The Sparrow

Father John and Brother Edward wake up to realize that Emilio is missing. After panicking, they realize Emilio is down by the water. John goes down to retrieve Emilio, careful not to startle him, and Emilio says that he’s been suffering from “horizon deprivation” and that it “feels good to be able to focus on something that’s far away” (90). John approaches him to give him a jacket, but Emilio says that if he comes any closer he will “bleed for it” (90). John is surprised by Emilio’s sudden violent talk.

Edward joins John, and the two sit at a distance, watching Emilio attempting to throw little rocks using his arm braces. Eventually, Emilio heads back to the retreat house, and Edward and John follow. Once at the top of the steps, they see Vincenzo, who is annoyed and calls out the fact that Emilio is wallowing in self-pity instead of genuinely trying to get better.

Once he’s cleaned up, Emilio comes into Vincenzo’s office. He tells Emilio that Jesuit missionaries have died or been tortured in various horrific forms throughout history, and he asks Emilio if he thought he was the only one to experience torture and to “lose God” (94). Vincenzo is hoping that he will recognize that many others have come before him and have experienced similar situations. Vincenzo says that the reason Emilio isn’t getting better is because the doctors say that he’s depressed, but Vincenzo tells him that he is simply “wallowing in self-pity” (94).

Emilio hasn’t seen Sofia since her arrival in San Juan to be Jimmy’s vulture. Anne thinks Emilio is deliberately avoiding Sofia, so she decides to have everyone over for dinner. Thinking about Sofia, Anne considers her an “emotional anorexic” and thinks that it is this, “along with her beauty, [that] drew men. Jimmy had long since confessed to his infatuation, unaware that Sofia’d had a similar effect on Emilio” (96).

Jimmy shows Sofia around Arecibo. He shows her an example of a star’s radio signal, telling her that these are often mistaken as alien because they are irregular. In this particular example, Jimmy emphasizes the peculiar aspects of this radio wave, pointing out that it sounds like audio. Jimmy says that the radio telescope “scans over fourteen million separate channels, billions of signals, looking for patterns in the noise” (98). If the system finds something interesting, it’s Jimmy’s job to “disprove the standing hypothesis that a transmission is intelligent communication” (98). While watching Jimmy work, Sofia begins to like Jimmy “very much” (99).

The next night, Sofia, Jimmy, and Emilio go to Anne and George’s for dinner. After dinner, Jimmy plays the piano. He begins playing songs that are too sentimental, so, in a playful manner, George orders him to get off the piano. Then Sofia takes over, and, seeing Emilio sitting in the corner of the room, she begins to play something “she thought would be familiar to him, a very old Spanish melody. To everyone’s surprise, probably even his own, Emilio left his corner, came to the side of the piano, and began to sing in a clear light tenor” (102). Sofia and Emilio’s harmonized duet, clearly full of sexual chemistry, makes Jimmy jealous.

Jimmy leaves and decides to go to Arecibo to get caught up on work. He begins working on the radio wave he showed Sofia the day before. At “3:57 A.M. on Sunday, August 3, 2019, James Connor Quinn pulled off his headset and sat back in his chair, sweating and sucking air, sure now, but hardly able to believe what he alone in all this world knew” (105). He stares at the screen some more and then calls Anne.

Anne is the first person Jimmy calls. He tells her:

It was the song that did it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and when I looked at the signal, it just reminded me of music. I figured if it was music, I’d recognize it and then I could figure out where it was coming from. So I washed it through a digital sound program. Anne, it’s like nothing I’ve ever heard before (106).

He tells her that it’s definitely extraterrestrial. Moments later, Anne, George, Sofia, and Emilio show up in Jimmy’s office at Arecibo to hear the radio waves for themselves:

It was vocal, mainly. There was a percussive underlayment and possibly wind instruments as well, but it was hard to tell about that—there was still a lot of noise, although Jimmy had already filtered some out. And it was unquestionably alien. The timbre of the voices, the harmonics were simply different, in some way that Jimmy couldn’t describe in words (108).

The group listens to the music clip over and over, and they deduce that the aliens must have some sort of social organization because they are singing in groups but with a clear lead singer. They also clearly have their own language and were somehow able to transmit their songs over radio.

In the midst of the excitement, Sofia points out that a computer program would never have realized that the radio wave was alien life, which means that Jimmy’s job can’t be replaced by a computer program and is therefore secure. This is good news for Jimmy, but it means that Sofia hasn’t yet earned her freedom from her broker. Emilio, out of nowhere, suggests that the group should go to this planet to visit the alien singers. His comment seems to come out of left field, as everyone is thinking about Sofia’s “unenviable position” (112).

The group begins talking hypothetically about how they could pull off the trip. They think they could realistically use an asteroid as a spacecraft, and Sofia points out that it wouldn’t be “any worse than the little wooden ships people used to cross the Atlantic in the 1500s” (112). They also hypothesize that it would take 17 years to get there, but due to the effects of traveling at light speed, it would only feel like six or seven months to the crew.

Everyone’s excitement grows, thinking they could really pull it off, except Anne, who remains highly skeptical. Emilio tells Anne that he will propose the idea of an interplanetary Jesuit mission to his superiors, and that he is “willing to let God decide. We could call it fate, if that makes you feel more rational” (119). 

News of the alien transmissions spreads rapidly, with a worldwide news conference being held at Arecibo. Emilio immediately calls D.W. Yarbrough, the New Orleans Provincial and Emilio’s mentor. George speculates about the possible mission to Anne, but she meets his musing with anger, making it clear that she in no way wants to be a part of it. Jimmy’s boss promotes him. He is now in “charge of a full-time effort to monitor the sources of the transmission,” and he will supervise a staff of five (125).

That night, Emilio lies in bed, unable to sleep. He thinks about how, until meeting Sofia, he had never questioned his vows of celibacy. He thinks back to when he first met D.W. at the age of 15. D.W. took an interest in him and saved him from a life of selling heroin on the streets of La Perla. He thinks about how once D.W. enrolled him in the Jesuit high school he attended, his family stopped speaking to him, and how, against all odds, he excelled in the “quiet orderliness of life in the boarding school” (126).

After being emotionally affected by a dream of a “full-blown rose unfolding petal by petal from its tightly wrapped bud,” Emilio entered the novitiate and decided he wanted to become a priest (126). He thinks about how the things that drove most people away from the priesthood attracted him, even the celibacy, since all of his former sexual experiences revolved around power or pride.

He also thinks about how he has always found Jesus’s life to be moving, but he never believed in the miracles: “He was aware of his agnosticism, and patient with it. Rather than deny the existence of something he couldn’t perceive himself, he acknowledged the authenticity of his uncertainty and carried on, praying in the face of doubt” (128).

Emilio shows up at the clinic to talk to Anne. He asks if she’s mad at him for suggesting the trip to Rakhat, and she says no, although it’s clear she still wants no part of it. He says, “It is often hard to tell from the way people behave whether or not they believe in God,” and then he asks her if she believes (129). She replies:

I believe in God the way I believe in quarks […] People whose business it is to know about quantum physics or religion tell me they have good reason to believe that quarks and God exist. And they tell me that if I wanted to devote my life to learning what they’ve learned, I’d find quarks and God just like they did (130).

Emilio says that despite not believing in God, she’s a moral person, and Anne gets upset and says, “I do not require heaven or hell to bribe or scare me into acting decently” (130). Emilio says they have more in common than she thinks and then tells her that the probability of a successful mission to Rakhat is high. In fact, each piece of the puzzle—the funding, the physics, and the engineering—is falling into place so rapidly that it is surprising even Emilio.

Meanwhile, people have been accusing Jimmy of faking the radio transmission, saying that it’s all a hoax. Jimmy denies the accusations and continues to search the airwaves for more alien waves, but he doesn’t hear any. Despite not having further proof of the aliens’ existence, Tomás da Silva, head of the Jesuit Order, okays the mission because he believes that there is now proof that “God has other children” (135). Soon after okaying the mission, another transmission is received from the alien singers, and all claims that it was a hoax are dismissed.

After Anne watches one of her patients fall into a permanent coma due to a car wreck, she decides that the risks associated with the Rakhat mission are better than “dying in a bus wreck on vacation,” and so she decides to join (137). Around this time, Jean-Claude Jaubert, Sofia’s broker, receives an anonymous message asking to pay for Sofia’s remaining debt. He agrees, and Sofia is now free. Sofia receives the news and is left speechless.

Emilio brings his mentor, D.W., over to Anne and George’s for dinner. D.W. has a heavy Texan accent, and Anne thinks that he’s sweet but is “the butt-ugliest man [she] ever met” (140). The dinner goes well, and D.W. tells George and Anne that he will be heading the mission to Rakhat because he was in the Marines and knows how to land the spacecraft. D.W. says that there are a lot of coincidences that are making this mission possible and says that it’s like the idea “when you find a turtle settin’ on top of a fencepost, you can be pretty damn sure he didn’t get there on his own” (144). In other words, he feels like God has been lining things up to make the mission happen.

Sofia uses her connections at the Asteroid Mining Division to secure an asteroid to be used as a spacecraft for the mission. After receiving her freedom, Sofia goes to Jerusalem because “after years of wandering, she felt a need to go home somehow, wanted to see if she was capable of belonging somewhere” (147). She decides that she wants to be a part of the mission, and D.W. says okay.

Emilio awakens on the beach to a young boy standing over him. The boy, Giancarlo, is the 10-year-old son of a local farmer, and he brings vegetables to the retreat kitchen. Giancarlo and Emilio head back to the house, where a “short, stocky man” wearing a “black skull cap and a dark plain suit” is waiting for Emilio (154). The man is Felipe Reyes, the young boy with the vulgar mouth that Emilio looked after in La Perla. However, due to the effects of space travel, Felipe looks much older than Emilio. For the next hour:

they reminisced about La Perla. It was only five or six years ago for Emilio and he found to his surprise that he could recall more names than Felipe, but Reyes knew what had happened to everyone and had a hundred stories, some funny, some sad. Of course, it had been almost forty years since Emilio had left (156).

Felipe tells Emilio that he inspired him to become a Jesuit priest. Felipe then holds out his arms, revealing artificial hands. Apparently, his hands were blown off in a bomb. In showing this to Emilio, he’s trying to connect with him, since they have both suffered the loss of their hands. However, this just makes him angry because he thinks that someone put Felipe up to this as a way to make Emilio count his blessings and realize that others have it bad, too. Felipe admits that he’s here to help, but Emilio says:

You can’t imagine the truth [...] I have to live with it now. You tell them: the hands are nothing. You tell them: self-pity would be an improvement. It doesn’t matter what I say. It doesn’t matter what I tell you. None of you will ever know what it was like. And I promise you: you don’t want to know (159).

Giuliani hears the news about how Emilio reacted toward Felipe. He thinks about how difficult it is to understand men like Emilio and how “Jesuits are well prepared for martyrdom. Survival, on the other hand, could be an intractable problem” (160).

John meets Emilio on the beach. Emilio initially tries to get John to go away, but then John makes a Young Frankenstein reference, and the two begin laughing and joking for the first time. John tells Emilio that he has options and that he can still leave the Jesuit order if he wants, but no matter what, he needs to talk about what happened. Emilio says he will hold it in as long as he can, and then walks away. 

George excitedly tells Anne all about the configurations and livable interior of the asteroid that will soon take them to Rakhat. He says that it’s “beautiful inside. Kinda Japanese-looking. Most of the walls are really light panels, so we don’t go nuts from the dark. They’re sort of like shoji screens” (165). Anne doesn’t seem amused but is nevertheless amazed that despite many setbacks, the mission is actually going to happen. She thinks “it became hard to ignore how, against all odds, the dice kept coming up in favor of the mission” (168). However, George, Jimmy, and Sofia “remained agnostics on the question of whether these events were minor miracles or major coincidences” (168).

Once in the asteroid, Anne experiences an “instant of unprecedented clarity, a moment of wholly unanticipated certainty that God was real” (169). For Anne,“[t]he sensation fled almost as quickly as it came but left in its wake the conviction that Emilio was right, that they were meant to be here, doing this impossible thing” (169). The crewmembers float around in zero gravity. Sofia feels okay, but most of the others feel sick.

Sofia and D.W. develop a strong friendship while working together as the two generalists on the team. Marc Robichaux is a naturalist and watercolorist from Montreal, and he’s in charge of the Wolverton tube plant colony and the tilapia tank, which will provide the crew with fresh food. George Edwards is responsible for the software and mechanical aspects of the Wolverton tube and the air and water extraction systems. James Connor Quinn, 28, is in charge of navigation and communications, while Alan Pace is a musicologist. However, they each cross-train with each other’s specialties in case something happens to any one of them.

The team studies the alien songs in hopes of recognizing patterns in their language. The main singer is the “voice of Hlavin Kitheri, the Reshtar of Galatna, who would one day destroy Emilio Sandoz” (174).

The next morning, everyone is at breakfast, except for Anne and George. After hearing loud giggling and awkward sounds coming from their bedroom, it’s clear that they are attempting to make love in zero gravity, but it’s not working out so well. After breakfast, Jimmy declares that the “Stella Maris is on her way out of the solar system,” and once gravity takes hold, everyone begins to feel at ease as they travel on an asteroid to the Alpha Centauri system (177).

D.W. announces that the days will be:

divided hour by hour. There would be free time for civilians […] while the four Jesuits convened for Mass, although anyone was welcome to join them. Classes were scheduled for three hours per day, nominal Sundays excepted, to give further depth to their training and maintain mental discipline, and to make sure that each crew member gained at least a passing knowledge of every other’s discipline” (179).