"Emilio was sent home on the Stella Maris," she muttered. "That’s why the signal went dead three years ago." Her hand touched the edge of the tablet and she clutched it to her chest, picking her way through the huddled mass of bodies and moving outside, where the sky was half golden, half aquamarine. They must have gotten here the same way we did, she thought. They had a mother ship and they had a lander. Supaari wasn’t sure if anyone but Sandoz had actually left Rakhat. The other ship might still be up there. Their lander might still be somewhere on the planet. There would be fuel. "If they haven’t left…" she said aloud. "Oh, God, oh, please…"
The satellite network put in place over eight years earlier by the Stella Maris crew was still functional. Working rapidly, she reprogrammed the radio relays to carry out a systematic broadband search for any active transponder currently in orbit around Rakhat. Once the software was altered, the search took only minutes: 9.735 gigahertz. "Yes!" she shouted, weeping and laughing, but then fell silent again, ignoring the Runa who now pressed around her, their questions falling on her ears as meaninglessly as rain.
There was no answer to her hail, but there were standardized navigation routines, interfaces established by the U.N. Space Agency when near-Earth traffic had become dense enough to be hazardous. Like a harbor pilot taking over a freighter, Sofia took control of the Magellan’s computer system and then hacked her way into its logs. There was no record of the ground party’s return to the ship. There had been no transmissions for nearly three years. Their lander must be somewhere on Rakhat, maybe near Kashan.
She began to broadcast a repeating message on the Magellan downlink to all land-based nodes, asking any respondent to reply through the Magellan return path. She listened, heart hammering, waiting for some response, any indication that she and Isaac were not the only human beings on Rakhat.
It was well past second dawn when she was able to sit back and think. The lack of reply was not proof that the others were dead. They might be separated from their transponders. Supaari believed they might still be alive but in captivity, as Emilio had been. Six months, she decided, her eye burning from the intensity of the work she’d just done. She owed the others that much. She would not abandon her own kind here without a serious attempt to find them.
Six months.
But then, by the God whose poetry was forgotten now, she would steal their lander and their ship. Then, by God, Sofia Mendes would take her son and go home.
15
Naples
July 2061
THERE WAS NO FORMAL PROPOSAL. SITTING ON THE HUGE STONE OUTCROPPING near the beach that had been his sanctuary when churches held out no hope to him, Emilio was watching Celestina play on the shore, talking to Gina about nothing in particular when he asked, after a companionable silence, "Would you object to a civil ceremony?"
"That would certainly be nicer than shouting abuse at one another," Gina replied, straight-faced, which, along with a settling into the hollow of his outstretched arm, served as an assent. "When?"
"You and Celestina are going to the mountains with your parents at the end of August, yes? So: first weekend in September."
Gina nodded agreeably. "Maybe late in the afternoon?" she suggested after a few minutes, smiling toward the sea. "That way, if the marriage doesn’t work out, we won’t have wasted the whole day."
"Ten o’clock," Emilio said. "Ten in the morning. September third, the Saturday after you get home."
The means to this end had been buried like treasure in the boxful of letters collected by Johannes Voelker in Rome and delivered to Sandoz by John Candotti.
Although hardcopy was routinely scanned for bombs and biologicals, all mail could conceal words with the power to inflict more pain. Emilio knew himself defenseless against this, and had refused to look at any of it, but Gina loved him, and believed that others must share her opinion of him. So one day in early July, while Emilio worked at the other end of the room and Celestina played house with Elizabeth and a stuffed dog named Franco Grossi, Gina sat on the swept wooden floor of his apartment, separating the messages into four piles: hateful, sweet, funny and interesting. When she finished the first pass through the box, she and Celestina took a walk over to see Brother Cosimo in the kitchen and watched him burn the hateful ones in the bread oven. Cosimo, who was among those who approved of the couple, sent the ladies back with three hazelnut gelati and a plate of leftover salad greens for Elizabeth.
"Sweet" was composed mainly of letters from Emilio’s students, the earliest of whom had been boys of fifteen when he’d taught them Latin I and were now men in their mid-sixties with enduring and fond memories of his classroom. Several—jurists, attorneys—offered to file suit on Sandoz’s behalf against the Contact Consortium for slander and defamation. Gina was cheered by their loyalty, but Emilio still believed himself guilty of some of what he’d been charged with in absentia. So she put the letters aside, thinking, Someday perhaps.
"Funny" included several from women whose grasp of reproductive biology was less firm than their grip on the basics of blackmail, and who attributed the paternity of their children to a celibate who wasn’t even on the planet at the time of conception. Emilio read one of these, but he found it less amusing than Gina had, so that pile too was consigned to the bread oven.
Which left "Interesting."
Most of these, she believed, would be rejected out of hand: requests for interviews, book contracts, and so on. There was, however, a letter from a legal firm in Cleveland, Ohio, written in English, and this envelope included a copy of a handwritten note dated July 19, 2021, signed with a name Gina recognized: Anne Edwards, the physician who had gone, along with her husband, the engineer George Edwards, to Rakhat as part of the first Jesuit mission. Emilio had spoken of Anne, briefly and with difficulty, so Gina hesitated before reopening this wound. But concerned that this was a matter of legal importance, she brought the letter to Emilio and saw his color vanish as he read.
"Caro, what’s wrong? What does it say?"
"I don’t know what to do with this," he said, shaking his head, throwing the papers down on his desk. He stood and walked away, clearly upset. "No. I don’t want it."
"What? What is it?" Celestina asked, sitting on the floor. Alarmed, she looked from one grown-up’s face to the other’s, and dissolved into tears. "Is it another divorce paper, Mamma?"
"Oh, my God," Emilio said and went to the child, kneeling to offer her his arms. "No, no, no, cara mia. Nothing like that, Celestina! Nothing bad." He looked up at Gina, who shrugged unhappily: what can we do? "It’s just something about money," Emilio told the child then. "Nothing important, cara—just money. Maybe it’s good, okay? I have to think about this. I’m not used to having other people to think of. Maybe it’s good."
The note from Anne was short, written on a sunlit day during the excitement of the preparations for the first mission to Rakhat, with mortality only a vague theoretical notion. "It can’t buy happiness, darlings. It can’t buy health. But a little cash never hurts. Enjoy." She and George had set up trust funds for each member of the Jesuit party and, with over forty years to accumulate, the law firm informed him, the individual portfolios had done handsomely. In addition, Emilio Sandoz had been named a beneficiary of the Edwardses’ personal estate, along with Sofia Mendes and James Quinn. In the judgment of the law firm, Sandoz was also legally due one-third of that estate. The terms of the will stipulated that while Sandoz remained a member of the Society of Jesus, he would be invited to serve on the board of trustees to help oversee distribution of the funds to charities benefiting education and medicine. However, if he decided for any reason to leave the active priesthood, the money was his to use as he saw fit.