One Million A.D. Read online

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  There was no station at Good Mountain, abandoned or otherwise. There wasn’t even an auxiliary trail for a worm to pull to one side. But the foundations for homes were visible, plus markings lain out to define a network of streets. The only signs of recent habitation were the promised locker—an underground facility little bigger than a worm’s stomach—and standing to the north, a beacon tower built of wood and capped with an enormous bone-lined bowl. A reservoir of fats and cured sap was burning slowly, yellow flames swirling with the wind. In other times, this would have been the brightest light for a hundred kilometers—a navigation point to help any lost souls. But the firestorm to the east made the fire seem quite weak. Against that rushing, sizzling wall of scorching fire and vaporized wood, everything about the world seemed small and feeble.

  The wind was blowing harder now, and with it came a chill from the west, causing Jopale to shiver.

  Caretakers worked frantically, breaking open the locker, rolling barrel after barrel onto the trail directly in front of the worm. And other caretakers ordered the mockmen off the worm’s back, gathering them together on the dusty, dry ground, loud voices warning them not to take another step.

  Jopale thought he could hear the firestorm, even though it was still ten or twenty kilometers behind them.

  It sounded like water, oddly enough. Like a strong current flowing over a brink, then falling fast.

  Do-ane appeared suddenly, almost close enough to touch him. Her boots were buttoned. Her book was cradled under one arm. She studied his face for a moment. Then she regarded the firestorm with the same speculative intensity. And finally, she said to Jopale, “Come with me.”

  He wasn’t surprised. For a long while now, he had imagined this invitation and his response. But what startled him was his own reaction, feeling decidedly unsure about what to do.

  “My colleagues are there now,” she continued, pointing at the still-distant tower. “Behind the beacon is a little hut, and there’s a shaft and elevator that will drop us all the way to the starship—”

  “What about me?” Rit interrupted.

  Do-ane gave him a moment’s glance. She seemed unprepared for his entirely natural question.

  “Your starship is huge,” Rit reminded her. “Huge and empty. Don’t you think your friends would welcome me, too?”

  She tried to speak.

  Then the old wealthy woman stepped forward. “There isn’t much time, miss. Where’s this sanctuary of yours—?”

  “Beyond that tower,” Rit offered.

  “Thank you.” Then to her companion, she said, “Help me, will you dear? I’m not sure I can manage such a long walk.”

  Her young man was holding their essential bags, a faint smile showing as he stared off to the north. With an agreeable tone, he said, “I’m sure you’ll do fine.” Then he winked, adding, “Start right away. As fast as you can.” And with the strength of youth, he ran off into the ruddy gloom, dropping his bags and hers in his wake.

  Other passengers began to follow him.

  “Well,” the old woman muttered. Then with a shuffling gait, she tried to keep up.

  Rit glared at Do-ane. Appalled by the circumstances, he asked, “So just how big is this elevator? And how fast? And will it take all of us at once?”

  She tried to answer, but her voice kept failing her.

  Rit looked back at the worm, then focused on the tower.

  “Where are you going?” Master Brace hollered. He was still up near the worm’s mouth, but moving toward them as fast as he could manage. “What are you people doing? What in the hell are you thinking?”

  Do-ane saw him coming. Then she threw down everything but her precious book, and glancing at Jopale one last time, she turned and sprinted across the empty plain.

  Rit considered Jopale, plainly doubting his good sense and sanity. Then he was gone too, his long stride letting him catch up to Do-ane, then the old woman, leaving both of them behind.

  “Sir,” said Brace, staggering up next to Jopale.

  He would say his good-byes; then he would run too. Jopale had made up his mind, or so he believed.

  “Don’t,” was the caretaker’s advice.

  “Don’t what?” Jopale asked.

  Brace took him by the shoulder. Panting from his run, he said, “I like you, sir. And I honestly meant to warn you before now.”

  “Warn me?”

  “And then . . . then I saw the girl talking to everybody, and I didn’t think . . . I couldn’t imagine . . . that all of you would actually believe her—”

  “What is this?” Jopale cried out.

  “She’s ridden my worm in the past, sir.” Brace looked across the plain. The fire to the east was tall enough and bright enough to illuminate each of the fleeing passengers. Tiny now. Frantic little shapes soon to be lost against that great expanse of dead dry wood.

  “I know she’s ridden this way,” Jopale said. “Of course she has. She comes here to study the secret mountain.”

  Brace shook his head. “No, sir,” he said.

  Then he looked Jopale in the eye, saying, “She does this. She has that book of hers, and she befriends a man . . . usually an older man . . . convincing him that everything she says is real. Then she steps off at this place and invites him to join her adventure, and of course any man would happily walk off with a pretty young thing like that. But she is insane, sir. I am sure.

  “On my worm, she has ridden west at least five times now. And three times, she has set off a flare to make us stop here and pick her up on our eastbound leg.” He gulped the cool air. “That’s what people do in this country when there is no station, sir.” Offering a grim smile, he added, “But sometimes we haven’t brought her, and it’s her men who set off the flares. We’ve rescued several gentlemen of your age and bearing, and they’re always angry. ‘She showed me this big book,’ they’ll say. They’ll say, ‘I was going to explore an ancient starship and look at the bones of gods.’ ”

  Jopale wrapped his arms around his chest, moaning softly.

  “That girl is quite crazy, sir. And that’s all she is.” Brace placed a comforting hand upon Jopale’s shoulder. “She takes her men walking in the darkness. She keeps telling them that their destination is just a little farther now. But there’s nothing to find out there. Even the most foolish man figures that out. And do you know what she does? At some point, she’ll turn and tell him, ‘You are the problem. You don’t believe, so of course we can’t find it.’

  “Then those fellows return here and continue their journey west. And she wanders for a little while, then comes and waits here for the next eastbound worm. Somehow she always has money. Her life is spent riding worms and reading her book, and when she forgets that nothing on those pages is real, she comes back this way again. And that’s all that she does in her life, from what I can tell.”

  Jopale was confused, and he had never been so angry. But somehow none of this was a perfect surprise.

  “I should have said something” Brace admitted. “In my baby’s stomach, when I saw her talking to everybody . . .”

  “Should we chase after them?” Jopale asked.

  But the caretaker could only shake his head, telling him, “There isn’t time, sir. And honestly, I don’t think we could make those people listen to reason now. They’re chasing the only hope they’ve got left.”

  “But we should try to do what’s right,” Jopale maintained. “Perhaps we can convince one or two of them to turn back—”

  “Sir,” Brace interrupted. Then the old fellow laughed at him.

  “I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, sir. But there is an exceptionally good chance that we ourselves won’t be alive for much longer.”

  Again, Jopale heard the soft watery rumbling of the fire. “Yes. Of course . . .”

  TOWARD PORT OF KRAUSS

  Brace began walking toward the worm’s head.

  The worm was slowly crawling forward, gulping down the big sweet barrels as s
he moved. Farther ahead, several dozen mockmen were being coaxed down onto the trail. At a distance, they looked entirely human. They seemed small and plainly scared, clinging to one another while their bare feet slipped on the white grease.

  Jopale caught Brace, and before he lost his own scarce courage, he made an enormous request.

  “I know it’s asking a lot,” he admitted.

  “That won’t make much difference,” the old man said, offering a dark little laugh. Then he paused and cupped his hands around his mouth, shouting new orders into the wind.

  The red-haired female was separated from the other mockmen.

  Jopale rejoined his companion, and the two of them grabbed his bags and then a rope ladder, climbing onto the worm’s wide back.

  Without prompting, the mockman claimed one of the low chairs, facing forward, her long legs stretched out before her. If the creature was grateful, it didn’t show on her stoic face. Either she was too stupid to understand what he had done, or she was perceptive enough to despise him for saving only her, leaving her friends to their gruesome fate.

  The worm’s bare flesh was warm to the touch. Jopale sat directly behind his mockman, letting her bulk block the wind. He could feel the great spine shifting beneath his rump. Facing backwards, he didn’t watch the rest of the feeding, and save for a few muddled screams, he heard nothing. Then the worm began to accelerate, drugs and this one meal lending her phenomenal energy. And after a little while, when they were racing across the empty landscape, Master Brace came and sat beside him.

  “But the book,” Jopale began.

  “It certainly looks real enough,” the old man replied, guessing his mind. “And maybe it is genuine. Maybe she stole it from a true scientist who actually knows where the starship is buried. Or maybe it’s an ancient manuscript, and there was once a starship . . . but the ship sank to the core ages ago, and some curious fluke has placed it in her strange hands.”

  “Or she invented everything,” Jopale allowed.

  “Perhaps.” Watching the firestorm, Brace nodded. “Perhaps the girl heard a story about space flight and lost worlds, and she has a talent that lets her draw elaborate diagrams and play games with cameras. And these times are what made her insane. The terrors and wild hopes tell her that everything she can dream up is real. Perhaps.”

  Or she was perfectly rational, Jopale thought, and the starship really was waiting out there. Somewhere. While Brace was the creature whose sanity had been discarded along the way, his mind lying to both of them, forcing them to stay onboard his treasured worm.

  “But the name,” Jopale muttered.

  “Sir?”

  “ ‘Good Mountain.’ She told me why the scientists used that old word. And honestly, I can’t think of another reason for placing that noble name on this ridiculous place?”

  “First of all, sir—”

  “Call me Jopale, please.”

  “Jopale. Yes.” Brace held both of his hands against the worm’s skin, listening to the great body. “First of all, I know this country well. If there were a project here, a research station of any size, it would not be a secret from me. And I can tell you frankly, Jopale . . . except for that one strange girl and her misguided men, nobody comes to this wasted space . . .”

  A small quake rolled beneath them.

  When it passed, Brace suggested, “We might be in luck here, sir. Do-ane may have told you: There’s a dead island under this ground. There’s a lot of wood sitting between us and the methane. So when the fire gets off the Tanglelands, it should slow down. At least for a little while. This wood’s going to burn, sure, but not as fast as that damned gas does.”

  Jopale tried to feel encouraged. Then he repeated the words, “ ‘First of all.’ ”

  “Sir?”

  “You said, ‘First of all.’ What’s second of all?”

  Master Brace nodded in a thoughtful fashion, then said, “You know, my mother was a caretaker on a worm exactly like this one. And her father was a driver on a freighter worm that crawled along this same trail, bringing the new iron back from Port of Krauss. It was that grandfather who told me that even when there was sunlight here, this was an awful place to live. Flat like this. Sapless. Hard to farm, and hard on the soul. But some greedy fellow bought this land for nothing, then sold pieces of it to people in more crowded parts of the world. He named his ground ‘Good Mountain’ because he thought the old word sounded strong and lasting. But of course, all he wanted was to lure fools into his trap . . .”

  Jopale reached back over his head, burying one of his hands into the mockman’s thick hair. Then he pushed with his legs, feeling a consuming need to be closer to her, grinding his spine hard up against her spine.

  “It’s just one old word,” Brace was saying. With his face lit up by the endless fire, he said, “And I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, sir. But words . . . what they are . . . they’re just sounds and scribbles. It’s people who give them meaning. Without us, the poor things wouldn’t have any life at all.”

  And they pressed on, rushing toward the promised Ocean, with the End of the World following close behind.

  A PIECE OF THE GREAT WORLD

  By Robert Silverberg

  Robert Silverberg is one of the most famous SF writers of modern times, with dozens of novels, anthologies, and collections to his credit. As both writer and editor (he was editor of the original anthology series, New Dimensions, perhaps the most acclaimed anthology series of its era), Silverberg was one of the most influential figures of the Post New Wave era of the ’70s, and continues to be at the forefront of the field to this very day, having won a total of five Nebula Awards and four Hugo Awards, plus SFWA’s prestigious Grandmaster Award.

  His novels include the acclaimed Dying Inside, Lord Valentine’s Castle, The Book of Skulls, Downward to the Earth, Tower of Glass, Son of Man, Nightwings, The World Inside, Born with the Dead, Shadrack in the Furnace, Thorns, Up the Line, The Man in the Maze, Tom O’Bedlam, Star of Gypsies, At Winter’s End, The Face of the Waters, Kingdoms of the Wall, Hot Sky at Morning, The Alien Years, Lord Prestimion, Mountains of Majipoor, and two novel-length expansions of famous Isaac Asimov stories, Nightfall and The Ugly Little Boy. His collections include Unfamiliar Territory, Capricorn Games, Majipoor Chronicles, The Best of Robert Silverberg, At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, Beyond the Safe Zone, and a massive retrospective collection The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume One: Secret Sharers. His reprint anthologies are far too numerous to list here, but include The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One and the distinguished Alpha series, among dozens of others. His most recent books are the novel The Long Way Home, the mosaic novel Roma Eterna, and a massive new retrospective collection, Phases of the Moon: Stories from Six Decades. Coming up is a new collection, In the Beginning. He lives with his wife, writer Karen Haber, in Oakland, California.

  As an author, Robert Silverberg has always seemed fascinated with the far future, and he has returned to far-future milieus again and again throughout his career in stories such as the Hugo-winning “Nightwings” (which was later melded with two other far-future novellas into the novel Nightwings), “At Winter’s End,” “A Long Night’s Vigil at the Temple,” “Homecoming,” “Dancers in the Time-Flux,” “This Is the Road,” “Red Blaze in the Morning,” the Nebula Award-winning “Sailing to Byzantium,” and many others, as well as in novels such as Son of Man and the stories and novels of the Majipoor sequence.

  All of which made him one of the very first authors I thought of when assembling this anthology. A confidence he amply justifies with the fascinating and exotic story that follows, in which we visit a future Earth just awakening again after sleeping through a million-year winter, and where we soon discover that even in a fresh new springtime world, there may be some cold pieces of winter left behind . . .

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  The expedition to the ancestral cocoon would be setting out very soon now. Nortekku was still deep in the task of preparing for it
, studying up on the accounts of the events of two centuries before. For weeks he had been poring over the accounts of the emergence of the People from the cocoons when the Long Winter had finally ended—out into that strange, empty world, where the debris flung up by the death-stars still hovered in the upper levels of the atmosphere and a rippling mesh of color streamed in the sky, rainbow nets of amethyst, copper, topaz, crimson, radiant green. He had read too of the famous trek across the continent to the ruins of ancient Vengiboneeza, and of the founding of the first cities of the New Springtime. By then he had become so caught up in the story that he kept pushing his research backward and ever backward across the ages, digging hungrily, compulsively.

  There was so much to absorb. He wondered if he would ever master it all. The years fluttered before him, going in reverse. He moved step by step from the tale of the Time of Going Forth back to the era of the cocoons itself, the 700,000 years of life underground during the Long Winter that had preceded the Going Forth, and from there to the dire onslaught of the death-stars that had brought on the deep snows and black winds of the Long Winter. Then he went farther back yet, to the glorious civilization known as the Great World that the winter of the death-stars had destroyed, when all was in motion and great caravels circled the globe laden with merchandise of fabulous richness and splendor, and onward even into what little was known of that shadowy era, millions of years before the Great World had existed, when the vanished human race had dominated the world.

  Nortekku had never cared much about all that before—he was an architect by profession, looking toward the future, not the past. But Thalarne, who was an archaeologist, did, and he cared very much about Thalarne, with whom he was about to go off on an expedition of the highest archaeological significance. So for her sake he went tunneling deep into these historical matters that he had not thought about since his schoolboy days.