The Second Sleep

by Robert Harris

  Imperial College, London, 22 March 2022

  Dear Colleague,

  Forgive this impersonal form of address. I am sending the same letter, as a matter of urgency, to a number of highly placed individuals – mostly in the scientific community but also some involved in industry, medicine, agriculture and the arts – whose work I esteem, and with whom I hope to communicate on a more personal level at a later date. For reasons that will become obvious, I would be grateful if you would treat what I am about to say as confidential.

  Three months ago I formed, with a group of like-minded colleagues, a working party to consider what contingency measures should be taken to prepare for a systemic collapse of technical civilisation. If you do not share this concern, and especially if you regard such a notion as alarmist nonsense, please discard this letter now!

  We have broadly identified six possible catastrophic scenarios that fundamentally threaten the existence of our advanced science-based way of life:

  Climate change

  A nuclear exchange

  A super-volcano eruption, leading to rapidly accelerated climate change

  An asteroid strike, also causing accelerated climate change

  A general failure of computer technology due either to cyber warfare, an uncontrollable virus, or solar activity

  A pandemic resistant to antibiotics

  Our purpose is not to propose counter-measures to avert any of these potential catastrophes – a task that, in the cases of 3 and 4, is in any case impossible – but to devise strategies for the days, weeks, months and years following such a disaster, with the aim of the earliest possible restoration of technical civilisation.

  We regard our society as having reached a level of sophistication that renders it uniquely vulnerable to total collapse. The gravity of the threat has increased vastly since 2000, with the transfer of so much economic and social activity to cyberspace, and yet there has been no corresponding contingency planning at government level.

  A prolonged general interruption to computer networks, for example, would lead within twenty-four hours to food and fuel shortages – especially in urban areas – a dramatic curtailing of money supply (due to the loss of ATMs, credit card transactions and online banking), communications and information breakdowns, transport shutdown, panic buying, mass exodus and civil disorder. Interruption of food distribution in particular, which relies upon computer-based information networks for round-the-clock resupply, would have serious consequences within a matter of hours. Thirty years ago, the average British household contained enough food to last eight days; today the average is two days. It is no exaggeration to say that London, at any time, exists only six meals away from starvation.

  Our fear is that an initial collapse could spread exponentially and at a speed that might rapidly overwhelm any official response. Vital workers might desert their posts, or be unable to reach them. Data might be lost irretrievably. Key sectors and technologies could be affected to such an extent that our chances of finding our way back to the status quo ante could diminish alarmingly quickly.

  I have myself made repeated representations at the highest levels of government and the civil service, and have been met effectively with a shrug. The general level of understanding in Westminster and Whitehall of the impact of new technologies is abysmal. Rather than do nothing, therefore, we have decided to take matters into our own hands, and attempt to devise practical steps to safeguard our present highly developed way of life.

  All civilisations consider themselves invulnerable; history warns us that none is.

  If you wish to play your part, I invite you to contact me, by letter, at the above address, at your earliest possible convenience. For security, all communications will be paper rather than electronic. I stress again the need for strict confidence: we have no desire to attract media attention and cause a general panic.

  Yours sincerely,

  Peter Morgenstern

  Mr Shadwell stated that ever since the discovery of the document he had been endeavouring to find out more about Morgenstern and his group, so far without success. It was impossible to say whether they had continued to meet, or done anything more than talk. Morgenstern himself was clearly an eminent figure of the late pre-Apocalypse era, for his name appeared upon a list of winners of the Nobel Prize that was extant in the hands of a private collector. (Mr Shadwell explained that this was an award made once per annum for over a century to figures of the greatest renown in the sciences and literature.) Morgenstern had received the said prize for the science of physic. But as far as was in Mr Shadwell’s competence to discover, no published work of his had survived.

  Mr Shadwell proposed that he should continue his researches, and to that end requested the award of a sum of £100 to defray his expenses. After a discussion, this was agreed, and the Treasurer was instructed to make the necessary funds available.

  The business of the society having been concluded, the meeting was adjourned at half past nine.

  Fairfax slowly laid the book face down on his chest. The language was difficult, the words obscure. It was the first time he had encountered the strange, abrupt, forbidden rhythms of pre-Apocalypse writing. And yet he felt he had been able to penetrate it sufficiently to grasp the essence of it. He felt quite faint – as if the solid wooden bed frame beneath him had dissolved while he was reading and he was plunging through the air.

  From the moment he could first begin to understand his lessons – from the moment he could read – he had accepted without question the teaching of the Church: that there had once been a time when Satan had been in control of the world; that God had punished the ancients for their elevation of science above all else by bringing down upon the Earth the four terrible riders of the Apocalypse – Pestilence, War, Famine and Death – as foretold in the Book of Revelation; and that thanks to a revival of the True Faith, they were blessed to be living in the time of the Risen Christ, when order had been restored to the world. He had never stopped to consider that there might be six possible scenarios that had led to the Apocalypse, let alone that there could have existed people misguided enough to wish to find their way back to the very system that had brought God’s punishment down upon their heads in the first place. Here in his hands was the mortal sin that the Church was determined to guard against: that what pretended to be a harmless interest in the past was in truth a disguised form of scientism that aimed to restore it. The book was heretical, pure and simple: it rightly deserved to be burned.

  And yet he found something about Morgenstern’s letter profoundly moving, even if much of it lay beyond him. What was ‘cyberspace’, or an ‘ATM’, or ‘antibiotics’? He picked up the book again, went back to the beginning of the passage and read it with close attention for a second time, snagging his mind on the difficult words, struggling like a captured Ephraimite to pronounce the tongue-twisting shibboleth, then began turning the succeeding pages in search of any further reference to Morgenstern.

  There was none. Shadwell had also vanished. He had sent his apologies for missing the next two meetings of the society, which were devoted to a monograph on the weathering of concrete structures and the excavation of a tunnel under the Thames at Blackwall, and after that the entries ceased. It was the final volume of the series. At that point, Fairfax presumed, the society must have been proscribed.

  Shadwell? He ruminated on the name. He wondered what had become of him. If he was still alive, he must be getting on in years – he did not sound as if he were a young man even thirteen years ago – and in that instant it flashed into his mind that perhaps Shadwell was the elderly mourner who had shouted out in church. It was absurd, of course. The likelihood that the former president of the Society of Antiquaries was still alive, let alone that he would have found his way to Addicott St George in the middle of a rainstorm, was infinitesimal. He told himself his imagination was becoming overstimulated. Still, the thought was unsettling.

  He reinserted the feather in its original place, closed t
he volume and replaced it on the nightstand. Then he put Father Lacy’s spectacles back on top of it exactly as he had found them, as if by so doing he could pretend they had never been disturbed, and blew out the candle. This time oblivion did not come so easily. He felt as if a hand had reached out of the distant past and brushed its fingers across his face. He wished he could unsee what he had read, but knowledge alters everything, and he knew that was impossible.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Thursday 11th April: The Piggeries

  HE FINALLY FELL asleep just before dawn, and was woken shortly afterwards by the sound of knocking – gentle but persistent and increasingly urgent. The day had broken and for the first time since he had arrived in the valley there was a suspicion of pale sunlight beyond the leaded window.

  A woman’s voice came through the closed door. ‘Father Fairfax?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Budd. Good morning. Is all well?’

  ‘Ye’re needed quickly. Please may ye come at once?’

  He threw off the covers, then glanced down at his nakedness. ‘Willingly I would. But I fear …’

  ‘Thy clothes were filthy, Father, from when ye fell over. I took ’em away to wash ’em. Ye can use Father Lacy’s.’

  He had fallen over? Had she undressed him? Oh God, oh God …

  ‘Thank you. I shall be down directly.’

  ‘As fast as ye can, Father, please.’

  In the chest of drawers, he found neatly ironed underclothes and a pair of old-fashioned long black woollen socks. Worse even than sleeping in the old man’s bed was the prospect of having to wear his clothes. At the first touch of the fabric his skin puckered into goose flesh. But he set his jaw and put them on. In the wardrobe was a simple black cassock, stinking of camphor and frayed at the hem and cuffs. It fitted him well. Let it be my hair shirt, he thought. My penance. A reminder of my sin.

  He went out on to the landing, looping Father Lacy’s white cotton stock around his neck, and tied it as he descended the stairs.

  Agnes was waiting for him in the passage, together with Rose, who was dressed to go out in a long brown coat that looked as if it had once belonged to Father Lacy. Between them stood a thin young man, bare-headed, twisting a felt cap in his hands. He was wearing an old black worsted suit, the trousers held up by twine. On his face was a look of such anguish that Fairfax instinctively reached out his hand and clasped his shoulder. ‘My good fellow, what is it?’ The man gaped at him, red-eyed, speechless.

  ‘His wife’s birthed and the babe’s not fit to last the morning,’ said Agnes. ‘The poor thing must be baptised.’

  ‘Yes indeed. I’m sorry. Allow me a moment.’ He ran back upstairs to his bag and retrieved his prayer book. At the front door he pulled on his boots, and Agnes kneeled to lace them. The young man was already waiting in the road. ‘His name’s John Revel,’ she whispered. ‘’Twill be the second they’ll have lost. Their house’s in The Piggeries. Rose’ll show thee back after.’

  He hurried down the path to the gate, which Rose held open for him, and together they set off after the man as he strode towards the village. Rose kept a few paces ahead of him. Now that the storm had passed, daily life was resuming. A woman was hanging out washing in her garden. Another carried pails of milk in either hand along the centre of the street, her shoulders sloped by the weight. Both stopped as Revel passed, and Fairfax could tell they knew what it meant to see a new young father at this hour of the morning trailed by a priest.

  The central arch of the bridge was almost entirely submerged. Barely a foot beneath the parapet a thunderous spate of yellowish-brown water foamed against a dam of broken branches. The spray drenched their faces. A hundred yards beyond the river, Revel abruptly disappeared into a narrow lane, itself a torrent, so that Fairfax and Rose were obliged to clamber up on to the grass verge and limp along it, occasionally slithering down into the water up to their ankles.

  Beyond the high hedge, a half-dozen spindly columns of smoke rose from invisible chimneys. Revel opened a barred wooden gate and they went after him into a yard. Chickens ran towards them in the hope of food, swaying from side to side like clerics with their skirts hitched up, while the pigs that had presumably given the place its name – all pink and grey with caked mud – snuffled at a pile of dung. On three sides of the yard were what Fairfax took at first to be dilapidated sties. But then he noticed that children were running in and out of them, and he realised with a shock that they were human dwellings – tumbling hovels with tiny windows and low doorways, into one of which they followed Revel.

  In the dimness, he registered a floor of bare earth spread with straw and sawdust. Clearly the animals must be brought in at night for their security and to provide a little heat. A ladder led up to a loft. On one side of the gloomy chamber, wet logs hissed in a small brick fireplace. Beside it an old woman seated on a stool sucked a short-stemmed pipe. The stink was tangible – human and animal, piss and shit, boiled food, woodsmoke and tobacco smoke, ammonia from the straw. Children clustered behind them at the door, blocking the daylight.

  As his eyes adjusted to the shadows, Fairfax made out a mattress in the corner heaped with rags. Revel went over and kneeled next to it. ‘The priest is come, Hannah,’ he said gently.

  The rags stirred and a thin white face appeared. ‘Parson Lacy?’

  ‘No, I am Father Fairfax.’ He approached the mattress, his hands outstretched. Rose lingered at the back, watching him. ‘May I see?’

  Revel gently pulled back the sheet. She had the child clasped to her chest. It was slate blue, the same blue as the veins on her bare white breasts, heavy with milk. She hadn’t the strength to lift it herself, so Revel took it and handed it up to Fairfax. It was as cold and light as a dead bird. He glanced around in despair and caught Rose’s eye. She looked away. He should have stopped the ceremony then. A proper priest would have explained the mystery of God’s will, not offered false comfort. He knew it, but he had not the courage to do it.

  Hannah whispered, ‘She ain’t gone, please God, tell me?’

  ‘No, no. We are just in time.’ Fairfax nestled the corpse in his left arm and fumbled with his prayer book. ‘Might I have some light, please? And a cupful of water? Children, why don’t you come in and join us?’

  Four of the young ones gathered round. The old woman came wearily from her stool, handed him a wooden beaker of water and held up a candle behind his shoulder. He could hear and smell her rank wheezing breath.

  ‘What is to be her name?’

  Revel looked at his wife. She said, ‘Judith Elizabeth.’ He nodded.

  Fairfax poured a little water over the wrinkled face. ‘Judith Elizabeth, I baptise thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.’

  ‘Amen.’

  ‘Shall we kneel together?’ He twisted his prayer book to the candle, but he knew the words well enough – too well, indeed. We yield thee hearty thanks, most merciful Father, that it hath pleased thee to regenerate Judith Elizabeth with thy Holy Spirit, to receive her for thine own Child by adoption, and to incorporate her into thy holy Church. And we humbly beseech thee to grant, that as she is now made partaker of the death of thy Son, so she may be also of his resurrection; and that finally, with the residue of thy Saints, she may inherit thine everlasting kingdom; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

  After a few moments of silence, one of the children said, ‘She’s dead, ain’t she?’

  ‘I think she may be now, God rest her soul.’ Fairfax placed the baby back in her mother’s arms. ‘But we were in time.’

  He stood in the centre of the yard, his hands hanging loosely at his sides, face tilted to the sky, and breathed in the smells of the farmyard. The poorest quarter of Exeter always shocked him, but somehow the quietness and isolation of rural poverty struck him as much worse. No wonder in the centuries after the Fall people had turned back to God: they would have needed to believe there was a life better than this one, whereas the ancients, with all
their comforts, had been able to exist without faith. But then he corrected himself. Peculiar, barely comprehensible phrases from Morgenstern’s letter were coming back to him. We regard our society as having reached a level of sophistication that renders it uniquely vulnerable to total collapse … Key sectors and technologies could be affected to such an extent that our chances of finding our way back to the status quo ante could diminish alarmingly quickly … Oh yes, the ancients had had faith right enough, he thought. Their God had been science, and it had deserted them.

  His presence in The Piggeries was creating a stir. People were watching him from their open doorways. He recognised some faces from the wake. Scrawny barefoot children, the tallest no higher than his chest, ran in circles round him, shouting and waving their arms. In their upraised hands they flourished wooden crosses, which they swooped and spun. After a while, he started to pay them more attention.

  ‘What’s that game you’re playing?’

  ‘Flying machines!’

  ‘How do you know of flying machines?’

  ‘The parson told us!’

  ‘May I see that?’

  The toy was crudely carved out of a single piece of wood, its wings swept back in the style of a swallow’s, its tail raised like a magpie’s. Tiny holes gouged along either side of its body seemed to represent portholes. In their imaginations the children were high above the puddled farmyard, flashing through the clouds. He had never observed such a game before. He turned the carved flying machine back and forth in his hands until Rose tugged at his sleeve. She nodded to a fair-headed girl, barely more than a child herself, yet her belly already swollen by pregnancy. The girl curtsied.