He had made a fire board about the length of his forearm, with a dish cut into its flat side. He had a spindle, a stick with a pointed end; a socket, a bit of rock that fit neatly into his hand; and a bow, more sapling with a bit of plastic shoelace tied tight across it. A bit of bark under the notch served as a tray to catch the embers he would make. Nearby he had made a little nest of dry bark, leaves, and dead grass, ready to feed the flames. He knelt on his right knee, and put the ball of his left foot on the fire board. He looped the bow string and slid the spindle through it. He lubricated the notch with a bit of earwax, and put the rounded end of the spindle into the dish of his fire board, and held the pointed end in the hand socket. Then, pressing lightly on the socket, he drew the bow back and forth, rotating the spindle with increasing pressure and speed, waiting for smoke and embers.
Snowy knew he looked older. He wore his hair long now, tied back in a ponytail by a bit of wire. His beard was growing too, though he hacked it back with a knife every couple of days. His skin was like tough leather, wrinkled around the eyes, the mouth. Well, I am older, he thought. A thousand years older. I should look the part.
It was hard to believe that it was only a bit more than a month since they had come out of the Pit.
They didn’t need to do this kind of thing yet, this fire building from scratch. They still had plenty of boxes of waterproof matches, and a supply of trioxane packs — a light chemical heat source much used by the military. But Snowy was looking ahead to the day when they wouldn’t be able to rely on what had come out of the Pit. In some ways he was “cheating,” of course. He had used his thousand-year-old finely manufactured Swiss Army knife to make the bow and the fire board; later he would have to try out stone knives. But one step at a time.
This ancient field was close to an arm of the vast oak forest which, as far as they had scouted, dominated the landscape of this posthuman England. It was on a slight rise. To the west, further down the hill, a lake had gathered. Snowy could see traces of stone walls disappearing under the placid water. But the lake was choked with reeds and lilies and weeds, and on its surface he could see the sickly gray-green sheen of an algal bloom. Eutrophication, said Sidewise: Even now, artificial nutrients — notably phosphorus — were leaching out of the land into the lake and overstimulating the miniature ecology. It seemed incredible to Snowy that the shit long-dead farmers had pumped into their land could still be poisoning the environment around him, but it seemed to be true.
It was a strangely empty landscape. Silence surrounded him. There wasn’t even birdsong.
Some creatures had probably bounced back quickly once human hunting, pest control, and land use had ceased — hares, rabbits, grouse. Larger mammals reproduced so slowly that recovery must have taken longer. But there seemed to be various species of deer, and Snowy had glimpsed pigs in the forests. They’d seen no large predators. Even foxes seemed rare. There were no birds of prey either — apart from a few aggressive-looking starlings. Sidewise said that as their food chains had collapsed, the specialized top predators would have died out. In Africa there were probably no lions or cheetahs either, he said, even if they had escaped being eaten by the last starving human refugees.
Maybe, Snowy thought. He wondered about the rats, though.
Balance would return in the long run, of course. Variation, adaptation, and natural selection would see to that; the old roles would be filled one way or another. But it might not be anything like the community that had gone before. And, said Sidewise, since the average mammalian species lasted only a few million years, it would correspondingly be millions of years — ten, twenty maybe, twenty million years — before there would again be assembled a world of the richness it had enjoyed. So even if humans recovered and lasted, say, five million years, they wouldn’t see anything like the world Snowy had known as a kid.
Snowy was not a tree hugger, definitely. But there was something deeply disturbing about these thoughts. How strange it was to have lived to see it come about.
Still no smoke, still the damn embers hadn’t caught. He continued to work the bow.
The main problem with fire making was that it gave him too much time to think. He missed his friends, the camaraderie of navy life. He missed his work, even the routine bits — maybe the routine most of all, since it had given his life a definition it lacked now.
He missed the noise, he found, though that was harder to pin down: TV and the web and music, movies and ads, the logos and jingles and news. The one thing about the new world that would drive him crazy in the end, he suspected, was the silence, the huge, inhuman, vegetable silence. It gave him the shivers to imagine how it must have been in the last days, when all the machines had died, the winking logos and neon tubes and screens flickering and dying, one by one.
And he missed Clara. Of course he did. He had never known his kid, never even seen him, or her.
At the beginning he had been plagued by spasms of guilt: guilt that he was still alive where so many had gone into the dark, guilt that there was nothing he could do for Clara, guilt that he was eating and breathing and pissing and taking shits and covertly studying Moon’s butt while everybody he had ever known was dead. But that, mercifully, was fading. He had always been blessed, as Sidewise had once told him, by a lack of imagination.
Or maybe it was more than that.
In the clear light of this new time it seemed like it was his old life, in the crowded, murky England of the twenty-first century, which was the dream. As if he were dissolving into the green.
There was a rustle in the waist-high foliage, a dozen paces away. He turned that way, still and silent. A single grass stem, laden with seeds, nodded gracefully. He had set a snare over there. Was there something in the foliage — a curve of shoulder, a bright, staring eye?
He put down the bow and spindle. He stood, stretched, and casually walked toward the place he had seen the rustle. He slid his bow from his back, scooped an arrow from his rabbit-skin quiver, notched it carefully.
There was no movement in the foliage — not until he was almost on it — and then there was a sudden blur, a lunge away from his approach. He glimpsed pale skin flecked with brown, long limbs. A fox? But it was big, bigger than anything he’d seen here so far.
Without hesitating further he ran up to the thing, lodged his boot in the small of its back, and raised his arrow toward its head. The creature squirmed onto its back. It yowled like a cat, put its hands over its face.
He lowered the bow. Hands. It had hands, like a human, or an ape.
His heart thumping, he dropped the bow. He knelt over the creature, trapping its torso, and got hold of its wrists. It was spindly, lithe, but very strong; it took all of his power to force those hands away from the face. Still the creature spat and hissed at him.
But its face — no, her face — was no chimp’s, no ape’s. It was unmistakably human.
For long seconds Snowy sat there, astounded, astride the girl.
She was naked, and though her pale skin showed through, she was covered by a loose fur of straggling orange-brown hairs. The hair on her head was darker, a tangle of filthy curls that looked as if they had never been cut. She was not tall, but she had breasts, sagging little sacks with hard nipples protruding from the hair, and beneath the triangle of darker fur at her crotch there was a smear of what might be menstrual blood. And she had stretch marks.