The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [119]
Life the Gods felt as much worth saving as our own.
We'd measured it, after a fashion, triangulating peaks around the Ring wall during our trek, plotting angle and azimuth on our birchbark maps as we walked around the world, day on week on month on year, slowly climbing, downward into the past, upward to the end of time.
You haven't lived 'til you've heard a dimetrodon scream.
At some point we guessed the big valley was maybe a half-million miles in diameter, maybe a little more. Enough to hold everything that ever was? Maybe so. Hard to say.
It made me remember another world, that World Without End I imagined, plastered round the outside surface of Creation, the final destination for all transmigrating souls. Somewhere here, there could be High America, if we wanted to build it. Room enough.
But why bother?
Up here, there wasn't any wind, which was just as well, since it was colder than any hell I'd seen since before the rainout. The pass we'd spotted months ago, spent months climbing towards, was maybe 80,000 feet above the Endtime grassland at the foot of the Ring wall.
Hopeless.
Jonas was the one who pointed out the air pressure wasn't changing as we went up and down the slope, suggesting the gravity gradient here might not be the same as it was back home and, with it, the atmospheric scale height.
Back home?
Funny to call it that.
It was never home to me.
Home only to the cheap, cheating billions who would live and die for nothing and no one.
Beside me, Maryanne said, "You look good with your gray hair and beard, Scottie. I'm glad they didn't take it away when they made us young again."
Young again?
Hardly that.
But they made us well, and that's as good as youth.
I looked down at her by my side and smiled, thinking how cheap of me it was to be looking at the vista below, when she had her eyes on me. Beyond her, all the others, some looking at the world, some up at the mountains towering on either side of the pass, others huddled in little groups, talking, about who knows what.
Ben and Katy. Jonas and his friends. The black guys from the HDC print shop, who'd seemed so glad to find us on our little hilltop that first night. Even Jake, the queer little advertising director, who'd done his best to be a nice guy instead of a manager. Interesting to see him holding hands with his new friend, Seekerhawk, one of the tall, slim brown men from a tribe who called themselves the Mother's Children.
Cro-Magnons we called them, one of the Five Races of Mankind, who swept from Africa one hundred millennia and more ago, drowning the Archaics before them.
When I looked, one of the Trolls waved, Weimaraner eyes a startling glint above a Durante nose, the whole shrouded in a bush of platinum blond hair. Five feet four, able to bend steel in his bare hands. No name. Speaking only in a cartoon jabber, like nothing you ever heard before.
The print shop guys called him Fred Flintstone for a while. Then he figured out they were laughing at him. Afterward, he was sorry about the guy that died, buried him with flowers and stone tools and cried over the grave.
The pass through the Ringwall was a short one, just a few hundred yards, the way down the other side pretty much like the one we'd followed upwards, and we all stood there too, looking out and down at what lay beyond.
Orange.
If Paulie were here, would he guess this one was Kzin?
Orange vegetation I guess, orange clouds. Green water, if water it was. A funny smell, making the Neanderthal guy point and jabber, raising his snout to the breeze, if breeze there was.
No mist here.
This valley, with no name as yet, was like some vast meteor crater, complete with central peak, rising from a ring-shaped sea holding enough water to fill the oceans of several worlds. Far away, at least another half-million miles away, was the other side of the Ringwall. Beyond it, there'll be another world, another one beyond that...