A Student Begins to Understand Her Strange Avian Purpose in This Sci-Fi Story

io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “It Holds Her in the Palm of One Hand” by Lowry Poletti; this is part two of two—read part one here. Enjoy!

“It Holds Her in the Palm of One Hand” by Lowry Poletti

“You have singularly bad timing, Sun,” Hati says as he leads Sun back into the lab.

Glass cabinets overhang black-topped benches. At the end of the aisle, the hatchling is suspended in a tank of proteinaceous fluid. Sun gasps at the sight. It’s only been a few days since the poor thing was eating in the video.

“What happened?” She steps past Hati, putting a hand on the glass. Unconscious, the hatchling’s head is tucked beneath its skinny neck. It hasn’t developed all of its fat pads yet, so its tail is reminiscent of a mouse’s.

The hatchling really is so small. Sun’s reflection—dark-eyed, long and black, dressed in her “hawkish” trench, as Hati always described it—stretches across the whole of its body.

“We were seeing evidence of atypical development. Some of her—” Hati coughs. “—some of its sensory organs are fine, but its crops are too small, and its female genitalia are atrophic. It’s receiving supplemental hormones now.” “And how long does that take?”

“We’re trying to be safe. A few days.”

Arms crossed against his chest, Hati leans against the bench. The hatchling may be small, but it casts a shadow that splits his face in two. She’s relieved, for a moment, to learn that it isn’t ill or dying. But she recalls the fate of the other hatchlings, and she starts to understand.

“You’re scared,” she says. Maybe she shouldn’t have come.

“No,” he lies. “If this one fails, we will move onto the next.”

“Have you told Dossa about this?”

It surprises her how much it hurts to say his name. The suggestion rings hollow, even to her.

“What would the old man care? He’s retiring in a year.”

“Hati? Because he’s your friend?”

She leans forward, catches his eye. The sigh that leaves his body makes his shoulders fall, and suddenly he is eggshell-fragile. He says finally, “I named her Luna.”

Sun sits on the bench beside him, pressed up against him, and he is still saying, “I have met fifty of her but her—” Her, her, her. She hears the catch in his voice. Yes, Sun knows of this type of love. “I feel as if she was pulled out of me, down out of my pelvis and onto the workbench. It’s been a decade—everything of me, for a decade. If I made her out of my skin, my marrow, my sperm, it would hold less of me than Luna does.”

“You won’t lose her.”

And she won’t lose her bird either: she will keep clawing her way back.

He’s silent for a bit. He picks at the hem of Sun’s coat.

“What did you name your bird?” he asks.

Sun lowers her voice. “I’m not allowed.”

Hati whispers back, “That’s not an answer.”

She never could decide. She wishes she could.

“I need to ask you something,” she says instead.

It doesn’t scare her as much as she thought it would to say this to Hati. Not when the light from Luna’s tank plays across his face. Not when she watches his manicured nails worm between the weave of her clothes.

“Yes?”

“I can’t tell Dossa,” she says. “But I think the bird is talking to me.”

Hati pauses. “Why do you think that?”

“Its outputs contain olfactory codes for scents I’ve told it about.”

“And you’re sure it isn’t a coincidence?”

“Gastorian pheromones don’t contain these compounds. Neither do any of the chamber gasses. And it only happens to me.”

“You think it’s remembering these scents intentionally, so they appear on the monitor.”

“I do.”

“For what purpose?”

“I don’t know. I need to know.”

“This would be a major departure from the current research, if you’re correct.”

“We already know they’re smarter than many other animals,” Sun says, feverish now, flush with the exhilaration of being believed. “And there’s so much we don’t know about them.”

She slides her tablet out of its case and hands it to him. He skims through the neural outputs, zooms in on the notes in the margins. She can tell how hard he’s trying not to let his hands shake.

“Normally when we see noisy sequences like these,” he says, still reading, “we assume they’re recollections. Daydreams.”

“My bird’s never done this.”

“Sure, sure,” Hati says. “The frequency of noisy outputs varies wildly between shamans. For the especially sentimental ones, we usually implement algorithms to filter out the noise.”

“Is there any way to read them?”

“Not to my knowledge.” He chews on his cheek. “We should be able to download an update to the database once we reach the station, but I’m not sure if anyone bothers to upload noise. A colleague of mine considered investigating noise more thoroughly, but finding funding was . . . impossible. It’s not important for piloting, after all.”

“There’s something else,” Sun says, scrolling down to the most recent output.

“The appeasement pheromone?”

“It means something, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe it’s referring to Dossa?”

“Oh.” Sun hugs herself, lips drawn tight. “No, not Dossa. I’ve already spoken to Dossa.”

“Your bird doesn’t know that. Besides, do you have to talk to him?”

• • • •

Sun and Dossa go out to dinner together.

It’s strange, at first. She and Dossa so rarely argue, and she hates how she feels when his cold gaze sweeps across her. Like she’s a child again. He asks how she is, then orders a salad with orange slices gifted to the ship by the Cyclops after they watched the capture together. She asks for whatever meat has been most recently unpacked from storage and a bottle of white wine.

She watches as Dossa eats in small, manufactured bites, choreographed to the restaurant’s cacophony of clinking silverware. As he eats, he conjures the driest dinner conversation: what toiletries the Daughter will source at the upcoming lunar station, the weather on Miphre, and the new tariffs on midship market imports.

“You must hate the wine,” Sun says.

“I’m sorry?”

“You haven’t even had a sip.”

He looks at his glass and puffs out his cheeks. “I suppose not.”

Sun waits a beat, justifying the pause by swirling her fork around on her plate. When she looks at him again, he’s gazing far off into one of the windows, where Miphre still shines like a white star.

“Were you there when Hati took tissue samples from the bird?”

A raised eyebrow. “I was.”

Sun steals an orange slice from his plate and eats it before he can say anything.

“Hm.” She hums. “You should ask him about it. I’m not sure what I’m allowed to say, but he’s made some interesting developments.”

Dossa peers at her from over his wine glass. Despite himself, he manages half a smile.

“All right,” he says, “consider me intrigued.”

“Yeah?”

“Really, Sun.”

He pours himself another drink and waves the server over to order desserts. They shift their chairs to the same side of the table, elbow-to-elbow, and he’s talking, suddenly, about his day and asking after hers. They chat until their plates are bare and she feels herself become Sundimnya from three years ago. She has just met her bird. She is ecstatic with new love. She wants everyone to know that she is full to bursting; everyone, but most of all Dossa, who is the only reason they have been united.

“—and really, do I have to tell you?” Dossa says, a little too loudly. “The IED discharged early obviously—why else would I be telling you this? So the dust clears and there he is, right, covered in blood, but he’s got this stupid grin on his face. I can’t even describe how that grin made me feel. My body still thinks it’s about to die. My ears are still ringing. And you know what he says to me. He says, ‘Well, at least we have dinner.’ And I realize all that gore isn’t from any of our men. It’s from the poor Alatarian livestock that were grazing out in the field. Nothing but red, sticky piles now. Of course, then I have to tell him that Alatarian herbivores produce a metabolite that’ll make you shit your guts out if you weren’t raised on the meat. He didn’t think that was nearly as funny. ‘Oh, you think it’s your job to tell me what I can and can’t eat,’ he says. Well, it was my job, actually.”

Sun leans her head against her hand as she listens. This is the longest Soldier-Dossa story she’s ever heard.

“I shouldn’t have told him,” Dossa decides. “But I was a nicer person back then.”

“What did he look like?”

“Oh, well. He was very handsome, you know, in a puppy-dog kind of way.” He pauses. “Sometimes it’s hard to remember his face. I’ll have to show you some pictures later.”

“I’ll be around,” Sun says. “Actually, I’ve been meaning to ask you a favor.”

“Oh?”

He hesitates for maybe half a second, but Sun’s skin goes cold. He’s waiting for her to say that the bird has been talking to her again—she knows this for a fact. She can’t believe she tricked herself into believing that he would forget so easily.

“I’ve been reading some of Hati’s latest research and some of his colleagues’, too,” she explains. “They reference some obscure pheromones that I can’t find in my database. Would you mind if I hopped onto your computer to see if you have anything on file?”

• • • •

Sun slips inside Dossa’s office.

“I’ll be in the other room if you need me,” Dossa says before he leaves. “Turn out the light if you head out after me.”

She thinks that her excuse to access his computer is pretty good. The transfer of data from ship to ship, or planet to ship, is time consuming and costly. Even as a high-ranking employee, the bandwidth allocated to her communication devices is strictly budgeted, especially for calls to people like Indrani, located lightyears away. They may get network access at the upcoming lunar station, but they couldn’t always bet on it. The last time they docked somewhere, she was only able to download half of the papers Dossa could because her connection kept failing.

She takes a seat at his desk, puts her hands on the keyboard, and looks at her reflection in the monitor.

He has to know something, right? Dossa has piloted with the bird for longer than she has been alive. Surely, that’s what the bird was trying to tell her: don’t scramble about in the dark, not when your pilot is right there, waiting until you present yourself belly-up.

She scrolls through his files in his piloting database. It’s marginally more expansive than hers, but completely ordinary. Absently, she clicks on his open applications. There’s a video call from his mother, Dossa Ektanimya, awaiting asynchronous reply, a few spreadsheets of financial information, and a draft of a “Congratulations, sorry I haven’t seen you” letter addressed to a friend who had, apparently, recently given birth. Looking at each one makes her feel like she’s staring Dossa right in the eye.

Even after their argument, he still trusts her this much.

She closes those apps and navigates to his documents instead. His filing system is immaculately specific, sorted by year and topic, then further divided into subsystems. They go back decades. It would take her hours, if not days, to comb through this amount of material.

She wrings her fingers. He became a fully-fledged pilot in ‘65, so she starts in that folder and finds routine datasheets.

Then she goes back, one year, two years, three years—the year in which he should have met their bird for the very first time. Inside, there are two folders with the same exact name.

She pauses, blinks.

She opens both of them. One contains a plethora of files with his typical naming scheme, but the other only has one unnamed folder. And unlike his personal calls, his work documents, it throws up a password entry prompt when she clicks on it.

This has to be it.

Standing, she studies his shelf. A small device projects a slideshow of images across a shining metal sheet; she realizes she’s never really looked at them. There is one of a tiger-striped basenji. Another of a wedding where a bride in red and gold (his sister?) is lifted in the arms of her husband, her saree fluttering like a bird-of-paradise in flight. A third of two soldiers dueling, their faces turned fuzzy with the distance and the dust, as the rest of their company, cloaked by wide leaves, cheers from the sidelines. This must be from Dossa’s post on Nourilia, where the atmosphere is so volatile that a gunshot can detonate a small village. They wear spears and swords instead of rifles, metal and leather instead of Teflon.

Beneath this, there’s a shelf of framed metals and traditional photographs, so old they’ve faded with time. She doesn’t recognize any of the faces. It’s like looking into the life of a stranger, and the feeling discomforts her. She stops. One is turned backwards, so she flips it around. It’s a black-and-white portrait of a man with a small, lopsided smile. He’s pale, even paler than Hati, and he wears his hair in a ponytail. A linen gorget hides his throat. On his shoulder, a soft shape implies the presence of a hand.

Sitting down, she opens up the frame. She finds that the photo is folded in half. Two men stand shoulder-to- shoulder. The second one does have his arm around the first, and there’s something about the serious expression on his face that makes Sun’s gut twist up. It’s Dossa—not her Dossa, but a version of him.

On the back of the photo, “To an eternity” is written in an unfamiliar script. Below it, she finds Dossa’s handwriting:

Antony Germain, 23/4/57.

She tries every variation of the name and date to open the folder—with spaces and without, with hyphens instead of slashes—and each one returns an error.

She leans back in the chair, chewing her lip, with the photo lying on her breast. When she lifts it up, Antony smiles at her.

She tries Antony’s note, exactly as it is written.

The folder opens and reveals its new name: MEMORY.

• • • •

MEMORY is made of three components.

The first: hundreds of documents of noise and nonsense code, each one titled and dated. ‘62, ‘63, ‘64. These records cease right before the new year.

The second: a decryption key, using the same format as the piloting database standard.

The third: a diary.

Another memory collected as of X/X/64, Dossa writes in one entry. The past few memories appear to be sequential, but their significance is still unknown to me. And I’m beginning to suspect that T— suspects something about these late-night visits.

Sun closes the diary files and instead uploads the first of her nonsense codes to the new database key. The program returns the following:

[Transcript completed 12/12/94, 21:05]

We notice that she is lagging behind.

She is called: inside-bone smell—rainstorm from the perch on Ungawa [1] —amber-warm skin after a strenuous flight. I call to her gently with this name. But I see it now: the bright red beads that float around her and the copper-urea alarm smell.

Her gut bulges from behind her keel. This is not new. The hatchling was a late hatcher and now a late drop. Its emergence is signaled by the ripples across the flank of warmth—bone—rain.

At my approach, she backs away. She breathes in gusts now. Her fear is nauseous and pervasive. Her fear lives inside of my lungs.

I ask the others to wait. I watch their eyes. But after some time, the hatchling does not emerge and warmth—bone—rain’s alarms cease. She shakes instead of straining. Her flank is still.

Perhaps this should not come as a shock to us. Above her gut, her hips sit lopsided. A red scar stretches from flank to pelvis. A metal spear hit her here. Above us, that day, things made of iron and planet-gravity flew past, things that do not think and do not speak.

I approach. I call to her, and she strains weakly. The hatchling’s tail emerges from her as if it might split her in two. This sight is full of wrongness. It fills me with a sickness I have not felt for some time.

I call to her again but nothing seeps out of her, not used-up-air, not my name. When I grasp the hatchling’s tail in my beak and pull, there is not even the urea-fear and no pain, either. I tell myself, there is no pain anymore, as I pull. Her muscles grip the hatchling with a primal memory, a desire to house it within. The feet slip out.

Limp and cobwebbed with blood. There is a wetness, beaded around us, and the embrace of the others against my skin. The others and their fear now, propagated collectively and mixed up with the warmth—bone—rain scent to such an extent that I cannot tell one from the other.

The hatchling emerges and I wrap myself around it. At first, I grip too tightly and it whines. It whines! It breathes and wriggles! Opening its mouth with mine, I let crop-food slide into its throat. It will breathe more easily now. It will warm up and sleep. For now, I will hold it in the nest of my tail.

A few of us nudge warmth—bone—rain’s face. She exhales once, and a strange, crackling period of time waits between this exhale and the next. Her gut is blackened, bruised, wrinkled, and her own blood sticks to her. We try to give her crop-food, as we did the hatchling, but it falls out of her beak. I see her throat moving, convulsing. She swallows maybe a bite or two by happenstance, but with the same convulsion, regurgitates it along with a stream of yellow bile.

There is nothing left of her, but we wait, anyway. We wait and wait until one of us wraps his mouth around her neck and crushes it. Another pinches the skin of her gut and pulls until it tears. Her crop-food leaks out, and we eat, and eat, and ea —not just crop-food but also the meat that warmth—bone—rain left behind. When I lick the fluid from the hatchling’s face, it tastes of warmth—bone—rain. Exactly of her, as if she is speaking her name to me.

[ [1] Approximation based on the given relative coordinates. Confidence 73.4%]

Sun doesn’t know how long she spends staring at the bird’s last line. When her clock chimes—the end of the hour—she startles out of her trance and switches the computer monitor off, snatching her hand away as if burned.

She is filled nearly to bursting. She imagines herself popping like a balloon. Knitting her fingers together, she closes her eyes until she can steady her breathing and prompts herself to think this through one step at a time.

What could she deduce from this? Could she assume that this memory was shared with her deliberately, that it means something beyond the literal recollection? Or was it a happenstance daydream, perhaps inspired by the flock leaving Miphre? She wonders how much it really matters. After all, the circumstances of how she attained this memory doesn’t change its contents. Name and ritual, grief and elation—her bird’s internal narrative demonstrates sapience far beyond that of any other non-human animal, and she has so far only caught a glimpse into its mind.

Thinking about the remaining contents of MEMORY makes her skin itch. There are hundreds of files just like this one: decrypted, annotated daydream code from their bird. Her bird.

She lets herself laugh, and she forces a smile on her face. This is what she’s been seeking, a validation of everything she’s suspected since her return to Messina’s Third Daughter, and although there is a new, simmering fear stalking her from within the files, there is relief, too. She is right. She has been right the whole time.

How long would it take for her to read all of the memories?

How long did it take Dossa to figure this all out?

Someone knocks at her door. She wraps herself up in a robe, checking to make sure her computer is still off, before answering.

Dossa stands in front of her. Something about his sad eyes and the tilt of his head sparks a fire in her stomach.

“Hi, Sun.” He speaks softly, as if he’s approaching a wild animal with a handheld palm-up.

“How did you know?”

“I’ve been trying to call you. Are you all right?”

She digs her nails into the neckline of her robe. “How?”

“How do I know that you opened a password-protected folder on my computer and copied its contents onto an external hard drive?” His shoulders fall as he exhales. “You can probably make a few guesses.”

“You lied to me.” She can’t help the way her lip curls. Her voice doesn’t even sound like her own.

He looks at her silently, brow furrowed, overflowing with—is it pity? She is returned to the night when she first handed him the neural output, flooded again with the doubt, the pain, and the icy chill. She wanted to scream: We’re the same! You made me out of yourself! Would you slit your own throat?

“You lied to me, and you made me think I was insane.” She uses the back of her hand to wipe away tears. “And you knew. This whole time.”

“Can I come inside?”

“No! No, you cannot come inside!”

Dossa takes a step back, hands held up. “Okay, Sun. Look,” he says. “Whatever you think is happening? It’s not
true.”

“Please, stop pretending. You can’t keep lying when I’ve already seen it.”

“It doesn’t love you, Sun.” This escapes him, wide-eyed and frantically. Dossa doesn’t need to yell. His words reverberate in Sun’s chest, even as he continues in a voice so soft that she can hardly hear him: “I’m sorry. It wants you to think it loves you, but it doesn’t, and the sooner you understand that, the easier this will be.”

“You can’t know that.”

“It doesn’t,” he whispers, “and it never will. Sun, I promise, you want to forget this ever happened. When you do, eventually, it’ll stop trying.”

Sun recedes into herself. Her mind is buzzing, still too full of the memory she just read, the smell of alarm pheromone fresh in her nose. She falls against the doorframe and asks, “What does it want?”

“How do you escape a prison where you can’t even speak to your captors? Maybe you convince one of them to love you so much that he will set you free.”

Sun shakes her head. “No. No. That’s not true. How can I trust you?”

He reaches out, but she flinches away, back into the green glow of her lamp. With no one to hold it, the door starts to creak closed. She can only see half of Dossa’s face.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he pleads. “Like you think I’m going to lock you up and take all of this away from you. You already know. There’s nothing I can do about that. This only ends one way, Sun, but there are many ways to get there. Some hurt less than others.”

“No,” she says, slowly, “this is all lies. All you’ve ever done, from the moment I stepped foot here, is lie to me.”

She’s spent years on this vessel. Picked her fingers across her bird’s brain. Learned the language of its wingbeats. She will never be anything else, but that doesn’t matter, because it chose her.

“You know that isn’t true.”

“Really—” She digs her fingers into her arms, scratches her skin until it burns. She startles herself with her own, bitter laugh. “Really, I don’t know why I haven’t told you to fuck off yet.”

Dossa nods, lips pursed. He turns away. “I’ll save you the trouble. Good night, Sun.”

• • • •

Messina’s Third Daughter docks at the station on Celuse’s third moon. With most of the crew gone, the ship
fills with a comforting silence.

Together, Sun and Luna head to the piloting chamber. Luna is wrapped up in a bundle in Sun’s arms, comfortingly heavy now that they’ve left the zero-gravity lab.

Gradually, now that Luna has awakened from its nap in the hormone gel, Hati has been taking it out on small excursions. In the wild, hatchlings are confronted with all manner of sensory input from the moment of their birth—far more than a sterile lab could provide. And before he left for the station, Hati gave Sun permission to introduce Luna to her bird.

“Intraspecies socialization is paramount for her neurological development,” he said as he checked which pens he’d packed for the third time.

“But you don’t want to be there?” Sun asked, haltingly. She didn’t want to question her luck—but she didn’t want to take advantage of her friend, either. After all, this was his bird.

“Your bird hardly knows me,” Hati replied. “It’s best to keep the situation as controlled as possible.” He added, more quietly this time, “And I think she’ll be lonely while I’m gone.”

Sun nestles Luna in a chair in the atrium, where the hatchling lays its heavy head against its chest and gazes up at twinkling lights reflected by the ceiling’s gold motifs. It’s too much work, out here, for it to move much.

Crossing the walkway, Sun pulls herself into the Daughter’s hand, and when she looks ahead, she feels as if she’s meeting the bird for the first time. This thing before her isn’t quite an animal, but it isn’t quite a human, either. What has it seen during its long life, during its unquantifiable jaunts through space. Who has it loved?

Who has it mourned? As the breadth of its experiences unroll before her, she finds herself overwhelmed with a sense of awe.

She settles down with her own tablet, grabs the monitor, and gets comfortable. Meanwhile, the bird puts its head between the Daughter’s fingers once again and waits. Dust-like particles float in the humor behind its hard eye caps. The ambient darkness reminds Sun of the bottom of a lake.

“You understand me,” Sun says. The statement makes her smile. “Will you tell me your name?”

A sweet smell escapes its nostrils in a mist. The monitor chimes as it records each component of the gas, and Sun takes her time working through the olfactory codes. But the name is more complex than she anticipated. Even a scent that could be summarized as “a rainstorm on Ungawa” may contain several chemicals: ozone, geosmin, stearic acid in varying ratios. She transfers the code to her tablet instead, runs it through Dossa’s key.

[Transcript completed 17/10/94, 06:12]

The tannic acid-smell of Anemoite oak bark soaked in water—the perfume of a small white petal of unknown origin, spotted one day by the shaman three-birds before me—iron salt from a dead cetacean.

Sun thinks, Oak-tea—petal—whale-blood. She wants to cup the name in her hands.

“Thank you,” she says. “You know I’m Sun, don’t you? It’s okay that you can’t say my name. I can’t exhale yours, so I think we’re even.”

Some nonsense code trickles down the screen. It’s not as long as any of the memories Sun has captured before. She translates this one, too.

[Transcript completed 17/10/94, 06:18]

She sits before me. I know her. I have known her.

Sun’s hand trembles. Never has she been so sure that Dossa is wrong.

She runs her fingers over the bird’s beak, lets its barbels fall against her palms. She thumbs open its mouth to reveal its vermillion tongue and the translucent ruby-like papillae that line each side of it. Past its beak, across its cheek and neck, her hands sink into its soft flesh like they would into a down pillow. Closer than she has ever been before, she can appreciate the dotted scars that pockmark its skin and the scar tissue that knots together where half of its wattle has been torn off.

“I want to show you something,” she says. “I hope you find it just as charming as I do.”

She hurries back to the atrium and returns with Luna bundled in her arms. The hatchling peers out shyly, only two eyes visible between the blanket’s folds. Weight melts away from them as they reach the Daughter’s hand, the blanket billowing away as if it were floating in water. Luna wraps its tail around Sun’s arm and presses its keel into her chest.

“It was made by a friend of mine,” Sun says, pulling the rest of the blanket away from Luna’s head. The new skin on its freshly grown wattle and comb shines like an oil spill. It cocks its head to the side then puffs little clouds out of its tail stomata.

The bird raises its head and with a trumpeting exhale, pushes itself away from the piloting apparatus. Tension runs through its body. The vestigial, wisp-like feathers along its spine stand straight up. It pulls its legs close to its belly and points its beak to the ground, staring with unreadable, limnic eyes. In just a moment, it has transformed from the languid, sleepy creature held by the ship’s fingers into something else entirely.

“Hey,” she tries, “I know it’s probably been a while since you’ve seen another bird. You can take your time.” With her hands full, Sun can’t reach for the monitor as code floods its screen. She doesn’t dare let Luna go.

The bird’s mouth drops open and it reaches forward, tongue-first, open-throat-first. From beak-tip to beak-tip, its mouth is twice as tall as Sun. Heat emanates from its depths. As it breathes in, Sun can see the fog-like gasses that flood the two open holes beneath its tongue.

She pulls her knees to her chest, in front of Luna, but she can’t bear to look away.

Her bird would never hurt her, even in a moment of fear. She knows that.

She knows the bird better than she knows herself.

Taking in a deep breath, she reaches out with a single hand.

A screech escapes the bird’s throat. With its wings raised, its shadow eclipses the entire apparatus. The sensors on the sides of its keel dilate, revealing pulsing rings of cyan blue and fleshy reds.

Its tail lashes back and forth, now fully extended and so long that it reaches from one end of the chamber to the next. Even the gas expelled from its tail stomata creates a dissonance of sounds as if it has four different mouths—ululating, laughing, screaming, trumpeting mouths.

There is another sound in the cacophony. Sun finds her own voice buried beneath the bird’s: her gasp of surprise, the sobs torn out of her from deep in her chest.

It throws its head back, so far that it must touch its own back, so far that its face is hidden by the writhing coils of its neck. Chest pushed out, sensors open to dark, black pupils, it no longer looks like a bird at all, but the monstrous face of a much larger beast whose head has risen above a pit of fog.

It inhales violently—inflated until its ribs press up against its skin—and exhales like a peel of thunder.

Tumultuous winds steal away the monitor and throw her tablet against the glass.

Sun claws herself back to the door with her tether. In her arms, Luna trembles.

“Please!” She can’t even hear herself over the storm. “Please, stop!”

The smell hits her all at once: the stink of fermented, rotten food and the uric stench of gastorian alarm pheromone. There’s enough of it to make her eyes burn.

“I promise you’re safe!”

Luna cries in high-pitched bursts, choking itself when it runs out of air, convulsing, and crying again. Fear pheromone escapes its stomata in such a concentrated form that it leaks out in yellow droplets. Sun struggles to wrap the blanket over it again, but even that won’t block out the smell.

“Please!” Sun cries. “You know I love you!”

With an air-shaking roar, the bird throws itself against the wall of the chamber. Its tail and neck and body move like a disjointed doll, independently from one another—the serpent, and the monster’s face, and the serpent’s twin—writhing and lashing against the glass and bellowing.

She cries again, into the storm, but there are no words this time. She finds the bird eyes as starlight glints off the caps: two white discs staring at her, two lines of serrated teeth below them, trails of heavy smoke seeping from the corners of its mouth—and she realizes that this is what they are: predator and prey.

New currents sweep Sun against the door. As her back collides with the metal frame, the air is knocked out of her lungs. Even as she gasps, she holds Luna tightly against her breast.

Finally, her fumbling hands find the door’s handles. As soon as the lock releases, the doors are flung open by the pressure system and Sun is thrown back into the ship’s gravity, where she falls to the floor.

The doors slam shut, and the locks engage with a resounding thud.

The only sound is Luna’s breathing: each shuddering, wheezing whisper falling gently into the expanse around them.

• • • •

[Transcript completed 12/12/92, 23:05]

Planet-side, we find a herd of large, fur-covered prey.

Around me, I hear us trumpet and call. The ground shakes when we touch it.

I take one of the herd by the leg, pull it into the sky. Its body cracks and breaks. Already its blood leaks down my throat. I can’t hear its heart moving anymore. I drop it against the cliff and lay my head against it. Its ribs collapse. Offal spills from the chasm in its gut. I roll over it again and again until I’m coated with its name: ruminated chyme and acid and vegetal fur.

The sound it makes when it breaks apart echoes in my chest. I’ve spread it across the rocks, the ground. I’ve turned it into dust. In the sky, its blood wouldn’t sink down. I see it: her blood, speckled across the sky like stars. It’s too heavy here, and I would break apart this whole cliff if I could, and this meat doesn’t taste like warmth—bone—rain; no, it doesn’t taste like much at all. The hatchling clutches my tail, but now she crawls forward, up my back and to my head. Her movements are slow and clumsy, as are mine. Here, nestled against my cheek, she opens her mouth and asks with a sweet and plant-like smell to be fed.

I tear off a piece and drop it into her mouth. She grabs it and backs away, eating in the shadow of my haunches. I don’t have her mother’s name—every piece of her body tells her to run until she finds that name, the one that she shares, the one embedded in her own skin: warmth—bone—rain—warmth—bone—rain—warmth—bone—rain.

This will be her first memory, I decide. That of violence, and loneliness, and the scar that decorated her mother’s flank. I will recite it to her when we fly again, and after she breathes this story in again and again, she will breathe it back into me.

• • • •

The adjunctive deck is dressed in golden curtains and shimmering glass baubles.

Dossa leans against the back of a chair, nursing a glass of sparkling wine. It’s starting to go sour, but it’s all they have left now that they’re three weeks out from the Celuseite lunar station.

Through the arched windows before him, gastorian exhaust ripples like a heat shimmer, obscuring the starscape beyond the piloting chamber with an iridescent mist. Harmonized against a backdrop of soft violins, the piloting crew gossips, and laughs, and drinks.

Sun sits on the edge of one of the tables, dressed in a sharp blazer, her hair newly buzzed to her scalp. She’s distracted by her tablet—she gazes into its face, and then into the Daughter’s hands, and back again, a distant look on her face as if she is remembering something from long ago—but every so often, she replies to the closest conversation or grins when the captain whispers to her. Dossa recognizes this particular breed of Sun-smile: the one she rehearses in the mirror because she can never get it quite right. When she actually finds something funny, she nearly frowns, hides her face, and her shoulders shake.

Yesterday, Sun successfully maneuvered Messina’s Third Daughter through an unforeseen pod of cetaceans during what was supposed to be a routine flight. The crew has been speculating that the particular composition of the gas clouds in this region of space obscured the pod—from both the ship and the bird—until their arrival was imminent. Between hours of slow crawls and civilian power-outages to avoid detection, it took twice as long to reach their target landmark. When Sun was dragged out of the Daughter’s hand, she was trembling, wide-eyed, glowing. He held her face between his palms, pressing just hard enough to remind himself that she was real, solid, and yet, somehow, not only made from bits of himself, but sculpted by his hand.

“You were perfect,” he said. “You’re perfect.”

He sips on his champagne and watches as Sun is dragged from table to table. They love her—they should love her. As the music reaches a crescendo, she falls into the arms of a woman with long red hair and a silk gown. They’re both tipsy.

In a blur, the crowd flows out of the observation chamber, presumably heading deeper into the ship, perhaps somewhere with dimmer lighting.

In the silence they leave behind, Dossa notices that Sun left her tablet on a table.

Dossa picks it up, about to put it away so he can return it to her tomorrow, when he notices that the screen is still on. Bright white text glares at him.

[Transcript completed 17/12/94, 06:54]

SHE HOLDS IT OUT—THIS THING THAT PEERS AT ME FROM THE CAGE OF HER HANDS

LOOK AT IT—LOOK AT ITS WRONGNESS—LOOK AT EYES WHICH HAVE NEVER SEEN—LUNGS THAT HAVE NEVER TASTED WORDS—WINGS THAT HAVE NEVER FLOWN

WHAT BIRTHED THIS THING—ITS FACE A MIRROR—ITS FLESH AN OLD MEMORY—I DID NOT BIRTH

THIS THING BUT IT HAS MY NAME

IT HAS MY NAME AND WHEN IT SPEAKS IT SPEAKS WITH MY VOICE

WE WILL NEVER LEAVE—EVEN IN DEATH THERE IS ANOTHER—AND ANOTHER—AND ANOTHER—WITH MY NAME

“Dossa!” Sun calls, waving from the doorway. “Dossa, come on!” Then she’s at his side, a little flustered and her smile a little strained. He holds out her tablet.

“You left this here.” “Oh!” She grabs it quickly. “Thank you.” She wavers like a candle flame, between him and the door. Her fingers worry at her sleeves. Finally, she tilts her head to the side, leans forward, and manages, “Did you—?”

“Yes,” he interrupts. “Yes, I saw the notification. It looks like you got something from Hati. Probably another update about the hatchling.”

The bird’s silhouette breaks up the chamber’s ambient blue glow. It’s followed by another, smaller creature that weaves between the curves of its tail like a ribbon. Their companionship is the result of a careful habituation protocol designed by Hati. Dossa didn’t realize how worried he had been for Sun until he met Hati’s hatchling. There is a perpetuity that lives inside of it, an inevitability, an immortality.

“Yeah,” Sun says, tucking the tablet away. “Yeah, that must be it.”

About the Author

Lowry Poletti is a Black author, artist, and veterinary student from New Jersey. They write a variety of fantasy, scifi, and horror fiction unified by their fascination with gore. When they aren’t writing about monsters and the people who love them, they can be found wrist deep in a formalin-fixed lab specimen. Their other pieces appear in Strange Horizons, Baffling Magazine, and Fantasy Magazine. You can find more of their work on their website: lowrypoletti.wordpress.com.

Please visit Lightspeed Magazine to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the February 2025 issue, which also features short fiction by Andrew Dana Hudson, Seoung Kim, Eugenia Triantafyllou, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Kristina Ten, David DeGraff, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $4.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition here.

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