4/4 time; that’ll drain the power out of anything
“With Gustav Adolf, you can’t ever be sure. He’s got intimidation down to a science and he’s usually playing the power game on several levels—simultaneously, mind you, not sequentially.”
Poor Grand Master. It’s a difficult role you’ve chosen. Almost as lonely as mine.
The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.
Behind him, he was aware of a tiny click as the door, cushioned by the hydraulic check, shut forever. It was not locked; but its other side bore the warning MEN.
And things were feeling eerie, which isn’t how they ought to feel to someone who loves solitude as much as I do, or pretend to myself I do. But the Martian landscape is even more spectral than that of Arabia or the American Southwest–lonely and beautiful and obsessed with death and immensity and sometimes it strikes through.
There is a flower that grows on Mars. It is red and harsh and fit for our soil. It is called haemanthus. It means blood blossom.
Ever see a plant with teeth—that bite? I don’t think you want to. You’d have to be on Pyrrus and that means you would be dead within seconds of leaving the ship.
A few, less constrained by pride and more resilient, survived and had children. Their offspring grew up with no illusions about the supremacy of humankind or anykind. They matured and observed the world around them through different eyes. Roll the log. Give and take. Bend with the wind. Adapt, adapt, adapt …!
“We stand undisputed masters of the Solar System and poised on the edge of interstellar space itself, just as they did fifty thousand years ago. And so, gentlemen, we inherit the stars.”
Nearly everywhere I’ve been, popular wisdom has it that the location of humanity’s original planet is unknown, mysterious. In fact it isn’t, as anyone who troubles to read on the subject will discover, but it is very, very, very far away from nearly anywhere, and not a tremendously interesting place. Or at the very least, not nearly as interesting as the enchanting idea that your people are not newcomers to their homes but in fact only recolonized the place they had belonged from the beginning of time. One meets this claim anywhere one finds a remotely human-habitable planet.
Behind a tiny ship heading into space is a doomed planet on the verge of suicide. Ahead lies a place called Earth, the third planet from the Sun. And for William Sturka and the men and women with him, it’s the eve of the beginning—in the Twilight Zone.
But we have crossed millions of miles of nothingness. We have visited another world.
It’s just a name, like the Death Zone, or the Zone of No Return. All the zones have names like that in the Galaxy of Terror.
Okay, so scariest environment imaginable. Thanks. That’s all you gotta say, scariest environment imaginable.
How could I have died and gone to hell without noticing the transition?
And that’s it. I spend the rest of the time standing in his doorway, looking over his shoulder at the computer screen. Watching him play my Hell.
A fire burned on the ocean, and that alchemy of flame and water produced luminescent calligraphy. At the modest, rustic villa that was the center of the world, the roof tiles repeated three phonetic letters. The children had posed the question, “Why?”
To put an end to your meddling. Who gave you the right to go bungling around in time, putting right what I made wrong?!
There were timelines branching and branching, a mega-universe of universes, millions more every minute. Billions? Trillions? The universe split every time someone made a decision. Split, so that every decision ever made could go both ways. Every choice made by every man, woman, and child was reversed in the universe next door.