Burl rolled up alongside her as Essen approached and surveyed the nearest outline. Essen suspected that she didn’t need her gloves, that this substance wasn’t infectious and couldn’t really hurt her, but she put them on anyway (no need to compound one bit of foolishness with another) before knocking. Repeatedly. Then she shook the outline a little in its harness, the object still disconcertingly weightless when held, and stepped back.

  “That was all it took last time, right, La? Just a little nudge at the canyon, a little jostle when you were retrieving these things from the junker?”

  La whistle-beeped a more definitive confirmation.

  Essen turned back to the outline of absence and waited. It did not take long. One tiny set of fuzzy black legs curled over the lip of that nothingness, a set of bright red eyes peeped out, and then it crawled out to meet her—followed by the usual swarm, in pairs, then dozens, then more. Soon enough, a massive Spinner-form had assembled itself before her and Burl, with Merken and La still hanging back by the corridor—and it was larger, far larger, than the one she’d seen either at the canyon or on the islet. This one looked ready to fill up the whole of the cargo hold—and because it was also made up of so many smaller arachnoids, it also had no trouble adjusting shape to engulf anything in storage in its way.

  Essen’s heart beat loudly, but she remained calm where it counted. No Spinner had ever been directly violent to any Partnership officer, or to any other visitor that she’d seen on record. Whatever happened to the crew of the Kir-Anin had probably been done by the chiggers, so the real menace didn’t lie in the size of this creature before her. There was nothing to fear in its eyes, its mandibles, its chitinous stench, its tic-tic-tic-ticking legs . . . only, perhaps, in its verdict. The summation of its “spinning” with the other stewards of Drasti Prime.

  And now that she knew the Kir-Anin’s crew bore the fault of intentional trespass . . . well. Her role was clear. A transgression to be restored by her, no matter how confusing all the peripheral details. They were not her business. Not Partnership business. Only restoration was.

  “Greetings, Spinners,” she said. “My thanks for your attendance here. I have just been made aware that this crew of ours did not land by accident on your world. On behalf of the Partnership, I extend my apologies for my people’s disruption of your planetary affairs. There was a clear ban on entering your system. They broke it. The responsibility lies with us.”

  Within the confined space of the landing craft, the tic-tic-tic-tic of the Spinner-form’s wobbly legs echoed differently—and occasionally even bumped against the shuttle’s ceiling and walls. Still, she was glad to hear it. Consideration before speech seemed a good sign.

  “There is no returning for the ones who have not left,” said the Spinner-form. “We have accepted their requests. The ones unable to enter the leaving have found their rest on this world instead. The ones who could travel are already in the leaving. They are gone.”

  Essen squinted at the giant mass of arachnoid bio-computing struggling to hold itself together in her shuttle’s cargo hold. “The ones . . . unable to enter the leaving. Do you mean the two fen who greeted you? Did your nanobots turn them into the island outside this vessel? Are they now to be found in all the roots holding up the Kir-Anin?”

  “Confirmed. The biologicals were all in transition. Some more transitioned than the others. The two who greeted us were tired. In search of rest. They asked it of us, even as they asked that we allow the others a chance to continue to explore.”

  “In transition?” Even as she echoed these words, though, Essen recognized the other meaning they contained. The Spinners saw death differently, after all. They’d never interfered when Partnership officers chose to transform into native creatures through the chiggers. They had even run afoul of Partnership notions of justice once, by failing to see the termination of a whole species as quite as stark an affair as the officer on the case—but had also readily offset the loss, once made aware of it, by transitioning themselves to fill the ecological niche.

  Had the crew of the Kir-Anin been dying? All sick of some disease or another that could not be easily repaired? Oh, but that would have been a convenient explanation, wouldn’t it? An act of medical desperation to excuse their breach of the Partnership embargo? And yet, Essen had seen enough of her fellow biological beings in action to harbor doubts about this excuse. Okay, sure, perhaps the two fen leading the mission had indeed been ill—the Spinner-form had confirmed as much by honoring their request—but plenty of people in Essen’s experience liked to bandwagon around exciting causes: to don the mask of suffering, that is, once someone else had done the hard work of making it a more desirable mask to wear.

  So maybe the others hadn’t been dying, exactly, or in any pain that couldn’t have been managed in some other way—but did they need to be, to want to reach the mythic land of Drasti Prime, and be willing to do whatever it took to get there? No, of course not. All most of them needed was the hope that, by leaning into this story of suffering, they could rationalize breaking the Partnership’s ban and embark on a grand new adventure in fetishized lands.

  If any of the original crew could still be interviewed, Essen didn’t doubt that each member would show perfect belief in their stories, too—I was sick! There was no other way! This was it! Just as Essen couldn’t follow all the narrative leaps in the Partnership’s recent history, after sleeping through a full two decades’ worth of system drama, neither could individuals in the middle of such a fray always see that they’d had other choices—or that they’d made a choice at all. That nothing had to have happened the way it did.

  And yet . . . delusion or not . . . choice or not . . . that was all neither here nor there now.

  Whatever the self-justification for their actions, the crew of the Kir-Anin had set out for this world, and landed successfully, and petitioned the Spinners for aid. And all had come to pass just as it had. As messily and ruinously as it had.

  “In transition,” Essen repeated, with emphasis. “As in, they were dying, or at least they thought they were. And even though they were not welcome here, even though you had asked us all to leave, still you honored their requests when they came to you.”

  The Spinner-form waited, wobbling.

  Not a question, Trexly.

  “Thank you,” Essen added. “That was a very kind and gracious thing to do.”

  The Spinner-form shivered more decisively, but did not fall apart.

  “Their leavings must not leave,” it said. “Their leavings are part of a different returning now.”

  “Of course,” said Essen—again, feigning a fuller comprehension than she actually had about any of this. “We will return these items to the surface, to the ship, and be on our way.”

  “No.”

  Essen paused.

  “No?”

  The Spinner-form’s clusters of tiny red eyes shifted focus to Burl, then to Merken and La in the backdrop. “One did not request. One remains a guest. All guests must leave.”

  A symphony of bot-beeps rose up in answer. Dawning recognition from all quarters. Even La seemed suddenly happier in its contribution to the overall chorus.

  “Oh, blazes! Obviously,” said Essen. “The Kir-Anin. You preserved the ship because there’s still a lifeform on it.” She’d been about to add, “A little like your own, no?” but thought better of it—though curious about the Spinners’ answer. “The Kir-Anin would have a mid-sentient operating system—did you ask it if it wanted to go on with the others?”

  “Confirmed. It did not wish to enter the leaving.”

  Essen felt a wave of conflicting feelings for the onboard AI: to have been abandoned by its crew. But then, to have been fortunate enough to meet a host species that recognized it as conscious enough to have merited a choice. Had the little Spinners been visiting the Kir-Anin every now and then to check in? To keep it company in the interim?

  “So, the Kir-Anin sent the distress signal? It’s been waiting for us for all this time?”

  “Confirmed.”

  And now she felt foolish for having made the original crew’s error herself, while distracted by the mystery of their absence, and the literal monuments to their absence that now existed in their stead. She had walked through their craft without so much as checking in on the ship’s internals. And she, with a three-bot crew herself!

  “We’ll extract the AI. Can you make use of the rest of the Kir-Anin’s materials to continue to build your world?”

  Behind the silken mask, the mass of little Spinners making up the maw moved almost as if to smile—though, no, that was mere romanticization on Essen’s part.

  “We will,” said the Spinner-form—with amusement, or not.

  Essen nodded. “And then I’ll make sure the Partnership adds more security around your system, so that no one else ventures this way, or takes advantage of your hospitality. Again, I do apologize. The Partnership looks forward to meeting whatever it is you are, ah, ‘returning’ . . . on your terms, when you’re ready.”

  And—

  “You will,” said the Spinner-form, at last. “You will.”

  Then a splash of tiny Spinners scattered everywhere, and poured back through every outline of absence in the cargo area. Within seconds, only their stench lingered in the air . . . and the work of returning the outlines of absence to Drasti Prime commenced.

  Soon after the landing craft had returned to the ship in orbit above Drasti Prime, Essen was kneeling beside a nearly assembled rover kit and holding her breath.

  “Right, gang. Did we forget anything?”

  Merken whistle-beeped in a way that Essen was happy to take as indignation at the question even needing to be asked.

  “Fair enough. Burl? All systems go? Official broadcasts sent out?”

  Burl was less enthusiastic in its response. If Essen didn’t know better, she could’ve sworn the bot would bolt upright halfway through her next cryo-sleep, waking in whatever the robotic equivalent of a cold sweat was, at the thought of having left a task here undone.

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” she told it. “Remember, there’s a limit to how much we can control in transit. All we can do is toss these warnings out to others, and hope for the best.”

  La hummed melodically, and Essen squinted at it—suspecting the bot of preening.

  “I know, I sound positively optimistic, don’t I? Don’t worry, the next round of cryo-sleep will knock that right out of me again. And who knows? The next time we wake up, half the universe could be a radioactive wasteland. So, there’s that, right?”

  La whistle-beeped in rapid, excited sequence. Essen laughed.

  “Right, I almost forgot—you might actually enjoy the universe more that way. Well, good for you.” For Essen’s part, it was with a twinge of regret that she thought about Drasti Prime now—how much she would never know, never understand, about all its mysteries underway. What the Spinners were up to. What the leaving—and the returning—actually entailed. How pristine its wonders would remain, if the embargo stood, even well after her next mission was underway. But—so went the job, did it not?

  “Ready, team?”

  A trio of confirmations. Two bots held the fourth rover-shell steady while the third installed the power cell, and Essen watched by its front lensing equipment as the bot switched on. It went through a typical processing cycle while adjusting to the huge downgrade in size and capacities—and then another full cycle, as if not believing the results from its first. And then a third. But Essen, recognizing the behavior as not unlike her own, simply waited until the bot had finished as many iterations as it needed, before catching its focus and smiling directly at it.

  “Welcome aboard, Kir-Anin. You might’ve noticed a few changes, huh? Well. Not to worry. Far as I can tell, they’re all still well within probabilistic norms. We’ll figure them out together, for as long as we all press on.”

  And with that, before returning to the rest of her pre-cryo checklist, Essen knocked gently on the new bot’s forward plating: half out of her own compulsive habit, and half just to be sure that nothing new . . . for now . . . was thinking of crawling out.

  About the Author

  M. L. Clark, Canadian by birth, is based in Medellín, Colombia. Along with stories in Clarkesworld, Clark is the published author of speculative and science fiction in magazines including Analog, F&SF, and Lightspeed, and the occasional year’s best anthology. Clark also writes global humanist articles twice-weekly at OnlySky.

  Fly Free

  Alan Kubatiev, translated by Alex Shvartsman

  “I needed a true monster, so I went with a bird.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s impossible to reach an accord with a bird.”

  —From a conversation with film director Juraj Herz

  Bird-speak was the only reason Crowley got this job.

  Without it, he couldn’t have dreamed of landing such a cushy, well-paying gig. He had cautiously constructed a resume and left it at the Bird Court three weeks prior. He’d recorded the tape in Sparrow, a language all birds more or less understood.

  Reciting the fifth statute had been especially difficult for him. Birds are fantastically sensitive to the tiniest tonal shifts. Compared to their ability, a lie detector is a useless hunk of metal, and regular human ears are dead meat. And when you lie the tone unfortunately rises as the effort overstrains the throat muscles.

  “Chip chirp fuirr chak.” He just couldn’t get the “fuirr” right. It sounded like “foirr” which meant “love very much.” He could’ve easily ended up paying a pound of flesh for such a mistake in pronunciation.

  Crowley had struggled with this for two evenings straight until he was satisfied with the sound.

  Now he sat in the aviary, his perch directly across from the Boss Lady’s, and labored to translate a response to the manager of a poultry farm who was begging for a reduced sentence. It was a hopeless case. All poultry farm managers were automatically sentenced to being immediately utilized at the feed mills. Their employees were to serve life sentences at those mills and be utilized posthumously.

  The Boss Lady wasn’t there, praise the Lord. Through the half-open door of the aviary he could see her table, littered with cassette tapes and a few half-pecked apples. Her perch was the tiniest bit soiled. Just enough to show that she remembered her true nature.

  Indistinct shouting and squeaks emanated from the nearby enclosures. Crowley understood only a fraction of it.

  Back in the before times he ended up studying zoolinguistics in college for a simple reason. For three simple reasons, to be precise.

  Number three was the severe shortage of applicants. Everyone who took the exam had been accepted.

  Number two was that it had been only a seven-minute walk from his home to the university.

  And the number one reason had been that Leda applied there, too. She had enrolled in a high school that specialized in ornithology and was obsessed with this stuff. She taught herself Cockatoo by ear, without study books or courses. She’d owned two locally bred cockatoos, listened to “The Cockatoo Screams” regularly at night, and her sailor brother would smuggle in foreign paperbacks and recordings in Cockatoo.

  Crowley had courted her for two semesters. On occasion, when the mood would strike, they’d make out half to death on staircase landings. Then Crowley decided to propose and went away on a construction gig, to “make some cabbage” and cover the costs of their wedding. Incidentally, he had been involved in building the very same poultry farm to whose director he was presently translating a response.

  Crowley shuddered. These days, that was a considerable black mark on one’s biography. God forbid the woodpeckers might drum up the truth.

  Chirrup-chirp-cheep-cheep-che-firr. Your request has been denied with no possibility of an appeal.

  Crowley set the microphone aside and took off the headphones. His bruised cartilage burned. In his head, ringing cries dashed about like sparrows under a church dome. This was the eighteenth translation that day, not even counting the written ones. His lips cramped, his tongue trembled with fatigue, his throat stung. He knew the birds flocked together to make fun of him and the other translators, knew that macaws masterfully mimicked human mistakes and mispronunciations. Screw them all. This was still better than working at the feed factories. Chirp-tweet-chip.

  Leda never ended up marrying him. While he worked his ass off at a construction site, she “got hitched to a naval pilot,” as her grandmother had said. She got pregnant with impressive speed and ease, gave birth to twins, named them Castor and Pollux, and promptly lost touch. Crowley rarely thought of her and when he did, it was usually due to a severe hangover.

  He couldn’t even look at women for two years after that. Even the harmless models on magazine covers had made him nauseous. Which isn’t to say men didn’t make him sick just as much. Everything had made him sick. Except bird-speak.

  He defended his diploma with flying colors. Professor McKingfisher had even offered him a position at the department but he left for the Curonian Spit instead, and was stuck for nearly four years there. His efforts on that sand dune were pure academic fun, with few practical applications, but it was a good time overall.

  And then everything changed. The Bird Court had taken over.

  Hunting was prohibited. Libraries were purged of any books pertaining to the subject, from To Kill a Mockingbird to Turgenev and London. Rumor had it, certain living authors of banned works had gone underground somewhere in Moscow. Literally. Seeking political asylum with the rats was an unreliable thing, and yet . . . And yet, it was better than the fate awaiting anyone accused of “inciting interspecies hostilities.”

  They had flown in from across the sea. Crowley had personally witnessed the beginning of the Great Migration—first it was a few individual birds, then small flocks, and then entire caravans: loud, cackling, constantly pecking at something.

  The door squeaked and was pushed slightly ajar, the width of three fingers. A pair of fogged-up glasses appeared through the crack, followed by a sweaty brow, and then a curved belly covered by a tie.

 

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