Lost in a Good Book

33. The Dawn of Life As We Know It

‘No need for that,’ said my father, gently taking the gun from my hand and laying it on the table. I don’t know whether he purposely arrived late to increase the drama, but there he was. He hadn’t frozen time—I think he was done with that. Whenever he had appeared in the past he had always been smiles and cheeriness, but today he was different. And he looked, for the first time ever, old. Perhaps eighty—maybe more.

He thrust his hand inside the nanodevice container as the final generator failed. The small blob of nanotechnology fell on his hand and the emergency lights flickered on, bathing us all in a dim green glow.

‘It’s cold,’ he said. ‘How long have I got?’

‘It has to warm up first,’ replied Wilbur glumly. ‘Three minutes?’

‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, Sweetpea, but self-sacrifice is not the answer.’

‘It was all I had left, Dad. Me alone or me and three billion souls.’

‘You don’t get to make that decision, Thursday, but I do. You’ve got a lot of good work to do, and your son, too. Me, I’m just glad that it all ends before I become so enfeebled as to be useless.’

‘Dad!’

I felt the tears start to roll down my cheeks.

‘It all seems so clear to me now!’ he said, smiling as he cupped his hand so none of the all-consuming Dream Topping would fall to the ground. ‘After several million years of existence I finally realised my purpose. Will you tell your mother there was absolutely nothing between me and Emma Hamilton?’

‘Oh, Dad! Don’t, please!’

‘And tell Joffy I forgive him for breaking the windows of the greenhouse.’

I hugged him tightly.

‘I’ll miss you. And your mother, of course, and Escher, Louis Armstrong, the Nolan Sisters—which reminds me, did you get any tickets?’

‘Third row, but… but… I don’t suppose you’ll need them now.’

‘You never know,’ he murmured. ‘Leave my ticket at the box office, will you?’

‘Dad, there must be something we can do for you, surely?’

‘No, my darling, I’m going to be out of here pretty soon. The Great Leap Forward. The thing is, I wonder where to? Was there anything in the Dream Topping that shouldn’t have been there?’

‘Chlorophyll.’

He smiled and sniffed the carnation in his buttonhole. ‘Yes, I thought as much. It’s all very simple, really—and quite ingenious. Chlorophyll is the key… Ow!’

I looked at his hand. His flesh was starting to swirl as the wayward nanodevice thawed enough to start work, devouring, changing and replicating with ever-increasing speed.

I looked at him, wanting to ask a hundred questions but not knowing where to start.

‘I’m going three billion years into the past, Thursday, to a planet with only the possibility of life. A planet waiting for a miraculous event, something that has not happened, as far as we know, anywhere else in the universe. In a word, photosynthesis. An oxidising atmosphere, Sweetpea—the ideal way to start an embryonic biosphere.’

He laughed.

‘It’s funny the way things turn out, isn’t it? All life on earth descended from the organic compounds and proteins contained within Dream Topping.’

‘And the carnation. And you.’

He smiled at me.

‘Me. Yes. I thought this might be the ending, the Big One—but in fact it’s really only just the beginning. And I’m it. Makes me feel all sort of… well, humble.’

He touched my face with his good hand and kissed me on the cheek.

‘Don’t cry, Thursday. It’s how it happens. It’s how it has always happened, always will happen. Take my chronograph; I’m not going to need it any more.’

I unstrapped the heavy watch from his good wrist as the smell of strawberries filled the room. It was Dad’s hand. It had almost completely changed to pudding. It was time for him to go and he knew it.

‘It was Aornis, wasn’t it?’

I nodded.

‘Worst of the lot—not counting Phlegethon. You know what we used to say about her? Evil rich, cash poor. She has her Achilles’ heel, same as the rest of the family. Goodbye, Thursday, I never could have wished for a finer daughter.’

I composed myself. I didn’t want his last memory of me to be of a snivelling wretch. I wanted him to see I could be as strong as he was. I pursed my lips and wiped the tears from my eyes.

‘Goodbye, Dad.’

He winked at me.

‘Well, time waits for no man, as we say.’

He smiled again and started to fold and collapse and spiral into a single dot, much like water escaping down a plughole. I could feel myself tugged into the event, so I took a step back as my father vanished into himself with a very quiet plop as he travelled into the deep past. A final gravitational tug dislodged one of my shirt buttons; the wayward pearl fastener sailed through the air and was caught in the small rippling vortex. It vanished from sight and the air rocked for a moment before settling down to that usual state we refer to as normality.

My father had gone.

The lights flickered back on as entropy returned to normal. Aornis’s boldly audacious plan for revenge had backfired badly. She had, perversely enough, actually given us all life. And after all that talk about irony. She’d probably be kicking herself all the way to Top Shop. Dad was right. It is funny the way things turn out.

I sat through the Nolan Sisters’ concert that evening with an empty seat beside me, glancing at the door to see whether he would arrive. I hardly even heard the music—I was thinking instead of a lonely foreshore on a planet devoid of any life, a person who had once been my father sloughing away to his component parts. Then I thought of the resultant proteins, now much replicated and evolved, working on the atmosphere. They released oxygen and combined hydrogen with carbon dioxide to form simple food molecules. Within a few hundred million years the atmosphere would be full of free oxygen; aerobic life could begin—and a couple of billion years after that something slimy would start wriggling onto land. It was an inauspicious start but now there was a sort of family pride attached to it. He wasn’t just my father but everyone’s father. As the Nolans performed ‘Goodbye Nothing To Say’, I sat in quiet introspection, regretting, as children always do upon the death of a parent, all the things we never said and never did. But my biggest regret was far more mundane—since his identity and existence had been scrubbed by the ChronoGuard, I never knew, nor ever asked him, his name.