Sparrowhawk

by Thomas A Easton

  Chowdhury opened his mouth and aimed the reflections from his spectacles at her alone, but before he could speak, Bernie said, “A chip like this would be lovely for criminals and terrorists—for hijackings, murders and assassinations, robberies…”

  “Bah!” Chowdhury held his syringe up as if to be sure they saw it. His open hand slapped the side of the door. The Armadon twitched beneath them, sensitized to such noises by its recent painful experience. “You are talking nonsense. Criminals don’t have the facilities! And I will thank you to leave my Armadon now. Out! It is suffering.”

  Emily waited until he had stepped aside before she descended from the Armadon, Bernie close behind her. While they maneuvered through the doorway, Chowdhury was silent. But as they moved away, she thought she heard him murmur, “And I must destroy it.”

  * * *

  Chapter Seven

  AS SOON AS Andy had eaten his breakfast, he had returned to the window to watch the Chickadee. Nick watched him with a smile while he finished his coffee. The gengineered birds were as familiar to the boy as metal airplanes had been to Nick as a child, or as wood and fabric biplanes had been to an earlier generation. Andy had seen the big ones at the airport, on the veedo, flying high overhead. He had one hanging from his bedroom ceiling. But this one was in his own backyard, and it was real.

  Nick could hear the voice clearly, so much deeper than a wild chickadee’s that the normal “dee-dee-dee” became a “doo-doo-doo.” He knew Andy could see the details—the scale-covered legs, the chunky, conical beak, the plumage, white below, gray above, the alertly gleaming eye beneath the black skullcap, shaggy instead of velvety as it was on normal, small chickadees. He could hear his son muttering—“Zoom! Whee!”—and knew that he was fantasizing about hopping onto its back and flying off to high adventures. He could be Sinbad, the Little Prince, Aladdin, Superman, any hero, every hero he had ever seen flying on the veedo shows or in books.

  Nick left the boy to his dreams. He brushed crumbs from the breakfast table into his cupped hand, washed the breakfast dishes, and checked the refrigerator and freezer to see what he had in stock that might make a decent dinner that night. He added to the grocery list and checked his wallet to be sure he had the cash he needed. Then, with a glance at Andy—he was still absorbed in the Chickadee—he went to the small room he called his office and turned on his word processor.

  It had been secondhand, or maybe third, when he had bought it in college. It had already been obsolete for decades, so obsolete in fact that its mouse was a little box, equipped with push-buttons and a roller ball, at the end of a cable that plugged into the back of the computer. But the dealer had made sense when he said that obsolescence was a relative thing. If a computer did what you wanted it to, it did not matter whether it was state-of-the-art technology. And five megabytes of memory, with half a gigabyte of hard disk storage, had been more than enough for a would-be writer with no wish to run scientific or business simulations. It had been cheap too. And in the years he had owned it, it had indeed done all he had wished of it.

  He had been reading Hey, Mabel!, Jennie Bone’s recent book on the tabloids and the magazines that followed in their tracks. Bone—years before, in school, she had been one of his professors—had quoted a long-dead tabloid editor to show why those rags never seemed to die: Any story, true or not, that could make a husband cry, “Hey, Mabel! Dja see this?” would sell papers. Nick had appreciated her pungent views of the tabloid-readers’ minds, and he had come in time to the poem now on the screen before him:

  It takes a gritty wine to suit my friend.

  Living in closets makes the brain leak blood,

  Will fill up his emptiness with wisdom.

  Now he needed a title, at least, and then he could try to find it a home. “Vintage Wisdom”? “Wine of Wisdom”?

  It had taken him a month to get this far. Andy was a distraction, as were all the chores of running a home, but those were by no means all the reasons for his slow progress. He sighed. He simply did not have the drive to be a successful writer.

  He flicked off the machine. Speaking of chores, and of drive, or driving…He checked the kitchen; Andy was still at the window. “I’ll be in the garage,” he called.

  “Sure, Daddy.”

  The garage. The Tortoise’s stable. There was the food bin, there the water, there the tools for mucking out. Some families had larger garages, with two—or more—vehicles, and their own litterbugs to keep the floor clean. Someday, he and Emily would have as much. Right now, even if they could afford a litterbug, one Tortoise was not enough to keep it fed. They would have to supplement its diet, and that would cost more money. Emily’s pay was ample, but so much of it went for taxes and insurance and to repay the loans that had put them both through school. He wished he had had the sense to study something more employable.

  He replaced his shoes with rubber boots from a wall-mounted cupboard, positioned the wheelbarrow near the pile of gray-streaked paste, and muttered to himself that a reptile’s crap didn’t look much like a mammal’s. Like a bird, the Tortoise had a single exit, a cloaca, for all its wastes, and the product looked it.

  He fleered, raising his upper lip and exhaling gustily like an animal confronting some awful stink. Then he laughed at himself—he was an animal, and the mess did stink—and began his labors. To escape the smell as best he could, he breathed through his mouth.

  Thankfully, he reflected that the task was not really so bad. The Hercules of ancient myth, drafted by a king without the sense to hire enough stablehands to do the job, or to tell the ones he had to muck out the barn more often, had had to divert a river to cleanse the Augean stables. His job might feel that great at times, but a Tortoise excreted fairly small amounts of manure. What it did excrete was rich in nitrogen and other nutrients. It would, as always, make excellent fertilizer for their flower beds and shrubbery. If they didn’t have the Tortoise, they would have to buy manure.

  When he returned inside, Andy cried, “Daddy! It’s looking right at me!” And indeed it was. He stood behind his son and watched the Chickadee, a foot away, separated only by the glass of the window, twitching its head back and forth, first one eye trained on the boy, then the other. What was it thinking?

  “Get away from the window, kiddo.” Window “glass” had been replaced by a harder, tougher polycarbonate plastic in the days of his grandparents, but the word and the image persisted in people’s minds. Besides, the Chickadee’s beak was the size of a kitchen wastebasket. Its tip and edges looked quite sharp enough to smash even plastic “glass,” and then to do far more damage than he could stand to contemplate. He laid a hand on his son’s shoulder and tugged.

  Andy looked up at his father with all the scorn a five-year-old can muster for a too-protective parent. “Oh, Daddy! It’s not going to eat me!” To his mind, the incident on the expressway had no bearing on the rest of life. Besides, that incident had not really touched them. Nick, like Emily, felt differently.

  “Come on. I’m going to call the airport.” He drew the boy away from the window. As he did so, the Chickadee stepped back itself, as if it could have heard and understood his words. When he picked up the phone, it launched itself heavily into the air, its wings straining. It was clearly, even to Nick’s untrained eye, just about at the limit for unassisted flight.

  The Chickadee didn’t go far, for Nick could hear its feet scrabble on the roof. With nothing to watch, Andy wandered into the living room, turned on the veedo, and sat down on the thickest of the several throw rugs scattered over the polished hardwood floor. He lay down on his belly and stretched an arm under the couch to retrieve a toy, a small metal truck that had somehow survived Nick’s own childhood.

  The airport Nick called was not the regional jetport he had visited to pick up Emily. It was just a few miles away, a much more local affair that catered to the owners of private one and two-passenger jets. He had driven past it several times, remembering the few lessons he had once had on mechanical airp
lanes and wondering if they could afford a few lessons on these modern aircraft. He had seen that the airport was small and shabby, but not so derelict that most of its planes could not be kept in small hangars. A few jets were tethered in the open. He would have thought the Chickadee one of the latter, except that there was no broken tether cord around its neck. Perhaps it was kept in a hangar, but its owner carelessly failed to latch the door.

  The airport clerk sighed with audible impatience. “You called us yesterday, didn’t you?”

  “That’s right. And you came and got the thing. Now it’s back. On the roof.”

  The clerk sighed again. Jets weren’t supposed to take off on their own, but sometimes they did. Or the small ones did. The big ones couldn’t, and Nick should be thankful he didn’t have a Sparrow on the roof.

  When Nick grunted, the clerk said hurriedly, “I didn’t mean…If you were…”

  “I was.”

  “So was my sister, and she won’t even go in the park now. The pigeons.” The clerk’s tone was instantly more sympathetic. “We’ll get someone right out there. It might be an hour or so, but we’ll get that jet off your roof. Yes, we will.”

  From the walk in front of their house, Nick and Andy could see a streak of birdlime running down the slope of the roof. A glob of the stuff had beaded there, while the rest had fallen, some of it hitting the brick side of the house beside the bedroom window, all of it spattering over the rhododendrons below. He would, Nick thought, have to hose it off later, or it would burn the shrubs, or even kill them. Fertilizer belonged in the soil, not on the leaves.

  The Chickadee was still on the roof. Its head jerked this way, that way. Its tail pumped at the air, compensating for the head movements that might have thrown it off balance. Swallows swirled around its head, trying to drive it from their nesting territory. Occasionally, it seized and ate one.

  “Yuck,” said Andy, and as if noticing his disapproval, the Chickadee spread its wings and hopped into the air, flapping, gliding to another rooftop down the block. Nick hoped that it would remain in the neighborhood until the airport crew could get there.

  “C’mon,” he said. “Let’s go get those groceries.”

  “I’ll get it!” Nick smiled as Andy dashed into the garage to lift their folding wire cart from its nail. Without it, they would need a cab to bring the groceries home. With it, the walk home would be only a little more labor than that to the store. It would be much less if Andy would not insist on helping him to pull it along the walk. He would have to walk with his knees half bent, and by the time they reached home, his back would be in agony.

  But before they left…A large oak tree overhung one corner of the front yard, its branches drooping with the weight of leaves. For some reason, Nick turned to stare at it, his eyes scanning the limbs revealed in shadows by the shifting of the foliage. There, the streaks of orange in its plumage spoiling the camouflage that might have worked quite well in a swamp, was the strange bird of breakfast time. It held a bittern’s posture, tapered body still, beak upthrust, eyes blinking. As he watched, it twisted on its feet as if to let its gaze sweep over the front of the house.

  Nick shuddered. “Let’s go, kiddo.”

  Nick was in the kitchen, in the back of the house, when he heard the garage door close. Footsteps sounded on the walk, the front door’s latch clicked, hinges squeaked, and the footsteps vanished as they touched the throw rug in the front hall. A clunk announced that Andy had dropped his toy, and there was a glad cry of “Mommy!” Emily’s briefcase struck the floor with a soft thud. Nick could tell when she bent to kiss their son, for there was a soft creak as the fabric of her skirt stretched across her butt.

  He sliced the last potato half, arranged the slices in the pan—they would have scalloped potatoes tonight, with fried tofu and salad—and set down the knife. He blinked away the odor of the onions he had sliced first and rinsed his hands. He opened the refrigerator, took out a carton of white wine, and poured two glasses. Then he stepped into the living room and saw: Just as he had imagined, his wife was scooching, one knee on the floor and the fabric of her skirt drawn tightly over one haunch. She was hugging Andy, and her dark hair fell forward to curtain her face, and the boy’s, from his view.

  “Hi, honey.” He held one wine glass out to her.

  She looked up, her eyes narrowing, her mouth as hard and tight as if there had been no hiatus between this moment and the morning. “Did you call?”

  “Sure. It’s gone, and I saw that strange bird again. You’ll get to see it. Good day?”

  Her mouth finally softened. She accepted the wine. She smiled at him, and he remembered when he had first seen those wide, expressive lips. He had been with another girl, at a party in a dorm, when a gust of laughter had drawn his attention to the other side of the room. There she had been, enjoying the joke, her mouth all teeth and tongue and happy noise, and her date—Nick had seen it—had slid a hand over the seat of her jeans. Her face had closed in, turned dark, erupted with her fury. There had been a slap, a curse, a stalking away. And when he noticed her again, in some unremembered class, he had asked her out. He had long forgotten the name of his date at that party.

  Why had she appealed to him? Had he seen her fury as a challenge? Had he thought, someplace within his mind, out of reach of any conscious intent, that he might be able to please her more? If so…He smiled back at her now. He lived for those sunny moments, fully aware that she could get mad with little notice and over what he, at least, thought were only minor slights. What’s worse, her anger could last for hours and days, until the world—or he—finally bent to her will. Though, to be fair, she really seemed to react that way only when whatever offended her might be judged to have some component of personal animus. She accepted impersonal events such as power outages and traffic jams and terrorist attacks on the expressway with more equanimity than he.

  “I’ll know for sure when Alan gets those kangaroo genes installed in the blimp.”

  Nick laughed. “The cargo pockets?”

  She nodded. “It looks like they’ll work.” She paused, ruffled Andy’s hair, and stood up. Then she added, “We had a cop at the lab today.”

  “I hope he wasn’t suspecting you of anything.” Nick led the way into the kitchen.

  “Can I have a sip?” Andy, toy truck in his hands, was staring at his mother’s glass. It was something of a family ritual: Whenever they had drinks—beer, wine, scotch, whatever—he could have one small sip from each of their glasses. They believed it could do no harm and might do good, if he grew up with the idea that alcohol was acceptable in small amounts.

  As he busied himself with getting their dinner onto the stove, she said, “They found a chip in that Sparrow’s control computer.” She had, she said, explained to the detective how such a chip might preempt control. She did not give the cop a name, or say that Nick had met him on the expressway.

  “I took him out to Ralph’s lab,” she said, and laughed. When Nick turned toward her, face poised in inquiry, she was sitting at the kitchen table, drink in one hand, her gaze aimed toward some vague place beyond the walls of the room. Yet she noticed his expression and drew her attention home again. She added, “I kept a straight face then, but…” She explained that she had told Chowdhury that the armadillo’s startle reflex would give his Armadons problems, and they had caught him checking the idea out with a small pistol. She described the scene and its outcome, and Nick laughed too.

  At the same time, both of them shook their heads ruefully. The situation had clearly had all the slapstick humor of a pratfall. But like any pratfall, no matter how ludicrous, it had involved pain. Pain for both the Armadon and its creator.

  If he wondered that his wife seemed to be dwelling on another man, he said nothing. She showed no sign of romantic or sexual interest, and besides, modern marriages varied broadly in their openness. Some couples orbited each other only loosely, returning home like explorers to a base camp. Some, like Nick and Emily, hewed only to each o
ther. Yet, he knew, neither of them had ever tested their bond. If and when such a test arose, their marriage might have to change.

  Later, once Andy was in bed and asleep, they had another drink. They read a bit in separate easy chairs. Then they shifted to the couch, side by side, his arm around her shoulders, one hand playing with her buttons, her hand against his chest toying with his, to watch a veedo show.

  The show proved boring, but one button led to another. Soon they tuned the veedo’s sound to a low murmur and paid attention only to each other:

  “Do all poets have quill pens?” she began. “Feathers here…”

  “Ballpoints.”

  “Fountain pens.”

  “Gengineers have test tubes.”

  “They need genes too.”

  “How do they get them?”

  “With pipettes.” A pause. “Did you know that once upon a time, long ago, lab workers used to suck on pipettes? With their mouths?” They shifted their positions, and there was a longer pause. “But now they’re safety-conscious. They use electronic pumps.”

  “Poets use electronics too.”

  “Not tonight, they don’t. We want those genes…”

  “Put that pipette…”

  “In the test tube…”

  “Click that ballpoint…”

  “Fountain pen!”

  They had perfected the game long ago, when they were still in school, before they were ever married. Still they loved to play it.

  * * *

  Chapter Eight

  WHAT HAD AWAKENED her? Morning light—early morning light—filtered past the curtains. The clock radio had not yet turned on. There was silence from Andy’s room. Nick was still, his head on her shoulder, his breath warm on her chest, his hand spread on her belly. She twisted in the bed, let his head fall to the pillow, and smiled tenderly at his oblivious face. He had always been a heavy sleeper. When baby Andy had cried in the night, he had never noticed. She had been the one to rise and feed the baby and change the diaper and rock him back to sleep.