Chapter 6
Mel found herself impulsively entering the pet shop, telling herself it was only for a few moments, the tinkle of the bell above the door announcing her arrival.
The young woman turned from feeding the guinea pigs their daily helping of kibbles and fresh veggies with a pleasantly warm and invitingly friendly smile.
"Good morning, ma'am. May I help you?"
Mel felt a stab of disappointment, followed by one of confusion. There was nothing at all familiar about this young woman's voice. But she'd been so sure that she knew her. In fact, she was still sure, in some odd way even more so than before.
But from where?
The only girls her age she knew were the younger sisters of a few friends and the daughters of some of the Watchfire's older regulars. And who did she know in Minnesota, anyway?
"Or did you just stop by to commune with some of your fellow Earthlings?"
"I - I guess I did," Mel stuttered, suddenly self-conscious. Whatever was engendering this feeling of familiarity, this young woman apparently didn't share it.
"Excuse me ... Do I know you?"
Mel ground her molars. Puh-leeze! Why couldn't the voices in her head just shut the hell up!?!
"That's perfectly okay," the young woman was saying as she secured the gratings over the guinea pig pens and moved on to the rabbits. "You'd be surprised at how many people do. Enjoy. Tropical fish and koi in the back. Puppies and kittens to your right. Fancy goldfish in the tanks by the register. Rabbits and small mammals over here, as you can plainly see. Birds in their own room, blue door on your left beyond the counter. Lots of birds, all locally bred. They're our specialty. Just follow all the noise."
"Sounds like you carry a pretty complete collection," Mel offered.
"Well, we don't stock reptiles, amphibians, tarantulas, saltwater fish, monkeys, ferrets or other exotics..." she explained, making certain each rabbit was happily munching its allotted carrots and salad greens before securing their hutches. "Just the usual. Anyway, if you need me or have any questions, I'll be in the bird room." She teasingly smiled, as though imparting a secret. "Got some baby feathered dinosaurs to hand-feed."
"Feathered dinosaurs? That's a joke, right?"
"Actually, no," she told her with obvious amusement. "Not all lines of dinosaurs went the way of extinction. Some of them continued to evolve and became birds. Then those birds became more birds."
"Oh. Right." Now Mel was feeling foolish. "The Discovery Channel. And the name of the store."
"Yeah." She smiled again. "They're not wrong about that, you know." She picked up her hamper-like basket. "Excuse me. Appetites are awaiting."
Mel watched her retreating back until she disappeared in the cacophony of twittering, chirping, tweeting, squawking birdy noises coming from the other room.
She really ought to get going, Mel told herself.
Still, she couldn't quite bring herself to leave just yet.
Feeling very much at loose ends, she surveyed the layout of the store and its merchandise from where she stood, uncertain of what was holding her there or exactly what she was looking for. It was a pet store, a typical pet store with typical pet store stuff. Nothing more. Had she been expecting something else?
Her wandering gaze was finally drawn to a stack of books piled high on the front counter.
"Melville, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dickens, Shakespeare, Faulkner and Twain."
Of course. A college kid with a part-time job would be doing her studying after chores and during lulls in walk-in business.
But those books weren't any of the classics.
"Green Eggs and Ham."
Some were weighty medical textbooks with long and mostly unpronounceable titles, but the majority had to do with genetics. Genome: The Blueprint of a Species. Sequence and Genome Analysis. Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation. Human Telomere Mapping and Sequencing. Biomedical Engineering. Genetics and Molecular Medicine.
Hardly light reading.
Apparently, the young woman was studying to become a doctor or a medical researcher or some such thing. While Mel found that to be an interesting tidbit of information, it didn't bring her any closer to knowing who this woman was or where she knew her from.
And she did know her. She knew that she did. Despite not having a single solitary shred of evidence to support that belief, despite the young woman not seeming to know her in return, Mel was all but positive about it. To not be able to place her was so annoyingly frustrating.
And right now her tolerance for frustration was at an all-time low.
Mel idly strolled over to the bird room door to curiously peer in through the glass panel inset.
It was a bird room okay, housing at least several hundred brightly-feathered birds. On one side were two aisles of small to large cages on racks or stands or hanging from hooks in the ceiling, each occupied by anywhere from one or two birds to small flocks of them. On the other side were the larger parrots, macaws and cockatoos in rows of bigger cages or set out on freestanding perches.
The mysterious young woman was seated on a stool at a central table with two aquarium tanks adapted for use as nurseries for pin-feathered baby birds. She was tying a napkin-bib around the neck of a vigorously squalling little guy who was eager for his meal to begin.
The noise abated for a few moments as Mel opened the door and entered, but soon picked up again where it had left off. A bright red macaw wolf-whistled at her; a big white cockatoo raised its sulfur-yellow crest and greeted her with a raucous Hello!' and an ear-splitting screech. Snatches of various bird songs could be heard rising above and weaving through the general decibel level.
"It was very loud."
The young woman looked up and smiled as Mel closed the door behind her.
"Sooner or later, everyone seems to end up coming in here," she commented.
"It's warm in here."
"Yeah, it is. Most of these guys are tropicals, so we keep the temperature a bit higher."
She scooped out a measure of oatmeal-like pabulum from a small jar with an infant-sized spoon. Howling at the top of its lungs, the sound remarkably like that of cranked-up static, the little bird greedily attacked the spoon as soon as it was offered. As the pabulum dribbled and splattered under the hungry assault, the reason for the bib became clear.
"What kind of bird is that?" Mel asked after a moment, not knowing what else to say. "It looks like a pincushion with too much rouge on its cheeks."
"Cockatiel," she absently replied as she held the bird still to gently wipe the mess of its first helping off of its face with a damp paper towel. "He should be almost fully feathered out in a week or so. Then he'll look much more like a bird."
Mel checked out the nursery tanks, each home to eight or nine little cockatiels, all loudly letting it be known in no uncertain terms that it should be the next one fed.
"They do look sort of ... reptilian."
"Yeah," she cheerfully agreed. "They kind of show off their ancestry at this age."
As Mel watched, the baby cockatiel latched on to a second offered spoonful with every bit as much ravenous enthusiasm – and every bit as much noise – as it had the first.
Why was she bothering this young woman? She was obviously very busy, still had about dozen and a half hungry babies to attend to and probably chores after that. And she herself had a long drive ahead of her.
Still oddly reluctant to leave, Mel moved off down the first aisle, reading the neatly handwritten legends on index cards taped or clipped to the cages on either side of her, the results of carefully managed breeding.
Zebra finches - Mutations in Stock: Normal Grays and Fawns, Florida Fancies, CFWs, Whites, Penguins, Orangebreasts, Blackbreasts, Pieds, Blackfaces, Phaeos, Combos and MORE. Just ask!.
Society finches - Normals and Grays in Brown, Chestnut and Fawn Selfs, Clearwings and Pieds.
Owl, strawberry and melba finches.
Indian silverbills.
Colorbred canaries - Whites, Red and Yellow Lipochromes, Red and Yellow Mosaics...
Her grandmother had kept a series of pet canaries over the years, Mel reflected, but it was impossible for her to say for certain just how many because they all blurred together in her mind. They'd all been yellow in color, just like those yellow lipochromes. And they'd all been unimaginatively named Tweety' – in honor, she supposed, of her grandmother's all-time favorite cartoon character. If she'd had a cat, she doubtless would have named him Sylvester'. But she'd been allergic to cats.
Several cages of parakeets – called budgies' on the index cards – in white, yellow and numerous shades of blue, green, violet and gray in various color mutations designated as Cinnamon, Graywing, Clearwing, Fallow, Opaline and Spangle.
Gloster corona canaries with jaunty mop-like crests.
Border canaries, tiny Fife canaries and chubby Norwich canaries, all in a range of colors.
Little wild-type' and brilliant' diamond doves.
Java finches - Normals, Whites and Cinnamons. Ask about Pieds and the NEW Silvers.
Two species of parrotlets.
Four species of squabbling lovebirds, each again in many color varieties...
Mel rounded the end of the first aisle and slowly made her way down the second back to where she'd started from, still reading the index cards.
Cordon-bleus, crimson-wings and several types of waxbills, firetails and firefinches.
A dazzling rainbow of different-colored Gouldian finches.
Another cage of canaries, these called American Singers.
At least nine different species of birds in as many cages, labeled as this or that munia or mannikin.
Sleekly feathered-out cockatiels – Lutino, White, Whiteface, Yellowface, Pearl, Pied, Fallow, Cinnamon and Combinations.
Still more cages of colorbred canaries in all manner of colors – Black, Brown, Agate and Isabel Series in Classic and the New Colors of Opal, Satinette, Pastel, Pastel Graywing, Ino and Eumo.
At the end of the second aisle back by the feeding table Mel stopped at one of the smaller cages, this one housing a single bird with a bright orange face.
"Male AS Canary Mule: Serinus canaria x Carduelis c. carduelis."
The young woman looked over at her from mopping clean another bird face. "I'm sorry. Did you just say something?"
"I ... um ... no," Mel stammered, oddly chagrined that she'd spoken aloud. "No. It's just that I ... I'd always thought a mule had hooves, four legs and long ears."
The young woman looked puzzled a moment, then she laughed, a throaty, musical sound. "Oh! No, he obviously isn't that kind of mule. That bird is from my aunt's breeding. He's a hybrid between a canary – the American Singer breed, to be exact – and a European goldfinch. Canary hybrids are called mules' to distinguished them from all other songbird hybrids."
"Hybrids?" Mel looked closer at the bird as it energetically hopped from perch to perch. Face to face with another deliberately created biological freak, a chill settled on the nape of her neck and her skin began to prickle as if it was crawling with hairy-legged bugs. "You mean as in ... between two different species?"
"Yeah," she said, returning her latest hand-fed to its nursery and taking out another. "It's a rather popular avicultural practice, really. It has a history going at least as far back as the days of the Roman Empire. It's been done with canaries for about 500 years now."
"But ... why would anybody want to do such a thing?"
"Oh, as a way to obtain an exotic plumage or a new color or a different type of blended song... Or as a study in genetics or taxonomy ... But mostly for the sheer challenge of it, I guess."
"Yeah, well, sure, that makes a whole lot of sense! ... Breed penguins with parrots, owls with eagles, create all sorts of..." Mel stopped herself, immediately regretting allowing the beginnings of the tirade to slip out. Her tone sounded so damn angry and snide.
"I'm afraid not!" the young woman laughed, apparently too involved with keeping the latest baby cockatiel from swallowing the entire feeding spoon to notice. "Crosses like that would be impossible."
Mel managed to compose herself and speak in a more conversational tone.
"And why should you think that?"
"Oh, it's not a matter of my opinion," she told her as she restrained the little bird from climbing into the food jar while measuring out another spoonful. "It is what is. Hybridization between different species can only be successfully accomplished if they're recently evolved and quite closely related, descended from the same or related stock. And often only under controlled conditions. Recently evolved species are still in a period of transition, still in a spurt of becoming, so to speak. Their genomes are relatively plastic at that stage."
A creepy sensation stuttered down Mel's spine, vibrating from vertebra to vertebra. She already knew, courtesy of the same Discovery Channel that had taught her about feathered dinosaurs, that modern Humans were a recently evolved species.
But Cole had once told her that Cirronians were an ancient, space-faring race long before the ancestors of Earth's dinosaurs had even evolved.
As for the rest...
"Okay... I really don't want to know the answer to this question, but I'm going to ask it anyway..."
"Do they ... really ... have to be ... closely related?"
The young woman gave her a curious glance as she finished cleaning off the little bird's dribbles.
"You're interested in hybrids?"
"Let's just say that, um ... I've ... had ... cause to become interested."
"Oh? Do you have any experience in keeping or breeding birds?"
Mel hesitated. She had none at all. The only real contact she'd ever had with her grandmother's canaries was to sometimes clip a piece of fruit or vegetable to the cage bars for them to peck at. And while she didn't have any interest in avian hybrids, she realized that she just might find a few answers here. This young woman seemed to be quite knowledgeable on the subject and there would be no way she could simply bluff her way through.
"I ask because breeding hybrids definitely isn't something for beginners," she clarified. "They're quite a challenge for even the most experienced of aviculturalists."
"Any particular reason why?" Mel asked, side-stepping the initial question.
Cole would be proud of her, she thought. Without lying, she'd misdirected the inquiry just as easily and skillfully as he ever did.
"The most basic one of all: convincing two different species to pair up isn't an easy thing to accomplish. In the natural order of things, hybrids only occur in unnatural situations or under artificial conditions, such as in very isolated populations where there's no mate of the appropriate species available ... Or in captivity when a breeder doesn't allow a choice. In all species, there are innate and inbred psychological, physiological and behavioral barriers working against out-crossing, an encoding that way, if you will. Each seeks out its own."
"I ... I guess I never really thought about it..." Mel lied with a crawling sense of unease.
The statement just felt completely right and she recognized the truth of it. It echoed the litany she had repeatedly told herself for so many months, the litany that one kiss had rendered moot: Bluebirds don't make it with turtles. Turtles don't make it with lizards. Lizards don't make it with fish. Fish don't make it with frogs. Frogs don't make it with deer. Deer don't make it with horses. Horses don't make it with cows. Cows don't make it with gorillas. Gorillas don't make it with Humans. And the beloved Human/alien connection of sci-fi be damned, Humans DON'T make it with aliens – no matter WHAT they've made themselves out to look like!
The young woman just smiled at her answer. "Well, why should you? It's as natural a part of life as breathing... No living thing ever has to consciously decide which species to court. Not even people. It's in the blood..."
"Yes, it was in your blood."
"... I mean, you ever hear of a hybrid between, say, a horse and a goat?"
Or between a Human and anything ELSE outside of the many chimeras of mythology?
"Guess not," Mel conceded, trying to ignore the reawakened yammerings of the voices in her head. "No more than I've ever heard of one between a ... a cat and a dog."
How about in your own mirror?
"And you never will," the young woman flatly stated, "Except maybe in some mad scientist's test tube..."
Test tube?
"... Even when those innate barriers break down, the vast majority of interspecies couplings don't result in offspring simply because they can't," she was saying as she concentrated on another feeding. "And it's one thing for two related animals like a horse and an ass to get it on, quite another for a horse and a goat."
Could the Cirronians have done an alien abduction' type thing? Could they have been cold-blooded and impersonal enough to perform sexual and reproductive experiments on Humans like the stories so regularly told in lurid detail in the supermarket tabloids?
The implanted viper of a thought was coiling in Mel's skull, slithering through her mind, its poisoned fangs sinking deep into her brain. She spoke quickly, before the young woman had quite finished her sentence, trying to mentally squirm away from the horror of the venom.
"But ... but why call a canary hybrid a mule'?"
"As in the old saying, sterile as a mule,' that's why. You do know that mules are just about the poster beast for sterility, don't you? They're a cross between two equines, an ass stallion and a horse mare. The offspring of all the equine species crosses – zebras, asses and horses – are sterile, just as the vast majority of all interspecies hybrids, regardless of the species involved, are sterile..."
"... mad scientist's test tube..."
Mel closed her eyes, desperately trying to push the thought away. It couldn't be. She had a father. And a mother. It ... just ... couldn't ... be...
"... For instance, a chicken is a type of domesticated pheasant, developed from the red jungle fowl, to be exact. Cross, say, a ring-neck pheasant – or any other pheasant, for that matter – with a chicken and you get what's called a phicken'. It's almost always sterile..."
... But what if they WEREN'T really her mother and father? Wouldn't that explain a lot?
"... Turkeys are also in the pheasant family, but not closely enough related to chickens to produce viable young. Their chromosome counts are different. Cross a chicken with a turkey and the embryo dies while it's...
"Ma'am? Are you all right? You look a little..."
NO! That was impossible! She looked just like her mother. And she was as tall as her grandmother, getting her height from her father's side of the family. It was impossible! Impossible!
"I ... I'm fine..." Mel tried, but she couldn't force even a faint smile. She pushed a stray lock of hair out of her eyes, surprised to find that her hand was shaking as if palsied. Her blood felt as if it were congealing in her veins, leaving her light-headed. "Just a ... headache... You were saying something ... about ... hybrid ... fertility?"
"One minute I'm a ... perfectly normal female Homo sapiens and the next minute I'm..."
It was a long few moments before the young woman spoke again. Mel stared at the canary mule and waited, feeling as if she were being studied, evaluated.
"... Now I don't even know what I am!"
"Oh, I could probably cite hundreds of examples," the young woman finally went on, slower and not as breezy as before. "But I don't want to bore you. It's enough to say that in the uncommon instances where there's any fertility at all, in birds it's usually only the male that is..."
"You're part Cirronian."
But WHAT part? And from WHOM? And HOW?
"... With mammals it's just the opposite, usually fertile females and mostly sterile males. Rarely are both sexes equally fertile in any given hybrid cross, even among the very closest of relations. There are a few rare exceptions, to be sure, but that's been found to be the rule."
"Is that ... physically ... possible!?"
Cirronians and Humans were not only different species evolved separate and apart on different worlds, as Mel thought she understood it, they were two completely different forms of life...
"I'm an energy-based being."
... And comparing them would be something on the order of comparing plants with animals.
"... your Human physiology is so primitive..."
The lights seemed to be getting brighter, the sounds of the birds louder, the disembodied babble of voices in her head more strident, as the floor began to tilt and wobble beneath her feet. Mel felt an arctic chill radiating from deep within that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature of the room. Her heart was sledging so fast and hard against her ribs that the inner percussion all but deafened her.
"... you created your image from the billboard."
"But I don't understand," she choked out. "Why should ... How could that be?"
Her voice was drawing out, echoing strangely in her ears, not even sounding like her own.
"... we traveled to a distant galaxy to create bloodlines..."
"You're Cirronian."
"And the two species must have..."
"I'm ... part ..."
"... scientist's test tube..."
"Mated."
"It's complicated, but... Listen, are you sure you're okay? You really don't look well."
Now the young woman's voice was sounding distantly hollow, low and distorted, like an old, scratchy recording playing at the wrong speed, becoming drowned out beneath the crowded echoings of the other voices.
"It was in your blood."
"It would seem so..."
"... so primitive..."
"... part ... Cirronian."
"I don't even know what I am!""
"I ... Yes. Please. I really ... need ... want ... to..."
In slow motion the young woman was rising from her seat and moving toward her, her features etched with alarm, her lips moving without sound as the floor lurched drunkenly beneath her feet, then abruptly climbed the walls.
"It was always part of you."
Then the room went completely white.