GUD Magazine Issue 3 :: Autumn 2008

by GUD Magazine Authors

  Jules stretched both arms in front of her. The right arm curved and bulged like a snake that had just eaten. The tips of its fingers reached no further than the wrist bone of her left hand. “I want it straightened. I can't fly like this."

  He pivoted. Those bird eyes glittered in his face. “There's an experimental procedure I've been considering.... “He explained the operation, bitten fingers fluttering, technical details of surgeries and timed-release immunosuppressants piling on hard and fast, till Jules shrank into herself and thought, How do patients pull decisions from this? It's like he's recounting the dry facts of uplift and downdrafts, the sudden gusts that sweep sideways across the cliffs. I'm not used to being a patient. It's all head information, and without a lifetime of experience tucked in my body, I can't know any of it.

  "Yes,” she said in the end.

  * * * *

  When she awoke, the room was dark. She tried to raise her arm, but it was tied down. No, it wasn't that; it was just dead heavy. She swallowed, and felt along her right arm with her left fingers. It was straight all right. Her forearm was straight—and solid to the touch. It was like skin stretched over stone.

  New striations of bone now reached into her upper arm, one running almost to her shoulder. But the bicep seemed to work and her elbow still had some play. If she let her body recalibrate to the new weight, she could still use her arm to fly. But it was her hand she needed the most, palms to grip and fingers to tilt the gyropics. She almost didn't want to try to move it and find out if any muscles and tendons still worked, if anything was left, snaking its way through rivulets in the bone. She closed her eyes, and in the blackness she wiggled the fingers of her right hand.

  Only then could she open her eyes and watch her fingers move in the dim glow of the bedside monitor.

  The knot in her chest loosened and her mind turned away from thoughts of her injury. The birds were nesting and she needed to get back to the cliffs. Her earbud lay in reach, on a tray of her personal items. She put it in place and subvocalized her sister's code.

  "When can you get them to release me?” She offered up the dry details, but did not feel like hashing out her feelings with her sister.

  "You should consider staying in bed. It sounds serious. What did he say about going back to work?"

  "Oh, to be careful."

  "I see,” said Marnie. There was skeptical silence. “Look, I've hired a bodyguard,” she said finally. “She'll be walking the foot of the cliffs and watching the trees."

  Relief. Then.... “Just till I get back?"

  "Permanently.” Marnie's curt voice. “I'm putting my foot down. I know what's best. You use the cycle for data collection and harvesting only. No more baby-bird-protection agency."

  "She'll scare the birds. This is their egg-laying season. They don't know her like they know me."

  "Grow up,” said Marnie. “Better fidgety than dead."

  "Your bedside manner leaves something to be desired,” Jules said dryly. “If you can call it bedside when you're halfway across the world. Where are you today?"

  "Lyddon. Awful thick fog. It's no picnic being here. You wouldn't like it."

  Jules looked down at her arm on the hospital bed. It seemed to belong to somebody much older and heavier. Someone with a different life, some Jules who sat in an office and programmed ship schedules or inspected snakeskin handbags. “The doctor thinks I should stop flying,” she admitted.

  "And you?"

  "I think I'd rather die. I think."

  "It's that serious?” said Marnie.

  "Might be.” There was something about saying it out loud, and suddenly Jules added, “What do you think I should do?” The question felt strange on her lips.

  "Keep flying."

  "Yeah?"

  "You can't stop your life just because you might die. We're all dying. Just be careful. Please."

  Jules nodded to the ceiling. She was obscurely comforted to know they had returned her to the same room.

  "Besides, we still need that data you're gathering,” Marnie said. “We need the money for it from the cycle company. It's important."

  "Ah,” said Jules. Her left hand fluttered. “Will you come see me now? In the hospital?"

  "I have commitments this week. I can't...."

  "Marnie.” The word was a stone pressing up through her throat.

  "I.... “A silence. “I'll come. I'll be there."

  "I knew you wouldn't let me down."

  * * * *

  Avar the bodyguard was restless and relentless, with short blonde hair mottled with grey and a hunch to her back like a tortoiseshell. She paced the bottom of the red cliffs like a machine programmed for one thing only. Her heavy tread shook stones.

  Jules couldn't watch her. After she checked to make sure the laying birds hadn't been disturbed further, she hopped the river and went to see where the poachers had been. The shot had come from the full beech past the stand of those skinny trees the squirrels liked.

  She unhooked her cycle gear and went poking around the beech, looking for traces. There were plenty: broken limbs and bold, careless footprints leading back to the northeast. There was a trail a quarter-mile up that led to a good fishing stream for carp. She couldn't think what lay beyond that.

  Jules picked up a stick and crouched by the beech tree, pointing it back toward the nest she had been observing. Her shoulder ached from the extra weight. Avar stopped in her stomping, stared hard at Jules, then continued again. The distance was not far and the flycycle's wings had been old; it didn't have to have been an elephant gun to have ripped through the left one. But powerful enough to kill an eiddar; not a poacher of the down harvest, then, but a common criminal, bagging nesting birds for their beaks.

  "I'm sorry I couldn't make it to the hospital.” The voice in her ear was loud after all that silence.

  Jules sighed and put down the stick.

  "Come away from the forest. I told you to be careful."

  "Stop watching me off the vidfeed. Let me work.” Jules raised the stick again, sighting along its bark. He'd been aiming at White-Bib Mom. “I thought this equipment was for the data for the flycycle company, not for tracking me."

  "Can't I see my sister when I call?"

  There was an obvious answer to that. Jules pressed her lips tighter and felt the earbud like a rock in her ear.

  Marnie's voice, softer, a whisper. “I meant, I mean, I'm sorry."

  The regret in her tone was the twist of the knife. “Sorry doesn't cut it,” Jules said. “Sorry doesn't mean a damned thing. It's a word you poison me with like it should do something, like it should make up for not coming. For condescending. For not bringing me home from school when—"

  "When mother was sick.” A beat, and then a sudden rush of words unburdening. “Jules, it was her wish. She didn't want you to see her...."

  Cold fear rippled in her chest at Marnie's words. Jules ruthlessly closed down that train of thought, traded fear for the old anger. “Right.” Jules wiggled out her earbud. “Well, maybe I want to be left alone, too,” she said to it, and dropped it on the ground.

  * * * *

  Nesting season began and the mother birds laid their eggs The first down harvest could not happen until the birds were born, so Jules took to exploring the forest, watching for the poacher. Avar returned a disinfected earbud, but Jules put it in a pouch on the flycycle. She was careful with her body.

  There were several times when she thought she saw the poacher, but never anything she could identify. He—in her mind it was a he, with beady eyes like her surgeon's—stayed just out of sight. But she was certain he was there, behind this tree or the next, watching. She could feel him waiting for her to make a mistake.

  A month passed and the eggs hatched. Her work called her to the cliff, but her attention stayed focused on the forest. Searching it on foot was the first and last thing she did in her day, and while she ate lunch, she would lean back against a twisted pine on the outcropping and watch the forest, dist
racted by every fox and leaf and squirrel.

  All over the red cliff face, bits of brown and buff were fluffing out, cheeping for attention. There was one nest, that of Speckly Grey Mom, where the eggs did not hatch. The shells had been too hard for the chicks to pierce with their egg teeth. Days after all the other birds’ eggs had hatched, the mother bird had tried to free her offspring from their shell prisons. The eggs lay cracked and open, oozing dead, slimy bird onto the down of the nest, and dead worms lay on top of them. The nest swarmed with maggots. Speckly Grey Mom warbled distress at Jules as she tried to clear the mess away.

  Jules brushed the dead creatures to the foot of the cliff with one hand, fingertipping the gyropics with the other. The down could be cleaned, so she collected the dirty clusters and slid them into the suction bucket at her thigh. With a clean nest, Speckly Grey Mom would soon forget her children and start the second round of stuffing the nest with down, for her and her mate's comfort during winter.

  The eiddar grew more agitated, flaring her wings. “It'll be all right,” Jules crooned to her. “Next year will be better.” She extended a heavy, black-gloved finger and cautiously ran it over the eiddar's bill. The bird jerked. “Next year,” said Jules. Speckly Grey Mom lifted her feet, then calmed, settling her wings.

  "I promise,” said Jules. She eased back. The eiddar cocked her head at the empty nest. Then plucked a bit of down and nosed it into place.

  The second round, the early autumn harvest, was always the most lucrative; it was cleaner and lasted a month. Jules harvested down and the females refilled it, until the down on their chests was slim enough that they would need to keep it themselves to live comfortably during the winter. That was when the males took over, lining the nests with their coarser feathers. When the males started downing the nest, harvesting stopped and the bird pair could finally complete the process of preparing their winter shelter. Those were always long, sleepless days, colored by the knowledge that she was interfering with their cycle, forcing their home-building to take three times as long as it should.

  The spring harvest, on the other hand, was usually one of her favorite times. The fluffball birds were charmingly ugly, and if Jules didn't take the soiled down that had cushioned their births, the mothers would clean it out themselves.

  But these hours were long, too, trying to get to the fluff before the birds tossed it down the cliffs, and as Jules got tired she made more mistakes—mistakes that hadn't formerly been worrisome, but now were. She told herself to be careful, but her body didn't instinctively know this meant something other than it once had. Her legs were always exhausted and she must have banged her thigh, for there was a hard lump in it that moved when she pressed it.

  Harvest days stretched into nights. Jules was at half-speed, stopping after every handful of down, or landing between nests to rest her legs and stare into the forest. There were days she managed to forget Avar was below, and once she landed her cycle on the riverbank and tackled the woman, certain the bodyguard was the figure that lurked in wait. Avar restrained her, holding Jules with stiff arms till she calmed. Even so, she lost the joints of two toes to rigidity.

  Some nights she slept in the shed, or she didn't even really sleep at all. Once she looked across the ridged plateau to where the family home stood, shrouded in pines, obscured by rock. It was inaccessible from here, except by going back to the road and winding across the cliff face. She almost considered trying to reach it on the cycle, but weariness overwhelmed her. She had not set foot in the house since her mother had died.

  A light flickered. Marnie? The caretaker? A trick of the moonlight? She imagined Marnie sitting in the old kitchen, all alone ... but she hardened her heart. Marnie wanted nothing to do with her.

  * * * *

  The first harvest wound to a close, but Jules’ long days didn't. She spent more time in the forest, measuring broken twigs and footprints, once yelling at a pair of hikers.

  She didn't talk to her sister until she was investigating the broken limb of a tree and Avar stepped silently from behind it with a second earbud. Jules weighed it from one hand to the other, looking across the wind-ruffled river at the birds on the cliffs. Avar crossed her arms.

  Jules put the earbud in. It was a foreign object and invasive. She ran her fingers along the tree limb, trying to guess how it had snapped.

  "Have you found the poacher?"

  "He's out there,” Jules muttered. She didn't want him to overhear their conversation. She retraced her path, crossed the bridge to her flycycle. “He's been tracking me; I see the signs."

  "Have you seen him?"

  "Not yet.” Jules slung the cycle harness on her shoulders, flicked at the hair whipping into her eyes. “But he's being careful. He knows he's mine.” An eiddar was calling overhead, a lonely distress signal carried off on the wind.

  "Jules,” said Marnie. “There's no one out there. Avar's watched the forest. I've watched the forest, through your vidfeed. Whoever he was, he knows what he did to you. He's not coming back."

  Somewhere deep down Jules both knew this was true and resented it. Her hands were loose on the straps, the harness. “You don't understand. I have to catch him.” She hit the battery-powered thrust and launched herself from the ground, searching for the crying eiddar. She could not tell from which direction the sound came; it seemed to surround her. “He's out there and I'll find him."

  "Let it go, Juliana."

  The wind buoyed the flycycle and then swept it back down. Jules’ hands were loose on the controls, and the world tumbled around her head. Wind and bird cries raged in her ears, sweeping her instincts off-balance. She didn't know which way was up and then she thought the sky was the water and the cliffs were the ground and Avar was running sideways, arms reaching out.

  "Jules? Jules!"

  "Damned poacher mine,” she said, and her tongue was thick in her mouth and she already knew that nothing made sense.

  The flycycle crashed on the riverbank and Jules tumbled from it. She coughed against something hard, choked, spat, and then lay where she'd fallen, stiffening.

  There was a voice far away, calling her name. Marnie? No, Avar. No, it was the poacher, her poacher, with beady black eyes and barred wings, crying in her ear. The sky was very far away.

  The black ground swallowed her whole.

  * * * *

  This change was much more painful. They drugged her again, and in her dreams she was chased by broken baby birds whose black heads flopped as they ran.

  From a distance, she heard Marnie's coldest voice directing the doctor, telling him what he was and wasn't allowed to do, what experiments he wasn't allowed to make, how long he was allowed to keep her. She tried to open her eyes to see her sister, but each time she thought she had managed it, there was blackness, and Marnie was never there.

  There was a very lucid dream where she was standing in the black hallway of her boarding school in Issland, and the headmistress was telling her someone had died. Only it wasn't her mother this time, it was Marnie, and then it was Jules herself, and then it was a little speckled-grey bird whose feathers had turned to hollow bone.

  One morning in early fall, she woke into consciousness. Her head was muzzy, but not drugged. For the first time in a long time, her brain seemed to function as it had in spring, before the nesting season. Her body was aching and heavy. It lay flat and stiff on the hospital bed like a suit she should be able to walk away from, if only she could find the snaps.

  A message on her earbud triggered as she woke. It said, “Come home."

  * * * *

  Jules tried three times to leave her hospital room, but her body would not obey. Pain returned in full force as she tried to move her new form, her new bones grinding on each other. Her remaining muscles could not pull the weight. Each time, the nurses caught her before she could finish the long, slow pull to the doorway, caught her and put her back in bed, where she fell asleep from the exertion.

  At last she opened her eyes and there was Av
ar. The woman picked Jules up, her movements slow in order to let Jules’ body shape into a form that could fit in her arms. She carried Jules through the low halls of the hospital and up to the sky.

  The drive up the cliffs to her childhood home seemed long. Jules drifted in and out of awareness, strapped into the backseat. The hospital had made Avar take a wheelchair, but it was designed for someone with a flexible midsection. Avar set it aside and carried Jules to the front door of the house.

  The sight of the red door wakened her, hit her with a rush of old memories. Images from the dream about her mother's death flickered, then vanished, rejected. She couldn't conjure up any more rage over the past.

  Inside, the chairs were covered with shapeless dusters; the front room was an indistinct blur. The still air smelled of unfamiliar chemicals. Jules’ head bumped against Avar's shoulder, and the pain, the smell, her helplessness pricked tears. The door to the master bedroom was ajar and Avar nudged it open with a foot. She stood Jules just inside the door, holding onto her waist with a steady hand.

  The master bedroom had been cleared of her mother's things. Her father's, too.

  In place of their bed stood two massive glass aquariums filled with gelatinous green, with tangles of tubes. Bundles of cords ran from the cases to what had once been the master bath; a thrumming sound from that direction suggested a generator.

  In the lefthand aquarium, attached to the tubes, was a woman. She hung stiffly in the gel, tilting forward. One leg was curled in three places, but frozen there; it did not undulate. An asymmetrical lump protruded from her belly, as if she had swallowed an eiddar-sized rock. One breast was swollen, misshapen by a torus of bone. Her head was covered by a tangle of wires and tubes that ran into her ears and nose, and a clear band that covered her eyes.

  But Jules could see those eyes, and they were still Marnie's.

  A voice said, “The tank will relieve the pain.” Her sister's mouth did not seem to move, and Jules wondered if it were only her new knowledge that made the voice in her ear seem not her sister's at all, but a dry whisper constructed to sound like the voice she expected.