Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF Read online

  "As I said," said Mativi, "I understand what is in this cargo. You do not. Do I have your full cooperation?"

  The Major's eyes went even wider than his perceived Remit To Use Deadly Force. He lowered the gun, visibly shaken.

  "You do," he said. "Sir," he added.

  The Hyundai became bogged down by bodies - fortunately living ones - in the immediate vicinity of the Heavy Weapons Alert site. A crowd of perhaps a thousand goggling locals, all dressed in complementary rayon T-shirts handed out by various multinationals to get free airtime on Third World famine reports, were making road and roadside indistinguishable. But the big blue bull bars parted the crowd discreetly, and Mativi dawdled forward to a hastily-erected barrier of velcrowire into which several incautious onlookers had already been pushed by their neighbours. Velcrowire barbs would sink a centimetre deep into flesh, then open up into barbs that could only be removed by surgeons, provided that the owner of the flesh desired to keep it. Barbed wire was not truly barbed. Velcrowire was.

  The troops at the only gap in the fence stood aside and saluted for the UN car, and Mativi pulled up next to an ancient Boeing V-22 VTOL transport, in the crew door of which a portly black man in a bad safari suit sat juggling with mobile phones. The casings of the phones, Mativi knew, were colour-coded to allow their owner to identify them. The Boeing had once been United Nations White. After too many years in the Congo, it was now Well-Used Latrine White.

  Mativi examined what was being done at the far end of the containment area. The site was a mass of specialized combat engineering machinery. Mativi recognized one of the devices, a Japanese-made tractor designed for defusing unexploded nuclear munitions - or rather, for dealing with what happened when a human nuclear UXB disposal operative made a mistake. Hair trigger sensors on the tractor would detect the incipient gamma flare of a fission reaction, then fire a 120-millimetre shell into the nuke. This would kill the bomb disposal man and fill the area around the bomb with weapons-grade fallout but probably save a few million civilians in the immediate area.

  Mativi walked across the compound and yelled at the man in the Boeing. "Louis, what the HELL are your UXB monkeys DOING?"

  Grosjean's head whipped round.

  "Oh, hello, Chet. We're following standard procedure for dealing with an unexploded weaponized gamma source."

  "Well, first off, this isn't a weapon."

  Grosjean's smile was contemptuous. "It's something that can annihilate the entire planet, and it isn't a weapon?"

  "It's thirty-nine things that can annihilate the planet, and they're not weapons any more. Think about it. Would anyone use a weapon that would blow up the whole world?"

  Grosjean actually appeared to seriously consider the possibility; then, he nodded to concede the point. "So what sort of weapon were these things part of?"

  "Not weapons," corrected Mativi. "Think of them as weapons waste. They were the principal components in a Penrose Accelerator."

  "You're making it up."

  "You damn fool security guy, me weapons inspector. We've suspected the People's Democratic Republic of Congo used Penrose weapons in their war with the Democratic People's Republic of Congo for some time. They had guns capable of lobbing loo-tonne shells full of plague germs at Pretoria from a distance of 4,000 kilometres, for instance. When we examined those guns after UNPEFORCONG overran their positions, what we found didn't fit. They had magnetic accelerators in their barrels but at the sort of muzzle velocities they'd have had to have been using, the magnets in the barrels would only have been any use in aiming, not in getting the payload up to speed. And the breech of each weapon had been removed. Something had been accelerating those projectiles, but it wasn't magnetism, and it wasn't gunpowder. The projectiles were big, and they were moving fast. You remember that outbreak of airborne rabies in New Zealand two years back? That was one of theirs. A Congolese shell fired too hot and went into orbit. The orbit decayed. The shell came down. Thirteen years after the war. Gunpowder and magnetism don't do that."

  "So what was it?"

  "A Penrose accelerator. You get yourself a heavy-duty rotating mass, big enough to have stuff orbit round it, and you whirl ordnance round those orbits, contrary to the direction of the mass's rotation. Half of your ordnance separates from the payload, and drops into the mass. The other half gets kicked out to mind-buggering velocities. The trouble is, none of this works unless the mass is dense enough to have an escape velocity greater than light."

  "A black hole."

  "Yes. You have yourself thirty-nine charged rotating black holes, formerly used as artillery accelerators, now with nowhere to go. Plus another hole lodged precariously on the back of a tractor on the public highway halfway between here and Djelo-Binza. And the only way for us to find enough energy to get rid of them, I imagine, would be to use another black hole to kick them into orbit. They also give off gamma, almost constantly, as they're constantly absorbing matter. You point one of those UXB defuser tractors at them and throw the safety on the gun, and —"

  "JESUS!" Grosjean stared at the ground-floor entrance where his men had been preparing to throw heavy artillery shells at the problem, jumped up, and began frantically waving his arms for them to stop. "OUI! OUI! ARRETE! ARRETE! And we thought getting rid of nuclear waste was difficult."

  "Looks easy to me," said Mativi, nodding in the direction of the highway. Two trucks with UNSMATDEMRE-CONG livery, their suspensions hanging low, had stopped just short of the military cordon in the eastbound lane. Their drivers had already erected signs saying LIGHT HEAT HERE FOR DOLLARS, and were handing out clear resin bricks that glowed with a soft green light to housewives who were coming out of the darkened prefabs nearby, turning the bricks over in their hands, feeling the warmth, haggling over prices.

  "Is that what I think it is?" said Grosjean. "I should stop that. It's dangerous, isn't it?"

  "Don't concern yourself with it right now. Those bricks can only kill one family at a time. Besides," said Mativi gleefully, "the city needs power, and Jean-Baptiste's men are only supplying a need, right?"

  Ngoyi, still in the passenger seat of the Hyundai, stared sadly as his men handed out radionuclides, and could not meet Mativi's eyes. He reached in his inside pocket for the gun he had attempted to kill Mativi with, and began, slowly and methodically, to clear the jam that had prevented him from doing so.

  "Once you've cordoned the area off," said Mativi, "we'll be handling things from that point onwards. I've contacted the IAEA myself. There's a continental response team on its way."

  In the car, Ngoyi had by now worked the jammed bullet free and replaced it with another. At the Boeing, Grosjean's jaw dropped. "You have teams set up to deal with this already?"

  "Of course. You don't think this is the first time this has happened, do you? It's the same story as with the A-bomb. As soon as physicists know it's possible, every tinpot dictator in the world wants it, and will do a great deal to get it, and certainly isn't going to tell us he's trying. Somewhere in the world at a location I am not aware of and wouldn't tell you even if I were, there is a stockpile of these beauties that would make your hair curl. I once spoke to a technician who'd just come back from there ... I think it's somewhere warm, he had a suntan. He said there were aisles of the damn things, literally thousands of them. The UN are working on methods of deactivating them, but right now our best theoretical methods for shutting down a black hole always lead to catastrophic Hawking evaporation, which would be like a i,ooo-tonne nuclear warhead going off. And if any one of those things broke out of containment, even one, it would sink through the Earth's crust like a stone into water. It'd get to the Earth's centre and beyond before it slowed down to a stop - and then, of course, it'd begin to fall to the centre again. It wouldn't rise to quite the same height on the other side of the Earth, just like a pendulum, swinging slower and slower and slower.

  Gathering bits of Earth into itself all the time, of course, until it eventually sank to the centre of the world and set to de
vouring the entire planet. The whole Earth would get sucked down the hole, over a period which varies from weeks to centuries, depending on which astrophysicist you ask. And you know what?" - and here Mativi smiled evilly. This was always the good part.

  "What?" Grosjean's Bantu face had turned whiter than a Boer's. From the direction of the car, Mativi heard a single, slightly muffled gunshot.

  "We have no way of knowing whether we already missed one or two. Whether one or two of these irresponsible nations carrying out unauthorized black hole research dropped the ball. How would we know, if someone kept their project secret enough? How would we know there wasn't a black hole bouncing up and down like a big happy rubber ball inside the Earth right now? Gravitational anomalies would eventually begin to show themselves, I suppose - whether on seismometers or mass detectors. But our world might only have a few decades to live - and we wouldn't be any the wiser.

  "Make sure that cordon's tight, Louis."

  Grosjean swallowed with difficulty, and nodded. Mativi wandered away from the containment site, flipping open his mobile phone. Miracle of miracles, even out here, it worked.

  "Hello darling ... No, I think it'll perhaps take another couple of days ...Oh, the regular sort of thing. Not too dangerous. Yes, we did catch this one ... Well, I did get shot at a little, but the guy missed. He was aiming on a purely Euclidean basis ...Euclidean. I'll explain when I get home ...Okay, well, if you have to go now then you have to go. I'll be on the 9 a.m. flight from Kinshasa."

  He flicked the phone shut and walked, whistling, towards the Hyundai. There was a spider's web of blood over the passenger side where Ngoyi had shot himself. Still, he thought, that's someone else's problem. This car goes back into the pool tomorrow. At least he kept the side window open when he did it. Made a lot less mess than that bastard Lamant did in Quebec City. And they made me clean that car.

  He looked out at the world.

  "Saved you again, you big round bugger, and I hope you're grateful."

  For the first time in a week, he was smiling.

  BLOODLETTING

  Kate Wilhelm

  In recent years Kate Wilhelm has become better known for her crime fiction novels, but for years - since her first sale in 1956 - she was a notable, if only occasional, writer of science fiction and fantasy, or speculative fiction, to use her preferred term. With her husband, Damon Knight, who died in 2002, she was a key player in creating both the Milford and Clarion SF Writers' workshops. Her SF novels include the Hugo-winning post-apocalyptic Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976), in which a community of clones find a remote hideaway to weather the storm. Her best short fiction will be found in The Infinity Box (1975), Somerset Dreams (1978), Children of the Wind (1989) and And the Angels Sing (1992). The following story, which considers how a global pandemic may start, is one of her more recent, and as yet remains uncollected.

  * * *

  I AM SITTING in my car, and nothing is visible, just the black night out there, the black night inside; the only sound is of the sea, the waves crashing against the cliff with fierce regularity. I remember the one time my grandmother came out here; she did not like the constant sea noise. She complained, "Don't it ever shut up?" She did not like the constant wind, either; worse than Kansas, she said on that trip. On my first visit to her farm in Kansas I marveled at the stars, and she took that to be a sign of a simple mind. But I knew then, and I think I still know, that they have more stars in Kansas than they do at the Oregon coast. Grandmother also said Warren was simple. But that was later, ten years ago.

  The impenetrable darkness has made me think of her, I suppose. She talked about growing up on the prairies that were virtually uninhabited, of being out late when there wasn't a light to be seen, of her fear of the dark then and forever after. When I said I wasn't afraid of the dark, she muttered, "You don't know dark, child. You don't know." I do now.

  She came out of the kitchen muttering the day I took Warren home to meet my family. "That man ain't as smart as he thinks," she said. "He don't know enough to open a can. Simple, that's what he is." I went to the kitchen to find Aunt Jewel showing Warren how to use an old can opener. He had never seen one like it. Simple. He was thirty, with a Ph.D., tenure at the University of Oregon, working with Gregory Oldhams. He had turned down other, better-paid, positions for the chance to work with Greg; he could have gone to Harvard, Stanford, almost anywhere he wanted.

  It has started to rain, a soothing monotonous patter on the roof of the car, and now a wind has come up, rustling in the firs, in the vine maples, the broom that grows down the face of the cliff where nothing else can find enough dirt to sink roots. I am very tired.

  I brought Warren up here before we were married; he was envious. "You grew up in a wilderness!" he said. He had grown up in Brooklyn.

  "Well, you're here now," I said. "So it doesn't really matter so much, does it?"

  "It matters," he said, gazing down at the ocean, then turning to look at the trees, and finally at the A-frame house below us and across a shallow ravine. I had lived in that house for the first twelve years of my life. "It matters," he repeated. "You have things in your eyes I'll never get. I have people and traffic and buildings, and people, more people, always more people, always more cars, more exhaust, more noise..." He stopped and I was glad. There was anguish in his voice, bitterness - I didn't know what it was; I didn't want to know it.

  Greg Oldhams is the foremost researcher in hematology, the study of blood. He already was famous when Warren started working with him, and since then his research, and Warren's, has become what the articles call legendary. At first, after I met Warren, I felt almost ashamed of my own field -medieval literature. What was the point in that, I wondered, compared to the importance of what they were doing? At first, Warren talked about his work with excitement, passion even, but then he stopped. I know to the day when it changed. On Mikey's fifth birthday, five years ago. Warren didn't come home in time for the party, and when he did get home, he was old.

  A person can become old in a day, I learned then. Mikey turned five; Warren turned a hundred.

  The wind is increasing; there may be a gale moving in. I had to roll up the window on my side when the rain started, and when I reached over to open the passenger side window, I realized I still had the seat belt fastened and then it seemed too hard to work the clasp and free myself. I began to laugh, and then I was crying and laughing. I don't care if rain comes in the passenger side, but the wind makes a harsh whistling sound through the narrow opening near my head, and I have to decide, open the window more and get wet, or close it. I can't bear the whistling noise. Finally I make the effort to undo the seat belt, reach over, and open the other window and close the driver-side one. Now I can hear the ocean, and the rain, and even the wind in the trees. So much exertion, I mock myself, but I have to lean back and rest.

  This is where I told Warren yes, I would marry him, up here overlooking the sea. "No children," he said. "The world has enough children."

  I backed away from him and we regarded each other. "But I want a family," I said after a moment. "At least one child of ours, our genes. We can adopt another one or two."

  Nothing was settled that day. We went back to the A-frame and banged pots and pans and argued and I told him to get lost, to get out of my life, and he said it would be criminal to bring another child into the world and I was being selfish, and the much-touted maternal urge was cultural, and I said people like us owed it to children to give them the same advantages we had, education, love, care... It went on into the night, when I told him to sleep on the couch, and the next day, until I stomped out of the house and came up here to glare at the ocean and its incessant racket. He came after me. "Christ," he said. "Jesus. One." Two months later we were married and I was pregnant.

  When Mikey was two he got a big sister, Sandra, who was three and a half, and a year later he got a bigger brother, Chris, who was five. Our family.

  Mikey was four when they all had chicken pox at th
e same time. One night Warren was keeping them entertained, coloring with them at the table while I made dinner.

  "Why did you make him green?" Chris demanded.

  "Because he has artificial blood," Warren said.

  "Why?"

  "Because something went wrong with his blood and they had to take it out and put in artificial blood."

  Mikey began to cry. "Is that what they'll do to us?"

  "Nope. You're not sick enough. You've just got spots on your face. You call that sick? I call it kvetching."

  "What's that?" Sandra asked. She had fallen in love with Warren the day we met her, and he loved all three children.

  "That's when you grow spots on your face, and itch, and pretend you're sick so your mother will let you eat ice cream all day if you want. And your dad plays silly games with you when he should be at work. That's kvetching."

  They liked kvetching. Later they got into my lipstick and tried to make it all happen again, spots, whining for ice cream, laughing.

  Later it was funny, but that night, with my sick children at the table, itching, feverish, it was not funny. I froze at the sink with water running over lettuce. Artificial blood? We were still in the cold war; atomic war was still possible, anything was possible. Even artificial blood.

  "Why?" I asked, after the children were in bed.

  He had to start way back. "Remember in the movie Dracula how the good doctor transfused one of the women over and over with whole blood, and it took? Pure luck. Lucy was probably an A-group type, and so was the guy. If he had put blood from an O group in her, she probably would have died on him. That's how it was. One took, another one, then bingo, it didn't. Then they found out about the blood groups, and later on about how the agglutinogens combine with certain agglutinins, and not others. And we've been learning ever since. The body treats the wrong blood type just like any other invading organism, bacterium, virus, whatever, and rejects it. But in the case of a major catastrophe you can't count on the lab facilities to handle the typing, the storage, all the mechanics of transfusions. The labs might not be there. We've got artificial blood now, you know, but it's pretty high-tech stuff."