The Sparrow

23 CITY OF GAYJUR: SECOND NA'ALPA VILLAGE OF KASHAN: SEVEN WEEKS AFTER CONTACT

Supaari VaGayjur profited from the presence of the Jesuit party on Rakhat before he knew of its existence. This was both characteristic of him and unusual. Characteristic, in that he had recognized a potential Runa fad before anyone else and took steps to capture the market just before the trend took off in Gayjur, Unusual, in that he was not in command of the facts underlying the market before he moved. It was unlike him to risk so much without investigating first. The gamble paid off handsomely but even as the profits were totaled, it left him feeling uneasy, as though he had just missed being killed in a ha'aran duel undertaken while drunk.

Moving through the warehouse with Awijan, his Runa secretary, who took down his orders and noted his inquiries, Supaari had spotted one of the Kashan villagers, a woman named Chaypas, standing at a doorway, waiting for permission to speak to him. She was wearing a cascade of ribbons worked into the circlet worn around her head: a waterfall of color, arrayed gracefully down her back. Lovely, Supaari thought, and it would quintuple the number of double-length ribbons desired by anyone who took the fashion up. He turned to Awijan. "Call the runners. Buy ribbon and take possession. Get contracts for all the deliveries available—" Supaari hesitated. How long would it last?

"Someone suggests that the contracts go no further out than Eighth Na'alpa."

Supaari VaGayjur knew better than to second-guess Awijan on a decision like that. "Yes. When you get back, have Sapalla clear out some merchandise to make room for the shipments, even if we have to take a loss on the berinje. Delivery after redlight, understood?" One of the many advantages of working with Runa, Supaari had found over the years, was that Jana'ata couldn't see well in redlight but Runa could. It imposed a secrecy that his competitors, sleeping away the red and black hours, didn't even suspect.

He watched as Awijan entered the courtyard, gathering the runners. Having set the transaction in motion, Supaari himself moved smoothly toward the VaKashani woman Chaypas and greeted her in her own language, holding out both hands to her. "Challalla khaeri, Chaypas." He leaned forward and breathed in her scent, mingled with that of the fragrant ribbons.

An unusual villager, willing to travel alone and to deal directly with Supaari VaGayjur in his own compound, Chaypas VaKashan returned the greeting without fear. Apart from their attire, they were alike enough to be sisters or near cousins, seen with a casual eye, from a distance. Supaari was more heavily muscled, slightly larger overall, facts enhanced by the padded gown, quilted and stiffened with embroidery; the pattens, which gave him a hand's width of extra height; the headpiece, which provided another measure of stature and identified him as a merchant and, by implication, a third-born child. His clothing today emphasized the differences in their lives, but, when he wished, Supaari could pass for Runa, wearing the trailing oversleeves and boots of an urban Runao. It was not illegal. It simply wasn't done. Most Jana'ata, even most thirds, would rather have died than be taken for Runa. Most Jana'ata, even most thirds, were not nearly so wealthy as Supaari VaGayjur. It was his stigma and his comfort, that wealth.

Supaari coaxed Chaypas indoors, away from the foot traffic, so that her ribbons would not be noticed by others of her kind before he had a chance to jump the market. Chatting, he walked ahead of her through the warehouse, showing her the way to his office as though she were not already familiar with it, allowing her to rearrange the cushions to her comfort as he prepared a yasapa tea he knew she liked. He served her himself, even pouring it, to show respect: Supaari VaGayjur went his own profitable way.

Taking a place across from Chaypas, he reclined comfortably on the cushions, careful to mimic her own posture as closely as possible. They talked amiably about the outlook for the sinonja harvest, the health of her husband, Manuzhai, and the prospects for resolution of a potential dispute between Kashan and Lanjeri over a new k'jip field. Supaari offered to mediate if the elders couldn't agree. He had no wish to impose himself on them and he did not relish the long tedious trip out to Kashan, but it would be worth the trouble to keep his scent fresh in everyone's nostrils.

"Sipaj, Supaari," Chaypas said, coming to the point of her visit at last. "Someone has a curiosity for you." She reached into a woven pouch and pulled out a small packet made of intricately folded leaves. She held it out to him but he lowered his ears regretfully: his hands were incapable of unwrapping the object carefully. Her own ears flattened abruptly in embarrassment, but Supaari took her gesture as a compliment. The VaKashani villagers sometimes forgot he was Jana'ata. In its own way, in context, it was high praise, Supaari thought, although his eldest brother would have killed her for it and his middle brother would have had her jailed.

He watched as Chaypas picked the strands of wrapping apart gracefully, with a Runao's lovely long-fingered dexterity. She held out to him seven of what he took at first to be beetles or unusually small kintai. Then, leaning forward, Supaari inhaled.

It was the most extraordinary thing he'd ever encountered. He knew he was getting esters and aldehydes, and the smell of burnt sugars certainly, but the scent was staggeringly complex. All this from a few small brown objects, oval, incised with a longitudinal line. Supaari covered his excitement with the ease of a man who has made a living of concealment. Even so, it came to him with a jolt that here, at last, was something that might interest Hlavin Kitheri, the Reshtar of Galatna.

"Someone's heart is glad," he told Chaypas, raising his tail with mild pleasure, not wanting to alarm her. "A remarkable scent, full of curiosity, as you say."

"Sipaj, Supaari! These kafay were given to someone by foreigners." She used a Ruanja word meaning "people from the next river valley," but her eyes were open very wide and her tail was twitching. There was some delicious joke here, Supaari realized, but he let her enjoy the amusement at his expense. "Askama is interpreting!" she told him.

"Askama!" he cried, throwing his hands up in delight, elegant claws clicking. "A good child, quick to learn." And ugly as white water in a narrow gorge, but no matter. If Chaypas's household was interpreting for the Kashan corporation, Supaari would have an exclusive trading relationship with the new delegation, by Runa custom if not by Jana'ata law and, in cases like this, Runa custom was all that counted. He'd based his life on that understanding and if it brought him no honor, it nonetheless provided much of what he savored: risk to stalk, intellectual challenge and a certain grudging deference among his own.

They chatted a while longer. He established that these small kafay were only a sample of a much larger store of unusual goods brought by the foreigners, who were staying in Kashan in Chaypas's own household. And Supaari heard with growing interest that they seemed to have no notion of profit, giving their goods away for the food and shelter that was theirs by right, as sojourners. Cunning, he wondered, or some nomadic remnant group, still bartering in the old, clean ways?

Supaari laid the little packet aside and, disciplined, did not allow himself to trail and capture the idea that he had scented in the distance: posterity and a way out of the living death he was born to. He rose instead and refilled Chaypas's cup, asking after her plans. She told him she would be visiting trade partners in the Ezao district. She was in no hurry to return home. All the other VaKashani would be leaving the village soon to harvest pik root.

"And the foreigners?" he asked. He was already planning the trip in his mind, maybe in mid-Partan, after the rains. But Kitheri came first. It all hinged on Hlavin Kitheri.

"Sometimes they come with us, sometimes they stay in Kashan. They are like children," Chaypas told him. She seemed a little puzzled by this herself. "Too small to travel like adults but only one to carry them. And that one lets them walk!"

If Supaari was curious before, he was baffled now, but Chaypas was showing signs of nervousness, swaying from side to side, as she often did when she spent too much time in ghost houses.

"Sipaj, Chaypas," he said, rising smoothly from his cushions, calculating that enough time had passed for Awijan to have concluded terms with the ribbon suppliers. "Such a long journey you've made! Someone's heart would be glad to send you to Ezao in a chair."

Her tail came up with pleasure and she even trembled a little, her eyes sliding away and closing. This bordered on flirtation and it passed his mind that she was remarkably attractive. He smothered the spark before it caught fire. Third-born, he still had his standards, which were considerably higher than those of his social betters. Urbane and sophisticated in many ways, Supaari VaGayjur was thoroughly bourgeois in others.

He sent a runner for a chair and, stifling yawns, waited with Chaypas in the courtyard until it arrived shortly after second sundown. He could hardly see her as she climbed into the chair but the fragrance of her ribbons was very fine; she had wonderful taste in perfumes, a natural elegance that Supaari admired. "Sipaj, Chaypas," he called quietly, "safe journey to Ezao and thence home." She returned his farewell, laughing breathily as the bearers lifted the chair supports, rocking the seat.

It was a luxury few Runa ever experienced, to be carried through the narrow city streets like a lord. Supaari was genuinely pleased to provide her with an evening she would remember, borne through the crowds of urban Runa, safe to go about their personal business in the blushing light of evening, while the Jana'ata slept. The breeze off the bay would carry her new ribbons like cirrus clouds behind her, their fragrance rising like mist from a cataract. By tomorrow, merchants from all over the city of Gayjur would be looking for ribbon at any price, and Supaari VaGayjur would own every scrap of it.

It was Sofia Mendes's fate to enrich investors who were unknown to her. The heavy black hair, which had inspired Chaypas to invent a new fashion, was at this moment pushed carelessly back, the ribbons Askama had braided into it slipping into disarray. Irritable as Sofia Mendes was, she'd have cut it all off without a thought, had scissors been handy. She'd brewed a cup of coffee out of habit, but it was too hot today to drink it and it cooled at her elbow; soon, such profligacy would be shocking. At the moment, however, beauty, adornment and wealth were further from her mind than usual, which was very far indeed. Her intellect was wholly occupied with the task of finding some sufficiently uncivil response to Emilio Sandoz's suggestion that she was being stupid.

"I can explain it to you again, but I can't understand it for you."

"You are insufferable," she whispered.

"I am not insufferable. I am correct," he whispered back. "If you prefer to memorize each declension separately, please do so. But the pattern is perfectly apparent."

"It's a false generalization. It doesn't make any sense."

"Oh, and I suppose that assigning gender to tables and chairs and hats and declining nouns on that basis does make sense? Language is arbitrary by nature," he informed her. "If you want sense, study calculus."

"Sarcasm is not argument, Sandoz."

Emilio took a deep breath and began again with unconcealed impatience. "All right. Once more. It is not abstract versus concrete. If you try to force that rule on Ruanja, you'll make consistent errors. It is spatial versus unseen or nonvisual." He reached out toward the tablet that lay on the table between them and stabbed a finger down at a section of the display, careful not to jar Askama, who had just fallen asleep in his arms. "Consider this group. Animal, vegetable or mineral: these words all denote something that takes up space in some manner and they are all declined with this pattern. You follow?" He pointed to another section of the screen. "In contrast, these nouns are nonspatial: thought, hope, affection, learning. This group takes the second pattern of declension. Clear so far?"

Concrete and abstract, dammit, she thought stubbornly. "Yes, fine. What I don't understand is—"

"I know what you don't understand! Stop arguing with me and listen!" He ignored her glare. "The overall rule is, anything that can be seen is always classified as occupying space, because seeing things is how you know they are spatial, so you use the first declension. The trick is that anything unseen, including but not limited to things that are inherently nonvisual, takes this second declension." He sat back abruptly and then glanced down at Askama, relieved to see she was still sleeping. "Now. I invite you to disprove. Please. Just try."

She had him. Face bright as ivory in the sun, she leaned forward and prepared to deliver the coup de grace. "Not ten minutes ago, Askama said, Chaypas-ru zhari i washan, and she used what you call the non-visual declension. But Chaypas is very large. Chaypas most certainly takes up a good deal of space—"

"Yes. Brava! Perfect. Now, think!"

He was being patronizing. She stared at him, open-mouthed, ready to detonate, when it suddenly came clear. Letting her head fall abruptly into her hands, she muttered, "But Chaypas is gone. So you can't see him. So you don't use the spatial declension. You use the nonvisual, even though Chaypas is concrete and not abstract." She looked up. He was grinning. "I hate it when you're smug."

The dark, merry eyes were triumphant. Emilio Sandoz had taken no vow of false modesty. It was a nice piece of analysis and he was immensely pleased with himself, and it had not escaped his own notice that he'd won Sofia's bet with Alan Pace. They'd made contact with the Runa only seven weeks ago, but he already had the basic grammar nailed. Damn, I'm good, he thought to himself, and his grin widened as Sofia stared at him through narrowed eyes, trying to think of some case that wouldn't fit the model.

"All right, all right," she said ungraciously, picking up her tablet, "I concede. Give me a few minutes to get it all down."

They were a good team. Sandoz was a master of this discipline but she was a far better writer, fast and clear. Already three papers bearing the authorship "E. J. Sandoz and S. R. Mendes" had been radioed back for submission to scholarly journals.

Finished with her notes, Sofia looked up and smiled. She had met before, in yeshiva students whom her parents often invited to dinner when she was a girl, this mixture of incisive intelligence and dreaminess, the joyful combative intellectual style and the tendency to fall into an inner world, absorbed and remote. Barelegged and barefoot, Sandoz was tanned to the color of cinnamon, wearing the loose khaki shorts and oversized black T-shirt that had replaced the soutane, impossibly hot in this climate. Sofia herself was equally browned, similarly dark and slender, dressed as simply, and she could understand why Manuzhai had assumed at first that she and Emilio were "littermates." The notion had been funny and embarrassing, as Manuzhai's pantomimed explanation of the word had been, but she could see how a Runao might come to that conclusion.

Askama sighed, stretching out a little. Emilio came to life and looked at Sofia with round-eyed alarm. Askama was dear, but she chattered incessantly; naps like this one were a welcome relief. "I wonder," said Sofia very softly, when it was clear that Askama would not awaken, "if a blind Runao would always use the nonvisual declension."

"Now that is an interesting question," Emilio said, inclining his head with respect, and she was tartly pleased to have reestablished claim to an adequate intelligence. He thought a while, rocking the hammock chair gently, one fine-boned foot braced against a hampiy stem, fingers stroking the soft fur behind Askama's ears. The sunrise smile reappeared. "If you could feel a thing, you would also know it took up space! Look for something that has contour or form or texture. Wager?"

"Lejano, maybe, or tinguen" she suggested. "No bets."

"No guts! I could be wrong," he said cheerfully, "but I doubt it. Try lejano first." He smiled down at the top of Askama's head before returning his eyes to the small herd of piyanot grazing on the plain beyond the stems of the hampiy shelter.

"They make a handsome couple, don't they," Anne said as she and D.W. strolled along the edge of the gorge, above the village.

"Yes, ma'am," D.W. agreed. "They do indeed." Everyone else was occupied or asleep, and they had found themselves restless together. Anne proposed a walk, and D.W. was happy to accompany her. Manuzhai had warned them all, repeatedly, against walking alone. A "djanada," whatever that was, might get them; so they traveled in pairs, more to mollify Manuzhai and the other Runa than because of any serious fear of predators or bogeymen.

"Jealous?" Anne asked. "They're both yours in a way, aren't they."

"Oh, hell, I'm not sure jealous is the right word," said D.W., who stopped for a moment to gaze crookedly at Sofia and Emilio, playing house with Askama out in the hampiy. He turned back to Anne and grinned lopsidedly and briefly before he squinted off into the west, across the river. "It's kinda like watchin' Notre Dame go up against the University of Texas in the Cotton Bowl. I don't hardly know what to hope for."

Anne laughed appreciatively and leaned her head against his shoulder. "Oh, D.W., I love you. I truly do. Of course, I've always had a weakness for a guy in a uniform."

It was an opening, and he walked through it, smiling. "You, too?"

"The Marines are looking for a few good men," Anne intoned, quoting the old recruitment slogan as they strolled south.

"Yeah, well. So was I." His eyes remained, more or less, straight ahead as he sang quietly, "But that was long ago and very far away."

"Exactly," Anne smiled. "My darling: the nearest closet is four and a third light years from here. Sofia knows. I know. Marc—"

"Is my confessor."

"Jimmy and George don't have a clue, but it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference to either of them," said Anne. "Which leaves Emilio."

D.W. sank slowly to his knees and motioned Anne to stay back. Moving cautiously, he brought his hand out over a little tuft of dusty lavender foliage and remained in position for several seconds. Then his hand shot out, carefully covering and then lifting a small two-legged snakeneck, which had been virtually undetectable pushing its way slowly into something else's burrow, hoping to find lunch. He stood and handed it to Anne.

"Isn't it pretty! Look, you can see a couple of vestigial front legs on this one," she cried, holding it out for him to see. "I never find stuff like that. You are amazing."

"You grow up like I did, ma'am, you learn a fair bit about camouflage."

"I'll bet you do, at that," she said. She put the snakeneck back down by the burrow and they continued their walk. "Emilio thinks the world of you, D.W. Okay, sure. He's probably carrying around some unexamined macho crapola he'd have to reconsider, but he's capable of adjusting an attitude."

"Hell, I know that," D.W. said. "And I'm not ashamed of what I am. But if he'd known when he was a kid, he wouldn't have come within a mile of me. And after all these years of him not knowin', what's the point of sayin' anything?"

"To put down a load. To be accepted, entirely, as you are." He smiled at that without looking at her and draped an arm over her shoulders. "Surely you don't imagine that he'd think less of you."

"Well, now, see. There's exactly the problem, Anne. I'm afraid he'd think more of me. Which is to say, I'm afraid the whole issue would occupy his mind to some extent and I don't want to distract him with trivia right now. Course, he'd work it all through and he'd realize that I'd played straight with him all along—"

"So to speak."

He laughed. "Poor choice of words." He stopped and scuffed a rock out of the ground with his foot. "It's not like I ever lied to him. Subject just never came up. I never asked him if he was straight and he never asked me if I wasn't. Closest we ever came to it was when he asked me about another guy, years ago. I just told him, hell, we ain't all abstainin' from the same thing."

"And what did he make of that?" Anne asked, smiling.

"Took it at face value." D.W. looked at the mountains south of them. Somewhere on the other side of the range was Alan Pace's grave. "Look, Anne. The way things are is fine. I don't need anything from Emilio. What went on inside my head years ago is my business. And it's history."

She couldn't argue with that. She might have said the same thing herself, had their positions been reversed. "Okay, okay. Message received."

"I 'preciate the thought, Anne, I surely do, and under other circumstances, you might be right. But, here, now—" D.W. leaned over to pick up the rock he'd unearthed and whipped it off across the gorge, loose-shouldered and accurate. It fell just short of the other side and rattled down the cliff to the river below them. "What concerns me is the big picture. You know as well as I do, everything about this mission has been damn near to miraculous. And Emilio is the key to it. I don't want to muddy the waters! I don't want him thinkin' about me. Or Mendes either, far as that goes. I ain't gonna make an issue of them workin' together because they're handlin' it okay. And they're doin' some fine research. But, frankly, I'm holdin' my breath."

There was a silence, and Anne sat down, legs dangling over the ledge. D.W. stood for a while, less confident about the stability of the rock formation, but joined her at last and occupied his hands by flipping stones out into the void.

"D.W., I'm not arguing with you. I'm just asking, okay?" He nodded, so she went on, "Let's say the Age of Miracles hasn't closed down altogether yet, okay? Just for argument's sake. And we agree that Emilio is very special. But so is Sofia, right?"

"No kick so far."

"Well, it just seems to me that there is some pretty powerful theology on the side of love and sex and families. It seems to me that a fairly authoritative Personage once commented that it is not good for man to be alone. Rome, along with all closets," Anne pointed out archly, "is very far away. We have been gone almost two decades. Maybe priests can marry now! And in any case, I fail to see how Emilio would be cheating God out of anything by loving Sofia."

"Annie, you are troddin' a path that's worn to bedrock." D.W. reached behind himself and scooped up another handful of pebbles. A spasm of pain crossed his face, but Anne put it down to the topic. "Oh, hell, I don't know. Maybe it wouldn't make a dime's worth of difference. Maybe they'd just be happy and have a fine bunch of kids an' God would love 'em all…"

They sat for a time listening to the sounds of the river and staring at the western sky, blazing now with the colors of first sundown. D.W. seemed to be working something out, so Anne just waited until he spoke again.

"Bear with me here, 'cause I'm just stirrin' this around some with a stick. But, Anne," he said softly, "it seems to me that sainthood, like genius, is rooted in a sort of inspired persistence. It's a consistent willing of one thing. It's that kind of consistency and focus I see at work in Emilio."

"D.W., are you serious?" Anne sat still, eyes wide open. "You think Emilio is a s—"

"I didn't say that! I'm talkin' in the abstract here. But Marc and me, we been hashin' it out and, yes, I see the potential for it, and it's my job to protect that, Anne." He hesitated a moment before confessing, "Maybe I shouldn't have but I did in fact use the S-word in one report back to Rome. I tole 'em I think we got us a gen-u-wine big-time mystic on our hands. 'Wedded to God and at certain moments, in full communion with divine love, is how I put it." He dumped the last few rocks, brushed the dirt off his hands and leaned over to watch the pebbles clatter downward, elbows on his knees, the big-knuckled hands loose between his legs. "Hell of a management problem," he said after a time. "They don't cover this one back home at the Famous Father Superiors School."

Anne found there was nothing she could say. She stared at the clouds in the western sky, piled like whipping cream tinted by strawberries and raspberries, blueberries and mangos. She never got tired of the colors here.

"And, Anne," D.W. continued thoughtfully, "I'm real concerned about Mendes in all this, too. I am awful fond of that girl and I don't want to see her hurt. She's all guts and brains on the outside, God love her, but there's broken glass inside that child. If he's gotta choose, Milio's gonna choose God, and I hate to think how Sofia would take that. So don't you go encouragin' her to take the initiative, unnerstan'?" D.W. got to his feet. Anne noticed that he seemed a little pale, but his next remark startled her out of any inquiry. "Too bad Sofia didn't take a shine to the Quinn boy or Robichaux."

Anne stood up as well and frowned, confused. "Well, Jimmy, of course! But Marc? I thought he was—well, you know. I thought—"

"You thought Robichaux was gay?" D.W. roared, and half a dozen coronaries rocketed into the air. He put a bony arm around Anne's shoulders, obviously tickled by the notion. "Oh, my. No-o-o. Not by a wondrous long shot. Marc Robichaux," he informed her as they strolled along, "is in love with capital-N Nature and women are nature at its finest for ole Marc! He loves the ladies. Marc, in his own way, is a kind of mystic, too. God's reality is everywhere for him. It's almost an Islamic theology. Robichaux don't separate the natural and the supernatural. It's all one thing for him, and he adores it all. Specially if it's female." He looked down at Anne, still gawping at him, and laughed at her. "Now, you talk about a management problem! Province had to put ole Marc to work in a boys' school to keep him out of trouble. He never hit on anybody but he is a good-lookin' sumbitch and one thing leads to another. Couldn't say no if a woman came to him. And come they surely did. Best therapeutic lay in Quebec, is what I heard."

"I'll keep it in mind," Anne said, breathless now herself with laughter, but she couldn't help saying, "So celibacy is optional."

"Well, in some sense, it mighta been for Marc, early on. Came a time when he mended his ways. But, now, look here! This illustrates my point about Emilio," D.W. said emphatically. "For Emilio, the separation between natural and supernatural is basic. God is not everywhere. God is not immanent. God is out there somewhere, to be reached for and yearned after. And you're gonna have to trust me on this, but celibacy is part of the deal for Emilio. It's a way of concentrating, of focusing a life on one thing. And I happen to think it's worked for him. I don't know whether it's he found God, or God come and got him…"

They could see the hampiy shelter again now, sunlight like molten copper streaming in from the west. Askama was still in Emilio's lap, asleep apparently. Sofia's head was bent over her computer tablet. Emilio noticed them and raised a hand. They waved back. "Okay. Okay, I see your point," Anne said. "I'll keep out of it. Maybe it will all work out."

"I hope so. Lots at stake here, for both of 'em. For all of us." He pressed a hand into his belly and made a face. "Damn."

"You okay?"

"Oh, sure. Nerves. I react to everything with my belly. I knew you knew but sayin' something's different."

"What's your theology like, D.W.?" Anne asked, pausing at the top of the path that led down the cliff.

"Oh, hell. On my best days? I try to keep my mind stretched around both experiences of God: the transcendent, the intimate. And then," he said, grinning briefly, "there are the days when I think that underneath it all, God has got to be a cosmic comedian." Anne looked at him, brows up. "Anne, the Good Lord decided to make D. W. Yarbrough a Catholic, a liberal, ugly and gay and a fair poet, and then had him born in Waco, Texas. Now I ask you, is that the work of a serious Deity?" And, laughing, they turned down the steps toward the cut-stone apartment they now called home.

The object of this conversation was unaware of the extent to which the exalted state of his soul was drawing notice. Emilio Sandoz was sweating buckets with Askama curled up on his lap, radiating heat like a fourth sun in the late afternoon. If, instead of assuming that he was meditating on the glory of God or synthesizing some new and closely reasoned model of Ruanja grammar, anyone had asked him directly what he was thinking about, he would have said, without hesitation, "I was thinking that I could really use a beer."

A beer and a ball game on the radio to listen to with half an ear as he worked, that would have been perfection. But even lacking those two elements of bliss, he was and knew himself to be completely happy.

The past weeks had been suffused with revelation. At home and in the Sudan and the Arctic, he had seen acts of great generosity, of selflessness and abundance of soul, and felt close to knowing God at those moments. Why, he had once wondered, would a perfect God create the universe? To be generous with it, he believed now. For the pleasure of seeing pure gifts appreciated. Maybe that's what it meant to find God: to see what you have been given, to know divine generosity, to appreciate the large things and the small…

The sense of being engulfed—saturated and entranced—had inevitably passed. No one exists like that for long. He was still staggered by the memory of it, could feel sometimes the tidal pull in some deep stratum of his soul. There had been times when he could not finish any prayer—could hardly begin, the words too much for him. But the days had passed and become more ordinary, and even that he felt to be a gift. He had everything here. Work, friends, real joy. He was swept sometimes with an awareness of it, and the intensity of his gratitude tightened his chest.

There was great contentment in the simplest moments. Like now: sitting inside a hampiy tree with Sofia and Askama, out here on the plain, where they could work in the afternoons while the others slept, without so many interruptions and so much kibitzing. Chaypas had shown them how to make a wonderful breezy shelter simply by pruning out a corridor to the natural clearing inside the trees. The older plants were fifteen to twenty feet in diameter with thirty or forty straight stems, growing bushlike, leading to an umbrella of leaves. The leaf canopy was so dense that it prevented all but the heaviest rainfall from reaching the central region of the tree, and the internal stems died off naturally, leaving a ring of live ones around the outside. All you had to do was clean up the center a little and bring in cushions or hammocks to hang from the branches overhead.

Lulled by the afternoon heat, the dull discussions and the peculiar foreign monotone, Askama would relax and he would feel her breathing slow and the sweet weight of her settling against him. Sofia would smile and nod at the child and their voices would drop even lower. Sometimes they would simply sit and watch Askama sleep, enjoying the rare silence.

The others complained about the constant talk and the physical closeness the Runa liked, the way they crowded around one another and around the foreigners, back leaning against back, heads in laps, arms draped around shoulders, tails curled around legs in a muddle of warmth and softness in the cool cavelike rooms of the cliff. Emilio found it beautiful. He had not realized how starved he was for touch, how isolated he had been for a quarter of a century, wrapped in an invisible barrier, surrounded by a layer of air. The Runa were unselfconsciously physical and affectionate. Like Anne, he thought, but more so.

Emilio pushed the hair off his forehead one-handedly and looked down at Askama, shifting in the hammock chair George had designed for him. Manuzhai made it, working from George's sketch, going beyond the plans he provided, her astonishing hands weaving complicated patterns into the rush basketry. Manuzhai often joined him and Sofia and Askama out in the hampiy, and he loved the Runao's low husky voice. Similar to Sofia's, now that he thought of it, but unusual among Manuzhai's people. And he loved the melody of Ruanja. Its rhythm and sound reminded him of Portuguese, soft and lyrical. It was a rewarding language to work on, full of structural surprises and conceptual delights…

Sofia snorted and he knew he was right when she fell back against her chair and stared balefully at him. "Lejano'nta banalja," she read. "Tinguen'ta sinoa da. Both spatial."

"Note, if you will," Emilio Sandoz said, face grave, eyes alight, "the awe-inspiring lack of smugness with which I greet your news."

Sofia Mendes smiled prettily at a man she was very nearly content to call colleague and friend. "Eat shit," she said, "and die."

"Dr. Edwards has had a lamentable influence on your vocabulary," Emilio said with starchy disapproval, and then continued without missing a beat. "Now that you mention it, shit would, of course, fit the general rules for spatial versus nonvisual declension, but what about a fart? Would a fart be declined as a nonvisual, or would a Runao consider such odors to be in a category that implies the existence of something solid? Your levity is uncalled for, Mendes. This is serious linguistic inquiry. We can get another paper out of this, I promise you."

Sofia was wiping tears away. "And where shall we publish it? The Interplanetary Journal of Intestinal Gas and Rude Noises?"

"Wait! There's another category. Noise. Easy. Nonvisual. Has to be. Well, maybe not. Try enroa."

"That's it! I'm quitting. I have had enough," Sofia declared. "It's too hot, and this has become entirely too silly."

"At least it isn't smug," he pointed out.

Askama, roused by the laughter, yawned and craned her neck to look at Emilio. "Sipaj, Meelo. What is smug?"

"Let's look it up," Sofia suggested airily, playing at using the tablet dictionary and deliberately talking over Askama's head. "Here it is! Smug. It says, Sandoz comma Emilio; see also: insufferable."

Ignoring Sofia, Emilio looked down at Askama and assured her with perfect aplomb, "It is a term of endearment."

They gathered up Askama's toys and the computer tablets and Sofia's coffee cup, which she emptied with a toss, and started back toward the cliff dwellings in the slanting light, one sun down, another dropping fast, and only the third and much dimmer red sun relatively high in the sky. For all the heat of these days, Jimmy Quinn was of the opinion that the weather might well turn soon. The rainfall was decreasing from torrential to merely soaking, and the heat lately had been drier, less enervating. The Runa were uninformative. The weather was just there, not much commented upon, except during thunderstorms, which scared them and seemed to provoke a lot of talk.

Sofia arrived at the apartment long before Emilio and Askama, undelayed by the swarm of children that coalesced around Sandoz, wheedling and teasing, hoping for some new delight or astonishment to appear in his hands. Most of the VaKashani napped during the heat, and the village was just waking up for the second round of daily activities. Emilio stopped to talk to people along the narrow walkways, lingering in terraces, admiring a toddler's new skill or flattering a youngster with a question that allowed the child to show off some new competence, accepting small bits of food or a sip of something sweet as he made his way home. It was dusk by the time he got there and Anne had already lit the camplights, a source of muted interest among the Runa, who might have been dismayed by the tiny eyes of their single-irised guests, but who merely observed the technical compensation for this handicap with sly, shy glances.

"Aycha's little one is walking already," Emilio announced as he ducked in from the terrace, accompanied by Askama and three of her friends, attached to various of his limbs, all talking.

Anne looked up. "So is Suway's. Isn't it darling? Just when a human child would plump down on its behind, these kids shoot those little tails out and catch themselves. There are few things quite as charming as the inept functioning of an immature nervous system."

"Has anyone seen an infant?" Marc asked from his corner of the large irregular room. He'd completed an approximate census that morning; to be honest, he had trouble telling individuals apart. "The population structure here is quite odd, unless there is a distinct breeding season—there are age cohorts with long gaps between them. And seems to me that there should be many more children, given the number of mature adults."

"It seems to me that there are a multitude of children," said Emilio wearily, talking a little loudly above the amazing clamor that four small kids could produce. "Legions. Hordes. Armies."

Anne and Marc launched into a discussion of infant mortality, which Emilio tried to follow but couldn't because Askama was pulling on his arm and Kinsa was trying to climb onto his back. "But they all seem so healthy," Anne was saying.

"Healthy and loud," Emilio said. "Sipaj, Askama! Asukar hawas Djordj. Kinsa, tupa sinchiz k'jna, je? George, please, ten minutes? Jimmy?"

George scooped Askama up and Jimmy distracted the other kids long enough for Emilio to go down to the river and wash up in some privacy before dinner. When he got back to the apartment, he found that the household numbers were somewhat reduced that evening. Askama had left to play with her friends, as she often did if Emilio was out of sight for a while. Manuzhai had gone visiting. She might not come back at all; equally likely, she might return with five or six guests who'd spend the night. Chaypas was away on some errand, for some unspecified length of time. People often disappeared like that, for hours or days or weeks. Time seemed unimportant to the Runa. There were no calendars or clocks. The nearest Emilio had come to finding vocabulary for the idea was a series of words having to do with ripening.

"Miz Mendes here says you spent the day bein' brilliant," D.W. drawled as Emilio sat down to eat.

"I said nothing of the kind," Sofia shot back. "I said he had spent the afternoon raising smugness to an art form. It was the analysis that was brilliant."

"A very fine distinction," Anne pointed out. She plunked a bowl onto the wooden table and sank onto a cushion next to George before adding, "Isn't he awful when he's right?"

"I am a simple man, just trying to do my job," Emilio said in injured tones, persevering despite the moans, "and for this, scorn and sarcasm are heaped on my head."

"So, what is this brilliant analysis?" D.W. asked grumpily. "I got reports to write, son." He'd put his plate aside almost immediately and Emilio now did the same, having filled up on the snacks pressed on him as he walked through the village. Like Jimmy Quinn, D.W. once observed, the Runa ate damn near anything pretty much continuously, and there was no way to visit anyone without being fed and there was no such thing as "not hungry." It meant that the food supply brought from Earth would last a lot longer than expected. That didn't make the Runa stuff any more palatable, although it did seem to be reasonably nutritious for them.

Emilio spent the next ten minutes explaining the rules for declension he'd worked out that morning. To Sofia's intense satisfaction, everyone else initially confused the ideas with abstract and concrete nouns, as she had. Once they'd all seen the underlying logic of it, it seemed perfectly reasonable, and Anne declared that Emilio was entitled to feel superior for precisely one half hour, which she offered to time for him. He refused the honor, admitting cheerfully that he'd already indulged in a sufficiency of self-congratulation.

"I couldn't have gotten this far this fast without Askama. And, in any case," he said seriously, "there are whole areas of this language that are still closed to me. For example, I am completely confused about gender."

Jimmy cracked up and D.W. muttered, "I wouldn't touch that line with a ten-foot pole," which made Anne choke on her food and everyone else laugh. Emilio blushed and told them all to grow up.

"I wonder what they'd do about an AV display. Or VR stuff," George said, pounding on Anne's back as she coughed and giggled helplessly. They'd been very careful about what they used in front of the Runa. Everyone was engaged in research that required computers but as much as possible, they lived as the Runa lived.

"Marc, what declension do they use for your drawings?" Emilio asked. "You create the illusion of space. They'd use spatial for the paper itself, I think, but what about the images?"

"I can't remember. I'll pay attention next time it comes up," Marc promised. "Has anyone seen what Kanchay is doing? He watched me while I was working on a portrait a few weeks ago and asked for materials. I believe he had never seen two-dimensional representation of volumes before but he's already produced some beautiful work."

"So that's where it started!" George exclaimed. It had seemed like spontaneous combustion. All of a sudden, paper and inks and pigments started showing up in the trade boats and everyone was drawing. Fads like that would flash through the village. It could be unnerving. You would hesitate to blow your nose, afraid the whole village would take up the practice en masse, as a hobby.

"You know, I'm beginning to think God really likes these guys best," Anne said, deliberately sounding like a jealous child. "First off, they've got a much nicer planet than we do. Lovely plants, prettier colors. And they're better looking than we are. And they have better hands." The Runa had five digits, but the innermost and outer fingers were fully opposable to the central three; it was almost as though they could work with four human hands simultaneously. Anne was fascinated by the way Askama would sit in Emilio's lap, fingers busy with her ribbons, plaiting them into one pattern after another. The ribbons were each scented differently and the combination of colors, fragrance and braiding pattern constituted much of Runa fashion. The rest consisted mostly of what you tied them around, as far as Anne could tell. "I mean, we thought thumbs were pretty slick, but we must seem almost crippled to the Runa."

"No, I don't think so," Sofia said. "I asked Warsoa once if our hands looked strange to him and he said, 'If you can pick up food, your hands are good enough. Very practical outlook."

"The craftsmanship is superb," Marc acknowledged.

"Granted," George said dismissively, "they are great with their hands, but these folks are not the ones who invented radio. Or anything else much more advanced than a chisel."

"They've got glass and metal and pottery," Marc pointed out.

"Trade goods," said George dismissively. "They're not making that stuff in this village. I hate to say it, boys and girls, but I don't think they're all that bright, on the whole."

Emilio was about to protest that Askama was very quick but there was, he thought, something to George's observation. The Runa could be perceptive, but he did occasionally find some of them—not dense, really, but limited somehow.

"The technological basis for this society is gathering," George was saying, disgusted. "They collect food. And flowers, for crying out loud. Damned if I know what they do with them."

"For the perfume trade," Sofia said. "I have the impression that there's a lot of manufacturing in the city. Sandoz, did I tell you I found out the name of the city? It's Gaiger or Gaidjur, something like that. In any case, each village specializes in trading something." She was allowed to sit in on what seemed to be village council discussions and picked up a lot of information that way. "In Kashan, it's blossoms for the fragrance industry. I think the Runa are much more interested in scent than we are. That's why the coffee is so valuable."

Anne cleared her throat and made a small movement with her head in D.W.'s direction, grinning.

Yarbrough grunted, refusing to be bullyragged. To his everlasting irritation, coffee was their choicest trade item. Worse yet, it wasn't even coffee per se, but the aroma of coffee. Sofia would brew some of her awful damn Turkish mud and Manuzhai would hold the cup in her hands, breathe the fragrance in and then pass it around to other guests. When the coffee cooled off, they'd hand it back to Sofia, who'd drink the wretched stuff. The Jesuit party could pay for almost anything by sharing a cup of coffee with someone.

"But George is right," said Jimmy who, like George, was perilously close to being bored by the Runa. The two men were working mainly on downloaded astronomical and meteorological data these days, but the city with the transmitters beckoned. "There's almost no advanced technology here. I haven't seen any sign that they even listen to radio. They can't be the Singers. They don't even like music!"

D.W. grunted an assent. There had been no sung Masses since the first one witnessed by the Runa, who had become agitated and distressed. At first he thought it was the ritual aspects of the behavior that bothered them; the Runa didn't seem to have any religious specialists or ceremonies themselves. But it turned out that if the Liturgy was merely said, the Runa were fine. And they liked the incense. So it wasn't the rites; it was evidently the singing itself.

"Someone is making the boats and the glass and the rest of it," Marc said. "Consider things at home. If you go to the highlands of Bolivia, it is like stepping into the Middle Ages. Travel to La Paz and they're designing satellite components and synthesizing pharmaceuticals. This village is simply at the edge of the more advanced culture."

"And, to be fair, there's very little need for industry here," Anne said. "Daylight almost all the time—who needs electric lights? Rivers all over the place—who needs paved roads or land transport? They eat such a variety of things, they just wait for something to ripen. Why plow when you can just pick?"

"If people like you were in charge of life," George said, "we'd still be living in caves."

"Q.E.D.," Jimmy pointed out, waving an arm at the stone walls around them, and there was a round of applause from everyone but Anne.

Emilio laughed but lost the thread of the discussion at that point, as he often did when too many people had strong opinions and expressed them well; he'd always hated seminars. Where's Askama? he wondered, missing her already. She was with him so continually that he felt as though he had taken over as her parent in some ways, and there were aspects of this strange cross-species pseudofatherhood that were deeply satisfying. But while the VaKashani generally addressed him by name, they also used a kinship term that seemed to make him Askama's older sibling. And Manuzhai sometimes corrected him rather sharply for inadvertent infractions, as though he were also her child. At the same time, there was a commercial aspect to their relationship having to do with trade goods, and he was not at all clear about what was expected of him.

His status among his human friends was sometimes equally confusing. The first time he'd fallen apart during Mass had been frightening, but neither Marc nor D.W. seemed surprised or upset; they were instead oddly careful with him, as though he were pregnant—that was the only parallel that came to mind. It was Sofia who put words to what he felt. "You are drunk on God, Sandoz," she told him flatly one afternoon, and he realized then that what he had believed to be entirely interior had been more apparent than he could have imagined. He wished he had time to think it all through but there was just too much going on, and even when things slowed up for a while, he tended to meditate on beer and baseball.

A pebble landed on his chest. "Sandoz," said Sofia, "pay attention!"

He rose onto his elbows. "What?"

"The question was, is Ruanja related to the language of the songs?"

"I doubt it. My guess is that they aren't even close."

"There! You see?" George cried. "I say we try for the city—"

Drawn back into the argument that ensued, Emilio found himself uneasy about going to the city. Things felt so right here. It might simply be an emotional attachment to Askama and her people, but the notion of starting another language so soon was daunting. He'd taken on two and sometimes three languages simultaneously before, but there had always been someone who spoke Latin or English. Without Askama or someone like her, he'd be badly handicapped when he tried the Singers' language. He waited for a break in the conversation and said, "I think it's too soon. To go to the city."

It was D.W. who asked, "Why do you say that, son?"

"It's been seven weeks! I just don't feel ready for another language and another culture yet. I could do it if I had to, but I'd like to be more solid in Ruanja first. I'm sorry," he apologized suddenly. "I'm holding other people up. It's okay. I'll manage. If everyone else wants to move on, we should go."

Marc's eyes slowly left Emilio's face and he turned to D.W. "Emilio's instincts have been reliable so far. We've taken one step at a time, and this has worked well. There is still a great deal to be learned here. Rather than rush him," Marc said, pausing to clear his throat, "into another language, we should perhaps settle for a time."

"We came because of the songs," Jimmy insisted stubbornly. "We came to find out about the Singers."

"This is true," Emilio said to Marc, shrugging. He was willing to go or stay.

"Okay, okay." D.W. held up a hand. "We ain't gonna make the decision tonight, but it's time to start thinkin' about what comes next."

"George, I admit that there is a sort of simplicity to Runa thinking, but we barely speak their language and we hardly know them," Emilio pointed out. "What seems like simplemindedness may be our ignorance of their subtlety. And it's very difficult, sometimes, to tell ignorance from lack of intelligence. We may seem a little dim to the Runa." He flopped back on the cushion.

"Right," Anne confirmed. "Eat that, techno pigs!"

"I'd rather eat that than eat this," George said, pointing at a bowl still half-filled with what he could only think of as fodder, thoughtfully left for them by Manuzhai, who would be offended if any were left. "This is not eating. It's just chewing."

"It helps if you think of it as salad," Emilio advised, speaking at the ceiling. "But not much."

"It could use some Roquefort," Marc grumbled. He held up a leaf and examined it critically. Feeling ungrateful, he searched for something nice to say. "Runa cuisine has, perhaps, a certain je ne sais quoi."

"Entirely too much quoi, for my taste," D.W. said sourly.

Emilio smiled at that and was about to comment when he realized that D.W.'s eyes were closed, which was odd. "Emilio," Marc said, interrupting his thoughts, "have you asked anyone yet about us planting an experimental garden? I would like to get a start on that work."

"If we could grow our own food, they might stop thinking they have to feed us this stuff," George said. He knew if they started a garden, they'd be stuck here for a while, but George Edwards had been a serious gardener back in Cleveland and the idea of trying to grow things here had a certain compensatory appeal. Jimmy would be restless, but that was his problem. "Maybe they're only being polite."

Anne nodded. "I am not a picky eater but I'm not Bambi either. There are just too damned many twigs in it."

"The twigs are the best part!" Jimmy exclaimed. Anne stared at him, aghast. "No. Really! They taste like chow mein noodles."

"Well, I like the food," Sofia declared. There were howls, but Jimmy looked blandly vindicated. "Seriously. I do. It reminds me of the food in Kyoto. Or Osaka."

"De gustibus non est disputandum," D.W. growled, adding darkly, "but some folks got a taste for shit. That stuff is purely dreadful."

Emilio sat up and looked at Yarbrough directly now, but said he'd feel Manuzhai out about the garden idea. The talk moved on and after a while Jimmy began clearing dishes, his job now that astronomers had been replaced on the active-duty roster by linguists. Emilio waited until the room emptied a little, everyone moving off to their own after-dinner activities, and went to D.W., hunched over and silent, his meal untouched. "¿Padre?" he said, dropping down next to Yarbrough so he could look up at the creased and crooked face, hidden now behind bony fingers. "¿Estas enfermo?"

Anne heard the question and came over. D.W.'s breathing was shallow, but when Emilio reached up to put a hand on his shoulder, he jumped like he'd been hit with a cattle prod and cried, "Don't!" Anne moved between the two men and spoke quietly to D.W., who answered her questions in monosyllables and remained immobile until he suddenly doubled up and groaned, gripping Emilio's arm in spite of himself.