Where there’s an equation, there’s an answer. I cocked my head in imitation of her earlier gesture, picking at the wall until it all came into sudden, perfect focus. I wrapped the answer to her equations in a soft shell of my intentions and lobbed it at the shields.
They went down all at once, a cascade of falling defenses. The whole process had taken only a few seconds. Back in the real world, outside our minds, the other cuckoo gasped, hand clutching at her swollen belly. The last of the shields fell. I looked at her levelly.
“Your name is Ingrid,” I said. “Now what the hell’s an instar?”
“Get out of my head,” she hissed.
I pulled back, enough that I was looking at her with my eyes more than with my mind, and said, “I met your conditions. I learned your name. It’s your turn to answer my questions.”
“She has you there,” said Mark.
“He’s on her side now,” said Heloise, in a jeering tone. “They went for a long, romantic walk in the woods together, and now he’s ready to switch to the winning team.”
“He’s already on the winning team,” said one of the male cuckoos in the back. The other male cuckoo said nothing, only sat in sullen silence, his mental glare overflowing the RV until the air felt like it was too heavy to breathe.
I did my best to ignore the lot of them, focusing instead on Ingrid. “Tell me what I need to know,” I insisted. “I know enough to know that I don’t know enough. Unless you’d rather I went in and took it . . . ?”
“No,” she said sharply, raising one hand in a warding gesture. The other hand remained clamped to her belly, cradling its precious contents. “You won’t take anything. But I can show you, if you’ll accept the knowledge. No forcing your way in. No digging for anything I haven’t offered willingly. Do we have an arrangement?”
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?”