Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

by Mike Ashley

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

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

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

  God. Giving names to everything.

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

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

  "Parasauralophus."

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

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

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

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

  For some reason, the Gods didn't say.

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

  "No shit."

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

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

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

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

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

  Maryanne said, "Those are habilis, aren't they?"

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

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

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

  Maryanne whispered, "Like it knows we're here, and it's glad."

  Millikan laughed. "Maybe it's fucking Flipper!"

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

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

  Rebirth.

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

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

  Not here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  But why bother?

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

  Hopeless.

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

  Back home?

  Funny to call it that.

  It was never home to me.

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

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

  Young again?

  Hardly that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Orange.

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

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

  No mist here.

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

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

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

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

  An unimaginable future?

  Perhaps.

  I thought I'd miss you, Paulie.

  But I don't.

  THE BOOKS

  Kage Baker

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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