The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  We stopped before what appeared to be a sheer drop, and Rep gestured with its largest pincer. “Behold.”

  The dehydrated seabed stretched away before us like some lifeless lunar landscape, magnificent not only in its size but in its silence, its grandeur made all the more impressive by the backdrop of the apoplectic sun.

  At first I thought its only features the cracks and rills that striated its surface; but then I made out tiny specks of wrecked vessels canted and embedded in the silt, and here and there scattered about the shattered plain I glimpsed what might once have been former dwelling places, agglomerations of bubble-domes and things like termite mounds, cracked and crumbled now. The landscape was as bereft of colour as of life: a dozen shades of grey predominated, from dull pewter to silver. I looked about for signs of vegetation, but saw only sporadic, stunted bindweed, ground hugging and the colour of straw.

  Indeed the only real colour provided was the bloody hue of the sun, which filled the air with a light like wine.

  Rep gestured towards the ruined domes. “Long ago the Kleem took to the sea, and became in time aquatic. They raised great submarine cities, and for aeons were the dominant species on the planet. Their days passed, however, and their cities fell to ruin.”

  “When did this race prosper?” I asked.

  “The Kleem were relatively recent, approximately nine million years gone. Some say they went to the stars aboard vast water-filled arks, when the seas of Earth began to dry, but that is only apocryphal.”

  We were standing on an apron of stone jutting out above the canyon, and I could see no steps leading the rest of the way.

  Kamis said, “We will cross the bottom of this vanished sea?”

  “We will,” Rep answered.

  “I see no means of descent,” I said.

  Rep waved a humorous pincer. “Our means is amongst us,” it said, and gestured towards Cheth.

  The manta-ray being descended and prostrated itself across the sun-blasted stones, like some vast and living mat of silver. “Step aboard,” it said, voice muffled.

  I glanced at Kamis, who gestured that I should go first.

  Rep said, “Move to the middle and be seated. I assure you that you will be safe.”

  “And I second that assurance,” came the modulated response from the ray’s hidden mouth.

  Tentatively, I took a step, and then another, across the flesh of the being, which gave like the surface of some liverish trampoline. I expected cries of surprise or pain from my host, but it was silent as I lowered myself and sat cross-legged on the broad back. I reached out and felt its skin: it was cold and rough, like frozen sandpaper.

  Kamis sat beside me and Rep took up position ahead of us, eyestalks peering forward as we lifted and floated out over the void.

  The experience was as I guessed it must be like to ride a flying carpet. Cheth moved slowly at first, the edges of its wings scrolled to ensure our safety. There was no sensation of vertigo – the extent of Cheth’s back was such that we had no sheer vision of the drop beneath us – or even danger; what I felt was a heady exhilaration as we picked up speed and descended in a great swooping parabola towards the seabed.

  I looked up and back, and saw the city move away from us with surprising speed. It presented an aged face, blasted by the sun, and I wondered how mighty it had been aeons ago, fully populated by its builders, abustle with life unimaginable to me. I looked ahead and wondered at our destination.

  I was skewered then by a fierce lancing stab of regret, and I tried to source it. I sensed the feelings I had felt for . . . loved ones, and I knew that much of the joy of my previous life, so long ago, had been because I had been able to share my experiences with them. How much more, I felt, I would appreciate what was happening now if only these faceless, nameless people were by my side to share this wondrous ride.

  I tried to recapture lost memories, but experienced only abstractions, wellings of love as evanescent as lost dreams, and no more.

  At one point we were side-swiped by a fierce wind, and rocked a little, and Kamis reached out with a silver hand and steadied me. The touch was a revelation. Whatever I had expected, it was not this: that its touch should communicate the essence of its humanity – a feeble word to use of a being not even human. It was as if it had communicated directly with my brain, as if its touch was all I needed to know that Kamis was good.

  In time we came to the surface of the seabed, and hovered along perhaps two metres above the drifted silver sands. We passed close by the shattered domes, among which stood monuments of the Kleem – their great and good, no doubt – with wasted bodies and bulbous heads, and fins instead of limbs. There was something ineffably sad about the ruins, the canted broken statues and the domes half-buried in scintillating drifts, as if we were passing through not the remains of a city but a graveyard. Indeed, I thought, that was what planet Earth had become in this advanced age two billion years from my own time, an august graveyard of the many races that had lived and died in ignorance of what might succeed them.

  It was a sobering thought as we left behind the once-submarine city and headed towards the roiling hemisphere of the swollen sun.

  “Does it ever set?” I asked.

  Rep said, “The rotation of planet Earth has slowed considerably over the millennia. A day now lasts almost a week, in your reckoning; a year lasts five of your years. The seasons are correspondingly protracted. We are in winter now.”

  “Winter?” Kamis said, surprised. “If this is winter, then what must summer be like?”

  “A time of solar storms when the surface of the planet is uninhabitable, and all creatures burrow deep underground. A minute on the surface in high summer spells certain death.”

  “So that is why,” said Cheth beneath us, “we are making this voyage now, in winter?”

  Rep inclined an eye-stalk. “That is why indeed.”

  The silence stretched as we waited for Rep to continue; it deigned not to, and we did not press it.

  Beside me, Kamis raised a hand and touched its temple. I said, “You are in pain?”

  “Not pain,” it said, a smile racing across its varied features. “I had a sudden . . . a fleeting return of memory. And yet . . . the memory is vague, though hauntingly strong, if that is not a contradiction. I recall a time in my childhood, when I accompanied my clan on a pilgrimage to the sea. It was the annual time of rejoicing in the fecundity of nature.”

  “Tell us,” said Cheth.

  The tall silver man sat up straight and looked ahead, into the sun. “There is little to tell, sadly. I recall great happiness, and safety. I was with my siblings, all thirty-odd of them, and we knew with the certainty of youth that the future held wondrous and miraculous events in store for us. I . . . I can sense more, feelings of tragedy, of elation, but it is as if these might belong to another person, so nebulous are they.” It paused, then said, “And you, Cheth? What do you recall?”

  The manta-ray replied, “Like you, my recollections are vague, abstract. As to specific instances of my life – these I find impossible to place, to pin down.” It stopped there, then continued. “I receive the impression that we were like creatures in a small pond, which dreamed of the life that might exist out there, but which could only think within the narrow remit of the pond containing that life.” It paused, then said, “And you, Channon?”

  I shook my head. “I have no recollections, other than maddening abstractions. I do know that those of my race were short-lived compared to yourselves. We lived perhaps seventy, eighty, ninety years in total.”

  “So little time!” Rep said, aghast.

  “No time,” Kamis went on, “to assess one’s suitability for . . . for anything.”

  I smiled. “In retrospect, I think we humans spent so much time mired in regret, wishing things were . . . different. Perhaps that’s the corollary of living such short lives.”

  I considered my words, then said tentatively, “Kamis, Cheth, do either of you recall loved ones, family
?”

  A silence greeted my words, and then Kamis said, “I recall lovers . . . I think. In a lifetime of a thousand years, we would have perhaps thirty or forty partners, often concurrently. But the depth of our love for each other was not diminished by this fact. And yet . . .” A frown chased itself across its shimmering face. “And yet I recall no specific mates.”

  “Cheth?” I asked.

  “Unlike the shimmer-folk, we villicents had but one lover in a lifetime, to whom we were devoted until death. But for the life of me, sadly, I do not recall the specifics of a mate.”

  A silence fell. Were we three thinking the same thing? That this absence, this lacunae in our memories, was a common link between us.

  We rode on in silence.

  Perhaps an hour passed before Rep said, “I think perhaps the time has arrived to pause for refreshments.”

  Duly Cheth slowed and came to rest a foot above the silver sands. We stepped off, into hot silt that lapped about our ankles, and Cheth rose so that it could regard us with the eyes which adorned its underside.

  From our backpacks we took the canisters, all except Cheth; it was without provisions, and at my enquiry it explained, “The sunlight is enough, my friend, to provide all my bodily needs.”

  I watched Rep as it deftly unscrewed the lid from its canister and tipped it towards its letter-box mouth. A foamy liquid poured out. Kamis, tentatively, did likewise, then nodded. “Quite wonderful,” it opined.

  “A nutrient which will provide you with strength,” Rep said.

  I opened my canister and drank. The liquid frothed and spangled upon my palate, leaving me feeling both refreshed and satisfied.

  “And these?” I asked, taking out the silver ball and the pencillike implement.

  “The sphere is a protector,” Rep said. “It maintains a field about your person which repels any predators which might be lurking.”

  “Predators?”

  “Strange beasts patrol the torrid wastes,” Rep said.

  “And the sticks?” Kamis asked.

  “Keys,” said Rep.

  A silence, then we all three asked in concert, “Keys, for what?”

  Its eye-stalks moved from Kamis to Cheth to me. “For what comes next, my friends,” it said with maddening taciturnity.

  “And that might be?” I ventured.

  Its eye-stalks swivelled until they were regarding the sun. It gestured with a pincer and said, “Look, our bellicose primary has loosed a supra-flare.”

  We looked, and beheld, emerging from the bloated belly of the sun, a quick lick of flame racing through space towards the planet.

  “But what,” said Cheth, “has this to do with the keys we carry?”

  “In time, in time,” said the damnable crab. “Follow me. The flare will arrive in perhaps one hour, and it would be well if we were far below the surface when it blasts the land.”

  It minced towards an outcropping of rock, and we followed.

  As it approached what appeared to be a slab of fractured basalt, a circular aperture in its flank irised to reveal a hovering disk of flat metal, perhaps five metres across. Rep stepped onto it, and we joined it. Instantly we were aboard, it dropped. I cried out in consternation and reached out to Kamis, who steadied me. The hovering Cheth gave a cry of surprise and dropped with us.

  A minute later the disk slowed its rapid descent, and I stepped off it into a chamber that staggered my senses with its dimensions.

  It was v-shaped, perhaps a hundred metres tall, constructed of some brilliant white ceramic substance, and it diminished into the distance for as far as the eye could see. Its sloping sides were scored with galleries, and on the ground floor and on each gallery – and I counted twenty of them before the distance defeated my eyesight – dozens of crabs like Replenish-362 worked at banks of consoles.

  Their activity was frantic as they skittered back and forth, tapping at surfaces, adjusting panels, conferring together and then parting in great haste.

  Kamis voiced what I was thinking, “What is happening here?”

  “These are scientists,” Rep said. “They are carrying out the work of the Effectuators.”

  “What work? Kamis asked.

  The reticent crab kept its own counsel and its eye-stalks peered ahead as it led us along the chamber.

  I recalled mention of the keys. “Our keys have some function down here?” I asked as we pursued the skittering crab.

  We came to a canted series of consoles, etched with arcane hieroglyphs and indented with several slots. At the sight of us, three crabs working at the consoles backed off, eye-stalks turned our way, and watched us as we approached with Rep.

  “If each of you takes a console, and inserts the key into the appropriate aperture . . .”

  Hastily, Kamis and I unfastened our packs and withdrew the pen-like implement. Rep stirred a pincer in its own pack, and withdrew a stick which it passed to Cheth, who manoeuvred its cilia to accept it.

  I stepped forward, towards the console, and slipped the pen point first into the appropriate slot. It was tugged from my grip in a rush . . . and I have no explanation for what happened next.

  It was as if the chamber ceased to exist. I was in a white limitless area, and out of the opalescence which surrounded me coalesced a series of images, a rapid procession of incidents which I knew – somehow – to be the history of planet Earth.

  And then I beheld a hundred creatures, a thousand, and with each one I was granted its name, its place in history, its significance. And I knew the planet Earth to be a wondrous place which over billions of years had played host to all manner of sentient lifeforms, races and species which had spanned hundreds of thousand of years before passing into oblivion, or a million years before disappearing from evolution’s stage: but whatever the race, and however long they ruled the planet, their fate was certain: they would one day hand the flame of the planet’s stewardship onto another emergent race.

  And then I was looking upon a creature I knew, somehow, to be an Effectuator: a bipedal ant-like being with a human’s swollen cranium. It turned and regarded me, and then smiled, and an exquisite sensation of well-being flooded my senses. I had the sudden knowledge, then, as he peered at me, that I was being assessed by this being, judged even, but for what I could not guess.

  I had a dozen questions, more, but at that instant I was whisked from the opalescent realm and I found myself back in the chamber surrounded by the scurrying crabs, with Kamis and Cheth by my side and Rep standing before me, regarding us with its eye-stalks.

  Kamis was the first to gather its thoughts, and I knew from what it said that it had experienced much the same as I. “And what,” it said, “became of the Effectuators?”

  Rep said, “They . . . ascended, stepped up, and employed us, the humble species known as Ky20, to do their bidding.”

  “Which is?” Kamis said.

  “And what,” I asked, “do they want with us? I felt I was being . . . judged – but for what?”

  Instead of replying, Rep moved away from the consoles, back towards the aperture which housed the elevator disc. It stepped upon it, and we had little option but to follow.

  Rep was silent as we rode to the surface of the planet and stepped out into the scorched landscape.

  Much was as it had been, but for twists and torques of fire scattered about the seabed, combustible material ignited by the errant supra-flare.

  Rep gestured, and Cheth descended. We accommodated ourselves upon its back, and it rose and flew towards the sun.

  We travelled for hours, and the sun expanded to fill fully half the sky. I dozed, and dreamed, lucid images of men and women, golden humans who radiated greatness, and I was filled by an inexpressible surge of joy, of ineffable rapture. The intensity was such that it brought me awake, and for seconds I was disconcerted to find myself riding upon the back of a strange creature, across a dying earth, towards a boiling sun.

  I closed my eyes and attempted to recapture the images, to access memo
ries so far denied me. I failed to recall specific instances of my life before, but I did come upon nebulous feelings, maddeningly elusive: feelings of love and hope, upwellings of basic emotion. They were so general they might have belonged to any human at any time in history.

  We were travelling high above the seabed obscured by drifting sands. I thought I saw, to my left, a mountainside shiver and collapse. I blinked, and the movement of my travelling companions, as they turned and watched the looming peak crumble and slide into the seabed, alerted me to the fact that I was not hallucinating.

  “What is happening?” asked Kamis.

  “The Earth,” Rep replied, “suffers stress from time to time; the pressure of the sun . . .” It was silent for a time, then said, “These are the last years of the planet.”

  We greeted its words with silence, such was the enormity of the concept.

  “The last years,” I echoed.

  “The sun’s gravitational force is tearing the planet apart, and has been doing so for millennia; but now has come the time when the integrity of the world will bear no more, and Earth will be torn to pieces. Already the moon has crumbled to dust . . .”

  Cheth said, “To think! The end of the world which has harboured so many great races, so much grand history. The planet has been an arena, upon which has been played out the destiny and fate of countless optimistic races.”

  It was a humbling thought.

  “And this,” said Kamis, “is why we were brought here, to the end of time?”

  Instead of replying, Rep turned a claw towards the earth below. The sandstorm had abated, to reveal a flat expanse of shimmering sand. I saw, far below, and made minuscule by our elevation, a procession of . . . at first I thought them vehicles, but on closer inspection I made out groups of individuals making their way towards the sun at speed.

  Cheth banked, and we glided towards the seabed, and the individuals resolved themselves into all manner of strange and wondrous creatures. I beheld a great segmented insects scurrying alongside a creature as golden and proud as a lion, but bi-pedal and clad in robes. I saw something like a jellyfish pulsing along through the air, its polychromatic innards strobing through the spectrum in what might have been some form of arcane language; I saw beings like birds the size of pterosaurs, and rolling balls of sinew that conformed to no life-form I had ever beheld. Among these varied beings I made out familiar figures: crab-beings like Rep running hither and yon as if shepherding the crowds.