The Sparrow (19 page)

T
HERE HAD BEEN
resistance to the escalation in Sofia's involvement with the mission, not from the other crew members, but from the Father General's office, which had been willing to employ her as a contractor but balked at her inclusion in the crew. It had taken D. W. Yarbrough's direct intercession to bring her in and the Texan was pretty damned pleased with himself for pushing it through.

For one thing, Sofia had turned out to be a natural pilot; nerveless and precise, with a logical approach to complex systems, she picked up the skills from her instructors with the cool competence that once profited Jean-Claude Jaubert and now delighted D. W. Yarbrough. "Learning curve like a jump jet's flight path—all but straight up," D.W declared to the Father General, and continued cheerfully, "I could drop dead any time now and she'd get 'em all up and down, no problem. 'S a load off my mind, I guarantee."

But there was more to it than that. D.W. made no claim to saintliness, only to a certain talent for bringing people into their own—for finding God in them. A master of disguise himself, Yarbrough knew when he was looking at a facade. If nothing else was accomplished on this crazy-ass mission, he told himself first and the Father General last, he intended to take a shot at helping this one soul patch itself up and make itself whole. Long ago, John F. Kennedy proposed that America go to the moon, not because it would be easy but because it would be difficult, and that was the gift D. W. Yarbrough offered Sofia Mendes: the opportunity to do something so difficult that she'd be stretched to her limits, feel her own possibilities, find something in herself to rejoice in.

And if it was a shock that Sofia was as wise to his ways as he was to hers, he reckoned that might be to the good. For all his folksy cowboy shtick, Yarbrough was, at fifty-nine, a careful, competent leader whose slipshod personal style masked a relentless, fastidious attention to detail. Once an air squadron commander, he knew there were many things one could not control when engaged in battle, and that knowledge dictated an iron-willed insistence that what could be controlled must be brought to perfection. And in this, Sofia was his match.

As the two generalists on the team, D. W. Yarbrough and Sofia Mendes had grappled with the coordination and supervision of the greatest voyage into the unknown since
Magellan
left Spain in 1519. Together, they had gone over every detail of the mission, collecting and absorbing the results of the work of several hundred independent task forces, reconciling differences, making command decisions, insisting on additional thought, better solutions, more thoroughly considered plans. They had to allow for every imaginable contingency: desert heat, tropical rain, arctic cold, plains, mountains, rivers, and do it with as much overlap in equipment as possible, to minimize bulk. They studied food-storage systems, considered possible means of overland transport, argued fiercely over whether they should bring coffee or learn to do without it, discussed the ecological impact of bringing seeds in hopes of establishing gardens, brainstormed about trade goods, shouted, fell out, made up, laughed a good deal and, despite the accumulated odds against such an outcome, came to be fond of each other.

Finally the day arrived when they were ready to begin loading the asteroid for the trip. D.W. and Sofia ferried George Edwards and Marc Robichaux up to the rock first, so they could inspect and fine-tune the life-support system onboard the asteroid and stow the first shipment of supplies.

Marc Robichaux, S.J., was a naturalist and watercolorist from Montreal. Blond hair graying at forty-three, he remained one of those perennially youthful looking men, soft-spoken and gentle-eyed. "The quintessential Shy, Cute Guy," Anne pegged him, the kind of boy who was simultaneously a high school heartthrob and a teacher's pet, adorable but with an obnoxious tendency to turn his papers in early and get A's on them. Marc was in charge of the Wolverton tube plant colony and the tilapia tank, which would produce fresh food to supplement the packaged stuff they were bringing. George Edwards was responsible for the software control of the Wolverton tube as well as for the software and mechanical aspects of the allied air- and water-extraction systems. The two men had spent the last year learning each other's specialties, Marc's quiet carefulness a good balance for George's exuberant try-anything approach to life.

Next up were James Connor Quinn, twenty-eight, mission specialist for navigation and communications, and the musicologist Alan Pace, S.J. At thirty-nine, Father Pace was a willowy Englishman who gave the sleepy-eyed impression of someone who had seen it all and who quite possibly knew it all as well. It was a trait that worried D.W.; Pace was a last-minute replacement for Andrej Jelacic, who'd suffered a heart attack during a stress test. Andrej, still mourned, was a hard act to follow. But Alan was well qualified—a remarkable musician, if kind of a pain in the ass. Like many musicians, he had a precise and orderly mind and had, in fact, minored in mathematics. He cross-trained with Jimmy Quinn, an amateur pianist, and they had spent the months of preparation studying the growing collection of alien song fragments, along with the technical skills needed to navigate the rock to Alpha Centauri.

That left Emilio Sandoz, forty, and Anne Edwards, who like her husband was sixty-four, as the last ones up to the rock. They had remained in Puerto Rico while the others dispersed for training. A new priest was assigned to take over Emilio's work in La Perla, and he'd shifted his effort to the clinic, where Anne supervised him in an accredited physician's assistant course, with an emphasis on the kinds of medical emergencies they might face off Earth, without benefit of hospitals, pharmacies or elaborate equipment. For his part, Emilio once again became Anne's language teacher, this time using Sofia's AI program to help Anne prepare for learning the Singers' language. Together night after night, they transcribed and studied the intercepted transmissions. They were handicapped by the utter lack of referents but picked out recurring phrases and accustomed themselves to the rhythm of the language.

They had a fair amount of material to work from, as did Alan Pace. Once established, the reception pattern became reliable. By June of 2021, most radio astronomers had returned to other projects and telescope operators simply turned toward Alpha Centauri in alternating 15- and 27-day cycles, tuning in for what seemed to be regularly scheduled concerts. The music never lasted long, the signals falling off to noise after only a few minutes. The songs always differed from one another, although a theme was repeated once. Sometimes there was the call-and-response pattern of the first song. Sometimes there was a soloist. Sometimes the music was choral.

Most exciting, in some ways, was that individual Singers came to be recognized, after a time. Of these, the most compelling had a voice of breathtaking power and sweetness, operatic in dimension but so plainly used in hypnotic, graceful chant that the listener hardly noticed its gorgeousness except to think of beauty and of truth.

This was the voice of Hlavin Kitheri, the Reshtar of Galatna, who would one day destroy Emilio Sandoz.

I
F THE ANTINAUSEA
patches did not entirely eliminate space sickness, they did seem to limit its duration. Both Anne and Emilio were fine by the time D.W. called out, some twelve hours after liftoff, "Thar she blows!" Floating cautiously toward the cockpit windows, they caught their first glimpse of the asteroid.

Emilio, who'd also been the recipient of George's enthusiastic description, made a disappointed face. "What? No sour cream? No chives?"

Anne giggled and pushed off to return to her place in the cargo bay. "And no gravity," she said over her shoulder. She was grinning.

"Is that significant?" Emilio asked in a low voice, joining her in the back.

"Strap in, you two," D.W. ordered. "We still got mass and you can still bust your neck if I blow the docking."

"Shit. What does he mean, blow the docking? He never said anything about that before," Anne muttered, taking her position and fastening the straps that held her to her couch.

Emilio, also buckling up, had not forgotten the look on Anne's face. "So, what was that about no gravity?" he pressed. "C'mon. What? What!"

"How shall I put this?" She was blushing but went on very quietly in tones of great propriety. "George and I have been married almost forty-five years and we've done it about all the ways it can be done, except in zero G."

He put his hands over his mouth. "Of course. It never occurred to me, but naturally—"

"It isn't supposed to occur to you," Anne said severely. "I, on the other hand, have thought of very little else since I stopped throwing up."

T
HE DOCKING PROCEDURE
went smoothly. D.W. and Sofia went almost directly to their quarters, having worked continually during the flight. Even Emilio and Anne were tired simply from being passengers, and despite the excitement of seeing the living quarters for the first time, neither of them protested being sent to "bed"—sleeping bags suspended in midair.

While the newcomers slept, George, Marc, Alan and Jimmy moved the last few hundred items off the docker. A lot of thought had gone into the geometry of the storage areas; it was hard to anticipate how the load would shift under acceleration. Indeed, all aspects of the living quarters had been planned for function in first weightlessness and later with a definite down, which would be aft, toward the engines, once they were fired. So everything had to be carefully secured before the first of two shakedown burns D.W. planned for the next day.

The work took hours, which was partly why Jimmy Quinn was so late waking up the next morning, but only partly. Eileen Quinn once observed that getting Jimmy up for school was more like performing a resurrection than providing a wake-up call; never a willing early riser, Jimmy hated mornings even in space. So when he floated into the common room after dealing with the aggravating complexities of weightless hygiene, he was ready to apologize for delaying the shakedown burn. To his surprise, Anne and George were still missing from breakfast, so he wasn't the latest after all. He went about his business, silent as usual at that time of day, sucking down a tube of coffee and some lobster bisque he'd discovered in the food bins. It was only after the caffeine began to work that he realized that everyone was kind of waiting for something to happen.

He was about to ask D.W. what time the burn was scheduled for when the laughter from Anne and George's room got noticeable and he turned to say, "What do you suppose they're up to?" He meant it as an innocent question, but Emilio cracked up and D.W. put his hands over his face. Alan Pace was clearly trying very hard not to notice anything, but Marc was laughing and Sofia's shoulders were shaking, although Jimmy couldn't see her face because she'd gone off to a corner of the galley.

"What—?" he started to ask again, but now Anne was audibly convulsed and then George's voice rang out from their cabin. "Well, sports fans, we're talking a major disappointment here in Fantasy Land."

That set D.W. off, but Alan was still quite composed and remarked, "Ah, I expect this is a difficulty somehow attributable to Newton's Third Law," which Jimmy, in his morning fog, had to think about for a moment before he said vaguely, "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction …" And then it began to dawn on him.

"Ole George is prolly having a little trouble gettin' a purchase," D.W. commented, which made even Alan Pace laugh. But Marc Robichaux pushed off purposefully toward a storage cabinet and floated back moments later, smiling seraphically, a middle-aged Angel Gabriel holding a two-inch-wide roll of silver adhesive tape. This he delivered by cracking open the door to Anne and George's room and holding it inside one-handed, the way one might deliver toilet paper to a discommoded guest. Meanwhile, Karl Malden's sonorous TV voice, marred by a slight Spanish accent, called out to them, "Duct tape! Don't leave home without it."