The Vanished Birds

by Simon Jimenez

  Sometimes there was no work, and few supplies. Sometimes there were nights when the meals were small and they went to bed with angry stomachs and restless dreams. But these nights he didn’t mind. He knew hunger long before he met Nia—was in a strange way comforted by the old sensation, safe in the knowledge that, at least here, there was no one who woke him up with the steel toe of their boot, no broken bones. The hunger was useful in its distraction. It stopped the other thoughts he had before bed; thoughts inspired by the men coming in from the shore with bodies like eels and sharks, and what it would be like to sing with them the song he learned on the moon of dogs. On the nights when there were no such distractions, he fumbled with himself in the dark, pretending he was not alone; an arm, wrapping itself around his waist; a finger, tracing his lips; nights that ended in frustration, his face pressed against the pillow as he reminded himself that it was late, and time to get some rest for the next day of work.

  But first he played another song.

  Saw, in between the notes, the vision of a black ocean.

  * * *

  —

  The more reliable he got, the more the crew saw him as their equal. There was no child left to be coddled. They opened up the parts of themselves that still hurt; the names they carried with them. As they tightened the straps that hugged the crates to the floor of the cargo bay, Em sang stories of his life back on Galena. The scrappy jank of the boxtown he called home, where he lived with a two-tailed cat named Nanda, and where, every other night, he would visit the bedroom of the violent black-market queenpin Morissa Algernon, who would briskly tell him after their midnight tussles that if he ever disappointed her in bed she would have him killed, even though it was common knowledge that he was her only lover. Whether she was joking, he never learned. “I still don’t know if she liked me,” he said with a rare shyness.

  Jogging through an empty glen, Sonja told him between gulps of air the story of the man who saved her in the gas fields of a Resource World. They were snuffing out a farmers’ rebellion, she explained, stalking the pipe-rows and stomping on the ground in search of hidden hatches, when a nervous fool tripped a party mine wedged under the lip of an argon valve. The light of the explosion was like a flower. Wiped out half the squad in a single rapturous blink. She was blasted onto her back. A slim crack running down her visor. The neurotoxins whistling in. At this part of the story she stopped jogging. She looked away from him when she shared the moment she would never forget—how the man saved her by removing his own mask and forcing it onto her head, his last sounds that of manic, red-veined laughter as the toxins squeezed his brain into a pea. “Norrin,” she said. “He was a kid. Not much older than you.”

  They were names of people who had passed on, and who lived only in the regret of their whispers. The patient Royvan had failed, the death that ruined his career. “Justine the Supreme, queen of your wet dreams. Immortal, until she wasn’t.” He poured out the last of the wine, until the red drink beaded over the rim of his cup. “Not everyone can be saved,” he said. “Some people just die. And it doesn’t matter how hard you try, because dead is dead. Dead is dead.” He drank deeply, his teeth a red smile, and he whispered that name, Justine, as he met Sonja at her hatch, and disappeared into that unknown and forgiving dark with her.

  As for Vaila, the stories she shared had everything not to do with the name she carried with her. These were the stories of the other people; the woman who drafted the first fold-accelerator, and the man who made art of the Thrasher military viper. Stories of other times. Her nervousness the day of her flight examination and how she almost crashed into the observer’s tent. She never spoke the name of the one she loved, but she didn’t need to. That story was in the clench of her ladeum beads and the days she went speaking to no one, trapped in fantasies that were for her alone. And so it was that he learned the names of Nanda, Morissa, Norrin, Justine, and Fumiko. And Deborah—the name that Nia whispered, after lights-off, when it was just her and him in the captain’s quarters. The sister she had left behind, to start a new life outside the debts of her gambling father. “My mother had this series of books,” she said. “An Old Earth collection. First edition. They were priceless.” She chuckled mirthlessly. “I sold them for the price of one ticket. And even that was cheap, compared to prices now.” He listened as she confided in him the old regrets—the friends she missed who were long gone, Nurse and Durat and Baylin, the names from another life whose faces were a blur in his memory, but for her seemed as sharply resolved as yesterday. And he was there for her to hold as she spoke aloud all the things she wished she’d done a different way, the words she had held back out of pride, and he smiled out of understanding the mornings after, when she apologized for how she’d behaved and told him that her comfort was not his responsibility.

  “The only person you have to take care of is you,” she told him.

  He did not tell her about the music.

  What was happening to him.

  The work wasn’t bad. He liked being useful, and feeling like a part of their company. There were days when it all clicked; when the work and the lessons made him the happiest he had ever been in his brief but eventful life. And there was the day he truly felt grown-up. Finally allowed to don one of the spacesuits in the locker, he left the ship with Nia into the float of space, their umbilicals making sines behind them as they climbed the rungs to the hull, their magnetic feet thumping along the roof of their home, to the place above the cockpit, where she showed him the emergency beacon and how to prop the antenna open by hand, should it come to that. And when she had finished her explanation, there was a silence as they both realized at the same time how vivid the stars were, the dappled swirl of the fringe, a paint splatter, a piece of art in progress. Everything far away, nothing important, nothing but the two of them as they smiled at each other through their visors and she held his hand and gave him permission to switch off the magnets of his feet, to float above her like he’d once done many years before in the kitchen, with the warm certainty that he was safe and that she would not let go, and the dark wondering of what if she did, and where he would find himself if not for the hand that gripped his.

  On the job he watched the strangers his own age wander down the darkly lit alleys of the larger cities, beautiful in their almost feral energy, howling as they headed toward a world he would never know. He dreamed of howling with them. Dreams that were interrupted by Nia’s nudges, Nia’s hand on his wrist, Nia’s calm yet insistent reminder that they needed to keep moving.

  “The work waits.”

  They were always leaving.

  Fuel. Thrusters. Strings. Gears. Sails. By year’s end he was one of them. On his own he unfurled the sails by hand and rewelded the snapped conduits; applied suture gel to the superficial cuts along Em’s arms after he was bit by the sharp brass teeth of the core gears, and made his own splint from materials he found in the medica when Vaila sprained her ankle coming to and from the cockpit, which she thanked him for a few folds later, presenting him with a rosary she had carved from many different-colored rocks. When he and Sonja walked out on a mesa, and she positioned an empty bottle on a high rock, far enough that it looked like a speck, he shattered it with one round of the gauss rifle, a feat that made him sick and proud. And by year’s end, the pit no longer made him nervous. Nia beamed as he elbowed his way through the people, their smoke, and he held up the Debby’s sig-card, and shouted, “Captain Nia Imani! Barbet Transport Ship! Doctor Trained in Gracilius Med! Soldier with Ten Tours’ Experience! Three-Day Limit! Captain Nia Imani! Barbet Ship! Experienced Crew of Seven! Ready to Work! Yes! You! This way!” and gestured for the employer to follow him, follow him back to his waiting captain. Another job, another outpost seen from behind Sonja’s broad back. Tired and heavy at the end of the day. His eyes shut and his mind between worlds as he pressed the flute to his lips and felt the spark that would soon bloom into a flame, not long after his
seventeenth birthday.

  * * *

  —

  They celebrated with his first pipe smoke. The pipe was lit under a green sky scattered with white balloons that measured the materials of the sky. The smoke swelled his brain and inspired his fingers as he played his lyn, and his flute, and palm-tapped his drums, all the instruments he’d collected along the way. He played the songs he composed in his head during the work; a ballad for Sonja and Royvan, who danced together slowly, their relationship no longer an open secret, while Em made drunken twirls behind them. And as Nia and Vaila played a game of cards on an upturned box and fold-out chairs, Ahro slowed the play of his lyn, and he glanced at Sartoris, his teacher, his thoughts bubbling about love. “Have you ever been with someone before?” he asked casually.

  The old man opened one of his eyes. “Do you mean in the romantic sense?”

  He strummed, nodded.

  “Then yes,” he said. “I have.” Both eyes were open now. “Though my relationships were different from what I suspect you are thinking of. I was with a group of like-minded people. We lived together for a number of years, shared everything but our physical selves.” He smiled, distantly. “I learned much from them. It’s a rare day when they do not cross my mind.”

  “What happened to them?”

  The man’s head moved side to side, as if to say this and that. “The last I heard they were still together, with some new additions. But if you’re wondering why I am not with them now…suffice to say I was young, and handled things poorly.” It was a smile without joy. “I was cruel.”

  “I can’t imagine you being cruel.”

  He chuckled. “Whatever you might think, I am but a mere mortal, and it is startling how easy it is for mortals to be cruel when they are afraid.” When he let out a great sigh, it occurred to Ahro that he had never seen the man look so sad. And then, as if aware of how he was coming across to his student, Sartoris straightened up. “But I hope that doesn’t dissuade you from learning your own lessons on love,” he said, “whenever that may be. It should say something that despite my regrets I still stand by its recommendation. I would do it all again if I could, even with its lackluster ending.”

  In his periphery, Ahro saw Nia leaning back in her chair, her hand of cards facedown—knew that she was listening. “I don’t think I’ll have the chance,” he said to Sartoris.

  “What makes you say that?”

  All Ahro had to do was give him a look.

  “Right. Our situation.” There was pity in Sartoris’s eyes, and an unconvincing lightness in his voice, as he said, “There will come a day. One day.”

  “Ahro,” Nia said, standing up from her chair. “Come help me with the bottles.”

  He put down his lyn and followed.

  * * *

  —

  The cargo bay was dark, all the lights in the Debby switched off. There was only the light from the fire outside, which threw their shadows forward as they made their way to the bin under the catwalk steps. She kicked open the lid, and one after another they tossed the empty bottles in, to be refilled later at the next outpost. Because of the backlight, he couldn’t see her face, her expression, when she said, “Things are good, right?” Saw her stand very still. “Not perfect. Nothing is. But I think we’re doing okay.”

  He nodded. He placed the last bottle in the bin, the glass clinking against its brothers.

  “You can talk to me. If there’s something on your mind.” Her head turned toward him, the concern in her eyes slowly resolving in the dark. “Is there?”

  He hesitated.

  “No,” he said, smiling. “We’re doing okay.”

  “Everything I do,” she said, “the choices I make, I know it can be frustrating. But it’s all to keep you safe. To make sure you can take care of yourself if I—if no one is there to help. Do you understand?”

  He said nothing.

  “This is all for you,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  The flute song that night was plaintive. It drifted through the vents, the hatches, and the corridors; past the rooms where the crew slept soundly, satisfied with their dreams, and through the hull, out of the ship itself. The notes of the song fell into the vacuum. Into the mythic constellations of the first travelers, and deeper still, until the song was caught in the pull of the black ocean, and disappeared, out of view. He put down his flute. Tapped it against his chest. There were some lessons he would have to learn on his own.

  And so he decided to leave. Not for good, only for a night; a night of his own.

  See what might happen.

  One month later, an opportunity. They had landed in the docks of the Painted City, where the walls were murals and the people celebrated the lunar alignment of Dyack, Rohindra, and Essex. Like a crow in the rafters, he waited until the crew were well into sleep. And he snuck out—slipped out the escape hatch nestled in the ceiling, between the cockpit and the captain’s quarters. Climbed down the rungs of the ship. Walked out of the docks. A nervous smile as he joined the cheering crowd in the streets. Above, the three blue moons telescoped outward, like three heads of smaller sizes stacked one atop another. There was enough of a glow that the streets were day-bright. He walked among the people—the old man draped in many fine cloths who called out to him from some crooked alley, the woman with beads in her braids and long fingernails scored by digital glamours—and he gazed across the street at the ones his age, the ones he never had any cause to speak to, the air around them intoxicating, so different from the older men and women of the Debby, crackling with languages he’d never heard. And he followed them, despite Nia’s lessons; accepted the consequences as he went deeper into this city, and saw where the people went. And there he found himself.

  It was an open park where they danced under electric moons to pounded drums. It was between the blown-out façades of old buildings, and among bone-white trees that helixed into the sky. He slipped into the dance, past the idle smokers and the lovers whispering into each other’s ears, into a crowd like the travelers’ pit but with bodies that moved in time with one another, muscles captured by the current of the music. Fell into this world, that old sensation, that resonance, as he breathed in the smell of the bodies and the sweat, and stepped into the movement toward the place where sound met sound like two whitecapped waves colliding. He grinned as a man bumped into him with a smile of his own. He held his hands up like everyone else. Shouted at the Essex moon. Colorful streamers scored the sky as he let himself be swallowed by the new; the limbs moving him toward the center, where the music was loudest. Where the electricity was like a finger traced up his spine, and where the world waved and warped as he clutched his swimming head, the resonance making a diamond shatter of his thoughts, shifting him into delirium as he felt the heat crescendo.

  And he remembered it all. All of the memories withheld from his conscious mind. An impressionistic rush of images of his last moments on the Quiet Ship—the how of his escape. The force with which the Kind One threw him into the escape pod. The final farewell, in the form of their gloved hand on his cheek. A touch, before the other Musicians found them, charged forward, and parted them violently. The snapping of bone as they cracked the Kind One with their wands. The Kind One broken, their body a gibbering splay. Then terror, as the masks turned toward the pod. His cowering form, curled by the controls, wishing himself away. That terrified wish made manifest by that bright and violent spark. A spark that crackled as the grip of the Musicians’ many hands dragged him out of the pod. The heat rising off his back. His robes flashing to ash. The smell of leaving.

  He knew exactly what this was.

  In the plaza of the Painted City, below the triad moons, his eyes rolled back and his hand clutched his chest and he let it take him. He gave his body up to the dancers and the moons, the black ocean and the roar. Time inhaled its breath and stopped the m
ovements of this world. The dancers were pinned to the air and the drinkers held in their kingly repose of goblets tipped into open mouths, while above them all the glittering streamers were glued to the sky, his last thought a guttural recognition of how beautiful it was, this frozen sea of love and action, before the power within him, that old stranger, returned, and upon a blast of light he fell away from this world; his body gone, between the celebratory beat of their drums.

  8

  Home

  And then he woke up.

  It was dark.

  Cold.

  His entire body was numb; the limbs unable to rise; the brain’s synaptic firings at a lazy and distracted crawl as he stared listlessly upward at the blanket of black above him. His eyes blinking once. Twice. Convinced in an unbothered way that he would not move again for days, or centuries.

  It was a slow awakening. The details of this place leaked in like gas whistling through a crack in a wall, poisoning his lethargic ease. The movement of leaves, twittering above him on thin, skeletal branches. The irregular surface of the forest floor under his back; the wet mulch, the sharp twig that poked his rib cage. The chill of the mist that carpeted the ground, and curled its gray tendrils over his naked body, leaving behind trails of dew on his chest and thighs. He realized his nakedness. The leak of details became a pour. Leaves rustling like broken nails against a wind that shrieked through the branches, while among his hands and feet the nauseous skitter and click of insects and the slick tickle of small, many-legged things brushing his skin as they dove in and out of the leaf bed. And slowly, the awful dawning that it was not the wind that shrieked but something else altogether, borne on its sharp currents; the shriek of something man-made, and hollow, and—if the chorus of it was truthful—of large number. And underneath this uncanny shrieking, the faint tremors in the ground that steadily grew in force and volume, signaling the thump of something large and heavy in swift approach, a creature in rampaging gallop, letting loose a baritone howl so rich in death that when he heard it, the old, rusted lock within him was shaken off its latch and he snapped awake, transformed, the coddled adolescent of the Debby sloughed from him like old skin, and was now, once more, the small, hard thing in the shadowed halls of the Quiet Ship, whose body knew only one verb.