Work Text:
NORTH BETHESDA:
1996
D.W. Yarbrough grew up Catholic, queer and funny-looking in Waco, Texas. By all rights, he should have any number of stories from his teenage years about getting his ass kicked and being made the odd one out. But it hadn't been like that. He had always been able to disarm his peers by embracing the joke of himself. In D.W.'s opinion, if Emilio Sandoz had one problem, it was that he was too damn serious.
They flew by plane from San Juan to Baltimore, a journey that must have been so far outside Emilio's experience that they might as well have boarded a rocket ship to the moon. Not that anyone would know to look at him. Scrunched up in the window seat, one eye still swollen shut and the other eye closed in feigned sleep, Emilio lost his pose just once in four hours, when they hit a pocket of turbulence over the Atlantic and his knuckles went white gripping the armrest. Too much a combat pilot to trust the clumsy maneuvers of a commercial airliner, D.W. could hardly blame him.
Three days later, with Emilio's eye looking like a bruised peach, D.W. stood with him in a dorm room at Georgetown Preparatory, a school that resembled La Pearla's rundown escuela about as much as a Lunar base.
The room was small and sparse, housing a single bed, dresser, desk and chair. D.W. leaned against the desk while Emilio stared at the floor. "Father Leahy, the headmaster, he's a straight shooter," D.W. told Emilio. Father Thomas Leahy, S.J., had been D.W.'s co-conspirator in several outrageous pranks when they'd been in novitiate together at Grand Coteau, and so he had excused Emilio from Georgetown's application process, requiring no interview and requesting no school transcripts. In return, D.W. would continue to deny that he had any idea how a half dozen chickens and a gallon of red paint had ended up in the Novice Director's office.
"You'll be a mite bit behind the rest of 'em in book learnin'," D.W. said. "But you'll catch up." He scratched his nose. "Just stay here for a while. Can you do that for me, 'mano? You get three squares a day and nobody's tryin' to beat the shit outta you. Y'never know, you might learn something."
"And then what will happen?"
Emilio lifted his chin. D.W. observed him, only fifteen and already working on a five o'clock shadow before high noon. Much to D.W.'s great chagrin, he was born and would die with a face that stayed smooth as a baby's bottom.
"What will happen?" Emilio asked again. He tossed out his questions like each one was a challenge to duel to the death. "Do you think I can go back there? That they'll welcome me with open arms? Who do you think I am, the prodigal son? That's bullshit, Father. There's no such thing as a prodigal bastard."
D.W. looked over Emilio's shoulder and out the window. A group of boys were playing soccer on the ostentatious expanse of manicured lawn, intramural sports probably the closest thing to armed combat most of them would ever know.
"Y'know," D.W. said, looking back at Emilio, "that one's always been a funny story to me. I think it's hard to imagine, what exactly it was like to be kickin' around Syria two thousand years ago. Because you've got this kid who's a real shithead, right? He takes his father's money, books it out of town, blows the whole wad on whores and ends up sleepin' with pigs."
It went unsaid between them that the prodigal son of D.W.'s description bore a strong resemblance to Emilio's older brother Antonio Luis.
"So the shithead kid thinks, well hell, this ain't the life I signed up for. I might as well go home and see if my ol' dad will take me back. And the father, he's a wealthy man, right?" D.W. said, warming up to the yarn. "See, a landowner in Galilee was as modest as a Victorian lady."
Emilio's stare remained blank. The soccer players jeered and shouted outside. "He wore long robes," D.W. clarified. "Always kept his ankles covered."
D.W. curled his fingers over the edge of the desk. "'But while he was still far off,'" D.W. said, letting the thickness of his accent drop away, "'his father saw him and was filled with compassion. He ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.'" It was the story of a son whose father met him with open arms, and here D.W. was telling it to a boy who'd only ever been met by a father with closed fists. But no one ever won over Emilio Sandoz by handling him with kid gloves.
D.W. did not favor the cassock, so he pantomimed the swishing of imaginary skirts. "He saw his son coming and so he ran to meet him," D.W. said. "He would've had to hitch up robe, y'see? Sumbitch was so glad to see his deadbeat son that he practically flashed the whole village." At this, Emilio betrayed himself with the ghost of a smirk.
"If you'd been one of 'em sittin' there listenin' to Jesus tell this story," D.W. said, "you woulda thought the father went streakin' through the village buck naked."
Emilio crossed his arms in front of his chest. "So, what's the point, Father?" he asked. Unlike his last question, this one seemed to look for a reply, making it that much harder to answer.
"I don't know, Milito," D.W. said, shaking his head. "Maybe God wants us to know that he knows we can all be made a little ridiculous sometimes."
They both looked out the window, at boys playing soccer in the afternoon sun, on green grass that stretched as far as the eye could see. From where D.W. and Emilio stood, they might as well have been on the surface of the moon.
CITY OF GAYJUR:
2042, EARTH-RELATIVE
"Lord, this unworthy one wishes to hear a story of your people."
Supaari VaGayjur flicked his tail with impatience. Once again, he was reminded that Sandoz was much like a Runao child, skilled at languages but always eager to distract with games.
They sat on dining cushions inside Supaari's home, waiting for one of the servants to bring their food. In Kashan, Sandoz had spent much of his time in the outdoors, and so Supaari had suggested they take their meal in the courtyard under the ivy. Sandoz's scent had flared sour in response, yet another bewildering rebuke.
"Your exceedingly grateful guest learns from stories," Sandoz said now, "to see how the words are used to put them together."
Supaari traced the edge of his ear with the light touch of a single claw, meaning to give Sandoz a subtle reminder of his status and clipped hands. The little foreigner never knew when to offer his neck and could be confusingly unaware of his own rudeness. "Third-born are not permitted to sing such songs," he told Sandoz.
"This wasteful one begs forgiveness," Sandoz said, but he remained undaunted. Perched on a dining cushion meant for an adult twice his size, he looked like a little g'etshki in its burrow. "Perhaps there are spoken tales," Sandoz suggested. "Any story told among your people would be a great help to this useless one. Among my people, there were stories told to children before sleep. Do the Jana'ata have stories such as this?"
"Ah," Supaari said. "Nursemaid stories. These are told by domestic Runa to Jana'ata young." A mere third, Supaari had not been tended by a nursemaid. Dagasha, a Runao who had been nurse to his second-oldest brother, had sometimes let Supaari listen to the stories she told Vijar at red light. "There is one I remember," he said. He still failed to understand Sandoz's purpose, but this diversion would pass the time until they ate.
"Long ago," Supaari began, "in the years before the Triple Alliance, there lived a Jana'ata named Husari Ruum. He was a third-born merchant and owned an apothecary in Lajithir. One season, a terrible plague befell the VaLajithiri Jana'ata, and many became sick and died. Husari Ruum worked in the apothecary day and night, and eventually he was able to concoct a root paste that cured the plague. For this, he was given the greatest honor and made a founder.
"Once bestowed with breeding rights, Husari Ruum had two sons. These two sons were as different as land and sea. The younger was an honor to his lineage, but the older son was often idle. He cared for little but lazing in the sun and thought himself ill-suited for army life. And so, when the time came for him to fulfill his military duty, the older son devised a plan. He hired a village Runao, and clothed her in armor and traveling robes he had soaked in his own scent. Once disguised, he told the Runao to march in his place with the army to the Great Southern Forest.
Supaari leaned back onto his pile of cushions. The plodding recitation of the morality tale was making him drowsy with sleep. He was glad to see one of the Runa servants arrive with their meal. There was a platter of roast for him and a paste of gomu root for Sandoz, in a wide shallow bowl so he could scoop the gruel with his hands. Meals remained the greatest failure of Supaari's hospitality, as he had not yet discovered a preparation of the meat that suited Sandoz's palate. When Sandoz first requested the meal being eaten by the servants, Supaari had rushed to assure him that not even hasta'akala were required to eat animal feed.
When Supaari had eaten his fill, he continued the story.
"The older son took a barge to the coast," Supaari said. "He intended to pass for third-born and work as an apothecary merchant as his father once had. It was an obscenely dishonorable plan, of course, but he was free from the life of a soldier, and so he was happy. But he was foolish as well as dishonorable, and had no smell for the healing elixirs. Indeed, he was barely fit to wash perfume bottles with the Runa. Penniless and alone, gnawing at scraps of stew meat, the son began to wonder if he had made a mistake.
"One day, the news reached the coast that the entire VaLajithiri army had perished when a fire swept the Great Southern Forest. 'Aha!' the older son said to himself. 'My father will believe that I have died. He will be so grateful to lay eyes on me that he will not be angry with my dishonorable acts.' And so he traveled to Lajithir, wearing a heavy veil because he was supposed to be dead. He arrived at his father's compound and pulled away his veil. 'Look!' he said, 'You son lives!' And he began to tell Husari Ruum what he had done.
"But Husari Ruum could not bear to listen to his first-born son's shameful story, and so he slashed the boy's throat. 'It is better to have no son than one with such poor and unfortunate traits as this one,' he said. Then Husari Ruum ordered a servant to bring him his traveling robes. 'But where shall my lord go?' the servant asked. 'This matter is surely finished.' And Husari Ruum said, 'No, it is not finished. By sunset, one will conclude the affairs of this patrimony.'"
At this, Sandoz cocked his head. "Before red light, this one settles all family debts," he said in his fumbling K'San.
Supaari knit his claws together in annoyance, unsure of Sandoz's meaning. Sandoz looked down at his own hands, arranged artlessly in his lap. Supaari had offered to find a Runao who could train him in the aesthetic display of hasta'akala, but this had been one more activity that held no interest.
"Al Pacino. The Godfather," Sandoz said in cryptic H'inglish, and then, "Jokes just don't translate." Switching back to K'San, he said, "This worthless one begs forgiveness for his interruption."
"Husari Ruum traveled to Inbrokar," Supaari continued, "where his second-born son held a position in the provincial government. When he stood before his son, Husari Ruum said, 'This lineage has bled feral. The only honorable act is to cauterize it.' Obedient to his very last, the son offered his neck.
"With the scent of his younger son's blood still fresh, Husari Ruum now drew his claws to his own throat. And so the final branch of his patrimony was pruned, but Husari Ruum was able to die happy, because he had cured one last plague."
Finished at last, Supaari flicked his ears to excuse the story's poor entertainment value. As he often did during their mealtime conversations, Sandoz smelled of salt. It was curious, as the foreigners never smelled so strongly when Supaari had dined with them in Kashan. He wondered why this was. But Sandoz's ears, immobile and uncommunicative as ever, told him nothing at all.
LOS ANGELES:
2054
Felipe Reyes didn't keep a lot of junk in his office.
More than one of his colleagues had joked that Felipe's office was "monastic," earning themselves a spontaneous lecture on the differences between various Catholic religious orders, delivered by Felipe more as an irritated scholar of comparative religion than an offended Jesuit. Caught between two worlds for most of his life, Felipe believed some things really were mutually exclusive. As a Jesuit he professed the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, but as a university professor, he gladly used the latest in computer tablet technology to prepare his lectures and upload his exams. He maintained delineation by stashing the tablet in his office before he left campus at the end of each day, though he was often guilty of using it to check baseball scores between classes.
Sitting in his office long after his last lecture of the day, Felipe considered the tablet. The surface was heat-sensitive, so his fingers could hover just above the screen without touching it, eliminating the friction drag created by his prostheses. It was a technological marvel he never could have imagined as a kid, when he'd broken into combustion engine cars and stolen smartphones so big they were the size of playing cards.
Felipe knew now that the first secret preparation for the Rakhat mission must have happened right under his own thieving, dirt-smeared nine-year-old nose. At the time, Father Sandoz had told the La Pearla parishioners he was being transferred by the Society to a position in Rome. For Felipe as a child, Rome might as well have been Rakhat.
"Mater tua futuit hircorum," Felipe had muttered when Father Sandoz said his final goodbyes at the Jesuit Center.
"That could be true," Father Sandoz had said, sitting down next to Felipe in the last row of pews. "My mother might have copulated with goats. I'm like you, Felipe, I never knew my father."
Felipe hadn't responded, determined to sulk in silence.
"Men like us," Father Sandoz had said, gesturing between himself and Felipe, "without fathers waiting for us at home, we have to travel much further to seek our fortune. I have to go now. Remember me in your prayers, and look to the stars."
"For God, you mean," Felipe had said with a snort. He'd drawn his next words out, letting them drip with sarcasm. "For my heavenly father, right?"
Father Sandoz had patted him on the shoulder, his face both amused and sad. "Something like that," he'd said. And so Father Sandoz had followed the stars to meet the Singers while Felipe followed a road Father Sandoz had already travelled, to a life with the Society of Jesus. Years later, after the mission to Rakhat had been publicized and Felipe had learned to laugh over Father Sandoz's cryptic goodbye, he'd still looked to the stars, imagining the parish priest of his childhood as his own secret saint.
Felipe had entered the novitiate at San Estanislao Kostka as one of a dozen first-year novices. Two decades later, he was the only one who remained a Jesuit.
As with any class of novices, three had left before the end of the first two years. Of those who took the final vows, two had caused quite a scandal when they later renounced their vows in order to marry. Of course, by then marriage was a common path away from the priesthood, but these two had left the Society in order to marry each other. One had renounced his vows in the wake of the publicity surrounding the fate of the Rakhat mission, this time fleeing a scandal rather than causing it. A short time later, after the Suppression, four more had left both the priesthood and the Church. One other remained a priest, but he had withdrawn from the Society and joined a remote Somascan mission in Guatemala.
Only Felipe remained. "If I hadn't joined the Society, right now I'd either be running drugs or sitting in prison," Felipe said to the Provincial when he received his most recent assignment. "I'm not exactly afraid of guilt by association."
And so Father Felipe Reyes, S.J., Ph.D., took a position at the Jesuit Theological Seminary at UCLA. In the first chaotic months after the Bull of Suppression, the Society encouraged its members to accept posts at unaffiliated universities. It was for their protection, but also to support Vincenzo Giuliani's fledgling public relations campaign, designed to remind the public that Jesuits had historically been academics and scholars, not closeted homosexuals and infanticidal prostitutes.
Sitting alone in his dark office, the only light from the glow of the tablet, Felipe remained dubious of the Society's image rehabilitation efforts. Vincenzo Giuliani was a cutthroat son-of-a-bitch and his family tree had equally deep roots in the priesthood and the southern Italian mafia. But even God and Giuliani gangsters couldn't control Hollywood. Movies based on the events of the Rakhat mission made more money at the box office than running black tar heroin out of Port-a-Prince.
The movie displayed on Felipe's tablet screen had the lurid title of The Devil and Emilio Sandoz. Felipe tried to avoid any of the trash that breathlessly claimed to be based on the incredible true events of the Rakhat mission. But this morning before class, the freshmen in his Introduction to the Old Testament lecture had been sending this video clip to each other's tablets, barely hiding their laughter with hands cupped over their mouths. On impulse, Felipe let his index finger hover above the "play" button.
On the screen, there was a priest and a teenage boy, meant to be Dalton Wesley Yarbrough and Emilio Sandoz. They were in a dim office lit with candles. The priest sat behind a heavy wooden desk and boy stood before him.
Do you know the Parable of the Prodigal Son, Emilio?
No, Father.
The prodigal son left his home behind. He wanted to make his way as a man in the world, but he was foolish, and he made some mistakes. He was like you, Emilio. He did whatever he needed to do to get by.
Yes, Father.
Felipe never met the Father Superior, but he'd heard stories from the older members of the La Pearla congregation. They'd remembered a Father Yarbrough whose face was as ugly as a monkey's asshole, making it no hardship to keep their heads bowed during mass. The Father Yarbrough on the screen had movie star good looks and wore the blood-red robes of a cardinal, which of course no active Jesuit would ever do. The teenage Emilio looked like a five-peso puto, straight off the street corner in Old San Juan.
On the screen, the boy circled the desk and the priest leaned back in his chair.
You're in a lot of trouble with the police right now, Emilio. But you want to go to this school, right? You're willing to do whatever you need to do, aren't you?
Of course, Father.
Well, then, why doesn't this prodigal son show the father how grateful he is?
The priest pushed his chair back from the desk and the boy started to sink down to his knees. Before he could get there, Felipe almost slapped the tablet off his desk trying to close the video screen. His face was burning so hot he was surprised it didn't illuminate the pitch-dark office. He was embarrassed that someone out in the hall might think Professor Father Reyes was watching softcore porn and almost more embarrassed by the movie's godawful dialogue.
Alone in the dark in his empty office, Felipe could appreciate the irony. No one had loved old movies more than Father Sandoz. "'Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!'" he'd declared when he'd quizzed the neighborhood kids about the graffiti in the chapel. And now there were kids out there quoting movies about the life of Emilio Sandoz. One of the students in this morning's lecture had slid up to another at his desk and said, "'Do you know the Parable of the Prodigal Son?'" The kid had tried keep his face in a seductive leer but he'd nearly fallen off the desk laughing instead.
As usual, Felipe Reyes was caught between two worlds, believing they could be mutually exclusive. There was the Emilio Sandoz he remembered and the one they made movies about. The priest who did magic tricks and the boy who whored himself through boarding school. The man who'd saved Felipe's life and the one who'd killed a child on an alien world. "Don't kid yourself, Reyes," Felipe muttered, and slipped the tablet into a desk drawer.
GIORDANO BRUNO:
2073, EARTH-RELATIVE
As they got closer to their destination, John Candotti made it his mission to coax Emilio into eating more meals.
"C'mon, man," he said when Emilio stayed on the treadmill through the entire dinner hour, "do you really want to show up there underweight?"
"If you recall, I don't actually want to show up there at all." Emilio's braces were discarded on the floor by the machine. He ran with the base of his palms balanced on the treadmill's display, letting his ruined fingers hang down like spider legs. The Father General himself had briefed John on Emilio's medical condition when John had arrived in Naples, but he'd still nearly lost his lunch the first time he saw Emilio's mangled hands.
Pausing at the doorway of the gym, Carlo shot John and Emilio a raised eyebrow. "Do eat up, Sandoz," he said. "I know you didn't care for the local cuisine on your last visit."
"Oh, screw you," Emilio huffed. Carlo blew him a kiss in reply, before continuing to stroll down the corridor to his bunk. John winced. Emilio gave John a long look, then said, "Fine, fine, okay. Let's go eat something."
John shepherded Emilio to the galley and served them each a plate of Nico's eggplant parmigiana. John had already eaten with the rest of the crew, but he knew there was less chance that Emilio would eat anything if John was just sitting there watching him. He wasn't an ecologist or a pilot and he would always speak Runa with a South Side accent, but John Candotti could sure as hell put on a Christmas pageant, win a CYO basketball game and get a decent meal into someone.
John had dreamt of deep space adventures when he was a kid, but he'd always imagined his role would be as the cocky swashbuckler, not the mother hen.
"You know," John said, rubbing the back of his neck, "this isn't how I thought it would be."
"What part," Emilio asked, looking up from pushing food around on his plate, "the kidnapping? The mafia prince with delusions of grandeur? The part where our pilot might eat himself to death?" Emilio was deft with the fork and knife in a way John never would have believed a year ago. He wished Emilio could see the miracle of it, but John knew better than to tell Emilio things like that.
"The food," John said thoughtfully. "I mean, it's good. But it's just regular food, you know? I thought there'd be astronaut ice cream."
"Seriously?" Emilio asked, eyes exaggeratedly wide. "NASA was dismantled before you were born. How do you even know about astronaut ice cream?"
"Oh, I like all that stuff," John said, running a piece of bread through a red sea of marinara sauce. "I like the old sci-fi movies. The ones they make now that we know for sure that there's life on other planets, they're not the same, they're boring." Most of them were recycled crap about the first Rakhat mission, but if Emilio didn't know that, John was happy to let him remain oblivious. "You know, like the original Star Wars trilogy," John added. "Those movies had everything. It's a classic story of resurrection and forgiveness, I would've made the parish catechism classes watch it every year at Easter if I thought I could get away with it."
"What's the lesson there?" Emilio asked with a small smirk. "Use the Force?"
"The lesson--" John paused, because bringing up God at the dinner table was the fastest way to upset Emilio's stomach, and then John would have spent all that time getting a meal into him for nothing. "The lesson," John started again, "is that God's love is the forgiveness that's waiting for you before you even turn to look for it, and it's yours to have even if you don't deserve it. The prodigal son's father ran to meet him at the edge of the village before the son could even beg for absolution, and Luke Skywalker went to the Death Star to tell Darth Vader that he forgave him when Vader was still trying to kill him, before Vader ever turned away from the Dark Side."
"So what you're saying is that Star Wars is the Parable of the Prodigal Father?" Emilio asked. His eyes darted away as he said it, and for a brief moment John could tell Emilio had gone somewhere else, one more unforeseen land mine in a field sewn with dead friends and regrets. But then the moment was over. "Father Candotti," Emilio said blandly, "as this ship's resident medic, it is my duty to inform you that you are suffering from space madness." Emilio pushed away his plate and left the table. But he'd eaten more than half the meal, and for John, that was enough.
NAPLES:
2101
He had never returned to Puerto Rico.
Several different people had offered to help him arrange a trip to San Juan during that brief interlude between his two journeys to Rakhat. First Brother Edward, then John Candotti and later Gina. John was the one to make the mistake of asking about family. Emilio had laughed bitterly, remembering a conversation with D.W. from a lifetime ago. "Who would be waiting to hike up their robes and run to meet me?" he'd said. "No one, John. There's no one. Let it go."
By now, there was both no one and nothing to go back to. Global temperature and sea level had continued to rise according to Joseba Urizarbarrena's gloomy predictions. La Pearla had washed out to sea decades ago.
But Emilio had stopped trying to cauterize his old wounds and he still loved baseball. So when San Juan made the World Series in '01, he sat Tommaso down on the couch in his apartment and said, very seriously, "Tommaso, it is time to talk about your inheritance."
"This," Emilio said, making a sweeping gesture at the image on the holoscreen, "is baseball."
Tommaso furrowed his eyebrows. "Nonno, why are those people wearing pajamas?"
Emilio sighed. "Don't worry," he said, ruffling Tommaso's hair with loose fingers, "your nonna thought the uniforms were ugly, too."
They sat back on the couch together. Emilio explained the basic rules of the game, and, much more importantly, which team they wanted to win. "Does this mean we don't have to do our homework?" Tommaso asked.
Emilio nodded. "Just this once, bambino," he said. "Don't tell your mother."
Now that Tommaso was in school, he and Emilio were learning Japanese together. "I skipped all the Altaic languages before," Emilio had told Ariana at dinner last week, "so Tommaso's already better than me at the pitch-accent. Although, hmm, I don't know, is Japanese still Altaic? They were thinking about reclassifying it as Ainu about a hundred years ago." Ariana had rolled her eyes, and Emilio had declared this was proof that a man was never too old to learn how to exasperate his daughter.
When Emilio had returned from Rakhat for the second time, his only plan was to quietly live out his days and never go anywhere by space flight ever again. He had no room in his head to learn another language and no room in his heart to love and lose one more single person.
But man plans and God laughs and so, at something resembling 49 years old, Emilio had met his 34-year-old daughter. "It's so confusing," Ariana had said. "You would've had to have been fifteen when I was born, then, right?"
Emilio had winced. "That could have been entirely possible," he'd said. "I wasn't born a priest. But that was, what, a hundred and fifteen years ago?" And so he'd gotten an apartment in Naples. During the day he wrote papers and some nights he babysat his grandson, cooking him the same macaroni and cheese he'd used to win the heart of Tommaso's Aunt Celestina.
San Juan's pitcher had a wicked slider and a long braid that whipped around her neck when she fell forward into her delivery. The Catholic Church may have managed to keep women from the priesthood, but with spontaneous metabolic mutations on the rise there was no keeping women out of professional baseball. She struck out the last batter and the top of the first inning gave way to a commercial break. When the announcers welcomed the viewing audience back to sunny Puerto Rico, Emilio snorted. It was clear on the holoscreen that San Juan was hanging under the same old patch of hazy smog.
"Where's Puerto Rico?" Tommaso asked.
"It's very far away," Emilio said. "Across the ocean. It's the place where I was born." He hissed when San Juan got a runner on base but then grounded into a double play. "When I was your age," he added, "I used to dream that someday I'd leave Puerto Rico to go play professional baseball."
"Did you?"
"I left Puerto Rico, yes. But I swung the bat like a limp noodle, so I never made it to the big leagues."
"And so you came here instead?"
Emilio shook his head. "No, not exactly, first I went to school, and then a few other places, and then I went back to Puerto Rico for a while, and -- well, it's a very long story, bambino."
"You went on a rocket ship to the moon. Mamma told me. That's why you need all your medicines."
"That's true," Emilio said. "But I went a little further than the moon."
The next batter hit a pop-up to shallow center field. The outfielder had been playing too deep, nearly up against the wall. He sprinted out to meet the ball, diving forward just in time to watch the ball land right in front of his face. Emilio laughed while the ball skittered past the player as he collapsed into a complete belly flop, but Tommaso frowned.
"I don't like that!" Tomasso said, thumping his hands against the couch cushions with the kind of outrage at uncontrollable embarrassment that only children can feel. "Why did he do that if it the ball was going to fall anyway?"
"He didn't know the ball was going to fall," Emilio said, patting Tomasso's hand, his overly-long fingers covering Tomasso's small ones. "But it's okay. He knows that God knows we can all be made a little ridiculous sometimes."
They turned their attention back to the game. The next hitter got ahold of one and drove the ball straight out of the park. The holoscreen camera followed it in a long arc that looked like it might go on forever, through the sky and above the clouds, until it reached the stars.