The Vanished Birds Read online

Nia’s lip curled. “This tin can saved your life.”

  “I will never forget that, Nia.” Nurse shook her head. “Never. Which is why,” she continued, leaning forward, beseeching, “I’m telling you now, in no uncertain terms, that this child is just that—a child. He’s not your pet, he’s not your plaything. He’s a child who needs a home.”

  “This is a home,” she said.

  “It’s a cargo ship. Barbet Class. Carries fifty tons and upward of ten passengers. A mercenary’s den. My savior. This ship is many things, Nia.” Nurse grasped her hand. This time she did not let Nia pull away. “But it is not a home.”

  * * *

  —

  The trip was almost over. The end of the fourth month approached, and with it, an excitement that electrified the recycled air. For the last crew meal of the trip, Baylin pulled a trout from stasis and grilled the fillet on the crosshatched element until the skin blackened. He unzipped the belly with a knife, and served the fish whole on a platter, with stewed tomatoes, spicy gurcoli flowers, and fist-sized florets of sautéed cauliflower. The crew applauded. After reconstituted meat and vitamin pellets, everyone was ravenous for something substantive. Their eyes were close to tears as their tongues rediscovered taste.

  Spirits were high. Durat and Sonja were at a cease-fire, the barbs they traded blunted by good-natured smiles, even when there was one last strawberry on the platter and the teeth came out. The boy sat between Nurse and Nia. He had no taste for the fish and ate the cauliflower with his sweet rice, his usual stillness not as guarded, his feet letting out a playful kick under the table. Nia served him more rice. She did not think about the coming days as she watched him eat, just listened to the sound of his thoughtful chewing, and the clink of the glasses around her as a third toast was made to a safe journey. It was a nice, uneventful meal, until the end, when Sonja had launched into one of her old war stories, a time she was hunkered in a diamond trench while green gunfire serrated the air, and her story was interrupted by the lights flickering above them, and the trout’s skeleton rising from the plate as if by fishing wire. Conversation stopped as they watched the fish fly up to the ceiling. Nia sighed, and asked Baylin how expensive a new Grav would be—but before Baylin could answer, the zero-G bubble expanded, and with it, a kick in the ship that threw it all up into the air, the last of the tomatoes, the cups of booze, the table itself, and, with a yelp, the crew; Baylin, Sonja, Durat, Nurse, the boy, and Nia, all of them floating off their chairs—with their chairs—Sonja cursing as they twirled, the tail of a fish smacking Durat in the face, Nurse fighting to keep her sari over her legs, none of them close enough to the walls or ceiling to gain purchase on the safety rails, struggling, red-faced, to reach a hard surface until, one by one, they stopped struggling, their attention caught by the sound of laughter, and they craned their heads and looked at the boy drifting in the center of the madness, his small body framed by a sea of floating bones and silverware as he clutched his sides that ached from hiccupping laughs, his joy so vicious it made Nia’s heart leap, and she gazed up at him, until the gravity returned and they crashed to the floor.

  After they cleaned up the splattered food, the cracked plates, and upturned chairs, grinning at what had just happened; after the boy was showered and put to bed; after he sighed under his blanket, and she told him that she would see him in the morning; only after all of this did Nia return to her quarters and finish the haiku she had scrapped months ago.

  The flute from Macaw,

  Cheaply made and out of tune,

  Still plays.

  * * *

  —

  In a matter of days they would emerge from Pocket Space. To curb the nauseous effects of the unfolding, they stretched each morning and night, ate nonacidic foods, and drank as much water as their stomachs would allow—things that wouldn’t stop the nausea altogether, but would round it into bearable. As Nia and the boy pounded glass after glass of water and followed Sonja’s exercise routines, she told him about Pelican Station. What the nexus station of Allied Space was like, and of the days she spent on its east wing, watching the half-light of the Perseus sun. And as he listened to her stories and together they prepared for the coming arrival, ten million kilometers away, on the wings of their destination, the people of Pelican Station underwent preparations of their own for a celebration that was centuries in the making.

  Nerves were frayed from the stress. Umbai representatives oversaw the construction of the fairgrounds in Izuni Park, and they coached the different culture groups performing in the Avenue Parade, going so far as to critique the act of a famous starlet, telling her to resist her usual flourishes and sing the notes on the page and no more. When she told them they could not hobble inspiration, they replaced her with a second-tier singer who was willing to follow their directions. In the schools, the teachers told their students the whys of the celebration: why it was important for them to dress well, and why they must have fun while also being respectful of the festival’s significance. On the quicksilver screen, they traced for the students the lineage of this historic day, and led them back through the centuries, to the time before the province of stars. Back to when Earth was old, but not yet done, and Fumiko Nakajima was still dreaming up her stations.

  3

  Nakajima

  Like most babies of her time, Fumiko was designed before she was extracted from her mother’s womb. Unlike most babies, she had been designed to be ugly.

  It was her mother’s doing. As one of the figureheads of the post-vanity movement, her mother requisitioned for Fumiko an off-kilter nose, crooked teeth, a slight overbite, eyes spaced close together, and satellite-dish ears too large for her small, heart-shaped head. Later, when Fumiko was famous in her own right, and interviewers would ask her why she didn’t undergo facial reconstruction to undo the damage her mother had done, Fumiko would tell them two things: first, the question was offensive, and second, this was her face, the only face she knew, and she would have none other. But after those interviews, when she returned home alone, she would remember how desperate she was as a child to be as pretty as the other girls in the park, who danced under falling cherry blossoms with their faces perfect in their symmetry. She would remember shame.

  A man at a signing once told her that yes, it was a shame her mother had made her ugly, but at least she was a genius.

  “Thank God for small mercies,” he said.

  It never ceased to amaze Fumiko, the things people would say to her face with a smile.

  The initial germination of her idea for the stations implanted itself long ago, at eight years old, when her mother took her to California to visit the last preserve of birds. Her mother, Aki Nakajima, was a once-famous actor who, after a series of cinematic flops, receded from the public eye and devoted her time and energy to various causes—the bird preserve was one of them.

  The preserve itself was a glass enclosure the size of two football fields, its terrain varied to simulate natural avian habitats. There was a forest, tributaries, even desert. As her mother performed for the news crew, Fumiko leaned on the railing that overlooked a false river, where the pelicans stood in the shallows, scooping water into their bucket mouths. There was one pelican in particular that caught her attention. It had a gimp foot, swaying when it moved, its body covered in bald patches. The thing looked diseased. She watched with amusement the bird’s splayfooted walk, thinking of how funny the creature looked, until the pelican perched itself on top of a boulder and unfolded its wings, drying its feathers in the light. Its wings open in presentation to the sky.

  As an adult she would struggle to articulate the transcendence of this moment, the sudden shift she witnessed when that ugly bird became beautiful, the words turning the moment into something small and quaint. Impossible to capture the awe she felt as a child. The top of her head tingling as she gazed at the drying bird while her mother finished her interview. The light on its feath
ers. The feeling that at any moment it would ascend into some holy form.

  When the news crew was gone, a hand gripped her shoulder, and her mother flatly told her it was time to go. Fumiko glanced at the bird once more as she was shepherded away.

  Its wings like boomerangs.

  On the four-hour SeaTram from the California preserve to Yokohama, her mother loaded math problems onto Fumiko’s Handheld—Fumiko was another one of Aki’s causes, determined as she was to have a daughter with a mind finely honed, for intellect was the most prized attribute of the post-vain. As they tunneled through the murk of the Pacific, passing the derelict wreckage of old oil tankers and other vestiges of the past, Fumiko balanced equations on her device, solved polynomials, scribbled her algebraic proofs with her stylus, while a part of her mind segregated itself, created a place where the pelican could perch and spread its wings under a beam of light that was always amber. When her mother left her seat to use the bathroom, Fumiko minimized the homeschool app and opened Doodle, and with the five or so minutes of free time she had she drew a quick sketch of the bird, accentuating its strange features, its sagged mouth, its tuft of cowlicked feathers, even gave it a speech bubble that said “BWRAAK”—

  Then remaximized the homeschool app, her mother back from the bathroom, brow knit with worry as she regarded her Handheld. “You’ve been on question five for a few minutes now. What’s confusing you?”

  Fumiko came up with a quick lie, said she had blanked on the quadratic formula; an unconvincing excuse, as she had performed the formula with ease just the other day. But her mother didn’t push the matter, and recited the formula for her again—though, by the time her mother arrived at “4ac over 2a,” Fumiko had solved the problem, and moved on to the next, the packet done by the time they reached Japanese seaspace. They passed through the ruins of the old city. Fumiko opened the camera app and snapped a picture of the watery grave—the algae blooms on the frames of shattered windows, the bicycle frame suspended on telephone wire, which swayed with the current, and the blown-out homes swallowed by the risen tide. She uploaded the picture to her mother’s Handheld, her insides twisted with stress as her mother regarded the picture with a stoic face, until she nodded, and said, “Good.”

  Fumiko devoured the praise.

  From Yokohama, they took a smaller, slower tube to Okinawa, where they lived at the top of a high-rise. It was just the two of them. There was no father. Aki did not see the need for one.

  The sea was their view.

  At the behest of her mother, Fumiko showered. Once her allotted ten minutes were up, the timer clicked, and the water guttered out. When she stepped out of the stall, she did not dry herself as she normally did, working the towel from ankle to head; instead, she draped the towel onto the floor, and stood on top of it, with arms spread open under the mirror’s band of fluorescent lights. She let the water drip off her body one bead at a time, until her mother rapped on the door and asked what was taking so long. She hurried the towel over herself and dressed for dinner.

  She waited at the table while her mother measured out the rice on the calorie counter, plucking grains out one at a time until the number fell to an even three hundred, and then measured the broccoli, the paper-thin slices of steak, the fifteen salt-dusted edamame pods. The girl’s mouth salivated, until finally her mother brought her the plate, holding it just out of reach as she asked her daughter, “What is the quadratic formula?”

  The rice steamed.

  “X equals negative b, plus or minus the square root of b squared, minus 4ac, over 2a,” Fumiko answered.

  The dish rested on the placemat.

  They ate.

  After dinner, when she was sure her mother was asleep, Fumiko snuck into the kitchen. With a chopstick and a paper clip, she jimmied open the locked drawer that contained her Handheld—darting glances over her shoulder each time the coastal wind rattled the shutters—and she sat in the dark with her face lit by the screen, her back resting against the skillet cabinet while with a finger she stroked her ugly drawing of the ugly bird, its big wings, its fat beak; her pelican.

  * * *

  —

  The pelican, and the other rare birds she soon grew to love, remained with her as she studied and flourished in academia. Despite her mother’s status as a has-been actor past her prime, she still wielded great influence in the public eye, which was why no door was closed to Fumiko, and no expense spared for her education. She graduated magna cum laude from Okinawa University with an engineering degree, and from there, the California Institute of Technology, where she earned her PhD in aerospace engineering—the field most bright minds were funneled toward as Earth was becoming a less viable home with each passing year, despite the solar-panel fields, the gullies stuffed with banned diesel vehicles, and the dirigibles that were always overhead, everywhere, spitting vapor coolant into the too-warm air. Able to perform complex mathematics without the aid of a Handheld or PrivateEye, Fumiko was in high demand. After a stint at JAXA, where she pioneered the development of massive hull structures able to withstand the fold into Pocket Space, she moved between various private tech companies with footholds in the aerospace industry, leaving behind her a wake of accomplishments, her name whispered in circles in the know—she, who was notoriously difficult to work for, who succumbed to bouts of intense depression, and who demanded perfection of her teams, no matter the time of night, and who always finished the jobs she started.

  During her time working for Cybelus Chicago, she took one of her subordinate engineers to task for his lazy mathematics. She broke down the numerous points where he went wrong in frantic proofs on the wall screen, not realizing that a snickering colleague, who had been waiting for this particular engineer to be chewed out, was recording the whole thing through the squint of his PrivateEye. The scene was uploaded onto the public Feed with a wink, where it went viral in a matter of minutes; the story of a furious genius, of a woman so brilliant she needed no technological crutch, her hand a slipstream font for the intricate and impenetrable workings of the universe. The man she disciplined lost his job soon after. He was hounded off social media, and from there, out of the state he lived in. There were rumors later that he had gone into the woods and mouthed the end of a hunting rifle, but no one cared enough to verify.

  As for Fumiko, she began to see her face displayed on her coworkers’ screens—photos from the past, of vacations and events; her hunchbacked graduation photo with her horse’s smile. The personal et ceteras of her life that were revived for popular entertainment. Her mother, now post her post-vanity, called her from Okinawa to congratulate her on the viral success. “This is it, Fumiko. This is when your life starts.”

  “My life,” Fumiko repeated, dumbfounded, as she received yet another notification from the Feed of a recent story about her.

  Her mother was not listening. She was too busy listing the steps her daughter had to take to hold on to the fame, to make sure it didn’t gutter out. “Fumiko.” Her voice from the speaker was textured with static. “Opportunities like this come along so rarely. Do not be foolish and squander it.”

  But the public eye was restless. Fame tended to burn out bright in those days, and Fumiko’s fame was no exception. Notwithstanding her mother’s best efforts—who went so far as to resurrect the old article written years ago about one courageous actor’s choice to thumb her nose at bought beauty and manufacture an imperfect daughter—the noise quieted over the next few weeks. Every day there was a new viral, billions of people pumping their PrivateEye stories into the Feed, to the point where it was impossible for anyone to remember the contemporary folklore for too long unless the subject of the viral made an effort to remain under the spotlight, which Fumiko refused to do. Her coworkers were in awe of how the social-media flare-up glided off her back like water; how she didn’t even smile or frown when it was brought back up in passing conversation; she who would just nod and say,
“Yes. It happened.”

  But the biggest surprise arrived in spring when, one day during a meeting in Cybelus’s conference hall, Fumiko’s Handheld went off and she excused herself to take the call in her office.

  Two days later, her office was empty.

  There were no goodbyes. Only a two-sentence letter of resignation on her desk, printed on paper, with ink. It was an old-fashioned gesture that no one knew what to make of. One of the men stole the letter, framed it, and sold it on the Feed market, made enough money to buy groceries for a year, but spent the money instead on a trip to the Arctic, where with his children he watched the last of the icebergs sweat. And so it was that, for a time, Fumiko Nakajima disappeared.

  * * *

  —

  It was the viral that put her on Umbai’s radar. The ping that led them to call, and offer her the once-in-a-lifetime proposition: to design for them a series of space stations that would rival the best of their competition. She said yes without hesitation. They allowed her one month to get her affairs in order before she joined them in their Malay headquarters. They told her she would be working there in isolation for a number of years, the isolation a safeguard for their intellectual property. They told her it would be best if she took her time to say her goodbyes.

  Out of familial obligation she packed a suitcase and visited her mother in Okinawa. She took the trolley from the port, amused by the cherry blossom trees that passed the window. She had forgotten it was spring.

  When Aki opened the door, she did not hug Fumiko. She shuffled out of the way so that she could enter, and told her to be ready for dinner, which would be in an hour. After her mother ladled rice into the calorie counter with varicose hands, and prepared the plates still hot from their steam bath, Fumiko half expected her to hold her dinner ransom and demand a recitation of formulae. But the woman gave the plate to her without a fight, and they ate as they had always eaten, as strangers. She didn’t tell her mother about the new job, or that she would not exist for an indeterminate number of years. It was no longer her business.