"What answer could there be?"
Caitlin shrugged. "If we can't decode the messages we'll never know. And I suppose if there was anything to be done, it would have been done by now."
"I don't think the messages need decoding," Maureen said.
Caitlin looked at her curiously, but didn't pursue it. "Listen, Mum. Some of us are going to try to do something. You understand that the Rip works down the scales, that larger structures break up first. The Galaxy, then the solar system, then planets like Earth. And then the human body."
Maureen considered. "So people will outlive the Earth."
"Well, they could. For maybe about thirty minutes, until atomic structures get pulled apart. There's talk of establishing a sort of shelter in Oxford that could survive the end of the Earth. Like a submarine, I suppose. And if you wore a pressure suit you might last a bit longer even than that. The design goal is to make it through to the last microsecond. You could gather another thirty minutes of data that way. They've asked me to go in there."
"Will you?"
"I haven't decided. It will depend on how we feel about the kids, and—you know."
Maureen considered. "You must do what makes you happy, I suppose."
"Yes. But it's hard to know what that is, isn't it?" Caitlin looked up at the sky. "It's going to be a hot day."
"Yes. And a long one. I think I'm glad about that. The night sky looks odd now the Milky Way has gone."
"And the stars are flying off one by one," Caitlin mused. "I suppose the constellations will look funny by the autumn."
"Do you want some more sandwiches?"
"I'll have a bit more of that cordial. It's very good, Mum."
"It's elderflower. I collect the blossoms from that bush down the road. I'll give you the recipe if you like."
"Shall we see if your Joe fancies laying a bit of concrete this afternoon? I could do with meeting your new beau."
"Oh, shut up," Maureen said, and she went inside to make a fresh jug of cordial.
October 14th
That morning Maureen got up early. She was pleased that it was a bright morning, after the rain of the last few days. It was a lovely autumn day. She had breakfast listening to the last-ever episode of The Archers, but her radio battery failed before the end.
She went to work in the garden, hoping to get everything done before the light went. There was plenty of work, leaves to rake up, the roses and the clematis to prune. She had decided to plant a row of daffodil bulbs around the base of the new pergola.
She noticed a little band of goldfinches, plundering a clump of Michaelmas daisies for seed. She sat back on her heels to watch. The colourful little birds had always been her favourites.
Then the light went, just like that, darkening as if somebody was throwing a dimmer switch. Maureen looked up. The sun was rushing away, and sucking all the light out of the sky with it. It was a remarkable sight, and she wished she had a camera. As the light turned grey, and then charcoal, and then utterly black, she heard the goldfinches fly off in a clatter, confused. It had only taken a few minutes.
Maureen was prepared. She dug a little torch out of the pocket of her old quilted coat. She had been hoarding the batteries; you hadn't been able to buy them for weeks. The torch got her as far as the pergola, where she lit some rush torches that she'd fixed to canes.
Then she sat in the pergola, in the dark, with her garden lit up by her rush torches, and waited. She wished she had thought to bring out her book. She didn't suppose there would be time to finish it now. Anyhow the flickering firelight would be bad for her eyes.
"Mum?"
The soft voice made her jump. It was Caitlin, threading her way across the garden with a torch of her own.
"I'm in here, love."
Caitlin joined her mother in the pergola, and they sat on the wooden benches, on the thin cushions Maureen had been able to buy. Caitlin shut down her torch to conserve the battery.
Maureen said, "The sun went, right on cue."
"Oh, it's all working out, bang on time."
Somewhere there was shouting, whooping, a tinkle of broken glass.
"Someone's having fun," Maureen said.
"It's a bit like an eclipse," Caitlin said. "Like in Cornwall, do you remember? The sky was cloudy, and we couldn't see a bit of the eclipse. But at that moment when the sky went dark, everybody got excited. Something primeval, I suppose."
"Would you like a drink? I've got a flask of tea. The milk's a bit off, I'm afraid."
"I'm fine, thanks."
"I got up early and managed to get my bulbs in. I didn't have time to trim that clematis, though. I got it all ready for the winter, I think."
"I'm glad."
"I'd rather be out here than indoors, wouldn't you?"
"Oh, yes."
"I thought about bringing blankets. I didn't know if it would get cold."
"Not much. The air will keep its heat for a bit. There won't be time to get very cold."
"I was going to fix up some electric lights out here. But the power's been off for days."
"The rushes are better, anyway. I would have been here earlier. There was a jam by the church. All the churches are packed, I imagine. And then I ran out of petrol a couple of miles back. We haven't been able to fill up for weeks."
"It's all right. I'm glad to see you. I didn't expect you at all. I couldn't ring." Even the mobile networks had been down for days. In the end everything had slowly broken down, as people simply gave up their jobs and went home. Maureen asked carefully, "So how's Bill and the kids?"
"We had an early Christmas," Caitlin said. "They'll both miss their birthdays, but we didn't think they should be cheated out of Christmas too. We did it all this morning. Stockings, a tree, the decorations and the lights down from the loft, presents, the lot. And then we had a big lunch. I couldn't find a turkey but I'd been saving a chicken. After lunch the kids went for their nap. Bill put their pills in their lemonade."
Maureen knew she meant the little blue pills the NHS had given out to every household.
"Bill lay down with them. He said he was going to wait with them until he was sure—you know. That they wouldn't wake up, and be distressed. Then he was going to take his own pill."
Maureen took her hand. "You didn't stay with them?"
"I didn't want to take the pill." There was some bitterness in her voice. "I always wanted to see it through to the end. I suppose it's the scientist in me. We argued about it. We fought, I suppose. In the end we decided this way was the best."
Maureen thought that on some level Caitlin couldn't really believe her children were gone, or she couldn't keep functioning like this. "Well, I'm glad you're here with me. And I never fancied those pills either. Although—will it hurt?"
"Only briefly. When the Earth's crust gives way. It will be like sitting on top of an erupting volcano."
"You had an early Christmas. Now we're going to have an early Bonfire Night."
"It looks like it. I wanted to see it through," Caitlin said again. "After all I was in at the start—those supernova studies."
"You mustn't think it's somehow your fault."
"I do, a bit," Caitlin confessed. "Stupid, isn't it?"
"But you decided not to go to the shelter in Oxford with the others?"
"I'd rather be here. With you. Oh, but I brought this." She dug into her coat pocket and produced a sphere, about the size of a tennis ball.
Maureen took it. It was heavy, with a smooth black surface.
Caitlin said, "It's the stuff they make space shuttle heatshield tiles out of. It can soak up a lot of heat."
"So it will survive the Earth breaking up."
"That's the idea."
"Are there instruments inside?"
"Yes. It should keep working, keep recording until the expansion gets down to the centimetre scale, and the Rip cracks the sphere open. Then it will release a cloud of even finer sensor units, motes we call them. It's nanotechnology, Mum, machines the
size of molecules. They will keep gathering data until the expansion reaches molecular scales."
"How long will that take after the big sphere breaks up?"
"Oh, a microsecond or so. There's nothing we could come up with that could keep data-gathering after that."
Maureen hefted the little device. "What a wonderful little gadget. It's a shame nobody will be able to use its data."
"Well, you never know," Caitlin said. "Some of the cosmologists say this is just a transition, rather than an end. The universe has passed through transitions before, for instance from an age dominated by radiation to one dominated by matter—our age. Maybe there will be life of some kind in a new era dominated by the dark energy."
"But nothing like us."
"I'm afraid not."
Maureen stood and put the sphere down in the middle of the lawn. The grass was just faintly moist, with dew, as the air cooled. "Will it be all right here?"
"I should think so."
The ground shuddered, and there was a sound like a door slamming, deep in the ground. Alarms went off, from cars and houses, distant wails. Maureen hurried back to the pergola. She sat with Caitlin, and they wrapped their arms around each other.
Caitlin raised her wrist to peer at her watch, then gave it up. "I don't suppose we need a countdown."
The ground shook more violently, and there was an odd sound, like waves rushing over pebbles on a beach. Maureen peered out of the pergola. Remarkably, one wall of her house had given way, just like that, and the bricks had tumbled into a heap.
"You'll never get a builder out now," Caitlin said, but her voice was edgy.
"We'd better get out of here."
"All right."
They got out of the pergola and stood side by side on the lawn, over the little sphere of instruments, holding onto each other. There was another tremor, and Maureen's roof tiles slid to the ground, smashing and tinkling.
"Mum, there's one thing."
"Yes, love."
"You said you didn't think all those alien signals needed to be decoded."
"Why, no. I always thought it was obvious what all the signals were saying."
"What?"
Maureen tried to reply.
The ground burst open. The scrap of dewy lawn flung itself into the air, and Maureen was thrown down, her face pressed against the grass. She glimpsed houses and trees and people, all flying in the air, underlit by a furnace-red glow from beneath.
But she was still holding Caitlin. Caitlin's eyes were squeezed tight shut. "Goodbye," Maureen yelled. "They were just saying goodbye." But she couldn't tell if Caitlin could hear.
Jesus Christ, Reanimator
Ken Macleod
Ken MacLeod (kenmacleod.blogspot.com) was one of the most exciting new science fiction writers to emerge during the '90s. His "Fall Revolution" quartet and "Engines of Light" trilogy are typical of his work, focusing on politics and economics, but still delivering the kind of widescreen, high-bit-rate, action-packed qualities that science fiction adventure demands. His most recent book is the near future SF novel The Execution Channel.
The story that follows, which has easily the best title of the year (a play on the title of an H. P. Lovecraft classic), is a satirical look at what might happen if the second coming actually arrived.
The Second Coming was something of a washout, if you remember. It lit up early-warning radar like a Christmas tree, of course, and the Israeli Air Force gave the heavenly host a respectable F-16 fighter escort to the ground, but that was when they were still treating it as a UFO incident. As soon as their sandals touched the dust, Jesus and the handful of bewildered Copts who'd been caught up to meet him in the air looked about for the armies of the Beast and the kings of the earth. The only soldiers they could see were a few terrified guards on a nearby archaeological dig. The armies of the Lord hurled themselves at the IDF and were promptly slaughtered. Their miraculous healings and resurrections created something of a sensation, but after that it was detention and Shin Bet interrogation for the lot of them. The skirmish was caught on video by activists from the International Solidarity Movement, who happened to be driving past the ancient battlefield on their way to Jenin when the trouble started. Jesus was released a couple of months after the Megiddo debacle, but most of the Rapture contingent had Egyptian ID, and the diplomacy was as slow as you'd expect.
Jesus returned to his old stomping ground in the vicinity of Galilee. He hung around a lot with Israeli Arabs, and sometimes crossed to the West Bank. Reports trickled out of a healing here, a near-riot there, an open-air speech somewhere else. At first the IDF and the PA cops gave him a rough time, but there wasn't much they could pin on him. It's been said he avoided politics, but a closer reading of his talks suggests a subtle strategy of working on his listeners' minds, chipping away at assumptions, and leaving them to work out the political implications for themselves. The theological aspects of his teaching were hard to square with those previously attributed to him. Critics were quick to point out the discrepancies, and to ridicule his failure to fulfill the more apocalyptic aspects of the prophecies.
When I caught up with him, under the grubby off-season awnings of a Tiberias lakefront cafe, Jesus was philosophical about it.
"There's only so much information you can pack into a first-century Palestinian brain," he explained, one thumb in a volume of Dennett. "Or a twenty-first-century one, come to that."
I sipped thick, sweet coffee and checked the little camera for sound and image. "Aren't you, ah, omniscient?"
He glowered a little. "What part of 'truly man' don't you people understand?" (He'd been using the cafe's Internet facilities a lot, I'd gathered. His blog comments section had to be seen to be believed.) "It's not rocket science . . . to mention just one discipline I didn't have a clue about. I could add relativity, quantum mechanics, geology, zoology. Geography, even." He spread his big hands, with their carpenter's calluses and their old scars. "Look, I really expected to return very soon, and that everyone on Earth would see me when I did. I didn't even know the world was a sphere—sure, I could have picked that up from the Greeks, if I'd asked around in Decapolis, but I had other fish to fry."
"But you're"—I fought the rising pitch—"the Creator, begotten, not made, wholly God as well as—"
"Yes, yes," he said. He mugged an aside to the camera. "This stuff would try the patience of a saint, you know." Then he looked me in the eye. "I am the embodiment of the Logos, the very logic of creation, or as it was said in English, 'the Word made flesh.' Just because I am in that sense the entirety of the laws of nature doesn't mean I know all of them, or can override any of them. Quite the reverse, in fact."
"But the miracles—the healings and resurrections—"
"You have to allow for some . . . pardonable exaggeration in the reports."
"I've seen the ISM video from Megiddo," I said.
"Good for you," he said. "I'd love to see it myself, but the IDF confiscated it in minutes. But then, you probably bribed someone, and that's . . . not something I can do. Yes, I can resurrect the recent dead, patch bodies back together and so on. Heal injuries and cure illnesses, some of them not purely psychosomatic. Don't ask me to explain how." He waved a hand. "I suspect some kind of quantum hand-wave at the bottom of it."
"But the Rapture! The Second Coming!"
"I can levitate." He shrugged. "So? I was considerably more impressed to discover that you people can fly. In metal machines!"
"Isn't levitation miraculous?"
"It doesn't break any laws of nature, I'll tell you that for nothing. If I can do it, it must be a human capability."
"You mean any human being could levitate?"
"There are recorded instances. Some of them quite well attested, I understand. Even the Catholic Church admits them."
"You could teach people to do it?"
"I suppose I could. But what would be the point? As I said, you can fly already, for all the good that does you." As if by coincidence, a c
ouple of jet fighters broke the sound barrier over the Golan Heights, making the cups rattle. "Same thing with healing, resurrections of the recent dead, and so on. I can do better in individual cases, but in general your health services are doing better than I could. I have better things to do with my time."
"Before we get to that," I said, "there's just one thing I'd like you to clear up. For the viewers, you understand. Are you telling us that after a certain length of time has passed, the dead can't be resurrected?"
"Not at all." He signaled for another pot of coffee. "With God, all things are possible. To put it in your terms, information is conserved. To put it in my terms, we're all remembered in the mind of God. No doubt all human minds and bodies will be reconstituted at some point. As for when—God knows. I don't. I told you this the first time."
"And heaven and hell, the afterlife?"
"Heaven—like I said, the mind of God. It's up in the sky, in a very literal sense." He fumbled in a book-bag under the table and retrieved a dog-eared Tipler. "If this book is anything to go by. I'm not saying you should take The Physics of Immortality as gospel, you understand, but it certainly helped me get my head around some of the concepts. As for hell . . ." He leaned forward, looking stern. "Look, suppose I tell you: if you keep doing bad things, if you keep refusing to adjust your thoughts and actions to reality, you'll end up in a very bad place. You'll find yourself in deep shit. Who could argue? Not one moral teacher or philosopher, that's for sure. If you won't listen to me, listen to them." He chuckled darkly. "Of course, it's far more interesting to write volumes of Italian poetry speculating on the exact depth and temperature of the shit, but that's just you."
"What about your distinctive ethical teaching?"
He rolled his eyes heavenward. "What distinctive ethical teaching? You'll find almost all of it in the rabbis, the prophets, and the good pagans. I didn't come to teach new morals, but to make people take seriously the morals they had. For some of the quirky bits—no divorce, and eunuchs for the Kingdom and so forth—I refer to my cultural limitations or some information loss in transmission or translation."
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-II Page 42
