This Way to the End Times: Classic Tales of the Apocalypse

by Robert Silverberg

  Little is known of the period when he was absent from our Earth. We get a glimpse into the mind of the people then when we learn that in the main the nations of Earth greatly rejoiced. The natural upheavals continued, since the oceans poured into the great hollow he had made forming our beloved and holy Sacred Sea. Great Wars broke out across the face of the globe.

  His return in 91 halted the wars—a sign of the great peace his presence has brought to his chosen people.

  But the inhabitants of the world at That Time were not all of our religion, though prophets moved among them, and many were their blasphemies. In the Black Museum attached to the great basilica of Omar and Yemen is documentary evidence that they tried at this period to communicate with the Huge God by means of their machines. Of course they got no reply—but many men reasoned at this time, in the darkness of their minds, that this was because the God was a Thing, as Black Gersheimer had prophesied.

  The Huge God, on this his Second Coming, blessed our Earth by settling mainly within the Arctic Circle, or what was then the Arctic Circle, with his body straddling from northern Canada, as it was, over a large peninsula called Alaska, across the Bering Sea and into the northern regions of the Russian lands as far as the River Lena, now the Bay of Lenn. Some of his rear feet broke far into the Arctic Ice, while others of his forefeet entered the North Pacific Ocean—but truly to him we are but sand under his feet, and he is indifferent to our mountains or our Climatic Variations.

  As for his terrible head, it could be seen reaching far into the stratosphere, gleaming with metal sheen, by all the cities along the northern part of America’s seaboard, from such vanished towns as Vancouver, Seattle, Edmonton, Portland, Blanco, Reno, and even San Francisco. It was the energetic and sinful nation that possessed these cities that was now most active against the Huge God. The weight of their ungodly scientific civilization was turned against him, but all they managed to do was blow apart their own coastline.

  Meanwhile, other natural changes were taking place. The mass of the Huge God deflected the earth in its daily roll, so that seasons changed, and in the prophetic books we read how the great trees brought forth their leaves to cover them in the winter, and lost them in the summer. Bats flew in the daytime and women bore forth hairy children. The melting of the ice caps caused great floods, tidal waves, and poisonous dews, while in one night we hear that the waters of the Deep were moved, so that the tide went out so far from the Malayan Uplands (as they now are) that the continental peninsula of Blestland was formed in a few hours of what had previously been separate Continents or Islands called Singapore, Sumatra, Indonesia, Java, Sydney, and Australia or Austria.

  With these powerful signs, our priests could Convert the People, and millions of survivors were speedily enrolled into the Church. This was the First Great Age of the Church, when the word spread across all the ravaged and transformed globe. Our institutions were formed in the next few generations, notably at the various Councils of the New Church (some of which have since proved to be heretical).

  We were not established without some difficulty. Many people had to be burned before the rest could feel the faith Burning in Them. But as generations passed, the True Name of the God emerged over a wider and wider area.

  Only the Americans still clung largely to their base superstition. Fortified by their science, they refused Grace. So in the year 271 the First Crusade was launched, chiefly against them but also against the Irish, whose heretical views had no benefit of science. The Irish were quickly Eradicated, almost to a man. The Americans were more formidable, but this difficulty served only to draw the people closer and unite the Church further.

  This First Crusade was fought over the First Great Heresy of the Church, the heresy claiming that the Huge God was a Thing, not a God, as formulated by Black Gersheimer.

  It was successfully concluded when the leader of the Americans, Lionel Undermeyer, met the Venerable World Emperor-Bishop, Jon II, and agreed that the messengers of the Church should be free to preach unmolested in America. Possibly a harsher decision could have been forced, as some commentators claim, but by this time both sides were suffering severely from plague and famine, the harvests of the world having failed. It was a happy chance that the population of the world was already cut by more than half, or complete starvation would have followed the reorganization of the seasons.

  In the churches of the world, the Huge God was asked to give a sign that he had witnessed the great victory over the American unbelievers. All who opposed this enlightened act were destroyed. He answered the prayers in 297 by moving swiftly forward only a comparatively Small Amount and lying Mainly in the Pacific Ocean, stretching almost as far south as what is now the Antarter, what was then the Tropic of Capricorn, and what had previously been the Equator. Some of his left legs covered the towns along the west American seaboard as far south as Guadalajara (where the impression of his foot is still marked by the Temple of the Sacred Toe), including some of the towns such as San Francisco already mentioned. We speak of this as the First Shift; it was rightly taken as a striking proof of the Huge God’s contempt for America.

  This feeling became rife in America also. Purified by famine, plague, gigantic earth tremors, and other natural disorders, the population could now better accept the words of the priests, all becoming converted to a man. Mass pilgrimages were made to see the great body of the Huge God, stretching from one end of their nation to the other. Bolder pilgrims climbed aboard flying airplanes and flew over his shoulder, across which savage rainstorms played for a hundred years Without Cease.

  Those that were converted became More Extreme than their brethren older in the faith across the other side of the world. No sooner had the American congregations united with ours than they broke away on a point of doctrine at the Council of Dead Tench (322). This date marks the beginning of the Catholic Universal Sacrificial Church. We of the Orthodox persuasion did not enjoy, in those distant days, the harmony with our American brothers that we do now.

  The doctrinal point on which the churches split apart was, as is well known, the question of whether humanity should wear clothes that imitated the metallic sheen of the Huge God. It was claimed that this was setting up man in God’s Image; but it was a calculated slur on the Orthodox Universal priests, who wore plastic or metal garments in honor of their maker.

  This developed into the Second Great Heresy. As this long and confused period has been aptly dealt with elsewhere, we may pass over it lightly here, mentioning merely that the quarrel reached its climax in the Second Crusade, which the American Catholic Universals launched against us in 450. Because they still had a large preponderance of machines they were able to force their point, to sack various monasteries along the edge of the Sacred Sea, to defile our women and to retire home in glory.

  Since that time, everyone in the world has worn only garments of wool or fur. All who opposed this enlightened act were destroyed.

  It would be wrong to emphasize too much the struggles of the past. All this while, the majority of people were peacefully about their worship, being sacrificed regularly, and praying every sunset and sunrise (whenever they might occur) that the Huge God would leave our world, since we were not worthy of him.

  The Second Crusade left a trail of troubles in its wake. The next fifty years were, on the whole, not happy ones. The American armies returned home to find that the heavy pressure upon their western seaboard had opened up a number of volcanoes along their biggest mountain range, the Rockies. Their country was covered in fire and lava, and their air filled with stinking ash.

  Rightly, they accepted this as a sign that their conduct left much to be desired in the eyes of the Huge God (for though it has never been proved that he has eyes, he surely Sees Us). Since the rest of the world had not been Visited with punishment on quite this scale, they correctly divined that their sin was that they still clung to technology and to the weapons of technology, which was against the wishes of God.

  With their faith
strong within them, every last instrument of science, from the Nuclears to the Canopeners, was destroyed, and a hundred thousand virgins of the persuasion were dropped into suitable volcanoes as propitiation. All who opposed these enlightened acts were destroyed, and some were even ceremonially eaten.

  We of the Orthodox Universal faith applauded our brothers’ wholehearted action. Yet we could not be sure they had purged themselves enough. Now that they owned no weapons and we still had some, it was clear we could help them in their purgation. Accordingly, a mighty armada of one hundred and sixty-six wooden ships sailed across to America, to help them suffer for the faith—and incidentally to get back some of our loot. This was the Third Crusade of 482, under Jon the Chubby.

  While the two opposed armies were engaged in battle outside New York, the Second Shift took place. It lasted only a matter of five minutes.

  In that time, the Huge God turned to his left flank, crawled across the Atlantic as if it were a puddle, moved over Africa, and came to rest in the south Indian Ocean, demolishing Madagascar with one rear foot. Night fell Everywhere on earth.

  When dawn came, there could hardly have been a single man who did not believe in the power and wisdom of the Huge God, to whose name belongs all Terror and Might. Unhappily, among those who were unable to believe were the contesting armies who were one and all swept under a Wave of Earth and Rock as the God passed.

  In the ensuing chaos, only one note of sanity prevailed—the sanity of the Church. The church established as the Third Great Heresy the idea that any machines were permissible to man against the wishes of God. There was some doctrinal squabble as to whether books counted as machines. It was decided they did, just to be on the safe side. From then on, all men were free to do nothing but labor in the fields and worship, and pray to the Huge God to remove himself to a world more worthy of his might. At the same time, the rate of sacrifices were stepped up, and the Slow-Burning Method was introduced (499).

  Now followed the great Peace, which lasted till 900. In all this time, the Huge God never moved; it has been truly said that the centuries are but seconds in his sight. Perhaps mankind has never known such a long peace, four hundred years of it—a peace that existed in his heart if not outside it, because the world was naturally in Some Disorder. The great force of the Huge God’s progress halfway across the world had altered the progression of day and night to a considerable extent. Some legends claim that before the Second Shift, the sun used to rise in the east and set in the west—the opposite of today’s natural order.

  Gradually, this peaceful period saw some reestablishment of order to the seasons and some cessation of the floods, showers of blood, hailstorms, earthquakes, deluges of icicles, apparitions of comets, volcanic eruptions, miasmic fogs, destructive winds, blights, plagues of wolves and dragons, tidal waves, year-long thunder storms, lashing rains, and sundry other scourges of which the scriptures of this period speak so eloquently. The Fathers of the Church, retiring to the comparative safety of the inland seas and sunny meadows of Gobiland in Mongolia, established a new orthodoxy well calculated in its rigor of prayer and human burnt-offering to invite the Huge God to leave our poor wretched world for a better and more substantial one.

  So the story comes to the present—to the year 900, only a decade past as your scribe writes. In that year, the Huge God left our earth!

  Recall, if you will, that the First Departure in 89 lasted only twenty months. Yet the Huge God has been gone from us already half that number of years! We need him Back. We cannot live without him, as we should have realized Long Ago had we not blasphemed in our hearts!

  On his going, he propelled our humble globe on such a course that we are doomed to deepest winter all the year; the sun is far away and shrunken; the seas Freeze half the year; icebergs march across our fields; at midday, it is too dark to read without a rush light; nothing will grow. Woe is us!

  Yet we deserve everything we get. This is a just punishment, for throughout all the centuries of our epoch, when our kind was so relatively happy and undisturbed, we prayed like fools that the Huge God would leave us. And now he has.

  I ask all the Elders Elect of the Council to brand those prayers as the Fourth and Greatest Heresy, and to declare that henceforth all men’s efforts be completely devoted to calling on the Huge God to return to us at once.

  I ask also that the sacrifice rate be stepped up again. It is useless to skimp things just because we are running out of women.

  I ask also that a Fourth Crusade be launched—fast before the air starts to freeze in our nostrils!

  THE

  NEW ATLANTIS

  — URSULA K. LE GUIN —

  EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

  THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT IS THE apocalypse du jour for the current generation: an atmosphere so choked by the gases that our industrial society exhales that the world’s temperature rises, the glaciers melt, coastal cities drown, and things in general go to hell. No doubt that thoughtful woman, the great writer Ursula K. Le Guin, is worried about that scenario, as are we all (with a few exceptions). But she had a different kind of planetary apocalypse in mind in 1975 when she wrote “The New Atlantis,” which became the title story for an anthology of stories about threats to the future of humanity that I was editing then. The oceans are rising and things look bad for the low-lying cities, but it isn’t pollution that’s doing it and no act of Congress is going to fix it.

  Ursula Le Guin has been a central figure in science fiction since the publication of her award-winning novel The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969. Her many other books include such notable works as The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, and the Earthsea series. In 2000 the Library of Congress declared her a Living Legend for her significant contributions to America’s cultural heritage; four years later the American Library Association honored her for her significant achievements in young adult literature; the National Book Foundation awarded her its medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters; and she has been the recipient of a long list of other honors, including, of course, the Grand Master award of the Science Fiction Writers of America.

  —R. S.

  THE NEW ATLANTIS

  — URSULA K. LE GUIN —

  COMING BACK FROM MY WILDERNESS WEEK, I sat by an odd sort of man in the bus. For a long time we didn’t talk; I was mending stockings and he was reading. Then the bus broke down a few miles outside Gresham. Boiler trouble, the way it generally is when the driver insists on trying to go over thirty. It was a Supersonic Superscenic Deluxe Longdistance coal-burner, with Home Comfort, that means a toilet, and the seats were pretty comfortable, at least those that hadn’t yet worked loose from their bolts, so everybody waited inside the bus; besides, it was raining. We began talking, the way people do when there’s a breakdown and a wait. He held up his pamphlet and tapped it—he was a dry-looking man with a school teacherish way of using his hands—and said, “This is interesting. I’ve been reading that a new continent is rising from the depths of the sea.”

  The blue stockings were hopeless. You have to have something besides holes to darn onto. “Which sea?”

  “They’re not sure yet. Most specialists think the Atlantic. But there’s evidence it may be happening in the Pacific, too.”

  “Won’t the oceans get a little crowded?” I said, not taking it seriously. I was a bit snappish, because of the breakdown and because those blue stockings had been good warm ones.

  He tapped the pamphlet again and shook his head, quite serious. “No,” he said. “The old continents are sinking, to make room for the new. You can see that that is happening.”

  You certainly can. Manhattan Island is now under eleven feet of water at low tide, and there are oyster beds in Ghirardelli Square.

  “I thought that was because the oceans are rising from polar melt.”

  He shook his head again. “That is a factor. Due to the greenhouse effect of pollution, indeed Antarctica may become inhabitable. But climatic factors will not explain the emergence
of the new—or, possibly, very old—continents in the Atlantic and Pacific.” He went on explaining about continental drift, but I liked the idea of inhabiting Antarctica and daydreamed about it for a while. I thought of it as very empty, very quiet, all white and blue, with a faint golden glow northward from the unrising sun behind the long peak of Mount Erebus. There were a few people there; they were very quiet, too, and wore white tie and tails. Some of them carried oboes and violas. Southward the white land went up in a long silence toward the Pole.

  Just the opposite, in fact, of the Mount Hood Wilderness Area. It had been a tiresome vacation: The other women in the dormitory were all right, but it was macaroni for breakfast, and there were so many organized sports. I had looked forward to the hike up to the National Forest Preserve, the largest forest left in the United States, but the trees didn’t look at all the way they do in the postcards and brochures and Federal Beautification Bureau advertisements. They were spindly, and they all had little signs on saying which union they had been planted by. There were actually a lot more green picnic tables and cement Men’s and Women’s than there were trees. There was an electrified fence all around the forest to keep out unauthorized persons. The forest ranger talked about mountain jays, “bold little robbers,” he said, “who will come and snatch the sandwich from your very hand,” but I didn’t see any. Perhaps because that was the weekly Watch Those Surplus Calories! Day for all the women, and so we didn’t have any sandwiches. If I’d seen a mountain jay, I might have snatched the sandwich from his very hand, who knows. Anyhow, it was an exhausting week, and I wished I’d stayed home and practiced, even though I’d have lost a week’s pay because staying home and practicing the viola doesn’t count as planned implementation of recreational leisure as defined by the Federal Union of Unions.

  When I came back from my Antarctican expedition, the man was reading again, and I got a look at his pamphlet; and that was the odd part of it. The pamphlet was called “Increasing Efficiency in Public Accountant Training Schools,” and I could see from the one paragraph I got a glance at that there was nothing about new continents emerging from the ocean depths in it—nothing at all.