Story Excerpt

In the Splinterlands the Crows Fly Blind
by Siobhan Carroll 

When Sarah Hawksfeather told Charlie his good-for-nothing brother was missing, he wasn’t worried. It was just like Gabe to head out to the Grasslands and forget to tell his latest girlfriend he was going. Charlie told Sarah as much as he soldered a connection on a Vestigium motherboard. His hands were full of alien tech right now; he didn’t have time for Gabe’s latest craziness.

“Well fuck you, Charlie Stone,” Sarah said. “And your brother. If you won’t look for him, I will.” She broke the door of his shop on her way out.

It took Charlie half a day to scavenge a new hinge, during which time he cursed Gabe and all Gabe’s furniture-destroying girlfriends, past and present. Charlie worried about plenty of things: another apocalypse, maybe; the Vestigium shield that protected their Universe-shard failing and their precious atmosphere streaming into the void. He worried about Sarah, who’d been a great atmotech before taking up with Gabe, and now always seemed to have her mind somewhere else. But after twenty-two years of worrying about Gabe, Charlie was done. His little brother had made his choices, and none of them involved Charlie, not anymore.

Charlie fixed the door. He repaired the motherboard. He made the atmotechnic delivery by himself, on schedule, so this slapped-together world could keep breathing another year. He practiced various “I-told-you-so” speeches in his head, though he knew he’d never give them, and waited for Sarah’s return.

A day passed. And another. Then Turnday. When Sarah didn’t show up for her paycheck, Charlie went to look for her.

“Hawksfeather?” said the man standing guard at the ôcênâs door. He looked white, but if he was living in the ôcênâs he’d been accepted as a relation. “Why’re you looking?”

Because she’s gone looking for Gabe and Gabe is good at getting people into trouble, Charlie thought. What he said was, “She’s the best I’ve got at fixing atmosphere generators. We’ve a big repair this weekend.”

The man grunted. The beaded circle on his jacket marked him as a Unity member, and Unities didn’t like being reminded they relied on atmotech to breathe. And here Charlie was, the mechanic’s badge that gave him access to off-limits areas clearly pinned to his collar.

“You’re Gabe’s brother, right?”

Charlie gritted his teeth and nodded.

“Huh,” the guard said, looking Charlie over skeptically. Then he relented. “Hawksfeather came by a couple days ago,” he said. “We gave her Gabe’s message. Don’t know what was in it, but she lit out for the Fringes.”

“The Fringes?” Something in Charlie’s stomach dropped like a stone.

“Think so,” the man said. “She was wearing atmotech.” He spat to clear the word from his mouth. Charlie glanced down at the glob of foam creeping dangerously near his boot and felt a comforting flare of anger. This Unit didn’t know atmotech from a regular mechanic’s rig.

“Any idea where Gabe is?” Charlie said, like it didn’t pain him to ask this guy about his brother.

“You should ask Kahkakow,” the man said reverently.

“The Crowmind?” Charlie used the English name for the crows that ruled the Universe-shard the human refugees were camped on. He knew he should stop himself. It suited Unity folk to claim the birds as some kind of Spirit, and what Charlie was doing right now was like poking a screwdriver into a socket to see what would happen. But Charlie didn’t like this guy, or his Unity badge, or the way he stood half-blocking the door with his body, because Charlie wasn’t “Native” enough to walk through the door of the community his brother had left him for.

“I guess those bird-spies come in handy, right?” Charlie continued. Yep, he definitely should have stopped talking already. “’Cause that’s traditional. That’s âtayôhkêwin.”

“Hey,” the man said in that superior way Unity folks excelled at. “It’s your brother. Maybe you should ask yourself where he is.” The metal door slid closed, shutting Charlie out.

By the time Charlie had fumed his way back to the store he’d won at least six arguments in his head with Unity Guy and convinced Sarah to stay in the shop. What he couldn’t imagine was talking Gabe out of joining Unity, because Charlie still didn’t know why he’d fallen in with Earth 3’s Quasi-New Age assholes in the first place.

Back in the early days of the multiverse fracture, back when Charlie was towing Gabe between alternate Earths that were either Racist as Shit or Too Damn Weird, he’d settled on Earth 3 because it seemed the safest. Earth 3’s dominant species was a group of corvids that might-or-might-not be part of a networked hivemind. And yeah, that was weird, but it was less weird than Vestigium, the version of Earth with intelligent reptiles, alien physics, and “Cronenberg-Would-Like-This!” style tech, and it felt less ominous than Frangere, the only human-dominated Earth, which was out to make Dystopia great again. Earth 3’s Crowmind had evolved using other animals as its tools, so working with humans came naturally to it. The Crowmind’s offer was simple: humans could stay on Earth 3 providing they helped maintain the ravaged planet’s ecosystems. Charlie’s Earth might have been destroyed, but on Earth 3, he could find work he liked doing. And Gabe could grow up like Charlie hadn’t, surrounded by other Nehiyawak, learning this new culture they were putting together in the wake of the fracture.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time. It was a good idea at the time. But now, fifteen years later, Charlie was wondering if he’d made a wrong choice somewhere. Maybe he should have called a halt to the visits with the Crowmind, back when he’d still had some influence over his brother. As it was, it felt like Gabe had turned into a stranger almost overnight.

“Anyone come by?” he asked Julio, who was sprawled on a salvaged chair outside the mechanic’s shop.

The kebab-vendor glanced up from a worn-looking ballad sheet. “Nah. You find her?”

“No.” Charlie opened the door, testing the hinge. “I’m going to talk to the Crowmind.”

Julio glanced nervously up at the sky-grey Dome overhead, scanning for birds. He’d had some bad experience with the avians on his arrival that had left him wary of the corvids. “You sure?”

“Yeah.” Saying the words made them true. Charlie scanned the shop’s interior. A brass atmosuit hung on the wall, a price written in chalk across the plate. “She was wearing atmotech,” Unity guy had said, but the Unities didn’t know atmosuits from the lighter service suits, and Sarah would never have gone to the Fringes without telling Charlie. Right?

“Tell Tahamont I’m going to be late with the engine,” he said. “I should be back in a couple of days.”

“And if you’re late?”

“Let the Guild know,” Charlie said, as if that would do any good. I’m just going to go get Sarah and come back, he reminded himself. He glanced again at the atmosuit, gleaming like molten gold; but atmosuits were hell to move in, and this would be just a quick trip into the Grasslands.

Still, he’d pack a stungun, just in case.

 

A couple of hours later, Charlie was regretting bringing the gun. For one thing, he couldn’t shoot worth a damn. For another, it was heavy. Charlie was already sweating under the weight of his service-suit, with its simple breathing mask and small air tank. In the humid transport corridor, the gun had felt like dead weight on his back.

But maybe it wasn’t. With the human sector’s metal door behind him, Charlie peered out into a waving ocean of yellow and green. The massive shapes of animals driven extinct centuries ago on his own Earth lurched in the distance. Charlie’s stomach lurched, too. Always before, when he’d come through the Grassland door with a repair crew, there’d been a party of crows to guide them safely across the prairie. Now Charlie was traveling solo, and even though he’d established his relations with the AI that monitored the door, that didn’t mean the Crowmind would send any of its flock in his direction. The Crowmind thought its own thoughts and played by its own rules.

Charlie shivered and tried to avoid looking up at the translucent shimmer overhead. The humans had opted to tint their section of the Dome, but the crows refused to disguise the fragility of the atmosphere. In the Grassland, you could stare right through the thin veil of remnant sky into a yawning blackness, where the tortured fragments of unfamiliar stars fell impossibly upward. Within that void was the black hole (or the Inner Dark, or the whatever-it-was that had formed on the day of the Unsettling), waiting for their universe fragment to join the others sliding inexorably into its maw. Charlie generally avoided looking at it. The Inner Dark was pretty boring to look at, given how it consumed light and all, and there was only so much inevitable doom you could contemplate.

Jerking his gaze downward, he spotted a narrow path cutting into the tall grass, heading away from the immense Wall that separated the human sector from the Grassland. Maybe it would take him to the Crowmind? Or to something that wanted to eat him. But, Charlie thought, feeling the stungun pressing into his hip, hopefully to the Crowmind.

The grass rustled on all sides of the path, hissing like a punctured air tank. He could see over it, but just barely, and he didn’t like to think about what might be stalking underneath those yellow waves. Charlie had never enjoyed hiking, not even on his own Earth. He wasn’t even sure he enjoyed Nature, which was either too hot or too cold and had way too many bugs for his liking. Maybe that made him Bad Indigenous in Unity’s eyes, but it was how he felt. And there was good reason to feel this in the ecosystems of Earth 3, which had never adapted to humans: snake venom was more lethal, the predators fearless, and pretty much everything not working for the crows wanted to either sting or eat him.

There was a buzz in his ear, and Charlie froze. A big, nasty-looking insect was hovering beside him like some malignant hummingbird, its bright red wings marking it as one of those poisonous things you shouldn’t touch. He resisted the urge to bat it away. Hopefully it wasn’t one of those Grassland bugs that liked to nest in people, Charlie thought, and swallowed.

The bug buzzed in his ear and Charlie ducked despite himself. Stay still. He remembered hearing that advice somewhere: from Gabe, or maybe it was from that dinosaur movie? Some irrational part of him was voting for “run like hell,” but that was a bad idea.

Finally, the hovering bug swung away from him, retreating back into the grass. Just curious, Charlie told himself. He moved forward, trying to keep to the center of the path so he didn’t accidentally enter something’s territory.

When he was a kid, Charlie had read a story about time travelers hunting dinosaurs. The rule was, the time travelers had to stay on the path. If you panicked and ran, you might step on a butterfly and wreck everything. But on this world, Charlie thought unhappily, the butterflies will wreck you.

Something like that probably caused the Unsettling, Charlie thought, picking his way down the rustling trail, feeling the yawn of dark somewhere above him. Sure, the multiverse crunch could have been a kind of natural disaster, but Charlie’s money was on rich guys doing something dumb. Not that it mattered. The Unsettling was beyond Charlie’s ability to fix. The thing he could do was find Sarah. And his dumbass brother. And stay on the path.

A large shape moved out of the grass and Charlie stopped short. At first all he could see were the yellowed teeth of the savannah dog. Then he took in the saddle strapped to its back, the wicked gleam of a spear, and the white-eyed black bird that watched him. Not a crow. He knew that much, though that didn’t mean he knew what kind of not-a-crow it was. A jackdaw? If it decided to spear him, it wouldn’t matter.

Charlie pulled down his air mask and the ancient atmosphere rushed into his lungs: heavy CO₂ and allergens that made his eyes water.

“Hi,” he coughed. He tried again, pitching his voice louder. “My name’s Charlie. I’m looking for the Crowmind.”

<Hello?> The jackdaw pulled its dog up slightly. It shifted into a deeper voice. <Hello Raku?> “Raku” was probably the bird’s name. Most of the non-crow corvids weren’t good at generating new language; they could only repeat phrases they’d heard before.

“I’m looking for a woman,” Charlie said. “Sarah. And my nisîmis. Gabe.” He enunciated their names clearly, hoping against hope that one of them had stopped to chat with the first alien Charlie was meeting in the grassland.

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Copyright © 2024. In the Splinterlands the Crows Fly Blind by Siobhan Carroll