This is the Way the World Ends

by James Morrow

  The chapel was on the move, pitching and rolling. Altar candles took to the air like twigs in a gale. Rivets detached themselves from the ceiling and rained into the aisles. Twisting in their seats, the panicked churchgoers grabbed the backs of their pews and hung on like people who had lives.

  George decided that he could not cope with another unexpected effect of nuclear war.

  Round and round went the room, ever rising, as if traveling up the surface of an enormous corkscrew. The ride seemed to unleash some latent fundamentalism in Soapstone. He embraced his pulpit, binding himself to it like a helmsman lashed to a ship’s wheel. The chaplain’s reading became a fire-and-brimstone sermon, his eyes spinning, his tongue spiraling, each word a scream.

  “And Humankind said, ‘Let the ultraviolet light destroy the food chains that bring forth the moving creature!’ And the evening and the morning—”

  A candlestick clipped Soapstone’s nose, releasing black blood. His Bible flew up as if being juggled by a poltergeist, then crashed through a stained-glass window. The congregation tumbled into the aisles, George sputtering, Brat cursing prolifically. Still hugging the pulpit, Soapstone continued from memory.

  “And Humankind said, ‘Let there be rays in the firmament to fall upon the survivors!’ And Humankind made two great rays, the greater gamma radiation to give penetrating whole-body doses, and the lesser beta radiation to burn the plants and the bowels of animals! And Humankind sterilized each living creature, saying, ‘Be fruitless, and barren, and cease to—’”

  George sailed into the outstretched arms of Saint Sebastian. As he and the statue collided, skullbone against marble, he experienced sensations reminiscent of being shot by John Frostig, but when he looked up he did not see his vulture. Of course—it’s under the missile deck, he thought. It’s in a cage. It can’t come for me this time…

  He awoke in his bunk, staring at dead sea horses. Jennifer, Suzy, Jeremiah, Alfred, and Margaret were now pulpy blobs floating near the top of the tank. He had nurtured them as best he could, raising the new generation, maintaining the old, talking to them, but his efforts were not equal to their death wish. Bits of Soapstone’s sermon drifted through his brain. And Humankind said, Be fruitless, and barren…

  “We hit rough water,” said a voice from nowhere.

  George blinked. The MARCH Hare’s emaciated form stood over him, proffering a Styrofoam cup filled with coffee. His face showed abundant evidence of the recent chaos: bruises, bandages, clotting cuts.

  “Worse than rough,” Brat continued. “A maelstrom.”

  George’s head felt as if it had been recently employed as the ball in some violent team sport. He fingered his scalp. The major lump was surrounded by tender foothills. He slurped down coffee. “Maelstrom?”

  “Big fat one.” With unrestrained glee Brat described the whirlpool—a latter-day Charybdis sucking in a hundred tons of water every second, chewing her way across the sea, feasting on archipelagoes, washing them down with vast areas of the South Atlantic. “Now, here’s the sweet part. The thing pitched us right out of the water. Believe it or not, we’re on God’s dry land.”

  George stumbled from his bunk and, after securing the necessary material from the bathroom, began wrapping the little equine corpses in toilet paper shrouds. “Land? You mean Antarctica?”

  “Antarctica is a thousand miles away. We’re beached on an island off the Cape of Good Hope. Saw it through the periscope. Tide’s going out. Tomorrow it will return and raise us up.” Brat’s eyes expanded with crazed joy. “I’ve got a question for you, Paxton, and if the answer is yes, then God is surely in His heaven. You brought a scopas suit on board—right?”

  George silently recited an epitaph for Jeremiah Sea Horse—HE WAS A GOOD FATHER—and nodded.

  “Could I see it?” Brat asked.

  The tomb inscriber went to his closet and took down Holly’s undelivered Christmas present. Brat pounced on it, ripping the Colt .45 from the utility belt and sticking it in his man-portable thermonuclear device holster.

  “That happens to be my gun, Brat. Or, to be precise, my daughter’s gun.”

  “You’re welcome to join me.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Through the amidships hatch.”

  “You mean—an escape?”

  “If the natives prove unfriendly, we can build a raft and sail to the mainland. We’ll find the pockets of civilization, help them clean the shit off the fan blades. We’ll put it all together. The world is our oyster, Paxton.”

  “Our dead oyster.” He wrapped up Suzy, composed her epitaph: A FINE SWIMMER.

  “What’s the matter, don’t you trust your survival instincts?” asked the general. “Got a dishonorable discharge from the Boy Scouts?”

  “This strikes me as a foolish idea, Brat.”

  “There must be lots of untargeted towns out there.”

  “It’s the back of the moon out there.”

  “That’s what you think. I’ve been telling you all along this extinction stuff was a lot of horse manure. There’s a city on this very island, a whole city, not a crack anywhere.”

  “A city?”

  “I saw it.”

  “What kind of city?”

  “It’s…I don’t know. A city.”

  “Does it have white walls?”

  “Yeah. White walls. Like marble. How did you know that?”

  CHAPTER 10

  In Which Our Hero Learns that Extinction Is as Unkind to the Past as It Is to the Future

  Holly’s pistol proved unnecessary. No sailors were on watch outside George’s cabin or in the corridors beyond. The flight to the amidships hatch was accomplished without spilling a single drop of black blood.

  They popped the hatch, leaped up. George underwent a succession of pleasant shocks—technological hum to whispering surf, chilly submarine to warm night, canned oxygen to sweet air. Formless tufts of decaying jungle growth reached out and smothered the grounded prow. A full moon looked down, its brilliant whites and harsh blacks forming a luminous celestial skull.

  The fugitives raced between the rows of missile doors—steel cables girded the walkway—climbed out on a rear diving plane, and dropped into the shallows. George followed Brat’s moonlit form wading to shore.

  Beyond the beach stretched a tidal marsh, a miasma of malodorous silt and terminally ill grasses. The fugitives slogged through the mud, George moving with a vitality acquired from his years of hauling granite. The swamp belched fierce gases; the air heaved with the sticky residue of the vanished sun. High above, beyond the hot sky, the stars of the southern hemisphere welded themselves into grotesque and pornographic constellations.

  The clay ground became soft, then hard, kiln-fired. Threaded by mist, great stone slabs grew from the plain. They were riddled with holes—missing gobbets of slate and marble suggesting that some rock-eating vulture had feasted here. Moonlight splashed against the slabs, darkening the plain with perforated shadows.

  The ground folded, hills bellied up. Trees broke from the bottom of the ravine like immense black hands. They bore not fruit but violence—thorns that were spikes, seed pods that were the heads of medieval maces. The moon took on a deathly pallor, becoming in George’s mind the corpse of his planet’s sun, sundeath syndrome leaving behind something to bury.

  At the base of each tree, rings of mushrooms went round and round. For species living in the post-exchange environment, their abundance and variety were astonishing. George and Brat ran past mushrooms shaped like elf hats and others shaped like horns of plenty. There were trumpet mushrooms, umbrella mushrooms, candlestick mushrooms, phallus mushrooms, pig-snout mushrooms, toadstools, toadchairs, toadtables, and toadhammocks. Spiraling out of the forest, the island’s vast fungus population spread across dead meadows and desiccated fields like an army of maggots, right up to the gates of the city.

  The city. It was as Brat had promised, whole, impounded by blast wave, unburned by thermal pulse. The marble walls glowe
d like phosphorous, the marble towers sweated in the torrid night. Fat vines slithered up and down the parapets. Gray, withered leaves, each the size and complexion of a shroud, lolled on the vines, embracing the ramparts as petals embrace the organs of a flower, so that the city seemed a kind of plant sprung from some mutant, war-irradiated spore. At one point the ramparts divided to receive a thick, tumid river. The main gate was open and unattended, the guard towers deserted. The fugitives entered freely.

  A bent city. Twisted alleys, fractured sidewalks, crooked courts, each lamp post curved like the spinal column of a hunchback. Tall marble buildings leaned over the cobblestone thoroughfares, in certain places touching, fusing to create tunnels and high walk-ways. The fog, fat and milky, floated through the city like a cataract lifted from the eye of a giant. Dank vapors escaped from the well shafts and sewer gratings. As the river advanced it became the city’s prisoner, chained by bridges of stone, bound by levees of concrete, forced to feed a labyrinth of canals.

  On the coiled and buckled streets, figures moved in a shadowy parade.

  “There—what did I tell you?” said the MARCH Hare. “This extinction has been blown all out of proportion. We’re a tough breed, Paxton. Who knows? Maybe one of these survivors is that fertility expert you want.”

  George paused beside a wrought iron gate and caught his breath. Had the war completely bypassed this island? Or had a faction of darkbloods emigrated from Antarctica and set up a colony off the tip of Africa? Closer observation suggested that the marchers were not unadmitted—certainly they bore little resemblance to Olaf Sverre’s cynical and irreverent Navy. They were like their city, palsied, broken, lost. Something pathological had visited these people—if not the war, then an equivalent catastrophe. They stepped to the beat of a convulsing drummer. They gasped like beached fish. Their clothing, a potpourri of styles and eras, was in worse shape than a scopas suit wardrobe after a thermonuclear exchange—rends, gashes, holes, with bare flesh beneath, yellow flesh, white, brown, cracked and gelatinous, here and there melting to bone.

  “Quite a show they put on, huh?” said Brat. “Folk festival, I guess.”

  Whenever he tried speaking with one of the marchers, the best he got was a blank look, more often a moan transmitting stenches and despair.

  “They don’t understand English,” the general concluded.

  The defendants moved down the sultry, glutted streets, jostling through the parade but in no way joining it. They came upon a plaza. Bricks glowed beneath the death’s-head moon. A defunct fountain lay in a web of fog. Across the way, a bright shop beamed through the night like a huge kerosene lantern.

  The paunchy window was filled with hats. George gulped.

  How had it managed to survive the Battle of Boston? How had it gotten here? Even the sign was intact: THE MAD TEA PARTY—REMARKABLE THINGS FOR HUMAN BODIES, followed by PROFESSOR THEOPHILUS CARTER—TAILOR, HATTER, FURRIER, INVENTOR, PROPRIETOR.

  “Looks like my best shot is to buy a costume and disappear into this Mardi Gras thing until the tide takes Sverre away,” said Brat. “Are you really determined to get your balls back in order?”

  “Yes.”

  “I imagine I’ve got some pretty fantastic adventures ahead. I could use a man like you on my team, somebody who’s smart, strong…a little pig-headed.”

  “Sorry, Brat. A cure, then Antarctica, then a family—I’ve seen it all.”

  The bells tinkled mournfully as the defendants entered. Gushing sweat, they wove through the vast collection of costumed mannequins. World War Three had not been kind to Carter’s inventory. The disintegrating tweeds of Edwardian gentlemen dusted the broken armor of Japanese knights. Eighteenth-century waistcoats rubbed tattered shoulders with nineteenth-century gowns.

  “Do you need lodgings?” a voice called out in a British accent. “Several funerals are happening upstairs. Would you like a room with a viewing?”

  The MAD Hatter had aged, not by the decades that had elapsed outside the darkblood realms, but enough to push him past the mortal side of sixty—eyes receding, red hair fading toward pink, brow stippled with liver spots. His top hat appeared to have contracted eczema.

  “I was sorry to hear of your species’s death,” he said. “I meant to send a sympathy card. They don’t make belated sympathy cards, do they? ‘So sorry I missed your mother’s bout with cancer.’”

  For the first time since the celebration banquet, George’s bullet wound began to throb. “I’m in a lot of trouble because of you, Professor.”

  “Trouble?” said the Hatter.

  “I’m on trial for ending the world.”

  “Just remember, it could be worse. You could not be on trial for ending the world. You could be the corpus delicti instead. Signing that sales contract was the smartest thing you ever did.”

  “Hey, you know this bird?” Brat asked of George.

  Theophilus pulled off his hat. “Bird? The raven is a bird, also the vulture, but not I. You’re not a bird either, General Tarmac, though we’d all be better off if you were. Say, George, did you ever find out why a raven is like a writing desk?”

  “Right now I’m trying to find out about fertility. My secondary spermatocytes are failing to become spermatids.”

  The Hatter’s sigh was long and musical. “There just isn’t much reproduction going on in the world any more, is there? What with the extinction and everything. These post-exchange environments have little to recommend them.”

  “Extinction?” said Brat. “Nonsense, the streets are teeming with your customers. You must do a pretty good business around carnival time.”

  Spontaneously—no one knew who was leading and who following—the three men went to the window. The parade crawled across the plaza like some huge organism, flagella and antennae lashing in all directions.

  “Welcome to the City of the Invalidated Past,” said the Hatter, “or, if you prefer, the Necropolis of History, or, if you don’t prefer, the City of the Invalidated Past. It’s your kind of town, George. Yours too, General.” He jabbed his index finger toward the window. “Look, there’s a guard from the court of Harun al-Rashid in eighth-century Baghdad. And a Roman civil engineer who built a water mill in 143 B.C. A merchant responsible for bringing improved plow designs to Flanders in 1074. A bishop who participated in the Council of Trent. A worker on Henry Ford’s original assembly line…Think about it! These people actually lived!” Theophilus held his top hat in front of his heart. “They got up each morning. They breathed, argued, screwed, moved their bowels. They saw the sun. They had opinions about cats. Listen, do you hear it? Do you hear their sorrow? Their sobs and wails? They’re sad because they’ve been invalidated. When you turn the human race into garbage, you also turn history into garbage. ‘Why did we bother to invent writing?’ they ask. ‘Or spinning jennies? Why did we trouble ourselves with the cathedrals?’”

  They followed the Hatter’s short beckoning arm as he led them back to the counter, behind the velvet drapes, and into a hot, squalid room suggesting a laboratory from which nothing beneficial ever issued. Detached human heads were suspended over steaming vats of what looked like liquid flesh. Disconnected limbs swam in tanks of purple fluid. Skeletons dangled from the ceiling as if waiting to make their entrances in some demented marionette show. George felt that he was about as far from a fertility clinic as he could get.

  “This is where Victor Frankenstein did his post-graduate work,” said Theophilus. Rusty surgical instruments and corroded technological bric-a-brac filled a dozen cabinets. “This is where Thomas Edison invented the burned-out light bulb.”

  The Hatter, George decided, had lost his mind. Was it possible for a lunatic to go mad?

  Tea things overran a linen-swathed table. Hungry and thirsty from their dash across the island, the fugitives sat down and indulged themselves, gulping hot tea, gobbling their way through a heap of stale rolls and crumpets. The Hatter joined them.

  “Every night, corpses float through the city,” he exp
lained merrily, smearing butter on a bran muffin.

  “War victims?” A silly question, George thought. Of course they were war victims.

  “No, they died long before the war, centuries before in some cases. I pull them from the river. I dress them. I perform surgery. No problem finding spare parts. The whole world is made of spare parts now. Out go the shriveled organs and the dehydrated blood. In go the relays, motors, microprocessors, voice synthesizers, and spark plugs. But does that do it? Of course not. What is history without hopes, ideals, neuroses, illusions? Hence—my Z-1000 computer over there. Isn’t it wonderful what a man can do with a little technology and some free time?”

  “Oh, I get it—they’re robots!” said Brat. “It’s like Walt Disney.”

  “If admitted,” said Theophilus, “I would have lived in the early twenty-first century, turning out automatons as efficiently as a cobbler turns out shoes.” He went to his work table and began transferring eyeballs from one glass jar to another, tossing the rejects into a teacup.

  “This can’t be the shop you had back in Boston,” said George. How far the Hatter had sunk—from designing scopas suits to desecrating war victims.

  “My humble establishment is like the submarine from which you escaped,” Theophilus explained. “It flits about from place to place. More twenty-first century know-how.”

  “I must say, Carter, you’ve got an impressive project under way here,” said Brat. “My hat goes off to you.”

  “First I have to sell you one.”

  “Probably not the best way to keep civilization afloat, but still ingenious.” The MARCH Hare grabbed a crumpet, slammed it into his tea.