The Sparrow

back. Pulse thready. In the ER, she'd have had a team all over him, intubating, charging the paddles. Death, in her experience, was never peaceful. Her training was to resist until flat-line, and beyond. After fifteen minutes, someone took hold of her shoulders and drew her back, ending the CPR. Understanding, she gave Pace up, but sat and held his limp hand until D.W. took it from her and crossed it over Alan's still and cooling chest.

'You'll want an autopsy,' she said. D.W. nodded numbly: they had to know. 'I'll have to do it right away. Without preservatives, with this heat—'

'I understand. Go ahead.'

George, who knew more than he liked about Anne's work, lashed together a waist-high table for her and curtained off an enclosure, using tarps from the lander. Then he filled containers of water from a nearby creek so she could rinse off as she worked, as well as all the tough, black plastic showerbags, setting them in the sunlight to warm the water, knowing that she'd want to scrub when she was done. Sofia finally roused herself from shocked immobility and went to help George as he took down his and Anne's tent and set it up again, away from the rest of the encampment. He thanked her and explained quietly as they worked, 'She's hard to be around when a patient dies under her hands like this. You never get used to that. It'll be better if we can be off by ourselves for a while afterward.'

Emilio, meanwhile, helped lift Alan's body onto the crude table and stayed behind after D.W., Jimmy and Marc left the enclosure. 'Do you want me to assist?' he asked, willing but already pale.

'No,' she said abruptly. Then she softened. 'You don't want this in your mind. Don't even stay close enough to hear. I've done a thousand bodies, sweetheart. I'm used to it.'

But not bodies like this. Not fresh; not friends. It was, in fact, among the worst, the most distressing things she'd done in a lifetime of grisly experience. And it was among the most futile. Hours later, she made the corpse presentable and called for the priests, who dressed it in vestments and wrapped it in another tarp, the plastic shroud garishly yellow, as inappropriate and unacceptable as the death it concealed.

It was dusk by then. Sitting around the small fire, the others listened to the nearby sound of falling water as Anne showered the blood and brains and excrement and stomach contents from her body, soaped away the smell, and tried unsuccessfully to put the images and sounds from her mind. When she emerged, wet-haired but dressed and apparently composed, it was too dark for D.W. to see how tired she was and how upset. He thought, perhaps, that this was not difficult for her, that she was a professional, hardened, unsusceptible to breakdown. So he called her to the fire and asked her the results.

'Let her alone,' George said, putting an arm around Anne and turning her toward their tent. 'Tomorrow is soon enough.'

'No, it's okay,' Anne said, even though it wasn't. 'It won't take long. There was no obvious cause of death.'

'There was the rash, Doctor. Perhaps an allergic reaction to the fruit he ate?' Marc suggested quietly.

'That was days ago,' Anne said patiently. 'And the rash was probably a contact dermatitis. There was no indication of elevated histamine levels in his blood, but we should take whatever he ate yesterday off our list.' She turned again to go to the tent, to lie down with George and to remind herself in his arms that she was alive, and glad of it.

'What about an aneurysm?' Emilio asked. 'Maybe he had a blood vessel that was ready to rupture all along and this was just chance.'

They were taking refuge in the concrete. Anne realized that. Faced with death, people looked for reasons, to protect themselves from its arbitrariness and stupidity. She'd been up for twenty hours. So had the others, but they'd only waited. Anne put her hands on her hips and stared at the ground, breathing deeply to control the anger. 'Emilio,' she said softly but precisely, 'I have just completed as thorough an autopsy as can be done under these conditions. How much detail would you like? There was no evidence of internal bleeding anywhere. There was no blood clot in the heart or lungs. There was no inflammation of the gut or stomach. The lungs were clear of fluid. The liver was in remarkably fine condition. The kidneys and the bladder were not infected. There was no stroke. The brain,' she said, working hard now to keep her voice steady, for the brain had been the hardest to retrieve and inspect, 'was fine. There was no physical sign that allows me to declare a known cause of death. He just died. I don't know why. People are mortal, okay?'

She turned to walk away again, looking for someplace to sit down and cry by herself, and nearly screamed when she heard D.W. ask, 'What about the bite on his leg? It didn't look like much and we've all been bitten, but maybe…Anne, there's got to be a reason—'

'You want a reason?' she asked, rounding on him. He stopped talking, startled by her tone out of his own reverie. 'You want a reason? Deus vult, pater. God wanted him dead, okay?'

She said it to shock D.W., to shock them all, to shut them up, and she was bitterly glad to see it work. She saw D.W. stop in midsentence, motionless, his mouth open slightly, Emilio wide-eyed, Marc blinking with the violence of it, the way she'd turned his habitual cry of faith against them.

'Why is that so hard to accept, gentlemen?' Anne asked with a flat stare. 'Why is it that God gets all the credit for the good stuff, but it's the doctor's fault when shit happens? When the patient comes through, it's always Thank God, and when the patient dies, it's always blame the doctor. Just once in my life, just for the sheer fucking novelty of it, it would be nice if somebody blamed God when the patient dies, instead of me.'

'Anne, D.W. wasn't blaming you—' It was Jimmy's voice. She felt George take her arm and she shook him off.

'The hell he wasn't! You want a reason? I'm giving you the only one I can think of, and I don't care if you don't like it. I don't know why he died. I didn't kill him. Dammit, sometimes they just die!' Her voice broke on the words and that made her more furious and desolate. 'Even when you've got all the medical technology in the world and even when you try your goddamnedest to bring them back and even if they're wonderful musicians and even if they were healthy yesterday and even when they're too damned young to die. Sometimes they just die, okay? Go ask God why. Don't ask me.'

George held her while she wept through her rage and told her quietly, 'He wasn't blaming you, Anne. Nobody blames you,' and she knew that, but for the moment it did feel like it was all her fault.

'Oh, shit, George!' she whispered, wiping her nose on her sleeve, and trying to stop crying and failing. 'Crap. I didn't even like him all that much.' She turned helplessly toward Jimmy and Sofia, who had moved to her side, but it was the priests Anne was looking at. 'He came all this way for the music and he didn't even get to hear it once. How is that fair? He never even got to see the instruments. What is the point of bringing him all this way, just to kill him now? What kind of stinking goddam trick is this for God to play?'

In the long months aboard the Stella Maris, many stories were told. They all still had secrets to keep, but some childhood memories were shared and Marc Robichaux's were among them.

Marc was not one of those guys who knew he wanted to be a priest when he was seven, but he was very close to it. Diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia at five, he was lucky enough to be a Canadian when universal health care was available. 'Leukemia is not that bad,' he told them. 'Mostly you are just very, very tired and you feel you need to die as a tired child needs to sleep. The chemo, on the other hand, was very terrible.'

His mother did her best, but she had other children to care for. So it fell to his paternal grandmother, perhaps compensating for the way her son had deserted the family under cover of the stress of Marc's illness, to sit by his bed, to regale him with stories of old Quebec, to pray with him and assure him with perfect confidence that a new kind of operation, an autologous bone marrow transplant, would cure him. 'Only a few years earlier, the kind of leukemia I had would surely have killed me. And the transplant itself very nearly did,' he admitted. 'But a few weeks later—it was like a miracle. My grandmother was convinced it was in fact a literal miracle, God's plan for me.'

'What about you, Marc?' Sofia asked. 'Did you think it was a miracle, too? Is that when you decided to become a priest?'

'Oh, no. I wanted to be a hockey star,' he told them, through a burst of surprised laughter. And when they refused to believe this, he insisted, 'I was a very good goalie in high school!' The talk moved on to sports at that point and never came back to Marc's childhood. But Sofia was not far wrong, although it was almost ten years before Marc Robichaux found a focus for his clear sense that life was God's gift, to give or take.

His grandmother's rosary had come with him to Rakhat, and so did his conviction that all life is fragile and