Near + Far

by Cat Rambo

  The second was covered with fur but had steel paws that clicked awkwardly when it walked. Joe christened it Pierre, but another neighbor, Sally, started calling it Patches when some of its fur fell off.

  The third he called Heracles and refused to divulge the name's origin.

  "If you have to ask!' he would say, blue-veined hand fluttering outward like a broken-winged sparrow. "Well, then." Then he'd subside into silence.

  Heracles was the most monstrous looking; the cloned fur had grown awry and clumped in angry black bristles. Like the other two, it was neuter, unsexed. The construction-surplus orange hue of its eyes proved their artificial nature. It was nowhere to be seen at the moment; it spent its time skulking in the dry juniper bushes.

  Today's clear sky meant everyone would have their curtains closed tight against the ultraviolet. I checked my truck to see if the windmill had generated enough juice for me to go to the market. We were close enough to walk, but in these unrelenting days, I wanted to stay out of the sun. Skin cancer brewed along my forearms. No sense in making it worse. The battery had charged, so I went around to the five occupied apartments to see who needed anything.

  Sally wanted canned peaches if they had any. Mrs. Daily had an armload of orders, shirts she'd sewn. I stuffed my pockets with vouchers and lists.

  I loaded up the truck with baskets of salmon to trade. It was not fit for human consumption, of course, but as a cheap feed for livestock it would be worth some vouchers. Beyond that, we had smoked trout and squash and peppers from the garden, along with comfrey.

  It's not a long ride over to the market. The usual stores were open—the market occupied the old Redmond Town Center mall, anchored in the middle with a waterless fountain of a bear and cubs. There used to be a Starbucks there. And everywhere.

  Nowadays, ever since It happened, there's not so many. There's not so many of anything.

  We only know a few facts, although there are many speculations:

  On November 14, 2017, at 7:07 pm PST, the majority of the world's inhabitants vanished, leaving a very small number (some estimate 1 in 10000, others even smaller figures). A few people wanted to claim it was the Rapture, but when it became evident every religious sect, Christian or otherwise, was represented in those left behind, that theory died away.

  No children have been born since then.

  In the following years, society collapsed, not with a bang, but a whimper. The East Coast broke out into assorted kingdoms which battled each other, but few people wanted to work hard enough to build an empire. Here on the West Coast, most felt content to live out their remaining years. They clustered in the larger cities, although a few chose to live in isolation, vanishing into national parks or other deserted stretches.

  No one in politics survived, even those with the most tenuous connections.

  Other leadership, more reluctant but more thoughtful, arose in the politicians' place. Here in Redmond, a market formed through the work of two men who said they were brothers, even though that seemed unlikely. Their store sold scavenged goods, bartering them for fresh food or long-hoarded treasures. We moved the library down to the old Borders and everyone brought books as they found them. Caroline Livegood lived in the back there, and spent her days cataloging and sorting books, subsisting on the food the market brought her. Perhaps a hundred of us lived around the market. Another thousand or so over in Seattle; smaller groups in other towns.

  A self-appointed committee tried to keep water and power running at first, but as people grouped up, they formed small enclaves dependent on their own water and power. Villa Marina edged Lake Sammamish as well as the park, so we turned to growing vegetables in the old Pea Patch Community Sites, thick with rapacious comfrey that Sally chopped and boiled for medicinal tonic. Haphazard travelers carried mail for pay. Some, rumors said, just went through the mail for valuables once they left town, throwing the rest away.

  At any rate, the market is the closest thing we have to a town hall. There's a computer network in the old Starbucks, which another woman runs off wind and solar cells and scavenged batteries, and sometimes people bring mp3s or software to the market to test them on the system there.

  The other stores have been sorted through for the useful and distributed through the market or the companion stores flanking it, selling clothing and technology.

  I found three boxes of old-time candles at the Market. The label said T.J.Maxx. 12.99 each, but I got all three for a half-bushel of peppers, which was a good deal. I swapped the fish around back near REI –no humans would want to eat the salmon, swollen and ghost white, but as I said, they make good animal food. The Home Depot rep was there this week; next week he'd be down in Bellevue, so I traded him squash for some rope and screws, as well as several seed packets: sunflowers, hot peppers, tomatillos. No need to look through the envelopes of winter vegetables. Our lives will fall away in heat and growing silence.

  I was sorting through canned vegetables and fruit when I caught sight of Celeste.

  She wore black as always. She says she is in mourning for the human race and manages to say it sincerely. Most of us sound insincere when we say anything like that, I've noticed. We smirk too, unable to avoid the irony in the phrases. The Last Days. The Final Years. The End of Civilization. Or we mark it by the happening: the Vanishing, the Disappearing, the Gone.

  Celeste and I met two years after it. She used to go sit beside the Sammamish River late at night, light candles and float them down the silent, black water in origami boats. I walked a lot in those first frightening days and stood there watching, when she turned and looked at me.

  I spoke, wanting to reassure her I meant no harm. "The boats are pretty," I said. "What are they for?"

  "They're to carry lost souls to the afterlife."

  "Think there's many lost souls around?" Further down the river, the frogs sang frenzies. It was one of those moist, damp springs we used to get, when everything was growing and alive at once.

  "Aren't we all lost souls?" she said. She rose from where she squatted on the bank and walked forward to shake my hand. "Two lost souls, swimming in a fish bowl ... "

  I chuckled. "Do you live around here?" I asked, and blushed with the inanity.

  "Down in Bear Creek, near Redmond Town Center. Where the herons are."

  "I'm over at Villa Marina. Past Marymoor."

  She nodded.

  "Well, it was a pleasure meeting you," I said awkwardly. The only light was that of the full moon above, obscured by wispy clouds like curdled milk.

  "Do you want to light a ship?" she asked.

  "I do."

  I stayed and lit a candle and sent it bobbing down the river, off into the darkness. We were friends after that, and nodded to each other at the market and library, and little by little, over the intervening eighteen years, we became lovers. She sent those ships out every week. In all the time Celeste has done this, I've never found any of those boats washed up on the lake shore.

  "Bill," Celeste said, spotting me through the small crowd. "I have bread and goat cheese. Will you come for dinner tonight?"

  "Let me give you a couple squash," I said, nodding in agreement. I stuffed a brown paper bag with red and yellow peppers as well. She gave me a half smile. She is tall and skinny, and keeps her hair cut short to her shoulders. She doesn't bother with make-up. Few women do anymore.

  "Cheer up." I motioned at the sunbaked concrete outside. "Nice sunny day."

  She rolled her eyes at me.

  At home, I found Gaston Le Deux dead. Its red-clothed skeleton lay half under a dessicated bush, mouth open and flies colliding on the soft flesh.

  I didn't want Joe to see it, so I wrapped the cat in a gunny sack and put it in the back of my truck. It would be safe enough there. Celeste lives up the hill, within easy walking distance, but closer to Redmond Town Center. No one else lives in her apartment complex, but she says she likes it that way.

  Celeste baked the squash out on her balcony in a solar oven to avoid heat
inside. Like most of us she has taken an apartment and expanded it outward, claiming two or three in order to have the space to stockpile and hoard.

  Celeste has three extra apartments, one filled entirely with goods scavenged from the Kirkland Costco.

  "As soon as I heard what had happened," she said. "I drove down to the U-Haul place, and then broke into Costco. All the power was still on at that point. I took three cheesecakes and ate them in a week."

  She's held onto it, too, doling out only what she needs to subsist on. Other apartments are filled with goods from other stores; she must have spent weeks methodically looting. She has pharmaceuticals, guns, survival gear, batteries, water filters, fishing gear, kayaks. For all that, she rarely goes beyond our small world's boundaries. She is a painter—she brought a truckload of art supplies from the Daniel Smith store to the downstairs apartment. I consider her images morbid, scenes of zombies staggering together, flesh falling from their limbs, pallid overripe skin sagging. Every time I go to eat there, she shows me new paintings and I make noncommittal noises she takes for approval.

  This time she had a series called Legends of the Gone to show me: a zombie's transition to skeleton over a month's course, a thirty one-part set.

  "You don't like it," she said, watching me, and I shrugged.

  "It's the world," she said.

  "It's a vision of the world. There are others."

  She took a deep breath, avoiding my eyes. "I'm thinking about moving on."

  At first I thought she meant leave Redmond, but that's not it. Other people have made this choice, to move on. Some have used drugs or guns. One sweet old woman starved to death by choice, spending her last days with friends nearby watching her die in apparent total peace. I was one. I touched her hand in the last hour and she smiled at me, but impatience lurked in her eyes as though she'd said all her goodbyes and was ready now to leave the station and embark.

  "How would you do it?" I said carefully.

  "Pills, probably. Would you miss me, Bill?"

  "Of course I would. How can you even ask that?"

  "It's that or watch the world wind down," she said.

  I knew what she meant that time. I've thought it myself; we all have. I decided a while back how I'd go: climb to the Space Needle's top and jump.

  "You're still deciding?" I asked.

  She nodded.

  "What things make you feel like staying?"

  "You," she said with frank warmth. "A few other friends."

  "That's it?"

  She nodded again.

  "When would you go?"

  "I'll be out of candles in a month and a half."

  "We can find you more candles."

  "That's not the point. The point is that the human race is dying off and I see no reason to prolong it."

  I had no idea what to say. I fell into silence as we sat there, looking at each other.

  Back home, I sit out by the lake. Water lilies cover most of the surface; people used to cut them back, but fewer people have gasoline for their boats, nowadays. You can't just go along through a neighborhood, siphoning cans, the way you used to be able to. The eagles swooped out over the lake and the frogs sang. We're lucky here—most pollution was reversible, given time, and it's been twenty years.

  Something splashes far out in the dark water, a fish, most probably. A long time ago, this lake housed perch and bass as well, but now we only have the fish pens and our mutant, ghostly salmon, which drift ashore to be eaten by Joe's robot cats.

  In fifty or sixty years' time, only the last of us will be surviving, the ones that were children in 2017. They will be living entirely off the earth by then. One by one, the last will die, alone perhaps, or in small groups, as we are now. Some people will strive to leave a message behind, in case someone comes after them, like Celeste's paintings, but most will be content to slip into obscurity.

  I see the reeds rustling near the fish pens, and investigation discloses Pierre and Heracles, working their way close. I shoo them off. Leaning over to stare into the fish pen, I see a light deep in the water.

  It is elusive, escapes the long handled net I try to catch it with again and again, but I am experienced at this from years of fish breeding. Finally I net it, bring it up to look closer.

  Coiling and writhing in the net is a tiny fish, phosphorescent green from head to tail. I know what this is. We've heard news of infestations in other waters.

  They were originally ornamental. Bred for decoration. Rendered sterile with radiation before being sold to the public. But life is stubborn, and it will come out, somehow. They became so popular it was inevitable one or two, or ten or fifteen, would slip by. Some were released in lakes.

  It's not as bad as the snakehead along the East Coast. Those things invade gardens and fields and eat them bare. But these little glowing fish will eventually fill the lake, eating what our fish live on, the plants and the insects. It will take a while. Years. Decades. Perhaps none of us will live to see the lake's death.

  I stare out into the darkness. Should I go with Celeste? What holds me here? I spend my days caring for the others at Villa Marina, bringing in fish, tending the garden, trading at the market for the things we need to stay alive. I had been the director, the one coordinating what we did where and when. I planned the fish pens, and the windmill turbine, after spending days at the library and then Home Depot. It was tiring. Was there a point to it?

  The clack of Pierre's steel claws floats from the parking lot, and then there is a screech as he jumps atop a rusting car. Everything is so quiet, so still, that I am forced to pause, as though held there, waiting for something to speak.

  The air hoots near my face and a giant barn owl swoops past in the darkness, its ghost valentine-shaped face turned to mine as though questioning. A chill runs down my spine as it vanishes into the night, leaving a whisper of wings in its trail. It is a perfect moment.

  As I cross the asphalt, headed towards my apartment, Pierre leaps from the car and assaults my ankles with a sudden friendly surge, purrs shaking his frame. The night is warm, but not as bad as the unrelenting, sunlit days.

  In the morning, I'll talk Celeste into moving over here; interacting with the others will end her slump. She can help out with the garden, the fish. We'll learn how to make candles; I don't think the hobby stores have been scavenged heavily. We'll construct a wooden boat to hold Gaston Le Deux; ablaze, it will move slowly out into the lake, a Viking funeral fit for the king of cats. I feel a wash of cheer that is, I know in my heart of hearts, as artificial as a fan's breeze.

  I have a few years left in me, a few years to wait for the night when the lake will be full of stars, ghostly salmon floating among them, neighboring phosphorescence lighting the pallid bodies. There are still perfect moments yet to come.

  Afternotes

  This story is set in the condo complex I live in, and part of the enjoyment of writing it was taking that landscape and transforming it. This story was one of my Clarion West application stories, and I can hear Octavia's Butler's voice in my head, saying, "Well, it's a very peculiar story." I left the question of what had happened very much up in the air, because that wasn't the point for me. The point was what happened to the ones left behind. At the same time, I couldn't resist doing away with all the politicians.

  NEAR + FAR

  Stories of the

  Near Future and the Far

  Cat Rambo

  Hydra House

  + FAR CONTENTS

  Futures

  Kallakak's Cousins

  Amid the Words of War

  Timesnip

  Angry Rose's Lament

  Seeking Nothing

  A Querulous Flute of Bone

  Zeppelin Follies

  Space Elevator Music

  Surrogates

  Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain

  Bus Ride to Mars

  FUTURES

  In that future, we learned to see all the other futures. The one where we found
out the world really was only 4000 years old. The one where the dinosaurs invented the abacus, the one where Deinonychi fought in cock-fights, bright feathers scattering like disintegrating fans. The future where cold-eyed aliens bought Manhattan for a handful of radioactive beads. A future of emotion and glass sculpture, where something danced like a quivering bird on the steps of a cloud coliseum for the en-couched, plugged-in ranks.

  When we slept we dreamed more futures. Worlds where everyone was a superhero, worlds where nothing died but lived on in clanking golem form. A world of floating cities in the sky and the kite warriors that defended them. Worlds of darkness and peril as well as ones filled with sunshine and marvels.

  We talked about them on the subway, online, face to face and mind to mind. I loved the one where mermaids taught us harmony; you preferred the future of textured light, where sorrow slanted sideways, slipping away along the grain like rain on nylon.

  The unjust futures haunted many of us, the ones where the corporations sold us our jobs, where we lived on rotting beaches, walked among pine stakes tipped with black mold. Futures of plague and zombies. Realities of saliva and hunger and the arrogance of existence. So many of them that they eclipsed all the rest, obliterated the more whimsical, the futures of tiny elephants and limerick-composing umbrellas. But we would have had to alter the past to prevent these grim-shaded dooms. It was too late.

  Or was it? Time travel had been glimpsed before. We turned the minds, the machines, long caffeinated nights and scrolling whiteboards to finding ways to repair long gone decisions.

  Gate after gate; every traveler vanished. Never seen again.

  Are they elsewhere, did they escape?

  Our choice now: follow them and disappear through the dreaming gate, or stay here, caught in nightmare, where all the futures but one are gone. Take my hand—or decide not to decide.