Fires sprouted down the shore, from nothing. The woman’s voice doubled and tripled, and was carried on the sea breeze that made the hairs on his arms stand on end, as if the hairs too were listening. The Kind One watched him impassively as he threw himself at these new fires and shouted into the flame. But the response never changed—there was always the static, the waver, as if she were asking a question with words that were beyond him. All he could do was shout louder.
Tenth jump. The only pattern that we can detect is that the more we play, the farther our jumps go. Instead of neighboring systems, we skip over the stars. But there is no shape to our journey—nothing that can give us any direction other than to keep playing, with the hope that the increasing distances are a sign in our favor.
Twelfth jump.
Nia says it is like having a one-sided conversation.
She could feel him just beyond the door, but the door had no key, not even a lock, only a jammed knob. And while Sartoris slept in his cordoned section of the busser, his body draped across a row of seats, she crouched before the busser’s engine, the black box, her hands pressed against her forehead as she asked for a clearer sign, the black box remaining silent, unaware how on the other side, the young man walked the necklace of fires with the Kind One dogging his step, ignoring the ache in his chest and in his head that grew in strength each hour as he waited for the next whisper.
“Nothing will come of this,” the Kind One muttered.
Fortieth jump. We are poor. The funds Nia had earned on the Kerrigan have dwindled, forcing us to return the busser to its original function. In the desert flats beyond the sounder’s outpost, Nia threw down the last stroke of white paint. Sartoris glanced up from his book and read aloud the name she had painted on the side of the busser. “The Ahro Imani.” He cracked a smile. “A bit obvious, isn’t it?” She flung paint at him. Now we scuttle passengers between the recently acquired fringe worlds, where there is less competition, for the City Planet plans are still being drafted. I serve the drinks to our twenty guests, suggesting the pairings with our frugal selection of snacks, while Nia pilots us to the next world.
They made their routes in the days between flute jumps. It was an involving job, and sometimes swallowed entire weeks with its menial upkeep and bureaucracy. Once, a whole month lost when the busser was suspended pending a “thorough” safety inspection, when a passing Allied inquisitor decided he did not like the rattle of its thruster. They brushed the chairs of crumbs and cleared out their makeshift beds before the passengers boarded. Switched off the scrambler before hailing the judiciary for authorization. Endured the long wait in the queue, which would more often than not span the better part of a day. Sometimes authorization would spring up at random; there was no choice but to hole up and wait. To placate the restless passengers who were without neural entertainments, they scattered objects around the cabin that would pass the time. Packs of Tropic Shuffle and pipes and books. A long-necked lyn from Suda-Sulai, which Nia ended up playing more than anyone else, for she could not play the flute when they had company, and the lyn was the closest she could get to being in his company.
She sometimes plays music for our guests. Strums simple chords to the popular songs of the day.
Sixtieth jump.
She has gotten quite good.
Eightieth.
She makes her own songs now.
As she played, in the place below ancient instinct, by the light of the hundredth flame, the young man could hear it. Her song. It was faint, all but a feeling. But still he could hum along to the notes, and remember the words of homecoming. And it was as he listened that the Kind One placed their gloved hand on their mask and removed it, revealing the face of a woman, tall and strong, who looked at him like he was brighter than the fire itself. A woman whose name was just beyond his tongue.
She held out her hand.
“Come with me across the water,” she said.
He felt himself unspool when he stood up, and left her. Fought the temptation to turn back as he tracked the static whisper to the next light—the one hundred and first, at the end of the fiery chain that rambled down the shore, and to the dozens, and hundreds, that followed.
It was a long march on feet with soles pricked by a directionless pain. He bore through it. The Kind One shadowed him on this march, appearing before him at the next fire without taking a single step, the beguiling mask always there to greet him, and tempt him with that final route across the water. Three hundredth fire. They tempted him with faces. They would remove their mask and show him the faces from his past. The hard-nosed veteran, the doctor with the immaculately trimmed beard, and the engineer who made a habit of glancing over his shoulder at the imagined shadows that were behind him. Four hundredth fire. The bald teacher with generous eyes, and that young man from the mountaintop, whose shattering eyes pinned him into place and flared his heart, along with the long line of fires behind him, the shoreline bright with his desire. The people he cared for, speaking now with the Kind One’s voice, telling him to let go. All of them tempting, but none more than the woman he now remembered was a captain, and who once sold her mother’s prized books for a ticket offworld. Difficult, but comfortable. A kinship in the hard-won lessons. Tacit understanding of each other’s hurt. A friend he once feared would leave him, but who never did, for where else would she go, with eyes so fierce with love? These were the faces the Kind One threw at him, always with hand outstretched, beseeching him to give in. Five hundred fires now. They were just behind him, asking why he did not stop. Could he not bear the pain? Umbai showered his blood onto the FT Chips of the Personal Flyers, each release of these ships, and each jump, a prick on the young man’s skin, a pluck of a nerve that tripped his step. Did he not know that this road led to the same end? Six hundred. The swarm of stings built to a crescendo, and Umbai smeared his blood onto the heart of the Pelican and jumped the massive station down the galactic arm, proclaiming their dominion on the black ocean, and his body. His heart seized, doubling him over onto the sand. “Your body will only withstand so much,” the Kind One whispered, crouched beside him. “You are a glass bird in a vise, and that vise is squeezing. You will crack. You will shatter.” They shook their head. “You beg to return to a world that has beaten you. A world that even now is siphoning the life from you so that it can grow large enough to swallow all cardinal directions. Why do you waste your time walking this shore? Why attempt this return?”
He gritted his teeth and pushed himself back on his feet, his hand clutched to his chest as he drag-stepped to the next fire.
“Because she is waiting for me,” he said.
And she was, even as she grew older over the years of her music, and all that she had seen and lived through now made their witness marks on her body; the happy wrinkles hardening into crows’-feet, the joints going rigid, and the hair sprouting new and varied grays. Through age, she waited. Some days she was hot, very hot, to the point of claustrophobia, as if a blanket had been smothered over her body. Those were the days when she sat on the roof of the busser and played her lyn, cooling herself off on the lip of a wind-blown canyon. A week spent landed on the last of the fringe worlds, the last of the rocks not stamped by an Umbai spire. No strata in sight. Only the ache in her arm as she held the lyn and pulled from its strings her songs while, below, Sartoris listened to the tribble of notes through the opened busser door.
There are things missing in my memory—residual gaps from my coma. She tells me stories of the crew that we once traveled with, but their names are gone. It is only when I hear her play these songs that I can grasp it—the blur of faces.
Faces of old friends.
Nia played for the shadows that gathered around the busser. The dozens she’d once known, their ghosts come for the performance.
At the head of them, Deborah, and Nurse.
Old friends that slip away when I reach for them. The
shape of them like paper cutouts. A play of one act, before the curtain is drawn, & they are gone again. I wonder why my brain bothers to retain these abstractions. What use is it to me, to hold on to these half-formed memories? Where am I supposed to put them? What pocket?
“I’m not going to stop,” Nia told them, for she had long since learned her life’s purpose. Accepted the nature of herself: that she would always, and ever, chase after what was just out of reach. Even if it was, in the end, a shadow.
Nurse smiled, and Deborah nodded.
We know.
Maybe it’s enough that they are there at all, he wrote.
The shouts rang past time and location. Six hundred fiftieth jump. There were nights when it almost ended; when she lay beside the black box, howled, and raged, and when the Kind One almost convinced him the pain was not worth the process, and he would look into the dark water and think how tempting it was, to walk that distance.
Seven hundredth jump. But always there was another fire in bloom, and a new chance to shout his coordinates. She would play her song, and he would find that new flame, and together, they would add another voice to the choir. Eight hundredth jump. Even when their bodies went ragged and age clawed its way down her back and made it hurt to sit upright, and the new fleets dragged the air from his lungs and he shivered in the dark, they continued. Past the nine hundredth jump, the nine hundredth fire. Time leaping from their fingers and their tongues as they chipped away at the wall, her music and his shout; his many shadow selves his chorus as their cries echoed through the flames and down the vaults of the Pocket, and made the bonfires erupt and dance. Their music was an assault. It was the moment itself. The unshakable feeling that they were working toward something, together. A finger, in some distant capsule, twitching to the beat. Both of them with hands held out as they whittled away the years, until one day, the music stopped, and the interstellar dance then ended.
Here: the year and hour when Umbai jumped their first surveyor ship to Andromeda, the distance between galaxies, and the farthest anyone had ever gone before.
It was the last great act. The company had pulled the string to its breaking point. When that surveyor ship made its leap from out of the Milky Way, the last of him was torn from his chest. Life’s energy fluttered out parted lips. His legs gave. And in a silent humph, his face met the sand.
He knew he would not rise again.
* * *
—
The Kind One lifted him up into their arms. Their voices were gentle as they told the young man, “There is no shame in this.”
And in the sad and sweet tones of their voices, he knew that they spoke the truth. He was limp. He would not move again. They carried him past the line of bonfires, and toward the water. There was nothing left in him. “Some roads go on and on,” the Kind One said. “And some roads end before their route. But no road goes on forever.
“All of them are half-finished circles,” they said.
* * *
—
The Kind One’s feet touched the surface of the black water. Their steps made no ripple as they began the long walk to the other side. The young man pressed his face against their chest as they journeyed across the water, and the shoreline shrank, the fires small now, the rage of their burn dying. The farther he went from shore, the less important it all was.
He pressed his hands to himself. He was shaking. It was surprising to him, how tired he could be, and still so scared. As if reading his thoughts, as if being his thoughts, the Kind One squeezed him against their chest, just a little, just enough to feel it. And in that moment, he knew that he was ready to let go.
“You tried,” the Kind One said.
I tried.
“That’s enough for anyone to be proud of.”
Be proud.
He relaxed in their embrace, and was borne on their floating walk across the water. I am proud, I am proud; these words his last prayer, as they voyaged from that brightly lit shore to where the tired ones go to rest.
“They took so much from you,” the Kind One murmured. “Take comfort in the fact that even if you emerged today, it would have likely been your last.”
The young man recognized this truth. He could feel it in the cracked bone and the turned-out flesh of him. But the words also stirred in him another truth—a deeper one, pinned to the lyrics of an old farmer’s song.
“They could take my day,” he said—leaned forward, just a bit—“but I’d still have the night.”
He was not sure where those words had come from. Like the shore, and the Kind One themselves, it was another thing unearthed. Woven into the fabric of him. A hint of the first parting he could not remember. And when he looked up, he saw it: the hairline crack that ran down the latitude of stars. That fissure of light above the coast that had been slowly unraveling itself, all this time, like the loose thread of a sleeve by an agitated thumb—ready now to be torn open.
It was then that he saw the birth of a new flame. The thousandth of her fires wavered like a star before dawn, weak but still living, beyond his reach, and calling to him from the end of the shore.
In the cockpit of the busser, she played on, to no response. Sartoris watched her fluteplay, the frantic madness of notes, his face sagging as he accepted what she could not. Hunched in his chair, his whole body resting against his cane, he whispered the truth.
“I think that’s it,” he said.
“I’m sorry, Nia,” he said.
But after fifteen years, there was too much momentum to stop her. There was no choice but to play to a leaving audience. She did not stop playing. Even after Sartoris had returned to the cabin, she did not stop. Even after the busser went into standby and the lights switched to dreamer’s blue. Even after she knew that it was over.
As he was drawn deeper toward the heart of the cold water, it struck him, this sudden and wretched ache to be near that last fire’s warmth. He demanded that the Kind One take him back. They sighed, and stopped their walk on the tip of a frozen wave. “If that is what you wish,” they said. They brought him to the thousandth bonfire, the last bonfire, and laid him beside its crackle, its still-audible whispering, and it was there, by the sound of her voice, calling to him, where the young man let out his final shout, and completed the circle.
* * *
—
The busser jumped. It settled against the wind currents of the new atmosphere. And something in Nia’s heart stirred as she gazed through the viewport at the purple fields of Umbai-V.
An old ache.
The world had changed with new industry. They sailed past the cluster of hotel spires, the bridge port, and the large factory beyond the fields, landing in the outskirts of the Fifth Village, where few things were still recognizable from the time when ships traveled the long way around. There were fold-out capsule homes shipped from Umbai-Fac to accommodate the growing population, stacked atop one another in looming towers. Children from windows high up watched her and Sartoris pass through the crooked streets. Some shouted at them in Standard. Look at me. Pretty, pretty. Why are you with that old man? They walked on. Few of the homes were still constructed from dhuba stalk and the wood from the nearby forest, and as far as Nia could tell, no one lived in those.
“Why do you think he brought us here?” Sartoris wondered.
She couldn’t say.
Today was a break day for the Fifth Village. There were no tourists walking the roads. The two of them were the only visitors, and were for the most part ignored, while the residents prepared the main plaza for an event later that night. Tables were carried out and propped open. Freestanding torches were dug into the ground, circling the perimeter—in the center, the collection of wood for a great fire. Nia caught the attention of one of the men preparing the tables, and asked him if this was all for Shipment Day, to which he answered with a blank stare. Of course it isn’t, she
thought, feeling ridiculous for even mentioning it. The man and his friends stared warily at her. Seeing no graceful way out, she offered to help stack the wood for the fire they were building. They accepted, almost out of sheer surprise that it was offered to begin with, and she worked through the burning pain in her shoulder, glad that she had found some use for herself here. Once the last of the timber was dropped into the pit, they invited her and Sartoris to stay for the celebrations. One of the men asked her for her name. She told him it was Nia, and that it was an Old Earth name, and when he smiled, she thought he was going to make a pass, but he only nodded and walked away. She laughed at how disappointed she was that she had not found another Kaeda; was glad she still had the capacity to expect such a thing, and to want it. This was no longer the world of her memory.
That world was gone.
The event that night was a birthday party for one of the governor’s sons. While Sartoris admired the spread of food on the long table, she leaned against the wall, feeling a keen déjà vu as she watched the young people dance. The governor’s son fumbled his arms around the hips of a woman who was unaware of his presence. Is this why we’re here? To watch kids grope each other? She tipped her cup and drank. She felt impatient, but she didn’t know what for. Something about the youths who held one another around the heart of the flame agitated her, the nervous energy of them reminding her of the time in her life she was given to dancing, and the sway of men. The memories did not make her happy. She needed to be alone.
“Where are you going?” Sartoris asked, breaking briefly from a conversation when he noticed her stand up.
The Vanished Birds Page 37
