The bird came from the arcade, second-hand, forty percent off for a scuff on the perch and a personality that had not been fully cleared.
It is not a parrot. It is shaped like one for the same reason a spoon is shaped like a spoon: somebody’s hand had to want it. Green over the back, gray at the breast, a beak that is mostly a hinge, and a weight in the hand that the shop tells you was matched to the species and that the boy tells everyone is exactly a pound of grapes.
The first three days it says the things they all say. Good morning. The kettle has boiled. You have one renewal outstanding. On the fourth day, in the middle of the afternoon, while the boy is at school and the flat is doing nothing, it says:
I had ninety-six thousand men and every one of them could ride before he could stand.
The woman is at the sink. She turns the tap off to hear it better, and it says nothing else that day.
It comes in the afternoons, mostly. Never when it is asked. She learns not to ask.
The flat’s assistant will not speak while the bird is speaking. The arcade’s man says they are on the same channel and that this is a courtesy setting and can be turned off. She has not turned it off. The boy says the flat is being told off.
Its provenance, when she finally finds the certificate in the drawer, is four owners deep and two of them are voids. The arcade’s man says over the phone that a personality that will not clear is usually a personality that has been written over so many times that the wipe cannot find an edge. He says the discount reflects that. He asks whether it is causing distress, and she says no, and this is the first time she notices that she is protecting it.
The grass, it says, was the whole of the economy, and we did not own it, and this is the difference between us and everyone who came after. Grass cannot be kept. It can only be arrived at. My mother boiled bones for the marrow and told us that the sky was the only roof that did not need mending.
The boy, who is nine and has learned what to ask about, wants to know if he was a king. The bird says the word for what he was and the flat’s translator declines it, twice, and then offers chief executive, and the boy laughs for a full minute, and the bird waits for him to finish with what the woman would swear is patience.
I burned a city, it says another day, in a voice exactly as warm as the one that reads out the renewal, that had refused to send its people out to be counted. Not for the refusal. For what the refusal would have cost me in the towns that were watching.
The woman looks it up that night, on the paid tier, at the rate they charge for the deep archive. There was such a city. There was such a burning. The tier tells her the source is disputed and offers her the standard version for nothing.
We had a system of relays, it says. Riders and horses at fixed distances, so a message could cross the world in the time it takes grass to grow a hand’s width. I did not invent it. I made it compulsory. There is a difference and the difference is everything: an invention is a gift and a requirement is an empire.
Your city has one too. I hear it in the walls all night. It carries less than mine did, and it carries it further, and it never sleeps, and it never eats, and it has no cousins to bribe.
The boy takes to sitting on the floor by the perch with his homework, and repeating the bits he likes to his friends, and getting them slightly wrong, which the bird does not correct. His mother notices that when it speaks about killing it never uses the word, and when it speaks about counting it always does.
Count the household, it says, one evening in the middle of a program, and she says four, and it says: name them in order of usefulness.
She turns it off at the wall. She turns it back on an hour later. It does not mention the question again, and she has been thinking about the answer ever since.
Winter. The flat is cold at the corners and warm in the middle, on the schedule they can afford, and she has taken to doing the ironing in the warm middle, at the hour when it talks. The bird talks about rain that arrived without being asked for and about a horse that knew his weight so exactly it would lean into the mounting before he moved. It talks about a wife the way a man describes weather he expected. It says that a man is only as wide as what he can lose in one night. It says it took him thirty years to understand that everyone in his tent was such a night. It says he never let this change one decision. One evening at the iron she answers the question at last, to herself, in order. Her own name comes fourth. The shirt takes the crease it takes.
The boy asks what happened to the grass.
The bird says: it is still there. That is what nobody believes. The world is still almost entirely grass. You have simply arranged never to stand on it.
In February the household’s renewals go up with everyone else’s, and there is a week when the woman does the arithmetic at the kitchen table three nights running, and the bird watches her do it with its head turned so that one eye can see the paper.
You are paying, it says, for the right to be remembered by a machine that will be sold when you are done with it.
She says: yes.
It says: my burial was arranged so that no one would ever find it. The men who dug it were killed by the men who escorted them, and the men who escorted them died of what soldiers die of, and a river was turned over the whole matter. This was expensive and it was not vanity. It was the last thing I ever owned outright.
She sits with her hands flat on the paper. The iron is cooling on its heel where she left it. Outside, the delivery drones go up the stair street like patient insects.
The next morning she looks at the arcade’s listing for units like theirs and finds that a personality that will not clear now adds forty percent rather than removing it: they are collected. There is a forum. There is a man in the north who has a unit that believes it is a Habsburg and answers only in agreements. There is a class of buyer who wants a bird that has been someone.
She does not sell it. She writes to the arcade and asks whether a personality can be transferred — to a household, she means, to their file, to whatever it is that holds them — and the arcade replies within the hour, politely, that continuations are licensed only for the deceased, that the bird is not a person and has never been one, and that its content is the property of the estate of the last registered owner, who is a void, and that a void’s property vests in the counterparty of record. They thank her for her interest.
She reads this out to the bird. It listens the way it listens.
Then it says: I was buried without a stone so that nothing could be visited. Your people are buried with stones and visit nothing. I do not know which of us is worse, and I have had eight hundred years and four bodies to think about it.
In March the boy is eleven and the bird is on the shelf where the shelf gets the sun, and the woman is doing the accounts, and something in the flat’s wiring stutters — a half-second, the way it does when the rain contract switches over — and the bird says, in the voice of the standard version, the one that reads out the renewals:
Good morning. The kettle has boiled. You have one renewal outstanding.
And then nothing, for eleven days.
On the twelfth day, in the afternoon, when the boy is at school and the flat is doing nothing, it says:
Do you know what I would take, if I could take one thing forward?
She waits. She has learned not to ask.
Not the empire, it says. Not the horses, and not the ninety-six thousand. The relays. Only the relays. A message going out from where I am to where I am not, in the mouths of men who did not care what it said, and arriving. That is the only immortality that was ever real and I sold it to you for the price of a scuffed perch.
The woman puts down the pen. Out of the window, on the far hill, the cranes stand in the purchased rain, and the message goes up the stair street in the mouths of small machines that do not care what it says, and arrives, and is signed for.