Slow Birds: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  I’m sure that the main advantage of having as many as six Sleepers in residence all over the world is that it keeps such folk on the move! If there were only one known Sleeper extant – in the city of Seashells, for the sake of argument* – what a host of pilgrims would bunch up there like moths round a single lanthorn, like bees at the only available flower bed!

  No, it wasn’t in poetry, nature or metaphysics that I found true beauty and significance, but rather in the engineering and civil architectural masterpieces of Thraea; and it was to admire and assess these that I travelled the globe, taking in, to name but a few highlights, the Panama Bridge that links Pacifica with Atlantica; and the Gibraltar Ship Canal down the frontier between Atlantica and Mediterre allowing boats of deepest draught to pass directly from the Gulf of Algeciras into the Bay of Tangier; and by no means least the mighty Suez Bridge joining Mediterre with the Peninsula of Suez, that long slim finger pointing from the crooked arm of Indica …

  Why didn’t I settle down sooner to design something equivalent? Well, you know what they say: one leaves home in order to return; one ranges the whole wide world in search of oneself. So if I had sometimes asked myself that very question in weary or frustrating moments during my wander-years, the answer had to be that during all this time I was still matching myself against what had already been accomplished. I was still in pursuit of a project grand enough: one which no one had yet dared, or even been able, to conceive.

  Yet I realize that I have mentioned Raoul’s name – but not my own!

  Enough. If you haven’t already guessed it, my name is Tomas d’Arque – from which you will have no difficulty in pinning down my birthplace to a certain fair town in Liguria Province of Mediterre, not too far from Lake Corsica.

  And this is how I first discovered Raoul’s secret, and became for a while his elder brother, protector, confidant …

  It happened amid the seven hundred densely forested lakes of the Bahamas. Specifically it occurred some eight or nine miles north of the sporting resort of Providence, where the hunting is so well renowned, out in the woodland near North Bimini Pool.

  I was on my way north to inspect the newly completed ISO-mile-long dam built to drain the salty shallows of the Florida Polder, so that I could tick off one more engineering feat as not quite worthy of aspiring to. An admirable endeavour, to be sure! Make no mistake! Twenty long years it had taken. However, it was something which had already been dreamed, and done.

  Here I must add an original insight of my own, stemming from my relationship with Raoul, concerning the surprise occasionally voiced by certain cultural historians that in our world where the tempo of life has ever remained demure, our people should nevertheless from quite early times constantly exhibit such devotion to mammoth, long-term feats of construction. I believe I know the real, deep reason why this is so.

  Pray consider the way in which a Sleeper must view his life’s span compared with all the rest of us. We are alive and conscious without ceasing; not even excluding the couple of hours every fortnight or so when we discharge our dreams (our psychic superfluity). Whereas he dies for eight hours out of every twenty-four, as regularly as clockwork.

  For him the daily death of sleep – the robbery of time – may well breed a panic urgency, an inner allegiance to more short-term goals; to which I can juxtapose our own sense of continuity and connexion, which breeds in us the desire to connect: capes of land with other capes by means of very long bridges or causeways; and the bay of one sea to the nearest bay of a neighbouring sea by means of grand canals – so that everything will flow and join together continuously.

  Yet there’s more. From what Raoul told me, a Sleeper’s fleeting visions of the Submerged are somewhat confused and not quite under the control of his own will. Of course it’s otherwise with everyone else, particularly the more coherent spirits amongst us. So, being able to project in miniature a majestic bridge or other edifice, it is easy and logical to conceive of this project being carried through into actuality in brick and stone, somewhere appropriate upon the surface of Thraea; and a whole nation or city can easily be fired with a fine dreamer’s vision, and act upon it. A powerful dream-projection readily becomes a building project.

  Such was the case with the Swannee Project for damming and draining the Florida Polder, whither I was heading. Typically, the name seemed somewhat capricious, since neither the forests of Atlantica nor the grain-lands of Mexique to the west of the Polder were noted for any such bird-life as swans! Yet this was the name which had been chosen metaphysically, by the Sleeper of Atlantica, during one of his nightly sorties into the Submerged …

  Raoul, however. Raoul, and what happened near North Bimini Pool…

  I was riding my newly acquired bay gelding through dense woodland along a little-frequented bridle path. There was not too much danger of attack by angry boars or sore-headed bears; and by keeping to this byway I hoped to avoid any further encounters with brash sportsmen – who have even been known to try to pit their blundering dreams against savage prey, rather than use their crossbow bolts.

  Ah, brash sportsmen: they have their uses, though! Only a few hours earlier in Providence I had obtained my fine mount and its full panniers as the result of a dream contest with one such …

  Besides appealing to the hunting instinct, and to a modicum of gluttony upon the products of the chase, Providence also caters to gambling fever – which I suppose is a variant on the hunt, involving this time the bagging, or more often the escape, of money. A famous casino, there, occupies the wives and girlfriends of the addicts of the chase; and after a few days in Providence the women seem willing to wager upon anything and everything. Will the hotel chef dish up that newly bagged boar with an orange or an apple in its mouth? Ten gives you twenty it’ll be an apple.

  I had felt my dream-time coming on as I tramped into Providence earlier on foot, and decided to capitalize on this, as I was somewhat strapped for funds. Luckily for me the casino was fresh out of a main act to amuse the guests, due to a bout of tummy upsets amongst a newly arrived team of artistes, who were no doubt unused to the rich fare. So the casino compère was only too happy to comply with my request.

  As usual with such dreamshows – lest they get out of hand – the venue was the open air rather than upon the indoor stage; though in this case the open air was graciously accoutred with a marquee awning stretched above a natural grassy amphitheatre, and lit by many lanthorns.

  Deliberately I had held back my dreams for a few hours longer than need be, to build their power and organization; and as luck would have it none of the guests or staff were dreaming that evening – or else, if they were, they stayed discreetly indoors with their jejune projections.

  All, that is, but for my sportsman; as I was to discover (to his cost) twenty minutes or so into my show.

  First I projected before me a wondrous miniature city of considerable detail; and as soon as it was firm I invited selected members of the audience – the prettiest – down on to the floor of the amphitheatre to step along my city’s boulevards and test the strength of its public buildings, before returning to their seats.

  Allowing no fires to break our nor any tremors to escape into the audience, I then daringly destroyed my city in an earthquake.

  For variety, next I dreamed a dancing, juggling bear. And it was at this point that the presumptuous oaf challenged me to a combat of dream-beasts, to the acclaim of his coterie of friends. I shan’t expatiate upon his vivid but basically floppy projections. Suffice it to say that, having allowed him various vantages for the sake of his amour-propre, and to let wagers mount up, I trounced the fellow. The upshot for me: possession of that bay gelding, and full panniers.

  So towards midnight I was about nine miles north of Providence, seated upon my spoils, occasionally checking that the bridle way ran true by reference to what stars I could spy through rifts in the foliage; when my keen sense of danger alerted me. That, and the snicker of the gelding.

  Some way o
ff the path in the dark underbrush I heard a grunt; then another. Reining in, as the rhythmic rasping noise continued, I reached for my crossbow, thinking: bear … or boar.

  Another man might have ridden cautiously on; or, had his dreaming been upon him, as it was upon me earlier, he might have sent a dream-beast crashing through the dingy boskage; as it was, I was fresh out of dreams. And I must admit that my curiosity has led me into tight scrapes often enough in the past; this must go with being an inventive sort of fellow!

  My steed pawed the turf, and whinnied; as I was hesitating a gibbous moon floated from behind some clouds, increasing the light. Recklessly I dismounted and tethered the gelding to a handy tree stump, soothing it, then I crept slowly into the underbrush, crossbow cocked, prepared to snatch back my foot should I feel a bending twig about to snap.

  Ten steps, twenty; and a tiny clearing hove dimly in sight … where, wrapped in a blanket, lay what I took at first sight to be a severely injured man in his death agony.

  A few paces more, and the amazing truth dawned on me: that the man was sleeping – the noise, as Raoul later explained, in some embarrassment, was that of ‘snoring’. At his head, a knapsack.

  What to do? I was consumed with curiosity, yet if I broke his sleep I could shock or injure him. After thinking this over, I sat down right there in the clearing and remained so all night long, till dawn began to creep into the east.

  During my long hours of vigil – interrupted only by two forays: once to the horse for a bite of pasty and a swig of wine, and the second time into the bushes on a call of nature – I noted how the man did not lie entirely still in his comatose state. At times he shifted from one side to the other, as if by some automatic instinct of his muscles, to protect himself from cramp or gangrene. And twice he cried out: once, the word, ‘Everglades’, and on the second occasion as if in baby talk, ‘Palm Beach, my Mammy!’ ‘Everglades’ no doubt referred to the extensive woods we were in, in a submerged, mythistorical fashion; though as to the latter I knew of no palm-fringed shores closer than the equatorial strands of the South American Ocean, down Cayenne way.

  As the forest cover eventually brightened I discerned that the Sleeper was only about twenty-one years old, with an unruly mop of dark hair, and fine, almost feminine features. When the bird chorus burst into song about us, he opened his soft brown eyes; and so we first met – much to his initial consternation.

  Quickly I reassured him; though on awakening it seemed that the Sleeper was still quite confused as to the substantial reality of the world. So without further ado I set to and cooked us both a tasty breakfast of venison sausages. No doubt it was because I treated him thus in comradely style as just another person like myself, not as a wonder and a living miracle, that he soon began to warm to me and to consider me as a potential friend and ally after all his years of subterfuge and self-imposed isolation.

  I did not just wag the ready ear of one who only listens in order to betray confidences and turn them to his own advantage; but I presented my own life’s quest, and myself, to him, so that presently he began to trust me, and soon to see merits: such as a horse to ride in tandem with me, and best prospect of all, someone reliable to watch and ward him while he slept. That night, and the night after, and the night after that …

  By the time we arrived at Jack’s Ville on the eastern shore of the Swannee Project a couple of weeks later, Raoul had already told me much about his relationship with the Submerged – which he had actually used, rather cunningly, as protective colouration. For he had long since adopted the guise of a rather devout mythistorical pilgrim.

  Thus whenever he was obliged to rent a room in a town, he could perfectly excuse his otherwise peculiar custom of locking himself away for hours at a stretch: such were his times of obligatory meditation upon the enigmas of the Submerged and our mythistory.

  Hard times, quite often! In a room intended to shelter ordinary travellers, what could Raoul lie down on but the floor? In the absence of female companionship he could hardly rent an amour-chambre; alone in a cushioned love-nest he would have been regarded as very weird indeed – and I suspect, though he didn’t answer this question directly, that Raoul had even denied himself the joys of intercourse entirely, lest with his seed spilt and passion spent he might fall asleep in someone’s arms. Till he met me it had been a sad life for him.

  So we reined in on a low hilltop above Jack’s Ville: that once tiny hamlet which had grown into something of a mini-city with all the construction work; and we both dismounted to survey the long dam stretching out forever to the west, straight as a die. To the south, the beginnings of the Polder; to the north the white breakers of the North American Ocean (for it was a breezy day).

  Raoul stared fixedly southwards as though the dam itself meant nothing to him.

  ‘Florida is rising,’ he said. ‘Rising into view. Wouldn’t it be rare if there were drowned cities to be found beneath the sea?’

  ‘And who would have built them?’ I asked, laughing. ‘Mermen?’

  I began to speculate, though, whether it might not be a grand enough project to build something noble underwater: with fishes swimming beyond the toughened windows, and air pipes leading to the surface? No one had ever constructed anything beneath the waves. How would one go about it? By means of massive caissons? Or using a circular dam, which one later demolished to let the briny deep flow back in? As you can see, already my intimacy with Raoul was beginning to stir strange and wonderful imaginings within me – amply repaying the care I was lavishing on our relationship.

  Raoul cleared his throat. ‘Some pilgrims say that when the universe was made, another universe had to be made too, for balance. Or maybe this was because the universe is made out of the void, say others; for a void isn’t just emptiness. You can tear it apart, into two distinct but complementary things: the Real, and the Submerged, the Mythistorical. Yet there must be a place somewhere,’ and he banged his fist into his palm, ‘where the two join, if only as a thread, an umbilicus. A location. A door. Where land is sea, and sea is land, unseparated out.’

  ‘Like a swamp, you mean? Ah, so that’s why you were heading here now that we’re pumping the Polder dry?’

  From our vantage point we could clearly see the first of the great hydraulic stations two miles out along the dam; and less distinctly a second, and a third. I fancied that I could hear the thump and slosh of that first station like a distant heartbeat, powered by the spinning windmills on its roof. Bucket by bucket, at fifty such locations, Florida was being emptied out, reclaimed for Atlantica; and during a few moments of reverie I was overwhelmed by the certainty that here, for the first time in history, the actual geography of Thraea was being slightly modified; so that what had been coloured blue on maps hitherto, now would be painted green. Fortunately my sense of proportion soon reasserted itself.

  Raoul gripped my arm. ‘I wonder if that dam can really hold? There must be so much pressure of water against it!’

  I assessed the structure with a practised eye.

  ‘It looks well enough built. Yet perhaps it shouldn’t be so utterly straight. That might encourage waves to build up abnormally high as they roll along it in the winter. Whereas if they’d built it with curving bays, giving it a scalloped edge, or if they’d thrust groynes out, which could have served as piers sometime in the future …’

  His grip tightened. ‘I wonder what other pressures are thrusting against it? Pressures, perhaps, from the Submerged itself … Imagine the inundation if the dam does break!’

  ‘Oh, then you’d have land and sea mixed up all right, in one almighty pudding! But let’s not carp at the workmanship, just because the design seems so linear and monotonous. It reflects, after all,’ and I winked wickedly, ‘our sense of continuity; whereas the periodic pump-stations, throbbing away – not unlike somebody snoring …’ I nudged him in the ribs affectionately, just as he released my arm. ‘Enough said!’

  We remounted one behind the other, and rode on down together int
o Jack’s Ville.

  That same night Raoul cried out the one strange word in his sleep, several times: ‘Okefenokee!’ In the morning over a breakfast of muffins, bacon and cinnamon coffee, I questioned him.

  He shrugged fretfully. ‘Another of the place names of the Submerged, Tomas! Somewhere hereabouts …’

  ‘But,’ I asked him trenchantly, ‘will it still be submerged, now that hereabouts is being drained? In a word, is “Okefenokee” the name of the door to your destiny?’ (Several words, actually. But I thought I phrased it rather well.)

  He stared blankly, hardly focusing. ‘How would it be,’ he muttered at last, ‘to tread the Submerged lands? Would the denizens of the Submerged perceive us as ghostly wraiths? Spooks, or will o’ the wisps? Vague blobs of light, occasionally solidifying into seemingly solid people? And what would they make of your projected dreams? Would these seem to be silver elves and hunking, dripping giants, and mothmen and such?’

  ‘Do you really believe in the existence of these … counter people?’

  ‘Counterfeit people?’ He misunderstood me, or deliberately chose to do so. ‘I must be one of those myself, born into the wrong universe!’

  ‘Surely,’ said I reasonably, ‘the Submerged is simply our mythic dimension? It’s like a sort of fifth dimension of our world, Raoul. The bulk of the people only notice four dimensions: length and breadth and time and height. But there’s another one, as well, which you perceive – perhaps it’s required as a kind of glue to join the other four together. Let its name be depth; depth is different in nature from height.’

  ‘Height?’ he retorted, as though I had offended him. Tat lot you know about height! Length and breadth and time, oh yes. But height? I’ll give you height!’

  ‘Now what would you mean by that?’ I asked soothingly.

  And he told me: and it came as a revelation.

  Not, I hasten to add, because he intended it as such; but because then and there at once I was able to grasp that this was the missing piece in the puzzle of my life. With an instinctive sense of right structure I slotted that piece straight into place; and thrilled.