The Sparrow

by Mary Doria Russell

  "About six o’clock," Jimmy supplied. "Okay, I’ll be there. And Anne?"

  "Yeah, I know, bring food. We’ll hit Señor Donut’s on the way."

  "No. Well, that, too. But—thanks. That’s what I wanted to say. For last night."

  "Hey, if news like this is the thanks I get for giving you a hug, you are entirely welcome, darling boy. We’ll see you in a couple of hours. And Jimmy? Congratulations. This is fantastic."

  IT WAS A clear chilly morning, the light still pale, when the Edwardses and their passengers pulled in. Jimmy’s little Ford was the only car in the dish parking lot besides the guard’s. "Private tour, Mr. Edwards?" he asked as they signed in.

  "No, there’s something Jimmy Quinn wanted to show us and we figured it was better to come by when the place isn’t busy," George said. Anne, smiling innocently, handed the guard a couple of donuts on the way by.

  Awake all night, Jimmy was bleary-eyed but too strung up on his nerves to notice he was tired. As they squeezed into his little cubicle, he grabbed the donut Anne held out to him and ate it in two bites, setting up the playback while he chewed.

  It was vocal, mainly. There was a percussive underlayment and possibly wind instruments as well, but it was hard to tell about that—there was still a lot of noise, although Jimmy had already filtered some out. And it was unquestionably alien. The timbre of the voices, the harmonics were simply different, in some way that Jimmy couldn’t describe in words. "I can display sound signatures that would show the differences between their voices and ours graphically," he told them, "the way you can see that a violin sounds different from a trumpet. I don’t know how to say it."

  "I know it’s not scientific, but you can just tell," Anne agreed, shrugging. "It’s like you could tell Aretha Franklin’s voice from anyone else’s, from a single note. It’s just different."

  At first, they simply listened to the fragment of music over and over, each time groaning as the signal fell off to static just as the music began to build to something wonderful. Then, after the third hearing, Anne said, "Okay. What can we tell about them? They sing in groups, and there is a lead singer. So they have a social organization. Can we assume they breathe air because their music can be heard like this?"

  "We can assume they have some kind of atmosphere that propagates sound waves," George said, "but not necessarily anything we could breathe."

  "So they’ve got something like lungs and mouths and they can control expelled air, or whatever it is they breathe," Anne listed.

  "And they can hear, or there’d be no point to singing, right?" said Jimmy.

  "The language doesn’t sound tonal to me," Emilio said, "but it’s difficult to tell when people are singing. There is a sentence structure. There are consonants and vowels and something in the throat, like glottal stops." It didn’t occur to him to wonder if they had throats. "Jimmy, may I hear it again, please?"

  Jimmy replayed it. Sitting at the edge of the group, almost in the hallway just beyond Jimmy’s little space, Sofia watched Sandoz, seeing in action the process she had abstracted while working for the Jesuits in Cleveland. He was already beginning to mouth a little of it, picking up phrases sung by the chorus, trying out phonemes. Without a word, she handed him her notebook and stylus. "I could learn this, I think," he said to no one in particular, distracted, half-convinced already. He began making notes. "Jimmy, may I?" Jimmy rolled his chair out of the way and let Emilio take the console.

  "Jim, have you changed the frequency much?" George asked. "Is this what it really sounds like, or is it more like insects chirping or whales singing in real time?"

  "No, as near as I can figure, this is what it sounds like. Of course, it would depend on the density of their atmosphere," Jimmy told him. He thought for a while. "Well. They’ve got radio. That implies vacuum tubes at least, right?"

  "No," George disagreed. "Vacuum tubes were actually kind of a fluke. You could just as easily go straight to solid state. But they would have to understand electricity." There was a short pause, everyone chewing on the ideas, the only sound that of the music as Emilio slowed it down and repeated sections, correcting his notes. "And chemistry, for sure," George continued. "They’d have to know something about metals and nonmetals, conductors. Microphones need carbon or some kind of variable resistor. Batteries—zinc and lead."

  "A theory of wave propagation," Jimmy said. "Radio implies a lot."

  "Mass communications," Anne suggested. "And a segment of the population with the leisure to sit around thinking up wave theories. So: probably a stratified society with economic divisions."

  "Metallurgy," Jimmy said. "You wouldn’t start with radio, right? You’d work metal for other stuff first. Jewelry, weapons, metal tools."

  "All possible," George said. He laughed and shook his head, still stunned. "Well, chalk one up for the Principle of Mediocrity, boys and girls." Sofia raised her brows in question, so George explained. "That’s the idea that Earth is nothing special, DNA is a pretty easy molecule to make and life is fairly abundant in the universe."

  "My goodness," Anne sighed, "what a fall. We thought we were the center of the universe and now look! Just another bunch of sentients. Hohum." Her face changed and she leaned over to hug Emilio with wicked glee. "Whom do you suppose God loves best, Father? Ooh, there’s a nasty little idea. Sentient rivalries! Think of the theology, Emilio!"

  Emilio, who had played the music again and again, catching more of it each time, finding a pattern or two, suddenly sat very still. But before he could say anything, Anne spoke up again. "Jim, you said this was Alpha Centauri. What’s the system like?"

  "Pretty complicated. Three suns. A yellow one that’s a lot like Sol and two others, red and orange. People have thought for years that the system was a good candidate for having planets. But it isn’t easy to sort things out when you’ve got three stars to contend with, so I guess it never seemed worth the effort. Jeez, it’s going to be a hot prospect now."

  The discussion went on for some time, with George, Anne and Jimmy extrapolating, deducing and arguing. Emilio, thoughtful, went back to the music again, playing it through softly once more, but then he turned the playback off.

  Sofia alone had neither comment on the music itself nor any speculation about the singers, but when the talk finally slowed to a halt, she asked, "Mr. Quinn, how did you decide to run the signal through an audio output?"

  In the excitement, Jimmy had forgotten the embarrassment of the previous evening, and now he was feeling too good to care. "Well, there was all the music last night," he said evenly. "And when I was in school, I had a part-time job cleaning up old recordings from a Soviet archive for digitizing. The signal just looked like music to me. So I decided to give it a try."

  "It would be fair to say that you used your intuition."

  "I guess so. It was a hunch."

  "Would another astronomer have known what a musical signal looks like and come to the same conclusion?"

  "Hard to say. Probably. Sure—somebody would have thought of it eventually. "

  "Would it ever have occurred to you, do you think, to suggest to me that the AI system wash all signals through an audio output to screen for transmissions such as this?"

  "Only to eliminate them as ETs," Jimmy admitted. "See, we always expected a string of primes, some kind of mathematical sequence. I think I’d have suggested that anything that looked like music was definitely not ET. Remember? Yesterday?" He yawned enormously and stood to stretch, which required Anne to duck out of his way and George to move into a corner. "Day before yesterday, now. I sort of recognized that the signal was music then, so I assumed it was local. If I’d been sure it was ET, I might never have considered music. I don’t know why but I always thought it was either music or ET, but not both."

  "Yes. Odd, isn’t it. That would have been my assumption as well," she said without emotion, but she was twisting the metal bracelet around and around. Triple time. She’d be perhaps thirty-seven or thirty-eight. Not forever. Hubr
is, to have made the wager. "Mr. Quinn, your job is secure. My system would not have picked this up. I will recommend that the project be scaled back. I can automate the request-and-return segments of the work. And coordination of scheduling. That could be finished in one or two months."

  "We could go, couldn’t we … if we wanted to?" Emilio said in the silence that followed her remarks. "I mean, there’d be a way to get there, if we decided to try."

  The others looked at him blankly, still thinking about Sofia’s unenviable position.

  "We could use a meteor—no, an asteroid, yes?" he corrected himself, looking directly at Sofia. "It wouldn’t be any worse than the little wooden ships people used to cross the Atlantic in the 1500s."

  At first, only Sofia saw what he was driving at. "Yes," she said, glad to be distracted by him for once. "The asteroids aren’t bad, really. The miners’ quarters can be rather comfortable—"

  "Yeah, sure," George said. "You’ve already got the mass-drivers grafted on and the lifepod in place. Get a big enough asteroid and you could just keep feeding slag into the engines. We do it now on a small scale to bring the rocks into Earth orbit from the asteroid belt. I thought years ago that you could go as far as you wanted, if you got a big enough rock. There just wasn’t any reason to leave the solar system."

  "Until now," Emilio said.

  "Until now," George agreed.

  "Did I miss something?" Anne said. "Asteroids?"

  But George was starting to laugh and Emilio looked positively beatific. "Sofia," George said, "tell Anne about that contract you had—"

  "—with Ohbayashi," Sofia finished for him. She looked at Anne and then the others, and gave a small astonished laugh before saying, "It was just before working with Dr. Sandoz in Cleveland. I did an expert system for Ohbayashi’s asteroid mining division. They specified an AI program that could take into account the cost of remote assaying and the costs of capturing an asteroid, mining and refining the minerals in space, versus the projected market values of the product at delivery, Earthside. Very little intuition involved, except projecting future metals prices," she said wryly. "You’re right, Dr. Sandoz. A partially mined asteroid could be used as a vehicle."

  Emilio, who had been leaning forward and watching her carefully as she spoke, clapped once and sat back in his chair, smiling broadly.

  "But it would take four years, wouldn’t it?" Anne objected.

  "Four years isn’t so bad," Emilio said.

  "Whoa," Jimmy said, looking at Sofia and Sandoz. "Okay, first off, it’s four point three and it’s light years, not plain solar years. Even a third of a light year is a nontrivial distance. And anyway, that’s the time it takes for light and radio waves to travel the distance, not a ship. It would take a ship a lot longer … but even so …" he said, starting to think about it now.

  George gestured for Sofia’s notebook and stylus. Emilio saved his file and handed it over. "Okay, so do the problem," George said, blanking the screen so he could sketch the idea out on the tablet. "At thirty-two feet per second per second, you’d have one G of gravity. Say you accelerate for half the trip and then rotate the rock a hundred and eighty degrees and decelerate for the second half …"

  For a while there was no sound except the muttering of numbers and the tapping of a keyboard, Jimmy beginning the calculations on-line as George continued them by hand. George finished his estimate first, to Jimmy’s irritation. "You’d need about seventeen years to get there, not four." Emilio looked both crestfallen and startled by the difference. "Hell," George told him, "Anne was in graduate school longer than that!" Anne snorted but George went on, "What if you kept a normal sleeping and waking schedule and bumped the engines up for two Gs while the crew’s flat in bed? That would cut the time down and get you closer to light speed, so you’d get some help from relativity. Make the trip seem faster to the people onboard."

  Jimmy continued to work on his own line of calculation. "No, wait. It might seem to the crew more like six or seven months."

  "Six or seven months!" Emilio exclaimed.

  "Jeez," Jimmy said, staring at the numbers. "You could get real close to light speed in less than a year or so, even at one G, constant acceleration. Like maybe ninety-three percent. Anybody want to take on Einstein? I wonder if you’d run out of rock … How big would the asteroid have to be?" he asked himself and went back to the calculations.

  "Wait a minute. I don’t understand about people sleeping," Anne said. "Wouldn’t you have to have somebody awake all the time to steer?"

  "Nah—navigation would be mostly automated, at least until you got near the system," George told her. "You’d just launch yourself in the right direction—"

  "And pray," said Emilio, laughing a little crazily.

  They fell quiet, talked out for the moment. "What do we do now?" Jimmy asked. It was almost eight o’clock, and he was beginning to think about what kind of trouble he could be in for not calling Masao Yanoguchi first.

  It was Emilio Sandoz, face solemn and eyes alight, who answered him. "Start planning the mission," he said.

  There was silence and then Anne laughed uncertainly. "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?"

  "Yes," he said simply, with a kind of hilarious gravity that kept the rest of them off balance. "Sofia, George, Jimmy. I was only speculating before—but this is a serious possibility, yes? Fitting out an asteroid for such a trip?"

  "Yes," Sofia confirmed. "As Mr. Edwards said, the idea has been around for some time."

  "It would cost hell’s own money," George pointed out.

  "No, I don’t think so," Sofia said. "I know of bankrupted wildcatters who’d be pleased to sell off hulks that didn’t pan out, with the engines in place. It wouldn’t be cheap but neither would it be prohibitive, for some kind of corporation …" Her voice trailed off and she looked at Sandoz, as everyone else was. For some reason, he found what she had just said very funny.

  None of them could have known what he was thinking, how much this reminded him of that evening in Sudan when he read the Provincial’s order sending him to John Carroll. Where he met Sofia. And Anne and George, who found Jimmy. Who brought them all here, now. He ran his hands through the dark, straight hair that had fallen into his eyes and saw them all staring at him. They think I’ve lost my mind, he thought.

  "I wasn’t listening closely enough before," he said, back in control. "Tell me again how this could be done."

  In the next hour, George and Jimmy and Sofia outlined the ideas for him: how wildcatters selected and obtained suitable asteroids and outfitted them with life support, how the engines broke down silicates to use as fuel to move the asteroids to Earth-orbit refineries, how twenty-ton loads of refined metals were aimed, like the old Gemini capsules, at recovery sites in the ocean off Japan’s coast. How you could scale the system up for long-range travel. Trained as a linguist and a priest, Emilio had a hard time understanding the Einsteinian physics that predicted that the transit time elapsed on Earth would be around seventeen years, while the effect of traveling near light speed would make it seem closer to six months for the crew onboard the asteroid.

  "Nobody understands this the first time they hear about it," George assured him. "And most people who think about it at all just accept that the math works out this way. But let’s say you go to Alpha Centauri and come straight back. When you get home, the people you left would be thirty-four years older but you’d only have aged about a year, because time slows down when you’re near light speed."

  Jimmy explained how they could plot the course, and Emilio found that even less intelligible. And then there was the problem of making landfall. There were a lot of loose ends, George and Jimmy and Sofia acknowledged. Even so, it could be done, they thought.

  Anne listened as closely as Emilio, but she was skeptical to the point of dismissing the whole business as silly. "Okay, granted," she said at last, "I personally have a har
d time understanding how maglev trains stay up. But look, there are half a million things that will go wrong. You’ll use up the whole asteroid before you get there—the fuel will run out. The asteroid will crack apart if you mine it out wrong. You’ll hit some random piece of interstellar shit and get smashed to atoms. You’ll fall into one of the suns. You’ll crash trying to land on the planet. You won’t be able to breathe once you get there. There’ll be nothing you can eat. The singers will eat you! Emilio, quit it. I’m serious."

  "I know," he laughed. "So am I."

  She looked around the room for allies and found none. "Am I the only one who sees how nuts this is?"

  "’God does not require us to succeed. He only requires us to try,’" Emilio quoted quietly. He was sitting very still, in the farthest corner of the cubicle, elbows on his knees, hands clasped loosely, looking up at her with merry eyes.

  "Oh, sure. Wave Mother Teresa in my face," Anne said, getting angry. "This is stupid. You guys are crazy."

  "No," George insisted. "It can be done, at least in theory."

  "Anne, we have, in this room, much of the expertise needed to make a go of this, or at least to attempt it," Emilio said. "Jimmy, could you navigate such an asteroid, using the same skills you use to locate astronomical targets?"

  "Not this morning, but I could start working on it now and by the time everything’s ready to go, I could be ready. There are very good astronomical programs that we can use. You don’t just aim at where Alpha Centauri is now. You have to aim at where the system will be in however many years it’ll take your craft to get there. But that’s just celestial mechanics. You just have to decide to work the problem out. And you’d have to find the planet once you got to the star system. That might be harder, really."

  Emilio turned to Sofia. "If you had freedom of choice, would you find it objectionable to work again for the Society of Jesus? Perhaps as a general contractor, to acquire and organize the material elements needed to put such a mission together? You have contacts in the mining industry, yes?"