This Way to the End Times

by Robert Silverberg

  “It’s here,” he called in warning. “Just ahead.”

  Peering forwards he fancied he could see the further interface, the fireball advancing at its own slow, inexorable pace behind the light flash. Even through the radiance he thought he could detect flickering patterns of orange flame dancing across its surface. Norton was suddenly reminded of what lay beyond there . . . but for now it was enough to be drifting, clad in a nimbus of cool white fire.

  Carver, a pale haloed ghost of a figure, was at his side. He swished his stick playfully through the fireball’s surface, coming away each time with a couple of inches less on the tip. He was like a lion-tamer, holding inconceivable energy at bay with just the stick and the force of his personality.

  “Don’t get too close,” Norton warned, as the other man edged forward. Carver took no notice, so Norton tapped him on the shoulder with his own stick. Carver began to turn, but as he did so his foot caught on the kerbstone. He teetered, began to fall backwards, mouth widening in surprise: fell faster than Norton could lunge forwards, into the fireball.

  Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion, as though Carver had fallen into still another time anomaly. He appeared to hang suspended as his hair burst into flame and his skin began to char. Puffs of steam rose from his body. His shirt was consumed so quickly that it simply seemed to vanish. His lips drew back as if he was about to say something, but they were only shrivelling with the heat. Behind them the gums burned away, exposing bone that blackened swiftly, though the teeth remained anomalously white until the enamel cracked and burst. The goggles melted, exposing steaming sockets in a face that was turning into a skull even as he fell. His body cooked, as if Norton was watching an accelerated film of meat being roasted. The skin crisped, then peeled away; the flesh followed, crumbling and flaking away from bones that snapped and popped from their sockets and themselves began to burn. By the time Carver hit the ground all that was left of him was a charred heap of smouldering detritus which blew away in clouds of ash even as it settled. It had taken only seconds; the only sound which reached Norton was a soft, almost plaintive sigh.

  Norton watched, transfixed with horror. Then as nausea rose in him he stumbled away, dropping his stick. He burst out of the interface into total darkness—then ripped off the goggles and squatted by the pavement, retching until all he could wring from his stomach was a thin trickle of sour yellow bile.

  Now, as Norton looked sidelong at the images recording the beginning and end of yesterday’s tragic adventure, he saw that the interface was undergoing a change. Patterns played more vigorously across its surface; fans of light sprayed outwards briefly; it seemed to vibrate, as if to a deep bass tone. It’s breaking down, he thought. It won’t be long now.

  To his surprise his major feeling was not fear but relief. He understood now why condemned prisoners sometimes sacked their lawyers and actively sought their execution rather than trying to delay it.

  He felt he would prefer to be at home when it happened, so he turned back into Marlborough Street. As he passed number 6 a voice called out his name. It was Mr. McDonald, a friendly and gregarious pensioner who lived there with his equally good-natured wife. Norton had always got on well with them on a pleasant superficial level. Lacking transport, the McDonalds had been unable to evacuate even if they had wanted to.

  Mr. McDonald was busily giving the sitting room windows a second coat of whitewash. “Just putting the final touches,” he said cheerily. The McDonalds had spent the last eight days as they had spent the week before, turning part of their house into a fallout shelter, following an official instruction leaflet. To them the last week seemed to be a God-given opportunity to finish the job properly. Their house did not have a cellar, so they had fitted out the large cupboard under the stairs, protecting it with countless black dustbin bags filled with earth. Inside were carefully arranged supplies of food, water and medicine; bedding and primitive cooking equipment; and even a portable chemical toilet. Before retirement made such recreations impossible to afford the McDonalds had been keen campers, and regarded their expertise and lovingly stored equipment as particular good fortune. A few days ago Mr. McDonald had insisted on showing off their impressively well-organised shelter to Norton; had even offered to squeeze up and make room for three if he hadn’t the materials to build his own defences. What was more, although the offer was made only out of politeness, Norton was sure the McDonalds would have gone through with it if he had pressed them. But he had declined politely, assuring them of the adequacy of his own preparations.

  Now, with the image of Carver vivid in his mind, he felt like shouting at Mr. McDonald, shocking him into a realisation of how futile his efforts were in the face of the kind of forces held delicately in check all around him. But it would only hurt and confuse the old man, who was simply following the instructions which he had been told would keep him safe.

  Norton waved goodbye to Mr. McDonald and started to walk away. But even as his foot lifted, the air seemed to shudder and split around him, and before his senses were able properly to register the phenomenon the world was filled with an instantaneous, consuming brilliance, a white fire that was neither cool nor pure.

  DAISY, IN THE SUN

  — CONNIE WILLIS —

  EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

  COLORADO-BORN CONNIE WILLIS IS ONE of the pivotal figures of modern science fiction, who in 2011 was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America and has an astonishing eleven Hugo and seven Nebula awards to her credit. Her novels Doomsday Book (1993) and Blackout/All Clear (2011) won both of those awards, making her one of a very small group of writers who have collected the Hugo and Nebula awards for the same book.

  Her career began quietly, in 1970, with a short story called “The Secret of Santa Teresa,” and it was not for another decade that her work attracted significant attention. But when “Daisy, in the Sun” appeared in 1979, it was quickly singled out by knowledgeable science-fiction readers—even though it had been published in Galileo, a magazine of very limited distribution. The subtlety of its storytelling and the elegance of its portrait of a world on the eve of destruction marked her as a writer to watch. “Daisy, in the Sun” was chosen for one of the Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies the following year, and was nominated for a Hugo in 1980, the first of her innumerable nominations.

  Connie Willis lives in Colorado with her husband, Courtney, a retired professor of physics at the University of Northern Colorado, and she plays a conspicuous role each year in the World Science Fiction Convention, where her gift for light onstage comedy at the annual awards banquet makes a fascinating contrast to the depth and poignancy of much of her fiction.

  —R. S.

  DAISY, IN THE SUN

  — CONNIE WILLIS —

  NONE OF THE OTHERS WERE any help. Daisy’s brother, when she knelt beside him on the kitchen floor and said, “Do you remember when we lived at Grandma’s house, just the three of us, nobody else?” looked at her blankly over the pages of his book, his face closed and uninterested. “What is your book about?” she asked kindly. “Is it about the sun? You always used to read your books out loud to me at Grandma’s. All about the sun.”

  He stood up and went to the windows of the kitchen and looked out at the snow, tracing patterns on the dry window. The book, when Daisy looked at it, was about something else altogether.

  “It didn’t always snow like this at home, did it?” Daisy would ask her grandmother. “It couldn’t have snowed all the time, not even in Canada, could it?”

  It was the train this time, not the kitchen, but her grandmother went on measuring for the curtains as if she didn’t notice. “How can the trains run if it snows all the time?” Her grandmother didn’t answer her. She went on measuring the wide curved train windows with her long yellow tape measure. She wrote the measurements on little slips of paper, and they drifted from her pockets like the snow outside, without sound.

  Daisy waited until it was the kitchen ag
ain. The red café curtains hung streaked and limp across the bottom half of the square windows. “The sun faded the curtains, didn’t it?” she asked slyly, but her grandmother would not be tricked. She measured and wrote and dropped the measurements like ash around her.

  Daisy looked from her grandmother to the rest of them, shambling up and down the length of her grandmother’s kitchen. She would not ask them. Talking to them would be like admitting they belonged here, muddling clumsily around the room, bumping into each other.

  Daisy stood up. “It was the sun that faded them,” she said. “I remember,” and went into her room and shut the door.

  The room was always her own room, no matter what happened outside. It stayed the same, yellow ruffled muslin on the bed, yellow priscillas at the window. She had refused to let her mother put blinds up in her room. She remembered that quite clearly.

  She had stayed in her room the whole day with her door barricaded. But she could not remember why her mother had wanted to put them up or what had happened afterward.

  Daisy sat down cross-legged in the middle of the bed, hugging the yellow ruffled pillow from her bed against her chest. Her mother constantly reminded her that a young lady sat with her legs together. “You’re fifteen, Daisy. You’re a young lady whether you like it or not.”

  Why could she remember things like that and not how they had gotten here and where her mother was and why it snowed all the time yet was never cold? She hugged the pillow tightly against her and tried, tried to remember.

  It was like pushing against something, something both yielding and unyielding. It was herself, trying to push her breasts flat against her chest after her mother had told her she was growing up, that she would need to wear a bra. She had tried to push through to the little girl she had been before, but even though she pressed them into herself with the flats of her hands, they were still there. A barrier, impossible to get through.

  Daisy clutched at the yielding pillow, her eyes squeezed shut. “Grandma came in,” she said out loud, reaching for the one memory she could get to, “Grandma came in and said . . .”

  She was looking at one of her brother’s books. She had been holding it, looking at it, one of her brother’s books about the sun, and as the door opened he reached out and took it away from her. He was angry—about the book? Her grandmother came in, looking hot and excited, and he took the book away from her. Her grandmother said, “They got the material in. I bought enough for all the windows.” She had a sack full of folded cloth, red-andwhite gingham. “I bought almost the whole bolt,” her grandmother said. She was flushed. “Isn’t it pretty?” Daisy reached out to touch the thin pretty cloth. And . . . Daisy clutched at the pillow, wrinkling the ruffled edge. She had reached out to touch the thin pretty cloth and then . . .

  It was no use. She could not get any further. She had never been able to get any further. Sometimes she sat on her bed for days. Sometimes she started at the end and worked back through the memory and it was still the same. She could not remember any more on either side. Only the book and her grandmother coming in and reaching out her hand.

  Daisy opened her eyes. She put the pillow back on the bed and uncrossed her legs and took a deep breath. She was going to have to ask the others. There was nothing else to do.

  She stood a minute by the door before she opened it, wondering which of the places it would be. It was her mother’s living room, the walls a cool blue and the windows covered with venetian blinds. Her brother sat on the gray-blue carpet reading. Her grandmother had taken down one of the blinds. She was measuring the tall window. Outside the snow fell.

  The strangers moved up and down on the blue carpet. Sometimes Daisy thought she recognized them, that they were friends of her parents or people she had seen at school, but she could not be sure. They did not speak to each other in their endless, patient wanderings. They did not even seem to see each other. Sometimes passing down the long aisle of the train or circling her grandmother’s kitchen or pacing the blue living room, they bumped into each other. They did not stop and say excuse me. They bumped into each other as if they did not know they did it, and moved on. They collided without sound or feeling, and each time they did, they seemed less and less like people Daisy knew and more and more like strangers. She looked at them anxiously, trying to recognize them so she could ask them.

  The young man had come in from outside. Daisy was sure of it, though there was no draft of cold air to convince her, no snow for the young man to shrug from his hair and shoulders. He moved with easy direction through the others, and they looked up at him as he passed. He sat down on the blue couch and smiled at Daisy’s brother. Her brother looked up from his book and smiled back. He has come in from outside, Daisy thought. He will know.

  She sat down near him, on the end of the couch, her arms crossed in front of her. “Has something happened to the sun?” she asked him in a whisper.

  He looked up. His face was as young as hers, tanned and smiling. Daisy felt, far down, a little quiver of fear, a faint alien feeling like that which had signaled the coming of her first period. She stood up and backed away from him, only a step, and nearly collided with one of the strangers.

  “Well, hello,” the boy said. “If it isn’t little Daisy!”

  Her hands knotted into fists. She did not see how she could not have recognized him before—the easy confidence, the casual smile. He would not help her. He knew, of course he knew, he had always known everything, but he wouldn’t tell her. He would laugh at her. She must not let him laugh at her.

  “Hi, Ron,” she was going to say, but the last consonant drifted away into uncertainty. She had never been sure what his name was.

  He laughed. “What makes you think something’s happened to the sun, Daisy-Daisy?” He had his arm over the back of the couch. “Sit down and tell me all about it.” If she sat down next to him he could easily put his arm around her.

  “Has something happened to the sun?” she repeated more loudly from where she stood. “It never shines anymore.”

  “Are you sure?” he said, and laughed again. He was looking at her breasts. She crossed her arms in front of her.

  “Has it?” she said stubbornly, like a child.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think maybe everybody was wrong about the sun.” She stopped, surprised at what she had said, at what she was remembering now. Then she went on, forgetting to keep her arms in front of her, listening to what she said next. “They all thought it was going to blow up. They said it would swallow the whole earth up. But maybe it didn’t. Maybe it just burned out, like a match or something, and it doesn’t shine anymore and that’s why it snows all the time and—”

  “Cold,” Ron said. “What?”

  “Cold,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be cold if that had happened?”

  “What?” she said stupidly.

  “Daisy,” he said, and smiled at her. She reeled a little. The tugging fear was further down and more definite.

  “Oh,” she said, and ran, veering around the others milling up and down, up and down, into her own room. She slammed the door behind her and lay down on the bed, holding her stomach and remembering.

  HER FATHER HAD CALLED THEM all together in the living room. Her mother perched on the edge of the blue couch, already looking frightened. Her brother had brought a book in with him, but he stared blindly at the page.

  It was cold in the living room. Daisy moved into the one patch of sunlight, and waited. She had already been frightened for a year. And in a minute, she thought, I’m going to hear something that will make me more afraid.

  She felt a sudden stunning hatred of her parents, able to pull her in out of the sun and into darkness, able to make her frightened just by talking to her. She had been sitting on the porch today. That other day she had been lying in the sun in her old yellow bathing suit when her mother called her in.

  “You’re a big girl now,” her mother had said once they were in her room. She was looking at the ou
tgrown yellow suit that was tight across the chest and pulled up on the legs. “There are things you need to know.”

  Daisy’s heart had begun to pound. “I wanted to tell you so you wouldn’t hear a lot of rumors.” She had had a booklet with her, pink and white and terrifying. “I want you to read this, Daisy. You’re changing, even though you may not notice it. Your breasts are developing and soon you’ll be starting your period. That means—”

  Daisy knew what it meant. The girls at school had told her. Darkness and blood. Boys wanting to touch her breasts, wanting to penetrate her darkness. And then more blood.

  “No,” Daisy said. “No. I don’t want to.”

  “I know it seems frightening to you now, but someday soon you’ll meet a nice boy and then you’ll understand . . .”

  No, I won’t. Never. I know what boys do to you.

  “Five years from now you won’t feel this way, Daisy. You’ll see . . .”

  Not in five years. Not in a hundred. No.

  “I won’t have breasts,” Daisy shouted, and threw the pillow off her bed at her mother. “I won’t have a period. I won’t let it happen. No!”

  Her mother had looked at her pityingly. “Why, Daisy, it’s already started.” She had put her arms around her. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, honey.”

  Daisy had been afraid ever since. And now she would be more afraid, as soon as her father spoke.

  “I wanted to tell you all together,” her father said, “so you would not hear some other way. I wanted you to know what is really happening and not just rumors.” He paused and took a ragged breath. They even started their speeches alike.

  “I think you should hear it from me,” her father said. “The sun is going to go nova.”

  Her mother gasped, a long, easy intake of breath like a sigh, the last easy breath her mother would take. Her brother closed his book. Is that all? Daisy thought, surprised.