Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars

by Nisi Shawl

  “Is that so?” Hawk looked more interested in that than anything else that had been said. The others didn’t seem to notice.

  “It’s a damn lie,” said Kendrick. “All our beast handlers are accounted for.”

  “Do monkeys lie?” I asked.

  “They just mutinied!” The pitch of Kendrick’s voice jumped almost beyond reason. “If monkeys stole my airship, they can damn well lie!”

  Hawk was nodding, and looked like she might be amused if she weren’t being so grim. “That’s why you needed a racer. Any of your frigates could have caught the Dayton, but you’d have monkeys on those crews. And you don’t trust them now.”

  Kendrick looked like he wanted to keep shouting, but he nodded. “The Commodore’s orders. If we really have a problem with their kind mounting some rebellion, we don’t want to give them more chances.”

  This didn’t quite make sense to me, for what seemed like an obvious reason. “What about the ones you had in that cage before?” I asked. “You didn’t mind sending them to the Dayton.”

  “Chimps aren’t monkeys. They’re apes.” Kendrick said it as though he was talking to the stepchild of the cousin he’d never liked. “And they showed no interest in the mutiny. Besides, a human boarding team wouldn’t have fit on this ship. And all this is a waste of time!” He turned back to Hawk, and jabbed his finger again. “You were enlisted to help us secure the Dayton. She is heading north, under steam, and if the wind holds, she’ll be in Canada within a day. You will not let the British Empire get their hands on that ship!”

  Hawk glared at him for a second, with the look she gets when she needs to make a decision fast. And then she smiled, with the look she gets when she’s about to cause trouble. “If you want your ship back, we need to get mine back in flying shape. That means tightening the canvas, securing the rigging, and losing that cage. I only see one good way to do all that.”

  “What exactly are you…?” Kendrick went speechless for a good, long moment, as he followed Hawk’s gaze down to the monkey cage. I could swear those monkeys were standing at attention. “Are you out of your goddamn mind, woman? They’re the ones who did all this!”

  “And now they’re going to fix it.”

  “Last time they were free, they all but crashed this ship! How do you know they won’t finish the job?”

  “Because they didn’t last time. They saved my ship by cutting that tether, while you were trying to shoot holes in it.”

  “Hold on, Hawk,” I said, before Kendrick could shout something else. “Not wanting us to crash is one thing. Why are they going to help us catch the others?”

  Hawk nodded at Baines, who had been standing quietly over the monkey cage through all this. “Why did you say they decided to mutiny?”

  Baines winced. “I’m honestly not sure they know what a mutiny is, ma’am. I’ve never tried explaining it to an animal before. But they say it was all on orders.”

  “And I’m telling you, there’s none of our officers on board that ship!” Kendrick roared.

  “Doesn’t need to be one of yours,” Hawk. “Long as they thought it was.”

  When I worked out what she was driving at, I couldn’t stop myself from whistling. The utterly lost expression on the Navy men’s face was priceless.

  “The uniforms,” I said. “You trained them to obey anyone who’s wearing the right hat.”

  Kendrick looked as though the sky had just turned upside down. “Jesus Christ almighty.”

  “The good news,” said Hawk, “is that you both have the right hats. So tell them to fix my ship.”

  Kendrick drew himself up, practically standing on tiptoes to bring himself up to Hawk’s eye level. “Miss, you do not tell me what to do. I am a commander in the United States Navy.”

  “And you’re on my ship.” Hawk glared him full in the eye. “I’m not telling you to do anything, and I’m not asking your permission.” She turned half away, looking down at the monkeys, then stopped. “But I will need your man to do the talking.”

  They stared at each other for another minute. The sun cast a harsh pattern of shadows across Hawk’s face, and a gust of wind rippled through the hull.

  “All right,” Kendrick growled. “You’ll have this your way. And you’ll be responsible for whatever this mission comes to. Baines, do what she says.”

  Hawk nodded, turned, and disappeared into the pilothouse. I supposed the business was over and started back toward the engine, but only made it to the door before Kendrick stopped me.

  “Mr. West,” he began, waving me into the engine house and then stepping in himself. We had tossed all the crates overboard in order to balance out the ship, so there was actually enough room for us to stand. “Your captain. How long have you flown with her?”

  “About a year, now,” I said. “Long enough to learn that she knows what she’s doing.”

  “Well, she’s proven she can fly,” said Kendrick. “But she clearly doesn’t care about the politics at issue.” He folded his arms, taking what I supposed was his most authoritative pose. “Ever since they took Alaska, the British have been looking for a chance to win back the Oregon Country, and the only force to stop them is our superior air power. It’s bad enough if we can’t trust our monkeys, but losing our most advanced flying fortress to them? Just imagine a British Navy with airships like that.”

  I didn’t know the first thing about the British Navy, or care much about whose flag flew over Oregon Country, but I supposed I should keep quiet.

  “Might be different,” Kendrick mused, “if our armies weren’t tied up, keeping peace in the South.” He paused at that, no doubt to see how I’d react. “But I suppose that’s the price we pay for freeing your people.”

  It seems almost impossible for Federals to complain about the British without finding some way to bring up Forrest’s rebellion. Mostly, I just wished that Kendrick had more tact in him. “From what I remember,” I said, “first thing the rebel states did was go running to the British. If you hadn’t broken the Confederates, you’d have enemy armies to north and south.”

  “True enough,” said Kendrick. “But, you know, there’s folks who argue abolition didn’t go far enough. They say the North uses beasts the way the South used men, and we’re both just as damned in the eyes of the Lord.” He was clearly trying to read me now. “You buy any of that?”

  “Why should I? Beasts aren’t people.”

  “And what about your captain? All that harmony-of-life talk do anything for her?”

  I probably should have worked it out sooner. Kendrick wanted me to tell him whether Hawk might sympathize with the monkeys, but didn’t quite want to ask the question. And I didn’t see much reason to save him the trouble.

  “Hawk isn’t political,” I told him. “She cares about flying, and she’s better at it than anybody I’ve seen. If she doesn’t catch your ship, that means it can’t be caught.”

  Kendrick leaned forward. “You know that for sure? Suppose she’s faking, about not knowing what the monkeys are saying. Suppose she could talk to them all along. Beast-talking’s an Indian thing, isn’t it? Why wouldn’t she know?”

  “I couldn’t say,” I said, trying to sound neutral. “But Hawk didn’t spend much time with her people. Most of her education came at the boarding school.”

  “Can’t say I ever saw the point of those schools. Sure, you can take the girl away from the savages, but can you take the savage out of the girl?”

  It was getting harder to keep a blank face. “I’ve heard a lot of talk like that in my life,” I said. “Never found it all that convincing.”

  Kendrick looked at me for another moment. “Just know one thing. You and your captain have found yourselves in the middle of a pivotal moment. History, and the United States Navy, will take a great interest what you do here. So I hope that you’ll show yourself as a patriot.”

  ∫

  The monkeys didn’t show any sign of conspiracy and kept working well into twilight. Even so, Waki
nyan had taken quite a pounding over the last few days, and a new wind came down from the northeast with a vengeance after dark. I spent the night wondering if it wouldn’t shake us apart.

  For Hawk and myself, this was our second night without sleep, and I suppose we were both on edge. I know I was, but I could never quite tell what Hawk was thinking back then.

  When I came forward, around midnight, I told myself it was to see how she was doing. It would have been a cold night even without the wind, and the Dayton’s cannon had shattered both the windscreen and the pilothouse’s lamp. Hawk stood there in the dark, still as you please, but her shoulders were sagging as if the whole ship weighed down on them.

  “What do you suppose they plan to do if we catch the Dayton again?” she asked. With the wind whipping through the cabin, she sounded a lot farther away than she was. “Two men couldn’t even fly an airship that size, much less capture it. And there’s no more apes to do their work for them.”

  It might have been the wind that put the bite in her voice, but I didn’t quite like what I heard. “What is this with you and the monkeys?” I asked.

  I think she shrugged, but it was hard to know in the dark. “I wanted to keep my ship flying, and they were the ones who could fix it.”

  “Because they’re the ones who did the damage,” said I. “Kendrick had a fair point. How are you so sure you know better?” I’d meant to say knew, but that’s not how the word came out. I suppose I could blame that on the wind, too.

  She looked back at me, pulling her goggles up to her forehead. I still couldn’t see her eyes so much as the moonlight reflected in them. “Because I do,” she said. And then she stared at me for a good long minute.

  “How do you even plan to catch them again?” I asked. “With winds like this, I’d be surprised if we’re moving north at all.”

  “I’m not going to fly us harder than I have to.” Hawk turned back around. “Not when I can’t see my hand in front of my face.”

  “So you’ll gamble with the monkeys, but not the wind?”

  Hawk turned back around at that. “What is this with you and the monkeys?” she asked. “There something you want to say?”

  There was, but I needed a second to get my thoughts together. “During the war, I was working in a shipyard, when they started to figure out apes could do their grunt work. The other boys like me were there because we believed in freedom and the Union and wanted to help, but none of that mattered to the man in charge. And when all the white boys were coming home from war and we all had to step aside, he sure didn’t mind keeping the monkeys around. This is what they do in the North because they can’t have slaves, and just try to get a decent wage when your competition will work for food. Hell, try and get a job at all.”

  “And what part of that do you think is the monkey’s fault?” Hawk asked. “What exactly do you want, Cassius? Should I throw the monkeys overboard and then fly my ship apart, so you can impress the white man? Because what that story tells me is that you care a lot more about your country than they ever did about you.”

  She hadn’t even looked at me when she spoke, and that burned just as much as the words did. “Did you just question my loyalty? I put a year of my life into getting this ship together, and it’s just as much mine as yours.”

  That made her turn around. “I put my entire life into getting here! This sky was my place. This was where I decide where to fly, and no badge or uniform or top hat was around to tell me different. Tell me this isn’t just a job for you.”

  “Just a job? You think there’s a lot of work out there for a Negro engineer?” I replied. We’d been all but shouting the whole time, just to be heard through the wind, but we were going all for it now. “You know the kind of jobs they put us to? Whatever’s too big for the animals, but that white boys won’t touch. And sure as hell there’s nothing else like this. You’re a damn spectacle; folks would drop a nickel just to see you in the goggles, but I’m just a black man with a wrench.”

  “So I’m a curiosity, you think. Like a trained monkey.”

  “Oh, now you think monkey’s an insult.”

  She stared at me for a moment, then turned back to the wheel and still didn’t speak for a minute. The wind shifted a little, sending a ruffle through the canvas we’d drawn over the ruined front of the pilothouse.

  “Just because we’re not the same as a monkey or a bird,” she said, “doesn’t make them nothing. And all our wisdom doesn’t matter if we don’t take the time to think.”

  “Who isn’t thinking?” I replied. “You know Kendrick doesn’t trust you, thinks you might want to lose the Dayton on purpose. I’ve been defending you ever since we met him!”

  “Well, stop it!” She shot back what I assume was a mean glare over her shoulder. “I don’t need any defense from you, and especially the kind you give.” Her voice took on an unflattering mimic of my accent. “‘Please forgive us, Mister. She’s just been so moody, ever since you killed her family. You know how women are.’”

  “You didn’t seem to mind so much when I was talking him out of five hundred dollars.”

  She didn’t look back at me again, and I decided I’d been away from the engine room long enough. On the way back, I nearly stepped on one of the monkeys, which must have been resting on the gangway. It screeched at me and scrambled off into the rigging.

  Kendrick, Baines, and the eagle were in the engine room, with its newfound deck space and working lamp. Kendrick was awake, hunched by the starboard porthole and glaring out into the night.

  “Need some damn cities up here,” he said. “We could be flying in circles for all I know.”

  “It’s a clear night,” I said. “If you step out on the gangway, you can see the stars.”

  Kendrick ignored the suggestion, and me in general. I stoked the engine and checked that nothing had come loose in my absence, and mostly tried to forget about Hawk at the other end of the ship. I was madder than I’d ever been with her before, but I couldn’t quite work out why.

  “Commander?” I said, though I had not quite worked out what I was doing there, either. “You have a plan yet for taking back the Dayton when we catch her again?”

  He straightened at that, turning around to scowl at me. “Do you?”

  I nodded. “I bet I could shut down her engines for you, fix them so no monkey can bring them back. Just get me on board.”

  ∫

  We got lucky when day rolled around. The winds had died down but hadn’t turned, so the Dayton still couldn’t make sail. And the morning sky showed us a trail of smoke that pointed straight toward Manitoba.

  The skies over Dakota let you see a long way, so it was noon by the time we caught up. We couldn’t have been fifty miles from the border, and if the British knew it was coming, their own airships might be on the way to secure their prize. We would only have one more chance.

  Hawk brought us in high, so even the cannons on top of Dayton would need to fire almost straight up to hit us. Once Hawk had maneuvered us near enough, we threw down a climbing rope, and one of the monkeys scampered down to the Dayton’s upper deck, where it secured the line to the ship’s guardrail.

  Airship work had taken the worry of heights out of me long before, but what came next was still not an experience I hope to repeat: Taking the firmest hold of the rope that I could, I stepped out from Wakinyan’s ruined gangway and began to lower myself down.

  The rope ran about sixty feet from end to end, but it felt like half a mile. I discovered that nothing quite impresses you with the openness of the sky like being suspended between two airships, floating hundreds of feet in the air. The Red River twisted through the land below, looking barely wider than my foot, and I supposed that if I lost my grip, I’d have far too much time to reflect on the illusions of scale.

  I was about thirty feet from the Dayton’s end of the line when something ambled out of the bridge and made for the foredeck. It looked at first like a walking chair, with brass joints clacking against t
he deck, carrying an animal like a fat gopher that I needed a moment to recognize.

  A beaver, in full mechanized suit, no less, wearing a Navy lieutenant’s cap. I supposed that was one mystery solved.

  I had never seen one of the suits before, and the thing distracted me for a few quick seconds before the beaver grabbed onto the end of my rope and started gnawing through the knot that secured it to the Dayton’s rail. I clambered down four or five more feet before I realized there was no chance of my reaching the end in time, so I stopped and tightened my grip on the rope about a second before the end snapped off.

  Through all this, the Dayton had been climbing and drifting to starboard—or Wakinyan had been doing the reverse—so I swung well away from the warship. The wind caught me, too, and started spinning me around. As though I needed more worries.

  Hanging at the end of a hundred-foot tether above hundreds more feet of air is a fine way to clarify your thoughts. With all the spinning and swinging, I wasn’t about to try climbing back up the line, so my best bet was for Hawk to notice and get us back above the Dayton, where I could simply drop onto the deck. She seemed to be trying, but struggling to match the other ship’s climb. I suppose it didn’t help that her engineer was hanging at the end of a rope.

  A gust of wind hit me like a runaway carriage, and near blew me free of the tether. I could hear the Dayton’s hull creaking as the wind knocked her sideways, and my line took on a remarkable angle to the ground. But the wind did come from just the right direction to push me nearly all the way to the Dayton’s hull.

  Not exactly the luck I was hoping for, but it would do.

  Between the wind pushing me sideways and Hawk finally getting the upper hand in the climbing race, I got within about twenty feet of the Dayton’s deck. It was like being on a pendulum that got jammed in midswing above a log rolling downhill, but I supposed it would be my best chance at getting off the rope and onto the ship. I started climbing down toward the end of the rope again, hoping to cut back on the distance I would have to fall.