Slow Birds: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Dystopian; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

Where do the metal death gliders come from? To the glass-sailors of the five villages the slow birds that inched over the Earth at shoulder height, appearing and vanishing, were a mystery - until young Daniel climbed aboard one of the scarred Missiles and vowed to find out where it went Ian Watson's third short story collection is his best yet: a brilliant array of original and imaginative inventions that plunge the reader into strangely familiar new worlds.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 219

Sample

The stories gathered in this collection all first saw the light of day in magazines or anthologies; and it occurs to me that there’s as much pleasure in seeing a short story – the work of a week – in print, as in receiving newly minted copies of a full-length novel which may have been the labour of a year.

Novels are monsters which escape from the author to make their own independent way in the world. (How many novelists can actually read right through their own books? As a fresh and, hmm, novel experience?) Or, to put it another way, novels are full-grown trees – even forests – transplanted suddenly into the wild. But with short stories the situation is different, for me at least. Short stories stay at home in the mental garden; or rather, in the hothouse. For me these are the orchids, the bonsai of a writer’s creativity. (Or perhaps the sundews, pitcher plants, and Venus fly traps – seductive nightmares to the creatures trapped in them?)

Short stories still need to be looked after. Periodically they need to be collected, re-exhibited; whereupon they still do not become, collectively, a Monster – monstrous though some of their individual shapes may be.

If a novelist designs whole landscapes, too large for him or her to tread from north to south, the door to the short story planthouse remains wide open still.

Years ago I used to grow cacti and succulents avidly; and in fact my first paid publications, at age thirteen and fourteen, were columns about succulents in gardening magazines. (Given the resources, I would have grown orchids, too, and bonsai.) But then I stopped.

Yet actually, putting these stories together, I realize that I never stopped at all, but began instead to breed my own species – not by genetic, but by verbal engineering.

So here are some of my bonsai, fly traps, crowns of thorns, and queens of the night. Such are the sorts of plants I would have grown.

‘Slow Birds’ is, of course, about Cruise missiles – fantastically transplanted. ‘Cruising’ is more obviously about Cruise missiles; while it isn’t too hard to guess which Prime Minister is the ‘Mistress of Cold’. Fantastic fiction often has its roots firmly planted in the fears and madness of the present day; and to a gardener of words, the new Cold War and threatened nuclear winter (or the thermonuclear heat-wave) are abominable. We might destroy not just ourselves, and any civilization, but possibly the only garden of life in the whole galaxy.

Other stories are more obvious exotics; whilst in a few the ordinary world is invaded by strangeness.

To me, it is strangeness which brings a story alive; which makes it real and believable. For our own situation is very strange indeed. Here we are, treading a time-line between birth and death, not knowing why time flows onward. Here we are in a universe whose existence remains a huge enigma; observing it with a consciousness which we don’t understand. Our flesh is composed of exotic particles which may just be energetic aspects of nothing. Our apparently long, rich history is really just an eye-blink. Our unknowable future is one in which humans would surely evolve into beings quite alien to us now.

Our future … if we can survive the Armageddon preachers and the nuclear war lords.

It was Mayday, and the skate-sailing festival that year was being held at Tuckerton.

By late morning, after the umpires had been out on the glass plain setting red flags around the circuit, cumulus clouds began to fill a previously blue sky, promising ideal conditions for the afternoon’s sport. No rain; so that the glass wouldn’t be an inch deep in water as last year at Atherton. No dazzling glare to blind the spectators, as the year before that at Buckby. And a breeze verging on brisk without ever becoming fierce: perfect to speed the competitors’ sails along without lifting people off their feet and tumbling them, as four years previously at Edgewood when a couple of broken ankles and numerous bruises had been sustained.

After the contest there would be a pig roast; or rather the succulent fruits thereof, for the pig had been turning slowly on its spit these past thirty-six hours. And there would be kegs of Old Codger Ale to be cracked. But right now Jason Babbidge’s mind was mainly occupied with checking out his glass-skates and his fine crocus-yellow hand-sail.

As high as a tall man, and of best old silk, only patched in a couple of places, the sail’s fore-spar of flexible ash was bent into a bow belly by a strong hemp cord. Jason plucked this thoughtfully like a harpist, testing the tension. Already a fair number of racers were out on the glass, showing off their paces to applause. Tuckerton folk mostly, they were – acting as if they owned the glass hereabouts and knew it more intimately than any visitors could. Not that it was in any way different from the same glass over Atherton way.

Jason’s younger brother Daniel whistled appreciatively as a Tuckerton man carrying purple silk executed perfect circles at speed, his sail shivering as he tacked.

‘Just look at him, Jay!’

‘What, Bob Marchant? He took a pratfall last year. Where’s the use in working up a sweat before the whistle blows?’

By now a couple of sisters from Buckby were out too with matching black sails, skating figure-eights around each other, risking collision by a hair’s breadth.

‘Go on, Jay,’ urged young Daniel. ‘Show ’em.’

Contestants from the other villages were starting to flood on to the glass as well, but Jason noticed how Max Tarnover was standing not so far away, merely observing these antics with a wise smile. Master Tarnover of Tuckerton, last year’s victor at Atherton despite the drenching spray … Taking his cue from this, and going one better, Jason ignored events on the glass and surveyed the crowds instead.

He noticed Uncle John Babbidge chatting intently to an Edgewood man over where the silver band was playing; which was hardly the quietest place to talk, so perhaps they were doing business. Meanwhile on the green beyond the band the children of five villages buzzed like flies from hoop-la to skittles to bran tub, to apples in buckets of water. And those grown-ups who weren’t intent on the band or the practice runs or on something else, such as gossip, besieged the craft and produce stalls. There must be going on for a thousand people at the festival, and the village beyond looked deserted. Rugs and benches and half-barrels had even been set out near the edge of the glass for the old folk of Tuckerton.

As the band lowered their instruments for a breather after finishing The Floral Dance, a bleat of panic cut across the chatter of many voices. A farmer had just vaulted into a tiny sheep-pen where a lamb almost as large as its shorn, protesting dam was ducking beneath her to suckle and hide. Laughing, the farmer hauled it out and hoisted it by its neck and back legs to guess its weight, and maybe win a prize.

And now Jason’s mother was threading her way through the crowd, chewing the remnants of a pasty.

‘Best of luck, son!’ She grinned.

‘I’ve told you, Mum,’ protested Jason. ‘It’s bad luck to say “Good luck”.’

‘Oh, luck yourself! What’s luck, anyway?’ She prodded her Adam’s apple as if to press the last piece of meat and potatoes on its way down, though really she was indicating that her throat was bare of any charm or amulet.

‘I suppose I’d better make a move.’ Kicking off his sandals, Jason sat to lace up his skates. With a helping hand from Daniel he rose and stood knock-kneed, blades cutting into the turf while the boy hoisted the sail across his shoulders. Jason gripped the leather straps on the bow-string and the spine-spar.

‘Okay.’ He waggled the sail this way and that. ‘Let go, then. I won’t blow away.’

But just as he was about to proceed down on to the glass, out upon the glass less than a hundred yards away a slow bird appeared.

It materialized directly in front of one of the Buckby sisters. Unable to veer, she had no choice but to throw herself backwards. Crying out in frustration, and perhaps hurt by her fall, she skidded underneath the slow bird, sledging supine upon her now snapped and crumpled sail …

* * *

They were called slow birds because they flew through the air – at the stately pace of three feet per minute.

They looked a little like birds, too, though only a little. Their tubular metal bodies were rounded at the head and tapering to a finned point at the tail, with two stubby wings midway. Yet these wings could hardly have anything to do with suspending their bulk in the air; the girth of a bird was that of a horse, and its length twice that of a man lying full length. Perhaps those wings controlled orientation or trim.

In colour they were a silvery grey; though this was only the colour of their outer skin, made of a soft metal like lead. Quarter of an inch beneath this coating their inner skins were black and stiff as steel. The noses of the birds were all scored with at least a few scrape marks due to encounters with obstacles down the years; slow birds always kept the same height above ground – underbelly level with a man’s shoulders – and they would bank to avoid substantial buildings or mature trees, but any frailer obstructions they would push on through. Hence the individual patterns of scratches. However, a far easier way of telling them apart was by the graffiti carved on so many of their flanks: initials entwined in hearts, dates, place names, fragments of messages. These amply confirmed how very many slow birds there must be in all – something of which people could not otherwise have been totally convinced. For no one could keep track of a single slow bird. After each one had appeared – over hill, down dale, in the middle of a pasture or half way along a village street – it would fly onward slowly for any length of time between an hour and a day, covering any distance between a few score yards and a full mile. And vanish again. To reappear somewhere else unpredictably: far away or close by, maybe long afterwards or maybe soon.

Usually a bird would vanish, to reappear again.

Not always, though. Half a dozen times a year, within the confines of this particular island country, a slow bird would reach its journey’s end.

It would destroy itself, and all the terrain around it for a radius of two and a half miles, fusing the landscape instantly into a sheet of glass. A flat, circular sheet of glass. A polarized, limited zone of annihilation. Scant yards beyond its rim a person might escape unharmed, only being deafened and dazzled temporarily.

Hitherto no slow bird had been known to explode so as to overlap an earlier sheet of glass. Consequently many towns and villages clung close to the borders of what had already been destroyed, and news of a fresh glass plain would cause farms and settlements to spring up there. Even so, the bulk of people still kept fatalistically to the old historic towns. They assumed that a slow bird wouldn’t explode in their midst during their own lifetimes. And if it did, what would they know of it? Unless the glass happened merely to bisect a town – in which case, once the weeping and mourning was over, the remaining citizenry could relax and feel secure.

True, in the long term the whole country from coast to coast and from north to south would be a solid sheet of glass. Or perhaps it would merely be a chequerboard, of circles touching circles; a glass mosaic. With what in between? Patches of desert dust, if the climate dried up due to reflections from the glass. Or floodwater, swampland. But that day was still far distant: a hundred years away, two hundred, three. So people didn’t worry too much. They had been used to this all their lives long, and their parents before them. Perhaps one day the slow birds would stop coming. And going. And exploding. Just as they had first started, once. Certainly the situation was no different, by all accounts, anywhere else in the world. Only the seas were clear of slow birds. So maybe the human race would have to take to rafts one day. Though by then, with what would they build them? Meanwhile, people got by; and most had long ago given up asking why. For there was no answer.

The girl’s sister helped her rise. No bones broken, it seemed. Only an injury to dignity; and to her sail.

The other skaters had all coasted to a halt and were staring resentfully at the bird in their midst. Its belly and sides were almost bare of graffiti; seeing this, a number of youths hastened on to the glass, clutching penknives, rusty nails and such. But an umpire waved them back angrily.

‘Shoo! Be off with you!’ His gaze seemed to alight on Jason, and for a fatuous moment Jason imagined that it was himself to whom the umpire was about to appeal; but the man called, ‘Master Tarnover!’ instead, and Max Tarnover duck-waddled past then glided out over the glass, to confer.

Presently the umpire cupped his hands. ‘We’re delaying the start for half an hour,’ he bellowed. ‘Fair’s fair: young lady ought to have a chance to fix her sail, seeing as it wasn’t her fault.’

Jason noted a small crinkle of amusement on Tarnover’s face; for now either the other competitors would have to carry on prancing around tiring themselves with extra practice which none of them needed, or else troop off the glass for a recess and lose some psychological edge. In fact almost everyone opted for a break and some refreshments.

‘Luck indeed!’ snorted Mrs Babbidge, as Max Tarnover clumped back their way.

Tarnover paused by Jason, ‘Frankly I’d say her sail’s a wreck,’ he confided. ‘But what can you do? The Buckby lot would have been bitching on otherwise. “Oh, she could have won. If she’d had ten minutes to fix it.” Bloody hunk of metal in the way.’ Tarnover ran a lordly eye over Jason’s sail. ‘What price skill, then?’

Daniel Babbidge regarded Tarnover with a mixture of hero worship and hostile partisanship on his brother’s behalf. Jason himself only nodded and said, ‘Fair enough.’ He wasn’t certain whether Tarnover was acting generously – or with patronizing arrogance. Or did this word in his ear mean that Tarnover actually saw Jason as a valid rival for the silver punch-bowl this year round?

Obviously young Daniel did not regard Jason’s response as adequate. He piped up: ‘So where do you think the birds go, Master Tarnover, when they aren’t here?’

A good question: quite unanswerable, but Max Tarnover would probably feel obliged to offer an answer if only to maintain his pose of wordly wisdom. Jason warmed to his brother, while Mrs Babbidge, catching on, cuffed the boy softly.

‘Now don’t you go wasting Master Tarnover’s time. Happen he hasn’t given it a moment’s thought, all his born days.’

‘Oh, but I have,’ Tarnover said.

‘Well?’ the boy insisted.

‘Well … maybe they don’t go anywhere at all.’

Mrs Babbidge chuckled, and Tarnover flushed.

‘What I mean is, maybe they just stop being in one place then suddenly they’re in the next place.’

‘If only you could skate like that!’ Jason laughed. ‘Bit slow, though … Everyone would still pass you by at the last moment.’

‘They must go somewhere,’ young Dan said doggedly. ‘Maybe it’s somewhere we can’t see. Another sort of place, with other people. Maybe it’s them that builds the birds.’

‘Look, freckleface, the birds don’t come from Russ, or ’Merica, or anywhere else. So where’s this other place?’

‘Maybe it’s right here, only we can’t see it.’

‘And maybe pigs have wings.’ Tarnover looked about to march towards the cider and perry stall; but Mrs Babbidge interposed herself smartly.

‘Oh, as to that, I’m sure our sow Betsey couldn’t fly, wings or no wings. Just hanging in the air like that, and so heavy.’

‘Weighed a bird recently, have you?’

‘They look heavy, Master Tarnover.’

Tarnover couldn’t quite push his way past Mrs Babbidge, not with his sail impeding him. He contented himself with staring past her, and muttering, ‘If we’ve nothing sensible to say about them, in my opinion it’s better to shut up.’

‘But it isn’t better,’ protested Daniel. ‘They’re blowing the world up. Bit by bit. As though they’re at war with us.’

Jason felt humorously inventive. ‘Maybe that’s it. Maybe these other people of Dan’s are at war with us – only they forgot to mention it. And when they’ve glassed us all, they’ll move in for the holidays. And skate happily for ever more.’

‘Damn long war, if that’s so,’ growled Tarnover. ‘Been going on over a century now.’

‘Maybe that’s why the birds fly so slowly,’ said Daniel. ‘What if a year to us is like an hour to those people? That’s why the birds don’t fall. They don’t have time to.’

Tarnover’s expression was almost savage. ‘And what if the birds come only to punish us for our sins? What if they’re simply a miraculous proof – ’

‘ – that the Lord cares about us? And one day he’ll forgive us? Oh goodness,’ and Mrs Babbidge beamed, ‘surely you aren’t one of them? A bright lad like you. Me, I don’t even put candles in the window or tie knots in the bedsheets anymore to keep the birds away.’ She ruffled her younger son’s mop of red hair. ‘Everyone dies sooner or later, Dan. You’ll get used to it, when you’re properly grown up. When it’s time to die, it’s time to die.’

Tarnover looked furiously put out; though young Daniel also seemed distressed in a different way.

‘And when you’re thirsty, it’s time for a drink!’ Spying an opening, and his opportunity, Tarnover sidled quickly around Mrs Babbidge and strode off. She chuckled as she watched him go.

‘That’s put a kink in his sail!’

Forty-one other contestants, besides Jason and Tarnover, gathered between the starting flags. Though not the girl who had fallen; despite all best efforts she was out of the race, and sat morosely watching.

Then the Tuckerton umpire blew his whistle, and they wer. . .