The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [179]
Marc was often called upon to sketch some object or situation in Runa life for which they had no words and which Supaari could elucidate, after he’d gotten over the initial surprise of seeing Marc’s drawings. Once that hurdle had been jumped, Jimmy and George pulled up visuals on tablet screens for him. Supaari would sometimes be struck by parallels or would describe differences. "Here it is done in a similar manner," he would tell them, or "We have no such thing as that object," or "When this happens, we do thusly." When Anne judged Supaari ready to handle it, George modified a VR headset for him and began to show him the virtual realities of Earth. This was even more frightening to him than Anne had anticipated, and he tore the headset off more than once but kept going back to it with a horrified fascination.
D.W., his own self, never warmed to Supaari, but the Winchester eventually went back into storage. Yarbrough said little during the sessions with the Jana’ata but often suggested lines of inquiry for the following day after Supaari, yawning hugely, retired at second sundown. There were seven of them and only one of Supaari, so they held back, not wanting to make the encounter feel like interrogation. He, after all, was still coming to grips with the very idea that they could exist, that their planet could exist, that they had traveled an incomprehensible distance by means of propulsion he was wholly unprepared to understand, simply to learn about him and his planet. No such notion had ever entered his head.
That the Jana’ata were the dominant species on Rakhat seemed probable from the beginning of their relationship with Supaari. They were used to carnivores being at the top of food chains and accustomed to killer species being in charge of a planet. And, to be honest, they’d been vaguely disappointed by the Runa. The stateliness and deliberation and placidity of Runa life made the humans feel almost drugged; the constant eating, the constant talk, the constant touching dragged on their energy. "They are very sweet," Anne said one night. "They are very boring," George replied. And Anne admitted in the privacy of their tent that she was often tempted during interminable Runa discussions to shout, "Oh, for chrissakes, who gives a shit? Get on with it!"
So despite their inauspicious introduction to Supaari, they were glad to be dealing with someone who came to a decision on his own, even if that decision was to take somebody’s head off at the shoulders. They were happy to find someone on Rakhat who was quick on the uptake, who caught jokes and made them, who saw implications. He moved faster than a Runao, did more things in a given day without making such a damned production out of it. His energy levels came closer to their own. He could, in fact, exhaust them. But then he crashed at second sundown and slept like a gigantic carnivorous baby for fifteen hours.
That the relationship between the Jana’ata and the Runa was asymmetrical became unquestionable when the VaKashani Runa returned to their village, huge baskets filled with pik, a few days after Supaari’s arrival in the village. Great deference was shown to the Jana’ata. He was, for all the world, like a Mafia don or a medieval baron, receiving Runa families, laying hands on the children. But there was also affection. His rule, if that was the proper word, was benign. He listened carefully and patiently to all comers, settled disputes with solutions that struck everyone as fair, steering participants toward