The Vanished Birds

by Simon Jimenez

  Feelings he did not know what to do with.

  He picked up the mastiff’s plate and brought it to the wash, thinking about the song. He glanced at Nia from across the room. Studied the lost look in her eyes.

  She was troubled too.

  “I’m going out for a smoke,” she announced as she backed out of the kitchen. The women and Sartoris followed her outside, where they would share a pipe.

  Ahro stood in the entryway to the common room and watched them go, unable to follow, for Nia had told him it wasn’t good to indulge in such a habit. He wandered back into the kitchen and joined Em and Royvan at the table, even though he wasn’t in the mood to play Tropic Shuffle. He didn’t want to be alone. He rested his cheek on his fist and watched a few rounds of the game, two perches, a whole nest, before he went back to his room, and brought his flute to the table, figuring out the melody the man had trapped in his head while Royvan ran circles around Em in their game.

  While he rediscovered the notes to the song, the women and Sartoris put out the fold-out chairs, near enough to the edge of the landing pad that they could see out into the desert black, the Debby’s floodlights on their backs. This high up, there was a cool breeze that dried the sweat off Nia’s brow and made pleasing swirls of her pipe smoke. The melancholic mood was still strong. She passed the pipe to Sartoris, and, in the last dregs of her sobriety, remembered the conversation she’d had with Em and Ahro on the tower. She rolled her neck muscles and asked the others how long they thought they could live on a world like this, where there were no people. Sartoris coughed smoke from his mouth, sounding like a squeeze-toy, and asked if he was allowed any books; when she said no, only the desert and the dogs, he said, “A few weeks then,” and passed the pipe to Sonja, who gave no qualifications for her answer and said, “Five years,” and left it at that. Sonja presented the pipe to Vaila, but the pilot didn’t grab it, or answer the question—her thoughts far away from them, while in her hands her ladeum beads embered. “Sorry, Captain,” she said, when she saw how they all looked at her. “What was the question?”

  “How long could you live on this world, alone?”

  In the dark Nia had to squint to make out Vaila’s smile.

  “As long as I was asked to,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  In the Debby’s kitchen, the last card was played, and conversation turned to work. Royvan was leaning back in his chair, and Em leaning forward, his chin resting on his cup. Ahro was between them, his flute on the table, listening intently as Royvan told him why he’d joined this crew. “I joined because that was what Nakajima requested that I do. Same goes for Em. Right, Em?” Across the table, Em nodded, his eyes on his hand of cards.

  “That was the only reason?” Ahro asked.

  “You’re dubious. I get that. Fifteen-year job is a big ask. But what you have to understand, Ahro, is that all you have to do is lose one patient”—he laughed, without humor—“one well-known and talented and loved patient…and they will ruin you. They will punish you for acts of whatever god was beyond your control, and throw you down the chute with the trash. That’s what happened to me. In one day, I went from being one of the premier doctors on Thrasher Station to living in the slums of the orbiting City Planet.” A sigh. “Lived like that for a while.”

  “We were probably neighbors,” Em said.

  “Box buddies.” Royvan smiled, rubbing the whiskers on his cheek, recalling old memories he would rather not speak of. “But then Fumiko found me, just before I ended things. Offered me a way out, in her service. When one of the most famous women in the galaxy visits your awful little box of an apartment and offers you a new life, you take it.”

  Em’s story was briefer. “I tried to steal her ship. She caught me, said she was impressed with my work. Hired me after.”

  Royvan chuckled. “It wasn’t that simple.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” Em said, but he didn’t elaborate, which didn’t surprise Ahro, for he’d by then figured out that as much as the engineer loved to gossip, he was quiet when it came to his own matters.

  “Fumiko does that kind of thing a lot,” Royvan said. “Pulls the wayward into her gravity, breeds loyal servants for a cause only she’s aware of. Deploys us when necessary. She has access to so much information, she knows when to strike.” He drank, gritted his teeth. “When she found me, I thought I was so goddamn special, until I learned there were hundreds of others she’d ‘saved’ like me.” He sighed. “So now I do what she tells me.”

  “Do you not like her?” Ahro asked.

  Royvan laughed. “I love her,” he said. “But I don’t know her at all.”

  “Who knows anyone?” Em muttered into his cup.

  “Well said, idiot.”

  “What about Vaila?” Ahro asked.

  The two men glanced at each other. Neither spoke. For a moment Ahro was worried he had spoken out of turn, until Em said, in a murmur of a voice, “She was one of the consorts.”

  * * *

  —

  The scramline in Sartoris’s pocket danced. He twirled it open, and when his expression turned grave, Nia sobered, as did the other women, all of them sitting up in their fold-outs.

  “What does it say?” she asked.

  “ ‘Your request for an abbreviated contract is denied,’ ” he read aloud. There was a pause. The hollow sound of the rushing breeze. “ ‘You will continue to travel until the boy exhibits his ability, as stated in the contract. Expect penalties in full should you or any of the crew return before this, or before the contract’s fifteen-year ceiling. All future reports should address the boy’s development, and his development only. Extraneous details will be duly ignored.’ Signed, Nakajima.” He sighed as he put the device away. “That was about what I expected her to say.”

  “You think we’ll return before fifteen years pass?” Sonja asked.

  “No,” Nia said, the night catching up with her quicker than she expected. “I don’t.”

  None of them believed the Jaunt was real. The topic was by then a long-running joke. Nia had once pretended she left a toothbrush behind in some city—she couldn’t remember which—and asked Ahro if he would please Jaunt over and get it for her, and when he shut his eyes as if in intense focus, everyone in the room went quiet, each of them wondering, Was something about to happen? until he pressed his fingers to his temples and farted, which was as definitive an answer as any of them expected to get. So when she heard Fumiko’s latest transmission, Nia let it make a glancing blow before she sighed the smoke from her mouth. Her eyes shut, she opened one, when Vaila, in a strangely calm voice, asked Sartoris, “Did you tell her I missed her?”

  A pause.

  “Yes,” Sartoris said softly. “I did.”

  She nodded. “Thank you.”

  Nia regarded her through the curl of smoke.

  * * *

  —

  There was context that had to be explained. Royvan started at the beginning. “Fumiko visits Pelican sporadically, sometimes twice in a year, sometimes in the space of decades. It’s always a big thing. And whenever she visits, one lucky woman is chosen to be her consort during her stay. They get their hair dyed, their eyes too, the works.” He took another drink. “Vaila was one of Fumiko’s favorites. When a consort’s week is up they’re paid enough to live off of for a few decades, and they never see Fumiko again, but Vaila, she hired Vaila, took her in like she did us.”

  “Vaila was special,” Em said.

  “Very special,” Royvan said. “She was Fumiko’s personal pilot, living the life of travel with the most famous woman in the galaxy.”

  “But not that special,” Em said, and whispered to Ahro, “Fumiko still had her consorts.”

  “So what?” Royvan said. “I saw the ’graphs. Vaila looked like she didn’t care. She looked happy.”

  Em
snorted. “Look where that got her. Dropped her here, with us. Forgotten in the fringe.”

  “Diamond in a tin can,” Royvan said.

  “That should be a song title,” Em said.

  “It is, idiot.”

  They fell quiet when they heard the others coming down the causeway. Ahro feared they’d heard their gossiping, but his worry was short-lived, as Nia sat at the table and told them the reason they looked so somber; the news from Nakajima, and the years ahead of them that were now a certainty. That this was, in her words, a long-term thing. He knew this news should’ve made him happy, that he would be in this place he loved very much, but as he listened to the strung-out quality of the others’ voices as they said their good nights, he was overcome with a heaviness that dragged his step. Besides, his thoughts were scattered. He lay in bed thinking of that inexplicable tug of the chest and dance of the head he had earlier felt. Sensations much like what he’d felt when he listened to the white noise of the Pocket, only emphasized, underlined, greater than before. He touched his chest, suspicious of what these sensations heralded, what they meant.

  From the room next to his, he heard the sounds of love—sounds that were quieter than before, but still audible; the short, knifelike gasps, whether Sonja’s or Royvan’s he was not sure; the rustle of a hand moving across sheeting and up a lover’s arm. The whispers through the wall. Sounds he was tranced by, like he was most nights, lately. Nia told him that this was the year he would learn to take care of himself, but that night, as he listened to the sounds of love, he saw there were some lessons he would never learn on this ship. Lessons none of this crew could teach him.

  He imagined what it must feel like, to be so close to someone. And as he remembered that tug he felt toward the swirling sky, he wondered how far he would have to go, to be in such good company.

  7

  His Year of Learning

  They were waiting for him in the cockpit the next morning. Vaila in the pilot’s chair and Nia standing beside her, she the most awake of all of them, waving for Ahro to come closer. “You’re going to watch the liftoff procedure,” she said. Her hand kneaded his shoulder into pliable clay. “Vaila’s going to talk you through it. Like with Em on the tower, we don’t expect you to pick it all up the first go. All you have to do is look, and listen. The doing will come later.”

  He took his seat in the copilot’s chair, wondering what Vaila was thinking as she gestured to the console—if even now, as she began her lesson, she was dreaming of Fumiko. “There are five safety checks all good pilots run through before takeoff,” she said. “Fuel. Thrusters. Strings. Gears. Sails. Even in an emergency, you run through the checks. Any of them are compromised, your flight is compromised.” She narrated each of her actions as she flicked the switches on the board above them, twirled a small wheel beside an imposing lever, and when she was done, she asked him, “What are the safety checks?”

  “Fuel. Thrusters. Strings,” he repeated.

  “And?”

  He looked to Nia for help, but she only lifted her shoulders.

  “Gears and sails,” Vaila finished for him. “Memorize it. They’re important.” And with a swipe she opened the console window and showed him how to unfold the wings.

  * * *

  —

  The year of learning began with observation. This came naturally to him, for the Quiet Ship had trained him how to be a shadow on the wall, and to anticipate the needs of those he served. In a sounder’s outpost inflicted by red influenza, he attended Royvan with a box of fresh gloves before the next round of patients, as he once did the Mistress Cellist with her rosin. Listened to the doctor as he ran through his list of questions for each patient; of when the rash first sprouted, and how bad was the itch, and was their perception of color more or less vivid than before.

  During landing and departure, he was in the cockpit, observing the intense knit of Vaila’s brow and the aliveness of her eyes as she razed the strings of the cat’s cradle, and kicked the Debby off the ground. He learned much about her, even though she spoke little. Could see clearly that this was where she was happiest, manipulating the Debby’s strings. The rumbling detonations of the thrusters felt through their shoes.

  Sonja, dropping an unloaded rifle into his hands, telling him to acknowledge the weight of its power, and to recognize how false that power was. “Any idiot can squeeze the trigger,” she said. “Smart one knows most of the time they don’t need to.” He sat by her, the both of them cross-legged on the blue tarp, and he listened to the click and the slide as she took the power from his hands and dismantled it, piece by piece, until she had returned the rifle to its true form, which was nothing.

  He and Em sat on the bench before the ticking gears of the fold-core, the pulsing light in the throne of glass, and counted out the healthy beat of the drive, the six-eight of it. “It’s like a heart,” the engineer told him. “Once you start to hear the rhythm, not hard to figure out when something’s wrong. Just have to listen. Put a finger to its throat and count.” He opened a panel beneath the core and showed Ahro the veins of the ship. Showed him how the lights worked, the order of automation. The skein of wires whose purposes were impossible to decipher by color alone.

  Sartoris gave a lecture on the first woman who ventured into Pocket Space, a long time ago, and how she was caught in the Vivacious Current and returned to Earth twenty years later, believing she had left only yesterday. This was the first traveler. “History is context,” he exclaimed. “We understand only through context!” And when the lecture was done, and he was given his free time, Ahro sat in his quarters and played his flute for the two hours allotted to him, feeling that dance along his scalp as he rehearsed the song of homecoming—afraid of that feeling, of what it might mean. Intrigued. He spiraled the song off into other forms, new songs, so accustomed to the resonance that he was unaware that it was growing in strength and amplitude.

  Nia stuffed his days with things to do, as if she knew what it was he wanted, and feared what would happen had he the time to search for it. He was no longer allowed to wander through the settlements and cities of the worlds they visited, with Sonja as his bodyguard—was instead by his captain’s side as they looked for work in the travelers’ bureau, overwhelmed by the raucous crowd in the pit; the spittle that flew from the shouting of desperate mouths; the elbows that knocked against his head; the loud and angry charge to this dark arena. He tried to hold Nia’s hand, desperate for comfort, only for her hand to slip out of his grasp, a fish through his fingers, because, as she told him afterward, no one hires a captain who looks weak. He stood with her in the mass of people fighting for what was theirs and tried his best to take note as she shouted who she was, and what she could do, up to the balcony of employers, with her sig-card held above her head. For the rest of the day he was shaking out the ringing in his ears, and the memory of the concerto days, when the violin strings would slice the corridors of the Quiet Ship as his arm was placed on a table, the breaker’s wand applied to his radius. The snap of bone. Being in the pit ignited an adrenaline that lasted all the way to the night, where in her quarters she told him why she did or did not accept a job, and where to place one’s trust. “I learned the hard way,” she told him. “You get the benefit of my own years of lessons.” He did not tell her of the triggered memories—he knew how much it saddened her to hear those stories. All he did was listen.

  Contracts were signed, and jobs accepted. He observed. And then he made his gradual participations. He carried the water and the bag of tools. He fell asleep on Sonja’s shoulder during a long night relieving a guard post, bumped awake by her elbow as she told him sleep was for later. He learned to drive behind the wheel of a rented truck, a lesson that ended quickly when he crashed into one of the bouncing posts along the dock. He shriveled in his seat as Nia rubbed her temple. He tipped backward when he misjudged the weight-bearing of the loader, turtle-struggling to get ba
ck up while Em cackled above him. He reached for Nia’s hand in the travelers’ pit, and was shrugged off.

  “Tell me why you can’t hold my hand.”

  “It makes the captain look weak.”

  His free time was given to him in pinches. He spent it exhausted in his quarters, playing his flute, haunting himself to sleep with the same repeated melody. The invisible sparks dancing above his head as he grew more certain of what was happening while he played the song of homecoming, and asked himself, as the resonance shook his body, where that other world was, and when he would find it, and why he yearned to.

  There was so much about himself he did not know.

  But he came to know the fringe. It was rock and sea, and unending desert. Boundless space punctuated by exclamations of people. It was outposts and rare cities that bloomed like wild gardens on the other side of black mountains. Most of the worlds they visited were uninhabited but for the cluster of spires on promontories, the bubble buildings in the jungle clearing. There were people, some of them curious about these travelers, most wary and withdrawn. Barely placated by assurances that they were not Allied associates, and had not come to acquire. He was curious about these people. But he never had a chance to speak to them—to share a meal by the fire and learn what it was like to live beneath a sky chandeliered with green crystalline clouds—the majority of them warned off by the sight of Sonja’s rifle. The people kept their distance; left a path wide open for him to follow Nia to the next job. On one oceanic world he caught in his periphery the divers who came back from the water with their fresh catch, the light of the water sliding off their broad shoulders in a way that ignited him as he tried to focus on washing the Debby’s sails, the black pool gathering at his feet and staining his boots as he peered at them from the corner of his eye. One of the men smiled at him, the spark briefly a flame, until there was only smoke, when Sonja appeared from behind the Debby’s landing strut, the Buffoon smiling wide in warning, and the man was gone.