The Vanished Birds

by Simon Jimenez

  The spoon stopped. He went still at her touch.

  She almost admired his disquieting ability to remain silent. Even as he cried.

  * * *

  —

  For three days, there was no music. The hatch to the guest quarters remained shut. On strict orders, no one but Nia was to enter the room—she made it clear that should they disobey, they would be discharged upon arrival at Pelican. The crew complied; they had no more business with their guest, their moods having lightened considerably with the newfound silence.

  For those three days, only Nia was privy to the boy’s slow retreat into the corner of the room. She sat with him when she had the chance, would read to herself while he lay in bed not moving but for the soft rise of his breath. And every lights-on, as she blinked herself awake, and fixed his breakfast, she asked herself what she was doing, what difference she was making with her company; asked herself why she cared. As angry as she was with Nurse, she knew the woman was right—once they arrived at Pelican, the boy would no longer be their problem. All she had to do was keep him eating, keep him clean. There was no need to attempt these clumsy jabs at comfort. But still she would find herself coming back to his room, pulled there as if by the force of empathy, or something else, a responsibility, maybe; oblivious that every now and then the boy would look up from under his blanket, like a small animal from its burrow, to make sure that she was still there.

  On the fourth day, his room was empty.

  Nia gripped the frame of the hatchway, but she stopped herself before she conjured up worst-case scenarios. She searched the ship, starting with the most dangerous areas first, the engine room and the cargo bay, but neither Baylin nor Sonja had seen him. Nurse hadn’t seen him either in the medica. She offered to help Nia look for the missing child, but she declined, the betrayal still too fresh. “Thank you,” she said, backing out of the medica, “but it’s fine. I’ll find him.”

  And she did. With a breath of relief she discovered him in the cockpit, seated in the pilot’s chair, dressed in one of the field outfits that Kaeda had packed for him—a magma-red, one-shouldered robe that cut across his torso diagonally, cinched at the waist with a black rope belt, dropping into a skirt that touched the tops of his small knees. His hands were enmeshed in the cat’s cradle of taut strings that were the Debby’s controls, while Durat stood behind him, instructing him on which string to pull for the back thrusters. In truth the boy piloted nothing, the cat’s cradle locked in autopilot, the strings dead to his touch, but his eyes nevertheless focused straight ahead at the shuttered viewport as he listened to Durat’s instructions and pretended that in each movement of his agile fingers he commanded the fate of a ship and her crew. Their lessons ended at the sound of Nia’s cough. Durat turned, saw her standing in the hatchway. “Captain,” he said with a grin.

  The spell was broken. The boy returned to himself. He pulled his hands from the well of the ship’s controls and slipped off the seat. His sandaled feet slapped across the floor as he went to stand by Nia’s side, staring up at her.

  “I found him in here,” Durat said. “Kid almost gave me a heart attack.”

  Nia cracked a smile. “You taught him to fly?”

  “The cursory basics. Years to go till he’s good as me.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe I just found myself a new pilot.” She grinned, the whole situation strange but welcome. She looked down at the boy. “Are you available for hire?”

  The boy shrugged.

  Her ex-pilot dropped his head. “And so I die the quiet death of obsolescence.”

  “Doesn’t seem that quiet,” Nia said, chuckling. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. You two can keep playing if you want.”

  “This is no game.”

  “Right. Dexterity exercises.”

  She turned to go, but she got no farther than the steps to the causeway when she heard the sound of the boy’s sandals in pursuit. He stood there, looking up at her again with that penetrating gaze, like it was a matter of course that he would follow her.

  “I wouldn’t recommend coming with,” she said. “My routine isn’t as exciting as flying through the Pocket. Stay here and play.” She led him back into the cockpit and sat him in the chair. “Keep playing with him,” she said to Durat firmly.

  She was halfway down the steps when the sandals slapped up behind her.

  “Sorry, Captain.” At the head of the steps, Durat smiled in a way that suggested he wasn’t sorry at all. “Unless we strap the kid down, I think you’re stuck with him.”

  “I’m realizing this,” she muttered.

  So it was that she had a partner for the day. Their first stop was the back of the ship, where Sonja was performing her post-workout ritual of disassembling her gauss rifle and polishing the pieces over a sheet of tarp. While Nia asked her if she had updated their food inventory like she’d asked her to do days ago, Sonja raised her eyebrows as the boy appeared from behind her captain’s back and wandered the cathedral hollow of the cargo bay like a cat, pawing at everything: the netting on the wall, the thick black straps that lashed the containers of seed to the grated floor, the ammo clip to her rifle—she slapped his hand away. He looked at her, affronted. “I’ll do inventory today,” she said, unnerved. “Just get him out of here.”

  On their way to the common room, they ran into Nurse, who was headed in the opposite direction. Nurse brightened with what seemed to be genuine delight at the boy’s presence, opened her mouth to say something about this, but Nia continued on without stopping, the boy close on her heels. In the common room they moved the couches against the paneled walls, rolled up the rug, and brought it to the catwalk. They draped the rug over the railing and beat the dust with brooms while, below them, Sonja sneezed. It would’ve been quicker to run the rug through the vac, but Nia thought the boy might enjoy the activity, and took pleasure in it herself, reminding her as it did of home; how her sister would watch the clouds of dust bloom from the fabric as Nia beat their mother’s rugs on the balcony railing, the City Planet skyline their view, the little girl delighted by how the particles glimmered against the chemical orange light of the false sun. Unlike her sister, the boy paid no attention to the play of dust. As he was with the flute, every ounce of his focus was directed on the task at hand. A single-mindedness that Nia found endearing.

  After they unfurled the rug on the common-room floor, she gave him a tablet and stylus, and let him doodle while she read one of the old books in the shelf, the sweeping epics from Old Earth her mother once loved. While on the page the warrior queen Faydra Faneuil fought for the freedom of her principality, Nia’s gaze drifted above the brim of the book, and she watched for a time as the boy drew long, spiraling lines on the tablet’s screen—lines that didn’t cohere into any particular picture or shape, but spiraled again and again, each intersecting with itself until the screen was one large black coil.

  The boy stopped drawing when the lamp on the coffee table rose from its platform. The lamp held its position in midair, as if it had gotten up on its own, only to forget where it had wanted to go. He looked to Nia for an explanation. She told him that the ship was old and that there were parts that needed to be replaced. She got up and clasped the lamp’s body with both hands and was about to remove it from the zero-G bubble when the boy stood and gazed at his warped reflection in the lamp’s brown, oblong body; the wide, dark eyes; the black hair that fell over his head in long, frizzy bangs. When he reached out and touched the reflection, the lamp dropped into Nia’s hands, safe.

  For dinner, she ripped open a foil bag of jerky and plumped the strips in the boil. She fanned them over a bowl of sweet rice and observed the way he ate, his deliberate movements, not one grain of rice dropped or left forgotten on his lips, the bowl polished clean by the end. His body so still and controlled he blended in with the furniture, nearly unnoticed by the crew that filtered in and out of the kitchen. Baylin didn�
�t see the boy at all, giving Nia a polite “Captain” as he grabbed some protein noodles from the fridge, going on about leaking engine filters as he walked back out. When he was gone, Nia looked at the boy with a wry smile, impressed by his uncanny ability to disappear.

  “You’ll have to teach me how to do that,” she said.

  The boy held up his empty bowl. Looked around.

  “It goes over here,” she said, showing him the wash.

  She waited outside the lav as he showered, and helped him dress for bed; a white sleeping shirt that swallowed most of his body, a hand-me-down from Durat, as the clothes Kaeda had packed were not suited to the cold nights aboard the ship. She leaned against the frame of his hatch as he lay in bed, his small body curling into itself under the thick woolen blanket. Despite herself, she smiled at the sight.

  “Sleep easy,” she said.

  His hand lifted up in a small wave as the nonessential lights switched off throughout the ship and brought them the night.

  * * *

  —

  Weeks passed with the boy as her shadow, he stitching himself slowly each day to the soles of her feet. He helped her do loads of laundry, dropping them into the mouth of the vac, waiting ten minutes for the ding! and the clothes that smelled like steel flowers. He sat beside her as she played Tropic Shuffle with Durat and Sonja, studying her hand of cards, and with each game picking up the convoluted rules as they explained to him why certain birds beat others, and what the difference was between a gaggle and a flamboyance; why Sonja insisted that Durat keep his hands above the table at all times.

  “Cheat once, always a cheater, apparently,” Durat said bitterly.

  During the afternoons he listened as Nia explained why there were handlebars running along the walls and ceiling. He listened to her stories in the common room, old contracts like the Roman treeplant they shipped across three systems, not realizing the treeplant was in its fruiting season, and was pollinating their ventilation system with neurotoxins, giving the whole crew a delirious and happy high for a few hours before they had enough wherewithal to grab the gas masks and move the treeplant into the sealed airlock. “We found Ponchi in the kitchen massaging rice into his face,” she said, mushing her face in her hands in demonstration, which made him smile. He listened to the fun stories, for those were the only ones she shared. And when, one day, she and Durat brought him to the cockpit and placed the headset over his ears, he listened to the sounds of the Pocket, his eyes widening to the symphony of crackles and finger snaps. Nia studied his tranced expression, wondering what thoughts were going through his mind as he listened to the black materials rush past the hull sensors of the Debby; and after that day, when she would sometimes find him in the cockpit in the early morning, asleep with the headset on, she would carry him back to bed, his arm limp and swaying, and would ask herself what it was that strange boys dream of.

  But most mornings, he was awake, and waiting for her. In the fringe of lights-on, Nia would lie in her bed and listen while outside her hatch she heard the familiar slap of his sandals make their eager approach. She would smile and find it strange that she was smiling. She would get out of bed and dress, leisurely, her pants first, her tank top last, drawing out the moment when she would throw open the hatch, delighting in the fact that on the other side was a person who could not wait to see her. Sometimes during this morning ritual she would stop, and would think of Kaeda, standing at the edge of the purple-stalked field, staring up at the sky as he gripped the flute she had left behind, and she would feel shame as she remembered how good it felt each time she left him, a throb of dark satisfaction in her heart for every ounce of her he was left wanting. And though the relationship between her and the boy was different, the notion remained: he was sustained by her presence, and she knew it.

  There were the rare days when she exploited this, when she told him she was busy and locked herself in her room to write her haikus or write nothing at all while she indulged in the youthful vanity of withholding. But there would come the hour when she saw herself from the outside, and knew that she was too old to be playing these games. She would go to find him—there, sitting at the kitchen counter, staring hard-eyed at some unknown memory in the corner of the room. Smiling at the sight of her. The cloudbreak, and a nod.

  Yes.

  Let’s do something today.

  She learned his mannerisms. How his right foot tucked itself behind his left leg when he ate, and how he picked at his nails when he was nervous. How he tugged at his hair with impatience—hair that they had by that point sheared off, leaving an inch of black on top—and how, when he dropped a plate or bumped into her or messed up whatever small task she had assigned him, his shoulders would hunch as if braced for a blow. And in these moments, she would catch a glimpse of his past. A history of silence that existed long before the trauma of the wreckage. A learned pain.

  * * *

  —

  On the third month and third day, after she had put the boy to bed, there was a knock on Nia’s hatch. She knew who it was even before she opened it. The talk was a long time coming. “This is absurd,” Nurse said, standing in the dark corridor, fuming. “Can we stop this now?”

  For a while now they had been civil, their conversation in the causeways light and without meaning. They had made feints toward reconciliation, but they never made it past the awkwardness of casual conversation. Nia had been so preoccupied with the boy that it wasn’t until now, seeing her friend standing outside the door, that she realized how much she missed Nurse, even though her pettier side still considered shutting the door in her face. She stepped aside and let the sari flit past her. There were four fingers left of the bourbon. She poured two cups and dropped the bottle in the wastebasket. “How’ve you been?” she asked.

  Nurse laughed as she sat on the bed. “Lonely,” she said.

  They drank.

  “We’re almost out of Sonja’s injections,” Nurse said. “You’ll want to add that to the requisitions list, unless you want her leg to fall off.”

  “Maybe we should let it,” Nia said with a sigh. “Maybe then she’ll stop kicking in all of my doors.”

  Nurse nodded. “Speaking of: When is Baylin going to fix the door to the tertiary lav?”

  “He says he can’t. Says the door needs to be replaced at Pelican, though part of me is convinced he doesn’t know how.”

  “That curtain he set up…every time I sit on the toilet, that’s when the ventilation decides to restart and the curtain blows open and somehow Durat is always passing by just in time to see me.” Nurse shook her head as Nia laughed. “Every time. It’s humiliating.”

  “I’ll fire him when we land. Him and Baylin. Sonja for good measure. We can start again with a fresh crew.”

  “Fresh crew. Fresh start. That’s exciting.”

  They drank again. During the quiet that followed, Nurse played with her fingernails, which Nia could see were recently chewed, though she made no comment about it, knowing how sensitive she was on the matter. “But I didn’t come here to talk to you about the door, or Sonja’s medicine,” Nurse said almost in a mutter. “I came here to say that I acted out of line. I recognize that.”

  Nia leaned forward. “Why did you do it?” she asked.

  “I told you why. The flute was affecting crew morale, yet nothing was being done about it.”

  “I mean why did you break it? Why didn’t you just tell him to stop? Isn’t that what you suggested I do?”

  Nurse hesitated. “I wasn’t clearheaded that night,” she said.

  Nia knew what she was getting at. “A flashback?”

  “Yes.”

  It had been five years since Nia found Nurse in the wreckage of a derelict in fringe space, and though the starved body had by now filled out, and the mouth remembered how to smile, and the mind rediscovered its wit, there were still the flashbacks of the time b
efore, when the food had run out, and the meat was the bodies of the volunteers she’d served with. “I make no excuses for how I behaved,” she said, “only an explanation: that at two in the morning, in the state of mind I was in, I felt there was no option but to break the flute in half.”

  “I understand that,” Nia said. “I do. Just so long as you understand that what you did was in direct violation of my command.”

  “With clarity,” she said.

  Nia nodded. “Okay then.”

  A third drink. There was something else on Nurse’s mind; Nia could tell by the play of her hand on her sari. “He is a sweet child,” she said. “And I’m glad that despite my best efforts, he’s getting on well here”—she put her cup down on the nightstand—“but I’m worried about how much time you’re spending with him.”

  Nia gave her a funny look while she drank. “He’s a guest on our ship. I’m entertaining him.”

  “You know you can’t keep him.”

  Nia put her cup down beside Nurse’s. “No one said I was going to.”

  “No one needed to. It’s obvious you’ve become attached.”

  “Why are you talking about this?”

  “You know exactly why,” she said. “The moment we reach Pelican Station, Umbai is going to take their cargo. That includes the boy. He trespassed on their property. They have first rights.”

  “He crash-landed. Intention counts for something.”

  “And they might let him go and that will be the end of it—but if it isn’t, if there’s something else going on, you won’t see him again. You know this.”

  Nia held up her hands. “Then we all go on living our lives as happy and legal citizens of Allied Space.”

  But Nurse wasn’t finished. “Even if they let him go, what then? Are you going to adopt him? Raise him on this ship and make this tin can his home?”