The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [89]
Emilio’s very survival had been improbable, not to say miraculous. Alone for months, in a crude vehicle, navigated by only slightly less crude computers, he had been found in the Ohbayashi sector of the asteroid belt when a support ship investigated the automatic distress signal. By that time, he was so malnourished that the healed scars of his hands had reopened, the connective tissue going to pieces. He would have bled to death if the Ohbayashi people hadn’t picked him up when they did.
Brother Edward realized that he might be the only one who believed wholeheartedly that it was a good thing Emilio had been found alive. Even John Candotti was ambivalent, if only because death seemed kinder and God was merciful.
Edward didn’t know what to think about the killing of Askama or the violence said to have been triggered by the Jesuit missionaries. But if Emilio Sandoz, maimed, destitute, utterly alone, had turned to prostitution, who could condemn him? Not Edward Behr, who had some measure of the man’s strength and of what it must have taken to bring him to the state he’d been found in, on Rakhat. Johannes Voelker, by contrast, was convinced that Sandoz was simply a dangerous rogue, gone to appalling excess in the absence of external controls. We are what we fear in others, Edward thought, and wondered how Voelker spent his time off.
There was a quiet knock at the door. Edward rose silently and went into the hallway, pulling the door almost but not quite closed behind him.
"Asleep?" the Father General asked.
"Yes. It’ll be hours," Brother Edward said softly. "Once the vomiting starts, I have to inject the Prograine, and that knocks him out."
"The rest will do him good." Vincenzo Giuliani rubbed his face with both hands and let out a long uneven sigh. He looked at Brother Edward and shook his head. "He admits it’s all true. But I could have sworn he was dumbfounded."
"Sir, if I may speak frankly?"
"Of course. Please."
"I can’t say anything about the murder. I’ve seen real anger. To be honest, I’ve seen potential for violence, although he’s always turned it on himself. But, Father, you only read the medical reports. I saw—" Brother Edward stopped. He’d never spoken of this to anyone, not even Emilio, silent always in the early days when he’d been too ill to move from bed. Perhaps the reports had been too clinical. Perhaps the Father General hadn’t understood what the sodomy had done, how desperate Sandoz must have been ...
"It was brutal," Brother Edward said plainly, and he looked at the Father General until Giuliani blinked. "He does not enjoy pain. If he worked as a whore, it gave him no pleasure."
"I don’t suppose the work ever does give much pleasure, Ed, but your point is taken. Emilio Sandoz is not a depraved libertine."
Giuliani walked to the doorway and hesitated before taking a step into the room. Most men were simple. They were looking for security, or power, or a feeling of usefulness or of certainty or competence. A cause to fight for, a problem to solve, a place to fit in. There were many possibilities but once you grasped what a man was looking for, you had the beginnings of understanding. At a loss, he studied the exotic face, half-hidden by dark hair and bed linens, and whispered, "So what, in the name of Jesus, is he?" It was a question he’d pondered, one way or another, off and on, for sixty years. He didn’t expect an answer, but he got one.
"A soul," said Edward Behr, "looking for God."
Vincenzo Giuliani stared at the fat little man standing in the hallway and then at Sandoz, sleeping drugged against an assault on his own body, and wondered, What if that’s been it, all along?
IT WAS WELL into the