The Sparrow

Long ago, Marc Robichaux had observed that a natural tendency to awaken early in the morning is a necessary though insufficient condition if a man is to survive formation and pass onward to ordination. He had known several men who might have become priests if waking at dawn had not done such violence to their normal sleep patterns.

Among the Jesuit party on Rakhat, Marc Robichaux was ordinarily the alpha to Jimmy Qui

Marc pulled on khaki shorts and, barefoot, padded noiselessly out to the terrace, where A

"And sometimes they just get better," Marc said quietly.

"Deus vult," she replied ironically.

He smiled in return, and made his way down to the river.

The precariousness of their existence on this planet was once again in the forefront of their minds and D.W.'s probable recovery did not remove the sense of dancing on a high wire. By the time Emilio came out to the terrace, rubbing his face muzzily in the midmorning light, George and Sofia were trying to decide if they could rig some kind of rope ladder so somebody could jump off the Ultra-Light as she flew over the clearing at the slowest possible air speed, and then could clear the brush before she attempted to land. A

He slept another couple of hours and when he came back out to the terrace, even D.W. was up, pale and rumpled but feeling a little better and making jokes about Runa's Revenge. Jimmy was back from wherever he'd been, and it appeared that at least one problem was about to resolve itself. That morning, Jimmy had learned that the villagers were about to leave for some kind of harvest.

"Pik root," Emilio said, yawning. "I heard about that last night."

"They want to know if we're coming," Jimmy told them.

"Do they want us to?" George asked.

"I don't think so. One of them said it was a long walk and asked me if I was going to carry all of you," Jimmy said. "It was obviously a big joke. Lots of tail twitching and huffing. I don't think they'd mind if we stay home." In fact, it was his impression that the Runa would be just as happy to find out that the foreigners weren't coming. The troop moved at the pace of the slowest member, which had often been A

"If they all leave, we won't have to explain about the plane," Emilio said, sitting down. The sky was hazy and it felt like it was going to be very hot. Sofia handed him a cup of coffee. Askama spotted him from two terraces away and scampered over, full of questions about D.W., whom she was too shy to address directly, and why had Meelo slept so late and was everyone coming to dig pik root?

"Sipaj, Askama," Emilio said. "Dee was very sick. Someone thinks we will stay here with him while he rests." The child looked crestfallen, ears at half-mast and tail drooping, but undaunted, she devoted the next half hour to cajolery, trying to talk them into coming. When it became plain that this wouldn't work, she declared herself "porai" and threatened to get sick like Dee because her heart was sad. A

"Okay. Listen up," D.W. said when Askama and A

"And then what?" Sofia asked.

"Then we'll try Plan B."

"Which is?"

"I ain't thought that one up yet. Shee-it," said Dalton Wesley Yarbrough, Father Superior of the Jesuit mission to the village of Kashan on Rakhat, amid cries of derision. "Get off my back! Hell, I'm a sick man."

Runa discussions tended to drag on for days but once a decision was made, the village mobilized with impressive efficiency. George and Sofia hardly waited until the last tail had disappeared before setting out in the opposite direction for the Ultra-Light cache. The little plane was reassembled within the hour, and Sofia took it up for a quick test run. Jimmy, linked to systems aboard the Stella Maris, established that the weather was okay on both sides of the mountain range. There was about seven hours of useful light left.

With unsettling dispatch, Marc and Sofia climbed aboard, strapped in and made ready to leave, the others watching as Yarbrough leaned into the little cockpit, hands moving through the air, miming emergency maneuvers. When Sofia started the motor, D.W. stepped back and hollered with specious ster

Sofia laughed and shouted, "Be here safe when we get back!" And then they were gone, the little plane rising quickly into the sky, wings tipping twice in farewell.

"I hate this," A

"You are a worrywart," George said, but he put his arms around A

Jimmy said nothing but he wished now that he'd had George take a look at the weather front coming in from the southwest before he okayed the flight.

"I think they will be fine," Emilio said. And D.W. added, "She's a damn good pilot."

"All the same," A

Seven days' journey north of them, in his wharf side compound overlooking the high seawall that bordered his property, Supaari VaGayjur began that day with a similar sense of the precariousness of his existence. He was about to risk not life and limb but status and dignity. If he failed, it would put an end to dreams he hardly dared acknowledge. The stakes were very high, in that sense.

He broke his fast with a handsome meal, gorging carefully: enough so that he would not need to consider meat again that day but not so much as to slow his thoughts. He spent the morning attending to business with the single-minded intensity of a first-born military man and the plodding thoroughness of a second-born bureaucrat. The only time his concentration broke was when he passed through the courtyard on his way to a storage building. He could not keep himself from glancing upward toward Galatna Palace, set apart like its inhabitant: splendid and useless.

Around him, the city rang and vibrated and rumbled with the noise of manufacture and trade, the treble clang and shriek of metalworking momentarily dimmed by the bass of wooden wheels thundering over cobbles just outside his warehouse; the clamor of craft and commerce merging with the noise of the docks, where six hundred vessels, laden with cargo from all over the southern coast of Rakhat's largest continent, shouldered in toward the wharves of Gayjur, their largest market.