D.W. waved that off. 'Oh, hell, no. Course not. I trust your judgment. You're much closer to him than I ever was, Anne.' He looked at her to see if she accepted that and then rubbed his eyes, red-rimmed and bloodshot in his pale, disheveled face. 'Okay. Fine by me. He goes first. Assumin' it looks safe to get out! We may get down there and decide it's too damn dangerous for anyone to risk it.'
'Oh, D.W.! Oh, my darling man!' Anne cried. 'If you even think about not letting us out of the lander, I will
D.W. laughed, and she decided against hugging him but held out her hand. He took it and, to her complete astonishment, brought it to his lips and kissed it, looking crookedly at her the whole time. 'Good night, Miz Edwards,' he said, Southern and gallant as he could be, dressed in sweats and floating in midair. 'Sleep well, y'hear?'
All of them, in their own ways, prepared that night both for death and for a kind of resurrection. Some confessed, some made love, some slept exhausted and dreamed of childhood friends or long-forgotten moments with grandparents. They all, in their own ways, tried to let their fear go, to reconcile themselves to their lives prior to this night, and to what might come tomorrow.
For some of them, there had been a turning point that now seemed justified, however painful the decision might have been. For Sofia Mendes, a way to make peace with what, even now, she could only think of as 'the days before Jaubert.' For Jimmy Quinn, the end of worry that he was wrong to leave his mother, and right to claim his life as his own.
For Marc Robichaux and Alan Pace, there was a sense that they had lived their lives the right way and confidence that God had recognized their artistry as the prayer they had always meant the work to be, and there was hope that He would let them serve Him now.
For Anne and George Edwards, for D. W. Yarbrough and Emilio Sandoz, this voyage had given meaning to random acts, and to all the points where they had done this and not that, chosen one thing and not another, to all their decisions, whether carefully thought out or ill considered.
I would do it all again, each of them thought.
And when the time came, each of them privately felt a calm ratification of those reconciliations, even as the noise and heat and buffeting built to a terrifying violence, as it seemed less and less likely that the plane would hold together, more and more likely that they'd be burned alive in the atmosphere of a planet whose name they did not know. I am where I want to be, they each thought. I am grateful to be here. In their own ways, they all gave themselves up to God's will and trusted that whatever happened now was meant to be. At least for the moment, they all fell in love with God.
But Emilio Sandoz fell hardest of all, letting his fear and doubt go almost physically, his hands opening as everyone else clutched at controls or straps or armrests or someone else's hand. And when the mind-numbing scream of the engines diminished and then fell off to a silence almost as deafening, it seemed only natural that he should move into the airlock and open the hatch and step out alone, into the sunlight of stars he'd never noticed while on Earth, and fill his lungs with the exhalation of unknown plants and fall to his knees weeping with the joy of it when, after a long courtship, he felt the void fill and believed with all his heart that his love affair with God had been consummated.
Those who saw his face as he pushed himself to his feet, laughing and crying, and turned back to them, incandescent, arms flung wide, recognized that they stood witness to a soul's transcendence and would remember that moment for the rest of their lives. Each of them felt some of the same dizzying exultation as they emerged from the lander, spilling from their technological womb wobbly and blinking, and felt themselves reborn in a new world.
Even Anne, sensible Anne, allowed herself to enjoy the sensation and didn't spoil it by speculating aloud that it was probably plain relief at cheating death combined with a sudden drop in blood pressure to the brain, consequent to the reversal of Fat Face, Chicken Legs. None of them, not even George who had no wish to believe, was entirely exempt from transcendence.
There followed days of rapture and hilarity. Children on a field trip to Eden, they named everything they saw. The eat-me's and the elephant birds, hoppers and walkies, the all-black Jesuits and the all-brown Franciscans, scummies and crawlers, hose-noses and squirrel-tails. Little green guys, blue-backs and flower-faces, and Richard Nixons, which walked bent over looking for food. And then black-and-white Dominicans, to round out their collection of orders. And turtle trees, whose seed pods resembled turtle shells; peanut bushes, whose brown blossoms were double-lobed; baby's feet, with foliage soft as rose petals; and pig plants, whose leaves were like sows' ears.
The niches were all there. Air to fly through, water to swim in, soil to burrow under, vegetation to exploit and hide behind. The principles were the same: form follows function, reach high for sunlight, strut your stuff to attract a mate, scatter lots of offspring or take good care of a precious few, warn predators that you're poisonous with bright colors or blend into the background to escape detection. But the sheer beauty and ingenuity of the animal adaptations were breathtaking and the gorgeousness of the plant life staggering.
Anne and Marc, their eyes informed by their study of evolution and Darwinian selection, were beside themselves with delight in everything they saw. They said it with different inflections but they both exclaimed repeatedly, 'My God, this is so great!' And long past the point when the others wanted to drop exhausted to the ground, Anne's voice or Marc's could be heard calling softly but urgently, 'You've got to see this! Come quick before it moves!' until they were all sated with beauty and novelty and astonishment.
D.W. had come in over ocean and flown low as a drug smuggler over what might as well be called treetops. He spotted a clearing and made a snap decision to land there rather than further on, in the plain Marc had chosen. Surrounded by the tall, heavy-stemmed vegetation that filled the niche of trees, they felt safe and unobserved. If the weather promised to be mild, they slept in the open, weaponless, too ignorant or trusting to worry about major carnivores or aggressive poisonous things. They had tents and took shelter during the sudden rainstorms, but they were frequently drenched. No one cared. The nights were so brief and the days so warm, they dried out quickly and napped in the leaf-filtered sunlight, drowsing in the warmth, contented and lazy as dogs by firelight.
Even dozing, they were suffused with their surroundings. The wind-borne fragrance of a thousand plants as varied as stephanotis, pine, skunk cabbage, lemon, jasmine, grass, but unlike any of them; the heavy dank odor of vegetation decayed by another world's bacteria; the oak-like musky bass notes of the crushed herbs they lay on overwhelmed their ability to perceive and categorize such things. As three dawns and three dusks came and went, the sounds of the long day changed, from chorus to chorus of trilling, shrieking, whirring things. Sometimes they could match the sound to the animal that made it: a shrilling that belonged to the lizardlike creatures they called little green guys, an amazingly loud rasping noise that was made by a small scaly biped staking out its territory in the forest's ground litter. Most often, the sounds were full of mystery, as was the God that some of them worshiped.
Their forays beyond the clearing were limited, made in pairs, kept always within sight and call of the lander and encampment. But after so much time together, they all broke D.W.'s rule once in a while and sought time alone, to come to grips with the experiences, to think and absorb and then move ahead again, into wonder. So Sofia was not surprised when she found Emilio sitting alone, his back against a boulder that had formed in layers, like sandstone. His eyes were closed. He might have been sleeping.
There are moments, she thought later, when reality seems to shift suddenly, like shards of colored glass in a kaleidoscope. Looking down at Sandoz, seeing him at rest and unaware, she realized, simply, that he was no longer young. And was astonished at the wave of feeling that swept over her.
He was always working or laughing or studying, and his intensity and humor made him seem ageless. She knew something of his life, having worked with him, and recognized him as one of her own kind: an eternal beginner, starting over and over in a new place in new circumstances, with new languages, new people, a new commission. They had this in common: the continual rushed confrontation with change, the feeling of being hothoused, forced to bloom early, the exhausting exhilaration of doing the unreasonable not just adequately but well and with grace.
Flexible, then, and adaptable but not authoritative. He felt himself to be a skilled tradesman, perhaps, doing work to order. She wondered if he had ever given an outright command in his life and thought that if she depended on Emilio Sandoz to teach her a language, she might never even suspect that the imperative mood existed. All this,
