Snowy knew he looked older. He wore his hair long now, tied back in a ponytail by a bit of wire. His beard was growing too, though he hacked it back with a knife every couple of days. His skin was like tough leather, wrinkled around the eyes, the mouth. Well, I am older, he thought. A thousand years older. I should look the part.
It was hard to believe that it was only a bit more than a month since they had come out of the Pit.
They didn’t need to do this kind of thing yet, this fire building from scratch. They still had plenty of boxes of waterproof matches, and a supply of trioxane packs— a light chemical heat source much used by the military. But Snowy was looking ahead to the day when they wouldn’t be able to rely on what had come out of the Pit. In some ways he was “cheating,” of course. He had used his thousand-year-old finely manufactured Swiss Army knife to make the bow and the fire board; later he would have to try out stone knives. But one step at a time.
This ancient field was close to an arm of the vast oak forest which, as far as they had scouted, dominated the landscape of this posthuman England. It was on a slight rise. To the west, further down the hill, a lake had gathered. Snowy could see traces of stone walls disappearing under the placid water. But the lake was choked with reeds and lilies and weeds, and on its surface he could see the sickly gray-green sheen of an algal bloom. Eutrophication, said Sidewise: Even now, artificial nutrients— notably phosphorus— were leaching out of the land into the lake and overstimulating the miniature ecology. It seemed incredible to Snowy that the shit long-dead farmers had pumped into their land could still be poisoning the environment around him, but it seemed to be true.
It was a strangely empty landscape. Silence surrounded him. There wasn’t even birdsong.
Some creatures had probably bounced back quickly once human hunting, pest control, and land use had ceased— hares, rabbits, grouse. Larger mammals reproduced so slowly that recovery must have taken longer. But there seemed to be various species of deer, and Snowy had glimpsed pigs in the forests. They’d seen no large predators. Even foxes seemed rare. There were no birds of prey either— apart from a few aggressive-looking starlings. Sidewise said that as their food chains had collapsed, the specialized top predators would have died out. In Africa there were probably no lions or cheetahs either, he said, even if they had escaped being eaten by the last starving human refugees.
Maybe, Snowy thought. He wondered about the rats, though.
Balance would return in the long run, of course. Variation, adaptation, and natural selection would see to that; the old roles would be filled one way or another. But it might not be anything like the community that had gone before. And, said Sidewise, since the average mammalian species lasted only a few million years, it would correspondingly be millions of years— ten, twenty maybe,
twenty million years
— before there would again be assembled a world of the richness it had enjoyed. So even if humans recovered and lasted, say, five million years, they wouldn’t see anything like the world Snowy had known as a kid.
Snowy was not a tree hugger, definitely. But there was something deeply disturbing about these thoughts. How strange it was to have lived to see it come about.
Still no smoke, still the damn embers hadn’t caught. He continued to work the bow.
The main problem with fire making was that it gave him too much time to think. He missed his friends, the camaraderie of navy life. He missed his work, even the routine bits— maybe the routine most of all, since it had given his life a definition it lacked now.
He missed the
noise,
he found, though that was harder to pin down: TV and the web and music, movies and ads, the logos and jingles and news. The one thing about the new world that would drive him crazy in the end, he suspected, was the
silence,
the huge, inhuman, vegetable silence. It gave him the shivers to imagine how it must have been in the last days, when all the machines had died, the winking logos and neon tubes and screens flickering and dying, one by one.
And he missed Clara. Of course he did. He had never known his kid, never even seen him, or her.
At the beginning he had been plagued by spasms of guilt: guilt that he was still alive where so many had gone into the dark, guilt that there was nothing he could do for Clara, guilt that he was eating and breathing and pissing and taking shits and covertly studying Moon’s butt while everybody he had ever known was
dead.
But that, mercifully, was fading. He had always been blessed, as Sidewise had once told him, by a lack of imagination.
Or maybe it was more than that.
In the clear light of this new time it seemed like it was his old life, in the crowded, murky England of the twenty-first century, which was the dream. As if he were dissolving into the green.
There was a rustle in the waist-high foliage, a dozen paces away. He turned that way, still and silent. A single grass stem, laden with seeds, nodded gracefully. He had set a snare over there. Was there something in the foliage— a curve of shoulder, a bright, staring eye?
He put down the bow and spindle. He stood, stretched, and casually walked toward the place he had seen the rustle. He slid his bow from his back, scooped an arrow from his rabbit-skin quiver, notched it carefully.
There was no movement in the foliage— not until he was almost on it— and then there was a sudden blur, a lunge away from his approach. He glimpsed pale skin flecked with brown, long limbs. A fox? But it was
big,
bigger than anything he’d seen here so far.
Without hesitating further he ran up to the thing, lodged his boot in the small of its back, and raised his arrow toward its head. The creature squirmed onto its back. It yowled like a cat, put its hands over its face.
He lowered the bow.
Hands.
It had hands, like a human, or an ape.
His heart thumping, he dropped the bow. He knelt over the creature, trapping its torso, and got hold of its wrists. It was spindly, lithe, but very strong; it took all of his power to force those hands away from the face. Still the creature spat and hissed at him.
But its face— no,
her
face— was no chimp’s, no ape’s. It was unmistakably human.
For long seconds Snowy sat there, astounded, astride the girl.
She was naked, and though her pale skin showed through, she was covered by a loose fur of straggling orange-brown hairs. The hair on her head was darker, a tangle of filthy curls that looked as if they had never been cut. She was not tall, but she had breasts, sagging little sacks with hard nipples protruding from the hair, and beneath the triangle of darker fur at her crotch there was a smear of what might be menstrual blood. And she had
stretch marks.
Not only that, she stank like a monkey cage.
But that face was no ape’s. Her nose was small but protruding. Her mouth was small, her chin V-shaped with a distinct notch. Over blue eyes, her brow was smooth. Was it a little lower than his?
She looked human, despite her hairy belly. But her eyes were— cloudy. Frightened. Bewildered.
His throat tight, he spoke to her. “Do you speak English?”
She screeched and thrashed.
And suddenly Snowy had an erection like an iron rod. Holy shit, he thought. Quickly he rolled off the girl, reaching for his bow and his knife.
The girl couldn’t get up. Her right foot was trapped by his snare. She scrabbled over the moist ground until she was hunched over her foot. She rocked back and forth, crooning, obviously scared out of whatever wits she had.
Snowy’s spasm of lust faded. Now she looked like a chimp in her gestures, in her mindless misery, even though her body had felt like a woman’s under his. (Clara, forgive me, it’s been a long time. . . . ) The scrapings of shit on her legs, the puddles of droppings where she had been lying, put him off even more.
He rummaged in a pocket of his flight suit, and pulled out the remains of a ration pack. It still contained a handful of nuts, a bit of beef jerky, some dried banana. He pulled out the banana and held it out, a handful of curling flakes, toward the girl.
She shied back, pulling as far as she could on the wire.
He tried miming, putting a flake or two into his own mouth and exaggeratedly devouring it with every expression of enjoyment. “Yum, yum. Delicious.”
But still she wouldn’t take the food from his hand. Then again, neither would a deer or a rabbit, he thought. So he put the flakes on the ground between them and backed away.
She grabbed a couple of the flakes and crammed them into her mouth. She chewed and chewed at the bits of banana, as if extracting every bit of flavor from them, before finally swallowing them. She must never have tasted anything so sweet, he thought.
Or maybe it was just that she was starving. He had set the trap a couple of days before; she might have been here for forty-eight hours already. All the shit and piss, the way the fur on her legs was matted and stained, indicated that too.
As she ate he got a good look at the foot that had been caught in the snare. It was a simple loop snare, meant for the heads of rabbits and hares. In her efforts to get free she had pulled the snare tighter— it had worked just as it had been designed— and it had cut so deeply into her leg that it had made a grisly, bloody mess of her flesh, and he thought he could see the white of bone in the wound.
What now? He could slug her and take her back to the base camp. But this wasn’t a prey animal, a rabbit or a hare; it wasn’t some interesting specimen, like the huge half-way-flightless parakeet Sidewise had caught stalking the fringe of a stagnant pond. This was a
person,
no matter what she looked like. And, he reminded himself, those stretch marks told him she had at least one kid out there waiting for her.
“Did I come all this way, across a thousand fucking years, to make the same mess of your life as I’ve made of mine? I don’t bloody think so,” he muttered. “Pardon me.” And without hesitating he leapt on her.
It was another wrestling match. He got her pinned to the ground, face down, her arms under her, his buttocks in the small of her back. He used his Swiss Army knife to cut the snare wire, and prized the loop out of the bloody gouge it had dug. Then he used up more of his precious supplies to clean away the dirt and dried blood and pus with antiseptic fluid— he had to pick strands of brown hair out of the scabs— and to apply sealant and cream to the wound. Maybe she would leave the stuff on long enough for the wound to get itself disinfected.
The moment he released her she was gone. He glimpsed a figure, upright and lithe, shimmering through the long grass toward the trees, limping but moving fast even so.
It was already late afternoon. They weren’t supposed to be alone in the dark, away from base: Ahmed’s standing orders. He longed to follow the girl into the green mysteries of the denser forest. But he knew he must not. Regretfully he gathered up his gear and set off back to the base camp.
Snowy was the last to join the group that evening.
They had decided to settle close to a lake a few kilometers from the ruined town. The site was in the lee of a compact, cone-shaped hill— apparently artificial, maybe an Iron Age barrow, or maybe just a spoil heap of some kind.
Ahmed made them gather round the stump of a fallen tree, where he sat, a bit grandly. Snowy wanted to tell the others of his encounter, of what he had found. But the mood wasn’t right. So he just sat down.
Moon had grown increasingly withdrawn as the weeks had worn away; now she just sat cross-legged before Ahmed, her eyes averted. But she was the center of everything, as always, all the wordless maneuvering. Sidewise had his usual detached dreaminess, but he was sitting facing Moon, and Snowy saw how his gaze strayed over the curve of her hip, the centimeters of calf she showed above her boot. Ahmed himself sat beside the girl, raised up on his tree stump, as if he owned her.
Bonner was the one whose lust for Moon showed most nakedly. He sat awkwardly, muscles tensed, with a great stripe of mud splashed across his face, a hunter’s camouflage marking. He looked like an animal himself, Snowy thought, as if the last bits of his training were barely holding him together.
They were breaking up, Snowy saw, drifting apart, with great fault lines running through their intense little set of relationships. There was hardly anything left of the timid group of Navy fliers who had huddled in the ruined church that first night, chomping on their rations. They might kill each other over Moon, if Moon didn’t kill them first.
And Ahmed, their leader, was aware of none of this. Ahmed, in fact, was smiling. “I’ve been thinking about the future,” he said.
Sidewise gave a muffled groan.
“I mean, the further future,” Ahmed said. “Beyond the next few months, even the next few years. However we get through the next winter, times are going to be hard for our children.”
At the talk of children, Snowy cast a glance at Moon. She was glaring at her hands, her nested fingers.
Ahmed said that during the industrialized period— and especially during the last few insane decades— mankind had used up all its accessible supplies of fossil fuels: coal, gas, oil. “The fossil fuels are probably forming again even now. We know that. But incredibly slowly. The stuff we burned up in a few centuries took around four hundred and fifty
million
years to form. But there will always be fuel for our descendants,” he said. “
Peat.
Peat is what you get when bog mosses, sedges, and other vegetation decompose in oxygen-starved wetlands. Right? And in some parts of the world peat-cutting for fuel continued right until the middle of the twentieth century.”
“In Ireland,” Sidewise said. “In Scandinavia. Not
here.
”
“Then we go to Ireland, or Scandinavia. Or maybe we’ll find it here. Conditions have changed a lot since we went into the cold sleep. Anyhow, if we don’t find peat we’ll find something else. We’ve inherited a burned-out world.” He tapped his temple. “But we still have our minds, our ingenuity.”