Slow Birds: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  Up top, the world’s surface is within a tenth of a degree of absolute zero. The two buried hot spots in the east and west – our home Enclave and the Enemy’s – show up as blazing specks of fire, spots of red blood amidst the other coded shades of blue. It gets colder further down, and even deeper blue; then a dull red glow marks the core itself.

  A hundred people are on duty. As usual the War Room is quiet and composed – yet it’s a hive of feverish activity compared with any other physical processes going on throughout the planet (except at the corresponding Enemy base in the east).

  An absurd thought occurs to me: suppose the Enemy base actually went blue years ago, and we never knew this because of a systems malfunction?

  There’s no malfunction, of course. Perhaps I’m cracking up …

  Sovrenian is eyeing me from his master console. On his face a grin – or even a leer. Have I betrayed myself? I feel impelled to go and talk to him, just to reassure myself.

  It’s a quarter to three.

  Dr Sovrenian:

  Harker looks as if he suspects something. Frankly I don’t see how he could, unless he’s taken a sudden quantum leap in intelligence. I’ve had to put up with the dull fool for years; I think I can safely taunt him. Actually, the end game is inevitable now. Our Mistress of Cold won’t change her mind. If only she could appreciate the full grandeur of what is about to happen! Maybe she does, but I can hardly enquire. Intimacy would spoil our relationship.

  The General looms over me. Asks, with stupid joviality. ‘The last push, eh?’

  ‘Maybe today,’ I say recklessly, ‘we will freeze time itself.’

  ‘Eh? How’s that?’

  I will tell him. It can alter nothing.

  ‘Well, it’s like this, my dear General. Nobody ever really believes he’ll die, right? It seems impossible that the world can carry on without him. Despite the evidence of a one hundred per cent mortality rate! True?’

  He nods dubiously.

  ‘Today, General, this changes. Today – perhaps – the whole history of life on our planet will be over forever. Finis, kaput. The whole universe will be dead too.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Didn’t our astronomers decide long ago that ours is the only intelligent species in the entire cosmos, existing on the only habitable world? What an enormous statistical accident we are, to be sure!

  ‘So when we’re all dead, there’ll be no more minds left to observe physical reality. Philosophically, the universe will cease to exist. When I die, General, the cosmos dies with me.’

  ‘Die? Are you mad, Sovrenian?’

  ‘I’ve always felt that the question of why anything exists at all, is the doorway to real madness. Today we shut the door forever.’

  Harker splutters. He looks apoplectic. ‘But it’s the Enemy who’ll die! We’re going to tap the last heat from the world’s core. To store power for the Enclave. To crank up the neg-energy field even higher – to reduce the world to within an ace of zero absolute. And hold it there. The Enemy will freeze at last. They’ll die, we’ll have won. Right? Right? Right?’

  I sigh condescendingly. ‘So why haven’t the Enemy jumped in ahead of us?’

  ‘Because their theory’s inferior. Their tech’s inferior. Always has been. Not much, but enough. The Enemy haven’t got the new modifiers.’

  ‘I think they may have.’ Keying my console, I display the most recent neg-energy exchange of the war. I point out peaks and resonances. Harker stares stupidly at my screen.

  ‘Put this through a Fourier analysis, General. Determine the harmonics of the wave. Hey presto.’ He doesn’t understand, but I do. ‘They could take the core right down to Ab-Zee. They’ve held off.’

  His eyes narrow. ‘Right down, all the way? But I thought …’ Perhaps he isn’t as stupid after all.

  ‘You thought it was physically impossible ever to reach Ab-Zee itself? Once you’re on a downhill slope such as this, there’s only one place to go: to the bottom.’

  To absolute zero, to the lowest possible state of heat when everything ceases. When the molecules stop jostling. When the atoms stop vibrating.

  ‘But …’

  And because atoms are most certainly not little grains which you can freeze; because elementary particles only exist as dynamic vibrations in the fabric of space itself – when you reach Ab-Zee at last, the world must cease to exist. The vacuum flux of space, also. Into that total nothingness will be sucked all other space and matter in the universe.

  Then there will be no more universe; no more thinking beings occurring by accident. No more space or time, ever again. There’ll be peace. Nirvana, non-existence, oblivion. None of these words can quite sum up that non-state, of the absence of anything at all – even of vacuum. How beautiful it is. How Godlike. What a logical end to the Cold War.

  General Harker is sweating, though the room is cool. He’s trying to perceive whether I am insane. But of course I am. And so is he. So he has no criterion to judge by.

  One minute left till she comes. How time flies, after twenty-five years.

  Mistress Marguerite:

  So into the War Room I stride, flanked by guards. On some strange whim I have put on a hat, in honour of the occasion. My hat is blue, with white artificial flowers.

  I make a brief but invigorating speech, then gaze directly at Sovrenian. Piercingly.

  ‘Increase the Cold!’

  Suddenly General Harker bleats out, ‘Don’t!’

  I’m utterly amazed. But I don’t allow this to show. I ought to have replaced Harker this morning; I did note signs of weariness in him. Behold where sentimentality has got me. However, I control my anger.

  Harker looks embarrassed; and in any case his feeble outburst makes no difference. Dr Sovrenian has already thrown the switch to enact the final sequence. We all watch the wall screens in silence.

  Gradually the blue deepens. It invades the heart-core of the world. I understand the theory fairly well. I myself was scientifically inclined before I decided that my true forte lay in government. The slight temperature differential should equalize out during the next few moments, putting an unbearable strain on the resources of our Enemy.

  Ah! The red fire-dot representing them flickers momentarily – and such a cheer goes up in the War Room!

  Now the temperature of their Enclave steadies again, as they too are forced to pump heat from what remains of the central embers to sustain themselves. Naturally, the rate of temperature descent steepens as a result. They won’t be able to keep it up. The whole world (excepting the Enclaves) is now one hundredth of a degree absolute. Excellent!

  Suddenly their red light oscillates through orange, yellow, green; touches blue.

  One last flare of yellow. Then blue, perfect blue.

  They’re gone, frozen. They’re dead.

  Those present don’t even cheer this time. What a quiet end to a war.

  ‘Abort the field, Sovrenian.’

  He grins at me.

  Dr Sovrenian:

  ‘The sequence, Mistress, is locked in,’ I tell her politely.

  We’re one three-hundredth of a degree away from Ab-Zee. Still heading down. I knew it could be done. As soon as the world touches Ab-Zee we’ll be sucked right in after it.

  ‘Sovrenian!’ she shrills. ‘We’re wasting power. This isn’t an experiment.’

  Abruptly Harker goes berserk. Snatching a hand-gun from a guard, he leaps back, levels it. He shouts something about taking command. The guard stands gawping, pawing at his empty holster idiotically. None of this matters. The General’s intervention comes far too late. But how utterly delightful.

  I whoop with joy.

  ‘Ab-Zee,’ I cry. ‘Coming up now!’

  General Harker:

  A sickening lurch – in my heart and head, my belly and my vision. Lights vanish, come back on. The world flickers, returns. Something strange and awful has happened. I feel as if I’ve been turned inside out.

  Oh yes. I know what it is! I’v
e disobeyed our Mistress. I have blasphemed. For a moment I was cast into outer darkness.

  Mistress Marguerite:

  My guards shelter me faithfully. But General Harker has already dropped the gun. Abruptly he crouches down on the floor, hides like a little boy. Why, now he has curled up in a foetal position! He’s rocking and mewing to himself.

  I thrust my guards aside. ‘Sovrenian: what has happened?’

  ‘We … we appear to have pushed the world through into Neg-Heat, Mistress.’ The man looks deeply shocked. So even he is a weak reed. I am disappointed in him. This is even worse than his misconduct a few moments ago.

  ‘Neg-Heat? What does that mean?’

  ‘The fall in temperature … has gone below Ab-Zee. The world ought to have vanished … It didn’t. This is incredible: negative temperature! There’s a temperature scale below absolute zero – running the other way! We’re in the minus zone. Minus absolute.’

  ‘But what’s that?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mistress. I’ve no idea.’

  My hat got bumped askew by one of the guards, in his haste to protect me. I resettle it on my head. There’s nothing to be gained by panicking.

  Dr Sovrenian:

  Now that I’ve had time to review the data, it seems clear that the world didn’t actually pass through absolute zero. Rather, in that instant when everything lurched, the whole world jumped right past Ab-Zee – and on to the scale of absolute negative temperature: the minus-Kelvin scale.

  No doubt it is just as impossible to attain true absolute zero as it is for any material object to reach the speed of light. (For if an object did so, it would attain infinite mass.) But we used to theorize that a starship could perhaps ‘jump past’ that barrier – and instantly be transformed into a mass of super-light particles.

  Something similar has happened. The whole world has gone through a phase transition. We’re familiar with the normal phase transitions: from plasma to gas, from gas to liquid, from liquid to solid. At absolute zero there is a further transition, hitherto unknown to us: a transition from solid to … what can I best call it? Negative existence? The immaterial? A wraith state?

  And the phase shift of the world drew our Enclave along with it. From being at room temperature on the plus-Kelvin scale, suddenly we were at the corresponding temperature on the minus-Kelvin scale. And the outside world was catching up with us fast, rapidly ‘warming up’ on the negative scale …

  We are wraiths. We still move around, we can still talk to each other. But most other bodily functions are suspended; we no longer need to eat, drink, breathe, excrete or sleep. I believe we have become immortal. (Certainly we have tried to kill each other, and ourselves. In vain.)

  There’s no hint of a universe beyond the world. The world is a hole in existence now; but it is a hole which endures, and evolves.

  And inside this hole – within our Enclave too – the temperature is rising higher and higher on the negative scale.

  Talk not of minus degrees Kelvin. Talk rather of cold fire; of fire which burns most coldly, but consumes not.

  Talk of degrees of pain; talk of the temperature of frozen agony. For nothing can destroy our wraith-flesh, but only hurt it inwardly. And every hour the frigid fire intensifies.

  I’ve begun to wonder whether there is any absolute upper limit to temperature. Why has no one thought of this before? The concept of Absolute Heat!

  Why, Absolute Heat can only be the temperature of the original cosmic fireball at the moment when the universe was born! And we know by calculation what the temperature was, just an instant after that: 1032 degrees Kelvin.

  Shall I spell this out? Can you conceive a hundred thousand billion billion billion degrees – of pain?

  At the present rate of increase we only have ten thousand years or so to endure.

  Until what? Until we reach Absolute Heat on the negative scale? And another phase transition? When the world suddenly becomes a white hole gushing its light to the boundaries of the universe? When at last we die? I hope we can die then.

  If only the Enemy hadn’t given up! (Did their scientists guess the truth?) They could have been suffering as intensely as we are.

  Mistress Marguerite:

  ‘Let’s be sensible, Gentlemen! When the going gets hot we need firm and confident leadership. I assure you that I can stay the course without flinching.’

  ‘Mistress! Mistress!’ they all acclaim me.

  After all, I did win the Cold War. Now I must win the Hot War, if it takes ten thousand years.

  What a beautiful word is perseverance.

  In the Mirror of the Earth

  Raoul was a Sleeper: the first Sleeper I had ever come close to (in either the proximal or the emotional sense!) during all my years of wandering across Thraea.

  Not, I hasten to add, that I journeyed in order to meet Sleepers, whom personally I had always regarded as pathological half-persons.

  Besides, their whereabouts are well enough known to every child. No diligent search is necessary; though perhaps a fair deal of patience, ardent persuasion and even greasing of palms is a requisite sine qua non for the actual admission into the presence of one of our pampered and protected treasures.

  Who are to be found – all six of them currently, out of a world population nudging two billion souls – ensconced in their quaintly named Observatories in the capital cities of Atlantica, Pacifica, Indica, Mediterre and Baltica. (Oh yes, and there’s one on the island of Caspia.)

  Observatories, ah ha! I’ve sometimes wondered whether it is the Sleepers who are being observed there – or whether it is they who are doing the observing. Or both. Or both. Still, we Thraeans aren’t an overwhelmingly superstitious people; so I suppose to describe those guarded palaces as ‘Sleep Temples’ or some such, and their attendants as ‘priests’ would hardly be deemed good form.

  Though indeed, in so far as we do possess a secular religion – or maybe I should call it an ‘imaginative mythology’ – as anyone glancing at the place names on the map of the world must inevitably concur that we do, this is entirely owing to the observations of all the random generations of Sleepers; of whom sometimes as many as nine have at any one time been alive, and sometimes as few as one.

  But never, as it happens, none. Would none be taken as a dire omen? By some, no doubt; by some.

  Never none, as I say; and very rarely in our history only one. Imagine the feelings of that singleton! One solitary sport of nature, one peerless lonely caprice! What a fate.

  But hush, I said that six Sleepers are alive today – in our present well-endowed epoch. Yet a seventh is also alive, far removed from any metropolitan Observatory, unknown but to my good self. Quite a life of danger and subterfuge is his: danger while he lies enslothed in what the mystic poets call ‘slumber’, and which more scientifically inclined spirits prefer to describe as ‘rapport with the Submerged’; danger, also, from any of our dreams which happen to encounter him during his waking hours, against which he, unpractised and ill-equipped, obviously has no defence.

  Peril, yes, and subterfuge – for our seventh secret Sleeper, Raoul.

  Frankly, when I first found out his identity I was astonished that he did not surrender himself forthwith to the rich life: of servants, mistresses, excellent cuisine, dream-guards and all the rest of the panoply – for the simple quid pro quo, ego-flattering in itself, of having his words hung on till the end of his days by a retinue of scribes, sages, scholiasts and pilgrims.

  Yet Raoul, it seemed, was in search of something of his own. As was I myself! Besides, his parents having by hook and by crook kept his sleeping sickness a dark secret, perhaps he also felt that he owed it to their memory to honour that unlucrative investment in his privacy.

  Lucre … There. I’ve mentioned it; and I would rather that I hadn’t. For this casts a tiny shadow of doubt on the altruism of my motives.

  A handsome reward goes to the parents of a Sleeper as soon as they declare their child and hand him or her over
into safe keeping. Which has even led in the course of our history to one or two attempted masquerades. Naturally, such deceit is bound to fail; for even if the miscreant mother and father pretend to have been completely out of touch with all civilization, stuck in some incredibly remote spot during the whole babyhood and infancy of their brat – till it reached an age when it could be trained to dissimulate – even so no child can possibly lie still with its eyes shut eight hours per day for a single week, let alone year in year out. Especially not for somebody else’s benefit!

  The question of lucre, though … To my knowledge the situation had never arisen before, yet it seemed a fair presumption that a generous reward might equally well accrue to anybody delivering news of a rogue adult Sleeper at large.

  However, Raoul had no need to fear my betraying him. And I’m sure that the thought never really crossed his mind, except perhaps at the very outset.

  But first things first …

  I had been wandering for some years, as I say, paying my way where food wasn’t free for the taking or impaling with my cross-bow, by selling my dreams for show – and on occasion pitting them against other waking dreams in contest or combat; since my own dreams are particularly powerful, coherent projections.

  Powerful, indeed … But here I must emphasize that no Romantic am I. On the contrary! Dreams are a psychic superfluity; and my psyche happens to be particularly orderly. Thus my classic turn of mind produces strongly structured dreams which are, if I say it myself, a distinct cut above the slop that a lot of other people produce: outpourings of wobbling jelly, rather than creatures with real teeth, or objects with some design function to them.

  Yes, I’m a classicist. Personally I’ve never felt inclined to warble song or revel in nature or cultivate ambiguous mysteries – unlike many other wanderers I have met with on my travels, not least of all those many perfervid pilgrims tramping their way from one Observatory to the next on the Grand Tour …