Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

by Mike Ashley

  Earth gravity turned me giddy. The robot eased me back to the bed and seemed to listen when I spoke, though its answer was nothing I could understand. When I stirred again, it helped me to a chair and left the room to bring a human physician, a lean dark man who wore a silver crescent on a neat white jacket. Briskly efficient, he listened at my heart, felt my belly, shook his head at what I tried to say, and turned to leave the room.

  "My friends?" I shouted at him. "Where are they?"

  He shrugged and walked out. The robot stood watching till I felt able to stand and then took my arm to guide me outside, into a circular garden ringed with a circular building. Its lenses followed intently while I walked gravel paths through strange plants that edged the air with scents new to me. The other doors, I thought, might be hiding my companions, but it caught my arm when I tried to knock. When I persisted, it drew a little silver baton clipped to its waist and beckoned me silently back into the room.

  Under its guard, I was treated well enough. Although my words seemed to mean nothing, it nodded when I rubbed my lips and my belly, and brought a tray of food: fruits that we have never grown on the Moon, a plate of crisp brown nut-flavored cakes, a glass of very good wine. I ate with a sudden appetite.

  Silent most of the time, now and then it burst into speech. Clearly, it had questions. So did I, desperate questions about these remote children of ours and what they might do with us. It listened blankly when I spoke and locked the door when it left the room, with no hint of any answers.

  Haunted by our images along that monumental avenue, I slept badly that night, dreaming that they were lumbering in hot pursuit while we fled across a lifeless landscape pitted with deep craters those black insects had eaten into the planet.

  Terror chilled me. Did these people want to sacrifice us in that sacred circle? Drown us in the Nile? Feed us to the insects? Freeze us into silver metal and stand us on guard against the next invasion of heretic clones? I woke up shivering, afraid to know.

  Next morning the robot brought an odd-looking machine, and admitted a slim, quick little woman who looked a little like Dian, though she was wrinkled and dark from a sun that never shone below our Tycho dome. Perhaps a sort of nun, she wore a tall silver turban and fingered a silver Moon pendant. She set up the machine to project words on the wall.

  The moon is distant from the sea, And yet with amber hands She leads him, docile as a boy, Along appointed sands.

  Familiar words. I'd heard Dian recite them in a tone of adoration, though I was never sure exactly what they meant. They became stranger now, as the woman chanted them like a prayer. She repeated them two or three times in the same solemn tones and then read them more slowly, watching through dark-rimmed glasses to see my response, until at last I could nod to a spark of recognition. Vowel sounds had simply shifted. Moon was mahan, see was say.

  She came back again and again, using her machine to teach me like a child. Even when the sounds became familiar, everything else was baffling: plants and animals, clothing and tools, maps of the world and the symbols of math. Yet at last I was able to ask about my companions.

  "Uhl-weese." She frowned and shook her head.

  Unwise. Why, she didn't say. When I tried to tell her we were visitors from the Moon, she scolded and seemed to pity me. Caressing her sacred pendant, she spoke of the paradise the Almighty Five had made of the Moon, where the blessed were allowed to dwell in an everlasting joy.

  Paradise, unfortunately, was not meant for the likes of me. Pretenders who unwisely tried to steal sacred things or powers were to be consumed forever by the black demons in their hell beneath the earth.

  In olden days, she told me darkly, divine fire might have descended to redeem my errant soul. In these more enlightened times, luckily for me, those who attempted to misuse the Holy Book were regarded as either psychotics in need of treatment or shysters deserving eternal torment.

  She tried to save me with instruction in the lunar truth, drawn from a massive volume in silver boards that had theological footnotes to explicate almost every holy word. Dickinson's oriole had become the trickster god, Pepe, who cheated as he enchanted. Dian was not only the Moon Mother but also the soul who selected her own society of those who lived to earn their place with her in paradise. The book itself was her letter to the world that never wrote to her.

  I was unconverted until one day when I was walking with the robot in the garden and stepped of the path to pick a purple flower. The robot said "Noot, noot," and took the flower from me, but it had failed to see me palm a little ball of crumpled paper. When I was able to spread it out in the privacy of my bathroom, it was a note from Tanya, written on a blank page torn from her notebook.

  They want to think we're crazy, though they have trouble explaining how we got here in a sort of craft they never saw before. My witch doctor has a theory. He's trying to convince me that we came from South America, which has not yet been colonized. He talks of a lost party that set out a couple of centuries ago to fight the black insects there. The expedition seems to have ended with a crash into the Amazon rain forest in an area the insects were just invading. Rescue efforts failed, but he believes we must be descendants of survivors. He thinks we somehow salvaged or repaired the wrecked craft that brought us back. If we want to get out of here, I think we'd better go along.

  I rolled the paper up and dropped it next day where I had found it. In the end we all went along, though Arne held out until Dian was allowed to persuade him. He grumbled bitterly till he found work on a Nile dredge, improving the channel and turning a swamp into new land for docks and warehouses. He says he is happier now than he ever was twiddling his thumbs on the Moon.

  Although the ages seem to have erased every relic of our own times, these people are eagerly searching their own past for evidence of the Holy Clones. They have given Dian a museum position, where she can make good use of her skills at restoring and preserving antiquities and perhaps finally establish herself as an inspired interpreter of holy writ.

  Pepe qualified for a pilot's license while Tanya studied methods for the control of the predatory insects. They are gone now with a new expedition to reclaim the Americas.

  Although all the history I know is heresy, sternly outlawed here, I've found a university job as a janitor. It gives me access to radio equipment that can reach the lunar station. We can't help hoping that our own silver colossi will endure to watch this new Egypt grow into a finer civilization than our own ever was. Yet Tycho must be kept alive, lest disaster strikes again.

  WORLD WITHOUT END

  F. Gwynplaine Maclntyre

  This final trilogy of stories takes us right to the far ends of existence on Earth.

  Fergus Gwynplaine Maclntyre is a Scottish-born writer, playwright and journalist, long resident in the United States. His work, often humorous and noted for its detailed research and rigorous plotting, has appeared in many magazines and anthologies. His books include the novel The Woman Between the Worlds (1994) and a collection of humorous imaginings Maclntyre's Improbable Bestiary (2005).

  * * *

  HE STOLE MY death. After all these long years I forget his face. I remember his hands, the long tapering fingers holding the hypodermic shaft and pressing its needle into my skinny-skank arm as I beg him to give me a drug I never tried before. Ooh, yeah. Too right, that's good.

  When I met him, back in 2023,1 was a street bint: selling my snatch to kerb-crawlers and other pervs, just to get enough dosh to buy my next high. When the ecstasy wore off and I came down again, I'd go back on the game again. Another night, another street.

  Now I've got every street in the world to myself.

  I've exhausted all the pencils in the world. I've used up all the pens, markers, biros, highlighters. Once, when I was still living in London, I broke into a museum and twocked a rusty old typewriter I found there but it only lasted me a couple of years while I banged out these notes to myself. (Whoever else is going to read them?) I've outlived hard drives, soft drives, fl
ash drives, tweets, flippits, thinxes and all the other fiddly-fancy ways to store text. I've gone back to the beginning, I have.

  I write with charcoal on walls. There's no shortage of walls hereabouts, and when I run out of charcoal I just burn something.

  The sun gets bigger every day. I used to think it only seems to get bigger cus it's coming closer, and that. No. It's really growing bigger, I'm sure. And redder.

  The nights are fewer and shorter now, and when night comes I don't recognize the stars. I was never good at their names: I only know Charles's Wain and Orion. A few thousand years after I lost my death, the stars in Orion scarpered off in different directions. Now the stars are all strange, except for the sun overhead. Too right I know that one.

  I remember my father. When I think of him all I see is a mouth shouting at me and two hard square fists. I remember his voice telling me I was just a whore and a slapper and yelling at me that I'd never amount to nowt. He got that last bit wrong though: only I'm the most important person in the world, now.

  Cus I'm the only one left.

  I can't remember my mam. I've forgotten the faces and the voices of everyone I ever loved. The only people I can still recall are the bastards I'll hate till the day I die. Which likely means I'll hate them forever. Most of all, I hate my dad and the filthy perv who stole my death.

  I was out in the street when I turned fifteen, and I was on the game and sixteen when I met him. One of those clever lads from the Uni, he was, reading science. While I was pulling him off in the alley, he kept nattering to me about something he was working on. Nanotech, that was the word. And summat called the Hayflick limit, which meant bugger-all to me at the time, only I sussed it out later. Said he hadn't kept track of his own experiment, and wasn't sure he could ever repeat the results. I wanted him to stop jawing so I could just concentrate on getting him off and then get on to my next punter, but he kept blagging about little tiny robots and such. I was wearing a skimpy miniskirt and a halter. He saw the tracks all in the veins in my arms and my legs and he knew I was on the stuff. Then he jabbed a needle into my arm, injected something. It felt like fire in my blood, ooh I wanted it I wanted it.

  I'd already got his money, so he just did up his flies and he left. I pulled a few more punters, then I went back to the bedsit I was sharing with two other girls on the game. I was on the blob that night, so I pulled the used tampon out of my fadge and chucked it away, but I couldn't find a clean one to put in. I found my last clean pair of knickers, and put those on. I felt like all my blood was on fire, and for a while I couldn't sleep. Then I passed out, like.

  When I woke up, there was a hole in my new knickers ... just there, across the fadge. There was also a hole in the mattress, underneath.

  I wasn't hungry, but that's normal when you're doing ecstasy. Thing is, I wasn't hungry for a high, either. For the first time in all I could remember, I wasn't hungry or thirsty for owt. I put on a skirt, then I looked for my make-up. When you're on the game, you age fast, and you want a bit of slap to cover the wrinkles and that.

  Then I noticed that the tracks in my arms had gone. And the ones in my legs were fading.

  I got my make-up and went to the mirror. While I was putting on my slap and my lippy, I saw that the lines in my face were gone. All this time, I'd been sixteen going on forty. Now I looked more a proper age sixteen again.

  I remembered that fellow from Uni, and I figured whatever was in that drug he'd needled me with, I wanted more of it. But I had no notion of where to find that punter again.

  Till then, I'd been going days at a trot without a proper meal, spending all my dosh on ecstasy and other drugs. After I met that perv from the Uni, it took me a couple of days to twig that I wasn't hungry any more, nor I didn't want the drugs neither. But every day, I kept finding holes in my knickers, so I always felt a breeze round my fadge. After a week without any meals, and not wanting any, I started to feel like maybe I was

  (gap)

  and wondering if I was going to stay sixteen years old for the rest of my life. Whenever I cut myself, or got beaten up by a punter, the hurt would heal right away. Except my teeth, and that. Before I'd met that perv, I'd had a few teeth knocked out that never grew back, and some chipped teeth that only got worse. Strange that everything else heals now, but never my teeth.

  I stopped going on the blob. I'd figured out that, whenever I sat down, or when my fanny ever touched against owt, that's how those tiny nano-robots inside me would get energy to keep working: whenever I pulled away, a few bits and bobs of whatever my fadge had touched would be missing, as if it had melted off, like. Didn't matter what: cloth, wood, metal, plastic. My lady-bits had become some kind of dispose-all, eating anything. Glass, too. So I'm a human bottle bank.

  There was only so long I could stay in one neighbourhood without someone noticing I never get any older. I tried to avoid the dole office, the labour exchange, the Nash ... the National Health System, I mean. Anyplace where government folk would see me. When they made everyone get ID microchips under their skin, I knew the game was up. After I'd been microchipped a few weeks, my skin pushed the microchip out again. The people at Central Entry knew straight away.

  Central Entry's security team came to nick me. They took me to a gowy lab down at Centry. They did no end of tests on me, and somebody twigged that the microbots in my bloodstream are regenerating my body - except my teeth - so that everything heals and I never get older. Some government wonk with big words explained to me about how my telomeres stay the same, and the Hayflick limit, and that. Another gowy told me the nanobots in my blood are (I heard this word often enough to remember it) self-replicating.

  Then they locked me up, so they could study me. Special Act of Parliament or summat, so they could keep me locked up in a lab.

  The doctors were especially interested in how I never need to eat nor drink, because the nanobots inside me get energy and materials from whatever touches my fadge. I still need to sleep, though.

  They gave me a private room but it was just a cell, cus I was never allowed to leave except when they took me out for tests. They stuck needles in me, and took all the blood out of my body twice over, trying to take out the tiny robots. They did tests on my fadge, and that, and several times my lady-bits melted the tips of their scientific thingies. Then they put me back the room again. With the door locked.

  Once, they turned off the vents in my cell, and I could hear all the air pumping out. I couldn't talk, with no air and that. I couldn't breathe, neither. About three hours later, the air came back and I started breathing again, then some doctors came to see me. Said it was an accident. Liars!

  There's a water tap in here, but I only drink water once in a while when I'm dead bored. That's dead bored, not dead. Once I went without water for two months, no probs. One of the doctors said summat about the nanobots rehydrating my cells. He also said as how the nano-wotsis had adapted to my personal DNA and that, so injecting some of my blood into somebody else won't work the trick.

  I never get hungry or thirsty. At least I still need to sleep.

  After seven or eight years of getting poked and jabbed, I tried to

  (gap)

  and they tried as long as they could to keep the lab safe from the snot-rot (what I heard a nurse call it), or the Global Pandemic (what a doctor called it), but finally it showed up in the lab and they all started dying. The stuff eats flesh and bones and all, and that. I heard rumours from the lab staff about people just melting into huge puddles of snot, or at least it looks like snot, with nowt left but their clothes and shoes and maybe bits and bobs of their teeth.

  One morning I woke up and nobody answered the signal to come to my cell, no matter how many times I pushed the button. I tried to force the door open, or a window, but the security thingies kept stopping me same as ever. The automatic voice kept warning me not to try again.

  After a long time, the lights went out and the air cycle stopped. I kept trying the door but just getting the warning. I sc
reamed for somebody, anybody. Finally, the automatic voice stopped. After another long time, I tried the door and it opened.

  It took me a while and more aggro to get out of the lab, but I did.

  Everybody was dead. I could see the big piles of snot and clothes where some people had been lately, and inside the buildings some little piles of dust where the snot had dried up.

  Most of the animals were dead too. Plenty of trees and plants, though. And insects. There were birds for a few weeks, then they all started dying.

  I found a car that worked without the security link to its owner's ID chip. I'd never twigged how to drive properly, but when you're the only driver on the road it's easy-peasy. I got out of London and I headed for the

  (gap)

  in the motorboat I'd found to get to France. I went along the coast till the boat needed a recharge and I couldn't keep it going. Then I found another car I could start, and for a couple of years I just

  (gap)

  and wouldn't you bloody well know it that whatever killed everything else won't kill the insects, and there's more of them all the time! Ugh! Flies and beetles and nasties, and there seem to be more every day. And I'm seeing new sorts of insects now: flies all glittery like red metal, and beetles with big yellow eyes, and I'm sure there weren't any of those before the snot-rot killed off all the people. At least the rats mostly

  (gap)

  Once in a long while I find an old stash of food in plasti-clings so it never went off nor got mouldy, and sometimes I'll eat something just to remember what food tastes like. Sometimes the wrap is broken and the food's gone off, but I'll eat it anyway. Not as if it will kill me ha ha. Once I ate some cheese that had gone all mouldy, just for the new experien

  (gap)