by Drew Ford
* * *
He awakes to unclouded vision. The vacationers checked out of his optic nerve as he slept. He rubs his empty eyes and stumbles to the corner market, where he throws down a few skins and picks up some foodslabs.
“You don’t have to pay for those,” the Gany monitoring the electricity says.
“Yes, I do.”
It would be so easy, he thinks sometimes, to go down to the place where the Ganys congregate, the place where you can go rent your body for a day or a lifetime to their volunteers, and just turn yourself over. Shut off your brain for as long as you wanted, and you’d get a nice pile of goodies when your assignment was over. But he’d never done that. Renting his eyes was as far as he’d go. And even that was done not out of love for the aliens or the desire for material objects but the knowledge that, if he did not do it, he would be marked a traitor and slated for commandeering.
The Ganys have taken a special interest in humans. They had cordoned them off in cities with invisible olfactory walls, so that the remaining humans would be able to find one another more easily. And of course, they had brought The Cure. All of it was done for our—no, he thinks, their—own good.
He takes a dramatic bow, as if addressing a live audience. And in a way, he is.
* * *
He’s leaving the city today. He crams a stack of foodslabs into a looted knapsack and heads north on foot. He walks until the sun is directly overhead and then stops by a river to eat.
The river is contaminated; he can smell the plague in it, festering. But there are drinkslabs in his pack, too. He tears off a few chunks of the tasteless foam and presses on.
A half hour later he is halted by a smell halfway between burning plastic and dog shit. I’ve reached it, he thinks. The wall between New York City and the rest of the world. He holds his breath and trudges through the wall, but it is no use. He can’t hold his breath forever. His chest deflates and the putrescent odor fills his nose and lungs, as if the dog shit is being shoveled into his mouth by the handful. He gags, and vomits up a piece of semi-digested foodslab. Choking, he runs out of the wall, and takes a whiff of pure air.
He didn’t even make it past the fifty yard line.
Plunging back in, he finds the smell has changed. Now it’s the scent of burning tires. He moves to the right and hits a wall of solid rotting flowers. Moving forward, there is a stench like fish guts being baked in the sun. He stumbles backwards, and falls into the strong arms of a stranger.
“Hello there, little guy,” a park ranger says. He looks into the ranger’s crossed and clouded eyes. A Gany.
“I couldn’t get past the wall,” he says. His eyes are running with tears and there is vomit on his chin.
“You shouldn’t be out here all alone.” The ranger gestures at his vehicle. “C’mon, let me give you a ride back home.”
He doesn’t want to take charity from a Gany, but he doesn’t like the prospect of walking three and a half hours either, especially since he still can’t breathe in all the way and his stomach feels swollen and fluttery. He gets in the vehicle.
“You have a mate back at home?” Of course, that’s the first thing the ranger would say.
“No.”
“Human beings should be fruitful and multiply. It says so in your holy book.” The Gany speaks with the friendly, homey Upper New York accent that was the ranger’s voice when he was in control of the body, but he can sense the cold analytical tone of the intelligent energy beam guiding it.
He grunts and turns back to the window. Less than twenty minutes later the four-wheel-drive all-terrain vehicle pulls up in front of his bar. That fucking Gany read his mind.
“You be safe now, partner.”
He slams the door.
In the apartment building across the street two humans are mating. For a moment, he wonders what it would be like to forget everything, become a creature of instinct, every moment of your life unscripted and so automatic.
Then he goes back into the bar.
THE BLACK MOULD
MARK SAMUELS
THE mould first appeared in a crater on a dead world at the rim of the universe. This world, with a thin atmosphere and a surface that comets and meteors had battered for millions of years, spun in a void of sunless dark. Perhaps it had been one of those comet collisions that had brought the mould into existence, some unique arrangement of molecules mutated by radiation and lying dormant in the comet’s slushy ice, something waiting to awaken and grow. The mould may have taken aeons to reach maturity and begin the process of reproduction. But when it did so, it grew rapidly and spread unchecked over the surface of that dead world, across its valleys and craters and mountains, across the equator and from pole to pole.
Once it had conquered that first world it became conscious, such was the size and complexity of the mould. The billions upon billions of simple cells formed a network that developed into a debased, gigantic hive-mind. The mould experienced a progressively horrible sequence of nightmares, a spiral of nameless dread without a centre. Its form of consciousness did not include the faculty of reason, but was a unique faculty; that of derangement. And its monstrous visions grew more intense as it spread, ever more profound in their ineffable malignity.
When it had conquered that dead and distant world, after everything lay under its ghastly black embrace, its nightmares demanded that it reach out across the void. And so trillions of spores were ejected into space.
In the end it brought ghastly, complete darkness to that unknown quarter of cosmic space, for it learnt how to suffocate stars.
It was terror, deepening without cessation, which bore aloft the spores of the mould on their voyage through interstellar space. Nightmarish ecstasy was the soul of the mould. It hungered and sought to consume the universe itself. Its dread was of a nameless horror, a stark madness beyond imagination; an ultimate horror that lurked somewhere in the universe but which it could not yet identify.
The mould had no means of recognising any other form of consciousness apart from its own. As it reproduced, the nameless dread that assailed it became exponentially complex. It existed only in order to experience the ultimate nightmare, the heart of horror, the petrifying vision that ends only in oblivion. It was in the attempt to destroy itself that the mould consumed everything around it, and dimly it looked forward to a time when there was nothing left to consume, when the entire universe was laid waste, and it would wither and die for want of sustenance. It was one entity, eventually separated by the inconceivable vastness of the intergalactic void, and with each spore exhaled between worlds still a component of the whole. Its nightmares were communicated telepathically and were not slowed by the immensity of the cosmos. Dreams are swifter than light.
When the spores found a world, be it asteroid, moon or planet, they would drift to its surface like soft rain and begin the process of assimilating whatever was found there. Where once there was a mighty empire with towers that reached to the heavens, soon after there were only ruins, and the black mould consumed the creatures of that world. Only husks remained as evidence that they had ever existed at all.
The ravages of the mould increased as it multiplied. As immeasurable time passed, countless galaxies bore the evidence of its all-conquering reign. Where there had been a multitude of worlds of differing aspects, of arid yellow deserts, of misty and scarred blue ice, of airless grey dust, now all were identical. All were blackened, their surfaces entirely smothered by the mould: canyons and mountains, plateaux and craters, cities and forests, ice and sand, even oceans (choked by a miasmal slime that conquered all incalculable depths). The mould flourished everywhere and anywhere. It mattered not if its habitat were a world of liquid methane or water, or a world roasting close to a star, or a world far flung out in space and frozen at absolute zero.
Astronomers on distant worlds looked on with dread at the development. Those that perceived it not, perished all the same. Multiform were the species of the universe, following different paths of evol
ution and modes of thought, though none were as the mould. But all those that looked outward at the universe felt wonder and terror, whether they were taloned crustaceans in a fungous jungle, cognisant machines of incredible technological complexity, or peace-loving sea mammals that gazed with dark eyes at the stars above the waters of an alien world. All knew the end was near and their kind would, ere centuries had passed, be consumed and then participate in the cosmic corruption of the mould.
One insignificant species amongst the many millions in the universe succumbed to the mould after vain attempts to resist its advance. This species, a nearly hairless race of anthropoids, habited the third planet orbiting an undistinguished star. The mould consumed the outer gas giants and the satellites of this solar system one by one. The simians watched with mounting terror as the spores drew inexorably nearer, moving unaccountably against the solar wind and turning the red desert planet in fourth orbit as black as the other outer worlds.
By the time the mould had reached the third planet’s only satellite the hairless apes were in turmoil. Their civilisation was on the brink of anarchy and they were close to destroying themselves. The light cast by the world’s moon at night was no longer white but a deathly grey, shading to black, and becoming dim. It bore the same affliction that had reigned throughout all those galactic regions the mould had conquered. There were morbid ape poets that wrote verses to the contagion and seemed to welcome the insidious nightmares that foretold complete assimilation. But other apes, vainglorious followers of science, who fired rockets into the heavens, watched the explosions that took place on their moon with desperate hope. The satellite bore a hellish aspect, utterly unfamiliar to them. The mould had rendered it terrifying: like decay in a corpse.
And when the spores finally filtered down onto their own world, there were many more explosions and scenes of horror amongst the hairless apes as they turned on themselves, blaming each other for the failure to resist what was, after all, inevitable.
And it was not long before the streets of their cities were thick with the mould, not long before black slime ran in the water, not long before the anthropoids found the first patches of black ichors on their skins. And then the endless dreams came, just before the mould completely consumed the helpless simians.
As soon as the star of that solar system was overrun and suffocated, the spores progressed onwards, their numbers always swelled by the exhalations of the solar systems consumed before. Across the unknown stellar gulfs spread the contagion, never once halted in its expansion. There were other civilisations that tried to resist its advance, but all perished in the end. The most advanced ones, who had cunning and the available means, elected to flee before the mould’s arrival. But even these were caught up with and consumed in the end. After aeons, all those that fled found that there was no longer anywhere left to hide.
The mould and its spores became omnipresent throughout the universe. The gas clouds and the gulfs of space were choked with spores. And yet the mould had not achieved its goal. Although the entire universe had been laid waste, and neither life nor thought existed, except for the mould and its exponential nameless dread, still it had not achieved the final petrifying vision that could terrify it into self-extinction.
And so the spores poured into those stars that had reached the final point of collapse, into the black holes scattered throughout the cosmos. The mould appeared in other universes and in every epoch across those other dimensions. It spread and adapted as voraciously as it had ever done, unchecked and irresistible, from the beginning until the end of all existence.
But the ultimate, petrifying vision could still not be glimpsed and the mould, now the supreme conqueror, dreamed on and on in its hideous majesty; doomed to re-experience its nameless dread forever; for it was the mould itself that was the ultimate horror and of itself it had never dreamed.
It groped futilely, as one in darkness gropes for the light, backwards and forwards throughout all space and time, until all that had been, and all that was to be, fell under its dominion. And there was to be no release from the nightmare.
THE PRETENCE
RAMSEY CAMPBELL
As the taxi drew up outside the terminal the driver said “What time’s your flight?”
“In about an hour.”
“Where are you flying?”
“To the mainland. Just to Liverpool.”
“You’ll be home before tomorrow, then.”
“I expect so.” Though he didn’t see why this should concern her, Slater said “I’m sure I shall.”
An April breeze like a reminiscence of a summer holiday set palm leaves chattering above him while he paid the fare. As he made for the terminal, the glass doors slipped apart, letting out a young woman so wide-eyed that her stare seemed to render her pale face even thinner. She thrust a glossy brochure at him, and he took it for a special offer until he glanced at it, having trundled his suitcase into the departure hall. The cover of the pamphlet showed a clock without hands and urged SEE YOUR TIME in type as thick as blackened matchsticks. It could almost have been directing his attention to the matrix sign that showed his flight was delayed. He wouldn’t be home by midnight after all; he mightn’t even be on land.
Having failed to locate a handy bin, Slater crumpled the pamphlet in his fist as he led his luggage to the security gates. On the far side of the electronic barrier he retrieved his watch and cash and mobile phone from the tray that emerged from the scanner like a car at the end of a fairground ride. He was putting on his shoes when the guard beside the conveyor belt beckoned to him. “Excuse me, sir, we don’t need that.”
She meant the brochure he’d left in the tray. “Can you bin it for me?”
“I can’t.” Apparently he’d ceased to be a sir. “Please take it,” she said.
It was her reproachful look that made him blurt “You’re a Finalist, are you?”
“We aren’t permitted to discuss our faith, sir.” Though she’d reverted to professionalism, her eyes hadn’t quite caught up, and she leaned across the dormant belt to murmur “If I were you I’d read what you have there.”
He already knew what they believed—he imagined nobody could avoid knowing—and he tramped away so fast that his shoelaces lashed the tiled floor. He sat down to tie them before wadding the brochure to lob it into the nearest bin. As he made for the bar through the duty-free court, sunglasses gave him a host of black looks while a multitude of watches showed him the time, the time, the time. Nobody was seated at the bar itself, though a few of the tables were occupied. Slater perched on a stool at the bar and ordered a glass of merlot. “A large one,” he said.
The barman was a broad slow fellow with a tentatively amused expression. As he brought Slater the glass he said “Another one held up.”
“Me, you mean.” The barman could have been referring to the plane, but when he didn’t admit to it Slater said “No point in fussing over it. I’ll be home when I am.”
“You’re not holding your breath for the end of the world, then.”
“I can’t believe anybody is. It’s not as if this is the first time that was supposed to happen. It’s been meant to end a dozen times in this century alone.”
“Maybe it did.”
Presumably this was the style of joke the barman had been waiting to deliver. “I don’t know why so many people have got it into their heads this time,” Slater complained. “You’d think by now they would know better.”
“If you ask me it’s all the computers. They’re meant to be giving us more of a mind, but it’s got stuff like that in it.”
“The internet, you’re saying. It contains everything, that’s the problem.”
“So none of us know what the world’s like any more.”
“I shouldn’t think it’s quite as bad as that. My mother has no time for computers but she knows what the Finalists are saying will happen.”
“It’s like I say, they get in everybody’s head.”
“She’s why I was over he
re. She and her friends have been working themselves up so much that she had an attack.”
“Better now, is she?”
“She is since I got her to talk about it. I did think the care home staff might have.”
“I couldn’t put my folks in one of those places.”
“My parents came to live on the island,” Slater said with some resentment, “and that’s where she says she wants to stay.”
“What we say isn’t always what we think. Won’t she be fretting about not seeing you tomorrow?”
“I’d already booked the flight. I could have stayed longer with her if I’d known it was going to be late.”
“Thought you weren’t bothered about that,” the barman said as if he’d been presented with a reason for amusement. “Well, it’ll all be over by tomorrow.”
Slater saw people at the tables lift their heads as if they’d sensed danger. He took hold of his glass, only to find he’d drained it while talking. “Same again,” he said. “I’ll just find something to read.”
As he made for the bookshop, such as it was—the first items he saw in it were earplugs and blindfolds—he took out his mobile and sent Melanie a message. Plane late. Don’t know how long. He leafed through the newspapers, which felt oddly out of date, containing not a single reference to the Finalists and their dogged prophecy, though of course that was hardly news any more, if it ever had been. Too many of the paperbacks on display seemed designed to resemble one another—he could almost have taken them for the products of a single mind—and in any case he didn’t expect to have time to finish or even get far into one. He bought a music magazine that reviewed new releases, and was returning to the bar when his mobile emitted its version of Beethoven’s pastoral hymn. “Hold on,” he told Melanie and paid the barman before carrying his glass to a table. “Here I am.”
“Where’s here, Paul?”
“Still at the airport. On the island, I mean.”