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He had no practice at this kind of thing; subtlety and indirection were not indoor sports in Chicago.
They had raised a son with a generous soul, with an impulse to heal hurts and lighten loads, who could not stand idly while men like Emilio Sandoz poured out their lives and energy for others.
“He’s got two-hundred-pound ideas about getting things done, and a hundred and thirty pounds to do it with. He’s gonna make himself sick.”
gasped Sandoz, who was on his way to Cleveland to serve as intellectual carrion for an AI vulture, ad majorem Dei gloriam. “It’s the punchline to a three-year joke.”
of its languages and loved some of its people. He had also discovered the outermost limit of faith and, in doing so, had located the exact boundary of despair. It was at that moment that he learned, truly, to fear God.
People who’d argued that interstellar travel was financially impractical had reckoned without the immense commercial possibilities of having a story to tell to an audience of over eight billion consumers.
“I begin with songs. They provide a sort of skeleton grammar for me to flesh out. Songs of longing for future tense, songs of regret for past tense, songs of love for the present.”
Have you noticed that lullabies nearly always use a lot of command form?”
“And we, who are vowed to chastity and obedience,” he said very softly, holding Emilio’s eyes with his own, “have made decisions, alone and unsupported, that have given scandal and ended in tragedy. Alone, we have made horrifying mistakes that would never have occurred in a community.”
He had expected the shock of recognition, the look that comes when the truth is spoken.
Watching him with one eye, she wondered if men ever figured out that they were more appealing when they were pursuing their own work than when they were pursuing a woman.
“Emilio, sometimes I can’t tell when you’re joking. Do you mean a mission or do you mean a mission? Are we talking science or religion?”
‘God does not require us to succeed. He only requires us to try,’
“Deus vult, mes amis,” Marc Robichaux called cheerfully from the galley. “God likes it that way.”
“Maybe because so few of us would be able to give up something so fundamental for something so abstract, we protect ourselves from the nobility of a priest’s vows by jeering at him when he can’t live up to them, always and forever.”
Who could speak of such things? Not Emilio Sandoz who, for all his facility with many languages, remained tongue-tied and inarticulate about the center of his soul.
Most men were simple. They were looking for security, or power, or a feeling of usefulness or of certainty or competence. A cause to fight for, a problem to solve, a place to fit in. There were many possibilities but once you grasped what a man was looking for, you had the beginnings of understanding.
“So what, in the name of Jesus, is he?” It was a question he’d pondered, one way or another, off and on, for sixty years. He didn’t expect an answer, but he got one. “A soul,” said Edward Behr, “looking for God.”
Let’s just go, Anne thought as Marc droned on. Fuck this shit. Let’s just do it. Pack some sandwiches, get in the goddam lander, and go down and throw open the doors and just live or die.
From a culture gone mad with documentation, publicity, broadcast, narrowcast and pointcast, where every act of public and private life seemed to be done for an audience, the voyage of the Stella Maris had begun in privacy, and its mission would be carried out in obscurity.
ALL OF THEM, in their own ways, prepared that night both for death and for a kind of resurrection.
And long past the point when the others wanted to drop exhausted to the ground, Anne’s voice or Marc’s could be heard calling softly but urgently, “You’ve got to see this! Come quick before it moves!” until they were all sated with beauty and novelty and astonishment.
Most often, the sounds were full of mystery, as was the God that some of them worshiped.
“My life has a certain amusing symmetry, if viewed with sufficient detachment.”
Deus qui incepit, ipse perficiet.” God who has begun this will bring it to perfection,
his body’s fragility mercilessly exposed.
Given that, Giuliani could see the tragedy: to fall so far from such a state of grace, to be on fire with God and let it go to ashes.
Time for this particular old priest, for Vince Giuliani, to bring the experience and knowledge of a lifetime to bear on one human problem, to call upon any wisdom he had garnered in his years to help one human soul,
