It’s coming along. ‘Polly Want’ is almost finished, although I need to change the ending. Ehh, sometimes you gotta. It works better this way.
From “Polly Want”:
Blid hadn’t been sure whether Kuiz would even want to talk to him about [birds] again. The muck from the [parrot’s] disappearance was slopping over onto the planetary government by now, and Blid fancied he could detect a note or two of genuine worry in the news coverage. Not that there was anything to worry about, right? [Parrots] only ate seeds, after all. The government was real careful to keep mentioning that, too. Almost as if they were worried people might start wondering otherwise.
But Kuiz proved eager to meet — and it turned out he didn’t believe the [parrot] had been stolen, either. “There’s just too many moving parts needed to make that story work,” he explained to Blid. The two of them were in Kuiz’s apartment, which looked like it was normally sparse but was now virtually covered in printouts and books. And they were all about [birds], or at least Terra — at least, that’s what Blid guessed from the pictures and compact, somewhat brutal Terran script on the printouts. “It’s much easier to assume that the creature flew out a window.”
“But how would it have gotten out?” asked Blid. That was the only sticking point for him, or at least the only one he was ready to concede.