The Vanished Birds

by Simon Jimenez

  * * *

  —

  Outside Sartoris’s tent, Nia listened to Ahro play his flute by the dying bonfire, wondering where the time had gone. It had just been morning, and now it was night—now the stars were out, and the birthday was almost over. It wasn’t long ago that she had discovered her first gray hair, above her right temple. It wasn’t long ago that the young man who now sat beside her was a boy. He no longer fit in Kaeda’s one-shouldered robe. Where had the time gone? The young man played a high note, a calm smile on his lips.

  She shut her eyes.

  Remember this day.

  The moment was done. It was already a quaint snapshot, ready to be discarded for more useful memory, stronger regrets. That was how her mind worked. It was so hard to remember the good things, pushed out as they were by the fear of troubles to come. Here before her was proof that time was moving, and quick. Here was this child who had already survived so much, but was still naïve about the way of things. Here was a small fire that must be nursed.

  “Did you like it?” he asked, when he had finished the song.

  “I did,” she told him.

  He smiled.

  Shield the fire from the wind. Feed it with old branches. Time was slipping, and he needed to learn the important things, learn them before it was too late.

  That was the night she decided the lessons would begin. Plans formed in her mind as he continued to play. She would teach him how to negotiate a contract, how to come out of a trade with the advantage. The crew would train him in their fields of expertise. Vaila would show him the cursory basics of flight, enough to lift off and land without too much damage. Royvan would teach him how to tend to physical wounds. Em would outline for him the organs of the ship and the art of rudimentary repair. Sartoris would continue with his generalized lessons of galactic life and history. And Sonja would teach him how to protect himself from harm, with violence, if necessary. She decided all of this in the space between his songs, told him none of these plans, not yet, for she did not wish to stress him on his birthday. Instead she nodded for him to play once more.

  “The happy one,” she requested.

  With a grin, he obliged her.

  Tomorrow the lessons would begin.

  * * *

  —

  A passage from Six Kingdoms comes to mind. It appears toward the end of the last book. Faydra Faneuil has been captured by the opposing principality. After a month of deliberation, the government decides that she will be beheaded before the crowd as a warning to the civilians who might still consider uprising. Upon seeing the chopping block, Faydra says, “I’ve warped reality, sundered empires, & built from nothing a legacy that will be remembered for millennia—but now, the work is done, & I think only of my empty youth in Arcadia. The idleness of summer. The sun on my back, & his hand, stroking the hair from my eyes.”

  I expected many things from this trip.

  I did not expect a family.

  Fumiko. Your mind as ever remains a mystery to me, & though I am certain you will in all likelihood be unmoved by what I have to say next, I feel it is nevertheless my duty to write it: If the Jaunt is real, it does not reside in the boy. He is but a boy like any other. This task is a fool’s errand. After three years, we have made our peace with the notion, & I ask that you make peace with it too. I beseech you to find it within yourself to cancel the contract, & let these people, all of whom I have come to care for deeply, return to Allied Space, or any destination of their choosing. They deserve their lives unbound by the strict terms of contract. They deserve freedom. Please, let this flight of fancy go, & do what you know in your heart of hearts is correct.

  Our next destination is the satellite moon of Ariadne. Nia has visited once before. Supposedly it is a musicians’ enclave. She wants Ahro to meet people like himself there; people he can talk to about the craft before we inevitably move on to the next of our many landings. Perhaps I will buy myself an instrument while we’re there. Never played before, so will start with something easy. A drum, or a two-stringer. Start with a ditty, challenge myself with a scale. Maybe in time, a song of my own composition.

  We will see where we go from there.

  6

  A Long-Term Thing

  Morning draped over the empty houses of Ariadne, but no bugle played, for the musicians were gone. No sound but the scatter of lizard things on warm rock as they prepared themselves for the sun that was about to break over the eastern dunes. No sound but the snore of a hundred dogs as fingers of red light crept through the alleys of the conspicuously silent fringe town.

  The dogs were everywhere in the former artists’ enclave. They were beached along the dusty side streets, and curled in piles on the porches of the abandoned prefab houses. Most of them were asleep; it was still early, still dark. Their collective breaths rumbled the air. A carpet of rising bellies. Of the few that were awake, only one now moved: an overweight mastiff, ambling down the main street.

  The smell of her, the Oldest, roused the others, and one by one their heads rose as she passed, a procession soon following her. She stopped in front of the town’s gate, which had been shut for days. The others remained at a respectful distance while she sat on her haunches and trained her rheumy eyes on the transmission tower that sat on the high dune, beyond the gate. The tower was many meters tall and cleaved the bruised sky in two. The mastiff knew, if not explicitly, then by feeling, that once first light broke above the ridged horizon and filled the highest of the tower’s many dishes, made a bright moon of it, the Man would arrive. It was always morning when he came and brought their food. The other dogs knew this too, their mouths watering in anticipation as morning came, and with it, the gray-white light that draped down the span of the tower.

  The barking began when the black speck crested the far hill, trailing behind it a plume of sand.

  The Man was coming.

  * * *

  —

  His name was Gorlen. He was the only human who lived on this moon. And he feared he would be the last.

  He kept his days to a strict schedule. Hour-long segments of different activities to stave off the madness of being alone, or worse, in his eyes, the boredom. But today, he fed the dogs for a bit longer than usual, did not rush the feed into the trough, for the visitors were enjoying themselves with the dogs, the young man who was with them smiling widely, but with hands petrified to his chest, as a Dane shoved her weight against him.

  Gorlen witnessed them for a time.

  He scratched at the scar behind his right ear.

  After the ravenous dogs were fed their pellets from his truck, he whistled at the mastiff, who then clambered into the passenger’s seat for the day’s ride. Their work here done, he shut the gate to the dead town and began the steep drive up to the transmission tower. He drove with one hand on the wheel. The other hand rested on the sill of the open window, the tanned index finger tapping the beat of the music in his head. On the usual days when he drove, he would be singing along with the music, but today he spared the visitors his rusty voice. He glanced at them through the rearview. The three of them were quiet. The captain gestured for the young man to drink from his canteen, while beside them, the cheekboned engineer slept with his head resting easily against the rattling window. Gorlen bet he had a history of sleeping in uncomfortable places.

  When they landed the night prior, he agreed to lend them supplies for their journey if they would help him with his day’s chores, though in truth he didn’t need any help feeding the dogs or checking the status of the tower and realigning the dishes knocked askew by the weekend storms.

  The company was nice, is all.

  He parked the truck by the first strut of the tower and the young man woke the engineer with an elbow nudge. Gorlen asked them if they had any questions about the work, but they did not. The captain told him they remembered his instructions, and woul
d be done soon, and she gave him a smile of reassurance that he was tempted to interpret as one of flirtation, though he knew that whatever ounce of charisma he used to have was long gone in the intervening years of being alone on this rock; unless, on the off chance she was into a man with three missing teeth. “Good,” he said. “I’ll be here if you need me.”

  As they ascended the rusted steps of the tower, shaking loose the sand that clung to the metal, Gorlen climbed out of the truck and stretched his arms and legs while the mastiff shark-circled him. Together they sat in the shade of one of the struts. She flopped on her belly close, but not too close, beside him, while he massaged the corns on his feet. When she yawned with all her rotted teeth, he looked at her, thought, with amusement, We are one pair of ugly, and was overcome with fondness for her.

  He felt this moment needed a song. So he shut his eyes and stretched his neck, and with a pained wince, activated the memory drive nestled under that scar behind his right ear. From the listings in his left eye he plucked the night he heard “Lover’s Quarry,” years ago. A simple ballad, sung in a duet between two youths who had, by now, most likely moved on to better things. The memory of that concert played out in the limbic theater of his brain, the sounds as clear as yesterday. Slowly, he smiled. And after he glanced up to make sure the visitors were a good ways to the first dish, and well out of earshot, he cleared his throat with the warm dregs of his canteen, and began to tentatively sing along.

  And as he sang, and the notes quit his lips, it happened: many meters above him, up where one could hold both the town of dogs and the landing base in both sides of one’s periphery, the youngest member of the visiting party paused mid-step, sensing in the air the subtle vibrations that should have been impossible to detect—a chill, from the base of his spine to the top of his head, and a tickle as his heart opened like a hand.

  * * *

  —

  “You all right?” Nia asked from behind.

  The moment ended, the sensation evaporated.

  Ahro blinked, and then shouldered his pack. “Yes,” he said. “My apologies.”

  They continued up the steps. The impressive height to which they climbed was enough to distract him from the echoes of what he had felt moments before. And by the time they reached the first dish, it was as if it had never happened.

  The updraft buffeted their loose clothing as they worked, threatening to tear the bag of tools from his grasp, but he held on and handed the needed tools to Em when requested, guilty that Em was the one doing all the hard work, though Nia had made it clear he was there to just observe and pick up what he could. From a few steps up, she recounted what this moon used to be like when she last visited over a decade ago, her time. The place where the dogs now lived used to be a real town back then, she told them. Like Gorlen had said, when the colony failed, the people moved on. “There used to be a lot of musicians here,” she said. “Some of them I called friends, but I guess they left too, or passed away.”

  “Before,” he said. “This place. What was it like?”

  “Bigger. Beyond the prefabs there were large-volume tents, enough to hold a few thousand people, most of them traders—like me, before I moved to corporate shipping. I’d just left home, was still figuring things out. Thought the freedom of the fringe would save me. I had a different ship then.”

  “What was the name?” he asked.

  “Also the Debby.” She chuckled. “Debby One. Cheap Pelican model with a snub-nosed cockpit. Ugliest fucking thing you’d ever seen. But it was all I could afford. Soon as I bought it, I shot straight out of Allied Space. Spent a few months trading. Did the runs through here; food and other necessaries for the artists’ works, which were pretty valuable back then, when Ariadne was a name people cared about. This place lived on trading.” She sighed as she looked out into the empty distance. “Died from it too, I guess.”

  “There was music?”

  “Everywhere.” Smiling now. “An entire hall, two kilometers long, just to sell the instruments. Bassos and lyns and cellos. Street concerts. Nightly choruses out in the dunes. It was good. It was really good.”

  There was much about Nia that still confused him. Mostly it was in the way she spoke about her past. Infused with so many conflicting emotions that it was hard to know how she truly felt about something. “If it was good, then why did you leave?” he asked.

  Nia went quiet in all ways. For a moment Ahro feared he had said something that upset her, but soon realized she was only thinking about the words she would use to explain a difficult thing. “I was happy, but I also wasn’t. Something was missing, here,” she said, tapping her chest, her heart. “Or not missing, but sleeping. But nothing here could wake it up. It made me feel alone. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

  She didn’t expect him to understand; was surprised when, after some thought, Ahro nodded. “I have felt this,” he said.

  “You have?”

  He tapped his chest, where she had hers.

  “Something asleep,” he said. “In here.”

  An updraft kicked through the grating beneath them, tousling their hair. She stared at him for a beat, as if thinking about how to interpret what he said. In the end, she simply smiled. “I’m glad you get it,” she said. “It’s a lonely feeling, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  She glanced down at the engineer. “How’s it coming, Em?”

  “It’s coming. Going.” The engineer was elbow-deep in the terminal, the wires cascading around his shoulders; sweat cascading down his face. “The heat sure isn’t helping.”

  “Echoed. I wonder how Gorlen deals with it every day.”

  “No cool. No people. Empty bed. Sand fucking everywhere. Surprised he hasn’t lost it yet.” Em stopped for a moment and looked up at her. “How long could you manage it, Captain?”

  Nia sighed in thought. “I could do a year—two, if I got something for it. You?”

  “One month. At most.”

  “Just a month?”

  “That’s if I was by myself the whole time.” He reached for something in the terminal. “Change the parameters, give me a special visitor every now and then, you could convince me to stay longer.”

  “Those poor women.”

  “Then I’d see the benefit of an empty planet,” he said, ignoring her jab. “You could be as loud as you like”—he grinned at Ahro—“no fear of waking anyone up in the middle of the night.” Ahro shifted his feet, very aware of what Em was referring to, and regretted having let the man wheedle that particular story out of him.

  Nia leaned against the railing and asked Em to clarify.

  “His room is right next to Sonja’s, you know.”

  “I’m aware,” Nia said.

  “You hear all sorts of sounds when two people are neighbors. Sounds like, say, a vigorous late-night checkup by the good doctor.”

  Gathering the gist, she pressed a hand to her eyes.

  Ahro was sheepish as he admitted, “They weren’t very quiet.”

  “Can’t fault them for that,” Em said. “Gotta celebrate that third anniversary hard.”

  Nia fought off a grin, and failed. “I’m sorry they woke you up,” she said. “I’ll tell them to be more discreet, that’s not something you should have to deal with. But if you are disturbed again, don’t tell the town gossip”—Em rolled his eyes at this—“and tell me instead, so that I can take care of it. We want to be respectful of the crew’s privacy, right?”

  “Right.”

  “A gossipy ship is an—”

  “An undisciplined ship,” Ahro finished, having by now memorized all of her favorite sayings.

  “I’m glad you’ve been listening,” she said. She nodded at Em. “How much longer will you be?”

  “Almost done.” He snapped his fingers at Ahro, who at the signal dug into the bag and handed
him the canister of spacklegum, and the connexion-nut. A few clacks later, the servos whirred to life, and with great pageantry the dish on the side of the tower shifted a few degrees to the left. Em shut the lid of the terminal, and with a nod Nia led the way to the next terminal a few flights up. They took breaks between the arrays for water and reconstituted snacks from her pack, enjoying the view of the desert, which seemed limitless from their height. “That’s where we landed,” Nia said, pointing to the right. While they worked, Em explained his process to Ahro; the best practices for spacklegum application, the steps he was taking to ensure his heart wouldn’t explode from electric shock, and the stories of fools from the past who learned the hard way about these things. And though Ahro didn’t have much interest in the technical details, he listened, because Nia had asked him to; the lessons were important to her, so they were important to him.

  They spoke no more about Royvan and Sonja’s nighttime trysts, but it remained in the air between them: the image of the boy wide-awake in his room, trying to block out the muffled sounds of slaps and moans. It was an image that stayed with them even after they had finished the work and had climbed back into the truck, Em playing with his chit, Ahro leaning his head against the cool window, following the swell of the passing dunes with his finger, thinking of that strange moment up in the tower when he thought he saw infinity; the both of them startled out of their private thoughts when their captain broke into laughter.

  * * *

  —

  Through the rearview Gorlen observed how the laugh spread from one person to the next. He was envious of it, and wished he knew the reason and the context, so he could join in. It seemed he was always on the outside of these things.