The Last Day of the War, with Parrots

I ran through the night, wondering if they would chase me. Ugly images danced through my mind, all the roadies possessed by demons who were exactly like the Singer, howling after me in pursuit. “Lyra, you’ve been watching too many late-night broadcasts,” I muttered, and kept running.

In time I had to slow to a hard-breathing trot. No one was following me, not the roadies, not the Singer. If the Singer wanted to blood me like the roadies, he didn’t have to track me in the dark; he could just wait for me to return to camp. I’d go back eventually. I had no choice — Jerith’s protein synthesizers made the only human-edible food on the planet.

And when I went back, the Singer would hear my thoughts coming.

Maybe it didn’t matter, I tried to tell myself. If I got smeared with blood and started to hear people’s thoughts, was that so bad?

Yes... when the thoughts belonged to the Singer. If his voice invaded my mind again, I truly might kill myself to get away.

Passing through a narrow gully between two hills, I heard a voice call, “Lyra?”

I looked up to the hill on my left and saw Jerith. Sweet, unintimidating man. “Jerith!” I cried. “Jerith!” I scrambled up the hillside and wrapped my arms around his neck. Awkwardly he put one arm around me. The other was thrust deep into his pocket.

A moment later he took his hand out of the pocket and pushed me away. “You know about the parrots.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I was mad at you for a while, but I got over it.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

I took his hand and pushed it back into his pocket. Then I put my arms around his neck again, stared him straight in the eye, and said, “Jerith, I am really, truly glad to see you. Okay?”

He looked away. “You’re annoyed I don’t believe you. That’s all I hear.”

“Then your goddamned parrot is broken, Jerith! The stupid thing broadcasts a tiny bit of annoyance and completely ignores the relief I feel...”

I stopped shouting, started thinking.

“Whoa, slow down,” Jerith said. “Your thoughts are all jumbling together — ”

I interrupted him. “After Roland collapsed, Alex felt sorry for him, but Roland couldn’t hear it. And you can’t hear how glad I am to see you. They don’t broadcast good thoughts, Jerith! Little irritations come through loud and clear, but not the positive stuff.”

“Lyra, that doesn’t make sense,” he replied, shaking his head. “It’s hard enough to believe parrots evolved the ability to broadcast thoughts. I mean, there’s no evolutionary advantage to their kind of telepathy, is there? Caproche’s animal life is so primitive, other species scarcely have thoughts. So don’t ask me to make another leap of faith and believe parrot telepathy is selective. Evolution is strained to the breaking point as it is.”

“Then screw evolution,” I said. “The little buggers didn’t evolve. They were summoned from hell.”

“Come on...”

“Don’t dismiss me! The things only eat Silk, right? Silk is a weapon, Jerith, you said so yourself. Eating Silk is like dining on dynamite. If they were normal animals, they’d eat grass or something.”

Jerith sighed. “Yes, it’s unusual they only eat alien plant matter. But that scarcely means they’re demons.”

“Okay, they’re aliens then,” I said. “They’re aliens brought in during the war, the same time as the Silk. Come to think of it, Alex and I found a carrying crate for them earlier in the evening. One side for Silk, the other side for the parrots. A one-two punch: a biological weapon and a psychological one.”

“What do you mean, a carrying crate?”

I described the box Alex and I had found: one compartment lined with Silk dust, the other littered with parrot bones. It was easy to imagine the box being parachuted in and crashing down harder than expected, killing a few parrots, <SPLINK>ing a little Silk, then getting buried later in some artillery barrage. Who knew how many other boxes were still out there?

Of course Jerith wanted to see the box immediately, but after my flight from camp I wasn’t sure where I was now, let alone how to get back to where Alex had dug up the box. “You can find it eventually,” I told Jerith. “If we get out of this with our brains in one piece, I’ll help you look.”

“You really think we’re in danger?”

“Remember how I worried that some weapons from the war might still be active? Well, they are. The parrots.”

“Other races studied the debris of the war before humans got to Caproche,” Jerith pointed out. “If parrots are weapons, why didn’t the other survey teams notice?”

“Maybe telepathy has different wavelengths, I don’t know. The other races didn’t pick up anything from the parrots, but humans just happen to match the wavelength of the original targets.”

“Maybe,” Jerith admitted. “Telepathic races like the Laysens say they can read some species but not others. Still, the idea that parrots might be weapons...”

I grabbed his arm and said, “Think about it. They’re all over the place, they’re brightly colored, they’re happy to be picked up and kept in your pocket... I bet they even looked cute to whatever species fought here. They were bioengineered to attract attention and be adopted as pets. So the troops picked them up, and suddenly they could hear what their fellow soldiers were thinking: all the angry stuff, all the bland stuff, but nothing good. Can you imagine what that would do to morale?”

Slowly, Jerith nodded. “If they heard all the bad stuff... the anger without the friendship, the lust without the affection... in a day or two, the soldiers would forget the enemy and start shooting each other.”

“Damned right they would,” I said.

With a thoughtful expression on his face, Jerith pulled his hand from his pocket. For almost a minute he stared off into the darkness. Finally he turned back to me. “Want to coauthor a paper?”

“I want to live to a ripe old age,” I said.

“Why wouldn’t you?”

I gave him a quick summary of what had happened back in the camp... no, to be honest, I started a quick summary, a quick clinical summary, but somehow it got away from me. The stress, the terror, everything began blubbering out in half-sentences and tears, until he was holding me in that gingerly awkward way men have when they don’t know what to do, while I was apologizing for getting emotional and wishing he were taller so I could bury my face in his shirt. “I shouldn’t be crying,” I said over and over again. “This is really stupid.” And watching myself, angry with myself, I started crying again.

In time, the force of my outburst drained away. I pulled out of his arms, turned my back on him, and desperately wished for something to wipe my nose. Jerith offered me a handkerchief. I whirled to face him, expecting to see his hand in his pocket, using the parrot to read my thoughts; but no, he was just volunteering the handkerchief because I needed it. I smiled with chagrin, then turned away again to give my nose a good blow.

“Sounds to me like the Singer is just being a shit,” Jerith said to my back. Maybe he was trying to comfort me, maybe he was only talking to avoid an embarrassing silence. “This ’come into my realm’ stuff,” Jerith went on, “that’s pure stage show. Popular music often dresses up in demon clothes. I mean, Paganini in the 1800s, he encouraged the public to think he’d sold his soul to the devil. And farther back, in almost every shamanistic tradition, music was associated with otherworldly — ”

“Jerith?”

“What?”

“Stop being an archaeologist.”

“Sorry.” He was quiet for five seconds at most, then hurtled on. “My point is, you talk about the Singer as if he’s some malevolent supernatural force. As if he’s got some sinister master plan. I think you’re overdramatizing. This stuff back at the camp... toying with people is just what the Singer always does. That’s his act, isn’t it, when he’s onstage. He spooks people. He gets under your skin.”

I had to admit Jerith was right.

“So what he’s doing with the parrots is more of the same,” Jerith went on. “Smearing people with blood... it’s all theatrics. Harassing people, making them sweat.”

“If the effects of the blood are permanent — ”

“I’m not denying he’s dangerous,” Jerith interrupted. “I don’t want him smearing blood on me; I don’t want to hear everyone being hateful for the rest of my life. I’m just saying he’s not some demonic evil — the Singer is an ordinary punk getting his kicks by making a mess. A petty vandal, nothing more.”

My only reply was a shrug. If Jerith wanted to believe the Singer was an ordinary punk, I wouldn’t waste breath arguing. I knew better. Nothing about the Singer was ordinary.

“The immediate question,” I said, “is what do we do now?”

“Sooner or later, we have to go back to camp,” Jerith replied. “You knew that, right? But we can wait till morning if you like. It’s not raining, and it won’t get too cold; spending the night outside won’t kill us.”

The longer I went without facing the Singer, the happier I’d be. And sunlight would give me courage... a little bit, anyway. “All right,” I told Jerith. “A night in the great outdoors, huddled together for warmth. But I doubt if I’ll get much sleep.”

He looked at me, obviously trying to figure out if I had intended any sexual overtones. I liked that look of uncertainty. It was refreshing that someone didn’t know exactly what was on my mind.

Sleep. Not comfortable sleep — the patch of grass Jerith led me to wasn’t as soft as advertised — but I did sleep, deeply and with ugly dreams.

The dreams were broken by a voice: “Are you awake? Are you awake?” whispered over and over again, until I surfaced from confusion and opened my eyes. I closed them again immediately, appalled by the brightness around me. Even with the light red-filtered through my eyelids, it was bright enough to be painful. I tried to scrunch my eyes shut more tightly.

“I take it the damned sun has risen,” I growled. “Top of the morning to you, Jerith, but if you don’t want a punch in the nose, you’ll let me go back to sleep.”

“Ah, milady,” whispered a voice in my ear, “yond light is not daylight; I know it, I. It is some meteor that the sun exhales to be to thee this night a torchbearer and light thee on thy way to... well, let thy destination remain unspoken.”

Chilled, I opened my eyes again. The Singer was there, kneeling beside me. “A passage from Romeo and Juliet,”  he said. “Their last scene together. Or more precisely, the last scene with both of them alive.” He smiled.

The sky above his head was still black, flecked with stars. Off to one side, several anti-grav platforms floated in the air, holding the huge beam-lamps we had brought for recording at night. The lights all aimed at me, as if I were a surgery patient on an operating table.

I jerked up to a sitting position and looked around for Jerith. He was gone. The grass he’d slept on still showed the imprint of his body.

“What did you do with him?” I asked.

“I anointed him,” the Singer said, “rather forcibly. Specifically, I tucked a pretty little parrot under his hand while he slept, then crushed hand and parrot under my heel. The pain woke him briefly, but with the lovely jumble of thoughts that rose in his mind as the parrot died... ah, well, he passed out again. I kindly instructed one of Jerith’s robots to carry his body back to camp. Very cooperative machines, those robots.”

Another robot picked its way through the grass toward us, the blue lights from its eyes sweeping the ground for safe places to plant its feet. “Grab this man!” I shouted to the bot. “He wants to hurt me.”