Jennifer snuggled harder against Michael, then realised she was pressing on his bandaged arm. He laughed and put his arm about her so she could lean against his chest. She tried to ignore the steady beat of his heart and looked over at the people in bathing costumes who were advertising holidays in Turkey. “Though it never came more than three hundred yards from the shore,” she started again, “it was the biggest storm ever recorded. It took down communications with the rest of the world. All ships that could came back into port. Every flying machine that wasn’t already lost had to land. It went on for two days. When the sun came up on the third morning, everything outside was gone.” Jennifer fell silent and thought back. When all electronic contact remained dead, and the Web still didn’t reach beyond the mainland, aeroplanes had been sent out to see how damaged the storm had left France. Back then, the media was still no more censored than usual, and she’d heard the recordings of astonished airmen as they described how roads and airfields were all covered in dense forest, and how every town had either vanished or shrivelled to microscopic settlements within the forests. The jets had been able to get only so far, before having to turn round for lack of fuel. But further efforts over the next few days established beyond any doubt that modern civilisation across Western Europe had simply vanished. Though every satellite was gone, and it took months to get news back from what had been the United States and the Far East, it was soon apparent that something beyond comprehension had happened. The entire island of Great Britain was exactly as before the storm. Everywhere else—including islands like Lindisfarne and Anglesey and the Isle of Wight—had “reverted” to an earlier age. Exactly three hundred yards in every direction from the mainland shore, tunnels and cables and oil and gas pipelines gave way to silt or water or solid rock. Beyond that, modernity came to an absolute stop. “1064” was what the astronomers had gone on television to mutter through clenched teeth. This had been confirmed by the first boatload of pilgrims who thought they were returning to Richborough, and who had to be rescued from the mud in which their boat stuck.
“Not just the year,” she went on after trying her best to put this in Latin, “but a different month of the year, and a different day of the week.” She smiled. “Even the time of day was different. Your midnight in this part of the world is one hour and fifty three minutes and thirty seven and a bit seconds behind ours.”
“Your country had an extensive trade with the outside world?” Michael suggested. How this had happened was as much beyond the girl’s understanding as it was beyond his. Probably none of these people was up to giving a proper explanation of The Break. But, thinking of the whole island as a city unexpectedly besieged, it was easy enough to understand the huge dislocations and the way in which the authorities had panicked. He sat up and looked at the girl. She was drifting off. He shone the torch briefly into her face. He apologised and asked how many people there were on the island. She had to repeat the number in halting Greek as well as in Latin before he’d believe her. “So why seal the country off from contact with the outside world?” he wondered aloud. “I spoke yesterday with your King’s chief minister. He really didn’t need to spell out the power of the forces available to you. Why not resume trade with the rest of the world on different terms? From what I heard, your government has only just got round to deciding that it wants any contact at all.”
Jennifer shrugged and tried to put an increasingly exhausted brain into gear. The answer, her father had explained more than once, was that any relaxation of border control would lead to an uncontrollable emigration and mixing with the Outsiders, and a collapse of every governing structure. “Even if millions starve, and millions more survive on industrial pap,” he’d sneered, “they’ll never give up control. They’ve finally got the police state they always wanted, and they’ll restrain any urges to world conquest until they’ve broken us to unthinking obedience.” Now, as all faded about her, she felt as if she was vanishing into the warmth of the Outsider’s body. In the normal course of things, he’d have been dead century upon century before she was born. How strange, she faintly thought, to feel the warmth that radiated from him.
Michael gave up on questioning the girl. She was going to sleep even as he watched her in the dim setting of the torch. “You can rest for an hour of your portable clock,” he said. “But then we need to be on our way.” He didn’t alarm her with his own fears about lights and shouting voices, and perhaps dogs, in one of the tunnels. He gently shifted position. “Jennifer,” he asked, “let me see the book of maps you got from the Indian. I may not be able to understand any of them. But I’d like to see what I can make of maps and of the words while you’re asleep.”
She reached wearily into her left pocket and pulled out the book. “Michael,” she suddenly asked, “do you believe in God and miracles.”
He took his arm away. “Do you also think I’m just a primitive fool? You people are certainly full of yourselves—as if a few machines for enslaving each other make you any better than the lowest savages.” Hadn’t Count Robert said much the same? she thought.
Michael leafed in silence through the atlas. “What do you think has happened?” he asked, looking up again.
Now she was fully awake again, and they were sitting apart, Jennifer shivered in what felt a growing chill. “My father told me it was most likely a slip in the normal course of time,” she said slowly, looking for words that would make sense. “He said it was brought on by the destruction of the world in a big war. Or, he said, there might have been no slip in time. Perhaps everyone was dead, and this was his own dying hallucination.” She laughed, wondering how much Michael was following. The more she thought about it, the less she herself could follow. Having the right words, even in English, didn’t always bring understanding. “Then he suggested it was my own hallucination,” she added. “But that was a year ago. If I am dreaming, it shows a more creative imagination than I think I have. Whatever seems to have happened must really have happened. No one else has managed to explain it.” She laughed again. “All I can say is that Jesus Christ didn’t put in an appearance above John Lewis!” She reached out for the thought that had seemed about to trouble her. But it was gone.
Michael watched her trail into a descending ramble about her father’s first meeting with a Count Robert of the Normans, and how this had solved their immediate problems. She may have been asleep half a sentence before she did fall silent. There were only a few skeletons in this stopping place, though a mass of discarded possessions that indicated arrests here rather than the massacres farther back along the tunnel. He cleared some of these possessions away from beside the bench and lay the girl on reasonably clean ground, and pulled her overcoat over her. He tried to look at the maps. But they made little sense without someone to explain them—and, now the girl was asleep, the slow dripping of water somewhere scared him with its reminder of how far underground they must be. He looked awhile at the picture of Ephesus—had the Old Faith been re-established? The woman’s whole appearance suggested a dancing prostitute. Thoughtfully, he glanced down at the sleeping girl. He sighed and decided not to look again at the picture. He thought instead of his dead uncle, and of his duty. He knew vaguely what that was—but how to do it? Indeed, what to do next? Michael had once seen a man fall into a swollen river and be carried towards a cataract. The man’s movements until he was carried over seemed a good model of his own situation. From the moment of Simeon’s death, he’d got by with minimal thought. The need for proper thinking had been further put off by the girl’s scream for help. Since then, he’d gone with the flow. It had been a matter of responding to immediate circumstances simply to stay alive. Now, they both seemed out of danger. Whatever he did next would require some plan of action. If only he could think of one….