Chronopolis

by J. G. Ballard

  An intern bent over Lang, thumbing a hypodermic. Morley stared at the floor. “I think they would have gone anyway.”

  “How can you say that?” Neill clamped his lips together. He felt frustrated and impotent. He knew Morley was probably right— the three men were in terminal withdrawal, unresponsive to either insulin or electrotherapy, and a vise-tight catatonic seizure didn’t close in out of nowhere—but as always refused to admit anything without absolute proof.

  He led the way into his office and shut the door.

  “Sit down.” He pulled a chair out for Morley and prowled off around the room, slamming a fist into his palm.

  “All right, John. What is it?”

  Morley picked up one of the test cards lying on the desk, balanced it on a comer and spun it between his fingers. Phrases swam through his mind, tentative and uncertain, like blind fish.

  “What do you want me to say?” he asked. “Reactivation of the infantile imago? A regression into the great, slumbering womb? Or to put it more simply still—just a fit of pique?”

  “Go on.”

  Morley shrugged. “Continual consciousness is more than the brain can stand. Any signal repeated often enough eventually loses its meaning. Try saying the word sleep fifty times. After a point the brain’s self-awareness dulls. It’s no longer able to grasp who or why it is, and it rides adrift.”

  “What do we do then?”

  “Nothing. Short of rescoring all the way down to Lumbar I. The central nervous system can’t stand narcotomy.”

  Neill shook his head. “You’re lost,” he said curtly. “Juggling with generalities isn’t going to bring those men back. First, we’ve got to find out what happened to them, what they actually felt and saw.”

  Morley frowned dubiously. “That jungle is marked private. Even if you do, is a psychotic’s withdrawal drama going to make any sense?”

  “Of course it will. However insane it seems to us, it was real enough to them. If we know the ceiling fell in or the whole gym filled with ice cream or turned into a maze, we’ve got something to work on.” He sat down on the desk. “Do you remember that story of Chekhov’s you told me about?”

  “‘The Bet’? Yes.”

  “I read it last night. Curious. It’s a lot nearer what you’re really trying to say than you know.” He gazed around the office. “This room in which the man is penned for ten years symbolizes the mind driven to the furthest limits of self-awareness . . . Something very similar happened to Avery, Gorrell, and Lang. They must have reached a stage beyond which they could no longer contain the idea of their own identity. But far from being unable to grasp the idea, I’d say that they were conscious of nothing else. Like the man in the spherical mirror, who can only see a single gigantic eye staring back at him.”

  “So you think their withdrawal is a straightforward escape from the eye, the overwhelming ego?”

  “Not escape,” Neill corrected. “The psychotic never escapes from anything. He’s much more sensible. He merely readjusts reality to suit himself. Quite a trick to learn, too. The room in Chekhov’s story gives me an idea as to how they might have readjusted. Their particular equivalent of this room was the gym. I’m beginning to realize it was a mistake to put them in there—all those lights blazing down, the huge floor, high walls. They merely exaggerate the sensation of overload. In fact the gym might easily have become an external projection of their own egos.”

  Neill drummed his fingers on the desk. “My guess is that at this moment they’re either striding around in there the size of hundred-foot giants, or else they’ve cut it down to their own dimensions. More probably that. They’ve just pulled the gym in on themselves.”

  Morley grinned bleakly. “So all we’ve got to do now is pump them full of honey and apomorphine and coax them out. Suppose they refuse?”

  “They won’t,” Neill said. “You’ll see.”

  There was a rap on the door. An intern stuck his head through.

  “Lang’s coming out of it, Doctor. He’s calling for you.”

  Neill bounded out.

  Morley followed him into the ward.

  Lang was lying in his cot, body motionless under the canvas sheet. His lips were parted slightly. No sound came from them, but Morley, bending over next to Neill, could see his hyoid bone vibrating in spasms.

  “He’s very faint,” the intern warned.

  Neill pulled up a chair and sat down next to the cot. He made a visible effort of concentration, flexing his shoulders. He bent his head close to Lang’s and listened.

  Five minutes later it came through again.

  Lang’s lips quivered. His body arched under the sheet, straining at the buckles, and then subsided.

  “Neill . . . Neill,” he whispered. The sounds, thin and strangled, seemed to be coming from the bottom of a well. “Neill. . .Neill. . .Neill. . .”

  Neill stroked his forehead with a small, neat hand.

  “Yes, Bobby,” he said gently. His voice was feather-soft, caressing. “I’m here, Bobby. You can come out now.”

  Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer

  At dawn the bodies of the dead birds shone in the damp light of the marsh, their gray plumage hanging in the still water like fallen clouds. Each morning when Crispin went out onto the deck of the picket ship he would see the birds lying in the creeks and waterways where they had died two months earlier, their wounds cleansed now by the slow current, and he would watch the white-haired woman who lived in the empty house below the cliff walking by the river. Along the narrow beach the huge birds, larger than condors, lay at her feet. As Crispin gazed at her from the bridge of the picket ship she moved among them, now and then stooping to pluck a feather from the outstretched wings. At the end of her walk, when she returned across the damp meadow to the empty house, her arms would be loaded with immense white plumes.

  At first Crispin had felt an obscure sense of annoyance at the way this strange woman descended onto the beach and calmly plundered the plumage of the dead birds. Although many thousands of the creatures lay along the margins of the river and in the marshes around the inlet where the picket ship was moored, Crispin still maintained a proprietary attitude toward them. He himself, almost single-handedly, had been responsible for the slaughter of the birds in the last terrifying battles when they had come from their aeries along the North Sea and attacked the picket ship. Each of the immense white creatures—for the most part gulls and gannets, with a few fulmars and petrels—carried his bullet in its heart like a jewel.

  As he watched the woman cross the overgrown lawn to her house Crispin remembered again the frantic hours before the birds’ final hopeless attack. Hopeless it seemed now, when their bodies lay in a wet quilt over the cold Norfolk marshes, but then, only two months earlier, when the sky above the ship had been dark with their massing forms, it was Crispin who had given up hope.

  The birds had been larger than men, with wingspans of twenty feet or more that shut out the sun. Crispin had raced like a madman across the rusty metal decks, dragging the ammunition cans in his torn arms from the armory and loading them into the breeches of the machine guns, while Quimby, the idiot youth from the farm at Long Reach whom Crispin had persuaded to be his gun loader, gibbered to himself on the foredeck, hopping about on his clubfoot as he tried to escape from the huge shadows sweeping across him. When the birds began their first dive, and the sky turned into a white scythe, Crispin had barely enough time to buckle himself into the shoulder harness of the turret.

  Yet he had won, shooting the first wave down into the marshes as they soared toward him like a white armada, then turning to fire at the second group swooping in low across the river behind his back. The hull of the picket ship was still dented with the impacts their bodies had made as they struck the sides above the waterline. At the height of the battle the birds had been everywhere, wings like screaming crosses against the sky, their corpses crashing through the rigging onto the decks around him as he swung the heavy guns, firing from rail to rail. A
dozen times Crispin had given up hope, cursing the men who had left him alone on this rusty hulk to face the giant birds, and who made him pay for Quimby out of his own pocket.

  But then, when the battle had seemed to last for ever, when the sky was still full of birds and his ammunition had nearly gone, he noticed Quimby dancing on the corpses heaped on the deck, pitching them into the water with his two-pronged fork as they thudded around him.

  Then Crispin knew that he had won. When the firing slackened Quimby dragged up more ammunition, eager for killing, his face and deformed chest smeared with feathers and blood. Shouting himself now, with a fierce pride in his own courage and fear, Crispin had destroyed the remainder of the birds, shooting the stragglers, a few fledgling peregrines, as they fled toward the cliff. For an hour after the last of the birds had died, when the river and the creeks near the ship ran red with their blood, Crispin had sat in the turret, firing the guns at the sky that had dared attack him.

  Later, when the excitement and pulse of the battle had passed, he realized that the only witness of his stand against this aerial armageddon had been a clubfooted idiot to whom no one would ever listen. Of course, the white-haired woman had been there, hiding behind the shutters in her house, but Crispin had not noticed her until several hours had passed, when she began to walk among the corpses. To begin with, therefore, he had been glad to see the birds lying where they had fallen, their blurred forms eddying away in the cold water of the river and the marshes. He sent Quimby back to his farm, and watched the idiot dwarf punt his way down river among the swollen corpses. Then, crossed bandoliers of machine-gun cartridges around his chest, Crispin took command of his bridge.

  The woman’s appearance on the scene he welcomed, glad someone else was there to share his triumph, and well aware that she must have noticed him patrolling the captain’s walk of the picket ship. But after a single glance the woman never again looked at him. She seemed intent only on searching the beach and the meadow below her house.

  On the third day after the battle she had come out onto the lawn with Quimby, and the dwarf spent the morning and afternoon clearing away the bodies of the birds that had fallen there. He heaped them onto a heavy wooden tumbril, then harnessed himself between the shafts and dragged them away to a pit near the farm. The following day he appeared again in a wooden skiff and punted the woman, standing alone in the bows like an aloof wraith, among the bodies of the birds floating in the water. Now and then Quimby turned one of the huge corpses over with his pole, as if searching for something among them—there were apocryphal stories, which many townsfolk believed, that the beaks of the birds carried tusks of ivory, but Crispin knew this to be nonsense.

  These movements of the woman puzzled Crispin, who felt that his conquest of the birds had also tamed the landscape around the picket ship and everything in it. Shortly afterwards, when the woman began to collect the wing feathers of the birds, he felt that she was in some way usurping a privilege reserved for him alone. Sooner or later the river voles, rats, and other predators of the marshes would destroy the birds, but until then he resented anyone else looting this drowned treasure, which he had won so hard. After the battle he had sent a short message in his crabbed handwriting to the district officer at the station twenty miles away, and until a reply came he preferred that the thousands of bodies should lie where they had fallen. As a conscripted member of the picket service he was not eligible for a bounty, but Crispin dimly hoped he might receive a medal or some sort of commendation.

  The knowledge that the woman was his only witness, apart from the idiot Quimby, deterred Crispin from doing anything that might antagonize her. Also, the woman’s odd behavior made Crispin suspect that she too might be mad. He had never seen her at a shorter distance than the three hundred yards separating the picket ship from the bank below her house, but through the telescope mounted on the rail of the bridge he followed her along the beach, and saw more clearly the white hair and the ashen skin of her high face. Her arms were thin but strong, hands held at her waist as she moved about in a gray ankle-length robe. Her bedraggled appearance was that of someone unaware that she had lived alone for a long time.

  For several hours Crispin watched her walking among the corpses. The tide cast a fresh freight onto the sand each day, but now that the bodies were decomposing, their appearance, except at a distance, was devoid of any sentiment. The shallow inlet in which the picket ship was moored—the vessel was one of the hundreds of old coastal freighters hastily converted to duty when the first flocks of giant birds had appeared two years earlier—faced the house across the river. Through the telescope Crispin could count the scores of pockmarks in the white stucco where spent bullets from his guns had lodged themselves.

  At the end of her walk the woman had filled her arms with a garland of feathers. As Crispin watched, hands clasping the bandoliers across his chest, she went over to one of the birds, walking into the shallow water to peer into its half-submerged face. Then she plucked a single plume from its wing and added it to the collection in her arms.

  Restlessly Crispin returned to the telescope. In the narrow eyepiece her swaying figure, almost hidden by the spray of white feathers, resembled that of some huge decorative bird, a white peacock. Perhaps in some bizarre way she imagined she was a bird?

  In the wheelhouse Crispin fingered the signal pistol fastened to the wall. When she came out the next morning he could fire one of the flares over her head, warning her that the birds were his, subjects of his own transitory kingdom. The farmer, Hassell, who had come with Quimby for permission to burn some of the birds for use as fertilizer, had plainly acknowledged Crispin’s moral rights over them.

  Usually Crispin made a thorough inspection of the ship each morning, counting the ammunition cases and checking the gunnery mountings. The metal caissons were splitting the rusty decks. The whole ship was settling into the mud below. At high tide Crispin would listen to the water pouring through a thousand cracks and rivet holes like an army of silver-tongued rats.

  This morning, however, his inspection was brief. After testing the turret on the bridge—there was always the chance of a few stragglers appearing from the nesting grounds along the abandoned coast—he went back to his telescope. The woman was somewhere behind the house, cutting down the remains of a small rose pergola. Now and then she would look up at the sky and at the cliff above, scanning the dark line of the escarpment as if waiting for one of the birds.

  This reminder that he had overcome his own fears of the giant birds made Crispin realize why he resented the woman plucking their feathers. As their bodies and plumage began to dissolve he felt a growing need to preserve them. Often he found himself thinking of their great tragic faces as they swooped down upon him, in many ways more to be pitied than feared, victims of what the district officer had called a “biological accident”—Crispin vaguely remembered him describing the new growth-promoters used on the crops in East Anglia and the extraordinary and unforeseen effects on the bird life.

  Five years earlier Crispin had been working in the fields as a laborer, unable to find anything better after his wasted years of military service. He remembered the first of the new sprays being applied to the wheat and fruit crops, and the tacky phosphorescent residue that made them glimmer in the moonlight, transforming the placid agricultural backwater into a strange landscape where the forces of some unseen nature were forever gathering themselves in readiness. The fields had been covered with the dead bodies of gulls and magpies whose mouths were clogged with this silvering gum. Crispin himself had saved many of the halfconscious birds, cleaning their beaks and feathers, and sending them off to their sailing grounds along the coast.

  Three years later the birds had returned. The first giant cormorants and black-headed gulls had wingspans of ten or twelve feet, strong bodies and beaks that could slash a dog apart. Soaring low over the fields as Crispin drove his tractor under the empty skies, they seemed to be waiting for something.

  The next autumn
a second generation of even larger birds appeared, sparrows as fierce as eagles, gannets and gulls with the wingspans of condors. These immense creatures, with bodies as broad and powerful as a man’s, flew out of the storms along the coast, killing the cattle in the fields and attacking the farmers and their families. Returning for some reason to the infected crops that had given them this wild spur to growth, they were the advance guard of an aerial armada of millions of birds that filled the skies over the country. Driven by hunger, they began to attack the human beings who were their only source of food.

  Crispin had been too busy defending the farm where he lived to follow the course of the battle against the birds all over the world. The farm, only ten miles from the coast, had been besieged. After the dairy cattle had been slaughtered, the birds turned to the farm buildings. One night Crispin woke as a huge frigate bird, its shoulders wider than a door, had shattered the wooden shutters across his window and thrust itself into his room. Seizing his pitch-fork, Crispin nailed it by the neck to the wall.

  After the destruction of the farm, in which the owner, his family, and three of the laborers died, Crispin volunteered to join the picket service. The district officer who headed the motorized militia column at first refused Crispin’s offer of help. Surveying the small, ferretlike man with his beaked nose and the birthmark like a star below his left eye, hobbling in little more than a blood-streaked singlet across the wreck of the farmhouse, as the last of the birds wheeled away like giant crosses, the district officer had shaken his head, seeing in Crispin’s eyes only the blind hunt for revenge.

  However, when they counted the dead birds around the brick kiln where Crispin had made his stand, armed only with a scythe a head taller than himself, the officer had taken him on. He was given a rifle, and for half an hour they moved through the shattered fields nearby, filled with the stripped skeletons of cattle and pigs, finishing off the wounded birds that lay there.