Bridge to Elsewhere, page 14
To compare, this is a transcript from her training:
Ash: Good spin. Sky happy.
Penny: Yep. Nice flying. None scare. Happy happy bird me.
Ash: Human coming home. Yes all good.
Penny: Whee!
At first, I am inclined to say there’s something wrong with their communication, that the signal gets lost further from Earth we go. But they tested that; huge chapters of all those books I skimmed last week were dedicated to this testing. Supposedly, the signal would be the same no matter the distance.
Maybe I’m personifying them too much, but these birds clearly have personalities. I haven’t read many of the other logs extensively, but even a quick look shows that every bird has different speech patterns, and every bird’s handler has different speech patterns, which their birds translate differently. If you strip the names off these logs, I would be able to tell you which ones were Penny and me in an instant, and which ones were Ash and his handler.
At least I thought I could. But Ash’s speech patterns have changed so much; the bird Pen and I have been communicating with doesn’t sound at all like the one she was communicating with in training.
So… Maybe it’s a different bird.
Five: Sometimes birds are lesbians.
Chills prickle up and down my back. Total epiphany moment.
I flip back through the communication logs, searching for something I had read earlier, half afraid I imagined it and half afraid that I didn’t. If I’m right…
My hands are literally shaking as I skim the pages. Where is it? I know it was here somewhere. There! “Holy peacock crap, Batman,” I whisper to Penny.
She tilts her head to the side and makes a soft little sound.
“I think I found them,” I said. “We found them. Whatever. We found at least one of them.” I’m tripping over my words, I’m talking so fast, but I have to get the idea out, see if it sounds ridiculous out loud. “I assumed you’d been talking to your boyfriend all this time because you’re a mated pair. Because they told me you were part of his harem. But you aren’t, are you?”
Penny ruffles her feathers and settles down on the table to watch me, her black eyes shimmering with something I interpret as humor.
“You’re gay. Birds can be gay. It’s perfectly natural. You aren’t talking to Ash. You’re talking to one of the other ladies. I mean, I get it. Why would you ever talk to some dude bird when there’s a pretty lady bird to talk to?” I run my hands through my hair. Some sort of nervous preening instinct, I guess. “You were talking to Ash during training, because you had to, but now that you’re in space, you’re trying to find your girlfriend again. You all were. That’s why you’re so awkward.” I chuckle. “Yeah, pretty girls have that effect on me, too.”
After taking a moment to compose myself so I have a remote chance of sounding like the professional I’m supposed to be, I ask Penny to contact Earth.
She refuses, tucking her feet underneath her as she gets comfortable on my command module.
“No,” I say, “you don’t understand. We figured out what went wrong, why the communication problems happened. We need to tell them so they can figure out a better system.”
I don’t know if peafowl have eyebrows, but if they do, Penny is definitely raising one at me right now.
“I’m not search and rescue, Penny. I figured out why it happened. Someone else can figure out exactly what it is and where they are. Come on.” I poke her doodle boppers. “Make these vibrate. Phone home.”
She gives me a look that makes me think I might lose a finger soon, so I back away quickly.
I run my hand through my hair. We could go home. I don’t need Penny’s help to get back; it would be helpful if Mission Control could guide us, but I can figure it out.
So why do I have the urge to look at the communication logs again for clues to where the other ships are?
For a long moment, I stare at Penny. Can I really turn all her nonsense into the outer space equivalent of mapQuest directions? And that’s assuming my interpretation is even correct. I think it is, but am I sure enough to actually go looking for the ships?
I look at the logs again. There’s one I skimmed over earlier (all right, it’s me we’re talking about, there’s a lot I skimmed over earlier), a long diatribe from the other bird, describing…I don’t know. How her day was going? It’s just a bunch of nonsense, or so I thought when I was under the impression this was the bird on Earth talking. Now that I know—suspect, anyway—that it’s one of the lost peahens, something she said takes on new significance.
It’s a passage where she is apparently describing her surroundings. Generic spaceship stuff, easily mistaken for a laboratory on Earth:
“Shiny white. Shiny metal. Shiny shiny so much shiny. Buttons switches lights human lady. Food room. Open doors. Always open.”
Melanie. Melanie and her perpetually open cupboard doors.
Now, I know. Nothing definitive. But the peahen talked about her human lady in other places, and I flip through the digital book like a woman possessed to find them.
“Human lady snake hair.” Mel’s dreadlocks?
“Mating ritual. No other human. Shaking no tail.” She always loved to dance.
“Ballerina baby duck.” This one, I think more than anything, means it’s Melanie. See, the birds are translating very roughly. One time I jokingly told Penny “Houston, we have a problem,” and she transmitted the phrase “uh-oh Texas.” So “ballerina baby duck” could absolutely mean “duckling tutu,” Mel’s cutesy nickname for coffee filters.
I bite my lower lip to keep from crying out in excitement. I’m probably reading too much into this; it’s probably not her.
But what if it is? What if I just solved the greatest mystery of our times: Why does everyone who goes into space with a genetically engineered peafowl never come back?
What if the answer is “Because the birds don’t care about communicating with the peacock back home; because they’re gay and purposely misleading their pilots so they can find each other again”?
I guess I’m about to find out, because we’re going to look for them.
Six: Peafowl have very sharp beaks and they do not necessarily enjoy being lifted over people’s heads.
I can’t contain my excitement anymore. With a foolish burst of energy, I scoop Penny up into my arms and hold her aloft in a poor recreation of the Dirty Dancing lift. She bites my nose. I totally deserve it.
Seven: The meaning of “love love space love.”
Humans are funny little things. Some lady invents faster than light technology, some old white dude steals the credit from her, and all of a sudden we have this primal urge to travel the galaxies.
What for? Just so we can say we did it? So we can find other planets, take them over, turn them into colonies and force whatever lifeform we find there to become Earthlings?
What could possibly be out there that we couldn’t find back on Earth? To quote Penelope, love love space love.
As soon as I stopped ignoring the seemingly meaningless chatter between the birds, I realized there are actually directions in there after all. Nothing concrete; peafowl still suck at navigation. But she has a destination in mind, and that destination isn’t deep space, but just outside our solar system.
I found it after extensive cross-referencing of travel times, relative gravity, phases of the moon and—
Yeah, no. That’s total BS. This morning, Penny’s girlfriend used the phrase “hello pretty satellite,” and if they were within range of 99% of our satellites, we would have found them by now. So they could only be near the long-since deactivated Spires-Murphy probe, and a quick trip to the old Google machine revealed its general whereabouts.
When we get closer, Penelope and her friend inform me that I have to “no no talk Earth no don’t,” which I take to mean “turn off your communications.” My ship can’t communicate directly and instantaneously with Earth, not like the birds can, but it still sends out a signal that can be tracked.
I look at Penny; she looks back with those beady eyes of hers and proceeds to defecate oh so elegantly on my control panel.
“I’m going to trust you,” I inform her. “I don’t know why, but I am.”
The other ships appear on the horizon. Yes, I know there is no such thing as a horizon in space, but pretend there is for a moment because it sounds cool to say that the other ships appear on the horizon.
They just hang there in space, like little toys on strings in a low-budget science fiction movie. I exchange a meaningful look with Penelope, and the incoming message light on her headset blinks.
“Love?” the computerized voice says.
I wait, but Penelope doesn’t respond. Maybe the message wasn’t intended for her?
Cautiously, I reply, “Love.” Then I shake my head at my own foolishness; I don’t need to respond in peafowl English. “Hello. This is Coraline James, pilot of the Exalted. Who am I speaking to?”
Penny wiggles her tail, and on one of the other ships, another peahen receives this transmission with her doodle boppers. Because sometimes, living with a guy doesn’t mean you are a bonded pair. Because sometimes, you don’t need a male to have a harem.
“Blue button. Talk talk.”
I turn my attention to the control panel. Blue button? We have a ton of blue buttons. But she must mean this one.
I press it, and my windshield becomes a communication screen. (No, not just like in Star Trek. It is…different. Don’t ask me how; it just is. Trust me.)
And there’s Melanie. And a bunch of other pilots in sort of a Brady Bunch opening theme song formation, but mostly, there’s Melanie.
“Hey.”
I smile. “Hey.”
She chews her bottom lip, unsure of what to say.
“So…are you guys just up here having a lesbian peahen party or something?” I ask.
That makes her smile. “I mean…it isn’t like we did it on purpose. Our birds just wanted to find each other, and it’s nice. Visiting each other’s ship, not having to deal with the bullshit of Earth for a little while.”
I lean back in my chair to absorb the way she phrased that. “Things like me?”
She shakes her head so hard, her dreads go flying. “At first, yeah. But you have no idea how good it is to see you again, Cor. You’re the only part of Earth that I missed.”
One by one, the other pilots awkwardly close out their windows, leaving just me and Melanie and our genetically engineered lesbian space peahens.
Humans are funny little things. We spend all this time and energy and money going out into space, and for what? To find asteroids we can mine to death now that our sacred land back home is gone? To prove we are smart enough to waste precious resources just for the purpose of scrawling our name on another planet with a Sharpie?
I don’t know about you, but I’m glad we are a frivolous, foolish species that worries more about whether they can and not whether they should, because maybe the mission was a failure, but I went to space with a genetically engineered lesbian space peahen, and I found the love love space love of my life again.
— THE TRIP —
By Mari Kurisato
According to time dilation, Corie was thirty-two years old. Her best friend in the universe, Amy? She was dying. The cancer resisted the chemo drugs and, despite stasis, spread like black oil in all the holoimages of Amy’s organs. Stage four. At least there was no pain. The images flashed across Corie’s mind like the Aurora Borealis.
Corie flicked her wrist and the world shimmered a moment. It glowed brighter—and the horizon, a calm eggshell sea, dropped away, basalt rising in its place.
Why did Amy have cancer? Wasn’t this the future, with flying cars and solar-powered space elevators, where everything had a nanocure pill? Where there were people living on moons and getting off Earth as fast as possible?
Corie pressed her hands together and rubbed them slightly. The wet-sand colored skin whispered, and lava burst from the newly created basalt floor, spraying into the sky and raining back to Earth before turning into glass spheres and bells that shattered as they cooled.
Amy, like Corie, couldn’t afford the pills and didn’t qualify for GovMedical. Unlike Corie, she lacked skill sets that would attract CorporateGov attention.
Fog rose from the lava, and with a snap of Corie’s fingers, the fog became a city. Steel, concrete, brickaplast, aluminum. It wasn’t what she’d choose, but that wasn’t the point.
Corie’s skills were some of the greatest, but contract jobs were just thin enough that she skipped eating real food for a few weeks to pay for her nanopills and rent. Racks were expensive, especially GovMed beds that kept her body from rejecting the radiation shielding implants and shutting down on the trip.
The bones of the city settled into place. Here and there she chopped her hands like a martial arts screen star, and streets shuffled themselves until the chaos looked managed, and yet unplanned. The buildings blended from a European post-modern style to a Gothic edge, as if the Notre Dame had been redesigned by the Soviet Union and melded with microprocessors and glass data cubes.
Corie lost count of how many nanopills she’d uploaded to create implants to control her body. The heart muscles, the pancreas, the cyberspace mental augments.
She searched data nodes for weather, traffic, scents, sounds that were appropriate for a city inland from the Pacific, adjusting the atmospheric pressure and humidity. Then she dove through her creation, thousands of copies of preprogrammed Cories taking walks, going to work, making dinner. When everything was done and a city-weeks’ worth of time had broken the metropolis in, Corie swept her hands back and flew away into the distance until she was looking down on what she’d made from orbit, like a satellite passing by overhead. It was real enough to fool most everyone.
It wasn’t right. It wasn’t what Corie would prefer, but it paid for her GovMed rack. It paid for Amy’s, too.
Corie exhaled and clapped her hands together, and the metropolis and the fundamental topography it rested upon accordioned into a flat card of light that flickered as she grabbed it with phantom hands and added it to the rest of the data shelf. Virtual heaven, hers for the low low price of a Med rack and good data transfer speeds.
Corie inhaled and the universe dripped away like hot, black, primordial ink. A moment later, when she pulled the cable from her neck, gagging and coughing as the data cord jerked free, Corienne Biskane became past present Corie.
She was back in her secret data layer, one that was hidden from the passengers and crew. Her rest-universe, as she thought of it.
The hard drives hummed in the darkness, and the smell of Mother’s morning coffee reached her. Corie shuffled the smell to the back of her mind, sensation data overlapping with fragments of jingle dancing clashing with the distant hum of flag songs and, inexplicably, Japanese opera. The psyche reconstruction always started with songs and scents. Corie’s mind turned about her memories—hers, no one else’s—like a tired dog settling down for troubled sleep and leg twitching.
Corie shook her head a moment, cursing the nausea that trailed her awareness like smoke snaking along the grass. Kamsack First Nation Radio (not the station’s real name, but it was the best analogue she could find) was reporting the weather in between ads for a payday loan service. Stadium Powwow by A Tribe Called Red (their last good song, truthfully) came on after that, and Corie realized she was in the wrong year. By this time things had already fractured in unexpected ways, the election of the wrong person to office, the Jump Gate research failures, the wars. Amy, who hadn’t been born yet, would still succumb to the agony of a bureaucracy and the sun would still shatter, expanding too soon.
Corie’s mother leaned in the doorway.
“Nindaanis, breakfast. Get up, you lazybutt, or you’ll be late for school.”
Corie moaned and waved a hand from under her blanket on the bed, her spine still shot through with ice. She’d gone through this moment hundreds of times, but hearing her mother’s voice like it was real, like she was still alive? It stung Corie fiercely.
You can’t save everyone, she reminded herself. Her mother had been too old for the first-gen implants they would invent two years from this moment Corie found herself in. Soon, too soon, her mother would die a natural, sudden death, and there was nothing Corie could do about it.
I’m not going through this, Corie told herself. Mom’s been dead for a long time.
It didn’t matter anyway. It wasn’t why Corie went back. She could spin the dial to any year ever, and her mom still died.
You can’t save everyone. Corie slid out from under the covers of her bed and turned off the laptop playing reztronica. She stretched, felt her spinal muscles pop with the movement, and massaged her breasts, groaning about the ache.
In this slice-time she still got bruises regularly. She’d forgotten that. The SensMemory Recall was flawless, even hyper-real. But the memory was there, latent beneath decades of…
Never mind.
She got dressed and then stumbled into their shared space.
“Morning, Momma,” Corie said, taking a seat at the battered Formica table. Her mother shuffled to the table and set down a warm bowl of manoomin wild rice grains with strawberry slices and a plate of hot bannock bread smeared with her mother’s favorite honey butter.
“Good morning, Corienne,” her mother said as she eased herself into the creaking chair with a whuff of a sigh. She sipped her coffee loudly. More loudly than yesterday. Or the ten thousand yesterdays before that.
Corie had replayed this moment dozens of times, and each time it was the little details that hit her feelings harder, memories reinforced by a recreated reality. Without knowing what she was doing, Corie set her spoon down and went over to her mother’s chair.
“Corie, what are you—” was interrupted by Corienne kneeling and hugging her tiny mother tightly. “Hey, I’m going to spill my coffee!” her mother said as Corienne pressed her face into her mother’s shirt and shook, just a bit.
