'Make a habit of monkey antics,' declared another guest. 'Pleasure employs muscles of enlightenment.' Then he led in a screaming chimp, a.s.sured everyone its name was Ramone, pushed it down a slide and said 'There you go.' Skychum told him he was playing a dangerous game.

A sag-eyed old man p.r.o.nounced his judgment. 'The dawn of the beard was the dawn of modern civilisation.'

'In what way.'

'In that time spent growing a beard is time wasted. Now curb this strange melancholy-let us burn our legs with these matches and shout loud.'

'I ... I'm sorry ... what. . .'

And the codger was dancing a strange jig on the table, cackling from a dry throat.

'One conk on the head and he'll stop dancing,' whispered someone behind the cameras.

Another suspect was the ringmaster of the Lobster Circus, who lashed at a wagon-ring of these unresponsive creatures as though at the advancing sp.a.w.n of the devil. 'The time will come,' he announced, 'when these mothers will be silent.' And at that he laid the whip into a lobster positioned side-on to him, breaking it in half.

A little girl read a poem: behind answers are hoverflies properly modest, but they will do anything for me One guy made the stone-faced a.s.sertion that belching was an actual language. Another displayed a fossilised eightball of mammoth dung and said it was 'simply biding its time'. Another stated merely that he had within his chest a 'flaming heart' and expected this to settle or negate all other concerns.

Then it was straight in with Skychum, known to the host as a heavyhitter among those who rolled up with their lies at a moment's notice. The host's face was an emulsioned wall as he listened to the older man describe some grandiose reckoning. 'n.o.body's free until everyone is, right?' was the standard he reached for in reply.

'Until someone someone is.' is.'

'Airless Martians still gasping in a town of smashed geodesics,' he stated, and gave no clue as to his question. After wringing the laughs out of Skychum's perplexed silence, he continued. 'These Martians-what do they have against us?'

'Not Martians-metaversal beings in a hypers.p.a.ce we are using as a skeleton cupboard. Horror past its sell-by date is dismissed with the claim that a lesson is learnt, and the sell-by interval is shortening to minutes.'

'I don't understand,' said the host with a kind of defiance.

'The media believe in resolution at all costs, and this is only human.' Once again Skychum's sepulchral style was doing the trick-there was a lot of sn.i.g.g.e.ring as he scowled like a chef. 'Dismissal's easier than learning.'

'So you're calling down this evangelical carnage.'

'I'm not-'

'In simple terms, for the layman'-the eyebrows of irony flipped to such a blur they vanished-'how could all these bodies be floating out in "hyper" s.p.a.ce?'

'Every form which has contained life has its equivalent echo in the super-etheric-if forced back into the physical, these etheric echoes will a.s.sume physical shape.'

'Woh!' shouted the host, delighted, and the audience exploded with applause-this was exactly the kind of wacko bulls.h.i.t they'd come to hear. 'And why should they arrive at this particular time?'

'They have become synchronised to our culture, those who took on the task-it is appropriate, poetic!'

The audience whooped, flushed with the nut's sincerity.

'The great thing about being ignored is that you can speak the truth with impunity.'

'But I call you a fraud, Dr Skychum. These verbal manipulations cause a hairline agony in the honest man. Expressions of the grave should rival the public? I don't think so. Where's the light and shade?'

Skychum leant forward, shaking with emotion. 'You slur me for one who is bitter and raging at the world. But you mustn't kick a man when he's down, and so I regard the world.' Then Ramone the chimp sprang on to his head, shrieking and flailing.

'Dr Skychum,' said the host. 'If you're right, I'm I'm a monkey.' a monkey.'

The ringmaster of the Lobster Circus was declared the winner. The man with the flaming heart died of a coronary and the man with the dung fossil threw it into the audience and stormed off. A throne shaped like the halfsh.e.l.ls of a giant nut was set up for the crowning ceremony. Skychum felt light, relieved. He had acquitted himself with honour. He enjoyed the jelly and ice cream feast set up for the contestants backstage. Even the chimp's food-flinging antics made him smile. He approached the winner with goodwill. 'Congratulations sir. Those lobsters of yours are a brutal threat to mankind.'

The winner looked mournfully up at him. 'I love them,' he whispered, and was swept away backwards by the make-up crew.

At the moment of the turn, Skychum left the studio building by a side entrance, hands deep in his coatpockets. Under a slouch hat which obscured his sky, he moved off down a narrow street roofed completely by the landscape of a s.p.a.cecraft's undercarriage.

During the last hour, as dullards were press-ganged onto ferris wheels and true celebrants arrested in amplified streets, hundreds of multidimensional ships had hoved near, denial-allow shields up. Uncloaking, they had appeared in the upper atmosphere like new moons. Now they hove into position over every capital city in the world, impossible to evade. Fifteen miles wide, these immense overshadow machines rumbled across the sky like a coffin lid drawing slowly shut. New York was being blotted out by a floating city whose petalled geometry was only suggested by sections visible above the canyon streets. Grey hieroglyphics on the underside were actually spires, bulkheads and structures of skysc.r.a.ping size. Its central eye, a mile-wide concavity deep in shadow, settled over uptown as the hovering landscape thundered to a stop and others took up position over London, Beijing, Berlin, Nairobi, Los Angeles, Kabul, Paris, Zurich, Baghdad, Moscow, Tokyo and every other conurbation with cause to be a little edgy. One nestled low over the White House like an inverted cathedral. In the early light they were silent, unchanging fixtures. Solid and subject to the sun.

The President, hair like a dirty iceberg, slapped on a middling smile and talked about caution and opportunity. Everywhere nerves were clouded around with awe and high suspension. Traffic stopped. Fanatics partied. The old man's name was remembered if not his line-a woman held a sign aloft saying I'M A SKY CHUM. Cities waited under dumb, heavy air.

Over the White House, a screeching noise erupted. The central eye of the ship was opening. Striations like silver insect wings cracked, ma.s.sive steel doors grinding downward.

The same was happening throughout the world, a silver flower opening down over Parliament, Whitehall and the dead Thames; over the Reichstag building, the World Bank, the Beijing Politburo.

The DC saucer eye was open, the bellow of its mechanism echoing away. Onlookers craned to see up inside.

For the s.p.a.ce of two heartbeats, everything stopped. Then a tiny tear dropped out of the eye, splashing on the White House roof.

And then another, falling like a light fleck of snow.

These were corpses, these two-human corpses, followed by more in a shower which grew heavier by the moment, some crashing now through the roof, some rolling to land in the drive, bouncing to hit the lawn, bursting to paint the porticoes. And then the eye began gushing.

Everywhere the eyes were gushing. With a strange, continuous, multiphonic squall, the ragged dead rained from the sky.

Sixty-eight forgotten pensioners buried in a ma.s.s grave in 1995 were dumped over the Chicago social services. Hundreds of blacks murdered in police cells. .h.i.t the roof of Scotland Yard. Thousands of slaughtered East Timorese were dumped over the a.s.sembly buildings in Jakarta. Thousands killed in the test bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki began raining over the Pentagon. Thousands tortured to death showered Abuja.

Thousands of Sudanese slaves were dumped over Khartoum. The border-dwelling Khmer Rouge found themselves cemented into a milehigh gut slurry of three million Cambodians. Thousands of hill tribesmen were dropped over the Bangladeshi parliament and the World Bank, the latter now swamped irretrievably under corpses of every hue.

Berlin was almost instantly clotted, its streets packed wall to wall with victims. Beijing was swamped with tank fodder and girl babies.

The Pentagon well filled quickly to overflowing, blowing the building outward as surely as a terrorist bomb. Pearl Harbor dupes fell on Tokyo and Washington in equal share. The streets of America flooded with j.a.panese, Greeks, Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians, Dominicans, Libyans, Timorese, Central Americans and Americans, all beclouded in a pink mist of Dresden blood.

London was a flowing sewer-then the bodies started falling. Parliament splintered like a matchstick model. In the Strand the living ran from a rolling wall of the dead. A king tide of hole-eyed German, Indian, African, Irish and English civilians surged over and against buildings which boomed flat under the pressure. Cars were batted along, flipped and submerged. The Thames flooded its banks, displaced by cadavers.

No longer preserved by denial, they started to sludge. Carpet-bombing gore spattered the suburbs, followed by human slurry tumbling down the streets like lava. Cheap human fallout from pain ignored and war extended for profit. The first wave. So far only sixty years' worth-yet, tilling like bulldozed trash, it spread across the map like red inkblots destined to touch and merge.

Skychum had taken the 8:20 Amtrak north from Grand Central-it had a policy of not stopping for bodies. Grim, he viewed the raining horizon-dust motes in a shaft of light-and presently, quietly, he spoke.

'Many happy returns.'

THE END OF THE FUTURE.

Colette Phair.

I HADN'T KNOWN what time it was in two years. It was hard to wait when you didn't know how long you had. In a weird way I felt like I was on vacation. But there was work to be done.

Each of us was getting ready, adding in baby bottle drips to our modest stockpile. Plenty to look at, at least. Hooks to hold up all sc.r.a.ps we found, flowers and wires growing through the floor, holes pasted over with anything, metal turning into deep blue. A dull pastel as you came in, worn tile on the wall, ripped plastic shower curtain stuck to the window with army tape. And through it a calm ocean, eternity of restraint. You wouldn't have suspected the world was so close to ruin.

Two figures stood before a missing wall, real working shutters on the ground and "Pour le reve" written in the dust. Broken gla.s.s popping underfoot, walking over busted doors to get to the real one. Shovels set up for a shelter but all we had to bury ourselves in was sand. Despite some sporadic precautions, everyone knew this place wasn't going to do us much good once the end hit. So what were they doing here? j.a.panese on the walls and Spanish on the ceilings, communication breaking down. Jule appearing for the occasion. She only spoke English when she had to.

"You come for end of world?"

She could tell they were cool or she wouldn't be talking to them. Green in the head and on their clothes. They looked like twins, but only because everything on them matched, like twins who were still children. They were new.

"Welcome," Jule said. Why was she trusting them just because they looked interesting? It was the worst practice. I glared at them just to even things out.

The girl came up and made some hand signs, using them to say "We - trust - you - by - G.o.d - we - seek - we - feel - you." Then with her voice she said "Got lost."

"What your names?"

"Maria and Z."

"And where you come from?"

Z was standing with her now too. Watching like he got something useful out of everybody. He tossed his green dreads and laughed. "A sad childhood, like everyone." They were in.

JULE TOOK THEM in to the torture room. It was called the torture room because Calc practiced his drums in there. She gave them some sc.r.a.ps and the grand tour ... down the wide-open barriers, the brief mouse maze. Rooms unused, rooms we'd forgotten about. Some rooms devoted to nothing but trash, our own landfill we had to live with. She led them through a human-sized hole in the wall that they had to lift their legs up to get through and stopped just on the other side to point out a walled honeycomb of tiny gla.s.s cells making up a larger cabinet framed in light pink plastic like a toy box. Inside each cell was a different supply: a compa.s.s, a condom ... And then, through a cardboard tunnel and up the stair, turn right, you'd find the lab.

The lab ... blue science, makeshift medicine ... converted from a storage room into pink walls-whoever'd found it before us. Tools we didn't know the use for, parts saved from hospital Dumpsters and biohazard bins. A hammer like a bird's beak, stringy gauze like a spider web, malformed metals, shape and sharpness hinting at their use. Magnetic tubing coiling upward on a ternary coat rack. A kid's chemistry set, pretend solutions, surgical texts forming tables. A safety station had been set up next door, long abandoned. We'd already taken what we could use from it, but the place was uninhabitable, even by our standards.

I stood, idle notebook in my grasp, looking out on the station. Airplane trails showed through the window, heading up and down, and below me doors that were all French and shattered like breaking out of a mold. I imagined former tenants smashing through them in their escape. How much better it must feel to run outside to safety than in.

Calc sat on the floor below, arranging a few of his personal items. Matches, medical packaging, a surgeon's knife. It took awhile watching him to realize what he was preparing was a meal. Among historical newspapers turning into toilet paper, headlines illegible through slang. Food wrapping, half-used everything, garbage or what was becoming garbage. Light was reflected through dirt in the tile. Looked like it'd be so easy to clean it, but who was going to? He washed the knife in toothpaste, then set it back down on the floor.

"Calc, what's 286 divided by 13?" I asked.

He told me and I wrote it down. "Calories," I said. "What's the square root of pi minus 9?"

"Minus 7.2275461490945. Why?"

I smiled. "Just wanted to see if you could do it."

"f.u.c.k you."

Jule was washing in the ocean. I could see her through the safe window. When she came in she sat down before us and said "My teeth hurt."

"Might be time to invest in a toothbrush," I told her.

"I do, it's not enough," she whined.

I motioned at her with the notebook. "It's all this sugar you've been picking up. We're not going to be going to any dentist. Stop with the sugar. We can't afford sugar."

"Sugar's all we have," she said.

I HAD AN idea it was evening when sun no longer hit the interior walls and the others had come in. Outside it was getting cold and inside it was getting colder. We gathered in the east stairwell. Z spoke biblically. Calc came in like sleepwalking and started a fire.

"You don't really think the world's going to end ..."

Outside people were living in houses, like normal. They were doing what they always did. In here shelves housed KFMs and KAPs, pota.s.sium iodide and medicine droppers. We were better prepared for the worst.

Jule was talking now. "It's paranoia."

Calc held fire on a stick. He said that it was happening already. That the kids would be the first to go, like miners' canaries. They'd see. Everything familiar lost to the big machine in tear gas crowds.

"Why are my eyes watering?" he asked, it seemed of Jule.

"Maybe you're crying."

Calc put the fire down. "Am I crying?" he asked no one, his voice only now beginning to tremble.

Before sleep I crept down to the cupboards, and only as I came up upon the empty shelves was I able to admit how hungry I was. I'd wanted the orange but Maria had gotten to it first. Garbage was empty and world was dark. There wouldn't be anything new till tomorrow. For some reason this felt much worse than it was, so that I sat down and just couldn't get up. Then I wished I could starve for weeks, grieved that this was not even the sort of tragedy that could be profound, that you got something out of suffering through. It was just a night.

IN THE MORNING I settle down into a nest of wires braided into dysfunction, on a floor sprinkled with shards of gla.s.s. Jule is walking around barefoot. I feel like I should tell her not to, but I know she won't listen to me. I tell her anyway. She doesn't listen. She curls up in the corner of the room and starts reading intently the nutrition information on one piece of trash after another. She's as good as asleep to us, so that Z and I are the only ones in the room.

"Puzzle's almost done," I say. "They just need to make a piece that will fit with something so twisted." Z's decoding a sc.r.a.p of Styrofoam. I realize this is the first time I've spoken to him.

"Did you do that?" he says in distinct syllables, each one stressed as much as the other.

I look behind me to where he's looking, at a graffiti mural bursting open with metal flowers on a giant egg, cracks in the walls betraying its two dimensions. Why he should a.s.sume it was me, when there are others living here, and many more before us ...

"No," I say, turning back to him. "I'm not an artist."

"Ah," he sighs. "Me neither. But it's an important job. We need more beautiful pictures."

"Pictures? The world's about to end. We have more practical matters to worry about."

"What are your worries?" he asks, looking me up and down. I notice I haven't done anything all day.

"I'm not that worried," I say.

We both think of something for me to do.

"Maybe you should be an artist."

"No." He's looking for some explanation so I give him one. "Why strive for any great goal when we all might die soon anyway?"

"We all always might."

"Oh that's really some consolation," I tell him.

He's still decoding and smiling as though the speculations of this conversation couldn't interrupt any of his normal routines of action. "This stuff was invented by the dinosaurs. Their innovations getting dusty. When the old tech is finally set off ..." he says, then pauses so long I almost don't care what he's going to finish with. "... Kind of an anticlimax."