The Sparrow

13 EARTH: AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 2019

Anne Edwards was finishing up her morning appointments when she saw Emilio hanging around the clinic's open door. She stopped midstride but then continued out of her office into the tiny reception area.

"You angry with me?" he asked quietly, not coming in.

"I'm angry with somebody," she conceded waspishly, drying her hands and stepping to the door. "I'm just not sure with whom."

"With God, perhaps?"

"I liked you better when you didn't bring God into every damned conversation," Anne muttered. "Do you want lunch? I'm going home for half an hour. There's leftover pasta."

He shrugged and nodded and stood out of her way as she locked up. They climbed the eighty steps to the house, Anne breaking the silence only to return the greetings of people they passed. Once inside, they moved to the kitchen and Emilio perched on the stool in the corner, watching Anne steadily as she rummaged around, putting together a light lunch for both of them.

"It is often hard to tell from the way people behave whether or not they believe in God," he remarked conversationally. "Do you, Anne?"

She started the ancient microwave and then turned to him, leaning against the counter and meeting his eyes for the first time since noticing him at the clinic. "I believe in God the way I believe in quarks," she said coolly. "People whose business it is to know about quantum physics or religion tell me they have good reason to believe that quarks and God exist. And they tell me that if I wanted to devote my life to learning what they've learned, I'd find quarks and God just like they did."

"Do you think they're telling the truth?"

"It's all rock and roll to me." She shrugged and turned away to pull the plates out of the oven and carry them to the table. He hopped off the stool lightly and followed her to the dining room. They sat down and began to eat, the sounds of the neighborhood drifting in with the breeze through the open windows.

"And yet," Emilio said, "you behave like a good and moral person."

He expected an explosion and he got it. She threw her fork down with a clatter on the plate and sat back. "You know what? I really resent the idea that the only reason someone might be good or moral is because they're religious. I do what I do," Anne said, biting off each word, "without hope of reward or fear of punishment. I do not require heaven or hell to bribe or scare me into acting decently, thank you very much."

He let her simmer down enough to pick up her fork and resume eating. "A woman of honor," he observed, inclining his head with respect.

"Damned straight," she muttered around a mouthful of food, glaring at her plate and spiking a piece of rigatoni with her fork.

"We have more in common than you might suppose," Emilio said mildly but did not elaborate when her head came up. As she struggled to swallow, he set his plate aside and became businesslike. "There has been a great deal of work done in the past few weeks. Our physicists have confirmed the practicality of using an altered asteroid for transport, and Alpha Centauri can in fact be reached in under eighteen years. I am told that if Jupiter and Saturn had been big enough to produce sustained fusion, our solar system might have looked like the three suns of Alpha Centauri. So the plan is to come in above the plane of the system and look for solid planets in the same relative orbit as Earth or Mars, between the sun and the gas giants." She grunted: sounds reasonable. Watching her reactions carefully, he continued, "George has already proposed an imaging technique that would help us identify planetary movement, which he can coordinate with radio monitoring, once we reach the system."

He expected surprise and anger. He saw resignation. It suddenly came to him that George might leave Anne and that she might be willing to let him go. The possibility made him go cold. Beyond their broad and useful professional qualifications, Anne and George Edwards were possessed of a fair degree of wisdom and a joint total of more than 120 years of alert experience of the world, combined with physical toughness and emotional stability. It had never occurred to him that one of them might stay behind.

Since proposing the mission, Emilio had been taken aback by the pace of things. What had begun in laughter, almost as a joke, was snowballing, changing lives. Already, time and money were being spent in quantities that staggered him. And if the speed of events scared him, the precision with which the pieces were falling into place was even more unnerving. He went sleepless, unable to decide which was harder to live with: the idea that he had started all this, or the possibility that God had. The only way he could reassure himself during these midnight debates was to believe that wiser heads than his were making the decisions. If he could not put his faith directly in God, who remained unknowable, he could place it in the structure of the Society and in his superiors—in D. W. Yarbrough and in Father General da Silva.

Now he felt himself rocked again by doubt. What if the whole thing was a mistake and it cost the Edwardses' marriage? And as quickly as that passed his mind, he caught another glimpse of the serenity that sometimes came to him lately. Anne and George, he felt sure, were meant to be a part of the mission, if the mission was meant to be. And when he spoke again, Anne heard only calm and reason.

"The Society would never permit a suicide mission, Anne. If the voyage could not be undertaken now with a reasonable chance of success, we would simply wait until it seems sensible to make the attempt. Already, the plans call for provisions sufficient for ten years, just in case the subjective travel time does not contract as much as the physicists predict. The specifications call for an asteroid more than sufficiently large to provide fuel for a return trip, plus a one hundred percent safety margin," he told her. "Who knows? The atmosphere may be unbreathable or it may be impossible to land. In such cases, we would gather as much information as possible and return home."

"Who's we? Is it definite now? Are you going?"

"There has been no decision about the crew as yet. But the Father General is, in fact, a religious man," Emilio said ironically, "who seems to believe that God is involved with this discovery." He saw that set her off again and laughed. "In any case, it would be logical to assign someone like me to the mission. If it is possible to make contact with the Singers, a linguist will presumably be useful." He wanted to tell her how much it meant to him to think that she would be part of this, but Emilio suspected he'd taken the subject as far as he could. He pushed his chair from the table and stood, picking up their plates and taking them to the kitchen. Out of sight, he called to her, "Anne. May I ask a favor?"

"What?" she asked suspiciously.

"I have an old friend coming in to visit. May I offer him your hospitality?"

"Dammit, Emilio! Aren't there any restaurants in Puerto Rico? Between you and George, I end up feeding every stray cat on this island."

He came out of the kitchen and leaned against the doorjamb, arms across his chest, grinning, not fooled for a moment.

"All right, who's coming?" she demanded ungraciously, refusing to be charmed.

"Dalton Wesley Yarbrough, New Orleans Provincial of the Society of Jesus, from Waco, Texas, Vatican City of the Southern Baptists," he announced with ceremony, standing at attention, a butler introducing the next guest to enter a ballroom.

She put her head in her hands, defeated. "Barbecue. Hush puppies. Collard greens, red beans and watermelon. With Carta Blanca. I can't seem to help myself," she said in tones of wonderment. "I have this compulsion to cook for strangers."

"Well, ma'am," said Emilio Sandoz with a Texas twang, "they don't come a whole hell of a lot stranger'n D. W. Yarbrough."

She laughed, reached behind her to the bookcase, and pitched a hardcover novel at him. He caught it with one hand and flipped it back at her. They spoke no more about the mission, but a truce had been reached.

"Dr. Quinn, Elaine Stefansky says the ET transmission is a hoax. Do you have a comment on that?"

Jimmy was no longer startled to find reporters waiting outside his apartment at eight in the morning and no longer amused that they routinely promoted him to doctor. He pushed past the crowd and made his way to the Ford, Murmuring "No comment," Jimmy got into the car, the crowd closing around the vehicle, shouting questions, aiming AV pickups at him. Jimmy let the window down. "Look, I don't want to run over anybody's foot here. Could you back off a little? I have to get to work."

"Why haven't there been any other transmissions?" someone called out.

"Is it that they're not sending or we're not listening?" asked another.

"Oh, we're listening," Jimmy assured them. With the entire scientific community and a goodly portion of the world's population looking over his shoulder, Jimmy Quinn had coordinated a concentrated effort by radio astronomers to listen for additional transmissions. There weren't any. "We're even sending, but it will take nearly nine years, minimum, before we find out if they notice us yelling and waving our arms," he said, starting to raise the window. "Listen, I gotta go. Really."

"Dr. Quinn, have you heard the Mongolian Humi singers? Stefansky says their music may have been altered and planted in the SETI file. Is that true?" "What about the Sufis, Dr. Quinn?"

Skeptics had begun to flood the nets with alternate explanations for the music, experimenting with obscure folk traditions, running the music backward or playing with the frequency, to show how alien human music could sound, especially when modified electronically.

"Well, sure, all that stuff sounds strange." Jimmy still found it hard to be rude enough to drive away abruptly, but he was learning. "But none of it sounds like what we picked up. And I'm not a doctor, okay?" Apologizing, he eased the car out of the crowd and drove to the Arecibo dish, where another mob was waiting.

The media eventually went on to other things. Radio telescopes around the world returned one by one to projects that had been under way before August 3rd. But in Rome, coded transmissions continued to move along the clear-cut Jesuit chain of command, from Father General to Provincial to Rector to individual priest given an assignment. There were practical decisions to be made, many scientific teams to organize.

Tomas da Silva, thirty-first General of the Society of Jesus, remained convinced of the authenticity of the signal. The theological rationale for this mission had been worked out decades before there was any evidence of other sentient species in the universe: mere considerations of scale suggested that human beings were not the sole purpose of creation. So. Now there was proof. God had other children. And when it was time for Tomas da Silva to make a decision about acting on this knowledge, he quoted the bald and artless words of Emilio Sandoz, to whom he had spoken on the evening of the discovery. "There is simply no alternative. We have to know them."

His private secretary, Peter Lynam, questioned this on August 30, 2019, but Father General da Silva smiled and dismissed the troubling slenderness of the reed that supported all their deliberate and complex plans to contact the Singers. "Have you noticed, Peter, that all the music that sounds most similar to the extraterrestrial music is sacred in nature?" the Father General asked. He was a man of great spirituality and almost no business sense. "Sufic, Tantric, Humi. I find that very intriguing."

Peter Lynam did not argue but it was clear that he thought the Father General was chasing wild geese. Lynam was, in fact, losing his nerve about the whole expensive business.

Seeing his secretary's barely concealed misgivings, Tomas da Silva laughed and, raising a didactic finger, declared, "Nos stulti proptur Christum."

Yes, well, Lynam mused silently, perfect humility might require that one be "a fool for Christ," but that does not rule out the possibility of being a plain fool.

Four hours later, to Peter Lynam's astonished chagrin and Tomas da Silva's pure delight, a second transmission was detected.

Despite the recent decline in interest, there were several radio telescopes set to receive the signal when it came. The word «hoax» was permanently retired from discussion of the songs. And around the world, those few who knew the extent of the plans for a Jesuit mission to the source of the music were greatly relieved, and began to be very excited indeed.

In the end, it was not George or Emilio who convinced Anne Edwards to sign on to the plan. It was a bus accident.

A trucker going east on the coast road swerved briefly onto the shoulder to avoid a chunk of rock in the road but then overcooked his return to the pavement. For a few moments, the truck went into the oncoming lane and sheared the side off a westbound bus that had just rounded the curve. The truck driver was killed. Among the bus passengers, there were twelve DOA, fifty-three others more or less badly hurt, and quite a few hysterical. By the time Anne took the call and got to the hospital, its lobby was filled with distraught relatives, and lawyers.

She helped first with triage and then moved to a trauma theater, part of the team trying to save a woman in her sixties with extensive head injuries. Anne had talked to the husband in the lobby. They were tourists from Michigan. "I gave her the window seat, so she could see. I was sitting right next to her." He kept putting his hand to the side of his face, where his wife's head had been hurt. "This trip was my idea. She wanted to go to Phoenix to see the grandkids. No, I said, let's do something different. We always go to Phoenix."

Pressed, Anne had murmured something about doing their best for his wife and moved on to the next task.

At dawn, the crisis was over and the patients who had passed through Emergency were distributed to their waiting relatives, to the wards, to the ICU, to the morgue. By chance, Anne glanced into an open door on her way out of the hospital and saw the man from Michigan seated at the foot of his wife's bed, his face striped and stippled with glowing readouts from the machinery surrounding them. Anne wanted to say something comforting, but the punch-drunk reaction to hours on her feet was beginning and the only thing that came to mind was, "Next time, go to Phoenix," which was clearly inappropriate. Then, oddly, the final scene of La Boheme came to her and, instructed by Puccini's librettist, she put a hand on the man's shoulder and whispered, "Courage."

When she got home, George was awake and dressed and offered her coffee, but she decided to clean up and catch a few hours of sleep. Standing in the shower, soaping herself, she glanced down at her own nakedness and a vision of the woman with the head trauma came back to her. The woman had been in good shape; her body might go on for decades, but she'd never know the grandkids were all grown up. One minute, she was in the State of Puerto Rico and the next minute, she was in the State of Persistent Vegetables. Jesus, Anne thought, shuddering.

She rinsed off and stepped out of the shower. Towel wrapped around her wet hair and terry robe wrapped around her durable dancer's body, she padded into the dining room and sat across the table from George. "Okay," she said. "I'm in."

It took him a few moments to realize what she was agreeing to.

"What the hell," Anne said, seeing that he understood. "It's gotta be better than not quite dying in a bus wreck on vacation."

On September 13, Jean-Claude Jaubert received a message asking for an AV appointment to discuss a buyout of the remaining time on Sofia Mendes's contract. The individual making the request gave no name and, seeing no referral, Jaubert denied video access but agreed to open an electronic meeting, which he would encrypt and route through several networks. Jaubert was not a criminal but his was a business subject to jealousies, hard feelings, tedious disputes; one could not be too careful.

Reestablishing contact on his own terms, he pointed out that he had recently taken a loss on Ms. Mendes's behalf. Her association with Jaubert had been extended somewhat in compensation. Was the negotiant in a position to purchase rights to seven and a half years? He was. Jaubert named a price and interest rate, assuming that the man would amortize the cost with a ten-year note. The reply stated a lower price, to be paid in cash. A mutually agreeable sum was found. Jaubert mentioned that he preferred, of course, Singaporean dollars. There was a slight delay. Zlotys were offered. This time it was Jaubert's turn to hesitate. Poland was volatile, but there was an interesting possibility of making a quick profit on the currency aspect of the deal.

Done, he agreed. And watching the ensuing flood of numbers wash over the screen, Jean-Claude Jaubert became a modestly richer man. Bonne chance, ma cherie, he thought.

On September 14, a third transmission from Alpha Centauri was picked up, fifteen days after the second. In the midst of the jubilation, the Arecibo staff put aside their initial reactions to the small, icy woman whose profession threatened their jobs and a little farewell party for Sofia Mendes was incorporated into the general exuberance. George Edwards arranged to have food delivered to the cafeteria and quite a few people dropped by to have some pizza or cake and to wish her good luck. Elsewhere. Far from Arecibo, they hoped, laughing good-naturedly, but serious all the same. Sofia took these ambivalent farewells with cool grace but seemed anxious to leave. Her contractual relationship with Dr. Yanoguchi discharged, she said good-bye to Jimmy Quinn and thanked George Edwards, asking him to relay her best wishes to his wife and to Dr. Sandoz. George, smiling mysteriously, suggested that they'd all be seeing one another again sometime, one way or another.

Arriving at her apartment that afternoon, wrung out from the unremitting labor of the previous weeks, Sofia fell onto the bed and fought tears. Nonsense, she told herself, just get on with it. But she conceded the need for a day of rest before informing Jaubert that she was ready for the next assignment. He had contacted her in August about the Jesuit asteroid project. It would be interesting work. There were compensations for her situation, she reminded herself.

To Sandoz's intense dismay, the Jesuits had only been willing to contract her services through Jaubert. She was surprised at the depth of his shock. Business is business, she told him and reminded Sandoz that he'd said himself that he had no authority to speak. She'd harbored no hopes, she assured him, and consequently had none to be dashed. That seemed to make him feel worse. A strange man, she thought. Intelligent, but naive. And slow to react to changed circumstances, she felt. Then again, most people were.

Releasing her hair from its habitual chignon, she ran a bath, planning to soak in it until the water was tepid. Idly, waiting for the tub to fill, she checked her messages to see what, if anything, was awaiting her attention.

She read the transcript of the negotiations twice and still found it impossible to believe. The sheer viciousness of Peggy Soong's practical joke choked her. Hands shaking, stunned by the violence of her outrage, Sofia turned off the bathwater, tied her hair back and went to work on breaking the file's intervening encryption, hoping to trace it to Soong, trying to imagine what she could do to the woman that was terrible enough to repay her for this pointless, heartless—

It took only minutes to realize that Peggy was not involved with this at all. It was, in fact, Jaubert's code. Sofia had written it herself, early in their association. It had been modified over the years, but her style was unmistakable.

Working through the transcript, she confirmed that the transaction had taken place. She accessed the international monetary exchange and saw that Jaubert had made a 2.3 percent gain overnight by hanging on to the zlotys. Singapore was down; Jaubert's luck was intact. But she could not pry from the network the origin of the money. Who on earth would have done such a thing? she wondered, very nearly frightened now. Jaubert had been a reasonable man to work for, had never asked her to do anything illegal or distasteful. But the possibility had always existed.

There had to be a legal transfer of rights to her. She combed through the civil records covering her contract, registered in Monaco, thinking over and over, Who owns me now? What bloodsucking vampire owns me now? Finding the correct file, she read the final entry and sat back, hand to her mouth, throat so tight she thought she might suffocate.

Contract terminated. Free agent. Inquiries: contact principal directly.

As though from a distance, she heard a wail. She walked numbly to the window and pushed the curtain away, looking outside for the child who was sobbing somewhere nearby. There was no one there, of course, no one else anywhere to be heard. After a while, she walked to the bathroom to blow her nose and wash her face and think about what she might do next.

When the bell rang two nights later, Anne Edwards went to the door and saw Emilio looking like a boy again, standing behind a tall, lean priest in his fifties. Late that night, alone at last in their bedroom, Anne, eyes bulging, confessed to George in a tiny, strangled voice, "That is the butt-ugliest man I ever met. I don't know what I expected but—wow!"

"Well, hell, a Texas Jesuit! I pictured the Marlboro man dressed up like Father Guido Sarducci," George admitted in a whisper. "Jesus. Which eye are you supposed to look at?"

"The one that looks back at you," Anne said decisively.

"I like D.W., I really do, but all during dinner I kept wondering if he'd be offended if I put a bag over his head," George said, suddenly breaking up. That set Anne off, and pretty soon they were hanging on to each other, appalled and ashamed, laughing helplessly, but trying to be as quiet as they could, since the subject of their merriment was in the guest room, right down the hallway.

"Oh, God, we're bad!" Anne gasped, struggling to sober up and losing the battle. "This is awful. But, shit! That one eye, wandering off on its own recognizance!"

"The poor bastard," George said quietly, getting ahold of himself momentarily, trying to sound sympathetic. There was a fleeting silence, as they each pictured D.W., his long broken nose almost as badly askew as his cast eye, loose-lipped grin displaying teeth just as disheveled.

"I'm not a cruel woman," Anne whispered, pleading for understanding. "But I kept wanting to kind of tidy him up, you know?"

"Maybe if we wear the bags?" George asked. Anne, whining and holding her stomach, fell onto the bed and buried her face in a pillow. George, completely undone, followed her.

It had been an evening of laughter, in fact, and none of it at D.W.'s expense until the Edwardses reached their bedroom after midnight.

"Dr. Anne Edwards and Mr. George Edwards," Emilio had said, formally introducing his guest at their door, "I would like to present to you Dalton Wesley Yarbrough, New Orleans Provincial of the Society of Jesus."

"From Waco, Texas, ma'am," D. W. Yarbrough began.

"Yes, I know, Vatican City of the Southern Baptists," Anne said. If she was startled by him, there was no hint of it then. She took the hand he offered, knowing what was coming but ready for him.

"I sure am pleased to meet you, ma'am. Milio has told me a lot about you," D.W. said, smiling, purest malice dancing in his variously arranged eyes. "An' I want straight off to extend to you the profound sympathy of the entire state of Texas on the humiliating loss Dallas handed Cleveland in the World Series last year."

"Well, we all have our crosses to bear, Father." Anne sighed bravely. "It can't be easy for a Texan to say Mass while the entire congregation is praying, Oh, Jesus, just give us one more oil boom—this time we promise we won't piss it all away."

D.W. roared, and they were off and running. Emilio, anxious that these people who meant so much to him should like one another, unleashed a smile like sunrise, went to his chair in the corner and settled in to watch the show. The dinner conversation, as hot and colorful as the barbecue sauce, soon found its center of gravity around politics, there being a presidential-election campaign heating up in which a Texan figured prominently, as usual.

"The country's already tried Texans," George protested.

"And you cowards keep throwin' 'em back to us after just one term!" D.W. hollered.

"Lyndon Johnson, George Bush," George soldiered on.

"No, no, no. You can't blame Bush on Texas," D.W. insisted. "Real Texans never use the word 'summer' as a verb."

Wordlessly, Emilio handed a napkin to Anne, who wiped her nose.

"Gibson Whitmore," George continued.

"Awright. Awright. I admit that was a mistake. He couldna poured water out a boot if the instructions was on the heel. But Sally's good people. Y'all're gonna love her, I guarantee."

"And if you believe that," Emilio said informatively, "D.W. has a very nice piece of the True Cross you might like to invest in."

It was three hours after they sat down to eat when Yarbrough pushed himself reluctantly away from the table, declared that he was stuffed insensible, and then told three more stories that left everyone else at the table worn out and breathless, stomachs and cheeks aching. And it was yet another hour before the four of them got up and started moving glasses and dishes into the kitchen. But there, finally, in the hard bright light of that room, the real reason for D. W. Yarbrough's visit came out.

"Well, folks, where I come from the only thing in the middle of the road is yellow stripes and dead armadillos," D.W. announced, hooking his hands over the top of the door frame and stretching like a gorilla. "So I'll tell y'all right now, I plan to recommend to the Father General, bless his narrow ole Portugee ass, that Emilio go ahead on this asteroid bidness and that the two of you go along, if you're willin'. I talked to the Quinn boy this mornin' and he's okay, too."

George stopped putting plates into the dishwasher. "Just like that? No tests, no interviews? Are you serious?"

"Serious as snakebite, sir. Y'all been researched, I guarantee. Public records, and so forth." There had, in fact, been hundreds of man-hours expended in studying their qualifications, and a rancorous in-house debate over including non-Jesuits in the party. There was ample historical precedent for a mixed crew and solid logic in selecting people with a broad range of experience, but with that established, Father General da Silva had, in the end, simply decided the issue in favor of what appeared to him to be God's will.

"And tonight was the interview," Anne said shrewdly.

"Yes, ma'am. You could say that." The accent and color abated somewhat as D.W. continued, "Emilio had it straight from the start. The skills are mostly all there. The relationships are already in place. We could dick around some, pickin' nits and lookin' at ever' kind of possibility, but I think she'll fly. Assumin' y'all can stand lookin' at me for months on end."

Anne pirouetted abruptly, finding that the glassware in the sink suddenly required her undivided attention. She tried not to let her shoulders shake.

"You're coming?" George asked, with admirable restraint.

"Yessir. That's part of what makes the Father General so sure this bidness is ordained, so to speak. See, somebody's got to get the crew up and down, couple-three times. You recall, there's still the open problem of landin' on the planet. If we find it."

"We could ask Scotty to beam us down," Anne suggested brightly, finally able to face her guest as Emilio, carrying a load of plates into the kitchen, ducked under D.W.'s arm.

"I thought it pretty much has to be a standard Earth-to-dock space-plane," George said. "Of course, just because the Singers've got radio, there's no reason to assume they've got airports—"

"So, the task becomes findin' some kind of flat land or desert to land on because they ain't no guarantee of a runway. And then the undercarriage might collapse from landin' on soft ground and the crew would be stranded." D.W. paused. "So we might do well to use a vertical lander, wouldn't you say?"

"D.W. was in the Marines," Emilio remarked, picking up a dish-towel to dry the stemware Anne was washing. The old trick of keeping a straight face was failing him these days. More and more, his face matched his eyes. "I don't think I ever mentioned that."

Anne looked sideways at D.W. "I have this terrible feeling that you aren't going to tell us that you were a chaplain."

"No, ma'am, I wasn't. This was back in the late eighties, early nineties you unnerstan', 'fore I signed up as a lifer in Loyola's outfit. I flew Harriers. 'Magine that."

Anne, who didn't quite see the point of this information, nevertheless tried imagining that and wondered how D.W. managed depth perception with a cast eye. Then she remembered LeRoy Johnson, a major-league ballplayer with a similar cast in one eye who consistently batted over.290, and she guessed their brains compensated for the problem somehow.

"It couldn't be a stock plane," George said. "You'd have to special-order one with a biphasic skin like the spaceplanes use, so it could take the reentry heat."

"Yeah, folks're workin' on that." D.W. grinned. "Anyhow, turns out, landin' a jump jet's real similar in some ways to flyin' an asteroid docker, 'cause they ain't no runways on space rocks neither. So I expect an ole Harrier pilot may be the very thing for the job at hand."

This time even Anne realized the implications.

"Kinda spooky, ain't it. Hell of a lot of coincidences. Like we say back home, when you find a turtle settin' on top of a fencepost, you can be pretty damn sure he didn't get there on his own." D.W. watched Anne and George look at each other and then continued. "Tomas da Silva, the General his own self, he thinks maybe God's been goin' around puttin' turtles on fenceposts. I don't know about that but I hafta admit, this's kept me up some long nights, thinkin'." D.W. stretched again and smiled crookedly at them. "I'm still in the Reserves and I've kept up my flight hours. I'll be spendin' the next little bit of time qualifyin' on a docker. Oughta be real interestin'. Which way is it to this guest room you've been so kind as to offer me, Dr. Edwards?"

"Well, fuck me dead!" cried Ian Sekizawa, vice president of the Asteroid Mining Division of Ohbayashi Corporation, headquartered in Sydney. "It's Sofie! What a treat to see you again, girl! What's it been? Three years?"

"Four," Sofia said, withdrawing a bit from her screen, not feeling safe from Ian's bear hug even across the electronic distance between them. "It's good to see you, too. Are you still happy with the system? It still suits your requirements?"

"Fits like a finger in a baby's bum," Ian said, grinning when her eyes widened. His grandparents were from Okinawa but he and his language were pure Australian. "Our blokes could be pissed as a newt and still bring back the goods. Profits are up almost twelve points since you did that work for us."

"I'm pleased to hear it," she said, genuinely gratified. "I have a favor to ask of you, Ian."

"Anything, my beauty."

"This is confidential, Ian. I have an encrypted business proposition for you to consider."

"Jaubert doing a dirty?" he asked, eyes narrowed in speculation.

"No, I'm independent now," she told him, smiling.

"Fair dinkum? Sofie! That's beaut! Is this your own little project or are you fronting?"

"I represent clients who wish to remain anonymous. And Ian," she said, "if you are interested, I am hoping you can take this step on your own authority."

"Send the proposal and I'll do me dash," he told her forthrightly. "If it's buggered, I'll trash the code and no one's the wiser, right, love?"

"Thank you, Ian. I appreciate your help," Sofia said. She ended the video conference and sent the code.

Looking her proposition over, Ian Sekizawa lapsed into thoughtfulness. She wanted a good-sized rock, junk, ice-bearing, with a lot of silicates, more or less cylindrical around the long axis; crew quarters for eight, engines and mining robots included, used if possible, installed if necessary. He tried to reckon who would want such a thing and for what. A drug factory? But then why ask for the mining equipment? Sure, ice, but why so much silicate? He turned it around in his mind for a while but came up with nothing that struck him as practical.

From his own point of view, it was sweet. Before Sofia's AI wizardry, Aussie wildcatters had gone from rock to rock, hoping to make the one big strike that could pay off the equipment mortgages they owed to Ohbayashi and set them up for life. Ninety-nine out of a hundred wildcatters went broke or crazy or both and abandoned their last asteroid with the equipment in situ. Rights reverted to Ohbayashi, which recovered the hardware whenever it was profitable to do so. He had a dozen or more rocks that could do for Sofia's client.

"Oh shit, oh fuck, oh dear, cried the fairy princess as she waved her wooden leg in the air," he recited blandly, alone in his office.

Sofia was offering a fair price. He could bury the transaction in "Obsolete equipment sales," maybe. The rocks were worth fuck-all as things stood. Why not sell one off? he thought. And who gives a damn what it's used for?

Waiting in her small rented room for Ian Sekizawa's response to the proposal, Sofia Mendes stared out the window at the Old City of Jerusalem and asked herself why she had come here.

In her first hours of freedom, she had decided simply to carry on as before. She informed the Jesuits in Rome of her new status, assured them of her willingness to act as general contractor on the previously negotiated terms, and made arrangements to have the agreement rewritten in her own name. There was a 30 percent advance payment and, realizing that she could fulfill the contract from anywhere in the world, she had used the money to buy passage to Israel. Why?

Without her mother to light the Sabbath candles, without her father to sing the ancient blessings over the bread and wine, she'd lost touch with the religion of her truncated childhood. But after years of wandering, she felt a need to go home somehow, wanted to see if she was capable of belonging somewhere. There was nothing left for her in Istanbul—peaceful now, exhausted from achieving its own destruction. And her ties to Spain were too tenuous, too faint and historical. So. Israel. Home by default, she supposed.

On her first day in Jerusalem, shyly, never having done so before, she'd sought out a mikveh, a place of ritual cleansing. She chose a place at random, unaware that it catered to Israeli brides preparing for their weddings. The mikveh lady who took care of her assumed at first that she was about to be married and was distressed to find that Sofia did not even have a sweetheart. "Such a beautiful girl! Such a lovely body! What a waste!" the woman exclaimed, laughing at Sofia's blush. "So, you'll stay here! Make aliyah, find a nice Jewish boy and have lots of beautiful babies, naturally!"

It was hopeless to contradict the good-natured advice, and she wondered why she wanted to, as she allowed herself to be preened and cleaned—hair, nails, everything rinsed, smoothed and shined, her body made free of cosmetics, of dust, of the past. Why not stay? she asked herself.

Wrapped in a white sheet, she was escorted to the mikveh itself and then left alone to descend the tiled steps, with their intricate mosaic designs, into the warm, pure water. The mikveh lady, standing discreetly behind a half-closed door, helped her remember the Hebrew prayers and urged her, "Three times. All the way under, so every bit of you is immersed. There's no rush, dear. I'll leave you now."

Breaking the surface of the water for the third time, smoothing her hair away from her forehead and pressing the moisture from her eyes, Sofia felt weightless and suspended in time as the words of the old prayers drifted through her mind. There was a blessing for tasting the first fruit after a winter of want, now said for new beginnings, she recalled, when some turning point had come to a life. Blessed art Thou, O God, Ruler of the Universe, for giving us life, for sustaining us, for enabling us to reach this season…

Perhaps it was the mikveh lady's talk of marriage and children that brought Emilio Sandoz to mind. Sofia Mendes had kept her distance from men since that final night with Jaubert—too much, too early. Even so, she found the idea of priestly celibacy barbaric. What she knew of Catholicism was repellent, with its persecutions, its focus on death, on martyrdom, its central symbol an instrument of Roman criminal justice, appalling in its violence. In the beginning, it was an act of heroic self-control to work with Sandoz: a Spaniard, dressed for mourning, heir to the Inquisition and the expulsion, the representative of a pirate religion that took the bread and wine of Shabbat and turned it into a cannibalistic rite of flesh and blood.

She had challenged him on this point one night at Anne and George's, inhibitions weakened by Ronrico: "Explain this Mass to me!"

There was a silence as he sat still, apparently looking at the dinner plates and chicken bones. "Consider the Star of David," he said quietly. "Two triangles, one pointing down, one pointing up. I find this a powerful image—the Divine reaching down, humanity reaching upward. And in the center, an intersection, where the Divine and human meet. The Mass takes place in that space." His eyes lifted and met hers: a look of lucid candor. "I understand it as a place where the Divine and the human are one. And as a promise, perhaps. That God will reach toward us if we reach toward Him, that we and our most ordinary human acts—like eating bread and drinking wine—can be transformed and made sacred." Then the sunrise smile appeared, transforming his dark face like dawn. "And that, Senorita Mendes, is the best I can do, after three shots of rum at the end of a long day."

It was possible, she admitted to herself, that one had misjudged. Out of ignorance. Or prejudice. Sandoz had made no move to convert her. He was a man of impressive intelligence who seemed to her clear-souled and fulfilled. She had no idea what to make of his belief that God was calling them to contact the Singers. There were Jews who believed that God is in the world, active, purposeful. After the Holocaust, it was difficult to sustain such an idea. Certainly her own life had taught her that prayers for deliverance go unheard, unless she wanted to believe Jean-Claude Jaubert was God's agent.

Still, Israel rose from the ashes of the six million. Jaubert got her out of Istanbul. She was alive. She was free now.

Sofia left the mikveh that day with a strong sense of purpose, and when she got back to her room, she contacted Sandoz in San Juan and spoke plainly, without false modesty or bravado. "I should like to be a part of your project. I want not merely to make arrangements for the voyage but to be a member of the crew," she told him. "My former broker, who is in a position to make valid comparisons, can provide references that will establish my intellectual suitability for a project such as this. I respond quickly to new situations and have unusually broad experience, technically and culturally. And I would bring a rather different perspective to the problems the crew may encounter, which may prove useful."

He did not seem at all surprised. Correct and respectful, he told her that he would relay her offer to volunteer to his superiors.

Then came a meeting with the bizarre Yarbrough. He told stories and asked sly, shrewd questions and got her to laugh twice and at the end, he said in his unfathomable dialect, "Well, darlin', the Company hired you a while back cause you was smarter'n hell and very damn quick on the uptake, and we already know you work harder'n six mules, and you get along fine with all these other folks who're goin', and I expect you can learn anything you put your mind to, which is gonna count for a whole lot if we ever meet these Singers. But what decides me, bein' as ugly as two warthogs in a mud ditch personally, is that havin' you around while we live for six, eight months inside a rock would prolly keep everyone else from pullin' their own eyes out by the roots. I'll have to check with the boss, but far's I'm concerned, you're in, if you're game."

She stared at him. "Does that mean 'yes'?"

He grinned. "Yes."

Standing at the window now, she could see the Kotel, the Western Wall. Too far away to hear the murmur of prayers, she could watch the tidal ebb and flow of tourists and pilgrims, pointing, davening, weeping, placing small pieces of paper bearing petitions and prayers of gratitude into the spaces between the ancient stones. And she knew why she was here. She had come to Israel to say good-bye to the past.

She heard her system's message signal and opened the file, read Ian Sekizawa's one-word reply and smiled.

"Done," the screen said.

That year, several superb works of Renaissance art were sold without publicity to private investors. At an auction in London, a price was found for what had previously been considered a priceless collection of seventeenth-century Oriental porcelains. Long-held pieces of property and stock portfolios quietly went on the market at calculated times and in carefully selected locations where considerable gains were available upon sale.

It was a matter of taking profits, liquidating some assets, redeploying capital. The total needed, as Sofia Mendes predicted, was not an inconsiderable amount of money, but it did not beggar the Society by any means and did not even affect Jesuit missions and charitable projects on Earth, which were operated under current cash flow from educational and research facilities, leasing agreements and patent licenses. The sum accumulated in this way was deposited in a reliably discreet Viennese bank. Jesuits around the world were instructed to monitor the public news media and private data nets for any mention of Jesuit financial activity and to relay that information to the Father General's office at Number 5. No pattern was detected, all that year.