Near + Far (27 page)

"Bill," Celeste said, spotting me through the small crowd. "I have bread and goat cheese. Will you come for dinner tonight?"

"Let me give you a couple squash," I said, nodding in agreement. I stuffed a brown paper bag with red and yellow peppers as well. She gave me a half smile. She is tall and skinny, and keeps her hair cut short to her shoulders. She doesn't bother with make-up. Few women do anymore.

"Cheer up." I motioned at the sunbaked concrete outside. "Nice sunny day."

She rolled her eyes at me.

At home, I found Gaston Le Deux dead. Its red-clothed skeleton lay half under a dessicated bush, mouth open and flies colliding on the soft flesh.

I didn't want Joe to see it, so I wrapped the cat in a gunny sack and put it in the back of my truck. It would be safe enough there. Celeste lives up the hill, within easy walking distance, but closer to Redmond Town Center. No one else lives in her apartment complex, but she says she likes it that way.

Celeste baked the squash out on her balcony in a solar oven to avoid heat inside. Like most of us she has taken an apartment and expanded it outward, claiming two or three in order to have the space to stockpile and hoard.

Celeste has three extra apartments, one filled entirely with goods scavenged from the Kirkland Costco.

"As soon as I heard what had happened," she said. "I drove down to the U-Haul place, and then broke into Costco. All the power was still on at that point. I took three cheesecakes and ate them in a week."

She's held onto it, too, doling out only what she needs to subsist on. Other apartments are filled with goods from other stores; she must have spent weeks methodically looting. She has pharmaceuticals, guns, survival gear, batteries, water filters, fishing gear, kayaks. For all that, she rarely goes beyond our small world's boundaries. She is a painter—she brought a truckload of art supplies from the Daniel Smith store to the downstairs apartment. I consider her images morbid, scenes of zombies staggering together, flesh falling from their limbs, pallid overripe skin sagging. Every time I go to eat there, she shows me new paintings and I make noncommittal noises she takes for approval.

This time she had a series called Legends of the Gone to show me: a zombie's transition to skeleton over a month's course, a thirty one-part set.

"You don't like it," she said, watching me, and I shrugged.

"It's the world," she said.

"It's a vision of the world. There are others."

She took a deep breath, avoiding my eyes. "I'm thinking about moving on."

At first I thought she meant leave Redmond, but that's not it. Other people have made this choice, to move on. Some have used drugs or guns. One sweet old woman starved to death by choice, spending her last days with friends nearby watching her die in apparent total peace. I was one. I touched her hand in the last hour and she smiled at me, but impatience lurked in her eyes as though she'd said all her goodbyes and was ready now to leave the station and embark.

"How would you do it?" I said carefully.

"Pills, probably. Would you miss me, Bill?"

"Of course I would. How can you even ask that?"

"It's that or watch the world wind down," she said.

I knew what she meant that time. I've thought it myself; we all have. I decided a while back how I'd go: climb to the Space Needle's top and jump.

"You're still deciding?" I asked.

She nodded.

"What things make you feel like staying?"

"You," she said with frank warmth. "A few other friends."

"That's it?"

She nodded again.

"When would you go?"

"I'll be out of candles in a month and a half."

"We can find you more candles."

"That's not the point. The point is that the human race is dying off and I see no reason to prolong it."

I had no idea what to say. I fell into silence as we sat there, looking at each other.

Back home, I sit out by the lake. Water lilies cover most of the surface; people used to cut them back, but fewer people have gasoline for their boats, nowadays. You can't just go along through a neighborhood, siphoning cans, the way you used to be able to. The eagles swooped out over the lake and the frogs sang. We're lucky here—most pollution was reversible, given time, and it's been twenty years.

Something splashes far out in the dark water, a fish, most probably. A long time ago, this lake housed perch and bass as well, but now we only have the fish pens and our mutant, ghostly salmon, which drift ashore to be eaten by Joe's robot cats.

In fifty or sixty years' time, only the last of us will be surviving, the ones that were children in 2017. They will be living entirely off the earth by then. One by one, the last will die, alone perhaps, or in small groups, as we are now. Some people will strive to leave a message behind, in case someone comes after them, like Celeste's paintings, but most will be content to slip into obscurity.

I see the reeds rustling near the fish pens, and investigation discloses Pierre and Heracles, working their way close. I shoo them off. Leaning over to stare into the fish pen, I see a light deep in the water.

It is elusive, escapes the long handled net I try to catch it with again and again, but I am experienced at this from years of fish breeding. Finally I net it, bring it up to look closer.

Coiling and writhing in the net is a tiny fish, phosphorescent green from head to tail. I know what this is. We've heard news of infestations in other waters.

They were originally ornamental. Bred for decoration. Rendered sterile with radiation before being sold to the public. But life is stubborn, and it will come out, somehow. They became so popular it was inevitable one or two, or ten or fifteen, would slip by. Some were released in lakes.

It's not as bad as the snakehead along the East Coast. Those things invade gardens and fields and eat them bare. But these little glowing fish will eventually fill the lake, eating what our fish live on, the plants and the insects. It will take a while. Years. Decades. Perhaps none of us will live to see the lake's death.

I stare out into the darkness. Should I go with Celeste? What holds me here? I spend my days caring for the others at Villa Marina, bringing in fish, tending the garden, trading at the market for the things we need to stay alive. I had been the director, the one coordinating what we did where and when. I planned the fish pens, and the windmill turbine, after spending days at the library and then Home Depot. It was tiring. Was there a point to it?

The clack of Pierre's steel claws floats from the parking lot, and then there is a screech as he jumps atop a rusting car. Everything is so quiet, so still, that I am forced to pause, as though held there, waiting for something to speak.

The air hoots near my face and a giant barn owl swoops past in the darkness, its ghost valentine-shaped face turned to mine as though questioning. A chill runs down my spine as it vanishes into the night, leaving a whisper of wings in its trail. It is a perfect moment.

As I cross the asphalt, headed towards my apartment, Pierre leaps from the car and assaults my ankles with a sudden friendly surge, purrs shaking his frame. The night is warm, but not as bad as the unrelenting, sunlit days.

In the morning, I'll talk Celeste into moving over here; interacting with the others will end her slump. She can help out with the garden, the fish. We'll learn how to make candles; I don't think the hobby stores have been scavenged heavily. We'll construct a wooden boat to hold Gaston Le Deux; ablaze, it will move slowly out into the lake, a Viking funeral fit for the king of cats. I feel a wash of cheer that is, I know in my heart of hearts, as artificial as a fan's breeze.

I have a few years left in me, a few years to wait for the night when the lake will be full of stars, ghostly salmon floating among them, neighboring phosphorescence lighting the pallid bodies. There are still perfect moments yet to come.

Afternotes

This story is set in the condo complex I live in, and part of the enjoyment of writing it was taking that landscape and transforming it. This story was one of my Clarion West application stories, and I can hear Octavia's Butler's voice in my head, saying, "Well, it's a very peculiar story." I left the question of what had happened very much up in the air, because that wasn't the point for me. The point was what happened to the ones left behind. At the same time, I couldn't resist doing away with all the politicians.

Near + Far

Stories
of the
Near Future
and the
Far

Hydra
House

+ Far Contents

I
n that future, we learned to see all the other futures. The one where we found out the world really was only 4000 years old. The one where the dinosaurs invented the abacus, the one where Deinonychi fought in cock-fights, bright feathers scattering like disintegrating fans. The future where cold-eyed aliens bought Manhattan for a handful of radioactive beads. A future of emotion and glass sculpture, where something danced like a quivering bird on the steps of a cloud coliseum for the en-couched, plugged-in ranks.

When we slept we dreamed more futures. Worlds where everyone was a superhero, worlds where nothing died but lived on in clanking golem form. A world of floating cities in the sky and the kite warriors that defended them. Worlds of darkness and peril as well as ones filled with sunshine and marvels.

We talked about them on the subway, online, face to face and mind to mind. I loved the one where mermaids taught us harmony; you preferred the future of textured light, where sorrow slanted sideways, slipping away along the grain like rain on nylon.

The unjust futures haunted many of us, the ones where the corporations sold us our jobs, where we lived on rotting beaches, walked among pine stakes tipped with black mold. Futures of plague and zombies. Realities of saliva and hunger and the arrogance of existence. So many of them that they eclipsed all the rest, obliterated the more whimsical, the futures of tiny elephants and limerick-composing umbrellas. But we would have had to alter the past to prevent these grim-shaded dooms. It was too late.

Or was it? Time travel had been glimpsed before. We turned the minds, the machines, long caffeinated nights and scrolling whiteboards to finding ways to repair long gone decisions.

Gate after gate; every traveler vanished. Never seen again.

Are they elsewhere, did they escape?

Our choice now: follow them and disappear through the dreaming gate, or stay here, caught in nightmare, where all the futures but one are gone. Take my hand—or decide not to decide.

Afternotes

This was originally written for a flash fiction contest sponsored by
New Scientist
. (It did not win.) It later appeared in
Dream People
, under the editorship of Betty Lomax and D. Harlan Wilson.

My philosophy with theme contests and anthologies is this: if when you read one, an idea springs to mind, go for it. Otherwise I don't know that I would push too hard on a specific theme, particularly one of the very precise ones that our genre sometimes comes up with,
Carmen Miranda's Ghost is Haunting Space Station 3
being a prime example. Also pirates, which I grew arrrr-tily tired of during my stint at
Fantasy Magazine
.

But this one was broad enough to inspire this piece, which is a type I'm fond of, a list with sundry commentary. (See also: "10 New Metaphors for Cyberspace" in
Near
.) The Deinonychi is a nod to a story by Ann Leckie, produced while we were at Clarion West, while the quivering bird dancing references Cordwainer Smith's marvelous story, "Golden the Ship Was—Oh! Oh! Oh!", a story that blew me away as an SF-devouring teen and which still amazes me with its beauty. I like the second person plural and the way it addresses itself while pulling the reader into that position; it's a neat little origami of an end that pleases me.

I used this collection in my editing class and challenged the students to put together their ordering of the stories and then defend it. This story appeared first on more than one list, and I had to agree that it's a good one to start off this collection.