The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell Read online

  “Basz?” he called.

  But the house seemed empty. It smelled faintly of mildew and something else. Sap maybe. The two side rooms—bedrooms probably, though there were no beds in them—were empty. Nothing in them. Nothing in the main room either, as if nobody had ever lived here.

  Maybe nobody ever had. Maybe he would be the first.

  He would lie low for a while, not even leave the islet until he ran out of food. How long would that be? Two weeks maybe if Basz showed back up again, probably a month if he was on his own. Then he would figure out some way of discovering if that fucker he’d stabbed was still alive and how much trouble he was in. Sure, he knew he owed money, that was fair, but there was a right way and a wrong way to ask for money, and that man had asked in a very wrong way.

  What about Basz? he thought later. Was he gone or would he be back? What had happened to him? He didn’t know, but one thing he did know was if Basz went shooting his mouth off, well, he’d sure as hell do something about it, nephew or no. He wouldn’t let Basz be the death of him.

  He pushed the crates against the front door, to keep it closed now that the latch was broken. He unlatched the hook holding the back door shut, checked to make sure the knob would hold it. He’d come and go through that door. That’d make him less visible from the water.

  The wind rattled the doors in their frames. It got on his nerves. He stood, started to pace.

  There was, he suddenly realized, a design of some sort scratched into the dirt floor of the main room. At first it was just lines. It took walking around it, staring at it, to make sense of what it was. But then, suddenly, the lines all came together for him: a face.

  Why would somebody do that, scratch a face in the floor?

  A man’s face, certainly. Vaguely familiar. He shook his head, turned away. All faces looked more or less the same, didn’t they?

  He propped himself in a corner of the main room to sleep, near the front door. Could he risk lighting a fire? Probably not. There was no bedding, nothing to wrap up in but his jacket. Probably he should have thought of that. Basz was always telling him that he needed to think things through, but he’d just been eager to get the hell out before the police arrived. And Basz, to be fair, hadn’t thought of it either. Besides, if Basz had let him do what he wanted, he could have just finished the bastard and dumped the body, and then they both could have stayed put. He wouldn’t have had to hide out at all.

  He settled deeper into the corner and tried to sleep. After a while, despite the damp, despite the cold, he did.

  It was dark when something woke him, a creaking sound. At first, he didn’t know where he was or what the sound could be, but then all at once he remembered he was on the islet, in the stone house. The sound, he realized, must be the back door opening.

  “Basz,” he called. “Is that you?”

  He heard a grunt that he took for a yes—after all, who else could it be? He heard a shuffling and saw the hints of a dim shape as Basz crossed the floor and settled into the darkness to one side of him, in the other corner or somewhere close to it.

  “Where the hell you been?” he asked.

  But Basz didn’t say anything.

  He waited a long time for an answer, but for once Basz outwaited him.

  “We’ll talk in the morning,” the uncle finally said. He was too tired to care.

  There was a grunt of assent from the corner, or at least the uncle thought so. And yet, at the same time, there was the same creaking sound from across the room, as if the door was opening again. Am I dreaming? he wondered. The same shuffling, going this time to another corner of the room. So, maybe this was Basz, and he had imagined or dreamt what he had first heard. Or maybe Basz was restless and hadn’t settled in the corner as he had originally thought.

  “Hello?” he said, his voice tight.

  The door squeaked again, if it was the door. Something squeaked, anyway. The same shuffling or a similar sound, as if Basz kept going in and out through the back door. And yet he was hearing movement from different parts of the room, too. Was he really hearing it?

  The smell of sap was stronger now. Perhaps the back door had been left ajar.

  He scooted over until he touched the crates, felt around in them until he came up with a box of matches.

  “Basz?” he said again. “Close the door, Basz.”

  No answer. He fished a match from the box and dragged it along the box’s side.

  But even with all the warning he’d had that something was wrong, he wasn’t prepared for what he saw: his nephew but not his nephew, right face but wrong body, no body exactly to speak of, not a human one, wandering aimlessly through the room. And not just one of him, but many.

  As soon as he lit the match all the faces turned toward him. Panicked, he blew it out. Almost immediately, he realized the mistake he had made. But by the time he managed to get another match lit it was already too late.

  Curator

  There were clear indications the cloud was moving again, headed their way. Where it passed it stripped the remaining leaves from the already crippled trees, left soil and water poisoned, stripped the flesh off any creature, living or dead, and then whittled away at the bones. It was no ordinary cloud, having been made by humans, so it did not disperse. There were some who believed the cloud had become sentient, but if this were the case, the archivist speculated, wouldn’t it have come for them sooner? It had finished off the rest of humanity long ago—why stop before it was done with the last few?

  “No chance it will shift direction?” the archivist asked.

  “There’s always a chance,” said Gradus. “But no, I don’t believe so. We’ll wait as long as we dare.”

  “And then retreat?” she asked.

  “There’s nowhere left to retreat to here,” said Gradus. “The cloud has destroyed everything else. No, we’ll have to depart for good.”

  “You’ll have to.”

  He bowed slightly, acknowledging this. “We’ll leave, archivist,” he said, “but you’ll stay.”

  …

  As Gradus and the others prepared for departure, the archivist set about her own tasks, sorting and sifting through all she was charged with. Gradus and the others would go in search of a viable alternative to this world, a new place to live, just as those ships that had departed before were now doing. The archivist would stay behind to watch the last bit of still-untouched ground be touched and die and to make sure the hatch was well sealed, the archive arranged. In a few weeks, a few months at most, she would be dead too. She was as good as dead already.

  As for Gradus, there was very little chance he would find what he was looking for. But what else could he do? He and his crew, like the archivist, were as good as dead. The only difference was they would take a little longer to go about dying.

  Once the preparations were made, Gradus sought the archivist out. He took her by the shoulders, kissed both her cheeks. His lips were warm and soft.

  “Nearly here,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Yours is a holy calling,” he told her.

  “Or a useless one.”

  “Perhaps,” he said, ever the optimist. “Perhaps.” Then he embraced her again and departed. It was, the archivist suddenly realized, the last human contact she was likely to ever have.

  A few minutes later the archivist was safely embunkered belowground. A dull rumbling began. A great gust of smoke and fire filled the screens of the monitors, and the vessel rose. And then she was alone, with just her holy or perhaps useless calling to keep her company.

  Once the ground had had time to cool, the archivist donned the black hazard suit and went above. The cloud was close enough now that she could make it out with her naked eye, a great roiling mass gathered on every horizon, converging on her.

  She returned to the shelter. She would have to finish quickly.

  …

  Her task was to preserve a record of humanity in the face of its imminent extinction, so that who
ever or whatever discovered the records might, through careful study, come to understand what humanity had been. She was not the only one involved in this task; each ship that had departed had taken a subarchivist and a similar set of records with it. Each ship had multiple highly abbreviated sets of data etched microscopically on nickel discs and encased in thick sheets of resin. At careful intervals, a satellite or probe carrying one of them would be released into space, where it would float until it was either found or destroyed.

  But she had remained on Earth, the place humanity had originated, which made hers the most important task: each set of data to be released into space, whatever else it included, gave coordinates for where this planet was, and where on the planet her archive was to be found.

  But Earth was, so the archivist increasingly felt, the place where humans had done their best to destroy themselves. And then, once they had succeeded in nearly destroying themselves and completely devastating the earth, they had, simply, fled to the stars, hoping to find new worlds to destroy.

  Here is how monstrous humans are, she felt the record should say. Humans are what they did to this world, their home. Here is why, once humans are extinct, they should never be brought back to life.

  Part of the record was more than a record: millions of preserved strands of DNA with instructions for how they could be reconstituted, inserted into artificial cells (the composition for several varieties of which were provided in the data), wound together into double helixes, and used—once this world was safe to inhabit again, once the cloud had done its worst and finally dissipated, its poisons neutralized, the earth slowly grown green again—to bring the human race back from extinction. Her archive contained pictorial instructions that could, in theory, be universally understood, so that whoever or whatever rediscovered the archive in a few thousand or a few million or a few hundred million years would be able to regrow humanity in a vat.

  Would it be humans, returned from the stars? If so, there was no need for them to grow more of themselves, unless they needed to occupy the earth fully. Perhaps, if other things had managed to come back to life first as microorganisms and then evolved into threats, there might be an advantage in this. Or perhaps because of the small groups aboard each ship they would now need to diversify their genetic pool. Or perhaps the humans who returned, so long among the stars, would have evolved, becoming something else entirely, and would believe they were discovering not their own but another species.

  Or perhaps it would be another sort of creature entirely, something with no relation to human beings at all, with a vastly different perceptual matrix. The pictographs had been designed for creatures with eyes, though the scientists had taken into account the differing vision of humans and animals, even the fragmenting and multiplying vision of insects. But suppose that whatever came did not have eyes? Even if they did have eyes, who was to say that they would have limbs? Perhaps they were sluglike or radially oriented or cephalopodic, and they would not interpret the two-legged, two-armed stick figures as being meant to represent sentient beings. What sort of tree is that? they might think, if they knew what a tree was, if they were able, in the way we understood it, to think.

  No, she thought. Even if anyone or anything found the archive it was hopeless.

  Or at least almost hopeless. There was the barest, most minute chance that everything would go just right, that there was other life in the universe, that that life would discover a probe, that the probe would contain a still-functional nickel disc microscopically engraved with data, that they (whoever “they” was) would figure out how to interpret the data, that they would take the trip to Earth and, once there, manage to take the steps necessary to resurrect humanity. There was a chance.

  Which was why she set about meticulously destroying all the millions of strands of DNA and defacing the pictograms. Millions of other species dead, all because of humans—plants, animals, bacteria. Some killed unknowingly, others willfully hunted down, a whole world ruined. No, the best thing, no matter who or what arrived here, no matter what life arose in millions of years from the sea, was to make sure it was impossible for humans to come back.

  When she had incinerated the preserved DNA, she put on her hazard suit again and climbed back to the surface. The cloud was much closer now; she could hear it howling. But it had not arrived yet.

  How shall I spend my remaining hours? she wondered, then went back down below.

  She went rapidly through the photographic images etched into metal that were part of the archive, carefully removing and feeding to the incinerator any benign images, any smiling images or images of peace, leaving behind only images of war: mutilated Civil War dead fallen on the field of battle, a mushroom cloud, the firebombing of Dresden. Smoke billowing from factory chimneys. A huge pile of dead passenger pigeons, tens of thousands of them, a man standing atop the heap. A man standing before the trunk of a huge redwood, and then the same man standing on the stump of the same felled tree, smiling. The dark face of a boy ravaged by hunger, a dying gaunt polar bear on a rapidly melting chunk of ice, children in cages, a wall of skulls, a white man grinning with another darker man swinging from a rope behind him, emaciated victims in camps on every inhabited continent, the slaughtered carcasses of animals presided over by their smiling killers. An island mostly underwater, abandoned houses still visible beneath the waves. Miles of devastated ex-forest, miles of sick and dying land. Death, famine, war, and conquest: the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

  She was no longer an archivist, she realized, but rather a curator, making careful decisions about what would or would not be put on display and exiling everything else. She was far from done sorting through the images, had barely reached the twenty-first century, when she began to reconsider. Was it enough? What, if anything, would be enough?

  For a long time she stayed there, absently holding an image etched into metal in her hand, as if hypnotized, and then she put it down. No, she had to destroy everything. She had to do her best to make sure that if anyone were to come, they would find nothing at all.

  And so she began to carry the archive, every bit and piece of it that had been amassed over the years and meticulously reduced and put into a format that would have a chance of surviving for an unimaginable length of time, to the incinerator. And did not rest until it was all gone.

  Once she was done, she stretched. She sat on the floor of the now-empty room and considered. The probes in space she could do nothing about. She had done all she could. Here, there was little data left, nothing significant waiting beyond the room itself and whatever would be left of her own body.

  But from the traces of her body they could, potentially, extract DNA. Who knew what procedures they would have developed in the intervening millennia?

  She put her hazard suit on again, climbed the ladder, and opened the hatch. Leaving it deliberately ajar, she climbed back down.

  The toxic cloud poured through the hatch slowly and began filling the space. It would scour the shelter. For a time, the suit would protect her against it, but only for a time.

  When the cloud was billowing as high as her waist and pouring more quickly now through the hatch, she stood and climbed the ladder again.

  Outside, everything was covered by the cloud. She could see nothing but a gray, indifferent light. If she held her hand a few inches from her faceplate, she could see it; if she moved it any farther, it became a vague shape. A few inches more and it was lost.

  She began to walk. After a while, the hazard suit felt stuffy, and she realized her air circulator was no longer working. She banged on it and it started to whirr again momentarily, then stopped for good.

  Maybe, she thought, I will die from lack of oxygen before the cloud consumes me. She brought her hand near her face and saw how the rubberized fabric had already begun to pit and crack, and thought, Maybe not.

  She imagined her desiccated corpse being found in the suit, stretched, shadowy forms standing over it and cautiously prodding it, thinking the suit a c
arapace, a hardened parcel of skin. Would even that misunderstanding tell them too much?

  But, she knew, this was impossible: after the cloud was done with her, there would be almost nothing left of the suit, and very little of her.

  She walked on, hoping to get as far away as she could from the shelter, far enough so that her remains would never be found. A warning began to sound in her suit, the words Breach Imminent flashing on her faceplate. And then, perhaps a hundred steps later, the first crack opened in the hazard suit’s fabric near her knee, and she began to experience an itching sensation that spread slowly up her leg, gradually transforming into a searing pain that soon had her screaming and then left her dead, and, with luck, all of humanity along with her.

  —for Jeffrey Alan Love

  To Breathe the Air

  I.

  To breathe the air of the high city I was given a strange mask. It had another face on it, by which I mean a face different from my own. Mostly it looked clearly like a mask, but if I stood before a mirror and stared at myself, at my mask, I sometimes forgot momentarily what my face looked like beneath. And sometimes, if I turned my head very slowly indeed, there would come a brief moment in the turning when the angle was such that it no longer seemed a mask to me but a flesh-and-blood face.

  I felt it was dangerous to wear, yet I wore it anyway. What choice did I have if I cared to breathe?

  My initial foray into the high city was discouraging, for it seemed little different from the domed city I had left below and which, on the long funicular journey up, I could still see shimmering at the base of the mountain. The high city was more refined perhaps, a little more rarefied, with the citizens slightly taller than those I was accustomed to below, and all were possessed of a swaying and precarious gait, as if the act of walking on two legs did not come naturally to them. For each of these citizens there were a dozen visitors, people like myself who had come from the lower city for a glimpse of the high city, each of our faces encased in those masks that doubled as breathing apparatuses, our own scuttling movements rapid and furtive as vermin.