J.G. BALLARD

DREAM CARGOES

*
A poor seaman forgets his past, and finds a bizarre new life on a polluted
Caribbean Isle.

Across the lagoon an eager new life was forming, drawing its spectrum of colors
from a palette more vivid than the sun's. Soon after dawn, when Johnson woke in
Captain Galloway's cabin behind the bridge of the Prospero, he watched the lurid
hues, cyanic blues and crimsons, playing against the ceiling above his bunk.
Reflected in the metallic surface of the lagoon, the tropical foliage seemed to
concentrate the Caribbean sunlight, painting on the warm air a screen of
electric tones that Johnson had only seen on the nightclub facades of Miami and
Veracruz.

He stepped onto the tilting bridge of the stranded freighter, aware that the
island's vegetation had again surged forward during the night, as if it had
miraculously found a means of converting darkness into these brilliant leaves
and blossoms. Shielding his eyes from the glare, he searched the six hundred
yards of empty beach that encircled the Prospero, disappointed that there was no
sign of Dr. Chambers' rubber inflatable. For the past three mornings, when he
woke after an uneasy night, he had seen the craft beached by the inlet of the
lagoon. Shaking off the overlit dreams that rose from the contaminated waters,
he would gulp down a cup of cold coffee, jump from the stern rail, and set off
between the pools of leaking chemicals in search of the American biologist. It
pleased Johnson that she was so openly impressed by this once barren island, a
leftover of nature seven miles from the northeast coast of Puerto Rico. In his
modest way he knew that he was responsible for the transformation of the
nondescript atoll, scarcely more than a forgotten garbage dump left behind by
the American Army after World War 11. No one, in Johnson's short life, had ever
been impressed by him, and the biologist's silent wonder gave him the first
sense of achievement he had ever known.

Johnson had learned her name from the labels on the scientific stores in the
inflatable. However, he had not yet approached or even spoken to her,
embarrassed by his rough manners and shabby seaman's clothes, and the engrained
chemical stench that banned him from sailors' bars all over the Caribbean. Now,
when she failed to appear on the fourth morning, he regretted all the more that
he had never worked up the courage to introduce himself.

Through the acid-streaked windows of the bridge house he stared at the terraces
of flowers that hung from the forest wall. A month earlier, when he first
arrived at the island, struggling with the locked helm of the listing freighter,
there had been no more than a few stunted palms growing among the collapsed army
huts and water tanks buried in the dunes. But already, for reasons that Johnson
preferred not to consider, a wholly new vegetation had sprung to life. The
palms rose like flagpoles into the vivid Caribbean air, pennants painted with a
fresh green sap. Around them the sandy floor was -thick With flowering vines
and ground ivy, blue leaves like dappled metal foil, as if some midnight
gardener had watered them with a secret plant elixir as Johnson lay asleep in
his bunk.

He put on Galloway's peaked cap and examined himself in the greasy mirror.
Stepping onto the open deck behind the wheelhouse, he inhaled the acrid chemical
air of the lagoon. At least it masked the odors of the captain's cabin, a
rancid bouquet of ancient sweat, cheap rum, and diesel oil. He had thought
seriously of abandoning Galloway's cabin and returning to his hammock in the
forecastle, but despite the stench he felt that he owed it to himself to remain
in the cabin. The moment that Galloway, with a last disgusted curse, had
stepped into the freighter's single lifeboat, he, Johnson, had become the
captain of this doomed vessel. He had watched Galloway, the four Mexican
crewmen, and the weary Portuguese engineer row off into the dusk, promising
himself that he would sleep in the captain's cabin and take his meals at the
captain's table. After five years at sea, working as cabin boy and deck hand on
the lowest grade of chemical waste carrier, he had a command of his own, this
antique freighter, even if the Prospero's course was the vertical one to the
seabed of the Caribbean.

Behind the funnel the Liberian flag of convenience hung in tatters, its fabric
rotted by the acid air. Johnson stepped onto the stern ladder, steadying
himself against the sweating hull plates, and jumped into the shallow water.
Careful to find his feet, he waded through the bilious green foam that leaked
from the steel drums he had jettisoned from the freighter's deck.

When he reached the clear sand above the tide line he wiped the emerald dye from
his jeans and sneakers. Leaning to starboard in the lagoon, the Prospero
resembled an exploded paint box. The drums of chemical waste on the foredeck
still dripped their effluent through the scuppers. The more sinister belowdecks
cargonameless organic by-products that Captain Galloway had been bribed to carry
and never entered into his manifest-had dissolved the rusty plates and spilled
an eerie spectrum of phosphorescent blues and indigos into the lagoon below.

Frightened of these chemicals, which every port in the Caribbean had rejected,
Johnson had begun to jettison the cargo after running the freighter aground.
But the elderly diesels had seized and the winch had jarred to a halt, leaving
only a few of the drums on the nearby sand with their death's-head warnings and
eroded seams.

Johnson set off along the shore, searching the sea beyond the inlet of the
lagoon for any sign of Dr. Chambers. Everywhere a deranged horticulture was
running riot. Vivid new shoots pushed past the metal debris of old ammunition
boxes, filing cabinets, and truck tires. Strange grasping vines clambered over
the scarlet caps of giant fungi, their white stems as thick as sailors' bones.
Avoiding them, Johnson walked toward an old staff car that sat in an open glade
between the palms. Wheelless, its military markings obliterated by the rain of
decades, it had settled into the sand, vines encircling its roof and windshield.

Deciding to rest in the car, which once perhaps had driven an American general
around the training camps of Puerto Rico, he tore away the vines that had
wreathed themselves around the driver's door pillar. As he sat behind the
steering wheel it occurred to Johnson that he might leave the freighter and set
up camp on the island. Nearby lay the galvanized iron roof of a barrack hut,
enough material to build a beach house on the safer, seaward side of the island.

But Johnson was aware of an unstated bond between himself and the derelict
freighter. He remembered the last desperate voyage of the Prospero, which he
had joined in Veracruz, after being duped by Captain Galloway. The short voyage
to Galveston, the debarkation port, would pay him enough to ship as a deck
passenger on an inter-island boat heading for the Bahamas. It had been three
years since he had seen his widowed mother in Nassau, living in a plywood
bungalow by the airport with her in. valid boyfriend.

Needless to say, they had never berthed at Galveston, Miami, or any other of the
ports where they had tried to unload their cargo. The crudely sealed cylinders
of chemical waste products, supposedly en route to a reprocessing plant in
southern Texas, had begun to leak before they left Veracruz. Captain Galloway's
temper, like his erratic seamanship and consumption of rum and tequila,
increased steadily as he realized that the Mexican shipping agent had abandoned
them to the seas. Almost certainly the agent had pocketed the monies allocated
for reprocessing and found it more profitable to let the ancient freighter, now
refused entry to Veracruz, sail up and down the Gulf of Mexico until her
corroded keel sent her conveniently to the bottom. For two months they had
cruised forlornly from one port to another, boarded by hostile maritime police
and customs officers, public health officials, and journalists alerted to the
possibility of a major ecological disaster. At Kingston, Jamaica, a television
launch trailed them to the ten-mile limit; at Santo Domingo a spotter plane of
the Dominican Navy was waiting for them when they tried to slip into harbor
under the cover of darkness. Greenpeace powerboats intercepted them outside
Tampa, Florida, when Captain Galloway tried to dump part of his cargo. Firing
flares across the bridge of the freighter, the U.S. Coast Guard dispatched them
into the Gulf of Mexico in time to meet the tail of Hurricane Clara.

When at last they recovered from the storm the cargo had shifted, and the
Prospero listed ten degrees to starboard. Fuming chemicals leaked across the
decks from the fractured seams of the waste drums, boiled on the surface of the
sea, and sent up a cloud of acrid vapor that left Johnson and the Mexican
crewmen coughing through make-shift face masks, and Captain Galloway barricading
himself into his cabin with his tequila bottle.

First Officer Pereira had saved the day, rigging up a hosepipe that sprayed the
leaking drums with a torrent of water, but by then the Prospero was taking in
the sea through its strained plates. When they sighted Puerto Rico the captain
had not even bothered to set a course for port. Propping himself against the
helm, a bottle in each hand, he signaled Pereira to cut the engines.

In a self-pitying monologue, he cursed the Mexican shipping agent, the U.S.
Coast Guard, the world's agrochemists, and their despicable science that had
deprived him of his command. Lastly he cursed Johnson for being so foolish ever
to step aboard this ill-fated ship. As the Prospero lay doomed in the water,
Pereira appeared with his already packed suitcase, and the captain ordered the
Mexicans to lower the lifeboat. It was then that Johnson made his decision to
remain onboard. All his life he had failed to impose himself on
anything-running errands as a six-year-old for the Nassau airport shoeblacks,
cadging pennies for his mother from the irritated tourists, enduring the years
of school where he had scarcely learned to read and write, working as a
dishwasher at the beach restaurants, forever conned out of his wages by the
thieving managers. He had always reacted to events, never initiated anything on
his own. Now, for the first time, he could become the captain of the Prospero
and master of his own fate. Long before Galloway's curses faded into the dusk,
Johnson had leapt down the ladder into the engine room.

As the elderly diesels rallied themselves for the last time, Johnson returned to
the bridge. He listened to the propeller's tired but steady beat against the
dark ocean and slowly turned the Prospero toward the northwest. Five hundred
miles away were the Bahamas and an endless archipelago of secret harbors.
Somehow he would get rid of the leaking drums and even, perhaps, ply for hire
between the islands, renaming the old tub after his mother, Velvet Mae.
Meanwhile Captain Johnson stood proudly on the bridge, over-size cap on his
head, three hundred tons of steel deck obedient beneath his feet.

By dawn the next day he was completely lost on an open sea. During the night the
freighter's list had increased. Belowdecks the leaking chemicals had etched
their way through the hull plates, and a phosphorescent steam enveloped the
bridge. The engine room was a kneedeep vat of acid brine. a poisonous vapor
rising through the ventilators and coating every rail and deck plate with a
lurid slime. Then, as Johnson searched desperately for enough timber to build a
raft, he saw the old World War 11 garbage island seven miles from the Puerto
Rican coast. The lagoon inlet was unguarded by the U.S. Navy or Greenpeace
speedboats. He steered the Prospero across the calm surface and let the
freighter settle into the shallows. The inrush of water smothered the cargo in
the hold. Able to breathe again, Johnson rolled into Captain Galloway's bunk,
made a space for himself among the empty bottles, and slept his first dreamless
sleep. "Hey, you! Are you all right?" A woman's hand pounded on the roof of the
staff car. "What are you doing in there?"

Johnson woke with a start, lifting his head from the steering wheel. While he
slept the lianas had enveloped the car, climbing up the roof and windshield
pillars. Vivid green tendrils looped themselves around his left hand, tying his
wrist to the rim of the wheel.

Wiping his face, he saw the American biologist peering at him through the
leaves, as if he were the inmate of some bizarre zoo whose cages were the bodies
of abandoned motorcars. He tried to free himself and pushed against the
driver's door.

"Sit back! I'll cut you loose." She slashed at the vines with her clasp knife,
revealing her fierce and determined wrist. When Johnson stepped onto the ground
she held his shoulders, looking him up and down with a thorough eye. She was no
more than thirty, three years older than himself, but to Johnson she seemed as
self-possessed and remote as the Nassau schoolteachers. Yet her mouth was more
relaxed than those pursed lips of his childhood, as if she were genuinely
concerned for Johnson. "You're all right," she informed him. "But I wouldn't
go for too many rides in that car."

She strolled away from Johnson, her hands pressing the burnished copper trunks
of the palms, feeling the urgent pulse of awakening life. Around her shoulders
was slung a canvas bag holding a clipboard. sample jars, a camera, and reels of
film. "My name's Christine Chambers," she 'called out to Johnson. "I'm
carrying out a botanical project on this island. Have you come from the stranded
ship?"

"I'm the captain," Johnson told her without deceit. He reached into the car and
retrieved his peaked cap from the eager embrace of the vines, dusted it off, and
placed it on his head at what he hoped was a rakish angle. "She's not a wreck-I
beached her here for repairs."

"Really? For repairs?" Christine Chambers watched him archly, finding him at
least as intriguing as the giant scarletcapped fungi. "So you're the captain.
But where's the crew?"

"They abandoned ship." Johnson was glad that he could speak so honestly. He
liked this attractive biologist and the way she took a close interest in the
island. "There were certain problems with the cargo."

"I bet there were. You were lucky to get here in one piece." She took out a
notebook and jotted down some observation on Johnson, glancing at his pupils and
lips. "Captain, would you like a sandwich? I've brought a picnic lunch-you look
as if you could use a square meal."

"Well . . . " Pleased by her use of his title, Johnson followed her to the
beach, where the inflatable sat on the sand. Clearly she had been delayed by
the weight of stores: a bell tent, plastic coolers, cartons of canned food, and
a small office cabinet. Johnson had survived on a diet of salt beef, cola, and
oatmeal biscuits he cooked on the galley stove.

For all the equipment, she was in no hurry to unload the stores, as if unsure of
sharing the island with Johnson, or perhaps pondering a different approach to
her project, one that involved the participation of the human population of the
island. Trying to reassure her, as they divided the sandwiches, he described
the last voyage of the Prospero, and the disaster of the leaking chemicals. She
nodded while he spoke, as if she already knew something of the story. "It sounds
to me like a great feat of seamanship," she complimented him. "The crew who
abandoned ship-as it happens, they reported that she went down near Barbados.
One of them, Galloway I think he was called, claimed they'd spent a month in an
open boat."

"Galloway?" Johnson assumed the pursed lips of the Nassau schoolmarms. "One of
my less reliable men. So no one is looking for the ship?"

"No. Absolutely no one."

"And they think she's gone down?"

"Right to the bottom. Everyone in Barbados is relieved there's no pollution.
Those tourist beaches, you know."

"They're important. And no one in Puerto Rico thinks she's here?"

"No one except me. The island is my research project," she explained. "I teach
biology at San Juan University, but I really want to work at Harvard. I can
tell you, lectureships are hard to come by. Something very interesting is
happening here, with a little luck . . ."

"It is interesting," Johnson agreed. There was a conspiratorial note to Dr.
Christine's voice that made him uneasy. "A lot of old army equipment is buried
here-I'm thinking of building a house on the beach."

"A good idea ... even if it takes you four or five months. I'll help you out
with any food you need. But be careful." Dr. Christine pointed to the weal on
his arm, a temporary reaction against some invading toxin in the vine sap.
"There's something else that's interesting about this island, isn't there?"

"Well . . . " Johnson stared at the acid stains etching through the Prospero's
hull and spreading across the lagoon. He had tried not to think of his
responsibility for these dangerous and unstable chemicals. "There are a few
other things going on here."

"A few other things?" Dr. Christine lowered her voice. "Look, Johnson, you're
sitting in the middle of an amazing biological experiment. No one would allow
it to happen anywhere in the world--if they knew, the U.S. Navy would move in
this afternoon."

"Would they take away the ship?"

"They'd take it away and sink it in the nearest ocean trench, then scorch the
island with flamethrowers."

"And what about me?"

"I wouldn't like to say. It might depend on how advanced . . " She held his
shoulder reassuringly, aware that her vehemence had shocked him. "But there's
no reason why they should find out. Not for a while, and by then it won't
matter. I'm not exaggerating when I say that you've probably created a new kind
of life."

As they unloaded the stores Johnson reflected on her words. He had guessed that
the chemicals leaking from the Prospero had set off the accelerated growth, and
that the toxic reagents might equally be affecting himself. In Galloway's cabin
mirror he inspected the hairs on his chin and any suspicious moles. The weeks
at sea, inhaling the acrid fumes. had left him with raw lungs and throat, and an
erratic appetite, but he had felt better since coming ashore. He watched
Christine step into a pair of thigh-length rubber boots and move into the
shallow water, ladle in hand, looking at the plant and animal life of the
lagoon. She filled several specimen jars with the phosphorescent water and
locked them into the cabinet inside the tent. "Johnson--you couldn't let me see
the cargo manifest?"

"Captain ... Galloway took it with him. He didn't list the real cargo."

"I bet he didn't." Christine pointed to the vermilion-shelled crabs that
scuttled through the vivid filaments of kelp, floating like threads of blue
electric cable. "Have you noticed? There are no dead fish or crabs-and you'd
expect to see hundreds. That was the first thing I spotted. And it isn't just
the crabs-you look pretty healthy . . . "

"Maybe I'll be stronger?" Johnson flexed his sturdy shoulder. ". . . . in a
complete daze, mentally, but I imagine that will change. Meanwhile, can you
take me onboard? I'd like to visit the Prospero."

"Dr. Christine Johnson held her arm, trying to restrain this determined woman.
He looked at her clear skin and strong legs.

"It's too dangerous, you might fall through the deck."

"Fair enough. Are the containers identified?"

"Yes, there's no secret." Johnson did his best to remember. "Organo . . . "

"Organophosphates? Right what I need to know is which containers are leaking and
roughly how much. We might be able to work out the exact chemical reactions-you
may not realize it, Johnson, but you've mixed a remarkably potent cocktail. A
lot of people will want to learn the recipe, for all kinds of reasons......

Sitting in the colonel's chair on the porch of the beach house, Johnson gazed
contentedly at the luminous world around him, a jever-realm of light and life
that seemed to have sprung from his own mind. The jungle wall of cycads, giant
tamarinds, and tropical creepers crowded the beach to the waterline, and the
reflected colors drowned in swaths of phosphorescence that made the lagoon
resemble a caldron of electric dyes.

So dense was the vegetation that almost the only free sand lay below Johnson's
feet. Every morning he would spend an hour cutting back the flowering vines and
wild magnolia that inundated the metal shack. Already the foliage was crushing
the galvanized iron roof. However hard he worked-and he found himself too easily
distracted-he had been unable to keep clear the r inspection pathways which
Christine patrolled on her weekend visits, camera and specimen jars at the
ready. Hearing the sound of her inflatable as she neared the inlet of the
lagoon, Johnson surveyed his domain with pride. He had found a metal card table
buried in the sand and laid it with a selection of fruits he had picked for
Christine that morning. To Johnson's untrained eye they seemed to be strange
hybrids of pomegranate and pawpaw, cantaloupe and pineapple. There were giant
tomatolike berries and clusters of purple grapes each the size of a baseball.
Together they glowed through the overheated light like jewels set in the face of
the sun.

By now, four months after his arrival on the Prospero, the onetime garbage
island had become a unique botanical garden, generating new species of trees,
vines, and flowering plants every day. A powerful life engine was driving the
island. As she crossed the lagoon in her inflatable, Christine stared at the
aerial terraces of vines and blossoms that had sprung up since the previous
weekend. The dead hulk of the Prospero, daylight visible through its
acid-etched plates, sat in the shallow water, the last of its chemical wastes
leaking into the lagoon. But Johnson had forgotten the ship and the voyage that
had brought him here, just as he had forgotten his past life and unhappy
childhood under the screaming engines of Nassau airport. Lolling back in his
canvas chair, on which was stenciled COLONEL POTTLE. U.S. ARMY ENGINEER CORPS,
he felt like a plantation owner who had successfully subcontracted a corner of
the original Eden. As he stood up to get Christine he thought only of the
future, of his pregnant bride and the son who would soon share the island with
him.

"Johnson! My God, what have you been doing?" Christine ran the inflatable onto
the beach and sat back, exhausted by the buffeting waves. "It's a botanical
madhouse!"

Johnson was so pleased to see her that he forgot his regret over their weekly
separations. As she explained, she had her student classes to teach, her
project notes and research samples to record and catalog.

"Dr. Christine . . . ! I waited all day!" He stepped into the shallow water, a
carmine surf filled with glowing animalcula, and pulled the inflatable onto the
sand. He helped her from the craft, his eyes avoiding her curving abdomen under
the smock.

"Go on, you can stare...... Christine pressed his hand to her stomach. "How
dollook, Johnson?"

"Too beautiful for me, and the island. We've all gone quiet."

"That is gallant-you've become a poet, Johnson."

Johnson never thought of other women and knew that none could be so beautiful as
this lady biologist bearing his child. He spotted a plastic cooler among the
scientific equipment. "Christine--you've brought me ice cream ......

"Of course I have. But don't eat it yet. We've a lot to do, Johnson,"

He unloaded the stores, leaving to the last the nylon nets and spring-mounted
steel frames in the bottom of the boat. These bird traps were the one cargo he
hated to unload. Nesting in the highest branches above the island was a flock
of extravagant aerial creatures, sometimes swallows and finches whose jeweled
plumage and tail fans transformed them into gaudy peacocks. He had set the
traps reluctantly at Christine's insistence. He never objected to catching the
phosphorescent fish with their enlarged fins and ruffs of external gills, which
seemed to prepare them for life on the land, or the crabs and snails in their
baroque armor. But the thought of Christine taking these rare and beautiful
birds back to her laboratory made him uneasy-he guessed they would soon end
their days under the dissection knife.

"Did you set the traps for me, Johnson?"

"I set all of them and put in the bait."

"Good." Christine heaped the nets onto the sand. More and more she seemed to
hurry these days, as if she feared that the experiment might end. "I can't
understand why we haven't caught one of them."

Johnson gave an eloquent shrug, In tact he had eaten the canned sardines and
released the one bird that had strayed into the trap below the parasol of a
giant cycad. The nervous creature with its silken scarlet wings and kite-like
tail feathers had been a dream of flight. "Nothing yet-they're clever, those
birds."

"Of course they are--they're a new species." She sat in Colonel Pottle's chair,
photographing the table of fruit with her small camera. "Those grapes are
huge--I wonder what sort of wine they'd make. Champagne of the gods, grand cru
. . . "

Warily Johnson eyed the purple and yellow globes. He had eaten the fish and
crabs from the lagoon, when asked by Christine, with no ill effects, but he was
certain that these fruits were intended for the birds. He knew that Christine
was using him, like everything else on the island, as part of her experiment.
Even the child she had conceived after their one brief act of love, over so
quickly that he was scarcely sure it had ever occurred, was part of the
experiment. Perhaps the child would be the first of a new breed of man and he,
Johnson, errand runner for airport shoeshine boys, would be the father of an
advanced race that would one day repopulate the planet.

As if aware of his impressive physique, she said: "You look wonderfully well,
Johnson. If this experiment ever needs to be justified . . . "

"I'm very strong now-I'll be able to look after you and the boy."

"It might be a girl-or something in between." She spoke in a matter-of-fact way
that always surprised him. "Tell me, Johnson, what do you do while I'm away?"

"I think about you, Dr. Christine."

"And I certainly think about you, But do you sleep a lot?"

"No. I'm busy with my thoughts. The time goes very quickly."

Christine casually opened her notepad. "You mean the hours go by without you
noticing?"

"Yes. After breakfast I fill the oil lamp and suddenly it's time for lunch.
But it can go more slowly, too. If I look at a falling leaf in a certain way it
seems to stand still."

"Good. You're learning to control time. Your mind is enlarging, Johnson."

"Maybe I'll be as clever as you, Dr. Christine."

"Ah, I think you're moving in a much more interesting direction. In fact,
Johnson, I'd like you to eat some of the fruit. Don't worry, I've already
analyzed it, and I'll have some myself." She was cutting slices of the
melon-sized apple. "I want the baby to try some."

Johnson hesitated, but as Christine always reminded him, none of the new species
had revealed a single deformity.

The fruit was pale and sweet, with a pulpy texture and a tang like alcoholic
mango. It slightly numbed Johnson's mouth and left a pleasant coolness in the
stomach.

A diet for those with wings. "Johnson! Are you sick?"

He woke with a start, not from sleep but from an almost too clear examination of
the color patterns of a giant butterfly that had settled on his hand. He looked
up from his chair at Christine's concerned eyes, and at the dense vines and
flowering creepers that crowded the porch, pressing against his shoulders. The
amber of her eyes was touched by the same overlit spectrum that shone through
the trees and blossoms. Everything on the island was becoming a prism of
itself.

"Johnson, wake up!"

"I am awake. Christine... I didn't hear you come."

"I've been here for an hour." She touched his cheeks, searching for any sign of
fever and puzzled by Johnson's distracted manner. Behind her, the inflatable was
beached on the few feet of sand not smothered by the vegetation. The dense wall
of palms, lianas, and flowering plants had collapsed onto the shore. Engorged
on the sun, the giant fruits had begun to split under their own weight, and
streams of vivid juice ran across the sand, as if the forest was bleeding.

"Christine? You came back so soon. . . ?" It seemed to Johnson that she had left
only a few minutes earlier. He remembered waving good-bye to her and sitting
down to finish his fruit and admire the giant butterfly, its wings like the
painted hands of a circus clown.

"Johnson--I've been away for a week." She held his shoulder, frowning at the
unstable wall of rotting vegetation that towered a hundred feet into the air.
Cathedrals of flower-decked foliage were falling into the waters of the lagoon.

"Johnson, help me to unload the stores. You don't look as if you've eaten for
days. Did you trap the birds?"

"Birds? No, nothing yet." Vaguely Johnson remembered setting the traps, but he
had been too distracted by the wonder of everything to pursue the birds.
Graceful, feather-tipped wraiths like gaudy angels, their crimson plumage leaked
its ravishing hues into the air. When he fixed his eyes onto them they seemed
suspended against the sky, wings fanning slowly as if shaking the time from
themselves.

He stared at Christine, aware that the colors were separating themselves from
her skin and hair. Superimposed images of herself, each divided from the others
by a fraction of a second, blurred the air around her, an exotic plumage that
sprang from her arms and shoulders. The staid reality that had trapped them all
was beginning to dissolve. Time had stopped and Christine was ready to rise
into the air.... He would teach Christine and the child to fly.

"Christine, we can all learn."

"What, Johnson?"

"We can learn to fly. There's no time anymore-everything's too beautiful for
time."

"Johnson, look at my watch."

"We'll go and live in the trees, Christine. We'll live with the high flowers. .
. ." He took her arm, eager to show her the mystery and beauty of the sky people
they would become. She tried to protest but gave in, humoring Johnson as he led
her gently from the beach house to the wall of inflamed flowers. Her hand on
the radio transmitter in the inflatable, she sat beside the crimson lagoon as
Johnson tried to climb the flowers toward the sun. Steadying the child within
her, she wept for Johnson, only calming herself two hours later when the siren
of a naval cutter crossed the inlet.

"I'm glad you radioed in," the U.S. Navy lieutenant told Christine. "One of the
birds reached the base at San Juan. We tried to keep it alive but it was
crushed by the weight of its own wings. Like everything else on this island."

He pointed from the bridge to the jungle wall. Almost all the overcrowded
canopy had collapsed into the lagoon, leaving behind only a few of the original
palms with their bird traps. The blossoms glowed through the water like
thousands of drowned lanterns.

"How long has the freighter been here?" An older civilian, a government
scientist holding a pair of binoculars, peered at the riddled hull of the
Prospero. Below the beach house two sailors were loading the last of
Christine's stores into the inflatable. "It looks as if it's been stranded there
for years."

"Six months," Christine told him. She sat beside Johnson, smiling at him
encouragingly. "When Captain Johnson realized what was going on he asked me to
call you."

"Only six? That must be roughly the life cycle of these new species. Their
cellular clocks seem to have stopped instead of reproducing, they force-fed
their own tissues, like those giant fruit that contain no seeds. The life of
the individual becomes the entire life of the species." He gestured toward the
impassive Johnson. "That probably explains our friend's altered time sense
great blocks of memory were coalescing in his mind, so that a ball thrown into
the air would never appear to land...... A tide of dead fish floated past the
cutter's bow, the gleaming bodies like discarded costume jewelry.

"You weren't contaminated in any way?" the lieutenant asked Christine. "I'm
thinking of the baby."

"No, I didn't eat any of the fruit," Christine said firmly. "I've been here only
twice, for a few hours."

"Good. Of course, the medical people will do all the tests."

"And the island?"

"We've been ordered to torch the whole place. The demolition charges are timed
to go off in just under two hours, but we'll be well out of range. It's a pity,
in a way."

"The birds are still here," Christine said, aware of Johnson staring at the
trees.

"Luckily, you've trapped them all." The scientist offered her the binoculars.
"Those organic wastes are hazardous. God knows what might happen if human beings
were exposed to long-term contact. All sorts of sinister alterations to the
nervous system-people might be happy to stare at a stone all day."

Johnson listened to them talking, glad to feel Christine's hand in his own. She
was watching him with a quiet smile, aware that they shared the conspiracy. She
would try to save the child, the last fragment of the experiment, and he knew
that if it survived it would face a fierce challenge from those who feared it
might replace them.

But the birds endured. His head had cleared, and he remembered the visions that
had given him a brief glimpse of another, more advanced world. High above the
collapsed canopy of the forest he could see the traps he had set, and the great
crimson birds sitting on their wings. At least they could carry the dream
forward.

Ten minutes later, when the inflatable had been winched onto the deck, the
cutter set off through the inlet. As it passed the western headland the
lieutenant helped Christine toward the cabin. Johnson followed them, then pushed
aside the government scientist and leapt from the rail, diving cleanly into the
water. He struck out for the shore a hundred feet away, knowing that he was
strong enough to climb the trees and release the birds, with luck a mating pair
who would take him with them in their escape from time.

*
From the collection War Fever, to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.,
in April 199 1. Copyright 1991 by J. G. Ballard.