When the Sparrow Falls

by Neil Sharpson

  I told her that while she had been living a life of luxury in Azadlig, my mother and I had been trying to survive on a war widow’s pension in a two-room flat on Moscow Street with no heating and that she did not get to lecture me on privilege.

  She had called me a murderer.

  I had yelled at her that I had never murdered anyone. I had killed, yes. For my country and for my people. Was a soldier a murderer? Was her father a murderer?

  “Soldiers kill people who can fight back,” she had said. “Those twenty Ajay kids gunned down in Shaki, did they put up a good fight? Glorious battle was it?”

  I had protested: that had been the army, not StaSec, not me.…

  “No, Nicky,” she had cut across me. “It’s you. As long as you carry a gun for them, you’re part of it. It’s all you.”

  A knock on the back door. Soft, apologetic, gentle. Barely audible over the rolling hum of the rain on the roof tiles. I padded wearily to the kitchen and pulled the door open.

  She stood there in the doorway, a fountain in a dress, rain pouring down her long auburn hair in rivulets. She cocked her head at me, a smile half apologetic and half teasing, equal parts Sorry and Miss me?

  Without a word, I let her in. She stood in the kitchen, looking around anxiously like a stranger at a party. I got her a towel and she undressed then and there and dried her hair while I gathered up her clothes. They were soaked through, less like she had gone walking in a storm than that she had been swimming. Jokingly, I asked her if she had jumped in the sea.

  “I was pacing in the street outside for an hour,” she said. “I was worried one of your mates would get the wrong idea and arrest me for solicitation.”

  “Why?”

  She looked at me, like I was an optical illusion and she just couldn’t see what I was meant to be. She shook her head tiredly.

  “Didn’t know if I should knock,” she said. “Didn’t know if you wanted me to. Didn’t know if I wanted to. Still don’t. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I should go.…”

  She looked around for her clothes to get dressed and leave. I took her wrist in my hand.

  “Stay,” I said.

  That’s a lie.

  “Stay,” I begged.

  Whatever was pulling her to leave let go. She stood there, my hand on her wrist. She didn’t take it. She didn’t brush it off. She simply remained.

  Olesya was proud, above all things. Coming here would have cost her a great deal.

  I would have to bridge the remaining distance. Fortunately, I have never been called “proud.”

  “I have missed you,” I said, and the words felt so paltry and small compared to the thing they were trying to describe. “I need you.”

  Hardly poetry, but sometimes small, simple words get through where long, flowery sentences would snag.

  She took my hand and gave it a cold, wet squeeze.

  “Ever since the funeral all I’ve wanted…”

  I stopped. Her grip had become corpse-like. Her breath caught in her throat and for a moment her expression was coldly furious.

  I shouldn’t have mentioned the funeral. Her father had passed away two months ago. She was obviously still hurting, and hurting badly. I was, too.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have…”

  Suddenly, she was a different woman. She placed a finger on my lip and smiled gently.

  “It’s all right,” she soothed. “It’s all right. I know.” She sighed. “Nicky, I haven’t treated you very well, have I?”

  I felt that there was a time for candor and a time for tact, and this was the latter.

  “Why did you come back?” I asked.

  “Are you angry?” she asked, not distracted in the slightest.

  I said nothing for a few seconds. The kitchen felt only a few feet wide, like we were trapped together in a cell. Every breath felt like a prelude to catastrophe.

  “Yes,” I said truthfully.

  “Fair,” she said.

  There were rules. Yell at me, if you will. Leave me, fine. Fly across the country and shack up in some cabin with one of your artist friends, perfectly acceptable.

  But tell me where you’re going. That was the rule, unspoken but perfectly understood and ironclad. I had finally believed that she was gone for good, not because she had run away, but because she had left no trail to follow.

  She buried her head in the towel and I heard her say, matter-of-factly, “We don’t work, you and I. I can’t change and you won’t stop changing. The man I married is different from the man I met, the man you are now is different from the man I married. Who will you be tomorrow, Nikolai?”

  “Your husband,” I said. “I hope.”

  “So do I,” she said. “Because I’ve realized something rather embarrassing. I love you, and I don’t like being away from you.”

  “But we don’t work,” I said wearily.

  “No,” she said. “You make me crazy and I make you miserable.”

  “I was miserable when you were gone,” I said, an understatement to the point of a lie.

  “Well then,” she said. “Which misery do you prefer?”

  “This,” I said. “I prefer this.”

  “Good,” she said. “So do I.”

  “You’re shivering,” I said.

  “It’s cold. Could you get me some clothes, please?”

  “No,” I said. And I kissed her.

  * * *

  We used big, old dial phones in the Caspian Republic. Ancient. Analog. Unhackable. And, if one went off beside you while you were sleeping, loud enough to rattle your teeth. I lurched up and out of bed and grabbed the phone clumsily and wheezed the word “South…”

  “You didn’t really think I’d let you sleep in just because you’ve been reassigned, did you?” said a voice at the other end.

  “Who is this?” I felt wretched. From the hot haze on my brow and the mottle of phlegm in my mouth I could tell that I’d caught a chill walking home through the sleet.

  “Grier.”

  I slumped back onto my pillow. Grier? I was in no condition for Grier.

  “I don’t know anyone by that name,” I said coldly. “I never have and I never will.”

  “Now, now. Don’t be like that,” Grier chided. “What choice did I have? Anyone would have thought you were for the chop. I was hardly going to stick my neck out and say, ‘Oh please, me too.’ I mean, it’s not like we’re old friends. I don’t even like you. Do you like me?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, there you go,” said Grier, without a hint of rancor.

  I carried the phone into the kitchen and began foraging for breakfast. I found a half-empty box of crackers and poured them into a bowl and began to eat them one by one like some kind of grim mechanism.

  “When are you meeting her?” Grier asked.

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. Xirau.”

  “You’re awfully well informed,” I said.

  “I’m just getting started. Do you know the name Oleg Mansani?”

  “The man who killed Paulo Xirau?”

  “Yes. Turns out he was the boyfriend of Yasmin Paria. And you’ll never guess…”

  “Sheena was involved with Paulo,” I said.

  Grier sounded disappointed. “Oh. How did you know?”

  It had all suddenly clicked into place. I could practically see the damn scene unfold before my eyes. Paulo is seeing Sheena. Oleg is seeing Yasmin. Paulo walks into the bar, sees Yasmin. Kisses the wrong twin, right in front of her boyfriend. It was like something out of a hackneyed comedic farce, except it had ended not with a double wedding but a grubby second-degree murder.

  “Xirau’s file said it was a case of mistaken identity,” I explained. “He kissed Yasmin, thinking she was Sheena.”

  “Ah,” said Grier. “Well, Sheena was apparently the luckier twin. Oleg was a bit of a bastard, by all accounts. Treated Yasmin appallingly. So with him in jail and poor Paulo dead…”

  “The Parias
have no more reason to stay in Caspian. That’s why they decided to be contranned.”

  It was usually the way. Family and friends were often the only tether that kept people in the Caspian Republic. Many decided to flee to the Machine world after a bereavement or a bad breakup. They weren’t just leaving their bodies behind.

  “Do you believe in coincidences, South?” Grier asked.

  I knew what he meant. To be assigned the Parias’ contran case and the Xirau detail in the same day, and now to learn Xirau and Sheena Paria had been involved? There was something going on here. There was a mechanism over my head, whirring menacingly in the shadows. But I couldn’t see its shape. As if suddenly remembering a bad dream, I recalled Chernov’s visit the night before and his theory about a contran operation being run from within StaSec. Chernov … that reminded me.

  “Did Wernham tell you I was escorting Mrs. Xirau?” I asked.

  “He did,” said Grier, smugly.

  “Yes, while I’m sure you’re having a good time I’d be careful what you say around him,” I advised.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s turning tricks for ParSec.”

  The line went silent, and I could practically hear Grier’s brain desperately replaying every conversation he’d had with Wernham in the last year, trying to recall every piece of information and gossip he had entrusted to him.

  “You think I don’t know that?” he said at last.

  “Yes!” I barked angrily, and hung up.

  8

  There was a king, cruel and powerful. One day, he bought a slave and set him to work cleaning and cooking for him. The slave worked tirelessly, never once failing to obey his master, and without so much as the whisper of a complaint ever escaping his lips. The king was pleased with his servant, and began to entrust him with more and more responsibilities. Before long the slave was in charge of the king’s household, commanding other servants, purchasing food and wine and even acting in the king’s stead when he was sick or absent. As the king grew older, he became ill and confined to his bed. The slave ensured that his master was comfortable and wanted for nothing; he ordered the finest doctors in the land to come and live in the palace so that they could be at the king’s bedside at a moment’s notice. The king, now mellowed in his old age, took the slave’s hand and thanked him for his years of faithful, unstinting service. The slave smiled to his master and left the king’s chambers. He then walked to the great hall, and placed the crown upon his head.

  —Leon Mendelssohn, The Slave Enthroned: The Triumvirate and the Death of Democracy

  I was barely dressed when the driver arrived. Like a bad student the morning of an exam I tore desperately through Mrs. Xirau’s itinerary in the backseat of the car while the driver, a short Persian man in his fifties, gazed at me witheringly in the rearview mirror.

  I was thwarted, however. There was an ink shortage in StaSec, and all documents were now printed as faintly as possible on cheap, light green paper that the letters blended into like jungle warriors hiding in the canopy. Between this, my short-sightedness, the motion of the car and the early-morning gloom, the document might as well have been written in Sanskrit for all that I could glean from it. The headers, at least, were bolded, which allowed me to deduce that Mrs. Xirau’s visit would last for a total of three days. This struck me as odd. How long does it take to identify a body? Perhaps the government had planned some kind of hospitality for Mrs. Xirau, maybe a performance of some state-sanctioned theater, or a meeting with the leading lights of the party?

  Better her than me.

  I resolved to read the entire document from cover to cover as soon as I found somewhere with better light, and until then to play my cards as close to my chest as possible.

  Ellulgrad International Airport was possibly the least used airport of any capital city in the world. In reality it was a mere airfield on the outskirts of the city where half a dozen prop planes (the nation’s airline) stood on the tarmac like the nation’s good china: to be seen but rarely (if ever) to be used. That morning they couldn’t even be seen, as the night’s sleet had given way to a thick, silvery fog that blanketed the whole airfield.

  I had been assigned a very specific time and place to meet Mrs. Xirau, and if one could credit the Machine with any virtue, it was punctuality. I got out of the car while the driver remained in the front seat, staring ahead motionlessly.

  I remember how perfectly silent it was. The fog had smothered the world. I took a deep breath of the cold, clammy air and held it. I could hear my own heartbeat. I exhaled, and my breath slipped silver from my mouth to rejoin the fog. Then, overhead, I heard a low growl, and I looked up to see two points of red light peeping feebly through the dense soup. Illuminated against the red haze I could make out the outline of the drone, narrow and sharklike. As it flew overhead and came in to land, I found myself wondering if the drone was afraid. It was, I realized, a more complex question than it might at first appear and while I waited for the drone to touch down I ran through the various possibilities.

  1) The drone is not afraid. It is not intelligent. It is simply a machine programmed to fly to a certain location, disgorge its cargo and return to its point of origin. It does not feel fear. It feels nothing at all.

  2) The drone is afraid. It is sentient and understands that every antiaircraft gun in the Caspian Republic is currently trained on it and that one instance of human error could blow it out of the sky. It fears for its continued existence.

  3) The drone is not afraid. It is sentient and understands that every antiaircraft gun in the Caspian Republic is a claptrap piece of obsolete technological nonsense that represents no threat to a shimmering, gleaming piece of advanced aerodynamics such as itself. Because we have fallen that far behind.

  4) The drone is not afraid. It is sentient. It understands that every antiaircraft gun is currently trained against it. Those weapons, despite their age, are perfectly capable of destroying the drone. But it is not afraid, because it is a very brave drone, that understood the risks of this mission, believes in the rightness of its cause and would be only too proud to die in the line of duty.

  The drone, whether it was courageous, fearful, contemptuous or unthinking, did its duty regardless. It landed and extended two thin legs upon which it raised itself vertically. It opened its belly and out stepped, as hesitant and ungainly as a newborn fawn, a woman. She set her small valise down by her feet, and began to smooth out her dress, which had apparently become rumpled during the flight.

  It was impossible to gauge her age at this distance and with this fog, but I knew that logically she would appear to be in her twenties or younger. Cloned bodies were a product. No one intentionally bought or sold old bodies any more than they would old milk or old bread. She was wearing a modest, knee-length dress, and a respectable brown woolen shawl. She was, I noticed with surprise, wearing exactly the kind of clothing one would expect to see a woman her age wearing in the Caspian Republic. I would have taken her for the wife of a regional party head from the countryside. The kind of respectable female who gives soft-spoken speeches about civic duty and the principles of the party to classrooms of bored children in the local school. For a moment, I wondered if fashions in the Machine world were so like our own and instantly chided myself for my denseness. Of course it is dressed like one of us, I thought to myself. Walking around looking like it has come from the outside world would be lethally stupid.

  “It” or “she”?

  “She,” by the laws of the Caspian Republic. An honorary human being, said the Good Brother.

  But also “it,” the Good Brother corrected himself, because she is a machine. She. She is it. She is … it is …

  I had the momentary sense of satisfaction one gets from watching two people one despises getting into an argument.

  She, it, the individual in question had not yet seen me.

  The drone returned to the horizontal position and wheeled around as gracefully and noiselessly as a swan on a la
ke. With a low buzz, it suddenly sprinted for the end of the tarmac, took to the air and was gone within seconds.

  She watched it go, her body language the very picture of abandonment. I wondered if they were friends.

  “Lily Xirau?” I called. She started and turned around. Her face was obscured by a scarf. Sensible wear in this weather.

  “Yes?” she said, a little hesitantly, as if she were unused to the name.

  The simple fact of what I was seeing, a young woman stranded in a hostile foreign country and very clearly afraid, contrasted with the knowledge of what she actually was (a fiendishly sophisticated computer program puppeteering a slab of cloned human flesh), induced a feeling of moral nausea. She seemed so normal, so perfectly designed to put me at ease, that the effect reversed and became quite terrifying. So much effort had clearly gone in to making her seem like a normal human being. She was a work of perfect artifice, with such fanatical, obsessive attention to detail, that it shook me to the core.

  I wondered how long it would take before I started forgetting what she was.

  Be strong, South, the Good Brother advised, and for once the advice was welcome.

  I had taken a risk with Smolna. I did not intend to take any others. Not with a case like this that would be attracting all kinds of the wrong sort of attention. There could be no laxness. No rule breaking. No softheartedness.

  I am not myself, I thought. I am the Good Brother.

  I banished myself, and let the voice that was always in the back of my head speak for me.

  “I am Security Agent South,” I announced brusquely. “I am to be your escort.”

  My tone was cold and harsh, and I could tell from her eyes that she was miserably disappointed. She had been hoping desperately for a friend.

  “South?” she asked.

  “That is correct.”

  “A pleasure to meet you,” she said, and extended her hand.

  StaSec is not in the business of shaking hands. I ignored her.

  “I am to take you to identify your husband’s remains.” A look of mild confusion passed over her features but I continued. “Before we leave the airport I must ensure that you understand the conditions of your stay here.”