The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction

by Ashley, Mike;

  The first time, it had been Elena. Tied together in life, now in death. Necroville had not been sanctuary. The place beyond the law only gave Adam Tesler new and more colorful opportunities to incarnate his jealousy. The Benthic Lords, they had called themselves. Wild, free, dead. They probably had not known they were working for Tesler-Thanos, but they took her out in a dead bar on Terminal Boulevard. With a game-fishing harpoon. They carved their skull symbol on her forehead, a rebuttal of the deathsign Sol had cut in her palm. Now you are really dead, meat. He had known they would never be safe on Earth. The companeros in the Death House had faked the off-world NightFreight contracts. The pill Sol took had been surprisingly bitter, the dive into the white light as hard as he remembered.

  Stars. You could lose yourself in them; spirit strung out, orb gazing. Somewhere out there was a still-invisible constellation of eight, tight formation, silent running. Killing stars. Death stars.

  Everyone came up to watch the missiles launch from the black foramens grown out of the misty ice. The chemical motors burned at twenty kays: a sudden galaxy of white stars. They watched them fade from sight. Twelve hours to contact. No one expected them to do any more than waste a few thousand rounds of the meat’s point defenses.

  In a dozen manufacturing pods studded around St Judy’s dumpy waist, Jorge and Sol’s fighters gestated. Their slow accretion, molecule by molecule, fascinated Sol. Evil dark things, St Andrew’s crosses cast in melted bone. At the center a humanshaped cavity. You flew spread-eagled. Bas-hands gripped thruster controls; swr-hands armed and aimed the squirt lasers. Dark flapping things Sol had glimpsed once before flocked again at the edges of his consciousness. He had cheated the dark premonitory angels that other time. He would sleight them again.

  The first engagement of the battle of St Judy’s Comet was at 01:45 GMT. Solomon Gursky watched it with his crewbrethren in the ice-wrapped warmth of the command womb. His virtualized sight perceived space in three dimensions. Those blue cylinders were the corporada ships. That white swarm closing from a hundred different directions, the missiles. One approached a blue cylinder and burst. Another, and another; then the inner display was a glare of novas as the first wave was annihilated. The back-up went in. The vanguard exploded in beautiful futile blossoms of light. Closer. They were getting closer before the meat shredded them. Sol watched a warhead loop up from due south, streak toward the point ship, and annihilate it in a red flash.

  The St Judy’s Cometeers cheered. One gone, reduced to bubbling slag by tectors sprayed from the warhead.

  One was all they got. It was down to the fighter pilots now.

  Sol and Elena made love in the count-up to launch. Bas-arms and swr-arms locked in the freegee of the forward observation blister. Stars described slow arcs across the transparent dome, like a sky. Love did not pass through death; Elena had realized this bitter truth about what she had imagined she had shared with Solomon Gursky in her house on the hillside. But love could grow, and become a thing shaped for eternity. When the fluids had dried on their skins, they sealed their soft, intimate places with vacuum-tight skin and went up to the launch bays.

  Sol fitted her into the scooped-out shell. Tectoplastic fingers gripped Elena’s body and meshed with her skin circuitry. The angel-suit came alive. There was a trick they had learned in their em-telepathy; a massaging of the limbic system like an inner kiss. One mutual purr of pleasure, then she cast off, suit still dripping gobs of frozen tectopolymer. St Judy’s defenders would fight dark and silent; that mental kiss would be the last radio contact until it was decided. Solomon Gursky watched the blue stutter of the thrusters merge with the stars. Reaction mass was limited; those who returned from the fight would jettison their angel-suits and glide home by solar sail. Then he went below to monitor the battle through the tickle of molecules in his frontal lobes.

  St Judy’s Angels formed two squadrons: one flying anti-missile defense, the other climbing high out of the ecliptic to swoop down on the corporada ships and destroy them before they could empty their weapon racks. Elena was in the close defense group. Her angelship icon was identified in Sol’s inner vision in red on gold tiger stripes of her skin. He watched her weave intricate orbits around St Judy’s Comet as the blue cylinders of the meat approached the plane labeled “strike range.”

  Suddenly, seven blue icons spawned a cloud of actinic sparks, raining down on St Judy’s Comet like fireworks.

  “Jesus Joseph Mary!” someone swore quietly.

  “Fifty-five gees,” Capitan Savita said calmly. “Time to contact, one thousand and eighteen seconds.”

  “They’ll never get them all,” said Kobe with the Mondrian skin pattern, who had taken Elena’s place in remote sensing.

  “We have one hundred and fifteen contacts in the first wave,” Jorge announced.

  “Sol, I need delta vee,” Savita said.

  “More than a thousandth of a gravity and the mass driver coils will warp,” Sol said, calling overlays onto his visual cortex.

  “Anything that throws a curve into their computations,” Savita said.

  “I’ll see how close I can push it.”

  He was glad to have to lose himself in the problems of squeezing a few millimeters per second squared out of the big electromagnetic gun, because then he would not be able to see the curve and swoop of attack vectors and intercept planes as the point defense group closed with the missiles. Especially he would not have to watch the twine and loop of the tiger-striped cross and fear that at any instant it would intersect with a sharp blue curve in a flash of annihilation. One by one, those blue stars were going out, he noticed, but slowly. Too slowly. Too few.

  The computer gave him a solution. He fed it to the mass driver. The shift of acceleration was as gentle as a catch of breath.

  Thirty years since he had covered his head in a synagogue, but Sol Gursky prayed to Yahweh that it would be enough.

  One down already; Emilio’s spotted indigo gone, and half the missiles were still on trajectory. Time to impact ticked down impassively in the upper right corner of his virtual vision. Six hundred and fifteen seconds. Ten minutes to live.

  But the attack angels were among the corporadas, dodging the brilliant flares of short range interceptor drones. The meat fleet tried to scatter, but the ships were low on reaction mass, ungainly, unmaneuverable. St Judy’s Angels dived and sniped among them, clipping a missile rack here, a solar panel there, ripping open life support bubbles and fuel tanks in slow explosions of outgassing hydrogen. The thirteen-year-old pilots died, raging with chemical-induced fury, spilled out into vacuum in tears of flash-frozen acceleration gel. The attacking fleet dwindled from seven to five to three ships. But it was no abattoir of the meat; of the six dead angels that went in, only two pulled away into rendezvous orbit, laser capacitors dead, reaction mass spent. The crews ejected, unfurled their solar sails, shields of light.

  Two meat ships survived. One used the last grams of his maneuvering mass to warp into a return orbit; the other routed his thruster fuel through his blip drive; headlong for St Judy.

  “He’s going for a ram,” Kobe said.

  “Sol, get us away from him,” Captain Savita ordered.

  “He’s too close.” The numbers in Sol’s skull were remorseless. “Even if I cut the mass driver, he can still run life support gas through the STUs to compensate.”

  The command womb quivered.

  “Fuck,” someone swore reverently.

  “Near miss,” Kobe reported. “Direct hit if Sol hadn’t given us gees.”

  “Mass driver is still with us,” Sol said.

  “Riley’s gone,” Captain Savita said.

  Fifty missiles were now twenty missiles but Emilio and Riley were dead, and the range was closing. Little room for maneuver; none for mistakes.

  “Two hundred and fifteen seconds to ship impact,” Kobe announced. The main body of missiles was dropping behind St Judy’s Comet. Ogawa and Skin, Mandelbrot set and Dalmatian spots, were fighting a rearguar
d as the missiles tried to reacquire their target. Olive green ripples and red tiger stripes swung round to face the meat ship. Quinsana and Elena.

  Jesus Joseph Mary, but it was going to be close!

  Sol wished he did not have the graphics in his head. He wished not to have to see. Better sudden annihilation, blindness and ignorance shattered by destroying light. To see, to know, to count the digits on the timer, was as cruel as execution. But the inner vision has no eyelids. So he watched, impotent, as Quinsana’s olive green cross was pierced and shattered by a white flare from the meat ship. And he watched as Elena raked the meat with her lasers and cut it into quivering chunks, and the blast of engines destroying themselves sent the shards of ship arcing away from St Judy’s Comet. And he could only watch, and not look away, as Elena turned too slow, too little, too late, as the burst seed-pod of the environment unit tore off her thruster legs and light sail and sent her spinning end over end, crippled, destroyed.

  “Elena!” he screamed in both his voices. “Elena! Oh Jesus oh God!” But he had never believed in either of them, and so they let Elena Asado go tumbling endlessly toward the beautiful galaxy clusters of Virgo.

  Earth’s last rage against her children expired: twenty missiles dwindled to ten, to five, to one. To none. St Judy’s Comet continued her slow climb out of the sun’s gravity well, into the deep dark and the deeper cold. Its five hundred and twenty souls slept sound and ignorant as only the dead can in tombs of ice. Soon Solomon Gursky and the others would join them, and be dissolved into the receiving ice, and die for five hundred years while St Judy’s Comet made the crossing to another star.

  If it were sleep, then I might forget, Solomon Gursky thought. In sleep, things changed, memories became dreams, dreams memories. In sleep, there was time, and time was change, and perhaps a chance of forgetting the vision of her, spinning outward forever, rebuilt by the same forces that had already resurrected her once, living on sunlight, unable to die. But it was not sleep to which he was going. It was death, and that was nothing any more.

  Friday

  Together they watched the city burn. It was one of the ornamental cities of the plain that the Long Scanning folk built and maintained for the quadrennial eisteddfods. There was something of the flower in the small, jewel-like city, and something of the spiral, and something of the sea-wave. It would have as been as accurate to call it a vast building as a miniature city. It burned most elegantly.

  The fault line ran right through the middle of it. The fissure was clean and precise – no less to be expected of the Long Scanning folk – and bisected the curvilinear architecture from top to bottom. The land still quivered to aftershocks.

  It could have repaired itself. It could have doused the flames – a short in the magma tap, the man reckoned – reshaped the melted ridges and roofs, erased the scorch marks, bridged the cracks and chasms. But its tector systems were directionless, its soul withdrawn to the Heaven Tree, to join the rest of the Long Scanning people on their exodus.

  The woman watched the smoke rise into the darkening sky, obscuring the great opal of Urizen.

  “It doesn’t have to do this,” she said. Her skin spoke of sorrow mingled with puzzlement.

  “They’ve no use for it any more,” the man said. “And there’s a certain beauty in destruction.”

  “It scares me,” the woman said, and her skin pattern agreed. “I’ve never seen anything end before.”

  Lucky, the man thought, in a language that had come from another world.

  An eddy in his weathersight: big one coming. But they were all big ones since the orbital perturbations began. Big, getting bigger. At the end, the storms would tear the forests from their roots as the atmosphere shrieked into space.

  That afternoon, on their journey to the man’s memories, they had come across an empty marina; drained, sand clogged, pontoons torn and tossed by tsunamis. Its crew of boats they found scattered the length of a half-hour’s walk. Empty shells stogged to the waist in dune faces, masts and sails hung from trees.

  The weather had been the first thing to tear free from control. The man felt a sudden tautness in the woman’s body. She was seeing it to, the mid-game of the end of the world.

  By the time they reached the sheltered valley that the man’s aura had picked as the safest location to spend the night, the wind had risen to draw soft moans and chords from the curves and crevasses of the dead city. As their cloaks of elementals joined and sank the roots of the night shell into rock, a flock of bubbles bowled past, trembling and iridescent in the gusts. The woman caught one on her hand; the tiny creature-machine clung for a moment, feeding from her biofield. Its transparent skin raced with oil-film colors, it quaked and burst, a melting bubble of tectoplasm. The woman watched it until the elementals had completed the shelter, but the thing stayed dead.

  Their love-making was both urgent and chilled under the scalloped carapace the elementals had sculpted from rock silica. Sex and death, the man said in the part of his head where not even his sub-vocal withspeech could overhear and transmit. An alien thought.

  She wanted to talk afterward. She liked talk after sex. Unusually, she did not ask him to tell her about how he and the other Five Hundred Fathers had built the world. Her idea of talking was him talking. Tonight she did not want to talk about the world’s beginning. She wanted him to talk about its ending.

  “Do you know what I hate about it? It’s not that it’s all going to end, all this. It’s that a bubble burst in my hand, and I can’t comprehend what happened to it. How much more our whole world?”

  “There is a word for what you felt,” the man interjected gently. The gyrestorm was at its height, raging over the dome of their shell. The thickness of a skin is all that is keeping the wind from stripping the flesh from my bones, he thought. But the tectors’ grip on the bedrock was firm and sure. “The word is die.”

  The woman sat with her knees pulled up, arms folded around them. Naked: the gyrestorm was blowing through her soul.

  “What I hate,” she said after silence, “is that I have so little time to see and feel it all before it’s taken away into the cold and the dark.”

  She was a Green, born in the second of the short year’s fast seasons: a Green of the Hidden Design people; first of the Old Red Ridge pueblo people to come into the world in eighty years. And the last.

  Eight years old.

  “You won’t die,” the man said, skin patterning in whorls of reassurance and paternal concern, like the swirling storms of great Urizen beyond the hurtling gyrestorm clouds. “You can’t die. No one will die.”

  “I know that. No one will die, we will all be changed, or sleep with the world. But . . .”

  “Is it frightening, to have to give up this body?”

  She touched her forehead to her knees, shook her head.

  “I don’t want to lose it. I’ve only begun to understand what it is, this body, this world, and it’s all going to be taken away from me, and all the powers that are my birthright are useless.”

  “There are forces beyond even nanotechnology,” the man said. “It makes us masters of matter, but the fundamental dimensions – gravity, space, time – it cannot touch.”

  “Why?” the woman said, and to the man, who counted by older, longer years, she spoke in the voice of her terrestrial age.

  “We will learn it, in time,” the man said, which he knew was no answer. The woman knew it too, for she said, “While Ore is two hundred million years from the warmth of the next sun, and its atmosphere is a frozen glaze on these mountains and valleys.” Grief, he skin said. Rage. Loss.

  The two-thousand-year-old father touched the young woman’s small, upturned breasts.

  “We knew Urizen’s orbit was unstable, but no one could have predicted the interaction with Ulro.” Ironic: that this world named after Blake’s fire daemon should be the one cast into darkness and ice, while Urizen and its surviving moons should bake two million kilometers above the surface of Los.


  “Sol, you don’t need to apologize to me for mistakes you made two thousand years ago,” said the woman, whose name was Lenya.

  “But I think I need to apologize to the world,” said Sol Gursky.

  Lenya’s skin-speech now said hope shaded with inevitability. Her nipples were erect. Sol bent to them again as the wind from the end of the world scratched its claws over the skin of tectoplastic.

  In the morning, they continued the journey to Sol’s memories. The gyrestorm had blown itself out in the Oothoon mountains. What remained of the ghost-net told Sol and Lenya that it was possible to fly that day. They suckled milch from the shell’s tree of life processor, and they had sex again on the dusty earth while the elementals reconfigured the night pod into a general utility flier. For the rest of the morning, they passed over a plain across which grazebeasts and the tall, predatory angularities of the stalking Systems Maintenance people moved like ripples on a lake, drawn to the Heaven Tree planted in the navel of the world.

  Both grazers and herders had been human once.

  At noon, the man and the woman encountered a flyer of the Generous Sky people, flapping a silk-winged course along the thermal lines rising from the feet of the Big Chrysolite mountains. Sol with-hailed him, and they set down together in a clearing in the bitter-root forests that carpeted much of Coryphee Canton. The Generous Sky man’s etiquette would normally have compelled him to disdain those ground bound who sullied the air with machines, but in these urgent times, the old ways were breaking.

  Whither bound? Sol withspoke him. Static crackled in his skull. The lingering tail of the gyrestorm was throwing off electromagnetic disturbances.

  Why, the Heaven Tree of course, the winged man said. He was a horrifying kite of translucent skin over stick bones and sinews. His breast was like the prow of a ship, his muscles twitched and realigned as he shifted from foot to foot, uncomfortable on the earth. A gentle breeze wafted from the nanofans grown out of the web of skin between wrists and ankles. The air smelled of strange sweat. Whither yourselves?