The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF (collection)

MOMENTS OF INERTIA William Barton

With this story we move from the pre- to the post-apocalypse, although this one takes us through the apocalypse and beyond.

William Barton was an engineering technician, specializing in military technology and, for some while, helped look after the United States’ nuclear submarines. He is now a freelance writer and software architect. He produced a couple of sf novels in the 1970s, but returned to the field with much gusto in the 1990s and has since produced a considerable body of complex and energetic science fiction, with a dozen novels and fifty or so short stories. He said of this story: “‘Moments of Inertia’ began as a novel that, as it evolved, proved unmarketable. It was picked apart into a series of short stories and novellas, published in venues ranging from North Carolina Literary Review to Asimov’s Science Fiction. In the end, it even spun off a how-to article for Writer’s Digest on what to do with a novel you can’t sell. Waste not, want not!” He also called the story “about as apocalyptic as they come!”

ALL OVER, THEN. All over but the shouting.

I sat with all the others, down in the National Redoubt’s auditorium, watching it end, right there on the big screen, emptied of being, flooded with memory.

Jesus.

Life had sucked but it was life, however sad, and life goes on, whatever you make of it. Then the discovery of the Cone — the Cone of Annihilation -like some absurd techno-modernization of Hoyle’s famous old Cloud. Then the Dark of the Sun. The Snowcanes. The Freezing. The Rainout.

Beside me, as if reading my thoughts, Maryanne shivered, holding my hand. She leaned close, so close I could smell breakfast bacon on her breath, and whispered, “We…”

Too late.

Suddenly, on the big screen, the sun lit up, pale pink, complete with frozen prominences and the black blotches of sunspots, looking for all the world like a Chesley Bonestell illustration of a red giant star.

Antares.

Sudden black.

Blue light.

The image of the sun seemed to wrap around itself, twisting hard.

It shrank to a brilliant dot. Then the screen filled with a blizzard of burning silver, and somebody actually screamed “Wooool” like they were watching fireworks or something.

Beside me, Maryanne said, “I feel so helpless.”

Watching the silver blizzard, like so many trillions of burning gumwrappers flying in the wind, I said, “I guess we are helpless.”

“What do you want to do?”

I squeezed her hand. “It’s got to resolve quickly, whatever it is. Afterwards…” I grinned. “How is anything changed? We can have dinner. Go home and mess around.” That got a smile, a little blush. “Maybe watch a video? I’ve been wanting to see Gunga Din again. Cary Grant. Victor McLaglen. ‘Though we beat you and we flayed you…’ Something like that.”

She put her arms around my chest and gave me a hug. “It doesn’t matter what happens, does it?”

“Not any more.” Nothing matters any more but us.

It took about fifteen minutes for the expanding ball of burning silver to reach Mercury, momentarily a brilliant pinprick of silver light. Just before the wave front struck, it exploded in a muddy orange gout of flaming magma, flying apart like a bursting tomato, then it was gone.

The whole room fell silent. “What happens when it gets here?”

I looked at my watch. “It’ll reach Venus in another fifteen minutes or so. If that goes… I guess we’ve got about half an hour.”

Her eyes started to panic. “Oh, Scott…” Not quite above a whisper, she said, “Oh, not now.”

Why not now? Isn’t that what God does? Lets you think you have a shot at happiness just before he pulls the rug out from under your feet? I bet that’s a real knee-slapper up in heaven, the way we all go splat on our faces every time.

I stood, taking both her hands in mine, and pulled her to her feet. “No sense staying here.”

Maryanne said, “Where can we go? Back to our room?”

The classic thing, in keeping with my character. Go to bed with the woman of my dreams, and wait ’til darkness falls, once and for all, now and forever. Die with my boots on, like a trooper. I said, “We need to go get our spacesuits, Maryanne. If we go outside, we can watch.”

Watch. I saw her eyes light up, just for me.

We walked hand in hand then, up the aisle and out the door, almost running down the long corridor toward the elevators, headed for the industrial complex near the surface. Just before the elevator came, I heard Paulie’s voice call out, “Wait! Wait for me!” He was alone, no Olga now when it mattered most, running towards us, hair and beard flapping.

Maryanne reached out and pressed the elevator’s hold button, smiling. “It doesn’t hurt to be nice. Not now.”

We got to the big airlock and got in our suits with a few minutes to spare. There were a surprising number of people already there, more pouring in as we racked up. I thought about the ISS crew. Talk about a grandstand seat! They’ll be the last ones to go. Jonas clapped me on the shoulder as Maryanne, Paulie and I climbed into his cart. “Where we headed?”

He said, “Awww, just out onto the shoulder of the mountain. Remember where we watched the launch?”

Somebody tripped the depress valves and the air started hissing away, tension forming on the door, our suits ballooning out slightly, then it was gone, the floor vibrating as the door rolled up.

“God!” That was from Jonas, not me.

I whispered, “Maryanne…” She turned and looked at me, face bathed in silver light as the cart rolled forward, out under a brilliant noonday sun. The sky was black, the mountains lit up all around us. Up in the sky, where the sun should have been, was a huge silver ball, full of twinkling sparkles, tumbling glitter, bits and streaks of magical fire.

Maryanne said, “Oh! It’s pretty, at least.”

Paulie cried out, “Look! It’s the Moon!”

Gibbous. Lit up silver like everything else.

The ball of silver fire was swelling fast, perspective making it look like some enormous steel sphere, falling on us out of the heavens. The Moon exploded, flying apart in a liquidy gout of magma fire, little black dots of solid material almost invisible in the spreading mass.

I wrapped my arms around Maryanne, holding her hard as I knew how, and before I could open my mouth to speak, we were snatched from the cart, falling into the sky as the world turned upside down.

Screaming. People screaming.

Falling with us.

Over her shoulder, I could see the mountains, the land, everything dropping away, a world made of brilliant liquid silver, melting as I watched.

I heard Paulie screaming somewhere: “Oh! Oh, God, Scott, I’m s-” My earphones filled up with a deafening fuzz of static, radio howls, terrible noises whose names I didn’t know. Looking at me through her faceplate, I could see Maryanne’s eyes, full of fear, full of… me. Her lips were moving, mouthing the words we’d waited too long to say.

The world suddenly flooded bright orange-red, the landscape bursting apart, leaping into the sky after us. I thought I saw the metal and concrete structures of the Redoubt, rupturing as they lifted off, spilling an antlike mass of people, then they were gone, smothered in foaming lava.

Seeing the light reflected in my face, maybe even seeing the image of it in my eyes, Maryanne pressed her head forward in her helmet, closing her eyes, trying to push into my chest.

“There, there.

We’re together now.

The rest doesn’t matter.

But I could feel my heart pound.

Feel myself not want it to happen.

Not really.

Not now.

The fire was closing with us quickly, leaping smears of molten rock, like the fire fountains of Hawaii, solid bits tumbling dark within. Try not to flinch. Keep your eyes open. You don’t want to miss a thing. Not when…

There was a hard impact, spinning us around. I could see Mary-anne’s eyes were open again, blazing into mine. I could see her mouth open, screaming. Another impact. Something hit me in the helmet, then something else, a lot harder. The glass cracked, then blew out with a howling roar.

A fiery hand reached down my throat to grab me by the lungs.

There was just enough time for one long, ghastly burp.

Then no more time at all.

It began, as always, once upon a fucking time…

Oh, the old life sucked.

But it was what we had.

Until the Cone.

That Saturday morning had been brilliant and clear, not a cloud in the tawny sky. I got up before Connie, got dressed, drank my coffee, called Paul, waking him, and said if he wanted to hear what I’d found out, he could meet me at the south entrance to Umstead Park in half an hour.

“Can’t it wait?” Another second and he’d be asleep, would stay asleep until the sun was high and the air turned to steam.

“Hey, it’s the end of the world, Paulie-boy. You feel fine yet?”

I got in my car and drove away, not even tempted to go back upstairs and hump Connie awake, rolled down the windows and drove too fast, down the Freeway, on up I-40 past the airport to Umstead, getting there in seventeen minutes, maybe a little less, singing as I drove, the words to that dumb old skateboarder song, and was surprised to find Paul had beaten me there.

There was a cool wind blowing as Paul killed the antique heavy metal music blaring from his car, some Grand-Funky bullshit. “This better be fucking good,” he said.

“Let’s go hiking, ole buddy ole pal!”

When we got in under the trees, breathless from trying to keep up, he called out, “What the hell is this all about?”

I turned around, walking backwards, slipping once in the pine straw, letting him catch up. “It’s the Cone of Annihilation, Paulie! The end of the world! And all in only eighteen years!”

“So this is your big joke, Scott?”

I stopped and waited until he was standing in front me. And told him what I’d found out, last night, with my little illegal server probe. Shovatsky’s Cone, thin as a needle, swept back to no more than a few arc-seconds wide, reaching backwards into the sky, from Gliese 138 all the way to the end of creation, wiping out stars and galaxies as it came.

It was fun to watch the grin fade. Finally: “Scott. You’re a mean bastard. This isn’t funny.”

I said, “There’s a printout in my car, Paulie. I’ll give it to you when we get done walking.” I turned and headed down the trail.

“Wait.” He said, “Scott, how the hell did you find this out?”

I told him…

Another doubtful look. “Will you let me have a copy of this… program you wrote?”

I shook my head. “I’m using HDC’s hardware and digital phone lines. You’d only get caught.” I started walking down the long, steep hill toward Crabtree Creek. “Come on. Suppose it’s true. Then what?”

“Well, shit, I don’t know. Eighteen years? We’ll be almost seventy. My Dad was only seventy-one when he… died.”

Right. “Why the hell would this fucking Cone be aimed at Earth? We collapsed its wave function with all our telescopes and shit?”

He said, “Finger of God.”

Right. “Paulie, let’s you and me pretend you’re really the atheist you always claimed to be. Why?”

“How fast did you say this thing was moving toward us?”

“Just a cunthair under the speed of light.”

He said, “Nice talk, Scott. So. The point of the Cone is moving toward us at close to the speed of light. And then, a Planck-length further away, there’s a ring of cone moving toward us at the same speed, but its ‘light’ is relativistically lagged. Then the next ring, another Planck length…”

I tripped over a root and stumbled headlong, stopping myself against a sticky-sapped tree, pieces of scaly bark coming away on my hand. “So it’s not a skinny cone, it’s a fat cone?”

He nodded. “Or maybe a flat surface, warped away from us by…”

“What would make a flat wave-front, sweeping across the entire universe, putting out the stars?”

He snorted, stifling a giggle. “I dunno. A bad science fiction writer desperate for a plot?” There was a book we’d wanted to write, years and years ago, about a science fiction writer who got turned into God by mistake. Didn’t get written because Paulie thought it was a stupid idea and wouldn’t work on it with me. I said, “You know, if this thing has the slightest Riemannian curvature, it’s wrapped around the sky, back behind the stars.”

“That’s stupid. Why would it have directionality then? Why do we see a Cone at all, in any particular part of the sky?”

“Heisenberg? Quantum oscillations?”

We walked on, silent for a while, then, as we were crossing the shaky green metal bridge of the creek, the one that was swept off its footings a while back, during hurricane Fran, he said, “So the point of the Cone gets here in eighteen years, and what? Suddenly a black dot appears in the sky, starts widening fast as the light-rings catch up to each other, stars start going out, and then the Sun-”

Funny to imagine that happening, storyworld become real at last, when I’m sixty-eight years old. If I live that long. “What the hell would happen if the Sun went out?”

“I’d have to think about it. I know Shovatsky was talking about infrared sources inside the Cone. Like the stars weren’t going out, maybe being dimmed by some kind of electromagnetic damping.”

“Brainwave’?” Like a story. A story full of stars and snow.

He said, “This has got to be some kind of elaborate joke. A game the scientists are playing with each other.”

“And if it’s not?”

He shrugged, “Eighteen years is a long time.”

Time enough for us to die and miss the whole thing.

He bumped into my back when I stopped walking. “What?”

I said, “How far behind the oncoming wavefront of the light we’re seeing now will the tip of the Cone lag?”

“What do you… oh. Yeah. The Cone’s going to run up behind its own light waves, moving at relativistic speed. It’ll…I don’t… um. It has to be a while. Otherwise it’d look like a point-source instead of a Cone. No, that’s not right. There’s no such thing as a point source of non-light. Hell. I’m surprised you didn’t see something about that in the newsgroup. Shovatsky group must know.”

I’d read fast, not really believing what I saw. “So, what? It’ll be here next week? Next month? Next year?” Point source. Interesting. And if the Cone were moving at light-speed, it would’ve arrived without warning.

He scratched his chin, rooting among loose, wiry beard hair. “If we had some numbers, we could probably figure it out. If we’re not too dumb.” He stopped and looked away from me for a minute. “How the hell are we going to know if this is real or not?”

“Shovatsky was talking about calling some kind of press conference on Monday.”

Next year? The world will end next year? The two of us were looking at each other, like a couple of goofy, lop-eared dogs.

Near as we could tell, sitting at a picnic table in the shady part of the park, using the calculator Paul had in his car, combing through both piles of printouts for clues, the tip of the Cone would run through the solar system in fourteen months.

Next August, Paulie. That’s what I whispered.

And now? Now, what?

We’re dead. Dead, Paulie! Do you hear me?

His face floated by, balloon-like, screaming. Turned suddenly and stopped, rotating towards me, balloon eyes staring. It’s all your fault, he said.

God damn it… Intensity of regret. Can you imagine it? The world gets destroyed, I get fucking killed, and here’s fucking Paulie haunting my fucking ghost?

Maryanne?

Nothing.

What the hell did I expect? Maybe I’m waiting for the Maryanne balloon to come by. Maybe the Connie balloon. Lara? Who else?

Maddie, fucked at a party, on the floor, in front of laughing others, when we were both so drunk we almost puked? Katy? Katy-balloon?

Nothing. No one. Just Paulie the balloon-head, orbiting me like Dactyl round Ida. Slowly.

There was a prickle of apprehension on the back of my neck, like a cool, damp wind, breath of swampy corruption. Oh, yeah. This is bad news, ole buddy, ole pal.

The balloon head screamed, It’s all your fault! You made me do it.

I think I smiled. Hard to tell. Am I a balloon head too?

Hey, Paulie. Maybe we’ll be lucky. Maybe this is just my death-dream. There’s a lot of blood and oxygen in a head, you know. Hey, great! That explains the balloon-head symbolism! See, we’re dying now but our brains are still intact and functional, producing a dream that lets us imagine we’ll somehow escape.

The balloon head’s lips twisted angrily, empty eyes accusing. So you’re going to tell me this is just another example of excuse-seeking behavior?

I think I laughed.

Balloon head whispered, It’s all your fault.

Hey, come on. Play along, Paulie. This’ll be fun. We’ll see the light at the end of the long, dark tunnel, it’ll get closer and closer, we’ll fall into the light, then the doctor will lift us by the heels, slap our little asses, and we’ll be reborn. Get it? Nudge-nudge, wink-wink.

Balloon: All I wanted to do was get along.

Something inside me went quiet with despair. I tried to make myself turn away. Turn my back on him. Come on balloon head. Get thee behind me. Paulie orbited away, mouth working angrily, eyes still accusing, and the emptiness around us flooded with fine white light after all.

Life goes on, whether you want it to or not. You can call it an adventure, if you want to, and we did, embezzling all that money from HDC, cheating on our taxes, building our shelter up in the mountains, the concrete redoubt in case the freezout was mild, the emergency capsule in case it wasn’t, Paulie growing stranger and more secretive until that last day, when I fell asleep on the porch, waiting for the sun to come up black. A hand shook my shoulder and I awoke with a start. Paul was standing there, staring down at me, looking well rested, dressed better than usual, hair neatly brushed and tied back in a pony tail. Even his beard, grown back over the winter, had been combed. He said, “It’s ten o’clock.”

Ten a.m. Pale blue sky. Dark green woods. Birds chirping. Bees buzzing. The distant whir of cars on the road. Hot out, maybe eighty-five already. Christ. Look at the sunshine. I said, “So. What do we do now?”

He shrugged, not looking at me, looking sideways, out across the lawn toward where our cars were parked. I said, “What happened? Is the timing wrong or… The government, Paul, they built all those shelters! What happened?”

He took a few steps, backing away from me, eyes shifty now, very nervous. And then he said, “You remember back at Christmastime?”

Christmas? All I remembered was Connie. “No. I, uh…”

He said, “After what I found out, after what you said and did. The bit about the software…”

I whispered, “Paulie, you were taking risks…”

“Asshole.”

I sat fonvard in my chair, watching as he backed to the top of the stairs. “What did you do, Paulie? Tell me.”

He said, “I bought a laptop computer and cellular modem. Kept it in my car. Only used it when you weren’t around.”

Some cold chill, like soft fingers down my back. “Paul…”

He said, “I made my own ferret, Scott, in imitation of yours, and I used it.” He seemed to smile, maybe at my reaction, my obvious gape. “In February, Scott, I found out that the Cone, the asteroid strike, the missile scare, everything… they’re all cover stories!”

“For what?”

He started backing down the steps, feeling with his feet, careful not to stumble on his way to the sidewalk. “I found out from a group up in Montana that’s been doing some digging, Scott. A group that calls itself Novus Ordo Seclorum.”

“‘A new order for the ages?’ Paulie, that’s right off the back of a dollar bill.”

He nodded, smiling as he reached the bottom of the stairs, standing flat-footed, right hand in the pocket of the fashionably loose slacks he was wearing. “Scott. Scottie…” a soft snicker. “They are cover stories for the establishment of the New World Order. The governments of the technically advanced countries, us, Russia, Japan, France… This is the moment of unification, an end to war, the beginning of… everything!”

I sat back, looking for the shine of madness in his eyes. But whose? His or mine? I whispered, “Why didn’t you tell me, Paul?”

Anger glinting now, a show of teeth. “Because you never listen to me, Scottie. We always had to do things your way!”

“And then?”

Another smile. “In May, Scottie-poo, I went up to Washington, DC, for a reason. And when the IRS audit comes next week, I’ll be on the other side. Scottie, they’ve agreed to let me…”

He suddenly recoiled, taking another step back, jerking a revolver, some small .32 caliberish thing, from his pocket, pointing it at me. “Stay in your chair, Scott!” I stood up anyway, willing him to shoot, listening to the whine in my ears, feeling like I was ten feet tall. Hands and feet far away. Maybe I’m going to faint. There was a dull, hot flush, hotter than the summer morning air, forming all over my face, rippling down the middle of my back.

“Why’d you do this to me, Paul?”

He kept backing away as I walked forward, coming down the steps, following him towards the cars. He whispered, “Stay back, Scott. I’ll kill you. I will.”

“You already have, you malignant little prick.”

He said, “You have to understand, Scott. I had to do it. Because of what you…”

I took another step forward, imagined myself rushing him, summer sunlight glassy and strange all around us. Maybe I’d get him first, maybe we’d grapple for the gun. Maybe one of us would die. Maybe both.

Paul looked away from me, a bizarre confused expression on his face, looking down on the ground at his feet, looking around at the shadows. Something about the shadows.

I looked beyond him, towards the horizon, towards the sky above the black ridge of trees. “Paulie.” My voice sounded funny and far away. “Why is it so pink out here?”

Nothing.

I turned on one heel and looked eastward, towards the sun. There was an unfamiliar violet disk in the sky, surrounded by a nimbus of silver haze. Here and there, black prominences lifted, like an artist’s impossible, frozen flame.

There was a soft retching sound.

When I looked, Paulie was on his hands and knees on the lovely brick sidewalk, puking, little pistol dropped in the grass, not far away.

In my death-dream, there was the sound of a toilet flushing. The splashy roar as the flapper valve opened. The whining song of the inlet valve, letting new water in as the float goes down. The turds leap up from the bottom of the bowl and start spinning round. The toilet paper sinks, sucked down into the darkness below.

Round and round and down we go.

Towards someplace.

Someplace long ago, in a universe far, far away.

Hmm. Would that be long ago, then, and, oh, so far away?

Or merely once upon a time?

Will I see malevolent indigo eyes open on darkness?

No. That’s merely another story lost and gone forever. Mieses to pieces.

Out of the darkness, came a very polite, ever-so-slightly supercilious male voice: I’m terribly sorry for the inconvenience, sir. If you’ll just follow me, I’ll get you where you belong and you can get on with your life.

Um. Amazing that a dead guy can still feel his bowels go watery with fear. Who the hell are you? My guardian fucking angel?

The voice was amused: What delightful spirit in the face of eternity!

A structure that I assumed was my throat made a dry swallow, a faint, ectoplasmic clucking sound.

The voice said, My dear Mr Faraday. Guardian angel is close enough but in your case, I think you’d better think of me as a neurotransmitter. My job is to move you through Transition Space to the Storage Plenum.

Storage Plenum?

Sigh. The Afterlife, if you wish. Come along.

Afterlife? Oh, shit.

The voice made a cute little tee-hee-hee. It’ll be all right, Mr Faraday. Really. We’re terribly sorry for all the trouble we’ve caused.

We?

It said, Oh, dear. They didn’t say you’d have so many questions! Tsk.

They?

One and the same, I’m afraid. I’m an element of the orphan cluster rescue array, a subset of the accidental entities study group, which is in turn attached to the disaster reversal special hierarchy. We adhere to an attractor in meme-set space which requires us to believe the pseudo-sentient biproducts of the disaster-set entity have a right to exist, even though they have no reality in the C_n plenum.

What the fuck are you talking about?

What C_n plenum?

Sigh. You are familiar with the concept that the universe exists as an eleven dimensional space?

The one where the extra dimensions are rolled up inside mass quanta, leaving behind just the three of space and one of time? More or less.

Well, that’s not quite it but it’s on the right track. Mr Faraday, the C_n plenum is a fully-packed array of Kaluza-Klein entities containing an infinite amount of energy. Perhaps the simplest way to visualize this space is to view it as random-access memory, whose base state is set to the value one. Assume that there are quantum uncertainty processes at work that sometimes reset an entity’s value to zero. Then assume there is some kind of universal CPU whose instruction set allows it to perform certain operations on all entities of value zero. You could think of that as a solid-state universe and not be far wrong.

Isn’t that what writers call bafflegab? And isn’t this nothing more than a data dump?

The voice’s amusement seemed lugubrious, to say the least. Oh, Mr Faraday. If that’s your attitude, then what more can I say?

Who are you, why are we here, where are we going and what the hell happened?

Fair enough, Mr Faraday. I told you who I am, though I don’t think you believe it. What happened? It’s not so simple, but I’ll see if I can simplify it. As you might imagine C_n space has something like evolution, and since its persistence time appears to be on the order of 10⁵² years, there has been plenty of time for it to operate. Over the vigintillia, unimaginably complex entities have evolved.

How complex is that, asshole?

Tsk-tsk. Mr Faraday! Unimaginable to you. As I was saying- in time, these entities grew to understand the properties of the universe they inhabited, and to manipulate it for their own purposes, also unimaginable to you.

Then why tell me?

It sounded hurt: Because you asked, Mr Faraday. Now, if you’ll just be patient? One day, a really long time ago, as you count such things, they discovered that they could create a subplenum with properties analogous to C_w, if C_1Q space existed. All they had to do was create it, and then they would have access to a technology in some ways equivalent to your own data processing technology but infinitely more powerful.

I felt a horrid supposition. One that made me feel cheated indeed.

So you’re going to tell me I’m nothing but a computer game? Well now there’s an original idea!

Such palpable sarcasm, Mr Faraday! My word! No, nothing so tawdry as that. If it were, none of this would be happening, and you’d never know you were, ah, simulations, I suppose. Unfortunately, once the entities had their C_1Q computers, they were able to work out the properties of the Cg plenum and deduce that they could use it for physical movement outside the laws of C_n. Star-ships, if you will. Time travel, etc. Magic.

How nice for them.

Mr Faraday, when the first C_g device was switched on, it started a chain reaction which began collapsing the dimensions in upon each other, creating lower and lower plena, basically eating away the higher ones. Something had to be done to contain this disaster, which is who I am, and what’s happening now. I don’t understand. Sigh. I suppose not, Mr Faraday. Look: timescales in the higher dimensions are considerably longer than in your own. C_j space began as an industrial accident, and everything within it is a product of that accident. You are toxic waste, and now, the cleanup crew has arrived. Oh.

Mr Faraday, the beings of C_n don’t know you exist, and if they did, they would not care. Their only interest is in reversing the substrate disaster, and in being more careful next time.

So who are you, really? And… and…

And what happens next? Do we wipe you from the floor and have done with it? No. We are the machines made to clean up the mess and we have noticed you, Mr Faraday. Some among us have realized we have no right to destroy you and have made a place for you to… persist. Yes. That’s the word.

Persist.

Perhaps you’d like to call us the gods of a lesser creation? Yes, that will do nicely. And that lesser creation is something you might want to call the storage plenum.

Storage. For how long?

I told you, Mr Faraday. Our timescales are far longer than yours.

You’ll like what we’ve made for you. The Earth bubble, with everything there ever was living on Earth. It’s my special creation, though I’m told the other bubbles are equally nice.

Other bubbles?

It said, We’re here, Mr Faraday. It’s been very nice to meet you, sir.

And so, my fine boys and girls, we went down the waste pipe and were flushed out to sea.

See?

After the Sun went out, it got colder and colder and colder, faster than we expected, punching through our heavy clothes, defeating our ingenious little masks, heated and otherwise, until we had to break out the spacesuits, not because there wasn’t enough air, but because it was too fucking cold.

You can’t imagine how cold -180 feels.

At -180, the oil on your skin freezes. You get cracks at the corners of your eyes. You blink and your skin breaks.

The spacesuits we’d stolen from dead Philadelphia were astonishingly heavy, astonishingly hard to put on, even harder to put together, like Christmas toys in their packaging with “some assembly required”.

On the other hand, they were warm and snug and each suit came with a mounting rack, so they would stand up like so many hollow men, waiting for us to crawl through the hatches in their backs. Unfortunately, they weighed almost 150 pounds apiece, like self-contained suits of Medieval combat armor. Cataphracts in Space. A wonderful Star Crap title no one’d managed to think of. Too late now, boys. Wonder if any of them are still alive? I hope not.

Connie and Julia had to help us up the stairs into the freezing cold hotel, which we were using as a sort of airlock, but once there, we could at least stand unaided, could stagger around, pissing and moaning to each other.

Paulie said, “They’ll never be able to walk in these, Scott.”

“Connie will. She’s in better shape than either of us. She weighs 145, you know.” And stands five feet eight.

He said, “Well, I weigh 260, and if I fell down…”

I gave a little hop. “I don’t even weigh 200, Paulie. You’re carrying at least eighty pounds of dead weight, as well as the suit.”

“Fuck you.”

“Not tonight, Paulie. I have a headache.”

“Asshole.”

“And proud of it. Come on, let’s see if we can get outside without falling down the steps.”

It was pitch black outside. Empty. Still. Maybe silent, but all I could hear was the wheeze and whir of my portable life support system. I tripped going over the jamb, staggering, barely able to catch my balance.

Paulie said, “Careful! Why the hell do the boots have heels, anyway? I mean, these suits were intended for orbital EVAs.”

“Failure of imagination.” Or maybe they thought one day we’d be going back to the Moon, going on to Mars? Fat chance.

It was hard going getting down the steps and out onto the lawn. I was starting to breathe hard, and Paulie’s gasps were keeping the microphones activated, rasping hard in my ears.

He said, “What if I have a heart attack?”

I said, “Do you think Julia will want me to fuck her after you’re dead, Paulie?”

He made a satisfying gibber, then shut up, saving his breath for walking. We didn’t make it to the top of the hill, not by a long shot, just to the head of the driveway but that was enough. There was a dark pickup truck with a bed cap sitting halfway down to the mailbox. I twisted and looked back towards the hotel, towards the lit-up cupola poking out of the ground beyond the hump of the garage birm. No one.

I said, “If we’d thought to turn on the security camera system, we’d’ve seen them coming.” And since we hadn’t, that movie mob of peasants armed with pitchforks and scythes would’ve been inside before we knew what was happening.

Paulie’s breath rasped and grunted as we slowly made our way down to the truck. Inanely, I wondered if there was any mail waiting for us out at the road. Maybe a summons from the IRS?

Inside the truck cab, Gary sat behind the wheel, eyes and mouth open, covered with frost. There was a woman sitting beside him in a fluffy white fur-trimmed parka, eyes shut, head down on his shoulder, looking like she was asleep. A thick lock of long, straight black hair had escaped from the hood and was hanging down halfway to her lap.

“I guess it’s a good thing we forgot to turn on the cameras. You see what’s in the rack?” I wonder where the hell he found a machine gun?

Paulie was leaning forwards in his helmet visor, head miniaturized and made comical by the optical properties of the glass, staring at the woman.

“You know her?”

He nodded. “It’s his sister.”

Sister. Well. Was she in the group we chased away, or did he actually make the long round trip to Chapel Hill for her? And then what? A peace offering? Here, Paulie. I’ll trade you my sister for Julia. I started to feel sick to my stomach, maybe from the exertion, maybe not.

We turned away and started scraping back up the driveway. It was slightly uphill and harder than ever. Paulie was starting to choke between gasps, like he wanted to swallow his tongue, making me wonder how the fuck we were going to manage this. When the air’s gone, the resistance in the joints from suit pressure will be multiplied.

Paulie stopped, turning, and I could see his head tilted back, looking up at the sky. “What…” The sound of wonder.

I looked up. There was the Cone, seeming to loom huge above us, hanging low over the horizon, threatening and obscene, like it was swallowing the sky. Hell. It is. There. A smear of gray not far from it. Over there another one, larger still, nacreous, with faint striations.

Visible?

“Paulie.”

He said, “It’s probably a lot colder up by the tropopause. Not so much radiant heating from the ground.”

“What do you mean?”

He turned and looked at me. “I think it’s an oxygen cloud.”

I felt a thrill run through my intestines, threatening to burst right out my asshole. This is… this is… what?

Real? Paulie was looking down at the snow surface around us. He switched on his helmet lights, and I was stunned to see it made the rime of carbon dioxide frost begin to steam. Here and there, like holes in a golf green, there were shadowy little pockets. Gophers?

I said, “Maybe we better go inside?”

He staggered over to one of the holes and tried to kick it with his toe, swaying. The thing was solid, like a little bowl of ice, maybe two inches across. “No. What the fuck are those things?”

“I dunno. Let’s walk up the hill and take a look around.”

We had to stop fifteen times on the way up and by the time we made the summit, we’d been outside for almost three hours. I said, “I guess you’re not going to have a heart attack, Paulie. No Julia for me.”

He was looking off to the east, still breathing too hard to talk, and when I followed his gaze, I saw some dim, hazy light down by the horizon, barely there. As I watched, eyes adapting, it seemed to grow brighter, then slowly wane, hesitate, flutter, and wax again. “Richmond?”

He gasped, tried to hold his breath, gasped again, panting, then said, “Maybe. On… fire?”

I said, “It’s too cold for anything to burn, Paulie.”

“Bomb.”

“Richmond’s only a little more than a hundred miles from here. If somebody set off even a little atom bomb, we’d’ve felt the ground shake.”

“Maybe we were asleep.” Breathing easier now.

Overhead, the oxygen clouds seemed larger. “Maybe so. Or fucking. Hey, Paulie, you feel the earth move when you come?”

He didn’t even laugh, looking away from the light, back up at the clouds and… “There.” He lifted his arm a little bit, trying to point.

Something was coming down towards us, a little glowing pinpoint of light. Tinkerbell, looking for Peter Pan. It was drifting our way, drifting like dandelion fluff on the wind, slowly settling. When it was close enough, I could see it was a little silver sphere about the size of a golfball. A vaguely luminescent soap bubble.

Paulie whispered, “Oh, my God.” I don’t remember ever having heard him sound so pleased in all my life.

The thing started to steam as it approached the ground, not quite hovering over the snowpack, steaming, shrinking, drifting lower. I suddenly realized whatever it was, it wasn’t hot enough to sublimate the CO₂. Lower.

Lower.

Paphl

It exploded with a sharp hiss, momentarily ballooning to a bright softball of dusty light. Suddenly, there was an icy teacup in the snow where it’d been.

I said, “Well. Guess we know where the holes came from.”

He looked like he wanted to kneel beside it. Impossible. He put his hands on his hips, clownish, clumsy, looking back up at bright clouds, visibly spreading across the black and starry sky.

I grinned. “Oxygen rain.”

He smiled back, eyes incredibly bright. “Yeah.”

I said, “Merry Christmas, Paulie.”

How many times can a man awaken and open his eyes slowly? As many times as it takes. Until he’s finally awake. Overhead, there was a clear blue sky, that fabled cornflower blue, with fine, faded white clouds so high up you could hardly make out their shape, more like faraway mist than clouds. There was a soft wind blowing and it was cool. Just cool enough for comfort, like when you’ve set the AC just right.

Just right to be naked.

I could hear the wind rushing in the trees, and there was another soft sound, a faint hissing, like the whitish noise you hear when you stand next to a field of ripe wheat rippling in the wind. Something else, too. Ocean waves in the distance. Sunlight warm on my skin. Sun hanging low in the sky, above remote, jagged white mountains.

All right. Mountains. I…

I sat up suddenly, feeling a hard jolt in my chest, looking around, bug-eyed. Oh!

Below me, stretching down the slope of a long hill, the Earth Bubble of the Storage Plenum, gift from the Gods of a Lesser Creation, was a vast, shallowly curving bowl, like a world inside a wok, rimmed by mountains that must make the Himalayas look small.

There were more hills, below the hills a sea, surrounded by white beach, beyond the beach, mountains, the Alps maybe, beyond the mountains, another sea, beyond that sea, a darkling plain, overhung by a boil of gray-white cumulonimbus.

There! A towering black anvil, lightning twisting from it, striking at the land below.

Mountains and seas and forking silvery rivers spreading out to right and left. Deserts, both yellow and red.

Beyond the curving land, down in the bottom of the bowl, hanging white mist. Then more landscape, so tiny it looked like a clutter of colored static, green and blue and gray, then the mountains below the sun.

Pellucidar, I thought, or that World Without End from a story I once thought of but never wrote, the one about the Space-Time Juggernaut.

And if the Gods told the truth, somewhere now, everyone is awakening. Everyone. People like me who think they’ve awakened on the bright sward of some personal Barsoom, fearful others, awakening to Heaven or Hell. Or Neterkhert.

Somewhere, a king of Kmt awakens, looks up in the sky, and screams Aton’s name.

Somewhere else, a sinner awakens, and wonders where they might have hidden the lake of boiling blood.

I got to my feet, dusting stalks of dead grass off my bare butt, wriggling my toes in cool green living grass, wondering if Dante was somewhere nearby, wondering why there were so many Italians in Hell.

There were trees, tall thin things with scaly gray trunks, surrounded by a carpet of brown pine needles and, just as I looked, a couple emerged, holding hands, a man and a woman, both of them very thin. She was a redhead; he had thin brown hair and a sculpted, curly brown beard. And seeing me, they waved, hurrying fonvard.

“Scott! Scottie!” The one from the man, the other from the woman.

Despite the best of intentions, I kept looking at her crotch, and that made her smile in a shy sort of way. Him too.

“Katy. Ben.”

He said, “That was a damn good idea you had!”

“Glad you liked it. Uh…” He laughed. “It was nowhere near as bad as I expected. You know, we almost made it to the rainout?”

That little pang of guilt, remembering the night I sent him away to die. All for nothing. I could have told him to go get Katy and bring her back. But I didn’t. So how am I different from Paulie then? Wasn’t Ben my friend? Or Katy, with her lovely little snatch?

“I, uh… well. I hope it wasn’t too bad for you. I mean…”

Katy said, “If you’ve got enough Seconal, it’s easy enough.” She laughed at my look. “Hey, Ben and me woke up together. He told me, um, you and Connie…”

I shook my head. “We made it through the rainout. After that…”

There was a shadow in Ben’s face, however sunny Katy was right now. And, of course, for them, that rainout was minutes ago, on the other side of a double-handful of mother’s little helper. Look at them. They belong together.

And, somewhere out here… Connie? Lara? I…

The two of them were looking past me now, faces curious. When I turned, there was a naked woman with curly black hair, smiling, just like you’d expect. And she said, “So, is this my reward in the hereafter?”

What a grin!

I don’t think she expected me to pounce on her the way I did, grappling, almost knocking her down in my eagerness. She pushed me away, laughing, wiping her mouth, “Jesus! Down puppy!”

Behind me, Katy said, “Shew! You don’t waste any fucking time, Scott! You know this nice nekkid lady?”

To his credit, naked Millikan was even blushing. When I introduced them all to each other, Katy looked Maryanne up and down slowly, lingering on her tits the way women will, then said, “Hey. Connie shows up anytime soon, we can compare notes.” Letting Maryanne know where she’d been. Maryanne looked at me, bit her lip, made a little crooked smile, and shrugged. I felt something cold touch my spine, making my balls pull in a bit. I looked down the hill again, towards the shining sea. People were coming out of the bushes everywhere, milling, calling out to one another.

Down there, most likely not far away, a pretty blonde woman of about thirty is inspecting her right wrist, and wondering what the hell she did wrong.

Wonder what I’ll say if I run into her?

Somewhere nearby, maybe just beyond the trees, an elephant howled and then we heard a man’s terrified scream. Millikan spun, looking towards the sound, then over his shoulder at me. “I guess I wasn’t paying attention when the Gods did their bit. Did they say anything about the animals coming here too?”

Gods? As in, I’m not the only one was told where we are? I said, “You got a nice ass, Ben.”

He gave me a weird look, then turned back to the woods. You could see a fucking elephant in there, a big gray shadow, blundering about among the pine trees, getting all tangled up, thrashing this way and that. In front of it, you could see a big fat white guy running our way. Every once in a while he’d look over his shoulder, scream, trip and fall, get up and stumble on.

Maryanne said, “The trees came to heaven with us, why not an elephant?”

I put my arm around her waist, and said, “Long as you’re here, the details don’t matter.”

She twisted in my grasp, trying to look me in the eye. I started to rear back, and realized with a jolt that the far-sightedness that’d been building as I moved through my late forties and into my fifties was gone.

She said, “Even if Connie shows up and changes her mind?”

I smiled. “Especially then.”

That still, solemn look. “And what about the other one?”

I took a deep breath. “When Lara took that razor to her wrist, she knew who would find her in the morning. I’ve had twenty years to think on that.”

A slow nod. “I’ve got a past of my own. You never asked.”

“If it matters, you’ll let me know. Until then… look!” A gesture with my free arm, downslope towards the deepening mist. “Everybody and everything that ever was is here in this valley. We…”

The fat guy came out of the trees stumbling, still looking back, though the elephant seemed to have given up, stuck in a tangle of fallen trees, confused. I waved my arm. “Paulie! This way!”

Maryanne nuzzled close to my ear and whispered, “Shut up! Maybe he won’t see us.”

He ran straight across the sloping ground towards the hill, tripping again, running slower, then slower still. Just before he got to the steeper part, leading up to where the four of us stood, he turned away, running parallel to the base, then turning at an angle away from us again.

Gasping. Gasping for breath.

Suddenly, he screamed, “Julia! Julia, wait!”

I turned and looked. There. Naked, long hair streaming out behind her, running away, toward another patch of dark, piny woods. Running along, holding hands with another fat man. Gary, of course, healed from the bullets and the cold.

Paulie fell down, got up, shouted, “Julia! For God’s sake! Please! I love you!” Ran on, stumbling, following them into the trees.

Eventually, the rainout reached the point where even the spacesuits were useless, trapping us in the shelter. One night, we all pitched in and put together one of best dinners I ever had. Cornish hens. Brussels sprouts. Baked potato. Cornbread stuffing. Salad with balsamic vinaigrette dressing. We were all crowded into the Staff Quarters kitchen, working on our favorite things, bumping into each other, laughing about silly little shit, like old times, like we were, somehow, having the life we’d always wanted, maybe even the life we deserved. There was chicken giblet gravy. Real butter. Sour cream.

Everybody had their own favorite wine, from Julia’s snobby chicken-appropriate dry white whatever, to my own beer stein full of tawny port. I lifted it now and looked at them. Silence? Not quite. In the background, you could hear a soft drumming sound, rather a slow drum right now, the dull, intermittent thud of exploding oxygen rain.

“Here’s to us,” I said, “here and now.”

Paul picked up a champagne flute of Black Opal something or other. “Not the things that were. Not the things that might have been. Just us.”

Julia looked at him, seeming surprised.

“Good one, Paulie.” Wish you’d been thinking that way back when life was real and there were things we were maybe going to do and be. We ate quietly for a while, most of the noise coming from Paul, who’d never learned to chew with his mouth shut. Hell. It’s just defiance. Somewhere, his dead parents are still looking over his shoulder, yelling at him, wringing their hands in despair because he won’t do what they want.

Overhead, the sound of the rain grew louder for a moment, then softened again. Like someone far above had dumped an extra-big bucket of droplets on us, just for fun. Connie put down her fork and looked up at the ceiling, as if inspecting it for water stains.

Conniekins, if this roof starts leaking, we are fucked.

She said, “Is it going to stay like this?”

“We don’t know.”

Paul grimaced. “Yeah we do. In a few days it’ll be like real rain, a downpour.”

“Well, we only imagine that, Paulie. And we’ve been wrong about a lot. Remember?”

“Look. Right now, it’s just getting started. The droplets are coming down slow because they’re low density and falling through gaseous air. But it’s the air that’s falling! The atmospheric pressure will start to drop, more oxygen will condense out, then the nitrogen will start to go.”

“I know. I know. As the pressure goes down, the drops will fall hard. Towards the end, they’ll be falling like rocks.”

He grinned. “Feathers in a vacuum.”

Julia kept her eyes on her plate, eating slowly, as if ignoring us.

Connie said, “What’ll happen to us then?”

“That’s why we piled that extra dirt on the birm. Might help. Can’t hurt. If things get scary, we’ll go in the capsule and seal the hatches.”

Her voice was soft, eyes on mine. “And… afterward?”

“We’ll just have to see. I…”

The floor shuddered, rattling dishes and glasses together on the table, my wine rocking in its mug. I jumped up and ran to the lounge, looking out the big picture window into the brightly-lit garage. Nothing. Bulldozer at the door. The two cars. The nose of the Cat visible in shadow. The little door up to the hotel was still sealed, containing its coffer dam of concrete and dirt.

Over my shoulder, Paulie said, “Let’s go to the cupola.”

I nodded, looking at the open door to the tunnel. Nothing. Darkness. “Yeah. And maybe we better think about keeping that shut when we’re not down there?”

From the cupola you could see there was a fire burning beyond our old observation hill, a big fire, enormous red flames licking skyward, pouring forth dense black clouds of smoke, like crude oil burning in a bowl, calling up images of the end of the Gulf War, when the well-heads were set off by Saddam’s retreating heroes. Already, the smoke was towering up in a steep, jet-black column towards the bright green sky, with its muddy orange streaks and curls of vermilion lightning.

There were sparks of rain everywhere, falling faster now, pulling their pale blue contrails, popping as they hit the landscape, twinkling around the edges of the hot black smoke, flaring and veering from the fire.

Paul said, “Somewhere near downtown. Maybe a gas main explosion?”

“I don’t think so. That’s big. Farther away than you think, maybe on Palmer’s Ridge. There’s nothing up there but woods.”

“Plane crash?”

“Jesus, Paulie. You know any planes that could fly in a -200 atmosphere?”

The flames were getting bigger and brighter now, showing long tongues of yellow in their midst, maybe from the falling oxygen.

Connie pressed her face to the quartz, then jerked back. I touched it. Cold. Cold enough to hurt. She said, “Are we in danger?”

I said, “Whatever it is, it can’t spread far. It’ll go out soon enough.”

Paul was looking down at the little bank of meteorological gauges in a panel below one window. “Temperature’s actually up a few degrees. It’s that hot. Pressure’s down more than I expected. It’s around twelve psi outside.”

I took a deep breath, feeling my heart flutter nervously. “Still okay in here. I guess we’ve got a tight enough seal.”

I turned and looked at the hotel. It was surrounded by a boil of pale blue fog, tower of vapor reaching for the sky. There was something wrong with the roof, maybe shingles missing now, and you could see the occasional ball of light as a raindrop would strike and flare. Leaking? Hard to say. The oxygen probably would evaporate on the wood, but… I said, “It’s not going to last, Paulie. We need to think about closing the geothermal water valves, so we don’t have a blowout when it collapses.”

He said, “It’ll go fast, once it gets cold enough.”

“We should leave a video camera running in here, once we do. So we’ll have a tape, after…” After? Christ. What after?

Paulie snickered, turning away towards the tunnel hatch, headed back to the Quarters, where our dinner was getting cold. When I looked at Connie, she was still staring out the window, not at the fire, not at the hotel that’d been our home for a while but down the driveway at Gary’s pickup truck. It was visibly dented, and the windshield was gone, no more than a few shards remaining, dangling around the rim, stuck together by safety-glass film. You couldn’t see inside, not even when a raindrop would get in and flare up briefly blue.

Maybe they’re eaten away. Maybe they’re gone. She must’ve seen it the first time she came in here, while we were out shoveling up birm dirt. She never said a fucking word.

She turned to me and smiled, put her hand out and touched my chest, let it drift down to hold onto my belt buckle. “Come on,” she said, “we can reheat our stuff in the microwave.”

Greekee, greekee, greekee, greekee…

The nights in heaven are dark indeed, filled with darktime noises that turn you back into a child. Greekee. Like those stickbug creatures I made up for a book I once wanted to write, about a man who didn’t know who he was. All lost now.

Perhaps for the best. Somewhere in the distance, a big cat squalled, high scream falling off in a deep gurgle, some great engine dieseling away to silence. Maryanne shivered next to me, maybe the tiger-bright, maybe the nighttime cold. I put my arm around her shoulders again, welcoming the touch myself.

Oh, great. Another hard-on. She’s going to get tired of this shit sooner or later.

We’d gotten a few more people together on the hilltop, mostly folks from the Redoubt EVA crew, a few from HDC, a couple of Ben’s friends, and we’d managed to uproot thorn bushes, swearing at the cuts they made, Jonas yelping when he hooked one on his dick, making a little boma round the top of the hill.

Millikan startled me by knowing how to make and use a fire drill, lighting us up a cheery little deadwood fire just as the sun sank fat and dull red-orange behind the remotest mountains.

He’d grinned at my amazement. “What the fuck did you think I was up to on all those wilderness camping vacations? You should’ve come along, like I said.”

Maryanne nuzzled the side of my neck, then pointed up in the sky. “You suppose they have names?”

She was pointing at a little pink moon, an irregular rocky little asteroid thing that had come over the mountains a couple of hours ago, swelling as it came our way, tumbling and twinkling against the black backdrop of the sky.

I said, “If they don’t, we’ll just have to make some up.”

There’d been three of them so far, a yellow, a blue, and now a pink, though there’d never been more than two at once. The blue one was sort of like Earth’s old Moon, a round, not quite featureless disk that seemed far, far away.

There were other lights in the sky too, but damned few. Distant, untwinkling glints, reminding me of planets, that familiar one out there maybe Venus, a pale yellow that might be Jupiter, a pink that could be Mars. Nothing, however, that would remind you of stars, just deep, velvety black that went on and on.

On to nowhere. That’s what the Gods said.

This is the Lesser Creation, infinitely folded in on itself, holding whatever the Gods felt was worth rescuing from the mistake that made us.

What happens if the Greater Gods, unknown, unknowable, find out what their tools have done? Will they sweep us away then, after all?

Maryanne stood and stretched, still looking up at the sky, shining and shadowy in the firelight, all breasts and bush and pale white skin. “You suppose we’re immortal now?”

Isn’t that the way it always works in these things? I said, “If it were my story, that’s the way I’d have it end.”

Looking out across the black, blank emptiness of the immense valley, supposedly filled with every living thing that had ever existed on the Earth, she said, “I always wondered just how bored people might get, living on forever in the hereafter.”

In the end, the only decent place to ride out the rain of air, if you could call it that, turned out to be in our survival capsule bunks. Paul and Julia were hiding in theirs, separate, Connie and I together, this time in mine. In case we wound up flung across the room, at least there’d be a few less feet to fall.

We left the lights on and scrunched in there, eating lunch, listening to the roar of the rain, now more like waves at the ocean, as if heard too close up, than anything else, eating yesterday’s leftovers, like nothing was wrong, like it was raining outside on a blustery winter night in North Carolina.

Tomorrow the sun will shine, and we’ll go for a nice walk in Umstead Forest, amid the leafless gray trees under a crisp, cloudless dark blue sky. And in due course, summer will come again.

We’re not fifty-something, Connie.

We’re young. Young and beautiful. Remember?

The tuna was better for having steeped for a day, and Connie got a loaf of that really great Wellspring bread out of the cupboard. “Last one,” she’d said, bracing her feet against the shivering floor, brandishing a sharp knife. Sandwiches, pickles, chips and Sealtest French Onion Dip, a plastic bottle of Welch’s for me, decaffeinated diet Coke for her.

Think about it.

No matter how hard you try, Connie dearest, you ain’t got time to get fat now.

I kept reaching out to touch her thighs, pat the warmth between her legs, and when we were done, we stretched out, bunk rocking gently underneath us, nuzzling our faces together. Inside her pants, my hand was nice and warm, Connie smiling against the side of my face and murmuring, “Incorrigible.”

I wanted her to call me Scottie again, wanting to feel the way it would melt my heart.

BAM!

The bunk jolted so hard it threw us up in the air a bit and, from the other side of the room, Julia screamed, a high drawn out wail like a special effect in some cheap movie or another.

Crackl

The capsule tilted hard, walls shuddering and groaning around us, tipping back the other way, so we fell together against the inside wall of the bunk. There was a tumbling sound from the floor, Paul cursing incoherently, not even words, near as I could tell. When I looked, he was scrambling on his hands and knees, trying to get back in bed.

Stroby out there, fluorescent lights flickering.

Ballasts failing, I guess.

I turned back to Connie, driving Paul and Julia and everything else from my head. She was scared-looking. White-faced. Wide-eyed. Eyes searching mine for something, anything.

I kissed her softly and reached under the waistband of her pants, putting my palm flat on her belly. Smiled. In the background, you could hear Julia sobbing. Nothing from Paul. Hey, Paulie. Gotcher pillow over yer head yet?

Connie seemed to smile back.

I said, “I’m glad you’re brave.”

The bed jerked under us and the angle of the floor steepened a bit. Outside, things were whacking and booming, so loud I couldn’t imagine what was happening. Jesus. Sounds like sheets and blankets flapping on a clothesline. Gigantic sheets and blankets. In a hurricane.

She said, “I never knew I was. Until just now.”

I slid my hand the rest of the way down into the warmth of her crotch, getting my fingers where I needed them to be. Outside, there was a loud groaning sound, the sound of a giant tree falling in some logger movie. What the hell am I thinking of? Sometimes a Great Notion? That Paul Newman thing. The guy drowning, pinned underwater by a log. Don’t laugh!

I wonder what Connie will say if I try to fuck her now? Maybe if we time it right, we can be coming just as the capsule implodes. I strangled a giggle.

Paul was saying something now. Babbling.

Connie pulled back a little, holding my face between her hands, looking at me. “I never saw two people as scared as Paul and Julia. Why aren’t you afraid?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess… I was only ever afraid of people. This… Hell. I would’ve died someday anyway.”

“Are we going to die right now?”

Outside there was another long groaning sound, followed by a deep thud, like someone slamming the hood of a i950s-era sedan. I said, “We’ll know pretty soon. One way or another.”

She pressed her back into the wall, lifting her leg so she’d be more accessible, and said, “What if we live?”

I shrugged. “What difference does it make?”

It was difficult to get our pants off, scrunched in the bunk like that but we managed, the bed hopping and shuddering around us. And some time in the middle of it all, accompanied by the squeal of what might have been the wind and somebody screaming, the lights went out.

We didn’t notice until afterwards.

Which, when you got right down to it, came as a surprise.

Afterwards?

Well.

Quiet.

Very quiet.

Paulie and I stood in our spacesuits, filling the capsule airlock, integrity checks completed, com checks completed, at the end of our last argument about whether it was reasonable to waste the air in the lock.

Hell, Paulie. We didn’t arrange for anything else.

And we’ve got to know.

Dark eyes doubtful.

Sure the idiot lights show the waste pipe connection is broken, but we’ve still got external power! That’s all we need to know. We’re safe.

For now.

Connie was inside, manning the communication console, watching the images from our helmet cams on TV. Even Julia’d finally gotten out of her fucking bunk, though she didn’t seem to have much to say anymore. Hollow-eyed. Empty.

It’d been over quicker than we expected, one final blast more or less leveling the capsule again, the same blast that broke our sewer pipe, then there was just the wind, moaning and moaning, getting softer and softer until you could hardly hear it at all.

Then you couldn’t.

Turned out the lighting system was fine, the fluorescent tubes had just broken. New tubes, and then we’d stood there, Paulie dressed in jeans, a coat, combat boots, like that’d do any fucking good if the capsule blew out, huh? Me naked again.

I flinched when he said, It’s quiet outside ’cause the air’s all gone.

Connie made me get dressed again, then we had supper, breaking into our TV dinners for the first time, appallingly salty stuff I wondered if I could get used to. Assuming there would be time to get used to anything. We cleaned up the mess, ate again, fucked around with the short wave radio. Ate again. Talked about what to do. No cameras. No satellite dish. No nothing.

The valve in the airlock squealed for a while as the air rushed out, then it got quiet in there as well, Paulie looking at me through the faceplates of our helmets, and I wondered which helmet cam Connie was looking through. Did she want to see me, or see what I saw?

“Well,” I said, “no time like the present.”

Paul grinned. “All of a sudden, I like the past a whole lot better.”

I said, “Connie? How are your instrument readings?”

Her voice was grainy but reassuringly familiar in the helmet phones. “Pressure’s holding steady in here, so I guess the seal’s tight. You’ve got twenty-three millibars in the lock.”

Paul’s face screwed up a little. “A lot more than on Mars!”

“Probably being kept up by outgas-sing from the PLSS backpacks.” I pronounced it pliss, just like the Apollo astronauts. Christ, listen to my fucking heart! Galloping like a horse. Scared? Excited? Or just from the weight of this fucking suit?

I started to work the lock-lever, withdrawing the deadbolts from their sockets. Nothing. I nodded to Paul.

“Okay.”

He reached out one clumsily gloved hand, hesitated, then pulled the latch handle.

The door popped open and swung wide before we could catch it, hinges locking against their stops with a clack. Christ. Impossible.

Connie said, “I heard that! You guys okay? Your pressure went down to nine millibars all of a sudden.”

Oh, Mir. The way they broke the airlock door that time. I said, “We’re fine.” Okay. Sound transmitted through the capsule structure and I heard it over the radio, that’s all.

I expected it to be dark outside for some reason. Dark like outer space in all the movies ever made. The light out there was pale turquoise. Very pale. Very dim. But there. Mist hanging over a soft white landscape. Snow drifted here and there. Something like snow, anyway.

I got out first, bumping Paulie aside as I ducked through the door, backpack antenna scraping, though I cleared my helmet okay. I was standing on a little flat place, like a bit of front porch, with jagged edges, a piece of concrete still clinging to the capsule’s hull. Beyond it, there was a long slope, gradually steepening into a canyon maybe two hundred yards away. Halfway down it, there was a big twisted hunk of something that kind of looked like a bulldozer blade.

No bulldozer, though.

The mist only went up a little ways. Above it, the sky was dark, punctured all over by the still white pinpoints of the stars. Lots of stars. Paul was standing beside me now, silent, looking around.

Little waxy snowflakes were falling, only a few, far apart, coming straight down out of the sky, bouncing when they hit. Just enough air left to slow them down. What? Noble gases?

“Look!” Beyond the mist, there was a shimmering disturbance, a ghostly white plume against the black sky, almost invisible. Paul’s eyes were shining bright through his faceplate. “It’s a nitrogen geyser. Like on Triton!” His little burst of laughter, pure joy, scared me a little bit.

Connie’s voice rasped in the earphones. “So, what’s the scoop? How long can we make it?”

I said, “Eight weeks on the capsule supplies. More if…”

I turned away from the geyser, turned left, towards where the Staff Quarters had been. Not a sign of anything. Twenty feet of structure, forty feet of birm, the hotel foundation. All gone. Where the storerooms had been, there was what looked like a crumpled pile of metal, some of it blue. My Camry maybe?

Paul was still staring at the geyser, lips moving. Telling himself what? I stepped forward, looking beyond him, at the jagged edge of the remaining concrete wall and the smooth curve of the partially exposed capsule. Have to do something about that. Try to cover it up with dirt or something.

What’ll we use for fucking shovels?

Why didn’t we put some tools in the capsule?

There was a hump in the landscape beyond it, level with the capsule, holding its own bit of concrete floor, its own little piece of wall, with a wide, corrugated metal door. My heart seemed to pulse in my chest, the proverbial skipped beat. Okay.

I hopped down, dropping heavily to the ground, almost falling. Why did I expect lowered gravity? Because I’m in a fucking spacesuit? Maybe I thought I was on the Moon. I trudged heavily over to the thing and tried climbing up onto its porch. Shit. Maybe I can reach the bottom edge of the door from here and It was stuck, coming up on one side only, and I imagined the screech of frozen wheels and rails. Silence. It only went up a couple of inches, then stuck fast but I could shine my helmet lights underneath and see inside.

“Well, shit-fire!”

Connie said, “Scott?”

I made my own little maniac’s laugh.

“Scottie?”

I turned to face Paul again, and was gratified to see I’d gotten his attention. “Looks like the Cat bay made it through. I guess we’ve got ourselves a vacuum-adapted halftrack.”

He got laboriously down off the capsule’s porch and started lumbering toward me, teetering, barely able to keep his feet. “Some of our supplies were pretty much indestructible. Air tanks. That kind of thing.”

“So?”

He said, “I bet there’s a lot of crap down in the gully we can salvage.”

When I looked that way, I could see, beyond the mist, another ghostly nitrogen geyser, and a third one beyond that, made tiny in the distance. This, I thought, is really pretty God-damned cool.

Not much more after that.

The Robinson Crusoe thing. The Swiss Family Robinson thing. The Farnham’s Freehold thing. Not quite the Island in a Sea of Time thing, eh? No Nantucket for us.

I awoke the next morning, bladder bursting, with Maryanne’s taste in my mouth, Maryanne curled up beside me, sound asleep and softly snoring just as the sun was coming up like a fat pink balloon over the mountains.

I got up, stretching, creaking, stiff as hell from sleeping on the cold, cold ground, wondering why the fuck the Gods had left me a fifty-something-year-old man. Surely…

I found a little gap in the boma, already pushed open by someone else, staggered down the hillside a little way, and could wait no longer, turned and started pissing merrily away. Jonas was there, a few yards off, pissing himself, and when he caught me watching, smirked, and said, “Deep, too.”

There was a commotion from the slope below, and when I turned to look, there was an enormous fat woman striding along, breasts bounding up and down, belly roll wriggling. Lot of nice muscle in those haunches.

Paulie was scuttling along beside her, walking half-crabwise. “Olga. Olga, please. I didn’t mean…”

She stopped and turned suddenly, planted her feet solidly about eighteen inches apart, one forward the other back, then her shoulders rotated and her fist caught Paulie in the middle of the face with a meaty splat. She stalked off, heading for the woods where the elephant had been yesterday.

Paulie went down on his backside, hands covering his face. When he took them away, there was plenty of blood, and I could see his nose was knocked crooked, broken maybe. “Ow!” He looked up at me, blood running from both nostrils, crossing his lips, dripping off his chin and down his chest, and started to cry.

That’s heaven for you.

With nothing left but the survival capsule, with it getting colder and then colder still, all that was left was for us to dig out the Cat and try to drive cross-country to the National Redoubt. All the way to Colorado. You think maybe they’ll let us in now? Jesus.

We made it all of a hundred miles, I think.

Much over fifteen miles an hour and the fucking thing would buck and jerk and roll, Paulie bitching he couldn’t make sense of the computer screen, Julia pissing and moaning and claiming she needed to puke. We stopped for a break, Connie complaining she needed to get out of the suit, went on, stopped for lunch, went on again…

Maybe ten hours like that, and I was actually asleep when it happened.

I don’t know. Paul was driving, Connie navigating, and there was a reek of piss in the cabin. Maybe it was the distraction Julia made once she figured out she could get the ISS ham frequency on the Cat’s radio.

ISS in the sky!

This is us on the ground!

HALP! HALLLP!

I remember I woke up in something like zero gee, floating inside my suit, head spinning weirdly to the sight of Paulie on the ceiling, Julia screaming, Connie screaming, all these crash-tinkle noises and crumpling sounds and we’re rolling down a God damn hill!

We came to a stop right-side up, lights out.

Julia sobbing.

Everybody else quiet.

Listen carefully.

The soft throb of the diesel at idle, softer pop and huff of the air valves, feeding the engine from all those SCUBA tanks in the trailer, the compressor, the vaporizer, the hamper of oxygen snow…

Okay. Good. Nothing’s broken.

Listen carefully.

No hissing noises?

“Paulie?”

“I’m all right.”

Great. Who gives a fuck? I wish you were dead, Paulie. “Put on the lights.”

A clattering sound. “The switch is on. Must be broken.”

“Swell. Connie?”

“Here, Scott.”

I got my ass on the bench seat and squirmed over somebody. There was a sweet, pissy smell, and Connie said, “Scott.”

“Sorry.” I rummaged in the junk on the floor, fishing in canvas tote bags, until I found a flashlight. Click. Yellow light picked out Paul’s face, staring from the open visor of his space suit. “Scrunch down.”

I got close to the window and shone the light outside. Sheer, irregular white walls on both sides, a narrowing vee of open space in front. “Shit.”

Connie said, “What’s out there, Scott?”

“We’re in a fucking gully.”

Paul made some little choking sound. “I’m… I didn’t see…”

“Move your ass out of the way.”

I got in the driver’s seat, got my feet on the pedals, engaged tracks and tires, and hit the gas. The engine grumbled, and something lumped around outside, but we didn’t budge.

Paul said, “Probably not even on the ground.”

I turned and shone the flashlight on the caulked-shut zipper. Picks and shovels bolted to the sides of this thing. Maybe… I looked at Paul. “Well. What do you think?”

He shut his eyes and looked for a second like he was holding his breath. After a bit, his lips started to move soundlessly. What the fuck, Paulie? Praying? Is that what we’ve got left. He opened his eyes, and said, “I’m so tired. Don’t you want to try?”

Agonized look, shine in his eyes growing. Jesus, don’t cry Paulie. He said, “I’ve got to shit.”

“Well, that’s a big help.”

“Please, oh…” You could actually hear the sound it made when he let go, eyes squinting, mouth in a grimace.

Connie, herself already floating in piss, snarled, “Oh, fucking Jesus!”

I grinned. “What the hell’d you fucking eat yesterday?”

“Frozen tacos.”

“Smart.”

I shone the light out the window again, then clicked it off. Up at the top of the crevasse, you could see a sky full of stars. I said, “Look, we’ll just wind up getting killed if we try to go outside now. Not to mention the wasted air. Why don’t we try to get some sleep? Maybe we’ll think of something in the morning.”

Then I opened my eyes on darkness, wondering what time it was, wondering how long I’d been asleep. I was alone in front, sprawled in the driver’s seat, feet propped up on the passenger’s side, looking out the window. I could see the starry sky, no recognizable constellations. The seat was shaking gently to the soft throb of the idling diesel.

Be a pisser if it stalled while we were sleeping, huh? Never get the fucker started again in this cold. Connie was stretched out on the middle bench seat, gasping softly in her sleep, one arm outflung, resting across my right thigh.

Paul and Julia must be crammed together in back. If you could, Paulie, would you get her out of the suit for one last little fuck? Or is that me I’m thinking about?

Somebody was sniffling a bit. Not Julia.

Watching the stars, I realized I could see them slowly edge east to west. As the world turns? Still got that, at least.

What the fuck are we going to do?

Once the diesel runs out and the engines stop, maybe a week or ten days from now, we’ll last another six or seven hours on the suit batteries, then we freeze to death.

That’s all, folks?

Or we go outside, losing a cabin full of air, try to dig the fucker loose? Maybe it falls on us, or explodes or something? What if the tracks are broken? What then? What if we do break it loose? Can we drive it out of here? There’s a winch under the front bumper. Maybe…

Maybe hell.

Never-say-die bullshit.

Where the hell’s Superman when you fucking need him?

Maybe that other thought was the right idea.

I watched the stars in their slow, stately dance, and, after a bit, wondered why they weren’t all going at the same speed, then wondering if they shouldn’t be going in the same direction. That one star right there, a little brighter than the others, seeming to detach itself from the field and go diagonal…

“Paulie?”

Sniffle. “Paul. Wake up.”

“What the fuck do you want?”

Bitter. Angry. Full of… everything.

Everything that ever went wrong between us.

I said, “There’s not enough ambient light to reflect off a big satellite now, is there?”

The scorn was, as they say, palpable. “Of course not.”

I pointed out the window, and said, “Then what the fuck is that?”

The spaceship turned out to be from Colorado, investigating our mysterious infrared source, and they were impressed as hell we’d built ourselves a mooncar.

Well. You know the rest. The flight to the National Redoubt, Connie gone, then blessed Maryanne, the Expedition to the Sun, the… right. The End.

Maryanne kept craning her neck as we pushed our way through the tall saw-grass, trying to watch the tribe of scared-looking chimps that’d been paralleling our track for the last few days, shading her eyes and standing on tiptoe. There were big, grizzled males, females with babies, cute as hell. Watching us, staying close, but not too close.

Maryanne whispered, “What do you suppose they want?”

I hefted one of the sharpened, fire-hardened sticks we were using for spears, and said, “They probably understand the sabertooth cats are scared of us.”

It’d been about a month since our little tribe had departed the top of the hill and started working its way downslope, deeper into the Earth Bubble valley, a month we’d counted by slashes Millikan made on a stick with his first flint blade. God damn clever little son of a bitch. But he got me thinking about the things I knew too. Which got us all started thinking about what we wanted to do.

Connie hadn’t turned up in that month, nor Lara, nor anybody else, fear about that meeting gradually ebbing away. But still, I wondered. If I found her, would Lara still be thirty years old? Really?

All I have left of her is hazy memories of wonderful old fucks. Were they so great? The only way I’ll ever know is if she turns up and…

Jonas, taking point, held up one broad hand, inhaling deeply. “Smell that ocean! It’s got to be around here somewhere!”

There was a fishy salt tang in the air, all right. And a shushing sound that might not be the wind. I said, “Once we get up on the dunes, we’ll get a better view.” Down in the hollows, all you could see was the white-ice peaks of the Ring wall.

God. Giving names to everything.

There was a sudden, booming howl, not so far away, like a mournful giant playing his tuba. The chimps jerked, looking around, panicky, bug-eyed, jabbering and gesturing, edging closer to us.

Millikan looked at me, more nervous than the chimps, and said, “What’d you say those trumpet-monsters were called?”

“Parasauralophus.”

As we’d moved downslope, it quickly became obvious the life forms of the ages were arranged in rings, going backward in time as you descended toward the mist. Without a machine technology, we won’t get far. The oxygen content of the air has to be different down there. And down in the mist, down in the Archaean…

We’d hardly gotten down to the Pleistocene border, seen our first few mammoths and crap, before the dinosaurs started turning up. Seventy-six million years ago, the world had been full of big, fast migratory animals. And nothing here to stop them from walking uphill.

What the hell’s it going to be like, when the mixing’s at full boil?

And what the hell happens to me if I get fucking killed in here?

For some reason, the Gods didn’t say.

Millikan was looking down at his spear. “This thing’s not going to be much good against a Tyrannosaur.”

“No shit.”

Jonas crested the dune and suddenly threw himself flat. “Jesus!”

I slithered up beside him, pulling Maryanne along by the hand, stopping when I could peer over the dune.

Ocean. Fat, flat ocean, stretching out and out until it became unreal. Something big out there. Something big like a whale.

Maryanne said, “Oh, my God! Look!” Pointing down at a broad white beach like a thousand Waikikis stuck together.

One of the little hairy things looked up from its forage, standing upright with a clam in one hand, a flat rock in the other. It pried the shell open and ate what was inside. Then it casually nudged the next one with its toe, nodding up at the dune. The kneeling one, a female from its hanging, hairy breasts, turned and looked up at us. Froze.

Maryanne said, “Those are habilis, aren’t they?”

I nodded, wishing for just a second that Paulie was here, so I could say they were tor-o-don.

Crouching beside me, Ben Millikan grinned through his beard, and said, “God damn, this is the coolest thing that ever happened to me!”

Out beyond the rolling surf, something leapt from the sea, curving like a dolphin, disappearing again. Not a fish, too small to be an ichthyosaur. It appeared again, standing on its tail looking straight at us, I thought, and screamed, a familiar word-like parrot squawk.

Maryanne whispered, “Like it knows we’re here, and it’s glad.”

Millikan laughed. “Maybe it’s fucking Flipper!”

Closer now, the parasauralophus moaned and, when I looked, the nearest chimp, a big male, was only a few yards away, eyes big and desperate. I gave a tight-lipped smile, remembering all that I’d read, and motioned for him to come on up.

When we camped out that night, six moons appeared in the sky all at once.

Rebirth.

I can’t even call it a second chance, for the first one was rigged against me, even before I squirted, inter anem et urinam, into the false old world.

From the lowest passes through the Ringwall, the Earth Bubble looks unreal, even more like an Impressionist canvas than the Grand Canyon, or the view southward from Kilimanjaro. From any mountain peak, you can see the world below tip away from you, tilting ever steeper as it gets farther away. From the south rim of the Grand Canyon, you can see the clouds over the North Rim angling impossibly upward.

Not here.

Here was a bowl of mist, a bowl of unknowable size, filled with a painted-on, cloud-hazy landscape, a patchy ring of green and gold and blue surrounding an abyss of dense, yellow-white fog. Down there, down in the deepest parts, was air no Phanerozoic animal could breath. Down there was the old bacterial world that was half the history of life on Earth.

Life the Gods felt as much worth saving as our own.

We’d measured it, after a fashion, triangulating peaks around the Ring wall during our trek, plotting angle and azimuth on our birchbark maps as we walked around the world, day on week on month on year, slowly climbing, downward into the past, upward to the end of time.

You haven’t lived ’til you’ve heard a dimetrodon scream.

At some point we guessed the big valley was maybe a half-million miles in diameter, maybe a little more. Enough to hold everything that ever was? Maybe so. Hard to say.

It made me remember another world, that World Without End I imagined, plastered round the outside surface of Creation, the final destination for all transmigrating souls. Somewhere here, there could be High America, if we wanted to build it. Room enough.

But why bother?

Up here, there wasn’t any wind, which was just as well, since it was colder than any hell I’d seen since before the rainout. The pass we’d spotted months ago, spent months climbing towards, was maybe 80,000 feet above the Endtime grassland at the foot of the Ring wall.

Hopeless.

Jonas was the one who pointed out the air pressure wasn’t changing as we went up and down the slope, suggesting the gravity gradient here might not be the same as it was back home and, with it, the atmospheric scale height.

Back home?

Funny to call it that.

It was never home to me.

Home only to the cheap, cheating billions who would live and die for nothing and no one.

Beside me, Maryanne said, “You look good with your gray hair and beard, Scottie. I’m glad they didn’t take it away when they made us young again.”

Young again?

Hardly that.

But they made us well, and that’s as good as youth.

I looked down at her by my side and smiled, thinking how cheap of me it was to be looking at the vista below, when she had her eyes on me. Beyond her, all the others, some looking at the world, some up at the mountains towering on either side of the pass, others huddled in little groups, talking, about who knows what.

Ben and Katy. Jonas and his friends. The black guys from the HDC print shop, who’d seemed so glad to find us on our little hilltop that first night. Even Jake, the queer little advertising director, who’d done his best to be a nice guy instead of a manager. Interesting to see him holding hands with his new friend, Seekerhawk, one of the tall, slim brown men from a tribe who called themselves the Mother’s Children.

Cro-Magnons we called them, one of the Five Races of Mankind, who swept from Africa one hundred millennia and more ago, drowning the Archaics before them.

When I looked, one of the Trolls waved, Weimaraner eyes a startling glint above a Durante nose, the whole shrouded in a bush of platinum blond hair. Five feet four, able to bend steel in his bare hands. No name. Speaking only in a cartoon jabber, like nothing you ever heard before.

The print shop guys called him Fred Flintstone for a while. Then he figured out they were laughing at him. Afterward, he was sorry about the guy that died, buried him with flowers and stone tools and cried over the grave.

The pass through the Ringwall was a short one, just a few hundred yards, the way down the other side pretty much like the one we’d followed upwards, and we all stood there too, looking out and down at what lay beyond.

Orange.

If Paulie were here, would he guess this one was Kzin?

Orange vegetation I guess, orange clouds. Green water, if water it was. A funny smell, making the Neanderthal guy point and jabber, raising his snout to the breeze, if breeze there was.

No mist here.

This valley, with no name as yet, was like some vast meteor crater, complete with central peak, rising from a ring-shaped sea holding enough water to fill the oceans of several worlds. Far away, at least another half-million miles away, was the other side of the Ringwall. Beyond it, there’ll be another world, another one beyond that…

It’s as if I can see them out there, like dimples in some impossibly vast waffle, each one a world, sampled across time from beginning to end.

Beside me, Maryanne said, “Not just all the worlds of the old universe, but all the worlds of all the universes that ever were, or ever could have been.”

I took her hand, taking the first step on the downward trail. “All of them,” I said. “And all within walking distance.”

An unimaginable future?

Perhaps.

I thought I’d miss you, Paulie.

But I don’t.

THE BOOKS Kage Baker

On the same day that I received the proofs for this anthology I learned that Kage Baker had died of cancer, aged fifty-seven. This was her last completed story.

She was best known for her time-travel series about the immortal operatives of the Company, which began with her first novel, In the Garden of Iden (1997). Her steampunk novel, Not Less Than Gods (2010), details some of the secret history of the Company’s Victorian-era predecessor, the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society. The House of the Stag (2008) was shortlisted for a World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.

With this story, written specially for this anthology, we look at a time beyond the apocalypse with the remnants of society trying to get back to life.

WE USED TO have to go a lot farther down the coast in those days, before things got easier. People weren’t used to us then.

If you think about it, we must have looked pretty scary when we first made it out to the coast. Thirty trailers full of Show people, pretty desperate and dirty-looking Show people too, after fighting our way across the plains from the place where we’d been camped when it all went down. I don’t remember when it went down, of course; I wasn’t born yet.

The Show used to be an olden-time fair, a teaching thing. We traveled from place to place putting it on so people would learn about olden times, which seems pretty funny now, but back then… how’s that song go? The one about mankind jumping out into the stars? And everybody thought that was how it was going to be. The aunts and uncles would put on the Show so space-age people wouldn’t forget things like weaving and making candles when they went off into space. That’s what you call irony, I guess.

But afterwards we had to change the Show, because… well, we couldn’t have the Jousting Arena anymore because we needed the big horses to pull the trailers. And Uncle Buck didn’t make fancy work with dragons with rhinesto-ne eyes on them anymore because, who was there left to buy that kind of stuff? And anyway he was too busy making horseshoes. So all the uncles and aunts got together and worked it out like it is now, where we come into town with the Show and people come to see it and then they let us stay a while because we make stuff they need.

I started out as a baby bundle in one of the stage shows, myself. I don’t remember it, though. I remember later I was in some play with a love story and I just wore a pair of fake wings and ran across the stage naked and shot at the girl with a toy bow and arrow that had glitter on them. And another time I played a dwarf. But I wasn’t a dwarf, we only had the one dwarf and she was a lady — that was Aunt Tammy and she’s dead now. But there was an act with a couple of dwarves dancing and she needed a partner, and I had to wear a black suit and a top hat.

But by then my daddy had got sick and died so my mom was sharing the trailer with Aunt Nera, who made pots and pitchers and stuff, so that meant we were living with her nephew Myko too. People said he went crazy later on but it wasn’t true. He was just messed up. Aunt Nera left the Show for a little while after it all went down, to go and see if her family — they were townies — had made it through okay, only they didn’t, they were all dead but the baby, so she took the baby away with her and found us again. She said Myko was too little to remember but I think he remembered some.

Anyway we grew up together after that, us and Sunny who lived with Aunt Kestrel in their trailer, which was next to ours. Aunt Kestrel was a juggler in the Show and Myko thought that was intense, he wanted to be a kid juggler. So he got Aunt Kestrel to show him how. And Sunny knew how already, she’d been watching her mom juggle since she was born and she could do clubs or balls or the apple-eating trick or anything. Myko decided he and Sunny should be a kid juggling act. I cried until they said I could be in the act too, but then I had to learn how to juggle and boy, was I sorry. I knocked out one of my own front teeth with a club before I learned better. The new one didn’t grow in until I was seven, so I went around looking stupid for three years. But I got good enough to march in the parade and juggle torches.

That was after we auditioned, though. Myko went to Aunt Jeff and whined and he made us costumes for our act. Myko got a black doublet and a toy sword and a mask and I got a buffoon overall with a big spangly ruff. Sunny got a princess costume. We called ourselves the Minitrons. Actually Myko came up with the name. I don’t know what he thought a Minitron was supposed to be but it sounded brilliant. Myko and I were both supposed to be in love with the princess and she couldn’t decide between us so we had to do juggling tricks to win her hand, only she outjuggled us, so then Myko and I had a swordfight to decide things. And I always lost and died of a broken heart but then the princess was sorry and put a paper rose on my chest. Then I jumped up and we took our bows and ran off, because the next act was Uncle Monty and his performing parrots.

But the time I was six we felt like old performers and we swaggered in front of the other kids because we were the only kid act. We’d played it in six towns already. That was the year the aunts and uncles decided to take the trailers as far down the coast as this place on the edge of the big desert. It used to be a big city before it all went down. Even if there weren’t enough people alive there anymore to put on a show for, there might be a lot of old junk we could use.

We made it into town all right without even any shooting. That was kind of amazing, actually, because it turned out nobody lived there but old people, and old people will usually shoot at you if they have guns and these did. The other amazing thing was that the town was huge and I mean really huge, I just walked around with my head tilted back staring at these towers that went up and up into the sky. Some of them you couldn’t even see the tops because the fog hid them. And they were all mirrors and glass and arches and domes and scowly faces in stone looking down from way up high.

But all the old people lived in just a few places right along the beach, because the further back you went into the city the more sand was everywhere. The desert was creeping in and taking a little more every year. That was why all the young people had left. There was nowhere to grow any food. The old people stayed because there was still plenty of stuff in jars and cans they had collected from the markets, and anyway they liked it there because it was warm. They told us they didn’t have enough food to share any, though. Uncle Buck told them all we wanted to trade for was the right to go into some of the empty towers and strip out as much of the copper pipes and wires and things as we could take away with us. They thought that was all right; they put their guns down and let us camp then.

But we found out the Show had to be a matinee if we were going to perform for them, because they all went to bed before the time we usually put on the Show. And the fire-eater was really pissed off about that because nobody would be able to see his act much, in broad daylight. It worked out all right, in the end, because the next day was dark and gloomy. You couldn’t see the tops of the towers at all. We actually had to light torches around the edges of the big lot where we put up the stage.

The old people came filing out of their apartment building to the seats we’d set up, and then we had to wait the opening because they decided it was too cold and they all went shuffling back inside and got their coats. Finally the Show started and it went pretty well, considering some of them were blind and had to have their friends explain what was going on in loud voices.

But they liked Aunt Lulu and her little trained dogs and they liked Uncle Manny’s strongman act where he picked up a Volkswagen. We kids knew all the heavy stuff like the engine had been taken out of it, but they didn’t. They applauded Uncle Derry the Mystic Magician, even though the talkers for the blind shouted all through his performance and threw his timing off. He was muttering to himself and rolling a joint as he came through the curtain that marked off backstage.

“Brutal crowd, kids,” he told us, lighting his joint at one of the torches. “Watch your rhythm.”

But we were kids and we could ignore all the grownups in the world shouting, so we grabbed our prop baskets and ran out and put on our act. Myko stalked up and down and waved his sword and yelled his lines about being the brave and dangerous Captainio. I had a little pretend guitar that I strummed on while I pretended to look at the moon, and spoke my lines about being a poor fool in love with the princess. Sunny came out and did her princess dance. Then we juggled. It all went fine. The only time I was a little thrown off was when I glanced at the audience for a split second and saw the light of my juggling torches flickering on all those glass lenses or blind eyes. But I never dropped a torch.

Maybe Myko was bothered some, though, because I could tell by the way his eyes glared through his mask that he was getting worked up. When we had the sword duel near the end he hit too hard, the way he always did when he got worked up, and he banged my knuckles so bad I actually said “Ow” but the audience didn’t catch it. Sometimes when he was like that his hair almost bristled, he was like some crazy cat jumping and spitting, and he’d fight about nothing. Sometimes afterwards I’d ask him why. He’d shrug and say he was sorry. Once he said it was because life was so damn boring.

Anyway I sang my little sad song and died of a broken heart, flumpf there on the pavement in my buffoon suit. I felt Sunny come over and put the rose on my chest and, I will remember this to my dying day, some old lady was yelling to her old man “… and now the little girl gave him her rose!”

And the old man yelled “What? She gave him her nose?”

“Damn it, Bob! Her ROSE\”

I corpsed right then, I couldn’t help it, I was still giggling when Myko and Sunny pulled me to my feet and we took our bows and ran off. Backstage they started laughing too. We danced up and down and laughed, very much getting in the way of Uncle Monty, who had to trundle all his parrots and their perches out on stage.

When we had laughed ourselves out, Sunny said “So… what’ll we do now?”

That was a good question. Usually the Show was at night, so usually after a performance we went back to the trailers and got out of costume and our moms fed us and put us to bed. We’d never played a matinee before. We stood there looking at each other until Myko’s eyes gleamed suddenly.

“We can explore the Lost City of the Sands,” he said, in that voice he had that made it sound like whatever he wanted was the coolest thing ever. Instantly, Sunny and I both wanted to explore too. So we slipped out from the backstage area, just as Uncle Monty was screaming himself hoarse trying to get his parrots to obey him, and a moment later we were walking down an endless street lined with looming giants’ houses.

They weren’t really, they had big letters carved up high that said they were this or that property group or financial group or brokerage or church but if a giant had stepped out at one corner and peered down at us, we wouldn’t have been surprised. There was a cold wind blowing along the alleys from the sea and sand hissed there and ran before us like ghosts along the ground but on the long deserted blocks between there was gigantic silence. Our tiny footsteps only echoed in doorways.

The windows were mostly far above our heads and there was nothing much to see when Myko hoisted me up to stand on his shoulders and look into them. Myko kept saying he hoped we’d see a desk with a skeleton with one of those headset things on sitting at it but we never did; people didn’t die that fast when it all went down. My mom said they could tell when they were getting sick and people went home and locked themselves in to wait and see if they lived or not.

Anyway Myko got bored finally and started this game where he’d charge up the steps of every building we passed. He’d hammer on the door with the hilt of his sword and yell “It’s the Civilian Militia! Open up or we’re coming in!” Then he’d rattle the doors but everything was locked long ago. Some of the doors were too solid even to rattle, and the glass was way too thick to break.

After about three blocks of this, when Sunny and I were starting to look at each other with our eyebrows raised, meaning “Are you going to tell him this game is getting old or do I have to do it?”, right then something amazing happened: one of the doors swung slowly inward and Myko swung with it. He staggered into the lobby or whatever and the door shut behind him. He stood staring at us through the glass and we stared back and I was scared to death, because I thought we’d have to run back and get Uncle Buck and Aunt Selene with their hammers to get Myko out, and we’d all be in trouble.

But Sunny just pushed on the door and it opened again. She went in so I had to go in too. We stood there all three and looked around. There was a desk and a dead tree in a planter and another huge glass wall with a door in it, leading deeper into the building. Myko began to grin.

“This is the first chamber of the Treasure Tomb in the Lost City,” he said. “We just killed the giant scorpion and now we have to go defeat the army of zombies to get into the second chamber!”

He drew his sword and ran yelling at the inner door, but it opened too, soundlessly, and we pushed after him. It was much darker in here but there was still enough light to read the signs.

“It’s a libarary,” said Sunny. “They used to have paperbacks.”

“Paperbacks,” said Myko gloatingly, and I felt pretty excited myself. We’d seen lots of paperbacks, of course; there was the boring one with the mended cover that Aunt Maggie made everybody learn to read in. Every grownup we knew had one or two or a cache of paperbacks, tucked away in boxes or in lockers under beds, to be thumbed through by lamplight and read aloud from, if kids had been good.

Aunt Nera had a dozen paperbacks and she’d do that. It used to be the only thing that would stop Myko crying when he was little. We knew all about the Last Unicorn and the kids who went to Narnia, and there was a really long story about some people who had to throw a ring into a volcano that I always got tired of before it ended, and another really long one about a crazy family living in a huge castle, but it was in three books and Aunt Nera only had the first two. There was never any chance she’d ever get the third one now, of course, not since it all went down. Paperbacks were rare finds, they were ancient, their brown pages crumbled if you weren’t careful and gentle.

“We just found all the paperbacks in the universe!” Myko shouted.

“Don’t be dumb,” said Sunny. “Somebody must have taken them all away years ago.”

“Oh yeah?” Myko turned and ran further into the darkness. We followed, yelling at him to come back, and we all came out together into a big round room with aisles leading off it. There were desks in a ring all around and the blank dead screens of electronics. We could still see because there were windows down at the end of each aisle, sending long trails of light along the stone floors, reflecting back on the long shelves that lined the aisles and the uneven surfaces of the things on the shelves. Clustering together, we picked an aisle at random and walked down it toward the window.

About halfway down it, Myko jumped and grabbed something from one of the shelves. “Look! Told you!” He waved a paperback under our noses. Sunny leaned close to look at it. There was no picture on the cover, just the title printed big.

“Roget’s. The. Saurus,” Sunny read aloud.

“What’s it about?” I asked.

Myko opened it and tried to read. For a moment he looked so angry I got ready to run, but then he shrugged and closed the paperback. “It’s just words. Maybe it’s a secret code or something. Anyway, it’s mine now.” He stuck it inside his doublet.

“No stealing!” said Sunny.

“If it’s a dead town it’s not stealing, it’s salvage,” I told her, just like the aunts and uncles always told us.

“But it isn’t dead. There’s all the old people.”

“They’ll die soon,” said Myko. “And anyway Uncle Buck already asked permission to salvage.” Which she had to admit was true, so we went on. What we didn’t know then, but figured out pretty fast, was that all the other things on the shelves were actually big hard books like Uncle Des’ Barlogio’s Principles of Glassblowing.

But it was disappointing at first because none of the books in that aisle had stories. It was all, what do you call it, reference stuff. We came out sadly thinking we’d been gypped, and then Sunny spotted the sign with directions.

“Children’s Books, Fifth Floor,” she announced.

“Great! Where’s the stairs?” Myko looked around. We all knew better than to ever, ever go near an elevator, because not only did they mostly not work, they could kill you. We found a staircase and climbed and climbed for what seemed forever before we came out onto the Children’s Books floor.

And it was so cool. There were racks of paperbacks, of course but we stood there with our mouths open because the signs had been right — there were books here. Big, hard, solid books but not about grownup stuff. Books with bright pictures on the covers. Books for us. Even the tables and chairs up here were our size.

With a little scream, Sunny ran forward and grabbed a book from a shelf. “It’s Narnia! Look! And it’s got different pictures!”

“What a score,” said Myko, dancing up and down. “Oh, what a score!”

I couldn’t say anything. The idea was so enormous: all these were ours. This whole huge room belonged to us… at least, as much as we could carry away with us.

Myko whooped and ran off down one of the aisles. Sunny stayed frozen at the first shelf, staring with almost a sick expression at the other books. I went close to see.

“Look,” she whispered. “There’s millions. How am I supposed to choose? We need as many stories as we can get.” She was pointing at a whole row of books with colored titles: The Crimson Fairy Book. The Blue Fairy Book. The Violet Fairy Book. The Orange Fairy Book. I wasn’t interested in fairies, so I just grunted and shook my head.

I picked an aisle and found shelves full of flat books with big pictures. I opened one and looked at it. It was real easy to read, with big letters and the pictures were funny but I read right through it standing there. It was about those big animals you see sometimes back up the delta country, you know, elephants. Dancing, with funny hats on. I tried to imagine Aunt Nera reading it aloud on winter nights. It wouldn’t last even one night; it wouldn’t last through one bedtime. It was only one story. Suddenly I saw what Sunny meant. If we were going to take books away with us, they had to be full of stories that would last. That had — what’s the word I’m looking for? Substance.

Myko yelled from somewhere distant, “Here’s a cool one! It’s got pirates!”

It was pretty dark where I was standing, so I wandered down the aisle toward the window. The books got thicker the farther I walked. There was a bunch of books about dogs but their stories all seemed sort of the same; there were books about horses too, with the same problem. There were books to teach kids how to make useful stuff but when I looked through them they were all dumb things like how to weave potholders for your mom or build things out of popsicle sticks. I didn’t even know what popsicle sticks were, much less where I could get any. There were some about what daily life was like back in olden times but I already knew about that, and anyway those books had no story.

And all the while Myko kept yelling things like, “Whoa! This one has guys with spears and shields and gods!” or “Hey, here’s one with a flying carpet and it says it’s got a thousand stories!” Why was I the only one stuck in the dumb books shelves?

I came to the big window at the end and looked out at the view — rooftops, fog, gray dark ocean — and backed away, scared stiff by how high up I was. I was turning around to run back when I saw the biggest book in the world.

Seriously. It was half as big as I was, twice the size of Barlogio’s Principles of Glassblowing, it was bound in red leather and there were gold letters along its back. I crouched down and slowly spelled out the words.

The Complete Collected Adventures ofAsterix the Gaul.

I knew what “Adventures” meant, and it sounded pretty promising. I pulled the book down — it was the heaviest book in the world too — and laid it flat on the floor. When I opened it I caught my breath. I had found the greatest book in the world.

It was full of colored pictures but there were words too, a lot of them, they were the people in the story talking but you could see them talk. I had never seen a comic before. My mom talked sometimes about movies and TV and they must have been like this, I thought, talking pictures. And there was a story. In fact, there were lots of stories. Asterix was this little guy no bigger than me but he had a mustache and a helmet and he lived in this village and there was a wizard with a magic potion and Asterix fought in battles and traveled to all these faraway places and had all these adventures!!! And I could read it all by myself, because when I didn’t know what a word meant I could guess at it from the pictures.

I settled myself more comfortably on my stomach, propped myself up on my elbows so I wouldn’t crunch my starched ruff, and settled down to read.

Sometimes the world becomes a perfect place.

Asterix and his friend ObelLx had just come to the Forest of the Carnutes when I was jolted back to the world by Myko yelling for me. I rose to my knees and looked around. It was darker now; I hadn’t even realized I’d been pushing my nose closer and closer to the pages as the light had drained away. There were drops of rain hitting the window and I thought about what it would be like running through those dark cold scary streets and getting rained on too.

I scrambled to my feet and grabbed up my book, gripping it to my chest as I ran. It was even darker when I reached the central room.

Myko and Sunny were having a fight when I got there. She was crying. I stopped, astounded to see she’d pulled her skirt off and stuffed it full of books, and she was sitting there with her legs bare to her underpants.

“We have to travel light and they’re too heavy,” Myko was telling her. “You can’t take all those!”

“I have to,” she said. “We need these books!” She got to her feet and hefted the skirt. The Olive Fairy Book fell out. I looked over and saw she’d taken all the colored fairy books. Myko bent down impatiently and grabbed up The Olive Fairy Book. He looked at it.

“It’s stupid,” he said. “Who needs a book about an olive fairy?”

“You moron, it’s not about an olive fairy!” Sunny shrieked. “It’s got all kinds of stories in it! Look!” She grabbed it back from him and opened it and shoved it out again for him to see. I sidled close and looked. She was right: there was a page with the names of all the stories in the book. There were a lot of stories, about knights and magic and strange words. Read one a night, they’d take up a month of winter nights. And every book had a month’s worth of stories in it? Now, that was concentrated entertainment value.

Myko, squinting at the page, must have decided the same thing. “Okay,” he said, “But you’ll have to carry it. And don’t complain if it’s heavy.”

“I won’t,” said Sunny, putting her nose in the air.

Myko glanced at me and did a double take.

“You can’t take that!” he yelled. “It’s too big and it’s just one book anyway!”

“It’s the only one I want,” I said, “And anyhow, you got to take all the ones you want!” He knew it was true, too. His doublet was so stuffed out with loot, he looked pregnant.

Myko muttered under his breath but turned away, and that meant the argument was over. “Anyway we need to leave.”

So we started to, but halfway down the first flight of stairs three books fell out of Sunny’s skirt and we had to stop while Myko took the safety pins out of all our costumes and closed up the waistband. We were almost to the second floor when Sunny lost her hold on the skirt and her books went cascading down to the landing, with the loudest noise in the universe. We scrambled down after them and were on our knees picking them up when we heard the other noise.

It was a hissing, like someone gasping for breath through whistly dentures, and a jingling, like a ring of keys, because that’s what it was. We turned our heads.

Maybe he hadn’t heard us when we ran past him on the way up. We hadn’t been talking then, just climbing, and he had a lot of hair in his ears and a pink plastic sort of machine in one besides. Or maybe he’d been so wrapped up, the way I had been in reading, that he hadn’t even noticed us when we’d pattered past. But he hadn’t been reading.

There were no books in this part of the library. All there was on the shelves was old magazines and stacks and stacks of yellow newspapers. The newspapers weren’t crumpled into balls in the bottoms of old boxes, which was the only way we ever saw them, they were smooth and flat. But most of them were drifted on the floor like leaves, hundreds and hundreds of big leaves, ankle-deep, and on every single one was a square with sort of checkered patterns and numbers printed in the squares and words written in in pencil.

I didn’t know what a crossword puzzle was then but the old man must have been coming there for years, maybe ever since it all went down, years and years he’d been working his way through all those magazines and papers, hunting down every single puzzle and filling in every one. He was dropping a stub of a pencil now as he got to his feet, snarling at us, showing three brown teeth. His eyes behind his glasses were these huge distorted magnified things, and full of crazy anger. He came over the paper-drifts at us fast and light as a spider.

“Fieves! Ucking kish! Ucking fieving kish!”

Sunny screamed and I screamed too. Frantically she shoved all the books she could into her skirt and I grabbed up most of what she’d missed but we were taking too long. The old man brought up his cane and smacked it down, crack but he missed us on his first try and by then Myko had drawn his wooden sword and put it against the old man’s chest and shoved hard. The old man fell with a crash, still flailing his cane but he was on his side and striking at us faster than you’d believe and so mad now he was just making noises, with spittle flying from his mouth. His cane hit my knee as I scrambled up. It hurt like fire and I yelped. Myko kicked him and yelled, “Run!”

We bailed, Sunny and I did, we thundered down the rest of the stairs and didn’t stop until we were out in the last chamber by the street doors. “Myko’s still up there,” said Sunny. I had an agonizing few seconds before deciding to volunteer to go back and look for him. I was just opening my mouth when we spotted him running down the stairs and out towards us.

“Oh, good,” said Sunny. She tied a knot in one corner of her skirt for a handle and had already hoisted it over her shoulder on to her back and was heading for the door as Myko joined us. He was clutching the one book we’d missed on the landing. It was The Lilac Fairy Book and there were a couple of spatters of what looked like blood on its cover.

“Here. You carry it.” Myko shoved the book at me. I took it and wiped it off. We followed Sunny out. I looked at him sidelong. There was blood on his sword too.

It took me two blocks, though, jogging after Sunny through the rain, before I worked up the nerve to lean close to him as we ran and ask: “Did you kill that guy?”

“Had to,” said Myko. “He wouldn’t stop.”

To this day I don’t know if he was telling the truth. It was the kind of thing he would have said, whether it was true or not. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say back. We both kept running. The rain got a lot harder and Myko left me behind in a burst of speed, catching up to Sunny and grabbing her bundle of books. He slung it over his shoulder. They kept going, side by side. I had all I could do not to fall behind.

By the time we got back the Show was long over. The crew was taking down the stage in the rain, stacking the big planks. Because of the rain no market stalls had been set up but there was a line of old people with umbrellas standing by Uncle Chris’s trailer, since he’d offered to repair any dentures that needed fixing with his jeweler’s tools. Myko veered us away from them behind Aunt Selene’s trailer, and there we ran smack into our moms and Aunt Nera. They had been looking for us for an hour and were really mad.

I was scared sick the whole next day, in case the old people got out their guns and came to get us but nobody seemed to notice the old man was dead and missing, if he was dead. The other thing I was scared would happen was that Aunt Kestrel or Aunt Nera would get to talking with the other women and say something like, “Oh, by the way, the kids found a library and salvaged some books, maybe we should all go over and get some books for the other kids too?” because that was exactly the sort of thing they were always doing, and then they’d find the old man’s body. But they didn’t. Maybe nobody did anything because the rain kept all the aunts and kids and old people in next day. Maybe the old man had been a hermit and lived by himself in the library, so no one would find his body for ages.

I never found out what happened. We left after a couple of days, after Uncle Buck and the others had opened up an office tower and salvaged all the good copper they could carry. I had a knee swollen up and purple where the old man had hit it but it was better in about a week. The books were worth the pain.

They lasted us for years. We read them and we passed them on to the other kids and they read them too, and the stories got into our games and our dreams and the way we thought about the world. What I liked best about my comics was that even when the heroes went off to far places and had adventures, they always came back to their village in the end and everybody was happy and together.

Myko liked the other kind of story, where the hero leaves and has glorious adventures but maybe never comes back. He was bored with the Show by the time he was twenty and went off to some big city up north where he’d heard they had their electrics running again. Lights were finally starting to come back on in the towns we worked, so it seemed likely. He still had that voice that could make anything seem like a good idea, see, and now he had all those fancy words he’d gotten out of Roget’s The Saurus too. So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that he talked Sunny into going with him.

Sunny came back alone after a year. She wouldn’t talk about what happened and I didn’t ask. Eliza was born three months later.

Everyone knows she isn’t mine. I don’t mind.

We read to her on winter nights. She likes stories.

PALLBEARER Robert Reed

Robert Reed (b. 1956) has been one of the more prolific writers of science fiction since he first appeared in 1986. His work is diverse but he is probably best known for his more extreme concepts, such as that found in Marrow (2000), about a group of aliens and genetically changed humans who travel through the universe in a ship that is so huge that it contains its own planet. Most of his short stories remain to be collected into book-form but some will be found in The Dragons of Springplace (1999) and The Cuckoo’s Boys (2005).

LOLA AGREES WITH me, we’ve never seen a colder winter. Most nights drop below freezing, sometimes a long ways below, and if the stoves don’t get fed, mornings are painful. Better to lie under the heavy covers and fool around, we joke. But eleven years together and two swollen bladders usually put the brakes on too much friskiness. Besides, we’ve got a dozen dogs howling to be fed. For the last few weeks, our habit has been to leap out of bed and dress in a rush, then sprint outside — she has her outhouse, I’ve got mine — and then with all of the mutts on our heels, we hurry indoors, throwing logs into the kitchen stove so at least one room is habitable before we attack the new day.

The cold is bad, but there hasn’t been any snow either. Not a dusting. Last year’s drought hasn’t shown any signs of surrender, leaf ess trees and sorry brown grass bending under a slicing north wind. With my big important voice, I announce, “Winter is Death.” Lola thinks that’s a bit much, but I believe what I say. If you can’t migrate or hibernate, there’s nothing to eat here but leftovers from last summer and fall. If this cold didn’t pass, we would eventually perish. But of course winter is just a season, and not a very big one at that. My wife smiles and promises me another spring followed by a long hot summer. “Because the air is still filled with… what is that stuff called…?”

“Carbon dioxide.”

“I don’t know why I can’t remember that,” she says.

Lola’s a simple, practical girl. That’s why.

“Carbon what?” she asks.

With my important voice, I repeat the words.

“I love you,” she says.

“I love you,” I say.

Lola stands at the warming stove, wearing two sweaters and stirring our oatmeal. In ways I could never be, she is happy. Smiling for no obvious reason, she asks what I’m planning for my day.

“You remember,” I say.

“Tell me again.”

“Run the meat into town.”

“I forgot,” she claims, her stirring picking up speed.

But really, she isn’t that simple. What she forgets can be a message, not a mistake. Like here: Butcher Jack wants the meat. But he has three daughters too, all in their teens. Some nights Lola lies awake, scared that I’ll leave her for some young gal who gives me babies. If not Butcher Jack’s kids, then there’s dozens of single ladies living in that hated town — fertile sluts talking about Christ but not meaning it, their spoiled easy lives giving them time to paint their faces and cover their bodies with fancy clothes meant to do nothing but draw a man’s eyes. She hates my trips to town. We need them, and she doesn’t dare stop me. But even an insensitive husband would pick up on these feelings, and I’m not the insensitive type.

Eating breakfast, I ask what we need. What can I bring her?

Two different questions, those are.

Her wish list is shorter than usual.

She mentions dried apples and bug-free flour and oats and maybe cloth that she can use to make new clothes and wool yarn if I can manage it. Then she pauses, staring at the table between us, saying nothing but in a very important way.

“What’s wrong?”

She shakes her head. But instead of lying, she admits that she gets scared when I leave for long.

“Scared of what?”

Lola looks at me.

“I always come home,” I remind her. Of course maybe I won’t make it tonight, but by tomorrow I’ll be sitting here again. And she’ll have me until spring, if we get enough supplies for all our smoked meat.

“I know you’ll be back,” she claims. Then a moment later, she mentions, “The butcher shouldn’t take long.”

“I have old friends to see,” I remind her.

She nods.

“Rituals,” I add.

One ritual makes her smile.

“Come with me,” I tell her.

But that will never happen. Even the suggestion brings up old feelings, and as her face stiffens, she says, “I wouldn’t be welcome.”

“It’s been years.”

“And what’s changed?”

“Well,” I say. “It’s not like people will talk ugly to your face.”

Heat flows into those gorgeous eyes. The sources of pain aren’t worth repeating. We know the history, and just by bringing it up, I make certain that she’ll stay behind. With a nod, Lola admits that we need supplies, but at least I won’t be doing this chore again next month. “Get everything you can today,” she implores. “Whatever we need, and maybe a present for me. All right? Then come home as fast as possible.”

Maybe my wife doesn’t know the ingredients of the air. But better than me, she remembers why we even bother to breathe.

There’s no telling how many vehicles went into making my freight truck. I lost count of the places where I found the little valves and bolts and brackets and gaskets. But the body belonged to a military Hummer and the engine to a second Hummer — a big eight-cylinder reconfigured to burn even our lousy homemade alcohol. No two tires have the same lineage. I can make most repairs using the tools on hand and the junkyard behind our last outbuilding. But one of these days, this truck is going to stop running. It’ll probably happen at the bottom of a gully and miles from home, and the part I need won’t be in my inventory, or more likely I’ll hike all the way home and find ten replacements, every last one of them rusted and useless.

Water and time are two demons steadily erasing what remains from before. But that very bad day still sits somewhere in the future. Today we have a fleet of Jeeps and little trucks and tractors and powered carts, plus the one big Hummer. With Lola’s help, I load the truck and both trailers, tying down the choicest parts of elk and whitetail and wild pigs, plus that one idiot black bear that decided to visit us last October, mauling our dogs when he wasn’t making a mess of our smokehouse. Balancing the load is critical, and it takes a lot of pushing and dragging until everything is just right. Suddenly it’s mid-morning. Lola thinks it’s too late to go and wants me to delay, although she won’t say it. I give her a kiss and she does nothing. I step away and she pulls me close and kisses me, lifting her face and whole body against me. I have to laugh. Then she slaps my face and storms away. I climb into the cab and take the usual deep breath, for luck. The engine catches on the first try, and I wave and she waves and smiles, and I roll across our yard and down onto the narrow, grass-choked road to town.

The dogs follow but not too far.

In good shoes and motivated, a fit person could run to Salvation in ninety minutes. Every road between home and the highway is my responsibility. Nobody else lives out here. Spring and summer, I use our biggest tractor to pull the mower, keeping the weeds and volunteer trees off the once-graveled roadbeds. I also blade over the ruts and any gullies made by cloudbursts and eventually I’m going to have to brace the bridge at the seven-mile mark.

The bridge creaks and moans but it holds as always. My roads end at the highway and sitting beside the intersection, happy in the sun, is a tiger — a great yellow and white and black beast staring at this noisy contraption and the stubborn, half-deaf man clinging to its steering wheel.

The local tigers are beauties. Their ancestors lived in a city zoo or maybe somebody’s private collection and instead of being mercy-killed the big cats were set free. Siberian blood runs in this fellow. He is enormous and warm inside that rich winter coat. A fur like that would command a huge price in town. Or even better, it would be the perfect surprise for a woman whose biggest hope is for a sack of bug-free flour.

But this tiger proves to be a wise soul. Reading my mind, he vanishes into the grass before I can get hold of my favorite rifle, much less put the scope to my eye or push a big bullet into the chamber.

Oh, well.

Salvation stands along this highway and the adjacent ribbon of clear, drought-starved water. Turning left, I head downstream. Rectangular foundations show where homes once stood, pipe and wire scavenged long ago, the wood and gypsum burnt off by the spring fires. Side roads and driveways are nearly invisible under the pale dead weeds. A factory was only half-built when work stopped and, while the roof caved in years ago, the concrete walls and paved parking lot are putting on worthy battles against roots and the surge of the frosts. After that ruin comes the first tended fields. Families have claimed different patches of bottomland. People who might be four generations removed from farming have figured out how to plow and irrigate, how to fight off the weeds and pests, saving seed and canning their produce and trading for new seeds that will do better or do worse this coming year.

It has been weeks since I saw any new human face. Today’s first face belongs to a boy. Standing in the trees between the cold water and me, he looks wild and very happy. Curious about this man and his enormous truck, he lifts his arms, yelling something important. I can’t hear a word over the screaming of the engine. Rolling past him, I wave like any friendly neighbor.

He runs after me. And because he is a boy, he picks up a piece of the broken pavement, flinging it into the last trailer.

New houses mark the outskirts of Salvation. Standing back from the river, they are built from packed earth and straw bales, roughly hewn wood and salvaged sheets of random metal. Beauty and elegance don’t matter. Being tight in the winter and cool in the summer is what counts. The town grows every year, and this is the look of the… what’s that word? Oh, yeah. The suburbs.

Another mile, and I’m in the original town. The houses here are taller and far prettier than the dirt mounds, and they’re 5,000 years fancier. Corkscrew windmills turn on the peaked roofs while solar panels face the cold bright sun, the day’s wealth turned into heat and LEDs and electricity stored in banks of refurbished batteries. I can’t say what people want with so much juice. How many lamps do you need to read an old book at midnight? But power is power, prestige never changes, and if I can’t remember who lives in which house, at least I can be certain that only the best citizens are living behind those insulated front doors.

Salvation has always been Salvation. But the people who built it were different from today’s good citizens. Worried about their future, they purchased hundreds of acres of farmland. They created a town square and a host of little businesses and streets filled with efficient, luxurious homes. Being fonvard-looking souls, they powered their world with wind and sunlight. They devised a community and a life style that demanded little from the overpopulated, overheated world. But wealthy people are smugly confident. They will always do what looks smart, and being smart was what killed them. That’s why Salvation became a ghost town. But these beautiful homes weren’t empty for long, because up in heaven a benevolent God sent His chosen people to a place with that perfect name, and among the blessed were my mother and my father, and me.

In a town that often chews up its own, Butcher Jack is considered a fair trader, a gentleman unencumbered by enemies or old grudges. And he’s glad to see me but only because we’re friends and because we think the world of each other. After the usual greetings and handshakes, he turns quiet, throwing a sour look at the truck and trailers loaded high with sweet wild meat.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing you’ve done.”

I can’t guess what he means.

“It’s the Martin brothers,” he begins.

Identical twins, the Martins are a few years older than me, prone to drinking homemade whiskey and starting fights with whoever is closest. They were barely men when they were shunned, and when their behaviors didn’t change the mayor took the unusual step of forcing them out of town. The brothers live on the National Guard base several days’ west, sharing at least four wives and a platoon of kids who call both of them “Dad”. Why that clan means anything to me is a mystery, right up until Jack admits, “They just brought in a load of cured buffalo and wild cattle.”

“Since when do they share?”

“Since this winter. Too many bored kids underfoot, too much energy causing mischief. They figured it was time to put the crew to work, maybe barter for toys and the like.”

“But how’s their meat?”

He answers my question with a hard stare.

“Do they match my stuff?” I ask.

“No, and that’s why you’ll always have customers, Noah. Least as far as I’m concerned.”

Why doesn’t this feel like good news?

“Drunks or not, the Martins did a respectable job. Not the flavor you manage, and the meat demands chewing. But people are pretty satisfied.”

“How much did they bring?”

Jack considers my load before saying, “Twice yours.”

“Damn.”

“There’s the problem’s heart,” he says. “Our local market is just about saturated.”

I used to worry about my neighbors turning into hunters, particularly as the elk and buffalo grew common. But killing is easy work. Gutting the beasts is hard, and smoking that lean flesh is an art form. If I hadn’t come to town today, I’d still feel like a wealthy man. But now I’m destitute, wrestling with my terrors, wondering if weeks of labor are going to count for nothing. And worst of all, my best friend in Salvation is delivering the deathblow.

“You’ve still got your loyal customers,” Jack repeats.

I nod.

“And remember, we’ve got more mouths in town. Twenty more than last year, nearly.”

I wait.

He offers a sum. It’s half what I expected, but I know it’s more than he has to pay me. This is charity, and I have to smile. Then he calls out his four sons to help unload the meat, and I catch myself watching for his notorious daughters. I don’t see them anywhere. Once his boys are working, he turns back to me, saying, “Things won’t get any better, Noah.”

“You mean with the Martins?”

“No, it’s the darn Mennonites,” he says, waving toward the southeast. “Those hill families are clearing pastures, putting up fences and breeding with some quality bulls.”

“Tigers like beef,” I point out.

And Jack nods, wanting to believe that too. “But they may have solved the predator problem,” he warns. “Big dogs trained to watch the herds, and when there’s trouble, the dogs bark. Cougars, wolves, even tigers… they’re all going to think twice when those bearded men start firing their big rifles.”

I laugh sadly.

Jack shrugs. “Next year, in a small scale, they’ll be putting domesticated beef on our tables.”

And I curse.

Which he expects. And with his own sense of impending loss, he adds, “Mennonites are smart businessmen. Always have been. They’ll eventually build their own cooler and slaughterhouse. And at that point, both of us will be scrambling for work.”

So everybody’s in a tough place. Except that I don’t care about Jack’s troubles. We’re friends, even partners. But when your life is tumbling down, it’s amazing how little you feel for the rest of the hapless debris.

Visits to town usually include the only official bar, The Quilt Shop. Christians don’t like public drinking, which is why the town policy is one beer every day -served in a very tall glass, of course. But the barter papers from Jack won’t cover the food and cloth that we need. In an ugly, sober mood, I walk past the bar, aiming to visit my mother instead. Marching across the town square, I pause here and there to chat with the faces I know. Nobody mentions Lola; nothing of substance is discussed. They want to know how I am. They tell me that I look fit and fed. What’s the news from the wilderness? Did I bring in my usual venison? Is the weather cold enough? This winter must be like the old winters, young voices claim. But Old Ferris knows better. “I’ve seen bigger chills and a lot more snow,” he says.

“And I grew up in Oklahoma.”

Oklahoma used to be a real place. Now it’s a word that a seventy-year-old man might as well have made up.

“Off to see your mom, are you?”

“I am.”

Ferris nods. “Say a good prayer for me, would you?”

“Yes, sir. I will.”

The cemetery sits on north-facing ground too steep to be planted, affording a view of the rooftops and solar panels, bottomlands and the hills and prairie reaching to the rolling horizon. Looking east and downstream, the distant country changes from dead brown to sterile cold gray. That grayness marks crisscrossing paved roads and too many houses to count. I’ll never go into the city again. It’s a vow I made years ago, and I’ve kept it better than most. A few slumping buildings can look noble and important, but a landscape where hundreds of thousands of people lived and died is never noble. Cemeteries are beautiful places in comparison, even when the grass is brown. A cemetery doesn’t smell, and it doesn’t cry out in pain, and looking at neat burial sites never makes me think about the waste and appalling loss that comes when half a million ghosts are whispering in one miserable voice.

I don’t know what to think about the afterlife. But I’ll never accept pretty notions like heaven and a righteous hell.

Mom’s marker is a square block cut from the local limestone, her name and the important dates chiseled into the flattest face, along with the usual scripture. My mom believed in God and loved Christ, and she took lessons from that strange old book. It’s those lessons that save my life, and that’s why I can stand on this frozen ground today. Mom always acted on what she believed, and since the heart is a fool, my poor father and his heart usually went along with her crazy decisions.

I never could make sense of their love. But if I were a grateful son, I would kneel down on this frozen sacred ground and clasp my hands together, thanking my mother and God for this opportunity to be alive, seeing the world unfold into new, unexpected shapes.

Except that I’m not a grateful son.

My little ritual — this chore that I perform whenever visiting town — I do for the sake of my wife. Years ago, most of the local people treated Lola and her family unfairly. One bitter old woman was at the center of those bad feelings and petty slights. Even as a boy, I realized that my future wife didn’t deserve to be shunned. But that was what happened. My mother was responsible, and the pain has lingered long past her death. And that’s why I usually have one tall beer at the bar and then walk to the cemetery, taking a long look around to make sure that I’m alone, then yanking down my pants and investing a few moments pissing on that crude tombstone.

It feels better than prayer. And that’s what I’m doing today — without beer to help, but managing just fine — and that’s what I’m finishing up when something unexpected happens. First comes the sound of an engine working and only then I catch a glimpse of a remarkable apparition on the highway east of town.

What kind of truck is that?

I pull up my trousers and fasten the buttons. I’m tying my belt when the mystery machine enters the town square. A long aluminum box rides high on fat tires and the windshield looks like the window on a house and smaller windows are fixed to at least one long side, and loyally following the vehicle is a big trailer carrying what looks like an auxiliary fuel tank and other supplies.

From some deep unexpected corner of my head, a memory finds me. No, the vehicle isn’t quite the same. It has been updated to meet this world’s bad roads and fuel shortages. But out of the fog between my ears comes an impossible answer:

An RV.

Which stands for what?

I can’t remember. I probably never knew. But this is the best kind of marvel, like something from a dream, and that foolish part of me is beating fast now, making me feel like a happy little kid.

I was seven and glad to be traveling the world, eating canned food and picking out new clothes as soon as my almost-new clothes were dirty. It seemed like a natural life, and I didn’t complain. Then dad heard chatter on the short wave radio. People of Faith were talking about a town left empty and clean, and life was going to be easy again. But weren’t things pretty sweet already? The dead didn’t stink much anymore. I liked wandering and the everyday rituals, like helping my father explore empty houses, hunting for ammunition and tools and keys to cars that still ran. The scale of the disaster was enormous. But then again, everything’s enormous to a young boy. And nothing is more natural than death. For all I knew, people had lived this way since the Creation: prosperity always made our species too proud, and then God would send a flood or worse, slaughtering only the evil people in the world.

That’s what my mother’s prayers said. Every night and every morning, and with each meal of scavenged food, she would thank the Good Lord for the treasure left behind by the vanquished Unbelievers.

I prayed and dad prayed, but not like mom. She was the one who decided we should drive to Salvation. Dad wasn’t as hopeful, but he couldn’t find good reasons to hang his doubts on. So we found a new car for a new beginning and by the end of that trip I was feeling excited about this mythical place. We crossed half the state before swinging wide around the giant city. Mom navigated; dad watched the gas gauge. I studied a thousand fires burning out of control, enjoying the towering smoke with the dirty flames at the bottom and the stink of chemicals and old wood incinerated by the wild, wondrous heat. I didn’t think once about the consequences to anybody’s health. I was seven, and fire was fun, and this very important drive was another great adventure in a life filled with little else.

But once we pulled into Salvation, nagging disappointment took hold. We were late arrivals; only a few half-finished houses were left unclaimed. The Mayor welcomed us as Christians, and a little feast was held in our honor. But we didn’t have solar panels or windmills on our house. Holes for pipes and wires were cut in the walls but none of that work had begun. Suddenly there were kids to play with, except now I was too busy to act my age. My folks put me to work. Ferris was our first friend, helping with the toughest jobs. He told us how the town was abandoned when he arrived, not even the usual bodies lying about. But then again, rich sinners usually died in distant hospitals and hospices. What else could explain it? A naturally happy fellow, Ferris smiled and sang odd songs as he and a few other men helped with our carpentry and plumbing and wring. But everybody had duties in their own homes. People with real skills were scarce and the Mayor and his inner circle monopolized their time. My parents did their best, learning from the daily mistakes. If I was lucky, the fires few and the weather clear, I got to ride with dad into the city. We hunted for useful machines or materials that could be bartered. I loved those little journeys. I killed my first wild game in one of city parks, and dad helped clean and cook my rabbit lunch.

When the day got late, he said, “We need to head home.”

“Why?”

He laughed. Shaking his head, he admitted, “I don’t know why.”

I argued that we could stay here tonight, go back tomorrow.

He dwelled on the merits of that strategy. Then he added his own good reason to delay. “We wouldn’t have to pray again until tomorrow.”

We hadn’t prayed before the rabbit feast. Until then, I hadn’t noticed.

“What do you think of Salvation, Noah?”

I thought hard. Then shrugging, I said, “It’s okay.”

He didn’t talk.

“Do you like it?” I asked.

He didn’t want to answer. It was best to point out, “Those houses are perfect for us. When ours is finished, we’ll have power and water and all the comforts. We can grow vegetables out back, so the canned goods last longer, and you’ll go to school with the other kids.”

“Are you going to teach us?”

Dad was a teacher before. But the question seemed to take him by surprise. “If they want me to serve. Yes.”

But nobody ever asked, and dad knew better than volunteer.

After that first year, life in Salvation became ordinary. Normal even. I had school and church and no reason to wonder where my food was coming from tomorrow. Which was good and bad. New people kept arriving, some coming from distant parts of the country, and while a few lingered, most found reasons to keep moving. Most weren’t Believers, or we didn’t think they were. Why God’s wrath had spared them was a mystery to me. But one undeserving family was particularly stubborn, claiming to have nowhere else to go. They built a new house in the hills. The dad was a talented carpenter, so he was able to find work even with the people who despised him. His little girl was named Lola. Lola’s mother taught her at home, and only on rare occasions did they attend church services. But I made a point of talking to the girl whenever I saw her, and better yet, she would smile and happily talk to me.

Mom noticed and thought it best to warn me, “She isn’t a good person, Noah. Stay clear of her.”

“How do you know that?”

Mom had many talents. She could talk to God and convince herself about anything, and she was a marvel when it came to manipulating others. But better than anyone, she was able to read people, measuring their souls and spotting their weaknesses.

“Lola’s parents are pretenders,” she claimed. “They say the right words, but words mean nothing if there’s no feeling behind them.”

Mom wasn’t the only perceptive person in our family. “What about Dad?” I asked.

She stared at me for a long moment. Then she looked away, asking, “What do you mean?”

“He says the right words. But I don’t think he believes them.”

“Well,” she said, her coldest eyes finding me. “Don’t repeat those words. Do you understand me?”

I understood, but that didn’t matter.

We weren’t the only people watching, and ideas, particularly the dangerous ones, have their own lives. Like diseases, they can be carried on the wind, growing wherever they find weakness.

A couple years after our arrival, Salvation’s first Mayor was drummed out of office. Three young girls were pregnant, each naming him as the father, and maybe that was true. Maybe. What mattered was that he was shunned, and mom became a very prominent citizen. She belonged to the new Mayor’s inner circle, suddenly attending meetings and seeing to important but vague duties, holding no official station but acquiring a considerable reputation nonetheless. People couldn’t stop smiling at her, even when they despised her. She formed a Bible study group, and women fought for the chance to sit in our living room, reading about God’s mercy and judgment. When those ladies visited, dad would vanish. Then he started to skip Sunday church. And here the story can be told one of two ways: either my mother protected my father, deflecting criticisms to keep him safe for as long as possible. Or she was the acidic force that decided something had to be done about the doubter in our midst.

Either way, one morning I woke to find Dad’s hand over my mouth. He told me to follow him, and we walked out back, past the battery shed holding yesterday’s sun and the woodpile holding forty years of sunshine. That’s the way that one-time teacher would talk to me, explaining how the world worked. But there weren’t any lessons that day. He barely had time to confess that he was leaving, leaving right now, and this was good-bye.

I didn’t ask why. There wasn’t any need. All I said was, “Take me.”

He shook his head. “I can’t, Noah. No.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m not sure,” he admitted, looking worried about whatever would come next.

I didn’t feel scared. Until that moment, I didn’t appreciate how much I wanted to be free of this town and its people — most of these people, at least -and that’s why I asked to go with him, and that’s why I was furious watching this man that I loved climb alone into a truck that probably didn’t have enough fuel to run fifty miles.

He felt sorry for me. I could see that. To make both of us feel better, he said, “I’ll be back some day. You’ll see.”

He was lying. I knew it, but maybe he didn’t. He was lying to himself, just like he did for years when he pretended to believe whatever his crazy wife would tell him to believe.

I started crying. On bare feet, I chased that truck west on the river highway, and I kept running hard even when I couldn’t see my father anymore. Then I stumbled and skinned both knees and limped home, finding my mother sitting at the kitchen table. She had been crying but her tears were finished by then. She looked old and extra stern. The woman used to be pretty. Before she was a mother, she was beautiful. I knew that from the old pictures. But that woman died during these last years, and what sat before me was tough and incapable of telling even a pitying lie.

“He did what was best,” she claimed.

“Leaving like this, before the harm spread to his loved ones…”

“But what about me?” I blurted.

“You?” She stared at me. Then after a shrug of the shoulders and one bored sigh, she admitted, “You’ll thrive or you’ll perish, Noah. Either way, your fate is entirely up to you.”

The RV sits on the ornate brick road that borders the grassy town square. The machine’s big engine has been turned off but still ticks down. Maybe twenty adults have gathered nearby, warning the children and one another to keep back. Guns are on display, and for every visible shotgun there are probably two pistols in easy reach. Stories about bandits have become common fodder, and people want to feel cautious and smart. Why nameless enemies would travel inside an old mobile home is a mystery. But sure enough, I find myself standing back too, listening to the engine cool, watching the dusty windows.

Behind the glass someone moves.

Prayers break out; neighbors join hands. But when somebody reaches for me, I step ahead of everyone, including the kids.

“Noah,” say a couple of the older voices, sounding reproachful.

Then a girl, maybe twelve years old, blurts, “Who’s that man?”

I’m not seen around town enough to be familiar. But Old Ferris says, “That’s Helen’s boy,” and it is strangely heartening to know that I am still defined by one minuscule accident in biology.

I walk halfway to the apparition and stop.

It’s Butcher Jack who emerges from the crowd, winking nervously when he joins me.

“What do you think?” he whispers.

A thousand years of guesses wouldn’t find the truth. I say nothing, and we walk together up to the RVs big front door, hesitating an instant before each of us gives the filthy metal a friendly, flat-handed slap.

Jack starts to say, “Hello?”

And the door opens. The violent hiss of compressed gas startles us, and we leap back. I’m so nervous that I am laughing, and that’s what the young woman sees when she pops into view.

She sees a giggling fool. To me, she looks twenty, fit and very pretty. Smiling as if it is her natural expression, she jumps to the bottom step and grabs the door handle while leaning out at us. She is lovely and slender with her gold hair worn long and trousers that couldn’t be much tighter. It’s not that I fall in love. But my first impression is that if I were ten years younger, I would be helplessly, shamelessly infatuated.

“Oh good,” she says.

There’s an accent to her words — a warm friendly way of speaking that is completely new to me.

“Can you two boys help with grandma?” she asks.

Jack looks at me.

I suppose this could be a trap. A beautiful girl lures ignorant older men into her mobile home, making them her prisoner, abusing them in all sorts of wicked ways. That certainly is worth the risk, I decide. So I lead the way, climbing up into the RV with Jack close behind. The woman says, “Thanks,” twice before adding, “My dad hurt his back, and I’m not strong enough to do this alone.”

What looks like a giant dirty box from outside proves smaller and less dusty than I expected. I smell people and recent meals and this morning’s bathroom business. The “dad” proves to be a wary fellow maybe five years older than me, sitting behind the little table where a happy traveler might eat his meals, watching the countryside roll past. I remember enough to piece together a compelling daydream. This is how millions of people lived. Before. Burning gasoline by the tanker, wandering their world on the smooth happy roads.

Loudly, confidently, the girl announces, “I’ve got help for us, grandma.”

Dad watches the two strangers, thanking us with a little nod as we pass. The old woman is in back, laid out on a bed big enough to sleep two. I can’t remember ever seeing a lady of these proportions. She probably began life big, time and too much food making her astonishingly fat. According to the one working scale at my house, I weigh 200 elk-fed pounds. But I wouldn’t want this lady standing on my scale. She’s that fat. And worse, her smooth round face is drawn around a couple blue eyes that look at me and look at Jack and then look at the blond woman, registering nothing in the process.

She’s blind, I guess.

But no, she suddenly asks, “Who are you?”

I start to answer. But the woman says, “I’m May and you’re my grandmother.”

She says those words instantly, like a reflex. As if she says them a hundred times every day. She’s patient enough, but I notice that she doesn’t bother trying to sound sweet. These are pragmatic words meant to carry us through the next several moments.

“May?”

“Yes, grandma.”

“Where are we, May?”

“At home,” the girl says. “Your home.” Then she looks at me and brings up that smile again, saying, “If you can each get on one side and lift. She’ll help us, I think. And we can get her outside.”

I don’t want to touch this strange old woman. It amazes me how hard I’m looking for any excuse.

But butchers are made of tougher stuff. Jack leaps to work, and the force of his example causes me to grab hold of the other arm and shoulder. Grandma is a pale soft and very cool piece of humanity. I can’t feel the bones for all of the fat riding on her. Yet as promised, she doesn’t fight us. We grunt and get her to stand on her own mammoth legs, twisting her sideways to leave room in the aisle, and with her granddaughter in the lead, coaxing and tugging, we herd the old lady up the length of the RV, giving her just enough lift that she doesn’t collapse, at least until we make it to the front.

“Oh, damn,” the doting granddaughter exclaims.

But the old woman falls like an expert, crumbling without complaint or noticeable damage. The man with the bad back pulls himself off his bench, getting in our way. Everybody is tugging on the limp arms and up from under the shoulders, and May says, “Try to stand, Grandma.” She says it several times, her voice not angry but insistent. Then she turns, suddenly shouting into the vehicle’s cab. Somebody else, someone I hadn’t noticed, sits behind the steering wheel, watching the drama with utter indifference.

“Get off your ass,” the girl tells him.

The man is barely adult, maybe a couple years younger than her, and judging by appearances he is a close relative to the others. But where grandma has bulk, the boy has muscle. If I have ever seen a bigger, stronger fellow in my life, I can’t remember it. He fills the huge leather chair, enormous hands clinging to the armrests. And he has no intention whatsoever of moving.

Now the girl’s father says, “Help us.”

But the strong man shuts his mouth in a defiant fashion, delivering his answer without making noise.

“Goddamn it, son. We need your help here!”

My dislike for the boy is immediate and scorching. But anger has its functions, and I’m not exactly weak. As if to show the idiot what courage and determination look like, I grab grandma under both arms and grunt, lifting with my legs, dragging her limp body up to where the others can help, pulling her skyward until those puffy legs remember that they’re supposed to walk.

“This way, grandma,” the girl coaxes.

“Who are you?”

“Your granddaughter. I’m May.”

“Where are we, May?”

We’ve made it to the steps. That’s where we are. I’ve taken over for everyone but the girl. I’m holding the old woman under her damp cool armpits, keeping a couple steps above her as I steer her out into the open air.

May keeps saying, “This is home, grandma. You’re at home.”

Saintly people talk this way to the senile. Home is a magical place of rest and security, and I assume that the girl is misleading the old woman with a small, sweetly intended lie.

The first slipper hits the ground, and the old woman nearly collapses again. But I jerk hard, holding her steady until the second foot finds its way. Then with an exhausted smile, May says to me, “Thank you. You’ve been such a help.”

I’m gasping and my back burns, but I feel proud of myself just the same.

“Winston’s such a dick,” she confides.

“Your brother?” I guess.

“So they tell me.” She says that, and like you do with any new audience, she feels free to laugh hard at must be a very old family joke.

“I’m Noah,” I tell her.

May doesn’t just smile. She repeats my name, making it sound better than it normally does, and she offers a little hand that feels warm and comfortable, shaking my hand and then letting her fingers linger inside my grip.

Inspired by sunshine or the fresh air, grandma stands without aid. The good residents of Salvation come close and look at her and study the machine. The old woman looks at their faces, and then she turns and stares at the RV with what might be a flickering curiosity. “What is this thing?” her eyes ask.

I’m not holding hands with May anymore but we’re standing close. Her grandmother does one slow turn, majestic in its own way. Then her gaze fixes on one of the closest homes — a three-story mansion built to eat sunlight and wind while wasting nothing — and with a voice as clear and certain as any can be, she asks, “Where is this? Where am I?”

I nearly laugh at her harmless confusion.

And May shows me a big wink while calling out, “This is Salvation, Grandma. Just like you described it. And doesn’t it look wonderful…?”

My father was gone. He was never officially shunned and certainly not banished, and the other adults began treating me with an uncommon amount of consideration. Warm voices asked about my state of mind. People I barely knew offered words of encouragement, friendly pats delivered to my shoulders and back. I was the man of the family now, and what a good young man I was. Yet those same voices began to whisper. Our community was better off without that very difficult soul. Nobody missed my father. Nobody wanted his return. The man’s peculiar ideas and attitudes were problems, yet his enemies preferred to laugh at his lousy carpentry and his inability to grow tomato plants. Cooperation and competence were what the world demanded, and how would a man with so few skills manage to survive?

One day, a teacher warned my class that the easy pickings were running out. Good water was harder to find, and bad water was rusting away the last of the canned goods. Then she looked at me. With a glance, she told me that she was thinking about my father. Then with a winner’s grin, she promised everybody that soon, very soon, the last of the wicked people would face God’s justice.

Salvation was built without an official school. Its original children were taught at home using the Internet and smart software. My school was the local organic grocer, stripped of its refrigerators and freezers, the empty space divided into simple classrooms. My teachers were women with little experience and uneven talents, but who nonetheless volunteered to stand in front of a mob of kids, giving us an opportunity to do something besides tending crops or running errands.

One lady tried hard to teach history. Our random textbooks covered a few periods in suffocating detail, while most of the past was as empty and unknown as the far ends of the universe. She liked to show movies even older than her. Using aging DVD players and televisions, she educated me about those black-and-silver days when everybody smoked and everybody could sing and dance. But more useful were her memories of life as it stood in the recent past. She was a natural talker blessed with an audience just old enough to remember bits and pieces about the world before, and she spent entire days rambling on about her lost life, how she and her husband had four cars between them and a big beautiful house that they didn’t have to share. The woman had little family and no children. She and her husband had survived the worst, but he died of a heart attack days after their arrival here. Few could talk as easily about the end of the world. Just mentioning the topic made most of the adults quiet and strange. But our teacher hadn’t lost as much as the others, and blessed with a tenacious optimism, she could claim total confidence in God’s mercy and the existence of heaven.

More than anything else, we wanted to know about the plague and its aftermath. She listened to our questions and warned that she was no medical expert, but in the next moment she carefully defined the plague’s miseries: blisters and bleeding lungs, the high fevers and painful, suffocating deaths. China was halfway around the world but new diseases often came from there. Twee in two years, the Chinese government barely contained the viral monster. And that’s why the world was terrified: what if the bug someday climbed onboard an airplane or bird, and what if it was carried across the helpless world?

This was grim odd rich fun, sitting in that quiet room, learning about horrors that would never hurt us. One day, our teacher arrived with an unexpected treasure. The original residents in Salvation had left behind furniture and clothes, plus fancy machines like sky-watching dishes and digital recording equipment. Also abandoned was a nondescript box tucked into a tornado shelter in the basement of one house. The box was full of hundreds and maybe thousands of hours of news reports. Somebody had worked hard to record the end of civilization. Each one of those bright silvery discs was carefully marked with dates and the network of origin. Not all of the disks worked, and most were surprisingly boring. But our teacher had made it her mission to hunt for the most interesting survivors.

The old player began to run. The room was full of patient, enthralled children. We watched the Chinese plague flare up twice and then die back again. Nearly ten per cent of the stricken had died, and maybe half of the rest were left with scarred faces and shrunken lungs. If that virus got loose, as many as ten million people would die, and a hundred million more would be left as invalids. That’s why the hard push for a vaccine. And that’s why there was celebration when a pharmaceutical company mass-produced an injection that would protect everybody who rolled up his sleeve, offering a willing arm.

Some nations did better than others. To me, Canada was that big green splotch at the top of a favorite old map. But it was also country with money and an efficient health care system, and the Canadians achieved a nearly perfect inoculation rate. Finland and Denmark and Costa Rica were equally successful. Japan and much of Europe exceeded ninety-seven per cent compliance. But the United States was falling behind in this critical race. Too many of us were poor or isolated. Empty rumors and misguided beliefs were huge problems. In the end, emergency laws and the National Guard managed to bring up the totals. Every doctor and nurse, teacher and law enforcement officer was inoculated. Every soldier and prisoner and hospital patient was inoculated. But there were always stubborn people who refused, and in the end we never even achieved ninety-five per cent saturation.

I remember being five and sitting in my bedroom, listening to my father and mother arguing. Mom didn’t want to obey Caesar’s Law. She didn’t want the government to force her to do anything. Dad didn’t want to hear about prayer and God’s decency staving off illness. But mom kept insisting, batting aside dad’s logic until he finally found his own way out the trap: if everybody else was inoculated, then we would be safe too.

As a family, we visited a fat little man who only seemed to be a doctor. The man took our money and filled out the proper forms, and in the eyes of the state, we were inoculated. Then we went home, and dad came into my room, sitting on my bed while explaining that this was what married people did. They compromised. And despite what he knew to be best, we could sleep easy because so many of the people around us had done the smart right noble thing.

China, where the murderous plague was born, managed to do better than the United States. India did less well, and parts of Latin America fell behind. But even those poor places managed to beat that ninety per cent mark. The meanest, saddest corners of the world were the most exposed. Africa and the wild nations in Asia achieved one-third compliance, if that. But charities and volunteer doctors didn’t stop fighting. Brave defenders of the public good, they tirelessly pushed needles into little brown arms, even as word began to find its way to them that the first people who had received the vaccine — the subjects in the hurry-up trials — were beginning to shake, growing weaker by the day and profoundly confused.

According to the dates displayed on the recordings, the world’s fate was decided on my sixth birthday. An old man stood before the cameras, the seal of his doomed nation behind him. With a worn sorry voice, he admitted that mistakes had been made. Who was responsible wasn’t known and might never be, but the rush to market was a blunder, and a horrific tragedy had been unleashed, and every citizen who had tried to do something good was now infected.

That old broadcast triggered memories. Suddenly I was six again, sitting between my parents, watching the president talk. I hadn’t understood most of the man’s words or grasped even the easiest part of what he was saying. But mom was praying hard even when she was crying, and dad was weeping like I’d never seen before, and I sat there with my hands in my lap, staring at the birthday gifts wrapped in all that bright colored paper.

“When will this be done?” I asked impatiently. “When can I open up my presents?”

A boy’s voice calls out to the visitors. Abrasive and impatient, he asks, “So where’d you people come from?”

Then Old Ferris adds, “The south, if I’m not mistaking that accent.”

Grandma’s eyes jump from one face to the next. People surge toward her, some running and everybody talking, and the old woman begins to panic. She gives a little gasp, spinning until she finds her granddaughter standing beside me.

“I’m here,” says May.

Grandma’s mouth opens, waiting for a name to be recalled.

Once again, the girl introduces herself, taking hold of a puffy hand before telling the rest of us, “Florida.”

To the little ones, the word sounds made-up. Senseless.

Old Ferris nods. “Thought so.”

Half-remembered maps pop into my head. On the fringe of the continent, an orange leg sticks out into the colorless ocean.

“How is our Sunshine State?” Ferris inquires.

“Wet,” a new voice declares.

Gazes shift. Even May turns, as surprised as anyone to see her mountainous brother filling up the RVs door.

Something here is worth laughing about. “Florida’s half-drowned,” Winston warns, his round face full of delight and big teeth. “Live there, and you’re lucky to be one step ahead of the ocean.”

“That’s not true,” his father insists. “Maybe the Atlantic’s a few feet deeper, but there’s plenty of land left.”

Kids ask about Florida, but most of their parents are younger than me and even more ignorant. Arms lift, pointing toward random spots on the southern horizon. Someone says mentions alligators — another word that means almost nothing to this gathering. Then Butcher Jack finally asks the most important question: “But now what brings you good folks all the way up here?”

“My grandmother,” the girl admits, tugging on one of the big arms. “She wanted to see her old home again.”

The doughy face hears those words, considers them for a moment, and gives a slight nod of agreement.

“She’s from where?” Jack asks, as if he doesn’t trust his ears.

“From Salvation,” says May.

“And I am too,” the father announces. “In fact, when I was a boy, mom and I lived right over there.”

He points at the mayor’s house. Some of us look, but most people can’t pull their eyes off these unexpected, astonishing strangers.

Once again, I move close to May.

She smiles at me, nothing about this girl shy. “It’s a cold day,” she observes.

“The worst winter in forty,” Jack jumps in.

I ask, “Have you ever seen frost before?”

She laughs. “Not until two weeks ago.”

“When did you leave home?” I want to know.

“Last summer,” her father reports.

“Florida is cooler than usual,” says May. “We’ve got a shortwave, and sometimes we’ll talk to friends. There have been some nights when the thermometer dives below sixty.”

“Maybe this is a sign,” says Jack, twinkling eyes full of hope. “Maybe our climate’s turning cool again.”

Winston lets out a loud, disagreeable laugh. “That’s not it at all,” he says. “A pair of volcanoes blew up last year. In Indonesia and Colombia. Right now, two mountains’ worth of dust are hanging up in the stratosphere, and they’ll keep chilling things down for the next year or two.”

May and her father exchange quick tense looks.

“All that water,” I say to May. “I’ve always wanted to see the ocean.”

But Winston doesn’t like ignorance, and he won’t let anyone keep his little dreams. “Believe me, you don’t want to see the Atlantic. That water is hot and acidic and half-dead. The reefs are gone, and the shellfish. But not the jellies, no. Those bastards are doing great.”

I’m not sure what a jelly is.

“The Gulf Stream still runs,” he continues. “Maybe not as hard as it should. But at least the oceans haven’t suffocated yet.”

May frowns, but she won’t take her eyes off me. “The sea is beautiful,” she insists. “And there are a lot of fish and some whales even.”

“Yeah, some,” says her brother.

“Summer,” I repeat. “A long time on the road.”

“And we didn’t know if we would make it,” she says cheerfully. “Dad and his friends built this truck. We’ve got great tires and a special suspension and the motor burns almost anything. But you can’t trust bridges anymore. And even if you find people, sometimes there isn’t any fuel.”

“People give up their alcohol?” Ferris asks skeptically.

To nobody in particular, she says, “We barter for it. Trade news and goods from other places. When we started out, we had fruit and dried fish strapped on top, and every cubbyhole was filled with some little treasure.”

And they stole their fuel too. I don’t see them as thieves, but there is no way to come this far and not take what charity won’t surrender.

May’s father stands on the other side of the old woman. He has to bend fonvard to look around her, asking me, “Would it be all right? Mom and I would love to see our old house.”

Crossing half of the continent to tour one building. That might be the most unlikely story that I’ve ever heard. Yet the mayor leaps to the cause. “It’s my house, and please. You’d be my welcomed guests, yes.”

Except grandma isn’t in the mood. She watches her arm lift when her son pulls at it. Yanking her hand free, she snaps, “I don’t want to be here. I want to lie down.”

Her son doesn’t seem like the patient kind. “Mom,” he says with a complaining tone. “Don’t be difficult please.”

But the woman starts to drop again, seemingly melting into the dull red bricks underfoot.

May jumps right in. “There’s a good bed in that house, grandma.”

“What?” she asks.

“A fine place to sleep, and warm too.”

Perhaps the woman reconsiders her decision. More likely, she has already forgotten her planned collapse.

“Come on, grandma. Show me which room was yours.”

And just like that, we start to walk. May remains close to the slow, stately woman, and I’m taking sluggish little steps to keep my place beside her. The present mayor is the gray-haired son of the second mayor — my mother’s old ally. He normally can’t look at me without showing his contempt. But on this exceptional occasion he manages to smile in my direction, showing the world his friendliness. “We have the biggest distillery in two hundred miles,” he boasts. “And you’re certainly welcome to take all the fuel you can carry.”

May looks at me and says, “Thank you.” As if I am the gracious one.

I match her smile, my step growing lighter. When was the last time a young woman gave me this kind of undeserved attention? It was Lola, of course, and a small, bearable guilt gnaws at me.

“Unless of course you want to remain here in Salvation,” the mayor continues. “We’re always looking for good neighbors.”

The girl seems ready for the suggestion. It isn’t that she acts uneasy, but it feels as if a hundred other topics would be more welcome. May nods. She pretends to consider the offer. Then with a polite, practiced tone, she says,

“We might stay for a little while.”

“But we’re pushing north,” the brother announces. “North before spring.”

Curiosity changes directions. Older voices name likely places.

“Farther north,” Winston declares. Then catching something in his father’s gaze, he adds, “Nobody cares where we’re going. These people are staying right here.”

May tugs fondly on her grandmother’s arm.

With a quiet voice, I ask her, “Where?”

She doesn’t want to reply. But silence only makes these matters more difficult. Not too softly and not too privately, she tells me, “Canada.”

“Nothing there but moose,” I warn. With its nearly perfect inoculation rate, Canada was obliterated. The few survivors were too scattered to survive, much less build communities. At least that’s what people have always claimed.

She acts untroubled by my concerns.

Half a dozen questions pile up inside my brain.

And then she artfully changes topics. “Where’s your house, Noah?”

The mayor makes a low, disapproving sound.

I point at the horizon. “You can’t see it from here.”

“Are you a hermit?”

I feel uncomfortable. I want to hide my life and can’t. With a hint of confession, I admit, “I live there with my wife.”

I expect to feel better, only I don’t.

The mayor overhears. “Maybe four times a year, we see Noah.”

May studies me, holding her grandmother’s hand with both of hers.

This peculiar parade has reached the largest, grandest house in Salvation. It is a towering structure with its south-facing windows and the old black solar panels and five corkscrew windmills on top, four of them turning and at least one windmill demanding new bearings or fresh grease — a squeaky, irritable sound that makes me more nervous by the moment.

Yet I stay beside the girl.

To the mayor, she says, “I’m curious. We asked other people about you. Salvation, I mean. They say you’re Christian and that you’re prosperous.”

Hearing praise, the man blushes.

I don’t know what I heard in her voice. More suspicion than approval, if I was guessing.

“Our residents are all True Believers,” the mayor says. As if being Christian isn’t good enough. “Our parents and grandparents knew God would save us. And that’s why we survived the Shakes.”

I have always despised that inadequate term.

“The Shakes.”

May studies the mayor and then looks at me. I’m sure she wants to ask my affiliations, and part of me wants to tell her whatever she wants to hear. But changing topics seems like the better tactic.

“Why Canada?” I press.

She doesn’t answer. One hand reaches behind. A small thick notebook has worked its way out of her hip pocket, and she shoves it back in place. Two ancient pens are nestled beside the book. “We’re almost there, Grandma. Do you see the front door?”

This is the slowest walk of my life.

Winston has heard my question. Pushing closer, he says, “Florida is a goddamn nightmare.”

I don’t want to talk to this creature.

“It’s the Africans,” he adds. “They’re coming in boats now. By the hundreds, thousands.”

His sister says his name, nothing more.

“What?” he growls.

“That’s not why we left,” she insists.

“It’s a big reason,” he says. Then he looks at me, adding, “Africa has millions of people. Their climate is getting hotter and drier. Some head toward Europe, but the Turks and Russians claimed those empty cities. New immigrants get shot, or worse. So the refugees pay diamonds and gold to ride what boats that can still cross the Acid-lantic. Hundreds of men and women and all those children jammed close, and they know nothing about America except that it used to be rich.”

He has told this story many times, but it’s still emotional. Working himself into a rage, he says, “We had good lives in Florida. But the freighters started dropping their cargo on the beaches. Those people expect to find houses ready to live in. They want cars and grocery stores. They’ve been lied to, which makes them angry. But before anybody can complain, their boat’s turned around and headed back for another bunch of fools.”

Hearing the shrill chatter, the mayor seems less sure about his guests. But the commitment was made. He throws a weak smile at everyone and turns the knob on his front door, leading the way into a great volume of warm air and little children. “Company,” he calls out. “We’ve got guests.”

Entering the sunny living room, May’s father says, “Well, well. I sure remember this place.”

Maybe it’s my age, or maybe it’s my present life. Whatever the reason, I’m not as angry as I would have expected. The last time I was under this roof, my neighbors were holding a meeting, and my mother was voting with the rest of the mob to shun Lola and all of her family.

“Do you remember this room, grandma?”

May is sweet, an angel effortlessly guiding the old lady to the tall windows that look south at the brown bluffs and bright winter skies. I go with them. For some reason, May lets go of the woman, pulling out the notebook and one pen and spending a few moments jotting down notes. Then again, always patient, she asks, “Do you remember any of this, grandma?”

The upper windows are original, but tossed balls and careless tumbles have broken all the lower panes. The replacement glass is never as good. Cold air seeps through gaps. And maybe that’s what the old lady feels now. The hand that May was holding lifts, fingertips to the dingy glass, and she seems to tilt into the sunshine, preparing to collapse again. But she doesn’t. She manages to straighten, the big dim eyes staring at the bluffs. “What happened to those trees, darling?”

“What trees, grandma?”

“On that hill there. Are they dead?”

“No, grandma.” The girl leans in close, speaking with a flat teaching voice. “It’s winter, grandma. The trees are sleeping.”

“Winter?”

The lady seems flabbergasted.

“Not like Florida, is it?” May asks.

And then grandma giggles. There’s no other word for the joyful girlish laugh that rolls out of her. She giggles and turns back to her granddaughter, saying, “Oh, my. Winter? Really?”

“Really.”

Delighted to her core, the old gal says, “Well then, we did it, didn’t we? Winter came. We saved the world!”

I wasn’t quite seven years old, hunting inside a garage for gas cans or tools, or even better, fresh toys that might help pass the day. Dad was searching the house for food. Mom waited on the front yard. She was supposed to be helping us, but sometimes her energy would leave her. Maybe she looked stern and strong, but the truth is never as simple as appearances. Sitting and doing nothing was all she could manage that morning, her face unchanged but the wrinkles deeper, the color leaving the skin as secret thoughts made her sick.

All of us were sick. More than once, dad confided that to me. We weren’t sick in ways that would kill us, but because of the awful things that we had seen. Yet difficult as it seemed, he insisted that each of us should try to count our blessings.

The garage had no blessings. There weren’t any toys and the only gas can was empty, and even before the world ended the car wasn’t worth much. Dust lay thick on its windshield, and I spent most of a minute writing the words I knew into the gray grime. I wrote my name and “dog” and “cat” and I don’t remember what else. Then dad came out the house, looking back at me.

“Wait there,” he said. “Don’t go inside.”

I’d seen bodies before. They didn’t scare me.

But dad was worried about something. He walked up the driveway, aiming for mom, and he started to talk and she looked at the house as he said something else, and then she was shaking her head.

“It’s not our business,” she said. “Don’t.”

That’s when I slipped through the side door.

The lady was in her thirties, and she used to be pretty. I found her sitting in the middle of the dining room. She was naked. Walls of cardboard boxes were stacked on three sides of her, each box cut open so that she could reach inside whenever she wanted. Empty cans of applesauce and spaghetti and condensed tomato soup and plastic water bottles covered the rest of the filthy floor. She sat with her naked body propped up, soft ropes around her chest and rubber handles dangling from the ceiling. Her chair belonged in a living room, except somebody had used a chainsaw to cut through the cushion. The hole was nearly too big for her scrawny bottom. Later, thinking about the situation, I realized that somebody must have cut a matching hole through the floor, leaving it so that the lady could go to the bathroom whenever it was necessary. Food and water in easy reach, and she could have lived for years eating from that stockpile.

I whispered, “Hello.”

Her face was jumping, but her eyes were steady. She could see me well enough to react, though her words didn’t make sense. Her ingenious, desperate system had worked until she was too weak to unseal the cans and bottles. Openers and barely punctured cans lay at her feet. There wasn’t any strength in the emaciated legs. Her stick-like arms were covered with sores and red blotches. Months had passed since I had seen somebody living with the Shakes. It amazed me that she had survived this long. But some people possessed a natural immunity. It wouldn’t save them, but it was enough to make life into something worse than dying.

With all of the dignity she could muster, that naked starving and helpless woman sat on her makeshift toilet and looked at me and said nonsense. Then her eyes moved, and she stopped talking.

A hand dropped on my shoulder.

I waited for my name to be said. I waited to be in trouble. But my father knelt and looked only at me. Then with a careful solemn voice, he said, “Go outside, Noah. Go now, and I’ll be right behind you.”

My first thought was that dad was going to open up some cans and bottles, giving the lady a feast before we moved on.

Then I saw the pistol tucked into the back of his pants.

I hesitated.

Again Dad looked at me. This time he said, “Go,” with God’s own authority, and I went outside as ordered. I didn’t want to run. I told myself just to walk. But I was suddenly in the bright sunshine, my legs churning, and the shot came and was gone and I barely heard it.

Mom called my name, but she didn’t try to stop me.

I ran past her, sobbing and making my own nonsensical sounds.

On the brink of giddy, the old woman says, “Oh, my. Winter? Well then, we did it, didn’t we? Winter came. We saved the world.”

Few people pay attention. A few notice her voice and maybe listen to the words. But everybody is talking. Everybody wants to find the fun in something new and unexpected. Just slightly, the noise inside the big room dips, and then grandma is finished and blank-faced again. Maybe she didn’t speak. I thought I heard everything, but I’m not sure what I heard. There might be a thousand fine reasons to ignore whatever leaks out of that lady. And that’s my intention, right up until I glance at May.

She and her father are trading looks. Less than comfortable, there’s this weird long moment where bolts of electricity seem to be flying between them.

And then together, at the same moment, they laugh.

Nothing could be funnier, their cackling says. May lowers her pad and pen, patting her grandmother on the back while casually studying the other faces in the room. Settling on the person most puzzled by this outburst, May uses a smile that couldn’t feel any sharper. “Grandma has troubles,” she mentions.

I nod amiably, seeing no reason to disagree.

“Gets confused,” she adds.

“It’s all right,” I say.

But that doesn’t satisfy her. She needs to touch me. Her fingers curl around my elbow, and her face is close enough that I can smell dried meat on her breath. “The poor thing tells the most amazing stories,” says May, her voice quiet, just short of a whisper.

“I can believe it,” I answer.

“Don’t make anything out of her noise,” her father suggests, offering up a nod and wink. “She doesn’t even know where she is.”

Maybe not, but the woman in question giggles again — that same odd girly giggle — and once more her eyes regain their depth and clarity. She turns and looks at us, engaged enough with the conversation to open her mouth, the beginnings of some new statement emerging.

May cuts her off.

Nothing about the act is rude, but the girl is determined. “I’m sure you’re tired, grandma. Wouldn’t you like to lie down? A little nap, yes?”

Grandma blinks, struggling with the abrupt shift in topics.

Her son turns to the mayor, his voice louder than necessary. “My mother needs to lie down. Do you have any guest quarters, a spare bed…?”

“We don’t have guests,” the mayor confesses. “And the beds are all upstairs.” But after giving the situation careful study, he charitably adds, “There’s a comfortable couch in the next room. With the door closed, I think your mother could relax.”

That’s good enough for this suddenly devoted son. “Come on, Mom. Let me help you.”

He and the old lady follow the mayor out of sight.

I watch May, and she smiles. But when I pretend to look elsewhere, her face stiffens and the smile turns into something harder.

Old Man Ferris is talking about winters past and current. Butcher Jack is beside him, but he throws me a questioning look.

I ask May, “What are you writing?”

She lifts the notepad, apparently surprised to find it in her hand. “Oh, I just like to write.” But is that enough of an answer? Maybe not, which is why she closes the pad and slides it back into the tight pocket. “When we started out, I thought it would be nice to keep a record. A journal. Maybe I could even finish a book about our travels some day.”

“A book?” I ask doubtfully.

Jack has drifted closer. “Of course a book,” he tells me. “Don’t you think someday, somewhere, there’s going to be enough people to make it worth printing new books?”

May nods enthusiastically. “That’s going to happen sooner than you might guess.”

Jack watches me.

I move my gaze from him to May and back again, saying nothing.

Silence bothers the girl. She pretends otherwise, but I get the strong sense that she feels nervous, intensely aware about this room full of strangers. The mayor emerges from the adjoining room, but May’s father remains behind. “I want to go check on my grandmother,” she announces. I don’t get an invitation to join her, which pricks me somehow. She tries not to look like a person in a hurry, but that’s exactly what she is, slipping between other people and past the grinning mayor, entering a room that she doesn’t know and making sure that the door is latched behind her.

I stare at the door while trying to make sense of my thoughts.

“You know what’s really odd?” Jack asks.

“The old lady’s babbling.”

“Not in her state, it isn’t,” he says. Then he gets beside me, saying, “She could talk about aliens and horned dragons, and really, who would care?”

“The girl’s reactions were peculiar,” I mention. “And her dad’s too.”

My old friend takes a deep breath.

“What else?” I ask.

“Do you see Winston anywhere?”

A man of his proportions would be obvious, but looking across the sun-washed room, I don’t see him.

“The old lady was talking her nonsense,” Jack says. “You know, about saving winter, saving the world? And that’s when I happened to look at her grandson.”

“So?”

“You should have seen his face,” says Jack. “Bonf res don’t get half as red as those cheeks of his.”

“I don’t see him now,” I say.

“Red-faced,” Jack repeats. “Then all at once, the kid turned and practically ran outdoors.”

Our history teacher wanted to show us more of the old news recordings -dispatches from the ends of the earth, tearful accounts of American hospitals being filled with the sick and dying. But too many kids went home crying after that first day. Too many of us didn’t sleep that night. So on the second day, the new mayor and my mother and several other important bodies sat in the back of the class, watching with us while shaking bodies and military convoys filled the television screen. I didn’t remember any of this from my own life. When the Shakes began, my father filled our van with food and drove us north to a lake and isolated cabin. There wasn’t any news or Internet for us, which meant that Mom was seeing these horrors for the first time too. When I felt sick, I looked at her. But she just sat there. Stone has more emotion than her face showed. Then came a long story about riots, mobs trying to break into pharmacies and gun shops, and the reporter — a smug fellow with a big cross dangling around his neck — explained how people were hunting for pills and bullets to kill themselves and their loved ones. “Suicide,” he said, “has become preferable to a slow miserable death.”

I looked over my shoulder again. Mom’s face had changed. Pale as milk, she stared at the screen with her eyes narrowed, her mouth set but her body struggling to hold inside whatever she was feeling.

It was the rarest sensation, feeling sorry for that woman.

Another news story began. Instead of people fighting for pills, one man was sitting in the middle of a long table, talking into a microphone. Several old men and old women were sitting behind another long table, listening carefully. Ignoring his own shaking hands, pushing past his sloppy voice and the drool, he was trying to explain his company’s role in the ongoing catastrophe.

“My people used standard methods to produce our vaccine,” he said. “Attenuated viruses have been employed for years. Successfully employed, yes. Mumps and chicken pox and measles have been conquered with these proven techniques. Our mistake was to believe that the wild virus was genuine. Which was everyone else’s mistake too, I should add.”

A woman at the other table held up her hand. “Where do you think the virus came from?”

“We have evidence,” he began. Then he hesitated. Two assistants showed him pieces of paper, and he started to read, offering long words that might have been technical or might have been mangled by his failing mouth. Then he stopped talking, gathering himself with one deep breath before adding, “This bug is an ingenious monster.”

“Is it military?” the woman asked. “Maybe the Chinese built it?”

“Certainly not. That’s absurd. The Chinese are dying as fast as the rest of us.”

“Then who is responsible?”

“Private hands,” he said mysteriously.

Nobody was happy to hear this.

“Evidence,” the woman demanded. “We need hard evidence.”

“I wish I could offer some,” he confessed. “I have to assume… what the scant evidence shows… some group with skills and a quality laboratory produced the virus and infected a few people. Those were the original epidemics. But those events were just to get our attention. These plotters understood that we would… that someone had to… generate a quick cheap vaccine in response…”

A man at the end of the table began to stand, one arm clumsily swinging at the sky as he shouted, “Prion.”

The witness quickly corrected him. “This is something else, Senator. Something we have never seen before. Prions manipulate a different protein. This particular agent… well, it’s a natural component of the phage’s protein shell. It was hiding in plain sight, and we never imagined that it would have such devastating effects on the human nervous system.”

The room buzzed with voices.

Someone called out, “Quiet.”

Then the woman leaned forward, hands shaking. Voice shaking. Into her little black microphone, she asked, “This is a great conspiracy. Is that your explanation?”

“Yes, Senator.”

“And your company is blameless.

The dying man hesitated. Then his face dropped as he admitted, “I’m not sure how to answer that, madam.”

More voices, more pleas for silence.

“This was a crash program,” he continued. “We hired consultants, experts from around the world… and it is possible that some of those people were part of a secret group…”

I looked over my shoulder again. The coldest woman in the world was weeping, mopping up tears with a handkerchief cut out of one of my father’s left-behind shirts.

“You’re blaming…” the woman began. Then her voice failed her.

An ancient man was sitting beside her. The Shakes didn’t kill the elderly as quickly as most. Maybe that’s why he didn’t have symptoms. His voice was level, his mind clear. With a rich voice, he pointed out, “Conspiracies demand goals. These people must have had some purpose. What do you think it was?”

“I can offer nothing but guesses,” the witness replied, looking down at his own hands. When they stopped trembling, he looked up and said, “Power is one possibility. The survivors of this nightmare will be left with the entire planet at their disposal. But my better guess… what seems more reasonable and even more awful to me… is that an environmental group might have take these steps. If they felt that human overpopulation and pollution were putting the earth at severe risk. If they convinced themselves that this was for the best…”

“How many would it have taken?”

“Excuse me, Senator?”

“This shadow organization you’re describing. I want to know how many of the criminals we should be chasing today.”

“I don’t know, Senator.”

“Dozens? Hundreds?”

“Perhaps hundreds,” he said. “But keeping an enormous secret would be difficult. A handful of likeminded individuals could probably achieve the desired results, if they were clever enough.”

“In your company, sir…”

“Yes?”

“Who didn’t receive the vaccine?”

An assistant leaned close, whispering a few words.

The advice was waved off. “No, I want to answer this.” The witness leaned close to his own microphone. “I’ve asked myself that same question, sir. I have. But my company has almost vanished. I insisted that my people were first to receive the vaccine, and that included our contractors. Most of us are already dead. That I’m alive is a small miracle. I can’t count all of the suicides… of friends and colleagues… yet in all good conscience, I can’t tell you that a few people haven’t managed to slip away in the chaos…”

The Senator considered his next question.

But the dying woman beside him rose to her feet. With a ragged, ugly voice, she asked, “But why? Even if it’s as you claim, a small group trying to save the world —?”

“I didn’t claim anything, madam. I’m just speculating.”

Behind me, our mayor jumped to his feet, his squeaky voice ordering the television to be turned off.

“I don’t care about the reasons,” the Senator continued. “Reasons are excuses. This is a cruel, vicious assault on humanity, and believe me, whoever’s responsible is taking great pleasure from our misery and terror.”

The television went black.

I turned. Mom was standing beside the mayor. The crying was finished, replaced with the old steel mask that I knew by heart.

To the class, the mayor said, “Obviously, this is a very painful subject.”

But we weren’t crying. This was ten times easier than watching shaking people fighting over poison pills. My mother whispered something to the mayor, and he nodded and came forward, unfolding one of the green sacks leftover from the old grocery. The DVD was removed from the player. Then Mom helped collect every other disk, and while she carried the full sack out into the parking lot, the mayor explained that these items were going to be burned. The oldest kids were surprised, and our teacher seemed puzzled, even hurt. But to give the action purpose, he explained, “Yes, people did play a role in what happened. But what is important — what you need to remember, children — is that only the hand of God can move this world. No other force has such power or majesty. A judgment as enormous as the one we have lived through demands Our Father, and we should be thankful. He has given us the gift, this new Eden, and we are more blessed than any people to ever walk the earth.”

With that, he retreated.

We soon smelled smoke, ugly black and probably toxic.

My teacher wandered to the front of the class, offering clumsy words of support for this disagreeable policy. Most of the students got busy making paper gliders and passing notes about small, fun nonsense. But I remained busy: closing my eyes while holding my breath, I wished that my mother would breathe in those fumes, grow sick and die.

Winston stands in the cold bright sunshine, hands at his side, eyes down and his mouth clamped shut, chewing hard at nothing. He isn’t as red as I imagined, but it doesn’t take any special skill to see the anger under his skin. Passersby want to talk to this newcomer, but they see his face and steer clear. Even a couple children approach and then think again, retreating past me, one asking the other, “What demon is in his heart?”

I put myself in front of Winston, and I wait.

He doesn’t react.

Nobody else is close, just him and me standing in the open. I don’t know what to say, but once I start talking, my mouth finds words and logic. I say, “Families,” with easy scorn. I tell him, “Families aren’t easy.” Then I offer up a few curse words, laying the groundwork before admitting, “My mother was an extraordinary bitch.”

He blinks, eyes focusing on me.

I wait.

He starts to turn away.

“What about your grandmother?”

I want him to look at me again, reacting to my open-ended question. But he avoids my eyes and the topic, big legs carrying him back toward the RV.

Walking beside him, I talk about the recordings of those old news stories. In a few crisp sentences, I try to recapture two days in class and the reaction of the important adults, plus my own raging scorn. “I mean, we had this window on the past. And what did the adults do? Destroy it. They didn’t see any value in the disks, only danger, and they destroyed them before anybody could figure out how to make copies. So these kids here today… they don’t know anything about what happened, except what their parents choose to tell them.”

Winston seems to listen, but he refuses to even glance at me.

“Here’s something funny,” I continue. “When I was twenty-one, I left Salvation. There was this local girl named Lola, and I loved her as much as my mom hated her, and we decided to move into a solid old house up in the hills. Live with each other and our dogs, no idiot Believers within miles of our front door.”

We reach the wheeled house. Winston grabs the door handle and pulls, the hiss of compressed gas helping it swing open. But as he takes one step inside, he hesitates. He can’t help but look at me, asking, “Why in hell should I care about any of this?”

“My wife’s smart, but in odd ways.”

The boy is just a little curious now. But that’s enough. He steps back down to the bricks and looks at the top of my head, asking, “So what?”

“We talk,” I say. “All day long, we chat. But since we don’t see other people, and since nothing important changes day by day, our best topic is the past. Our childhood. She didn’t go to school with me, but she remembers the day when they burned the disks. She heard all about it from me. And a couple years ago, after talking it over a thousand times, Lola turned to me and asked, ‘Don’t you think it’s strange? Why would an ordinary person go to all that trouble?’

“‘Because it’s history,’ I told her. ‘That’s why.’

“‘But it wasn’t history yet,’ she pointed out. ‘It was just a plague in China when it started. Most of the world was still safe. Yet somebody started saving news stories about that disease. And they recorded everything about the vaccine, even when everybody else in the world thought that this was the answer to all of our troubles. Which is a crazy thing to do, isn’t it? Unless of course you knew all along what was going to happen.’”

I stop talking.

Winston looks more like a boy than ever. His face is empty and pale, his mind pulled back to some private place, leaving me almost nothing to see. But before I go on with my tale, he asks, “Where were those disks?”

“In a box,” I tell him. “Unmarked and probably left behind by mistake.”

“No. What house were they in?”

“I don’t know.”

“My grandmother’s?”

“Probably not,” I admit.

He gives a deep snort before telling me, “You don’t know anything.”

“I know the old lady saved the world.”

Winston moves closer, looming over me. “She’s nuts.”

“No, she isn’t.”

He licks his lips and says, “Forget it.”

I say nothing.

Then he remembers where he was headed. Again, one of the big feet steps up into the RV, and just to be sure that I know it, he tells me again, “Grandma is crazy.”

“Was she a scientist?”

He keeps climbing.

“It must be tough,” I say, stepping up after him.

He turns, surprised to find me sticking with him. “What’s tough?”

“Being stuck with them: a senile woman who saved the world, and your father who grew up with a legend. Because he’s always known, hasn’t he? Families can’t keep secrets. And you grew up hearing how grandma helped build the bug or the vaccine, which were good things. Great things. Without them, there would have been too many people in the world, and civilization would have crashed just the same. But with the climate in every worse condition, everything was falling apart in ways a lot worse than what we got.”

The boy’s face grows red again. I make plans about what to do if he takes a swing at me. I’ll jump down the stairs and run — that’s my heroic scheme. But he doesn’t lift a hand. Instead, he says, “You don’t know shit.”

“Billions murdered, and that old lady is partly to blame.” I smile and halfway laugh, adding, “It’s got to be hard, sleeping under the same roof with one of the world’s great criminals and her proud son and a sister who thinks that old grandma is just about the best, most special person ever.”

Winston sighs.

A moment later, he straightens his back and lifts a hand, that broad hard palm driving once into my chest, pretty much wringing the breath right out of me. Without trying.

I want to run and don’t.

“No,” he declares. “That’s not it.”

“Oh yeah?” I ask doubtfully. “What is ‘it’?”

A smirk rises, and he laughs. “I’m not telling you anything. But if I did know somebody like that — I’m just saying ‘if — the killing wouldn’t be what pisses me off. No, the trouble is that the wrong people got killed. If you’ve got this wonderful weapon in hand, you don’t just slaughter your own. You don’t save the world just to fill it up with idiot Christians and black savages. That’s a dumbshit waste, if you want my honest opinion.”

Butcher Jack would have brought the news but it was summer and scorching hot and his main freezer was in some kind of trouble. That’s why Old Ferris made the journey instead. I was out back in the junkyard, hunting for pipe that I could splice into our growing irrigation system. The rattling roar of a little motor brought me back to the house. I came around to discover Lola standing on the porch, flanked by several dogs, her favorite Bushmaster assault rifle propped just inside the front door. Our visitor was straddling his little motorcycle, the dust of his arrival finally settling on top of the heavier dust. Lola was talking. With a voice friendlier than any she used on me, she told the visitor that he was welcome to come inside or at least into the shade of the porch and would he like a drink of water because we had plenty, it was no trouble, and he looked hot, did he feel hot, and how was the ride out from town?

Ferris was pleasant about his silence — no grimaces, no uncomfortable looks at the cloudless sky. But even miles from Salvation, he refused to speak to any person who had been officially and permanently shunned.

I called to him.

He brightened instantly. One stiff leg swung over the seat, and he propped up his bike and looked at me, forgetting for a second or two why he had come. Then he remembered. A fresh sorrow went into his eyes, and that’s when I knew that he’d brought bad news. It was easy to guess what he would tell me but there was still shock in the words. “It’s your mom, Noah,” he began. Then with a slow shake of the head, my old friend said, “She died this morning. Just before sunrise.”

I didn’t say anything.

So he answered the questions that I might ask, put in my place. “It was the cancer. She didn’t suffer too much. The right prayers got said. In the end, I don’t think she even knew where she was. Which isn’t a bad way to be, all things considered.”

He paused and stared at me.

“What else?” I asked.

“She was talking about you. These last days, she kept asking where you were. She didn’t remember.”

I stepped up on the porch, one sweaty hand pushing into my wife’s damp back. “Well,” I began. Then after some consideration, I admitted, “I guess I should know she died. So thank you.”

He wanted to look only at me, but his eyes kept jumping back to Lola.

“Want some water?” I asked.

He almost said, “Yes.” But he had so thoroughly ignored the earlier offers that he couldn’t agree now. So he took a deep breath, pushing into the rest of his important news. “She planned her funeral. Weeks ago, before she was real sick, she told us that it was important to her that you come and serve as one of her pallbearers.”

“No,” I said, out of reflex.

Lola moved against my hand.

I shook my head and stepped off the porch, suddenly angry with this man that had never said one cruel word to either one of us. He was a simple decent creature who helped my family many times over the years. But there was a lot of emotion to deal with on a day best spent in the shade. I approached and stopped short of him, and he watched me. His little mouth looked as if it was holding something sour but nothing in his eyes was worried. I wasn’t scaring him. He was sorry and wished that somebody else had come on this tough errand. But he was brave enough or stubborn enough to wait, and when my emotions simmered down, he said, “It’s your choice, Noah. The funeral’s tomorrow morning, and it starts in the town center.”

“Won’t be there,” I promised.

He nodded and climbed back on the bike and kicked it twice and left again -a wiry little man vanishing into a fresh cloud of dust.

Exhausted, I returned to the porch. To Lola. But the only affection and understanding that I got were from the licking, panting mutts at her feet.

“What?” I asked.

She turned and went inside.

I followed, again asking, “What?”

Cleaning up the kitchen was important just then. Lola started pushing plates into cupboards and sorting the silverware and cups, and I watched until I didn’t think there was any chance that she would volunteer her thoughts. So I took a shot, saying, “You think I should go.”

Her response wasn’t to agree with me. Because saying, “Yes,” wouldn’t say half enough. Instead it was important to throw a handful of knives into the wrong drawer and then turn, lifting a china plate over her head as if ready to bust it. We have very good dishes in our household — fine work from Germany and England, some of it older than the old farmhouse that we took over for ourselves. Maybe that’s why she held her hand. Or maybe she wasn’t all that upset but it was important to get my attention before saying, “She was your mother.”

“I think I know that.”

Lola bit her bottom lip. Then she offered up a few words that must have lived inside her for years, never mentioned and never even suspected by the man who slept with her every night. “She was your best parent, Noah. So yes, I think that mean old bitch deserves to have you at her funeral.”

Leaning against the nearest wall, I asked, “What do you mean? My best parent how?”

“Your father left you. Your mother didn’t. Your father could have taken you but he chose not to.”

“Life on the road? He didn’t want to put me at risk.”

“And for that matter, why the hell did he leave in the first place?” If anger was a race, Lola was in the lead now. “He wasn’t banished. He wasn’t even shunned.”

“He would have been,” I said.

“Shunning isn’t death,” she pointed out. “How many years did my family live in that miserable town, not one Believer offering us anything more than some secret whispered words?”

Never in my marriage did I feel like hitting Lola.

That was the nearest that I’ve ever been, and there was still a good gap between the urge and the deed. But my hands closed, and I was breathing hard with my heart pounding, doing nothing else while she watched me.

“What else?” I finally managed.

“Your mom stayed. Believe me, she would have talked your father into taking you, if that’s what she wanted. But she thought it was best for her and for you that you stayed behind. And bad as she was as a parent and a human being, she probably did her very best. Which is enough reason for you to go into town and do the service like she wanted. Make yourself believe she’s really dead, and then you can do whatever you want to the bitch’s grave. But come back to me afterwards. All right, Noah? Will you do all that for me?”

Clear-headed, full of purposeful rage, I hurry back to the mayor’s house. My mind is made up. I’m ready to announce what I know, or at least tell people what I think I know. Most won’t believe me. Stubborn, unimaginative souls will dismiss my words, declaring that I am misinformed or crazy or both. But even if the entire town laughs at my madness, the idea will start chewing at them: what if I am right? What if the odd old lady bears some responsibility in the murder of billions? And what if her family not only knows about it but by one route or another approves of what she did?

Yet coming through the front door, I discover May and her father standing before a very happy audience. I expected them to be in the adjacent room, the door closed. I didn’t imagine dozens of people laughing about something outrageously funny, something said just a moment ago. I’m standing at the back of a big loud happy party, a handful of people glancing my way just long to determine that I am immune to their deep joy.

May sees me. I feel her eyes but when I try to meet them, she shifts direction. A fond hand touches her father’s shoulder, and whatever story she has been telling ends with the words, “And that’s how we finally crossed the Mississippi River.”

Raucous laughter.

And I retreat outdoors.

My mind is still made up. Yes it is. I just need a better moment, and maybe a smaller, more open-minded audience. And I might have to lie. Winston gave a hypothetical confession. I’ll just change his words a little, giving him even more arrogance than usual. But even as I’m practicing this speech, Jack emerges to ask me, “What’s wrong?”

I take a deep breath, wanting to answer. But my voice is missing.

“Did you catch Winston?”

I nod.

“You look sick, Noah.”

That’s only because I feel sick. I’ve got a rabbit’s heart in my chest, and I can’t seem to breathe fast enough to make my chest stop aching. I want to sit. I want that tall beer and a good chair and silence. But mostly, I want to be in a different place than this, and that’s why I ask Jack, “Did you ever get my elk unloaded?”

“Mostly, but then our guests showed up and my boys bolted,” he says. “Why? You want to start home now?”

“Yes.”

He nods. He says, “Let’s go finish then. I don’t know where my boys got to, but there shouldn’t be much left to do.”

“No.”

He studies me, waiting.

I’m not sure what I want. But I hear myself saying, “Do me a different favor. Would you?”

“Sure, what?”

“When you get a chance, tell May… tell her that I know.”

“You know what?”

“Tell her that her brother told me most of it. And I figured out the rest for myself.”

“What did you figure out, Noah?”

I just shake my head.

Now Jack looks grim and serious. One of those strong hands clamps down on my shoulder. “What’d that kid say to you?”

Through the door comes more laughter. Fourteen years of my life was spent in this town, and I can’t remember ever hearing this much joy.

“Noah?” he presses.

But I shake free, starting back to the butcher’s shop. “Point May towards me, would you? And don’t wait long, Jack. As soon as the meat’s off, I’m driving out of here.”

Three years after my mom died, Lola and I took our last trip to the city. Useful scrap was hard to find by then, what with fires and rust and time. But we had some loot worth the trouble, and we also realized we’d never come back to this place again. Which was a very worthy accomplishment.

Half by mistake, half by planning, we ended up standing next to one of the mass graves. A fleet of bulldozers had been parked on the same ground for nearly two decades. The ground was still rough, bits of bone and stubborn clothes poking out here and there. Looking at that sorry scene, I thought about the last funeral that I had attended, and when Lola asked what I was thinking, I told her.

She was crying. I was crying.

Sniffling, she told me, “Somebody wanted this. Somebody planned all of this.”

I couldn’t count the times we had wrestled with this subject.

“Know what I wish, Noah?”

“What?”

“That those responsible had come out and said so.” My sweet sad shunned wife leaned into me, explaining, “As soon as the Shakes began, they should have put out some official statement proving that they were real and listing all of their wise good-hearted reasons for doing the unthinkable.”

“We can guess their reasons,” I said.

“But if they went public, there wouldn’t have been any doubts.”

“And what would that have changed?”

“We would have somebody to blame today. A group with a name, real people with a clear purpose.”

“The Shakes would have killed the same people,” I said. “Every government would have failed in the same ways. And the two of us would have ended up here or someplace like here, looking at dead people and dirt.”

“Except,” she said. “If they offered their proof and their reasons, then we’d know that people were responsible for everything. Just ordinary idiot self-important people. And that means that those ordinary idiot self-important people in Salvation couldn’t tell themselves that this had to be God’s judgment, or that they’re all so special and pure for surviving.”

I hadn’t thought of it that way.

Lola sniffed and said nothing more, wiping at her eyes with the backs of both hands. And I stood very still, looking out over that enormous graveyard, thinking, “This is how it feels. This is what it’s like, serving as pallbearer to the world.”

I watch for her, pulling a slab of smoky meat off the trailer, and then I take a break, expecting May to rush into view. Only she doesn’t. I remove another two slabs and carry them into the butcher’s shop, and when I come out I’m ready to see her. But the street is empty. Nervous energy gives me enough juice to work hard and fast. Warm enough to sweat, I open up my coat and sling more meat onto a cart and wheel it inside, pausing in the doorway to look back at nobody. She won’t show. I know this now. But when I come outside again, May is standing in my truck, waiting for me. Except that I don’t want to see her. A moment ago I was comfortable with the two of us never crossing paths again.

She says, “What?”

I push the cart past her, my head down.

“Your friend says you know something,” she says. “He told me that I had to run over here and talk to you. That it was important.”

Bear meat is greasy and dark, and it demands an entirely different approach to smoke properly. I start pulling the bear off the truck, piling the roasts and haunches on the cart. May watches me until the cart is full. Then she says, “You don’t know anything.”

“What was the old woman’s job?”

There. Somebody asks a question. And I guess it was me, since nobody else is standing here.

“Job?”

“Before the Shakes came,” I say.

She stares at me, saying nothing.

“She was a scientist,” I guess.

May straightens her back before reminding me, “That was a long time ago. And I’m sure you noticed, her mind is mostly gone.”

“She saved the world.”

The girl doesn’t react, not even to blink.

“Your brother’s pissed with her. But that’s only because she killed the wrong people he thinks. On the other hand, you know that she’s a good person, an exceptional person, and always has been. You love your grandmother, and you came all this way to see where she and your dad lived before the world changed. Those notes in your back pocket? They’re going to help you write a book about this great woman who helped save the world.” I’m sweating hard, tired hands shaking. “The world needed saving. If grandma and her friends hadn’t acted, our species would have eventually pushed the climate over the brink. And that would have been an even worse mess than the nightmare I lived through.”

May says nothing. But her eyes drop, and with ten feet between us, I can hear her breathing.

“The thing is, maybe I believe that’s all true. The climate was in deep trouble. There were too many people and no time to spare. And that one way or another, the Shakes saved the world.”

Her eyes lift.

“We’re still here,” I admit. “And I’m pretty much happy to be alive.”

A smile starts, but then she thinks better of it.

“There’s just one problem, May. Maybe your grandma did what she did for the best reasons. Maybe we didn’t have any choice left. But why not come out and explain the situation? Why didn’t she and her colleagues make their argument, even if it was horrible to consider and there was no turning back?”

She looks off into the distance.

“One statement, and all the mystery would be gone. Nobody likes dying, but at least there would have been a purpose to it. Mankind was being chopped back like a weed, and the planet would be better for it. That’s not nearly as hopeless as a pack of faceless murderers with no goal but to be vicious.”

May stares at the sky until I look in the same direction. I see nothing but the high blue, and she turns to me. “Maybe they should have,” she says.

“Did any of them take the vaccine?” I ask.

Her eyes stay on me. She waits and then says, “No,” before risking a small step toward me.

I try to speak, but my voice breaks.

May waits impatiently.

I breathe, and talk. “Most voices would claim that if people wanted to kill billions, even for the good of the earth, then they should take their own medicine. Me? I’d be happy if they ate their shotguns or drove off cliffs. But to think that one of them is fat and ancient and rolling around the half-dead world in a palace… that doesn’t say much about this group’s sense of sacrifice, or decency, or honor.”

May considers what to say. Then as she opens her mouth, ready to challenge me, I interrupt.

“But the worst thing? In my mind, without doubt, their silence made these people possible.” I swipe my hand at the town, at faces neither of us can see, at the years of embarrassment and hurt and being excluded by people who in better times I wouldn’t need for a single minute. “The good citizens of Salvation think they’re here because God is benevolent. God is decent. And God preferred them to the nameless bones in unmarked graves all around the world. Dumb-shit lucky bastards, yet they’re free to think they’re nothing but chosen.”

Again, she considers.

And when her mouth opens, I start to interrupt.

But May throws up a hand. I fall silent. I don’t remember what I was going to say. A step apart, she looks younger than ever but not as pretty, and she smiles with the bright intense expression that I have never seen from a real person, only on saints in old religious books — the consuming crazed gaze of an earthly soul bound to eventually sit on the lap of God.

In a whisper but with considerable intensity, she tells me, “You don’t understand.”

“Understand what?”

The hand covers my mouth.

“You think it’s finished,” she says. “You think once is enough to save the world. But what you call the ‘noble’ thing would have been foolish. My grandmother and the others… they had to survive and remain in touch with one another. That was the plan from the start.” She pauses, investing in a couple deep breaths. “How many children are living in this one town, Noah? It’s like that everywhere. A few old people, plenty of young parents, and too many children to count. And you heard how people are crossing the sea, spreading out to find new homes. Another crisis is coming. It won’t happen in my life, and maybe not for several centuries. But eventually these same tricks will be necessary if we’re going to…”

Her voice falters.

I taste salt and May as I pull back the hand. “If you’re going to what?”

Almost too softly to be heard, she says, “Another weeding.”

Then the saintly smile returns, self-assured and a million miles above the concerns of the ignorant and innocent.

Lola was right. Seeing my shrunken mother in the casket was important. Even essential. Now I was certain that she was dead, no doubts left, and helping carry her to the hole in the ground reminded me that she was never half as large as she seemed in my head.

She was a shell already beginning to rot, and we nailed shut the lid and lowered the box and started to shovel gouts of dirt and chunks of rock on top of an object that was no more my mother than it was the sky overhead.

Yet I was crying by the end.

And those who still happened to like me, or at least loved my mother, put their own emotions on my tears. They came over and hugged me and prayed for my soul. Then I went down to the Quilt Shop and bought a very tall beer, drinking it too fast, my gait a little sloppy as I headed back up the hill.

“Going to see your mom again?” Ferris asked in passing.

“I need another minute with her,” I admitted.

The old man pulled up, hearing that. Then he turned and looked at me until I returned the gaze. He was a small ageless sparkplug with a bright smile and charming manner. Others had told me that he had lost most of his family to the Shakes, but I could never remember him mentioning them, even in prayer.

“Son,” he said to me, like old men often do when referring to any fellow younger than them.

I waited.

“A minute won’t be long enough, son.”

“Maybe not,” I agreed.

“Don’t go,” he said.

But I’d already turned, pushing hard for that hill.

The guests won’t stay the night in Salvation. I guess that much, watching May walking quickly toward the RV. She will speak to her brother, and he’ll make a show of his important anger, and leaving him, she’ll return to the Mayor’s house to speak in private with her father. In the meantime, I might tell somebody what I guessed and everything I know. In the heat of the moment, May said too much. But that moment has passed and she probably can’t believe that she could do something so careless, so plainly stupid. Right now she’s telling herself that I’m not part of this community,

I’m just a crazy hermit, and nobody will listen to my nonsense. But it’s going to gnaw at her, this idea that maybe I will spread the word, and maybe a few of these odd people will believe me, and May is certainly not enough of a fool to trust the good will of Christians living in the midst of this parched, unfamiliar wilderness.

The four of them will drive away, and it will happen sooner instead of later. The best road is the highway. They can either head back east or drive west to the next junction, then north to the old Interstate — a route that gives them a straight shot at the promised land of Canada.

What waits in Canada, and why should it matter?

Other people like grandma, and a secret community of like-minded zealots. At least that’s what I imagine. But I know almost nothing about the world beyond my horizon. All I can deal with today is the people who are here, now.

In a rush, I unload the last of the bear and elk and fire up the truck and make the long turn around the block, driving back up the highway. I stop beside the half-built factory, considering its walls and windows before deciding to move farther. The bridge is as good as any place. I cross the bridge slowly and pull off into the ditch, parking in a spot low enough that nobody can see my rig from the opposite bank, but still leaving me with a good chance of driving out of there. Fast, if necessary.

This is hunting. My prey isn’t people, I tell myself. What I’m hunting is a large lumbering machine cast off from another time, and I won’t hurt anybody. That’s how I convince myself to pull my rifle out of its hiding place, both pistols and enough ammunition to fight off a brigade. With binoculars around my neck, I move close to the north end of the bridge, and after hard thought and a few doubts, I decide where to make my blind and how to work this ambush.

But I am hunting people. Punching holes in those military-grade tires might be impossible, and I doubt that I could cripple any engine that’s durable enough to drive halfway across the continent. But a bullet in the driver’s head wouldn’t be difficult, and I don’t like Winston. I picture him at the wheel and grandma back on the bed, and once the RV rolls off the road, I can finish the old lady without ever seeing her. Her son is a bigger problem. And there’s May too. I don’t know what I want to do, but when I think about them, my thoughts start to swerve. They won’t be coming in this direction, I promise myself. I’m just sitting here to prove a point to myself, because they’re right now heading back east again, taking a known route before heading north to that promised land.

My blind is a stand of tall dead grass and I do my best job of vanishing. The day is past its brightest, with the cold coming out of the ground and out of the dimming sky. It doesn’t take long to feel chilled. But I curl up tight and adjust my stocking cap, standing every so often to stomp my feet, checking the surrounding ground for anything sneaking up on me. But nothing is. I might be the only animal in this landscape. I kneel down again, check my weapons again, feeling nervous and a little warmer because of it.

They won’t come.

I say that aloud.

“They went the other way, and they’re gone,” I tell the evening breeze.

Maybe an hour of daylight remains. I stand again and stomp my stiff cold hurting feet, thinking hard about leaving. But when I glance downstream, I catch a sudden flash of sunlight reflected off moving glass, my heart kicks and for a moment I think of turning and running. But that isn’t what I do. From somewhere comes the courage to put the binoculars against my eyes and just the sight of that aluminum house is enough to make the anger rise up all over again, as big as ever and refusing to back down.

I am going to shoot the driver and then work my way back. Any movement in a window will be a target. Any likely hiding place will be punctured. I’ll tear apart the RV on my way back to grandma, and then I will stop. Maybe I won’t waste precious ammunition on her. One cold night with nobody to care for her, and the end won’t be long coming for her either.

The RV is still a long, long ways off.

I kneel. I check my guns again. I stand and stomp and use the gun sight, seeing nothing but the machine with its flat face and no hint of a soul.

I kneel.

A moment later, I’m shaking. Hard.

Then comes the rattling roar of an engine, and my first thought is that I know that sound and why is it so familiar? Somewhere behind me, the little engine cuts out. I keep hiding. A block of granite would show more motion that I do right now. I wait and listen, holding my breath for long spells, and then I hear the sound of boots on the road above and then the boots stop and a voice that I know better than my own asks, “What are you doing down there?”

I turn, looking up at Lola.

She smiles, and then decides not to smile. What replaces that first expression is scared and puzzled and then even more scared. In my face, she sees something she has never witnessed before, and when I rise to my feet, she looks at the various guns and my face again and then across the bridge, asking the cold dusk air, “What are you waiting for, Noah?”

“A tiger.”

“What tiger?”

“I saw him when I came by before,” I say. One weak step doesn’t carry me far up the very brief slope. “He’s a beauty. He’s got a spectacular pelt.” I manage another step, saying, “It’s been a bad day, and I wanted to give you a gift. Something you wouldn’t expect.”

The RV is close now. Its driver doesn’t seem to notice either person on the far side of the river, the vehicle neither speeding up nor slowing down, it and its loyal trailer rolling close to us and then past, the clatter of gravel on concrete lingering for several seconds. But the rest of the apparition has vanished behind a wall of oak and cottonwoods.

Lola watches me. She has probably never seen a machine like that, but I am the only object of any importance on this landscape. She stares and says nothing, watching me slowly climb up to the old roadbed, and then I start to talk again, to tell her something else that isn’t true, and her gloved hand pushes at my face while her face cries, and she says, “I don’t want a tiger.”

She tells me, “Come home with me. Now.”

AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA Elizabeth Bear

The following story reminds me of both “Damnation Alley” by Roger Zelazny and “The Postman” by David Brin, so we’re really getting three for the price of one.

Elizabeth Bear received the Campbell Award as Best New Writer in 2005 and has since won two Hugo Awards for her short fiction, a selection of which was published as The Chains That You Refuse (2006). She has been immensely prolific since her debut. Her first novel, Hammered (2005), which began the Jenny Casey trilogy set in a post-catastrophe North America, won the Locus Award for Best First Novel.

THE END OF THE WORLD had come and gone. It turned out not to matter much in the long run.

The mail still had to get through. Harrie signed yesterday’s papenvork, checked the dates against the calendar, contemplated her signature for a moment, and capped her pen. She weighed the metal barrel in her hand and met Dispatch’s faded eyes. “What’s special about this trip?”

He shrugged and turned the clipboard around on the counter, checking each sheet to be certain she’d filled them out properly. She didn’t bother watching. She never made mistakes. “Does there have to be something special?”

“You don’t pay my fees unless it’s special, Patch.” She grinned as he lifted an insulated steel case onto the counter.

“This has to be in Sacramento in eight hours,” he said.

“What is it?”

“Medical goods. Fetal stem-cell cultures. In a climate-controlled unit. They can’t get too hot or too cold, there’s some arcane formula about how long they can live in this given quantity of growth media, and the customer’s paying very handsomely to see them in California by 1800 hours.”

“It’s almost 1000 now. What’s too hot or too cold?” Harrie hefted the case. It was lighter than it looked; it would slide effortlessly into the saddlebags on her touring bike.

“Any hotter than it already is,” Dispatch said, mopping his brow. “Can you do it?”

“Eight hours? Phoenix to Sacramento?” Harrie leaned back to check the sun. “It’ll take me through Vegas. The California routes aren’t any good at that speed since the Big One.”

“I wouldn’t send anybody else. Fastest way is through Reno.”

“There’s no gasoline from somewhere this side of the dam to Tonopah. Even my courier card won’t help me there-”

“There’s a checkpoint in Boulder City. They’ll fuel you.”

“Military?”

“I did say they were paying very well.” He shrugged, shoulders already gleaming with sweat. It was going to be a hot one. Harrie guessed it would hit 120 in Phoenix.

At least she was headed north.

“I’ll do it,” she said, and held her hand out for the package receipt. “Any pickups in Reno?”

“You know what they say about Reno?”

“Yeah. It’s so close to hell that you can see Sparks.” Naming the city’s largest suburb.

“Right. You don’t want anything in Reno. Go straight through,” Patch said. “Don’t stop in Vegas, whatever you do. The overpass’s come down, but that won’t affect you unless there’s debris. Stay on the 95 through to Fallon; it’ll see you clear.”

“Check.” She slung the case over her shoulder, pretending she didn’t see Patch wince. “I’ll radio when I hit Sacramento—”

“Telegraph,” he said. “The crackle between here and there would kill your signal otherwise.”

“Check,” again, turning to the propped-open door. Her prewar Kawasaki Concours crouched against the crumbling curb like an enormous, restless cat. Not the prettiest bike around, but it got you there. Assuming you didn’t ditch the top-heavy son of a bitch in the parking lot.

“Harrie-”

“What?” She paused, but didn’t turn.

“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

She glanced behind her, strands of hair catching on the strap of the insulated case and on the shoulder loops of her leathers. “What if I meet the Devil?”

She let the Concours glide through the curves of the long descent to Hoover Dam, a breather after the hard straight push from Phoenix, and considered her options. She’d have to average near enough 160 klicks an hour to make the run on time. It should be smooth sailing; she’d be surprised if she saw another vehicle between Boulder City andTonopah.

She’d checked out a backup dosimeter before she left Phoenix, just in case. Both clicked softly as she crossed the dam and the poisoned river, reassuring her with alert, friendly chatter. She couldn’t pause to enjoy the expanse of blue on her right side or the view down the escarpment on the left, but the dam was in pretty good shape, all things considered.

It was more than you could say for Vegas.

Once upon a time — she downshifted as she hit the steep grade up the north side of Black Canyon, sweat already soaking her hair — once upon a time a delivery like this would have been made by aircraft. There were places where it still would be. Places where there was money for fuel, money for airstrip repairs. Places where most of the aircraft weren’t parked in tidy rows, poisoned birds lined up beside poisoned runways, hot enough that you could hear the dosimeters clicking as you drove past.

A runner’s contract was a hell of a lot cheaper. Even when you charged the way Patch charged.

Sunlight glinted off the Colorado River so far below, flashing red and gold as mirrors. Crumbling casino on the right, now, and the canyon echoing the purr of the sleek black bike. The asphalt was spidenvebbed but still halfway smooth — smooth enough for a big bike, anyway. A big bike cruising at a steady ninety k/ph, much too fast if there was anything in the road. Something skittered aside as she thought it, a grey blur instantly lost among the red and black blurs of the receding rock walls on either side. Bighorn sheep. Nobody’d bothered to tell them to clear out before the wind could make them sick.

Funny thing was, they seemed to be thriving.

Harrie leaned into the last curve, braking in and accelerating out just to feel the tug of g-forces, and gunned it up the straightaway leading to the checkpoint at Boulder City. A red light flashed on a peeling steel pole beside the road. The Kawasaki whined and buzzed between her thighs, as if displeased to be restrained, then gentled as she eased the throttle, mindful of dust.

Houses had been knocked down across the top of the rise that served as host to the guard’s shielded quarters, permitting an unimpeded view of Boulder City stretching out below. The bulldozer that had done the work slumped nearby, rusting under bubbled paint, too radioactive to be taken away, too radioactive even to be melted down for salvage.

Boulder City had been affluent once. Harrie could see the husks of trendy businesses on either side of Main Street: brick and stucco buildings in red and taupe, some whitewashed wood frames peeling in slow curls, submissive to the desert heat.

The gates beyond the checkpoint were closed and so were the lead shutters on the guard’s shelter. A digital sign over the roof gave an ambient radiation reading in the mid double digits and a temperature reading in the low triple digits, Fahrenheit. It would get hotter — and “hotter” — as she descended into Vegas.

Harrie dropped the sidestand as the Kawasaki rolled to a halt, and thumbed her horn.

The young man who emerged from the shack was surprisingly tidy, given his remote duty station. Cap set regulation, boots shiny under the dust. He was still settling his breathing filter as he climbed down red metal steps and trotted over to Harrie’s bike. Harrie wondered who he’d pissed off to draw this duty, or if he was a novelist who had volunteered.

“Runner,” she said, her voice echoing through her helmet mike. She tapped the ID card visible inside the windowed pocket on the breast of her leathers, tugged her papers from the pouch on her tank with a clumsy gloved hand and unfolded them inside their transparent carrier. “You’re supposed to gas me up fortheruntoTonopah.”

“You have an independent filter or just the one in your helmet?” All efficiency as he perused her papers.

“Independent.”

“Visor up, please.” He wouldn’t ask her to take the helmet off. There was too much dust. She complied, and he checked her eyes and nose against the photo ID.

“Angharad Crowther. This looks in order. You’re with UPS?”

“Independent contractor,” Harrie said. “It’s a medical run.”

He turned away, gesturing her to follow, and led her to the pumps. They were shrouded in plastic, one diesel and one unleaded. “Is that a Connie?”

“A little modified so she doesn’t buzz so much.” Harrie petted the gas tank with a gloved hand. “Anything I should know about between here and Tonopah?”

He shrugged. “You know the rules, I hope.”

“Stay on the road,” she said, as he slipped the nozzle into the fill. “Don’t go inside any buildings. Don’t go near any vehicles. Don’t stop, don’t look back, and especially don’t turn around; it’s not wise to drive through your own dust. If it glows, don’t pick it up, and nothing from the black zone leaves.”

“I’ll telegraph ahead and let Tonopah know you’re coming,” he said, as the gas pump clicked. “You ever crash that thing?”

“Not in going on ten years,” she said, and didn’t bother to cross her fingers.

He handed her a receipt; she fumbled her lacquered stainless Cross pen out of her zippered pocket and signed her name like she meant it. The gloves made her signature into an incomprehensible scrawl, but the guard made a show of comparing it to her ID card and slapped her on the shoulder. “Be careful. If you crash out there, you’re probably on your own. Godspeed.”

“Thanks for the reassurance,” she said, and grinned at him before she closed her visor and split.

Digitized music rang over her helmet headset as Harrie ducked her head behind the fairing, the hot wind tugging her sleeves, trickling between her gloves and her cuffs. The Kawasaki stretched out under her, ready for a good hard run, and Harrie itched to give it one. One thing you could say about the Vegas black zone: there wasn’t much traffic. Houses — identical in red tile roofs and cream stucco walls — blurred past on either side, flanked by trees that the desert had killed once people weren’t there to pump the water up to them. She cracked 160 k/ph in the wind shadow of the sound barriers, the tach winding up like a watch, just gliding along in sixth as the Kawasaki hit its stride. The big bike handled like a pig in the parking lot, but out on the highway she ran smooth as glass.

She had almost a hundred miles of range more than she’d need to get to Tonopah, God wiling and the creek didn’t rise, but she wasn’t about to test that with any side trips through what was left of Las Vegas. Her dosimeters clicked with erratic cheer, nothing to worry about yet, and Harrie claimed the center lane and edged down to 140 as she hit the winding patch of highway near the old downtown. The shells of casinos on the left-hand side and godforsaken wasteland and ghetto on the right gave her back the Kawasaki’s well-tuned shriek; she couldn’t wind it any faster with the roads so choppy and the K-Rail canyons so tight.

The sky overhead was flat blue like cheap turquoise. A pall of dust showed burnt sienna, the inversion layer trapped inside the ring of mountains that made her horizon in four directions.

The freeway opened out once she cleared downtown, the overpass Patch had warned her about arching up and over, a tangle of banked curves, the crossroads at the heart of the silent city. She bid the ghosts of hotels good day as the sun hit zenith, heralding peak heat for another four hours or so. Harrie resisted the urge to reach back and pat her saddlebag to make sure the precious cargo was safe; she’d never know if the climate control failed on the trip, and moreover she couldn’t risk the distraction as she wound the Kawasaki up to 170 and ducked her helmet into the slipstream off the fairing.

Straight shot to the dead town called Beatty from here, if you minded the cattle guards along the roads by the little forlorn towns. Straight shot, with the dosimeters clicking and vintage rock and roll jamming in the helmet speakers and the Kawasaki purring, thrusting, eager to spring and run.

There were worse days to be alive.

She dropped it to fourth and throttled back coming up on that overpass, the big one where the Phoenix to Reno highway crossed the one that used to run LA to Salt Lake, when there was an LA to speak of. Patch had said overpass’s down, which could mean unsafe for transit and could mean littering the freeway underneath with blocks of concrete the size of a semi, and Harrie had no interest in finding out which it was with no room left to brake. She adjusted the volume on her music down as the rush of wind abated, and took the opportunity to sightsee a bit.

And swore softly into her air filter, slowing further before she realized she’d let the throttle slip.

Something — no, someone — leaned against a shotgunned, paint-peeled sign that might have given a speed limit once, when there was anyone to care about such things.

Her dosimeters clicked aggressively as she let the bike roll closer to the verge. She shouldn’t stop. But it was a death sentence, being alone and on foot out here. Even if the sun weren’t climbing the sky, sweat rolling from under Harrie’s helmet, adhering her leathers to her skin.

She was almost stopped by the time she realized she knew him. Knew his ocher skin and his natty pinstriped double-breasted suit and his fedora, tilted just so, and the cordovan gleam of his loafers. For one mad moment, she wished she carried a gun.

Not that a gun would help her. Even if she decided to swallow a bullet herself.

“Nick.” She put the bike in neutral, dropping her feet as it rolled to a stop. “Fancy meeting you in the middle of Hell.”

“I got some papers for you to sign, Harrie.” He pushed his fedora back over his hollow-cheeked face. “You got a pen?”

“You know I do.” She unzipped her pocket and fished out the Cross. “I wouldn’t lend a fountain pen to just anybody.”

He nodded, leaning back against a K-Rail so he could kick a knee up and spread his papers out over it. He accepted the pen. “You know your note’s about come due.”

“Nick-”

“No whining now,” he said. “Didn’t I hold up my end of the bargain? Have you ditched your bike since last we talked?”

“No, Nick.” Crestfallen.

“Had it stolen? Been stranded? Missed a timetable?”

“I’m about to miss one now if you don’t hurry up with my pen.” She held her hand out imperiously; not terribly convincing, but the best she could do under the circumstances.

“Mmm-hmmm.” He was taking his own sweet time.

Perversely, the knowledge settled her. “If the debt’s due, have you come to collect?”

“I’ve come to offer you a chance to renegotiate,” he said, and capped the pen and handed it back. “I’ve got a job for you; could buy you a few more years if you play your cards right.”

She laughed in his face and zipped the pen away. “A few more years?” But he nodded, lips pressed thin and serious, and she blinked and went serious too. “You mean it.”

“I never offer what I’m not prepared to give,” he said, and scratched the tip of his nose with his thumbnail. “What say, oh — three more years?”

“Three’s not very much.” The breeze shifted. Her dosimeters crackled. “Ten’s not very much, now that I’m looking back on it.”

“Goes by quick, don’t it?” He shrugged. “All right. Seven—”

“For what?”

“What do you mean?” She could have laughed again, at the transparent and oh-so-calculated guilelessness in his eyes.

“I mean, what is it you want me to do for seven more years of protection.” The bike was heavy, but she wasn’t about to kick the sidestand down. “I’m sure it’s bad news for somebody.”

“It always is.” But he tipped the brim of his hat down a centimeter and gestured to her saddlebag, negligently. “I just want a moment with what you’ve got there in that bag.”

“Huh.” She glanced at her cargo, pursing her lips. “That’s a strange thing to ask. What would you want with a box full of research cells?”

He straightened away from the sign he was holding up and came a step closer. “That’s not so much yours to worry about, young lady. Give it to me, and you get seven years. If you don’t -the note’s up next week, isn’t it?”

“Tuesday.” She would have spat, but she wasn’t about to lift her helmet aside. “I’m not scared of you, Nick.”

“You’re not scared of much.” He smiled, all smooth. “It’s part of your charm.”

She turned her head, staring away west across the sun-soaked desert and the roofs of abandoned houses, abandoned lives. Nevada had always had a way of making ghost towns out of metropolises. “What happens if I say no?”

“I was hoping you weren’t going to ask that, sweetheart,” he said. He reached to lay a hand on her right hand where it rested on the throttle. The bike growled, a high, hysterical sound, and Nick yanked his hand back. “I see you two made friends.”

“We get along all right,” Harrie said, patting the Kawasaki’s gas tank. “What happens if I say no?”

He shrugged and folded his arms. “You won’t finish your run.” No threat in it, no extra darkness in the way the shadow of his hat brim fell across his face. No menace in his smile. Cold fact, and she could take it how she took it.

She wished she had a piece of gum to crack between her teeth. It would fit her mood. She crossed her arms, balancing the Kawasaki between her thighs. Harrie liked bargaining. “That’s not the deal. The deal’s no spills, no crashes, no breakdowns, and every run complete on time. I said I’d get these cells to Sacramento in eight hours. You’re wasting my daylight; somebody’s life could depend on them.”

“Somebody’s life does,” Nick answered, letting his lips twist aside. “A lot of somebodies, when it comes down to it.”

“Break the deal, Nick — fuck with my ride — and you’re in breach of contract.”

“You’ve got nothing to bargain with.”

She laughed, then, outright. The Kawasaki purred between her legs, encouraging. “There’s always time to mend my ways—”

“Not if you die before you make it to Sacramento,” he said. “Last chance to reconsider, Angharad, my princess. We can still shake hands and part friends. Or you can finish your last ride on my terms, and it won’t be pretty for you” -the Kawasaki snarled softly, the tang of burning oil underneath it — “or your bike.”

“Fuck off,” Harrie said, and kicked her feet up as she twisted the throttle and drove straight at him, just for the sheer stupid pleasure of watching him dance out of her way.

Nevada had been dying slowly for a long time: perchlorate-poisoned groundwater, a legacy of World War Two titanium plants; cancer rates spiked by exposure to fallout from above ground nuclear testing; crushing drought and climactic change; childhood leukemia clusters in rural towns. The explosion of the PEPCON plant in 1988 might have been perceived by a sufficiently imaginative mind as God’s shot across the bow, but the real damage didn’t occur until decades later, when a train carrying high-level nuclear waste to the Yucca Mountain storage facility collided with a fuel tanker stalled across the rails.

The resulting fire and radioactive contamination of the Las Vegas Valley proved to be a godsend in disguise. When the War came to Nellis Air Force Base and the nuclear mountain, Las Vegas was already as much a ghost town as Rhyolite or Goldfield — except deserted not because the banks collapsed or the gold ran out, but because the dust that blew through the streets was hot enough to drop a sparrow in midflight, or so people said.

Harrie didn’t know if the sparrow story was true.

“So,” she muttered into her helmet, crouched over the Kawasaki’s tank as the bike screamed north by northwest, leaving eerie Las Vegas behind. “What do you think he’s going to throw at us, girl?”

The bike whined, digging in. Central city gave way to desolate suburbia, and the highway dropped to ground level and straightened out, a narrow strip of black reflecting the summer heat in mirage silver.

The desert sprawled on either side, a dun expanse of scrub and hardpan narrowing as the Kawasaki climbed into the broad pass between two dusty ranges of mountains. Harrie’s dosimeters clicked steadily, counting marginally more rads as she roared by the former nuclear testing site at Mercury at close to 200 k/ph. She throttled back as a sad little township -a few discarded trailers, another military base and a disregarded prison — came up. There were no pedestrians to worry about, but the grated metal cattle guard was not something to hit at speed.

On the far side, there was nothing to slow her for fifty miles. She cranked her music up, dropped her head behind the fairing and redlined her tach for Beatty and the far horizon.

It got rocky again coming up on Beatty. Civilization in Nevada huddled up to the oases and springs that lurked at the foot of mountains and in the low parts in valleys. This had been mining country, mountains gnawed away by dynamite and sharp-toothed pay-loaders. A long gorge on the right side of the highway showed green clots of trees; water ran there, tainted by the broken dump, and her dosimeters clicked as the road curved near it. If she walked down the bank and splashed into the stream between the roots of the willows and cottonwoods, she’d walk out glowing and be dead by nightfall.

She rounded the corner and entered the ghost of Beatty.

The problem, she thought, arose because every little town in Nevada grew up at the same place: a crossroads, and she half-expected Nick to be waiting for her at this one too. The Kawasaki whined as they rolled through tumbleweed-clogged streets but they passed under the town’s sole, blindly staring stoplight without seeing another creature. Despite the sun like a physical pressure on her leathers, a chill ran spidery fingers up her spine. She’d rather know where the hell he was, thank you very much. “Maybe he took a wrong turn at Rhyolite.”

The Kawasaki snarled, impatient to be turned loose on the open road again but Harrie threaded it through slumping cars and around windblown debris with finicky care. “Nobody’s looking out for us any more, Connie,” Harrie murmured, and stroked the sun-scorched fuel tank with her gloved left hand. They passed a deserted gas station, the pumps crouched useless without power; the dosimeters chirped and warbled. “I don’t want to kick up that dust if I can help it.”

The ramshackle one- and two-story buildings gave way to desert and highway. Harrie paused, feet down on tarmac melted sticky-soft by the sun, and made sure the straw of her camel pack was fixed in the holder. The horizon shimmered with heat, ridges of mountains on either side and dun hardpan stretching to infinity. She sighed and took a long drink of stale water.

“Here we go,” she said, hands nimble on the clutch and the throttle as she lifted her feet to the peg. The Kawasaki rolled forward, gathering speed. “Not too much further to Tonopah, and then we can both get fed.”

Nick was giving her time to think about it, and she drowned the worries with the Dead Kennedys, Boiled in Lead, and the Acid Trip.

The ride from Beatty to Tonopah was swift and uneventful, the flat road unwinding beneath her wheels like a spun-out tape measure, the banded mountains crawling past on either side. The only variation along the way was forlorn Goldfield, its wind-touched streets empty and sere. It had been a town of 20,000, abandoned before Vegas fell to radiation sickness, even longer before the nuke dump broke open. She pushed 200 k/ph most of the way, the road all hers, not so much as the glimmer of sunlight off a distant windshield to contest her ownership. The silence and the empty road just gave her more to worry at, and she did, picking at her problem like a vulture picking at a corpse.

The fountain pen was heavy in her breast pocket as Tonopah shimmered into distant visibility. Her head swam with the heat, the helmet squelching over saturated hair. She sucked more water, trying to ration; the temperature was climbing toward 120, and she wouldn’t last long without hydration. The Kawasaki coughed a little, rolling down a slow, extended incline, but the gas gauge gave her nearly a quarter of a tank — and there was the reserve if she exhausted the main. Still, instruments weren’t always right, and luck wasn’t exactly on her side.

Harrie killed her music with a jab of her tongue against the control pad inside her helmet. She dropped her left hand from the handlebar and thumped the tank. The sound she got back was hollow, but there was enough fluid inside to hear it refract off a moving surface. The small city ahead was a welcome sight: there’d be fresh water and gasoline, and she could hose the worst of the dust off and take a piss. God damn, you’d think with the sweat soaking her leathers to her body, there’d be no need for that last, but the devil was in the details, it turned out.

Harrie’d never wanted to be a boy but some days she really wished she had the knack of peeing standing up.

She was only about half a klick away when she realized that there was something wrong about Tonopah. Other than the usual; her dosimeters registered only background noise as she came up on it, but a harsh reek like burning coal rasped the back of her throat even through the dust filters, and the weird little town wasn’t the weird little town she remembered. Rolling green hills rose around it on all sides, thick with shadowy, leaf ess trees, and it was smoke haze that drifted on the still air, not dust. A heat shimmer floated over the cracked road, and the buildings that crowded alongside it weren’t Tonopah’s desert-weathered construction but peeling white shingle-sided houses, a storefront post office, a white church with the steeple caved in and half the facade dropped into a smoking sinkhole in the ground.

The Kawasaki whined, shivering as Harrie throttled back. She sat upright in the saddle, letting the big bike roll. “Where the hell are we?” Her voice reverberated. She startled; she’d forgotten she’d left her microphone on.

“Exactly,” a familiar voice said at her left. “Welcome to Centralia.” Nick wore an open-faced helmet and straddled the back of a Honda Goldwing the color of dried blood, if blood had gold dust flecked through it. The Honda hissed at the Kawasaki, and the Connie growled back, wobbling in eager challenge. Harrie restrained her bike with gentling hands, giving it a little more gas to straighten it out.

“Centralia?” Harrie had never heard of it, and she flattered herself that she’d heard of most places.

“Pennsylvania.” Nick lifted his black-gloved hand off the clutch and gestured vaguely around himself. “Or Jharia, in India. Or maybe the Chinese province of Xinjiang. Subterranean coal fires, you know, anthracite burning in evacuated mines. Whole towns abandoned, sulfur and brimstone seeping up through vents, the ground hot enough to flash rain to steam. Your tires will melt. You’ll put that bike into a crevasse. Not to mention the greenhouse gases. Lovely things.” He grinned, showing shark’s teeth, four rows. “Second time asking, Angharad, my princess.”

“Second time saying no.” She fixed her eyes on the road. She could see the way the asphalt buckled, now, and the dim glow from the bottom of the sinkhole underneath the church. “You really are used to people doing your bidding, aren’t you, Nick?”

“They don’t usually put up much of a fight.” He twisted the throttle while the clutch was engaged, coaxing a whining, competitive cough from his Honda.

Harrie caught his shrug sideways but kept her gaze trained grimly fonvard. Was that the earth shivering, or was it just the shimmer of heat-haze over the road? The Kawasaki whined. She petted the clutch to reassure herself.

The groaning rumble that answered her wasn’t the Kawasaki. She tightened her knees on the seat as the ground pitched and bucked under her tires, hand clutching the throttle to goose the Connie forward. Broken asphalt sprayed from her rear tire. The road split and shattered, vanishing behind her. She hauled the bike upright by raw strength and nerved herself to check her mirrors; lazy steam rose from a gaping hole in the road.

Nick cruised along, unperturbed. “You sure, Princess?”

“What was that you said about Hell, Nick?” She hunkered down and grinned at him over her shoulder, knowing he couldn’t see more than her eyes crinkle through the helmet. It was enough to draw an irritated glare.

He sat back on his haunches and tipped his toes up on the footpegs, throwing both hands up, releasing throttle and clutch, letting the Honda coast away behind her. “I said, welcome to it.”

The Kawasaki snarled and whimpered by turns, heavy and agile between her legs as she gave it all the gas she dared. She’d been counting on the refuel stop here, but compact southwestern Tonopah had been replaced by a shattered sprawl of buildings, most of them obviously either bulldozed or vanished into pits that glared like a wolf s eye reflecting a flash, and a gas station wasn’t one of the remaining options. The streets were broad, at least, and deserted, not so much winding as curving gently through shallow swales and over hillocks. Broad, but not intact; the asphalt rippled as if heaved by moles and some of the rises and dips hid fissures and sinkholes. Her tires scorched; she coughed into her filter, her mike amplifying it to a hyena’s bark. The Cross pen in her pocket pressed her breast over her heart. She took comfort in it, ducking behind the fairing to dodge the stinking wind and the clawing skeletons of ungroomed trees. She’d signed on the line, after all. And either Nick had to see her and the Kawasaki safe or she got back what she’d paid.

As if Nick abided by contracts.

As if he couldn’t just kill her and get what he wanted that way. Except he couldn’t keep her if he did.

“Damn,” she murmured, to hear the echoes, and hunched over the Kawasaki’s tank. The wind tore at her leathers. The heavy bike caught air coming over the last rise. She had to pee like she couldn’t believe, and the vibration of the engine wasn’t helping, but she laughed out loud to set the city behind.

She got out easier than she thought she would, although her gauge read empty at the bottom of the hill. She switched to reserve and swore. Dead trees and smoking stumps rippled into nonexistence around her, and the lone and level sands stretched to ragged mountains east and west. She was back in Nevada, if she’d ever left it, hard westbound now, straight into the glare of the afternoon sun. Her polarized faceplate helped somewhat, maybe not enough, but the road was smooth again before and behind and she could see Tonopah sitting dusty and forsaken in her rearview mirror, inaccessible as a mirage, a city at the bottom of a well.

Maybe Nick could only touch her in the towns. Maybe he needed a little of man’s hand on the wilderness to twist to his own ends, or maybe it amused him. Maybe it was where the roads crossed, after all. She didn’t think she could make it back to Tonopah if she tried, however, so she pretended she didn’t see the city behind her and cruised west, toward Hawthorne, praying she had enough gas to make it but not expecting her prayers to be answered by anybody she particularly wanted to talk to.

The 95 turned northwest again at the deserted Coaldale junction; there hadn’t been a town there since long before the War, or even the disaster at Vegas. Mina was gone too, its outskirts marked by a peeling sign advertising an abandoned crawfish farm, the Desert Lobster Facility.

Harrie’s camel bag went dry. She sucked at the straw forlornly one last time and spat it out, letting it sag against her jaw, damp and tacky. She hunkered down and laid a long line of smoking road behind, cornering gently when she had to corner, worried about her scorched and bruised tires. At least the day was cooling as evening encroached, as she progressed north and gained elevation. It might be down into the double digits, even, although it was hard to tell through the leather. On her left, the Sarcophagus Mountains rose between her and California.

The name didn’t amuse her as much as it usually did.

And then they were climbing. She breathed a low sigh of relief and patted the hungry, grumbling Kawasaki on the fuel tank as the blistering blue of Walker Lake came into view, the dusty little town of Hawthorne huddled like a crab on the near shore. There was nothing moving there either, and Harrie chewed her lip behind the filter. Dust had gotten into her helmet somehow, gritting every time she blinked; weeping streaks marked her cheeks behind the visor. She hoped the dust wasn’t the kind that was likely to make her glow, but her dosimeters had settled down to chickenlike clucking, so she might be okay.

The Kawasaki whimpered apologetically and died as she coasted into town.

“Christ,” she said, and flinched at the echo of her own amplified voice. She reached to thumb the mike off, and, on second thought, left it alone. It was too damned quiet out here without the Kawasaki’s commentary. She tongued her music back on, flipping selections until she settled on a tune by Grey Line Out.

She dropped her right foot and kicked the stand down on the left, then stood on the peg and slung her leg over the saddle. She ached with vibration, her hands stiff claws from clutching the handlebars. The stretch of muscle across her ass and thighs was like the reminder of a two-day-old beating but she leaned into the bike, boot sole slipping on grit as she heaved it into motion. She hopped on one foot to kick the stand up, wincing.

It wasn’t the riding. It was the standing up, afterward.

She walked the Kawasaki up the deserted highway, between the deserted buildings, the pavement hot enough to sear her feet through the boot leather if she stood still for too long. “Good girl,” she told the Kawasaki, stroking the fonvard brake handle. It leaned against her heavily, cumbersome at a walking pace, like walking a drunk friend home. “Gotta be a gas station somewhere.”

Of course, there wouldn’t be any power to run the pumps, and probably no safe water, but she’d figure that out when she got there. Sunlight glimmered off the lake; she was fine, she told herself, because she wasn’t too dehydrated for her mouth to wet at the thought of all that cool, fresh water.

Except there was no telling what kind of poison was in that lake. There was an old naval base on its shore, and the lake itself had been used as a kind of kiddie pool for submarines. Anything at all could be floating around in its waters. Not, she admitted, that there wasn’t a certain irony to taking the long view at a time like this.

She spotted a Texaco station, the red and white sign bleached pink and ivory, crazed by the relentless desert sun. Harrie couldn’t remember if she was in the Mojave or the Black Rock desert now, or some other desert entirely. They all ran together. She jumped at her own slightly hysterical giggle. The pumps were off, as she’d anticipated, but she leaned the Kawasaki up on its sidestand anyway, grabbed the climate-controlled case out of her saddlebag, and went to find a place to take a leak.

The leather was hot on her fingers when she pulled her gloves off and dropped her pants. “Damned, stupid… First thing I do when I get back to civilization is buy a set of leathers and a helmet in white, dammit.” She glanced at the Kawasaki as she fixed herself, expecting a hiss of agreement, but the black bike was silent. She blinked stinging eyes and turned away.

There was a garden hose curled on its peg behind one of the tan-faced houses huddled by the Texaco station, the upper side bleached yellow on green like the belly of a dead snake. Harrie wenched it off the peg one-handed. The rubber was brittle from dry rot; she broke it twice trying to uncoil a section, but managed to get about seven feet clean. She pried the fill cap off the underground tank with a tire iron and yanked off her helmet and air filter to sniff, checking both dosimeters first.

It had, after all, been one of those days.

The gas smelled more or less like gasoline though, and it tasted like fucking gasoline too, when she got a good mouthful of it from sucking it up her impromptu siphon. Not very good gasoline, maybe, but beggars and choosers. The siphon wouldn’t work as a siphon because she couldn’t get the top end lower than the bottom end, but she could suck fuel up into it and transfer it, hoseful by hoseful, into the Kawasaki’s empty tank, the precious case leaning against her boot while she did.

Finally, she saw the dark gleam of fluid shimmer through the fill hole when she peered inside and tapped the side of the tank.

She closed the tank and spat and spat, wishing she had water to wash the gasoline away. The lake glinted, mocking her, and she resolutely turned her back on it and picked up the case.

It was light in her hand. She paused with one hand on the flap of the saddlebag, weighing that gleaming silver object, staring past it at her boots. She sucked on her lower lip, tasted gas, and turned her head and spat again. “A few more years of freedom, Connie,” she said, and stroked the metal with a black-gloved hand. “You and me. I could drink the water. It wouldn’t matter if that was bad gas I fed you. Nothing could go wrong…”

The Kawasaki was silent. Its keys jangled in Harrie’s hip pocket. She touched the throttle lightly, drew her hand back, laid the unopened case on the seat. “What do you say, girl?”

Nothing, of course. It was quiescent, slumbering, a dreaming demon. She hadn’t turned it on.

With both thumbs at once, Harrie flicked up the latches and opened the case.

It was cool inside, cool enough that she could feel the difference on her face when she bent over it. She kept the lid at half-mast, trying to block that cool air with her body so it wouldn’t drift away.

She tipped her head to see inside: blue foam threaded through with cooling elements, shaped to hold the contents without rattling. Papers in a plastic folder, and something in sealed culture plates, clear jelly daubed with ragged polka dots.

There was a sticky note tacked on the plastic folder. She reached into the cool case and flicked the sticky note out, bringing it into the light. Patch’s handwriting. She blinked.

“Sacramento next, if these don’t get there,” it said, in thick black definite lines. “Like Faustus, we all get one good chance to change our minds.”

If you meet the Buddha on the road—

“I always thought there was more to that son of a bitch than met the eye,” she said, and closed the case, and stuffed the note into her pocket beside the pen. She jammed her helmet back on, double-checking the filter that had maybe started leaking a little around the edges in Tonopah, slung her leg over the Kawasaki’s saddle, and closed the choke.

It gasped dry when she clutched and thumbed the start button, shaking between her legs like an asthmatic pony. She gave it a little throttle, then eased up on it like easing up on a virgin lover. Coaxing, pleading under her breath. Gasoline fumes from her mouth made her eyes tear inside the helmet; the tears or something else washed the grit away. One cylinder hiccuped. A second one caught.

She eased the choke as the Kawasaki coughed and purred, shivering, ready to run.

Both dosimeters kicked hard as she rolled across the flat, open plain towards Fallon, a deadly oasis in its own right. Apparently Nick hadn’t been satisfied with a leukemia cluster and perchlorate and arsenic tainting the ground water; the trees Harrie saw as she rolled up on the startling green of the farming town weren’t desert cotton-woods but towering giants of the European forest, and something grey and massive, shimmering with lovely crawling blue Cherenkov radiation, gleamed behind them. The signs she passed were in an alphabet she didn’t understand, but she knew the name of this place.

A light rain was falling as she passed through Chernobyl.

It drove down harder as she turned west on the 50, toward Reno and Sparks and a crack under the edge of the clouds that glowed a toxic, sallow color with evening coming on. Her tires skittered on slick, greasy asphalt.

Where the cities should have been, stinking piles of garbage crouched against the yellowing evening sky, and nearly naked, starvation-slender people picked their way over slumped rubbish, calling the names of loved ones buried under the avalanche. Water sluiced down her helmet, soaked her saddle, plastered her leathers to her body. She wished she dared drink the rain. It didn’t make her cool. It only made her wet.

She didn’t turn her head to watch the wretched victims of the garbage slide. She was one hour out of Sacramento, and in Manila of fifty years ago.

Donner Pass was green and pleasant, sunset staining the sky ahead as red as meat. She was in plenty of time. It was all downhill from here.

Nick wasn’t about to let her get away without a fight.

The Big one had rerouted the Sacramento River too, and Harrie turned back at the edge because the bridge was down and the water was on fire. She motored away, 100 meters, 200, until the heat of the burning river faded against her back. “What’s that?” she asked the slim man in the pinstriped suit who waited for her by the roadside.

“Cuyahoga river fire,” he said. “1969. Count your blessings. It could have been Bhopal.”

“Blessings?” She spared him a sardonic smile, invisible behind her helmet. He tilted the brim of his hat with a grey-gloved finger. “I suppose you could say that. What is it really?”

“Phlegethon.”

She raised her visor and peeked over her shoulder, watching the river burn. Even here, it was hot enough that her sodden leathers steamed against her back. The back of her hand pressed her breast pocket. The paper from Patch’s note crinkled; her Cross poked her in the tit.

She looked at Nick, and Nick looked at her. “So that’s it.”

“That’s all she wrote. It’s too far to jump.”

“I can see that.”

“Give me the case and I’ll let you go home. I’ll give you the Kawasaki and I’ll give you your freedom. We’ll call it even.”

She eyed him, tension up her right leg, toe resting on the ground. The great purring bike shifted heavily between her legs, lithe as a cat, ready to turn and spit gravel from whirring tires. “Too far to jump.”

“That’s what I said.”

Too far to jump. Maybe. And maybe if she gave him what was in the case, and doomed Sacramento like Bhopal, like Chernobyl, like Las Vegas… Maybe she’d be damning herself even if he gave it back to her. And even if she wasn’t, she wasn’t sure she and the Kawasaki could live with that answer.

If he wanted to keep her, he had to let her make the jump, and she could save Sacramento. If he was wiling to lose her, she might die on the way over, and Sacramento might die with her, but they would die free.

Either way, Nick lost. And that was good enough for her.

“Devil take the hindmost,” she said under her breath, and touched the throttle one more time.

THE MEEK Damien Broderick

Broderick is a highly respected science-fiction writer, futurist and currently the SF editor of the popular science magazine Cosmos. He has been writing science fiction since 1964, and is probably best known for The Judas Mandala, published in 1982 but written in 1975 in which he termed the phrase “virtual reality”. His thoughts about the future and the relationship between humans and technology are explored in The Spike (1997) and The Last Mortal Generation (1999).

In the following story we are still amongst the remnants of a humanity struggling to survive that might grasp at any opportunity for recovery — but at what price?

IN THE CHILDHOOD of the garden there is much I remember, much I regret. And much has brought me pleasure. I see in memory the great spindles floating effortless as snow-flakes, bright against the sky’s iron. The rust of time obscures these memories but when I see the cold clear moon I see also the ships of light.

They came once, in an angel’s song, in silver fire, and they come again in the garden, the garden of my dreams.

Now bright birds swoop in a spray of tropical hues and the river whispers secrets to the lake. You could say I am happy, though the future is gone and the earth rolls lonely as a child’s lost balloon. They are gone and I am glad and I am sad. The garden is a place of peace, but the flame has guttered out.

Once I was a man in my middle years and the world was a bowl of molten, reworked slag, a lethal place where the stuff of the soil humped up into delirious fractal corals that glowed blue and crimson in the night. Now fireflies flicker, and warmth rises where it is needed. But there is no warmth in the soul, no fire, just the moonglow of age and a forsaken dream.

I was young and the earth was a sphere of maddened terror, for we had unleashed a beast so small we could not see it, only its accumulating handiwork, so hungry that it ate up everything except flesh, some privileged flesh. And I was mortally afraid, for I saw my death, and my wife’s death. There would be no children to grieve us, no mourning after.

All the earth was blind to the stars, the sky a cloud of dull steel, the nano dust of death in the air. Then we knew fear and remorse, for in the murder of our world we had killed ourselves.

Our choice had been blind and at second-hand. But death accepts no excuses.

The day the world ended was Wish Jerome’s birthday, and at forty-one he was guileless as a child. He possessed that blithe detachment from any sense of danger, which is the menace and the joy of innocence. Professor Aloysius Jerome — “Wish” to his wife — was a man of philosophy, a creature of gentle habits and soft words, the wonder of the Faculty. He ate toast for breakfast, dunking it in black coffee.

One eye closed, the other surveying the crumbs on her plate, his wife said: “It certainly seems there’ll be a war. They’ll kill us all with their damned nano toys.”

Wish looked sadly out the window, past the ruffled curtains. The morning was bright with the promise of spring.

“‘To Carthage I came,’” he said, dunking toast, “‘where there sang all around my ears a cauldron of unholy hates.’”

“St Augustine of Hippo, slightly trampled,” he told his wife’s eyebrows a moment later. “I prefer Pelagius. Perhaps a twenty-one gun salute, but hardly an ecophagic war for my birthday, Beth.”

Domesticity and Wish’s peculiarly unassuming goodness had made them a happy marriage. Beth Jerome, fair, fey, fertile of spirit and barren of womb, had founded an empathy between them twenty years before, from the first day they met. Empathy had grown into love, if not passion. The warm sun brought her little of the wash of peace that swept around her husband. On the table at her elbow a conservative daily screamed headlines about military grade nanotechnology.

“I refuse to educate the minds of the young on such a glorious day.” Wish finished his toast and stretched luxuriously. “We shall take the car and drive as far from this warren as we can, and we shall eat our food beside an honest-to-goodness fire, and we shall forget the madmen and their war posturing.”

Beth rose and put their dishes in the washer. “It is absurd,” she said, peeved. “Still they insist on adding foaming agents to these detergents. What fools they must take us for.” She shut the door and set the dial. “An excellent suggestion, darling. Better call first and see if Tod or Muriel can take your classes.”

She wet a dish-cloth and wiped the crumbs off the table, and Wish leaned back on two legs of his chair and fired up a joint. The sun was a pool of warmth, and he soaked in the contentment of the joy of life.

For a million years and more Homo sapiens fought on equal terms with the world, fought the worst the world could throw at the species. Today I lie in the balm of an eternal afternoon, half asleep, and the world sleeps with me. The flowers bloom and the leaves fall and bud anew, but humanity lies in the calm of Indian summer, and there is no blast of wind. I recall the days when men were violent and men were cruel, yes, and women, too; dimly, but there it is, taunting me. And the ships from the stars, falling from the skies like manna, call to me from the depths of time and their call is lost in the breeze. Too late, too late.

The sky was eggshell blue, fragile, edged with cottonwool clouds. The little valley was a green bowl sweeping up to meet the luminous blue dome halfway between heaven and earth. Why should it be a sartorial disaster to wear blue and green together, Wish Jerome asked himself dreamily, when nature gets away with it to such good effect? He finished chewing a greasy chop, licked his fingers, settled back happily into the grass. Something with many legs examined his bare arm, and sleepily he flicked it off. Beth put the tops back on the jars, folded the picnic cloth and placed it in the basket. She yawned; the day was warm without being hot, weather for wandering hand in hand beside a creek, or whispering, or snoozing. She shook her blond hair in the sun and sat down beside her husband.

Wish put his arm around her. A screen came across the sky, like a filigree of diamonds and sapphires, fell everywhere, drifting on the wind, like glittery snow. A tall old tree on the hill turned brown and sagged, and burst explosively into leaping yellow ribbons of structure. Heat rose from the valley as a trillion small machines opened up molecules, releasing energy, twisting it to their mad purpose. Wish and Beth alike screamed. There was no sound beyond the crackle of crystalline growth. Sixty kilometers away a city melted into shapes from migraine: battlements, turrets, fortifications, the primordial geometries of the unconscious.

They did not see the mushroom of hot white light that tried to burn away the enemy infestation. They were the lucky ones, Beth and Wish, two of the thousand or so who escaped the holocaust of the bomb that wiped away three million human lives. In other cities, other bombs charred flesh, and steel girders twisted into melted toffee; there were the few others who got clear.

The man and the woman lay in each another’s arms while the heat flared and went away, and then they ran for the cave in the hill and huddled in it, and Beth cried and cried and cried like a child, and they lived.

They found each other, the survivors, gradually, but they had no comfort to share, no hope. The brave fought, the cowards acquiesced in the diamond and iron cloud; death seeped down on the brave and the cowards through the porous fog. They suffered appallingly, the last straggling men and women, the few bleak children; they grew gaunt and ill, and sores festered in their bodies. And even those who fought knew it was bitter, meaningless, for though they should live a few months more there was no future.

Dispossessed like the rest, Wish and Beth wandered the desolate, remade landscape in the horror humans had unleashed. They ate rubbish and what they could find unmolested in cans, and drank bottled water that the nano weapons whimsically left untouched, and slept when they could between their nightmares, and prayed, and when the day came at last that the fog opened in a drift of silver light and the ships brought their salvation, there was no rejoicing.

Suffering had drained them utterly. The survivors, the quick and the vulgar and the brave, all of them together went to the ships. On the wrecked plain, amid the glassy crevices and turrets that once had been green with living things and busy with people, the spindles stood like awesome mirrors. Their polished hulls gleamed back the diamond speckled sky, and the survivors saw themselves reflected in a leap of light that hid no item of their degradation.

Wish Jerome was the first to laugh.

He stood in front of the sweeping edge of a star spindle and saw himself in the burnished gloss. He looked at the burned eyebrows, the singed patchy hair, the emaciated scarecrow frame under the scraps of clothing.

“The wisdom of the ages,” he said, without animosity. “What a piece of work!” Bitterness was alien to Wish. He viewed the ravaged spectacle of philosophical man with amusement.

Beth crept up beside him, from the crowd of skeletons, like a child to a protecting arm. Their roles were reversed; this was a strangeness only innocence might face with equanimity.

Wish laughed again, and the small crowd shuffled noisily, somehow relieved, and through their muttering a voice spoke to them. Meaning echoed without words in their minds. The people of the ships spoke.

“We heard the cry of death from your world,” the voice told them. “It was a shout of lamentation and grief that crossed the void in the moment your world died. We took it for the cry of one murdered, and find instead that you brought this blight upon yourselves.”

In the silence, in the awful reproach, Wish looked across the land where life had come with expectation four billion years before and had perished in suicide. The fog arched overhead, an iron-grey pall glistening with points of light, a looming covenant of death. The voice spoke only the truth, and it was beyond human power to redeem their crime. He clenched his hands. Beyond the ships, the ground curled and shifted in harsh, sluggish peristalses.

“It is not within our power to remake your Earth. The biosphere is slain by your small stupid machines. We can resurrect only a small part of it. We will exact a payment, but some of your world at least will be now, again, green and fresh.”

The last humans stirred then, mindless life crying for a chance to live again.

“Yes!” cried humanity, cried life. The tattered group passed instantly beyond identity in its paroxysm.

“Yes!”

“We will meet your fee, whatever it is.”

“Only let us live again!”

Silence returned to the plain, save for a whining wind that carried insanely creative dust across the wasteland. A vision came into the minds of the survivors: the sea of darkness, an ocean of blackness blazing with the light of stars. The spindles hung there, another kind of shining dust, life and consciousness, consumed in a battle with those from the shores of the galaxy, or some folded, deeper place.

“They are murderous and beyond our comprehension,” said the voice. “They have come from the places between the islands of stars, come with a blind, unreasoning hatred which cannot be turned aside except by lethal force. We had thought your world a victim of their murder. Instead, we find something worse, a world that has taken its own life. It is too late to offer our aid, but at least we can build you sanctuary, if, in return, some of your number will come with us, to fight.”

“To fight?” A woman screamed in rage; her face ran with weeping wounds. “Is all life so stupid? Do you condemn us as murderers of our planet and then ask us to repeat the madness? No, we will not fight. Go away and let us die in our shame and folly.”

“It is for each of you separately to make this choice,” the voice said. “Understand this: they attack without quarter. And they are winning.”

The price of life is death, Beth told herself, pressed against her husband’s arm. Those who went from among this pitiful number surely would not return.

“Only some among you will suit our purpose,” the voice explained. “The predators, the fighters. They must come with us. The others will remain, and we will restore to them a corner of their world. Come, you must decide. The stars are dying in our galaxy.”

It was beyond most of them, this vision of a war between gods. Not gods, though, Wish Jerome told himself, merely life, exerted in an unconscionable violence to safeguard its own seed.

Fear blew across the group, chilling as the wind, but their decision, too, rose like a wind, beyond fear.

High above them, an opening dilated in the silver hull. The last of humanity went forward for their testing.

That was the way of it, sings memory, here in the dusk. They took our soul and gave us the comfort of emortality amid a new-built Xanadu. The stars came clear in the dark of an unclouded sky. We can look into the black night and know that somewhere out there the spindles are warring against an enemy too terrible for understanding or compassion. And our soul is with them, sweating, slaving in the agony of death and victory. We spin on, we and our quiet garden, in an anesthesia of contentment.

I see a hawk soaring on a high wave of song. His cry hangs in the air, and his lofty feathered body. Now he stoops, falls like a projectile, opens his wings, stills magically, climbs the sky again. It is cozy here, in the warmth of the sun. I seem, though, to remember a word from the past, from the repeated past. Why do I feel a stir of horror as I gaze upon my unaging hands? Did my innocence save me then? Perhaps, but I am innocent no longer. Our life will stretch on, for our bargain is sealed, and the sun is warm on our peace.

Still, the horror remains, as the memory remains, that the meek have inherited the earth.

THE MAN WHO WALKED HOME James Tiptree, Jr

James Tiptree, Jr was the primary pseudonym used by Alice Sheldon (1915-87) and she hid her identity so well that almost everyone was deceived into believing she was a man. This, despite such stories as “The Women Men Don’t See” (1973), which vividly revealed the distinctions between the sexes. Although she wrote two novels, Up the Walls of the World (1978) and Brightness Falls from the Air (1985), her strengths lay in the short story and her work constitutes some of the most remarkable fiction, not just of the 1970s — the chief decade for her writing — but in all speculative fiction. Her collections include Ten Thousand Light Years From Home (1973), Warm Worlds and Otherwise (¹975)> and Star Songs of an Old Primate (1978), but perhaps the most representative single volume is Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (1990), which critic John Clute called, “one of the two or three most significant collections of short SF ever published”.

Tiptree wrote several stories dealing with a post-apocalyptic world, and to my mind the following (first published in 1972, hence the dates) is the most unusual, with a cataclysm arising from an experiment that will take many centuries to resolve. Like most of Tiptree’s fiction, it is an extended allegory that leaves you pondering long after finishing the story.

Transgression! Terror! And he thrust and lost there — punched into impossibility, abandoned never to be known how, the wrong man in the most wrong of all wrong places in that unimaginable collapse of never-to-be-reimagined mechanism — he stranded, undone, his lifeline severed, he in that nanosecond knowing his only tether parting, going away, the longest line to life withdrawing, winking out, disappearing forever beyond his grasp — telescoping away from him into the closing vortex beyond which lay his home, his life, his only possibility of being; seeing it sucked back into the deepest maw, melting, leaving him orphaned on what never-to-be-known shore of total wrongness — of beauty beyond joy, perhaps? Of horror? Of nothingness? Of profound otherness only, certainly — whatever it was, that place into which he transgressed, it could not support his life there, his violent and violating aberrance; and he, fierce, brave, crazy — clenched into total protest, one body-fist of utter repudiation of himself there in that place, forsaken there — what did he do? Rejected, exiled, hungering homeward more desperate than any lost beast driving for its unreachable home, his home, his HOME — and no way, no transport, no vehicle, means, machinery, no force but his intolerable resolve aimed homeward along that vanishing vector, that last and only lifeline — he did, what?

He walked.

Home.

Precisely what hashed up in the work of the major industrial lessee of the Bonneville Particle Acceleration Facility in Idaho was never known. Or rather, all those who might have been able to diagnose the original malfunction were themselves obliterated almost at once in the greater catastrophe which followed.

The nature of this second cataclysm was not at first understood either. All that was ever certain was that at 1153.6 of May 2,1989 Old Style, the Bonneville laboratories and all their personnel were transformed into an intimately disrupted form of matter resembling a high-energy plasma, which became rapidly airborne to the accompaniment of radiating seismic and atmospheric events.

The disturbed area unfortunately included an operational MIRV Watchdog womb.

In the confusion of the next hours the Earth’s population was substantially reduced, the biosphere was altered, and the Earth itself was marked with numbers of more conventional craters. For some years thereafter, the survivors were existentially preoccupied and the peculiar dust bowl at Bonneville was left to weather by itself in the changing climatic cycles.

It was not a large crater; just over a kilometer in width and lacking the usual displacement lip. Its surface was covered with a finely divided substance which dried into dust. Before the rains began it was almost perfectly flat. Only in certain lights, had anyone been there to inspect it, a small surface-marking or abraded place could be detected almost exactly at the center.

Two decades after the disaster a party of short brown people appeared from the south, together with a flock of somewhat atypical sheep. The crater at this time appeared as a wide shallow basin in which the grass did not grow well, doubtless from the almost complete lack of soil microorganisms. Neither this nor the surrounding vigorous grass was found to harm the sheep. A few crude hogans went up at the southern edge and a faint path began to be traced across the crater itself, passing by the central bare spot.

One spring morning two children who had been driving sheep cross the crater came screaming back to camp. A monster had burst out of the ground before them, a huge flat animal making dreadful roar. It vanished in a flash and a shaking of the earth, leaving an evil smell. The sheep had run away.

Since this last was visibly true, some elders investigated. Finding no sign of the monster and no place in which it could hide, they settled for beating the children, who settled for making a detour around the monster-spot, and nothing more occurred for a while.

The following spring the episode was repeated. This time an older girl was present, but she could add only that the monster seemed to be rushing flat out along the ground without moving at all. And there was a scraped place in the dirt. Again nothing was found; an evil-ward in a cleft stick was placed at the spot.

When the same thing happened for the third time a year later, the detour was extended and other charm-wands were added. But since no harm seemed to come of it and the brown people had seen far worse, sheep-tending resumed as before. A few more instantaneous apparitions of the monster were noted, each time in the spring.

At the end of the third decade of the new era a tall old man limped down the hills from the south, pushing his pack upon a bicycle wheel. He camped on the far side of the crater, and soon found the monster-site. He attempted to question people about it, but no one understood him, so he traded a knife for some meat. Although he was obviously feeble, something about him dissuaded them from killing him, and this proved wise because he later assisted the women in treating several sick children.

He spent much time around the place of the apparition and was nearby when it made its next appearance. This excited him very much and he did several inexplicable but apparently harm less things, including moving his camp into the crater by the trail. He stayed on for a full year watching the site and was close by for its next manifestation. After this he spent a few days making a charm-stone for the spot and left northward, hobbling as he had come.

More decades passed. The crater eroded, and a rain-gully became an intermittent streamlet across the edge of the basin. The brown people and their sheep were attacked by a band of grizzled men, after which the survivors went away eastward. The winters of what had been Idaho were now frost-free; aspen and eucalyptus sprouted in the moist plain. Still the crater remained treeless, visible as a flat bowl of grass; and the bare place at the center remained. The skies cleared somewhat.

After another three decades a larger band of black people with ox-drawn carts appeared and stayed for a time, but left again when they too saw the thunderclap-monster. A few other vagrants straggled by.

Five decades later a small permanent settlement had grown up on the nearest range of hills, from which men riding on small ponies with dark stripes down their spines herded humped cattle near the crater. A herdsman’s hut was built by the streamlet, which in time became the habitation of an olive-skinned, red-haired family. In due course one of this clan again observed the monster-flash, but these people did not depart. The stone the tall man had placed was noted and left undisturbed.

The homestead at the crater’s edge grew into a group of three and was joined by others, and the trail across it became a cart road with a log bridge over the stream. At the center of the still faintly discernible crater the cart road made a bend, leaving a grassy place which bore in its center about a square meter of curiously impacted bare earth and a deeply etched sandstone rock.

The apparition of the monster was now known to occur regularly each spring on a certain morning in this place, and the children of the community dared each other to approach the spot. It was referred to in a phrase that could be translated as “the Old Dragon”. The Old Dragon’s appearance was always the same: a brief violent thunder-burst which began and cut off abruptly, in the midst of which a dragonlike creature was seen apparently in furious motion on the earth, although it never actually moved. Afterward there was a bad smell and the earth smoked. People who saw it from close by spoke of a shivering sensation.

Early in the second century two young men rode into town from the north. Their ponies were shaggier than the local breed, and the equipment they carried included two boxlike objects which the young men set up at the monster-site. They stayed in the area a full year, observing two materializations of the Old Dragon, and they provided much news and maps of roads and trading towns in the cooler regions to the north. They built a windmill which was accepted by the community and offered to build a lighting machine, which was refused. Then they departed with their boxes after unsuccessfully attempting to persuade a local boy to learn to operate one.

In the course of the next decades other travelers stopped by and marveled at the monster, and there was sporadic fighting over the mountains to the south. One of the armed bands made a cattle raid into the crater hamlet. It was repulsed, but the raiders left a spotted sickness which killed many. For all this time the bare place at the crater’s center remained, and the monster made his regular appearances, observed or not.

The hill-town grew and changed, and the crater hamlet grew to be a town. Roads widened and linked into networks. There were gray-green conifers in the hills now, spreading down into the plain, and chirruping lizards lived in their branches.

At century’s end a shabby band of skin-clad squatters with stunted milk-beasts erupted out of the west and were eventually killed or driven away, but not before the local herds had contracted a vicious parasite. Veterinaries were fetched from the market city up north, but little could be done. The families near the crater left, and for some decades the area was empty. Finally cattle of a new strain reappeared in the plain and the crater hamlet was reoccupied. Still the bare center continued annually to manifest the monster, and he became an accepted phenomenon of the area. On several occasions parties came from the distant North west Authority to observe it.

The crater hamlet flourished and grew into the fields where cattle had grazed, and part of the old crater became the town park. A small seasonal tourist industry based on the monster-site developed. The townspeople rented rooms for the appearances, and many more or less authentic monster-relics were on display in the local taverns.

Several cults now grew up around the monster. One persistent belief held that it was a devil or damned soul forced to appear on Earth in torment to expiate the catastrophe of three centuries back. Others believed that it, or he, was some kind of messenger whose roar portended either doom or hope according to the believer. One very vocal sect taught that the apparition registered the moral conduct of the townspeople over the past year, and scrutinized the annual apparition for changes which could be interpreted for good or ill. It was considered lucky, or dangerous, to be touched by some of the dust raised by the monster. In every generation at least one small boy would try to hit the monster with a stick, usually acquiring a broken arm and a lifelong tavern tale. Pelting the monster with stones or other objects was a popular sport, and for some years people systematically flung prayers and flowers at it. Once a party tried to net it and were left with strings and vapor. The area itself had long since been fenced off at the center of the park.

Through all this the monster made his violently enigmatic annual appearance, sprawled furiously motionless, unreachably roaring.

Only as the fourth century of the new era went by was it apparent that the monster had been changing slightly. He was now no longer on the earth but had an arm and a leg thrust upward in a kicking or flailing gesture. As the years passed he began to change more quickly until at the end of the century he had risen to a contorted crouching pose, arms outflung as if frozen in gyration. His roar, too, seemed somewhat differently pitched, and the earth after him smoked more and more.

It was then widely felt that the man-monster was about to do something, to make some definitive manifestation, and a series of natural disasters and marvels gave support to a vigorous cult teaching this doctrine. Several religious leaders journeyed to the town to observe the apparitions.

However, the decades passed and the man-monster did nothing more than turn slowly in place, so that he now appeared to be in the act of sliding or staggering while pushing himself back ward like a creature blown before a gale. No wind, of course, could be felt, and presently the general climate quieted and nothing came of it all.

Early in the fifth century New Calendar, three survey parties from the North Central Authority came through the area and stopped to observe the monster. A permanent recording device was set up at the site, after assurances to the townsfolk that no hardscience was involved. A local boy was trained to operate it; he quit when his girl left him but another volunteered. At this time nearly everyone believed that the apparition was a man, or the ghost of one. The record-machine boy and a few others including the school mechanics teacher referred to him as The Man John. In the next decades the roads were greatly improved; all forms of travel increased, and there was talk of building a canal to what had been the Snake River.

One May morning at the end of Century Five a young couple in a smart green mule-trap came jogging up the highroad from the Sandreas Rift Range to the southwest. The girl was golden-skinned and chatted with her young husband in a language unlike that ever heard by The Man John either at the end or the beginning of his life. What she said to him has, however, been heard in every age and tongue.

“Oh, Serli, I’m so glad we’re taking this trip now! Next summer I’ll be busy with baby.”

To which Serli replied as young husbands often have, and so they trotted up to the town’s inn. Here they left trap and bags and went in search of her uncle, who was expecting them there. The morrow was the day of The Man John’s annual appearance, and her Uncle Laban had come from the MacKenzie History Museum to observe it and to make certain arrangements.

They found him with the town school instructor of mechanics, who was also the recorder at the monster-site. Presently Uncle Laban took them all with him to the town mayor’s office to meet with various religious personages. The mayor was not unaware of tourist values, but he took Uncle Laban’s part in securing the cultists’ grudging assent to the MacKenzie authorities’ secular interpretation of the monster, which was made easier by the fact that the cults disagreed among themselves. Then, seeing how pretty the niece was, the mayor took them all home to dinner.

When they returned to the inn for the night it was abrawl with holidaymakers.

“Whew,” said Uncle Laban. “I’ve talked myself dry, sister’s daughter. What a weight of holy nonsense is that Moksha female! Serli, my lad, I know you have questions. Let me hand you this to read, it’s the guidebook we’re giving them to sell. Tomorrow I’ll answer for it all.” And he disappeared into the crowded tavern.

So Serli and his bride took the pamphlet upstairs to bed with them, but it was not until the next morning at breakfast that they found time to read it.

“‘All that is known of John Delgano,’” read Serli with his mouth full, “‘comes from two documents left by his brother Carl Delgano in the archives of the MacKenzie Group in the early years after the holocaust.’ Put some honey on this cake, Mira my dove. Verbatim transcript follows, this is Carl Delgano speaking:

“‘I’m not an engineer or an astronaut like John, I ran an electronics repair shop in Salt Lake City. John was only trained as a spaceman, he never got to space; the slump wiped all that out. So he tied up with this commercial group who were leasing part of Bonneville. They wanted a man for some kind of hard vacuum tests, that’s all I knew about it. John and his wife moved to Bonneville, but we all got together several times a year, our wives were like sisters. John had two kids, Clara and Paul.

“‘The tests were supposed to be secret, but John told me confidentially they were trying for an antigravity chamber. I don’t know if it ever worked. That was the year before.

“‘Then that winter they came down for Christmas and John said they had something far out. He was excited. A temporal displacement, he called it; some kind of time effect. He said their chief honcho was like a real mad scientist. Big ideas. He kept adding more angles every time some other project would quit and leave equipment he could lease. No, I don’t know who the top company was — maybe an insurance conglomerate, they had all the cash, didn’t they? I guess they’d pay to catch a look at the future, that figures. Anyway, John was go, go, go. Katharine was scared, that’s natural. She pictured him like, you know, H.G. Wells — walking around in some future world. John told her it wasn’t like that at all. All they’d get would be this flicker, like a second or two. All kinds of complications.’ -Yes, yes, my greedy piglet, some brew for me too. This is thirsty work!

“So. ‘I remember I asked him, what about Earth moving? I mean, you could come back in a different place, right? He said they had that all figured. A spatial trajectory. Katharine was so scared we dropped it. John told her, don’t worry. I’ll come home. But he didn’t. Not that it makes any difference, of course, everything was wiped out. Salt Lake too. The only reason I’m here is that I went up by Calgary to see mom, April 29. May 2 it all blew. I didn’t find you folks at MacKenzie until July. I guess I may as well stay. That’s all I know about John, except that he was a solid guy. If that accident started all this, it wasn’t his fault.

“‘The second document’ — in the name of love, little mother, do I have to read all this? Oh, very well, but you will kiss me first, madam. Must you look so delicious? ‘The second document. Dated in the year eighteen, New Style, written by Carl’ — see the old handwriting, my plump plump pigeon? Oh, very well, very well.

“‘Written at Bonneville Crater: I have seen my brother John Delgano. When I knew I had the rad sickness I came down here to look around. Salt Lake’s still hot. So I hiked up here by Bonneville. You can see the crater where the labs were, it’s grassed over. It’s different, not radioactive; my film’s okay. There’s a bare place in the middle. Some Indios here told me a monster shows up here every year in the spring. I saw it myself a couple of days after I got here, but I was too far away to see much, except I was sure it’s a man. In a vacuum suit. There was a lot of noise and dust, took me by surprise. It was all over in a second. I figured it’s pretty close to the day, I mean, May 2, old.

“‘So I hung around a year and he showed up again yesterday. I was on the face side, and I could see his face through the visor. It’s John, all right. He’s hurt. I saw blood on his mouth and his suit is frayed some. He’s lying on the ground. He didn’t move while I could see him but the dust boiled up, like a man sliding onto base without moving. His eyes are open like he was looking. I don’t understand it anyway, but I know it’s John, not a ghost. He was in exactly the same position each time and there’s a loud crack like thunder and another sound like a siren, very fast. And an ozone smell, and smoke. I felt a kind of shudder.

“‘I know it’s John there and I think he’s alive. I have to leave here now to take this back while I can still walk. I think somebody should come here and see. Maybe you can help John. Signed, Carl Delgano.

“‘These records were kept by the MacKenzie Group, but it was not for several years’ — etcetera, first light-print, etcetera, archives, analysts, etcetera — very good! Now it is time to meet your uncle, my edible one, after we go upstairs for just a moment.”

“No, Serli, I will wait for you downstairs,” said Mira prudently.

When they came into the town park Uncle Laban was directing the installation of a large durite slab in front of the enclosure around The Man John’s appearance-spot. The slab was wrapped in a curtain to await the official unveiling. Townspeople and tourists and children thronged the walks, and a Ride-for-God choir was singing in the band shell. The morning was warming up fast. Vendors hawked ices and straw toys of the monster and flowers and good-luck confetti to throw at him. Another religious group stood by in dark robes; they belonged to the Repentance church beyond the park. Their pastor was directing somber glares at the crowd in general and Mira’s uncle in particular.

Three official-looking strangers who had been at the inn came up and introduced themselves to Uncle Laban as observers from Alberta Central. They went on into the tent which had been erected over the closure, carrying with them several pieces of equipment which the townsfolk eyed suspiciously.

The mechanics teacher finished organizing a squad of students to protect the slab’s curtain, and Mira and Serli and Laban went on into the tent. It was much hotter inside. Benches were set in rings around a railed enclosure about twenty feet in diameter. Inside the railing the earth was bare and scuffed. Several bunches of flowers and blooming poinciana branches leaned against the rail. The only thing inside the rail was a rough sandstone rock with markings etched on it.

Just as they came in, a small girl raced across the open center and was yelled at by everybody. The officials from Alberta were busy at one side of the rail, where the light-print box was mounted.

“Oh, no,” muttered Mira’s uncle, as one of the officials leaned over to set up a tripod stand inside the rails. He adjusted it, and a huge horsetail of fine feathery filaments blossomed out and eddied through the center of the space.

“Oh, no,” Laban said again. “Why can’t they let it be?”

“They’re trying to pick up dust from his suit, is that right?” Serli asked.

“Yes, insane. Did you get time to read?”

“Oh, yes,” said Serli.

“Sort of,” added Mira.

“Then you know. He’s falling. Trying to check his — well, call it velocity. Trying to slow down. He must have slipped or stum bled. We’re getting pretty close to when he lost his footing and started to fall. What did it? Did somebody trip him?” Laban looked from Mira to Serli, dead serious now. “How would you like to be the one who made John Delgano fall?”

“Ooh,” said Mira in quick sympathy. Then she said, “Oh.”

“You mean,” asked Serli, “whoever made him fall caused all the, caused —”

“Possible,” said Laban.

“Wait a minute,” Serli frowned. “He did fall. So somebody had to do it — I mean, he has to trip or whatever. If he doesn’t fall the past would all be changed, wouldn’t it? No war, no —”

“Possible,” Laban repeated. “God knows. All I know is that John Delgano and the space around him is the most unstable, improbable, highly charged area ever known on Earth, and I’m damned if I think anybody should go poking sticks in it.”

“Oh, come now, Laban!” One of the Alberta men joined them, smiling. “Our dust mop couldn’t trip a gnat. It’s just vitreous monofilaments.”

“Dust from the future,” grumbled Laban. “What’s it going to tell you? That the future has dust in it?”

“If we could only get a trace from that thing in his hand.”

“In his hand?” asked Mira. Serli started leafing hurriedly through the pamphlet.

“We’ve had a recording analyzer aimed at it,” the Albertan lowered his voice, glancing around. “A spectroscope. We know there’s something there, or was. Can’t get a decent reading. It’s severely deteriorated.”

“People poking at him, grabbing at him,” Laban muttered. “You —”

“TEN MINUTES!” shouted a man with a megaphone. “Take your places, friends and strangers.”

The Repentance people were filing in at one side, intoning an ancient incantation, “Mi-seri-cordia, Ora pro nobisl”

The atmosphere suddenly became tense. It was now very close and hot in the big tent. A boy from the mayor’s office wiggled through the crowd, beckoning Laban’s party to come and sit in the guest chairs on the second level on the “face” side. In front of them at the rail one of the Repentance ministers was arguing with an Albertan official over his right to occupy the space taken by a recorder, it being his special duty to look into The Man John’s eyes.

“Can he really see us?” Mira asked her uncle.

“Blink your eyes,” Laban told her. “A new scene every blink, that’s what he sees. Phantasmagoria. Blink-blink-blink — for god knows how long.”

“Mi-sere-re, pec-cavi,” chanted the penitentials. A soprano neighed. “May the red of sin pa-aa-ass from us!”

“They believe his oxygen tab went red because of the state of their souls,” Laban chuckled. “Their souls are going to have to stay damned awhile; John Delgano has been on oxygen reserve for five centuries — or rather, he will be low for five centuries more. At a half-second per year his time, that’s fifteen minutes. We know from the audio trace he’s still breathing more or less normally, and the reserve was good for twenty minutes. So they should have their salvation about the year seven hundred, if they last that long.”

“FIVE MINUTES! Take your seats, folks. Please sit down so everyone can see. Sit down, folks.”

“It says we’ll hear his voice through his suit speaker,” Serli whispered. “Do you know what he’s saying?”

“You get mostly a twenty-cycle howl,” Laban whispered back. “The recorders have spliced up something like ayt, part of an old word. Take centuries to get enough to translate.”

“Is it a message?”

“Who knows? Could be his word for ‘date’ or ‘hate’. ‘Too late’, maybe. Anything.”

The tent was quieting. A fat child by the railing started to cry and was pulled back on to a lap. There was a subdued mumble of praying. The Holy Joy faction on the far side rustled their flowers.

“Why don’t we set our clocks by him?”

“It’s changing. He’s on sidereal time.”

“ONE MINUTE.”

In the hush the praying voices rose slightly. From outside a chicken cackled. The bare center space looked absolutely ordinary. Over it the recorder’s silvery filaments eddied gently in the breath from a hundred lungs. Another recorder could be heard ticking faintly.

For long seconds nothing happened.

The air developed a tiny hum. At the same moment Mira caught a movement at the railing on her left.

The hum developed a beat and vanished into a peculiar silence and suddenly everything happened at once.

Sound burst on them, raced shockingly up the audible scale. The air cracked as something rolled and tumbled in the space. There was a grinding, wailing roar and -

He was there.

Solid, huge — a huge man in a monster-suit, his head was a dull bronze transparent globe, holding a human face, a dark smear of open mouth. His position was impossible, legs strained fonvard thrusting himself back, his arms frozen in a whirlwind swing. Although he seemed to be in frantic fonvard motion nothing moved, only one of his legs buckled or sagged slightly -

- And then he was gone, utterly and completely gone in a thunderclap, leaving only the incredible afterimage in their staring eyes. Air boomed, shuddering; dust rolled out mixed with smoke.

“Oh! Oh, my god,” gasped Mira, unheard, clinging to Serli. Voices were crying out, choking. “He saw me, he saw me!” a woman shrieked. A few people dazedly threw their confetti into the empty dust cloud, most had failed to throw at all. Children began to howl. “He saw me!” the woman screamed hysterically. “Red, oh, Lord have mercy!” a deep male voice intoned.

Mira heard Laban swearing furiously and looked again into the space. As the dust settled she could see that the recorder’s tripod had tipped over into the center. There was a dusty mound lying against it — flowers. Most of the end of the stand seemed to have disappeared or been melted. Of the filaments nothing could be seen.

“Some damn fool pitched flowers into it. Come on, let’s get out.”

“Was it under, did it trip him?” asked Mira, squeezed in the crowd.

“It was still red, his oxygen thing,” Serli said over her head. “No mercy this trip, eh, Laban?”

“Shsh!” Mira caught the Repentance pastor’s dark glance. They jostled through the enclosure gate and were out in the sunlit park, voices exclaiming, chattering loudly in excitement and relief.

“It was terrible,” Mira cried softly. “Oh, I never thought it was a real live man. There he is, he’s there. Why can’t we help him? Did we trip him?”

“I don’t know, I don’t think so,” her uncle grunted. They sat down near the new monument, fanning themselves. The curtain was still in place.

“Did we change the past?” Serli laughed, looked lovingly at his little wife. For a moment he wondered why she was wearing such odd earrings; then he remembered he had given them to her at that Indian pueblo they’d passed.

“But it wasn’t just those Alberta people,” said Mira. She seemed obsessed with the idea. “It was the flowers really.” She wiped at her forehead.

“Mechanics or superstition,” chuckled Serli. “Which is the culprit, love or science?”

“Shsh.” Mira looked about nervously. “The flowers were love, I guess… I feel so strange. It’s hot. Oh, thank you.” Uncle Laban had succeeded in attracting the attention of the iced -drink vendor.

People were chatting normally now, and the choir struck into a cheerful song. At one side of the park a line of people were waiting to sign their names in the visitors’ book. The mayor appeared at the park gate, leading a party up the bougainvillea alley for the unveiling of the monument.

“What did it say on that stone by his foot?” Mira asked. Serli showed her the guidebook picture of Carl’s rock with the inscription translated below: WELCOME HOME JOHN. “I wonder if he can see it.” The mayor was about to begin his speech.

Much later when the crowd had gone away the monument stood alone in the dark, displaying to the moon the inscription in the language of that time and place:

ON THIS SPOT THERE APPEARS ANNUALLY THE FORM OF MAJOR JOHN DELGANO, THE FIRST AND ONLY MAN TO TRAVEL IN TIME.

MAJOR DELGANO WAS SENT INTO THE FUTURE SOME HOURS BEFORE THE HOLOCAUST OF DAY ZERO. ALL KNOWLEDGE OF THE MEANS BY WHICH HE WAS SENT IS LOST, PERHAPS FOREVER. IT IS BELIEVED THAT AN ACCIDENT OCCURRED WHICH SENT HIM MUCH FARTHER THAN WAS INTENDED. SOME ANALYSTS SPECULATE THAT HE MAY HAVE GONE AS FAR AS 50,000 YEARS AHEAD. HAVING REACHED THIS UNKNOWN POINT, MAJOR DELGANO APPARENTLY WAS RECALLED, OR ATTEMPTED TO RETURN, ALONG THE COURSE IN SPACE AND TIME THROUGH WHICH HE WAS SENT. HIS TRAJECTORY IS THOUGHT TO START AT THE POINT WHICH OUR SOLAR SYSTEM WILL OCCUPY AT A FUTURE TIME AND IS TANGENT TO THE COMPLEX HELIX WHICH OUR EARTH DESCRIBES AROUND THE SUN.

HE APPEARS ON THIS SPOT IN THE ANNUAL INSTANTS IN WHICH HIS COURSE INTERSECTS OUR PLANETS ORBIT, AND HE IS APPARENTLY ABLE TO TOUCH THE GROUND IN THOSE INSTANTS. SINCE NO TRACE OF HIS PASSAGE INTO THE FUTURE HAS BEEN MANIFESTED, IT IS BELIEVED THAT HE IS RETURNING BY A DIFFERENT MEANS THAN HE WENT FORWARD. HE IS ALIVE IN OUR PRESENT. OUR PAST IS HIS FUTURE AND OUR FUTURE IS HIS PAST. THE TIME OF HIS APPEARANCES IS SHIFTING GRADUALLY IN SOLAR TIME TO CONVERGE ON THE MOMENT OF 1153.6, ON 2 MAY, 1989 OLD STYLE, OR DAY ZERO.

THE EXPLOSION WHICH ACCOMPANIED HIS RETURN TO HIS OWN TIME AND PLACE MAY HAVE OCCURRED WHEN SOME ELEMENTS OF THE PAST INSTANTS OF HIS COURSE WERE CARRIED WITH HIM INTO THEIR OWN PRIOR EXISTENCE. IT IS CERTAIN THAT THIS EXPLOSION PRECIPITATED THE WORLDWIDE HOLOCAUST WHICH ENDED FOREVER THE AGE OF HARDSCIENCE.

— He was falling, losing control, failing in his fight against the terrible momentum he had gained, fighting with his human legs shaking in the inhuman stiffness of his armor, his soles charred, not gripping well now, not enough traction to break, battling,

thrusting as the flashes came, the punishing alternation of light, dark, light, dark, which he had borne so long, the claps of air thickening and thinning against his armor as he skidded through space which was time, desperately braking as the flickers of Earth hammered against his feet -only his feet mattered now, only to slow and stay on course — and the pull, the beacon was getting slacker; as he came near home it was fanning out, hard to stay centered; he was becoming, he supposed, more probable; the wound he had punched in time was healing itself In the beginning it had been so tight — a single ray of light in a closing tunnel -he had hurled himself after it like an electron flying to the anode, aimed surely along that exquisitely complex single vector of possibility of life, shot and been shot like a squeezed pip into the last chink in that rejecting and rejected nowhere through which he, John Delgano, could conceivably continue to exist, the hole leading to home — had pounded down it across time, across space, pumping with desperate legs as the real Earth of that unreal time came under him, his course as certain as the twisting dash of an animal down its burrow, he a cosmic mouse on an interstellar, intertemporal race for his nest with the wrongness of everything closing round the rightness of that one course, the atoms of his heart, his blood, his every cell crying Home — HOME! — as he drove himself after that fading breath-hole, each step faster, surer, stronger, until he raced with invincible momentum upon the rolling flickers of Earth as a man might race a rolling log in a torrent. Only the stars stayed constant around him from flash to flash, he looking down past his feet at a million strobes of Crux, of Triangulum; once at the height of his stride he had risked a century’s glance upward and seen the Bears weirdly strung out from Polaris — but a Polaris not the Pole Star now, he realized, jerking his eyes back to his racing feet, thinking, I am walking home to Polaris, home! to the strobing beat. He had ceased to remember where he had been, the beings, people or aliens or things, he had glimpsed in the impossible moment of being where he could not be; had ceased to see the flashes of worlds around him, each flash different, the jumble of bodies, shapes, walls, colors, landscapes -some lasting a breath, some changing pell-mell — the faces, limbs, things poking at him; the nights he had pounded through, dark or lit by strange lamps, roofed or unroofed, the days flashing sunlight, gales, dust, snow, interiors innumerable, strobe after strobe into night again; he was in daylight now, a hall of some kind; I am getting closer at last, he thought, the feel is changing — but he had to slow down, to check; and that stone near his feet, it had stayed there some time now, he wanted to risk a look but he did not dare, he was so tired, and he was sliding, was going out of control, fighting to kill the merciless velocity that would not let him slow down; he was hurt, too, something had hit him back there, they had done something, he didn’t know what, back somewhere in the kaleidoscope of faces, arms, hooks, beams, centuries of creatures grabbing at him — and his oxygen was going, never mind, it would last — it had to last, he was going home, home! And he had forgotten now the message he had tried to shout, hoping it could be picked up somehow, the important thing he had repeated; and the thing he had carried, it was gone now, his camera was gone too, something had torn it away — but he was coming home! Home! If only he could kill this momentum, could stay on the failing course, could slip, scramble, slide, somehow ride this avalanche down to home, to home — and his throat said

Home! — called Kate, Kate! And his heart shouted, his lungs almost gone now, as his legs fought, fought and failed, as his feet gripped and skidded and held and slid, as he pitched, flailed, pushed, strove in the gale of timerush across space, across time, at the end of the longest path ever: the path of John Delgano, coming home.

A PAIL OF AIR Fritz Leiber

I sincerely hope that the name, work and reputation of Fritz Leiber (1910-92) does not fade. He was one of the most accomplished writers of science fiction and fantasy in the years from 1939 to his death and one of the most honoured. According to the Locus Index to SF Awards he won six Hugos, three Nebulas, two World Fantasy Awards, two Locus Awards, one British Fantasy Award, one Geffen, one Worldcon

Special Convention Award, one Balrog and one Gandalf, as well as the World Fantasy Award Life Achievement, Stoker Life Achievement and the SFWA Grand Master. He is perhaps best known for his sword-and-sorcery series featuring Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, collected in seven volumes starting with The Swords of Lankhmar (1968). He is also renowned for his supernatural fiction, of which “Conjure Wife” (1943) has been filmed three times. His science fiction perhaps takes a back seat to his other work, yet he won a Hugo award for The Wanderer (1964) about an errant planet that enters the solar system and threatens the Earth. Gather, Darkness (1943) is set three centuries after a nuclear disaster when two powerful factions try to control the remnants of civilization. Of his other post-apocalyptic fiction I have always been attracted to “A Pail of Air” because of the most unusual concept and the indelible imagery.

PA HAD SENT me out to get an extra pail of air. I’d just about scooped it full and most of the warmth had leaked from my fingers when I saw the thing.

You know, at first I thought it was a young lady. Yes, a beautiful young lady’s face all glowing in the dark and looking at me from the fifth floor of the opposite apartment, which hereabouts is the floor just above the white blanket of frozen air. I’d never seen a live young lady before, except in the old magazines — Sis is just a kid and Ma is pretty sick and miserable — and it gave me such a start that I dropped the pail. Who wouldn’t, knowing everyone on Earth was dead except Pa and Ma and Sis and you?

Even at that, I don’t suppose I should have been surprised. We all see things now and then. Ma has some pretty bad ones, to judge from the way she bugs her eyes at nothing and just screams and screams and huddles back against the blankets hanging around the Nest. Pa says it is natural we should react like that sometimes.

When I’d recovered the pail and could look again at the opposite apartment, I got an idea of what Ma might be feeling at those times, for I saw it wasn’t a young lady at all but simply a light — a tiny light that moved stealthily from window to window, just as if one of the cruel little stars had come down out of the airless sky to investigate why the Earth had gone away from the Sun, and maybe to hunt down something to torment or terrify, now that the Earth didn’t have the Sun’s protection.

I tell you, the thought of it gave me the creeps. I just stood there shaking, and almost froze my feet and did frost my helmet so solid on the inside that I couldn’t have seen the light even if it had come out of one of the windows to get me. Then I had the wit to go back inside.

Pretty soon I was feeling my familiar way through the thirty or so blankets and rugs Pa has got hung around to slow down the escape of air from the Nest, and I wasn’t quite so scared. I began to hear the tick-ticking of the clocks in the Nest and knew I was getting back into air, because there’s no sound outside in the vacuum, of course.

But my mind was still crawly and uneasy as I pushed through the last blankets — Pa’s got them faced with aluminum foil to hold in the heat — and came into the Nest.

Let me tell you about the Nest. It’s low and snug, just room for the four of us and our things. The floor is covered with thick woolly rugs. Three of the sides are blankets, and the blankets roofing it touch Pa’s head. He tells me it’s inside a much bigger room, but I’ve never seen the real walls or ceiling.

Against one of the blankets is a big set of shelves, with tools and books and other stuff, and on top of it a whole row of clocks. Pa’s very fussy about keeping them wound. He says we must never forget time, and without a sun or moon, that would be easy to do.

The fourth wall has blankets all over except around the fireplace, in which there is a fire that must never go out. It keeps us from freezing and does a lot more besides. One of us must always watch it. Some of the clocks are alarm and we can use them to remind us. In the early days there was only Ma to take turns with Pa — I think of that when she gets difficult — but now there’s me to help, and Sis too.

It’s Pa who is the chief guardian of the fire, though. I always think of him that way: a tall man sitting cross-legged, frowning anxiously at the fire, his lined face golden in its light, and every so often carefully placing on it a piece of coal from the big heap beside it. Pa tells me there used to be guardians of the fire sometimes in the very old days — vestal virgins, he calls them — although there was unfrozen air all around then and you didn’t really need one.

He was sitting just that way now, though he got up quick to take the pail from me and bawl me out for loitering — he’d spotted my frozen helmet right off. That roused Ma and she joined in picking on me. She’s always trying to get the load off her feelings, Pa explains. Sis let off a couple of silly squeals too.

Pa handled the pail of air in a twist of cloth. Now that it was inside the Nest, you could really feel its coldness. It just seemed to suck the heat out of everything. Even the flames cringed away from it as Pa put it down close by the fire.

Yet it’s that glimmery white stuff in the pail that keeps us alive. It slowly melts and vanishes and refreshes the Nest and feeds the fire. The blankets keep it from escaping too fast. Pa’d like to seal the whole place, but he can’t -building’s too earthquake-twisted, and besides he has to leave the chimney open for smoke.

Pa says air is tiny molecules that fly away like a flash if there isn’t something to stop them. We have to watch sharp not to let the air run low. Pa always keeps a big reserve supply of it in buckets behind the first blankets, along with extra coal and cans of food and other things, such as pails of snow to melt for water. We have to go way down to the bottom floor for that stuff, which is a mean trip, and get it through a door to outside.

You see, when the Earth got cold, all the water in the air froze first and made a blanket ten feet thick or so everywhere, and then down on top of that dropped the crystals of frozen air, making another white blanket sixty or seventy feet thick maybe.

Of course, all the parts of the air didn’t freeze and snow down at the same time.

First to drop out was the carbon dioxide — when you’re shoveling for water, you have to make sure you don’t go too high and get any of that stuff mixed in, for it would put you to sleep, maybe for good, and make the fire go out. Next there’s the nitrogen, which doesn’t count one way or the other, though it’s the biggest part of the blanket. On top of that and easy to get at, which is lucky for us, there’s the oxygen that keeps us alive. Pa says we live better than kings ever did, breathing pure oxygen, but we’re used to it and don’t notice. Finally, at the very top, there’s a slick of liquid helium, which is funny stuff. All of these gases in neat separate layers. Like a pussy caffay, Pa laughingly says, whatever that is.

I was busting to tell them all about what I’d seen, and so as soon as I’d ducked out of my helmet and while I was still climbing out of my suit, I cut loose. Right away Ma got nervous and began making eyes at the entry-slit in the blankets and wringing her hands together — the hand where she’d lost three fingers from frostbite inside the good one, as usual. I could tell that Pa was annoyed at me scaring her and wanted to explain it all away quickly, yet could see I wasn’t fooling.

“And you watched this light for some time, son?” he asked when I finished.

I hadn’t said anything about first thinking it was a young lady’s face. Somehow that part embarrassed me.

“Long enough for it to pass five windows and go to the next floor.”

“And it didn’t look like stray electricity or crawling liquid or starlight focused by a growing crystal, or anything like that?”

He wasn’t just making up those ideas. Odd things happen in a world that’s about as cold as can be, and just when you think matter would be frozen dead, it takes on a strange new life. A slimy stuff comes crawling toward the Nest, just like an animal snuffing for heat — that’s the liquid helium. And once, when I was little, a bolt of lightning — not even Pa could figure where it came from — hit the nearby steeple and crawled up and down it for weeks, until the glow finally died.

“Not like anything I ever saw,” I told him.

He stood for a moment frowning. Then, “I’ll go out with you, and you show it to me,” he said.

Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside clothes — mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and so on.

Ma started moaning again, “I’ve always known there was something outside there, waiting to get us. I’ve felt it for years — something that’s part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the Nest. It’s been watching us all this time, and now it’s coming after us. It’ll get you and then come for me. Don’t go, Harry!”

Pa had everything on but his helmet.

He knelt by the fireplace and reached in and shook the long metal rod that goes up the chimney and knocks off the ice that keeps trying to clog it. Once a week he goes up on the roof to check if it’s working all right. That’s our worst trip and Pa won’t let me make it alone.

“Sis,” Pa said quietly, “come watch the fire. Keep an eye on the air, too. If it gets low or doesn’t seem to be boiling fast enough, fetch another bucket from behind the blanket. But mind your hands. Use the cloth to pick up the bucket.”

Sis quit helping Ma be frightened and came over and did as she was told. Ma quieted down pretty suddenly, though her eyes were still kind of wild as she watched Pa fix on his helmet tight and pick up a pail and the two of us go out.

Pa led the way and I took hold of his belt. It’s a funny thing, I’m not afraid to go by myself, but when Pa’s along I always want to hold on to him. Habit, I guess, and then there’s no denying that this time I was a bit scared.

You see, it’s this way. We know that everything is dead out there. Pa heard the last radio voices fade away years ago, and had seen some of the last folks die who weren’t as lucky or well-protected as us. So we knew that if there was something groping around out there, it couldn’t be anything human or friendly.

Besides that, there’s a feeling that comes with it always being night, cold night. Pa says there used to be some of that feeling even in the old days, but then every morning the Sun would come and chase it away. I have to take his word for that, not ever remembering the Sun as being anything more than a big star. You see, I hadn’t been born when the dark star snatched us away from the Sun, and by now it’s dragged us out beyond the orbit of the planet Pluto, Pa says, and taking us farther out all the time.

I found myself wondering whether there mightn’t be something on the dark star that wanted us, and if that was why it had captured the Earth. Just then we came to the end of the corridor and I followed Pa out on the balcony.

I don’t know what the city looked like in the old days, but now it’s beautiful. The starlight lets you see pretty well -there’s quite a bit of light in those steady points speckling the blackness above. (Pa says the stars used to twinkle once, but that was because there was air.) We are on a hill and the shimmery plain drops away from us and then flattens out, cut up into neat squares by the troughs that used to be streets. I sometimes make my mashed potatoes look like it, before I pour on the gravy.

Some taller buildings push up out of the feathery plain, topped by rounded caps of air crystals, like the fur hood Ma wears, only whiter. On those buildings you can see the darker squares of windows, underlined by white dashes of air crystals. Some of them are on a slant, for many of the buildings are pretty badly twisted by the quakes and all the rest that happened when the dark star captured the Earth.

Here and there a few icicles hang, water icicles from the first days of the cold, other icicles of frozen air that melted on the roofs and dripped and froze again. Sometimes one of those icicles will catch the light of a star and send it to you so brightly you think the star has swooped into the city. That was one of the things Pa had been thinking of when I told him about the light, but I had thought of it myself first and known it wasn’t so.

He touched his helmet to mine so we could talk easier and he asked me to point out the windows to him. But there wasn’t any light moving around inside them now, or anywhere else. To my surprise, Pa didn’t bawl me out and tell me I’d been seeing things. He looked all around quite a while after filling his pail, and just as we were going inside he whipped around without warning, as if to take some peeping thing off guard.

I could feel it, too. The old peace was gone. There was something lurking out there, watching, waiting, getting ready.

Inside, he said to me, touching helmets, “If you see something like that again, son, don’t tell the others. Your Ma’s sort of nervous these days and we owe her all the feeling of safety we can give her. Once — it was when your sister was born — I was ready to give up and die, but your mother kept me trying. Another time she kept the fire going a whole week all by herself when I was sick. Nursed me and took care of the two of you, too.

“You know that game we sometimes play, sitting in a square in the Nest, tossing a ball around? Courage is like a ball, son. A person can hold it only so long, and then he’s got to toss it to someone else. When it’s tossed your way, you’ve got to catch it and hold it tight — and hope there’ll be someone else to toss it to when you get tired of being brave.”

His talking to me that way made me feel grown-up and good. But it didn’t wipe away the thing outside from the back of my mind — or the fact that Pa took it seriously.

It’s hard to hide your feelings about such a thing. When we got back in the Nest and took off our outside clothes, Pa laughed about it all and told them it was nothing and kidded me for having such an imagination, but his words fell flat. He didn’t convince Ma and Sis any more than he did me. It looked for a minute like we were all fumbling the courage-ball. Something had to be done, and almost before I knew what I was going to say, I heard myself asking Pa to tell us about the old days, and how it all happened.

He sometimes doesn’t mind telling that story, and Sis and I sure like to listen to it, and he got my idea. So we were all settled around the fire in a wink, and Ma pushed up some cans to thaw for supper, and Pa began. Before he did, though, I noticed him casually get a hammer from the shelf and lay it down beside him.

It was the same old story as always -I think I could recite the main thread of it in my sleep — though Pa always puts in a new detail or two and keeps improving it in spots.

He told us how the Earth had been swinging around the Sun ever so steady and warm, and the people on it fixing to make money and wars and have a good time and get power and treat each other right or wrong, when without warning there comes charging out of space this dead star, this burned out sun, and upsets everything.

You know, I find it hard to believe in the way those people felt, any more than I can believe in the swarming number of them. Imagine people getting ready for the horrible sort of war they were cooking up. Wanting it even, or at least wishing it were over so as to end their nervousness. As if all folks didn’t have to hang together and pool every bit of warmth just to keep alive. And how can they have hoped to end danger, any more than we can hope to end the cold?

Sometimes I think Pa exaggerates and makes things out too black. He’s cross with us once in a while and was probably cross with all those folks. Still, some of the things I read in the old magazines sound pretty wild. He may be right.

The dark star, as Pa went on telling it, rushed in pretty fast and there wasn’t much time to get ready. At the beginning they tried to keep it a secret from most people, but then the truth came out, what with the earthquakes and floods — imagine, oceans of unfrozen water! — and people seeing stars blotted out by something on a clear night. First off they thought it would hit the Sun, and then they thought it would hit the Earth. There was even the start of a rush to get to a place called China, because people thought the star would hit on the other side. But then they found it wasn’t going to hit either side, but was going to come very close to the Earth.

Most of the other planets were on the other side of the Sun and didn’t get involved. The Sun and the newcomer fought over the Earth for a little while -pulling it this way and that, like two dogs growling over a bone, Pa described it this time — and then the newcomer won and carried us off. The Sun got a consolation prize, though. At the last minute he managed to hold on to the Moon.

That was the time of the monster earthquakes and floods, twenty times worse than anything before. It was also the time of the Big Jerk, as Pa calls it, when all Earth got yanked suddenly, just as Pa has done to me once or twice, grabbing me by the collar to do it, when I’ve been sitting too far from the fire.

You see, the dark star was going through space faster than the Sun, and in the opposite direction, and it had to wench the world considerably in order to take it away.

The Big Jerk didn’t last long. It was over as soon as the Earth was settled down in its new orbit around the dark star. But it was pretty terrible while it lasted. Pa says that all sorts of cliffs and buildings toppled, oceans slopped over, swamps and sandy deserts gave great sliding surges that buried nearby lands. Earth was almost jerked out of its atmosphere blanket and the air got so thin in spots that people keeled over and fainted — though of course, at the same time, they were getting knocked down by the Big Jerk and maybe their bones broke or skulls cracked.

We’ve often asked Pa how people acted during that time, whether they were scared or brave or crazy or stunned, or all four, but he’s sort of leery of the subject, and he was again tonight. He says he was mostly too busy to notice.

You see, Pa and some scientist friends of his had figured out part of what was going to happen — they’d known we’d get captured and our air would freeze — and they’d been working like mad to fix up a place with airtight walls and doors, and insulation against the cold, and big supplies of food and fuel and water and bottled air. But the place got smashed in the last earthquakes and all Pa’s friends were killed then and in the Big Jerk. So he had to start over and throw the Nest together quick without any advantages, just using any stuff he could lay his hands on.

I guess he’s telling pretty much the truth when he says he didn’t have any time to keep an eye on how other folks behaved, either then or in the Big Freeze that followed — followed very quick, you know, both because the dark star was pulling us away very fast and because Earth’s rotation had been slowed in the tug-of-war, so that the nights were ten old nights long.

Still, I’ve got an idea of some of the things that happened from the frozen folk I’ve seen, a few of them in other rooms in our building, others clustered around the furnaces in the basements where we go for coal.

In one of the rooms, an old man sits stiff in a chair, with an arm and a leg in splints. In another, a man and a woman are huddled together in a bed with heaps of covers over them. You can just see their heads peeking out, close together. And in another a beautiful young lady is sitting with a pile of wraps huddled around her, looking hopefully toward the door, as if waiting for someone who never came back with warmth and food. They’re all still and stiff as statues, of course, but just like life.

Pa showed them to me once in quick winks of his flashlight, when he still had a fair supply of batteries and could afford to waste a little light. They scared me pretty bad and made my heart pound, especially the young lady.

Now, with Pa telling his story for the umpteenth time to take our minds off another scare, I got to thinking of the frozen folk again. All of a sudden I got an idea that scared me worse than anything yet. You see, I’d just remembered the face I’d thought I’d seen in the window. I’d forgotten about that on account of trying to hide it from the others.

What, I asked myself, if the frozen folk were coming to life? What if they were like the liquid helium that got a new lease on life and started crawling toward the heat just when you thought its molecules ought to freeze solid forever? Or like the electricity that moves endlessly when it’s just about as cold as that? What if the evergrowing cold, with the temperature creeping down the last few degrees to the last zero, had mysteriously wakened the frozen folk to life — not warm-blooded life, but something icy and horrible?

That was a worse idea than the one about something coming down from the dark star to get us.

Or maybe, I thought, both ideas might be true. Something coming down from the dark star and making the frozen folk move, using them to do its work. That would fit with both things I’d seen — the beautiful young lady and the moving, starlike light.

The frozen folk with minds from the dark star behind their unwinking eyes, creeping, crawling, snuffing their way, following the heat to the Nest.

I tell you, that thought gave me a very bad turn and I wanted very badly to tell the others my fears, but I remembered what Pa had said and clenched my teeth and didn’t speak.

We were all sitting very still. Even the fire was burning silently. There was just the sound of Pa’s voice and the clocks.

And then, from beyond the blankets, I thought I heard a tiny noise. My skin tightened all over me.

Pa was telling about the early years in the Nest and had come to the place where he philosophizes.

“So I asked myself then,” he said, “what’s the use of going on? What’s the use of dragging it out for a few years? Why prolong a doomed existence of hard work and cold and loneliness? The human race is done. The Earth is done. Why not give up, I asked myself — and all of a sudden I got the answer.”

Again I heard the noise, louder this time, a kind of uncertain, shuffling tread, coming closer. I couldn’t breathe.

“Life’s always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold,” Pa was saying. “The earth’s always been a lonely place, millions of miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don’t matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture, like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers — you’ve seen pictures of those, but I can’t describe how they feel — or the fire’s glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that’s as true for the last man as the first.”

And still the steps kept shuffling closer. It seemed to me that the inmost blanket trembled and bulged a little. Just as if they were burned into my imagination, I kept seeing those peering, frozen eyes.

“So right then and there,” Pa went on, and now I could tell that he heard the steps, too, and was talking loud so we maybe wouldn’t hear them, “right then and there I told myself that I was going on as if we had all eternity ahead of us. I’d have children and teach them all I could. I’d get them to read books. I’d plan for the future, try to enlarge and seal the Nest. I’d do what I could to keep everything beautiful and growing. I’d keep alive my feeling of wonder even at the cold and the dark and the distant stars.”

But then the blanket actually did move and lift. And there was a bright light somewhere behind it. Pa’s voice stopped and his eyes turned to the widening slit and his hand went out until it touched and gripped the handle of the hammer beside him.

In through the blanket stepped the beautiful young lady. She stood there looking at us the strangest way, and she carried something bright and unwinking in her hand. And two other faces peered over her shoulders — men’s faces, white and staring.

Well, my heart couldn’t have been stopped for more than four or five beats before I realized she was wearing a suit and helmet like Pa’s homemade ones, only fancier, and that the men were, too — and that the frozen folk certainly wouldn’t be wearing those. Also, I noticed that the bright thing in her hand was just a kind of flashlight.

The silence kept on while I swallowed hard a couple of times, and after that there was all sorts of jabbering and commotion.

They were simply people, you see. We hadn’t been the only ones to survive; we’d just thought so, for natural enough reasons. These three people had survived, and quite a few others with them. And when we found out how they’d survived, Pa let out the biggest whoop of joy.

They were from Los Alamos and they were getting their heat and power from atomic energy. Just using the uranium and plutonium intended for bombs, they had enough to go on for thousands of years. They had a regular little airtight city, with airlocks and all. They even generated electric light and grew plants and animals by it. (At this Pa let out a second whoop, waking Ma from her faint.)

But if we were flabbergasted at them, they were double-flabbergasted at us.

One of the men kept saying, “But it’s impossible, I tell you. You can’t maintain an air supply without hermetic sealing. It’s simply impossible.”

That was after he had got his helmet off and was using our air. Meanwhile, the young lady kept looking around at us as if we were saints, and telling us we’d done something amazing, and suddenly she broke down and cried.

They’d been scouting around for survivors, but they never expected to find any in a place like this. They had rocket ships at Los Alamos and plenty of chemical fuels. As for liquid oxygen, all you had to do was go out and shovel the air blanket at the top level. So after they’d got things going smoothly at Los Alamos, which had taken years, they’d decided to make some trips to likely places where there might be other survivors. No good trying long-distance radio signals, of course, since there was no atmosphere to carry them around the curve of the Earth.

Well, they’d found other colonies at Argonne and Brookhaven and way around the world at Harwell and Tanna Tuva. And now they’d been giving our city a look, not really expecting to find anything. But they had an instrument that noticed the faintest heat waves and it had told them there was something warm down here, so they’d landed to investigate. Of course we hadn’t heard them land, since there was no air to carry the sound, and they’d had to investigate around quite a while before finding us. Their instruments had given them a wrong steer and they’d wasted some time in the building across the street.

By now, all five adults were talking like sixty. Pa was demonstrating to the men how he worked the fire and got rid of the ice in the chimney and all that. Ma had perked up wonderfully and was showing the young lady her cooking and sewing stuff, and even asking about how the women dressed at Los Alamos. The strangers marveled at everything and praised it to the skies. I could tell from the way they wrinkled their noses that they found the Nest a bit smelly, but they never mentioned that at all and just asked bushels of questions.

In fact, there was so much talking and excitement that Pa forgot about things, and it wasn’t until they were all getting groggy that he looked and found the air had all boiled away in the pail. He got another bucket of air quick from behind the blankets. Of course that started them all laughing and jabbering again. The newcomers even got a little drunk. They weren’t used to so much oxygen.

Funny thing, though — I didn’t do much talking at all and Sis hung on to Ma all the time and hid her face when anybody looked at her. I felt pretty uncomfortable and disturbed myself, even about the young lady. Glimpsing her outside there, I’d had all sorts of mushy thoughts, but now I was just embarrassed and scared of her, even though she tried to be nice as anything to me.

I sort of wished they’d all quit crowding the Nest and let us be alone and get our feelings straightened out.

And when the newcomers began to talk about our all going to Los Alamos, as if that were taken for granted, I could see that something of the same feeling struck Pa and Ma, too. Pa got very silent all of a sudden and Ma kept telling the young lady, “But I wouldn’t know how to act there and I haven’t any clothes.”

The strangers were puzzled like anything at first, but then they got the idea. As Pa kept saying, “It just doesn’t seem right to let this fire go out.”

Well, the strangers are gone, but they’re coming back. It hasn’t been decided yet just what will happen. Maybe the Nest will be kept up as what one of the strangers called a “survival school”. Or maybe we will join the pioneers who are going to try to establish a new colony at the uranium mines at Great Slave Lake or in the Congo.

Of course, now that the strangers are gone, I’ve been thinking a lot about Los Alamos and those other tremendous colonies. I have a hankering to see them for myself.

You ask me, Pa wants to see them, too. He’s been getting pretty thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up.

“It’s different, now that we know others are alive,” he explains to me. “Your mother doesn’t feel so hopeless any more. Neither do I, for that matter, not having to carry the whole responsibility for keeping the human race going, so to speak. It scares a person.”

I looked around at the blanket walls and the fire and the pails of air boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in the warmth and the flickering light.

“It’s not going to be easy to leave the Nest,” I said, wanting to cry, kind of. “It’s so small and there’s just the four of us. I get scared at the idea of big places and a lot of strangers.”

He nodded and put another piece of coal on the fire. Then he looked at the little pile and grinned suddenly and put a couple of handfuls on, just as if it was one of our birthdays or Christmas.

“You’ll quickly get over that feeling, son,” he said. “The trouble with the world was that it kept getting smaller and smaller, till it ended with just the Nest. Now it’ll be good to have a real huge world again, the way it was in the beginning.”

I guess he’s right. You think the beautiful young lady will wait for me till I grow up? I’ll be twenty in only ten years.

GUARDIANS OF THE PHOENIX Eric Brown

Eric Brown has written over twenty books and eighty short stories, since his first collection The Time-Lapsed Man (1990). His first novel was Meridian Days (1992). Recent works include The Fall of Tartarus (2005) and The Extraordinary Voyage of Jules Verne (2005). He has twice won the BSFA short story award, in 2000 and 2002. I had the pleasure of collaborating with him in compiling The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (2005).

IT WAS DAWN when we set off from beneath the twisted skeleton of the Eiffel Tower and crossed the desert to Tangier s.

We travelled by day through a blasted landscape devoid of life, and at night we stopped and tried to sleep. I’d lie in my berth and stare through the canopy at the magnetic storms lacerating the troposphere. The heat was insufferable, even in the marginally cooler early hours. When I slept I dreamed of the women I had seen in old magazines, and when I woke in the searing heat of morning and Danny started the truck on the next leg of the journey, I was silent and sullen with melancholy longing.

Two days out of Paris, heading through what Edvard informed us had once been the Auvergne, we picked up the fifth member of our party.

Around sunset, as the horizon burned and a magnetic storm played out in a frenzy overhead, the truck stuttered and came to a halt.

Danny hit the steering wheel. “Christ! It’s one of the main capacitors. I’ll wager anything…”

“Not again?” Fear lodged in my throat. This was the third time in as many weeks that the truck had failed, and every time Danny’s desperation had communicated itself to me. He tried to disguise it, but I could see the dread in his eyes, in the shake of his hands. Without the truck, without the means to cross the ravaged land in search of water, we were dead.

Danny was our leader by dint of the fact that he owned the truck and the drilling rig, and because he was an engineer. He was in his fifties, small and lean, and despite what he’d been through he was optimistic.

I’d never heard that word till I met Danny, four years ago.

I stared through the windscreen. We were on the edge of a city: its jagged skyline of ruined buildings rose stark against the dying light. Over the decades, sand had drifted through the parks and esplanades, softening the harsh angles of the buildings, creating beautifully parabolic curves between the shattered streets and vertical walls.

“Edvard!” Danny called. “Kat!”

Seconds later Edvard’s balding head appeared through the hatch. A little later, on account of her limp, Kat joined us. Her lined face wrinkled even more as she peered through the windscreen.

Danny indicated the scene before us. “You know what happened here?”

Edvard looked at the map on the seat between Danny and me. “Clermont-Ferrand. It wasn’t a nuclear strike. I know that much. Too small a place to be a target, nuclear or biological.”

Danny looked at him, scratching his greying beard. “So you reckon it’s safe?”

Edvard thought about it, then nodded.

Kat said, “I just hope there’s no one out there.”

Stalled like this, we’d be easy pickings for marauders — not that we’d come across any of those for years.

“Okay,” Danny said, “come on, Pierre. Let’s see what the damage is.”

I took my rifle from the locker, hung it over my shoulder, and followed Danny from the truck. Even though the sun was on its way down, the heat was ferocious: it was as if we’d stepped into an industrial oven. We walked down the length of the truck, pausing at the foot of the ladder welded onto the flank, and Danny gingerly picked open a small hatch. He pulled out a toolbox and two pairs of gloves and passed one pair to me. The rungs of the ladder would take the skin clean off our palms if we ascended unprotected.

Danny nodded, and I followed him up the side of the truck and across the top. The heat radiating from the solar arrays and the steel surface of the truck hit me in a blast. I picked my way carefully after Danny, wary of allowing the exposed flesh of my legs to get anywhere near the hot steel.

Danny stopped at the apex, hauled open an inspection cover and passed it back to me. For the next ten minutes he rooted around inside, grunting and cursing as he checked each capacitor in turn.

I unslung my rifle and scanned the darkening city, wondering what this place might have been like fifty or sixty years ago, when the streets and buildings had been full of people going about their everyday business — before the nuclear and biological wars, before the governments collapsed under the strain of trying to hold together a dying world.

I heard the hatch open below and saw Edvard limp out of the truck and across the sand to the nearest building. He paused before it, looking ragged and frail, staring up at the ruin before stepping inside.

I scanned the horizon, looking for signs of life. A part of me knew it was a futile exercise. I hadn’t seen a live animal for months, or other human beings for three years now. Even so, I searched the ruins with hope, and a little dread — for if we did happen upon humans out there, then chances were that they’d be as hostile as the last lot.

“Pierre!”

I started. “Sorry, I—”

“Just pass me the cover.”

He took it from me and slipped it back into place. “You fixed it?” I asked.

“For now. Don’t know how long it’ll last.” He shook his head. “But we’re lucky. If it’d been something major…”

I nodded, smiling. Danny laughed, trying to make light of his own relief. I backed down to the ground and, as Danny slipped into the truck to tell Kat not to worry herself sick, I waded through the sand towards the shattered buildings.

Edvard had moved into the shadowy interior of the nearest shell. I followed his dimpled prints in the drift and leaned in the doorway, watching him.

Edvard was Norwegian, and he’d had to explain to me what that meant, now that nations no longer existed. He’d been a doctor in Oslo before the colony died out. He was slow and wise, and as ghostly-pale as the rest of us. It was Edvard who had taught me how to read and write.

He had aged quickly in the four years I’d known him. He’d slowed down, and the flesh had fallen from his bones, and when I’d asked him if he was okay he’d just smiled and said he was fine, for an old man. I reckoned he was in his late forties.

The room was empty, but for drifts of sand, scattered paper, and a skeleton in the far corner. The bones had collapsed, and the skull had rolled onto its right cheek; in the half-light of the room, the empty eyes seemed to be staring at us.

“Ed,” I said. “The truck’s okay. A blown capacitor. Danny fixed it.”

He turned and smiled. “That’s great.” He seemed distant, lost in thought.

“What?” I said.

He pointed at the skeleton. “I remember when I would have taken those bones, Pierre. Can you believe that? Nutrients, you see. The marrow in the bones. Boil them up, make a soup. Pretty thin, but nourishing…” He shrugged. “No good now, of course. All dried out, desiccated.”

He knelt slowly, and I could almost hear the creak of his joints. He reached out and picked up a scrap of paper. He joined me in the doorway where the light was better and held out the old newspaper.

“Christ, Pierre. 2040. What, fifty years ago? Look, a headline about the peace pact with China. Lot of good that did!”

He’d told me about what had happened to China. The military had taken over in a bloody coup, overturning a government they accused of not doing all they could to feed the people. And then the people had overthrown the junta, when the military had proved as useless as the government.

Not long after that, China invaded India, and Europe came to the aid of the subcontinent, and World War III broke out. It lasted five days, according to Edvard. And after that, the world was never the same again.

That was the beginning of the end, Edvard said. After that, there was no hope. What humankind had begun with wars, the planet finished off with accelerated global warming.

He stared at the scrap of newspaper. In his clawed hand, the paper crumbled.

I took his arm. “C’mon, Ed. Let’s get something to eat.”

We sat around the fold-down table in the truck and ate spinach and potatoes grown in the hydroponics trailer, washed down with the daily ration of water. Danny talked enthusiastically about the maps he’d found in Paris.

Kat’s smile was like a mother’s watching a favourite child. She was sixty, grey and thin and twisted like a length of wire. There was something shattered in her grey eyes which spoke of tragedy in her past, or knowledge of the future, and Danny loved her with a tender, touching concern.

He jabbed a finger at the map. “There’s the trench, right there, just north of the African coast. I’m sure if we drill deep enough…”

“We could use some fresh stuff,” I said. “I’m tired of drinking recycled piss.”

Danny laughed. Edvard raised his glass and examined the murky liquid, smacking his lips. “I don’t know. As victuals go, this is a fine drop. Good body, a hint of mustard.”

I watched Kat as she ate, which she did sparingly. She’d given herself a small portion, and didn’t eat all of that. Before the rest of us had finished, she pushed her plate away and left the table, limping to the door of the berth she shared with Danny. He watched her go, then followed her. I looked at Edvard, as if for explanation, but his eyes were on his food.

After the meal I moved outside, taking my rifle with me, and in the spill of light from the truck I had a bath. I sat naked in the sand, taking handfuls of the fine grains and rubbing them over my body. I felt the grease and sweat fall away, leaving a fine covering of sandy powder. I dug deeper, finding the cooler sand, and poured it over my belly and thighs.

I thought about Kat, and told myself she’d be fine. Minutes later, as if to confirm that hope, the truck began rocking as Danny and Kat made love. I found myself thinking how Kat must have been good looking, way back. But I stopped those thoughts as soon as they began, stood up and pulled on my shorts.

I was about to go inside when a door opened along the flank of the truck and Edvard looked out. “Pierre?”

He stepped from the truck and slowly lowered himself into the sand beside me.

We sat in silence for a time and stared into the night sky. The storms were starting high above the far horizon, great actinic sheets of white fire.

At last I said, “Is Kat okay?”

He flashed a glance at me. “She’s ill, Pierre. We all are.”

“But Kat—?”

He sighed. “Cancer. I don’t know how advanced it is. There’s nothing I can do about it, apart from give her the odd painkiller. And I’m running low on those.” He paused, then said, “I’m sorry.”

I said, “How long?”

He shook his head. “Maybe a year, two if she’s lucky.”

I nodded, staring through the darkness at the dim buildings. I wanted to say something, but the words wouldn’t come. I changed the subject.

“You think Danny’s right about the Med?”

Edvard shrugged. “I honestly don’t know.” He was silent for a time. “I do recall when there was sea there, Pierre, and magnificent towns and cities. The rich flocked there.”

Not for the first time I tried to imagine the vast bodies of water Edvard had described, water that filled areas as vast as deserts, and heaved and rolled… I shook my head. All I saw was a desert the colour of drinking water, flat and still.

He looked into the heavens as the night sky split with a crack of white light. It was Edvard who’d explained to me why, despite all the storms that raged, we never experienced rainfall: the little rain that did fall evaporated in the superheated lower atmosphere before it reached the earth. I thought of the storms, now, as mocking us with their futile promise.

I stared around at the buildings. “You think we can rebuild? I mean, make things like they were, before?”

Edvard smiled. “I like to think that with time, and hard work… Like Danny, I’m an optimist. I really think that people, at heart, are good. Call me a fool, if you like, but that’s what I think. So… if we could band together, always assuming there were enough people to feasibly propagate the race… then perhaps there would be hope.”

“But to get back to where things were… civilized?” I finished.

“That’s a big call, Pierre. We’ve lost so much, so much learning, culture. We’ve lost so much expertise. So much of what we knew, of what we learned over centuries of scientific investigation and understanding… all that is gone, and can never be rediscovered. Or if it can, then it’ll take centuries… even assuming the planet isn’t too far gone, even assuming that humanity can reform…” He laughed. “And I mean reform in more than just the figurative sense.”

I thought about that for a time, then said, “But with no more oceans, no more seas…”

He smiled at me. “I live in hope, Pierre. There might be small seas, underground reserves. I heard there are still small seas where the Pacific ocean was—”

“Couldn’t we…?” I began.

He was smiling.

“What?” I said.

“The Pacific is half a world away,

Pierre. This thing might get us to the Med, if we’re lucky. But not the Pacific.”

I considered his words, the barren vastness of the world, and the little I knew of it. At last I said, “If we’re the last… I mean, I haven’t seen another human for years.”

“We aren’t alone, Pierre. There are others, small bands. There must be.” He was silent a while, and then said, “And anyway, even if life on Earth is doomed…”

After a few seconds I prompted him, “Yes?”

“Well,” he said, “there’s always Project Phoenix.”

He’d told me all about Project Phoenix, the last hope. Forty years ago, when the world governments had known things were bad and getting worse, they pooled resources and constructed a starship, full of 5,000 hopeful citizens, and sent it to the stars.

Towards the east, where the sky was blackest, I made out a dozen faint glimmering points of distant stars. I thought of the starship, still on its journey, or having reached its destination and settled on a new, Earthlike planet.

“What do you think happened to the starship?” I asked.

“I like to think they’re sitting up there now, enjoying paradise, and wondering what they left behind on Earth—”

He stopped and looked up into the night sky, then fitted his hand above his eyes to cut out the glare of the magnetic storm. “Je-sus Christ, Pierre.” He scrambled to his feet. I joined him, my heart thumping. “What?”

Then, as I scanned the sky, I heard it — the faint drone of a distant engine.

Edvard pointed, and at last I made out what he’d seen.

High in the air, and heading towards us, was the dark shape of some kind of small plane.

I reached out for my rifle, propped against the side of the truck, and shouted at Danny and Kat to get out here.

“It’s in trouble,” Edvard said.

The engine was stuttering as the plane angled steeply over the distant buildings, a dark shape against the flaring storm. We watched it pass quickly overhead and come down in the desert perhaps half a kilometre beyond the truck.

Danny and Kat were out by now. “What was it?”

Edvard told them.

I said, “I’ll go and check it out.”

Edvard’s hand gripped my arm. “It’s no coincidence. A flyer doesn’t just drop out of the sky so close. They knew we were here. They want something.”

We all looked to Danny. He nodded. “Okay, I’ll go with you. Edvard, Kat, stay here.”

Kat nodded, moved to Edvard’s side. Danny entered the truck and came back holding a rifle. We set off across the sands, towards where the flyer had come down.

“Je-sus Christ…” I said, bubbling with excitement. “Wonder who it is?”

Danny flashed me a look. “Whoever it is, chances are they’re dangerous.” He raised his rifle.

I could see he was thinking more about the flyer, and what might be salvaged from it, than who the pilot might be.

My mind was in turmoil. What if the pilot were a woman? I recalled the images of models in the magazines I’d hoarded over the years, their flawless, immaculate beauty, their haughty you’re-not-good-enough gazes.

My heart was thudding by the time we crested a slipping dune.

In the stuttering white light of the magnetic storm we could see that the flyer had pitched nose-first into the desert. Its near wing was crumpled, snapped into flapping sections.

I thought of the irony of finding a beautiful woman sitting in the cockpit… dead.

I took a step fonvard. Danny said, “Remember, careful.”

I nodded and led the way.

We approached slowly, as if the crumpled machine were a wounded animal.

“A glider,” Danny said, “jerry-rigged with an old turbo.”

I lifted my rifle and we stepped cautiously towards the shattered windshield of the cockpit.

“Oh,” I said, as I made out the figure slumped against the controls.

It was a man, an old, wizened man, thin and bald and stinking. Even from a distance of two metres I could smell his adenoid-pinching body odour.

Danny cracked the cockpit’s latch with the butt of his rifle. He hauled back the canopy, checked the pilot for weapons, then felt for his pulse.

“Alive,” he said, but his gaze was ranging over the craft and the supplies packed tight around the cockpit.

I reached out and gently eased the pilot back into his seat, his head lolling. I looked for injuries; his torso seemed fine, but his left leg was snapped at the shin and bleeding.

Danny thought about it. I guessed he was calculating the worth of the glider and the supplies against the long-term cost of giving refuge to another needy stray. “Okay, go back to the truck and tell Kat to get it over here. Tell Ed to have his equipment ready.”

I took off at a run.

Five minutes later Kat braked the truck beside the glider and we jumped out. Edvard limped through the sand and knelt in the cockpit’s hatch. After examining the pilot he did something to the leg, tying off the shattered limb, then nodded to Danny and me. We eased the pilot from the glider, trying to ignore his sourdough body odour, and carried him over to the truck.

On the way I realized that he wasn’t as old as I’d first thought. He was in his forties, perhaps, though his skeletal frame and bald head made him look older. He wore tattered shorts and a ripped T-shirt and nothing else.

We installed him in the lounge and Edvard got to work on the leg, aided by Kat. Danny fetched the toolkit and for the next couple of hours we took the glider apart and stowed it in the cargo hold. We ferried the supplies, packed in three silver hold-alls, to the galley.

“Water,” Danny grinned as he passed me the canisters. “And dried meat, for chrissake!”

“Where the hell he get meat from?” I wondered aloud.

Danny shook his head. “We’ll find that out when we question him. If he lives.”

I looked across at Danny. “You hope he dies?”

He weighed the question. “He dies, and that’s one less mouth… He lives, and what he knows might be valuable. Take your pick.”

It was late when we returned to the lounge. The pilot was still unconscious, his leg swaddled in bandages. “Broken in a couple of places,” Edvard reported. “He’ll pull through. I’ll stay here with him. You get some sleep.”

In my berth, I stared through the canopy at the flaring night sky, too excited at the prospect of questioning the pilot to sleep.

The rocking of the truck brought me awake. Outside, the desert was on fire. I pulled on my shorts and lurched into the lounge. Kat must have been driving because Danny was sitting in his armchair, leaning fonvard and staring at the pilot.

“You don’t know how grateful…” the invalid said in heavily accented English between slurps of water — a half ration, I saw. He indicated his leg with the beaker. “You could have left me there.”

Guarded, Danny said, “We reckoned it was a fair trade, the wreckage of your plane, the supplies. We’ll feed you, keep you alive. But you’ll have to work if you want to be part of the team.”

Edvard sat on the battered sofa against the far wall. He said, “What can you do?”

The man’s thin lips hitched in an uneasy smile. “This and that, a bit of tinkering, engineering. I worked on solar arrays, years ago.”

I said, “What’s your name?”

He stared back at me, and I didn’t like the look in his eyes. Hostile. “What’s yours?”

“Pierre,” I said, returning his glare.

He nodded, increasing the width of his smile. “Call me Skull,” he said.

It was obviously not his given name, but considering the fleshless condition of his head, and his rictus grin, it was appropriate. Skull.

Danny took over. “The meat you had in the glider. Where’d you get that?”

“Down south. Still some game surviving. Shot it myself.”

“South?” Danny sat up, hope in his eyes. “There’s water down there, sea?”

Skull looked at Danny for a second before shaking his head. “No sea. The place is almost dead.”

Edvard said, “Where did you come from? With supplies like those, a plane. My guess is a colony somewhere.”

I didn’t like the way Skull paused after each question, as if calculating the right answer to give. “I was with a gang of no-hopers holed up in what was Algiers. Conditions were bad. The only hope was to get out, move north. But they didn’t want to risk it.”

“So you stole the supplies and the plane and got the hell out,” Danny finished.

That sly pause, again. A shrug. “A man has to look after himself, these days.”

I thought of the failing colony in Algiers, confirmation that there were others still out there.

“You’re one lucky bastard you spotted us,” Danny said.

Skull made a quick pout of his lips, as if to debate the point, then said, “Where you heading?”

Danny said, “The Mediterranean,” and left it at that.

The stranger had this way of trying not to show any reaction, as if to do so would give something away. I wondered at the company he’d kept, where he’d had to hide his emotions like this, wary and mistrustful. At last he said, “You’re joking, right?”

Danny shook his head, serious. “We’ve crossed Europe I don’t know how many times, drilling for water. I think it’s just about all dried up. My reckoning is, at the bottom of the Med, or where the sea used to be, there’ll be a better chance of striking water.”

“Salt water. Undrinkable sea water.”

Danny smiled and played his trump. “So what? I have a desalination rig all ready if that’s the case.”

“But south… the Med?” Skull shook his head. “You’re mad, you know that? You heard about the scum down there? The feral bands? They’d kill you for what you got, no questions asked.”

Danny shrugged. “We can look after ourselves,” he said, and the confidence in his voice made me feel proud.

Skull licked his lips. “Madness.”

Edvard said, from the couch, “Well, wel was at the wheel of the truck could always leave you here, if you don’t wish to accompany us.”

Skull lay his head back, staring at the ceiling. “I’ll take my chances with you people,” he grunted.

The following day the desert gave way to high bare hills, and then a range of mountains. I sat with Danny in the cab as we drove along what might have been a highway, years ago; now it was little better than an eroded track. According to the map, we were travelling through a range of mountains called the Cevennes. We passed remnants of what had been forests, stunted trunks that covered hillsides like so many barren pegs, dead now like everything else.

This was as far south as we’d ever been, and it seemed brighter out there than I’d ever experienced. This high up, we had a perfect view of the plains to the south, a drift of golden sand that stretched all the way to what had been the Mediterranean sea.

The sun was going down when I said, “What Skull said about feral bands?”

Danny snorted. “His sort — the kind of bastard who runs out on a colony and takes their supplies… his sort are cowards. Anyway, he’s a liar.”

I looked at him. “He is?”

“There’s no colony in Algiers. I heard they died out way back, twenty years ago or more.”

“But he must have run from somewhere?”

“Yeah, but not Algiers. He didn’t want to tell us where he came from.”

“Why? What’s he hiding?”

“We’ll find out in time, Pierre, believe me.”

For the next hour he concentrated on driving, as we wound down the crumbling highway and left the hills behind us. As darkness fell, Danny braked and the truck came to a halt. After the drone of the engine, the silence was resounding.

We left the cab and moved into the lounge.

Last night Danny had allocated Skull a tiny berth at the rear of the truck, and served him his meals there. This cheered me — I wasn’t alone in not wanting mealtimes spoilt by Skull’s presence.

“Meat’s on the menu tonight,” Edvard said. He carried a steaming pot and set it down before us.

He ladled broth into our bowls and the smell sent my head reeling. For a second, I almost welcomed the arrival of the mysterious stranger.

“You okay, Kat?” I asked.

She smiled at me. I was encouraged by the way she was spooning the broth; she seemed to be enjoying the meal. I glanced at Edvard. He was chewing with his eyes closed, as if savouring not only the meat but the memories of past times it conjured.

After the meal, for the first time in months, my belly felt full.

Later I excused myself, wanting to be alone with my thoughts. I left the truck, dug myself a little hollow of cool sand, and settled down.

The night was silent, the sky unusually still. No storms ripped the heavens, for once. The air was heavy and hot, oppressive. I controlled my breathing, enjoying the cooling sand, and considered the journey south.

A sound made me jump. I thought it was Edvard, come to join me. But the skeletal figure that came hobbling out on crutches, fashioned from lengths of metal cannibalized from the wreck of the glider, was the pilot.

He eased himself down onto the sand beside me and nodded. “It’s cooler out here.” The little light spilling from the truck made his face seem even more skull-like. I took shallow breaths, not wanting to inhale his acid stink.

“That’s why I’m here,” I said.

A pause. Then, “Maybe you’ll listen to sense, Pierre. I’ve tried the others. They’re too old, set in their ways.”

“They’re my friends,” I said, and then as if to make it clearer, “my family. We’re in this together.”

I looked at him. His sly eyes appeared calculating. “Listen to me, Pierre. You’re no fool. If we head south, to the Med-”

“Yes?”

A pause. He licked his lips. “There’s dangers down there, things you haven’t encountered in Europe.”

“You said. Feral bands—”

“Worse!”

“Worse than feral bands?”

“Much worse. Feral means animal. You can deal with animals, outwit ’em. These people… these people are no fools. They’re evil, and calculating.” I wondered, for a second, if he were describing himself. “You ever seen what human beings can do when they’re desperate?”

I thought back to the ruins of Paris, before the desert engulfed the city. I considered the people I’d lived with, and why I left. Yes, I almost told him, I’ve experienced desperate people, and survived. But I said nothing, reluctant to share with Skull what I’d never told anyone else, not even Danny or Kat or Edvard.

“Like Danny said,” I murmured, not looking at him, “we can look after ourselves.”

Skull spat viciously. “Fools, the lot of you!”

I considered what Danny had said last night. Into the following silence, I said, “What are you frightened of, Skull? What are you running away from?”

He looked at me, then grinned. “No… you’re no fool, are you?”

“Well?”

I didn’t expect him to tell me, so I was surprised when he said, “People so fucking evil, so purely bad, you cannot imagine, Pierre.”

And he left it at that, as if challenging me to enquire further.

I was at the wheel of the truck the following day when we came to the escarpment overlooking what had once been the Mediterranean sea.

Danny said, “Would you look at that?”

Kat and Edvard squeezed into the cab.

The land before us fell away suddenly to form a vast, scooped-out crater bigger than the eye could encompass. The dried-up sea bottom was cracked and fissured, as steely grey as the pictures I’d seen of the lunar landscape. The horizon shimmered, corrugated with heat haze.

I glanced at Danny. He was staring, speechless. I realized that before him was the goal he’d set his heart on months back, when he first had the idea to journey south.

“We’ll drive on another four, five hours, then stop for the night,” he said. “Over dinner we’ll look at the map, plan the next leg of the journey.”

Edvard and Kat moved back to the lounge. I was pleased that Skull had not bothered to show himself.

I mopped the sweat from my face. It was sweltering in the cab: the thermometer read almost thirty-five Celsius. Next to that dial was the outside temperature: fifty-five, hot enough to bake a man in less than an hour.

Danny took the wheel and drove along the coast, parallel to the escarpment, looking for a shallow entry down into what had been the sea. Five kilometres further on we came to a section of the coast which shelved gradually, and Danny eased us over the edge, moving at a snail’s pace. Baked soil as fine as cement crumbled under the truck’s balloon tyres. We lurched and Danny eased back the throttle, slowing our descent.

At last the land flattened out and we accelerated, the headwind blowing the dust behind us. A great plain stretched before us, rilled with expansion cracks and dotted with objects I couldn’t at first make out. As we drew nearer I saw that they were the rusted hulks and skeletons of ships, fixed at angles in the sea bottom. We passed into the shadow of one, a great liner red with rust, its panels holed but the sleek lines of its remaining superstructure telling of prouder times. I found it hard to imagine that so great a vessel could actually float on water: it seemed beyond the laws of physics.

Danny pointed. In the lee of the ship’s rearing hull I made out a pile of white spars, like bleached wood. We drew closer and I saw that they were bones. Domed orbs contrasted with the geometric precision of femur and tibia: skulls.

I shook my head. “I don’t see…”

“My guess is that there was a colony on the ship, ages ago,” Danny said. “As they died, one by one, the survivors pitched the bodies over the side.”

“You think there’s anyone left?” I asked, knowing the answer even before Danny shook his head.

“This was probably thirty years ago, at a guess. Back when the drought was getting bad and nations collapsed. Tribes formed, the rule of law broke down. It was every man for himself. Colonies formed on ships, while the oceans still existed — away from the wars on dry land.”

I shook my head, thinking of the horrors that must have overtaken the shipboard colonies in their last, desperate days.

We drove on, heading south.

A couple of hours later, to our right, the sea-bed rose to form a series of pinnacles, five in all. They towered above the seared landscape for hundreds of metres, their needle peaks silhouetted against a sky as bright as aluminium.

Danny glanced at his map. “They were the Balearic Islands, part of old Spain.”

“People lived up there?” I asked, incredulous.

He smiled. “They were small areas of land, Pierre, surrounded by sea. Islands.”

I shook my head, struggling to envisage such a configuration of land and sea. On the summit of the nearest peak I made out the square shapes of dwellings, the tumbledown walls of others.

We left the stranded islands behind us.

Three hours later the sun went down to our right in a blaze of crimson. Ahead, indigo twilight formed over Africa, the sky untouched by magnetic storms.

Kat called from the lounge, “Food in ten minutes!”

Danny brought the truck to a halt and we moved back to the lounge. He unfolded one of his maps and indicated our position.

Kat served us plates of fried potatoes and greens — rationing the meat. She was carrying a plate across the lounge for our passenger when Skull emerged from his berth and limped to the table.

“Don’t mind if I join you folks tonight? I was getting lonesome back there.”

I returned to my meal without a word. Edvard indicated a chair and Skull dropped into it, wincing quickly.

Danny stubbed a forefinger at the map.

“So this is where we are now, and this is where we’re heading — a hundred kilometres north of what was the coast of Africa, off a place called Tangiers.”

Skull stopped chewing. He looked across at Danny, uneasy. “Let me see…” He leaned forward, peering.

He looked up. “I don’t like the sound of it.”

I took a swallow of water, aware of my heartbeat and the sauna heat of the room.

Danny nodded, considering his words. “And why not?”

“Like I said before, there’s feral bands down there. We’d best avoid them.”

“There specifically, Skull?” Danny asked. “How come you’re so certain?”

Skull chewed, not looking away from Danny’s stare. “I heard stories, rumours.”

Danny lay down his knife and fork in an odd gesture of civility that belied the anger on his face. “Bullshit. Tell us straight — what the hell do you know?”

Skull’s eyes darted from right to left, taking in Danny and Kat, Edvard and myself. He looked uneasy, a rat cornered.

Edvard said quietly, “You didn’t come from Algiers. So where did you come from?”

The silence stretched. Skull used his tongue to work free a strand of fibre from between his teeth. “Okay, okay… I was travelling with some people. Only they weren’t people. Animals more like, monsters. A dozen or so of them. They had a vehicle, a collection of solar arrays lashed together around a failing engine… Anyway, they were heading west, towards Tangiers.”

Danny nodded. “Why?”

Skull shrugged. “They didn’t say. They invited me to stay awhile. They needed an engineer to help out, they said. So I travelled with them a few days, a week.”

I said, “Why did you leave them?”

“Because I reckoned that soon, once I’d helped out with the arrays, I would’ve outlived my usefulness and they’d kill me rather than have me using up food and water. They were that kind of people.”

He looked around at us, then bolted down the last of the food, stood with difficulty and hoiked himself from the lounge.

Danny said, “So, what do you think? He telling the truth?”

Edvard voiced what I was thinking. “I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could spit. Which isn’t far, these days.”

I said, “We’ve come across bastard gangs before. We just have to be careful, that’s all.”

Kat nodded. “I second that.”

“What I’d like to know,” Edvard said, “is what’s so important about Tangiers that this mob was heading for it?”

I was in the cab with Edvard the following day when we came across the hovercraft.

It was late afternoon and we were roughly a hundred kilometres north of the trench, our destination. The sea bottom desert stretched ahead for as far as the eye could see, flat and featureless.

I was nodding off in the heat when Edvard slowed the truck. I sat up and looked across at him. He indicated the horizon with a silent nod.

I scanned. Far ahead, coruscating in the merciless afternoon glare, was the domed shape of a vehicle, entirely covered by an armature of solar arrays. At this distance it looked for all the world like a diamond-encrusted beetle.

It was not moving. I guessed its occupants had seen us and halted, wary.

Edvard brought the truck to a stop and called out to Danny.

Seconds later Danny and Kat squeezed into the cab and crouched between us.

“What do you think?” I said.

“Big,” Danny said under his breath. “Impressive arrays. Of course, they might not all be in working order.” He screwed up his eyes. “I don’t see any evidence of a rig. Wonder what they do for water?”

Kat said, “What should we do?”

“Break out the rifles, Pierre. Ed, take us fonvard slowly.”

I slipped from the cab and hurried into the lounge. I unlocked the chest where we kept the rifles and hauled out four, one each. I carried them back to the cab and doled them out as the truck crawled fonvard.

The occupants of the other vehicle were doing the same, advancing carefully across the desert towards us. We slowed even further, and so did the other truck. We must have resembled two circumspect crabs, unsure whether to mate or fight.

“It’s a hovercraft,” Kat said. Despite her years, she had sharp eyes. Only now, with the vehicle perhaps half a kay from us, did I make out the bulbous skirts below the layered solar arrays. As Danny had said, it was big; perhaps half the size again of our truck.

“Okay,” Danny told Edvard. “Bring us to a stop now.”

The truck halted with a hiss of brakes. Edvard kept the engine ticking over.

The hovercraft stopped too, mirroring our caution.

My heart was thudding. I was sweating even more than usual. I gripped the rifle to my chest. Minutes passed. Nothing moved out there. I imagined the hovercraft’s occupants, wondering like us whether we constituted a threat or an opportunity.

“What now?” I asked Danny. I realized I was whispering.

“We sit tight. Let them make the first move.”

This was the first time I’d seen a working vehicle, other than our own, in more than three years, physical proof that other people beside us were out there.

“What’s that?” Kat said.

Something was moving on the flank of the vehicle. As we watched, a big hatch hinged open and people came out. I counted five individuals, tiny at this distance. They paused in the shadow of the craft, staring across at us.

Minutes passed. They made no move to approach.

Edvard said, “Looks like they’re armed.” He paused. “What do we do?”

Danny licked his lips. “They made the first move. Maybe we should match it.”

“I’ll go out,” I said.

“Not alone.” This was Kat, a hand on my arm.

Danny nodded. “I’ll come with you.” To Edvard and Kat he said, “Keep us covered. If they do anything, fire first and ask questions later, okay?”

Kat nodded and slipped the barrel of her rifle through the custom-made slits in the frame of the windscreen. Edvard crouched next to her.

Danny and I left the cab and hurried through the lounge, grabbing sun hats on the way. Danny cracked the door and we stepped out into the blistering heat. I stopped dead in my tracks, drawing in a deep breath of superheated air, thankful for the shade afforded by my hat. This was the first time in months that I’d ventured from the truck in the full heat of day, and I felt suddenly dizzy.

I expected the ground to be like the desert, deep sand making each step an effort. Instead it was hard, baked dry. We paused by the truck, staring across at the five figures standing abreast.

“Okay…” Danny said.

We left the truck at a stroll, our rifles slung barrels down in the crooks of our arms. Ahead, there was movement in the group. One of the figures ducked back into the hatch and emerged with something. At first I assumed it was some kind of weapon; evidently so did Danny. He reached out a hand, staying my progress.

As we watched, four of the figures erected a frame over the fifth. It was some kind of sun-shade. Only when it was fully erected, and the central figure suitably shaded, did the entourage move fonvard.

“Christ,” I said. We were a hundred metres from the group now, and I saw that the central figure was a woman.

She was tall, statuesque, like one of the models in the old magazines. She was bare legged and bare armed, wearing only shorts and a tight shirt which emphasised the swelling of her chest. As we drew within ten metres of the group, I saw that her face was long, severe, her mouth hard and her nose hooked. But I wasn’t looking at her face.

Something turned over in my gut, the same heavy lust I experienced when looking at the long-dead magazine models.

Danny said, “Do you speak English, French?”

“I speak English,” the woman said in an accent I couldn’t place. She looked middle-eastern to my inexperienced eye.

Her henchmen were a feeble mob. They looked starved, emaciated, and a couple were scabbed with ugly melanomas which covered their faces like masks.

“We’re from the north,” Danny said.

“Old Egypt.” The woman inclined her head. “My name is Samara.”

“I’m Danny. This is Pierre.”

I glanced at the hovercraft. I saw the barrel of a rifle directed at us from an open vent. I nudged Danny, who nodded minimally and said under his breath, “I’ve seen it.”

The woman said, “Do you trade?”

“That depends what you want.”

Samara inclined her head again. “Do you have water?”

Beside me, Danny seemed to relax. We were in a position of power in this stand-off. He said, “What do you have to trade?”

The women licked her lips. I found the gesture sensuous. I gazed at her shape, the curve of her torso from breast to hip.

She said, “Solar arrays.”

I sensed Danny’s interest. “In good working order?”

“Of course. You can check them before the trade.”

“How many are you talking about?”

She pointed to a panel which overhung the flank of her craft. “Four, like that.”

Danny calculated. “I can give you… four litres of water in return.”

“Ten,” she said.

“Six,” Danny said with admirable force, “or no deal.”

I stared at the woman. She needed water more than we needed the arrays. I saw her look me up and down, and I felt suddenly, oddly, vulnerable.

She nodded, then spoke rapidly to one of her guards in a language I didn’t recognize. Two of her men returned to their craft, the weight of the sun-shade taken up by the two who remained.

I was reminded, by her regal stance beneath the shade and her henchmen’s quick attention to duty, of an illustration I had seen in a magazine of an Ancient Egyptian Queen.

Her big, dark eyes regarded me again. She smiled. I found myself looking away, flushing.

Her men returned, hauling the solar arrays. They lay them on the sand and backed off. Samara gestured, and Danny stepped forward to examine the arrays while I covered him.

Minutes later he looked back at me and nodded.

“They look okay,” he told the woman. “We’ll take them.”

“I’ll have them placed between our vehicles,” she said. “If you bring out the water, we will meet halfway.”

Danny nodded. He stood and rejoined me. To Samara he said, “What have you been doing for water?”

She paused before replying. “There is a settlement with a rig about 200 kilometres east of here, along the old coast. They have a deep bore. We trade with them every so often. You?”

Danny said, “We trade with a colony up in old Spain.”

The woman nodded, and I wondered if she’d seen through the lie. She said, “And how many of you live in the truck?”

“Five,” he said. He nodded at the hovercraft. “And you?”

“Just six,” she said.

Danny said, “We’ll fetch the water.”

We turned our backs on the woman and her men and began the slow walk back to the truck. I felt uneasy, presenting such an easy target like that, but I knew I was being irrational. They wanted water, after all; they would gain nothing by shooting us now.

“You hear that?” Danny said. “A mob has a deep bore, east of here. So there is water.”

He unlocked the hatch on the side of the truck where we stored the water. We hauled out two plastic canisters and carried them back to where the woman’s lackeys had placed the arrays. She stood over the shimmering rectangles, watching us as we placed the canisters on the ground.

She snapped something to one of the men, who opened the canister and tipped a teaspoonful of water into his palm. He lifted it to his cracked lip and tasted the water. After a second he nodded to Samara and said something in their language.

I could not keep my eyes off the woman. Her legs were bare, long and brown, and I could see the cleavage of her breasts between the fabric of her bleached blouse. She saw me looking and stared at me, her expression unreadable. I looked away quickly.

She said, “Where are you heading?”

Danny waved vaguely. “South.”

She looked surprised. “Tangiers?”

“In that direction, yes.”

She calculated. “Then we should travel together, no? There are bandits in the area. Together we are stronger.”

Danny looked at me, and I found myself nodding.

“Very well, we’ll do that. We stop at sunset, set off at dawn.”

Samara smiled. “To Tangiers, then.”

She said something to her men and two of them took the canisters. She turned and walked towards the hovercraft, flanked by her sunshade toting lackeys.

I watched her go.

Danny laughed and said, “Put your tongue away and help me with these.”

We hauled the arrays across the sea-bed and stowed them in the truck.

We stepped into the lounge to find an altercation in progress.

Skull was standing at one end of the room, Kat and Edvard at the other. Skull’s face was livid with rage, his lips contorted, eyes wide with accusation.

“You told her!” he yelled across at us as we entered. “You contacted her and told her I was here!”

I looked across at Edvard. He said, “He came flying from his berth, shouting insane accusations.”

“That’s because you bastards told her!”

I was glad he had a broken leg; able-bodied, he would undoubtedly have attacked us.

Danny said, “Calm down. We told no one. Listen to me — we don’t have a radio, okay? How could we have contacted her if we don’t possess a damned radio? And anyway, why the hell would we tell her we’d picked you up?”

Skull let go of his crutch to gesture beyond the truck. “So how come she’s found me?”

I moved into the lounge and sat down, watching Skull. Danny joined me, gesturing Skull to a seat opposite. Glaring at us, he stumped across the lounge and sat down. Kat and Edvard joined us.

Danny said, reasonably, “Are you sure it’s the same mob?”

“How many hovercraft you think are out there?” Skull snorted. “And you think I wouldn’t recognize the queen bitch herself?”

Kat said, “It’s a coincidence. They saw us from a distance, and as they needed water…”

Skull shook his head. “Some coincidence! Do you know how big this desert is? The chances of two tiny vehicles meeting like this—”

Edvard said, “We didn’t contact them, Skull. So it has to be coincidence, no? What other explanation is there?”

“The plane,” Danny said. “You took it from them, right? What about this: that she had it tagged with some kind of tracking device? It’d make sense, a valuable piece of kit like that.”

Skull held his head in his hands and sobbed.

I said, “What have you got to fear?”

He looked up, staring through his tears. “She’s evil. They all are. I ran out on her because I didn’t like what she was doing. She won’t rest till I’m dead. And now she’s found you, she won’t stop at just killing me.”

“You make her sound like a monster,” I said.

He nodded. “Oh, she is. She might have traded solar arrays now, but she’ll be scheming to get them back — and more. Right now they’ll be working out how to kill us, take the truck…”

Danny shook his head. “I don’t think so. There’s only six of them — and we’re well armed. The truck’s armoured. We can defend ourselves.”

Skull brayed a laugh. “Six! Is that what she told you? She’s lying. There were a dozen of the bastards with her when I left.”

I looked across at Danny, who said, “Like I said, we can look after ourselves.”

“Okay, but the best defence is distance. Let’s get the hell away from her before she attacks us, okay?”

Danny considered. We had agreed with Samara that we would travel south together; it would be hard to shake her, especially if Skull was correct in thinking she had come for him.

Danny nodded and said to Kat, “Okay, start us up. Let’s move on.”

Kat and Edvard moved to the cab. Skull nodded, gratefully. “Thank Christ…” was all he said before hiking himself upright on his crutches and hobbling back to his berth. I watched him go, wondering what his reaction might be when he discovered that Samara was following us.

I sat with Danny. The silence was broken by the drone of the engine as Kat kicked the truck into life.

I said, “What do you think?”

Danny rubbed his beard. “I think we trust no one but ourselves, Pierre. We keep Samara at arm’s length, and as for Skull-” “Yes?” “As Edvard said yesterday, I don’t trust him as far as I can spit.”

I moved to the rear of the truck and sat before an observation screen, staring out across the sea-bed. Through the sandy spindrift of our wake, I made out the scintillating shape of the hovercraft. It was perhaps half a kilometre behind us, and keeping pace.

For the next couple of hours before sunset, my thoughts slipped between Skull’s warning and fantasies involving Samara. I interpreted the way she looked at me as indicating desire on her part, and told myself that her henchmen were less than prime physical specimens.

The sun went down, replaced by the deep blue of night shot through with the raging flares of magnetic storms. Kat brought the truck to a standstill and Edvard fixed a meal.

The hovercraft slowed and came alongside, sinking to the sand a hundred metres from us with a curtsey of rubber skirts.

I moved to the lounge and joined Danny and Kat. Edvard ferried plates from the galley and slid them onto the table. The heady scent of braised meat filled the air.

We ate quietly, subdued. Danny had told Edvard and Kat about the travel pact with Samara, and from time to time I saw Kat glance through the hatch at the settled hovercraft across the sand.

I said, “What do we do when we get to the trench?”

Danny chewed on a mouthful of tough meat. “We stop.”

“But we don’t set up the rig, right?”

“Of course not. I don’t want her knowing anything about the rig. We stop the night and in the morning feign a mechanical fault. And if she doesn’t go on without us, then we know she wants something.”

“Skull?” Kat said.

“And maybe the rest of us,” Danny said in a low voice.

Five minutes later Skull emerged from his berth. I was waiting for his reaction when he saw the hovercraft, but evidently he was already aware of its presence. He said, “You see, she’s following us. She knows I’m here. Tonight, they’ll come across…” He seemed resigned to his fate, no longer angry.

Danny said, “You don’t know that. Anyway, the truck’s secure.”

Skull considered a reply, but merely nodded his acknowledgment of Danny’s words, grabbed his bowl of food and returned to his berth.

We finished the meal in uneasy silence.

Later I took my rifle outside, broke up the surface crust, and scooped myself a hollow in the sand beneath.

The hovercraft squatted a hundred metres away, an ugly beetle armoured in a patchwork of solar arrays. Evidently the crew had exited and were having a party on the far side of the vehicle. I heard the sound of drunken voices, raised in revelry.

I undressed and rubbed myself with sand, ridding myself of the day’s sweat and grime. I lay back and closed my eyes.

Minutes later a sound startled me. I opened my eyes. Someone had cracked a hatch on the flank of the hovercraft and was crossing the sand towards the truck. I judged I had no time to get dressed before they arrived, so instead reached out and grabbed the rifle.

Then I paddled a heap of sand onto my groin, covering myself.

I stared into the darkness, making out the figure as it emerged into the light falling from the lounge behind me, and I set aside the rifle.

Samara halted about three metres away, smiling down at me. She had discarded her shorts and blouse of earlier. Now she wore a thin white dress which hugged her chest, flanks and belly and flowed around her bare legs.

And there was something else about her, something I had not noticed on our first meeting. She smelled of flowers.

My heart banged like a faulty engine.

She moved closer and knelt, tossing a strand of dark hair from her face. Her scent almost overwhelmed me. “I saw you out here. Thought it was you.”

I opened my mouth. I wanted to ask what she wanted, but no words came. I was very aware of how ridiculous I looked, torso and legs emerging from the hollow I’d dug in the sand.

She sat before me, cross-legged. “So I thought I’d come over, say hello.”

It struck me then that, unless she was a consummate actress, she was as nervous as I was. A catch in her voice, a hesitation in her gaze as it flicked from the sand to my upper torso.

The dress was low-cut, and I could not keep my eyes from the swelling of her breasts.

“You know, I get lonely, surrounded by…” she gestured over her shoulder with a long-fingered hand, “those animals.”

I said, “It must be,” I shrugged, “diff cult to control them.”

She smiled. “Oh, I have my ways.” She wasn’t beautiful, nor really pretty, but when she smiled her face changed, became suddenly attractive. She shrugged, and the way her breasts moved together…

I responded. The sand at my groin stirred, disturbed.

She saw it, reached out and took me.

I surged upright with a moan, and she lifted her dress, pushed me back onto the sand and straddled me. I closed my eyes as she eased herself around me, impossibly warm and fluid. I reached out, dug my fingers into her bottom as she rocked, leaning fonvard and pressing her breasts into my face.

Minutes later it was over. I spasmed in ecstasy and cried aloud, then lay back in the cool sand as she gripped me and shook, her teeth biting the flesh of my shoulder.

I was near to tears. I thought back over the long, lonely years, the years of thwarted desire, of wondering if I would ever experience such intimacy.

She whispered something to me, then rolled off and pulled her dress down over her nakedness. Before I could protest, she stood and padded back to the hovercraft.

I stared into the storm-ripped night sky. Beyond the hovercraft, her crew was still partying. A hot wind blew. It was like a hundred other nights, a thousand, I had experienced in the hell that was my world, and yet tonight I felt an elation beyond description.

I considered what Skull had said about her, and contrasted his words with what I had experienced. How could she be the evil woman that he claimed she was, when she gave herself like that, and parted with such words? It was her farewell which convinced me.

“Thank you,” she had whispered.

I was woken in the early hours by a shout.

I sat up, listening. I heard the sound of a scuffle in the lounge, loud footsteps and something crashing to the floor. I pulled on my clothes and pushed open the door. I made out movement along the narrow corridor to the lounge.

In the dim light I saw half a dozen figures, and someone struggling in their midst.

I hurried along the corridor, regretting having stowed away my rifle in the locker.

I stopped dead when I came to the lounge.

Three individuals had Skull bound and gagged, and another three stood guard, armed with rifles. They faced Danny and Kat, who had just emerged from their room. Seconds later Edvard appeared.

One of the men saw me and gestured with his rifle. “Move. Join the others.”

The point of his weapon tracked me as I rounded the group and joined my friends. From this angle I could see more of Skull. He was on his knees, arms tied behind his back. A gag obscured the lower half of his face, but above it his eyes blazed with the anger of betrayal.

Kat clutched Danny’s arm, and I understood her fear. I wondered if this was where four years of comparative security and safety would come to an end. Too late, I knew we should have listened to Skull.

Calmly, Danny said, “What do you want?”

I looked around the faces of the men.

Many I did not recognize from our meeting the day before; so evidently Samara had been lying when she claimed a crew of half a dozen.

One of the men, bigger and meaner looking than the others, nodded down to Skull. “We’ve got what we came for.”

I felt an almost incredulous relief -then checked myself. He must be lying, surely? They could kill us and ransack the truck, taking our water and provisions and laying claim to the vehicle itself.

A scrawny African looked around the lounge with evident disgust. “We’d as soon as kill you all…” There were mutters of assent from those around him. “But she doesn’t want that. She said just take the bastard.” He grinned. “It’s your lucky day.”

Skull struggled, tried to say something. Someone cuffed him around the head. Their leader grunted in their language and they kicked open the hatch and left the lounge, dragging Skull with them.

As soon as they were gone, Kat hurried across the room and closed the door. The lock was smashed. “Don’t worry about it, Kat,” Edvard said. “I’ll fix it.”

We sat down around the table in silence. I think each of us felt pretty much the same mix of emotions: a vast relief that we were still alive, a kind of retrospective dread of what might have become of us, and guilt as we thought back to the reassurances we had given Skull.

Eventually, Kat said, “So… what do we do?”

Danny said, “We leave right now. Head for the trench as first planned. Lose them. We were lucky, just now.

Let’s not push that luck. Yes?”

He looked around at each of us. Edvard and Kat nodded their agreement.

“Pierre?”

I thought of Samara, the ecstasy I had experienced with her just hours ago. At last I nodded. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.

Danny drove, Kat in the cab beside him. Edvard retired to his bunk in an attempt to catch some sleep. I tried to sleep, but visions of Samara’s body, and the look of terror in Skull’s eyes as he was dragged away, kept me awake.

I moved to the rear of the truck and looked out through the observation screen. The sun was coming up ahead of us, casting our long shadow far behind. As I stared, I made out the glinting, glimmering shape of Samara’s hovercraft, following steadily in our wake.

My stomach lurched with a sensation that was not wholly dread.

We made steady progress during the day, south-west towards the trench. The hovercraft tracked us all the way, a constant presence. I moved to the cab in the early afternoon. Danny glanced at me. “Still there?”

I nodded.

He eased the throttle fonvard gently and we accelerated. Kat slipped from the passenger seat and moved through the lounge. I sat beside Danny as we crawled over the sea-bed. Ahead, the sun was a blinding white explosion high above the horizon. All around us the sea-bed was barren, utterly lifeless.

Kat returned. “They’re still there, keeping pace.”

“What the hell do they want?” Danny muttered. “I mean, they could have taken everything we had back there.”

“Perhaps Samara was being truthful,” I said. “She wants us to travel together, for safety. And she just wanted Skull back, for her own reasons…” It sounded lame, even as I spoke the words.

Danny shook his head. “I don’t buy it. They want something.”

Two hours later, as the sun sank and ignited the horizon as if it were touch-paper, Danny signalled ahead. I made out, perhaps a kilometre before us, a dark irregularity in the sea-bed, a mere line widening as it ran away from us.

We had arrived at the eastern end of the sea-bottom trench. Danny slowed and veered so that we were travelling parallel to the widening rift.

“I reckon Tangiers is around a hundred kays south-west of here,” he said. “I’m going to stop here and just pray that the bastards keep on going.”

He eased the truck to a halt beside the lip of the ridge. After the drone of the engine, the silence rang with its own eerie volume. We sat quietly as the truck ticked and cracked around us, and minutes later saw what we were secretly fearing.

To our left, the hovercraft moved into view, slowed and settled a couple of hundred metres from us.

Danny said, almost in a whisper, “I just hope Skull didn’t tell them about the rig.”

The very idea filled me with dread. I stared out at the hovercraft’s array-encrusted carapace, expecting at any second a hatch to crack and Samara’s men to come pouring out.

After ten minutes, with no discernible movement from the vehicle, I began to breathe a little easier.

We ate the evening meal in silence: potatoes and spinach. As I ate, I wondered if Kat and Edvard had been unable to bring themselves to prepare Skull’s gift of meat. We hardly exchanged a word, and afterwards I moved to the hatch and peered through the window.

The hovercraft was a dark, domed shape in the darkness. Samara’s crew were partying again. They had lit a fire on the far side of the vehicle, and its flickering crimson illumination danced above the uneven crenellation of the solar-arrays.

I made a decision. I turned to where my friends were still seated. “I’m going over there. I want to talk to Samara, find out why they took Skull.”

Kat looked shocked. “I can’t let you go-”

“I— Samara won’t harm me,” I said. “I’ll try to get a promise from her, that her men won’t attack us.”

Kat made to protest further, but Danny lay a quick hand on hers, and nodded at me silently. Something in his gaze told me he was aware of what had passed between me and Samara the night before.

Edvard said, “If you’re going, then for God’s sake take this.” He moved to the weapon’s locker and withdrew a small pistol.

I hesitated, then nodded and tucked it into the band of my shorts.

I nodded farewell and slipped from the truck. I stopped and stared across the dark expanse of sand to the hovercraft, my heart pounding. I was about to set off towards the vehicle when a door hinged open in its flank and a figure stepped out. I smiled, relieved.

She stopped when she saw me, a hand still on the door.

I crossed the cooling sea-bed towards her.

I came within range of her heady scent and my senses reeled. She stroked my cheek. “I hoped you’d be out, Pierre. I was going to invite you over… It’ll be more comfortable here, yes?”

“What about…?” I gestured to the far side of the vehicle.

She smiled. “They’re having their fun, Pierre. We won’t be disturbed, okay?”

I could only nod, all thoughts of asking what had become of Skull forgotten.

She took me by the hand and led me into the hovercraft. We moved down a warren of tight corridors, past tiny stinking cubicles where her crew slept, and a rack containing the canisters of water we had traded with her. We ducked through a hatch into a larger chamber — evidently the engine room where the dangling leads of the solar arrays were coupled to banked generators.

Samara’s room was beyond this.

I stopped on the threshold and stared.

The room was twice the size of the lounge back at the truck, and sumptuous. A vast bed occupied the centre of the room. To the left was a small window, looking out onto the sea-bed. Through thin curtains I made out the flare of the fire and the sound of voices, loud and drunk.

Then I saw, in the far corner of the chamber, a clear perspex kiosk. I crossed to it, then turned to Samara with a question.

“A shower,” she said.

I repeated the word.

She smiled. “It’s a water shower,” she said.

I looked at her. “But how can you…?”

“I make sure we’re well supplied, Pierre. And of course it’s recycled after I’ve used it.”

I could hardly conceive of the luxury of having sufficient water to use for bathing.

She took my hand and pulled me towards the bed. We kissed. She reached behind her, unbuttoned her dress and let it fall. I stared like a fool as she rolled onto the bed and smiled up at me.

I pulled off my shirt and dropped my shorts. Samara laughed.

I reddened. “What?”

“I see that you have more than one weapon in there, Pierre.”

I struggled to explain the presence of the pistol. “Ed, he said I might need it.”

“A wise move in these times.” She reached out and pulled me onto the bed.

We made love, Samara urging me to slow down, take my time, as she opened herself to me.

Time was obliterated. I had no idea how long might have passed. I lost, too, all sense of self. It was as if I were an animal, indulging in primal appetites, oblivious of anything else but the pleasures of the flesh. Samara was ferocious, biting me, scratching. I felt a heady sense of accomplishment, almost of power, that I could instil in her such a display of passion.

Later we lay in each other’s arms, slick with sweat and exhausted. She sat up, left the bed and padded to the shower. I watched her, overcome with the sight of her nakedness. She gestured for me to join her.

We stepped into the cubicle and stood together, belly to belly. She touched the controls and I gasped. Warm water cascaded over our heads, and I experienced both a sense of pleasure at the silken warmth of the water, and guilt at the profligate use of such a resource.

She passed me something, a small white block.

“Soap,” she explained. “Rub me with it.”

I did so, surprised by the resulting foam, and we made love again.

We dried ourselves and lay on the bed, facing each other. I stroked her cheek. Even then I knew that this was a passing pleasure, unexpected and delightful but hedged with danger. I knew that it could not last.

Then, as if reading my thoughts, Samara traced a finger across my ribs and said, “You can stay here, if you wish. Leave the others, travel with me. The life is hard, but I have my comforts.”

I stared at her, at her hard eyes, her cruel mouth. Even then I had wits enough to wonder if she harboured ulterior motives.

I said, “And leave my… my family?”

“You’d have me, Pierre,” she said. “We’d want for nothing. We’d eat well.”

I wondered if she had a hydroponics expert aboard. I’d seen no evidence of things growing in my brief passage through the hovercraft.

She leaned on one elbow, staring down at me. “And things will get better, believe me.”

I shook my head. “How?” I asked, wondering suddenly if she had information about a thriving colony somewhere.

“We’re heading to Tangiers,” she said.

“There’s a colony there?”

She smiled. “There was once a successful colony at Tangiers, Pierre. It died out, I’ve heard, a few years ago.”

“Then…” I shrugged. “Why go there?”

She paused, stroking my chest. “The colony was religious — one of those insane cults that flourished as civilization died. They called themselves the Guardians of the Phoenix.”

I shook my head. “I’ve never heard of them.”

She looked at me. “But you’ve heard of Project Phoenix?”

“Edvard told me about it,” I said. “A ship was sent to the stars, hoping to find a new Earth.”

She was smiling. “That was the plan, anyway.”

“The plan? You mean…”

“I mean the ship was almost built, in orbit, before the end — but the funding ran out, and governments lost control. The project became just another dead hope-”

“How do you know this?”

She rolled from the bed, crossed the room to a small wooden table and returned with a sheaf of papers.

“A read-out,” she said, curling next to me. “I obtained it years ago from a trader. This was before the Guardians of the Phoenix died out. It’s an official report about the winding up of the Project, and the resources that remained.”

I leafed through the papers. They were covered in a flowing script that made no sense to me.

Samara said, “It’s an Arabic translation.”

I lay the papers to one side. “And?”

“And it contains information about the spaceport at Tangiers. It’s a copy of the so-called sacred papers on which the Guardians founded their cult.”

“I don’t see—”

“Pierre, the Tangiers spaceport was where the supply ships would be launched from, before the departure from orbit of the Phoenix itself.”

“Supply ships,” I said, suddenly understanding. “You reckon they’re still there, the supply ships, full of everything the colonists would need for the journey — food, water…”

She laughed suddenly, disconcerting me. “Oh, I’m sorry, Pierre! You are so naive. No, the colonists would not need such supplies as food and water.”

“They wouldn’t?” I said, puzzled.

“The supply ships at Tangiers, some dozen or so, were full of the colonists. But they were frozen in suspended animation, and would be for the duration of their trip to the stars. Five thousand of them.”

I stared at her. “Five thousand? That’s… that’s a city,” I said. “Christ, yes… With so many, we could start again, rebuild civilization.”

Samara brought me up short. “Pierre, you’ve got it wrong. We couldn’t sustain a colony of 5,000. How would we feed them? What about water? Pierre, face it — the Earth is almost dead. It’s everyone for themselves, now.”

“Then—?” I gestured at the print-out. “What do you mean? You said there were colonists?”

She stroked my jaw, almost pityingly.

“Of course there are, but we couldn’t just revive them to… to this. That would be… cruel.”

“Then what?” I began.

She jumped from the bed and crossed the room, kneeling beside a curtained window and gesturing for me to join her.

Bewildered, I did.

She eased the curtain aside and inclined her head towards the revelry outside. A dozen men stood around a blazing fire, singing drunkenly. They were swigging from plastic bottles and eating something.

I turned to Samara. “What?”

Her hand, on my shoulder, was gentle. “The fire…” was all she said.

I looked again at the fire, at the spit stretched across the leaping flames, and at what was skewered upon the spit.

I felt suddenly sick, and in terrible danger. My vision misted.

I said, “Skull?”

Samara murmured, “He was a traitor. He was against our plans. He stole supplies, water.”

“But… but…” I said, gesturing to what was going on out there.

“Pierre, Pierre. Life is hard. The Earth is dying. There is no hope. We must do what we must do to survive. If that means—”

I said, “The colonists.”

She did not say the world, but her smile was eloquent enough.

Meat.

She led me back to the bed and pulled me down, facing me and gently stroking my face. “Pierre, come with me. Life will be good. We will rule the Mediterranean.”

Despite myself, I felt my body respond. She laughed, and we made love again — violently now, like animals attempting to prove superiority. This time, I did not lose my sense of self. I was all too conscious of Skull’s words, his warnings. I was in control enough to know that however much I revelled in the pleasures of the flesh with Samara, this had to be the last time.

She gasped and closed her eyes. Fighting back my tears, I rolled over and reached down beside the bed.

“Pierre?” she said. She sat up, but she had no time to stop me. She merely registered sudden alarm with a widening of her eyes.

I shot her through the forehead, sobbing as I did so, and only in retrospect hoping that the sound of the gunshot would go unheard amid the noise of the party outside.

I stood and dressed quickly, then moved to the door. On the way I stopped, returned to the bed and picked up the print-out.

At the door I paused, and forced myself to take one last glance. Samara was sprawled across the bed, the most beautiful thing I had seen in my life.

I fled the room. I passed through the chamber housing the solar arrays. Despite the desire to get away, I knew what I must do. I spent a long minute looking over the couples and leads, then judiciously snapped a bunch of connections and removed a capacitor. The hovercraft would be going nowhere for a long, long time, if ever.

I hurried along the corridor until I came to the water canisters. I grabbed two, made it to the hatch and stumbled into the night, gasping air and hauling the canisters towards the truck. I imagined some drunken reveller finding Samara and chasing me, catching me before I reached safety…

I barged into the lounge, startling Edvard, Danny and Kat. They stared wide-eyed as I staggered towards them.

“Pierre?” Kat said.

“Start up! We’ve got to get out of here!”

Kat, closest to the cab, needed no second telling. She scrambled through the hatch and seconds later the engine kicked into life. The truck surged, heading west.

Sobbing, I collapsed into a chair.

Danny and Edvard knelt before me. “Pierre…?” Danny reached out and touched my shoulder.

I passed the print-out to Edvard and told them about Samara and her men.

For the next four hours, as the truck headed along the ridge of the crest, I was afraid lest the cannibals repair their vehicle and follow us, crazed with the desire to avenge their dead queen. I sat at the rear of the truck, staring through the dust of our wake.

An hour or two before dawn, Danny turned the truck and we headed nose-down into the trench. We bucked down the incline, then straightened out and accelerated. A little later he judged that we had put enough distance between ourselves and the hovercraft: he slowed the truck and stopped with the sloping wall of the trench to our left.

I joined Danny and Kat, and together we set up the rig and dropped the longest bore through the crazed surface of the old sea-bed.

“Where’s Edvard?” I asked as I locked the final length of drill column into place.

Kat nodded back to the truck. “In there, trying to translate the print-out.”

Danny stabbed the controls that dropped the drill-head, then stood back mopping the sweat from his brow. It was still dark, but the sky in the east was turning magnesium bright with the approach of dawn and already the temperature was in the high thirties.

Dog tired, I returned to the truck to catch some sleep.

An hour later I was awakened by a cry from outside. I surged upright, thinking we were under attack. I launched myself from the truck, into the heat of the day, and stared around in panic.

Kat and Danny were standing in the shadow of the rig, holding hands and staring at the bore.

As I watched, the trickle of water bubbling from around the drill column became a surge, then a fountain-head. I ran to join them and we embraced as the water showered down around us.

I opened my mouth and drank. “It’s fresh!” I shouted. “My God, it’s fresh!” I held Kat’s thin body to me, looking into her eyes and crying with more than just the joy of finding water.

We dismantled the rig and stowed it aboard the truck. Danny marked the position of the bore on the map, and the three of us sat in the cab as we accelerated up the incline of the trench.

Later, Edvard joined us. I glanced at him as I drove.

Kat said, “What is it?”

Edvard seemed subdued. He sat between us, staring down at the print-out in his lap.

Danny said, “Ed? You okay?”

He lifted the sheaf of papers. “The colonists,” he said in barely a whisper, “number some 5,500, and they were selected to found a new world on some far star. Among them are…” his voice caught “…are doctors and scientists and engineers, specialists in every field you can imagine.”

He looked around at us, tears in his eyes We drove on in silence, into the blazing sun, towards Tangiers.

LIFE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE Paul Di Filippo

TERRAFORMING TERRA Jack Williamson