Firebirds Rising

by Sharyn November

  “Suppose it bites you?” Zelda snapped at him.

  “Wouldn’t matter. They’re not poisonous.”

  “How do you know? Everything here could be. Even the air could be full of some poison the machines just don’t recognize. We may all get sick, or evaporate, or turn into mush.”

  Having said that, watching his bright face crunch up, she felt sorry in case she’d really scared him.

  But then he poked out his tongue at her. “Balls,” said Joe, as he was never allowed to.

  Day followed day, and night followed night. Same old thing.

  They moved into the new house with its wide, airy rooms and brilliant self-cleaning, shockproof glass windows. Moth and Dad hung up the new white drapes.

  “Doesn’t it look fine?”

  Chilly evenings, they lit the self-renewing pine logs on the big stone hearth.

  “It’s really getting to be homey now.”

  Outside in the darkness, strange things whiffled and chattered, just as they did by day. But here, the birds sang all night.

  There were no dangerous animals in the region. Even if there had been, the fences and the house area walls had infallible devices for keeping any bad problems out.

  In every window, the rolling blue hills, the rolling blue plain dotted with fields of white or red alien grain, with trees that would make pink and orange fruits and were already covered with pink and staring purple blossom. Machines roved, walking the land. Above, the green sky, lit by a sun that was not the sun of Earth. And at night, a green-black sky, lit by two tiny moons. Even the stars were wrong.

  One night, Zelda dreamed she flew out over the hills. In the dream she didn’t mind them so much. When she woke, the dream disgusted her.

  “You’ll be at school soon,” said Dad, riding in on the cultivator machine, so cheerful Zelda wanted to hit him.

  “That’ll be so nice.”

  “Now, why be sarcastic? Lots of new friends to make.”

  “I liked my old friends.”

  Dad frowned and swung off the machine. He came over and stroked her hair. “It takes a while for the Ipsi-mail* to come through. You’ll have some letters soon.”

  “It’s been over a month, Dad.”

  “Well…I guess maybe…”

  “They don’t know what to say to me. I don’t either, Dad.”

  He sat beside her on the porch. She could smell the three Earth trees that had been planted in the yard, especially the pine—if she shut her eyes she could pretend. But what was the use? If she opened them, the truly blue hills reached to the truly green sky. The sun was sinking in the front, over the fields, turning the hills to a mauve as raucous as a loud noise.

  “Honey, look. You know how tight money was. We tried to tell you. We couldn’t have kept going—we’d have had to move—take some tiny apartment in the city—my firm folded, I’d lost my job, Zelda, remember? And then this opportunity—government sponsored—perfect…”

  “Yeah, Dad. It’s okay.”

  “I know it isn’t, honey. Not for you. Not yet.”

  “I’ll get used to it,” said Zelda grimly.

  Dad sighed, and went into the house, and again, seeing his bowed head, she was sorry. Till she heard him laughing with Moth at the stove.

  In two years I’ll be sixteen. I’ll take some kind of job—who needs college? I’ll save. I’ll catch the first ship out I can. I’ll go home.

  If only the night birds would shut up. They sat on the trees along the wall, even came in and sat on the Earth trees in the yard below Zelda’s window. Twindle-twindle tweety trrr, they went. “Our own nightingales,” Moth had said, pleased. But their song was thin, like wires in Zelda’s ears.

  She put in her music plugs not to hear the birds.

  Tomorrow the house transport would run her to the school in the nearby town. It was, by Earth measurement, miles and miles away, but the transport would get her there in twenty minutes. She dreaded it

  The planet had no human life other than the human life that, for the past three years, had come here from Earth. Moth and Dad were two of the last batch of “settlers” who had taken up the government’s offer to help develop the land. Everyone else at school would have been here a long time.

  Aliens. Like everything else.

  I’d run away, but where’d I go? There’s only here now.

  In sleep, one of the music plugs was dislodged. In sleep, she began to hear the twindle-twindle birds. In sleep, she threw stones at them, which, awake, she never would have done. In sleep, anyhow, she missed.

  Joe dissolved in tears when Zelda started to leave for school. Astonished, they all stood gawping at him.

  “What’s wrong, baby?” cried Moth, trying to resist gathering him into her arms.

  “Zelda!” wailed Joe. “Don’t wan’ Zelda go!”

  “But, honey—she has to—”

  “She don’ wanna!” yodeled Joe, absurd, funny, heartbreaking. “Don’ make ’er—”

  Zelda stepped forward. She just knew how ashamed he would be of this in ten minutes’ time. She grabbed him by the shoulders.

  “I do want to, you pest. Do you think I want to hang around here all day with you? And where’s that stupid play rabbit thing you promised to catch for us? When I get back tonight you’d better have caught one—or two, that’d be better. Get two, Joey. If you think you can.”

  Joe stared at her. The tears dried on his face in the heat of his fury. “What ya bet, huh?”

  “Ten Earth bucks.”

  “Zelda!” shrieked Moth. Dad restrained her, grinning.

  “You are on,” snarled Joe.

  Zelda swept into the house transport and was whisked away.

  She thought of Dad, his face so pale when he’d first told them he’d lost his job. She thought of Moth, being so determined to make the best of it. And Joey, always ready for something new. And herself, Zelda, sticking tight, refusing to move an inch.

  She had never felt so alone. She couldn’t even talk about her feelings now, in case she upset Joe. She just hated it when he cried. She would have to pretend from now on everything was fine, just fine.

  Zelda pretended.

  She pretended she hadn’t dreaded the school, had been looking forward to it. She marched in, looking coolly pleased. When spoken to, she was friendly. She absorbed all the new instructions, the new schedule, gazed at the subjects of the classes, pinned on her grade badge, did what everyone else did. At lunchtime she went into the school yard, which was absolutely an alien garden. On the soft blue grass court, she played flyball with a girl called Patty. They were both pretty good.

  “What color would you say this grass is?” Patty asked as they ate their food under a tree like a giant zucchini.

  “Blue?”

  “What shade of blue?”

  “Well—kind of dark blue—”

  “I’d say,” said Patty, “it’s the shade of Todd Ariano’s eyes.”

  “Who?”

  “Look. Over there.”

  Zelda looked. Just then Todd Ariano looked back at them and smiled.

  Patty was totally right.

  The planet grass was Todd-Ariano’s-eyes blue.

  Zelda kept on pretending. She pretended very hard. She pretended to Dad and Moth and Joe. At school and at home. Indoors and out. Even to Plod, she pretended. “Listen, Plod! Those birds are really singing today!”

  It grew easier. Like something she’d wear on her wrist, at first too tight, loosening up over time.

  She joined the chess club and the drama club at school and the flyball team. Patty did, too. So, for that matter, did Todd Ariano. Why not? It was okay.

  She thought about home—that was, the house on Anchor Street, which they would have had to leave anyhow. And about the town and the big city they’d have to have moved to, crowded, often dangerous, alarms going off and sirens every place, and police cordons. She thought of the blue sky of Earth that could also turn gray or yellow with heat and pollution. She thought of Dad,
tired and sullen, Moth looking angry or sad. Joey had always been the happiest there, maybe—but Joey hadn’t made any fuss at all. He’d just said, “When are we going?” and gone to pack his games and toys.

  Zelda had started to notice some things, almost as if she hadn’t seen them before.

  How not only was the grass the color of Todd Ariano’s eyes but the purple blossom was like raspberry Jell-O, or sometimes violets.

  The new town was clean and painted in different colors, too, hot colors and refrigerated colors.

  Here and there Earth plants, which had been put in a year or so ago, were beginning to grow to great height, glossy-leaved, liking the soil, and the sun that was always warm, never too hot.

  “This place is like heaven, my mother says,” admitted Todd as a group of them walked to the transport bay.

  “Heaven?”

  “Yeah, I know. Mom uses words like that. But I like it here.”

  “Me, too,” said Zelda, pretending, since now she must never say, except to her own heart, that she didn’t like the planet.

  “Wait till you see the wild roses in the spring,” said Todd, truly surprising her. “But, you know, there’s something even better.”

  “What?”

  “The new ice-cream place on the corner of Foundation.”

  Zelda sat and thought in the window of her room, too.

  She wondered why there was no humanlike life, no so-called Higher Intelligent life here.

  This, so far, had been common to all the planets discovered, which was why, apparently, it was all right to colonize them. Earth had gotten so small, so crammed with people. There had to be somewhere else to go.

  Earth.

  The sunset touched the hills. Mauve.

  Zelda glared at the color. Outside, the twindle-twindle birds twittered and trilled.

  A couple of plays were actually playing in the backyard, closely watched by Joe. He crept toward them. Zelda could see from the angle of the two single upright ears that they knew exactly what he was doing, but they let him get way close before they darted off under the gap in the fence Joe had made to lure them in. There they went, along the outer wall and through the gate—Zelda laughed. She guessed her ten bucks were still safe.

  A few months more, she’d be fifteen.

  I can wait. Fifteen, sixteen—then she could start to get ready to go—home.

  The rains came, and high winds, and Zelda stayed at the house, doing schoolwork through the compulink.

  In the evenings she saw how the twindle birds sat out, soaking and beak-dripping, in the cover of the stout planet trees by the wall. They still bravely sang, through wind and rain, twindle-twindle tweety trrr.

  “Moth—do you think we should put out some food for them? They look so—wet.”

  They put out food for the twindle birds. (Their real name was auxicaps—“twindle” was much better.) The birds fed, and fluttered around the yard. They never left droppings. Apparently they only ever had to—er—drop stuff about once every five or six days, so you were unlucky if it fell on you or the lawn.

  It was that day when Zelda stopped hearing them. Worried, she glanced out the window. Then she could see—and hear—they still sang. She had simply stopped hearing it, unless she listened.

  An Ipsi-mail torrent of letters to Zelda fell into the home computer as the torrents of rain drummed down. She answered them slowly, carefully. Everyone wanted to know everything—the way the planet was, the animals, the people. Zelda sat for hours, telling them, telling them all about it. Describing the colors, the moons, the sky.

  Outside in the sheets of rain, the huge forms of the tappuls grazed and slowly moved, unconcerned, calm. Several had new calves.

  Joe, unable to hunt plays in the weather, sat drawing up battle plans of capture. He and Plod—or, rather, Plod with Joe jumping around him—had already constructed a large, luxurious enclosure for the one-eared rabbits.

  Seeing Joe hunched over his plans, just after she and Todd had read through their parts for the drama club on the voice-view link, Zelda said, “Joey—thanks.”

  “What? Thanks ’cause I didn’t catch a play yet and cost ya ten bucks? Just wait.”

  “No. Thanks for caring about me.”

  “You?” he asked with utter scorn.

  The wind and rain faded back up into the sky. The world was glassy and clear, smelling of salad and flowers.

  Zelda walked between the fields, the wet, Todd’s-eyes-blue grass tinkling with a few last cascades, the grain heavy in the head, tall now as any corn in the fields of Earth.

  That night, her ears unstoppered by the music plugs, sleeping, Zelda heard the twindle birds singing again. She was glad they sang. Why shouldn’t they?

  She thought, in her sleep, See, there is a poison in the air. It makes you like this place even when you hate it.

  In the dream, she flew up above the plain once more, gazing at the house below, lit not by moonlight but by the sunset. How—beautiful it was after all, the light of the sun on the faces of the house and the hills, not lurid, but a color like lavender.

  Zelda flew over the dream hills. She watched the dream moons rise, one, two. She looked at the clever pattern of the stars.

  Next week I’ll be fifteen.

  Only one more year then before she could begin to think about leaving the planet. She could get through it. Just a year.

  Down in the dream she swooped, to peer into the house. She saw Moth and Dad and Joe sitting watching an old classic movie, Pirates of the Caribbean. Joe nearly had caught a play today. Better save her money.

  She thought, I’m dreaming this. It’s so real. It’s like—home.

  Something in the air, she thought.

  In her sleep, she smiled, and turned over.

  Outside the twindle birds sang solemnly on through the night.

  PLANET DATE : YEAR 31

  Part Two—Present Tense: Harrington

  In the end the farmers on the plains made their money and moved away. Some went back to Earth, but most went to the great cities that now stood proudly up on the planet. Meanwhile, the little towns swelled. New streets bloomed and ran like vines. Stretching out over the plains and hills, they closed around the solitary houses of the first pioneers, turned their farmlands to parks and neat backyards, enclosed everything in neighborhoods.

  The house stood on Pine Street now. On either side were other houses, and across the street Pioneer Park, with a fine view of the overhead train.

  A nice area. Good to bring up kids.

  Their mother had thought that, Harrington guessed, when she and Pop bought the house eight years ago. Mom usually went by “Annie,” now that Harrington had turned fifteen. Pop, though, had ceased to have a name or to be Pop. He’d left them one month after they’d moved in.

  Then eventually there had been Annie’s other guy.

  Harrington—thirteen back then—hadn’t liked the Guy much. But he was soon gone, though he’d left behind a souvenir.

  Harrington looked at it now, this keepsake of Annie’s sudden short love affair.

  It was crawling along the rug, looking adorable. Harrington wanted to throw up.

  Its real name was Jasselly. It couldn’t speak even, not properly, not yet. A girl who was almost two, Annie’s second daughter, Harrington’s sister.

  “Oh, Harry—couldn’t you have kept an eye on her?”

  “I have to practice piano, don’t I?”

  “Yes—but—oh—come here, baby baa-baa,” cooed Annie, scooping the crawling atrocity off the floor.

  Annie didn’t—couldn’t—see, apparently, that Harrington did not care about It, that frankly, if It had crawled right out the front door and away down the block, Harrington would not have been exactly upset. She knew she should be. But why tell yourself lies?

  It was a pain.

  “When I think,” said Annie, rocking the object, “buying this house—do you remember?”

  “Not much. I was seven.”

  “And
their daughter was married—I remember the live-view showing it—what was her name? She’s a writer—Zelda, that’s it. Zelda Ariano—she married the male flyball champion…And the son, what was he doing? A naturalist with Government Survey. No wonder they all moved away to someplace more fancy. But it was so lucky for us. The house going so cheap and all—”

  “Yeah, we were really lucky. We moved in, Pop moved out, you got together with that Guy and we ended up with It—” All this was under Harrington’s breath as she began to let loose rills of Chopin from the piano.

  Annie put It back in the enclosure.

  Really, the enclosure was like the ones the plays had, Harrington thought.

  They had two plays, mostly to amuse It, though Harrington was quite fond of them, too. They were very affectionate and intelligent for one-eared rabbits, and you could let them roam free outside when they wanted, like cats. Unlike cats, they did no damage, though the people next door always seemed to think they would.

  Not It, though. It must not roam free. It had to be protected.

  Which was why the Hedge was coming today.

  “It’s so clever,” said Annie. She didn’t mean the baby, but the Hedge, or what the Hedge could do.

  “Sure, Annie.”

  “What are you playing so loud?” cried Annie as Jasselly started to wail.

  “Chopin, Mom. ‘The Funeral March.’”

  “You’d never know it wasn’t real, would you, Mrs. Riveras?”

  Mrs. Riveras stared through the eyehole in the Hedge.

  “No, Annie. It sure blocks out the sun like it’s real. I’d a thought you had enough big things growing in there already with that pine tree.”

  “Well, the Hedge is only for one hour in the morning and one in the late afternoon.”

  “I guess that’ll have to be okay, then.”

  “What we agreed, Mrs. Riveras.”

  Mrs. Riveras frowned. She was a thin old woman with a bitter face. She didn’t think much of Annie, and she lived right next door. On the other side were Mr. and Mrs. Oplough. When Annie had explained to them about getting the Hedge, they had both peered at her as if she were crazy.