He had a sense, sometimes, of flawless peace. The words of Donne seemed perfect: "For I am every dead thing / In whom love wrought new Alchemie." Attacked by hope, he could no longer resist belief in the goodness of having a future, and felt the past’s grip loosen. It’s over, he would think now and then. It’s finally over.
14
Trucha Sai
2042–2046, Earth-Relative
SOFIA MENDES DID NOT LACK COMPANIONSHIP IN TRUCHA SAI. THE VILLAGE population stabilized at about 350, and there were other settlements nearby; visits were common and festive. She shared chores and meals with many people, and soon it felt natural to pass the time weaving the swordlike leaves of diuso trees into mats, windbreaks, umbrellas, cooking packets for steaming roots, baskets for collecting fruit. She participated in the seasonal round of ripening, and learned the location and identification of useful plants, the ways to avoid dangers, and how to find one’s way in what had first appeared impenetrable jungle.
She was becoming a competent Runa adult—a knowledgeable field botanist, a useful member of the community—and found a certain satisfaction in that. But during the early months of her exile, the orbiting Stella Maris library system was the nearest thing she had to an intellectual companion. She could not reach the ship physically, but she spent much of her day in radio contact with the library. After she had polished and edited them, she poured her observations of Runa life and her private thoughts into its memory, rather than leave them logged only on her own computer tablet. This habit made her feel less isolated, as though she were sending messages, not making entries in a diary. Someday her words would reach Earth, and she could believe herself a solitary scientist, contributing to her own society with her research. Still human. Still sane.
Then, when Isaac was only fifteen months old, the morning came when she called up the access routines and was greeted by an unyielding silence. Staring at the laconic error message on her screen, she felt the physical jolt of a ship whose mooring rope has suddenly given way. Had the onboard systems become corrupted somehow? Perhaps the ship’s orbit had degraded and the Stella Maris itself had burned up in the atmosphere or fallen into the Rakhati sea. There were endless possibilities. The only thing she did not consider was what had actually occurred: a second party from Earth, traveling under the auspices of the United Nations, had in fact arrived on Rakhat. Some twelve weeks after landfall, the Contact Consortium had located Emilio Sandoz. Believing him the sole survivor of the Jesuit mission, they had sent the Stella Maris on its automated way back to Earth, navigated by Sofia’s own artificial-intelligence programs, carrying Emilio Sandoz home alone to infamy.
There were many kinds of loneliness, she discovered. There was the loneliness that came from understanding but not being understood. There was the loneliness of having no one to banter or argue with, no one to be challenged by. Loneliness at night was different from the daylight loneliness that sometimes overwhelmed her in the midst of a crowd. She became a connoisseur of loneliness, and the worst kind of all, she discovered, came after a night when she dreamed of Isaac laughing.
A tiny infant, long and fatless, he had slept away his early weeks with a heavy unresponsiveness that frightened her. She recognized that sleep was his way of concentrating his meager resources on survival, so she fought the desire to rouse him, knowing it to be a sign of her own need for reassurance. But even when he was awake, he could not meet her eye for more than a moment or two without going gray under his papery skin, and though he suckled more strongly as the weeks passed, he often vomited her milk. No matter what she told herself about a preemie’s undeveloped digestive system, it was difficult not to feel this as a heartbreaking rejection.
At six months, Isaac remained birdlike and remote, always looking into the distance, intent on some far-off mystery of leaves and light and shadow. By his first birthday, he had an otherworldly dignity, a tiny quiet unsmiling boy with deep-set elvish eyes, who spent a great deal of his time examining the kaleidoscope of his own fingers, entranced by the patterns they made. She began to hope that his silence had its roots in deafness, for he did not babble, did not turn toward her when she called his name, seemed not to hear the Runa children around him as they squabbled and played and teased and huffed in breathy laughter. But one day, he said, "Sipaj," and repeated it endlessly until the word for "Hear me!" became as meaningless as a mantra for all who listened. Then the silence closed in again.
As his second birthday approached, he seemed to have achieved a state of unassailable self-containment: a precocious Zen master without needs, without desires. He would nurse when Sofia placed her nipple in his mouth; later, he would eat when food was placed on his tongue, drink if water were brought to his lips. He would allow himself to be picked up and held, but he never raised his arms to anyone. Carried about by his Runa playmates as though he were a doll, he would wait unmoving and unmoved for the interruption of his reverie to cease; put down, he would return to his meditation as though the incident had not occurred.
Inside his invisible citadel, it seemed, there was a perfection from which the outside world could not distract or tempt him. He sat for hours, still and well balanced as a Yogi, his face sometimes transformed by a smile of shattering beauty, as though privately pleased by some secret, sacred thought.
Sofia did not have to ask what would have been done with a Runa baby so abnormal. Like a Spartan exposing his deformed infant on a wolf-prowled hillside, a Runa father would have given a defective child up to the djanada—veal for Jana’ata aristocrats. Perhaps the Runa did not realize there was anything wrong with Isaac, or perhaps they didn’t care; Isaac was not Runa and so the rules for him were different. As far as Sofia could tell, they simply accepted Isaac’s solitary silence as they accepted his lack of tail and his hairless body, as they accepted nearly everything in their world: with placid good humor and unruffled calm.
So Sofia, too, tried to accept her son as he was, but it was not easy to watch her child stare for hours at his hands or sit patting the ground with a quiet unchanging tattoo as he listened to some inner melody. As beautiful and inhuman as an angel, Isaac would have been difficult for any mother to love, and Sofia Mendes’s life had provided little opportunity to practice loving.
In the most hidden region of her soul, she felt an unspeakable relief that her son desired so little of her. For years, the only measure she had of how deeply she felt the loss of her parents was the unreasoning terror that swept through her at the mere thought of dying young and orphaning a child of her own. There were some compensations for Isaac’s condition, she told herself. If she died, he’d hardly notice.
She would realize later how close she’d come to madness. She’d looked over the edge of it, dizzy and careless at the brink, by the time Isaac was four years old. It was then that Supaari and his infant daughter arrived in Trucha Sai, brought there by Djalao and several other VaKashani women. The forest Runa showed no amazement at his unexpected appearance in a haven they had always kept a secret from their Jana’ata masters; it was their nature to accept things without much questioning, and Supaari VaGayjur had always been different from other djanada. But if the Runa were as calm as ever, Sofia Mendes was rocked by the strength of her emotions. Supaari was Jana’ata and yet, when she first saw him, she did not think of riot or death, of oppression or exploitation or cruelty, but only of friendship and an end to loneliness.
It was the first time since Isaac’s birth that she had found something to thank God for.