Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

Sometimes I scream but no one hears me.

I used to be able to cry. Now the tears never come no matter how much I want them. It’s just so bloody not fair. I can’t eat I can’t drink I can’t sleep I can’t breathe and now I can’t even cry. I’ve lost everything that ever made me human except I can’t die.

(gap)

ought to be some way to turn off the sun it’s so bright all the time and when

(gap)

It’s happening faster. Used to be if I hurt myself the cut or the hurt would heal at the normal speed for healing. Yesterday I found a jagged piece of plastic with a sharp edge, so I took it in one hand and I deliberately slit open my other arm all the way from my wrist to my shoulder. I started bleeding and I hoped the nano-things would all leak out. While I watched it the whole bloody cut healed in about nineteen seconds. I heal faster now.

It’s just so bloody not fair.

(gap)

Those bug-men and their big metal round thing never came back but after a long time some green shiny people showed up. Not shaped like humans but green and shiny. I think they were all female, no men. They started building a city and planting new sorts of plants and changing the air so it got easier to breathe. Too right I came running to meet them. Their words are just a lot of squeaking noises but they tried to teach me anyway and I tried to learn but it was just too hard. The sky is so bright all the time now, I could just barely see a few stars in the little bit of night, but one of the green ladies pointed up at the sky and I think she was showing me what star they came from, I mean what star their planet is from.

For a long time I lived in their city as a kind of pet and they were mostly nice to me except when they didn’t understand what I wanted. They did all kinds of things to me that I guess were medical tests but I let them do it partly because I wanted the green ladies to like me and partly because I hoped they’d find out how to cure me so I can die. After they stopped testing me they were mostly nice to me.

The beautiful shiny green ladies had all sorts of lovely art and precious things they made, not like the statues and paintings and like all back when other humans were alive. The green ladies make this beautiful art out of glowing hot gas that just hangs in the air for a while, then melts. One of the green ladies showed me this sculpture of red gas she’d made, then she pointed up at the sun overhead, and I sussed that they make their lovely sculptures from the same stuff as the sun. I know it’s called plasma gas cus I learnt it off one of those holovids. After a long while, the lovely green ladies even managed to show me how to work one of their thingies so I could make words and pictures in the air out of burning hot plasma gas.

Then something happened suddenly and all the green ladies left in a hurry. I never knew why. They left behind for me their city and some machines but I couldn’t suss how to make those machines work. It was nice they were here while it lasted though.

I wish the green ladies had taken me with them.

(gap)

The sun is right over me all the time now. Big red hot bloody hot.

Every once in a while I travel back to someplace where I was before and I find something I wrote a long time ago. I’m having trouble remembering what I wrote so long ago, so any time I find my own writing it’s a surprise like reading summat for the first time.

My right eye is going blind like my left one did. I never sleep but I have nightmares awake thinking what it will be like for me when I can’t eat drink sleep breathe and also CAN’T SEE and I will go through blind Eternity feeling my way forever. It’s so bloody not fair.

It won’t be long now before the Earth melts or drops into the sun. I don’t much care which. What I want to know is will it finally kill me? If it does, peace at last.

What bloody scares me is the thought that I’ll fall into the sun and die… but then inside the sun I’ll heal again, and die again, and so on forever. Too right it will hurt.

The sun has to die some day. I mean it won’t be day anymore when it happens but you know what I mean. Just my stinking luck if Earth falls into the sun and I keep living anyway, and I have to feel the sun killing me all the time while the nano-things keep me alive for millions millions bloody billions more years till the sun finally burns out. I wonder if I can write words in burning plasma inside the sun like those green ladies from somewhere else taught me once. I wish the green ladies would come back. I hope maybe the

(gap)

Everywhere hot lava. Melting melting everything and I burn all over and it hurts it bloody hurts but as fast as I heal I get burnt again stop it stop it stop.

I can still see a bit with one eye. I’m writing this last part with a black flaky stone against a hard white stone but the stone’s going soft. The sun’s coming closer. After all these millions of years I suddenly remember an old happy song it goes here comes the sun it’s all right, but no it’s NOT all right. Everything is so hot and all melted. I’m sure it will come any

(gap)

At last at last at last billions of years falling into the sun hurry up will I die now or will it get worse now I’ll know if

(gap)

oh damn its not fair

Stephen Baxter began his career in 1987 with “The Xeelee Flower”, a story that introduced his future history series, which includes the novels Raft (1991), Flux (1993) and Ring (1994). He attracted a wider readership with The Time Ships (1995), his sequel to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, and went on to establish himself as one of Britain’s most innovative and entertaining science fiction writers. His more recent books include the apocalyptic Flood (2008) and its sequel Ark (2009).

JAAL HAD ALWAYS been fascinated by the ice on the horizon. Even now, beyond the smoke of the evening hearth, he could see that line of pure bone white, sharper than a stone blade’s cut, drawn across the edge of the world.

It was the end of the day and a huge sunset was staining the sky. Alone, restless, he walked a few paces away from the rich smoky pall, away from the smell of broiling racoon meat and bubbling goat fat, the languid talk of the adults, the eager play of the children.

The ice was always there on the northern horizon, always out of reach no matter how hard you walked across the scrubby grassland. He knew why. The ice cap was retreating, dumping its pure whiteness into the meltwater streams, exposing land crushed and gouged and strewn with vast boulders. So while you walked towards it, the ice was marching away from you.

And now the gathering sunset was turning the distant ice pink. The clean geometric simplicity of the landscape drew his soul; he stared, entranced.

Jaal was eleven years old, a compact bundle of muscle. He was dressed in layers of clothing, sinew-sewn from scraped goat skin and topped by a heavy coat of rabbit fur. On his head was a hat made by his father from the skin of a whole raccoon, and on his feet he wore the skin of pigeons, turned inside-out and the feathers coated with grease. Around his neck was a string of pierced cat teeth.

Jaal looked back at his family. There were a dozen of them, parents and children, aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces, and one grandmother, worn down aged forty-two. Except for the very smallest children everybody moved slowly, obviously weary. They had walked a long way today.

He knew he should go back to the fire and help out, do his duty, find firewood or skin a rat. But every day was like this. Jaal had ancient, unpleasant memories from when he was very small, of huts burning, people screaming and fleeing. Jaal and his family had been walking north ever since, looking for a new home. They hadn’t found it yet.