The Ornithologiad, or Daedalus's Birds

Content warning: Some harm to animals

It looked like Earth.

The musk trailing off of the pine saplings was friendly. The multi-coloured myosotis that lined the dirt walkway were familiar, but no mice ears held low to the ground for food, or high to the sky for prey. The ground, a combination of deep brown soil topped with a dark auburn mulch, muted her footsteps. The vibrations brought no worms to the surface under the pretence of false rain. Indeed, each step taken was mum—not in the natural way reminiscent of walking along the moss of old forests, letting hands brush through low overgrowth and fending off mosquitoes. This was cultivated, curated. The wind that formed an invisible halo around her head, pulling her hair up off her shoulders and striking her in the face, was tepid, controlled. Even the architecture, the most human of all the arts, appeared commonplace in its demeanour, but this too had been optimised to the highest extent.

Greer’s bike clicked with each full rotation of the front wheel as she steered it to the side of the Aetos Memorial Aviary and Ornithology Centre. No bike rack was needed and she knew it wouldn’t rain today. For the first time, she believed the small icon of the sun and rainless clouds, saw the anemone’s petals open and did not bring an umbrella with her, “just in case.”

She let out a deep breath.

Her eyes drifted up as if tracking the carbon dioxide escaping her lungs and joining with the firmament above. It comforted her to know she was adding to the thin atmosphere, no matter how artificial in creation, natural in molecules. It was the turquoise of the sky from a limited palette which could not quite produce that distinct shade of cerulean. The clouds weren’t cumulus, stratus, or cirrus. They didn’t resemble anything created by the Impressionists, did not cling to the sky as a means of evading the heat from below. They held to the sky because they were placed there and had nowhere else to go.

No birds flew over the horizon. No fish swam in the oceans.

There were bugs, though. Once, an annoyance, an irrational fear even. The sight of a single ant across the kitchen counter would make her skin itch for days. But going from one environment brimming with life in all forms to this—almost a dream of Earth—was jarring, unsettling. Greer hadn’t killed one insect since her arrival last month and longed for the day they brought the bees. It had disrupted her befittingly obdurated beliefs when they grew this biosphere with no pollinators—no bees or birds, bats or butterflies, moths or beetles. Only humans, their wind, and the small insects which could not be expelled from the tons of imported soil and food.

“Morning Greer,” Lucille sang from behind her laptop balanced precariously on top of her bent knees. Her shoes were already off, abandoned on the other side of the work space. Greer noted the old coffee rims on not one, but multiple tables.

It was the most inventive workspace Greer had been in considering most of her doctoral work had been done in dingy, low ceiling labs with little access to natural light. Here, the windowed building entrance sat low yet open. The lab behind Lucille was spotless and futuristic. The aviary to the right of the receptionist’s desk—vacant until tomorrow’s grand opening—was monumental, larger than any on Earth.

“How early were you here?” Greer raised her eyebrows ignoring the greeting.

“Couldn’t sleep,” Lucille didn’t look up from her dissertation.

Greer hummed in agreement, then paused.

“Are they here yet?”

A rhetorical question.

Her eyes narrowed at the double glazed window into the aviary. It stood an empty temple to everything Greer had ever been and was now. The anticipation of it being full was in fact not a sensation she had ever been privy to, but the feeling had not left her in weeks. When she rushed for its doors minutes after arriving on the spacecraft with her colleagues and another batch of new residents, the emptiness reached out, pulling the air from her lungs and settling within her. It was not solely the privation of the birds, but the absence of her supervisor. This was her aviary, her design, her project. Now she was forever memorialised. Not in memory, as this would soon be forgotten in a couple decades, but in name.

She stepped into the aviary, walked into its centre and grieved one last time for all that should have been.

“They’re here G,” Pollard, her undergraduate intern, called from the intercom.

“They’re here,” she echoed, almost religious-like, repeating the sacred words that held more meaning than could ever be conveyed to the average onlooker. She prepared herself for the sermon.

***

Not even an hour later, Greer pulled each slender bird from their enclosure, double checking their tracking chips and removing their restraints. The erratic beating hearts within each weightless, toy-like body were handed to Lucille. Her assistant placed each in the large open field, so reminiscent of a mother placing her child in bed gently for the night. This reminded Greer of why she picked Lucille. She loved the birds just as much as her mother did. They would test the main body of the aviary, moving to the smaller wings once success was achieved. She named each one in the private confines of her mind.

Pollard rushed alongside Lucille, naming each species and remembering new facts for repeat species. Greer could have supervised him in this monotonous work rather than complete it herself, but her hands reached out upon seeing the first finch. Over 3000 birds would soon fill the almost three hectares of aviary space. Once they adapted to the lower gravity, the thinner air, the longer days, they would be sent out into the world. Greer’s job was to ensure enough adapted to begin buffing up the ecosystem. Animals that explored the air had been voted on first by a non-disclosed group of scientists back on Earth. Land animals would come after the birds and the bees. No thought had been given thus far to the fish, at least publicly.

Yet her audience, both meant to be the saviour and the saved, belaboured themselves once the sedation wore off. Wings smacked against each other while they dove and rose as one into the metal-fenced ceiling of the aviary. Frenzied, they scaled an invisible mountainside, pushing off each other to get more leverage, to be the first to summit.

Greer stood still at base camp.

“Dr. Aetos, what do we do?” Pollard, abreast of birds in theory, had never once called her by her mother’s name. Dr. Aetos was—had been—his supervisor too.

“Should I go get the handlers?”

Her feet twitched instinctually like she would launch herself skyward and pull every bird into her embrace, coo at them as a mother to the silly infant who cried for no apparent reason. But this self-destruction was unconsolable. As the birds swooped lower to the ground gaining more space for elevation, some collided hard. Those who caromed off the ceiling joined them twitching on the grassed floor. The flock did not let up at their brother and sister’s failures—they would escape.

“Greer,” Lucille begged as if Greer could snap her fingers and end this senseless violence. She was an ornithologist yes, but not their god, not whatever force seemed to compel them upward.

“Get me blankets, now!” Greer shouted over the battering wings.

Pollard’s heavy boots pounded against the ground back into the building. Greer did not take her eyes off the birds as he returned with arms full of blankets and a few nets for good measure.

***

“What. The. Fuck. Was that?” Lucille panted.

They sat at the other side of the aviary. En eerie silence settled close to the ground. Dusk was upon them, but the day was far from complete. They had gone through the various enclosures of each section bringing down the birds who now settled beneath the felted wool. Pollard laid on his back not speaking but blinking hard and mouthing silent words. Lucille sat crossed-legged next to him, her eyes aimlessly roving the field of fabric for any movement, any sign at the second coming. The nets poked out from under the blankets—the former weren’t enough to quell the birds’ desire for height.

Cinq minutes, her mother would say, Cinq minutes, you don’t think, you don’t theorise. Tu respire, then you start again.

So they did.

***

“They have to eat.” Pollard said, still shaken, but composed enough.

Greer looked up from her textbook, her laptop long forgotten to the side, and squinted through the limited light.

The comfort of the sun diminished behind them. Not in the West, but in the East, though the inhabitants here reversed South and North—contrary to the magnetic poles of this planet; to what they were most acquainted with. Though Greer searched for the denizens of her home planet, their course around the sun, where the magnetic lines of attraction enter the planet, their three moons that alleviate gravity during the night, these were all idiosyncrasies which couldn’t be disturbed. They could be discussed, spoken in a different manner from what they were, but this would not change their nature. Humans here could camouflage the outermost layer of crust to resemble the Earth, but there were no plate tectonics which moved and shifted to push up mountains and pull apart seas. This ambivalent planet’s inside’s remained unseen, hidden, from those who would conceive this a twin planet of Earth—but the sun would rise in the West and set in the East.

The birds must know this.

“We do too,” sighed Lucille.

“I’m not leaving,” Pollard lifted his chin towards Lucille but looked at Greer.

“We’re not,” Greer said before Lucille could, not asking them if they would stay. She never asked them for anything beyond their hours, their funding, but this was beyond the everyday routine. This wasn’t normal. Greer kept peeking up at the subdued birds as if they would give up their individual consciousness into a singular subconscious to form a mono-creature. It would rise up from the ground, shed its textile restraints and become a god for this new world to worship and fear.

“Pollard, go order us some pizza.”

“Right boss,” he hopped to his feet, spilling a tower of textbooks over their makeshift picnic blanket. There was an unspoken agreement; they would remain in the aviary with the birds.

“Any requests?”

His optimism was almost admirable.

“Just no chicken please,” Lucille said and Greer nodded, grateful they weren’t brought in on the livestock project. She ground her teeth and returned to her reading.

Birds in captivity can develop a range of strange, or otherwise, abnormal behaviours. These can and have led to both documented and anecdotal accounts of self-injury, and/or injury to others including their captors.

But they planned for this. These birds had been selected over the past year and held in captivity on Earth, reproducing and creating a generation to inhabit this new planet. They were accustomed to captivity, habituated with its daily routines that had brought them from one solar system to the next.

They knew Greer above all, her mother even better.

“Shit,” Lucille said, “The opening.”

Fuck.

“Call the governor’s secretary and the media, cancel it all.”

“What do I say about all the people who planned to come?”

Who cares about the people, but appearances were important during this precarious planetary transition. The governor and lead public scientists had made that clear enough.

“Make something up, the birds are still sedated or something I don’t know, but we can’t open tomorrow. Not with suicidal birds.”

Leaving Greer alone in the aviary for the first time since the birds arrived, she approached the nearest blanket. The small chirps had subsided with the sun and she wasn’t sure why but she lifted the banket as if commanded to. The couple dozen finches and sparrows propped up from their backs and bellies. Their beady eyes bore into hers for a moment as if to ask “Where are we?”

Greer held her breath as they situated themselves. They did not fly for the ceiling.

***

“We’re letting them go,” Greer announced at the end of the week to the childlike happiness of Pollard and scepticism of Lucille. The birds moved through the aviary, unaware of their apocalyptic behaviour from earlier that week. But now even Pollard seemed unsure.

“The governor won’t be happy,” Lucille cautioned.

“I wasn’t hired to make the governor happy.”

The bird had resumed their erratic behaviour with each sunrise so Greer called the local construction companies to cover the aviary in tarps—Lucille’s brilliant idea. Darkness, except for the artificial glow of their flashlights, acted as a blanket for the birds. Everytime they lifted one corner, the birds made for the sun.

“Are you su-”

“At midnight behind the aviary, we open the east wing.”

They watched the birds hop around on the soft ground. Neither argued again.

***

Under one full moon, a waxing crescent, and a waning gibbous, the birds flew through the illuminated night sky, their human companions losing sight of them within seconds. The flock of various species murmured through the air, bellies full from the feed the aviary would have to provide day-in-day-out until more insects were introduced to the ecosystem.

“They look normal,” Lucille breathed.

No response came, for at least five minutes.

The birds were gone now, hidden within the fabricated forest, but the scientists remained standing in the open field of bristling tall grasses.

“Why?” Pollard questioned, breaking the silence.

“I don’t know,” Greer said, yet she slept through the night without waking as if she would bound down the stairs the following morning to find her mother cooking breakfast for the two of them. Their boots ready at the door, they’d venture down to the mudflats in the Bay of Fundy to net and tag sandpipers. Greer imagined herself as the shorebirds, richly spotted with stuttering wingbeats, but embodying what her mother taught her that they represented— problem-solving, resilience. They would return home covered in mud and algae, happy. They would theorise over mint tea as to why the birds were acting so. Her mother would figure this out.

***

“They’ve just stopped moving,” Lucille called over her shoulder.

The aviary disappeared behind them as they cycled into the forest the birds emigrated over last night.

“How much further?”

“Right up here,” Lucille's eyes flickered between the uncut path through the trees and the tracker. Little red dots clustered on her GPS like fire ants in a colony. They pushed through some undergrowth between two large oaks but before Greer could search for her birds Lucille went flying over her handlebars.

“Shit, Lucille,” Greer gasped, hitting the ground too.

She caught her breath and felt for any injuries.

“Greer.”

Lucille’s voice came out as no more than a croak. Blood dripped down the side of her arm onto her pristine yellow daffodil dress. She looked like a saint.

Lucille paid her no attention, her eyes fixed low but sweeping far behind Greer.

A metallic taste pooled in her mouth. It mixed with the saliva, became difficult to swallow. Birds, or what remained of them littered the valley beyond the forest. Claws, beaks, and feathers spread out amongst the tall grass, burnt and charred.

“No.”

Lucille choked.

“No,” she said again.

Standing slowly, hands shaking, she stumbled towards the carnage, but nothing could be done. She fell back to her knees.

Deadalus’s torrid blade of anguish sliced through her. It cauterised the veins so that she may survive to feel more pain, so that she may be reminded of her own foolish ambitions. They weren’t gods, they had no right to move these creatures from their home planet. They knew, and she now knew too.

This land would become a mass grave and she would dig each hole.

Greer bowed her head and cried.

“They don’t belong here, do they?”

“No,” Greer looked out at the sea of misery, “I’m sorry mom.”