by Wayward
~
Haughtenson Curr stared into the eyes of the man sitting opposite him in the interrogation room.
“I shall,” he said, “take every silence you keep to be an admission of guilt.”
Chervil Guava shrugged. “You’ve told me what I did. You know. There’s no point in me confirming it.”
Haughtenson nodded. “Do you truly believe me to be your enemy?”
“Of course. We live to stop you. To stop your growth.”
“Before I throw you into solitary for the rest of your life, I want to show you something about growth.”
Chervil frowned. “Show me what?”
Haughtenson stood up and walked to a wall-sized computer monitor. “This is something we call PowerPoint,” he said. “It’s all the rage here in the city, you know.” He pressed some buttons on a remote control, whereupon graphs appeared on the monitor. “This,” he continued, indicating a bent-knee graph, “is an example of natural growth. See how the growth is proportional to time in the earlier stages. However, a point comes when that growth stops, here at the knee, so that as time continues there is no growth.”
“I see,” Chervil said, nodding.
“This, however, is human inspired growth. Note that there is no knee, nor any cessation of growth. In fact the growth is exponential, indicating its vigour. Do you see how human inspired growth is superior, because it has no limit?”
“I do see what you’re talking about,” Chervil said. “But you’ve failed to grasp something. I see natural growth as superior to human inspired growth for exactly the same reason.”
Haughtenson frowned.
“London,” Chervil explained, “has an inviolate edge. We call it the greenbelt.”
~
Kewpol’s new headquarters was a vast treehouse set in the heart of a medieval oak.
Huw surveyed the sanctuary. The architectural wave had trickled to a halt at Staines, leaving Egham and everything to the south and the west free of new buildings. But the heat now was intense.
They all wore shorts, sweat-stained vests, and cheap, rotting sandals made in Southall. The woods of Windsor Great Park were dotted with the corpses of owls, hares, and a wide range of amphibians. And from the shattered streets of Greater London came a line of refugees walking in single file, a line that Huw knew would soon become a throng.
Research was hampered by the absence of the archive, and so Hew and Fae decided they would have to return to Kew, else lose the battle forever.
They rejected all offers of help. “We two are known to the authorities,” Huw explained. “Nobody else here has such a high profile on the Metropol computers. If we are caught, your anonymity, if nothing else, will help you continue the struggle.”
They chose an engine-free canoe – invisible to the Metropol tech radars – and packed it as if for combat: machetes, stun-crossbows, high energy foods and elodea bottles. To the north-east the pall above London covered half the sky, like a diffuse, all-seeing mushroom cloud.
With green/brown marked skin, camouflage vests and low density boots they made a striking pair. They hugged one another, waved to the assembled crowd, then lifted the canoe and began the trek to Chertsey.
But Thamesia, they discovered, was suffering.
The smoke emitted by the furnaces of London’s streets had made the city so hot a monoculture had been created in the river waters, all delicate plant life out-competed by a brown weed, whose leaves Huw initially thought were floating turds.
Fae pointed to the banks. “This is going to hamper us as we go downstream,” she said. Through a pair of binoculars she surveyed the waters curling around Hampton Court Park. “The weed gets thicker. I think it might even be blocking the river further down.”
Huw glanced at the banks. Thamesia did seem higher. “I don’t like this,” he said. “Shall we get out at Kingston and follow the road to Twickenham?”
“What then?”
Huw shrugged. “You’re Kewpol’s best agent. If you don’t know… ”
Fae smiled. “We cross the Chertsey Road and head for Syon House.”
Huw glanced at the press of buildings to the south of the river. People swarmed everywhere; sweating, noisy, squashed into tiny spaces. To the north, the verdancy of the park had been manicured by the owners of golf courses.
He said, “Lead on.”
At Syon House, all was quiet. At their leisure they raided the archive for every downloadable book and data disc detailing the evolution of photosynthesis, packing the haul into a rucksack.
On the banks of Thamesia Huw made to lift the canoe, but Fae stood still, silent, staring at him. “What?” he asked.
“Here we split,” she said.
“What? Why?”
She gestured with a thumb over her shoulder. “I need to return to the city.”
“Chervil?”
“Yes. Haughtenson is beyond us, but Chervil’s wing could still be tempted back into the political arena.”
“How will you find them?” Huw asked.
Fae grinned. “Oh, I’ll find them. I know their…graffiti.”
~
Fae stood in Battersea Park, on the banks of Thamesia. Despite the discomfort brought about by the heat, beneath her blouse and jeans she was protected by her bulletproof waistcoat. Her hair lay lank against her head; her back prickly with sweat.
The grey smoke that blanketed the city was here reduced by gusting winds created by skyscraper vortexes, but the air was foul with particulates and fumes, and, like most of the locals, she had to wear a mask. Unlike the locals’, hers was attached to an elodea bottle. O2, the sweetest poison.
Before her, high between embankments, the waters of Thamesia lay hidden under brown weed, and upon that weed a great fayre had been set. In such places the military wing of Kewpol could be active. In jeans, blouse and mask she was disguised, so here she could explore.
A multitude of stalls littered the site, and the place was dense with people. The weed gave beneath her boots like a sodden carpet, belching methane and water vapour under the press of so many punters. As she wandered the random lanes she began to get a sense of who was where: here the stallholders, here the craftspeople, there the food vendors, drinks merchants and the bored sellers of programmes. And there…there a sign.
A Mollison vector, the sigil of the underground.
Good. Fae grinned. Chervil should not be far away.
The stall above which the sigil (artlessly it seemed) had been dropped was covered with leaflets. New Chlorophyll Times, Riding Milankovich’s Cycle, PEP-C Not Pepsi, Back To The Eocene, Are Aerosols Your Saviour? And many more.
Fae knew the scent of Kewpol’s military wing, knew their rumour, their traces, not because she had been born with them, nor because she sympathised, but because she used so many of their methods when Huw was not looking. She was a roots politician – a radical. The military wing was not here, but their agents were.
She picked up a couple of leaflets, glancing at the tattooed woman behind the stall, who seemed little older than herself.
“Got any Schumacher?” she asked.
The woman looked left and right, then glanced upward at the silver butterfly patrolling the heavens. Moments later she handed over a scuffed book.
“You giving up smoking?” the woman asked.
Fae stiffened. This was a code metaphor. “It’s a filthy habit.”
“Where to, then?”
Fae shrugged. This was presumably a reference to the military wing itself. “Dunno… but I am looking.”
The woman offered no reply, apparently bored. Fae strolled away.
The encounter encouraged her: small was beautiful. Heading over Chelsea Bridge she turned right into Pimlico, were the smoke was extreme, the heat intense, and she had to smear mosquito repellent on her exposed skin else be eaten alive. As she paced north along Millbank a demonstration approached, hundreds of filthy, rag-clothed people waving sundews on sticks, who reached out to her, imploring her to join th
em.
“Down with death!”
“Clean with green!”
Fae found herself surprised. A popular movement, born, as so often, of desperation was tramping the foggy streets of London. Had Chervil and the rest sparked a popular movement? It seemed unlikely.
She looked up and down the Embankment. London was shot to smithereens: smoke shrouded, lung excoriating, filthy and stinking. The fires had extinguished of their own accord, but the smoke lay heavy and the heat had nowhere to go. This febrile city could still burn, if it did not die in its own excrement first. It was a monoculture of the senses: hot, arid, full of weed and poverty. Everything brown and grey and black.
She passed through Westminster and turned into Birdcage Walk, almost missing the junction in the smog; a minute later she stood on the baked ground of St James’s Park. For a few minutes she wandered through the restless crowds, until the hint of an East End accent caught her ear.
She approached a huddle of people.
She handed one of them the book.
Rotor blades and shouting and swirling fog. Suddenly they were all surrounded by Metropol officers. She shrank back, but into the arms of a man, who pushed her back into the gathering.
A voice cried out. “Put them in chokey!”
Haughtenson Curr. It had all been a trap.
~
The interrogation was gentle. They did not want to hurt her. They just wanted the information, and they had all the time in the world.
Haughtenson Curr, Chervil and Fae. Just the three of them.
“Think of me as your mediator,” Haughtenson said.
Fae frowned. “Between?”
“You and Chervil.”
Chervil glanced at her. “He wants us to merge. Then you’re tainted with what they say I’ve done. Refuse. If you submit they’ll demolish Kewpol, to all intents and purposes legitimately, and then everyone in London will support Metropol. And think of them as their saviours.”
Fae looked at Haughtenson. “If you refuse,” Haughtenson said, “we’ll just wait. After some years you’ll give us the information we need, out of boredom if nothing else.”
“What information do you need?”
“The location and plans of Kewpol. Metropol does not want Kewpol anymore. London has changed.”
“You’re telling me. I don’t see any green.”
“I’ve explained to Chervil why we don’t need green.”
Chervil laughed. “You do realise you’re presiding over the demise of London?”
Haughtenson replied, “We think of it as the rebirth.”
“Londoners do know what you’re doing,” said Fae. “I’ve seen the street demos. I passed one just now – ”
“A rabble roused by no-hoper demagogues,” Haughtenson declared. “We ignore them.”
Fae shivered, then glanced at Chervil. This was akin to a scorched earth policy.
“You can afford to ignore them?” she said.
“In every way suggested by that word.”
“And where did your wealth come from?”
“From London itself. From the mares-tails and the ferns and the cycads. All that lovely lignin. Come on, Fae! We’re all in this together. We’re all responsible for what’s happened. It’s just that I accept it while you pretend it’s something to fight. But your nose is in the trough too.”
Chervil sang to himself, so softly Fae almost missed it. “Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner… ”
“Okay,” said Fae. “I’ll show you where Kewpol is hiding out. But I’m not doing it on my own. I came here to find Chervil, so I’m taking him with me.”
Haughtenson hesitated, and in those moments Fae knew her risk had half paid off. Chervil said nothing: tacit agreement. He knew what was at stake.
Then, slowly, Haughtenson said, “Very well. I don’t trust either of you, but all we have to do is follow you… and, if you run anywhere we don’t like, our butterflies only have to sting.”
Fae nodded. She had no plan. She just had to get out of the capital.
~
Victoria Street was pandemonium, as London succumbed to a fourfold attack: drought, heat, hunger and sea level rise. Fae watched dumbstruck as a rider on a white horse galloped from crossroads to crossroads; it seemed as if the people in the street were desiccated as he passed, their lips blackened by thirst, their tongues swollen, their skin grey, flaking, covered in particulate filth. The smoke in the street was so hot it was like bathing in car exhaust fumes. Fae could see no further than twenty yards through the smog.
And she was fading from dehydration. At her side Chervil shook his head, “We may not get out of this.”
“Are you following me, or am I following you?”
“I know where we’re not going – to Huw. We’ve got to give Metropol the slip. We’ve got to use our nous to get away. We can do it!”
“I was hoping you’d say that. I could see how desperate Haughtenson was – he knows London can’t last much longer but he could never admit it. He’d lose too much face.”
Chervil laughed. “You first have to have a face. Listen, he’ll have his top agents following us. They’ll be nearby. Where to now, d’you reckon?”
Fae turned to face him. “Why did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Raise the Carboniferous.”
“To reverse three hundred million years of geology,” he replied, shrugging. “To eat all the food in the atmosphere -”
“They just burned everything! Your actions made it worse. They made a pall of smoke to cover -“
“I know! I tried to manage London, I tried to be its steward.”
“We can’t be city stewards, Chervil. We don’t have a long or deep enough vision. Don’t you know London can manage itself?”
Chervil nodded. “Let’s move. We’ve got Curr’s agents to lose.”
Fae followed him up Victoria Street; as the rider on the white horse spread raging thirst across the centre of the city. Explosions rocked St James’s to the north; then a detonation blasted Buck House into the sky. The smog ate into stonework, leaving a tracery like the multiple channels of woodworm in a tree. The charred remains of tree stumps were half covered by dust and sand.
Chervil led Fae into Parliament Square, then headed south along Abingdon Street. A rider on a black horse galloped by, and the heat became so intense it was like a barrier before them, searing their skin, parching their mouths. Chervil cut open the tops of the elodea bottles, threw the pondweed into a bag, then handed Fae one. They drank the scummy, muddy water. From their florid skin drops of water evaporated before their eyes.
Abingdon Street was choked with refugees, some of whom had tried to force their way into the Houses of Parliament: the bodies were stacked ten high. They saw the pale blue flag fluttering over Big Ben shot down, then as charcoal-black fog swept along the street they affixed dampened masks to their faces – the last drops of the elodea water – and headed into it, goggles on their eyes, machetes held ready. Heatstroke victims lay in the gutters and on the pavements, and they had to dodge insanely driven cars pounding up and down the street, with glaring, staring headlights and front grilles like jaws.
At last they reached Lambeth Bridge. Chervil said, “This is hopeless. There’s only one way out, only one way to avoid Metropol. The underground.”
“Which one?”
“Let’s try and reach Vauxhall Station. Come on!”
A rider on a red horse galloped past as they struggled over the bridge. The pavements were piled high with skeletal bodies, eaten by rats that swarmed from the gutters . Those standing were pot-bellied, walking as if half asleep, collapsing and dying. The stench along Albert Embankment was unbearable.
Starving, with no remaining supplies, Fae encouraged Chervil to eat the pondweed. It tasted foul and had almost no nutritional value, but in their hunger they were desperate. She watched the rider on the red horse spreading starvation across the city. She was tired. Her skin hung off her bones. Her muscle
s were wasting. So little energy left to reach Vauxhall Station…
“We’re almost there,” Chervil said.
“How far to go?”
“We just passed Tinworth Street. Come on.”
A rider on a green horse galloped past as he spoke, and Thamesia began to rise; in less than a minute the river was pouring over the embankment. They waded down Albert Street, knee high, thigh high, waist high, but when they saw Vauxhall Station they stopped in horror. The sea level rise was now so great Thamesia had flooded Vauxhall from Lambeth to Kennington. On the other bank Pimlico was drowning: to the north, Big Ben half under water. London had fever.
Fae turned to face the heart of the city. Against a cacophony of screams and cries, gun shots and explosions, she saw great clouds of smoke and dust rising into the sky, as London burned, fell, disintegrated, was smashed by war. Jet fighters strafed Pall Mall, while rickety Eastern European bombers targeted the East End. Chinatown was swamped as the sewers vomited up their brown cargo, Bloomsbury bombed to pieces, Holborn annihilated in an orgy of TNT: and far off, somewhere between Highgate and Golders Green, a chlorine cloud rose.
As the rider on the green horse splashed by and the waters rose, Chervil grabbed a rowing boat, dragged Fae in, then cast off, allowing the floods to dictate their direction.
They floated on and on and on.
~
They were a trio, like the three carbon atoms of the original photosynthetic molecule: Huw, Fae and Chervil, linked together for the purpose of consuming atmospheric food. The vast clouds of smoke hanging over sunken London led to a plankton bloom, on which great numbers of creatures fed. The air above the water shimmered, a heat haze unnoticed by most. Surfing in on boards made of compressed plankton, and pulled by whale sharks, the trio made north east, carrying with them an immense horde of plant seeds.
Not enough smoke was being absorbed by the plankton. The trio would regenerate London through the agency of plants. Plants, Huw pointed out, were the makers and shakers of the world.
The tops of innumerable buildings poked up above the water. The water itself, warm and acidic, was hardly fertile, but already erosion and the action of mosses, lichen, worts and algae had reduced stone to soil, making London an archipelago swathed in smoke. As they floated over Kensington, Brompton and Belgravia they saw beneath them the weed infested streets of the Metropol cream, whose houses now were skeletons for coral, and whose chimneys expelled eggs and spermatozoa when the moon was full.