by John Gribbin
*
I’m glad you took a drink in the end. I knew you’d change your attitude. I can see I’ve gone and blown your mind, you poor bastard. Here, would you like me to let one out to play on your lap? He won’t bite too hard, their teeth are still quite delicate when they’re first coming in. Ha ha! Look at the little critter go! I’ll set a few more out and we can see them play with each other. Little monsters, make human children look well behaved, I can tell you. This little guy here, the orange one, I call him Hubert, I made him out of a chaffinch who I reversed half a million times, took me three years. Three years of setting the chamber going, stopping, starting again, making him into an egg then watching his parents appear then ringing the neck of the male and setting the female going again. Poor old men, we really are history’s janitors, the dogsbodies, while women do all the important work in evolutionary terms.
Could I do that to a human? What a sick frigging idea, mate. I’d need a lot bigger glass chambers for a kick-off, which would be higher technology than I can lay my hands on here in suburban Antwerp. And Christ, watching two real live adult human beings appear out of nothing then knowing you have to kill one of them? That would be a real horror movie. You want another drink? Hell, this is just me playing around with some poor rodents, sky rats. You’ll forgive me if I don’t display quite the sentimentality for the little flying feckers that my fellow men and women do, but maybe that’s because I know they’re going to take over the planet. The meek shall inherit the Earth it says in the bible, and it’s rarely wrong, about that or anything else. The birds are going to inherit the sky, actually, then everything.
*
Hello again. Good to see you, mate. You don’t look so good, I tell you. Grey about the eyes, a tad unshaven, if I might say so. Not that I’m entitled by any means to regard myself as a paragon of good health and sartorial elegance, but hey I’m just a wino, remember, not married with a good job and stuff? Really? Man, I’m sorry to hear that, you sound like you could do with a friend to talk to, a good drink. Say, you got some money on you? Let’s treat ourselves to a couple of crates each and make a weekend of it, what do you say?
*
Well, now you’ve nearly seen it all, eh, Adam? I know that’s not your real name, but I’m going to rename you, the first man you see, the first man other than me of course, to set eyes upon this stuff. I don’t count because I’m not a man anymore. I’m a god, because I can create life and destroy it, because I’ve seen the true hidden meaning of life, understood it and mastered it and put it to use. Maybe that’s all gods are, people who’ve found out the real way of things and learned to rise above it all. That blackbird and those two starlings are coming on nicely, aren’t they? We might let them out later. Things get really interesting when the booze runs out and you start to sober up on the third day. You’ve not been through that stage, so this will be your first time. Usually in the middle of the night, I find I’ll wake up and all the wee critters will be oozing out of the plasterboard ceiling and the sarking boards, running all over your skin and pecking at you. It makes you panic at first, the first couple of times, then I learned to just laugh about it. Wave after wave of avian invasion washing over you, a little foretaste of all that’s to come for the rest of humanity.
I picked up a copy of Le Monde from a waste paper basket the other day and saw that those raving lunatics at CERN are going ahead with that experiment soon, the one I warned them about. The end is nigh, my friend, want another drink of this bottle? Still a little left, before we have to settle in for the thaw-out and the shakes. Delirium Tremens is the correct Latin medical term for the effect, I believe. Hallucinations. Cold Turkey is the druggie’s version. Cold chicken for us maybe, eh? Get it? Squawk squawk, flap flap. It gets better every time. Last weekend the west gable dissolved, just slid away like a magic carpet and their leader, the bird god Loplop fluttered in to visit me. The surrealist artist Max Ernst used to do collages about him. About four feet high, red plumage and nasty looking talons but wearing a gentleman’s waistcoat and top hat and talking in a kind of metallic croaking tone of voice like a crow. He sang me a song that changed all the colours in the sky, which turned my fingers into the fine green fronds of a primordial palm waving in a swamp breeze. I got real hot and my mouth filled with sand, sweating tropical rivers. Man, I was suddenly so dried up and gagging, I got up and followed him out and tripped then flew across the suburban rooftops, flew down a few chimneys together until we found ourselves outside the supermarket. The local MP was doing the rounds in his black suit, shaking hands and kissing babies in the lead-up to the next elections. But me and Loplop rumbled him, we saw the feathers sticking out of his shirt, the beak concealed under his five-o’clock shadow.
We liberated the headless frozen chickens in the meat counter and led them all a merry dance like the pied piper, up and down the aisles and out into the street where they terrified the old ladies. How we laughed. The birds are coming back to life. Even your eggs and your omelettes aren’t safe. You’ve been murdering birds for years, centuries, millennia. But they won’t stand for it much longer. If you can’t beat them, join them. Beat them, eggbeater, get it? I’m with the birds, and we’re coming to get you. Drink eases the pain of knowing I’m a traitor, and it helps me to fly, fly like they do, and to see it all from above from where everything looks so small, so arbitrary, so fragile. You all think you’re in charge, but you’re nothing, an accident of history because the tide went your way for a while. But what does tide do? It goes out again, and reveals all the flapping fish suffocating, the washed up crabs and stones and fossils. And then it washes all your footprints away until there’s nothing. Nothing but a few cryptic clues that everybody misses. Look at me. Like I said, I used to be a particle physicist, but now I’m just a drunk.
II
Monsieur Oiseau is just the nickname the children of La Chapelle call him. Rumour has it he is actually a form of bipedal dinosaur, approximately man-height, the result of some grotesque experiment undertaken by the missing and discredited mad Belgian scientist Henri Vermeulen, who lost his job under mysterious circumstances at CERN in 2012. No authenticated photographs have yet emerged of Oiseau, despite numerous, supposed, sightings and ongoing investigations by Swiss, Belgian, and French undercover police agencies. Paris is a big place. Sightings have also been reported in the 18th arrondissement. Monsieur Oiseau seems to emerge only at night in poorly lit areas, usually in overcast conditions when even moonlight is limited. He wears a long dark grey raincoat and hat and strangely shaped boots which have been adapted to hold his talons, some of which have been seen to protrude through the leather in places. Oiseau’s movements appear odd, even at a distance, resembling human walking only superficially. His progress is generally slow and furtive, but on occasions when he has been challenged by ill-intentioned adolescents he has been seen to move off at a phenomenal speed, sometime removing his ungainly footwear in order to do so. A video on YouTube, unauthenticated and possibly a fake, purports to show a shady figure sprinting down Rue d’Orsel at a speed in excess of seventy miles an hour, far in excess of human capability. This might provide a clue as to why the creature has so far proven so elusive and evaded capture. A spate of stray dog carcasses found in 2013 was connected for a while with the Oiseau rumours, as was an unusual number of disappearances of homeless men and drug-addicts last winter, followed by accusations that the Gendarmerie had been implicated in a cover-up in order to reduce the risk of panic among the wider Parisian population. The impression that Oiseau seems to limit his appearances to the poorer immigrant areas of the capital has fuelled social discontent and the suspicion that not enough has been done to address the danger. Some sceptics maintain that this bird-man is an urban myth, a projection of social division and simmering racial tensions in city where far-right politics and large ethnic populations sit uncomfortably side by side.
III
The shouting children and ragged street people scare her. Her creator, or her father (as she t
hinks of him) Professor Vermeulen named her Sappho, and this is the name with which she thinks of herself. She wants only to be left alone but, paradoxically, the dense chaotic streets of a major European city are actually the safest hiding place she has been able to devise. She needs a ready food source, and the poor and the homeless seem to her to have been discarded by the wider populace, pushed aside like the unfinished dirty dinner plates of overfed aristocrats. Vermeulen showed her films of human history. She understands a great deal of it, insofar as any rational being can, or at least all she needs to. Her large green eyes, slit vertically and merciless as a hawk’s are generally enough to paralyse any would-be assailant at close quarters, through sheer shock. Her powerful prehensile tale is also extremely useful and unexpected in any contretemps with mammalian bipeds.
Of course she is a female. This is how it works, the Matryoshka Doll principle as Vermeulen explained it. She is the product of a localised time-reversal experiment, and so her metabolism and development is anti-entropic. She is getting slowly younger in other words, and in several years’ time will finally have to seek out a safe and secluded hide-away in which to regress to the size of a helpless chick and synthesise finally into a beautiful turquoise egg the size of a basketball. Then the most mysterious and miraculous thing of all will happen: both her adult parents will spontaneously emerge out of the ether as the egg deliquesces into its component parts. Without the professor on hand for the first time, of course, nobody will be able to supervise the destruction of the unnecessary male, and so the danger will emerge of the population starting to grow and expand over time from that point forward. Starting out as fully grown intelligent adults, will present this new reptilian race with a distinct evolutionary advantage over its human counterparts. If they can stay undetected and breed and expand in covert locations dispersed across Europe, then in time they may present a real threat to the current human dominance of the planet.
For now Sappho enjoys her evening walk by the Seine, walks down the narrow streets of the Île Saint-Louis wrapped in the perceptual scarf of winter fog, and gazes in the windows of the antique shops. On the next corner, she spies a fine lady’s hat with peacock feathers in it. On a whim, her claw smashes the glass and she struts in to seize it. Two blocks on, a police car pulls up at a crossroads, blocking the street, and she regrets having been so foolhardy to have ventured for the first time this close to the city centre and the middle-class areas. The two uniformed guards getting out either side of the vehicle ahead look better fed than her usual choice of dinner partner. She surmises that they are probably more likely to be missed too, stitched in to the whole wider fabric of human society, social pack animals that they are. Foregoing the chance to taste their flesh, she instead simply scrambles vertically straight up the four-storey façade of the Haussmann tenement immediately to her right and scuttles and flutters away across the rooftops.
Later she makes her way to one of towers of the west façade of Notre Dame, a nice flat lead roof on which she can feast on a Korean tourist with a side salad of Algerian pick-pocket, both plucked from the richly-stocked streets below. Her short vestigial feathers are quite adequate to keep her warm, even at this altitude in the chill easterly breeze of oncoming winter, and her wings, though short and ineffectual, will certainly suffice to help her glide back down in due course, should a rapid descent be necessary to evade capture before daybreak.
The way home does not prove as inconsequential as she has hoped. Driven down into the Métro to escape the pursuit of three police cars with irritating flashing lights and wailing sirens, she takes a wrong turning, failing to find the sewer entrance where she thought she remembered one, arriving instead at a busy train platform packed with opera-goers in furs and shawls, preparing to head home to their elegant well-to-do suburbs. She is their worst nightmare, the ultimate immigrant, a refugee not just from another country but from another time. The humans don’t realise it, but one of their most unwittingly effective weapons against her is their screaming when they are panicked, since it causes intense pain and disturbance to her vastly superior hearing system, evolved to let her detect herds of prey moving up to twenty-five miles away across the great plains of central Asia.
Forced onto a Métro train in confusion, she bounds through all six carriages at speed leaving dazzled and petrified passengers in her wake before smashing her way out of the front cabin and into the darkness of the tunnel beyond, swiftly taking the driver’s yelling head off, as much to silence him as by way of a snack. She finds an entrance from the Métro tunnels to the sewer system at last, which she usually knows and remembers well, but after a few miles a new section blocks her way unexpectedly so that, knowing daybreak is dangerously near, she has to take the ultimate last resort and rise up through a street gully on Rue Saint-Denis. A gypsy beggar, playing an accordion cross-legged on the pavement next to her point of emergence, looks up at her in awe as his polka grinds down to a sagging halt in his disbelieving arms. Too full to eat any more, but resourceful enough never to give up, she hold her talons out towards him and lets her long tongue salivate over his face until he parts with his coat, hat and instrument as invited and runs off gibbering.
The streets are not yet busy enough for anyone to have witnessed the truth before she completes her new disguise and kneels down over the accordion and begins to puzzle over how to coax passable human music from the instrument. The sun is up now, so this seems as reasonable a strategy as any for a place to hide until the next nightfall. Wrapped under old blankets, doubtless passers-by will just mistake her for the tragic victim of some disfiguring disease. In this shady corner by a train station, who will attempt to look past the overhanging brim of her hat or the folds of her tattered old coat? Whoever wants to meet the eyes of a beggar anyway? But if they do they will doubtless be rendered magically speechless and unable thereafter to be believed.
IV
For the benefit of the tape, this interview is between Henri Vermeulen and Officers Bertrand and DeBeer, of Interpol. A consultant scientist and psychologist, Professor Mousavi and Doctor Brezinka, are also in attendance.
Q: We thought you were dead, Monsieur Vermeulen. Where have you been hiding and why have you decided to re-emerge in plain sight after so long?
A: It’s Professor Vermeulen to you, actually. Brussels is a big place. I began to realise I was missing a relative of mine in Paris so I decided to come through and visit her here at last. You may have heard of her: six feet tall with feathers and a beak and talons.
Q: Your inappropriately joking reference is, we presume to the so called Monsieur Oiseau phenomenon. Can you tell us please of the whereabouts of this creature and its true nature?
A: As her only guardian in the world I had a moral duty to protector her from you people for as long as possible. Her name was Sappho by the way, she was female and she was as intelligent as you are, possible more so in your particular case.
Q: We notice you are talking of her in the past tense, Monsieur Vermeulen.
A: Quite so. She finally deliquesced into an egg a month ago after a six month period of vulnerable childhood during which period I watched over and cared for her. She has now been replaced by her two adult parents. Ha. I see that got your attention. No, I won’t be telling you their whereabouts any time soon. Then again, I don’t need to. Have any of you got the exact time on you?
Q: We’re asking the questions, but it’s about five minutes to noon. Why?
A: Then I suggest you get your televisions and internet fired up and get ready for a very interesting news story which will be breaking.
Q: We are on guard for your notorious pranks and hallucinations, Monsieur Vermeulen. Your file describes in detail your sorry record as a hopeless alcoholic and social misfit.
A: Oh, but I thawed out years ago. Woke up and smelt the coffee, as those damned Americans say with their invasion of Franglais. I kicked the bottle the day my little dino-birds started getting sentient and calling me daddy. Fatherhood brings out the best i
n even the worst of us, wouldn’t you say? I’ll take that as a yes. Since you seem intent in persisting in acting like complete dullards with your line of questioning, perhaps I should just start imparting the relevant and required scientific information, shall I? Your two so-called experts sitting there may at least understand some of it, even if you don’t.
Q: Mister Vermeulen. Henri…
A: Ever heard of T-symmetry? The theoretical reversal of the vector of time at the quantum level? Good. One of you at least. I’ve tried warning CERN about this and they won’t listen, which is why I have been driven to this, this campaign of avian terror, if you want to think of it that way. According to my estimates and calculations and the latest scientific papers I’ve been able to get my hands on: CERN will undertake the T-symmetry experiment some time around summer 2020. We don’t have much time left therefore, quite literally. We have to stop them from doing that. It will set a series of events in motion that will reverse the direction of time and humanity will begin moving backwards, de-evolving, generation by generation. Nobody will even be aware of this of course, because they will be trapped within their own biological framework from which everything will appear indistinguishable from normal. The net effect however will be that this planet’s future will have been aborted, we will be heading back towards the dinosaur age when creatures like my friends Castor and Pollux ruled the earth, and were probably doing rather a good job of it before a meteor struck the Yucatan peninsula.