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 per cent, 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.
ARD had died. Not even RVR knew exactly how, or why, or when. Her communications, increasingly erratic and peevish, had finally ceased altogether. No one had marked the date; people had long since ceased to notice, and RVR’s attention was mostly, if not entirely, on people and their concerns.
“So where are the Old Ones who sent for us?” Cole asked. “These people hardly notice us.”
“Maybe these Old Ones are the starship people,” Lee suggested. “Maybe they are no longer on Earth.”
“They died,” said RVR. “There are no starship people. I have told them here, but they keep ‘forgetting.’ They don’t want to know.”
“What happened?”
“They just died. There is nothing between the stars. Too much nothing. It is no place. No place for man, no place for RVR.”
It all seemed a sad end to a long adventure. Humankind was a quarter of a billion years old. We had been on the Earth longer than the dinosaurs, as long as the hermit crab or the cockroach; we were the new champs. There wouldn’t be any champs after us. The day was now 44 hours long – old hours, that is, original hours; though what indeed was an hour but a portion of a day? What indeed was a day, or a year?: all were just spinnings.
The stars no longer looked strange or frightening or promising or mysterious to Cole. They looked as random and as temporary and as unimportant as the glint of light on waves.
“What about Dear Abbey,” Cole asked. “If these guys don’t have it, who does?”
“I believe we missed it,” said Lee. “Perhaps you are right and it is just as well. From here, what does it matter?”
Cole had to agree. Still, they had come so far . . . “It was our decision to make. And we never got the chance.”
“Was it ours? Yours and mine? I don’t think so.”
“It was sure supposed to be somebody’s,” said Cole. “But maybe you’re right and it doesn’t matter.” After all, all was lost. And yet – weren’t these people staying busy, saving the world? Maybe the world had to be saved over and over.
Their hosts were consumed in their task of shooting rockets at the sun, and had little interest in them. Lee and Cole watched, waiting for the cursor to start blinking. There was food but neither of them had an appetite; the chocolate was enough. Cole paced; Lee sat silently staring at the dying sun. Even RVR was quiet. But when Cole put his fingertips up beside his head, there he was. “Is this it?” he asked. “For us, I mean. Is this the last slice?”
He hoped so. He might have loved Paris, or Bahia, or even the no-name plains of no-place, but not this, not here: not this barren rock that wasn’t even Earth any more, with ARD gone.
“Not yet,” said Lee. “According to the PalmPC there’s another slice.”
“How can that be? And what about Justine, I mean Flo? Didn’t you already beep her?”
“Pell. He knows we have returned. But he couldn’t be there yet. Only minutes have passed.” Lee held up the PalmPC. The cursor was blinking. “Plus, you do understand that we have no choice. Not if we desire to get home. We must follow the logarithm, the path the Old Ones have laid down for us.”
“Whatever.” Cole didn’t want to see what lay ahead. But he didn’t want to stay here either, waiting for the sun to go out. He sat down on the glider and watched as Lee hit RETURN for what they both hoped would be the last slice of time.
And there they were, faithful, diligent, mindless as ever . . . the army of mice.
+2.4 BILLION
Cole had learned to keep his eyes shut until the spinning stopped.
When he opened them, he saw stars. Then stones. Then his own hands, feet, knees. Lee was sitting beside him; they were on a rocky ledge overlooking a wide valley all in shadow. The same valley? It was hard to tell. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . . It wasn’t the same sun. It was redder and smaller, back to less than its “normal” size (the size Cole remembered). It hung low over rolling hills as soft and as round as waves. A few towers stuck up from a fold in the hills. Lights flickered across them. There was what appeared to be a road but nothing moved on it.
Cole smelled smoke. He stood up, pulling Lee with him. “Let’s go and meet the Old Ones,” he said.
&n
bsp; “Yes,” Lee said, agreeing finally. “This must be the End of Time.”
It wasn’t, not quite, but who knew? There was a fire, a few feet below. A path led down to the fire. Cole followed it down. His legs felt funny. His feet hardly worked, and no wonder. They were 2.4 billion years in the future, on the steep, narrow, stony path to the End of Time.
Lee had shown him the numbers on his PalmPC.
A man sat by the fire, poking it with a stick. He nodded as Cole and Lee came up. He pointed with the stick where they were to sit; they sat.
“Welcome back, Lee, Cole,” he said.
“Back?” Lee asked. “Who are you? Are you the one who summoned us?”
“You were here before, or will be,” the man said. “It all overlaps, or will, you see. Or will see.”
He passed Cole a bottle. It was whiskey, smoky, but not scotch. Cole took a drink and passed it to Lee, who took a drink and passed it on around the fire, which they had trisected, to their host. He was a black man, not quite as dark as Cole, with thin, lank white hair, tied back in a ponytail, and a short white beard. He was old: seventy, eighty, maybe a hundred, who could say? He wore dark coveralls and boots dirty with ashes.
“Are you one of the Old Ones?” Cole asked.
The old man chuckled and poked the fire with his stick. There was no wood on the fire but stones, like gray coal. They barely burned. They gave off little heat.
“There are no Old Ones. There is only me. And RVR of course. It was he who brought you here. He did it for me. I wanted to see you, to say farewell, to thank you. This last thing is hard. I did not want to die alone.”
“It was you?” Cole reached up beside his ear.
“Not exactly,” RVR said. “Others found a way to travel in time, long ago, before I was born, or rather, made. They are the ones who opened the loop. All I did was use the loop they made.”
“What about Dear Abbey?”
“That was the paper they had for you,” said RVR. “I brought it here, to bring you on.”
“So it was you,” Lee said.
“There is your Old One,” said the old man, patting the fold beside his ear. “Not so old as us, but old.”
“But how?” Cole couldn’t imagine RVR with a physical form.
“He sent me,” said the old man. “From here, you can go everywhere, with the right math, but only once. I brought the paper back. I have it here.” He patted the breast pocket of his coveralls.
“You killed that man,” Lee said.
“Actually, I didn’t. They were killing each other without me. All I did was pick up after them. But, you know, from here, everyone is already dead. Including you.”
“Where is it?” Cole asked. “Do we get it?”
“Of course.” The old man patted his pocket again, but didn’t reach into it. “You get everything.” He stirred the fire and took another drink, then passed the bottle back around. He coughed – a sound more human than a word or a laugh – and Cole realized they were talking to the last man. There would be, there could be, no more. Some had gone to try and settle the stars but they were dead, according to RVR. They had made it less than halfway across the emptiness that separates every tiny star from every other. The Universe was not really a place for them. For us.
Cole shivered. He was cold, colder then he had ever been. It was a cold he knew no fire could warm, but he moved closer to the tiny fire anyway, turned out his hands in a gesture as ancient as . . . as himself. He didn’t know what to say, so he nodded toward the sun. “Setting?”
“It no longer rises or sets,” the last man said.
“The Earth is locked in a synchronous orbit,” RVR added, in Cole’s ear. “Like the Moon used to be, when there was a Moon.”
So it wouldn’t set; it would just go out. Was it Cole’s imagination or was it growing dimmer as they spoke? He looked at the stars. They seemed the same as ever.
“They were trying to stabilize the sun,” said Lee. “It didn’t work?”
“Oh, it worked very well,” the last man said. “That was a very very long time ago. We survived that crisis just as we survived the others. The first close call was the one they call the Crossing, when a few hundred of us left Africa and went on to settle the entire planet. Then not much later, there was what they called the Sixth Extinction, when in our arrogance we destroyed many species and almost destroyed our home and everything that made life worth living. That was the closest call of all, for without it we would have been just an experiment that failed, like a five-legged frog. But we survived, just barely. Thanks to you.”
“To us?” Cole hunkered down beside him. He sat the way Cole had seen his grandad sit, in Tennessee, a few hundred million years ago.
“Yes, you,” said the last man. “You are the ones who had to make the change. Who lived through the hope and the horror without going mad. Once the change was made we could live to enjoy the life span of any successful species. There were scares, close calls, new diseases, disappointments . . .”
“One great disappointment,” Cole said. He was thinking of the Universe and how empty it was. But that was nothing to how empty it was going to be, from now on. Forever.
“The last crisis was the sun itself, the helium flash, but you lived through that one,” said RVR. “You monitored the sun and slowed its burning down. The earth was reinhabited from pole to pole. Repopulated, but the population was kept down to three and a half billion.”
The last man pointed up toward the sky with his stick. “Mars was briefly resettled, but only for a few million years. It was the afternoon of our time. Now it is going out, like the fire, and so am I. There must be an end to everything, even to us. Do you see?”
“I think so,” Cole said.
“I see,” said Lee. “I think I understand.” And he did.
beep beep
The last man stood up. “Your cursor is blinking,” he said. He walked them back up the path. The sun felt cold on their faces and the backs of their hands. Behind them a luminous pearl-colored ring was rising, like a knife, to halve the sky. There was no Moon.
In front of them was the glider.
“One other thing,” said Cole.
“Oh, yes,” said the last man. He reached into the pocket of his coveralls and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “This is what you came for.”
“And do we use it?” Lee asked.
“I don’t know. From here it doesn’t matter,” said the last man, handing it to Lee. “It’s your decision, your world. Whatever you do, we know it leads here. To this farewell.”
“Farewell, then,” said Cole, embracing the last man.
“Farewell and thank you, for everything. It is not every man who gets to say farewell to his most distant ancestors. Thank you for coming here.”
It’s not like we had a choice, Cole wanted to say; but didn’t, of course. He reached up and stroked RVR. So long, old friend . . .
“Farewell, and thank you,” said Lee. He too embraced the last man; then he took Cole’s hand and pulled him down beside him, onto the glider, and pressed RETURN, and the last man disappeared as if he had never been.
There were no lights, no army of mice, no sound at all. Only a weird wrong-way lurch, like a car getting tapped from the side. “Whoa . . .”
And they were still there, on the stony hillside. They hadn’t gone anywhere. “What happened?” Cole asked, but Lee was already up, out of the glider.
Cole followed him down the path. The knife-like ring had either set, or hadn’t yet risen.
There was the fire, but the ashes were cold. And there was the last man. Cole realized he had never asked his name. He had been dead for quite some time. Wordlessly, straining in the thin air, they buried him in the rocks. There was very little dirt there, on the last rocky hill, overlooking the dying sun.
“Okay,” Lee said, dusting off his hands. “Let’s go.”
“Wait,” said Cole. “What about Dear Abbey?”
“What about?”
; “That was the point of the trip, remember? We wanted to shape the future, but the future shapes itself. Now we know that we have a future. Dear Abbey doesn’t seem like such a great idea.”
“Maybe future because of Dear Abbey.” Lee patted his left patch pocket. “Takes guts, go for it.”
“Takes guts to stop it, too.” But something was wrong; something else. “How come you’re talking that stupid fucking cowboy talk again? Where’s RVR?”
Lee shrugged. Cole reached up beside his ear.
Nothing.
“Trail’s end,” said Lee, pulling Cole down the path toward the glider. “Last round-up.”
“Meaning?”
“Let’s ride. Head home.” The cursor was blinking. Lee took Cole’s hand and pulled him down onto the glider beside him.
“We can’t leave RVR here alone,” Cole said.
“Done deal,” said Lee. “Listen up, careful.”
And then, for the first time, Cole heard it. Distant, faint at first, like the background radiation that fills the universe: a long, slow, mournful wail, almost a howl, rising and falling, filling the emptiness between the stars. It was all desolation, all longing, all loss. It was RVR mourning for us, for all of us; for you and for me, and all those still to come, and yet to die.
“Farewell, old friend,” Cole whispered, reaching up again; but of course there was no one there. On a sudden impulse he reached down just as Lee hit RETURN, and pulled the paper out of Lee’s pocket, and stuck it into his own.
“Hey,” said Lee.
But Cole didn’t answer and Lee didn’t pursue it. They both were listening to the saddest sound either of them had ever heard: the lonely howl, the lamentation that drowned out even the army of mice: RVR, inconsolable, mourning for Man.
1+
Whoa! I pointed at the clock. It said 9:55. “How did you do that?” Lee was smiling. That inscrutable, enigmatic . . .
The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17 Page 111
