The Sparrow (54 page)

"F
ATHER
R
OBICHAUX WAS
in poor physical condition when this procedure took place," John was saying, "and did not survive it."

Emilio looked up and saw that everyone was staring at his hands. He put them in his lap.

"It must have been very difficult," the Father General said.

"Yes."

"And then you were alone."

"Oh, no," Emilio said softly. "Oh, no. I believed that God was with me." He said this with great sincerity and because of that, it was impossible to know if he was serious or if this was mockery. He sat and looked into Vincenzo Giuliani's eyes. "Do you believe that? Was God with me?" He looked around at each of them: John Candotti, Felipe Reyes, Johannes Voelker, Edward Behr, his eyes coming to rest again on Giuliani, who found it impossible to speak.

Sandoz rose and went to the door, opening it. Then he paused, struck by a thought. "Not comedy. Not tragedy." Then he laughed, a feral sound, devoid of humor. "Perhaps farce?" he suggested. And then he left.

32

NAPLES:
AUGUST 2060

"I
THINK PERHAPS
that I was a disappointment to Supaari," Sandoz told them the next day. "Anne was a delight to work with, and they had enjoyed each other a great deal. I was not nearly so amusing."

"You were grieving and terrified and half-dead," Voelker told him flatly. And John nodded, in agreement at last with something Johannes Voelker had said.

"Yes! A poor dinner companion." Sandoz had a bright and brittle sound to him this afternoon. Giuliani was openly disapproving of this strange glittery mood; Sandoz ignored him. "I'm not sure Supaari really thought through the idea of formally accepting me as a dependent. It might have been a sort of spontaneous gesture of interplanetary goodwill. Maybe he wished he'd let the government have me after all." Sandoz shrugged. "In any case, he seemed primarily interested in the trade aspects of the situation, and I was not much good to him as an economic adviser. He asked me if I thought that there might be other parties coming from Earth. I told him that we had radioed news of our situation back to our home planet and that it was possible others might come. We had no way of knowing when. He decided to learn English from me because it is our lingua franca. He had already started to pick it up from Anne."

"So. You had work as a linguist," Giuliani said lightly. "For a time, at least."

"Yes. Supaari was making the best of things, I think. We had many conversations, once I was well enough to sort out which language I was supposed to use. It was good English practice for him, and he explained many things to me. You should be grateful to him. Most of what I understand about what happened came from him. He was very helpful."

"How long were you with him?" Giuliani asked.

"I'm not really sure. Six to eight months, perhaps? I learned K'San during that time. Appalling language. The hardest I've ever learned. Part of the joke, I suppose," he said, inexplicably. He stood up and began to walk around the room, jumpy and distractible.

"Did you hear anything of the violence that Wu and Isley reported?" Giuliani asked, watching him move from place to place.

"No. I was quite isolated, I assure you. I imagine, however, that with characteristic creativity, the Runa were beginning to expand on Sofia's suggestion that they were many and the Jana'ata were few."

"Wu and Isley asked after you as soon as Askama brought them to Supaari's compound," Giuliani said, pausing when he saw Sandoz flinch. "Supaari told them that he had made other arrangements for you. What was the phrase he used? Ah. Here: ‘more suited to his nature.' Can you tell us why you were removed from the household?"

There was an ugly laugh. "Do you know what I said to Anne Edwards once? God is in the why." He would not look at anyone now. He stood with his back to them and stared out the window, holding the gauzy curtain aside, careful with the hardware of his brace, so as not to snag the fabric. Finally, they heard him say, "No. I don't know what he meant by that, except that somehow he believed he was justified in what he did."

"In what he did," Giuliani repeated quietly. "You did nothing to cause your removal?"

"Oh, Christ!" Sandoz spun to face him. "Even now? After all this?"

He walked to his place at the table and sat down, shaking with anger. When he spoke again, his voice was very soft, but he was obviously fighting rage, braced hands rigid in his lap, eyes on the table. "My position in the household of Supaari VaGayjur was that of a crippled dependent. Supaari was not a flighty person, but I believe he must have tired of me. Or perhaps he simply felt that I had fulfilled my role as a language tutor when he became competent in English and that it was time for me to take up another position, so to speak." He looked directly at Giuliani then. "My residential and occupational preferences were not inquired into at any time. How explicit am I required to be?"

H
E WAS ASLEEP
when they came for him, just past dawn. Caught in the web of a dream, he was at first unsure if the hands were real or imagined, and by the time he knew, their grip was unbreakable. Later on, when he asked himself if there might have been some way to escape, he knew the question was folly. Where could he have gone? What shelter would he have found? Equally pointless: the struggle, the demands for an explanation. The first blow drove the air from his lungs, the second knocked him nearly senseless. Efficient, they wasted no additional time in beating him. Half-dragged, half-carried, he tried to memorize the streets and had an impression that the route was fairly consistently uphill. By the time they arrived at Galatna Palace, his head was clear and he was able to breathe without pain.

Arms pinioned, he was escorted past the fountains he'd seen from Supaari's compound and taken through a side entrance to the palace, down hallways bright with colored tiles and floored with marble and jasper, past internal courtyards, under vaulted, ribbed ceilings. The simplest aspects of the interior were gilded, walls overlaid by silver-wire trellis, each diagonal defined and sparkling with a jewel: emerald and ruby and amethyst and diamond. He saw, in passing, a formal room of ecclesiastical proportions fitted out with a wide indoor canopy in a yellow silken fabric figured and embroidered in turquoise and carmine and spring green, tasseled and fringed with gold thread, its richness echoed by the piles of cushions, ivory and red and blue, their plush fabric creased and divided by braid and costly welting.

Room after room: there was nothing straight that could be made curved, nothing plain that could be given a pattern, nothing white that could be brilliant. The very air was embellished! Everywhere, there was scent: a hundred fragrances and odors he could not name or recognize.

It was, he thought crazily, the most spectacularly vulgar place he'd ever been in. It looked and smelled like a cheap whorehouse, except the jewels were real and each dram of perfume probably cost a village corporation's yearly earnings.

He tried both Ruanja and K'San each time they encountered someone new, but no one would respond and he thought at first that all the servants were mutes. As the day wore on, he was given short orders in a form of K'San that was unfamiliar to him, as High German might be unfamiliar to someone who spoke Low. Go there. Sit here. Wait. He did his best to comply; he was cuffed when he got something wrong. It was he who became mute.

In the days that followed, he was held with an odd mixture of freedom and constraint. There were others kept, as he was, in subtle but effective cages. They were able to move from cage to cage but not inside the palace proper. A zoo, he thought, trying to make sense of all this. I am in some kind of private zoo.

The others were a bizarre but beautiful group of Runa and some Jana'ata, and there were a few individuals whose species he was unsure of. The Runa who shared his cushioned captivity came to his assistance when he needed help because of his hands. They were extraordinarily affectionate and friendly and tried to make him feel a part of whatever odd society existed within the ornate and costly walls of Galatna Palace. In their way, they were kind, but they seemed almost stupid, as though bred for looks alone, with coats of unusual color, brindled or pied, one striped like a zebra. Most had fine-boned and overbred faces, a few had manes, several even approached taillessness. None spoke the dialect of Ruanja he'd learned in Kashan.

The captive Jana'ata were kept in a separate enclosure and paid him no attention, even though he could not detect any difference in their status within the zoo. They were heavily robed, with headdresses that covered their faces, smaller than Supaari. Later he found out they were females, and still later he realized that they must be the kind of sterile partners Supaari had told him about. He called to them in K'San, asked them to explain to him what this place was, but they kept to themselves. He was never able to get them to speak to him in any language.

He had been fed irregularly but well in Supaari's household, like the pet of a small child who'd wanted a puppy but then lost interest. Here the food was provided ad libitum because, he supposed, so many of the others were Runa, who required more constant meals. It was an improvement in theory, but he had no appetite. The Runa always seemed touchingly pleased when he accepted food from them. So he ate, to repay their kindness.

It came to him that he was now perfectly useless, probably kept as a curiosity, as unique and odd as the gaudy trinkets he'd seen stuffing the alcoves and jamming the shelves of Galatna that first day. And then he was fitted with a jeweled collar, and his humiliation seemed complete. He was, he thought, the exact counterpart of a capuchin monkey kept on a golden chain by some sixteenth-century European aristocrat.

Supaari, however cool and perplexing, had at least been an intellectual companion. Now he tried to steel himself for the predictable effects of utter loneliness, to be patient with the hollow unreality he felt. He did sums and sang songs in his head and tried to pray but stopped when he realized that he was mixing the languages up. He was no longer certain of the differences between Spanish and Ruanja, and that frightened him as much as anything that had happened to him so far. The worst moment came when he realized that he couldn't remember the name of his neighborhood back in Puerto Rico. I am losing my mind, he thought, one word at a time.

He was confused and vaguely frightened all of the time, but he forced himself to keep some kind of schedule, to exercise. This amused his Runa colleagues, but he did it anyway. There were scented baths, as elaborate and horrible as the rest of the place. As no one gave him orders about this, he chose the water with the least offensive perfume and did his best to keep himself clean.

"T
ELL US," HE
heard the Father General say.

"I thought that I had been sold as a zoological specimen," Emilio Sandoz said, trembling violently now, staring at the table, each soft word a separate act of self-control. "I believed, for a while, that I was in a menagerie owned by the Reshtar of Galatna. An aristocrat. A great poet. The author of many songs, yes? A gentleman of catholic tastes. It was, in fact, a kind of harem. Like Clytemnestra, I was compelled to master submission."

I
T WAS PERHAPS
three weeks or a month later when one of the guards came to the cageside and spoke to the others, who huffed and twitched and crowded around him. He had no idea what anyone was saying, had made no effort to learn anything beyond the most rudimentary phrases of the language spoken here. It was a form of denial, he supposed. If he didn't learn the language, he wouldn't have to stay. Stupid, of course. For reasons he could not have articulated, he was suddenly afraid, but he calmed himself with thoughts that would, very soon, shatter his soul. He said to himself: I am in God's hands. Whatever happens now to me is God's will.

He was given a robe, obviously made specially for him, cut down to his size. It was staggeringly heavy and hot but preferable to parading around naked. He was taken, arms held firmly, to a plain and empty white room, unscented and unfurnished. It was astonishing. He was so relieved to be out of the welter, the visual and olfactory and auditory confusion, that he very nearly sank to his knees. Then he heard Supaari's voice and, heart racing, felt a rush of hope, thinking that he would surely be released. Supaari will take me home now, he thought. It's all been some mistake, he thought, and forgave Supaari for not coming sooner.