The Vanished Birds

by Simon Jimenez

  “This is the only sunset I’ve ever known,” he said one afternoon, smiling as he pulled grass from the dirt and twirled the dry blades around his fingers. “I’m lucky it’s a pretty one.” Words that glanced off the boy without impact as he chewed his cake and stared past the red sky at a point Kaeda could not see.

  It was late in the afternoon, the two of them sitting on the cleft of a hill, watching the deep red approach of night, when they heard the music.

  From beyond the tree line came the farmers, marching down the dirt road with the containers of dhuba, singing the song of homecoming. They seemed to march directly from out of Kaeda’s memory. He was swiftly caught up in himself, wracked with emotion as he listened to the melody’s swell, delivered by farmers young and strong, his eyes tearing up at the words Take my day, but give me the night. He sniffed, and wiped his face. It was only then that he glanced at the boy, remembering that he was not alone, and he saw something surprising: the boy’s eyes were shut, and his ear tilted toward the song, as if he were basking in it.

  “So you like music,” Kaeda said with a smile.

  When they returned home, he brought the flute out from its dusty corner of the bureau. The boy was confused by the object until Kaeda demonstrated for him a trill of notes, inspiring in the boy a startle of widened eyes, his hands reaching out toward the instrument.

  This was how the flute lessons began. Kaeda taught him how to play when he had the time; how to hold it, how to purse the lips, and as he taught, he would remember with winces of pleasure and regret the image of Nia at the entrance of the alley, her musical silhouette. He taught the boy the old songs.

  He was a quick study, even with the language barrier. It was clear he was an experienced hand with music, if not with the flute. It wasn’t long until he exceeded Kaeda’s skill—a matter of days, much to the old man’s delight and jealousy—and was able to play new songs, ones that Kaeda had never heard before, and were beautiful in their own right. Jhige was touched when the boy played for her a sweet and sad tune one evening, and when Yana stopped by with a fresh supply of food and she heard the music coming from the boy’s room, for the first time in months she crossed the threshold and sat at the table to listen for a while.

  Kaeda had only intended to lend the boy the flute. It was not a gift. But the flute remained on the boy’s lap when they ate, and he took it with him into his room when he slept, and as the house swelled with his song, Kaeda’s mood darkened with the petty thought that the flute had betrayed him, that it had used him to get to its true owner. He knew this to be true the day Jhige referred to it as “the boy’s flute.”

  “It’s not his,” he snapped.

  Jhige stared at him.

  The music infiltrated his ears at night. It brought forth nightmares of Nia, at the foot of his bed with tears in her eyes as she asked him where the gift she had given him had gone; of him assuring her that he had kept it with him for all these years, and that he could prove it, if he could just find the damn thing; nightmares of him upturning his house, ripping out the floorboards, scoring the mattress with his machete, until he woke up with his hands clawing at the air. On the worst of these nights he stumbled out of his bedroom still half dreaming, using the wall for support as he limped down the hall, and had gotten so far as to twist the knob of the boy’s bedroom door, thinking he just wanted to see the flute, to hold it one last time, make sure it was safe, before he was stopped by the sound of muffled weeping from inside the room, and he emerged from his half-dreaming state and backed away from the door. He returned to his bed empty-handed, hoping that his acceptance of the situation would bring easy sleep. But in the morning, he felt much the same. Tired.

  His pockets empty.

  He did his best to hide his distress from the boy. Forced smiles when there was no reason to, and he cooked up many sweetcakes for him to eat while his own appetite shrank. During meals he shuffled his extra food onto the boy’s plate and watched him eat. And at night, as Jhige stroked his hair, she asked him the question she always asked when he was in such a mood; where he was, and where he was going. To which he would give the same answer he had always given.

  I am here, I am here.

  The flute song wafted through the moisture season, and brought down the dry, until the dirt crumbled and the stalks turned brittle under the hard sun; the village holding its collective breath for the approach of the offworlders, and their release of this stranger, while Kaeda waited out his days in dread.

  When the sky cracked and the green lines broke across the wisped clouds, he knew this was most likely the last Shipment Day he would ever witness. The last time he would meet Nia Imani. In the fields, after he gave the welcome speech he had rehearsed on his walks the weeks leading up to this moment, he coughed phlegm into his sleeve and wondered why now, at the end, he wanted nothing more than to get on one of those ships and leave with her; why this desire still lay dormant in his heart after all this time; why it still flared bright. Nia hugged him when she left her ship. She was younger and stronger than ever, and he felt so small in her arms. When she released him, he made his request, and was surprised when she told him, without a moment’s thought, that she would take the boy. “Interesting,” he said, smiling a little. “I was expecting more resistance.”

  “And why is that?” she asked, returning his smile with one of her own.

  “You never struck me as the generous type.”

  Her smile wavered. The old hurts were returning, and he could not help himself. “I’m sorry,” he said finally.

  “It’s fine.” Nia shifted her bag over her shoulder and walked toward the village, where the party would soon be held. “Consider it repayment for the company.”

  Come the bonfire, they spoke only briefly—plans of where to meet tomorrow for the handoff of the child. Nia kept her company with the other offworlders while Kaeda remained with his own at the long tables, glancing at her from the other side of the fire, hoping that their eyes would connect and give him an opening to apologize for his behavior earlier that day. But she never looked at him, not once, and was gone before he could find the courage, or the time, to approach her on his own.

  He did not sleep that night. He paced the halls of the house, passing the door to the boy’s bedroom, until morning.

  It was a brutally hot day. The heat like a weight on his back as he made his way to the village plaza, where Nia waited for him. The villagers sweeping up the ash pit and clearing the tables snuck glances at the two of them as he approached her. He nodded to her, and she nodded back. And though now he had her full attention, he did not know what to say. A whole night of thinking, preparing for some grand speech, some resolution, but the words were gone.

  “Where is he?” she asked.

  “This way,” he said.

  They climbed the steepening path to his house. He struggled with his cane, but refused the assistance of her offered arm. He was short of breath when they reached the top, his heart full and pushing against the lax muscles of his chest. He showed her to the living room, where the boy stood with the travel bag at his feet, packed with spare robes, some cakes, and other things Kaeda thought the boy might like to own. He was about to ask Nia if she would like a drink, but before he had the chance, she picked up the boy’s bag and headed for the door with a hand on the child’s back. Kaeda followed them. She spared a glance at his cane, and said, “You don’t have to come down with us. We can say our goodbyes here.”

  “No,” he said. “I will come. I can manage.”

  “If you’re sure.”

  The three of them walked through the village, past the wary eyes of the other villagers, while Kaeda struggled to keep up with Nia’s quick pace. The boy didn’t so much as look back at him to make sure he was still there. Kaeda grimaced through the joint pain.

  It was all falling through his hands.

  In the field of yello
w grass, where the ships waited, and where the last of the dhuba was carried off, the two offworlders turned toward him. Nia told him it was time. Kaeda nodded, and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, and told him he had enjoyed their brief time together. He smiled at the boy in a way that only adults were capable of, one that was at once happy and sad and full, his grip on the boy’s shoulder tightening as he told him how lucky he was to go with her. The boy stared at him blankly, the old man’s words beyond him; words that were increasingly choked with tears as it dawned on Kaeda that he had never stood this close to the hangar doors of Nia’s ship before.

  He had never felt the cool air seeping out of the ship’s dark maw. Never smelled that peculiar lace of fresh metals, or heard the idle rumbling of its belly and the snap of its folded sails as the posts swayed in the wind. Nia asked him if he was all right with such startling kindness that he was seven years old again, and he was twenty-two, and he was thirty-seven, his whole life sandwiching into this one moment, startling him with a powerful need to take her hand and walk into the ship and fly away and live the dream of his youth. He slapped the wetness from his eyes. No! he thought. I’m happy! I’m happy! He gave the boy a pat on the head and he shook Nia’s hand and wished her safe travels, words chipped carelessly from a mountain of impotence, before returning to his home, his namesake. A long walk punctuated by the sound of the ship smacking the sky, its green trail dissolved by night, no remnant of its passing, only the red moon swollen with kiri juice when Kaeda shut the windows and eased himself into bed beside his old friend. He gazed at her. The dream was gone, and only now, at the end of the day, was he awake. And as Jhige wondered aloud where the boy had gone, he took her hand and pressed his face into her coarse palm, comforted by the skin callused by the days of work. The sweet smell of the harvest. The taste of a banquet. And he told her, “I’m here, I’m here,” and he kissed her like they were young again, behind a storage shack in the conspiratorial dark, no lick of flame to distract him. Nothing but the two of them, while in the vaulted dark above their sky, in her ship of cloth and metal, Nia opened the boy’s travel bag and found among the folded clothes and wrapped pastries a long-forgotten object—unable to breathe as she held the flute in her trembling hands, and felt in its cracks the decades.

  2

  The Flute from Macaw

  “Sneaky bastard,” Nia muttered, as the flute slipped from her fingers and dropped into the travel bag. She stood up from her crouch with a smile even she did not understand, and palmed the sweat off her brow, her skin hot to the touch. Feverish. It was when the pressure began to bubble behind her eyes that she knew what was happening. She gave the quiet boy in the corner of the room a curt nod before she stumbled out of the hatch, gripping the causeway railing for support as she made her way to the ship’s lav, the veins thick in her neck. She slammed the door shut behind her and doubled over the toilet. Counted out the beats in her head as she breathed, and with each breath returned the paste in her veins to liquid, and the drumbeat in her ears to a melted drone, until the Compression Panic left her system and she was able to smother it, this sudden sense of lost time.

  She grimaced, ashamed that, even after her many routes through the fold, time loss could still get to her; that it could still startle her from behind and squeeze the air from her lungs. She cleared her throat and spat into the toilet. Flicked on the faucet. Splashed cold water on her neck. The walls were throbbing, but she told herself it would soon pass; that the ocean waves would settle and she would stand on solid ground again. This was known territory.

  But for the rest of the afternoon the effects of the attack lingered. A ball of fingers in her gut as she moved through the ship, checking in on her crew while they prepared for the coming fold into the Pocket. She nodded through a joke Durat had learned from the dhuba farmers the night before, and she made use of the railing as she walked herself across the ship to the medica, where Nurse was performing her diagnostic tests on the boy and delivering him any needed vaccinations.

  The boy was perched on the edge of the metal table, with the flute gripped tight in his right hand while Nurse asked him simple questions about his health and history. He nodded, and shook his head, to the questions.

  Yes. He felt fine.

  No. He did not know where he was.

  Yes. He had a name.

  No. He could not write it.

  No. He did not know how to write.

  No.

  No family.

  Outside the medica, she and Nurse spoke in hushed tones about their newest crew member.

  “So he understands Station Standard?” Nia asked.

  “Yes,” Nurse said as her eyes fixed on a bead of sweat trickling down her captain’s temple, “but he seems unable to speak it. Or won’t.”

  Nia thumbed away the sweat. “Won’t?”

  “Might be he just needs more time. He’s been through a lot. Long past of broken bones: legs, arms, even his ribs. Signs of repeated fractures, none of them caused by the crash. Too healed for that. Nothing is broken now, nothing physical, but mentally”—she glanced at him through the hatchway—“the only person who knows how bad it is, is him.” She leaned against the wall, as if weighted by her own sense of empathy. “He might speak, he might not. Some trauma patients take a while to find their voice again.”

  “They found him months ago. How much more time does he need?”

  “You know I can’t answer that.” Then, “Captain—Nia, are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, self-conscious as she wiped her shirtsleeve against her damp face. The boy played a quick note on the flute. A piercing F. She winced.

  “I would suggest not worrying about him too much,” Nurse said. “There are facilities on Pelican. He’ll be taken care of by people trained for such situations. And in the meantime, the flute should keep him occupied.” She hummed. “It’s funny. You have one just like it, don’t you?”

  “I did. I gave it to him,” Nia lied. She was in no mood to explain the story of Kaeda. “I thought it’d be something he could play with.”

  Nurse smiled. Surprised. “That was kind of you,” she said.

  Kaeda’s words rang in her ears: You never struck me as the generous type. “I can be kind,” Nia said.

  “I didn’t say—”

  “Captain,” Durat interrupted over the intercom, “ship’s ready to fold on your order.”

  “I’ll be right there,” she told him. Then, to Nurse, “Can you bring him back to his room when you’re done?”

  “Of course,” she said. “And Nia. About tonight?” She made a subtle drinking gesture with her right hand.

  Nia placed a hand on her stomach. “Later this week, maybe.”

  Nurse chuckled. “Now I know you aren’t feeling all right.”

  An understatement. It was like she had swallowed a bag of glass. With a hand on the wall railing, she made her way to the cockpit and sat down in the copilot’s chair, leaning back with eyes shut as Durat told her all the things he would do, and the people he would do, during their furlough on Pelican Station. “Did I tell you the joke the dhuba farmers told me?” he asked. “Yes,” she said. But he told her again anyway. One-armed man goes hunting with his nephew, it began. And as he explained to her for the second time that day why it was funny that the nephew ended up in bed with the one-armed man’s wife, she rubbed one hand against the armrest of her chair, centering herself on the tactile sensation, and told herself that what happened in the boy’s room was just a trick of body chemistry, an explainable thing, and because it was explainable, it was something she could control. She told herself this, and many other stories, as she gave Durat the go-ahead, and he in turn gave Baylin confirmation to pull the rip cord, and the ship began to sandwich in on itself, like an infinitely folding sheet of paper, until they had left that reality and entered the next, where the sails billowed open in great swel
ls and rocketed along the energetic waves of the Diffident Current.

  Let me finish this contract and move on, Nia thought sickly as her boat rode the black waves. Let this last leg be easy.

  But then, like a curse answered, the music began.

  It started an hour after the fold. The crew was still shaking off the wobble effect, stretching out their jaws, vomiting in the lav, when they heard the thin, reedy notes of the boy’s flute coming in through the vents. It was fine in the beginning, most of the crew agreeing that the boy was very talented. The problem was the music didn’t stop. Their guest played regardless of the hour, and since the Debby was an old gossip of a ship and carried sounds from hatch to hatch with giddy talent, nowhere was safe.

  The flute song had a life of its own. It seeped into the kitchen from behind the cold-stasis container, and drifted across the counter into the common room, where it lay over the sofas and the shelf filled with old books. It fell through the grates to the engine room, following the tendrils of thick cable that ran straight to the heart of the ship, where the fold-core clicked its brassy gears, and where the engineer sat on the workbench, so distracted by the music that he stripped the wrong wire and killed the backlights under the causeway grating. It flumed through the c-path vents, into the cavernous cargo bay, around the twenty crates stuffed with purple seed and the veteran who sat cross-legged on a mat, scowling at the music as it kicked her out of her meditations. Leaked into the cockpit, where the pilot leaned back on his throne, his legs kicked up on the console, eyelid twitching as the music disrupted his dreams of sexual exploits. And it whispered through the cracks of the paneled walls, into the captain’s quarters, where it found Nia sitting at her desk, staring up at the air around her as she listened to the music that haunted the Debby, wondering why the notes put her at ease, and how it could be that she did not hate it.