The Sparrow

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

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

"We could ask Scotty to beam us down," A

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

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

"D.W. was in the Marines," Emilio remarked, picking up a dish-towel to dry the stemware A

A

"No, ma'am, I wasn't. This was back in the late eighties, early nineties you u

A

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

"Yeah, folks're workin' on that." D.W. gri

This time even A

"Kinda spooky, ain't it. Hell of a lot of coincidences. Like we say back home, when you find a turtle settin' on top of a fencepost, you can be pretty damn sure he didn't get there on his own." D.W. watched A

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

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

"Fits like a finger in a baby's bum," Ian said, gri

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

"Anything, my beauty."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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