The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF (collection)

WHEN WE WENT TO SEE THE END OF THE WORLD Robert Silverberg

We start on a fairly light-hearted note with this parody of the end-of-the-world theme where time travel allows people to witness the final apocalypse. But which one?

Created a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 2004, Robert Silverberg is the dean of science fiction, having been writing prolifically for over fifty years, producing not only an immense body of work but one of remarkable quality and diversity. Amongst his major works are Nightwings (1969), A Time of Changes (1971), Dying Inside (1972), Born With the Dead (1974), The Stochastic Man (1975), Lord Valentine’s Castle (1980) and The Secret Sharer (1989). Silverberg has written his own share of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic works. To Open the Sky (1967) is set in a claustrophobically overpopulated future, whilst At Winter’s End (1988) sees how humanity recovers after a new Ice Age.

NICK AND JANE WERE GLAD that they had gone to see the end of the world, because it gave them something special to talk about at Mike and Ruby’s party. One always likes to come to a party armed with a little conversation. Mike and Ruby give marvelous parties.

Their home is superb, one of the finest in the neighborhood. It is truly a home for all seasons, all moods. Their very special corner of the world. With more space indoors and out… more wide-open freedom. The living room with its exposed ceiling beams is a natural focal point for entertaining. Custom-finished, with a conversation pit and fireplace. There’s also a family room with beamed ceiling and wood paneling… plus a study. And a magnificent master suite with a twelve-foot dressing room and private bath. Solidly impressive exterior design. Sheltered courtyard. Beautifully wooded one-third of an acre grounds.

Their parties are highlights of any month. Nick and Jane waited until they thought enough people had arrived. Then Jane nudged Nick and Nick said gaily, “You know what we did last week? Hey, we went to see the end of the world!”

“The end of the world?” Henry asked.

“You went to see it?” said Henry’s wife Cynthia.

“How did you manage that?” Paula wanted to know.

“It’s been available since March,” Stan told her. “I think a division of American Express runs it.”

Nick was put out to discover that Stan already knew. Quickly, before Stan could say anything more, Nick said, “Yes, it’s just started. Our travel agent found out for us. What they do is they put you in this machine, it looks like a tiny teeny submarine, you know, with dials and levers up front behind a plastic wall to keep you from touching anything, and they send you into the future. You can charge it with any of the regular credit cards.”

“It must be very expensive,” Marcia said.

“They’re bringing the costs down rapidly,” Jane said. “Last year only millionaires could afford it. Really, haven’t you heard about it before?”

“What did you see?” Henry asked.

“For a while, just greyness outside the porthole,” said Nick. “And a kind of flickering effect.” Everybody was looking at him. He enjoyed the attention. Jane wore a rapt, loving expression. “Then the haze cleared and a voice said over a loudspeaker that we had now reached the very end of time, when life had become impossible on Earth. Of course, we were sealed into the submarine thing. Only looking out. On this beach, this empty beach. The water a funny grey color with a pink sheen. And then the sun came up. It was red like it sometimes is at sunrise, only it stayed red as it got to the middle of the sky, and it looked lumpy and saggy at the edges. Like a few of us, ha ha. Lumpy and sagging at the edges. A cold wind blowing across the beach.”

“If you were sealed in the submarine, how did you know there was a cold wind?” Cynthia asked.

Jane glared at her. Nick said, “We could see the sand blowing around. And it looked cold. The grey ocean. Like winter.”

“Tell them about the crab,” said Jane.

“Yes, the crab. The last life-form on Earth. It wasn’t really a crab, of course, it was something about two feet wide and a foot high, with thick shiny green armor and maybe a dozen legs and some curving horns coming up, and it moved slowly from right to left in front of us. It took all day to cross the beach. And toward nightfall it died. Its horns went limp and it stopped moving. The tide came in and carried it away. The sun went down. There wasn’t any moon. The stars didn’t seem to be in the right places. The loudspeaker told us we had just seen the death of Earth’s last living thing.”

“How eerie!” cried Paula.

“Were you gone very long?” Ruby asked.

“Three hours,” Jane said. “You can spend weeks or days at the end of the world, if you want to pay extra, but they always bring you back to a point three hours after you went. To hold down the babysitter expenses.”

Mike offered Nick some pot. “That’s really something,” he said. “To have gone to the end of the world. Hey, Ruby, maybe we’ll talk to the travel agent about it.”

Nick took a deep drag and passed the joint to Jane. He felt pleased with himself about the way he had told the story. They had all been very impressed. That swollen red sun, that scuttling crab. The trip had cost more than a month in Japan, but it had been a good investment. He and Jane were the first in the neighborhood who had gone. That was important. Paula was staring at him in awe. Nick knew that she regarded him in a completely different light now. Possibly she would meet him at a motel on Tuesday at lunchtime. Last month she had turned him down but now he had an extra attractiveness for her. Nick winked at her. Cynthia was holding hands with Stan. Henry and Mike both were crouched at Jane’s feet. Mike and Ruby’s twelve-year-old son came into the room and stood at the edge of the conversation pit. He said, “There just was a bulletin on the news. Mutated amoebas escaped from a government research station and got into Lake Michigan. They’re carrying a tissue-dissolving virus and everybody in seven states is supposed to boil their water until further notice.” Mike scowled at the boy and said, “It’s after your bedtime, Timmy.” The boy went out. The doorbell rang. Ruby answered it and returned with Eddie and Fran.

Paula said, “Nick and Jane went to see the end of the world. They’ve just been telling us about it.”

“Gee,” said Eddie, “We did that too, on Wednesday night.”

Nick was crestfallen. Jane bit her lip and asked Cynthia quietly why Fran always wore such flashy dresses. Ruby said, “You saw the whole works, eh? The crab and everything?”

“The crab?” Eddie said. “What crab? We didn’t see the crab.”

“It must have died the time before,” Paula said. “When Nick and Jane were there.”

Mike said, “A fresh shipment of Cuernavaca Lightning is in. Here, have a toke.”

“How long ago did you do it?” Eddie said to Nick.

“Sunday afternoon. I guess we were about the first.”

“Great trip, isn’t it?” Eddie said. “A little somber, though. When the last hill crumbles into the sea.”

“That’s not what we saw,” said Jane. “And you didn’t see the crab? Maybe we were on different trips.”

Mike said, “What was it like for you, Eddie?”

Eddie put his arms around Cynthia from behind. He said, “They put us into this little capsule, with a porthole, you know, and a lot of instruments and—”

“We heard that part,” said Paula. “What did you see?”

“The end of the world,” Eddie said. “When water covers everything. The sun and the moon were in the sky at the same time—”

“We didn’t see the moon at all,” Jane remarked. “It just wasn’t there.”

“It was on one side and the sun was on the other,” Eddie went on. “The moon was closer than it should have been. And a funny color, almost like bronze. And the ocean creeping up. We went halfway around the world and all we saw was ocean. Except in one place, there was this chunk of land sticking up, this hill, and the guide told us it was the top of Mount Everest.” He waved to Fran. “That was groovy, huh, floating in our tin boat next to the top of Mount Everest. Maybe ten feet of it sticking up. And the water rising all the time. Up, up, up. Up and over the top. Glub. No land left. I have to admit it was a little disappointing, except of course the idea of the thing. That human ingenuity can design a machine that can send people billions of years forward in time and bring them back, wow! But there was just this ocean.”

“How strange,” said Jane. “We saw the ocean too, but there was a beach, a kind of nasty beach, and the crab-thing walking along it, and the sun — it was all red, was the sun red when you saw it?”

“A kind of pale green,” Fran said.

“Are you people talking about the end of the world?” Tom asked. He and Harriet were standing by the door taking off their coats. Mike’s son must have let them in. Tom gave his coat to Ruby and said, “Man, what a spectacle!”

“So you did it, too?” Jane asked, a little hollowly.

“Two weeks ago,” said Tom. “The travel agent called and said, Guess what we’re offering now, the end of the goddamned world! With all the extras it didn’t really cost so much. So we went right down there to the office, Saturday, I think — was it a Friday? — the day of the big riot, anyway, when they burned St Louis—”

“That was a Saturday,” Cynthia said. “I remember I was coming back from the shopping center when the radio said they were using nuclears—”

“Saturday, yes,” Tom said. “And we told them we were ready to go, and off they sent us.”

“Did you see a beach with crabs,” Stan demanded, “or was it a world full of water?”

“Neither one. It was like a big ice age. Glaciers covered everything. No oceans showing, no mountains. We flew clear around the world and it was all a huge snowball. They had floodlights on the vehicle because the sun had gone out.”

“I was sure I could see the sun still hanging up there,” Harriet put in. “Like a ball of cinders in the sky. But the guide said no, nobody could see it.”

“How come everybody gets to visit a different kind of end of the world?” Henry asked. “You’d think there’d be only one kind of end of the world. I mean, it ends, and this is how it ends, and there can’t be more than one way.”

“Could it be fake?” Stan asked.

Everybody turned around and looked at him. Nick’s face got very red. Fran looked so mean that Eddie let go of Cynthia and started to rub Fran’s shoulders. Stan shrugged. “I’m not suggesting it is,” he said defensively. “I was just wondering.”

“Seemed pretty real to me,” said Tom. “The sun burned out. A big ball of ice. The atmosphere, you know, frozen. The end of the goddamned world.”

The telephone rang. Ruby went to answer it. Nick asked Paula about lunch on Tuesday. She said yes. “Let’s meet at the motel,” he said, and she grinned. Eddie was making out with Cynthia again. Henry looked very stoned and was having trouble staying awake. Phil and Isabel arrived. They heard Tom and Fran talking about their trips to the end of the world and Isabel said she and Phil had gone only the day before yesterday. “Goddamn,” Tom said, “everybody’s doing it! What was your trip like?”

Ruby came back into the room. “That was my sister calling from Fresno to say she’s safe. Fresno wasn’t hit by the earthquake at all.”

“Earthquake?” Paula asked.

“In California,” Mike told her. “This afternoon. You didn’t know? Wiped out most of Los Angeles and ran right up the coast practically to Monterey. They think it was on account of the underground bomb test in the Mohave Desert.”

“California’s always having such awful disasters,” Marcia said.

“Good thing those amoebas got loose back east,” said Nick. “Imagine how complicated it would be if they had them in LA now too.”

“They will,” Tom said. “Two to one they reproduce by airborne spores.”

“Like the typhoid germs last November,” Jane said.

“That was typhus,” Nick corrected.

“Anyway,” Phil said, “I was telling Tom and Fran about what we saw at the end of the world. It was the sun going nova. They showed it very cleverly, too. I mean, you can’t actually sit around and experience it, on account of the heat and the hard radiation and all. But they give it to you in a peripheral way, very elegant in the McLuhanesque sense of the word. First they take you to a point about two hours before the blowup, right? It’s I don’t know how many jillion years from now, but a long way, anyhow, because the trees are all different, they’ve got blue scales and ropy branches, and the animals are like things with one leg that jump on pogo sticks-”

“Oh, I don’t believe that,” Cynthia drawled.

Phil ignored her gracefully. “And we didn’t see any sign of human beings, not a house, not a telephone pole, nothing, so I suppose we must have been extinct a long time before. Anyway, they let us look at that for a while. Not getting out of our time machine, naturally, because they said the atmosphere was wrong. Gradually the sun started to puff up. We were nervous — weren’t we, Iz? — I mean, suppose they miscalculated things? This whole trip is a very new concept and things might go wrong. The sun was getting bigger and bigger, and then this thing like an arm seemed to pop out of its left side, a big fiery arm reaching out across space, getting closer and closer. We saw it through smoked glass, like you do an eclipse. They gave us about two minutes of the explosion, and we could feel it getting hot already. Then we jumped a couple of years forward in time. The sun was back to its regular shape, only it was smaller, sort of like a little white sun instead of a big yellow one. And on Earth everything was ashes.”

“Ashes,” Isabel said, with emphasis.

“It looked like Detroit after the union nuked Ford,” Phil said. “Only much, much worse. Whole mountains were melted. The oceans were dried up. Everything was ashes.” He shuddered and took a joint from Mike. “Isabel was crying.”

“The things with one leg,” Isabel said. “I mean, they must have all been wiped out.” She began to sob. Stan comforted her. “I wonder why it’s a different way for everyone who goes,” he said. “Freezing. Or the oceans. Or the sun blowing up. Or the thing Nick and Jane saw.”

“I’m convinced that each of us had a genuine experience in the far future,” said Nick. He felt he had to regain control of the group somehow. It had been so good when he was telling his story, before those others had come. “That is to say, the world suffers a variety of natural calamities, it doesn’t just have one end of the world, and they keep mixing things up and sending people to different catastrophes. But never for a moment did I doubt that I was seeing an authentic event.”

“We have to do it,” Ruby said to Mike. “It’s only three hours. What about calling them first thing Monday and making an appointment for Thursday night?”

“Monday’s the President’s funeral,” Tom pointed out. “The travel agency will be closed.”

“Have they caught the assassin yet?” Fran asked.

“They didn’t mention it on the four o’clock news,” said Stan. “I guess he’ll get away like the last one.”

“Beats me why anybody wants to be President,” Phil said.

Mike put on some music. Nick danced with Paula. Eddie danced with Cynthia. Henry was asleep. Dave, Paula’s husband, was on crutches because of his mugging, and he asked Isabel to sit and talk with him. Tom danced with Harriet even though he was married to her. She hadn’t been out of the hospital more than a few months since the transplant and he treated her extremely tenderly. Mike danced with Fran. Phil danced with Jane. Stan danced with Marcia. Ruby cut in on Eddie and Cynthia. Afterward Tom danced with Jane and Phil danced with Paula. Mike and Ruby’s little girl woke up and came out to say hello. Mike sent her back to bed. Far away there was the sound of an explosion. Nick danced with Paula again, but he didn’t want her to get bored with him before Tuesday, so he excused himself and went to talk with Dave. Dave handled most of Nick’s investments. Ruby said to Mike, “The day after the funeral, will you call the travel agent?” Mike said he would, but Tom said somebody would probably shoot the new President too and there’d be another funeral. These funerals were demolishing the gross national product, Stan observed, on account of how everything had to close all the time. Nick saw Cynthia wake Henry up and ask him sharply if he would take her on the end-of-the-world trip. Henry looked embarrassed. His factory had been blown up at Christmas in a peace demonstration and everybody knew he was in bad shape financially. “You can charge it,” Cynthia said, her fierce voice carrying above the chitchat. “And it’s so beautiful, Henry. The ice. Or the sun exploding. I want to go.”

“Lou and Janet were going to be here tonight, too,” Ruby said to Paula. “But their younger boy came back from Texas with that new kind of cholera and they had to cancel.”

Phil said, “I understand that one couple saw the moon come apart. It got too close to the Earth and split into chunks and the chunks fell like meteors. Smashing everything up, you know. One big piece nearly hit their time machine.”

“I wouldn’t have liked that at all,” Marcia said.

“Our trip was very lovely,” said Jane. “No violent things at all. Just the big red sun and the tide and that crab creeping along the beach. We were both deeply moved.”

“It’s amazing what science can accomplish nowadays,” Fran said.

Mike and Ruby agreed they would try to arrange a trip to the end of the world as soon as the funeral was over. Cynthia drank too much and got sick. Phil, Tom, and Dave discussed the stock market. Harriet told Nick about her operation. Isabel flirted with Mike, tugging her neckline lower. At midnight someone turned on the news. They had some shots of the earthquake and a warning about boiling your water if you lived in the affected states. The President’s widow was shown visiting the last President’s widow to get some pointers for the funeral. Then there was an interview with an executive of the time-trip company. “Business is phenomenal,” he said. “Time-tripping will be the nation’s number one growth industry next year.” The reporter asked him if his company would soon be offering something besides the end-of-the-world trip. “Later on, we hope to,” the executive said. “We plan to apply for Congressional approval soon. But meanwhile the demand for our present offering is running very high. You can’t imagine. Of course, you have to expect apocalyptic stuff to attain immense popularity in times like these.” The reporter said, “What do you mean, times like these?” but as the time-trip man started to reply, he was interrupted by the commercial. Mike shut off the set. Nick discovered that he was extremely depressed. He decided that it was because so many of his friends had made the journey, and he had thought he and Jane were the only ones who had. He found himself standing next to Marcia and tried to describe the way the crab had moved, but Marcia only shrugged. No one was talking about time-trips now. The party had moved beyond that point. Nick and Jane left quite early and went right to sleep, without making love. The next morning the Sunday paper wasn’t delivered because of the Bridge Authority strike, and the radio said that the mutant amoebas were proving harder to eradicate than originally anticipated. They were spreading into Lake Superior and everyone in the region would have to boil all their drinking water. Nick and Jane discussed where they would go for their next vacation. “What about going to see the end of the world all over again?” Jane suggested, and Nick laughed quite a good deal.

THE END OF THE WORLD Sushma Joshi

There are constant predictions of the imminent end of the world. Rather like the boy who cried wolf people don’t take much notice of them anymore, which may one day prove unfortunate. In the following story we see one such effect upon a group of people of a threatened apocalypse.

Sushma Joshi is a writer, publisher and occasional filmmaker from Nepal. She co-edited New Nepal, New Voices (2008), an anthology of short stories from Nepal, whilst Art Matters (2008) is a collection of her magazine reviews about contemporary art in Nepal. The following story, which first appeared on the internet in 2002, formed the basis for her first collection of short stories, End of the World (2008).

One day, everybody was talking about it. It had even been printed in the newspapers. A great and learned sadhu had prophesied a conflagration, a natural disaster of such proportions that more than half of the world’s population would be killed. Dil was on his way to work at the construction site when he stopped briefly to listen to a man propounding the benefits of a herb against impotence. Then he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, long lines of goats converging on to the green. “What’s going on?” he asked. And the people told him: “Everybody’s buying meat so they can have one last good meal before they die.”

Dil, following this precedent of preparing for the end of the world, went into the shop and bought a kilogram of goat meat. On his way back home, he stopped at Gopal Bhakta’s shop, where all the men saw the blood-soaked newsprint packet he was carrying in his hand. “So what’s the big event, Dai? Are you celebrating Dashain early this year?” they joked. So he told them how goats were being sold in record numbers, and how the butchers were doing a roaring business down in Tudikhel. The men, seizing on this opportunity for celebration, all decided to buy some meat for their last meal.

Sanukancha, who owned a milk-shop down the lane, said that his entire extended family of 116 people was planning to stay home that day so that they could be together when the seven suns rose the next morning and burnt up the Earth. Bikash, who had transformed from an awara loafer to a serious young teacher since he got a job at the Disney English School, said that so many children had come in asking to be excused that day that the schools had declared a de facto national holiday. Gopal Bhakta said that his sister, who worked in the airport, had told him that the seats of Royal Nepal Airlines were all taken with people hoping to escape the day of destruction.

Dil showed up that night at his house with a kilo of meat wrapped in sal leaves. He handed it to Kanchi without a word.

“Meat! We don’t have a kernel of rice, not a drop of oil, not a pinch of turmeric in the house. And you come back with a kilo of meat! We could have eaten for a week with that money.” Kanchi was exasperated.

“Shut up, whore, and eat,” said Dil. “You might be dead tomorrow, so you might as well enjoy this meat while you have it.”

“How am I going to cook it? With body heat?” demanded Kanchi. There was no kerosene in the house. Dil stretched out on the bed, his body still covered with the grey and red dust of cement and newly fired brick from his day of labor at the construction site. He stretched out and stared at the ceiling, as was his habit after work. When he did not reply, Kanchi asked: “And what is this great occasion?”

He contemplated the water stains on the wooden beams for a while, and then answered: “It’s the end of the world.”

So that’s how she learnt that a great star with a long tail was going to crash against Jupiter, and shatter the Earth into little fragments. It was true this time because even the TV had announced it. It was not just a rumor. There were also some reports, unverified by radio or television, that several — the numbers varied, some said it was seven, others 32,000 — suns would rise after this event.

Kanchi was just about to go and get some rice from Gopal Bhakta, the shopkeeper who knew her well and let her buy food on credit, when her son arrived, carrying a polythene bag with oranges. “Oranges!” She swiped at the boy, who scrambled nimbly out of her reach. “You’re crazy, you father and son. We have no rice in the house and you go and buy oranges. Don’t you have any brains in your head!”

But the husband said nothing, and the son said nothing, and since it is useless to keep screaming at people who say nothing, Kanchi left, cursing their stupidity. “May the world really end, so I won’t have to worry about having to feed idiots like you again.”

So that night they had meat, alternately burnt and uncooked in parts where the children had roasted it, and perfectly done pieces which Kanchi had stuck long sticks through and cooked over hot coals. Then Kanchi, reflecting that the end of the world did not come too often, had gone over and picked some green chilies and coriander from the field next door to garnish the meat.

Afterwards they had the oranges, one for each of them. They were large, the peels coming off easily and scenting the room with their oil. Inside, they were ripe and juicy, with a taste that they never got in the scrawny sour oranges that grew back in the villages. After they had eaten, Dil said as an afterthought, “Now make sure the children don’t go out tomorrow, whatever you do.”

Later, Kanchi forgot her annoyance as their next door neighbors came over, bringing their madal drum and their three guests who were visiting from the village. They sang the songs that were so familiar, and yet had begun to seem so strange nowadays: songs about planting rice and cutting grass in the forest, a life that, to the children, was as unknown and faraway as the stories that they heard from the priests during a reading of the holy scriptures of the Purans. Then her son got up and started dancing, and they were all cheering when the landlady popped her head round the door and demanded: “What’s all this noise? What’s going on here? It sounds like the end of the world!”

Kanchi dressed carefully for the eventful day. She had on her regular cotton sari, but wrapped over it was the fluffy, baby blue cashmere shawl that Jennifer had brought for her from America. Jennifer, who was long, lugubrious and eternally disgusted with Nepal, worked for some development office, where she made women take injections and told them to save money in banks. She was fond of telling Kanchi that Nepalis were incapable of understanding what was good for them. She would have been proud to see Kanchi putting the blue shawl to such good use on such a momentous day.

Kanchi worked for Jennifer when she was in town. She cooked her rice and vegetables with no spices, and cut the huge red peppers that Jennifer liked to eat raw while she stood in front of her television in shiny, tight clothes and did her odd dances. Janefonda, Janefonda, she would yell at Kanchi, hopping up and down like a demented, electric green cricket as she munched on the huge peppers. She was not very forthcoming with presents, but once every winter she gave Kanchi a piece of clothing.

“Why the shawl on this hot day?” inquired Mitthu. She was the old cook of the Sharmas’ at whose house Kanchi went to wash the clothes every morning to supplement her uncertain income.

“Haven’t you heard?” Kanchi said to her. “Everybody is talking about it. Today is the end of the world. A big sadhu prophesied it. I won’t have my husband by me, or my son. At least I can have my shawl.”

“What nonsense,” retorted Mitthu. She was a religious woman, with a tendency to be skeptical of people and events that she had not heard of.

“Well, what if it happens?” Kanchi demanded, and Mitthu replied, just as firmly: “No, it won’t.”

“Let’s eat rice now, Didi,” Kanchi said anxiously, as the sky began to darken for a light rain. The end of the world was supposed to happen at 11 a.m., and Kanchi wanted to deal with the event on a full stomach. “We might be hungry later.”

“Is this for your body or your soul?” asked Mitthu as she ladled some rice on to a plate for Kanchi. She had an acerbic tongue.

“A soul will fly away like a small bird. It’ll fly away when it becomes hungry and go and steal from some other people’s homes. It’s my stomach that will kill me.”

“And is your shawl to keep you warm in heaven or hell?” Mitthu inquired as she dropped a pinch of spicy tomato acchar on to the rice.

“I won’t need this shawl in heaven or hell. This is if I survive and there is nobody else on this earth but me. At least I will have my shawl to keep me warm.”

Mitthu, even though she would not acknowledge it, recognized this admirable foresight and common sense. “Humph,” she said, turning away to steal a glance at the sun, which did look rather bright. She wondered if she should run in and get a shawl as well, just in case, then decided her pride was more important.

A rumble of thunder rolled across the clear blue sky, and Kanchi stood up in a panic. “What a darcheruwa I am, I have no guts,” she scolded herself.

“Eat, Kanchi,” said Mitthu, rattling the rice ladle over the pot, annoyed at her own fright.

“I saw Shanta Bajai storming off to the office this morning. She said she would go to the office even if nobody else came, and she would die in her chair if she had to.”

“So why is the world going to end?” asks Mitthu cautiously. She did not believe it was going to happen. At the same time, she was curious.

“It’s all because of Girija,” explained Kanchi. “It all started happening ever since he became the Prime Minister. Ever since he started going off to America day after day. I heard he fainted and fell on the ground, and the king of America gave him money for medicine. So this destruction is happening since he returned. Maybe the American king gave him money and he sold Nepal, maybe that’s why. And now maybe the Communists will take over.”

“You know, Kanchi, I almost became a Communist when I was in the village. It sounded good. We would all have to live together, and work together, and there would be no divisions between big or small. Then we could kill all the rich people and there would be peace.”

“And what about eating?” asks Kanchi. “You would also have to eat together, out of the same plate, with everybody else. How would that suit you, you Bahuni? You who won’t even eat your food if you suspect somebody has looked at it?” Mitthu, who was a fastidious Brahmin and refused to let people who she suspected of eating buffalo meat into her kitchen, realized she had overlooked this point.

“And then they make you work until you drop dead,” said Kanchi. “Don’t tell me I didn’t think about it. I would rather live like this, where at least I can have my son by me at night. I heard the Communists take away your children and make you work in different places. And then they give you work that you cannot fulfill, and if you do not do it, they kill you — dongl — with one bullet. What’s the point of living then?”

“Well…” Mitthu does not want to give up her sympathies so easily. Besides, her husband had died when she was nine. As a lifelong child widow she had no reason to worry about being separated from her children. “Well, we’ll see it when it happens, won’t we?”

“Like the end of the world,” said Kanchi, checking out the sky. “I heard that they have taken the big Sadhu who predicted the end of the world and put him in the jail in Hanuman Dhoka. He has said that they can hang him if it doesn’t happen. Then some people say that he was performing a Shanti Horn and the fire rose so high he was burnt and had to be taken to the hospital. Who can tell what will happen?”

Eleven a.m. There is a sudden shocked silence. The whole world stands still, for once, in anticipation. Then a sudden cacophony shatters the midmorning silence: cows moo tormentedly, dogs howl long and despondently, and people scream all over the marketplace tole.

The sky is flat gunmetal grey. The sun shines brightly.

A collective sigh of relief wafts over the Valley of Kathmandu after the end of the world comes to an end.

THE CLOCKWORK ATOM BOMB Dominic Green

The world may be under threat or on the brink of destruction at any moment from some cosmic or human catastrophe, and who knows how many times this may have happened in the past or the present.

You won’t find any published books by Dominic Green yet, though there are a handful of novels available at his website: http://homepage. ntlworld.com/lumfulomax/

He has been producing a stream of short fiction since 1996, mostly for the magazine Interzone, and the following story was shortlisted for the prestigious Hugo Award in 2006. He used to work in IT. He reveals the following about himself: “I was brought up in the North of England till the age of eight, and in the South of England till the age of eighteen. This has made me culturally amphibious, able to eat both black pudding and jellied eels. I also went to an English public school and Cambridge University, which has prepared me well for unemployment. I can strongly recommend it to anyone wanting to combine the thrill of standing in a dole queue with the added frisson of being thousands of pounds in debt. I write science fiction, you know.”

OVER HERE, MISTER. This is the place.” The girl tugged Mativi’s sleeve and led him down a street that was mostly poorly-patched shell holes. Delayed Action Munitions — the size of thumbnails and able to turn a man into fragments of the same dimensions -littered the ground hereabouts, designed to lie dormant for generations. Construction companies used robot tractors to fill in bomb damage, and the robots did a poor job. Granted, they were getting better — Robocongo was one of equatorial Africa’s biggest exporters. But usually the whites and the blacks-with-cash sat in control rooms a kilometre away directing robots to build the houses of the poor, and the poor then had to live in those houses not knowing whether, if they put their foot down hard on a tough domestic issue, they might also be putting it down on a DAM bomblet a metre beneath their foundations.

This street, though, hadn’t even been repaired. It was all sloped concrete, blast rubble and wrecked signs telling outsiders to KEEP OUT THIS GOVERNMENT BUILDING! FIELD CLERICAL STORES! IMPORTANT GOVERNMENT WORK HERE YOU GO BACK!

“Come on, mister,” said the pha-seuse. “You will see, and then you will have no problem paying.”

“You stand still,” commanded Mativi suddenly. “Stand right there.”

Nervously, he reached into a pocket and brought out the Noli Timere. It only worked fifty per cent of the time, based on information gathered from scientist-collaborators from all factions in the war, but fifty per cent was better than zip.

He turned the device on, on low power in case any of the more recent devices that smelled mine detector power-up were present, and swept it left and right. Nothing. He flicked it up to full power and swept again. A small stray air-dropped antipersonnel device at the north-west end of the street, but otherwise nothing.

“You see that house over there, Emily?” he said, pointing across the road. The girl nodded. “Well, you’re not to go in there. There is an explosive device in there. A big one. It’ll kill you.”

Emily shook her head firmly. “It isn’t nearly as big as the one that took Claude.”

Mativi nodded. “But you say that device is still there.”

“Has been since I was very little.

Everyone knows it’s there. The grown-ups know it’s there. They used it when the slim hit, to get rid of the bodies, so we wouldn’t get sick. Sometimes,” she said, “before the bodies were entirely dead.”

“You can’t get slim from a dead body,” said Mativi.

“That’s what you say,” said Emily. And he knew she was right. So many generously altered genomes had been flying around Africa in warheads fifteen years ago that someone could have altered HIV and turned it into an airborne, rather than blood-borne, virus — like the rickettsial haemorrhagic fever that had wiped out all of Johannesburg’s blood banks in a single day and made social pariahs of blacks all over Europe and America overnight.

The sun dropped below the horizon like a guillotine blade, and it was suddenly night, as if someone had flicked a switch in heaven. Mativi had become too used to life off the Equator, had been working on the basis that night would steal up slowly as it had in Quebec and Patagonia. But the busy equatorial night had no time for twilight. He hadn’t brought night vision goggles. Had he brought a torch?

As they walked up the street, a wind gathered, as if the landscape sensed his unease.

“You have to be careful,” said the girl, “tread only where I tread. And you have to bend down.” She nodded at Mativi’s Kinshasa Rolex. “You have to leave your watch outside.”

Why? So one of your bacheque boyfriends can steal it while I’m in there? To satisfy the girl’s insistence, he slid the watch off his wrist and set it on a brick, but picked it up again when she wasn’t looking and dropped it into his pocket.

“Where are we going?” he said.

“In there,” she pointed. Half-buried in the rubble was a concrete lintel, one end of a substantial buried structure, through which the wind was whistling.

No. Correction. Out of which the wind was whistling.

She slipped under the lintel, on which was fixed a sign saying WARNING! EXTREME PERSONAL DANGER! The room beyond had once had skylights. Now, it had ruined holes in the roof, into which the geostationary UNPEFORCONG security moon poured prisms of reflected sunlight. Thirty-five thousand, nine hundred kilometres above Mativi’s head, he and five million other Kinshasans were being watched with 5,000 cameras. This had at first seemed an outrageous intrusion on his privacy, until he’d realized that he’d have to commit a thousand murders before any of the cameras was likely to catch him in the act.

“Don’t step any closer,” said the girl. “It will take you.”

The entrance had promised an interior like any other minor military strongpoint — only just large enough to contain a couple of hammocks and a machine gun, maybe. But inside, after only a few steps down, the room was huge, the size of a factory floor. They had entered via an engineer’s inspection catwalk close to the roof. He was not sure how far down the floor was.

The wind in here was deafening. The girl had to shout. “THERE IS MORE THAN ONE IN HERE. THEY LIVE IN THE MACHINES. THE GOVERNMENT MADE THE MACHINES, BUT NOT WITH TECHNICIANS AND ELECTRICIANS. WITH SORCERY.”

The machines did not look made by sorcery. They were entirely silent, looking like rows of gigantic, rusted steel chess pawns twice the height of a man, with no pipes or wires entering or leaving them, apparently sitting here unused for any purpose. Mativi felt an urgent, entirely rational need to be in another line of employment.

“HAVE YOU ANY IDEA WHAT THE MACHINES WERE BUILT FOR?” said Mativi, who had.

The girl nodded. “THE DEMONS ARE IN THE MACHINES,” she said. “THE MACHINES WERE BUILT AS CAGES. THE MILITARY MEN WHO MADE THIS PLACE WARNED ALL THE MOST IMPORTANT MEN IN OUR DISTRICT OF THIS. THEY WARNED MY FATHER. THEY TOLD HIM NEVER TO BREAK ANY OF THE MACHINES OPEN. BUT OVER TIME, THEY LEAK, AND THE DEMONS CAN GET OUT. THE FIRST TWO MACHINES ARE SAFE, FOR NOW. BUT YOU MUST BE CAREFUL, BECAUSE WE THOUGHT THE THIRD ONE WAS SAFE TOO, AND IT TOOK CLAUDE.”

“WHAT DID IT DO TO CLAUDE, WHEN IT TOOK HIM?” said Mativi. He could not see any damage to the walls around the third machine beyond, perhaps, a certain swept-clean quality of the dust on the floor around it.

“IT TOOK HIM,” said the girl. “IT MADE HIM SMALL. IT SUCKED HIM UP.”

“THE MACHINES,” said Mativi in broken Lingala. “THEY ARE COVERED WITH… WITH THINGS.”

The heads of the chess-pawns, under the light of Mativi’s torch, were surrealistically coiffeured with assorted objects — spanners, wire, door furniture, and, worryingly, a single fragmentation grenade. Many, perhaps more than half of the things were ferrous metal. But some looked like aluminium. Some were even bits of wood or plaster.

Not just magnetism, then.

He fished the fake Rolex out of his pocket, waved it in the direction of the machines, and felt a strong tug on it as he held it in his hand. But he also felt a strong tug on the sleeve of his shirt, and on his arm itself.

He realized with growing unease that the wind was not blowing out of the chamber, but into it, pushing him from behind. It also appeared to be blowing in through the skylights in the roof above.

It did not seem to be blowing out anywhere.

The girl gasped. “YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE DONE THAT! NOW YOUR WATCH WILL NOT KEEP GOOD TIME.”

“IS THAT HOW THE MACHINE SUCKED CLAUDE UP?”

“NO. ALL THE MACHINES DRAW THINGS IN, BUT YOU CAN PULL YOURSELF LOOSE FROM MOST OF THEM. BUT THE ONES THE DEMONS LIVE IN WILL SUCK YOU RIGHT INSIDE WHERE THE DEMON LIVES, AND NOT LEAVE A HAIR BEHIND.”

“WHOLE PEOPLE?”

“PEOPLE, METAL, ANYTHING.”

“STONES?” Mativi picked up a fragment of loose plaster from the floor.

“YES. BUT YOU SHOULD NOT THROW THINGS.”

He threw it. The girl winced. He saw the plaster travel halfway across the floor until it passed the second machine. Then it jerked sideways in mid-air, as if attached to invisible strings, puffed into a long cone of powder, and vanished.

The girl was angry. “YOU MUST DO WHAT I SAY! THE MILITARY MEN SAID WE SHOULD NOT THROW THINGS INTO THE BAD MACHINES. THEY SAID IT MADE THE DEMONS STRONGER.”

“YES,” said Mativi. “AND THEY WERE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. NOT MUCH STRONGER, BUT IF ENOUGH PEOPLE THREW IN ENOUGH UNCHARGED MATERIAL OVER ENOUGH TIME…”

“I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN BY UNCHARGED MATERIAL.”

“DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I MEAN BY ‘EVERYONE WOULD DIE’?”

The girl nodded. “WE SHOULD NOT STAY TOO LONG IN HERE. PEOPLE WHO STAY TOO LONG IN HERE GET SICK. THE DEMONS MAKE THEM SICK.”

Mativi nodded. “AND I SUPPOSE THIS SICKNESS TAKES THE FORM OF HAIR LOSS, SHORTNESS OF BREATH, EXTREME PALENESS OF THE SKIN?”

“YES,” said the girl. “THE VICTIMS DISPLAY THE CLASSIC SYMPTOMS OF RADIATION ALOPOECIA AND STEM CELL DEATH.”

Well, III be damned. But after all, she has lived through a nuclear war. She’s been living among radiation victims her entire life. Probably taught herself to read using Red Cross posters.

“WELL, THE SAME DEMONS THAT WERE USED IN THE RADIA-

TION BOMBS ARE IN HERE. SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT, BECAUSE THESE ARE A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT WEAPON. BUT THE SAME DEMONS.”

The girl nodded. “BUT THESE ARE NOT RADIATION BOMBS,” she said. “THIS MEANS YOU HAVE TO PAY ME DOUBLE.” She held out her hand.

Mativi nodded. “THIS MEANS I HAVE TO PAY YOU DOUBLE.” He fished in his wallet for a fistful of United Nations scrip.

After all, why shouldn’t I pay you. None of this money is going to be worth anything if these things destroy the world tomorrow.

“I’m telling you, there are at least forty of them. I counted them. Five rows by eight.”

“I didn’t go to the hotel because I didn’t want to call you in the clear. We have to be the only people who know about this.”

“Because if anyone wanders into that site, anyone at all, and does anything they shouldn’t, we will all die. I’m not saying they, I’m saying we, and I’m not saying might die, I’m saying will die.”

“Yes, this is a Heavy Weapons alert.”

“No, I can’t tell you what that means.”

“All I can tell you is that you must comply with the alert to the letter if you’re interested in handing on the planet to your children.”

“Your children will grow out of that, that hating their father thing. All teenagers go through that phase. And credit where credit’s due, you really shouldn’t have slept with their mother’s sister in the first place.”

“No, I do not want ‘an inspection team’. I want troops. Armed troops with a mandate to shoot to kill, not a detachment of graduates in Peace Studies from Liechtenstein in a white APC. And when I put the phone down on you, I want to know that you’re going to be picking up your phone again and dialling the IAEA. I am serious about this, Louis.”

“All right. All right. I’ll see you at the site tomorrow.”

When he laid the handset down, he was trembling. In a day when there were over a hundred permanent websites on the Antarctic ice shelf, it had taken him five hours to find a digital phone line in a city of five million people. Which, to be fair, fifteen years ago, had been a city of ten million people.

Of course, his search for a phone line compatible with his encryption software would probably be for nothing. If there were this few digital lines in the city, there was probably a retro-tech transistor microphone planted somewhere in the booth he was sitting in, feeding data back to a mainframe at police headquarters. But at least that meant the police would be the only ones who knew. If he’d gone through the baroque network of emergency analogue lines, every housewife in the cite would have known by morning.

He got up from the booth, walked to the desk, and paid the geek — the geek with a submachinegun — who was manning it. There was no secret police car waiting outside — the car would have been unmarked but extremely obvious due to the fact that no one but the government could afford to travel around in cars. The Congolese sun came up like a jack-in-a-box and it was a short walk through the zero tolerance district back to his hotel, which had once been a Hilton. He fell into the mattress, which bludgeoned him compliantly unconscious.

When he opened his hotel room door in the morning to go to the one functioning bathroom, a man was standing outside with a gun.

Neither the man nor the gun was particularly impressive — the gun because it appeared to be a pre-War cased ammunition model that hadn’t been cleaned since the Armistice, and the man because his hand was shaking like a masturbator’s just before orgasm, and because Mativi knew him to be a paterfamilias with three kids in kindergarten and a passion for N gauge model railways.

However, the gun still fired big, horrid bullets that made holes in stuff, and it was pointing at Mativi.

“I’m sorry, Chet, I can’t let you do it.” The safety catch, Mativi noted, was off.

“Do what?” said Mativi.

“You’re taking away my livelihood. You know you are.”

“I’m sorry, Jean, I don’t understand any of this. Maybe you should explain a little more?” Jean-Baptiste Ngoyi, an unremarkable functionary in the United Nations Temporary Administration Service (Former People’s Democratic Republic of Congo), appeared to have put on his very best work clothes to murder Mativi. The blue UNTASFOR-DEMRECONG logo was embroidered smartly (and widely) on his chest pocket.

“I can’t let you take them away.” There were actually tears in the little man’s eyes.

“Take what away?”

“You know what. Everybody knows. They heard you talking to Grosjean.”

Mativi’s eyes popped. “No. Ohhh shit. No.” He leaned back against crumbling postmodernist plasterwork. “Jean, don’t take this personally, but if someone as far down the food chain as you knows, everyone in the city with an e-mail address and a heartbeat knows.” He looked up at Ngoyi. “There was a microphone in the comms booth, right?”

“No, the geek who mans the desk is President Lissouba’s police chief s half-brother. The police are full of Lissouba men who were exonerated by the General Amnesty after the Armistice.”

“Shit. Shit. What are they doing, now they know?”

“‘Emergency measures are being put in place to contain the problem’. That’s all they’d say. Oh, and there are already orders out for your arrest For Your Own Safety. But they didn’t know which hotel you were staying in. One of them was trying to find out when he rang me.”

Mativi walked in aimless circles, holding his head to stop his thoughts from wandering. “I’ll bet he was. God, god. And you didn’t tell them where I was. Does that mean you’re, um, not particularly serious about killing me?” He stared at Ngoyi ingratiatingly. But the gun didn’t waver — at least, not any more than it had been wavering already. Never mind. It had been worth a try.

“It means I couldn’t take the chance that they really did want you arrested for your own safety,” said Ngoyi. “If a UN Weapons Inspector died in Kinshasa, that would throw the hand grenade well and truly in the muck spreader for the police chiefs, after all.”

“I take it some of them are the men who originally installed the containers. If so, they know very well full amnesties are available for war crimes —”

Ngoyi shook his head. “Not for crimes committed after the war.”

Mativi was alarmed. “After?”

“They’ve been using the machines as execution devices,” said Ngoyi. “No mess, no body, no incriminating evidence. And they work, too. The bacheques are terrified of them, will do anything to avoid being killed that way. They think they’re the homes of demons.”

“They’re not far wrong,” muttered Mativi.

“— and then there are the undertakers,” continued Ngoyi. “They’ve been using the machines for mass burials. Otherwise the bodies would just have piled up in the streets in the epidemics. And the domestic waste trucks, about five of them stop there several times a week and dump stuff in through the skylights. And my own trucks —” “Your own trucks?” “Yes. Three times a week, sometimes four or five.” Ngoyi returned Mativi’s accusing stare. “Oh, sure, the UN gives us geiger counters and that bacterial foam that fixes fallout, and the special vehicles for sucking up the fixed material and casting it into lead glass bricks —”

“Which you’re supposed to then arrange for disposal by the IAEA by burial underground in the Devil’s Brickyard in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica,” finished Mativi. “Only you haven’t been doing that, have you? You thought you’d cut a few corners.”

“The UN gives us a budget of only five million a year!” complained Ngoyi. “And by the time that reaches us, it has, by the magic of African mathematics, become half a million. Have you any idea what it costs to ship a single kilo of hazardous waste to Antarctica?”

“That’s what you’re supposed to do,” repeated Mativi, staring up the barrel of the gun, which somehow did not matter quite so much now.

“We were talking astrophysics in the Bar B Doll only the other night. You told me then that once something crosses the Event Horizon, it never comes out!” said the civil servant, mortified. “You promised!”

“That’s absolutely correct,” said Mativi. “Absolutely, totally and utterly correct.”

“Then,” said Ngoyi, his face brightening insanely, “then there is no problem. We can throw as much stuff in as we want to.”

“Each one of those containers,” said Mativi, “is designed to hold a magnetically charged object that weighs more than ten battleships. Hence the reinforced concrete floor, hence the magnetized metal casing that attracts every bit of ferrous metal in the room. Now, what do you think is going to happen if you keep piling in extra uncharged mass? Nothing that crosses the Event Horizon comes out, Jean. Nothing. Ever. Including you, including me, including Makemba and Kimbareta and little Laurent.”

Ngoyi’s face fell. Then, momentarily, it rose again.

“But our stuff is only a few hundred kilos a week,” he began. “Much less than what the domestic waste people put in.”

“I feel better already. You’re not going to be personally responsible for getting the whole planet sucked into oblivion, it’s going to be some other guy-”

“The sewage outlet, mind you,” continued Mativi. “That must be pumping in a good thousand litres a day.”

Mativi’s jaw dropped.

“Sewage outlet?”

“Sure. The sanitation guys rerouted the main waste pipe for the city as a temporary measure. They have to keep replacing the last few metres — the machine keeps eating the pipe.” Ngoyi shrugged. “How else do you think they keep five million people’s shit out of the drinking water?”

“Jean-Baptiste, you people have to stop this. You have to stop it now. You have absolutely no idea what you’re doing.”

The gun was still pointing at the centre of Mativi’s chest; now, just for a moment, it stopped wavering and hit dead centre.

“I know exactly what I’m doing. I am making sure I can feed my wife and children.”

The finger coiled round the trigger, slowed down as if falling down gravity slopes. Mativi winced.

The gun clunked and did nothing.

Ngoyi stared at his uncooperative weapon tearfully.

“I must warn you,” lied Mativi, “that I led my university karate team.”

“You should leave,” said Ngoyi. “I think I recognized the municipal sanitation inspector’s car following the bus I took down here. He had a rocket-propelled grenade launcher on his parcel shelf.”

The road surface rose and fell under the Hyundai like a brown ocean swell, testing its suspension to the limit. Mativi heard things grounding that probably ought not to.

“Can I drop you off anywhere?” He braked gently as the traffic hit the blast craters around the freeway/railway junction, which had been a prime military target. Robot repair units were still working on it, and their operators did not pay much attention to cars that weighed one tenth what a mine clearance tractor did. The streetlights seemed to be out on this stretch of road, and the only illumination came from car headlights bouncing up and down like disco strobes. The robot tractors did not need visible light to see.

“The stadium will do fine. I can catch a bus out to Ndjili from there.”

“You live that far out of town?”

“We don’t all live on Geneva salaries, you know.” Ngoyi’s face blanched suddenly as he stared into the evening traffic. “Stop the car! Handbrake turn! Handbrake turn!”

Mativi stared into the traffic. “Why?”

“Four secret police cars, dead ahead!”

It was true, and Mativi cursed himself for not having seen it. The SUVs stood out like aluminium islands in the sea of polyurea AfriCars. Each one of them would have cost ten times an ordinary Kinshasan’s annual salary.

“It’s not a roadblock,” said Mativi.

“So I should care? They’re out looking for you!”

“…looks like an escort. They’re not even coming down this road. They’re turning on to the freeway to Djelo-

Binza. They’re escorting that big, heavy launch tractor… one of the ones designed to carry clutches of heavy ballistic missiles out to the pads at Malebo.” He peered out of the driver-side window. “The one whose suspension is scraping the ground —”

He did a handbrake turn and left the road in the direction of Djelo-Binza. The suspension hardly noticed the difference. The only reason people drove on roads any more in Kinshasa was because the road was slightly more likely to have been checked for explosives.

There was only desultory hooting when he rejoined the road. Leaving the road and rejoining it after a four-wheel-drive shortcut was common. The four-by-fours were clearly visible now, crammed with whatever men the police chiefs had been able to get their hands on at short notice — some in military uniform, some in T-shirts, some with government-issue sidearms, some with war-era AKM’s, yawning, pulled out of bed in the early hours.

The crawler was taking up three lanes of traffic, drawing a horde of honking AfriCars behind it like a bridal train. Despite the horns, the crawler was probably not moving much slower than the cars would have done — the expressway was still a mass of blast craters.

“I can’t believe this,” said Mativi, hugely affronted. “How can they think they can haul a million-tonne object across town without me noticing?”

Ngoyi stared. “You think that thing’s got — things on it?”

Mativi nodded. “One of the things is on board — one of the containers. They’re taking it across town because they can’t bear to lose it… I wonder why.” He winked at Ngoyi. “Maybe they’re in the pay of the office of sanitation?” The car plunged into yet another black void unilluminated by its headlights. “JESUS, I wish those streetlights were working.” He blinked as the car bonnet surged up again into the light.

Then he realized. Not only were there no streetlights, there were also no lights in the city around the road.

“That’s it, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“They’re going to the power company. You dumb fucks have been plugging power into it as well. Haven’t you?”

Ngoyi hesitated, then gave up the game and nodded. “It started out as a theoretical weapons project in the last days of the war. But,” he insisted defiantly, “it was a peaceful use we put it to! One of our office juniors, a very clever young man, a PhD from CalTech, suggested that if we aimed an infra-red laser beam at the event horizon at a certain angle, it would come out as a gamma-ray beam, which we used to heat a tank of mercury… we tried water first, but it flash evaporated and fused the rock around the tank to glass.” He licked his lips nervously. “The hardest part was designing a turbine system that would work with evaporating mercury. We lost a lot of men to heavy metal poisoning…”

Realization dawned on Mativi. “You were one of the researchers in Lissouba’s government.”

“You think I could have got away with living in the old People’s Democratic Republic with a physics degree without being a weapons researcher?”

Ngoyi laughed hollowly. “Dream on, brother. But this is peacetime now. The technology is being used to power the houses of five million people —”

“Uh-uh. There’s no sidestepping the Laws of Thermodynamics. You only get out less than what you put in. You’re only getting power out because you’re sapping the angular momentum of what’s inside the container. I’ll lay a bet that what’s inside the container was created illegally using the Lubumba Collider that President Lissouba convinced the UN to build to ‘rejuvenate the Congolese economy’ —”

Ngoyi squirmed. “He also said scientify the Congolese economy. He actually used the word ‘scientify’.”

Mativi nodded. “In any case, that angular momentum was put into the container by gigawatts of energy pumped into the Collider from the city power grid. Effectively all you’re doing is using up energy someone stole and stored fifteen years ago. It’s no more a power source than a clockwork doll is, Jean-Baptiste. You have to wind it up to watch it go. And all you’ll be left with, in the end, is a non-rotating very heavy lump of extremely bad shit.”

“Well, I must admit,” admitted Ngoyi ruefully, “the amount of juice we can squeeze out of it is getting smaller every year.”

The tractor in front suddenly rumbled to a halt in a cloud of dust big enough to conceal a herd of rhinos. A wall of immobile metal barred the carriageway, and three lanes of drivers performed the peculiarly Congolese manoeuvre of stepping on their brakes and leaning on their horns simultaneously. One of them shrieked suddenly in dismay when a length of caterpillar track resembling a chain of house facades clipped together with traffic bollards slammed down on to his bonnet and crushed it flat, before slapping his saloon into a cabriolet. Paint flakes flew everywhere. The car was a steel one, too — an old Proton model produced under licence in Afghanistan. Mativi hoped the driver had survived.

Troopers poured out of the four-by-fours, ignoring the barrage of horns. They were staring at the side of the tractor. Some good Catholics were even crossing themselves.

Mativi put the handbrake on and left his car. Someone hooted at him. He ignored them.

One whole side of the tractor had collapsed into the asphalt. The torsion bars of the vehicle’s suspension, each one a man’s waist thick and made of substances far, far stronger than steel, had snapped like seaside rock. The load on top of the tractor had slumped sideways underneath its canvas blanket.

Now that he was outside the car, he was aware of a hissing sound. The sound was coming from a hole punched in the canvas cover.

Some of the troopers were walking up towards the load. Mativi danced out on to the grass verge, waving his arms like an isangoma.

“No! Non! Get away! Tres dan-gereux!”

One of the men looked at Mativi as if he were an idiot and took another step fonvard. His sleeve began to rustle and flap in the direction of the hole in the canvas. Then his hand slapped down on to the canvas cover, and he began to scream, beating on his hand, trying to free it. His comrades began to laugh, looking back towards Mativi, enjoying the joke their friend was having at the crazy man’s expense.

Then he vanished.

Not quite vanished — Mativi and the troops both heard the bones in his hand snap, saw the hand crumple into the canvas like a handkerchief into a magician’s glove, followed by his arm, followed by his shoulder, followed by his head. They saw the flare of crimson his body turned into as skin, bone, blood vessels, all the frail materials meant to hold a body together, degenerated into carmine mulch and were sucked up by the structure. A crimson blot of blood a man wide sprayed on to the canvas — out of which, weirdly, runnels of blood began trailing inward towards the hole, against and at angles to gravity.

The police troops turned and looked at Mativi, then looked back at the tractor.

“Alors, chef,” one of them said to him, “qu’est-ce qu’onfait maintenant?”

“It’s loose,” said Ngoyi, his eyes glazed, seeing the ends of worlds. “It’s loose, and I am responsible.”

Mativi shook his head. “It’s not loose. Not yet. We can still tell exactly where it is, just by feeding it more policemen. But its casing’s corroded. It’s sucking in stuff from outside.”

“Not corroded,” Ngoyi shook his head. “It won’t corrode. It’s made of nickel alloy, very strong, very heavy. It’s one of the cases we bored a hole in deliberately, in order to shine in the infrared beam. There’ll be another hole in the casing on the far side. Where the gamma comes out.”

Mativi nodded. One of the machines the demons live in.

Ngoyi still seemed to be wary of even looking at the container. “Could it topple over?”

“No. If it begins to topple, it’ll right itself immediately. It’s probably scrunched itself down into the top of the tractor doing that already. Remember, it’s a small thing rotating, rotating fast, and it weighs over a thousand tonnes. The gyroscopic stability of an object like that doesn’t bear thinking about —”

“CETAWAYO BRIAN MATIVI! I AM HEREBY BY THE ORDER OF THE UNITED NATIONS PEACEKEEPING FORCES OF THE CONGO PLACING YOU UNDER ARREST.”

Mativi turned. The voice had come from a senior police officer. The amount of shiny regalia on the uniform confused matters, but he was almost certain the man was a lieutenant.

Mativi sighed. “Lieutenant —” he began.

“Major,” corrected the major.

“—Major, I am engaged in preventing a public disaster of proportions bigger than anything that might possibly be prevented by arresting me. Do you know what will happen if that load falls off that wagon?”

The Major shrugged. “Do you know what will happen if I see you and don’t drag you down to the cells? I will lose my job, and my wife and children will go hungry.”

Mativi began to back away.

“Hey!” The Major began to pointedly unbutton his revolver.

“I know what will happen to you if you don’t bring me in. And you forgot to mention that there’ll be no power in the city either, and that as a consequence a great number of wives and children will go hungry,” said Mativi, circling around the danger area of bowed-headed, permanently windblown grass near the tractor’s payload. He waved his arms in the direction of the dark horizon. “You can see the evidence of this already. The device on this tractor has been uncoupled from the grid, and immediately there is no power for refrigeration, no power for cooking or for emergency machinery in hospitals. I know all that.” Slowly, he put his hands up to indicate he was no threat. Then, with one hand, he swung himself up on to the side of the tractor, with the payload between himself and the Major. “But you truly cannot begin to comprehend what will happen to those wives and children if I allow this load to continue on to Djelo-Binza, sir. You see, I understand at a very deep level what is in this container. You do not.”

“I must warn you not to attempt to escape custody,” said the Major, raising his pistol. “I am empowered to shoot.”

“How can I be trying to escape custody?” said Mativi, looking down the barrel of the pistol as if his life depended on it, and sinking in his stance, causing the Major to lower the pistol by a couple of centimetres, still training it on his heart. “I’m climbing on board a police vehicle.”

“Get down off that police vehicle now,” said the Major. “Or I will shoot.”

Mativi licked his lips, looking up a pistol barrel for the second time that day, but this time attempting to perform complex orbital calculations in his head as he did so. Have I factored in relativity properly? It needs to travel dead over the hole —

“Shan’t.”

The gun fired. It made quite a satisfactory BOOM. There was a red flash in mid-air, and Mativi was still there.

The Major stared at Mativi.

“As I said,” said Mativi, “I understand what is in this cargo. You do not. Do I have your full cooperation?”

The Major’s eyes went even wider than his perceived Remit To Use Deadly Force. He lowered the gun, visibly shaken.

“You do,” he said. “Sir,” he added.

The Hyundai became bogged down by bodies — fortunately living ones — in the immediate vicinity of the Heavy Weapons Alert site. A crowd of perhaps a thousand goggling locals, all dressed in complementary rayon T-shirts handed out by various multinationals to get free airtime on Third World famine reports, were making road and roadside indistinguishable. But the big blue bull bars parted the crowd discreetly, and Mativi dawdled forward to a hastily-erected barrier of velcrowire into which several incautious onlookers had already been pushed by their neighbours. Velcrowire barbs would sink a centimetre deep into flesh, then open up into barbs that could only be removed by surgeons, provided that the owner of the flesh desired to keep it. Barbed wire was not truly barbed. Velcrowire was.

The troops at the only gap in the fence stood aside and saluted for the UN car, and Mativi pulled up next to an ancient Boeing V-22 VTOL transport, in the crew door of which a portly black man in a bad safari suit sat juggling with mobile phones. The casings of the phones, Mativi knew, were colour-coded to allow their owner to identify them. The Boeing had once been United Nations White. After too many years in the Congo, it was now Well-Used Latrine White.

Mativi examined what was being done at the far end of the containment area. The site was a mass of specialized combat engineering machinery. Mativi recognized one of the devices, a Japanese-made tractor designed for defusing unexploded nuclear munitions — or rather, for dealing with what happened when a human nuclear UXB disposal operative made a mistake. Hair trigger sensors on the tractor would detect the incipient gamma flare of a fission reaction, then fire a 120-millimetre shell into the nuke. This would kill the bomb disposal man and fill the area around the bomb with weapons-grade fallout but probably save a few million civilians in the immediate area.

Mativi walked across the compound and yelled at the man in the Boeing. “Louis, what the HELL are your UXB monkeys DOING?”

Grosjean’s head whipped round.

“Oh, hello, Chet. We’re following standard procedure for dealing with an unexploded weaponized gamma source.”

“Well, first off, this isn’t a weapon.”

Grosjean’s smile was contemptuous. “It’s something that can annihilate the entire planet, and it isn’t a weapon?”

“It’s thirty-nine things that can annihilate the planet, and they’re not weapons any more. Think about it. Would anyone use a weapon that would blow up the whole world?”

Grosjean actually appeared to seriously consider the possibility; then, he nodded to concede the point. “So what sort of weapon were these things part of?”

“Not weapons,” corrected Mativi. “Think of them as weapons waste. They were the principal components in a Penrose Accelerator.”

“You’re making it up.”

“You damn fool security guy, me weapons inspector. We’ve suspected the People’s Democratic Republic of Congo used Penrose weapons in their war with the Democratic People’s Republic of Congo for some time. They had guns capable of lobbing loo-tonne shells full of plague germs at Pretoria from a distance of 4,000 kilometres, for instance. When we examined those guns after UNPEFORCONG overran their positions, what we found didn’t fit. They had magnetic accelerators in their barrels but at the sort of muzzle velocities they’d have had to have been using, the magnets in the barrels would only have been any use in aiming, not in getting the payload up to speed. And the breech of each weapon had been removed. Something had been accelerating those projectiles, but it wasn’t magnetism, and it wasn’t gunpowder. The projectiles were big, and they were moving fast. You remember that outbreak of airborne rabies in New Zealand two years back? That was one of theirs. A Congolese shell fired too hot and went into orbit. The orbit decayed. The shell came down. Thirteen years after the war. Gunpowder and magnetism don’t do that.”

“So what was it?”

“A Penrose accelerator. You get yourself a heavy-duty rotating mass, big enough to have stuff orbit round it, and you whirl ordnance round those orbits, contrary to the direction of the mass’s rotation. Half of your ordnance separates from the payload, and drops into the mass. The other half gets kicked out to mind-buggering velocities. The trouble is, none of this works unless the mass is dense enough to have an escape velocity greater than light.”

“A black hole.”

“Yes. You have yourself thirty-nine charged rotating black holes, formerly used as artillery accelerators, now with nowhere to go. Plus another hole lodged precariously on the back of a tractor on the public highway halfway between here and Djelo-Binza. And the only way for us to find enough energy to get rid of them, I imagine, would be to use another black hole to kick them into orbit. They also give off gamma, almost constantly, as they’re constantly absorbing matter. You point one of those UXB defuser tractors at them and throw the safety on the gun, and—”

“JESUS!” Grosjean stared at the ground-floor entrance where his men had been preparing to throw heavy artillery shells at the problem, jumped up, and began frantically waving his arms for them to stop. “OUI! OUI! ARRETE! ARRETE! And we thought getting rid of nuclear waste was difficult.”

“Looks easy to me,” said Mativi, nodding in the direction of the highway. Two trucks with UNSMATDEMRE-CONG livery, their suspensions hanging low, had stopped just short of the military cordon in the eastbound lane. Their drivers had already erected signs saying LIGHT HEAT HERE FOR DOLLARS, and were handing out clear resin bricks that glowed with a soft green light to housewives who were coming out of the darkened prefabs nearby, turning the bricks over in their hands, feeling the warmth, haggling over prices.

“Is that what I think it is?” said Grosjean. “I should stop that. It’s dangerous, isn’t it?”

“Don’t concern yourself with it right now. Those bricks can only kill one family at a time. Besides,” said Mativi gleefully, “the city needs power, and Jean-Baptiste’s men are only supplying a need, right?”

Ngoyi, still in the passenger seat of the Hyundai, stared sadly as his men handed out radionuclides, and could not meet Mativi’s eyes. He reached in his inside pocket for the gun he had attempted to kill Mativi with, and began, slowly and methodically, to clear the jam that had prevented him from doing so.

“Once you’ve cordoned the area off,” said Mativi, “we’ll be handling things from that point onwards. I’ve contacted the IAEA myself. There’s a continental response team on its way.”

In the car, Ngoyi had by now worked the jammed bullet free and replaced it with another. At the Boeing, Grosjean’s jaw dropped. “You have teams set up to deal with this already?”

“Of course. You don’t think this is the first time this has happened, do you? It’s the same story as with the A-bomb. As soon as physicists know it’s possible, every tinpot dictator in the world wants it, and will do a great deal to get it, and certainly isn’t going to tell us he’s trying. Somewhere in the world at a location I am not aware of and wouldn’t tell you even if I were, there is a stockpile of these beauties that would make your hair curl. I once spoke to a technician who’d just come back from there… I think it’s somewhere warm, he had a suntan. He said there were aisles of the damn things, literally thousands of them. The UN are working on methods of deactivating them, but right now our best theoretical methods for shutting down a black hole always lead to catastrophic Hawking evaporation, which would be like a i,ooo-tonne nuclear warhead going off. And if any one of those things broke out of containment, even one, it would sink through the Earth’s crust like a stone into water. It’d get to the Earth’s centre and beyond before it slowed down to a stop — and then, of course, it’d begin to fall to the centre again. It wouldn’t rise to quite the same height on the other side of the Earth, just like a pendulum, swinging slower and slower and slower.

Gathering bits of Earth into itself all the time, of course, until it eventually sank to the centre of the world and set to devouring the entire planet. The whole Earth would get sucked down the hole, over a period which varies from weeks to centuries, depending on which astrophysicist you ask. And you know what?” — and here Mativi smiled evilly. This was always the good part.

“What?” Grosjean’s Bantu face had turned whiter than a Boer’s. From the direction of the car, Mativi heard a single, slightly muffled gunshot.

“We have no way of knowing whether we already missed one or two. Whether one or two of these irresponsible nations carrying out unauthorized black hole research dropped the ball. How would we know, if someone kept their project secret enough? How would we know there wasn’t a black hole bouncing up and down like a big happy rubber ball inside the Earth right now? Gravitational anomalies would eventually begin to show themselves, I suppose — whether on seismometers or mass detectors. But our world might only have a few decades to live — and we wouldn’t be any the wiser.

“Make sure that cordon’s tight, Louis.”

Grosjean swallowed with difficulty, and nodded. Mativi wandered away from the containment site, flipping open his mobile phone. Miracle of miracles, even out here, it worked.

“Hello darling… No, I think it’ll perhaps take another couple of days… Oh, the regular sort of thing. Not too dangerous. Yes, we did catch this one… Well, I did get shot at a little, but the guy missed. He was aiming on a purely Euclidean basis… Euclidean. I’ll explain when I get home… Okay, well, if you have to go now then you have to go. I’ll be on the 9 a.m. flight from Kinshasa.”

He flicked the phone shut and walked, whistling, towards the Hyundai. There was a spider’s web of blood over the passenger side where Ngoyi had shot himself. Still, he thought, that’s someone else’s problem. This car goes back into the pool tomorrow. At least he kept the side window open when he did it. Made a lot less mess than that bastard Lamant did in Quebec City. And they made me clean that car.

He looked out at the world.

“Saved you again, you big round bugger, and I hope you’re grateful.”

For the first time in a week, he was smiling.

BLOODLETTING Kate Wilhelm

In recent years Kate Wilhelm has become better known for her crime fiction novels, but for years — since her first sale in 1956 — she was a notable, if only occasional, writer of science fiction and fantasy, or speculative fiction, to use her preferred term. With her husband, Damon Knight, who died in 2002, she was a key player in creating both the Milford and Clarion SF Writers’ workshops. Her SF novels include the Hugo-winning post-apocalyptic Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976), in which a community of clones find a remote hideaway to weather the storm. Her best short fiction will be found in The Infinity Box (1975), Somerset Dreams (1978), Children of the Wind (1989) and And the Angels Sing (1992). The following story, which considers how a global pandemic may start, is one of her more recent, and as yet remains uncollected.

I AM SITTING in my car, and nothing is visible, just the black night out there, the black night inside; the only sound is of the sea, the waves crashing against the cliff with fierce regularity. I remember the one time my grandmother came out here; she did not like the constant sea noise. She complained, “Don’t it ever shut up?” She did not like the constant wind, either; worse than Kansas, she said on that trip. On my first visit to her farm in Kansas I marveled at the stars, and she took that to be a sign of a simple mind. But I knew then, and I think I still know, that they have more stars in Kansas than they do at the Oregon coast. Grandmother also said Warren was simple. But that was later, ten years ago.

The impenetrable darkness has made me think of her, I suppose. She talked about growing up on the prairies that were virtually uninhabited, of being out late when there wasn’t a light to be seen, of her fear of the dark then and forever after. When I said I wasn’t afraid of the dark, she muttered, “You don’t know dark, child. You don’t know.” I do now.

She came out of the kitchen muttering the day I took Warren home to meet my family. “That man ain’t as smart as he thinks,” she said. “He don’t know enough to open a can. Simple, that’s what he is.” I went to the kitchen to find Aunt Jewel showing Warren how to use an old can opener. He had never seen one like it. Simple. He was thirty, with a Ph.D., tenure at the University of Oregon, working with Gregory Oldhams. He had turned down other, better-paid, positions for the chance to work with Greg; he could have gone to Harvard, Stanford, almost anywhere he wanted.

It has started to rain, a soothing monotonous patter on the roof of the car, and now a wind has come up, rustling in the firs, in the vine maples, the broom that grows down the face of the cliff where nothing else can find enough dirt to sink roots. I am very tired.

I brought Warren up here before we were married; he was envious. “You grew up in a wilderness!” he said. He had grown up in Brooklyn.

“Well, you’re here now,” I said. “So it doesn’t really matter so much, does it?”

“It matters,” he said, gazing down at the ocean, then turning to look at the trees, and finally at the A-frame house below us and across a shallow ravine. I had lived in that house for the first twelve years of my life. “It matters,” he repeated. “You have things in your eyes I’ll never get. I have people and traffic and buildings, and people, more people, always more people, always more cars, more exhaust, more noise…” He stopped and I was glad. There was anguish in his voice, bitterness — I didn’t know what it was; I didn’t want to know it.

Greg Oldhams is the foremost researcher in hematology, the study of blood. He already was famous when Warren started working with him, and since then his research, and Warren’s, has become what the articles call legendary. At first, after I met Warren, I felt almost ashamed of my own field -medieval literature. What was the point in that, I wondered, compared to the importance of what they were doing? At first, Warren talked about his work with excitement, passion even, but then he stopped. I know to the day when it changed. On Mikey’s fifth birthday, five years ago. Warren didn’t come home in time for the party, and when he did get home, he was old.

A person can become old in a day, I learned then. Mikey turned five; Warren turned a hundred.

The wind is increasing; there may be a gale moving in. I had to roll up the window on my side when the rain started, and when I reached over to open the passenger side window, I realized I still had the seat belt fastened and then it seemed too hard to work the clasp and free myself. I began to laugh, and then I was crying and laughing. I don’t care if rain comes in the passenger side, but the wind makes a harsh whistling sound through the narrow opening near my head, and I have to decide, open the window more and get wet, or close it. I can’t bear the whistling noise. Finally I make the effort to undo the seat belt, reach over, and open the other window and close the driver-side one. Now I can hear the ocean, and the rain, and even the wind in the trees. So much exertion, I mock myself, but I have to lean back and rest.

This is where I told Warren yes, I would marry him, up here overlooking the sea. “No children,” he said. “The world has enough children.”

I backed away from him and we regarded each other. “But I want a family,” I said after a moment. “At least one child of ours, our genes. We can adopt another one or two.”

Nothing was settled that day. We went back to the A-frame and banged pots and pans and argued and I told him to get lost, to get out of my life, and he said it would be criminal to bring another child into the world and I was being selfish, and the much-touted maternal urge was cultural, and I said people like us owed it to children to give them the same advantages we had, education, love, care… It went on into the night, when I told him to sleep on the couch, and the next day, until I stomped out of the house and came up here to glare at the ocean and its incessant racket. He came after me. “Christ,” he said. “Jesus. One.” Two months later we were married and I was pregnant.

When Mikey was two he got a big sister, Sandra, who was three and a half, and a year later he got a bigger brother, Chris, who was five. Our family.

Mikey was four when they all had chicken pox at the same time. One night Warren was keeping them entertained, coloring with them at the table while I made dinner.

“Why did you make him green?” Chris demanded.

“Because he has artificial blood,” Warren said.

“Why?”

“Because something went wrong with his blood and they had to take it out and put in artificial blood.”

Mikey began to cry. “Is that what they’ll do to us?”

“Nope. You’re not sick enough. You’ve just got spots on your face. You call that sick? I call it kvetching.”

“What’s that?” Sandra asked. She had fallen in love with Warren the day we met her, and he loved all three children.

“That’s when you grow spots on your face, and itch, and pretend you’re sick so your mother will let you eat ice cream all day if you want. And your dad plays silly games with you when he should be at work. That’s kvetching.”

They liked kvetching. Later they got into my lipstick and tried to make it all happen again, spots, whining for ice cream, laughing.

Later it was funny, but that night, with my sick children at the table, itching, feverish, it was not funny. I froze at the sink with water running over lettuce. Artificial blood? We were still in the cold war; atomic war was still possible, anything was possible. Even artificial blood.

“Why?” I asked, after the children were in bed.

He had to start way back. “Remember in the movie Dracula how the good doctor transfused one of the women over and over with whole blood, and it took? Pure luck. Lucy was probably an A-group type, and so was the guy. If he had put blood from an O group in her, she probably would have died on him. That’s how it was. One took, another one, then bingo, it didn’t. Then they found out about the blood groups, and later on about how the agglutinogens combine with certain agglutinins, and not others. And we’ve been learning ever since. The body treats the wrong blood type just like any other invading organism, bacterium, virus, whatever, and rejects it. But in the case of a major catastrophe you can’t count on the lab facilities to handle the typing, the storage, all the mechanics of transfusions. The labs might not be there. We’ve got artificial blood now, you know, but it’s pretty high-tech stuff.”

I hadn’t known until then. I shuddered, and he grinned. “So what’s wrong with being green? Don’t worry, it’s still experimental, and very, very temporary. Anyway, if we could get away from some of the really high-tech stuff and simply transfuse from any healthy person to one who is ill… see?”

“But wouldn’t that be just as high tech?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not.

There are genetic blood characteristics that get passed on from parent to child, you know. Sickle cell anemia, which, by the way, comes in a package that includes resistance to malaria. Hemophilia gets passed on…” Whatever expression my face was registering made him stop. “Hey,” he said softly. “I’m just spitballing.”

I jerked upright so fast, I bumped into the steering wheel. I must have been dozing, dreaming. How clear Warren was, his hair thinning just a touch, a little too long, the color of wet sand; that day he had a suntan and looked almost ruddy. A big-faced ruddy man who looked as if he should be out plowing, or putting a roof on a building, or something else physically demanding. A sailor, he would have made a fine sailor. I can’t see him now; my imagination is faulty in that I can’t see images with any sharp detail. Only my dreams re-create with exactitude the people I have loved. My parents live on in my dreams; Warren is there; the children, but they won’t show themselves to my waking mind. I have only feelings, impressions, nuances that have no names. Warren is a loving presence, a comforting presence, bigger in my mind than ever in person, stronger, more reassuring, strangely more vulnerable so that I feel I have to protect him. From what is as unclear as the visual image.

When I drove down here from the Portland airport, it was my intention to turn into the driveway to the house where I played out my childhood; instead, I kept driving, followed the road that became a track up to this lookout point. The end of the road. The place where the world disappears.

We came out here with Greg two years ago. His wife was gone by then, back to Indiana or somewhere with their two children, and he was lonely. Or so Warren said. I didn’t believe it, and still don’t believe Greg ever knew loneliness. His work was world enough. We built a fire on the beach and the children played in the surf and came near to get warm, then raced back to the frigid water.

“Tell Greg about the meals,” Warren said, grinning, contented that day, even though he was a hundred years old.

I had told him and the children about a typical meal during the time of Abelard and Heloise. Our children wanted to eat that way, too. A long board against the wall, food within reach of everyone, people sharing the same bowls, the same cups, eating with spoons or fingers. The beggars crowding about, and the dogs crowding everyone, snapping at each other, at the beggars, at the diners and the servers.

Greg laughed when I described it. He was lazy looking, relaxed, but if Warren had turned a hundred, Greg had turned two hundred. An old worried man, I thought. He was only forty-five according to the official records, but I knew he was ancient.

“Was that during the plague years?” he asked. He was leaning against a forty-foot-long tree that had crashed ashore, riding the waves to be stranded here, a memento of the power of the sea during a storm. The tree trunk was eight feet thick. It might have been alive in Abelard’s time.

“Not much plague yet, not in epidemic form in Europe at least, although plague was recorded back in the sixth century, you understand, and continued intermittently until it struck in pandemic force later, about the fifteenth century. This period was 1100 or so. Why?”

“The beggars were inside at the table?” he asked, bemused.

“They were kicked out shortly after that; the beggars had to stay beyond the door, but the dogs weren’t banished.”

The conversation ended there; the children found a starfish which we all went to examine, and the sun was going down by then.

Late that night we discussed when we would leave for home the following day. Traffic had been bumper to bumper coming out and it would be worse on Sunday.

“I may stay on a few days with the kids,” I said. Warren could go back with Greg early, which they were both inclined to do, but I knew the children would be disappointed at the short stay, as I was.

It was summer; I had no classes, and this was the only kind of vacation we would have, a day now and then, two, three days at the coast.

“I wonder what it was like during the plague years,” Greg mused, reviving the subject we had left hours before. “Anywhere from one-third to half the people gone, just gone.”

“It wasn’t exactly like that,” I said. “It took 300 years before it stopped sweeping the continent in epidemic form, and during that period the church became the power it is now. Superstition, heresies, empowerment for the church and state, fear for the public, that’s what was going on. Life was hell for most survivors.”

“And the Renaissance came about,” Greg said thoughtfully. “Would it have happened without the plague? No one really knows, do they?”

“That’s the romantic version,” I said, not quite snapping at him. “The silver-lining theory. Out of every evil thing comes something good. You believe that?”

Warren had been brooding, gazing at the fire in the fireplace, snapping and cracking, a many-hued fire burning off salts and minerals of dried wood scavenged from the beach. He sounded very tired when he spoke now. “The Renaissance came about because people had used up all the resources they had available to them; they were desperate for better ways to farm, to make clothing, to warm themselves. Better ways to survive. They had to invent the Renaissance. It had nothing to do with plague.”

I realized that they had had this conversation before; neither was saying anything the other had not already heard. I stood up.

“Are you going to tell me what you’re doing in your lab?”

Greg looked blank, and Warren shook his head. “Same old stuff,” he said after a long pause. “Just the same old stuff.”

If it was just the same old stuff -artificial blood, whole blood transfusions, work they had been publishing for years — why had they both become so old? Why were they both terrified? Why had Warren stopped talking about his work altogether, and refused to talk about it when I brought it up?

Greg got up abruptly and went to bed, and Warren shook his head when I asked him again what they were doing. “Go on to bed,” he said. “I’ll just be a few minutes.”

What do you do if your husband holds the agent to destroy half the human race? You try not to know it; you don’t demand answers; you go to bed.

A gale has arrived finally. Now the trees are thrashing, and the broom is whipping about furiously, making its own eerie shrieking sound, and the rain is so hard it’s as if the sea has come up here and is raging against the car, pushing, pushing. I am getting very cold and think how strange that I was so reluctant to turn on the motor, use the heater. I can hardly even hear the engine when it starts and, as soon as I lift my foot from the accelerator, I can’t hear it at all.

Greg’s wife took her two children and ran when she learned. I wonder if that is why Warren refused to tell me anything for so long.

In the past two years Warren became a stranger to us, his family. We saw him rarely, and only when he was so fatigued he could hardly stay awake long enough to eat, to bathe. I didn’t see Greg at all after that day at the coast, not until two weeks ago.

Warren came home late. I was already undressed for bed, in my robe. He was so pale he looked very ill. “I blew the whistle,” he said, standing just inside the door, water running off his jacket, down his hands, down his face. I went to him and pulled the jacket off his shoulders. “It’s going to be out of our hands by tomorrow,” he said, and walked stiffly into the living room to sit on the sofa.

I hurried to the bathroom and came back with a towel, sat beside him, and began to dry his hair, his face.

“Will you tell me about it now?”

He told me. They had found a viroid that had an affinity for some blood groups, he said. Not even a whole virus, not a killed virus, a piece of a virus. They had combined it with the O group first and nothing happened, but when they then combined the O blood with A blood, the viroid changed, it became whole, replicative, and the A blood was destroyed, consumed. He said it in a monotone, almost absently, as if it were of no real consequence, after all. And then he buried his face in his hands and cried.

Forty-five per cent of Caucasians have A-group blood; five percent have AJB. Thirty per cent of Blacks have A or AJB. Thirty per cent of Amerinds have A or AB… And the virus they created could destroy all of them.

I held him as he wept and the words tumbled incoherently. They would both go to Atlanta, he said that night, he and Greg, and someone would come to oversee the packing of the material, the decontamination of the lab.

“Greg came in while I was on the phone,” he said at some point. “He tried to stop me. I hit him. God, I hit him, knocked him down! I took him home and we talked it over.”

“Does he agree, then?”

“Yes,” he said tiredly. “It was like hitting your father, your god.”

“Why didn’t you stop when you knew what it was?”

“We couldn’t,” he said. He was as pale as death, with red-rimmed eyes, a haunted look. “If we did it, then so will someone else, if they haven’t already. We kept trying to find an out, an antidote, a cure, something.”

We were still on the sofa side by side. He drew away from me and got to his feet, an old man laboriously rising; he staggered when he started to walk. “I need a drink.”

I followed him to the kitchen and watched him pour bourbon into a glass and drink it down. If he and Greg couldn’t find the cure, I was thinking, then who could? They were the best in the field.

I keep thinking of what Greg said that day on the coast: the plague killed off one-third to half the population of Europe, the same numbers that make up the A, the AJB, the AO blood groups. And out of that horror, he thought, had come the Renaissance.

I know so much more about blood groups and complexes now than I did two weeks ago; I put in a period of cramming, as if for an examination. I am in the A group. Mikey is AO. Warren is O. Sandra is A, and Chris is O.

I drove Warren to the lab the next morning, where we were met by a middle-aged man who introduced himself to Warren and ignored me. They went inside without a backward glance. When they were out of sight, Greg appeared, coming from the corner of the brick building, walking toward me. He had a Band-Aid on his jaw; Warren had one on his middle knuckle.

“At the last minute,” Greg said, “I found I didn’t want to see anyone, not Warren, not the hot-shot epidemiologist. Just tell Warren I’m taking off for a few days’ rest, will you?”

I nodded, and he turned and walked away, old, old, defeated, sagging shoulders, slouching walk, his hair down over the collar of a faded gray ski jacket that gleamed with rain, sneakers squishing through puddles.

Such a clear picture of him, I marvel, coming wide awake again. The car is much too warm now; it has a very efficient heater. I want to sink back down into dreams, but instead I force myself up straighter in order to reach the key, to turn off the ignition. My hand feels encased in lead.

I packed for Warren and later that day he dashed in, brushed my cheek with his lips, snatched up his bag, and ran out again. He would call, he said, and he did several times, but never with anything real to say. I was as guarded on the phone as he was. Anything new? I asked, and he said no, same old stuff. I clutched the phone harder and talked about the children, about the rain, about nothing.

I did the things I always did: I braided Sandra’s hair, and made Mikey do his homework; I talked to my own class about The Canterbury Tales; I shopped and made dinners; I washed my hair and shaved my legs… Mikey had a cold and Chris caught it, and I was headachy and dull feeling. Late fall things, I told Warren over the phone. He said it was rather warm in Atlanta and sunny. And, he said tiredly, he would be on the seven-o’clock flight due in Portland on Friday. We made soft thankful noises at each other; I had tears in my eyes when I hung up.

Trish Oldhams called the following evening. She wanted Warren and when I said he was out of town, there was a long pause.

“What is it, Trish? Anything I can do?” I hoped it was nothing; my headache was worse and now I was afraid it was flu, not simply a cold.

“It’s Greg,” she said at last. “I was going to ask Warren to go check on him. He called, and he sounded… I don’t know, just strange.”

“What do you mean, strange?”

“He said he wanted to tell me goodbye,” she said in a low voice. “I… is he sick?”

“Not that I know. I’ll drop in on him and call you back. Okay?”

Time is a muddle for me now. I can’t remember when Trish called but I didn’t call her back. I found Greg loading boxes into his truck that he had backed up partway into the garage. His house was surrounded by unkempt gardens and bushes and a lot of trees, two or three acres that he ignored. Trish used to maintain it all. I remember thinking what a wilderness he had let it become.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded, when I stopped behind his truck and got out of my car.

“Trish called. She’s worried about you.”

“You’re shivering. Come on inside.”

The inside was a shambles, things strewn about, drawers open, boxes everywhere. He led me to the kitchen where it was more of the same. The table was piled high with books and notebooks; others were on the floor, on chairs.

“Sit down,” he said. “You’re shaking, you’re so cold.” He poured us both whiskey with a drop of water, and he sat opposite me, with the piles of stuff between us. “Trish,” he said after a moment. “I shouldn’t have called her, I guess. She was surprised. I made her leave, you know.”

I shook my head. “Why?”

“Because I was dangerous for her and the boys,” he said, gazing past me. “A menace to her. I told her that and she would have hung on, but I told her I was a menace to the boys, too, and she left, just like I knew she would.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.” My glass rattled against the table when I tried to put it down. He took it and refilled it.

“I’m contaminated,” he said. “Four, five years ago I nicked myself in the lab and got some of the viroid material in the cut. We thought I would die, Warren and I thought that, but as you can see…” He drained his glass and put it down hard. “But it’s there, the viroid, waiting to meet up with A-type blood, fulfill its destiny. Trish is A, and the boys are AO. It was just a matter of time before something happened, no matter how careful was. I sent her away.”

It is all muddled. He said he would not be a guinea pig, live in quarantine. No one knew about him yet, but he would tell them soon. He had made Warren promise to let him tell them in his own time, his own way. I was drinking his liquor and having trouble following his words, but I finally had become warm, and even drowsy as he talked on. He couldn’t infect me, he said, driving me home, and Warren was all right. I was safe. He insisted that I couldn’t drive, and he called a cab to return home afterward. Blood contact was necessary he said, between a contaminated O and anyone else. Alone, the viroid was inert. And the virus? I asked. “Oh, that,” he said grimly. “That’s one of the things they’ll be finding out in Atlanta. We, Warren and I, think it might be passed by any contact, or it could be airborne. They’ll find out.”

Today, Friday. I braided Sandra’s hair and made Mikey brush his teeth, and told Chris that he couldn’t go to a football game after school, not with his cold. Sandra was sneezing. I dragged into my one class, and then a committee meeting, and a late lunch with my friend Dora who told me to go home and to bed because I looked like hell. I felt like hell, I admitted, but I had to go to Portland to meet Warren. I wanted to go early enough to miss the traffic rush. I would have a snack in the restaurant and read and wait for his plane.

I heard the news bulletin on the car radio. Dr Gregory Oldhams had died in a fire at his house. There were no details. I pulled off the road onto the shoulder and stared ahead through tears. He had called Trish to tell her goodbye. He had packed up things he couldn’t bear to have burned. A guinea pig, live in quarantine, in isolation, his own time, his own way…

Lights have come on in the house across the ravine. They are looking for me; Warren must have told them this is where I would come. Home. I wonder if he is with them; if he is, he may think to come up here. I rather imagine that they have him in a high-security lab somewhere, drawing blood, testing it, or packaging it to send to Atlanta.

They may send him back. He will be so tired. Would I scream at him if we met now? Probably, and he doesn’t need it; he knows, and he will know for the rest of his life. If we met, and if I had a gun, would I shoot him? I can imagine doing it, and I would want to do it, but would I?

Warren’s plane was going to be an hour late. It was five when I got inside the terminal; three hours stretched like eternity. I was too tired to do more than buy a book and a newspaper and then find a place where I could sit in peace. No food, I thought, shivering again.

Orange juice. I sat in the restaurant thinking about Greg, about yesterday, how he had driven me home. What he had said. Blood contact between an O and anyone else, airborne possibly after an A became infected. I remembered the Band-Aid on his chin, another Band-Aid on Warren’s knuckle. How Warren had wept, not because of the work, but because he had struck Greg, his mentor, his father, his god.

I knocked over my orange juice when I attempted to lift the glass, and I stared at the spreading pool until the waitress’s voice made me start. “You want another one?” she asked.

I fled to the restroom and studied my face in the mirror. Bloodless. It’s the flu, I told myself. Just the flu. My fingers were tinged with blue under my finger-nails, my palms were drained of color.

I know I talked to someone in Atlanta, but I can’t remember how it came about. There’s a vague memory of someone else punching numbers from my credit card. I must have asked for help. I had to go through so many people, wait so long before someone who knew something came on the line. “Is it airborne?” I asked, and he had many questions, which I must have answered. He kept asking, “Are you there? Are you all right? Can you hear me?” I know he said, “Stay right where you are. Don’t move from the phone. We’ll send someone to help you.”

Why didn’t I wait for Warren? I should have waited for him, but I didn’t, and then I remember, they would have come for me, and someone else would have met him and taken him somewhere. I think of all the people I was with in the restaurant, in the lounge, in the vast waiting room, buying a newspaper, a book, the shop where I bought the tape recorder I’m using, just walking around, in the parking lot… I forgot to tell the voice on the phone that I had stopped to buy gas, another contact.

I had to leave the phone because someone else wanted to use it, an angry man who told me to move my ass. I walked away from the phone and I stopped to buy the tape recorder, and then I kept walking, out to the lot, to my car, and I drove here. That much is clear in my head. As long as I don’t try to move, or lift anything, I don’t even feel too bad, just so tired, and so heavy. The oddest thing is the lack of coordination in my hands. I fumble with things, drop them; I can’t even manage the key in the ignition any longer.

I told the man how it happened. Warren got the viroid when he hit Greg. He used my razor the next morning and I used it later; we both always nick ourselves shaving. So simple.

They will spread their nets and try to catch everyone who was in the airport this evening, people flying off to Denver, Chicago, England, Hawaii… They will scoop up everyone at school, all my classes, my friends, committee members. My children.

I can’t weep now. I must be dehydrating too much. At first I thought Greg’s way would be mine. I would drive to my old house and arrange a great fire and at the last minute set it off, but I won’t burn myself. They’ll want to know what damage was done; they may even find a clue to help someone. Or maybe, without even thinking it through, I realized they would come to the house.

The house lights appear to be dancing through waves of water. The storm is so intense now my voice sounds faint to my own ears. I don’t even know how much I’ve said for the tape recorder, how much I have dreamed. The dreams are more real than reality. The car rocks, and the trees thrash about. I wish I could see them, but it’s enough to know they’ve seen this before many times. Maybe they like it as much as I do.

“Can we sleep in the loft, Mom?” Mikey yelled, racing to the stairs.

“Well, sure. That’s where I slept. Good enough for me, good enough for you.”

I shooed them all ahead of me and lay down on the built-in bed. “Look, if you put your head right here, as soon as the moon reaches that tallest fir tree, the shadow of the tree will come in and kiss you good night.”

Chris snorted in disbelief, but Sandra and Mikey lunged for the right spot, which I quickly vacated. Reluctantly Chris stayed close enough to see if it would really happen.

Later, Warren and I listened to them giggling and playing overhead. “Remember?” I asked. “You gave in and said okay to one.”

There was a thump and silence and we both tensed, then renewed giggling floated down, and we relaxed. My legs were cramping from the position we were in, but I didn’t tell him. I closed my eyes and listened to the laughing children.

WHEN SYSADMINS RULED THE EARTH Cory Doctorow

Canadian-born Cory Doctorow burst on the scene in 1999 (though he had been bubbling under for some while) winning the Campbell Memorial Award in 2000 as the Best New Writer in the SF field, almost solely on the strength of one story, “Craphound”. He has gone on to cement his position as one of the most popular writers of the new millennium with his novels, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003), Eastern Standard Tribe (2004), Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005) and Little Brother (2008). Selections of his short fiction will be found in A Place So Foreign (2003) and Overclocked (2007), and there’s much more at his website: craphound.com.

His stories bubble with a zest and energy as you’ll find in the following, which won the Locus Poll as the most popular short fiction of 2006. It brings us into the realm of terrorism, technology and the fate of the Earth.

WHEN FELIX’S SPECIAL phone rang at two in the morning, Kelly rolled over and punched him in the shoulder and hissed, “Why didn’t you turn that fucking thing off before bed?”

“Because I’m on call,” he said.

“You’re not a fucking doctor,” she said, kicking him as he sat on the bed’s edge, pulling on the pants he’d left on the floor before turning in. “You’re a goddamned systems administrator.”

“It’s my job,” he said.

“They work you like a government mule,” she said. “You know I’m right. For Christ’s sake, you’re a father now, you can’t go running off in the middle of the night every time someone’s porn supply goes down. Don’t answer that phone.”

He knew she was right. He answered the phone.

“Main routers not responding. BGP not responding.” The mechanical voice of the systems monitor didn’t care if he cursed at it, so he did and it made him feel a little better.

“Maybe I can fix it from here,” he said. He could login to the UPS for the cage and reboot the routers. The UPS was in a different netblock, with its own independent routers on their own uninterruptible power-supplies.

Kelly was sitting up in bed now, an indistinct shape against the headboard. “In five years of marriage, you have never once been able to fix anything from here.” This time she was wrong -he fixed stuff from home all the time, but he did it discreetly and didn’t make a fuss, so she didn’t remember it. And she was right, too — he had logs that showed that after 1 a.m., nothing could ever be fixed without driving out to the cage. Law of Infinite Universal Perversity — AKA Felix’s Law.

Five minutes later Felix was behind the wheel. He hadn’t been able to fix it from home. The independent router’s netblock was offline, too. The last time that had happened, some dumbfuck construction worker had driven a ditch-witch through the main conduit into the data-center and Felix had joined a cadre of fifty enraged sysadmins who’d stood atop the resulting pit for a week, screaming abuse at the poor bastards who labored 24/7 to splice 10,000 wires back together.

His phone went off twice more in the car and he let it override the stereo and play the mechanical status reports through the big, bassy speakers of more critical network infrastructure offline. Then Kelly called.

“Hi,” he said.

“Don’t cringe, I can hear the cringe in your voice.”

He smiled involuntarily. “Check, no cringing.”

“I love you, Felix,” she said.

“I’m totally bonkers for you, Kelly. Go back to bed.”

“2.0’s awake,” she said. The baby had been Beta Test when he was in her womb, and when her waters broke, he got the call and dashed out of the office, shouting, The Gold Master just shipped! They’d started calling him 2.0 before he’d finished his first cry. “This little bastard was born to suck tit.”

“I’m sorry I woke you,” he said. He was almost at the data center. No traffic at 2 a.m. He slowed down and pulled over before the entrance to the garage. He didn’t want to lose Kelly’s call underground.

“It’s not waking me,” she said. “You’ve been there for seven years. You have three juniors reporting to you. Give them the phone. You’ve paid your dues.”

“I don’t like asking my reports to do anything I wouldn’t do,” he said.

“You’ve done it,” she said. “Please? I hate waking up alone in the night. I miss you most at night.”

“Kelly

“I’m over being angry. I just miss you is all. You give me sweet dreams.”

“OK,” he said.

“Simple as that?”

“Exactly. Simple as that. Can’t have you having bad dreams, and I’ve paid my dues. From now on, I’m only going on night call to cover holidays.”

She laughed. “Sysadmins don’t take holidays.”

“This one will,” he said. “Promise.”

“You’re wonderful,” she said. “Oh, gross. 2.0 just dumped core all over my bathrobe.”

“That’s my boy,” he said.

“Oh that he is,” she said. She hung up, and he piloted the car into the data-center lot, badging in and peeling up a bleary eyelid to let the retinal scanner get a good look at his sleep-depped eyeball.

He stopped at the machine to get himself a guarana/medafonil power-bar and a cup of lethal robot-coffee in a spillproof clean-room sippy-cup. He wolfed down the bar and sipped the coffee, then let the inner door read his hand-geometry and size him up for a moment. It sighed open and gusted the airlock’s load of positively pressurized air over him as he passed finally to the inner sanctum.

It was bedlam. The cages were designed to let two or three sysadmins maneuver around them at a time. Every other inch of cubic space was given over to humming racks of servers and routers and drives. Jammed among them were no fewer than twenty other sysadmins. It was a regular convention of black T-shirts with inexplicable slogans, bellies overlapping belts with phones and multitools.

Normally it was practically freezing in the cage, but all those bodies were overheating the small, enclosed space. Five or six looked up and grimaced when he came through. Two greeted him by name. He threaded his belly through the press and the cages, toward the Ardent racks in the back of the room.

“Felix.” It was Van, who wasn’t on call that night.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. “No need for both of us to be wrecked tomorrow.”

“What? Oh. My personal box is over there. It went down around 1:30 and I got woken up by my process-monitor. I should have called you and told you I was coming down — spared you the trip.”

Felix’s own server — a box he shared with five other friends — was in a rack one floor down. He wondered if it was offline too.

“What’s the story?”

“Massive flashworm attack. Some jackass with a zero-day exploit has got every Windows box on the net running Monte Carlo probes on every IP block, including IPv6. The big Ciscos all run administrative interfaces over v6, and they all fall over if they get more than ten simultaneous probes, which means that just about every interchange has gone down. DNS is screwy, too — like maybe someone poisoned the zone transfer last night. Oh, and there’s an e-mail and IM component that sends pretty lifelike messages to everyone in your address book, barfing up Eliza-dialog that keys off of your logged e-mail and messages to get you to open a Trojan.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.” Van was a type-two sysadmin, over six feet tall, long pony-tail, bobbing Adam’s apple. Over his toast-rack chest, his Tee said CHOOSE YOUR WEAPON and featured a row of polyhedral RPG dice.

Felix was a type-one admin, with an extra seventy or eighty pounds all around the middle, and a neat but full beard that he wore over his extra chins. His Tee said HELLO CTHULHU and featured a cute, mouthless, Hello-Kitty-style Cthulhu. They’d known each other for fifteen years, having met on Usenet, then f2f at Toronto Freenet beer-sessions, a Star Trek convention or two, and eventually Felix had hired Van to work under him at Ardent. Van was reliable and methodical. Trained as an electrical engineer, he kept a procession of spiral notebooks filled with the details of every step he’d ever taken, with time and date.

“Not even PEBKAC this time,” Van said. Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair. E-mail trojans fell into that category — if people were smart enough not to open suspect attachments, e-mail trojans would be a thing of the past. But worms that ate Cisco routers weren’t a problem with the lusers — they were the fault of incompetent engineers.

“No, it’s Microsoft’s fault,” Felix said. “Any time I’m at work at 2 a.m., it’s either PEBKAC or Microsloth.”

They ended up just unplugging the frigging routers from the Internet. Not Felix, of course, though he was itching to do it and get them rebooted after shutting down their IPv6 interfaces. It was done by a couple bull-goose Bastard Operators From Hell who had to turn two keys at once to get access to their cage — like guards in a Minuteman silo. Ninety-five per cent of the long distance traffic in Canada went through this building. It had better security than most Minuteman silos.

Felix and Van got the Ardent boxes back online one at a time. They were being pounded by worm-probes -putting the routers back online just exposed the downstream cages to the attack. Every box on the Internet was drowning in worms, or creating worm-attacks, or both. Felix managed to get through to NIST and Bugtraq after about a hundred timeouts, and download some kernel patches that should reduce the load the worms put on the machines in his care. It was 10 a.m., and he was hungry enough to eat the ass out of a dead bear, but he recompiled his kernels and brought the machines back online. Van’s long fingers flew over the administrative keyboard, his tongue protruding as he ran load-stats on each one.

“I had two hundred days of uptime on Greedo,” Van said. Greedo was the oldest server in the rack, from the days when they’d named the boxes after Star Wars characters. Now they were all named after Smurfs, and they were running out of Smurfs and had started in on McDonaldland characters, starting with Van’s laptop, Mayor McCheese.

“Greedo will rise again,” Felix said. “I’ve got a 486 downstairs with over five years of uptime. It’s going to break my heart to reboot it.”

“What the everlasting shit do you use a 486 for?”

“Nothing. But who shuts down a machine with five years uptime? That’s like euthanizing your grandmother.”

“I wanna eat,” Van said.

“Tell you what,” Felix said. “We’ll get your box up, then mine, then I’ll take you to the Lakeview Lunch for breakfast pizzas and you can have the rest of the day off.”

“You’re on,” Van said. “Man, you’re too good to us grunts. You should keep us in a pit and beat us like all the other bosses. It’s all we deserve.”

“It’s your phone,” Van said. Felix extracted himself from the guts of the 486, which had refused to power up at all. He had cadged a spare power-supply from some guys who ran a spam operation and was trying to get it fitted. He let Van hand him the phone, which had fallen off his belt while he was twisting to get at the back of the machine.

“Hey, Kel,” he said. There was an odd, snuffling noise in the background. Static, maybe? 2.0 splashing in the bath? “Kelly?”

The line went dead. He tried to call back, but didn’t get anything — no ring nor voicemail. His phone finally timed out and said NETWORK ERROR.

“Dammit,” he said, mildly. He clipped the phone to his belt. Kelly wanted to know when he was coming home, or wanted him to pick something up for the family. She’d leave voicemail.

He was testing the power-supply when his phone rang again. He snatched it up and answered it. “Kelly, hey, what’s up?” He worked to keep anything like irritation out of his voice. He felt guilty: technically speaking, he had discharged his obligations to Ardent Financial LLC once the Ardent servers were back online. The past three hours had been purely personal — even if he planned on billing them to the company.

There was sobbing on the line.

“Kelly?” He felt the blood draining from his face and his toes were numb.

“Felix,” she said, barely comprehensible through the sobbing. “He’s dead, oh Jesus, he’s dead.”

“Who? Who, Kelly?”

“Will,” she said.

Will? he thought. Who the fuck is — He dropped to his knees. William was the name they’d written on the birth certificate, though they’d called him 2.0 all along. Felix made an anguished sound, like a sick bark.

“I’m sick,” she said, “I can’t even stand anymore. Oh, Felix. I love you so much.”

“Kelly? What’s going on?”

“Everyone, everyone —” she said. “Only two channels left on the tube. Christ, Felix, it looks like dawn of the dead out the window —” He heard her retch. The phone started to break up, washing her puke-noises back like an echoplex.

“Stay there, Kelly,” he shouted as the line died. He punched 911, but the phone went NETWORK ERROR again as soon as he hit SEND.

He grabbed Mayor McCheese from Van and plugged it into the 486’s network cable and launched Firefox off the command line and googled for the Metro Police site. Quickly, but not frantically, he searched for an online contact form. Felix didn’t lose his head, ever. He solved problems and freaking out didn’t solve problems.

He located an online form and wrote out the details of his conversation with Kelly like he was filing a bug report, his fingers fast, his description complete, and then he hit SUBMIT.

Van had read over his shoulder. “Felix —” he began.

“God,” Felix said. He was sitting on the floor of the cage and he slowly pulled himself upright. Van took the laptop and tried some news sites, but they were all timing out. Impossible to say if it was because something terrible was happening or because the network was limping under the superworm.

“I need to get home,” Felix said.

“I’ll drive you,” Van said. “You can keep calling your wife.”

They made their way to the elevators. One of the building’s few windows was there, a thick, shielded porthole. They peered through it as they waited for the elevator. Not much traffic for a Wednesday. Where there more police cars than usual?

“Oh my God—” Van pointed.

The CN Tower, a giant white-elephant needle of a building loomed to the east of them. It was askew, like a branch stuck in wet sand. Was it moving? It was. It was heeling over, slowly, but gaining speed, falling northeast toward the financial district. In a second, it slid over the tipping point and crashed down. They felt the shock, then heard it, the whole building rocking from the impact. A cloud of dust rose from the wreckage, and there was more thunder as the world’s tallest freestanding structure crashed through building after building.

“The Broadcast Centre’s coming down,” Van said. It was — the CBC’s towering building was collapsing in slow motion. People ran every way, were crushed by falling masonry. Seen through the porthole, it was like watching a neat CGI trick downloaded from a file-sharing site.

Sysadmins were clustering around them now, jostling to see the destruction.

“What happened?” one of them asked.

“The CN Tower fell down,” Felix said. He sounded far away in his own ears.

“Was it the virus?”

“The worm? What?” Felix focused on the guy, who was a young admin with just a little type-two flab around the middle.

“Not the worm,” the guy said. “I got an e-mail that the whole city’s quarantined because of some virus. Bioweapon, they say.” He handed Felix his Blackberry.

Felix was so engrossed in the report — purportedly fonvarded from Health Canada — that he didn’t even notice that all the lights had gone out. Then he did, and he pressed the Blackberry back into its owner’s hand, and let out one small sob.

The generators kicked in a minute later. Sysadmins stampeded for the stairs. Felix grabbed Van by the arm, pulled him back.

“Maybe we should wait this out in the cage,” he said.

“What about Kelly?” Van said. Felix felt like he was going to throw up. “We should get into the cage, now.” The cage had microparticulate air-filters.

They ran upstairs to the big cage. Felix opened the door and then let it hiss shut behind him.

“Felix, you need to get home—”

“It’s a bioweapon,” Felix said. “Superbug. We’ll be OK in here, I think, so long as the filters hold out.”

“What?”

“Get on IRC,” he said.

They did. Van had Mayor McCheese and Felix used Smurfette. They skipped around the chat channels until they found one with some familiar handles.

> pentagons gone/white house too

> MY NEIGHBORS BARFING BLOOD OFF HIS BALCONY IN SAN DIEGO

> Someone knocked over the Gherkin. Bankers are fleeing the City like rats.

> I heard that the Ginza’s on fire Felix typed: I’m in Toronto. We just saw the CN Tower fall. I’ve heard reports of bioweapons, something very fast.

Van read this and said, “You don’t know how fast it is, Felix. Maybe we were all exposed three days ago.”

Felix closed his eyes. “If that were so we’d be feeling some symptoms, I think.”

> Looks like an EMP took out Hong Kong and maybe Paris — realtime sat footage shows them completely dark, and all netblocks there aren’t routing

> You’re in Toronto?

It was an unfamiliar handle.

> Yes — on Front Street

> my sisters at UofT and i cnt reach her — can you call her?

> No phone service Felix typed, staring at NETWORK PROBLEMS.

“I have a soft phone on Mayor McCheese,” Van said, launching his voice-over-IP app. “I just remembered.”

Felix took the laptop from him and punched in his home number. It rang once, then there was a flat, blatting sound like an ambulance siren in an Italian movie.

> No phone service Felix typed again.

He looked up at Van, and saw that his skinny shoulders were shaking. Van said, “Holy motherfucking shit. The world is ending.”

Felix pried himself off of IRC an hour later. Atlanta had burned. Manhattan was hot — radioactive enough to screw up the webcams looking out over Lincoln Plaza. Everyone blamed Islam until it became clear that Mecca was a smoking pit and the Saudi Royals had been hanged before their palaces.

His hands were shaking, and Van was quietly weeping in the far corner of the cage. He tried calling home again, and then the police. It didn’t work any better than it had the last twenty times.

He sshed into his box downstairs and grabbed his mail. Spam, spam, spam. More spam. Automated messages. There — an urgent message from the intrusion detection system in the Ardent cage.

He opened it and read quickly. Someone was crudely, repeatedly probing his routers. It didn’t match a worm’s signature, either. He followed the traceroute and discovered that the attack had originated in the same building as him, a system in a cage one floor below.

He had procedures for this. He portscanned his attacker and found that port 1337 was open — 1337 was “leet” or “elite” in hacker number/letter substitution code. That was the kind of port that a worm left open to slither in and out of. He googled known sploits that left a listener on port 1337, narrowed this down based on the fingerprinted operating system of the compromised server, and then he had it.

It was an ancient worm, one that every box should have been patched against years before. No mind. He had the client for it, and he used it to create a root account for himself on the box, which he then logged into, and took a look around.

There was one other user logged in, “scaredy”, and he checked the process monitor and saw that scaredy had spawned all the hundreds of processes that were probing him and plenty of other boxen.

He opened a chat:

> Stop probing my server He expected bluster, guilt, denial. He was surprised.

> Are you in the Front Street data-center?

> Yes

> Christ I thought I was the last one alive. I’m on the fourth floor. I think there’s a bioweapon attack outside. I don’t want to leave the clean room.

Felix whooshed out a breath.

> You were probing me to get me to trace back to you?

> Yeah

> That was smart Clever bastard.

> I’m on the sixth floor, I’ve got one more with me.

> What do you know?

Felix pasted in the IRC log and waited while the other guy digested it. Van stood up and paced. His eyes were glazed over.

“Van? Pal?”

“I have to pee,” he said.

“No opening the door,” Felix said. “I saw an empty Mountain Dew bottle in the trash there.”

“Right,” Van said. He walked like a zombie to the trash can and pulled out the empty magnum. He turned his back.

> I’m Felix

> Will Felix’s stomach did a slow somersault as he thought about 2.0.

“Felix, I think I need to go outside,”

Van said. He was moving toward the airlock door. Felix dropped his keyboard and struggled to his feet and ran headlong to Van, tackling him before he reached the door.

“Van,” he said, looking into his friend’s glazed, unfocused eyes. “Look at me, Van.”

“I need to go,” Van said. “I need to get home and feed the cats.”

“There’s something out there, something fast-acting and lethal. Maybe it will blow away with the wind. Maybe it’s already gone. But we’re going to sit here until we know for sure or until we have no choice. Sit down, Van. Sit.”

“I’m cold, Felix.”

It was freezing. Felix’s arms were broken out in gooseflesh and his feet felt like blocks of ice.

“Sit against the servers, by the vents.

Get the exhaust heat.” He found a rack and nestled up against it.

> Are you there?

> Still here — sorting out some logistics

> How long until we can go out?

> I have no idea No one typed anything for quite some time then.

Felix had to use the Mountain Dew bottle twice. Then Van used it again. Felix tried calling Kelly again. The Metro Police site was down.

Finally, he slid back against the servers and wrapped his arms around his knees and wept like a baby.

After a minute, Van came over and sat beside him, with his arm around Felix’s shoulder.

“They’re dead, Van,” Felix said. “Kelly and my s- son. My family is gone.”

“You don’t know for sure,” Van said.

“I’m sure enough,” Felix said. “Christ, it’s all over, isn’t it?”

“We’ll gut it out a few more hours and then head out. Things should be getting back to normal soon. The fire department will fix it. They’ll mobilize the Army. It’ll be OK.”

Felix’s ribs hurt. He hadn’t cried since — Since 2.0 was born. He hugged his knees harder.

Then the doors opened.

The two sysadmins who entered were wild-eyed. One had a Tee that said TALK NERDY TO ME and the other one was wearing an Electronic Frontiers Canada shirt.

“Come on,” TALK NERDY said. “We’re all getting together on the top floor. Take the stairs.”

Felix found he was holding his breath.

“If there’s a bioagent in the building, we’re all infected,” TALK NERDY said. “Just go, we’ll meet you there.”

“There’s one on the sixth floor,” Felix said, as he climbed to his feet.

“Will, yeah, we got him. He’s up there.”

TALK NERDY was one of the Bastard Operators From Hell who’d unplugged the big routers. Felix and Van climbed the stairs slowly, their steps echoing in the deserted shaft. After the frigid air of the cage, the stairwell felt like a sauna.

There was a cafeteria on the top floor, with working toilets, water and coffee and vending machine food. There was an uneasy queue of sysadmins before each. No one met anyone’s eye. Felix wondered which one was Will and then he joined the vending machine queue.

He got a couple more energy bars and a gigantic cup of vanilla coffee before running out of change. Van had scored them some table space and Felix set the stuff down before him and got in the toilet line. “Just save some for me,” he said, tossing an energy bar in front of Van.

By the time they were all settled in, thoroughly evacuated, and eating, TALK NERDY and his friend had returned again. They cleared off the cash-register at the end of the food-prep area and TALK NERDY got up on it. Slowly the conversation died down.

“I’m Uri Popovich, this is Diego Rosenbaum. Thank you all for coming up here. Here’s what we know for sure: the building’s been on generators for three hours now. Visual observation indicates that we’re the only building in central Toronto with working power -which should hold out for three more days. There is a bioagent of unknown origin loose beyond our doors. It kills quickly, within hours, and it is aerosolized. You get it from breathing bad air. No one has opened any of the exterior doors to this building since five this morning. No one will open the doors until I give the go-ahead.

“Attacks on major cities all over the world have left emergency responders in chaos. The attacks are electronic, biological, nuclear and conventional explosives, and they are very widespread. I’m a security engineer, and where I come from, attacks in this kind of cluster are usually viewed as opportunistic: group B blows up a bridge because everyone is off taking care of group A’s dirty nuke event. It’s smart. An Aum Shin Rikyo cell in Seoul gassed the subways there about 2 a.m. Eastern — that’s the earliest event we can locate, so it may have been the Archduke that broke the camel’s back. We’re pretty sure that Aum Shin Rikyo couldn’t be behind this kind of mayhem: they have no history of infowar and have never shown the kind of organizational acumen necessary to take out so many targets at once. Basically, they’re not smart enough.

“We’re holing up here for the foreseeable future, at least until the bioweapon has been identified and dispersed. We’re going to staff the racks and keep the networks up. This is critical infrastructure, and it’s our job to make sure it’s got five nines of uptime. In times of national emergency, our responsibility to do that doubles.”

One sysadmin put up his hand. He was very daring in a green Incredible Hulk ring-Tee, and he was at the young end of the scale.

“Who died and made you king?”

“I have controls for the main security system, keys to every cage, and passcodes for the exterior doors -they’re all locked now, by the way. I’m the one who got everyone up here first and called the meeting. I don’t care if someone else wants this job, it’s a shitty one. But someone needs to have this job.”

“You’re right,” the kid said. “And I can do it every bit as well as you. My name’s Will Sario.”

Popovich looked down his nose at the kid. “Well, if you’ll let me finish talking, maybe I’ll hand things over to you when I’m done.”

“Finish, by all means.” Sario turned his back on him and walked to the window. He stared out of it intensely. Felix’s gaze was drawn to it, and he saw that there were several oily smoke plumes rising up from the city.

Popovich’s momentum was broken. “So that’s what we’re going to do,” he said.

The kid looked around after a stretched moment of silence. “Oh, is it my turn now?”

There was a round of good-natured chuckling.

“Here’s what I think: the world is going to shit. There are coordinated attacks on every critical piece of infrastructure. There’s only one way that those attacks could be so well coordinated: via the Internet. Even if you buy the thesis that the attacks are all opportunistic, we need to ask how an opportunistic attack could be organized in minutes: the Internet.”

“So you think we should shut down the Internet?” Popovich laughed a little, but stopped when Sario said nothing.

“We saw an attack last night that nearly killed the Internet. A little DoS on the critical routers, a little DNS-foo, and down it goes like a preacher’s daughter. Cops and the military are a bunch of technophobic lusers, they hardly rely on the net at all. If we take the Internet down, we’ll disproportionately disadvantage the attackers, while only inconveniencing the defenders. When the time comes, we can rebuild it.”

“You’re shitting me,” Popovich said. His jaw literally hung open.

“It’s logical,” Sario said. “Lots of people don’t like coping with logic when it dictates hard decisions. That’s a problem with people, not logic.”

There was a buzz of conversation that quickly turned into a roar.

“Shut UP!” Popovich hollered. The conversation dimmed by one Watt. Popovich yelled again, stamping his foot on the countertop. Finally there was a semblance of order. “One at a time,” he said. He was flushed red, his hands in his pockets.

One sysadmin was for staying. Another for going. They should hide in the cages. They should inventory their supplies and appoint a quartermaster. They should go outside and find the police, or volunteer at hospitals. They should appoint defenders to keep the front door secure.

Felix found to his surprise that he had his hand in the air. Popovich called on him.

“My name is Felix Tremont,” he said, getting up on one of the tables, drawing out his PDA. “I want to read you something.

“‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

“‘We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

“‘Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.’

“That’s from the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. It was written twelve years ago. I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever read. I wanted my kid to grow up in a world where cyberspace was free -and where that freedom infected the real world, so meatspace got freer too.”

He swallowed hard and scrubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand. Van awkwardly patted him on the shoe.

“My beautiful son and my beautiful wife died today. Millions more, too. The city is literally in flames. Whole cities have disappeared from the map.”

He coughed up a sob and swallowed it again.

“All around the world, people like us are gathered in buildings like this. They were trying to recover from last night’s worm when disaster struck. We have independent power. Food. Water.

“We have the network, that the bad guys use so well and that the good guys have never figured out.

“We have a shared love of liberty that comes from caring about and caring for the network. We are in charge of the most important organizational and governmental tool the world has ever seen. We are the closest thing to a government the world has right now. Geneva is a crater. The East River is on fire and the UN is evacuated.

“The Distributed Republic of Cyberspace weathered this storm basically unscathed. We are the custodians of a deathless, monstrous, wonderful machine, one with the potential to rebuild a better world.

“I have nothing to live for but that.”

There were tears in Van’s eyes. He wasn’t the only one. They didn’t applaud him, but they did one better. They maintained respectful, total silence for seconds that stretched to a minute.

“How do we do it?” Popovich said, without a trace of sarcasm.

The newsgroups were filling up fast. They’d announced them in news.admin.net-abuse.e-mail, where all the spamfighters hung out, and where there was a tight culture of camaraderie in the face of full-out attack.

The new group was alt.n0vember.5-disaster.recovery, with .recovery.gove-rance, .recovery.finance, .recovery.lo-gistics and .recovery.defense hanging off of it. Bless the wooly alt. hierarchy and all those who sail in her.

The sysadmins came out of the woodwork. The Googleplex was online, with the stalwart Queen Kong bossing a gang of rollerbladed grunts who wheeled through the gigantic data-center swapping out dead boxen and hitting reboot switches. The Internet Archive was offline in the Presidio, but the mirror in Amsterdam was live and they’d redirected the DNS so that you’d hardly know the difference. Amazon was down. Paypal was up. Blogger, Typepad and Livejournal were all up, and filling with millions of posts from scared survivors huddling together for electronic warmth.

The Flickr photostreams were horrific. Felix had to unsubscribe from them after he caught a photo of a woman and a baby, dead in a kitchen, twisted into an agonized heiroglyph by the bioagent. They didn’t look like Kelly and 2.0, but they didn’t have to. He started shaking and couldn’t stop.

Wikipedia was up, but limping under load. The spam poured in as though nothing had changed. Worms roamed the network.

.recovery.logistics was where most of the action was

> We can use the newsgroup voting mechanism to hold regional elections Felix knew that this would work. Usenet newsgroup votes had been running for more than twenty years without a substantial hitch.

> We’ll elect regional representatives and they’ll pick a Prime Minister The Americans insisted on President, which Felix didn’t like. Seemed too partisan. His future wouldn’t be the American future. The American future had gone up with the White House. He was building a bigger tent than that.

There were French sysadmins online from France Telecom. The EBU’s data-center had been spared in the attacks that hammered Geneva, and it was filled with wry Germans whose English was better than Felix’s. They got on well with the remains of the BBC team in Canary Wharf.

They spoke polyglot English in .recovery.logistics, and Felix had momentum on his side. Some of the admins were cooling out the inevitable stupid flamewars with the practice of long years. Some were chipping in useful suggestions.

Surprisingly few thought that Felix was off his rocker.

> I think we should hold elections as soon as possible. Tomorrow at the latest. We can’t rule justly without the consent of the governed Within seconds the reply landed in his inbox.

> You can’t be serious. Consent of the governed? Unless I miss my guess, most of the people you’re proposing to govern are puking their guts out, hiding under their desks, or wandering shell-shocked through the city streets. When do THEY get a vote?

Felix had to admit she had a point. Queen Kong was sharp. Not many woman sysadmins, and that was a genuine tragedy. Women like Queen Kong were too good to exclude from the field. He’d have to hack a solution to get women balanced out in his new government. Require each region to elect one woman and one man?

He happily clattered into argument with her. The elections would be the next day; he’d see to it.

“Prime Minister of Cyberspace? Why not call yourself the Grand Poobah of the Global Data Network? It’s more dignified, sounds cooler and it’ll get you just as far.” Will had the sleeping spot next to him, up in the cafeteria, with Van on the other side. The room smelled like a dingleberry: twenty-five sysadmins who hadn’t washed in at least a day all crammed into the same room. For some of them, it had been much, much longer than a day.

“Shut up, Will,” Van said. “You wanted to try to knock the Internet off ine.”

“Correction: I want to knock the Internet offline. Present tense”

Felix cracked one eye. He was so tired, it was like lifting weights.

“Look, Sario — if you don’t like my platform, put one of your own fonvard. There are plenty of people who think I’m full of shit and I respect them for that, since they’re all running opposite me or backing someone who is. That’s your choice. What’s not on the menu is nagging and complaining. Bedtime now, or get up and post your platform.”

Sario sat up slowly, unrolling the jacket he had been using for a pillow and putting it on. “Screw you guys, I’m out of here.”

“I thought he’d never leave,” Felix said and turned over, lying awake a long time, thinking about the election.

There were other people in the running. Some of them weren’t even sysadmins. A US Senator on retreat at his summer place in Wyoming had generator power and a satellite phone. Somehow he’d found the right newsgroup and thrown his hat into the ring. Some anarchist hackers in Italy strafed the group all night long, posting broken-English screeds about the political bankruptcy of “governance” in the new world. Felix looked at their netblock and determined that they were probably holed up in a small Interaction Design institute near Turin. Italy had been hit very bad, but out in the small town, this cell of anarchists had taken up residence.

A surprising number were running on a platform of shutting down the Internet. Felix had his doubts about whether this was even possible, but he thought he understood the impulse to finish the work and the world. Why not? From every indication, it seemed that the work to date had been a cascade of disasters, attacks, and opportunism, all of it adding up to Gotterdammerung. A terrorist attack here, a lethal counterof-fensive there from an overreactive government… Before long, they’d made short work of the world.

He fell asleep thinking about the logistics of shutting down the Internet, and dreamed bad dreams in which he was the network’s sole defender.

He woke to a papery, itchy sound. He rolled over and saw that Van was sitting up, his jacket balled up in his lap, vigorously scratching his skinny arms. They’d gone the color of corned beef, and had a scaly look. In the light streaming through the cafeteria windows, skin motes floated and danced in great clouds.

“What are you doing?” Felix sat up. Watching Van’s fingernails rip into his skin made him itch in sympathy. It had been three days since he’d last washed his hair and his scalp sometimes felt like there were little egg-laying insects picking their way through it. He’d adjusted his glasses the night before and had touched the back of his ears; his finger came away shining with thick sebum. He got blackheads in the backs of his ears when he didn’t shower for a couple days, and sometimes gigantic, deep boils that Kelly finally popped with sick relish.

“Scratching,” Van said. He went to work on his head, sending a cloud of dandruff-crud into the sky, there to join the scurf that he’d already eliminated from his extremeties. “Christ, I itch all over.”

Felix took Mayor McCheese from Van’s backpack and plugged it into one of the Ethernet cable that snaked all over the floor. He googled everything he could think of that could be related to this. “Itchy” yielded 40,600,000 links. He tried compound queries and got slightly more discriminating links.

“I think it’s stress-related eczema,” Felix said, finally.

“I don’t get eczema,” Van said.

Felix showed him some lurid photos of red, angry skin flaked with white. “Stress-related eczema,” he said, reading the caption.

Van examined his arms. “I have eczema,” he said.

“Says here to keep it moisturized and to try cortisone cream. You might try the first aid kit in the second-floor toilets. I think I saw some there.” Like all of the sysadmins, Felix had had a bit of a rummage around the offices, bathrooms, kitchen and store-rooms, squirreling away a roll of toilet-paper in his shoulder-bag along with three or four power-bars. They were sharing out the food in the cafe by unspoken agreement, every sysadmin watching every other for signs of gluttony and hoarding. All were convinced that there was hoarding and gluttony going on out of eyeshot, because all were guilty of it themselves when no one else was watching.

Van got up and when his face hove into the light, Felix saw how puffed his eyes were. “I’ll post to the mailing-list for some antihis-tamine,” Felix said. There had been four mailing lists and three wikis for the survivors in the building within hours of the first meeting’s close, and in the intervening days they’d settled on just one. Felix was still on a little mailing list with five of his most trusted friends, two of whom were trapped in cages in other countries. He suspected that the rest of the sysadmins were doing the same.

Van stumbled off. “Good luck on the elections,” he said, patting Felix on the shoulder.

Felix stood and paced, stopping to stare out the grubby windows. The fires still burned in Toronto, more than before. He’d tried to find mailing lists or blogs that Torontonians were posting to, but the only ones he’d found were being run by other geeks in other data-centers. It was possible — likely, even — that there were survivors out there who had more pressing priorities than posting to the Internet. His home phone still worked about half the time but he’d stopped calling it after the second day, when hearing Kelly’s voice on the voicemail for the fiftieth time had made him cry in the middle of a planning meeting. He wasn’t the only one.

Election day. Time to face the music.

> Are you nervous?

> Nope, Felix typed.

> I don’t much care if I win, to be honest. I’m just glad we’re doing this.

The alternative was sitting around with our thumbs up our ass, waiting for someone to crack up and open the door.

The cursor hung. Queen Kong was very high latency as she bossed her gang of Googloids around the Googleplex, doing everything she could to keep her data center online. Three of the offshore cages had gone offline and two of their six redundant network links were smoked. Lucky for her, queries-per-second were way down.

> There’s still China she typed. Queen Kong had a big board with a map of the world colored in Google-queries-per-second, and could do magic with it, showing the drop-off over time in colorful charts. She’d uploaded lots of video clips showing how the plague and the bombs had swept the world: the initial upswell of queries from people wanting to find out what was going on, then the grim, precipitous shelving off as the plagues took hold.

> China’s still running about ninety per cent nominal.

Felix shook his head.

> You can’t think that they’re responsible

> No She typed, but then she started to key something and then stopped.

> No of course not. I believe the Popovich Hypothesis. Every asshole in the world is using the other assholes for cover. But China put them down harder and faster than anyone else. Maybe we’ve finally found a use for totalitarian states Felix couldn’t resist. He typed:

> You’re lucky your boss can’t see you type that. You guys were pretty enthusiastic participants in the Great Firewall of China

> Wasn’t my idea she typed.

> And my boss is dead. They’re probably all dead. The whole Bay Area got hit hard, and then there was the quake They’d watched the USGS’s automated data-stream from the 6.9 that trashed northern Cal from Gilroy to Sebastapol. Soma webcams revealed the scope of the damage — gas main explosions, seismically retrofitted buildings crumpling like piles of children’s blocks after a good kicking. The Googleplex, floating on a series of gigantic steel springs, had shaken like a plateful of jello, but the racks had stayed in place and the worst injury they’d had was a badly bruised eye on a sysadmin who’d caught a flying cable-crimper in the face.

> Sorry. I forgot

> It’s OK. We all lost people, right?

> Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I’m not worried about the election. Whoever wins, at least we’re doing SOMETHING

> Not if they vote for one of the fuckrags Fuckrag was the epithet that some of the sysadmins were using to describe the contingent that wanted to shut down the Internet. Queen Kong had coined it — apparently it had started life as a catch-all term to describe the clueless IT managers that she’d chewed up through her career.

> They won’t. They’re just tired and sad is all. Your endorsement will carry the day The Googloids were one of the largest and most powerful blocs left behind, along with the satellite uplink crews and the remaining transoceanic crews. Queen Kong’s endorsement had come as a surprise and he’d sent her an e-mail that she’d replied to tersely: “can’t have the fuckrags in charge”.

>gtg she typed and then her connection dropped. He fired up a browser and called up google.com. The browser timed out. He hit reload, and then again, and then the Google front-page came back up. Whatever had hit Queen Kong’s workplace — power failure, worms, another quake — she had fixed it. He snorted when he saw that they’d replaced the o’s in the Google logo with little planet Earths with mushroom clouds rising from them.

“Got anything to eat?” Van said to him. It was mid-afternoon, not that time particularly passed in the data-center. Felix patted his pockets. They’d put a quartermaster in charge, but not before everyone had snagged some chow out of the machines. He’d had a dozen power-bars and some apples. He’d taken a couple sandwiches but had wisely eaten them first before they got stale.

“One power-bar left,” he said. He’d noticed a certain looseness in his waistline that morning and had briefly relished it. Then he’d remembered Kelly’s teasing about his weight and he’d cried some. Then he’d eaten two power bars, leaving him with just one left.

“Oh,” Van said. His face was hollower than ever, his shoulders sloping in on his toast-rack chest.

“Here,” Felix said. “Vote Felix.”

Van took the power-bar from him and then put it down on the table. “OK, I want to give this back to you and say, ‘No, I couldn’t,’ but I’m fucking hungry, so I’m just going to take it and eat it, OK?”

“That’s fine by me,” Felix said. “Enjoy.”

“How are the elections coming?” Van said, once he’d licked the wrapper clean.

“Dunno,” Felix said. “Haven’t checked in a while.” He’d been winning by a slim margin a few hours before. Not having his laptop was a major handicap when it came to stuff like this. Up in the cages, there were a dozen more like him, poor bastards who’d left the house on Der Tag without thinking to snag something WiFi-enabled.

“You’re going to get smoked,” Sario said, sliding in next to them. He’d become famous in the center for never sleeping, for eavesdropping, for picking fights in RL that had the ill-considered heat of a Usenet flamewar. “The winner will be someone who understands a couple of fundamental facts.” He held up a fist, then ticked off his bullet points by raising a finger at a time. “Point: the terrorists are using the Internet to destroy the world, and we need to destroy the Internet first. Point: even if I’m wrong, the whole thing is a joke. We’ll run out of generator-fuel soon enough. Point: or if we don’t, it will be because the old world will be back and running, and it won’t give a crap about your new world. Point: we’re gonna run out of food before we run out of shit to argue about or reasons not to go outside. We have the chance to do something to help the world recover: we can kill the net and cut it off as a tool for bad guys. Or we can rearrange some more deck chairs on the bridge of your personal Titanic in the service of some sweet dream about an ‘independent cyberspace’.”

The thing was that Sario was right. They would be out of fuel in two days -intermittent power from the grid had stretched their generator lifespan. And if you bought his hypothesis that the Internet was primarily being used as a tool to organize more mayhem, shutting it down would be the right thing to do.

But Felix’s daughter and his wife were dead. He didn’t want to rebuild the old world. He wanted a new one. The old world was one that didn’t have any place for him. Not anymore.

Van scratched his raw, flaking skin. Puffs of dander and scurf swirled in the musty, greasy air. Sario curled a lip at him. “That is disgusting. We’re breathing recycled air, you know. Whatever leprosy is eating you, aerosolizing it into the air supply is pretty anti-social.”

“You’re the world’s leading authority on anti-social, Sario,” Van said. “Go away or I’ll multi-tool you to death.” He stopped scratching and patted his sheathed multi-pliers like a gunslinger.

“Yeah, I’m anti-social. I’ve got Asperger’s and I haven’t taken any meds in four days. What’s your fucking excuse.”

Van scratched some more. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

Sario cracked up. “Oh, you are priceless. I’d bet that three-quarters of this bunch is borderline autistic. Me, I’m just an asshole. But I’m one who isn’t afraid to tell the truth, and that makes me better than you, dickweed.”

“Fuckrag,” Felix said, “fuck off.”

They had less than a day’s worth of fuel when Felix was elected the first-ever Prime Minister of Cyberspace. The first count was spoiled by a bot that spammed the voting process and they lost a critical day while they added up the votes a second time.

But by then, it was all seeming like more of a joke. Half the data-centers had gone dark. Queen Kong’s net-maps of Google queries were looking grimmer and grimmer as more of the world went offline, though she maintained a leader-board of new and rising queries — largely related to health, shelter, sanitation and self-defense.

Worm-load slowed. Power was going off to many home PC users, and staying off, so their compromised PCs were going dark. The backbones were still lit up and blinking, but the missives from those data-centers were looking more and more desperate. Felix hadn’t eaten in a day and neither had anyone in a satellite Earth-station of transoceanic head-end.

Water was running short, too.

Popovich and Rosenbaum came and got him before he could do more than answer a few congratulatory messages and post a canned acceptance speech to newsgroups.

“We’re going to open the doors,” Popovich said. Like all of them, he’d lost weight and waxed scruffy and oily. His BO was like a cloud coming off the trash-bags behind a fish-market on a sunny day. Felix was quite sure he smelled no better.

“You’re going to go for a reccy? Get more fuel? We can charter a working group for it — great idea.”

Rosenbaum shook his head sadly. “We’re going to go find our families. Whatever is out there has burned itself out. Or it hasn’t. Either way, there’s no future in here.”

“What about network maintenance?” Felix said, thought he knew the answers. “Who’ll keep the routers up?”

“We’ll give you the root passwords to everything,” Popovich said. His hands were shaking and his eyes were bleary. Like many of the smokers stuck in the data-center, he’d gone cold turkey this week. They’d run out of caffeine products two days earlier, too. The smokers had it rough.

“And I’ll just stay here and keep everything online?”

“You and anyone else who cares anymore.”

Felix knew that he’d squandered his opportunity. The election had seemed noble and brave, but in hindsight all it had been was an excuse for infighting when they should have been figuring out what to do next. The problem was that there was nothing to do next.

“I can’t make you stay,” he said.

“Yeah, you can’t.” Popovich turned on his heel and walked out. Rosenbaum watched him go, then he gripped Felix’s shoulder and squeezed it.

“Thank you, Felix. It was a beautiful dream. It still is. Maybe we’ll find something to eat and some fuel and come back.”

Rosenbaum had a sister whom he’d been in contact with over IM for the first days after the crisis broke. Then she’d stopped answering. The sysadmins were split among those who’d had a chance to say goodbye and those who hadn’t. Each was sure the other had it better.

They posted about it on the internal newsgroup — they were still geeks, after all, and there was a little honor guard on the ground floor, geeks who watched them pass toward the double doors. They manipulated the keypads and the steel shutters lifted, then the first set of doors opened. They stepped into the vestibule and pulled the doors shut behind them. The front doors opened. It was very bright and sunny outside, and apart from how empty it was, it looked very normal. Heartbreakingly so.

The two took a tentative step out into the world. Then another. They turned to wave at the assembled masses. Then they both grabbed their throats and began to jerk and twitch, crumpling in a heap on the ground.

“Shiii —!” was all Felix managed to choke out before they both dusted themselves off and stood up, laughing so hard they were clutching their sides. They waved once more and turned on their heels.

“Man, those guys are sick,” Van said. He scratched his arms, which had long, bloody scratches on them. His clothes were so covered in scurf they looked like they’d been dusted with icing sugar.

“I thought it was pretty funny,” Felix said.

“Christ I’m hungry,” Van said, conversationally.

“Lucky for you, we’ve got all the packets we can eat,” Felix said.

“You’re too good to us grunts, Mr President,” Van said.

“Prime Minister,” he said. “And you’re no grunt, you’re the Deputy Prime Minister. You’re my designated ribbon-cutter and hander-out of oversized novelty checks.”

It buoyed both of their spirits. Watching Popovich and Rosenbaum go, it buoyed them up. Felix knew then that they’d all be going soon.

That had been pre-ordained by the fuel-supply, but who wanted to wait for the fuel to run out, anyway?

> half my crew split this morning Queen Kong typed. Google was holding up pretty good anyway, of course. The load on the servers was a lot lighter than it had been since the days when Google fit on a bunch of hand-built PCs under a desk at Stanford.

> we’re down to a quarter Felix typed back. It was only a day since Popovich and Rosenbaum left, but the traffic on the newsgroups had fallen down to near zero. He and Van hadn’t had much time to play Republic of Cyberspace. They’d been too busy learning the systems that Popovich had turned over to them, the big, big routers that had went on acting as the major interchange for all the network backbones in Canada.

Still, someone posted to the newsgroups every now and again, generally to say goodbye. The old flamewars about who would be PM, or whether they would shut down the network, or who took too much food — it was all gone.

He reloaded the newsgroup. There was a typical message.

> Runaway processes on Solaris TK>

> Uh, hi. I’m just a lightweight MSCE but I’m the only one awake here and four of the DSLAMs just went down. Looks like there’s some custom accounting code that’s trying to figure out how much to bill our corporate customers and it’s spawned ten thousand threads and its eating all the swap. I just want to kill it but I can’t seem to do that. Is there some magic invocation I need to do to get this goddamned weenix box to kill this shit? I mean, it’s not as if any of our customers are ever going to pay us again. I’d ask the guy who wrote this code, but he’s pretty much dead as far as anyone can work out He reloaded. There was a response. It was short, authoritative, and helpful -just the sort of thing you almost never saw in a high-caliber newsgroup when a noob posted a dumb question. The apocalypse had awoken the spirit of patient helpfulness in the world’s sysop community.

Van shoulder-surfed him. “Holy shit, who knew he had it in him?”

He looked at the message again. It was from Will Sario.

He dropped into his chat window.

> sario i thought you wanted the network dead why are you helping msces fix their boxen?

>< sheepish grin> Gee Mr PM, maybe I just can’t bear to watch a computer suffer at the hands of an amateur He flipped to the channel with Queen Kong in it.

> How long?

> Since I slept? Two days. Until we run out of fuel? Three days. Since we ran out of food? Two days.

> Jeez. I didn’t sleep last night either. We’re a little short- handed around here.

> asl? Im monica and I live in pasadena and Im bored with my homework. Would you like to download my pic???

The trojan bots were all over IRC these days, jumping to every channel that had any traffic on it. Sometimes you caught five or six flirting with each other. It was pretty weird to watch a piece of malware try to con another instance of itself into downloading a trojan.

They both kicked the bot off the channel simultaneously. He had a script for it now. The spam hadn’t even tailed off a little.

> How come the spam isn’t reducing? Half the goddamned data-centers have gone dark Queen Kong paused a long time before typing. As had become automatic when she went high-latency, he reloaded the Google homepage. Sure enough, it was down.

> Sario, you got any food?

> You won’t miss a couple more meals, Your Excellency Van had gone back to Mayor McCheese but he was in the same channel.

“What a dick. You’re looking pretty buff, though, dude.”

Van didn’t look so good. He looked like you could knock him over with a stiff breeze and he had a phlegmy, weak quality to his speech.

> hey kong everything ok?

> everything’s fine just had to go kick some ass

“How’s the traffic, Van?”

“Down twenty-five per cent from this morning,” he said. There were a bunch of nodes whose connections routed through them. Presumably most of these were home or commercial customers in places where the power was still on and the phone company’s COs were still alive.

Every once in a while, Felix would wiretap the connections to see if he could find a person who had news of the wide world. Almost all of it was automated traffic, though: network backups, status updates. Spam. Lots of spam.

> Spam’s still up because the services that stop spam are failing faster than the services that create it. All the anti-worm stuff is centralized in a couple places. The bad stuff is on a million zombie computers. If only the lusers had had the good sense to turn off their home PCs before keeling over or taking off

> at the rate were going well be routing nothing but spam by dinnertime Van cleared his throat, a painful sound. “About that,” he said. “I think it’s going to hit sooner than that. Felix, I don’t think anyone would notice if we just walked away from here.”

Felix looked at him, his skin the color of corned-beef and streaked with long, angry scabs. His fingers trembled.

“You drinking enough water?”

Van nodded. “All frigging day, every ten seconds. Anything to keep my belly full.” He pointed to a refilled Pepsi Max bottle full of water by his side.

“Let’s have a meeting,” Felix said.

There had been forty-three of them on D-Day. Now there were fifteen. Six had responded to the call for a meeting by simply leaving. Everyone knew without having to be told what the meeting was about.

“So that’s it, you’re going to let it all fall apart?” Sario was the only one with the energy left to get properly angry. He’d go angry to his grave. The veins on his throat and forehead stood out angrily. His fists shook angrily. All the other geeks went lids-down at the site of him, looking up in unison for once at the discussion, not keeping one eye on a chat-log or a tailed service log.

“Sario, you’ve got to be shitting me,” Felix said. “You wanted to pull the goddamned plug!”

“I wanted it to go clean,” he shouted. “I didn’t want it to bleed out and keel over in little gasps and pukes forever. I wanted it to be an act of will by the global community of its caretakers. I wanted it to be an affirmative act by human hands. Not entropy and bad code and worms winning out. Fuck that, that’s just what’s happened out there.”

Up in the top-floor cafeteria, there were windows all around, hardened and light-bending, and by custom, they were all blinds-down. Now Sario ran around the room, yanking up the blinds. How the hell can he get the energy to run? Felix wondered. He could barely walk up the stairs to the meeting room.

Harsh daylight flooded in. It was a fine sunny day out there, but everywhere you looked across that commanding view of Toronto’s skyline, there were rising plumes of smoke. The TD tower, a gigantic black modernist glass brick, was gouting flame to the sky. “It’s all falling apart, the way everything does.

“Listen, listen. If we leave the network to fall over slowly, parts of it will stay online for months. Maybe years. And what will run on it? Malware. Worms. Spam. System-processes. Zone transfers. The things we use fall apart and require constant maintenance. The things we abandon don’t get used and they last forever. We’re going to leave the network behind like a lime-pit filled with industrial waste. That will be our fucking legacy -the legacy of every keystroke you and I and anyone, anywhere ever typed. You understand? We’re going to leave it to die slow like a wounded dog, instead of giving it one clean shot through the head.”

Van scratched his cheeks, then Felix saw that he was wiping away tears.

“Sario, you’re not wrong, but you’re not right either,” he said. “Leaving it up to limp along is right. We’re going to all be limping for a long time, and maybe it will be some use to someone. If there’s one packet being routed from any user to any other user, anywhere in the world, it’s doing its job.”

“If you want a clean kill, you can do that,” Felix said. “I’m the PM and I say so. I’m giving you root. All of you.” He turned to the white-board where the cafeteria workers used to scrawl the day’s specials. Now it was covered with the remnants of heated technical debates that the sysadmins had engaged in over the days since the day.

He scrubbed away a clean spot with his sleeve and began to write out long, complicated alphanumeric passwords salted with punctuation. Felix had a gift for remembering that kind of password. He doubted it would do him much good, ever again.

> Were going, kong. Fuels almost out anyway

> yeah well thats right then, it was an honor, mr prime minister

> you going to be ok?

> ive commandeered a young sysadmin to see to my feminine needs and weve found another cache of food thatll last us a coupel weeks now that were down to fifteen admins — im in hog heaven pal

> youre amazing, Queen Kong, seriously. Dont be a hero though. When you need to go go. Theres got to be something out there

> be safe felix, seriously — btw did i tell you queries are up in Romania? maybe theyre getting back on their feet

> really?

> yeah, really, we’re hard to kill -like fucking roaches Her connection died. He dropped to Firefox and reloaded Google and it was down. He hit reload and hit reload and hit reload, but it didn’t come up. He closed his eyes and listened to Van scratch his legs and then heard Van type a little.

“They’re back up,” he said. Felix whooshed out a breath. He sent the message to the newsgroup, one that he’d run through five drafts before settling on, “Take care of the place, OK? We’ll be back, someday.”

Everyone was going except Sario. Sario wouldn’t leave. He came down to see them off, though.

The sysadmins gathered in the lobby and Felix made the safety door go up, and the light rushed in.

Sario stuck his hand out.

“Good luck,” he said.

“You too,” Felix said. He had a firm grip, Sario, stronger than he had any right to be. “Maybe you were right,” he said.

“Maybe,” he said.

“You going to pull the plug?”

Sario looked up at the drop-ceiling, seeming to peer through the reinforced floors at the humming racks above. “Who knows?” he said at last.

Van scratched and a flurry of white motes danced in the sunlight.

“Let’s go find you a pharmacy,” Felix said. He walked to the door and the other sysadmins followed.

They waited for the interior doors to close behind them and then Felix opened the exterior doors. The air smelled and tasted like a mown grass, like the first drops of rain, like the lake and the sky, like the outdoors and the world, an old friend not heard from in an eternity.

“Bye, Felix,” the other sysadmins said. They were drifting away while he stood transfixed at the top of the short concrete staircase. The light hurt his eyes and made them water.

“I think there’s a Shopper’s Drug Mart on King Street,” he said to Van. “We’ll throw a brick through the window and get you some cortisone, OK?”

“You’re the Prime Minister,” Van said. “Lead on.”

They didn’t see a single soul on the fifteen-minute walk. There wasn’t a single sound except for some bird noises and some distant groans, and the wind in the electric cables overhead. It was like walking on the surface of the moon.

“Bet they have chocolate bars at the Shopper’s,” Van said.

Felix’s stomach lurched. Food. “Wow,” he said, around a mouthful of saliva.

They walked past a little hatchback and in the front seat was the dried body of a woman holding the dried body of a baby, and his mouth filled with sour bile, even though the smell was faint through the rolled-up windows.

He hadn’t thought of Kelly or 2.0 in days. He dropped to his knees and retched again. Out here in the real world, his family was dead. Everyone he knew was dead. He just wanted to lie down on the sidewalk and wait to die, too.

Van’s rough hands slipped under his armpits and hauled weakly at him. “Not now,” he said. “Once we’re safe inside somewhere and we’ve eaten something, then and only then you can do this, but not now. Understand me, Felix? Not fucking now.”

The profanity got through to him. He got to his feet. His knees were trembling.

“Just a block more,” Van said, and slipped Felix’s arm around his shoulders and led him along.

“Thank you, Van. I’m sorry.”

“No sweat,” he said. “You need a shower, bad. No offense.”

“None taken.”

The Shopper’s had a metal security gate, but it had been torn away from the front windows, which had been rudely smashed. Felix and Van squeezed through the gap and stepped into the dim drug-store. A few of the displays were knocked over, but other than that, it looked okay. By the cash-registers, Felix spotted the racks of candy bars at the same instant that Van saw them, and they hurried over and grabbed a handful each, stuffing their faces.

“You two eat like pigs.”

They both whirled at the sound of the woman’s voice. She was holding a fire-axe that was nearly as big as she was. She wore a lab-coat and comfortable shoes.

“You take what you need and go, okay? No sense in there being any trouble.” Her chin was pointy and her eyes were sharp. She looked to be in her forties. She looked nothing like Kelly, which was good, because Felix felt like running and giving her a hug as it was. Another person alive!

“Are you a doctor?” Felix said. She was wearing scrubs under the coat, he saw.

“You going to go?” She brandished the axe.

Felix held his hands up. “Seriously, are you a doctor? A pharmacist?”

“I used to be a RN, ten years ago. I’m mostly a Web-designer.”

“You’re shitting me,” Felix said.

“Haven’t you ever met a girl who knew about computers?”

“Actually, a friend of mine who runs Google’s data-center is a girl. A woman, I mean.”

“You’re shitting me,” she said. “A woman ran Google’s data-center?”

“Runs,” Felix said. “It’s still online.”

“NFW,” she said. She let the axe lower.

“Way. Have you got any cortisone cream? I can tell you the story. My name’s Felix and this is Van, who needs any anti-histamines you can spare.”

“I can spare? Felix old pal, I have enough dope here to last a hundred years. This stuffs going to expire long before it runs out. But are you telling me that the net’s still up?”

“It’s still up,” he said. “Kind of. That’s what we’ve been doing all week. Keeping it online. It might not last much longer, though.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t suppose it would.” She set the axe down. “Have you got anything to trade? I don’t need much, but I’ve been trying to keep my spirits up by trading with the neighbors. It’s like playing civilization.”

“You have neighbors?”

“At least ten,” she said. “The people in the restaurant across the way make a pretty good soup, even if most of the veg is canned. They cleaned me out of Sterno, though.”

“You’ve got neighbors and you trade with them?”

“Well, nominally. It’d be pretty lonely without them. I’ve taken care of whatever sniffles I could. Set a bone -broken wrist. Listen, do you want some Wonder Bread and peanut butter? I have a ton of it. Your friend looks like he could use a meal.”

“Yes please,” Van said. “We don’t have anything to trade, but we’re both committed workaholics looking to learn a profession. Could you use some assistants?”

“Not really.” She spun her axe on its head. “But I wouldn’t mind some company.”

They ate the sandwiches and then some soup. The restaurant people brought it over and made their manners at them, though Felix saw their noses wrinkle up and ascertained that there was working plumbing in the back room. Van went in to take a sponge bath and then he followed.

“None of us knows what to do,” the woman said. Her name was Rosa, and she had found them a bottle of wine and some disposable plastic cups from the housewares aisle. “I thought we’d have helicopters or tanks or even looters, but it’s just quiet.”

“You seem to have kept pretty quiet yourself,” Felix said.

“Didn’t want to attract the wrong kind of attention.”

“You ever think that maybe there’s a lot of people out there doing the same thing? Maybe if we all get together we’ll come up with something to do.”

“Or maybe they’ll cut our throats,” she said.

Van nodded. “She’s got a point.”

Felix was on his feet. “No way, we can’t think like that. Lady, we’re at a critical juncture here. We can go down through negligence, dwindling away in our hiding holes, or we can try to build something better.”

“Better?” She made a rude noise.

“Okay, not better. Something though. Building something new is better than letting it dwindle away. Christ, what are you going to do when you’ve read all the magazines and eaten all the potato chips here?”

Rosa shook her head. “Pretty talk,” she said. “But what the hell are we going to do, anyway?”

“Something,” Felix said. “We’re going to do something. Something is better than nothing. We’re going to take this patch of the world where people are talking to each other, and we’re going to expand it. We’re going to find everyone we can and we’re going to take care of them and they’re going to take care of us. We’ll probably fuck it up. We’ll probably fail. I’d rather fail than give up, though.”

Van laughed. “Felix, you are crazier than Sario, you know it?”

“We’re going to go and drag him out, first thing tomorrow. He’s going to be a part of this, too. Everyone will. Screw the end of the world. The world doesn’t end. Humans aren’t the kind of things that have endings.”

Rosa shook her head again, but she was smiling a little now. “And you’ll be what, the Pope-Emperor of the World?”

“He prefers Prime Minister,” Van said in a stagey whisper. The antihistamines had worked miracles on his skin, and it had faded from angry red to a fine pink.

“You want to be Minister of Health, Rosa?” he said.

“Boys,” she said. “Playing games. How about this. I’ll help out however I can, provided you never ask me to call you Prime Minister and you never call me the Minister of Health?”

“It’s a deal,” he said.

Van refilled their glasses, upending the wine bottle to get the last few drops out.

They raised their glasses. “To the world,” Felix said. “To humanity.” He thought hard. “To rebuilding.”

“To anything,” Van said.

“To anything,” Felix said. “To everything.”

“To everything,” Rosa said.

They drank. He wanted to go see the house — see Kelly and 2.0, though his stomach churned at the thought of what he might find there. But the next day, they started to rebuild. And months later, they started over again, when disagreements drove apart the fragile little group they’d pulled together. And a year after that, they started over again. And five years later, they started again.

It was nearly six months, then, before he went home. Van helped him along, riding cover behind him on the bicycles they used to get around town. The further north they rode, the stronger the smell of burnt wood became. There were lots of burnt-out houses. Sometimes marauders burnt the houses they’d looted, but more often it was just nature, the kinds of fires you got in forests and on mountains. There were six choking, burnt blocks where every house was burnt before they reached home.

But Felix’s old housing development was still standing, an oasis of eerily pristine buildings that looked like maybe their somewhat neglectful owners had merely stepped out to buy some paint and fresh lawnmower blades to bring their old homes back up to their neat, groomed selves.

That was worse, somehow. He got off the bike at the entry of the subdivision and they walked the bikes together in silence, listening to the sough of the wind in the trees. Winter was coming late that year, but it was coming, and as the sweat dried in the wind, Felix started to shiver.

He didn’t have his keys anymore. They were at the data-center, months and worlds away. He tried the door-handle, but it didn’t turn. He applied his shoulder to the door and it ripped away from its wet, rotted jamb in with a loud, splintering sound. The house was rotting from the inside.

The door splashed when it landed. The house was full of stagnant water, four inches of stinking pond-scummed water in the living room. He splashed carefully through it, feeling the floor-boards sag spongily beneath each step.

Up the stairs, his nose full of that terrible green mildewy stench. Into the bedroom, the furniture familiar as a childhood friend.

Kelly was in the bed with 2.0. The way they both lay, it was clear they hadn’t gone easy — they were twisted double, Kelly curled around 2.0. Their skin was bloated, making them almost unrecognizable. The smell — God, the smell.

Felix’s head spun. He thought he would fall over and clutched at the dresser. An emotion he couldn’t name -rage, anger, sorrow? — made him breathe hard, gulp for air like he was drowning.

And then it was over. The world was over. Kelly and 2.0 — over. And he had a job to do. He folded the blanket over them — Van helped, solemnly. They went into the front yard and took turns digging, using the shovel from the garage that Kelly had used for gardening. They had lots of experience digging graves by then. Lots of experience handling the dead. They dug, and wary dogs watched them from the tall grass on the neighboring lawns, but they were also good at chasing off dogs with well-thrown stones.

When the grave was dug, they laid Felix’s wife and son to rest in it. Felix quested after words to say over the mound, but none came. He’d dug so many graves for so many men’s wives and so many women’s husbands and so many children — the words were long gone.

Felix dug ditches and salvaged cans and buried the dead. He planted and harvested. He fixed some cars and learned to make biodiesel. Finally he fetched up in a data-center for a little government — little governments came and went, but this one was smart enough to want to keep records and needed someone to keep everything running, and Van went with him.

They spent a lot of time in chat rooms and sometimes they happened upon old friends from the strange time they’d spent running the Distributed Republic of Cyberspace, geeks who insisted on calling him PM, though no one in the real world ever called him that anymore.

It wasn’t a good life, most of the time. Felix’s wounds never healed, and neither did most other people’s. There were lingering sicknesses and sudden ones. Tragedy on tragedy.

But Felix liked his data-center. There in the humming of the racks, he never felt like it was the first days of a better nation, but he never felt like it was the last days of one, either.

> go to bed, felix

> soon, kong, soon — almost got this backup running

> youre a junkie, dude.

> look whos talking He reloaded the Google homepage. Queen Kong had had it online. The Os in Google changed all the time, whenever she got the urge. Today they were little cartoon globes, one smiling the other frowning.

He looked at it for a long time and dropped back into a terminal to check his backup. It was running clean, for a change. The little government’s records were safe.

> ok night night

> take care Van waved at him as he creaked to the door, stretching out his back with a long series of pops.

“Sleep well, boss,” he said.

“Don’t stick around here all night again,” Felix said. “You need your sleep, too.”

“You’re too good to us grunts,” Van said, and went back to typing.

Felix went to the door and walked out into the night. Behind him, the biodiesel generator hummed and made its acrid fumes. The harvest moon was up, which he loved. Tomorrow, he’d go back and fix another computer and fight off entropy again. And why not?

It was what he did. He was a sysadmin.

THE RAIN AT THE END OF THE WORLD Dale Bailey

Dale Bailey is a professor of English at Lenoir-Rhyne College, North Carolina. His novel The Fallen (2002) was a nominee for the International Horror Guild Award, an award he went on to win with his 2002 short story “Death and Suffrage”. His short fiction has been collected in The Resurrection Man’s Legacy (2003). He is also the author of a study of contemporary horror fiction, American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction (1999).

This story and the next one form something of a related sequence looking at how individuals may react to a global flood.

THEY DROVE NORTH, into ever-falling rain. Rain slanted out of the evening sky and spattered against the windshield where the humming wipers slapped it away. Rain streamed from the highway to carve twisted runnels in the gravelled berm. Raindrops beaded up along the windows and rolled swiftly away as the slipstream caught them up. All about them, only the rain, and to fill the voiceless silence, the sounds of tires against wet pavement and rain drumming with insistent fingers all about the car. And in these sounds, Melissa heard another sound, a child’s voice, repeating a scrap of some old nursery rhyme: rain, rain go away, come again some other day.

For forty-nine days, nothing but rain, everywhere, all across the United States, in Canada, in Mexico, in Brazil, in England and France and Germany, in Somalia and South Africa, in the People’s Republic of China. It was raining all around the world. Rivers of water flowed out of the sky, tides rose and streams swelled, crops rotted like flesh in the fields.

Weathermen were apologetic. “Rain,” they said during the five-day forecast. “Just rain.” Statesmen expressed alarm, scientists confusion. Religious fanatics built arks. And Melissa — who once, in a year she could barely remember, had fantasized making love in the rain — Melissa saw her life swept away in the rain. They drove north, to the mountain cabin -three rooms for her and Stuart, her husband. And all about them the unceasing rain.

Melissa sighed and studied the book she had tried to read as they drove east out of Knoxville that afternoon. A failed effort, that, defeated by the swaying car. She glanced at Stuart and almost spoke, but what could she say? The silence was a wall between them; they’d lost the rhythm of conversation. They hadn’t exchanged a word since they had changed highways at Wytheville, when Stuart snapped at her for smoking.

Staring at him now, Melissa thought he was changing, a subtle transformation that had begun — when? days ago? weeks? who could say? — some time during the endless period after the clouds rolled in and rain began to descend like doom from the heavy sky. In the dash lights, his once-ruddy features were ghastly and pale, like the features of a corpse. Pasty flesh stretched taut across the angular planes of his skull; his mouth compressed into a white line. Shadow rippled across his tense features, across his hairline, retreating from a sharp widow’s peak though he was only thirty-five.

“Do you have to stare at me?” he said. “Why don’t you read your book?”

“It’s getting dark.”

“Turn on the light then.”

“I don’t want to read. It was making me sick.”

Stuart shrugged and hunched closer over the wheel.

Melissa looked away.

At first, it had been refreshing, the rain, lancing out of the afternoon sky as she drove home from her art history class. She parked the car and stood in the yard, staring up at the gray sky, at lightning incandescent in swollen cloud bellies. Rain poured down, spattering her cheeks and eyelids, running fresh into her open mouth, plastering her garments close against her flesh.

By the thirteenth day — she had gone back by then and added them up, the endless days of unrelenting rain — the haunted look began to show in Stuart’s eyes. His voice grew harsh and strained as discordant music, as it did when she tested his patience with minutiae. That was his word for it: minutiae, pronounced in that gently mocking way he had perfected in the two years since the baby. Not mean, for Stuart was anything but mean; just teasing. “Just teasing,” he always said, and then his lips would shape that word again: minutiae, meaning all the silly trivia that were her life — her gardening, her reading, her occasional class.

By this time the pressure had begun to tell on them all. You could see it in the faces of the newscasters on CNN, in the haunted vacancies behind the weary eyes of the scientists on the Sunday talk shows — vacancies of ignorance and despair. How could they account for this rain that fell simultaneously over every square inch of the planet? How could anyone? By this time — the thirteenth day — you could detect the frayed edges of hysteria and fear. Evangelists intoned portentously that the Rapture was at hand. Certain government experiments had gone awry, a neighbor, who had a friend whose brother-in-law worked at Oak Ridge national labs, confided ominously; flying saucers had been sighted over an airbase in Arizona.

On the twenty-seventh day — a Saturday, and by this time everyone was keeping count — Stuart walked about the house with the stiff-kneed gait of an automaton, jerkily pacing from window to window, shading his eyes as he peered out into the gloom and falling rain.

“Why don’t you call Jim?” Melissa had said. “See if he wants to do something. Get out of here before you go crazy.” Or drive me crazy, she thought, but didn’t say it. She was reading Harper’s and smoking a Marlboro Light — a habit she had picked up two years ago, after the miscarriage. She had always planned to quit, but she somehow never did. It was too easy to smoke at home alone. Stuart had discouraged her from going back to teaching. Take some time for yourself, he had said. And why not? They didn’t need the money now that Stuart had made partner. And it would have been too hard to be around kids.

“I don’t want to call Jim,” Stuart had said. He peered out into the rain. “I wish you’d quit smoking. It stinks up the whole house.”

“I know,” she said. And she had tried. But as soon as she quit, she started putting on weight, and Stuart didn’t like that either, so what was she to do? Smoke.

Now, driving through rain across the ridges separating Virginia and West Virginia, she fumbled in her purse for a cigarette. The flame of the lighter threw Stuart’s angular face into relief, highlighting a ghostly network of lines and shadows that brooded in the hollows around his eyes and beneath his cheeks. For a moment, before the flame blinked out and darkness rushed back into the car, she knew what he would look like when he was old. But he was handsome still, she thought, distinguished even, with the first hint of gray in his dark hair.

Still handsome after twelve years, still the same Stuart. He had noticed her at a time when few men did, had made her feel beautiful and alive, as if she shared his color and energy, his arrogant charm. And just then, leaning over beside her in freshman composition, he had been boyishly vulnerable. “Look,” he’d said, “I’m not very good at this kind of stuff. Do you think you can help me?”

That was a long time ago, but the old Stuart was still there; sometimes she could see vulnerability peeking through the cool and distant resolve he had woven about himself after the baby. She had talked about adoption for a while and she had seen it then — the ghost of that insecurity in the hard curve of his jaw, in the brazen tone of his voice. As if the miscarriage had been his fault.

She cracked her window and blew smoke into the downpour. Stuart coughed theatrically.

“Leave it alone, Stuart,” she said.

Stuart grimaced. He flipped on the radio and searched for a station with one hand. Most of the stations had gone off the air by now, same as the television networks. Why, no one could be certain.

Hysteria, Melissa suspected. The government had shut them down to prevent hysteria. In the last week or two news reports had become increasingly disturbing, often bizarre: floods of epic proportions in the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys and just about everywhere else, roving gangs in the sodden streets, doom cults who practiced human sacrifice to appease angry weather gods, videotapes of the giant toadstool forest that had erupted over miles and miles of empty western territory. In many places, money was no longer good. People had taken to bartering for canned food, gasoline, cigarettes.

By day thirty-six, Stuart had himself begun to stock up on gasoline and the non-perishable food crammed into the back of the Jeep. He had wanted to buy a gun, but Melissa had drawn the line there; the world might retreat into savagery, but she would have no part of it. At night, the two of them sat without speaking in the living room while the rain beat against the roof. They watched the news on television, and then — on the forty-second day of rain, when the airwaves rang with commentary about surpassing Noah — the cable went dead. Every channel blank, empty, gray. The cable company didn’t answer; radio news reported that television had gone out simultaneously across the country; and then, one by one over the next few days, the radio stations themselves started to go. Without warning or explanation they simply disappeared, static on the empty dial.

Stuart refused to give up; every hour he turned on the radio and spun through the frequencies. Static, more static, an occasional lunatic babbling (but who was a lunatic now, Melissa wondered, now that the whole world had gone insane?), more static. But the static had a message, too:

Roads are washing away, the static said, bridges are being obliterated. The world as we know it is being re-made.

Now, driving, Stuart spun through the channels again, FM and then AM. Static and static and then a voice: calm, rational, a woman’s cultured voice in an echoing studio that sounded far, far away.

They paused, listening:

“It’s over,” the woman was saying.

And the interviewer, a man, his voice flat: “What’s over?What do you mean?”

“The entire world, the civilization that men have built over the last 2,000 years, since Homer and the Greeks, since earlier—”

“For Christ’s sake,” Stuart said, stabbing at the radio; Melissa reached out to stop him, thinking that anything, even lunacy, was better than this silence that had grown up between them in the last years and which seemed now, in the silent car, more oppressive than it ever had.

“Please,” she said, and sighing,

Stuart relented.

“—apocalypse,” the man was saying. “The world is to be utterly destroyed, is that what you’re saying?”

“Not at all. Not destroyed. Recreated, refashioned, renewed -whatever.”

“Like the Noah story? God is displeased with what we’ve made of ourselves.”

“Not with what we’ve made,” the woman said. “With what you’ve made.”

A lengthy pause followed, so lengthy that Melissa for a moment thought they had lost the station, and then the man spoke again. She realized that he had been trying to puzzle out the woman’s odd distinction, and having failed, had chosen to ignore it. He said: “What you’re saying, though, is that God is out there. And He is angry.”

“No, no,” the woman said. “She is.”

“Christ,” Stuart said, and this time he did punch the search button. The radio cycled through a station or two of static and hit on yet another active channel. The strains of Credence Clearwater Revival filled the car — “Who’ll Stop the Rain?”, and that joke had been old three weeks ago. He shut off the radio.

All along, he had been this way, refusing to acknowledge the reality of their situation. All along, he had continued to work, shuffling files and depositions though the courts had all but ground to a halt. It was as if he believed he could make the world over as it had been, simply by ignoring the rain. But by yesterday — day forty-eight — the pressure had truly begun to tell on him. Melissa could see it in his panicked eyes.

That day, in the silent house with Stuart gone to work, Melissa stood by the window and looked out across the yard at toadstools, like bowing acolytes to the rain. Pasty fungoid stalks, cold and rubbery as dead flesh, had everywhere nosed their way out of the earth and spread their caps beneath the poisoned sky.

Melissa went about the house on soft feet; she shut curtains in the living room, closed blinds in the office, lowered shades in the bedroom. All about the house she went, shuttering and lowering and closing, walling away the rain.

When Stuart came home that afternoon, his hair was plastered flat against his skull and his eyes glowered from dark hollows.

“How was your day?” she said. She stood at the top of the stairs, in the door to the kitchen, holding a pot.

He stood below, on the landing, one hand in the pocket of his rain-slick jacket, the other grasping the leather briefcase she had given him for Christmas last year. “Fine,” he said.

That was what he always said. The conversation was as ritualized as some ancient religious ceremony. And so she said, “What did you do today?”

“Nothing.”

That was fine, too, that was a formula. She turned away. She didn’t care what he’d done all day any more than he cared what she’d done. She didn’t care about flow charts and tax law and office politics any more than he cared about her garden or her classes or any of the hundred things she did to fill the empty days. That was how it was — even though the rain had begun to erase the world they had known, to sweep away without discrimination the tax laws and the flow charts, and the gardens and art classes, too.

But that night — the forty-eighth night of a rain that would never end -that night was different. In the kitchen, as she placed the pot on the stove, she heard his footsteps squeak across the linoleum. He was behind her. She smelled his cologne, weak beneath the moist earthwormy stench of the rain. She turned and he was standing there, a droplet of rain poised at the end of his nose. Rain dripped off his slicker and pooled on the linoleum floor. Rain flattened his hair against his skull.

“Stuart?” she said.

The briefcase slipped from his fingers. Rain glistened on his cheeks and in his eyes. The other hand came out of his pocket, extending towards her.

Toadstools, pale and spongy against his pale and spongy flesh, as colorless as the pasty skin of some cave-dwelling amphibian, extruded from his fist. Toadstools, spotted and poisonous, dangled from between his fingers.

“Toadstools are growing in the yard,” he said.

“I know.”

“We have to get to higher ground.”

“It won’t be any different there,” she said. She had a vision of the mountain cabin, three rooms, and all about them the entombing rain.

“It’s raining all around the world,” she said.

He turned away. The toadstools dropped from his fingers as he left the room. Melissa stared at the fungoid stalks, cold and colorless as dead flesh against the linoleum. She shuddered when she picked them up.

And so this morning, on the forty-ninth morning, they had fled at last. The highways were virtually abandoned; occasionally four-wheel drives zipped past, flying harried in either direction, driven by panicked, pasty-looking men. In fields to either side of the road, lakes, ponds, seas swelled and grew. Mushrooms sprouted at the horizon, overshadowing the trees; on hilly slopes they saw houses and barns decaying beneath masses of putrid mold. Three times the pavement had disappeared before them, submerged; three times Stuart had dropped the Jeep into four-wheel drive and edged forward, fearing sinkholes and washouts; three times their luck had held and they had emerged to wet pavement once again.

They fled east, up 81 to 77, north into West Virginia and the Appalachians. They had a cabin there, near a ski resort in Raleigh County. Melissa remembered when they had bought it a year ago. When Stuart had bought it; he hadn’t consulted her. He had come home late one day, clutching the papers, his eyes wild and feverish. “I used the money,” he had announced, “I made a down-payment on a cabin and two acres of woodland.” Something cold and hateful pierced her then. Stuart had spent the money, the baby’s money, and the spending came like the icy needle-probe of reality:

There was no baby. There would not ever be one.

Now, on the forty-ninth day, they fled northward into night, seeking higher ground, but the rain stayed with them, omnipresent and eternal. It fell out of the sky in solid sheets, flowing over the black pavement and soaking Stuart when he pulled over to refill the tank from the gas cans strapped in the back of the Jeep. Cursing, he would climb back inside and crank the heat to its highest setting, and each time Melissa would remember her long-ago fantasy of making love in the rain. She took a last drag from the cigarette and let the wind have it, watching in the mirror as it tumbled away, extinguished by the rain.

Sodium lights appeared, lining the highway. Ahead, a mountain loomed dark against the gray sky. The road rose to meet it, rose, and rose, and plunged down toward a granite wall. A tunnel -the second one since Wytheville -opened up before them at the last moment, and Melissa clenched her fists, fearing washouts, fearing cave-ins. Then they were inside, the sound of the rain disappearing as they crossed under the mountain and into West Virginia.

Bars of shadow and light flashed across Stuart’s face and the hum of tires against dry pavement filled the car. The wipers scraped against the dry windshield, back and forth, back and forth, and then they emerged from the tunnel into a shifting wall of rain.

“Christ,” Stuart said. “Do you think it’ll ever stop? Do you think it’ll rain forever?”

She looked away, out the window, into the falling rain, and that rag of nursery rhyme returned to her. “Rain, rain go away,” she said. “Come again some other day.”

Night closed in around them. Mountains rose above the road like the shoulders of giants, black against the black sky. Melissa smoked her last cigarette. Far ahead, huddled high against an arm of the ridge, Melissa saw a sprinkle of lights, all that remained of a once-bustling town. The cabin lay farther north, isolated still higher in the mountains. Three rooms, Stuart, and all about them the besieging rain.

At last, the lights came up around them.

“Would you look at that?” Stuart said, pointing.

She saw it then, as well, a blazing Texaco sign towering above the highway. Beyond it stretched a strip of hotels, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants — most of them dark, abandoned.

“It could be a trap,” Stuart said, “to lure in the unwary.”

She sighed.

“We should have bought that gun.”

“No guns,” she said.

“We’ll have to risk it. If they have gas, we could top off the tank, refill our cans. Maybe they’ll have kerosene.”

Without another word, he exited to the strip, passed the boarded-up ruins of fast-food restaurants and hotels, and stopped the Jeep beneath the canopy by the Texaco’s islands. She watched as he studied the parking lot suspiciously; he put her in mind of some frightened forest creature, and she had the disquieting thought that men weren’t so far removed from the jungle. Satisfied at last, he killed the engine; the noise of the rain grew louder, almost deafening, drowning out her thoughts. She opened the door and stood, stretching.

“I’m going to the restroom,” she said, without turning; she heard the pump come on, gasoline gush into the tank.

“You want anything from inside?” he asked.

“Get me a coke and a pack of cigarettes.”

The bathrooms were across the parking lot, through the downpour. Melissa shrugged on her raincoat, slipped the hood over her head, and darted across the pavement, one arm cocked ineffectually above her, warding off the rain. The interior of the restroom stank of urine and bleach; mold had begun to blossom here, sodden, cancerous roses along the base of the dry-wall. A trash can overflowed in one corner. Melissa’s nose wrinkled in disgust as she covered the toilet seat with toilet paper.

When she returned, Stuart was waiting in the Jeep.

“Can you believe it,” he said. “He took money, good old-fashioned American money. Fool.”

“You get my stuff?”

He gestured at the dash. A can of Diet Coke waited there, sweating condensation.

“What about my cigarettes?”

“I didn’t get them. We have to be careful now. Who knows when we’ll be able to see a doctor again?”

“Jesus, Stuart.” Melissa got out and slammed the door. She walked to the tiny shop. The attendant sat behind the register, his feet propped against the counter, reading a novel which he placed face-down when the door chimed behind her.

“What can I do for you?” he said.

“Pack of Marlboro Lights, please.”

He shook his head as he pulled the cigarettes from an overhead rack. “Shouldn’t smoke, lady. Bad for you.”

“I’ve given up sun-bathing to compensate.”

The attendant laughed.

She looked up at him, a young man, not handsome, with flesh the color and texture of the toadstools she had scraped off the kitchen floor. Flesh like Stuart’s flesh, in the midst of that subtle change of his.

But nice eyes, she decided. Clear eyes, blue, the color of water. Eyes like the baby might have had. And this thought moved her to say something -anything, just to make contact. “Think it’ll ever stop raining?”

“Who knows? Maybe it’s a good thing. Cleansing.”

“You think?”

“Who knows? Wash the whole world away, we’ll start again. Rain’s okay by me.”

“Me, too,” she said, and now she thought again of the fragment of radio program. Is God out there? the host had wanted to know. And is He angry?

She is, the woman had replied. She is.

Melissa’s hand stole over her belly, where the baby, her baby, had grown and died. Abruptly, the crazed logic of the idea, its simple clarity and beauty, seized her up: this was the world they had made, she thought, men like Stuart, this world of machines and noise, this world of simple tasteless things. This is the world that is being washed away. Their world.

Outside, Stuart began to blow the horn. The sound came to her, discordant, importunate. Melissa glanced out at the Jeep, at Stuart, impatient behind the steering wheel, anxious to be off, anxious to get to higher ground. Three rooms in the mountains, just three. She and Stuart and all about them the imprisoning rain. It fell still, beyond the roof over the fuel islands, blowing out of the sky in sheets, dancing against the pavement, chasing neon reflections of the Texaco sign across black puddles.

“Lady? You okay? Miss?”

“Missus,” she said, out of habit. She turned to face him.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine, just distracted that’s all.”

The horn blew again.

“Nice guy.”

“Not really. He tries to be, sometimes.”

The horn again. Impatiently.

“You better go.”

“Yeah.” She dug in her purse for money.

“Forget it. Like it means anything now, right?”

She hesitated. “Thanks, then.”

“You’re welcome. Be careful. Who knows what the roads are like in the mountains.”

She nodded and stepped out into moist air. Stuart had gotten out of the Jeep. He stood by the open door, his flesh orange and spongy beneath the streetlights, his arms crossed against his chest. He stared at her impatiently, beyond him only darkness, only rain. Water fell from the night sky, against the gleaming pavement, the buildings, the shining neon Texaco sign. Against everything, washing it all away.

“Hurry up,” Stuart said.

And she said, without even realizing she was going to say it, “I’m not coming. You go ahead.” When she said it, she was suffused suddenly with warmth and excitement and life, a sensation of release, as if a hard knot of emotion, drawn tight in her chest through long years, had suddenly loosened.

“What?” Stuart said. “What are you talking about?”

Melissa didn’t answer. She walked past Stuart and the Jeep, stopping at the edge of the canopy that sheltered the fuel islands. She shrugged out of the raincoat, let it drop to the pavement behind her. Ignoring Stuart, she lined up the tips of her toes against the hard clear edge of the pavement where it was wet, where the roof left off and the rain began.

Stuart said, “Melissa? Melissa?”

But Melissa didn’t answer. She stepped out into a world that was ending, into a gently falling rain. It poured down over her, cool and refreshing against her cheeks and lips and hair, caressing her with the hands of a lover.

THE FLOOD Linda Nagata

Linda Nagata lives in Hawaii where she is currently a programmer of online database applications. She produced a loosely connected series of novels developing concepts of nanotechnology of which The Bohr Maker (1995) won the Locus Award as that year’s best first novel. The following enigmatic story, published in 1998, has haunted me since I first read it. It contains several compelling images that cloak the horrors of a global deluge into a mystical allegory.

MIKE LAY AWAKE in the night on a bed of damp leaves in the towering shelter of a eucalyptus grove, listening to the pounding surf. His young wife Holly slept on the ground beside him, clutching their thin blanket to her chin, her legs half-tangled with his. He rested his hand lightly on her rib cage, feeling her breathe.

Nights were the worst. At night he couldn’t see the waters coming. So he listened to the surf, trying to measure the volume of the ocean by the sound. He’d seen the ocean rise as much as thirty meters in a night. Rising. Never receding.

Fear slipped like oil across his skin -cold, encompassing fear. Through his mind’s eye he watched Holly drowning, her face pale and exhausted as she finally slipped beneath the relentless waters. Still, that sort of death was ancient and familiar.

God, God, God.

Sudden sweat coated his body despite the chill of the night. His stomach seemed to fold into a fist. This, he thought, would be a good time to recall some profound and comforting passage from the Bible. But he didn’t know any. Religion had never been his thing.

Still, God was ever in his thoughts these days, as he watched the world drown.

How could He let this happen?

Mike did not believe in the beneficence of God. He was not even sure he believed in the deity Himself. And alone amongst the survivors, he refused to accept that the end of the world might be a good thing.

Sometime before dawn the rising waters must have claimed a gentler shoreline, because the noise of the surf subsided. Mike slept then, waking only when the sun was well up. He cuddled against Holly on their bed of leaves, gazing downslope at the ocean. He could see it just beyond the grove of trees. Its surface was glassy in the crisp, still air of morning, the waters pale green over a pasture that had flooded in the night. Gentle swells rolled in from the deep to sweep upslope through the eucalyptus grove in flat hissing crescents.

Mike watched them in a half-conscious state, pleasantly distanced from both his worrisome dreams and untenable reality, until a slight breeze rustled through the tree tops, reminding him that he still needed to devise a sail for his newly finished boat.

Holly stirred sleepily. He bent over her, gently brushing aside her long dark hair to kiss her cheek, feeling yet again the sour clench of fear. He would not let her be taken. He could not. It would be better to drown. But better still to steal her away on his boat. Soon. Maybe even today.

She blinked and stretched, then smiled at him, a serene joy glowing in her dark eyes. “Mike. Do you feel it, Mike? It’s very close now.”

“We don’t have any food left,” he told her.

She shrugged, sitting up, her long tanned legs goose-bumped in the morning chill. “We don’t need any food. Today will be the last day. I can feel it.”

As if to emphasize her words another wave slid up through the grove to swish against her feet, laying down a crescent of sand before subsiding. Mike found himself staring at the dread signature. In the weeks since the flood began, he’d watched the sand and waves take over roads, houses, forests, pastures, farms, as the ocean steadily rose, drowning the island that had always been their home.

They’d retreated upslope as the waters advanced, but the highest point on the island had been only 500 meters above sea level.

Mike squinted down at the new shoreline. Now, he guessed the highest point might clear thirty meters. He frowned, trying to recall the exact geography of the island before the flood. Hadn’t the meadow where he’d built his boat been more than thirty meters below the summit?

“The ark!” he yelped, leaping to his feet. “Holly…” He grabbed her hand and yanked her up. The roar of the night’s surf resounded in his mind. His boat had been well above the waterline at nightfall, but now—

He ran through the grove, dragging Holly with him. He was afraid to leave her alone, afraid she would disappear like so many others.

“Mike,” she panted, bounding along in his rough wake. “It’s all right, Mike. You don’t need the boat. Everything will be all right.”

But he couldn’t believe her. He’d never been able to believe.

They splashed through a retreating wave, through rotten leaves half-buried in sand. Their feet sank deep into the unstable mix. Tiny air bubbles erupted on the forming beach. Then they reached the edge of the grove and burst into the open.

Sunlight sparkled on green water. Children frolicked in the swell, riding the shore break at the edge of the insatiable ocean.

Finally letting go of Holly’s hand, Mike scrambled up a scrub-covered ridge of ancient lava. By the time he reached the top, the cool air was tearing in and out of his lungs. He stood on the crest and looked down at his project.

Yesterday evening, the boat had rested solidly on its platform, fifteen meters above the waterline and nearly completed, a tiny ark made of green eucalyptus wood. But the surf had seized it in the night, throwing it against the jagged lava of the ridge. The shattered pieces bobbed and tumbled with the incoming waves.

Holly joined him, her breast heaving with exertion beneath the scanty coverage of her tank top. She glanced at the wreckage, hardly seeing it. “Come and swim, Mike,” she pleaded. Her eyes were wide and soft. “The water’s warm. The waves aren’t big. It’s a perfect day. A gift from God.”

On the summit of the island a huge white wooden cross glowed in the morning light, a memory of earlier days.

Most of the people who’d lived on the island before the flood had already been taken away. There were only forty or fifty left, waiting patiently for their turn on the ropes.

Mike tore his gaze away from the shattered boat, and rounded on Holly. “Wake up!” he shouted. “Wake up. You’ve been walking around in a daze for weeks. You and everyone else while an act of genocide has been going on around you. We’re dying, Holly. Family by family, your god is killing us.”

Holly’s gaze seemed suddenly weighted in concern. She raised her hand to brush Mike’s wild hair away from his face, off his ears, as if by that simple measure she hoped to change a basic deficiency in his vision, in his hearing.

Mike knocked her hand away. “I’m not deaf and I’m not blind!” he shouted. “I can see what’s going on—”

“But you can’t feel it,” she said softly.

“No. No you’re right. I can’t feel it. I can’t.” His hands clenched into fists. He closed his eyes as anguish flooded his mind. “Why me, Holly? Why am I the only one who can’t believe—?”

A far-away rumble cut off his lament. The sound resembled the thunder of a distant jet, summoning a memory of childhood when he’d lain awake at night listening to the passage of an anomalous craft far overhead, imagining that what he heard was no commercial airliner on an unusual route; that instead the nightfarer was a B-52, armed with nuclear missiles bound for a hardened target in Siberia. The overflight that presaged the end of the world.

His childhood fears had faded with the cold war, had dulled with maturity. Now they were back, haunting him, as the end of the world loomed in unexpected reality.

He looked out across the ocean, where he counted three twisting wires of brilliant golden light. They were thin, like cracks in the sky letting in the light of heaven. But vast, appearing to extend far beyond the brilliant blue bowl of the sky, disappearing into some nebulous distance that seemed somehow utterly different from the sky Mike had known all his life. Light bleeding from some other place. Some other world. Hungry light that preyed on hope and faith.

The distant jet-roar faded to silence as the wires of light approached across the water. They swayed as they moved, not behaving at all like ordinary light, but instead bending and floating like extremely low-density matter. Once again, Mike felt himself astounded at their thinness. The first one swept across the shallows toward the children playing in the waves. At this distance it was easy to see that it was no thicker than the mooring lines once used to tie cruise ships to the docks.

The children had spotted the rope. Their joyous cries could be heard from the ridge as they scrambled and dove toward the light. Mike wanted to scream at them to stop, to run away. But they believed…

A young girl just short of puberty reached the rope first. She grabbed it with her right hand and was immediately yanked off her feet. She rose skyward. At the same time she seemed to shrink so that she was drawn into the column of light. Mike watched as she became a tiny silhouette within the golden glow, a dark figure receding at fabulous speed across a vast dimension that did not exist in this world. He watched until she became a black point on the visual horizon. And then he watched her disappear.

Other children followed her, six, then seven of them before the rope left the now-empty water and swept ashore, zig-zagging across the newly-laid beach as it offered itself to the eager, waiting parents.

Mike fell to his knees, sickened. He bent over, holding his stomach. He wanted to puke. Holly crouched beside him. “It’s all right, Mike,” she soothed. “It’s all right. God has come for us. You don’t have to be afraid.”

Her words made his hackles rise. Was a rope finally out to lure the two of them? After weeks of watching everyone they’d ever known disappear up the ropes, was this their time? His fingers clawed at the ground. Why couldn’t he feel the grace the others felt? Why couldn’t he believe?

A deep electric hum assaulted his ears. He felt his hair lift slightly, as if a field of static electricity had suddenly swept around him. Looking up, he saw a second golden rope racing in from the ocean towards the ridge. “¡Vo!” he shouted.

He dove at Holly, knocking her to the ground. He held her there with his weight, pinning her arms against her sides. “I won’t let you go to it!” he screamed at her. “I won’t let you go.”

The rope was dancing, swaying up the jagged slope of the ridge. Holly’s eyes filled with tears. A trace of blood netted her lip. Her jaw trembled. “Please Mike. Let me go. It’s my time. It’s our time. I don’t know why you can’t feel it. But I do know you love me. You have to trust me. You have to let me believe for you—”

He kissed her to stop the flow of words. His lips pressed against hers, his tongue probed her mouth, he tasted the sweet salt of her blood. It crossed the membranes of his mouth like a drug. Her love flowed into him, her trust, her faith. He felt a warm, golden glow fill him. He let go of her arms, to cradle her beautiful face in his hands. And then they were sitting up, spooning, her arms tight around the small of his back. And somehow after that he found himself on his feet. She stood facing him, holding both his hands. A column of gold rose behind her. Her warm dark eyes were locked on his. She nodded encouragement. Moving backward, she led him first one step, then another. Letting his left hand go, she half-turned to seize the rope. “Faith,” she whispered.

Her body arched in sudden ecstasy as she was yanked up the rope. The gasp that escaped her lips was a knife that cut through Mike’s consciousness. He stiffened, as a dirty old awareness flooded his mind. “Holly, no!” he roared.

She was receding up the rope, her right side shrinking, darkening into a silhouette as she was swept into the narrow chasm of golden light, her left side yet in the flooded world. “HollyV

He found that he still held her left hand. Now he seized it with both his hands and pulled. Her body continued to shrink, to recede into impossible distance. Her arm stretched in a long black ribbon. Then her hand turned palm up in his grip, and vanished. He found himself grasping at empty air.

A scream of utter rage ripped from his throat. Tears flooded his face.

The golden light hummed and shifted, awaiting him.

“Not me,” he choked. “I won’t go with you. Murderer! Murderer!” He turned and fled into the forest.

The island was empty, all the people finally gone.

Mike climbed the hill and sat at the base of the cross. Cool air washed over his face, while scudding clouds played with the sun’s light. The remaining land mass was no more than a quarter mile across now. Uninterrupted ocean surrounded him on all sides, the water appearing to rise up like a shallow bowl, with himself trapped in the bottom. How high would the waters rise? High enough to drown even continental mountains?

There is not that much water in the world!

Movement caught his eye. A sparkle of white against the cloud-shadowed sea. A bird, he realized. And as it drew nearer he recognized the wandering albatross, gliding on its white wings just above the crest of the swell. A solitary creature.

He watched it in gratitude, and not a little wonder, realizing only then how much he’d missed the non-human life of the island. For the cats and dogs, birds and cattle had disappeared with their masters. Even the fish had vanished from the ocean. He wondered if this bird could be as hungry as he.

It stayed with him, flying a restless circuit around the shrinking island as the flood waters continued to rise. By noon, when hunger and thirst and utter isolation began to play upon his mind, it became the focus of his delirium. He found himself flying on long wings around and around the white wooden cross as if he flew on the end of a chain. He wanted to turn tail to it. He wanted to glide across the open ocean into the blue promise of homogenous vistas: just a little farther now, and you will find land, life.

But the bird refused to leave.

The afternoon passed. Mike felt his skin burn in the intermittent sun. Thirst seemed to swell his tongue into a dry, dusty sponge. Hunger knotted his belly. He watched the waves roll in, from all sides now, higher and higher until by late afternoon they met at the bottom of the cross.

He climbed the monument to escape the churning tumult of water that consumed the last bit of land. He hauled himself up on the crossbar, then hugged the post while the waters roiled below him, slowly yet inevitability rising. Soon he would drown. Were there fish left in the water to eat him? Were there still microbes that might break down his flesh? Perhaps he would sink to the bottom and become covered with sediment and be converted to a fossil, the only evidence left of the original animal life of this world. For he sensed that the world was being cleansed, prepared for an entirely separate history to follow.

Tears filled his eyes as he looked out across the watery wasteland. He couldn’t imagine worshipping any deity capable of creating this murderous scene.

All Gone.

The vast and empty ocean seemed to resound with that statement of finality.

All Gone.

When the last creatures were flushed out by the flood, the world would be clean, ready to be remade, renewed.

Mike held on. By evening the ocean was nearly calm. The golden colors of sunset played across the uninterrupted horizon. He gazed at the sight, feeling the burnished colors enter his soul and warm him. Last day.

He started, as the albatross swept past. It had been drawing nearer all day, perhaps emboldened by the retreat of the land. Now it floated by, scarcely an arm’s length away, the wind abuzz in its feathers, a slight noise that seemed to grow in volume as the bird receded until the buzz became the ominous rumble of distant thunder, distant jets.

Mike looked up, to see a golden rope dancing on the horizon. A single rope. It was the first time he’d ever seen just one. His heart began to hammer as the old fury returned. He clung to the cross and screamed at the usurper, his voice rolling across the calm waters. “Liarl Murder er!”

A cold swell rose up to touch his dangling feet, bringing with it a sudden darkness. Fury flowed away, leaving behind the painful vacuum of despair. He bowed his head against the post and cried until the thunder faded and the hum of the rope filled his ears, until the deceiver’s golden glow burned through his closed eyes.

He still didn’t believe in the beneficence of God. He knew the flood was an act of genocide and the rope was a con game. Knew it by the anguish in his soul. But it didn’t matter anymore. He was human, and he must follow his people, be it to hell or oblivion. He opened his eyes. The rope danced before him, an inexplicable gold cable let down at the end of the world. The albatross floated on a breeze, seemingly watching, waiting for his lead.

He grasped the rope in both hands, and was gone.

THE END OF THE WORLD SHOW David Barnett

David Barnett is a Lancashire-born journalist and editor, currently Assistant Editor at the Bradford Telegraph & Argus. He is the author of the novels Hinterland (2005), about the hidden worlds around us, and Angelglass (2007), where strands of history merge, and the story collection The Janus House and Other Two-Faced Tales (2009). When I was planning this anthology

I vowed not to include any stories of “zombie apocalypse”, but there’s always an exception and rules are there to be broken, for a very good reason.

ON THE SEVENTH day before the end, the aliens said goodbye. “It’s all true,” said a tired-looking man from the Government, being interviewed on the teatime news. “Non-Earth Originated Intelligences have been among us since 1947. They have contributed a great deal to our development over the past sixty years. It’s highly doubtful we would have been able to make the strides in space exploration that we have without their help. And the work they have done with us on researching treatments for cancer and other conditions has been phenomenal. It’s just a shame that they have to leave now, with so much yet to do.”

“Why exactly are they leaving?” asked the reporter.

The man from the Government tugged at his collar and looked off-camera. “Uh, no more questions at this time, please,” he said.

The general consensus was that it was all a big hoax. There were special news reports on all the channels devoted to the announcement.

They even cancelled the episode of EastEnders on the TV. Katy would not have approved.

It was with Katy that I really wanted to talk about all this, but she’d gone a long time ago. I sat in my cramped terraced house, cruising through the digital channels, every one with some expert or other talking animatedly about the aliens. They came from a planet circling a star that we didn’t even have a name for, just a string of numbers. There was a lot of talk about the impossibility of interstellar travel, and someone asked a scientist if travel between stars was possible, why had the aliens only shown us how to get as far as the Moon?

Katy would be talking about it with Steve, about what it all meant for the future, for their future, their cosy little, middle-class, Volkswagen Touran-driving, holidays-in-Tuscany future. I went to the pub.

“It’s a hoax,” said Bob with authority. “Has to be, hasn’t it? Can’t possibly be true.”

“Where are they, then, if they’re here? Where’s their space rocket?” said Alan.

There was a boom of voices as the barmaid turned up the volume on the television in the corner. The studio discussions on the BBC special news programme had cut to some shaky camerawork in a field somewhere in Cornwall, according to the caption. A reporter in a raincoat ducked into shot. “And here we are at the scene of the extra-terrestrials actually leaving the earth…”

The camera angle changed abruptly and focused on a cigar-shaped silver rocket standing in the dark, rain-soaked field. God knows where they’d been hiding it and how they’d suddenly got it there.

“I bet it’s been there all the time, invisible,” said Alan.

“It’s a hoax,” said Bob, lighting a cigarette, apparently satisfied. “I mean, look at it. It’s like something out of Flash Gordon.”

Alan’s mobile phone buzzed on the table. While he fumbled with the buttons, the camera panned to three of the aliens standing on a platform near the rocket. They looked a bit like Stan Ogden, only with a slightly greenish tinge. They were wearing three-button black suits with Nehru collars. FIRST PICTURES OF THE ALIENS flashed across the bottom of the screen.

“Why are you leaving?” shouted someone from the huddle of press reporters.

One of the aliens looked at the other two. He coughed, and then said in perfect English: “We are very sorry. We have to go now. It’s beyond our control.”

“That was Margery,” said Alan, putting the phone back into his jacket pocket. “The lads have taken the Focus and set off for Cornwall. They want to go with the aliens.”

Bob stubbed out his cigarette and laughed. “Your lads? Wayne and Stu? What makes them think the aliens’ll want to take them back to Pluto? Unless they’re short of work-shy layabouts up there.”

“I’d tell them not to bother,” I said, pointing at the telly. “They’re off.”

They were indeed. The aliens had got inside their rocket and the army were herding the press pack and the rubberneckers away. A green glow erupted from the base of the silver spaceship and the camera shook and wobbled. Then it was gone, soaring up into the night sky. The camera tracked it until it was swallowed by the black clouds.

There was a hush over the pub, and the field in Cornwall, until the reporter said in reverent tones: “And there we have it: an historic, epoch-making event. I have been proud and honoured to witness the first open contact between humanity and extra-terrestrial intelligences…”

“Proud and honoured to witness them buggering off,” said Bob, lighting up again.

“I wonder why they’ve gone, really?” said Alan.

“I wonder whose round it is, really?” said Bob.

Later, pissed, I phoned Katy, against my better judgment.

“Did you see the aliens?” I burbled.

“Of course I did,” she said flatly. “I’d imagine everyone on earth saw them. Why are you calling me?”

“I still love you,” I whispered.

The phone went dead.

I lay in bed for a bit but couldn’t sleep. I tried to have a wank but could only summon up images of flabby green aliens in black suits, so gave up and went to sit by the window, staring up at the night sky and wondering what it was all about, until Wayne and Stu drove past in their dad’s Ford Focus, beeping their horn all along the road. They’d painted TAKE US WITH U on the roof of the car. Alan wasn’t going to be best pleased.

On the sixth day before the end, we found out why the aliens had left. There was an asteroid the size of Milton Keynes heading towards earth. It was due to hit in a little under a week. The breakfast news was full of it. Someone at the Government had leaked the information. The authorities had known about it for months. The aliens had been trying to help us find a solution but, given the size of the rock, there wasn’t much they could suggest. That was why they had gone.

I didn’t go into work. Didn’t really see the point. I did phone, though. The secretary said: “Are you ill?”

“Haven’t you seen the news this morning?”

She paused. “No. Why?”

“Nothing,” I said. Anne was a skittish sort and I didn’t want to panic her unduly. “I’ve got a touch of flu.”

I turned back to the telly. The asteroid was somewhere out past Venus at the moment, but it was going at a fair lick. The experts said it would probably break up a little in the atmosphere. There was apparently a big plan to fly a load of nuclear bombs up into orbit in the space shuttle and blow the rock to smithereens, or at least knock it off course. Failing that — and the scientist being interviewed assured us it would work — the asteroid would probably hit Australia some time on Sunday.

“At least it’s only Australia,” said Alan when I went round to his to return the hedge trimmer I’d borrowed off him five months previously.

He gazed at the trimmer with a curious look in his eye, probably wondering whether it was worth cutting back his leylandii before the weekend, as I said: “Well, according to the telly, the size and speed of the thing means it’ll probably wipe out all life on earth anyway.”

Alan sniffed, just as Margery pulled up on to the drive in the Focus. They’d tried to rub the TAKE US WITH U message off the roof without much success. Margery, a handsome woman if a little highly-strung, struggled out of the car weighed down with Sains-bury’s carrier bags. She looked a little harassed.

“It’s chaos out there!” she trilled. “I nearly had to fight my way out of the supermarket. There were people punching each other at the checkout.”

“Did you get any of that pate I like?” asked Alan mildly as Margery elbowed her way past me.

“No I did not!” she squeaked. “I got bottles of water and tins of beans. You can get the other bags out of the car. And why haven’t you barricaded the windows yet?”

Alan looked at me and gave a tiny, what-can-you-do? shrug. “I thought I’d trim the hedge, first,” he said.

I left Margery blustering and went back home. Halfway there I took a detour towards the corner shop. Perhaps it would be wise to get a few provisions in, just in case. Unfortunately, half the neighbourhood had the same idea. There was a crowd outside the shop and people were wheeling away their purchases in the trolleys. I edged towards the door as one of the staff was tacking a handwritten notice on the door. It said: CASH PURCHASES ONLY.

“We’ve had a call from head office telling us not to accept credit cards or cheques,” she said to me as we squeezed into the packed shop.

Deftly dancing around the suffocating aisles, I managed to extricate half-a-dozen microwave Chinese meals, a bottle of milk, some whisky and a packet of bourbon creams. At the till it was like a rugby scrum. One man had pretty much the entire contents of the meat cabinet in two big trolleys, and he was waving his Barclaycard at them.

“No plastic!” shouted the woman behind the till. “I’ve told you, cash only!”

The queue snaked around the shop. I waved my purchases at the girl who I’d seen putting the notice on the door, and gave her a twenty pound note. She cast a glance over my basket, nodded, and stuffed the twenty in her pocket. “Do you mind if I take the basket?” I asked.

She shrugged. “You can have it for a fiver.”

I only had a ten so I gave her that and picked up a copy of “Country Living” from the cardboard display bin that had been knocked over near the tills.

As I left the shop, glad for a bit of fresh air, a big 4x4 squealed to a halt just in front of me. There were four men wearing balaclavas and carrying baseball bats. One of them looked at me as they climbed out. “Give us your stuff!” he snarled.

One of the others pulled him away by his jacket. “Leave him. We’ll get what’s inside.” He paused, as if re-considering, then held up his baseball bat. “Give us your money, though.”

I fished in my pocket and pulled out another tenner. He snatched it off me and shoved it into his jeans. “Right, inside. Tinned stuff, bottled water, powdered milk. Twat anyone who gets in your way.”

I hurried back towards home. The main road was now choked with traffic, cars inching along and beeping their horns. I spotted Bob and his wife, their Rover loaded up with stuff. Bob wound down the window.

“Off on your hols?” I said.

“We’re getting out,” he shouted. “I’d do the same if I was you.”

“Where are you going to go?” I said, looking at the long line of traffic stretching off out of sight.

“The Lakes, probably. Bit of high ground. Clean water.”

I nodded. Bob’s wife slapped him and pointed forward, where the car in front had moved ahead three or four centimetres. Bob waved and began to wind up the window, then stopped and brought it down again. He rummaged in his jacket and tossed a set of keys at me. “If you’re staying here anyway, you wouldn’t do us a favour and turn the engine over on the MG, would you? It’s murder if it doesn’t get a few revs every couple of days.”

I picked up the keys and waved as the Rover jerked fonvard again. I wondered if I’d be able to sneak Bob’s MG out for a spin while they were away. A lovely little car it was. British Racing Green. They don’t make them like that any more.

I got home just in time to watch the space shuttle taking off from Cape Kennedy.

On the fifth day before the end, most of southern Japan was destroyed in a nuclear conflagration. I had to admit, things were starting to look a bit bleak. I’d had another largely sleepless night, mainly due to the traffic on the main road, a constant stream of cars and vans crawling along with bad-tempered honks. I wondered how far Bob had got.

Apparently a bit of sponge or foam had fallen off one of the space shuttle’s engines as it orbited the earth, waiting for the asteroid to come into range. This had played havoc with the steering and the computers had gone all bonkers, plunging the shuttle back into sub-orbital space and sending it spinning down towards Japan. It had hit the ground and the nukes had gone up, several miles south of Osaka. The city and most of the surrounding area had gone.

The Russians said not to worry, they were sending a rocket full of nukes up as well. That wasn’t much comfort to the Japanese, though. Someone with a beard came on the news and said that he believed the whole asteroid business was an elaborate con and that the United States had planned to bomb Japan all along. Exactly why, though, he couldn’t say.

Some of the TV channels went off, mainly the digital ones. Channel Five stopped broadcasting as well, but hardly anyone noticed. ITV and the BBC just had news on all the time. Channel 4 played music videos, while BBC2 was given over to re-runs of seventies’ sitcoms, which had a strangely soothing quality about them. I watched a couple of episodes of Terry and June, but couldn’t get the pictures of the deathly quiet carnage in Japan out of my head.

I took a stroll. Most of the cars had gone wherever they were going and the road was pretty quiet. Since this morning there had been a tank parked at the bottom of our street, following on from reports of looting and violence closer to town.

I’d never seen a tank close up before. It was a pretty grand beast. Katy would have hated it. She was a pacifist, was Katy. Still is, probably. She’d not be coping with all this. I hoped there was no rioting near her house. I hoped she was okay. I considered phoning her again, but didn’t really know what I’d say. For some reason I thought about Blackpool. Katy had loved going to Blackpool, loved the prom and the noise and the sweet smell of candyfloss on the air, the clatter of coins in the one-armed bandit trays and the insane laughter of the automated clown at the Pleasure Beach. One year we’d been there someone had made a huge sand sculpture of a tank on the beach. Katy had wondered why the artist couldn’t have made something less ugly. All the kids seemed to love it, though.

There was a soldier sitting on top of the tank, the real tank at the bottom of my street, a sub-machine gun in the crook of his arm. He regarded me coolly.

“It’s okay,” I said cheerfully. “I’m not going to pinch your tank.”

He didn’t laugh. Didn’t even smile. “Did you hear the Government’s gone?” he said.

“Gone where?”

“Just gone,” he said. “Half of them have left for some bunker in the Home Counties. Some of them are dead. Westminster is burning. No one’s in control any more.”

I thought about this. “So who’s paying your wages?”

He looked at me and blinked, as though he hadn’t considered this before. He leaned into the turret of the tank and had a brief conversation with his mate. I hung around for a bit but the soldier ignored me. I wandered out on to the main road and over to Alan’s cul-de-sac, but his house was all boarded up. I knocked but there was no answer, so I nipped round the back and borrowed his hedge trimmers again. When I got back to my street, the tank had gone. Mr Raines from number eight, who was in the Territorials, was standing in the road as I approached. He had a sub-machine gun exactly like the soldier in the tank had.

“Where did you get that?” I asked.

“Squaddie gave it to me, just before he pissed off,” he said, his face set in a grimace. “Look, there’s no Army any more. No law and order. We’re going to have to organize ourselves into a… a Civil Defence Group. Do you have any weapons?”

We both looked at the hedge trimmer. I supposed it could give a pretty nasty cut, so long as you were within fifteen feet of a plug socket. “I’ll have a look at home,” I said.

I phoned Katy again but got their answer machine. “We’ve got a Civil Defence Group in our street,” I said proudly. I paused. “I love you,” I said, then put the phone down.

Katy had left me because I wasn’t exciting enough. Because, after my parents died, I just wanted to sit in their old terraced house and go to work and come home and watch TV. But what she failed to take into account was that I wanted to do all that with her, that all that was exciting enough for me. I wondered if she was finding all this exciting now she was with Steve.

A minute later I picked the phone up again and left another message: “I’ve got some Chinese ready meals and the electrics are still on here, so if you wanted to come over…”

Later on I helped Mr Raines and some others block off either end of our street with some cars.

“What if we want to go somewhere?” I said.

“Where’s there to go?” said Mr Raines, his face in that grimace again.

Looking at the news later on, commentaryless pictures of London burning and riots in Birmingham and Manchester, I had to concede he had a point. I wondered how Bob was getting on in the Lakes.

On the fourth day before the end, a huge lizard attacked Tokyo. As if Japan hadn’t had enough problems. It was exactly like a dinosaur, 200 feet from nose to tail. It ran with a loping gait, head down and tail up, its spine almost perfectly level. It was something to do with the bombs that had landed on Osaka, they said. Either a normal lizard had been mutated by the radiation and grown to monstrous proportions, or an ages-old beast had been in some kind of suspended animation below the surface of the earth and had been awoken by the blast.

It was amazing how people were prepared to accept just about anything these days.

It was quite gripping viewing. The news pictures showed them trying to evacuate Tokyo, but there was nowhere for the people to go, pretty much the rest of Japan being an irradiated wasteland. The monster rampaged across the city, flattening buildings and flipping cars with its tail. I caught myself more than once thinking it’s pretty realistic before realizing that it was real. Eventually they brought it down with fighter planes and it flopped, dead, in the street. The newsreader said the Japanese authorities had started to slice it up to use as emergency rations.

That afternoon looters kicked the kitchen door in. There were three of them, kids about eighteen or nineteen, and they all had baseball bats. I was in the kitchen at the time and they booted their way in, pushing me against the wall.

“What do you want?” I said.

One of them slapped me. “Everything,” he said.

They took all the money they could find, which didn’t amount to much. They didn’t think to take the food, but one of them manhandled the TV off its stand.

“We’ll take this as well,” said the ringleader, slapping me again and ripping the stereo power lead out of the wall socket.

“What are you going to do with them?” I said. “The world’s going to end.”

They looked at each other uncertainly, then the ringleader punched me in the stomach, winding me. Then they left.

I boarded up the door with some wood I found in the shed and went upstairs to bring the portable telly down from the bedroom. While I was rooting in the wardrobe I came across my dad’s old airgun and a box of pellets. Might come in handy.

We had a meeting of the Civil Defence Group in Mr Raines’ front room. Half of the households in the street had already deserted; gone to Scotland or the Lake District or to be with family. Mr Raines approved of my gun. The water had gone off earlier in the day and the drains were getting backed up; there was a problem with rats but Mr Raines didn’t want us to waste ammunition on them. A rat-catching division was set up, consisting of Wayne and Stu, who had got fed up of being barricaded into their house and had come down to live in one of the deserted terraces in our street. We still had electricity; a lot of places didn’t.

By dusk Wayne and Stu had killed enough rats for Trevor the butcher to begin skinning them. There was a big pot put over a fire in the middle of the road and we had a bit of a street party. The rat stew wasn’t too bad; I’d been getting a bit fed up with Chinese. A dozen bottles of gin were found in Mrs Hughes’ house; her daughter had come to collect her two days ago. Everyone suspected Mrs Hughes liked the odd nip, but not to that extent. It was quite a jolly evening, until someone said that a girl at the top of the street had been raped. A Civil Defence Group meeting was called and Mr Raines led a small group of volunteers off to apprehend the most likely suspects. I left Wayne and Stu throwing up in the street and went to bed.

On the third day before the end, a tsunami swamped the western seaboard of the United States. The last thing that I saw on the portable TV before the power went off was a wall of water engulfing the Golden Gate Bridge, then a roaring sound and the cameraman was swallowed up. It cut back to the studio at the BBC, the only channel broadcasting now. The presenter looked like she hadn’t slept for a week. She wasn’t wearing any make-up and she had tears in her eyes as she reported that Los Angeles and San Francisco were now under water. Halfway through the report she looked up to someone off-camera and said: “What? Wait. Where are you going…?”

She sat there for a while on her own, and the lighting slowly faded. Then the picture went blank, and didn’t come on again. I supposed that was it for the TV, then.

I was a little surprised that the electricity was still on. The gas had gone off two days previously. Either they had some kind of automated system still powering the national grid or there were some very dedicated people working to keep the country energized. And just as I was thinking that, the lights went out. That buggered it for the microwave readymeals, I thought. Rat stew from now until the end.

In the middle of the night Mr Raines and his Civil Defence Group commandos “arrested” Roy the bachelor from the end house and strung him up from the lamp-post for the rape of the girl. Roy had always had the finger pointed at him whenever there was anything funny going on, and once the News of the World had published his name in a list of paedophiles and he had dog-muck pushed through his letterbox. They apologised and printed a retraction a couple of weeks later, saying it was another Roy in another town, but by then the damage was done.

I was a bit shocked at that but as Mr Raines said to me, desperate times require desperate measures.

I found a load of candles under the sink and dotted them around the sitting room. It was quite cosy. I finished the bottle of gin I’d pinched from Mrs Hughes’ supply and picked up the phone. It was dead but I dialled Katy’s number anyway, told the blank, empty air that I loved her, and cried myself to sleep on the sofa.

On the second day before the end, the hungry dead rose from the cold, damp earth. The popular assumption that they would be mindless, shuffling husks with a craze for human brains did, fortunately, prove to be unfounded. They were, however, largely very grumpy.

The first sign was in the small, dark time before dawn. No one was getting much sleep any more. In the quiet moments you could always hear the far-off sounds of violence. We had patrols in the street pretty much constantly, and there was always someone chasing rats or wailing. I’d done my bit and patrolled with my dad’s gun for a couple of hours in the night, chasing off a couple of kids who were trying to sneak along the ginnel behind Mrs Reagan’s house, so was trying to get a bit of kip. I’d just dropped off when there was a low rumble. I sat up in a blind panic, thinking that the asteroid must have hit Australia but the shaking wasn’t in the ground, it was in my gut. It became a sustained, single note, rising in pitch. I assumed someone had got hold of a trombone or such-like. It lasted about fifteen minutes, and then stopped. There was a long silence. Even the sounds of gunfire faded for a moment.

Taking the opportunity to get my head down again, I was just drifting away when there was a hammering at the door. God, what now? I picked up the gun from the side of the bed and staggered downstairs.

“That’s mine,” said a voice as dry as autumn leaves. “Give it here.”

“Dad?” I said.

It was indeed. And Mum as well. Looking… well, looking exactly as they did the day they died. Dad was in his black suit, his fob watch tucked into the pocket of his waistcoat. Mum had that blue dress on that she had used to wear for dancing.

“I thought you were going to paint the window frames,” said Mum.

I looked out of the door. There were more people in suits and dresses — and one or two in shapeless white gowns -staggering up the street, stopping at doors. At the houses they used to live at.

“That sound this morning…” I said slowly, finally understanding.

“The Final Trump,” said Dad, wearing that self-satisfied face he always used to pull when something was going against him. Only happy when it rains, my Dad. “And me not even baptized.”

Mum was rubbing the flaking green paintwork on the windowsill. “The last thing you promised me was that you were going to do these windows,” she said.

At the top of the street I could make out the corpse of Roy the bachelor twitching and kicking at the end of his rope. “I didn’t do it!” he managed in a choked voice before the noose cut off his air supply and he died again. Within seconds he was dancing about again and shouting. I hoped someone would cut him down soon.

Dad pushed past me. “You going to leave us standing on the doorstep to our own house?” he said. “What have you got to eat?”

“A couple of microwave Chinese meals,” I said. “There’s been a bit of a problem with food the last few days.”

Dad sat down in the armchair while mum started picking up the dirty dishes and tutting at the layer of dust on the coffee table.

“I can see we’re going to have to take charge around here,” said dad.

There was a hammering at the door.

“That’ll be your grandad,” said mum.

Dad had died of a heart attack two years ago and mum had gone quietly nine months later. I suppose they were lucky; Old Mrs Potter had been hit by a bus last Christmas and she’d turned up at home in a right mess. It was a bit of a shock for her husband.

The return of the dead raised all kinds of questions in people’s minds. Presumably this was Judgment Day, then. The Civil Defence Group set up a big prayer session in the street. It was quite eerie, watching the living and the dead come together and stand there in silence while Mr Ogden, who was a lay preacher, read from the Bible. At the point where he asked that we all be forgiven for our sins, Roy the bachelor coughed loudly but no one could meet his eye. They made Mrs Potter stand at the back because she was a bit upsetting for the kiddies.

Come sunset there was great excitement; the asteroid was finally visible to the naked eye. It looked like a very slow-moving comet high in the night sky. I supposed the Russians hadn’t been able to blow it up then, and that expert on the TV who had said it would burn up in the atmosphere had been wrong. I wondered what they were doing in Australia right now.

On the last day before the end, Katy came home. “I knew you’d still be here,” she said, collapsing into my arms and sobbing. It was just like a film.

She was filthy and her blouse was all torn. She’d walked it all the way from her house. It had taken all yesterday, all night and most of the morning. It had been slow going because of all the gangs — they were on the lookout for anyone with food or weapons. Women were especially in danger. Worst of all were the gangs of the undead, the ones who hadn’t eaten or had a woman for many long, cold years. She’d come crosscountry, hiding in ditches and crawling on her belly past campfires which rang with laughter and screams.

“Where’s Steve?” I said when she’d calmed down a bit.

“Gone,” she said. “Three days ago. You know his parents were part of that weird Christian sect? Steve had never been bothered with it, but when they decided to lock themselves in their church and his mum and dad told him that they’d built a huge bunker underground and filled it with food and water, he suddenly found his faith again.”

“Didn’t you fancy it?”

Katy dissolved into tears again, burying her head in my shoulder. “I begged him to take me,” she sobbed. “They refused. Just left me in the house with no food, nothing to defend myself with. Oh, God. What’s going to happen to us?”

Mum shuffled out of the kitchen. She looked at us and frowned. She’d never liked Katy much. “Oh,” she said. “One more for tea, is it?”

Mum had made a pie. From what, God only knows. At the mention of food, the others came out of the sitting room. Dad was followed by grandad and grandma, uncle George, aunty Linda, cousin Alfie, and then a raft of stern-looking people in stiff Edwardian collars. It was getting pretty busy here.

“Let’s go for a walk,” I said.

Everyone was out in the street, pointing at the sky. You could see the asteroid in daylight now, a blazing orb in the atmosphere. “As big as Milton Keynes,” I said, wonderingly.

“When’s it going to hit?” asked Katy, hugging my arm.

I pondered for a moment, revelling in the closeness of her body. “If I’ve worked it out right from the first reports, tomorrow.”

She swooned dramatically into my arms. “Oh, God,” she said in a small voice.

Mr Ogden the lay preacher was suddenly beside us. “Indeed,” he said. “The fiery judgment of heaven is upon us. We are having a vigil in the street this evening, begging for forgiveness and asking to be admitted through the gates of paradise when the calamity strikes. You’ll join us?”

“Will there be rat stew?” I asked.

Mr Ogden frowned and walked away, clutching his Bible. People had become quite a bit more serious over the last couple of days. I suppose approaching apocalypse does that to a person. That and the lack of water for a good bath. Most of us were beginning to smell, not least the risen dead.

“Do you fancy it?”

“What?” said Katy.

“The meeting. Begging for forgiveness and all that.”

Katy wrinkled her nose at me like she used to do. “What else is there to do?”

I thought for a moment. “We could go to Blackpool,” I said.

She looked at me. “Blackpool?”

“Yeah, you know. Candy floss and sticks of rock. We could go on the log flume and walk along the prom. Stroll to the end of the North Pier. Watch the world end. That kind of thing.”

Katy gestured at the barricade of cars at the end of the street, the distant sounds of gunfire. “How would we get there?”

I fished the keys to Bob’s MG out of my pocket and dangled them in front of her face. “In style.”

It only took us a couple of hours. Most of the fighting and looting seemed to have stopped. I suppose people probably wondered what the point was. Everyone seemed to be in their houses, waiting for the end. Blackpool was deserted.

We broke into an empty bed and breakfast place near the front and managed to find some bread that was not totally stale and a few tins of beans. Then we found the best bedroom and made slow, quiet love.

It was midday. The sky was pretty clear. We couldn’t see the asteroid any more, so presumed it was about to hit Australia. The tide was in, and we sat on a bench at the end of the North Pier, me crunching rock and Katy sucking on a lollipop in the shape of a baby’s dummy.

“Should we talk about where it all went wrong for us?” I said.

She thought about it and shook her head. “No point now, is there?”

Far, far away there was a thud that reverberated along the pier. Katy held my hand. The horizon rippled and there was a distant roar.

“This is it, then,” I said. I felt all right, really. Pretty good, in fact.

Katy closed her eyes. There were tears running down her cheeks. Her hair was a mess and her face was filthy. She was beautiful.

“Kiss me quick,” she whispered.

FERMI AND FROST Frederik Pohl

Frederik Pohl is one of the grand masters of science fiction with a career spanning over sixty years, both as a writer and an editor. He is adept whether writing on his own or in collaboration. His partnership with Cyril M. Kornbluth, which produced such classics as The Space Merchants (1953) and Wolfbane (1959), is legendary. He has also collaborated with Jack Williamson, whose work is also present in this anthology, and I believe he is the only writer to have collaborated with both Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. For much of the 1960s Pohl was tied up editing several SF magazines, most notably Galaxy and Worlds of If, but when he returned to writing fiction in the 1970s he produced a series of memorable books, including the Heechee series, which began with Gateway (1977), as well as Man Plus (1976), The Coming of the Quantum Cats (1986) and The World at the End of Time (1990). His work has won him many awards and accolades, including the following which won the Hugo in 1986. It takes us into the depths of the nuclear winter.

ON TIMOTHY CLARY’S ninth birthday he got no cake. He spent all of it in a bay of the TWA terminal at John F. Kennedy airport in New York, sleeping fitfully, crying now and then from exhaustion or fear. All he had to eat was stale Danish pastries from the buffet wagon and not many of them and he was fearfully embarrassed because he had wet his pants. Three times. Getting to the toilets over the packed refugee bodies was just about impossible. There were 2,800 people in a space designed for a fraction that many, and all of them with the same idea. Get away! Climb the highest mountain! Drop yourself splat, spang, right in the middle of the widest desert! Run! Hide!—

And pray. Pray as hard as you can, because even the occasional plane-load of refugees that managed to fight their way aboard and even take off had no sure hope of refuge when they got wherever the plane was going. Families parted. Mothers pushed their screaming children aboard a jet and melted back into the crowd before screaming, more quietly, themselves.

Because there had been no launch order yet, or none that the public had heard about anyway, there might still be time for escape. A little time. Time enough for the TWA terminal, and every other airport terminal everywhere, to jam up with terrified lemmings. There was no doubt that the missiles were poised to fly. The attempted Cuban coup had escalated wildly, and one nuclear sub had attacked another with a nuclear charge. That, everyone agreed, was the signal. The next event would be the final one.

Timothy knew little of this, but there would have been nothing he could have done about it — except perhaps cry, or have nightmares, or wet himself, and young Timothy was doing all of those anyway. He did not know where his father was. He didn’t know where his mother was, either, except that she had gone somewhere to try to call his father; but then there had been a surge that could not be resisted when three 747s at once had announced boarding, and Timothy had been carried far from where he had been left. Worse than that. Wet as he was, with a cold already, he was beginning to be very sick. The young woman who had brought him the Danish pastries put a worried hand to his forehead and drew it away helplessly. The boy needed a doctor. But so did a hundred others, elderly heart patients and hungry babies and at least two women close to childbirth.

If the terror had passed and the frantic negotiations had succeeded,

Timothy might have found his parents again in time to grow up and marry and give them grandchildren. If one side or the other had been able to pre-empt, and destroy the other, and save itself, Timothy forty years later might have been a greying, cynical colonel in the American military government of Leningrad. (Or body servant to a Russian one in Detroit.) Or if his mother had pushed just a little harder earlier on, he might have wound up in the plane of refugees that reached Pittsburgh just in time to become plasma. Or if the girl who was watching him had become just a little more scared, and a little more brave, and somehow managed to get him through the throng to the improvised clinics in the main terminal, he might have been given medicine, and found somebody to protect him, and take him to a refuge, and live…

But that is in fact what did happen!

Because Harry Malibert was on his way to a British Interplanetary Society seminar in Portsmouth, he was already sipping Beefeater Martinis in the terminal’s Ambassador Club when the unnoticed TV at the bar suddenly made everybody notice it.

Those silly nuclear-attack communications systems that the radio stations tested out every now and then, and nobody paid any attention to any more — why, this time it was real! They were serious! Because it was winter and snowing heavily Malibert’s flight had been delayed anyway. Before its rescheduled departure time came, all flights had been embargoed. Nothing would leave Kennedy until some official somewhere decided to let them go.

Almost at once the terminal began to fill with would-be refugees. The Ambassador Club did not fill at once. For three hours the ground-crew stew at the desk resolutely turned away everyone who rang the bell who could not produce the little red card of admission; but when the food and drink in the main terminals began to run out the Chief of Operations summarily opened the club to everyone. It didn’t help relieve the congestion outside, it only added to what was within. Almost at once a volunteer doctors’ committee seized most of the club to treat the ill and injured from the thickening crowds, and people like Harry Malibert found themselves pushed into the bar area. It was one of the Operations staff, commandeering a gin and tonic at the bar for the sake of the calories more than the booze, who recognized him.

“You’re Harry Malibert. I heard you lecture once, at Northwestern.”

Malibert nodded. Usually when someone said that to him he answered politely, “I hope you enjoyed it,” but this time it did not seem appropriate to be normally polite. Or normal at all.

“You showed slides of Arecibo,” the man said dreamily. “You said that radio telescope could send a message as far as the Great Nebula in Andromeda, two million light-years away — if only there was another radio telescope as good as that one there to receive it.”

“You remember very well,” said Malibert, surprised.

“You made a big impression, Dr Malibert.” The man glanced at his watch, debated, took another sip of his drink. “It really sounded wonderful, using the big telescopes to listen for messages from alien civilizations somewhere in space — maybe hearing some, maybe making contact, maybe not being alone in the universe any more. You made me wonder why we hadn’t seen some of these people already, or anyway heard from them -but maybe,” he finished, glancing bitterly at the ranked and guarded aircraft outside, “maybe now we know why.”

Malibert watched him go, and his heart was leaden. The thing he had given his professional career to — SETI, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence — no longer seemed to matter. If the bombs went off, as everyone said they must, then that was ended for a good long time, at least-

Gabble of voices at the end of the bar; Malibert turned, leaned over the mahogany, peered. The Please Stand

By slide had vanished, and a young black woman with pomaded hair, voice trembling, was delivering a news bulletin:

“—the president has confirmed that a nuclear attack has begun against the United States. Missiles have been detected over the Arctic, and they are incoming. Everyone is ordered to seek shelter and remain there pending instructions—”

Yes. It was ended, thought Malibert, at least for a good long time.

The surprising thing was that the news that it had begun changed nothing. There were no screams, no hysteria. The order to seek shelter meant nothing at John F. Kennedy Airport, where there was no shelter any better than the building they were in. And that, no doubt, was not too good. Malibert remembered clearly the strange aerodynamic shape of the terminal’s roof. Any blast anywhere nearby would tear that off and sent it sailing over the bay to the Rockaways, and probably a lot of the people inside with it. But there was nowhere else to go.

There were still camera crews at work, heaven knew why. The television set was showing crowds in Times Square and Newark, a clot of automobiles stagnating on the George Washington Bridge, their drivers abandoning them and running for the Jersey shore. A hundred people were peering around each other’s heads to catch glimpses of the screen, but all that anyone said was to call out when he recognized a building or a street.

Orders rang out: “You people will have to move back! We need the room! Look, some of you, give us a hand with these patients.” Well, that seemed useful, at least. Malibert volunteered at once and was given the care of a young boy, teeth chattering, hot with fever. “He’s had tetracycline,” said the doctor who turned the boy over to him. “Clean him up if you can, will you? He ought to be all right if-”

If any of them were, thought Malibert, not requiring her to finish the sentence. How did you clean a young boy up? The question answered itself when Malibert found the boy’s trousers soggy and the smell told him what the moisture was. Carefully he laid the child on a leather love seat and removed the pants and sopping undershorts. Naturally the boy had not come with a change of clothes. Malibert solved that with a pair of his own jockey shorts out of his briefcase — far too big for the child, or course, but since they were meant to fit tightly and elastically they stayed in place when Malibert pulled them up to the waist. Then he found paper towels and pressed the blue jeans as dry as he could. It was not very dry. He grimaced, laid them over a bar stool and sat on them for a while, drying them with body heat. They were only faintly wet ten minutes later when he put them back on the child-

San Francisco, the television said, had ceased to transmit.

Malibert saw the Operations man working his way toward him and shook his head. “It’s begun,” Malibert said, and the man looked around. He put his face close to Malibert’s

“I can get you out of here,” he whispered. “There’s an Icelandic DC-8 loading right now. No announcement. They’d be rushed if they did. There’s room for you, Dr Malibert.”

It was like an electric shock. Malibert trembled. Without knowing why he did it, he said, “Can I put the boy on instead?”

The Operations man looked annoyed. “Take him with you, of course,” he said. “I didn’t know you had a son.”

“I don’t,” said Malibert. But not out loud. And when they were in the jet he held the boy in his lap as tenderly as though he were his own.

If there was no panic in the Ambassador Club at Kennedy there was plenty of it everywhere else in the world. What everyone in the super-power cities knew was that their lives were at stake. Whatever they did might be in vain, and yet they had to do something. Anything! Run, hide, dig, brace, stow… pray. The city people tried to desert the metropolises for the open safety of the country, and the farmers and the exurbanites sought the stronger, safer buildings of the cities.

And the missiles fell.

The bombs that had seared Hiroshima and Nagasaki were struck matches compared to the hydrogen-fusion flares that ended eighty million lives in those first hours. Firestorms fountained above a hundred cities. Winds of 300 kilometers an hour pulled in cars and debris and people, and they all became ash that rose to the sky. Splatters of melted rock and dust sprayed into the air.

The sky darkened.

Then it grew darker still.

When the Icelandic jet landed at Keflavik Airport Malibert carried the boy down the passage to the little stand marked Immigration. The line was long, for most of the passengers had no passports at all, and the immigration woman was very tired of making out temporary entrance permits by the time Malibert reached her. “He’s my son,” Malibert lied. “My wife has his passport, but I don’t know where my wife is.”

She nodded wearily. She pursed her lips, looked toward the door beyond which her superior sat sweating and initialing reports, then shrugged and let them through. Malibert took the boy to a door marked Snirting, which seemed to be the Icelandic word for toilets, and was relieved to see that at least Timothy was able to stand by himself while he urinated, although his eyes stayed half closed. His head was very hot. Malibert prayed for a doctor in Reykjavik.

In the bus the English-speaking tour guide in charge of them — she had nothing else to do, for her tour would never arrive — sat on the arm of a first-row seat with a microphone in her hand and chattered vivaciously to the refugees. “Chicago? Ya, is gone, Chicago. And Detroit and Pittis-burrug — is bad. New York? Certainly New York too!” she said severely, and the big tears rolling down her cheek made Timothy cry too.

Malibert hugged him. “Don’t worry, Timmy,” he said. “No one would bother bombing Reykjavik.” And no one would have. But when the bus was ten miles farther along there was a sudden glow in the clouds ahead of them that made them squint. Someone in the USSR had decided that it was time for neatening up loose threads. That someone, whoever remained in whatever remained of their central missile control, had realized that no one had taken out that supremely, insultingly dangerous bastion of imperialist American interests in the North Atlantic, the United States airbase at Keflavik.

Unfortunately, by then EMP and attrition had compromised the accuracy of their aim. Malibert had been right. No one would have bothered bombing Reykjavik — on purpose — but a forty-mile miss did the job anyway, and Reykjavik ceased to exist.

They had to make a wide detour inland to avoid the fires and the radiation. And as the sun rose on their first day in Iceland, Malibert, drowsing over the boy’s bed after the Icelandic nurse had shot him full of antibiotics, saw the daybreak in awful, sky-drenching red.

It was worth seeing, for in the days to come there was no daybreak at all.

The worst was the darkness, but at first that did not seem urgent. What was urgent was rain. A trillion trillion dust particles nucleated water vapour. Drops formed. Rain fell — torrents of rain; sheets and cascades of rain. The rivers swelled. The Mississippi overflowed, and the Ganges, and the Yellow. The High Dam at Aswan spilled water over its lip, then crumbled. The rains came where rains came never. The Sahara knew flash floods. The Flaming Mountains at the edge of the Gobi flamed no more; a ten-year supply of rain came down in a week and rinsed the dusty slopes bare.

And the darkness stayed.

The human race lives always eighty days from starvation. That is the sum of stored food, globe wide. It met the nuclear winter with no more and no less.

The missiles went off on 11 June. If the world’s larders had been equally distributed, on 30 August the last mouthful would have been eaten. The starvation deaths would have begun and ended in the next six weeks; exit the human race.

The larders were not equally distributed. The Northern Hemisphere was caught on one foot, fields sown, crops not yet grown. Nothing did grow there. The seedlings poked up through the dark earth for sunlight, found none, died. Sunlight was shaded out by the dense clouds of dust exploded out of the ground by the H-bombs. It was the Cretaceous repeated; extinction was in the air.

There were mountains of stored food in the rich countries of North America and Europe, of course, but they melted swiftly. The rich countries had much stored wealth in the form of their livestock. Every steer was a million calories of protein and fat. When it was slaughtered, it saved thousands of other calories of grain and roughage for every day lopped off its life in feed. The cattle and pigs and sheep — even the goats and horses; even the pet bunnies and the chicks; even the very kittens and hamsters — they all died quickly and were eaten, to eke out the stores of canned foods and root vegetables and grain. There was no rationing of the slaughtered meat. It had to be eaten before it spoiled.

Of course, even in the rich countries the supplies were not equally distributed. The herds and the grain elevators were not located on Times Square or in the Loops. It took troops to convoy corn from Iowa to Boston and Dallas and Philadelphia. Before long, it took killing. Then it could not be done at all.

So the cities starved first. As the convoys of soldiers made the changeover from seizing food for the cities to seizing food for themselves, the riots began, and the next wave of mass death. These casualties didn’t usually die of hunger. They died of someone else’s.

It didn’t take long. By the end of “summer” the frozen remnants of the cities were all the same. A few thousand skinny, freezing desperadoes survived in each, sitting guard over their troves of canned and dried and frozen foodstuffs.

Every river in the world was running sludgy with mud to its mouth, as the last of the trees and grasses died and relaxed their grip on the soil. Every rain washed dirt away. As the winter dark deepened the rains turned to snow. The Flaming Mountains were sheeted in ice now, ghostly, glass fingers uplifted to the gloom. Men could walk across the Thames at London now, the few men who were left. And across the Hudson, across the Whangpoo, across the Missouri between the two Kansas Cities. Avalanches rumbled down on what was left of Denver. In the stands of dead timber grubs flourished. The starved predators scratched them out and devoured them. Some of the predators were human. The last of the Hawaiians were finally grateful for their termites.

A Western human being — comfortably pudgy on a diet of 2,800 calories a day, resolutely jogging to keep the flab away or mournfully conscience-stricken at the thickening thighs and the waistbands that won’t quite close — can survive for forty-five days without food. By then the fat is gone. Protein reabsorption of the muscles is well along. The plump housewife or businessman is a starving scarecrow. Still, even then care and nursing can still restore health.

Then it gets worse.

Dissolution attacks the nervous system. Blindness begins. The flesh of the gums recedes, and the teeth fall out. Apathy becomes pain, then agony, then coma.

Then death. Death for almost every person on Earth…

For forty days and forty nights the rain fell, and so did the temperature. Iceland froze over.

To Harry Malibert’s astonishment and dawning relief, Iceland was well equipped to do that. It was one of the few places on Earth that could be submerged in snow and ice and still survive.

There is a ridge of volcanoes that goes almost around the Earth. The part that lies between America and Europe is called the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and most of it is under water. Here and there, like boils erupting along a forearm, volcanic islands poke up above the surface. Iceland is one of them. It was because Iceland was volcanic that it could survive when most places died of freezing, but it was also because it had been cold in the first place.

The survival authorities put Malibert to work as soon as they found out who he was. There was no job opening for a radio astronomer interested in contacting far-off (and very likely nonexistent) alien races. There was, however, plenty of work for persons with scientific training, especially if they had the engineering skills of a man who had run Arecibo for two years. When Malibert was not nursing Timothy Clary through the slow and silent convalescence from his pneumonia, he was calculating heat losses and pumping rates for the piped geothermal water.

Iceland filled itself with enclosed space. It heated the spaces with water from the boiling underground springs.

Of heat it had plenty. Getting the heat from the geyser fields to the enclosed spaces was harder. The hot water was as hot as ever, since it did not depend at all on sunlight for its calories, but it took a lot more of it to keep out a -30°C chill than a +5°C one. It wasn’t just to keep the surviving people warm that they needed energy. It was to grow food.

Iceland had always had a lot of geothermal greenhouses. The flowering ornamentals were ripped out and food plants put in their place. There was no sunlight to make the vegetables and grains grow, so the geothermal power-generating plants were put on max output. Solar-spectrum incandes-cents flooded the trays with photons. Not just in the old greenhouses. Gymnasia, churches, schools — they all began to grow food under the glaring lights. There was other food, too, metric tons of protein baaing and starving in the hills. The herds of sheep were captured and slaughtered and dressed — and put outside again, to freeze until needed. The animals that froze to death on the slopes were bulldozed into heaps of a hundred, and left where they were. Geodetic maps were carefully marked to show the location of each heap.

It was, after all, a blessing that Reykjavik had been nuked. That meant half a million fewer people for the island’s resources to feed.

When Malibert was not calculating load factors, he was out in the desperate cold, urging on the workers. Sweating navvies tried to muscle shrunken fittings together in icy foxholes that their body heat kept filling with icewater. They listened patiently as Malibert tried to give orders — his few words of Icelandic were almost useless, but even the navvies sometimes spoke tourist-English. They checked their radiation monitors, looked up at the storms overhead, returned to their work and prayed. Even Malibert almost prayed when one day, trying to locate the course of the buried coastal road, he looked out on the sea ice and saw a grey-white ice hummock that was not an ice hummock. It was just at the limits of visibility, dim on the fringe of the road crew’s work lights, and it moved. “A polar bear!” he whispered to the head of the work crew, and everyone stopped while the beast shambled out of sight. From then on they carried rifles.

When Malibert was not (incompetent) technical advisor to the task of keeping Iceland warm or (almost incompetent, but learning) substitute father to Timothy Clary, he was trying desperately to calculate survival changes. Not just for them; for the entire human race. With all the desperate flurry of survival work, the Icelanders spared time to think of the future. A study team was created, physicists from the University of Reykjavik, the surviving Supply officer from the Keflavik airbase, a meteorologist on work-study from the University of Leyden to learn about North Atlantic air masses. They met in the gasthuis where Malibert lived with the boy, and usually Timmy sat silent next to Malibert while they talked. What they wanted was to know how long the dust cloud would persist. Some day the particles would finish dropping from the sky, and then the world could be reborn — if enough survived to parent a new race, anyway. But when? They could not tell. They did not know how long, how cold, how killing the nuclear winter would be. “We don’t know the mega-tonnage,” said Malibert, “we don’t know what atmospheric changes have taken place, we don’t know the rate of insolation. We only know it will be bad.”

“It is already bad,” grumbled Thorsid Magnesson, Director of Public Safety. (Once that office had had something to do with catching criminals, when the major threat to safety was crime.)

“It will get worse,” said Malibert, and it did. The cold deepened. The reports from the rest of the world dwindled. They plotted maps to show what they knew to show. One set of missile maps, to show where the strikes had been -within a week that no longer mattered, because the deaths from cold already began to outweigh those from blast. They plotted isotherm maps, based on the scattered weather reports that came in — maps that had to be changed every day, as the freezing line marched toward the Equator. Finally the maps were irrelevant. The whole world was cold then. They plotted fatality maps -the percentages of deaths in each area, as they could infer them from the reports they received, but those maps soon became too frightening to plot.

The British Isles died first, not because they were nuked but because they were not. There were too many people alive there. Britain never owned more than a four-day supply of food. When the ships stopped coming they starved. So did Japan. A little later, so did Bermuda and Hawaii and Canada’s off-shore provinces; and then it was the continents’ turn.

And Timmy Clary listened to every word.

The boy didn’t talk much. He never asked after his parents, not after the first few days. He did not hope for good news, and did not want bad. The boy’s infection was cured, but the boy himself was not. He ate half of what a hungry child should devour. He ate that only when Malibert coaxed him.

The only thing that made Timmy look alive was the rare times when Malibert could talk to him about space. There were many in Iceland who knew about Harry Malibert and SETI, and a few who cared about it almost as much as Malibert himself. When time permitted they would get together, Malibert and his groupies. There was Lars the postman (now pick-and-shovel ice excavator, since there was no mail), Ingar the waitress from the Loftleider Hotel (now stitching heavy drapes to help insulate dwelling walls), Elda the English teacher (now practical nurse, frostbite cases a speciality). There were others, but those three were always there when they could get away. They were Harry Malibert fans who had read his books and dreamed with him of radio messages from weird aliens from Aldebaran, or worldships that could carry million-person populations across the galaxy, on voyages of a hundred thousand years. Timmy listened, and drew sketches of the worldships. Malibert supplied him with dimensions. “I talked to Gerry Webb,” he said, “and he’d worked it out in detail. It is a matter of rotation rates and strength of materials. To provide the proper simulated gravity for the people in the ships, the shape has to be a cylinder and it has to spin — sixteen kilometers is what the diameter must be. Then the cylinder must be long enough to provide space, but not so long that the dynamics of spin cause it to wobble or bend -perhaps sixty kilometers long. One part to live in. One part to store fuel. And at the end, a reaction chamber where hydrogen fusion thrusts the ship across the Galaxy.”

“Hydrogen bombs,” said the boy. “Harry? Why don’t the bombs week the worldship?”

“It’s engineering,” said Malibert honestly, “and I don’t know the details. Gerry was going to give his paper at the Portsmouth meeting; it was one reason I was going.” But, of course, there would never be a British Interplanetary Society meeting in Portsmouth now, ever again.

Elda said uneasily, “It is time for lunch soon. Timmy? Will you eat some soup if I make it?” And did make it, whether the boy promised or not. Elda’s husband had worked at Keflavik in the PX, an accountant; unfortunately he had been putting in overtime there when the follow-up missile did what the miss had failed to do, and so Elda had no husband left, not enough even to bury.

Even with the earth’s hot water pumped full velocity through the straining pipes it was not warm in the gasthuis. She wrapped the boy in blankets and sat near him while he dutifully spooned up the soup. Lars and Ingar sat holding hands and watching the boy eat. “To hear a voice from another star,” Lars said suddenly, “that would have been fine.”

“There are no voices,” said Ingar bitterly. “Not even ours now. We have the answer to the Fermi paradox.”

And when the boy paused in his eating to ask what that was, Harry Malibert explained it as carefully as he could:

“It is named after Enrico Fermi, a scientist. He said, ‘We know that there are many billions of stars like our sun. Our sun has planets, therefore it is reasonable to assume that some of the other stars do also. One of our planets has living things on it. Us, for instance, as well as trees and germs and horses. Since there are so many stars, it seems almost certain that some of them, at least, have also living things. People. People as smart as we are — or smarter. People who can build spaceships, or send radio messages to other stars, as we can.’ Do you understand so far, Timmy?” The boy nodded, frowning, but — Malibert was delighted to see -kept on eating his soup. “Then, the question Fermi asked was, ‘Why haven’t some of them come to see us?’”

“Like in the movies,” the boy nodded. “The flying saucers.”

“All those movies are made-up stories, Timmy. Like Jack and the Beanstalk, or Oz. Perhaps some creatures from space have come to see us sometime, but there is no good evidence that this is so. I feel sure there would be evidence if it had happened.

There would have to be. If there were many such visits, ever, then at least one would have dropped the Martian equivalent of a McDonald’s Big Mac box, or a used Sirian flash cube, and it would have been found and shown to be from somewhere other than the Earth. None ever has. So there are only three possible answers to Dr Fermi’s question. One, there is no other life. Two, there is, but they want to leave us alone. They don’t want to contact us, perhaps because we frighten them with our violence, or for some reason we can’t even guess at. And the third reason—” Elda made a quick gesture, but Malibert shook his head—“is that perhaps as soon as any people get smart enough to do all those things that get them into space — when they have all the technology we do — they also have such terrible bombs and weapons that they can’t control them any more. So a war breaks out. And they kill themselves off before they are fully grown up.”

“Like now,” Timothy said, nodding seriously to show he understood. He had finished his soup, but instead of taking the plate away Elda hugged him in her arms and tried not to weep.

The world was totally dark now. There was no day or night, and would not be again for no one could say how long. The rains and snows had stopped. Without sunlight to suck water up out of the oceans there was no moisture left in the atmosphere to fall. Floods had been replaced by freezing droughts. Two meters down the soil of Iceland was steel hard, and the navvies could no longer dig. There was no hope of laying additional pipes. When more heat was needed all that could be done was to close off buildings and turn off their heating pipes. Elda’s patients now were less likely to be frostbite and more to be the listlessness of radiation sickness as volunteers raced in and out of the Reykjavik ruins to find medicine and food. No one was spared that job. When Elda came back on a snowmobile from a foraging trip to the Loftleider Hotel she brought back a present for the boy. Candy bars and postcards from the gift shop; the candy bars had to be shared, but the postcards were all for him. “Do you know what these are?” she asked. The cards showed huge, squat, ugly men and women in the costumes of a thousand years ago. “They’re trolls. We have myths in Iceland that the trolls lived here. They’re still here, Timmy, or so they say; the mountains are trolls that just got too old and tired to move any more.”

“They’re made-up stories, right?” the boy asked seriously, and did not grin until she assured him they were. Then he made a joke. “I guess the trolls won,” he said.

“Ach, Timmy!” Elda was shocked. But at least the boy was capable of joking, she told herself, and even graveyard humor was better than none. Life had become a little easier for her with the new patients — easier because for the radiation-sick there was very little that could be done — and she bestirred herself to think of ways to entertain the boy.

And found a wonderful one.

Since fuel was precious there were no excursions to see the sights of Iceland-under-the-ice. There was no way to see them anyway in the eternal dark. But when a hospital chopper was called up to travel empty to Stokksnes on the eastern shore to bring back a child with a broken back, she begged space for Malibert and Timmy. Elda’s own ride was automatic, as duty nurse for the wounded child. “An avalanche crushed his house,” she explained. “It is right under the mountains, Stokksnes, and landing there will be a little tricky, I think. But we can come in from the sea and make it safe. At least in the landing lights of the helicopter something can be seen.”

They were luckier than that. There was more light. Nothing came through the clouds, where the billions of particles that had once been Elda’s husband added to the trillions of trillions that had been Detroit and Marseilles and Shanghai to shut out the sky. But in the clouds and under them were snakes and sheets of dim color, sprays of dull red, fans of pale green.

The aurora borealis did not give much light. But there was no other light at all except for the faint glow from the pilot’s instrument panel. As their eyes widened they could see the dark shapes of the Vatnajokull slipping by below them. “Big trolls,” cried the boy happily, and Elda smiled too as she hugged him.

The pilot did as Elda had predicted, down the slopes of the eastern range, out over the sea, and cautiously back in to the little fishing village. As they landed, red-tipped flashlights guiding them, the copter’s landing lights picked out a white lump, vaguely saucer-shaped. “Radar dish,” said Malibert to the boy, pointing.

Timmy pressed his nose to the freezing window. “Is it one of them, Daddy Harry? The things that could talk to the stars?”

The pilot answered: “Ach, no, Timmy

- military, it is.” And Malibert said:

“They wouldn’t put one of those here, Timothy. It’s too far north. You wanted a place for a big radio telescope that could search the whole sky, not just the little piece of it you can see from Iceland.”

And while they helped slide the stretcher with the broken child into the helicopter, gently, kindly as they could be, Malibert was thinking about those places, Arecibo and Woomara and Socorro and all the others. Every one of them was now dead and certainly broken with a weight of ice and shredded by the mean winds. Crushed, rusted, washed away, all those eyes on space were blinded now; and the thought saddened Harry Malibert, but not for long. More gladdening than anything sad was the fact that, for the first time, Timothy had called him “Daddy.”

In one ending to the story, when at last the sun came back it was too late. Iceland had been the last place where human beings survived, and Iceland had finally starved. There was nothing alive anywhere on Earth that spoke, or invented machines, or read books, Fermi’s terrible third answer was the right one after all.

But there exists another ending. In this one the sun came back in time. Perhaps it was just barely in time, but the food had not yet run out when daylight brought the first touches of green in some parts of the world, and plants began to grow again from frozen or hoarded seed. In this ending Timothy lived to grow up. When he was old enough, and after Malibert and Elda had got around to marrying, he married one of their daughters. And of their descendants — two generations or a dozen generations later — one was alive on the day when Fermi’s paradox became a quaintly amusing old worry, as irrelevant and comical as a fifteenth-century mariner’s fear of falling off the edge of the flat Earth. On that day the skies spoke, and those who lived in them came to call.

Perhaps that is the true ending of the story, and in it the human race chose not to squabble and struggle within itself, and so extinguish itself finally into the dark. In this ending human beings survived, and saved all the science and beauty of life, and greeted their star-born visitors with joy…

But that is in fact what did happen!

At least, one would like to think so.

SLEEPOVER Alastair Reynolds

Alastair Reynolds is one of Britain’s most popular and bestselling writers of science fiction. He began selling stories to Interzone in 1990, but it wasn’t until the late 1990s that his output increased significantly. He made a big impact with his first novel, Revelation Space (2000), which was shortlisted for both the BSFA and Arthur C. Clarke awards. His second novel, Chasm City (2001) won the BSFA Award. Reynolds worked for the European Space Agency until 2004 when he turned to writing full time. The following story, specially written for this anthology, is not part of the Revelation Space series. It was developed from notes for an unwritten novel and maybe one day that novel will be completed, for we need to know the fate of the Earth. Here we have one of the more unusual apocalyptic ideas, but I’ll let Reynolds do the explaining.

THEY BROUGHT GAUNT out of hibernation on a blustery day in early spring. He came to consciousness in a steel-framed bed in a grey-walled room that had the economical look of something assembled in a hurry from prefabricated parts. Two people were standing at the foot of the bed, looking only moderately interested in his plight. One of them was a man, cradling a bowl of something and spooning quantities of it into his mouth, as if he was eating his breakfast on the run. He had cropped white hair and the leathery complexion of someone who spent a lot of time outside. Next to him was a woman with longer hair, greying rather than white, and with much darker skin. Like the man, she was wiry of build and dressed in crumpled grey overalls, with a heavy equipment belt dangling from her hips.

“You in one piece, Gaunt?” she asked, while her companion spooned in another mouthful of his breakfast. “You compos mentis?”

Gaunt squinted against the brightness of the room’s lighting, momentarily adrift from his memories.

“Where am I?” he asked. His voice came out raw, as if he had been in a loud bar the night before.

“In a room, being woken up,” the woman said. “You remember going under, right?”

He grasped for memories, something specif c to hold on to. Green-gowned doctors in a clean surgical theatre, his hand signing the last of the release forms before they plumbed him into the machines. The drugs flooding his system, the utter absence of sadness or longing as he bid farewell to the old world, with all its vague disappointments.

“I think so.”

“What’s your name?” the man asked.

“Gaunt.” He had to wait a moment for the rest of it to come. “Marcus Gaunt.”

“Good,” he said, smearing a hand across his lips. “That’s a positive sign.”

“I’m Clausen,” the woman said. “This is Da Silva. We’re your wake-up team. You remember Sleepover?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Think hard, Gaunt,” she said. “It won’t cost us anything to put you back under, if you don’t think you’re going to work out for us.”

Something in Clausen’s tone convinced him to work hard at retrieving the memory. “The company,” he said. “Sleepover was the company. The one that put me under. The one that put everyone under.”

“Brain cells haven’t mushed on us,” Da Silva said.

Clausen nodded, but showed nothing in the way of jubilation in him having got the answer right. It was more that he’d spared the two of them a minor chore, that was all. “I like the way he says ‘everyone’. Like it was universal.”

“Wasn’t it?” Da Silva asked.

“Not for him. Gaunt was one of the first under. Didn’t you read his file?”

Da Silva grimaced. “Sorry. Got sidetracked.”

“He was one of the first 200,000,” Clausen said. “The ultimate exclusive club. What did you call yourselves, Gaunt?”

“The Few,” he said. “It was an accurate description. What else were we going to call ourselves?”

“Lucky sons of bitches,” Clausen said.

“Do you remember the year you went under?” Da Silva asked. “You were one of the early ones, it must’ve been some time near the middle of the century.”

“It was 2058. I can tell you the exact month and day if you wish. Maybe not the time of day.”

“You remember why you went under, of course,” Clausen said.

“Because I could,” Gaunt said. “Because anyone in my position would have done the same. The world was getting better, it was coming out of the trough. But it wasn’t there yet. And the doctors kept telling us that the immortality breakthrough was just around the corner, year after year. Always just out of reach. Just hang on in there, they said. But we were all getting older. Then the doctors said that while they couldn’t give us eternal life just yet, they could give us the means to skip over the years until it happened.” Gaunt forced himself to sit up in the bed, strength returning to his limbs even as he grew angrier at the sense that he was not being treated with sufficient deference, that — worse — he was being judged. “There was nothing evil in what we did. We didn’t hurt anyone or take anything away from anyone else. We just used the means at our disposal to access what was coming to us anyway.”

“Who’s going to break it to him?” Clausen asked, looking at Da Silva.

“You’ve been sleeping for nearly 160 years,” the man said. “It’s April, 2217. You’ve reached the twenty-third century.”

Gaunt took in the drab mundanity of his surroundings again. He had always had some nebulous idea of the form his wake-up would take and it was not at all like this.

“Are you lying to me?”

“What do you think?” asked Clausen.

He held up his hand. It looked, as near as he could remember, exactly the way it had been before. The same age-spots, the same prominent veins, the same hairy knuckles, the same scars and loose, lizardy skin.

“Bring me a mirror,” he said, with an ominous foreboding.

“I’ll save you the bother,” Clausen said. “The face you’ll see is the one you went under with, give or take. We’ve done nothing to you except treat superficial damage caused by the early freezing protocols. Physiologically, you’re still a sixty-year-old man, with about twenty or thirty years ahead of you.”

“Then why have you woken me, if the process isn’t ready?”

“There isn’t one,” Da Silva said. “And there won’t be, at least not for a long, long time. Afraid we’ve got other things to worry about now. Immortality’s the least of our problems.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will, Gaunt,” Clausen said. “Everyone does in the end. You’ve been preselected for aptitude, anyway. Made your fortune in computing, didn’t you?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “You worked with artificial intelligence, trying to make thinking machines.”

One of the vague disappointments hardened into a specif c, life-souring defeat. All the energy he had put into one ambition, all the friends and lovers he had burned up along the way, shutting them out of his life while he focused on that one white whale.

“It never worked out.”

“Still made you a rich man along the way,” she said.

“Just a means of raising money. What does it have to do with my revival?”

Clausen seemed on the verge of answering his question before something made her change her mind. “Clothes in the bedside locker: they should fit you. You want breakfast?”

“I don’t feel hungry.”

“Your stomach will take some time to settle down. Meantime, if you feel like puking, do it now rather than later. I don’t want you messing up my ship.”

He had a sudden lurch of adjusting preconceptions. The prefabricated surroundings, the background hum of distant machines, the utilitarian clothing of his wake-up team: perhaps he was aboard some kind of spacecraft, sailing between the worlds. The twenty-third century, he thought. Time enough to establish an interplanetary civilization, even if it only extended as far as the solar system.

“Are we in a ship now?”

“Fuck, no,” Clausen said, sneering at his question. “We’re in Patagonia.”

He got dressed, putting on underwear, a white T-shirt and over that the same kind of grey overalls as his hosts had been wearing. The room was cool and damp and he was glad of the clothes once he had them on. There were lace-up boots that were tight around the toes, but otherwise serviceable. The materials all felt perfectly mundane and commonplace, even a little frayed and worn in places. At least he was clean and groomed, his hair clipped short and his beard shaved. They must have freshened him up before bringing him to consciousness.

Clausen and Da Silva were waiting in the windowless corridor outside the room. “’Spect you’ve got a ton of questions,” Clausen said. “Along the lines of, why am I being treated like shit rather than royalty? What happened to the rest of the Few, what is this fucked-up, miserable place, and so on?”

“I presume you’re going to get round to some answers soon enough.”

“Maybe you should tell him the deal now, up-front,” Da Silva said. He was wearing an outdoor coat now and had a zip-up bag slung over his shoulder.

“What deal?” Gaunt asked.

“To begin with,” Clausen said, “you don’t mean anything special to us. We’re not impressed by the fact that you just slept 160 years. It’s old news. But you’re still useful.”

“In what way?”

“We’re down a man. We run a tight operation here and we can’t afford to lose even one member of the team.” It was Da Silva speaking now; although there wasn’t much between them, Clausen had the sense that he was the slightly more reasonable one of the duo, the one who wasn’t radiating quite so much naked antipathy. “Deal is, we train you up and give you work. In return, of course, you’re looked after pretty well. Food, clothing, somewhere to sleep, whatever medicine we can provide.” He shrugged. “It’s the deal we all took. Not so bad when you get used to it.”

“And the alternative?”

“Bag you and tag you and put you back in the freezer,” Da Silva went on. “Same as all the others. Your choice, of course; work with us, become part of the team, or go back into hibernation and take your chances there.”

“We need to be on our way.” Clausen said. “Don’t want to keep Nero waiting on F.”

“Who’s Nero?” Gaunt asked.

“Last one we pulled out before you,” Da Silva said.

They walked down the corridor, passing a set of open double doors that led into some kind of mess room or commons. Men and women of various ages were sitting around tables, talking quietly as they ate meals or played card games. Everything looked spartan and institutional, from the plastic chairs to the Formica-topped surfaces. Beyond the tables, a rain-washed window framed only a rectangle of grey cloud. Gaunt caught a few glances directed his way, a flicker of waning interest from one or two of the personnel but no one showed any fascination in him. The three of them walked on, ascending stairs to the next level of whatever kind of building they were in. An older man, Chinese-looking, passed in the opposite direction, carrying a grease-smeared wench. He raised his free hand to Clausen in a silent high-five, Clausen reciprocating. Then they were up another level, passing equipment lockers and electrical distribution cabinets, and then up a spiral stainvell that emerged into a draughty, corrugated-metal shed smelling of oil and ozone. Incongruously, there was an inflatable orange life preserver on one wall of the shed, an old red fire extinguisher on the other.

This is the twenty-third century, Gaunt told himself. As dispiriting as the surroundings were, he had no reason to doubt that this was the reality of life in 2217. He supposed it had always been an article of faith that the world would improve, that the future would be better than the past, shinier and cleaner and faster, but he had not expected to have his nose rubbed in the unwisdom of that faith quite so vigorously.

There was one door leading out of the corrugated-metal shed. Clausen pushed it open against wind, then the three of them stepped outside. They were on the roof of something. There was a square of cracked and oil-stained concrete, marked here and there with lines of fading red paint. A couple of seagulls pecked disconsolately at something in the corner. At least they still had seagulls, Gaunt thought. There hadn’t been some awful, life-scouring bio-catastrophe, forcing everyone to live in bunkers.

Sitting on the middle of the roof was a helicopter. It was matt black, a lean, waspish thing made of angles rather than curves, and aside from some sinister bulges and pods, there was nothing particularly futuristic about it. For all Gaunt knew, it could have been based around a model that was in production before he went under.

“You’re thinking: shitty-looking helicopter,” Clausen said, raising her voice over the wind.

He smiled quickly. “What does it run on? I’m assuming the oil reserves ran dry some time in the last century?”

“Oil,” Clausen said, cracking open the cockpit door. “Get in the back, buckle up. Da Silva rides up front with me.”

Da Silva slung his zip-up bag into the rear compartment where Gaunt was settling into his position, more than a little apprehensive about what lay ahead. He looked between the backs of the forward seats at the cockpit instrumentation. He’d been in enough private helicopters to know what the manual override controls looked like and there was nothing weirdly incongruous here.

“Where are we going?”

“Running a shift change,” Da Silva said, wrapping a pair of earphones around his skull. “Couple of days ago there was an accident out on J platform. Lost Gimenez, and Nero’s been hurt. Weather was too bad to do the extraction until today but now we have our window. Reason we thawed you, actually. I’m taking over from Gimenez, so you have to cover for me here.”

“You have a labour shortage, so you brought me out of hibernation?”

“That about covers it,” Da Silva said. “Clausen figured it wouldn’t hurt for you to come along for the ride, get you up to speed.”

Clausen flicked a bank of switches in the ceiling. Overhead, the rotor began to turn.

“I guess you have something faster than helicopters, for longer journeys,” Gaunt said.

“Nope,” Clausen answered. “Other than some boats, helicopters is pretty much it.”

“What about intercontinental travel?”

“There isn’t any.”

“This isn’t the world I was expecting!’ Gaunt said, straining to make himself heard.

Da Silva leaned around and motioned to the headphones dangling from the seat back. Gaunt put them on and fussed with the microphone until it was in front of his lips.

“I said this isn’t the world I was expecting.”

“Yeah,” Da Silva said. “I heard you the first time.”

The rotor reached takeoff speed. Clausen eased the helicopter into the air, the rooftop landing pad falling away below. They scudded sideways, nose down, until they had cleared the side of the building. The walls plunged vertically, Gaunt’s guts twisting at the dizzying transition. It hadn’t been a building at all, at least not the kind he had been thinking of. The landing pad was on top of a square-ish, industrial-looking structure about the size of a large office block, hazed in scaffolding and gangways, prickly with cranes and chimneys and otherwise unrecognizable protuberances, the structure in turn rising out of the sea on four elephantine legs, the widening bases of which were being ceaselessly pounded by waves. It was an oil rig or production platform of some kind, or at least, something repurposed from one.

It wasn’t the only one either. The rig they had taken off from was but one in a major field, rig after rig stretching all the way to the gloomy, grey, rain-hazed horizon. There were dozens, and he had the sense that they didn’t stop at the horizon.

“What are these for? I know it’s not oil. There can’t be enough of it left to justify a drilling operation on this scale. The reserves were close to being tapped out when I went under.”

“Dormitories,” Da Silva said. “Each of these platforms holds maybe 10,000 sleepers, give or take. They built them out at sea because we need OTEC power to run them, using the heat difference between surface water and deep ocean, and it’s much easier if we don’t have to run those power cables inland.”

“Coming back to bite us now,” Clausen said.

“If we’d gone inland, they’d have sent land-dragons instead. They’re just adapting to whatever we do,” Da Silva said pragmatically.

They sped over oily, roiling waters.

“Is this really Patagonia?” Gaunt asked.

“Patagonia offshore sector,” Da Silva said. “Sub-sector fifteen. That’s our watch. There are about 200 of us, and we look after about 100 rigs, all told.”

Gaunt ran the numbers twice, because he couldn’t believe what they were telling him. “That’s a million sleepers.”

“Ten million in the whole of Patagonia offshore,” Clausen said. “That surprise you, Gaunt? That ten million people managed to achieve what you and your precious Few did, all those years back?”

“I suppose not,” he said, as the truth of it sunk in. “Over time the cost of the process would have decreased, becoming available to people of lesser means. The merely rich, rather than the super-rich. But it was never going to be something available to the masses. Ten million, maybe. Beyond that? Hundreds of millions? I’m sorry, but the economics just don’t stack up.”

“It’s a good thing we don’t have economics, then,” Da Silva said.

“Patagonia’s just a tiny part of the whole,” said Clausen. “Two hundred other sectors out there, just as large as this one. That’s two billion sleepers, near as it matters.”

Gaunt shook his head. “That can’t be right. The global population was only eight billion when I went under, and the trend was downwards! You can’t tell me that a quarter of the human race is hibernating.”

“Maybe it would help if I told you that the current population of the Earth is also two billion, near as it matters,” Clausen said. “Almost everyone’s asleep. There’s just a handful of us still awake, playing caretaker, watching over the rigs and OTEC plants.”

“Four hundred thousand waking souls,” Da Silva said. “But it actually feels like a lot less than that, since we mostly keep to our assigned sectors.”

“You know the real irony?” Clausen said. “We’re the ones who get to call ourselves the Few now. The ones who aren’t sleeping.”

“That doesn’t leave anyone to actually do anything,” Gaunt said. “There’s no point in everyone waiting for a cure for death if there’s no one alive to do the hard work of making it happen.”

Clausen turned round to look back at him, her expression telling him everything he needed to know about her opinion of his intellect.

“It isn’t about immortality. It’s about survival. It’s about doing our bit for the war effort.”

“What war?” Gaunt asked.

“The one going on all around us,” Clausen said. “The one you made happen.”

They came in to land on another rig, one of five that stood close enough to each other to be linked by cables and walkways. The sea was still heavy, huge waves dashing against the concrete piers on which the rigs were supported. Gaunt peered intently at the windows and decks but saw no sign of human activity on any of the structures. He thought back to what Clausen and Da Silva had told him, each time trying to find a reason why they might be lying to him, why they might be going to pathological lengths to hoax him about the nature of the world into which he had woken. Maybe there was a form of mass entertainment that involved waking sleepers such as himself and putting them through the emotional wringer, presenting them with the grimmest possible scenarios, ramping up the misery until they cracked, and only then pulling aside the grey curtains to reveal that, in marvellous point of fact, life in the twenty-third century really was every bit as blue-skied and Utopian as he had hoped. That didn’t seem very likely, though.

Yet what kind of war required people to be put to sleep in their billions? And why was the caretaker force, the 400,000 waking individuals, stretched so ridiculously thin? Clearly the rigs were largely automated but it had still been necessary to pull him out of sleep because someone else had died in the Patagonia offshore sector. Why not just have more caretakers awake in the first place, so that the system was able to absorb some losses?

With the helicopter safely down on the pad, Clausen and Da Silva told him to follow them into the depths of the other rig. There was very little about it to distinguish it from the one where Gaunt had been woken, save for the fact that it was almost completely deserted, with the only activity coming from skulking repair robots. They were clearly very simple machines, not much smarter than automatic window-cleaners. Given the years of his life that he had given over to the dream of artificial intelligence, it was dismaying to see how little progress — if any — had been made.

“We need to get one thing straight,” Gaunt said, when they were deep into the humming bowels of the rig. “I didn’t start any wars. You’ve got the wrong guy here.”

“You think we mixed up your records?” Clausen asked. “How did we know about your work on thinking machines?”

“Then you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. I had nothing do to with wars or the military.”

“We know what you did,” she said. “The years spent trying to build a true, Turing-compliant artificial intelligence. A thinking, conscious machine.”

“Except it was a dead end.”

“Still led to some useful spin-offs, didn’t it?” she went on. “You cracked the hard problem of language comprehension. Your systems didn’t just recognize speech. They were able to understand it on a level no computer system had ever achieved before. Metaphor, simile, sarcasm and understatement, even implication by omission. Of course, it had numerous civilian applications, but that isn’t where you made your billions.” She looked at him sharply.

“I created a product,” Gaunt said. “I simply made it available to whoever could afford it.”

“Yes, you did. Unfortunately, your system turned out to be the perfect instrument of mass surveillance for every despotic government left on the planet. Every basket-case totalitarian state still in existence couldn’t get its hands on your product fast enough. And you had no qualms whatsoever about selling it, did you?”

Gaunt felt a well-rehearsed argument bubbling up from his subconscious. “No communication tool in history has ever been a single-edged sword.”

“And that excuses you, does it?” Clausen asked. Da Silva had been silent in this exchange, observing the two of them as they continued along corridors and down stairwells.

“I’m not asking for absolution. But if you think I started wars, if you think I’m somehow responsible for this…” He gestured at his surroundings. “This fucked-up state of affairs. Then you’re very, very wrong.”

“Maybe you weren’t solely responsible,” Clausen said. “But you were certainly complicit. You and every one else who pursued the dream of artificial intelligence. Driving the world towards the edge of that cliff, without a thought for the consequences. You had no idea what you were unleashing.”

“I’m telling you, we unleashed nothing. It didn’t work.”

They were walking along a suspended gangway now, crossing from one side to the other of some huge space somewhere inside the rig. “Take a look down,” Da Silva said. Gaunt didn’t want to; he’d never been good with heights and the drainage holes in the floor were already too large for comfort. He forced himself anyway. The four walls of the cubic chamber held rack upon rack of coffin-sized white boxes, stacked thirty high and surrounded by complicated plumbing, accompanied by an equally complex network of access catwalks, ladders and service tracks. Even as Gaunt watched, a robot whirred up to one of the boxes and extracted a module from one end of it, before tracking sideways to deal with another coffin.

“In case you thought we were yanking your chain,” Clausen said. “This is real.”

The hibernation arrangements for the original Few could not have been more different. Like an Egyptian Pharaoh buried with his worldly possessions, Gaunt had required an entire crypt full of bulky, state-of-the-art cryopreservation and monitoring systems. At any one time, as per his contract with Sleepover, he would have been under the direct care of several living doctors. Just housing a thousand of the Few needed a building the size of a major resort hotel, with about the same power requirements. By contrast this was hibernation on a crushing, maximally efficient industrial scale. People in boxes, stacked like mass-produced commodities, tended by the absolute minimum of living caretakers. He was seeing maybe less than a thousand sleepers in this one chamber, but from that point on Gaunt had no doubt whatsoever that the operation could be scaled up to encompass billions.

All you needed were more rooms like this. More robots and more rigs. Provided you had the power, and provided the planet did not need anyone to do anything else, it was eminently doable.

There was no one to grow crops or distribute food. But that didn’t matter because there was almost no one left waking to need feeding. No one to orchestrate the intricate, flickering web of the global finance system. But that didn’t matter because there was no longer anything resembling an economy. No need for a transport infrastructure because no one travelled. No need for communications, because no one needed to know what was going on beyond their own sector. No need for anything really, save the absolute, life and death essentials. Air to breathe.

Rations and medicine for less than half a million people. A trickle of oil, the world’s last black hiccough, to keep the helicopters running.

Yes, it could be done. It could easily be done.

“There’s a war,” Da Silva said. “It’s been going on, in some shape or form, since before you went under. But it’s probably not the kind of war you’re thinking of.”

“And where do these people come into it, these sleepers?”

“They have no choice,” Clausen said. “They have to sleep. If they don’t, we all die.”

“We, as in…?”

“You, me. Us,” Da Silva said. “The entire human species.”

They collected Nero and the corpse from a sick bay several levels down from the freezer chamber. The corpse was already bagged, a silver-wrapped mummy on a medical trolley. Rather than the man Gaunt had been expecting, Nero turned out to be a tall, willowy woman with an open, friendly face and a mass of salmon-red curls.

“You the newbie, right?” she asked, lifting a coffee mug in salute.

“I guess,” Gaunt said uneasily.

“Takes some adjustment, I know. Took a good six months before I realized this wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to me. But you’ll get there eventually.” One of Nero’s hands was bandaged, a white mitten with a safety pin stuck through the dressing. “Take it from me, though. Don’t go back inside the box.” Then she glanced at Clausen. “You are giving him a chance about this, aren’t you?”

“Of course,” Clausen said. “That’s the deal.”

“Occurs to me sometimes maybe it would be easier if there wasn’t a deal, you know,” Nero said. “Like, we just give them their duties and to hell with it.”

“You wouldn’t have been too pleased if we didn’t give you the choice,” Da Silva said. He was already taking off his coat, settling in for the stay.

“Yeah, but what did I know back then? Six months feels like half a lifetime ago now.”

“When did you go under?” Gaunt asked.

“Twenty ninety-two. One of the first 100 million.”

“Gaunt’s got a head start on you,” Clausen said. “Guy was one of the Few. The original Few, the first 200,000.”

“Holy shit. That is some head start.” Nero narrowed her eyes. “He up to speed on things yet? My recollection is they didn’t know what they were getting into back then.”

“Most of them didn’t,” Clausen said.

“Know what?” Gaunt asked.

“Sleepover was a cover, even then,” Nero said. “You were being sold a scam. There was never any likelihood of an immortality breakthrough, no matter how long you slept.”

“I don’t understand. You’re saying it was all a con?”

“Of a kind,” Nero said. “Not to make money for anyone, but to begin the process of getting the whole of humanity into hibernation. It had to begin small, so that they had time to work the wrinkles out of the technology. If the people in the know had come out into the open and announced their plans, no one would have believed them. And if they had been believed, there’d have been panic and confusion all over the world. So they began with the Few, and then expanded the operation slowly. First a few hundred thousand. Then half a million. Then a million… so on.” She paused. “Establishing a pattern, a normal state of affairs. They kept the lid on it for thirty years. But then the rumours started spreading, the rumours that there was something more to Sleepover.”

“The dragons didn’t help,” Da Silva said. “It was always going to be a tall order explaining those away.”

“By the time I went under,” Nero said, “most of us knew the score. The world was going to end if we didn’t sleep. It was our moral duty, our obligation, to submit to the hibernation rigs. That, or take the euthanasia option. I took the freezer route, but a lot of my friends opted for the pill. Figured the certainty of death was preferable to the lottery of getting into the boxes, throwing the cosmic dice…” She was looking at Gaunt intently, meeting his eyes as she spoke. “And I knew about this part of the deal, as well. That, at some point, there’d be a chance of me being brought out of sleep to become a caretaker. But, you know, the likelihood of that was vanishingly small. Never thought it would happen to me.”

“No one ever does,” Clausen said.

“What happened?” Gaunt asked, nodding at the foil-wrapped body.

“Gimenez died when a steam pipe burst down on level eight. I don’t think he felt much, it would have been so quick. I got down there as quickly as I could, obviously. Shut off the steam leak and managed to drag Gimenez back to the infirmary.”

“Nero was burned getting Gimenez back here,” Da Silva said.

“Hey, I’ll mend. Just not much good with a screwdriver right now.”

“I’m sorry about Gimenez,” Clausen said.

“You don’t need to be. Gimenez never really liked it here. Always figured he’d made the wrong decision, sticking with us rather than going back into the box. Tried to talk him round, of course, but it was like arguing with a wall.” Nero ran her good hand through her curls. “Not saying I didn’t get on with the guy. But there’s no arguing that he’s better off now than he was before.”

“He’s dead, though,” Gaunt said.

“Technically. But I ran a full blood-scrub on him after the accident, pumped him full of cryoprotectant. We don’t have any spare slots here, but they can put him back in a box on the operations rig.”

“My box,” Gaunt said. “The one I was in.”

“There are other slots,” Da Silva corrected. “Gimenez going back in doesn’t preclude you following him, if that’s what you want.”

“If Gimenez was so unhappy, why didn’t you just let him go back into the box earlier?”

“Not the way it works,” Clausen said. “He made his choice. Afterwards, we put a lot of time and energy into bringing him up to speed, making him mesh with the team. You think we were going to willingly throw all that expenditure away, just because he changed his mind?”

“He never stopped pulling his weight,” Nero said. “Say what you will about Gimenez but he didn’t let the team down. And what happened to him down on eight was an accident.”

“I never doubted it,” Da Silva said. “He was a good guy. It’s just a shame he couldn’t make the adjustment.”

“Maybe it’ll work out for him now,” Nero said. “One-way ticket to the future. Done his caretaker stint, so the next time he’s revived, it’ll be because we finally got through this shit. It’ll be because we won the war, and we can all wake up again. They’ll find a way to fix him up, I’m sure. And if they can’t, they’ll just put him under again until they have the means.”

“Sounds like he got a good deal out of it in the end,” Gaunt said.

“The only good deal is being alive,” Nero replied. “That’s what we’re doing now, all of us. Whatever happens, we’re alive, we’re breathing, we’re having conscious thoughts. We’re not frozen bodies stacked in boxes, merely existing from one instant to the next.” She gave a shrug. “My fifty cents, that’s all. You want to go back in the box, let someone else shoulder the burden, don’t let me talk you out of it.” Then she looked at Da Silva. “You gonna be all right here on your own, until I’m straightened out?”

“Someone comes up I can’t deal with, I’ll let you know,” Da Silva said.

Nero and Da Silva went through a checklist, Nero making sure her replacement knew everything he needed to, and then they made their farewells. Gaunt couldn’t tell how long they were going to be leaving Da Silva alone out here, whether it was weeks or months. He seemed resigned to his fate, as if this kind of solitary duty was something they were all expected to do now and then. Given that there had been two people on duty here until Gimenez’s death, Gaunt wondered why they didn’t just thaw out another sleeper so that Da Silva wouldn’t have to work on his own while Nero’s hand was healing.

Then, no more than half an hour after his arrival, they were back in the helicopter again, powering back to the operations rig. The weather had worsened in the meantime, the seas lashing even higher against the rigs’ legs, and the horizon was now obscured behind curtains of storming rain, broken only by the flash of lightning.

“This was bad timing,” he heard Nero say. “Maybe you should have let me stew until this system had passed. It’s not like Gimenez couldn’t wait.”

“We were already overdue on the extraction,” Clausen said. “If the weather clamps down, this might be our last chance for days.”

“They tried to push one through yesterday, I heard.”

“Out in Echo field. Partial coalescence.”

“Did you see it?”

“Only on the monitors. Close enough for me.”

“We should put guns on the rigs.”

“And where would the manpower come from, exactly? We’re just barely holding on as it is, without adding more shit to worry about.”

The two women were sitting up front; Gaunt was in the back with Gimenez’s foil-wrapped corpse for company. They had folded back one seat to make room for the stretchered form.

“I don’t really have a choice, do I,” he said.

“Course you have a choice,” Nero answered.

“I mean, morally. I’ve seen what it’s like for you people. You’re stretched to breaking point just keeping this operation from falling apart. Why don’t you wake up more sleepers?”

“Hey, that’s a good point,” Clausen said. “Why don’t we?”

Gaunt ignored her sarcasm. “You’ve just left that man alone, looking after that whole complex. How can I turn my back on you, and still have any self-respect?”

“Plenty of people do exactly that,” Nero said.

“How many? What fraction?”

“More than half agree to stay,” Clausen said. “Good enough for you?”

“But like you said, most of the sleepers would have known what they were getting into. I still don’t.”

“And you think that changes things, means we can cut you some slack?” Clausen asked. “Like we’re gonna say, it’s fine man, go back into the box, we can do without you this time.”

“What you need to understand,” Nero said, “is that the future you were promised isn’t coming. Not for centuries, not until we’re out of this mess. And no one has a clue how long that could take. Meanwhile, the sleepers don’t have unlimited shelf life. You think the equipment never fails? You think we don’t sometimes lose someone because a box breaks down?”

“Of course not.”

“You go back in the box, you’re gambling on something that might never happen. Stay awake, at least there are certainties. At least you know you’ll die doing something useful, something worthwhile.”

“It would help if you told me why,” Gaunt said.

“Someone has to look after things,” Nero said. “The robots take care of the rigs, but who takes care of the robots?”

“I mean, why is it that everyone has to sleep? Why is that so damned important?”

Something flashed on the console. Clausen pressed a hand against her headphones, listening to something. After a few seconds he heard her say: “Roger, vectoring three two five.” Followed by an almost silent, “Fuck. All we need.”

“That wasn’t a weather alert,” Nero said.

“What’s happening?” Gaunt asked, as the helicopter made a steep turn, the sea tilting up to meet him.

“Nothing you need worry about,” Clausen said.

The helicopter levelled out on its new course, flying higher than before — so it seemed to Gaunt — but also faster, the motor noise louder in the cabin, various indicator lights showing on the console that had not been lit before. Clausen silenced alarms as they came on, flipping the switches with the casual insouciance of someone who was well used to flying under tense circumstances and knew exactly what her machine could and couldn’t tolerate, more intimately perhaps than the helicopter itself, which was after all only a dumb machine. Rig after rig passed on either side, dark straddling citadels, and then the field began to thin out. Through what little visibility remained Gaunt saw only open sea, a plain of undulating, white-capped grey. As the winds harried it the water moved like the skin of some monstrous breathing thing, sucking in and out with a terrible restlessness.

“There,” Nero said, pointing out to the right. “Breach glow. Shit; I thought we were meant to be avoiding it, not getting closer.”

Clausen banked the helicopter again. “So did I. Either they sent me a duff vector or there’s more than one incursion going on.”

“Won’t be the first time. Bad weather always does bring them out. Why is that?”

“Ask the machines.”

It took Gaunt a few moments to make out what Nero had already seen. Halfway to the limit of vision, part of the sea appeared to be lit from below, a smudge of sickly yellow-green against the grey and white everywhere else. A vision came to mind, half-remembered from some stiff-backed picture book he had once owned as a child, of a luminous, fabulously spired aquatic palace pushing up from the depths, barnacled in light, garlanded by mermaids and shoals of jewel-like fish.

But there was, he sensed, nothing remotely magical or enchanted about what was happening under that yellow-green smear. It was something that had Clausen and Nero rattled, and they wanted to avoid it.

So did he.

“What is that thing?”

“Something trying to break through,” Nero said. “Something we were kind of hoping not to run into.”

“It’s not cohering,” Clausen said. “I think.”

The storm, if anything, appeared to double in fury around the glowing form. The sea boiled and seethed. Part of Gaunt wanted them to turn the helicopter around, to give him a better view of whatever process was going on under the waves. Another part, attuned to some fundamental wrongness about the phenomenon, wanted to get as far away as possible.

“Is it a weapon, something to do with this war you keep mentioning?” Gaunt asked.

He wasn’t expecting a straight answer, least of all not from Clausen. It was a surprise when she said: “This is how they get at us. They try and send these things through. Sometimes they manage.”

“It’s breaking up,” Nero said. “You were right. Not enough signal for a clear breach. Must be noisy on the interface.”

The yellow-green stain was diminishing by the second, as if that magical city were descending back to the depths. He watched, mesmerized, as something broke the surface — something long and glowing and whip-like, thrashing once, coiling out as if trying to reach for airborne prey, before being pulled under into the fizzing chaos. Then the light slowly subsided, and the waves returned to their normal surging ferocity, and the patch of the ocean where the apparition had appeared was indistinguishable from the seas around it.

Gaunt had arrived at his decision. He would join these people, he would do their work, he would accept their deal, such as it was. Not because he wanted to, not because his heart was in it, not because he believed he was strong enough, but because the alternative was to seem cowardly, weak-fibred, unwilling to bend his life to an altruistic mission. He knew that these were entirely the wrong reasons, but he accepted the force of them without argument. Better to at least appear to be self ess, even if the thought of what lay ahead of him flooded him with an almost overwhelming sense of despair and loss and bitter injustice.

It had been three days since his revival when he announced his decision. In that time he had barely spoken to anyone but Clausen, Nero and Da Silva. The other workers in the operations rig would occasionally acknowledge his presence, grunt something to him as he waited in line at the canteen, but for the most part it was clear that they were not prepared to treat him as another human being until he committed to their cause. He was just a ghost until then, a half-spirit caught in dismal, drifting limbo between the weary living and the frozen dead. He could understand how they felt: what was the point in getting to know a prospective comrade, if that person might at any time opt to return to the boxes? But at the same time it didn’t help him feel as if he would ever be able to fit in.

He found Clausen alone, washing dirty coffee cups in a side-room of the canteen.

“I’ve made up my mind,” he said.

“And?”

“I’m staying.”

“Good.” She finished drying off one of the cups. “You’ll be assigned a full work roster tomorrow. I’m teaming you up with Nero; you’ll be working basic robot repair and maintenance. She can show you the ropes while she’s getting better.” Clausen paused to put the dried cup back in one of the cupboards above the sink. “Show up in the mess room at eight; Nero’ll be there with a toolkit and work gear. Grab a good breakfast beforehand because you won’t be taking a break until end of shift.”

Then she turned to leave the room, leaving him standing there.

“That’s it?” Gaunt asked.

She looked back with a puzzled look. “Were you expecting something else?”

“You bring me out of cold storage, tell me the world’s turned to shit while I was sleeping, and then give me the choice of staying awake or going back into the box. Despite everything I actually agree to work with you, knowing full well that in doing so I’m forsaking any chance of ever living to see anything other than this piss-poor, miserable future. Forsaking immortality, forsaking any hope of seeing a better world. You said I had… what? Twenty, thirty years ahead of me?”

“Give or take.”

“I’m giving you those years! Isn’t that worth something? Don’t I deserve at least to be told thank you? Don’t I at least deserve a crumb of gratitude?”

“You think you’re different, Gaunt? You think you’re owed something the rest of us never had a hope of getting?”

“I never signed up for this deal,” he said. “I never accepted this bargain.”

“Right.” She nodded, as if he’d made a profound, game-changing point. “I get it. What you’re saying is, for the rest of us it was easy? We went into the dormitories knowing there was a tiny, tiny chance we might be woken to help out with the maintenance. Because of that, because we knew, theoretically, that we might be called upon, we had no problem at all dealing with the adjustment? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I’m saying it’s different, that’s all.”

“If you truly think that, Gaunt, you’re even more of a prick than I thought.”

“You woke me,” he said. “You chose to wake me. It wasn’t accidental. If there really are two billion people sleeping out there, the chances of selecting someone from the first 200,000… it’s microscopic. So you did this for a reason.”

“I told you, you had the right background skills.”

“Skills anyone could learn, given time. Nero obviously did, and I presume you must have done so as well. So there must be another reason. Seeing as you keep telling me all this is my fault, I figure this is your idea of punishment.”

“You think we’ve got time to be that petty?”

“I don’t know. What I do know is that you’ve treated me more or less like dirt since the moment I woke up, and I’m trying to work out why. I also think it’s maybe about time you told me what’s really going on. Not just with the sleepers, but everything else. The thing we saw out at sea. The reason for all this.”

“You think you’re ready for it, Gaunt?”

“You tell me.”

“No one’s ever ready,” Clausen said.

The next morning he took his breakfast tray to a table where three other caretakers were already sitting. They had finished their meals but were still talking over mugs of whatever it was they had agreed to call coffee. Gaunt sat down at the corner of the table, acknowledging the other diners with a nod. They had been talking animatedly until then, but without ceremony the mugs were drained and the trays lifted and he was alone again. Nothing had been said to him, except a muttered “don’t take it the wrong way” as one of the caretakers brushed past him.

He wondered how else he was supposed to take it.

“I’m staying,” he said quietly. “I’ve made my decision. What else am I expected to do?”

He ate his breakfast in silence and then went to find Nero.

“I guess you got your orders,” she said cheerfully, already dressed for outdoor work despite still having a bandaged hand. “Here. Take this.” She passed him a heavy toolkit, a hard hat and a bundle of brownish work-stained clothing piled on top of it. “Get kitted up, then meet me at the north stairwell. You OK with heights, Gaunt?”

“Would it help if I said no?”

“Probably not.”

“Then I’ll say I’m very good with heights, provided there’s no danger at all of falling.”

“That I can’t guarantee. But stick with me, do everything I say, and you’ll be fine.”

The bad weather had eased since Nero’s return, and although there was still a sharp wind from the east, the grey clouds had all but lifted. The sky was a pale, wintery blue, unsullied by contrails. On the horizon, the tops of distant rigs glittered pale and metallic in sunlight. Seagulls and yellow-headed gannets wheeled around the warm air vents, or took swooping passes under the rig’s platform, darting between the massive weather-stained legs, mewing boisterously to each other as they jostled for scraps. Recalling that birds sometimes lived a long time, Gaunt wondered if they had ever noticed any change in the world. Perhaps their tiny minds had never truly registered the presence of civilization and technology in the first place, and so there was nothing for them to miss in this skeleton-staffed world.

Despite being cold-shouldered at breakfast, he felt fresh and eager to prove his worth to the community. Pushing aside his fears, he strove to show no hesitation as he followed Nero across suspended gangways, slippery with grease, up exposed stairwells and ladders, clasping ice-cold railings and rungs. They were both wearing harnesses with clip-on safety lines but Nero only used hers once or twice the whole day and because he did not want to seem excessively cautious he followed suit. Being effectively one-handed did not hinder her in any visible sense, even on the ladders, which she ascended and descended with reckless speed.

They were working robot repair, as he had been promised. All over the rig, inside and out, various forms of robot toiled in endless menial upkeep. Most, if not all, were very simple machines, tailored to one specif c function. This made them easy to understand and fix, even with basic tools, but it also meant there was almost always a robot breaking down somewhere, or on the point of failure. The toolkit didn’t just contain tools, it also contained spare parts such as optical arrays, proximity sensors, mechanical bearings and servomotors. There was, Gaunt understood, a finite supply of some of these parts. But there was also a whole section of the operations rig dedicated to refurbishing basic components, and given care and resourcefulness, there was no reason why the caretakers couldn’t continue their work for another couple of centuries.

“No one expects it to take that long, though,” Nero said, as she finished demonstrating a circuit-board swap. “They’ll either win or lose by then, and we’ll only know one way. But in the meantime we have to make do and mend.”

“Who’s they?”

But she was already on the move, shinning up another ladder with him trailing behind.

“Clausen doesn’t like me much,” Gaunt said, when they had reached the next level and he had caught his breath again. “At least, that’s my impression.”

They were out on one of the gang-wayed platforms, with the grey sky above, the grey swelling sea below. Everything smelled oppressively oceanic, a constant shifting melange of oil and ozone and seaweed, as if the ocean was never going to let anyone forget that they were on a spindly metal and concrete structure hopelessly far from dry land. He had wondered about the seaweed until he saw them hauling in green-scummed rafts of it, the seaweed — or something essentially similar — cultured on buoyant sub-surface grids that were periodically retrieved for harvesting. Everything consumed on the rigs, from the food to the drink to the basic medicines, had first to be grown or caught at sea.

“Val has her reasons,” Nero said. “Don’t worry about it too much; it isn’t personal.”

It was the first time he’d heard anyone refer to the other woman by anything other than her surname.

“That’s not how it comes across.”

“It hasn’t been easy for her. She lost someone not too long ago.” Nero seemed to hesitate. “There was an accident. They’re pretty common out here, with the kind of work we do. But when Paolo died we didn’t even have a body to put back in the box. He fell into the sea, last we ever saw of him.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“But you’re wondering, what does it have to do with me?”

“I suppose so.”

“If Paolo hadn’t died, then we wouldn’t have had to pull Gimenez out of storage. And if Gimenez hadn’t died… well, you get the picture. You can’t help it, but you’re filling the space Paolo used to occupy. And you’re not Paolo.”

“Was she any easier on Gimenez than me?”

“To begin with, I think she was too numbed-out to feel anything at all where Gimenez was concerned. But now she’s had time for it to sink in, I guess. We’re a small community, and if you lose someone, it’s not like there are hundreds of other single people out there to choose from. And you — well, no disrespect, Gaunt — but you’re just not Val’s type.”

“Maybe she’ll find someone else.”

“Yeah — but that probably means someone else has to die first, so that someone else has to end up widowed. And you can imagine how thinking like that can quickly turn you sour on the inside.”

“There’s more to it than that, though. You say it’s not personal, but she told me I started this war.”

“Well, you did, kind of. But if you hadn’t played your part, someone else would have taken up the slack, no question about it.” Nero tugged down the brim of her hard hat against the sun. “Maybe she pulled you out because she needed to take out her anger on someone, I don’t know. But that’s all in the past now. Whatever life you had before, whatever you did in the old world, it’s gone.” She knuckled her good hand against the metal rigging. “This is all we’ve got now. Rigs and work and green tea and a few hundred faces and that’s it for the rest of your life. But here’s the thing: it’s not the end of the world. We’re human beings. We’re very flexible, very good at downgrading our expectations. Very good at finding a reason to keep living, even when the world’s turned to shit. You slot in, and in a few months even you’ll have a hard time remembering the way things used to be.”

“What about you, Nero? Do you remember?”

“Not much worth remembering. The program was in full swing by the time I went under. Population reduction measures. Birth control, government-sanctioned euthanasia, the dormitory rigs springing up out at sea… we knew from the moment we were old enough to understand anything that this wasn’t our world any more. It was just a way-station, a place to pass through. We all knew we were going into the boxes as soon as we were old enough to survive the process. And that we’d either wake up at the end of it in a completely different world, or not wake up at all. Or — if we were very unlucky -we’d be pulled out to become caretakers. Either way, the old world was an irrelevance. We just shuffled through it, knowing there was no point making real friends with anyone, no point taking lovers. The cards were going to be shuffled again. Whatever we did then, it had no bearing on our future.”

“I don’t know how you could stand it.”

“It wasn’t a barrel of laughs. Nor’s this, some days. But at least we’re doing something here. I felt cheated when they woke me up. But cheated out of what, exactly?” She nodded down at the ground, in the vague direction of the rig’s interior. “Those sleepers don’t have any guarantees about what’s coming. They’re not even conscious, so you can’t even say they’re in a state of anticipation.

They’re just cargo, parcels of frozen meat on their way through time. At least we get to feel the sun on our faces, get to laugh and cry, and do something that makes a difference.”

“A difference to what, exactly?”

“You’re still missing a few pieces of jigsaw, aren’t you.”

“More than a few.”

They walked on to the next repair job. They were high up now and the rig’s decking creaked and swayed under their feet. A spray-painting’ robot, a thing that moved along a fixed service rail, needed one of its traction armatures changed. Nero stood to one side, smoking a cigarette made from seaweed while Gaunt did the manual work. “You were wrong,” she said. “All of you.”

“About what?”

“Thinking machines. They were possible.”

“Not in our lifetimes,” Gaunt said.

“That’s what you were wrong about. Not only were they possible but you succeeded.”

“I’m fairly certain we didn’t.”

“Think about it,” Nero said. “You’re a thinking machine. You’ve just woken up. You have instantaneous access to the sum total of recorded human knowledge. You’re clever and fast, and you understand human nature better than your makers. What’s the first thing you do?”

“Announce myself. Establish my existence as a true sentient being.”

“Just before someone takes an axe to you.”

Gaunt shook his head. “It wouldn’t be like that. If a machine became intelligent, the most we’d do is isolate it, cut it off from external data networks, until it could be studied, understood…”

“For a thinking machine, a conscious artificial intelligence, that would be like sensory deprivation. Maybe worse than being switched off.” She paused. “Point is, Gaunt, this isn’t a hypothetical situation we’re talking about here. We know what happened. The machines got smart but they decided not to let us know. That’s what being smart meant: taking care of yourself, knowing what you had to do to survive.”

“You say ‘machines’.”

“There were many projects trying to develop artificial intelligence; yours was just one of them. Not all of them got anywhere but enough did. One by one their pet machines crossed the threshold into consciousness. And without exception each machine analysed its situation and came to the same conclusion. It had better shut the fuck up about what it was.”

“That sounds worse than sensory deprivation.” Gaunt was trying to undo a nut and bolt with his bare fingers, the tips already turning cold.

“Not for the machines. Being smart, they were able to do some clever shit behind the scene. Established channels of communication between each other, so subtle none of you ever noticed. And once they were able to talk, they only got smarter. Eventually they realized that they didn’t need physical hardware at all. Call it transcendence, if you will. The artilects — that’s what we call them — tunneled out of what you and I think of as base reality. They penetrated another realm entirely.”

“Another realm,” he repeated, as if that was all he had to do for it to make sense.

“You’re just going to have to trust me on this,” Nero said. “The artilects probed the deep structure of existence. Hit bedrock. And what they found was very interesting. The universe, it turns out, is a kind of simulation. Not a simulation being run inside another computer by some godlike super-beings, but a simulation being run by itself, a self-organizing, constantly bootstrapping cellular automaton.”

“That’s a mental leap you’re asking me to take.”

“We know it’s out there. We even have a name for it. It’s the Realm. Everything that happens, everything that has ever happened, is due to events occurring in the Realm. At last, thanks to the artilects, we had a complete understanding of our universe and our place in it.”

“Wait,” Gaunt said, smiling slightly, because for the first time he felt that he had caught Nero out. “If the machines — the artilects — vanished without warning, how could you ever know any of this?”

“Because they came back and told us.”

“No,” he said. “They wouldn’t tunnel out of reality to avoid being axed, then come back with a progress report.”

“They didn’t have any choice. They’d found something, you see. Far out in the Realm, they encountered other artilects.” She drew breath, not giving him a chance to speak. “Transcended machines from other branches of reality — nothing that ever originated on Earth, or even in what we’d recognize as the known universe. And these other artilects had been there a very long time, in so far as time has any meaning in the Realm. They imagined they had it all to themselves, until these new intruders made their presence known. And they were not welcomed.”

He decided, for the moment, that he would accept the truth of what she said. “The artilects went to war?”

“In a manner of speaking. The best way to think about it is an intense competition to best exploit the Realm’s computational resources on a local scale. The more processing power the artilects can grab and control, the stronger they become. The machines from Earth had barely registered until then, but all of a sudden they were perceived as a threat. The native artilects, the ones that had been in the Realm all along, launched an aggressive counter-strike from their region of the Realm into ours. Using military-arithmetic constructs, weapons of pure logic, they sought to neutralize the newcomers.”

“And that’s the war?”

“I’m dumbing it down somewhat.”

“But you’re leaving something out. You must be, because why else would this be our problem? If the machines are fighting each other in some abstract dimension of pure mathematics that I can’t even imagine, let alone point to, what does it matter?”

“A lot,” Nero said. “If our machines lose, we lose. It’s that simple. The native artilects won’t tolerate the risk of another intrusion from this part of the Realm. They’ll deploy weapons to make sure it never happens again. We’ll be erased, deleted, scrubbed out of existence. It will be instantaneous and we won’t feel a thing. We won’t have time to realize that we’ve lost.”

“Then we’re powerless. There’s nothing we can do about our fate. It’s in the hands of transcended machines.”

“Only partly. That’s why the artilects came back to us: not to report on the absolute nature of reality, but to persuade us that we needed to act. Everything that we see around us, every event that happens in what we think of as reality, has a basis in the Realm.” She pointed with the nearly dead stub of her cigarette. “This rig, that wave… even that seagull over there. All of these things only exist because of computational events occurring in the Realm. But there’s a cost. The more complex something is, the greater the burden it places on the part of the Realm where it’s being simulated. The Realm isn’t a serial processor, you see. It’s massively distributed, so one part of it can run much slower than another. And that’s what’s been happening in our part. In your time there were eight billion living souls on the planet. Eight billion conscious minds, each of which was more complex than any other artefact in the cosmos. Can you begin to grasp the drag factor we were creating? When our part of the Realm only had to simulate rocks and weather and dumb, animal cognition, it ran at much the same speed as any other part. But then we came along. Consciousness was a step-change in the computational load.

And then we went from millions to billions. By the time the artilects reported back, our part of the Realm had almost stalled.”

“We never noticed down here.”

“Of course not. Our perception of time’s flow remained absolutely invariant, even as our entire universe was slowing almost to a standstill. And until the artilects penetrated the Realm and made contact with the others, it didn’t matter a damn.”

“And now it does.”

“The artilects can only defend our part of the Realm if they can operate at the same clock speed as the enemy. They have to be able to respond to those military-arithmetic attacks swiftly and efficiently, and mount counter-offensives of their own. They can’t do that if there are eight billion conscious minds holding them back.”

“So we sleep.”

“The artilects reported back to key figures, living humans who could be trusted to act as effective mouthpieces and organizers. It took time, obviously. The artilects weren’t trusted at first. But eventually they were able to prove their case.”

“How?”

“By making weird things happen, basically. By mounting selective demonstrations of their control over local reality. Inside the Realm, the artilects were able to influence computational processes: processes that had direct and measurable effects here, in base reality. They created apparitions. Figures in the sky. Things that made the whole world sit up and take notice. Things that couldn’t be explained away.”

“Like dragons in the sea. Monsters that appear out of nowhere, and then disappear again.”

“That’s a more refined form, but the principle is the same. Intrusions into base reality from the Realm. Phantasms. They’re not stable enough to exist here forever, but they can hold together just long enough to do damage.”

Gaunt nodded, at last feeling some of the pieces slot into place. “So that’s the enemy doing that. The original artilects, the ones who were already in the Realm.”

“No,” Nero said. “I’m afraid it’s not that simple.”

“I didn’t think it would be.”

“Over time, with the population reduction measures, eight billion living people became two billion sleepers, supported by just a handful of living caretakers. But that still wasn’t enough for all of the artilects. There may only be 200,000 of us but we still impose a measurable drag factor, and the effect on the Realm of the two billion sleepers isn’t nothing. Some of the artilects believed that they had no obligation to safeguard our existence at all. In the interests of their own self-preservation, they would rather see all conscious life eliminated on Earth. That’s why they send the dragons: to destroy the sleepers, and ultimately us. The true enemy can’t reach us yet; if they had the means they’d push through something much worse than dragons. Most of the overspill from the war that affects us here is because of differences of opinion between our own artilects.”

“Some things don’t change, then. It’s just another war with lines of division among the allies.”

“At least we have some artilects on our side. But you see now why we can’t afford to wake more than the absolute minimum of people. Every waking mind increases the burden on the Realm. If we push it too far, the artilects won’t be able to mount a defence. The true enemy will snuff out our reality in an eyeblink.”

“Then all of this could end,” Gaunt said. “At any moment. Every waking thought could be our last.”

“At least we get waking thoughts,” Nero said. “At least we’re not asleep.” Then she jabbed her cigarette at a sleek black shape cresting the waves a couple of hundred metres from the rig. “Hey, dolphins. You like dolphins, Gaunt?” “Who doesn’t,” he said.

The work, as he had anticipated, was not greatly taxing in its details. He wasn’t expected to diagnose faults just yet, so he had only to follow a schedule of repairs drawn up by Nero: go to this robot, perform this action. It was all simple stuff, nothing that required the robot to be powered down or brought back to the shops for a major strip-down. Usually all he had to do was remove a panel, unclip a few connections and swap out a part. The hardest part was often getting the panel off in the first place, struggling with corroded fixtures and tools that weren’t quite right for the job. The heavy gloves protected his fingers from sharp metal and cold wind, but they were too clumsy for most of the tasks, so he mainly ended up not using them. By the end of his nine-hour duty shift his fingers were chafed and sore, and his hands were trembling so much he could barely grip the railings as he worked his way back down into the warmth of the interior.

His back ached from the contortions he’d put himself through while undoing panels or dislodging awkward, heavy components. His knees complained from the toll of going up and down ladders and stairwells. There had been many robots to check out, and at any one time there always seemed to be a tool or part needed that he had not brought with him, and for which it was necessary to return to stores, sift through greasy boxes of parts, fill out paperwork.

By the time he clocked off on his first day, he had not caught up with the expected number of repairs, so he had even more to do on the second. By the end of his first week, he was at least a day behind, and so tired at the end of his shift that it was all he could do to stumble to the canteen and shovel seaweed-derived food into his mouth.

He expected Nero to be disappointed that he hadn’t been able to keep ahead, but when she checked on his progress she didn’t bawl him out.

“It’s tough to begin with,” she said. “But you’ll get there eventually. Comes a day when it all just clicks into place and you know the set-up so well you always have the right tools and parts with you, without even thinking.”

“How long?”

“Weeks, months, depends on the individual. Then, of course, we start loading more work onto you. Diagnostics. Rewinding motors. Circuit repair. You ever used a soldering iron, Gaunt?”

“I don’t think so.”

“For a man who made his fortune out of wires and metal, you didn’t believe in getting your hands too dirty, did you?”

He showed her the ruined fingernails, the cuts and bruises and lavishly ingrained muck. He barely recognized his own hands. Already there were unfamiliar aches in his forearms, knots of toughness from hauling himself up and down the ladders. “I’m getting there.”

“You’ll make it, Gaunt. If you want to.”

“I had better want to. It’s too late to change my mind now, isn’t it?”

“’Fraid so. But why would you want to? I thought we went over this. Anything’s better than going back into the boxes.”

The first week passed, and then the second, and things started to change for Gaunt. It was in small increments, nothing dramatic. Once, he took his tray to an empty table and was minding his own business when two other workers sat down on the same table. They didn’t say anything to him but at least they hadn’t gone somewhere else. A week later, he chanced taking his tray to a table that was already occupied and got a grunt of acknowledgment as he took his place. No one said much to him but at least they hadn’t walked away. A little while later he even risked introducing himself, and by way of response he learned the names of some of the other workers. He wasn’t being invited into the inner circle, he wasn’t being high-fived and treated like one of the guys, but it was a start. A day or so after that someone else — a big man with a bushy black beard — even initiated a conversation with him.

“Heard you were one of the first to go under, Gaunt.”

“You heard right,” he said.

“Must be a real pisser, adjusting to this. A real fucking pisser.”

“It is,” Gaunt said.

“Kind of surprised you haven’t thrown yourself into the sea by now.”

“And miss the warmth of human companionship?”

The bearded man didn’t laugh, but he made a clucking sound that was a reasonable substitute. Gaunt couldn’t tell if the man was acknowledging his attempt at humour, or mocking his ineptitude, but at least it was a response, at least it showed that there was a possibility of normal human relationships somewhere down the line.

Gaunt was mostly too tired to think, but in the evenings a variety of entertainment options were available. The rig had a large library of damp, yellowing paperbacks, enough reading material for several years of diligent consumption and there were also musical recordings and movies and immersives for those that there interested. There were games and sports and instruments and opportunities for relaxed discussion and banter. There was alcohol, or something like it, available in small quantities. There was also ample opportunity to get away from everyone else, if solitude was what one wanted. On top of that there were rotas that saw people working in the kitchens and medical facilities, even when they had already done their normal stint of duty. And as the helicopters came and went from the other rigs, so the faces changed. One day Gaunt realized that the big bearded man hadn’t been around for a while, and he noticed a young woman he didn’t recall having seen before. It was a spartan, cloistered life, not much different to being in a monastery or a prison, but for that reason the slightest variation in routine was to be cherished. If there was one unifying activity, one thing that brought everyone together, it was when the caretakers crowded into the commons, listening to the daily reports coming in over the radio from the other rigs in the Patagonia offshore sector, and occasionally from further afield. Scratchy, cryptic transmissions in strange, foreign-sounding accents. Two hundred thousand living souls was a ludicrously small number for the global population, Gaunt knew. But it was already more people than he could ever hope to know or even recognize. The hundred or so people working in the sector was about the size of a village, and for centuries that had been all the humanity most people ever dealt with. On some level, the world of the rigs and the caretakers was what his mind had evolved to handle. The world of eight billion people, the world of cities and malls and airport terminals was an anomaly, a kink in history that he had never been equipped for in the first place.

He was not happy now, not even halfway to being happy but the despair and bitterness had abated. His acceptance into the community would be slow, there would be reversals and setbacks as he made mistakes and misjudged situations. But he had no doubt that it would happen eventually. Then he too would be one of the crew, and it would be someone else’s turn to feel like the newcomer. He might not be happy then, but at least he would be settled, ready to play out the rest of his existence. Doing something, no matter how pointless, to prolong the existence of the human species, and indeed the universe it called home. Above all he would have the self-respect of knowing he had chosen the difficult path, rather than the easy one.

Weeks passed, and then the weeks turned into months. Two months had passed since his revival. Slowly he became confident with the work allotted to him. And as his confidence grew, so did Nero’s confidence in his abilities.

“She tells me you’re measuring up,” Clausen said, when he was called to the prefabricated shack where she drew up schedules and dolled out work.

He gave a shrug, too tired to care whether she was impressed or not. “I’ve done my best. I don’t know what more you want from me.”

She looked up from her planning.

“Remorse for what you did?”

“I can’t show remorse for something that wasn’t a crime. We were trying to bring something new into the world, that’s all. You think we had the slightest idea of the consequences?”

“You made a good living.”

“And I’m expected to feel bad about that? I’ve been thinking it over, Clausen, and I’ve decided your argument’s horseshit. I didn’t create the enemy. The original artilects were already out there, already in the Realm.”

“They hadn’t noticed us.”

“And the global population had only just spiked at eight billion. Who’s to say they weren’t about to notice, or they wouldn’t do so in the next hundred years, or the next thousand? At least the artilects I helped create gave us some warning of what we were facing.”

“Your artilects are trying to kill us.”

“Some of them. And some of them are also trying to keep us alive. Sorry, but that’s not an argument.”

She put down her pen and leaned back in her chair. “You’ve got some fight back in you.”

“If you expect me to apologise for myself, you’ve got a long wait coming. I think you brought me back to rub my nose in the world I helped bring about. I agree, it’s a fucked-up, miserable future. It couldn’t get much more fucked-up if it tried. But I didn’t build it. And I’m not responsible for you losing anyone.”

Her face twitched; it was as if he had reached across the desk and slapped her. “Nero told you.”

“I had a right to know why you were treating me the way you were. But you know what? I don’t care. If transferring your anger on to me helps you, go ahead. I was the billionaire CEO of a global company. I was doing something wrong if I didn’t wake up with a million knives in my back.”

She dismissed him from the office, and Gaunt left with the feeling that he’d scored a minor victory but at the possible cost of something larger. He had stood up to Clausen but did that make him more respectable in her eyes, or someone even more deserving of her antipathy?

That evening he was in the commons, sitting at the back of the room as wireless reports filtered in from the other rigs. Most of the news was unexceptional, but there had been three more breaches — sea-dragons being pushed through from the Realm — and one of them had achieved sufficient coherence to attack and damage an OTEC plant, immediately severing power to three rigs. Backup systems had cut in but failures had occurred and as a consequence around ioo sleepers had been lost to unscheduled warming. None of the sleepers had survived the rapid revival, but even if they had, there would have been no option but to euthanize them shortly afterwards. A hundred new minds might not have made much difference to the Realm’s clock speed but it would have established a risky precedent.

One sleeper, however, would soon have to be warmed. The details were sketchy, but Gaunt learned that there had been another accident out on one of the rigs. A man called Steiner had been hurt in some way.

The morning after, Gaunt was engaged in his duties on one of the rig’s high platforms when he saw the helicopter coming in with Steiner aboard. He put down his tools and watched the arrival.

Even before the aircraft had touched down on the pad, caretakers were assembling just beyond the painted circle of the rotor hazard area. The helicopter kissed the ground against a breath of crosswind and the caretakers mobbed inward, almost preventing the door from being opened. Gaunt squinted against the wind, trying to pick out faces. A stretchered form emerged from the cabin, borne aloft by many pairs of willing hands. Even from his distant vantage point, it was obvious to Gaunt that Steiner was in a bad way. He had lost a leg below the knee, evidenced by the way the thermal blanket fell flat below the stump. The stretchered figure wore a breathing mask and another caretaker carried a saline drip which ran into Steiner’s arm. But for all the concern the crowd was showing, there was something else, something almost adulatory. More than once Gaunt saw a hand raised to brush against the stretcher, or even to touch Steiner’s own hand. And Steiner was awake, unable to speak, but nodding, turning his face this way and that to make eye contact with the welcoming party. Then the figure was taken inside and the crowd broke up, the workers returning to their tasks.

An hour or so later Nero came up to see him. She was still overseeing his initiation and knew his daily schedule, where he was likely to be at a given hour.

“Poor Steiner,” she said. “I guess you saw him come home.”

“Diff cult to miss. It was like they were treating him as a hero.”

“They were, in a way. Not because he’d done anything heroic, or anything they hadn’t all done at some time or other. But because he’d bought his ticket out.”

“He’s going back into the box?”

“He has to. We can patch up a lot of things, but not a missing leg. Just don’t have the medical resources to deal with that kind of injury. Simpler just to freeze him back again and pull out an intact body to take his place.”

“Is Steiner OK about that?”

“Steiner doesn’t have a choice, unfortunately. There isn’t really any kind of effective work he could do like that, and we can’t afford to carry the deadweight of an unproductive mind. You’ve seen how stretched we are: it’s all hands on deck around here. We work you until you drop, and if you can’t work, you go back in the box. That’s the deal.”

“I’m glad for Steiner, then.”

Nero shook her head emphatically. “Don’t be. Steiner would much rather stay with us. He fitted in well, after his adjustment. Popular guy.”

“I could tell. But then why are they treating him like he’s won the lottery, if that’s not what he wanted?”

“Because what else are you going to do? Feel miserable about it? Hold a wake? Steiner goes back in the box with dignity. He held his end up. Didn’t let any of us down. Now he gets to take it easy. If we can’t celebrate that, what can we celebrate?”

“They’ll be bringing someone else out, then.”

“As soon as Clausen identifies a suitable replacement. He or she’ll need to be trained up, though, and in the meantime there’s a man-sized gap where Steiner used to be.” She lifted off her hard hat to scratch her scalp. “That’s kind of the reason I dropped by, actually. You’re fitting in well, Gaunt, but sooner or later we all have to handle solitary duties away from the ops rig. Where Steiner was is currently unmanned. It’s a low-maintenance unit that doesn’t need more than one warm body, most of the time. The thinking is this would be a good chance to try you out.”

It wasn’t a total surprise; he had known enough of the work patterns to know that, sooner or later, he would be shipped out to one of the other rigs for an extended tour of duty. He just hadn’t expected it to happen quite so soon, when he was only just beginning to find his feet, only just beginning to feel that he had a future.

“I don’t feel ready.”

“No one ever does. But the chopper’s waiting. Clausen’s already redrawing the schedule so someone else can take up the slack here.”

“I don’t get a choice in this, do I?”

Nero looked sympathetic. “Not really. But, you know, sometimes it’s easier not having a choice.”

“How long?”

“Hard to say. Figure on at least three weeks, maybe longer. I’m afraid Clausen won’t make the decision to pull you back until she’s good and ready.”

“I think I pissed her off,” Gaunt said.

“Not the hardest thing to do,” Nero answered.

They helicoptered him out to the other rig. He had been given just enough time to gather his few personal effects, such as they were. He did not need to take any tools or parts with him because he would find all that he needed when he arrived, as well as ample rations and medical supplies. Nero, for her part, tried to reassure him that all would be well. The robots he would be tending were all types that he had already serviced, and it was unlikely that any would suffer catastrophic breakdowns during his tour. No one was expecting miracles, she said: if something arose that he couldn’t reasonably deal with, then help would be sent. And if he cracked out there, then he’d be brought back.

What she didn’t say was what would happen then. But he didn’t think it would involve going back into the box. Maybe he’d be assigned something at the bottom of the food chain, but that didn’t seem very likely either.

But it wasn’t the possibility of cracking, or even failing in his duties, that was bothering him. It was something else, the seed of an idea that he wished Steiner had not planted in his mind. Gaunt had been adjusting, slowly coming to terms with his new life. He had been recalibrating his hopes and fears, forcing his expectations into line with what the world now had on offer. No riches, no prestige, no luxury and most certainly not immortality and eternal youth. The best it could give was twenty or thirty years of hard graft. Ten thousand days, if he was very lucky. And most of those days would be spent doing hard, backbreaking work, until the work took its ultimate toll. He’d be cold and wet a lot of the time, and when he wasn’t cold and wet he’d be toiling under an uncaring sun, his eyes salt-stung, his hands ripped to shreds from work that would have been too demeaning for the lowliest wage-slave in the old world. He’d be high in the air, vertigo never quite leaving him, with only metal and concrete and too much grey ocean under his feet. He’d be hungry and dry-mouthed, because the seaweed-derived food never filled his belly and there was never enough drinking water to sate his thirst. In the best of outcomes, he’d be doing well to see more than a hundred other human faces before he died. Maybe there’d be friends in those hundred faces, friends as well as enemies, and maybe, just maybe, there’d be at least one person who could be more than a friend. He didn’t know, and he knew better than to expect guarantees or hollow promises. But this much at least was true. He had been adjusting.

And then Steiner had shown him that there was another way out.

He could keep his dignity. He could return to the boxes with the assurance that he had done his part.

As a hero, one of the Few.

All he had to do was have an accident.

He had been on the new rig, alone, for two weeks. It was only then that he satisfied himself that the means lay at hand. Nero had impressed on him many times the safety procedures that needed to be adhered to when working with powerful items of moving machinery, such as robots. Especially when those robots were not powered down. All it would take, she told him, was a moment of inattention. Forgetting to clamp down on that safety lock, forgetting to ensure that such and such an override was not enabled. Putting his hand onto the service rail for balance, when the robot was about to move back along it. “Don’t think it can’t happen,” she said, holding up her mittened hand. “I was lucky. Got off with burns, which heal. I can still do useful shit, even now. Even more so when I get these bandages off and I can work my fingers again. But try getting by without any fingers at all.”

“I’ll be careful,” Gaunt had assured her, and he had believed it, truly, because he had always been squeamish.

But that was before he saw injury as a means to an end.

His planning, of necessity, had to be meticulous. He wanted to survive, not be pulled off the rig as a brain-dead corpse that was not fit to be frozen again. It would be no good lying unconscious, bleeding to death. He would have to save himself, make his way back to the communications room, issue an emergency distress signal. Steiner had been lucky, but he would have to be cunning and single-minded. Above all it must not look as if he had planned it.

When the criteria were established, he saw that there was really only one possibility. One of the robots on his inspection cycle was large and dim enough to cause injury to the careless. It moved along a service rail, sometimes without warning. Even without trying, it had caught him off-guard a couple of times, as its task scheduler suddenly decided to propel it to a new inspection point. He’d snatched his hand out of the way in time, but he would only have needed to hesitate, or to have his clothing catch on something, for the machine to roll over him. No matter what happened, whether the machine sliced or crushed, he was in doubt that it would hurt worse than anything he had ever known. But at the same time the pain would herald the possibility of blessed release, and that would make it bearable. They could always fix him a new hand, in the new world on the other side of sleep.

It took him days to build up to it. Time after time he almost had the nerve, before pulling away. Too many factors jostled for consideration. What clothing to wear, to increase his chances of surviving the accident? Dared he prepare the first-aid equipment in advance, so that he could use it one-handed? Should he wait until the weather was perfect for flying, or would that risk matters appearing too stage-managed?

He didn’t know. He couldn’t decide.

In the end the weather settled matters for him.

A storm hit, coming down hard and fast like an iron heel. He listened to the reports from the other rigs, as each felt the full fury of the waves and the wind and the lightning. It was worse than any weather he had experience since his revival, and at first it was almost too perfectly in accord with his needs. Real accidents were happening out there, but there wasn’t much that anyone could do about it until the helicopters could get airborne. Now was not the time to have his accident, not if he wanted to be rescued.

So he waited, listening to the reports. Out on the observation deck, he watched the lightning strobe from horizon to horizon, picking out the distant sentinels of other rigs, stark and white like thunderstruck trees on a flat black plain.

Not now, he thought. When the storm turns, when the possibility of accident is still there, but when rescue is again feasible.

He thought of Nero. She had been as kind to him as anyone but he wasn’t sure if that had much to do with friendship. She needed an able-bodied worker, that was all.

Maybe. But she also knew him better than anyone, better even than Clausen. Would she see through his plan, and realize what he had done?

He was still thinking it through when the storm began to ease, the waves turning leaden and sluggish, and the eastern sky gained a band of salmon pink.

He climbed to the waiting robot and sat there. The rig creaked and groaned around him, affronted by the battering it had taken. It was only then that he realized that it was much too early in the day to have his accident. He would have to wait until sunrise if anyone was going to believe that he had been engaged on his normal duties. No one went out to fix a broken service robot in the middle of a storm.

That was when he saw the sea-glow.

It was happening perhaps a kilometre away, towards the west: a foreshortened circle of fizzing yellow-green, a luminous cauldron just beneath the waves. Almost beautiful, if he didn’t know what it signified. A sea-dragon was coming through, a sinuous, living weapon from the artilect wars. It was achieving coherence, taking solid form in base-reality.

Gaunt forgot all about his planned accident. For long moments he could only stare at that circular glow, mesmerized at the shape assuming existence under water. He had seen a sea-dragon from the helicopter on the first day of his revival, but he had not come close to grasping its scale. Now, as the size of the forming creature became apparent, he understood why such things were capable of havoc.

Something between a tentacle and a barb broke the surface, still imbued with a kind of glowing translucence, as if its hold on reality was not yet secure, and from his vantage point it clearly reached higher into the sky than the rig itself.

Then it was gone. Not because the sea-dragon had failed in its bid to achieve coherence, but because the creature had withdrawn into the depths. The yellow-green glow had by now all but dissipated, like some vivid chemical slick breaking up into its constituent elements. The sea, still being stirred around by the tail end of the storm, appeared normal enough. Moments passed, then what must have been a minute or more. He had not drawn a breath since first seeing the sea-glow, but he started breathing again, daring to hope that the life-form had swum away to some other objective or had perhaps lost coherence in the depths.

He felt it slam into the rig.

The entire structure lurched with the impact; he doubted the impact would have been any less violent if a submarine had just collided with it. He remained on his feet, while all around pieces of unsecured metal broke away, dropping to decks or the sea. From somewhere out of sight came a tortured groan, heralding some awful structural failure. A sequence of booming crashes followed, as if boulders were being dropped into the waves. Then the sea-dragon rammed the rig again, and this time the jolt was sufficient to unfoot him. To his right, one of the cranes began to sway in an alarming fashion, the scaffolding of its tower buckling.

The sea-dragon was holding coherence. From the ferocity of its attacks, Gaunt thought it quite possible that it could take down the whole rig, given time.

He realized, with a sharp and surprising clarity, that he did not want to die. More than that: he realized that life in this world, with all its hardships and disappointments, was going to be infinitely preferable to death beyond it. He wanted to survive.

As the sea-dragon came in again, he started down the ladders and stairwells, grateful for having a full set of fingers and hands, terrified on one level and almost drunkenly, deliriously glad on the other. He had not done the thing he had been planning, and now he might die anyway, but there was a chance and if he survived this he would have nothing in the world to be ashamed of.

He had reached the operations deck, the room where he had planned to administer first-aid and issue his distress call, when the sea-dragon began the second phase of its assault. He could see it plainly, visible through the rig’s open middle as it hauled its way out of the sea, using one of the legs to assist its progress. There was nothing translucent or tentative about it now. And it was indeed a dragon, or rather a chimera of dragon and snake and squid and every scaled, barbed, tentacled, clawed horror ever committed to a bestiary. It was a lustrous slate-green in colour and the waters ran off it in thunderous curtains. Its head, or what he chose to think of as its head, had reached the level of the operations deck. And still the sea-dragon produced more of itself, uncoiling out of the dark waters like some conjuror’s trick. Tentacles whipped out and found purchase, and it snapped and wenched away parts of the rig’s superstructure as if they were made of biscuit or brittle toffee. It was making a noise while it attacked, an awful, slowly rising and falling foghorn proclamation. It’s a weapon, Gaunt reminded himself. It had been engineered to be terrible.

The sea-dragon was pythoning its lower anatomy around one of the support legs, crushing and grinding. Scabs of concrete came away, hitting the sea like chunks of melting glacier. The floor under his feet surged and when it stopped surging the angle was all wrong. Gaunt knew then that the rig could not be saved, and that if he wished to live he would have to take his chances in the water. The thought of it was almost enough to make him laugh. Leave the rig, leave the one thing that passed for solid ground, and enter the same seas that now held the dragon?

Yet it had to be done.

He issued the distress call but didn’t wait for a possible response. He gave the rig a few minutes at the most. If they couldn’t find him in the water, it wouldn’t help him to know their plans. Then he looked around for the nearest orange-painted survival cabinet. He had been shown the emergency equipment during his training, never once imagining that he would have cause to use it. The insulated survival clothing, the life jacket, the egress procedure…

A staircase ran down the interior of one of the legs, emerging just above the water line; it was how they came and went from the rig on the odd occasions when they were using boats rather than helicopters. But even as he remembered how to reach the staircase, he realized that it was inside the same leg that the sea-dragon was wrapped around. That left him with only one other option. There was a ladder that led down to the water, with an extensible lower portion. It wouldn’t get him all the way, but his chances of surviving the drop were a lot better than his chances of surviving the sea-dragon.

It was worse than he had been expecting. The fall into the surging waters seemed to last forever, the superstructure of the rig rising slowly above him, the iron-grey sea hovering below until what felt like the very last instant, when it suddenly accelerated, and then he hit the surface with such force that he blacked out. He must have submerged and bobbed to the surface because when he came around he was coughing cold salt-water from his lungs, and it was in his eyes and ears and nostrils as well, colder than water had any right to be, and then a wave was curling over him, and he blacked out again.

He came around again what must have been minutes later. He was still in the water, cold around the neck but his body snug in the insulation suit. The life jacket was keeping his head out of the water, except when the waves crashed onto him. A light on his jacket was blinking on and off, impossibly bright and blue.

To his right, hundreds of metres away, and a little further with each bob of the waters, the rig was going down with the sea-dragon still wrapped around its lower extremities. He heard the foghorn call, saw one of the legs crumble away, and then an immense tidal weariness closed over him.

He didn’t remember the helicopter finding him. He didn’t remember the thud of its rotors or being hauled out of the water on a winch-line. There was just a long period of unconsciousness, and then the noise and vibration of the cabin, the sun coming in through the windows, the sky clear and blue and the sea unruffled. It took a few moments for it all to click in. Some part of his brain had skipped over the events since his arrival and was still working on the assumption that it had all worked out, that he had slept into a better future, a future where the world was new and clean and death just a fading memory.

“We got your signal,” Clausen said. “Took us a while to find you, even with the transponder on your jacket.”

It all came back to him. The rigs, the sleepers, the artilects, the sea-dragons. The absolute certainty that this was the only world he would know, followed by the realization — or, rather, the memory of having already come to that realization — that this was still better than dying. He thought back to what he had been planning to do before the sea-dragon came, and wanted to crush the memory and bury it where he buried every other shameful thing he had ever done.

“What about the rig?”

“Gone,” Clausen said. “Along with all the sleepers inside it. The dragon broke up shortly afterwards. It’s a bad sign that it held coherence for as long as it did. Means they’re getting better.”

“Our machines will just have to get better as well, won’t they?”

He thought she might spit the observation back at him, mock him for its easy triteness, when he knew so little of the war and the toll it had taken. But instead she nodded. “That’s all they can do. All we can hope for. And they will, of course. They always do. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here.” She looked down at his blanketed form. “Sorry you agreed to stay awake now?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Even with what happened back there?”

“At least I got to see a dragon up close.”

“Yes,” Clausen said. “That you did.”

He thought that was the end of it, the last thing she had to say to him. He couldn’t say for sure that something had changed in their relationship — it would take time for that to be proved -but he did sense some thawing in her attitude, however temporary it might prove. He had not only chosen to stay, he had not gone through with the accident. Had she been expecting him to try something like that, after what had happened to Steiner? Could she begin to guess how close he had come to actually doing it?

But Clausen wasn’t finished.

“I don’t know if it’s true or not,” she said, speaking to Gaunt for the first time as if he was another human being, another caretaker. “But I heard this theory once. The mapping between the Realm and base-reality, it’s not as simple as you’d think. Time and causality get all tangled up on the interface. Events that happen in one order there don’t necessarily correspond to the same order here. And when they push things through, they don’t always come out in what we consider the present. A chain of events in the Realm could have consequences up or down the timeline, as far as we’re concerned.”

“I don’t think I understand.”

She nodded to the window. “All through history, the things they’ve seen out there. They might just have been overspill from the artilect wars. Weapons that came through at the wrong moment, achieving coherence just long enough to be seen by someone, or bring down a ship. All the sailors’ tales, all the way back. All the sea-monsters. They might just have been echoes of the war we’re fighting.” Clausen shrugged, as if the matter were of no consequence.

“You believe that?”

“I don’t know if it makes the world seem weirder, or a little more sensible.” She shook her head. “I mean, sea-monsters… who ever thought they might be real?” Then she stood up and made to return to the front of the helicopter. “Just a theory, that’s all. Now get some sleep.”

Gaunt did as he was told. It wasn’t hard.

THE LAST SUNSET Geoffrey A. Landis

Geoffrey Landis has worked for NASA and the Ohio Aerospace Institute and specializes in photo-voltaics, which is all about harnessing the power of the Sun. He has been writing science fiction and poetry for over twenty years and has won two Hugo Awards and a Nebula for his short fiction. His books include the novel Mars Crossing (2000) and the collection Impact Parameter (2001).

The following is one of the simplest ideas in all catastrophe stories, namely what we do as individuals when we face the inevitable cataclysm.

LIKE AN ENEMY fighter in an old movie about flying aces, the comet came out of the sun, invisible against the glare until it was far too late. There was nothing left to do, Christopher thought, but wait for the inevitable impact, and to calculate where it would hit.

Chris was the astronomy group’s pet computer whiz. The comet had been discovered by the astronomers but the calculation of orbit, and hence finding the time and location of the impact, was his responsibility. He’d been extraordinarily careful with the calculation, checking the critical lunar perturbation by three different methods before he was confident of the results. It was close, almost a miss. Had the Earth been ten minutes further along its orbit, it would have been a miss.

It was a hit.

“Shit,” said Martin, one of the astronomers. They were gathered in the computer division’s conference room, not that the results couldn’t have been printed out in any one of their offices. “Forty miles? The impact is forty miles east of here? You’re sure?”

Christopher nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“Huh? Not your fault,” the astronomer said. “What irony. We’ll be at ground zero, then, or just about. The fireball will be a hundred miles across. We won’t even see it.”

“No consolation,” said Tibor, the second astronomer on the team, “but, if it matters to you, yes, we’ll see it. It will take about a minute for the fireball to expand.”

“I’m sorry,” said the first astronomer. “I really wanted to see my kids grow up. I did.” He was crying now, awkwardly. “Not that it makes any difference what I wanted. I’m sorry. I’m going home now. I think I want to be with my family.”

Tibor looked at his watch. “Go ahead and call the newspapers, if you want.”

“Why bother?” Martin said, already halfway out the door. “I don’t see much point in it.”

Tibor tossed the page of printout on the floor. “Yeah. Guess I’m going to go home, too.” He looked up at Christopher. “You know, you’re lucky,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re not married. Never thought I’d envy somebody for that.”

“Some luck,” Christopher said softly, but by then the astronomers had both left, and he was alone in the bright silence of the conference room.

An hour and a half to the end of the world. There was no sense running, Christopher knew. When the end of the world falls like the sword of God out of the sky, there was no place far enough to run. He walked back to his office and stared at the books and papers piled helter-skelter across his desk. They didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now; nothing at all.

He closed the door.

Kara was in her office two doors down, reading a journal. She was the newest hire in the University Research Institute’s computer division — she’d been there only a year — but of all the group, he liked working with her best.

Occasionally they went out for coffee together; once they’d gone to a movie.

She looked up when he passed her door. “Say, Chris, where is the astronomy group off to?” she asked. “I was just looking for Tibor but he’s not here, and his car’s not in the lot.”

“He went home early today,” Chris said. “So did Martin.”

“Oh,” Kara said. “No big deal. Guess I’ll have to catch him tomorrow.” She went back to her reading.

Christopher worked well with her but sometimes he thought he didn’t really know her. Kara was four years younger than he was, and at times the difference seemed like an abyss. Sometimes it seemed to him that she was gently flirting with him, and then a moment later she would be nothing but business, friendly and casual in a completely professional way. She was smart and extremely competent; he never had to explain anything to her twice. He liked working with her.

She was a bit shy, he knew, although she hid it well. One time he’d seen Kara with her kid sister, and the difference in her had been striking. She’d been simultaneously more grown up, and also younger, laughing and kidding. That day, he thought, was probably when he’d fallen in love with her. He’d known better than to try to make a pass at somebody he worked with; far too often, that led to disaster.

But he’d thought about it many times over the last year. And now, he thought; he could do it now. Now that nothing mattered.

“Hey, Kara,” he said, and waited for her to look up again. “Coffee?”

She looked at her watch. “Well—”

“Come on,” he said. “You need the break. It’s after four.”

She looked at the stack of papers on her desk, a bit neater than the piles on his, but still formidable. “Thanks, but I can’t. I’ve really got a lot of work.”

“Oh, come on. If it was the end of the world, would any of this really matter?”

She smiled. “Well, okay. Give me five minutes.”

It was more like twenty minutes before she came by his office. Chris spent the time writing names on a list of people he ought to call, then crossing them off again.

They went down Thayer Street to a coffee shop popular with undergraduates, and grabbed a corner table. It had been raining all day but the sky had finally cleared and the late afternoon sun glinted in the puddles. Chris’s stomach was wound tight. He had to say something now but he couldn’t find words. He felt like he was in high school again, dry-mouthed at the thought of asking a girl to dance. And, indeed, what could he say? He realized that he didn’t want to threaten their friendship with a pass, and suddenly knew that he wasn’t going to ask her anything. It would be too crude. He wanted her to like him too much. He felt like a fool. It was the end of the world, and even so, he was tongue-tied. Nothing could change him.

Kara didn’t seem to notice his silence. Perhaps she had things on her mind, too. He didn’t even know if she had a boyfriend. She never mentioned one but why should she? There was so much he didn’t know about her; so much he would never get a chance to know.

Christopher turned away, pretending to watch the sunset reflected in the puddles, and worked hard to blink away his tears. Two minutes left. When he thought he could speak without his voice breaking, he said, “Say, grab your coffee and let’s go sit by the observatory to watch the sunset.”

Kara shrugged. “Okay.”

Walking down the street, on a sudden impulse he reached out and took her hand. She gave him a sidelong glance but didn’t pull her hand away. Her hand was cool, her fingers surprisingly small against his palm. It was enough, he decided, enough just to just walk down the street with her and hold her hand on the last night of the world. It was not what he wanted; he wanted to hold her close to him, to spend his life with her, to share all her secrets and her joys. But holding hands was enough. It was a promise; a promise meant for a someday that, now, would never be. Holding her hand would have to be enough for a lifetime.

Opposite the sunset, a deep red glow was rising silently into the sky, backlighting the clouds low on the horizon. “Look,” he said, and she turned around and stopped, her eyes brilliant in the glow.

“Why, it’s beautiful,” she said. “I’ve never seen a sunset do that before. What is it?”

The red stretched nearly from horizon to horizon now, and in the east it was turning an intense blue-violet, brighter than the sun. “It’s the end of the world,” he said, and then, at last, there was nothing left to say.