"Marc!" Sofia cried. "Marc is alive, too?"
"No! He is gone!" Supaari doubled over in frustration. "Sandoz is gone also, but a different way!" Tired as he was, he got to his feet and began to pace. "Ruanja is impossible for this! Can you remember any H’inglish?" he demanded, swinging around to look at her.
"Yes," she said. Supaari’s baby began to keen. Kinsa, too, was becoming upset by the intensity of the emotion and seemed about to cry herself. Handing the infant to Kanchay, Sofia stood as well and stopped Supaari’s agitated prowling with a hand on his arm. "Yes. I remember English," she said again. "Supaari, where is Marc? Where is Sandoz now? Are they dead, or not where we can see them?"
"Marc is dead. It is my fault. I meant no harm!" Inexplicably, he held up his hands, but she was too distracted to see any point in the gesture. "The hasta’akala doesn’t make us bleed—"
"Supaari, for God’s sake, where is Sandoz?"
"The others sent him home—"
"What others?" she cried, frantic now. "What do you mean, home? To Kashan?"
"No, not Kashan. There were other foreigners who came—"
"Other foreigners! Supaari, do you mean people from another river valley or people like—"
"Foreigners like you. With no tails. From H’earth."
She was swaying and he caught her before she fell, pressing his hands against her shoulders. "I’m all right," she told him, but he could see that she wasn’t. She sat on the ground and put her head in her hands. Kanchay gave the wailing baby to Kinsa and told the girl to go back to the clearing and stay with the others. He came and sat behind Sofia, arms around her shoulders protectively, and she leaned back to let him know she appreciated his gesture, but spoke again to Supaari, as calmly as she could. "Tell me," she said. "Tell me everything."
IT TOOK A LONG TIME, AND THREE LANGUAGES. HE TOLD HER HOW HE had tracked down Sandoz and found that Marc was alive as well but only just; told about bribing the patrol commander, and about the hasta’akala and how he’d meant only to protect Marc and Sandoz from being tried for inciting the Runa to riot. "You see?" he asked her, showing his hands again to display the thin, tough webbing between his fingers. "It is nothing for us—it only weakens the hands if the webs are clipped. But for the foreigners, there was so much blood and Marc died." And then there was the season in Gayjur with Sandoz, and Supaari’s own fear that Emilio would perish of loneliness.
That much, God help her, Sofia understood. "But others came," she reminded Supaari. "Where are the other foreigners now?" When he didn’t answer, she leaned forward to clutch at his arm and cried, "Supaari, did they all leave? Oh, my God. Don’t tell me they’re gone! Did they all go back to Earth?"
"I don’t know." He turned away, ears down. "They sent Sandoz away first. The others sojourned with me awhile in Gayjur." He stopped speaking abruptly.
"They’re gone, aren’t they," she said dully. "Are they dead, or did they go back to Earth?"
"I don’t know!" he insisted, but she could sense that he was concealing something. Finally, he spoke again, very quietly. "I don’t know, but I think… I may have created a market for…" There was a long silence. "Sofia, what is this word: ’celibate’?"
She looked up, amazed that he should ask this now. But it wasn’t like him to evade…. How could she explain? "It means abstention from sex." Supaari looked blank; English was no good. She tried again in Ruanja. "To make a child begin, there is an action—" He lifted his chin. "Among us, this action is also done for pleasure. Do you understand? For enjoyment." Again, the chin went up but slower this time, and he was staring at her intently. "A celibate is one who never… behaves this action—not to begin children or for pleasure. Do you understand?"
"Even if they are first- or second-born?"
"Birth rank makes no difference among us—"
"A celibate is VaHaptaa, then. A criminal without rights?"
"No!" she said, startled. "Sipaj, Supaari, even this one finds celibacy hard to understand." She paused, unsure how to put this, which language to use, how much to tell him. "Men such as Sandoz and Marc and Dee set themselves apart. They choose not to behave this action for children or for pleasure. They are celibates so that they may serve God more completely."
"Who are ’god’?"
She took shelter in grammar. "Who is, not who are. There is only one God." She said this without thinking, but before she could even attempt to explain monotheism, Supaari cut her off.
"Sandoz said he was celibate—he said he took no wife so that he could serve many!" the Jana’ata cried indignantly, standing once more and walking away from her. He spun and glared, ears cocked forward, on the attack. "He said he was celibate. Celibates serve god. God must be many."
Q.E.D., she thought, sighing. Where were the Jesuits when you needed them? "God is one. His children are many. We are all his children. Sandoz served God by serving His children." Supaari sat down abruptly and rubbed the sides of his head. "Sipaj, Supaari," she said sympathetically, reaching out to touch the lean-cheeked, wolfish face. "Does your head hurt, too?"
"Yes. You make no sense!" He stopped himself, and changed his mind and then his language, going back to H’inglish. "Maybe you make sense to you. I don’t understand."
Sofia smiled slightly. "Anne said that’s the beginning of wisdom." He looked at her, mouth open. "Wisdom: true knowing," she explained. "Anne said wisdom begins when you discover the difference between ’That doesn’t make sense’ and ’I don’t understand.’»
"Then I must be very wisdom. I don’t understand anything." His eyes closed. When he opened them, he looked as though he might be sick, but soldiered on in the jumbled creole that was all they had to work with. "Sipaj, Fia. What means in H’inglish ’serve’? Can service mean the behavior for—for having pleasure?"
"It can," she said finally, confused. "But not for Marc and Dee and Meelo. For them, to serve meant to give help freely to others. To give food to the hungry, to make lodgings for…. Wait—serves many? Oh, my God. You created a market? Supaari, what happened to Emilio!"
IN THE ROSY LIGHT THAT FOLLOWED SECOND SUNDOWN, SOFIA SAT AND watched Supaari sleep, too worn out to feel much more than resignation. It took hours to get the whole story straight and toward the end, Supaari seemed to invite her contempt. "I was proud of my cleverness! I made myself stupid with my wish for children, but I thought, This Supaari, he is a fine, clever man. I should have understood!" he cried, exhausted and distraught. "These were Jana’ata. My own people. I made great harm to Sandoz. Perhaps now the other foreigners also have been harmed the same way. And now, you shall hate me."
We meant well, she thought, looking up at a sky piled with cumulus clouds turning amethyst and indigo above the clearing. No one was deliberately evil. We all did the best we could. Even so, what a mess we made of everything…
Sitting with her back against Kanchay’s, she reached out to stroke her sleeping son’s auburn curls, and thought of D. W. Yarbrough, the father superior of the Jesuit mission to Rakhat, now almost five years gone, buried near Kashan with Anne Edwards, his companion in sudden death.
Sofia Mendes and D. W. Yarbrough had worked together closely during the long months of preparation for the Jesuit mission to the planet of the Singers. Many who watched their partnership develop and deepen thought them proof that opposites attract, for D. W. Yarbrough, with his cast eye and his meandering nose and that unruly mob of anarchic teeth, was as outlandishly ill-favored as Sofia Mendes was startlingly, classically beautiful. A few understood the sanctuary of uncomplicated friendship Sofia and D.W. could offer one another, and those few were privately pleased that these two souls had been brought together.