Splinter by Adam Roberts

Author:Adam Roberts
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, General, War & Military, Action & Adventure, Fiction
ISBN: 9781844167517
Publisher: Solaris
Published: 2007-08-28T05:00:00+00:00

7

THE STORM CONTINUES. One day something bursts through the exterior fence; a boulder, big as a car and surprisingly round.

Nobody heard it come in, over the howl of the increasingly insistent rainfall and wind; but Tom spots it on one of his roundabout wanders. A group of them go take a look. Shuffling together through the bad weather like the penguins in that movie: those Morgan Freeman voice-overs, those Antarctic landscapes. "Can it have been blown by the wind?" wonders somebody, shouting above the wind. But no, apparently not, the general opinion is that it's too bulky to have been moved by anything except a seriously heavy-duty hurricane, and the wind, though burly, is not so devastating. "It rolled," shouts Pablo. "It just rolled." The fence is knocked over, lying juddering in the wind against the moss-moss, Hector notes, that now covers the whole ground. "This moss," he bellows, at the person next to him, anonymous in their windcheater with their head down. "It's everywhere. I guess there's lots of water," he continues. "Lots of water everywhere, so it grows." But it feels oddly stiff under his soles, wiry and convoluted like an agglomeration of oven scourers. There is no indication that the person to whom he was speaking has heard him. The group, or the eight of them who have coated-up and come out to look at the boulder, quickly get bored. Pablo and Hans and a couple of other men are struggling, in the wind and rain, to heave the panel of fence upright again, its wire flapping with ponderous sinusoidal momentum, slow-motion footage of a flag in the breeze. It is hard to handle, but the others are trudging back to the main house, and Hector falls in with them. The boulder, he thinks as he disrobes and hangs the sodden Macintosh to dry, is a good touch. Lately he is increasingly certain that not only his father but several of his disciples are conspiring together to preserve the post-catastrophic impression. It is all so obviously a hoax. The fact that he can't see how it's done doesn't mean that it's real. The best conjuring tricks are the ones where you can't see the prestidigitator's sleight-of-hand. But what's most certain is that the whole world has not come to an end, it must still be out there. Evidence that there is indeed life out there comes three or four dawns later. The phone rings. The phone! The landline, its receiver tucked away in an alcove in the hallway, surely obsolete in this new world, bursts shockingly into brassy purls and knits of sound: twin trilling chimes followed by a repeated syncopated pause of silence, and then two more rings, horribly strident, the same rhythm as the step-step-stop, step-step-stop of the throttler advancing on his victim in the stage play. It rings and rings. People in the house seem too startled, at first, even to register it. They gather in the hallway. Staring in the direction of the sound.

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