Aves: the class of vertebrates recognized as birds [Latin. Plural: Avis] * His name— …Shinichiro Tamaki… —means nothing here: not in a way he recognizes, at least. He is not Shinichiro the Alien or Shinichiro the Pale-skin. He is not even, as far as he can tell, Shinichiro the Human. To the local mind (as it governs the local eye) he is scarcely a ghost, but the locals are easy in their friendly, laconic tolerance of him. When it occurs to them, they show him things. They teach him words—one at a time and with endless reserves of patience—illustrating their meanings with the eloquence of gesture: a point, a smile, a pantomime. He smiles and remembers their words and their associated, dance-like movements. If they have their own name for him, they never say it in his presence. There are those who speak to him in Terran Standard, but their words—when spoken—wear a common and inscrutable accent suspended somewhere between cat-purr and brogue. They are human. Their world, as Shinichiro has always known it, is called Maalé; it dwells on the fringes of human-inhabited space, far away from everywhere else. At times, he recites its name, as if to remind himself of its reality, as if a local woman, man, or child, has pointed to the soil underfoot in illustration of that single, proper noun. (Maalé, though associated with the planet is not a literal associate of “earth” or “rock” or “soil.” Maalé, if he understands its sometimes-unfixed meaning is home: the place your feet know, when they stand upon it, the place you know when you smell it.) Maalé. There are cities here. There are spaceports. Each is as far away as any of the others from the village of Fás, though Fás itself is not some primitive backwater village. Maalé, he thinks to himself. Fás. And the words echo, now, into the last hour of nocturnal silence before sunrise. The others will rise soon: the lady of the house, Damai, and her husband (perhaps half an hour later) Bweha. They will, by late morning, attend to village business, doling out herbolic tinctures, salves, and elixirs to cure skin fungus, dodgy stomachs, tree-peeler’s rash, and errant erections. Damai, as always, will leave lunch for him; and quiet advice on where to go, where to find the nesting sites he seeks, or interesting fossil-beds: each as likely to shadow his research as much as illuminate some obscure facet of it. Bweha, as is common, will leave a map for him, drawn on a scrap of canvas, a sheet of velum, a leaf. Each map clarifies one or another of Damai’s suggestions. Shinichiro always goes where Bweha instructs. And now, at an hour before dawn, he wakes up and begins his morning rituals. * * * Bweha has drawn a good route for him: the only one Shinichiro really ever needs. There is a whole language of maps in the village of Fás: a map for every need. For every map, there is a substance: a grade of paper, a weave of fabric, and for special maps—something of an intimacy shared among compatriots—a species of leaf with veins like the existential skeleton of a particular type of journey. Shinichiro has been given a wealth of maps: on leather for his journeys to prosaic places in the village, on fine vellum for his trips to the old places marked on the landscape itself by obelisks, dolmens, and on occasion, the ruins of something that might once have been an interstellar vessel. He has seen a map, once, made of woven hair. Now, he follows a course drawn on a single leaf affixed to coarse, cotton-fiber paper and protected by a fine spray of protective varnish. He doesn’t need the map, but he keeps it, and refers to it as a courtesy to Bweha. (The map, he knows, will go with him when he returns to Earth.) Shinichiro walks, now: quietly. His footsteps draw the map, recreating it in a footprint here, a twig (snapped) there. The first shadings of sunlight color the eastern sky. The bellies of clouds hold the first shades of peach-hue light, while to the west, the sky remains dark, violet, and indolent with the last scraps of night. The forest—never still, and never silent—looms in shadow around him with its trees like succulent towers of bamboo and odd, wholly-alien hourglass shapes. The hour-glass leviathans are crowned with umbrella-canopies of acid-green foliage. Loud things live in those trees: primate-things, though something reptilian lurks in their pointed-snout faces. Shinichiro has some near-intimate knowledge of them. He knows what they are called, but in his letters home—to Mako and to Noriko, to Jareth, to Yuki, and to Peter—he calls them iguana monkeys: lizards in fur coats, lizards that build snares and traps against the hordes of marauder rodents that threaten their nests. In Fás, they are called The Little Men and are admired for their habit of eating the little things that threaten them. The Little Men have taught the humans of Fás how to build a better mousetrap. He hears them now, cooing and hooting at one another, like a chorus of precocious wooden owls. As Shinichiro approaches a natural clearing, he comes upon a group of quiet young men, as human as himself, but dark in the way that the men of Fás wear darkened skin in various shades of nut: like pecans, like walnuts, or if ruddy, like acorns. He is a ghost among them, pale: gaikoku-jin if he applies a term from his own language to himself. Alien. He knows that they are tree-peelers. He recognizes a few of them, though they have never revealed their names. They stand amid the tools of their profession: sealed buckets of some arboreal irritant to inspire the growth of scab bark on the enormous stands of bamboo tree, like enormous smokestacks that—in a moment of evolutionary whimsy—have decided to crown themselves with ostrich plumes. They will apply irritant to the trees and inspire the rapid growth of strong, flexible bark. Others will come and peel the bark, cut it, and shape it into walls for new homes, or for old homes in need of expansion. The trees do not die, and by Bweha’s account, a single tree will grow walls for an entire city as big as Somál, with its spaceport and modern monstrosities of metal and glass. He approaches the tree peelers, aware of a pause in their conversation. He bows to them, resisting the urge to reach for the camera hanging from his neck. (There are times when he wishes to capture their images: their faces, postures, and dawn-shadowed colors; but now—as always—he refrains from the potential, rude imposition.) He adjusts his backpack, as distraction from what these young Fás men would likely see as rude, off-world behavior. They scarcely acknowledge him, though it seems—for an instant—that they search him for something in common with themselves: a familiar facial cast, a thought in their language, or the familiar narrative of planet-local history in the weave of his DNA. He passes them, and glances back. Three of them have resumed their conversation, but one—the tallest among them—keeps his gaze on Shinichiro and smiles faintly, offering the rakish precision of a stiff, though friendly, bow. * * * The birds, when he reaches their colony site, are already active. Shinichiro has come to expect this. They squawk to one another; they preen, and kick litter from their nests, sweeping—Shinichiro thinks—with their feet, in the pseudo-avian echo of dogs scattering their droppings with backwards kicks of their hind legs. He knows to avoid the trees during nest-sweeping. A jagged maze of olivine formations has reshaped the forest. Smaller trees grow in the increased sunlight where the rock prevents larger trees from sinking their roots; vines and creepers are a treacherous riot beneath the loam of fallen leaves, twigs, and bird drops kicked from the nests above. The trees themselves are something like acacias, for their common shape. Their canopies are wide and good for shade and they are heavy with birds and nests. The tree canopy (here) is like the strangest of rain-clouds, occasionally releasing flurries of nest-litter. High up, limbs intertwine, as the pseudo-acacias engage in the strangest of ecological dances. Each tree competes with its neighbors, to secure sunlight and rainfall. The upper canopy of this stretch of forest is a wild display of phototropic contortion with branches like snakes, mating; and with the leaf stems of one tree braiding around the leaf stems of its neighbor with murderous intent. An uneven rain of nest debris whispers down from the lower canopy: the nest-cleaning frenzy of fastidious, social birds…if their feathers are any indication. Like any bird Shinichiro might recognize, they bear beaks and talons; they speak in a range of squawks and chortles, like crows, like gulls, like any number of creatures Shinichiro can scarcely name. They are shaped like grackles. They are as large as chickens. They are green and gray with black-tipped wings and patches of white-speckled-red beneath their chins. They regard the world through large, dark eyes: forward-pointing evidence of their predatory tendencies. He has visited them on countless occasions; he has come to know individual birds, though he has refrained from naming them. To do so, he thinks, may offend the gods of Maalé. He does not believe in gods, nor do the planet-local people, but he cannot bring himself to apply Terran names, not even significant Nihon-jin names from his grandmother’s Shinto mythology. The birds are accustomed to his presence and his quiet manner. He moves slowly within the shadow of their complex colony: nests like woven bowls, suspended (by complex arrangements of fibrous vines) from the lower reaches of the overhead canopy. The sun has climbed higher and its light pierces gaps in the forest canopy. There are dead nests among the living; he has marked them, and now they are easy to find; a few of them hang close to the trunk of the nearest tree and he has devised a way of climbing it, of rigging a support for himself and his camera. He has come to use those supports and to record the further decay of the largest, dead nest. Though the birds are his primary focus, he is drawn to the patterns of entropy that claim the abandoned structures. They are, he thinks, sacrificial nests, surplus shelter built for the sole purpose of abandonment; the are, he thinks, signs that his beloved, alien birds are intelligent creatures. Beings, perhaps. Bweha says that these birds will build nests and abandon them so that they may attract small things: insect-variants. Cheap food. Shinichiro has seen the interloper bugs and is frightened of them for their size and their common, ferocious shape. They are nightmare things, as black as activated charcoal. They are alien chimeras: something of the common cockroach in their shape, something demonic in their complex mandibles like hinge-articulated mandibles. Maalé carries a higher level of oxygen in its atmosphere and so spiracle-breathing creatures can grow to a greater size than the insects of Earth. The dead nests catch his attention but fail to hold it. A subtle change in bird-noise alerts him to a different energy in the air, and so he pauses for a while and tries to see what differences surround him. A number of females (larger than the males) clean their nests, but without the kick-sweeping motion so familiar to him. They peck at nest litter, clinch it in their beaks, and simply drop it out of the nest openings. He is careful in climbing the nearest tree to a cluster of nests; he finds a branch thick enough to support his weight, as he hugs himself to the tree trunk. In this awkward, monkey-position, he is able to see into a nearby nest. Three wads of grayish fluff have replaced the three brownish eggs: they quiver and jostle one another as an adult (their mother?) meticulously eviscerates something the size of a mouse. There is some risk in capturing the tableau, but Shinichiro has come to know these trees, this forest, and his own relationship with planet-local gravity. He has watched tree-peelers and rambunctious boys from Fás, climbing trees and playing their complicated, near-combative games. He knows how to climb, how to gauge the strength of a branch, and—though he hasn’t tried—how to hang, sloth-like, while grabbing for something. He makes no sloth-motions now, but it is easy enough to grab the camera suspended from his neck; it is easy to use the tree trunk as a stabilizer, while he zooms in on the nest and ClickClickClick steals a number of photos in quick succession: ClickClickClick ClickClickClick ClickClickClick …as the sun moves, slowly, across the sky and at last, begins to sink. He spends the day here, photographing the nests, the chicks, and the parent-birds, flying to the nest with drooping things in their beaks, and leaving them for their mates to gut and shred for their ravenous chicks. There is strange visual poetry in the doting carnage playing out beneath this particular forest canopy. He captures as much of it as he dares, moving slowly and moving as carefully as he can. Three birds seem to recognize him, and by mid-day, he can count the number of times he has received gift-offerings of small, rodent-variant entrails. These birds, he knows, will form complex, social arrangements, all based on the sharing of food, and the three nameless birds—members of a clan, perhaps?—have included him in the colony ritual. He laughs at the thought of it: of local birds offering viscera in the way that a tea-master proffers brewed contemplation in an exquisite, ceramic cup. He cannot identify the organs he has been given, nor the animals they come from. He photographs them. He photographs each of the males responsible for the offerings and each of the females eyeing him, to see—perhaps—if he will eat the gifts, as any civilized person is surely expected to do. He collects them, wrapping them in leaves, and by the first hints of evening he knows that he will need to bury the gifts somewhere beyond the edge of this forest. As the sun begins its descent, he follows suit, climbing down from the last of today’s trees. He turns back, facing the overhanging colony and touches the bulging leaf of bird offerings. He smiles. “Domo arigato gozaimasu,” he says to the birds, as if they understand and speak Nihon-go: thank you very much. He bows, as if they understand the gesture. And perhaps, in some dim alien way, they do. * * * Now, the day replays itself on twelve diagonal inches of lap-screen display. Shinichiro has spent the evening with Damal and Bweha: quietly, at first and—later—through the ritual of the evening meal and quiet conversation for an hour before his hosts retired for the night. He has learned the names of eviscerated things, though he cannot identify any of them by the guts he was given. Now, he repeats those names to himself, savoring their subtle, alien flavor: —kipanya— —chui— —mjusi— There is something atavistic in each of those names: teasing familiarity that dwells in the fact that these are human words with roots in an old human language. He has not heard these words until tonight. The birds, his birds, as Damal calls them, wear poetry in their common name— …mfalme wa ndege… —though he has some trouble with the consonant blends. Bweha laughs at his pronunciation. He is alone and outside, now. It is too hot for sleep. He is restless. He is dressed for the night, as any local might dress. He wears a simple sarong: a thin wrap of fabric extending from waist to ankles. He wears a light, sleeveless shirt. His feet are naked and dusty along the soles. In the pale amber glow of streetlights stretching along Maktaba Street, he resembles—he thinks—a ghost. The light from his laptop lends a nacreous tinge to the flesh of his arms and, he knows, his face. There are people out: night-workers making their way along the serene curve of Maktaba Street. He is sure that they recognize him: Eschel’s and Damal’s pet ghost. No one has ever said as much, no one has ever implied anything at all, and yet Shinichiro is certain that they have their quiet nicknames for him, their little planet-specific jokes. This comforts him in small ways. A breeze tickles errant strands of hair against the side of his neck. Thunder rolls in the easterly distance: promise of a late-night storm. He listens, for a moment, to the sounds of the night: animal-songs of territorial bravado and amorous entreaty. There are things here that sound like bullfrogs, and strange things he has never seen, that exhale the mournful cry of oboes. Something across the street rattles like a cicada and then falls silent, and in the distance…there…just to his left, human voices rise in laughter and then fade back into the unheard murmurs of conversation. Fás, he thinks, is a peaceful village, but his thoughts do not remain here. For a long while, he sits in silence, listening to the night and imagining the sound of eggs hatching in the forest. * THE END * …mfalme wa ndege… I don’t speak Swahili, but I know that single phrase, though I can’t actually vouch for the spelling. It is a term, more than a name, but it works rather well as the name for a species of alien bird. If I remember correctly, it means: “king of birds.” The non-Terran birds depicted in the story you’ve presumably just read don’t consider themselves the kings and queens of anything, but much like the corvids (crows and ravens) of Earth, they possess distinct non-birdlike mental capacities. Like their real-world/Terran counterparts, they seem to possess mental capacities not often attributed to avians. Crows have been observed (rather famously) skiing and snowboarding, and though mfalme wa ndege isn’t a cold-weather bird (not even a real bird at all) we’ve at least seen members of the species engaged in making symbolic gestures. This story is a response to the April Challenge, here in the Writer’s gallery, and I find it amusing that, so far, two challenges have provided the inspiration for at least two distinct worlds. As always, thank you for reading, viewing, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week.