Children of the Dust (8 page)

Bill Harnden continued his life in the Avon bunker, but he was not entirely happy with the situation. Military men with no one left to conquer, administrators with no population to administer, civic dignitaries, civil servants, and police chiefs, were all professionally redundant, no different from himself. Yet they continued to cling to the ranks the world had once bestowed on them, and expected him to obey. They seemed to think that they, like the children of Israel, were the chosen few . . . the military, civic and academic elite, destined to rule over a kingdom that would soon recover. A Union Jack flag fluttered, red, white, and blue, a symbol of triumph on the top of an empty hill. It did not occur to them that Britain, like the rest of the civilized world, had been defeated.

'It is our duty,' General MacAllister said, 'to restore this country to what it was.'

He actually believed it could happen, that the mines would reopen, the factories would be rebuilt, and industry would start again. Planning committees were formed. New contingency plans were drawn up and submitted to Central Government in the Berkshire bunker, and their own bunker extended outward. Bill was transferred from stores to manual labour. Along with Grant and Elmer, supervised by an American army colonel by the name of Jeff Allison, and dressed in white protective suits, he helped to clear the surrounding land of its sterile surface of dust. The prefabricated field units were put into use, bolted to metal girders, and the whole area roofed over with sheets of transparent corrugated plastic to form a vast glass-house. They grew fresh vegetables and cereal crops and Erica Kowlanski went to work in the food-processing laboratory.

The first batch of cloned root vegetables were harvested eight weeks later, and army personnel with government requisition orders scoured the surrounding countryside for any animals which might have survived. Half a dozen sheep, a few dozen chickens and three goats, were brought to the bunker from a settlement in the Cotswold hills, legalized theft which formed the basis of a breeding flock. Egg yolk was cloned. But the fertilized chicken embryos all showed signs of mutation, and new grass in the outside fields seared brown in the sun. They lacked the means for successfully breeding and raising livestock and women, who had not rated very high on the government's list of priority survivors, suddenly assumed a significance.

Apart from a few elderly wives and growing daughters, there were only thirty-two women in the whole bunker who were capable of conceiving and giving birth to children, and Erica Kowlanski was one of them. Bill never really knew why she sought him out. It had nothing to do with love and little to do with affection. She admitted, quite freely, that she had never wanted marriage or children, that she found the idea abhorrent. But now she saw it as a necessary duty and she was not the kind of woman to turn her back. Bill understood. She was not offering to be a wife to him in the way Veronica had been. She had simply chosen him to father her child. And one year later, after a long and difficult labour, Erica gave birth to a baby girl.

She was forty-one years old and Bill was almost fifty. And even if it was her duty, Erica swore she would never go through it again. She was a woman devoid of all maternal instincts and maybe that was why she had chosen Bill for a mate. She had sensed perhaps that he would make up for her inadequacy, that he had fathered before and would love the child enough for both of them.

Under the white hot lights of the hospital ward Bill took his daughter in his arms. She did not remind him of William or Catherine. She reminded him of Sarah, Bognor Regis polytechnic, and a marriage gone wrong. Marriage to Erica was wrong too, but he could not regret this child. She would make up for the children he had lost and he could not love her more.

In the next bed to Erica, Jeff Allison's wife cradled her second Anglo-American son. Wayne Jeffrey, like his brother Dwight, had been conceived out of love, not duty. Next time, Mrs Allison vowed, she too would have a girl. But Bill smiled down at his own little daughter and knew he would never have another. The small face puckered to cry and Erica handed him the feeding bottle.

'What will you call her?' Mrs Allison asked. 'Ophelia,' said Bill. 'And let her not walk i' the sun.'

Ophelia assumed she would never walk in the sun. For her it was a dim yellow disc seen through the plastic roof of the cultivation area, an m-type star ninety-three million miles distant. It shone on the great solar panels on the hilltop above her and indirectly provided her with warmth and light, charging the battery cells that worked the electric generator on which life in the bunker depended.

She was not unhappy in her little regimented world of rooms and passageways. She had been born and brought up there and knew nothing different. In the schoolrooms her father taught what life had been like before the holocaust, but to Ophelia it did not seem relevant. And although she loved the rich language of English literature . . . sceptred isles set in silver seas and seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness ... it was all remote and unreal, as unreal as the images seen in dreams and instantly forgotten. It was ancient history. Western Civilization, like the Greek and Roman Empires, was irretrievably gone. Only the memory was kept alive, the ambition to rebuild it which General MacAllister conceived as a duty, and Dwight Allison said was futile.

Ophelia did not much care who was right or wrong. She saw only what was actual, an outside world that was treeless and hostile, a landscape eroded by wind and rain and sun. Telescreens showed it in the main communications room, outside cameras panning the rock-strewn deserts of Avon and Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Somerset. Rain had washed away the surface soil. Snow, and frost, and fog of winter gave way in summer to bleak baked hills and barren valleys where nothing much grew . . . just tussocks of brittle grass, a few hardy flowers and pockets of vegetation along the river margins. Packs of scavenging dogs hunted the tiny nomadic herds of sheep and goats that roamed the plains, and red pins on a map of England showed the scattered communities of human survivors. But there were none nearby. It was bad land around the bunker and the ultraviolet light was too intense for agriculture.

Down in the valley by the river conditions were a little better. Men in white protective suits planted wheat and potatoes in fields of dung and dust, and reaped a small annual harvest. But the conifers had shrivelled on the hillside and the few surviving sheep were horribly deformed. Most of them were blind. Some had stumps instead of limbs and gave birth to lambs with multiple heads and twisted spines, and chickens hatched in the laboratory incubators with white pupil-less eyes. The white-eyed gene was a dominant mutation, Dr Stevenson said. Even rats were affected, and the only things that thrived in the land outside were lizards and flies.

Mostly the northern hemisphere could not support much life. Years before the aerial surveys had shown the continents laid waste, from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean, across industrial Europe and the United States of America ... a world gone dead. Now the supply of petrol and diesel had almost run out and no one knew if anything had changed among the settlements of human survivors. There was no population census and long ago people had moved away from the surrounding countryside, taken what animals they had and fled to the hills to escape from the government requisition orders.

Inside the bunker nothing ever changed. It was a constant environment, just as Ophelia had always known it. Maybe, as Dwight said, it got a little crummier with every day that passed, but it was hardly noticeable . . . except when the electric generator broke down and had to be repaired. And although the concrete structure was cracked and crumbling in places, the videos and computers went on working, and Ophelia assumed they would go on working for ever.

Cloned vegetables grew in the culture tanks in Erica's laboratory. Edible protein was culled from blue-green algae, and extract of sugar beet provided sweetness. Food plants nourished in the cultivation area where the sunlight filtered through the plastic roof and the rain rattled. Ophelia liked to go there, walk among the smells of damp earth and green things growing, among the splashed colours of ripe red tomatoes and yellow marrow flowers.

Sometimes, after watching a video film or visiting the cultivation area, she could almost envisage the lost world her father talked of. But she could not imagine the taste of chocolate biscuits, the smell of beefsteak braised in wine, or the song of the blackbird. Bill Harnden could not convey taste, or scent, or sound, to someone brought up in concrete corridors, on cloned egg yolk and carrot juice, where human voices were the only natural sounds. He could not convey past realities in a windowless classroom to these children of the dust.

Without text books or writing materials he tried to teach them literature and history. With only computer video pictures he tried to teach them art. Lacking the basic tools for making things he tried to teach them crafts. He insisted they needed a fully comprehensive education, that concentration on maths, and science, and computer learning, did not make for a balanced intellect. He believed that a teacher was more than an educational supervisor, that human interactions were of paramount importance to understanding, that the stimulation of a child's imagination was even more necessary than teaching it to calculate. On those issues he clashed with the bunker hierarchy, with the Education Chief, with General MacAllister, and with his wife.

'We need creative thinkers,' said Bill. 'Not a generation of automatons!'

'Logical thought can be just as creative,' Erica said. 

'It's a dead end without imagination. The human brain has two sides to it and both are meant to be used. What's the good in raising calculative geniuses who are incapable of understanding anything but their own calculations? One-track minds, blind to all else?'

In the small family apartment with pale green walls, where the paint flaked away to show bare plaster underneath, Ophelia listened as her parents exchanged words. Usually, in the evenings, there was only herself and her father with Erica working away in the laboratory, but tonight she had joined them. The conversation that had begun in the dining hall over a meal of chicken-flavoured soya bean stew, still continued. Apparently Mrs Allison was having trouble with Dwight, and Erica blamed Bill. She said his teaching methods were filling Dwight's head with stuff and nonsense and rebellious ideas.

'These young people have to accept things as they are,' Erica said. 'They don't need to know how things used to be, or what things might become again in the future. We don't need dreamers. We need scientists and technologists. They're the ones who will make the breakthrough, Bill. They're the ones on whom our future depends.'

'You're darned right!' said Bill. 'Our future
does
depend on them . . . their ability to create something better than the world we have now, or the world of the past. If they don't know about the past they have nothing to compare the present to, and nothing to feed their imagination on which a future society depends.'

'That imagination has to be fostered in the right way!' Erica retorted. 'You're encouraging them to want what they can't have! Flipping poetics, Bill! Beauty, and truth, and freedom, the pursuit of personal happiness . . . there's no room for that in an enclosed environment. Dwight Allison is a very clever boy. We need his skills. If we can't get a breakthrough in genetic engineering then we'll have to go on living underground. He could design the city of the future ... a brilliant architect, Bill, if you don't turn him into a blasted revolutionary!'

'What use is an architect who can't make bricks?' Bill asked her. 'We're teaching all the wrong things! If we forget how to use our hands and our hearts what good can we do with our heads? Who's going to build the fabled city?'

'When the time comes we'll recruit outside workers,' Erica said.

'Suppose they don't want to be recruited?'

'Oh come on, Bill! Everyone has to work for a living.'

'They
are
working, woman! They're working for themselves! Working to survive in conditions as we have never known! What right do we have to expect them to give up their own enterprises and work for us? It's you who are the dreamer, Erica! You, and the rest of the make-Britain-great-again brigade. This place will fall down around our ears whilst you're still sitting on your backside hoping for a scientific breakthrough. It's not going to happen . . . and Dwight sees that.'

Ophelia chewed her finger nails. Her parents quarrelled. They seldom did anything else but quarrel. They were not like Dwight's parents, loving each other and him. Harsh light shone on the green linoleum floor, shone on her father's grey hair and Erica's spectacles. There was a flush on her face, and her eyes flashed with annoyance, and she was not about to give up.

'Without technology you wouldn't be alive now!' Erica said furiously.

'And countless millions of people wouldn't be dead!' retorted Bill. 'Lest we forget: it was science and technology that invented the bomb and devastated the earth . . . not to mention blokes like MacAllister with his blind obedience to Central Government policy. Is that what you call creative thinking, Erica?'

Erica put on her white laboratory overall.

'I'm going!' she said.

'Maybe one day you'll face it!' said Bill.

There was a knock on the door.

And Erica opened it.

'Domestic harmony is one beautiful thing,' said Colonel Allison in his slow American drawl. 'You can hear it all the way to the recreation room.'

'What do you want?' Erica asked sourly.

'Ophelia,' said Colonel Allison. 'A message from Dwight. There's baseball in the storage depot and you're to report to second base.'

'And stop biting your nails!' said her father.

There were one hundred and twenty-two children in the Avon bunker, their ages ranging from Mrs Sutcliffe's two-month-old baby to Dwight Allison, who was seventeen. There was a creche and kindergarten for the little ones and graded education for the rest. Schooling began at 09.00 hours and ended at 17.00 hours, and included supervised sports sessions with Sergeant -Major Wilkinson in the recreation hall. With so many experts in the bunker they did not lack qualified tuition. At sixteen Ophelia was already studying advanced genetics with Dr Stevenson two afternoons a week. She knew how to dissect the ovum of a rat and isolate the chromosome that gave rise to mutational blindness. She could remove and replace it with a non-mutated chromosome from a bunker-bred rat. But in the next generation the mutation recurred. In cartography Bernard Sowerby was updating the Ordnance Survey maps from aerial photographs, and Dwight was working on designs for an elevator shaft to a projected lower basement area.