The Sparrow

19 LANDFALL, RAKHAT: OCTOBER 13, 2039, EARTH-RELATIVE

The following days were the worst they'd experienced, physically and mentally. From the tonnage of stored materiel, they had to select the equipment, clothing and food that seemed likely to be most immediately useful and stow it on the lander. The asteroid systems had to be locked down for their absence. The radio transceivers had to be set up to receive, encrypt and relay their reports to Earth. The onboard computers had to be left in a condition to be accessed remotely.

D.W. double-checked everything, catching errors, correcting mistakes. Having nursed a certain amount of resentment about his highhandedness, Anne began to reassess. D.W. was right to have gotten a grip on things when he did. Even with his steadying influence, the activity verged on frantic toward the end. They were all secretly scared they'd forgotten something or made a mistake that would result in some disaster or get someone killed. So when D.W. finally called a halt and brought them all together, there was a sense of being pulled back from the brink of hysteria.

"Finish what you have to do by five o'clock this afternoon," he told them. "Then let it go. Stop thinkin' about what can go wrong. It's more important right now to calm down. Y'all're too strung out for your own good. Go to bed early tonight. Just rest if you can't sleep. We'll say Mass at nine. And then we'll go down." D.W. smiled into the eyes of all his tired people, one by one. "You'll do fine. I'd trust any of you, apart or together, with my life and my soul. And when you bed down tonight, I want y'all to think about what Emilio said: God didn't bring us this far to let us down now."

That night, Anne left George and pushed herself across the commons to D.W.'s door. She knocked softly, not willing to wake him if he was asleep but wanting to talk to him in private if he wasn't.

"Who is it?" he called quietly.

"Anne." There was a little delay, and then the door opened.

"Evenin'. C'mon in. I'd offer you a chair but…"

She smiled and tried to find a place to float that felt properly situated. A paper for some graduate student, she thought. Maintenance of Culturally Based Distancing Norms in Zero G. "This won't take long, D.W. You need rest, too. I just wanted to ask if you'd consider letting Emilio be the first one out of the lander tomorrow."

In the silence that fell, Anne watched him work it through in his mind. There was no place in history at stake here, no plan to record this event. No reporters, no photography or AV feed to the nets. From a culture gone mad with documentation, publicity, broadcast, narrowcast and pointcast, where every act of public and private life seemed to be done for an audience, the voyage of the Stella Maris had begun in privacy, and its mission would be carried out in obscurity. Jesuits being as they are, there would be no mention of who set foot on this planet first, not even in the internal report relayed back to the Father General, whoever he might be when the news got back. Even so, as their leader by nature and by Order, it was D.W.'s risk to take and his privilege to claim. If Emilio Sandoz had first suggested this endeavor, it had nevertheless become D. W. Yarbrough's mission. No one had worked harder or longer, no one had given more thought to it or slaved over its details more single-mindedly. Anne knew that and she honored it.

He looked up at her after a long time, almost bringing both eyes into alignment with the intensity of his gaze. She could see him making one of the decisions involved in discussing this with her and she maintained a strict neutrality, so as not to influence him. When he spoke, his voice was as empty of accent as his face was naked of defense. "And you think that this would be appropriate? There would be no suspicion," he said and then hesitated before saying, "of favoritism?"

"D.W., I wouldn't have asked if I thought there was even a possibility of that." It's okay, she wanted to say. He's easy to love. I understand. "I think the others would approve and I believe it will mean a great deal to him. Spiritually." She cleared her throat then, embarrassed even to have said that word. "I hope you don't mind my venturing into your purview here—"

D.W. waved that off. "Oh, hell, no. Course not. I trust your judgment. You're much closer to him than I ever was, Anne." He looked at her to see if she accepted that and then rubbed his eyes, red-rimmed and bloodshot in his pale, disheveled face. "Okay. Fine by me. He goes first. Assumin' it looks safe to get out! We may get down there and decide it's too damn dangerous for anyone to risk it."

"Oh, D.W.! Oh, my darling man!" Anne cried. "If you even think about not letting us out of the lander, I will chew straight through that plane. You just try to stop me."

D.W. laughed, and she decided against hugging him but held out her hand. He took it and, to her complete astonishment, brought it to his lips and kissed it, looking crookedly at her the whole time. "Good night, Miz Edwards," he said, Southern and gallant as he could be, dressed in sweats and floating in midair. "Sleep well, y'hear?"

All of them, in their own ways, prepared that night both for death and for a kind of resurrection. Some confessed, some made love, some slept exhausted and dreamed of childhood friends or long-forgotten moments with grandparents. They all, in their own ways, tried to let their fear go, to reconcile themselves to their lives prior to this night, and to what might come tomorrow.

For some of them, there had been a turning point that now seemed justified, however painful the decision might have been. For Sofia Mendes, a way to make peace with what, even now, she could only think of as "the days before Jaubert." For Jimmy Quinn, the end of worry that he was wrong to leave his mother, and right to claim his life as his own.

For Marc Robichaux and Alan Pace, there was a sense that they had lived their lives the right way and confidence that God had recognized their artistry as the prayer they had always meant the work to be, and there was hope that He would let them serve Him now.

For Anne and George Edwards, for D. W. Yarbrough and Emilio Sandoz, this voyage had given meaning to random acts, and to all the points where they had done this and not that, chosen one thing and not another, to all their decisions, whether carefully thought out or ill considered.

I would do it all again, each of them thought.

And when the time came, each of them privately felt a calm ratification of those reconciliations, even as the noise and heat and buffeting built to a terrifying violence, as it seemed less and less likely that the plane would hold together, more and more likely that they'd be burned alive in the atmosphere of a planet whose name they did not know. I am where I want to be, they each thought. I am grateful to be here. In their own ways, they all gave themselves up to God's will and trusted that whatever happened now was meant to be. At least for the moment, they all fell in love with God.

But Emilio Sandoz fell hardest of all, letting his fear and doubt go almost physically, his hands opening as everyone else clutched at controls or straps or armrests or someone else's hand. And when the mind-numbing scream of the engines diminished and then fell off to a silence almost as deafening, it seemed only natural that he should move into the airlock and open the hatch and step out alone, into the sunlight of stars he'd never noticed while on Earth, and fill his lungs with the exhalation of unknown plants and fall to his knees weeping with the joy of it when, after a long courtship, he felt the void fill and believed with all his heart that his love affair with God had been consummated.

Those who saw his face as he pushed himself to his feet, laughing and crying, and turned back to them, incandescent, arms flung wide, recognized that they stood witness to a soul's transcendence and would remember that moment for the rest of their lives. Each of them felt some of the same dizzying exultation as they emerged from the lander, spilling from their technological womb wobbly and blinking, and felt themselves reborn in a new world.

Even Anne, sensible Anne, allowed herself to enjoy the sensation and didn't spoil it by speculating aloud that it was probably plain relief at cheating death combined with a sudden drop in blood pressure to the brain, consequent to the reversal of Fat Face, Chicken Legs. None of them, not even George who had no wish to believe, was entirely exempt from transcendence.

There followed days of rapture and hilarity. Children on a field trip to Eden, they named everything they saw. The eat-me's and the elephant birds, hoppers and walkies, the all-black Jesuits and the all-brown Franciscans, scummies and crawlers, hose-noses and squirrel-tails. Little green guys, blue-backs and flower-faces, and Richard Nixons, which walked bent over looking for food. And then black-and-white Dominicans, to round out their collection of orders. And turtle trees, whose seed pods resembled turtle shells; peanut bushes, whose brown blossoms were double-lobed; baby's feet, with foliage soft as rose petals; and pig plants, whose leaves were like sows' ears.

The niches were all there. Air to fly through, water to swim in, soil to burrow under, vegetation to exploit and hide behind. The principles were the same: form follows function, reach high for sunlight, strut your stuff to attract a mate, scatter lots of offspring or take good care of a precious few, warn predators that you're poisonous with bright colors or blend into the background to escape detection. But the sheer beauty and ingenuity of the animal adaptations were breathtaking and the gorgeousness of the plant life staggering.

Anne and Marc, their eyes informed by their study of evolution and Darwinian selection, were beside themselves with delight in everything they saw. They said it with different inflections but they both exclaimed repeatedly, "My God, this is so great!" And long past the point when the others wanted to drop exhausted to the ground, Anne's voice or Marc's could be heard calling softly but urgently, "You've got to see this! Come quick before it moves!" until they were all sated with beauty and novelty and astonishment.

D.W. had come in over ocean and flown low as a drug smuggler over what might as well be called treetops. He spotted a clearing and made a snap decision to land there rather than further on, in the plain Marc had chosen. Surrounded by the tall, heavy-stemmed vegetation that filled the niche of trees, they felt safe and unobserved. If the weather promised to be mild, they slept in the open, weaponless, too ignorant or trusting to worry about major carnivores or aggressive poisonous things. They had tents and took shelter during the sudden rainstorms, but they were frequently drenched. No one cared. The nights were so brief and the days so warm, they dried out quickly and napped in the leaf-filtered sunlight, drowsing in the warmth, contented and lazy as dogs by firelight.

Even dozing, they were suffused with their surroundings. The wind-borne fragrance of a thousand plants as varied as stephanotis, pine, skunk cabbage, lemon, jasmine, grass, but unlike any of them; the heavy dank odor of vegetation decayed by another world's bacteria; the oak-like musky bass notes of the crushed herbs they lay on overwhelmed their ability to perceive and categorize such things. As three dawns and three dusks came and went, the sounds of the long day changed, from chorus to chorus of trilling, shrieking, whirring things. Sometimes they could match the sound to the animal that made it: a shrilling that belonged to the lizardlike creatures they called little green guys, an amazingly loud rasping noise that was made by a small scaly biped staking out its territory in the forest's ground litter. Most often, the sounds were full of mystery, as was the God that some of them worshiped.

Their forays beyond the clearing were limited, made in pairs, kept always within sight and call of the lander and encampment. But after so much time together, they all broke D.W.'s rule once in a while and sought time alone, to come to grips with the experiences, to think and absorb and then move ahead again, into wonder. So Sofia was not surprised when she found Emilio sitting alone, his back against a boulder that had formed in layers, like sandstone. His eyes were closed. He might have been sleeping.

There are moments, she thought later, when reality seems to shift suddenly, like shards of colored glass in a kaleidoscope. Looking down at Sandoz, seeing him at rest and unaware, she realized, simply, that he was no longer young. And was astonished at the wave of feeling that swept over her.

He was always working or laughing or studying, and his intensity and humor made him seem ageless. She knew something of his life, having worked with him, and recognized him as one of her own kind: an eternal beginner, starting over and over in a new place in new circumstances, with new languages, new people, a new commission. They had this in common: the continual rushed confrontation with change, the feeling of being hothoused, forced to bloom early, the exhausting exhilaration of doing the unreasonable not just adequately but well and with grace.

Flexible, then, and adaptable but not authoritative. He felt himself to be a skilled tradesman, perhaps, doing work to order. She wondered if he had ever given an outright command in his life and thought that if she depended on Emilio Sandoz to teach her a language, she might never even suspect that the imperative mood existed. All this, perhaps, contributed to what she had always perceived as a certain unfledged quality, made more striking by a willingness to submit to authority, odd in a grown man of intelligence and energy, but part and parcel of Jesuit formation. Not childish, but certainly childlike. And yet, she could see now the skin of the eyes pleating, the mouth bracketed by deeper grooves than she had noticed the first time she'd seen him. Half his life, she thought, given to this jealous God of his.

And perhaps a third of my own life given to Jaubert, she thought, and before that…Who am I to judge a life misspent?

She drew closer to him, the humus and herbage cushioning her step and absorbing the sound of her approach, and dropped silently almost to her knees. Her hand was drawn to a lock of hair near his face, silver against the black, and she reached out tentatively, as though to touch a butterfly. Sensing her movement, his eyes opened, and she took cover behind Anne's unwitting lessons.

"Sandoz!" she cried, lightly seizing his hair and pulling it playfully toward his eyes, "Look at this! You're getting gray, old man."

He laughed. She smiled back and stood again, looking around, as though there were something, anything in this world, that was of more interest to her now than the man she'd just turned away from.

"So. You are pleased with your choice?" When she said nothing, Emilio asked again, "Happy that you came here?"

"Yes, I am happy with my choice." Sofia gazed at the forest, her hands gesturing toward it all, before turning to look at him. "This makes everything worthwhile, doesn't it." She was aware, always, that he knew what she had been and wondered with fresh interest how this shadowed his thoughts of her.

"I had a dream last night," Emilio told her. "I was floating in the air. And in the dream, I said to myself, I wonder why I never tried this before? It's so easy."

"REM-mediated dendrite formation," she told him. "Your brain is trying to organize a response to prolonged weightlessness followed by all this new sensory input."

Emilio regarded her through narrowed eyes. "You spend entirely too much time with Anne. What is it with the women on this mission?" he demanded suddenly. "If I looked up prosaic in the dictionary, it would probably say, 'Immune to poetry. See also Mendes comma Sofia. I happen to believe that dream was a religious revelation."

He had been praying, Sofia realized, not sleeping. His voice was light and ironic, but she had seen his face that day and knew he meant it. She tried hard to identify the feeling, to name what swept her, and realized that it was tenderness. This is impossible, she thought. I can't let this happen.

"Aside from exasperating me," he continued, "did you have some reason for—?"

She blinked. "Oh. Yes, actually, it's time for work. Anne sent me for you."

"No one is hurt?" he asked, getting to his feet.

"No. But Robichaux is ready to begin the experiments with local food sources. Anne wants you to help monitor the responses."

They walked back to the encampment, bantering amiably on the way. But she was careful to keep her distance, and believed she gave no sign that she had at last taken up a burden that Emilio had long carried for both of them, without her conscious knowledge. Sofia Mendes, after all, had survived by sealing off emotion, her own and others'. It was an old skill, employed in times past to protect herself and now honorably exercised on behalf of another. I am Mendes, she thought. Nothing is beyond me.

Anne looked up from her notebook as Emilio and Sofia joined the others. It's happened, Anne thought, but she turned immediately to the work at hand.

"We'll start with a little meat," she told the group sitting in a circle in front of the lab tent. "Marc wants to go first, but he's just spent a lot of time throwing up in zero G so I don't want to put him under any further stress. Jimmy's big and healthy and he'll eat anything that gets near his mouth. I expect he'll survive if the stuff here turns out to be poisonous to us." Jimmy laughed but looked a little nervous. Anne wasn't joking. "Emilio, you and I are going to watch him in shifts for the next twenty-four hours," Anne continued. "I'll take the first three hours and then you're on."

"What are we looking for?" Emilio asked, sitting on the ground between Alan and George.

"Vomiting within the first hour or so. Then abdominal pain. Then intestinal pain, and then diarrhea ranging from annoying to bloody and life threatening. And then," she said seriously, looking at Jimmy the whole time, "there's the possibility of strokelike bleeding in the brain and a whole range of damage to the intestines and liver and kidneys, which could be either temporary or permanent."

"You'd never get permission from the National Institutes of Health to run this experiment," Jimmy said.

"Not even if the lab rats signed their consent forms with perfect penmanship," Anne agreed. "But we're not applying for a research grant. Jimmy, you know the risks. Marc and I have run a hundred tests, but there are endless chemical compounds in anything as complicated as a plant or an animal. Alan has volunteered to go first if you want to back out."

He didn't, and they began with a small amount of roasted little green guy because the animals were abundant and easy to catch. Everyone watched as Jimmy got ready to take his first bite.

"Simply hold it in your mouth for thirty seconds and then spit it out, please," Marc instructed him. "Any tingling or numbness around the lips or in the mouth?"

"No. It's not bad," Jim told them. "Could use some salt. Tastes just like chicken." There were moans, as he knew there would be, and he beamed happily at the response.

"So. Another bite and this time swallow," Marc told him. Jimmy sucked the rest of the meat from the little pair of legs. And was shouted at by Marc, to everyone's surprise, since they didn't know Marc had shouting in him. "Never again, do you understand? There is a protocol and you will observe it!"

Sheepish, Jimmy apologized but, despite the risk he took, suffered no ill effects, either immediately or at any time during the next twenty-four hours. Like the rainwater they'd drunk, little green guy meat seemed harmless.

They went on from there, with Jimmy taking the first taste of each item they sampled. If it didn't make Jimmy sick, Alan and D.W. tried it next and then George and Marc, and finally Sofia, with Anne and Emilio acting as controls, recording the foodstuffs they tested and tracking the responses, ready to do what they could if someone reacted badly. Marc's protocol was observed to the letter after Jimmy's rashness. If anyone experienced the tingling or numbing that indicated potential poison, the item was described carefully for the record and not tried again. If there was no numbing and if the item was reasonably palatable, then they'd take another small bite and swallow. Wait fifteen minutes and try some more. Then finish a good-sized sample an hour later and hope to be as lucky as Jimmy had been.

They rejected many things on the basis of taste. Most of the leaves they tried were too bitter, and many of the fruits were too sour, although one that tasted great gave even Jimmy the shits. Alan broke out in a rash once, and Marc threw up after one meal. But slowly they compiled a list of things that didn't seem to damage them, even if it was still unclear whether or not they were deriving any useful nutrients from the food. That would require time and a gradual shift from a diet made up primarily of food brought from Earth to one comprising native elements.

The planet seemed so welcoming and their contentment was so thorough that the weeks came and went without a return to the Stella Maris. Having admired its extravagant beauty, warmed by its suns, sheltered by its forest, at least potentially nourished by it, they began to feel at home on this planet whose name they did not know and to trust its benevolence and welcome.

The first and only sign of trouble was simply that Alan slept late one morning. In the relaxed discipline of those days, D.W. let him but finally decided to roust him out for breakfast. First with humor and then with concern, he jostled Alan with a toe and then shook his shoulder. Getting no response, he called to Anne, who knew from the tenor of his voice to bring her kit.

Shouting Alan's name, talking to him constantly, she surveyed his condition. Airway open. Breathing and heartbeat irregular. "Alan, honey, come on back. Come on, sweetheart, we know you're in there," she said in what she hoped was a mother's voice as D.W. began the ritual anointing. Pupils dilated and fixed. "Father Pace!" she yelled. "You'll be late for services!" Anything. Try to engage him, find a way into wherever he was now, pull him back. Pulse thready. In the ER, she'd have had a team all over him, intubating, charging the paddles. Death, in her experience, was never peaceful. Her training was to resist until flat-line, and beyond. After fifteen minutes, someone took hold of her shoulders and drew her back, ending the CPR. Understanding, she gave Pace up, but sat and held his limp hand until D.W. took it from her and crossed it over Alan's still and cooling chest.

"You'll want an autopsy," she said. D.W. nodded numbly: they had to know. "I'll have to do it right away. Without preservatives, with this heat—"

"I understand. Go ahead."

George, who knew more than he liked about Anne's work, lashed together a waist-high table for her and curtained off an enclosure, using tarps from the lander. Then he filled containers of water from a nearby creek so she could rinse off as she worked, as well as all the tough, black plastic showerbags, setting them in the sunlight to warm the water, knowing that she'd want to scrub when she was done. Sofia finally roused herself from shocked immobility and went to help George as he took down his and Anne's tent and set it up again, away from the rest of the encampment. He thanked her and explained quietly as they worked, "She's hard to be around when a patient dies under her hands like this. You never get used to that. It'll be better if we can be off by ourselves for a while afterward."

Emilio, meanwhile, helped lift Alan's body onto the crude table and stayed behind after D.W., Jimmy and Marc left the enclosure. "Do you want me to assist?" he asked, willing but already pale.

"No," she said abruptly. Then she softened. "You don't want this in your mind. Don't even stay close enough to hear. I've done a thousand bodies, sweetheart. I'm used to it."

But not bodies like this. Not fresh; not friends. It was, in fact, among the worst, the most distressing things she'd done in a lifetime of grisly experience. And it was among the most futile. Hours later, she made the corpse presentable and called for the priests, who dressed it in vestments and wrapped it in another tarp, the plastic shroud garishly yellow, as inappropriate and unacceptable as the death it concealed.

It was dusk by then. Sitting around the small fire, the others listened to the nearby sound of falling water as Anne showered the blood and brains and excrement and stomach contents from her body, soaped away the smell, and tried unsuccessfully to put the images and sounds from her mind. When she emerged, wet-haired but dressed and apparently composed, it was too dark for D.W. to see how tired she was and how upset. He thought, perhaps, that this was not difficult for her, that she was a professional, hardened, unsusceptible to breakdown. So he called her to the fire and asked her the results.

"Let her alone," George said, putting an arm around Anne and turning her toward their tent. "Tomorrow is soon enough."

"No, it's okay," Anne said, even though it wasn't. "It won't take long. There was no obvious cause of death."

"There was the rash, Doctor. Perhaps an allergic reaction to the fruit he ate?" Marc suggested quietly.

"That was days ago," Anne said patiently. "And the rash was probably a contact dermatitis. There was no indication of elevated histamine levels in his blood, but we should take whatever he ate yesterday off our list." She turned again to go to the tent, to lie down with George and to remind herself in his arms that she was alive, and glad of it.

"What about an aneurysm?" Emilio asked. "Maybe he had a blood vessel that was ready to rupture all along and this was just chance."

They were taking refuge in the concrete. Anne realized that. Faced with death, people looked for reasons, to protect themselves from its arbitrariness and stupidity. She'd been up for twenty hours. So had the others, but they'd only waited. Anne put her hands on her hips and stared at the ground, breathing deeply to control the anger. "Emilio," she said softly but precisely, "I have just completed as thorough an autopsy as can be done under these conditions. How much detail would you like? There was no evidence of internal bleeding anywhere. There was no blood clot in the heart or lungs. There was no inflammation of the gut or stomach. The lungs were clear of fluid. The liver was in remarkably fine condition. The kidneys and the bladder were not infected. There was no stroke. The brain," she said, working hard now to keep her voice steady, for the brain had been the hardest to retrieve and inspect, "was fine. There was no physical sign that allows me to declare a known cause of death. He just died. I don't know why. People are mortal, okay?"

She turned to walk away again, looking for someplace to sit down and cry by herself, and nearly screamed when she heard D.W. ask, "What about the bite on his leg? It didn't look like much and we've all been bitten, but maybe…Anne, there's got to be a reason—"

"You want a reason?" she asked, rounding on him. He stopped talking, startled by her tone out of his own reverie. "You want a reason? Deus vult, pater. God wanted him dead, okay?"

She said it to shock D.W., to shock them all, to shut them up, and she was bitterly glad to see it work. She saw D.W. stop in midsentence, motionless, his mouth open slightly, Emilio wide-eyed, Marc blinking with the violence of it, the way she'd turned his habitual cry of faith against them.

"Why is that so hard to accept, gentlemen?" Anne asked with a flat stare. "Why is it that God gets all the credit for the good stuff, but it's the doctor's fault when shit happens? When the patient comes through, it's always Thank God, and when the patient dies, it's always blame the doctor. Just once in my life, just for the sheer fucking novelty of it, it would be nice if somebody blamed God when the patient dies, instead of me."

"Anne, D.W. wasn't blaming you—" It was Jimmy's voice. She felt George take her arm and she shook him off.

"The hell he wasn't! You want a reason? I'm giving you the only one I can think of, and I don't care if you don't like it. I don't know why he died. I didn't kill him. Dammit, sometimes they just die!" Her voice broke on the words and that made her more furious and desolate. "Even when you've got all the medical technology in the world and even when you try your goddamnedest to bring them back and even if they're wonderful musicians and even if they were healthy yesterday and even when they're too damned young to die. Sometimes they just die, okay? Go ask God why. Don't ask me."

George held her while she wept through her rage and told her quietly, "He wasn't blaming you, Anne. Nobody blames you," and she knew that, but for the moment it did feel like it was all her fault.

"Oh, shit, George!" she whispered, wiping her nose on her sleeve, and trying to stop crying and failing. "Crap. I didn't even like him all that much." She turned helplessly toward Jimmy and Sofia, who had moved to her side, but it was the priests Anne was looking at. "He came all this way for the music and he didn't even get to hear it once. How is that fair? He never even got to see the instruments. What is the point of bringing him all this way, just to kill him now? What kind of stinking goddam trick is this for God to play?"

In the long months aboard the Stella Maris, many stories were told. They all still had secrets to keep, but some childhood memories were shared and Marc Robichaux's were among them.

Marc was not one of those guys who knew he wanted to be a priest when he was seven, but he was very close to it. Diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia at five, he was lucky enough to be a Canadian when universal health care was available. "Leukemia is not that bad," he told them. "Mostly you are just very, very tired and you feel you need to die as a tired child needs to sleep. The chemo, on the other hand, was very terrible."

His mother did her best, but she had other children to care for. So it fell to his paternal grandmother, perhaps compensating for the way her son had deserted the family under cover of the stress of Marc's illness, to sit by his bed, to regale him with stories of old Quebec, to pray with him and assure him with perfect confidence that a new kind of operation, an autologous bone marrow transplant, would cure him. "Only a few years earlier, the kind of leukemia I had would surely have killed me. And the transplant itself very nearly did," he admitted. "But a few weeks later—it was like a miracle. My grandmother was convinced it was in fact a literal miracle, God's plan for me."

"What about you, Marc?" Sofia asked. "Did you think it was a miracle, too? Is that when you decided to become a priest?"

"Oh, no. I wanted to be a hockey star," he told them, through a burst of surprised laughter. And when they refused to believe this, he insisted, "I was a very good goalie in high school!" The talk moved on to sports at that point and never came back to Marc's childhood. But Sofia was not far wrong, although it was almost ten years before Marc Robichaux found a focus for his clear sense that life was God's gift, to give or take.

His grandmother's rosary had come with him to Rakhat, and so did his conviction that all life is fragile and evanescent, that God alone endures. And yet he knew that Anne would find such an answer to her unanswerable question inadequate and unsatisfying. Why? she would ask. Why does it have to be that way?

In the brief hours before the first of the Rakhati dawns, as Marc kept vigil with Alan's body, he watched Jimmy Quinn moving quietly from tent to tent, listening, agreeing, finding common ground and relaying messages. There had been times, Marc knew, when each of the mission members had thought privately that Alan Pace might cause trouble, but none of them had anticipated that it would come about like this or that Anne of all people would drive a wedge into the group.

Finally, with the night noises quieting and the orange sun's chorus tuning up, Jimmy came across the clearing toward Marc. "Blessed are the peacemakers," Marc said quietly. "Has the diplomacy gone well?"

Jimmy stared toward what they called east because that's where daybreak began, and ticked off the summaries with his fingers. "George thinks it's D.W.'s fault for pushing Anne past her limits. Anne is ashamed of herself for blowing up and says it was twenty years of frustration coming to a head. D.W. understands that and wishes he'd waited until Anne was rested up. Emilio also understands about Anne but he's afraid your feelings were hurt. Sofia says not even Job got an answer to Anne's question and Job got to ask God to His face."

Unexpectedly, Marc smiled. The orange sunlight filtered through the eastern edge of the forest and reached his silvering hair, restoring to it the golden tint of his youth. He had been a spectacularly beautiful child and even in middle age, the lovely lines of his face softening, he could be a treasure to look at. "Tell Father Yarbrough I should like to be the celebrant, please. And be sure that Dr. Edwards comes to Mass, oui?"

Jimmy waited to see if Marc had anything more to say but Robichaux turned away. The beads of an antique rosary began again to slip through his fingers in the gentle rhythm only Marc, and perhaps God, could hear.

There was a brief, tight discussion before the Requiem about whether they should bury Alan, cremate the corpse or take it back to the Stella Maris. The issue was whether or not the bacteria in his body would contaminate the local ecosystem. To Anne's considerable relief, she and Marc found themselves on the same side of the argument.

"The moment we stepped out of the lander, we affected this ecosystem," Anne said, voice husky from crying. "We have breathed and vomited and excreted and shed hair and skin cells. This planet has already been inoculated with whatever bacteria we're carrying."

"Have no illusions," Marc Robichaux added. "Our presence is now a part of this planet's history."

So a grave was dug and the yellow tarp's shrouded contents were carried to its edge. The Liturgy of Resurrection was begun, and when the time came, Marc spoke of Alan Pace and of the beauty of his music and the delight he had taken in hearing whole songs only a few weeks earlier.

"The voyage was not without reward for Alan," Marc said. "But we are left with Anne's question. Why would God bring him all this way, only to die now?" He paused and looked at Sofia before continuing. "The Jewish sages tell us that the whole of the Torah, the entirety of the first five books of the Bible, is the name of God. With such a name, they ask, how much more is God? The Fathers of the Church tell us that God is Mystery and unknowable. God Himself, in Scripture, tells us, 'My ways are not your ways and My thoughts are not your thoughts. "

The noise of the forest was quieting now. Siesta was the rule in the heat of midday, when three suns' aggregate light drove many animals to shelter. They were all, priests and lay, tired and hot, and wanted Marc to finish. But Marc waited until Anne lifted her eyes to his. "It is the human condition to ask questions like Anne's last night and to receive no plain answers," he said. "Perhaps this is because we can't understand the answers, because we are incapable of knowing God's ways and God's thoughts. We are, after all, only very clever tailless primates, doing the best we can, but limited. Perhaps we must all own up to being agnostic, unable to know the unknowable."

Emilio's head came up and he looked at Marc, his face very still. Marc noted this and smiled, but continued. "The Jewish sages also tell us that God dances when His children defeat Him in argument, when they stand on their feet and use their minds. So questions like Anne's are worth asking. To ask them is a very fine kind of human behavior. If we keep demanding that God yield up His answers, perhaps some day we will understand them. And then we will be something more than clever apes, and we shall dance with God."