And that was why Doug felt like he did now. With death approaching, his daughter scared him because she was acting as she never had before. She was still Gemma, but she was a strange Gemma.
He would not have time to come to terms with this new strangeness. He would have to live with it, and die with it.
“She’s trying to tell us something,” Peter said.
“Huh?” Doug could not look away from his daughter. If he did, something might happen.
“Gemma is trying to tell us something. She’s imparting information… ideas, theories, histories… she’s throwing a jigsaw at us and asking us to complete it.” He was becoming more animated now, standing up, pacing as he drank and thought. His expression was wide and frank, not narrow and sardonic as usual.
Doug shook his head. “Peter, she’s terrified. She’s seen people dying on TV in the last couple of days, she saw… she saw a bunch of men raping women in the road. I don’t think Lucy-Anne covered her eyes quickly enough…” He trailed off. Lucy-Anne was coming back, wringing her hands, sitting next to Gemma and trying to soothe her out of whatever hyperactive trance she was in.
Peter glugged another glassful of wine and gave himself a refill. “It’s like she’s reliving the life of humanity in the face of its end. Flashing our collective memories in front of us before we drown.”
“She’s just rehashing stuff she’s heard.”
“You know that’s wrong, Doug. Don’t you?” Peter held out his hand as if offering some invisible truth. “It may be incredible, but what’s more incredible than the here and now?”
Doug looked away from Gemma and felt something lift from his shoulders, some strange weight of responsibility, as if the old man’s words had convinced him that none of this was his fault. He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply, smelling the wine Lucy-Anne had spilled.
“So what is she trying to say?” He thought to humour Peter, but as he spoke he realised he was curious. And, perhaps, there was a spark of truth in the old man’s mad words.
Peter shrugged, but he was twitchy now, more animated than before. “I don’t know. That there’s hope, perhaps? A way to stop all this?”
Doug barked a short, bitter laugh. “And we’ll be able to do it, will we?”
Peter frowned, then shook his head. He stared down the valley to the south where somewhere over the horizon past, present and future was being nulled. “Of course not. But it would be one bitter irony, wouldn’t it?”
That made them go quiet, all except for Gemma.
He looked at Gemma, listened to what she was saying and tried so hard not to find sense in any of it.
It did not work. He found sense. They all did.
Gemma fell back into an uneasy trance, but she never stopped talking. Even as she slouched down into Lucy-Anne’s arms and her head drooped to one side, the endless monologue continued, spewed out like good breath fleeing bad flesh. A few birds landed in a nearby tree and twittered and cocked their heads, perhaps listening, perhaps not. And what would they hear, Doug thought? Unknowable banter, or unbearable truths? Because wherever Gemma was recalling all this from… or reciting it… it was beginning to hurt.
She knew what was happening, that is what became apparent soon after she lost consciousness again. Most of what she had been saying over the last hour or so — the superstring theories, freezing air, viroids — all formed some small part of a larger plan that was coalescing, slowly, in the air around her. If the hillsides could echo all her words at once, perhaps it would form something that he and Peter and Lucy-Anne could understand, but as it was there was truly nothing they could do. They all heard the desperate intent in Gemma’s voice… a painful thing to hear in a girl so young, so innocent… but none of them could move upon it.
They felt more powerless than they ever had before.
“There must be something,” Peter said to no one in particular, opening a second bottle of wine and seeking truth and solace in the grape. “There just must be something we can do.”
“Dare we hope?” Lucy-Anne said. “Really, Doug? Dare we hope?”
He hated himself for thinking her foolish, and he hated all of them for being so ineffectual. He hated, most of all, the pointless information they were being subjected to. Why them, here and now? Why not someone who could do something with it?
“Because there’s no one else left,” he said quietly.
“Hmm?” Peter raised an eyebrow past another glass of wine
“I said there’s no one else left,” Doug said. “Gemma’s telling us all there is to know because there’s no one else to tell. What did you say, Peter? We’re living all humanity’s knowledge in one go, like a drowning man?”
Peter kicked at the loamy ground as he replied. “Well, I only meant it… you know, metaphorically. There must be someone else, someone who can do something with this…”
“No, you meant it. You did. You believed it when you said it.”
“How does this help us?” Lucy-Anne said, staring down at Gemma where she twitched and mumbled in her lap. “How does this give us hope?”
Doug stood and walked to his wife and child, sitting behind them so that he could hug them both close to him. “It doesn’t.”
In the distance, way down the valley, a heavy mist seemed to be forming out of the daylight.
“It doesn’t help us, honey. We’re beyond help. We’ve given evolution a helping hand and nudged ourselves away.”
Lucy-Anne shook her head, twisting from beneath his arm so that she could look at him. “No, Doug. Peter? He’s wrong isn’t he?”
Peter came to them as well, but he did not reach out to touch them. He sat calmly to one side, content at last. “Maybe the truth is, knowledge can never be its own undoing. We’re not being teased, we’re being taught, right up to the last. Our questing mind goes on, even when nothing matters anymore. That’s good enough.” He smiled, drank another glass of wine. “Ahh. A fine year. Whatever year it was, a fine year.”
The mist had moved quickly up the valley, and now Doug could see that it was actually dark and thick, like a brown soup churning through the air, consuming everything it touched. Nearer, as close to them as Peter’s house, birds dropped from the sky, flowers shed petals, leaves fell from trees as the nanos commenced their senseless, programmed task of deconstruction. And every leaf that fell, every bird that was taken apart, soon gave up its component parts to make more of them.
Gemma woke again and sat upright, turning to look at her parents and her great-uncle. “It would have been so easy,” she said sadly. “The answers were all there, if we’d only had the will to help ourselves.”
“Come here,” Doug said, and she hunched herself into his hug, wrapping her arms around her mother’s waist at the same time.
Light began to fade and a strange hissing sound drowned out the birds and the breeze, like a trillion grains of sand dancing in the air.
Doug’s sight faded, his skin itched, his insides turned warm. He went to tell his family he loved them, but he could no longer speak. His muscles still worked, though, for the moment, and so he hugged them. They hugged him back.
At least they would all be together in the end.
Mannequin Man and the Plastic Bitch
She was a dream. He had imagined her once, he was sure, and as she lowered herself and began grinding her hips Tom had that sense of deja vu again. He licked at her vulva and stroked her arse and she pushed down… and he thought that in the dream she would be dancing, not fucking. Or maybe it was that elusive dance of love.
He had paid for his troubles to be taken away, soothed and suckled and swallowed by this plastic bitch. Within a few minutes later they’d been bearing down heavier than ever before, because he’d experienced that which he’d never believed in, thought existed only in songs and poems and his own warped mind… love at first sight.
