Chronopolis

by J. G. Ballard

When Quimby arrived in his coracle two hours later, eager to see the bird, Crispin sent him up the mast to secure the dove to the crosstree. Dancing about beneath the bird, the dwarf seemed mesmerized by Crispin, doing whatever the latter told him.

  “Fire a shot at her, Crisp!” he exhorted Crispin, who stood disconsolately by the rail. “Over the house, that’ll bring her out!”

  “Do you think so?” Crispin raised the rifle, ejecting the cartridge whose bullet had destroyed the bird. He watched the bright shell tumble down into the feathery water below. “I don’t know ... it might frighten her. I’ll go over there.”

  “That’s the way, Crisp . . .” The dwarf scuttled about. “Bring her back here—I’ll tidy it up for you.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  As he berthed the launch on the beach Crispin looked back at the picket ship, reassuring himself that the dead dove was clearly visible in the distance. In the morning sunlight the plumage shone like snow against the rusting masts.

  When he neared the house he saw Catherine York standing in the doorway, her windblown hair hiding her face, watching him approach with stern eyes.

  He was ten yards from her when she stepped into the house and half-closed the door. Crispin began to run, and she leaned out and shouted angrily: “Go away! Go back to the ship and those dead birds you love so much!”

  “Miss Catherine . . .” Crispin stammered to a halt by the door. “I saved you . . . Mrs. York!”

  “Saved? Save the birds, Captain!”

  Crispin tried to speak, but she slammed the door. He walked back through the meadow and punted across the river to the picket ship, unaware of Quimby’s insane moon eyes staring down at him from the rail.

  “Crisp . . . What’s the matter?” For once the dwarf was gentle. “What happened?”

  Crispin shook his head. He gazed up at the dead bird, struggling to find some solution to the woman’s last retort. “Quimby,” he said in a quiet voice to the dwarf, “Quimby, she thinks she’s a bird.”

  During the next week this conviction grew in Crispin’s bewildered mind, as did his obsession with the dead bird. Looming over him like an immense murdered angel, the dove’s eyes seemed to follow him about the ship, reminding him of when it had first appeared, almost from within his own face, in the mirror glass of the bridgehouse.

  It was this sense of identity with the bird that was to spur Crispin to his final stratagem.

  Climbing the mast, he secured himself to the lookout’s nest, and with a hacksaw cut away the steel cables tangled around the dove’s body. In the gathering wind the great white form of the bird swayed and dipped, its fallen wings almost knocking Crispin from his perch. At intervals the rain beat across them, but the drops helped to wash away the blood on the bird’s breast and the chips of rust from the hacksaw. At last Crispin lowered the bird to the deck, then lashed it to the hatch cover behind the funnel.

  Exhausted, he slept until the next day. At dawn, armed with a machete, he began to eviscerate the bird.

  Three days later, Crispin stood on the cliff above the house, the picket ship far below him across the river. The hollow carcass of the dove which he wore over his head and shoulders seemed little heavier than a pillow. In the brief spell of warm sunlight he lifted the outstretched wings, feeling their buoyancy and the cutting flow of air through the feathers. A few stronger gusts moved across the crest of the ridge, almost lifting him into the wind, and he stepped closer to the small oak which hid him from the house below.

  Against the trunk rested his rifle and bandoliers. Crispin lowered the wings and gazed up at the sky, making certain for the last time that no stray hawk or peregrine was about. The effectiveness of the disguise had exceeded all his hopes. Kneeling on the ground, the wings furled at his sides and the hollowed head of the bird lowered over his face, he felt he completely resembled the dove.

  Below him the ground sloped toward the house. From the deck of the picket ship the cliff face had seemed almost vertical, but in fact the ground shelved downward at a steady but gentle gradient. With luck he might even manage to be airborne for a few steps. However, for most of the way to the house he intended simply to run downhill.

  As he waited for Catherine York to appear he freed his right arm from the metal clamp he had fastened to the wing bone of the bird. He reached out to set the safety catch on his rifle. By divesting himself of the weapon and his bandoliers, and assuming the disguise of the bird, he had, as he understood, accepted the insane logic of the woman’s mind. Yet the symbolic flight he was about to perform would free not only Catherine York, but himself as well, from the spell of the birds.

  A door opened in the house, a broken pane of glass catching the sunlight. Crispin stood up behind the oak, his hands bracing themselves on the wings. Catherine York appeared, carrying something across the yard. She paused by the rebuilt nest, her white hair lifting in the breeze, and adjusted some of the feathers.

  Stepping from behind the tree, Crispin walked forward down the slope. Ten yards ahead he reached a patch of worn turf. He began to run, the wings flapping unevenly at his sides. As he gained speed his feet raced across the ground. Suddenly the wings steadied as they gained their purchase on the updraught, and he found himself able to glide, the air rushing past his face.

  He was a hundred yards from the house when the woman noticed him. A few moments later, when she had brought her shotgun from the kitchen, Crispin was too busy trying to control the speeding glider in which he had become a confused but jubilant passenger. His voice cried out as he soared across the falling ground, feet leaping in ten-yard strides, the smell of the bird’s blood and plumage filling his lungs.

  He reached the perimeter of the meadow that ringed the house, crossing the hedge fifteen feet above the ground. He was holding with one hand to the soaring carcass of the dove, his head half-lost inside the skull, when the woman fired twice at him. The first charge went through the tail, but the second shot hit him in the chest, down into the soft grass of the meadow among the dead birds.

  Half an hour later, when she saw that Crispin had died, Catherine York walked forward to the twisted carcass of the dove and began to pluck away the choicest plumes, carrying them back to the nest which she was building again for the great bird that would come one day and bring back her son.

  The Sound-Sweep

  One

  By midnight Madame Gioconda’s headache had become intense. All day the derelict walls and ceiling of the sound stage had reverberated with the endless din of traffic accelerating across the midtown flyover which arched fifty feet above the studio’s roof, making the faded air feel leaden and angry.

  Exhausting but at least impersonal, these sounds Madame Gioconda could bear. At dusk, however, when the flyover quieted, they were overlaid by the mysterious clapping of her phantoms, the sourceless applause that rustled down onto the stage from the darkness around her. At first a few scattered ripples from the front rows, it soon spread to the entire auditorium, mounting to a tumultuous ovation in which she suddenly detected a note of sarcasm, a single shout of derision that drove a spear of pain through her forehead, followed by an uproar of boos and catcalls that filled the tortured air. It always drove her away toward her couch, where she lay gasping helplessly until Mangon arrived at midnight, hurrying onto the stage with his sonovac.

  Understanding her, he first concentrated on sweeping the walls and ceiling clean, draining away the heavy depressing underlayer of traffic noises. Carefully he ran the long snout of the sonovac over the ancient scenic flats (relics of her previous roles at the Metropolitan Opera House) which screened in Madame Gioconda’s makeshift home—the great collapsing Byzantine bed (Othello) mounted against the microphone turret; the huge framed mirrors with their peeling silver screen (Orpheus) stacked in one corner by the bandstand; the stove (Trovatore) set up on the program director’s podium, the gilt-trimmed dressing table and wardrobe (Figaro) stuffed with newspaper and magazine clippings. He swept them methodically, moving the sonovac�
�s nozzle in long strokes, drawing out the dead residues of sound that had accumulated during the day.

  By the time he finished the air was clear again, the atmosphere lightened, its overtones of fatigue and irritation dissipated. Gradually Madame Gioconda recovered. Sitting up weakly, she smiled wanly at Mangon. Mangon grinned back encouragingly, slipped the kettle onto the stove for Russian tea—sweetened by the usual phenobarbitone chaser—switched off the sonovac and indicated to her that he was going outside to empty it.

  Down in the alley behind the studio he clipped the sonovac onto the intake manifold of the sound truck. The vacuum drained in a few seconds, but he waited a discretionary two or three minutes before returning, keeping up the pretense that Madame Gioconda’s phantom audience was real. Of course the cylinder was always empty, containing only the usual daily detritus—the sounds of a door slam, a partition collapsing somewhere or the kettle whistling, a grunt or two, and later, when the headaches began, Madame Gioconda’s pitiful moanings. The riotous appause, that would have lifted the roof off the Met, let alone a small radio station, the jeers and hoots of derision were, he knew, quite imaginary, figments of Madame Gioconda’s world of fantasy. They were phantoms from the past of a once great prima donna who had been dropped by her public and had retreated into her imagination, each evening conjuring up a blissful dream of being once again applauded by a full house at the Metropolitan. Guilt and resentment turned the dream sour by midnight, inverting it into a nightmare of fiasco and failure.

  Why she should torment herself was difficult to understand, but at least the nightmare kept Madame Gioconda just this side of sanity. Mangon, who revered and loved her, would have been the last person in the world to disillusion her. Each evening, when he finished his calls for the day, he would drive his sound truck all the way over from the West Side to the abandoned radio station under the flyover at the deserted end of F Street. There he would go through the pretense of sweeping Madame Gioconda’s apartment on the stage of studio 2 charging no fee; and he would make tea and listen to her reminiscences and plans for revenge, then see her asleep and tiptoe out, a wry but pleased smile on his youthful face.

  He had been calling on Madame Gioconda for nearly a year, 102

  but what his precise role was in relation to her he had not yet decided. Oddly enough, although he was more or less indispensable now to the effective operation of her fantasy world, she showed little personal interest or affection for Mangon. He assumed that this indifference was merely part of the autocratic personality of a world-famous prima donna, particularly one very conscious of the tradition—now, alas, meaningless—of Melba, Callas, Gioconda. To serve at all was the privilege. In time, perhaps, Madame Gioconda might accord him some sign of favor.

  Without him, certainly, her prognosis would have been poor. Lately the headaches had become more menacing, as she insisted that the applause was growing stormier, the boos and catcalls more vicious. Whatever the psychic mechanism generating the fantasy system, Mangon realized that ultimately she would need him at the studio all day, holding back the enveloping tides of nightmare and insanity with dummy passes of the sonovac. Then, perhaps, when the dream crumbled, he would regret having helped her to delude herself. With luck, though, she might achieve her ambition of making a comeback. She had told him something of her scheme—a serpentine mixture of blackmail and bribery—and privately Mangon hoped to launch a plot of his own to return her to popularity. By now she had unfortunately reached the point where success alone could save her from disaster.

  She was sitting up when he returned, propped back on an enormous gold lame cushion, the single lamp at the foot of the couch throwing a semicircle of light onto the great flats which divided the sound stage from the auditorium. These were all from her last operatic role—The Medium—and represented a complete interior of the old spiritualist’s seance chamber, the one coherent feature in Madame Gioconda’s present existence. Surrounded by fragments from a dozen roles, even Madame Gioconda herself, Mangon reflected, seemed compounded of several separate identities. A tall figure, with full shapely shoulders and massive ribcage, she had a large handsome face topped by a magnificent coiffure of rich blue-black hair—the exact prototype of the classical diva. She must have been almost fifty, yet her soft creamy complexion and small features were those of a child. The eyes, however, belied her. Large and watchful, slashed with mascara, they regarded the world around her balefully, narrowing even as Mangon approached. Her teeth too were bad, stained by tobacco and cheap cocaine. When she was roused, and her full violet lips curled with rage, revealing the blackened hulks of her dentures and the acid flickering tongue, her mouth looked like a very vent of hell. Altogether she was a formidable woman.

  As Mangon brought her tea she heaved herself up and made room for him by her feet among the debris of beads, loose diary pages, horoscopes, and jeweled address books that littered the couch. Mangon sat down, surreptitiously noting the time (his first calls were at 9:30 the next morning and loss of sleep deadened his acute hearing), and prepared himself to listen to her for half an hour.

  Suddenly she flinched, shrank back into the cushion and gestured agitatedly in the direction of the darkened bandstand.

  “They’re still clapping!” she shrieked. “For God’s sake sweep them away, they’re driving me insane. Ooooohh . . .” she rasped theatrically, “over there, quickly . . . !”

  Mangon leapt to his feet. He hurried over to the bandstand and carefully focused his ears on the tiers of seats and plywood music stands. They were all immaculately clean, well below the threshold at which embedded sounds began to radiate detectable echoes. He turned to the corner walls and ceiling. Listening very carefully, he could just hear seven muted pads, the dull echoes of his footsteps across the floor. They faded and vanished, followed by a low threshing noise like blurred radio static—in fact Madame Gioconda’s present tantrum. Mangon could almost distinguish the individual words, but repetition muffled them.

  Madame Gioconda was still writhing about on the couch, evidently not to be easily placated, so Mangon climbed down off the stage and made his way through the auditorium to where he had left his sonovac by the door. The power lead was outside in the truck but he was sure Madame Gioconda would fail to notice.

  For five minutes he worked away industriously, pretending to sweep the bandstand again, then put down the sonovac and returned to the couch.

  Madame Gioconda emerged from the cushion, sounded the air carefully with two or three slow turns of the head, and smiled at him.

  “Thank you, Mangon,” she said silkily, her eyes watching him thoughtfully. “You’ve saved me again from my assassins. They’ve become so cunning recently they can even hide from you.”

  Mangon smiled ruefully to himself at this last remark. So he had been a little too perfunctory before; Madame Gioconda was keeping him up to the mark.

  However, she seemed genuinely grateful. “Mangon, my dear,” she reflected as she remade her face in the mirror of an enormous compact, painting on magnificent green eyes like a cobra’s, “what would I do without you? How can I ever repay you for looking after me?”

  The questions, whatever their sinister undertones (had he detected them, Mangon would have been deeply shocked) were purely rhetorical. All their conversations, for that matter, were entirely one-sided. For Mangon was a mute. From the age of three, when his mother had savagely punched him in the throat to stop his crying, he had been stone dumb, his vocal chords irreparably damaged. In all their endless exchanges of midnight confidences, Mangon had contributed not a single spoken word.

  His muteness, naturally, was part of the attraction he felt for Madame Gioconda. Both of them in a sense had lost their voices, he to a cruel mother, she to a fickle and unfaithful public. This bound them together, gave them a shared sense of life’s injustice, though Mangon, like all innocents, viewed his misfortune without rancor. Both, too, were social outcasts. Rescued from his degenerate parents when he was four, Mangon had been brough
t up in a succession of state institutions, a solitary wounded child. His one talent had been his remarkable auditory powers, and at fourteen he was apprenticed to the Metropolitan Sonic Disposal Service. Regarded as little better than garbage collectors, the sound-sweeps were an outcast group of illiterates. They were all mutes (the city authorities preferred these—their discretion could be relied upon) and social cripples who lived in a chain of isolated shacks on the edge of an old explosives plant in the sand dunes to the north of the city which served as the sonic dump.

  Mangon had made no friends among the sound-sweeps, and Madame Gioconda was the first person in his life with whom he had been intimately involved. Apart from the pleasure of being able to help her, a considerable factor in Mangon’s devotion was that until her decline she had represented (as to all mutes) the most painful possible reminder of his own voiceless condition, and that now he could at last come to terms with years of unconscious resentment.

  This soon done, he devoted himself wholeheartedly to serving Madame Gioconda.

  * * *

  Inhaling moodily on a black cigarette clamped into a long jade holder, she was outlining her plans for a comeback. These had been maturing for several months and involved nothing less than persuading Hector LeGrande, chairman-in-chief of Video City, the huge corporation that transmitted a dozen TV and radio channels, into providing her with a complete series of television spectaculars. Built around Madame Gioconda and lavishly dressed and orchestrated, they would spearhead the international revival of classical opera that was her unfading dream.

  “La Scala, Covent Garden, the Met—what are they now?” she demanded angrily. “Bowling alleys! Can you believe, Mangon, that in those immortal theaters where I created my Tosca, my Butterfly, my Brunnehilde, they now have—” she spat out a gust of smoke “—beer and skittles!”