The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [99]
Christopher turned away, pretending to watch the sunset reflected in the puddles, and worked hard to blink away his tears. Two minutes left. When he thought he could speak without his voice breaking, he said, "Say, grab your coffee and let's go sit by the observatory to watch the sunset."
Kara shrugged. "Okay."
Walking down the street, on a sudden impulse he reached out and took her hand. She gave him a sidelong glance but didn't pull her hand away. Her hand was cool, her fingers surprisingly small against his palm. It was enough, he decided, enough just to just walk down the street with her and hold her hand on the last night of the world. It was not what he wanted; he wanted to hold her close to him, to spend his life with her, to share all her secrets and her joys. But holding hands was enough. It was a promise; a promise meant for a someday that, now, would never be. Holding her hand would have to be enough for a lifetime.
Opposite the sunset, a deep red glow was rising silently into the sky, backlighting the clouds low on the horizon. "Look," he said, and she turned around and stopped, her eyes brilliant in the glow.
"Why, it's beautiful," she said. "I've never seen a sunset do that before. What is it?"
The red stretched nearly from horizon to horizon now, and in the east it was turning an intense blue-violet, brighter than the sun. "It's the end of the world," he said, and then, at last, there was nothing left to say.
MOMENTS OF INERTIA
William Barton
With this story we move from the pre- to the post-apocalypse, although this one takes us through the apocalypse and beyond.
William Barton was an engineering technician, specializing in military technology and, for some while, helped look after the United States' nuclear submarines. He is now a freelance writer and software architect. He produced a couple of sf novels in the 1970s, but returned to the field with much gusto in the 1990s and has since produced a considerable body of complex and energetic science fiction, with a dozen novels and fifty or so short stories. He said of this story: '"Moments of Inertia' began as a novel that, as it evolved, proved unmarketable. It was picked apart into a series of short stories and novellas, published in venues ranging from North Carolina Literary Review to Asimov's Science Fiction. In the end, it even spun off a how-to article for Writer's Digest on what to do with a novel you can't sell. Waste not, want not!" He also called the story "about as apocalyptic as they come!"
* * *
ALL OVER, THEN. All over but the shouting.
I sat with all the others, down in the National Redoubt's auditorium, watching it end, right there on the big screen, emptied of being, flooded with memory.
Jesus.
Life had sucked but it was life, however sad, and life goes on, whatever you make of it. Then the discovery of the Cone - the Cone of Annihilation -like some absurd techno-modernization of Hoyle's famous old Cloud. Then the Dark of the Sun. The Snowcanes. The Freezing. The Rainout.
Beside me, as if reading my thoughts, Maryanne shivered, holding my hand. She leaned close, so close I could smell breakfast bacon on her breath, and whispered, "We ..."
Too late.
Suddenly, on the big screen, the sun lit up, pale pink, complete with frozen prominences and the black blotches of sunspots, looking for all the world like a Chesley Bonestell illustration of a red giant star.
Antares.
Sudden black.
Blue light.
The image of the sun seemed to wrap around itself, twisting hard.
It shrank to a brilliant dot. Then the screen filled with a blizzard of burning silver, and somebody actually screamed "Wooool" like they were watching fireworks or something.
Beside me, Maryanne said, "I feel so helpless."
Watching the silver blizzard, like so many trillions of burning gumwrappers flying in the wind, I said, "I guess we are helpless."
"What do you want to do?"
I squeezed her hand. "It's got