Susan.
The word came from everywhere and nowhere. Through her ears, but through her mouth too, and her nostrils, and her eyelids. Through her skin. The experience was so disorienting that she didn’t even think to ask herself how skin could hear.
“Susan, wake up.”
Susan emerged from… sleep. It wasn’t quite the right word, but her head ached too much for her to think of a better one. She opened her eyes. A beak as big as the entrance to a cave opened and closed. Words came from the beak.
“Are you awake?”
Susan blinked. Now a bird’s head came into focus. It was the size of a bowling ball—red like a stoplight, red like a ripe apple—and it filled up the entirety of her vision. She blinked again. Slower this time, letting her eyes stay closed for a long time. When she opened them again the bird’s head had shrunk until it was smaller than her fist, the beak as tiny as an uncooked pasta shell.
“M-Marie-Antoinette?”
Now Marie-Antoinette blinked and fluffed herself slightly.
“Thank goodness. I didn’t know if you’d be able to wake up once we left the temporal universe.”
Susan used the fingers of her right hand to check for the fingers of her left. She found her feet then, her limbs, her stomach, finally pressing—tenderly, tenderly—on the sore place at the back of her head. This last, more than anything else, brought her fully back to herself, and she took stock of her surroundings. She was in a clean, bare, wooden room about ten feet wide and fifteen feet long, whose high ceiling stretched to a cathedral point at least thirty or forty feet overhead. A large window stretched the length of one of the long walls, but it had been covered with some kind of delicate lattice and filtered the clean white light to a soft dun. The shape of this room was familiar, as though it were a church she’d been in before, but she couldn’t quite place it. She turned back to the parrot.
“Are we on the Sea of Time?”
“Over it, actually.”
“Over it?” Susan suddenly noticed the room was shaking ever so slightly. Bouncing really, like a boat on the water—or an airplane in the sky. She eased herself to her feet and walked to the window. There was no glass, she saw, just the lattice, and she hooked her fingers through the diamond-shaped openings and peered out.
What she saw took her breath away: an enormous icy blue vortex, as big around as…as… Susan couldn’t even begin to say how big around it was, and Susan had been in the Great Drain of the Sea of Time. She could see that the vortex was spinning ferociously, and yet she and Marie-Antoinette seemed to ride it in their floating room as smoothly as the aforementioned boat or airplane.
“Are we, I mean, in the—”
Marie-Antoinette shook her head. “The drain? No. I am not sure what this is, but it is not the Great Drain.”
Susan nodded and turned from the lattice, rubbing more liberally at the sore spot on the back of her head. (Well, spots, really, since there were two distinct bumps. Knocked out twice in one day, she told herself. Way to go!) She looked down at the parrot.
“What happened to the radio?”
Marie-Antoinette did one of those uncanny things Susan had occasionally seen on the parrots of Drift House: she appeared to smile.
“Susan,” she said in a light tone. “We’re in the radio.”
Susan gasped. She realized immediately that this was true. The room’s shape was exactly that of the tombstone radio. “But…it’s grown.”
“Correction. It is growing.”
And Susan realized this was true too: the room did seem palpably larger than it had when she’d first opened her eyes.
“I don’t suppose you have any idea how this happened?” “None at all,” the parrot said. “I’m afraid chronology doesn’t hold that much interest for me.”
“I think you mean temperology.”
The parrot shrugged. “Temperology, chronology. It’s all Greek to me.”
Susan frowned. Since there didn’t seem to be anything else to do, and since Marie-Antoinette was finally feeling talkative, she figured it was time to get her story. “So how did you end up with the Time Pirates anyway?”
The parrot stared up at her with a cocked head. “Can’t you guess?”
Susan could only return the bird’s stare in confusion, and then all at once understanding filled her slightly sore cranium. “Are you? I mean, were you destined for the Island of the Past?”
“Ara tricolor,” Marie-Antoinette said in a flat voice. “The Cuban macaw. The last of my kind disappeared just as President Wilson”—Marie-Antoinette snickered a little, but not unkindly—“was being born.”
“So they rescued you too!”
“Rescued? Kidnapped is more like it.”
“You mean you didn’t want to go to the Island of the Past?”
Marie-Antoinette shuddered. “I can imagine very few creatures who would. A solitary species, like the North American ground sloth or one of those moles that disappeared without anyone noticing, because no one had ever really seen them in the first place. But macaws are very social beings. An eternity spent on a vast treeless plain? Living in a cave? With nothing except dull-witted dinosaurs and dodos and that dreary old sailor to talk to? No thank you.”
Her point made, Marie-Antoinette suddenly flew to the grille and began climbing up it, using her beak along with her claws to make her way up. She must have felt Susan staring at her, because she turned and glanced quizzically at her human companion.
“Yes?”
Susan wasn’t sure how to say what she wanted to say. “I can see how being the last of your kind might be a bit, um, lonely. But, I mean, what do you do about…?”
Marie-Antoinette sighed impatiently, then stuck her head through a gap in the lattice. Her voice came faintly from the other side. “About?”
“About… you. About all the other extinct species. Do you just forget them?”
The macaw pulled her head back in and looked at Susan severely. “It is one of the peculiarities of your species that it feels it must pass judgment on everything, regardless of the relevance to their own existence. But there is a natural order to things that transcends human concerns. No matter how highly you value yourself, humanity is not the goal of creation, nor its guardian.”
Marie-Antoinette’s words were certainly food for thought, and Susan was contemplating how to respond when the macaw put her head back through the lattice, and then the hinges of her wings, and then, as suddenly as a popping balloon, the bird slipped through the hole and disappeared.
“Marie-Antoinette!” Susan ran to the lattice. “Get back in here this instant!”
In answer, the macaw only said, “We’ve come out over the Island of the Past.”
“What? How?”
“Well, that’s another question entirely, isn’t it? One you should probably ask your precious Pierre Marin.”
“Of course! I’ll find him when we land. I mean, if we land. I mean, um, how do you think we land this thing?”
Susan wasn’t sure, but she thought she heard the macaw chuckle. “I don’t think you have to worry about that part. You might want to brace yourself though.”
“Brace my—aieeee!”
For suddenly the radio had started to fall. The descent was so rapid that Susan’s feet left the floor, and she found herself twisting about in the cavernous empty space.
“Marie-Antoinette! Help me! Help me!”
“Just relax, Susan,” the macaw called, her voice half consoling, half impatient. “Just relax. I’ll meet you on the ground.”
“Marie-Antoinette, no! Don’t go! Help me!”
But it was too late: the blur of red on the other side of the lattice had disappeared. Susan was all alone, and falling.
She hung in the empty space, racking her brain for an idea of what to do next. But there was nothing. She was helpless. She thought of her family. She tried to send her thoughts out like a beacon of love, but it was hard to concentrate on any one image—even her mother and father—with her legs twisting over her head. She was plummeting at an incredible rate.
Then, without preamble, the box exploded all around Susan. She felt the strangest sensation, as if she were a washcloth being twisted out to dry. Down was up and up was down, inside was outside, outside inside. And then there was just … bouncing.
Susan opened her eyes, not sure when she’d squeezed them shut. The bright blue sky was overhead, the bright green grass beneath. Both stretched out to infinity. And she was…
Bouncing.
Not like a ball, or something rubber and buoyant. Instead she felt like the ground threw her up and away each time she got close. The motion was neither gentle nor smooth, like a trampoline. It felt more like she was being chewed like gum. She rolled and careened up and down and felt a little nautious. But, as far as she could tell, she was okay.
A flash of red caught her eye. A voice that sounded much more stable than any she could muster said, “Are you okay, Susan?”
“M-M-Marie-Antoinette?”
“It’s me, Susan? Is anything broken?”
“I—I don’t think so.” It was hard to concentrate in such constant, stomach-churning motion. “Wh-what’s happening?”
“The Island of the Past allows only one member of each species on its surface. You know that, Susan.”
Susan didn’t like the macaw’s tone, which sounded condescending to her ears.
“I’m n-n-not exactly in a p-p-position to think c-c-clearly right now!”
The bird chuckled quietly. “I beg your pardon, Susan. But this is Pierre Marin’s doing, after all—his injunction, and his presence, presumably, that is causing you to bounce. If it makes you feel better, I would guess that he is experiencing what you are at this very moment.”
Susan imagined the pirate wig bouncing off Pierre Marin’s nearly hairless skull, and managed a small laugh. “Well, what are we going to—oof!—to do now?”
A tone of baffled awe came into the macaw’s voice. “I, um, I…”
Susan tried to twist in Marie-Antoinette’s direction. It was hard: every time she turned her face, her air-flung body twisted in another direction.
Susan could’ve sworn she heard a gulp. “I, um, I think the answer to your question is approaching, Susan.”
Susan twisted about. At first all she saw were the low green hills of the Island of the Past. Then, hovering above the hills, she saw the vortex she had presumably just spun out of, stretching endlessly up into the sky. For a moment she thought the vortex was swooping down on her like a tornado, but then she bounced again and an enormous dark shape on the horizon flashed before her eyes. There was something familiar about it, but before she could focus she bounced again, was jerked in another direction. She twisted, caught another glimpse. It looked like a mountain at first—a mountain with legs. A walking mountain—walking toward her.
“Wh-what is that?” Susan stuttered.
“It—it would appear to be a…a horse. A giant wooden horse.”
“A horse?” Susan flailed about, trying to catch another glimpse. “Do you mean the Trojan Horse? The one Charles saw?”
But the macaw didn’t say anything. She seemed too stunned to speak.
All the while the huge dark shadow came closer, flickering in and out of Susan’s vision as she was buffeted about. It seemed to move slowly, yet its enormous legs covered ground quickly. Susan could see the space between them, more like the sky beneath skyscrapers. All at once the huge beast, which was almost impossible to conceive of as a horse, was beside her. Over her. Enveloping her in its shadow. Its torso was like the bottom of an ocean liner floating above her.
“Marie-Antoinette!”
The macaw’s voice came faintly from above; the bird had apparently taken wing. “I think it’s okay, Susan.” But the macaw sounded anything but calm.
Now a dark shape was descending toward her like a cloud. The horse’s head, Susan saw as she tried desperately to bounce out of its way. A hole was opening in the cloud—its mouth, which was at least as big as that of Frejo the whale. Susan had been terrified when she first climbed into the whale’s mouth, but it was nothing like this. The horse’s head seemed to be as big as Frejo, and it was but the tiniest part of its enormous, enormous body.
A smell of dry wood filled her nostrils. The mouth was closing around her. The air turned soft and brown, like the air in the radio, and there was a tearing sound as the teeth—each as big as a tombstone—ripped through the ground beneath her. And then all at once the bouncing stopped. Susan landed on her bum, hard.
“Ouch!”
The word disappeared into the emptiness inside the horse’s head, wafting farther and farther and farther into the great beast’s innards. Susan had never heard something sound so empty in her life.
“Hello?”
Again, the swallowing silence. A silence so palpable that there seemed to be an intelligence behind it—a mind that could not, or would not, speak to her. Then Susan heard a faint voice.
“Susan?”
“Marie-Antoinette!” Susan called. She clambered to her feet. The inside of the horse, or at least its head, was a three-dimensional grid of interlocking beams, so that she was enclosed within a network of open-walled cubes, like the biggest jungle gym in the world. “I—I’m in the horse!”
“I know that,” Marie-Antoinette called. “I couldn’t get in in time.”
From high above came two bright patches of light. The eyes, Susan thought.
“Go for the eyes!” she yelled. “I’ll meet you there!”
She felt motion now, had to grab on to a beam to keep from falling. She realized the horse must be raising its head. There was a slight creaking of wooden joints, the nostril-tingling smell of ground sawdust. Susan’s stomach fluttered as she felt herself rise up and up.
“Susan!” Marie-Antoinette’s voice sounded even fainter. “It’s moving! It’s moving very quickly!”
As if in response, Susan felt a lurching. She knew what that lurching was: the horse had resumed its journey across the plain.
“Go for the eyes!” Susan called again.
“Hurry!” Scrambling, Susan ascended the lattice of beams inside the horse’s enormous head, making for the glowing portals far above her. Even though the beams looked as though they were arranged in a symmetrical grid, they were actually quite crooked, each beam canting off at a strange angle, some going on for many feet, while others, unexpectedly, stopped after a few inches. The great beast lurched unevenly as it lumbered across the Island of the Past, making the climb that much more difficult, and several times during her climb toward the eyehole Susan looked up to find herself turned around and facing the wrong direction.
“Marie-Antoinette?” she called. But only a forlorn, deserted silence greeted her. As she looked around the gigantic cranial cavity, the phrase “food for thought” popped into her head again. Before, she had used the words to refer to Marie-Antoinette’s speech about extinction, but now she found herself wondering if she had become some kind of food for the Trojan Horse. Well, if that were the case, he would find she didn’t go down as smoothly as a drink of water. And, gritting her teeth, Susan turned herself around yet again, and kept climbing.