All over, then. All over but the shouting.
I sat with all the others, down in the National Redout’s auditorium, watching it end, right there on the big screen, emptied of being, flooded with memory.
Jesus.
Life had sucked, but it was life, however sad, and life goes on, whatever you make of it. Then the discovery of the Cone, Cone of Annihilation, like some absurd techno-modernization of Hoyle’s famous old Cloud. Then the Dark of the Sun. The Snowcanes. The Freezing. The Rainout.
Beside me, as if reading my thoughts, Maryanne shivered, holding my hand. She leaned close, so close I could smell breakfast bacon on her breath, and whispered, "We . . ."
Too late.
Suddenly, on the big screen, the sun lit up, pale pink, complete with frozen prominences and the black blotches of sunspots, looking for all the world like a Chesley Bonestell illustration of a red giant star.
Antares.
Sudden black.
Blue light.
The image of the sun seemed to wrap around itself, twisting hard.
It shrank to a brilliant dot. Then the screen filled with a blizzard of burning silver, and somebody actually screamed "Woooo!" like they were watching fireworks or something.
Beside me, Maryanne said, "I feel so helpless."
Watching the silver blizzard, like so many trillions of burning gumwrappers flying in the wind, I said, "I guess we are helpless."
"What do you want to do?"
I squeezed her hand. "It’s got to resolve quickly, whatever it is. Afterward . . ." I grinned. "How is anything changed? We can have dinner. Go home and mess around." That got a smile, a little blush. "Maybe watch a video? I’ve been wanting to see Gunga Din again. Cary Grant. Victor Mclaglen. ‘Though we beat you and we flayed you . . .’ Something like that."
She put her arms around my chest and gave me a hug. "It doesn’t matter what happens, does it?"
"Not any more." Nothing matters any more but us.
It took about fifteen minutes for the expanding ball of burning silver to reach Mercury, momentarily a brilliant pinprick of silver light. Just before the wave front struck, it exploded in a muddy orange gout of flaming magma, flying apart like a bursting tomato; then it was gone.
The whole room fell silent. "What happens when it gets here?"
I looked at my watch. "It’ll reach Venus in another fifteen minutes or so. If that goes . . . I guess we’ve got about half an hour."
Her eyes started to panic. "Oh, Scott . . ." Not quite above a whisper, she said, "Oh, not now."
Why not now? Isn’t that what God does? Lets you think you have a shot at happiness just before He pulls the rug out from under your feet? I bet that’s a real knee-slapper up in Heaven, the way we all go splat on our faces every time.
I stood, taking both her hands in mine, and pulled her to her feet. "No sense staying here."
Maryanne said, "Where can we go? Back to our room?"
The classic thing, in keeping with my character. Go to bed with the woman of my dreams, and wait ’til darkness falls, once and for all, now and forever. Die with my boots on, like a trooper. I said, "We need to go get our spacesuits, Maryanne. If we go outside, we can watch."
Watch. I saw her eyes light up, just for me.
We walked hand in hand then, up the aisle and out the door, almost running down the long corridor toward the elevators, headed for the industrial complex near the surface. Just before the elevator came, I heard Paulie’s voice call out, "Wait! Wait for me!" He was alone, no Olga now when it mattered most, running toward us, hair and beard flapping.
Maryanne reached out and pressed the elevator’s hold button, smiling. "It doesn’t hurt to be nice. Not now."
We got to the big airlock and got in our suits with a few minutes to spare. There were a surprising number of people already there, more pouring in as we racked up. I thought about the ISS crew. Talk about a grandstand seat! They’ll be the last ones to go. Jonas clapped me on the shoulder as Maryanne, Paulie, and I climbed into his cart. "Where we headed?"
He said, "Awww, just out onto the shoulder of the mountain. Remember where we watched the launch?"
Somebody tripped the depress valves and the air started hissing away, tension forming on the door, our suits ballooning out slightly, then it was gone, the floor vibrating as the door rolled up.
"God!" That was from Jonas, not me.
I whispered, "Maryanne. . . ." She turned and looked at me, face bathed in silver light as the cart rolled forward, out under a brilliant noonday sun. The sky was black, the mountains lit up all around us. Up in the sky, where the sun should have been, was a huge silver ball, full of twinkling sparkles, tumbling glitter, bits and streaks of magical fire.
Maryanne said, "Oh! It’s pretty, at least."
Paulie cried out, "Look! It’s the Moon!"
Gibbous. Lit up silver like everything else.
The ball of silver fire was swelling fast, perspective making it look like some enormous steel sphere, falling on us out of the heavens. The Moon exploded, flying apart in a liquidy gout of magma fire, little black dots of solid material almost invisible in the spreading mass.
I wrapped my arms around Maryanne, holding her hard as I knew how, and before I could open my mouth to speak, we were snatched from the cart, falling into the sky as the world turned upside down.
Screaming. People screaming.
Falling with us.
Over her shoulder, I could see the mountains, the land, everything dropping away, a world made of brilliant liquid silver, melting as I watched.
I heard Paulie screaming somewhere: "Oh! Oh, God, Scott, I’m s–" My earphones filled up with a deafening fuzz of static, radio howls, terrible noises whose names I didn’t know. Looking at me through her faceplate, I could see Maryanne’s eyes, full of fear, full of . . . me. Her lips were moving, mouthing the words we’d waited too long to say.
The world suddenly flooded bright orange-red, the landscape bursting apart, leaping into the sky after us. I thought I saw the metal and concrete structures of the Redoubt, rupturing as they lifted off, spilling an antlike mass of people, then they were gone, smothered in foaming lava.
Seeing the light reflected in my face, maybe even seeing the image of it in my eyes, Maryanne pressed her head forward in her helmet, closing her eyes, trying to push into my chest.
There, there.
We’re together now.
The rest doesn’t matter.
But I could feel my heart pound.
Feel myself not want it to happen.
Not really.
Not now.
The fire was closing with us quickly, leaping smears of molten rock, like the fire fountains of Hawaii, solid bits tumbling dark within. Try not to flinch. Keep your eyes open. You don’t want to miss a thing. Not when . . .
There was a hard impact, spinning us around. I could see Maryanne’s eyes were open again, blazing into mine. I could see her mouth open, screaming. Another impact. Something hit me in the helmet, then something else, a lot harder. The glass cracked, then blew out with a howling roar.
A fiery hand reached down my throat to grab me by the lungs.
There was just enough time for one long, ghastly burp.
Then no more time at all.
It began, as always, once upon a fucking time. . . .
Oh, the old life sucked.
But it was what we had.
Until the Cone.
That Saturday morning had been brilliant and clear, not a cloud in the tawny sky. I got up before Connie, got dressed, drank my coffee, called Paul, waking him, and said if he wanted to hear what I’d found out, he could meet me at the south entrance to Umstead Park in half an hour.
"Can’t it wait?" Another second and he’d be asleep, would stay asleep until the sun was high and the air turned to steam.
"Hey, it’s the end of the world, Paulie-boy. You feel fine yet?"
I got in my car and drove away, not even tempted to go back upstairs and rape Connie awake, rolled down the windows and drove too fast, down the Freeway, on up I-40 past the airport to Umstead, getting there in seventeen minutes, maybe a little less, singing as I drove, the words to that dumb old skateboarder song, and was surprised to find that Paul had beaten me there.
There was a cool wind blowing as Paul killed the antique heavy-metal music blaring from his car, some Grand-Funky bullshit. "This better be fucking good," he said.
"Let’s go hiking, ole buddy ole pal!"
When we got in under the trees, Paul breathless from trying to keep up, he called out, "What the hell is this all about?"
I turned around, walking backward, slipping once in the pine straw, letting him catch up. "It’s the Cone of Annihilation, Paulie! The end of the world! And all in only eighteen years!"
"So this is your big joke, Scott?"
I stopped and waited until he was standing in front of me. And told him what I’d found out, last night, with my little illegal server probe. Shovat-sky’s Cone, thin as a needle, swept back to no more than a few arc-seconds wide, reaching backward into the sky, from Gliese 138 all the way to the end of creation, wiping out stars and galaxies as it came.
It was fun to watch the grin fade. Finally: "Scott. You’re a mean bastard. This isn’t funny."
I said, "There’s a printout in my car, Paulie. I’ll give it to you when we get done walking." I turned and headed down the trail.
"Wait." He said, "Scott, how the hell did you find this out?"
I told him.
Another doubtful look. "Will you let me have a copy of this . . . program you wrote?"
I shook my head. "I’m using HDC’s hardware and digital phone lines. You’d only get caught." I started walking down the long, steep hill toward Crabtree Creek. "Come on. Suppose it’s true. Then what?"
"Well, shit, I don’t know. Eighteen years? We’ll be almost seventy. My dad was only seventy-one when he . . . died."
Right. "Why the hell would this fucking Cone be aimed at Earth? We collapsed its wave function with all our telescopes and shit?"
He said, "Finger of God."
Right. "Paulie, let’s you and me pretend you’re really the atheist you always claimed to be. Why?"
"How fast did you say this thing was moving toward us?"
"Just a hair under the speed of light."
He said, "So. The point of the Cone is moving toward us at close to the speed of light. And then, a Planck-length further away, there’s a ring of cone moving toward us at the same speed, but its ‘light’ is relativistically lagged. Then the next ring, another Planck length. . . ."
I tripped over a root and stumbled headlong, stopping myself against a sticky-sapped tree, pieces of scaly bark coming away on my hand. "So it’s not a skinny cone, it’s a fat cone?"
He nodded. "Or maybe a flat surface, warped away from us by . . ."
"What would make a flat wave-front, sweeping across the entire universe, putting out the stars?"
He snorted, stifling a giggle. "I dunno. A bad science fiction writer desperate for a plot?" There was a book we’d wanted to write, years and years ago, about a science fiction writer who got turned into God by mistake. Didn’t get written because Paulie thought it was a stupid idea and wouldn’t work on it with me. I said, "You know, if this thing has the slightest Riemannian curvature, it’s wrapped around the sky, back behind the stars."
"That’s stupid. Why would it have directionality then? Why do we see a Cone at all, in any particular part of the sky?"
"Heisenberg? Quantum oscillations?"
We walked on, silent for a while, then, as we were crossing the shaky green metal bridge of the creek, the one that was swept off its footings a while back, during Hurricane Fran, he said, "So the point of the Cone gets here in eighteen years, and what? Suddenly a black dot appears in the sky, starts widening fast as the light-rings catch up to each other, stars start going out, and then the Sun–"
Funny to imagine that happening, storyworld become real at last, when I’m sixty-eight years old. If I live that long. "What the hell would happen if the Sun went out?"
"I’d have to think about it. I know Shovatsky was talking about infrared sources inside the Cone. Like the stars weren’t going out, maybe being dimmed by some kind of electromagnetic damping."
"Brain Wave?" Like a story. A story full of stars and snow.
He said, "This has got to be some kind of elaborate joke. A game the scientists are playing with each other."
"And if it’s not?"
He shrugged, "Eighteen years is a long time."
Time enough for us to die and miss the whole thing.
He bumped into my back when I stopped walking. "What?"
I said, "How far behind the oncoming wavefront of the light we’re seeing now will the tip of the Cone lag?"
"What do you . . . oh. Yeah. The Cone’s going to run up behind it’s own light waves, moving at relativistic speed. It’ll . . . I don’t . . . um. It has to be a while. Otherwise it’d look like a point-source instead of a Cone. No, that’s not right. There’s no such thing as a point source of non-light. Hell. I’m surprised you didn’t see something about that in the newsgroup. Shovatsky must know."
I’d read fast, not really believing what I saw. "So, what? It’ll be here next week? Next month? Next year?" Point source. Interesting. And if the Cone were moving at light-speed, it would’ve arrived without warning.
He scratched his chin, rooting among loose, wiry beard hair. "If we had some numbers, we could probably figure it out. If we’re not too dumb." He stopped and looked away from me for a minute. "How the hell are we going to know if this is real or not?"
"Shovatsky was talking about calling some kind of press conference on Monday."
Next year? The world will end next year? The two of us were looking at each other, like a couple of goofy, lop-eared dogs.
Near as we could tell, sitting at a picnic table in the shady part of the park, using the calculator Paul had in his car, combing through both piles of printouts for clues, the tip of the Cone would run through the solar system in fourteen months.
Next August, Paulie. That’s what I whispered.
And now? Now, what?
We’re dead. Dead, Paulie! Do you hear me?
His face floated by, balloon-like, screaming. Turned suddenly and stopped, rotating toward me, balloon eyes staring. It’s all your fault, he said.
God damn it. . . . Intensity of regret. Can you imagine it? The world gets destroyed, I get fucking killed, and here’s fucking Paulie haunting my fucking ghost?
Maryanne?
Nothing.
What the hell did I expect? Maybe I’m waiting for the Maryanne balloon to come by. Maybe the Connie balloon. Lara? Who else? Maddie, fucked at a party, on the floor, in front of laughing others, when we were both so drunk we almost puked? Katy? Katy-balloon?
Nothing. No one. Just Paulie the balloon-head, orbiting me like Dactyl round Ida. Slowly.
There was a prickle of apprehension on the back of my neck, like a cool, damp wind, breath of swampy corruption. Oh, yeah. This is bad news, ole buddy, ole pal.
The balloon head screamed, It’s all your fault! You made me do it.
I think I smiled. Hard to tell. Am I a balloon head too?
Hey, Paulie. Maybe we’ll be lucky. Maybe this is just my death-dream. There’s a lot of blood and oxygen in a head, you know. Hey, great! That explains the balloon-head symbolism! See, we’re dying now, but our brains are still intact and functional, producing a dream that lets us imagine we’ll somehow escape.
The balloon head’s lips twisted angrily, empty eyes accusing. So you’re going to tell me this is just another example of excuse-seeking behavior?
I think I laughed.
Balloon head whispered, It’s all your fault.
Hey, come on. Play along, Paulie. This’ll be fun. We’ll see the light at the end of the long, dark tunnel, it’ll get closer and closer, we’ll fall into the light, then the doctor will lift us by the heels, slap our little asses, and we’ll be reborn. Get it? Nudge-nudge, wink-wink.
Balloon: All I wanted to do was get along.
Something inside me went quiet with despair. I tried to make myself turn away. Turn my back on him. Come on, balloon head. Get thee behind me. Paulie orbited away, mouth working angrily, eyes still accusing, and the emptiness around us flooded with fine white light after all.
Life goes on, whether you want it to or not. You can call it an adventure, if you want to, and we did, embezzling all that money from HDC, cheating on our taxes, building our shelter up in the mountains, the concrete redoubt, in case the freezeout was mild, the emergency capsule in case it wasn’t, Paulie growing even stranger and more secretive until that last day, when I fell asleep on the porch, waiting for the sun to come up black. A hand shook my shoulder and I awoke with a start. Paul was standing there, staring down at me, looking well-rested, dressed better than usual, hair neatly brushed and tied back in a ponytail. Even his beard, grown back over the winter, had been combed. He said, "It’s ten o’clock."
Ten a.m. Pale blue sky. Dark green woods. Birds chirping. Bees buzzing. The distant whir of cars on the road. Hot out, maybe eighty-five already. Christ. Look at the sunshine. I said, "So. What do we do now?"
He shrugged, not looking at me, looking sideways, out across the lawn toward where our cars were parked. I said, "What happened? Is the timing wrong or . . . the government, Paul, they built all those shelters! What happened?"
He took a few steps, backing away from me, eyes shifty now, very nervous. And then he said, "You remember back at Christmastime?"
Christmas? All I remembered was Connie. "No. I, uh . . ."
He said, "After what I found out, after what you said and did. The bit about the software. . . ."
I whispered, "Paulie, you were taking risks. . . ."
"Asshole."
I sat forward in my chair, watching as he backed to the top of the stairs. "What did you do, Paulie? Tell me."
He said, "I bought a laptop computer and cellular modem. Kept it in my car. Only used it when you weren’t around."
Some cold chill, like soft fingers down my back. "Paul. . . ."
He said, "I made my own ferret, Scott, in imitation of yours, and I used it." He seemed to smile, maybe at my reaction, my obvious gape. "In February, Scott, I found out that the Cone, the asteroid strike, the missile scare, everything . . . they’re all cover stories!"
"For what?"
He started backing down the steps, feeling with his feet, careful not to stumble on his way to the sidewalk. "I found out from a group up in Montana that’s been doing some digging, Scott. A group that calls itself Novus Ordo Seclorum."
" ‘A new order for the ages’ ? Paulie, that’s right off the back of a dollar bill."
He nodded, smiling as he reached the bottom of the stairs, standing flat-footed, right hand in the pocket of the fashionably loose slacks he was wearing. "Scott. Scottie . . ." a soft snicker. "They are cover stories for the establishment of the New World Order. The governments of the technically advanced countries, us, Russia, Japan, France . . . this is the moment of unification, an end to war, the beginning of . . . everything!"
I sat back, looking for the shine of madness in his eyes. But whose? His or mine? I whispered, "Why didn’t you tell me, Paul?"
Anger glinting now, a show of teeth. "Because you never listen to me, Scottie. We always had to do things your way!"
"And then?"
Another smile. "In May, Scottie-poo, I went up to Washington, DC, for a reason. And when the IRS audit comes next week, I’ll be on the other side. Scottie, they’ve agreed to let me. . . ."
He suddenly recoiled, taking another step back, jerking a revolver, some small .32 caliberish thing, from his pocket, pointing it at me. "Stay in your chair, Scott!" I stood up anyway, willing him to shoot, listening to the whine in my ears, feeling like I was ten feet tall. Hands and feet far away. Maybe I’m going to faint. There was a dull, hot flush, hotter than the summer morning air, forming all over my face, rippling down the middle of my back.
"Why’d you do this to me, Paul?"
He kept backing away as I walked forward, coming down the steps, following him toward the cars. He whispered, "Stay back, Scott. I’ll kill you. I will."
"You already have, you malignant little prick."
He said, "You have to understand, Scott. I had to do it. Because of what you . . ."
I took another step forward, imagined myself rushing him, summer sunlight glassy and strange all around us. Maybe I’d get him first, maybe we’d grapple for the gun. Maybe one of us would die. Maybe both.
Paul looked away from me, bizarre confused expression on his face, looking down on the ground at his feet, looking around at the shadows. Something about the shadows.
I looked beyond him, toward the horizon, toward the sky above the black ridge of trees. "Paulie." My voice sounded funny and far away. "Why is it so pink out here?"
Nothing.
I turned on one heel and looked eastward, toward the sun. There was an unfamiliar violet disk in the sky, surrounded by a nimbus of silver haze. Here and there, black prominences lifted, like an artist’s impossible, frozen flame.
There was a soft retching sound.
When I looked, Paulie was on his hands and knees on the lovely brick sidewalk, puking, little pistol dropped in the grass, not far away.
In my death-dream, there was the sound of a toilet flushing. The splashy roar as the flapper valve opened. The whining song of the inlet valve, letting new water in as the float goes down. The turds leap up from the bottom of the bowl and start spinning around. The toilet paper sinks, sucked down into the darkness below.
Round and round and down we go.
Toward someplace.
Someplace long ago, in a universe far, far away.
Hmm. Would that be long ago, then, and, oh, so far away?
Or merely once upon a time?
Will I see malevolent indigo eyes open on darkness?
No. That’s merely another story lost and gone forever. Mieses to pieces.
Out of the darkness, came a very polite, ever-so-slightly supercilious male voice, the voice of an English queer: I’m terribly sorry for the inconvenience, sir. If you’ll just follow me, I’ll get you where you belong and you can get on with your life.
Um. Amazing that a dead guy can still feel his bowels go watery with fear. Who the hell are you? My guardian fucking angel?
The voice was amused: What delightful spirit in the face of eternity!
A structure that I assumed was my throat made a dry swallow, a faint, ectoplasmic clucking sound.
The voice said, My dear Mr. Faraday. Guardian angel is close enough, but in your case, I think you’d better think of me as a neurotransmitter. My job is to move you through Transition Space to the Storage Plen- um.
Storage Plenum?
Sigh. The Afterlife, if you wish. Come along.
Afterlife? Oh, shit.
The voice made a cute little tee-hee-hee. It’ll be all right, Mr. Faraday. Really. We’re terribly sorry for all the trouble we’ve caused.
We?
It said, Oh, dear. They didn’t say you’d have so many questions! Tsk.
They?
One and the same, I’m afraid. I’m an element of the orphan cluster rescue array, a subset of the accidental entities study group, which is in turn attached to the disaster reversal special hierarchy. We adhere to an attractor in meme-set space that requires us to believe the pseudo-sentient byproducts of the disaster-set entity have a right to exist, even though they have no reality in the C11 plenum.
What the fuck are you talking about? What C11 plenum?
Sigh. You are familiar with the concept that the universe exists as an eleven dimensional space?
The one where the extra dimensions are rolled up inside mass quanta, leaving behind just the three of space and one of time? More or less.
Well, that’s not quite it, but it’s on the right track. Mr. Faraday, the C11 plenum is a fully packed array of Kaluza-Klein entities containing an infinite amount of energy. Perhaps the simplest way to visualize this space is to view it as random-access memory, whose base state is set to the value one. Assume that there are quantum uncertainty processes at work that sometimes reset an entity’s value to zero. Then assume there is some kind of universal CPU whose instruction set allows it to perform certain operations on all entities of value zero. You could think of that as a solid-state universe and not be far wrong.
Isn’t that what writers call bafflegab? And isn’t this nothing more than a data dump?
The voice’s amusement seemed lugubrious, to say the least. Oh, Mr. Faraday. If that’s your attitude, then what more can I say?
Who are you, why are we here, where are we going, and what the hell happened?
Fair enough, Mr. Faraday. I told you who I am, though I don’t think you believe it. What happened? It’s not so simple, but I’ll see if I can simplify it. As you might imagine C11 space has something like evolution, and since its persistence time appears to be on the order of 1052 years, there has been plenty of time for it to operate. Over the vigintillia, unimaginably complex entities have evolved.
How complex is that, asshole?
Tsk-tsk. Mr. Faraday! Unimaginable to you. As I was saying: In time, these entities grew to understand the properties of the universe they inhabited, and to manipulate it for their own purposes, also unimaginable to you.
They why tell me?
It sounded hurt: Because you asked, Mr. Faraday. Now, if you’ll just be patient? One day, a really long time ago, as you count such things, they discovered that they could create a subplenum with properties analogous to C10, if C10 space existed. All they had to do was create it, and then they would have access to a technology in some ways equivalent to your own data-processing technology, but infinitely more powerful.
I felt a horrid supposition. One that made me feel cheated indeed. So you’re going to tell me I’m nothing but a computer game? Well, now there’s an original idea!
Such palpable sarcasm, Mr. Faraday! My word! No, nothing so tawdry as that. If it were, none of this would be happening, and you’d never know you were, ah, simulations, I suppose. Unfortunately, once the entities had their C10 computers, they were able to work out the properties of the C9 plenum and deduce that they could use it for physical movement outside the laws of C11. Starships, if you will. Time travel, etc. Magic.
How nice for them.
Mr. Faraday, when the first C9 device was switched on, it started a chain reaction that began collapsing the dimensions in upon each other, creating lower and lower plena, basically eating away the higher ones. Something had to be done to contain this disaster, which is who I am, and what’s happening now.
I don’t understand.
Sigh. I suppose not, Mr. Faraday. Look: timescales in the higher dimensions are considerably longer than in your own. C3 space began as an industrial accident, and everything within it is a product of that accident. You are toxic waste, and now, the cleanup crew has arrived.
Oh.
Mr. Faraday, the beings of C11 don’t know you exist, and if they did, they would not care. Their only interest is in reversing the substrate disaster, and in being more careful next time.
So who are you, really? And . . . and . . .
And what happens next? Do we wipe you from the floor and have done with it?
No. We are the machines made to clean up the mess, and we have noticed you, Mr. Faraday. Some among us have realized that we have no right to destroy you, and have made a place for you to . . . persist. Yes. That’s the word.
Persist.
Perhaps you’d like to call us the gods of a lesser creation? Yes, that will do nicely. And that lesser creation is something you might want to call the storage plenum.
Storage. For how long?
I told you, Mr. Faraday. Our timescales are far longer than yours. You’ll like what we’ve made for you. The Earth bubble, with everything there ever was living on Earth. It’s my special creation, though I’m told the other bubbles are equally nice.
Other bubbles?
It said, We’re here, Mr. Faraday. It’s been very nice to meet you, sir.
And so, my fine boys and girls, we went down the waste pipe and were flushed out to sea.
See?
After the Sun went out, it got colder and colder and colder, faster than we expected, punching through our heavy clothes, defeating our ingenious little masks, heated and otherwise, until we had to break out the spacesuits, not because there wasn’t enough air, but because it was too fucking cold.
You can’t imagine how cold minus-one-eighty feels.
At minus-one-eighty, the oil on your skin freezes. You get cracks at the corners of your eyes. You blink and your skin breaks.
The spacesuits we’d stolen from dead Philadelphia were astonishingly heavy, astonishingly hard to put on, even harder to put together, like Christmas toys in their packaging, "some assembly required."
On the other hand, they were warm and snug, and each suit came with a mounting rack, so they would stand up like so many hollow men, waiting for us to crawl through the hatches in their backs. Unfortunately, they weighed almost 150 pounds apiece, like self-contained suits of medieval combat armor. Cataphracts in Space. A wonderful Star Crap title no one’d managed to think of. Too late now, boys. Wonder if any of them are still alive? I hope not.
Connie and Julia had to help us up the stairs into the freezing cold hotel, which we were using as a sort of airlock, but once there, we could at least stand unaided, could stagger around, pissing and moaning to each other.
Paulie said, "They’ll never be able to walk in these, Scott."
"Connie will. She’s in better shape than either of us. She weighs one- forty-five, you know." And stands five-feet-eight.
He said, "Well, I weigh two-sixty, and if I fell down . . ."
I gave a little hop. "I don’t even weigh two hundred, Paulie. You’re carrying at least eighty pounds of dead weight, as well as the suit."
"Fuck you."
"Not tonight, Paulie. I have a headache."
"Asshole."
"And proud of it. Come on, let’s see if we can get outside without falling down the steps."
It was pitch black outside. Empty. Still. Maybe silent, but all I could hear was the wheeze and whir of my portable life support system. I tripped going over the jamb, staggering, barely able to catch my balance.
Paulie said, "Careful! Why the hell do the boots have heels, anyway? I mean, these suits were intended for orbital EVAs."
"Failure of imagination." Or maybe they thought one day we’d be going back to the Moon, going on to Mars? Fat chance.
It was hard going getting down the steps and out onto the lawn. I was starting to breathe hard, and Paulie’s gasps were keeping the microphones activated, rasping hard in my ears.
He said, "What if I have a heart attack?"
I said, "Do you think Julia will want me to fuck her after you’re dead, Paulie?"
He made a satisfying gibber, then shut up, saving his breath for walking. We didn’t make it to the top of the hill, not by a long shot, just to the head of the driveway, but that was enough.
There was a dark pickup truck with a bed cap sitting halfway down to the mailbox. I twisted and looked back toward the hotel, toward the lit-up cupola poking out of the ground beyond the hump of the garage birm. No one.
I said, "If we’d thought to turn on the security camera system, we’d’ve seen them coming." And since we hadn’t, that movie mob of peasants armed with pitchforks and scythes would’ve been inside before we knew what was happening.
Paulie’s breath rasped and grunted as we slowly made our way down to the truck. Inanely, I wondered if there was any mail waiting for us out at the road. Maybe a summons from the IRS?
Inside the truck cab, Gary sat behind the wheel, eyes and mouth open, covered with frost. There was a woman sitting beside him in a fluffy white fur-trimmed parka, eyes shut, head down on his shoulder, looking like she was asleep. A thick lock of long, straight black hair had escaped from the hood and was hanging down halfway to her lap.
"I guess it’s a good thing we forgot to turn on the cameras. You see what’s in the rack?" I wonder where the hell he found a machine gun?
Paulie was leaning forward in his helmet visor, head miniaturized and made comical by the optical properties of the glass, staring at the woman.
"You know her?"
He nodded. "It’s his sister."
Sister. Well. Was she in the group we chased away, or did he actually make the long round trip to Chapel Hill for her? And then what? A peace offering? Here, Paulie. I’ll trade you my sister for Julia. I started to feel sick to my stomach, maybe from the exertion, maybe not.
We turned away and started scraping back up the driveway. It was slightly uphill and harder than ever. Paulie was starting to choke between gasps, like he wanted to swallow his tongue, making me wonder how the fuck we were going to manage this. When the air’s gone, the resistance in the joints from suit pressure will be multiplied.
Paulie stopped, turning, and I could see his head tilted back, looking up at the sky. "What. . . ." The sound of wonder.
I looked up. There was the Cone, seeming to loom huge above us, hanging low over the horizon, threatening and obscene, like it was swallowing the sky. Hell. It is. There. A smear of gray not far from it. Over there another one, larger still, nacreous, with faint striations.
Visible?
"Paulie."
He said, "It’s probably a lot colder up by the tropopause. Not so much radiant heating from the ground."
"What do you mean?"
He turned and looked at me. "I think it’s an oxygen cloud."
I felt a thrill run through my intestines, threatening to burst right out my asshole. This is . . . this is . . . what? Real? Paulie was looking down at the snow surface around us. He switched on his helmet lights, and I was stunned to see it made the rime of carbon dioxide frost begin to steam. Here and there, like holes in a golf green, there were shadowy little pockets. Gophers?
I said, "Maybe we better go inside?"
He staggered over to one of the holes and tried to kick it with his toe, swaying. The thing was solid, like a little bowl of ice, maybe two inches across. "No. What the fuck are those things?"
"I dunno. Let’s walk up the hill and take a look around."
We had to stop fifteen times on the way up, and by the time we made the summit, we’d been outside for almost three hours. I said, "I guess you’re not going to have a heart attack, Paulie. No Julia for me."
He was looking off to the east, still breathing too hard to talk, and when I followed his gaze, I saw some dim, hazy light down by the horizon, barely there. As I watched, eyes adapting, it seemed to grow brighter, then slowly wane, hesitate, flutter, and wax again. "Richmond?"
He gasped, tried to hold his breath, gasped again, panting, then said, "Maybe. On . . . fire?"
I said, "It’s too cold for anything to burn, Paulie."
"Bomb."
"Richmond’s only a little more than a hundred miles from here. If somebody set off even a little atom bomb, we’d’ve felt the ground shake."
"Maybe we were asleep." Breathing easier now.
Overhead, the oxygen clouds seemed larger. "Maybe so. Or fucking. Hey, Paulie, you feel the earth move when you come?"
He didn’t even laugh, looking away from the light, back up at the clouds and . . . "There." He lifted his arm a little bit, trying to point.
Something was coming down toward us, a little glowing pinpoint of light. Tinkerbell, looking for Peter Pan. It was drifting our way, drifting like dandelion fluff on the wind, slowly settling. When it was close enough, I could see it was a little silver sphere about the size of a golfball. A vaguely luminescent soap bubble.
Paulie whispered, "Oh, my God." I don’t remember ever having heard him sound so pleased in all my life.
The thing started to steam as it approached the ground, not quite hovering over the snowpack, steaming, shrinking, drifting lower. I suddenly realized that whatever it was, it wasn’t hot enough to sublimate the CO2. Lower. Lower.
Paph!
It exploded with a sharp hiss, momentarily ballooning to a bright softball of dusty light. Suddenly, there was an icy teacup in the snow where it had been.
I said, "Well. Guess we know where the holes came from."
He looked like he wanted to kneel beside it. Impossible. He put his hands on his hips, clownish, clumsy, looking back up at bright clouds, visibly spreading across the black and starry sky.
I grinned. "Oxygen rain."
He smiled back, eyes incredibly bright. "Yeah."
I said, "Merry Christmas, Paulie."
…
