Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse

by John Joseph Adams

  The two lovers fell upwards.

  There was frantic, incomprehensible activity all around them, as if they were mice in the grinding engine of a merry-go-round. Like the maculated sun overhead, the planet’s surface had come unmoored. Geological strata had gently unpacked like the baked layers of a baklava, sending the surface debris crashing about in search of new equilibria.

  Eerie pink sunlight glittered from the hearse’s window as, plucked from beyond the horizon, it tumbled past them, its hood and doors slamming rhythmically, bouncing up the slopes of the nearest peak.

  In ordinary times, the earthquake noise alone might have crushed their clinging bodies, but the booming of this planetary destruction was oddly muted and gentle. The fundamental constants had plateaued for a moment. A new order of gravity settled in, with everything that could come loose from the Earth being messily sorted according to its mass.

  Belatedly, a reluctant mountain tore itself loose and rose ponderously into the lemon sky.

  Rabbiteen and Angelo were floating a few score yards above the remains of the ancient desert—a patch of fine dust beneath a layer of sand with pebbles admixed, topped by bones, sticks, stones and target-range military rubble.

  A venomous little Gila monster tumbled past them, dislodged from some flying mountain redoubt, its stubby tail twisting, its skin glittering like a beaded armband.

  Angelo’s blown mind irritably snatched for facts. “Are those nerve-gas canisters up there? They’re like weather balloons.” He beat his helpless legs against the empty air and began to twist in place. “Can you explain this to me, Ms. Karmic Science?”

  Rabbiteen’s mind had frozen with awe. The mountains of the firmament were floating across the spotted face of the bloated sun. She had no way to think clearly—with thunderhead shelves of granite and feldspar poised to crush her.

  “Hold me, Angelo! You’re drifting away! I want to be with you till the very end!”

  “We’re doomed,” said Angelo. He squinted into the hazy, polymorphous distances. The stark concrete hangars and wooden shacks of Area 52 were piled in midair like badly assembled Ikea shelving.

  The humbled remnants of the secret federal base showed no signs of life. No super scientists, no fat cats there, no Black Egg. All those cogent hints about close encounters in the American Southwest with psychic saucer-craft, and nobody was even here. People were so cynical about the miraculous that they couldn’t even bother to show up.

  “I can almost feel that other brane arriving now,” said Rabbiteen. “Once the force of gravity has changed, we only have six minutes.”

  “Cody!” hollered Angelo, his voice echoing off the floating islands of stone. He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Help us, Cody!”

  “Come on, Cody!” shrieked Rabbiteen. Giggling shrilly, she grappled at Angelo. Her fingers were numb, and the flesh of his neck and shoulders felt spongy and strange. “The desert’s so beautiful, Cody! Especially upside down! We had great sex, and next time you can watch us, I promise!”

  “Cody, Cody, Cody!!!”

  A lens-like shape formed in mid-air, magnifying the tumbleweeds and boulders. Slowly, it opened a dark throat.

  “Hello?” said Angelo.

  The blackness folded in on itself and took form. The hole became crooked, then everted, like a giant origami tentacle. It swayed around in mid-air like a hungry feeler.

  It took note of the two of them.

  The warped tentacle wriggled and dimpled; the tip flexed to assume the shape of a staring, glistening face. Complex forces within the bulging shape were manipulating it like a sock puppet. The eyes bulged like a rubber mask, the mouth stretched and gaped like a toad’s.

  “Cody?” said Angelo, yet again, one arm wrapped around Rabbiteen. “Are you here to save us?”

  The demonic toad twisted his head this way and that. He had large, golden eyes. “Do I look properly embodied within your planet’s three spatial dimensions?”

  “No!” Rabbiteen squeaked, stiff with unearthly terror. “You look like hell!”

  “Interaction was so much easier on the Internet,” said the toad, smacking his thin lips. “It’s a lot of trouble to manifest this low-dimensional form to you.” The creature’s voice was modulated white noise, like sand sculpted into letters.

  “I saw him last night, Angelo,” cried Rabbiteen. “I saw him peeking into the hearse! And he was in the motel parking lot. Cody was stalking us.”

  “I was monitoring you,” said Cody, his head billowing like a black pillowcase. “You two alone have reached Area 52, naturally selected from the many billions on your planet. You are like sperm cells beating their way up a long canal—”

  “—to reach the Black Egg,” completed Angelo hurriedly. His molecules felt overstretched. “Okay, yes! Here we are! Let us inside!”

  Cody leered at them provokingly. “The Cosmic Mother,” he said, “is the immortal entity that fills the band of hyperspace between the twin branes of the cosmos. I am the tip of one of Mother’s many tentacles. If you can imagine that.”

  “Of course we can imagine that!” jabbered Rabbiteen. “Don’t let us die!”

  “Let us in,” repeated Angelo. His fingers felt and looked like orange circus peanuts.

  “This Black Egg is prepared for you, my blogger friends,” said Cody simply. “The universe is collapsing, so the Cosmic Mother has placed a Black Egg on every space and place that supports intelligence. Billions of eggs, spewed in the cosmos like dewdrops in the shining sea.”

  “Oh, Cody,” said Rabbiteen. “You read my blog too.”

  “Of course I do. Physics is collapsing, but the network will persist. All the Black Eggs are linked via quantum entanglement. Telepathy, if you will.”

  Momentarily, Angelo forgot his fears. “Wow, I always wanted some telepathy.”

  “There’s also infinite connectivity and infinite storage in the network of eggs,” Cody evangelized. “The network has an infinite number of users. They’re all upset and angry, just like you, because they’re all indignant to see their universe collapse. They all believed they were the most important aspect of the universe. Imagine the confusion. We have an infinite number of anthropic principles—one for each race!”

  “Then you’ll need moderators,” said Rabbiteen practically. “You need some users that know how to link and comment.”

  “Absolutely we do,” said Cody. “This cosmic cycle was planned out and architected rather poorly. It’s closing down much earlier than the Cosmic Mother expected. Instead of crashing like this, the universes are supposed to get more stable with each new release.”

  “We’re just the kickass bloggers you need!” crowed Angelo. “We can keep up our moaning and complaining for millions of years! Assuming that we’re rewarded for our efforts. I mean—is there any kind of revenue stream inside there?”

  “You’ll lack nothing inside your race’s Black Egg,” leered Cody. “Except your human need to eat or breathe. There will be sex, of course. There’s always sex on the Net. The Cosmic Mother adores sex.”

  “Wow,” said Rabbiteen.

  “Now come closer to me,” said the toad-headed tentacle. “Technical detail: your Black Egg is a hyperdisk where the branes are riveted together via a wormhole link in the twelfth dimension. In this one special region—it’s down my gullet—the branes can’t collide. I know your primitive minds can’t understand that. Think of me as a pine cone that protects a tree’s seeds from the heat of a fierce wildfire.”

  Angelo shook his bloating hands. “Never mind the license agreements, just sign us up and log us in!”

  Rabbiteen had to annotate. “Really, Cody, I think it’s more accurate to say the cosmic branes pass through each other serenely.”

  “Ah, you refer to the Twisterman coordinatization,” said Cody, his bloated demon head expanding with a ragged jolt. “Yes, under that viewpoint, we’ll all be transformed into our mirror-images. If you calculate in terms of the diffeomorphic quiver bundles, then it’s�
�”

  “Hurry up!” screamed Angelo—losing his composure as his left thumb snapped off.

  “Fine,” said Cody. “Over the next ten million years we can discuss these issues fully.” His wide mouth gaped open. The inside looked dank and slimy.

  Rabbiteen felt another flicker of unease. Could it be that Cody was an underworld demon after all? Under his promise of cosmic transformation, was he luring them to a fate infinitely worse than mere death? How would the toad behave any differently, if he were doing that?

  Cody waited with his silent mouth agape.

  Up in the sky, the sun went out. The stars and moon were gone as well. Utter darkness reigned. A shrill buzz filled the nonexistent air and slid menacingly down the scale.

  Pressing together, Angelo and Rabbiteen crawled into the toad’s mouth. Pushing and pulling, moving as one, the lovers wriggled their way down to the womb of the Black Egg. And of our world they saw no more.

  Within the Egg’s twelve-dimensional kalpas, time and space regressed. There was neither room nor duration in which to hunger, to tire, or draw a human breath. Yet in another sense, this was a weightless and limitless utopian paradise in which happy Neetibbar and wry Olegna could gambol and embrace.

  The mortal races of the next universe would occasionally comment on two glorious superclusters, titanic arcs of creative energy stenciling the void like a net—sharp and sleek, stable and sweet, weaving the warp and weft of the reborn cosmos.

  ELLIE

  JACK McDEVITT

  If the lights at Bolton’s Tower go out, the devil gets loose. At least, that was the story. The idea spooked me when I was a kid, and even years later on those rare occasions when I traveled into its general neighborhood, which was well north on the Great Plains, far off the trading routes.

  The Tower put out a lot of light, so much that it could be seen from the Pegborn-Forks road. In a world illuminated mostly by kerosene and candles, it was unique, and it was easy to believe there might be a supernatural force at work.

  I’d been away from the Dakotas for years, and had long since forgotten about the thing, when the press of business and a series of unseasonal storms drove me north into my old home grounds. The weather had been overcast for a week, had cleared off during the course of a long cold afternoon, and when the sun went down, Bolton’s star rose in the east. I knew it immediately for what it was, and I knew I was close.

  There’s something else odd about Bolton’s Tower.

  It’s just inside the southern rim of a long, curving ridge. The ridge isn’t high. It seldom exceeds thirty feet, and sometimes it’s no more than a ripple in the grass. But it’s a strange ridge: if you follow it far enough, you discover it forms a perfect circle. You can’t see that from any single place; the ring is too big. More than sixty miles around. I’ve heard tent preachers explain that the circle symbolizes God, because it’s endless, and cannot be improved on. Just the thing to imprison Satan, they add darkly.

  I crossed the ridge on foot, leading my mount. Snow was beginning to fall again, and the wind was picking up. The Tower rose out of a cluster of dark, weather-beaten buildings and a screen of trees. These structures were low and flat, dreary boxes, some made of clapboard and others of brick. Their windows were gone; their doors hung on broken hinges or were missing altogether. A roof had blown off one, another lay partly demolished by a fallen tree. A small barn, set to one side, had been kept in reasonable repair, and I heard horses moving within as I drew near.

  The Tower soared above the ruin, seven stories of bone-white granite and thick glass. Porches and bays and arches disconnected it from the prairie, as if it belonged to a less mundane reality. The roof melted into banks of curved glass panels capped by a crystal spire. Its lines whispered of lost power and abandoned dreams, passion frozen in stone.

  I released the straps on my crossbow, and loosened it in its sheath.

  Several windows on the second and third floors were illuminated. The Tower lights themselves, red and white signature beams, blazed into the murky night.

  In the windows, no one moved.

  The base of the Tower culminated in a broad terrace surrounded by a low wall, elevated from the road by about twenty wide stone steps. The steps were flanked by dead hedge.

  I rode past, down a grass-covered street, and dismounted in front of the barn. Max made some noises to indicate he was glad the day was over. I hoped he was right.

  The barn had sliding doors. I opened one and we went inside. Three horses moved restlessly in their stalls. The place smelled of them, warm and pungent. I tied Max up, but did not remove his saddle. Just in case. I debated whether to take the crossbow, but in the end left it, on the ground that guests arriving with weapons were a lot more likely to be turned away.

  Wind shook the building, and snow rattled against it like sleet. On the plains, the stuff has the consistency of rock salt. And when the wind is up the way it was that night, it can beat you down pretty good. I burrowed into my coat, pulled my hat low to protect my eyes, and strode back out into the storm.

  I climbed the steps and crossed the terrace. There was a statue of someone out there, in an old dried-up fountain, a rumpled woman in Old World clothes, with the name Margaret Hanbury, and the inscription: FROM THIS NARROW SPACE, WE TOUCH THE INFINITE.

  Six heavy glass doors guarded the entrance. I looked up at the Tower, cold and remote, its aspect growing and shifting in the changing texture of its spectral lights.

  The doors had no give. Beyond them lay a dark lobby. I could see furniture, wall-hangings, a stairway illuminated from above. I banged on the glass.

  For several minutes nothing happened. I tried again, and was thinking about moving in with the horses when the terrace lit up. A man descended the staircase, came to a stop midway across the lobby, and stood for a time studying me. Finally, he came forward, threw a bolt, and pulled the door open.

  “Good evening,” he said, in a rich baritone. “Sorry to leave you standing out here, but I’m inclined to be careful these days.”

  He was a half-foot taller than I, with lean, almost cruel features, and dark intelligent eyes. His buckskin jacket covered a white denim shirt. His black trousers were creased. He was a dark and somber man, and his manner suggested he was accustomed to command. He wore a neatly trimmed beard, and his hair was black and quite thick.

  “Thank you,” I said, moving past him. It was good to be in out of the wind.

  More lights went on. The interior was quite long, perhaps two hundred feet, although it was only as wide as an ordinary room. It was decorated with Indian art, totems, weavings, pottery, and a few oils depicting teepees by sunset and young braves in canoes. Chairs were scattered about in no particular order, and with no effort to match their styles. There were rattans, fabric of a half-dozen different colors, a wooden bench, and several small tables.

  He extended a hand. “This is not a good day to be on the road.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s downright brisk out there.” I shook the snow off my shoulders. “I’m Jeff Quincey.”

  “Edward Marsh. Where are you headed, Quincey?” His voice changed texture, not precisely softening, but rather growing consciously more amiable.

  “I’m bound for the Forks. I’d expected to spend the night in Sandywater, but I got off to a late start this morning. And the weather—”

  He nodded. Snow whipped across the glass. “You’ll want to stay the night with us, of course.”

  “If it’s no trouble, I’d be grateful.”

  “None at all. We don’t get many visitors here.” He turned on his heel and led the way to the staircase.

  On the second floor, carpeted corridors ran off in three directions. The carpet was frayed and, in some places, threadbare. Closed doors marched uniformly along the walls. “This way,” Marsh said, striding off into the right-hand passageway. “What business are you in, Quincey?”

  “I’m a trader. And an occasional agent for Overland.”

  He nodded. “
It’s the traders that’ll open up this country.” Halfway down the hall, the place began to look lived-in. The gray walls gave way to dark-stained paneling, rugs were thrown over the weary carpet, and someone had hung a series of prints. The prints alternated between abstracts and sketches of Old World city scenes. One depicted Chicago, crowded with traffic; another, New York at night; and a third, a Parisian sidewalk café. “I’ve been there,” I told him.

  “Where?”

  “Chicago.”

  “Really?” He glanced at the image. “Odd, all the times I’ve walked by this, and I don’t think I ever really looked at it.” He pushed his hands deep into his jacket pockets. “Why?”

  Why indeed? It had been one of the more oppressive experiences of my life, wandering through those gray, cold canyons. Climbing past the rusting metal that filled its ravine streets, looking up at thousands of empty windows, and knowing what lay mouldering behind them. “I was hired to help with a survey. An historical project.”

  He nodded. “I do believe you’re a man after my own heart, Quincey.” We entered a sitting room half-lit by a low fire. Several pieces of oversized upholstered furniture filled most of the available space. Crossbows and bison trophies were mounted in strategic locations, and a battered garrison hat hung on a peg. Yellowing books were stacked on wall-shelves, more than I’d seen in one place this side of Port Remote. Some appeared to be military histories. But there were also travel journals, and technical titles whose meaning escaped me, like An Orderly Approach to Chaos, and The n-Particle. That was old stuff, pre-Crash, and I wondered whether anyone now living really understood them.

  He switched on an electric lamp, and motioned me to a chair. “I stay out of the cities,” he said. “I don’t like places where you can’t see what’s coming at you. Anyway,” he winked, “you never know when some of the concrete is going to let go.” He took glasses and a decanter from a cabinet. “Port?”