Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

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  The last man’s people survive by moving underground. Caves shelter them from fiery rains and pathogens and tidal waves. Underground, they have access to subterranean water sources that remain temporarily pure.

  His people’s luck lasts a century, until the geological instabilities set in motion by impact bubble up from the earth’s molten heart. Sudden, violent tremors herald chains of volcanic eruptions that transform the caves into tombs.

  The last man and his son dig their way free, but it takes so long that the already weak child grows weaker. He breathes dust and ash. Once, as they work to pry loose a stubborn boulder, a rain of debris showers down on the son. He seems fine when he gets up and shakes himself off, but who knows what injuries can afflict a malnourished boy?

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  The light-eyed child’s people believe they escaped the fiery rains because the earth protects them. Unlike the mining-scarred, ecologically damaged area of Nepal where the last man’s people live, the light-eyed child’s people enjoy a paradise of native species and pristine cliffs. Even some kangaroos survive to provide the light-eyed child’s people with food.

  The light-eyed child’s grandmother tells her the bones she finds sometimes are not the bones of people, but of devils. They made the cataclysm happen by hating and ignoring the earth, she says, Most of them died, but the ones who survived - Grandpa Burn and Grandma Starve, Grandpa Hate and Grandma Bullet - they chained us and hurt us and tried to take our land. We had to use their tools on them instead.

  The light-eyed child’s people initially triumphed over their enemies, but their luck ran out some four score years after the cataclysm. A species of bird which hadn’t been seen since impact arrived during the annual migration, carrying the pathologist’s bequest.

  One illness killed the elderly. A second attacked the healthiest. A third killed one tenth of the population in a single night. The fourth wiped out the men.

  No one tells the light-eyed child directly, but she hears talk of the plagues as our curse, sometimes brought by the earth spirits, sometimes by the ghosts of the demons. The light-eyed child asks her mother, who pauses while gathering roots to explain, Being favored by the spirits is both a blessing and a burden. They won’t forgive us for acting in ignorance as the demons did. They haven’t yet decided the punishment for our transgressions.

  The light-eyed child’s mother gets a strange, wistful look on her face and goes on. You’re our last hope.

  The light-eyed child’s people have a legend that girls with water eyes can sometimes turn into boys. They need her to do so; that is what they mean when they say she is their last hope.

  No one knows how to make it happen. Send the girl out on her own, her grandmother says, Boys like to be on their own. So every morning, the light-eyed child’s mother sends her off to explore the remnants of the rainforest.

  The light-eyed child thinks being a last hope is both a blessing and a burden. She enjoys being special. She hates the disappointment in everyone’s eyes when she comes home every day, still a girl.

  Sometimes she squats over the river, her eyes squeezed shut as if she’s trying to shit because it’s the best way she can imagine to force a penis out of her vagina. She clenches and grunts, clenches and grunts. Sometimes when her eyes get so tired she sees bright sparkles over the scribbly gums on the horizon, she feels her vaginal walls pinch together and she knows - just knows - that something has come out. But when she reaches down, she finds only soft, yielding flesh.

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  The last man cries over his son until he realizes his sobs are tearless. He stops.

  The ravens won’t leave them alone, so he throws more stones. He must watch the birds constantly or they try to pluck out his son’s eyes.

  His trousers are soiled, but he urinates at a marked spot near the cave mouth to maintain a semblance of civilization. He has nothing to defecate. When he gets too hungry, he sucks on stones.

  In all the deprivation the last man has suffered in his life, he’s never lacked for water. Even now as he starves, puddles pock the stony landscape. They taste brackish, but they keep him alive longer than he wants.

  He gives up sleep, but dreams awake. He sees mirages on the horizon, machines his father told tales of: great silver birds with hearts like ticking clocks; blood-heated covers to keep him warm; android doctors with needle-covered palms injecting life back into his bony chest.

  He remembers the first time he came to the surface as a boy, with his own father. His people’s men folk had a tradition of sending males to the surface to prove they had the courage to tread across the lip of a dead world. All around the valley grew the red-stemmed ban mara daisies which choked out the trees until the hills blanched white as the clouds.

  When I was young, they said the flowers showed the hills were dying, the last man’s father said. They came from a far-away land over the sea and when they got here, they grew so thick and fierce that they killed all the plants that had been here already, the ones that had lived here forever.

  Once, the last man and his father explored the mountains beyond the hills and found the remains of a fabric shop. Bolts of durable synthetic cloth tumbled across each other, like the discarded sheets of a giant. The last man and his father brought them home for the women to make clothes out of. They were greeted like heroes.

  Before the eruptions, the last man never brought his son to the surface. He was a sickly baby, like all the newborns conceived in the past few years. Many of them died, but the last man prayed over his son every minute until he was a year old. His son’s hair grew in scraggly patches across his scalp. When he ate, his gums bled into his food. Even after the boy had passed the most dangerous point, the last man refused to let him sleep alone, afraid he’d get lost in his dreams and forget to come home. The last man’s wife told him she would leave him for another man if he didn’t return to share her pallet. He let her.

  The setting sun reflects pink off the upturned petals cloaking the hills. The last man regrets not taking his son up here before, sickly or not. He thinks his son would have liked to explore these hills, feel his bony feet slip in the mud. He would have run through the ruins and hollered at the vast, free sky. At least, he would have liked a length of the gray cloth the last man and his father found so many years ago: sewn with golden strands for the sun and red strands like the stems of the ban mara daisies.

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  Literacy fades years before the last man dies. The older generation of his people remember how to read, but they don’t teach the young ones. Reading seems frivolous, indulgent, a luxury like brocade or peacock feathers or reminiscing about long summer evenings when men chewed betel nuts and women chattered while the lowering sun lengthened their shadows until an ordinary human presence had the heft of a god’s.

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  Two generations before the light-eyed child was born, her grandmother would have screamed at Grandpa Burn and kicked his skull downstream. Her mother would have cried over Grandma Starve’s aged bones, cursing the fact she would never live to acquire a stoop.

  The light-eyed child places her hands over their hollow sockets and returns to playing.

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  The last lie is not a single lie but a group of lies, uttered by the last man’s people and the light-eyed child’s people, by children and elders, by men and women, by the stoic and the red-eyed.

  Don’t worry, Mama, Grandpa, sir, honey, lover, child, heart-keeper, mine. You’re going to get better. You’re going to be all right.

  #

  The last man leaves his son awhile and climbs a formation of rocks on the other side of the cave mouth. The tallest one leans on a pair of others like an old man asking for support. Below, a thousand foot drop sinks into a ravine blanketed in daisies.

  The last man selects a small gray stone and pitches it down. As it plummets, he tries to fit the idea of such distance into his head: how things so high can fall so far.

  Before it hits, he’s distracted by a rush of wind
as a raven flies past him. He waves it away. It dives past the cave, headed for his son. The last man climbs down to chase it off and misses the moment when the rock hits the ground.

  By the time the last man reaches his son, the boy’s left eye is gone. The thread of his intestines trails across the stony ground.

  He remembers sitting with his son, then a five year old, coaxing him to eat yak meat and lichen. The little boy turned away, fanning his hands in front of his face.

  A little more, just a little more. Come on, the last man said. It hurt the boy to chew; it hurt him to swallow; it hurt him to have food in his stomach.

  A few steps away, the last man’s wife stood, staring, the glint of her reddened eyes bright in the darkness. The next day she’d leave him for the fat man who lived near the cave mouth, the one with who had another wife already. She didn’t need to vocalize; the words were written in the taut line of her mouth: Why squander time on the dying when we’ll reach death’s door soon enough ourselves?

  Truthfully, the last man had heard the ravens fly toward his son as soon as he climbed the rocks. He’d known what the birds would do. But it wasn’t until he threw the stone that his mind had the sense to distract him from trying to confront mortality while the wind of falling rushed around his own ears, too.

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  The last man is tone deaf and the light-eyed child doesn’t like to sing because it reminds her that her voice is piping and high when it should be resonant and bass, so the last music mankind makes is subtle and strange. It’s the last man grunting in answer to the raven’s sporadic caws; it’s the light-eyed child splashing in the river to the beat of her heart; it’s the last man’s fingers drumming on his son’s hollow belly.

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  The light-eyed child’s people don’t live long enough to suffer from their lack of men. The third wave disease, the one that killed a tenth of them in a night, reawakens in its surviving hosts after its long period of incubation and strangles the entire population by dawn.

  The dusk before, as the last man prepares to throw a stone down a cliff, the light-eyed child runs back to camp to find her mother. The sky dims. Pale stars emerge. The two of them stroll to a spring to fetch clean water with which to cook the evening meal of kangaroo meat flavored with peppermint leaves.

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  The last word the light-eyed child’s mother says before she starts to choke is whakahohoro: hurry.

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  The last man becomes grateful for things he should despise: the red-tinted sky, the stench of his son’s decaying corpse, the coldness of his soiled trousers. His last hour stretches, but not in the way a bored afternoon expands across a child’s landscape. His last hour is the petal of an orchid browning from the outside in. It’s a cloud blowing across the sky puff by puff, until without ever moving as a single entity, it soars away into the blue expanse. It’s a grain of sand, unnoticed until held up close - whoever would have known it was crimson? And smelled like salt? And shaped like a crescent moon?

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  The last piece of technology mankind invents is a bundle of lyrebird feathers and wallaby bones and blue lizard tongues wrapped in sugar glider fur which the light-eyed child’s people believe a woman can use to draw sickness out of a loved one. It possesses no magic, but it serves a purpose: it busies hands and buoys hearts.

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  The light-eyed child lives a few hours longer than the rest of her people. She clutches her mother’s hand through her breathless contortions, and when they’re over, she cradles her mother’s blue, arthritic fingers.

  As she runs out of breath herself, she wonders if her skeleton will wear jewelry with spokes and chains like Grandpa Burn and Grandma Starve. She wonders who will dig up her bones.

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  The puddles of rainwater could sustain the last man a few days yet, but he stops drinking. He watches the ravens’ reflections in the dirty water and repeats, “Trasa, trasa.” Though his mouth is dry, it isn’t thirst he’s referring to.

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  Though the last man and the light-eyed child live on opposite sides of the globe, they die within hours of each other. It is one of those improbable vagaries of fate which become probable given enough time and opportunity, like calculus stirring simultaneously in the brains of Newton and Leibnitz, evolution in Darwin and Wallace, relativity in Einstein and Smoluchowski. The last two humans are simply the final pair to march hand in hand into an unexplored realm.

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  The last animal to see a living human is a raven. She watches the last man’s final exhalation and waits a moment to be sure he won’t rise and hurl another stone in her direction. His body sags. She paces her perch. All remains still.

  She swoops.

  Portrait of Lisane da Patagnia, by Rachel Swirsky

  Nebula Nomination for Best Novelette 2012

  The line between art and magic is a treacherous thing.

  I didn’t hear the first knock. It blended into the patter of rain against my window.

  The full moon was shining brightly that night, penetrating storm clouds and my oiled cloth blinds to cast white pallor into my studio. I wouldn’t ordinarily have been working so late, but my commission was overdue so the moonlight was a boon. Supplementing with candles and my oil lamp, I had just enough light to work by.

  The painting showed a winter landscape of my patron’s fortress. Massive stone cylinders rose out of relentless white. A frozen river wended diagonally from the eastern tower to the edge of the panel.

  I’d gone out to sketch the fortress three months ago. At first, my patron had been afraid the building would decay if I sketched on the spot. I explained to him that the magic doesn’t work like that, but he still kept an anxious eye on the stones as my stylus crossed my tablet.

  Magic frightens people almost as much as it intrigues them.

  I mixed pale blue oils and dabbed color on to the painted riverbank. As my brush touched the panel, the water in the pitcher beside me began to tremble. A measure of liquid disappeared, as though swallowed past invisible lips. The painted river attained a new dimension, becoming tangibly cold.

  A second knock sounded, followed by a third. Finally jarred from my concentration, I traded my brush and palette for the oil lamp and hastened to answer.

  One of Lisane’s apprentices stood outside, water beading across his slender brows. His gloved hands shivered around the handle of his lantern. I recognized the boy from the last holiday I’d spent at Lisane's manor—Giatro. His infatuation with Lisane had been obvious. He’d followed her, lurking like a shadow cast against the wall, always ceding her the light as though she were the main figure in a composition and he a hastily brushed afterthought.

  I’d been the same way when I was her apprentice.

  Rain pelted the cobbles behind him. Giatro’s gaze flickered like a wavering candle flame across my face. “Mistress Renn, I have a message.”

  “Come inside. I’ll boil some water. You must be freezing.”

  I stepped aside to admit him. Giatro remained in the doorway. “Mistress Lisane has taken ill. She says she won’t last the night.”

  Giatro’s voice was newly tenor, but grief gave it gravity beyond his years. Lisane dying? Rain tipped from the gutters above my house, pouring onto the cobbles like water from a pitcher.

  “Has she summoned a physic?”

  “One came last night.”

  “And there’s nothing . . .?” I trailed off.

  Giatro inclined his head. A droplet ran down the bridge of his nose and splashed across his hands. As it went, it reflected the hazel of his eyes, the silver buttons on his coat, the slick black of the cobbles.

  “She wants you to come,” he said.

  “Is the hall big enough for all her old apprentices?”

  “She only asked for you.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I’d once thought I was special to Lisane. The intervening years had shown otherwise—or so I’d thought.

  “Why?” I asked.

 
“Please,” Giatro said. “Will you come?”

  Giatro’s lantern swung, casting weird patterns of light and shadow across our bodies. White petals driven down by the rain lay crushed in the grooves between cobbles, releasing scents of perfume and soil.

  I pulled my cloak from its hook and followed him into the rain.

  I was taught to paint by Lisane da Patagnia, whose skill at rendering inner lives transformed portraiture. She painted aristocrats and merchants—and sometimes others who could afford her fee—in luminous colors against stark backgrounds. Even when she painted merchant’s wives in sumptuous golden gowns or dukes wearing ermine stoles, her paintings always drew the viewer’s eye toward the plain oval of the face.

  Her early work conceded to prevailing aesthetics. She softened sharp features and strengthened weak chins. The familiar iconography of portraiture crowded the panels: bowls of fruit to indicate fertility, velvets for wealth, laurel leaves for authority.

  As her work gained acclaim, she eschewed such contrivances. Her compositions became increasingly spare. She painted her subjects emerging, solitary, from darkness or fields of color. She detailed their expressions with an unflinching gaze—pinched lips and watery eyes, crooked noses and sagging jowls. Yet each flawed face contained its own ineffable intrigue. It was impossible to look away.

  Hints of magic sparkled across the panels, softening the fur on a collar or sluicing red in a raised wine glass. Her paintings flirted with magic, using its spare presence to captivate, just as Lisane herself might tantalize lovers with a hint of bare shoulder, inviting them to imagine more.

  Lisane was born the bastard child of a maid who worked in the house of Ruschio di Gael, an artist renowned for shimmering sfumato. He was famously debauched—a drunkard—but he was also a man with modern ideas. When he saw Lisane sketching faces with charcoal in the kitchen, he decided to let her sit with his students.