The highway finally settled down into a six-lane transcontinental viaduct. Our three lanes leading back to downtown Guadalajara were fairly empty, but the other side, a beeline to the new theme park, was already bumper-to-bumper with campers and trailers. Both sides of the highway was a stripmall from park to city limits. At dusk we reached the river chasm bridge, which now bisected the sea of gangrenous waste that had filled, then jumped, the gorge and flowed four miles beyond.
Directly ahead of us in the eastern sky we saw a brilliant star slowly rise above El Cappa. We watched it grow in morbid fascination, finally recognizing that the sunset illuminated a miles-long orbiting Mylar Elvis.
We drove through the city until night had fallen, not able to find our villa at all. We could barely locate Avenida de la Paz, although the only tranquillity on the Avenue of Peace came from the curtains and walls of dark atmosphere, blacker than the night, a strange thickness that couldn’t be called either smog or haze. Tall buildings vanished less than thirty feet up in the stuff, and that ceiling seemed to be steadily lowering. The dark flocculence even narrowed the streets.
“Where should we go, Doctor Zygidaynus?” Inez asked. “What do you want to do?”
Ziggy had been awfully quiet; even The Royal We seemed distressed by his unnatural bearing and had, to my amazement, jumped to the front seat and crawled into his lap. He ignored her, but she tapped into him and her eyes grew forlorn and confused. She, too, was a dear anachronism, as dead as the science he championed, natural history. “I want my world back,” he whispered. But he would never get it.
We drove until the veil encompassed the road and us altogether. In the shadows I could see the motes and vague forms and new beasties and superimposed forests and cities, this world of another dimension, regressive evolution, perhaps; and I wondered if we would be perceived, for a fading moment, as ghostly motes in the jelly of their eyes—the future who walks beside us, those who will be our survivors, all translucent yet, but gathering like mourners at the grave site.