Slow Birds: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  Unfortunately my joke had the opposite effect: it wound him up still further.

  ‘I’ll swear there’s a link between them, and the cosmos!’ he insisted. ‘We think that we do all the observing. But why shouldn’t they too observe the cosmos – using vastly different senses from ours, however extended ours are by the cyberscopes? What else can they possibly fill their minds with?’

  ‘Why, with the job of operating much larger bodies!’ said I. ‘Far more thought-space has to be taken up by simple body-monitoring. Their brains remain the same size as ours, so conscious thought is squeezed out. Didn’t they give up consciousness for the sake of something more valuable: to rejuvenate us?’

  ‘Yes – by annulling Time! But how do they tap Time? Time is the key. Did they change just to give us a longer lifespan? Or was it to build a body-field of their own, which might discover the truth we’re seeking? By another route: a biological one! Are we men perhaps just their slaves: remaining mobile and “intelligent” only so that we can service the harem and inflame their bodies every now and then to make more worker ants, and a few more Queenly Watchers? Maybe they sensed the quest long before us – though only an eye-blink ago, in the lifetime of the universe!’

  Ridiculous. I couldn’t entertain the notion. Poor Jacques was more disturbed than I feared.

  My hand fell from his. In mutual silence we walked on above supposedly gay music, which that night sounded plangent, elegiac and funereal to my ears – as though other men had been hurt recently, as well as recharged, by the harem experience. The music, composed from the musicians’ brain-waves via a skull-web, betrayed this in a dirge.

  From amongst the musicamors below we heard another cry of fear. Immediately the music itself magnified this into a banshee wail.

  As I said, Jacques was a junior cosmetician; and I was a senior prammer, in line for being prime prammer: a chief cyberscope programmer. He had experienced around five hundred half-yearly reincarnations in woman since puberty. I, considerably more. Still, we weren’t so far apart in terms of city status. Even a junior cosmetician draws on the services of many junior prammers, and can even tap a prime prammer in pursuit of a particularly daring hypothesis. Junior cosmeticians have to be given free rein for flashes of genius, or else the quest would have hardened into dogmatics millennia ago. So we make a good pod-duo, Jacques and I. Things balance out; disputes are flash-in-the-pan affairs – and we were again holding hands by the time we got back to our pod.

  Palming the entry panel open, we stepped downstairs to the roomglobe – which was currently a blue bubble in a tropic sea where tall angel fish wafted by like the sails of yachts: data memories of a warmer Earth. I had dialled these marine visuals before we left for the harem, expecting that on our return we would wish to float in amniotic bliss. But now we felt more like cold cod, with morose hooks of doubt beneath our chins, than graceful angels.

  So I dialled another scene: of pastureland, with extinct sheep cropping it, and fleecy clouds puffing overhead like bales of steam. A pastoral – with flute music to accompany, being tootled by some unseen shepherd. Jacques dialled a picnic supper for us to eat on the floor, which he softened from the day’s logic-hardness, half way to the softness of bed. We had bread, a bottle of wine, lamb and cheese analogues.

  The mood still jarred, though.

  ‘Let’s eat out under the damned stars, then!’ he cried. ‘They’re what’s uppermost in our minds.’

  So the Milky Way glowed all around us in coiling banners of light; and we were happy at last, to be alone in space together, wrapping bread around cold lamb in starlit sandwiches. Our viewpoint was from the memory of some cyber-observatory, long defunct, far out at one of the Trojan points of Jupiter.

  Jacques glanced in the direction of Andromeda, and beyond.

  ‘Consider,’ he said. ‘The expanding universe slows to a halt. Then it actually does halt, briefly. Is that moment “a moment in time”, if nothing is taking place? Can the cosmos ever become static as a whole, even for a microsecond? Yet how else can it ever begin to rebound? Time must reach zero out at the periphery, relativistically, as gravity grows huge. And here in the centre, time speeds up – or rather it grows denser. Life, the sensitive register, knows this subconsciously. The body field can feed on it – hence our rejuvenations!’

  ‘But how can Time be different in different places?’ I asked him. ‘You always said that Time is the binding force because it is simultaneous, everywhere at once.’

  That’s simple. Time is denser near an effect, than near a cause. Right now the periphery of the universe is becoming the cause: of the future implosion. This is what the body-field of woman soaks up: that huge increase in effective time pouring inwards. She’s receiving gradients of density of time. And we can’t measure such a thing. All out netting of neutrinos is useless. All the data we’ve piled up is in vain.’

  ‘Jacques, tomorrow, please! That’s tomorrow’s work, not tonight’s pleasure.’ I stroked his cheek in the milky starlight.

  But he ignored me.

  ‘In a sense woman does draw the universe towards her – by soaking up the effect of the changing gradient of Time. As matter ceases to flow outward, so Time streams back into the centre. A big enough body-field can sense this instantly, whereas our cyberscopes only tell us ancient history. So how can we men ever know when we reach the Turn? But our women will know the moment. It’s been creeping up on us all for thousands of years already, in the shift of time density.’ He laughed emptily. ‘Woman was chosen to witness the Turn, and we to serve her. All our cyberscopes are useless. We already had our receivers all along.’

  He gestured madly towards the Greater Magellanic Cloud; or was it towards the harem unseen beyond the pod wall? Brusquely I cancelled the star view, hoping that this might shock Jacques back to his senses. I dialled clear walls so that he might see our true and beautiful city, and held him tight.

  In my arms he still ranted.

  If only we could read their thoughts, then we would know the Answer! They don’t sense the passage of time, as we do. They respond to its density – and they pass on the effects to us men, in the form of renewed life. Density, yes, density! That’s it! That’s why woman’s static way of life doesn’t offend her. My other equations are all nonsense.’

  But at last he yielded to me, and to the yielding floor, which I softened still further, to sponge, to eiderdown.

  We woke to a quiet quake that was jiggling the city spokes and rocking our pod gently. The weak morning sunlight, sparse juice of a lemon which the hand of gravity did not squeeze quite tightly enough these days, nevertheless cast grey bars of shadow from the eastern arms of the diadem to slant against the harem – bars which seemed, to my keen eyes, to tremble. Or was it that the walls of the harem itself were throbbing?

  But even if the epicentre of this quake lay directly down our energy-root into the crust, I wasn’t worried; our base and taproot were strong enough to withstand such shocks.

  However, the trembling went on and on remorselessly, far beyond the timespan of any normal quake; and instead of keying our pod walls to cosmomathematical equations for the morning’s work, we left the pod and climbed up on to the roof-road, curious.

  We weren’t alone. Other men were hurrying up on the spoke ahead of us; and along other spokes to right and left. Crowds buzzed up at the zeniths. Some people pointed; others cried out.

  As soon as we joined the group of spectators up on the high point of our own spoke, we could see that the basalt blocks of the harem were rupturing here and there, pushing outwards. Other parts of the walls were crumbling like cheese or cobwebs, as though the constant seismic shock was eroding the very bonds of matter there.

  Finally the vibrations ceased, leaving two-thirds of the harem relatively intact, while the other third gaped with holes.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I reassured Jacques. ‘The robots can cut new blocks. Our women won’t die from a little sunlight leaking in.’

  ‘Are
you blind? Don’t you see what’s happening?’

  No, I hadn’t been able to see! Because I couldn’t conceive of seeing it. Because my mind erased it. But now suddenly I saw.

  Women were emerging from the ruptured harem, on to the broad base-joints of the spokes. Women, in daylight! Vast blank oval slugs, wallowing forward. Enormous sloths moving out on to the separate spokes – and crushing any man who tried to drive them back by waving his arms and screaming into their fathomless uncommunicative faces.

  As yet, no woman had shuffled out on to our own spoke. But already, up very many others crawled a white, bloated enormity, dislodging pods from their moorings so that they fell and smashed like eggs. Each gay, buoyant bridge withstood, withstood – till the woman reached about half way up to the zenith.

  Then, one by one, each spoke abruptly reached its catastrophe point and snapped or buckled to the ground below. Part fell across the starfish base, but the further reaches churned up the land itself, rock and soil.

  Yet however many men died in each collapse, the women themselves seemed hardly affected by the fall. They continued to wallow out along the now-fallen sky-bridges: crumpled roads leading them away from the city in all directions.

  Overhead, the air blanket flickered with lightning as its energies surged and faltered; picked up and faltered again – while our own crowd stood bunched together on the crown of a single isolated spike like a rib sticking out of a carcass.

  During the night, the universe had turned!

  Unashamedly I wept for all the lost alien civilizations which had risen and fallen during the billions of years throughout the youth and middle age of the universe, without ever knowing of this moment; and I wept because they had been able to flower and to fade away in peace without knowing it.

  Yet it had not been Man, either, who had marked the Turn. It had been our alien, life-giving, recumbent Queens – who had now moved out from the prison of their contemplations, towards what rendezvous?

  Our own sky-spoke shuddered as a limbless giantess grovelled out upon it. Jacques and I clung to each other in the crowd, waiting.

  The Flesh of her Hair

  Then a spirit passed before my face:

  the hair of my flesh stood up.

  JOB 4:15

  I had decided to travel back to Europe from Japan as a passenger on a cargo ship. This would be much cheaper than flying – anyway, I loathed flying – and would give me a chance, I imagined, to finish the first draft of my book on the Japanese puppet theatre.

  I did toy, for a while, with the notion of sailing from Yokohama over to Nakhodka and catching the Trans-Siberian Railway to cross the alternative ‘ocean of soil’; but though this would be even cheaper and considerably quicker than the sea journey, I feared that it would be uncomfortable and oppressive. Moreover, I was full of ‘Japanese sentiment’ – a mood the retention of which seemed essential to the success of my projected book. To be confronted suddenly by Siberia on a train crowded (I imagined) with samovars and babooshkas, military uniforms, and a motley of international travellers squeezed together like sardines, would have seemed quite inappropriate. I fancied that I could very well concentrate and crystallize into appropriate words my Japanese mood amidst the emptiness of the Pacific Ocean. I could meditate before my trusty portable Swiss typewriter, I could type a page or two, then take a turn about the deck. I would be completely detached from the world at large, able to return in spirit to the time of Chikamatsu. There would be few other passengers to bother me: ten at most. Nor would they speak my language. For I would choose a foreign ship – neither Italian nor Japanese. (I thought of myself as partly Japanese, at least in soul.)

  The next six weeks would be a period of gentle weaning from the Japan I loved – and, to mix a metaphor, of peaceful gestation of my book.

  They would also prove, from the very first day, to be a terrible mistake.

  I booked passage on the Lübeck, a container vessel outward bound from Yokohama twenty thousand kilometres non-stop by way of the Panama Canal. (When one is on the other side of the world, Italy and Germany do not seem very far apart, merely a rail journey. Besides, I had friends at Lugano in Switzerland, whom I dearly wished to visit before heading south to the stately decay of our family home outside Palermo.)

  Arriving from Kyoto aboard the bullet train, I allowed myself the luxury of a taxi from Tokyo station all the way to Yokohama docks, since I had a fair amount of luggage with me. The taxi was the usual lurid affair, striped in red and orange, with French chansons warbling from a stereo cassette player. But there was a fine miniature flower arrangement in a glazed pot clipped to the back of the driver’s seat, and I congratulated myself that this was the real Japan bidding farewell to me. The driver may have looked like a gangster, and driven his Toyota like one, but each morning when he rose from his quilt mattress to go on duty, he arranged flowers of the season tastefully for his vehicle.

  We arrived at the docks by mid-afternoon. I checked my luggage through Customs, and my driver whisked me along to the ship where he helped me haul my bags and traps up the gang plank on board the Lübeck. The ‘cabin boy’ – if this is the right term for a very tall blond Nordic specimen – shooed my driver back ashore and took over, showing me to my cabin, and informing me casually in impeccable English that dinner was at nineteen-thirty. We would sail with the tide at three A.M. Then he melted away.

  I surveyed the little cabin with satisfaction. It was very neat and orderly, in light pastel colours. There was a single bunk-bed, a little table for my typewriter, a chair, and a picture on one wall, of – of course – a merchant ship at sea. A porthole of satisfactory size looked out from the cabin itself, and its twin from the tiled shower cubicle and water closet adjacent. The whole was not unlike a gasthof I had once spent a few nights in at Innsbruck – if one transposed the foaming breakers I visualized outside (though actually the dockside sea at the moment was flat and oily) into the snowy peaks of the Alps.

  I hung up some clothes in the wardrobe unit, unpacked my typewriter – as a gesture of intent – then decided, on the spur of the moment, to go out and see Japan one last time, ashore.

  I found another taxi prowling the docks and had myself driven to the Motomachi shopping street – I was, after all, a bona fide tourist now. From there, as dusk gathered, I wandered down to China Town, where I ended up eventually at a raw fish restaurant; there I dined, for the last time, on thin strips of my favourite oily underbelly of tuna on pats of rice, washed down with a flask of tokkyu saké, returning to the Lübeck at ten o’clock or so.

  So far, I had met no one on the ship except for Klaus the ‘cabin boy’.

  When I woke up next morning, to the sound of a breakfast gong being dinned along the corridor past the cabins, the ship was out at sea, leaning gently from port to starboard and back again in the timeless rhythm of voyage.

  I showered quickly, scraped my face clean of bristles, dressed and was in the dining room within seven or eight minutes.

  And the public humiliation began: the humiliation which, in the first shocked moments, I believed was directed at myself alone, but which I soon came to realize was to be shared equally amongst all eight of us paying passengers, or victims. For this was the game of the Captain and officers.

  My own baptism into the game commenced almost immediately.

  The Captain, a red-faced man with meaty fists, rose from table briskly and introduced me, Gino Landolfi, to the Second Officer Herr Jünger (who was travelling with his daughter – she occupied one of the other passenger cabins), the Chief Engineer Herr Hausman, and the Steward Herr Grünewald, who was busy serving breakfast. And then to the other passengers: there were three British couples, and a Japanese boy of about sixteen. (And of course the fact that so many British people happened to be travelling on a German ship had gone a long way towards precipitating the ‘game’. I blame the British at least partly for the situation, since they had done their best to turn these particular Germans into caricatures of thems
elves. Yet at the same time, as I was to discover … Yet at the same time!)

  We all shared the same huge table, which possessed an inconvenient lip like a billiard table’s, to prevent plates and glasses from sliding off on to the floor. The Lübeck apparently had no stabilizers. Thus it could travel faster, corkscrewing through the waves from side to side. Behind my seat stretched a long window. On the wall opposite me, behind the Captain’s seat, was a serene mural of the palace of San Souci, in Potsdam.

  ‘I must make one thing quite plain, Mr Landolfi,’ said the Captain, his face suddenly beetroot-red. He actually thumped the breakfast table with his fist, violently jarring the cutlery. ‘This is my ship, and on it you will obey me. Last night you were invited to dinner at this table. You were not here. On this ship, in future you do as I say. Is that clear? I have always found Italians very unreliable people. Did you not find them so, Herr Grünewald, in the last war? Ah, but for Italy – the weak underbelly. Ah, but for Italy!’ And casually he instructed the patrolling Steward to pile my plate with sausages.

  Conversation around the table resumed, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  It was a conversation conducted entirely in English, about the likely weather at sea. The Japanese boy remained silent. (It transpired that he spoke hardly any English, and very poor German. Speaking Japanese myself, I had to take him under my wing, as it were. His father, a fanatical militarist, was sending him to Germany to qualify as a glider pilot, and presumed that he would pick up fluent German en route. Unfortunately for the eager youth, nobody was speaking German. This first morning, seeing me rebuked – without understanding the meaning of the words – he stared at me with blank shining enmity, like a kamikaze pilot.)

  To say that I was shocked to the core, would be an understatement.

  I shall not recount every such incident which so disturbed my serenity and tormented my ‘Japanese sentiment’ that within a few days – with an apparent eternity of time before me, and an infinity of featureless blank water before we were due to catch sight of Panama – I despaired of being able to write a single page of my book, or concentrate effectively upon anything. So much in despair was I, that I even thought – almost seriously – of stepping overboard. Anything, to be able to drift away from this wretched prison-ship! (I should add that the cargo hatches were so loaded down with extra, chained containers – two deep – that from the crew deck one only needed to step down into the ocean.)