The Sparrow s-1

by Mary Doria Russel

  "We had no idea what was going to happen. We just went up to the plain because everyone else did," Sandoz said. "Marc was the only one of us who'd seen any Jana'ata besides Supaari, and he was very uneasy about this patrol. The VaKashani asked us to stay in the center and keep quiet, and Marc thought this was correct. He was very agitated, yes? He told me he'd seen something in the city but he couldn't be sure he'd understood it. Manuzhai told us to be quiet, so I never found out what he meant. All I knew was that Marc was frightened, but the Runa seemed to be taking the situation fairly calmly. Then the patrol began to kill the babies."

  Emilio sat down and put his head in his hands. Brother Edward went to the lavatory for the Prograine, but Sandoz was talking again when Behr came back into the office, and he ignored the bottle of pills Ed put next to him. "There is a phrase in Hebrew," he was telling them. "Eshet chayil: woman of valor. Sofia realized what was happening before the rest of us."

  "And she resisted," Giuliani said, realizing now how violence had become linked with the Jesuit party.

  "Yes. I heard her say it first, but then it was picked up by the VaKashani and became a sort of chant: 'We are many. They are few.' She said this and then she walked forward." He saw her at night, in the dreams: head up, a princely posture. "She lifted one of the babies from the ground. I think the Jana'ata commander was so astonished by her existence that he simply couldn't move at first. But then the whole village surged forward to retrieve the children, and when the Runa moved, the patrol began to react very quickly." He sat, breathing deeply, eyes wide, staring at the table. "It was a bloodbath," he said finally.

  Voelker leaned forward. "Perhaps you would like to stop now?"

  "No. No. I need to finish this." Emilio's head lifted and he looked at the bottle of Prograine but did not touch it. "The patrol, I think, was out of control for a time. I believe it was the combination of shock over our presence and outrage that the Runa had moved against them. And what Sofia said was terrifying to them, yes? You must understand that the Jana'ata also strictly limit their numbers to those that can be sustained by this system of breeding. Their population structure is almost exactly that of a predator species in the wild, about four percent of the prey population. Supaari explained this to me. So to hear the Runa chanting, 'We are many. They are few'—this must have been nightmarish for them."

  "I can't believe you're defending them," Felipe said, aghast. There was a burst of talk, argument about the Stockholm syndrome. Emilio put his hands over his head while it went on. Suddenly he brought his fists down to the table with soft control, careful not to damage the braces, and said with quiet precision, "If you keep up this noise, I will have to quit."

  They fell silent then, and he pulled in a careful breath. "I am not defending them. I am trying to explain to you what happened and why. But it is their society, and they pay their own price for their way of life." He looked, hard-eyed, at Reyes and demanded, "What is the population of Earth now, Felipe? Fourteen, fifteen billion?"

  "Almost sixteen," Felipe said quietly.

  "There are no beggars on Rakhat. There is no unemployment. There is no overcrowding. No starvation. No environmental degradation. There is no genetic disease. The elderly do not suffer decline. Those with terminal illness do not linger. They pay a terrible price for this sys­tem, but we too pay, Felipe, and the coin we use is the suffering of children. How many kids starved to death this afternoon, while we sat here? Just because their corpses aren't eaten doesn't make our species any more moral!"

  Giuliani let this outburst burn itself out. When Sandoz got ahold of himself again, the Father General repeated, "Tell us what happened."

  Emilio looked at him, as though lost, but finally realized that he had gone off track. "I believe the patrol meant only to kill the infants, origi­nally. Supaari told me later that if the villagers bred a second time without permission, it would have been a capital offense for the females who'd given birth. But because the Runa resisted, the patrol overreacted. They clearly meant to crush the riot."

  "How many were killed?" Giuliani asked levelly.

  "I don't know. Perhaps a third of the VaKashani. Maybe more." He looked away. "And Sofia. And Jimmy. And George." Emilio finally gave in and reached for the Prograine. Too late, most likely, for it to do any good. They watched him as he washed down two of the tablets and drained the glass of water.

  "And where were you?" Giuliani asked.

  "Toward the center of the crowd. Askama was very frightened. When the killing started, Manuzhai and I were trying to shield her with our bodies. Chaypas was killed, defending us."

  "And Father Robichaux?"

  "He ran." Sandoz looked at Felipe and said softly, "I'm not defending him either, but there wasn't anything he could have done. We were the size of half-grown children and it was utter chaos. There was no chivalry. Anyone who came within reach was cut down." He was almost pleading with them to understand. "We were completely unprepared for this! Supaari was so different. Try to imagine what it was like!"

  "The Jana'ata military is the martial arm of a sentient predatory species," Voelker said quietly. "And they were defending civilization as they know it. It must have been terrifying."

  "Yes." It was getting harder. "I've got to have the lights out." Voelker got up to take care of it for him. Then he heard the Father General's voice again.

  "Tell us."

  "I was taken prisoner immediately." He could hear Askama, screaming his name. "Marc was hunted down without difficulty. We were taken with the Jana'ata patrol. From village to village. I don't think they necessarily understood that we were responsible for the gardens. They didn't know what to make of us. They had a job to do, and they took us along. I believe they meant eventually to bring us to the city of Inbrokar, to the capital. In every village along the route, the gardens were burned and there was a slaughter of innocents. I've got to finish this." He stopped, concentrated on keeping his breathing steady. "Marc—you understand that the gardens were Marc's, yes? To witness this slaughter—" A few more minutes. "The Jana'ata eat only once a day. We were offered food each morning and then force-marched for many hours. Marc refused to eat. I tried to persuade him, but he would only say something in French. A few words."

  He took his hands away from his head and tried to look at them. "I am illiterate in many languages," he told them. "I have learned to speak Arabic and Amharic and K'San, but not to read them. French is the only language I read but do not speak. It is very different in its spoken form, yes?" The light was too much. He closed his eyes again. "When I tried to make Marc eat, he would say, 'Ill son, less and sawn.' Something like that. I should have recognized it…"

  "Us sont les innocents," It was Giuliani's voice. "It is hard to think the unthinkable. They were offering you the meat of the innocents."

  Emilio was trembling badly now. "Yes. Later, I myself saw what—Nothing was wasted. Ed?" He managed to hold on until Brother Edward got him to the lavatory, and when the sickness passed, Ed replaced the vomited Prograine with an injected dose. He had no idea who took him to his room but before he fell asleep, he said, "I dream of it sometimes."

  Johannes Voelker, the beads of a rosary passing through his fingers, was with him when he awoke. "I am sorry," he said.

  It was two days before Sandoz was able to continue. "You told us that you believed you were being brought by the military to the capital city," Giuliani began. "I take it you did not reach—" He consulted his notes. "Inbrokar."

  "No. Supaari told me later that he arrived at Kashan about two days after the massacre. He attended to matters there and then came af­ter Marc and me. He had to guess at the route, I suppose. I think we were on the march for perhaps two weeks before he caught up with us. This period of time was very confused. And we were not functioning well. I tried to get Marc to eat. I—He was not able to do this. After a while I gave up."

  "But you ate the meat," John said. "After you knew."

  "Yes." Emilio stopped, searching for some way to ex
plain. "There was a time in the British military when it was possible to punish a man with as many as eight hundred lashes. Have you read of such things? Some men actually survived this, and they reported that after a time, they no longer felt any pain. They felt only a sort of hammering. It was like that, in my soul. Do you understand? To watch the children killed, to eat the meat. After a time, it felt only like hammering." He shrugged. They were trying, but he knew they couldn't imagine it. "Anyway, Supaari caught up to the patrol. By the time he found us, Marc was very weak. I think the commander would have killed him soon. He was slowing them up." There had been no emotion when he saw Supaari. He and Marc simply sat on the ground, too tired to think or hope or pray. Even with the meat, he was exhausted. He knew he couldn't keep Marc on his feet much longer, that he was close to collapse himself. "I think Supaari bribed the commander. There was a long discussion. It was in a language I didn't know."

  "So Supaari took you back to Kashan?" John prompted, when the silence went on too long.

  Sandoz roused himself. "No. I don't know that we'd have been welcome there. He took us to Gayjur. To his own compound. I never saw Kashan again."

  "Based on Father Robichaux's descriptions of his time in that city, you would have been relatively safe there, as long as you kept out of sight," the Father General said. "Or perhaps I am wrong?"

  "I believe Supaari originally meant it to be safe for us. He may not have been clear about his own motives. He felt some duty toward us, perhaps. He was fond of Anne, genuinely, I believe. And we had made him a very wealthy man. He was quite empathetic for a Jana'ata. I think he could imagine to some extent what it might be like, to be alone and unsupported."

  Vincenzo Giuliani became very still, but Sandoz did not notice. I deserved that, Giuliani thought, echoing Johannes Voelker's remark, even if it wasn't intentional.

  "In any case," Sandoz was saying, "he evidently decided to ransom us and brought us to his home and took responsibility for us. He made us part of his household."

  "That was when he took you to see the ivy, the sta'aka?" John asked.

  "Yes." For once, he did not have to explain. Sitting impassively, his mind drifted as John Candotti told the others about the hasta'akala. About the way the hands were made to look like the trailing branches of ivy, which grows on stronger plants, to symbolize and enforce dependence. John now realized why Marc died. "What if Marc was developing scurvy?" he'd asked Sandoz. "Was there something you ate that Marc didn't?" It wasn't scurvy that killed Marc Robichaux, it was starvation and anemia. And, quite possibly, despair.

  He realized later that he'd gone into clinical shock about halfway through the destruction of his left hand. Over the next few days, he would come to himself at intervals, damp and cold and suffering from a thirst unlike anything he'd experienced previously. It seemed impossible to draw enough breath and when he slept, there were dreams of suffocation or drowning. Sometimes, dreaming, he would reach for something, trying to pull himself to air, and his hands would spasm as a dog's legs will twitch during dreams of running, and he would awaken screaming as the involuntary motion sent thin bolts of phosphorescent pain up the long nerves of his arms.

  For a time, the heavy immobility of bloodlessness kept him from looking at what had been done. His hands felt clubbed, swollen and throbbing, but he could not lift his head to see them. Periodically, someone would come and exercise his fingers, stretching them flat. He had no idea why this was done. He knew only that the stretching was agony and, sobbing, begged for it to stop. His pleas were in Spanish and therefore unintelligible, but it wouldn't have mattered if he had spoken a pure and perfect High K'San. They believed it was necessary to prevent contractures from spoiling the line of his fingers' fall from the wrist. So they let him scream.

  As his body slowly replaced the blood he'd lost, he was able to move, but there was no profit in it. The scabs were forming then and the itching that heralded healing maddened him. They tied him down to keep him from tearing at the bandages with his teeth, frantic and weep­ing with misery. His struggles against the binding may well have prevented blood clots from forming in his legs and breaking loose to kill him with stroke or heart attack. And, God help him, he had eaten the meat on the long march from Kashan and so had undergone the hasta'akala when decently nourished. These things, for good or ill, probably saved his life.

  His first sentence in Ruanja was a request to know Marc's status. "That one is not strong," he was told, but he was too exhausted from the effort of asking to hear the answer and slept dreamlessly for once.

  When next he woke, his head was clear and he was alone, unbound, in a sunlit room. With great effort, he got himself to a sitting position and looked at his hands for the first time. He had nothing left to react with, too weak even to wonder why it had been done.

  He was still sitting, hunched and pallid and staring at nothing, when one of the Runa servants came in. "Someone's heart will sicken if he does not see Marc," he said as firmly as he could.

  Like twin infants put in different rooms to keep them from waking each other up, the two foreigners had been separated. The Runa knew that the sheer physical stamina evidenced by screaming meant that the smaller of the two would likely survive. They had hope of the quiet one but not much, and took him away to keep his strength from being sapped by the other's constant waking. "That one is sleeping," Awijan told Sandoz. "Someone will bring you to him when he wakes."

  Two days later, he sat again in wait for her, determined now to go to Marc no matter what. "Someone's heart will stop if he does not see Marc," he insisted, and stood, moving toward the door on thin legs empty of bone. The Runao caught him as he fell and, muttering, carried him through the compound to the room where Marc was sleeping.

  The stink of blood was everywhere and Marc was the color of rain. Emilio sat on the edge of the sleeping nest, his own ruined hands in his lap, and called Robichaux's name. Marc's eyes opened, and there was a glimmer of recognition.

  He had no clue to what Marc said during those last hours. In Latin, he asked Marc if he wished to confess. There was more whispered French. When it stopped, Emilio said the absolution. Marc slept then and he did as well, sitting on the floor next to the bed, his head resting next to Marc's right hand, still seeping blood. Sometime that night, he felt something brush his hair and heard someone say, "Deus vult." It might have been a dream.

  In the morning, when the sunlight hit his eyes, he awoke, stiff and wretched. Rousing himself, he left the room and tried to get a Runab to call a healer or to put pressure on the oozing wounds between Marc's fingers. Awijan only looked at him blankly. Later, he wondered if he'd remembered to speak Ruanja. Maybe he'd used Spanish again. He would never be sure.

  Marc Robichaux died about two hours later without regaining consciousness.

  "Father Robichaux was in poor physical condition when this procedure took place," John was saying, "and did not survive it."

  Emilio looked up and saw that everyone was staring at his hands. He put them in his lap.

  "It must have been very difficult," the Father General said.

  "Yes."

  "And then you were alone."

  "Oh, no," Emilio said softly. "Oh, no. I believed that God was with me." He said this with great sincerity and because of that, it was impossible to know if he was serious or if this was mockery. He sat and looked into Vincenzo Giuliani's eyes. "Do you believe that? Was God with me?" He looked around at each of them: John Candotti, Felipe Reyes, Johannes Voelker, Edward Behr, his eyes coming to rest again on Giuliani, who found it impossible to speak.

  Sandoz rose and went to the door, opening it. Then he paused, struck by a thought. "Not comedy. Not tragedy." Then he laughed, a feral sound, devoid of humor. "Perhaps farce?" he suggested. And then he left.

  32

  NAPLES:

  AUGUST 2060

  "I think perhaps that I was a disappointment to Supaari," Sandoz told them the next day. "Anne was a delight to work with, and they had enjoyed each oth
er a great deal. I was not nearly so amusing."

  "You were grieving and terrified and half-dead," Voelker told him flatly. And John nodded, in agreement at last with something Johannes Voelker had said.

  "Yes! A poor dinner companion." Sandoz had a bright and brittle sound to him this afternoon. Giuliani was openly disapproving of this strange glittery mood; Sandoz ignored him. "I'm not sure Supaari really thought through the idea of formally accepting me as a dependent. It might have been a sort of spontaneous gesture of interplanetary goodwill. Maybe he wished he'd let the government have me after all." San­doz shrugged. "In any case, he seemed primarily interested in the trade aspects of the situation, and I was not much good to him as an economic adviser. He asked me if I thought that there might be other parties coming from Earth. I told him that we had radioed news of our situation back to our home planet and that it was possible others might come. We had no way of knowing when. He decided to learn English from me because it is our lingua franca. He had already started to pick it up from Anne."

  "So. You had work as a linguist," Giuliani said lightly. "For a time, at least."

  "Yes. Supaari was making the best of things, I think. We had many conversations, once I was well enough to sort out which language I was supposed to use. It was good English practice for him, and he explained many things to me. You should be grateful to him. Most of what I understand about what happened came from him. He was very helpful."

  "How long were you with him?" Giuliani asked.

  "I'm not really sure. Six to eight months, perhaps? I learned K'San during that time. Appalling language. The hardest I've ever learned. Part of the joke, I suppose," he said, inexplicably. He stood up and began to walk around the room, jumpy and distractible.