Orca and Bird by Anna Chilvers

The mood in this novel is what lingers: tall trees, lush moss, deep forests and calming quiet. Orca and Bird may be a science fiction novel about an android called Orca who is struggling to understand alarming, implanted memories which interrupt her daily routine of forest surveying. When Orca is distressed or needs to recharge and stay quiet, she heads for the trees. When she shuts down at night (she thinks of herself as a female) she sleeps standing outdoors among the trees, apparently without blankets or bedding, and wakes in the morning to take a nutrient pill and some water, then starts her work again. She is not untiring, but her energy seems to be more than human. She makes calls to communicate without apparently needing a phone, but gives her number to those who ask for it: does she have a comms device inside her mind, connected to the national phone network? She is managed by a person called Dorcas who checks on her progress, tracks her location and gets cross and frustrated when Orca decides to leave her assigned survey forest. Notice that I said “may be.” Orca may also be a severely traumatised woman with damaged memories, now working in forestry under psychiatric supervision to rehabilitate her mental health, and with good reasons for feeling uncomfortable in houses. It’s really hard to tell. Chilvers does not make either option obvious with a reveal or an aha! moment. Orca’s skin can bleed, she feels physical sensations from prickles to pain, she feels faint without water, she needs to eat and is revived by food (though she finds solid food difficult to chew and digest). Yet she has uploads from Dorcas which are superficial compared to “deeper levels of programming, older than the surveying instructions, as old as Orca herself. This person is in danger. If she can help, without endangering herself or her mission, then she should do so.” It is hard to not read Orca as an android of some kind, following the Asimovian rules. She is impelled to help humans, and though we never see her in a situation when she has a choice of harming a human, her primary response to a human asking for help is to give it. That’s about as close as we get to a nod that she (it?) is not human, or fully human. There are other disconcerting and unexplained SF elements in this novel. Orca is asked for help by Nadia, a young woman who blunders into the woods where Orca has been resting, and asks for her help. Nadia is living in a van at the Hayes country park with her boyfriend Nick, and Nick’s baby son Eli. Nadia adores Eli but is being beaten up by Nick. She wants to run away with the baby and Orca helps, unquestioningly. But Nadia quickly returns, and Nick announces that his job of surveying beetles will now take them to Suffolk. Off they go, and Orca is, again, impelled to help Nadia, and so also sets off for Suffolk. She shuts down her comms so Dorcas won’t know where she is, and risks not buying a train ticket so that her electronic payment won’t trigger an alert. She arrives in Suffolk, finds Nadia, and is helped by Jack, a local forester, with whom she encounters some disturbing finds among the rows of identical pines in a forest plantation. UFO encounters are rumoured, but Orca pays no attention to these. We needn’t, either, as this episode is again left unresolved. Nick takes Nadia and Eli off north and so Orca’s chase to help Nadia begins again, up to Kielder Forest, this time with Jack driving. At Kielder Forest things become even more weird. Jack and Orca arrive at a campsite, where they see Nick’s van, but the area is deserted: grass has been growing up around the tents for weeks. Nobody is in the shop. But where are Nick, and Nadia, and Eli? There is a mysterious wooden sign in the woods instructing them to choose one of three paths. Orca rings the number left in the shop and meets an aged forester and his young twin grandsons whose mother walked into the woods one day and never returned. They find Nadia unconscious with a very smelly Eli beside a lake, and she is taken to hospital. Suddenly the people are back, and this episode is barely referred to again. Was it a timeslip? What was it for? When Jack and then Orca choose the paths they must take, subsequent events definitely point towards them having slipped sideways out of time. But how and why remain unresolved, leaving this an anomaly that manages the trajectories of different characters, but ultimately leaves no-one changed. Except Orca. Her memory flashbacks are increasing, she is attracted to Jack but is aware that, since his ex-girlfriend has stepped back into his life, she, Orca, must step back; and her systems are running low. She has to get back to Dorcas, to the Hayes where she belongs. The presence of woods, forests, forest work, trees, and the wildlife supported by the trees is all-pervasive. It wasn’t until I was summarising the plot that I realised that most of the characters are in tree-adjacent professions. Yet there doesn’t seem to be an extraordinary number of trees: This is not solarpunk or climate fiction. This is a novel about finding family and friendship from a place of desolation, and the trees are the common factor in all Orca’s travels that signal permanence and respite. Nadia is clearly in an abusive relationship with a man who adores his baby son, but who has abandoned his wife and is beating Nadia into the same state of stunned submission. Orca’s flashbacks disturb her so much because she remembers Eric, the lover or husband with whom she was passionately in love and with whom she thinks she had children, or one child, but lost them all in a fire. She is confused about memories of a little girl in a red dress with white socks because that little girl might be herself or might be Sylva, with whom she worked in an office under Dorcas’s supervision, who was more uncontrollable than Orca—and who was thus assigned elsewhere against her will. Or is Sylva her sister? When Sylva herself turns up, all bets are off. Sylva is of course the Latin name for wood. Orca and Sylva spend a lot of time in a wood together, and Sylva’s insights and instructions in their time together show that she is the wild spirit and the visionary, where Orca is meek and worried about rules and order. Is Sylva a version of Orca’s own self? Are we getting too psychoanalytical? When Orca returns from Kielder she returns to a catatonic state, and is rescued by Dorcas, who seems a perfectly nice, normal woman. Dorcas sends Orca to London for talking sessions with Dr Morgan, and then she meets Nadia again, drunk on the pavement. Nick has thrown Nadia out of his van and has driven off with all her stuff. The Bird of the title is a puzzle, as the spirit blackbird appears only to Orca, and rarely. But she takes its leadings as her guide. When Orca walks off into the Scottish mountains on her own (this is where we go after Cornwall, which is after London) she thinks she has lost Bird, since it has stopped speaking to her, and she has thoughts of throwing herself off a crag because without Bird her life has truly become too difficult and unfathomable. Orca is a splendid character, with vitality and kindness and worry just oozing from her androidic pores. She deserves to love and be loved, and to be rid of her demons and allowed to carry on working in the forest, perhaps with her new friends nearby. I just wish the author had better explained her timeslip. It’s not an irredeemable absence: the novel was compelling to read and the characters are still haunting my memory. The plot is at the mercy of Orca’s returning patchwork memory of unexplained impressions, which create a disturbing whole; but we know there are things missing, things untold and unsaid that perhaps we’re not intended to know. Can we accept Orca just as she is, android or woman? Or will she walk into a timeslip again, and find another reality to inhabit?