The Sparrow s-1

by Mary Doria Russel

  When Jimmy brought Emilio and Marc into the apartment, Sofia was still awake, dark eyes huge in her small face, lips and eyelids swollen. She had heard what her husband had called out to Marc and guessed what had given rise to it. Flooded with love, she thought to herself: I have chosen well. She watched, too worn out to help, as Jimmy cobbled together sleeping cushions for the two priests. Marc was subdued but fine. Emilio, she knew, was not fine but he was spent, and slept almost as soon as Jimmy covered him.

  When everyone else was taken care of, Jimmy came to her and she took his hand, getting to her feet wearily. They walked out to their terrace and sat close together in the two-person glider George and Manuzhai had built, Sofia nestling under Jimmy's arm, her small hand on his thigh. Jimmy set the chair in motion and for a while, they rocked in companionable quiet. It was clouding up. Moons that had been bright only half an hour earlier were already reduced to hazy glowing disks in the sky. Sofia felt the baby move and drew Jimmy's hand to her belly and watched his face light up, his red-rimmed eyes unfocused as he listened with his fingers to the dance within her.

  They spoke then, with the dear and ordinary intimacy of the well-married in the eye of a storm. George was doing okay, considering. Marc was getting his bearings. Emilio seemed stunned but had been able to cry a little.

  "And you, Sofia? You look so tired," Jimmy said, worried about her and the child. My God, he thought suddenly. What will we do without Anne? What if the baby is breech? Please, God, let it be a girl, a tiny girl who takes after Sofia and my mom. An easy birth, please, God. And he wondered if they could get back home before the due date if the lander fuel could be manufactured soon enough. But he said, "Do you want to tell me about it tonight or wait until later?"

  She had sworn she would never again keep anything from him. Her vow to herself and to him: she would not carry burdens alone. So she began, voice pitched low, to tell him of the past two days.

  "Sandoz? I'm sorry." She watched him struggle awake, feeling terrible for waking him. "I'm sorry," she repeated as he sat up blinking.

  Emilio looked around him, a little confused yet. Then his eyes opened wide and he asked anxiously, "D.W.?"

  Sofia shook her head and shrugged. "It's only that I heard something a while ago. I'm probably being an alarmist, but Anne and D.W. have been gone a long time. I think we should go find them."

  Still thickheaded, he nodded agreeably: Sure, absolutely, if you say so. And looked around for his clothes, his hand dropping onto his discarded shirt, where he looked at it for a moment, as though he had no idea what to do with it. Finally, he seemed to come fully awake and Sofia said, "I'll wait outside."

  As he dressed, she berated herself for timidity. "I should have gone out myself," she called. "I shouldn't have gotten you up." Emilio was showing the effects of broken nights spent nursing D.W. and needed all the sleep he could get during the day. She felt like a caricature of a pregnant woman, scared of noises, apt to burst into tears for no good reason. The early weeks of her pregnancy had been an embarrassing emotional roller coaster.

  "No. It's okay. You did the right thing." A minute later, Sandoz appeared on the terrace, reasonably alert. He'd had perhaps four or five hours of sleep.

  They went first to the hampiy and saw the cup with its dregs of soup. Stepping back outside, Sandoz looked around. "It's quiet out there," he drawled, squinty-eyed, like an old-time cinema cowboy. "Too quiet." He said it to make her laugh, and she smiled but wished she could see Anne and D.W. somewhere.

  "They usually walk off that way." He waved vaguely toward the south. "You stay here. I can manage." D.W. was so thin now that Emilio could almost carry him alone. He and Anne could lock hands and make a sort of sling for him.

  "No," Sofia said, practical even about her own emotional upheavals. "I'll only sit and worry. I may as well come." He looked at her doubtfully so she added, "It's all right. I feel fine. Really."

  They were still north of the lander when they began to know something was wrong. The wind must have shifted because their first indica­tion of what had happened was the odor, the unmistakable smell of blood. Emilio went to the lander and quietly opened the cargo door a few inches, enough to reach in and grab D.W.'s Winchester. "Get inside, lock the door and stay there," he told her. He checked to see that the rifle was loaded, that a round was in the chamber, and walked around the lander without looking back.

  She was not sure what made her disobey the order. Maybe she was frightened to be alone and unknowing or simply determined not to shrink from whatever was waiting, but she followed him around the lander and saw then, as he did, the carnage, indistinct in the distance. Even from where they stood, some things were clear. Whatever Sandoz had thought to do with the rifle, it was too late now. Emilio turned, ashen, and saw her. "Stay here," he said, and this time she did as she was told, frozen by memories of her mother's corpse.

  She watched Emilio move toward the bodies, saw the rifle fall from his hands, saw his head turn down and away. He looked back toward it all almost immediately, and she saw his hands rise toward his head as he stood, taking in the details. She knew suddenly that it was insupportable for him to be alone with this. I am Mendes, she thought, and she forced herself to go closer but stumbled at the sight of it, and fought nausea. Nimrod, she thought numbly. The hunter of Genesis, whose prey was man.

  Emilio turned and saw her moving toward him again. She meant to pull him away from it or hold him, but before she could get closer, he said in a quiet level voice, "There are tarps and a shovel in the lander." He looked at her, eyes steady and dry, until finally she realized why he wanted her to leave. Craven, she walked back to the plane. When she returned, he was streaked and smeared and soaked with blood, and had laid the two bodies out, putting limbs in position. He wiped his gory hand on his shirt and then reached out to close the eyes, smooth the hair.

  She was almost blind with tears now but as silent as Emilio. She wanted to help him unfold the tarps, but her arms wouldn't seem to move and so, alone, he covered the butchered bodies of the father of his soul and the mother of his heart. Sick with reaction, Sofia moved to the edge of the cliff and vomited over the side. All she could think of was what a meager meal they must have made.

  The graves took a long time, the ground stony and grudging. Emilio dug close by; it was unthinkable to move the bodies in pieces. He had been too busy with the language research to help with the garden, so his hands were not hardened to the shovel. After a while, Sofia realized that he needed gloves and went for them, glad to be able to help somehow. She decided next to collect rocks in a pile, to put over the graves when the time came. That accomplished, she sat and watched, but left again an hour later to fill a canteen for him. As the long Rakhati evening wore on, he would now and then stop digging and stare hollow-eyed and at those times, Emilio would accept water from her wordlessly. Then he would lean to the task again, the relentless sound of the shovel filling the world. At dusk, Sofia got a camplight from the lander and stayed with him until he was done, sometime after midnight.

  Emilio climbed out of the second grave and sat for a time, hunched on the ground with his head in his hands. Then he stirred and pushed himself to his feet. Sofia had by that time come to some sticking point. Together, they laid the remains of D. W. Yarbrough and Anne Edwards to rest, and the shoveling began again.

  When the mounds were covered with stones, the brief, endless night was over and they simply stood staring at the graves, too exhausted to think or speak. Sofia leaned over and turned off the camplight, its orange glow lost in the light of morning. When she straightened, she found herself looking directly into the eyes of Emilio Sandoz and was appalled by what she saw.

  How long had they known each other? she wondered. Was it ten years? In all that time, she had never even called him by his given name…She tried to find words for him, some way to let him know that she had the measure of this loss, knew the weight and depth and breadth of it, and shared it.

  "Emilio," she said fina
lly, "I am your sister and we are orphaned."

  He was, she thought, too tired to weep, too shocked, but he looked at her and nodded, accepting it; let her come to him then and hold him. And when at last they embraced, she was a married woman, pregnant with his friend's child, and he was a priest in perpetuity, gutted by grief, and they clung to each other in dumb, bewildered misery.

  She led him by the hand down the cliffside, stopping for clean clothes, which she carried to the river. They washed away the blood and dirt and sweat, and dressed, and she brought him to her home, as eerily silent as the first day they'd entered this strange and beautiful village. She fixed them both something to eat; he refused at first, but she insisted. "It's a Jewish law," she told him. "You have to eat. Life goes on." Once he took the first bite, he was ravenous and finished everything she put in front of him.

  She knew as clearly as her husband would the next evening that no one should sleep alone, not now, not after all that, so she put him to bed, in Jimmy's place, and cleaned things up a little before lying down next to him. It was then that she felt the baby move for the first time. She was motionless for a moment, astonished and absorbed. Then she reached toward him and took his hand and held it against her belly. There was a breathless pause and then again the turning, the quickening. Life goes on, she meant for him to understand. Death is balanced.

  "I did not mean to be cruel," she would tell Jimmy the next night, despairingly, her small hands fisted. "I only wanted him to feel a part of life again."

  Emilio sat up suddenly and twisted away from her, shattering at last. She realized then how it must have seemed to him and begged him to forgive her, trying to explain. He understood, but it was so vivid and his isolation now seemed total, and he could not speak. She rose on her knees behind him and held him as tightly as she could, as though to keep his body from going to pieces. He was so worn out, but the sobbing lasted a long time. Finally he lay down again, his back to her, hands over his face. "God," she heard him whisper over and over, "God."

  She lay down behind him and pulled her knees up close, cradling the shaking body until she felt the spasmodic shuddering diminish and heard his breathing slow and grow even. And so they slept: bereaved and exhausted, with mourning as their chaperone.

  31

  NAPLES:

  AUGUST 2060

  It was a desiccated version of Sofia's story that the Father General and his colleagues heard from Emilio, but they had Marc Robichaux's report from that night and from the days that followed.

  "The VaKashani were kind," Sandoz told them. "When they returned and found out what had happened, they made certain no one was left alone. It was, I believe, in part a desire to comfort us but I think they were concerned that the VaHaptaa hunter who had taken Anne and D.W. was still in the region, looking for more easy prey. They were afraid for their children, naturally, but also for us because we obviously did not know how to take care of ourselves. And we had attracted trouble."

  The headaches were very bad, clusters of them coming only hours apart, crushing thought and prayer, pressing even grief out of his mind. The Runa expected emotional distress to cause illness, but they were concerned that they could find no way to compensate him. Askama would lie down next to him in the dark, waiting it out with him, and he would awaken to find her eyes on him, searching for signs that he was better. She was older, more mature by then. "Meelo," she said in English one morning, "can you not be glad again? I am very worried you might die." It was a turning point, a lifeline he was able to grasp, and he thanked God for it. He didn't want to frighten her.

  "Father Robichaux reported that there were a lot of babies at that time," John said. It seemed to him, reading the reports, that these births might have provided some sense of renewal. Indeed, Robichaux had felt this, marveling that he had forgotten "what a joy a new child can be, what a simple pleasure it is to have a baby's damp head on one's shoulder." In the last report Robichaux filed, about two weeks after the deaths of Anne Edwards and D. W. Yarbrough, Marc wrote that George Edwards had been greatly heartened by the infants placed in his arms, the press of new life around him. The Quinns, too, were awaiting a birth.

  But at John's words, Emilio's face took on the careful neutral look that now told them all he was working hard. "Yes. There were a lot of babies." He sat very still but looked steadily at Johannes Voelker. "It was the gardens."

  Knowing that he was being addressed directly for some reason but unable to see why, Voelker shook his head. "I'm sorry. I don't follow."

  "The mistake. What you've been waiting for. The fatal error."

  Voelker flushed and glanced at the Father General, who remained impassive, and then looked back at Sandoz. "I deserved that, I suppose." Sandoz waited. "I deserved that," Voelker repeated, without qualification.

  "We had all the information, really," Emilio said. "It was all there. We just didn't understand. I think perhaps that even if we had been told directly, we would not have understood."

  They listened to the clock ticking and watched him, not sure if he'd go on or leave. Then Sandoz came back to the room from where he had been and began to speak again.

  They heard the singing first. Martial and strongly measured. Snatches of it, from a distance, carried on the wind. The VaKashani stirred and gathered themselves, and moved up onto the plain to watch the patrol approach. Why hadn't they stayed in the apartments? Why hadn't they run? They might have hidden the babies, he thought later. But then again, they'd have laid down a trail that any half-competent predator could have followed. What would have been the point? So they circled—the infants, the children, the fathers in the center—and waited on the plain for the patrol to arrive.

  Later on, when he'd lived in Gayjur for a while, he understood better the limitations of village Runa; it was incomprehensible at the time. They gave the babies up. They must have known at some level that they would not be allowed to keep them, but the juices of life had risen in them and they'd chosen their own mates and nature, unnaturally aided by the foreigners' gardening with its richer food close by for the eating, had taken its course.

  "They breed to their feed, you see," Sandoz told the others. "I realized this later, and Supaari confirmed it. The system is balanced so that the Runa are ordinarily untroubled by sexual desire. They have a family life, but they don't breed unless the Jana'ata want them to. Normally, their fat levels stay low. They travel out to naturally growing resources. It costs energy to do this, yes? The gardens upset the balance." He looked from face to face, to see if they understood. "It's difficult to take it in, isn't it. You see, the Jana'ata don't keep Runa in stockyards or enslave them. The Runa work within the Jana'ata culture because they want to. They are bred to it, and it is normal for them. When a village corporate account reaches a certain level, they are provided with extra food, extra calories, and this brings the females into estrus."

  Suddenly, a phrase from a report came back to Giuliani. "Passive voice," he said. "I wondered about it when I read it. Dr. Edwards said their mates were chosen using criteria other than those used for choosing spouses."

  "Yes. Subtle, isn't it. Their mates were chosen for them: by Jana'ata geneticists. The Runa select anyone they like to marry but they are bred according to the standards of the Jana'ata." He laughed, but it was not a good sound. "It is, when you think about it, quite a humane system, compared to the way we breed meat animals."

  Felipe Reyes blanched and breathed, "Oh, my God."

  "Yes. You see it now, don't you?" Sandoz looked at Voelker, who had not yet realized. Then Voelker's eyes closed. "You see it now," Sandoz repeated, watching Voelker react. "The standards in the city, for specialists, are very high. But nothing is wasted. If the result of a mating is not up to standard, the offspring is removed as soon as possible, before an attachment can be formed. A sort of veal, one might say." Johannes Voelker looked as though he might be sick. "The village Runa are in some ways the most fortunate. They gather food and fibers and other plant products, very much a
s they might have without Jana'ata interference in their lives. Their breeding is strictly controlled, but they are not preyed on as they were in prehistory, except for the occasional VaHaptaa poacher, who still exploits the Runa in the old way, as free-range food. Supaari told us that. When was it? About two days after Anne and D.W. were killed. I myself used the word, poacher. I simply didn't realize that it implied the existence of legal use of the meat."

  "It wouldn't have made any difference, Emilio," John said.

  Sandoz stood suddenly and began to pace. "No. It wouldn't have. I understand that, John. It was already too late. The gardens had been planted. The babies had been conceived. Everywhere. All over Inbrokar. Even if I had understood the day Supaari told us, it wouldn't have made any difference." He came to rest in front of Voelker. "We asked permission. We considered the ecological impact. We simply wanted to feed ourselves, not to be a burden on the village." He stopped and then, rigorously honest, added, "And we wanted something familiar to eat. No one saw any harm in it. Not even Supaari. But he was a carnivore! He thought the garden was ornamental. It never occurred to him that we would grow food."

  The Father General sat back in his chair. "Tell us what happened."

  Emilio stood still and looked at Giuliani for a long time, as though confused. Then he told them.

  The Jana'ata officer was evidently aware of the unauthorized breeding and ordered the Runa to bring the babies forward. This was done with near silence, only some of the older children like Askama keening. The humans had been concealed in the center of the crowd. They might have escaped detection if Sofia had not gone forward, Sandoz thought. Or perhaps not. Their scent might well have been picked up within moments even if they hadn't called attention to themselves.