The Sparrow

laughed again because it was hard to decide whose arms should go over whose shoulders. Then Anne opened the door and called out wearily, 'Okay, somebody get this man a sandwich.' Jimmy yelled, 'Sandoz, you jerk! When's the last time you ate? Do I have to think of everything?' And Sofia said, 'Maybe we should play for raisins next time,' but she and Jimmy already had a meal ready for him. And things went back to as normal as they could get, inside an asteroid, above Alpha Centauri, looking for signs from God.

'My daddy had a Buick once, drove like this,' D. W. Yarbrough muttered at one point. 'Sumbitch handled like a damn pig in a wallow.'

Nobody dared laugh. During the past two weeks, D. W. Yarbrough and Sofia Mendes had worked nonstop, dropping the Stella Maris closer and closer to the planet. The process was dangerous and frustrating, and D.W. was sometimes startlingly short with people.

Everyone was irritable, and after D.W. finally managed to wrestle the ship into an acceptable orbit, they went into freefall and things got even worse. For over three years, they'd worked like mules to be here, within sight of the planet they had come to investigate. In a small place together for over eight months, they'd gotten along remarkably well, but there were accumulated tensions and anxieties and a grinding restlessness that did not surface in shouting matches very often but was evident in sudden silences as people swallowed retorts.

Of all of them, D.W. was most likely to snarl, dressing people down for minor mistakes or lapses in attention to detail or ill-timed remarks. Emilio, no worse than any of the others, nevertheless caught hell most often. When Yarbrough laid down the law to reestablish the regular order, Emilio threw out a little joke about the disordo irregularis. D.W. stared at Sandoz until his eyes dropped and then told him, 'If you can't be serious, be quiet.' Which shut Emilio up for days. Another time, after the Father Superior left everyone feeling ruffled by issuing a string of abrupt commands at breakfast, ending with a particularly sharp decree aimed at Sandoz, Emilio tried to take the sting out of it by asking, 'You want fries with that order?' Yarbrough just about took his head off with a barrage of very rapid, very colloquial, heavily accented Spanish no one else could follow, but whose meaning they could guess at by the effect.

Anne might have approached D.W. to see if she could provide a little perspective on the general topic of overcompensation but within an hour, she herself was on the receiving end of a lecture, having forgotten to cover a salt shaker, whose contents had then drifted out of the holes over several days. D.W. opened the storage cabinet and a miniature snow squall resulted. There was an unpleasant exchange and George got involved, and it took both Sofia and Jimmy's intervention to calm everyone down.

Eventually the adjustment to zero G was over, nausea had abated all round, the ordo was back in place, and everyone was once again working with reasonable efficiency. They did a full survey to begin with, launching several satellites to encircle the planet, collecting atmospheric and geographic data. At this distance, the patterns of ocean and land-mass were clear. The overall impression was of greens and blues running to purple, broken by areas of red and brown and yellow, frosted with the white of clouds and very small ice caps. It wasn't Earth but it was beautiful, and it had a powerful pull on their emotions.

The biggest surprise was the sudden reappearance of the radio signals. Whenever they moved between the moons and the planet, the ship received bursts of incredibly strong radio waves. 'They're aiming at the moons,' Jimmy realized as he sketched the system and worked out what was happening physically. There was no indication of any indigenous life or colonies on the moons. 'Why would they be aiming radio at the moons?'

'No ionosphere!' George announced triumphantly one afternoon, floating into the common room from his cabin, where he'd been going over the atmospheric data. It came to him out of the blue, when he wasn't thinking about the radio problem. 'They're using the moons to bounce the signals off.'

'That's it!' Jimmy yelled from the bridge. He shot into the common room, hooked a hand around a support pole like a gigantic orangutan, and friction-spiraled to a halt. 'That's why we only got the signals every fifteen and twenty-seven days back home!'

'You lost me with that one,' Anne called from the galley, where she and Sofia were getting lunch ready.

'Without an ionosphere to contain radio waves, you could only use line-of-sight signals, like microwave towers at home,' George explained. 'If you wanted to broadcast over a wider region, you could aim a really strong signal at the moons, and it would bounce back in a cone that would cover a lot of the planet's surface.'

'So what we were picking up at home was the scatter around the moons, every time they moved into line with Earth,' Jimmy said, crowing with happiness at clearing up that little mystery.

'What's an ionosphere?' Anne asked. Jimmy gaped at her. 'Sorry. I've heard the word but I don't know what it is, really. I'm a doctor, Jim, not an astronomer!' George broke up but Jimmy, too young for the first Star Trek, didn't get it.

'Okay: solar radiation knocks electrons off atmospheric molecules at the top of the atmosphere, right? That makes them ions,' Jimmy began.

'Listen up,' D.W. cut in, as he pushed himself into the common room from the bridge. 'Be ready to give a summary of everything you've learned tomorrow at nine. I got decisions to make.'

Then he was gone, disappearing into his cabin, leaving people shaking their heads and muttering. Anne watched him go and rotated toward Sofia. 'What do you think? PMS?'

'It's a form of affection,' Sofia smiled. 'The squadron commander is back on duty. He doesn't want his people killed by enthusiasm and cabin fever, but no one wants to come this far and then go back without visiting the surface, especially not D.W. There's a great deal of pressure on him.'

'I see your point,' Anne said, impressed by the analysis, which she considered precisely one brick shy of the full load, and wondered if Sofia was unaware or very discreet. Discreet, Anne decided. Sofia didn't miss much and she knew D.W. very well. 'Which way is he leaning? Do you know?'

'He keeps his own counsel. From what I've gathered, we could survive on the surface. Maybe D.W. will go down alone or with one or two others and leave the rest on the ship.'

Anne closed her eyes, sagging as much as one could while weightless. 'Oh, Sofia, I think I would literally rather die than stay inside here one minute longer than I have to.'

Sofia was surprised to see the woman look every day of her age for once, and for a dreadful moment she thought that Anne would burst into tears. Sofia reeled her in for the kind quick embrace she had received in the hundreds from the older woman. It was not an impulsive act, for hardly anything Sofia Mendes did was impulsive. But now, at last, she'd soaked up enough affection to give some back.

'Oh, Sofia, I love you all,' Anne said, laughing and taking a quick swipe at her eyes with a sleeve. 'And I am mortally sick of every last one of you. Come on. Let's get these guys fed.'

The next morning was as tense and demanding as anything Anne had ever sat through. Or floated through, in this case. She meant to follow it all but found herself distracted and savagely restless during a long debate about whether the lander fuel would combust properly in the atmosphere of the planet. The air was breathable, and the weather was stinking hot but wouldn't kill them. There were a lot of thunderstorms and cyclones going on at any given time, which could have been due to the season or to the amount of energy pouring into the system from the three suns.

Marc's presentation was thorough but frustrating. He could delineate boundaries between ecological regions but who knew what that predominantly lavender stuff was? It might be something like a deciduous forest in summer or something like grasslands or something like conifer forest or even an enormous algae mat. 'Whatever it is,' Marc pointed out with a shrug, 'there is a great deal of it.' Terrain was easier for him to interpret with confidence. Open bodies of water were sometimes plain, but Marc warned that they could be confused with swampy areas. Tidal zones were remarkably extensive—not surprising with multiple moons. There were obvious oxbow lakes and many river systems. He believed there were areas of cultivated land but told them, 'It is quite easy to confuse agricultural plantations with mixed species forest.'

Let's just go, Anne thought as Marc droned on. Fuck this shit. Let's just do it. Pack some sandwiches, get in the goddam lander, and go down and throw open the doors and just live or die.

Startled by her own fretfulness, she looked around and saw it in the others as well, but then Marc said, 'And this is the source of the radio transmissions.' There was an exhalation and a murmur all around. Marc outlined an area near the coast. 'This appears to be a city in a high valley ringed by several mountains. There is not the confluence of roads I expected, but these lines here may be canals leading from the two rivers you can see, here and here. This may be a port. I would guess that this semicircular area could be a good harbor.'