Slow Birds: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  Oh yes, he was stiff: his whole body wore a velvet bloom.

  Oddly, his woman seemed to wish to see him tonight. Squashed in the blank slab of her face, her little eyes squinted down the mountainous uplands of her thorax towards the fleecy hilltop of her tall mons. Of course she lost sight of him as soon as he stepped down from the lip of the divan.

  Impulsively I hastened after him, to watch. As I arrived, he was still balanced on the fat triangular wedge of her perineum, the ‘diving platform’ bulging outward through the archway of her larger lips. Her fonts of Bartholin were releasing oily vapours, coating him with a lubricating veil and fogging her regrown hymen: that silk tissue curtain which hid the way within.

  Abruptly Jacques launched himself through that damask, cleaving it into streamers. With a graceful twist of his hips he squirmed through the vestibule, between the lesser lips. His shanks flexed against the walls. His heels administered the final push.

  And he was gone. Inside.

  As the woman’s uplands quivered with the motions of his body within her, a low resonant moan rose from the lips of her mouth; and this noise was taken up by women in the neighbouring divans as though their numb vocal chords had become tuning forks in sympathy.

  A soft solitary cooing sound was usual – but not this hint of mutual lamentation. Which was curious; and which made my head buzz.

  Choosing my own woman at random – two divan-pits further round the hall – I too climbed down on to her perineum, descending hastily below her line of sight since I noticed that she also was trying to squint at me.

  As I stood there momentarily on the fatty ledge, her spray smelled less musky, more acrid than usual; it even stung my eyes a little. Half closing my eyes, I dived forward, rending the veil, and hauled and kicked my way within her. As I butted through the soft squeeze of her muscles, up the elastic canal, my excitement mounted deliriously. For now I was laved by lymph, experiencing a quickening ecstasy as my whole body was massaged to joy from the glans of my head right down the shaft of my trunk.

  Up into that darkness I thrust myself, up to the great infolding bud of her womb entrance. My fingers tore fruit blindly from her arbor vitae. My teeth bit upon it.

  And yet … I was gritting my teeth, too. I felt as though my whole body had already climaxed once in her, and now I was trying to force pleasure upon myself a second time. I was having to think about this, and compel it, instead of simply surrendering to the flow of feeling. It was as if my frame had already detumesced.

  Yet at last my fists thrust through into her cervix. As her plug-bud burst open, her rich inner ichors drenched my head and breast and loins, and all my tense erect expectancy was finally fulfilled – in that moment outside of time when the orgasm of the whole organism sets time itself aside …

  My woman also climaxed in her own way, in that ‘no-instant’. Very soon her muscles were squeezing me back and down again, to pop out on to the fatty triangle from which I had first dived.

  She squeezed me hard, though. She almost … hurt me.

  And although, thus expelled, I glowed with fresh vitality, somehow I also felt seared and corroded. The first, reborn breath that I gasped should have tasted sweet; instead it smelled rank. The air in the divan pit seemed subtly poisonous.

  A hand gripped mine. Jacques helped me to climb out.

  He read the expression on my face. ‘You too?’ he whispered. ‘It seemed fine, inside – but then afterwards …!’

  I nodded, unwilling to speak. The strange air pervaded the whole hall: not a dizzying musk alone, but musk laced with acid gas.

  Those leg flippers wagged at us almost mockingly as we walked away to collect our clothes.

  We returned from the great basalt block of the harem, that night, Jacques and I, puzzled and hurt by the strange repulsion we had both felt in that palace of love.

  To be sure, the women had accepted us as always, becalmed there in the dim rosy light like so many beached whales – massive, mysterious, truncated beings dazing us with their scent attractors; yet there had been that bitter, tetchy undertang …

  True, we had swum into their womb-ducts deliriously enough, and been reborn; yet afterwards we had felt aborted, sloughed off like dead womb linings, soiled and cheated …

  Once, would you believe it, man could only enter woman’s body a very little way? Man had specialized his sexuality into one tiny flute. His whole body could not act as an organ. No grand chorales of all-body love could be played.

  Was this the way it had tasted long ago: this dissatisfying, partial union of which Jacques and I had now experienced a hint?

  Once, man had ejected little homunculi of himself towards a tiny womb-entry. The sheer delirious act of bursting through into the very womb was unknown. (A violent act to us males, perhaps – one of force and rupture! – yet to those comatose giantesses, our women, how gentle; so that they cooed with sweet delight. Invariably they cooed … until tonight.)

  What a strange world it must have been before the Change! Man and woman were the same size then; the female as mobile and fleet as any male.

  We still possess, as one of the ur-documents of our culture, fragments from the Case Notes of Ephraim Johnson MD, first man to witness and assess the Change. I thought a lot about that ancient man as Jacques and I walked home that night, our fingers interlaced comfortingly. Could we be the witnesses, I wondered, of some equally epochal Second Change? Hating this idea, I rejected it. Yet the suspicion still nagged at me. I felt as though I had been hurled back to that time tens of thousands of years ago, when man and woman needed to wrestle together frantically to achieve a mere fraction of our own rejuvenating, polymorphous plunge; back to that time when the numbers of the population soared abominably in pursuit of this fleeting fraction of pleasure, until nature itself took a hand, or else humanity would surely have suffocated itself and the whole world.

  Yet was it really nature, or was it man, that took a hand? Ephraim Johnson’s Case Notes are of two minds on this matter. Written in the earliest purdah days, the Case Notes place the responsibility for the Change now at the door of those chemicals with which the world’s water supplies were liberally saturated for a number of years: chemicals favouring the success of Y-chromosome sperm, for male offspring – and next at the door of sheer stress due to population pressure which at the very same time was producing hormonal changes in woman so that for every fifty males conceived, only one female would be.

  Perhaps the latter explanation is nearer the truth. Perhaps it was really a case of man thinking along the same lines as nature – inventively mimicking what nature was already doing of its own accord; for without any further dosage by chemicals from that day to this the same ratio of 50:1 has persisted.

  But of course the Change involved far more than a mere shift in the balance of the sexes. Did it not bring us our present longevity, by physical rebirth in the body of woman? For which, I need hardly add, the body of woman was obliged to grow big enough for a grown man to re-enter her, entire.

  No, a far more profound alteration had occurred than could be accounted for by an intervention by those early pharmacologists. Though at first it was not noticed. For the ratio-shift led inevitably to the start of the purdah phase of culture; since where woman are rare, they must be guarded, and all their former ‘rights’ of mobility or activity are as nothing, then. Which ensured that the real Change could take place easily within harem walls, and even pass unremarked for several generations.

  Certain documents are so epochal that they become part of our very thought processes, transcending the demise of old languages, and passing over into the new speech. So it is with Ephraim Johnson’s Notes, the vivid memoir he wrote some years after his lost and reputedly rather turgid treatise, On the Health of Women in Harems. His fragmentary words, imprinted on us as children via the datanet, cling to our hearts.

  To capsule them from memory:

  … a special study of the indolent, recumbent existence that all women were now livin
g, was long overdue … I must confess that at first I was mainly concerned with the risks of varicosity, obesity and thrombosis. I had no reason to suspect the true state induced by harem life: the alteration in the human female form away from a mobile, petite configuration towards an ovoid, recumbent form together with a general enlargement in bodily size …

  I was able to measure the slow but sure progression away from the male archetype: away from those ratios of distance between foot, solar plexus, head and upraised hand as extolled ever since Classical Times, and explained by modern mathematics as the Fibonacci Series.

  This had not been noted earlier because progressive enlargement of the torso-thorax region coincided with decrease in leg and arm length, as ambulation and manipulation became increasingly irrelevant to harem females.

  Statistically, though, the mass of the female body was on the increase. Women were growing steadily larger as their limbs diminished, their physiology tending towards a soft, fruity, pearlike state – which males continued to find deeply gratifying without perceiving the real extent or nature of the change; for visiting males were dazed by the increased output of pheromonal scent attractors, and deceived by the discreet lighting of the harems (something initially intended to help tranquillize the ‘exiles within’).

  I saw that humanity was dividing into two distinct, sexually symbiotic species: the one, small, mobile and active; the other vast, flaccid, passive …

  But it might be years before most men noticed that they were riding their partners ever higher off the couch, enmeshed in an increasing mass of flesh. Many men indeed remarked on the delicious aroma of the harems, yet there was always an element of amnesia about their reminiscences. Besides, with strict social-reward criteria being applied for entry to the harems, long gaps occurred between individual visits …

  Of course, that wasn’t all. Ephraim Johnson had no idea how large the women would become within mere centuries; nor of the vastly extended life-span which this would bring to man. Thus his words thrill us, but amuse us too.

  So I was brooding about Johnson, that man of the interface between then and now, as much as I was trying to avoid thinking about that air of change in the harem, while I escorted my lovely Jacques home to our pod, to lie in one another’s arms, reborn. Though for the first time in memory we had been reborn astringently …

  Our city spread out its aerial diadem of curving spoke-ways, which dangled living-pods beneath like raindrops on branches. It was the diadem of a splash, to be exact, with the point of impact in the earth being the central harem block – from which all arcing veins radiated, bending through the sky in fan tracery vaulting down to their final tips hanging within a mere twenty metres of the ground. Our elastic, sprung city of overwhelming beauty, delicacy and quake resilience.

  Far below the spoke we walked along, there purred the starfish arms of life-support machinery, clinging to the earth around the harem core, drawing their power from the geothermal spike plunging ten kilometres deep. The city’s root thus bore the harem upon it like the ovary of a flower, from which in turn our three hundred and sixty slim, graceful living-zone petals spread out, abloom.

  Each pod beyond Inner Zone was a home wherein from two to twenty loving individuals thrived, speculating about the universe in a thousand different ways; while away beyond the barrier of the mountains on the horizon sprouted our giant cybernated telescopes (photon, radio, neutrino, whatever), unseen and unvisited by us personally. All of their gleanings poured into our datanet, making the city itself one great receiving dish. As well as a living flower.

  Overhead, the air-blanket held thick warm atmosphere around us, setting the stars a-twinkle far more impishly than ever out at the cyberscopes, in the thin cold beyond the hills.

  But we were both still walking through Inner Zone: a calyx of sepals underslung with gaiety pods for gourmets, drugsters, liquorites, musicamors. And we might, have stopped by one of these to celebrate our rebirth. Only a sudden inexplicable scream from one of the drugpods stirred our anxiety anew, so that we only wished to hasten on over the rainbow bridge and reach home.

  And as we hurried, below our spoke the pods rocked gently like lanterns, and the spoke itself bobbed up and down a few centimetres. A mild quake was nudging the city’s base. But this was nothing. The Earth’s crust was simply slackening out as gravity declined – albeit faster, noticeably faster than it should have done.

  Naturally, we all connected the increasing decline of gravity with the coming Turn of the Universe. Using daring new equations of his own devising, Jacques had arrived at a startlingly tiny figure for how long it would take the cosmos to collapse in on itself once expansion halted and contraction began. His ideas were still reverberating round scientific circles, establishing him as very much an up-and-coming cosmetician – or ‘cosmological theoretician’, to give him his full glory – making my heart throb with pride for my chosen pod partner. Jacques had such a fine mind.

  He argued that if the half-time of collapse of any massive star into a singularity is approximately one-thousandth of a second (a reasonable figure), and if the collapse of the entire universe commences everywhere at once, then the half-time of universal collapse must be proportional on a logarithmic scale to that of any lesser stellar body.

  He disregarded the speed of light as a constraint on events, since it is the whole space-time matrix which is due to contract. He boldly discarded the gravitational mass of the universe as a prime consideration – and declared that Time itself was the general binding force and root energy of all. It was in Time, proclaimed Jacques, that the ‘missing mass’ of the universe was tied up: in elapsed, accrued Time.

  If the radius of the cosmos at its maximum is estimated at 1028 centimetres, then the half-time of collapse ought to be a mere 1014 seconds: a puny 33 million years!

  So billions of years of leisurely contemplation hardly lie in store for us, once the critical size is reached. The smearing back into Superspace will take place very rapidly indeed. Hence humanity’s justifiable obsession with predicting the moment of the Turn. It isn’t simply an abstract quest for knowledge. It seems that we are actually elected as direct witnesses of the greatest cosmic event (bar one: the primal fireball, and of course no one can possibly witness that) – and it’s one which will arrive sooner than anyone in the olden days expected!

  Whilst gravity weakens year by year, and the Earth spirals further from the Sun, the most distant galaxies are visibly starting to slow down in their headlong flight. Their red shifts lessen perceptibly. Or rather, they began slowing down a long time ago, and the light only reaches us now. But according to the standard models, not long enough ago to bring them anywhere near a standstill yet.

  Not so, says Jacques: as gravity grows less for us, so it ‘pools’ out at the periphery, slowing the far galaxies much more rapidly – and here Jacques’s subtlest equations come into play, explaining how an observer on Earth can experience diminishing gravity, even though an observer on the fringes of creation (which would seem, to him, to be the centre) would see us as slowing down due to a tightening of the bonds.

  I confess that this concept of relativistic gravity is almost too subtle for me to grasp – but Time, says Jacques, is the key.

  Anyway, the question of how soon, and in what manner, the universe will turn is inevitably the life’s work of all the specialists in our science city: philosophers, theologians, physicists alike. What else can really be important in these late days, as Earth spirals untimely towards the cold?

  To march across the metagalaxies, let alone visit nearby suns in our own galaxy, we cannot; that dream is long gone. For how could we ship even a single woman off our world? As soon hoist a whale into the sky! The acceleration would destroy the great body. Man’s earliest space ambitions faltered utterly on the nub of the Change; for woman appears to belong with Planet Earth which wrought this transformation in her – as though the Earth itself lives and thinks and breathes (even while its corsets slacken), and intends to k
eep its daughter at home.

  As for sending men on their own to the stars, well, male love is fine and beautiful: Jacques and I lie in each other’s embrace by night, enchanted, trembling with the bliss of polymorphous touch – yet it is woman-love which enables us to live this way. Far from orgasm being the ‘little death’ it used to be back in the human dawn times, now by being bathed in woman’s ichors our cells replicate themselves way past the Hayflick limit; and we rejuvenate. We can live ten thousand years, until we choose to die. And when we do so choose, we simply avoid visiting the harem; death follows peacefully within a year or so. So how could we go to the stars, womanless? And without woman how would we have time to reach the stars?

  Thus our longevity is at once our anchor – and the solace which Earth offers us, to allow us to wait and watch for the Turn, invigorated over and over again by that other side of our species which has been subconscious, dreamlike, vast and torpid for so many millennia.

  Glancing up at the distant Moon, half as far again from Earth as when man first trod its dusty seas, Jacques exclaimed fancifully:

  ‘You might say that the only enduring constant is the mass of woman! Gravity certainly isn’t. Just consider: one half of our species is only one-fiftieth by numbers. Yet woman is fifty times larger than a man! What if a woman anticipated the slackening of gravity long before man knew of it through his instruments? What if she intuited that there would be less gravity to weigh her down?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I quipped, ‘that “missing mass” isn’t locked up in Time at all – but in our women?’ I hoped that humour might soothe him, upset as he was by the inexplicable nastiness in the harem. ‘Perhaps new matter was created suddenly and multiplicatively in all the women’s bodies – to slow down the expansion!’