Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales (24 page)

But there are quite a few others who can do the same. I’m not unique. I am no freak, you understand.

‘What’s happened to the others? What are they doing right now? Where’s Williams?’

‘You’re the investigator on this one.’

‘I might get blown to pieces and then I’ll be nothing. How about a protective suit, or even a flack jacket and helmet?’

‘Wear what you want. Protect yourself. But get out there. It’s your job.’

It’s my job. They know that. Others know that. Did Jameson really send me the bird? Was that his voice on the comm or a clever copy? What do I know? Nothing. I can’t use
insight
at a distance, through walls. I have to get close to my subject to see inside it, understand it.

I look inside the canary again, carefully study its
inscape
. It feels innocent enough. Nothing registers. Maybe they’ve got it screened in some way. You evolve the gift of
insight
and then someone comes up with a screen to prevent it. That’s progress. Only thing that stands between unstoppable attack and ultimate defence is
time
. You get one, the other follows naturally, as night follows day, only in unknowable hours.

Into the freezer with the canary.

Sparrows.
Just the right size.
Not too big, not too small.
All over the goddamn place.
Random.
Millions of the little fuckers.
Flying bombs. Hiding on the ledges, the rooftops, in the eves, in the drains. Not hiding at all, but hopping along pavements, roads, pathways. Scattered in the squares, looking harmless. How the hell are we going to find out? What do we do when we do find out? Gas them all overnight? Maybe someone will come up with a device for killing
them
.
A freeze gun?
You point the thing, squeeze the trigger, and a dozen sparrows fall out of the sky
.
Thunk, thunk, thunk.
Little balls of solid ice.

Wait a minute
. Maybe the gun has already been invented? Maybe it was invented before the sparrows became biological experiments? The gun had no use, so then the inventor invented a use? Perhaps the sparrows are here because the gun needs to be marketed, sold in all the retail stores, for the inventors to get their money back?
First the freeze gun, then the sparrows?
I would buy one. Who wouldn’t? Even if the truth got out, you would still want a weapon, and if that was the most effective, then purchase and be damned, regardless of moral distaste.

How many of these have there been, in recent years? The cure without the disease, so then discover the disease, let it loose, get rich curing it?

Could be the big corporations.

Back to the research.

The Ornithologist’s Guide: ‘Sparrows do not migrate.’

They’re local then. You can contain the experiment, within a given area. This is more like government, testing out its new weaponry. ‘Don’t worry boss, it won’t get out of hand. We’ll just test it out on a few people. No one will know. Nobody will ever find out. Nothing can go wrong.’ Famous last sentences, rearrangable syntax. Myxomatosis wiped out sixty million rabbits in this country alone and it wasn’t even started here. They started it on the other side of the world. It
always
gets out of hand, always
goes wrong
. Sixty million. That’s the total British population, of people, right now.

Governments are good at hiding things, covering up their insane blunders, losing documents. Yet they never stop their experiments, on people, on animals, on nature. Wonderful methods of destruction: defoliants, napalm,
nuclear
weapons. They move too fast when starting things, and move too slowly to stop them. God has always made the big disasters, and now governments too. The disasters get bigger all the time. Government equals God now.
Disasters at nuclear power stations.
Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, over a period of thirty years.
Random disasters, flying around in history by the hundred million, too few in a lifetime to alarm, but in geological time, too many.

The comm again.

I am impatient with them.

‘What?’

‘Go outside and look around.’

‘Fuck you. You go outside.’

A voice charged with quiet panic.

‘You can be replaced.’

‘So replace me.’

‘You can be punished.’

‘Yeah? Who’s going to come round to smack me?’

Click
.

So what about the third possibility?

Terrorists don’t do things for nothing. They want something. Prisoners released. Land returned. Ideologies destroyed and other ideologies put into place.
An end to war, a start to war.
Not
nothing
.
Something. What do they want then?

How about the Mafia? They want money and power. No money and power to be had with random terror.

Strike out terrorists and criminals.

Maybe anarchists? Any government is a bad
government,
no government is a good government. I’ll go along with that. So why kill the ordinary people? The population? Does that upset the government? Not really. They do it themselves, in various ways.

Sparrows. What if they increase in number, the bomb-sparrows as opposed to the non-bomb-sparrows? Maybe there’s say, one in a thousand at the moment, but with breeding? What if it’s a dominant gene?
A dominant gene and a season to pass it on, before the ticker reaches the required number and takes out the wall of a house.

Comm.
Me
again.

‘
Fuck it
,
I’m going outside
. I’m going crazy in here. There are no answers to be found indoors.’

‘About time.’

‘I’ll get back to you.’

‘Leave the line open, so we can hear.’

‘Hear what?’

No answer.

Someone singing in my head:
My sweet ex-pend-able you...

After putting on a flack jacket and helmet I prepare myself, psychologically, for going outside. There’s no point in wearing anything over the whole of my head, like a diver’s helmet, because that would interfere with my
insight
. Anyway, it’s just a gesture. When you get that close to a bomb, the concussion turns your brains to porridge, whatever you’ve got on in the way of protective clothing. There are other more important considerations to worry about.

What if it’s not a time bomb? What if it’s some kind of heat-trigger that sets it off? You walk close to a sparrow and Goodbye Columbus. Or maybe some kind of beam from their eyes and you break the circuit? Perhaps the exploding birds have funny laser
eyes, that
blow you to hell?

I have plenty of questions.

‘I think it’s nature,’ I say into the comm, ‘not governments, terrorists or corporations. They’re big noises to us, but mere hiccups in time to nature, to history. Just little glitches, little pops and fizzes, like seedpods exploding under the sun. What if it’s the way they reproduce now, spread their egg-seeds over a wide area like exploding pods, grow sparrow-blooms that break off in the spring and fly away?’

‘Have you been outside and taken a look?’

‘That must be it. Nature. It’s something we’ve done to the atmosphere, with our radio waves, our space junk, our deodorant sprays. We’ve polluted the sky and the earth, letting in things through the ozone layer. The sparrows are just freaks, but natural freaks, so not freaks at all. I mean, if they’ve altered naturally, overnight, then they’re not mutants, but simply quick-change artists of evolution, like me.
Humans the unfortunates that get in their way?
Wham-bam, evolutionary spam.’

‘Listen, have you been outside?’

‘I’d like to go, but there ’s death out there.
On the streets, in the air.
I used to be scared of motorways and skin cancer, but now it’s sparrows that obsess me. I
will
go out, but not today, not till I get used to them, take them for granted, like bombs in the Blitz.’

‘If you don’t go out soon, we may never get to know, we might not be given the chance.’

‘That’s true. Do we need to? I mean
,
do we have to know the
why
of everything? Can’t we leave just one question unanswered, one puzzle unsolved? Why do we have to classify all the shapes on the earth, label them in Latin, count their bones, their heartbeats, witness their sexual antics, watch them eating each other? I mean, these are the first exploding sparrows, so they don’t fit into any group, type, family or species.
Or if you really can’t bear for it not to have a scientific label, then how about
Passer bombicus
?
That’ll do, won’t it? Why do we need to explain everything?’

‘It’s your job.’

‘What, to understand the whole universe?’

‘No, to find out what this is.’

‘Well, let’s leave this one, eh? Why not? Let’s just have a wonder we don’t know anything about.
A deadly wonder.
We’ve killed enough cobras and dissected them. We’ve hunted enough sharks and measured their jaws, numbered their teeth. Let’s have one very dangerous thing we don’t know anything about and let it keep its secrets? The cryptic sparrow, with its weird unknown biological reaction to God knows what. Here we have what used to be the common house sparrow, ladies and gentlemen, which suddenly turned into a kamikaze killer, for no logical reason. Reach out with your emotions, and feel what you feel: hate, admiration,
fear
. Marvel but don’t analyse. Empathise, but don’t try to understand, or you’ll destroy the wonder of the thing. What do you say? I’m going to hang up now, and I don’t want to hear from you again.’

It’s driving me nuts, not knowing, and they’re right, it
is
my job.
My
job. It’s what they pay me for. I just like to do it in my own time. I need to psyche myself up first.

I go outside.

Outside it’s peaceful, but I don’t like it. The sparrows chatter in the street. I’m only human, still flesh and blood, despite the gift I have. I still experience fear, an instinct to survive.

Maybe it’s a
virus, that
will spread to humans?

Next on the Extinction List, exploding people?

One of the sparrows hops over to my foot. I look inside it, finding nothing. Others come. They too, do not register anything more than
sparrow
. Tweet. Harmless. What about screens? Not all of them.
Too many.
Millions.
It’s
just paranoia, that’s what it just is, surely to God?

An explosion down the street.

Something, a feral cat
?,
staggers, blood pouring from its headless corpse, falls in the gutter, twitches.

The sparrows descend. They pick at the bits of flesh, blood and bone that have rained on the lawns.

Punctuated evolution. The sparrows have leapt.

They’re all round my feet now, dozens of them, maybe hundreds. I can see nothing, feel nothing, but I think I’ve got the answer.

What if the actual punctuated leap itself triggers the explosion?

No
insight
would show that up, not beforehand.

This ability to detonate
themselves
, to leap evolution, is deliberate and voluntary.
One of them, sacrificing itself for the good of the many, not by intelligent choice, simply by instinct—but still a choice.