This Way to the End Times

by Robert Silverberg

  13.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (e) turning into your pillow that last time he tried to kiss you goodnight. In the days and months and years to come, you would miss the taste of his mouth, miss the cool scratch of his unshaved chin across your cheek. Of course the little boy’s death bothers you, and the pink-andgreen tie, and the hideous satisfaction of the hard granite sound your hand made when it collided with his jaw. But none of these produced in you the same yearning, the same hunger, the deep chilling pain of a hollowness you yourself created.

  14.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (a) radio static, interspersed with love songs from old black-and-white movies. If Donald ever calls you, the ring tone will be the same: a sweet plucking of violin strings, a woman’s too-mellow voice. The worst thing about these nightmares is that you often think he is calling you, and it pulls you out of your dream of running into the cold and poorly-lit reality of the place you ran to. And once there, in the silence, in your narrow bed, you are all alone.

  15.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (d).

  16.ANSWERS WILL VARY.

  17.ANSWERS WILL VARY.

  PRAYERS TO THE SUN

  BY A DYING PERSON

  — ALVARO ZINOS-AMARO —

  EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

  ALVARO ZINOS-AMARO, ONE OF THE most promising of today’s newer science-fiction writers, was born in Spain to Spanish and American parents, studied theoretical physics at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, and lives now in Southern California. His fiction, essays, and poems have appeared in such publications as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction, Galaxy’s Edge, Nature, and Clarkesworld. The story that appears here, a visionary treatment of the old adage that “time is what keeps everything from happening at once,” has not been published before.

  —R. S.

  PRAYERS TO THE SUN BY A DYING PERSON

  — ALVARO ZINOS-AMARO —

  FROM ONE OF THE FIFTY-TWO ghats near Pushkar Lake, the old woman watched the mid-day sky. Bright, pearly clouds swelled and burst, raining the future down upon the world.

  The throngs that had gathered in prayer around the lake fragmented. People ran and staggered. But Ashima remained still and chanted.

  She wasn’t here for the same reason as them. They were hoping to attain moksha, liberation from the endless cycle of death and rebirth. Ashima’s purpose was a more humble one: simply to leave the world with a measure of grace. For the last two days the Gayatri mantra had served her well, and so she chose it again today. Stroking the beads of her Japa mala, she prepared to repeat the mantra one hundred and eight times. “Om bhūr bhuvah svah—”

  Cries of terror drowned out Ashima’s frail voice. A man and woman within a stone’s throw of her were encased in a translucent sphere and carried by the sphere up to an orbital structure that hadn’t existed moments before. Ten feet away from Ashima, a huge cylindrical object materialized in the space occupied by a family, crushing them. Minutes later an old man’s skin grew into a golden shell and fell away to reveal him looking decades younger, an otherworldly green gleam in his rejuvenated eyes. Nearby, flames incinerated a father and his children.

  The myriad transformations swept on, unpredictable, haphazard. The very air seemed to pulse with the changes. Talking heads on Ashima’s ocular implant called this collapse of the future into the present “causal accumulation,” but Ashima imagined Shiva, Kali, and Maya as Krishna’s sword, mace, and bow, cutting and bashing and piercing the present with all their might. And yet somehow, throughout it all, she had remained untouched. You are not special, she reminded herself. Your time will come any moment now. Be ready for it.

  A pinprick of light high in the sky caught her attention. Goggle-eyed, she watched it explode into a trillion dots. A blanket of scintillating lights fell from above, covering everything and everyone. Ashima felt the energy first on her ghagra choli and then on her skin.

  Within seconds her ocular implant overloaded and fizzled out, temporarily blinding her. Hot pain pressed against her temples and skull. This is the end, she thought, dizzy, heaving. Accept it. Let it all go. She imagined herself turning into gray ash and scattering in the wind like the petals of a lotus blossom.

  Her legs buckled and she tumbled.

  A young girl caught her, breaking her fall. Gently the girl helped Ashima back up.

  Tears ran down Ashima’s cheeks. Despite all my preparations, a part of me was not ready, she thought, embarrassed at her relief. And this girl saved me. She stopped crying and studied the girl that had appeared out of thin air. The girl’s features were nothing like Ashima’s. Her mouth was hardly a sliver, her small ears tapered off in an eerie fashion, and her huge eyes burned with a cold fire. She might be nine or ten—or perhaps, if her inscrutable stare was anything to go by, much older. Ashima opened her mouth to speak, but the iridescence that had fallen from the sky and draped itself over the world spoke inside her mind, transmitting the girl’s words directly to her.

  “It is time to break your fast,” the girl said, not moving her lips. “Your spirit is strong. But you must nourish your body. We have far to go.”

  A stream of particulate matter rushed up from the ground, snaked up the girl’s thin arms and solidified into a wide, thin piece of millet bread. The girl handed it to Ashima. It was warm to the touch, as though freshly baked.

  “Bajre ki roti,” Ashima murmured. “My favorite. How . . . ?”

  The girl grinned.

  Ashima cracked off a piece and took a bite. It tasted like the real Rajasthani deal, a little tangy but not bitter, as though the dough had been kneaded before cooking. The girl performs miracles, Ashima thought. Perhaps anything is possible during these end times.

  “No miracle,” the girl said, apparently able to hear Ashima’s thoughts through the network of lights. “The bread’s constituent molecules were extracted from the local environment and nano-assembled into an emulation of roti.”

  Ashima stared in blank bewilderment. “Nano-assembled molecules? An emulation of roti? It tastes real enough to me.” And then: “Who are you? And how did you get here?”

  “I am Uki.”

  All sounds except the girl’s wordless voice and Ashima’s breathing faded into the background.

  “Are you doing that?” Ashima asked.

  “The Disease has spared you,” Uki said. “But it could strike at any moment.”

  Ashima frowned. “The Disease?”

  “Ah—they haven’t named it yet.”

  “Yet?”

  Uki’s gaze became so intense that Ashima felt the girl was looking through her instead of at her. “In my time,” Uki said, “many have become paralyzed by the whole future falling in on us at once. The Disease is the name of this paralysis. Only some of the young ones who fled off-world, like me, seem to have escaped it.”

  Ashima’s mind raced, trying to keep up. “You are not of this time?” She surveyed the rippling world outside their bubble. “Tell me, if the future and the present are different pages of the same book, how is it possible for them to speak to one another?”

  “Think of time as the thickness of the pages rather than the pages themselves,” Uki said. “Your life is the writing on the pages. Two days ago relative to our present, some pages began to thin, and the print of future events began to bleed through. We’re not sure how or why. Some think that the Large Hadron Collider upset a fundamental balance of forces, a balance involving something called composite scalar baryonic dark matter. Others believe that a swarm of micro-singularities is to blame.”

  “Baryonic . . . ? Micro-singularities?” Ashima shook her head. She listened to the gentle whisper of the lights inside her mind, which gave her the definitions of Uki’s difficult words, but the concepts remained beyond her grasp.

  Uki smiled. “Never mind,” she said. “They’re just theories. There are plenty of others, even more bizarre. I was one of a group chosen to find out the truth.”

  “Ah.” She considered the girl’s earnestness. “You were selected not only to discover the
truth, but to try and reverse the effect, weren’t you?”

  “Yes. Time-travel technology is available in my day,” Uki confirmed. “It fell to us from several centuries in the future.”

  “So you can skip from one page to another, without having to read the words in between. Where did you go?”

  “I was recruited and sent far into the future.” Uki’s face darkened. “To the very end of time.”

  All books are finite, thought Ashima.

  “Those who sent me there,” the girl continued, “believed that when the collapse was complete, all events would be simultaneous, and the cause of the temporal folding-in would become evident. If we could understand the cause, we could change the past and restore the timeline.” The ice in Uki’s eyes burned

  bright. “I failed.”

  Ashima retreated a little into herself, shaken by the girl’s words. “I am very sorry the plan did not work,” she said moments later. “But why tell me all this? I have nothing to do with such cosmic stories.”

  “Perhaps not yet,” Uki said. “But I am hoping that you will—and soon. You see, I am going to try a second time. Fear got the better of me on my first journey, but this time will be different. Come with me. Help me make things right.”

  Ashima pondered Uki’s words for a long time, while the world outside their bubble became almost unrecognizable. The unborn sprang to life; new cities and conurbations flourished by the moment; wondrous objects parted the heavens, and all things became connected by the life-like iridescence. These are end days, Ashima thought, and I would be wise not to forget that. “I am sorry,” she said, voice quivering. “But I cannot do as you ask.”

  Uki’s gaze turned scalpel-sharp. “Have you no loved ones you wish to save?”

  Ashima shook her head. “I am an only child and have no children of my own. My husband and I separated forty years ago. My parents have long passed on.”

  Uki lowered her voice. “Do you not wish to save yourself?”

  “I have no illusions about my longevity.”

  “Then why turn me down?”

  Ashima shivered. “You offer me hope, and I fear that hope will break my spirit.”

  Uki’s eyes softened. “If you fear hope,” she said, “then you fear life, and in a way you’re already dead.” Her words carried no accusatory tone, merely a kind of clinical detachment. She cocked her head sideways. “Allow me at least to share with you what I experienced on my journey,” the girl said. “You have nothing to lose.”

  For the second time Ashima reflected deeply on her words. “Very well,” she said.

  Uki stretched out her arms.

  Ashima took a halting step forward.

  They embraced.

  Images and sensations flooded Ashima with electric force as she became Uki’s silent passenger in the reliving of her memories. Here was Uki, looking from outer space at an Earth millions of years in the future, watching the continents lock in. Then the scene shifted to Uki dancing among the rings of Saturn and contemplating the end of multi-cellular life on Earth. As the hours had passed Uki had become painfully aware of the sun ballooning into a red giant and engulfing Mercury, Venus, and the Earth. Using teleportation technology from thousands of years in the future, the girl had leaped to a place far beyond the Solar System, seeking solitude and respite. The jump had tired her, draining her in some subtle fashion.

  How could you bear all the destruction? Ashima wondered.

  I told myself it was not an ending, Uki replied, merely a transformation of energy and matter.

  I would not have been so calm, Ashima said.

  In truth, I wasn’t.

  Ashima felt the doubts that had sprouted within Uki as though it were happening all over again now. The girl had slipped from shock to numbness and apathy; she had begun to question her mission.

  I wondered whether I had contracted a mild form of the Disease, Uki said. To try and regain my sense of purpose, I practiced visualization; I pictured myself rescuing humanity from the brink of extinction.

  But the exercise proved useless, Ashima surmised.

  Indeed. I asked myself, “What if life isn’t worth saving?”

  Surely, that was the Disease talking, Ashima said. The value of life is not for us to determine.

  Ah, but it is, Uki said. Which is why I have asked for your help. If we do not decide to act, it will make little difference what others think about the subject.

  In the end it was her instinct for self-preservation that had propelled Uki forward. Given the exponential nature of the collapse, she had only a few days left before everything went dark, cold, irreversibly dead. Uki’s energy matrix would fade into the great abyss of this heat death, floating in an endless morass of nothingness.

  I had to confront this, Uki said. I had no choice but to jump forward in time, past the Dark Era of protonic decay, until I reached the very finality of things: over ten to the one hundred years in the future, which amounts to several real-time years from now.

  As she shared her memory of the experience, Ashima truly understood the girl’s fear. There were costs to the temporal jumps. That same fatigue Uki had experienced before, during her teleportation exercises, would happen again, this time on a much larger scale. The terrible truth was revealed: Uki’s final jump might be too taxing, leaving her stranded in a gossamer realm of non-being.

  Despite this, she had tried. Uki had jumped once, twice, ten times. And each time she had found she had not quite jumped far enough, and had become weaker then the time before. She had felt the very essence of her beginning to give way, to lose cohesion . . . .

  Ashima was overwhelmed at the recollection. Her brain began to seize up. She couldn’t breathe. “Enough—”

  She stumbled back and Uki severed the link.

  A few minutes passed and Ashima at last regained her sense of self. Her breathing returned to normal and her head stopped spinning. “That was when you fled,” she said. “You turned around and came here, to the past.”

  Uki lowered her head. “Yes. My courage failed me. A poet once said that time present and time past are both present in time future, and time future contained in time past; he was more right than he could have known. I drifted for a while, aimless. But then I felt your presence, like a beacon shining through the years. I was drawn here, to this time. To you.”

  “You were incredibly brave,” Ashima said. Just thinking about the girl’s predicament chilled her. “What they asked of you was impossible.”

  Uki’s orb-like eyes seemed to protrude, and her youthful face drew up into taut lines. “Impossible? No. I simply wasn’t ready.”

  Ashima did not succeed in keeping incredulity out of her voice. “And now you are?”

  “I am if you’ll come with me,” Uki said. “Together we can make all the difference in the world.”

  “Or end up dissolved in that realm of non-existence,” Ashima said.

  “The rewards outweigh the risks.”

  Ashima thought about what Uki was proposing, and it filled her with weariness; she felt every one of her years, the slowness and clumsiness of her body. Her voice broke as she spoke. “I am an old woman. I am not the one you seek.” She tapped into the network of glittering lights, looking up Uki’s poetry reference. “Didn’t the same poet you quoted also say that what might have been, and what has been, point to one end, which is always present? My end is certainly present. Please return me to it.”

  The softness of Uki’s voice belied the intensity of her pleading. “You can help me. You must.”

  Ashima looked through the invisible curtain to the world beyond. If the girl insisted on keeping her captive here, she would surrender her body, but not her mind. She sat down and resumed her chant. “Tát savitúr váreṇ-i-yaṃ—”

  “That’s it then?” Uki exclaimed.

  Ashima did not reply, focusing on completing the prayer. And then she began it anew, a second time, a third, one hundred and eight times through the cycle. She recalled the twelve con
stellations and the nine arc segments, or namshas. She thought of the one hundred and eight energy lines that converge to form the heart chakra, and felt warmed by Sushumna on the path to self-realization. In time the cacophony of the disintegrating world returned, and a stifling wind brought hot gusts from several nearby fires, started as rites of purification or sacrifice. So, the girl has relented. Good, Ashima thought. She prayed on. “Bhárgo devásya dhīmahi—”

  With the speed of a trumpet blast, the sky darkened and the air cooled, interrupting Ashima’s meditation. The moon deity Chandra was swallowing up the sun deity Surya.

  “Is this your doing, Uki?”

  “No.” The girl’s eyes shone defiantly. “Beginning now, each minute of our present is equivalent to nearly one future century. We’re witnessing the total solar eclipse of June 3, 2114. In two hours each passing minute will see four centuries of changes; in three hours, seven hundred and sixty five future years; and in nine hours and twenty-one minutes, the Earth will return to one of the current ice age’s glacial periods, fifty thousand years in the future. By the time—”

  “I understand.” Ashima stood up. “No matter what the future holds, I must deal with this moment—that is all we can ever hope to do. Help me find some tulsi for the eclipse.”

  Uki frowned. “Holy basil?”

  “Yes.”

  The girl sighed but proceeded to help. With her enhanced senses it didn’t take long. Basil in hand, Ashima purified a cup of drinking water and proffered it. “Drink with me.”

  Uki took a sip and returned the cup. Ashima’s dry lips welcomed the water. She emptied the vessel. “Now we must dip ourselves into the holy waters of Pushkar Lakem,” Ashima said, “and cleanse ourselves from the stains of adharma, unrighteousness.”

  The girl followed her lead. They waded in slowly, sharing the spot with several other people. Ashima kept her breathing calm and regular, centering herself on a single idea: Accept the present. Thoughts of the distant past threatened to rupture her serenity, so she pushed them away. The web of interconnected, glimmering lights babbled and droned within her mind, urging caution, warning of impending events. Was that Uki, trying to influence Ashima, or was it a greater future awareness, sharing its wisdom?