The Sparrow

by Mary Doria Russell

  Chaypas stood. Leaving her meal and Supaari behind, she walked outside and then a short way uphill to a vantage point that gave her a view of Galatna Palace, with its twisted marble columns, its finely wrought and silvered gates, its silken awnings, its glazed tile walls gilded and sparkling in the reflections from the paired three-sided fountains sending droplets of precious scented oils like fire sparks into the sunlight.

  "In flood, the heart longs for drought," Chaypas said when she returned, and set the simplest of the flasks before him. Then she held out both her hands to him and said, with a warmth that touched him to his soul, "Sipaj, Supaari. May you have children!"

  HLAVIN KITHERI WAS a poet, and it had always seemed especially outrageous to him that his title, Reshtar, had such a grand significant sound to it.

  Reshtar. When spoken, it emerged in two pieces, slowly, with dignity. It could not be said quickly or dismissively. It had a kind of majesty that the position itself had never matched. It meant, simply, spare or extra. For like the merchant Supaari VaGayjur, Hlavin Kitheri was a third-born son.

  The two men had other things in common. They had been born in the same season, some thirty years earlier. As thirds, they existed in a state of statutory sterility—neither was allowed to marry or have children, legally. Both of them had made more of their lives than anyone could have expected, given their birth positions. And yet, since their honor derived not from inheritance but from accomplishment, they both existed largely outside the bounds of their society.

  There the similarities ended. In contrast to Supaari’s decidedly middling ancestry, Hlavin Kitheri was the scion of Rakhat’s oldest and most noble lineage, and he had once been third in line to succeed as the paramount of Inbrokar. In a reshtar’s case, being a third was not a family scandal but the unfortunate consequence of a poorly timed aristocratic birth. Traditionally, noblewomen were bred frequently because their sons died in high numbers. Supaari’s parents had no such justification for their lapse. And while men like Supaari often wondered why they’d been born at all, a reshtar’s purpose was explicit: it was to exist, as a spare, ready to step into an elder brother’s place if he were killed or incapacitated before an heir was born. Reshtari were trained therefore to versatility, prepared equally for war or for governance; either or neither could be their fate.

  In the old days, the probability of succession by a reshtar was high. Now, in the enduring peace of the Triple Alliance, most aristocratic thirds simply lived out their lives in pointlessness: softened by servants, dulled by ease, blunted by sterile pleasure.

  There was, however, another path open to reshtari, called, appropriately, the Third Way: the way of scholarship. History and literature, chemistry and physics and genetics, both pure and applied, formal architecture and design, poetry and music, all these were the products of aristocratic thirds. Barred—or liberated—from dynasty, the reshtari of Rakhat were freed—or driven—to make sense of their lives in other ways. If a reshtar was careful not to attract a dangerous faction while in exile and did not arouse a routinely paranoid brother’s suspicions, he could sometimes produce a sort of intellectual posterity by making some lasting and significant contribution to science or the arts.

  Thus, the princely thirds of Rakhat were the volatile elements, the free radicals of Jana’ata high culture, just as bourgeois thirds like Supaari VaGayjur formed the striving, bustling commercial element of Jana’ata society. The crushing restriction of their lives was like the pressure that turns coal to diamond. Most were lost to it, ground to powder; some emerged, brilliant and of great value.

  The Reshtar of Galatna Palace, Hlavin Kitheri, was among those for whom constraint had been transforming. He had redeemed his life and given meaning to it in an unprecedented way. Lacking a future, he became a connoisseur of the ephemeral. A singularity, he devoted himself to an appreciation of the unique. He made himself alive to the moment, embracing its transience and, paradoxically, immortalizing it in song. His days were a form of artistry, arising from an aesthetic of evanescence. He brought beauty to vapidity, weight to hollowness, eloquence to emptiness. Hlavin Kitheri’s life was a triumph of art over fate.

  His earliest poetry was stunning in its originality. In a culture wreathed by perfumes and incense since ancient times, Hlavin Kitheri turned his attention in the beginning to the most reviled of odors. Faced with the ugly, reeking, clamorous city of his exile, he composed songs that captured and exalted the metallic vapors of the marble quarries, the stinking alkaline bite of the red swamps, the smoky sulfurs and strange fermentations and mephitic phantasms emanating from the mines and factories, the seething mixtures of oily and saline compounds transpiring from the dockyards of Gayjur. Scent: capricious and enduring, vanguard of taste, instrument of vigilance, essence of intimacy and recollection— scent was the spirit of the world, Hlavin Kitheri sang. His finest work was a haunting poetry of storms, songs that spoke of the slackening and rarefication and elasticity of such scents, transformed by lightning and rain as the wind danced. These songs were so compelling that his concerts began to be broadcast, the first nonmilitary use of radio in his culture’s history.

  The acclaim did not dilute the cogence of his poetry. He accepted it as validation and, strengthened, turned his mind and his art to a fearless examination of a reshtar’s living death. He survived his own unblinking scrutiny. The poetry that resulted, written when Kitheri was only twenty-six, had what many thought would be his greatest influence on his culture.

  Robbed of any possibility of reproduction, empty of any future, sex for a reshtar was reduced to its most irremediable physicality, no more satisfying to the soul than a sneeze or the voiding of a bladder. In youth, Hlavin Kitheri had fallen into the trap that snared so many others of his kind, compensating for utter vacuity with numerically staggering indulgence, hoping to make up in sheer repetition of experience what was missing in depth and meaning. In maturity, he came to despise the harem of sterile courtesans and cross-species partners his brothers provided; Hlavin saw it for what it was: a sop thrown to him to dissipate envy of his elders’ fecundity.

  And so he turned his aesthetic sensibilities to the experience of orgasm and found the courage to sing of that evanescent moment which, for the fertile, brings the weight of the past to bear on the future, which holds all moments in its embrace, which links ancestry and posterity in the chain of being from which he was barred and exiled. With his poetry, he severed that moment from the stream of genetic history, carried it beyond the body’s drive to reproduce and the lineal need for continuity and, focusing the mind and soul on it, discovered in climax a reservoir of piercing erotic beauty no one else in the history of his kind had suspected.

  In a culture walled in by tradition and heavy with stability, Hlavin Kitheri had created a new subtlety, a delicacy, a new appreciation of raw experience. What had once been merely obnoxious or ignored was now theater and song: scent’s veiled and hidden opera. What had once been dynastic duty or meaningless carnality was resolved and purified, raised to an aesthetic voluptuousness that had never before existed on Rakhat. And, scandalously, the Reshtar of Galatna lured even those who could have bred productively to artistic lives of momentary and sterile but ravishing brilliance, for he had changed the world of those who heard his songs for all time. There arose a generation of poets, the children of his soul, and their songs—sometimes choral, sometimes singular, often the call-and-response of the oldest chants—propagated through space on unseen waves and reached a world they could not imagine, and changed lives there as well.

  It was to this man, Hlavin Kitheri, the Reshtar of Galatna Palace, that Supaari VaGayjur now sent, in a strikingly simple crystal flask, seven small kernels of extraordinary fragrance.

  Opening the flask, breaking its vacuum, Kitheri was met by a plume of sweetly camphoric enzyme by-products giving off notes of basil and tarragon, by chocolate aromatics, sugar carbonyl and pyrazine compounds carrying the suggestion of vanilla, by hints of nutmeg and celery seed and cu
min in the products of dry distillation created during roasting. And, overlaying all, the tenuous odor of volatile short-chain carbons, the saline memorial of an alien ocean: sweat from the fingers of Emilio Sandoz.

  A poet with no words to describe organic beauties whose origin he could not possibly suspect, Hlavin Kitheri knew only that he must know more. And, because of this, lives were changed again.

  25

  NAPLES:

  JULY 2060

  STANDING IN THE hallway, John Candotti and Edward Behr could hear half of the conversation taking place inside the Father General’s office quite clearly. It was not necessary to eavesdrop. It was only necessary not to be deaf.

  "None of it was published? You are telling me that not one article we sent back was submitted—"

  "Maybe I shouldn’t have told him," John whispered, rubbing the bump on his broken nose.

  "He was bound to find out eventually," said Brother Edward placidly. Anger, he believed, was healthier than depression. "You did the right thing. He’s handling it fairly well, in my opinion."

  Why, Sandoz had asked John at lunch, why was he being asked about things that were in the records that were sent back? Why didn’t they just read the daily reports and scientific papers? John told him that only the Father General had access to the reports. "So, what about all the published papers?" Sandoz asked and when he got the answer, he left the table, stone-faced and seething, and headed directly for the Father General’s office.

  Candotti and Behr turned at the sound of Johannes Voelker’s steps. He joined them at the door and listened with frank interest as Sandoz said sarcastically, "Oh, fine! So the astronomy and the botany got through the sieve. I’m pleased to hear it, but that leaves ninety percent of what we did—" Another pause. "Vince, people died for the data!"

  Voelker, hearing this, raised an eyebrow. Probably pisses him off to hear Sandoz call Giuliani by his first name, John thought. Voelker insisted on imbuing the office of the Father General with as much imperial glory as he could, the better to play Grand Vizier, in John’s admittedly biased opinion.

  "For the data?" Voelker asked with dry surprise. "Not for Christ?"

  "What possible justification is there—" There was a pause and they could hear the Father General’s quiet voice but couldn’t make out the words without actually laying an ear against the door, an extremity no one was willing to go to, with witnesses.

  Felipe Reyes arrived, brows up inquiringly, and came to a sudden halt as Sandoz shouted furiously, "No way. There is no way you can make me responsible for this. Of all the twisted logic and half-baked— No, you let me finish! I don’t give a damn what you think of me. There is no justification for suppressing the scientific work we did. That was absolutely first-rate!"

  "Your man sounds upset, Candotti," Voelker said quietly, smiling.

  "He’s a scientist and his work was buried, Voelker. He’s got a right to be upset," John said just as softly with as gentle a smile. "How’s the secretary biz these days? Scheduled any first-rate appointments lately?"

  It would have gotten nastier had Felipe Reyes not stopped them with a look. It is almost hormonal with these two, Reyes thought. Put Voelker and Candotti in a room together and you could practically see the metaphysical antlers growing out of their heads.

  They realized then that the shouting had stopped and for a long while there was no indication of what was going on inside the office. Finally, Voelker glanced at the time on his notebook and reached passed John to rap on the door.

  To John’s vast satisfaction, it was the Father General who yelled, "Not now, dammit."

  INSIDE THE OFFICE, Emilio Sandoz was staring at Vincenzo Giuliani in utter disbelief.

  "So you see, it was, in retrospect, a wise decision," Giuliani was saying, hands spread placatingly. "If we had published everything as the data arrived, it would have been even worse when it came out later."

  Sandoz stood there, rigid, almost unable to take it in. He wanted to believe that it made no difference, but it did. It made everything different, and he tried to remember every conversation they’d had, almost faint with the fear that he’d remember saying something, unknowing, that might have wounded her.

  Giuliani pulled out a chair for him. "Sit down, Emilio. Obviously, this is a shock." A scholar himself, Giuliani was not at all happy about the suppression of scientific work, but there were larger issues here, things Sandoz could not be told. He was not proud of himself for bringing Mendes into this, but it was a useful diversion and might unearth some relevant insight if he could get Sandoz to open up. "You didn’t know?"

  Emilio shook his head, still dazed. "She said something once. Just that she preferred bond-work for a broker to prostitution. I thought she was speaking hypothetically. I had no idea … She must have been a child," he whispered, horrified. How did she survive being used like that? With all the resources of an adult, it had destroyed him.

  She had saved his life, her AI navigation system piloting the Stella Maris back to the solar system nearly a year after her own death on Rakhat. He was a broken man, alone, incapable even when whole of coping with the navigational tasks. Sofia’s programs had done it all: efficient, logical and competent as their creator. Sometimes he would call up the initial screen that put the AI program in motion and stare at the message she had left in Hebrew. "Live," it said, "and remember." It was more than he could stand to think of, and he forced himself away from it, fighting the descent into migraine. She’s dead and I may as well be, he thought. The work doesn’t deserve to be entombed as well.

  "It makes no difference," he insisted then, and Giuliani realized the diversion hadn’t worked. "I want our work published. Moral indignation over the authors’ sex lives is irrelevant. And Anne’s stuff and D.W.’s! I want all of it published. We sent back something like two hundred papers in three years. It’s all that’s left of what we were, Vince—"

  "All right, all right. Calm down. We can address that issue later. There is more at stake here than you realize. No, just be quiet," Giuliani said peremptorily when Sandoz opened his mouth. "We are talking about solid science, not ripe peaches. The data will not deteriorate. We’ve already delayed publication for over twenty years for reasons that have seemed good and sufficient to three successive generals, Emilio." He was not above applying leverage. "The sooner these hearings are over and we are clear about what happened on Rakhat and why, the sooner the Society will be able to make a decision about the wisdom of publication. And I promise you will be consulted."

  "Consulted!" Sandoz cried. "Look: I want that work published and if—"

  "Father Sandoz," the Father General of the Society of Jesus reminded him, hands folded on the table, "you do not own that data."

  There was a moment of stunned silence before Sandoz slumped in his seat and turned away, eyes closed, mouth hard, effectively checkmated. A minute or so later, one gloved hand went involuntarily to the side of his head, pressing against the temple. Giuliani got up and went to the lavatory for a glass of water and the bottle of Prograine he now kept handy. "One or two?" he asked when he got back. One tablet didn’t quite do the job; two flattened Sandoz for hours.

  "One, damn you."

  Giuliani placed the tablet in the palm of the glove Sandoz held out abruptly and watched as the man tossed the pill into his mouth and took the glass between his wrists. He could manage some things quite well with Candotti’s fingerless gloves on. The gloves reminded Giuliani of those once worn by cyclists; the athletic allusion made Sandoz seem less impaired without the braces, if you didn’t watch carefully. New braces were being fabricated.

  Giuliani took the glass back to the lavatory and when he returned, Sandoz was resting his head on the heels of his hands, elbows on the table. Hearing Giuliani’s steps, he said almost soundlessly, "Turn off the lights."

  Giuliani did so and then went to the windows to pull the heavy outer curtains closed as well. It was another gray day, but even dull light seemed to bother Emilio when he had a heada
che. "Would you like to lie down?" he asked.

  "No. Shit. Give me some time."

  Giuliani walked to his desk. Rather than open the door and tell the others himself, he routed a message to the front door, asking the porter to relay it to the men waiting outside his office: the afternoon’s meeting was canceled. Brother Edward was to wait in the hall for Father Sandoz.

  To pass the time, Giuliani did some of what he still thought of as paperwork, reviewing several letters before signing off on transmission. In the quiet that now settled over the office, he could hear the elderly gardener, Father Crosby, whistling tunelessly outside the windows as he deadheaded the annuals and pinched back chrysanthemums. It was perhaps twenty minutes later when Emilio’s head came up and he sat back gingerly in his chair, the heel of one hand still pressing hard against the side of his forehead. Giuliani closed the file he was working on and went back to the table, sitting in the chair across from Emilio.

  Sandoz’s eyes remained closed but, hearing the chair move, he said almost inaudibly, "I don’t have to stay here."

  "No. You don’t," Giuliani agreed neutrally.

  "I want that stuff published. I could write the papers again."

  "Yes. You could do that."

  "There must be someone who’d pay me for them. John says people will pay to interview me. I could make a living outside."

  "I’m sure you could."

  Sandoz, squinting into what seemed to him painfully bright light, looked directly at Giuliani. "So give me one good reason why I should put up with this crap, Vince. Why should I stay?"

  "Why did you go?" Giuliani asked simply.

  Sandoz looked blank, not understanding.

  "Why did you go to Rakhat, Emilio?" Giuliani asked again gently. "Was it just a scientific expedition? Did you go just because you were a linguist and it sounded like an interesting project? Were you just another academic grubbing for publications? Did your friends really die for the data?"