Memory's Legion, page 26
So when Momma bird made a noise—a wheeze with a click in the middle of it—Cara knew it was something new. The babies knew too. They gathered around Momma bird, chittering in agitation and slapping the water with their wings. Momma bird didn’t seem to notice them. Her head was wobbling on its long, thin neck. Her unfocused eyes seemed fierce and confused.
Cara put down her sandwich, a knot tightening in her chest. Something was wrong. Momma bird spun around in the water, then turned and spun the other way with so much violence that the nearest of her babies overturned.
“Hey,” Cara said. “Don’t do that. Don’t hurt your little ones.”
But unlike the dogs, Momma bird didn’t even seem to listen to her. She spread her wings, slapped the water twice, and hauled herself up into the air. Cara had the impression of half-closed eyes and a gaping green-toothed mouth, and then Momma bird sped up into the air, paused, and fell. She didn’t try to catch herself when she landed—just crashed into the clover.
“Momma bird?” Cara said, stepping closer. Her heart was tripping over itself. “Momma bird? What’s the matter?”
The babies were calling out now, one over the other in a wild frenzy. Momma bird lifted her head, trying to find them from their voices, but too disoriented to do more than wave her head around once, twice, and then set it down. Cara reached out, hesitated, then scooped up the bird’s warm, soft body. Momma bird hissed once, halfheartedly, and closed her angry black eyes.
Cara ran.
The pathway leading toward home was barely wider than an animal track, but Cara knew it like the hallway outside her room. It only seemed treacherous because she couldn’t wipe her tears back, since she needed both her hands to hold Momma bird. She was still three hundred meters from home when the bird shifted in her hands, arched its back, and made a deep coughing sound. After that, it was still. The thick sack-and-earth walls of her house came into sight—red and orange, with the rich-green panels of their solar array on top canted toward the sun—and Cara started shouting for her mother. She wanted to believe there was time. That Momma bird wasn’t dead.
She wanted to believe. But she also knew better.
Her house stood out just past the edge of the forest. It had the lumpy snakes-lying-on-top-of-each-other walls that all the first-wave colonial structures had. They curved around the central bulb garden, where they grew food. The windows stood open, screens letting in the air and keeping out the insect analogs. Even the little toolshed, where Dad kept the clippers he used to cut the vinegar weed and the cart to carry the stinking foliage away, had windows in it.
Cara’s feet slapped down the stone-paved path, her tears making the house, the sky, the trees blurred and unreal. Xan’s voice called out from somewhere nearby, and his friend Santiago answered back. She ignored them. The cool, dry air of the house felt like walking into a different world. Rays of light pressed in from the windows, catching motes of dust. For the first time since the pond, Cara’s steps faltered. Her legs burned, and the vast, oceanic sadness and horror stopped up her throat so that when her mother stepped into the room—taller than her father, dark-haired, fixing a necklace of resin and glass around her neck like she was getting ready for a party—all Cara could do was hold up the body of Momma bird. She couldn’t even ask for help.
Her mother led her to the kitchen and sat there with her and the dead bird’s body while Cara coughed out a version of what had happened between sobs. She knew it was muddled—the bird, the dogs, the babies, the bread—but she just had to get it all out of her and hope that her mother could make sense of it. And then make it make sense to her too.
Xan came in, his eyes wide and scared, and touched her back to comfort her. Her mother smiled him away again. Santiago ghosted into the doorway and out again, curious and trying to seem like he wasn’t. Tragedy drew attention.
Eventually, Cara’s words ran out and she sat there, feeling empty. Deflated. Defeated. Momma bird’s corpse on the table didn’t seem to care one way or the other. Death had robbed the bird of her opinions.
“Oh, babygirl,” Cara’s mother said. “I’m sorry.”
“It was me, wasn’t it?” Cara said. “I killed her, didn’t I?”
“You didn’t mean to. It was an accident. That’s all.”
“But it was in the book,” Cara said. “Feeding bread to birds. The lady in the park in the book did that. And they didn’t die. They were fine.”
Her mother took her hand. It was strange, but Cara knew if she’d been just a little younger—Xan’s age, even—her mother would have hugged her. But she was getting to be a big girl now, and hugs weren’t for big girls. Holding hands was.
“These aren’t birds, babygirl. We call them that because they’re sort of like birds. But real birds have feathers. And beaks—”
“No bird I’ve ever seen.”
Her mother took a deep breath and smiled through her exhalation. “When life comes up on a planet, evolution forces a bunch of choices. What kinds of proteins it’s going to use. How it’s going to pass information on from one generation to the next. Life on Earth made those decisions a long time ago, and so everything that comes from Earth has some things in common. The kinds of proteins we use. The ways we get chemical energy out of our foods. The ways our genes work. But other planets made other choices. That’s why we can’t eat the plants that grow on Laconia. We have to grow them special so they’ll be part of our tree of life.”
“But the old lady fed bread to the birds,” Cara said. Her mother wasn’t understanding the problem, and she didn’t know how to say it any more clearly. In the books, the old lady had fed bread to the birds, and the birds hadn’t died. And Momma bird was dead.
“She was on Earth. Or someplace where Earth’s tree of life took over. Laconia doesn’t eat the same things we do. And the food that Laconia makes, we can’t use.”
“That’s not true,” Cara said. “We drink the water.”
Her mother nodded. “Water is very, very simple, though. There aren’t choices for living systems to make with water because it’s more like a mineral or—”
“Dot!” Her father’s voice was like a bark. “We have to go!”
“I’m in the kitchen,” her mother said. Footsteps. Cara’s father loomed into the doorway, his jaw set, his mouth tight. He’d combed his hair and put on his best shirt. He shifted his gaze from Cara to her mother to Momma bird with an expression that said, What the hell is this?
“Cara accidentally poisoned one of the sunbirds,” her mother told him, as though he’d actually asked the question aloud.
“Shit,” her father said, then grimaced at his own language. “I’m sorry to hear that, kid. That’s hard. But, Dot. We have to gather up the kids and get out of here.”
Cara scowled. “Where are you going?”
“The soldiers are hosting a party,” her mother said. “It’s a celebration because the platforms came on.” She didn’t smile.
“We need to be there,” her father said, more to her mother than to Cara. “If they don’t see us, they’ll wonder why we didn’t come.”
Cara’s mother pointed to her necklace. I’m getting ready. Her father shifted his weight from one foot to the other, then back. Cara felt the weight of his anxiety like a hand on her shoulder.
“Do I have to go?”
“No, kid,” her father said. “If you want to stay here and hold down the fort, that’s fine. It’s me and your mom.”
“And Xan,” her mother said. “Unless you want to be responsible for keeping him out of trouble.”
Cara knew that was supposed to be a joke, so she chuckled at it. Not that it felt funny. Her mother squeezed her fingers and then let her go. “I am sorry about the sunbird, babygirl.”
“It’s okay,” Cara said.
“We’ll be back before dinner,” her father said, then retreated back into the depths of the house. A few breaths later, Cara heard him yelling at Xan and Santiago. The focus of the family spotlight had moved past her. Momma bird was over. She couldn’t put her thumb on why that bothered her.
The town was half an hour away, down past a dozen other houses like hers. The older houses all came from the first wave—scientists and researchers like her parents who’d come to Laconia just after the gates opened. The town itself, though, came later, with the soldiers. Even Cara could remember when construction waldoes started laying down the foundations of the barracks and the town square, the military housing and the fusion plant. Most of the soldiers still lived in orbit, but every month, the town grew a little—another building, another street. Xan’s friend Santiago was seven years old. He was the child of soldiers, and had their boldness. He often came all the way out to her house by himself so he could play. Someday, her father said, the town would grow out around all their houses. The pond and the forest would be taken down, paved over, rebuilt. The way he said it, it didn’t sound like a good thing or a bad one. Just a change, like winter moving into spring.
For now, though, her house was her house and the town was the town, and she could sit at her kitchen table while the others got ready to go someplace else. Momma bird didn’t move. The more Cara looked at the bird, the less real it seemed. How could something that clearly dead ever have swum or flown or fed its babies? It was like expecting a rock to sing. The babies would be wondering what had happened by now. Calling for their mother. She wondered if they’d know to go back up to the nest with no one there to show them when.
“Mom?” Cara said as her father herded Xan and Santiago back out the door again. “I need to use the sampling drone.”
There was a line that appeared between her mother’s brows when she got annoyed, even when she was smiling at the same time. “Babygirl, you know I can’t go out right now. Your father and I—”
“I can do it. I just need to help take care of Momma bird’s babies. Just for a few days, until they’re used to her being gone. I messed things up. I need to fix them.”
The line erased itself, her mother’s gaze softening. For a moment, Cara thought she was going to say yes.
“No, baby. I’m sorry. The sampling drone’s delicate. And if something goes wrong, we can’t get a new one.”
“But—” Cara gestured to Momma bird.
“When I get back, I’ll take it out with you if you still want to,” her mother said, even though that probably wasn’t true. By the time they got back from the town, Xan would be tired and hyperactive and her parents would just be tired. All anyone would want to do was sleep. A few baby sunbirds didn’t really matter much in the big scheme of things.
Santiago’s voice came wafting in from outside with a high near-whining note of young, masculine impatience in it. Her mother shifted her weight toward the doorway.
“Okay, Mom,” Cara said.
“Thank you, babygirl,” her mother said, then walked out. Their voices came, but not distinctly enough for her to make out the words. Xan shouted, Santiago laughed, but from farther away. Another minute, and they were gone. Cara sat alone in the silence of the house.
She walked through the rooms, her hands stuffed deep in her pockets, her scowl so hard it ached a little. She kept trying to find what was wrong. Everything was in place, except that something wasn’t. The walls had the same smudges by the doors where their hands had left marks over the months and years. The white flakes at the corners showed where the laminate that held the house in place was getting old. The house had only been designed to last five years, and they’d been in it for eight so far. Her room, with its raised futon, across the hall from Xan’s, with his. Her window looking out over the dirt road her family had just walked down. The anger sat under her rib cage, just at her belly, and she couldn’t make it go away. It made everything about the house seem crappy and small.
She threw herself onto her futon, staring up at the ceiling and wondering if she was going to cry. But she didn’t. She just lay there for a while, feeling bad. And when that got boring, she rolled over and grabbed her books. They were on a thin foil tablet keyed to her. Her parents had loaded it with poems and games and math practice and stories. If they’d been able to get in touch with the networks back on the far side of the gates, they could have updated it. But with the soldiers, that wasn’t possible. All the content in it was aimed at a girl younger than Xan, but it was what she had, so she loved it. Or usually she did.
She opened the stories, looking through them for one particular image like she was scratching at a wound. It took a few minutes to find it, but she did. A picture book called Ashby Allen Akerman in Paris, about a little girl back on Earth. The image was in watercolors, gray and blue with little bits of gold at the streetlights. Ashby and her monkey friend, TanTan, were dancing in a park with the high, twisting, beautiful shape of the Daniau Tower behind them. But the thing Cara was looking for was on the side. An old woman, sitting on a bench, throwing bits of bread at birds that her mother called pigeons. That was where the rage came from. An old woman being kind to a bird and nobody was dying. No one was hurt. And it wasn’t even exactly a lie, because apparently she could do that on Earth. In Paris. Where she’d never been and didn’t have any reason to think she’d ever go. But if all the things in her books were about other places with other rules, then none of them could ever really be about her. It was like going to school one morning and finding out that math worked differently for you, so even if you got the same answer as everyone else, yours was wrong.
So no, it wasn’t a lie. It went deeper than that.
She made herself a bowl of bean-and-onion soup, sitting at the counter by herself as she ate. She’d half expected that, as upset as she was, she wouldn’t be able to keep the food down. Instead, eating seemed to steady her. The quiet of the house was almost pleasant. Something about blood sugar, probably. That was what her father would have said. Momma bird’s skin had started shining, like it was growing a layer of oil or wax. It could stay there on the counter. She thought about taking it back in case the babies would understand that they shouldn’t wait. That they were on their own. She hoped they could get back up to the nest. There were things that would eat baby sunbirds if they couldn’t get someplace safe.
“Fuck,” Cara said to the empty house, then hesitated, shocked by her own daring. Her mother didn’t allow profanity, not even her father’s, but they weren’t here right now. So like she was running a test to see if the rules were still the rules, she said it again. “Fuck.”
Nothing happened, because of course no one was watching her. And since no one was watching…
The sampling drone was in a ceramic case next to her mother’s futon. The latches were starting to rust at the edges, but they still worked. Just a little scraping feeling when she pulled them open. The drone itself was a complex of vortex thrusters as wide as her thumb connected by a flexible network of articulated sticks able to reconfigure itself into dozens of different shapes. Two dozen attachable sampling waldoes built for everything from cutting stone to drawing blood stood in ranks in the case like soldiers, but Cara only cared about the three grasping ones. And of them, really just the two with pliable silicone grips. She put the waldoes in her pocket, hefted the drone on her hip as if she was carrying a baby, and shoved the case closed again before she headed out to the shed.
Momma bird and the drone fit into her father’s cart with plenty of room to spare. She thought about it, then grabbed a little hand spade too. She’d use the drone to put the babies safe in their nest, and then give Momma bird a proper burial. It wasn’t enough, but she could do it, so she would.
The sun was starting its long slide down into night. The low mist that came from the east smelled as bright as mint, and the shadows of the trees all had a greenish tint against the reddening light. The cart had one wheel that stuck sometimes, skidding along behind her like a stutter until it broke loose again. Cara put her head down, her mouth set, and marched back toward the pond. The tightness between her shoulder blades felt like resolve.
The forest was mostly hers. Xan played there some, but he liked the other kids more than she did, so he spent more time in town. Her mother and father stayed near the house or working on the community greenhouse—which wasn’t really a house or green—to keep the food supplies coming. She knew what the sounds of the forest were, even if she couldn’t always figure out what made them. She knew the drape of a hook vine from a straight one, the call of a red clicker from a green one. Most of the things that lived there didn’t have names. Laconia was a whole world, and humans had only been on it for about eight years. Even if she gave names to everything she saw every day for the whole rest of her life, most of the species there would stay nameless. It didn’t bother her. They just were what they were. Common things got names so that she and her schoolmates and the grown-ups could talk about them. Sunbirds, rope trees, tooth worms, glass snakes, grunchers. Other things, no one talked about, so they didn’t need names, and even if she named them, she’d probably just forget.
That wasn’t strange, though. All names were like that. A shorthand so people could talk about things. Laconia was only Laconia because they called it that. Before they’d come, it had been nameless. Or if not, the things that had named it were all dead now, so it didn’t matter.
She reached the pond, a few bright-gold streaks in the sky where the last of the sun still lit the high clouds. The baby sunbirds were still in the water, peeping in distress at her arrival. The water was dark already, like it had pulled the shadows under the trees into it. The night-feeding animals would come out soon—scratchers and hangman monkeys and glass snakes. She slaved the drone to her handheld. The control panel was more complicated than she was used to, with half a dozen control modes listed down the side that she didn’t understand. She was pretty certain she could do everything she needed with only the basic setup. She just needed to get the babies up out of the water and safe into their nest. And maybe take some food up to them. Do the things Momma bird had done. Then she could bury Momma bird, and things would be… not right. But the least wrong she could make them. She took the waldoes out of her pocket and compared them to the babies, squinting in the deepening gloom to see which of them looked like they’d be able to hold on to the little bodies but not hurt them.
