“It’s not distrust, exactly,” I said, though distrust was exactly what it was. “It’s more … frustration, I guess. They weren’t worth enough to save, and they’re not worth enough to bring back. Not as they were, anyway.”

  “Disneyfied,” he said, with a pained twist to his mouth. “I heard you.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, it’s true. I always thought art was meant to hurt, a little, and this does. For that reason. So I guess it’s a success.”

  He didn’t look happy, and I couldn’t blame him. Debates of value and nostalgia aside, likewise the sweetening of a dead past based on a flawed assessment of worth, this was a culminating night for him, the result of many years’ work, and I’d been impolite. I’d spoiled things. Trust for the new resurrectionists was thin since my encounter with Granny, only a few days since, but that was no excuse. Coincidence or not, it wouldn’t do to aggravate.

  “It is a success,” I said, and gestured at the knots of people crowded around the leaping robots, completely enamoured. “I don’t even like birds that much and I can see that.”

  “I’ve heard you’re a jellyfish kind of girl,” he said, and the smile eased his face open.

  “What can I say — I like animals that have a sting to them. Perhaps it’s an undiscovered artistic side of me,” I said, tipping my champagne flute at him. A rock wren noticed the movement and fluttered up, perching on the rim of the glass. “It looks so perfect,” I said, and it was unalloyed praise. Darren chuckled a little, under his breath, and it seemed like a moment to turn dispraise into tease. “It’s not going to burst into song, is it?”

  He laughed out loud. “I haven’t gone that far, no. You’ll have to go elsewhere if you want to play Snow White.”

  I don’t know what made me say it. I hadn’t made any connection — not consciously, anyway. I’d like to say it was illumination, a flash of logic and insight, but the moment after I said it, all I could think of was jellyfish and how they trailed tentacles through the water behind them, fishing for prey.

  “I’m more of an Andersen girl myself. Give me ‘The Little Mermaid’ over the Brothers Grimm any day of the week.”

  “Really.” That wasn’t a question either, but the moment of absolute stillness in his shoulders reminded me of meat-scented breath wafting through dark corridors and the bite of small teeth on fingers. Had they been only a little older, those teeth could have drawn blood.

  “Mmm. They’re sadder, I think, but ultimately I find them more hopeful.” This was probably the biggest lie I’d ever told in my life, as Andersen had always struck me as someone who parceled the world up into misery and portioned it out again, but I was sick of undercurrents and fishing for bait.

  “I always liked the story about the Nightingale,” he said. “I used to read it again and again when I was a kid. The mechanical bird that enchanted a king, and how the song of the bird — the real bird — was so beautiful that it won mercy from death.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, as the robotic rock wren fluttered from my glass, “but if those peeps it makes are meant to be the most beautiful song in the world, I worry for your hearing.”

  “The rock wren really isn’t much of a singer,” Darren agreed. “But it was the idea that captured me — that something so beautiful could make such a difference.” He didn’t say any more then, as one of the docents pulled him away to meet a donor, but I knew what he didn’t say. That desire for panacea, that attempt to bargain with the inevitable. There’s no nightingale alive that can turn aside the progression of Grief, once it starts, and no rock wren either. But what if there was a possibility, even so, of Grief not starting at all? How many little wrens, how many little joeys, could prevent that endless sensation of loss? Not for all, but for some.

  Would it make a difference? I didn’t know. It was hard to forget that the birds were mechanical. In Andersen, the simulacra broke down, and only the real bird could suffice. In this world, this much grimmer and sadder world, the simulacra, for some species, might have been all that was left.

  A false resurrection, it was true. But did its deceit affect its value?

  Apparently an interest in fairy tales was enough to garner a second invitation — to an area in the mountains, where the more realistic of the robotic wrens had been released. These wrens were not programed for human interaction. They were to be as natural as possible, given the information available. “I like to think,” said Darren, “that people will see them when they go tramping. Just out of the corner of their eye. And it will remind them of what used to be here.”

  The rats might hunt these birds, but their teeth would close on metal beneath the feathers, and the robots at least would survive when their predecessors had not.

  “The official release date is next month. But there’s a study site, off-limits to the general public. They’ve been there for a few months already, so that we could observe them and adjust the programing if necessary.”

  We followed him to that study area two days later, and were allowed to wander while Darren checked in at a small on-site monitoring centre. “There’s no guarantee you’ll see one, I’m afraid,” said Darren. “If I could guarantee it I’d know that I’d done something wrong.” Some behavior or programing that made the bird stand out from the rocks and scrub and scree in which the wren made its home and render the camouflage of its feathers useless.

  “I don’t know if I want to see it or not,” I said to George, as we wandered over the slopes. In some ways, absence here would be success. When I’d said as much to Darren, his expression had been all anticipation, with the barest gleam of teeth.

  The mountains were alive enough, but George still shook his head when he looked at them. He could see the changes from when he was a kid, he said, a small-town boy who’d gone on school trips to the Southern Alps, to see the fading of the glaciers and the ice in a warming world. The speed of it unsettled him. It had unsettled the Sea Witch, too, when she sailed over the Reef, but that was not a comparison to dwell on.

  “Do you think it’s foolish,” he said, “to come up here and pretend? Are we going to have a world filled with simulacra now?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe pretending is better than the alternative.” We’d pretended for so long, after all — that the climate wasn’t changing, that the consequences wouldn’t be as bad as they were. Was this really that different?

  “Yes,” said George, when I asked him. He peered around rocks, winced when a sudden movement turned out to be rodent instead of bird; the site was infested with them. “I’m more interested in them now than I was before.” He wasn’t the only one. I’d seen the reactions at the museum, how both children and adults had been charmed by a facsimile altered enough to appeal to them. I’d read the media responses, had seen the fascination there as well. The fake wrens earned far greater approval than the real ones.

  It was the friendliness that did it. The fluttering and the flirting, the way the fakes made up to us. I’d like to say all I felt for the effort was contempt, but the truth was if someone had created a lion’s mane jellyfish that rubbed up against me, that took my hand with friendly tentacles while we swam together, I’d have been the first in the water with it.

  “Can you smell that?” said George, interrupting the fantasy.

  The sweet stench of rot, of spoiling meat. And for a moment, for the tiniest microsecond, I wondered if it was dead bird we were smelling. Of course it wasn’t, and couldn’t be, but it just went to show how simulacra could affect even the most cynical of observers. They weren’t real, but they looked real, and want filled in the rest. I even felt relief when I remembered that the wrens were robots and incapable of decomposition.

  The smell was dead rat. At first there was only one, but the more we walked over the mountainside, the more rats we found. All of them dead, all with the smallest puncture wound in them — George noticed it first, nudging at the stiffening bodies with his boot. The punctures were often hard to see. They’d barely bled at all. Whatever it was that caused them, it was effective.

  Then we saw the wren, and we knew the invitation that had come to us across oceans had not been coincidence. A robot that looked like a wren, which acted in all ways like a wren … it would draw in the same predators that had killed the species, back when it was biology that fluttered over rocks, instead of aesthetic and mechanism.

  “It’s not possible,” said George, as we watched, from a distance, as the wren flew at a rat and stabbed it, a small flash of too-small beak. The rats here were large and well-fed. “It’s not enough to kill it.” The rat died anyway, and quickly.

  “Are you thinking poison?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  The wren perched on a nearby rock and watched us, too steady in its lack of movement.

  “Realistic my arse,” I said. “This is just as fake in its behavior as the ones at the museum.” Though I had to give it to Darren: his little robots would be wonderful pest control.

  “Why would he tell us these were the normal ones?” said George. He stared at the wren, suspicious. “They are clearly not.”

  “I mean, this is the study site. It’s like a practice round,” I said, sounding unconvincing even to myself, but before I could go any further he cut me off.

  “This isn’t practice. First Tasmania and now this? I said it before, Ruby. There’s something dodgy going on here.”

  “It hasn’t escaped me,” I said. “Are you getting the feeling we’re being shown something?”

  “You’re being shown something,” he said, shrugging off his backpack and crouching over it, fumbling with the clasps. His eyes were still on the wren, and the wren watched us in return, the little wings neatly folded. “Here it is,” he said, under his breath, pulling out the thermos by touch and unscrewing the lid, emptying coffee all over the mountainside.

  “Hey!”

  “I don’t want to brain the thing,” he said, and barely having finished his sentence, he threw the thermos, overhand with surprising accuracy. The flask landed with a dull crunch.

  “I think it’s pretty well brained,” I said, easing over to the bird. It kicked and whirred on the rock, pathetic and broken. I tried to tell myself that it wasn’t real; I felt bad for it anyway. George used the lid of the thermos to nudge the bird inside, keeping his hands well away, and capped it off.

  “You better hope they don’t make you pay for that,” I said.

  “You better hope whatever poison’s pasted on that beak doesn’t do for more than rats,” he said.

  I’d have called him suspicious, but on another island Grief had turned resurrection into something that had smacked of murder. Not directly, but I’d felt the danger all down my spine, felt the little hairs raised, and known insanity had come with teeth embedded in flesh. I’d like to say it had turned me paranoid, but we’d been lied to, here, the both of us, and birds had been used as bait.

  George had been used as bait, I realized. He was never meant to go to Tasmania, and his invitation to this particular exhibit was worded to include his wife. “You should give it to me and go home,” I said, meaning back to a country that wasn’t his, and reached for the thermos. “Whatever this is, it doesn’t have to involve you.”

  “Yeah, nah,” said George, definitive, sliding the thermos back into his pack. “You’re the scientist. Tell me, who would we see about a poison?”

  “You could see me,” said Darren, behind us.

  4

  Darren was nervous but not sorry. A certain clarity in his eyes passed for sanity, but there must have been an awareness that it wasn’t a sanity we shared, because he kept himself carefully beyond arm’s length. Untouchable. For the bird to enchant a king, there had to be a king to enchant, and clearly Darren thought he fit the bill. It was the monstrous obsession of Grief, taking yet another form. “It makes me see things more clearly than other people,” he said. “I know you don’t feel the same. Not yet.”

  The implication was that I would. That Grief could be induced, somehow, through outside influence, and that with it would come advocacy, or at least compliance. “I want you to understand,” he said, but it wasn’t understanding that I felt with extinct marsupials chewing on my fingers, and I didn’t feel it here either. Recognition, perhaps, but recognizing that imbalance exists is not the same as feeling imbalance as stability.

  “I just wanted to bring them back,” he said.

  “You haven’t brought anything back,” I said. “These birds … these things you’ve created, they’re not real. They’re not alive. You know that, don’t you?”

  “They’re beautiful,” he said. As if that by itself was enough. But then, under influence of Grief, dead things often were.

  “They’re killing the rats,” I said, and he nodded. “Can they kill anything else?”

  “Just rats,” he said. I didn’t believe him.

  “So if I were to empty the thermos and take that wren in my hands and stab you with that little beak, you’d be all right with that?”

  A minor twitch, quickly covered. “Of course.”

  “Ruby,” George interrupted, and his voice was warning-low. I waved him off.

  “What if I were to stab myself?” Another twitch, this time more pronounced. “I wonder what the Sea Witch would have said about that?” It was a shot in the dark, but if what was happening in these mountains was connected to what was happening in Tasmania, then the inciting factor might have been the same. Saner than any of us. It was the most terrible lie.

  “You’re not a rat,” said Darren. The words burst out of him. “Rats are … they are …”

  “They’re evil,” I finished for him. “Monstrous.” Some people said that about the jellies, disturbed by how the deterioration of the ecosystem was for them opportunity and blooming. And I could see — in this country of birds, where all the birds flirted with extinction, their clawed feet invitations on the path of Grief — what devouring and predators had done. “They kill everything. Indiscriminate destruction. They can’t be trusted.”

  Monstrous. Some people said that about colonization. The coming of people like me, and what we’d done in Tasmania, the rest of Australia, and what we’d done in New Zealand … the same devouring, the same indifference to the pre-existence of other life. The same conversation, over and over, with different settings and different subjects.

  “It’s so hard to stop them,” he said, shoulders easing. “There are so many, and they don’t care. Nothing makes them care. And when they’re done they leave and go elsewhere, off the sinking ship.”

  “You won’t get an argument from me,” I said, hands spread wide to show commiseration and lack of threat. “They’re better off dead.”

  “Yes.” His expression cleared, and he was once again the man I’d met at the museum. Sane, and good-humored. It was a shock to me, having always considered Grief as linear and recognizable, how easy it was for him to cover it up. I wanted to know how far that cover went.

  “Tell me something,” I said, leaning forward, my voice lowering. “Is George a rat?”

  I could feel George stiffen behind me – the quality of his silence was one that I had come to know well over the years. It was silence from a man profoundly uninterested in devouring, who had crossed an ocean to avoid it, but if he was being used for bait I had to know.

  “I don’t know,” said Darren, cocking his head to one side as if he too were a wren, suspicious of interlopers. “Shall we test him?”

  I didn’t know what the test was supposed to be, what it was Darren thought would sway my judgment either way. There were two of us and only one of him, but insanity was not always rational, and he had poison, potentially, on his side. He also had a prior relationship with George, one that might have made him harder to hurt, but I wasn’t willing to gamble my husband’s safety on the remnants of friendship.

  “Sounds like a waste of resources to me,” I said. “If you don’t remember what he was like at the museum, I do. He was as fascinated with your wrens as you are.” Which was exaggeration, but it was exaggeration for purpose. What would affect Darren more than anything, I believed, was the delight George had shown at the museum, his honest fascination with the recreated wrens. That fascination, I implied, could easily turn to obsession, and from there to Grief and enlightenment. It was a measure of how badly Grief undermined intellect, I think, that my argument was accepted.

  Darren gave us coordinates and sent us on our way; as little as I trusted him, residual loyalty to the woman who had been my friend made me accept the directions. He also gave us the wren — or at least had not prevented us from taking it, which was possibly more accurate. “You probably think it’s proof,” he said. “And it is. But it’s a reminder as well. Of what the future could be.”

  “Just who is it you’re reminding?” George asked him, eyes narrowed. If my invitation had come in the form of letters, his had been more conventional. His could also have been a proxy. We were still married, after all.

  Darren smirked at him, an expression undercut by wistfulness. The desire, perhaps, to connect. “Who do you think I’m reminding? Even if you’re the means to an end, your wife seems to think you can learn. I’d like to think she was right. A jellyfish should know a survivor when she sees one.”

  George stared at him, narrow eyed and supremely unimpressed. I knew that expression. It said “Fucking charming,” or would have if he thought Darren was worth the effort of comment. Instead he said, “Come on, Ruby,” and took my arm to escort me back to the car, making sure to keep his body between me and his former friend.

  “The next time you are kidnapped by a crazy wolf woman, I am leaving your arse to whatever shallow grave has been assigned to you,” he said, as we drove away. He always took that snippy tone, that pretense of formality, when he was upset.

  I couldn’t blame him. He’d put the thermos in the boot and then thought better of it. He had no doubt pictured the lid coming off as we took the twisty turns down the mountain, and he now held it between his knees, with the lid clamped down under fingers.

 

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