"THIS INGWY, SHE’S A HIGH GODDESS, IS SHE?" SEAN ASKED SANDOZ when the others had cleared out of the commons after a quiet breakfast.
Emilio set his coffee mug on the table, brace servos humming. There was still a fault in one of the electroelastic actuators, but he had learned to work around it. "I don’t think so. I had the impression she might be a personification of foresight or prophesy—just from context. Supaari was not a believer, but her name came up now and then." It was interesting, the way the drug took him. He felt almost like an AI construct, able to respond to requests for information, even to solve problems at times. On the other hand, it seemed impossible to learn anything new. No desire for mastery, he guessed. "There are others," he told Sean. "Wisdom—or Cunning, perhaps, also feminine. It wasn’t clear what the translation should be. He also mentioned a goddess of Chaos once. She is one of the Calamities."
"Female deities," Sean said, frowning. "Odd, wouldn’t y’say? In a society dominated by males?"
"There is perhaps an older belief system underlying the present culture. Religion is generally conservative."
"True. True for you." Sean looked away, quiet for a time. "Did y’ever wonder then why Orthodox Jews count lineage through the mother’s ancestry?" Sean asked. "Strange, isn’t it? The entire Old Testament, filled with begats. Twelve tribes for the twelve sons of Jacob. But Jacob had a daughter, too. Remember? Dina. The one who was raped." There was no reaction from Sandoz. "And yet, there’s no Tribe of Dina. Patrilineage, all through the Torah! Religion is conservative, as y’say. So why? When was it declared that a Jew is the child of a Jewish mother?"
"I have always hated the Socratic method," Sandoz said without heat, but he answered dutifully. "During the pogroms, to legitimize the Cossacks’ bastards."
"Yes, so none of the children would be stigmatized as half-Jew or no Jew a-tall. And good for the rabbis, I say." Sean had spent a childhood being asked, "What are y’then?" Whatever he answered, the buggers’d laugh. "So. To legitimize the children of rape, when rape was so common the rabbis had to overturn twenty-five hundred years of tradition to cope with it. Good girls and bad. Virgins and whores. Young and old alike. Devout and indifferent and apostate. All done." He gazed at Sandoz with steady blue eyes. "And not a one of ’em ever got an apology from God, nor from the fackin’ basturd who done her."
Sandoz didn’t even blink. "Your point is taken. I am neither the first nor the only person to be worked over."
"So what?" Sean demanded. "Does it help to know that?"
"Not a blind bit," Sandoz said in Sean’s own voice. He sounded irritable. It might have been the mimicry.
"Nor should it," Sean snapped. "Sufferin’ may be banal and predictable, but it doesn’t hurt any less for all that. And it’s despicable to take comfort in knowin’ that others have suffered as well." He was watching Sandoz carefully now. "I’m told y’blame God for what happened on Rakhat. Why not blame Satan? Do y’believe in the devil, then, Sandoz?"
"But that is irrelevant," Sandoz said lightly. "Satan ruins people by tempting them to take an easy or pleasurable path." He was on his feet, taking his mug and plate to the galley.
"Spoken like a good Jesuit," Sean called to him. "And there was nothin’ easy nor pleasurable in what happened to you."
Sandoz reappeared, empty-handed. "No. Nothing," he said, voice soft, eyes hard. " ’As fish are caught in a net and as birds are trapped, so are the children of men entrapped—this I experienced under the sun, and it seemed a great evil to me.’»
"Ecclesiasticus. Omnia vanitas: All is vanity and chasing after the wind. The wicked prosper and the righteous get rooted up the hole, and is that all y’learned in a quarter of a century in the Company of Jesus?"
"Fuck off, Sean," Sandoz said and moved toward the doorway that led to the cabins.
Suddenly, Sean was out of his chair and, cutting him off, blocked the way out of the room. "Nowhere t’run now, Sandoz. Nowhere t’hide," Sean said, and he did not waver under the murderous glare he got for his trouble. "You were a priest for decades," Sean said with quiet insistence, "and a good one. Think like a priest, Sandoz. Think like a Jesuit! What did Jesus add to the canon, man? If the Jews deserved one thing, it was a better answer to sufferin’ than the piss-poor one Job got. If pain and injustice and undeserved misery are part of the package, and God knows they are, then surely the life of Christ is God’s own answer to Ecclesiasticus! Redeem the suffering. Embrace it. Make it mean something."
There was no response except that stony stare, but the shaking was visible.
"Yer feelin’ it now, aren’t you. Carlo stopped the Quell aerosol he’s been pumpin’ into yer room while y’slept," Sean informed him. "There’s no way past the next forty-eight hours except through them. Y’watched a thousand babies die, slaughtered like lambs. Y’saw the bloody corpses of everyone y’loved. You were gang-raped for months and when you were rescued, we all assumed you’d prostituted yersalf. Well, the dead are dead. You’ll never be unraped. And you’ll never live out yer life with sweet Gina and her wee daughter. And yer feelin’ it."
Sandoz closed his eyes, but Sean’s voice went on, with its hard r’s and the flat, unmusical poetry of Belfast. "Pity the poor, wee souls who live a life of watered milk—all blandness and pleasantry—and die nicely asleep in ripe old age. Water and milk, Sandoz. They live half a life and never know the strength they might have had. Show God what yer made of, man. Pucker up and kiss the cross. Make it your own. Make all this mean something. Redeem it."
Sean noticed only then that Daniel Iron Horse was standing silently behind a bulkhead just beyond the commons. Danny came forward and stood now in plain sight. For a moment, Sean frowned, unsure of Danny’s intention, but then it came clear to him. "Here’s one thing y’can do to redeem the next two days, Sandoz. Y’can let this man witness them. Will y’ permit it?"
Sandoz would look at neither of them, and remained silent. But he didn’t say no, and so Sean left and Danny stayed.
SANDOZ SEEMED STUNNED IN THE BEGINNING BUT, BEFORE LONG, withdrawal began to work on him physically. Too tense to stay still, he needed to walk the pain out, and Danny followed him into the chilling silence of the lander bay, which was nearly thirty meters long and afforded him room to move, and privacy.
For the first hours, Sandoz said nothing, but Danny knew the anger was coming and tried to brace himself for it. He believed that there was nothing Sandoz could say to him that he had not said to himself, but he was wrong. When Sandoz spoke at last, brutal mockery quickly escalated beyond rage to a pure moral fury, its expression informed by decades of Jesuit study. Tears, Daniel Iron Horse discovered that first morning, felt cold against skin flushed with shame.
Then the silence settled in again.
Danny left only twice on the first day, to go to the head. Sandoz paced and paced, and after a time, stripped off his shirt, sodden with sweat that leached the moisture from his body even in the numbing cold of the lander bay. A while later, he took off the braces as well and then sat down as far away from Danny as possible, near the exterior hangar-bay door, his back against the sealed stone walls, head resting on arms wrapped around raised knees, the nearly dead fingers twitching sometimes.
In spite of himself and his intentions, Danny fell asleep as the hours passed. He woke once and saw Sandoz standing at the bay door, staring into the darkness through the small porthole. Danny dropped off once again, only to hear the words "Aqui estoy" sometime during the night. He was not sure of the language, but he remembered the words and, later on, asked the other priests if any of them understood. Both Joseba and John recognized the Spanish: Here I am. It was Sean who said, "That’s what Abraham answered when God called his name." But Sandoz had said it with a kind of beaten resignation, and Danny thought it might only have signaled the man’s recognition that he was stuck on the Bruno, with nowhere to go but forward.