Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

by Mike Ashley

  "The reserve still aboard might get us back to the Moon, with half a drop left in the tanks."

  "With only one aboard?"

  "Safe enough."

  Then I want you to go back for what we need to replant our own biocosm. Seed, frozen eggs and embryos, equipment for the lab."

  "To replant ourselves?" Arne scowled at her. "With that black biocosm just over the ridge?"

  She shrugged. "We face risks. We must cope when we can. Leave our records when we can't." She turned to me. "You'll go back with Pepe. Holograph the data we can send you. Hold the fort."

  "And leave us marooned?" Arne went pale. "Just the two of us?"

  "Pepe will be back," she told him. "You have enough to do here. Testing soils. Prospecting for oil and ores we'll need."

  Pepe and I went back to the Moon. My beagle was happy to have me home. The robots loaded and refueled the plane. Pepe took off and left me alone and very lonely. The robots were poor companions and the holos had nothing new to say, but Spaceman was a comfort until I got news from Earth.

  Pepe had inflated another geodome for a hydroponic garden. Arne surveyed land for a farm. When the rainy season ended, the robotic Calvin built a diversion dam to draw irrigation water from the river.

  "Arne enjoys shooting a yearling jumper when we need meat," Tanya reported. "A tasty change from the irradiated stuff we brought from the Moon. The hippo-whales come and go between the river and the grass. They stopped twice to stare and bellow, but they ignore us now. I think our tiny human island really is secure, though Arne still frets about the black spot. He's gone now to climb the western cliffs for a look beyond the rim."

  Her next transmission came only hours later.

  "Arne's back." Her voice was tight and quick. "Exhausted and in panic. Something chased him. A storm, he calls it, but nothing we can understand. A cloud so dark it hides the sun. A roar that isn't wind. Something falling that isn't rain. He says our days on Earth are done."

  7

  The monitor went blank. All I heard was static. Outside the dome Earth hung full in the lunar night. I watched Africa slide out of sight, watched the black-patched Americas crawl through an endless day, watched Africa return, heard Tanya's voice.

  "We're desperate."

  Her face was drawn haggard and streaked with something black. In the window beyond her head, I saw a dead black slope reaching up to the dark laval flows that edged the rift valley.

  "The bugs have overwhelmed us." Her voice was hoarse and hurried. "Bugs! They're what made those blighted areas that always worried Arne. You must preserve the few facts we've learned.

  "These marauding insects have evolved, I imagine, from mutations that enabled some locust or cicada to survive the impact. Evidently they now enter migratory phases like the old locusts. A strange life cycle, as I understand it. I believe they're periodic, like the seventeen-year cicada.

  "They must spend decades or even centuries underground, feeding on plant roots or juices. Emergence may be triggered when they've killed too many of their hosts. Emerging, they're voracious, consuming everything organic they reach and then migrating to fresh territory to leave their eggs and begin another cycle.

  "Their onslaught on us was dreadful. They blackened the sky. Their roar became deafening. Falling like hail, they ate anything that had ever been alive. Trees, brush, grass, live wood and dead wood, live animals and dead. They coupled in their excrement, buried their eggs in it, died. Their bodies made a carpet of dark rot. The odor was unendurable.

  "We're safe in the plane, at least for now, but total desolation surrounds us. The bugs ate our plastic geodomes. They ate the forest and the grass. They killed and ate the hoppers, bones and all. They shed and ate their wings. They died and ate the dead. They're all gone now. Nothing alive but their eggs in the dust, waiting for wind and water to bring new seed from anywhere to let the land revive, while they hatch and multiply and wait to kill again.

  "Dark dust rises when the wind blows now, bitter with the stink of death. The hippos came out, wandered forlornly in search of anything to graze, and dived back in the river. Nothing alive is left in sight. Nothing but ourselves, in a stillness as terrible as their roar.

  "How long we can last, I don't know. Arne wanted to give up and get back to the Moon, but there's no fuel for that. We aren't equipped for any long trek across this devastation, but Pepe has ripped metal off the plane and welded it into a makeshift boat. If the bugs didn't get across the sea, perhaps we can make a new start beyond it.

  "The plane must be abandoned, with our radio gear. This will be our last transmission. Keep your eye on the Earth and record what you can.

  "And Dunk-" With a catch in her voice, she stopped to wipe at a tear. "I couldn't wish you were with us, but I want you to know I miss you. Next time, whenever that comes, I hope to know you better. As Pepe likes to say, Hasta la vista!"

  One thousand years after, we've been reborn to try again. Much of Earth is still darkly scarred, but those dark spots are gone from Africa and Europe. We're going down to Earth, all five of us, with a cryostat filled with seed and cells to replant the planet if we must. Dian is bringing a few of her precious artefacts and the narrow chance we find anybody apt to care.

  We're landing on the delta of the Nile. It drains into the Red Sea now, but its valley is still a vivid green slash across red-brown desert. Pepe has picked a landing spot a little north of where the pyramids stood. We're overloaded. Pepe thinks we'll have to spend so much fuel on survey and landing that we can't come back, but we're prepared to stay. I'll record more detail as we drop out of low orbit.

  "Technology!" Pepe's shout of triumph rang from the cockpit on our first pass above the Nile. "They've got technology. I heard radio squeals and whistles, and then a burst or weird music. I think our job is done."

  "If it is—" Dian was at the telescope, but I heard the awed words she murmured almost to herself. "A new world ready to welcome us!"

  "Maybe." Waiting uneasily for a turn at the telescope, Arne shook his head. "We haven't met them yet."

  "Maybe?" Pepe mocked him. "We came to meet them, and I think they'll have enough to show us. I see bright lines across the ancient delta. Some run all the way to the river. Canals, I imagine. And—"

  His voice caught.

  "A grid! There on the western edge. A pattern of closer lines. Could be the streets of a city." He was silent as Earth rolled under us. "Buildings!" His voice lifted suddenly. "It is a city. With the sun shifting, I can make out a tower at the center. A new Alexandria!"

  "Try for contact," Tanya told him. "Ask for permission for us to set down."

  "Down to what?" Arne drowned. "They didn't ask us here."

  "What's the risk?" Dian asked him. "What have we got to lose?"

  Pepe tried when we came around again.

  "Squeals." Frowning in the headphones, he made a face of wry frustration. "Whistles. Scraps of eerie music. Finally voices, but nothing I could understand."

  "There!" Tanya was at the telescope.

  "Out in the edge of the desert, west of the city. A pattern like a wheel."

  He studied it.

  "I wonder—" His voice paused and quickened. "An airport! The wheel spokes are runways. And there's a wide white streak that could be a road into the city. If we knew how to ask—"

  "No matter," she told him. "We've no fuel to search much farther. Put us down, but out where we won't make a problem."

  On the next pass, we glided down. The city roofs raced beneath us. Red tile, yellow tile and blue, aligned along stately avenues. The airport rushed beneath us. We were low above the tall control tower when I felt the heavy thrust of the retrorockets.

  We tipped down for a vertical landing. The thundering cushion of fire and steam hid everything till I felt the jolt of landing. The rocket thrust gone, we could breathe again. Tanya opened the cabin door to let us look out.

  The steam was gone, though I caught its hot scent. I rubbed the sun dazzle out of my eyes a
nd found clumps of spiny yellow-green desert brush around us. The terminal building towered far off in the east. We stayed aboard, uneasily waiting. At the radio, Pepe got hums and squawks and shouting voices.

  "Probably yelling at us." He twirled his knobs, listened, tried to echo the voices he heard, shook his head again. "Could be English," he mustered. "Angry English, from the sound of it, but I can't make anything out."

  We sat there under the desert blaze till the plane got too hot for comfort.

  "Will they know?" Arne shrunk back from the door. "Know we brought their forefathers here?"

  "If they don't," Tanya said, "we'll find a way to tell them."

  "How?" Sweating from more than the heat, he asked Pepe if we could take off again.

  "Not for the Moon," Pepe said. "Not till we must."

  Tanya and I climbed down to the ground. Spaceman came with us, running out to sniff and growl at something in the brush and slinking back to tremble against my knee. Arne followed a few minutes later, standing in the shade of the plane and staring across the brush at the distant tower. A bright red light began flashing there.

  "Flashing to warn us off," he muttered.

  I had brought my videocam, Tanya had me shoot clumps of the thorny brush and then a rock matted over with something like red moss.

  "Data on the crimson symbiote reported by the last expedition." She spoke crisply into my mike. "Apparently surviving now in a mutant Bryophyte—" "Hear that?" Arne cupped his hand to his ear. "Something hooting."

  What I heard was a pulsing mechanical scream. Spaceman growled and cowered closer to my leg till we saw an ungainly vehicle lurching over a hill and rolling toward us on tall wheels, flashing colored lights.

  "Now's our chance," Tanya said, "to give them the gifts we've brought. Show them we mean no harm."

  Clumsy under the heavy gravity we climbed back into the plane and came down with our offerings. Dian carried one of her precious books, the Poems of Emily Dickinson, wrapped in brittle ancient plastic. Arne brought a loudhailer, perhaps the same one DeFalco had used to warn the mob away from the escape craft. Pepe stayed in the cockpit.

  "We come from the Moon." Arne pushed ahead of us to meet the vehicle, bawling through his hailer. "We come in peace. We come with gifts."

  The vehicle had no windows, no operator we could see. Spaceman ran barking to meet it. Arne dropped the bullhorn and stood in front of it, waving his arms. Hooting louder, it almost ran over us before it swerved and rolled on around us to butt against the plane. Heavy metal arms reached out to grab and tip it. Pepe scrambled out as it was lifted off the ground. The hooting stopped, and the machine hauled it away, while Spaceman whimpered and huddled against my feet.

  "Robotic, I guess." Pepe stared after it, scratching his head. "Sent out to salvage the wreck."

  Baffled and anxious, we stood there sweating. Flying insects buzzed around us. Some of them stung. Tanya had me get a closeup of one on my arm. A hot wind blew out of the desert west, sharp with a scent like burned toast. We started walking toward the tower.

  "We're idiots," Arne muttered at Tanya. "We should have stayed in orbit."

  She made no answer.

  We plodded on, battling the gravity and swatting at insects, till we came over a rocky rise and saw the wide white runways spread out ahead, the tower at the hub was still miles away. Parked aircraft scattered the broad triangles between the flight strips. A few stood upright for vertical landing and ascent, like our own craft, but most had wings and landing gear like those I knew from pictures of the past.

  We dropped flat when a huge machine with silver wings came roaring overhead, stopped again when a silent vehicle came racing to meet us. Arne lifted his bullhorn and lowered it when Tanya frowned. Brave again, Spaceman growled and bristled till it stopped. Three men in white got out, speaking together and staring at him. He stood barking at them till one of them pointed something like an ancient flashlight at him. He whined and crumpled down. They gathered him up and took him away in the van.

  "Why the dog?" Arne scowled in bafflement. "With no attention to us?"

  "Dogs are extinct," Tanya said.

  "Hey!" A startled cry from Pepe. "We're moving!"

  The parked aircraft beside the strip were gliding away from us. Flowing without ripples, without a sound, with no mechanism visible, the slick white pavement was carrying us toward the terminal building. Pepe bent to feel it with his fingers, dropped to put his ear against it.

  "A thousand years of progress since we came to fight the bugs!" He stood up and shrugged at Tanya. "Old DeFalco would be happy."

  Scores of people were leaving the parked aircraft to ride the crawling pavement. Men in pants and skirt-like kilts. Women in shorts and trailing gowns. Children in rainbow colors as if on holiday. Although I saw nothing much like our orange-yellow jumpsuits, nobody seemed to notice. People streamed out of the terminal ahead. Most of them, I saw, wore bright little silver balls on bracelets or necklaces.

  "Sir?" Arne called to a man near us.

  "Can you tell us-"

  With a hiss as if for silence, the man frowned and turned away. They all stood very quietly, alone or in couples or little family groups, gazing solemnly ahead.

  Pepe jogged my arm as we came around the building and into a magnificent avenue that led toward the heart of the city. I caught my breath and stood gawking at a row of immense statues spaced down the middle of the parkway.

  "Look at that!" Arne raised his arm to point ahead. "I think they do remember us."

  A woman in a long white gown gestured sternly to hush him, and the pavement bore us on toward a tall needle that stabbed into the sky at the end of the avenue. A thin crescent at its point shone like a bright new Moon.

  Statues, needle, crescent, they were all bright silver. A bell began to boom somewhere ahead, slow deep-toned notes like far thunder. The murmur of voices ceased. All eyes lifted toward the crescent. I saw Pepe cross himself.

  "A ceremonial," he whispered. "I think they worship the Moon."

  I heard him counting under his breath as the bell pealed. "Twenty-nine," he murmured. "The lunar month."

  The soundless pavement took us on till he started and jogged my arm again, pointing at the towering figure just ahead. More than magnificent, a blinding silver dazzle in the slanting morning sun, it must have been a hundred feet tall. Shading my eyes, I blinked and looked and blinked again.

  It was my father. In the same jacket and necktie his holo image had worn when it spoke from the tank, flourishing the same tobacco pipe he had waved to punctuate his lectures. The pipe, I thought, could be only a magic symbol now; DeFalco had saved no tobacco seed.

  Those nearest the statue dropped to their knees, kissing their lunar pendants. Eyes lifted, they breathed their prayers and rose again as we moved on toward the next monumental figure, even taller than my father's. It was Pepe himself, in the flight jacket and cap his clone father had worn to the Moon, one gigantic arm lifted as if to beckon us on toward the needle and the crescent. People pressed toward it, kneeling to kiss heir pendants and pray.

  "He never dreamed." His own eyes lifted, Pepe shook his head in awe. "Never dreamed that he might become a god."

  Tanya came next, taller still, splendid in the sunlit shimmer of her lab jacket, raising an enormous test tube toward the tower. Arne next, waving his rock-hunter's hammer. Finally Dian, the tallest, holding a silver book. I heard our actual Dian gasp when she read the title cut into the metal.

  The Poems of Emily Dickinson.

  Below the needle and the crescent, the pavement carried us into a vast open circle ringed with great silver columns. Slowing it crowded us together. At a single thunderous peal, people stood still, gazing up at a balcony high on the face of the spire.

  A tiny-seeming man robed in bright silver appeared there, arms raised high. The bell pealed again, echoes rolling from the columns. His voice thundered, louder than the bell. The worshipers sang an answer, a slow and solemn chant. He spoke ag
ain, and Pepe gripped my arm.

  "English!" he whispered. "A queer accent, but it's got to be English!"

  The speaker stopped, arms still lifted toward the sky. The bell pealed, its deep reverberations dying slowly into silence. People around us fell to their knees, faces raised to the crescent. We knelt with them, all of us but Arne. He stalked on fonvard, bullhorn high.

  "Hear this!" he bawled. "Now hear this!"

  People around him hissed in protest, but he strode on toward the tower.

  "We are your gods!" He paused to let his voice roll back from the columns. "We live on the Moon. We have returned—"

  A tall woman in a silver robe came off her knees to shout at him, waving a silver baton. He stopped to gesture at Dian and the rest of us.

  "Look!" he shouted. "You must know us-"

  She waved the baton at him. His voice choked off. Gasping for breath, he dropped the bullhorn and crumpled to the pavement. The woman swung the baton toward us. Dian rose, waving her book and declaiming Dickinson: This is my letter to the world That never wrote to me— Dimly, I recall the desperate quaver in her voice, the hushed outrage on the woman's face. The baton swept us. A puff of mist chilled and stung my cheek. The pavement seemed to tilt, and I must have fallen.

  For a long time I thought I was back at Tycho Station, confined to the bed in our tiny clinic. A robot stood over me, as patiently motionless as any robot. A fan hummed softly. The air was warm, with an odd fresh scent. I felt a sense of groggy comfort till a numb stiffness on my cheek brought recollection back: that avenue of gigantic silver figures, the stern-faced woman in her silver robe, the icy mist from her silver baton.

  Shocked wide awake, I tried to get off the bed and found no strength. The robot tipped its lenses, bent to catch my wrist and take my pulse. I saw the difference then; its slick plastic body was the pale blue of the walls, though it had the half-human shape of our robots on the Moon.