The Cormorant
A Story inspired by a Visitor from Interstellar Space
Did you know that there is something quite unique about the cormorant? It is this: only he among all the birds has the ability to fly using only one wing. Yes — it’s true, if not for all cormorants then certainly for some. You see him, traversing the sky, flying, say, from east to west. Do you see? There — using his port wing. And it exercises a rather peculiar rapid circular motion, quite different from the measured wing beat that your common or garden starlings and crows do. Then, when he reaches his meridian, he tucks the wing into his side and gets going with his starboard wing. The change barely affects his flight path. Just a momentary quiver, and then he’s away into the distance. And he seems to rock — to and fro and to and fro. His flight has a sort of chaotic quality. But it makes good sense, don’t you think? Saves energy and offsets fatigue. Now, there’s a smart bird for you.
I remember that my younger sister was concentrating on something she was sketching. She had scarcely looked up from her drawing block. ‘Don’t pay any attention to him, ‘Legra. That’s typical Grandpa. He is full of old lies …’
I was probably mildly shocked at the little girl’s cheek. If I was, our grandfather certainly wasn’t. He just laughed gleefully. ‘I wouldn’t call them lies, Cassie. Just tales, perhaps. Fairy tales. Magic.’ Then I saw that Cassie was staring at him. She had taken in, and probably retained, every word. That was her way.
‘But Grandpa’ I said, ‘The things you tell us … they’re really interesting. But honestly, are they true? Some of your stories are lovely. It’s a bit of a shame when you tell us later that they didn’t happen at all’
The old man stopped what he was doing — I think he was carving a small whistle from a length of wood — and frowned. ‘Well, I’d never want to make you or Cassie to feel foolish, Allegra. Tell you what — anymore, if you really want to know if I was kidding or not, well, just ask me “now Grandpa, is that the truth?” And if it was a lie, as your sister puts it so charmingly, then I promise I will come clean with you right away. On the other hand, if you want to keep the magic you might choose to say nothing at all ….’
The three of us fell silent. From the back of the house we could hear a woman’s voice singing in a soft contralto. The melody lovely and the words enchanting but in a language I did not know.
* * *
I unlatch the gate. The sound is a familiar one. Evocative. It engenders a sense of anticipation, even excitement in me. I walk slowly up the garden path taking in as much as I can as I make my way. The vast skies and the distant sea with its two low islands. The smell of cows in the field across the road, the newly cut grass, and the carelessly haphazard flower beds. At the open front door I call out ‘Grandpa?’
‘Come in! Come in child. I’ll put the kettle on …’
I think it odd that he should still call me ‘child’. He slipped into this way when my grandmother become ill. It’s not that he didn’t like the name ‘Allegra’. So, it’s a good few years now. And on my last birthday I was twenty-eight.
‘Oh — wait a few minutes. Let me see how you are. And I can make the tea.’
He is in the kitchen. He spends much of the day there. He is very frail now. He turns his wheelchair, cautiously, to face me. I stoop down so that my face is on a level with his. He raises his hands and places them gently on my cheeks. And as is his way he gazes into my eyes. He is searching for something — someone — I know that. Soon he finds her, and his lips move soundlessly ‘Úna — Tá mé I ngrá leat’. In spite of my ancestry, I have practically no Irish, and he very little. But my grandmother whom he so adored most certainly had. She was born and raised in the Gaeltacht — the Irish speaking region — in Connemara. And I know what he has just said to her.
‘So tell me — how is your sister getting on? It’s too long since I saw her.’
‘She’s doing fine. Did she tell you, she’d about to have another book published?’ Children’s fantasy. But she has a real gift for the genre.’
‘And where does she get her inspiration, I wonder? She never seems to be short of ideas.’
‘Hmmm — you might say it runs in the family …’
‘Really? Of course, I know that you write. I’m sure that you’ve had more stuff published than Cassie has, but it’s all facts in your case, you being a hard scientist. By the way — I read your recent paper in Nature. You’re certainly going places. Like your sister.’
‘Well, not my paper, Grandpa. I was a co-author — one of fourteen.’
He nods briefly, a pensive look in his eyes. ‘She has such imagination, has Cassie. Yet I’ve often been fascinated by the notion that …’ for a moment he hesitates, ‘… well, I mean you, both of you, explore your universes. They are so different, and yet similar in other ways …’
‘You’re losing me, Grandpa.’
‘You both of you probe mysteries. Hers from within her, yours from limitless space and time.’
‘But Cassie’s truths are the ones she creates. The truths I search for are, well, predetermined. Set, if you like.’
‘And all too often, elusive. Your work on Oumuamua answered a handful of questions, but it raised hundreds more for which we may never find the answers. Unless sometime in the future you can catch up with it.’
‘Well, don’t hold your breath on that one.’
When the strange object was first detected in October 2017 the discovery provoked enormous excitement among astronomers. I had got involved in some of the earlier observations and measurements as I was at that time working on my doctoral thesis at the Panoramic Survey Telescope — Pan-STARRS — in Hawaii, and a member of Doctor Karen Meech’s team. It was remarkable for two main reasons — firstly that it was the first object proven definitely to have entered our solar system from inter-stellar space and secondly of account of its shape: seemingly elongated in the form of a cylinder or possibly a disc. Some theorised that it might be artificial — the handiwork of some distant, ancient and possibly vanished civilisation. And because no high-resolution images of Oumuamua were ever obtained this notion was never entirely discounted. Nor might it ever be — for it has left the solar system and continues its journey among the stars, perhaps until the end of all things.
‘But Grandpa,’ I continue, ‘when I said it might run in the family, I wasn’t thinking of all the stuff I have trotted out in the journals. I was thinking of you.’
My grandfather looks away into the distance, a hint of a smile on his lips.
* * *
It is good to be back in Ireland, and so very good to be with Cassie again whom I have not seen for more than two years. This time we have a task to attend to — a bittersweet one: sorting out and attending to our grandfather’s belongings, reminiscing, and sharing precious memories. It is just one month since he passed away.
We have each other’s lives to catch up on too. I am still much of the time in Hawaii working mostly at the Keck observatory also at Pan-STARRS. Cassie returned to Ireland a year ago and in fact stayed with Grandpa and cared for him and was with him when he died. She is now a bestselling author — deservedly so. I mean, she is brilliant and widely acknowledged in literary circles and has been short-listed for several major international prizes. She has presented a copy of her latest book to me, and I hope I may get round to reading it soon.
The book is called ‘Oumuamua’.
I didn’t realise when she first showed such intense interest in our work at Pan-STARRS that she was planning to base her latest novel on that mysterious visitor from inter-stellar space. But I have to say I can think of few more inspiring events than the discovery of the ‘first messenger from afar’ as its name loosely translates. Being a writer of speculative fiction, she has license, of course, to consider the question ‘what if?’ So in the world she has created, Oumuamua is indeed the work of a super-civilisation separated from us by a vast expanse of space and time. And that might — just might — be true.
I go to bed early, exhausted by my journey halfway across the world, and by the grief from the loss of someone whom I had loved dearly. But I cannot sleep. I reach for the book that rests on the table beside me. I begin to read Oumuamua.
* * *
The millions of kilometres fell away relentlessly into thousands, then hundreds. The object, at first on the very edge of sight, began to take form. I had never before seen anything quite so strange, quite so unearthly. More than anything it seemed to me like a bird. It seemed to be rocking — to and fro, to and fro. Yes, I was reminded of a bird, but a bird flying with one wing, giving its passage across the sky a strange chaotic quality. And so it had flown for millennia beyond counting and distance beyond measuring, guarding its slumbering secrets.
‘Cassie — I have to say it is superb. We don’t know — probably will never know — what the reality is. I was so tired when I turned in, but I was captivated by the story. I just couldn’t put it down. However do you come by these ideas?’
‘Well, they certainly come from … somewhere. Or someone …’
‘There was a story Grandpa told us — oh, years ago when we were just kids.’
‘Yes.’ She looks out to the sea and the distant horizon. ‘The cormorant.’
‘You remember?’
‘Certainly, I remember. But then I remember pretty much everything he ever told us. Strange. I think it must be, you know, what they call “total recall”.
‘The cormorant … that was certainly one of his more, well, bizarre ideas. I have no idea how he came by the notion.’
‘There’s nothing bizarre about it at all.’ There was a hint of defensiveness in her voice.
‘But he did tell you, surely, that it was one of his … inventions …’
‘He did no such thing.’
‘But when you asked him if what he told us was the truth?’
‘I didn’t ask him.’
For a few moments I wasn’t sure how best to continue the conversation, or whether to continue it at all. Then Cassie went on: ‘I didn’t need to. I knew he was telling the truth’
‘But Cassie — no birds fly with just one wing! Grandpa was kidding us!’
She shook her head. ‘I grant you that you’ve never seen a cormorant fly with just one wing. That’s because probably most of them don’t. Remember be told us that.’
‘I have to say that I don’t see cormorants very often. Hardly at all in fact’.
‘But I do. It’s kind of inevitable if you live close to the sea as I do.’
‘And you’ve seen them flying using only one wing?’
She nodded. ‘Grandpa and I used to go walking by the shore before he had his stroke. We saw them there. And when he couldn’t get out anymore, we used to watch them from the big window in his studio.’
Cassie seemed to have slipped back and was talking almost as she did when she was a child. I felt a need to be cautious about further questioning her. Hesitating, I said, ‘Cassie — was it only when you were with Grandpa that you saw the cormorants using … just one wing?’
‘Well … yes. But you mustn’t read anything into that.’
I didn’t comment on that last remark.
* * *
It is clear now that what we are learning from the near infinite amount of data that we have gleaned from the quantum computers in the heart of that colossal archive had been made available to us by intent. I can only hope that the intention is benign because, as with all new knowledge there is the potential for its misuse to result in destruction on an unimaginable scale. Above all else now we need wisdom to inform us how we ought to proceed. And wisdom is not in the gift of Oumuamua. More likely that gift resides in our ancestors and in a sphere entirely separate from that of science and technology.
So when, eventually, I return to my home on the Earth, I will walk again on the shore and seek and see the cormorant through the eyes of one who was so far sighted and who was possessed of a depth of wisdom such as to just possibly afford the constraint needed to shield humankind from the consequences of its worst excesses.
