The Second Sleep

by Robert Harris

It was as if the valley, with its singular geographic isolation and its contempt for the curfew, existed somehow outside time and law.

On the back was the ultimate symbol of the ancients’ hubris and blasphemy—an apple with a bite taken out of it.

slowly, as they reminisced, Father Lacy began to come alive, to assume a personality, and he regretted that he had not had the opportunity to collect their memories before he wrote his eulogy.

All civilisations consider themselves invulnerable; history warns us that none is.

He felt as if a hand had reached out of the distant past and brushed its fingers across his face. He wished he could unsee what he had read, but knowledge alters everything, and he knew that was impossible.

The calendar had been reset after the Apocalypse so that it started in the year 666:

But no judge would convict a woman, especially one of your rank, of the crime of hoarding broken glass.” “How little you know of the world, and of the peril of a woman alone in it, with no husband to protect her!”

What a boorish fellow he was, thought Fairfax, and for the first time he felt glad to be staying for supper, if only to cause him irritation.

“So Church and state should be separate?” “It would be best for both.” “Then surely we would arrive at a place where the Church would have morals without power, and the state would have power without morality. That is exactly what led the ancients to disaster.” “So the Church maintains—but then of course it suits their interest to tell us such. But how are we to know if what they say is true, since they have made it a crime to investigate the past?”

“Suppose a man saw an appalling calamity looming—what would he do? What would any of us do? Well, I’ll tell ye what I would do. I’d lay up a stock of provisions—of all that was essential to maintain existence—and I’d block up my doors and windows and attempt to live through it. That was what this man Morgenstern did. I’m sure of it.”

Consider what might be hidden up there! Consider whether it contains the secret of electrifying. And not just in a form for playing stupid parlour games, but in the way they used it, a way that would permit us to produce a big and continuous supply, and the means by which to store and transport it. The earliest possible restoration of technical civilisation…The world could begin anew! What I would not give for that!”

“The day his body was discovered—I believe you didn’t come all the way up to the Devil’s Chair.” “No, we had no need—we came along the track down there and found him near the rock. Why? How d’ye know that?” “Because if you’d come up past the tower—before the storm—you’d have seen the fresh trench he’d dug.” Hancock nodded slowly. “That’s true.” “Then don’t you understand? He was not at the Devil’s Chair that day for no reason. He had a task—digging bones. Why would he venture up on to the ridge? Something must have caused him to desert his work and clamber all the way up here—chased him up, I shouldn’t wonder. Whether accident or murder, I cannot tell, but I surmise he was in terror of his life, and that was how he died.”

“I thought you were not a believer, Captain Hancock?” “It’s your Church I don’t believe in, sir. Your God I treat with respect.”

“Faith that cannot withstand the truth is not a faith worth holding.”

“One does not burn knowledge! That is a show for the common folk. One hides knowledge—one keeps it close. The libraries of the Church hold truths you cannot dream of, Shadwell.