Declare

er, handsome and charming. Thirty-seven years old at the time, probably quite a—well. St. John seems to have been troubled by the fear that Christianity might be… real, the true story. Specifically he was afraid of Roman Catholicism, with all its… nasty old relics and sacraments and devotions, the whole distasteful Irish and Mediterranean air of it. He apparently thought that if he could persuade a so-called bride of Christ to forsake her vows—seduce her, I mean—”
    Hale nodded impatiently. “I didn’t suppose he tried to force wealth on her.”
    “Right. Well, he thought this would disprove the nun’s whole faith, you see, expose it as a morbid but harmless hypocrisy—like citing Popes who have had illegitimate children. I do wonder how Catholics justify—”
    “Infallible, not impeccable,” snapped Hale; and he wondered why he was bothering to defend his forsaken old faith at all. “The Russians want both of St. John’s sons up on the mountain—working together this time. Why?”
    “Because St. John’s dalliance with your mother was a very costly mistake for him—and for the Russians. Young Kim was supposed to be a human emissary to the djinn, taking the long-dormant job over from the Arab royalty—the son of King Saud relinquished an ancestral rafiq diamond to Kim, in 1919, when Kim was seven.”
    “Rafiq?” said Hale, puzzled. “Do you mean in the Bedu sense? An introducer or guarantor?”
    “Right, a member of the other tribe, who’ll vouch for you. Kim was supposed to be this person; and even now the diamond serves its rafiq purpose. Kim was given the djinn sacrament when he was an infant, deliberately, by his father. St. John received it by accident—he was born in Ceylon, and on that day a streak of light like a comet shot south over the Bay of Bengal and lit up several Ceylonese villages—but after that St. John was baptized, which blunted the non-human grace of it. St. John made sure that Kim was never baptized.”
    “Uh,” said Hale, “djinn sacrament?”
    “The splitting?” Hartsik raised his eyebrows, then shook his head in disappointment. “Huh. You remember the story in First Kings, about the two women who came before King Solomon? They had a live baby and a dead baby, and each woman claimed the live one was hers. According to the Bible, Solomon called for a sword and offered to cut the baby in half.”
    “Yes. It always seemed implausible to me—that the lying woman would agree to that, would say, ‘Yes, cut him in half.’ ”
    “Well, sure—because actually Solomon didn’t call for a ‘sword’ to settle the argument. The old copyists put in the word sword because it seemed to make more sense than the word that was in the oldest manuscripts—it began with the Hebrew letters cheth and resh , as sword does, but it was a neologism—paleologism, I suppose—a combination of blasphemy and destruction and potter’s wheel , which are all spelled similarly.”
    A potter’s wheel, thought Hale—a changing form, rotating. “A djinn,” he said. “Solomon called for a djinn.”
    “Right. Apparently Solomon really was able to confine the djinn, abbreviate and summarize their tumultuous thoughts down to something he could pop into a jug and then seal with”—he pointed at the lead balls on the desk—“a threaded cluster of those. Threaded, see? So that they’d have to be rotated, assimilated, for the djinn to get out; and assimilating those would kill the thing. In any case, if you expose a tabula rasa infant to the attention of a djinn, there’s a bond formed—neither side can help it, the child has no defensive mental walls yet, and the djinn is no more able to not look into the child’s eyes than water can not run downhill. The djinn almost adopts the child, recognizes it as family. Djinn apparently perceive humans as autistic—”
    Hale suppressed a wince, remembering having shared that perception in the Ahora Gorge.
    “—but they can tell that a baby is new —it’s not the child’s fault that it can’t express anything. Now this procedure, this sacrament, is fine for inter-species relations, but it’s hard on the child—the shock of it polarizes the child’s mind, as if you were to freeze a glass of gin and tonic—you’d wind up with liquid gin and solid tonic, right? The child becomes two children; that is, the child is able to be in two places at once, literally.” He shrugged. “It’s not so implausible that the lying woman in