by Mike Ashley
As the sun climbed the children tired, their pace falling, and the arid air sucked the sweat off their bodies. But at last the mountains came looming out of the dusty air. These worn hills were ancient, a relic of the formation of New Pangaea. But to Tura and Bel, standing before their scree-covered lower slopes, they were formidable heights indeed.
Then Tura saw a splash of green and brown, high on a slope. Curiosity sparked. Without thinking about it she began to climb. Bel, always more nervous, would not follow.
Though at first the slope was so gentle it was no more than a walk, Tura was soon higher than she had ever been in her life. On she climbed, until her walk gave way to an instinctive scramble on all fours. Her heart hammering, she kept on. All around her New Pangaea unfolded, a sea of Mars-red dust worn flat by time.
At last she reached the green. It was a clump of trees, shadowed by the mountain from the dust-laden winds and nourished by water from subsurface aquifers. Instinctively Tura rubbed her hand over smooth, sturdy trunks. She had never seen trees before.
As the sun brightened, Earth's systems compensated by drawing down carbon dioxide from the air. But this was a process with a limit: even in Jaal's time the remnant carbon dioxide had been a trace. Already the planet had shed many rich ecosystems -tundra, forests, grasslands, meadows, mangrove swamps. Soon the carbon dioxide concentration would drop below a certain critical level after which only a fraction of plants would be able to photosynthesize. The human population, already only a million strung out around the world's single coastline, would implode to perhaps ten thousand.
People would survive. They always had. But these trees, in whose cool shade Tura stood, were among the last in the world.
She peered up at branches with sparse crowns of spiky leaves, far above her head. There might be fruit up there, or water to be had in the leaves. But it was impossible; she could not climb past the smoothness of the lower trunk.
When she looked down Bel's upturned face was a white dot. The day was advancing; as the sun rode higher the going across the dry dust would be even more difficult. With regret she began her scrambled descent to the ground.
As she lived out her life on the coast of Pangaea, Tura never forgot her brief adventure. And when she thought of the trees her hands and feet itched, her body recalling ape dreams abandoned half a billion years before.
V
Ruul was bored.
All through the echoing caverns the party was in full swing. By the light of their hearths and rush torches people played and danced, talked and laughed, drank and fought, and the much-evolved descendants of snakes and wasps curled affectionately around the ankles of their owners. It was a Thousand-Day festival. In a world forever cut off from the daylight, subterranean humans pale as worms marked time by how they slept and woke, and counted off the days of their lives on their fingers.
Everyone was having fun - everyone but Ruul. When his mother was too busy to notice, he crept away into the dark.
Some time ago, restlessly exploring the edge of the inhabited cave, where tunnels and boreholes stretched on into the dark, he had found a chimney, a crack in the limestone. It looked as if you could climb up quite a way. And when he shielded his eyes, it looked to him as if there was light up there, light of a strange ruddy hue. There might be another group somewhere in the caverns above, he thought. Or it might be something stranger yet, something beyond his imagination.
Now, in the dim light of the torches, he explored the chimney wall. Lodging his fingers and toes in crevices, began to climb.
He was escaping the party. Eleven years old, neither child nor adult, he just didn't fit, and he petulantly wished the festival would go away. But as he ascended into profound silence the climb itself consumed all his attention, and the why of it faded from his mind.
His people, cavern-bound for uncounted generations, were good at rock-climbing. They lived in caverns in deep limestone karsts, laid down in long-vanished shallow seas. Once these hollows had hosted ecosystems full of the much-evolved descendants of lizards, snakes, scorpions, cockroaches, even sharks and crocodiles. The extreme and unchanging conditions of Pangaea had encouraged intricacy and interdependency. The people, retreating underground, had allowed fragments of these extraordinary biotas to survive.
Soon Ruul climbed up out of the limestone into a softer sandstone, poorly cemented. It was easier to find crevices here. The crimson light from above was bright enough to show him details of the rock through which he was passing. There was layer upon layer of it, he saw, and it had a repetitive pattern, streaks of darkness punctuated by lumpy nodules. When he touched one of the nodules, he found a blade surface so sharp he might have cut his fingers. It was a stone axe - made, used, and dropped long ago, and buried somehow in the sediments that had made this sandstone. Growing more curious he explored the dark traces. They crumbled when he dug into them with a fingernail, and he could smell ash, as fresh as if a fire had just burned here. The dark layers were hearths.
He was climbing through strata of hearths and stone tools, thousands of layers all heaped up on top of one another and squashed down into the rock. People must have lived in this place a very long time. He was oppressed by a huge weight of time, and of changelessness.
But he was distracted by a set of teeth he found, small, triangular, razor-edged. They had holes drilled in them. He carefully prised these out of the rock and put them in a pouch; perhaps he would make a necklace of them later.
With aching fingertips and toes, he continued his climb.
Unexpectedly, he reached the top of the chimney. It opened out into a wider space, a cave perhaps, filled with that ruddy light. He hoisted himself up the last short way, swung his legs out onto the floor above, and stood up.
And he was stunned.
He was standing on flat ground, a plain that seemed to go on forever. It was covered in dust, very red, so fine it stuck to the sweat on his legs. He turned slowly around. If this was the floor of a cave - well, it was a cave with no walls. And the roof above must be far away too, so far he could not see it; above him was nothing but a dome of darkness. He had no word for sky. And in one direction, facing him, something lifted over the edge of the world. It was a ruddy disc, perfectly circular, just a slice of it protruding over the dead-flat horizon. It was the source of the crimson light, and he could feel its searing heat.
Ruul inhabited a convoluted world of caverns and chimneys; he had never seen anything like the purity of this utterly flat plain, the perfectly circular arc of that bow of light. The clean geometric simplicity of the landscape drew his soul; he stared, entranced.
Three hundred million years after the life and death of Tura and Bel, this was what Earth had become. The sediments on which Ruul stood were the ruins of the last mountains. The magmatic currents of a cooling world had not been able to break up the new supercontinent, as they had the first. Meanwhile the sun's relentless warming continued. By now only microbes inhabited the equatorial regions, while at the poles a few hardy, tough-skinned plants were browsed by sluggish animals heavily armoured against the heat. Earth was already losing its water, and Pangaea's shoreline was rimmed by brilliant-white salt flats.
But the boy standing on the eroded-flat ground was barely changed from his unimaginably remote ancestors, from Tura and Cale and Urlu and even Jaal. It had never been necessary for humans to evolve significantly, for they always adjusted their environment so they didn't have to - and in the process stifled evolutionary innovation.
It was like this everywhere. After the emergence of intelligence, the story of any biosphere tended to get a lot simpler. It was a major reason for the silence of the stars.
But on Earth a long story was ending. In not many generations from now, Ruul's descendants would succumb; quietly baked in their desiccating caves, they would not suffer. Life would go on, as archaic thermophi-lie microbes spread their gaudy colours across the land. But man would be gone, leaving sandstone strata nearly a billion years deep full of hearths
and chipped stones and human bones.
"Ruul! Ruul! Oh, there you are!" His mother, caked by red dust, was clambering stiffly out of the chimney. "Somebody said you came this way. I've been frantic. Oh, Ruul - what are you doing?"
Ruul spread his hands, unable to explain. He didn't want to hurt his mother, but he was excited by his discoveries. "Look what I found, mother!"
"What?"
He babbled excitedly about hearths and tools and bones. "Maybe people lived here in great heaps, and the smoke of their fires rose up to the sky. Mother, will we come to live here again?"
"Perhaps one day," his mother said at random, to hush him.
But that wasn't answer enough for Ruul. Restless, curious, he glanced around once more at the plain, the rising sun. To him, this terminal Earth was a place of wonder. He longed to explore. "Let me go on. Just a little further!"
"No," his mother said gently. "The adventure's over. It's time to go. Come now." And she put her arm around his shoulders, and led him home.
THE STAR CALLED WORMWOOD
Elizabeth Counihan
I could have concluded this anthology with any of several stories, but there is something about the ending of this story that seemed just right, and brings our journey through an apocalyptic future almost full circle.
Elizabeth Counihan is from a writing family. Her father was a BBC journalist and her grandfather a novelist. Elizabeth was a family doctor in the National Health
Service for many years but is now concentrating on writing. Her stories have appeared in Asimov's, Realms of Fantasy, Nature Futures and several other magazines and anthologies. She is the editor of the British fantasy magazine Scheherazade.
IN THE WEEK that Anya died a comet approached the Earth. At first a bright spark in the east, it enlarged, trailing a cloud of shimmering white - a glowing snowball, flung into the sky above the frozen landscape of Siberia. Anya did not see it. She lay, ninety-nine years old, in the last ice palace, tended by machines older than she was. Their antennae perceived the new celestial body. Their voices reported it, echoing through vaulted chambers and long-abandoned halls where, here and there, a small creature twitched a whisker or pricked a furry ear before returning to the business of living. The voices whispered in Anna's room. She could no longer speak but electronic eyes interpreted the movement of her lips, and recorded that her last word was "Wormwood". Her breath rattled in a last sigh and her eyes closed.
The machines went to the burial place and drew out a core of ice. Anya's body was wrapped in an embroidered sheet and placed feet first in the bore hole. Finally, as they had been taught, the machines reverently capped her grave with powdered ice and played the music appropriate to the death of a lady of the palace. The sound was heard only by the wolves and bears of the wilderness. Her grave, the last in row upon row of similar graves, lay under the bleak gaze of the comet.
The comet hurtled on, over wrinkled mountains, arid plains, sundrenched ocean. Wild dogs howled at its passing; owls blinked under its bright gaze.
Kuri squatted beside a thorn tree, his shadow black and dwarfish under the equatorial sun. He reached out a dark, bony hand and picked up a fragment of yellow ringlass from the jigsaw of coloured shards at his feet, laying it carefully to one side with pieces he had already chosen. After a few moments' thought, chin in cupped hand, he selected a second piece, green this time and laid it with the others. He removed his wide-brimmed hat and half-filled it with the selected glass then, rising stiffly, walked towards his house beside the lake. His body was wiry and naked, his knobbly feet bare; without his hat, only a tangle of grey and black hair protected his head from the sun.
His way to the domed building lay across a hundred metres of flat desert, fringed at its margin by dark reeds. From there the jade-green lake stretched into the west. A feather of white vapour spiralled from the volcano on Crocodile Island and dispersed in the shimmering air. Kuri stopped halfway to catch his breath, his throat rasped by the harsh taint of the volcano. He gazed with narrowed eyes, half-blinded by the beauty of his ancient home, placed like a jewel of many colours between him and the lake. At this time of day the windows were almost inaudible, a subdued harmony, but to the sight they blazed with the brilliance of the noonday sun.
There was a flicker of movement near the water. Kuri shaded his eyes with his free hand then grinned and whistled loudly through his fingers. The moving shape bounded towards him on all fours but rose onto hind legs when it reached his side. The creature, yellow-brown like the earth, planted a slender fore paw on each side of his chest. Green eyes, adoring as a dog's, gazed up at him from a flat, cat-like face. Her tongue rasped his skin.
He bent and kissed her between the ears, then said, "Drink, Jade."
"Drink? Water? Juice drink?" she answered in her breathy growl. She rubbed her head against his hand and he stroked her under the chin.
"Juice. In the house," he said. She raced back towards the glowing building, her tail waving like a yellow plume. Kuri followed more slowly still clutching his hat. The glass vibrated gently, picking up the resonance of the house. His feet left one more line of prints in the dusty earth. He looked back; today's line went only to the thorn tree and the previous day's reached no further, yet he was very tired. He squinted to see older tracks. There were Jade's paw marks skittering here, there and everywhere and the bigger marks of her cousins, the wild adapts. He saw the slots of jumpbuck and, with a stir of anxiety, the recent pug marks of a fanged leopard. Plodding into the distance and only faintly discernible were the wide prints of his own dromedary. Was it then so long since he had ridden it inland? He realized with some surprise that it was two months at least. He turned slowly, looking in vain for signs of his own tracks extending further than the thorn tree and the pile of ringlass sparkling in the sun. He looked at his hand, black and wrinkled; at his arm thin and sere as a dead thorn-branch. A shade fell across his soul.
Kuri shrugged and trudged on. He was thirsty and there was work to do on the east window. The dark entrance to his home was cool and inviting below the blazing windows. He ducked to avoid the curved roof of the tunnel and plunged below ground like a fox to earth. Breathing heavily again, he sat down in the cool light of the northern window that glowed high above him. Jade skipped up to him on her hind legs, holding a beaker between her front paws. He drank, and his skin rained cold drops of sweat. He turned to Jade but she had anticipated his next wish, and was proffering a square of damp lake-weed. He smiled at the little creature; in the window light her tawny coat was dappled purple and bronze like a child's toy. She pirouetted on two legs as if she knew he found her antics comical.
"Good Jade," he said, wiping his forehead. "You must go out this evening. Play with your friends."
"Kuri play with Jade?" she said.
"I'm too old to play. Old creatures don't play." She dropped to all fours and rubbed against his knee. Using her mouth she took the weed from his hand, growling playfully, shaking her head about; then seeing he wasn't going to join the game, trotted out of the house to return it to the water.
Kuri sighed and stretched his creaking bones. He wanted to sleep but wanted even more to return to his task. He lurched to his feet and fetched another juice drink from the cold store. He went over to the east side of his dwelling and, with a critical eye, gazed up at the sun-shaped east window, brilliant in orange and yellow and yet transmitting no heat to him. He could not remember who had installed the window - his mother? Perhaps even his grandfather. He frowned trying to recall that distant time when three people had lived here - no four: there had been his brother, Omu, who had died from a snakebite.
He bent stiffly and picked up his krar, twanging its three strings in turn. A high keening resonated from the window above him. He shook his head in distaste then played a series of chords. The keening descended in pitch but was still unpleasing to his ear. This must have been the original artist's idea of the rising sun - too harsh, too strident for him.
He emptied his hat of the
glass pieces and piled them onto a basketful he had selected on previous days. Then he ambled round the chamber picking up tools here and there, taking them and the glass over to the east side. Finally he uttered a word of command and a wooden platform emerged creakily from the wall and swung towards him, lowering itself to floor level. He piled everything on to it and clambered up, directing the platform until it had risen on a swivelling arm to the roof. Even so close to the blazing sun of the window he was neither dazzled nor overheated, such was the wonder of ringlass.
Once Kuri had decided the effect he wanted he worked quickly, tapping out crescents of citrine and gamboge from the solar orb. As he removed the pieces the true heat of the day blasted through the lattice like a wind from the volcano.
He mopped his forehead with the brim of his hat then jammed it on his head. The lattice itself writhed in discomfort and gratefully hugged the replacement sections, softer shades of rose and ochre, that he offered it. As each new piece was inserted he tuned it with his krar, slicing tiny slivers of glass from the sections he was altering until both sight and sound merged with the image in his head.
By the time he lowered the mechanism to the ground the sun was sinking towards the western window which already vibrated gently in anticipation. Kuri slumped to the floor, too exhausted even to fetch himself another drink. He looked around for Jade but she was not sleeping in her usual place, under the cool light of the northwest spiral, the only silent window. In his mind's eye he saw her, among the reeds, skipping and pouncing with her adapt cousins. That would be only right.
He licked dry lips. She must prepare for a future without him - quite soon, he thought. But then he heard her familiar call, the repeated little noise she made when she was bringing him food. She bounded in through the entrance tunnel, a wriggling fish held in her jaws. She dropped it at his feet and ran outside again, mewing joyfully. Kuri smiled, shaking his head. "I'm not hungry," he whispered to himself.