by Mike Ashley
I plunged deep, deep, deep into her, and oh god but it felt fine. Like that eye-opening shock you get when you plunge into a cold lake for the first time on a hot summer’s day and the water wraps itself around you and feels so impossibly good. Only this was warm and slippery-slick and a thousand times better. Then I was telling her things, telling her I needed her, I wanted her, I loved her, over and over again.
I awoke the next morning with a raging hangover. Victoria was sitting in the cab of the pickup, brushing her long white hair in the rear-view mirror and humming to herself.
“Well,” she said, amused. “Look what the cat dragged in. There’s water in the jerrycans. Have yourself a drink. I expect we could also spare a cup for you to wash your face with.”
“Look,” I said. “I’m sorry about last night.”
“No you’re not.”
“I maybe said some foolish things, but – ”
Her eyes flashed storm-cloud dark. “You weren’t speaking near so foolish then as you are now. You meant every damn word, and I’m holding you to them.” Then she laughed. “You’d best get at that water. You look hideous.”
So I dragged myself off.
Overnight, Victoria had changed. Her whole manner, the way she held herself, even the way she phrased her words, told me that she wasn’t a child anymore. She was a woman.
The thing I’d been dreading had begun.
“Resistance is useless,” Victoria read. “For mine is the might and power of the Cosmos Itself!” She’d found a comic book stuck back under the seat and gone through it three times, chuckling to herself, while the truck rattled down that near-nonexistent road. Now she put it down. “Tell me something,” she said. “How do you know your magician came by this way?”
“I just know is all,” I said curtly. I’d given myself a shot of B-complex vitamins, but my head and gut still felt pretty ragged. Nor was it particularly soothing having to drive this idiot truck one-armed. And, anyway, I couldn’t say just how I knew. It was a feeling I had, a certainty.
“I had a dream last night. After we, ummmm, danced.”
I didn’t look at her.
“I was on a flat platform, like a railroad station, only enormous. It stretched halfway to infinity. There were stars all around me, thicker and more colourful than I’d ever imagined them. Bright enough to make your eyes ache. Enormous machines were everywhere, golden, spaceships I suppose. They were taking off and landing with delicate little puffs of air, like it was the easiest thing imaginable to do. My body was so light I felt like I was going to float up among them. You ever hear of a place like that?”
“No.”
“There was a man waiting for me there. He had the saddest smile, but cold, cruel eyes. Hello, Victoria, he said. How did you know my name, I asked. Oh, I keep a close eye on Daniel, he said, I’m grooming him for an important job. Then he showed me a syringe. Do you know what’s in here? he asked me. The liquid in it was so blue it shone.” She fell silent.
“What did you say?”
“I just shook my head. Mortality, he said. It’s an improved version of the drug you shot yourself up with fifty years ago. Tell Daniel it’ll be waiting for him at Sky Terminus, where the great ships come and go. That was all. You think it means anything?”
I shook my head.
She picked up the comic book, flipped it open again. “Well, anyway, it was a strange dream.”
That night, after doing the dishes, I went and sat down on the pickup’s sideboard and stared into the fire, thinking. Victoria came and sat down beside me. She put a hand on my leg. It was the lightest of touches, but it sent all my blood rushing to my cock.
She smiled at that and looked up into my eyes. “Resistance is useless,” she said.
Afterwards we lay together between blankets on the ground. Looking up at the night sky. It came to me then that being taken away from normal life young as I had been, all my experience with love had come before the event and all my experience with sex after, and that I’d therefore never before known them both together. So that in this situation I was as naive and unprepared for what was happening to us as Victoria was.
Which was how I admitted to myself I loved Victoria. At the time it seemed the worst possible thing that could’ve happened to me.
We saw it for the first time that next afternoon. It began as a giddy feeling, like a mild case of vertigo, and a vague thickening at the centre of the sky as if it were going dark from the inside out. This was accompanied by a bulging up of the horizon, as if God Himself had placed hands flat on either edge and leaned forward, bowing it upward.
Then my inner ear knew that the land which had been flat as flat for all these many miles was now slanting downhill all the way to the horizon. That was the gravitational influence of all that mass before us. Late into the day it just appeared. It was like a conjuring trick. One moment it wasn’t there at all and then, with the slightest of perceptual shifts, it dominated the vision. It was so distant that it took on the milky backscatter colour of the sky and it went up so high you literally couldn’t see the top. It was – I knew this now – our destination:
The antenna.
Even driving the pickup truck, it took three days after first sighting to reach its base.
On the morning of one of those days, Victoria suddenly pushed aside her breakfast and ran for the far side of the truck. That being the only privacy to be had for hundreds of miles around.
I listened to her retching. Knowing there was only one thing it could be.
She came back, pale and shaken. I got a plastic collection cup out of my bag. “Pee into this,” I told her. When she had, I ran a quick diagnostic. It came up positive.
“Victoria,” I said. “I’ve got an admission to make. I haven’t been exactly straight with you about the medical consequences of your . . . condition.”
It was the only time I ever saw her afraid. “My God,” she said, “What is it? Tell me! What’s happening to me?” “Well, to begin with, you’re pregnant.”
There were no roads to the terminus, for all that it was visible from miles off. It lay nestled at the base of the antenna, and to look at the empty and trackless plains about it, you’d think there was neither reason for its existence nor possibility of any significant traffic there.
Yet the closer we got, the more people we saw approaching it. They appeared out of the everywhere and nothingness like hydrogen atoms being pulled into existence in the stressed spaces between galaxies, or like shards of ice crystallizing at random in supercooled superpure water. You’d see one far to your left, maybe strolling along with a walking stick slung casually over one shoulder and a gait that just told you she was whistling. Then beyond her in the distance a puff of dust from what could only be a half-track. And to the right, a man in a wide-brimmed hat sitting ramrod-straight in the saddle of a native parasite larger than any elephant. With every hour a different configuration, and all converging.
Roads materialized underfoot. By the time we arrived at the terminus, they were thronged with people.
The terminal building itself was as large as a city, all gleaming white marble arches and colonnades and parapets and towers. Pennants snapped in the wind. Welcoming musicians played at the feet of the columns. An enormous holographic banner dopplering slowly through the rainbow from infrared to ultraviolet and back again, read:
BYZANTIUM PORT AUTHORITY
MAGNETIC-LEVITATION MASS TRANSIT DIVISION
GROUND TERMENUS
Somebody later told me it provided employment for a 100,000 people, and I believed him.
Victoria and I parked the truck by the front steps. I opened the door for her and helped her gingerly out. Her belly was enormous by then, and her sense of balance was off. We started up the steps. Behind us, a uniformed lackey got in the pickup and drove it away.
The space within was grander than could have been supported had the terminus not been located at the cusp of antenna and forehead, where the proximate masses each
canceled out much of the other’s attraction. There were countless ticket windows, all of carved mahogany. I settled Victoria down on a bench – her feet were tender – and went to stand in line. When I got to the front, the ticket-taker glanced at a computer screen and said, “May I help you, sir?”
“Two tickets, first-class. Up.”
He tapped at the keyboard and a little device spat out two crisp pasteboard tickets. He slid them across the polished brass counter, and I reached for my wallet. “How much?” I said.
He glanced at his computer and shook his head. “No charge for you, Mister Daniel. Professional courtesy.”
“How did you know my name?”
“You’re expected.” Then, before I could ask any more questions, “That’s all I can tell you, sir. I can neither speak nor understand your language. It is impossible for me to converse with you.”
“Then what the hell,” I said testily, “are we doing now?”
He flipped the screen around for me to see. On it was a verbatim transcript of our conversation. The last line was: I SIMPLY READ WHAT’S ON THE SCREEN, SIR.
Then he turned it back toward himself and said, “I simply read what’s – ”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” I said. And went back to Victoria.
Even at mag-lev speeds, it took two days to travel the full length of the antenna. To amuse myself, I periodically took out my gravitometer and made readings. You’d think the figures would diminish exponentially as we climbed out of the gravity well. But because the antennae swept backward, over the bulk of the grasshopper, rather than forward and away, the gravitational gradient of our journey was quite complex. It lessened rapidly at first, grew temporarily stronger, and then lessened again, in the complex and lovely flattening sine-wave known as a Sheffield curve. You could see it reflected in the size of the magnetic rings we flashed through, three per minute, how they grew skinnier then fatter and finally skinnier still as we flew upward.
On the second day, Victoria gave birth. It was a beautiful child, a boy. I wanted to name him Hector, after my father, but Victoria was set on Jonathan, and as usual I gave in to her.
Afterwards, though, I studied her features. There were crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes, or maybe “laugh lines” is more appropriate, given Victoria’s personality. The lines to either side of her mouth had deepened. Her whole face had a haggard cast to it. Looking at her, I felt a sadness so large and pervasive it seemed to fill the universe.
She was aging along her own exponential curve. The process was accelerating now, and I was not at all certain she would make it to Sky Terminus. It would be a close thing in either case.
I could see that Victoria knew it too. But she was happy as she hugged our child. “It’s been a good life,” she said. “I wish you could have grown with me – don’t pout, you’re so solemn, Daniel! – but other than that I have no complaints.”
I looked out the window for a minute. I had known her for only – what? – a week, maybe. But in that brief time she had picked me up, shaken me off, and turned my life around. She had changed everything. When I looked back, I was crying.
“Death is the price we pay for children, isn’t it?” she said. “Down below, they’ve made death illegal. But they’re only fooling themselves. They think it’s possible to live forever. They think there are no limits to growth. But everything dies – people, stars, the universe. And once it’s over, all lives are the same length.”
“I guess I’m just not so philosophical as you. It’s a damned hard thing to lose your wife.”
“Well, at least you figured that one out.”
“What one?
“That I’m your wife.” She was silent a moment. Then she said, “I had another dream. About your magician. And he explained about the drug. The one he called mortality.”
“Huh,” I said. Not really caring.
“The drug I took, you wake up and you burn through your life in a matter of days. With the new version, you wake up with a normal human lifespan, the length people had before the immortality treatments. One hundred fifty, two hundred years – that’s not so immediate. The suicides are kept alive because their deaths come on so soon; it’s too shocking to the survivors’ sensibilities. The new version shows its effects too slowly to be stopped.”
I stroked her long white hair. So fine. So very, very brittle. “Let’s not talk about any of this.”
Her eyes blazed “Let’s do! Don’t pretend to be a fool, Daniel. People multiply. There’s only so much food, water, space. If nobody dies, there’ll come a time when everybody dies.” Then she smiled again, fondly, the way you might at a petulant but still promising child. “You know what’s required of you, Daniel. And I’m proud of you for being worthy of it.”
Sky Terminus was enormous, dazzling, beyond description. It was exactly like in Vickie’s dream. I helped her out onto the platform. She could barely stand by then, but her eyes were bright and curious. Jonathan was asleep against my chest in a baby-sling.
Whatever held the atmosphere to the platform, it offered no resistance to the glittering, brilliantly articulated ships that rose and descended from all parts. Strange cargoes were unloaded by even stranger longshoremen.
“I’m not as excited by all this as I would’ve been when I was younger,” Victoria murmured. “But somehow I find it more satisfying. Does that make sense to you?”
I began to say something. But then, abruptly, the light went out of her eyes. Stiffening, she stared straight ahead of herself into nothing that I could see. There was no emotion in her face whatsoever.
“Vickie?” I said.
Slowly, she tumbled to the ground.
It was then, while I stood stunned and unbelieving, that the magician came walking up to me.
In my imagination I’d run through this scene a thousand times: Leaving my bag behind, I stumbled off the train, towards him. He made no move to escape. I flipped open my jacket with a shrug of the shoulder, drew out the revolver with my good hand, and fired.
Now, though . . .
He looked sadly down at Victoria’s body and put an arm around my shoulders.
“God,” he said, “don’t they just break your heart?”
I stayed on a month at the Sky Terminus to watch my son grow up. Jonathan died without offspring and was given an orbital burial. His coffin circled the grasshopper seven times before the orbit decayed and it scratched a bright meteoric line down into the night. The flare lasted about as long as would a struck sulfur match.
He’d been a good man, with a wicked sense of humour that never came from my side of the family.
So now I wander the world. Civilizations rise and fall about me. Only I remain unchanged. Where things haven’t gotten too bad, I scatter mortality. Where they have I unleash disease.
I go where I go and I do my job. The generations rise up like wheat before me, and like a harvester I mow them down. Sometimes – not often – I go off by myself, to think and remember. Then I stare up into the night, into the colonized universe, until the tears rise up in my sight and drown the swarming stars.
I am Death and this is my story.
WAVES AND SMART MAGMA
Paul Di Filippo
This story was written especially for this anthology, but it’s a sequel to an earlier story. When I was first checking out stories for this anthology, Paul sent me “Clouds and Cold Fires”, originally published in 2003 in Live Without a Net, edited by Lou Anders. It was a wonder-filled story set in a distant future where genetic engineering and the general manipulation of nature had reached an unprecedented extreme. The story ended on a positive note with the birth of a child, and I wanted to know what became of that child, and how he came to understand the world about him. So I challenged Paul to write that story. As ever, he was up to the challenge. You don’t need to have read that earlier story as it’s briefly summarized at the start of this one. But if you have read it, you’ll be delighted to discover more about this remarkable future. Paul Di Fi
lippo (b. 1954) is one of those annoyingly talented writers who seems to be able to write effortlessly and at will. I’m sure it’s not like that, but his quirky and highly original, vivacious stories have been appearing at a relentless pace for over twenty years. A selection will be found in Ribofunk (1996), Fractal Paisleys (1997), Lost Pages (1998), Shuteye for the Timebroker (2006) and a half-dozen other volumes. You’ll find a lot more about him at www.pauldifilippo.com.
SALT AIR STUNG STORM’S super-sensitive nose, although he was still several scores of kilometers distant from the coast. The temperate August sunlight, moderated by a myriad, myriad high-orbit pico-satellites, one of the many thoughtful legacies of the Upflowered, descended as a soothing balm on Storm’s unclothed pelt. Several churning registers of flocculent clouds, stuffed full of the computational particles known as virgula and sublimula, betokened the watchful custodial omnipresence of the tropo-spherical mind. Peaceful and congenial was the landscape around him: a vast plain of black-leaved cinnabon trees, bisected by a wide, meandering river, the whole of which had once constituted the human city of Sacramento.
Storm reined to a halt his furred and feathered steed – the Kodiak Kangemu named Bergamot was a burly, scary-looking but utterly obedient bipedal chimera some three meters tall at its muscled shoulders, equipped with a high saddle and panniers – and paused for a moment of reflection.
The world was so big, and rich, and odd. And Storm was all alone in it.
That thought both frightened and elated him.
He felt he hardly knew himself or his goals, of what depths or heights he was capable. Whether he would live his long life totally independent of wardenly strictures, a rebel, or become an obedient part of the guardian corps of the planet. Hence this journey.