The Sparrow

by Mary Doria Russell

  Engineers don’t go to confession when they screw up; they find a fix. So Anne watched George deal with his own fear and guilt by starting an engineer’s rosary: a series of calculations involving the lander’s weight, drag, lift, thrust, the prevailing winds, their altitude above sea level, the rotational boost they’d get from their latitude on Rakhat, the distance to the Stella Maris at its closest approach to their present position. She knew this was his way of apologizing to the others, of begging pardon for his sin.

  Jimmy stayed with Sofia until he was certain she was asleep but joined Anne and George a few minutes later. Emilio brought them all coffee and sat quietly at a small remove, opaque and withdrawn, while Jimmy and George considered the variables. How much weight could they save if they stripped every nonessential piece of equipment out of the lander? Used a single pilot? Which one? D.W. was far more experienced but weighed almost twice as much as Sofia. What if they moved the Stella Maris into a more favorable orbit? How hard would that be using remote ground control? Could the lander engine be reprogrammed to squeeze more power out of the remaining fuel?

  Several hours later, the outcome was as plain as it was predictable: Murphy’s Law held on Rakhat. Their best estimates fell into a zone of ambiguity. If the winds were right, if one of the lower estimates of the lander’s stripped weight was correct, if Sofia piloted the plane, they’d still have to maneuver the Stella Maris into a lower orbit.

  "We can talk to D.W. about that when he wakes up, but I don’t think it’s a good idea." Jimmy sat back, leaning his head against the wall and stretching his long legs in front of him. "The asteroid was a pig to drive. It wouldn’t take much error to sink it into the gravity well."

  "And then Rakhat gets to play the dinosaur game?" Anne crossed her arms over her drawn-up knees, where she rested her chin. "No good. Not worth the risk."

  "Dinosaur game?" Emilio asked, breaking his silence for the first time.

  "One of the best guesses about the reason for the extinction of the dinosaurs was that a good-sized asteroid smashed into Earth," Anne told him. "Changed the climate, wiped out big hunks of the food chain."

  Emilio held up a hand. "Of course. I knew that. I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening closely enough. So if the Stella Maris were to hit Rakhat, it would wreck the planet."

  "No. It’s not as bad as that," George said. "We scrubbed off a lot of speed getting into orbit. If the ship came down in the ocean, it wouldn’t do that much damage. Tidal wave maybe, but it wouldn’t destroy the whole ecosystem."

  "I don’t think it would be ethical to risk even a tidal wave," Emilio said softly. "Seven of us. Whole populations on the coast."

  "I’m not sure we can find a new orbit that would do us much good anyhow, if we need an ocean splashdown," said Jimmy. "Might be possible, but it would restrict us to a really narrow orbital band."

  "Well, boys and girls, I am really sorry but it’s about eight to one odds we’re stuck." George wiped his hands over his face and shrugged as he filed his calculations to show D.W. later. "We can radio home, but it will take better than four years for them to get the news, another two or three years to configure a ship, and then seventeen more to get here." The younger people might see home again. That was something.

  "Still, there’s some room to maneuver, and things could be a lot worse," Jimmy said matter-of-factly. He pulled up the supply lists they’d assembled for George and D.W. to use on the last trip from the asteroid. "We figured on a year’s worth of stuff for the food depot and brought down all the equipment we thought would be of most use. Marc had seeds on his list. We can survive on the native foods, but if we can start a garden that doesn’t get washed away in this endless rain, we’ll have our own plants as well. I think we’ll do okay."

  George suddenly sat up straight. "You know, there’s a chance we could manufacture more fuel for the lander. We’re pretty sure the Singers know chemistry, right?" he said, looking around. "Maybe after we make contact with them, we can work something out."

  It was the first notion that offered any real hope. Jimmy and Anne stared at each other and then at George, who looked like a man who’d just gotten a reprieve. He was already back at work, looking for files on the fuel components.

  "How long will the Wolverton tube operate without maintenance?" Anne asked George.

  He looked up. "It’s set up to be self-sustaining, but we’ll lose maybe twenty percent of the plants a year, rough estimate. Marc will know better. There’s only seven of us now, so there’ll be a smaller oxygen demand. If we can make enough fuel to get back up there even once, then Marc or I could go up and optimize things before the rest of you come aboard. And we might be able to use Rakhati plants as replacements, now that I think of it." He felt better at that. They weren’t necessarily doomed.

  "And in the meantime," Jimmy said, with modest cheer, "we can still use the Stella Maris as a resource. We’ve got the onboard computer systems and radio relays." He looked at Sandoz, who’d said virtually nothing during the discussion.

  Emilio was preoccupied, but he’d followed most of the talk if not the calculations it was based on. He shivered suddenly but then seemed to come fully into focus. "It seems to me that the mission is intact. We came here to learn and we can still send back data." The equivocal face smiled but the eyes, for once, did not. "As you say, everything we need and everyone we care for is right here."

  "The twigs aren’t that bad," Anne said resolutely. "I could get to like the twigs."

  "And," George said, "I just might pull a rabbit out of this hat after all."

  SOFIA MENDES AWOKE some twelve hours later, thoroughly disoriented. She had been dreaming, for some reason, of Puerto Rico, which she recognized more from the feel of the soft air than from any geographic clue. There was music in the dream and she asked, "Won’t someone get in trouble for singing?" But Alan Pace replied, "Not if you bring flowers," which made no sense to her, even inside the dream.

  When she opened her eyes, it took several moments to figure out where she was, and then the misery from every joint and muscle reprised for her the story of the two days just past. She lay still, aching worse than she had the morning before in the forest, and began to work out why she’d dreamt of Puerto Rico. Someone was simmering a sofrito and she could detect the earthy smell of beans. The music was real, too, on remote from the Stella Maris library. The Runa were gone, she remembered, so they could play music again with impunity. She sat up with infinite care and was startled when Jimmy Quinn, sitting nearby, announced: "Sleeping Beauty has awakened!"

  D.W. was the first to duck into the apartment and stare at her, open-mouthed. "I never thought I’d see the day but, Mendes, you look like fifteen miles of bad road. How do you feel?"

  "Worse," she said. "How’s Marc?"

  "Bloodied but unbowed," Marc called from the terrace. "And too stiff to come inside and say good morning to you, mademoiselle."

  "God, child, I admire your bladder control." Anne came in. "Allow me to escort you to the nearest riverside. Can you walk or would you like me to call the Quinn taxi service to give you a lift?"

  Sofia tentatively swung her legs over the side of her low camp bed and waited a few moments for her head to stop spinning. Jimmy stood and leaned down to offer an arm, which she used to pry herself partially out of her sitting position. "I feel like I’ve been in a plane wreck," she said, astonished by how entirely pulverized it was possible to feel without actually having broken anything. She took a few bent-over steps and moaned and laughed, but regretted it because her chest hurt so much. "This is awful."

  George came in. A veteran of many spectacular lost arguments with steadfastly immovable objects like planets, he watched her hobble knowingly and informed her, "The third day is always the worst."

  She stopped moving, bent as a crone, and regarded him narrowly. "Does today count as the second or the third day?"

  He laughed sympathetically. "You’ll find out tomorrow."

  She rolled her eyes, the only body
part that wasn’t sore, and moved slowly out to the terrace using Jimmy’s arm as a crutch. Marc’s eyes met hers, but he was otherwise completely immobile, his face too bruised even to smile comfortably. "Robichaux, you look dreadful," she said, truly horrified.

  "Thank you. So do you."

  "George has a new business scheme," Emilio said, straight-faced. "We’re going to build cathedrals. We’ve been able to obtain employment for you and Marc as gargoyles." He held up the coffee pot. "Look, Mendes: reason to live."

  "I’m not certain that’s sufficient motivation." She looked doubtfully at the long trail down to the river.

  Jimmy, whose blue gaze had rested on her unwaveringly all this time, saw the glance. To have held her in his arms once in twenty-four hours was enough for him. Friendship, he told himself, was all he hoped for. "I carried Marc down," he said casually.

  "This is true, Mendes," Emilio assured her, his face smiling but his eyes unreadable.

  She’d have shrugged but, in view of how she felt standing still, shrugging seemed rash. "All right. You’ve got a customer, Mr. Quinn." And he lifted her up with no more effort than if she were a child.

  OVER THE NEXT few days, they simply rested, each privately engaged in adjusting to the situation, learning to moderate the swings of hope and despond, trying to balance habitual optimism with sensible resignation. Beyond this, they needed to gather themselves for the next phase of their lives on Rakhat. The immensely difficult work they’d done during the past few years and relentless change had taken a toll; they were all closer to the edge of mental and emotional exhaustion than anyone except Emilio had realized. The others had all left their native lands and their native tongues at one time or another and had all coped with cultures other than their own, but they’d worked within the worldwide international culture of science and technology. Only Emilio had been dropped repeatedly into completely unfamiliar ways of life almost without resources beyond his own resilience and intelligence, and he knew how draining it was.

  So he was glad of the respite and felt it a gift and thanked God for it. Marc and Sofia slept a great deal. D.W. did as well. Anne was concerned that Yarbrough had picked up some kind of gut parasite. There were cyclic bouts of diarrhea, a general weakness and a troubling lack of appetite. She now had access to broad-spectrum parasitotropics from the lander pharmacy and had begun dosing him, hoping something that killed worms at home would kill whatever was sapping his strength here. She watched the others for symptoms, but so far only D.W. seemed affected.

  George was subdued. His anodyne was to work on representing the lander fuel formula graphically, in anticipation of finding someone who might be willing and able to help them once they made contact with the city people. He was feeling worse than he let on, but George had Anne, whose eyes were often on him although she did not fuss over him. George, Emilio thought, would be all right.

  Jimmy, of all of them, seemed the most serene, and it was plain why this should be so. He was unobtrusively attentive, alert to Sofia’s needs as she recovered but to Marc’s as well, Emilio noted. There was an appealing off-handedness and good humor to his courtship, for that was clearly what it was becoming. What Jimmy had said and done since Sofia’s return was so well controlled, so generous and full of respect, that Emilio was sure it would be recognized and valued. And the love that underpinned it all, he thought, might one day be returned.

  It came to him then that there might be a child, human children on Rakhat. And that, Emilio thought, would be good. For Sofia and Jimmy. For all of them.

  And so, in the quiet days that followed the crash, Emilio Sandoz turned inward for a time and probed the sense of mourning that had come over him, tried to understand why he felt so strongly that something inside him was dying.

  Like all of them, he’d been badly rocked by the notion that they might never see Earth again. But as the shock wore off, so did the numbing sense of loss. Jimmy was right. Things could have been much worse; they had what they needed. They might yet get back to the Stella Maris, and if they didn’t, there was still the real possibility of long-term survival here. Not just survival but a good life, full of learning, full of love, Emilio thought, and took a step closer to the death he felt inside himself.

  He had, in the months since arriving on Rakhat, experienced a vast ocean of love and had been content to drift on it, not distinguishing degrees of intensity or relative depths of feeling. That he took pleasure in Sofia’s company was undeniable, but it was hardly new. He had been, always, scrupulous in his behavior and even in his thoughts. He had concealed his own feelings and mastered them, and mastered them once more when he recognized that she’d fallen in love with him. They had shared work and humor and comradeship, and they had also shared self-restraint. And this increased his regard for Sofia, made it that much harder not to love her as George loved Anne.

  Unbidden, the thought came. Rabbis marry. Ministers marry. And he told himself that, yes, if he were a rabbi or a minister, he would love her as a whole man and thank God for her every day. And if he were an Aztec, he thought ruthlessly, he’d cut the hearts from the living breasts of his enemies and offer blood to the sun. And if he were Tibetan, he’d spin prayer wheels. But he was none of those things. He was a Jesuit, and his path was different.

  What was dying, he recognized in those quiet hours, was the possibility of himself as a husband and a father. More: as Sofia’s husband and the father of her children. He had not truly understood that he’d kept part of his soul open to that possibility until he’d seen Sofia in Jimmy Quinn’s arms in the rain and had felt a cold wash of violent jealousy.

  This was, he thought, the first time that celibacy would truly rob him of something. Before, he was aware of the clarity, the singleness of purpose, the concentration of energy, the gifts bestowed by the discipline. Now, he was aware in some much deeper way, not of sexual famine, which was familiar, but of the loss of human intimacy, the sacrifice of human closeness. He felt with an almost physical pain what it would mean to renounce his last opportunity to love Sofia, what it would mean to free her to love Jimmy, who would surely cherish her as dearly as Emilio might have himself. For he was honest with himself: before Sofia turned to another, she would look to him for some sign. If he made any move to encourage her love of him, he had to be prepared to meet it wholly. He knew D.W. and Marc would accept it, that George and Anne would rejoice in it. Even Jimmy, he thought, might take it with good grace …

  So here it was. A time to ratify or to repudiate a vow made in youth and ignorance, to be lived out in maturity and in full understanding. A time to weigh the extraordinary and spiritual and fathomless beauty that God had shown him against the ordinary and worldly and incalculable sweetness of human love and family. A moment to consider if he would trade everything he had hoped for and had been given as a priest for everything he yearned for and desired as a man.

  He did not flinch from the knife. He cut the thread cleanly, a priest in perpetuity. God had been generous with him. He could not stint in return. It did not occur to him to wonder then if Sofia Mendes had been as much a gift from God as all the rest of the love he’d been offered, or if he had been God’s gift to her. Two thousand years of theology spoke, five hundred years of Jesuit tradition spoke, his own life to that moment spoke.

  God was silent on the matter.

  Later that day, Sofia met his eyes as he watched her accept a cup of coffee and a sandwich from Jimmy, who made a comic display of his knightly service. Emilio saw Sofia read him and then look to Jim: already a dear friend, steady and good and strong and patient. He saw her pause and consider, and he felt at that moment like a woman giving a child to adoptive parents—certain it was the right thing, best for the beloved child, good for all. But the grief was real.

  HAVING MADE HIS decision, he bided his time, waiting for the right moment for his next move. It came during the quiet of midmorning a week or so later when Marc and Sofia, bruises fading to yellow and green, were moving with notably less lam
entation, D.W.’s color was better and George had pulled out of his gloom. Everyone seemed rested.

  "I have been considering my present situation," Emilio Sandoz announced. They all looked at him curiously, surprised that he should make such a personal statement. Only Anne caught the tone, and she was already half-smiling, waiting for the punchline. "I have decided that I am happier than I have ever been in my life. And yet," he assured them with great and solemn sincerity, "I would crawl over your dead, burnt bodies if it meant getting to absolutely anything deep-fried."

  "Bacalaitos fritos," Jimmy said. Emilio moaned in agreement.

  "Beignets with powdered sugar," Marc said wistfully.

  "French fries," George sighed.

  "Cheese puffs," Anne said with conviction. "I really miss orange food coloring."

  "Chicken-fried steak," D.W. said. And added, "Hell. Steak, period."

  Sofia stood, creaking a little, and started toward the terrace.

  "Mendes, where you goin’?" D.W. called.

  "To the grocery store."

  D.W. looked at Sofia as though she’d just revealed a second head. But Anne joined her. "To the world’s most astoundingly high-tech pantry," Anne explained inexplicably before spelling it out. "To the lander, D.W.! To get ready for the party."