Firebirds Soaring Read online

  “The stage suffered the day that Ling Jun chose to become a sailor, no?” Grandmother scowled and made a rude gesture with her free hand toward the retreating junk. “The idiot. Ten years as first mate on my boat, and he takes a post with the Red Lanterns scrubbing decks. If he’d stuck with me, he’d have his own boat by now.”

  Yumin shrugged and turned his attention back to the device in his hands, trying to work out what was preventing it from operating.

  “Ever since you found that thing in the rubbish pile last month,” Grandmother said, drawing nearer, “I think you’ve scarcely been without it.”

  “It’s something to do with my hands, I suppose,” Yumin answered sheepishly.

  “Now look, Daughter’s-son.” As Grandmother shooed a few skinks out of the way with the toe of her boot and dropped the bag to the planks of the dock, Yumin’s nostrils caught the strong scent of ginger that followed her everywhere like a cloud. “I’ve never stood in the way of your tinkering, and God knows that I’m grateful enough for it when the junk’s engines give out, but you’ve been spending more time at your hobby than your job, and it’s got to stop. I’ve cut you some slack since your mother died, but now I need your head and hands both back at their jobs. It’ll just be you and me on this trip.”

  From the deck of Grandmother’s junk came the sound of wet flesh slapping wood, and they turned to see a pair of otters, their forelegs propped up over the boat’s railing. One, with a nick in his ear, waved his paws, signing furiously.

  Grandmother sighed. “Yes, Genius, just me and Yumin and you and Recluse, of course.”

  Recluse, the other otter, nodded his small head, signing the gestures for laughter, while Genius ran in a tight circle, slapping the deck with his paws and tail.

  “Clowns.” Yumin shook his head.

  A squawk came from overhead.

  “And you, too, Great Sage,” Grandmother called up to the cormorant perched atop the mast, “you feathered pillow, you.”

  The cormorant clacked its beak, an avian sort of laugh, and then returned to preening its feathers.

  “Here, take this, boy.” Grandmother pushed the bag of supplies over to Yumin with the side of her foot, and then vaulted nimbly to the deck of the junk.

  Yumin tucked the device inside his tunic, and then handed the bag over, careful not to let the supplies fall into the cold waters.

  “Hurry up now. We need to get on the open water before midday, or else the Red Lanterns will have caught all of the fish before we catch a one.” To Yumin’s surprise, Grandmother said the name of their rivals with scarcely a moue of distaste.

  Yumin untied the junk from the dock and, with a final glance back at the town, jumped the gap, landing on the deck with a thud. He had just five more days before he needed to be back, or so the recruiting officer had said. Five days to spend one last trip with his grandmother, and then break her heart.

  Once they’d motored far enough away from the shore, Grandmother cut the engines and let the sails catch the wind, propelling them out into the waters of the Southern Sea.

  At the wheel, Grandmother puffed on her pipe and called over to Yumin, tinkering with his device in the prow. “I want to drop anchor near the Sunken City by nightfall and be in position to release the nets before dawn.”

  The Sunken City, Yumin thought. Would this be his last time to see its faint lights?

  “You hear me, Yumin? Or have your brains fallen into that little red box of yours?”

  “I heard you, Grandmother.” Yumin tried not to sound like a petulant child, but succeeded only partially.

  The Sunken City had a name, once, but no one used it now. Before the water levels of the Southern Sea had risen to their current height, when it was only a lake a few hundred meters deep, the Sunken City had perched at its shores. It was a port city, a hub for travel and home to fishers, and also the place where all of the creatures of the Southern Sea were first hatched and adapted for life on Fire Star. Most had originally been aquatic strains brought to Fire Star once the red planet had been sufficiently terraformed to support aquatic life. Many of the species had been modified over the generations, their genes twisted and turned until they were better suited to survive on the red planet, and some, like Grandmother Lu’s otters and cormorant, had even had their intelligence and aptitudes boosted. When the water levels rose even higher, as the red planet grew ever warmer, the Sunken City was claimed by the waves, and as the coast migrated inland to the borders of Ting township, it had become the new port.

  “You know, Grandmother . . .” Yumin said, at length. “About the Red Lantern Families . . . ?”

  “Yes, what of them?” Grandmother answered, guardedly.

  “Well, it seems to me that the main reason they’re so successful is their automation. If you were to automate your operation, you wouldn’t need to hire extra hands. In fact, if you sprang for one of the mechanical intelligent central controllers that are now available, you wouldn’t have to go out on the waters at all, but could instead stay at home and relax while the automated systems did all of the work for you.”

  Grandmother blew air through her thin lips, making a sound like flatulence. “That isn’t real fishing. And besides, it’s automated systems like the Red Lantern Families that are fishing the Southern Seas empty. That’s why the fish have been so scarce. Machines that don’t need to eat and sleep, that catch more fish than the market can buy, driving down prices for everyone else. Besides, I’ve got the otters and the cormorant and you to help me, so why do I need to spend a fortune on automata just to haul in the nets? We’ll do just fine, as we always have.”

  Yumin sighed, and turned back to the red-and-gold brick.

  That night, they dropped anchor, and Yumin was so tired that he went straight to sleep after their evening meal, climbing into his bunk in the hold before the sun had completely set.

  How long he slept, Yumin wasn’t sure, but sometime in the middle of the night he was roused from his slumber by the sound of something large bumping the bottom of the boat. Yumin scrambled out of his bunk and up on deck, but Grandmother was already there, smoking her pipe and peering over the side of the junk.

  They could see nothing in the dark waters except glittering lights far below the surface.

  “The Sunken City,” Yumin said. He knew that the lights were just bioluminescent algae, cultured and engineered when the submerged city had been a living metropolis, but still, seeing them by moonlight, he couldn’t help but be reminded of the bedtime stories of his grandmother, before he claimed to have outgrown such things, about the Land in the Sea, a glittering kingdom at the bottom of the ocean, ruled over by a magical dragon.

  Grandmother puffed her pipe, the burning ember in the bowl glowing red like a hot coal, casting an eerie red light on her careworn features, but said nothing.

  They were back at work before sunrise. The cormorant wheeled overhead but squawked that it couldn’t see any sign of shoals beneath the water.

  “That’s a bad sign,” Grandmother said, but she didn’t have to explain what she meant. Fish had always congregated around the structures of the submerged city, finding shelter to feed, and to reproduce, in buildings that once housed humans and their machines. If there were no fish to be found here, it was not a promising indicator that they would have much luck in other locales.

  “What do we do, Grandmother?”

  “Well, there’s nothing to be gained from standing here and gawking. We’ll send Great Sage out to range a bit farther afield”—she flashed a few signs at the cormorant, who squawked in response, then flew off in a wide arc, heading toward the east—“while we start trawling here. It’ll be only for individual fish, at best, but it beats waiting around on our backsides.”

  With Grandmother’s help, Yumin released the nets, two large sets of mesh hooked to strong lines that ran over pulleys on a high gantry in the junk’s rear, ending in wide spools attached to a motor. When the nets were in place, Grandmother took the wheel and started up
the engine. The boat moved in wide circles, marking out the limits of the Sunken City far below. If there’d been shoals in these waters, the otters would have been put to work, herding the fish in their dozens and hundreds into the nets. With only scattered fish to be had, their talents wouldn’t be needed, so they sat on the prow of the junk, leaning into the spray, luxuriating in the warm sum.

  When they’d made a full circuit, Grandmother cut the engine, and Yumin kicked the lever that started the motor spooling in the nets. When the nets had been reeled in and were hanging from the gantries overhead, Yumin was dispirited to see only one or two fish sporadically flopping in the heavy mesh.

  “Keep heart, Daughter’s-son,” Grandmother said brightly. “We’ll catch them yet.”

  Yumin sighed. He’d hoped to fill the hold with a big haul right away so they’d be forced to head back into port sooner rather than later. Then he could tell Grandmother his news when they were nearly in reach of home, and there’d be less chance that he’d miss his transport.

  “Look there.” Grandmother pointed overhead with the stem of her pipe.

  The cormorant came angling in from the east, frantically flapping his wide wings, and gracelessly landed on his perch at the mast’s top.

  “Well?” Grandmother shouted impatiently up at the bird.

  The cormorant shivered, and squawked in his simple syllables that he had sighted something in the water to the east. It seemed to Yumin that the bird was agitated, even nervous. “Grandmother, does Great Sage seem . . . distressed, to you?”

  Grandmother looked from Yumin to the bird overhead and back again, and shrugged. “That may be. He’s probably just excited, eager for the treat he’ll have earned when his directions lead us to a good catch.”

  Yumin nodded, and looked up at the shivering bird, unconvinced.

  After a few days of relaxing, the otters were eager for some exercise. They slid out through their bolt holes, one on either side of the boat, and coursed along beside the junk as they traveled eastward.

  Yumin was in the prow, fiddling with the red-and-gold device. He was worried but found that he was more concerned about what his grandmother would think of his present than of what she would say when he told her his news. And worried that she’d try to keep him away from shore for so long that he’d miss his transport. The officer had told him to report in six days, and it had already been three. Grandmother wouldn’t intentionally keep him away once she heard his plans, would she?

  He reassembled the device, but its screen remained dark, flat black in its ornate frame of gold. He toggled the switches that initiated the internal diagnostics, but when the cycles were complete, it emitted a sequence of tweets and whistles that meant no fault had been found. To all indications, then, the original persona was intact, deep within the red-lacquered shell, but it still did not communicate or respond to stimuli—awake, but unresponsive.

  Yumin’s deep concentration was shattered when he was pelted on the side of the head with a dumpling, leaving a greasy spot in his hair.

  “I’ve been calling your name forever, boy,” Grandmother hooted. “Where are you, anyway? Your body is here but your mind is somewhere else.”

  “Sorry, Grandmother,” Yumin said, and couldn’t help but think that soon, his body would be elsewhere, too.

  The junk reached the spot that the cormorant had indicated, and the bird perched on top of the mast, nervously preening.

  Yumin released the nets while Grandmother fired up the engine, and they began to drag the nets behind the boat. The otters dropped back, allowing the junk to course ahead. They gave a little salute and then dove beneath the waters.

  Grandmother was at the wheel, and she called over to Yumin at his post at the nets. She told him about chores they needed to look after when they got back, errands she needed him to run. Yumin felt an uneasy fluttering deep in the pit of his stomach and tasted betrayal on his tongue.

  Far behind, the head of one of the otters crested the surface of the water. From its nicked ear, Yumin could tell immediately it was Genius. Absently, without waiting for the otter’s signal, Yumin kicked the lever that started the retraction of the nets. But after a few moments, Recluse, the other otter, still hadn’t surfaced, and its companion, Genius, wasn’t giving the affirmative salute, but was instead motioning “Fear” and “Danger,” frantically.

  “Hey, Grandmother,” Yumin called, and the old woman looked back. “Could Recluse could be caught in a net, do you think? ”

  Grandmother rubbed her lower lip between thumb and forefinger, and nodded, slowly. “It’s possible.”

  “You think I should stop the nets’ retraction?”

  “No, let them keep reeling in. If Recluse is in a net, bringing the nets onboard will be the best, and perhaps only, way of getting him loose.”

  “Fair enough.” Yumin glanced back and eyed the otter trailing behind them. “Something’s got Genius spooked, though.”

  Grandmother came to stand beside him. “Will you look at that?”

  The otter was still on the surface, still signing “Danger,” and “Fear,” and “Big.” Then he began to sign “Fish,” followed quickly by “Not Fish.” He dove, was gone for a long moment, resurfaced and signed again. “Fish, Not Fish.”

  “What does he mean, Grandmother?”

  “Nothing good.”

  There came a high-pitched squeal, as the motor pulling in the nets began to strain.

  “Yumin, take the wheel.” Grandmother switched places with Yumin, going over to lean low over the spools. From the wheel, Yumin could see that the line was taut, the motor still pulling, but the nets weren’t coming in.

  Yumin looked back, past the aft end of the boat, to where the lines of the net cut V-shaped wakes into the cold water. Genius the otter was nowhere to be seen.

  The motor squealed and strained, and then suddenly the junk lurched forward as the lines momentarily went slack before going taut again. But now the line was spooling in, and the nets were slowly being hauled out of the water.

  “There we go!” Grandmother shouted, clapping her hands.

  The nets flapped onto the deck. There were fewer fish than they’d hauled in over the Sunken City, but, more surprisingly, there was a huge rent in the mesh of one of the nets.

  “What did that?” Yumin said, mouth hanging open.

  Grandmother narrowed her eyes and shook her head, without saying a word.

  Night fell, and the otters never resurfaced.

  Yumin and Grandmother sat on the deck, laboriously mending the nets. They hadn’t spoken much since the loss of the otters. The cormorant, Great Sage, refused to come down from his perch atop the mast.

  The stars were out overhead, and the moons moved across the sky. There was a shooting star moving toward the north, and Yumin realized it was a ship leaving stationary orbit at the top of the orbital elevator. Yumin was momentarily worried that his transport had left without him, but he calmed himself, remembering that it had only been four days, and he had two more to go.

  Yumin looked up from his mending. “Grandmother, I suppose we’ll have to head back into land, come the morning, right?” He tried not to sound too eager, but he couldn’t prevent a trace of excitement, mingled with fear, from creeping into his voice.

  Grandmother was looking at the net in her hands. “I’ve never see the like. Just never.”

  “What about the stories you told me as a boy? The old stories of fish with razor teeth, or otters who carried swords, or dragons from the Land in the Sea.”

  Grandmother waved his words away. “Those were just stories. Not flesh and bone.”

  After a long silence, Grandmother began to talk, quietly, her voice so low that at first Yumin wasn’t sure whether he was only imagining it. “My husband, your grandfather, used to love those old tales. He seemed to know more of them than anyone could count. And as much as he loved telling them, your father, well, he loved listening to them.”

  She paused, and Yumin felt a sting of so
me strange regret, like a hunger, but thought it strange to feel such a pang of loss for his grandfather, a man he’d never met, and his father, who had died while Yumin was still a babe in arms. He’d never known either of them, not really. But still, when Grandmother would mention them, Yumin couldn’t help but feel that he was missing something deep inside, something vital.

  “It is a dark thing to outlive your children,” Grandmother continued, after a long moment’s silence. “Darker still to be left behind, when everyone you know has gone away into the long night.”

  Yumin remained silent, trying to think what to say.

  “The Red Lantern Families have made me an offer.”

  “An offer?” Yumin asked.

  “On the junk, on the business, on everything.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I told them they could take their offer and use it to plug their bungholes.” Grandmother paused, and turned her eyes to the moons overhead, sailing one toward the other. “But now. . . . Now, I just don’t know.”

  A long silence followed. In the dim light of the moon, Yumin saw Grandmother sit up straighter.

  “But enough stargazing and woolgathering, yes? We have work to do, after all!”

  Grandmother and Yumin slept on deck and, before sunrise, were awake and back at work, the engine chugging and belching black smoke, the nets dragging behind. Yumin was concentrating on the red-and-gold object in his hands. If he only could find a way to make the persona within communicate.

  Grandmother scolded him for lollygagging. Yumin slipped the little machine back into his belt and turned to face their wake.

  The V-shapes the nets’ lines made as they parted the water were joined by another. The cormorant overhead squawked profanity and flew away.

  “Um, Grandmother?”

  Just as the old woman turned back to look, a triangular head parted the waters, grayish-green with black spots, and was lifted on a long, sinuous neck. Baleful, moist eyes regarded them coolly.