Slow Birds: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  ‘Prototype? Air-waves? Power source? What are these?’

  ‘I can tell you.’

  ‘Those are just words. Fanciful babble. Oh for this babble of the world to still itself!’

  ‘Just give me time, and I’ll …’

  ‘Time? You desire time? The mad ticking of men’s minds instead of the great pure void of eternal silence? You reject acceptance? You want us to swarm forever aimlessly, deafening ourselves with our noisy chatter?’

  ‘Look … I suppose you’ve had a long, tough life, Jay. Maybe I shouldn’t have come here first.’

  ‘Oh, but you should indeed, my impetuous fool of a brother. And I do not believe my life has been ill-spent.’

  Daniel tapped his forehead. ‘It’s all in here but I’d better get it down on paper. Make copies and spread it around – just in case Atherton gets glassed. Then somebody else will know how to build the transmitter. And life can go on. Over there they think maybe the human race is the only life in the whole universe. So we have a duty to go on existing. Only, the others have destroyed themselves arguing about which way to exist. But we’ve still got time enough. We can build ships to sail through space to the stars. I know a bit about that too. I tell you, my visit brought them real joy in their last hours, to know this was all still possible after all.’

  ‘Oh, Dan.’ And Jason groaned. Patriarch-like, he raised his staff and brought it crashing down on Daniel’s skull.

  He had imagined that he mightn’t really notice the blood amidst Daniel’s bright red hair. But he did.

  The boy’s body slumped in the doorway. With an effort Jason dragged it inside, then with an even greater effort up the oak stairs to the attic where Martha Prestidge hardly ever went. The corpse might begin to smell after a while, but it could be wrapped up in old blankets and such.

  However, the return of his housekeeper down below distracted Jason. Leaving the body on the floor he hastened out, turning the key in the lock and pocketing it.

  It had become the custom to invite selected guests back to the Babbidge house following the Mayday festivities; so Martha Prestidge would be busy all the rest of the day cleaning and cooking and setting the house to rights. As was the way of the housekeepers, she hinted that Jason would get under her feet; so off he walked down to the glass and out on to its perfect flatness to stand and meditate. Villagers and visitors, spying the lone figure out there nodded gladly. Their prophet was at peace, presiding over their lives. And over their deaths.

  The skate-sailing masque, the passion play, was enacted as brightly and gracefully as ever the next day.

  It was May the Third before Jason could bring himself to go up to the attic again, carrying sacking and cord. He unlocked the door.

  But apart from a dark stain of dried blood the floorboards were bare. There was only the usual jumble stacked around the walls. The room was empty of any corpse. And the window was open.

  So he hadn’t killed Daniel after all. The boy had recovered from the blow. Wild emotions stirred in Jason, disturbing his usual composure. He stared out of the window as though he might discover the boy lying below on the cobbles. But of Daniel there was no sign. He searched around Atherton, like a haunted man, asking no questions but looking everywhere piercingly. Finding no clue, he ordered a horse and cart to take him to Edgewood. From there he travelled all around the glass, through Buckby and Hopperton; and now he asked wherever he went, ‘Have you seen a boy with red hair?’ The villagers told each other that Jason Babbidge had had another vision.

  As well he might have, for within the year from far away news began to spread of a new teacher, with a new message. This new teacher was only a youth, but he had also ridden a slow bird – much farther than the Silent Prophet had ever ridden one.

  However, it seemed that this young teacher was somewhat flawed, since he couldn’t remember all the details of his message, of what he had been told to say. Sometimes he would beat his head with his fists in frustration, till it seemed that blood would flow. Yet perversely this touch of theatre appealed to some restless, troublesome streak in his audiences. They believed him because they saw his anguish, and it mirrored their own suppressed anxieties.

  Jason Babbidge spoke zealously to oppose the rebellious new ideas, exhausting himself. All the philosophical beauty he had brought into the dying world seemed to hang in the balance; and reluctantly he called for a ‘crusade’ against the new teacher, to defend his own dream of Submission.

  Two years later, he might well have wished to call his words back, for their consequence was that people were tramping across the countryside in between the zones of annihilation armed with pitchforks and billhooks, cleavers and sickles. Villages were burnt; many hundreds were massacred; and there were rapes – all of which seemed to recall an earlier nightmare of Jason’s from before the time of his revelation.

  In the third year of this seemingly endless skirmish between the Pacifists and the Survivalists Jason died, feeling bitter beneath his cloak of serenity; and by way of burial his body was roped to a slow bird. Loyal mourners accompanied the bird in silent procession until it vanished hours later. A short while after that, quite suddenly at the Battle of Ashton Glass, it was all over, with victory for the Survivalists led by their young red-haired champion, who it was noted bore a striking resemblance to old Jason Babbidge, so that it almost seemed as though two basic principles of existence had been at contest in the world: two aspects of the selfsame being, two faces of one man.

  Fifty years after that, by which time a full third of the land was glass and the climate was worsening, the Survival College in Ashton at last invented the promised machine; and from then on slow birds continued to appear and fly and disappear as before, but now none of them exploded.

  And a hundred years after that all the slow birds vanished from the Earth. Somewhere, a war was over, logically and finally.

  But by then, from an Earth four-fifths of whose land surface was desert or swamp – in between necklaces of barren shining glass – the first starship would arise into orbit.

  It would be called Slow Bird. For it would fly to the stars, slowly. Slowly in human terms; two generations it would take. But that was comparatively fast.

  A second starship would follow it; called Daniel.

  Though after that massive and exhausting effort, there would be no more starships. The remaining human race would settle down to cultivate what remained of their garden in amongst the dunes and floods and acres of glass. Whether either starship would find a new home as habitable even as the partly glassed Earth, would be merely an article of faith.

  On his deathbed, eighty years of age, in Ashton College lay Daniel who had never admitted to a family name.

  The room was almost indecently overcrowded, though well if warmly ventilated by a wind whipping over Ashton Glass, and bright-lit by the silvery blaze reflecting from that vitrified expanse.

  The dying old man on the bed beneath a single silken sheet was like a bird himself now: shrivelled with thin bones, a beak of a nose, beady eyes and a rooster’s comb of red hair on his head.

  He raised a frail hand as if to summon those closest, even closer. Actually it was to touch the old wound in his skull which had begun to ache fiercely of late as though it was about to burst open or cave in, unlocking the door of memory – notwithstanding that no one now needed the key hidden there, since his Collegians had discovered it independently, given the knowledge that it existed.

  Faces leaned over him: confident, dedicated faces.

  They’ve stopped exploding, then?’ he asked, forgetfully.

  ‘Yes, yes, years ago!’ they assured him.

  ‘And the stars –?’

  ‘We’ll build the ships. We’ll discover how.’

  His hand sank back on to the sheet. ‘Call one of them ‘Yes?’

  ‘Daniel. Will you?’

  They promised him this.

  ‘That way … my spirit …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘… will f
ly …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘… into the silence of space.’

  This slightly puzzled the witnesses of his death: for they could not know that Daniel’s last thought was that, when the day of the launching came, he and his brother might at last be reconciled.

  The Width of the World

  There were four of us in Dave Bartram’s office at Geo-Graphics that afternoon: Dave himself, puffing his pipe, Sally-Ann from design, Maggie from marketing, and myself from the computer graphics side.

  After hours of gentle gloomy rain, the sun had finally come out over Launchester. The steeply pitched slate roofs of the town outside were shimmering blue and green as though slicked with oil, while the stone of the cathedral glowed almost golden.

  And I was scrapping with Maggie, as usual.

  This time it was over the idea I’d had that we ought to expand the Mappamundi to include optional programmes for maps of imaginary worlds – Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Donaldson’s the Land, that sort of thing. I wasn’t exactly winning the argument, but I had certainly managed to rile Maggie.

  Tor heaven’s sake, we’re just about to launch the Mappamundi! The thing’s a surefire best seller as it is – for the whole educational market, and for the mums and dads. And that’s because it’s an accurate record of what the world was like in the past. Your idea would turn it into’ – she searched for a suitable term of abuse – ‘into a video game!’

  ‘I’m betting that we could expand the appeal enormously.’

  ‘No takers, Alan. Mappamundi’s a serious project.’

  A brief reprieve, by buzzer. Dave flicked his intercom, and we heard Dorothy sing out from Reception:

  ‘Mr MacNamara called from Heathrow, sir. He said not to bother you in conference, but his flight was late from New York. So he won’t be at your house till about seven.’ Dan MacNamara was our American marketing agent for Mappamundi; this visit mattered to us.

  ‘Right,’ said Dave. ‘Call Mrs B, will you? Dinner at eight, to be on the safe side.’

  In a sense, of course, Maggie was quite right. For Mappamundi – as the brochure boasted – was the ultimate teaching aid: a home computer package displaying on your own TV screen the changing map of the world from the Paleozoic through to modern times. You could zoom in on any million-square-kilometre section; that’s roughly the size of France. You could overlay appropriate animated graphics which were just as good as movie footage: of dinosaurs grazing or fighting, of primitive hominids bashing flints together, of the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria sailing to discover America, of Napoleon marching on Moscow …

  ‘Apparently a lot of other planes were late, sir.’

  ‘Tut tut.’

  I myself had been hooked on geography, as a boy, by something much more vulgar: an adventure magazine, long defunct, called Wide World. I still had a stack of these at home, and every once in a while I hauled them out for a nostalgic chuckle. What lurid covers! And what tall tales inside! Seventy-foot-long anacondas outracing galloping horses; six weeks alone on a raft in the shark-infested South Seas …

  By the time I grew up, alas, the job of geography was somewhat different. It didn’t involve drawing pirate charts with X marking where the sea chest lay buried.

  Dave was champing impatiently at his pipe, and it seemed to have gone out.

  ‘Well, Alan?’

  ‘Look, if we include a stylus and digitizing tablet, and modify the software slightly, we can even let people design their own maps – of their own imaginary worlds …’

  ‘No,’ said Maggie flatly.

  ‘But, Dave, don’t you think we should keep a trick up our sleeves?’

  Our chairman read the auspices in the hot dottle of his pipe bowl.

  ‘Hmm, hmm, hmm,’ he said.

  ‘I’m willing to work up a presentation in my spare time.’ Oh, yes, Sarah should love that… I’d been eating and breathing Mappamundi for the best part of two years now …

  ‘Spare time?’ said Maggie archly. ‘I trust you weren’t thinking of taking a holiday right now?’

  ‘Whatever for? They don’t schedule flights to El Dorado.’

  ‘What a weird remark.’

  ‘There be no dragons on our maps.’

  ‘And a good thing too!’

  ‘We’d better wind this up,’ said Dave, consulting his watch. ‘Listen, Alan, your idea might have merits. Nothing ventured, eh? So why don’t you go ahead and work up something for us to get our teeth into?’

  Maggie grinned at me, conceding tactical defeat. But she would make sure, by next time, that she had her teeth sharpened.

  It’s a twelve-mile drive home over the moors to Ferrier Malvis. The Volvo always got me back there in just under twenty minutes, and I’d long since stopped paying much conscious heed to the business of steering, or to the sheep grazing amidst heather and bracken.

  But this time, just as I was zipping along smartly past a certain ruined dry-stone barn, an alarm bell went off in my head. Because I had left GeoGraphics exactly as usual … and I ought to have been home already.

  A glance at my watch confirmed this; twenty minutes had passed.

  ‘The world’s been stretched,’ I thought ridiculously. ‘It’s been inflated, like a balloon. The surface looks the same, but there’s farther to go.’

  It didn’t seem very likely.

  I arrived at Ferrier Malvis fifteen minutes late, and Sarah’s green Renault wasn’t parked outside the house. She must be late home too, from the craft shop in Forby.

  En route to the kitchen, I flipped on a Vivaldi cassette. I poured some chilled wine from the fridge, then opened my briefcase on the pine table, to work in the golden light of the westering sun.

  Maybe I was heading for a nervous breakdown? Could the weird stretching of the journey home be a warning sign from my psyche – a shot across the bows?

  Presently a car door thumped outside.

  ‘Kitchen, love!’

  Silver Sarah looked distraught, as though she had been combing her blond hair with her fingers.

  ‘Hullo, Silver.’

  ‘Haven’t you been listening to the radio, Alan?’

  ‘No, I was listening to The Four Seasons. Should I have been?

  She darted back towards the lounge, presumably to kill the Vivaldi, but checked herself.

  ‘Faster to tell you, my mappaholic husband! The latest planes from the States are landing up to three hours overdue at Heathrow.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘One of them just barely got down at Shannon, out of fuel. A jumbo from Brazil has ditched off Lisbon. It’s the same all over. It took me far too long to drive home.’

  ‘Oh, my God, I thought it was just me. Hell, I don’t know what I thought it was!’

  ‘Those planes aren’t leaking, you know. They’re using their fuel. They’re still travelling at the same speed.’

  ‘And yet there’s farther to go – ’

  ‘Miles and miles farther.’

  ‘I’ll get you a drink, love.’

  ‘Scotch. Neat.’

  As I went through to the lounge for the Famous Grouse, The Four Seasons was just over. The tape ran on for a moment. Then click, and silence. Silver Sarah followed me.

  ‘So how do you explain it?’ She sounded accusatory – as if I had programmed untold square kilometres of blank space into the Mappamundi and these had suddenly sprung into being in the real world.

  I poured a few fingers of the noble bird for both of us.

  ‘Something must be happening to space,’ I said lamely.

  ‘Space?’

  ‘I mean the nature of space. The universe is expanding, isn’t it? So space is expanding too. And now the space between places is getting bigger into the bargain. It takes longer to get from A to B.’ I laughed.

  Four hours later – after several more fingers of the bird, a scratch meal and much TV-viewing – we knew that space was just the same today as it had been yesterday. The moon hadn’t moved one inch farther
away from Earth. Satellite data confirmed that the earth’s circumference was exactly the same as usual.

  Nevertheless, radar and laser fixes from orbit upon jets sent up specially showed that these aircraft certainly weren’t covering the distances as measured by airspeed and fuel consumption. There was much talk that night – to little effect – of lasers and the speed of light and trigonometry, and how photons are massless particles …

  When we went to bed eventually, all airports around the world were closed, and all flights grounded. Apparently the ‘distance effect’ was still on the increase.

  Next morning, when the alarm clock grabbed me out of the middle of some silly dream, the radio was repeating the same bulletin – with minor updates – every fifteen minutes.

  The distance effect seemed to have stabilized overnight. Imagine a graph with a curve on it, rising gently at first, then ever more steeply. Distances of up to fifty miles were now doubled. A journey of a hundred miles was in the region of five hundred. And the distance between London and New York, say – measured by radio-wave delays – was something of the order of a hundred thousand miles. It might be as far as a million miles from England to Australia, unless the distance effect followed a bell curve, though no one was certain. The American government, in consultation with the Russians, intended to test-fire an ICBM with an instrument package in place of its warhead from Nevada across the Pacific towards Guam …

  ‘Wouldn’t they just?’ exclaimed Silver. ‘All they can think about is whether they can still fight a nuclear war! Just try flying a B-l bomber to Russia now – ’

  ‘Or a Backfire bomber from Russia over here.’

  ‘Which is why they’re going to test a missile, of course! Because a missile leaves the atmosphere.’

  ‘It’s just to measure the extent of the phenomenon.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Of course.’

  Power transmission through the National Grid was down by some 8 per cent, due to loss over extra distances; so consumers were being asked to be sparing in their use of power …