The Sparrow

Finally, as the rain began to abate and her need to tell him about the adventure subsided, D.W. saw her realize that something was wrong. 'What is it?' she asked. 'What's the matter?'

He looked at George and then at the daughter he'd never imagined having. There was the barest chance. If she'd held her speed down. If she'd flown straight to Kashan. If the tail wind was strong enough. If God was on their side. 'Sofia, it's my fault! It is my responsibility entirely. I should have warned you—'

'What?' she asked, alarmed now. 'Warned me about what?'

'Sofia, darlin',' he said gently, when there was no longer any way to put it off, 'how much fuel is left?'

It took a moment. Then her hands went to her mouth and she went white beneath the bruises. He held her while she sobbed, loving her as much as any human being he'd ever known. They all understood then. There was no longer any way off Rakhat.

Jimmy recovered first. 'Sofia,' he said quietly, his voice close to her ear. 'Sofia, look at me.' She responded to the calmness and lifted her eyes, swollen now with more than bruises. Shuddering and gulping, still huddled in D.W.'s arms, she looked up into clear blue eyes set deep in a face that knew itself homely at best, framed now by comic spirals of wet red hair. 'Sofia,' Jimmy said, his voice sure and his eyes steady, 'we have everything we need, right here. We have everyone we care about, right here. Welcome home, Sofia.'

D.W. ceded her to Jimmy then, and sat wearily down in the mud as Sofia, crying now for a different reason, was enfolded by long arms. Around them, the others were coming out of their shock, George reminding Sofia of his part in it, Anne and Emilio already making jokes about being resident aliens and wondering where to apply for green cards, Marc assuring her this must be the way God wanted it.

Lord, D. W. Yarbrough prayed, this is as fine a bunch of tailless primates as Your universe has to offer. I hope You're proud of 'em. I sure as hell am.

Surrounded by plants of dusty blues and purples, listening to his people come to grips and come together, D.W. put his hands out into the mud behind him and leaned back to offer his face to the rain. Maybe Marc's right, he thought. Maybe this is how it's supposed to be.

27 VILLAGE OF KASHAN: SEVENTH NAWA—FIFTH PARTAIN

When they got inside, out of the rain, Anne swung into action, examining Marc and Sofia and confirming Marc's inexpert assessment of their physical condition, informing D.W. that he looked terrible. George, Emilio and Jimmy helped her get the three semi-invalids dry and warm, fed and put to bed as the light faded. When it was clear that he could be of no more use to Anne, George Edwards took his tablet next door to Aycha's empty apartment. Anne saw him go. When everyone else was taken care of, she went to her husband and knelt on the cushion behind him, reaching out to massage the back of his neck and then to put her arms around his shoulders. George smiled at her as she moved to his side and leaned over to kiss her but went back to his work without comment.

Four and a half decades together had given them a core of certainty about each other, if not about life itself. Theirs was a companionable marriage of competent and self-reliant equals, and they rarely called on each other for aid or ministration. Anne was used to George's response to crisis: don't panic; take it piece by piece; make the best of it. But she also knew that he'd had a favorite Dilbert cartoon pinned over his desk for years: 'The goal of every engineer is to retire without getting blamed for a major catastrophe.' There was no way around it. What had happened was in large measure his fault.

George's initial concern was that D.W. and Sofia not take the blame for the fact that the lander fuel had been drawn down past the point of return. Sofia's use of fuel had been sensible. George's had been pure stupid self- indulgence: fooling around, showing off to D.W., trying out maneuvers he'd practiced on the simulator and wanted to do in real life, using up a slim margin for error that he hadn't thought about. So George made sure everyone understood that it was he, George, who'd put them in this position, not Sofia. As for D.W. not anticipating what happened and not warning Sofia against it, George pointed out that nobody had thought of it. 'We've got a collective IQ here that goes into quadruple digits,' he'd told Yarbrough as they walked back down to the apartment, 'and none of us, singly or together, anticipated this. Quit beating yourself up.'

Engineers don't go to confession when they screw up; they find a fix. So Anne watched George deal with his own fear and guilt by starting an engineer's rosary: a series of calculations involving the lander's weight, drag, lift, thrust, the prevailing winds, their altitude above sea level, the rotational boost they'd get from their latitude on Rakhat, the distance to the Stella Maris at its closest approach to their present position. She knew this was his way of apologizing to the others, of begging pardon for his sin.

Jimmy stayed with Sofia until he was certain she was asleep but joined Anne and George a few minutes later. Emilio brought them all coffee and sat quietly at a small remove, opaque and withdrawn, while Jimmy and George considered the variables. How much weight could they save if they stripped every nonessential piece of equipment out of the lander? Used a single pilot? Which one? D.W. was far more experienced but weighed almost twice as much as Sofia. What if they moved the Stella Maris into a more favorable orbit? How hard would that be using remote ground control? Could the lander engine be reprogrammed to squeeze more power out of the remaining fuel?

Several hours later, the outcome was as plain as it was predictable: Murphy's Law held on Rakhat. Their best estimates fell into a zone of ambiguity. If the winds were right, if one of the lower estimates of the lander's stripped weight was correct, if Sofia piloted the plane, they'd still have to maneuver the Stella Maris into a lower orbit.

'We can talk to D.W. about that when he wakes up, but I don't think it's a good idea.' Jimmy sat back, leaning his head against the wall and stretching his long legs in front of him. 'The asteroid was a pig to drive. It wouldn't take much error to sink it into the gravity well.'

'And then Rakhat gets to play the dinosaur game?' Anne crossed her arms over her drawn-up knees, where she rested her chin. 'No good. Not worth the risk.'

'Dinosaur game?' Emilio asked, breaking his silence for the first time.

'One of the best guesses about the reason for the extinction of the dinosaurs was that a good-sized asteroid smashed into Earth,' Anne told him. 'Changed the climate, wiped out big hunks of the food chain.'

Emilio held up a hand. 'Of course. I knew that. I'm sorry, I wasn't listening closely enough. So if the Stella Maris were to hit Rakhat, it would wreck the planet.'

'No. It's not as bad as that,' George said. 'We scrubbed off a lot of speed getting into orbit. If the ship came down in the ocean, it wouldn't do that much damage. Tidal wave maybe, but it wouldn't destroy the whole ecosystem.'

'I don't think it would be ethical to risk even a tidal wave,' Emilio said softly. 'Seven of us. Whole populations on the coast.'

'I'm not sure we can find a new orbit that would do us much good anyhow, if we need an ocean splashdown,' said Jimmy. 'Might be possible, but it would restrict us to a really narrow orbital band.'

'Well, boys and girls, I am really sorry but it's about eight to one odds we're stuck.' George wiped his hands over his face and shrugged as he filed his calculations to show D.W. later. 'We can radio home, but it will take better than four years for them to get the news, another two or three years to configure a ship, and then seventeen more to get here.' The younger people might see home again. That was something.

'Still, there's some room to maneuver, and things could be a lot worse,' Jimmy said matter-of-factly. He pulled up the supply lists they'd assembled for George and D.W. to use on the last trip from the asteroid. 'We figured on a year's worth of stuff for the food depot and brought down all the equipment we thought would be of most use. Marc had seeds on his list. We can survive on the native foods, but if we can start a garden that doesn't get washed away in this endless rain, we'll have our own plants as well. I think we'll do okay.'

George suddenly sat up straight. 'You know, there's a chance we could manufacture more fuel for the lander. We're pretty sure the Singers know chemistry, right?' he said, looking around. 'Maybe after we make contact with them, we can work something out.'

It was the first notion that offered any real hope. Jimmy and Anne stared at each other and then at George,