It was not long before the Sephardic Jew and the Jesuit priest established a working routine; within weeks, it was their habit to end each long, difficult day of compilation, analysis, argument and decision with dinner and a couple of Lone Star beers at a quiet bar near D.W.’s provincial residence in New Orleans. The talk sometimes went late into the night, turning to religion more often than not. Sofia was defensive at first, still clinging to a certain amount of historical hostility to Catholicism, but embarrassed by how little she knew of Judaism. Yarbrough was aware of how abruptly and how badly her childhood had ended; an admirer of Judaism on its own terms and not merely as a precursor to his own religion, he became both a goad and a guide in her rediscovery of the tradition she was born to.
"There’s a fine fierceness to Jews that I like a whole lot," the Texan told her one night, during a discussion of the Virginal intercessions and saintly go-betweens, of the baroque hierarchy of priests and monsignors and bishops and archbishops and cardinals and pope that lay between God and the Catholic soul, which Sofia found pointless and mystifying. "Most people, now, they don’t like to go straight to the top, not really. They need to sidle up to a proposition, come at the thing a little off-center. They feel better with a chain of command," D.W. said, an old Marine squadron commander whose years in the Jesuit order had done nothing to diminish his tendency to think in military terms. "Got a problem, you ask the sergeant. Sergeant might go to a captain he knows. Most folks would have a hell of a time getting up the nerve to bang on the general’s office door, even if he was the nicest fella in the world. Catholicism makes allowances for that in human beings." He’d smiled then, teeth and eyes askew, the ugliest and most beautiful man she’d ever met. "But the children of Abraham? They look God straight in the face. Praise. Argue! Dicker, complain. Takes a lot of guts to deal with the Almighty like that." And she had warmed to him, feeling it the highest accolade he could have given her and her people.
They agreed on many things during those midnight conversations. There was, they decided, no such thing as an ex-Jew or an ex-Catholic or an ex-Marine. "Now why is that?" D.W. asked one night, after noting that ex-Texans were hard to come by, too. It was, he thought, crucial to get at your recruits when they were young and impressionable. Pride in tradition was part of it as well, Sofia pointed out. But most important, D.W. said, was the fact that all these groups based their philosophies on the same principle.
"Talk is cheap. We believe in action," Yarbrough said. "Fight for justice. Feed the hungry. Take the beach. We none of us sit around hopin’ for some big damn miracle to fix things."
But for all his emphasis on action, D. W. Yarbrough was a highly educated and conscientious man who was well aware of the cultural and spiritual damage missionaries could do, and he had laid out strict rules of engagement for the Jesuit mission to Rakhat. "We don’t preach. We listen," he insisted. "These’re God’s children, too, and this time we’re gonna learn what they got to teach us ’fore we go around retumin’ the favor."
Of all the members of the Stella Maris crew, Sofia Mendes had been the most relieved by that clear-eyed humility and reluctance to proselytize. It was superbly ironic, then, that this afternoon, against all probability, it had fallen to Sofia Mendes herself to speak of God to a VaRakhati.
"Who are ’god’?" Supaari had asked.
I don’t know, she thought.
Not even D.W. was willing to make a statement of full faith. He was tolerant of skepticism and doubt, at home with ambivalence and ambiguity. "Maybe God is only the most powerful poetic idea we humans’re capable of thinkin’," he said one night, after a few drinks. "Maybe God has no reality outside our minds and exists only in the paradox of Perfect Compassion and Perfect Justice. Or maybe," he suggested, slouching back in his chair and favoring her with a lopsided, wily grin, "maybe God is exactly as advertised in the Torah. Maybe, along with all its other truths and beauties, Judaism preserves for each generation of us the reality of the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, of Moses—the God of Jesus."
A cranky, uncanny God, D.W. called Him. "A God with quirky, unfathomable rules, a God who gets fed up with us and pissed off! But quick to forgive, Sofia, and generous," D.W said, his voice softening, eyes full of light, "always, always in love with humanity. Always there, waiting for us—generation after generation—to return His passion. Ah, Sofia, darlin’! On my best days, I believe in Him with all my heart."
"And on your worst days?" she had asked that night.
"Even if it’s only poetry, it’s poetry to live by, Sofia—poetry to die for," he told her with quiet conviction. He slouched in his chair for a time, thinking. "Maybe poetry is the only way we can get near the truth of God. … And when the metaphors fail, we think it’s God who’s failed us!" he cried, grinning crookedly. "Now there’s an idea that buys some useful theological wiggle room!"
D. W. Yarbrough had taught her that she was the heir to an ancient human wisdom, its laws and ethics tested and retested in a hundred cultures in every conceivable moral climate—a code of conduct as sound as any her species had to offer. She longed to tell Supaari of the wisdom of Hillel who taught, a century before Jesus, "That which is hateful to you, do not do unto others." If you would not live as the Runa must, stop breeding them, stop exploiting them, stop eating them! Find some other way to live. Love mercy, the prophets taught. Do justice. There was so much to share! And yet, the history of her home planet was one of almost continual warfare, and with tragic frequency, war’s taproot was set deep in fervent religion and unquestioning belief. She longed to ask D.W., If it was right for us to learn from the VaRakhati, isn’t it right for them to learn from us?
I don’t know what to do, she thought. Even the laws of physics resolve to probabilities. How can I know what to do?
"God who has begun this will bring it to perfection," Marc Robichaux always said. Emilio Sandoz told her once, "We are here because God has brought us here, step by step." Nothing happens by chance, the Jewish sages taught. Perhaps, she thought, it was to bring this wisdom to Rakhat that I have been left here. Perhaps this was why I was the only one of us to survive on Rakhat…
And perhaps I have lost my mind, she thought then, startled to be taking such a notion seriously.
It had been a grueling day. She didn’t dare think about what might have been, if only Supaari had realized she was alive. Be glad for what you have, she told herself, settling down near Kanchay, in sight of her strange son’s sleeping face; near Supaari and his tiny, beautiful Ha’anala; surrounded by Sichu-Lan and Tinbar and all the others who had made her welcome.
It was dawn the next morning when Supaari’s words came back to her. "The others—" She sat up, breathing unevenly, and stared into the darkness. Others. Other people had come.
"Sipaj, Fia! What are you doing?" Kanchay asked sleepily. He too sat as she rose onto her knees and began to feel around the edge of the shelter. "What do you seek?"
"The computer tablet," she said and hissed as she cut herself on a knife left carelessly in a pile of platters.
"Agh, Fia! Stop that!" Kanchay cried disgustedly, as she cursed and sucked the thin, salty line of pain on her hand. There was a general outcry of dismay from the others, awakened by the sudden spurt of blood scent that roused them as a shout might have roused humans, but Sofia continued to rummage through the storage area around the perimeter of the shelter.