The Best of Subterranean

by William Schafer

  The moment of madness came when he was inside the town’s mercantile. The windowless buildings meant he had to use an oil lantern even with the endless summer daylight outside. That in turn produced strange, stark shadows between the warmly glowing pools of light. Racks of merchandise ranging from cold weather gear to snow-runner wheels crowded the retail space. Ask was pushing from aisle to aisle, watching for useful survival gear as much as anything in this place, when he heard an electronic chirp.

  He froze and almost killed the lantern. That was stupid, of course. Anyone or anything that might have been alerted to the light already had. Still, he turned slowly, mouth wide open to improve his hearing over the pounding of his heart. His blood felt curdled.

  The noise did not repeat itself.

  After standing in place for several minutes, he gave up on stillness as a strategy and headed for the sales counter. That was where any surviving equipment was likely to be.

  Three and a half decades after Day Zero, and now there was something else moving on this planet?

  Nothing.

  He found nothing. Ask tore the sales counter apart, looking in all the little drawers, even. He opened the access panel behind to the long-useless breaker boxes and comm line interchanges. He turned up the dry-rotted carpet. He yanked everything out from inside the display cases. He grabbed an axe from the tools section, though there wasn’t a tree within five hundred kilometers of this place, and chopped up the cases looking for whatever might be hidden inside them. He tried chopping the floor, but stopped when he nearly brained himself with the rebound of the axe.

  Panting, sick, shivering, Ask finally stopped. He’d trashed the interior of the place. In all the years of his wandering, he’d never stooped to petty vandalism. For all the windows he’d broken getting in and out of places, he’d never destroyed for the sake of the pleasure of destruction.

  Now, this?

  It’s not like they were coming back. Wherever they’d gone.

  With that realization, he took up the axe and charged through the mercantile screaming. A long pole of parkas collapsed under his blows, their insulation spinning like snow where they tore. He smashed a spinner rack of inertial compasses. Tents spilled and tore. Useless power tools went flying to crack against other displays or the outside walls. When he got to the lamp oils and camping fuels, he spilled those, too, then transferred the flame from his lantern to the spreading, glistening pools.

  After that, he retreated outside to the almost-warmth of the polar summer, that had cracked above freezing. Smoke billowed out from the open door of the mercantile. After a while, something inside exploded with a satisfying ‘whomp.’ He watched a long time, but the roof never fell in.

  Finally Ask stretched in the cold and turned to wonder what he might do next. That was when he realized he had been surrounded by a patient dog pack. Furry, lean, with the bright eyes of killers, they had watched him watch the fire.

  “Hey there, boys,” he said softly. Though surely none of these remembered the hand of man. These were the descendants of the survivors, not the domestic escapees of the early years.

  One of the dogs growled deep in its throat. Ask regretted leaving his guns in the sailboat. Deliberately archaic collector’s items, they were all that worked anymore with the interlocks burned out on any rational, modern weapon.

  Not that he had much ammunition, either.

  And not that he had any of it with him.

  Knife in hand, he charged the apparent leader of the pack. It was good to finally have something to fight back against.

  November 1st, 3094 [RTS-ra]

  On the one hundred and seventeenth year of his hegira, Aeschylus Sforza returned to the Shindaiwa Valley. He’d buried forty-seven bodies in the years of his wandering. The last of them had been little more than heaps of leather and bones. The cities, towns and settlements he’d visited had largely buried themselves by the time he’d been to every human outpost he could possibly reach on this planet.

  He had not spoken a word out loud in thirty years. The epic poetry was not forgotten—with his Howard memory, nothing he meant to remember was ever forgotten—but he had not bothered with it in decades. The madness, well, it had stayed a long time. Eventually he’d grown tired even of that and retreated back to sanity. The track of that descent was marked in the number of burn sites across one whole arc of Redghost’s northern hemisphere.

  The dogs had failed to kill him. Wound infections had failed to kill him, though he’d come perilously close to dying at least twice. Even the ocean crossings had failed to kill him. Loneliness, that curse of the Howards, had failed to kill him.

  Boredom might, though.

  The Shindaiwa Valley had gone back to the land. Many of the houses still stood, but as rotting shells overgrown with weeds. Some things were more permanent than others. The railroad tracks, for instance. Likewise the plascrete shells of the hospital and the train stations.

  Ask had time. Nothing but time. So he set about using it. He needed a place to live, near water but not likely to be flooded out when summer thawed the snowcap at the head of the watershed. He needed to catch and break some of the wild horses that haunted these fields and forests to draw the plow. He needed to log out trees in some areas, and find saplings young enough for the project that had been forming in his mind for the past decade or so.

  He needed so much, and would never have any of it. Now that he was done walking home, Ask had nothing but time.

  March 17th, 3283 [RTS-ra]

  The demands of controlling the horses, not mention managing the pigs and goats he eventually took on, had brought Ask’s voice back to him. He’d become garrulous over the long years with those patient eyes staring back at him.

  He’d also been convinced he was the last man in the universe. In over three centuries since Day Zero, no one had come calling at Redghost so far as he knew. If the rest of the human race were still out there functioning normally, the planet should have been swarming with rescuers and Polity investigative teams in the first year or two. Or any of the decades since.

  Someone might have done a fly-by then hustled away. Ask knew he wouldn’t have been aware of that. But human beings could not leave a disaster alone. And Redghost, whatever else it had been, was definitely a disaster.

  He even had a little bit of electronics, having at one point taken a pair of pack horses back to his cave and retrieved his surviving equipment. The passive solar strips used on so many Shindaiwa Valley rooftops were still intact, and he worked out a sufficient combination of salvage parts and primitive electronics to keep a few batteries charged. Space-rated equipment lasted, at the least. He had steady light by which to read at night—Shindaiwa Valley had boasted two hundred and eleven surviving hardcopy books by the time he’d gotten around to salvaging those. Four of them were actual paper printings from the Earth of his childhood, three in English that he could read. Their unspeakably fragile pages were preserved in a monomolecular coating as family heirlooms.

  He’d read them all over and over and over. He could recite them all, and some years did so just to have something to say to the goats and horses—the pigs never cared so much for his voice.

  Still, reading and reciting those words written by authors long dead was the closest Ask could come to speaking to another human being.

  In the mean time, his project had matured. Blossomed into success, in a manner of speaking. He’d spent decades carefully surveying, logging and replanting, even diverting the courses of streams to make sure water was where he wanted it to be.

  When that had grown boring, he’d built himself a new house and barn. Living in the hospital had felt strange. The weight of souls there was stronger. Having his own home, one that none of the people before Day Zero had ever lived or worked or died in, had seemed important for a while.

  So Ask had built the house at the center of his project. Made a sort of castle of it, complete with turrets and a central watchtower. A platform for a beacon fire, just to make
the point. It wasn’t high enough to see his work, but when he climbed the ridge at the eastern edge of the valley—the one he’d first come down in those confused weeks right after Day Zero—he could glimpse what his imagination had engineered.

  Eating a breakfast of ham and eggs the morning of March 17th, Aeschylus Sforza heard the whine of turbines in the air outside his home. Centuries of living alone had broken him of the habit of hurrying. He finished his plate a little faster than normal, nonetheless, and scrubbed it in the stone trough that was his sink. He pulled on his goatskin jacket, for the Shindaiwa Valley mornings could still be chilly in this season, and walked outside at a measured but still rapid pace.

  Ask had realized a long time ago that it didn’t matter who they were when they came. The unknown raiders who’d stripped this planet, the descendants of those taken up by the attackers, or his own people finally returned. When they returned, whoever they were, he’d wanted to meet them.

  That was why his house sat in the exact center of three arrows of dense forest, each thirty kilometers long and spaced one hundred and twenty degrees apart, each surrounded by carefully husbanded open pasture. A “look here” note visible even from orbit. Especially from orbit. Who the hell else would be looking?

  Outside his front gate a mid-sized landing shuttle, about thirty meters nose to tail, sat clicking and ticking away the heat of its descent. The grass around it smoldered. Ask did not recognize the engineering or aesthetics of the machine, which answered some of his speculations in the negative. It certainly did not display Polity markings.

  He stood his ground, waiting for whoever might open that hatch from within. His long walk was done, had been done for over two hundred years. Time for the next step.

  The hatch whined open, air puffing as pressure equalized. Someone shifted their weight in the red-lit darkness within.

  Human?

  It didn’t matter.

  He was about to learn what would happen next.

  Aeschylus Sforza was home.