The Wanderer held up both hands.
‘Okay, okay, I was just asking about it. I wasn’t getting at you.’
The Presley replica didn’t answer. For some time he and the Wanderer walked in silence. Finally the Wanderer could stand it no longer.
‘Hey.’
‘What?’
‘If you don’t mind me asking, what were you before you were a replica?’
‘I was a blank.’
‘Where?’
‘Goddamn, how the fuck should I know? All that was wiped out when I was printed like this.’
‘You don’t remember anything at all?’
‘I remember it was crowded.’
‘Rough, huh?’
‘No, not really. You still could find some room.’
‘What did you do?’
The Presley replica gave a jerk of his shoulders.
‘I dunno. Just sat around an’ told jokes, I guess.’
After that, there seemed nothing left to say. The mountainside was, by now, getting exceedingly steep, and both men were becoming short of breath. They began to approach the level that was permanently shrouded in cloud. The Wanderer abruptly sat down on the grass. He gasped for breath.
‘That’s it, that’s far enough.’
The Presley replica looked down at him.
‘You tuckered out, Mister Wanderer?’
‘That and a couple of other things.’
The Presley replica squatted down beside him.
‘What other things?’
The Wanderer shook his head from side to side.
‘I got a bad feeling.’
The Presley replica took off his glasses and looked at the Wanderer with concern.
‘What kind of bad feeling?’
The Wanderer looked at him coldly.
‘You really want to know?’
The Presley replica raised his eyebrows.
‘Sure.’
The Wanderer pointed.
‘Then look.’
The Presley replica turned. Down on the plain, the ziggurat had started to collapse in on itself. Huge cracks were spreading across the landscape. The Wanderer chuckled.
‘I figure it’s finally all over for the likes of us.’
***
The shock waves spread outwards through the whole of the damaged world. They clashed, merged and formed more complex patterns of destruction. The stasis towns and generator cities went out one by one.
Some, like Pleasant Gap, simply vanished as their generators broke down under the strain. Others disappeared in a far more spectacular manner.
The glowing plain around Dogbreath erupted in a huge fireball that scorched the town to grey ash. Earthquakes and furious storms raged round both Con-Lee and Wainscote. In Con-Lee the great tower collapsed, and without the control equipment, the rest of the city slowly faded into the nothings.
As the tremors shook Wainscote, He finally awoke, and stalked the crumbling corridors turning the last frenzy of the eternal party into a nightmare.
In Sade, the nightmare had already started before the shock waves even hit. The citizens were deep into the ceremony of the Wild Hunt, an orgy of suffering and slaughter that they justified as a ritual cleansing that purged the city of mutations and weaklings.
The collapsing buildings and the rapidly spreading fires merely formed a scenic background to the final hideous celebration of pain.
The small Roller community of Beth-Gilead saw the shock waves coming across the desert that surrounded their settlement. They took the form of huge, fast moving dust clouds. As the light was finally blotted out, they assumed it was the wrath of their particularly disagreeable deity.
Recognizing their innate fallibility and sinfulness, the population knelt in silent prayer, and then simply switched off their generator and vanished.
The brotherhood also accepted the end very calmly. They spent their last hours checking their calculations in the hope of finding the error that had prevented them predicting destruction on such a universal scale.
The wheelfreaks were about the only group who greeted the end with anything approaching glee. As the shock waves rolled down the road to Graveyard, a huge cavalcade of gleaming trucks massed on the parking lot. Gunning their motors and jockeying for position, they raced ahead towards the disrupting section of road. The wheelfreaks, at least, met the disaster with class.
***
Billy and the Minstrel Boy dropped out of the nothings. They landed hard on a sloping hillside of densely packed sand. The fall knocked the breath out of Billy, and he lay for a few minutes trying to recover. After a while he sat up. The Minstrel Boy seemed to be out cold.
The landscape was totally desolate. As far as Billy could tell they were on a small conical hillock of sand in the middle of the nothings. There was no water and no vegetation. There was no sign of inhabitants of any kind.
Surprisingly, Billy found he wasn’t worried by the situation. He was filled with a feeling of lethargic, untroubled wellbeing. It was something like being stoned. He leaned over and grasped the Minstrel Boy by the shoulder. He shook him.
‘Hey, wake up. We’ve arrived somewhere.’
The Minstrel Boy opened his eyes.
‘Huh?’
‘We’ve arrived somewhere.’
The Minstrel Boy raised his head.
‘So I see.’
Billy lay back on the sand and took a deep satisfied breath.
‘I think I’m going to like it here. Do you know where we are?’
The Minstrel Boy closed his eyes and concentrated. Billy was a little surprised that he’d made no protest. After about a minute he opened them again and shook his head.
‘That’s weird.’
‘What’s weird?’
‘It’s gone.’
‘You mean you’ve lost your gift?’
‘Not my gift.’
‘What then?’
The Minstrel Boy frowned. Then he grinned crookedly.
‘I think I’ve lost the rest of the world.’
‘What?’
‘It’s gone. It’s not there any more. As far as I can tell, this is all that’s left.’
‘You’re kidding?’
‘I’m not.’
This is all that’s left?’
Billy started to giggle.
‘That’s absurd.’
The Minstrel Boy stood up.
‘Maybe it isn’t.’
He began to climb the slope towards the summit of the mound. When he reached the top he stood looking down. He glanced back at Billy.
‘You better come up here.’
Billy struggled to his feet.
‘What is it?’
‘Come and see for yourself.’
Billy made his way up the slope. The top of the mound dropped away into a shallow depression. The Minstrel Boy pointed down into it.
‘Look.’
In the bottom was a clutch of large gold eggs. There were nine in all. Each one was about half the height of a man. Billy looked at the Minstrel Boy.
‘What are they?’
The Minstrel Boy shrugged.
‘I don’t know for sure.’
‘You sound as though you’ve got a theory.’
The Minstrel Boy laughed.
‘Yeah, I’ve got a theory. A peach. I think we are looking at our superiors. Us humans finally screwed up, just in time for whatever’s in those eggs to take over.’
Before Billy could answer, a loud tapping came from inside one of the eggs. The air took on the kind of heavy stillness that usually precedes a storm. Billy looked anxiously at the Minstrel Boy.
‘What’s happening?’
‘I think they’re about to hatch.’
Minstrel Boy took Billy by the arm.
‘Let’s go back down the slope. I don’t think I really want to see them come out of the eggs.’
They went almost to the edge of the nothings. A high singing sound filled the air. It was pitched at the uppermost range audible to a human ear. Billy glanced at the Minstrel Boy.