The Sparrow

27 VILLAGE OF KASHAN: SEVENTH NAWA—FIFTH PARTAIN

When they got inside, out of the rain, Anne swung into action, examining Marc and Sofia and confirming Marc's inexpert assessment of their physical condition, informing D.W. that he looked terrible. George, Emilio and Jimmy helped her get the three semi-invalids dry and warm, fed and put to bed as the light faded. When it was clear that he could be of no more use to Anne, George Edwards took his tablet next door to Aycha's empty apartment. Anne saw him go. When everyone else was taken care of, she went to her husband and knelt on the cushion behind him, reaching out to massage the back of his neck and then to put her arms around his shoulders. George smiled at her as she moved to his side and leaned over to kiss her but went back to his work without comment.

Four and a half decades together had given them a core of certainty about each other, if not about life itself. Theirs was a companionable marriage of competent and self-reliant equals, and they rarely called on each other for aid or ministration. Anne was used to George's response to crisis: don't panic; take it piece by piece; make the best of it. But she also knew that he'd had a favorite Dilbert cartoon pinned over his desk for years: "The goal of every engineer is to retire without getting blamed for a major catastrophe." There was no way around it. What had happened was in large measure his fault.

George's initial concern was that D.W. and Sofia not take the blame for the fact that the lander fuel had been drawn down past the point of return. Sofia's use of fuel had been sensible. George's had been pure stupid self-indulgence: fooling around, showing off to D.W., trying out maneuvers he'd practiced on the simulator and wanted to do in real life, using up a slim margin for error that he hadn't thought about. So George made sure everyone understood that it was he, George, who'd put them in this position, not Sofia. As for D.W. not anticipating what happened and not warning Sofia against it, George pointed out that nobody had thought of it. "We've got a collective IQ here that goes into quadruple digits," he'd told Yarbrough as they walked back down to the apartment, "and none of us, singly or together, anticipated this. Quit beating yourself up."

Engineers don't go to confession when they screw up; they find a fix. So Anne watched George deal with his own fear and guilt by starting an engineer's rosary: a series of calculations involving the lander's weight, drag, lift, thrust, the prevailing winds, their altitude above sea level, the rotational boost they'd get from their latitude on Rakhat, the distance to the Stella Maris at its closest approach to their present position. She knew this was his way of apologizing to the others, of begging pardon for his sin.

Jimmy stayed with Sofia until he was certain she was asleep but joined Anne and George a few minutes later. Emilio brought them all coffee and sat quietly at a small remove, opaque and withdrawn, while Jimmy and George considered the variables. How much weight could they save if they stripped every nonessential piece of equipment out of the lander? Used a single pilot? Which one? D.W. was far more experienced but weighed almost twice as much as Sofia. What if they moved the Stella Maris into a more favorable orbit? How hard would that be using remote ground control? Could the lander engine be reprogrammed to squeeze more power out of the remaining fuel?

Several hours later, the outcome was as plain as it was predictable: Murphy's Law held on Rakhat. Their best estimates fell into a zone of ambiguity. If the winds were right, if one of the lower estimates of the lander's stripped weight was correct, if Sofia piloted the plane, they'd still have to maneuver the Stella Maris into a lower orbit.

"We can talk to D.W. about that when he wakes up, but I don't think it's a good idea." Jimmy sat back, leaning his head against the wall and stretching his long legs in front of him. "The asteroid was a pig to drive. It wouldn't take much error to sink it into the gravity well."

"And then Rakhat gets to play the dinosaur game?" Anne crossed her arms over her drawn-up knees, where she rested her chin. "No good. Not worth the risk."

"Dinosaur game?" Emilio asked, breaking his silence for the first time.

"One of the best guesses about the reason for the extinction of the dinosaurs was that a good-sized asteroid smashed into Earth," Anne told him. "Changed the climate, wiped out big hunks of the food chain."

Emilio held up a hand. "Of course. I knew that. I'm sorry, I wasn't listening closely enough. So if the Stella Maris were to hit Rakhat, it would wreck the planet."

"No. It's not as bad as that," George said. "We scrubbed off a lot of speed getting into orbit. If the ship came down in the ocean, it wouldn't do that much damage. Tidal wave maybe, but it wouldn't destroy the whole ecosystem."

"I don't think it would be ethical to risk even a tidal wave," Emilio said softly. "Seven of us. Whole populations on the coast."

"I'm not sure we can find a new orbit that would do us much good anyhow, if we need an ocean splashdown," said Jimmy. "Might be possible, but it would restrict us to a really narrow orbital band."

"Well, boys and girls, I am really sorry but it's about eight to one odds we're stuck." George wiped his hands over his face and shrugged as he filed his calculations to show D.W. later. "We can radio home, but it will take better than four years for them to get the news, another two or three years to configure a ship, and then seventeen more to get here." The younger people might see home again. That was something.

"Still, there's some room to maneuver, and things could be a lot worse," Jimmy said matter-of-factly. He pulled up the supply lists they'd assembled for George and D.W. to use on the last trip from the asteroid. "We figured on a year's worth of stuff for the food depot and brought down all the equipment we thought would be of most use. Marc had seeds on his list. We can survive on the native foods, but if we can start a garden that doesn't get washed away in this endless rain, we'll have our own plants as well. I think we'll do okay."

George suddenly sat up straight. "You know, there's a chance we could manufacture more fuel for the lander. We're pretty sure the Singers know chemistry, right?" he said, looking around. "Maybe after we make contact with them, we can work something out."

It was the first notion that offered any real hope. Jimmy and Anne stared at each other and then at George, who looked like a man who'd just gotten a reprieve. He was already back at work, looking for files on the fuel components.

"How long will the Wolverton tube operate without maintenance?" Anne asked George.

He looked up. "It's set up to be self-sustaining, but we'll lose maybe twenty percent of the plants a year, rough estimate. Marc will know better. There's only seven of us now, so there'll be a smaller oxygen demand. If we can make enough fuel to get back up there even once, then Marc or I could go up and optimize things before the rest of you come aboard. And we might be able to use Rakhati plants as replacements, now that I think of it." He felt better at that. They weren't necessarily doomed.

"And in the meantime," Jimmy said, with modest cheer, "we can still use the Stella Maris as a resource. We've got the onboard computer systems and radio relays." He looked at Sandoz, who'd said virtually nothing during the discussion.

Emilio was preoccupied, but he'd followed most of the talk if not the calculations it was based on. He shivered suddenly but then seemed to come fully into focus. "It seems to me that the mission is intact. We came here to learn and we can still send back data." The equivocal face smiled but the eyes, for once, did not. "As you say, everything we need and everyone we care for is right here."

"The twigs aren't that bad," Anne said resolutely. "I could get to like the twigs."

"And," George said, "I just might pull a rabbit out of this hat after all."

Sofia Mendes awoke some twelve hours later, thoroughly disoriented. She had been dreaming, for some reason, of Puerto Rico, which she recognized more from the feel of the soft air than from any geographic clue. There was music in the dream and she asked, "Won't someone get in trouble for singing?" But Alan Pace replied, "Not if you bring flowers," which made no sense to her, even inside the dream.

When she opened her eyes, it took several moments to figure out where she was, and then the misery from every joint and muscle reprised for her the story of the two days just past. She lay still, aching worse than she had the morning before in the forest, and began to work out why she'd dreamt of Puerto Rico. Someone was simmering a sofrito and she could detect the earthy smell of beans. The music was real, too, on remote from the Stella Maris library. The Runa were gone, she remembered, so they could play music again with impunity. She sat up with infinite care and was startled when Jimmy Quinn, sitting nearby, announced: "Sleeping Beauty has awakened!"

D.W. was the first to duck into the apartment and stare at her, open-mouthed. "I never thought I'd see the day but, Mendes, you look like fifteen miles of bad road. How do you feel?"

"Worse," she said. "How's Marc?"

"Bloodied but unbowed," Marc called from the terrace. "And too stiff to come inside and say good morning to you, mademoiselle."

"God, child, I admire your bladder control." Anne came in. "Allow me to escort you to the nearest riverside. Can you walk or would you like me to call the Quinn taxi service to give you a lift?"

Sofia tentatively swung her legs over the side of her low camp bed and waited a few moments for her head to stop spinning. Jimmy stood and leaned down to offer an arm, which she used to pry herself partially out of her sitting position. "I feel like I've been in a plane wreck," she said, astonished by how entirely pulverized it was possible to feel without actually having broken anything. She took a few bent-over steps and moaned and laughed, but regretted it because her chest hurt so much. "This is awful."

George came in. A veteran of many spectacular lost arguments with steadfastly immovable objects like planets, he watched her hobble knowingly and informed her, "The third day is always the worst."

She stopped moving, bent as a crone, and regarded him narrowly. "Does today count as the second or the third day?"

He laughed sympathetically. "You'll find out tomorrow."

She rolled her eyes, the only body part that wasn't sore, and moved slowly out to the terrace using Jimmy's arm as a crutch. Marc's eyes met hers, but he was otherwise completely immobile, his face too bruised even to smile comfortably. "Robichaux, you look dreadful," she said, truly horrified.

"Thank you. So do you."

"George has a new business scheme," Emilio said, straight-faced. "We're going to build cathedrals. We've been able to obtain employment for you and Marc as gargoyles." He held up the coffee pot. "Look, Mendes: reason to live."

"I'm not certain that's sufficient motivation." She looked doubtfully at the long trail down to the river.

Jimmy, whose blue gaze had rested on her unwaveringly all this time, saw the glance. To have held her in his arms once in twenty-four hours was enough for him. Friendship, he told himself, was all he hoped for. "I carried Marc down," he said casually.

"This is true, Mendes," Emilio assured her, his face smiling but his eyes unreadable.

She'd have shrugged but, in view of how she felt standing still, shrugging seemed rash. "All right. You've got a customer, Mr. Quinn." And he lifted her up with no more effort than if she were a child.

Over the next few days, they simply rested, each privately engaged in adjusting to the situation, learning to moderate the swings of hope and despond, trying to balance habitual optimism with sensible resignation. Beyond this, they needed to gather themselves for the next phase of their lives on Rakhat. The immensely difficult work they'd done during the past few years and relentless change had taken a toll; they were all closer to the edge of mental and emotional exhaustion than anyone except Emilio had realized. The others had all left their native lands and their native tongues at one time or another and had all coped with cultures other than their own, but they'd worked within the worldwide international culture of science and technology. Only Emilio had been dropped repeatedly into completely unfamiliar ways of life almost without resources beyond his own resilience and intelligence, and he knew how draining it was.

So he was glad of the respite and felt it a gift and thanked God for it. Marc and Sofia slept a great deal. D.W. did as well. Anne was concerned that Yarbrough had picked up some kind of gut parasite. There were cyclic bouts of diarrhea, a general weakness and a troubling lack of appetite. She now had access to broad-spectrum parasitotropics from the lander pharmacy and had begun dosing him, hoping something that killed worms at home would kill whatever was sapping his strength here. She watched the others for symptoms, but so far only D.W. seemed affected.

George was subdued. His anodyne was to work on representing the lander fuel formula graphically, in anticipation of finding someone who might be willing and able to help them once they made contact with the city people. He was feeling worse than he let on, but George had Anne, whose eyes were often on him although she did not fuss over him. George, Emilio thought, would be all right.

Jimmy, of all of them, seemed the most serene, and it was plain why this should be so. He was unobtrusively attentive, alert to Sofia's needs as she recovered but to Marc's as well, Emilio noted. There was an appealing off-handedness and good humor to his courtship, for that was clearly what it was becoming. What Jimmy had said and done since Sofia's return was so well controlled, so generous and full of respect, that Emilio was sure it would be recognized and valued. And the love that underpinned it all, he thought, might one day be returned.

It came to him then that there might be a child, human children on Rakhat. And that, Emilio thought, would be good. For Sofia and Jimmy. For all of them.

And so, in the quiet days that followed the crash, Emilio Sandoz turned inward for a time and probed the sense of mourning that had come over him, tried to understand why he felt so strongly that something inside him was dying.

Like all of them, he'd been badly rocked by the notion that they might never see Earth again. But as the shock wore off, so did the numbing sense of loss. Jimmy was right. Things could have been much worse; they had what they needed. They might yet get back to the Stella Maris, and if they didn't, there was still the real possibility of long-term survival here. Not just survival but a good life, full of learning, full of love, Emilio thought, and took a step closer to the death he felt inside himself.

He had, in the months since arriving on Rakhat, experienced a vast ocean of love and had been content to drift on it, not distinguishing degrees of intensity or relative depths of feeling. That he took pleasure in Sofia's company was undeniable, but it was hardly new. He had been, always, scrupulous in his behavior and even in his thoughts. He had concealed his own feelings and mastered them, and mastered them once more when he recognized that she'd fallen in love with him. They had shared work and humor and comradeship, and they had also shared self-restraint. And this increased his regard for Sofia, made it that much harder not to love her as George loved Anne.

Unbidden, the thought came. Rabbis marry. Ministers marry. And he told himself that, yes, if he were a rabbi or a minister, he would love her as a whole man and thank God for her every day. And if he were an Aztec, he thought ruthlessly, he'd cut the hearts from the living breasts of his enemies and offer blood to the sun. And if he were Tibetan, he'd spin prayer wheels. But he was none of those things. He was a Jesuit, and his path was different.

What was dying, he recognized in those quiet hours, was the possibility of himself as a husband and a father. More: as Sofia's husband and the father of her children. He had not truly understood that he'd kept part of his soul open to that possibility until he'd seen Sofia in Jimmy Quinn's arms in the rain and had felt a cold wash of violent jealousy.

This was, he thought, the first time that celibacy would truly rob him of something. Before, he was aware of the clarity, the singleness of purpose, the concentration of energy, the gifts bestowed by the discipline. Now, he was aware in some much deeper way, not of sexual famine, which was familiar, but of the loss of human intimacy, the sacrifice of human closeness. He felt with an almost physical pain what it would mean to renounce his last opportunity to love Sofia, what it would mean to free her to love Jimmy, who would surely cherish her as dearly as Emilio might have himself. For he was honest with himself: before Sofia turned to another, she would look to him for some sign. If he made any move to encourage her love of him, he had to be prepared to meet it wholly. He knew D.W. and Marc would accept it, that George and Anne would rejoice in it. Even Jimmy, he thought, might take it with good grace…

So here it was. A time to ratify or to repudiate a vow made in youth and ignorance, to be lived out in maturity and in full understanding. A time to weigh the extraordinary and spiritual and fathomless beauty that God had shown him against the ordinary and worldly and incalculable sweetness of human love and family. A moment to consider if he would trade everything he had hoped for and had been given as a priest for everything he yearned for and desired as a man.

He did not flinch from the knife. He cut the thread cleanly, a priest in perpetuity. God had been generous with him. He could not stint in return. It did not occur to him to wonder then if Sofia Mendes had been as much a gift from God as all the rest of the love he'd been offered, or if he had been God's gift to her. Two thousand years of theology spoke, five hundred years of Jesuit tradition spoke, his own life to that moment spoke.

God was silent on the matter.

Later that day, Sofia met his eyes as he watched her accept a cup of coffee and a sandwich from Jimmy, who made a comic display of his knightly service. Emilio saw Sofia read him and then look to Jim: already a dear friend, steady and good and strong and patient. He saw her pause and consider, and he felt at that moment like a woman giving a child to adoptive parents—certain it was the right thing, best for the beloved child, good for all. But the grief was real.

Having made his decision, he bided his time, waiting for the right moment for his next move. It came during the quiet of midmorning a week or so later when Marc and Sofia, bruises fading to yellow and green, were moving with notably less lamentation, D.W.'s color was better and George had pulled out of his gloom. Everyone seemed rested.

"I have been considering my present situation," Emilio Sandoz announced. They all looked at him curiously, surprised that he should make such a personal statement. Only Anne caught the tone, and she was already half-smiling, waiting for the punchline. "I have decided that I am happier than I have ever been in my life. And yet," he assured them with great and solemn sincerity, "I would crawl over your dead, burnt bodies if it meant getting to absolutely anything deep-fried."

"Bacalaitos fritos," Jimmy said. Emilio moaned in agreement.

"Beignets with powdered sugar," Marc said wistfully.

"French fries," George sighed.

"Cheese puffs," Anne said with conviction. "I really miss orange food coloring."

"Chicken-fried steak," D.W. said. And added, "Hell. Steak, period."

Sofia stood, creaking a little, and started toward the terrace.

"Mendes, where you goin'?" D.W. called.

"To the grocery store."

D.W. looked at Sofia as though she'd just revealed a second head. But Anne joined her. "To the world's most astoundingly high-tech pantry," Anne explained inexplicably before spelling it out. "To the lander, D.W.! To get ready for the party."

Sandoz clapped once, delighted to be understood, and at that the men jumped up to join Anne and Sofia, all except Marc, who simply got up, but with enthusiasm. It was, in fact, exactly what the doctor would have ordered, except Emilio thought of it first. What he needed, what they all needed, he decided, was a feeling of expansiveness, a jolt of freedom to counter the sense of being boxed in, of having options closed down.

They trooped up the cliffside and paraded to the lander, which was filled with food from home, arguing spiritedly about menus until they finally agreed along the way that everyone should just dig in and find some soul food. And as they chattered, it became obvious that meat was on everyone's mind, not just D.W.'s. With the Runa away, they could crank up the music and dance and eat meat, by God, and everyone was ready for that. The Runa were vegetarians, and there was a great outcry the first and only time the humans opened a vacuumpak containing beef; the apartment they'd used was declared off-limits in a way they did not understand and abandoned, whether permanently or temporarily they did not know. So the Jesuit party had been vegetarian as well all these weeks, and they'd eaten mostly fish on the Stella Maris.

Striding toward the lander, pleased to see that D.W. was also moving with some of his old energy, Emilio remembered seeing the rifle and suggested suddenly that D.W. take a shot at a piyanot, an idea that met with cries of approbation, except from Sofia, who surprised them all by mentioning that Jews don't eat game, but that she could find something in the lander stores. They came to a halt and looked at her.

"Hunting isn't kosher," she told them. No one had heard of this before. She waved off her initial objection. "I don't keep kosher, as you know," she told them, a little embarrassed. "I still found it impossible to eat pork or shellfish, and I've never eaten game. But if you can kill the animal cleanly, I suppose it doesn't matter."

"Darlin', if a clean kill is all you need, I shall be happy to oblige," D.W. said as they reached the lander. He flung open the cargo-bay door, feeling his oats, and fetched out the rifle, a sweet old Winchester his grandfather had taught him to use and which he had brought along partly from sentiment. D.W. checked it over thoroughly, loaded it, and then walked a little way out toward one of the piyanot herds that grazed on the plain above the river. Sitting down, he used his own knobby knee as a tripod. Anne watched him sight down the gun, still curious as to how he managed not to be confused by the skewed images his eyes must be taking in, but he dropped a young piyanot like a stone at three hundred yards, the report of the gunshot echoing off the hills to the north.

"Wow," George said.

"That's clean enough for me," Sofia said, impressed.

D.W., who was made to endure the title Mighty Hunter for some hours, sauntered off to butcher the carcass with Anne, who later declared the activity to have been an interesting exercise in field anatomy, while the others set up for a barbecue. By early afternoon, they were as happy and relaxed as a prehistoric band of Olduwan hunters, full of unaccustomed and highly desirable protein and fat, feeling well and truly fed for the first time in months. They were savannah creatures, deep in their genes, and the flat grassland with widespread trees felt right in some vague way. The plants of this plain were now familiar, and they knew a number of them that could sustain life. The coronaries only made them laugh, the snakenecks' bites were known to be simply painful and not poisonous to them, although there was unquestionably a venom that killed the little animals' prey. The land around them was beginning to feel like home, in emotion as well as in hard fact, and they were no longer unnerved by their exposure.

Rakhat, therefore, seemed a known quantity to them and when, one by one, they noticed a stranger striding toward them intently, they were only a little surprised, thinking that a barge trader had stopped for blossoms and did not know that the VaKashani were all out digging pik root somewhere. And they were not concerned, of course, because the Runa were as harmless as deer.

Later, D. W. Yarbrough would recall how Alan Pace had given such a great deal of thought to the music he would first present to the Singers to represent human culture. The subtle mathematical joys of a Bach cantata, the thrilling harmonies of the sextet from Lucia di Lammermoor, the quiet evocative beauties of Saint-Saens, the majesty of a Beethoven symphony, the inspired perfection of a Mozart quartet—all these had been considered. There was an unintentional remembrance of Alan Pace, in the event. George, who'd shared much of Alan's eclectic taste, had picked out the music that was playing over the lander's sound system as Supaari VaGayjur approached them. And while Alan would not have selected this particular piece to introduce human music to Rakhat, what Supaari heard was in fact something Alan Pace had reveled in: the rhythmic power, soaring vocals and instrumental virtuosity, not of Beethoven's Ninth, but of Van Halen's arena rock masterpiece, 5150. The cut, Anne would remember afterward, was appropriate. The song playing was "Best of Both Worlds."

Emilio had his back to the newcomer and, absorbed in shouting along with the chorus, he was the last to realize, from the trajectory of the others' now frightened gazes, that something large and threatening was just above him. He half-rose and turned just in time to see the attack coming.

The blow, had it been aimed at any of the others, would have been either disfiguring or lethal, but Emilio Sandoz had known from earliest childhood the look of someone who wanted to obliterate him, to make him simply cease to be. Without thinking, he dropped under the sweep of the heavy arm, which passed harmlessly over his head, and using all the power in his legs, drove his shoulder upward into the belly, knowing from the explosive grunt above him that he'd emptied the lungs of air. He followed the body as it came crashing down, pinning the arms with his knees, and took up a position with his forearm like an iron bar over the newcomer's throat. Emilio's eyes made the threat plain even to someone who had never before seen such eyes: he could, if he shifted his position a fraction, use his weight to crush the fragile windpipe, and make the present airlessness permanent.

There was a sudden silence—Anne had made a dash for the lander and turned the music off, to decrease the noise and craziness of the situation—and then Emilio heard the metallic click of the Winchester being cocked but he kept his eyes on the person he was choking. "I stopped taking crap like that when I was fourteen," he said quietly in Spanish, for his own satisfaction. He continued in the soft lilt of Ruanja, "Someone regrets your discomfort. Even so, harm is not permitted. If someone lets you up, will your heart be quiet?"

There was a slight movement upward of the chin, body language indicating assent or agreement. Slowly, Emilio eased back, watching for any sign that the stranger would take advantage of size and strength and attack again. Once somebody this size had a grip on him, Emilio knew from painful experience, he would have his own ass handed to him unceremoniously, and so his strategy from earliest adolescence had been to fight quick and fight dirty, to take the other guy out before he knew what hit him. He hadn't had much practice lately, but the skills were still there.

For his part, Supaari VaGayjur, speechless with shock, eyes watering and breath coming back raggedly, simply stared at the…thing crouching over him. Finally, when he collected enough breath and nerve to speak, Supaari asked, "What are you?"

"Foreigners," the monster said peaceably, moving off Supaari's chest.

"That," Supaari said, rubbing his throat judiciously, "must be the understatement of all time." To his utter astonishment, the monster laughed.

"This is true," it said, lips pulling back from white and strangely even teeth. "May someone offer you coffee?"

"Kafay! The very thing one came to inquire after," Supaari said with almost equal amiability, recovering a shard of his urbanity from the shambles surprise and horror had made of it.

The impossible being stood and offered him a bizarre hand, evidently meaning to help him up. Supaari extended his own hand. There was a momentary pause and the foreigner's half-bare face changed color abruptly in a way Supaari had no words to describe but before he could analyze that, his attention was swept away by the realization that the monster had no tail. He was so startled by the alarming precariousness of an unassisted two-legged stance that Supaari was hardly aware of it when the being grasped his wrist with a fairly strong two-handed grip and helped him to his feet. And then he was freshly amazed, this time by the monster's size, which made its demonstrated ability to render a fully grown male Jana'ata helpless all the more confounding.

He had no way of knowing that the monster, neck craned upward, was at that moment equally dumbfounded by the same occurrence. In fact, Emilio Sandoz had almost passed out cold for the second time in his life, having just gotten a look at the three-inch-long claws that would have sliced through his neck like butter if he'd hesitated even a moment before ducking.

Supaari, meantime, was trying desperately to adjust to a far deeper shock than Emilio Sandoz was dealing with. Sandoz, at least, had traveled to Rakhat expecting to meet aliens. Supaari VaGayjur had traveled to Kashan simply to meet a new trade delegation and he'd assumed that the foreigners and their kafay were from some unexplored region of the forest far south of Kashan.

Disembarking at the Kashan dock, Supaari had not been surprised to see the village deserted, having been told by Chaypas of the pik harvest. He instantly detected the odor of roasting meat mixed with a confusing welter of dimming burnt hydrocarbons and stronger short-chain carbons and amines; the meat told him that the traders were Jana'ata, but the other scents were very peculiar.

He was not a man to tolerate poaching, although he was prepared to be reconciled if the traders offered compensation. Then, hitting the top of the gorge at a run, he stumbled at the sight of a huge piece of entirely inexplicable machinery squatting on the plain, half a cha'ar inland from the gorge and, tasting the wind more clearly, realized that this was the source of the hydrocarbon stink. The unfamiliar sweat was issuing from a circle of individuals sitting near the equipment. At that point, striding toward them, many emotions were working on him: lingering anger over the idea of poaching, disgust at the ugly odors and the abominable noise of the machinery, fatigue from the long unaccompanied trip, jumpiness at the strangeness of the scene in front of him, a desire to control himself because of the immense potential gain if he established himself as purveyor to the Reshtar of Galatna, and finally a stunned fascination as he drew close enough to see that these were not Jana'ata or Runa or anything else he could identify.

Supaari's overpowering urge to attack was fundamental. As a human being might react to the sudden appearance in a campsite of a scorpion or a rattlesnake, he wanted not just to kill the threat but to destroy it, to reduce it to molecules. And, in this state of mind, Supaari had tried unsuccessfully to decapitate Emilio Sandoz.

Sofia Mendes broke the impasse. Taking Emilio's stunned immobility for an inspiring calm, she brought their visitor the cup of coffee Emilio had offered. "Most Runa prefer only to inhale," she said, holding the cup up to him almost at her arms' length. "Perhaps you will try drinking some, as we do," she suggested, in deference to his undoubted differences from the Runa.

Supaari looked down at this new sprite, this speck that could not possibly be real and that had just spoken to him in very decent Ruanja. Its face and neck were bare, but it had a mane of black hair. The ribbons! he thought, remembering Chaypas's new style. "Someone thanks you," he said at last. He brushed the dust and ground litter from his gown and then accepted the cup, holding it at its rim and bottom between his first and third claw, the central claw counterbalancing it gracefully, and tried to ignore the fact that he was being invited to ingest an infusion of something like forty thousand bahli worth of kafay.

"It's hot," the tiny particle warned him. "And bitter."

Supaari took a sip. His nose wrinkled, but he said, "The scent is very agreeable."

Tactful, Anne thought, taking in the carnassial teeth and claws. Jesus H. Christ, she thought, a tactful carnivore! But Sofia's gesture pulled her out of her own shock. "Please, our hearts will be glad if you will share our meal," Anne said, using the Ruanja formula they were all familiar with. I can't believe this is happening, she thought. I'm doing Miss Manners with a tactful alien carnivore who just tried to cut Emilio in half.

Supaari turned to this next apparition and saw another barefaced wonder, its white mane plaited with ribbons. Not responding to Anne's invitation, he looked around him for the first time and, finding Jimmy Quinn, he asked incredulously, "Are all these your children?"

"No," Jimmy said. "This one is the youngest."

The Runa had consistently taken this truth as evidence of Jimmy's wonderful sense of humor. Supaari accepted it. This, as much as his terrifying claws and dentition, told them all that they were dealing with an entirely different species.

Supaari looked to the others. "Who then is the Elder?"

Emilio cleared his throat, as much to reassure himself that he could make a sound as to draw Supaari's attention. He turned and indicated D. W. Yarbrough.

D.W., heart hammering, had not moved or spoken since he'd made a dive for the Winchester and, priest or not, prepared to blow the alien bastard in front of him straight to hell. He had thought that he would see Emilio's severed head fall at his feet and he doubted that he'd ever forget that moment or the flood of blind rage that would have ended Supaari's life if Emilio hadn't taken care of the situation himself with such dispatch. "This one is the Elder," D.W. heard Emilio say, "though not the oldest. His decisions are for all of us."

Supaari saw only a middle-sized monster holding a rod that smelled of carbon steel, sulfur and lead. With no intermediary to speak his names, Supaari took the initiative and briefly moved his hands to his forehead. "This one is called Supaari, third-born, of the Gaha'ana lineage, whose landname is VaGayjur." He waited, ears cocked expectantly toward Sandoz.

Emilio realized that, as the interpreter, he was supposed to introduce Yarbrough. Winging it, he said, "The Elder is called Dee, first-born, of the Yarbrough lineage, whose landname is VaWaco."

A warrior, Supaari assumed, quite rightly but for the wrong reasons. Since their common language was Ruanja, he held out both hands, not knowing what else to do. "Challalla khaeri, Dee."

Yarbrough handed his rifle to George with a look that said, Use it if necessary. Then he stepped forward and laid his fingers in the cupped hollows of Supaari's long upturned claws. "Challalla khaeri, Supaari," he said, squinty-eyed, with a pronounced Texas accent and an attitude that clearly implied the unsaid, You goddamned sonofabitch.

Anne was tempted to laugh out loud but she didn't; forty-five years of dinner parties will out. Instead she stepped up to their guest and greeted him in the Runa manner without another thought. When their hands parted, she said, "Sipaj, Supaari! Surely you are hungry from your journey. Will you not eat with us now?"

He did. All in all, it was quite a day.