The Sparrow

by Mary Doria Russell

  The eyes closed and there was a long silence before his lips formed the word, "No."

  "No. I didn’t think so." Giuliani took a deep breath and let it out. "Emilio, everything I have learned about the mission leads me to believe that you went for the greater glory of God. You believed that you and your companions were brought together by the will of God and that you arrived at your destination by the grace of God. In the beginning, everything you did was for the love of God. I have the testimony of two of your superiors who believed sincerely that something far out of the ordinary happened to you on Rakhat, that you—" He hesitated, not knowing how far to go. "Emilio, they both believed that you had, in some sense, seen the face of God—"

  Sandoz stood and turned to leave. Giuliani reached out and locked a hand over the man’s arm to keep him from running away but released it instantly, startled by the strangled scream as Sandoz pulled away violently. "Emilio, please don’t leave. I’m so sorry. Don’t go." He had seen before this look of sheer panic, the terror that sometimes swamped the man when you least expected it. This has to be part of it somehow, he thought. "Emilio, what happened to you out there? What changed everything?"

  "Don’t ask me, Vince," Sandoz said bitterly. "Ask God."

  HE KNEW IT was Edward Behr who’d come after him. The wheezing was unmistakable. He’d felt his way down the stone stairs, blinded by the tears and the lingering pain, and when he realized he’d been followed, he swore viciously and told Ed to leave him the hell alone.

  "Do you miss the asteroid?" Brother Edward asked curiously. "You were alone there."

  Emilio laughed in spite of it all. "No. I do not miss the asteroid," he said as dryly as a crying man could. He sat down where he stood, feeling boneless and bereft, and put his head in what was left of his hands. "There’s no bottom to this."

  "You’re better, you know," Edward said, sitting down. Emilio looked out at the Mediterranean, gunmetal blue and oily under a flat pewter sky. "Of course, there are good days and bad days, but you’re a lot stronger than you were a few months ago. You couldn’t have sustained an argument like that before. Physically or mentally."

  Wiping his eyes on the backs of his gloves, Emilio said angrily, "I don’t feel stronger. I feel that this will never be over. I feel that I will never be over it."

  "Well, I can only speak to the grief. You lost so much and so many out there." Edward saw rather than heard the sobbing and resisted the impulse to put a hand out; Sandoz hated being touched. "In the normal way of things, it takes about a year, when you lose someone you really care for. Before the worst of it lets go of you, I mean. I found anniversaries the hardest. Not just formal things like wedding anniversaries, you understand. I’d be going along, functioning fairly well really, and then I’d realize, today would have been ten years since we met, or six years since we moved to London, or two years since that trip to France. Used to lay me away properly, little anniversaries like that."

  "How did your wife die, Ed?" Sandoz asked. He’d gotten a grip again. Brother Edward wished he’d let himself go, but there was some overriding need to keep control, something that couldn’t be wept away. "You don’t have to tell me," Sandoz said then. "I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry."

  "Oh, I don’t mind. It helps actually, to talk about her. Keeps her alive to me in some ways." Edward leaned forward, pudgy elbows on his knees, head close to Emilio’s now. "It was a stupid thing, really. I was rooting around in the glove box, looking for a tissue to blow my nose with. Can you imagine? I had a cold! Dumb luck. Kind of thing you do a hundred times and it makes no difference and then one bright winter morning, it makes all the difference in the world. Wheel hit a hole in the tarmac and I lost control of the car. She was killed and I was barely scratched."

  "I’m sorry." There was a long silence. "Was it a good marriage?"

  "Oh, it had its ups and downs. We were actually in a rough patch when the accident happened but I think we’d have sorted things out. We weren’t either of us quitters. We’d have done all right, I think."

  "Did you blame yourself, Ed? Or did you blame God?"

  "Funny about that," Brother Edward said, musing. "There was plenty of blame to go around, but it never occurred to me to blame God. I blamed myself, of course. And the council for not keeping the roadways in good repair. And the wretched little boy in the flat upstairs who gave me the cold. And Laura, for letting me drive when I was sick."

  They listened for a while to the mournful screams of the gulls wheeling overhead. The water was too far away to hear the waves, but watching the rhythmic ebb and flow was nearly as soothing and Emilio’s headache began to ebb as well. "How did you come to this life, Ed?" he asked.

  "Well, I was fairly religious as a child. Then I was an atheist for a while. I think they call that period of spiritual development ‘adolescence,’ " Edward said dryly. "Then about two years after Laura was killed, a friend talked me into going to a Jesuit retreat. And when we got to the part about following the standard of Christ, I thought, well, why not? I’ll have a go. I was at loose ends, you see. Wasn’t exactly a Pauline conversion. No voices. And you, sir?"

  "No voices," Sandoz said, his voice normal again and a little hard. "I never heard voices and the migraines do not feel like metal bands around my head. I’m not psychotic, Ed."

  "I don’t believe anyone has suggested that you were, sir," Brother Edward said quietly. "I meant, how did you come to the priesthood?"

  It was some time before Sandoz answered, flat-voiced and unexpansive, "Seemed like a good idea at the time."

  Brother Edward thought that might be the end of the conversation, but after a few minutes Sandoz said, "You’ve been on both sides. Which is the better life?"

  "I’d never give up the years I had with Laura, but this is the right place for me now." Edward hesitated, then thought it might be as good a time as any to broach the subject. "Tell me about Miss Mendes. I’ve seen pictures. She was beautiful."

  "Beautiful and bright and very brave," Sandoz said, the sound leached from his voice. He cleared his throat and ran an arm over his eyes.

  "A man would have to be a fool not to love someone like that," Edward Behr said gently. Some priests were so hard on themselves.

  "Yes, a fool," Sandoz agreed and added, "but I didn’t think so then." It was a puzzling thing to say and Sandoz followed it with something just as unexpected. "Have you ever wondered about the story of Cain, Ed? He made his sacrifice in good faith. Why did God refuse it?"

  Sandoz stood and, without looking back, made his way down the long stairway to the sea. He was small and foreshortened, halfway across the beach to the huge stone outcropping he often retreated to, before Edward Behr realized what he had just been told.

  26

  VILLAGE OF KASHAN AND GREAT SOUTHERN FOREST:

  EIGHT WEEKS AFTER CONTACT

  ANNE AWOKE THAT night without knowing what had disturbed her. Her first thought, accompanied by a spurt of adrenaline that snapped her eyes open in the dark, was that D.W. was sick again or that someone else had fallen prey to Runa’s Revenge. She listened, alert for any telltale sound, but heard only George snoring softly in heavy, dreamless sleep. Knowing that she wouldn’t relax until she’d checked on everyone, Anne sighed and thought, I have turned into a semi-mom with a very odd bunch of children. So she pulled on one of Jimmy’s giant T-shirts and worked her way out of the tent.

  She went first to D.W. and, reassured, moved on to Jimmy’s sleeping shape in another corner. She looked, with a pang, at the empty beds of Marc and Sofia and wished she were a praying person so their absence would not fill her with such helpless anxiety. Then she saw a third bed empty but before her heart could lurch, she began to hear the faint clicking of a keyboard. Picking her way along a stone path only a goat could appreciate, she ducked into Aycha’s place next door and saw her favorite semi-son kneeling like a scholarly geisha at a low table, typing rapidly.

  "Emilio!" she cried softly. "What the hell are you—"

&nbs
p; He shook his head without looking up and continued to type. She sank onto a cushion next to him and listened to the night noises. It smelled like rain to her but the stones were still dry. Well, she thought, noticing the radio monitor propped next to Emilio, I’m not the only one sweating it out.

  Marc and Sofia had reported that they were going to try a landing. There had been a sickening silence ever since. Jimmy thought this might be due to the severity of the storm on the other side of the mountains, but George said that would only have disrupted signals, not silenced them altogether. No one said anything aloud about a crash.

  Emilio typed awhile longer and then closed out the file, satisfied that he’d written enough to be able to reconstruct the logic the next morning. "I’m sorry, Anne. I had four languages going in my head at once and if we had added one more—" His fingers flew apart and he made a sound like an explosion.

  "How do you keep them all straight?" she asked.

  He yawned and rubbed his face. "I don’t always. It’s funny. If I understand an entire conversation perfectly in Arabic or Amharic or Ruanja or whatever, with no missing words or confusing ideas, I sometimes remember it taking place in Spanish. And I’m losing Polish and Inupiaq."

  "Those were the ones in Alaska, between Chuuk and the Sudan, right?"

  He nodded and flopped back on a cushion, digging fingers into his eyes. "I may not have done well with them because I was so resentful about having to learn those two. I never got used to the cold and the dark, and I felt that my education was being squandered. Nothing made sense to me." He took his hands away from his face and looked at her sideways. "It’s not easy to be obedient if you suspect your superiors are asses."

  Anne snorted. Not a very saintly remark, she thought. "At least the Sudan was warm."

  "Not warm. Hot. Even for me, hot. And by the time I got to Africa, I was getting better at learning languages in the field. And then—well, professional irritation seemed pretty trivial." He sat up and stared out into the darkness. "It was awful, Anne. No time for anything except feeding people. Trying to keep the babies alive." He shook it off. "I am still amazed that I picked up three languages that year. It just happened. I stopped thinking of myself as a linguist."

  "What did you think of yourself as?"

  "A priest," he said simply. "That was when I really started to believe what was said at ordination: Tu es sacerdos in aeternum."

  A priest in perpetuity, Anne thought. Always and forever. She studied the protean face: Spaniard, Taino, linguist, priest, son, beloved, friend, saint. "And now?" she asked softly. "What are you now, Emilio?"

  "Sleepy." He grabbed her neck affectionately and pulled her close to pass his lips over her hair, loosened in sleep, silver-gilt in the camplight.

  Anne motioned at the monitor. "Heard anything?"

  "I’d have mentioned it, Anne. In a loud and ringing voice."

  "D.W. will never forgive himself if anything’s happened to those two."

  "They’ll be back."

  "What makes you so certain, hotshot?"

  He spoke from his heart and from Deuteronomy. " ‘You have seen with your own eyes what the Lord your God has done.’ "

  "I’ve seen what human beings can do—"

  "You’ve seen what," Emilio conceded, "but not why! That’s where God is, Anne. In the why of it—in the meaning." He looked at Anne and understood the skepticism and the doubt. There had been so much joy, such a flowering within him … "All right," he said, "try this: the poetry is in the why."

  "And if Sofia and Marc are lying in a heap of wreckage right now?" Anne demanded. "Where would God’s poetry be then? Where was the poetry in Alan’s death, Emilio?"

  "God knows," he said, and there was in his tone both an admission of defeat and a statement of faith.

  "See, that’s where it falls apart for me!" Anne cried. "What sticks in my throat is that God gets the credit but never the blame. I just can’t swallow that kind of theological candy. Either God’s in charge or He’s not. What did you do when the babies died, Emilio?"

  "I cried," he admitted. "I think sometimes that God needs us to cry His tears." There was a long silence. "And I tried to understand."

  "And now? Do you understand?" There was, almost, a note of pleading in her voice. If he told her he did, she’d have believed him. Anne wished that someone could explain this to her and if anyone she knew could understand such things, it might be Emilio Sandoz. "Can you find any poetry in babies dying now?"

  "No," he said at last. Then he added, "Not yet. Some poetry is tragic. It is perhaps harder to appreciate."

  Anne stood then, tired, for it was the middle of the night, and was about to go back to bed when she glanced back and saw a familiar look on his face. "What?" she demanded. "What!"

  "Nothing." He shrugged, knowing his singular congregation very well. "Only: if this is all that is holding you back from faith, perhaps you should just go ahead and blame God whenever you think it’s appropriate."

  A slow smile started across Anne’s face and she sat back down on the cushion next to him, looking speculative.

  "What?" it was his turn to ask. She was grinning wickedly now. "What are you thinking, Anne?"

  "Oh, I’m just considering a few sentiments I might express to God," she said sweetly, and then clamped both hands over her mouth to keep from laughing out loud. "Oh, Emilio, my darling child," she said behind her fingers in a fey and crafty voice. "I do believe you’ve hit upon a theology I can live with! I have your permission for this, do I, Father? You are willing to be implicated as an accessory?"

  "How rude do you plan to get?" Emilio started to laugh warily but his face was now wholly alive. "I’m only a priest! Maybe we should check with a bishop or something—"

  "Chicken shit!" she cried. "Don’t back down on me now!" And getting up on her knees, poking him in the chest repeatedly, she began to deliver herself of a series of increasingly impolite, entirely profane and very vigorously expressed opinions on the suffering and untimely death of innocents, on the fate of Cleveland in the World Series of 2018, and on the persistence of evil and of Republicans from Texas in a universe ruled by a deity who had the nerve to claim omnipotence and justice, all of which Emilio earnestly translated, with wondrously pompous and Latinate phrases, into standard groveling platitudes. Pretty soon they were clinging to each other and laughing like loons, and the whole thing got louder and rowdier until George Edwards, roused by the noise, was jolted fully awake by Anne screaming, "Emilio, stop it! Old women have weak bladders!"

  "Sandoz," George yelled, "what the hell are you doing with my wife?"

  "We’re discussing theology, dear," Anne sang breathlessly, snorting in great gulps of air.

  "Oh, for Christ’s sake!"

  "We’re still working on theodicy!" Emilio yelled. "We haven’t gotten to divine incarnation yet." Which laid them both out again.

  "Kill ’em, George," D.W. suggested loudly. "Justifiable homicide."

  "Will all of you please shut the fuck up?" Jimmy hollered, which for some reason made Anne and Emilio laugh even harder.

  "A New York echo!" Anne cried. "Helloo-o-o!"

  "Shut the fuck u-u-u-u-p!" Emilio supplied, doubling over.

  "Oh, well, what the hell. Maybe I’ll give religion another try," Anne said softly, wiping her eyes as the cleansing laughter faded and they caught their breath. "You think God can handle the kind of crap that I’m likely to dish out?"

  Emilio lay back on a cushion, exhausted and happy. "Anne," he said, putting his hands behind his head, "I think God will be glad to have you back."

  THE LAST THING Marc Robichaux thought before the crash was, Merde, the Father Superior will be furious.

  It had looked reasonable to him. The runway was still quite distinct and the vegetation looked soft and leafy. He believed that the root systems might actually be helpful in stabilizing the soil so that the wheels of the plane would not sink. Sofia had landed on many forms of terrain during her training and seemed confiden
t that she could manage this. So they decided to go down.

  Neither Marc nor Sofia had counted on vines. They must have been woody, like grapevines, or the plants would have pulled apart when the wheels touched down. Instead they grabbed viciously at the fragile little plane’s undercarriage and the sudden stop had thrown him and Sofia brutally into their harnesses. Sitting in the front seat, Marc had a terrifying view of the ground coming up to meet him, but he blacked out before the Ultra-Light tore apart, the safety belts ripping the suddenly stationary framework to pieces as their bodies hurtled forward.

  He had no idea how long he’d lain unconscious. It was daylight when they crashed. Both moons were up now. For a while, he kept still, concentrating on each limb and on the pain in his chest, trying to judge the seriousness of his injuries. His legs were numb and, heart drumming, he was horrified, thinking he’d broken his back. But when he moved his head cautiously, he saw that Sofia had been thrown onto him in the wreck and that the numbness was simply due to impeded circulation.

  There was blood all over her face but she was still breathing. Marc slowly slid out from under her, trying not to jar her body, all Anne’s apocalyptic descriptions of compound fractures coming back to him. He was able to turn and cradle her head as he pulled his legs clear and, in his concern for her, he forgot to be worried about his own body. By the time he got to his knees, he realized that he couldn’t be badly hurt himself or the pain would have been worse.

  He pulled his shirt up to see why his chest felt so awful and saw in the moonlight the exact outline of the safety harness, drawn in burst skin and ugly bruises; he almost passed out again, but put his head down for a few minutes and was better. Then he looked to Sofia and began to clear away hollow poles and guy wires and polymer film, all that was recognizable from the Ultra-Light. When she was free of the wreckage, Marc got up and made his way to the lander, unlocking the cargo bay door and flicking on the battery-powered lamp inside. When his eyes adjusted, he found the first-aid kit, a portable camplight and a set of insulated emergency blankets, which he carried back to Sofia.