“Elena!” he screamed in both his voices. “Elena! Oh Jesus oh God!” But he had never believed in either of them, and so they let Elena Asado go tumbling endlessly toward the beautiful galaxy clusters of Virgo.
Earth’s last rage against her children expired: twenty missiles dwindled to ten, to five, to one. To none. St. Judy’s Comet continued her slow climb out of the sun’s gravity well, into the deep dark and the deeper cold. Its five hundred and twenty souls slept sound and ignorant as only the dead can in tombs of ice. Soon Solomon Gursky and the others would join them, and be dissolved into the receiving ice, and die for five hundred years while St. Judy’s Comet made the crossing to another star.
If it were sleep, then I might forget, Solomon Gursky thought. In sleep, things changed, memories became dreams, dreams memories. In sleep, there was time, and time was change, and perhaps a chance of forgetting the vision of her, spinning outward forever, rebuilt by the same forces that had already resurrected her once, living on sunlight, unable to die. But it was not sleep to which he was going. It was death, and that was nothing any more.
Friday
Together they watched the city burn. It was one of the ornamental cities of the plain that the Long Scanning folk built and maintained for the quadrennial eisteddfods. There was something of the flower in the small, jewel-like city, and something of the spiral, and something of the sea-wave. It would have as been as accurate to call it a vast building as a miniature city. It burned most elegantly.
The fault line ran right through the middle of it. The fissure was clean and precise—no less to be expected of the Long Scanning folk—and bisected the curvilinear architecture from top to bottom. The land still quivered to aftershocks.
It could have repaired itself. It could have doused the flames—a short in the magma tap, the man reckoned—reshaped the melted ridges and roofs, erased the scorch marks, bridged the cracks and chasms. But its tector systems were directionless, its soul withdrawn to the Heaven Tree, to join the rest of the Long Scanning people on their exodus.
The woman watched the smoke rise into the darkening sky, obscuring the great opal of Urizen.
“It doesn’t have to do this,” she said. Her skin spoke of sorrow mingled with puzzlement.
“They’ve no use for it any more,” the man said. “And there’s a certain beauty in destruction.”
“It scares me,” the woman said, and her skin pattern agreed. “I’ve never seen anything end before.”
Lucky, the man thought, in a language that had come from another world.
An eddy in his weathersight: big one coming. But they were all big ones since the orbital perturbations began. Big, getting bigger. At the end, the storms would tear the forests from their roots as the atmosphere shrieked into space.
That afternoon, on their journey to the man’s memories, they had come across an empty marina; drained, sand clogged, pontoons torn and tossed by tsunamis. Its crew of boats they found scattered the length of a half-hour’s walk. Empty shells stogged to the waist in dune faces, masts and sails hung from trees.
The weather had been the first thing to tear free from control. The man felt a sudden tautness in the woman’s body. She was seeing it to, the mid-game of the end of the world.
By the time they reached the sheltered valley that the man’s aura had picked as the safest location to spend the night, the wind had risen to draw soft moans and chords from the curves and crevasses of the dead city. As their cloaks of elementals joined and sank the roots of the night shell into rock, a flock of bubbles bowled past, trembling and iridescent in the gusts. The woman caught one on her hand; the tiny creature-machine clung for a moment, feeding from her biofield. Its transparent skin raced with oil-film colors, it quaked and burst, a melting bubble of tectoplasm. The woman watched it until the elementals had completed the shelter, but the thing stayed dead.
Their love-making was both urgent and chilled under the scalloped carapace the elementals had sculpted from rock silica. Sex and death, the man said in the part of his head where not even his sub-vocal withspeech could overhear and transmit. An alien thought.
She wanted to talk afterward. She liked talk after sex. Unusually, she did not ask him to tell her about how he and the other Five Hundred Fathers had built the world. Her idea of talking was him talking. Tonight she did not want to talk about the world’s beginning. She wanted him to talk about its ending.
“Do you know what I hate about it? It’s not that it’s all going to end, all this. It’s that a bubble burst in my hand, and I can’t comprehend what happened to it. How much more our whole world?”
“There is a word for what you felt,” the man interjected gently. The gyrestorm was at its height, raging over the dome of their shell. The thickness of a skin is all that is keeping the wind from stripping the flesh from my bones, he thought. But the tectors’ grip on the bedrock was firm and sure. “The word is die.”
The woman sat with her knees pulled up, arms folded around them. Naked: the gyrestorm was blowing through her soul.
“What I hate,” she said after silence, “is that I have so little time to see and feel it all before it’s taken away into the cold and the dark.”
She was a Green, born in the second of the short year’s fast seasons: a Green of the Hidden Design people; first of the Old Red Ridge pueblo people to come into the world in eighty years. And the last.
Eight years old.
“You won’t die,” the man said, skin patterning in whorls of reassurance and paternal concern, like the swirling storms of great Urizen beyond the hurtling gyrestorm clouds. “You can’t die. No one will die.”
“I know that. No one will die, we will all be changed, or sleep with the world. But…”
“Is it frightening, to have to give up this body?”
She touched her forehead to her knees, shook her head.
“I don’t want to lose it. I’ve only begun to understand what it is, this body, this world, and it’s all going to be taken away from me, and all the powers that are my birthright are useless.”
“There are forces beyond even nanotechnology,” the man said. “It makes us masters of matter, but the fundamental dimensions—gravity, space, time—it cannot touch.”
“Why?” the woman said, and to the man, who counted by older, longer years, she spoke in the voice of her terrestrial age.
“We will learn it, in time,” the man said, which he knew was no answer. The woman knew it too, for she said, “While Ore is two hundred million years from the warmth of the next sun, and its atmosphere is a frozen glaze on these mountains and valleys.” Grief, he skin said. Rage. Loss.
The two-thousand-year-old father touched the young woman’s small, upturned breasts.
“We knew Urizen’s orbit was unstable, but no one could have predicted the interaction with Ulro.” Ironic: that this world named after Blake’s fire daemon should be the one cast into darkness and ice, while Urizen and its surviving moons should bake two million kilometers above the surface of Los.
“Sol, you don’t need to apologize to me for mistakes you made two thousand years ago,” said the woman, whose name was Lenya.
“But I think I need to apologize to the world,” said Sol Gursky.
Lenya’s skin-speech now said hope shaded with inevitability. Her nipples were erect. Sol bent to them again as the wind from the end of the world scratched its claws over the skin of tectoplastic.