Conrad Williams - One

'She's a little raw, Richard,' Plessey said, taking in the devastation. Out of his cosy bolt-hole and with his balaclava off for the first time since Jane had known him he looked too pale, waxy. His hair was a beige scrim grafted onto a sweating pate. 'Aidan . . . it's not that she doesn't care. You can see that she does. But—'

'But she fears the worst.'

'I think so. I think that's the case, yes.'

'Plessey, I've been fearing the worst for the past ten years. But it's the not knowing that's the killer.'

'I'll pass that on,' he said. 'That will help, I'm sure. She'll come round, eventually. She's strong. People like her don't give up easily.'

Jane looked away, in the direction of Commercial Street. He thought there was trust, some love, even, between himself and Becky, but her dismissal of him, her preference for Plessey's nostalgic comforts indicated that there was no space for sentiment now. You took what comfort you could from people and you moved on. He supposed it was a kind of evolution. He would learn from it.

'What about you?' Plessey asked him. 'Where are you going?'

'I'll see if I can find Aidan at my Library.'

'You're carrying on with that pointless job? When we've got this cause for hope gifted us?'

'We have to make the effort,' Jane said, not believing it for a second. 'It's the decent thing to do. Some of us want to carry on. Some of us want to keep busy.'

He didn't mean it as a slight but he didn't doubt that was how Plessey would take it. 'Let me know what the Shaded think of the broadcasts,' Jane added. He started for the road, then thought of something. 'Plessey, one thing. The Skinners. Could they intercept those signals? Understand them?' As soon as the question was out he thought it witless. Of course they couldn't understand; they didn't speak, they moved as though they had the brains of dinosaurs. They were driven only by hunger. But something in Plessey's expression spoke of his not having even considered this possibility. Now he seemed to, and he began to shake his head, but the gesture was without conviction. They stared at each other, Plessey halted by the razor wire, his skin sickly white against the dark tweed of his jacket, a vampire in hawthorn.

19. FOETAL ECHO

The Library was wherever you wanted it to be. Jane liked to take his journals with him to Trafalgar Square. If the rain had paused he might climb to the top of the ENO building and sit under the dead neon letters of its tower, looking south past the amorphous, dissolving statue of Nelson on his column towards the great roads of Whitehall and The Mall. You could write anything as long as it was connected with the Event. Your experiences, fears, hopes. You were encouraged to write about what you knew of the Skinners, and the way they made you feel: reportage as therapy. You could write about how they killed, if you were up to it, or more prosaically, what your work had consisted of since you last were the Librarian. But you only had one day on the job. Someone had decreed, some psychologist manqué , that it was too damaging to dwell for any longer on the agonies of how you got here and what might yet come. There was a greater likelihood of burn-out this way, it was argued, than there was in cleansing the city of its corpses.

The words were designed to be a gift to whoever came after. A warning and a set of guidelines. How to survive. Parallel to Jane's Event work (he usually wrote diary entries expanded from brief notes he made at the end of each day), he continued with his letter to Stanley. He guessed it must be around five thousand pages long now. All of these he kept in a series of fireproof suitcases in the boardroom of a boutique hotel in Covent Garden, fully intending to pass them on to his son one day.

Aidan liked it up here too. But he was not on the rooftop today. Jane looked out across the ceiling of London but could spot no other figure. The possibility that Aidan had been taken was strong, but he doubted it, somehow. Aidan had grown to be a tough, resourceful young man, despite his sickliness. He knew places to hide that Jane would ordinarily have walked right by. He could melt away like shadows on a cloudy day.

The skies around London had lost definition. Where once there had been a strange miasmal fog as black as sea-coal and thick mammatus hanging from the base of vast storm clouds, and the teasing of crepuscular rays suggesting that the sun still hung beyond and had not forsaken the planet, there was now a featureless blanket. The cloud was not leaving, merely retreating into the heights, as if aghast at the behaviour of what lay beneath it. It was becoming dangerous now to travel across the city's ceiling. The persistent hungry rain had eaten away the waterproof outer layers and was tucking into less resistant parts of the rooftops. Already some older, less well-tended buildings had collapsed. Some of the warehouses on the banks of the Thames that had missed out on renovation were now little more than scruffy lines of brick dust on the wharves and dockyards nestling against the river. Fires were still breaking out in some buildings as gas pipes corroded and released pockets of fuel. Jane had been close enough to an explosion in a pizza restaurant in Waterloo East some years previously to have felt the ends of his beard crisp.

The grand plaza of Trafalgar Square was awash with dirty water, like a shallow lido that had been neglected by cleaning staff. The great bronze lions at the foot of Nelson's eroding granite column had developed a patina of verdigris and sat hunched like moss topiary. Screams flew out of the city, confused by distance, dopplering towards or away from him like weird sirens, calls for help that were rarely answered. Although there were jobs to be done, there weren't enough live bodies to cope with emergencies. You could hardly term it an acceptable level of collateral, but there were no feasible alternatives. There were no rapid response units, no electric-blue lights or souped-up engines. Nobody warned you about the dangers; everyone knew the score. The people screaming were either slowed down by injury, or the weight of the things they were carrying, or, Jane wrote: because they want to be caught .

He looked at the things that he took with him everywhere. Once it had been a wallet, a shoulder bag for his bottle of water, newspapers and novel. Now money meant nothing and he himself was the news. Reading novels seemed offensive, somehow, in these times; an insult to the people who had been killed. Books had once seen him through many a grim hour flushing his system of nitrogen on the Ceto, so long ago that to think of diving was to somehow question his own sanity. Hundreds of feet deep, wearing only a thin rubber skin and a helmet? It was work from nightmares. It was behaviour from one of the science fiction novels he'd read.

The mantra he had once uttered, getting ready in the morning, had been keys, money, bus pass . Now it was rifle, mask, goggles . The rifle, its walnut stock having changed its shape minutely over the years where he'd held it so that it might fit his own hand better, was an old friend; he felt as naked without it over his shoulder as he would if he'd forgotten to put on his boots. Filters for the bicycle mask. Sunblock. His bible. The new essentials. Not heavy now, but maybe they would be one day when age was piling into him, or a muscle strain had halved his walking speed.

I no longer know what day it is, Stanley, or what time of day. I know when it's time to wake up and when it's time to go to sleep. It's kind of nice. I remember everything being geared to the clock and the watch when I was younger. Everything was an appointment. Getting you up and to nursery on time, if I was off duty. Picking you up in the afternoon. Tea by five, bath by six, bed by seven. Do you remember the game we played once, Stan? Last man on Earth, I called it. But you said you wanted to call it One. You said it was more serious to do that. More grown-up. You were really into your numbers. What's a hundred add a hundred add one, you'd ask me. And I'd pretend to struggle, and you'd tell me the answer.