The Sparrow

Marc and Sofia had reported that they were going to try a landing. There had been a sickening silence ever since. Jimmy thought this might be due to the severity of the storm on the other side of the mountains, but George said that would only have disrupted signals, not silenced them altogether. No one said anything aloud about a crash.

Emilio typed a while longer and then closed out the file, satisfied that he'd written enough to be able to reconstruct the logic the next morning. "I'm sorry, A

"How do you keep them all straight?" she asked.

He yawned and rubbed his face. "I don't always. It's fu

"Those were the ones in Alaska, between Chuuk and the Sudan, right?"

He nodded and flopped back on a cushion, digging fingers into his eyes. "I may not have done well with them because I was so resentful about having to learn those two. I never got used to the cold and the dark, and I felt that my education was being squandered. Nothing made sense to me." He took his hands away from his face and looked at her sideways. "It's not easy to be obedient if you suspect your superiors are asses."

A

"Not warm. Hot. Even for me, hot. And by the time I got to Africa, I was getting better at learning languages in the field. And then—well, professional irritation seemed pretty trivial." He sat up and stared out into the darkness. "It was awful, A

"What did you think of yourself as?"

"A priest," he said simply. "That was when I really started to believe what was.said at ordination: Tu es sacerdos in aeternum."

A priest in perpetuity, A

"Sleepy." He grabbed her neck affectionately and pulled her close to pass his lips over her hair, loosened in sleep, silver-gilt in the camp-light.

A

"I'd have mentioned it, A

"D.W. will never forgive himself if anything's happened to those two."

"They'll be back."

"What makes you so certain, hotshot?"

He spoke from his heart and from Deuteronomy. " 'You have seen with your own eyes what the Lord your God has done. »

"I've seen what human beings can do—"

"You've seen what," Emilio conceded, "but not why! That's where God is, A

"And if Sofia and Marc are lying in a heap of wreckage right now?" A

"God knows," he said, and there was in his tone both an admission of defeat and a statement of faith.

"See, that's where it falls apart for me!" A

"I cried," he admitted. "I think sometimes that God needs us to cry His tears." There was a long silence. "And I tried to understand."

"And now? Do you understand?" There was, almost, a note of pleading in her voice. If he told her he did, she'd have believed him. A

"No," he said at last. Then he added, "Not yet. Some poetry is tragic. It is perhaps harder to appreciate."

A

"Nothing." He shrugged, knowing his singular congregation very well. "Only: if this is all that is holding you back from faith, perhaps you should just go ahead and blame God whenever you think it's appropriate."

A slow smile started across A

"What?" it was his turn to ask. She was gri

"Oh, I'm just considering a few sentiments I might express to God," she said sweetly, and then clamped both hands over her mouth to keep from laughing out loud. "Oh, Emilio, my darling child," she said behind her fingers in a fey and crafty voice. "I do believe you've hit upon a theology I can live with! I have your permission for this, do I, Father? You are willing to be implicated as an accessory?"

"How rude do you plan to get?" Emilio started to laugh warily but his face was now wholly alive. "I'm only a priest! Maybe we should check with a bishop or something—"

"Chicken shit!" she cried. "Don't back down on me now!" And getting up on her knees, poking him in the chest repeatedly, she began to deliver herself of a series of increasingly impolite, entirely profane and very vigorously expressed opinions on the suffering and untimely death of i

"Sandoz," George yelled, "what the hell are you doing with my wife?"

"We're discussing theology, dear," A

"Oh, for Christ's sake!"

"We're still working on theodicy!" Emilio yelled. "We haven't gotten to divine incarnation yet." Which laid them both out again.

"Kill 'em, George," D.W. suggested loudly. "Justifiable homicide."

"Will all of you please shut the fuck up?" Jimmy hollered, which for some reason made A

"A New York echo!" A

"Shut the fuck u-u-u-u-p!" Emilio supplied, doubling over.

"Oh, well, what the hell. Maybe I'll give religion another try," A

Emilio lay back on a cushion, exhausted and happy. "A

The last thing Marc Robichaux thought before the crash was, Merde, the Father Superior will be furious.

It had looked reasonable to him. The runway was still quite distinct and the vegetation looked soft and leafy. He believed that the root systems might actually be helpful in stabilizing the soil so that the wheels of the plane would not sink. Sofia had landed on many forms of terrain during her training and seemed confident that she could manage this. So they decided to go down.