The Strange Bird

by Jeff VanderMeer

  But still, somehow, they found her because she had a beacon on her back. They lunged out of the buried and burned places in the sand and thus at the Strange Bird who as passenger could do nothing but take the quick rending of their claws in ambush before the Magician startled away, injured but not fatally.

  The slash of fangs that just missed the mark, but did not miss the Strange Bird. But what was being cleaved and torn to one who had been so utterly destroyed already? There had been so much rending away before this, so many times she could not escape but must withstand whatever came at her, that the Strange Bird did not panic or even register the pain.

  In the lee of an abandoned facility, the purpose of which had been lost to time and the sands, the Magician rested, enraged—gasping for breath and cursing her bad luck. Ranting at how preternatural the bears’ tracking skills had been, when it was the foxes that kept their aim true, left the clues that betrayed the Magician’s position.

  They had been chased the entire night by Mord’s proxies and into the dawn and the Magician did not care her cloak was leaking blood into the sand, and what that might mean for her camouflage, but only to tend her bruised ribs, and the long, shallow gash across her back, which was a cut in the Strange Bird that had sliced right through.

  “They think they have me,” the Magician told the Strange Bird crushed between her back and the wall. “But no one knows the Company building like I do. Except Wick, and he’s headed there, too. If he makes it, I’ll shadow him and pick his pockets. If not, you and I can still gather ourselves, wait it out.”

  The Strange Bird had no response. She existed in a peculiar world where for hours she had seen and heard only secondhand, her senses shut down.

  The foxes were her eyes and ears instead, and she heard the Magician say those words from the vantage of a fox sneaking close, saw through the fox’s eyes. How the Magician was invisible and the cloak was invisible, but for a flickering blue flame across the top of the cowl that only they could see, that was the Strange Bird’s beacon.

  The flame she must keep alive, must keep alive. She had imagined it as red, as pulsing red, but it was blue, blue as the fox head on the Magician’s wall.

  * * *

  Still the Magician pushed on, past her own exhaustion, past the exhaustion of her living cloak. She laid her own traps, doubled back, found ways to evade as if she knew she must be visible to some, until the Company building lay not an hour’s travel ahead of them. The Strange Bird could feel the growing concern of the foxes, something ancient and brittle and deep that made her shiver and doubt whether she knew them at all.

  While behind them lay a horizon too terrible for the Magician to look at, something that made the Magician gasp the one time she had turned back to gaze upon it. Something that the foxes did not want to show the Strange Bird, that she must strain her blurry vision to make it out, and only in the end could tell that Mord fought something as monstrous as himself against the skyline.

  “There is only what is ahead,” the Magician told her traitorous cloak.

  While the ghost of Charlie X stalked them both, and his surgical mice chittered to the Strange Bird their ridiculous complaints. About the repetition of their work and their years of devotion to their host, expecting, perhaps, that she might have sympathy having served the Magician for so long. But she did not.

  In the darkness, Charlie X eventually receded and she understood the mice that spoke to her were not the ones she had known, and that the tunnels there teemed with life, even if she no longer had the dark, glittering net with which to capture the traces, bring them close.

  Plunging into the depths of the Company building. Down, down, down while the Magician murmured reassurance meant only for herself and then silence, the foxes having left her, and there was only the dark and the wound cutting through the middle of her and the certain knowledge that she was done, could not go on, finally could not go on, and in the darkness there was only Sanji, or the ghost of Sanji, or the Strange Bird talking to herself, saying, “Now it is time to rest.”

  * * *

  The last transmission to her from that underground world: a vision of a better place, a place that did not exist in the world, and she could see birds in flight frozen in that image, birds that she envied, for they had been captured at the exact moment when they would never have to obey anything but the air, the wind.

  Then she was falling into the Company building. She was falling from the island perch into the sea below, because she had glimpsed for a moment, just one single instant, that the crocodiles were gone, that it was safe to fall, and the only thing left to her was to fall.

  So she fell, limp and formless into the sea, and the sea wrapped itself around her in a comforting embrace, the most kindness she had ever known. To be nourished and yet to be weightless, to not be part of someone else or be seen through someone else’s eyes. But just to be herself.

  And it was painful because she knew that could not be true, that it was a trick.

  She was just a surface. She was never the bird striking the glass but only the windowpane, and she could no longer even see herself.

  Time could not fix that.

  The Fifth Dream

  The tree on the island had lost all of its leaves and the crocodiles were skeletons. She sat huddled in the dead tree and from the island spread out the desert in all its desolate glory, and half-buried there, as after a storm: all of the dead animals from the lab, motionless but for their eyes. The blue fox no longer shone from above. There was just a vague, limitless glare.

  She had no wings now, as she stood beside the tree, which had withered away to almost nothing. She could not remember her wings anymore, and thus they had fallen away from her.

  “We gave up luxuries before they were gone, because we knew they would be gone soon,” Sanji told her, sitting there beside her. “We knew it would be harder if we waited until they became extinct. We knew we would never survive that. So we made do with less and less. Not just luxuries but so much more beside. We put more of ourselves into other things.”

  “Into me,” the Strange Bird said.

  “Yes, into you.”

  “You never showed me kindness or consideration.”

  “I showed you both.”

  “You were cruel.”

  “Imagine being confronted by the end of the world. Imagine having the person you cared about so distant at a time when you needed not just her but what she was working on. Imagine everything going dark and not being able to talk to that person, even as you held part of the key. Imagine struggling so desperately hard and long to put it right.”

  “What is the compass inside me?”

  “A last chance. A last hope. A kind of song only you can sing. Hidden.”

  “Where was I meant to go?”

  “You have already been there.”

  But they were no longer on the island. They were in the garden, beside the apple trees, walking through the tall grass, after a session in the blood room, and there was nothing left to say.

  What Did She Hope For?

  Monsters fought and the world was drenched in fire and rain. While she was trapped in a sack. Swinging upside down. In a trapdoor coffin with a little bat-faced man. Up a tree. Falling through the air. Falling through the darkness.

  Strange Bird plunged into a rich sea, a thick, warm sea that wrapped itself around her, comforting, nourishing as she floated in its embrace. How good it felt, to be weightless, to not be worn, to not be part of someone else. For by this sensation she also knew the Magician must be cast out or dead.

  Just to float and all around the glide and waft and drift of that … There were other creatures in the mire with her, languid in their passage, but they did not concern her. Embracing her were long, thin worms and they did not concern her, either. Where their touch alighted, her flesh healed and reasserted itself. There was a trickling sound, as of water filling a tub, and she was steadily lifted higher as the water level rose.

  Her mind was c
lear even if her senses were muffled, as if she had taken a long, peaceful sleep and woken up without an alarm to prompt her. But when had she ever set an alarm?

  From above, a beam of sunlight and faces that stared down at her around the edges of the pond. Not cruel, but concerned. Not angry, but seeking to help. The faces of Rachel and Wick, and by this and the ceiling above, the Strange Bird knew that she was no longer in the Company building but in the Balcony Cliffs, in the stronghold of the enemies of her enemies.

  Wick had cuts across his forehead and bloodshot eyes, a translucent, gaunt quality to him. Rachel was grimy and had nicks and burns. Whatever they had endured had been harrowing. Whatever they had endured had just ended, and by this, too, the Strange Bird knew not much time had passed.

  “What is this thing?” Rachel said, cloudy, coming to the Strange Bird as if from a great height, from a place impossibly remote.

  “What isn’t it?” Wick replied, turning from his scrutiny of the Strange Bird to stare at Rachel.

  “Can it fly?” Rachel asked.

  “It has no wings,” Wick replied.

  “Does it bite?”

  “If it does, should we eat it?”

  “Much worse to eat a bomb than a beacon, I think I have heard you say. Should we end it? Is it dangerous?”

  “No. It isn’t. It’s just weary and wary and ill-used, like all of us. It is not … itself. It can never be itself again.”

  Wick smiled wryly, something passing between them that was ancient, older than the Strange Bird, and that she would never intuit but could only observe. Something being set aside or reclaimed. While Rachel’s hand was on his shoulder, as if in support.

  “Can you save it?” Rachel asked Wick. “Should you?” A cryptic expression. Perhaps she would decide a living cloak was not worth concerning themselves with. Perhaps they would discard her as she had been discarded before.

  Wick was busy unfolding part of the Strange Bird that had become tangled, spreading her across the thick water of the healing pool. His touch did not concern her. How thoughtful that they had dimmed the lights above so that she might not be blinded, so that the comfortable glow reminded her of winter by a low warm fire. When had she ever known winter? Or a fireplace?

  “It’s salvage,” Rachel said. “Not worth much now. Look at all the scars. That wound right through the middle. The feathers—lost their color, lost their sparkle. I took this thing out of that place even though it looked dead already. I don’t know why.”

  Still Wick remained silent, staring down at the Strange Bird’s one good eye, at the mess that was her now, considering, reading what the diagnostic worms told him as they wrapped the Strange Bird in their spell.

  If you could have seen me as the dark wings did, the Strange Bird thought.

  But Rachel must have thought the silence meant disinterest, for she turned away, said, “I can just put it outside to fend for itself. Or use it for scraps. It’s not important now … if that is what you want to do.”

  A tremor, a tremble, there from Wick, of a secret emotion, a sympathy that did not allow him to look at Rachel as he said it. But also in her gaze toward him the look of a companion who knew her partner so well that they did not need words.

  “Can you believe the Magician wore this poor creature?” Wick said, not answering Rachel. “She also made it, in a way.” Wick had a look of awe and disgust on his face. The Magician made this creature into a cloak. I recognize her sutures, her markers.”

  “What was it before?”

  “A mix of things, but in outward form … a bird. A large bird with iridescent wings. A powerful bird, to make such a long cloak. No matter how the Magician butchered it.”

  “Outward form?”

  “Too much human in it. Very complex. Nervous system modified. Can still see those places. Neurons redistributed, not just in what was the head, but in the feathers, which are a hybrid, contain cephalopod. That is why she can still think—her brains are all over her body. I don’t know if the Magician knew that.”

  “That … is human?”

  Wick nodded, hands were on the Strange Bird again. Soft, quiet hands, and where they touched her, information flowing into Wick through his fingers.

  “Sometimes a creator will leave a signature. I’m just searching for the signature.”

  “What was it made to do before the Magician?”

  Wick shrugged. “Only guesses. There could be more than one reason. But before the Magician got hold of her, this bird was a kind of … dispersal system for genetic material. It would have been reseeding the world as it flew. Microscopic organisms.”

  “But now?”

  “The Magician snuffed that out, took away her wings, too. Took away her bones.” Wick withdrew his hands from the Strange Bird. “The signature is much more than that. Sometime before the Magician altered her, someone modified her to add a lot more human functionality and decision making. Very specific. Normally, this would be distributed, pulled from multiple sources. This is one source. This transfer conveyed personality traits, too.”

  “I don’t understand. Is that important?”

  “Important? I don’t know. Interesting, definitely. Whoever did this shortened their own lifespan to do so, or at least weakened themselves. As if it was more important part of them be in this new form.”

  Their silence, the weariness on their faces, was the Strange Bird’s weariness, too. For the bloodshed, for the senseless acts in the name of order, the name of the city’s resurrection.

  She knew it took them an effort not just to discard her.

  * * *

  Inside the Strange Bird, the worms moved, binding up the wounded places, and with each moment the beacon became more of a compass again and the little foxes were receding, no longer needed or needing her, and she saw them again where they belonged, on the distant dunes, their smiling expressions in the slit of sunlight, the love that came from them for each other and for her and for their fallen comrade, the blue fox the Magician had nailed to the wall. So long gone in truth, and although the island had disappeared, she felt the loss, but only for a moment, and the worms were still making her strong and waking her up, returning what the Magician’s spider had taken away, making stalwart what had been malleable, and she felt the urge to fly although she could not.

  “You are strong,” Sanji said in her head. “You have a compass within you. You will leave this place. You will survive it.” And for the first time, the Strange Bird believed that it might be true, but not because Sanji had said it.

  Wick was still talking and the Strange Bird listened with half an ear, understanding some things and not others. Wanting to know some things and not to know others.

  “There’s something else, too,” Wick said. “A kind of genetic imperative, buried deep, tied to a location. This bird, this creature, would, for most of its life, have felt an overwhelming desire to reach that place, ever since the modifications that made it more human. And deep in that place, too, there is a message it has carried, encoded so I can’t read it.”

  “Should we let it go, then?” a particular weight on this.

  “Yes. Yes. After everything that … If we can. She can’t be fixed, not in the usual way. There are things gone forever and things I can’t replace and things I don’t understand. But I can stay true to what she was meant to be. I can strip away the conditioning. The coordinates will remain, but what I fashion out of this … this mess … will be able to choose for itself what it does, where it goes. This creature hasn’t had that for a long time.”

  * * *

  In the end, there were four from one, when Wick lifted the Strange Birds from the vat of his converted swimming pool, and the rest of what had been a living cloak sinking insensate to the bottom, there to be fed upon by the little fishes and the mudskippers and the things without fins that hid there and wished not to be found. To be sent into motion, to dance, in the darkness, by the sharp, quick kiss of teeth and the snap and tear so that the cloak seemed to dance f
or a time, to rise and fall as of its own volition but only, really, by the will of those who feasted upon it, and the dying cells did not mind, wandered where they would, passed from mouth to mouth and honored in their way.

  The Strange Birds made their way to the balcony, two held by Rachel and two by Wick. They were finch-small, drab, but swift and clever, and each identical to the others and each believed they were the original, and each held every memory of the others. They stared at one another and saw themselves. Trilled out chirps that were coordinates and communication both, the secret code of all things. Their minds were the same as before, but quicksilver, darting.

  The lightness of their bodies was a marvel for them, a celebration and a miracle. Dispensing with weight as if it, too, were a cumbersome cloak sinking to the bottom of the pool.

  The hands that held them released them up into the air over the poison river at the same time, tossed them up with laughter and celebration, like benediction for that place, and up, up, up they flew out into the sky together, in delight, exulting in the feel of it, the sheer power of movement, doubled back to look as one upon the couple standing on the balcony, and then wheeling over the river, through the trees that lined it, and then south.

  No longer the Strange Bird, but always the Strange Bird.

  Where Was She Headed?

  The ecstasy of flight, the ecstasy of choice, and three of the four chose where the compass pointed—southeast and southeast and southeast, singing the song of that imprinted in their heads. The fourth wanted no part of either compass or city, but only solitude, and struck out to the north, and they held that Strange Bird blameless and sang to her until she was just a dot on the horizon.

  Then off the three went in earnest, buffeted by the air, unused to the lightness of their bodies after being so earthbound and heavy, and their flight at least in part to flee the memory, to escape from what had been so terrible to bear. Their bodies shining with the sunlight, their beaks bright, their eyes bright.

  Over the city and out into the desert, beyond the ruined Company building and beyond the little foxes and beyond any reach of the Magician’s ghost. Across the vast stretches they flew, with purpose, into and through blazing heat, like arrows shot to the heart of a target. On they sped. Alert, alert, alert. Avoid, avoid, avoid. Looping and dipping in their passage and twisting around together, dispersing, for flying after so long would forever be so new.