After all the time and work I’ve invested in the process, it’s hardly a decision I take lightly. But there is a difference between acting as a gatekeeper and a psychiatrist. I’m afraid that recent developments have given me cause for concern. We all work under some degree of stress. Science is not a carefree playground. It’s an arena where reputations can crash as readily as they soar.
Commit some error of analysis, read too much into noise, claim a premature discovery, and you may as well tie your own academic noose. Forget those keynote lectures. Forget those expenses-paid conference invitations. You’ll be tarnished – dead in the water.
I’ve felt the pressure myself. I know what solitude and overwork can do to your objectivity. All the same, there are limits. I should have sensed that things were not going well long before they reached this latest development. I explain to the journal editor that I’m no longer in a position to offer a balanced opinion on the worth of this work. Frankly, I’m not even sure it still qualifies as science.
I’m stuffing the paper back into the glove compartment when it meets some obstruction, some object lodged at the back. I push my fingers into the mess and meet a stiff, sharp-edged rectangle about the size of a credit card. For a moment there’s a tingle of recognition.
I pull out the offending object, study it under the 4WD’s dome light. It’s a piece of grey foil printed with the name and logo of a pharmaceutical company. The foil contains six blisters. All but one of the blisters have been popped and emptied of their contents.
The sixth still holds a small yellow pill.
I wonder what it does?
I SLEEP BADLY, but dare to hope that the murmuration will have gone by morning – broken up or drifted away elsewhere. But when I wake, I find it still present.
If anything, it has grown. I run a number count and find that it has been absorbing birds, sucking them into itself. More than half a million now. Enslaved to the murmuration, the individual birds will eventually exhaust themselves and drop out of the sky. But the whole does not care, any more than I concern myself with the loss of a few skin cells. As long as there are fresh starlings to be fed into the machine, it will persist.
I drive the 4WD out again, set up the laptop, try increasingly desperate and random measures to make the pattern terminate itself.
Nothing works.
But the supply of new birds is not inexhaustible. Sooner or later, if they keep coming, it will churn its way through all the starlings in the country. Long before that happens, though, the wrongness of this thing will have become known to others beside myself. They will know that I had something to do with it. They will admire me at first, for my cleverness. After that, they will start blaming me.
I want it to end. Here. Now.
So.
Desperate measures. The wind is stiff today, the bushes and trees buckling over. Even the birds struggle to hold their formation, although the will of the murmuration forces itself through.
I make it move. I can still do that.
I steer the murmuration in the direction of the wind turbine. The blades swoop around at the limit of their speed: if it were any windier, the automatic brakes would lock the turbine into immobility. The edge of the flock begins to enter the meat slicer. I hear its helicopter whoosh, the cyclic chop its great rotors. The blades knock the birds out of the sky in their hundreds, an instant bludgeoning execution. They tumble out of formation, dead before they hit the ground.
This is merciful, I tell myself. Better than being trapped in the murmuration.
But my control slackens. The domains are resisting, slipping out of my grip. The ensemble won’t allow itself to be destroyed by the wind turbine.
It knows what I have tried to do.
It knows that I am trying to murder it.
On my laptop the Perl script says:
>>NO. NO. NO.
THE PILL LEAVES a bitter but familiar aftertaste. With a clarity of mind I haven’t known – or don’t remember knowing – in quite some time, I make my way once more to the top of the turbine tower. It’s odd that I feel this compulsion, since my fear of heights hasn’t abated, and for once there’s nothing wrong with the turbine, beyond some fresh dark smears on the still-turning blades.
In the housing, I ease around the humming core of the generator and its whirring shaft. The dials are all still registering power – enough for my needs, at any rate. We’re still down to those last few replacement fuses, but there’s no need to swap one of them at the moment.
I climb the little ladder and poke my head out through the roof hatch. Steeling myself, pushing my fear aside, I put my elbows on the rim and lever my body up through the hatch. Finally I’m sitting on the rim, with my legs and feet still dangling back into the housing. The wind is hard and cold up here, a relentless solid force, but with the enclosing handrails there’s no real chance of me falling. All the same, it takes my last reserves of determination to rise from the hatch, pushing myself up until I am standing on the rubberised decking. The handrails seem too low now, and the gaps between the uprights too widely spaced. With each swoop of the blades, the housing moves under me. My knees wobble. My stomach flutters and sweat pools in the palms of my gloved hands.
But I will not fall. That’s not why I’ve come to the top of the turbine.
Once more I survey my little world from this lofty vantage. The hut, the instruments, the parked vehicle. The low sky. The boggy tracks of my daily routine.
The harder gleam of the causeway, arrowing away.
But it never gets anywhere. The causeway vanishes into bog and then the bog opens up into the silver mirror of a larger expanse of open water. I squint, trying to pick up the causeway’s continuation beyond the flooded area. There, maybe. A scratch of iron-grey, arrowing on toward the horizon. But dark shapes bordering that scratch. Cars, vans – all stopped. Some of them tipped over or emptied like skulls. Burnt out.
I might be imagining it.
Beyond the marsh, beyond the enclosing water, nothing that hints at civilisation.
I realise now that I’ve been here a lot longer than weeks. I know also that I don’t need to worry about being a scientist any more. That’s the least of anyone’s concerns. Being a scientist is just something I used to do, a long time ago.
I wish I could hold onto this. I wish I could remember that the paper doesn’t matter, that the journal doesn’t matter, that nothing matters. That the only thing left to worry about is holding on, keeping things at bay. But unless I’m mistaken that was the last of my medication.
Finally the wind and the swaying overcome my will. I start down the tower, back to the ground.
At the 4WD I stand and watch the birds. That clarity hasn’t completely left me, that knowledge of what I am and what has become of me. I can feel it slipping, draining out of my head as if there are holes in the base of my skull. For the moment, though, there’s still enough of it there. I know what happened.
But the murmuration still contains troubling structure – sharp edges, block knots of density, shifting domains and restless connections. Did I cause all of that to come into being, or is this now the way of things? Is it a kind of equivalence, order emerging in the natural world, while order is eclipsed in ours? Have I been trying to communicate with the murmuration, or is it the other way around? Which of us is the observer, which the phenomenon?
If I tried to kill it, will it find it in itself to forgive me?
I try to hold onto these questions. They seem hugely important to me now. But one pill was never going to hold the dusk at bay.
IN THE MORNING I feel much better about things. Finally, I think I can see a way through – a fresh approach, a new chance of publication. It will mean going back to the start of the process, but sometimes you have no choice – you just have to end things before they get any worse.