Ah!

Ahimsa called for me to come down to the yard after I finished cleaning the incubators. I found her at the back gate with a gold-edged feather in her hand and Robin snug in a baby wrap slung over her shoulder. We wore sun-hoods but no oxy-packs. 

Every day we bring Robin down to the yard to see the world at ground level and let our feet touch the earth, and when he learns to walk he can explore the outdoors in this safe place. We live overhead in an arbor-shelter and raise robins for the rewilded forest. Now we are raising Robin as well, a miracle born of perseverance and the gene-splitting genius of Talos, our global intelligence system. 

Ahimsa held the feather by its hollow shaft and twirled it. Robin reached out his plump hand, but I shook my head and Ahimsa pulled the feather away. Who knew what microbes it carried in its barbs? We had enough to worry about. 

“Hawk feather,” Ahimsa said.

“Robin-eater feather,” I said.

“Don’t be silly.” She tucked the feather in a fold of her tunic. “I’ll genoscan it later.”

Talos could identify what hawk it was and from where. We know it was rewilded, since there were no natural hawks outside of locked-down sanctuaries. The naturals don’t have the genetic manipulation needed to survive in this degraded environment, like the rewilded hawks. Like us.

“There’s a robin-sized pile of feathers right there by the oak.”

Ahimsa’s face went full lamentation on me, and I wished I hadn’t told her. She’s prone to despair, more so since her father died last year. It’s hard to watch our birds, so lovingly raised to adulthood, perish from predators and other hazards. I know this is how the big wheel turns, but it makes our work feel futile. We turned to look at the robin remains and saw not feathers, but a human, as raw and naked as a hatchling, sitting at the base of the tree. Ahimsa clutched Robin to her body. 

“Get the baby inside,” I said, “I’ll talk to … him,” but she was already rushing to the ramp.

 I moved slowly and latched the gate behind me. Not afraid, exactly, just cautious. Violent crime was rare and this young man clearly had nowhere to hide a weapon, but still. It was a human, and a male. Not a good track record. We were a little isolated, as most rewilding centers were, except those that produced urban creatures. Rewilding rats seemed plain wrong to me, but the Ethics Board decreed they were part of the web and we can’t just help the species we find cute. We rise or fall together.

I squatted a few feet away from the stranger. He did not look my way, but kept his attention on the sky. Life sparkled in his eyes. Where had he come from and how had he breathed during his travels? There was no transport around, and he showed no signs of recent hypoxia in spite of not having a pack with him. He had sufficient air now because our trees had been modified to pump out more oxygen than wild trees, which had been through too much for too long to have more than a passing resemblance to “tree.” They produced so little oxygen that to go from one rewilded area to another without a pack meant to die in the barrens. Our life’s work, humanity’s work along with Talos, was to shrink those areas, but for now, well, for now. 

“Hi there,” I said. He smelled of dry heat and alkaline dust. “Are you okay? Are you lost?”

He didn’t acknowledge me, so I felt free to stare. His eyes were green and had thin orange circles around the irises, which explained the sparkling. His dark skin had the green tint that Talos implemented early on to help protect us from radiation, which meant he was not born outside of the system. In the small number of cases where couples insisted on maintaining their DNA autonomy and didn’t access Talos, the outcomes were disturbing and obvious. And yet, I understood wanting nature to take its course. We all wanted to get back to that, but in the meantime our mutation load was such that Talos had to screen fertilized eggs before implantation, then add guardrails. Our precious Robin came into being this way. We used my bone marrow cells and Ahimsa’s eggs, but we would have done that even if we weren’t both cis-females, sperm being particularly vulnerable to environmental hazards. It was a tough decision, bringing a child into a damaged world, but in the end we decided that it fell on us to make sure there were future generations to continue the work, to fix what humanity had destroyed. It was a lot to put on a baby. 

My point being, this young man seemed to have been born with all the protections Talos could provide, and yet, something was off. He was non-verbal and used no paralinguistic signals. Was it a mental health crisis? An organic brain injury? Or was he just being a sullen teenager? Whatever it was, I was not getting anywhere with words, so I climbed back up to the house. Food and water might open him up.

“The health team is on its way,” said Ahimsa, holding Robin in her arms and staring out the window.

I assembled a plate of grains and greens from the grow-station, then filled a ceramic water bottle. “Maybe they can get him to talk,” I said. “He just gazes at the sky with those starry eyes of his.”

“Starry eyes?” she mused. “Let’s call him Astrolabe.”

“Don’t name him,” I said. 

“Maybe he was brought here by some rogue migration outfit and abandoned in the barrens to die.”

“If he has a home we’ll help him find it. If he doesn’t, the Collaborative will find one for him.” 

“I’m going to throw a tunic and turban on him. Even here, he’ll burn.”

“We’re not keeping him,” I said.

“Says the one who’s making him lunch,” she said, and handed me our baby. 

I pressed my nose against Robin’s and he smiled. I stuck out my tongue, he stuck out his. Five months old and just brilliant. As we were making faces, we were both startled when something hit the window. At first I thought Astrolabe had thrown something, but it was Bennu, the robin we’d raised by hand who’d been born with one wing. After Talos grew a new one for him, Bennu escaped into the woods the night Ahimsa went into labor, but he never flew far. Lately he’d been throwing himself at his reflection in our window, thinking it was another male bird. The glass was made of clear, hardened sap, created from maple genes, flexible enough so that Bennu’s beak didn’t drive into his brain. Even so, every day he exhausted himself in battle and never got around to doing his job, which was to find a mate and get on with it. We raised the robins, but once we set them free, they had to figure it out on their own.

Ahimsa returned with her mother, Uriel, who had come to help when Robin was born, and then stayed. Her health was not good. She’d been sorrow-weak since Ahimsa’s father died. Talos has succeeded in extending lifespans, but Uriel’s generation still got old young, rarely making sixty. My parents were long gone. For the grieving, Talos could optogenetically stimulate the amygdala to reactivate happy memories, but it couldn’t bring back the dead. 

“Ahimsa and I are going out to tend to the boy,” Uriel said, carrying a bucket of soapy water and clean linen. The news of the visitor seemed to have perked her up. “I want to give him a good scrub.”

“I’ll do that, Uriel,” I said. “You sit down and rock Robin.”

“Mom wants to help me,” said Ahimsa, as she packed up the meal I’d prepared. “You rock.” 

They put on their hooded capes and descended the ramp. Uriel refused Ahimsa’s arm but kept one hand firmly on the railing. Robin and I watched through the window as they left the yard through the gate. The late afternoon light fell on Ahimsa’s face and she seemed to glow. How did she stay so serene? Robin put his little starfish of a hand on the glass and said “Ma.”

Such a brilliant child.  

As Ahimsa arranged the food, Uriel began washing the stranger’s feet. When the health team arrived, Ahimsa talked to them while they moved the healthscan wand over and around an immobile Astrolabe, and after a bit, she looked up at me and mouthed the word “pilgrim.”

Oh. We’d never seen one before. They were the odd souls who withdrew from the human community to wander, not heeding the dangerous barren zones. Health teams were always trying to resettle them somewhere safe. They gave them de-radiation, DNA rehab, and tactile consolation treatment, but a team could not hold them against their will. Holy ones and scholars on the Ethics Board had long ago determined that pilgrims were playing a part in the healing of the Earth. Within the narrow overlap of modern unified theory and quantum physics, it was thought they were bringing life-supporting energy into the dead zones without dying themselves. They pushed the boundaries of viability, and worked in ways that not even Talos could explain. 

And yet, my old collapsology professor, who taught the science of societal disintegration, did try to explain. He believed that as things got better, some humans would attempt to rewild themselves. They would not survive long, but over time, one would succeed, and others would follow. Evolution, he said, generates options, not answers, sometimes desperately so, making it possible for genomes to change relatively quickly with symbiogenesis. So it might not take ten thousand years for our bodies to adapt to the environment, he said, but we won’t know until we get there.

While Ahimsa talked with the health team, Uriel continued her work on Astrolabe, who paid her no mind. By the time she finished scrubbing him from toe to scalp, his skin was luminescent. She could not get the tunic over his rigid form, so she draped the white fabric on his knees and shoulders, then shook out the turban and placed it over his bald head. We were all bald, except for our exceptional baby. I patted Robin’s fuzzy scalp. Talos had recently been able to fortify follicles, giving them strength in the face of lingering radiation. Robin’s generation was the first in almost two centuries to maintain a few strands, a promising development in human restoration. I just hoped that we hadn’t gotten so used to bald humans that he’d be seen as a hairy oddball. 

“He was indifferent to the food,” Uriel said when she came back in, a little out of breath from climbing the ramp. “But he didn’t object to his bath. Which is more than I can say about some people around here.” And with that, she grabbed hold of Robin’s toes and they both squealed. 

“He’ll have to eat to live,” I said, and handed Robin off to her so I could get back to the hatchery. 

“Does he?” she asked. “We don’t know the limits of his reality.”

 Ahimsa came back in after seeing the health team off. “Isaura, you have to grow a protective canopy over him, but the team says not to obstruct his sight lines. They want to protect him from the sun, not scare him away.”

We used fractal geometry to create additions as needed in our arbor-shelter and rewilding facility. A little growth hormone there, a little pruning here, and a room could be made in a matter of days, a canopy in hours. I could stimulate growth right off the tree where he sat. 

“So he’s staying?” I asked. 

“Yes. The team said it’s best to leave them in the spot they chose themselves. They’ve done a number of assessments on him in the past two years. They say he’s in remarkably good health for someone who keeps walking the barrens, but right now he seems to want to rest. They’re hoping we can convince him to put down roots for a while. We’ll be getting extra nourishment credits while we give him refuge.”

“Shouldn’t we discuss this as a family?” Between the robins, Robin, and Uriel, we were caretaking so many as it was. It was exhausting.

“What’s to discuss?” said Ahimsa. “Astrolabe has chosen us. We can do this.”

#

Ahimsa and I continued our work of populating the woods with robins and raising our own Robin, while Uriel found the strength to take on most of the Astrolabe chores, keeping him clean and bringing him meals that he ignored. The canopy mitigated the sun, but with no sides it could not shield him from windstorms or the dark cold of night, and it did nothing to keep the birds and chipmunks from eating his food and water. I was prepared for him to die outside our gate, but if anything, he began to sit up straighter against the tree trunk and his breath deepened. Ahimsa and Uriel moved chairs right up to the window so they could watch him while they rocked or nursed Robin, who watched too. He kicked his little feet and said “Ah” for Astrolabe, which was more than Astrolabe said. In spite of his silence, we talked to him whenever we were in the yard, and Uriel insisted he was listening. The health team must have thought so too, because in the second week they prescribed musicians, two strings and a flute, to play for him an hour a day, hoping to create a spatiotemporal journey back to health. They performed outside the gate, but we could hear them throughout the house and facility, even above the piercing pipping of the hatchery, where the calls of hundreds of robin chicks added to the music. The dopaminergic circuitry of the chords peeled open our hearts, exposing tender images we kept hidden inside ourselves—falling snow, drifts of fragrant petals, pelted mammals curled in moony hibernation, bright fish that moved like dancers in the seas. The music, using no voices, seemed to speak of a higher power, and I thought to myself: Devotion. I am devoted to what I am doing. But the music also made me yearn for a past I never knew, and I’d put in my earplugs to dull the hurt of hope.

“We should have music in here all the time,” said Ahimsa after a few days of the therapy. We were inspecting the day’s batch of damp hatchlings and she cupped a lively one in her hands. “The chicks are more robust.” 

I put away my earplugs. “Talos probably just tweaked their genome recently.”

Ahimsa kissed the chick’s head and put him back under the heat lamp. “We have to do something about your negativity.”

“What was negative about that?” 

Uriel walked in and asked me to bring a chair outside. “I’d like to get some air while the baby sleeps.”

“I don’t know…” I said, and Ahimsa tugged at my tunic.

“Isaura will be right out with it, Mom.” 

When Uriel left the hatchery I turned to Ahimsa. “What? At her age she’s not supposed to be outside that long.”

“If it makes her happy, who cares?”

“I care. She could get sun-sick and we have our hands full as it is. And since when have you gotten so relaxed with the rules? You, who used to fret over the least little thing.”

But she was already off, pushing a cart of chicks down the hall to the fledgling room, and I carried the chair outside. I wanted it in the safety of the yard, but Uriel insisted on being next to Astrolabe. “The musicians won’t be here for a while,” I said. 

“Ambient sound is music worth listening to,” she said. “Try it. It might take your mind off your dark thoughts.”

“What dark thoughts?” I said, but she only looked up at the sky and smiled.

From then on, she spent Robin’s nap time outside with Astrolabe, keeping herself covered up. Sometimes she brought a book with her, one of the ancient texts, and read it out loud. Her voice was not strong, but we could hear her words rise up to us as if floating through the air, and it made us pause in our work. Even the crew delivering the daily eggs stopped. The birds held their song. Uriel read stories of hope and despair, rage and reconciliation, words meant to tease hope from our battered souls. Life was an ongoing struggle. In spite of all the advancements made since the Extinction Crisis, like bringing whole species back from a handful of cells and rejuvenating the human species with genetic manipulation, most of the time we still had no clue what we were doing. Talos could figure out how, but not why. That was our job.

One day, while we were loading the feeders, Uriel finished with a reading from the Wendell fragment. “Be joyful,” she said, “though you have considered all the facts.”

An impossible equation, I thought to myself, but Ahimsa said, “Amen to that.” 

#

The next morning, I let Uriel and Ahimsa sleep in. We’d been up all night with a teething Robin, so I did the first chick feeding and then brought breakfast to Astrolabe, as if he might eat. The sun was right below the horizon and the sky was coloring up. A degraded atmosphere had given us wild red and magenta sunsets, but particulate refraction occurred in the morning too. Talos was working to replace contaminants with protective aerosols, but we hoped it could keep the colors. I knelt near Astrolabe and put his meal within reach. He smelled moist and warmly saline now, like the underwing of a seabird. Above us, somewhere in the tree, a robin sang the song designed to attract a mate. It was melodious and wistful, with three slow high then low whistles, ending with a few twittering notes, and then a pause. I looked up into the branches. Bennu. He had finally stopped fighting himself and was doing his job. He began another lilting series which was slightly different from the previous one, but just as sweet.

When Bennu paused in his repertoire, I looked back at Astrolabe, and was shocked to see him looking right at me. His eyes were full of gorgeous life, as if he was not just seeing other worlds, but this world as it was meant to be, the one we all strived for, and I felt the pull. Around us, blue skies filled with yellow-green birds, and red squirrels leaped from oak to maple in a forest so dense the canopy was a soft green blanket. Beyond the woods lay rolling meadows with pink asters and black crickets and silky gray voles. I smelled the tang of the crumbly dirt, the bitter pollen in the air, and the verdant taste of grass in the mouth of a deer. Bennu began a new variation on his song and Astrolabe’s face opened like a gate in front of me.

“Ah,” he said. 

Bennu continued to sing short whistles and twits as tears ran down my face, and when he was done, Astrolabe and I sat in the silence, looking at one another. Either Bennu had flown away to try another dating perch or he had found the mate for whom the song was sung. 

I heard fast steps coming down the ramp and stood in alarm. Ahimsa, holding her hawk feather, ran towards me. 

“I’d forgotten to scan it,” she said. “I just did it now. Talos says it was from a natural hawk, not a rewilded one. A kite. A red kite. It escaped, and it’s alive. The first ever outside a sanctuary, and it came here, to us.”

“To us.” I touched the miracle of the gold-edged feather, letting the stiff barbs spring back along my finger, microbes and all. We both stared at it in awe, and then Ahimsa looked over at the oak. 

“Where’s Astrolabe?”

“Oh no,” I said. We searched all around the center, but there was no underbrush movement, no footfalls crunching the forest litter. It seemed impossible that he could disappear so quickly. We scanned the branches of the trees until our necks ached. Nothing. Ahimsa, still clutching the hawk feather, crouched down and placed her other hand where Astrolabe had sat on the earth. A few flattened robin feathers still remained from the hawk’s feast only a few weeks before. 

“Still warm,” she said. A sudden wind came up and blew the robin feathers into the air and out into the world, but Ahimsa held tight to the hawk’s, determined to hold on.

JoeAnn Hart is the author of Arroyo Circle, a novel to be released by Green Writers Press in October 2024. Her other books include Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival, Stamford ’76, Float, and Addled. Her short fiction, reviews, and essays have appeared in a wide range of publications, including Orion, Terrain.org, Slate.com, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Dreams for a Broken World, Among Animals 3, The Hopper, and others. Her work often explores the relationship between humans, their environments, and the other-than-human world.

Published October 15 2024