Eupocalypse Box Set

by Peri Dwyer Worrell

“It seemed to be one of the women she’s been chatting with from Djibouti. That’s in the Horn of Africa, south of Egypt. But she’s somehow become blended, united, merged, whatever… with the quantum consciousness of the ctenophores. If you can call it consciousness.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, to be conscious, you have to be aware of time passing, right?”

  “I suppose so. I never gave it much thought, but it wouldn’t mean much to experience things if they all happened at the same time, would it?”

  “Or if they happened backwards as easily as forwards. Quantum coherence effects work equally well backwards through time as forwards.” The children’s thumps became louder. They were running and shrieking at the tops of their lungs and the screen door that led to the stairway kept banging.

  Jessica shook her head again. “Maybe it’s because I’m not drinking. Does this make sense to either of you?”

  Gaby and Jeremy shook their heads. Gaby glanced out the door, shifted to get up and check on the kids.

  “You’ll just have to trust me on this. I don’t think your mother will ever be the same. But, and this sounds absurd, but I don’t know if she ever was.”

  The children fell instantaneously silent. Then Pablo and Martha, the two oldest, ran breathlessly in, little Deirdre trailing Martha hand in hand.

  “Come quick! Ozark’s hurt bad!” said Pablo.

  “Real bad!” whimpered Martha.

  Jessica was up and out the door like a shot, Jeremy on her heels and Alfred close behind. Gaby took Pablo by the shoulders. “You’re not in trouble. What happened?”

  “We were playing ringle-eave-door-luck, and Ozark tried to get away from me by climbing down the outside of the steps. I grabbed for him, but he was too heavy.” He took in a deep breath.

  “Mom, he fell on the threshing drum.”

  All color drained from Gaby’s face. “It’s going to be okay,” she said. She released his shoulders and headed out the door. She murmured to herself, “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay,” as she descended the stairs.

  Jeremy stood over the drum of the threshing machine. “Oh, god, oh god,” he said, as Jessica knelt next to Ozark. “I was going to move the drum back into the shed, but then a thunderstorm came up. I’m so sorry.”

  Jessica said, “Can you hear me, Ozzie?”

  Ozark lay on his back, splayed over the thresher drum—a cylinder the size of an oil drum, studded with heavy, blunt six-inch-long steel spikes. Blood flowed from somewhere under his head. The child’s plump baby limbs lay at wrong angles.

  Gaby glanced up. If he’d been at the top, he’d fallen about fifteen feet. He’d hit the squared-off ends of those rods hard.

  She spoke to her husband. “Ride to the hospital.” She took her ctenophore out of her pocket. “I’m calling them now. But you can meet them on the way, or if they haven’t left yet, you can hurry them along and ride with them.”

  Jeremy nodded, relieved to have something to do.

  The three other children clumped around Gaby. Deirdre started moaning for her mother and Martha handed her over. Gaby spoke to the hospital. “Yes, it’s an emergency. A toddler, almost three years old, fell on a thresher. He’s unconscious.” To Jessica, “Is he breathing?”

  Jessica nodded. “He’s breathing,” said Gaby into the ctenophore. To Jessica, Gaby added, “They say not to move him. They’re coming.” Jessica smoothed a lock of hair from the unbloodied side of her son’s forehead, took his limp fingers in her own.

  What felt to be hours later, an enclosed wagon with elaborate spring shock absorbers arrived, and four people got out. Jeremy followed not long after.

  “Hey, doc!” Gaby recognized the emergency doctor, Creekmore, from less serious visits. “It’s bad.”

  “Let me be the judge of that,” Dr. Creekmore said. She examined Ozark carefully where he lay on the thresher, carefully probing the spike his head lay on. She prodded his neck, flicked his fingers and toes, and shone a ctenophore-powered flashlight into his eyes.

  “Let’s get a collar on him, then lift him straight up onto the spine board.” Her technicians efficiently complied, and as he was being placed on the board, Ozark’s eyes flickered open.

  “Ozark?” Jessica said, the technician securing him to the board gently blocking her from getting too close.

  Ozark didn’t respond to his mother’s voice.

  XXXVIII.

  Opposite of Irish

  The pool cabana was livable. The pool itself had drained when the pipes connecting it to the pump had melted away with the machine sickness. Someone had squatted in the main house until the accumulation of garbage and human waste (people obliviously continued to use toilets everywhere, long after it became obvious that they were never going to flush again) made it impossible for any but the most olfactorily stalwart to stand occupying them.

  The walls of the big house were permeated with mold from the water that leaked from ruptured pipes and seeped from vinyl wallpaper. The plywood floors had slowly peeled apart from the synthetic glue that held them together. The nylon and olefin and polyester carpets had dissolved in days. Asphalt roof tiles meant that rain and wind now entered freely.

  But the pool cabana had a clay-tiled roof and steel framing, its floor was tile (now loose, since the mastic holding the tiles to the concrete floor was gone) and the gypsum wallboard was more or less undamaged, though the paint on it had long ago run off in streaks where the P. davisii consumed the synthetic latex and left the pigment.

  D.D. unrolled her bedroll and went out to gather firewood on the concrete pool deck. Kittykitty caught lizards and mice for his dinner. The beach was covered with seabutter, and she found an empty can to use to render it. That task occupied her until nightfall.

  She braced the door shut and lay down, Kittykitty at her feet. One hand clutched her revolver (never did replace it with a semiauto). The central drone unit slept by her side, its cousins perched in various spots around the periphery outdoors. She fell asleep listening to the sound of the waves breaking on the shore.

  She woke at the first glimmer of dawn, acutely aware that her body had aged quite a few years and taken several beatings since the last time she’d slept on concrete. She stretched out as best she could and rolled her neck.

  Making her way down the path to the beach, she disturbed sleeping birds tucked amongst the dunes. She was welcomed by the most glorious, flamboyant, multilayered sunrise imaginable. She skirted a streak of seabutter at the tide line and padded barefoot to the lapping surf, Kittykitty close behind.

  She touched her toes to the top of a wave as it reversed itself. The water was cool. Nothing unusual. Another wave enveloped her feet, rising to the level of her ankles, and pulled away the sand around her feet—and then, beneath them. Kittykitty danced back.

  She staggered slightly, off balance. The next wave was close and splashed her knees, and all at once nothing was solid. She lifted one foot and stepped into her own death. Or something which took her soul away from her body, so she couldn’t own her body anymore. And what is life if not the process of owning one’s body?

  Kittykitty barked and forgot his fear of water. He lunged after her and became enmeshed with Abiba and a million ctenophores.

  The swirl of the waves ceaselessly conveyed a message which was new with every wave. Yet the pattern of the waves was finite; the sea didn’t go on forever. Where she and Kittykitty touched the wave, they canceled it. The next wave came anyway.

  And with it came Africa. With it came the spinfoam energy that bound two lovers on the coast of Yemen. With it came the meshwork of impossibly small black holes that collapsed an impossibly long time ago to make the dimensionless and omnidimensional substance of reality.

  Abiba didn’t need tentacles to embrace D.D.; D.D. grew her own and soothed her loyal hound until his whimpering stopped. A raft of ctenophores bore him along.

  A presence. A presence.

  Abiba sense
d the presence, and it was new to her, but had been in her womb when she was D.D., which was 10-33 instants ago. She and all the ctenophores wriggled and blasted and flew and rolled towards the presence and away from it, and over and under and through and around it.

  Jessica stared at the sun where it ascended above the Gulf, her face puffy, her tear ducts squeezed dry. The section she was standing on had been harvested already; the harvest crews started at the end of the peninsula before daybreak and worked north, delivering their slimy, grimy delicacy to the rendering plant, which heated up early to avoid the heat of fires in the intense sun of midday.

  Something was there in the waves. A dolphin? No. She passed a hand over her face. It didn’t disappear.

  “Jessica.”

  It was her mother’s voice, but not. Improbably, her mother’s dog floated towards her like a sunbathing tourist, sprawling on a raft of ctenophores. The raft bobbed in place a few yards out, Kittykitty’s tail wagging and thumping the beast’s skin. The dog clinched it for her. “Mom?”

  The vague lump in the water coalesced into a human structure, clear and shot with spiral circuitry, then opacified and solidified into her mother. “What’s wrong, baby?”

  “It’s Ozark. He’s in a coma in the hospital.”

  Her mother looked as Jessica remembered her from long ago, in her prime—before the adolescent rebellion had cleaved them apart, before the machine sickness, before the misadventures that had brought Jessica to Texas.

  “What happened, baby?”

  “I knew I shouldn’t have let Gaby and Jeremy take him! He was my child! No matter how bad of a mom I was being, he was my baby! I shouldn’t have let him go!”

  “Was it something they did?”

  “Jeremy left the thresher drum at the foot of the ladder. Gaby’s brat pushed Ozark off the ladder onto it. Oh, Mom, he might never wake up. He looks so still and pale!”

  Jessica froze as a barely-perceptible tendril curled around her leg, and then sighed as a wave of profound relaxation swept through her.

  “Ozark’s given you all he will give you. He’s made you fully alive.” This voice was her mother’s but not—the voice of a presence she felt from far away, on the other side of the world, somehow, but still right here with them. Like a dubbed foreign film, it came from her mother’s lips.

  “How?” Jessica stammered.

  “To live is to own your body. You can only live if you own your body. Men can own a body but only a body, in the same manner you own a television or a house. Women are the source of life and wealth and abundance. What they own is ownership of ownership of ownership. Life after life, life after death. Women are the only ones who are fully alive.”

  Jessica shook her head. The mysteries were complex enough, but her grief made them incomprehensible to her. “My baby—”

  “Jessica.” This was her mother’s voice; no doubt. “Forgive.”

  The word echoed from mother to daughter, owner to ownership, future to cold, past to heat. Forgive.

  The sound began to build and burn like fire, ache like cancer, scream like a harpy on a cold mountaintop: Forgive.

  Jessica wanted to cover her ears. D.D.’s hands were over hers. Abiba would have covered hers, but she had none at the moment. Only Kittykitty was unaffected; he held no grudges, so forgiveness meant nothing to him.

  “How can I forgive them? My baby could be dying!” She sobbed the word so it throbbed, dy-y-y-y-ing.

  “Forgive for yourself.”

  “If I forgive, will he be alright? Will my baby be okay?”

  “Forgive for yourself.”

  At the moment Jessica forgave, D.D. felt something give way within herself as well. Suddenly all the scars she wore like medals slipped away from her like a fish through her fingers. Slights, slaps, punches, kicks. Frotteurs and exhibitionists. rapes and near-rapes. Robberies and scams. Threats and insults. Lies; so many lies. Men shooting at her, chasing her like a wolf pack. Betrayals: Jessica’s father. Tim. Selene and the nuns. Even the mob at the inn. They poufed out and away, in an iridescent mushroom cloud, dissolved in swirling streamers, sifting, sand falling into mud.

  D.D. and Jessica stepped forward at the same moment and fell into a tear-logged embrace.

  “Mom!”

  “It’s okay, baby. It’s going to be okay.”

  XXXIX.

  Sometimes the Sun

  The sun rose over the ocean, illuminating the sky with lavender and rose-gold fluff, high clotted-cream clouds that would soon burn away in the morning light. Li had dozed lightly in his spot propped against the tree trunk, and now the growing daylight was revealing just how desolate his surroundings were.

  It had been thousands of years since Yemen had been anything but a desperately poor, isolated place, a starving nation among its petrowealth-replete Arab neighbors. The proxy wars of the Saudis, Russia, and China in the few years prior to the eupocalypse were an escalation of torture and neglect that had ended abruptly with the transformation of petroleum to water and carbon dioxide. The kleptocracy that thrived on black money and military aid faded into the woodwork, leaving an ungoverned and ungovernable indigenous population.

  None of them were here where Li stood, now. There were: barely-discernible sand tracks; low vegetation similar to the twisted; venerable evergreen he’d slept under; the ocean; and nothing.

  He got to his feet and brushed the sand off his body, emptied out his flotation bag and folded up the cloth. Li sipped at the fresh water remaining in his skin bag and walked to the beach for a splash. A ctenophore approached his feet in the water, and he scooped it out.

  Meala. Her hash came up in the readout. Send.

  He had no real hope of reaching her, had messaged her so many times in the last few days with no response. But hope sprang eternal.

  She didn’t respond. He stowed the beast in the pouch at his waist, where it trilled and settled. It wasn’t one custom-grown for him, but in this sparsely populated area, it hardly needed to be.

  He continued walking. The sun was beginning to get painfully hot, and he improvised a keffiyeh from the bag.

  Presently, he reached a place where the road widened. An open wooden fishing boat sat high on the strand with its oars stowed. A few driftwood shelters had been jammed into the sand, and some metal buckets sat in their shade. A man with a grey goatee and muscles that belied the greyness walked in the shallows. He was surrounded by three youths, all caramel and chocolate skin and eyes, with the agile grace and strength that came from rowing boats and hauling nets—except for the youngest, a grinning slender boy of just ten or so.

  They hailed him excitedly and chattered at him in Arabic, but finally abated when they realized he couldn’t understand a word of it. They gestured towards the buckets in the shelters, and he looked in to see fish, crabs, and octopus. He turned out his pockets expressively. They looked at him gravely, offered him a tiny shotglass from their water supply, and sent him on his way, still hungry. As he crested the next gentle dune slope, he glanced back and saw that three camels had come along the track from inland. Their riders, swathed in white, were talking to the fisherman and his sons.

  Those men probably don’t even understand how much things have changed. Because they haven’t changed much, not for them. Maybe they can’t get cooking fuel anymore, and their mother has had to go back to burning dung and scraps of wood. Maybe they used a motorboat before and now they’re back to rowing.

  He walked on and on, happy to have the sun at his back instead of blinding him. When the path diverged from the shore, he looked at the sand that was devouring the track ahead and at the ocean to his right, and chose to follow the sea, keeping it in sight. At least I won’t wind up lost in the middle of this endless desert.

  Close to nightfall, he came upon a fishing village. He approached its outskirts cautiously. He’d been incredibly lucky to pass that night in the open and unmolested by man or beast. He was unsure, though, whether this village would view him as a guest, a predator…
or prey. This was a harsh part of the world, and he didn’t know the way of it.

  He swayed softly on his feet, silhouetted against the sun that set at his back, casting a long shadow towards the cluster of enclosed yards of goats and chickens. Suddenly, he heard a loud whistle. He squinted and resolved the fisherman waving at him from in front of one of the houses. The ten-year-old boy scampered towards him across the dusty earth, too lightly for the end of a long day in the heartless sun.

  The boy took his hand and tugged him along into the family’s abode. A woman wrapped in colorful cotton cloth knelt there, cooking flatbreads on a grill over a small stick fire in the courtyard. The men and boys came through a break in the low adobe wall and joined her. She pushed away the cloth over her arms and sorted through the buckets, looking for something to make for dinner.

  The males beckoned Li inside and made him sit on the floor with them. The men sipped Karak cardamom tea served by a sister who’d appeared magically from somewhere and vanished the same way. Li smiled and nodded, understanding none of the conversation, but grateful to be included as a guest. The smell of fish on the grill wafted in through the open doorway, and Li thought he might faint from hunger.

  Soon the females came in—Mom in her colorful hijab, and the young daughter in a simple sari-like wrap. The fish had been transformed into a savory spiced stew of tomatoes and okra, and they scooped it up with the soft folding bread.

  When they finished, the women vanished again, and the men and the two older boys began to pass about a sack of khat and chew it. Li tried to pass it on, but the oldest son became quite insistent. Li relented, took a small leaf and nibbled it lightly, then pantomimed taking more each time the bag went by. The others became animated, chattering and laughing. The young boy fell asleep sprawled at his father’s feet.

  Li wished he could understand the conversation. It was apparently quite hilarious, as each appeared to try to outdo the previous man with some sort of story or other. False voices, cryptic dramatic hand gestures, and belly laughs abounded, so infectious that Li laughed along despite his incomprehension.