There was nothing Flaminio could have done to stop her. But simultaneous with the dematerialization of Szette’s body, he heard an extraordinary noise, a scream, issuing from his own mouth.
What Flaminio did next could not be called an impulsive act. He thought it through carefully, and though that took him only an instant, his resolve was firm. He ran up the steps toward the beam, determined to join Szette in her endless voyage to nowhere. He would offer his body to the universe and his soul to oblivion. He would not, he was certain, hesitate when he reached the beam.
A shoulder in his chest stopped him cold. A hand gripped his shoulder and another his elbow. Three protettori closed in upon him, scowling. “You must come with us, sir,” said one, “to have this suicidal impulse removed.”
“I’m a citizen! I know my rights! You can’t stop me without a contract!”
“Sir, we have a contract.”
They dragged him to a cellular. It closed about him and took him away.
When he was released from therapy, incapable then or ever after of ending his own life, Flaminio went to see the only individual in all the world who might have taken out a contract on him and asked, “Why wouldn’t you let me die?”
“To me, your lives are as those of mayflies,” the Great Albino said. “Enjoy what precious seconds remain.”
“And the bracelet? Why didn’t you tell me about Szette’s bracelet?”
“Until that night, I had forgotten about them. Such things were commonly worn by travelers back when the world was rich. To protect themselves from molestation. To enlist aid when in need. But they were a small and unimportant detail in a complex and varied age.”
Flaminio had only one more question to pose: “If I was only doing the bracelet’s bidding, then why haven’t these feelings gone away?”
Albino looked terribly sad. “Alas, my friend, it seems you really did fall in love with her.”
That same day, Flaminio left Roma to become a wanderer. He never married, though he took many lovers, both paid and not. Nor did he ever settle down in one place for any length of time. In his old age he frequently claimed to have been around the world forty-eight times and to have seen everything there was to see on all four occupied planets of the Solar System, and much else as well. All of which was verifiably true, were one to search through the records for his whereabouts over the decades. But, in his cups, he would admit to having never gone anywhere or seen anything worth seeing at all.
The Martian Obelisk
LINDA NAGATA
Here’s a look at a project of building a bittersweet memorial to humanity’s now-failed attempt to spread beyond the Earth, one which is interrupted by an unexpected emergency that may change everything.
Linda Nagata is a Nebula and Locus Award–winning author. She has spent most of her life in Hawaii, where she’s been a writer, a mom, and a programmer of database-driven websites. She lives with her husband in their longtime home on the island of Maui. Her most recent work is The Red Trilogy, a series of near-future military thrillers published by Saga Press/Simon & Schuster. The first book in the trilogy, The Red: First Light, was named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2015. She maintains a website at www.mythicisland.com.
The end of the world required time to accomplish—and time, Susannah reflected, worked at the task with all the leisurely skill of a master torturer, one who could deliver death either quickly or slowly, but always with excruciating pain.
No getting out of it.
But there were still things to do in the long, slow decline; final gestures to make. Susannah Li-Langford had spent seventeen years working on her own offering-for-the-ages, with another six and half years to go before the Martian Obelisk reached completion. Only when the last tile was locked into place in the obelisk’s pyramidal cap, would she yield.
Until then, she did what was needed to hold onto her health, which was why, at the age of eighty, she was out walking vigorously along the cliff trail above the encroaching Pacific Ocean, determined to have her daily exercise despite the brisk wind and the freezing mist that ran before it. The mist was only a token moisture, useless to revive the drought-stricken coastal forest, but it made the day cold enough that the fishing platforms at the cliff’s edge were deserted, leaving Susannah alone to contemplate the mortality of the human world.
It was not supposed to happen like this. As a child she’d been promised a swift conclusion: duck and cover and nuclear annihilation. And if not annihilation, at least the nihilistic romance of a gun-toting, leather-clad, fight-to-the-death anarchy. That hadn’t happened either.
Things had just gotten worse, and worse still, and people gave up. Not everyone, not all at once—there was no single event marking the beginning of the end—but there was a sense of inevitability about the direction history had taken. Sea levels rose along with average ocean temperatures. Hurricanes devoured coastal cities and consumed low-lying countries. Agriculture faced relentless drought, flood, and temperature extremes. A long run of natural disasters made it all worse—earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions. There had been no major meteor strike yet, but Susannah wouldn’t bet against it. Health care faltered as antibiotics became useless against resistant bacteria. Surgery became an art of the past.
Out of the devastation, war and terrorism erupted like metastatic cancers.
We are a brilliant species, Susannah thought. Courageous, creative, generous—as individuals. In larger numbers we fail every time.
There were reactor meltdowns, poisoned water supplies, engineered plagues, and a hundred other, smaller horrors. The Shoal War had seen nuclear weapons used in the South China Sea. But even the most determined ghouls had failed to ignite a sudden, brilliant cataclysm. The master torturer would not be rushed.
Still, the tipping point was long past, the future truncated. Civilization staggered on only in the lucky corners of the world where the infrastructure of a happier age still functioned. Susannah lived in one of those lucky corners, not far from the crumbling remains of Seattle, where she had greenhouse food, a local network, and satellite access all supplied by her patron, Nathaniel Sanchez, who was the money behind the Martian Obelisk.
When the audio loop on her ear beeped a quiet tone, she assumed the alert meant a message from Nate. There was no one else left in her life, nor did she follow the general news, because what was the point?
She tapped the corner of her wrist-link with a finger gloved against the cold, signaling her personal AI to read the message aloud. Its artificial, androgynous voice spoke into her ear:
“Message sender: Martian Obelisk Operations. Message body: Anomaly sighted. All operations automatically halted pending supervisory approval.”
Just a few innocuous words, but weighted with a subtext of disaster.
A subtext all too familiar.
For a few seconds, Susannah stood still in the wind and the rushing mist. In the seventeen-year history of the project, construction had been halted only for equipment maintenance, and that, on a tightly regulated schedule. She raised her wrist-link to her lips. “What anomaly, Alix?” she demanded, addressing the AI. “Can it be identified?”
“It identifies as a homestead vehicle belonging to Red Oasis.”
That was absurd. Impossible.
Founded twenty-one years ago, Red Oasis was the first of four Martian colonies, and the most successful. It had outlasted all the others, but the Mars Era had ended nine months ago when Red Oasis succumbed to an outbreak of “contagious asthma”—a made-up name for an affliction evolved on Mars.