The Vanished Birds

by Simon Jimenez

  There he was; and there, all his things. His bed. His clothes. His instruments. His joy too big to name. He brushed the ashes of the burnt robe off his body and dressed in his old clothes, hands shaking, for he had jumped through space, he was infinite, with no walls to restrict him, no distance denied. He felt he must shout this power from rooftops, but first, he would shout it to his family.

  He ran out into the empty corridor. He heard the mumble of conversation from the common room. A giddy smile on his lips, he walked up to the doorway, took in a breath, and made his grand entrance. Vaila screamed. Sartoris, startled, dropped the cup in his hand and spilled the blue contents on the rug. Nia ran up to him, scooped him into a fierce, almost violent hug.

  “Where the hell were you?” she cried. She pushed him away. Shook him, hugged him again. “Where did you go?”

  He almost told her, almost, but his throat constricted and stopped the words from exiting his parted lips, his body aware of the truth of things before his mind; that this was his home, and he would have none other. Once he told them what he was able to do, how the impossible was in fact possible, the job would be over. They would return to Fumiko. And then, what would come next, he did not know—only that it would be over. He would lose these people. This home. And there was still so much to do.

  So he told her a half-truth. That he had been lost. And Nia stared at him, into him, with that same searching look, only this time profuse with all of her anger, confusion, and happiness. “Goddammit,” she whispered finally, smoothing his cheek with her thumb. “Goddamn you.”

  That night, he composed for them a story. He told them of the people his age that he had met. He told them of the spirits he had drunk. The dancing. A night of revelry carried away as they drove him to a distant outpost, and the morning when he woke on the couch in a house he did not recognize. He described his long day of wandering. The kind person who helped him return. He knew to keep the story vague; he claimed that because of the drink he could remember little of it, even made a show of a headache. Nia stared at him from across the table, but she said nothing, nothing other than how glad she was that he was back. And when the story had ended, all of them, exhausted by the long day, went to bed, each of them making some small gesture of how happy they were to see him. He thanked them all, and he apologized. He made art of his apologies while, inside, a small smile lingered in his heart, believing he had gotten away with it all.

  It was only later, when he was back in his room, surrounded by all of his things, that he felt the guilt of what he had done.

  The simple, hollow thump of it.

  * * *

  —

  The guilt was a hard apple in his throat. It choked him when Nia would out of the blue touch his back, as if to remind herself that he was still there. But with time, he learned to cope. And it wasn’t long till the guilt was subsumed by delight, now that he was certain he was as special as Fumiko claimed. Who else had true concrete evidence that they were so extraordinary? Delight would bubble up during his lessons with Sartoris, inspiring in the boy peals of laughter, much to the old man’s confusion; laughing because, finally, he knew something that they did not.

  In time he began to practice his newfound power. He waited a month, when Nia no longer demanded that he sleep in her room during their planetside visits, and when his every movement was not scrutinized. That was when he would sneak away from home, out into the dark, and test the limits of himself.

  These were the months of his discovery, these night routines.

  9

  Night Routines

  He walked alone across the vast on-off fields of BlackFlower and GreyWheat on Mondrian while the crew slept in the inn, oblivious to his disappearance. In a place where he was sure no one was watching, he stripped naked, knowing the clothes would burn away on his exit. Barefoot on the frosted dirt, his nerves gone numb, he narrowed his focus down, quieting the winds around him, the sensations of his smell, his taste, his touch, until all was dark, and still. And when he had done this, he heard the distant swell of music, detected the invisible currents, and was soon gone from that world. Time stopped as high and bodiless above the planet he followed the myriad currents that cat’s-cradled outer space, funneling down a path that dropped him into—

  The whirling dervish of a gas giant, free-falling through the wretched and toxic air, red-veined as he gagged and choked, borne along wind currents so rapid they would’ve ripped apart any other body not charged with the kinetic energy of a fresh jump, and he in his dimming consciousness thought this was it, he was going to die, why had he been so stupid—but then, the ancient instinct—a fishing wire that hooked his heart and yanked him out of the hemisphere-wide hurricane, lobbing him across the galaxy, till he dropped through the red sky of Umbai-V.

  The burnt stalks beneath his body cracked as he stood back up. Dizzy, he clutched his head, steadied. Once he had reoriented himself, and saw where he’d landed, he dimmed the sensations again, and rode the currents back to the planet that lay claim to the Debby, landing with a sickening thud beside the clothes he had left behind, in the black square of the Mondrian field, his back arched as he reeled from the incredible, starry-eyed pain of whiplash, violent coughing. He dressed. He limped back to the inn a cowed dog, not ready to try again that night. He comforted himself with the fact that now he knew for sure—when he was in danger, he was always returned to Umbai-V; he did not know how, or why, but there it was, his safety net.

  He got better with practice. In the icy drifts he stripped, and jumped, and learned that passage to safe worlds, breathable worlds—worlds that wouldn’t rip him apart once he had quit the jump—was identifiable if he listened to the tone of its music. It wasn’t music, not as he once understood the term; it was more the music’s marrow, the stuff that would pour from a song’s cracked bone; a rhythmic current; a melody sung not with the mouth but the body. His body sang past the stars, and dropped into a forest glade, dappled in sunlight. Some floral creature sped away at his sudden approach. The delirium once experienced during his first few jumps was lessened, now a dull ache that soon subsided. He grinned, and leapt back up the line that left the forest glade, warping to the other side of the planet, onto a rock promontory that overlooked a large valley whittled down by a silvery lake at the bottom. He pointed up at the highest ridge he could see; a ridge that narrowed out to a thin point in the green-tea sky. Now he wanted to see how exact he could make his jump. But his jump was still being tamed, still inexact in its landings, and his stomach gulped as he missed the ridge by a good foot, and fell at a dead drop so swift he had no air left to scream, the hard ground spinning toward him, sure he was dead before the ancient instinct woke and carried him up the currents, up into the sky, away from death, falling back into the purple crop fields. From there, back to the snowy drifts, barefoot but standing upright. And then his legs gave out.

  “Are you sleeping all right?” Royvan asked at breakfast, reaching out to touch his forehead. Ahro played along and told the doctor he had been coughing all night. He was given water to drink, and told to stay in bed for the rest of the day. Nia poked her head into his hatch every other hour to make sure he was doing as he was told. He worried that these periodic checks were ones of suspicion, as if she was ready to catch him in the lie, but nothing came of it except more water, more hands measuring his temperature.

  He swam in untouched lakes and let loose full-throated howls as he fell through swirling pink clouds. He rested in the forked branches of trees hundreds of meters tall as he gazed out into the misted horizon. He did what he pleased.

  “Where are you going?” Sartoris whispered one night from across the hall.

  “For air,” he whispered back.

  He lived in flight between worlds. There was freedom in these uninhabited places, where it did not matter how he behaved, or how he dressed, or not dressed. Pissing where he liked, bowels loosened from great he
ights, forbidden words shouted into the air—he listened as they bounced like stones off the faces of sheer cliffs. He said silly things into the ears of grobin birds, and sang into a great black pit his secrets, the fantasies, the wet dreams he ached with. He laughed, alone. Those were his animal days. And they were good. But as happens with enough time, he soon grew tired of his countless, empty Edens.

  He wanted people.

  He had been making a point to avoid the inhabited worlds. From listening to the currents he knew where the people were, could tell from the tempo and fury of the song; the music was always raucous on those worlds, discordant. He avoided them because he was afraid he would be discovered, or worse, captured. But the temptation was too great. Soon he stood atop curvaceous man-made dollops, looking down at the populated streets below and leaping from ship to ship, the pilots detecting minor fluctuations in weight before he was gone again. And as his talent became more exact, more precise with its locations, he leapt into people’s homes, ate a pastry from their kitchen, and leapt out with them none the wiser, they wondering what that sound was from the other room. He slipped through cultures. He listened to the songs of New Tides. He went where the priests climbed trees by shimmying up the trunks with tough cloth ladders to be closer to their gods. He listened to the din of people far below, always too far to make out the words. And then he walked among them, stole clothes where he could so that he could blend in, close enough to see the subtle articulation of all their faces, the grains of their beards, their eyes red from drink, and the smell of their morning bodies.

  But of all the places he had visited, all the vistas he had seen, nothing would ever compare to Kilkari, the sunbaked city where he stole a pair of breeches and an olive shirt off a drying rack and walked the clay stairs. Kilkari, where he dragged a careless finger across the blue-painted walls, and down the coast where the calm waters lapped the dock struts. Where the fishermen in the distance tossed stasis nets into the clear water, dragging up stunned creatures from the deep, creatures that whipped about as they were dumped into holding containers. Kilkari, the newly acquired city of Allied Space, where as he stood at the edge of the quay and watched the easy waves, a voice from behind said, “Sanpa?”

  * * *

  —

  It was a Kilkaran word, sanpa. It meant both Hello and Have we met before? It was a word, among many others, that Ahro learned that day from the boy who approached him on the quay, who said, again, “Sanpa?”

  The boy was a little taller than he, with eyes cut from cold jewel, and a nose just a bit off-kilter, as if it had been broken many times, but never properly set. He was looking at Ahro now as if he were an old friend. He said that word again.

  “I’m sorry,” Ahro said, startled. “I don’t understand.”

  The boy’s smile fell. “You speak Station.”

  Ahro nodded. “So do you.”

  “Most of us do,” he said. “But not by choice.” He brushed this thought off with a flick of his thin wrist as though it were a trivial annoyance—a smooth gesture that Ahro found compelling. The boy bowed. “Your clothes confused me. I had thought you were someone else. My apologies.” But before he could go, Ahro told him to please wait, and the boy waited, with a look of impatience, whatever warmth there had been before now gone. “Yes?” he said.

  It was Ahro’s first time speaking to someone his own age, and his first time interacting with a stranger without Nia or Sonja around. It was not a moment to squander. “What’s your name?”

  “Oden.” The boy eyed him. “Why?”

  The question caught him off guard. “I don’t know,” he said—then, feeling foolish for saying so, he offered his own: “My name is Ahro.”

  “Okay, Ahro.” He said his name like a joke, and then he was gone, walking up the steps that led out of the quay without looking back once.

  Ahro watched him go. He wondered what he did wrong. Of all the lessons the crew had taught him, making friends was one they had never gotten around to. And so he continued his stroll down the pier by himself, whispering, “Sanpa,” liking the way the word felt in his mouth, how the last syllable sounded like a small breath let out between parted lips.

  With hours yet before he had to return, he wandered around the city, which seemed to be in perpetual sunset, the sun remaining just above the ocean’s horizon, trapping Kilkari in the amber of its light. He watched a woman open an eel with a knife. The ease with which she pulled out the cartilaginous bones. An intense familiarity with the eel’s body, her expression casual as she gripped the spine and popped the bones from the flesh. He was mesmerized by her work, until he heard shouting down the street—the sound of a crash behind him, and a blur of movement, rushing out the open flap of a building. Oden. Ahro saw him sprint into an alley, chased by an older man who, properly winded, fell short of the alley’s entrance, shouting at the top of his lungs words that Ahro presumed were curses. The man stomped his foot, his quarry lost. The woman Ahro had been watching snorted at the sight before grabbing another limp eel from her basket and chopping off its head.

  It didn’t take long to find him. A few streets, to an open park in the middle of the city.

  “You again,” Oden said. He was collecting himself behind an auburn tree that sprouted angrily from the cobble. Sweat beaded down his face as he breathed in and out. “What do you want?”

  “Are you okay?” Ahro asked.

  “No.” When Oden’s breath had steadied, he stood up, glaring in the direction he had come from, where, in the distance, the man was still shouting. “No, I am not.” He then glanced back at Ahro. “Do you not have a ship to be attending to? A captain who needs your service?”

  Nia’s face flashed in his mind. The time was fast approaching when he would have to leave. But he wasn’t ready. “I don’t have to go back yet,” he told Oden, who gave him a measured stare. “Do you need help?”

  Oden laughed. “And what help are you offering? How do you plan on solving my problems?”

  Ahro remembered the Kind One on the Quiet Ship, how they had asked him what he needed, and how impossible that question was to answer; like trying to unearth a root dug too deep into the ground. He remembered the arrogance of them, how he wanted to tell them—but did not yet have the words—how little they knew, and how out of their depth they were when talking about his life. “You’re right,” he said to Oden. “I don’t think I can help.”

  “No. You can’t.” But Oden’s expression softened a little. “What is it you want?”

  “Someone to talk to.”

  The words came out with little thought. He knew how pathetic he sounded, knew he deserved the laugh that Oden let out—but it was a laugh less harsh than the one before. It was laced with some amusement.

  “Sahave,” Oden muttered, wiping off the last of the sweat. Then, “See that hill?” He pointed up, toward the mountains that jutted out from behind the clay buildings like rising fingers. “I’m climbing to the top. Come if you want.” And then he began to stride so fast that Ahro had to decide in a matter of seconds whether he should take the boy up on his offer. He knew Nia would be disappointed that he chose to follow this stranger out of the gates of the city, but she wasn’t there to stop him.

  They spoke little as they walked. Any questions Ahro posed to Oden were rebuffed with vague nonanswers, even simple questions like What do you do for fun? “That depends on the day,” he answered.

  “What about today?”

  “Today, for fun, I walk up a hill with a kid who likes to ask many questions.” He reached out his hand to help Ahro up the steep rock face, help that Ahro ignored as he leapt up with ease. Oden stared at him with appraising eyes. “And you?” he asked. “What do you do for fun?”

  Ahro grinned. “Today, for fun, I walk with a kid who doesn’t like to answer questions.”

  Oden’s laugh was nearly a growl.

  He was compos
ed of hard edges, and walked like he was shrugging water off his back. Ahro was at once comfortable walking beside him, and wary, every nerve of his body awake whenever their elbows brushed, and whenever he caught Oden assessing him with his stark green eyes. Ahro kind of liked this—the agony of not knowing what the person beside him was thinking, but hoping that maybe he did.

  They rounded the bend of the hill, and after climbing another steep incline, they arrived at a cluster of clay-textured homes along the edge of a bluff. The bluff overlooked the city proper, many meters below. The buildings here were sparer in their construction, the walls more cracked, and the roads that ran between them littered with trash, embedded in the ground like steel flowers. It smelled like mud. “Do you live here?” he asked Oden, but again he was answered with a shrug and another vague reply: “I live in many places.” For the next hour, he followed Oden like a stray while the boy made various stops at different buildings, some more run-down than others, handing off a package to a small old woman, poking his head through a window and speaking in his language to people Ahro could not see. It was like Oden had forgotten he was there, like Ahro had turned invisible and was now observing this stranger’s routine. People liked Oden. Their stony expressions broke into smiles when he came around, but the things they talked about were beyond Ahro—sometimes the person would cock their head with a curious yet wary gaze in his direction and ask Oden something, and Oden would do that flicked wrist gesture of his with a perfunctory statement, saying something to the effect of He’s just some guy who won’t stop following me or Don’t worry about him, he’s irrelevant. This went on for a time, until they had visited most of the houses, and whatever routine Oden was performing had ended. He looked Ahro in the eyes for the first time since they’d arrived at the bluff. “You are very patient,” he said, not for flattery’s sake, but as a simple observation. “Are you tired yet?”