Карен Хабер - This Way to the End Times

14.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (a) radio static, interspersed with love songs from old black-and-white movies. If Donald ever calls you, the ring tone will be the same: a sweet plucking of violin strings, a woman’s too-mellow voice. The worst thing about these nightmares is that you often think he is calling you, and it pulls you out of your dream of running into the cold and poorly-lit reality of the place you ran to. And once there, in the silence, in your narrow bed, you are all alone.

15.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (d).

16.ANSWERS WILL VARY.

17.ANSWERS WILL VARY.

ALVARO ZINOS-AMARO, ONE OF THE most promising of today’s newer science-fiction writers, was born in Spain to Spanish and American parents, studied theoretical physics at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, and lives now in Southern California. His fiction, essays, and poems have appeared in such publications as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction, Galaxy’s Edge, Nature, and Clarkesworld. The story that appears here, a visionary treatment of the old adage that “time is what keeps everything from happening at once,” has not been published before.

FROM ONE OF THE FIFTY-TWO ghats near Pushkar Lake, the old woman watched the mid-day sky. Bright, pearly clouds swelled and burst, raining the future down upon the world.

The throngs that had gathered in prayer around the lake fragmented. People ran and staggered. But Ashima remained still and chanted.

She wasn’t here for the same reason as them. They were hoping to attain moksha, liberation from the endless cycle of death and rebirth. Ashima’s purpose was a more humble one: simply to leave the world with a measure of grace. For the last two days the Gayatri mantra had served her well, and so she chose it again today. Stroking the beads of her Japa mala, she prepared to repeat the mantra one hundred and eight times. “Om bhūr bhuvah svah— ”

Cries of terror drowned out Ashima’s frail voice. A man and woman within a stone’s throw of her were encased in a translucent sphere and carried by the sphere up to an orbital structure that hadn’t existed moments before. Ten feet away from Ashima, a huge cylindrical object materialized in the space occupied by a family, crushing them. Minutes later an old man’s skin grew into a golden shell and fell away to reveal him looking decades younger, an otherworldly green gleam in his rejuvenated eyes. Nearby, flames incinerated a father and his children.

The myriad transformations swept on, unpredictable, haphazard. The very air seemed to pulse with the changes. Talking heads on Ashima’s ocular implant called this collapse of the future into the present “causal accumulation,” but Ashima imagined Shiva, Kali, and Maya as Krishna’s sword, mace, and bow, cutting and bashing and piercing the present with all their might. And yet somehow, throughout it all, she had remained untouched. You are not special, she reminded herself. Your time will come any moment now. Be ready for it.

A pinprick of light high in the sky caught her attention. Goggle-eyed, she watched it explode into a trillion dots. A blanket of scintillating lights fell from above, covering everything and everyone. Ashima felt the energy first on her ghagra choli and then on her skin.

Within seconds her ocular implant overloaded and fizzled out, temporarily blinding her. Hot pain pressed against her temples and skull. This is the end, she thought, dizzy, heaving. Accept it. Let it all go. She imagined herself turning into gray ash and scattering in the wind like the petals of a lotus blossom.

Her legs buckled and she tumbled.

A young girl caught her, breaking her fall. Gently the girl helped Ashima back up.

Tears ran down Ashima’s cheeks. Despite all my preparations, a part of me was not ready, she thought, embarrassed at her relief. And this girl saved me. She stopped crying and studied the girl that had appeared out of thin air. The girl’s features were nothing like Ashima’s. Her mouth was hardly a sliver, her small ears tapered off in an eerie fashion, and her huge eyes burned with a cold fire. She might be nine or ten—or perhaps, if her inscrutable stare was anything to go by, much older. Ashima opened her mouth to speak, but the iridescence that had fallen from the sky and draped itself over the world spoke inside her mind, transmitting the girl’s words directly to her.

“It is time to break your fast,” the girl said, not moving her lips. “Your spirit is strong. But you must nourish your body. We have far to go.”

A stream of particulate matter rushed up from the ground, snaked up the girl’s thin arms and solidified into a wide, thin piece of millet bread. The girl handed it to Ashima. It was warm to the touch, as though freshly baked.

“Bajre ki roti,” Ashima murmured. “My favorite. How . . . ?”

The girl grinned.

Ashima cracked off a piece and took a bite. It tasted like the real Rajasthani deal, a little tangy but not bitter, as though the dough had been kneaded before cooking. The girl performs miracles, Ashima thought. Perhaps anything is possible during these end times.

“No miracle,” the girl said, apparently able to hear Ashima’s thoughts through the network of lights. “The bread’s constituent molecules were extracted from the local environment and nano-assembled into an emulation of roti.”

Ashima stared in blank bewilderment. “Nano-assembled molecules? An emulation of roti? It tastes real enough to me.” And then: “Who are you? And how did you get here?”

“I am Uki.”

All sounds except the girl’s wordless voice and Ashima’s breathing faded into the background.

“Are you doing that?” Ashima asked.

“The Disease has spared you,” Uki said. “But it could strike at any moment.”

Ashima frowned. “The Disease?”

“Ah—they haven’t named it yet.”

“Yet?”

Uki’s gaze became so intense that Ashima felt the girl was looking through her instead of at her. “In my time,” Uki said, “many have become paralyzed by the whole future falling in on us at once. The Disease is the name of this paralysis. Only some of the young ones who fled off-world, like me, seem to have escaped it.”

Ashima’s mind raced, trying to keep up. “You are not of this time?” She surveyed the rippling world outside their bubble. “Tell me, if the future and the present are different pages of the same book, how is it possible for them to speak to one another?”

“Think of time as the thickness of the pages rather than the pages themselves,” Uki said. “Your life is the writing on the pages. Two days ago relative to our present, some pages began to thin, and the print of future events began to bleed through. We’re not sure how or why. Some think that the Large Hadron Collider upset a fundamental balance of forces, a balance involving something called composite scalar baryonic dark matter. Others believe that a swarm of micro-singularities is to blame.”

“Baryonic . . . ? Micro-singularities?” Ashima shook her head. She listened to the gentle whisper of the lights inside her mind, which gave her the definitions of Uki’s difficult words, but the concepts remained beyond her grasp.

Uki smiled. “Never mind,” she said. “They’re just theories. There are plenty of others, even more bizarre. I was one of a group chosen to find out the truth.”

“Ah.” She considered the girl’s earnestness. “You were selected not only to discover the truth, but to try and reverse the effect, weren’t you?”