The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [112]
She turned to me and smiled, put her hand out and touched my chest, let it drift down to hold onto my belt buckle. "Come on," she said, "we can reheat our stuff in the microwave."
Greekee, greekee, greekee, greekee ...
The nights in heaven are dark indeed, filled with darktime noises that turn you back into a child. Greekee. Like those stickbug creatures I made up for a book I once wanted to write, about a man who didn't know who he was. All lost now.
Perhaps for the best. Somewhere in the distance, a big cat squalled, high scream falling off in a deep gurgle, some great engine dieseling away to silence. Maryanne shivered next to me, maybe the tiger-bright, maybe the nighttime cold. I put my arm around her shoulders again, welcoming the touch myself.
Oh, great. Another hard-on. She's going to get tired of this shit sooner or later.
We'd gotten a few more people together on the hilltop, mostly folks from the Redoubt EVA crew, a few from HDC, a couple of Ben's friends, and we'd managed to uproot thorn bushes, swearing at the cuts they made, Jonas yelping when he hooked one on his dick, making a little boma round the top of the hill.
Millikan startled me by knowing how to make and use a fire drill, lighting us up a cheery little deadwood fire just as the sun sank fat and dull red-orange behind the remotest mountains.
He'd grinned at my amazement. "What the fuck did you think I was up to on all those wilderness camping vacations? You should've come along, like I said."
Maryanne nuzzled the side of my neck, then pointed up in the sky. "You suppose they have names?"
She was pointing at a little pink moon, an irregular rocky little asteroid thing that had come over the mountains a couple of hours ago, swelling as it came our way, tumbling and twinkling against the black backdrop of the sky.
I said, "If they don't, we'll just have to make some up."
There'd been three of them so far, a yellow, a blue, and now a pink, though there'd never been more than two at once. The blue one was sort of like Earth's old Moon, a round, not quite featureless disk that seemed far, far away.
There were other lights in the sky too, but damned few. Distant, untwinkling glints, reminding me of planets, that familiar one out there maybe Venus, a pale yellow that might be Jupiter, a pink that could be Mars. Nothing, however, that would remind you of stars, just deep, velvety black that went on and on.
On to nowhere. That's what the Gods said.
This is the Lesser Creation, infinitely folded in on itself, holding whatever the Gods felt was worth rescuing from the mistake that made us.
What happens if the Greater Gods, unknown, unknowable, find out what their tools have done? Will they sweep us away then, after all?
Maryanne stood and stretched, still looking up at the sky, shining and shadowy in the firelight, all breasts and bush and pale white skin. "You suppose we're immortal now?"
Isn't that the way it always works in these things? I said, "If it were my story, that's the way I'd have it end."
Looking out across the black, blank emptiness of the immense valley, supposedly filled with every living thing that had ever existed on the Earth, she said, "I always wondered just how bored people might get, living on forever in the hereafter."
In the end, the only decent place to ride out the rain of air, if you could call it that, turned out to be in our survival capsule bunks. Paul and Julia were hiding in theirs, separate, Connie and I together, this time in mine. In case we wound up flung across the room, at least there'd be a few less feet to fall.
We left the lights on and scrunched in there, eating lunch, listening to the roar of the rain, now more like waves at the ocean, as if heard too close up, than anything else, eating yesterday's leftovers, like nothing was wrong, like it was raining outside on a blustery winter night in North Carolina.
Tomorrow the sun will shine, and we'll go for a nice walk in Umstead Forest, amid the leaf ess gray trees under