White and Other Tales of Ruin (47 page)

The two men drank to that.

“
Sun’s coming up,” Doug said after a couple of minutes. “Today will be the day, I reckon.”

“
We’ll go for a walk,” Peter said suddenly. “I have a large estate, you know. A herd of deer, a lake, and a walk up into the mountains that you’d kill for. It’ll be wondrous. I’ll do a lunch for us. I bake my own bread, you’ll faint with delight when you taste it, it’s simply heavenly. And I’ll even take a few bottle of wine I’ve been—“

“
Saving for a suitable occasion?”

Peter nodded. “Absolutely. A suitable occasion. You’ll see, we’ll have a fine day. We’ll watch the sunset from the mountains. And if it’s not the sunset we get to see … well, we’ll watch the other from up there. I imagine from what I’ve heard about it, it will be quite a sight.”

“
Reality being unmade before our eyes. All matter unstitched. Quite a sight, yes.”

“
Ah, yes.” Peter sat back in his huge chair and steepled his fingers, peering between the arches.

Doug wondered what he saw. “You’re enjoying this.”

“
I suppose I am. Not the circumstances, mind. Just … well, having you here.”

“
I thought you didn’t like people.”

Peter looked surprised for a moment, then lowered his eyes slightly. It was the only time Doug ever saw a hint of humility or shame in the old man. “Well, generally maybe … but it’s different. You’re my folk. And as I said, I knew some of my folk would turn up here sooner or later.”

He raised his glass, and the new sunlight streaming through the windows set the liquid aflame.

Before they left the house Peter found Doug in the downstairs bathroom, trying to contact someone on his mobile phone. They’d already tried the TV that morning … a blank screen and an endless repetition
of God Save The Queen.

“
Selling your shares?” The old man smiled.

Doug could only stare at him for a few seconds, trying to see whatever was behind the joke. “Well actually, I have a couple of friends living in Newcastle. I thought I’d … try them. See if they’re still there.”

“
Any reply?”

“
No. No, none. Line must be down, or maybe they’re working on it. Or something.”

Peter stared back, chewing his bottom lip for a few seconds, obviously turning something over in his mind before he said it. Then he put his hands on Doug’s shoulders and drew him close, so close that their noses were almost touching. When he spoke, Doug smelled Brandy and tobacco. It was a sweet smell, lively, not at all unpleasant. It inspired a surprising nostalgia for his long-dead grandfather.

“
Doug,” the old man said, “let it go. We’ll likely be dead before sunset, all of us, and there’s absolutely nothing you, me or anyone can do about it. And the crazy thing is … it doesn’t matter.”

“
How do you figure that?” Doug said, anger rising like the sun in his chest. “Why doesn’t it matter that my wife and my daughter are about to die?”

“
Everyone is going to die. Everything is being ruined. Within a day or two, there will be nothing left of the surface of this planet, just a sea of mindless, voracious mini-robots. Nothing animal, mineral, metal. And when there’s nothing left for them to destroy, I guess they start to take each other apart, reconstruct, take apart again. Everything will be pointless, forgotten, and the only physical thing left of humanity will be a few space probes wandering the stars and a century’s worth of radio and TV transmissions winging their way into deep space. Nobody to grieve, nobody to remember, nobody to miss us. It will be like we’ve never even existed. Nothing … will … matter.”

He squeezed Doug’s shoulders as if trying to knead the truth into his unwilling muscles.

Doug stepped to the window, pulled the net curtain aside and stared out at the rising sun. It seemed bigger than usual, redder, and as he glanced away he retained its image on his retinas. Looking at the hillsides, the forests and the sloping moorland leading up into the mountains, the sun’s red after-image touched them all.

It was a beautiful sunrise, maybe because it was one of the first that Doug had ever truly taken note of. It could be that dust in the air further south — dust, or those things — was catching the sunlight and spreading it across the sky, breaking up its colours and splashing an artist’s palette of light over the lowlands. But if this were the case, then it was a gift from the end of the world. There was no way he could refuse it.

He thought about what Peter had said. He didn’t agree with him — he thought that everything mattered now more than ever, because love was still here even when hope was not — and then he turned back to the old man.

“
Well we can’t let it beat us, I suppose.”

Peter nodded.

Doug smiled back, pleased at the compromise he had made.

They circled around the back of the house and headed toward the forest smothering the lower hills. Peter carried a rucksack bulging with fresh bread and choice cuts from his fridge. Lucy-Anne shouldered another bag which clinked as she walked.

Doug carried Gemma. He sang softly, enjoying the look of contentment and happiness on her face, loving the way the corners of her mouth turned up whenever he spoke, as he had always loved it. There was nothing more wonderful in the world than seeing his daughter smile when she saw him. It told him that he was doing all the right things.

“
Alright sweetie?” he asked quietly.

She planted a kiss on his cheek, leaned back and smiled at him. “Yes thanks, Daddy. You can let me down now, I’d like to walk.”

“
It’s a long way.”

She shrugged, looked up into the blue sky. “I don’t care. It’s a nice day for a walk. It’s good for you, anyway.”

He stopped and lowered Gemma to the ground. She hurried away and his vision blurred, the tears came, but he fought them back. If she saw him crying, her final day would be an unhappy one. He could never do that to her, no matter what Peter said, however sure he was that nothing mattered any more. He could never hurt his baby.

Soon they were in the woods. Peter pointed out dozens of species of flower and heather to Gemma, who nodded attentively and smelled the blooms and prickled her fingers on the heathers, laughing. Lucy-Anne fell into step with Doug and held his hand, saying nothing. Their touch was communication enough, every slight squeeze of fingers or palm sending message of love, companionship and comfort back and forth. It made him happy.

Squirrels leapt from branch to branch, flashes of wondrous red. Birds sang from high in the trees, and occasionally fluttered around below the cover, snatching morsels from the ground or simply singing their unknowable songs.

Twenty minutes after leaving the house Doug shuffled the mobile phone from his pocket and dropped it as he walked. He did not worry about littering. And he felt no parting pangs.

Newcastle was only two hundred miles away.

“
There used to be gold in these here hills,” Peter called out from where he had walked on ahead. “Even did a bit of prospecting myself. Swilled sediment around in a pan for weeks on end, anyway.”

“
Did you find anything?” Lucy-Anne asked.

“
Not a sliver, a filing or a nugget. But it was a nice few weeks, I’d take lunch with me and a good book, spend the whole day out in the wild and get back just before it was dark enough to get lost.” He had stopped, and stood staring through the last of the trees at the hillside looming above them, hands on his hips, shoulders rising and falling as he struggled for breath.

He was an old man, Doug kept having to remind himself. They were walking too fast, rushing to get from here to there, wherever here and there were, because of what would take them soon. “We should slow down,” he said. “There’s no hurry.”

Lucy-Anne glanced at him and smiled, her eyes glittering with tears she would never cry.

“
Strange how some metals are so valuable,” Peter continued, in a world of his own. “Strange how we’re so ignorant, we think we can classify the importance of all the things that go to make the world. Rock, now. Rock. That should be the most valuable. Holds it all together, after all.”

“
I thought gravity did that,” Doug mumbled.

“
Lithium is the lightest metal there is,” Gemma said. She had been skipping along in front of them, pausing occasionally to bend down and stare at a flower or a rock of some crawling thing. Now she became still, and as she looked up into the sky — there was nothing there to see, nothing but blue — she continued. Her voice was the voice Doug had always known, but her words, her tone, her knowledge was pure mystery.

“
It floats on water, has a specific gravity of nought-point-five-seven. Relative atomic mass six-point-nine-four-one. It’s used in batteries, and its compounds can be employed to treat manic depression. It was named in eighteen-eighteen by Jons Berzelius.” She sat down heavily and leaned forward, her head resting between her knees, talking at the ground. “But of course, it was his student Arfwedson who actually discovered it.”

Then she was sick.

“
What the hell was that?” Doug called. “Eh? Peter? What was that?” He ran to his little girl as he shouted, barely wondering why he expected the old man to know what Gemma was talking about.

Lucy-Anne reached her first and scooped her up, ignoring the spatter of sick that fell across her front. “Honey?” she said. “You okay? You feel okay?”

“
Headache,” Gemma said weakly, her face buried in her mother’s neck.

Doug reached them and stood behind Lucy-Anne, smoothing damp hair from Gemma’s pale face. She was sweating, drips of it ran down and pooled darkly on Lucy-Anne’s shirt, and she stank of vomit.

Yesterday dinosaurs, today lithium, Doug thought. Hell, I know nothing about lithium. Is this what they teach kids in primary school nowadays?

Peter strolled back to them, concern creasing his brow. “What was that she said?” he asked.

“
Does it matter? She’s ill.” Lucy-Anne was angry, Doug could tell that the moment she spoke, but she did not wish to reveal it to her old uncle.

Peter, however, was wise behind that crazy beard. “Sorry Lucy-Anne. Thoughtless of me. It’s just … well, you’ve a very bright girl there.”

“
Research into nanotechnology began in the early ‘80s,” Gemma mumbled. “And there were lots of scientists convinced —”

“
Gemma,” Doug said, confused and afraid and upset. It was not his daughter saying these things, not the Gemma he knew, the little girl who loved the Teletubbies and Winnie the Pooh and riding her tricycle and helping him dig the garden, so long as he moved all the worms out of the way because they were icky.

“ —
that it would be the new engineering. The Japanese created the first robots small enough to travel through veins, shredding fatty deposits or cancerous cells. The AT & T Bell laboratories in New Jersey constructed gears smaller in diameter than a human hair, and an electric motor a tenth of a millimetre across was built … and then it went top secret, and the various bodies involved started turning the positive research to more warlike ends.” There was a pause, just long enough to mark a change of tone. “As always, Man is distinguished only by his foolishness, and nothing good can come of him.”

“
Gemma, please honey …” Lucy-Anne said, and there was such a note of helplessness in her voice that it froze them all, for just a second or two.

Then Gemma whined, cried for a few seconds more and fell asleep.

They could not wake her.

Doug and Lucy-Anne refused to leave her side, so Peter hurried away and soaked his shirt in a nearby stream. He squeezed it over Gemma’s face as Doug held her in his arms. The water splashed on her skin, ran across her closed eyelids — they were twitching as her eyes rolled behind them — and they even forced some of it between her lips.

But Gemma would not wake up.

“
We have to go back,” Lucy-Anne said. “Get her to bed, make her warm.” Her voice cracked as she spoke, and Doug could see the truth of their situation in her eyes even as her mouth tried to deny it.

“
You know there’s no point, honey,” he said carefully. “By the time we get back to the house it’ll be lunchtime, and I doubt we’ll set out again before … the end of the day. And …” He looked up at Peter where he stood a little distance away, giving the family the space he assumed they needed. “Well, Gemma will be as comfortable up in the hills as she will in some bed hidden away indoors.”

Lucy-Anne’s mouth pursed tightly as she held back tears. “I wanted her to be awake when we died,” she said quietly. “Is that selfish of me?”

Doug felt his face burning and his nose tingling as tears came. He had been thinking the same thing. “We’ll be together,” he said, “whether she’s awake or asleep.”

“
What was she saying?” Peter asked quietly. “About the nanos? She was talking about the nanos, wasn’t she? Have there been programmes on television, documentaries, news items? Never watch it myself, but it seems to me that was all pretty technical for a pretty little girl like Gemma.”

“
It wasn’t her talking,” Doug said, and he hugged her tight to his chest. She was warm and twitching slightly in his arms. Her eyelids flexed as her eyes rolled. He looked up at Peter. “Can we go now?”