io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “It Holds Her in the Palm of One Hand” by Lowry Poletti; this is part one of two—look for part two next week. Enjoy!
“It Holds Her in the Palm of One Hand” by Lowry Poletti
On Miphre, a planet hardly larger than a moon, jagged mountaintops stab above the cloud cover and harbor small ecosystems in the palms of their hands: rock eels and ribbon mosses and seabirds with rodents clutched to their breasts, each one nestled between those stony fingers.
“The perfect nesting spot for gastor,” the captain of The Cyclops Cradles Her Sheep said when they arrived on board a few hours ago. “It’s basically a buffet for them.”
Sun tilted her head to the side. “Gastor don’t nest.”
“I’m sorry?” The captain’s reply was concurrent with a pointed look from Dossa Nirav, Sun’s mentor.
“They’re ovoviviparous.” She paused and reluctantly added, “They retain their eggs until they hatch internally. Then they come planet-side to refill their crops after the birth. They don’t make nests.”
“That’s what I meant.”
“No,” she said. “It’s not.”
Now Sun watches the clouds with a mug of Earl Gray cupped in both hands. The observation deck features a 270-degree domed window and a metal floor so reflective that she feels like she’s standing on the same sky floating above her.
“You didn’t have to correct him, Sundimnya,” Dossa whispers to her, facing away so it doesn’t seem as though his student needs a talking-to. She wonders if he knows that he has whipped cream in his beard.
“I didn’t?”
“It was a great compliment that we were invited for the capture, you know. Most pilots never see this.”
She shrugs. “I could have just watched the recording after.”
She does want to be here, but it’s worth it to see the look on Dossa’s face: the raised eyebrows and wide eyes, the barely audible sigh.
In the flat expanse of the clouds, there is a stirring. She squints.
“When is the flock supposed to arrive?”
“They estimated half an hour.”
She leans into him, points to a stirring in the clouds. “Do you think so?”
She feels the pang in her chest, and she bets Dossa does, too. After working with her bird for years, the wonder has never left. If anything, it has grown. Sun isn’t the superstitious type, but she has spent so long memorizing everything about the gastor, from the feeling of her bird’s skin against hers to the rhythm of its breathing to the cadence of its locomotion. The crew of the Cyclops doesn’t see the held-breath silence of the sky preceding the arrival of a flock. If she said a word, they could call it prescience.
She hooks her arm into the crook of Dossa’s.
When the flock breaches the clouds, they make even the peaks seem small. Their feet claw for purchase against the cliff faces and their wings beat frantically against the wind, weighed down by the unfamiliar gravity. As one wraps its serpentine neck around the crags, another crashes into it and forces its too-big body beneath the other’s wing. In space, the gas gathered in their crops makes their blubberous bodies inflate, but here, their deeply pigmented skin is pulled drum-like across their keels.
Sun has rarely seen a flock of Gastor siderum this numerous. It crowds the crags, spinning and trumpeting as the birds blot out the starlight with both their wings and the hanging carcasses of their prey. Their last meal paints their faces red.
She picks out the eldest pilot-bird from the frenzy. Gastor age like whales, combs cauliflowered and wattles tickmarked. Their flesh holds a potter’s fingermarks, and the pilot-bird, who so often leads their flights, bears the deepest scars. But like a bee colony that has outgrown its nest, this flock has hatched a new pilot-bird so it may take half the flock as its own.
Around Sun, the crew cheers. Their eyes flicker every which way. Sun remembers the first time she saw a flock like this, how she couldn’t make out fleshy, vent-lined tail from neck, nor ends from beginnings. Here, only she and Dossa know where to look.
She finds the hatchling’s little head nestled beneath the two birds on the mountainside. Her heart leaps into her throat. She can only tell it apart from a misplaced rock by its wide, four-eyed stare.
They usually don’t find pilot-birds so young. Not clinging-to-its-mother young.
Above them, droning hydraulics indicate the release of the capture vessels.
“This could be yours someday,” Dossa muses.
She wants to crack open his skull and figure out how he arrived here at this unearned optimism.
No one knows how long gastor live for. Sun and Dossa’s bird has been served by generations of pilots. When she met it, she felt like a child. Some days she wakes up, consumed with dread, because she may walk into the bird’s chamber and find it sprawled across the floor.
If their bird dies in the middle of her career, she would be lucky to be stationed on a new ship with another bird so old that she feels small all over again. That is, if there are any unmanned birds at all. More likely, she will be abandoned, grounded—
Waiting and waiting and waiting.
She imagines meeting this new, egg-wet thing, imagines cradling its head in her hands. She is filled with a sudden hatred for the pilot destined for this bird. She didn’t think she would feel like this. If it is a shock to anyone, it is one especially to her.
• • • •
When Sun returns to Messina’s Third Daughter, she visits her bird first.
Under the watchful gaze of two stylized gastor sculpted over the doorways, Sun slips into her suit, checks the integrity of the hooks latched to her side, and fits her mask over her mouth and nose. The door behind her seals shut with a hiss, then the one before her swings open.
Down a shining, aluminum walkway lies a pair of metal hands within a glass dome. A radiant, cerulean sphere, the piloting chamber, the bird’s home. At the midpoint between, she needs to hold onto the railings. The magnets in her gloves keep her from floating toward the ceiling before she can anchor herself inside of the chamber.
Despite their brief jaunts onto planets, gastor don’t maintain the bone density needed to withstand gravity for long periods of time, so the bird’s chamber is held at arm’s length away from the ship.
The exception being hatchlings captured days after birth—or birds born and raised in captivity—housed without zero gravity accommodations.
And no one has ever bred a pilot-bird. These strange variations on the wild type gastor feature a complete intersex reproductive system and unusually discerning sensory organs. By unknown means, gastor control the production of pilot birds to exactly one per flock.
One per wild flock. Captive flocks don’t produce any at all.
Does Sun want to see that anyway? Those big-boned, domestic creatures made dense as they were pulled toward the Earth, covered in a puffy coat of down, huddled up on their stumpy necks and hypertrophied haunches? She and Dossa were invited to a private collection of Earthly gastor last year and she could hardly look them in the eye. How insulting that would be, she thinks, to do the same to a pilot-bird.
Pushing against the railing, she propels herself toward the chamber and pulls herself inside.
Like Sun, the bird has been on vacation. Untethered from the piloting apparatus, it floats in the upper sector of its chamber in the classical gastorian pose: head cushioned in the rolls of its neck like a ball python hidden beneath a rock, its fatty tail curled back towards its body. Vapors made from the bird’s exhaust and the gas filtered in from the body of the ship swirl to create a fog that lazily plays with the bird’s wattles.
The technicians, mercifully, have tinted the glass panels, obscuring the flight of the wild flock. One of the panels is a slightly different color than the rest due to an old repair. The story Sun hears about this panel is always different: in some, it was damaged by stray debris and a distracted pilot; in others, the bird broke it with its wing. Accidentally, of course. It must have been startled.
As the bird turns towards her, the circular stomata on either side of its keel stare like false eyes. She waves.
“I don’t like being gone for so long,” she says to it. “It makes my skin itch.”
Sometimes she feels like it understands her, especially when she talks (she’s told it about her house on Earth, and that sometimes she misses the feeling of grass beneath her feet, and—most recently—that she’s managed to source a substitute for her sister’s rosy scent, which comes so close, but not quite, to the smell Sun associates with her childhood), but she knows that’s nonsense. Sun’s mother thinks her dog understands humans, too.
“The capture was strange. Dossa doesn’t seem to understand why I think so.”
Fumes from the fermented food of the bird’s dual crop, exhaled from the gill-like stomata on its tail, propels it forward at a languid pace. In the comfort of space, wings are not for locomotion. The slow, undulating movement of its wings stimulates its body walls, moving gas through its air sacs and food through its guts without the need for a consistent negative pressure system.
Sun admires the pulsing muscle moving like the waves of the sea beneath the bird’s skin. Encased behind protective glass for decades, the bird is so pale that its skin is translucent. Yellow fat pads flank its keel, spiderwebbed with purple veins. Following the death of the pilot-bird of Nine Heads Overlooking the River earlier this year, theirs is the oldest one in captivity.
Her head falls to the side. “Did you ever hide any hatchlings under there?”
With a click, the monitor to her right turns on. Brow furrowed, she pulls on her tethers to get back to the wall and unlatches the device, intending to turn it off.
Sequences of white text play across the screen. This data is transmitted from the electrodes installed in the bird’s brain. Both its brain and electrodes are covered with a metal plate, which cuts off the signal, but sometimes bits and pieces still leak through.
Sun has spent the better part of her life learning how to interpret her bird’s neural outputs so she can relay that information to the navigation crew in real time.
But she can’t make heads nor tails of this. There’s an entire screen filled with the same line repeated over and over. She scrolls past the repeated code, and the neural output descends into jumbled nonsense, full of lines she’s never seen before. Her finger hovers over the power button.
A shadow falls over her. The bird has come closer now, neck stretched forward, lines of murky gas trailing from its nostrils, the black orbs of its eyes unblinking. She has never forgotten how huge her bird is, but she has forgotten the feeling in her gut when it is so close to her, its head as tall as she is, its wings spanning past the far reaches of her vision. Terrific, nauseous. The beeps of the monitor drift into the back of her mind, far away now, as she tries to make sense of the output filling up the screen.
“What is this?”
Her mask muffles her voice, her words bent in strange ways by the gastorian exhaust.
The output ceases.
• • • •
Leaning back in her recliner, Sun drags a finger down today’s neural output. Flickering on her computer screen, it doesn’t scare her as much as it did before.
The electrodes were probably malfunctioning, she tells herself.
Although most of it appears to be nonsense, both the first and last line are the same. It’s probably an olfactory code, but for a chemical she is unfamiliar with, which is especially odd since the bird didn’t have access to any new scents. She picks at her hair as she reads. Her curls lie close to her head, but she can stretch each coil down to her eyebrow if she tugs hard enough.
Beside her, her friend, Metir Hati, finally sits down with a mug of warm wine and taps the television remote.
“The capture?” he asks as it boots up.
“Was fine,” Sun says. Tapping the down arrow, scanning the rest of the output for familiar codes. “I’m not sure what I expected.”
“And that?” He gestures to her computer.
She wheels her chair over quickly. “It’s nothing.”
Hati exhales. He doesn’t reply, but he does cross his legs. His body is made up of all sharp angles, from the slope of his bowed lips to the way his knuckles jut out of his skin. He turns on the display, and the video chat interface is projected onto the wall. The cursor still hovers over the name Mare Indrani even though their last call was nearly three weeks ago.
Hati, graciously, navigates away from this without comment. He pulls up a video instead.
“Is this what you wanted to show me?” Sun asks.
“These are the failures.”
In the video, a gastor hatchling peels the remnants of its caul from its neck, wings still glued to its side with albumin. From out of view, a metal pointer lifts the hatchling’s head up. Hati’s monotone rings through the speakers, “Keel sensors poorly developed. Wing vasculature under—”
He skips to the next video. Another hatchling. A light is flashed into its eyes, and it stumbles away with an alarm cry.
The next. Two gloved hands pry open its beak. Beneath the weight of its gravity-laden body, its legs tremble.
“Shamans show high ocular resistance to UV radiation even at a young age. Sublingual gland pores should be open and functional within an hour of birth,” Hati says.
Human technology has yet to develop the same navigational prowess of a pilot-bird, which can not only detect novel planets or oncoming threats in unexplored regions of space, but also calculate efficient, safe routes instinctively. Researchers have only just breached the surface of pilot-bird sensory organs: from the cryptochromes that allow them to detect magnetic fields to olfaction more sensitive than a state-of-the-art spectroscopy.
Although she isn’t intimately familiar with the embryonic development of pilot-birds, Sun doesn’t need to be told. She can see it in these hatchlings already in their ghostly visage, the dullness of their eyes. They’re nothing like the child she saw today.
“Did you grow all of these?”
“Unfortunately,” Hati says. “Genetically, they are identical to your shaman, but correct maturation cannot be confirmed until late development. These hatchlings were selected from a batch of fifty treated with a cocktail of pheromones. Each one bore proto-pilot organs which, inevitably, failed to develop.”
“What happened to them?”
“They were no longer needed.”
The next video plays. This hatchling is still curled up in a bath of amnion, shielded from the world with panes of glass. Lined with red tissue, an eye-shaped organ emerges from the hatchling’s keel—one on each side—glistening, dark. Barbels hang from the base of its beak and vibrate softly.
“Oh,” Sun says.
“We are watching this one.”
“This one,” Sun echoes.
• • • •
Sun read the brief last night. This tutorial flight is routine and typically wouldn’t require gastorian piloting, but a flare star damaged some of their equipment while she and Dossa were away. The nearest station is too far away to be detected with their current navigational capabilities. She just needs to get them within a day’s travel or so. Just needs to keep them on course.
“Why do you think Dr. Metir still calls pilot-birds ‘shamans’?” she asks Dossa as they wait for the preparations to cease.
Even though he’s in the adjunctive deck above the piloting chamber, she can see him shrug. His voice trickles in through her radio. “He strikes me as the sentimental type.”
“Does he?”
“That’s the joke, Officer Mare.”
She stops herself from asking if he has seen Hati’s hatchling. Hati often confides in Sun first, particularly when his findings are promising but not confirmed. Not to mention, there’s other people in the observation deck today. She should have known, as soon as she had entered the atrium, that the Daughter’s operators were going to observe her tutorial today, given that Dossa had brushed his beard for once, slicked back his hair, and even covered the mole beneath his right eye with a dot of terracotta-brown concealer.
Either way, she hopes he learns of the hatchling soon. She can only imagine his excitement.
A shrill alarm announces the chamber’s imminent depressurization. A full suit and helmet protect Sun from the vacuum as the glass panels yawn open. Now more than ever, she relies on the tethers to keep her connected to the piloting apparatus: shaped like two hands held back-to-back, the apparatus holds Sun in the palm of one hand and the bird in the claws of the other. She’s heard that the late commissioner of the Daughter was an artist before an explorer, and that she oversaw the sculpture of each wrinkle personally.
The bird’s skull cap is open now, the metal plate slid away. Through the glint of green-coated protective glass, she can see the melanistic tissue of its brain.
It lifts its head as the expanse unrolls before them (slowly now, but soon each star will be a line of white and the blackness in between unreadable). Miphre sparkles with starlight reflected off its mica-laden peaks. In an instant, Sun’s monitor flashes to life and the bird’s neural outputs fill the screen with inconsequential readings: Ozone smell. An iron-metal pull planet-side.
With a wave of her hand, she asks for blinders to her left. The glass panels shift back with bone-shaking creaks,
now tinted black.
She studies the monitor.
As she stares, the strings of code appear to float. She touches each glowing character with the tips of her fingers because she knows soon they will disappear entirely.
She directs the crew over the radio: lips moving, words like whale song in her ears, but she doesn’t register what she’s saying. Each calculation is automatic. The bird senses the magnetic pull of the station from a distance Sun herself can’t comprehend, the magnitude of each metallic twitch embedded in code. She finds the coordinates in an animal part of her brain—a feeling/unthinking part that understands how a vector becomes somewhere in space—as the rest of her drifts further away.
Dossa says piloting is like studying a painting. Each code becomes a different color, distinctly but subtly different, and he picks through the shades until they become a whole picture. Today, in this painting, they crash through a cloud of methane and ethanol and Sun feels the smell so thickly in her throat that she might as well tear her helmet off.
Her bird lets hydrocarbons fall on its tongue, each drop of wax dissolving in its saliva to be stored in its buccal sacs. It breathes out the same chemicals in a new ratio: a new, generic flock-recognition pheromone that says: I am here; this is my name; this is my family’s name.
Three planets lie in the path between them and the station: the farthest is invisible, the next a dot winking, and the third so bright that it hums in scarlet, redder as they approach, making her shake with its new baritone voice.
She wishes she could tell her bird each of their names.
She describes their locations relative to the ship, and as Messina’s Third Daughter adjusts her course, Sun doesn’t hear the creaking metal or the hissing hydraulics. She sees the pressure shift deep in the bird’s chest, its stomata stenosed to the right, exhaust pumped out to the left, wings tilted just so. Although it is strapped to the ship, it thinks it’s flying on its own route.
There is a wisp of route-propagation pheromone so faint that Sun nearly misses it, but suddenly it is everywhere. Olfactory codes crawl across the screen:
Go here come here go here come here.
It must be from the Miphre flock. Her bird isn’t navigating anymore. It has pulled its head back against its body, beak yawning wide, keel stomata flared.
It sees them. Black wings on black night. Their scent lingers: mother and the not-quite pilot; the smell of amnion; their summons and Sun’s/the bird’s answer, which has become their singular thought.
Would they ever see each other again?
With stomach-churning force, Sun drags herself back into her body.
“Neutralizer for the propagation signal, please!” she calls.
The gas is pumped into the chamber and fanned onto the bird’s face; the scent is generally confusing enough to prevent any more olfactory outputs. A temporary solution. But they should be out of the flock’s pheromone range within the hour. Already, the hatchling’s smell fades away.
“Mare?”
She doesn’t answer. She’ll resume the flight imminently, and that will be answer enough. Quickly, she puts her fingers to the monitor again, stills her body, and tries to sink into the bird’s thoughts once again. She reads the first line.
The nonsense output has returned.
It starts with the same olfactory code, the one she saw just the other day. The bird’s smelling a gas that she’s never even seen in space before. She can’t even find the compounds that make up the neutralizing gas in the jumbled mess that follows.
“Dr. Mare?”
She presses her fingers into the screen. As fast as her gloved hands will let her, she navigates to the admin commands so she can make a copy for herself. She highlights the nonsense output, scrolls down and down and down. Last time, the nonsense ended with the olfactory code. If she can find that, she’ll know she’s gotten the whole thing. But it’s even longer than the first time.
“Sundimnya.”
Dossa’s voice pulls the chamber to a halt. The stars return in stark focus and Sun hugs the monitor to her chest.
In the fragile stillness, she finds herself vibrating.
“I need to go,” she says.
• • • •
In the evening, Sun finds a man in the cafe and brings him to her suite.
He has round, clear eyes, which remind her of a pond, and smooth skin. She thinks he could be handsome, so she ignores his unbrushed hair and the oil stains on his sleeve.
She strips him naked (he tries to kiss her once; “I’d rather not,” she says) and places him on the bed, belly-up. Without his clothes, she’s struck by how much larger he is compared to her. It makes her stomach roll, and for a moment, she forgets why she picked this one.
“Here,” she says, and she straddles his hips. He lets his hands fall on her waist, but the touch is distant, hollow.
This used to be nice. And simple, too. She hasn’t enjoyed sex in quite a while, but she still tells herself that the next time might be different. Sometimes she convinces herself that she misses it. Someone like Indrani probably misses it, and someone like Indrani probably cheats because she actually likes getting off.
He thumbs between her labia.
“Do you like that?”
“Sure,” Sun says.
Even though she transferred her files to her computer, her tablet is still on and the codes slide across the screen, staring at her from her nightstand. She shoves the device into the drawer. When she slinks back to her seat in his lap, she can only bring herself to look at the wall past his head: the chipping latex paint and the metal bolts beneath.
She shouldn’t think about the nonsense output. Noise shows up from time to time, and pilots are trained to skim over it. Researchers haven’t decoded every type of gastorian thought, but they have decoded those relevant to piloting. Anything she can’t read is simply a waste of time.
Thankfully, the man below her is already erect, so she doesn’t have to get her hands dirty. She lowers herself onto him slowly, exhaling. At the very least, the sensation is comforting in its familiarity.
“Sun—”
“Please don’t talk,” she says, finally. “You’re ruining it.”
She closes her eyes as she rocks back and forth. Perhaps this feeling of fullness, like a warm stomach after a meal, could be mistaken for real affection.
If only she could enjoy it, maybe she could forget the sound of Dossa’s voice over the radio, and maybe the bird’s neural outputs would stop sliding across the back of her eyelids.
Didn’t it seem deliberate? The same olfactory code, twice. An impossible smell.
That’s how the birds talk to one another. Their pheromone language is one of the most complex in the animal kingdom. If a bird were to talk to anyone, wouldn’t it try scents first?
The man kisses the space between her neck and her ear, and she thinks, Fine. She thinks, Maybe he’s on to
something, so she sandwiches his face between her palms and kisses him. Their teeth clink together. He lets his
thick fingers worm into her hair.
What if she were kissing Indrani? Sun replaces the man’s clumsy tongue with Indrani’s carefully manicured fingers picking their way over her teeth. Sun squeezes her eyes shut and decides that his tannic sweat is a new designer perfume.
Last time she saw Indrani on a video call, it wasn’t really Indrani. Sure the face looked the same, but that doesn’t matter. It’s like a worm crawled up inside of the woman Sun used to call her wife and now stares out through the holes of her eyes. Sun can’t shake the uncanny feeling of looking into the holes and feeling nothing at all.
She finds that she’s gripping the man’s shoulders tightly and that he shudders when her nails dig into his skin. Would it help if she hurt him? She would like to disappear into that animal version of herself, but when she tries (claws, teeth, tongue), his noises make her grimace. She’s embarrassed for him and embarrassed for herself for pretending at all.
Would another student imagine she were with Dossa? The handsome teacher: older, wiser, gentler. Last she saw him, she had just rushed back to the atrium, helmet in hand. The doors swung open and Dossa stalked past silently, face obscured by the tint of his visor.
He’s going to talk to her about the incident tomorrow, but the wait makes it worse. You’re too deep into your training now to make mistakes like this, he’ll say. When you’re an established pilot, there’ll be no one to save you. You’re lucky you still have someone to clean up your messes.
When Sun had been assigned to Dossa, he was surprised to learn that she was married. Before that, all of her instructors had warned her that she and Indrani would split up by the end of the academic year. Their protests only made her cling to Indrani harder. Was it spite? The two of them spoke every day after Sun’s lectures; when visitation hours arrived, she covered Indrani in claw marks, tore out her hair and kept it beneath her pillow until the sheets smelled like saffron. Sun never loses. After all, out of her class of fifteen students, only she and one other graduated to flighted mentors.
Dossa claims he doesn’t miss his life before the bird, but he had to have been a normal man at one point or another, right? Sun knows he was a soldier when he was young and that his lover was his brother-at-arms—she thinks she knows what kind of a love he and Dossa had because once Sun said, “Before this, I wanted to swallow Indrani whole,” and Dossa, finally, didn’t look at her with pity. He nodded, looked to the window, and swished his drink between his cheeks. “Yeah,” he said, because he knew.
There is a specific kind of person suited for gastorian piloting and a specific kind of love. Sun’s love for Indrani was her prototype.
She hears a sound that reminds her of a wounded animal. The hair along her spine stands straight up. For the first time, she really sees the man beneath her. His odor becomes sulfurous. Her fingers slide into the damp meat of his abdomen. As his mouth opens, she sees the yellow plaque that coats the surface of his lolling tongue.
With a gasp, she stumbles out of the bed, bare feet slapping against the floor. The nighttime silence bears down on her shoulders.
He braces himself up on his elbows. All she can see are his eyes: glassy, dog-like in their blackness.
“Is something wrong?” he asks.
“You should go,” Sun whispers.
“What? Why?”
“I want you to leave.”
She retreats to her office chair. Back to him, she listens for the sound of his clothes rustling and feels the coldness of his shadow falling over her as he heads towards the door. He’s muttering under his breath.
“Bitch.”
She’s on her feet in an instant, her nails biting into her fists. “Don’t fucking call me that.”
The door slams shut behind him.
A draft plays across Sun’s bare skin. Somehow, she feels more exposed now. Still shaking, she goes to her desk and switches on her computer monitor. The neural output is still there. It’s always there; she couldn’t bring herself to even close the program. She can’t even sit down, so she leans against the back of the chair, looming over the jumbled mess of characters and staring until they swim across her vision.
“I’m afraid of you,” she admits.
She picks up a stylus and bites the end of it.
It’s been so long since she’s really had to translate gastorian neural outputs. She has memorized the important codes, which is the only way she can interpret for the crew so quickly. But for each olfactory or pheromone code, the characters correspond to the chemical makeup of the compound, which has already been filtered and analyzed through the bird’s stomata.
Turning on red markup, she writes on the touchscreen, isolating the olfactory codes from the rest of the nonsense output. With her other hand, she types her notes on her tablet.
She puts the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle. The amount of hydrogen ions and carbon rings, each potential spot for a methyl group or a double bond to an oxygen molecule. It feels like stretching a cramped muscle, atrophied with disuse, and before long the document is covered in red.
She narrows the olfactory codes to a few potential configurations, which she searches up in their piloting database.
Geraniol. Damascone. Rose oxide.
She pauses, squints.
Rose perfume?
• • • •
Sun leans on the wall outside of Dossa’s office, half of her face buried in a scarf. On her tablet, she executes and terminates the neural analysis program absently until a notification makes her heart leap. She thinks it must be from Dossa, but instead it’s a video from Hati.
His hatchling floats in a depressurized glass chamber. She’s not surprised Hati has a lab in the zero-gravity unit. A metal claw holds out a strip of meat, and the hatchling snatches it with dizzying speed, tossing its head back to swallow it whole. Beak wide open, the teeth-like papillae lining its tongue catch the light. Hazy gas escapes in wisps from its sublingual pores.
Someone laughs. “Hungry today?” Hati says from off-screen. Sun has never heard him speak like that. Like he’s smiling.
All four of the hatchling’s eyes are open and clear, still baby bird blue, and there’s a spot just behind its nares, in the same place as Sun’s bird. What if this hatchling is already grown up by the time her bird dies?
It’ll be like it never left.
The video spins around to Hati. Hati has always been pretty, but there’s a new quality to his face when the pale glow of the incubator’s UV lights reflects off his skin. Womanish and hen-like. Sun lets herself smile back.
“You should visit us,” he says.
Down the hall, heavy footsteps echo. The lights are on a twelve-hour cycle, so she can’t make out his face, but she knows it’s Dossa. He stops by her side, shoulder-to-shoulder against the wall.
“Do you know how late it is, Sun?”
“I’m sorry, Dossa.” She sucks on her lip. She doesn’t have a script for how she wants to approach this conversation, and when she tries to think of what she wants to say, she sees Hati’s hatchling instead and the hatchling from the capture and the flock from Miphre blotting out the sky.
“Do you think—” she starts. “Do you think our bird likes it here?”
It takes a second for Dossa to respond. “We meet every standard of gastorian care.”
“No, not—not that bullshit. I mean, do you think it likes piloting? Is it happy in there? Does it remember being taken?”
Something unreadable crosses his face. Sun tries to rub the chill out of her arms.
“It’s best not to ask questions like that,” he says, stooping down to eye level. “Nothing good comes of this.”
With a sigh, she nods, and says, “You need to look at this.”
She opens the neural outputs, hands the tablet to Dossa. The pressure from her fingers makes the screen flicker.
“What is this?”
“It’s from today’s flight.”
“Sun . . .”
She doesn’t know how long she can bear to hear him talk like that. He has to believe her—she feels it in her bones. She and Dossa are the same; Indrani and his nameless lover, the same. He has to understand.
“Just look at it,” she says.
He peers over his glasses as he reads.
“A first-year student could look at this and tell you it’s just noise,” Dossa says. “Is this why you excused yourself?”
“We received this olfactory code right after you released the neutralizing gas. The bird shouldn’t have been able to smell anything.”
“So it was remembering a smell.”
“This has happened before!” Desperation drags tears to her eyes, which she furiously blinks away. Stealing the tablet back,she scrolls to the end of the output. “The same scent, from two days ago. We weren’t even flying.”
She watches Dossa’s eyes roll across the screen. The cold light makes him shockingly pale, ghostly. Old.
“Did anything strange happen after you took over?” she asks, haltingly.
Anything. Anything at all.
“No.” He scrolls, reading more deliberately now.
She wraps her arms around herself. When she speaks next, it’s in a whisper. “What if it’s only giving these messages to me?”
“‘Messages?’” He switches off the screen with a sense of finality that makes Sun feel as if she’s been slapped.
“Sun, do you hear yourself?”
“You don’t think this is strange?”
The pause he takes stretches for too long. Sun can hear her heart pounding in her ears.
“You aren’t acting like yourself,” he says.
A realization washes over her like shower water cold enough to make her chest ache. He thinks she’s crazy. She sinks back against the wall, meeting the gaze of the wall opposite of her, unblinking.
“We’re resuming normal flights once we leave the station,” Dossa says. Exploratory flights. Flights where small errors in calculations could leave the ship destroyed by asteroids, by magnetic storms, by the iron-clad astral cetaceans that eat gastor whole. “I need you prepared. Do you understand?”
She nods.
Dossa shifts his weight and the floor creaks beneath him, like he’s about to leave, but he stays for another moment, staring at the same spot on the wall as she is.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, “we took you up here, too. You left your family behind. But you’re meant to be here, Sun. You’re happy. Aren’t you?”
“Sure,” she says. “I am. Are you?”
He exhales, puts a hand on her shoulder, and squeezes. “Sure.”
• • • •
Sun ties herself to the Daughter’s hand and sits cross-legged above the aluminum palm, the monitor in her lap.
“My sister loved roses,” Sun says. “Sometimes she made scents herself by picking roses from her garden and steeping the petals in oil. That’s why I can’t find anything that smells quite like her.”
Her bird floats far out of reach, but it stirs at the sound of her voice. Behind pink clouds of its own making, its undulating silhouette draws nearer.
“But my wife smells like saffron,” Sun says, although it feels like a lie. How could she know? It’s been years since she’s smelled Indrani’s skin. “She spends too much money on perfume.”
The monitor clicks on and already, lines of code fill the screen. She lets her hand drift across the surface, scrolling past.
The bird places its head between the apparatus’ thumb and index finger. Messina’s Third Daughter wears rings studded with rubies and emeralds. Even the texture of the skin has been meticulously carved into the metal; gold vermeil remains in the crevices of the fingerprints and the edges of the nail beds. Where the skin has not been worn smooth, Sun finds little gastorian motifs curled across the knuckles and reflected in the bird’s eyes.
“May I?” Sun asks, holding out a hand. Her bird doesn’t move. She presses her hand flat against its beak, which is shockingly cold to the touch. She stays there for a moment, feeling her pulse swell up against her bird. It is a rare pleasure to touch it.
The monitor chimes again, and Sun returns to it reluctantly. Under the gaze of her bird, she takes notes on the scents at the end of the output. First, the rose perfume again. Secondly, safranal. And thirdly—
She recognizes the last code immediately. It’s a pheromone used by a submissive bird to appease one higher in the pecking order or by a hatchling to a mother.
The sight of these characters fills Sun with a reactionary unease. She’s never considered herself either of those things: a superior, a mother—to her bird? There’s something unnatural about the thought, perverse, shameful enough to make her ears grow hot. The bird could have a century on her. It may die before her; it may outlive her. She has no way of knowing.
“Oh—Oh no, this isn’t me,” she stutters. Can it even understand her? She feels, suddenly, like she’s losing her mind, so she presses her fingertips into the warm skin beneath its eyes. It has to know. It has to. As she clings to this threadbare line of communication between them, she imagines that it too has clawed itself toward her with the same desperation.
The bird turns away, dorsal stomata flared open as it snakes up towards the top of the chamber. The same pheromone appears on the monitor, again and again.
If not her, she thinks, then who else?
[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 2 NEXT WEEK]
About the Author
Lowry Poletti is a Black author, artist, and veterinary student from New Jersey. They write a variety of fantasy, scifi, and horror fiction unified by their fascination with gore. When they aren’t writing about monsters and the people who love them, they can be found wrist deep in a formalin-fixed lab specimen. Their other pieces appear in Strange Horizons, Baffling Magazine, and Fantasy Magazine. You can find more of their work on their website: lowrypoletti.wordpress.com.
Please visit Lightspeed Magazine to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the February 2025 issue, which also features short fiction by Andrew Dana Hudson, Seoung Kim, Eugenia Triantafyllou, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Kristina Ten, David DeGraff, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $4.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition here.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
