Why you asking questions, child? it screamed.
Trying to find a friend of mine I said, keeping calm. I clumped around on my perch to face the big red-black bird. Twig still in my beak.
It held up one foot; three talons up, one down. See these three claws? it said.
Yup. (Might as well play along for now, but I’m checking the exits, thinking of my leg-ring with the wake-up code on it.)
You got to the count of three to move your beak back to reality you skin job, the red bird says. You hear me? I’m starting counting now: 3.
I’m just looking for my friend.
2.
It’s just an ant. I’m only looking for a little ant who was my friend.
1.
What’s the fucking problem here? Don’t a creature get no respect for – (and I’m shouting now angrily and I drop the twig from my beak).
Then the big red bird’s foot comes out like its bleeding leg is telescopic and zaps itself towards my head and wraps round it and squishes me down before I can do anything and I feel myself trapped and squelched down through the fabric of the metallic bird I’m perched upon and down through the building it’s part of and down through the city and down through the grid and down through the earth beneath and down and down and down and what’s worse I can feel that the ring round my leg that had my wake-up code on it has gone like that big red bird swiped it when it hit me and sure enough, I can’t think what the hell the wake-up code is, meanwhile I’m still going down and down and down and I’m thinkin,
Oh shit…
Next original section
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TRANSLATION – THREE – 4
Original text
Once the sky was full of birds; used to go black with birds it did and birds ruled the air (well, apart from the insects) but that’s all changed now; humans came along and started shooting and trapping and killing them and even if they’ve mostly stopped doing that sort of thing now they’re still top of the roost partly because they killed off so many species and partly because they make stuff fly, which when you think about it does kind of spoil it for the birds on account they had to spend millions of years jumping off cliffs and out of trees and crashing to the ground and dying and then doing it all over again and one time maybe not crashing quite so hard but gliding a bit and then a bit more and a bit more still and so on and so on etc. and just generally painstakingly evolving in this incredibly complicated way (I mean, lizard-scales into feathers! and hollow bones, for goodness sakes!) and then these bleeding humans, these ridiculous-looking bald monkeys come along what have never showed the slightest interest in flying nor sign of adaptation to the air what-so-bleeding-ever and they start buzzing around in flying machines just for a laugh!
Makes you sick. Didn’t even have the decency to do it slow; one minute their flying machines is made from paper and spit, then one evolutionary blink of the eye and the bastards are playing golf on the moon!
Oh, there’s still birds around all right but there’s a damn sight fewer of them and a lot of what you would think is birds isn’t; it’s chimerics, or machines, and even if it is the case that what looks like a bird is a bird, if it’s a big one it’s probably not even got its head to itself but it’s been taken over by a dead person. Can’t even have peace in your own bonce. Birds have coped with tics and fleas and lice all their evolutionary life but these damn humans are worse and they get everywhere!
I’m flapping and squawking and walking about my perch and wishing Mr Zoliparia the human would hurry up and wake me because the more I think about people the less I like them and the more I like being a bird.
Been almost a week now; what’s keeping the man? My own fault for entrusting my safety to an old geezer. That’s the trouble with old persons; slow reactions. Probably dropped the pen I asked him to catch and is even now scrabbling about on the floor for it, forgetting the important thing is to wake me, not to get the bleeding pen. But it must have been a minute in real time by now; surely even an old person can’t take that long to look for a bleeding pen for goodness sakes.
How am I going to wake up? I’m below the level where you get asked in your sleep automatically and my own wake-up code was taken from me by that big bastard bird what slapped me down here in the first place and even though I’ve remembered it since it just doesn’t seem to be working no more.
My goose, like they say, may well be cooked.
I’m on a perch in a sort of little dark cave.
If you can imagine a giant black brain in an even bigger dark space, and then zoom in on the brain and go down in amongst its corrugations and folds and see that the walls of every fold is made out of zillions of little boxes with a perch in it, well, that’s what this bit of bird-space is like, in the crypt.
My little box looks out onto a huge hanging dark space all filled with shadows and the occasionally passing bird flapping slowly past (we all flap slow – the pretend gravity is less here). Well, I’m saying it’s all dark but maybe it isn’t really, maybe that’s just me because truth to tell I’ve not been very well; in fact I’m half blind, but that’s better than what I was a couple of days ago, which was half dead.
There’s a dainty flutter of wings at the entrance to my box, and in comes little Dartlin, who’s the friend I’ve made here.
Hello, Dartlin, how’s it going?
Fine, Mr Bathcule. I been terribly busy, you know; terribly busy bird I been. I flew through to the parliament of the crows and picked up some gossip, would you like to hear it?
Dartlin is my spy, sort of. When I imagined myself in here in the first place, back in Mr Zoliparia’s pad, I just naturally somehow took on the appearance of a hawk, which is what I still am now. Dartlin’s a sparrow, so in theory we should be raptor and prey respectively, but it doesn’t actually work that way here, not in this bit anyway.
Dartlin found me on the floor here. I’d just got back from the level beneath where the real fun in the crypt starts and I was in a sorry state, let me tell you.
The first couple of days were the worst. When the big bird slapped me down through all them levels I thought my time was up; I mean, I knew I’d wake up in the eyeball of the septentrional gargoyle Rosbrith sooner or later, but I thought I was going to die in here, and that’s a hell of a thing to take back to your waiting mind; scar you for life, that can.
It’s very difficult to explain what it’s like when you go that deep in the crypt, but if you can imagine being in a snow storm, flying in a thick snowstorm only the snow is multi-coloured and some of it seems to be coming at you from every angle (and each snow-flake seems to sing and hum and sizzle and hold little flashing images and hints of faces in it and as they go past you here snatches of speech or music or you feel a emotion or think of a idea or concept or seem to remember something) and if one of the snow-flakes hits you in the eye you are suddenly in somebody else’s dream and it’s an effort to remember who the hell you are, well if you can imagine experiencing all that when you are feeling a bit drunk and disoriented then that’s a bit like what it’s like, except worse of course. And weirder.
I don’t actually remember much about that bit and I don’t think I want too, either. I learnt to navigate by the flavour of the surrounding dreams and gradually sorted some sense out of the gibberish and though I got blinded by the abrading impact of all those snow-flakes and lost the wording of my wake-up code, I finally broke back through to the darkness and peace and quiet here, and lay exhausted on the floor amongst lots of scraggly dead feathers and solidified droppings and that’s where Dartlin found me.
He’d been terrified by something and lost the memory of how to fly and so ended down on the floor too, but he could see and so once I’d got my strength back he got onto my back between my wings and guided me to where the sparrows gather. They told him how to fly again but they didn’t feel comfortable having a hawk around so they found me this place down here and that’s where I’ve been the last four days, getting my sight back while Dartlin flits about making inquiries and being busy and nosy and gossiping, which is what sparrows like doing anyway.