Tomorrow’s World (31 page)
Authors: Davie Henderson
We exhausted our food in four days and, despite rationing our drinks to the point of being permanently thirsty, our bottles were as dry as our throats by the day after that. My throat was raw as well as dry, as if something in the air was burning it, and I developed a wracking cough. Paula was the same and, like me, her voice became croakier by the day. As if things weren't bad enough our skin got steadily itchier, and contact with water only made things worse.
That night, our fifth Outside, there was a colossal thunderstorm. We were so thirsty we ran out of the house we'd made our home for the nightâa luxury bungalow that was no longer luxuriousâand stood on the patio with our mouths wide open and our arms outstretched.
But the rainwater tasted vile on our tongues and left our faces burning. We boiled some of it in an old pot, on a fire of ripped up cardboard boxes and broken chair legs, lit with a scavenged cigarette lighter. But, after twenty minutes of bubbling away, the water was still so foul we couldn't make ourselves drink it.
It was as good a time as any to bring out what I'd taken from my desk back in the haven: a syringe full of clear liquid.
Paula looked at it for a very long time. Then she looked at me and said, “Ben, what's in that?”
“Promise not to turn me in if I tell you,” I croaked.
She almost managed a smile.
“It's Slo-Mo,” I told her. “I found it on a callout a few weeks ago. When you were being a good cop I was being a bad copâI never bothered handing it in.”
“Why not?”
“I thought it might be fun to try a few drops of it some day.”
Paula looked from me back to the syringe.
“We can watch each other die a lingering, miserable death,” I told her. “Or we can take some of this and die in each other's arms after what seems like a lifetime of love.”
“That's what they used to call a no-brainer, isn't it?”
We shared out first laugh in more than a day.
There was nothing funny about the silence that followed.
Paula reached for my hand and gently closed it around the syringe, saying, “Not here, Ben. Let's find somewhere special to⦔
She wasn't able to finish the sentence. She didn't have to. I knew how it ended.
“I can think of the perfect place,” I said.
Jen had taken me there once, but it was such a long walk we'd only had a few minutes to look around, and even then our filtermasks were used up before we got back to the community.
“What sort of place is it?” Paula asked.
But I wouldn't tell her. I wanted to surprise her with it, the way Jen had surprised me. I was helped by the same toxic haze that was slowly killing us, for it hid the tell-tale shapes from view until we were nearly upon them. They appeared as if by magic in front of us, dark and unmoving amidst the swirling pearlescence. I watched Paula as she looked at these shapes, which must have been so unlike anything she'd come across before.
“Trees,” she said, disbelievingly.
“It's the relic of a forest,” I told her. Then I didn't say anything, because I was too caught up in the excitement of being in the presence of something that was almost as alien to me as it was to her. I just stood there with a tightness in my chest and throat that had nothing to do with the ill-effects of the toxic haze.
I could tell Paula was feeling the same things, too, because she said, “It's⦠It's⦔
I picked a word for her: “Amazing.”
She nodded. “If only we'd come across this place earlier,” she said.
I knew what she meantâthe light was fading fast. The darkness closed in all around us like a physical thing. As it did, we drew closer together.
It should have been eerie but I didn't feel frightened, and when I stole a glance at Paula I saw she wasn't scared, either. Her eyes were glowing with something I'd never discerned in them before, something that couldn't be reflected light, not in the fast approaching darkness.
She led me deeper into the forest with a tug of the hand, wanting to explore.
Instead of growing more hesitant as the darkness deepened, we walked faster and faster. And then we were running, laughing with wild, carefree abandon like a couple of children, discovering a strangely beautiful world that was dramatically different from the only one we'd ever known. It was a world where there was give in the ground beneath our feet; where every texture felt with our fingertips was different from the last, and not a single one was perfectly smooth.
Finally, inevitably, I tripped over a tree root. Paula fell down next to me. The darkness was complete by now, and rather than get up we crawled on hands and knees until we came to a place comfortable enough to lie down in: a make-do mattress of what I took to be pine needles, softened by time and the elements so they were no longer jaggy.
I flipped over onto my back and Paula settled on her side next to me, head resting in her palm, the fingers of her other hand tracing my cheekbones.
My thoughts turned to the syringe in the pocket of my coveralls, and I said, “Paulaâ”
She knew me well enough by then to read my mind. “Not now,” she said. “Not yet. Let's just spend a night here. All I've seen of the Outside is what remains of the worst of it; I want to experience what remains of the best of it.
So we lay there silently appreciating the place and each other. I waited for her to get bored and restless like a Number should in such a situation, but she snuggled up to me contentedly. In this place, Paula truly was a different personâand, with her beside me, so was I.
After a time I'd no way of measuringâwe'd long since abandoned our i-bandsâshe fell sound asleep with her head resting on my chest.
Moments later, emotionally drained, I was sleeping, too.
I dreamed of birdsong high above, and wind whistling through the branches.
And woke up in the middle of the night to find I hadn't been dreaming, at least about the wind. All around me I heard the creak of trees swaying and branches bending in something much stronger than a breeze. I don't know how long I lay there with my eyes closed, listening to those unfamiliar, evocative, strangely beautiful sounds: the roar of the wind as it roamed the skies far above; the howl it made passing through the high branches; the creaking of trunks straining against their roots; and the rustle of small things I could only guess at moving all around us on the forest floor.
When I opened my eyes I found I was looking into Paula's. I don't know if my waking had woken her, or if it was the other way around. Her expression was one of awe. “Paula, what is it?” I asked, intrigued by what had put that look on her face.
She didn't answer, and I thought she hadn't heard. Then she turned to me, and it was as if she'd returned from somewhere very far away. “Ben,” she said, with the same bewilderment in her voice that I'd seen in her eyes, “I think I just had a⦠I think I just had a dream.”
I'd rarely seen anyone, let alone a Number, look so intensely moved.
“What did you dream of?” I asked, sharing her wonder.
“I can't remember details, just a feeling. I just remember that things seemed different while I slept.”
“In what way?”
She struggled to find words, another thing I wasn't used to seeing a Number do. Finally she said, “The world was young, not old, and we had time enough for love.”
Reaching into the thigh pocket of my coveralls and bringing out the syringe of Slo-Mo, I said, “The world might not be young, Paula, but we do have time for love.”
She looked at the syringe and I looked at her. I wondered if she was anything like as afraid as I was. I wanted to say something that would make things easier for her. Given the situation, it should have been almost impossible to think of what to say. But the words came to me unbidden: “I won't let you die without making sure you believe in love, Paula, and I'll tell you everything I know about the way the world was when the wind had many names.”
T
IME LOST ALL MEANING FOR THE TWO OF US
. T
HE
earth might have turned once or made a thousand revolutions, the sun might have stopped rising, the moon might have fallen, and the brightest star might have burned itself out. Paula and I could have been the first people in the world, or the last, or the only two who ever lived. We talked until our thoughts turned into feelings, and then discovered just how many things can't be put into words: the secrets and mysteries; the beauty that's more than skin deep, and the magic that makes people so much more than a sum of their parts.
Only once did anything intrude into our world, a light so bright it was like every sheet of lightning that's ever flashed across the sky.
After that I didn't see or feel or hear anything.
Until a sound that was vaguely familiar yet somehow very strange. I couldn't pin down what it was. There was a word for it, but I'd forgotten it long ago.
Then I remembered that the word was âlanguage,' and I listened to the sound.
The language was strange but familiar, like the sound had been before I realized what it was. I felt like I should have been able to understand it. I thought that on some level I did, and yet I had no idea what was being said.
I opened my eyes and looked into two pools of blackness that were full of secrets I understood, mysteries I'd solved, memories I shared. Each black pool was set in silvery blue, and they were so beautiful I could have looked into them forever. I felt like I already had looked into them forever, and it hadn't been long enough.
There was a pinprick on my arm. Suddenly time accelerated and I could barely breathe. I was lying on the forest floor next to Paula, looking into her eyes and seeing my own confusion mirrored there. The world was spinning so crazily that, even though I was lying down, I felt like I was about to fall over. I held onto Paula and she held onto me as though we might be flung off into opposite corners of the universe at any moment.
Looking up to see what was happening, all I could make out was a spiral of pink and brown, white, and blue. A wave of nausea rose in my throat. I swallowed it back and closed my eyes.
When I opened them the spinning had slowed and the colors were resolving themselves into the faces of people looking down on us; the branches of trees; and the beautiful blue of a sky streaked with pure white clouds.
Someone spoke, and the language I hadn't been able to understand suddenly made sense now that I was no longer hearing it in slow motion.
They explained what had happened, or at least what they knew of it. A tremendous coronal mass ejectionâa solar flare in common parlanceâhad engulfed the Earth, burning out electronic circuits, erasing hard-drives and databanks; disabling the Ecosystem and resetting mankind's technological clock to the year zero in the blink of an eye.
It did something else, that flood of charged particles that swamped the Earth: it ionized the toxins in the atmosphere, burning off the leaden haze that had blighted the planet for so long.
Some of the shell-shocked people who emerged from the crippled community had found Paula and I lying in the forest. They thought we were dead because the Slo-Mo had virtually put us into stasis. But then a faint whisper or a moan told them we were still alive, and they'd given us some Rush to bring us back to the world.
To a new world.
We ate some of the food they'd brought from the community, and slaked our thirst with rainwater they'd collected earlier that morningâwater that was sweet and safe to drink without being boiled, just as the air was good to breathe without being filtered. We told them our names and our story, and they told us theirs, and we sat with them at the river's edge and watched the sun disappear behind the distant havens. It was something they said they'd seen many times now, but still it awed them. The setting sun streaked the blue of the sky with fire and turned the river to a shimmering sheet of liquid gold and amber. There had to be a hundred people in that foraging party but not a single word was spoken, such was the reverence for sky and sun and river, for the difference between day and night, and the magical transition between the two.
As the fire died in the sky we built one with driftwood on the land. The people who'd found Paula and I told us the rest of what they knew, and we did likewise, and together we tried to make sense of what had happened to us and to the world. Ideas and explanations leapt from our collective imagination like sparks from the burning wood as we confronted the past and considered the future.
Many things were beyond our comprehensionâperhaps more than we understoodâbut of one thing we felt sure: there had to be a greater power than man at work in this. I don't know how we knew; we just did. It had used computers to save us when we lost our way, and taught us that we must put our faith not in technology but in ourselves and each other. It had taught us how bad it was when greed came to be seen as good, and how much was lost along with coral reefs and butterflies and rainbows, the pull of far horizons and the names of the wind. It had taught us that the true god is nature.
And now it was down to us to start anew and make a world where we could learn to live, to laugh and to love again.
Then once more there was silence around the fire because above usâimpossibly far above usâthe stars were coming out one by one, and it was a humbling sight. I put my arm around Paula and we counted stars until we ran out of numbers, and then gave names to constellations until we ran out of words.
The tide turned and with it came a wind. It was stronger than a breeze but gentler than a storm, so nobody knew quite what to call it. There was nothing acrid or tainted about it; instead, it carried the salty tang of the sea. It was a smell so fresh we wanted to breathe it in deeplyâand, in doing so, were reborn.
I know that in time the wind will carry other things: the earthy promise of freshly turned soil and the scent of rising sap; the perfume of blossoming flowers and the sweetness of ripening fruit. I know that in years to come it will carry the sound of leaves rustling in dark green forests, and stalks of wheat swaying in golden fields; the call of birds in high branches, and the laughter of children as they dance barefoot with carefree abandon around fires such as this. It will be a song of Mother Earth that sounds different from place to place and one moment to the nextâand, in listening to this song of things long-forgotten and yet to be found, people will be enchanted by the singer, and they'll rediscover wonder and wisdom and give wildly romantic names to the wind once more.
THE END