Anthonology

BEAK BY BEAK

For a time we had parakeets, starting with Cinnamon, passed along to us by my wife's sister. Naturally our second was Nutmeg, and then Clove, and Ginger, Saffron and Angelica—a pretty spicy flock. We constructed a cage a yard across so they could fly, as they weren't hand-tame and we felt they should have some reasonable freedom. We liked them very well; each bird had his/her personality. Then they started dying—heart-attack, tumor, the same ailments mankind suffers. We could do nothing, and it tore us up. When the last one passed on, after several years, we didn't get any more. So I wrote this story, and my heart is in it though it is all fiction. And the editor changed my spelling of "parakeet" to "parrakeet." Apparently he just assumed my spelling was wrong.

The red bird was perched fetchingly on the mailbox as Humbert ambled out in slippers and tousled iron hair to pick up the morning newspaper. A gust of wind blew the front door open behind him, and a squawk came from inside.

The red visitor perked up. It fluttered across the lawn to cling precariously to the front hedge.

Humbert stopped, the banded paper in one hand. "Lost, little fellow?" he inquired. "Why... you're no cardinal. You're a parrakeet!"

He peered at it more closely. "A beautiful, blood-red, male parrakeet. I never saw your like before."

There was another angry chirp inside. "My pets don't like the draft," Humbert explained. "I'll have to shut this door."

The red bird hopped to the doorstep and up to the closed screen, fluttering against it and falling back.

"You are a tame bird!" he said. He squatted down and held out his hand, but the bird skittered nervously away. He laughed. "Not that tame, I see!"

As he opened the screen the bird hopped forward again. "You want to come in? Where's your home?" But he held the door open and allowed it to fly into the living room.

His wife bustled in from the kitchen holding a jar of instant coffee. "Humbert, did you forget the door again? You know Blue doesn't..." She froze. "Humbert—there's a bird in here!"

"Several, Meta," he said, gently closing the door.

"I mean a wild bird. Look at that color!"

The red parrakeet flew up to the tall decorative lamp and perched on the shade, looking at her.

"He seemed to want to come in," Humbert said. "He's a remarkable specimen, and half tame."

Her attitude changed immediately. "What a beautiful bird! I've never seen a parrakeet that color."

The bird spied the large cage and flew over to it. The three parrakeets inside spooked, plastering themselves against the sides in mad retreat.

Humbert approached and put his hand to the stranger again. "Let me have a look at you, Red. I can't put you in with our family without good references. You might have the mites." But it jumped away from him.

"Check the newspaper," Meta said. "Maybe there's an ad for a lost pet. Such a distinctive bird must be valuable." She disappeared into the bedroom with her coffee.

Humbert eased himself into the easy chair. He had made it a point, since his heart attack, to move slowly and remain unexcited. He spread the paper.

The black headline leaped at him, ALIEN SPACESHIP ORBITS EARTH.

"Meta!" he called.

"Dear, I have to hurry down to the office," her muffled protestation came back. She was active in numerous volunteer capacities as well as holding a part-time clerical position. She preferred to keep herself occupied, now that their children were married and on their own, even though money was no problem.

Humbert shrugged and did not push the matter. Probably the headline would only upset her. He read through the article, finding the information too scant. The newspaper really knew little more than the fact: a strange ship appeared a thousand miles above Earth, and now hung in an oblique orbit. There were statistics: how many minutes it took to circle the Earth, at what times it would pass over which cities, and so on, but nothing essential. There had been no communications, no threats. Just—observation?

Meta bustled through. She always bustled, never walked. "Is there any notice?"

He'd forgotten the bird! "I haven't seen it," he said.

She was already through the door, and soon he heard the car start up. She would be gone for several hours. He glanced at the red parrakeet, who was on top of the cage again, searching for some way to enter.

"Oh, all right, Red," he said, smiling. "I'll introduce you." He opened the cage door and reached in to catch a bird. There was the usual panicked flutter; for the birds, tame as they were, did not really like to be handled.

He snared one and brought it out. "Take it easy, Yellow," he said. Yellow was the youngest and most energetic of their family: a spectacular yellow harlequin with a green underside. He set the bird on top of the cage. "Yellow, this is our visitor from Outside. Red, this is Yellow."

Yellow shook out his feathers, stretched one wing, and sneezed. Having suitably expressed his indignation at being handled, he eyed the other bird warily. It was always this way; parrakeets took time to become acquainted.

Humbert reached in for Blue. She was a timid, retiring bird given to nervous starts and loose droppings, but of very pretty hue. In the right light, a green overcast could be seen above the deep blue breast, as though the yellow of her head had diluted the blue. She bit his finger, not hard, and did not struggle as his hand closed over her wings. Sometimes the birds would perch on his finger, but he hadn't really tried to train them. He set Blue down beside Yellow, but she took flight immediately, afraid of the stranger, and came to rest on top of the front curtains. She settled down to preen her wingfeathers.

"Well, that was Blue," he said apologetically.

He did not try to catch Green, but shooed her out with a wave of his hand. Green was the eldest of the brood and had had more than one owner before. She was a conventional green-bodied, dark-winged female with a neat yellow bib sporting four to six black dots—they kept changing—and she bit viciously when handled. She would come quickly to eat some treat from the hand, however.

"And that's Green," Humbert said as she flew to displace Blue from the curtain. "You'll get to know them all in due course." Green was contentedly chewing the edge of the curtain.

Yellow, seldom cowed very long by anything, was already making the first overture. He strode over to Red and pecked at him. Red sidled away.

"That's the way it is, Red," Humbert said as he reached into the cage to remove the fouled newspaper on its floor. "Very important to establish the pecking order—not that much attention is paid to it here." Yellow was chasing the disgruntled visitor more boldly now. "Just give him a sharp rap on the beak," he advised Red. "You have to assert yourself sometime."

He put in new paper and filled the treat-cups with oats, installing a fourth cup for the newcomer. He stepped back. "Soup's on!"

Green, always alert, arrowed across the room, the beat of her wing washing a breeze past his face. She hopped into the cage and mounted to the row of cups. Seed scattered noisily upon the fresh newspaper as she scraped energetically.

Yellow heard the sound and scrambled across the top and down the side of the cage, using both feet and his beak to hold on. Blue, realizing what she was missing, flew in at the same time. They collided at the door, fluttering for balance, and fell inside. In a moment both were upon the feeding perch, while Green chattered angrily in an effort to protect her claim.

"This is what we call 'King of the Perch,' or maybe 'Musical Treat-Cups,' " Humbert explained to Red, who peered through the wire in some alarm. "The object is to get a cropful of seed without letting anybody else eat in peace. You'll get the hang of it soon enough."

He returned to his chair and watched while Green and Yellow, owners of the two end cups, converged on Blue in the middle. None of the three went near the new cup. While Blue's attention was taken up by Yellow, Green pecked her neck from the other side. Blue squawked and flew across the cage.

"They don't mean anything," he said reassuringly, "it's just a mealtime game, and there's plenty of ordinary seed available in the main dish in case anyone does go hungry. Watch."

Sure enough, Blue flew back immediately to the row of cups, the whir of her wings startling Green into flight. Now Yellow and Blue forgot their differences long enough to do some serious seed-scattering, picking up the hard grains and hulling them adeptly in their beaks. Green scrambled up the side of the cage, using both feet and bill as Yellow had done, and recovered her place before her end cup. All three ate contentedly.

"You'll catch on. Red." he said. "I'll let you be, now." The bird didn't seem to hear him.

Humbert went into his study, turned on the radio, and settled down to work on his toothpick models. The artistic constructions he had fashioned from the simplest materials were all around the house: boats and statues and geometric shapes made from slender wooden splinters and drops of cement.

The whir of wings made him look up. "That you, Yellow?" But it was the newcomer. "Not ready to mix yet. huh, Red?"

The bird perched upon his toothpick sculpture of Meta. "Oh... you want to know what I'm doing? Well. I make things like that bust of my wife you're sitting on. Don't worry—it's strong enough to hold a hundred of your kind. Well, fifty, maybe. But don't mess on it, if you don't mind. Personal dignity, you know."

He studied the bird more carefully. Its breast and tail feathers were lighter than the back and wings, but still red. Four dark-red dots showed up against the pink throat plumage; otherwise its coloration was nearly uniform. The cere, above the vertical parrakeet bill, was blue, the signal for the male of the species, and this was the only deviation.

"You're a strange one," he said. "Not just your color, but your manner. You aren't tame enough to be handled, yet you're more interested in what I'm doing than in others of your kind. It's almost as if you—"

He stopped as he became aware of the radio news broadcast. "...In orbit ten hours without acknowledgment of signals or any apparent effort to communicate with us. Experts are divided on whether it should be considered friendly, indifferent, or hostile. The present assumption is that its purpose is merely observational. However—"

Humbert tuned the words out of his mind. "It's so hard to trust each other, let alone an unknown quantity. We don't know what that ship is doing in our skies, and probably it doesn't know what to make of us. But I'll bet it isn't much different from any meeting between strangers. You and me, for instance: I've never seen a bird quite like you, and you could be a dangerous alien from some other system for all I know. And you can't afford to trust me, either, because my hand could crush you in a moment. But you see, we get along. In a little while we'll really get to know each other, and then mutual trust will come. Some things just can't be pushed."

He spread a group of picks on the table and heated his cement. "You know, Red, I think I'll make a ship—a spaceship like the one in the sky. There's a picture of it in the... no! Stay clear of that glue. It's hot, and it gets awfully hard when it isn't hot, and they say the fumes can make hallucinations. You dip your bill in that and I'd have to scrape it off with a file. Believe me, Red, you wouldn't like that."

He rose to fetch the newspaper, and the bird, startled, flew ahead of him into the living room. The three local residents were still inside the cage, though its door was open. Green was braced on one of the ladders, pecking industriously at its plastic rungs, while Yellow was reaching forward surreptitiously to tweak Blue's unguarded tail.

"That's another thing you'll have to learn, Red," he said, smiling. "Feather-tweaking. Keep your wings and tail out of range, or you'll wind up with a bent feather. It just isn't parrakeet nature to pass up a good tweak." He thought about that a moment. "I hope they don't try to tweak that spaceship before they get to know it well."

Red did not accompany him to the study this time. The radio had lapsed into popular music. The melody of "Sipping Cider" was on.

"Hey... I remember that one!" Humbert said, pleased. He matched the words with his own off-key accompaniment:

"So cheek by cheek and jaw by jaw.

We both sipped cider through a straw."

For a little while the years rolled back.

Later he emerged to discover Red inside the cage with the others. Yellow was friendly, but Blue still kept her distance and Green was sleeping on an upper swing, one foot tucked up and head behind a wing. According to the handbook, a sleeping bird never raised a foot and folded back the head simultaneously, but Green evidently didn't read much.

Red cocked an eye at him. "Right," Humbert said. " 'Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.' That's the way Mr. Lovelace put it. Our birds have the run of the house—but a familiar cage is more comfortable than a strange world. I only lock things up at night so nobody can get hurt in the dark."

Red had been largely accepted by the time Meta came home. Less hurried now, she admired him again. "He's just what we needed to fill out the set. Four birds, four distinctive colors. But are you sure he doesn't belong to anybody?"

Humbert admitted he'd forgotten to check the paper. It made no difference, as it turned out; there was no notice about any missing red parrakeet, that day or in the ones following. Red was theirs, as long as he chose to stay.

Weeks passed. While Humbert's elaborate spaceship model grew, Red learned every facet of parrakeet existence as locally practiced. He splashed seed industriously from both the main feeder and the treat-cups, then descended to the floor of the cage to search out the fallen morsels and swallow bits of gravel. He banged at the plastic toys and threw them about as though they were enemies. He raced up and down the ladders and took flying leaps at the dangling length of clothesline. He tweaked tail feathers, and played tug-of-war with stems of millet. When ushered from the cage during cleaning time, he flew merrily over to Meta's curtains to peck at stray threads.

There were three unusual things about him. The first was his color; the second his almost-intelligent interest in human affairs; and he was mute. Humbert never heard him chirp or warble. But since Red seemed to be perfectly healthy otherwise, it was not a matter for concern. He was one of the family.

The spaceship remained in orbit, uncommunicative. Humbert remembered that it had appeared the same day Red came, so it was easy to keep track. After a while the matter ceased to make headlines. Humbert wasn't certain why no Earth ship was sent to link with the interstellar visitor and attempt direct contact; something about a deadlocked UN session. It was easier to do nothing, in a democracy, than to agree on any positive course of action. Yet this did not explain why the spaceship made no effort to communicate, either. Surely it had not come all this way just to orbit silently?

Red became friendly with shy Blue. They groomed each other's neck feathers and shared a treat-cup. "Do you think they would mate, if we set up a nesting box for them?" Meta inquired. "If that mutation bred true—"

Humbert agreed it was worth a try. He read up on parrakeet nesting procedures, for they had never bred their birds before, and bought a suitable enclosed box. "Beak by beak, and claw by claw," he sang to the melody of "Sipping Cider."

But tragedy struck before the arrangements were complete.

The birds scrambled in normal fashion for their preferred roosts on the highest swinging perches as Humbert turned out the light. They went everywhere in the day time, but always sought the heights at night.

There was a bump. Alarmed, Humbert turned on the light—and found Blue beating her wings on the floor. Something was wrong: she was unable to fly!

Red came down solicitously, but Blue was not aware of him. She got to her feet and climbed to the lowest perch and clung there, her little body quivering.

Meta came to watch. "What's the matter with Blue?"

"I'm afraid it's a... a heart attack," he said. He knew the symptoms too well, and knew that parrakeets, along with men, were subject to such things.

Blue tried to fly back up to the swinging perch, but fell to the floor again. Humbert opened the cage and reached in to pick her up. She struggled, afraid of him, but had no strength to fight. He held her and stroked her neck with a finger, knowing he could not help her.

After a while she became quiet, and he returned her to the cage. He set her on a lower perch, afraid she might fall again, but her feet grasped it securely. He turned out the living-room light, but as an afterthought left the hall light on so that she could see enough to find the top perch, just in case. It would be better if she remained put, but—

There was a flutter. He and Meta could not resist checking—but Blue remained where she was. Red had come down to join her. "Isn't that sweet," Meta said.

In the morning Blue was dead. She lay on her back on the bottom of the cage, and her eyes were open and already shrunken. The two others seemed not to notice, but Red hopped about nervously.

"You don't know what to make of it, do you?" Humbert said. He felt unaccustomed tears sting his eyes as he picked up the fragile body.

He inspected Blue carefully, but there was no way to bring her back. He wrapped her tenderly in his handkerchief and took the body into the back yard for burial.

Red came with him. "We all have to go sometime," Humbert said as he dug a shallow grave beside a rose bush.

He laid the body in the ground and covered it over. "I know how you must feel," he said to Red on the bush. "But you did what you could to give her comfort. I'm sure you made her life brighter, right up to the end. I think she died knowing she was loved."

Red flew to the fence and looked at him. Humbert knew even before the bird took flight again that this was the end of their acquaintance.

Meta was too upset to go to work that day. She looked at the cage, suddenly too large for the two birds within, and turned away, only to look again, perversely hopeful, a moment later. Humbert turned on the radio and sat before his toothpick spaceship, the model almost complete, but could not work.

"We interrupt this program for a special news bulletin," the radio said urgently. "The alien spaceship is gone. Just a few minutes ago—"

Humbert listened, surprised. Just like that? It had left without ever making contact with Man. All that effort to come, then a departure as mysterious as the arrival.

He smiled. Perhaps they had been wise to avoid contact with Earth's officialdom, for that was representative in name only. Still, in their place he would at least have sent down a representative, perhaps incognito, in an attempt to come to know the temper of the common man of the planet. That was where the truth inevitably lay—in the attitudes of the common individual. Once that was known, little else was required for decision.

Yes—he would have gone down quietly, and not for any overnight stand. He would have observed for a reasonable length of time, and if the standards of the world differed somewhat from his own—well, there were still ways to judge, given sufficient time.

His hand halted before the model. A representative—perhaps a creature very like a native animal, neither wild nor tame. Something like a parrakeet, free to enter certain homes without being challenged or held; free to observe intimately....

Free also to love a native girl, who might not be as intelligent, but still was beautiful and affectionate. Free to love her—and lose her?

Free to run from grief—but never to escape it entirely, though a world be forgotten, and its other inhabitants never contacted at all.