Tomorrow’s World

by Davie Henderson

  Listening to her, watching her, I wanted to put my arm around her.

  As we moved through the rest of the house I searched desperately for something that might fire her imagination. Instead, I found only things that intrigued me, like how there were big electrical fans in every room, and moth-eaten mosquito nets draped over the beds.

  And then, lying on an antique desk in one of the bedrooms, I found a diary. I tried not to get too excited as I picked it up. As often as not when you come across a diary the pages are blank or the entries get shorter by the day and stop altogether after the first couple of weeks. But a quick riffle through this one revealed page after page of flowing script. I picked an entry at random; it’s a thrilling way to form a first impression, to let a person from the past introduce their personality and their world. The page was headed FEBRUARY 21, 2025, which tied in with the mosquito nets and electrical fans. Things really were heating up by then.

  Before I could read the entry below the date, Paula’s voice stopped me: “We better get a move on, Travis.” She sounded bored, as well as concerned about running out of filtermasks.

  Reluctantly I closed the diary and put it in the hip pocket of my dark blue coveralls.

  I was about to join Paula in the hallway when I noticed a collection of movie discs in a cabinet below the bedroom video screen. I love old films, so I couldn’t resist a quick glance to see if there were any worth adding to my collection. None of the first few titles stood out. But then I came to one that stopped my heart beating. The breath caught in my throat, and the room started spinning.

  “Travis!” Impatience replaced the boredom and anxiety in Paula’s voice, but I didn’t care.

  I swallowed back the lump that had formed in my throat, and bent down to reach out for the movie. My legs were so unsteady I had to kneel on the floor. I didn’t realize a tear had rolled down my cheek until it splashed on the cover of the DVD. And I didn’t realize Paula had been standing in the doorway watching me. Not until she said, “Travis?” in a voice full of bewilderment and concern.

  “Travis?” she said again. “What is it?”

  I’d never heard such puzzlement in her voice before. But then she’d never seen me like this before.

  Paula knelt down beside me and looked at the cover of the DVD. The words on it said March of the Penguins, and the picture below the words showed an emperor penguin looking down at its newly hatched chick.

  “What’s wrong?” Paula asked.

  “You wouldn’t understand,” I said, and put the film back. Embarrassed that Paula had seen me this way, I got up and hurried past her. I walked quickly out of the room and then out of the house and along the street toward the library.

  I heard Paula calling out behind me: “Travis, I think there’s a storm on the way! We should turn back!”

  I knew she was right. The sky had darkened and lowered while we’d been in the house, and something in the air made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. But I didn’t even look around to see if Paula was following me, let alone turn and head back for the bridge. I kept going toward the library, wanting to get away from Paula and the penguins… Wanting to forget my past, and at the same time to remember it. A few fat raindrops splashed around me, and instinctively I pulled up the hood of my coverall. The rain’s not as acidic as it used to be, but it’s still toxic enough to cause some major irritation if it comes in contact with your skin. I saw the library up ahead—housed in an old school that became surplus to requirements when the fertility rate went into freefall—and made a run for it as the heavens opened.

  I had a head start on Paula, but she was right on my heels by the time I reached the library. No sooner had the door closed behind me than it swung open again as she hurried out of the rain, which was bouncing off the pavement.

  We pulled down our hoods and shook ourselves dry. Then we stood there looking at each other, with the rain hammering down on the roof and splashing into puddles around us where slates had been torn away by the countless superstorms of the last half century.

  Paula spoke first. “What was all that about?” she asked.

  “You wouldn’t understand,” I told her.

  “Don’t be so patronizing,” she said with a hurt and anger that took me by surprise. I’d never seen her show so much emotion. And then her voice cracked as if something was breaking inside her, and she said, “How do you know what I’m capable of understanding?” In little more than a whisper she added, “How could you possibly know, when I don’t even know myself?”

  And now I did put my arm around her.

  She was supposed to rest her head on my shoulder and sob quietly while I stroked her hair and reassured her with words and my sheer physical presence that everything was going to be okay. But, instead, she threw my arm off angrily. A flash of lightning lit up the world outside, as if the elements were perfectly in tune with her emotions—although, if they had been, I suspect the lightning bolt would have struck yours truly and left a pile of smoking ash in my place.

  “You treat us like we’re robots, like we have no feelings,” Paula said.

  “That’s how you act.”

  “Has it never occurred to you at least some of that, for at least some of us, is just an act?”

  It hadn’t occurred to me. Not once in all my dealings with Numbers. But then, I was starting to realize Paula wasn’t like other Numbers. It dawned on me the differences must have something to do with her emotional flaw, and her next words bore that out: “Has it never occurred to you that we’re not all alike, however much we look it? That some of us feel things the others don’t, maybe things like you sometimes feel?”

  Speechless, all I could do was shake my head.

  Paula turned and walked away, disappearing behind the nearest stack of shelves.

  When I rounded the corner she wasn’t scanning the books, she was leaning against them, face resting on her forearms, shoulders shaking ever so slightly. Just as a storm was breaking outside the library, so a storm was breaking inside my partner. A quiet storm that had been building for a lot longer than the one outside. My heart went out to her even though I didn’t understand what was going on inside her. I put my arm around her. She still didn’t put her head on my shoulders and her arms around me. She didn’t even turn to look at me. But she didn’t pull away. I held her until her shoulders were no longer shaking. And then I whispered, “Let me tell you about the penguins.”

  I led her over to the table and sat down opposite her. While the rain thundered down above us and the lightning flashed, I began to tell her why the sight of the adult penguin gazing down at its chick had sent a tear rolling down my face. “It was Jen’s favorite film,” I said.

  She ignored that, obviously wanting to show she was still mad at me. But curiosity soon got the better of her. Looking more like a little girl than the ice maiden I was used to, she wiped her killer cheekbones dry with the back of her hands and said, “Who was Jen?”

  “My wife,” I said. “God, how I miss her,” I added, the words coming out before I knew I was going to say them. “She loved animals, spent a year working in a nature reserve.”

  “Why would someone risk their health like that?”

  “It’s the only chance to experience what the world was once like, albeit a far less wonderful version of it,” I told her. “Anyway, she started getting so breathless that she had to give it up. She got a job caring for the animals in the genetic breeding program, but—” I thought I’d stopped myself in time.

  However, Paula correctly guessed what I’d left unsaid: “The genetically engineered specimens were a pale imitation of ‘real’ animals. They didn’t have the same spirit and unpredictability. They didn’t have the same passion, and Jen couldn’t love them the way she’d loved the wild animals,” she said bitterly.

  “Paula…”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. But her voice and the look in her eyes told me it did matter. It mattered a whole lot more to her than I would have belie
ved before we crossed the bridge.

  Trying to change tack, I said, “Jen felt horrible at seeing the animals confined, although she knew it was in their best interests given the state of the planet. And she felt ashamed and guilty at the knowledge that their plight and the planet’s was caused by the selfishness and greed of our forefathers.”

  “So where do the penguins come in?” Paula asked. “Is it to do with the fact they were among the animals worst hit by climate change?”

  “They did come to symbolize the plight of the animal kingdom, but to Paula and me—” I stopped when I saw the look on her face.

  “You said, to ‘Paula’ and me.”

  “I’m sorry, I meant Jen and me.” If I’d had any doubt over how I felt about the woman sitting across from me, that Freudian slip told me everything I needed to know.

  “What did penguins mean to Jen and you?” Paula asked, as if what I was saying was more than a way of passing time while a storm broke.

  “I met Jen on a treasure-hunting trip, in a house like the one you and I were in a few minutes ago. I was looking for cameras—”

  Paula rolled her eyes and said, “Travis, you can’t even take pictures with them.”

  “I know, it’s just…” But I couldn’t explain it.

  A few days earlier—a few hours earlier—Paula would have let me flounder and sneered while I did so. But now she said, “What was Jen looking for?”

  “Wildlife books. We all have our holy grail, an object we long to come across on those treasure-hunting trips, something that means far more to us than it should. For Jen it was the book March of the Penguins. She found it in that house, and that’s where I found her. The moment I set eyes on her I…” My voice died away as I recalled the first time I’d seen Jen. My heart stopped just from the memory of that moment, from the memory of her.

  This time Paula didn’t prompt me. She gave me as much time as I needed to come back out of the past and rejoin her in the library. I suspect it was longer than I realized. “I walked back to the community with Jen and we found laughter came easily, and words, too,” I told Paula when I was ready to go on. “The only word that didn’t come easily was ‘goodbye.’ We made it easier to say by arranging to say hello again the next day. And at the end of that next day, it was even harder to say goodbye. I always hated saying goodbye to her, and when I saw her again each evening it was like seeing her for the first time. Every time she smiled at me it stopped my heart,” I said. And then I remembered who I was talking to, and said, “That must sound laughable.”

  But Paula wasn’t laughing. She was looking at me like she’d never really seen me before, like she hadn’t really known me until now.

  So I kept on talking. “March of the Penguins was her favorite movie, and it was what we watched on our first date. She used up two days’ food rations in the Community Store to buy us some treats, and we had a movie night in her apartment.”

  “That sounds so romantic,” Paula said, and the longing in her voice was a revelation. It was then I began to suspect what her emotional flaw was: a belief in the most illogical thing of all—love.

  “Ever seen it?” I asked.

  Paula looked confused, as if she didn’t follow. I’d hardly ever seen that look on the face of a Number. The few times I had, I’d given them a taste of their own medicine by sneering at them and trying to make them feel stupid. It never occurred to me to do that to Paula now. Instead, I said, “March of the Penguins—it’s the most incredible movie. Have you ever seen it?”

  Paula shook her head.

  “It’s about what the emperor penguins went through to bring their young into the world. It’s truly humbling. I know they were hard-wired by evolution; they were acting purely out of instinct, and there’s a danger of anthropomorphizing their motives. But there’s this one scene that shows a father penguin who’s gone without food for weeks to incubate an egg. He’s balancing the egg on his feet and is hardly able to move because if it rolls onto the ground it freezes in seconds. Anyway, the egg finally hatches, and when the father looks down and sees this tiny face emerging—when he sees his chick for the first time—no one will convince me he isn’t feeling something every bit as profound and moving as what we call love.”

  Paula should have sniggered or sneered. She should have been sarcastic, or at least asked me to get to the point. But she surprised me again, saying, “It’s moving just listening to you talk about it. I can see why the film means so much to you.”

  “No, you can’t,” I said.

  Paula looked as though I’d slapped her, and I realized that although we were getting to know each other in ways which hadn’t seemed possible before, there was still a profound difference between us and misunderstanding was never far away. “There’s a bit more to it than that,” I said quickly.

  She looked relieved her capacity to feel wasn’t being called into question.

  “Jen had spent so long Outside that her immune system was seriously weakened. I could see it in her breathlessness, the way she got tired quickly, caught all the viruses that were doing the rounds of the haven and took an alarmingly long time to recover from them. I didn’t know how seriously weakened she was, though. Not until she told me that having a child was even harder for her than it was for other women, because in the unlikely event I was fertile enough to do my bit, her damaged immune system meant she’d grow weaker each day the child inside her grew stronger.

  “I told her not to worry about children; I wouldn’t feel I’d missed out on anything if I was sharing life with her…” My voice choked and I found it hard to go on.

  Using maternal instinct, or feminine intuition, or something else I’d never dreamed she possessed, Paula was able to say the words for me: “But Jen was feeling the same thing as the penguins.”

  I nodded.

  I looked out of the window, not knowing how much of the misting was on the glass and how much was in my eyes. “She didn’t make it past her second trimester,” I said. “I should never have let her try. I feel like I’m to blame for—”

  My words were interrupted by the scraping of a chair. The next thing I knew Paula was sitting next to me and her arm was around me and my head was on her shoulder.

  That wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen.

  That wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen at all.

  CHAPTER 12

  PHANTOM PREGNANCY

  I SEARCHED PAULA’S EYES FOR ANY SIGN OF MOCKERY as we moved apart, but found none. I’d never opened up to anyone like that. I hadn’t thought I ever would. Especially not to a Number. Especially not to Paula. What she did next surprised me as much as what I’d done; she gave my hand a gentle, reassuring squeeze. In a strange way, it was harder to deal with than mockery.

  Then Paula pushed her chair back and walked over to the window. The rain was hammering off the glass hard enough to break it if it hadn’t been broken already. Paula watched the rain coming down, and I watched Paula.

  “If it doesn’t let up soon we’ll have to make a run for it,” she said.

  I prayed for the rain to go off, because trying to keep up with Paula on a six-kilometer run would be almost as embarrassing for me as the way I’d just opened up to her. Fit as I am, I’m no match for a Number over that distance. I moved my chair back, meaning to join her at the window to see if there was any sign the storm was passing, but something jagged the back of my thigh and jogged my memory.

  The diary.

  I took it out, opened the cover, and fell headlong into another world. It was a world on the brink of collapse, a society on the point of imploding.

  The first page read:

  DECEMBER 26, 2024

  I’ve never had the slightest urge to keep a diary, but Mike looked so happy when he gave me this I know I should at least make an effort to fill its pages. Besides, there’s so much going on that’s worth writing down. Not in my life, but in the world around me.

  Take the other day, for example; there was a bit on the ne
ws about how it’s the first time no one in Britain has placed a bet on there being a White Christmas.

  As for Christmas itself, it was as melancholy a day for Mike as it was for me. He tries to hide it, but I know he feels it as much as I do. There are little give-aways, like his face when he hears the neighbors’ kids screaming with delight as they open their presents. It’s like a knife in the heart for Mike when he hears those sounds, and for me when I look at him as he listens to them. Our house is filled with love, but it’s not filled with laughter and fun. This Christmas I think we both came to accept it never will be, that all the books of scientific advice for how to improve your chances of conception, all the following of old wives’ tales and all the money spent on IVF has been for nothing. Mike was quieter than usual, and I’m sure that was why.

  All day I had the feeling there was something he wanted to say. Sure enough, after a Christmas dinner of forced smiles and hollow laughter and more than a few drinks, he said he’d understand if I wanted to go to a sperm bank. There’s as big a run on that kind of bank as there was on the other kind during the Wall Street crash ten years back—it seems more men than not have a critically low sperm count these days, so it’s a classic case of demand increasing as supply declines, and price escalating as a result. It would mean remortgaging the house, but that isn’t why I don’t want to do it; I don’t just want a baby, I want his baby. I didn’t tell him that. I didn’t have to. I just thanked him and shook my head, and he knew. And then, on the rug in front of the fireplace, we…

  Well, that’s not for a diary, even one that probably no one will ever read. Let’s just say it was pretty special because there was a massive storm outside while we were… Anyway, the wind was so strong I thought it was going to tear off the new storm shutters Mike fitted after the last time the glass blew in. At one point there was a flash of lightning and a crack of thunder directly overhead and the whole house shook. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect, because it happened right as we…