"Then we shall truly be gone," Suukmel whispered.
"Perhaps," this hard man said. "Perhaps."
"If you have no hope for us, why have you stayed?" she demanded. "To watch us die?"
Perhaps, he almost said. But then Sean remembered his father, eyes shining with the unadulterated glee that Maura Fein had loved and shared, shaking his head at some ignominious example of the human capacity for boneheaded, self-inflicted calamity. "Ah, Sean, lad," David Fein would say to his son, "it takes an Irish Jew to appreciate a cock-up this grand!"
Sean Fein gazed for a time at the pale northern sky, and thought of the place where his own ancestors had lived. He was a Jesuit and celibate, an only child: the last of his line. Looking at Suukmel’s drawn, gray face, he felt at long last compassion for the fools who expected fairness and sense—in this world, not the next.
"My father was the son of ancient priests, my mother the daughter of petty kings long gone," he told Suukmel. "A thousand times, their people might have died out. A thousand times, they nearly killed themselves off with political bickering and moral certainty and a lethal distaste for compromise. A thousand times they might have become nothing but a memory in the mind of God."
"And yet they live?" she asked.
"Last time I looked," he said. "I can’t swear to more than that."
"And so might we," Suukmel replied, with frail conviction.
"Shit, yes, y’might at that," Sean muttered in English, remembering Disraeli’s wee couplet: How odd of God / to choose the Jews. "My very much esteemed lady Suukmel," he said then in his strangely accented K’San, "one thing I can say for certain. There’s just no telling whom God will take a liking to."
38
Rakhat: Landfall
October 2078, Earth-Relative
EVEN IF F SFAN FEIN HAD HARBORED ANY ILLUSIONS ABOUT THINGS MAKING sense on Rakhat, he’d have lost them all to the near oblivion he achieved during the hours before the Giordano Bruno party made landfall.
As beautiful as he found the laws and workings of chemistry, the physics of flying defeated him, and Sean always expected his innate pessimism to be rewarded by the flaming crash of whatever aircraft he was on. So he had hoarded his last bottle of Jameson’s for this occasion, and spent his final hours on the Bruno preparing himself spiritually to meet his Lord and Savior with an apology for the whiskey on his dying breath.
Weightlessness and chill dominated the first stage of the descent from the vacuum of space. There was a brief, blessed interval of low gravity and growing warmth, but that was followed by perceptible acceleration. As they entered the atmosphere, the lander began to vibrate, and then to buck like a small boat in a dirty sea.
Alcohol failed him. Nauseated and cotton-mouthed, Sean spent the balance of the flight alternately invoking the Virgin’s intercession and chanting, "Fack, fack, fack," like a litany, with his eyes closed and his palms stinking. Just when it seemed it couldn’t get any worse, they hit a wall of bad air left over from the last tropical storm to move through the region, and as the entry heat grew in ferocity, his body fought crazily with its own autonomic nervous system: ice-cold with terror and sweating to stave off fever.
Which is why the first man from the Giordano Bruno to set foot on Rakhat was not Daniel Iron Horse, who was the mission’s superior, or Joseba Urizarbarrena, an ecologist aching for his first glimpse of this new world; not Emilio Sandoz, who knew the place and would react most quickly to danger, or John Candotti, determined to be at his side, in case disaster struck again; nor was it the would-be conquistador Carlo Giuliani or his bodyguard Niccolo d’Angeli. It was Father Sean Fein, of the Society of Jesus, who pushed his way to the front of the queue and exited the lander the moment the hatch opened, stumbling forward a few steps and falling gracelessly to his knees, where he threw up for a good two minutes.
They might have hoped for a more auspicious beginning to their stay. Sean at least managed to arrange for the first words spoken by a member of their mission to be a kind of prayer. "Dear God," he gasped, when things slowed down, "that was a shameful waste of good liquor."
IT WAS ONLY WHEN SEAN SAT BACK ON HIS HEELS AND HAWKED AND SPAT and caught his breath that any of them looked beyond his distress to the high plateau south of Inbrokar City, which Sofia Mendes had recommended as their landing site.
"I had forgotten," Emilio Sandoz whispered, walking as they all did now away from the lander’s ticking-hot hull, away from the stench of burnt fuel and vomit, into the redolent wind. "I had forgotten."
They’d meant to come earlier, just after the first of Rakhat’s suns had risen, before the steaming heat of full day, but the weather was more than usually unstable this time of year and storms had delayed landfall twice. Finally, Frans had identified a break in the rains and Carlo had decided to go down, even though it would be close to second sunset when they landed.
So they had by accident arrived on Rakhat at the most beautiful time of day, when the late afternoon chorale of wildlife announced its existence to an unheeding world intoxicated with its own luxuriance. To the east, the far landscape was veiled by sheets of gray rain, but there were two suns low behind them, just above the white limestone escarpment that helped contain the Pon river, and these lit up the near country brilliantly, making an immoderate world sparkle like a pirate’s jewel box: all diamond raindrops and golden clouds, its wanton foliage amethyst and aquamarine and emerald, its extravagant blossom citrine and ruby and sapphire and topaz. The very sky flared like opaclass="underline" yellow and pink and mauve, and the azure of the Virgin’s robes.
"What is that scent?" John asked Emilio, standing next to him.
"Which one?" Joseba cried, agriculture’s depredations forgotten in the languorous panorama of lavender savannah. There was a lifetime’s work within a few paces of where he stood. The soil alive with tiny vertebrate fauna, the air teeming with flying things, membranous wings flashing as they wheeled in the sunlight. Overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data, Joseba could hardly keep himself from staking out a square meter and beginning the research that very moment; he needed to contain it somehow-divide it, tame it, know it.
"It’s like a perfume shop!" said Nico.
"But there’s one scent, especially," said John, searching for words. "Like cinnamon, except-more flowery."
"Yes, exquisite," Carlo agreed. "I recognize it—there were ribbons with that scent in the shipment the Contact Consortium stowed on board the Stella Maris when they sent Sandoz back."
Emilio looked around and then walked to a patch of low-growing bushes a few paces away. He picked a trumpet-shaped blossom, its petals the hallucinatory scarlet of a poppy, and held it out to John, who leaned forward to inhale. "Yeah, that’s what I’m smelling. What’s it called?" John asked, offering the blossom to Sean, who backed away, still feeling rocky.
"Yasapa," said Emilio. "And yasapa means?"
John pulled the pieces apart. Ya s ap a… "You can make tea with it!" he translated triumphantly.
Pleased with his pupil, the linguist nodded as Carlo reached for the flower, carrying it with both hands to his face and inhaling deeply. "The Runa fill a glass jar with the blossoms, cover them with water and set it in the sun—too sugary for my taste," Emilio said, "but they add sweetleaf to the tea as well. If you leave it long enough, it ferments. You can distill that for a kind of brandy."
"Just as I predicted!" Carlo crowed triumphantly. "We’ve been here less than half an hour and you have already paid for this entire expedition," he told Sandoz, looking at the blossom. "Beautiful color—" He paused, and then sneezed violently.