The Last Day of the War, with Parrots

“What about the Singer?” I asked.

Her thoughts shriveled. Fear. Cold fear so sharp and similar to mine I jerked my hand away from the parrot. “You can have the Singer,” she said, her voice trembling slightly. “If you can catch the Singer, he’s yours.”

She turned abruptly away and started walking toward the edge of the hill. Without turning, she called back, “I’m sure you’ll do the right thing, Lyra. The smart thing.”

I watched till she was gone. At the last second, I brushed my finger across the parrot. On the surface, Helena fretted about me watching her walk away — she was sure I was laughing at her, at her hips and ass thickening with middle age. But deeper down ran a current of terror: wordless, imageless fear of the Singer.

Her thoughts echoed my own.

When she was gone, I made my way in the same direction, keeping my hands off the parrot. Even so, the parrot dominated my attention... like when you meet someone who’s completely wrong for you and you know he’ll screw up your life, but every minute of the day you find yourself thinking about him. Not love, not lust, and you know you’re too sensible for obsession; but you still keep turning it over and over in your mind. I could laugh at how I was getting in so deep with the parrot, I could tell myself it would only take a tiny effort of will to set my parrot free...

But I didn’t do it. Fixations can be sweet.

Following Helena’s footsteps through the dew soon brought me back to camp. Music played in the main Quonset hut, the timeworn feel-good classic “Orange Puppy,” recorded by “Vivaldi’s Love-Child.” That meant the hut had been taken over by roadies — only they were old enough to play such a rusty dusty nostalgia number. I could imagine them sitting around, wearing sloppy T-shirts from old groups like “Madrigal Canyon” or “Freckles on a Green-Eyed Girl,” and saying spiteful things about the music scene today.

I considered joining them, but didn’t think I’d be up to eavesdropping on a crowd. Besides, what could the parrot tell me that I couldn’t guess myself? The roadies all said exactly what they thought the moment it crossed their minds... except for the wet-dream fantasies a few of the guys had when they looked in my direction, and who needed telepathy to pick up those?

Instead, I turned toward the huts that served as sleeping quarters. The nearest belonged to Alex and Helena, but I didn’t want to see either of them again tonight. A few meters farther was the hut that songwriter Roland shared with our equipment manager. The equipment manager would surely be keeping company with the rest of the roadies, and Roland would be alone.

I knocked on the door.

“What?” The question sounded angry, but Roland always sounded angry.

“It’s Lyra,” I said. “Are you busy?”

“Yes.” The door opened and there was Roland, a towel draped over one hand but still fully dressed in his usual black. “I was just going to take a shower.” He snorted an unpleasant laugh. “Unless you’d care to join me?”

“I have a shower in my own hut,” I answered.

“Once you’ve had the best, don’t settle for the rest,” he muttered.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I wanted to reach for my parrot, but he was staring at me so intently there was no way I could make the gesture look natural.

“Alex doesn’t keep secrets,” Roland said, still blocking the doorway. “Even if he doesn’t blurt it right out, it’s written all over his face. I guarantee Helena will know about you and Alex within the hour.”

“She knows already.”

“And?”

“No ’and,’ “ I told him. “We’re both being civilized. Sophisticated women of the world. Although it would obviously be best for all concerned if I dropped Alex immediately.”

“She’s right,” Roland said. “Not that I expect common sense to prevail. You still haven’t mentioned why you’re here.”

“Just to chat,” I replied, stretching as if my shoulders were stiff and casually reaching toward my pocket. “I thought maybe I could talk to you about Alex and...”

His hand snapped out and grabbed my wrist. He pulled it tight to his chest and dragged me closer, eye to eye. “No games, Lyra,” he said, his breath hot on my face. “No casual little chats. I know.”

He held up his other hand, the one that had been covered with the towel. The towel slid down his arm to reveal a parrot squeezed between his fingers.

“I wondered why Jerith was so possessive of his damned parrots,” Roland said. “I found out. And if you ever try to eavesdrop on me, I’ll know it. If you can hear my thoughts, I can hear yours. Toy with me, and I won’t act civilized like Helena.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but he interrupted. “You think I’m bluffing? That I don’t have the balls to play vicious?” He put his fist against my face and roughly dragged the parrot’s snout along my cheek. The moment the parrot touched me, Roland’s fury screamed in my ears like a howl of feedback from an amplifier; then he pulled back the parrot and the noise cut off. “Now you know it’s no bluff,” he said. “No one gets into my head but me.”

“The same goes for me.” I tried to snatch the parrot from his hand, but he swung it back out of my reach. His grip on my wrist tightened.

“I don’t need a parrot to get into your head,” he snapped. “I know exactly what women like you think. ’Creepy Roland, ugly Roland,’ that’s always the attitude. With a pinch of pity thrown in, just to make it hurt more.”

“I’m not — ”

He twisted my arm and jerked it down hard. “Shut up!” he screamed. “I can hear you. I can hear you trying to decide which lie will pacify me. I can hear you wonder if you should come on to me, if you can stomach giving Roland a press of the flesh, ugly Roland will be so overcome...  God damn you!”

In blind rage, he swung his fist at my jaw. I managed to block with my free arm and took the blow above my elbow. The crunching impact hurt like hell, his knuckles hammering into me deep as the bone. Then he whispered, “Oh, shit,” and his grip on my other arm went slack.

I writhed away from him. He fell over facedown and stopped moving.

For several seconds, I kept my distance, panting and rubbing my arm. He still didn’t move. Had he fainted? Or was he just faking? But why? I thought of reaching for my parrot to see what was in his mind; but if he was just faking, that would infuriate him.

I stretched out my foot and nudged him. No response.

Harder. Still nothing.

At last I bent beside his body and rolled him over. The exertion hurt my bruised arm but I gritted my teeth. Roland’s breathing was very shallow. There was an odd smell in the air too, a thin, metallic smell. I sniffed more closely, his body, his clothes, trying to find the source of the odor.

It came from his fist — still clenched tightly around the parrot.

The parrot had been crushed like a handful of grapes when Roland’s punch landed on my arm. Bits of its flesh bulged out between Roland’s fingers and a dark fluid spilled over his knuckles.

I pried his fist open, using a stick to lever the fingers so I wouldn’t have to touch the blood. The smell grew stronger. The parrot looked like a squeezed rag. Indentations shaped like Roland’s fingers had crushed into its body.

The parrot had died and Roland collapsed. I wondered what he’d heard in the moment of the parrot’s death.

I dragged the roadies away from “Orange Puppy” and told them to hoist Roland into his bed while I got Jerith’s medical robot out of storage. The bot was decades old, scratched in places, and tarnished around the sampling mouths, but it moved easily over the rough terrain and its voice was free of static as it asked me to describe the nature of Roland’s problem. Jerith obviously maintained the bot with great care... which only made sense when the closest doctor was seven light-years away.

I considered keeping mum on the circumstances of Roland’s collapse, then decided to tell the bot everything. Medi-bots are programmed for confidentiality. Besides, no matter how furious I was that Roland hit me, I didn’t want him to die.

By the time the bot and I got back to Roland’s hut, a crowd of people had gathered around the bed. Teary-eyed Alex knelt on the floor, holding Roland’s hands in his. Helena stood behind him, her hand patting Alex’s shoulder over and over again. I was reaching for my parrot to see what was going through their minds when a roadie spotted the bot and me. He raised a fuss, making such a show of dragging us over to the bed that I didn’t have a chance to touch the parrot. A moment later, Helena drove the roadies and me out of the hut, saying the “doctor” needed room to work. Yeah, right.

I headed off to my own hut. I shared it with Violette who did makeup, but she and the other roadies went back to the main hut, so I had the place to myself. Good — peace and quiet. I took the parrot out of my pocket and set it down on the dressing table. The others weren’t close enough for me to hear their thoughts distinctly. When I touched the parrot, I only picked up myself and a background mumble from everyone else in camp.

The parrot yawned itself awake, stretched, and decided to walk around the table a bit, sniffing at the powders and perfumes Violette and I left lying about. I wondered if the little animal was hungry. I got out some bean sprouts I keep for snacking, but the parrot just snuffled at the sprouts, then lay down on top of them.

“Probably bad for you anyway,” I said. I went outside for a moment, pulled a few blades of the local grass, and laid them down under the parrot’s nose. One of its antennae waved above the grass briefly, but then the parrot pointedly turned away.

“Not good enough for you?” I asked. “Won’t eat anything but Silk?”

The parrot stared at me without blinking.

“There must be something else you’ll eat. If the Silk came here as a weapon in the war, that was only seven hundred years ago. What did your species eat before then?”

The parrot closed its eyes and went to sleep.

I laughed softly. “You don’t care what kind of garbage your barbarian ancestors chucked down their gullets. Only modern cuisine for you. I don’t blame you — I probably couldn’t stomach what my ancestors ate either.”

The door opened without warning and for a few fearful moments I thought it was the Singer. No. The shirt was buttoned and it was only Alex, but Alex looking grim and worried. “Roland wants to speak to you,” he said. He didn’t look me in the eye.

“Roland is awake?” I asked.

“He’s awake, but he’s not...” Alex’s voice trailed off and he looked down at his hands. One palm had a brown stain on it. “He’s not very good, Lyra. Maybe seeing you will calm him down.”

“I don’t know,” I said, wondering how obvious it would be if I just picked up my parrot from the dressing table and put it into my pocket, “Seeing me might only upset him.”

“He’s asking for you,” Alex replied. “He says it’s important. Roland, he’s... Women affect him strongly, you know? That’s why he writes such good songs. Women affect him. Sometimes they make him mad and sometimes he just burns himself up wanting them. Most guys... this is hard to say, Lyra, but for most guys, being with a woman is nice and all, but it’s not everything. Not to live and die for. But with Roland, it is. And whatever happened between you and him before he got all keyed up... I don’t know. It’s just, the only thing that calms him down when he’s upset is attention from a woman. Talk, I just mean talk. But you have to go see him.”

Sighing, I stood and reached toward the dressing table.