The Sparrow

The dark, merry eyes were triumphant. Emilio Sandoz had taken no vow of false modesty. It was a nice piece of analysis and he was immensely pleased with himself, and it had not escaped his own notice that he'd won Sofia's bet with Alan Pace. They'd made contact with the Runa only seven weeks ago, but he already had the basic grammar nailed. Damn, I'm good, he thought to himself, and his grin widened as Sofia stared at him through narrowed eyes, trying to think of some case that wouldn't fit the model.

'All right, all right,' she said ungraciously, picking up her tablet, 'I concede. Give me a few minutes to get it all down.'

They were a good team. Sandoz was a master of this discipline but she was a far better writer, fast and clear. Already three papers bearing the authorship 'E. J. Sandoz and S. R. Mendes' had been radioed back for submission to scholarly journals.

Finished with her notes, Sofia looked up and smiled. She had met before, in yeshiva students whom her parents often invited to dinner when she was a girl, this mixture of incisive intelligence and dreaminess, the joyful combative intellectual style and the tendency to fall into an inner world, absorbed and remote. Barelegged and barefoot, Sandoz was tanned to the color of cinnamon, wearing the loose khaki shorts and oversized black T-shirt that had replaced the soutane, impossibly hot in this climate. Sofia herself was equally browned, similarly dark and slender, dressed as simply, and she could understand why Manuzhai had assumed at first that she and Emilio were 'littermates.' The notion had been funny and embarrassing, as Manuzhai's pantomimed explanation of the word had been, but she could see how a Runao might come to that conclusion.

Askama sighed, stretching out a little. Emilio came to life and looked at Sofia with round-eyed alarm. Askama was dear, but she chattered incessantly; naps like this one were a welcome relief. 'I wonder,' said Sofia very softly, when it was clear that Askama would not awaken, 'if a blind Runao would always use the nonvisual declension.'

'Now that is an interesting question,' Emilio said, inclining his head with respect, and she was tartly pleased to have reestablished claim to an adequate intelligence. He thought a while, rocking the hammock chair gently, one fine-boned foot braced against a hampiy stem, fingers stroking the soft fur behind Askama's ears. The sunrise smile reappeared. 'If you could feel a thing, you would also know it took up space! Look for something that has contour or form or texture. Wager?'

'Lejano, maybe, or tinguen' she suggested. 'No bets.'

'No guts! I could be wrong,' he said cheerfully, 'but I doubt it. Try lejano first.' He smiled down at the top of Askama's head before returning his eyes to the small herd of piyanot grazing on the plain beyond the stems of the hampiy shelter.

'They make a handsome couple, don't they,' Anne said as she and D.W. strolled along the edge of the gorge, above the village.

'Yes, ma'am,' D.W. agreed. 'They do indeed.' Everyone else was occupied or asleep, and they had found themselves restless together. Anne proposed a walk, and D.W. was happy to accompany her. Manuzhai had warned them all, repeatedly, against walking alone. A 'djanada,' whatever that was, might get them; so they traveled in pairs, more to mollify Manuzhai and the other Runa than because of any serious fear of predators or bogeymen.

'Jealous?' Anne asked. 'They're both yours in a way, aren't they.'

'Oh, hell, I'm not sure jealous is the right word,' said D.W., who stopped for a moment to gaze crookedly at Sofia and Emilio, playing house with Askama out in the hampiy. He turned back to Anne and grinned lopsidedly and briefly before he squinted off into the west, across the river. 'It's kinda like watchin' Notre Dame go up against the University of Texas in the Cotton Bowl. I don't hardly know what to hope for.'

Anne laughed appreciatively and leaned her head against his shoulder. 'Oh, D.W., I love you. I truly do. Of course, I've always had a weakness for a guy in a uniform.'

It was an opening, and he walked through it, smiling. 'You, too?'

'The Marines are looking for a few good men,' Anne intoned, quoting the old recruitment slogan as they strolled south.

'Yeah, well. So was I.' His eyes remained, more or less, straight ahead as he sang quietly, 'But that was long ago and very far away.'

'Exactly,' Anne smiled. 'My darling: the nearest closet is four and a third light years from here. Sofia knows. I know. Marc—'

'Is my confessor.'

'Jimmy and George don't have a clue, but it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference to either of them,' said Anne. 'Which leaves Emilio.'

D.W. sank slowly to his knees and motioned Anne to stay back. Moving cautiously, he brought his hand out over a little tuft of dusty lavender foliage and remained in position for several seconds. Then his hand shot out, carefully covering and then lifting a small two-legged snakeneck, which had been virtually undetectable pushing its way slowly into something else's burrow, hoping to find lunch. He stood and handed it to Anne.

'Isn't it pretty! Look, you can see a couple of vestigial front legs on this one,' she cried, holding it out for him to see. 'I never find stuff like that. You are amazing.'

'You grow up like I did, ma'am, you learn a fair bit about camouflage.'

'I'll bet you do, at that,' she said. She put the snakeneck back down by the burrow and they continued their walk. 'Emilio thinks the world of you, D.W. Okay, sure. He's probably carrying around some unexamined macho crapola he'd have to reconsider, but he's capable of adjusting an attitude.'

'Hell, I know that,' D.W. said. 'And I'm not ashamed of what I am. But if he'd known when he was a kid, he wouldn't have come within a mile of me. And after all these years of him not knowin', what's the point of sayin' anything?'

'To put down a load. To be accepted, entirely, as you are.' He smiled at that without looking at her and draped an arm over her shoulders. 'Surely you don't imagine that he'd think less of you.'

'Well, now, see. There's exactly the problem, Anne. I'm afraid he'd think more of me. Which is to say, I'm afraid the whole issue would occupy his mind to some extent and I don't want to distract him with trivia right now. Course, he'd work it all through and he'd realize that I'd played straight with him all along—'

'So to speak.'

He laughed. 'Poor choice of words.' He stopped and scuffed a rock out of the ground with his foot. 'It's not like I ever lied to him. Subject just never came up. I never asked him if he was straight and he never asked me if I wasn't. Closest we ever came to it was when he asked me about another guy, years ago. I just told him, hell, we ain't all abstainin' from the same thing.'

'And what did he make of that?' Anne asked, smiling.

'Took it at face value.' D.W. looked at the mountains south of them. Somewhere on the other side of the range was Alan Pace's grave. 'Look, Anne. The way things are is fine. I don't need anything from Emilio. What went on inside my head years ago is my business. And it's history.'

She couldn't argue with that. She might have said the same thing herself, had their positions been reversed. 'Okay, okay. Message received.'

'I 'preciate the thought, Anne, I surely do, and under other circumstances, you might be right. But, here, now—' D.W. leaned over to pick up the rock he'd unearthed and whipped it off across the gorge, loose-shouldered and accurate. It fell just short of the other side and rattled down the cliff to the river below them. 'What concerns me is the big picture. You know as well as I do, everything about this mission has been damn near to miraculous. And Emilio is the key to it. I don't want to muddy the waters! I don't want him thinkin' about me. Or Mendes either, far as that goes. I ain't gonna make an issue of them workin' together because they're handlin' it okay. And they're doin' some fine research. But, frankly, I'm holdin' my breath.'

There was a silence, and Anne sat down, legs dangling over the ledge. D.W. stood for a while, less confident about the stability of the rock formation, but joined her at last and occupied his hands by flipping stones out into the void.

'D.W., I'm not arguing with you. I'm just asking, okay?' He nodded, so she went on, 'Let's say the Age of Miracles hasn't closed down altogether yet, okay? Just for argument's sake. And we agree that Emilio is very special. But so is Sofia, right?'