evolve and thrive in the new medium, some fundamentally dead kind of being that would be capable of carrying on its metabolic activities on the far side of existence, reproducing beyond the grave at birth, a creature that breathed corrosive poisons and pumped hyped-up hydrocarbons through its invulnerable veins.
He sat quietly behind the wheel, letting the car do all the work, taking him up and up onto the steadily rising spine of California.
As the hours passed, even the few last traces of civilization began to drop away. He was in the foothill country, now, where people had generally built their houses from wood, and there were hardly any ruins left to see. Fire had taken care of that: the natural succession of forest blazes, sweeping across the uninhabited towns in the dry season year after year, had scoured the land of man’s presence.
Peaceful. An empty world lay before him.
A total contrast to the densely populated turbulence of San Francisco, and all the other nightmare zones of urban life stretching down the coast with hardly a break all the way to the great Belial, the Beast with a Thousand Heads itself, Los Angeles. Even the thought of L.A. made Carpenter wince. That monstrous blemish on the landscape, that pullulating black hole of ineffable ugliness, where uncountable millions of harried souls huddled together in unspeakable heat and air so foul it could be cut and sliced and stacked—
Los Angeles, the city of his birth—
Carpenter could remember his grandfather’s tales of growing up in an unfucked world—sentimental memories of the old Los Angeles of long ago—the late twentieth century, maybe? The early twenty-first? A lost paradise, so the old man had said, a place where the wind was fresh and clear off the ocean and days were mild and pleasant. The parks and lush gardens everywhere, the spacious homes, the sparkling sky, the snow on the mountaintops behind Pasadena and San Gabriel in the winter. Sometimes even now Carpenter would visit that vanished Los Angeles in his dreams: the beautiful unspoiled Los Angeles of the distant past, the remote and unattainable 1990s, say, before the iron sky had closed in on everything. He hoped that it hadn’t all been just some senile romantic fantasy of his grandfather’s invention, that it had really been like that back then. He felt sure that it had been. But it was gone now and would never return.
Onward. Eastward.
Lightning flashed in the empty sun-blasted vault of the sky, a spear-shaft of white brightness crossing the other brightness. A far-off drumroll of thunder. It meant nothing, Carpenter knew. Merely Zeus clearing his throat. The lightning was generated by heat differentials, and rain almost never came with it All that would come was fire, cutting its scalpel path along the grasslands, then widening, widening.
The trees were different, now. Instead of oaks, there were soaring pines and slender creamy trees that might be aspens. Low gnarly clumps of chaparral—manzanita and greasewood, mainly—bordered the old highway. He saw no other cars. He was the last man alive in the world. In some places, where fire had lately been, stands of bare and blackened tree trunks stretched away in all directions for miles, rising above the charred earth.
Fire was pure. Fire was good.
Let it burn everything everywhere, Carpenter prayed. Let it sear away the sins of the world.
How strange, he thought, that the human race had survived the worst of its national rivalries and its religious wars, had put so much of the old cockeyed irrational strife behind it, had entered into an era of actual peace and global cooperation, more or less. And then this: rot and ubiquitous tropic heat and atmospheric degradation and doom. Strange, strange, strange. Nick Rhodes in his laboratory, struggling with his conscience as he strived to turn the human race into something with gills and green blood. Kovalcik out in the Pacific under that brute of a sun, filling her ship with sea monsters for the needs of hungry humanity. Poor shitheaded Paul Carpenter, so eager to haul an iceberg back to a foolish ungrateful city that he forgets what little decency had ever been programmed into him, and allows himself to abandon—
No.
What you are doing right now, he reminded himself, is running away from all of that.
Fragments of some old barely remembered liturgy came to him.
Onward. Eastward.
The highway climbed and climbed and climbed, until it entered a comparatively straight stretch in a pass cloaked by the gathering darkness of the oncoming night. This was the high country here. Thin air, toothpick forests of slender struggling pines reaching toward timberline, above them bare rock faces like immense granite shields. All around him rose the purple-gray bulks of enormous mountains, the loftiest peaks of the Sierra.
There was actually a tiny fringe of snow on the north faces of some of the tallest ones, trapped in sheltered bowls and cirques, and Carpenter stared at those turreted patches of white as though he had been translated to some other planetary sphere, one of the moons of Jupiter, perhaps. He had seen snow maybe three times in his life before this. You had to go to the high country, two or three miles above sea level, if you wanted to see it, and then only on the north faces, and at certain times of the year.
Let it snow everywhere, Carpenter thought.
Let the land be covered from sea to sea by a shining white blanket. And let us emerge from it into a pure new springtime of sweet fresh renewed life.
Sure. Sure.
And now he was across the purple-gray mountains, on the far side of the pass, coming down by switchback upon switchback into what he assumed was Nevada. Night was descending quickly. A hard black sky, no moon, plenty of stars, the eerie silent floating lights of space habitats occasionally making their passage among them, visible to the naked eye. Time to settle down for a little while and let the car’s reciprocator get a little ahead of the rate of energy consumption so that it could recharge the batteries for the next leg of the journey.
He had rarely seen such a backdrop of darkness and such an intensity of brightnesses crossing it. The sky here looked cold, cold as space itself, frigid mountain air, a terrible icy clarity to it quite different from city air, eternally swirling with muck. But Carpenter knew that it wasn’t so. That was a hot sky out there, same as anywhere else. Wherever you went in this sorry world the sky was always hot, even at midnight, even at the edge of this dark and star-flecked mountain kingdom.
Carpenter pulled off the road into a turnout cut from the side of the hill he was traversing and had a bleak dinner of packaged algae cakes that he had brought with him from Oakland. He washed it down with a little sour wine from a bottle cached below the dashboard. Then he curled up and slept in the car, with the security alarms on, as though he were in the midst of some deadly city. When the sun sprang into the morning sky and came crashing against his windshield he sat up quickly, bewildered, not knowing for a moment where he was or what was happening, thinking blurrily that he might be back in Spokane, in his dismal little room on the thirtieth floor of the Manito Hotel.
There was actually a town on the valley floor just ahead of him. It even looked inhabited: a couple of dozen houses, some shops, a restaurant or two. Cars moving around, even this early in the morning.
He pulled up outside the restaurant. DESERT CREEK DINER, it said out front. It looked as if it hadn’t been remodeled since about 1925. Carpenter felt as though he had been traveling in time as well as space.
Everyone inside was wearing a face-lung. That seemed wrong, wearing face-lungs in this outpost of 1925, but Carpenter put his on and went in.
A genuine human waitress. No androids, no table visors, no data pads for entering your orders. She smiled at him, eyes twinkling above the breathing-mask.
“What’ll it be? Scrambled eggs? Coffee?”
“Fine,” Carpenter said. “That’s what I’ll have.”
He hadn’t left California yet, he discovered shortly. The Nevada boundary was another couple of miles down the road.
His Company credit card took care of the meal. He still had that much corporate existence, apparently.
When he had eaten he set off toward the east again. The morning flowed toward him out of Utah. Everything was sandy and almost colorless here, and the landscape had the look of not having felt rain since at least the thirteenth century. There were jagged mountains here, not anything like the Sierra but big enough, pink in the early light and then golden brown. Fluffy white clouds, deep blue sky with faint yellow striations of greenhouse gases.
