Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

“Uhl-weese.” She frowned and shook her head.

Unwise. Why, she didn’t say. When I tried to tell her we were visitors from the Moon, she scolded and seemed to pity me. Caressing her sacred pendant, she spoke of the paradise the Almighty Five had made of the Moon, where the blessed were allowed to dwell in an everlasting joy.

Paradise, unfortunately, was not meant for the likes of me. Pretenders who unwisely tried to steal sacred things or powers were to be consumed forever by the black demons in their hell beneath the earth.

In olden days, she told me darkly, divine fire might have descended to redeem my errant soul. In these more enlightened times, luckily for me, those who attempted to misuse the Holy Book were regarded as either psychotics in need of treatment or shysters deserving eternal torment.

She tried to save me with instruction in the lunar truth, drawn from a massive volume in silver boards that had theological footnotes to explicate almost every holy word. Dickinson’s oriole had become the trickster god, Pepe, who cheated as he enchanted. Dian was not only the Moon Mother but also the soul who selected her own society of those who lived to earn their place with her in paradise. The book itself was her letter to the world that never wrote to her.

I was unconverted until one day when I was walking with the robot in the garden and stepped of the path to pick a purple flower. The robot said “Noot, noot,” and took the flower from me, but it had failed to see me palm a little ball of crumpled paper. When I was able to spread it out in the privacy of my bathroom, it was a note from Tanya, written on a blank page torn from her notebook.

They want to think we’re crazy, though they have trouble explaining how we got here in a sort of craft they never saw before. My witch doctor has a theory. He’s trying to convince me that we came from South America, which has not yet been colonized. He talks of a lost party that set out a couple of centuries ago to fight the black insects there. The expedition seems to have ended with a crash into the Amazon rain forest in an area the insects were just invading. Rescue efforts failed, but he believes we must be descendants of survivors. He thinks we somehow salvaged or repaired the wrecked craft that brought us back. If we want to get out of here, I think we’d better go along.

I rolled the paper up and dropped it next day where I had found it. In the end we all went along, though Arne held out until Dian was allowed to persuade him. He grumbled bitterly till he found work on a Nile dredge, improving the channel and turning a swamp into new land for docks and warehouses. He says he is happier now than he ever was twiddling his thumbs on the Moon.

Although the ages seem to have erased every relic of our own times, these people are eagerly searching their own past for evidence of the Holy Clones. They have given Dian a museum position, where she can make good use of her skills at restoring and preserving antiquities and perhaps finally establish herself as an inspired interpreter of holy writ.

Pepe qualified for a pilot’s license while Tanya studied methods for the control of the predatory insects. They are gone now with a new expedition to reclaim the Americas.

Although all the history I know is heresy, sternly outlawed here, I’ve found a university job as a janitor. It gives me access to radio equipment that can reach the lunar station. We can’t help hoping that our own silver colossi will endure to watch this new Egypt grow into a finer civilization than our own ever was. Yet Tycho must be kept alive, lest disaster strikes again.

This final trilogy of stories takes us right to the far ends of existence on Earth.

Fergus Gwynplaine Maclntyre is a Scottish-born writer, playwright and journalist, long resident in the United States. His work, often humorous and noted for its detailed research and rigorous plotting, has appeared in many magazines and anthologies. His books include the novel The Woman Between the Worlds (1994) and a collection of humorous imaginings Maclntyre’s Improbable Bestiary (2005).

HE STOLE MY death. After all these long years I forget his face. I remember his hands, the long tapering fingers holding the hypodermic shaft and pressing its needle into my skinny-skank arm as I beg him to give me a drug I never tried before. Ooh, yeah. Too right, that’s good.

When I met him, back in 2023,1 was a street bint: selling my snatch to kerb-crawlers and other pervs, just to get enough dosh to buy my next high. When the ecstasy wore off and I came down again, I’d go back on the game again. Another night, another street.

Now I’ve got every street in the world to myself.

I’ve exhausted all the pencils in the world. I’ve used up all the pens, markers, biros, highlighters. Once, when I was still living in London, I broke into a museum and twocked a rusty old typewriter I found there but it only lasted me a couple of years while I banged out these notes to myself. (Whoever else is going to read them?) I’ve outlived hard drives, soft drives, flash drives, tweets, flippits, thinxes and all the other fiddly-fancy ways to store text. I’ve gone back to the beginning, I have.

I write with charcoal on walls. There’s no shortage of walls hereabouts, and when I run out of charcoal I just burn something.

The sun gets bigger every day. I used to think it only seems to get bigger cus it’s coming closer, and that. No. It’s really growing bigger, I’m sure. And redder.

The nights are fewer and shorter now, and when night comes I don’t recognize the stars. I was never good at their names: I only know Charles’s Wain and Orion. A few thousand years after I lost my death, the stars in Orion scarpered off in different directions. Now the stars are all strange, except for the sun overhead. Too right I know that one.

I remember my father. When I think of him all I see is a mouth shouting at me and two hard square fists. I remember his voice telling me I was just a whore and a slapper and yelling at me that I’d never amount to nowt. He got that last bit wrong though: only I’m the most important person in the world, now.

Cus I’m the only one left.

I can’t remember my mam. I’ve forgotten the faces and the voices of everyone I ever loved. The only people I can still recall are the bastards I’ll hate till the day I die. Which likely means I’ll hate them forever. Most of all, I hate my dad and the filthy perv who stole my death.

I was out in the street when I turned fifteen, and I was on the game and sixteen when I met him. One of those clever lads from the Uni, he was, reading science. While I was pulling him off in the alley, he kept nattering to me about something he was working on. Nanotech, that was the word. And summat called the Hayflick limit, which meant bugger-all to me at the time, only I sussed it out later. Said he hadn’t kept track of his own experiment, and wasn’t sure he could ever repeat the results. I wanted him to stop jawing so I could just concentrate on getting him off and then get on to my next punter, but he kept blagging about little tiny robots and such. I was wearing a skimpy miniskirt and a halter. He saw the tracks all in the veins in my arms and my legs and he knew I was on the stuff. Then he jabbed a needle into my arm, injected something. It felt like fire in my blood, ooh I wanted it I wanted it.

I’d already got his money, so he just did up his flies and he left. I pulled a few more punters, then I went back to the bedsit I was sharing with two other girls on the game. I was on the blob that night, so I pulled the used tampon out of my fadge and chucked it away, but I couldn’t find a clean one to put in. I found my last clean pair of knickers, and put those on. I felt like all my blood was on fire, and for a while I couldn’t sleep. Then I passed out, like.