Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

by Mike Ashley

  "I don't really have a choice, do I," he said.

  "Course you have a choice," Nero answered.

  "I mean, morally. I've seen what it's like for you people. You're stretched to breaking point just keeping this operation from falling apart. Why don't you wake up more sleepers?"

  "Hey, that's a good point," Clausen said. "Why don't we?"

  Gaunt ignored her sarcasm. "You've just left that man alone, looking after that whole complex. How can I turn my back on you, and still have any self-respect?"

  "Plenty of people do exactly that," Nero said.

  "How many? What fraction?"

  "More than half agree to stay," Clausen said. "Good enough for you?"

  "But like you said, most of the sleepers would have known what they were getting into. I still don't."

  "And you think that changes things, means we can cut you some slack?" Clausen asked. "Like we're gonna say, it's fine man, go back into the box, we can do without you this time."

  "What you need to understand," Nero said, "is that the future you were promised isn't coming. Not for centuries, not until we're out of this mess. And no one has a clue how long that could take. Meanwhile, the sleepers don't have unlimited shelf life. You think the equipment never fails? You think we don't sometimes lose someone because a box breaks down?"

  "Of course not."

  "You go back in the box, you're gambling on something that might never happen. Stay awake, at least there are certainties. At least you know you'll die doing something useful, something worthwhile."

  "It would help if you told me why," Gaunt said.

  "Someone has to look after things," Nero said. "The robots take care of the rigs, but who takes care of the robots?"

  "I mean, why is it that everyone has to sleep? Why is that so damned important?"

  Something flashed on the console. Clausen pressed a hand against her headphones, listening to something. After a few seconds he heard her say: "Roger, vectoring three two five." Followed by an almost silent, "Fuck. All we need."

  "That wasn't a weather alert," Nero said.

  "What's happening?" Gaunt asked, as the helicopter made a steep turn, the sea tilting up to meet him.

  "Nothing you need worry about," Clausen said.

  The helicopter levelled out on its new course, flying higher than before - so it seemed to Gaunt - but also faster, the motor noise louder in the cabin, various indicator lights showing on the console that had not been lit before. Clausen silenced alarms as they came on, flipping the switches with the casual insouciance of someone who was well used to flying under tense circumstances and knew exactly what her machine could and couldn't tolerate, more intimately perhaps than the helicopter itself, which was after all only a dumb machine. Rig after rig passed on either side, dark straddling citadels, and then the field began to thin out. Through what little visibility remained Gaunt saw only open sea, a plain of undulating, white-capped grey. As the winds harried it the water moved like the skin of some monstrous breathing thing, sucking in and out with a terrible restlessness.

  "There," Nero said, pointing out to the right. "Breach glow. Shit; I thought we were meant to be avoiding it, not getting closer."

  Clausen banked the helicopter again. "So did I. Either they sent me a duff vector or there's more than one incursion going on."

  "Won't be the first time. Bad weather always does bring them out. Why is that?"

  "Ask the machines."

  It took Gaunt a few moments to make out what Nero had already seen. Halfway to the limit of vision, part of the sea appeared to be lit from below, a smudge of sickly yellow-green against the grey and white everywhere else. A vision came to mind, half-remembered from some stiff-backed picture book he had once owned as a child, of a luminous, fabulously spired aquatic palace pushing up from the depths, barnacled in light, garlanded by mermaids and shoals of jewel-like fish.

  But there was, he sensed, nothing remotely magical or enchanted about what was happening under that yellow-green smear. It was something that had Clausen and Nero rattled, and they wanted to avoid it.

  So did he.

  "What is that thing?"

  "Something trying to break through," Nero said. "Something we were kind of hoping not to run into."

  "It's not cohering," Clausen said. "I think."

  The storm, if anything, appeared to double in fury around the glowing form. The sea boiled and seethed. Part of Gaunt wanted them to turn the helicopter around, to give him a better view of whatever process was going on under the waves. Another part, attuned to some fundamental wrongness about the phenomenon, wanted to get as far away as possible.

  "Is it a weapon, something to do with this war you keep mentioning?" Gaunt asked.

  He wasn't expecting a straight answer, least of all not from Clausen. It was a surprise when she said: "This is how they get at us. They try and send these things through. Sometimes they manage."

  "It's breaking up," Nero said. "You were right. Not enough signal for a clear breach. Must be noisy on the interface."

  The yellow-green stain was diminishing by the second, as if that magical city were descending back to the depths. He watched, mesmerized, as something broke the surface - something long and glowing and whip-like, thrashing once, coiling out as if trying to reach for airborne prey, before being pulled under into the fizzing chaos. Then the light slowly subsided, and the waves returned to their normal surging ferocity, and the patch of the ocean where the apparition had appeared was indistinguishable from the seas around it.

  Gaunt had arrived at his decision. He would join these people, he would do their work, he would accept their deal, such as it was. Not because he wanted to, not because his heart was in it, not because he believed he was strong enough, but because the alternative was to seem cowardly, weak-fibred, unwilling to bend his life to an altruistic mission. He knew that these were entirely the wrong reasons, but he accepted the force of them without argument. Better to at least appear to be self ess, even if the thought of what lay ahead of him flooded him with an almost overwhelming sense of despair and loss and bitter injustice.

  It had been three days since his revival when he announced his decision. In that time he had barely spoken to anyone but Clausen, Nero and Da Silva. The other workers in the operations rig would occasionally acknowledge his presence, grunt something to him as he waited in line at the canteen, but for the most part it was clear that they were not prepared to treat him as another human being until he committed to their cause. He was just a ghost until then, a half-spirit caught in dismal, drifting limbo between the weary living and the frozen dead. He could understand how they felt: what was the point in getting to know a prospective comrade, if that person might at any time opt to return to the boxes? But at the same time it didn't help him feel as if he would ever be able to fit in.

  He found Clausen alone, washing dirty coffee cups in a side-room of the canteen.

  "I've made up my mind," he said.

  "And?"

  "I'm staying."

  "Good." She finished drying off one of the cups. "You'll be assigned a full work roster tomorrow. I'm teaming you up with Nero; you'll be working basic robot repair and maintenance. She can show you the ropes while she's getting better." Clausen paused to put the dried cup back in one of the cupboards above the sink. "Show up in the mess room at eight; Nero'll be there with a toolkit and work gear. Grab a good breakfast beforehand because you won't be taking a break until end of shift."

  Then she turned to leave the room, leaving him standing there.

  "That's it?" Gaunt asked.

  She looked back with a puzzled look. "Were you expecting something else?"

  "You bring me out of cold storage, tell me the world's turned to shit while I was sleeping, and then give me the choice of staying awake or going back into the box. Despite everything I actually agree to work with you, knowing full well that in doing so I'm forsaking any chance of ever living to see anything other than this piss-poor, miserable future. F
orsaking immortality, forsaking any hope of seeing a better world. You said I had ... what? Twenty, thirty years ahead of me?"

  "Give or take."

  "I'm giving you those years! Isn't that worth something? Don't I deserve at least to be told thank you? Don't I at least deserve a crumb of gratitude?"

  "You think you're different, Gaunt? You think you're owed something the rest of us never had a hope of getting?"

  "I never signed up for this deal," he said. "I never accepted this bargain."

  "Right." She nodded, as if he'd made a profound, game-changing point. "I get it. What you're saying is, for the rest of us it was easy? We went into the dormitories knowing there was a tiny, tiny chance we might be woken to help out with the maintenance. Because of that, because we knew, theoretically, that we might be called upon, we had no problem at all dealing with the adjustment? Is that what you're saying?"

  "I'm saying it's different, that's all."

  "If you truly think that, Gaunt, you're even more of a prick than I thought."

  "You woke me," he said. "You chose to wake me. It wasn't accidental. If there really are two billion people sleeping out there, the chances of selecting someone from the first 200,000 ... it's microscopic. So you did this for a reason."

  "I told you, you had the right background skills."

  "Skills anyone could learn, given time. Nero obviously did, and I presume you must have done so as well. So there must be another reason. Seeing as you keep telling me all this is my fault, I figure this is your idea of punishment."

  "You think we've got time to be that petty?"

  "I don't know. What I do know is that you've treated me more or less like dirt since the moment I woke up, and I'm trying to work out why. I also think it's maybe about time you told me what's really going on. Not just with the sleepers, but everything else. The thing we saw out at sea. The reason for all this."

  "You think you're ready for it, Gaunt?"

  "You tell me."

  "No one's ever ready," Clausen said.

  The next morning he took his breakfast tray to a table where three other caretakers were already sitting. They had finished their meals but were still talking over mugs of whatever it was they had agreed to call coffee. Gaunt sat down at the corner of the table, acknowledging the other diners with a nod. They had been talking animatedly until then, but without ceremony the mugs were drained and the trays lifted and he was alone again. Nothing had been said to him, except a muttered "don't take it the wrong way" as one of the caretakers brushed past him.

  He wondered how else he was supposed to take it.

  "I'm staying," he said quietly. "I've made my decision. What else am I expected to do?"

  He ate his breakfast in silence and then went to find Nero.

  "I guess you got your orders," she said cheerfully, already dressed for outdoor work despite still having a bandaged hand. "Here. Take this." She passed him a heavy toolkit, a hard hat and a bundle of brownish work-stained clothing piled on top of it. "Get kitted up, then meet me at the north stairwell. You OK with heights, Gaunt?"

  "Would it help if I said no?"

  "Probably not."

  "Then I'll say I'm very good with heights, provided there's no danger at all of falling."

  "That I can't guarantee. But stick with me, do everything I say, and you'll be fine."

  The bad weather had eased since Nero's return, and although there was still a sharp wind from the east, the grey clouds had all but lifted. The sky was a pale, wintery blue, unsullied by contrails. On the horizon, the tops of distant rigs glittered pale and metallic in sunlight. Seagulls and yellow-headed gannets wheeled around the warm air vents, or took swooping passes under the rig's platform, darting between the massive weather-stained legs, mewing boisterously to each other as they jostled for scraps. Recalling that birds sometimes lived a long time, Gaunt wondered if they had ever noticed any change in the world. Perhaps their tiny minds had never truly registered the presence of civilization and technology in the first place, and so there was nothing for them to miss in this skeleton-staffed world.

  Despite being cold-shouldered at breakfast, he felt fresh and eager to prove his worth to the community. Pushing aside his fears, he strove to show no hesitation as he followed Nero across suspended gangways, slippery with grease, up exposed stairwells and ladders, clasping ice-cold railings and rungs. They were both wearing harnesses with clip-on safety lines but Nero only used hers once or twice the whole day and because he did not want to seem excessively cautious he followed suit. Being effectively one-handed did not hinder her in any visible sense, even on the ladders, which she ascended and descended with reckless speed.

  They were working robot repair, as he had been promised. All over the rig, inside and out, various forms of robot toiled in endless menial upkeep. Most, if not all, were very simple machines, tailored to one specif c function. This made them easy to understand and fix, even with basic tools, but it also meant there was almost always a robot breaking down somewhere, or on the point of failure. The toolkit didn't just contain tools, it also contained spare parts such as optical arrays, proximity sensors, mechanical bearings and servomotors. There was, Gaunt understood, a finite supply of some of these parts. But there was also a whole section of the operations rig dedicated to refurbishing basic components, and given care and resourcefulness, there was no reason why the caretakers couldn't continue their work for another couple of centuries.

  "No one expects it to take that long, though," Nero said, as she finished demonstrating a circuit-board swap. "They'll either win or lose by then, and we'll only know one way. But in the meantime we have to make do and mend."

  "Who's they?"

  But she was already on the move, shinning up another ladder with him trailing behind.

  "Clausen doesn't like me much," Gaunt said, when they had reached the next level and he had caught his breath again. "At least, that's my impression."

  They were out on one of the gang-wayed platforms, with the grey sky above, the grey swelling sea below. Everything smelled oppressively oceanic, a constant shifting melange of oil and ozone and seaweed, as if the ocean was never going to let anyone forget that they were on a spindly metal and concrete structure hopelessly far from dry land. He had wondered about the seaweed until he saw them hauling in green-scummed rafts of it, the seaweed - or something essentially similar - cultured on buoyant sub-surface grids that were periodically retrieved for harvesting. Everything consumed on the rigs, from the food to the drink to the basic medicines, had first to be grown or caught at sea.

  "Val has her reasons," Nero said. "Don't worry about it too much; it isn't personal."

  It was the first time he'd heard anyone refer to the other woman by anything other than her surname.

  "That's not how it comes across."

  "It hasn't been easy for her. She lost someone not too long ago." Nero seemed to hesitate. "There was an accident. They're pretty common out here, with the kind of work we do. But when Paolo died we didn't even have a body to put back in the box. He fell into the sea, last we ever saw of him."

  "I'm sorry about that."

  "But you're wondering, what does it have to do with me?"

  "I suppose so."

  "If Paolo hadn't died, then we wouldn't have had to pull Gimenez out of storage. And if Gimenez hadn't died ... well, you get the picture. You can't help it, but you're filling the space Paolo used to occupy. And you're not Paolo."

  "Was she any easier on Gimenez than me?"

  "To begin with, I think she was too numbed-out to feel anything at all where Gimenez was concerned. But now she's had time for it to sink in, I guess. We're a small community, and if you lose someone, it's not like there are hundreds of other single people out there to choose from. And you - well, no disrespect, Gaunt - but you're just not Val's type."

  "Maybe she'll find someone else."

  "Yeah - but that probably means someone else has to die first, so that someone else has to end up widowed. An
d you can imagine how thinking like that can quickly turn you sour on the inside."

  "There's more to it than that, though. You say it's not personal, but she told me I started this war."

  "Well, you did, kind of. But if you hadn't played your part, someone else would have taken up the slack, no question about it." Nero tugged down the brim of her hard hat against the sun. "Maybe she pulled you out because she needed to take out her anger on someone, I don't know. But that's all in the past now. Whatever life you had before, whatever you did in the old world, it's gone." She knuckled her good hand against the metal rigging. "This is all we've got now. Rigs and work and green tea and a few hundred faces and that's it for the rest of your life. But here's the thing: it's not the end of the world. We're human beings. We're very flexible, very good at downgrading our expectations. Very good at finding a reason to keep living, even when the world's turned to shit. You slot in, and in a few months even you'll have a hard time remembering the way things used to be."

  "What about you, Nero? Do you remember?"

  "Not much worth remembering. The program was in full swing by the time I went under. Population reduction measures. Birth control, government-sanctioned euthanasia, the dormitory rigs springing up out at sea ... we knew from the moment we were old enough to understand anything that this wasn't our world any more. It was just a way-station, a place to pass through. We all knew we were going into the boxes as soon as we were old enough to survive the process. And that we'd either wake up at the end of it in a completely different world, or not wake up at all. Or - if we were very unlucky -we'd be pulled out to become caretakers. Either way, the old world was an irrelevance. We just shuffled through it, knowing there was no point making real friends with anyone, no point taking lovers. The cards were going to be shuffled again. Whatever we did then, it had no bearing on our future."

  "I don't know how you could stand it."

  "It wasn't a barrel of laughs. Nor's this, some days. But at least we're doing something here. I felt cheated when they woke me up. But cheated out of what, exactly?" She nodded down at the ground, in the vague direction of the rig's interior. "Those sleepers don't have any guarantees about what's coming. They're not even conscious, so you can't even say they're in a state of anticipation.