"Sofia," he said and held his hands out to her.
Her’s remained quiet. "It’s been a long time," she observed coldly, when he drew near. "You might have come to me first." She held his gaze with her one eye until his own dropped. "Have you seen Isaac?" she asked, when he could look at her again.
"Yes," he said. She stiffened slightly and took in a breath, and he understood then that Sofia had believed her son long dead, his name used heartlessly to lure more hostages to the djanada stronghold. "Isaac is well," he began.
"Well!" She gave a short laugh. "Not normal, but well, at least. Is he with you?"
"No—"
"They are still holding him hostage."
"No, Sofia, nothing like that! He is a person of honor among them—"
"Then why isn’t he here, with you?"
He hesitated, not wanting to wound her. "He—Isaac prefers to stay where he is. He has invited you to come to him." He stopped, looking past her to the troops visible beyond the golden tenting. "We can take you to him, but you must come alone."
"Is that the game?" she asked, smiling coolly. "Isaac is the bait, and they’d have me."
"Sofia, please!" he begged. "The Jana’ata aren’t—. Sofia, you’ve got it all wrong!"
"I have it wrong," she repeated softly. "I have it wrong. Sandoz, you’ve been here, what? A few weeks?" she asked lightly, brows up, one twisted by scar tissue. "And now you tell me that I have it all wrong. Wait! There is a word in English for this—now let me think…" She stared at him, unblinking. "Arrogance. Yes. That’s the word. I had almost forgotten it. You have come back, after forty years, and you have taken almost three whole weeks to get to know the situation, and now you propose to explain Rakhat to me."
He refused to be intimidated. "Not Rakhat. Just one small settlement of Jana’ata, trying not to starve to death. Sofia, do you realize that the Jana’ata are nearly extinct? Surely you didn’t mean—"
"Is that what they told you?" she asked. She snorted with derision. "And you believed them."
"Dammit, Sofia, don’t patronize me! I know starvation when I see It—"
"What if they are starving?" she snapped. "Shall I regret that a cannibal starves?"
"Oh, for crissakes, Sofia, they aren’t cannibals!"
"And what would you call it?" she asked. "They eat Runa—"
"Sofia, listen to me—"
"No, you listen to me, Sandoz," she hissed. "For nearly thirty years, we-but-not-you fought an enemy whose whole civilization was the purest expression of the most characteristic form of eviclass="underline" the willingness to erase the humanity of others and turn them into commodities. In life, the Runa were conveniences for the djanada—slaves, assistants, sex toys. In death, raw materials—meat, hides, bones. Labor first, livestock in the end! But the Runa are more than meat, Sandoz. They are a people who have earned their liberty and won it from those who kept them in bondage, generation after generation. God wanted their freedom. I helped them to get it, and I regret nothing. We gave the Jana’ata justice. They reaped precisely what they sowed."
"So God wants them extinct?" Emilio cried. "He wants the Runa to turn the planet into a grocery store? God wants a place where no one sings, where everyone is alike, where there is one kind of person? Sofia, this has gone way past an eye for an eye—"
The sound was like a gunshot, flat and unresonant, and he could feel the exact outline of her hand, stinging and sharp, form on his face.
"How dare you," she whispered. "How dare you leave me behind, and come back now—after all this time—and presume to judge me!"
He stood still, face averted, waiting for the sensation to ease, eyes wide to keep the tears from spilling. Tried to imagine forty years alone and unsupported, without John or Gina, without Vince Giuliani or Edward Behr, or any of the others who’d helped him.
"I’m sorry," he said finally. "I’m sorry! I don’t know what happened here, and I won’t pretend to understand what you have lived through —»
"Thank you. I am glad to hear it—"
"But, Sofia, I do know what it is to be a commodity," he said, cutting her off. "I know what it is to be erased. I also know what it is to be falsely accused, and God help me! I know what it is to be guilty—" He stopped and looked away, but then met her eye and said, "Sofia, I have eaten Runa, and for the same reason the djanada did: because I was hungry and I wanted to live. And I have killed—I killed Askama, Sofia. I didn’t mean it to be her, but I wanted to kill, I wanted someone to die so that I could be free, one way or the other. So you see," he told her with bleak cheer, "I am the last person to judge anyone else! And I grant you that the Jana’ata you fought got what was coming to them! But, Sofia—you can’t let the Runa kill them all! They’ve paid for their sins—"
"Paid for their sins!" Incredulous, she stood, and left her chair and walked a step or two, bent and hobbled by a coiled spine. "Did they confess to you, Father? Have you forgiven them, just because they asked you to?" she asked, face twisted with contempt. "Well, some things cannot be absolved! Some things are unforgivable—"
"You think I don’t know that?" he shouted, his own anger rising to meet hers. "No one confesses to me anymore! I left the priesthood, Sofia. I didn’t come here to judge you. I didn’t even come back to rescue you! I came because I was beaten senseless and kidnapped by Carlo Giuliani. I spent a good portion of the voyage from Earth drugged, and all I want to do right now is go home and find out if the woman I nearly married seventeen years ago is still alive—"
She stared at him but now his eyes did not drop. "You said that you knew what happened to me at Galatna, Sofia, but you don’t know the worst of it: I left the priesthood because I can’t forgive what happened to me there. I can’t forgive Supaari, who did this to me," he said, holding up his hands. "And I can’t forgive Hlavin Kitheri, and I doubt that I ever will. They taught me to hate, Sofia. Ironic, isn’t it? We heard Kitheri’s songs and risked everything to come here, prepared to love whomever we met and to learn from them! But when Hlavin Kitheri met one of us—. He looked at me, and all he thought—"
He stopped, spun from her, hardly able to breathe, but turned, trembling, and held her uneasy gaze as he said in a voice soft with outrage, "He looked at me and thought, How nice. Something new to fuck."
"It’s over," she snapped, face white. But he knew it wasn’t, not even for her, not even after all these years. "You work," she told him. "You concentrate on the task at hand—"
"Yes," he agreed willingly, quickly. "And you make loneliness a virtue. You call it self-reliance, right? You tell yourself you need nothing, that you don’t want anyone in your life ever again—"
"Wall it off!"
"You think I haven’t tried?" he cried. "Sofia, I keep stacking up the stones, but nothing holds the walls together anymore! Not even anger. Not even hate. I am worn out with hating, Sofia. I’m tired of it. I’m bored by it!" The storm was now only minutes away and the lightning was frighteningly close, but he didn’t care. "I have hated Supaari VaGayjur, and Hlavin Kitheri, and sixteen of his friends but… I can’t seem to hate in the aggregate," he whispered, hands falling emptily. "That one small island of integrity is still left to me, Sofia. As much as I have hated the fathers, I cannot hate their children. And neither should you, Sofia. You can’t in justice kill the innocent."
"No," she said, curled over her own heart. "There are no innocents."
"If I can find you ten, will you spare the others for their sake?"
"Don’t play games with me," she said, and motioned for her bearers.