Read Online One by Conrad Williams - Free Book Online Page B

that much of their time together since had felt like the same thing. They had taken a tent to the Brecon Beacons in South Wales. They'd climbed Pen y Fan, a day's trek, and then camped in the great valley beneath it, cooking packet foods in water taken from the nearby lake and boiled, smacking their lips, making appreciative groans even though the rehydrated rice had been appalling. The silence as night fell had freaked them out. That and the depth to the sky, the assault of stars. Their chattiness was cut by the spectacle. They lay on their backs in the grass, awed as stars materialised in the dark spaces between the brighter bodies. There was no limit. There was a point when they both swore there was more light than night in the sky.
They watched the scratches of light as meteors erased themselves on the skin of the Earth. They pointed out the uniform trajectories of satellites. Venus crept across their line of sight. Even though they were exhausted by their long walk, sleep had no chance of settling in them.
'It's amazing,' Jane had said.
Cherry's voice, when she replied, quavered, brimming with tears. 'I feel . . . small, and thrilled, and sad,' she said. 'I can't explain. I haven't the words.' He clasped her hand.
'We're on the edge of a galaxy that's expanding,' he said. 'We're the shrapnel from a bomb blast.'
'If we're on the edge, does that mean we're one of the oldest parts?'
'That would make sense, wouldn't it?'
'So the centre of the Milky Way, that's quite young?'
'Well, relatively, I suppose.'
'Should we take a physics degree now?'
They did not make love that night, the first time in three intense weeks since they had started seeing each other regularly. Jane, whose appetite for her was great, did not notice.
'Those meteors,' he said, as another chalked itself off, 'they're probably the size of golf balls. Maybe smaller.'
'Richard balls?'
'I said smaller, not bigger.'
Once you had become accustomed to the dense scatter of stars, and fastened your eyes to one patch, it was striking to realise how many meteors there were.
'It's beautiful,' Cherry said. 'But I wouldn't want to be out there.'
'We are out there,' Jane replied.
'You know what I mean.'
'Yeah. It's a pretty rough place. You wouldn't last a second. Nothing to breathe. Sub-zero temperatures. Radiation. Super-accelerated debris would fly straight through you. Pressure.'
'Perhaps only marriage comes close to rivalling it.'
He laughed nervously at that. 'If anything larger than a golf ball came down on us . . . I mean, considerably larger than a golf ball, like the size of Iceland, say, we'd be in big trouble.' 'I've seen the films.'
'You've seen the heroes save the day. What if one really hit? Came down tonight. If you survived the impact you'd be looking forward to a nuclear winter that lasted years. No sunlight. Death of vegetation. Food chain down. Everything dead.'
'Are you always such a hot date?'
Jane liked that about her, that ability to rescue them from a downturn in mood with a quip. It wasn't the only thing. Cherry was like no other woman he had met. She didn't have a ramrod-straight back and skin so glossy and flawless you could have played curling on it. Her hair wasn't advert soft, thick and tangle-free. She didn't have a hundred pairs of shoes or spend two hours in the bathroom getting ready for a pub lunch. She didn't consider a small green undressed side salad to be a substantial meal. He liked the way she moved during lovemaking, flipping him onto his back, climbing him, pressing fully against him, a steepening of herself to match the growth of her own pleasure.
'What would you do?' she asked. 'If this was our last night? If a meteor were to hit, or the Earth split in two, or a star exploded and drenched us in fire?'
'Burn my pants and take a shower.'
'But seriously?'
'If we survived? I'd shoot you. And then I'd shoot myself. There would be no way forward.'
After that night things changed. There was a soberness. It wasn't as if they didn't