Sandoz clapped once, delighted to be understood, and at that the men jumped up to join Anne and Sofia, all except Marc, who simply got up, but with enthusiasm. It was, in fact, exactly what the doctor would have ordered, except Emilio thought of it first. What he needed, what they all needed, he decided, was a feeling of expansiveness, a jolt of freedom to counter the sense of being boxed in, of having options closed down.
They trooped up the cliffside and paraded to the lander, which was filled with food from home, arguing spiritedly about menus until they finally agreed along the way that everyone should just dig in and find some soul food. And as they chattered, it became obvious that meat was on everyone’s mind, not just D.W.’s. With the Runa away, they could crank up the music and dance and eat meat, by God, and everyone was ready for that. The Runa were vegetarians, and there was a great outcry the first and only time the humans opened a vacuumpak containing beef; the apartment they’d used was declared off-limits in a way they did not understand and abandoned, whether permanently or temporarily they did not know. So the Jesuit party had been vegetarian as well all these weeks, and they’d eaten mostly fish on the Stella Maris.
Striding toward the lander, pleased to see that D.W. was also moving with some of his old energy, Emilio remembered seeing the rifle and suggested suddenly that D.W. take a shot at a piyanot, an idea that met with cries of approbation, except from Sofia, who surprised them all by mentioning that Jews don’t eat game, but that she could find something in the lander stores. They came to a halt and looked at her.
"Hunting isn’t kosher," she told them. No one had heard of this before. She waved off her initial objection. "I don’t keep kosher, as you know," she told them, a little embarrassed. "I still found it impossible to eat pork or shellfish, and I’ve never eaten game. But if you can kill the animal cleanly, I suppose it doesn’t matter."
"Darlin’, if a clean kill is all you need, I shall be happy to oblige," D.W. said as they reached the lander. He flung open the cargo-bay door, feeling his oats, and fetched out the rifle, a sweet old Winchester his grandfather had taught him to use and which he had brought along partly from sentiment. D.W. checked it over thoroughly, loaded it, and then walked a little way out toward one of the piyanot herds that grazed on the plain above the river. Sitting down, he used his own knobby knee as a tripod. Anne watched him sight down the gun, still curious as to how he managed not to be confused by the skewed images his eyes must be taking in, but he dropped a young piyanot like a stone at three hundred yards, the report of the gunshot echoing off the hills to the north.
"Wow," George said.
"That’s clean enough for me," Sofia said, impressed.
D.W., who was made to endure the title Mighty Hunter for some hours, sauntered off to butcher the carcass with Anne, who later declared the activity to have been an interesting exercise in field anatomy, while the others set up for a barbecue. By early afternoon, they were as happy and relaxed as a prehistoric band of Olduwan hunters, full of unaccustomed and highly desirable protein and fat, feeling well and truly fed for the first time in months. They were savannah creatures, deep in their genes, and the flat grassland with widespread trees felt right in some vague way. The plants of this plain were now familiar, and they knew a number of them that could sustain life. The coronaries only made them laugh, the snakenecks’ bites were known to be simply painful and not poisonous to them, although there was unquestionably a venom that killed the little animals’ prey. The land around them was beginning to feel like home, in emotion as well as in hard fact, and they were no longer unnerved by their exposure.
Rakhat, therefore, seemed a known quantity to them and when, one by one, they noticed a stranger striding toward them intently, they were only a little surprised, thinking that a barge trader had stopped for blossoms and did not know that the VaKashani were all out digging pik root somewhere. And they were not concerned, of course, because the Runa were as harmless as deer.
Later, D. W. Yarbrough would recall how Alan Pace had given such a great deal of thought to the music he would first present to the Singers to represent human culture. The subtle mathematical joys of a Bach cantata, the thrilling harmonies of the sextet from Lucia di Lammermoor, the quiet evocative beauties of Saint-Saens, the majesty of a Beethoven symphony, the inspired perfection of a Mozart quartet—all these had been considered. There was an unintentional remembrance of Alan Pace, in the event. George, who’d shared much of Alan’s eclectic taste, had picked out the music that was playing over the lander’s sound system as Supaari VaGayjur approached them. And while Alan would not have selected this particular piece to introduce human music to Rakhat, what Supaari heard was in fact something Alan Pace had reveled in: the rhythmic power, soaring vocals and instrumental virtuosity, not of Beethoven’s Ninth, but of Van Halen’s arena rock masterpiece, 5150. The cut, Anne would remember afterward, was appropriate. The song playing was "Best of Both Worlds."
Emilio had his back to the newcomer and, absorbed in shouting along with the chorus, he was the last to realize, from the trajectory of the others’ now frightened gazes, that something large and threatening was just above him. He half-rose and turned just in time to see the attack coming.
The blow, had it been aimed at any of the others, would have been either disfiguring or lethal, but Emilio Sandoz had known from earliest childhood the look of someone who wanted to obliterate him, to make him simply cease to be. Without thinking, he dropped under the sweep of the heavy arm, which passed harmlessly over his head, and using all the power in his legs, drove his shoulder upward into the belly, knowing from the explosive grunt above him that he’d emptied the lungs of air. He followed the body as it came crashing down, pinning the arms with his knees, and took up a position with his forearm like an iron bar over the newcomer’s throat. Emilio’s eyes made the threat plain even to someone who had never before seen such eyes: he could, if he shifted his position a fraction, use his weight to crush the fragile windpipe, and make the present airlessness permanent.
There was a sudden silence—Anne had made a dash for the lander and turned the music off, to decrease the noise and craziness of the situation—and then Emilio heard the metallic click of the Winchester being cocked but he kept his eyes on the person he was choking. "I stopped taking crap like that when I was fourteen," he said quietly in Spanish, for his own satisfaction. He continued in the soft lilt of Ruanja, "Someone regrets your discomfort. Even so, harm is not permitted. If someone lets you up, will your heart be quiet?"
There was a slight movement upward of the chin, body language indicating assent or agreement. Slowly, Emilio eased back, watching for any sign that the stranger would take advantage of size and strength and attack again. Once somebody this size had a grip on him, Emilio knew from painful experience, he would have his own ass handed to him unceremoniously, and so his strategy from earliest adolescence had been to fight quick and fight dirty, to take the other guy out before he knew what hit him. He hadn’t had much practice lately, but the skills were still there.
For his part, Supaari VaGayjur, speechless with shock, eyes watering and breath coming back raggedly, simply stared at the … thing crouching over him. Finally, when he collected enough breath and nerve to speak, Supaari asked, "What are you?"
"Foreigners," the monster said peaceably, moving off Supaari’s chest.
"That," Supaari said, rubbing his throat judiciously, "must be the understatement of all time." To his utter astonishment, the monster laughed.
"This is true," it said, lips pulling back from white and strangely even teeth. "May someone offer you coffee?"
"Kafay! The very thing one came to inquire after," Supaari said with almost equal amiability, recovering a shard of his urbanity from the shambles surprise and horror had made of it.
The impossible being stood and offered him a bizarre hand, evidently meaning to help him up. Supaari extended his own hand. There was a momentary pause and the foreigner’s half-bare face changed color abruptly in a wa
y Supaari had no words to describe but before he could analyze that, his attention was swept away by the realization that the monster had no tail. He was so startled by the alarming precariousness of an unassisted two-legged stance that Supaari was hardly aware of it when the being grasped his wrist with a fairly strong two-handed grip and helped him to his feet. And then he was freshly amazed, this time by the monster’s size, which made its demonstrated ability to render a fully grown male Jana’ata helpless all the more confounding.
He had no way of knowing that the monster, neck craned upward, was at that moment equally dumbfounded by the same occurrence. In fact, Emilio Sandoz had almost passed out cold for the second time in his life, having just gotten a look at the three-inch-long claws that would have sliced through his neck like butter if he’d hesitated even a moment before ducking.
Supaari, meantime, was trying desperately to adjust to a far deeper shock than Emilio Sandoz was dealing with. Sandoz, at least, had traveled to Rakhat expecting to meet aliens. Supaari VaGayjur had traveled to Kashan simply to meet a new trade delegation and he’d assumed that the foreigners and their kafay were from some unexplored region of the forest far south of Kashan.
Disembarking at the Kashan dock, Supaari had not been surprised to see the village deserted, having been told by Chaypas of the pik harvest. He instantly detected the odor of roasting meat mixed with a confusing welter of dimming burnt hydrocarbons and stronger short-chain carbons and amines; the meat told him that the traders were Jana’ata, but the other scents were very peculiar.
He was not a man to tolerate poaching, although he was prepared to be reconciled if the traders offered compensation. Then, hitting the top of the gorge at a run, he stumbled at the sight of a huge piece of entirely inexplicable machinery squatting on the plain, half a cha’ar inland from the gorge and, tasting the wind more clearly, realized that this was the source of the hydrocarbon stink. The unfamiliar sweat was issuing from a circle of individuals sitting near the equipment. At that point, striding toward them, many emotions were working on him: lingering anger over the idea of poaching, disgust at the ugly odors and the abominable noise of the machinery, fatigue from the long unaccompanied trip, jumpiness at the strangeness of the scene in front of him, a desire to control himself because of the immense potential gain if he established himself as purveyor to the Reshtar of Galatna, and finally a stunned fascination as he drew close enough to see that these were not Jana’ata or Runa or anything else he could identify.
Supaari’s overpowering urge to attack was fundamental. As a human being might react to the sudden appearance in a campsite of a scorpion or a rattlesnake, he wanted not just to kill the threat but to destroy it, to reduce it to molecules. And, in this state of mind, Supaari had tried unsuccessfully to decapitate Emilio Sandoz.
Sofia Mendes broke the impasse. Taking Emilio’s stunned immobility for an inspiring calm, she brought their visitor the cup of coffee Emilio had offered. "Most Runa prefer only to inhale," she said, holding the cup up to him almost at her arms’ length. "Perhaps you will try drinking some, as we do," she suggested, in deference to his undoubted differences from the Runa.
Supaari looked down at this new sprite, this speck that could not possibly be real and that had just spoken to him in very decent Ruanja. Its face and neck were bare, but it had a mane of black hair. The ribbons! he thought, remembering Chaypas’s new style. "Someone thanks you," he said at last. He brushed the dust and ground litter from his gown and then accepted the cup, holding it at its rim and bottom between his first and third claw, the central claw counterbalancing it gracefully, and tried to ignore the fact that he was being invited to ingest an infusion of something like forty thousand bahli worth of kafay.
"It’s hot," the tiny particle warned him. "And bitter."
Supaari took a sip. His nose wrinkled, but he said, "The scent is very agreeable."
Tactful, Anne thought, taking in the carnassial teeth and claws. Jesus H. Christ, she thought, a tactful carnivore! But Sofia’s gesture pulled her out of her own shock. "Please, our hearts will be glad if you will share our meal," Anne said, using the Ruanja formula they were all familiar with. I can’t believe this is happening, she thought. I’m doing Miss Manners with a tactful alien carnivore who just tried to cut Emilio in half.
Supaari turned to this next apparition and saw another barefaced wonder, its white mane plaited with ribbons. Not responding to Anne’s invitation, he looked around him for the first time and, finding Jimmy Quinn, he asked incredulously, "Are all these your children?"
"No," Jimmy said. "This one is the youngest."
The Runa had consistently taken this truth as evidence of Jimmy’s wonderful sense of humor. Supaari accepted it. This, as much as his terrifying claws and dentition, told them all that they were dealing with an entirely different species.
Supaari looked to the others. "Who then is the Elder?"
Emilio cleared his throat, as much to reassure himself that he could make a sound as to draw Supaari’s attention. He turned and indicated D. W. Yarbrough.
D.W., heart hammering, had not moved or spoken since he’d made a dive for the Winchester and, priest or not, prepared to blow the alien bastard in front of him straight to hell. He had thought that he would see Emilio’s severed head fall at his feet and he doubted that he’d ever forget that moment or the flood of blind rage that would have ended Supaari’s life if Emilio hadn’t taken care of the situation himself with such dispatch. "This one is the Elder," D.W. heard Emilio say, "though not the oldest. His decisions are for all of us."
Supaari saw only a middle-sized monster holding a rod that smelled of carbon steel, sulfur and lead. With no intermediary to speak his names, Supaari took the initiative and briefly moved his hands to his forehead. "This one is called Supaari, third-born, of the Gaha’ana lineage, whose landname is VaGayjur." He waited, ears cocked expectantly toward Sandoz.
Emilio realized that, as the interpreter, he was supposed to introduce Yarbrough. Winging it, he said, "The Elder is called Dee, first-born, of the Yarbrough lineage, whose landname is VaWaco."
A warrior, Supaari assumed, quite rightly but for the wrong reasons. Since their common language was Ruanja, he held out both hands, not knowing what else to do. "Challalla khaeri, Dee."
Yarbrough handed his rifle to George with a look that said, Use it if necessary. Then he stepped forward and laid his fingers in the cupped hollows of Supaari’s long upturned claws. "Challalla khaeri, Supaari," he said, squinty-eyed, with a pronounced Texas accent and an attitude that clearly implied the unsaid, You goddamned sonofabitch.
Anne was tempted to laugh out loud but she didn’t; forty-five years of dinner parties will out. Instead she stepped up to their guest and greeted him in the Runa manner without another thought. When their hands parted, she said, "Sipaj, Supaari! Surely you are hungry from your journey. Will you not eat with us now?"
He did. All in all, it was quite a day.
28
NAPLES:
AUGUST 2060
RELYING ON VAGUE directions from the porter and dead reckoning, John Candotti worked his way into the bowels of the retreat house to a dimly lit cellar that had been converted to a modern laundry facility in the 1930s, updated almost a hundred years later and never again since. The Society of Jesus, John noted, was willing to commit to interstellar travel on less than two weeks’ notice, but it did not rush into things like new laundry equipment. The ultrasonic washers were antiques now but still functional. In sunny weather, the wet wash was still line-dried. The whole setup reminded John of his grandmother’s basement except, of course, she’d used a microwave dryer, rain or shine.
He had almost walked past the room when, listening more closely, he realized that he’d just heard Emilio Sandoz humming. Actually, he hadn’t been sure it was Sandoz, since John had never before heard Emilio make any sound remotely like humming. But there he was, unshaven and comfortable-looking in somebody else’s old clothes, pulling damp bed linen out of o
ne of the washers and piling it into a rattan basket that was probably older than the Vatican.
John cleared his throat. Emilio turned at the sound and looked stern. "I hope you don’t expect to walk into my office and see me without an appointment, young man."
John grinned and looked around. "Brother Edward said they’d put you to work down here. Very nice. Kind of Bauhaus."
"Form follows function. Dirty laundry requires this sort of ambience." Emilio held up a wet pillowcase. "Prepare to be dazzled." He managed to fold it remarkably well before tossing it onto the pile in the basket.
"So those are the new braces!" John cried. The hearings had been canceled for a few weeks while Sandoz worked with Paola Marino, the Milanese bioengineer whom the Father General had brought in when Father Singh couldn’t correct the defects in the original braces. Sandoz was reluctant to be seen by anyone new, but Giuliani insisted. Things had evidently gone well. "I am dazzled. That’s wonderful."
"Yes. I am very flashy with towels as well, but there are limits." Emilio turned back to the machines. "Socks, for example. You guys send them down inside out, they go back upstairs clean but in the same condition."
"Hey, my dad had the same rule at home." John watched Sandoz work. His grip wasn’t perfect and he still had to pay close attention to the movement, but the improvement was remarkable. "Those are really good, aren’t they."
"They’re much easier to control. Lighter. Look: the bruises are clearing up." Emilio turned and held out his arms for John’s inspection. The new braces were radically different, less a cage than a set of wrist splints with electronic pickups. The fingers were supported from below with flat bands, jointed but lying close to his hands. There were finer bands that crossed over the top of the phalanges and a set of three flat straps that held the splints to his metacarpals, wrists and forearms. John tried not to notice how atrophied the muscles were and concentrated on the machinery as Sandoz explained the mechanisms.
The Sparrow Page 37