The Sparrow Page 26

  D.W.’s own list included a rifle, which he intended to bring down without mentioning because he didn’t want any big damn discussion about it. And more rope. And he’d just about die before he admitted it, but he wanted to bring down more coffee. The climate had proved reasonably benign, although the thunderstorms could be literally hair-raising and it got too hot to move when the three suns were up simultaneously. They could use lighter clothing and more sunblock.

  Most of all, though, he wanted the Ultra-Light. Like all the equipment they’d brought, it was solar-powered—a tiny two-person airplane with wings sheathed in a photovoltaic polymer film capable of running a fifteen-horsepower electric motor. Cute as a bug’s ear and a lot of fun to fly. There hadn’t been room for it the first time down, not with a full passenger complement. Now they could really use the little plane to scout the territory. Marc’s maps were good, but D.W. wanted to fly out ahead and see with his own eyes what they were up against before the party moved out overland.

  He tucked his tablet under his arm and walked across the clearing toward Anne Edwards, who noticed him on his way. She was going over her own records, sitting with her back against a "tree" trunk, knees up to support her notebook, which was on-line to the Stella Maris library.

  "Could have been endocarditis," she said quietly when he was close enough to hear. "Bacterial infection of the heart valves. There was a new form of it I heard about just before we left. It could kill a healthy person pretty quickly, and it was a bitch to find in an autopsy, even at home."

  He grunted and hunkered down next to her. "Where would he have picked up the bacteria?"

  "Beats the shit out of me, D.W.," Anne said, waving her hand in front of her face to clear off a swarm of gnatlike things they called little buggers. "Might have been carrying it all along, until something weakened his immune system to the point that it overwhelmed his body’s defenses. Ultraviolet radiation can suppress the immune system, and we are catching a real dose of UV down here."

  "But you’re not sure it was, whaddyacallit? That endo shit." He picked up a stick and toyed with it, passing it through his hands, bending it little by little into a hoop.

  "No. It’s just the best guess I’ve come up with so far." She closed her notebook. "It’s hard to believe that he died just yesterday. I’m sorry about last night."

  "Same here," D.W. said, glancing at her with one eye and then looking away, staring out at the forest. He tossed the stick aside. "Warn’t good judgment, raggin’ at a lady’s had a real bad day."

  She stuck out her hand. "Peace?"

  "Peace," he affirmed, taking her hand and holding it a few moments. Then he let it go and stood up, groaning at the protest his knees made. "You may not want to be friends after I tell you what I’ve decided we’re gonna do next." Anne looked up at him, with narrowed eyes. "I’m goin’ back up to the Stella Maris and I want George to copilot."

  "Oh, my," she said. A blue-green Fast Eddie skittered by her feet and dashed into the leaf litter nearby, and they could hear the Dominicans howling in the forest.

  "He was the best of the bunch on the simulator, Anne, and I want him trained on the real thing. And he can check on the life-support systems while I’m loadin’ supplies. He ain’t had hardly any trouble with space sickness, so there’s a good chance he won’t get sick this time neither. I knew you’d be pissed, but that’s how it parses."

  "He’ll probably love it, too," Anne said ruefully. "Oh, boy, do I ever hate this idea."

  "I ain’t askin’ permission, Miz Edwards," he said, but his voice was very gentle. He grinned crookedly. "I just thought I’d tell you so’s you could cuss me out in private."

  "Consider yourself cussed," she said, but she laughed even as she shuddered. "Oh, well. It won’t be the first time I’ve stood around waiting for George to get blown up. Or torn limb from limb. Or smeared across the pavement. Or squashed like a bug. The shit that man does for fun!" She shook her head, remembering the whitewater and the rock climbing and the dirt bikes.

  "You ever hear that old joke about the guy who jumped off the Empire State Building?" D.W. asked her.

  "Yeah. All the way down, you could hear him say, ‘So far, so good. So far, so good. So far, so good.’ That is George’s life story in a nutshell."

  "He’ll do okay, Anne. It’s a good plane and he’s got a talent for the job. I’ll put him on the simulator again ’fore we go." D.W. scratched his cheek and smiled down at her. "Ain’t in no big damn hurry to crash and burn, my own self. I don’t get counted as a holy martyr if we just screw up a landing and pancake into the ground. We’ll be careful."

  "Speak for yourself, D.W. You don’t know George Edwards as well as I do," Anne warned.

  IN THE EVENT, the flight went almost without a hitch and George made a beautiful landing, which Anne, hiding behind Emilio and Jimmy with her hands over her eyes, was too scared to watch. When she finally peeked out from behind the two men and between her fingers, George had already climbed out of the lander, yelling and whooping, and was running toward her, sweeping her up to swing her around, talking a mile a minute about how great it had been.

  Sofia, smiling at George as they passed, went to help D.W. with the postflight inspection. "You look a little pale," she remarked quietly, moving along the port-side wing.

  "He did jes’ fine," D.W. muttered, "for a stupid damn sumbitch with more guts than sense."

  "A rather more exciting flight than you anticipated," Sofia ventured dryly and smiled with her eyes alone when D.W. grunted and ducked under the fuselage, where he occupied himself with the starboard systems until his heart rate returned to normal.

  Anne, still shaking, came over and made a point of congratulating Sofia on the obvious effectiveness of the flight simulator. "I am tempted to say, Thank God!" she said quietly, hugging the younger woman. "But thank you, Sofia."

  Sofia was gratified by the acknowledgment. "I must admit I am also relieved to have them back in one piece."

  "It is also nice to have the plane back, mes amis," Marc said unsentimentally as he and Jimmy wrestled a packing crate out of the cargo bay. And everyone who’d waited on the ground silently seconded that. There was only one way off this planet, and everyone knew it.

  GEORGE, WHOLLY SMITTEN with flying, now wanted to try piloting the Ultra-Light as well but had to be content with simply putting the diaphanous miniature plane together the next day. D.W. had already decided that Marc would go up with him on the first flight so the naturalist could get a feel for how the space images corresponded to the actual terrain and vegetation.

  While George and D.W. were off-planet, the ground crew had passed the time preparing a runway for the Ultra-Light, which required a forty-meter strip. There were still two stumps to finish pulling, and then they had to wait for the right amount of rain to pack the loose soil down without turning it into a swamp, so it was nearly a week before D.W. and Marc were able to start their flight down a river gorge that passed through a minor mountain range northeast of their position in the clearing.

  There had been no indication yet that anyone knew they were there, despite two noisy trips in and one out of the clearing, and that was to the good. Their flight paths had been chosen to minimize the likelihood of passing over inhabited regions, and evidently no air transportation had been developed locally. While still on the Stella Maris, George had worked out the AM radio frequencies used by the Singers and recommended that the Jesuit party use UHF and virtually undetectable spread-band encryption for radio communication with the shipboard systems and with each other when separated, to avoid attracting attention prematurely. Even so, D.W. and Marc were forced to maintain radio silence during the last part of their first reconnaissance flight. They did not have full coverage from the satellites they used to relay signals and a period of blackout coincided with the time when the runway was usable.

  After fifteen hours, the last five of which were incommunicado, Jimmy broke the silence with a shout. Then they all heard the Ultra-Light’s
motor and everyone stood to scan the sky for the little plane. "There!" Sofia cried and they watched D.W. circle and then drop down for the bumpy landing.

  Marc was smiling broadly as he climbed out of his seat. "We found a village! Perhaps six, or seven days’ walk from here, if we move along the river valley," he told them. "Set into the side of some cliffs, about thirty meters up from the river. We almost missed it. Very interesting architecture. Almost like Anasazi cliff dwellings but not at all geometric."

  "Oh, Marc!" Anne moaned. "Who gives a shit about the architecture?"

  "Did you find any Singers? What do they look like?" George asked.

  "We didn’t see anyone," D.W. told them, climbing out and stretching. "Damnedest thing. The place didn’t look to be abandoned. Not like a ghost town. But we didn’t see a soul stirrin’."

  "It was very bizarre," Marc admitted. "We landed across the river and watched for a long time, but there was no one to be seen."

  "So what do we do now?" Jimmy asked. "Look for another village with some people in it?"

  "No," said Emilio. "We should go to the village Marc and D.W. found today."

  They all turned to look at him blankly, and Emilio realized that no one had expected him to have an opinion about this. He couldn’t stop himself from running his hands through his hair but he straightened and spoke again, with more confidence than usual and in his own voice. "We have been here for some time, in seclusion. To become used to the planet, as we hoped, yes? And now, we have the possibility of investigating this village, also in some privacy. It appears to me that things are proceeding step by step. And next perhaps, we will meet whom we are meant to meet."

  "Do you suppose," Marc Robichaux asked, breaking the silence and turning to D.W. with shining eyes, "that this village constitutes a turtle on a fencepost?"

  D.W. snorted and laughed shortly and rubbed the back of his neck and stared at the ground for a while, heartily sorry that he had ever mentioned turtles. Then he looked around at the civilians. George and Jimmy were clearly ready to hoist backpacks and go. He shook his head and appealed wordlessly to Anne and Sofia, hoping that one of the women had something logical or practical to contribute. But Anne only shrugged, palms up, and Sofia simply asked, "Why walk when we can fly? I think we should use the Ultra-Light for transport. No fuel problems. We can ferry in personnel and equipment in several trips."

  At that, D.W. threw his arms up and looked at the sky in resignation and walked in a circle with his hands on his hips muttering to himself that the whole damn thing beat the livin’ shit out of him. But finally he came to rest and gazed at Emilio Sandoz, whom he had known, boy to man, for almost thirty years now. Whose astonishing, diffident, whispered confessions he now heard while fighting back his own tears. For a moment, D.W. was overwhelmed by the sense that he had seen this soul take root and grow and blossom in a way he never would have predicted and could hardly have hoped for and barely understood. A mystic! he thought, astounded. I got a Porter Rican mystic on my hands.

  The others were all waiting for his decision. "Sure," D.W. said at last. "Okay. Fine by me. Why not? There’s a flat patch where I can land, outta sight, a few miles south of the village on the same side of the river. We’ll ferry the heaviest equipment in with Mendes, here, ’cause she don’t weigh nothing. Quinn can carry the damn toothbrushes on his trip."

  There were cheers then and high fives and a general sense of being ready to roll and they began talking all at once. In the midst of the commotion, Emilio Sandoz stood silently, as though listening, but he heard none of the discussion of plans and procedures that went on around him. When he came back from wherever he had been, it was Sofia Mendes he saw, a little distance away, as apart from the others as he was, watching him with intelligent, searching eyes. He met her gaze without embarrassment. And then the moment passed.

  ONE BY ONE, they were carried over forest, along the river course, and into a drier mountain-lee land, to the staging area D.W. had identified. They took with them the camping and communications gear and a two-month supply of food, leaving the bulk of their cargo stored in the lander, which D.W. locked down and camouflaged. The last thing each of them looked at as they rose skyward from the runway was the grave of Alan Pace. No one commented on or admitted to leaving the flowers.

  Everything east of the mountains seemed a little dwarfed and less colorful than in the forest. The blues and greens and lavenders were more muted and dusty, the animal species more dependent on stealth and concealment for safety. There were treelike plants, widely spaced, but with multiple stems and a tangle of branches in place of the graceful canopies of the forest. That evening, between the second and third sunsets, George found a place in the rocks to conceal the disassembled Ultra-Light, while the others secured the new food depot. They were constantly startled as they worked by small gray-blue animals, almost invisible until they stepped near one, which Anne named coronaries for the heartstopping habit the little animals had of exploding upward, grouselike, in brief flights from the ground. Their voices sounded loud even when they spoke quietly. Without any discussion, they pitched the tents very close together that night. For the first time since landfall, they all felt alien and misplaced, and a little scared as they crawled into sleeping bags and tried to get some rest.

  The next morning, Marc led them cautiously down the river valley to a sheltered place where they could see the village, although at first none of them could make out what he was pointing at. It was a wonder, not to say a miracle, he had noticed it at all, soaring past it in the Ultra-Light. Intended to blend into their surroundings, the masonry and terraces fit seamlessly into the layered, river-cut stone of the cliffside. Roof lines showed sudden displacements, changing height and materials to mimic subsidences and shifts in the rock. Openings were not squared or uniform but varied in concert with the shadowed overhangs where the natural rock had spalled off and fallen toward the river.

  Even at this distance, they could see many rooms that opened directly onto terraces overlooking the river. There were large open-weave river-reed parasols, nearly invisible in the surrounding vines and foliage, providing midday shade. These relatively flimsy structures supported D.W.’s impression that the village had been inhabited not long ago; they would not have withstood many storms without upkeep.

  "Plague?" Jimmy asked Anne softly. There was still no sign of the villagers, and seeing their emptied dwellings was distinctly eerie.

  "No, I wouldn’t think so," she said quietly. "There’d be bodies lying around, or mourners, or something. Maybe there’s a war going on and they were all evacuated?"

  They watched for a while, speculating and studying the village, trying to estimate population and drawing grim whispered conclusions about the missing inhabitants.

  "Awright, awright, let’s go take a closer look," D.W. said finally.

  D.W. posted George and Jimmy as lookouts, armed with radio transceivers, in positions high above the village, where they could see the river and the plain that sloped away eastward from the clifftops. Then he let Marc lead the rest of them up the cliffside, where they began a furtive tour of the dwellings they could enter through the terraces without disturbing anything.

  "I feel like Goldilocks," Anne whispered, as they peeked into rooms and moved through passageways and picked their way along exterior rock walkways.

  "I was hoping for some artwork that would show us what they look like," Marc admitted. The walls were bare, the stone neither plastered nor painted. There were no sculptures. No representational art at all. There was, in general, a sparseness of furnishings, but evidence of craftsmanship was everywhere. Large cushions with beautifully woven, brilliantly colored covers filled some spaces; other rooms had low platforms, of grained material like wood, that might have been tables. Or benches, perhaps. The joinery was superb.

  The inhabitants’ departure did not appear to have been rushed. There were rooms or regions of rooms that were apparently used for food preparation, but no food was left out. They
found closed containers that probably contained staples but did not open anything, not wanting to tamper with the seals. Pots, bowls, platters, ceramic containers of all kinds were stored on high rock shelves and cutlery was suspended from racks in rafters, high overhead.

  "Well, they’ve got hands," Anne said, looking at the knife handles. "I can’t quite work out how I’d hold one of those things, but some kind of fingers are involved."

  "They’ll be closer to Jimmy’s height than ours," Sofia said to Anne. Almost all the storage was far above her reach. That was true at home as well, but it was more extreme here. She found it odd that everything was either very low or very high.

  There was no pattern to the rooms that they could figure out on their first pass. Spaces varied in size and shape, often following natural hollows in the rock but with subtle enlargements in volume. In one very large room, they found a vast collection of huge baskets. In a smaller one, beautiful friction-stoppered glassware, filled with liquids. They moved along in the spooky silence for a while longer, expecting at any moment to come face to face with who knew what. Just as they were about to leave, George’s voice, tinny in the tiny radio speaker, sounded in the quiet.

  "D.W.?"

  Anne almost jumped out of her skin at the sound of her own husband’s words, and there was a burst of nervous laughter all round, which D.W. silenced with a scattershot glare.

  "Right here."

  "Guess who’s coming for dinner."

  "How far off? And how many of ’em?"

  "I can just see the first of them coming around a hill about five miles northeast of here." There was a short silence. "Wow. It’s a gang of ’em. Walking. Bigs and littles. Looks like families. Carrying stuff. Baskets, I think." There was another brief silence. "What do you want us to do?"

  D.W. sorted through their options quickly and was about to say something when Emilio headed out through the nearest terrace, pausing momentarily, and inexplicably, to pick small blossoms from the vines he passed before setting off toward George’s outpost. D.W. watched Emilio leave, open-mouthed, and looked at Anne and Marc and Sofia. Then he spoke into the radio. "We’re on our way. Meet us where you see us."