DEFRAGMENTED

???? ??

The bird awakens and bursts out again, finding a man this time. He holds up a finger. The bird lands on it, gives a gentle peck. The man speaks.

“Tell Ferdinand I’m back,” he says. “Tell him I need him to search the Archives for me.”

The bird leaps up, circles, and flies along a long street just underneath the ceiling lamps, straight as a beam. The bird folds into itself, turns into light. The air thins to purity; amber lamps blaze and croon messages in a million tongues. Information throbs everywhere.

How does it get here? Where is here? A thousand feathered flights overlay themselves in a gathering awareness. The bird flickers into a dark space filled with smoke and ancient air, lands on the shoulder of a man, chirps one word: “Ferdinand.”

The bird flies up, hovers; the man rises from a large chair, walks form the room into the honeyed light, bends to scoop up a handful of sparkling grains near his feet. The bird’s wings beat faster, faster, blurring as it hangs above the man’s hand, the draft from its wingbeats kicking up a flash of sandy brilliance.

“For you,” the man says, “eat your fill.”

The bird perches on the hand, pecks at the grains greedily, consuming them, its crop swelling, its eyes watching the man’s blue gaze. It chirps once, twice; its body expands in coils of color, feathers smoothing to skin, awareness filling its growing head until I am there and the bird’s eyes are mine and the body is mine and the flood of information washes through me at last again. I stand naked in the golden light; the man turns his back and vanishes into the dark room, its door closing and disappearing to leave me alone among the confections of my desire.

I am home again, in the Archives, in innerspace. I am Ferdinand. I had wanted to die.

A Question forms in my mind: “I need to know who or what lived on Tarnus before the Colonists came. The Archive has blocks on all that. Go in and get past the blocks, and then come here again. I’ll find you.”

I can’t remember who said this to me, or when it was. I try to recall, my memory riffling its leaves, but there is too much to sift. Somewhere my body lies waiting for me to return from here – maybe I should go see where it is.

No, that’s not right. I died, didn’t I? The list of drugs I humped into my veins writhes past me in a wisp of recall. A few hours, and my body had to be eaten by the streetrats or jagger beetles, or sown full of hairthin wiry pinfly eggs, or all three. Or maybe just cut up and recycled by the cleaners.

But the Question drives me, just the way my desire for – what was her name? – drove me, or did it? I know my way. I will find the answer to that one question, and then I’ll answer the others. No sense worrying about having a body now. One thing at a time.

How unlike me to say that.

The smell and taste speak truth. I sniff a trace of what I seek, and move like light through diffractive sieves to a dark space in the shade of a deeply-branched tree. A meal of dense, harsh-spiced information is there. I start to taste it, afraid of its flavors and sudden bursts of heat, afraid it will consume me again.

Abruptly I am in a man’s thoughts; I am him.