The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [285]
“Third row, but—but—I don’t suppose you’ll need them now.”
“You never know,” he murmured. “Leave my ticket at the box office, will you?”
“Dad, there must be something we can do for you, surely?”
“No, my darling, I’m going to be out of here pretty soon. The Great Leap Forward. The thing is, I wonder where to? Was there anything in the Dream Topping that shouldn’t have been there?”
“Chlorophyll.”
He smiled and sniffed the carnation in his buttonhole. “Yes, I thought as much. It’s all very simple, really—and quite ingenious. Chlorophyll is the key—Ow!”
I looked at his hand. His skin and flesh were starting to swirl as the wayward nanodevice thawed enough to start work, devouring, changing and replicating with ever-increasing speed.
I looked at him, wanting to ask a hundred questions but not knowing where to start.
“I’m going three billion years in the past, Thursday, to a planet with only the possibility of life. A planet waiting for a miraculous event, something that has not happened, as far as we know it, anywhere else in the universe. In a word, photosynthesis. An oxidizing atmosphere, sweetpea—the ideal way to start an embryonic biosphere.”
He laughed.
“It’s funny the way things turn out, isn’t it? All life on earth descended from the organic compounds and proteins contained within Dream Topping.”
“And the carnation. And you.”
He smiled at me.
“Me. Yes. I thought this might be the ending, the Big One— but in fact it’s really only just the beginning. And I’m it. Makes me feel all sort of, well, humble.”
He touched my face with his good hand and kissed me on the cheek.
“Don’t cry, Thursday. It’s how it happens. It’s how it has always happened, always will happened. Take my chronograph; I’m not going to need it anymore.”
I unstrapped the heavy watch from his good wrist as the smell of artificial strawberries filled the room. It was Dad’s hand. It had almost completely changed to pudding. It was time for him to go, and he knew it.
“Goodbye, Thursday. I never could have wished for a finer daughter.”
I composed myself. I didn’t want his last memory of me to be of a sniveling wretch. I wanted him to see I could be as strong as he was. I pursed my lips and wiped the tears from my eyes.
“Goodbye, Dad.”
He winked at me.
“Well, time waits for no man, as we say.”
He smiled again and started to fold and collapse and spiral into a single dot, much like water escaping from a plughole. I could feel myself tugged into the event, so I took a step back as my father vanished into himself with a very quiet plop as he traveled into the deep past. A final gravitational tug dislodged one of my shirt buttons; the wayward pearl fastener sailed through the air and was caught in the small rippling vortex. It vanished from sight, and the air rocked for a moment before settling down to that usual state that we refer to as normality.
My father had gone.
The lights flickered back on as entropy returned to normal. Aornis’s boldly audacious plan for revenge had backfired badly. She had, perversely enough, actually given us all life. And after all that talk about irony. She’d probably be kicking herself all the way to TopShop. Dad was right. It is funny the way things turn out.
I sat through the Nolan Sisters concert that evening with an empty seat beside me, glancing at the door to see if he would arrive. I hardly even heard the music—I was thinking instead of a lonely foreshore on a planet devoid of any life, a person who had once been my father sloughing away to his component parts. Then I thought of the resultant proteins, now much replicated and evolved, working on the atmosphere. They released oxygen and combined hydrogen with carbon dioxide to form simple food molecules. Within a few hundred million years the atmosphere would be full of free oxygen; aerobic life could begin—and a couple of billion years after that, something slimy would start wriggling onto land. It was an inauspicious start, but now there was a sort of family pride attached to it. He wasn’t just my father but everyone’s father. As the Nolans performed