The Last Day of the War, with Parrots

“What’s this?” a voice whispered. A chill voice with a sharp edge that stabbed through all the fantasies.

Alex was still digging, glancing over at me from time to time. No one else was in sight.

“Have we got a visitor then?” the thready voice went on. “Someone peeking through the basement window?”

My own thoughts asked who is it, who? I could hear the chatter of my questions, even though other voices in my brain pleaded for silence, not to draw attention to myself.

“Ah, one of Alex’s friends come to call,” the voice whispered. “But he hasn’t thought your name yet....”

Reflexively, I thought “Lyra.” Horrified copies of my voice screamed, “No!”

“Lyra,” whispered the voice. “I saw you this afternoon, milady. We sang together. Yes. Your beauty entices me. You have entered my heart, milady. Now I have entered your mind.”

That’s just a song, I thought wildly.

“There’s no such thing as ’just a song,’ milady. Song is a realm unto itself, separated from your world by the tiny thickness of an eighth note. Strange things live in this realm, milady. Wraiths. Ghosts with tattered hearts.” The voice laughed, a laugh with claws of ice. “It’s dangerous to enter this realm, milady. Once a song gets into your head, sometimes it’s impossible to get out.”

The thing’s laugh gushed over me like glacier spill water. Blackness pooled in front of my eyes; the real world began to dissolve. Beneath the laughter, I could just make out a tiny voice, my own voice, murmuring, “Let go of the parrot, let go, let go.” But my body was freezing up, heavy with ice. I couldn’t remember what it felt like to move. Try to move, think of moving, focus on motion, any motion, the spasming dance I did for that cut on Trash and Thrash, sing the song: “Damn it, slam it, break it; don’t give me your repercussions...”

Forcing myself against the stony cold, I moved my hand a hairsbreadth. I let go of the parrot.

My eyes snapped into focus: the hilltop, the stars, the silence. Shivering, shuddering, the memory of ice.

Then Alex touched my shoulder and pointed to the hole. “I’ve found something,” he said.

I could barely keep my teeth from chattering. I wanted to scramble away screaming but could barely move — I felt divorced from my body, like waking up from a nightmare. Alex’s grin melted to a frown. “Are you all right?”

“Uhh. Hmm.” My mouth wouldn’t work. “I just, uhh... I must have drifted off. Weird dream.” I eyed Alex closely, searching for any sign of the Singer; but this was good old amiable Alex, sweet, even innocent. Maybe I had just been dreaming.

“Come see what I found,” Alex said, holding out his hand. I took it without thinking. He pulled me up to my feet and didn’t let go as he led me to the hole. I didn’t let go either — I was grateful for human contact. I considered sliding closer to him and stealing a hug, but didn’t know what he’d think of it. (I could use the parrot to find out... but no, I couldn’t do that again. Never. Never. Not yet.)

At the bottom of the hole lay a rusty expanse of sheet metal, about a meter square. One edge showed a set of hinges and the opposite edge had a handle. “I think it’s a lid,” Alex said eagerly.

“I think so too.” I leaned against him. His body was warm and solid.

“Can we open it?” he asked.

“We probably shouldn’t,” I told him. “Jerith would want to document everything first. The position of this thing in the hole, the depth, all that. And we don’t want to damage whatever’s inside. Didn’t most of those Egyptian mummies crumble to dust when people opened the sarcophagus?”

Alex’s face fell. “You mean I make a major discovery and I can’t even see what it is?”

“It’s up to you,” I answered. “You wanted to impress Jerith, right? For that, you have to be meticulous.” I squeezed his waist tightly. Very tightly. But I tried to make my voice sound playful. “If you open it, I won’t tell anyone.”

He whooped with elation and leapt, sliding down the loose dirt to the bottom of the hole. I knew Jerith would be appalled at what Alex was up to, but it certainly wouldn’t be a serious blow to science. You couldn’t walk thirty seconds in a straight line without tripping over debris from Caproche’s war — the entire surface of the planet was heaped with the stuff. Given so much material to draw upon, Jerith’s investigation would scarcely suffer if one artifact wasn’t dug up with full pomp and circumstance. Besides, after my recent experience, my dream, whatever it was, I loved Alex’s high spirits and didn’t want to dampen them.

The box’s handle was set too tightly against the lid, at least by human standards — it must have been built for an alien race with thinner hands, or tentacles — but Alex eventually wiggled his fingers under the bar. Down at the bottom of the hole, standing on loose dirt, he wasn’t in a good position for lifting, so I got the shovel and slid down to help, jamming the shovel blade under the lip of the lid and levering upward. Together, we managed to break the grip of the rust holding the lid shut, and with protests from the hinges, the lid groaned open.

There was nothing inside: just an empty canister, divided into two compartments by a metal partition down the middle. Whatever the box once held, it was long gone.

I started to laugh — a bit too hysterically, but still, all that work for an empty box. Alex started to laugh too, and suddenly we were kissing, twining together. The kisses were hungry; I’d never felt so desperate. I’d been terrified by the Singer and now I was plunging for safety into the same arms... but they were Alex’s arms, and Alex seemed like the only comfort on the planet.

Soon we were out on level ground again, stretched body to body beside the hole. For the flicker of an instant, I considered reaching for the parrot, to see what was going through Alex’s mind. But I didn’t want to let go of him; and I realized I didn’t want to know what he was thinking. I wanted to kiss him, I wanted to hold him. Everything else could wait.

We agreed we shouldn’t go back to camp together. Cool reason had replaced heat, and second thoughts were piling up in my mind. Helena. The complications of working side by side. Doubts and apprehension.

“You go on ahead,” I told Alex. “I’ll wait out here a while longer. Go on.”

We kissed awkwardly. He gave me a smile, a sweet confused smile, and said good night. As he vanished down the side of the hill, he began whistling.

I laughed in disbelief. Was he happy, was he sad, was he just whistling because men get the urge to whistle? It was tempting to reach for the parrot. So I did.

“Do I confront her? Talk to her, woman to woman? Threaten her? Or just ignore everything?”

The voice I heard didn’t belong to Alex. It was Helena, and she was close by. Close enough for her thoughts to drown out whatever Alex was thinking as he walked back to camp. Close enough that she must have seen whatever there’d been to see.

Shit. The whole damned planet was practically empty, and everyone wanted to crowd up on my little hill.

“I could fire her,” Helena’s thoughts went on. “Slit her throat. No, there isn’t another decent backup singer within a dozen parsecs. Not with perfect tits. Damned perfect tits. Alex, there’s more to life than tits, isn’t there? After everything I’ve... but it isn’t Alex’s fault. He’s just this big simple...” The next thought wasn’t a single word, but a montage: man, child, baby, bumpkin, son, lover. And there were images too — Alex grinning, with spaghetti sauce dribbling down his chin; Alex looking up as Helena’s hand brushed hair from his eyes, Alex’s face looming close in a darkened room. Underneath was Helena’s soft fear that she was losing him, that she couldn’t compete with younger women, that she was growing old.

Suddenly, like Silk going <SPLINK>, her thoughts grew sharp and hard. “It’s Lyra who should know better,” she thought. “Hateful bitch.” And then Helena was walking toward me, planning how to browbeat and sweet-talk me into giving Alex up.

She’d taken a flashlight with her when she’d set out to look for Alex. Now she waited till the last moment to turn it on, hoping the sudden light would startle me. I stared up calmly as she shone it into my eyes.

“Hello, Lyra.”

I nodded. “Helena.”

“Doing some impromptu excavation?” she asked, making a show of looking at the freshly turned dirt.

“The search for knowledge never sleeps,” I answered.

She shone the light into the hole. It lit the unearthed box more distinctly than the starlight. I could see that one of the compartments was completely lined with sticky white powder from exploding Silk. The other compartment wasn’t as empty as I’d thought. Tiny bones littered the floor, with one skeleton intact enough to recognize as the remains of a Caprochian parrot.

“Looks like an important artifact,” Helena said. “A trash bin.”

“The search for knowledge sometimes craps out.” I shrugged.

“What about you and Alex?” she asked. “Was that a search for knowledge too?”

She wanted me to be surprised by the question. Thanks to the parrot, I wasn’t. “I don’t know what it was with Alex,” I answered honestly. “Just one of those things. I was feeling pretty needy at the time.”

Her thoughts shouted, “Selfish bitch!” but aloud she said, “Your needs aren’t Alex’s needs.”

“I didn’t hear him protesting,” I replied. But my background chorus told me I knew that was no excuse.

“Alex is a sixteen-year-old in a twenty-five-year-old’s body,” Helena said. “He’s not going to fight off any woman. He may even initiate the... festivities. He may have initiated things with you, I don’t know — the starlight wasn’t quite bright enough for me to see.”

“I don’t know who initiated what,” I told her.

“The point is, Alex is a little boy who never grew up.” She faked a laugh. “Do you realize that he proposed to me after our first night together? He thought it was required, the only gentlemanly thing to do after ravishing me. He has this terribly constricted background... I bet he was too shy to take off his shirt, right?”

“True.” And I was glad he didn’t. If unbuttoning his shirt released the Singer...

“He’s so unsophisticated,” Helena said, nodding, “and that’s why there’s a problem. I’m a broad-minded woman, I don’t own him...” Her thoughts yelled, “He’s mine!” and added softly, “Why can’t he just be mine?” She put on a brittle smile and said, “Alex can’t handle the complications of dealing with both of us. Someone like Roland...” I picked up a snap memory of Helena in bed with Roland. Well, well. “Roland wouldn’t get hung up about an idle one-night stand. He’s not one to confuse sex with loyalty. But Alex... he confuses easily. You see?”

“See what?”

“That someone is going to get hurt. Certainly Alex, and maybe you. Not me,” she added airily. “I don’t get hurt. I just have to pick up the pieces.”

“Noble you.”

“Noble me.” Internally she debated whether to threaten me. She could fire me, and could probably arrange that the major recording labels wouldn’t let me into their studios; but backing me into a corner held too many risks. Especially when she believed I could steal Alex with one nudge of my nipples. So keep it cool, keep it sophisticated, woman to woman, one tuck-and-tumble doesn’t have to mean anything.

“If I were you,” she said, “I’d tell him this was just a brief... weakness on your part. You could say you were under the influence of some fiendish psychological weapon still at work on the battlefield. A lust gun. Makes you rut like a mink in heat no matter how ridiculous you look. No matter how damaging it might be for your career. Lust grenades. Lust lasers. Alex would believe that.”

“You don’t give Alex enough credit.”

“I give Alex all the credit,” she replied. “I do the work, he gets the credit. If you want to start a tug-of-war, Lyra, you may pull Alex away from me. But without me, he’s no star. He’s just a not-too-bright guy with a so-so voice. Not a great catch, believe me.”