Hugh said, “He’s dead. Or, after a minute out there, he would be.” A tentacle—a life-support tube, I imagined—floated in the foreground. It ended at the edge of the picture without connecting to anything. Perhaps it was out of the frame of the picture.
Or perhaps it had been cut.
I edged closer. “Wow. You’re right. Wouldn’t he burst?”
“No. But there’s a question here. A story. Is it an accident? Suicide? Murder? Execution?”
Leilani craned her neck to take a closer look. Meitner moved her head back and forth like a metronome, examining; listening. I felt a bit uncomfortable, as we had shielded both of them from television mayhem and violent video games. I always thought that Leilani would learn about the adult world in immediate, graphic terms, soon enough.
Like now. I wished that I had looked more closely at the picture before having it hung.
“I’m thinking it’s murder,” said Hugh.
“Murder?” asked Meitner, cocking her head to one side.
“When one human kills another.”
The parrot shifted back and forth uneasily on Leilani’s shoulder. “Why would they do that?” The fluency of her speech never ceased to amaze me. Or everyone else, for that matter.
Hugh said, shifting swiftly and irritatingly into professorial mode, “Rage. Jealousy. Or, if they have thought things through—this is called murder in the first degree—they might plan things so that it doesn’t look like a murder. They might do this to get money, or to hide something that the dead person knew. They might try to make it look like an accident, or suicide—”
“Suicide?”
“Killing oneself.”
Meitner rested her small gray head, briefly, against Leilani’s ear. I saw a little crease between Leilani’s large brown eyes. My girl said, “Why would anyone kill themselves?”
“I don’t know,” I said, quite honestly. Someday I would tell her that my brother committed suicide, but this was not the moment.
She persisted. “Why would anyone kill someone else?”
“People don’t do it very often,” I lied, thinking of war. “It’s a crime. People who do it go to jail.”
Hugh snorted. “Sometimes.”
Meitner’s feathers stood out suddenly. “I don’t like being human.” As she flew down the wide veranda and soared into the night, her strange, jarring cry bit into me like a knife.
After a moment of silence, all I could think of to say to Leilani was, “Let’s see what your mother is doing.”
A week later we found Jean’s doorless Jeep at the bottom of a deep crevasse. She was dead. The cause of death was internal injuries caused by the crash. Her face was badly damaged, but the coroner said she was pretty sure that Jean’s face and neck were bitten by birds. Not one bird, but many.
I was too sick to even think about what might have happened.
I waited for Meitner to show up so that I could ask her questions, but she did not.
The parrot flock was wild and protected. We could not trap or kill them.
Which was a good thing for them.
In the beginning, it was all so beautiful. It remained beautiful for twelve years. After that, it was a dread horror that brought out all that was worst in me. My lovely girl grew up in the company of her tutu and cousins, because I turned sour when Jean died and I carried the secret of her death inside me, for reasons I never quite understood.
Now, when I hear Jean’s voice on my pod demanding rights for animals as I monitor the Stinger news channel in the hale where our life together began, I immediately grasp what it’s about.
I turn on the video that is streaming from the ship with which I have become so deeply involved after that initial, distant investment. But I quickly turn off the visual screen. It’s jarring and heartbreaking to hear Jean’s voice, her syntax and accent, but see a parrot’s head, beak, and eye.
“I am here in several capacities.
“Most of you are amazed that I can talk. There is a story in that, which I will tell you.
“But before that, I am here as spokesperson—yes, I am a person—to offer an invitation to participate in an international mathematical ballet. This is a ballet planned in conjunction with Psittacus and Company, one of the many corporations sponsoring the Stinger Ship, to celebrate the Stinger’s completion and departure.
“Many of you already have the neuroplasticity enhancement that will allow you to do so; it is P-493, manufactured by Psittacus and Company, updated a week ago. Psittacus and Company is making a temporary dose of this drug available on demand. Directions about obtaining it will follow. Participation is, of course, entirely voluntary. It is fully compatible with all neuroplasticity drugs manufactured by other companies; it has been extensively tested for years and is fully certified for use by the International Agency for Neuroplasticity and Genetic Modification. Participants will be encouraged to be at particular places at particular times, which will follow dawn around the Earth, beginning on the island of Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands, in one week. You will need special 4-D earbuds, which will be provided, and a special bracelet, which will transmit information, accept your feedback movements, and create a dance based on the flocking capabilities bestowed by P-493. We anticipate that this will be a joyous occasion.
“This is the part of this announcement that is most important to me. I am taking this opportunity to demand certain legal rights for my fellow creatures. The legal document has been prepared and will be released soon, but I will describe it briefly and follow that description with my story. Psittacus and Company is not a party to this demand; I am doing it as an individual.
“Non-humans—all flora and fauna—are presently treated as beings with no real agency, as robots, slaves, toys, experimental subjects, nuisances, food.
“As living individuals, we outnumber humans a billionfold. To those of you aware of how I was created, who think that we parrots have been given the gift of speech by magnanimous humans, I tell you no. We have had speech for eons. All of us non-human creatures communicate with one another and with our environment, and many have evolved communication systems that could be called speech—semiotic in nature, couched in context. We are scientists, observing the environment. We collect data. We calculate and make decisions based on that data. Some of us build. Some of us farm. Some of us hunt. Some of us use tools. All of us communicate. Some of us live solitary lives. Some of us are eusocial.
“Most of us try to avoid you, but some of us are born or trapped into servitude. We parrots can serve as a bridge, spreading this message species to species where communication pathways overlap.”
I am musing on the fact that Meitner’s creators were testing the effects of genetic enhancement and neuroplasticity extensions, and that, twenty-five years later, like most people, I sport some of those enhancements, and many newer ones as well, when transmission ceases.
I realize, in the silence, rather surprised, that Meitner is talking about Jean’s message. Her vision.
Being realized, perhaps, after all these years.
Something else is apparent to me, as well. Meitner once said: “My dreams are geometries of flight.” I did not understand at that time that her spatial dynamics were quite as unique as they are. It is something I have learned in the past few years by reading her papers. I think about those geometries in the context of the “experiment” the announcer mentioned.
A thrill runs through me.
Chased instantly by dread. As soon as I hear Meitner say that she is going to tell her story I know: I have to call Leilani and tell her.
Before Meitner does.