Slow Birds: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  A flock of Canada geese came winging in towards the water. One moment they were flying blithely along; the next they were tumbling out of the sky. Falling like rocks on to the lawn. Thump, thump. Dead as ducks.

  For one mad instant I thought Jim must have shouldered his gun and zapped the geese in an incredible – and silent – display of marksmanship. But no; he was still tapping the ground with the rifle butt, like the old man in the riddle of the Sphinx.

  ‘And what, Magister,’ Jim asked icily, ‘is the cause of that? I liked those birds.’

  ‘Ah …’ Lucretius scratched his chin. ‘A vacuum must have formed, you see. The ground has been rotted by unseasonable rain, and now it is pelted with sunbeams. Consequently a foul effluence rises, expelling all the air above.’

  ‘Of course! How stupid of me! What other explanation could there be?’

  Lucretius regarded the phenomenon equably. ‘We must believe the evidence of our senses, as interpreted by Reason. I have a question, though.’

  ‘Ask away.’

  Thump, thump. A trio of mallards slapped on to the lawn.

  ‘By use of Reason, I discovered the causes of pestilence: pestiferous clouds of atoms uncongenial to us, which fly about. Yet different air in different lands breeds characteristic diseases. Thus elephantiasis is only found in Egypt, while gout is native to Attica. Tell me, what is the characteristic disease of this land, America?’

  ‘Cancer and heart disease mostly,’ remarked Tony, who was otherwise occupied with the occasional tumbling bird.

  ‘Jesus, what did you tell him that for? Magister, disease is not caused by atoms in the air. Well, usually is isn’t …’

  ‘Maybe it is, around this neck of the woods.’ Tony pointed. ‘Here come more kamikaze birdies.’

  At this point my eyes blurred, as if they had just been attacked by cataract-causing atoms. I heard Harmony scream, ‘A monster!’ I heard the bang of the rifle. Then a thump.

  ‘Holy Moses,’ I heard Tony cry. ‘You’ve shot him.’

  My vision swam back to normal. Jim was standing with his rifle at the slope. Harmony had her hands over her mouth in a theatrical show of shock; she had dropped all the doughnuts. Lucretius lay sprawled on his back, looking very dead.

  ‘Did you see that monster?’ babbled Harmony. ‘It was breathing fire! My Daddy saved us!’

  ‘What do you mean, saved?’ said Tony. ‘That bullet hit Mr Lucretius.’

  ‘What a terrible accident,’ said Jim. ‘Oh, this is awful, I hope you got it all on film.’

  ‘Of course I didn’t! I was looking over there. I didn’t see any monster.’

  ‘It was a lion,’ said Harmony. ‘But worse. It breathed fire. Now it’s gone.’

  ‘Did you see anything?’ Tony asked me. I shook my head.

  But I had the gravest suspicions that Jim Roseberry had just killed Titus Lucretius Carus deliberately. Out of almighty pique at how he, Jim, had been upstaged.

  He must have thought this was the perfect murder, too. For how can you be guilty of murder when your victim already died two thousand years ago?

  Well, there was quite some fuss then. We rushed back to the house, where Jim monopolized the phone for a while. Soon as I could, I called Carl and Muhammed at the motel; and a bit later a police captain and a lieutenant arrived in a Buick, all lit up and screaming – just beating the Network minibus by a short head.

  However, Jim must have already have been calling in a favour or two before he even called the police to report the fatality, since the two officers were so respectful and apologetic; and what’s more, even as we were all heading back down to the lakeside, they were already deciding that the matter was right outside their jurisdiction.

  And Jim was nodding so concernedly and saying that on scientific grounds the body would really have to be rushed back to the Institute of dematerialization; though he had felt it his duty as a citizen, et cetera.

  When we got to the lake, Institute staff were already standing by with a stretcher. After asking the bare minimum of questions, the captain and lieutenant waved the body on its way; and departed.

  Dead Lucretius departed too. To return to his own time. Back where he was already on the point of death. So nobody back in ancient times would notice any real difference; except maybe that Lucretius now had a hole in his chest. If he had indeed stabbed himself to death, crazed by a love-potion, this mightn’t look too odd. Or maybe the murder, up in our present day, was what caused the tale of suicide? Even if nobody back in the past could locate a knife – since there wasn’t one …

  Very neat, Jim!

  Except, it wasn’t neat at all.

  As I was the first to notice, while we headed for the Institute in the wake of the corpse, when Jim’s face suddenly unpeeled and flew at my eyes several times.

  ‘Hey!’ cried Carl, staring at my face in alarm.

  I tapped Jim on the arm. ‘Notice something?’

  ‘You mean, the effect still continuing. Hmm, I thought it would fade as soon as he died – ’

  ‘Did you just?’

  He flushed, ‘So instead, it’ll go away when we get rid of the body. Be very careful what you imply.’

  ‘Oh, I will be careful, don’t you worry.’

  And so we all saw Lucretius off, six days early, from the resurrection room accompanied by crackling air and sparks and a little sonic boom. And our show had gone down the drain, thought I.

  But on our way back through the rhododendrons afterwards, to the Roseberry house, I thought I heard the distant roar of a lion.

  ‘Just thunder,’ Jim said dismissively, and scanned the sky.

  He froze, ashen. For up on the side of the nearest cloud hung a familiar face. The cloud-mouth of Lucretius opened and dripped red blood like a sunset, before dissolving.

  So the effect hadn’t gone away, after all. It stayed. And I could guess why. It was because Lucretius had died here in the present. His vital spirit had already flavoured the environment in a most exaggerated manner, courtesy of the Roseberry Effect and its derangement of space-time. Him being killed here, this feature was locked in. All that Jim sent back to ancient times was a lump of meat.

  The grounds of the Institute were haunted now. Meteorologically, optically, psychologically haunted.

  Storms broke out. Trees burst into flames. Birds plunged from the sky from time to time. Phantom images flew about. Faces appeared on clouds. Love-frenzies possessed people.

  One thing was for sure: the reputation of Lucretius endured in the modern world. Jim had seen to that. A couple of square miles were definitely Lucretian.

  Ironically enough, Lucretius himself always poured scorn on the idea of life after death. As I discovered when I read The Nature of the Universe not long after.

  I also discovered that our Roman never believed in fire-breathing monsters. ‘If fire burns all known animals, even lions,’ he urged, very rationally, ‘then no animal can ever breathe fire.’ Harmony went right over the top there. Which only proves how she conspired, hastily, with her Daddy. They must have loved it when they saw that kid goat born from the puffball womb.

  At one point the Lucretius Zone overlapped the grounds a bit, and slopped over a stretch of state highway. Since nobody can drive safely when images might zap their eyes, this effectively rendered the highway unusable. Some real estate was hexed, too. So Jim was in trouble.

  Not trouble as a murderer, of course. As I said, you can’t murder a dead man. But soon he would be hit by suits for damages from neighbouring residents whose property values had crashed; not to mention the highway authority, who were going to have to build a very costly detour.

  Those members of the Institute who hadn’t fled were busy studying the new Roseberry Effect – of disordered reality. One thing they quickly found was that the old Roseberry Effect was blocked by the haunting. So there would be no more resurrections at the Institute.

  One morning Jim phoned me at the Network. He sounded stressed.

  ‘It
occurs to me,’ he said, ‘that you could shoot a damn fine horror movie here in the Roseberry Zone.’ (He didn’t, of course, refer to it as the Lucretius Zone.) ‘I mean, we have a genuine phenomenon here.’

  ‘Do you really think anyone would want to act in there, when they could catch instant plague or be smeared by thunderbolts?’

  ‘So do your location shooting here – build your script around the phenomena. Then find somewhere else that’s similar looking, but safe, for the actors.’ He was almost pleading.

  ‘Do I hear the rattle of an almost empty money box?’

  ‘Look, it’ll stir up a lot more interest than laureate lectures. Or even a real live sermon by Jesus, and seeing how he uses the bathroom.’

  ‘Ah, but we can’t host Jesus now. Not any longer. And frankly I wouldn’t want to. In fact, I’d personally whip up a real campaign to block any such proposal. No, Jim. But let me give you a bit of advice, out of the pure kindness of my heart. Get out of there fast.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Take to your heels. I know that you murdered Lucretius – and his zone knows it, too. It’s just biding its time.’

  Oh yes. Pretty soon it would trap Jim Roseberry in a nasty doom. Worse than any law suits. Perhaps that doom would be such as overwhelmed the Athenians with loathsome ulcers and malignant fluxes of foul blood, descending to the groin, so that some men only saved their lives by self-castration, while other victims completely forgot who they were. As Lucretius reveals in the gory and psychotic climax to The Nature of the Universe.

  ‘You’re out of your mind,’ said Jim.

  ‘No, you’re into his mind. Slap in the midst of all his cockeyed ideas, exaggerated and made real.’

  Of course, Jim wouldn’t listen. Was he not the custodian of a profound natural mystery?

  Really, all that poor old Lucretius ever wanted out of life was peace and quiet. Resurrecting him had been a fairly unkind cut. But resurrecting him, then murdering him had been the unkindest cut of all. No wonder Lucretius died raving mad – mad at Jim.

  A week after that, a snake bit Harmony – though she did recover, away from the Zone in intensive care.

  A fortnight subsequent, the Roseberry house was struck by a thunderbolt and burned down. So Jim moved into the Institute, to camp out.

  Just yesterday I heard how Jim has caught, yes, plague. A Lucretian plague isn’t very pleasant. But you can’t say I didn’t warn him.

  Mistress of Cold

  Mistress Marguerite:

  Perseverance is a beautiful word. I think of it variously as an obelisk of white salt, or as a pyramid of blue ice.

  Contained within perseverance is the word ‘severe’. This is the salt rubbed into wounds, the salt that preserves flesh all through the winter. Salt, too, was the fate of Lot’s disobedient wife.

  Also contained is the word ‘ever’. This is the ice which endures.

  Sometimes I wish I had been named Perseverance, in the way that other women are named Patience or Felicity or Grace. But my name is Marguerite, after the flower, now extinct as all the flowers are. At least marguerites were mostly white, as snow is white.

  But no one dares to use my name. I am addressed as Mistress. And today I shall become mistress of the whole frozen world. Dr Sovrenian has promised me this, and Sovrenian has never let me down during all these years. His mind is crystal-perfect; he has never melted at the edges when it was time for some hard choice. I speak metaphorically, of course: he and I are as warm-blooded as anyone else in the Enclave. Yet I’ve noted a tendency for people to adopt the characteristics of their surroundings.’ Our immediate surrounding, of course, is the Enclave made of metal. Thus the young guard who stands before my door is as stiff as a steel bar. He has been brought up amongst steel and imitates its rigidity and polish. That boy has never seen a field of grass waving in the wind, or the ripples of rivers. Possibly such chaotic motion would distress him.

  There were marguerites once, growing in fields of grass. But if one is to win through in the end, one must be willing to make sacrifices of such things as fields and daisies.

  Steel is our immediate surrounding. But beyond, all is ice; it is this ice which forms our character. So everything in my state room is either white or blue. Walls, desk, rugs, the eiderdown upon the bed. Even my hair is turning white with age. Our skins are white from never seeing the sun; but my eyes are a piercing blue. I wear a blue pleated skirt and a white blouse ruffed with lace. My shoes are white with blue bows.

  And now it’s time to meet my War Cabinet. After patting my hair twice or thrice before my mirror. I sit down at my desk. (Mirrors are like window-panes of ice, aren’t they? Mirrors hang everywhere throughout the Enclave, doubling the size of rooms and corridors. These mirrors were my idea.) Presently I press the buzzer.

  Dr Sovrenian:

  And now I wish to wax poetic; for there is beauty in oblivion. Here is the last poem in the history of the world; if my poem is in prose, that’s because I am that kind of person …

  Oh, it was only a simple war of weather to begin with! A way to freeze the harvests of the Enemy, to cause snow and ice to lock their land in frozen chains. But they stole the technique from us or invented one of their own. They began to freeze our own hemisphere.

  Do you remember the Diamond Dust Catastrophe? The glory of the ice crystals high in the upper atmosphere?

  Do you remember the migrating birds falling frozen from the heavens as though each had been shot by a bullet of ice?

  Do you recall the glaciers growling forth? Like armies of Frost Giants fighting for the good and the true. Against evil. Or like evil giants fighting against truth and goodness – depending on whether we speak of our hemisphere, or theirs.

  We had our own Enclave by then. But so did the Enemy.

  I wonder where the last wild beast died; and the last exposed human being? I wonder where the last blade of grass perished?

  But that was only the beginning of the Cold War – though little could we guess so, to begin with! Continually we refined our techniques; they, theirs. Do you recall when all the oceans froze solid, cracking the shores?

  Do you remember when the atmosphere itself froze out and fell as snow, leaving the world as airless as Pluto?

  How I wish I could sing this song to my Mistress of Cold. But I must only talk in scientific terms to her; she only in political terms to me. She is our inflexible leader, dipped in liquid oxygen. My song might shatter her.

  General Harker:

  5300 souls: that’s how many of us there are in the Enclave. Several hundred have died of natural causes since the war began; a few dozen have been born, none recently.

  5000 men, to 300 women. So naturally there’s a tendency for men to become homo or mechanical or else to ignore the whole business of sex, as I have done. Our Mistress of Cold won’t allow officers to pull rank regarding, uh, leisure activities. Without her discipline we might have fallen apart at the seams years ago. But we didn’t: we’re pure with purpose, pure as snow.

  Homo or mechanical sex activity doesn’t worry her. It’s a safety valve. Some men need it. The flesh is weak. But actually I think that kind of thing’s been dying out in recent years. One great sign of our mettle – one proud boast we can make – is that no rape of a woman has ever occurred down here in the Enclave. How could it, with our Mistress at the helm? Her leadership chills the groin; it certainly chilled mine. Long ago it transfigured me from animal into spirit, into Will. I think I could pray to her. But I have to discuss military matters instead.

  She’s keeping us waiting longer than usual, isn’t she?

  I think I’ve lost my sense of time. For example, it’s hard to believe that the Cold War only began twenty-five years ago. Such leaps there have been since then, in the technology of heat control! In the course of my career I’ve seen as much progress on this front as during the entire million years previous, between the first taming of fire and the nuclear furnace. Yet what an effort it takes to gaze back through the len
s of memory and recall how the world once was! It’s as if my working life spans not decades but aeons, a whole geological era. From a warm world to an ice age. Yet from then to now has been a perfectly logical progression.

  Ah, her buzzer summons us.

  Mistress Marguerite:

  ‘Gentlemen! Be seated, please.’

  ‘Madam,’ says General Harker.

  ‘Mistress,’ says Sovrenian.

  The others don’t matter much: Robinson of Home Affairs, Stanley of Materials, Food and Energy … But it’s customary to have them here; they’re a traditional part of my cabinet, and what are we fighting for, if not to preserve our traditions?

  Even my General Harker doesn’t matter much. It’s Dr Sovrenian I depend on. I wonder if he guesses? Surely not. I must remain invulnerable for all our sakes. I have never let him glimpse this.

  When it’s time for his report, he permits himself the slightest smile of pride. ‘The new modifiers have passed all the tests, Mistress. We may proceed.’

  Today?’

  And he nods.

  Today let it be, then, Gentlemen. Today we will free the world of evil … at long last. I pray we do. I shall give the order personally.’

  ‘But of course.’ The others have an air of tiredness about them. I’ve gone through several Ministers of Home Affairs, several Generals during the past twenty-five years: but Dr Sovrenian always kept the faith.

  ‘We shall meet in the War Room at 3.00 P.M. I thank you, Gentlemen.’

  General Harker:

  What a fine place this War Room is. There’s so much open space. I shouldn’t be surprised if some of the younger personnel couldn’t tolerate it. They’d gasp and flop about like fish on land. Prostrated by agoraphobia.

  Look around. Behold the ranks of thermo-consoles. Those are Dr Sovrenian’s province, but the display screens on the walls are mine, and those contain the whole world in miniature. In one quick scan I take in the ‘weather’ across both hemispheres, then down through the various layers of the planetary onion, all the way to the still-warm core.