Why Do Birds

CHAPTER 36

What I think we should do now," Federigo said after breakfast, "is go back to Buenos Aires and get my money. Then I have to give some to my wife, and then we can go out in the pampa and buy horses. It is better to live there than in the city."

"I don't want to live in the pampa."

"All right," he said cheerfully, "then we will live in Buenos Aires, but in a different part of town. And I will buy horses somewhere, it doesn't matter. "

"No, I'm going to stay here. We'd better say good-bye now, Federigo."

"Well, are you really sure? Last night was so beautiful."

"I'm really sure."

He shrugged and smiled. "Good-bye, then."

She watched him get into the taxi. "Good luck with your horses," she said.

He waved. "I will call you!" he said.

She shook her head with a faint smile. He waved again cheerfully and drove away.

She turned on the holo and punched in a phone window. The queue read:

Geoffrey Nero

Sylvia Englander

Federigo Oliveras

Ed Stone

His face was tired and anxious. "Hello, Linda?"

"Yes."

"Is there something wrong with the video?"

"No, I've got it turned off."

"Well, anyway, where are you?"

"Nowhere special."

"What's that supposed to mean? Linda, what happened? What's the matter?"

"I had a dream that you were either an alien, or else you made this whole thing up."

"You had a dream ? Is that what this whole thing is about?"

"Well, what if it is a dream? I mean, whose dream is it?"

"You're not making any sense."

"I know that. So what? Good-bye."

"Wait a-" She punched off; his image dwindled and disappeared.

That night the ceiling bulged and opened. A blade came down, as long as the room; it descended and split everything in half, walls, furniture, carpet, and the halves fell away into darkness.

From her balcony she could see the lines of cars coming into town from the north, streaming away westward toward Rosario. It made her dizzy to think of these rivers of people flowing from the mountains to the coast; the whole southeastern part of the continent was emptying itself out into Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, Buenos Aires.

At the market she met a family from Chile-father, mother, and five girls. They had driven over the Uspallata Pass, then across the breadth of Argentina, sight-seeing. It had been a wonderful trip, they said. It was wonderful to see so many happy people, all going to the City of God.

"Do you think that's what it is?" Lavalle asked. "Do you mean that the Cube is the City of God?"

"Oh, certainly," said the mother, wide-eyed. "You are not a Catholic?"

"I was, but no longer. "

"Your faith will return," said the mother positively. She searched in her handbag and gave Lavalle a St. Christopher medal. "Please take this. If you wear it, it will surely help you."

In two days the stream of travelers had thinned to a trickle, and by the end of the week it had stopped altogether. Prices, which had soared to ridiculous levels, fell again; the store owners were taking whatever they could get. Then almost every shop in town was closed; the littered streets were empty.

The same names turned up in her phone queue day after day, but she never returned the calls, and after a while they stopped.

On Monday Senor Aguirrez said, "Senora, I am going to close the motel now and go to Buenos Aires before the boats leave. But if you would like to stay here, I'll give you the keys, you can do whatever you like."

"That's very kind of you, Senor Aguirrez. I'll probably stay a few days longer, maybe a week. How long do you think it will be before everybody leaves Buenos Aires?"

"They say nine or ten days to evacuate the Atlantic side of South America, Senora."

"Then let me pay you for another week. How much will that be in gold?"

"Whatever you like, Senora. Three hundred reales would be sufficient."

She got the money out of her purse and handed it to him.

"Thank you, Senora, you are very kind. Good-bye." She watched him drive away with his wife in a Volvo packed with belongings.

On holovision, day after day, cameras reported the exodus. The people were streaming out of the mountains and the high pampas down the roads that followed watercourses to the coastal plain. In satellite pictures they were grains slowly flowing, like corpuscles in the veins of a bleeding cadaver.

In Shanghai, early arrivals by air from all over the world were already being processed, and she watched that too. The entry points were gay with paper streamers, balloons, flowers, bells. As each family stepped out, dressed in its best, with bundles, sacks, and pets in cages, smiling young women greeted them, led them to the waiting capsules. There were tearful good-byes, embraces. Then the attendants helped them into the capsules, packed their belongings around them. "Smile!" they said in one of five hundred languages, and an overhead camera snapped their pictures. The lids were lowered; metal arms came down and attached the photographs to the lids. The capsules moved on through one junction after another, accelerating each time. When they entered the eight hundred twenty-six lanes of the final stage, they were moving at more than a hundred miles an hour. Under the gaily colored canopies, they zoomed up the scaffolding, crossed the grid and were locked into place. Twenty-three every second, two million a day.

By Wednesday the town seemed almost empty. Some stores were locked or boarded up; others stood open and empty. Along every residential street were little piles of abandoned belongings: clothing, books, toys. The garbage had not been collected for three days, and there was a pestilential smell.

There were plenty of abandoned cars in Villa Maria, but she had seen the holo pictures of the clogged approaches to Buenos Aires, and it was obvious that she could not get through that way. In the garage of an abandoned house, finally, she found a little Yugo moped with a trailer. She drove it back to the motel, loaded her luggage and supplies, and started south.

All along the highway on both sides was a sad scattering: clothing, toys, cabinets, drifts of paper spread out to dry like exposed obscenities. King vultures, ungainly white birds with black wings and gaudy multicolored necks, were hunched over bits of offal; a few unidentifiable mounds were covered with red or black ants. The smell of excrement was everywhere, and there were a great many flies.

The closer she got to the center of town, the more dogs there were, dogs of all sizes and colors, running back and forth, sniffing one another, or sitting on their haunches with their wet red tongues hanging out. None of them looked as if they were starving, but they made her uneasy. There were cats, too, in alleyways, and several times she saw parakeets on balconies and rooftops. She turned off into a suburban district, avoiding main avenues, and found a dead-end street where the doors of a small house stood open. Inside, the house was in disarray, but there were linens, kitchen utensils, the gas and water had not been turned off.