The Sparrow

by Mary Doria Russell

  "Moons," George said softly, putting his arm around Anne and pulling her close. "Moons!"

  "Forget the first one. There’s our planet," Marc said, with complete confidence. "A good-sized moon keeps a planet’s precession steady enough for stable weather patterns to develop. If there’s open water, moons make tides, and tides breed life." Anne looked at him, brows up, the question unasked. The naturalist smiled. "Because that’s the way God likes it, Madame."

  And then everyone was talking at once, congratulating Jimmy and George and Marc, discussing how long it would take to get to the planet with the moons, excitement swamping the funk they’d been in as the sterile weeks had dragged by. The buzz of conversation halted when D.W. looked around for Emilio and then called out sharply, "Sit down ’fore you fall down, son," and pushed past the little crowd around the display, making his way through the common room benches and tables. He wasn’t quite quick enough to catch Emilio before he hit the floor.

  There was, at first, a burst of laughter because Emilio looked so comical, going down like a puppet with the strings cut, but in slow motion because of the low gravity. Alan Pace thought impatiently that he’d only done it as a joke and was irritated as usual at the man’s habitual frivolity.

  Anne was right behind Yarbrough. "It’s okay," she said matter-of-factly as the laughter died and turned to consternation. "He’s just fainted." She could have lifted Emilio off the floor herself; at .25 G, he only weighed about thirty pounds. But intellectual equality aside, Anne Edwards retained a certain deference toward male sensibilities, so she looked up at D.W., intending to ask him to carry Emilio into his cabin for her. She was astonished to see that Yarbrough was trembling. Then it clicked and many things became clearer to her.

  "Jimmy, would you lug him into his room for me, please?" she called out in a slightly bored voice, to minimize the drama. D.W. opened the door to Emilio’s room and stepped out of the way as Jimmy went by, a giant Raggedy Andy carrying Emilio, who looked like a rag doll himself, limp in the big man’s arms. Anne gave the situation about three seconds’ consideration and then gave D.W. a firm and reassuring hug, brief but forthright, before squeezing past Jimmy into the little cabin. Jim left and she closed the door behind him.

  Emilio was already coming out of it. Anne could hear D.W. just outside the door, in full East Texas cry, making everyone laugh and steering the conversation back to the planet. The voices receded, and Anne looked back to Emilio, who was now sitting up, feet over the side of the bed, eyes wide and blinking.

  "What happened?" he asked.

  "You passed out. Must have been the surprise about the planet. The autonomic nervous system will do that to you. You can feel your arms and legs get cold and then everything turns white."

  He nodded. "That never happened to me before. What a strange sensation." He shook his head to clear it and his eyes widened again.

  "Whoa. Just sit there awhile. Takes a little time for your blood pressure to get settled." She was leaning against the bulkhead, arms crossed, watching him with a clinical eye but thinking about what she’d just seen. He laughed a little and then sat still, letting his equilibrium reassert itself.

  "I am surprised," Anne said judiciously, "that you were surprised."

  "About the planet?"

  "Yes. I mean, this whole thing was your idea. I thought you had some kind of direct line to God about this." She wasn’t as sarcastic as she might have been. In fact, she said this with a straight face, almost, with only a hint of insincerity to protect herself.

  He was silent for a long time, starting twice to say something and then stopping again. Finally, he said, "Anne, may I tell you something? In confidence?" She slid down the wall, as controlled in her drop to the floor as Emilio had been boneless, and sat cross-legged, looking up at him. "I’ve never told anybody this, Anne, but—" He stopped again and laughed nervously. "This must be some kind of record, yes? A man who can be completely inarticulate in fourteen languages."

  "You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to."

  "No. I need to talk to someone about this. Not someone. You. I need to talk to you about this. Anne, I’m just getting somewhere that everyone thinks I’ve been all along."

  There was another silence, as he tried to decide how much to tell her, where to start. She waited, watching him, pleased to see the color come back and then touched to realize that he was blushing. Self-disclosure is almost like sex, she thought. It isn’t easy to bare your soul.

  "You have to understand, Anne, I’m not one of those guys who decided to be a priest when he was seven. I started out—well, you’ve seen La Perla, right? But you can’t imagine what it’s like to grow up there." There was another pause, as the memories crowded in. "Anyway, the Jesuits, D.W. especially, they showed me a different kind of life. I’m not saying that I became a priest because I was grateful. Okay, I admit, that was probably part of it. But I wanted to be like them. Like D.W."

  "Not a shabby ambition," she said, eyes steady.

  He took a deep breath. "No. It was a good ambition. And it wasn’t all hero worship. I wanted this life and I have no regrets. But—Anne, do you remember when I said that it’s difficult to tell from the way people behave whether or not they believe in God?" Emilio watched her carefully, looking for shock or disappointment, but she didn’t seem horrified or even terribly surprised. "You’d make a good priest, you know."

  "Except for that celibacy shit," she laughed. "And the popes keep saying I have too many X chromosomes. Don’t change the subject."

  "Right. Right." He hesitated again, but finally the words began to come for him. "I was like the physicists you talked about. I was like a physicist who believes in quarks intellectually, but doesn’t feel quarks. I could make all the Thomist arguments about God and discuss Spinoza and say all the right things. But I didn’t feel God. It was not a thing of the heart for me. I could defend the idea of God but it was all from hearsay evidence, a lawyer would call it. None of it had any emotional truth for me. Not like it does for guys like Marc." He hugged himself and leaned forward over his knees. "I mean, there was a place in me that wanted God to be in it, but it was empty. So, I thought, Well, not yet. Maybe someday. And to be honest, I sort of looked down on that kind of thing. You know how there are people who’ll tell you that Jesus is a close personal friend of theirs, yes?" His voice was very low and he made a face that said, Who are they kidding? "I always thought, Sure, right, and you probably see Elvis at the laundromat."

  "Hey! What’s wrong with that!" Anne cried, offended. "I have personally seen Keith Richards at a grocery store in Cleveland Heights."

  He laughed and moved back onto the bed so he could sit against the wall. "Okay. So, one day, I get this call at four in the morning. And then we’re all sitting in Jimmy’s office, listening to this incredible music and I say, I wonder if we could go there? And George and Jimmy and Sofia say, Sure, no problem, just do the math. And you thought we were crazy? Well, so did I, Anne. I mean, at first, it all was sort of a game! I was just toying with the idea of it’s being God’s will, really." Anne remembered the playfulness. It had seemed so strange at the time. "I kept expecting the game to stop, and everyone would have a good laugh at my expense, and I’d go back to trying to get Ortega to give me that house for the preschool and arguing with Richie Gonzales and the council about the sewers in the east end and all the rest of it, right? But it just kept going. The Father General and the asteroid and the plane and all these people working on this crazy idea. I kept waiting for someone to say, Sandoz, you idiot, what a lot of trouble for nothing! But everything kept happening."

  "Like D.W. said, a whole hell of a lot of turtles showing up on a whole hell of a lot of fenceposts."

  "Yes! So I’m lying in bed, night after night, and I can’t sleep anymore, and you know me—I used to fall asleep in the middle of a sentence. All night long, I would be thinking, What is happening here? And part of me would say, God is trying to tell you something, you dumb bastard. And a
nother part of me would say, God doesn’t talk to punks from Puerto Rico, you know?"

  "What makes you say that? I ask as one semicommitted agnostic to another, you understand."

  "Well, okay, I take it back about Puerto Rico, but it’s not fair for God to play favorites. What makes me so special that God would bother to tell me anything, right?"

  He ran out of steam for a while, and Anne let him stare and gather his thoughts. Then he looked at her and smiled and climbed down off the bed to sit next to her on the floor, their shoulders touching, knees drawn up. The difference in their ages seemed less important than their near equality of size. Anne had a flashing memory of sitting like this with her best friend when they were both thirteen, telling secrets, figuring things out.

  "So. Things kept happening, just like God was really there, making it all happen. And I heard myself saying Deus vult, like Marc, but it still seemed like some kind of huge joke. And then one night, I just let myself consider the possibility that this is what it seems to be. That something extraordinary is happening. That God has something in mind for me. Besides sewer lines, I mean … And a lot of the time, even now, I think I must be a lunatic and this whole thing is crazy. But, sometimes—Anne, there are times when I can let myself believe, and when I do," he said, voice dropping to a whisper and his hands, resting on his knees, opening, as though to reach for something, "it’s amazing. Inside me, everything makes sense, everything I’ve done, everything that ever happened to me—it was all leading up to this, to where we are right now. But, Anne, it’s frightening and I don’t know why …"

  She waited to see if he had more but when he fell silent, she decided to take a shot in the dark. "You know what’s the most terrifying thing about admitting that you’re in love?" she asked him. "You are just naked. You put yourself in harm’s way and you lay down all your defenses. No clothes, no weapons. Nowhere to hide. Completely vulnerable. The only thing that makes it tolerable is to believe the other person loves you back and that you can trust him not to hurt you."

  He looked at her, astounded. "Yes. Exactly. That’s how it feels, when I let myself believe. Like I am falling in love and like I am naked before God. And it is terrifying, as you say. But it has started to feel like I am being rude and ungrateful, do you understand? To keep on doubting. That God loves me. Personally." He snorted, half in disbelief and half in astonishment, and put his hands over his mouth for a moment and then pulled them away. "Does that sound arrogant? Or just crazy? To think that God loves me."

  "Sounds perfectly reasonable to me," Anne said, shrugging and smiling. "You’re very easy to love." And saying it, she was pleased to hear how natural it sounded, how unburdened.

  He reared away to look at her and his eyes softened, doubts set aside for a truth he was sure of. "Madre de mi corazón," he said quietly.

  "Hijo de mi alma," she replied, as softly and as certain. The moment passed and they were back together, staring at their knees, companionable again. Then the spell was broken, and he laughed. "If we stay in here much longer, we shall give scandal."

  "Do you think so?" she asked, eyes wide. "How flattering!"

  Emilio got to his feet and offered Anne a hand up. She stood easily in the low gravity but held on to his hand a moment longer than necessary, and they embraced and laughed again because it was hard to decide whose arms should go over whose shoulders. Then Anne opened the door and called out wearily, "Okay, somebody get this man a sandwich."

  Jimmy yelled, "Sandoz, you jerk! When’s the last time you ate? Do I have to think of everything?" And Sofia said, "Maybe we should play for raisins next time," but she and Jimmy already had a meal ready for him. And things went back to as normal as they could get, inside an asteroid, above Alpha Centauri, looking for signs from God.

  "MY DADDY HAD a Buick once, drove like this," D. W. Yarbrough muttered at one point. "Sumbitch handled like a damn pig in a wallow."

  Nobody dared laugh. During the past two weeks, D. W. Yarbrough and Sofia Mendes had worked nonstop, dropping the Stella Maris closer and closer to the planet. The process was dangerous and frustrating, and D.W. was sometimes startlingly short with people.

  Everyone was irritable, and after D.W. finally managed to wrestle the ship into an acceptable orbit, they went into freefall and things got even worse. For over three years, they’d worked like mules to be here, within sight of the planet they had come to investigate. In a small place together for over eight months, they’d gotten along remarkably well, but there were accumulated tensions and anxieties and a grinding restlessness that did not surface in shouting matches very often but was evident in sudden silences as people swallowed retorts.

  Of all of them, D.W. was most likely to snarl, dressing people down for minor mistakes or lapses in attention to detail or ill-timed remarks. Emilio, no worse than any of the others, nevertheless caught hell most often. When Yarbrough laid down the law to reestablish the regular order, Emilio threw out a little joke about the disordo irregularis. D.W. stared at Sandoz until his eyes dropped and then told him, "If you can’t be serious, be quiet." Which shut Emilio up for days. Another time, after the Father Superior left everyone feeling ruffled by issuing a string of abrupt commands at breakfast, ending with a particularly sharp decree aimed at Sandoz, Emilio tried to take the sting out of it by asking, "You want fries with that order?" Yarbrough just about took his head off with a barrage of very rapid, very colloquial, heavily accented Spanish no one else could follow, but whose meaning they could guess at by the effect.

  Anne might have approached D.W. to see if she could provide a little perspective on the general topic of overcompensation but within an hour, she herself was on the receiving end of a lecture, having forgotten to cover a salt shaker, whose contents had then drifted out of the holes over several days. D.W. opened the storage cabinet and a miniature snow squall resulted. There was an unpleasant exchange and George got involved, and it took both Sofia and Jimmy’s intervention to calm everyone down.

  Eventually the adjustment to zero G was over, nausea had abated all round, the ordo was back in place, and everyone was once again working with reasonable efficiency. They did a full survey to begin with, launching several satellites to encircle the planet, collecting atmospheric and geographic data. At this distance, the patterns of ocean and landmass were clear. The overall impression was of greens and blues running to purple, broken by areas of red and brown and yellow, frosted with the white of clouds and very small ice caps. It wasn’t Earth but it was beautiful, and it had a powerful pull on their emotions.

  The biggest surprise was the sudden reappearance of the radio signals. Whenever they moved between the moons and the planet, the ship received bursts of incredibly strong radio waves. "They’re aiming at the moons," Jimmy realized as he sketched the system and worked out what was happening physically. There was no indication of any indigenous life or colonies on the moons. "Why would they be aiming radio at the moons?"

  "No ionosphere!" George announced triumphantly one afternoon, floating into the common room from his cabin, where he’d been going over the atmospheric data. It came to him out of the blue, when he wasn’t thinking about the radio problem. "They’re using the moons to bounce the signals off."

  "That’s it!" Jimmy yelled from the bridge. He shot into the common room, hooked a hand around a support pole like a gigantic orangutan, and friction-spiraled to a halt. "That’s why we only got the signals every fifteen and twenty-seven days back home!"

  "You lost me with that one," Anne called from the galley, where she and Sofia were getting lunch ready.

  "Without an ionosphere to contain radio waves, you could only use line-of-sight signals, like microwave towers at home," George explained. "If you wanted to broadcast over a wider region, you could aim a really strong signal at the moons, and it would bounce back in a cone that would cover a lot of the planet’s surface."

  "So what we were picking up at home was the scatter around the moons, every time they moved into line with Earth," Ji
mmy said, crowing with happiness at clearing up that little mystery.

  "What’s an ionosphere?" Anne asked. Jimmy gaped at her. "Sorry. I’ve heard the word but I don’t know what it is, really. I’m a doctor, Jim, not an astronomer!" George broke up but Jimmy, too young for the first Star Trek, didn’t get it.

  "Okay: solar radiation knocks electrons off atmospheric molecules at the top of the atmosphere, right? That makes them ions," Jimmy began.

  "Listen up," D.W. cut in, as he pushed himself into the common room from the bridge. "Be ready to give a summary of everything you’ve learned tomorrow at nine. I got decisions to make."

  Then he was gone, disappearing into his cabin, leaving people shaking their heads and muttering. Anne watched him go and rotated toward Sofia. "What do you think? PMS?"

  "It’s a form of affection," Sofia smiled. "The squadron commander is back on duty. He doesn’t want his people killed by enthusiasm and cabin fever, but no one wants to come this far and then go back without visiting the surface, especially not D.W. There’s a great deal of pressure on him."

  "I see your point," Anne said, impressed by the analysis, which she considered precisely one brick shy of the full load, and wondered if Sofia was unaware or very discreet. Discreet, Anne decided. Sofia didn’t miss much and she knew D.W. very well. "Which way is he leaning? Do you know?"

  "He keeps his own counsel. From what I’ve gathered, we could survive on the surface. Maybe D.W. will go down alone or with one or two others and leave the rest on the ship."

  Anne closed her eyes, sagging as much as one could while weightless. "Oh, Sofia, I think I would literally rather die than stay inside here one minute longer than I have to."

  Sofia was surprised to see the woman look every day of her age for once, and for a dreadful moment she thought that Anne would burst into tears. Sofia reeled her in for the kind quick embrace she had received in the hundreds from the older woman. It was not an impulsive act, for hardly anything Sofia Mendes did was impulsive. But now, at last, she’d soaked up enough affection to give some back.