The Sparrow s-1

by Mary Doria Russel

  It was the most extraordinary thing he'd ever encountered. He knew he was getting esters and aldehydes, and the smell of burnt sugars certainly, but the scent was staggeringly complex. All this from a few small brown objects, oval, incised with a longitudinal line. Supaari covered his excitement with the ease of a man who has made a living of concealment. Even so, it came to him with a jolt that here, at last, was something that might interest Hlavin Kitheri, the Reshtar of Galatna.

  "Someone's heart is glad," he told Chaypas, raising his tail with mild pleasure, not wanting to alarm her. "A remarkable scent, full of curiosity, as you say."

  "Sipaj, Supaari! These kafay were given to someone by foreigners." She used a Ruanja word meaning "people from the next river valley," but her eyes were open very wide and her tail was twitching. There was some delicious joke here, Supaari realized, but he let her enjoy the amusement at his expense. "Askama is interpreting!" she told him.

  "Askama!" he cried, throwing his hands up in delight, elegant claws clicking. "A good child, quick to learn." And ugly as white water in a narrow gorge, but no matter. If Chaypas's household was interpreting for the Kashan corporation, Supaari would have an exclusive trading relationship with the new delegation, by Runa custom if not by Jana'ata law and, in cases like this, Runa custom was all that counted. He'd based his life on that understanding and if it brought him no honor, it nonetheless provided much of what he savored: risk to stalk, intellectual challenge and a certain grudging deference among his own.

  They chatted a while longer. He established that these small kafay were only a sample of a much larger store of unusual goods brought by the foreigners, who were staying in Kashan in Chaypas's own household. And Supaari heard with growing interest that they seemed to have no notion of profit, giving their goods away for the food and shelter that was theirs by right, as sojourners. Cunning, he wondered, or some nomadic remnant group, still bartering in the old, clean ways?

  Supaari laid the little packet aside and, disciplined, did not allow himself to trail and capture the idea that he had scented in the distance: posterity and a way out of the living death he was born to. He rose instead and refilled Chaypas's cup, asking after her plans. She told him she would be visiting trade partners in the Ezao district. She was in no hurry to return home. All the other VaKashani would be leaving the village soon to harvest pik root.

  "And the foreigners?" he asked. He was already planning the trip in his mind, maybe in mid-Partan, after the rains. But Kitheri came first. It all hinged on Hlavin Kitheri.

  "Sometimes they come with us, sometimes they stay in Kashan. They are like children," Chaypas told him. She seemed a little puzzled by this herself. "Too small to travel like adults but only one to carry them. And that one lets them walk!"

  If Supaari was curious before, he was baffled now, but Chaypas was showing signs of nervousness, swaying from side to side, as she often did when she spent too much time in ghost houses.

  "Sipaj, Chaypas," he said, rising smoothly from his cushions, calculating that enough time had passed for Awijan to have concluded terms with the ribbon suppliers. "Such a long journey you've made! Someone's heart would be glad to send you to Ezao in a chair."

  Her tail came up with pleasure and she even trembled a little, her eyes sliding away and closing. This bordered on flirtation and it passed his mind that she was remarkably attractive. He smothered the spark before it caught fire. Third-born, he still had his standards, which were considerably higher than those of his social betters. Urbane and sophisticated in many ways, Supaari VaGayjur was thoroughly bourgeois in others.

  He sent a runner for a chair and, stifling yawns, waited with Chaypas in the courtyard until it arrived shortly after second sundown. He could hardly see her as she climbed into the chair but the fragrance of her ribbons was very fine; she had wonderful taste in perfumes, a natural elegance that Supaari admired. "Sipaj, Chaypas," he called quietly, "safe journey to Ezao and thence home." She returned his farewell, laughing breathily as the bearers lifted the chair supports, rocking the seat.

  It was a luxury few Runa ever experienced, to be carried through the narrow city streets like a lord. Supaari was genuinely pleased to provide her with an evening she would remember, borne through the crowds of urban Runa, safe to go about their personal business in the blushing light of evening, while the Jana'ata slept. The breeze off the bay would carry her new ribbons like cirrus clouds behind her, their fragrance rising like mist from a cataract. By tomorrow, merchants from all over the city of Gayjur would be looking for ribbon at any price, and Supaari VaGayjur would own every scrap of it.

  It was Sofia Mendes's fate to enrich investors who were unknown to her. The heavy black hair, which had inspired Chaypas to invent a new fashion, was at this moment pushed carelessly back, the ribbons Askama had braided into it slipping into disarray. Irritable as Sofia Mendes was, she'd have cut it all off without a thought, had scissors been handy. She'd brewed a cup of coffee out of habit, but it was too hot today to drink it and it cooled at her elbow; soon, such profligacy would be shocking. At the moment, however, beauty, adornment and wealth were further from her mind than usual, which was very far indeed. Her intellect was wholly occupied with the task of finding some sufficiently uncivil response to Emilio Sandoz's suggestion that she was being stupid.

  "I can explain it to you again, but I can't understand it for you."

  "You are insufferable," she whispered.

  "I am not insufferable. I am correct," he whispered back. "If you prefer to memorize each declension separately, please do so. But the pattern is perfectly apparent."

  "It's a false generalization. It doesn't make any sense."

  "Oh, and I suppose that assigning gender to tables and chairs and hats and declining nouns on that basis does make sense? Language is arbitrary by nature," he informed her. "If you want sense, study calculus."

  "Sarcasm is not argument, Sandoz."

  Emilio took a deep breath and began again with unconcealed impatience. "All right. Once more. It is not abstract versus concrete. If you try to force that rule on Ruanja, you'll make consistent errors. It is spatial versus unseen or nonvisual." He reached out toward the tablet that lay on the table between them and stabbed a finger down at a section of the display, careful not to jar Askama, who had just fallen asleep in his arms. "Consider this group. Animal, vegetable or mineral: these words all denote something that takes up space in some manner and they are all declined with this pattern. You follow?" He pointed to another section of the screen. "In contrast, these nouns are nonspatial: thought, hope, affection, learning. This group takes the second pattern of declension. Clear so far?"

  Concrete and abstract, dammit, she thought stubbornly. "Yes, fine. What I don't understand is—"

  "I know what you don't understand! Stop arguing with me and listen!" He ignored her glare. "The overall rule is, anything that can be seen is always classified as occupying space, because seeing things is how you know they are spatial, so you use the first declension. The trick is that anything unseen, including but not limited to things that are inherently nonvisual, takes this second declension." He sat back abruptly and then glanced down at Askama, relieved to see she was still sleeping. "Now. I invite you to disprove. Please. Just try."

  She had him. Face bright as ivory in the sun, she leaned forward and prepared to deliver the coup de grace. "Not ten minutes ago, Askama said, Chaypas-ru zhari i washan, and she used what you call the non-visual declension. But Chaypas is very large. Chaypas most certainly takes up a good deal of space—"

  "Yes. Brava! Perfect. Now, think!"

  He was being patronizing. She stared at him, open-mouthed, ready to detonate, when it suddenly came clear. Letting her head fall abruptly into her hands, she muttered, "But Chaypas is gone. So you can't see him. So you don't use the spatial declension. You use the nonvisual, even though Chaypas is concrete and not abstract." She looked up. He was grinning. "I hate it when you're smug."

  The dark, merry eyes we
re triumphant. Emilio Sandoz had taken no vow of false modesty. It was a nice piece of analysis and he was immensely pleased with himself, and it had not escaped his own notice that he'd won Sofia's bet with Alan Pace. They'd made contact with the Runa only seven weeks ago, but he already had the basic grammar nailed. Damn, I'm good, he thought to himself, and his grin widened as Sofia stared at him through narrowed eyes, trying to think of some case that wouldn't fit the model.

  "All right, all right," she said ungraciously, picking up her tablet, "I concede. Give me a few minutes to get it all down."

  They were a good team. Sandoz was a master of this discipline but she was a far better writer, fast and clear. Already three papers bearing the authorship "E. J. Sandoz and S. R. Mendes" had been radioed back for submission to scholarly journals.

  Finished with her notes, Sofia looked up and smiled. She had met before, in yeshiva students whom her parents often invited to dinner when she was a girl, this mixture of incisive intelligence and dreaminess, the joyful combative intellectual style and the tendency to fall into an inner world, absorbed and remote. Barelegged and barefoot, Sandoz was tanned to the color of cinnamon, wearing the loose khaki shorts and oversized black T-shirt that had replaced the soutane, impossibly hot in this climate. Sofia herself was equally browned, similarly dark and slender, dressed as simply, and she could understand why Manuzhai had assumed at first that she and Emilio were "littermates." The notion had been funny and embarrassing, as Manuzhai's pantomimed explanation of the word had been, but she could see how a Runao might come to that conclusion.

  Askama sighed, stretching out a little. Emilio came to life and looked at Sofia with round-eyed alarm. Askama was dear, but she chattered incessantly; naps like this one were a welcome relief. "I wonder," said Sofia very softly, when it was clear that Askama would not awaken, "if a blind Runao would always use the nonvisual declension."

  "Now that is an interesting question," Emilio said, inclining his head with respect, and she was tartly pleased to have reestablished claim to an adequate intelligence. He thought a while, rocking the hammock chair gently, one fine-boned foot braced against a hampiy stem, fingers stroking the soft fur behind Askama's ears. The sunrise smile reappeared. "If you could feel a thing, you would also know it took up space! Look for something that has contour or form or texture. Wager?"

  "Lejano, maybe, or tinguen" she suggested. "No bets."

  "No guts! I could be wrong," he said cheerfully, "but I doubt it. Try lejano first." He smiled down at the top of Askama's head before returning his eyes to the small herd of piyanot grazing on the plain beyond the stems of the hampiy shelter.

  "They make a handsome couple, don't they," Anne said as she and D.W. strolled along the edge of the gorge, above the village.

  "Yes, ma'am," D.W. agreed. "They do indeed." Everyone else was occupied or asleep, and they had found themselves restless together. Anne proposed a walk, and D.W. was happy to accompany her. Manuzhai had warned them all, repeatedly, against walking alone. A "djanada," whatever that was, might get them; so they traveled in pairs, more to mollify Manuzhai and the other Runa than because of any serious fear of predators or bogeymen.

  "Jealous?" Anne asked. "They're both yours in a way, aren't they."

  "Oh, hell, I'm not sure jealous is the right word," said D.W., who stopped for a moment to gaze crookedly at Sofia and Emilio, playing house with Askama out in the hampiy. He turned back to Anne and grinned lopsidedly and briefly before he squinted off into the west, across the river. "It's kinda like watchin' Notre Dame go up against the University of Texas in the Cotton Bowl. I don't hardly know what to hope for."

  Anne laughed appreciatively and leaned her head against his shoulder. "Oh, D.W., I love you. I truly do. Of course, I've always had a weakness for a guy in a uniform."

  It was an opening, and he walked through it, smiling. "You, too?"

  "The Marines are looking for a few good men," Anne intoned, quoting the old recruitment slogan as they strolled south.

  "Yeah, well. So was I." His eyes remained, more or less, straight ahead as he sang quietly, "But that was long ago and very far away."

  "Exactly," Anne smiled. "My darling: the nearest closet is four and a third light years from here. Sofia knows. I know. Marc—"

  "Is my confessor."

  "Jimmy and George don't have a clue, but it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference to either of them," said Anne. "Which leaves Emilio."

  D.W. sank slowly to his knees and motioned Anne to stay back. Moving cautiously, he brought his hand out over a little tuft of dusty lavender foliage and remained in position for several seconds. Then his hand shot out, carefully covering and then lifting a small two-legged snakeneck, which had been virtually undetectable pushing its way slowly into something else's burrow, hoping to find lunch. He stood and handed it to Anne.

  "Isn't it pretty! Look, you can see a couple of vestigial front legs on this one," she cried, holding it out for him to see. "I never find stuff like that. You are amazing."

  "You grow up like I did, ma'am, you learn a fair bit about camouflage."

  "I'll bet you do, at that," she said. She put the snakeneck back down by the burrow and they continued their walk. "Emilio thinks the world of you, D.W. Okay, sure. He's probably carrying around some unexamined macho crapola he'd have to reconsider, but he's capable of adjusting an attitude."

  "Hell, I know that," D.W. said. "And I'm not ashamed of what I am. But if he'd known when he was a kid, he wouldn't have come within a mile of me. And after all these years of him not knowin', what's the point of sayin' anything?"

  "To put down a load. To be accepted, entirely, as you are." He smiled at that without looking at her and draped an arm over her shoulders. "Surely you don't imagine that he'd think less of you."

  "Well, now, see. There's exactly the problem, Anne. I'm afraid he'd think more of me. Which is to say, I'm afraid the whole issue would occupy his mind to some extent and I don't want to distract him with trivia right now. Course, he'd work it all through and he'd realize that I'd played straight with him all along—"

  "So to speak."

  He laughed. "Poor choice of words." He stopped and scuffed a rock out of the ground with his foot. "It's not like I ever lied to him. Subject just never came up. I never asked him if he was straight and he never asked me if I wasn't. Closest we ever came to it was when he asked me about another guy, years ago. I just told him, hell, we ain't all abstainin' from the same thing."

  "And what did he make of that?" Anne asked, smiling.

  "Took it at face value." D.W. looked at the mountains south of them. Somewhere on the other side of the range was Alan Pace's grave. "Look, Anne. The way things are is fine. I don't need anything from Emilio. What went on inside my head years ago is my business. And it's history."

  She couldn't argue with that. She might have said the same thing herself, had their positions been reversed. "Okay, okay. Message received."

  "I 'preciate the thought, Anne, I surely do, and under other circumstances, you might be right. But, here, now—" D.W. leaned over to pick up the rock he'd unearthed and whipped it off across the gorge, loose-shouldered and accurate. It fell just short of the other side and rattled down the cliff to the river below them. "What concerns me is the big picture. You know as well as I do, everything about this mission has been damn near to miraculous. And Emilio is the key to it. I don't want to muddy the waters! I don't want him thinkin' about me. Or Mendes either, far as that goes. I ain't gonna make an issue of them workin' together because they're handlin' it okay. And they're doin' some fine research. But, frankly, I'm holdin' my breath."

  There was a silence, and Anne sat down, legs dangling over the ledge. D.W. stood for a while, less confident about the stability of the rock formation, but joined her at last and occupied his hands by flipping stones out into the void.

  "D.W., I'm not arguing with you. I'm just asking, okay?" He nodded, so she went on, "Let's say the Age of Miracles hasn't closed down altogether ye
t, okay? Just for argument's sake. And we agree that Emilio is very special. But so is Sofia, right?"

  "No kick so far."

  "Well, it just seems to me that there is some pretty powerful theology on the side of love and sex and families. It seems to me that a fairly authoritative Personage once commented that it is not good for man to be alone. Rome, along with all closets," Anne pointed out archly, "is very far away. We have been gone almost two decades. Maybe priests can marry now! And in any case, I fail to see how Emilio would be cheating God out of anything by loving Sofia."

  "Annie, you are troddin' a path that's worn to bedrock." D.W. reached behind himself and scooped up another handful of pebbles. A spasm of pain crossed his face, but Anne put it down to the topic. "Oh, hell, I don't know. Maybe it wouldn't make a dime's worth of difference. Maybe they'd just be happy and have a fine bunch of kids an' God would love 'em all…"

  They sat for a time listening to the sounds of the river and staring at the western sky, blazing now with the colors of first sundown. D.W. seemed to be working something out, so Anne just waited until he spoke again.

  "Bear with me here, 'cause I'm just stirrin' this around some with a stick. But, Anne," he said softly, "it seems to me that sainthood, like genius, is rooted in a sort of inspired persistence. It's a consistent willing of one thing. It's that kind of consistency and focus I see at work in Emilio."

  "D.W., are you serious?" Anne sat still, eyes wide open. "You think Emilio is a s—"

  "I didn't say that! I'm talkin' in the abstract here. But Marc and me, we been hashin' it out and, yes, I see the potential for it, and it's my job to protect that, Anne." He hesitated a moment before confessing, "Maybe I shouldn't have but I did in fact use the S-word in one report back to Rome. I tole 'em I think we got us a gen-u-wine big-time mystic on our hands. 'Wedded to God and at certain moments, in full communion with divine love, is how I put it." He dumped the last few rocks, brushed the dirt off his hands and leaned over to watch the pebbles clatter downward, elbows on his knees, the big-knuckled hands loose between his legs. "Hell of a management problem," he said after a time. "They don't cover this one back home at the Famous Father Superiors School."