Slow Birds: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  I did not tell Raoul that I had experienced revelation, due in small part to him. I feared that this might make him vain and swollen-headed with a sense of his own importance; which could in turn have made him reckless. So, while my brain buzzed inwardly with a grand conception, I simply nodded.

  ‘There’s something in that,’ I allowed; and I ruffled his hair. ‘Care for another muffin?’

  That all took place four years ago.

  I still can’t believe that Raoul deliberately gave me the, slip that day in Jack’s Ville due to some paranoid suspicion that I might betray his identity. Still less could it have been caused by any disinclination for my company, since I was proving to him for the first time in his lonely life how valuable friendly human brotherhood can be. For a while I suspected that something ill had befallen him.

  But now I realize why he went, and where he is to this very day.

  Even now it will take several more years to drain the Florida Polder entirely since the water level only sinks slowly, even with fifty bucket-stations on the job. So the Polder is still betwixt and between: a queer region of salt swamp, neither properly land nor water, full of dead rotting seaweeds and the bones of fishes beached on newly arisen cays.

  I know that, haunted by inner necessity, Raoul will be the wanderer of that half-land. He will be blowing into empty conch shells to hearken for an answering echo from somewhere in the murk, and to follow it, there to fall asleep and listen to the whisper of metaphysical names – some of which the Sleeper of Atlantica is already enunciating publicly: Canaveral, Tampa, Orlando, Lauderdale …

  I take note of these announcements, even back home here in Mediterre; though I must confess that I’m not consumed with curiosity. These days I have my own work cut out – ever since my own grand dream-projection, and accompanying passionate explanations, convinced the good folk of my native Liguria to undertake the work.

  For what I realized during my moment of revelation in Jack’s Ville was that all the great engineering projects of Thraea hitherto have been concerned exclusively, and mundanely, with length and breadth and time – with connecting land-mass to land-mass, and linking ocean to ocean. Never have we dreamed of connecting the ground to the sky in a purely gratuitous aesthetic way with no strict linear purpose.

  Already here in Liguria midway between Lake Corsica and the Azure Coast the foundations and base of my tower are complete, and the first stage will soon be rising.

  To begin with, I thought of naming it the ‘Eiffel Tower’, after a phrase that spilled from Raoul’s lips once while he was asleep – followed the next morning, on enquiry, by a description of a most unusual erection.

  Yet on second thoughts I have decided not to use any Submerged name: for on the contrary my creation will soar upward and upward. So instead, I may well call it ‘Raoul’s Tower’ to honour a well-loved if briefly known friend; thus to tantalize all future visitors, without betraying any confidences.

  Though somewhere in the structure – well concealed in a strong casket, yet so placed that a future generation will come upon it while refurbishing some part of the fabric, thus unlocking an enigma of years – I shall secrete this true account of the genesis of my masterpiece. Which will inevitably be a Wonder of the World.

  On the other hand, though, if I do call it ‘Raoul’s Tower’, future biographers may leap to the conclusion that Raoul was my lover during our brief sojourn together; or even that I may have taken advantage of him while he slept! That lays too much stress upon our relationship.

  So on balance maybe the Tomas Tower’ is the better name; and if I deliberately leave my work untitled – thus emphasizing its nonfunctional purity – so it will inevitably come to be known. People are impelled to give names to things; what other raison d’être, I sometimes wonder, is there for our precious Sleepers in their Observatories?

  Tomas Tower: I think I like it. But let time and history decide.

  And to time and the future I bequeath this little memoir: to a posterity when maybe – though I doubt it – the world will have changed out of recognition; for which reason, pardon me my explanations of items that will surely appear to you completely obvious and well-known.

  Such as my own name:

  (signed with a flourish)

  Tomas d’A.

  Cruising

  From where I shelter, hidden underneath my concrete burster slab, I can feel the swallows flocking outside. Above my airfield they mill wildly in the sky. Their beaks click like tiny castanets as they gulp a stream of gnats to put a last gram of fat on their bodies before they undertake the great journey. The swallows are drunk with a sweet panic. They’re a host of fairy children dancing streamers round a hidden maypole which holds up the sky; right now, they’re busily unwinding the maypole of the year.

  My mind goes out to them. ‘The fogs are coming! We smell the fogs!’ they cry.

  ‘How fat the berries on the bushes!’

  ‘Wind’s from the south today. It calls!’

  ‘Can you hear the dunes of the desert booming? Can you hear the screaming of the apes?’

  ‘Can you hear the cough of the camel and the roar of the lion?’

  ‘We’ll be late!’

  I understand them perfectly. My own brain is very like their brains. In common with the swallows I know in advance every rise and dip, every river and valley of my destined route. Their instincts are my instincts; but mine are held in check. How I envy their freedom to migrate, even if it spells death for them.

  Am I the only one of my flight to overhear the swallows? Am I the only one to feel excitement, frustration, jealousy? Perhaps. In our mighty mobile metal nest my three companions (for want of a better word) sit silent and inert. No emotions leak from them. Any thoughts they think are masked and secret.

  But not the thoughts of the swallows. Winding themselves up like stones swung round and round on strings, the swallows race through figure-eights.

  ’Tswit! Sweet! Sweet!’ one of them cries out. This is the call to take wing and fly south, forever south, until they arrive in the sweet heat of southern Africa.

  I decide to name this swallow Amy. I follow her with my mind. Amy, wonderful Amy, flier beyond compare.

  She fans her tail. She turns in full flight to dart in a different direction, wild to flap her wings in another quarter of the sky. She snatches a tiny spider floating on a silken thread.

  In her breast she feels a strange kind of hurt. This is a lovely hurt, teasing her wonderfully; it will draw her ever onwards.

  ‘I can’t bear to stay another day!’ she tells her mate Nijinsky. (I name him for his nimbleness.) Amy’s voice is the chattering of a mountain stream, the babbling rush of water over pebbles.

  She and twenty others dart down to the line of telephone wires at the perimeter of the airfield. There they chatter about their preset route: the mountain passes of the Pyrenees, the dusty plains of New Castile, the apes screaming from the Rock of Gibraltar. Next, those desert forts and oases. Then the dry Sahara, with such stunning oven-heat reflecting from its sands that many swallows, will die on the wing. Many will drop from the air like stones.

  Naturally, Amy and Nijinsky are worried about the youngest of their brood, whom I call Pavlova.

  ‘The desert may be wider this year,’ Amy twitters. ‘Last year it was wider than the year before. But we can’t stay. Soon the cold will come here. When it comes, it’ll kill all the insects.’

  ‘But is Pavlova chubby enough yet?’

  ‘Chubby or not, we all have to go.’

  ‘Oh, it puzzles me, Amy, that we can never act in any other way! What we must do, we must do. Is it the same for every living creature?’

  ‘But doing what you must do is what living is all about!’ cries Amy in astonishment. ‘That’s the perfect joy of existence.’ She preens quickly under her wing. ‘If the world quit turning, then a swallow might stop flying! But only then. Don’t worry: we’ll all get there safely. It’ll be the most wonderful flight ever flown.
I know it in my heart.’

  Swallows are spaced out on the wires as neatly as soldiers on parade. They all wear the same dark steel-blue uniforms with frock-tail coats, the same rust-red caps and chinstraps, the same soft snowy breastplates.

  ‘I’m dying to see this desert of yours,’ burbles little Pavlova. ‘I mean, I can already see it in my mind’s eye. I’m not scared. I’ll skim it in a day.’

  ‘No, nor two days, either,’ says Nijinsky. ‘Your mind’s eye’s out of date. Every year the Sahara desert grows greater.’

  Momentarily I pity these swallows; my mind’s eye is never out of date. But what do I care about the Sahara desert? Africa isn’t mapped in my mind. My migration route lies eastward.

  Something is happening! Down here in the bunker my soldiers are scrambling into their armoured jeeps, my maintenance men into their trucks. My metal nest awakens, engine roaring. The bunker doors descend over the empty debris pit.

  And they drive me out, under the open sky!

  * * *

  Presently we’re on a country road, crunching southward away from the airfield: me and my three mute siblings in one transporter, four more of us in another, together with a whole convoy of wagons, trucks, and jeeps.

  It’s been a good summer. The harvest is all safely in. Golden hay lies piled in great rolls in the barns. My swallows have seen the stubble burning off fiercely, reddening the sky by night, clouding it with smoke by day. Now I observe how most of the blackened fields have already been turned over by the plough.

  I spy rams in a pasture, serving the grazing ewes, marking their woolly backs with blue and red wax. The rams wear tight harnesses which hold the coloured wax. The sheep glance at our convoy, then lose interest.

  Reaching out with my mind, I sense that Amy has just forked her tail straight and true – and leapt into flight. After her leap all the other swallows. For the moment has come. Only Nijinsky glances back at the little village beyond my airfield where he and Amy nested this summer in the eaves of a farmhouse. He glances once, but already it seems as if the village has receded infinitely far away. As indeed it has. Already it’s on the very far side of the map in his mind. Away beyond the whole of Africa. Even if Nijinsky wanted, he couldn’t now turn back.

  Let me not be turned back, either!

  While my transporter navigates the byways, heading south by east, I follow Amy in her flight. And I begin to hope.

  An hour later our convoy turns off the country lane, up a broad woodland ride to a clearing surrounded by fir trees.

  The soldiers fan out through the woods. My launch officer tips me up in the steel nest, pointing east. And we wait. And wait. A few nearby soldiers pace about, nervous as swallows themselves. They sweat. Occasionally they joke. Or urinate.

  Amy, Nijinsky, and Pavlova link up with a straggling line of other migrants on the sky-road. Oh yes, there are roads through the sky. Quite narrow roads: these are the caravan trails of the blue. Such roads rise or sink at the whim of the wind. My flock of swallows is flying high now to catch a side breeze from due east.

  They fly quite straight, with little swerving or veering, hardly any capricious jinking. Instead of chasing insects as before, now they let the insects come to them. Bristling out the tiny contour feathers at the sides of their mouths, they funnel their fuel in to a scooping beak.

  Click: a fly.

  Click: a little moth borne aloft by some mood of the wind.

  Click: a winged beetle.

  Lifting and thrusting, they overtake swifts and martins.

  Upstroking, they feather the blades of their wings to lessen air resistance. I understand all this very well, though I have never flown before. Below, the curves of the rolling hills are a caress.

  And suddenly I do burst free – with the power of a million swallows. A second later, my nozzle controls start to steer me on course. Five seconds later, my fins flip out. A few seconds more, and my wings swing into place to balance me. I’m the first to leave the nest. After three years of waiting, at last I can migrate! My booster drops. My jet commences. I gulp air hungrily.

  At last. I’m a bird.

  Swiftly I skim forest and water meadow, flat fields and heathland. I swoop past a solitary windmill, its sails pointing like a road-sign. Long before Amy and Pavlova and Nijinsky are anywhere near the coast, I’m over a beach, then out across the blue chop and toss of the sea, exulting …

  Whilst flying, Amy is dreaming of the reed beds of the Lualaba river down in Zambia. Survivors of the Sahara, replenished by the insects of Nigeria and the Congo, may roost a while along the Lualaba. They will cling to bending reeds, twittering at one another while in the dusk an elephant trumpets and the tick birds peck vermin from its hide. Amy will dart into the river for a quick dip to clean herself, ever wary of the snap of the crocodile.

  But she isn’t there yet. The wind threatens to veer. If a strong tail wind gets behind swallows they need to find a wire or reed to roost on till the wind shifts or drops. Otherwise they’ll be pushed along too quickly for the map unrolling in their minds. They’ll overfly it, get lost.

  No such problem for me! I fly faster than any normal wind. My mind-map is impeccable. As soon as I’ve crossed the sea, I shall scan my map in mere fractions of time too small to be called seconds.

  For her part, Amy rises higher where the wind is slower. I rise slightly too, since waves are swelling.

  Within half an hour I’m over the polders of the Netherlands. Fifteen minutes later, and I’m across the German border, commencing my long sweep across the German plains. Here my map clicks into place. The terrain matches it perfectly. Farms flash by, bare fields, cows and churches …

  In the City Park of Johannesburg there are reed beds. It is there that Amy will join up with fellow migrants arriving by way of the Nile valley from furthest Siberia. For in Joburg the two main streams of migration flow together in the southern spring. In Joburg in the southern autumn those two streams part again, like twin forks of a swallow’s tail. Last year in Joburg Amy and Nijinsky met and roosted a while with Ivan Swallow, from Irkutsk beside Lake Baikal. (I fantasize, of course.)

  I dream along with Amy while I cruise over Germany, comparing my mind-map with the territory from time to time. Everything is as it should be. Of course. I’m a specialized instrument – and why, so is Amy too! She and I, we’re both designed for cruising. For a life on the wing. Only with peril and hardship can she ever alight on terra firma. Earlier this year, when she was shuffling clumsily about on the ground using her wings as crutches whilst she scooped up wet mud for her nest, an evil tabby cat nearly had her for breakfast.

  Amy’s making progress towards the seaside, but I’m already over Poland. Flying fifteen metres low. I swing around a pimple of a hill. A farmer stares at me in shock. A policeman jumps from his car and empties his pistol into the air; but I’m already past him and away.

  Far behind me something flashes as brightly as the sun. I’m soon buffeted by a fierce wind which presses me down almost into the soil. But I recover my balance and my proper height.

  Something bright and burning has blinded Amy! I lose touch with her; there’s interference in the air and in my mind …

  Momentarily I feel a pang of grief that Amy won’t even reach the Channel crossing – let alone the breezy Gavarnie valley with its pouncing hawks; let alone the Rock lit by golden flames when the Levanter wind tethers banners of sunset vapour to the Moroccan peaks. I fly on, burning such emotions out. I’m stronger than she is. I consult my mind-map again. Cruising, cruising.

  Where are you, Amy?

  Amy, beautiful Amy!

  Ach, beautiful me …

  Russia!

  Forests of oak, beech and fir …

  I’m dimly aware of my destination already: a town called Vitebsk. That’s where I’ll roost.

  Once more I’m faintly aware of Amy far away. She lies panting on a patch of mud. Her feathers are all burnt. She can’t see. It’s a wonder she’s still alive. Soon she�
�ll die of shock.

  Oh, this is my cruise of a lifetime! Here’s the West Dvina river. The little town of Beshenkovichi lies by a sharp bend where the stream alters course from south to north. Only sixty kilometres further to Vitebsk. Five minutes, slightly less.

  And now Vitebsk lies ahead. So my mind-map is coming to an end. Nothing exists beyond it. Nowhere.

  So soon! Yet as Amy said, ‘Doing what you must do is what living is all about!’ A mayfly only lives one day – a few hours of one day – and is complete.

  One minute left.

  Vitebsk is the town where the painter Marc Chagall was born. He imagined cows flying in the sky.

  There’ll be cows flying through the sky today, for sure.

  Universe on the Turn

  We parted softly, with a kiss. Jacques’s face looked flushed in the misty, rosy light. Did I detect a hint of embarrassed excitement, a youthful coyness still, after so many visits? No, he was a young God! As he strode towards his woman, I could only helplessly admire the firm swing of his legs, the cleft apple of his buttocks, and the strong trapezius of muscles massaging his shoulder blades in a river of sinew that narrowed suddenly to hold high a jaunty head. He was an athlete of a swimmer, poised for the perfect plunge into the stream of woman’s flesh.

  His woman reclined enormously in her soft half-ovoid of a divan: three metres deep, twenty metres long. Her great parted rump-cheeks were as high as Jacques himself. The flipper protuberances of her one-time legs waggled gently on either side as she scented him. She could not close those stumps around him, of course, yet ancient nerve and muscle memories seemed to be still urging her to try.

  Upon the brink of the divan Jacques turned, and grinned impishly. Oh, he knew that I would be admiring him! At a distance the purse of his lips looked harsher: his mouth a mauve, almost maroon gash. Yet the soft bud of his penis had shrunk to a tiny ivory knob – just as if, with so much blood engorging the erect musculature of the rest of his frame, none could be spared for his phallus and even the rosy light was drained away from there, eating a white moth-hole.