The Sparrow

'Anne, everyone's had diarrhea and gut pain off and on,' said Emilio. 'Perhaps he'll just have a bad night and be fine in the morning.'

'But.' Anne looked at him, her eyes serious.

'Yes,' Emilio agreed finally. 'But.'

'So. What do we do now?' Sofia asked.

'Boil some water and whistle in the dark,' said Anne. She stepped to the edge of the terrace and looked out across the gorge. It was a rare night on Rakhat, cloudless and starry, with a single, nearly full moon. The river splashed and foamed around the rocks below her, and she could hear the metallic squeal of a rusted iron gate blowing in the wind—the bizarre call of a redlight moranor. 'At home, I'd put him on an IV drip and pump him full of drugs. I can approximate a rehydration fluid but the stuff he really needs is in the lander.' Shit, Anne thought, and turned around to look at Sofia. 'If George put the Ultra-Light together, could you—'

'No one goes back to the lander!' D.W. called out. He was in misery but he was neither comatose nor deaf, and he had heard at least some of what they'd said. 'We ain't been back for weeks and the runway is prolly all overgrown. I don't want anybody killed just 'cause I got a damn bellyache.'

Sofia went back inside and knelt by his bed. 'I can land in the rough. We have to go back sometime. The longer we wait, the worse the runway will get. If you need saline and antibiotics, I'm going tonight.'

It was public now, and everyone had an opinion. D.W. struggled to sit up and prove to Sofia he wasn't that sick. Jimmy and George got involved in the argument, with Marc wading in as well. They should have thought of this before, but the time had gone by quickly and besides, they had hesitated to introduce the notion of manned flight to the Runa. They were making things up as they went along; there were no guidelines except the negative example of their predecessors' disastrous interactions with technologically simple cultures on Earth. They had no wish to be taken for gods or to begin a cargo cult here. Even so, they had to go back for supplies eventually and they needed to reestablish the runway soon, so why not tonight?

Manuzhai, distressed by the dispute and swaying, took Askama by the hand and left the apartment to sit on the terrace. Emilio quietly apologized to her as she passed him, and then he went inside.

'Enough,' he said softly, and silence fell. 'D.W., lie down and be quiet. The rest of you, stop arguing. You are offending our hosts and the discussion is pointless. The Ultra-Light won't fly in darkness anyway, will it?' There was a burst of chagrined laughter. In the press of crisis, no one else had thought of that. Emilio ran his hands through his hair. 'All right. Tomorrow is soon enough for a reconnaissance flight, which we will undertake even if D.W. is fine. I can explain the plane somehow. Anne, I'll take the night shift. The rest of you, get some sleep.'

Nobody moved at first. Direct orders, issued from the mouth of Emilio Sandoz, Sofia Mendes was thinking, astonished. Evidently, the same observation had occurred to D. W. Yarbrough, who fell back laughing weakly and said, 'And I thought you weren't management material.' Emilio said something rude in Spanish, and the small knot of anxious people arrayed around Yarbrough's bed dispersed, leaving Emilio and D.W. alone finally, with Anne's repeated instructions—to force liquids and call her if there was any vomiting in addition to the diarrhea—ringing in their ears.

That night, they all were awakened over and over by the unavoidable disturbance caused when D.W. was forced to get up suddenly, and he became sicker by the hour. Then just before dawn, they woke again, this time to an unmistakable smell and D.W.'s groan of 'Oh, my God,' and lay awake, pretending to be unaware, listening to Emilio's soft Spanish reassurances and Yarbrough's humiliated weeping.

Askama slept on but Manuzhai abruptly rose and left the apartment. Anne lay rigid next to George, listening carefully and weighing the choices as Emilio cleaned up the mess, efficient as a night nurse and as unflappable. D.W. was already mortified. A thirty-year taboo against touch had already been broken. A woman's involvement would only make it worse, she decided. Anne heard Emilio insist that Yarbrough drink some more water, boiled and spiked with sugar and salt. The stuff tasted awful and D.W. gagged on it, but Emilio reminded him that dehydration could kill, and so with a practiced ease born of internship, Anne went back to sleep, trusting Emilio's judgment, if not God's will.

Moments later, Manuzhai returned with a stack of simple woven mats used for infants' beds. Emilio helped D.W. raise his hips and slipped one under him, before covering him again. Manuzhai, who had risen repeatedly to escort the two foreigners down the dark rocky pathway to the river and who had seen the tenderness of care one gave the other, now patted Yarbrough's arm in a gesture of reassurance that was startlingly human and left to spend the balance of the night elsewhere.

Long ago, Marc Robichaux had observed that a natural tendency to awaken early in the morning is a necessary though insufficient condition if a man is to survive formation and pass onward to ordination. He had known several men who might have become priests if waking at dawn had not done such violence to their normal sleep patterns.

Among the Jesuit party on Rakhat, Marc Robichaux was ordinarily the alpha to Jimmy Quinn's omega, so the apartment was silent as usual when Marc sat up and looked around. In the brief morning witlessness that afflicts even early risers, the night's events were forgotten; then Marc saw Sandoz in a sleeping bag next to the Father Superior's bed and it all came back to him. His eyes went to Yarbrough, who, Marc saw with relief, was also sleeping.

Marc pulled on khaki shorts and, barefoot, padded noiselessly out to the terrace, where Anne sat with Askama, who was trying to teach her the incredibly complicated version of cat's cradle the Runa played. He looked at Anne inquiringly and she smiled and rolled her eyes heavenward, shaking her head at her own fears.

'And sometimes they just get better,' Marc said quietly.

'Deus vult,' she replied ironically.

He smiled in return, and made his way down to the river.

The precariousness of their existence on this planet was once again in the forefront of their minds and D.W.'s probable recovery did not remove the sense of dancing on a high wire. By the time Emilio came out to the terrace, rubbing his face muzzily in the midmorning light, George and Sofia were trying to decide if they could rig some kind of rope ladder so somebody could jump off the Ultra-Light as she flew over the clearing at the slowest possible air speed, and then could clear the brush before she attempted to land. Anne was providing graphic descriptions of the sort of really interesting compound fractures that were likely to result from this plan while Marc argued that he might be able to tell from the air whether the growth that had undoubtedly begun to fill in the runway was woody or soft. Emilio, stupefied, stared at them for a few moments before turning away and going back to bed after an interlude at the river.

He slept another couple of hours and when he came back out to the terrace, even D.W. was up, pale and rumpled but feeling a little better and making jokes about Runa's Revenge. Jimmy was back from wherever he'd been, and it appeared that at least one problem was about to resolve itself. That morning, Jimmy had learned that the villagers were about to leave for some kind of harvest.

'Pik root,' Emilio said, yawning. 'I heard about that last night.'

'They want to know if we're coming,' Jimmy told them.

'Do they want us to?' George asked.

'I don't think so. One of them said it was a long walk and asked me if I was going to carry all of you,' Jimmy said. 'It was obviously a big joke. Lots of tail twitching and huffing. I don't think they'd mind if we stay home.' In fact, it was his impression that the Runa would be just as happy to find out that the foreigners weren't coming. The troop moved at the pace of the slowest member, which had often been Anne or Sofia. No one complained, but it was obvious when they got where they were going that some of the flowers had passed their peak.

'If they all leave, we won't have to explain about the plane,' Emilio said, sitting down. The sky was hazy and it felt like it was going to be very hot. Sofia handed him a cup of coffee. Askama spotted him from two terraces away and scampered over, full of questions about D.W., whom she was too shy to address directly, and why had Meelo slept so late and was everyone coming to dig pik root?

'Sipaj, Askama,' Emilio said. 'Dee was very sick. Someone thinks we will stay here with him while he rests.' The child looked crestfallen, ears at half-mast and tail drooping, but undaunted, she devoted the next half hour to cajolery, trying to talk them into coming. When it became plain that this wouldn't work, she declared herself 'porai' and threatened to get sick like Dee because her heart