They circled around the back of the house and headed toward the forest smothering the lower hills. Peter carried a rucksack bulging with fresh bread and choice cuts from his fridge. Lucy-Anne shouldered another bag, which clinked as she walked.

Doug carried Gemma. He sang softly, enjoying the look of contentment and happiness on her face, loving the way the corners of her mouth turned up whenever he spoke, as he had always loved it. There was nothing more wonderful in the world than seeing his daughter smile when she saw him. It told him that he was doing all the right things.

"Alright sweetie?" he asked quietly.

She planted a kiss on his cheek, leaned back and smiled at him. "Yes thanks, Daddy. You can let me down now, I'd like to walk."

"It's a long way."

She shrugged, looked up into the blue sky. "I don't care. It's a nice day for a walk. It's good for you, anyway."

He stopped and lowered Gemma to the ground. She hurried away and his vision blurred, the tears came, but he fought them back. If she saw him crying, her final day would be an unhappy one. He could never do that to her, no matter what Peter said, however sure he was that nothing mattered any more. He could never hurt his baby.

Soon they were in the woods. Peter pointed out dozens of species of flower and heather to Gemma, who nodded attentively and smelled the blooms and prickled her fingers on the heather, laughing. Lucy-Anne fell into step with Doug and held his hand, saying nothing. Their touch was communication enough, every slight squeeze of fingers or palm sending messages of love, companionship, and comfort back and forth. It made him happy.

Squirrels leapt from branch to branch, flashes of wondrous red. Birds sang from high in the trees, and occasionally fluttered around below the cover, snatching morsels from the ground or simply singing their unknowable songs.

Twenty minutes after leaving the house Doug shuffled the mobile phone from his pocket and dropped it as he walked. He did not worry about littering. And he felt no parting pangs.

Newcastle was only two hundred miles away.

"There used to be gold in these here hills," Peter called out from where he had walked on ahead. "Even did a bit of prospecting myself. Swilled sediment around in a pan for weeks on end, anyway."

"Did you find anything?" Lucy-Anne asked.

"Not a sliver, a filing, or a nugget. But it was a nice few weeks, I'd take lunch with me and a good book, spend the whole day out in the wild and get back just before it was dark enough to get lost." He had stopped, and stood staring through the last of the trees at the hillside looming above them, hands on his hips, shoulders rising and falling as he struggled for breath.

He was an old man, Doug kept having to remind himself. They were walking too fast, rushing to get from here to there, wherever here and there were, because of what would take them soon. "We should slow down," he said. "There's no hurry."

Lucy-Anne glanced at him and smiled, her eyes glittering with tears she would never cry.

"Strange how some metals are so valuable," Peter continued, in a world of his own. "Strange how we're so ignorant, we think we can classify the importance of all the things that go to make the world. Rock, now. Rock. That should be the most valuable. Holds it all together, after all."

"I thought gravity did that," Doug mumbled.

"Lithium is the lightest metal there is," Gemma said. She had been skipping along in front of them, pausing occasionally to bend down and stare at a flower or a rock or some crawling thing. Now she became still, and as she looked up into the sky—there was nothing there to see, nothing but blue—she continued. Her voice was the voice Doug had always known, but her words, her tone, her knowledge was pure mystery.

"It floats on water, has a specific gravity of nought-point-five-seven. Relative atomic mass six-point-nine-four-one. It's used in batteries, and its compounds can be employed to treat manic depression. It was named in eighteen-eighteen by Jons Berzelius." She sat down heavily and leaned forward, her head resting between her knees, talking at the ground. "But of course, it was his student Arfwedson who actually discovered it."

Then she was sick.

"What the hell was that?" Doug called. "Eh? Peter? What was that?" He ran to his little girl as he shouted, barely wondering why he expected the old man to know what Gemma was talking about.

Lucy-Anne reached her first and scooped her up, ignoring the spatter of sick that fell across her front. "Honey?" she said. "You okay? You feel okay?"

"Headache," Gemma said weakly, her face buried in her mother's neck.

Doug reached them and stood behind Lucy-Anne, smoothing damp hair from Gemma's pale face. She was sweating, drips of it ran down and pooled darkly on Lucy-Anne's shirt, and she stank of vomit.

Yesterday dinosaurs, today lithium, Doug thought. Hell, I know nothing about lithium. Is this what they teach kids in primary school nowadays?

Peter strolled back to them, concern creasing his brow. "What was that she said?" he asked.

"Does it matter? She's ill." Lucy-Anne was angry, Doug could tell that the moment she spoke, but she did not wish to reveal it to her old uncle.

Peter, however, was wise behind that crazy beard. "Sorry Lucy-Anne. Thoughtless of me. It's just … well, you've a very bright girl there."

"Research into nanotechnology began in the early '80s," Gemma mumbled. "And there were lots of scientists convinced—"

"Gemma," Doug said, confused and afraid and upset. It was not his daughter saying these things, not the Gemma he knew, the little girl who loved the Teletubbies and Winnie the Pooh and riding her tricycle and helping him dig the garden, so long as he moved all the worms out of the way because they were icky.

This was not her.

"Wait, leave her, listen," Peter said.

"—that it would be the new engineering. The Japanese created the first robots small enough to travel through veins, shredding fatty deposits or cancerous cells. The AT&T Bell laboratories in New Jersey constructed gears smaller in diameter than a human hair, and an electric motor a tenth of a millimeter across was built … and then it went top secret, and the various bodies involved started turning the positive research to more warlike ends." There was a pause, just long enough to mark a change of tone. "As always, Man is distinguished only by his foolishness, and nothing good can come of him."

"Gemma, please honey …" Lucy-Anne said, and there was such a note of helplessness in her voice that it froze them all, for just a second or two.

Then Gemma whined, cried for a few seconds more and fell asleep.

Doug and Lucy-Anne refused to leave her side, so Peter hurried away and soaked his shirt in a nearby stream. He squeezed it over Gemma's face as Doug held her in his arms. The water splashed on her skin, ran across her closed eyelids—they were twitching as her eyes rolled behind them—and they even forced some of it between her lips.

But Gemma would not wake up.

"We have to go back," Lucy-Anne said. "Get her to bed, make her warm." Her voice cracked as she spoke, and Doug could see the truth of their situation in her eyes even as her mouth tried to deny it.

"You know there's no point, honey," he said carefully. "By the time we get back to the house it'll be lunchtime, and I doubt we'll set out again before … the end of the day. And …" He looked up at Peter where he stood a little distance away, giving the family the space he assumed they needed. "Well, Gemma will be as comfortable up in the hills as she will in some bed hidden away indoors."

Lucy-Anne's mouth pursed tightly as she held back tears. "I wanted her to be awake when we died," she said quietly. "Is that selfish of me?"

Doug felt his face burning and his nose tingling as tears came. He had been thinking the same thing. "We'll be together," he said, "whether she's awake or asleep."

"What was she saying?" Peter asked quietly. "About the nanos? She was talking about the nanos, wasn't she? Have there been programs on television, documentaries, news items? Never watch it myself, but it seems to me that was all pretty technical for a pretty little girl like Gemma."

"It wasn't her talking," Doug said, and he hugged her tight to his chest. She was warm and twitching slightly in his arms. Her eyelids flexed as her eyes rolled. He looked up at Peter. "Can we go now?"

Peter frowned and wanted to say more, Doug could see that. But the old man nodded and smiled, and waved them onward. "You carry her for now," he said to Doug. "I'll take her from you when you get tired."

"And then I'll have her," Lucy-Anne said. She stayed close to Doug, reaching out every few steps to stroke her daughter's hair or touch her husband's face.

The going was more difficult, the hillside becoming steeper as they emerged from the forest, but the views did much to alleviate the pain Doug was already feeling in his back and legs. His daughter may only be small, but asleep like this she was a dead weight. Dead people are heavier, he seemed to remember reading somewhere, and the thought chilled him. But then he almost smiled. When they died, they would weigh nothing at all.

"Lovely view of the house and gardens from about here," Peter said, letting them pause and look back down the way they had come.

Doug lowered his daughter to the ground. She groaned slightly, mumbled something, but he didn't try too hard to hear what it was. He was afraid it would be something he did not wish to know.

Peter was right. The forest coated the hillside way down into the valley, and at its edge sat his house, its grounds and the winding driveway leading down to the road. Thankfully the animals and gargoyles were well hidden from this distance, so the scene took on a sense of magnificence and innocence, untainted by an old man's paranoid foibles. It was also possible too to see just how isolated this place was. Roads crisscrossed the countryside here and there, but the patchwork of fields which Doug was used to in the more farm-oriented lands to the south was all but absent here. The land was retained entirely by nature.

"I'll take a turn now," Peter said, stooping to scoop Gemma into his arms.

"Peter, come on, you're not the young man you used to be." Doug reached out and tried to take Gemma from his arms, but the old man's expression was one of such hurt that he stepped back and raised his hands in supplication. "Just don't overdo it, " Doug said. "I can't see me and Lucy-Anne carrying the both of you."

They continued uphill, Doug and Lucy-Anne walking on either side of Peter so that they could constantly touch their daughter, hold her hand, chatter away in an attempt to wake her up.

"How much further?" Lucy-Anne asked after another few minutes.

"We've no destination," Peter said. "Tell me when you're happy to stop, and we'll stop."

She nodded. "I want to walk forever. If another footstep will give us another second, I want to keep walking."

Doug knew what she meant, but he was also aware that she was not serious. They could fight for another few seconds, or they could sit and talk and eat a final meal, drink a last glass of wine.

He would never make love to his wife again; never feel her sigh on his cheek as she came; never have a play-fight with her while Gemma attacked them both with her array of teddy bears; never eat a TV dinner; never swim from a sun-drenched beach out to a yacht; never appreciate a good painting, a thrilling book, an evocative piece of music … he would never hear music again. …

Doug lived for music.

"Here," he said. "We stop here. We'll live what we can here, there's no point going any higher or any further." He gave Lucy-Anne a hug and kissed her neck.

Peter eased Gemma to the ground, stood and flexed his back, groaning and cursing. "Bright girl, maybe, but she's a heavy one too."

As if on cue, Gemma woke up and began to talk once more.

And they were unstoppable.

Peter opened a bottle of wine and poured three glasses, but only he drank. Doug and Lucy-Anne tried to quieten their daughter, but Gemma only waved them away, told them she was fine and then continued her bizarre monologue.

And the strangest thing was, her eyes were sparkling as she spoke, her hands formed shapes in the air as she illustrated her thoughts and ideas, and she smiled as she revealed another complex truth. It was her talking, Doug realized. It was Gemma saying these weird, wondrous things, his daughter, his little girl. It was not long before all three adults knew for sure what Doug had suspected all day: that Gemma had not known any of this before now.

She was learning and imparting at the same time.

"Gemma," Doug tried again, "how do you know all this? Who's telling you? Gemma, you're making Mummy and Daddy sad."

She stopped. Instantaneously, halfway through a series of equations that had lost the adults the moment she had begun reciting them. She looked at Doug, and behind her enthusiastic face he saw his tired, scared daughter. "I don't want to make you sad, Daddy. I really don't. But some things have to be said."

She looked away again, facing south, as if challenging their approaching doom with examples of what humanity had achieved and learned in its too-brief time on the planet. The fact that the doom was a fruit of humanity's misdirected labors did not matter, any more than the cause of wind or the sound of clouds mattered. "There's nobody else to say them," she whispered. And then she started again.

The association of reflex points on the feet and remote organic functions …

Fractionation, and how liquid air can be divided into its component parts at minus one hundred and ninety-six degrees centigrade …

Brownian movement, and from there Einstein, and from there the unified field theory, and then superstrings and the theory of everything …

"Make her stop!" Lucy-Anne shouted, standing up and walking away. Her glass spilled red wine into the earth. "Please, Doug," she said, without turning around, "just bring our daughter back for a while."

Doug remembered a time a couple of years before when Gemma went through a short stage of waking in the night, screaming. It was only a week or so, but the sound of her scream was terrifying, and after the first night neither of them slept at all until it ended as suddenly as it had begun. And when they asked her what was wrong she could only say, The moon, Daddy, the moon was in my room and it was laughing at me. He had never really understood what she was afraid of, not then, because the moon was a familiar thing, and the man in the moon was something she loved.

Now, he thought he could see what had disturbed her during those few frantic nights. The man in the moon was something she had known from her storybooks, but that same man laughing at her was something new entirely, something threatening and unpleasant and secret, a bastardization of what she had once known.

And that was why Doug felt like he did now. With death approaching, his daughter scared him because she was acting as she never had before. She was still Gemma, but she was a strange Gemma.

He would not have time to come to terms with this new strangeness. He would have to live with it, and die with it.

"She's trying to tell us something," Peter said.

"Huh?" Doug could not look away from his daughter. If he did, something might happen.

"Gemma is trying to tell us something. She's imparting information … ideas, theories, histories … she's throwing a jigsaw at us and asking us to complete it." He was becoming more animated now, standing up, pacing as he drank and thought. His expression was wide and frank, not narrow and sardonic as usual.

Doug shook his head. "Peter, she's terrified. She's seen people dying on TV in the last couple of days, she saw … she saw a bunch of men raping women in the road. I don't think Lucy-Anne covered her eyes quickly enough …" He trailed off. Lucy-Anne was coming back, wringing her hands, sitting next to Gemma and trying to soothe her out of whatever hyperactive trance she was in.

Peter glugged another glassful of wine and gave himself a refill. "It's like she's reliving the life of humanity in the face of its end. Flashing our collective memories in front of us before we drown."

"She's just rehashing stuff she's heard."

"You know that's wrong, Doug. Don't you?" Peter held out his hand as if offering some invisible truth. "It may be incredible, but what's more incredible than the here and now?"

Doug looked away from Gemma and felt something lift from his shoulders, some strange weight of responsibility, as if the old man's words had convinced him that none of this was his fault. He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply, smelling the wine Lucy-Anne had spilled.

"So what is she trying to say?" He thought to humor Peter, but as he spoke he realized he was curious. And, perhaps, there was a spark of truth in the old man's mad words.

Peter shrugged, but he was twitchy now, more animated than before. "I don't know. That there's hope, perhaps? A way to stop all this?"

Doug barked a short, bitter laugh. "And we'll be able to do it, will we?"

Peter frowned, then shook his head. He stared down the valley to the south, where somewhere over the horizon past, present, and future were being nulled. "Of course not. But it would be one bitter irony, wouldn't it?"

That made them go quiet, all except for Gemma. One bitter irony, Doug thought. Oh yes indeed.

He looked at Gemma, listened to what she was saying and tried so hard not to find sense in any of it.

It did not work. He found sense. They all did.

Gemma fell back into an uneasy trance, but she never stopped talking. Even as she slouched down into Lucy-Anne's arms and her head drooped to one side, the endless monologue continued, spewed out like good breath fleeing bad flesh. A few birds landed in a nearby tree and twittered and cocked their heads, perhaps listening, perhaps not. And what would they hear, Doug thought? Unknowable banter, or unbearable truths? Because wherever Gemma was recalling all this from … or reciting it … it was beginning to hurt.

She knew what was happening, that is what became apparent soon after she lost consciousness again. Most of what she had been saying over the last hour or so—the superstring theories, freezing air, viroids—all formed some small part of a larger plan that was coalescing, slowly, in the air around her. If the hillsides could echo all her words at once, perhaps it would form something that he and Peter and Lucy-Anne could understand, but as it was there was truly nothing they could do. They all heard the desperate intent in Gemma's voice … a painful thing to hear in a girl so young, so innocent … but none of them could move upon it.

They felt more powerless than they ever had before.

"There must be something," Peter said to no one in particular, opening a second bottle of wine and seeking truth and solace in the grape. "There just must be something we can do."

"Dare we hope?" Lucy-Anne said. "Really, Doug? Dare we hope?"

He hated himself for thinking her foolish, and he hated all of them for being so ineffectual. He hated, most of all, the pointless information they were being subjected to. Why them, here and now? Why not someone who could do something with it?

"Because there's no one else left," he said quietly.

"Hmm?" Peter raised an eyebrow past another glass of wine.

"I said there's no one else left," Doug said. "Gemma's telling us all there is to know because there's no one else to tell. What did you say, Peter? We're living all humanity's knowledge in one go, like a drowning man?"

Peter kicked at the loamy ground as he replied. "Well, I only meant it … you know, metaphorically. There must be someone else, someone who can do something with this.…"

"No, you meant it. You did. You believed it when you said it."

"How does this help us?" Lucy-Anne said, staring down at Gemma where she twitched and mumbled in her lap. "How does this give us hope?"

Doug stood and walked to his wife and child, sitting behind them so that he could hug them both close to him. "It doesn't."

In the distance, way down the valley, a heavy mist seemed to be forming out of the daylight.

"It doesn't help us, honey. We're beyond help. We've given evolution a helping hand and nudged ourselves away."

Lucy-Anne shook her head, twisting from beneath his arm so that she could look at him. "No, Doug. Peter? He's wrong, isn't he?"

Peter came to them as well, but he did not reach out to touch them. He sat calmly to one side, content at last. "Maybe the truth is, knowledge can never be its own undoing. We're not being teased, we're being taught, right up to the last. Our questing mind goes on, even when nothing matters anymore. That's good enough." He smiled, drank another glass of wine. "Ahh. A fine year. Whatever year it was, a fine year."

The mist had moved quickly up the valley, and now Doug could see that it was actually dark and thick, like a brown soup churning through the air, consuming everything it touched. Nearer, as close to them as Peter's house, birds dropped from the sky, flowers shed petals, leaves fell from trees as the nanos commenced their senseless, programmed task of deconstruction. And every leaf that fell, every bird that was taken apart, soon gave up its component parts to make more of them.

Gemma woke again and sat upright, turning to look at her parents and her great-uncle. "It would have been so easy," she said sadly. "The answers were all there, if we'd only had the will to help ourselves."

"Come here," Doug said, and she hunched herself into his hug, wrapping her arms around her mother's waist at the same time.

Light began to fade and a strange hissing sound drowned out the breeze and the startled cries of the birds, like a trillion grains of sand dancing in the air.

Doug's sight faded, his skin itched, his insides turned warm. He wanted to tell his family he loved them, but he could no longer speak. His muscles still worked, though, for the moment, and so he hugged them.

They hugged him back.