The Vanished Birds

by Simon Jimenez

  She raised the gun to her head.

  It was the movement that did it. The way she tucked the nozzle against her right temple, until the nozzle became a cherry blossom, tucked behind her ear by a blond woman with purple eyes, and the pistol slipped from her trembling hand, clattering to the floor, as did her knees, as she wept, for after centuries, she remembered Dana’s name.

  * * *

  —

  The floodgates were broken. Over the coming days the memories rushed in, filling the hollows of her mind. The true memories, of a bench by the pier, of ribbons of curry, of Dana’s foot touching hers under the table in that café while outside it rained; a dirigible drifting against a parchment moon. They arrived like drops of water on a dry tongue. She was sustained by them. The museum exhibit. The canals. Images delivered fresh from her past life. She even had it in her to smile when she remembered her mother’s calorie counter, for like the other images, it had happened to her. The pistol soon forgotten, as she was entertained by the stoked embers of her mind, and the mystic shapes she caught in their smoke.

  Two weeks passed before she gathered the strength to venture down to the subbasement. The first time she entered, she almost fainted from the overpowering stench, and she returned wearing an air-filtration mask so that she could walk the field of corpses. Hart was easy to find. His was the only body in the center of the room. She snapped the bloodstained name tag from his chest and dropped it into her bag—did the same for the thousands of others who were congregated on the far side of the chamber, rolling bodies over, moving limbs aside, so she could collect their names. The children were without name tags, but the parents were easy to find, their arms wrapped protectively around the small bodies. The work took many hours, and when she was certain she had all the tags, she returned to the upper levels of the base, to the dormitories and family suites, and followed the names to the appropriate homes. On twin beds and kings and child-sizes she laid the tags to rest, sometimes guessing which name had slept where. This was the only action she could take, for the elevators were dead, and she could not lift each body up the many flights of steps. Once the names were given to their homes, she spent the next few hours sitting in one of the living rooms, picturing the day in a life on Stopwatch. He showered first. Then he dressed, here, before he went to the kitchenette. Three soy packs in his fridge. He halved one, and mixed it with the ricemeal. Gave it a pinch of sweetener before he brought it to her in bed. And when night came, and it was time to sleep, Fumiko lay in her own bed, her body still, as the memories from long ago continued to return to her, and with those memories the flash pain of what she would never experience again; the way Dana would cock her head to the side when confused, the smell of her hair. The crushed lilac of it.

  There was no more Pocket Space, and no more cold sleep. Fumiko was forced to live through real-time again, and had no choice but to let the days come and go, slowly. She marked the days in the pages of a notebook and continued her routine of visiting each of the dormitories, and giving the dead a few hours of life in her mind’s eye as she learned about them from their records, and imagined how they moved through their spaces. The routine became ritual. She repeated their names as she walked the base, and their stories, like mantras. Jayne, who worked in the tertiary lab. Cardet, who was a gardener. Cardet’s daughters, Sufa and Delon. There was no folding away. No way to pass the time but to acknowledge the bodies. This was her new life—the rediscovery of the old.

  Hart, who followed her through time.

  She spent her nights in her room on the thirty-third, where it was still warm, but never warm enough, and she shivered as she read books by candlelight. The candle was made from her own improvisation, from the tub of tru-fat she found in the central kitchen. The light of the candle wavered, and was not the most reliable source to read by, but she preferred the dull orange glow to the harshness of the torch. Often she would stare into the finger of fire, tranced by it. She would recall Dana’s work with the bioluminescent lightbulb, her gift to those the Arks left behind on Old Earth. She was right that day, Fumiko thought one night, when she remembered their conversation in the café. Not everyone gets to leave.

  She licked her fingers and pinched the flame.

  In her dreams she walked toward the dark shore, past the food cart, to the benches by the docks, where the one she loved waited for her, with an empty seat by her side.

  “Don’t,” Dana said when Fumiko was about to sit. “Not yet.”

  She asked her why not.

  “Because you’re not done yet.”

  Fumiko told her there was nothing left to do, but Dana shook her head.

  “We wired the whole place with explosives, remember?” She smiled with teeth, and placed her hand on Fumiko’s. “If we can’t have our world, then no one can.”

  Her heart stopped. She threw off the blankets. Remembered the last fail-safe. The YonSef explosives she buried in this crater long ago—how she could reverse-engineer them into workable power sources. Somewhere in her mind Dana was cheering her on as she searched the construction site in the lower levels for the rudimentary equipment Umbai had not bothered to take or destroy. There was a drill without batteries. Crowbars and tubing. A pickax. The pick in hand, she continued her descent, flying down the steps as she flipped through the banks of her memory, hoping she had the right of it—right here, she thought, pressing her hand against the concrete wall of Substrata D; one hundred feet from here, into the rock of the crater, the YonSef waited.

  Dana materialized behind her. Fumiko knew she was not there. That she was only a projection, and in all likelihood the first sign of her insanity. But still, she was glad to see her. “Are you sure it’s there?” Dana asked.

  No, Fumiko was not, but she raised the pick anyway, and began her assault.

  11

  The Last Stop

  The others were just beyond the hatch. Nia knew their ears were pressed to the door so as not to miss a word of what she or the boy said, despite the fact that she had commanded privacy. But she did not throw open the hatch and shout at them to scatter, for they were in a place beyond protocol, beyond even her command—the impossible place where mirages were real, and where one-thousand-year-old women were correct in their lunatic speculations; the place Nia feared as she looked down at the boy. Her stranger.

  He was seated in her desk chair, where she had told him to sit, his head hung low as he stared at his feet, unable to meet her eyes. This was just as well. She knew she would find no truth in them. “When did it start?” she asked.

  When he did not answer, she made her guess.

  “Was it in the Painted City? When you went missing?” His whole body was still, his chest barely rising at his breath, as though he hoped she would forget he was there, if he simply willed himself into stone. “That was it, wasn’t it?” she said. And she felt a rock drop into her stomach when he confirmed her suspicions with a nod. “Ahro.” Her voice was strung out. “That was four months ago.”

  He curled one foot behind the other.

  “Four months you lied to me.”

  His shoulders trembled.

  “What am I supposed to do with that? With you?”

  As he cried, she opened a drawer and pulled out a box of tissues. She yanked out a ply and handed it to him. He blew his nose.

  “I don’t know anything about your ability,” she said. “All I know is that I can’t stop you; whatever your power is, I can’t command it.” She crouched before him, hard-eyed. “So I’m just going to ask you once. Just once. Will you stay until the job is done, and the contract is finished?”

  He nodded, his face covered in the napkin.

  “I need you to say it. Say you agree.”

  “I agree,” he said with a small, cracked voice.

  She stood up.

  Opened the hatch.

  “Go to your room,” she said. “We’
ll talk later.”

  He ran out. She caught a glimpse of his puffy-eyed face as he turned the corner and disappeared. “Sartoris!” she shouted. The little man stepped out from behind the hatchway, hands clasped before him, his eyes betraying his utter discomfort. “Have you sent the scramline to Fumiko yet?”

  “They sent us rendezvous coordinates ten minutes ago. We’ll be ready to depart as soon as Vaila returns.”

  “And where is Vaila?”

  He held up his empty hands. “She said she forgot something back in town. She was no more specific than that.”

  Nia attacked her scalp. “Tell Em to spool the drive. Once Vaila’s back on board we lift off. Not a second after.”

  “Yes, Captain.” He turned to go, but paused at the hatch, sparing a worried glance at her before she snapped, “Now!” and he rushed down the causeway, chased by the footsteps of the others who had been listening.

  And then she was alone.

  She picked up the empty cup on her desk. Held the cup in her hand like a glass egg. Felt the weight of this object, in this impossible place. No more than a few ounces. She studied its hexagonal faces. How it refracted light. Too real to be a dream. But there was only one way to know for certain. She smashed the cup into the floor. It exploded—the shards skittering across the room, and glinting like sand against the lamplight. It was all real, she thought as she fetched the broom from the closet and swept up her mess.

  Vaila returned a half hour later, panting. She had sprinted all over the colony searching for the ladeum beads she had dropped, a story she related to her captain even though Nia made it clear she didn’t need to hear it; that all she needed from her was to get the ship off the ground. The hands in the cat’s cradle kicked the thrusters to life and the Debby quit the sky and folded into the Pocket. It would be a two-week trip down the Chimerical Current to the rendezvous point—enough time for Nia to gather the words she would say to him.

  * * *

  —

  For days they avoided each other. His chair was empty at breakfast. She left it to Sartoris to bring him food from the kitchen. On her walk down the causeway, she caught a dash of movement in her periphery, the lav door shutting behind the blur, but she did not wait for him to emerge. She continued on. She was not ready yet.

  The crew was just as lost. The Debby’s corridors and hatches were stilled by their silence. When they spoke to one another it was in a whisper, for everything about him was suspect, and they could not be sure of the limits of his perceptions, what he could and could not hear. They listened to Sartoris as he recounted what he had seen in the plains—the wavering air, the sudden materialization of his naked body, like a thought, solidified—and they asked one another, and themselves, how this power could be possible, and what it meant.

  It was on the second day that Nia heard one such conversation. She stood outside the cargo bay, and listened to the carry of voices as her crew volleyed thoughts to one another in the far corner of the room.

  They were all there. Everyone but Vaila.

  “I haven’t slept yet,” Em said.

  “How can anyone?” Royvan asked. “There’s a god on our ship.” He said the word with a laugh. A half joke.

  “I think we’re safe though.” She heard Sartoris pace around. “The power seems to be harmless.”

  “Can you be sure?” Royvan asked. “There’s so much we don’t know—so much the kid might not even know. Remember the report? How he was found in the dhuba field surrounded by rubble? What if he Jaunts and the ship…reacts? Pulls us with him. Turns the ship, and us, into char. It could happen at any moment.”

  “That is a lot of what-ifs.”

  “What-ifs are all we got, Sarty.”

  “Has anyone talked to him?” Sonja asked.

  Sartoris sighed. “He wouldn’t speak to me when I brought him his food. I think he’ll only speak to the captain.”

  “Whenever that happens.”

  “She will,” he said. “Eventually.”

  A pause. “It’s crazy,” Em said. “ ’Side from Fumiko, I’d never been this close to someone this important. He might change the course of human history. Make folding obsolete.”

  “No more lost time,” Sonja said.

  “Can’t even imagine it,” Royvan said.

  “What do you think Fumiko’ll do with him?” Em asked.

  “I suspect she will try to find a way to duplicate his power,” Sartoris said. “Disperse it. That’s if her research is fruitful. It might be a long while till anything comes of the study. It could be years.”

  “But our job is over,” Em said.

  “Yes,” Sartoris said. “It is.”

  They were quiet.

  “Feels like we just left.”

  Nia stepped away from the entrance.

  In her room that night, she sat at her desk and thumbed through the pages of her old notebooks. The entries she had written along the way, the poems inspired by the small things they had done together. And then, she thought of them. Deborah and Nurse. Imagined the conference these two women would have with each other, about her—there, sitting side by side on her cot, each of them smirking at the other, sharing a private joke that was beyond her. And it occurred to Nia—no, she was reminded—how easy it was, to miss the chance to say the important things. She put the notebook down.

  It was the next day, after lunch, when she knocked on the boy’s hatch. By then her thoughts on the matter had settled.

  “I’m coming in,” she said.

  The room was dark. It took her eyes a moment to resolve the shadows and see his small form, buried underneath the blanket. She asked him if he was awake and took the subtle movement of what she guessed was his head as an affirmative, and walked over to the bed, tripping over one of his discarded boots. She sat down beside him. The mattress gave way a bit. The body under the blankets did not move. It hurt her, to see him breathe. The fragility of it. She needed him to understand. “There’s not enough time,” she said. “I need to be angry with you. I need you to understand what your lie has cost, could’ve cost, but there’s not enough time. Maybe after this is all done, and we still— I’ll scream. I’ll show you how furious I am that you broke my trust. But that day might not come. We have so few days left, and I’ve wasted so many, Ahro.” She coaxed the blanket off him. Revealed him, knuckling his wet eyes. Her hand gripped his shoulder. “Listen to me, Ahro. I love you. Do you hear me? I don’t care what you are. I love you.”

  “I’m sorry,” he sobbed. His head was in her lap.

  She stroked his hair.

  “I will always love you,” she whispered angrily. “Always.”

  * * *

  —

  He explained to her that it was like he could feel a breeze no one else could feel. A breeze he could see, and follow, wherever he wished. A breeze of music, of time.

  He explained his jumps. The first, in the escape pod of the Quiet Ship, and the second, in the Painted City, when the moons were in alignment, and the music was loud. Loud enough to shake loose the door in him. How he found himself back on Umbai-V, where he was helped by an old woman with a spear, and where, beyond the purple fields, he heard Nia’s music. Told her shyly that the music had led him back to her, her beginner’s string. He did not know why. Why Umbai-V or why the music. It just was. He shared with her the many places he had visited. The icescapes and mountaintops and wild cities. The breathy span between stars. And he told her, hesitantly, with care, of his time with Oden, picking which details to share and which to keep for himself.

  She listened. By the end of it, when everything had been shared, she sank back in her chair, amazed. “You’ve lived a whole other life,” she said. She let that fact sit there for a time while she rubbed the back of her head. “What was your favorite part?” she asked.

  “Coming home,” he said.

&
nbsp; She stared at him.

  “Bullshit,” she said. “It was Oden, wasn’t it?” When he started laughing, she pointed at him. “I knew it! You little liar. Coming home, my ass. You think sweet lines like that are going to make me forget everything?”

  He smiled, sheepish. “Did it work?”

  “A little,” she conceded. She leaned back in her chair. “Just a little.”

  He spoke to the others over the days, apologizing to each of them for drawing out the contract for longer than he needed to. For lying. But they were more interested in his worlds-shaping power than his apology, and he did his best to address the thousands of questions Sartoris threw at him, their teacher-student dynamic now reversed as he tried to describe the music and the lines that bound the stars, as they drank DanSen Tea in the common room. Sonja burst into laughter—the booming kind, her hand slapping the table—after learning of Ahro’s physical status upon finishing a jump. “What on earth is so funny?” Sartoris asked, annoyed.

  “It’s perfect,” she said, palming tears from her eyes. “Naked bastard flying about.”

  He sighed. “Can we elevate our discourse? This is the harbinger of the New Age.”

  But Ahro was laughing too.

  It was a good trip. Royvan, the most wary of them all, soon came around and stopped avoiding him. Amid all the excitement, no one noticed Vaila’s self-imposed solitude in the cockpit, intoxicated as they were by the fact of the boy, and the fact that, after many years, the job they had taken on would soon be over, eleven years earlier than expected. It was Sartoris who observed that what they were experiencing was the best-case scenario. The statement went undisputed.