It was perhaps inevitable that she ran into the older man again. He seemed to be everywhere, or maybe, she thought, the world was that small.
This time he was on the patio that overlooked the vast blue crater below, a cigarette in his mouth, flicking the ash off the railing, into the nothing. Above, Fumiko could see the gauzy skin of the pseudosphere that kept the air in, and the poisons of the moon out—the pseudosphere was like a giant wet eye that blurred the stars and made the sky look like it was melting. When the man noticed her, he offered her a cigarette, which she declined. She knew her body was too sensitive to the smoke.
“Is it the side effects?” he asked. “The reason you’re awake?”
“I believe so.”
“It wasn’t this bad the last time you woke,” he said.
She stood by the railing, placed a hand on its smooth sheen. “I don’t remember this patio. Strange that a research base would have such a thing.” She looked around at the empty tables. “It’s like a hotel.”
He looked at her, almost with pity.
“It was always here,” he said. “You wanted this place to feel like a home.”
“You’ve reminded me of this before.”
“I have.”
She withdrew her hand from the railing and clasped it with the other behind her back; looked out at the crater, the big blue spoon; tried not to make it known how disturbed she was that he knew more about her than she did. “You really don’t remember me,” he said.
There was no point in denying it. “I do not,” she admitted.
He wore a hurt smile. It amazed her, how easy it was to break his heart.
“There are ways to hold on to the memories you lose in cold sleep,” he told her. “Memory extenders. A hard drive they inject right here”—he touched the back of his ear, where there was a small loupe of a scar. “They hurt for a little while, and sometimes you get unwanted flashbacks, but they do the task. You never forget again.”
“Some memories aren’t worth keeping.”
“How would you know this, if you don’t remember them?”
“Intuition. I’ve lived a long time.”
“We both have,” he said.
She looked at him, surprised. But she never had a chance to question him, for it was then that the alert went off—the wail of the emergency sirens, and a call, to each of their devices, that an Umbai warship had folded out of Pocket Space, in orbit of their moon.
The man dropped his cigarette into the dark.
“They found us,” he muttered.
* * *
—
The swell of excitement in her breast. She found it pleasing as she and this man ran together through the corridors, the way the blue lights pulsed hypnotic along the carbon-steel panels, and the rush of movement as bleary-eyed workers emerged from their dens to the sound of coming danger. It was the delight of chucking a rock at a beehive, and witnessing the explosion of movement after. It was a splash of cold water to a sleeping face. The man who knew her noticed her grin but said nothing. It was clear he was not as appreciative as she was of their situation’s aesthetics.
In the amphitheater, they studied the projection of the system map, the red dot signaling the location of the Umbai ship. It was when she saw how close they were, how close she was to losing everything, that something sparked in Fumiko—the memory of the plans she had made, in preparation for such a day.
“Call coming in from the ship,” a woman shouted from an elevated platform.
“Send it through!” the man who knew her shouted back.
A dead voice echoed throughout the vaulted room.
“This is the warship Euphrates. As she is in breach of contract, we of the Umbai-Pelican Fleet have come to discipline Fumiko Nakajima, and collect the intellectual property of the company. Compliance will be met with peace.”
“Send the families down to the basement,” the man said, then joined Fumiko’s side, the stylus he held slipping from his grasp with all his palmy sweat. “We don’t have the power to fend off the Euphrates,” he told her. “We have to let them enter.”
But Fumiko was not paying attention—she was still scratching at the calcified memories, unearthing the actions her past self had done, the fail-safes she had installed.
Another voice from across the room shouted, “Just received message from the Debby!”
“Read it!”
“Start. Fumiko, the child has exhibited the ability to jump. We are ready to return. Requesting rendezvous coordinates. Signed, Sartoris Moth, end of message.”
The message silenced the room; the operators and the scientists, the guards all wordless. Fumiko’s smile sharpened into something frightening. The lark was real. There it was, after all this time.
The Jaunt.
All she needed now was a way out.
Why, darling, we’ve wired the whole place with explosives.
And then she remembered the fail-safe.
“Open a line with the warship,” she said.
The woman confirmed that the line was open. The man who knew her looked at her with begging eyes.
“Warship Euphrates,” Fumiko said into the microphone. “Embedded in Stopwatch Crater are YonSef explosive devices. If your warship does not fold away, I will speak the command word and destroy this base, along with the intellectual property you have come to collect. You will lose decades of vital, progressive research that will change the course of your history. I repeat, fold away, or we create a second crater.”
The man stepped away from her, his hand to his neck. “Is it true?” he asked, choked. “The YonSefs? When did you—Fumiko, there are two hundred families on this base!”
She ignored him. “Umbai, confirm that you have received this warning.”
“Confirmed,” the voice said.
The line went silent.
Then,
“Your proposition is denied.”
“This is not an idle threat,” she said into the microphone, heart beating at a pace it hadn’t in a long time, her brow cloaked in sweat, the world zeroed-out, the world the microphone, her voice, and the warship Euphrates. “Fold within five minutes or I will speak the key command. Do you—”
She heard, from somewhere far off, the sound of a hollow thwack. It took her a moment to realize that the sound was that of something hard, struck against the back of her head. She staggered to the floor. The man who knew her had hit her with the butt end of a torch. The last thing she saw was the disappointment on his face before it all went black.
* * *
—
No sound. No alarm when next she woke. There was only the plain-faced man who sat beside her bed, in his hands a packet of paper, which, when he saw that she was awake, he read from without affect. “This partnership agreement is made this Wednesday of February 2132 and between the party of the Umbai Company and Fumiko Nakajima.” She fought to control the doubled vision in her eyes, and the multidirectional throb of her brain. Her mouth was dry, her lips chapped to the point of bleeding. “And unless the context otherwise requires, the word or words set forth below within the quotation marks shall be deemed to mean the words which follow…” She tried to touch her lips, but her hands were restrained with magne-ties to the bed railing. “All research and creative endeavor performed by Fumiko Nakajima under the purview and collaboration with the Umbai Company will be in perpetuity considered rightful ownership to said company…” She lay there as he spoke, for hours it seemed, until he arrived at the ending, the mistake she had made so long ago. “Signed here by one Fumiko Nakajima.” He showed her the jagged heart attack of her signature. “Do you acknowledge that this is your contract, and your signature?”
“What purpose is this question?” she asked, her voice empty of force.
“Do you acknowledge that this is your contract, and your si
gnature?” he asked again.
“Yes,” she said.
“Thank you.” He took a drink of water from a metal cup. His pronounced Adam’s apple bobbed with each gulp. Fumiko found this grotesque. She wanted to tear the apple right from his throat. “Fumiko,” he said. “You know why we’re here, don’t you?”
There was hair in his nostrils. She wasn’t sure why she was so fixated on this, but she was. “To ‘discipline’ me.”
He nodded. “Your Allied citizenship credentials have been revoked, as have any degrees earned from secondary learning institutions. While you were unconscious, we’ve taken the data from the storage banks, the research from the primary, secondary, and tertiary labs, the ships in the landing pads, as well as the strong majority of raw materials in the subbasements. The computers have been dismantled, and the generator plant in Station B has been drained.”
“You’ve been thorough.”
“We have been thorough,” he corrected. “Please understand that I am the executor, not the judicator. The specifics of the disciplinary actions have been decided beforehand, by the Pelican-Barbet-Thrasher-Macaw Tribunal.”
She laughed. Her own birds were against her.
Fine.
“Is that it, then?”
The man sighed. She was startled by the amount of feeling in that one sigh—startled that he felt anything at all. “No,” he said quietly. “There are two more actions that need to be taken. First, once everything has been settled, you will be left here. Alive, and unharmed. But we cannot take you with us into Allied Space. The tribunal has decided this place will be your banishment.”
So dramatic. “And the other thing?”
“Your subordinates.” He drummed his fingers. “They will be let go.”
“ ‘Let go.’ ” She found this euphemism hilarious, but had no energy to laugh—could only muster a weak smile. “Killed.”
He hesitated. But whatever correction he planned to make he restrained.
“I was willing to blow them up an hour ago. What difference does it make now?” Fumiko sighed. She did not relish the idea of more than a thousand people dying because of her, but it was worth it, the callousness of her response, just to see the surprised expression on the man’s so-average face. It was all out of her hands anyway. That was what she told herself. But the façade didn’t last, her voice small now, as she said, again, “Fine.”
“The tribunal has also ordered that you observe the terminations,” he said. “So that, in their words, you may ‘understand the consequences of breaching your contract.’ ” He stood up, not looking at her. “I’m sorry,” he said before he left the room.
The pain of her dry lips was excruciating. But when she reached up for her glass of water, she was stopped halfway to the bed stand by the cuff on her wrist.
She had never wanted anything more in her life than that water.
She licked her lips with her sandpaper tongue as they escorted her out of the medica. The termination was to be performed in the subbasement, a room the size of a warehouse that smelled of dried clay. What used to house the raw materials with which the research base was expanded was now filled with the 2,590 residents of Fumiko’s little toy city.
There were adults, and there were children. None of them moved, not a sound from their mouths, as though they thought that if they continued to obey the orders, and stood very still, the bullets would go around them. The Yellowjackets had Fumiko stand in the center of the firing squad, as dictated by tribunal orders. From the odd way the soldiers acted, she supposed this was not a normal course of action; that even they were startled by the harshness of such a discipline. But they complied anyway. Fumiko swallowed. She made herself watch. Told herself this was only another cost of business, and that after all the years she had passed through, all the lives she’d seen end in the passage, she had learned that life was cheap refuse to be discarded over her shoulder. Refuse without names, without faces and—
The mag-rifles raised on the lieutenant’s command. As if pushed by a great, invisible wave, the people fled into the opposite wall. Amid the riot, this fresco of hell, she saw the man who knew her; the one who had knocked her unconscious. He stood his ground, straight-backed and sweating. He stared at Fumiko in a way that beguiled her. It was without anger, without warmth.
And then she remembered how she knew him, and where they had first met.
* * *
—
It was the same coldly neutral look he had given back on Old Earth, more than one thousand years ago, when she had found him outside of his mother’s cabin, chopping wood for a fire—a look that said, Oh. It’s you.
She had always wondered what had become of the man whose career she had ruined after she had deconstructed his sloppy work on the whiteboard of the Cybelus conference room; wondered if the rumors were true that his newfound infamy moved him to suicide. “It didn’t,” he said, nestling his ax into the stump. “But I haven’t left this plot of land in three years.” He unsheathed his gloves. “A boy from town brings me groceries.”
The plot was in the middle of a North American forest, on the rise of a hill, peppered with skeletal pine trees with roots dug firm in the black dirt. It had taken a while for her to find him, but she needed to do it before she rode the Ark away from this world—needed to close the last of the loops. “I never intended for that moment to go viral,” she said.
He shrugged. “If you’re here to apologize, don’t bother. I’ve made my peace with things.”
She nodded. “I’m glad to hear that.”
That would’ve been the end of it—she would’ve gotten back in her car and left him to his solitude, had he not stopped at his front door, and, after running his hand through his thinning hair, asked her if she wanted some tea. Her time was limited, for there were still many preparations to be made before she rode the Colombian Elevator the following week, but she accepted his invitation anyway.
She sat on a homemade stool that tilted to the right while he put on the kettle. He told her about his life. The mundane details about his day. The pot noodles he liked to cook, the weekend fishing in the tributary a few miles east. “Trees make for good company,” he said, apropos of nothing. He told her that he still worked on his mathematics skills. That he was no longer the arrogant young man in the viral video. He said this with pride. It was obvious to her that he was lonely, that the mere act of talking was enough to make his hands shake. She knew lonely, and knew that, however inadvertent, it was her actions that had created his loneliness; that was why she interrupted his life story and asked if he would like to board the departing Ark with her. Hot tea dribbled from his mouth as he told her yes, God yes, and she saw in his eyes how she had turned from Specter to Savior; the gimp pelican, spreading its wings into transcendence; an intoxicating sensation that she would chase for centuries.
Hart was her first loyal bird, among hundreds more to come. There were days when he was her only friend in the universe, and it was just the two of them in a conference hall, sharing their memories of Old Earth. Without hesitation he synced his cold sleep with hers, and followed her through the dregs of time. She supposed he loved her. A kind of love, one that she could not reciprocate, but still appreciated, for it was better than no love at all.
In the depths of the crater, in the vault of screaming, she remembered him. She was about to shout his name when the triggers were squeezed. She flinched from the percussive blasts of the rifles, but kept her eyes open as they killed her people, and the friend she had forgotten.
* * *
—
The plain-faced man was the last to speak with her. The soldiers were boarding the transport ship on the landing pad as the man told her they had left behind the foodstuffs in the storage area, enough to last one person a lifetime. When he was certain they were not seen, the man stepped close to her and pressed a pistol into her hand. �
��It’s empty,” he whispered, “but I left a cartridge in the amphitheater.” And then he turned and boarded the ship, and with a boom he quit the moon. She was alone.
What she had witnessed in the subbasement was too vast to comprehend. The trauma came in rounds, crippling her to her knees as she walked down the steps of the base, tightening her chest to the point of breathlessness as she walked the corridors. It took time, and effort, to gather enough composure to make it to the amphitheater, where she discovered the truth of the plain-faced man’s words; the computers had been destroyed, and there was no energy in the circuits, no lights but for the torch she found in the emergency cabinet in the central staircase. Anything that would enable contact off-world was dead. And there, on the round table, where Hart had knocked her out, stood a cartridge for her empty pistol.
She left the cartridge where it was for the time being. Spent the next few days searching the base with the small sliver of hope that Umbai had missed a crucial component that her past self had anticipated. But every fail-safe she had installed into the guts of the base had been found, and stripped. The isolated scramline terminal. The backup communications chips for the ships. Even the old radio transmitter. Without access to the amphitheater consoles she had no way of searching the ship logs to see if there were any that had left and were due for return, but she suspected there were not, certain she had seen a full roster in the bay when she first arrived. She knew in her heart that all of the pilots were in the subbasement with the others; that they were dead, like she should’ve been, a long time ago.
Her vain search for salvation ended, she returned to the amphitheater and sat in the chair by the round table, where she gazed down at the plain-faced man’s parting gift. The only tool she had to leave this moon. Her hand wrapped around the cartridge and guided it into the pistol with a satisfying click. She did this slowly, drawing out the movements as she imagined what was to come—the great wind that would blow her troubles out the side of her head, like dirt cleared from a pipe. When the gun was loaded, she hesitated—thought she could smell curry from down the hall, thought she could hear the patter of rain on a café window—before these sense memories evaporated with a shudder.
The Vanished Birds Page 29
