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?”
Peter frowned and wanted to say more, Doug could see that. But the old man nodded and smiled, and waved them onward. “You carry her for now,” he said to Doug. “I’ll take her from you when you get tired.”
“And then I’ll have her,” Lucy-Anne said. She stayed close to Doug, reaching out every few steps to stroke her daughter’s hair or touch her husband’s face.
The going was more difficult, the hillside becoming steeper as they emerged from the forest, but the views did much to alleviate the pain Doug was already feeling in his back and legs. His daughter may only be small, but asleep like this she was a dead weight. Dead people are heavier, he seemed to remember reading somewhere, and the thought chilled him. But then he almost smiled. When they died, they would weigh nothing at all.
“Lovely view of the house and gardens from about here,” Peter said, letting them pause and look back down the way they had come.
Doug lowered his daughter to the ground. She groaned slightly, mumbled something, but he didn’t try too hard to hear what it was. He was afraid it would be something he did not wish to know.
Peter was right. The forest coated the hillside way down into the valley, and at its edge sat his house, its grounds and the winding driveway leading down to the road. Thankfully the animals and gargoyles were well hidden from this distance, so the scene took on a sense of magnificence and innocence, untainted by an old man’s paranoid foibles. It was also possible too to see just how isolated this place was. Roads criss-crossed the countryside here and there, but the patchwork of fields which Doug was used to in the more farm-oriented lands to the south was all but absent here. The land was retained entirely by nature.
“I’ll take a turn now,” Peter said, stooping to scoop Gemma into his arms.
“Peter, come on, you’re not the young man you used to be.” Doug reached out and tried to take Gemma from his arms, but the old man’s expression was one of such hurt that he stepped back and raised his hands in supplication. “Just don’t overdo it, “ Doug said. “I can’t see me and Lucy-Anne carrying the both of you.”
They continued uphill, Doug and Lucy-Anne walking either side of Peter so that they could constantly touch their daughter, hold her hand, chatter away in an attempt to wake her up.
“How much further?” Lucy-Anne asked after another few minutes.
“We’ve no destination,” Peter said. “Tell me when you’re happy to stop, and we’ll stop.”
She nodded. “I want to walk forever. If another footstep will give us another second, I want to keep walking.”
Doug knew what she meant, but he was also aware that she was not serious. They could fight for another few seconds, or they could sit and talk and eat a final meal, drink a last glass of wine.
He would never make love to his wife again; never feel her sigh on his cheek as she came; never have a play-fight with her while Gemma attacked them both with her array of teddy bears; never eat a TV dinner; never swim from a sun-drenched beach out to a yacht; never appreciate a good painting, a thrilling book, an evocative piece of music… he would never hear music again…
Doug lived for music.
“Here,” he said. “We stop here. We’ll live what we can here, there’s no point going any higher or any further.” He gave Lucy-Anne a hug and kissed her neck.
Peter eased Gemma to the ground, stood and flexed his back, groaning and cursing. “Bright girl, maybe, but she’s a heavy one too.”
As if on cue, Gemma woke up and began to talk once more.
She told them about viroids, nucleic acid strands with no protein coating, and how they cause stunting in plants. She divulged the basics of chaos theory, especially relating to weather patterns and spread of infectious disease. Then after a pause she was back onto nanotechnology, and how the silicone-based had transmuted into a biology-based technology over the past few years. And how self-replicating nano-machines had been created, manmade viruses which had one major advantage over their natural counterparts: they could function perfectly well on their own. They consumed organic and inorganic materials alike, breaking them down, rearranging their constituent parts, creating more of themselves. They did not need a host to replicate.
And they were unstoppable.
Peter opened a bottle of wine and poured three glasses, but only he drank. Doug and Lucy-Anne tried to quieten their daughter, but Gemma only waved them away, told them she was fine and then continued her bizarre monologue.
And the strangest thing was, her eyes were sparkling as she spoke, her hands formed shapes in the air as she illustrated her thoughts and ideas, and she smiled as she revealed another complex truth. It was her talking, Doug realised. It was Gemma saying these weird, wondrous things, his daughter, his little girl. It was not long before all three adults knew for sure what Doug had suspected all day: that Gemma had not known any of this before now.
She was learning and imparting at the same time.
“Gemma,” Doug tried again, “how do you know all this? Who’s telling you? Gemma, you’re making Mummy and Daddy sad.”
She stopped. Instantaneously, half-way through a series of equations that had lost the adults the moment she had begun reciting them. She looked at Doug, and behind her enthusiastic face he saw his tired, scared daughter. “I don’t want to make you sad, Daddy. I really don’t. But some things have to be said.”
She looked away again, facing south, as if challenging their approaching doom with examples of what humanity had achieved and learned in its too-brief time on the planet. The fact that the doom was a fruit of humanity’s mis-directed labours did not matter, any more than the cause of wind or the sound of clouds mattered. “There’s nobody else to say them,” she whispered. And then she started again.
The association of reflex points on the feet and remote organic functions…
Fractionation, and how liquid air can be divided into its component parts at minus one hundred and ninety-six degrees centigrade…
Brownian movement, and from there Einstein, and from there the unified field theory, and then superstrings and the theory of everything…
“Make her stop!” Lucy-Anne shouted, standing up and walking away. Her glass spilled red wine into the earth. “Please, Doug,” she said, without turning around, “just bring our daughter back for a while.”
Doug remembered a time a couple of years before when Gemma went through a short stage of waking in the night, screaming. It was only a week or so, but the sound of her scream was terrifying, and after the first night neither of them slept at all until it ended as suddenly as it had begun. And when they asked her what was wrong she could only say The moon, Daddy, the moon was in my room and it was cringing at me. He had never really understood what she was afraid of, not then, because the moon was a familiar thing, and the man in the moon was something she loved.
Now, he thought he could see what had disturbed her during those few frantic nights. The man in the moon was something she had known from her storybooks, but that same man cringing at her was something new entirely, something threatening and unpleasant and secret, a bastardisation of what she had once known.
