Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 193 by Neil Clarke

Author:Neil Clarke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: editor short form, science fiction, Science Fiction - Short Stories, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Science Fiction And Fantasy, science fiction magazine, short fiction, short story
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2022-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

About the Author

M. L. Clark, Canadian by birth, is based in Medellín, Colombia. Along with stories in Clarkesworld, Clark is the published author of speculative and science fiction in magazines including Analog, F&SF, and Lightspeed, and the occasional year’s best anthology. Clark also writes global humanist articles twice-weekly at OnlySky.

Fly Free

Alan Kubatiev, translated by Alex Shvartsman

“I needed a true monster, so I went with a bird.”

“Why?”

“It’s impossible to reach an accord with a bird.”

—From a conversation with film director Juraj Herz

Bird-speak was the only reason Crowley got this job.

Without it, he couldn’t have dreamed of landing such a cushy, well-paying gig. He had cautiously constructed a resume and left it at the Bird Court three weeks prior. He’d recorded the tape in Sparrow, a language all birds more or less understood.

Reciting the fifth statute had been especially difficult for him. Birds are fantastically sensitive to the tiniest tonal shifts. Compared to their ability, a lie detector is a useless hunk of metal, and regular human ears are dead meat. And when you lie the tone unfortunately rises as the effort overstrains the throat muscles.

“Chip chirp fuirr chak.” He just couldn’t get the “fuirr” right. It sounded like “foirr” which meant “love very much.” He could’ve easily ended up paying a pound of flesh for such a mistake in pronunciation.

Crowley had struggled with this for two evenings straight until he was satisfied with the sound.

Now he sat in the aviary, his perch directly across from the Boss Lady’s, and labored to translate a response to the manager of a poultry farm who was begging for a reduced sentence. It was a hopeless case. All poultry farm managers were automatically sentenced to being immediately utilized at the feed mills. Their employees were to serve life sentences at those mills and be utilized posthumously.

The Boss Lady wasn’t there, praise the Lord. Through the half-open door of the aviary he could see her table, littered with cassette tapes and a few half-pecked apples. Her perch was the tiniest bit soiled. Just enough to show that she remembered her true nature.

Indistinct shouting and squeaks emanated from the nearby enclosures. Crowley understood only a fraction of it.

Back in the before times he ended up studying zoolinguistics in college for a simple reason. For three simple reasons, to be precise.

Number three was the severe shortage of applicants. Everyone who took the exam had been accepted.

Number two was that it had been only a seven-minute walk from his home to the university.

And the number one reason had been that Leda applied there, too. She had enrolled in a high school that specialized in ornithology and was obsessed with this stuff. She taught herself Cockatoo by ear, without study books or courses. She’d owned two locally bred cockatoos, listened to “The Cockatoo Screams” regularly at night, and her sailor brother would smuggle in foreign paperbacks and recordings in Cockatoo.

Crowley had courted her for two semesters. On occasion, when the mood would strike, they’d make out half to death on staircase landings.

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