“It seemed impossibly slow to me at the time,” Cole said. “Still does.”
“A hundred generations is nothing,” said Brin. “We are an exceptional species, the only one with such control—for good or ill—over our environment. But we are also part of the environment. We are a species, still, and what we want is in our bones as well as in our minds.”
“What we want is —” Cole stopped. They were all looking at him. “This,” he said, with a wave of his hand that was meant to encompass it all: sky, sunset, whiskey, company, tobacco, the darkling plain …
“All this is ours, it will be ours, if we can learn to coexist and not destroy,” said Lee. How can he speak of the future here, in the future? Cole wondered. But according to Lee, humankind’s journey had only just begun. “Then we can, we will, settle down to enjoy the life span of a successful species, which is anywhere from ten to a hundred million years.”
Cole had heard Lee’s rap before but he didn’t mind hearing it again. Ten million years. They were ten years old, into a lifespan of a hundred. They had only just begun. It felt like immortality. Or maybe what it felt like was good whiskey, tobacco, the sunset.
“The explosion started in your time,” said Brin, “with agriculture and cities. Surplus. We ceased the wandering that had taken us all over the world. Your generation, those who lived in the tiny sliver of time between 1500 and 2500, merely saw its end. And began the mopping up. It must have been a scary business.”
“I think that is true,” said Lee. “Five thousand years, five hundred. There is little difference from here.”
“The main thing is, you did it,” said Brin, relighting the pipe and passing it to Cole. “There are those who would have been happier if humankind had lived and died in a brief blaze of glory, like Jimi Hendrix.”
Cole grinned. “You’ve heard of Hendrix?”
“Of course,” she said. “The Age of Empire. Hill and I studied it, for this assignment, which I assure you is a labor of love. I even know a little English. Don’t translate, RVR. Let me go it alone.”
She said something unintelligible. Cole and Lee smiled politely. Cole recognized Lee’s smile; it was the inscrutable one, the one he had always shown to him before RVR.
It was an evening Cole would always keep with him, in dreams if not in memory, for the beauty of the place as well as for the sweet contentment of Hilary and Brin, who were thankful for the opportunity to live closer to unspoiled nature, if only for a while.
“ARD usually only allows brief forays into what she calls the ‘Open Areas’ (which are closed to us),” said Brin. “We were thrown out of the Garden of Eden ten million years ago. We should be used to it by now. We live in the cities, and only come into the Open Areas as hunters or hikers or herders.”
“Hunters?” Lee asked. “Still that old thing?”
“Nature red in tooth and claw,” said Hilary. “It is often said that ARD doesn’t love us, but I don’t agree. The man ARD loves is ancient man, one of her killer species. Man, the bloodletter. ARD loves killing. We learned that during the ARD wars.”
The ARD wars had started with an anti-RVR cult some two hundred and sixty thousand years before. A group from what had once been India, south of the Great Plateau, becoming convinced through a series of dreams and prophetic utterances that RVR was a malevolent entity, had moved into the wilderness. It was a great pilgrimage, of hundreds of thousands. Colonies were set up in remote locations with the permission of ARD and the cooperation of the rest of humanity, which was living with numbers of about seven billion (6.756) in the major cities and in smaller locations around the world. Over two hundred thousand years passed and the “pilgrims” were forgotten, except by historians (and of course ARD and RVR) until a series of earthquakes and floods sent refugees streaming. The colonies and ARD had come into conflict, and ARD had destroyed them. It was Sodom and Gomorrah all over again. A few humans filtered into the cities, but their language was untranslatable and they were no longer truly human. In fact they had regressed to the hominid stage (which explained, Cole thought, some of our “junk” DNA) and could no longer intermarry with humans. They died of through disease and heartbreak. This was the last speciation of the human race, and it was a repeat, a reversal.
“And no other sentient life-forms?” Cole knew but he had to ask again. The stars were beginning to appear, one by one. He couldn’t find any familiar constellations; he had never been very good at picking them out, but now even the Big Dipper was gone. Flung apart by Time.
“None to speak of,” said Hilary. “Or to speak with. Molds and slimes, mostly. Not good company.”
“Speaking of company …” Cole saw that the ponies were grazing right up next to the house.
“They like people,” said Brin.
“Like dogs,” Lee said. It turned out that Hilary and Brin had never seen or touched a dog. They had long been extinct.
“Tell us about dogs,” said Hilary, and Cole did, as much as he knew, from the days they had first seen man’s fires and crept closer, fascinated and comforted by our talk and our singing. Hilary and Brin listened with what seemed to Cole a polite but diminishing interest. The long partnership, the love affair, had long been over. Humankind had forgotten the dog.
“That’s a beautiful story,” said RVR.
The ponies gathered around the deck, compact, silent and shapeless in the darkness, while the people smoked and talked. Man the destroyer is loved by the other animals as much (or more) than man loves them, Cole thought. Even though we kill them and eat them, they love us, and shouldn’t it be so? Life kills us and eats us, yet we worship it in our way. We fall all over it.
The wine was perfect. No surprise, thought Cole. After ten million years, would there be a place in the world for bad wine? Ditto the clothes, which fit perfectly. Cole wondered how he and Lee looked to Hilary and Brin, particularly Lee in his hideous L.L. Bean safari jacket (which Cole had gotten used to). There was of course no way to know. If there was one thing this couple of the far future had, in addition to their love for each other, it was manners. Not that there was any coldness about them—no, only a perfection of warmth and gravitas and style, with just enough bite, like a perfect whiskey.
Crime, sorrow, even catastrophe were still part of the human condition, Cole and Lee were assured. Not war, though; war was crime sanctioned, even sanctified, which was unimaginable. Cole looked up at the stars and they looked even colder, even more distant than usual, now that he knew that they were empty. They had looked to him, to us, to Early Man, so much like a great city in the distance. We had wanted so much to go there, to be welcomed in. And now he knew that what we had thought, had hoped, was a beacon, was in fact just dumb fires, sparks, not even ruins. This tiny house of Earth was all there was. We were more alone than any of us had ever imagined possible.
So melancholy came with the gift. Even the dog, man’s companion, had slipped under the dark waters of Time.
“Nothing at all,” Cole said, looking up. “No one. It is hard to believe that in all that immensity …”
“It’s getting late,” said Brin. “Shall we go for a ride?”
The ponies liked to be ridden; it gave them an excuse to strut about. They were bone-shaking little trotters, with one liquid-smooth canter, like the Icelandic ponies Cole and his second Helen had ridden on their honeymoon, when a black face in Iceland was rare. The Icelanders had thought Cole must be a jazz musician. They had asked him about Miles Davis, and he had pretended to have known him, in his old age. It was even partly true: he had met him once, as a child, with his uncle Will, who had sold dreams in the form of drugs to the rich and famous.
Were those clouds on the Moon? They were. Brin explained that they were the result of a long-ago comet, deflected to the moon for its ice, gradually sublimating into mist that wrapped the poles like a sheer scarf. I know all about that, Lee said. He told of seeing the white streaks on the mountains, and Brin and Hilary wanted to hear about Zoe, almost ten million ye
ars ago. Zoe and Cole and Lee were all contemporaries, to them.
Brin and Hilary slowed their ponies to a walk, so that they could hold hands. Cole and Lee would soon be gone, and they would return to Edminidine, the long littoral city along the China coast. They were ready to resume their life among their friends and their children. But they would miss the ponies, the stars, the sea of grass.
So would Cole. He was riding bareback across the grass-smelling plain, like an Indian. The stars bore down like a burning blanket. Even though he was not familiar with the constellations, he knew they were all changed, changed utterly, irretrievably. The hundred thousand years behind his long-ago birth, the short trail from Africa to America was nothing compared with the ten million since, which had carried the galaxy and the solar system into new immensities. He looked up, into the hole that is the heavens, and understood for the first time, in his very bones, the awesome enormity of the journey on which humankind had embarked when we first looked up from our small horizons and saw the stars.
What if, Cole wondered, we had known then what he knew now—that it was all empty? That we were like a child, alone in a great empty house? Forgotten … worse than forgotten. Worse than abandoned. Alone forever from the beginning unto the end, from dust to dust, all, all alone. Would we have, could we have, still survived?
“Cole. Duty calls.”
Beep beep. Lee showed Cole his PalmPC. The cursor was blinking; it was time to go.
Hilary and Brin led the way. They rode side by side with their arms around each other, an awkward but lovely sight. The house was a beacon, a far-off ship across the sea of grass, a nearest star.
“What would happen,” Cole wondered out loud, as they rode back slowly across the plain, toward the frail ship of House, “What would happen, if we didn’t hit RETURN. If we stayed here.”
“ARD would not allow it,” Lee said.
“I don’t mean here here. I mean here, on this late afternoon Earth, with these good people.”
“And forget what we were sent to do?”
“You mean Dear Abbey. I wonder now if we should be doing it at all, even if we find it and return with it.”
“I think that is not for us to decide, Cole, you and I,” Lee answered, kicking his pony and trotting ahead.
Cole looked up at the still-, always-, ever-to-remain-unfamiliar stars, and shivered, and kicked his little pony too.
1+
There they were, the army of mice. Soon Cole knew, without opening his eyes, that they were back in the Student Union. He could hear the thumping from upstairs, and there was a smell of cinder blocks and Coca-Cola.
The door opened and Parker’s big head stuck through. “Dr. Lee!—Mr. Cole? I thought I heard something. What are you doing here this time of night? I mean, are you …?”
“It’s okay,” Lee said, opening his eyes and letting go of Cole’s hand.
“I have to lock up at ten,” said Parker, sounding annoyed. He looked meaningfully toward the analog clock on the wall. It was 9:46.
“No problem,” said Lee.
The door closed with loud click.
“Why is he always surprised to see us?” Cole asked.
“Time loop, till ten.” RVR had been left behind, or rather ahead, ten million years in the future, and Lee was speaking English again. Pidgin English.
“I hope this isn’t some kind of Groundhog Day,” Cole said.
“Ground what?”
“Nothing. I thought you said we weren’t done. So why are we back here?”
“Beats me,” Lee said, pulling a cell phone from his safari jacket and punching in a number.
“Wait! Who are you calling?”
“You know. Beeper.”
“Wait, Lee!” Cole said, reaching for the phone. “What about Los Viejos? What about Dear Abbey? You and I need to talk first.”
“All come around,” Lee said, handing Cole the phone.
Cole heard it ring once, then click.
“Damn!” he said. “So what now, Lee? We wait for Pell and Flo, or whatever her name is, so they can decide what we saw and what we think? But who am I talking to? There’s no talking to you!”
Cole punched in his own number; might as well check his messages. While it rang, he watched the clock make one jump, to 9:48. Time moved so slowly here, in the present. That tiny isle. He was beginning to feel like an islander: slightly homesick away, hugely restless at home.
“You have reached …” Cole couldn’t believe the sound of his own voice on the machine. Was he really that dark, that gloomy? “Leave a message if you insist.”
Cole punched in a code. The machine’s computer-generated voice was so much more pleasant, more human than his own. “You have ONE message.”
A last piece of nastiness from Helen? Cole was just punching in the retrieval code when he heard a beep beep beep.
Lee’s PalmPC was blinking.
“I thought we were done! I thought it was over.”
“More slice,” Lee said, smiling inscrutably. “Old Ones? Los Viejos? Let’s ride.”
Cole folded the phone. He didn’t have to be asked twice. He was more at home off the island than on. Besides, in the future he and Lee could talk. He put one hand on Lee’s and the other up beside his own ear, for reassurance, but of course, RVR wasn’t there. Not yet —
“One more slice,” Lee said again, and there they were, the mice. And the centuries, streaming down, covering the two of them over like drifting sand …
+225,000,000
It was dark.
It was cold.
Something was wrong with the air. Cole smelled smoke and ash and ozone mixed with fear; an ugly smell. He knew it well. It was the smell of downtown New York City after the World Trade Center attack. He had helped a friend (not a Helen) sneak in and loot her own apartment, how many years—how many centuries—ago?
The glider was squeaking to a stop. They were on a terrace overlooking a dark valley, all in shadow. Cole could see a few lights moving far below. The sun, huge and dark red, hung over a range of hills on the other side. It was setting, or so Cole thought. It looked squashed and impossibly near; but surely that was illusion, a trick of the air. Behind them was a stone building. A light came on, spilling through a long window.
Someone opened a door. “Contact!”
Three people came outside, all dressed in the same gray and blue uniform with hoods, like homeboy sweatshirts. Their apparent leader, a woman, carried a coil of glowing rope that looked like soft neon. “They’re out here!” she barked in a harsh, unfamiliar tongue. Cole could see the fold in the air beside her ear that told him RVR was back, and back at work.
He reached up and touched him. Hello old pal.
“Dr. Cole, Dr. Lee!” the woman said. “Come inside. It’s cold out here.” It was cold. The sun was too big and too orange; too easy to look at. The wind had a wrong, raw, wrung-out feel.
They gladly followed her inside. “This has to be them, the Old Ones,” Cole whispered. “Ask them if they have something for us. Ask them why they brought us here.”
Lee didn’t respond. He was studying his PalmPC and shaking his head.
“If you don’t ask them, I will!”
The woman with the glowing rope turned to Cole and smiled. He smiled back, and started to ask her … but she and the other two “hosts” had already turned their backs. They were busy over a small console with a plasma screen that changed size and color, and seemed to be taking pictures of the sun, or of lots of different suns.
“This is the end of everything,” Lee said mournfully, to himself as much as to Cole. “We can look at the sun.”
“What are you saying?”
“I am saying, we can look at the sun. It is old and dim.”
“This must be them, then,” Cole said, shaking Lee’s arm. “The Old Ones. What year is it, can you tell?”
Lee nodded and showed him on the PalmPC. +231,789,098. Cole felt dizzy. They were two hundred fifty million years in the future.
A quarter of a billion turns of rock and air around the sun, and now the sun itself was going cold.
The sun. There it was, through the window. Cole couldn’t bear looking at it but he couldn’t look away.
“So did they bring us here to give us Dear Abbey? Or to tell us that it doesn’t fucking matter anymore?”
Lee didn’t answer; he just looked from his PalmPC to the dying sun, and back, again and again.
Finally a door opened (in a wall, where there hadn’t been a door) and a man in uniform brought them both a cup of hot chocolate. Cole would have preferred a drink, but it was hot, and it was chocolate.
“Are you the Old Ones? Do you have something for us?” Cole asked the man, who seemed to find the question amusing. He told Cole his own name was Cole; he had been named after him. “The Old Ones sent for you,” he said, “and we take that as a sign of our certain success. Of our survival. Therefore we honor you.”
He excused himself and left the way he had come. Through the open door (before it turned back into a wall) Cole could see children, all standing in rows, dancing or exercising to … it was almost Mozart, but a little off, with too many strings.
Not like the Miles Davis he had heard earlier. Two hundred million years earlier.
Through the window he saw needle-shaped ships rising out of the valley, silently, like a volley of arrows. “Is there a war on?” he asked RVR, reaching up to touch him again. “Is that what’s wrong?”
“No, no war. It’s the sun,” RVR said. Their hosts were trying to keep the sun from going nova, he explained. It had already exploded in a flare called the Helium Flash, which had killed over two billion people directly, and three billion more in the natural fires and famine that followed. That was almost a thousand years ago. The nuclear fires had since been stabilized with an ongoing “inoculation series” (the ships Cole had seen) but only temporarily. It was a holding action. The sun’s hydrogen was almost all consumed and our mother star was in the process of converting herself into a helium giant, unless prevented. It was still touch and go. All humanity was down to about a billion and a half people, living on a narrow habitable band. The atmosphere had been altered, which accounted for the smell. Oxygen had been down to less than fourteen percent, but was now back up to eighteen. Cities? They were only memories. People lived underground in long warrens. Several hundred thousand had left on a starship, but they hadn’t been heard of since.
The Year's Best SF 21 # 2003 Page 110
