"Oh, but you should indeed, my impetuous fool of a brother. And I do not believe my life has been ill-spent."
Daniel tapped his forehead. "It's all in here. But I'd better get it down on paper. Make copies and spread it around — just in case Atherton gets glassed. Then somebody else will know how to build the transmitter. And life can go on. Over there they think maybe the human race is the only life in the whole universe. So we have a duty to go on existing. Only, the others have destroyed themselves arguing about which way to exist. But we've still got time enough. We can build ships to sail through space to the stars.
I know a bit about that too. I tell you, my visit brought them real joy in their last hours, to know this was all still possible after all."
"Oh, Dan." And Jason groaned. Patriarch-like, he raised his staff and brought it crashing down on Daniel's skull.
He had imagined that he mightn't really notice the blood amidst Daniel's bright red hair. But he did.
The boy's body slumped in the doorway. With an effort Jason dragged it inside, then with an even greater effort up the oak stairs to the attic where Martha Prestidge hardly ever went. The corpse might begin to smell after a while, but it could be wrapped up in old blankets and such.
However, the return of his housekeeper down below distracted Jason.
Leaving the body on the floor he hastened out, turning the key in the lock and pocketing it.
It had become the custom to invite selected guests back to the Babbidge house following the Mayday festivities, so Martha Prestidge would be busy all the rest of the day cleaning and cooking and setting the house to rights.
As was the way of the housekeepers, she hinted that Jason would get under her feet, so off he walked down to the glass and out onto its perfect flatness to stand and meditate. Villagers and visitors spying the lone figure out there nodded gladly. Their prophet was at peace, presiding over their lives. And over their deaths.
The skate-sailing masque, the passion play, was enacted as brightly and gracefully as ever the next day.
It was May the third before Jason could bring himself to go up to the attic again, carrying sacking and cord. He unlocked the door.
But apart from a dark stain of dried blood the floorboards were bare.
There was only the usual jumble stacked around the walls. The room was empty of any corpse. And the window was open.
So he hadn't killed Daniel after all. The boy had recovered from the blow. Wild emotions stirred in Jason, disturbing his usual composure. He stared out of the window as though he might discover the boy lying below on the cobbles. But of Daniel there was no sign. He searched around Atherton like a haunted man, asking no questions but looking everywhere piercingly. Finding no clue, he ordered a horse and cart to take him to Edgewood. From there he traveled all around the glass, through Buckby and Hopperton; and now he asked wherever he went, "Have you seen a boy with red hair?" The villagers told each other that Jason Babbidge had had another vision.
As well he might have, for within the year from far away news began to spread of a new teacher, with a new message. This new teacher was only a youth, but he had also ridden a slow bird — much farther than the Silent Prophet had ever ridden one.
However, it seemed that this young teacher was somewhat flawed, since he couldn't remember all the details of his message, of what he had been told to say. Sometimes he would beat his head with his fists in frustration, till it seemed that blood would flow. Yet perversely this touch of theatre appealed to some restless, troublesome streak in his audiences. They believed him because they saw his anguish, and it mirrored their own suppressed anxieties.
Jason Babbidge spoke zealously to oppose the rebellious new ideas, exhausting himself. All the philosophical beauty he had brought into the dying world seemed to hang in the balance; and reluctantly he called for a «crusade» against the new teacher, to defend his own dream of Submission.
Two years later, he might well have wished to call his words back, for their consequence was that people were tramping across the countryside in between the zones of annihilation armed with pitchforks and billhooks, cleavers and sickles. Villages were burnt; many hundreds were massacred; and there were rapes — all of which seemed to recall an earlier nightmare of Jason's from before the time of his revelation.
In the third year of this seemingly endless skirmish between the Pacificists and the Survivalists Jason died, feeling bitter beneath his cloak of serenity; and by way of burial his body was roped to a slow bird. Loyal mourners accompanied the bird in silent procession until it vanished hours later. A short while after that, quite suddenly at the Battle of Ashton Glass, it was all over, with victory for the Survivalists led by their young red-haired champion, who it was noted bore a striking resemblance to old Jason Babbidge, so that it almost seemed as though two basic principles of existence had been at contest in the world: two aspects of the selfsame being, two faces of one man.
Fifty years after that, by which time a full third of the land was glass and the climate was worsening, the Survival College in Ashton at last invented the promised machine; and from then on slow birds continued to appear and fly and disappear as before, but now none of them exploded.
And a hundred years after that all the slow birds vanished from the Earth. Somewhere, a war was over, logically and finally.
But by then, from an Earth four-fifths of whose land surface was desert or swamp — in between necklaces of barren shining glass — the first starship would arise into orbit.
It would be called Slow Bird. For it would fly to the stars, slowly. Slowly in human terms; two generations it would take. But that was comparatively fast.
A second starship would follow it; called Daniel.
Though after that massive and exhausting effort, there would be no more starships. The remaining human race would settle down to cultivate what remained of their garden in amongst the dunes and floods and acres of glass. Whether either starship would find a new home as habitable even as the partly glassed Earth, would be merely an article of faith.
On his deathbed, eighty years of age, in Ashton College lay Daniel who had never admitted to a family name.
The room was almost indecently overcrowded, though well if warmly ventilated by a wind whipping over Ashton Glass, and bright-lit by the silvery blaze reflecting from that vitrified expanse.
The dying old man on the bed beneath a single silken sheet was like a bird himself now: shrivelled with thin bones, a beak of a nose, beady eyes, and a rooster's comb of red hair on his head.
He raised a frail hand as if to summon those closest even closer.
Actually it was to touch the old wound in his skull which had begun to ache fiercely of late as though it was about to burst open or cave in, unlocking the door of memory — notwithstanding that no one now needed the key hidden there, since his Collegians had discovered it independently, given the knowledge that it existed.
Faces leaned over him: confident, dedicated faces.
"They've stopped exploding, then?" he asked, forgetfully.
"Yes, yes, years ago!" they assured him.
"And the stars —?"
"We'll build the ships. We'll discover how."
His hand sank back on to the sheet. "Call one of them —"
"Yes?"
"Daniel. Will you?"
They promised him this.
"That way… my spirit…"
"Yes?"
"…will fly…"
"Yes?"
"…into the silence of space."
This slightly puzzled the witnesses of his death; for they could not know that Daniel's last thought was that, when the day of the launching came, he and his brother might at last be reconciled.