Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

by Mike Ashley

  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 Cla
usen.

  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," D
a 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."