The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [247]
THE STAR CALLED WORMWOOD
Elizabeth Counihan
I could have concluded this anthology with any of several stories, but there is something about the ending of this story that seemed just right, and brings our journey through an apocalyptic future almost full circle.
Elizabeth Counihan is from a writing family. Her father was a BBC journalist and her grandfather a novelist. Elizabeth was a family doctor in the National Health
Service for many years but is now concentrating on writing. Her stories have appeared in Asimov's, Realms of Fantasy, Nature Futures and several other magazines and anthologies. She is the editor of the British fantasy magazine Scheherazade.
IN THE WEEK that Anya died a comet approached the Earth. At first a bright spark in the east, it enlarged, trailing a cloud of shimmering white - a glowing snowball, flung into the sky above the frozen landscape of Siberia. Anya did not see it. She lay, ninety-nine years old, in the last ice palace, tended by machines older than she was. Their antennae perceived the new celestial body. Their voices reported it, echoing through vaulted chambers and long-abandoned halls where, here and there, a small creature twitched a whisker or pricked a furry ear before returning to the business of living. The voices whispered in Anna's room. She could no longer speak but electronic eyes interpreted the movement of her lips, and recorded that her last word was "Wormwood". Her breath rattled in a last sigh and her eyes closed.
The machines went to the burial place and drew out a core of ice. Anya's body was wrapped in an embroidered sheet and placed feet first in the bore hole. Finally, as they had been taught, the machines reverently capped her grave with powdered ice and played the music appropriate to the death of a lady of the palace. The sound was heard only by the wolves and bears of the wilderness. Her grave, the last in row upon row of similar graves, lay under the bleak gaze of the comet.
The comet hurtled on, over wrinkled mountains, arid plains, sundrenched ocean. Wild dogs howled at its passing; owls blinked under its bright gaze.
Kuri squatted beside a thorn tree, his shadow black and dwarfish under the equatorial sun. He reached out a dark, bony hand and picked up a fragment of yellow ringlass from the jigsaw of coloured shards at his feet, laying it carefully to one side with pieces he had already chosen. After a few moments' thought, chin in cupped hand, he selected a second piece, green this time and laid it with the others. He removed his wide-brimmed hat and half-filled it with the selected glass then, rising stiffly, walked towards his house beside the lake. His body was wiry and naked, his knobbly feet bare; without his hat, only a tangle of grey and black hair protected his head from the sun.
His way to the domed building lay across a hundred metres of flat desert, fringed at its margin by dark reeds. From there the jade-green lake stretched into the west. A feather of white vapour spiralled from the volcano on Crocodile Island and dispersed in the shimmering air. Kuri stopped halfway to catch his breath, his throat rasped by the harsh taint of the volcano. He gazed with narrowed eyes, half-blinded by the beauty of his ancient home, placed like a jewel of many colours between him and the lake. At this time of day the windows were almost inaudible, a subdued harmony, but to the sight they blazed with the brilliance of the noonday sun.
There was a flicker of movement near the water. Kuri shaded his eyes with his free hand then grinned and whistled loudly through his fingers. The moving shape bounded towards him on all fours but rose onto hind legs when it reached his side. The creature, yellow-brown like the earth, planted a slender fore paw on each side of his chest. Green eyes, adoring as a dog's, gazed up at him from a flat, cat-like face. Her tongue rasped his skin.
He bent and kissed her between the ears, then said, "Drink, Jade."
"Drink? Water? Juice drink?" she answered in her breathy growl. She rubbed her