The Sparrow (18 page)

Felipe Reyes endured Emilio's gaze as long as he could. He looked away finally, but he could not close out the soft savage voice.

"You can't imagine the truth. I lived it, Felipe. I have to live with it now. You tell them: the hands are nothing. You tell them: self-pity would be an improvement. It doesn't matter what I say. It doesn't matter what I tell you. None of you will ever know what it was like. And I promise you: you don't want to know."

When Felipe looked up, Sandoz was gone.

V
INCENZO
G
IULIANI, BACK
in his Rome office, was informed of the fiasco within the hour.

In truth, the Father General had not summoned Felipe Reyes to serve as Emilio Sandoz's prosecutor. There would be no trial, no devil's advocate, not even in the loose colloquial sense that Emilio had used. The aim of the coming inquiry was to help the Society plan its next moves regarding Rakhat. Reyes was a well-respected specialist in comparative religious studies whom Giuliani expected to be of use as Sandoz worked his way through the details of the Rakhat mission. But there was no use denying it. The Father General had also hoped that Felipe Reyes, who had known Sandoz in better days and who himself had been maimed while studying at a Pakistani university, might give Emilio a healthier perspective on the apparent uniqueness of his experience. So it was with a good deal of chagrin that Giuliani learned how badly he'd misread Sandoz on this score.

Sighing, he rose from his desk and walked to the windows to stare out at the Vatican through the rain. What a burden men like Sandoz carried into the field. Over four hundred of Ours to set the standard, he thought, and remembered his days as a novice, studying the lives of sainted, blessed and venerated Jesuits. What was that wonderful line? "Men astutely trained in letters and in fortitude." Enduring hardship, loneliness, exhaustion and sickness with courage and resourcefulness. Meeting torture and death with a joy that defies easy understanding, even by those who share their religion, if not their faith. So many Homeric stories. So many martyrs like Isaac Jogues. Trekking eight hundred miles into the interior of the New World—a land as alien to a European in 1637 as Rakhat is to us now, Giuliani suddenly realized. Feared as a witch, ridiculed, reviled for his mildness by the Indians he'd hoped to gain for Christ. Beaten regularly, his fingers cut off joint by joint with clamshell blades—no wonder Jogues had come to Emilio's mind. Rescued, after years of abuse and deprivation, by Dutch traders who arranged for his return to France, where he recovered, against all odds.

Astonishing, really: Jogues went back. He must have known what would happen but he sailed back to work among the Mohawks, as soon as he was able. And in the end, they killed him. Horribly.

How are we to understand men like that? Giuliani had once wondered. How could a sane man have returned to such a life, knowing such a fate was likely? Was he psychotic, driven by voices? A masochist who sought degradation and pain? The questions were inescapable for a modern historian, even a Jesuit historian. Jogues was only one of many. Were men like Jogues mad?

No, Giuliani had decided at last. Not madness but the mathematics of eternity drove them. To save souls from perpetual torment and estrangement from God, to bring souls to imperishable joy and nearness to God, no burden was too heavy, no price too steep. Jogues himself had written to his mother, "All the labors of a million persons, would they not be worthwhile if they gained a single soul for Jesus Christ?"

Yes, he thought, Jesuits are well prepared for martyrdom. Survival, on the other hand, could be an intractable problem. Sometimes, Vincenzo Giuliani suspected, it is easier to die than to live.

"I'
M REALLY STARTING
to hate those stairs," John Candotti called, walking across the beach. Sandoz was sitting on the rocks as usual, his back against the stone, hands exposed and loose, dangling between his drawn-up knees. "I don't suppose you could brood in the garden? There's a real nice spot for brooding, right next to the house."

"Leave me alone, John." Emilio's eyes were closed and he had what John was beginning to recognize as the look of a man with a crushing headache.

"I vass only followink awdahs. Father Reyes sent me." He expected an epithet, but Sandoz was back in control, or past caring. John stood on the beach, a few feet from Sandoz, and for a while looked out over the sea. There were sails in the distance, brilliant in the slanting sunlight, and the usual fishing boats. "It's times like this," John said philosophically, "when I remember what my old dad always used to say."

Emilio's head came up and he looked at John wearily, resigned to another assault.

" ‘What the hell are you doing in the bathroom day and night?'" John shouted suddenly. " ‘Why don't you get out of there and give somebody else a chance?' "

Emilio lay his head back against the rock, and laughed and laughed. "Now, that is a good sound," John said, grinning, delighted by the effect he'd had. "You know what? I don't think I've ever heard you laugh before, not really."

"
Young Frankenstein
! That's from
Young Frankenstein
!" Emilio gasped. "My brother and I knew that whole movie by heart. We must have watched that thing a hundred times when we were kids. I loved Mel Brooks."

"One of the greats," John agreed. "
The
Odyssey
.
Hamlet
.
Young Frankenstein
. Some things never die."

Emilio laughed again, wiping his eyes on his sleeve and catching his breath. "I thought you were going to tell me things would look better in the morning or something. I was preparing to murder you."

John checked at that but decided it was only a figure of speech. "Heavens! Then I suppose my presence constituted the near occasion of sin, my son," he said prissily, mimicking Johannes Voelker. "May I join you on your rock, sir?"

"Be my guest." Emilio moved over to make room, shaking off the lingering reaction to seeing Felipe again.

Preceded by his prowlike nose, John clambered up, all elbows and knees and big feet, envying Emilio's compact neatness, the athletic grace evident even now. John made himself fairly comfortable on the unyielding surface of the rock, and the two men admired the sunset for a while. They'd be climbing the stairs in darkness but they were both familiar with every step.

"The way I see it," John said, breaking the silence as the light deepened to blue, "you've got three choices. One: you can leave, like you said you wanted to, in the beginning. Leave the Society, leave the priesthood."

"And go where? And do what?" Sandoz demanded, his face in profile as hard as the bald stone outcropping they sat on. He had not spoken of leaving since the day the reporter burst into his room, when the reality of life on the outside had shouted in his face. "I'm trapped. And you know it."

"You could be a rich man. The Society was offered an immense amount of money just for permission to interview you." Emilio turned to him and, in the dusk, John could almost taste the bile rising in the other man's throat. He waited, to give Sandoz a chance to say something, but Emilio turned back to the sunless sea. "Two: you can see the inquiry through. Explain what happened. Help us decide what to do next. We'll stand by you, Emilio."

Elbows on his drawn-up knees, Emilio raised his hands to his head and rested the long, bony fingers there, pale and skeletal against his hair. "If I start talking, you won't like what you hear."

He thinks the truth is too ugly for us, John had thought, coming down the stairs after a hurried conference with Brother Edward and Father Reyes. Ed thought perhaps that Sandoz didn't realize how much of his story had been made public. "Emilio, we know about the child," John said quietly. "And we know about the brothel."

"No one knows," Sandoz said, his voice muffled.

"Everybody knows, Emilio. Not just Ed Behr and the people at the hospital. The Contact Consortium released the whole story—"

Sandoz stood suddenly and climbed off the rock. He took off down the darkened beach, heading south, arms crossed over his chest to keep the hands tucked under his armpits. John jumped down after him and followed at a run. Overtaking Sandoz, he grabbed the smaller man's shoulder and twisted him around, shouting at him, "How long do you think you can hold all this in? How long do you plan to carry it all yourself? "

"As long as I can, John," Sandoz said grimly, wrenching his shoulder out of Candotti's grip and backing away from him. "As long as I can."

"And then what?" John yelled as Emilio turned away from him. Sandoz spun to face him.

"And then," he said with quiet menace, "I'll take the third option. Is that what you want to hear, John?" He stood there, trembling slightly, flat-eyed, skin drawn taut over the bones of his face.

John, his anger draining away as quickly as it had risen in him, opened his mouth to say something, but Sandoz spoke again.

"I'd have done it months ago but I'm afraid I still have enough pride to deny God the punchline for whatever sick joke I'm playing out now," he said lightly, but his eyes were awful. "That's what's keeping me alive, John. A little bit of pride is all I've got left."

Pride, yes. But also fear:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come.

15

SOLAR SYSTEM:
2021

THE
STELLA MARIS
:
2021–2022, EARTH-RELATIVE

"A
NNIE, IT IS
so cool! Wait until you see it. The rock looks like this giant potato. And all I could think of when I saw it was the
Muppet Show
. Spuds in spa-a-a-ce!"

Anne laughed, amused by the image and relieved to have George home, if only for a few days while he and D.W. collected additional equipment. The past four weeks had been an anxious time for a woman whose faith in technology was more by practical default than informed conviction, but George had come back to her ebullient and confident, burying her misgivings in an avalanche of enthusiasm as she drove him home from the San Juan airport.

"The engines are on one end and the remote cameras and so forth are on the other end, but recessed and kind of cross-eyed, so they don't point directly in the line of travel—"

"Why's that?"

"To keep them from getting abraded by ‘interstellar shit' as you so delicately put it, my dear. The cameras focus on a set of mirrors—the mirrors are exposed but we can sort of peel layers off as the images degrade, the way you peel a layered face shield off a motorcycle helmet in a dirt race. God, you look fabulous!" She kept her gaze on the road but the delicate fan of lines around her eyes deepened with pleasure. Her hair was piled in some kind of style George could only identify as "up" and she was wearing pearls and cream silk. "So anyway," he said, "if you think of the potato, we dock on the long side, like where you'd put the butter—"

"Or the soy-based butteroid nonfat substance, with the taste of real margarine," Anne muttered, eyes on the traffic.

"You fly into this tube and then there's an airlock, but you have to suit up to go from the docker to the airlock. Then you go down this little rock corridor with the wall surfaces all sealed up and there's another airlock just in case—"

"Just in case what?" Anne wanted to know, but he hardly heard her.

"Then you get to the living quarters, which are right in the center where the shielding is best and Annie, it's beautiful inside. Kinda Japanese-looking. Most of the walls are really light panels, so we don't go nuts from the dark. They're sort of like shoji screens." She nodded. "So. There're four concentric cylinders inside, okay? The bedrooms and the toilets are around the outer cylinder. The rooms are pie-shaped—"

"Did you set aside one for the exercise and medical equipment?"

"Yes, Doctor. I put the stuff in there, but you'll have to set it up the way you want it when you get there." George closed his eyes, picturing the rest, then stared straight ahead, not seeing the traffic or San Juan, but the unique and wonderful vessel that would be their home soon, which felt cozy and nautical to him, everything in its place, neat and organized and surprisingly comfortable. "The next inner cylinder has a big common room with built-in tables and benches and the kitchen, which is good, you'll like it. Did you know Marc Robichaux can cook? French stuff. Lot of sauces, he says—"

"I know. Marc's a honey. We've been in touch on the net a lot."

"—but we're eating out of tubes until we've got gravity. Oh! And I had the robots hollow out an extra room with a stone tub, like a Japanese bathroom, where you soap up and rinse off in a little water and then soak."

"Oooh, now that sounds seriously okay," Anne purred. "How big is it?"

He leaned over and planted a kiss on her neck. "Big enough. Now. In the center, there are two more concentric cylinders for the Wolverton tube, right? Column of plants stuck in holes all around the outer cylinder. Leaves coming out into the living area, roots converging toward the center, right? All the air and almost all the wastes get filtered through the plant cylinder. I've seen them before but
God
, this one is beautiful! Marc has been working on the plant mix for months—"

There was more about the plants and then George went on to tell her about the bridge and how the mining robots fed the mass-drivers. And Anne gathered that he and Sofia and Jimmy would be working on AI programs that would make the asteroid self-navigating on the return trip, locking onto Earth broadcasts and Sol's radio frequency, so the system could do the kind of calculations Jimmy was doing on the trip out, in case he was killed. And there was also a VR flight simulator for the docker-lander they'd all train on, in case D.W. was …

Anne nosed the car into a parking space at that point and shut off the motor. There was a long silence, both of them sobered by the knowledge that casualties were likely. They were all being cross-trained, to build redundancy into the final crew of eight.

"The ship will just about fly itself on the way back," George said finally.

"That's the part I like," Anne said firmly. "The ‘on the way back' part."

A
NNE STILL PLAYED
Official Skeptic, but the past eighteen months had worked a surprising internal change in her. Time after time, it looked as though the entire mission would be scrubbed; each time, Anne marveled as Jesuit industry and Jesuit prayer were brought to bear on the problems.

The first asteroid turned out to have a faultline likely to give way under one G of acceleration. The second appeared perfect until a remote assay showed too high an iron content, which would foul the engines over the long term. A few nights later, the evening prayers of a Jesuit physicist were interrupted by the sudden realization that his load-bearing calculations were unduly limited by the specification of a roughly cylindrical rock. He finished his prayers, rapidly rethought his assumptions, and woke up Jesuit colleagues in several different time zones. Twelve hours later, Sofia Mendes was authorized to contact Ian Sekizawa and instruct him to broaden the search to include asteroids of nearly any shape, as long as they were roughly symmetrical around the long axis. Within days, the reply from Ian came: he'd located a rock that was more or less ovoid, would that do? It did, nicely.

There was a similar crisis over the biphasic cladding for D.W.'s docker. The material used to sheathe spaceplanes had to function in the unimaginable cold of space as well as in the blast-furnace heat of entry and exit from an atmosphere. Military orders, being the most lucrative contracts, took precedence over civilian projects. Intense prayer, along with astute technical and diplomatic skill, was dedicated to this problem. Unexpectedly, the military government in Indonesia fell and the Indonesian Air Force's order for a spaceplane was canceled, freeing up material for the private order that had been placed months earlier by Sofia Mendes on behalf of an anonymous group of investors.

After a while it became hard to ignore how, against odds, the dice kept coming up in favor of the mission. The crew members went on with their training, their work unaffected by the waxing and waning of confidence, but they all experienced varying degrees of amazement. Even the Jesuits were divided. Marc Robichaux and Emilio Sandoz smiled and said, "See?
Deus vult
," while D. W. Yarbrough and Andrej Jelacic shook their heads in wonder. George Edwards and Jimmy Quinn and Sofia Mendes remained agnostics on the question of whether these events were minor miracles or major coincidences.

Anne said nothing but as the months passed, it was increasingly difficult to resist the beauty of belief.

A
ND SO, AS
fate or chance or God would have it, nineteen months and twelve days after Anne began compiling her list with "1. Bring nail clippers," she was able at last to cross off the wry final entry: "Vomit in zero G." Unable to stomach even playground swings as a child, she was resigned to the idea that having the contents of her abdomen drift lungward would probably be sufficient to set off the space sickness that still afflicted 15 percent of all travelers, despite medical advances. Not completely pessimistic about her chances of avoiding this, she wore the antinausea transdermal patch that D. W. Yarbrough swore by, and swore at it when she could breathe again.

On the whole, however, she was able to congratulate herself. Everyone had expected her to be frightened so, of course, she decided to confound their expectations by enjoying the ride. And she did. The vertical liftoff was incredibly noisy but there was very little sense of motion. Then there was the thrill of building to four Gs, of being plastered against her couch as they roared along toward Mach 1, when suddenly the noise dropped off behind them. The sky quickly got blacker and blacker and then D.W. turned the afterburner off and she was thrown forward against the belts so hard she thought she'd ruptured her heart. Then she caught sight of the moon and the turquoise rim of the Earth against the dense darkness, straight out the cockpit window ahead of her. As Asia rolled under them into a sunset of great and memorable beauty, Anne felt herself drift away from the couch and begin to float.

It was then that she experienced an instant of unprecedented clarity, a moment of wholly unanticipated certainty that God was real. The sensation fled almost as quickly as it came but left in its wake the conviction that Emilio was right, that they were meant to be here, doing this impossible thing. She looked to him in astonishment, shaken, and was irrationally infuriated to see that he was asleep.

They had been up about two and half hours when Sofia floated by to make a navigational sighting. Turning her head to follow the movement was probably what did it. Anne's inner ears, not her guts, betrayed her. Without warning, her body revolted against its bizarre situation, and she spent the next few hours retching and blowing her nose. When it was over, she realized she was famished and, unfastening her straps, pushed off toward the cockpit, feeling like Mary Martin on a wire until she bumped into a bulkhead so hard that she exclaimed, "Ouch!" and then "Damn," without thinking. She glanced back at Emilio, hoping that she hadn't disturbed him, but he opened his eyes and grinned greenly at her, and she realized that he'd been awake all along and was just this side of blowing breakfast.

D.W. chose that moment to holler back to them, "Hey, anybody hungry?" The effect of the question was immediate and impressive.

At his own firm if garbled request, Anne left Emilio alone to cope with the revolting experience as she had, without a solicitous audience. She joined D.W. and Sofia for lunch, which featured an excellent vichyssoise, packaged in bags like toothpaste tubes. With her stomach settling and a surprisingly decent meal in her, Anne's spirits rose all the way up to okay. This was sufficient improvement for her to decide morosely that even while suffering from the Fat Face, Chicken Legs syndrome that was affecting them all in zero G, Sofia at thirty-two looked better than Anne had on her wedding day, fresh-faced and twenty. Not even a radical redistribution of blood plasma and lymph was able to dim Sofia's looks entirely, the fluid in her face smoothing it into an ivory oval, dark brows arched and tranquil over egg-shaped eyelids, the lips pursed in calm self-possession: an emotionless Byzantine portrait.

D.W., on the other hand, was even more unsightly than usual.

Beauty and the Beast, Anne thought, watching them work head to head over some navigational task. It was a friendship she found odd and pure and touching in a way she didn't quite understand. With Sofia, D.W. dropped most of his elaborate Good Ole Boy act and seemed to take up less of the oxygen in a room; Sofia, for her part, seemed less wary in D.W.'s company, more at home in her skin. Remarkable, Anne mused. Who'd have thunk it?