It was hard to look at her, but he forced himself. “You’d rather we stayed in LA when it fell into the sea, then? You’d prefer to have died in the food riots?”
“We didn’t just come out here to survive,” she spat. “You staked our lives on the premise that someone out there was watching. And that they would save us.”
The distress signal had been going out, in some form or other, for almost twenty years. The endless string of binary laser-light pulses and more esoteric codes were a barrage that anyone who could make sense of mathematics would surely decipher to learn the location of Earth and the dire state of its environment. If they were as merciful as they were advanced, they would come running to save the few humans left from imminent destruction.
“We could have gone out with our families,” she sobbed, “with people who mattered to us… we could’ve gone somewhere and just tried to live…”
Immune as he was to the rogue nano-compilers riddling her flesh, he could still be infected with her doubt. Scriabin had spent their pooled life savings on the mostly underground compound, the telescope farm and some weapons. It seemed less like fate than the plot of some corny made-for-TV gospel, that their Moses did not survive the journey himself.
Society collapsed even faster than Scriabin had predicted, and angels lifted no one out of the fire. Of the forty-two men and women who set out, only twenty were still alive, and less than half of them were fit enough to get out of bed. “We are still alive because of the group, Joyce, and we have a purpose… we still have––“
“Hope? Have you talked to anyone down below lately, Gary? Hope has them, and it’s eating them alive.” After the canned food ran out and the hydroponic victory garden failed, the weakest took their own lives or deserted, while the rest shaved their heads and prayed to outer space. Some claimed they heard Scriabin lecturing them in their dreams, promising a new Eden.
Even Joyce had drifted away into a desperate fugue state. Caldwell spent more time in the communications bunker just to get away. “This can’t be the End,” she said. He looked away, and then it happened.
The night was a black wall, the jet stream of toxic clouds grinding grimy lightning sparks off the empty wasteland, and suddenly, the whole sky was alive with light.
“Joyce, look! Do you see them? I told you––” He threw up his arms to shield his face, turned to reach for her, so transported by joy that he didn’t realize that he was blind.
They were not at all as he expected. He had tried to prepare his mind for flying saucers, for vast, weightless cities of otherworldly light, but he was utterly wrecked by the reality of them. The only way to frame what he saw was the Biblical descriptions of the Angels’ appearances to Jacob and Ezekiel – the wheels within wheels of fire, the terrible intensity that lifted his hair erect on his head and blew out every circuit in the bunker.
They did not descend out of the clouds. They were so instantly, absolutely there that they must have come through a fold in space, or out of a parallel universe, to hover directly overhead. As if summoned by his faith or her doubt, they had come at last…
He trembled with true awe that transcended fear for his life, but even then, he did not let his excitement run away with him and scream for the others. He had not eaten in almost three days. He might be hallucinating. It couldn’t be real…
But then the sonic boom and shockwave of displaced air from the overwhelming manifestation smashed into the bunker. The blinding, rosy glow of that fleet of celestial wheels grew so bright as to fill the space between his eyes and his hand with a pink opaque ocean.
There was no message of universal peace, no psychic embrace from the visitors. There was nothing at all… until now.
He was cold, and he ached all over. But slowly, agonizingly, he was able to move. His hands brushed a brittle crust off his face, and bumped against the ceiling. He lay supine in a thickly padded space the size of a coffin. He might be in some sort of suspended animation pod, but something had obviously gone wrong.
The walls of his coffin were solid, but the one behind his head was slightly translucent and allowed the muted golden light to pass through it. He rapped on it, then pounded with his fists. It meekly slid back into the wall, and let the ambient air of the ship fill his chamber.
The first breath of it nearly killed him.
Carbon monoxide is a soothing way to die – three of the group killed themselves in the motor pool, when the nukes fell on New York. But carbon monoxide was the least toxic of the ingredients that he inhaled.
His eyes teared up so badly, they could be melting. He tried to scream, as the sulfurous vapors reacted with the fluid in the lining of his throat to form acidic foam. Coughing it clear, he found some relief by breathing through the fibrous padding torn from the walls of his coffin.
The sweltering yellow miasma was hostile, but not deadly. In fact, it was not really even an alien atmosphere, in the sense that he had breathed it before. It was all too familiar, reminding him of the fires that feasted on Las Vegas, and the long-gone smoggy stench of his morning commute. Perhaps they hadn’t left Earth after all.
Closing his burning eyes and breathing shallowly through his mask, he lowered his legs over the edge of his cell. He felt much lighter than he should have, but there was still a discernible pull of gravity that dragged him downward. Probing with his bare feet, he found the convex windows of other coffins, but he did not know if he was anywhere near the floor. He clung to the wall until his fingers cramped. Sweat beaded on his brow and burned like battery acid. If he didn’t keep moving, he was going to fall. He lowered himself out of his open coffin and fumbled sideways on the wall of a bottomless mausoleum.
Moving like a crippled fly on a pane of dirty glass, he crept over to the nearest coffin. He scrubbed away the yellow scum from the translucent pane and rubbed his outraged eyes. Joyce?
A woman lay inside, her face dimly lit by the corroded gold light, but he didn’t recognize her.
Where was the rest of the group? Where was his wife? He had hoped for some familiar face, but the coffins all around his were occupied by people he’d never seen before.
When he had peered into more of them than he could count and his legs shook and threatened to give out on him, he tried to return to his own coffin, but he was lost. It seemed such a shame to fall to his death, when he had come so far…
Something grabbed his leg and lifted him off the wall. Thrashing in its unbreakable grip, he dangled upside down over the murky abyss, then was spun around to face his captor.
A gigantic mound of spiny armor, bigger than a blue whale, clung to the wall on hundreds of jointed, branching tentacles. More of them slithered out of vaginal slots all around its underbelly to ensnare and cradle his helpless body. The tips of many of them swelled into polyps and darkened to become curious eyes.
He didn’t know what he’d expected, but it was nothing like this. Benevolent, dome-headed gray humanoids were just as much of an anthropocentric fantasy as angels. But this thing showed no sign of the intelligence one would expect to find in a starfaring species. Certainly, it had none of the mercy one might hope for in aliens that had just saved humans from a dying world.
But maybe, the thought shot through him with the force of an electric shock, they aren’t merciful, at all. Maybe they didn’t come to save us…
The forest of forking tentacles brought him closer to the hulking shell. While it showed no semblance of a head, its pitted, bony surface danced with glossy black motes that, amid all this strangeness, gave him another horrible spasm of unwelcome familiarity.
Cockroaches. His alien savior was infested with cockroaches.
He fought against the very arms holding him up as waves of tiny, many-legged things came scuttling down them to crawl over his body and his face.
The tendrils stretched him out and held him completely rigid as the maddening tickle of millions of probing legs inspected every inch of him. Close up, the parasites were more like earwigs or silverfish,
with twitching antennae at either end of their segmented, armored bodies.
Your container was faulty, said a buzzing, susurrate voice. Apologies. We will rectify.
He could not move. He could not even close his eyes or his mouth as they crawled over his tongue and sampled his streaming tears.
You are conscious, lucid, and in somatic distress.
Leave it to sentient insects to belabor the obvious. They spoke directly into his mind. A constant background hiss of discarded synonyms and alternate phrasings ghosted everything they said. Every expression was a consensus of millions of networked minds. But when they commanded him to RELAX, the devastating roar came at him in his own inner voice.
“I am terrified,” he wheezed, “of you. I don’t know what’s happened, or where I am –”
Contact with catalytic specimens is proscribed…
Millions of tiny legs beat a jumbled tattoo on his skin that gradually became an even more infuriating united rhythm. But our caste/brood mandate is curiosity. We have absorbed your cognitive modalities at great cost. Isolation… forfeiture of daughter colonies…
He wanted to be a good ambassador for humanity. “I know I should be grateful – and I am… but why did you come to Earth? You heard our transmissions?”
An unexpected permutation of your programming… we have never seen such progress. We have hopes the next cultivation will mature within our lifetime… this was promised to us. But you have questions…
The gigantic shell-colony began slowly to climb the wall of coffins, holding him helpless for the insectoids that came and went over his flesh.
“Why did you come for us? Where are you taking us? Where are my friends? What happened to my wife?”
Your clan was unsalvageable. Your individual genotype expresses exceptional immunity to environmental/viral hazards. We came as we have always come. It was foretold in your sacred texts… Dictation and transmission of transhuman spiritual visions was the core mandate of our caste, so we hope your race found them a comfort.
In simple, flat sentences, the creature had undone all that Caldwell believed, and condemned all that he loved. He should rage, he should go insane, and yet he could only feel a dim, hollow echo of regret. “We got it wrong, then. We all got it wrong…”
Your species’ naïve misinterpretation of the cultivation and harvest cycle was the most useful and benign method of preparing you for your purpose.
“Our… purpose?”
Set down in a garden, you multiply and advance at a monitored rate, digesting raw resources until the indigenous biosphere collapses and environmental conditions become optimal for our colonization. Surviving catalyst specimens are harvested and transplanted…
Optimal conditions? He scoffed at the bitter irony, but then the creatures did seem to inhabit a toxic stew… “You’ve known about us? You could have come down and contacted us at any time…?”
We oversaw cultivation of your world for two million Terran solar years. Ancestors/mother colonies were far too cautious. By transplanting your species to an unripe world, we will take possession in less than ten centuries.
Words and breath failed him. They could’ve saved us… but we were serving them, all along. All our pollution was not the by-product of progress, but the purpose itself… not of ruining the earth, but cultivating it, to make it perfect for them.
“And now you’re taking over the Earth?”
Taking it over? As your race understands ownership… it was always ours.
The insect horde whispered on even as it placed his body inside a coffin and sealed it. The toxic vapors were vacuumed out, the temperature dropped and a skeleton crew of insects converged on his ears and eyes.
Be fruitful and multiply, they said.
They ordered him to SLEEP and FORGET in his own voice and tore any conscious thoughts of his own to shreds, but he hurled himself against the walls to smash them, and dug his fingers into his ears and sinuses until the last squirming body was smashed.
His ears thrummed white noise and his head pounded, but when drugged sleep finally claimed him, he felt possessed by a fierce exultation that kept his horror and despair at bay.
A second chance!
They were being taken to another planet, a virgin world, a new Eden, to start again. They would never make the same mistakes––
* * * *
He awoke with the sun blazing down full on his face.
He rolled over and stretched, wiped the crust of sleep from his eyes, and marveled at the flawless aquamarine sky. His mind still drowsed under a fuzzy blanket of warm euphoria that he didn’t entirely trust, but could not resist.
One of his ears gave only a dull thrum like the sound of distant crickets, but the other, though clogged with waxy exoskeletons, clearly brought him the sound of men and women singing.
He lay upon a broad, flat outcrop of burgundy lava rock on the edge of a placid green sea. The beach was a narrow strip of powdered sugar crowded by towering trees with white trunks and deep red bladed leaves.
A fat, balding man dripping sweat came out of the trees. When he saw Caldwell, he beamed and threw out his arms to embrace him, then caught him when he knocked him down.
“Hallelujah, brother! Blessings unto Jesus!” His thick Texas accent acutely reminded Caldwell of home, and everything that had gone wrong there.
The singing came from the forest. Caldwell steadied himself against the Texan’s sturdy bulk. “How many people are there?”
“About a hundred or so, and mostly Americans… Awful lot of Chinese, which struck me funny, tell you the truth… I expected a whole lot more from my parish. We just woke up on the beach, and well, here we are! There could be more of us scattered all over. The angels said there would be other groups, but for now, we should make a home, and be fruitful––”
“They weren’t angels,” Caldwell said.
The preacher’s tight, too-bright smile silently warned Caldwell that he was hanging on to sanity by his fingernails. This wasn’t what anyone expected. It must’ve been a crushing blow, not to awaken on a cotton-candy cloud with dove-white wings and a harp.
Caldwell followed the preacher into the trees. They must’ve been up for hours, and they hadn’t wasted any time.
Singing and speaking in tongues, the men chopped down trees, while the women stoned the flightless, six-winged bird-things that flapped honking out of the crimson foliage, and gathered their jeweled eggs in nests shaped like shopping bags.
“We found the lava rocks were almost ready-made axe heads, so we got a heck of a head-start chopping down a clearing, and our boys say we can dam up the stream nearby and have a sawmill… There’s iron ore and oil just oozing up out of the ground.”
“You think this is Paradise… and you’re just going to plow it under and burn it down, just like the last one?” Caldwell could not keep the edge of hysteria out of his ragged voice.
The Texan fanned his ruddy face with a bleeding leaf. “I don’t presume to question His means or ends, brother. I know the Bible is the Lord’s gospel truth and I don’t mean to cast stones at His divine plan, but I don’t believe Adam and Eve ever had it half as easy as we’re going to. Praise Jesus!”
Caldwell drew in a breath to shout, and it almost came out of him before he even felt it building… the desperate cry of his soul, to stop and look at themselves and the second chance they’d been given. He almost told them the truth about their angels.
But when he looked around, he saw no one who did not join in the hymns and glossolalia. Not a single member of his group. Just good God-fearing folks, chopping out their little piece of the new Eden.
At first, Caldwell only moved his lips so as not to stand out, but it didn’t take long to learn the words.
And by then, he was swinging an axe.
Eliza
by Joshua Reynolds
Oily rain wept down from the black sky and sizzled where it struck the rusty catwalks. Occasionally, a bolt of lightning would shriek down and da
nce across the iron shields that protected the upper reaches of the city and for a moment, the darkness would be swept aside in a flash of painful brilliance.
Despite the rain and the lightning, the walkways and catwalks were choked with people as the city went about its business. Impromptu markets sprang into existence as merchants of all stripes and legitimacies hawked their recycled wares to the dull-eyed populace. They sold protective amulets and powdered ancestors; dreams of protection and safety, though everyone knew the truth of it.
The city was humanity’s last stand and outside of its walls, old things raged and fought in an entropic cacophony that had engulfed the rest of the world one mind at a time. The Old Ones had taught mankind new ways to shout and kill and revel in the doing so, and all of the Earth was burning in a holocaust of madness and freedom.
But not in the Empire; not in the last city of a once-proud race. There was order beneath the Iron Curtain. There was order and safety, of sorts, even if it was all the more cruel than the chaos outside because it could be taken away.
Eliza Whateley knew all about that. Soshe ran, her albino skin going the color of basalt and her pink eyes the color of the far stars. It wasn’t just the hues that were changing, but the shape of her pupils and her bones, the latter shifting and cracking quietly whenever she tried to catch a few precious moments of sleep.
The horns had been first; twin nodules of calcified bone, poking up through her crinkly hair. They had grown so fast and become so heavy that she had been forced to keep her head covered by her rain-hood even on the rare dry days. Then her toes had stuck and grown into curved cloven hooves so that when she ran, she made a sound unlike anything anyone in the city had ever heard before, except in nightmares.
She was running now, her hood tossed back, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps. She gripped balance cables and rail-wires, hauling her aching body along, out into the burning rain and through the packed crowd. Curses and other querulous noises filled her ears as she shoved through the crowd, her hooves stomping on feet, her elbows digging into kidneys, hips, and shoulders.
Apotheosis: Stories of Human Survival After the Rise of the Elder Gods Page 9
