The Sparrow s-1

by Mary Doria Russel

  "Do you think so, Jim?" Anne asked, joining the discussion for the first time. "With three suns, very little of the planet is in darkness at any one time, or for very long. They might not pay any attention at all to the night sky."

  "They're aiming radio at the moons," Sofia and Jimmy said simultaneously. Everyone laughed, and Anne shrugged and nodded, admitting defeat.

  "Anyway, it seems to me that we'd do best to go where the high tech is. I'm willing to bet that this here" — George pointed to a lake in the mountainous area near the city—"is a hydroelectric dam. See? This could be the spillway. If they can build stuff like this and figure out how to bounce radio off their moons, they've got to be at least as technologically advanced as nineteenth- or twentieth-century Earth. So they're probably reasonably sophisticated. I say we go for it. Land in the center of town."

  Marc was very much disturbed by this line of reasoning and appealed directly to D.W. "Father, it seems to me that we should learn something of the planet before we deal with the intelligent species, if for no other reason than to send basic ecological data back for the next party, in case something happens to us. We need to get our bearings first."

  D.W. turned to Anne. "How long do you expect it to take us to get used to gravity again?"

  "George says the planet is a little smaller than Earth, so we expect the gravity to be a little lighter than we were used to. That's a plus. But we've all lost muscle mass and bone density, and our feet are too soft to walk very far. And frankly, everyone is strung out," she said. "Alan, I know you're just dying to see the instruments and to sing with the Singers, but making contact is going to be very risky. Do you honestly feel you're ready to cope with any kind of crisis at this point?"

  Pace grimaced. "I suppose not."

  "Me, neither," Anne said. "I should think we could take two to three weeks getting used to conditions on the surface, building up strength and readapting to sunlight."

  "That would also give us time to study the flora and fauna at least in a limited region," Marc said. "And we could find out if we can eat or drink anything safely—"

  The discussion went on for hours but ultimately D.W. decided that they would attempt to land in an area that appeared to be uninhabited, with supplies for a month's stay, to assess the conditions and plan their next move. And later they all realized that in the end, the decision to go had once again come down to the words of Emilio Sandoz.

  "I agree with Marc and Anne about a cautious approach, but there are logical arguments either way and no empirical means of choosing between them," he'd said. "So, I suppose, at some point, we must simply make a leap of faith." Then, to his own surprise, he added, "If God brought us this far, I don't think He will fail us now."

  And if the statement was not entirely unconditional, only Anne noticed.

  19

  LANDFALL, RAKHAT:

  OCTOBER 13, 2039, EARTH-RELATIVE

  The following days were the worst they'd experienced, physically and mentally. From the tonnage of stored materiel, they had to select the equipment, clothing and food that seemed likely to be most immediately useful and stow it on the lander. The asteroid systems had to be locked down for their absence. The radio transceivers had to be set up to receive, encrypt and relay their reports to Earth. The onboard computers had to be left in a condition to be accessed remotely.

  D.W. double-checked everything, catching errors, correcting mistakes. Having nursed a certain amount of resentment about his highhandedness, Anne began to reassess. D.W. was right to have gotten a grip on things when he did. Even with his steadying influence, the activity verged on frantic toward the end. They were all secretly scared they'd forgotten something or made a mistake that would result in some disaster or get someone killed. So when D.W. finally called a halt and brought them all together, there was a sense of being pulled back from the brink of hysteria.

  "Finish what you have to do by five o'clock this afternoon," he told them. "Then let it go. Stop thinkin' about what can go wrong. It's more important right now to calm down. Y'all're too strung out for your own good. Go to bed early tonight. Just rest if you can't sleep. We'll say Mass at nine. And then we'll go down." D.W. smiled into the eyes of all his tired people, one by one. "You'll do fine. I'd trust any of you, apart or together, with my life and my soul. And when you bed down tonight, I want y'all to think about what Emilio said: God didn't bring us this far to let us down now."

  That night, Anne left George and pushed herself across the commons to D.W.'s door. She knocked softly, not willing to wake him if he was asleep but wanting to talk to him in private if he wasn't.

  "Who is it?" he called quietly.

  "Anne." There was a little delay, and then the door opened.

  "Evenin'. C'mon in. I'd offer you a chair but…"

  She smiled and tried to find a place to float that felt properly situated. A paper for some graduate student, she thought. Maintenance of Culturally Based Distancing Norms in Zero G. "This won't take long, D.W. You need rest, too. I just wanted to ask if you'd consider letting Emilio be the first one out of the lander tomorrow."

  In the silence that fell, Anne watched him work it through in his mind. There was no place in history at stake here, no plan to record this event. No reporters, no photography or AV feed to the nets. From a culture gone mad with documentation, publicity, broadcast, narrowcast and pointcast, where every act of public and private life seemed to be done for an audience, the voyage of the Stella Maris had begun in privacy, and its mission would be carried out in obscurity. Jesuits being as they are, there would be no mention of who set foot on this planet first, not even in the internal report relayed back to the Father General, whoever he might be when the news got back. Even so, as their leader by nature and by Order, it was D.W.'s risk to take and his privilege to claim. If Emilio Sandoz had first suggested this endeavor, it had nevertheless become D. W. Yarbrough's mission. No one had worked harder or longer, no one had given more thought to it or slaved over its details more single-mindedly. Anne knew that and she honored it.

  He looked up at her after a long time, almost bringing both eyes into alignment with the intensity of his gaze. She could see him making one of the decisions involved in discussing this with her and she maintained a strict neutrality, so as not to influence him. When he spoke, his voice was as empty of accent as his face was naked of defense. "And you think that this would be appropriate? There would be no suspicion," he said and then hesitated before saying, "of favoritism?"

  "D.W., I wouldn't have asked if I thought there was even a possibility of that." It's okay, she wanted to say. He's easy to love. I understand. "I think the others would approve and I believe it will mean a great deal to him. Spiritually." She cleared her throat then, embarrassed even to have said that word. "I hope you don't mind my venturing into your purview here—"

  D.W. waved that off. "Oh, hell, no. Course not. I trust your judgment. You're much closer to him than I ever was, Anne." He looked at her to see if she accepted that and then rubbed his eyes, red-rimmed and bloodshot in his pale, disheveled face. "Okay. Fine by me. He goes first. Assumin' it looks safe to get out! We may get down there and decide it's too damn dangerous for anyone to risk it."

  "Oh, D.W.! Oh, my darling man!" Anne cried. "If you even think about not letting us out of the lander, I will chew straight through that plane. You just try to stop me."

  D.W. laughed, and she decided against hugging him but held out her hand. He took it and, to her complete astonishment, brought it to his lips and kissed it, looking crookedly at her the whole time. "Good night, Miz Edwards," he said, Southern and gallant as he could be, dressed in sweats and floating in midair. "Sleep well, y'hear?"

  All of them, in their own ways, prepared that night both for death and for a kind of resurrection. Some confessed, some made love, some slept exhausted and dreamed of childhood friends or long-forgotten moments with grandparents. They all, in their own ways, tried to let their fear go, to reconcile themselves to their lives pri
or to this night, and to what might come tomorrow.

  For some of them, there had been a turning point that now seemed justified, however painful the decision might have been. For Sofia Mendes, a way to make peace with what, even now, she could only think of as "the days before Jaubert." For Jimmy Quinn, the end of worry that he was wrong to leave his mother, and right to claim his life as his own.

  For Marc Robichaux and Alan Pace, there was a sense that they had lived their lives the right way and confidence that God had recognized their artistry as the prayer they had always meant the work to be, and there was hope that He would let them serve Him now.

  For Anne and George Edwards, for D. W. Yarbrough and Emilio Sandoz, this voyage had given meaning to random acts, and to all the points where they had done this and not that, chosen one thing and not another, to all their decisions, whether carefully thought out or ill considered.

  I would do it all again, each of them thought.

  And when the time came, each of them privately felt a calm ratification of those reconciliations, even as the noise and heat and buffeting built to a terrifying violence, as it seemed less and less likely that the plane would hold together, more and more likely that they'd be burned alive in the atmosphere of a planet whose name they did not know. I am where I want to be, they each thought. I am grateful to be here. In their own ways, they all gave themselves up to God's will and trusted that whatever happened now was meant to be. At least for the moment, they all fell in love with God.

  But Emilio Sandoz fell hardest of all, letting his fear and doubt go almost physically, his hands opening as everyone else clutched at controls or straps or armrests or someone else's hand. And when the mind-numbing scream of the engines diminished and then fell off to a silence almost as deafening, it seemed only natural that he should move into the airlock and open the hatch and step out alone, into the sunlight of stars he'd never noticed while on Earth, and fill his lungs with the exhalation of unknown plants and fall to his knees weeping with the joy of it when, after a long courtship, he felt the void fill and believed with all his heart that his love affair with God had been consummated.

  Those who saw his face as he pushed himself to his feet, laughing and crying, and turned back to them, incandescent, arms flung wide, recognized that they stood witness to a soul's transcendence and would remember that moment for the rest of their lives. Each of them felt some of the same dizzying exultation as they emerged from the lander, spilling from their technological womb wobbly and blinking, and felt themselves reborn in a new world.

  Even Anne, sensible Anne, allowed herself to enjoy the sensation and didn't spoil it by speculating aloud that it was probably plain relief at cheating death combined with a sudden drop in blood pressure to the brain, consequent to the reversal of Fat Face, Chicken Legs. None of them, not even George who had no wish to believe, was entirely exempt from transcendence.

  There followed days of rapture and hilarity. Children on a field trip to Eden, they named everything they saw. The eat-me's and the elephant birds, hoppers and walkies, the all-black Jesuits and the all-brown Franciscans, scummies and crawlers, hose-noses and squirrel-tails. Little green guys, blue-backs and flower-faces, and Richard Nixons, which walked bent over looking for food. And then black-and-white Dominicans, to round out their collection of orders. And turtle trees, whose seed pods resembled turtle shells; peanut bushes, whose brown blossoms were double-lobed; baby's feet, with foliage soft as rose petals; and pig plants, whose leaves were like sows' ears.

  The niches were all there. Air to fly through, water to swim in, soil to burrow under, vegetation to exploit and hide behind. The principles were the same: form follows function, reach high for sunlight, strut your stuff to attract a mate, scatter lots of offspring or take good care of a precious few, warn predators that you're poisonous with bright colors or blend into the background to escape detection. But the sheer beauty and ingenuity of the animal adaptations were breathtaking and the gorgeousness of the plant life staggering.

  Anne and Marc, their eyes informed by their study of evolution and Darwinian selection, were beside themselves with delight in everything they saw. They said it with different inflections but they both exclaimed repeatedly, "My God, this is so great!" And long past the point when the others wanted to drop exhausted to the ground, Anne's voice or Marc's could be heard calling softly but urgently, "You've got to see this! Come quick before it moves!" until they were all sated with beauty and novelty and astonishment.

  D.W. had come in over ocean and flown low as a drug smuggler over what might as well be called treetops. He spotted a clearing and made a snap decision to land there rather than further on, in the plain Marc had chosen. Surrounded by the tall, heavy-stemmed vegetation that filled the niche of trees, they felt safe and unobserved. If the weather promised to be mild, they slept in the open, weaponless, too ignorant or trusting to worry about major carnivores or aggressive poisonous things. They had tents and took shelter during the sudden rainstorms, but they were frequently drenched. No one cared. The nights were so brief and the days so warm, they dried out quickly and napped in the leaf-filtered sunlight, drowsing in the warmth, contented and lazy as dogs by firelight.

  Even dozing, they were suffused with their surroundings. The wind-borne fragrance of a thousand plants as varied as stephanotis, pine, skunk cabbage, lemon, jasmine, grass, but unlike any of them; the heavy dank odor of vegetation decayed by another world's bacteria; the oak-like musky bass notes of the crushed herbs they lay on overwhelmed their ability to perceive and categorize such things. As three dawns and three dusks came and went, the sounds of the long day changed, from chorus to chorus of trilling, shrieking, whirring things. Sometimes they could match the sound to the animal that made it: a shrilling that belonged to the lizardlike creatures they called little green guys, an amazingly loud rasping noise that was made by a small scaly biped staking out its territory in the forest's ground litter. Most often, the sounds were full of mystery, as was the God that some of them worshiped.

  Their forays beyond the clearing were limited, made in pairs, kept always within sight and call of the lander and encampment. But after so much time together, they all broke D.W.'s rule once in a while and sought time alone, to come to grips with the experiences, to think and absorb and then move ahead again, into wonder. So Sofia was not surprised when she found Emilio sitting alone, his back against a boulder that had formed in layers, like sandstone. His eyes were closed. He might have been sleeping.

  There are moments, she thought later, when reality seems to shift suddenly, like shards of colored glass in a kaleidoscope. Looking down at Sandoz, seeing him at rest and unaware, she realized, simply, that he was no longer young. And was astonished at the wave of feeling that swept over her.

  He was always working or laughing or studying, and his intensity and humor made him seem ageless. She knew something of his life, having worked with him, and recognized him as one of her own kind: an eternal beginner, starting over and over in a new place in new circumstances, with new languages, new people, a new commission. They had this in common: the continual rushed confrontation with change, the feeling of being hothoused, forced to bloom early, the exhausting exhilaration of doing the unreasonable not just adequately but well and with grace.

  Flexible, then, and adaptable but not authoritative. He felt himself to be a skilled tradesman, perhaps, doing work to order. She wondered if he had ever given an outright command in his life and thought that if she depended on Emilio Sandoz to teach her a language, she might never even suspect that the imperative mood existed. All this, perhaps, contributed to what she had always perceived as a certain unfledged quality, made more striking by a willingness to submit to authority, odd in a grown man of intelligence and energy, but part and parcel of Jesuit formation. Not childish, but certainly childlike. And yet, she could see now the skin of the eyes pleating, the mouth bracketed by deeper grooves than she had noticed the first time she'd seen him. Half his life, she thought, give
n to this jealous God of his.

  And perhaps a third of my own life given to Jaubert, she thought, and before that…Who am I to judge a life misspent?

  She drew closer to him, the humus and herbage cushioning her step and absorbing the sound of her approach, and dropped silently almost to her knees. Her hand was drawn to a lock of hair near his face, silver against the black, and she reached out tentatively, as though to touch a butterfly. Sensing her movement, his eyes opened, and she took cover behind Anne's unwitting lessons.

  "Sandoz!" she cried, lightly seizing his hair and pulling it playfully toward his eyes, "Look at this! You're getting gray, old man."

  He laughed. She smiled back and stood again, looking around, as though there were something, anything in this world, that was of more interest to her now than the man she'd just turned away from.

  "So. You are pleased with your choice?" When she said nothing, Emilio asked again, "Happy that you came here?"

  "Yes, I am happy with my choice." Sofia gazed at the forest, her hands gesturing toward it all, before turning to look at him. "This makes everything worthwhile, doesn't it." She was aware, always, that he knew what she had been and wondered with fresh interest how this shadowed his thoughts of her.

  "I had a dream last night," Emilio told her. "I was floating in the air. And in the dream, I said to myself, I wonder why I never tried this before? It's so easy."

  "REM-mediated dendrite formation," she told him. "Your brain is trying to organize a response to prolonged weightlessness followed by all this new sensory input."

  Emilio regarded her through narrowed eyes. "You spend entirely too much time with Anne. What is it with the women on this mission?" he demanded suddenly. "If I looked up prosaic in the dictionary, it would probably say, 'Immune to poetry. See also Mendes comma Sofia. I happen to believe that dream was a religious revelation."