The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [97]
But Clausen wasn't finished.
"I don't know if it's true or not," she said, speaking to Gaunt for the first time as if he was another human being, another caretaker. "But I heard this theory once. The mapping between the Realm and base-reality, it's not as simple as you'd think. Time and causality get all tangled up on the interface. Events that happen in one order there don't necessarily correspond to the same order here. And when they push things through, they don't always come out in what we consider the present. A chain of events in the Realm could have consequences up or down the timeline, as far as we're concerned."
"I don't think I understand."
She nodded to the window. "All through history, the things they've seen out there. They might just have been overspill from the artilect wars. Weapons that came through at the wrong moment, achieving coherence just long enough to be seen by someone, or bring down a ship. All the sailors' tales, all the way back. All the sea-monsters. They might just have been echoes of the war we're fighting." Clausen shrugged, as if the matter were of no consequence.
"You believe that?"
"I don't know if it makes the world seem weirder, or a little more sensible." She shook her head. "I mean, sea-monsters ... who ever thought they might be real?" Then she stood up and made to return to the front of the helicopter. "Just a theory, that's all. Now get some sleep."
Gaunt did as he was told. It wasn't hard.
THE LAST SUNSET
Geoffrey A. Landis
Geoffrey Landis has worked for NASA and the Ohio Aerospace Institute and specializes in photo-voltaics, which is all about harnessing the power of the Sun. He has been writing science fiction and poetry for over twenty years and has won two Hugo Awards and a Nebula for his short fiction. His books include the novel Mars Crossing (2000) and the collection Impact Parameter (2001).
The following is one of the simplest ideas in all catastrophe stories, namely what we do as individuals when we face the inevitable cataclysm.
* * *
LIKE AN ENEMY fighter in an old movie about flying aces, the comet came out of the sun, invisible against the glare until it was far too late. There was nothing left to do, Christopher thought, but wait for the inevitable impact, and to calculate where it would hit.
Chris was the astronomy group's pet computer whiz. The comet had been discovered by the astronomers but the calculation of orbit, and hence finding the time and location of the impact, was his responsibility. He'd been extraordinarily careful with the calculation, checking the critical lunar perturbation by three different methods before he was confident of the results. It was close, almost a miss. Had the Earth been ten minutes further along its orbit, it would have been a miss.
It was a hit.
"Shit," said Martin, one of the astronomers. They were gathered in the computer division's conference room, not that the results couldn't have been printed out in any one of their offices. "Forty miles? The impact is forty miles east of here? You're sure?"
Christopher nodded. "I'm sorry."
"Huh? Not your fault," the astronomer said. "What irony. We'll be at ground zero, then, or just about. The fireball will be a hundred miles across. We won't even see it."
"No consolation," said Tibor, the second astronomer on the team, "but, if it matters to you, yes, we'll see it. It will take about a minute for the fireball to expand."
"I'm sorry," said the first astronomer. "I really wanted to see my kids grow up. I did." He was crying now, awkwardly. "Not that it makes any difference what I wanted. I'm sorry.