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

by Robert Silverberg

  “No,” she said.

  “Atoms can’t even hold together in the middle of the sun. It’s so crowded they bump into each other all the time, bump bump bump, like that, and their electrons fly off and run around free. Sometimes when there’s a collision, it lets off an X-ray that goes whoosh, all the way out at the speed of light, like a ball in a pinball machine. Bing-bang-bing, all the way to the surface.”

  “Why do you read those books anyway? To scare yourself?”

  “No. To scare Mom.” That was a daring piece of honesty, suitable not even for the freedom of Grandma’s, suitable only for the train. She smiled at him.

  “You’re not even scared, are you?”

  She felt obliged to answer him with equal honesty. “No,” she said, “not at all.”

  “Why not?”

  Because it won’t hurt. Because I won’t remember afterwards. Because I’ll stand in the sun with my bucket and shovel and look up and not be frightened. “I don’t know,” Daisy said. “I’m just not.”

  “I am. I dream about burning all the time. I think about how much it hurts when I burn my finger and then I dream about it hurting like that all over forever.” He had been lying to their mother about his dreams, too.

  “It won’t be like that,” Daisy said. “We won’t even know it’s happened. We won’t remember a thing.”

  “When the sun goes nova, it’ll start using itself up. The core will start filling up with atomic ash, and that’ll make the sun start using up all its own fuel. Do you know it’s pitch-dark in the middle of the sun? See, the radiations are X-rays, and they’re too short to see. They’re invisible. Pitch-dark and ashes falling around you. Can you imagine that?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” They were passing a meadow and Daisy’s face was full in the sun. “We won’t be there. We’ll be dead. We won’t remember anything.”

  Daisy had not realized how relieved she would be to see her grandmother, narrow face sunburned, arms bare. She was not even wearing a hat. “Daisy, dear, you’re growing up,” she said. She did not make it sound like a death sentence. “And David, you still have your nose in a book, I see.”

  It was nearly dark when they got to her little house. “What’s that?” David asked, standing on the porch.

  Her grandmother’s voice did not rise dangerously at all. “The aurora borealis. I tell you, we’ve had some shows up here lately. It’s like the Fourth of July.”

  Daisy had not realized how hungry she had been to hear someone who was not afraid. She looked up. Great red curtains of light billowed almost to the zenith, fluttering in some solar wind. “It’s beautiful,” Daisy whispered, but her grandmother was holding the door open for her to go in, and so happy was she to see the clear light in her grandmother’s eyes, she followed her into the little kitchen with its red linoleum table and the red curtains hanging at the windows.

  “It is so nice to have company,” her grandmother said, climbing onto a chair. “Daisy, hold this end, will you?” She dangled the long end of a yellow plastic ribbon down to Daisy. Daisy took it, looking anxiously at her grandmother. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Measuring for new curtains, dear,” she said, reaching into her pocket for a slip of paper and a pencil. “What’s the length, Daisy?”

  “Why do you need new curtains?” Daisy asked. “These look fine to me.”

  “They don’t keep the sun out,” her grandmother said. Her eyes had gone coal-black with fear. Her voice was rising with every word. “We have to have new curtains, Daisy, and there’s no cloth. Not in the whole town, Daisy. Can you imagine that? We had to send to Ottawa. They bought up all the cloth in town. Can you imagine that, Daisy?”

  “Yes,” Daisy said, and wished she could be afraid.

  RON STILL HELD HER HANDS tightly. She looked steadily at him. “Warmer, Daisy,” he said. “Almost here.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He untwined their fingers and rose from the couch. He walked through the crowd in the blue living room and went out the door into the snow. She did not try to go to her room. She watched them all, the strangers in their endless, random movement, her brother walking while he read, her grandmother standing on a chair, and the memory came quite easily and without pain.

  “YOU WANTA SEE SOMETHING?” HER brother asked.

  Daisy was looking out the window. All day long the lights had been flickering, even though it was calm and silent outside. Their grandmother had gone to town to see if the fabric for the curtains had come in. Daisy did not answer him.

  He shoved the book in front of her face. “That’s a prominence,” he said. The pictures were in black and white, like old-fashioned snapshots, only under them instead of her mother’s scrawled white ink, it said, “High Altitude Observatory, Boulder, Colorado.”

  “That’s an eruption of hot gas hundreds of thousands of feet high.”

  “No,” Daisy said, taking the book into her own lap. “That’s my golden hoop. I saw it in my dream.”

  She turned the page.

  David leaned over her shoulder and pointed. “That was the big eruption in 1946 when it first started to go wrong only they didn’t know it yet. It weighed a billion tons. The gas went out a million miles.”

  Daisy held the book like a snapshot of a loved one.

  “It just went bash, and knocked all this gas out into space. There were all kinds of—”

  “It’s my golden bear,” she said. The great paw of flame reached lazily out from the sun’s black surface in the picture, the wild silky paw of flaming gas.

  “This is the stuff you’ve been dreaming?” her brother asked.

  “This is the stuff you’ve been telling me about?” His voice went higher and higher. “I thought you said the dreams were nice.”

  “They were,” Daisy said.

  He pulled the book away from her and flipped angrily through the pages to a colored diagram on a black ground. It showed a glowing red ball with concentric circles drawn inside it. “There,” he said, shoving it at Daisy. “That’s what’s going to happen to us.” He jabbed angrily at one of the circles inside the red ball. “That’s us. That’s us! Inside the sun! Dream about that, why don’t you?”

  He slammed the book shut.

  “But we’ll all be dead, so it won’t matter,” Daisy said. “It won’t hurt. We won’t remember anything.”

  “That’s what you think! You think you know everything. Well, you don’t know what anything is. I read a book about it, and you know what it said? They don’t even know what memory is. They think maybe it isn’t even in the brain cells. That it’s in the atoms somewhere, and even if we’re blown apart, that memory stays. What if we do get burned by the sun and we still remember? What if we go on burning and burning and remembering and remembering forever?”

  Daisy said quietly, “He wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t hurt us.” There had been no fear as she stood digging her toes into the sand and looking up at him, only wonder. “He—”

  “You’re crazy!” her brother shouted. “You know that? You’re crazy. You talk about him like he’s your boyfriend or something! It’s the sun, the wonderful sun that’s going to kill us all!” He yanked the book away from her. He was crying.

  “I’m sorry,” Daisy was about to say, but their grandmother came in just then, hatless, with her hair blowing around her thin, sunburned face.

  “They got the material in,” she said jubilantly. “I bought enough for all the windows.” She spilled out two sacks of red gingham. It billowed out across the table like the northern lights, red over red. “I thought it would never get here.”

  Daisy reached out to touch it.

  SHE WAITED FOR HIM, SITTING at the white-damask table of the dining car. He hesitated at the door, standing framed by the snow of ash behind him, and then came gaily in, singing.

  “Daisy, Daisy, give me your theory do,” he sang. He carried in his arms a bolt of red cloth. It billowed out from the bolt as he handed it to her grandmother—sh
e standing on the chair, transfixed by joy, the pieces of paper, the yellow tape measure fallen from her forever.

  Daisy came and stood in front of him.

  “Daisy, Daisy,” he said gaily. “Tell me—”

  She put her hand on his chest. “No theory,” she said. “I know.”

  “Everything, Daisy?” He smiled the easy, lopsided smile, and she thought sadly that even knowing, she would not be able to see him as he was, but only as the boy who had worked at the grocery store, the boy who had known everything.

  “No, but I think I know.” She held her hand firmly against his chest, over the flaming hoop of his breast. “I don’t think we are people anymore. I don’t know what we are—atoms stripped of our electrons maybe, colliding endlessly against each other in the center of the sun while it burns itself to ash in the endless snowstorm at its heart.”

  He gave her no clue. His smile was still confident, easy. “What about me, Daisy?” he asked.

  “I think you are my golden bear, my flaming hoop, I think you are Ra, with no end to your name at all, Ra who knows everything.”

  “And who are you?”

  “I am Daisy, who loved the sun.”

  He did not smile, did not change his mocking expression. But his tanned hand closed over hers, still pushing against his chest.

  “What will I be now, an X-ray zigzagging all the way to the surface till I turn into light? Where will you take me after you have taken me? To Saturn, where the sun shines on the cold rings till they melt into happiness? Is that where you shine now, on Saturn? Will you take me there? Or will we stand forever like this, me with my bucket and shovel, squinting up at you?”

  Slowly he gave her hand back to her. “Where do you want to go, Daisy?”

  Her grandmother still stood on the chair, holding the cloth as if it were a benediction. Daisy reached out and touched the cloth, as she had in the moment when the sun went nova. She smiled up at her grandmother. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “I’m so glad it’s come.”

  She bent suddenly to the window and pulled the faded curtains aside as if she thought because she knew she might be granted some sort of vision, might see for some small moment the little girl that was herself, with her little girl’s chest and toddler’s stomach . . . might see herself as she really was: Daisy, in the sun. But all she could see was the endless snow.

  Her brother was reading on the blue couch in her mother’s living room. She stood over him, watching him read. “I’m afraid now,” Daisy said, but it wasn’t her brother’s face that looked back at her.

  All right, then, Daisy thought. None of them are any help. It doesn’t matter. I have come face to face with what I fear and what I love and they are the same thing.

  “All right, then,” Daisy said, and turned back to Ron. “I’d like to go for a ride. With the top down.” She stopped and squinted up at him. “I love the sun,” she said.

  When he put his arm around her shoulder, she did not move away. His hand closed on her breast and he bent down to kiss her.

  THREE DAYS AFTER

  — KAREN HABER —

  EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

  AFTER WORKING AS A NEWSPAPER reporter and as an editor for an art magazine, and spending some time in Brazil and Paraguay, Karen Haber turned to writing science fiction with the stories Samba Sentado and Madre de Dios in 1988, both of them outgrowths of her South American sojourns. Since then, she has published some fifty other short stories in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction, as well as nine novels. She has also edited numerous anthologies, reviews science-fiction and fantasy art books and does profiles of artists for Locus, and has produced several books of nonfiction, including the Hugo-nominated Meditations on Middle Earth (2001), Exploring the Matrix: Visions of the Cyber Present (2003), and Masters of Science Fiction and Fantasy Art (2011), based on her interviews with leading science-fiction and fantasy artists. The chilling post-apocalyptic vignette reprinted here, “Three Days After,” was published for the first time in The Sweet Taste of Regret (ReAnimus Press, 2014), a collection of thirteen of her short stories.

  She lives in the San Francisco area and in her real-world life is the wife of science-fiction writer Robert Silverberg.

  —R. S.

  THREE DAYS AFTER

  — KAREN HABER —

  PHELIA AWAKENS IN THE VIOLET gloom, hands locked around the balled blue sheet, palms sweating. The clock says 6:05 A.M., April 12. Twenty minutes before the alarm.

  The noise pushes aside the fading echoes of her dreams, pushes in, pushes hard. Eagles, falling, wings locked shut, screaming. A small child alone and wet in a dark tunnel, keening.

  Whatwhatwhatinhell and where is it?

  The window and its thin blinds bending at the touch of a fingertip—pop—and a horizontal sliver of half-night slides into the room.

  No mongrel pack or rogue scavenger lingers in the shadows. Nothing, there is nothing out there at all save the purple mist swirling slowly above the pavement, haloing the yellow streetlamp, and a strange green light in the east, pearly as the inside of an abalone’s shell, soft and luminescent. Generations of artists struggled and died trying to capture that light.

  Bed calls, better dreams. She turns toward her pillow.

  But someone or thing is blocking the way, there in the room with her, stiff-legged and staggering. A Frankenstein in dress whites, limbs sheathed in long pale tents, fishbowl for a head, silver gloves on hands and feet, and a flat matte screen for a face.

  Phelia points. “What?” she says. “What, what?”

  A robot? Rewrapped mummy? Drunken friend’s joke?

  She waits for something to jump out and go boo but nothing does. “What do you want?” she says.

  Deaf, the fishbowl head, and dumb. He runs his hands over the pale blue roses growing on the walls. Golden numbers click at his fingertips. Touch. Touch again. Eyes in his hands? Mouth in his head?

  Work, brain, she thought. “I’ll call the police,” she said.

  Pulling away from the roses, he turns to the bed. Takes a step. No, she thinks.

  No, no, please, God, be home and listening. No.

  He turns back, back to the powerful wall flowers and makes long undersea movements along the wallboards.

  “Are you deaf? Get out of here!”

  Now he is a prairie dog testing the air for enemy scent. Up on the hind legs and sniff, sniff, sniff.

  She dials 911.

  “Hola? Quien?”

  Redial.

  “Police dispatcher,” says the robot voice. “All operators are busy. Please hold.”

  The man with numbers on his fingers touches the wall and looks at his hands. Touches the window, looks again.

  “All operators are still busy but your call is important to us. Please hold.”

  Phelia stares after her visitor. She can’t see him.

  Gone. Gone?

  Ignoring ghostly pleas she puts the phone back in its cradle and checks the closet, the bathroom, but finds nothing, nowhere.

  In-out, in-out, she breathes deeply, counts her breaths, her silver, her chakras for good measure, and touches the front door. Locked. Locked. Locked.

  She double-locks herself in with her fear.

  The phone rings. “You’re too late,” she says.

  A voice whispers in a long-distance hiss. Her brother, a scientist, calling from the South Pole. He has been scrambling through the labyrinth of the underground lab, searching for the switch, the food, the light above the exit door.

  “Run,” he says. “Run, run, run . . .”

  His words break into sharp pieces in her ears but Phelia can feel his meaning transmitted in pulses over the shining wires and pillowed cables, all the longing and sadness bounced off of satellites and into her brain, once around the auditory canal and home. She’s been infected with the twentieth century—love is the vector but the cure is years distant.

  “Take care,” she says. “I miss you,” and many other words without de
eds, safe because he can’t hear her, because the line is dead. She hangs up tenderly and the tv is there, waiting to comfort and understand.

  A blue face onscreen says “Seminary student enters nursery school, machine-guns teacher.”

  Flip!

  “Woman throws freezer from bridge. Eight homeless killed by falling food.”

  Flip! Flip!

  “The sovereign nation of Dakota has entered trade talks with Montana.”

  Flip!

  “Bulletproof buntings for baby—”

  Phelia sleeps, lulled by familiar syllables.

  A TIGERISH NOISE IN THE sky. A fervid light brighter than the sun at midday, too bright to see except through black glass, flashing neon against the red silk lining of eyelids. Outside a corona of particles sleets softly down upon the sleeping city.

  PHELIA SHUTS OFF THE TELEVISION and peers through the window slats. Sun’s up. The clock says April 12, 6:05 A.M.

  First the shower, then the green dress and an apple. The bus, when it comes, is late. She steps over drifts of snow, oddly warm, to climb in. The ride is slow, the engine stalls often, and the tires slip and spin against the slick road.

  When she gets to work, someone has painted the building blue. But it was bronze yesterday, wasn’t it? When? she wonders. Why?

  Upstairs heads are bent in brown cubicles, bodies hunched over keyboards, good punctual boys and girls.

  All day Phelia types numbers into glowing orange columns. She only goes outside to buy and eat fried rice, salty and brown with soy sauce. And after, she types words into glowing orange paragraphs and moves them here, there. Then she goes home.

  The apartment is yellow. But that morning it had been white. They must be painting them all, she thinks.

  Disembodied television voices say, “. . . joint chiefs of staff.”

  A face, suddenly, onscreen. Bland, female, and green.

  “World leaders meet,” it says, and other hard words that begin with consonants.

  Flip.