Harlan Ellison - Shatterday

The blip of light in the upper left quadrant of the communication frame pulsed, “Aren’t you on service at this time, friend Lhayne?”

Lhayne admitted he was. “I’ve just returned from my duty period.” He knew the discrepancy would be noted. The blip pulsed, “There seems to be an imbalance. Your pass is, of course, granted; however, this break in your schedule will count against your quota.” Lhayne said he understood that would certainly have to be. the case. H. e was getting a trifle annoyed. He was, after all, a human being, and this was, after all, only a logging device to which he was speaking. He wanted to get to Ahna as quickly as possible, had to see her, actually see her, as quickly as possible. The blip pulsed, “This will be logged.”

“Then log it!” Lhayne said, angrily.

Without rancor, the lower right quadrant of the frame strobed validation of the pass. Lhayne made another sign in the air and the communication frame wavered and scintillated and vanished.

Lhayne stood a moment, still trembling with fear; then he disassembled his atoms and save for a momentary watery quality to the air in the shoppe, he was gone and the shoppe was empty. Empty: with the silent, voracious pressure of the Infinite Dark Mass steadily pressing against it.

He could not entirely divorce himself from his sense of duty, no matter what had happened, what he had done back there during work-time, no matter how much he hungered to see Ahna. And so he paused in transit and re-formed in the Supply section.

Beyond the frame in that place he could see men and women working with photons, quarks and muons to create the supplies the shoppe used as stock. The glass beads and trinkets.

The communication frame greeted him politely and had the temerity to inquire why he wasn’t out on work-time.

“I need restock,” he said, “do you want to take my order or lecture me on attendance?”

“What do you need?” the blip pulsed.

“Stock is low on Omicrons, healing ointments and hula hoops. I’ll need seven-league boots in sizes 10 to 13 triple A. Three succubi, a gross of the Beethoven cubes, about a dozen pair of the eyeglasses that see through solid matter, and have you gotten those universal college entrance exam answers back in stock yet?”

The blip pulsed, “No, I’m sorry, friend Lhayne, not yet. But we do have the original Shakespeare first folios and a large supply of original copies of Cotton Mather’s ‘Wonders of the Invisible World. ‘“

He placed his order and vanished; he reformed in the Glass Square. All around him Rubble Point flickered with light. The world. What was left of the world. Maintained flickeringly against the Infinite Dark Mass all around, beyond the perimeter. It took enormous energy to maintain the bubble of Rubble Point against the pressure from outside. It flickered, but it continued to exist.

And beyond this silver bubble, ashes and darkness.

Here at Rubble Point, at the end of time and the imminent end of space, where entropy was programming the heat-death of the universe, only ten thousand humans remained to mark the place where life and intelligence and dreams of empire had lived.

In the Centers that ringed the Glass Square the on-duty Supervisors manipulated energy to keep the barriers solid against the Infinite Dark Mass.

And he had jeopardized all this. with a moment’s self-indulgence. What power had that loathesome young man in the shoppe already. possessed to make friend Lhayne throw all this—and Ahna—into jeopardy?

He shivered, knowing it was not yet finished, not by any possible wish or hope.

And he suddenly had the chill feeling that this might be the last time he saw Ahna. He hurried to the vaults.

Ahna was there, behind glass. The erg-gauge was not even one-fourth filled. He stared at it for the longest time, trying to wish it full… the red line pressed against the very top of the counter… but it was nonmanipulable: it remained less than one-fourth filled.

He looked in at Ahna, sleeping. He could not detect the rise and fall of her chest. But she was only sleeping.

She had been sleeping for three hundred years.

He stared in at her, waiting for her to realize he was here, to open her eyes and smile with a wondrous mouth too large to be called correct for her slim face. But she only slept and though he tried to bring back the exact sound of her voice, he only heard words, a conversation between himself and himself in the empty places of his memory.

“How long will your new piece take?”

“I think a week.”

“I’ll miss you.”

“Come and see me.”

“Not this time, please, Lhayne.”

“I won’t be in pain.”

“Yes, but you look as if you’re in pain. I can’t bear it.”

“I have to create, Ahna.”

“You know I understand. But it hurts me to see you.”

“They have to see. They need to remember what it was like to be just human beings, not gods. ‘Fire and Sleep’ will be my best work. They won’t be able to reject it, or ignore it.”

“But you burn.”

Sleeping. Here at Rubble Point the last thousand of the ten thousand humans who had survived the ages slept in their vaults, waiting for those who loved them to buy their release from induced catalepsy. Here at Rubble Point the surviving ten thousand had taken their stand against the moment when the last planet fell into the last sun, and the last sun was swallowed by the Infinite Dark Mass. Here at Rubble Point, where everything came to an end until the universe could be reborn and begin again its stately pavan toward nothingness, the ten thousand had rescued a piece of the space-time substance and made it a world of survival. They had taken the energy of entropy itself, the heat that flows during the thermodynamic process, the heat entropy provides as criteria for spontaneous chemical changes and thus chemical equilibrium, the energy that still exists but is lost for the purpose of doing work… the entropic heat generated in quantifiable time, a piece of a second, a chunk of a minute, a slice of an hour… and they had used it to maintain their bit of a world, Rubble Point, against the voracious appetite of the Mad Conqueror, Entropy, eating everything till it swallowed itself, leaving nothing but the Infinite Dark Mass that would inevitably explode from its own engorgement of time and space.

They had used what they could steal from the past to maintain their world. But each one of the nine thousand who lived and survived in the world of Rubble Point used a carefully calculated amount of antientropic energy, gauged in ergs, of course. And there was x amount allocated simply to maintain Rubble Point’s existence against the pull of the Infinite Dark Mass. Those who had been unfortunate enough to be placed in the vaults, to be wakened only when there was sufficient anti-entropic energy available for their maintenance could do no other than wait.

Wait: for energy to be brought forward to the end of time from all of the past that still lived in the megaflow. Wait: for those who had a stake in their revival to earn their freedom. Wait: for loved ones to journey into the dangerous past to steal minutes, hours, days. Wait: for the anti-entropic heat-energy to be generated by pivotal events that the nine thousand created in the past, events programmed by those who danced their dance here at Rubble Point, at the end of time.

Ahna slept, waiting.

And her erg counter was less than one-fourth filled.

He stood before the vault, staring in at her sleeping features. A sleep more than merely sleep; endless if he could not trade worthless trinkets for vital energy. The powerstone, for instance. A trinket. A child’s plaything here at Rubble Point. But to a young man whose present was codified as March 21, 1967… a heart’s desire.