James Ballard: Dream Cargoes

"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.