This is the Way the World Ends Read online

  George tried to pull away from the periscope, but he could not break his own grip.

  The last woman on earth walked up to the tree, tossed the rope over a branch, and, as the waves rolled in and the sun danced amid the tide pools, hanged herself by the neck. Her oscillating shadow was shaped like a star.

  George sat down beneath the periscope and panted. “We’re through?” he said, half inquiring, half asserting.

  “At this irrevocable point in history,” said Morning, “not one human being exists anywhere—with the frail and tentative exception of this boat.”

  The hermit crab had left his shell. He was a shivering mass of tender protoplasm. “Nobody can ride a mechanical horse.”

  “True.”

  “Or see the Big Dipper.”

  “Correct.”

  “Or take acting lessons.”

  He was weeping now, copiously, and he could not tell whether his tears were for Justine, Holly, the Frenchman who had clawed the potato out of the ground, the Iranian school teacher who had died of louse-borne typhus, the last woman on earth…

  Morning knelt beside the hurt man. She hugged him and dried his tears.

  He returned her embrace. His bullet wound throbbed like a castanet grafted to his stomach. As if to stop the spasms, he reached into his shirt. His fingers touched glass, and slowly he withdrew his Leonardo.

  “Look at this,” he said, licking his tears. “It’s you. And me. And our child.”

  “I don’t understand. Are you an artist?”

  “I told you about it before. The painter was Leonardo da Vinci. You know—the man with the vulture complex.”

  “A forgery, right?”

  “An original Leonardo—inspired by the brilliant prophet Nostradamus. It predicts the future. See? Holly’s stepsister is coming. You’ll be the mother.”

  She took the slide. Light ascended from the glass and ignited her blue-green eyes. “It really does look like me. Spooky.”

  “It’s you.”

  “And the child…?”

  “If Justine had gotten pregnant again, we would have named the baby Aubrey. Have you ever had a child?”

  “No.”

  “They do all these amazing things.”

  “I’ve never been married. Aubrey?”

  “Aubrey Paxton.”

  “Pretty name.”

  “And there will be others. Aubrey’s brothers and sisters. Holly always wanted a sister.”

  “Why would anybody want to bring children into—?”

  “Into this world? I may not know about psychology or sundeath, Dr. Valcourt, but I did learn something at the Crippen Monument Works. Our children will take whatever world they can get.”

  “You’re sterile.”

  “I have reason to believe the condition is not permanent.”

  “Next you’ll be saying we have the power to restore the race.”

  Justine Paxton had frequently accused her husband of lacking ambition. She should hear what I’m about to say, he thought. “Maybe we do.” (Maybe they did!) “Maybe it’s one of those unexpected effects of nuclear war you’re always talking about. Your own fertility is…?”

  “No problems that I know about.” She hefted the slide, ran her fingertips over the tiny bumps and furrows of paint. “Where did you get this thing?”

  “A civilian passenger. Nadine Covington. Her blood is black.”

  “Black?”

  “Like ink.”

  “I doubt that she can be trusted.”

  “I trust her.”

  Without unlocking arms, they stood up. Again they embraced. George took his Leonardo back and departed with the words “restore the race” ringing in his ears. There, you see, my poor, extinct Justine? You did not marry a lazy man after all.

  Lieutenant Commander Olaf Sverre

  of

  SSBN 713 City of New York

  United States Navy

  Cordially Invites

  GEORGE PAXTON

  to a

  Celebration Banquet

  2000 Hours, 29 January

  Main Mess Hall

  The extinction of one’s own species is an event not easily comprehended. Only by using Periscope Number One privately, over and over, did George begin to grasp the contours of the event. He studied his planet for hours on end, rubbing his nose in oblivion. He even looked at the stars. Nothing. Nothing save the burned land, the poisoned water, the harsh stillness, the rare clam, the occasional roach, the intermittent swatch of grass, the clusters of salt-pickled corpses floating in the South Atlantic timefolds like barges of flesh.

  Brian Overwhite was wrong. The human mind can accommodate anything. Some parents beat their children. Auschwitz. Sundeath. It’s just blood, the mind says. It’s only pain. It’s merely putting people into ovens. It’s simply the end of the world…

  Long ago, George’s grandfather had died on the last day of June, an event that had plunged the family into a quandary. Should they hold the usual Fourth of July picnic? George’s grandfather loved the Fourth of July. He always built cherry-bomb-tipped skyrockets for the occasion, deploying them against a balsa wood model of Fort McHenry. During the battle, the family would sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” while toy frigates shot marbles at the ramparts and the cherry bombs detonated around a tattered little American flag.

  The solution to the dilemma came from George’s Aunt Isabel. “Daddy would want us to celebrate,” she asserted. “Daddy would be angry at us if we didn’t have a good time,” she insisted.

  The picnic happened, and with a vengeance. Horseshoes flew, beer flowed, banjos sang, chickens vanished without a trace, blueberry pies were reported missing in action, and rockets glared redly over Fort McHenry. Everyone agreed that Aunt Isabel had made the right decision.

  And so it was that whenever Chief Petty Officer Rush brought the dinner menu around, George always checked off the most opulent and sauce-laden dishes. He began frequenting the Silver Dollar Casino, making wild, Scotch-inspired bets at the blackjack table. The invitation to Captain Sverre’s banquet sent waves of joyous anticipation—food! coffee! dessert!—through his body.

  “Your species would want you to celebrate,” he told himself. “Your species would be angry at you if you didn’t have a good time,” he decided.

  Swathed in velvet drapes, lit by crystal chandeliers, the main mess hall of the City of New York proved just how tasteful and sophisticated defense spending could be. The banquet itself, by contrast, followed the gaudy lines of Imperial Rome, with an eye to Babylon and a nod to Gomorrah—gold plates, bejeweled goblets. The tablecloth was thick enough to blot a liter of priceless wine without leaving a drop. The serving staff—a dozen seamen and noncoms—patrolled the borders in their dress blues, pushing carts brimming with slabs of ham, planks of beef, heaps of bread, cauldrons of soup, and pots of satiny black coffee.

  Ceramic dolphins held the place cards. George ended up between Overwhite and Reverend Sparrow—in the crossfire of a debate over the STABLE II treaty. (Evidently one of Sparrow’s broadcasts had figured decisively in the US Senate’s decision not to ratify this agreement.) Sadness and confusion enveloped his friends like gray scopas suits—the human extinction was not sitting well with them. Wengernook sucked on an unlit cigarette. Randstable built strange perpetual-motion devices out of the silverware and then knocked them over. Brat was down to about a hundred and thirty pounds. Overwhite’s beard looked mangy. Sparrow’s voluminous smile had wilted. They should all go see Mrs. Covington, George decided. They should find out about their futures.

  At the far end of the table Captain Sverre spoke with a civilian, a small, raffish fellow who managed to look youthful and eminent at the same time. Between remarks they stuffed themselves in gluttonous rivalry, Sverre favoring ham, the young man specializing in roast beef. Sverre’s gin bottle sat faithfully at his elbow. Gravy stains bloomed on the young man’s dark suit.

  Brat was saying, “Personally, I think this race-loss business has been ex
aggerated. Psychotherapists like to be dramatic.”

  Wengernook nodded in agreement. “The earth is really much more resilient than those periscope views suggest.”

  The serving staff was well-meaning but graceless, dumping food on the table as if shoveling coal into the furnace of a tramp steamer. Champagne came forth in torrents. George drank enough to put music in the air and a pleasant buzz between his ears.

  He had to admit it—Morning had not taken to the Aubrey Paxton idea with great enthusiasm. Just remember, he told himself, it’s a big step for a woman, having a kid, restarting a species. You must let the idea grow on her.

  “They don’t run very good movies on this ship,” said Reverend Sparrow. “War and Peace, what a boring mess.”

  “What should they run, your old TV shows?” sneered Overwhite.

  “Ever see King of Kings?” said Sparrow. “It’s wonderful the way Orson Welles pronounces the T in ‘apostles.’” He placed George’s shoulder in a warm grip. “I’m still praying for you.”

  “That’s nice,” said George.

  As soon as dessert arrived—the evacuees could corrupt themselves with either German chocolate cake or lemon meringue pie—Sverre drew a carving knife from a ham and clanked it against his water glass. All eyes shot toward him. The serving staff scurried out of the hall.

  “Antarctica,” whispered Randstable. “He’s going to tell us about Antarctica.”

  “Tonight’s banquet was advertised as a celebration,” the captain began. “Dr. Valcourt reports that, when we dock at McMurdo Station, six rational and competent survivors will disembark. We are here to rejoice in your cure. You have looked extinction in the face and lived. Operation Erebus will succeed.”

  He set the carving knife on a linen napkin, poured gin into a gold goblet, drank.

  “Extinction. Such a sterile word, so Latin. What does it mean? When you kill a species, good guests, you do not simply kill its current members, you also kill the generation that lies dormant in its germ cells—and, thus, the generation that the descendants of those germ cells would have made, and the next generation, and the next. Extinction is an endless crime, quietly slaughtering all the lives that would have been. The human birth canal is the only way into human existence, gentlemen. There is no other port of entry.”

  “What is this guy, one of those warrior intellectuals?” whispered Wengernook.

  “Lawrence of Arabia joins the Navy,” said Brat.

  Sverre took off his claw-hammer coat, tossed it on the floor, and rolled up his shirt sleeve.

  “At a certain moment in the great nuclear arms race, it became common knowledge that an extinction was in the offing. The universe trembled with the news. Your species mattered, gentlemen—more than you knew. The planets reeled, the trees wept, the rocks cried out. But from which place did the greatest anger issue? From the place that keeps my kind. We have always been with you, waiting to get in…and now the door has been shut.”

  “That keeps his what?” said Brat.

  “His kind,” said Overwhite.

  “Oh God,” said Randstable.

  “Shut,” repeated Sverre.

  George’s bullet wound began to throb. Waiting to get in…

  “So great was our anger that, shortly before the war, we achieved a tenuous hold on life,” said Sverre. “We even managed to insert ourselves into your affairs.”

  “Do any of you know what he’s talking about?” said Brat.

  “Oh, dear, I think so,” said Randstable. “Oh, God.”

  Sverre picked up the knife, which was long and shiny with fat. What happened next would visit George’s dreams for many nights to come. Slowly, wincingly, Sverre opened his arm. Arteries came asunder. Muscles perished. A lustrous black liquid spurted from the wound, as if someone had drilled for, and found, oil in his flesh. A sulphurous odor rushed out. Once on the tablecloth, the blood did not die, but collected itself into a viscous lump. The lump became a small, screaming, human head with a face that bore a disquieting resemblance to Sverre’s.

  “We are the inheritors who can never take title,” said the bleeding captain. “We are the darkblood multitudes whose ancestors were exterminated before they could sire us,” asserted the pilot of the City of New York.

  He sat down, pressed a napkin against his wound, and anesthetized himself with gin. The blood-head dissolved into a puddle.

  “We are the unadmitted,” said Lieutenant Commander Olaf Sverre of the United States Navy.

  Nuclear war entails many surprising effects. George had learned this from his therapist. The unadmitted…

  Overwhite’s lips encircled words he could not voice. Brat looked dredged in flour. Wengernook tore the unlit cigarette from his mouth and eviscerated it. An aura of wrath surrounded Reverend Sparrow. “Foul wizard!” he cried. “‘But the abominable and sorcerers shall have their part in the lake that burneth with fire!’” he quoted.

  “Mercy! A discontinuity!” gasped Randstable, pulling a pocket calculator from his vest.

  “You mean it’s a trick?” said George.

  “Trick? No—a quantum aberration.” Randstable stroked the little keyboard. “Normally such things happen only at the subatomic level, when your pions and antineutrinos and so on burst out of nothing as vacuum fluctuations.” A string of zeros appeared on the display screen. “In the macroworld, where you have your people and so on, the expected frequency of such an event is very, very low—just shy of zero, in fact.”

  The captain told of his locked-out race. He took his guests back to the time of the materializations, bade them see the Antarctic glaciers gestate men, women, and children, each scheduled to gain the continent at the high point of his would-be life, the time of greatest fulfillment and promise.

  “Watch us rise through the ice, crack into the frigid dawn, rub the snow from our eyes, stretch our hypothetical limbs. My parents were killed in the Battle of Washington exactly two weeks before they would have conceived me. I would have gone to Annapolis. I would have served my country with honor and distinction. I would have—”

  Bypassing the goblet, Sverre drank directly from the bottle.

  “Do you know what our outrage was worth? A year. A year is nothing, gentlemen. Half my life is already gone. I can tell you how many hours I have left. How many minutes.”

  Faces jumped into George’s brain. Nadine Covington. Theophilus Carter. Ensign Peach. Darkbloods all.

  Morning Valcourt.

  Was she one of them? Was Aubrey’s mother a woman from the future?

  “If unadmitted, you must use your sojourn well,” said Sverre. “A year is nothing.”

  First priority—get warm. And so you become pirates, plundering the scopas suit barges on their transpacific crossings.

  “Such attire is excellent for keeping out the cold,” the captain explained.

  A year. Nothing. You cannot raise a family in a year. You cannot forge a great republic. But you can, with luck, after making appropriate political arrangements, track down certain key individuals and call them to account. So you build a courthouse. Judge’s bench. Witness stand. Prisoner’s dock. A Multiprong submarine lies at the bottom of McMurdo Sound. Unadmitted Navy frogmen bring her up. You set sail. You snatch six men from the jaws of the holocaust. You want more—President Orlaff, Senator Krogh, the Secretary of the Navy, the National Security Advisor—but they are already dead.

  “Courthouse?” Brat tried to eat a forkful of German chocolate cake, failed. “Is that what he said?”

  “Courthouse,” muttered Randstable.

  “We want admittance,” said Sverre. “Instead we must settle for knowledge. You will tell us why this war was necessary. Consider how fortunate you are. We could have left you to the flames, as we elected to do with them. The others. Their gimcrack Party, their bankrupt Marxism, their outrageous pretensions—all blessedly extinct. You, by contrast, are ambiguous. You don’t add up. It was your ambiguousness that saved you, that alone.”

  George had never
thought of himself as being ambiguous.

  “Surely you don’t presume to lay this tragedy at our feet,” grumbled Overwhite. “We did everything in our power to prevent—”

  “Er, wait a minute, Brian,” said Randstable. “Surely they do presume to lay this tragedy at our feet. I mean, when you consider that the alternative is…you know. The extinction loop.”

  “You have no jurisdiction over us,” said Wengernook. “Zero. None. Nada.”

  A new voice said, “I’m afraid that’s not true.”

  Sverre’s table companion was standing. “The McMurdo Sound Agreement charters an International Military and Civilian Tribunal,” asserted the young man as he devoured a glob of lemon meringue pie. “The first appendix lists the counts against you. Have no fear—we shall challenge the competence of the court as soon as the trial begins.”

  George’s appetite for dessert, a primary drive not long ago, was completely gone. Counts against us? Trial? All because of some ridiculous sales contract?

  “Who the hell are you?” demanded Brat.

  “Your advocate. Martin Bonenfant, unadmitted counsel for the defense. My staff and I have been hired to argue your case before the judges. I strongly recommend that you retain us.”

  “We don’t need a goddamn lawyer,” asserted Wengernook.

  Bonenfant raked his fingers through his glossy black hair. “Yes, you do—though your case is much better than you might suppose. We’ve been researching your enemy’s morals, as well as the many imaginative ways you sought to prevent mutual destruction. Do you realize that the Soviets violated the spirit and at times the letter of both STABLE agreements?” He devoured more lemon meringue pie. “And if all else fails, I’ve got a rabbit or two in my hat. I believe we should go for acquittals, count by count.”

  He’s so young, George thought. They sent a child to defend us.

  “Yes, an acquittal strategy is certainly the way to play this one,” muttered Randstable. Turning, he solicited his co-defendants with large, clumsy gestures. “Let me put it this way. A photon that doesn’t exist can borrow energy from the uncertainty relation to make a real positron-electron pair, which annihilates to produce the photon that created it in the first place.”