The Sparrow s-1 Read online

  "Hmmm." George was almost asleep.

  "I could be a Jewish mother, if I put my mind to it. The real trouble with Jesus," Anne decided, "was that he never found a nice Jewish girl to marry and have a family with, poor thing. That's probably blasphemy, isn't it."

  George got up on an elbow and looked at her in the dark. "Keep out of it, Anne."

  "Okay, okay. I was only kidding. Go to sleep."

  But neither of them did for a while, each thinking thoughts in the dark.

  9

  NAPLES:

  APRIL 2060

  John Candotti was awake and dressing when he heard the knock, just after dawn.

  "Father Candotti?" It was Brother Edward, calling quietly but urgently in the hallway. "Father, have you seen Emilio Sandoz?"

  John opened the door. "Not since last night. Why?"

  Behr, rumpled and pudgy, looked almost angry. "I just came from his room. His bed wasn't slept in and he's sicked up and I can't find him."

  Pulling on his sweater, John pushed past Brother Edward and headed for Sandoz's room, unable to believe the man wasn't there.

  "I cleaned up the mess. Lost everything he ate yesterday," Edward called behind him, wheezing, as they hurried down the hallway. "Although that was little enough. I already checked in the lavatories. He's not in there, I tell you."

  John stuck his head into the room anyway and caught the lingering odor of vomit and soap. "Damn," he whispered fiercely. "Damn, damn, damn. I should have expected something like this! I should have been nearby. I would have heard him."

  "It was my place to be here, Father. I don't know why I didn't insist on the room next door. But he doesn't usually need me at night anymore," Edward said, trying to explain his lapse to himself as much as to Candotti. "I would have looked in on him last night but I didn't want to interfere if he was—He told me he wanted to talk to you. I thought he might—"

  "I thought so, too. All right, look. He can't be far away. Have you checked the refectory?"

  Trying not to panic, they searched the building, John, for one, half-expecting to find Sandoz's body at each turn. He'd begun to wonder about contacting the Father General, or the police, when it occurred to him that Sandoz was from an island and might be down by the water. "Let's look outside," he suggested, and they left the main building on its western side.

  The sun had hardly begun to climb and the stone balcony was still in shadow, as was the shoreline far below. Stunted trees, contorted by the prevailing winds off the Mediterranean, were covered with a gold and green haze, and farmers were already plowing, but the spring had been gray and cold—Vesuvius, everyone said. Anxiety and chill combined and John began to shiver as he leaned over the wall, eyes sweeping the coast.

  Then, awash with relief, he spotted Sandoz and shouted against the wind, "Brother Edward? Brother Edward!" Edward, hunched against the cold with round arms crossed over his barrel chest, had headed for the garage to count the bicycles. He heard Candotti's voice indistinctly and turned back. "I see him," John yelled, motioning downward. "He's on the beach."

  "Shall I go down and bring him back?" Edward called on his way back to the balcony.

  "No," John yelled. "I'll get him. Grab a coat for him, okay? He must be freezing."

  Brother Edward trundled off to get three coats. Returning minutes later, he helped John into the biggest one, handed him another to bring to Sandoz and pulled one on himself as John started down the long line of stairs that zigzagged downhill to the Mediterranean. Before he'd gotten far, Brother Edward stopped him with a shout.

  "Father? Be careful."

  What an odd thing to say, John thought, wondering for a moment if Brother Edward was concerned about his slipping on the damp stone stairs. Then John remembered the way Sandoz had come at him, that first day, back in Rome. "I will. It'll be okay." Brother Edward looked doubtful. "Really. If he hasn't done anything to himself, I don't think he'd hurt anyone else."

  But he sounded more sure of that than he was.

  The wind was carrying the sound of his footsteps away from Sandoz. Not wanting to startle him, John cleared his throat and made as much noise as he could, scuffling through the gravelly sand. Sandoz didn't turn but he stopped moving and waited near a large stone outcropping, part of the geological formation that had tithed its substance to the ancient buildings on the hill behind them.

  John stopped as he drew even with the man and looked out over the water himself, watching shorebirds wheel and dip and settle on the gray water. "I have been suffering from horizon deprivation," he declared conversationally. "Feels good to be able to focus on something that's far away." John's own face and hands ached with cold. He was shuddering now and did not understand how Sandoz could be so still. "You gave us a scare, man. Next time, let somebody know when you're going out, okay?" He took a step closer to Sandoz, the jacket held casually in one outstretched hand. "Aren't you freezing? I brought you a coat."

  "If you come near me," Sandoz said, "you'll bleed for it."

  John let his arm drop, the coat brushing the rocky sand, unnoticed. Closer now, he saw that what he had taken for stillness was a coiled tension, wound too tightly to be seen from a distance. Sandoz turned away and reached out toward a line of fist-sized stones placed along the edge of a natural shelf in the rocks, the brace gleaming suddenly as the sunlight came at last over the bluff. His own body tensing in sympathetic concentration, John watched the muscles in Sandoz's back, outlined by sweat-dampened cloth, knotting convulsively as he worked to bring his fingers around a stone.

  Sandoz turned back toward the Mediterranean, sparkling now in the morning light, and with the grace of an old ballplayer, cocked and threw. The fingers did not loosen in time and the rock thudded into the sand. Methodically, he went back to the shelf and once again gripped a stone, turned, stanced and threw. When he exhausted his supply of rocks, he went out to collect them again, leaning from the waist, grasping them with his left hand, gasping sometimes with the effort, but releasing them carefully one by one, in a row on the rocky shelf.

  Most of the stones, heartbreakingly, were only a few steps from where he stood to throw them.

  By the time the sun was overhead, Candotti had discarded his own coat, and he now sat on the beach, watching silently. Brother Edward had joined him and he watched as well, the tears rolling down his plump cheeks drying quickly in the wind off the sea.

  Around ten o'clock, when the bruises had broken through to frank bleeding, Edward tried to talk to Sandoz. "Please, Emilio, stop now. That's enough." The man turned and looked through him as though one of them did not exist, the dark eyes unfathomable. John saw then that there was nothing to do except bear witness, and gently drew Ed away.

  For two hours more, he and Brother Edward marked the painful progress Sandoz made, his fingers working more consistently for him, the stones beginning to land in the water more often than not, new ones taking their place on the rocky shelf. Finally, he was able to whip off a dozen in sequence, each sinking into the water a good distance beyond the shoreline. Shaking and gray-faced, Sandoz stared out at the sea a moment longer and then walked past the two men who had shared this morning with him. He did not pause or even glance at them as he drew near, but he spoke in passing.

  "Not Magdalene," he said. "Lazarus."

  If Vincenzo Giuliani was moved by what he witnessed that morning from the balcony, there was no sign of it in his face as he watched the three men make their way along the stone steps leading upward from the beach. Emilio stumbled badly, twice, on the way up. The white heat of anger that had seen him through the dawn had burned down to a dangerous snarling resentment and Giuliani could see him shake off the help he was offered by John Candotti and Brother Edward when he fell.

  The men below had no idea that the Father General was not in Rome. He had, in fact, preceded them to the Naples house, taking up residence in the room next to the one given to Sandoz, where he waited patiently for the breakdown he was engineering. In the thirteenth century,
the Dominicans proposed that the end justifies the means, Giuliani mused. The Jesuits took up that philosophy in their turn but multiplied the means, doing what seemed necessary in the service of God, for the good of souls. Deception, in the case before him, he deemed justifiable, preferable to a direct approach. So Vincenzo Giuliani had signed the note "V," knowing that only Voelker addressed Sandoz as "Doctor." Emilio's reaction tended to confirm the Contact Consortium's allegations about what had happened on Rakhat. And as Giuliani had gambled, the very idea that Voelker knew was enough to snap Emilio's brittle self-control.

  It took almost half an hour for the little party to climb to the top of the cliff. As they approached, the Father General stepped back into the shadows, waiting to speak until they were near enough to be startled by the soft and unexpected words.

  "Really, Emilio," Vincenzo Giuliani said in a dry, bored voice, "why not stumble again, in case someone has missed the symbolism? I'm sure Brother Edward has been meditating on Golgotha all the way up, but Father Candotti is a practical man and may have been distracted by the fact that he's long overdue for breakfast." He saw, without unseemly satisfaction, the fresh anger he had provoked and he continued in the same light, ironic tone. "I'll see you in my office in fifteen minutes. And get cleaned up. The carpets in that room are quite valuable. It would be a pity to bleed all over them."

  The man ushered into Giuliani's office twenty minutes later had indeed been cleaned up, Giuliani observed, but he had not eaten since vomiting the previous evening and had not slept at all, after an exhausting trip out of the city. Sandoz looked waxen, the skin beneath his eyes purplish. And he had put himself through a hellish ordeal this morning. Good, Giuliani thought.

  He did not invite Sandoz to sit but rather left him standing in the center of the room. Giuliani sat motionless behind the vast desk, outlined by the light from the window at his back, his face unreadable. Aside from the ticking of an ancient clock, there was no sound. When the Father General finally spoke, his voice was quiet and mild.

  "There is no form of death or violence that Jesuit missionaries have not met. Jesuits have been hanged, drawn and quartered in London," he said quietly. "Disemboweled in Ethiopia. Burned alive by the Iroquois. Poisoned in Germany, crucified in Thailand. Starved to death in Argentina, beheaded in Japan, drowned in Madagascar, gunned down in El Salvador." He stood and began to circle the room slowly, an old habit from his days as a history professor, but stopped for a moment by the bookcase to select an old volume, which he turned idly over and over in his hands as he spoke, strolling again, placing no special emphasis on any of his words. "We have been terrorized and intimidated. We have been reviled, falsely accused, imprisoned for life. We have been beaten. Maimed. Sodomized. Tortured. And broken."

  He came to rest now in front of Sandoz, close enough to see the man's eyes glittering. There was no change in Emilio's face but the tremor was visible. "And we, who are vowed to chastity and obedience," he said very softly, holding Emilio's eyes with his own, "have made decisions, alone and unsupported, that have given scandal and ended in tragedy. Alone, we have made horrifying mistakes that would never have occurred in a community."

  He had expected the shock of recognition, the look that comes when the truth is spoken. For a moment, Giuliani wondered if he had misjudged. But he saw shame, he was certain, and despair.

  "Did you think you were the only one? Is it possible that you are so arrogant?" he asked, in tones of wonderment. Sandoz was blinking rapidly now. "Did you think you were the only one ever to wonder if what we do is worth the price we pay? Did you honestly believe that you alone, of all those who have gone, were the single man to lose God? Do you think we would have a name for the sin of despair, if only you had experienced it?"

  Give the man credit for courage. He did not look away. Giuliani changed tactics. He sat down at the desk once more and picked up a notescreen. "The last report I received on your health tells me that you are not as sick as you seem. What was the term the physician used? 'A psychogenic somatic retraction. I do hate jargon. I suppose he means you are depressed. I would put it more bluntly. I think you are wallowing in self-pity."

  Emilio's head snapped up, face carved in wet stone.

  For an instant, Sandoz looked like a bewildered child, slapped for weeping. It was so brief, so out of expectation, that it almost didn't register. Months later, and for the rest of his life, Vincenzo Giuliani would remember that instant.

  "I, for one, am tired of it," the Father General continued matter-of-factly, sitting back in his chair and contemplating Sandoz like a master of novices. How strange, to be both a year younger and decades older than this man. He tossed the notescreen aside and straightened, hands folded on the desk in front of him, a judge about to pass sentence. "If you treated anyone else as you have treated yourself during the past six hours, you would be guilty of assault," he told Sandoz flatly. "This will cease. From this moment on, you will show your body the respect it deserves as God's creation. You will allow your arms to heal and then you will embark on a sensible and moderate course of physical therapy. You will eat regularly. You will rest properly. You will care for your own body as you would for that of a friend to whom you are indebted. In two months' time, you will appear before me and we will examine in detail the history of the mission upon which you were sent," Giuliani said, his voice hardening suddenly as he pronounced each word separately, "by your superiors."

  And then, mercifully, Vincenzo Giuliani, Father General of the Society of Jesus, took back the awful burden that belonged to him and his predecessors by right. "During these months and for all time," he told Sandoz, "you will cease to arrogate to yourself responsibility that lies elsewhere. Is that clear?"

  There was a long moment, but Emilio nodded almost imperceptibly.

  "Good." Giuliani rose quietly and went to the door of his office. He opened it and was not surprised to see Brother Edward waiting, his anxiety plain. Candotti was seated a little way down the hall, hunched over, hands together between his knees, tense and tired.

  "Brother Edward," the Father General said pleasantly, "Father Sandoz will be having some breakfast now. Perhaps you and Father Candotti would like to join him in the refectory."

  10

  SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO:

  AUGUST 2–3, 2019

  Looking back on what happened that warm August night, Anne Edwards always wished she'd dug out horoscopes for everyone at the dinner. It would have been an excellent test of astrology, she thought. Somewhere, under someone's sign, there should have been a warning: "Brace yourself. Everything changes tonight. Everything."

  Emilio, when she asked him over for dinner on Saturday, had suggested with telling casualness that George might invite Jimmy Quinn and Sofia Mendes as well. Sure, Anne agreed, putting misgivings aside. The more, the merrier.

  Emilio had not seen Sofia since Cleveland, and it was beginning to seem as though he was deliberately avoiding her, which was probably uncomfortably close to the truth. Well, Anne knew what it took to convert attraction to valued friendship and believed Emilio capable of it; she was willing to provide neutral ground for the task. And Sofia? An emotional anorexic, Anne diagnosed privately. That, perhaps, along with her beauty, was what drew men. Jimmy had long since confessed to his infatuation, unaware that Sofia'd had a similar effect on Emilio. And George, for that matter. And I'm in no position to complain, she thought. My God, all this misplaced sexual heat! The house is going to be flooded with pheromones tonight.

  So, she decided, locking up the clinic on Saturday afternoon, my job is to make the evening feel like a family gathering, make the kids feel like cousins, maybe. Above all, she understood, it was necessary to avoid treating Emilio and Sofia, or even Jimmy and Sofia, as a couple. Keep it fun, she told herself firmly, and then keep out of it.

  On Friday of that week, Jimmy Quinn had begun explaining to Sofia the portion of his job involving the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

  "The SETI work is similar to
the rest of the observations but it's on the back burner," he told her. Headsets and gloves on, they felt themselves to be sitting in front of an old-fashioned oscilloscope, some VR engineer's idea of a joke. "When we aren't using the dish for anything else, SETI does a systematic scan for radio signals from other planets. The program flags anything that looks like a possible ET message—anything with a constant frequency that's not one of the known sources like registered radio broadcasts or military transmissions, things like that."

  "I understand there are already very sophisticated pattern-recognition programs in place," Sofia said.

  "Yeah. The SETI programs are old but they're good, and ISAS updated the signal-processing equipment when they took Arecibo over. So the system already knows how to screen out junk signals from things we know are nonsentient sources like hydrogen atoms vibrating or stars making noise." He pulled up an example. "See how crazy this looks? This is a star's radio signal. It's completely irregular and it sounds like this in audio," he said, making a breathy crackly noise through his teeth. He pulled up a new display. "Okay. Radio used for communication uses a constant frequency carrier with some kind of amplitude modulation. See the difference?" Sofia nodded. "SETI scans over fourteen million separate channels, billions of signals, looking for patterns in the noise. When the system picks out something interesting, it logs the time, the date, the source location, the frequency and the duration of the signal. The problem is the backlog of transmissions the SETI tech has to look at."

  "So your job is to disprove the standing hypothesis that a transmission is intelligent communication."