After the End: Recent Apocalypses Read online

  AFTER THE END:

  Recent Apocalypses

  Copyright © 2013 by Paula Guran.

  Cover design by Sherin Nicole.

  Cover art by Aurélien Police.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors,

  and used here with their permission.

  An extension of this copyright page can be found here.

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-390-7 (trade paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-411-9 (ebook)

  PRIME BOOKS

  www.prime-books.com

  Publisher’s Note: No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  For more information, contact Prime Books at [email protected].

  “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”

  —R. E. M. song title

  (Written by Bill Berry, Michael Stipe, Mike Mills, Peter Buck)

  • CONTENTS •

  Introduction • Paula Guran

  The Books • Kage Baker

  Tumaki • Nnedi Okorafor

  The Egg Man • Mary Rosenblum

  Chislehurst Messiah • Lauren Beukes

  Ragnarok • Paul Park

  Beat Me Daddy (Eight to the Bar) • Cory Doctorow

  After the Apocalypse • Maureen F. McHugh

  We Will Never Live in the Castle • Paul Tremblay

  Never, Never, Three Times Never • Simon Morden

  Pump Six • Paolo Bacigalupi

  The Disappeared • Blake Butler

  Amaryllis • Carrie Vaughn

  The Fifth Star in the Southern Cross • Margo Lanagan

  True North • M. J. Locke

  Horses • Livia Llewellyn

  The Cecilia Paradox • John Mantooth

  The Adjudicator • Brian Evenson

  A Story, With Beans • Steven Gould

  Goddess of Mercy • Bruce Sterling

  Isolation Point, California • John Shirley

  Acknowledgements

  :

  INTRODUCTION:

  BEFORE AFTER THE END

  Paula Guran

  These are twenty-first century stories of what might happen after the end of the world as we know it: post-apocalyptic fiction.

  In ancient Greek, apocálypsis, literally meant “uncovering.” An apocalypse was like taking the lid off of a pot of previously hidden knowledge. It later came to mean, around the fourteenth century, “revelation,” or the lifting of a veil to disclose mysteries. In Middle English, it also had a less specific meaning of “insight, vision” or even “hallucination.”

  Nowadays, outside of its prophetic meaning, we usually use apocalypse to mean a cataclysmic event or doomsday scenario in which the world suffers great or near-total devastation.

  Of course, such scenarios can be revelatory, and post-apocalyptic tales often offer insight . . .

  Homo sapiens have been expecting, predicting, and fearing the end of the world since they could conceive of such a thing.

  Our close relations, the Neanderthals (just how we’re related is too debatable to delve into here), became extinct around 30,000 years ago. At least some of our ancestors probably made note of that. Many of the theories of their demise match our own concepts of human apocalypse. To Neanderthals, homo sapiens might have equated with an alien race—one that may have killed with genocidal fervor, merely used their advanced technology to invade and conquer, or introduced new pathogens resulting in a species-ending pandemic. Climatic change and natural disasters could have played a role in bringing doom for the Neanderthals as well.

  But, even now, modern humans share some nuclear DNA with the extinct Neanderthals. If there is such a thing as genetic memory, the story of their apocalypse might still be part of us all.

  Since the extinction of the Neanderthals, humans have experienced, time and again, events that—at least for those involved—meant the end of their civilization, their cultures: their “world.” There are numerous tales in many cultures of a great flood wiping out a civilization, and we know of various other verifiable cataclysmic natural disasters. Genocide reaches back at least to the first millennium BCE; draconian changes in climate have destroyed established ways of life or forced inhabitants to seek new territories over the millennia; countless pandemics have drastically reduced populations, altering social structures forever; mass panics have resulted in substantial ruin; and endless wars have led to numberless annihilations.

  In the past, the end of the world for one tribe/country/continent may have been just an “extreme event” to those not affected. Today, all of humanity is far more closely linked, so we view apocalypse on a global scale. Some areas might survive better than others or retain more of a semblance of what once was, but the entire world as we know it would be affected to some extent.

  There are still many who believe in a religious apocalypse brought about by the will of the divine, but science has given us plenty of new possibilities to be concerned with beyond holy wrath or predetermined prophecy: impacting asteroids, rogue planets, solar flares, overpopulation, Y2K (obviously we lived through that one), the Large Hadron Collider seeding a black hole, out-of-control nano-bots consuming stuff, AI displacing humans, intentional or accidental biological catastrophe . . . the more you know the more apprehensive you can be.

  Speculation can also produce apocalyptic anxiety. The idea of aliens from another planet invading Earth or infiltrating among us was not a societal concern until we grasped the concept of our world as a planet, and then considered the possibility of life elsewhere and the means for them to reach us. Physics and electricity could fail, technology might cease to function altogether and we’d have to revert to a style of life we have not known for generations . . . or maybe magic would take the place of technology . . . or perhaps the end has already come and all of us are really only bits of binary code in a computer program.

  Daily reality provides a lot of fearful fodder, too. Who worried much about nuclear warfare before 1945? The Cold War made worldwide destruction seem quite probable. In the sixties and seventies societal injustice and political upheaval brought rioting in the streets (it wasn’t the first time). International energy crises, economic recessions, urban decay, and industrial collapse followed. The appearance of AIDS became both a moral watershed and a reminder of how quickly a deadly disease can change the world.

  Although the Mideast always seems on the verge of explosion, how seriously did we concern ourselves with terrorism before 9/11? Did technological calamity bother us that much before events like the Gulf of Mexico oil spill? A hurricane like Katrina had long been anticipated for New Orleans, but when it happened, we wondered why we were so unprepared. When a “superstorm” devastates the Jersey Coast and shuts down New York City, we start considering how close to the brink society might be. The economic upheavals of the last few years have made cultural meltdown suddenly seem more probable. Senseless acts of mass violence against innocent victims shake us all.

  Some feel our love/hate relationship with the apocalyptic is based in a collective anxiety about that which lies outside our individual control. Events like those above make us wonder if humankind even has the capacity to solve such overwhelming problems. We feel powerless.

  Maybe that’s where post-apocalyptic fiction, film, television, and ga
ming enter the picture. One researcher, Jerry Piven, has been quoted as saying he feels our consideration of doomsday almost embeds a tale of fantasy into reality and provides safe theater for exploring death. Robb Willer, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies apocalyptic political and religious psychology, thinks “end times” can be both a spectator sport and a reality show for some people.

  Whatever the reasons, our pop cultural fascination with the end of the world is both ancient and current. Science fiction and fantasy critic Paul Goat Allen wrote, in 2011:

  . . . the last few years have brought about a new Golden Age of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction. . . .What does this renaissance of apocalyptic fiction tell me? Readers—and writers—are, once again, becoming increasingly fascinated by various end-of-the-world scenarios: the causes, the implications, and the aftermath. The specific reasons readers are attracted to apocalyptic fiction releases varies from person to person but for me at least, I think it’s all about comfort and hope. Reading these books and envisioning the nightmarish, end-of-days horrors described within makes me realize just how well off we have it. Yeah, I drive an 18-year-old car and sometimes it’s a struggle to pay my bills but at least I have food to eat and a roof over my head. After reading about a world inhabited by masses of starving nomads . . . an America overrun by zombies . . . and a world where millions have simply disappeared after a Rapture-like event . . . my life seems pretty good! . . . I know it sounds paradoxical but reading apocalyptic fiction generally leaves me with a sense of hope—hope that we can somehow avoid the mistakes made in [this fiction] and right the wrongs before it is really too late.

  There’s also a simpler theory, one espoused by a character in one of the following stories:

  I used to pretend the world had ended and that I was the only one who survived . . . I know your secret, you’ve fantasized about that too, everyone fantasizes that they’re important enough to survive, more than survive, to be the last one left, right? [I]t’s why you read those books or watched those Will Smith movies, you imagined how important the last one left would feel . . . you only indulged in the fantasy because it was safely impossible in your mind, sort of like daydream sex with somebody you’re not supposed to be daydreaming about, you indulge in the danger until you start thinking about the consequences, until you start really thinking about the big what if, what if it really happened?

  Although the twenty-first century has brought a plethora of media featuring zombies—both supernatural and “science”-based—you won’t find that particular type of post-apocalyptic fiction in this anthology. I’ve edited one anthology, Zombies: The Recent Dead (Prime Books, 2011) that includes some of the best short zombie fiction from 2000-2011; another, Zombies: More Recent Dead is forthcoming in 2014. There’s also Extreme Zombies (Prime Books, 2012)—not confined to only recent fiction and intended for those who enjoy more extreme explorations of the trope. In other words, I think I have zombies covered—apocalyptic and not.

  I delighted in discovering the many non-zombie variations of post-apocalyptic futures depicted in the stories collected here. With one exception (first published in 2002), the stories in this volume first appeared from 2007 through 2012. I hope they demonstrate at least a few of our current ideations of what will bring the End and come after it. They vary in style from Anglo-Saxon epic verse to the near-surreal and, in tone, range from optimism and hope to the bleakest pessimism. What the stories all have in common, other than the theme, is that they are about people: their actions, reactions, interactions, and relationships; their hopes, dreams, strategies, and failures. More than one someone has survived. The world may have ended, but there is still life.

  Paula Guran

  9 March, 2013

  (National Panic Day)

  The End came perhaps a generation before the narrator of Kage Baker’s story was born. His parents are members of a band of artisans and entertainers who once were a travelling “Renaissance fair.” Now they use their “olden times” skills to make necessities of life, but they still provide much-needed entertainment too.

  THE BOOKS

  Kage Baker

  We used to have to go a lot farther down the coast in those days, before things got easier. People weren’t used to us then.

  If you think about it, we must have looked pretty scary when we first made it out to the coast. Thirty trailers full of Show people, pretty desperate and dirty-looking Show people too, after fighting our way across the plains from the place where we’d been camped when it all went down. I don’t remember when it went down, of course; I wasn’t born yet.

  The Show used to be an olden-time fair, a teaching thing. We traveled from place to place putting it on so people would learn about olden times, which seems pretty funny now, but back then . . . how’s that song go? The one about mankind jumping out into the stars? And everybody thought that was how it was going to be. The aunts and uncles would put on the Show so space-age people wouldn’t forget things like weaving and making candles when they went off into space. That’s what you call irony, I guess.

  But afterward we had to change the Show, because . . . well, we couldn’t have the Jousting Arena anymore because we needed the big horses to pull the trailers. And Uncle Buck didn’t make fancy work with dragons with rhinestone eyes on them anymore because, who was there left to buy that kind of stuff? And anyway, he was too busy making horseshoes. So all the uncles and aunts got together and worked it out like it is now, where we come into town with the Show and people come to see it and then they let us stay a while because we make stuff they need.

  I started out as a baby bundle in one of the stage shows, myself. I don’t remember it, though. I remember later I was in some play with a love story and I just wore a pair of fake wings and ran across the stage naked and shot at the girl with a toy bow and arrow that had glitter on them. And another time I played a dwarf. But I wasn’t a dwarf, we only had the one dwarf and she was a lady, that was Aunt Tammy, and she’s dead now. But there was an act with a couple of dwarves dancing and she needed a partner, and I had to wear a black suit and a top hat.

  But by then my daddy had got sick and died so my mom was sharing the trailer with Aunt Nera, who made pots and pitchers and stuff, so that meant we were living with her nephew Myko too. People said he went crazy later on but it wasn’t true. He was just messed up. Aunt Nera left the Show for a little while after it all went down, to go and see if her family—they were townies—had made it through okay, only they didn’t, they were all dead but the baby, so she took the baby away with her and found us again. She said Myko was too little to remember but I think he remembered some.

  Anyway we grew up together after that, us and Sunny who lived with Aunt Kestrel in their trailer which was next to ours. Aunt Kestrel was a juggler in the Show and Myko thought that was intense, he wanted to be a kid juggler. So he got Aunt Kestrel to show him how. And Sunny knew how already, she’d been watching her mom juggle since she was born and she could do clubs or balls or the apple-eating trick or anything. Myko decided he and Sunny should be a kid juggling act. I cried until they said I could be in the act too, but then I had to learn how to juggle and boy, was I sorry. I knocked out one of my own front teeth with a club before I learned better. The new one didn’t grow in until I was seven, so I went around looking stupid for three years. But I got good enough to march in the parade and juggle torches.

  That was after we auditioned, though. Myko went to Aunt Jeff and whined and he made us costumes for our act. Myko got a black doublet and a toy sword and a mask and I got a buffoon overall with a big spangly ruff. Sunny got a princess costume. We called ourselves the Minitrons. Actually Myko came up with the name. I don’t know what he thought a Minitron was supposed to be but it sounded brilliant. Myko and I were both supposed to be in love with the princess and she couldn’t decide between us so we had to do juggling tricks to win her hand, only she out-juggled us, so then Myko and I had a sword fight t
o decide things. And I always lost and died of a broken heart, but then the princess was sorry and put a paper rose on my chest. Then I jumped up and we took our bows and ran off, because the next act was Uncle Monty and his performing parrots.

  By the time I was six we felt like old performers, and we swaggered in front of the other kids because we were the only kid act. We’d played it in six towns already. That was the year the aunts and uncles decided to take the trailers as far down the coast as this place on the edge of the big desert. It used to be a big city before it all went down. Even if there weren’t enough people alive there anymore to put on a show for, there might be a lot of old junk we could use.

  We made it into town all right without even any shooting. That was kind of amazing, actually, because it turned out nobody lived there but old people, and old people will usually shoot at you if they have guns, and these did. The other amazing thing was that the town was huge and I mean really huge, I just walked around with my head tilted back staring at these towers that went up and up, into the sky. Some of them you couldn’t even see the tops because the fog hid them.

  And they were all mirrors and glass and arches and domes and scowly faces in stone looking down from way up high.

  But all the old people lived in just a few places right along the beach, because the further back you went into the city the more sand was everywhere. The desert was creeping in and taking a little more every year. That was why all the young people had left. There was nowhere to grow any food. The old people stayed because there was still plenty of stuff in jars and cans they had collected from the markets, and anyway they liked it there because it was warm. They told us they didn’t have enough food to share any, though. Uncle Buck told them all we wanted to trade for was the right to go into some of the empty towers and strip out as much of the copper pipes and wires and things as we could take away with us. They thought that was all right; they put their guns down and let us camp, then.