by Mike Ashley
Nothing.
I turned on one heel and looked eastward, towards the sun. There was an unfamiliar violet disk in the sky, surrounded by a nimbus of silver haze. Here and there, black prominences lifted, like an artist's impossible, frozen flame.
There was a soft retching sound.
When I looked, Paulie was on his hands and knees on the lovely brick sidewalk, puking, little pistol dropped in the grass, not far away.
In my death-dream, there was the sound of a toilet flushing. The splashy roar as the flapper valve opened. The whining song of the inlet valve, letting new water in as the float goes down. The turds leap up from the bottom of the bowl and start spinning round. The toilet paper sinks, sucked down into the darkness below.
Round and round and down we go.
Towards someplace.
Someplace long ago, in a universe far, far away.
Hmm. Would that be long ago, then, and, oh, so far away?
Or merely once upon a time?
Will I see malevolent indigo eyes open on darkness?
No. That's merely another story lost and gone forever. Mieses to pieces.
Out of the darkness, came a very polite, ever-so-slightly supercilious male voice: I'm terribly sorry for the inconvenience, sir. If you'll just follow me, I'll get you where you belong and you can get on with your life.
Um. Amazing that a dead guy can still feel his bowels go watery with fear. Who the hell are you? My guardian fucking angel?
The voice was amused: What delightful spirit in the face of eternity!
A structure that I assumed was my throat made a dry swallow, a faint, ectoplasmic clucking sound.
The voice said, My dear Mr Faraday. Guardian angel is close enough but in your case, I think you'd better think of me as a neurotransmitter. My job is to move you through Transition Space to the Storage Plenum.
Storage Plenum?
Sigh. The Afterlife, if you wish. Come along.
Afterlife? Oh, shit.
The voice made a cute little tee-hee-hee. It'll be all right, Mr Faraday. Really. We're terribly sorry for all the trouble we've caused.
We?
It said, Oh, dear. They didn't say you'd have so many questions! Tsk.
They?
One and the same, I'm afraid. I'm an element of the orphan cluster rescue array, a subset of the accidental entities study group, which is in turn attached to the disaster reversal special hierarchy. We adhere to an attractor in meme-set space which requires us to believe the pseudo-sentient biproducts of the disaster-set entity have a right to exist, even though they have no reality in the C11 plenum.
What the fuck are you talking about?
What Cn plenum?
Sigh. You are familiar with the concept that the universe exists as an eleven dimensional space?
The one where the extra dimensions are rolled up inside mass quanta, leaving behind just the three of space and one of time? More or less.
Well, that's not quite it but it's on the right track. Mr Faraday, the Cn plenum is a fully-packed array of Kaluza-Klein entities containing an infinite amount of energy. Perhaps the simplest way to visualize this space is to view it as random-access memory, whose base state is set to the value one. Assume that there are quantum uncertainty processes at work that sometimes reset an entity's value to zero. Then assume there is some kind of universal CPU whose instruction set allows it to perform certain operations on all entities of value zero. You could think of that as a solid-state universe and not be far wrong.
Isn't that what writers call bafflegab? And isn't this nothing more than a data dump?
The voice's amusement seemed lugubrious, to say the least. Oh, Mr Faraday. If that's your attitude, then what more can I say?
Who are you, why are we here, where are we going and what the hell happened?
Fair enough, Mr Faraday. I told you who I am, though I don't think you believe it. What happened? It's not so simple, but I'll see if I can simplify it. As you might imagine Cn space has something like evolution, and since its persistence time appears to be on the order of io52 years, there has been plenty of time for it to operate. Over the vigintillia, unimaginably complex entities have evolved.
How complex is that, asshole?
Tsk-tsk. Mr Faraday! Unimaginable to you. As I was saying- in time, these entities grew to understand the properties of the universe they inhabited, and to manipulate it for their own purposes, also unimaginable to you.
Then why tell me?
It sounded hurt: Because you asked, Mr Faraday. Now, if you'll just be patient? One day, a really long time ago, as you count such things, they discovered that they could create a subplenum with properties analogous to Cw, if C1Q space existed. All they had to do was create it, and then they would have access to a technology in some ways equivalent to your own data processing technology but infinitely more powerful.
I felt a horrid supposition. One that made me feel cheated indeed.
So you're going to tell me I'm nothing but a computer game? Well now there's an original idea!
Such palpable sarcasm, Mr Faraday! My word! No, nothing so tawdry as that. If it were, none of this would be happening, and you'd never know you were, ah, simulations, I suppose. Unfortunately, once the entities had their C1Q computers, they were able to work out the properties of the Cg plenum and deduce that they could use it for physical movement outside the laws of Cn. Star-ships, if you will. Time travel, etc. Magic.
How nice for them.
Mr Faraday, when the first Cg device was switched on, it started a chain reaction which began collapsing the dimensions in upon each other, creating lower and lower plena, basically eating away the higher ones. Something had to be done to contain this disaster, which is who I am, and what's happening now. I don't understand. Sigh. I suppose not, Mr Faraday. Look: timescales in the higher dimensions are considerably longer than in your own. Cj space began as an industrial accident, and everything within it is a product of that accident. You are toxic waste, and now, the cleanup crew has arrived. Oh.
Mr Faraday, the beings of Cn don't know you exist, and if they did, they would not care. Their only interest is in reversing the substrate disaster, and in being more careful next time.
So who are you, really? And ... and...
And what happens next? Do we wipe you from the floor and have done with it? No. We are the machines made to clean up the mess and we have noticed you, Mr Faraday. Some among us have realized we have no right to destroy you and have made a place for you to ... persist. Yes. That's the word.
Persist.
Perhaps you'd like to call us the gods of a lesser creation? Yes, that will do nicely. And that lesser creation is something you might want to call the storage plenum.
Storage. For how long?
I told you, Mr Faraday. Our timescales are far longer than yours.
You'll like what we've made for you. The Earth bubble, with everything there ever was living on Earth. It's my special creation, though I'm told the other bubbles are equally nice.
Other bubbles?
It said, We're here, Mr Faraday. It's been very nice to meet you, sir.
And so, my fine boys and girls, we went down the waste pipe and were flushed out to sea.
See?
After the Sun went out, it got colder and colder and colder, faster than we expected, punching through our heavy clothes, defeating our ingenious little masks, heated and otherwise, until we had to break out the spacesuits, not because there wasn't enough air, but because it was too fucking cold.
You can't imagine how cold -180 feels.
At -180, the oil on your skin freezes. You get cracks at the corners of your eyes. You blink and your skin breaks.
The spacesuits we'd stolen from dead Philadelphia were astonishingly heavy, astonishingly hard to put on, even harder to put together, like Christmas toys in their packaging with "some assembly required".
On the other hand, they were warm and snug and each suit came with a mounting rack, s
o they would stand up like so many hollow men, waiting for us to crawl through the hatches in their backs. Unfortunately, they weighed almost 150 pounds apiece, like self-contained suits of Medieval combat armor. Cataphracts in Space. A wonderful Star Crap title no one'd managed to think of. Too late now, boys. Wonder if any of them are still alive? I hope not.
Connie and Julia had to help us up the stairs into the freezing cold hotel, which we were using as a sort of airlock, but once there, we could at least stand unaided, could stagger around, pissing and moaning to each other.
Paulie said, "They'll never be able to walk in these, Scott."
"Connie will. She's in better shape than either of us. She weighs 145, you know." And stands five feet eight.
He said, "Well, I weigh 260, and if I fell down..."
I gave a little hop. "I don't even weigh 200, Paulie. You're carrying at least eighty pounds of dead weight, as well as the suit."
"Fuck you."
"Not tonight, Paulie. I have a headache."
"Asshole."
"And proud of it. Come on, let's see if we can get outside without falling down the steps."
It was pitch black outside. Empty. Still. Maybe silent, but all I could hear was the wheeze and whir of my portable life support system. I tripped going over the jamb, staggering, barely able to catch my balance.
Paulie said, "Careful! Why the hell do the boots have heels, anyway? I mean, these suits were intended for orbital EVAs."
"Failure of imagination." Or maybe they thought one day we'd be going back to the Moon, going on to Mars? Fat chance.
It was hard going getting down the steps and out onto the lawn. I was starting to breathe hard, and Paulie's gasps were keeping the microphones activated, rasping hard in my ears.
He said, "What if I have a heart attack?"
I said, "Do you think Julia will want me to fuck her after you're dead, Paulie?"
He made a satisfying gibber, then shut up, saving his breath for walking. We didn't make it to the top of the hill, not by a long shot, just to the head of the driveway but that was enough. There was a dark pickup truck with a bed cap sitting halfway down to the mailbox. I twisted and looked back towards the hotel, towards the lit-up cupola poking out of the ground beyond the hump of the garage birm. No one.
I said, "If we'd thought to turn on the security camera system, we'd've seen them coming." And since we hadn't, that movie mob of peasants armed with pitchforks and scythes would've been inside before we knew what was happening.
Paulie's breath rasped and grunted as we slowly made our way down to the truck. Inanely, I wondered if there was any mail waiting for us out at the road. Maybe a summons from the IRS?
Inside the truck cab, Gary sat behind the wheel, eyes and mouth open, covered with frost. There was a woman sitting beside him in a fluffy white fur-trimmed parka, eyes shut, head down on his shoulder, looking like she was asleep. A thick lock of long, straight black hair had escaped from the hood and was hanging down halfway to her lap.
"I guess it's a good thing we forgot to turn on the cameras. You see what's in the rack?" I wonder where the hell he found a machine gun?
Paulie was leaning forwards in his helmet visor, head miniaturized and made comical by the optical properties of the glass, staring at the woman.
"You know her?"
He nodded. "It's his sister."
Sister. Well. Was she in the group we chased away, or did he actually make the long round trip to Chapel Hill for her? And then what? A peace offering? Here, Paulie. I'll trade you my sister for Julia. I started to feel sick to my stomach, maybe from the exertion, maybe not.
We turned away and started scraping back up the driveway. It was slightly uphill and harder than ever. Paulie was starting to choke between gasps, like he wanted to swallow his tongue, making me wonder how the fuck we were going to manage this. When the air's gone, the resistance in the joints from suit pressure will be multiplied.
Paulie stopped, turning, and I could see his head tilted back, looking up at the sky. "What ... " The sound of wonder.
I looked up. There was the Cone, seeming to loom huge above us, hanging low over the horizon, threatening and obscene, like it was swallowing the sky. Hell. It is. There. A smear of gray not far from it. Over there another one, larger still, nacreous, with faint striations.
Visible?
"Paulie."
He said, "It's probably a lot colder up by the tropopause. Not so much radiant heating from the ground."
"What do you mean?"
He turned and looked at me. "I think it's an oxygen cloud."
I felt a thrill run through my intestines, threatening to burst right out my asshole. This is ... this is ... what?
Real? Paulie was looking down at the snow surface around us. He switched on his helmet lights, and I was stunned to see it made the rime of carbon dioxide frost begin to steam. Here and there, like holes in a golf green, there were shadowy little pockets. Gophers?
I said, "Maybe we better go inside?"
He staggered over to one of the holes and tried to kick it with his toe, swaying. The thing was solid, like a little bowl of ice, maybe two inches across. "No. What the fuck are those things?"
"I dunno. Let's walk up the hill and take a look around."
We had to stop fifteen times on the way up and by the time we made the summit, we'd been outside for almost three hours. I said, "I guess you're not going to have a heart attack, Paulie. No Julia for me."
He was looking off to the east, still breathing too hard to talk, and when I followed his gaze, I saw some dim, hazy light down by the horizon, barely there. As I watched, eyes adapting, it seemed to grow brighter, then slowly wane, hesitate, flutter, and wax again. "Richmond?"
He gasped, tried to hold his breath, gasped again, panting, then said, "Maybe. On... fire?"
I said, "It's too cold for anything to burn, Paulie."
"Bomb."
"Richmond's only a little more than a hundred miles from here. If somebody set off even a little atom bomb, we'd've felt the ground shake."
"Maybe we were asleep." Breathing easier now.
Overhead, the oxygen clouds seemed larger. "Maybe so. Or fucking. Hey, Paulie, you feel the earth move when you come?"
He didn't even laugh, looking away from the light, back up at the clouds and ... "There." He lifted his arm a little bit, trying to point.
Something was coming down towards us, a little glowing pinpoint of light. Tinkerbell, looking for Peter Pan. It was drifting our way, drifting like dandelion fluff on the wind, slowly settling. When it was close enough, I could see it was a little silver sphere about the size of a golfball. A vaguely luminescent soap bubble.
Paulie whispered, "Oh, my God." I don't remember ever having heard him sound so pleased in all my life.
The thing started to steam as it approached the ground, not quite hovering over the snowpack, steaming, shrinking, drifting lower. I suddenly realized whatever it was, it wasn't hot enough to sublimate the C02. Lower.
Lower.
Paphl
It exploded with a sharp hiss, momentarily ballooning to a bright softball of dusty light. Suddenly, there was an icy teacup in the snow where it'd been.
I said, "Well. Guess we know where the holes came from."
He looked like he wanted to kneel beside it. Impossible. He put his hands on his hips, clownish, clumsy, looking back up at bright clouds, visibly spreading across the black and starry sky.
I grinned. "Oxygen rain."
He smiled back, eyes incredibly bright. "Yeah."
I said, "Merry Christmas, Paulie."
How many times can a man awaken and open his eyes slowly? As many times as it takes. Until he's finally awake. Overhead, there was a clear blue sky, that fabled cornflower blue, with fine, faded white clouds so high up you could hardly make out their shape, more like faraway mist than clouds. There was a soft wind blowing and it was cool. Just cool enough for comfort, like when you've set the AC just right.
Just right to be naked.
I could hear the wind rushing in the trees, and there was another soft sound, a faint hissing, like the whitish noise you hear when you stand next to a field of ripe wheat rippling in the wind. Something else, too. Ocean waves in the distance. Sunlight warm on my skin. Sun hanging low in the sky, above remote, jagged white mountains.
All right. Mountains. I...
I sat up suddenly, feeling a hard jolt in my chest, looking around, bug-eyed. Oh!
Below me, stretching down the slope of a long hill, the Earth Bubble of the Storage Plenum, gift from the Gods of a Lesser Creation, was a vast, shallowly curving bowl, like a world inside a wok, rimmed by mountains that must make the Himalayas look small.
There were more hills, below the hills a sea, surrounded by white beach, beyond the beach, mountains, the Alps maybe, beyond the mountains, another sea, beyond that sea, a darkling plain, overhung by a boil of gray-white cumulonimbus.
There! A towering black anvil, lightning twisting from it, striking at the land below.
Mountains and seas and forking silvery rivers spreading out to right and left. Deserts, both yellow and red.
Beyond the curving land, down in the bottom of the bowl, hanging white mist. Then more landscape, so tiny it looked like a clutter of colored static, green and blue and gray, then the mountains below the sun.
Pellucidar, I thought, or that World Without End from a story I once thought of but never wrote, the one about the Space-Time Juggernaut.
And if the Gods told the truth, somewhere now, everyone is awakening. Everyone. People like me who think they've awakened on the bright sward of some personal Barsoom, fearful others, awakening to Heaven or Hell. Or Neterkhert.
Somewhere, a king of Kmt awakens, looks up in the sky, and screams Aton's name.
Somewhere else, a sinner awakens, and wonders where they might have hidden the lake of boiling blood.
I got to my feet, dusting stalks of dead grass off my bare butt, wriggling my toes in cool green living grass, wondering if Dante was somewhere nearby, wondering why there were so many Italians in Hell.
There were trees, tall thin things with scaly gray trunks, surrounded by a carpet of brown pine needles and, just as I looked, a couple emerged, holding hands, a man and a woman, both of them very thin. She was a redhead; he had thin brown hair and a sculpted, curly brown beard. And seeing me, they waved, hurrying fonvard.
