Page 45 of Imaginary Numbers

There was fear in her words, lending them a spicy brightness that hadn’t been there before. I wanted to hear more of it, I realized; I wanted to hear her beg. That wasn’t like me. That didn’t change how much I wanted it.

Something was wrong. “Yes,” I said, and swallowed, suddenly dry-mouthed. “But you have to promise me the same. No looking at things I’m not intentionally showing you. No digging around.”

“The compact is sealed,” she said, and her eyes flashed white, and I was falling.

The infant cuckoo was pulled, purple-gray and squalling, from its mother’s womb. It kicked its tiny legs and thrashed its tiny arms until its father passed it into its mother’s arms, allowing her to guide it to her breast, where it latched on and started sucking greedily. Unlike a human baby, it seemed to know immediately what to do and how to do it.

“We have no instincts left,” said Ingrid. I turned my head, unsurprised to see her standing next to me. “We don’t need them. Everything an infant cuckoo needs to know is passed down, parent to child, before birth. They’re passive receivers in those days, unable to talk back, only able to learn.” She caressed her own swollen belly with one hand. “They stay passive for a week, maybe two, after birth. Long enough for us to be sure they’re whole and healthy before we pass them on. It’s not cruelty that makes us find better homes for our children. It’s mercy.”

“My parents left me with human strangers,” I said. “They died.”

“Yes, and that’s very sad, but it had to happen,” said Ingrid. The little family in front of us jumped forward, the man disappearing, the woman going from naked in her bed to clothed and composed and walking calmly up a driveway in a nice suburban neighborhood, a swaddled baby in her arms. “Babies are larval, you see. They’re easily influenced, easily changed. We give them everything we can before they’re born, and then we place them with hosts who won’t be able to manipulate them. We protect them by allowing them to incubate in peace. Larvae give off a sort of a . . . signal, like those wireless fences people buy for their dogs. No one can see that anything’s wrong, but the dog won’t cross the invisible line. Well, adult cuckoos won’t go anywhere near an infant that’s old enough to have started radiating, not before they’ve reached their first instar. Our children are safe from us. They claim and keep territory just by existing.”

“Are you going to abandon your baby?”

She looked at me like I was dim. I realized, numbly, that I could read her expression perfectly. It was just like being back in Artie’s mindscape. Here, everything was thought, and I could visualize it all without even trying.

“Of course I am, you stupid girl,” she said. “This isn’t my first, and it won’t be my last, if I have anything to say about it. I’m a wonderful mother, by the standards of our kind. I create them, I nurture them, I birth them, and then I let them go. Can you swear to me that you’d do half as well?”

“I never really thought about it,” I admitted.

“Of course you didn’t. You’ve been living with another species, living with another species’ rules. We don’t keep our children with us because we’re bad for them. They’d never become their own people if we kept them. They’d grow into little mirrors of their parents, because we’d be inside their heads every hour of every day, keeping them from becoming anything else. We love them, so we leave them. We give them a chance.”

I’d never considered the way cuckoos abandoned their offspring in quite that way. I twisted my fingers together, watching as the mother cuckoo rang the doorbell, smiled at the woman who answered, and stepped inside, out of view. Then I frowned.

“What about the families you leave the babies with? Do you give them a chance?”

“Why would we do that?” The scene shifted again, a discarded bicycle appearing on the lawn, a few bright stickers appearing in the window. The door banged open and a little girl ran out, pale-skinned and black-haired and identical to every other cuckoo child in the world. “There are so many of them. They’re predators, and they’ve overbred their habitat to a degree that would be appalling in anything else. If every cuckoo in the world had a baby every year, we still wouldn’t have a large enough population to threaten human superiority. Who died and gave them this entire planet? Oh, right. The dragons.” Her laughter was high and bright and giddy, like she’d just made the best joke the world had ever known.

The little girl grabbed the bike and maneuvered it up onto its wheels. Ingrid sobered.

“She’s larval,” she said, indicating the girl. “She has perfect camouflage at this age. All her telepathy does, ever, is convince the people around her that she belongs. It doesn’t revise them. It doesn’t tell them ‘this is your daughter.’ It just makes it so that when she skins her knee, they see blood; when she goes to the pediatrician, the doctor finds a heartbeat. This is a normal part of our development. It’s meant to last until the start of puberty. Trauma can trigger the first instar early. Do you remember when your first set of parents died?”

I swallowed, not looking at her. It was easier to focus on the child, who was bright and happy and fictional and uncomplicated. She was walking the bike toward the street, both hands on the handlebars.

“I don’t remember them at all,” I said quietly.

“No. I suppose you wouldn’t, not after what that butcher did to your mind.”

“Don’t talk about my mother that way.”

“You’ve had three mothers. The one who gave you away to save you, the one who died, and the one who stole you. I’ll talk about the third any way I like. She had no right. She stole everything you had, and she made you thank her for it.” Ingrid’s anger was a stinging swarm of gnats, swirling through the thoughts that shaped the illusion around us. “Children are supposed to come to their first instar in their own time. They grow, they mature, and one day, the little egg inside them breaks, and they see the world for what it is.”

The girl with the bike seemed to age five years in the blinking of an eye. She straightened, the suddenly too-small bicycle falling from her hands, and turned to look at the house with a thoughtful eye.

“That egg contains everything they need to know about being a cuckoo. It tells them what they are and where they came from. It tells them what’s going to happen to them, how to survive it . . . how to adapt.” The girl—the teen—walked back into the house, shutting the door behind her.

Someone screamed. A splash of blood hit the window. I flinched.

Ingrid was untroubled. “The entry into first instar can be a trifle violent, it’s true, but it’s a natural part of our development. The individual gets overwhelmed by the weight of the collective memory of a hundred generations, but not forever. They always resurface.”

“It turns them evil,” I said.

“It reminds them that they’re predators, surrounded by predators who wouldn’t thank them for pretending to belong,” said Ingrid. “The average age for metamorphosis from larval to first instar is thirteen. Your morph was delayed. Severely. That woman—the one you call your mother—had no right to steal your future from you.”

“She stole nothing,” I said. “She made it so I could care about other people.”

Ingrid turned to look at me, weary regret written clearly across her face. I was suddenly glad I couldn’t normally read expressions the way humans did. It was exhausting, looking at people and knowing what they were thinking, even if I wasn’t reaching out to read their minds. Telepathy was kinder.