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Emilio was sitting in the Stella Maris’s pilot seat. He swayed back and forth anxiously, shivering in the cold air, which was slightly rank with the smell of decaying plants and fish. The full-spectrum light blazing from the light panels was giving him a headache.
They’d left him here some time ago. The humans. They were humans, weren’t they? They’d been as small as he was, he remembered that, with single-pupiled eyes. All except Askama. Oh, sweet little Askama, eyes wide as she coughed up blood and whispered that Emilio’s family had come for him.
She was wrong. Emilio’s family was dead. Marc, Alan, D.W., Anne, George, Jimmy, Sofia. And now Askama. All dead. All those children. All his fault.
Emilio focused on the computer screen in front of him.
חֲיוּ, ו זִכְרוּ
He blinked, trying to make sense of the gibberish on the screen, feeling panic rising. It was like this when the humans came to his cell, after the door opened, after he, after someone hurt Askama. They were yelling, angry, and he couldn’t – it wasn’t K’san, or Ruanja, not Spanish, not Arabic, not Amharic, and he couldn’t he couldn’t - Hebrew, Emilio recognized suddenly. Why was the computer display in Hebrew?
“Live,” he translated slowly, whispering the words out loud, his once quick-silver brain as ponderous as D.W.’s Buick, “and remember.”
A flicker of movement in the corner of his eye made Emilio flinch away. He gasped; moving quickly hurt his hands, his head, his everything. Sitting in the co-pilot seat next to him was Sofia Mendes, tiny, bird-like, haughty and beautiful.
“You’re dead,” he accused her.
She nodded. “You, however, are not. Let’s keep it that way. Press the Enter key to initiate the return program,” she said curtly, pointing to the keyboard in front of Emilio.
Long-ingrained habit had him immediately leaning forward. After a moment’s consideration, he awkwardly nudged the Enter key with the side of his hand. The jolt of pain brought tears to his eyes. There was a low thrum Emilio could feel in his bones as the engines fired the first of the realignment blasts that would position the asteroid-ship for the flight back to Earth.
When he glanced back at the co-pilot seat, Sofia was gone.
Emilio stumbled to his quarters, hot and bright the way George had programmed it for him, reminding him of La Perla and Kashan. The door automatically shushed closed behind him, trapping him in the tiny room; it took a few frantic moments of him smacking the wall control with his elbow to open it. Cursing in gutter Spanish, he painstakingly locked it open. Then he lay down on his bed and fell instantly asleep.
Emilio stared up at the blank ceiling of his room with dry eyes. He was exhausted, but every time he fell asleep he had nightmares, and — no.
“Are you going to get up at some point, or is your plan to lay there until you urinate, and then wallow in your own filth?”
Emilio turned his head to the side and saw Sofia Mendes standing in the doorway, her posture perfect as always.
“I’m going insane,” he greeted her.
She gave a tiny shrug. “The mind and body have a wide variety of coping strategies when it comes to trauma. What are your symptoms?”
He pointedly looked her up and down, and then raised an eyebrow.
“I see. You think I’m a hallucination? That’s one possibility. Perhaps I’m a ghost.”
Emilio shivered, childhood fears of the Woman in White reminding him that a beautiful young woman, freshly married and ripe with new life, would naturally seek vengeance for her own murder.
“Or maybe,” she said, visibly growing impatient with him, “the world-renowned designer of AIs who developed the return program got creative on the journey, and decided to interface the Stella Maris’s VR tech with her own AI.”
“Are you saying you’re an AI?” Emilio asked.
She tilted her head. “Would you believe me if I did?”
Emilio considered that for a moment. The ship’s VR system was powerful. They had used it to simulate landings for D.W., Sophia and George, medical emergencies for him and Anne. But he’d never heard of it being used to simulate people, in real-time. “No,” he answered honestly.
“Then it seems,” Sofia said, “that your problem isn’t so much a lack of data as a nasty case of confirmation bias.”
That startled a harsh laugh out of him.
“You need to eat something,” Sofia said, changing the subject. “You haven’t eaten since you came onboard the ship twelve hours ago.”
The laugh curdled, cracking in his throat. He sat up using his elbows. “Of course, señora, I’ll whip up a five-course meal with these,” he said viciously, holding out his hands palms up, so the useless fingers dangled down towards the floor like the sta’aka vine they were named for.
Sofia stared at his hands and took a sharp breath. A storm of some emotion swept over her face. It was gone before Emilio could identify it. The Sofia that looked back at him was the cold, controlled, unstoppable woman he recognized from every crisis they’d been through together.
“What level of mobility, functionality, and sensation do you have?” she asked.
“I can’t grasp or hold anything,” Emilio answered her, trying to match her calm, trying not to think what the words meant. “I can open and close the hand, a bit, although it is quite painful.”
She thought a moment, and then nodded decisively. “The zero-g rations are easily accessible. You can open them with your teeth, and squeeze them between your wrists or against a table. There was only a few weeks supply left, but rationing for one person — the calories will be sufficient, and the malnutrition symptoms shouldn’t be too severe by the time you get back to Earth.”
She stepped back out of the doorway. Emilio stared dumbly at the place where she had been.
“Now, Sandoz,” she snapped, and he scrambled out of bed.
Emilio had always avoided touching Sofia. It had taken exquisite care, in the close confines of the ship. He continued the same effort now as he followed her down the corridor, knowing he would fall apart if he tried to touch her, and couldn’t.
She led him to the storeroom where he managed to knock over and kick open one of the storage containers. The zero-g food tubes fell to the floor in a colorful, riotous pile. I’d better clean that mess up before D.W. sees it, Emilio found himself thinking.
“I can’t do this,” he said.
“You can,” Sofia corrected him sharply. “And you will.”
His head jerked up. Her tone reminded him of the Singer, the nobles, all the guards who treated him like a thing to be used and ordered about. “You,” he said, “are not in charge here!” His voice cracked on the last word. Emilio felt a hot flare of shame, tight in his throat and around his eyes, but he held his ground.
Sofia turned to face him, poised like a dancer, a singer, a fighter. She took one deep breath, held it, and let it out slowly. She did it again, and then once more. Emilio found his own body mirroring her hers, his chest opening, shoulders unclenching.
“I’m in no position to take anything from you, or force you to do anything,” she finally agreed. “You know me well enough to know that even if I could do those things, I never would. All I want is to help you, Emilio. So let me help. I know you are hurt, wounded in body and spirit. I know that you are grieving.” There were tears in her eyes now, Emilio could see them. “This is Jewish Law,” she continued fiercely. “You will mourn, and you will eat. Life goes on.”
Emilio nodded. He knelt down in front of the pile of food tubes like he would once have knelt to pray. There were fourteen different flavors. Emilio only had to choose one, and eat it.
It had been so long since he had any choice in what to eat. Emilio remembered the slop of the palace dungeons, the carnivorous delicacies of Supaari VaGayjur’s barbed hospitality, the horror of the forced march across the continent, fed the same meat as the soldiers who had no need of rations when the victims of each day’s massacre provided that night’s feast. It was eat or starve, and Emilio had eaten, he had choked it down, he had survived—
“Pick the sopa de pollo con mofongo,” Sofia offered quietly. “Anne loved feeding us, and she fought hard to make sure you’d have a little taste of home.”
Emilio nodded. For Anne. By the time he’d managed to painstakingly, painfully, pick up one of the tubes between his wrists, Sofia was gone.
Half-way through the journey, the ship needed a few hours to turn around before it could begin its months of deceleration. Zero-g was a torment. The anti-nausea patches that had made it tolerable on the journey out were neatly tucked away in the infirmary, behind latches that could be opened one-handed, but not none-handed. He had puked up everything in his stomach. Unable to clean up the mess, he had shoved himself, one painful-jolt of a bulkhead at a time, to the exercise room at the far side of the ship rather than die aspirating his own vomit.
“Someone’s heart is porai. Someone will die of it,” he whispered to himself in Ruanja, over and over, as he floated, curled up in a ball of pain and misery in the middle of the room.
“What’s that?” Sofia asked, her voice like a gunshot.
Emilio flinched and found himself somersaulting slowly across the room until he crashed into the far bulkhead. He groaned in pain, fought the cramps and uncurled slightly to find Sofia floating beside him. “My heart is sad because it wants what it cannot have,” he translated sluggishly, mouth full of the taste of his own vomit, eyes squinting against the pain in his head, unsure what language he was speaking. “I’m dying of sadness.”
She sniffed. “If humans could die of that, the overpopulation problem would be solved in a day. Dehydration, on the other hand? That will kill you. You need to drink some water, now that you’ve stopped heaving.”
Emilio smacked his dry lips, his tongue a thick stub in his mouth. He wanted the water, but his roiling stomach, throbbing head, and aching body was almost, almost bearable if he just held perfectly still and closed his eyes. More than anything he wanted … “Don’t go,” he said. “I need to speak to you.” His voice was a cracked husk as he bargained with the only thing he had to offer. “I’ll drink, but only if you promise to stay.”
Sofia hesitated. “All right, I’ll stay for a little while. But you have to drink some water.”
Emilio moved along the wall to the sink, unhooked the zero-g hose, and drank. He found he was desperately thirsty. The water washed away the taste in his mouth and decreased the pounding in his head. When he looked up, he found Sofia was still there. “Thank you,” he said. “I’ve been thinking …“
“Ah, there’s your problem,” she teased, and then looked concerned when he didn’t respond.
“I love you,” Emilio said seriously, his gut clenching with nerves as much as nausea. “And I’m sorry. My vows … I thought you, the life we could have had together, was the sacrifice that God needed from me. I should have chosen you. But I didn’t. I knew you and Jimmy would be happy together, and you were. He was a good husband. I just needed to, to tell you that. You can go now, to be with him,” Emilio concluded, and closed his eyes, not wanting to see her disappear for the last time.
He remembered Sofia, an eshet chayil, standing up to the soldiers who would murder the children of the village, and Jimmy standing with her. Both killed. Both martyrs. He wasn’t certain if Sofia believed in Heaven, but surely even the God who had dealt with him so savagely would not refuse them entrance?
Sofia sighed. “There was a time when I thought I was incapable of love,” she said quietly. “But, like any skill, I found that with enough practice I could excel at it. I can love more than one man, Emilio. Jimmy doesn’t need me right now. You do.”
She sounded much closer now. He kept his eyes closed, longing, aching, for a touch of that cool, tiny hand to brush his sweaty hair away from his forehead, knowing it was impossible, knowing she was gone. “I’m not a priest anymore,” he told her.
“No?” Sofia sounded surprised. “Why not?”
“All of the, the death, and the suffering. I thought at least there was some reason for it. I thought I was following God’s plan. And then …” Emilio remembered the transcendent joy he’d felt when he realized he was being presented to the Singer, the one whose radio transmissions had brought them to Rakhat. And then the pain of the claws digging into his shoulders, the prehensile feet grasping him, the sudden panic as he felt the prodding at his ass. “He fucked me,” he blurted out.
“Welcome to the human race,” Sophia said drily.
He opened his eyes and stared at her, shocked.
“You’re not some delicate flower from the suburbs, Emilio. I’ve seen La Perla, where you grew up. You worked in a Somali refugee camp. I can guarantee, whatever you lived through, some other human being has gone through worse,” she said, baring her teeth in a brittle, ugly smile. “And you survived. So act like it.”
“Sofia,” he said, “They crippled me. I can’t –”
“You can,” she interrupted. “You don’t want to be a priest anymore? Fine. Luckily you have another skillset to fall back on. You’re a gifted linguist. You don’t need your hands to translate and analyze languages. You can dictate to the computer.”
Emilio blinked. That was true, but somehow it hadn’t occurred to him.
“Unless you’re telling me you don’t know a single thing about the languages of Rakhat beyond what’s already been documented and uploaded?”
“No,” Emilio said slowly. “I learned K’San, a fiendishly difficult language, and heard enough different Ruanja dialects to make some discoveries about the underlying structure …” he trailed off with a groan, head pounding. “What’s the point?”
“What’s the point?” Sophia hissed at him furiously. “In that Somali camp, refugees would arrive dying from starvation.”
He nodded, remembering the bloated bellies of the children.
“The doctors knew how to save them. Adults, children, they knew exactly what to do, how to feed them in ways that their bodies could absorb, to bring them back from the brink. Do you know where that knowledge came from?”
Emilio shook his head.
“The Warsaw ghetto. The Jewish population was intentionally starved by the Nazis during World War II. The Jewish doctors in the ghetto knew what was happening. They were dying; the people they loved were dying. They couldn’t stop it, so they studied the ‘Hunger Disease.’ They couldn’t smuggle people out of the ghetto, but that data, that information, made it out. And it is still saving lives today.”
Saving lives? He’d done that once. Saved lives. Saved souls. Pulled promising young men out of the gutter of La Perla and set them up with scholarships. Recruited all his friends to go with him on some mad crusade to explore the universe, ad majorem Dei gloriam. He’d barely saved himself, like some pathetic consolation prize you’d rather throw away than keep as a reminder of everything you’d lost.
Still …
There were humans on Rakhat right now. Emilio hadn’t managed to tell them anything, hadn’t explained what he’d learned about the Runa and the Jana’ata. Hadn’t told them how a garden could cause a massacre. If he could save one life. Just one human, one Runa, even one Jana’ata …
“I’ll do it,” he told Sofia. “I’ll document what we learned.”
He looked up to find that she had disappeared again. “Computer, record and transcribe,” Emilio ordered, and got to work.
His hands were bleeding.
His hands were bleeding, and they wouldn’t stop. It had started yesterday, a slow seepage of blood from wounds that had closed up over a year ago. Scurvy. Rakhat foods were low in several minerals humans needed, vitamin C among them. He’d already been deficient, and as he rationed the zero-g food tubes, his body had fallen further and further behind. He was dying of starvation and malnutrition, in good company with the Somali refugees and the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto.
The hunger had faded to a constant ache, eclipsed by terrible migraine headaches. Someone was yelling at him, had been for some time now.
“Sandoz, your patient is bleeding! What is the proper treatment?” the voice demanded.
“Pressure,” Emilio muttered. “Pressure on the wounds. Tried to tell them, for Marc. They didn’t listen.”
“There is a solution,” the voice said. “There’s always a solution.” The voice was familiar. It was a woman, Emilio realized. Sofia.
“No,” he informed her. “Sometimes the patient just dies.” Like Alan. Like D.W., if the djanada hadn’t poached and eaten him. He turned his head to the side so he could see her, frantic and lovely. He was so very glad not to die alone. “I’m beyond saving.”
“I am Mendes,” she declared fiercely. “Nothing is beyond me.” She stepped closer, inspecting him. He saw the moment inspiration struck. “Turn over,” she ordered.
“What?” He wished he could touch her. Maybe when he died, he’d be a ghost, too. Maybe then they could touch. Or maybe God would keep tormenting him, even after death.
“Your hands,” she explained rapidly, “if you turn over on your belly, and lay on top of them, the bedding and your body weight might apply enough pressure to stop the bleeding.”
“I can’t,” he said, appalled. “It hurts when anything touches them. That much pressure –”
“Life is pain,” she snapped, and Emilio wondered, blearily, if she’d ever studied Buddhism. “Do it!”
Emilio clumsily, awkwardly, managed to get to his knees on the bed, mocked by memories of his body strong and whole, sliding into third base, plucking a flower from behind Askama’s ear. He tucked his hands to his belly and fell forwards.
Emilio screamed as the wave of red pain rolled over him. He started to roll to his side.
“No, stay there, don’t move,” Sofia ordered.
“Hurts,” he sobbed.
“I know,” she said. “I know it does. But it won’t be long now. Our emergency signal’s been picked up. A rescue ship is on the way. They’ll arrive in another day or two, Emilio. So stay there. Do it for me.”
Of course, he thought. God, the Singer, his father, even Sofia. He loved them, and they loved it when he suffered.
“I’m here. I won’t leave,” she promised. “I’ll stay with you until help comes. Just don’t move.”
Sofia began to sing a soft, lovely song in a language that was almost, but not quite, Spanish.
Durme, durme, querido hijico
durme sin ansia y dolor
cerra tus chicos ojicos
durme, durme con savor.
Cerra tus lindos ojicos
durme, durme con savor.
It reminded Emilio of the first and only time he had allowed himself to sing with her, his tenor a descant above her rich contralto, anchoring him and freeing him to exult in the beauty of the music and his blossoming love for this extraordinary woman. He felt no urge to sing now. He was used up, no voice, no strength, nothing left. The song gently, inexorably urged him to close his eyes and surrender to sleep.
Tears streaming down his cheeks, Emilio prayed to a God he despised. He prayed that this was the end, that beyond death was nothing but darkness, and that the last sound he would ever hear was Sofia’s lullaby.
Some endless time filled with impossible pain later, Emilio heard a loud metallic clank, followed by footsteps and human voices.
It seemed God wasn’t done punishing him yet.