The buildings in the town were of two different types. The old ones, the ones like her house, lumpy and round, built from the soil of Laconia and constrained by printed polymer sheaths, marked the original township. The other kind, solidly efficient metal and formed concrete, came later with the soldiers. The roads were new too, and still being built. She and all the other kids loved riding on the smooth, hard surface, feeling the bumps and uncertainty of the land vanish into a steady low hum that traveled up from the wheels through the handlebars and into her bones. They weren’t supposed to ride on the roads because the soldiers sometimes had transports and cars come through, but everyone did it anyway.
The sunlight pressed down, warm against her skin. The air had the soft, musty smell it got when rain was coming, the smell her mother called “moldy coffee grounds.” A swarm of smoke gnats rose up, swirling into the sky above her in their weird angular patterns, like writing in an alphabet that no one knew. She almost stopped to watch. The road ended at a barracks and construction yard, soldiers in their crisp blue uniforms watching her as she passed. When she waved, one of them waved back. And then she was on the rough trail again and had to keep both hands on the bars.
The effort of riding and the warmth of the afternoon brought her to a kind of trance, comfortable and mindless. In the moment, her body and the world felt like they were all the same thing. As she got near home, she tried to bring her focus back. There hadn’t been a lot of study done on sunbird life cycles in particular, but she’d found some notes from one of the early surveys. They said sunbirds ate a lot of things, but they seemed to like the little gray encrustations on water roots the best. She thought that meant Momma bird would have been diving deep into the pond to crack the little gray things free, and then the babies would gobble them as they came up. So she had to find a way to do the same thing. For a few more weeks at least. Until the babies were old enough to leave and make their own nests.
At home, the doors were open, letting the cool air into the house. She pulled the bicycle up beside the door. Her parents’ voices came from inside, raised the way they did when they were having a conversation from different rooms. Her mother’s words sounded jagged and stretched, like a wire on the edge of breaking. Cara paused to eavesdrop.
“We’re bearing the risks. As long as we’re here, anything they do can affect us. They don’t know what they could wake up.”
“I know,” her father said. “Look, I’m not saying you’re wrong. But we’re not in a position to say what those risks are. And… what are the options?”
She knew the rhythm of her parents, how they talked when they knew she and Xan were listening, and how it changed when they thought they were alone. This was alone-grown-up talk.
“I’m not arguing for that,” her mother said, and Cara wondered what “that” was. “But look at Ilus.”
“Ilus was uncontrolled, though. Admiral Duarte seems pretty certain they can at least influence how it behaves here.”
“How did they even get a live sample?” Her mother’s voice had gone peevish and frustrated. “Why would you want that?”
“You know this better than I do, honey. The protomolecule was a bridge builder, but it also has an interface aspect. And being able to talk to other artifacts is…” His words faded as, somewhere inside, he walked back to her mother.
Cara looked at the shed. She was pretty sure there was a tree-core sampler in there she could use to scrape the roots, but it was heavy. It probably made more sense to just roll her sleeves up and use her fingers. Plus which, she didn’t want to tear the roots.
She walked out toward the pond, thinking about her schoolwork. The phonetics lesson. Part of the background had been about how babies learn the phonemes by listening to their parents even before there are any words involved. The way different places use sound—the difference between a particular diphthong on Ceres and the same one in the North American Shared Interest Zone or Korea or on Titan or Medina Station—was something babies mastered even before they knew that they knew it.
She’d read something once about a man back on Earth who’d tried to figure out how to speak with octopi by raising his baby children with octopi, hoping that the human children would grow up bilingual in octopus and English. It had sounded crazy at the time, but who knew? The way the phoneme thing worked, maybe it made sense after all. Only she was pretty sure no one spoke octopus, so it probably hadn’t ended well…
She walked down the path, her steps following the little scrapes that the cart’s wheels had made. The pond water was going to be cold. She could already imagine how it was going to feel pushing her arm down into it. She wondered if the babies would still be in the nest. They might be old enough to get themselves down and into the water, and she couldn’t decide if that would be a good thing or a bad one.
The smell of coming weather was getting thicker, but the only clouds were light, scudding veils over the sun, not much more than a lighter shade of blue. The breeze was hardly enough to stir the fronds of the trees; they made light tapping sounds when they touched, like dry raindrops. She wondered if anyone had ever studied the little gray things on the water roots to see what they were. Probably they hadn’t. Laconia had too many things on it, and there were only so many people there. It would be lifetimes before everything on the planet got discovered and understood. If that ever even happened. She’d had a history-of-science lesson the year before that traced how long it had taken people back on Earth to understand the ecosphere there, and there had been billions of people on Earth for thousands of years. Laconia had a few thousand people for less than a decade.
At the pond, the babies were on the water, splashing pale leathery wings and piping to each other. That was good. They were independent enough to look after themselves that much anyway. With the drone broken, she’d still have to carry them up to the nest. She didn’t like thinking about the drone, though.
“Okay, little ones,” she said. “Let’s see if I can get you some food, okay?”
She knelt at the water’s edge, the wet of the mud seeping through the knees of her pants. Deep in the water, she could just make out the pale roots. They looked deeper in than she’d remembered. She was going to wind up soaking her shirt, but she started rolling up her sleeves anyway.
Momma bird hissed.
Cara fell back, scrambling on feet and elbows, as Momma bird swam out of the scrub at the pond’s edge. The bird bared her greenish teeth. The tiny wrinkled face deformed in rage as she rushed forward, wings spread. The babies on the pond’s surface gathered behind her, clicking in distress. Cara stared, and Momma bird coughed, spat, and turned away. For a moment, Cara tried to make this into some other bird that had happened upon the orphans and taken over the care of them.
But things were wrong. The bird’s skin had the same waxy, dead look it had gotten on her counter. The black eyes didn’t quite focus the way a normal bird would. There were sunbirds all across the town. Cara had seen dozens, and none of them had the awkward movements this one did. None of them had the weird stillness between its movements or the hesitation like every muscle had to be reminded how to work. Cara pulled herself up the bank, dragging her heels across the blue clover. Momma bird ignored her, paddled to the center of the pond—paused, still as statue—and dove down. The babies circled, excited, until she bobbed back up. All their little mouths struck at the water, spat out whatever they didn’t filter out as food, and then struck again.
Cara’s throat felt thick. Her breath came in snatches and gasps, like someone had turned off the planet’s air supply, and her heart felt like something that had blundered into her rib cage by accident and was frantic for a way back out.