* * *
THE REAL MIRACLE is that Daphne let me walk off with the swallow in my pocket: The Vault of All Life isn’t exactly a lending library. And the blue swallow has been extinct for almost 70 years—she let me leave with the last known tissue sample of an entire species. Had Guillame said something to her? Was she angling for an invitation? I suppose it’s better not to speculate.
So many biologists, better biologists than I, have spent a million hours and cried a million tears cloning samples from The Vault, resurrecting for a while this species or that other species or a small ecosystem of species. But nobody has had much luck building a food web from scratch: bring back one of the spider species to eat the flies and frogs to eat the spiders and herons to eat the frogs, but sooner or later the whole house of cards falls in again because of some mite or species of grass that was missing and which nobody knew was needed.
Anyway, I won’t be cloning the whole swallow. Once I’m back in the lab, I’ll isolate some of its cardiac tissue, sequence the genes, key out the expression, and by the end of the month, with luck, I’ll be cloning blue swallow hearts like pink lentils in a dish. In the train car I drift off a moment, dreaming that I have already begun the sequencing, watching the letter for each nucleotide base plop down one by one on the screen in unflattering typeface, as though The Book of Life had been written in Courier New, dreaming that my own genome manifests mysteriously in the torrent of letters, full of synonymous mutations, frame-shift mutations, weird mutations that code for proteins that passed out of this world a long time ago.
It’s next evening before I get the swallow into the lab. “This poor guy had a pretty short tail”, I say to myself when I first get him under the dissection scope. Back when they existed, blue swallow females apparently mated with the males that had the longest tail feathers. Researchers could glue a couple of extra centimeters of feather to a male’s tail and suddenly he’d turn into Lothario, getting his pick of the females, plus some extra-pair copulations into the bargain. Those old research findings had always seemed comical to me. I suppose all sexual posturing in other species is a comedy gold mine to disinterested bystanders. The mating rituals of Homo sapiens only seem more serious to Homo sapiens. Maybe someday a super-intelligent alien probing my corpse will regard my wang with bemused pity.
I imagine a moment that blue swallows would have survived if this specimen had gotten lucky, as though the species had gone extinct because of lack of interest in sex. I cut him lengthwise, pop open the cabinet of his tiny ribcage, look on the packed assembly of his once-useful viscera. The intestines spiral and curlicue like a baroque cursive letter. The heart, laid bare for the first time, peeks out like an all-seeing little eye, taking in the world and its carelessness with the blue swallow and all species.
* * *
THE ENTIRE HEART weighs 400 mg or so. I think I can pull off the whole project with half of that, give or take
Once sautéed, blue swallow hearts reduce to the size of grains of rice. A more interesting texture than I remember rice having, though. Against my better judgment I had also cloned a few birds in full. All males, of course—I wouldn’t be resurrecting this species by any of my own paltry sleight-of-hand. In the weeks leading up to the big dinner the fledglings hop about and shit up the antique parrot cage I bought for the lab. Twice a day I feed them moistened worm meal, or fly meal if I don’t find any worms that day.
This will be my first, and probably only, Hemingway Society dinner. Guillame makes clear The Society wishes to reward me for all my work. The hall is in one of the deserted sections of the city, in a sleek glass palace that looks like it was once a botanical garden or maybe a luxury car showroom. I’m surprised I haven’t seen the building before: this neighborhood isn’t so far from where I live.
I had expected a pack of sybaritic old men and I’m not disappointed. Most of the males, anyway, seem to be in their seventies and eighties: men who can remember eating meat. They all seem to have traded in their menopausal wives for perky young things, mostly women, not that anybody here is likely to get pregnant. The hall is decorated with more varieties of corn and tomato plants than I could ever have imagined.
The menu is Siberian tiger steak, baked dodo eggs, Yangtze dolphin chowder (the dolphins had been raised in an old water treatment facility, I hear), and of course blue swallow heart risotto. I didn’t do the cooking and I’m not sure if there’s real cheese in the risotto—if so I don’t even want to think about what animal provided the milk.
At the end of the hall a string quartet plays something bright and Olympian, maybe Schubert or Beethoven. The cloned swallows swoop about overhead, scooping up the many houseflies—a nice effect, I think.
I did end up bringing Daphne from The Vault of All Life. She’s the oldest woman here by about 30 years, looking scarily attractive in evening gown and vampy lipstick. She seems utterly unfazed by the carnival of vanity on all sides of us. As the steaks are served I raise my eyebrow quizzically at her. “We were made to eat meat,” she answers with a predatory grin over the $50,000 plate of risotto between us.
I reach for my fork and see a strange housefly there. It’s an awkward little creature, with longer legs than I would expect for a housefly; its body, too, seems a bit narrower. Strangest of all are the mouthparts, half again as long as on a typical fly, slightly hooked, almost like the nubbin of a proboscis. Almost like a nectar-feeding proboscis—but what could this creature possibly be eating with such a mouth?
Not that I know flies. I know just enough—or know just enough how much I don’t know—to pause in my speculations and simply watch for a while.
BRANCHES ON MY BACK, SPARROWS IN MY EAR
Nikki J. North
Nikki J. North lives on the island of Guam with her wonderful spousal unit, Eric, and two dogs. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer and Information Science from the University of Maryland. Having lived in the United Kingdom and traveled throughout Europe and Southeast Asia, her favorite sight is still that of the Rockies rising up over the high deserts of the northwest where she grew up. By day she writes in 1s and 0s as a Web programmer for the University of Guam. By night she writes speculative fiction. Her first published story, “Symptoms Persist,” appeared in Larks Fiction Magazine at the end of 2011. “‘Branches’ was only the second story I’ve ever attempted to have published,” she says. “I’m working on the third, a short story called ‘The Rise of the House of Denver.’” Currently, she is also working on a novel set on Mars.
“Branches on My Back, Sparrows in My Ear” was published in the first annual online issue of James Gunn’s Ad Astra. It is authentically strange science fiction, from an already accomplished prose stylist.
LAY UPON THIS sheath of skin, map of bone and tendon, pulling muscle and equilateral contraction, a vacant mold. Color these remnants of steaming Vietnamese jungles, perilous trips, survived atrocities, collapsed Tokyo empires, and the love of two, with a brush dipped in water. Look at café skin, full upper lip, radiant lines emergent from eyes, volumetric cheeks, and … there is a word for the reaction. Even now it’s a true word, despite its own absurd, obsolete nature, and I know you find words precious, Daughter.
My gift to you: squinch. A squinch is neither an especially smelly portion of cheese nor a disease whose symptoms are squinting and itching. It is an involuntary kind of jerk, mixed with a spasming flinch, causing the body to both lean forward and jump back at the same time. Squinch is now one of the fifty-seven terms found on the Nguyen family Made Up Words that Can Be Used in Scrabble list, and it is the perfect word to describe the reaction of the woman who walked into my office that day. I have made you this word, an offering at the altar of your suffering so you will know that I understand, but these words will reach no further. They bind me. Let me show you. I can now. Here—
* * *
LEADING A CLIENT with designer Vash Vidaaru circuitry sliding up her jaw to the clinic chair, I see her trying to catch a glimpse of my ankle, straining
for a peek of skin beneath my high collar. She’s wasting her time, as have many before her. I don’t have any sub-q. I’ve never been inked.
There are those who choose to go without ink. Some people leave the face blank as a form of self-expression, some because they are part of a religious group that forbids it. Almost everybody knows a friend of a friend whose cousin is blank, but most people will never meet a resistant in a time when it’s more common to see a man with a giant squid tattooed across his forehead than a ten-year-old with a spot of untouched skin. These days seeing someone without sub-q is like opening a book and finding all the pages are empty, so I understand the stares. Usually, I ignore them, but not today. When I catch the woman scrutinizing my neck for the third time, I answer the unasked question. I even tell the truth: I’m resistant.
“Actually,” I say, keeping a detached smile on my face as I prep ink with gloved hands, “resistant is a bit of an understatement. My body violently rejects the ink.” I dip the needle into a bottle of standard sub-q. “In fact, just a drop of this landing on my skin would send my body’s immune system into a kind of protective overdrive that would create enough toxins to incapacitate me for hours. Hence the long sleeves and twitchy assistant.” I smile as my thumb pulls skin taut. “Mia is good. She’s been with me for years. I went through three assistants before her. Nothing like finding your boss unconscious, right?”
Needle hovering, I look the woman in the eyes. My self-deprecating smile fades. Words down a well, I think. Her top teeth clasp her lower lip. Her eyes dart away. It’s always like that with the ones who never learned to speak. I wonder what I must sound like to her. Are my words loud and sharp? Are they like the meaningless squawk of a bird? Or are they a writhing babble under the composed stream of sub-q communications running through her head? What exquisite data is she exchanging while I sit here like a rock, like a giraffe longing for opposable thumbs? Halfway through this habitual, bitter thought the realization hits me that today I don’t have to feel this way. The needle skitters as my hand convulses, and I almost penetrate too far into the derma.
I manage to keep my thoughts focused for the rest of the appointment.
Finished enhancing her comm system with the latest upgrades, I show Mrs. Bardon out to the lobby where Mia will hand her a bill that is three times most people’s rent. Nothing but the best for Servanix Group board members and their husbands … and their children and their cousins and their associates at the Office of New Immortals and their friends in Sydney North Ring. And, and, and—the list is a long one composed of Sydney’s rich and richer. I don’t mind. Their grasping pursuit of the techpossible (Nguyen Scrabble Word #44, a contribution from Kaede) funds my research.
In my office a stack of messages covered in Mia’s careful handwriting waits. I ignore it, pushing up my left shirt sleeve instead. There I trace the reason for my joy: a black, three-inch line, stark and defiant amongst the ghosts of past attempts. Unlike its kin, gobbled up and spit out by my body’s own defenses, it remains. Ten days ago, surrounded by the quiet of a deserted building, I inked this line into my skin. With Emergency’s number queued on my ancient mobile, I waited for the crippling pain and shortness of breath to overtake me.
Only now, looking down at it still there, do I finally let myself believe that after two years of resuming my search I’ve found the enzyme that will make it work. There is one person in all the world I want to tell.
* * *
KAEDE, WHEN YOU don’t have ink you’re a ghost. You glide in a world of silence. Public spaces are full of eyes that never focus and mouths that never move. Walking through the open food court at the bottom of the clinic is never really a comfortable experience, but lunch is the worst: the shouts of forks on plates, the screams of chairs being pushed back, the roar of breath that bellows in and out of hundreds of lungs through lips unused. Here—
* * *
I ESCAPE THE cool interior of the Sydney General Dermacomm and Neurocohesives Clinic building into a day capped by a sky milky with cumulus clouds. The buildings around me are thorns piercing this dome with their spiraling exteriors. Songs of thrushes and robins overlay the distant calls of seabirds. People rush around me. Most are headed toward Central, still caught in the morning commute. Letting myself be taken up in the stream of their travel, I walk past the older Short District and halfway through New Zenith District before I see the man with the complex of Keorgi tats. At first glance I am taken by their beauty. Someone knows their business. I’m trying to figure out where I know the style from when I realize the man’s eyes are not staring into the distance past me, taking in ads and signs and addresses only he can see, but are focused on something. He is looking at me, seeing me. It feels like a thousand feathers landing on my skin. I stop and turn back to get a better look, but he’s gone. I stand to the side as a transport whispers past. Water from the building’s weather system murmurs down the shining black synthskin exterior. The feeling of eyes touching me has disappeared with the man.
The elevator in the Servanix Tech building smells like leather and pomegranate. It takes me to the twenty-fourth floor where, after traveling a maze of curving hallways, I find Kaede’s office.
She’s not there.
I leave a note with her assistant, who holds it pinched between two fingers like a dead possum. Exiting the building, my eyes dart up both sides of the greenway jostling and shimmering with people. The rising and falling voices of the leaves covering the spiral behind me crash and echo. I wish for a dog to bark. I wish for one out of the thousands of people rushing by to laugh. I wish for a giant bell, the kind of bell that must be rung by two men hurtling a whole tree’s worth of wood at it, the kind of bell that would call with its deep voice across mist-shrouded mountains and cratered valleys, eating this quiescent scene with its annihilating voice. There is no bell, only a world immersed in sub-q. My skin curls tight to my body waiting for the touch of eyes as I make my way back to the clinic.
* * *
MY MOTHER’S GENERATION was the last to live in a spoken world. She named me Izumi and died when I was nineteen. I loved my mother’s quiet presence, and the way she smelled like almonds. I loved the way her black hair made an almost audible twang as the curls sprang back up under the hand she used to constantly smooth them down. I loved the swirls of tattoo that washed and echoed across her face. I remember tracing them with a finger as she leaned over me, pulling blankets tight around shoulders. I still try, sometimes, to trace my own face while lying in bed and see myself in the topographic mirror there, but all I see is the ink of her face superimposed over the unmapped territory of my own. Kaede, do you lie somewhere now? Do you try to imagine yourself otherwise? Give me the gift of believing you do not. Here—
* * *
“I CAME BY your office today,” I say, pouring the rest of the wine into Kaede’s glass.
“Oh?”
I nod, holding her glass hostage in one hand until she yields.
“I was in the lab.”
When Kaede lies she does this thing with her voice. It becomes rougher, like the lies are smoke rising in her throat.
“New research? Or still working on—”
“Oh, I don’t want to bore you, Mom.” She dismisses my question with a wave of her fork.
I want to bark a “Ha!” at her over my own glass of wine. I know you think I’m a fifty-four-year-old has-been, a dinosaur flashmonkey who’s never had a drop on her skin, but who gave you the beautiful tiger main tat that crosses your back, dear? And why are you avoiding my questions? And why was a man with your ink following me around the city today?
I don’t say these things, though. I drink my wine and let Margie, my younger daughter, change the subject. She begins gossiping about something one of the famous clients at the net entertainment agency where she works has done. On her back is the crane I gave her when she was twelve. She’s continued the motif. Water scrolls up her collarbones, washing up her neck and jaw to her ears, where it carries the signals that m
ake her constantly tip her head in silent communion with a client. She’s been at it the whole meal. Her voice trails off as she’s taken away again.
“Hey!” Kaede’s palm comes down hard on the table. “Get out of the sub-q and have a real conversation.”
They share a long look. What kind of sibling squabble are they having? What expressions and kindled emotion is being passed in the ether of sub-q? I want to know and to tell them both that soon I will know. They’ve both heard it before, but this time is different. This time it’s real. Margie leaves the table.
“So, Mom,” Kaede says, sounding far too bright and chipper.
“So, Kaede.” I grin at her. It’s a joyful grin, but she doesn’t see it; her focus is on dismantling the fudge cake in front of her into smaller and smaller piles of crumbs. The secret of my joy is swallowed by the image of the tats on the stranger.
“Sorry, that was Kyle,” Margie says, taking her seat again.
We talk about cake and work and Margie’s boyfriend, whom Kaede and I both dislike, for the rest of the night. Margie leaves with a kiss pressed affectionately to my left cheek; Kaede follows with a kiss to the right. They never have been much for sharing.
Kaede pauses at the door. I’m going to tell her. I find myself clutching the door instead. Kaede’s eyes flicker downward, and I realize I’m rubbing my forearm. She leaves without saying anything.
Standing at the window moments later, my mind worries at shadows. I have a feeling I’ve missed something, that I’ve failed to understand a critical component in the schematic of the night. I clear the table, sit at the computer, but ultimately find myself back at the wine. After two more glasses to stop my brain from moving and flickering, sleep comes like a whispered incantation.
I wake to the sharp trills of the HUD in my bedroom. Eyes shuttered against the light from the wall to my left, I try to make out the characters scrolling there. It’s a message from the intrusion detection monitor at work. Someone has hacked their way into the clinic systems. I run a log audit; there’s no indication of remote access. Security guy trip something? Mia doing some late-night work? Neither scenario seems very plausible. The sense of failed understanding returns as I run a full scan of the system.
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