The Sparrow

15 SOLAR SYSTEM: 2021 THE STELLA MARIS: 2021–2022, EARTH-RELATIVE

"Annie, it is so cool! Wait until you see it. The rock looks like this giant potato. And all I could think of when I saw it was the Muppet Show. Spuds in spa-a-a-ce!"

Anne laughed, amused by the image and relieved to have George home, if only for a few days while he and D.W. collected additional equipment. The past four weeks had been an anxious time for a woman whose faith in technology was more by practical default than informed conviction, but George had come back to her ebullient and confident, burying her misgivings in an avalanche of enthusiasm as she drove him home from the San Juan airport.

"The engines are on one end and the remote cameras and so forth are on the other end, but recessed and kind of cross-eyed, so they don't point directly in the line of travel—"

"Why's that?"

"To keep them from getting abraded by 'interstellar shit' as you so delicately put it, my dear. The cameras focus on a set of mirrors—the mirrors are exposed but we can sort of peel layers off as the images degrade, the way you peel a layered face shield off a motorcycle helmet in a dirt race. God, you look fabulous!" She kept her gaze on the road but the delicate fan of lines around her eyes deepened with pleasure. Her hair was piled in some kind of style George could only identify as «up» and she was wearing pearls and cream silk. "So anyway," he said, "if you think of the potato, we dock on the long side, like where you'd put the butter—"

"Or the soy-based butteroid nonfat substance, with the taste of real margarine," Anne muttered, eyes on the traffic.

"You fly into this tube and then there's an airlock, but you have to suit up to go from the docker to the airlock. Then you go down this little rock corridor with the wall surfaces all sealed up and there's another airlock just in case—"

"Just in case what?" Anne wanted to know, but he hardly heard her.

"Then you get to the living quarters, which are right in the center where the shielding is best and Annie, it's beautiful inside. Kinda Japanese-looking. Most of the walls are really light panels, so we don't go nuts from the dark. They're sort of like shoji screens." She nodded. "So. There're four concentric cylinders inside, okay? The bedrooms and the toilets are around the outer cylinder. The rooms are pie-shaped—"

"Did you set aside one for the exercise and medical equipment?"

"Yes, Doctor. I put the stuff in there, but you'll have to set it up the way you want it when you get there." George closed his eyes, picturing the rest, then stared straight ahead, not seeing the traffic or San Juan, but the unique and wonderful vessel that would be their home soon, which felt cozy and nautical to him, everything in its place, neat and organized and surprisingly comfortable. "The next inner cylinder has a big common room with built-in tables and benches and the kitchen, which is good, you'll like it. Did you know Marc Robichaux can cook? French stuff. Lot of sauces, he says—"

"I know. Marc's a honey. We've been in touch on the net a lot."

"— but we're eating out of tubes until we've got gravity. Oh! And I had the robots hollow out an extra room with a stone tub, like a Japanese bathroom, where you soap up and rinse off in a little water and then soak."

"Oooh, now that sounds seriously okay," Anne purred. "How big is it?"

He leaned over and planted a kiss on her neck. "Big enough. Now. In the center, there are two more concentric cylinders for the Wolverton tube, right? Column of plants stuck in holes all around the outer cylinder. Leaves coming out into the living area, roots converging toward the center, right? All the air and almost all the wastes get filtered through the plant cylinder. I've seen them before but God, this one is beautiful! Marc has been working on the plant mix for months—"

There was more about the plants and then George went on to tell her about the bridge and how the mining robots fed the mass-drivers. And Anne gathered that he and Sofia and Jimmy would be working on AI programs that would make the asteroid self-navigating on the return trip, locking onto Earth broadcasts and Sol's radio frequency, so the system could do the kind of calculations Jimmy was doing on the trip out, in case he was killed. And there was also a VR flight simulator for the docker-lander they'd all train on, in case D.W. was…

Anne nosed the car into a parking space at that point and shut off the motor. There was a long silence, both of them sobered by the knowledge that casualties were likely. They were all being cross-trained, to build redundancy into the final crew of eight.

"The ship will just about fly itself on the way back," George said finally.

"That's the part I like," Anne said firmly. "The 'on the way back' part."

Anne still played Official Skeptic, but the past eighteen months had worked a surprising internal change in her. Time after time, it looked as though the entire mission would be scrubbed; each time, Anne marveled as Jesuit industry and Jesuit prayer were brought to bear on the problems.

The first asteroid turned out to have a faultline likely to give way under one G of acceleration. The second appeared perfect until a remote assay showed too high an iron content, which would foul the engines over the long term. A few nights later, the evening prayers of a Jesuit physicist were interrupted by the sudden realization that his load-bearing calculations were unduly limited by the specification of a roughly cylindrical rock. He finished his prayers, rapidly rethought his assumptions, and woke up Jesuit colleagues in several different time zones. Twelve hours later, Sofia Mendes was authorized to contact Ian Sekizawa and instruct him to broaden the search to include asteroids of nearly any shape, as long as they were roughly symmetrical around the long axis. Within days, the reply from Ian came: he'd located a rock that was more or less ovoid, would that do? It did, nicely.

There was a similar crisis over the biphasic cladding for D.W.'s docker. The material used to sheathe spaceplanes had to function in the unimaginable cold of space as well as in the blast-furnace heat of entry and exit from an atmosphere. Military orders, being the most lucrative contracts, took precedence over civilian projects. Intense prayer, along with astute technical and diplomatic skill, was dedicated to this problem. Unexpectedly, the military government in Indonesia fell and the Indonesian Air Force's order for a spaceplane was canceled, freeing up material for the private order that had been placed months earlier by Sofia Mendes on behalf of an anonymous group of investors.

After a while it became hard to ignore how, against odds, the dice kept coming up in favor of the mission. The crew members went on with their training, their work unaffected by the waxing and waning of confidence, but they all experienced varying degrees of amazement. Even the Jesuits were divided. Marc Robichaux and Emilio Sandoz smiled and said, "See? Deus vult" while D. W. Yarbrough and Andrej Jelacic shook their heads in wonder. George Edwards and Jimmy Quinn and Sofia Mendes remained agnostics on the question of whether these events were minor miracles or major coincidences.

Anne said nothing but as the months passed, it was increasingly difficult to resist the beauty of belief.

And so, as fate or chance or God would have it, nineteen months and twelve days after Anne began compiling her list with "1. Bring nail clippers," she was able at last to cross off the wry final entry: "Vomit in zero G." Unable to stomach even playground swings as a child, she was resigned to the idea that having the contents of her abdomen drift lungward would probably be sufficient to set off the space sickness that still afflicted 15 percent of all travelers, despite medical advances. Not completely pessimistic about her chances of avoiding this, she wore the antinausea transdermal patch that D. W. Yarbrough swore by, and swore at it when she could breathe again.

On the whole, however, she was able to congratulate herself. Everyone had expected her to be frightened so, of course, she decided to confound their expectations by enjoying the ride. And she did. The vertical liftoff was incredibly noisy but there was very little sense of motion. Then there was the thrill of building to four Gs, of being plastered against her couch as they roared along toward Mach 1, when suddenly the noise dropped off behind them. The sky quickly got blacker and blacker and then D.W. turned the afterburner off and she was thrown forward against the belts so hard she thought she'd ruptured her heart. Then she caught sight of the moon and the turquoise rim of the Earth against the dense darkness, straight out the cockpit window ahead of her. As Asia rolled under them into a sunset of great and memorable beauty, Anne felt herself drift away from the couch and begin to float.

It was then that she experienced an instant of unprecedented clarity, a moment of wholly unanticipated certainty that God was real. The sensation fled almost as quickly as it came but left in its wake the conviction that Emilio was right, that they were meant to be here, doing this impossible thing. She looked to him in astonishment, shaken, and was irrationally infuriated to see that he was asleep.

They had been up about two and half hours when Sofia floated by to make a navigational sighting. Turning her head to follow the movement was probably what did it. Anne's inner ears, not her guts, betrayed her. Without warning, her body revolted against its bizarre situation, and she spent the next few hours retching and blowing her nose. When it was over, she realized she was famished and, unfastening her straps, pushed off toward the cockpit, feeling like Mary Martin on a wire until she bumped into a bulkhead so hard that she exclaimed, "Ouch!" and then "Damn," without thinking. She glanced back at Emilio, hoping that she hadn't disturbed him, but he opened his eyes and grinned greenly at her, and she realized that he'd been awake all along and was just this side of blowing breakfast.

D.W. chose that moment to holler back to them, "Hey, anybody hungry?" The effect of the question was immediate and impressive.

At his own firm if garbled request, Anne left Emilio alone to cope with the revolting experience as she had, without a solicitous audience. She joined D.W. and Sofia for lunch, which featured an excellent vichys-soise, packaged in bags like toothpaste tubes. With her stomach settling and a surprisingly decent meal in her, Anne's spirits rose all the way up to okay. This was sufficient improvement for her to decide morosely that even while suffering from the Fat Face, Chicken Legs syndrome that was affecting them all in zero G, Sofia at thirty-two looked better than Anne had on her wedding day, fresh-faced and twenty. Not even a radical redistribution of blood plasma and lymph was able to dim Sofia's looks entirely, the fluid in her face smoothing it into an ivory oval, dark brows arched and tranquil over egg-shaped eyelids, the lips pursed in calm self-possession: an emotionless Byzantine portrait.

D.W., on the other hand, was even more unsightly than usual.

Beauty and the Beast, Anne thought, watching them work head to head over some navigational task. It was a friendship she found odd and pure and touching in a way she didn't quite understand. With Sofia, D.W. dropped most of his elaborate Good Ole Boy act and seemed to take up less of the oxygen in a room; Sofia, for her part, seemed less wary in D.W.'s company, more at home in her skin. Remarkable, Anne mused. Who'd have thunk it?

There 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.

If 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."

The 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 Ro-bichaux 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."

Anne shrieked with laughter, but George yelled, "I don't suppose we could get a little gravity around here?" and D.W. hollered back, "Nope. All we got is levity."

And thus began the first morning of the Jesuit mission to Rakhat.

"Well, ladies and gentlemen, the Stella Maris is on her way out of the solar system," Jimmy called out from the bridge, a remarkably short time after they got under way.

A ragged cheer went up. Knobby hands wrapped around a cup of coffee, D.W. leaned over the table and said archly, "Miz Mendes, I 'magine this qualifies you as the all-time champi'n Wanderingest Jew in history." Sofia smiled.

"He's been waiting for months to use that line," George snorted, watching the clocks and seeing the first discrepancies appear.

"Are we there yet?" Anne asked brightly. There were boos and groans.

"Well, I thought it was funny, Anne," Emilio told her earnestly, as he set the table, "but I have really low standards."

From the moment the engines were fired, they had full gravity, and it very quickly seemed normal to be inside an asteroid traveling toward Alpha Centauri, no matter how crazy the idea was objectively. The only indication that they were doing anything extraordinary came from two clock-calendar readouts mounted in the common room, which George was watching with open-mouthed fascination. The ship's clock, hand-labeled US, appeared normal. The Earth-relative clock, labeled THEM, was calibrated as a function of their computed velocity.

"Look," George said. "You can see it already." The seconds were ticking by noticeably faster on the Earth clock.

"I am still confused about this," Emilio said, glancing up at the clocks as he laid out napkins that Anne and D.W. had had a big argument about several months earlier. Anne's logic was, "I refuse to spend half a year watching you guys wipe your mouths on your sleeves. There is no reason to make this trip into some kind of nasty macho endurance test. There'll be plenty of time to wallow in hardship when we get where we're going." "Table linens are a silly-ass waste of cargo capacity," had been D.W.'s counter. Finally, Sofia had pointed out that cloth napkins would weigh about eight hundred grams and weren't worth shouting about. "Coffee," Sofia said, "is worth shouting about." And, thank God, Emilio thought, the women had won that argument, too.

"The faster we go, the closer we approach the speed of light," George explained again patiently, "and the faster time will roll by on the Earth clock. At our peak velocity, halfway through the voyage, it will be our impression that one year is passing on Earth for every three days spent on the ship. Of course, on Earth, if anyone knew what we're up to, it would seem that time on the ship slowed down so that each day takes four months to pass. That's relativity for you. It depends on your point of view."

"Okay, I've got that. But why? Why does it work that way?" Emilio persisted.

"Deus vult, mes amis," Marc Robichaux called cheerfully from the galley. "God likes it that way."

"As good an answer as any, I suppose," George said.

"Praise! We require lavish praise!" Anne announced as she and Marc brought out the first meal they'd managed to cook normally in space: spaghetti with red sauce, a salad made with Wolverton veggies and reconstituted Chianti concentrate. "Oh, I am so glad we're done with weightlessness!"

"Really? I rather enjoyed zero G," Sofia said, taking a seat at the table. George leaned over to Anne and said something inaudible. Everyone smiled when she hit him.

"Only because it didn't make you sick!" Emilio retorted, ignoring the Edwardses, although Anne heard and seconded his sentiment.

"Well, that may be part of it," Sofia admitted, "but I very much liked being any height I pleased."

Walking in from the bridge right on cue, Jimmy Quinn plummeted into a chair with comic suddenness. Even sitting, he towered over her. "Sofia and I have a deal," Jimmy told them. "She doesn't say anything about basketball and I never mention miniature golf."

"Well, Miz Mendes, we may have quite a spell of zero G to look forward to," D.W. said. "You'll get another shot at bein' tall when we get where we're goin' and have to stop and look around."

"And when we reverse the engines halfway there," George pointed out. "We'll be in freefall while we come about."

"You and Anne gonna try it again?" Jimmy asked. Anne slapped him in the back of the head as she passed behind him to get the pepper from the galley. "You know, George, if you aren't going to share, it's not fair to the rest of us."

Alan Pace looked pained, but there was a chorus of hoots from the rest of them, as they settled around the table. They paused for grace and then passed the food around, laughing and ragging at one another. It was easy to feel they were all back at George and Anne's place, having dinner. Pleased at how the group was gelling, generally, D.W. listened and let the conversation drift a while, before holding up a hand. "Okay, listen up, rangers and rangerettes. Here's the ordo regularis, startin' tomorrow.»

The days were divided hour by hour. There would be free time for the four civilians, as D.W. called them, while the four Jesuits convened for the Mass, although anyone was welcome to join them. Classes were scheduled for three hours per day, nominal Sundays excepted, to give further depth to their training and maintain mental discipline, and to make sure that each crew member gained at least a passing knowledge of every other's specialty. In addition, they were each scheduled for a daily hour of physical training. "Gotta be ready for anything," said the old squadron commander. "Nobody slacks off."

There were routine maintenance operations and a rotating duty roster. There were clothes and dishes to be cleaned even in space, filters to be changed, plants and fish to be tended, hair and crumbs and unidentifiable orts to be vacuumed, even when traveling at a substantial portion of the speed of light toward God only knew what. But there would also be time for them to pursue private projects. The ship's computers contained pretty close to the sum of Western knowledge in memory and a fair bit of non-Western data as well, so there was plenty to work with. And each day after lunch, D.W. proposed, they would work together on a joint project. "I have consulted with Miz Mendes, here, on this one," he said, aiming an eye in her direction. "Father Pace is going to teach us to sing the whole of Handel's Messiah. "

"It's quite nice music," Sofia said, shrugging in response to the muted surprise around the table. "I have no objection to learning it in anticipation of the appearance of the Messiah. I simply argue that Handel was somewhat premature."

Another chorus of hoots and whistles broke out, punctuated by George's "Go get 'em, Sofia!" and Anne's blissful cry, "We've got another duelist at the table!" And D. W. Yarbrough grinned, beaming at Sofia like she was his own personal triumph. Which in some ways she was, Anne thought.

"Seriously, however, music is why we are here. The one thing we know for certain about the Singers is that they sing," Alan Pace pointed out, accurately if a trifle pedantically, trying to introduce some sort of serious discussion into the conversation. "Music may very well afford us our only means of communication."

The clink of forks and dishes became audible in the quiet, and Anne was about to say something tart when Sofia Mendes spoke.

"Oh, I shouldn't think so. Dr. Sandoz has mastered thirteen languages, six of them in the space of a little over three years," she said coolly, passing the salad to Jimmy, whose own mouth had dropped open at Pace's comment. "Would you be interested in a wager? If we make contact successfully, I am willing to bet that he'll have the basic grammar worked out in under two months." She smiled pleasantly at Pace and watched him, brows raised expectantly, as she took another bite of spaghetti.

"I'll take a piece of that action, Alan," D.W. said comfortably, looking somewhere in the vicinity of Alan Pace but quite possibly at Sofia or Emilio instead. "You lose, we can call you Al for a month."

"Ah. Stakes are too high for me," Pace said, backing down smoothly. "I stand corrected, Sandoz."

"Forget it," said Emilio a little stiffly, and he left the table carrying a plate of half-eaten food to the galley, evidently finished with his meal.

He was grateful to hear Anne pick up the conversation after he left, and put himself to work cleaning the pots. Intent on mastering his reaction, he was startled when he heard Sofia Mendes's voice behind him, and that infuriated him further.

"Which is worse," she asked levelly, reaching past him to put her dishes on the counter, "to be insulted or to be defended?"

Emilio stopped scrubbing, not used to having his mind read, and rested his hands on the sink but resumed resolutely a moment later. "Forget it," he said again, without looking at her.

"It is said that the Sephardim taught pride to the Spaniards," she commented. "I apologize. That was inappropriate. It won't happen again."

When he turned, she was gone. He swore violently under his breath and wondered, not for the first time, what had ever made him believe he might have the temperament of a priest. Finally, he straightened his shoulders, ran wet hands through his hair and walked back into the common room.

"I am not a complete jerk," he informed the table formally, and having caught their attention with that, he assured them, "but I could be if I made an honest effort." Through their surprised laughter, he begged pardon of Father Pace for taking offense and Alan reiterated his own regrets as well.

Emilio took his place at the table again and waited until the others seemed engrossed in the after-dinner talk before he leaned slightly toward Sofia, sitting on his left. "Derech agav," he said quietly, "yeish arba-esrei achshav."

"I stand corrected," she said, echoing Alan Pace. Her eyes were sparkling, although she didn't look at him directly. "You're rolling the r's a little but otherwise the accent is quite good." By the way, he'd said casually in Sephardic Hebrew that would almost have passed for that of an Israeli native, it's fourteen now.

And if Jimmy Quinn and Anne Edwards and D. W. Yarbrough noticed Sofia's face, because they were all alert to such things for different reasons, they also realized later that this was the last time Emilio Sandoz sat next to the young woman for nearly a year.