of birth control as inflexible and cruel as the one Sandoz describes on Rakhat," Gelasius continued.
"The middle way is always the most difficult path to follow, Your Holiness."
"And extremism the simplest, but—. Ecclesia semper reformanda!" said Gelasius with sudden vigor. "We have studied the Jesuit proposals, and those of our Orthodox Christian brethren. There is good to be achieved! The question is how…. It will be a matter, We think, of redefining the domains of natural and artificial birth control. Sahlins—you have read Sahlins? Sahlins wrote that ’nature’ is culturally defined, so what is artificial is also culturally defined." The hand moved, the starter hummed and the Pope made ready to leave. But then the dark-eyed gaze returned to Vincenzo Giuliani’s face. "To think. To plan. And yet—what extraordinary children come to us unplanned, unwanted, despised! We are told that Emilio Sandoz is a slum-bred bastard."
"Harsh words, Your Holiness." Supplied no doubt by Vatican politicians who had moved smoothly behind the throne of Peter when that spot was vacated by exiled Jesuit antecedents. "But technically correct, I understand. " Giuliani thought a moment. "Numbers 11:23 comes to mind. And Sarah’s unlikely child, and Elizabeth’s. Even Our Lady’s! I suppose that if Almighty God wants an extraordinary child born, we may trust Him to arrange it?"
The gleaming brown eyes shone in a still face. "We have enjoyed this conversation. Perhaps you will visit Us in the future?"
"I’m sure my secretary can make the arrangements with your office, Your Holiness."
The Pope inclined his head, lifted his hand in blessing. Just before he blanked the Fiat’s one-way windows to outside view and rolled out onto the ancient stone-paved road that led toward the autostrada to Rome, he said again, "Sandoz must go back."
4
Great Southern Forest, Rakhat
2042, Earth-Relative
SOFIA MENDES PULLED HERSELF TOGETHER DURING HER LAST MONTH of pregnancy, forcing the faces of the dead from her mind by concentrating on the unknown child within her. The turning point came several weeks after they arrived in Trucha Sai. "Someone thought: Fia is never without this," Kanchay said, handing a computer tablet to her one morning. "So someone brought it from Kashan."
Running her small hands over its smooth machined edges, feeling the well-known shape and heft, wiping off its photovoltaics, Sofia thanked Kanchay almost soundlessly and went off alone to sit against a downed w’ralia trunk, resting the tablet on her belly and drawn-up knees. After all the strangeness and fear, the confusion and sorrow, here was the ordinary, the familiar. Trembling, she called up the connect and gave a shouted gasp of relief when the Stella Maris library access appeared, patient and reliable as always.
She lost herself in the system, downloading data as she went. Childbirth, related terms: Childbirth at Home, Childbirth in Middle Age. Natural Childbirth. "My only option," she muttered. Then: "Underwater Childbirth!" she exclaimed aloud. Thoroughly mystified, she took a moment to pull the references up just to see what that could be about. Nonsense, she decided, and went on. Child Development—thousands of citations. She pulled out Infant Development—Normal, and, perhaps superstitiously, bypassed references on Autism, Developmental Disablement, and Failure to Thrive. Child-rearing—Maxims. Possibly useful, she decided, having no grandmotherly source of advice. Oh, Anne! Oh, Mama! she thought, but pushed them both away. Child-rearing— Religious Aspects—Jewish. Yes, she thought, and brought the Torah down as well. What will I do if it’s a boy? she wondered then, and decided she’d circumcise that problem if and when she came to it.
"There’s an angel behind every blade of grass whispering, Grow, darling, grow!" her mother told her when she was small and afraid of the dark. "Do you think God would take all that trouble for a blade of grass and not watch over you?"
Mama, I am a one-eyed pregnant Jewish widow, Sofia thought, and I am very far from home. If this constitutes being watched over by God, I’d be better off as a blade of grass. And yet…. A daughter, please, she prayed swiftly. A little girl. A small healthy girl.
But Sofia had never relied on God, who tended to be terse even when He was clearly on the job. Go to Pharaoh and free My people, He said, and left the logistics to Moses as a lesson in self-reliance. So she spent the next weeks reading and absorbing on-line books and articles, creating an AI obstetrician: synthesizing, laying out sequences, finding branch points, reducing as much as possible to "if (condition) then (action)" statements, wherever the action was feasible on Rakhat, among the Runa. She refined her explanations to simple sentences, graphic and plain; entered them in Ruanja so that she might look up her own or her baby’s distress and, without thinking, give instructions that might save them both. And in doing all this, she lost some of her fear, if not any of her hope.
THE CULLS WENT ON, ACROSS SOUTHERN INBROKAR—ANYWHERE THE gardens had been planted. Runa fathers in little groups of twos and threes continued to arrive with infants, bringing news as well. Once women from Kashan visited, led by the girl named Djalao, who was made much of by the men who’d heeded her warning that the djanada patrols were coming.
Aware now that Djalao VaKashan had saved her life and the lives of many others, Sofia took the girl aside to thank her during a brief lull in the murmur of Ruanja that filled the redlit evenings, when fathers gathered to talk children to sleep, arms over bellies, tails over legs, back against back. Ears high, Djalao accepted Sofia’s gratitude without embarrassment, and it was this as much as anything that prompted Sofia to take the conversation further.
"Sipaj, Djalao, why must the Runa go back to the villages at all? Why not simply walk away from the Jana’ata? Why not show your tails to them and live here!"
Djalao looked around the forest settlement, and it was only then that her ears dropped. Distressed by the sight of Runa living like animals, she told Sofia, "Our homes are back there. We can’t leave the villages and the cities. That’s where we live and trade. We—" She stopped and shook her head, as though there were a yuv’at buzzing in one ear. "Sipaj, Fia: we made the cities. To come here—for a time—is acceptable. To walk away from the art of our hands and the places of our hearts is not—"