Tomorrow's Parties by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction; sci-fi; climate change; Kim Stanley Robinson; James Bradley; Meg Elison; Tade Thompson; Daryl Gregory; Greg Egan; Sarah Gailey; Justina Robson; Chen Qiufan; Emily Jin; Malka Older; Saad Z. Hossain; Sean Bodley
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2022-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

7

I Give You the Moon

Justina Robson

The apocalypse was a terrible disappointment.

There was no great flood. Fire did not fall from the sky, not even a meteorite. You couldn’t even write the line, “Death stalked slowly in her cloak of many viruses, because Terminators always walk,” because although that was true it gave the event a lot more color and interest than it deserved. Even displayed in graphs and comparative charts with numbers and pulsating animated globs and fire-crisping maps it took thirty years to complete. It progressed by boring increments of boom and bust before fizzling out to inconvenient embers in the cities, where for ages its only sign was the sudden hacking cough of passersby to startle the occasional cat from its nap on the hot pavements. Millions died, several times, and nobody since had stopped banging on about it in case it wasn’t really over, though what their anxiety was going to do to fix it was anybody’s guess.

Jack took off his hat. The lesson that had filled his hearing and vision vanished. He set the hat down on the sand beside him and sat in the sudden quiet of the calm sea and the empty sky, not even a gull to see. The breeze boxed his ears with a random blather. A hundred meters to his left the old man who had been fishing when he started his lecture, was still fishing in exactly the same spot. As far as the eye could see in all directions, they were alone.

Behind them Jack felt the continental bulk of Africa sitting quietly, satisfied with whatever was going on. It had a cozy quality this afternoon, not so much at their backs as having their backs in a way that seemed to say that they were free to do what they wanted about whatever they thought important, silly little creatures, it would still be there regardless, no worries, until something happened to it far in the future that changed it into something new. But Jack wouldn’t see that, it was a problem for future Africa, though as Africa had no problem with it there was no problem at all. Continents were lucky that way.

Right now Jack’s problem was that he had to complete his history course before he could qualify for Viking Adventure. Jack had lived his whole life on this coastline and Viking Adventure would take him far away from it, through strange lands to the white North where the last ice still capped the planet. He longed to feel it, to taste it, to see how cold it was. Here on the beach the temperature was about 30°C and the idea of a glacier, a frozen river, a snowfield—felt like the most amazing thing there could be. Almost unbelievable that it existed. And the Vikings themselves, creatures of legend: he felt a kinship of a strange kind to them, savage travelers wandering their own coasts, fearless upon the sea in ships made by hand, out of wood—forests! Ah,

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