by Kage Baker
The pirate queen shouted at Mickey Tronic in very broken English. “Why you talk to this woman so much like that? You betray me now?”
Mickey Tronic gave an indifferent tilt to his smoked-glass faceplate. “Look, lady, don’t try to boss me around. If you’re the Queen of Pirates, then I’m the Witch Doctor of Pirates. I got your stepping razors, your whipping sticks, I got tech voodoo that would scare you so bad your grandchild will be born two-headed. So back off.”
“I never understand this stupid computer man,” said the pirate queen to Miss Sato, her regal face wrinkled with dismay. “Why does he speak English to me like that?” She pointed east, with a rattling clatter of bangles. “Does he think that is England over there? That is Japan!”
“Tell the Third World mother-of-eight here,” said Mickey Tronic, “that I don’t need any geolocation lessons. Tell her to get lost. Tell her that the ninja in the mud pit there is about to liquidate her the same way he did to pirate boyfriends one, two, and three.”
“I’m a woman of honor! I hate disrespect!” shrieked the Pirate Queen. “A quick death is too good for this no-face turtle man! I will kill him now in such an awful, terrifying way that everyone will be impressed! Tell me, you, peace woman, you’re always crying about the people suffering! What is the very worst thing in the world that ever happened to anyone? Tell me that! Tell him I’ll do that to him.”
“She claims she’s going to torture you,” said Miss Sato in English.
“Hell, this is Japan,” shrugged Mickey Tronic. “Her torture’s no good around here. Tell her I’ll commit an agonizing hara-kiri just to spite her.”
Miss Sato wisely said nothing.
The pirate queen glanced behind her, where half-hearted attempts to haul the blind man from his mud were getting nowhere. “Talk to him in English and make him scared of me, and I’ll reward you richly. Don’t make that face, because I’ll give you back your real clothes. You’ll be just like you were before we beat you. I will, you’ll see, I’ll do that now.”
The pirate queen turned and raised her voice to harangue her scattered minions, but a rolling peal of typhoon thunder blotted out her commands.
This was the season of the sacred winds, and a huge storm front was rolling in from continental Asia. The kamikaze was serious, world-scale weather, a storm front big and black and presumably radioactive. The kamikaze was full of tainted rain from the city-sized craters of North Korea. A tremendous rain was coming, the kind of rain that would scatter a horde of Mongols the way Mongols scattered civilized nations.
“Oh what a bother,” said the pirate queen. Gathering her robes in the patter of thumb-sized raindrops, she waddled to her jeep and fled the downpour.
The tempest bent the trees. Howling, ship-killing winds roared across Tsushima with salvo after salvo of thunder.
No one could remain in rain of this kind, so everyone simply left the scene.
Miss Sato and Yoshida found some shelter under the leaning roof of a dead vacation home. This stately family mansion had died not long after Tokyo had perished, as a collateral casualty. The house had suffered a fuel shortage, a water shortage, an electrical blackout, abandonment, a fire . . .
The beautiful island house had just fallen over in that strange mysterious way a civilization decays when nobody champions it. The dead house was a filthy mulch of fire-blackened memorabilia, wise books, tasteful paintings, meaningful photographs, important and civilized things.
These civilized things were so entirely gone now, so entirely flaked to nothingness and debris, that they lacked even the mono no aware of a cherry blossom. They were like an entire cherry orchard blown flat by a giant storm. With a loss of such scale, one could not even start over. One could not even vow to persist. One could only, in some halting but seismic fashion, come to identify with the storm winds.
Winds lashed and rain fell in buckets for four hours. When the tempest finally faded, the island landscape was foggy, silent, dark, and very cold. The swimming pool had flooded to its brim. When the evening sun flashed on it, it looked pretty and sweet again, a place of leisure and pleasure.
Zeta One had vanished. A blind aircraft had ditched in his swimming pool. It was perfect and sleek, pearl-white above and, from below, as blue as a sunlit sky.
Bruce Sterling is a science fiction novelist and technology blogger who unites his time between Austin, Turin, and Belgrade. His most recent book is a short story collection, Gothic High-Tech.
The End, at least for North America, came from the “Aggression Factor,” which altered the “wiring” of the brain. Come within nineteen paces of another human and you both become psychotic killers. No one knows where it came from, but, surely, it will, somehow, go away, wear off, mutate again . . . surely?
ISOLATION POINT, CALIFORNIA
John Shirley
Gage pushed the door of his cabin open with his booted foot, as he always did, peering inside, right and left, without going in, to make sure no one was hiding there waiting for him. He looked around, saw only his single bunk, neatly made up, with the solar-powered lamp on a small stand beside it, glowing faintly in the overcast, late afternoon gloom. Faces did stare back at him: the old magazine photos of smiling people, mostly girls, on the wall over his bunk. The wooden chair stood just where he’d left it, pulled back slightly from the metal table with its two coffee cups, long bereft of coffee, and his collection of pens, stacks of spiral notebooks, the radio. Above the table were the shelves of random books, many of them blackened at the edges, foraged from a burned library in Sweetbite. The axe leaned on the stack of firewood beside the river-stone fireplace, opposite the old wood stove, with its two pots.
It was tedious, having to stop and look around in the cabin and the outhouse, before going in, day after day. But as he went inside, he told himself that the first time he neglected to do it, someone would be there to brain him with his own ax.
He closed and barred the door behind him, saw that the fire was out, but went immediately to the desk and stood there, looking out the window. It was nailed shut and curtained—a risk having a window at all—but he could see the light was dimming, the clouds shrugging together for rain. The charge on the lamp was low, so he plugged it into the socket that connected to the solar-collection panel on the roof, and the lamp’s charge meter bobbed to near full. He dialed up the light, and looked at the radio but decided not to try it. He was usually depressed for a while after listening to the radio and didn’t want to ruin his hopeful mood.
He leaned his shotgun against the wall, within reach, put the binoculars on a stack of notebooks, and sat down at the table. He adjusted the shim under the short table leg to minimize the wobbling, picked up a pen, and wrote his newest journal entry. His fingers were stiff with the chill but he wanted to tell his journal what had happened more than he wanted to stoke up the fire.
November 1st, 2023
I saw her again this afternoon, about forty-five minutes ago. She was standing on what was left of the old marina, coming out from all those burned-out buildings along San Andreas Spit, across the river’s mouth from me. She was standing right where the river meets the tidal push from the ocean. That always seemed suggestive to me, the river flowing into the ocean; the ocean pushing back, the two kind of mingling. “Here’s some silt” and “Here’s some salt back at you.” Silt and salt, never noticed how close the words were before now.
I looked at her in the binoculars, and when she saw I was doing that, she spread her arms and smiled as if to say, “Check me out!” Not that I could see much of her under all those clothes. It’s pretty brisk out now, Northern coast this time of year, wind off the sea, and she was wearing a big bulky green ski jacket, and a watch cap, and jeans and boots. She had a 30.06 bolt-action deer rifle leaned against a rock. She never went far from it. She’s got long wavy chestnut hair, and her face, what I could make out, seemed kind of pleasant. She’s not tall. Taking into account the silhouette of her legs, she seems slim. Not that there’s anyone
obese left, not on this continent, anyway. She seemed energetic, confident. I wonder if she found a new supply drop somewhere? If she found it first, she could be doing well. Another reason to make contact.
But who knows what she’s up to? She could be talking to men at a safe distance all over the county. Getting them to leave her gifts or something. But that’d be risky. They’ll kill her eventually. Unless someone finds a cure for the AggFac soon. Not very goddamn likely.
Anyway it felt good talking to her. Shouting back and forth, really. I got pretty hoarse, since of course she was several hundred feet from me. Said she was from San Francisco. Got out just in time. Told her I was from Sacramento. She laughed when I told her this little peninsula of mine is called “Isolation Point.” Had to swear and cross my heart it was always called that. She said she used to be a high school English teacher. Told her, “Hey that’s amazing, I used to be a high school student!” She laughed. I can just barely hear her laugh across the river.
She asked what did I used to do. Said I managed some restaurants. Wanted to be a journalist, write about America. Big story came, no one to tell it to. She said I could still write. I said for who? She said for people—you leave the writing in places and other people find it. “I’d read it!” she said. I said okay. Thinking that writing for one person at a time wasn’t what I had in mind, but you scale down your dreams now. Way down.
I was running out of breath and my voice was going with all the yelling back and forth so I asked her name. Told her mine. Our ages too, me 43, she 34. I tried to think of some way to ask her to come closer, maybe at the fence. To ask her without scaring her. But I couldn’t think of any way and then she waved and picked up her rifle and walked off.
Her name’s Brenda.
I was hiking back to the cabin going, “Brennnn-da! Brennnn-da!” over and over like an idiot. Like I’m twelve. Not surprising after two years alone here, I guess. It was good just to see someone who isn’t trying to kill me.
Wish the dog would come back. Someone probably ate him, though. I need to check the fence again. Going to do it now. It might rain. Might get dark before I’m back. Might be someone there. I’ve got the shotgun. Not that I can afford to use the shells. The sight of the gun keeps people back, though, if they stay beyond The Nineteen. Going now. Should stay here . . . Too antsy . . .
Gage put the pen down and picked up his shotgun. “That’s right,” he said aloud. “Put down the pen, pick up the gun.” He had to talk aloud, fairly often, just to hear a human voice. Brenda’s was the first he’d heard, except for the warning noise, for three months. “That’s how it is,” he said, hearing the hoarseness in his voice from all that shouting. Bad time to get laryngitis. Bad time to get anything—he’d almost died of pneumonia that once. No pharmacies anymore. You ran into a doctor, he’d try to kill you. He’d be sorry afterwards but that didn’t do you any good.
Gage unbarred the door, and went out, closing the door carefully behind him. There was still some light. He walked out to the edge of the trees to take a quick look out at the Pacific, beyond the edge of the cliff, fifty yards away. It was steely under the clouds. He was looking for boats and hoping he wouldn’t see one. Nothing out there, except maybe that slick black oblong, appearing and disappearing—a whale. At least the animals were doing better now.
He’d chosen this little finger of land, with its single intact cabin, partly because there was no easy way to land a boat. Mostly the sea was too rough around it. You could maybe come in from the sea up into the mouth of the river, clamber onto the big slippery wet crab-twitchy rocks that edged the river bank, if you could secure your boat so it didn’t float away, but the current was strong there and no one had tried it that he knew of. His cabin was pretty well hidden in the trees, after all, and it didn’t look like much was here. And of course, they were as scared of him as he was of them. But then, that’s what his father had told him about rattlesnakes.
He turned and tramped through the pine trees toward the fence, a quarter mile back, noticing, for the first time in a year or more, the smell of the pine needles mingling with the living scent of the sea. Funny how you see a girl, you start to wake up and notice things around you again. To care about how things smell and look and feel.
The wind off the sea keened between the trees and made the hackles rise on the back of his neck. He buttoned the collar of his thick, blue REI snowline jacket with his left hand, the other keeping the Remington twelve-gauge tucked up under his right armpit, pressed against him, the breach-block cupped in his palm. He was good at getting the Remington popped fast to his shoulder for firing. So far nobody had noticed what a lame shot he was. The two guys he’d killed since coming to the area—killed four months apart—had both got it at close to point-blank range. That was the AggFac for you. If people sniped at you, it was out of desperation, not because of the AggFac.
He felt the wind tugging at his streaked beard, his long sandy hair. “I must be getting pretty shaggy,” he said to a red squirrel, looking beadily down from a low branch. “But the only thing I’ve got left to cut it with is a knife and it’s so dull . . . I’m down to my last cake of soap. Half a cake really . . . ” For two years, cognizant that no one on the continent was making soap anymore, he’d only washed when he could no longer bear his own smell.
The squirrel clicked its claws up the tree, looking for a place to curl up out of the wind, and Gage continued, five minutes later cutting the old deer path he took to the fence. Another ten minutes and he was there: a twenty-five foot hurricane fence with antipersonnel wire across the top in a Y-frame. The fence and the place at the river where he got the fish and the crabs were two of the main reasons he’d chosen this spot. There was no gate in the fence—they’d used a chopper landing pad of cracked asphalt, near the edge of the cliff on the south side of the cape. There’d been some kind of military satellite monitoring station, here, once, and the fence, he figured, had been put up to keep people away from it. It kept bears and wolves out too. The post building had crumbled into the sea after a bad storm—you could see the satellite dish sticking up out of the water at low tide, all rusty; the cabin was all that was left. There was forage, if you knew where to look; there was river water to filter; there was a way he knew to get around the fence, underneath its southern end, when he was willing to try his luck checking the crossroads at Sweetbite Point for supply drops. But he hadn’t been out to the crossroads in seven months. Previous time, someone had almost gotten him. So he stayed out here as long as he could. It was a great spot to survive in, if you wanted to survive. He’d almost stopped wanting to.
The fence looked perfectly upright, unbreached, so far as he could see from here, no more rusted than last time. Of course, a determined man could get over it—or around it, if you didn’t mind clambering over a sheer drop—but it was rare for anyone to come out onto the cape. There weren’t many left to come.
He walked along the fence a ways south, wondering what’d brought him here. He had a sort of instinct, especially sharp post-AggFac, that kept him alive—and usually it had its reasons for things.
There it was. The sound of a dog barking. He hoped it was Gassie.
“Hey Gassie!” he shouted, beginning to trot along the fence. “Yo, dog!” Be a great day, meeting a woman . . . sort of . . . and getting his dog back too. “Gassie!”
Then it occurred to him to wonder who the dog was barking at. Maybe a raccoon. Maybe not.
He bit off another shout, annoyed with himself for getting carried away. Shouting. Letting people know where he was.
He circled a lichen-yellowed boulder that hulked up to his own height, and came upon Gassie and the stranger—who was just a few steps beyond The Nineteen. Gassie was this side of the fence, the man on the other side, staring, mouth agape, at the hole the dog had dug under the fence to get in . . .
Despite the dangerous presence of the stranger, Gage shook his head in admiration at the dog’s handiwork. It was the same spot he’d gotten out at—
some critter, raccoon or skunk, had dug a hole under the fence where the ground was soft, and the dog had widened it and gotten out and wandered off, more than a month ago. Gage had waited a week, then decided he had to fill the hole in. Here he was, Gassie, his ribs sticking out, limping a little, but scarcely the worse for wear—a brown-speckled tongue-drooping mix of pit bull, with his wedge-shaped head, and some other breed Gage had never been sure of.
The stranger—a gawky, emaciated man in the tatters of an Army uniform, who’d let his hair fall into accidental dreadlocks—goggled stupidly at the hole, then jerked his head up as Gage approached the dog.
Gage reckoned the stranger, carrying an altered ax handle, at twenty-one paces away, with the fence between them. Not at The Nineteen yet. Everyone alive on this continent was good at judging distances instantly. Nineteen paces, for most people, was the AggFac warning distance. It was possible to remain this side of psychotic—like this side of the fence—beyond nineteen paces from another human being. Nineteen paces or less, you’d go for them, with everything you had, to kill them; and they’d go at you just the same. Which was why most people in North America had died over the past few years. A couple of phrases from one of the first—and last—newspaper articles came into his mind: The very wiring of the brain altered from within . . . That portion of the brain so different victims become another species . . .
“You’re outside the margin, dude,” Gage said. “You can still back up.”
He knew he should probably kill the guy whether he backed up or not, on general principle. For one thing, the guy was probably planning to kill and eat his dog. For another, now that the son of a bitch knew there was someone camped on the other side of the fence, he’d come over to forage and kill—or rather, to kill and forage.