Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

“They might ask you to hand your group over to someone else.”

“Or worse…

“I don’t think they’ll break them up after everything you’ve done… but you’re too valuable in an evacuation. So. What’ll you do if it comes to that?”

“I’d…” I thought I knew what I’d say if asked that question: I thought I would say no. It was a simple, obvious, moral issue. “They don’t trust anyone else. If I handed them over it would set some of them back months…”

He saw through me easily. “Sure. But what do you want?”

I looked out at the view from the window: the same old mountains wrapped in cloud. It was getting cold outside.

“Asha?” he asked.

“I’m sorry…” I said. “I just, I felt for a moment… just for a moment, I thought it would be good to stop. And…”

“Go on.”

There was no point in lying to him. “I don’t know. I really don’t. If they asked me to go… I don’t know what I’d do.”

“Is it the group itself?”

I shook my head, not wanting to blame them. But…

“I feel like…” I looked away, down the room, at nothing at all. Anything to get away from Ranev’s kindly eyes. “I don’t know what I can do for them. It doesn’t seem to make any difference.”

“You feel powerless?

“Stupid, I know…”

“Not at all. How are they?”

“Iokan’s still in shock. We had to bring him back. He won’t talk about it…”

“He will.”

“He’s not the only one. I can’t get Pew to talk to me either. And the stuff he’s reading is scaring me.”

“Oh? Such as?”

“He’s only interested in genocide. Not preventing it. Starting it.”

“Don’t you think he has a right to be angry?”

“Up to a point. I’m worried he’ll go off the edge and we’ll lose him.”

“There’s only so much you can do. If they choose not to co-operate, you can’t force them.”

“I know.”

“You have to accept that we do lose them sometimes. It’s not a failure. It’s a measure of how damaged they were to begin with.”

“It never feels like that.”

“True. But I think you’re emphasising the negative over the positive. You’re close to diagnosis on all of them, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And you know as well as I do, that’s the hill you have to get over.”

“If they can actually be treated.”

“Well, yes, there’s that as well. Do you think they can’t?”

I looked out at the mountains again. If anything, they looked colder than before. “I wonder if it’s worth it.”

“Why?”

“They’re the last of their kind. They're probably never going to see another member of their own species again.”

“All the more reason to help them.”

I didn’t answer for a moment. I had another worry. “I started wondering how many members of my own species there are on Hub.”

“Ah.”

“One hundred and twenty-three. Forty-six in the delegation. Everyone else went on to the new place.”

“Is that what you’d prefer?”

“I don’t know. I keep thinking… I keep thinking about home.”

“Hub Metro?”

“No.”

“You mean your world.”

“Yes. I keep thinking, what if we hadn’t been evacuated? What if we’d gone all the way to the end?”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. My patients did.”

“Transference, Asha. You have to be careful. You’re not them.”

“I know. But… I keep…” It was hard to express it; this thing growing closer to the edge of my waking mind. “I keep thinking it’ll always be like this. We’ll always corrupt every world we find. Not just my species, not just their species, I mean every human species. And I know this is just because I’ve been closer to the bad stuff than usual…”

“I don’t have to tell you that the more advanced each species gets, the more able they are to avoid all these problems.”

“I know. I know that. I’ve seen how some of the older species live. I just don’t know how they do it.”

He took a breath. “Okay. Listen. I think if they ask you to work on the Ardëe evacuation — if that happens — I think you should say no.” I looked outside. “And I think you should take a holiday. You need some time off. You went through a lot in the attack and I don’t think you’ve really had a chance to recover.”

I didn’t reply immediately. Something outside the window caught my attention.

“Asha?” he asked. “Are you all right? Is something wrong with the signal?”

“No,” I said, and went to the window. I looked back at him. “What can you see out of this window? In your centre?”

“It’s a sunny day. Like every day. Except when the rain comes, but it’s sunny now. What do you see?”

I looked back outside. Clouds were billowing up around the mountains, the kind we’d been warned about. I looked up and saw they were coasting over the centre, heavy and black. The first snowflakes flittered down. The wind picked up and suddenly the snow was heavier, and catching in the grass.

“Winter just started,” I said.

Ranev took on an admonishing tone. “Asha… come on. It’s not a symbol. Winter always starts about this time of the year at your centre.”

I turned back and smiled, and put on a small chuckle for his benefit. “Yeah. I know.”

But the flakes were coming thick now, and burying the grounds in snow.

The word spread through the Refugee Service as quickly as the snow piled up around the centre: a world was dying, and we would soon be called on to save as many as we could. The pictures from Ardëe were terrifying. The sun bristled in the sky, coronal mass ejections bursting out every few minutes and spitting more plasma into the solar system. The storm of charged particles smashed into Ardëe’s magnetic field, making auroras flare up from pole to equator, so bright they turned night into day. The frail magnetic protection that had kept the sun’s electromagnetic gales away from the planet for billions of years was being battered into submission, allowing the solar hurricane to strip away the upper layers of atmosphere. Views from space showed a churning stream of air blasting away from the planet for millions of kilometres, as though Ardëe had been turned to a streaking comet. The ozone layer was already gone, and standing outside in the daytime could result in first degree burns just from the ultraviolet. The shower of deadly light did even worse: it fused nitrogen and oxygen together to make nitrogen dioxide, a dirty brown gas you could see polluting the clouds of Ardëe. The slight protection it gave from the UV was no consolation for the acid rain, or the freezing cold that would settle on the world as it blocked out the rest of the sun’s light. The turbulence stirred up by the fleeing atmosphere set off shrieking winds and storms, overwhelming the weather control systems and making it even worse. If the sun continued these outbursts, then eventually there wouldn’t be any air left to breathe; but it seemed hardly likely anyone would be left by then. The death toll was already more than a million only days after the sun went into this new phase, on a planet of nine billion closely packed people.

“Nine billion…” said the ambassador from Ardëe, beneath the vast screen in the IU Assembly Hall that showed the pictures of apocalypse. Handheld footage now, of people streaming from vast, sky-arcologies into the undercities, crowds looking up at cavern roofs, fearing collapse as the cityscrapers above groaned under the typhoon’s assault. “Nine billion people… who have less than a year to live.” There were already tears tracking down his face. “My own cityscraper… Erbesoon… fell last night. I…” And the grief choked him, but he waved away an assistant. Hundreds of representatives watched him in the assembly hall, many more observing remotely.