MASADA
The city of XK-Masada
sprouts like a vast mushroom, a milewide dome emerging from the top
of a cold plateau on a dry planet that orbits a dying star. The
jagged black shapes of F-117s howl across the empty skies outside
it at dusk and dawn, patrolling the threatening emptiness that
stretches as far as the mind can imagine.
Shadows move in the
streets of the city, hollowed-out human shells in uniform. They
rustle around the feet of the towering concrete blocks like the dry
leaves of autumn, obsessively focused on the tasks that lend
structure to their remaining days. Above them tower masts of steel,
propping up the huge geodesic dome that arches across the sky:
blocking out the hostile, alien constellations, protecting frail
humanity from the dust storms that periodically scour the bones of
the ancient world. The gravity here is a little lighter, the night
sky whorled and marbled by the diaphanous sheets of gas blasted off
the dying star that lights their days. During the long, winter
nights, a flurry of carbon dioxide snow dusts the surface of the
dome: but the air is bone-dry, the city slaking its thirst on
subterranean aquifers.
This planet was once
alive—there is still a scummy sea of algae near the equator that
feeds oxygen into the atmosphere, and there is a range of volcanoes
near the north pole that speaks of plate tectonics in motion—but it
is visibly dying. There is a lot of history here, but no
future.
Sometimes, in the
early hours when he cannot sleep, Roger walks outside the city,
along the edge of the dry plateau. Machines labor on behind him,
keeping the city tenuously intact: he pays them little attention.
There is talk of mounting an expedition to Earth one of these
years, to salvage whatever is left before the searing winds of time
erase it forever. Roger doesn’t like to think about that. He tries
to avoid thinking about Earth as much as possible: except when he
cannot sleep but walks along the cliff top, prodding at memories of
Andrea and Jason and his parents and sister and relatives and
friends, each of them as painful as the socket of a missing tooth.
He has a mouthful of emptiness, bitter and aching, out here on the
edge of the plateau.
Sometimes Roger
thinks he’s the last human being alive. He works in an office,
feverishly trying to sort out what went wrong: and bodies move
around him, talking, eating in the canteen, sometimes talking
to him and waiting as if they expect a
dialogue. There are bodies here, men and some women chatting,
civilian and some military—but no people. One of the bodies, an
army surgeon, told him he’s suffering from a common stress
disorder, survivor’s guilt. This may be so, Roger admits, but it
doesn’t change anything. Soulless days follow sleepless nights into
oblivion, dust trickling over the side of the cliff like sand into
the un-dug graves of his family.
A narrow path runs
along the side of the plateau, just downhill from the foundations
of the city power plant, where huge apertures belch air warmed by
the radiators of the nuclear reactor. Roger follows the path,
gravel and sandy rock crunching under his worn shoes. Foreign stars
twinkle overhead, forming unrecognizable patterns that tell him
he’s far from home. The trail drops away from the top of the
plateau, until the city is an unseen shadow looming above and
behind his shoulder. To his right is a dizzying panorama, the huge
rift valley with its ancient city of the dead stretched out before
him. Beyond it rise alien mountains, their peaks as high and
airless as the dead volcanoes of Mars.
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 lives. 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 toward
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.
Afterword—“A Colder War”This wasn’t originally going to be an H. P. Lovecraft tribute story, honest; it was going to be about alienation and inhumanity when I started writing it in 1997.But I happened to be rereading “At the Mountains of Madness” at the time, and purely by coincidence caught a documentary on TV that featured one of those sinister May Day parades through Moscow, with the ranks of tanks and infantry carriers rumbling through Red Square. I couldn’t help sketching in a vision of low-loaders like tank transporters—burdened with something amorphous, barely glimpsed beneath a tarpaulin—rolling past the review stand, and all at once I was left wondering, What kind of present day would Professor Pabodie’s Antarctic expedition have led to?Nothing good, that’s for sure.A couple of years later, some of the questions raised by this story came back to haunt me in a different context as I began writing “The Atrocity Archive.” But I can’t maintain that level of existential bleakness at greater length (which is probably a good thing) . . .