The Last Hour of Gann (164 page)

“Shev. Mykrm Shevas.”

“I was Amagar Silq. They call me the Brunt now.”

“And I am Lashraq Zhan,” finished Zhan. “It is now 3046, what some people are calling Year Seventeen after the Fall. Sometime in the spring, I think.”

Shev snorted. “Not that anyone can tell. The U’uskirs dropped their whole fucking array when they got hit by the cloud. They didn’t even aim the fucking thing, just fired whatever they had at whatever it all happened to be pointed at. Over seven thousand
disruptors going off at once. Irradiated the whole fucking planet, and you can’t hear it from in here, but the storm it kicked up when it happened is still going on. I haven’t seen the sun once in seventeen years.”

“I’m sure we’ll be seeing the casualties for some time,” Mkole added anxiously, “but we
seem to have stabilized for now. Death by direct exposure to radiation seems to have receded to nominal levels and the risk of related complications appears to be dropping as well. Along the eastern seaboard of Tirazez, anyway.”

“Ah fuck me, here we go,” muttered Xaima, rubbing at his
brow-ridges. “Zhan, shut him down or tie me up. I can’t listen to this again.”

“Breathe, Xaima. Breathe and let him talk. This is part of why we came here.”

“What is this?” Meoraq asked. His spines were flat, his eyes wide, betraying a terrible tension and fear that had not been present even during Technician Nuu’s short series of narratives. “Who are these people? What are they saying?”

She put her hand on his arm and he looked at her wildly. “It’s all right, Meoraq.”

“Those are not priests!”

“Just listen.”

Mkole concluded his rather rambling summary of the post-apocalyptic health hazards he’d seen with the optimistic note that, “We’ve estimated that life expectancy has risen almost six months in the past seven years and although female fertility remains dangerously low, from all reports, one out of every thirty pregnancies is now being carried to term with no marked increase in infant defect or mortality.”

“That’s enough.”

“But this could be important!” Mkole protested, looking wounded. “Statistics like these are absolutely vital in the process of—”

“Enough for now then,” said Zhan, but gently. “Just for now. Thank you, surgeon.”

“We need to make records,” Mkole insisted, retreating with the help of the burly Brunt to sit in the chair where Nuu had blown his brains out. He wiped at his eyes. “It’s important! We have to tell them about…about how it all ended!”

“It’s not over yet,” the Brunt rumbled, patting him, and Xaima, scowling at them with his arms folded and looking so much like Meoraq that Amber had to check and see that it wasn’t just his reflection in the video screen, flicked his spines and muttered, “It may as well be.”

“No! Listen! We have seen…” Mkole’s words faltered. For a moment, he merely stared at the camera, his eyes flicking back and forth like an actor reading his next troubling lines. It took Lashraq’s hand on his shoulder before he seemed to pull himself out of it, first with a shaky breath and then the continuation of his even, almost unemotional recital. “We have seen what is unquestionably only the beginning of a devastating wave of extinctions. You…You simply can’t imagine how quickly it happens. The collapse is…”

Mkole lapsed again into blank-faced silence.

“We still have some livestock in the middle districts,” Lashraq said, frowning. “Mostly ilqi. But I don’t think they’ll last much longer.”

“It turns out that cattle need feed,” Shev pointed out wryly. “And feed needs to be planted, grown, harvested and processed.”

“Oh, it’s got nothing to do with feeding them,” said the Brunt, looking very mildly surprised. “Ilqi, tuk-tuks, woolyvibs, and every other kind of cattle we keep, I promise you, even the so-called natural-grown ones—most of them are surgically altered to keep them from fucking and the rest probably couldn’t figure out how.”

“All the animals are dying,” Ichazul said suddenly. “Wild and domestic. It’s not the Wrath and it c
an’t all be the weather—”

“The weather’s part of it,” Lashraq muttered, glancing up as if he could see through the roof to the storm howling behind it.

“Of course, it’s part of it!” Ichazul snapped. “There’s no direct sunlight anymore, the fucking rain never stops until it freezes, and the ice storms never stop until they turn back into rain! But it’s only part of it. The real problem is the plants. Nothing grows like it used to. There’s something, some kind of chemical wash in the rain or maybe a parasite or a virus, but whatever it is, it’s killing everything.”

“Untrue,” the Brunt said. “Thorns and rockweed are growing
. They’ll grow right up your boots if you stand still.”

Ichazul rolled his eyes and gave his spines an irritable flick. “Fine, it’s killing all the crops. By which I mean the stuff we need to eat.”

“By which you mean,” the Brunt corrected, smiling, “the stuff we’ve made dependent upon us. Think about it. Artificial pollination, climate control, nutrient-enriched soil…koitaan and pialhfruit were never meant to grow in Gedai. Are you really surprised it’s all dying? Everything that was already in the ground grew wild after the Wrath fell,” he added, looking directly into the computer’s camera. “But it takes men to grow crops these days and all the men were busy killing each other. So it all died.”

“I have tried on six separate occasions to grow riak,” Ichazul countered. Faint lines of color were becoming visible along his throat. “Riak! And I know what I’m doing, damn it! I’m telling you, it’s more than that! There’s something wrong, something in the soil or the rain or…something!”

“Who knows what we shot at each other?” Xaima asked, showing very little concern. “I don’t see any reason why you can’t both be right. It wouldn’t take much of a contaminant to kill off a grove of koitaan in Gedai, or for animals to eat all the crops and seed that were left. Because for a while there were animals everywhere. Not just the vermin, like you’d think, but everything. All the people were dead and the animals simply exploded to fill all that empty space. We were hip-deep in ponucs that first year and then they all dropped dead and the uzayas and ebii were everywhere until they dropped dead. You’d think all our pet apas would just go feral and be all right, but they were all gone by the third year.” He stopped there, his spines slowly lowering, and finally said, “I still can’t really believe that. I’ve had an apa underfoot all my life. But they’re gone. Everywhere. They just…”

“Collapsed,” said Mkole.

“And he’s right, it’s probably just the beginning,” Lashraq agreed quietly. “I don’t know if anything will be left at the end, but there’s always hope. We still have some ilqis and if we can take care of them, they’ll make it. There will always be yifu, I suppose, and the ghets seem to be doing all right.”

“Naturally,” muttered Xaima, rubbing at the side of his snout. “All the apas are dead, but we have ghets.”

“They’re little and furry. Maybe we can make pets out of them instead,” suggested the Brunt. “You’ve still got your apa’s collar, don’t you?”

“Fuck a fist,” Xaima snapped.

The Brunt’s spines flared lazily forward. “Is that an offer?”

“So we’ve lost most of our domestic animals and about half the native wildlife,” said Lashraq
as his men visibly defused themselves, edging away from one another and taking slow breaths. “But several conservation parks seemed to have opened their doors in the first days of God’s Wrath and while most of the animals have died off, some of them actually seem to be thriving.”

“There are saoqs all over central Yroq,” Shev inserted with a laugh. “I mean it. They’re everywhere.”

“And corrokis,” grunted the Brunt. “Wild corrokis. In herds.”

“Right. The apas die. The woolyvibs die. The oshe? I haven’t seen even a track in the mud in more than ten years.” Shev leaned forward into the camera’s eye, spreading his arms and flaring his spines fully forward to make himself as impressively sincere as possible. “But there are corrokis all over
Yroq. Chew on that for a while. Right this moment, there are probably five, six corrokis eating the shrubs off the Prime Chancellor’s lawn.”

“They’ll die out,” said Lashraq with finality, proving that whatever else he might be, he was no prophet. “Nothing that size could possibly survive
now, but other animals might. And as long as we have something to feed on and something else to clean up after us, we have some hope of restoring and maintaining a natural balance.”

“Natural,” snorted the Brunt.

“I believe the world will survive. In our arrogance, we may have thought we could destroy it, but the world is more resilient than any weapon our mortal minds could dream up. All we can do is kill each other,” Lashraq said.

“But we are damned good at that,” agreed the Brunt, striking his chest with feigned pride. Shev and Ichazul laughed.

Zhan stared at his boots until they quieted. At last, he raised his hand and indicated the group as a whole. “Hard to believe this started out as a supply raid.”

Meoraq started again. “Raid?”

“I’m from Daophith, originally. After the cloud hit, somehow a fire got started and the whole city burned to the ground, along with Jezaana and Zethoze and half the northern states. Best thing, really. The cities were no good after the Fall, nothing but killing grounds for God’s Wrath. I ended up outside Ynanje with Shev and Ichi here, living in an old waystation. By the time the cold season came along, we were all six together and Shev made two fairly sky-shaking observations. The first was that God Himself couldn’t have arranged a better group to survive the annihilation of all life as we know it: soldier, mechanic, surgeon, historian, technician and botanist. The second was that we had no women.”

“And you all
were starting to look pretty damn good to me,” Xaima remarked.

“So with the lofty goal in mind of acquiring, in no particul
ar order, food, water, supplies and sex,” said Zhan archly, “we set out from our cozy waystation to see what was left of the world. Somehow, that turned into a two-year trek across the fucking country, stopping in at every house with a lit window along the way.”

“Got dipped once in a while, didn’t we?” Shev grunted.

Zhan acknowledged this with a shrug of his spines. “So. The Brunt back there pointed out that we were probably the first people to really get a good look at the world beyond the one little piece we inhabited after the Fall and we had what he called a divinely-ordained obligation to record our findings.”

“Fuck you,
O noble leader,” said the Brunt, amused.

“Records are important,” Mkole whispered, and the Brunt patted his shoulder.

“Records are important,” Zhan agreed, his spines lowering. “Because when we sat down to really talk about it, we realized we’d actually learned something pretty damn amazing. I think it was…I think it was you who noticed.”

“In Reqann
, yes.” Xaima stepped up as Zhan moved back, eyeing the camera with an expression of rueful humor and contempt. “By that time, we’d been to a few of these military outposts and finally found out just what the fuck had happened. Most of them had some kind of survivor’s journal left for us to find, like the one this poor pisser made, but with the exception of that crazy woman with all the dolls, they were dead. We couldn’t ask any questions and if we didn’t have Ichi along, we could never have run the damn videos in the first place.”

“Almost every one of them were technicians
,” Ichazul remarked, “and not one thought to put their video on automatic playback. Sure, the recording will last until the end of Time or until their roof caves in, but in fifty years, everyone who knows which buttons to push is going to be dead.”

“So here we are,” said
Zhan and snorted. “And I don’t know how happy you’re going to be when you hear what we have to say, but if you’re standing there to hear it at all, then our plan probably worked. Just remember that.” He glanced at the other men, grunted to himself, and looked back at the camera. “If we did our job right, you may have heard that we came here to meet with Great Sheul and that we heard His words and wrote His laws,” he said. “But honestly…we’re going to make it all up.”

* * *

Amber and Meoraq listened. There were plenty of words she didn’t know, but she was able to work most of them out by context; there must have been just as many words he didn’t know, and set down in ways just as foreign to him, but Meoraq asked no questions. Her awareness of him faded as the men on the screen talked about the virus Nuu had called God’s Wrath with the kind of clinical callousness that came so easily to survivors. They didn’t pace, rarely gestured, and had a habit of looking right at the camera even when they weren’t talking so that it began to feel uneasily like they were alive—that they were here in this room, in this very moment—so much so that Amber found herself nodding now and then to show them she was listening.

Beside her, Meoraq remained motionless. He listened and did not react at all.

“The virus had absolute communicability in its first stage, the cloud stage,” Xaima said, gesturing vaguely towards the consoles surrounding them. “And if Ichi really knows how to read these machines and isn’t just lying us along for the dips and the good times—”