“School tomorrow,” says Carol. “We love you, and we understand what you’re going through, but it’s either school, or doctor.”
Understand what I’m going through? They do not. I’m going through the history of civilization, basically. Not a big deal. Only minor work there.
I wait for them to leave my room, and then I’m back in it. There’ve been several sightings since the funeral. One person saw weird lights. Another saw a bright thing near the horizon. Another actually saw something he said was a rope.
Sir, you have my attention. But then he recanted and said some stupid stuff about downed power lines. Whatever.
There were other sightings of the same kind earlier this year—one above Chile, one in the air over Alaska, one over Sicily—but none of them helped me. People, alas, don’t document things with any kind of precision. They fill Twitter with blurry photos.
Now, however, we live in the epoch of the app. The official ones, and these, the nonofficial. Forget jailbreaking your phone, I’m talking about the ones that require you to break that phone out of Alcatraz.
There are a few hundred of us who develop them (See: Friends in Other Time Zones), mainly because someone else on-list dared us. I’m a midlevel amateur at this point, but they magnanimously let me on the message boards, and even allow me to throw down the odd gauntlet to the real players.
Hence: I now have a sky-anomaly app. You just aim your phone at wherever you saw the strange thing—cloud formations, weird lights, storms out of nowhere—and the app plots coordinates and checks with satellite info to gauge air displacement, mass, humidity, condensation of whatever you’re looking at, cross-referenced with similar reports.
The world is sometimes amazing.
Most of the sightings I’m researching are clearly fake, but three have been real, or as real as I can figure. I think they’re from the same clump of impossible sky out of which I heard Aza’s voice.
I’m done with being cautious now. I’m just going to call it what I think it is.
So, henceforth, we will be referring to that piece of sky as Aza’s ship.
Aza’s ship is heading northeast, slowly, spending a lot of time over farming areas. Those areas have been plagued by hailstorms, windstorms, lightning. Tiny tornadoes have scattered and flattened several fields. No crop circles. Just unforeseen, chaotic weather patterns, destroying harvests.
What Aza said she saw—what Aza saw—is part of a long tradition of things seen in the sky since the sixth century. In 1896, for example, there was something called the Mystery Airship scandal. People all over the western US saw skyships, brightly lit, flying fast. People in Illinois saw some kind of airship on the ground, and watched it take flight. After it was gone, they discovered footprints all around the place it had been. And the thing they said, my favorite quote?
“Something has happened above the clouds that man has not yet accounted for.”
Yeah. So that’s where I’m working right now. Something above the clouds.
I interviewed some farmers (I claimed I was reporting for small newspapers that actually exist, in case they checked) and they talked about it like, well, the world is ending and all I can do is try to harvest when I can. When I asked about the whereabouts of the damaged crops, they kind of didn’t have an answer.
“Well, they’re ruined, son, that means they can’t be sold.”
Most of us don’t notice waste, so if all the corn blows off the cobs, or gets trampled, what we notice is that it’s no longer edible, not that, hey, a lot of it is straight up gone.
There is a pattern. The events, the sightings of the odd lights, the weird white clouds, they’re all moving in a straight line.
There is a destination. I just need to find out where it is. I stare and plot the course. I stab virtual pins into a virtual map.
Amina Pennarum is a fishing boat, I decide, except not, because we’re fishing not in an ocean, but on earth.
A launch loaded down with apples waves a flag to ask us if we want to trade. The robins in its crew lift the boat to our level, and Zal comes out on deck to offer them a sack of dry corn from our hold in exchange for the fruit. We trade for a pig from a small tug. Our Rostrae haul it aboard and it totters past me, heavy and determined. I feel vegetarian just looking at it.
We fly over a field, and a swarm of bees appears over the rail. The cook tromps up from pig butchery, wiping blood from his knife, and barters with them for honey. (Yeah, with them. The bees themselves. They speak to the Rostrae. I don’t know how that works, but it’s a kind of humming whirr from both parties.)
Midafternoon, Amina Pennarum goes low, in a hailstorm created by our squallwhales. The blue jay girl does some of that twitchy lasso work along with a couple of other Rostrae, and the ropes swing out of a little cloud, slipping around something down below, which gives a disgruntled moo.
I stare. Are they pulling up . . . a cow? Our rustlers attach the ropes to the big crane jutting over the edge of our back deck. Its engine runs and we haul the creature up. You’ve never seen surprise until you’ve looked into the eyes of an ascending bovine.
So. Those legends about UFOs stealing cattle? Right, apparently the cause was not UFOs, but Magonian ships.
Mostly it seems we just milk the cows and let them go. The poor girls sit around in a pressurized hold, until they get grumpy for lack of grass. Which is more quickly than you might imagine.
It’s like we’re on a floating farm. Except we don’t grow anything. We just take it. We’ve got corn and wheat, animals that rotate in and out, and animals that end up meals for the Magonian crew.