Summer 2007 (24 page)

#

The second-to-last human to die is a child who lives in
the region that was once called the Blue Mountains of Australia. She has the
strange light eyes that children are occasionally born with, the way they are
sometimes born as triplets or with white hair or with another baby’s empty body
growing from their bellies. Her mother calls them water eyes, a sign that the
child shares the changeable spirit of the ocean which can shift from calm to
storm in the space of a breath.

On the last day of her life, the light-eyed child finds
a pair of ancient skeletons exposed in the silt by the river near her camp. She
pulls out the ribs with a sucking noise, loosing the foul stench of trapped
gas. Pelvic bones lie in the mud below, tangled with metal things no one can
make anymore. As she teases them free, the light-eyed child unearths rusted
chains and hollow disks the diameter of her wrist.

The light-eyed child rinses the bones clean in the
river. She runs her hand over the long femurs, marveling. People no longer grow
so tall.

The light-eyed child sets the bones in a loose pile
underneath a scribbly gum tree. The skulls preside on top, regarding her with
hollow eyes. The light-eyed child kisses each in the center of its caved-in
forehead.

Goodnight, Grandpa Burn,
she
says.
Goodnight, Grandma Starve.

#

The last major art movement is invented near Lake
Vättern in Sweden. With the help of enough processing power to calculate the
trajectories of a beachful of sand over a millennium, the artist taps a feeder
loop directly into her brain and uses it to shape a three-dimensional
holographic image of her father. For the first time, human thought patterns
take direct, physical form. Her father’s projection repeats sequences of
fragmented memories. His limbs trail into images of people and places he loved
when he was alive; his hair winds into the tapestries he was famous for weaving;
his face flickers cyclically from youth to gray.
It’s not my father,
the
artist explains.
It’s how I think of my father, his imago.

Within five years, her invention revolutionizes art.
Artists show the world how they conceive of childbirth, fire, finches, walk
bodies, urtists, religion, synthesis and death.

Within twenty years, the technology to create such work
is destroyed. Art falls backward. Humanity falls farther.

#

The man who will survive to be the last human lives in
the region once called Nepal. Amid the still-falling ash from a series of
volcanic eruptions, he and his son dig their way free of a cave-in.

Ravens perched on branches overhanging the cave mouth
observe their progress. When the son grows weak, the last man tries to scatter
the birds by throwing stones. They flap a short distance into the naked trees
and witness the boy’s death from there, watching events unfold the way birds
do: turning their heads to look first with one eye, then the other, to see
which version of life is more appealing.

#

The last scientific discovery excites the neurons of an
amateur stargazer. Even before the cataclysm, she is the last of an
increasingly rarefied breed - air and light pollution have made ground
telescopes useless, so she has to pay for satellite time to peer out in an era
when almost all of humanity’s technological eyes are aimed inward. One lonely
night when all her mates and children are away, she trains her screen to watch
the cloud bands on Jupiter’s gaseous surface and glimpses a city-sized object
hurtling toward the earth.

Oh, God,
she says,
an asteroid.

#

With near-earth space increasingly militarized, it’s
been years since government telescopes have been dedicated to anything but
scrutinizing the actions of other nations. The scant handful of under-funded
astronomers confirms that the object’s path will bring it into contact with
earth.

The astronomers agree: there’s nothing to be done. A
century of attrition has withered space programs. Early iterations of
space-faring technology were cannibalized to fund defense and weapons aimed at
earthly targets. Remaining resources are primitive and useless. The object is
too close to fire missiles at or deflect or drag into the gravity well of the
sun.

#

Wealthy global governments convene. If they can’t stop
the asteroid, they agree to let it hit. Calculations demonstrate it will impact
near the southern tip of Chile. Industrialists working on technology for
deep-sea exploration believe they can adapt their pressure shield mechanisms to
protect a few major cities from the global fires, earthquakes and tidal waves
that will result from impact. With nuclear, wind, and solar power operating at
full capacity, there should be enough energy to protect key sections of Asia,
Europe and North America. First world populations that live outside protected
urban centers are herded in en masse, crowding like cattle into emergency
shelters.

As for those who won’t be included in the rescue plan,
global leaders mumble about regrettable losses then do what they have always
done: sacrifice the good of the many for the good of themselves.

#

The last act of malice lights in the eyes of a
pathologist who works in a secure facility in a dome on an island in an
untraveled sea. When it becomes clear their government has abandoned them, the
other scientists drink and screw on the lab tables. He unlocks his deadliest
specimens, flees the building to the rhythm of unheeded alarms, and looses
genetically manipulated spores like fairy dust onto the wind.

#

The last heroes desert their homes in wealthy nations
and travel south to stand with their impoverished brothers and sisters.

Like everyone else, they die.

#

By the time the cataclysm strikes, more words have been
forgotten over the course of human history than remain known.

#

The city-sized object hits.

#

Wealthy northerners watch the event through cameras on
surviving satellites. Milliseconds after impact, their screens go black as the
asteroid’s collision displaces earth and rock in a hundred mile radius. Radioactive
waste illegally buried in poverty-stricken Puerto Natales flies into the air,
joining the plume of dirt that whirls into the chaotic weather systems caused
by impact. Soil sewn with radioactive dust distributes across the globe in a
storm that blocks the sun for three months.

Human folly has made a bad natural occurrence into an
untenable one. It is as if the planet has gone to global nuclear war. Toxic
heavy metals rain into the surface water systems and poison the springs of
civilization.

Pressure shields are helpless against nuclear fallout.
For those not killed by the fiery rains of impact, dying lingers. Bones weaken;
teeth fall out; skin loosens in long, slender strips like fruit peels.

Before she dies, the Swedish artist tries to redraw her
father’s imago on a flat sheet of pulped tree. Her shaking hand is raw and
bleeding, but her lines fall true. The drawing fails anyway. She can’t remember
what her father looked like. She can only remember her art.

#

The last man’s people survive by moving underground.
Caves shelter them from fiery rains and pathogens and tidal waves. Underground,
they have access to subterranean water sources that remain temporarily pure.

His people’s luck lasts a century, until the geological
instabilities set in motion by impact bubble up from the earth’s molten heart.
Sudden, violent tremors herald chains of volcanic eruptions that transform the
caves into tombs.

The last man and his son dig their way free, but it
takes so long that the already weak child grows weaker. He breathes dust and
ash. Once, as they work to pry loose a stubborn boulder, a rain of debris
showers down on the son. He seems fine when he gets up and shakes himself off,
but who knows what injuries can afflict a malnourished boy?

#

The light-eyed child’s people believe they escaped the
fiery rains because the earth protects them. Unlike the mining-scarred,
ecologically damaged area of Nepal where the last man’s people live, the light-eyed
child’s people enjoy a paradise of native species and pristine cliffs. Even
some kangaroos survive to provide the light-eyed child’s people with food.

The light-eyed child’s grandmother tells her the bones
she finds sometimes are not the bones of people, but of devils.
They made
the cataclysm happen by hating and ignoring the earth, she says, Most of them
died, but the ones who survived - Grandpa Burn and Grandma Starve, Grandpa Hate
and Grandma Bullet - they chained us and hurt us and tried to take our land. We
had to use their tools on them instead.

The light-eyed child’s people initially triumphed over
their enemies, but their luck ran out some four score years after the
cataclysm. A species of bird which hadn’t been seen since impact arrived during
the annual migration, carrying the pathologist’s bequest.

One illness killed the elderly. A second attacked the
healthiest. A third killed one tenth of the population in a single night. The
fourth wiped out the men.

No one tells the light-eyed child directly, but she
hears talk of the plagues as
our curse,
sometimes brought by the earth
spirits, sometimes by the ghosts of the demons. The light-eyed child asks her
mother, who pauses while gathering roots to explain,
Being favored by the
spirits is both a blessing and a burden. They won’t forgive us for acting in
ignorance as the demons did. They haven’t yet decided the punishment for our
transgressions.

The light-eyed child’s mother gets a strange, wistful
look on her face and goes on.
You’re our last hope.

The light-eyed child’s people have a legend that girls
with water eyes can sometimes turn into boys. They need her to do so; that is
what they mean when they say she is their last hope.

No one knows how to make it happen.
Send the girl out
on her own,
her grandmother says,
Boys like to be on their own.
So
every morning, the light-eyed child’s mother sends her off to explore the
remnants of the rainforest.

The light-eyed child thinks being a last hope is both a
blessing and a burden. She enjoys being special. She hates the disappointment
in everyone’s eyes when she comes home every day, still a girl.

Sometimes she squats over the river, her eyes squeezed
shut as if she’s trying to shit because it’s the best way she can imagine to
force a penis out of her vagina. She clenches and grunts, clenches and grunts.
Sometimes when her eyes get so tired she sees bright sparkles over the scribbly
gums on the horizon, she feels her vaginal walls pinch together and she knows -
just knows - that something has come out. But when she reaches down, she finds
only soft, yielding flesh.

#

The last man cries over his son until he realizes his
sobs are tearless. He stops.

The ravens won’t leave them alone, so he throws more
stones. He must watch the birds constantly or they try to pluck out his son’s
eyes.

His trousers are soiled, but he urinates at a marked
spot near the cave mouth to maintain a semblance of civilization. He has
nothing to defecate. When he gets too hungry, he sucks on stones.

In all the deprivation the last man has suffered in his
life, he’s never lacked for water. Even now as he starves, puddles pock the
stony landscape. They taste brackish, but they keep him alive longer than he
wants.

He gives up sleep, but dreams awake. He sees mirages on
the horizon, machines his father told tales of: great silver birds with hearts
like ticking clocks; blood-heated covers to keep him warm; android doctors with
needle-covered palms injecting life back into his bony chest.

He remembers the first time he came to the surface as a
boy, with his own father. His people’s men folk had a tradition of sending
males to the surface to prove they had the courage to tread across the lip of a
dead world. All around the valley grew the red-stemmed ban mara daisies which
choked out the trees until the hills blanched white as the clouds.

When I was young, they said the flowers showed the hills
were dying,
the last man’s father said.
They came from a
far-away land over the sea and when they got here, they grew so thick and
fierce that they killed all the plants that had been here already, the ones
that had lived here forever.

Once, the last man and his father explored the mountains
beyond the hills and found the remains of a fabric shop. Bolts of durable
synthetic cloth tumbled across each other, like the discarded sheets of a
giant. The last man and his father brought them home for the women to make
clothes out of. They were greeted like heroes.

Before the eruptions, the last man never brought his son
to the surface. He was a sickly baby, like all the newborns conceived in the
past few years. Many of them died, but the last man prayed over his son every
minute until he was a year old. His son’s hair grew in scraggly patches across
his scalp. When he ate, his gums bled into his food. Even after the boy had
passed the most dangerous point, the last man refused to let him sleep alone,
afraid he’d get lost in his dreams and forget to come home. The last man’s wife
told him she would leave him for another man if he didn’t return to share her
pallet. He let her.