About half a mile away from the dome, the trail circles an outcrop of rock and takes a downhill switchback turn. Roger stops at the bend and looks out across the desert at his feet. He sits down, leans against the rough cliff face and stretches his legs out across the path, so that his feet dangle over nothingness. Far below him, the dead valley is furrowed with rectangular depressions; once, millions of years ago, they might have been fields, but nothing like that survives to this date. They’re just dead, like everyone else on this world. Like Roger.
In his shirt pocket, a crumpled, precious pack of cigarettes. He pulls a white cylinder out with shaking fingers, sniffs at it, then flicks his lighter under it. Scarcity has forced him to cut back: he coughs at the first lungful of stale smoke, a harsh, racking croak. The irony of being saved from lung cancer by a world war is not lost on him.
He blows smoke out, a tenuous trail streaming across the cliff. “Why me?” he asks quietly.
The emptiness takes its time answering. When it does, it speaks with the Colonel’s voice. “You know the reason.”
“I didn’t want to do it,” he hears himself saying. “I didn’t want to leave them behind.”
The void laughs at him. There are miles of empty air beneath his dangling feet. “You had no choice.”
“Yes I did! I didn’t have to come here.” He pauses. “I didn’t have to do anything,” he says quietly, and inhales another lungful of death. “It was all automatic. Maybe it was inevitable.”
“—Evitable,” echoes the distant horizon. Something dark and angular skims across the stars, like an echo of extinct pterosaurs. Turbofans whirring within its belly, the F-117 hunts on: patrolling to keep at bay the ancient evil, unaware that the battle is already lost. “Your family could still be alive, you know.”
He looks up. “They could?” Andrea? Jason? “Alive?”
The void laughs again, unfriendly: “There is life eternal within the eater of souls. Nobody is ever forgotten or allowed to rest in peace. They populate the simulation spaces of its mind, exploring all the possible alternative endings to their life. There is a fate worse than death, you know.”
Roger looks at his cigarette disbelievingly: throws it far out into the night sky above the plain. He watches it fall until its ember is no longer visible. Then he gets up. For a long moment he stands poised on the edge of the cliff nerving himself, and thinking. Then he takes a step back, turns, and slowly makes his way back up the trail towards the redoubt on the plateau. If his analysis of the situation is wrong, at least he is still alive. And if he is right, dying would be no escape.
He wonders why hell is so cold at this time of year.
∇
The Unthinkable
Bruce Sterling
Since the Strategic Arms Talks of the early 1970s, it had been the policy of the Soviets to keep to their own quarters as much as the negotiations permitted—in fear, the Americans surmised, of novel forms of technical eavesdropping.
Dr. Tsyganov’s Baba Yaga hut now crouched warily on the meticulously groomed Swiss lawn. Dr. Elwood Doughty assembled a hand of cards and glanced out the hut’s window. Protruding just above the sill was the great scaly knee of one of the hut’s six giant chicken legs, a monstrous knobby member as big around as an urban water main. As Doughty watched, the chicken knee flexed restlessly, and the hut stirred around them, rising with a seasick lurch, then settling with a squeak of timbers and a rustle of close-packed thatch.
Tsyganov discarded, drew two cards from the deck, and examined them, his wily blue eyes shrouded in greasy wisps of long graying hair. He plucked his shabby beard with professionally black-rimmed nails.
Doughty, to his pleased surprise, had been dealt a straight flush in the suit of Wands. With a deft pinch, he dropped two ten-dollar bills from the top of the stack at his elbow.
Tsyganov examined his dwindling supply of hard currency with a look of Slavic fatalism. He grunted, scratched, then threw his cards faceup on the table. Death. The Tower. The deuce, trey, and five of Coins.
“Chess?” Tsyganov suggested, rising.
“Another time,” said Doughty. Though, for security reasons, he lacked any official ranking in the chess world, Doughty was in fact quite an accomplished chess strategist, particularly strong in the endgame. Back in the marathon sessions of ’83, he and Tsyganov had dazzled their fellow arms wizards with an impromptu tournament lasting almost four months, while the team awaited (fruitlessly) any movement on the stalled verification accords. Doughty could not outmatch the truly gifted Tsyganov, but he had come to know and recognize the flow of his opponent’s thought.
Mostly, though, Doughty had conceived a vague loathing for Tsyganov’s prized personal chess set, which had been designed on a Reds versus Whites Russian Civil War theme. The little animate pawns uttered tiny, but rather dreadful, squeaks of anguish, when set upon by the commissar bishops and cossack knights.
“Another time?’’ murmured Tsyganov, opening a tiny cabinet and extracting a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka. Inside the fridge, a small overworked frost demon glowered in its trap of coils and blew a spiteful gasp of cold fog. “There will not be many more such opportunities for us, Elwood.”
“Don’t I know it.” Doughty noted that the Russian’s vodka bottle bore an export label printed in English. There had been a time when Doughty would have hesitated to accept a drink in a Russian’s quarters. Treason in the cup. Subversion potions. Those times already seemed quaint.
“I mean this will be over. History, grinding on. This entire business”—Tsyganov waved his sinewy hand, as if including not merely Geneva, but a whole state of mind—“will become a mere historical episode.”
“I’m ready for that,” Doughty said stoutly. Vodka splashed up the sides of his shot glass with a chill, oily threading. “I never much liked this life, Ivan.”
“No?”
“I did it for duty.”
“Ah.” Tsyganov smiled. “Not for the travel privileges?”
“I’m going home,” Doughty said. “Home for good. There’s a place outside Fort Worth where I plan to raise cattle.”
“Back to Texas?” Tsyganov seemed amused, touched. “The hard-line weapons theorist become a farmer, Elwood? You are a second Roman Cincinnatus!”
Doughty sipped vodka and examined the gold-flake socialist-realist icons hung on Tsyganov’s rough timber walls. He thought of his own office, in the basement of the Pentagon. Relatively commodious, by basement standards. Comfortably carpeted. Mere yards from the world’s weightiest centers of military power. Secretary of Defense. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Secretaries of the Army, Navy, Air Force. Director of Defense Research and Necromancy. The Lagoon, the Potomac, the Jefferson Memorial. The sight of pink dawn on the Capitol Dome after pulling an all-nighter. Would he miss the place? No. “Washington, D.C., is no proper place to raise a kid.”
“Ah.” Tsyganov’s peaked eyebrows twitched. “I heard you had married at last.” He had, of course, read Doughty’s dossier. “And your child, Elwood, he is strong and well?”
Doughty said nothing. It would be hard to keep the tone of pride from his voice. Instead, he opened his wallet of tanned basilisk skin and showed the Russian a portrait of his wife and infant son. Tsyganov brushed hair from his eyes and examined the portrait closely. “Ah,” he said. “The boy much resembles you.”