Robert Silverberg - Waiting for the Earthquake

It was eleven weeks and two days and three hours—plus or minus a little—until the earthquake that was going to devastate the planet, and suddenly Morrissey found himself doubting that the earthquake was going to happen at all. The strange notion stopped him in his tracks. He was out strolling the shore of the Ring Ocean, half a dozen kilometers from his cabin, when the idea came to him. He turned to his companion, an old fux called Dinoov who was just entering his postsexual phase, and said in a peculiar tone, “What if the ground doesn’t shake, you know?”

“But it will, ” the aborigine said calmly.

“What if the predictions are wrong?”

The fux was a small elegant blue-furred creature, sleek and compact, with the cool all-accepting demeanor that comes from having passed safely through all the storms and metamorphoses of a fux’s reproductive odyssey. It raised its hind legs, the only pair that remained to it now, and said, “You should cover your head when you walk in the sunlight at flare time, friend Morrissey. The brightness damages the soul.”

“You think I’m crazy, Dinoov?”

“I think you are under great stress.”

Morrissey nodded vaguely. He looked away and stared westward across the shining blood-hued ocean, narrowing his eyes as though trying to see the frosty crystalline shores of Farside beyond the curve of the horizon. Perhaps half a kilometer out to sea he detected glistening patches of bright green on the surface of the water—the spawning bloom of the balloons. High above those dazzling streaks a dozen or so brilliant iridescent gasbag-creatures hovered, going through the early sarabandes of their mating dance. The quake would not matter at all to the balloons. When the surface of Medea heaved and buckled and crumpled, they would be drifting far overhead, dreaming their transcendental dreams and paying no attention.

But maybe there will be no quake, Morrissey told himself.

He played with the thought. He had waited all his life for the vast apocalyptic event that was supposed to put an end to the thousand-year-long human occupation of Medea, and now, very close to earthquake time, he found a savage perverse pleasure in denying the truth of what he knew to be coming. No earthquake! No earthquake! Life will go on and on and on! The thought gave him a chilling prickling feeling. There was an odd sensation in the soles of his feet, as if he were standing with both his feet off the ground.

Morrissey imagined himself sending out a joyful message to all those who had fled the doomed world: Come back, all is well, it didn’t happen! Come live on Medea again! And he saw the fleet of great gleaming ships swinging around, heading back, moving like mighty dolphins across the void, shimmering like needles in the purple sky, dropping down by the hundred to unload the vanished settlers at Chong and Enrique and Pellucidar and Port Medea and Madagozar. Swarms of people rushing forth, tears, hugs, raucous laughter, old friends reunited, the cities coming alive again! Morrissey trembled. He closed his eyes and wrapped his arms tight around himself. The fantasy had almost hallucinatory power. It made him giddy, and his skin, bleached and leathery from a lifetime under the ultraviolet flares of the twin suns, grew hot and moist. Come home, come home, come home! The earthquake’s been canceled!

He savored that. And then he let go of it and allowed the bright glow of it to fade from his mind.

He said to the fux, “There’s eleven weeks left. And then everything on Medea is going to be destroyed. Why are you so calm, Dinoov?”

“Why not?”

“Don’t you care? ”

“Do you?”

“I love this place,” Morrissey said. “I can’t bear to see it all smashed apart.”

“Then why didn’t you go home to Earth with the others?”

“Home? Home? This is my home. I have Medean genes in my body. My people have lived here for a thousand years. My great-grandparents were born on Medea and so were their great-grandparents.”

“The others could say the same thing. Yet when earthquake time drew near, they went home. Why have you stayed?”

Morrissey, towering over the slender little being, was silent a moment. Then he laughed harshly and said, “I didn’t evacuate for the same reason that you don’t give a damn that a killer quake is coming. We’re both done for anyway, right? I don’t know anything about Earth. It’s not my world. I’m too old to start over there. And you? You’re on your last legs, aren’t you? Both your wombs are gone, your male itch is gone, you’re in that nice quiet burned-out place, eh, Dinoov?” Morrissey chuckled. “We deserve each other. Waiting for the end together, two old hulks.”

The fux studied Morrissey with glinting, unfathomable, mischievous eyes. Then he pointed downwind, toward a headland maybe three hundred meters away, a sandy rise thickly furred with bladdermoss and scrubby yellow-leaved anglepod bushes. Right at the tip of the cape, outlined sharply against the glowing sky, were a couple of fuxes. One was female, six-legged, yet to bear her first litter. Behind her, gripping her haunches and readying himself to mount, was a bipedal male, and even at this distance Morrissey could see his frantic, almost desperate movements.

“What are they doing?” Dinoov asked.

Morrissey shrugged. “Mating.”

“Yes. And when will she drop her young?”

“In fifteen weeks.”

“Are they burned out?” the fux asked. “Are they done for? Why do they make young if destruction is coming?”

“Because they can’t help—”

Dinoov silenced Morrissey with an upraised hand. “I meant the question not to be answered. Not yet, not until you understand things better. Yes? Please?”

“I don’t—”

“—understand. Exactly.” The fux smiled a fuxy smile. “This walk has tired you. Come now: I’ll go with you to your cabin.”

They scrambled briskly up the path from the long crescent of pale blue sand that was the beach to the top of the bluff, and then walked more slowly down the road, past the abandoned holiday cabins toward Morrissey’s place. Once this had been Argoview Dunes, a bustling shoreside community, but that was long ago. Morrissey in these latter days would have preferred to live in some wilder terrain where the hand of man had not weighed so heavily on the natural landscape, but he dared not risk it. Medea, even after ten centuries of colonization, still was a world of sudden perils. The unconquered places had gone unconquered for good reason; and, living on alone since the evacuation, he needed to keep close to some settlement with its stores of food and materiel. He could not afford the luxury of the picturesque.

In any case the wilderness was rapidly reclaiming its own now that most of the intruders had departed. In the early days this steamy low-latitude tropical coast had been infested with all manner of monstrous beasts. Some had been driven off by methodical campaigns of extermination and others, repelled by the effluvia of the human settlements, had simply disappeared. But they were starting to return. A few weeks ago Morrissey had seen a Scuttlefish come ashore, a gigantic black-scaled tubular thing, hauling itself onto land by desperate heaves of its awesome curved flippers and actually digging its fangs into the sand, biting the shore to pull itself onward. They were supposed to be extinct. By a fantastic effort the thing had dug itself into the beach, burying all twenty meters of its body in the azure sand, and a couple of hours later hundreds of young ones that had tunnelled out of the mighty carcass began to emerge, slender beasts no longer than Morrissey’s arm that went writhing with demonic energy down the dunes and into the rough surf. So this was becoming a sea of monsters again. Morrissey had no objections. Swimming was no longer one of his recreations.