Green Jay and Crow

by D. J. Daniels

  “How do you feel? Do you need anything?” asks Judith.

  I shake my head, but that movement alone contradicts my valour and so she slips me something she had in her pocket. The time for caring what the something is, or whether or not it’ll do me harm or good, is well past. She hops up, pours a glass of water from a jug by the bed and hands it to me. She watches the insect buzzing away, trying to find its way back out to the world, not understanding the glass.

  “There’s a story about those dragonflies,” she says. “Waiting for an old woman and then turning her into sprites, half mechanical, half organic.”

  “Maybe we should let it out,” I say.

  “It’s about to die,” says Judith. But she opens the window anyway and persuades the poor creature out into the air. She pulls at the window some more, trying to coax it down, but it’s old and stuck. Instead, she props a piece of wood underneath to stop it paying sudden homage to gravity.

  “How do you know her?” she asks.

  I sit up some more, put the glass back down on the table. “I don’t.” It’s possible I’ve never felt more crummy.

  Judith examines her tea.

  “I know someone a lot like her,” I offer.

  The tea is still remarkably interesting.

  “A double,” I say. And I know I’ve probably made things a lot worse.

  But Judith brightens. Or at least she looks up, looks straight at me. “And she’s survived?”

  I nod.

  “How long?”

  “Eight weeks.” Adding quickly: “I think.”

  “Oh, she’s just beginning.”

  “There’s been more than one?”

  Judith nods and she turns to stare out the window. “You know we even had her stung with bees. It was meant to help. She was so young.” She turns back to me and we both ignore the tears. She puts her tea down on the windowsill and scrapes at something on her left inside wrist. It takes a moment, but eventually she peels away a thin, floppy membrane. She flicks it and it becomes rigid, but it’s still a translucent nothing. “This might help,” she says. She must see utter incomprehension, because she adds, “It’s not fancy and there are newer ones out, but it might have less glitches than yours.” She hands me the card. It reminds me a little of Mac’s fold up knife, it’s about that size, the size of an overly ambitious credit card.

  “Thanks,” I say as I take it. Judith presses something on the bottom and the thing springs to life and then, immediately, I know it’s a phone. It’s probably a lot of other things as well, but here, for the first time, I’m seeing some weird future shit I really have no idea about.

  The cynic in me wants to ask if it’s helped before, how many other people have been pulled through to this strange place and tortured by the Barleycorn King, but I hold that cynic down and stomp on his head.

  She looks at me for a moment, then quickly darts in and kisses me on top of my head. And then she’s off, disappearing out of the room, back to her life. She’s a woman of many secrets, is Judith, but I can’t help but like her.

  The phone is empty. There’s no evidence it’s been used before at all. It’s easy to navigate, no strange future symbols or capacities that I can see. I send its details through to the number that keeps desperately appearing on my own battered phone. Shit, I hope the sender’s Mac.

  The message whirs quickly away, but there’s no reply. I fiddle with the phone for a while, but there’s not much doing, really. I think about attaching it to my wrist, future style, but instead I slip it my pocket, along with my olde worlde heap of junk. Unfair, really. I was in love with it only days ago.

  Judith’s pill, whatever it was, has taken effect. I lever myself out of bed, take a piss, splash my face with water and run my fingers through my hair. Which is just as well, because it turns out I have a visitor.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Green Jay

  I’VE BEGUN TO read the books in the room I’m staying in. I need something to do now that I’m more alive. Because if I don’t occupy myself, I think I might run to the edge and throw myself over, hoping perhaps that the Chemical Conjurers might catch me, or that the Trocarn will fix me after my fall. I dare not imagine that Blue Jay would catch me. He seems to have left me here, and without him there is no hope.

  But I will not let myself think about him. Instead, I tell myself that books are of benefit, that once again I can develop my own brain, lay down memories that are completely mine. Rose-Q must know that I am better, but she’s given no indication of it. Or perhaps she’s just stopped drugging me. Maybe Guerra thinks I am compliant now, maybe Rose-Q trusts me; but I must continue to be careful. If I run, they will catch me and I am not strong enough for that.

  I want to ask Rose-Q if there are books of Trocarn stories. But I haven’t found courage for that yet. Perhaps their stories are part of themselves, biological threads rather than words. I content myself with the books in this room. I wonder who they once belonged to. I doubt that Guerra has ever read them.

  The saddest story I’ve found so far is about a lonely woman, a woman who I think could turn out to be me, if I manage to live so long. And I feel I understand her, because Blue Jay has not shown and there is no sign of the Crow and the box, and I seem forgotten, up here in Guerra’s castle.

  The woman had lived a long time, a very long time, but now she was alone except for a dragonfly. Not a real dragonfly, but a toy, a childhood gift that had turned into something more. A companion, a friend, a repository.

  She’d been all alone for at least ten years and, in the end, she didn’t mind. She’d imagined a life, once, surrounded by people, but she hadn’t managed to find it—or no-one simpatico, anyway—and the wear of souls who failed to understand proved too much. Sometimes in the book, you weren’t sure if the woman was telling the truth, but the dragonfly knew what was true because it had been there for almost all of it.

  She loved the dragonfly. It and her house by the sea had been enough.

  “Let me die,” she said, more than once, knowing that the dragonfly could keep her alive as a type of memory ghost. And so, when the time came, the dragonfly did.

  But not long after her last breath had drifted from her mouth, the dragonfly got to work. It extracted cells and other matter, it manufactured strands of its own substance. It was only a small being with gossamer wings and a tiny body, but it could spin and make. It used whatever it could find, and in this fine empty house by the sea there was plenty of material.

  The old lady’s body was desiccated and still by the time the dragonfly had finished. It had not wanted the body to jelly and decay, and so it had injected the remains with something to keep it mummified, just in case. There would be no skeleton lying on the bed. But it did not matter; the dragonfly’s plan had worked.

  A cloud of sprites—half human, half machine—flowed through the dining room, up the stairs and into the library. They found nests between the books. All they needed was a few centimetres of space. They built homes and shelters. They lived their own individual lives, but they remembered the old lady and the dragonfly too. Because all too soon it was the dragonfly’s turn to die. It had lived far longer than it was meant to, and its final act of creation had depleted it. The sprites took over the house by the sea and lived there until its stones crumbled and fell into the waves. Which, as the story says, may not yet have happened.

  It’s an odd kind of fairy tale, what with artificial dragonflies who live longer than humans. It can’t be something old, can it? It must be something new. Or have people always dreamt of machines and of ways to stay alive? Probably they have. I do.

  Crow

  I DON’T RECOGNISE her at first, seeing as she’s not dressed in robes, but it turns out one of the prophets has come to call. A minor prophet, I dare say. But Judith, as usual, has plied her with food. You’d think Ed and Judith would be larger with all the eating that’s done here, but maybe it’s the fresh farm air or what-have-you that keeps them trim.

  So I find
myself sitting at the kitchen table, eating some kind of orange cake and drinking coffee—yes, coffee—and admiring the dragonfly tattoo on the inside wrist of the prophet, whose name as it turns out is a relatively unmystical Catelin. She’s got rid of the robes and is wearing jeans and a T-shirt. She’s not, as everyone feared, an emissary from the Barleycorn King; or, she claims, a messenger of any type. Instead she’s come of her own accord, to buy some fresh veg, she says, because she missed the best stuff at the markets. Or, more truthfully, she’s quite possibly come to see me, as Judith obviously suspects. But that seems to be okay with everyone. Including me.

  Ed talks with her a little about the yellow robe days. Sure it’s a sign of contaminants in the air, but nothing too dreadful, nothing he can’t cope with. Catelin reassures him on that front, and for a while they reminisce about the orange robe days, how those times seem to be gone. I sit back and enjoy my coffee and whatever other pleasures are on hand. I have no interest in pollutants, yellow, orange, or any other colour.

  “He’s sorry, you know, that he pushed you down the stairs,” says Catelin. Apropos, as far as I’m aware, of nothing.

  Still hurt, I think but don’t say. I let my many and varied wounds speak for themselves, though most of them, admittedly, are not on display.

  “Brom was lucky it wasn’t worse,” says Judith loyally. “I’ll never forget him staggering towards us that first day. I thought he would collapse before we reached him.”

  Ed says nothing. They’re both obviously not moving on their anti-Barleycorn King stance, but entertaining minor prophets seems to be permissible.

  “He’d like to talk to you,” says Catelin.

  “Not up on the High Track,” I say.

  And that shocks everyone. Apparently the Barleycorn King never, but ever leaves the High Track. If he is Guerra, then he’s gone spectacularly mad. Makes you wonder what set him off.

  “Who is he?” I ask. “I mean, has he always been there? Was he always the Barleycorn King? Ever the Barleycorn Prince? A baby in waiting? Heir apparent?” I’m raving; the look on the three faces around me is not encouraging.

  “Different histories,” says Ed after a moment.

  We all begin to talk at once and, because I’m a fool, I’m the one that keeps going. “Back where I come from, if you’re asked to come and talk with the man who owns the High Track, it usually don’t mean anything good.” I don’t mention that I work for him. Or I used to.

  “Oh, no,” says Catelin, scandalised. “He just wants to apologise. Perhaps he can help.”

  “That’s unlikely,” says Ed. Judith shakes her head. But at the same time, she offers Catelin more cake, an offer which Catelin gently refuses. I take another piece, because why the fuck not.

  The conversation winds down back to banalities, until Catelin finds a way to extricate herself. I catch her looking at my wrist at one point. Perhaps she is scoping for a phone, and as much as I’d like to be able to contact her, I find I’m grateful I didn’t attach Judith’s gift to my skin. Judith and Ed take her out to the garden to load her up with the vegetables she may or may not want. And I’m left alone, none the wiser.

  I take the future phone from my pocket. It’s showing a type of screensaver. That, or I activated something without meaning to. The image is a head-and-shoulders portrait of Olwin Duilis superimposed over what appears to be an old map. Very arty, sepia tones. I can look at it because Olwin’s eyes are closed. She’s not examining me for failings. Her hair is back in a bun. It’s very peaceful, almost deathlike, but not in a creepy way. She is truly beautiful, this person. I can admit that.

  On the map are tiny, tiny words, so small they could be mistaken for mountain ranges or some such, contour lines on a map. I move my fingers over one of them, mostly to see if they’ll enlarge. The writing gets big enough to read. Jump through, it says. Which makes no sense. Or, perhaps I kind of sense I don’t want to think about. I don’t want to touch the screen again, in case it takes my probing as assent and moves me somewhere else. What I’d really like is a message from Mac. Clear and unequivocal.

  Judith comes back to the room. The phone’s reverted to the original picture and I show her. “Is that yours?” I ask. Wondering if I’ve stepped too far into her personal space, but needing to know if this is a genuine message or just something I opened by mistake.

  “I know the picture,” says Judith, “but not like that.” She turns her right wrist over, taps it a few times and there, hanging in front of us, is the same portrait of Olwin. Brighter colours. No map. I don’t know what to say. We admire it for a while in silence.

  “I think Catelin probably wanted to talk to you alone, Brom. I’m sorry if we got in the way.”

  “She’s probably a spy.” I don’t want it to be true, but there it is.

  “Probably,” says Judith. But she smiles to reassure me. Perhaps a spy is okay, she seems to suggest.

  “Maybe I should talk to him?” I say.

  Judith releases the picture back to her phone. “Olwin will help you.”

  I don’t want to say that much as Olwin, or for that matter Eva, would be interested in getting hold of the box, neither of them probably cares much where I end up.

  “Has anything else come through?” she asks.

  I don’t tell her about the map message, but I do show her my future phone, because quite frankly I don’t think I’m around all its thin, bendy intricacies.

  She fiddles with it for a while, shakes her head and then shows me how to attach it to my wrist. “If you want to?”

  I agree. And there it is, attached to me, barely discernible. Unless, of course, you think about it, and then it’s a weird sort of itch.

  Judith shows me how to activate connections: if you shake someone’s hand, or even just tap them lightly on the hand with a finger, their details will come through to you, and yours to them. I think wistfully of the prophet and her dragonfly tattoo for a while. In the meantime, Judith tells me of ways to set up various privacy screens and precautions, but there’s not much to me in this reality: no credit details to skim, no identity to steal.

  “It collects biodata too, if you want it to?”

  No, that’s not for me. Because, seriously, what am I going to do with that knowledge?

  There’s a pause, which is nothing to do with technology and then, finally she’s out with it. “Stay,” says Judith. “Just for a while. It can’t hurt.”

  I smile and she seems to take that as a yes. It’s not like I have the means to go anywhere else. Not really. Not unless you count a cryptic message hidden in a map. Well, jump through isn’t that cryptic, but I’m choosing to treat it as such. As much as I’d like to be back home in known surrounds with known enemies, I’m not up for whatever jumping as that may entail just yet.

  Who puts an option like that on a phone anyway?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Green Jay

  I HAVE GUERRA’S phone. I can’t keep it for long, but while I have it, I search. I scroll through messages. There’s too much here to search properly, quickly. I skim over the messages from Olwin Duilis. I should read them, but I can’t. I can’t face them. But I see messages from Kern Bromley and I click them open.

  It’s strange, this stuff. Pictures, almost codes, and many of them don’t seem to have been sent properly. And then a final message, a new number. I memorise it. I need to tell Blue Jay. I need to see Blue Jay. But I find that new number and see only one message sent. A portrait. Of me. Or, more likely, of Olwin Duilis. Without meaning to I remember the photograph, the day it was taken. The place. I think of my mother and father and the farm and then force myself to remember that they are not mine. That is not my past. They are not my parents. I’m angry at myself for letting her in. I see my hand is shaking and I focus on that, try and make it stop.

  “You seem upset,” says a voice. The phone, of course. Eila. I ignore her.

  I force myself to look at the photo. Why would Guerra want to send this to the Crow? A warning?


  “I am trying to get him back,” Eila says.

  “Get who back?” I ask. I know it mightn’t work. My voice is not Guerra’s voice, but she must already know that I am not him.

  “Kern Bromley,” she says. “He has the box. I hope you don’t mind. I thought you would want the box back too.”

  Does she know who I am? Who she is talking to? “How will this photograph help?”

  “It’s a short cut for Time Lock. A way to shift between realities.”

  “But that’s…” Impossible, I think, but I stop because there are footsteps close to the door.

  I stuff the phone under me, because there is not enough time to put it anywhere else. Guerra will be searching. He will know he left it here. He visited earlier today, and caught me reading. If he thought anything of it, he didn’t say. He wandered the room. Sat down beside me as usual. He must know he left the phone.

  I close my eyes as the door opens. The pretence will do me no good if Eila speaks. I can feel the phone in the hollow of my back. It buzzes, but there is no voice. They’re trying to find it by ringing. I hope that my body is enough to dampen the sound. I open my eyes just a fraction, enough to see who has come in. Not Guerra, but one of his people. Carine, I think. It does not matter. No-one can find me with the phone. I keep track of where they go, where they look. I need to find a place to put the phone, a place where nobody has searched.

  When Carine leaves I get up, put the phone on the floor by the chair and kick it to the back of the room. I want to look at it more. I don’t let myself. Instead, I leave my room and go in search of Rose-Q. She will ask how I am, she will fuss. She will be my barrier.

  Crow

  IT’S NIGHT AND Judith and Ed are fast asleep. Me, I’m as restless as hell, so I decide to go for a walk. It’s not as dark as I thought it might be. The farm itself isn’t lit up, but there are lights up on the High Track that shine down and light the way. Somebody has seen fit to light up the water tower. Not that I’m going to risk walking underneath it. It’s usually a bit of a magnet for assignations, dubious and otherwise, at night. So I skirt around, make my way to the marketplace. The shops have pretty much shut down, except for the kebab place. I’m not sure if it’s the same guy, but it’s the same idea. Late nights require a certain sort of quickly available grease- and salt-enriched food. Back home I’d go have a chat to the Chemical Conjurers. The thought occurs that I could go visit myself, but seriously, why’d I do that? Especially as I’d be older. The thought also occurs that the person to visit might be Mac. Would he still be in Barlewin? Doubt it. But I do want to explore a bit. I want to drift. There’s secrets to be learned, and usually this is the best way to find them.