Inside the vivarium, the flames crackled even more briskly. The oak branches began to char, and the spikenard curled up, and the thorny cuttings of commiphora myrrha were all reduced to fragile black prickles. There was a strong, aromatic smell of burning spices.
As the nest was reduced to ashes, the phoenix-worm itself gradually reappeared, and Nathan could see that its pale gray skin was starting to shrivel and flake off in the heat. Underneath its skin, however, its flesh was glowing dull red, like a hot coal; and as Nathan watched it, it began to glow brighter and brighter. Within a few seconds, it was incandescent, not like a hot coal any longer, but more like a white gas mantle. It was so bright that Nathan could hardly look at it.
‘Can you see if it is metamorphosing, Professor?’ asked Aarif, shielding his eyes with his hand. ‘There is so much shining! So much smoke!’
Nathan said, ‘I don’t know yet. To tell you the truth I can’t see a goddamned thing.’
Now the phoenix-worm burned more intensely than ever. Even through the thick fire-resistant glass, Nathan could hear a low flaring sound as it burned. The flames leaped up fiercer and higher until they filled the whole vivarium, and as minutes went past they showed no signs of dying down. Nathan began to feel the heat on his face, and he stepped back two or three paces, as did Kavita.
‘It is incredible,’ said Aarif. ‘How long can such a small creature burn? And all of the oxygen inside the vivarium, that must be used up. This is against all of the laws of physics!’
At that moment there was an explosive crack, and the front glass panel of the vivarium broke in half diagonally and dropped out on to the floor. Flames rolled out with a hungry roar and enveloped Aarif’s video cameras, almost as if the blazing worm was angry at being filmed. Aarif dodged forward to rescue them, but the flames came rolling out again, and he had to back away, both arms crossed in front of him to protect his face.
The heat that came blasting out of the shattered vivarium was overwhelming. Papers strewn on top of the laboratory workbenches caught fire and whirled up into the air. Bottles of chemicals exploded, one after the other. Even the varnish on the floor burst into flames. There was a sharp click, and fire-suppressant F-200 gas began to hiss out of the pipes in the laboratory’s ceiling, but to begin with, even that seemed to have no effect.
‘My cameras!’ screamed Aarif.
But Nathan shouted, ‘Forget them! Just get the hell out of here!’
They hurried to the door. Nathan opened it and pushed Aarif and Kavita outside, but then he unhooked the fire extinguisher that was hanging beside it and turned back toward the blazing vivarium.
‘Professor!’ said Aarif.
‘Call nine-one-one!’ Nathan told him. He hit the button on top of the fire extinguisher and slowly started to walk back toward the vivarium, spraying foam from side to side. But the flames continued to blaze with undiminished ferocity. In fact they almost seemed to eat the foam that he was spraying at them. The heat was searing. Nathan could feel his forehead and his cheeks scorching, and one by one, the three remaining glass panels in the vivarium cracked and fell out.
‘Professor!’ called Aarif. ‘The fire department will be here in just a few minutes!’
Nathan gave the wreckage of the vivarium a last spray of foam before his extinguisher ran out. He dropped it on to the floor with a clang and retreated toward the door.
He was only halfway there when there was a devastating bang, and for a split second the whole laboratory was filled floor-to-ceiling with fire. Nathan was thrown against the wall so hard that he was stunned and dropped to his knees. Aarif rushed to help him and started hitting him repeatedly on the back of the head.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Nathan protested.
‘Your hair is alight, Professor. I am putting you out.’
‘Is it? Are you? OK, thanks.’
Aarif helped Nathan to his feet. Nathan turned around and saw that the fire had extinguished itself. Nothing was left of the vivarium but its twisted metal frame and its ventilator hood, and two workbenches were scorched and littered with broken glass. Apart from that, however, the damage was superficial. The fire may have burned at an unfeasibly high temperature, but it had burned for only two or three minutes.
Nathan walked across to the remains of the vivarium, his shoes scrunching on shattered glass. He sniffed. The laboratory reeked of smoke, but something else, too, like joss sticks from his student days.
Aarif said, ‘Maybe I had better call the fire department and tell them that we have no need of them after all.’
‘No … they’ll want to come and take a look. In any case, the company will have to have the fire marshal’s report before they can claim on their insurance. We don’t want them accusing us of negligence, do we?’
‘It was not our fault. How could we have foreseen this fire would be so intense? It defies all scientific principles.’
‘Trying to recreate mythical creatures, Aarif – that defies all scientific logic, too.’
Nathan picked up a long steel rule. He bent over the remains of the vivarium and started to poke through the heaps of hot ashes.
Jādir had written that each phoenix was supposed to live for five hundred years. When its time came, it flew to the ancient city of Heliopolis, city of the sun, which used to be located five miles to the east of modern-day Cairo. There, it built a nest out of branches and spices, and crept inside, and died, and became a phoenix-worm. Then the rays of the sun set the nest alight, and out of the flames a new phoenix appeared.
‘Zip,’ said Nathan. ‘It didn’t work, did it? I’m beginning to think that Jādir never did create a phoenix, not for real. Maybe everything he wrote about it was a legend. You know – like something out of The Arabian Nights. Like genies, and dragons, and flying carpets.’
He scraped aside the last of the ashes with the edge of the steel rule, and then stood up straight. ‘I don’t know how the hell I’m going to explain this to Ron Kasabian. He’s going to cut off our funding for sure. And he’s certainly not going to give us any more money to create a wyvern.’
Aarif was trying to salvage his camera equipment, but the heat had shattered all of the lenses and the legs of his tripods had collapsed.
‘I believed so much that this would work,’ said Aarif, shaking his head. ‘I believed it with all of my heart.’
‘Well, I’m sorry,’ said Nathan. ‘It’s always the same with science. You work your butt off for year after year, and in the end you come up with squat. It’s not surprising that you get so many mad scientists.’
‘Professor,’ said Kavita.
There was an odd inflection in her voice, which made Nathan turn around and say, ‘What is it, Kavita? What’s wrong?’
Kavita was staring up at a ventilator hood on top of the burned-out vivarium. Nathan frowned at her and then he looked up to see what she was staring at. On top of the ventilator hood he could just make out a silhouette that looked like a bird’s head with a hooked beak.
At first he thought it might be an optical illusion, an angular arrangement of shadows on the ceiling. But then the head jerked sideways, opened its beak, and let out a high, harsh cry.
‘Aarif!’ said Nathan. ‘Aarif – up there, on top of the vent!’
Aarif looked up, too, and then he turned to Nathan with a widening smile on his face. ‘You did it, Professor! You did it! I was sure that you could do it!’
‘You mean we did it, Aarif. Me and you and Kavita. We did it. And I think I need to apologize to Jādir, for doubting him.’
‘I will bring the stepladder,’ said Aarif, and hurried off to the storeroom to fetch it. Nathan crossed over to the far side of the laboratory, where a large parakeet cage was standing ready on a workbench. When he had ordered this cage, he had believed that he was tempting fate, and that he would never be able to create a living phoenix to put inside it. But at last he had done it. He had brought to life a living creature that for centuries had been known only as a myth.
Aarif came back with the stepladder and set it up beside the remains of the vivarium. Nathan made sure it was firm, and then climbed up it very slowly, so that he wouldn’t startle the phoenix with any sudden moves.
Little by little, the phoenix came into view. It cocked its head sideways and stared at Nathan with one glistening eye, and then it let out another harsh crarrrrkk.
‘Come on, baby,’ Nathan coaxed it. ‘Come to poppa. You’re beautiful, aren’t you? You’re really, really beautiful!’
The phoenix was about the size of a small scavenger hawk. The French author Voltaire had described this mythical bird as having a rose-red beak and feathers covering its head and its neck that were all the colors of the rainbow ‘but more brilliant and lively, with a thousand shades of gold glistening on its body and its tail’. But then Voltaire had never seen one, not for real. This real phoenix had brown, lusterless plumage, almost shabby, with darker brown tinges to the tips of its wings.
As Nathan rose higher on the stepladder, it spread its wings a little and backed away, its claws scratching noisily on top of the ventilator hood.
‘Come on, baby,’ said Nathan. ‘Come to poppa.’
The phoenix gave a nervous little skitter and backed even further away. Nathan froze, and then stayed completely motionless, both hands raised, scarcely even breathing, for over half a minute.
Aarif said, ‘Do you want me to try, Professor? When I was a boy, I used to catch my uncle’s chickens for him.’
Nathan didn’t answer, and still didn’t move. The phoenix let out yet another crrarrrk of alarm, but after a while its curiosity was beginning to get the better of it, and it came a few steps nearer, repeatedly twitching its head from side to side.
Nathan waited until the phoenix had almost reached the near edge of the ventilator hood. It stared at him, making a thin warbling noise in its throat, and ruffling its feathers. Even when it was close enough for him to try snatching it, Nathan held off. He wanted to make sure that he got a good firm grip on it, first time. He didn’t know for sure if it was developed enough to fly yet, and he didn’t want it to fall off the top of the ventilator hood on to the floor and injure itself. It was only a fledgling, after all.
‘Aarif,’ he said, ‘take off your lab coat and hold it out, just in case it loses its footing.’
Aarif did as he was asked, and he and Kavita stood underneath the phoenix with his lab coat stretched out between them as a safety net.
The phoenix came even closer. Nathan took a deep breath, and then lunged forward and caught hold of both of its scaly legs.
Immediately, with a screech of rage and indignation, the phoenix attacked him. It jabbed at his face with its beak, narrowly missing his left eye, and its claws scrabbled at his wrists. It screeched again and again, its beak hacking at his forehead and his cheeks and splitting his lower lip, and its wings beat so frantically that it almost lifted him off the stepladder.
He tried to take a step down, but the phoenix went for his face yet again, and when he instinctively jerked away from it, he lost his balance. He clattered backward down the stepladder, still holding the phoenix’s legs in both hands. Aarif managed to snatch the tail of his lab coat and partially break his fall, but he landed heavily on his right shoulder on the floor. Even as he lay there, winded, the phoenix kept up its furious attack, tearing at his left earlobe with its beak and clawing at his neck.
‘For Christ’s sake get this damned thing off me!’ Nathan shouted.
Aarif tried to pin the bird’s wings against its body, the way he would have caught a frightened chicken, but the phoenix was like a blizzard of feathers and claws, and it was impossible for him to get his hands around it. He tried instead to seize its neck, but it screeched and twisted its head around and viciously pecked at his hand.
It was Kavita who finally managed to subdue it. She threw Aarif’s discarded lab coat right over it, twisting one of the sleeves around its legs and tying it roughly into a knot. The phoenix screeched again and again, and fought with such determination to escape from its makeshift straitjacket that they could barely hold it. Eventually, Aarif managed to keep the struggling creature pressed against his chest long enough for Nathan to be able to climb to his feet. Between the two of them they carried it across to the parakeet cage, opened the door and forced it inside.
Aarif untied the sleeve of his lab coat and dragged it out of the cage, while Nathan quickly fastened the catch. Instantly, the phoenix exploded with fury. It thrashed its wings and hurled itself from one side of the birdcage to the other, crashing against the bars so violently that some of its feathers burst out and floated in the air all around it.
‘Aggressive little critter, isn’t it?’ said Nathan, dabbing the blood from his face with a paper napkin. ‘You remember what I told you about mythical creatures not being afraid of humans? I should have remembered it myself.’
‘It won’t hurt itself, will it?’ asked Kavita.
‘Maybe we should give it a tranquilizer,’ Aarif suggested. ‘A small dose of metoserpate hydrochloride, like they give to chickens whenever they get stressed.’
‘No,’ said Nathan. ‘At least, not yet. Let’s just give it time to relax. I don’t want to risk giving it an overdose.’
Outside in the street, they heard the wailing and honking of sirens. At the same time, the building’s super appeared in the doorway, a tall rangy black man called Henry. He wore a flappy gray uniform with the Schiller insignia on the pocket, and a peaked cap.
‘Holy Moses, Professor!’ he said. ‘What happened in here? I heard a bang, but I thought it was just more thunder.’
‘Slight accident,’ said Nathan.
‘You ain’t kidding me. Look at this place!’
‘Don’t worry. We called the fire department, as you can hear.’
‘But your face, Professor! You’re all cut up!’
‘It’s nothing, Henry. Only a few scratches. Why don’t you go back down to the lobby and show the firefighters where we are? And you can tell them that the fire’s out now, so they won’t be needing their hoses.’
Henry loped around the workbenches in his thick-soled shoes, sniffing and shaking his head. The way he walked always reminded Nathan of Jar Jar Binks. ‘You know they had this entire laboratory refurberated just last fall, only a couple of weeks before you moved in. Man, oh man! Mr Kasabian, he’s going to go apeshit.’
He passed close to the phoenix cage, and as he did so, the phoenix screeched and scrabbled at the bars. Henry jumped back, and said, ‘Shee-it! That’s some seriously cranky bird you got there, Professor!’
He bent down and peered at it more closely. ‘Homely, too. Never saw a bird like that before.’
Nathan was dabbing more blood from his ear, but he couldn’t stop himself from smiling. ‘No, Henry, you never did. Nobody ever did. Nobody in this day and age, anyhow.’