Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

by Mike Ashley

  "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 spl
it 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."