by Rich Horton
No one would work it except us.
Well. And Drake.
We picked up our stuff and most of mine fit in the bag I brought when I arrived, which told me something, I guess. Arty hugged me and cried, which was a little surprising and kind of gratifying, and I told her we’d talk and things would be okay and then I went out to say goodbye to Drake.
He was out on his rock like he’d never moved and, “Listen . . .” I said, and then remembered that early that morning they’d removed my chip and the fuck, I should have talked to him before then. But he was watching me, the same look he always had, the same gaze only broken by the occasional sweep of a thin, grey membranous lid.
“I wish things had been different,” I said. No one out there but him and me, and he didn’t understand what I was saying anyway. “I don’t know. Maybe we should have asked each other more questions.”
Out beyond Drake the lava fields were all greys and steel of morning, ash still hanging in low clouds where it would linger like that for days. Behind me I could feel the heat of the flow, still active, and the sun rising.
“They told us not to assume that things you did were for the same reasons we do them, or things you say mean the same thing as when we say them.” I turned now, looked back out at T5. I hated this place. Hated it, and was really going to miss it. “But what else do we have to go on?”
My back was to Drake when he laid his long beak on my shoulder.
Eventually I had to move although I’d stood there a good long time and Drake showed no signs of shifting. But he lifted his head and looked at me and I looked at him and said “Yeah. So, it was good working with you, Drake.”
He followed me out to the transport, awkwardly shuffling his still-healing feet, until he finally lifted off just enough to glide over the sand and land when I got to the shuttle, where Mort was stowing our luggage aboard. I forgot, every time, how massive those wings were until he opened them. The transport pilot looked at him mistrustfully. “So he attacks you and then you get fired,” she said.
“We got ourselves fired,” and “No,” Mort and I said more or less simultaneously. I watched as Mort lifted his hand like he was going to pat Drake’s neck then dropped it again. “See you,” he said.
We watched Drake’s shape as the shuttle rose, until he was obscured by heat and dust and then we were over the smoke and close atmosphere layer and could see nothing and everything. I thought of him below, sharpness and curves and wide wings. Tried to imagine what he’d think of seeing things from this vantage, where the grey and orange and brown spun away beneath, as we fell out into the dark and cold.
I thought about rescue, about what I’d do now. About being remembered, or forgotten. About the moment on a wind-torn rock face where you don’t know if you’ll fall or you’ll hold.
I wondered if he’d find me, praying.
A Murmuration of Starlings
Joe Pitkin
Once Evelyn Cole lost her identity, she had little reason to remember the past. A good deal of it she couldn’t remember anyway, at least not with her own eyes and consciousness. But she could remember minutely even the insignificant details surrounding the day when the end began, the way one does when recalling any great or small cataclysm in one’s life.
All new faculty in the department had to teach Biology 101 for a couple of quarters. That had been Evelyn Cole’s hazing. That, and she had been assigned to the campus safety committee. Safety committee meetings were the worse punishment—the presentations about non-slip floors and restroom signage were interminable—but the safety committee met only once per month. Biology 101 met every day.
On this day at least she had been able to give her invasive species lecture to her passel of sullen freshmen. This part of the course she considered a kind of public service. If she could convince even a few students not to plant English ivy in their yards when they graduated and bought houses, it would be worth all the painful mornings so far that term, all the stares of incomprehension when she talked about phyla and ecological communities and the different types of mutualism.
And lecture had gone well today. At the end during the Q&A, she’d actually gotten a question about how well biocontrol might work on the invasive species du jour (it wouldn’t). Also a supposedly daring insight came up, disguised as a question: Dr. Cole, aren’t humans the most invasive species of all? She’d fielded that one many times before, during public lectures and even in her days as a teaching assistant; the person to bring it up would almost always be young and white, and invariably male, and he would trot out his question in a loud brassy voice that suggested he was the first person on Earth ever to have such a revelation. And Evelyn needed to humor such a question: after all, the young man might really be interested in the subject, might become a first-rate conservation biologist. “I’m not unsympathetic to that line of thinking,” she answered, “but even if it’s true, we’re also the only species in any position to do anything about it.” That was the only answer she found the least bit satisfying after ruminating on the question for years.
After the morning’s class Evelyn sat in her office hour, dealing with the emails she’d received the night before. Among the memos from Computing Services and questions from students about the homework sat an email from Jason Holly. Her heart leapt when she saw his name there, and the subject line: “Thinking of You.”
She and Jason had gone to graduate school together, had hooked up on and off, furtively, their whole last year at college. But he had worked in one of the microbiology labs, had been snapped up by MIT to work on bacterial computing, while she had come out of an ecology lab to be shunted off to a tiny department in a third-rate land-grant school. Apparently you could make twice as much money, maybe three times as much, trying to train colonies of gut bacteria to solve simple math problems as you could by studying the population ecology of the European starling in degraded American landscapes.
So an email with the subject line “Thinking of You” called up an odd mix of jealousy and lust and regret and affection in Evelyn. But the message, when she read it, was just a dispiriting little news story that involved starlings: another bird flu episode in China, only it turned out not to be flu at all but a bacterial infection, and starlings were apparently the carriers. Only a one-line note from Jason at the beginning of the story: Hope you are well. I’ll be thinking of you this Apocalypse season.
Unfortunately, it was as bad as Jason Holly had joked it would be. Then it was worse. Just as the public health prophets had warned it someday would, the pandemic began in East Asia, passing freely between humans and starlings (and, oddly enough, only starlings), and by the time alert levels had been raised, the infection was incubating on every continent.
The government closed all of the schools, including Evelyn’s. Not that anybody would have shown up for class if the university had remained open: once people started dropping like poisoned cattle, they needed little prodding to take up the social distancing that the Centers for Disease Control had been preaching. The well and sick alike shut themselves up in their rooms in terror, the well hoping that they were not incubating the disease and the sick each hoping that he or she would be one of the 10 percent of victims who survived.
Of course, cars still appeared in the streets rarely, driven by police officers or emergency room nurses or ambulance drivers or other vital personnel; each person wore a surgical face mask, which everyone suspected with varying degrees of certainty to be useless.
Evelyn was at first surprised to find herself designated vital personnel. She had at best an undergraduate biology major’s knowledge of public health or immunology. But only about a dozen people in America, if that, knew as much as she did about starling ecology, starling life history, and by extension, about how one might begin eradicating this ubiquitous bird. Within a few days she, too, was driving the depeopled interstate with her air vents closed and her surgical mask drawn up.
A lot of exotic invasive species had been introduced to America
by accident. Others had been brought on purpose years ago, perhaps foolishly, but at least with some rationale that would make sense to us today. The introduction of the starling, though—that was just crazy. Evelyn had gone through the seven stages of grief about it and had come to accept the reality that starlings had completely overrun America. She didn’t like to imagine the American landscape before they had come—it was too painful to contemplate how they had driven so many native bird species to extinction or to the brink of it, to say nothing of the plague starlings had brought—but sometimes she liked to imagine the mind of the man who had thought it a good idea to release into Central Park pairs of all the bird species mentioned in Shakespeare, including the starlings that had been mentioned once in King Henry IV, Part One. Evelyn admired the poetry of that kind of folly.
The CDC had summoned her to one of the hotspots of the Northwest. On the US map of new infections, Vancouver, Washington throbbed as one of the glaring red splotches. She found herself an apartment within two hours of her arrival, had arranged over the phone to see it; the property manager had left the door unlocked for her when Evelyn arrived. Evelyn decided within ten minutes to take the place and gave the property manager her credit card over the phone. The place was far more elegant than she could possibly have afforded in a normal market, 1,400 square feet of Italian travertine and cork flooring on the twentieth story of a riverfront high rise. Below her, the Columbia River moved sluggishly beneath the ancient truss spans of the Interstate Bridge. She knew from every trip she had ever taken over that bridge to Portland how a massive colony of starlings used to cloud about those spans. That flock was the first to be gassed, though.
Evelyn looked down on the windblown gray streets this side of the river. A few blocks away stood a trio of idle cranes, leaning like great spindly skeletons over an abandoned construction project. For the moment only a single human being was visible anywhere, a tiny black smudge shuffling along the very middle of the broad intersection below. The figure seemed to list slightly as it walked, seemed as though it would haul up and keel over at any moment. Who was this sick or foolish or imperturbable person, Evelyn wondered. Whoever it was almost certainly needed help, seemed incapable of walking much further.
Evelyn watched with increasing dread as the person trudged up the street and began to move beyond her field of vision. She felt an odd resentment at the prospect of rushing down twenty stories to attend to someone she imagined was probably contagious. It occurred to her as she watched the struggling figure below that the evolution of compassionate behavior had been millions of years in the making, predating Homo sapiens certainly, that those first compassionate mammals had a selective advantage over their heartless siblings because compassion between them wove a web of mutual aid. Those first compassionate ones, just like humans today, did not act out of true altruism; rather, they helped kin—and hence helped to perpetuate their own genes—or they acted in hopes of future reward, of support from those who received that compassion. Every religion in the world had made a sacrament of compassion, and Evelyn wondered how many of them, like Christianity, had made explicit the promise of future reward. Millions of years of evolution had honed that urge into this sense she had now, of her embarrassment at watching this figure stumble helpless down the street. It was this urge to help one another that the infection exploited; it was what brought the sick and the healthy into one another’s arms, sickening everybody in the end. It is compassion that will kill us, she thought to herself.
She took one last despairing look at the listing figure below, as though the shuffling might all be an act, as though the person might suddenly break into a vigorous stride and set Evelyn’s conscience at rest. Then, just as she was turning to walk to the elevator, a flash of red caught the corner of her eye. She looked back to the street and saw a police car with its lights flashing, coming up slowly as a hunting cat behind the stumbling figure. Evelyn felt a palpable relief, an all’s-well-that-ends-well ease, to know that the problem (if there was one) would be resolved this way, by professionals.
The next Monday morning, Evelyn presented herself at the makeshift headquarters in the county agricultural extension office at the north end of town. A small sign at the gate announced S.V.E.T.F. It took Evelyn a minute to decipher the acronym: “Sturnus vulgaris Eradication Task Force.” Why, she wondered, would they use the starlings’ Latin name there? It seemed the peak of eggheadedness, an acronym designed to shield the public from the unpleasantness of gassing a million birds. Or maybe someone hoped to inspire some measure of public confidence, to convey by acronym and Latin nomenclature the sense that experts were on the case. If so, it was a flaccid attempt—the sign looked as though it had been printed the night before at a twenty-four-hour copy place.
The building was an ancient, paint-peeling, Depression-era construction. The main room within was filled with stuffed falcons, hawks, ducks, and geese emanating a stale taxidermic odor in concert. There was an empty desk and, on the wall behind it, an old-fashioned poster map of the county flocked with red and yellow push-pins. Evelyn passed behind the desk to study the constellation of pins up close, as though to draw from them a horoscope.
A lean, middle-aged man, unmasked and wearing an unkempt, careless beard, came in through a back door.
“You must be Dr. Cole—welcome to the command post.” Evelyn could see his hands splay at his sides as though it were physically painful to him not to be able to shake hands with her. But nobody shook hands anymore.
“Call me Evelyn,” she said. She loved being able to tell people to call her Evelyn, which she could only do if they called her Dr. Cole first. “Do you need a mask?”
The man apologized and produced a mask from the pocket of his coveralls. He volunteered that his name was Thomas. “I guess we get to close the barn door now that the horse has gotten out.”
“You got that right,” she answered with a grim chuckle. “The horse is definitely out.” Whether any humans survived this—or if none did—the outcome no longer depended on starlings and whether they lived or died. But killing them at least gave one the impression that something was being done to contain the disease.
“Well, you’re the boss now,” Thomas said. “What do you think?”
“I think I should probably see your operation.”
Thomas showed her around. The place was empty, a mess of desks loaded down with papers and reports and ancient computers, the relics of previous, lazier operations in the office. Besides Thomas and Evelyn, the only person in the building was a short college kid named Gordo, whom Thomas introduced enigmatically as “our dispatcher.”
Most of the team—thirty agents, according to Thomas—were “on patrol” right now, whatever that meant. Thomas himself had only stayed behind to meet her; he asked whether she wanted to join him on his patrol.
Evelyn assented. The rest of the morning he drove her all over the county in an old state university truck while she scanned the fields and parking lots and overpasses with binoculars. She saw scads of cowbirds and swallows, lots of red-tailed hawks and ospreys, scrub jays within the town and Steller’s jays in the backwoods outside city limits. She saw ducks and geese and all manner of sparrows, finches, thrushes, and wrens. But not a single starling. Thomas worked a radio, taking reports from the gang of other field agents.
“I expected this would be a bigger operation,” Evelyn said.
“The real action is with the CDC,” Thomas answered. They’ve taken over the whole Cascadia University Hospital in Portland.”
“I’m even more surprised we haven’t seen any birds.”
“Oh, they’re around,” Thomas answered. “They’re lying low, but they’re out there. We took out the flocks on the big bridges, and the next day all the other flocks had gone into hiding.”
“Just like all the people,” Evelyn said, looking over the eerily empty parking lot of a massive strip mall. She had, in fact, received a dozen or more emails in recent days from field biologists and former classm
ates from graduate school, asking whether Sturnus flocks were disaggregating in some freak late-season mating event. Starlings seemed far less susceptible to the pandemic than humans, but perhaps the flocks had dissolved as some response to the infection. In spite of the general feeling of apocalypse in the air, it thrilled her that a species she had studied for years, since the beginning of graduate school, would be exhibiting such novel behavior: great flocks of starlings were melting into a thousand individual birds, each scurrying, roach-like, in the dumpsters and eaves and vacant lots and waste places.
“How many did you get before the flocks all started breaking up?” Evelyn asked.
“We got the Interstate Bridge flock and a good chunk of the downtown population—a couple thousand birds in all. But probably 90 percent of the county’s starlings are still out there. It’s a shame the flu doesn’t kill them.”
“Something must be getting them,” Evelyn answered; “there’s not a single starling out here.”
“They’re out here,” Thomas answered in a bleak tone. “They’re just damn good hiders.”
As though to embarrass the both of them, a single starling flushed out of the long weeds of a vacant lot as they drove by. It made its clumsy, crashing flight toward a line of gray, dusty cottonwoods that ran along the other edge of the highway. Then, as though it had spotted the old extension truck, it dropped back into the tall oat grass of the lot.
Thomas braked hard, then parked in the middle of the highway. He got out and peered over the truck with his binoculars. Evelyn watched too, seeing only the waving tall oat grass and the great green mounds of Himalayan blackberry.
They watched intently for a minute or so. “There’s another singleton,” Thomas suddenly whispered. “Now he’s disappeared again.” Evelyn found the intensity of Thomas’ voice discomforting. He whispered as though he were reconnoitering an enemy encampment by night. She wondered if he was all there.