Once, out with her aunt, Hopper had seen a cluster of them suspended from a lamppost. On the ground, knots of people had gathered to observe the sight, looking like patrons at an art gallery. On a wall behind them, the words RANTERS BE WARNED had been painted in dark brown matter.
These days almost nobody adhered to the original faith—just these few men, and occasionally women, ignoring everyone ignoring them, and scarring themselves in the street.
Here were the Embankment Gardens. The old watergate was still standing. But it had been half submerged in the huge flood after the Stop, and in the years since, nobody had cleaned the thick scurf from the bottom half of the pillars. Across the gardens, Cleopatra’s Needle was pinioned in place by broad metal pipes, held up like a thief on the cross. The chipped sphinxes on either side stared at it, appalled.
She found a bench and pulled the papers David had given her from her bag.
The first sheet contained a list of names and addresses.
The second was Thorne’s obituary. It had been typed on one of the old typewriters and bore the initials “HM” at the top—for Harry Markham, she guessed. It had been written seventeen years ago—two years before whatever event had driven Thorne out of government. She began to read: Edward Thorne, one of the architects of the post-Slow world and principal planners of the new Britain, has died.
His career had been gilded almost from the first. He’d been born in 1983, an only child, to two physicist parents, a gifted student from a young age. He had attended both Oxford and Cambridge, and visited MIT for postdoctoral work in the then rapidly developing field of bioengineering. He had developed crops that would flourish in constant light, that didn’t need cold soil to prompt their growth. It was as though he’d predicted the Slow years before it came to pass.
A black-and-white photo of Thorne was clipped to the second page. Tall and long-faced, he was lounging against a gatepost wearing a pale suit, in the process of adjusting his cuffs. His quizzical look at the photographer had survived. By his side was a young woman in a dress of sharp, slanting blocks.
She read on. His scientific career had been truncated when, at twenty-five, he had temporarily abandoned research altogether and applied to Sandhurst to train as an officer. A year later he had been commissioned into the Royal Lancers, from where he began the first of several tours of duty—Afghanistan, Iraq, North Africa. He kept writing, observing, even publishing under a pseudonym.
It was during this period that he had met the man who would become his closest friend. Richard Davenport had joined the army out of school and was nearly a decade younger than Thorne, but the two had become inseparable. Thorne had been the best man at Davenport’s first wedding; Davenport had saved Thorne’s life when he was shot in Kandahar.
Invalided out of the army, Thorne had returned to his scientific career, working on agriculture. A few years later, the Slow had begun. And when the Slow had curdled into the Stop and the country was perilously close to collapse, when the widely respected General Richard Davenport had begun his rise first to authority and then to power, he had recruited Edward Thorne as his adviser.
Davenport’s own ascendancy was here recounted, although there could be few people unfamiliar with it by now. Hopper skimmed it and, finding she knew the whole story, lifted her gaze and stared over to where the Thames lapped at the concrete embankment.
The politicians had promoted Davenport from a mere general to minister for security as the Slow was drawing to its close. It had been Davenport who had closed the country’s gates. But he had resisted the first calls to replace the sclerotic ministers who preceded him, whetting the country’s appetite for his eventual takeover. His real affirmation of power had begun six years after the Stop.
By then, the Americans in the southern counties were struggling to survive. The second collapse—that of the nations nearest the Hotzone, baking in the sun—was under way and threatening to overwhelm Britain’s borders, or so the government claimed. The emergency administration was impotent, seized up. The breakdown of law and order had reached its worst point. The only real power in the land had been Davenport’s civil defense units, almost indistinguishable from the army, its ranks swollen by his conscription drive.
Eventually, with the utmost reluctance, Davenport had consented to serve in the office of Supreme Commander, appropriating a title from the old NATO as his own. He had initiated the Reconstitution. He had seized control of food supplies, and helped stabilize the American Zone with aid packages. Most important of all, he had pulled up the national drawbridge.
He had been responsible for the very first sinkings, the boats from the Coldside immediately after the Stop, but his next drive had been far larger. And he had established the Breadbasket, imposing order on the old Europe with a simple push just as the Continent fell apart. First the border had moved two hundred yards into France, then half a mile, then ten miles. Today Davenport governed more of continental Europe than any Englishman since the Hundred Years’ War.
It had worked. Food supplies had improved. Water supplies had grown cleaner. The cholera epidemic had slowed and eventually stopped. Britain had reindustrialized. And at some point in the process, Davenport had become prime minister. When the worst of the crisis had abated, there seemed no sense in returning to the emergency government, and the appetite for elections was nil, so he had carried on.
The obituary was followed by another photo of the two men. Thorne must have been in his early fifties. He had a neat little beard; the suit was darker, the eyes more lined, but his hair still dark brown. Davenport was in uniform. The pair were standing on the deck of some vessel, perhaps one of the new ships from the Liverpool yards.
When this photo was taken, Thorne had been one of the most important men in the country. And then, after nine years of working as the right hand of the prime minister—theoretically his chief scientific adviser, in practice his deputy—he had left government so abruptly even the newspapers had covered the story.
Not with much scrutiny, though. The clipping in the file that dealt with this development gave no hint about why it had happened. It merely observed, with careful blandness, that Thorne had “chosen to leave government to teach at Oxford,” and gave the details of the appointment.
Hopper turned back to the list of names and addresses at the front. From the look of it, they were mostly Thorne’s former colleagues—almost all dead or retired now, a handful still in post. They were accompanied by little ticks and crosses at the side, and further squiggles: background only, friends said, wife hostile.
One name stuck out, ringed with thick dark ink and marked with a double tick. Private secretary. Graham Chandler. An address accompanied the name. Camberwell. Well within the central zone.
Hopper looked at her watch. She could probably be there by three.
FIFTEEN
“Yes?”
He had barked the word out as she entered. He was facing the door, sitting at his desk, already half immured in paperwork.
“Miss Hopper. How nice to see you. Take a seat.”
A week had passed since their conversation in the common room, and now here she was, sitting in an armchair in one of Edward Thorne’s rooms. The walls were covered in old prints, the bookcases so full they spilled onto the floor, sprawling heaps sitting like foothills before a sheer cliff face of paper. It was warm today: a single large fan stirred the air listlessly. He picked up a piece of paper from his desk.
“The warden sent me this. Your first year; no work completed worth speaking of.”
“No.” Hopper looked onto the quad. One of the gardeners was laboriously pulling a roller along the artificial lawn.
“And she tells me you raised no objections when she suggested you leave. My plan for the term not enough to pique your interest, I take it?”
“This is something I’ve been considering for a while. It’s nothing to do with you, Dr. Thorne.�
��
“Edward, please. Nor with your achievements before you came here.” He gestured at the papers in front of him. “You’re clearly bright. Could you tell me why you wish to leave?”
She shrugged. “I don’t see the point in staying.”
He pushed the paper aside, came out from behind his desk, and sat in the other of the two armchairs, wincing a little as he did.
She continued. “And I don’t need you to tell me how stupid I’m being. Or that I have potential. I’ve been told that shit before. Edward.” He had long, bony hands, she noticed. The joints of the fingers were so long she wondered how he formed a fist.
“Do you have something else to do?”
“No.” This was true, at least. Someone with less inbuilt perversity might have wanted to remain in the final institution in her life that resembled a home. Without knowing why, she felt pleased by the prospect. “I’ll think of something.”
“Do you have no desire to finish your studies?”
“As I said, I don’t see the point.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Everything’s falling apart. Europe has collapsed. People are starving even here, and all we’re doing is fending off the remains of the world, hoping we can keep ourselves going for . . . how long? And people sit here studying Western civilization like there’s going to be a Western civilization in fifty years. Christ.”
His tone was amiable, reasonable. “You think it’s time to roll over, then?”
She looked at him, smiling and genial, and pitied him for his optimism. “There’s no point preserving ourselves if this is the life we can look forward to.”
Thorne picked at his fingernails, looking back at her. “You think a decline in the world’s quality of life means that life should come to an end, is that it?”
“Not necessarily, but—”
“But these conditions are extraordinary. And what would you say if I was to tell you I knew—knew, mind you—conditions would improve?”
“I’d say you were lying. Or a fool.”
He did not react to the insult. “Let me tell you one thing, Miss Hopper. Early in my career—years before the Slow began—I was sent as a peacekeeping soldier to a famine in East Africa. Things were dreadful. Worse, if you can believe it, than they are here and now. Far worse. People were eating bark, boiling grass. Some ate the earth.” He paused, looking down at his lap. “Some ate each other.
“But we developed new strains of crops, hardier ones, proofed against disease. And we were able to avert the next famine. And the one after that.” His voice hardened. “And the next time the crops might have failed, they grew instead. And we saw people alive—children, alive, running, playing—where without the intervention of clever men and women like yourself, there would only have been graves.”
She wanted to laugh. “You can say anything you like about the world before the Slow. Things were different then. The world was a paradise almost everywhere. When there were problems, plenty of people went to help. There’s nothing like that now.”
“There’s never going to be enough to help everyone, Miss Hopper. If you want a world free of suffering, you’ll be looking a long time. It’s your decision. But that’s life these days. A series of horrible decisions. Including, perhaps, whether you’re going to disengage totally, or whether you’re going to help.”
He stopped, then spoke again, gently. “It sounds like your parents were a couple of the people helping. Your mother a doctor, you said. And your father working in aid.”
Hopper’s throat tightened. She should never have told him about them. He carried on, mild, as if unaware of the effect he was having. “Are you worried about not matching up to their example, perhaps?”
“No. That’s not it.” She was furious. “You have no idea about them.”
“As you prefer. But don’t let their goodness stop you from doing the work you’re meant to. You could be brilliant, Ellen. If you allow yourself to be.”
They sat in silence for a minute—her wrestling with her feelings, him looking down as if waiting for her to master herself—before he spoke again, his tone lighter.
“Was there something in particular about last year’s course you found inadequate?”
She felt a little calmer. “Well, I mean, lots of things, but . . . yes.”
“Name it.”
She had thought it so many times, sitting listening to Harlow preaching his doctrine of decline, it would have been perverse not to say anything now someone was actually asking. She took a breath. “There’s almost nothing in the main earth science syllabus about the state of the oceans. It’s all soil, land reclamation, farm fertility, crop supply, distribution. It’s so stupid.”
“Go on.”
“We know what the old system was like: currents generated by the wind, the tides, and differences in density. We know the system kept the atmosphere and the ocean near this country warmer, kept areas at this latitude free of ice and snow. We know the old conveyor belt, the deep-level currents, transferred massive amounts of heat around the planet, and that those currents were vital for nutrient cycles. And we know that as the Slow happened, the whole system was thrown into chaos. But these days there must be all kinds of new currents, carrying warm water toward the Coldside and then bringing colder water back the other way, maybe deeper.”
“Granted.”
“But I don’t think there’s anyone at Environment studying the new long-term currents that we’ll have. Why not? Because they can’t imagine getting beyond the coastline, because of the closures and the shore defenses. Nobody’s taken the measure of the new currents, despite the fact that they could determine whether we have any hope of long-term survival. And because the satellite system’s collapsed, we won’t be able to, unless we get out there. It’s sheer stupidity.” She had spoken so urgently she could feel her heart beating faster than normal. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d said this much to a tutor.
“And you don’t think we could do with someone studying these new currents?”
“I can’t change the syllabus, and our last tutor thought there was no point.”
“That all sounds rather more important than a syllabus. And your last tutor sounds like a fool. What would you do?”
She hesitated, then thought: He can only say no. “I did some reading last year. The system they used to measure currents before satellites was imperfect and labor intensive, but it did get some results. They used these things called drifters.” She remembered she had a drawing of one in her notebook, fumbled for it, and showed him the page. “I want to build some new ones. Some at the surface, some hundreds of meters down. They drift along with the currents, and if you track them, they can tell you how the ocean’s moving. I think I could rig one up to send radio signals back, giving us a rough idea of their movements.”
“Why didn’t you suggest this to anyone else?”
“I did. I told our previous tutor. He said it wouldn’t work.”
“Do you think he was right?”
“No.”
“Do you think his authority invalidated your opinions?”
“No.”
“Do you want another person’s poor teaching to be your academic epitaph?”
“I suppose not.”
“Well then, that sounds like a prospect. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’d like you to compose a preliminary paper on longer-term prospects for oceanic study for this time next week. If you haven’t left us, of course.”
She was confused. He had listened; had told her there might be something in her idea; had taken her seriously. Now he was looking at her, smiling, offering her control of the situation. She thought for one irrational moment of her father, patiently showing her how to operate the long-distance radio. But she did not quite want to agree—not yet�
��so she shrugged one shoulder, and said: “I’ll think about it.”
“I hope you do, Miss Hopper. Good morning.”
SIXTEEN
Hopper had just missed a bus, so she started walking to Camberwell instead. It would help her think: about Thorne, about why he had summoned her here, about what he had wanted her to find.
Waterloo was dingy after Embankment Gardens. Forty or fifty train services ran from the station each day, but freight took priority. The passenger trains that did run were hopelessly crowded. Many were armed: travel between cities was dangerous.
And living in the spaces between cities, of course, were the woodsmen.
They were a combination of outcasts, escapees, and exiles, voluntary and forced. The men outnumbered the women; she remembered reading that much. The only thing they had in common was the woods. Some were outlaws who had never been sent to the Breadbasket, for whatever reason. A few had been exiled by soft-hearted towns, too sentimental to send their sons and daughters across the Channel; others had escaped in transit.
They weren’t far away either. The police networks were so degraded these days that a man might live a completely new life just fifty miles from his previous home. To survive, the woodsmen foraged, stole livestock, and raised their own scratchy crops outside the big farming belts. Occasionally they grew bold enough to move into towns, attacking badly defended places for their canned goods. Some had supposedly built whole villages that didn’t appear on maps, a network of fragile settlements in the wooded spaces between towns. Like a tumor, a new kind of tissue pushing outward and testing the limits of the host body.
Sometimes they were swept out: during a land reclamation, or if the thefts grew too audacious. When they were arrested, the thin, bearded men, the shaven-headed women clutching mewling bundles of rags, the filthy, saucer-eyed children were paraded through the streets of their local towns before being dispatched to the Breadbasket or executed.
The Last Day Page 11