Eupocalypse Box Set

by Peri Dwyer Worrell

  Finally, exhaustion overwhelmed him, and he reclined against a cushion and closed his eyes. Drifting off to sleep lulled by conversation he couldn’t understand had transported him to childhood. He dreamed of his parents, left behind in China when he’d left for Georgetown as an exchange student so long ago.

  He woke up the next morning alone, on the carpet where he’d apparently fallen asleep. He went outside, blinking in the morning sun, and saw the whole family around the yard, eating dates and dried fish and sipping red tea. The old woman brought him a suit of clothes, a simple galabia and heavily-patched drawstring pants, and gestured that he should take them and put them on. He complied, and got a round of hooted approval when he emerged. He wadded up his filthy clothing into his bag.

  The girl spoke, urged by her father . “Speak English?” she said, to Li’s surprise.

  “Yes, I do! I do! Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

  She stared in incomprehension.

  He tried again.

  “Yes. English.”

  “Go…that way?” She pointed east.

  “Yes, I go that way. Look for African boats.” He tried to speak slowly and simply.

  “My papa and brother take you to Aden.”

  “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” He pressed his hands together and bowed in what he hoped was a universal gesture of gratitude.

  “Why take me? Why clothes? Why food? Why?”

  “You bring luck. Stranger bring good luck. Good fortune. Inshallah.”

  Li could only repeat his thanks again and again. He nodded and bowed to each family member in turn.

  Finally, the man and the oldest son boarded the boat, and Li found he was expected to row as well. Of course, he didn’t mind at all, but the boat kept veering to the side where he sat because he couldn’t match the teenager’s powerful oar strokes. With a disgusted expression, the youth eventually shooed him away.

  Li sat and watched the sea, the sky, and the coastline, feeling useless and helpless, until they came around a point of land as they approached the coastal port of Aden.

  He scanned the harbor eagerly, but didn’t see Meala’s fleet.

  His heart sank. If they were planning a rendezvous with the Sana’a contingent, Aden was the logical place to do so. If Meala had died, at least the sailors in her fleet could tell him, release him from this sharp-edged, shrill unknowingness. If they weren’t here, where could they be? Attacked by pirates (he didn’t think they would take on boats so well-armed and fiercely crewed, but one never knew)? Perhaps they’d been and gone?

  He extracted his ctenophore for the millionth time and texted: Meala. Send. Silence.

  This is the hardest choice I’ve ever had to make. But I have been extraordinarily lucky here so far. I don’t belong in this part of the world, and it will be the death of me. I need to go home.

  After many more bows and professions of gratitude, he left his benefactors. He walked Aden’s main street, stopping everyone he met, addressing them in Mandarin and English.

  “Can you tell me if there are any ships leaving for the far east?” Person after person shrugged and moved on, refusing to meet his eyes.

  A wizened man finally responded, in English. “Where?” the man asked. “Korea? China?”

  “I’m going to China, but anywhere east of here is a first step. Anywhere in Asia will get me closer than here!”

  “Have you checked the secondary harbor?” the man asked. “Most of the long-haul freighters dock there.”

  “Secondary…harbor?” Li asked, not daring to hope. The man pointed, and in his eagerness Li almost knocked him down.

  He jogged along the road, towards what he’d assumed was the city center, past a village of squatters in shipping containers abandoned since the eupocalypse. He found, instead, a second, smaller cove. And in the center of that cove, he saw ten beautiful, elegant batwinged ships, armed with cannons and flying the flag of Mother Isis.

  “Meala,” he breathed. He ran towards the shore, shouting her name. “Meala!” Louder! “Meala!”

  Of course, the ships were anchored too far out for anyone to hear him. He sank to the sand, digging his fingers into its silky dryness in frustration.

  He sat there all day, disturbed occasionally by food and trinket vendors, none of whom spoke either of his languages. He watched a troop of women glean the shore for its thin accumulation of seabutter. He watched wading birds scavenge the shallows.

  About halfway through the afternoon, a man in a boat rowed up to where he sat and hailed him. He spoke English.

  He also, he explained, made his living ferrying people back and forth to boats at anchor. “It’s two drachmas or the equivalent in trade. Which ship you going to?”

  “That one there.” He pointed out the fleet’s flagship. “I need to visit its captain. But I have no money or trade goods.”

  “Admiral Meala? You know her?” The man was impressed. Inside, Li was elated—Meala alive!—but he still had to get to the boat.

  “Yes, I know her well.”

  “A likely story.”

  “No, really! She’ll be glad to see me! She will.”

  “Hmph. I could row out there and ask her.”

  “Yes! Please do!”

  “Too much work. Then I’d just have to row back here and get you. Climb aboard.” Li waded out to comply, and the boatman put up a hand. “You’re lying, you’re swimming back.”

  Li nodded. The boat ride seemed to take forever. He scanned the deck impatiently. He saw crew women at the rail, but none with her familiar physique and bearing.

  She could have changed. It’s been almost a year. And she’s young. So young.

  But then she stepped out on deck, resplendent as he’d remembered. His heart leapt to his throat. She came to the rail and saw him, and he was close enough to see her face light up, her shoulders lift, and her smile break out like the sunrise.

  She commanded a ladder be thrown down, and the boatman be paid. Li climbed deliberately, anxious not to ruin this moment with a clumsy slip in his eagerness.

  When at last he stood on the deck, face to face with her, he could see nothing else. She was in that moment not a commander, but just a lover. She closed the distance between them and enveloped him with two strong, supple arms and one muscular leg wrapped about his body. They kissed, warm and gentle, and then pressed their cheeks together—savoring the touch, the smell, the sound, and the sensation of each other’s breath. His hand strayed across her side and she flinched and drew back slightly.

  Their attention returned to their surroundings and they realized they were surrounded by Meala’s aides. Four fierce faces scowled at him. The fifth smiled. It was not a nice smile.

  “When will we place your new concubine’s spur and scarab, commander?”

  XL.

  The Spoils

  Liallil led her women’s force down the mountain trails that led down from Sana’a in the heights to the sultry sea air of Aden. The male warriors of Sana’a had fallen with amazing ease, even considering the city had been decimated by bombing and starved by blockades just before the p davisii struck. Their women had heard of the New Islam, which was more in alignment with the hidden Asherah traditions handed down over millennia, mother to daughter, in these remote mountains. They whispered of Isis over fences and wells, cradles and goat pens. The men had found their slings frayed, swords either blunted or their hilts loosened, spears wettened and warped. The side gates and doors of the walled districts had been mysteriously unlocked.

  The warriors of Isis had later noticed that when they held the mass ritual of spur and scarab placement for their new subjects, the girl children gathered there outnumbered the boys undergoing the ceremony by about five to one. Liallil, the sortie commander, and hence the chief of the temporarily occupied town, was concerned, but there was nothing to be done without re-fighting the battle they had just won. She made mental note which of her subordinates seemed happy about the thwarting of the Lady’s will, and which of
them were irritated by it.

  The women had feasted on the plenty and reveled in the cooler air in the heights. It had only taken Sanaa a few years for them to emerge from the hardship and want they suffered, Before. The bizarre weather patterns that had made a winter that wouldn’t end in North America had brought steady rain to them for three twice-yearly growing seasons in a row, and now they had grain, meat, and vegetables in abundance.

  The march was less strenuous downhill than the climb upwards had been, for the sea-level dwellers. They smiled as the relative moisture of the sea breeze hit their faces when they crested the last ridge. They crossed the last miles singing praise for Durga Isis and proclaiming their triumph.

  Meala greeted them gladly before a tent, erected on land, expressly for this purpose. After pomp and praise of Liallil’s victory before her troops as they cheered, the two women went inside the tent. Liallil stiffened as she saw Li.

  “The rumors are true. Is this wise, commander?” the junior officer asked.

  “It’s the wisdom of the Great One who’s returned him to me. The little friends bore him here on their backs.”

  “And yet he hasn’t taken the spur or scarab?”

  “By my order.”

  “But surely you see what will happen here! The women will see their leader flouting the law of the New Islam, and they’ll all make exceptions of their own men!”

  “And what would be so terrible in that? Since when do two wrongs make a right?” Meala took out her ctenophore. “Here’s the message from Bilqis. I anticipated your questions. I knew you’d challenge this, as rightly you should.”

  Liallil scrolled patiently through the Ge’ez text and looked up. “It is as you say. Bilqis decrees that the spur and scarab are no longer halal!”

  “So may it be. Ins’Isis. Let us make the announcement together.”

  The two women stepped out the door of the tent and strode to the shoreline, Meala confident and happy, Liallil stiff with inner conflict. The waves lapped behind them as they addressed the assembled troops.

  Meala was the first to speak. “We have vanquished the Zar-Wak everywhere we have met him!”

  The women pounded the butts of their weapons on the ground and cheered and shrieked with joy.

  “Soon, we feast!” Liallil was met with even more ebullient cheers at this.

  They waited for the hoots of joy to die down. “But there’s one more thing to celebrate. The Lady is good!” More cheering, subdued.

  “We have avenged the ripping of our flesh wherever we found it. Did we find it in Sana’a?” Meala said.

  A murmured “No,” from the assembly, looking side-eyed at each other in confusion.

  “Then why do we inflict offense where no offense was given?” Liallil said with barely a note of reluctance.

  Before the crowd could react, Meala took up the speech. “Here’s the message from Bilqis, who resides on high in Gabal Elba.” She raised her ctenophore overhead.

  Every woman in the assemblage heard her individual creature trill in its pouch as the edict bounced through the spiral cryptographic quantum ether to verify itself on her device.

  “Read and consider. Do as you will.” The women’s heads were down, some reading the Ge’ez text on their ctenophores—others who had not learned to read listening to the words as they played aloud. They nodded at one another—some annoyed, some jubilant, but most indifferent.

  As pre-arranged, Li emerged from the tent. He’d cleaned up nicely in the days since the boatman had brought him to Meala. At the time, he’d looked like a drowned rat, caked in salt and dressed in borrowed rags. Now he stood tall in a ceremonial galabia and a serene expression; only a subtle tightening about his eyes told Meala of his inner terror. He took his place next to Meala. The scattered hard-liner women among the troops, who’d savored their vengeance against men for centuries of female genital mutilation, murmured discontentedly.

  “As for me, I take my signals from the Great Goddess herself.”

  The two of them, Meala and Li, raised their arms. The wavelets lapped their ankles, and a huge wave rolled in. Yet, there was no weather to impel it on this glaring Mid-east day, below the molten sun set in its blue-white field of sky. The wave didn’t break, though, but grew, and became a twenty-foot woman, crowned and bejeweled, with ten tentacles, riding a lion.

  Disorder reigned. Some of the women fell to their faces in worship. Others wept. Some brandished their weapons, ready to challenge this apparition at their commanders’ word. Some backed up in horror—among them fierce fighters who had put men to death in battle within the fortnight. Faced with the embodied supernatural in broad daylight, they fell into cowardice.

  Durga-Abiba extended two tentacles, gently plucked Meala and Li from the beach, and set them behind her on the lion. Her voice was the voice of multitudes:

  “I AM WHO AM. I AM WHO MAKES. LET NO ONE SUBDUE THE POWER OF MAKING EVER AGAIN. THIS SEA IS THE SEA OF THE LION. THIS WORLD IS THE WORLD OF FOREVER.”

  The lion turned away. A spear flung by a single confused, impassioned warrior fell impotently short. The lion surged through the waves, where it left a deep, foaming wake. The couple behind the goddess clung to its back, heads down on each other’s shoulders to keep the wind of their motion and the salt spray it kicked up out of their eyes.

  Liallil watched them until they faded into invisibility in the south, then turned to the troops. Her ambivalence was gone as she realized that she was now in command. “Our commander is gone—on her honeymoon,” she smiled. “Let’s see about boarding these ships.

  “We have a new mission: in India!”

  The women cheered.

  XLI.

  Let It Be

  D.D. on the left, Jessica on the right, they held Ozark’s hands. He stumbled on the sand, his broken hip only recently cleared by the chiropractor and physiotherapist to bear weight, the soft, uneven surface too much of a challenge.

  They stopped for him to rest, and Jessica stroked his black hair. Her fingers sought the knot behind his left ear, the patch of bare scalp where the thresher tine had almost killed him. The doctors said he would never hear out of that ear again. The hand she held was oddly stiff, flexed and rigid, with a tremor when he tried to use it. The results of the spinal-cord injury—but the doctors agreed he was young enough that more recovery might be possible.

  Abiba, however, wanted to form her own opinion. His broken ribs had knit well. He was learning to read, and to his grandmother’s delight, he had a fascination for all things living and how they worked.

  How they worked. How quickly they had worked to replace what had been lost! Jessica took out her ctenophore and thumbed it, and a small dronemobile hummed up and settled on its spider-like legs. They helped him onto it and continued their stroll to the water’s edge.

  Alfred trotted behind them. “I was afraid I was too late! Oh, Mother Goddess, we hail you and beseech your blessings!” he shouted at the sea.

  D.D. smothered a smirk. It couldn’t be easy for him to feel still so distant from the thing he held most sacred. D.D. and Jessica had come to know her better than most ever would. It really was unseemly for her to be smug.

  Abiba arose, sending a school of fifth-generation ctenophores that swam and scooted and slithered on four jointed legs and four fat tentacles apiece from the water up onto the shore. By the time Ozark’s foot was on the strand, they seamlessly flowed over his body. They caressed Alfred’s feet as well, and he closed his eyes in joy.

  “Now, now. Now, now,” cooed Abiba through each of a thousand animals’ mouths and her own. Ozark was completely covered with them now, barely a glimpse of his skin showing here and there.

  “Can you explain to me?” Alfred begged.

  “I could but you would have to become.”

  “I am ready to become.”

  “You are as. You may never be. You cannot become.”

  “But I,” said Ozark, “I can become well.”

  Abiba continued, the beasts sc
urrying over Ozark undiverted as they also addressed Alfred. “You cannot know unless you are. I cannot know except as I see and feel and hear through each of these, my senses. You have only you, but still that’s enough for you to be conscious.

  “You will never be Consciousness. You can only know.”

  Alfred fell to his knees. “You are the great One. I am humbled before you.” He sprawled facedown on the sand.

  The ctenophores dropped away from Ozark and slid into the sea. His gnarled and twisted right hand was straight, pale, and limp. His left toe faced straight ahead for the first time since his fall.

  “Ozzie! Ozzie!”

  A chorus of voices called excitedly, barely audible over the rush of the surf: Missy and Marta, trailed by Pablo and Maria, with Deirdre upright on her hip.

  Ozark turned his head to see his playmates. Jessica gulped.

  Their calls had come from his left.

  The End

  Dear Reader:

  Thank you once again for purchasing and reading this trilogy. It was a joyful and laborious pathway writing and publishing it. I hope, once again, that you will take the time to review Book 3 on Amazon.

  One thing of which you may be sure: I won’t stop writing as long as I’m sucking air! If you’d like to keep abreast of my work, consider following my blog at www.eupocalypse.com, or my Amazon author page.

  —Peri Dwyer Worrell

  III.

  Science Fiction—Caution: Contains Real Science.

  The pendulum of the SF&F genre has continued to swing gratifyingly in the three years since I began writing the Eupocalypse series. In all its manifestations, hard sci-fi is roaring back into style. These books are a tribute not to the glory days of the Golden Age of serialized space opera of the 40s and 50s—but to the heady, revolutionary, sometimes psychedelic days of 60s and 70s sci-fi.