Come, she said to her brother. Change how you live and what you do. Make your children fat and happy, and give your wife something to smile about.
Come, she said to both of them. If we can change this much, we can change the Changer himself.
The whale grew legs and began to walk about as if he were human, cautiously at first, then with greater confidence. He still had pretty much the appearance of a whale, but Lichen thought this was to his advantage.
With the whale and her brother, Lichen walked away from the beach to change the world, and if she didn’t do a better job than anyone had already, she didn’t do a hell of a lot worse.
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
This story took me forever to write, because I kept doing it wrong. It owes something to a whale-shaped rock that I knew as a child in the woods of New Hampshire. It owes more to Leota Anthony of Suquamish, Washington. Mrs. Anthony kindly shared part of her personal history with me one rainy afternoon. I couldn’t tell her story, although it was enormously affecting: I didn’t even see a way I could become the person who could tell her story. I needed time to figure out what it was in her story that I found so resonant. It also owes a debt of thanks to my friend Ann Dailey and to William Butler Yeats, who I’m sure are mutually happy to be mentioned in the same sentence.
Contact
The Desert of Winds was inland, a four-day flight from the eyries along the coastal mountains. After the eight-day fast, it was a long journey, even for the strongest-winged. But when they felt the high, hot desert wind lift them like dry leaves, the exhausted flyers stretched their wings to the fullest and surrendered to the euphoria of approaching death.
Girat had been riding the winds for three days. She no longer made a distinction between her body and the current of air on which it rested. Mesas blue-green with lichen, chalky desert sinks, the land flowed like viscous liquid beneath her wide, motionless wings. The circle of horizon shimmered with heat and the sky shaded to transparent blue at the zenith. Suspended between earth and sky, she savored the time remaining and looked forward to death with pleasure.
It was her final afternoon. She was approaching the old City of Pillars, where she would die surrounded by memories of her ancestors. As she passed over the outskirts of the dead city, she noticed a visitor’s encampment below, its tent a sharp cool circle against the hot desert floor.
Her people avoided the awkward, wingless visitors — their devices produced unnatural wave disturbances. Girat murmured a prayer against excessive vibration and glanced down at the camp.
There was only one visitor and it was lying motionless in the shadows, a victim, perhaps, of its own technology. Girat circled and descended, preparing to salvage its flesh for its relatives. She hoped she could do so without abandoning her early and well-deserved deathflight.
Odd that the preservation of their dead flesh was so important to the visitors. The past summer, Girat had observed them packing their dead in boxes and burying them for preservation. Perhaps they would eat them later. She found the thought repellent.
Girat was descending toward the visitor, only a few beats away, when suddenly it came alive and leaped to its feet, snatching a small object from the ground beside it. It held the object at arm’s length toward Girat, an action she recognized as an attempt to preserve the formality and distance that existed between her people and the visitors.
Well, that was certainly all right with her. With a sharp beat of her wings, Girat continued past, to resume her slow flight of dehydration. Since the visitor was not dead, she would not have to delay her dying on its account.
As she passed over the visitor, the object in its hand moved. Her right wing stung momentarily and went numb. Girat faltered in her flight, gave a jolting flap, and swung irregularly to the right, favoring the wounded wing.
Moving faster than she would have thought possible with a wing injury and in her moribund condition, Girat swooped toward the center of the empty city. She landed clumsily on an abandoned flight deck, bruising her numbed shoulder against a wall of masonry.
For a peaceful, pleasing death, she must die airborne, in a slow glide to the earth: she could fly no further until sensation returned to her wing. A maze of warrens and obelisks, its vibrations stilled, the City of Pillars would shelter her until she could resume flying. She settled her wounded limb carefully in place, then scuttled as quickly as she could down a deteriorating ramp.
The interruption was unexpected, but like any event on a deathflight, it must be accepted. A sentient creature like the visitor, however, ought to have more control over its actions. Her people were wise to avoid them, she thought. The miasmic resonance enveloping their camps would cripple anyone’s control.
At the foot of the spiraling inner ramp, strewn with ragged insulation and electronics torn from the walls, a broad irregular doorway led into a pillared square. Windswept detritus, wires and cables of synthetic substances, had piled up to the edge of the door. Girat stepped over the rubble and moved out into the open plaza.
Bozhye moi. The size of that bird. He knew he’d hit it with the trank gun, but he hadn’t brought it down. Damned dosage too low.
Alex Zamyatin watched the bird sail toward the center of the abandoned city. It was conscious, but the drug obviously was taking effect. The bird landed on a balcony a kilometer away. Good, he thought. It wouldn’t fall too far when it keeled over.
He shrugged on his copter pack and started after it. The city fell away beneath him — tall, slab-like buildings around tiled squares. Pyerva’s lighter gravity made it easier to get around, but without the copter, he’d have had a rough time in the roadless ruins.
Laid out in a series of open squares, vast empty plazas edged with towering obelisks, the city had obviously been the home of a people oriented to the air — and all the higher animals on Pyerva were winged. There were no streets below him and few connecting passages between the honeycomb of sandstone buildings and squares.
The balcony where the bird had landed was directly ahead. Alex was anxious to find the bird. It was his first chance, the expedition’s first chance, to examine a live specimen. They had dissected several dead birds found in the ruins, and had raised more questions than they had answered. What did the birds eat? Their intestines had contained no food at all. Where did they nest? Nowhere near the cities, that was certain; aerial reconnaissance had yielded no clues — no birds had even been sighted. How did they use those highly developed paws? Four fingers, two thumbs: they looked very efficient. And why did they die? In every case, dehydration had been the apparent cause of death. The wiry bodies were dried out, tongues shriveled, mucous membranes cracked. Perhaps they were gliding birds blown off course, away from their habitat, by strong winds.
Despite their large brains and opposable digits, there was no definite proof that they were at all intelligent. No artifacts or clothing. They didn’t inhabit the cities. And the initial planetary survey hadn’t revealed any other settlements.
And yet, they were the only possibility so far for intelligent life on this first extrasolar, life-harboring planet, Pyerva. The complexity of their nervous systems argued intelligence. And, structurally, they were the right creatures to live in these cities. Everything was built to the scale of these birds, alone of all the animals of Pyerva. Devices were engineered for their peculiar hands. If he were going to design a city for the birds to live in, Alex conceded, these were the cities he’d design. A live bird should end the speculation.
Alex landed on the balcony. It was pretty shaky — he ran into the building. They were familiar to him now, these alien structures. Door were staggered at various levels in the walls, designed for entrance from the air. Interior automated ramps, no longer operative, led down to the plaza level. He scanned the cluttered interior, furniture half or fully extruded from the walls and floor, the disorder of decaying technology. The bird was nowhere in sight. Alex ran down the ramp, checking quickly at each level. It would head for the plaza, he thought. Someplace open to the sky.