The Sparrow

' 'What the hell are you doing in the bathroom day and night? ' John shouted suddenly. ' 'Why don't you get out of there and give somebody else a chance? »

Emilio lay his head back against the rock, and laughed and laughed.

'Now, that is a good sound,' John said, grinning, delighted by the effect he'd had. 'You know what? I don't think I've ever heard you laugh before, not really.'

'Young Frankenstein! That's from Young Frankenstein*' Emilio gasped. 'My brother and I knew that whole movie by heart. We must have watched that thing a hundred times when we were kids. I loved Mel Brooks.'

'One of the greats,' John agreed. 'The Odyssey. Hamlet. Young Frankenstein. Some things never die.'

Emilio laughed again, wiping his eyes on his sleeve and catching his breath. 'I thought you were going to tell me things would look better in the morning or something. I was preparing to murder you.'

John checked at that but decided it was only a figure of speech. 'Heavens! Then I suppose my presence constituted the near occasion of sin, my son,' he said prissily, mimicking Johannes Voelker. 'May I join you on your rock, sir?'

'Be my guest.' Emilio moved over to make room, shaking off the lingering reaction to seeing Felipe again.

Preceded by his prowlike nose, John clambered up, all elbows and knees and big feet, envying Emilio's compact neatness, the athletic grace evident even now. John made himself fairly comfortable on the unyielding surface of the rock, and the two men admired the sunset for a while. They'd be climbing the stairs in darkness but they were both familiar with every step.

'The way I see it,' John said, breaking the silence as the light deepened to blue, 'you've got three choices. One: you can leave, like you said you wanted to, in the beginning. Leave the Society, leave the priesthood.'

'And go where? And do what?' Sandoz demanded, his face in profile as hard as the bald stone outcropping they sat on. He had not spoken of leaving since the day the reporter burst into his room, when the reality of life on the outside had shouted in his face. 'I'm trapped. And you know it.'

'You could be a rich man. The Society was offered an immense amount of money just for permission to interview you.' Emilio turned to him and, in the dusk, John could almost taste the bile rising in the other man's throat. He waited, to give Sandoz a chance to say something, but Emilio turned back to the sunless sea. 'Two: you can see the inquiry through. Explain what happened. Help us decide what to do next. We'll stand by you, Emilio.'

Elbows on his drawn-up knees, Emilio raised his hands to his head and rested the long, bony fingers there, pale and skeletal against his hair. 'If I start talking, you won't like what you hear.'

He thinks the truth is too ugly for us, John had thought, coming down the stairs after a hurried conference with Brother Edward and Father Reyes. Ed thought perhaps that Sandoz didn't realize how much of his story had been made public. 'Emilio, we know about the child,' John said quietly. 'And we know about the brothel.'

'No one knows,' Sandoz said, his voice muffled.

'Everybody knows, Emilio. Not just Ed Behr and the people at the hospital. The Contact Consortium released the whole story—'

Sandoz stood suddenly and climbed off the rock. He took off down the darkened beach, heading south, arms crossed over his chest to keep the hands tucked under his armpits. John jumped down after him and followed at a run. Overtaking Sandoz, he grabbed the smaller man's shoulder and twisted him around, shouting at him, 'How long do you think you can hold all this in? How long do you plan to carry it all yourself?'

'As long as I can, John,' Sandoz said grimly, wrenching his shoulder out of Candotti's grip and backing away from him. 'As long as I can.'

'And then what?' John yelled as Emilio turned away from him. Sandoz spun to face him.

'And then,' he said with quiet menace, 'I'll take the third option. Is that what you want to hear, John?' He stood there, trembling slightly, flat-eyed, skin drawn taut over the bones of his face.

John, his anger draining away as quickly as it had risen in him, opened his mouth to say something, but Sandoz spoke again.

'I'd have done it months ago but I'm afraid I still have enough pride to deny God the punchline for whatever sick joke I'm playing out now,' he said lightly, but his eyes were awful. 'That's what's keeping me alive, John. A little bit of pride is all I've got left.'

Pride, yes. But also fear: For in that sleep of death what dreams may come.

15 SOLAR SYSTEM: 2021 THE STELLA MARIS: 2021–2022, EARTH-RELATIVE

'Annie, it is so cool! Wait until you see it. The rock looks like this giant potato. And all I could think of when I saw it was the Muppet Show. Spuds in spa-a-a-ce!'

Anne laughed, amused by the image and relieved to have George home, if only for a few days while he and D.W. collected additional equipment. The past four weeks had been an anxious time for a woman whose faith in technology was more by practical default than informed conviction, but George had come back to her ebullient and confident, burying her misgivings in an avalanche of enthusiasm as she drove him home from the San Juan airport.

'The engines are on one end and the remote cameras and so forth are on the other end, but recessed and kind of cross-eyed, so they don't point directly in the line of travel—'

'Why's that?'

'To keep them from getting abraded by 'interstellar shit' as you so delicately put it, my dear. The cameras focus on a set of mirrors—the mirrors are exposed but we can sort of peel layers off as the images degrade, the way you peel a layered face shield off a motorcycle helmet in a dirt race. God, you look fabulous!' She kept her gaze on the road but the delicate fan of lines around her eyes deepened with pleasure. Her hair was piled in some kind of style George could only identify as «up» and she was wearing pearls and cream silk. 'So anyway,' he said, 'if you think of the potato, we dock on the long side, like where you'd put the butter—'

'Or the soy-based butteroid nonfat substance, with the taste of real margarine,' Anne muttered, eyes on the traffic.

'You fly into this tube and then there's an airlock, but you have to suit up to go from the docker to the airlock. Then you go down this little rock corridor with the wall surfaces all sealed up and there's another airlock just in case—'

'Just in case what?' Anne wanted to know, but he hardly heard her.

'Then you get to the living quarters, which are right in the center where the shielding is best and Annie, it's beautiful inside. Kinda Japanese-looking. Most of the walls are really light panels, so we don't go nuts from the dark. They're sort of like shoji screens.' She nodded. 'So. There're four concentric cylinders inside, okay? The bedrooms and the toilets are around the outer cylinder. The rooms are pie-shaped—'

'Did you set aside one for the exercise and medical equipment?'

'Yes, Doctor. I put the stuff in there, but you'll have to set it up the way you want it when you get there.' George closed his eyes, picturing the rest, then stared straight ahead, not seeing the traffic or San Juan, but the unique and wonderful vessel that would be their home soon, which felt cozy and nautical to him, everything in its place, neat and organized and surprisingly comfortable. 'The next inner cylinder has a big common room with built- in tables and benches and the kitchen, which is good, you'll like it. Did you know Marc Robichaux can cook? French stuff. Lot of sauces, he says—'

'I know. Marc's a honey. We've been in touch on the net a lot.'

'— but we're eating out of tubes until we've got gravity. Oh! And I had the robots hollow out an extra room with a stone tub, like a Japanese bathroom, where you soap up and rinse off in a little water and then soak.'