The Children of Men

by P.D. James

Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days.

We are outraged and demoralized less by the impending end of our species, less even by our inability to prevent it, than by our failure to discover the cause. Western science and Western medicine haven’t prepared us for the magnitude and humiliation of this ultimate failure.

Most of the concern was less about a falling population than about the wish of nations to maintain their own people, their own culture, their own race, to breed sufficient young to maintain their economic structures.

What we guarantee is freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom from boredom. The other freedoms are pointless without freedom from fear.”

Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.

If there had been no Omega, these were aims which a man might be prepared to fight for, even to suffer for. But if there had been no Omega, the evils would not exist. It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all too soon, the very words “justice,” “compassion,” “society,” “struggle,” “evil,” would be unheard echoes on an empty air.

It was a small class, she said, and got smaller by the week. People have no persistence. They take up enthusiasms but quickly tire, particularly if their interest isn’t continually stimulated.”

But the whole situation was one of paradox. Could ever aims and means have been so mismatched? Had there ever been an enterprise of such immense importance embarked upon by such frail and pathetically inadequate adventurers?

Daylight, tentative and bleak, stole like a chill breath into the wood, wrapping itself round barks and broken boughs, touching the boles of the trees and the low denuded branches, giving darkness and mystery form and substance.

The sun, a ball of harsh white light, was already beginning to dispel the thin mist which lay over fields and far hills, absorbing the autumn colours and merging them to a soft olive green in which the individual trees stood out like black cut-outs. It was going to be another mellow autumn day.

He listened again to the forest, to its secret life. Now the sounds, seeming to increase as he listened, were full of menace and terror: the scavenger scurrying and leaping on its prey, the cruelty and satisfaction of the hunt, the instinctive struggle for food, for survival. The whole physical world was held together by pain, the scream in the throat and the scream in the heart. If her God was part of this torment, its creator and sustainer, then He was a God of the strong, not of the weak.