The Vanished Birds

by Simon Jimenez

  The words were so unexpected Nia could think of no other reaction but to laugh. A short, abrupt laugh. She picked up her glass of ojai liquor and toasted Sonja’s cup without waiting for her to pick it up. Shotgunned its contents.

  Her stomach bloomed from the drink; that blindside of kindness.

  * * *

  —

  She returned to the station elevators after dinner rather than the hotel, preferring her ship to the Travillion’s opulence. Some of the dockworkers gave her the eye as she walked past the unmanned loaders and the empty crates, wondering what a captain was doing in the docks at this hour, away from the celebrations, the lights of the upper strut. One of the workers nodded at her and winked, and flicked his details to her Handheld. She passed him without comment.

  The Debby was dark. The corridors dead. She stopped by the boy’s old room, half expecting to see that little hand waving good night. The room was empty. She made the linen on the cot and fluffed the pillow before continuing on to her quarters, where she sat at her desk, her face half lit by the lamp, her hand holding the pen above the paper, the ink tip drawing circles in the air, unsure of what to write. Something that would capture her dark mood. Trap it on the page instead of in her head. But that transition was never made. She fell asleep with her head propped up on her fist, the pages beneath her blank and unattended.

  While she slept, and dreamed of flute song, Durat entered the Schreiberi Grand Hall, his arms cast over the shoulders of the friends he had met in the sauna of the Travillion Spa—a couple who were traveling together, retracing the famous pilgrimage of some monkish figure whose name was in their eyes a revelation. Durat had little interest in the performer singing that night in the Grand Hall, and it was difficult for him to keep up with his new friends’ conversations as they often segued into topics that referenced events he had missed during his time in the Pocket—what the Pompadour Fleet was and why they were important was beyond him—but he was enjoying himself anyway, because after four months stuck in the Debby, it was exhilarating just to hear talk that had nothing to do with ship maintenance or flight plans. To be around so many unknowns. Flush with new money, he bought drinks for his entire row, and he absorbed with almost manic glee the attention this brought, and he told himself that this was going to be the best vacation of his life, which is what he told himself every time they landed, and was almost always proven wrong, because even he recognized the wild impossibility of his fantasies.

  As Durat drank himself into joy, Nurse patrolled the milk-white corridors of Pelican Hospital’s central branch. Her sterilized booties padded past the patient quarters while her mouth chewed the nails on her right hand; an old, stress-induced habit that had returned ever since the boy had boarded their ship. A pair of gloves was stuffed in her back pocket, which she would put on to hide her nails when she entered a patient’s room, resuming the chew when she knew no one was watching. During her rounds she argued with Nia in her head about the ten percent pay cut, and explained with sober clarity why the punishment did not fit the crime, and how it was necessary to take into account the fact that the boy’s presence had hobbled her ability to reason. She refined these arguments and made knives of them until an alert signaled on her retina. Room 23. She hurried to the patient in distress. There would not be a day she would let pass unguarded. When the worst arrived on its fiery hooves—and she was certain that it would, could feel the vibrations of it on her feet—she would be ready to tear out its throat.

  While Nurse cleaned the soiled thighs of a man who would never wake again, somewhere on Gracilius Wing, in the small alcove of a local park, Sonja sat with a group of fellow veterans as they shared with one another the names of the dead. The ages of the soldiers vacillated, from a ninety-year-old woman to a nineteen-year-old boy, the one commonality between them their inability to forget the smell of a body after it was toasted by a railgun. They didn’t swap war stories, didn’t relive the glory days of terror; those stories they saved for civilian ears. All they did was say the names of those they had lost, one at a time, clockwise, giving the dead the space to live again for a night. Parda. Suchong. Jura. “Norrin,” Sonja said, when it was her turn. “He was from Edelweiss. He saved my life, once.”

  “Norrin,” the nineteen-year-old repeated.

  “Norrin,” the ninety-year-old repeated.

  During the rehearsal of the dead in this park on Gracilius, kilometers away, on Pelican’s alternate wing, in the same Grand Hall where Durat sat with his friends, Fumiko Nakajima took her seat up in the private balcony. She sat beside the woman chosen to be her companion for the duration of her stay: a young woman with hair cut short into blond Nero bangs, and eyes that were dyed royal purple, none of these attributes coincidental. They held hands from across chairs, Fumiko stroking the consort’s soft palm skin with her index finger, tracing the identity lines, trying to unearth a long-forgotten name. The consort was not her only companion that evening—to her left, by the balcony curtains, sat one of the Pelican consuls, his presence required by Umbai for the PR. Fumiko ignored him until midway through the performance, when she heard him speak to an indeterminate third party through his neural, his tone hushed and secretive. When she asked him if something was wrong, he assured her with a too-quick smile that it was but a small security matter. Fumiko smiled and turned back to the performance, while with her custom neural she traced the call the consul was making to Nest Security. To her evening partners it looked as though her attention was solely on the elliptical aria, but within her dilated eye there was a whole play of action, her neural flipping through dozens of different windows, combing through recent station acquisitions, until the pages stopped, and she discovered the boy from Umbai-V, who was at that moment sitting alone in a holding cell in the thirteenth strut. It didn’t take long, twenty seconds at most, for her to research the whys of him, and to see that she had been waiting for someone like him for a very long time. Her hands gripped the sides of her chair and she excused herself from both the consul and her blond companion, telling them that she was tired but that she hoped they would have a fantastic evening. She was gone before either one could convince her to stay, the man and woman looking at each other with uncertainty across the now-empty chair.

  And while the Millennia Woman rode her private tram back to the main body of the station, far below, in Pelican Dock B-3, Baylin stumbled into the bay of the Debby, unable to remember why he had returned to the ship instead of his heated bed in the Travillion. It was the fault of the greenery pub. The weed had wreaked havoc with his senses, he too young and inexperienced to know when he was about to smoke his way over the edge until he already had. He moved through the darkened ship, one foot in front of the other, thinking it odd and tickly that he seemed to be experiencing time with a ten-second delay, his neurons wading through molasses as his brain told his foot to rise up and step forward. It was a nice change of pace from the anxiety he felt most days, but detrimental to finding his way back to his bunk. He tripped over his own feet like a toddler as he navigated the main causeway. Found a nice place to sit, on the grating between the door to the lav and the common room, where he listened to the dark and the quiet. Strange to be on a ship that wasn’t flying. Was it still a ship then? He giggled, until he heard the approach of footsteps from behind. When he turned his head, he gasped—the Goddess of Shadow towered above him, Nelho, She who would ascend all into the night, and he cursed himself for not believing in the family stories, his sisters’ insistence that the old myths were real, until the goddess laughed, and her gentle face resolved into Nia’s hard eyes and sharp cheeks. “You’re high,” she said.

  “I think I’m high,” he said.

  She helped him to his feet. Led him back to his room. He stopped before a three-step staircase, for despite Nia’s assurance that it was only three short steps, those steps were eighty feet tall and would take years to climb—entire generations of his descendants would die before
the lineage ever reached the top. And then what would they do? The climb was fruitless, the pride of effort a holdover from the old days. Who was the first person to climb a mountain, and what god did they expect to witness at its peak? What truth?

  His spiraling quest for answers was interrupted when Nia sighed and scooped him up like a baby. She carried him the rest of the way.

  “This is nice,” he murmured against her warmth. When she chuckled, to his addled senses each chuckle was an underwater detonation, distant and percussive. He thought he heard her say something along the lines of Don’t get used to it, but he couldn’t be sure. He shut his eyes, with comfort borne on the strength of her grip. In a murmur, he said, “I know why he looks up to you.” She did not ask him who he was talking about; such an answer was unnecessary, when the boy was everywhere around them. She only asked him what made him think that. He told her the simple truth he’d known since he’d first met his captain.

  “Because you’re strong.”

  For a time, there was only the sound of her footsteps.

  And then she thanked him.

  When Nia lowered him onto his cot he melted into the pillow with the vague awareness that she now sat beside him. He clutched his blanket to his chest as if it might be taken away and smothered it over his head until his world was as dark and warm as the engine belly of his parents’ generation ship—and in that dark, there was a glimmer. A number. An important number. “Thirty thousand,” he mumbled. “New Grav. Costs thirty thousand.” Beyond his blanket he could hear the air whistling through the circulation vents, and could feel the mattress shift as Nia stood up. She asked him a strange question. If he liked living on this ship. He always thought the answer was obvious. “Yes….yes,” he said, drifting. “I do.” The dark was warm.

  “Would you call it a home?”

  But he never answered her, for he’d fallen asleep.

  And as the young man slept, Nia smirked, denied the answer to a question that had been plaguing her for a while now. She had hoped that Baylin, as young as he was, would be able to share his perspective on the matter, but he was too far gone for that, and come morning, when he was sober again, she suspected it would be too awkward to ask. So she left him to his dreams, and went to the kitchen for a glass of water, her throat dry and scratched.

  Her eyes were still adjusting to the dark when the Handheld lit up and shot a notification straight to her brain.

  This is a personalized invitation for Captain Nia Imani BC2890 to attend the Canopy Dance in celebration of Fumiko Nakajima and the Umbai Company.

  The party will begin at 2300 on the 14th of March, Station Standard Time, on the Canopy Deck of Pelican Station.

  Directions are provided below.

  Please wear appropriate attire for the occasion.

  Resell/recoding of this invitation is illegal, and will result in immediate expulsion from Pelican Station, as well as further disciplinary measures.

  —UMBAI REPRESENTATIVE COMMITTEE

  * * *

  —

  The captains of the twelve commercial transport vessels convened in the dining hall of the Travillion for breakfast. The activity was suggested by Baruk of the Rock on Water as a way of commemorating the four years of travel they had spent together, even if much of it was spent in their own isolated bubbles of Pocket Space, and because Baruk was the eldest, and had helped the other captains out of various rough patches in the past, they felt they had no choice but to accept his invitation, even though there was much else they would rather be doing than entertaining his nostalgia.

  Nia joined them after she made her fruitless visit to Nest Security. The secretary had turned her away almost as soon as she had arrived, telling her Andetwa was not in the office and that she would be contacted when and if the ones in charge of the case “deemed it appropriate.” She was in a foul mood when she met the others, and was itching to complain about something. Once they were each served the first course—a perfumed broth that was milky white, with a swirl of blue, which tasted to Nia like drinking straight from a sour teat—she brought up the topic of the invitation she had received the night previous, and asked them if they were going to bother attending the event, having assumed the invite was a cursory gesture from Umbai to all the captains; the belligerent reaction of the ever-temperamental Toral Anders of the Solus proved that assumption wrong. “Is this a joke?” he cried. “You got invited?”

  “No offense was intended,” she said. Firm. “I honestly hadn’t realized it was such a big thing.”

  “It’s a privilege,” he said, with acid.

  The captain of the Helena Basho swept an auburn bang from her eyes and explained, “From what I’ve heard, of all the parties that are happening this week, the Canopy Dance is the most exclusive.”

  “The rarefied air of the elite,” said the captain of the Ghost Dog. “I wouldn’t have gone even if I was invited. Glad I wasn’t. Can’t imagine a place more suffocating.”

  “I’m not glad,” Toral snapped, close to slamming a fist on the table. “We all did equal the work, we should get equal the pay, and equal the benefits. None of this is fair.”

  Baruk stroked his gray beard. “Few things are, my friend.”

  “Save your wisdom for the pilgrims.”

  The captain of the BGT, the name of which stood for nothing but was chosen because the captain liked the sounds of the letters B, G, and T jammed together, leaned her small head forward, and said in a low voice, “I heard even the Primark Prince wasn’t invited.”

  “That’s because he spoke out against the station’s policy on language control,” the captain of the Helena Basho corrected. “Less to do with him not being special enough to attend.”

  “Still,” the BGT captain said, “he wasn’t.” Her big eyes regarded Nia. “And you were.”

  Baruk’s eyes twinkled. “I’m not surprised. Nia is a great captain.”

  “And what about us?” Toral asked.

  “It was a compliment, Toral, not a slight. If I must save you from my wisdom, you must save us from your hurt feelings.”

  To that, Toral stood up, his chair teetering from the abrupt movement, and excused himself to the bathroom.

  “His crew are an unlucky bunch,” the Helena Basho’s captain murmured.

  Baruk sighed. “Don’t let him get to you, Nia. Whatever reason you were given the invite, I am sure you’ve earned it fairly.”

  The other captains nodded in agreement, and though Nia was touched, she wasn’t convinced the invitation was a meritocratic gesture. It made no sense that the Umbai Company would pick her, and her alone, because as much as it hurt to concede Toral’s point, she knew they had all done the same amount of work. The only difference between her and them was that she was the one who delivered to the company the fallen boy.

  She was certain he was the reason.

  It was then that she decided that tomorrow night she would attend the dance. She would be among the great, and see if she could once and for all get some answers, even though she bristled at the invitation’s mention of appropriate attire, which almost never meant comfortable. “Just be careful,” the captain of the Mandolin warned her. “Those nobles are some of the most powerful in Allied Space. You cross one of them, you can find yourself executed on some backwater planet.”

  “Or ejected out the airlock one night.”

  “Or thrown down an elevator chute.”

  “Or just shot in the back of the head!”

  These were supposed to be jokes; Nia gathered this when everyone at the table broke into laughter.

  That night she paced around the Debby, moving things, rewashing dishes, polishing panels in the cargo bay, having learned from her father that the best way to curb anxiety was to pour herself into busywork and not give her brain a chance to consider the captains’ playful warnings. It was when she was elbow-deep in the
lighting circuitry that she laughed at herself, realizing both that she had no idea which wire led to the causeway lights, and that the hours she lost trying to figure it out had been lost in vain, for her heart was still punching her chest in anticipation for the dance that was still more than twenty hours away. With a sigh she finished off the last checks on her list, submitting the requisitions list to Dock Acquisitions and solving the weird rattling problem in the tertiary lav shower—it was a loose bolt—and then she called Durat on her Handheld to ask him if he was busy that night. She’d been thinking about Baylin, the image of him blissed out on pipe smoke, and decided that was what she needed—the old days, when the days were still cheap. Durat asked her where she wanted to meet.

  The greenery pub—sea blue and pastoral orange lights that shifted against the smooth concave walls while a quartet of synth artists played warblers on a raised dais for the people who smoked their pipes inside the many discreet recesses. The air was dank, and laced with the artificial flavoring of smokes both citric and sweet. Nia smiled when she entered, the seductive vibe of the pub loosening her wound-up neck muscles, asking her to sit back and remember her twenties. Durat had booked a private alcove in the back, with enough plush couch space for a dozen people. She didn’t ask him how much of his paycheck he’d blown since they’d arrived. Just took a seat. “Welcome to my ship, Nia Imani,” he said with arms splayed out along the spine of the couch. “Tonight, you are not a captain. Not even crew. You are my valued passenger.” He gave her a toothy smile. “All you have to do is point, and that’s where we’ll go.”