Tired, hot, dry. An endless expanse where the sea of sand is white and the sky is blue and the water, blessed water, is clear. Your throat is wetted, green and teal and red feathers gaining colour in the shade and leaching against the sand, bleeding into the blinding sun living beneath the ironwood and copper of the caravan sledges and wheels. The house curtain of your cabin, hot heavy red velvet, soaks up the light that threatens sand-blindness to the forest fire of your eyes, ruby red and topaz orange and butter gold and emerald evergreen. The caravan does not lurch — it is steady, an endless plodding of the windborne dunestriders clicking and hissing in their pneumatic whistle-bones.
It is burning, a searing of your flesh, cooking — you can feel your muscles degenerating like protein denaturation from the textbooks, from the chemistry readings you copy and tell, storyteller you are, again and again and again — the heat is eating you alive, chewing and swallowing and coughing and gagging you up, regurgitating you saliva-sodden, teeth-gnawed, back onto the bolted-down chairs, tables, lockable shelves and percussion-resistant storage crates without gravity-reliant locks and cables tying them shut. The metal looks hot, even that which has been shaded all day, because all is wood and bone and brass in the cabin floor and one of those is eternally exposed to the sun. Endless sun. Do you close your eyes? No, you don’t, but you begin to sing, double sets of vocal cords making a self-harmonic melody that ripples and clicks — vibrato, you can make, and so you do with one while you echo-slide with the other. Your eyelids droop and your song lulls you to a half-sleep, because you sing to yourself when you are so stressed and tired and terribly bored and lonely that song is the only cold that exists, a cold within your mind numbing like ice, a tundra that cannot be melted by company anymore because the ice has turned to permafrost. You are a lake fully frozen over and through, inside the hotbox of your body.
The figurehead of Caravan Ship One crashes down through square waves of thick coiling blue and orange — concentrated hydrogen and helium — that summit the bow with the force of the impact, and this ripple rolls through the rest of the caravan line. The crew of Caravan Ship Three lurch forward, a fellow Makii taking to the oxygenless air with a snap of rocky grey-blue wings outside the caravan’s sheltered bubble, the searing thin volatile gasses of the waves evaporating into wisps before collapsing back into the superpressured expanse of the planet like it is not a planet at all, but a miniature Sun.
Across the boat-train, the Yaka cling tight to thick salt-drenched ropes wider than their paws can comfortably circle as the boat thrashes like a crazed animal. Lightning cracks down like a whip, shimmies across the spirit-pumps and booms as it hits something, some railway coupling repurposed for the sledge-shape the caravan holds when she makes her every-other-lifetime journey to— what is it, exactly? The Other Sky, Shimreth, Opposite Blue, the Break-in-the-Heavens. The Wind-Rose, the Salt-Forever-Home, because sometimes on the hottest days when the sand is like magma the salt river on the horizon glimmers blue-green as the gaseous sea that roils beneath you.
The Janus-Sea, by people who say little and never linger long.
You hold to a cable with a hindfoot, swaying in the roll of the waves as another breaker bashes, ripples through the shipline, chains pinching your sodden talonflesh with the vigor of biting rats and a Yaka — her metal anklets are a disturbance to the lightning, Yarrow is her name — is canny, sees what you need. She hauls the great chainlength to whose end you clutch off its hook. All the coils hefted so easily like a hose from a sling and a wind gusts with a smattering of hail, the desert planet so high above and almost at its zenith and she is ready and so without preamble you topple, smash your knee and hear a crunch that isn’t the bone of the railing and is instead a low whistling pain, then freefall that grows enormously powerful as the tensions of gravity ease on your mortal body.
Your singing takes an upward lilt, and words enter your song. Yarrow enters, stump of her tail twitching. You clamber out, still singing to yourself, memories coalescing, solidifying like wetted dust-sand from the north, that clay that forms on the side of the mountains the chuckling yaps of Yaka had told you were your home, when you had yet to be born. You had never gone there — this does not change your song. You reenter the cabin you call home, that is your home, that has been your only home, and that you think of and feel of as your home. There is a geomagnetic sense within you; you can feel it more days than not, and you— the table goes there, the wares go here, you raise your wings and up you fly and trill to those townspeople hidden white-against-white in their flowing cloaks and silken gowns, ruby and sapphire streams of scarves worn by the non-children, yellow worn by the smallest and a few Kin among them — crying down in five languages come, come, the caravan is here for those who have not yet heard.
The flying exhausts you. You have not flown as often as you enjoy, today. And your magnetic sense is stronger in the air, on the wind, and an aching, resonant, cool-as-cave part of you says safe, longing, return and grows stronger by the day, even on the ground, is telling you to fly the other direction, and for a brief, terrifying, world-cracking moment time is unwound and the caravan does not feel like home. Yarrow, Mint, Blooms-in-the-Evening and all the other caravaneers are not your people; you know them only as one knows an image, a picture, the paintings you sold only days after you were born, and for an agonizing moment, minute, week in the sky you are pulled towards something your body irretrievably, irrevocably knows is home.
And then the moment is broken. Your mind is your own again, the chill of mountains and caves and cliffside forests from your bones and feathers still there but the desert is in your eyes, and the dichotomy swims freely inside you like your body is a glass aquarium for a giant koi, and you are excited because soon, you have been told, soon the caravan will begin its ascent, stop going South and start heading North, and soon you will meet people just like you.
Fall past statues, rune-encircled shrines, past where the rain stops and your battered and cracked-open body stops whistling and starts creaking from the thickness of the air — can it even be called air? Is it even there, or is the space just contorting itself to your expectations? To your reality, to your dreams? — and you narrowly miss a huge statue of a two-armed hairless thing on its hind legs, covered by some draping fabric, or maybe it grows that through its skin, with thorns jutting in a circle from the skin covering its skull — all cast in cold white marble. Careen, wings narrow, barely see another caraveer also falling, their own rope swaying and briefly, between rapid blinks from your first eyelids, appearing in front of you before they are gone again and—
When you were born, it was sixty-two long-nights before the caravan was estimated to arrive to the peak of the highest mountain during syzygy. But you had been prepared for this, even before hatching, as your people were wont to be. The caravan’s ages-long cycle, and much of your education, was taught to you in your most formative time through the cool incubator clasped to your eggshell, told to you in five languages, in murmurs, in burbles and chirps, in the sliding-together hiss and tapping of Kin limbs, gentle but firm in their sturdily unfrantic intensity, putting rhythm to your teaching.
Six languages, actually, but you scarcely recognize the last, although you are grateful, ever grateful, that your egg-teachers did take the time to sing the notes of what would have been your mother tongue, your home language, to you so you would — could— know and learn it again one day without as much trouble as one who had never tasted the language before. They told you that they mutilated it, hide their eyes and bow their heads, clasp paws and pincers together, fail their hydraulics in a death-knell imitation when they say they truly did fail you when they taught you enough of your home-song that you would know it when you heard it, to establish those neural networks so you had it for use in your future, if ever it came to you on its own bidding. But you would not know, because when you were young that broken, half-formed song that they tell you should have been clean whistles and trills and zips like birdsong — that that broken form was the only one you knew, and so to you it sounded lovely.
Language, stories, music. You came out soggy, thick pointed talons soft, barbules of your blood-feathers unrealized and gummy inside their waxen sheaths. But your eyes opened, and Mistake – a midwife, of a sort – tells you your eyes were stuffed to the brim with all the knowledge fed to you before your hatching day and were starving for more. As it goes.
You lurch, like how the figurehead does far above on gasses the wind-spirits make solid like gelatin, thick as rain in monsoon season where there’s less air than water outside, dense as the slow-roasted cooked for that Spider holiday you never remembered the name of and you are so dizzy, tongue lolling from your beak and your gizzard grinds itself to misery but your talons, your talons they grasp to whatever artifact of history is nearest, you haven’t found something perfect but you have found something. Your eyes are streaming black tears built for desert, not lit-within endless soup sea, and something convulses your body but you hold tight, both to the chain with your back feet and to your treasure with your front and the chain surges—
Black out, topple overboard, back onboard, gasping, gases spilling green and blue and noxious from your lungs — you are being held upside down, rain lashing your body in cuts of frozen water. Held vertiginous so the denser-than-oxygen airs can leave your lungs, watch them pooling out, head caught in a black miasma with no sound, no memory, absent but present in the same way as a patient to which too much has happened to lose the world but too jostled from the fabric of reality to be anything but a puppet to causality.
You sway in Yarrow’s clumsy, non-opposable grip and the treasure you pulled from the Deep, a jumble of bioelectric nets with jellyfish stingers and magnetic coils and arc pylons at the tips that aren’t weighted down with diving belts — the information flickers through your mind, omnipotent you are not but a beautiful animal of knowledge you have become — drops from your talons to the deck with a humm. And you are pleased, because in the nets you caught you spot fish, both tiny and large, tangled inside and it’s not easy to find living things in the Deep. You grow limp and Yarrow tightens her grip on your exposed leg-bone, presumably to bandage it and you—
And then one day, shortly after your hatching, you are taken away. This happens, sometimes — the desert is pleasant, but never quite peaceful, and workers are always needed, especially in the Western loop. It is common, if anything else, for people to go missing, especially those who are young. It is not the fault of those who took you that they needed more hands.
They take you along with some cargo. Twenty long-nights pass. And, to your fortune of people who love you and their searches, you are found, taken safely home.
But you are not the same. You do not fly. You do not leave your room. You neglect your duties as a caravaneer. You keep your wings tightly folded behind you, like you had been bound. Your carers, your friends, your family find that you delight, sadistically, in the withering of your muscles, the dulling of your senses and eyes as the hot dark of your room confines your mind from the wild free expanse of the sky to the narrow sightlines of red velvet. You bite, viciously, at the suggestion that you sing, that you fly, that you be yourself.
It is too much, these small suggestions. You decide, forcefully, to unlearn your languages.
The captain’s cabin. Yarrow barks at you, concerned and impatient and cheerful as a Yaka often are when they have done a wrong to make a greater right, and you slip down onto your four legs and spread your damp wings over the controls of Caravan Ship Three, watching the tiny pinprick in the ceiling of the black room. The aiming portal. You wait, everything still, waves crashing outside and you think the ship falls over, at one point, rolls entirely and would have twisted the cable line but that’s what swivel hooks are for and there—
And despite everything, despite the checking-ins from those who know you, the meals left just under the curtains, the water passing through the spigot, the single time your original caretakers hoped that by taking you kicking and flapping and screaming from your caravan and holding you and reading you stories would cure you—
— nothing works.
The Desert peeks into view right through the aiming portal, and with your shaking wings spread across the control panel you beat hard once, twice, tips of your primaries just wide enough and just barely bioinert enough to have the caravan register you as not a passenger but a fellow machine. An operator. Anyone could do this, really — some used sticks, some wet fur — but you have the most success. And a great creaking rumbles through the wood-bone-metal, the sandblasted array, and you are so desperate to know you launch yourself from the black of the frontcabin and watch: the Makii and the Yaka and the Spiders and everyone else holding tight, clambering into safe zones as old mechanisms, older than even you, rise and the other planet looms at the zenith and below you, ropes trailing from your back legs to the caravan lest you get lost, the caravan lurches like a caterpillar rearing and with a great rush of exploding fuel and oxygen as the wind-spirits whir to life the whole of the train surges forward and the universe is breaking—
Home comes on a day three weeks ago charged with electricity that stands your feathers upright. It comes in the form of two of your people, in the northern reaches where hill turns into karst into mountain. The Caravan is on the move, the sun is high, the air is crisp and the vibrations of the mountains in your chestbones stir you from your noonday torpor. A decaffeinated lurch out from the smothering curtains of your cabin — you need to keep warmer than everyone else in the caravan; they can barely stand your cabin — because if you allow yourself to acclimate to the cold, it makes your yearning for home even stronger. Makes you an iceberg out at sea, forever staring up at the sky and unable to reach the animals on the seabed — and, even if it could, unable to care. But on that day, home comes in the form of feathered forms on the horizon as the caravan gurgles, hisses, and winds down for the night as sunset’s translucent dragon creeps down the hills and nestles at sunlight’s last strikes before night claims the stage.
Far, they are, but to your eyes they are unfathomably close, because you never did quite rid yourself of the instinctual speed and distance approximation you can make just by sight. To you they are close because you know they are just a few minutes out, small and far as they are. Your eyes wet and your anger and stress find a target, and you curse yourself for crying, for wasting water, curse yourself for the trembling in your quilltips that makes your skin rise, damn the heat leaving your cabin with night's approach for not keeping you sane, for not keeping you hating yourself enough to loathe the possibility of becoming whom you were born to be — no, not even that: damning the heat for not transforming you into someone incapable of even thinking like the thing you were born as.
You desperately want — need — to be anything but. And so you scream without voice and, muscles so tight it hurts, tear your feathers out as rabidly as you can, sobbing inside for anyone to see you, to stop you, to keep you from your pain and hold you and tell you everything is all right; you think this fervently, desperately, even as you know you are making things worse with the soft bristles clutched between shaven but still damnably taloned fingers and yanked with all your might, crushing the spines and it still isn’t enough, your flight feathers are too deep so you horribly change your attack in agonizing sorrow to your down, iridescent green and blue and red, because at least that is skin-deep. It isn’t enough — you want to hurt yourself, and this is only a paltry facsimile of any truly cruel action. And as the sound of wingbeats fills the scorched and cooling air outside the stupid curtains of your cabin, you know desperately, certainly, that you want to die.
Caravan Ships One, Two, and Three erupt into Space. The air spirit canisters are like banshees, sound evacuating as the atmosphere thins, but inside the air pocket of the Caravan they are just as loud until the compartmentalization kicks in to decrease oxygen wastage, and briefly there is that period of space between the planets where the grappling forces of gravity are so great that you feel yourself stretching, your joints aching and your feathers loosening like you are strapped to a crank-table, torn apart by opposing forces like taffy sold to the people in the north—
They glide gently to land on the sand like silken handkerchiefs slipping to a polished wooden floor, reeking like a hundred reagent bottles of chlorine and iodine spilled from their wares, just as they have done hundreds of times before and the caravan has done an unknown infinitude of times before any of them joined as followers of the great machine. Before you. This is during your self-admonishing, approaching now to your cabin in your flesh-rending. There are no more good feathers to remove — you are left scrabbling at the tiny pinpricks of the smallest down and cutting clean, sharp lines across your flesh in your scratching from your talons arcing across your knobbled birdflesh. There is a metal strut in your cabin, many of them, but this one is upright — your gaze is blurred by pain and internal activity, all collapsing in on yourself like a black hole. Your leg feels distant, sharp, an object that has sensation to it, a dull and detached knowledge of familiarity, like how one can ascribe pain to a rock. You hold your leg, limp and floppy, and the metal is sharp and clanging hollow-on-hollow, the bat-crack of bone, marrow, blood. The world crumbles and finally, finally you have done enough damage to see clearly, but you aren’t even here.
The caravan is stopped — or not stopped, really, but slowed to move as quickly as bamboo grows in winter —and there are thumps as caravan people disembark and raise the flags and drop the ladders. You are almost at the summit of the mountain — yourself feels so close now, like iodine on the tongue, a tablet fizzling and hissing at the contact with your saliva and the leathery nick of your mouth-muscle. There is a charge to the air — people you must not see, people who are impossibly like you — and that’s why you can’t leave, isn’t it? You’ve been disassembling yourself piece by piece, saying that you are unreal, should not be like the thing you are, but now that there is real, undeniable proof that you are not inherently wrong for being yourself right outside your curtains, the stage-set, the theatre-mask of red velvet fabric, heavy and hot. You cannot bear to see. Because it would mean that all this damage to yourself is wrong, that your pain was unwarranted, that you did not need to hate and kill, to massacre your sense of self and identity to so fit that of everyone else all your life. You mouth Yaka words, heavy and thick, in your throat, feel the second set of vocal cords you have strain as they always have to produce the wrong sounds — how you change to unmake yourself.
Outside is a rustling of feathers. You move to stand, collapse, scream a broken scream with two sets of vocal cords and a throat more leather and cartilage-teeth than mucous membrane, crop underneath unlike anyone else you have grown up around and you are only twelve.
The world ripples.
Sand, distant mountains, sky islands — you’ve seen it all, will remember it all. You do not need to fear your longing for the mountains, because you will return soon, then rejoin the caravan, then back and forth forever, or for however long it takes until you are at peace.
Your broken-healing leg throbs in time with the air spirits jettisoning the caravan back to the sand and salt. This is home for you. Your spirit is safe here, and though you have one from your people and one from your upbringing, you are your own.
You do need to take moments, sometimes, to remember how to be yourself. Because there are times when you remember what it was like when you were twelve, when you were younger, where you hated your very essence of being. Where you despised being, because you thought you had to be anyone but — where you overthought and punished for every time you were yourself. Because if you did not punish yourself, then who would? Once, there was a Kin who did — for years, in fact — but then they left. You never even got to tell them how much they ruined you. Then, because you were used to masquerading in a conversion camp where n=1, you behaved as though everything was that, that you needed to hide yourself.
They take you in. That is the short of it — Yarrow, your tutor in letters and signs, had contacted your birth parents when the caravan had made its way past the southernmost point of the loop. A Makii outpost, where your people flew the course of the caravan at many times the speed, delivering letters, small packages, news. Telling the homeland of your people to find those who had given an egg to the caravan, because something was terribly wrong and though the caravan people kept trying to connect with you, nothing seemed to work.
They take you in, wholly unlike how you were stolen just sixty long-nights ago. You are clothed in the ways of your people, fed in the ways of your people. Instructed quietly, firmly, in the ways of re-acculturation: walk like this, speak like this, bathe at this schedule, pray to these gods, fly like how we show you, paint your feathers when you are eighteen and come back to us when you are ready for changeover into adult colours. They mend your leg — a clean break — with sticky multicoloured gauze, wrapping it far more tightly than your caravan-mates ever dared to, because you as Makii have much more durability to your limbs than any other species. For a short few weeks, you trained flight muscles long sapped into uselessness through your self-punishment back into working order, ate what you were told around a large stone table on an outcropping exposed to the sky, experienced cliffside walkways with no railings because why would you need those and the walkways only used for when a package was too heavy for one to carry alone. Absorbed culture, language, adjusted your coarse accent and relearned words you had thought were forgotten forever. This was another form of self-punishment, you knew, and did not understand why.
And then that, too, is confronted, when everything else has smoothed out to become normal. You have stopped flinching at the sight of others who look like you, have stopped shying from the sky, have stopped stopping when you are told to step into the sand playbox they have carved out in the center of one of the childrens’ rooms, specially imported from the desert to the forests and mountains your people call home.
You smell like pine — have been oiled dutifully, carefully, with no words spoken in cedar oils, have been taught to sing in the language your bones know better than your mind. And now, just now, when the caravan is becoming more a distant and detached memory, an I used to be a caravaneer instead of an I am a caravaneer and I was just there and I need to leave lie you were at the beginning — just when that change is solid and continuing to stone, you are told that these are your last few days.
And then you are given a compass, because your geomagnetic sense never really did recover, and on its edge there is a small nick, in silver, taken out from the metal. That, they tell you, points towards home. You are tasked with returning home, following your love and hope and passions, where they may lead you, but to return home at least once more.
That is enough. You want to remain home forever but — you know this, now — your other languages are slipping, now. Your purpose was to see if the Makii could join the caravan, and you need to fulfill the end of the experiment by going back to see the caravan reach the summit of the mountain, where your people say the caravan makes an extra loop in the sky when the planets are at syzygy. That that is the reason why they had to let you go, they say to your furious insistence to stay. That you are tied to the caravan, now, and that to keep away from it would only be a deprivation of your being, just as it was when you were taken and smothered from the mountains that your other soul yearned for.
You are told, go. But come back when you are done.
The caravan jettisons. You are tugged violently, rended apart a final time — and then it is like there is no gravity at all, and you drift in the empty.
But it is warm. A pleasantness, not anything like the agony that was the forty days of your youth. You hold windchill in your bones, pine-oil intermingled with the preen oil in your feathers, keeping your wings dry from the wet that had so recently soaked them. And you flap gently, babble nonsense chirps and whistles to Blooms-in-the-Evening, the other who had wanted you so badly to go, but also to stay. The repairsone for the dunewalkers fixed to the preexisting and eternal Work that is the caravan. And speaking of which— there is a mass of clicking: your skull against the cool burnished brass of the deck helps to transmit the vibrations with clean efficiency to your inner ears, dunewalkers reorienting into their zero-gravity forms to have oars made of fire and oxygen, harnessing wind spirits to make it happen. And above you the stars are brilliant, huge, and you are going away, now, not just up. For all the times you long for home, this is what you were made for. And even when you must return to yourself, you can do so. You are not stuck in place — you are free-falling, ever-changing, wholly yourself. Space twinkles, and the sun peeks around the planet, and your heart hammers in your chest, adjacent to but apart from the warmth of satisfaction, contentment that floods your limbs like warm mercury…
This you cannot regret.
TO BE YOUR PEOPLE OR TO BE THE PEOPLE YOU GREW UP WITH AND NOT ONLY CHOOSING FAMILY BUT ALSO DECIDING WHETHER TO ACCEPT THE INDOCTRINATION INTO SOMEONE ELSE’S CULTURE, SOMEONE ELSE’S SPECIES CHANGING YOUR NATURAL INSTINCTS SO YOU CAN BETTER WORK WITH OTHERS WHO ARE NOT YOUR PEOPLE.