imagine.
Shadows move in the streets of the city, hollowed-out human shells in uniform. They rustle around the feet of the towering concrete blocks like the dry leaves of autumn, obsessively focussed on the tasks that lend structure to their remaining days. Above them tower masts of steel, propping up the huge geodesic dome that arches across the sky: blocking out the hostile, alien constellations, protecting frail humanity from the dust storms that periodically scour the bones of the ancient world. The gravity here is a little lighter, the night sky whorled and marbled by diaphanous sheets of gas blasted off the dying star that lights their days. During the long winter nights, a flurry of carbon dioxide snow dusts the surface of the dome: but the air is bone-dry, the city slaking its thirst from subterranean aquifers.
This planet was once alive-near the equator there is still a scummy sea of algae that feeds oxygen into the atmosphere, and a range of volcanoes near the north pole indicates plate tectonics in motion-but it is visibly dying. There is a lot of history here, but no future.
Sometimes, in the early hours when he cannot sleep, Roger walks outside the city, along the edge of the dry plateau. Machines labor on behind him, keeping the city tenuously intact: he pays them little attention.
There is talk of mounting an expedition to Earth one of these years, to salvage whatever is left before the searing winds of time erases it forever. Roger doesn’t like to think about that. He tries to avoid thinking about Earth as much as possible, except when he cannot sleep. Then he walks along the cliff top, prodding at memories of Andrea and Jason and his parents and sister and relatives and friends, each as painful as the socket of a missing tooth. He has a mouthful of emptiness, bitter and aching, out here on the edge of the plateau.
Sometimes Roger thinks he’s the last human being alive. He works in an office, feverishly trying to sort out what went wrong; and bodies move around him, talking, eating in the canteen, sometimes talkingto him and waiting, as if they expect dialogue. There are bodies here, men and some women chatting, civilian and some military-but no people. One of the bodies, an army surgeon, told him he’s suffering from a common stress disorder, called survivor’s guilt. This may be so, Roger admits, but it doesn’t change anything. Soulless days follow sleepless nights into oblivion.
A narrow path runs along the side of the plateau, just downhill from the foundations of the city power plant, where huge apertures belch air warmed by the nuclear reactor’s heat-exchangers. Roger follows the path, gravel and sandy rock crunching under his worn shoes, dust trickling over the side of the cliff like sand into the undug graves of his family. Foreign stars twinkle overhead, forming unrecognizable patterns that tell him he’s far from home. The trail drops away from the top of the plateau, until the city is an unseen shadow looming above and behind his shoulder. To his right is a vertiginous panorama, the huge rift valley with its ancient city of the dead outstretched before him. Beyond it rise alien mountains, their peaks as high and airless as the dead volcanoes of Mars.
About half a mile away from the dome, the trail circles an outcrop of rock and takes a downhill switchback. Roger stops at the bend and looks out across the desert at his feet. He sits down, leans against the rough cliff-face and stretches his legs across the path, so that his feet dangle over nothingness.
Far below him, the dead valley is furrowed with rectangular depressions; once, millions of years ago, they might have been fields, but nothing of that survives. They’re just dead, like everyone else on this world.
Like Roger.
In his shirt pocket, a crumpled, precious pack of cigarettes. He pulls a white cylinder out with shaking fingers, sniffs at it, then flicks his lighter under it. Scarcity has forced him to cut back: he coughs at the first lungful of stale smoke, a harsh, racking croak. The irony of being saved from lung cancer by a world war is not lost on him.
He blows smoke out, a tenuous trail streaming across the cliff. “Why me?” he asks quietly.
The emptiness takes its time answering. When it does, it speaks with the Colonel’s voice. “You know why.”
“I didn’t want to do it,” he hears himself saying. “I didn’t want to leave them behind.”
The void laughs at him. There are miles of empty air beneath his dangling feet. “You had no choice.”
“Yes I did! I didn’t have to come here.” He pauses. “I didn’t have to do anything,” he says quietly, and inhales another lungful of death. “It was all automatic. Maybe it was inevitable.”
“-Evitable,” echoes the distant horizon. Something dark and angular skims across the stars, like an echo of extinct pterosaurs. Turbofans whirring in its belly, the F117 hunts on: patrolling to keep the ancient evil at bay, unaware that the battle is already lost. “Your family could still be alive, you know.”
He looks up. “They could?” Andrea? Jason? “Alive?”
The void laughs again, unfriendly: “There is life eternal within the eater of souls. Nobody is ever forgotten or allowed to rest in peace. They populate the simulation spaces of its mind, exploring all the possible alternative endings to their lives. Thereis a fate worse than death, you know.”
Roger looks at his cigarette disbelievingly: throws it far out into the night sky above the plain. He watches it fall until its ember is no longer visible. Then he gets up. For a long moment he stands poised on the edge of the cliff nerving himself, and thinking. Then he takes a step back, turns, and slowly makes his way back up the trail toward the redoubt on the plateau. If his analysis of the situation is wrong, at least he is still alive. And if he is right, dying would be no escape.
He wonders why hell is so cold at this time of year.
The Real World - Steven Utley
Everything felt like a dream. The flight attendants seemed to whisper past in the aisle. The other passengers were but shadows and echoes. Through the window, he could see the wing floating above an infinite expanse of cloudtop as flat and featureless as the peneplained landscapes of the Paleozoic. I’m just tired, he thought, without conviction.
Ivan forced his attention back to the laptop. He had called up an did documentary in which he himself appeared. “Resume,” he said, very softly, and the image on the screen unfroze, and a familiar, strange voice said, “Plant life may actually have invaded the land during the Ordovician Period.” Is that really me? he thought. My face, my eyes, I look so unlived-in. “We know about two dozen genera of land plant in the Silurian,” and the screen first showed a tangle of creeping green tendrils at his younger self’s feet, “such as these, which are called psilophytes,” then a glistening algal mat. “The big flat things you see all over the mudflats are Nematophycus. The point is-”
His earphone buzzed softly. “Pause,” he murmured to the laptop, and the image on the screen froze once more.
