The Vanished Birds

by Simon Jimenez

  …two, one.

  Nia braced herself.

  But there was no light. No spectacle.

  The stars simply shifted position. The nebula, and the fleet, gone. Through the window she saw only empty space. The transition was so sudden that for a moment she thought it a trick of the eye, a skip in the frame of some cheap holo, the jump imperceptible but for the slight stutter of her chair. Almost laughable, until she followed Sartoris’s gaze toward the bank of windows on the other side of the busser, and saw why his eyes widened—saw the spindles of an Umbai City Planet in plain view, the bleached spires glowing against the sun it orbited like a sea urchin in a drift of volcanic light.

  No one spoke.

  “We’ve arrived at City Planet Averyn,” the pilot said with a smile in her voice. “You’ll see it on your left. Take it in. We’ll be jumping again in five minutes.”

  Wordlessly Nia stared at the City Planet. Here it was: vivid and concrete proof that they had moved across the galaxy in one-quarter of a second. She pressed herself against the back of the chair, tears beading her eyes, rivering down her cheeks. One-quarter of a second. Not even enough time to sign a shipping contract, or to utter the first syllable of the sentence “Ready to fold.” No time at all.

  She curled her arms over herself, pressed the flute to her chest. All the years she had given up to the Pocket. The sacrifices that were now irrelevant. There would be no more lost time. No more derelicts stranded in the fringe without hope of rescue. No more last goodbyes to old friends. No skipping across the entire lifetimes of forgotten lovers. It was so beautiful, and so horrible, she couldn’t breathe.

  Sartoris’s hand fell on her shoulder. Through wracked breath she told him she was all right, even though she knew she would not be all right again.

  She wiped her eyes and looked down at the flute in her hand, the cheap wooden thing. She decided to play a song. A final song, here, in memoriam to the fold, and to all the people she let it take from her—a song for Ahro, who felt close now, everywhere, wherever there was a ship that could leapfrog the stars. A song for his blood price, and the smile of his she desperately missed; the slap of sandals down a Barbet class corridor.

  A sound she could hear even now. She found her fingering and pressed her lips to the mouthpiece. With nothing in her heart but the crater of her love for him, for all of them, she trilled the first few notes and, on her first note, that clarion call, the veil was pierced, and in the place below ancient instinct, a small flame bloomed on a dark shore, where the young man woke with a gasp as if punched in the chest, not knowing who he was, or where, or for how long he had slept; only that the dark was broken by some sudden light—a campfire, just a few meters away, small, but bright enough that he had to look away as he crawled toward it, dragging himself across the textureless sand and over the log benches, all the while feeling like he knew this beach and that dark water and even this fire, but not knowing from where, haunted by this ember of a feeling as he crouched before the campfire’s leaping flames and listened to its crackle, the sound of it familiar, the whisper-snap of a woman’s voice…a voice that coaxed him forward with its promise of love and safety, compelling him closer to the red-white heat, close enough to singe, close enough for her to hear him as he opened his mouth and with all the air in his lungs called out to her in a great shout—I’M HERE!—and the busser jumped with unexpected force, like a hand slapped to the back of the head, the passengers winded by the protective hug of their seatbelts, their suc-pacs of ale thrown into the air like confetti, the young server falling forward into the aisle with her ankle caught in an armrest with a twist, the shouts in the cabin at once sharp and guttural, before droning into a chorus of dull groaning as the lights rattled back on and the hull trembled to a stillness, the ship settling, while Nia, dazed, gripped the pulled muscle in her neck and held her hand out to Sartoris, touching him to make sure he was still whole, her friend’s face scrunched up as he pressed his palm to his temple, which he had banged against the window. She asked him if he was all right. With a grimace, he nodded. The cabin was quiet as everyone collected themselves. They were so preoccupied with gathering their wits that no one noticed the morning flare of the white sun that broke through the starboard windows, not until someone screamed and pointed as if in accusation at the sight of the jagged mountain of this unknown planet. The cold white cumulus. The coarse wind that wobbled the glass.

  The world that was not Averyn.

  The pilot confirmed their suspicions, her voice shaking as she said, “I—we jumped. I’m going to hail the judiciary, see what’s going on. Thank you for your patience.”

  The people were not happy. The magic was gone, and now the workers shouted at the young woman in the aisle who was still nursing her ankle, demanding answers. And as they shouted, Nia felt the ground for the flute she had dropped, grasping at the instrument that had rolled under her chair.

  “What happened?” Sartoris asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, rising up, making sure the flute was not broken.

  And she didn’t know, the pieces in her mind, the vital clues, not put together until the busser jumped again, by Umbai’s command, and they arrived at Thrasher Station. Technicians and Yellowjackets waited in the Thrasher docks, ready to determine the cause of the glitch. The passengers were corralled into the port security offices while the woman from Ustinov stood by her ship and watched helplessly as the Umbai technicians stripped her livelihood apart. Nia and the others were body-searched in separate rooms for contraband belongings, of any evidence of tampering with the FT system, the Yellowjackets finding only lint balls and playing cards and twizerine screwdrivers in the workers’ pockets, and, mysteriously, a flute, which a pair of gloved hands studied under the harsh light of the interrogation chamber. And as the light flooded the holes of the instrument, and the inspector peered through the tube, and blew into it to make sure nothing was hiding inside, Nia was graced with her first suspicion; a simple connection in her mind like two meeting fingers. A dared hope of cause and effect, one that would infect her thoughts after they returned to the Joplin, and she, holding the heat blade limply in her hand, would for the first time in many months allow her mind to drift from the work, and remember what the boy had told her before he was taken; a memory of the music that had once called him home when he was lost.

  Come workday’s end, she met with the floor manager and told him she would not be signing the new contract; that, in fact, she would be gone by the end of the month. He did his best to convince her to stay, but in the end was only able to grunt and wish her the best of luck in her future endeavors.

  She ate in the mess hall with purpose. And she strode down the corridors, to the room that she and Sartoris shared, her gaze ahead steeled as she worked out the beginnings of her plan.

  * * *

  —

  No one was sure what had provoked the unscheduled jump, but they were determined to find out. For ten hours the Fast Travel network was shut down while the labs resurfaced the capsule from the Pocket and scrutinized Acquisition’s wiring and automated health utilities, the body that lay in the heart of the machine, the history of its heartbeats. A diagnostics check, interrupted by the movement of Acquisition’s body.

  It was his eyes. They shot open, the pupils dilated, staring blankly at the domed ceiling of the capsule. Tears tracking down his cheeks.

  None of the technicians moved, frozen by the fear that one of their number had messed up with the drug doses, and that the boy was about to escape on the wings of his power. But the open eyes were only a reflex. “It’s fine,” the head tech said, holding up his gloved hand. “He’s still asleep.” Once the heart-stopping moment had passed, they dialed up the sedatives, and the eyelids shuttered to a close. And they sent him, and his capsule, back into the Pocket.

  But the technician was not entirely correct. A part of him was awake now. He had seen the
piercing light, and the crooked bend of shadowed people standing over him, before the new load of drugs submerged him further into the dream. The cold water rising over his face as he was dragged through the black water and crawled back onto the nighttime shore like a protean thing, back to the small, wavering fire on the beach. He heaved himself onto one of the seating logs. His muscles sore. A fist of needles in his head that pricked against the movement of his neck as he looked around at this place below the ancient instinct, knowing now that this place was not real. Not really. Not the silent tree line to his right, with rustling leaves that soundlessly rubbed against one another in the breeze, or the water to his left, the small waves described by the strangely bright light of the moon. He didn’t know what this place was, but he knew that in truth he was elsewhere. He held his hand to the throb in his head.

  A dread feeling overrode the pain of his body when he glanced out at the limitless water, and saw a figure approach. The figure was a black silhouette against the smooth white moon, walking above the waves as though they had no weight at all, their body cloaked in a robe that reflected no light, and their face covered by a mask of cold porcelain, pale and unforgiving.

  The figure stepped onto the beach, making no footprints in the sand, and, after circling around his fire, regarding for a curious moment the young man, they sat on the log opposite his.

  “You’re awake,” they observed.

  The young man trembled as the cold water dripped off his skin. Beyond the feverish shaking, the needling pain in his head, there was a chime; the small brass bells of recollection; the memory of the mask this person wore. He had seen it before. The disturbing smoothness, and the dark eye slits angled as if in anger, or laughter. “You are the Kind One,” he said. He was unsure where the name had come from, or how he remembered it; like the beach and the black water, it was as though the name had always been there, in some secret pocket in his mind, waiting to be reached for.

  Somehow, even though there was no mouth, it looked as though the mask were smiling. “They cut so much from you, but not everything, it seems,” they said with their many voices. “They still believe memories are citizens of the mind. But memories also live in the bones, and the blood.” The voices were a genderless whisper-rush, asynchronous, some voices dragging behind the others, disturbing the clarity, each voice a cold-warm tendril in his ear. “Do you know where you are?” they asked.

  The young man looked around. “No,” he said. “But it feels…familiar.”

  “As it should.” Their gloved hands met, and rested in their lap. “You celebrated a birthday here, once.”

  He winced. There was a knot in his head—a knot of memory that he could not undo. A haze of someone asking him to play another song on his flute.

  What flute?

  “Don’t worry yourself about these things,” the Kind One said. “They are no longer relevant. All that matters, is that.” They pointed at the water from which they had come with their gloved hand. And then the waves stilled, and the ocean seemed to the young man a solid thing, the light of the moon a path that ribboned across its valleys, into the black horizon. “That is the way out from this place. The last road.”

  “Where does it go?”

  “To a long overdue rest.”

  They stood up and held out their gloved hand, which was gray leather, and stenciled by the light of the silent fire. There was a pull, a coaxing, that the young man felt for that hand. And he knew by instinct that to take that hand, to follow the Kind One across the water, would mean the end of pain. Of everything.

  But something else was pulling at him. The fire he sat beside. The voice that had come from it. The yearning he felt, to hear that voice again.

  He hugged himself, and snubbed the Kind One’s outstretched hand.

  “Not yet,” he said, staring at the fire.

  “You know you are dying,” they said. “They are burning through you like my brethren did in the Quiet Ship. Using you up.” They sighed. “Young One, your end has been written. I am sorry for that, but this is truth. But what has not yet been written is how you arrive at this end. From here there are two paths. Stay, and let the birds peck at your body. Or leave, with me, and deny them their stolen meal.”

  But the young man’s eyes did not waver from the flame.

  “Not yet,” he whispered again.

  The Kind One withdrew their hand, stared at him through their eye slits, their thoughts beyond him. They sat back down.

  “It is up to you,” they said simply. “When you are ready.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  And on that quiet and darkened shore, he did his best to ignore the steady flare of pain in his body as he waited with his shepherd for the next whisper from the flame.

  Beyond the place of ancient instinct, in Allied Space, FT traffic resumed as it had before the glitch. In the report sent to the judiciary, the technicians explained that due to the array of inputs and drugs that were fed into Acquisition’s system, it was inevitable that there would be the occasional involuntary reflex—a random jump, perhaps, that would leap a public busser from City Planet Averyn into the atmosphere of a border-fringe world. There was little they could do to combat these “system kicks” but to amp the drug cocktails, and hope. Any further action was not advisable, for one glitched jump out of thousands was not worth the cost of its inquiry. The judiciary agreed with the report. It was in the company’s financial interests to instead address the more pressing matter of the increasing load of FT-capable ships.

  They called it the Bottleneck. They had but one Acquisition, which could service only one ship at a time. From ship authorization to the jump itself and then the post-confirmation, one service job took three to five seconds. As more planets and fleets signed contracts with Umbai, and more ships became FT-capable, the daily authorization queue reached into the hundreds of thousands, inflating the time between request and jump into tens of hours, sometimes days. The Feed swelled with complaints concerning the absurd wait times. Jump schedules were coordinated in advance by weeks. Some unlucky bussers jumped only once a month, which meant ticket prices rose to combat the scarcity of flights. Umbai continued its steadfast optimization of the process, shaving fractions of seconds off the authorization loop. And to satisfy their investors, the company established the Preferential Hour; a one-hour “fast lane” during the Station Standard Day, when jump access was restricted to corpro-government ships and any civilians willing to pay the substantial admission fee, the ships able to come and go as they pleased; a law that, transparent to all, was meant to aid the noble fleets, and few others.

  For Umbai, these were good problems to have. Their coffers were lined with iotas made from the distribution of the chips, the toll tax, the Preferential Hours, and the loyalty contracts of neutral galactic powers. Profits jumped by exponents. City Planets multiplied. Each newly installed chip, each jump, like a nerve peeled fresh from Acquisition’s back.

  * * *

  —

  The room was unfamiliar to Sartoris. He did not know these beds, or the chair by the desk, or the dark view of spires from his window. He touched the cold glass. He did not know how he got here.

  It had happened again.

  Things were always slipping from him. He thought he was getting better, had a better grasp of time. But sometimes, like now, he would turn around, and forget. Circumstance gone in a finger snap.

  He paced around the small room, his cane thumping along the coarsely fibered carpet as he went to the door, and then back to the window. He looked out again. Swallowed dryly. He did not know this place.

  He was alone.

  Hand trembled against cane head as he sat down on the chair by the desk. Something crinkled in his pocket. A sheet of paper, torn fresh from a notebook. Words written on it, a scrawl jotted down in haste. It took him a while to divine the words.

  He had gott
en better, but words were still difficult.

  Sartoris, the note said. This is Nia. You are in a hostel on City Planet Galena. We rented the room for the night. It is ours, so please do not leave. I left at 1600 hours for the substrata, and will be back before midnight. Something down there I need to get. I will tell you more when I return. Try to get some rest. There are snacks in the bag by the bed if you get hungry.

  Don’t worry.

  You are safe.

  He flattened the sheet on the desk. Ran his fingers over the words You are safe. Muttered it to himself as he stood back up and returned to the window.

  “I am safe,” he muttered as he looked up at the unfathomable heights of the City Planet spires, and down to the dark, limitless depths. “I am safe.”

  Words whispered in frantic prayer as life moved on without him. A flow of people traffic in and out of the strata elevators. Down into the underbelly, where the stars could not be seen, and where the people made their own light with broken crackle-sticks and fires fed by trash chuted down from the higher strata. The streets were thronged with crowds, and in the midst of all of them, a child smiled as she crouched in the gutter and relieved herself, waving at the four members of the citizen militia that patrolled past her with their strapped rifles. And nearby, a body, limp on the ground, its throat opened by a knife, while around the corpse people peddled to passersby pairs of knock-off neurals, orbital necklaces, and a fine gem diadem once worn about the head by a forgotten queen of a generation ship. This was the path that Nia walked with a rifle of her own—an old gauss that had once belonged to Sonja—past the boxtowns in the alleyways and the eyes that trailed her without affect before those eyes returned to their listless gazing at the holo-light adverts thrown against the walls, adverts that proclaimed the expensive miracles of new Umbai Company products. No one asked why she was there. They received many visitors from the higher strata, and knew they could do nothing but hope that these visitors too got swallowed by this place.