The Sparrow Read online

  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, given 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."

  He had been praying, Sofia realized, not sleeping. His voice was light and ironic, but she had seen his face that day and knew he meant it. She tried hard to identify the feeling, to name what swept her, and realized that it was tenderness. This is impossible, she thought. I can’t let this happen.

  "Aside from exasperating me," he continued, "did you have some reason for—?"

  She blinked. "Oh. Yes, actually, it’s time for work. Anne sent me for you."

  "No one is hurt?" he asked, getting to his feet.

  "No. But Robichaux is ready to begin the experiments with local food sources. Anne wants you to help monitor the responses."

  They walked back to the encampment, bantering amiably on the way. But she was careful to keep her distance, and believed she gave no sign that she had at last taken up a burden that Emilio had long carried for both of them, without her conscious knowledge. Sofia Mendes, after all, had survived by sealing off emotion, her own and others’. It was an old skill, employed in times past to protect herself and now honorably exercised on behalf of another. I am Mendes, she thought. Nothing is beyond me.

  ANNE LOOKED UP from her notebook as Emilio and Sofia joined the others. It’s happened, Anne thought, but she turned immediately to the work at hand.

  "We’ll start with a little meat," she told the group sitting in a circle in front of the lab tent. "Marc wants to go first, but he’s just spent a lot of time throwing up in zero G so I don’t want to put him under any further stress. Jimmy’s big and healthy and he’ll eat anything that gets near his mouth. I expect he’ll survive if the stuff here turns out to be poisonous to us." Jimmy laughed but looked a little nervous. Anne wasn’t joking. "Emilio, you and I are going to watch him in shifts for the next twenty-four hours," Anne continued. "I’ll take the first three hours and then you’re on."

  "What are we looking for?" Emilio asked, sitting on the ground between Alan and George.

  "Vomiting within the first hour or so. Then abdominal pain. Then intestinal pain, and then diarrhea ranging from annoying to bloody and life threatening. And then," she said seriously, looking at Jimmy the whole time, "there’s the possibility of strokelike bleeding in the brain and a whole range of damage to the intestines and liver and kidneys, which could be either temporary or permanent."

  "You’d never get permission from the National Institutes of Health to run this experiment," Jimmy said.

  "Not even if the lab rats signed their consent forms with perfect penmanship," Anne agreed. "But we’re not applying for a research grant. Jimmy, you know the risks. Marc and I have run a hundred tests, but there are endless chemical compounds in anything as complicated as a plant or an animal. Alan has volunteered to go first if you want to back out."

  He didn’t, and they began with a small amount of roasted little green guy because the animals were abundant and easy to catch. Everyone watched as Jimmy got ready to take his first bite.

  "Simply hold it in your mouth for thirty seconds and then spit it out, please," Marc instructed him. "Any tingling or numbness around the lips or in the mouth?"

  "No. It’s not bad," Jim told them. "Could use some salt. Tastes just like chicken." There were moans, as he knew there would be, and he beamed happily at the response.

  "So. Another bite and this time swallow," Marc told him. Jimmy sucked the rest of the meat from the little pair of legs. And was shouted at by Marc, to everyone’s surprise, since they didn’t know Marc had shouting in him. "Never again, do you understand? There is a protocol and you will observe it!"

  Sheepish, Jimmy apologized but, despite the risk he took, suffered no ill effects, either immediately or at any time during the next twenty-four hours. Like the rainwater they’d drunk, little green guy meat seemed harmless.

  They went on from there, with Jimmy taking the first taste of each item they sampled. If it didn’t make Jimmy sick, Alan and D.W. tried it next and then George and Marc, and finally Sofia, with Anne and Emilio acting as controls, recording the foodstuffs they tested and tracking the responses, ready to do what they could if someone reacted badly. Marc’s protocol was observed to the letter after Jimmy’s rashness. If anyone experienced the tingling or numbing that indicated potential poison, the item was described carefully for the record and not tried again. If there was no numbing and if the item was reasonably palatable, then they’d take another small bite and swallow. Wait fifteen minutes and try some more. Then finish a good-sized sample an hour later and hope to be as lucky as Jimmy had been.

  They rejected many things on the basis of taste. Most of the leaves they tried were too bitter, and man
y of the fruits were too sour, although one that tasted great gave even Jimmy the shits. Alan broke out in a rash once, and Marc threw up after one meal. But slowly they compiled a list of things that didn’t seem to damage them, even if it was still unclear whether or not they were deriving any useful nutrients from the food. That would require time and a gradual shift from a diet made up primarily of food brought from Earth to one comprising native elements.

  THE PLANET SEEMED so welcoming and their contentment was so thorough that the weeks came and went without a return to the Stella Maris. Having admired its extravagant beauty, warmed by its suns, sheltered by its forest, at least potentially nourished by it, they began to feel at home on this planet whose name they did not know and to trust its benevolence and welcome.

  The first and only sign of trouble was simply that Alan slept late one morning. In the relaxed discipline of those days, D.W. let him but finally decided to roust him out for breakfast. First with humor and then with concern, he jostled Alan with a toe and then shook his shoulder. Getting no response, he called to Anne, who knew from the tenor of his voice to bring her kit.

  Shouting Alan’s name, talking to him constantly, she surveyed his condition. Airway open. Breathing and heartbeat irregular. "Alan, honey, come on back. Come on, sweetheart, we know you’re in there," she said in what she hoped was a mother’s voice as D.W. began the ritual anointing. Pupils dilated and fixed. "Father Pace!" she yelled. "You’ll be late for services!" Anything. Try to engage him, find a way into wherever he was now, pull him back. Pulse thready. In the ER, she’d have had a team all over him, intubating, charging the paddles. Death, in her experience, was never peaceful. Her training was to resist until flat-line, and beyond. After fifteen minutes, someone took hold of her shoulders and drew her back, ending the CPR. Understanding, she gave Pace up, but sat and held his limp hand until D.W. took it from her and crossed it over Alan’s still and cooling chest.

  "You’ll want an autopsy," she said. D.W. nodded numbly: they had to know. "I’ll have to do it right away. Without preservatives, with this heat—"

  "I understand. Go ahead."

  George, who knew more than he liked about Anne’s work, lashed together a waist-high table for her and curtained off an enclosure, using tarps from the lander. Then he filled containers of water from a nearby creek so she could rinse off as she worked, as well as all the tough, black plastic showerbags, setting them in the sunlight to warm the water, knowing that she’d want to scrub when she was done. Sofia finally roused herself from shocked immobility and went to help George as he took down his and Anne’s tent and set it up again, away from the rest of the encampment. He thanked her and explained quietly as they worked, "She’s hard to be around when a patient dies under her hands like this. You never get used to that. It’ll be better if we can be off by ourselves for a while afterward."

  Emilio, meanwhile, helped lift Alan’s body onto the crude table and stayed behind after D.W., Jimmy and Marc left the enclosure. "Do you want me to assist?" he asked, willing but already pale.

  "No," she said abruptly. Then she softened. "You don’t want this in your mind. Don’t even stay close enough to hear. I’ve done a thousand bodies, sweetheart. I’m used to it."

  But not bodies like this. Not fresh; not friends. It was, in fact, among the worst, the most distressing things she’d done in a lifetime of grisly experience. And it was among the most futile. Hours later, she made the corpse presentable and called for the priests, who dressed it in vestments and wrapped it in another tarp, the plastic shroud garishly yellow, as inappropriate and unacceptable as the death it concealed.

  It was dusk by then. Sitting around the small fire, the others listened to the nearby sound of falling water as Anne showered the blood and brains and excrement and stomach contents from her body, soaped away the smell, and tried unsuccessfully to put the images and sounds from her mind. When she emerged, wet-haired but dressed and apparently composed, it was too dark for D.W. to see how tired she was and how upset. He thought, perhaps, that this was not difficult for her, that she was a professional, hardened, unsusceptible to breakdown. So he called her to the fire and asked her the results.

  "Let her alone," George said, putting an arm around Anne and turning her toward their tent. "Tomorrow is soon enough."

  "No, it’s okay," Anne said, even though it wasn’t. "It won’t take long. There was no obvious cause of death."

  "There was the rash, Doctor. Perhaps an allergic reaction to the fruit he ate?" Marc suggested quietly.

  "That was days ago," Anne said patiently. "And the rash was probably a contact dermatitis. There was no indication of elevated histamine levels in his blood, but we should take whatever he ate yesterday off our list." She turned again to go to the tent, to lie down with George and to remind herself in his arms that she was alive, and glad of it.

  "What about an aneurysm?" Emilio asked. "Maybe he had a blood vessel that was ready to rupture all along and this was just chance."

  They were taking refuge in the concrete. Anne realized that. Faced with death, people looked for reasons, to protect themselves from its arbitrariness and stupidity. She’d been up for twenty hours. So had the others, but they’d only waited. Anne put her hands on her hips and stared at the ground, breathing deeply to control the anger. "Emilio," she said softly but precisely, "I have just completed as thorough an autopsy as can be done under these conditions. How much detail would you like? There was no evidence of internal bleeding anywhere. There was no blood clot in the heart or lungs. There was no inflammation of the gut or stomach. The lungs were clear of fluid. The liver was in remarkably fine condition. The kidneys and the bladder were not infected. There was no stroke. The brain," she said, working hard now to keep her voice steady, for the brain had been the hardest to retrieve and inspect, "was fine. There was no physical sign that allows me to declare a known cause of death. He just died. I don’t know why. People are mortal, okay?"

  She turned to walk away again, looking for someplace to sit down and cry by herself, and nearly screamed when she heard D.W. ask, "What about the bite on his leg? It didn’t look like much and we’ve all been bitten, but maybe … Anne, there’s got to be a reason—"

  "You want a reason?" she asked, rounding on him. He stopped talking, startled by her tone out of his own reverie. "You want a reason? Deus vult, pater. God wanted him dead, okay?"

  She said it to shock D.W., to shock them all, to shut them up, and she was bitterly glad to see it work. She saw D.W. stop in midsentence, motionless, his mouth open slightly, Emilio wide-eyed, Marc blinking with the violence of it, the way she’d turned his habitual cry of faith against them.

  "Why is that so hard to accept, gentlemen?" Anne asked with a flat stare. "Why is it that God gets all the credit for the good stuff, but it’s the doctor’s fault when shit happens? When the patient comes through, it’s always ‘Thank God,’ and when the patient dies, it’s always blame the doctor. Just once in my life, just for the sheer fucking novelty of it, it would be nice if somebody blamed God when the patient dies, instead of me."

  "Anne, D.W. wasn’t blaming you—" It was Jimmy’s voice. She felt George take her arm and she shook him off.

  "The hell he wasn’t! You want a reason? I’m giving you the only one I can think of, and I don’t care if you don’t like it. I don’t know why he died. I didn’t kill him. Dammit, sometimes they just die!" Her voice broke on the words and that made her more furious and desolate. "Even when you’ve got all the medical technology in the world and even when you try your goddamnedest to bring them back and even if they’re wonderful musicians and even if they were healthy yesterday and even when they’re too damned young to die. Sometimes they just die, okay? Go ask God why. Don’t ask me."

  George held her while she wept through her rage and told her quietly, "He wasn’t blaming you, Anne. Nobody blames you," and she knew that, but for the moment it did feel like it was all her fault.

  "Oh, shit, George!" she whispered, wiping he
r nose on her sleeve, and trying to stop crying and failing. "Crap. I didn’t even like him all that much." She turned helplessly toward Jimmy and Sofia, who had moved to her side, but it was the priests Anne was looking at. "He came all this way for the music and he didn’t even get to hear it once. How is that fair? He never even got to see the instruments. What is the point of bringing him all this way, just to kill him now? What kind of stinking goddam trick is this for God to play?"

  IN THE LONG months aboard the Stella Maris, many stories were told. They all still had secrets to keep, but some childhood memories were shared and Marc Robichaux’s were among them.

  Marc was not one of those guys who knew he wanted to be a priest when he was seven, but he was very close to it. Diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia at five, he was lucky enough to be a Canadian when universal health care was available. "Leukemia is not that bad," he told them. "Mostly you are just very, very tired and you feel you need to die as a tired child needs to sleep. The chemo, on the other hand, was very terrible."

  His mother did her best, but she had other children to care for. So it fell to his paternal grandmother, perhaps compensating for the way her son had deserted the family under cover of the stress of Marc’s illness, to sit by his bed, to regale him with stories of old Quebec, to pray with him and assure him with perfect confidence that a new kind of operation, an autologous bone marrow transplant, would cure him. "Only a few years earlier, the kind of leukemia I had would surely have killed me. And the transplant itself very nearly did," he admitted. "But a few weeks later— it was like a miracle. My grandmother was convinced it was in fact a literal miracle, God’s plan for me."