Slow Birds: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  Presently Tarnover awoke, and struggled groggily erect. He groaned, rocked sideways, recovered his balance.

  ‘Babbidge … Partridge, Ned Darrow …? What the hell are you up to?’

  Jason planted hands on hips. ‘Oh, we’re just playing a little prank, same as you did on my brother Dan. Who’s missing now; maybe forever, thanks to you.’

  ‘I never – ’

  ‘Admit it, then we might cut you down.’

  ‘And happen we mightn’t,’ said Ned. ‘Not till the Wheatsheaf closes. But look on the bright side: happen we might.’

  Tarnover’s legs twitched as he tested the bonds. He winced. ‘I honestly meant your brother no harm.’

  Sam smirked. ‘Nor do we mean you any. Ain’t our fault if a bird decides to fly off. Anyway, only been here an hour or so. Could easily be here all night. Right, lads?’

  ‘Right,’ said Ned. ‘And I’m thirsty. Race you? Last one buys?’

  ‘He’s admitted he did it,’ said Jason. ‘You heard him.’

  ‘Look, I’m honestly very sorry if – ’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Sam. ‘You can stew for a while, seeing as how you’ve made the Babbidges stew. You can think about how sorry you really are.’ Partridge hoisted his sail.

  It was not exactly how Jason had envisioned his revenge. This seemed like an anti-climax. Yet, to Tarn-over no doubt it was serious enough. The champion was sweating slightly … Jason hoisted his sail, too. Presently the men skated away … to halt by unspoken agreement a quarter of a mile away. They stared back at Tarnover’s little silhouette upon his metal steed.

  ‘Now if it was me,’ observed Sam. ‘I’d shuffle myself along till I fell off the front … Rub you a bit raw, but that’s how to do it.’

  ‘No need to come back, really,’ said Ned. ‘Hey, what’s he trying?’

  The silhouette had ducked. Perhaps Tarnover had panicked and wasn’t thinking clearly, but it looked as if he was trying to lean over far enough to unfasten the knot beneath, or free one of his ankles. Suddenly the distant figure inverted itself. It swung right round the bird, and Tarnover’s head and chest were hanging upside down, his arms flapping. Or perhaps Tarnover had hoped the cord would snap under his full weight; but snap it did not. And once he was stuck in that position there was no way he could recover himself upright again, or do anything about inching along to the front of the bird.

  Ned whistled. ‘He’s messed himself right up now, and no mistake. He’s ruddy crucified himself.’

  Jason hesitated before saying it: ‘Maybe we ought to go back? I mean, a man can die hanging upside down too long … Can’t he?’ Suddenly the whole episode seemed unclean, unsatisfactory.

  ‘Go back?’ Sam Partridge fairly snarled at him. ‘You were the big mouth last night. And whose idea was it to tie him on the bird? You wanted him taught a lesson, and he’s being taught one. We’re only trying to oblige you, Jay.’

  ‘Yes, I appreciate that.’

  ‘You made enough fuss about it. He isn’t going to wilt like a bunch of flowers in the time it takes us to swallow a couple of pints.’

  And so they skated on, back to the Wheatsheaf in Atherton.

  At ten thirty, somewhat the worse for wear, the three men spilled out of the alehouse into Sheaf Street. A quarter moon was dodging from rift to rift in the cloudy sky, shedding little light.

  ‘I’m for bed,’ said Sam. ‘Let the sod wriggle his way off.’

  ‘And who cares if he don’t?’ said Ned. ‘That way, nobody’ll know. Who wants an enemy for life? Do you, Jay? This way you can get on with things. Happen Tarnover’ll bring your brother back from wherever it is.’ Shouldering his sail and swinging his skates, Ned wandered off up Sheaf Street.

  ‘But,’ said Jason. He felt as though he had blundered into a midden. There was a reek of sordidness about what had taken place. The memory of Tarnover hanging upside-down had tarnished him.

  ‘But what?’ said Sam.

  Jason made a show of yawning. ‘Nothing. See you.’ And he set off homeward.

  But as soon as he was out of sight of Sam he slipped down through Butcher’s Row in the direction of the glass, alone.

  It was dark out there with no stars and only an occasional hint of moonlight, yet the breeze was steady and there was nothing to trip over on the glass. The bird wouldn’t have moved more than a hundred yards. Jason made good speed.

  The slow bird was still there. But Tarnover wasn’t with it; its belly was barren of any hanged man.

  As Jason skated to a halt, to look closer, figures arose in the darkness from where they had been lying flat upon the glass, covered by their sails. Six figures. Eight. Nine. All had lurked within two or three hundred yards of the bird, though not too close – nor any in the direction of Atherton. They had left a wide corridor open; which now they closed.

  As the Tuckerton men moved in on him, Jason stood still, knowing that he had no chance.

  Max Tarnover skated up, accompanied by that same beefy farmer with the wart.

  ‘I did come back for you,’ began Jason.

  The farmer spoke, but not to Jason. ‘Did he now? That’s big of him. Could have saved his time, what with Tim Earnshaw happening along – when Master Tarnover was gone a long time. So what’s to be done with him, eh?’

  Tit for tat, I’d say,’ said another voice.

  ‘Let him go and look for his kid brother,’ offered a third, ‘Instead of sending other folk on his errands. What a nerve.’

  Tarnover himself said nothing; he just stood in the night silently.

  So, presently, Jason was raised on to the back of the bird and his feet were tied tightly under it. But his wrists were bound together too, and for good measure the cord was linked through his belt.

  Within a few minutes all the skaters had sped away towards Tuckerton.

  Jason sat. Remembering Sam’s words he tried to inch forward, but with both hands fastened to his waist this proved impossible; he couldn’t gain purchase. Besides, he was scared of losing his balance as Tarnover had.

  He sat and thought of his mother. Maybe she would grow alarmed when he didn’t come home. Maybe she would go out and rouse Uncle John … And maybe she had gone to bed already.

  But maybe she would wake in the night and glance into his room and send for help. With fierce concentration he tried to project thoughts and images of himself at her, two miles away.

  An hour wore on, then two; or so he supposed from the moving of the moon-crescent. He wished he could slump forward and sleep. That might be best; then he wouldn’t know anything. He still felt drunk enough to pass out, even with his face pressed against metal. But he might easily slide to one side or the other in his sleep.

  How could his mother survive a double loss? It seemed as though a curse had descended on the Babbidge family, but of course that curse had a human name; and the name was Max Tarnover. So for a while Jason damned him, and imagined retribution by all the villagers of Atherton. A bloody feud. Cottages burnt. Perhaps a rape. Deaths even. No Mayday festival ever again.

  But would Sam and Ned speak up? And would Atherton folk be sufficiently incensed, sufficiently willing to destroy the harmony of the five villages in a world where other things were so unsure? Particularly as some less than sympathetic souls might say that Jason, Sam, and Ned had started it all.

  Jason was involved in imagining a future feud between Atherton and Tuckerton that he almost forgot he was astride a slow bird. There was no sense of motion, no feeling of going anywhere. When he recollected where he was, it actually came as a shock.

  He was riding a bird.

  But for how long?

  It had been around, what, six hours now? A bird could stay for a whole day. In which case he had another eighteen hours left to be rescued in. Or if it only stayed for half a day, that would take him through to morning. Just.

  He found himself wondering what was underneath the metal skin of the bird. Something which could turn five miles of landscape into a sheet of glass
, certainly. But other things too. Things that let it ignore gravity. Things that let it dodge in and out of existence. A brain of some kind, even?

  ‘Can you hear me, bird?’ he asked it. Maybe no one had ever spoken to a slow bird before.

  The slow bird did not answer.

  Maybe it couldn’t, but maybe it could hear him, even so. Maybe it could obey orders.

  ‘Don’t disappear with me on your back,’ he told it. ‘Stay here. Keep on flying just like this.’

  But since it was doing just that already, he had no idea whether it was obeying him or not.

  ‘Land, bird. Settle down on to the glass. Lie still.’

  It did not. He felt stupid. He knew nothing at all about the bird. Nobody did. Yet somewhere, someone knew. Unless the slow birds did indeed come from God, as miracles, to punish. To make men God-fearing. But why should a God want to be feared? Unless God was insane, in which case the birds might well come from Him.

  They were something irrational, something from elsewhere, something which couldn’t be understood by their victims any more than an ant colony understood the gardener’s boot, exposing the white eggs to the sun and the sparrows.

  Maybe something had entered the seas from elsewhere the previous century, something that didn’t like land dwellers. Any of them. People or sheep, birds or worms or plants … It didn’t seem likely. Salt water would rust steel. But for the first time in his life Jason thought about it intently.

  ‘Bird, what are you. Why are you here?’

  Why, he thought, is anything here? Why is there a world and sky and stars? Why shouldn’t there simply be nothing for ever and ever?

  Perhaps that was the nature of death: nothing for ever and ever. And one’s life was like a slow bird. Appearing then vanishing, with nothing before and nothing after.

  An immeasurable period of time later, dawn began to streak the sky behind him, washing it from black to grey. The greyness advanced slowly overhead as thick clouds filtered the light of the rising but hidden sun. Soon there was enough illumination to see clear all around. It must be five o’clock. Or six. But the grey glass remained blankly empty.

  Who am I? wondered Jason, calm and still. Why am I conscious of a world? Why do people have minds, and think thoughts? For the first time in his life he felt that he was really thinking – and thinking had no outcome. It led nowhere.

  He was, he realized, preparing himself to die. Just as all the land would die, piece by piece, fused into glass. Then no one would think thoughts any more, so that it wouldn’t matter if a certain Jason Babbidge had ceased thinking at half past six one morning in May. After all, the same thing happened every night when you went to sleep, didn’t it? You stopped thinking. Perhaps everything would be purer and cleaner afterwards. Less untidy, less fretful: a pure ball of glass. In fact, not fretful at all, even if all the stars in the sky crashed into each other, even if the earth was swallowed by the sun. Silence, forever: once there was no one about to hear.

  Maybe this was the message of the slow birds. Yet people only carved their initials upon them. And hearts. And the names of places which had been vitrified in a flash; or else which were going to be.

  I’m becoming a philosopher, thought Jason in wonder.

  He must have shifted into some hyperconscious state of mind: full of lucid clarity, though without immediate awareness of his surroundings. For he was not fully aware that help had arrived until the cord binding his ankles was cut and his right foot thrust up abruptly, toppling him off the other side of the bird into waiting arms.

  Sam Partridge, Ned Darrow, Frank Yardley, and Uncle John, and Brian Sefton from the sawmill – who ducked under the bird brandishing a knife, and cut the other cord to free his wrists.

  They retreated quickly from the bird, pulling Jason with them. He resisted feebly. He stretched an arm towards the bird.

  ‘It’s all right, lad,’ Uncle John soothed him.

  ‘No, I want to go,’ he protested.

  ‘Eh?’

  At that moment the slow bird, having hung around long enough, vanished; and Jason stared at where it had been, speechless.

  In the end his friends and uncle had to lead him away from that featureless spot on the glass, as though he was an idiot. Someone touched by imbecility.

  But Jason did not long remain speechless.

  Presently he began to teach. Or preach. One or the other. And people listened; at first in Atherton, then in other places too.

  He had learned wisdom from the slow bird, people said of him. He had communed with the bird during the night’s vigil on the glass.

  His doctrine of nothingness and silence spread, taking root in fertile soil, where there was soil remaining rather than glass – which was in most places, still. A paradox, perhaps; how eloquently he spoke – about being silent! But in so doing he seemed to make the silence of the glass lakes sing; and to this people listened with a new ear.

  Jason travelled throughout the whole island. And this was another paradox, for what he taught was a kind of passivity, a blissful waiting for a death that was more than merely personal, a death which was also the death of the sun and stars and of all existence, a cosmic death which transfigured individual mortality. And sometimes he even sat on the back of a bird that happened by, to speak to a crowd – as though chancing fate or daring, begging, the bird to take him away. But he never sat for more than an hour, then he would scramble down, trembling but quietly radiant. So besides being known as ‘The Silent Prophet,’ he was also known as ‘The Man who rides the Slow Birds.’

  On balance, it could have been said that he worked great psychological good for the communities that survived; and his words even spread overseas. His mother died proud of him – so he thought – though there was always an element of wistful reserve in her attitude …

  Many years later, when Jason Babbidge was approaching sixty, and still no bird had ever borne him away, he settled back in Atherton in his old home – to which pilgrims of silence would come, bringing prosperity to the village and particularly to the Wheatsheaf, managed now by the daughter of the previous landlord.

  And every Mayday the skate-sailing festival was still held, but now always on the glass at Atherton. No longer was it a race and a competition; since in the end the race of life could not be won. Instead it had become a pageant, a glass ballet, a re-enactment of the event of many years ago – a passion play performed by the four remaining villages. Tuckerton and all its folk had been glassed ten years before by a bird which destroyed itself so that the circle of annihilation exactly touched that edge of the glass where Tuckerton had stood till then.

  One morning, the day before the festival, a knock sounded on Jason’s door. His housekeeper, Martha Prestidge, was out shopping in the village; so Jason answered.

  A boy stood there. With red hair, and freckles.

  For a moment Jason did not recognize the boy. But then he saw that it was Daniel. Daniel, unchanged. Or maybe grown up a little. Maybe a year older.

  ‘Dan …?’

  The boy surveyed Jason bemusedly, his balding crown, his sagging girth, his now spindly legs, and the heavy stick with a stylized bird’s head on which he leaned, gripping it with a liver spotted hand.

  ‘Jay,’ he said after a moment, ‘I’ve come back.’

  ‘Back? but …’

  ‘I know what the birds are now! They are weapons. Missiles. Tens and hundreds of thousands of them. There’s a war going on. But it’s like a game as well: a board game run by machines. Machines that think. It’s only been going on for a few days in their time. The missiles shunt to and fro through time to get to their destination. But they can’t shunt in the time of that world, because of cause and effect. So here’s where they do their shunting. In our world. The other possibility-world.’

  This is nonsense. I won’t listen.’

  ‘But you must, Jay! It can be stopped for us before it’s too late. I know how. Both sides can interfere with each other’s missiles and explode them ou
t of sight – that’s here – if they can find them fast enough. But the war over there’s completely out of control. There’s a winning pattern to it, but this only matters to the machines any longer, and they’re buried away underground. They build the birds at a huge rate with material from the Earth’s crust, and launch them into other-time automatically.’

  ‘Stop it, Dan.’

  ‘I fell off the bird over there – but I fell into a lake, so I wasn’t killed, only hurt. There are still some pockets of land left, around the Bases. They patched me up, the people there. They’re finished, in another few hours of their time – though it’s dozens of years to us. I brought them great hope, because it meant that all life isn’t finished. Just theirs. Life can go on. What we have to do is build a machine that will stop their machines finding the slow birds over here. By making interference in the air. There are waves. Like waves of light, but you can’t see them.’

  ‘You’re raving.’

  ‘Then the birds will shunt here. But harmlessly. Without glassing us. And in a hundred years’ time, or a few hundred, they’ll even stop coming at all, because the winning pattern will be all worked out by then. One of the war machines will give up, because it lost the game. Oh I know it ought to be able to give up right now! But there’s an element of the irrational programmed into the machines’ brains too; so they don’t give up too soon. When they do, everyone will be long dead there on land – and some surviving people think the war machines will start glassing the ocean floor as a final strategy before they’re through. But we can build an air-wave-maker. They’ve locked the knowledge in my brain. It’ll take us a few years to mine the right metals and tool up and provide a power source …’ Young Daniel ran out of breath briefly. He gasped. ‘They had a prototype slow bird. They sat me on it and sent me into other-time again. They managed to guide it. It emerged just ten miles from here. So I walked home.’