The Strange Bird. Jeff VanderMeer

      They treated the Strange Bird as foe, with a great raspy chirping, the beat of wings mighty as one, and raked at her with their beaks. She dropped and rolled, bewildered, to get below them, but they followed, pecking and making of their dislike a vast orchestral sound, and she wore a coat of them, felt their oily mottled feathers scraping against hers.

      It was an unbearable sensation, and with a shriek the Strange Bird halted her dive and instead rose fast, tunneling up through a well of cold air, against the weight of her kin, until the little birds peeled off, could not follow that high and they became a cloud below, furious and gnatlike. While the cold wind brought her a metallic smell and the world opened up, so the Strange Bird could see on the curving edges that the desert did end, and on one corner at least turned green and wooded. A faint but sharp scent of sea salt tantalized, faded into nothing, but spoke to the compass within her, which came alive once again.

      But now the three dark-winged monsters that had been above her drifted to either side, the feathers at the ends of wide wings like long fingers and their heads gray and bereft of feathers and their eyes tinged red.

      They rode the wind in silence for several minutes, and the Strange Bird was content to recover in the dark wings’ company. But a prickling of her senses soon became an alert that the dark wings were probing the edges of her mind, the defenses the scientists had placed there. Walls the Strange Bird hadn’t known existed slid into place and, following certain protocols, a conduit opened while all else became a shield wall, sacrosanct.

      Origin?

      Purpose?

      Destination?

      Words that appeared in her head, placed there by the dark wings. She had no answer, but in approaching her, they had opened themselves up and because they were older, they had no sense yet of the danger, of how their own security had been breached by the complex mechanisms living inside the Strange Bird. Much of what was new in them, of their own making, had arisen solely to talk to each other with more autonomy, to become more like birds.

      For the Strange Bird realized that, just like her, they were not strictly avian, and that unlike her, parts of them were not made of flesh at all. With a shock, she came to understand that, like living satellites, they had been circling the world for a vast amount of time, so many years she could barely hold them in her head. She saw that they were tasked with watching from above and transmitting information to a country that no longer existed, the receiving station destroyed long ago, for a war that had been over for even longer.

      In their defenselessness, performing their old tasks, keeping data until full to bursting, erasing some of it, to begin again, the Strange Bird gleaned a view of the world that had been, saw cities cave in on themselves or explode outward like passionflower blooms opening, a tumbling and an expansion that was, at its heart, the same thing. Until there was just what observed from above, in the light and the dark, sentinel-silent and impartial, not inclined to judgment … for what would the judgment be? And how would a sentence be carried out now that all those responsible were dead and buried? But in these images, the Strange Bird knew that, perversely, the laboratory had functioned as sanctuary … just not for the animals kept there.

      The dark wings needed no food. They needed no water. Ceaselessly they flew and ceaselessly they scanned the land beneath them, and never had their talons felt the firmness of a perch or their beaks food. The thought brought an almost human nausea to the Strange Bird.

      Shall I set you free? she queried. And in a way, she meant to set the world within them free, too.

      For she could see that this was possible, that with the right command, the dark wings would drop out of their orbits and think for themselves, in their way, and rejoin the landscape beneath them. What they would do then, she didn’t know, but surely this would be a comfort to them?

      But the query alarmed the dark wings, tripped some internal security, lurching back online. All three gave out a mighty cry, and right there, beside her, they burst into specks of blackness that she could see were miniature versions of their larger selves and the specks dispersed into the thin air. The dark wings vanished as if never there and the Strange Bird’s heartbeat quickened and she flew higher still as if she could escape what she had seen.

      Whether in a day or a week, the specks would find each other and bind together again, slipping into the old, familiar pattern, and once more three dark wings would glide across the invisible skin of the world on their preordained routes, performing functions for masters long dead. They might fly on for another century or two, dead-alive, until whatever powered them grew old or distant or the part of them that was flesh wore out.

      Yet even as specks roiled by the buffeting wind, the dark wings communicated with one another. The Strange Bird could hear them, mote speaking to mote, sharing intel about her. Telling what must be lies.

      Analysis

      >>Composition: Avian, overlaid with Homo sapiens, other terrestrial life-forms. Unstable mélange.

      >>Mission critical uncertain; synapse control override inconsistent with blueprint of original design. Interference 100 percent certain.

      >>Conclusion: Sleeper cells exist. Unknown origin and intent.

      >>Action: Avoid a void a void a void!

      At dusk, she found a perch atop the rusted hull of a ship that had foundered there in the desert half a hundred years before. She was tired. A sadness had come over her as she had let herself drift across the skin of the sky, watched the desert transform into mountains of rusted electronics, of ancient caravans calcified and fossilized into the dunes.

      With the sadness had come the knowledge that the Strange Bird could be mighty—and that she was almost as large as the dark wings. That her feet ended in talons meant to rend, to slice, to tear. That her beak was sharp and curved. That she did not need food like other birds, or did not need it often, could go without. In that, she was more like the dark wings.

      As the hidden nocturnal life crept out at the margins and the wind slowed and deepened, the scent of animal musk welled up strong, and with it a metallic aftertaste, by-product of centuries of pollution. Constantly, the Strange Bird’s system purified itself of ghosts, of particles that could kill, all much smaller than a speck of dark wing.

      The Strange Bird could see as she alighted there, in her newfound strength, the history of the place in her mind, it rising up as naturally as breathing. Below the ship were buried many others, in the sea of sand that had once been filled with salt water. Even that place, the depth of it, the detail, was almost too much to take in, the world overwhelming.

      New things were rising in her, capabilities she didn’t know she had. They flickered on and then sometimes flickered off, as if the laboratory had not quite been finished with her. If she tried, the Strange Bird could reach out across the rim of the world, could feel life pulsing in all directions, even if hidden, even if sometimes in distress or marginal.

      She tried to sleep, in the half-awake way that the Strange Bird slept. For always there was an eye inside of her that was awake.

      The First Dream

      In the dream, the Strange Bird sees a woman with black hair and brown skin peeling a piece of fruit, an apple, from the garden room, and cutting the pieces into pieces and putting them in a bowl. This woman she knows from the laboratory; her name is Sanji. The woman hands the bowl to another woman very much like Sanji but taller and with a rounder face, sitting on the couch next to her. She knows somehow that Sanji’s friend used to work at the lab, but left long before the Strange Bird’s own escape.

      In front of them floats a moving image of other human beings talking and walking around. The women watch, joking and laughing. The Strange Bird can see the lab spreading out beyond them, still clean and new and fresh. The lights still work. There is still plentiful food.

      Sanji feeds a piece of apple to her companion and says, “I save you from the bad apples. That’s my job. All these years, I’m the only reason you have not died from eating bad fruit. I am all that lies between you and that fate.”

      The other woman