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    After the Fireflood
    After the Fireflood
    After the Fireflood
    Ebook218 pages3 hours

    After the Fireflood

    By John Walters

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    As a consequence of the Fourth World War, the entire Earth is engulfed in a torrent of fire, transforming the landscape and obliterating all life.  Using terraforming, time travel, and other expediencies, human survivors from Moonbase and outer colonies attempt to cope with their devastating loss, reconstruct the Earth's surface, and reorganize Earth sociologically to ensure lasting peace.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJohn Walters
    Release dateNov 5, 2015
    ISBN9781386434467
    After the Fireflood
    Author

    John Walters

    John Walters recently returned to the United States after thirty-five years abroad. He lives in Seattle, Washington. He attended the 1973 Clarion West science fiction writing workshop and is a member of Science Fiction Writers of America. He writes mainstream fiction, science fiction and fantasy, and memoirs of his wanderings around the world.

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      Book preview

      After the Fireflood - John Walters

      Contents

      Part One:  Noah and the Fireflood

      Part Two:  The Last Hurrah of the Time Tiger

      Part Three:  Shackled

      Part Four:  The Earth-Born

      Part Five:  The Perspicacity of Soaring Eagle

      Part Six:  Debby Death Meets the Time Tiger

      Part Seven:  The New Earth

      End Notes

      Part One

      Noah and the Fireflood

      This much is known by all intelligent species, being one of the great tragedies of all time:  Earth’s atmosphere ignited and burned; Earth became a fireball, then a glowing heap of ash and molten rock.

      From worlds all over the galaxy Earth’s descendants and sympathetic aliens came to mourn.  By the time they had arrived and set up encampments on the Moon, most of Earth’s surface had cooled.  It had melted like an ancient wax candle.  Not a microbe remained alive.

      A lesser-known event, dwarfed by Earth’s demise, was the disappearance of Dalia Lee. 

      Her father was an ambassador from one of the outer worlds and she had come with his delegation as his private secretary.  She was slim, dark-skinned, with large brown eyes and wavy black hair that, when not tied or braided and looped, fell to the small of her back.  She loved animals and had pets from many different worlds, but her dream had always been to travel to Earth to pick up DNA cultures of the fauna, and construct a vast zoo-park on her home world.  When she realized the impossibility of the fulfillment of her vision (for there were replicates of very few Earth species off-planet) she became despondent, almost comatose.  But after several days of fasting and lamentation she abruptly regained her vigor.  She stole her father’s spacecraft, neutralized the security tracking system, and headed off into space.  She surfaced a few hundred light years away, where she converted some of the family assets into negotiable hard trading goods, mostly rare microchips and illicit but popular hallucinogenic drugs.  Then she vanished, never again to be seen in known space.

      All this is well documented, and can be found out through a minimum of research in any number of news databases. 

      With the ship’s homing signal deactivated, a search was impossible.  Her family and friends could only wait and hope.  Finally it was assumed that she had died, either in the blackness between stars or on some unknown planet or moon, and the spacecraft had become her coffin.  Her parents, it is said, never recovered from the loss; her father retired from the foreign service and died soon afterwards, and her mother became remote and asocial and spent her time gardening.  Her lovers had been casual; they shrugged and went on to other loves.  Her pets were given to others, turned loose, or terminated.  In short, time flowed over the emptiness that Dalia Lee had left, and moved on.

      But Dalia Lee had not died.

      Her first stop after acquiring the supplies was Peekaboo Port.  It was well off the normal shipping lanes, known only to the smugglers that used it as a refuge and a few top-secret law enforcement agencies; but her father, being a diplomat with high-security clearance, was privy to such information, and his daughter, as his secretary, could easily access it as well.

      Unfortunately though, she didn’t know the current local password, so she had to come in fighting.  She punched a hole through the dome that contained the Port’s breathable atmosphere and sprayed inside a powerful psychedelic, and while most of the inhabitants of Peekaboo were hallucinating wildly her ship, loaded with state-of-the-art weapons technology, made short work of the defense systems.

      The inhabitants of Peekaboo, both permanent and transient, in the midst of living their most cherished dreams and worst nightmares, didn’t know, nor did they care, that their attacker had no intention of achieving supremacy in their uniquely structured hierarchy or of arresting them and confining them to hard labor – two motives they would consider most likely, were they in a position to reason at all.

      Instead, she wanted information, and a bit of hardware.

      Dalia Lee docked her ship, donned a chameleon suit (whose base color was turquoise) of flexible but highly resilient body armor and a rainbow-hued re-breather mask that looked like a beetle’s wings with visors, and set out through the maze of Peekaboo Port.

      The Port intentionally had no architectural coherence.  The residents had been encouraged to improvise, to construct labyrinths with dead ends and pitfalls designed to confound those who got through the outer defenses.  So Dalia Lee had to walk circumspectly as she searched.  She knew whom to look for but not where to find him.

      But locate him she did, after traversing corridors of iron, brass, cement masonry, plexigold, xend tissue, and oak wood (this last must have been artificial, but it was replicated with extreme fastidiousness); on the way she picked seven locks, blasted through three walls, avoided innumerable death traps, and finally ran a gauntlet of a mélange of mirrors that kept changing shape and size and distance.

      When Dalia Lee entered the room it was an elegant palace that he had wired into its memory, with mosaics on the floor and tapestries on the walls, crimson silk curtains and golden lamps, groveling slaves and faithful pets from all over the galaxy.  When she turned off the simulation, however, she saw he lived in a hovel stinking of sweat and urine that had a stainless steel cot, chair, and table and little else in the way of furniture.  Her head almost scraped the ceiling and there was hardly space to turn around.

      He was lying naked on the cot’s flimsy mattress, rolling his eyes at the ceiling.  He looked more or less human; at least he had the right number of arms, fingers, legs, toes, and so on.  His skin was tan mottled with large chocolate-colored spots, and callous-like ridges ran from his neck over his shoulders, down his arms to his claws.  His sparse body hair was bright yellow.  Whorls of crimson were tattooed onto his forehead, cheeks, and chin.

      She injected him with a generous dose of the hallucinogen’s antidote and, after sitting back and waiting for it to take effect, said, We have to talk.

      He had a high-pitched nasal voice.  Who are you?

      I’m the Queen of Peekaboo Port, but I hereby renounce my throne.  I came not to take but to give.

      With a quizzical expression:  And what will you give?

      A generous recompense, in return for the smallest of favors.

      Ah.  There’s always a catch.

      You should know.

      But who are you?  I don’t recognize you.  I know everyone here.

      I’m the mystery woman, the bearer of psychedelic splendor, the harbinger of dazzling dreams, the turquoise tantalizer.  I just arrived.  I know you, however:  Carver Cuttner, procurer extraordinaire.

      And what can I procure for you, my lovely?

      A map with the precise location of the Time Tiger, and twelve clones of myself.

      With that he sputtered, sat up, and shook his head as if just awakening.  Why did you turn off my palace?  And how did you get in here? And what did you just say?

      You heard me.  You have an excellent memory.  Unfortunately, since I’m short of time I had to force my way in.  The entire population of Peekaboo is effectively neutralized.

      "And why do I have the dubious pleasure of your company?"

      There are very few people who know what you were up to ten years ago and why you ran here to hide – but I am one of those people.

      Oh.  He stared at the floor, and scratched the yellow bristles between his eyebrows.  Then he realized he was naked and pulled a sheet over himself.  In the simulation I’m adorned in royal robes.

      No doubt.  Sorry for the abruptness, but can we talk business?

      This goes beyond business.  Before I help you I want to know why you need these items.

      Let’s just say it’s for a rescue attempt.  Maybe.

      The map to the Time Tiger is right here.  He tapped his left temple.  Maybe.

      And?

      You couldn’t raise twelve clones without getting detected anywhere, not even at Peekaboo.

      Can you get the hardware?

      He nodded.  The hardware, sure, in pieces, as long as I don’t assemble it here so it’s obvious what I’m up to.  Even Peekaboo doesn’t tolerate cloning; there are automatic defenses against it.  But why should I?

      For the Time Tiger.

      Right.  Right.  For the Time Tiger.

      *     *     *

      Dalia Lee left Peekaboo Port with bits of seemingly unrelated materials in her ship’s hold, and a reconstituted Carver Cuttner.  He had abandoned all the extraneous bodily adornments he had picked up out of paranoia and boredom at Peekaboo, and had reassumed his original shape, size, and color.  In reality he was tall, slim, with auburn hair and milk-white skin covered with copper freckles.

      When they come around they’ll be very, very upset, he said.  They’ll track you.  And they have some good trackers.

      Then I’ll just have to keep a step ahead of them, said Dalia Lee.

      At the edge of the galaxy, on the shore of the great blackness, she instructed her twelve clones.  The copies were never as good as the original, so they did not know everything she knew.  Though they had the strength of her body, they did not have the complexity of her mind.  Clones were usually as eight- or ten-year-old children, and had to be given specific detailed instructions, over and over again, so they would not forget or be distracted from what they were supposed to do.  But they had one quality that made them ideally suited for Dalia Lee’s purpose:  absolute unswerving loyalty to their original, as if they were but a part of Dalia Lee’s own flesh.  Which, of course, in a sense they were, and which had been one of the main reasons that it had been deemed immoral and illegal to construct and use such entities.

      The twelve duplicate Dalia Lees stood at casual attention as she spoke.

      The Time Tiger has fabricated a unique defense for himself, she said.  He has hidden, but nobody knows exactly when.  To be able to get back to now he needs to keep the portal open, so he has constructed a series of dummy portals, the locations and destinations of which he periodically changes.  We don’t know where these portals lead, but nobody who has entered them has ever returned.  People have spoken to the Time Tiger and lived to tell of it, but then he shifted the true portal so they were never able to duplicate their journey.  We must find him, if we are to successfully complete our mission.  Therefore I am sending you through twelve of the thirteen portals.  If the portal is false, you will not return; if it is the true portal, you will come and tell me, and I will try to lock it down before he can change it, so I can go through and meet him.

      But Mother, what of those of us who enter the other doors?

      Tears trickled from Dalia’s eyes.  I’m sorry, my children.  I would not have created you if the need were not dire.  None of you can return to this time again.

      They all nodded, but apprehension could be seen in all the identical faces.

      Whoever finds the Time Tiger must report back to me at once.

      They nodded again: determination mixed with dismay.  They were obviously frightened, as a ten-year-old would be frightened at being sent off alone into the unknown, but nothing could make them break the bond of obedience to their parent body.

      *     *     *

      The Time Tiger’s portals were then located on a spherical space station drifting in darkness far from any solar system, which after hearing Cuttner’s voice obligingly lit up, allowed them entry, and assumed breathable atmosphere.  After inquiring of their purpose, it directed them into a spacious chamber in which thirteen crystalline arches, about a meter wide and three meters high, were arranged in a concentric semicircle.  Within the arches was not darkness, not light, but blankness, nothingness, an absence of color.

      Throughout the inhabited portions of the galaxy, among those who knew of the Time Tiger and discussed such things, it was rumored that his dummy portals were death traps, that they led to such places as mires full of bloodsucking creatures, lava flows, deserts with sandstorms that ripped flesh off bones, jungles with primitive tribes that specialized in torture, glaciers crisscrossed with crevasses, pitch-black caverns.  Dalia Lee did not believe it.  She had the Time Tiger’s top-top secret file; she knew who he really was and where he had come from, and she had his psychological profile as well.  She was fairly certain the destinations to which she was sending her children were innocuous; as it was though, even the thought of them being separated from her for the rest of their lives, physically safe though they might be, was almost enough to dissuade her from her task. 

      Almost, but not quite.

      Each of the twelve Dalia Lee clones stood ready in front of a different portal; each cast anxious glance at her mother; upon seeing the signal-nod, each stepped through simultaneous with the others.

      Scarcely had they disappeared when one stepped back out.  I saw him, Mother, she said.  He’s waiting for you.

      This was the risky moment.  Though Dalia Lee had been fairly certain that the Time Tiger would not send people to their deaths through his decoy doorways, she was not at all sure that he would not attack now, knowing that he was being tracked.  It all depended on how effectively her child had explained the situation to him, and whether or not he cared after the explanation had been given.

      But if she was willing to send her clones to their possible deaths, she had to be willing to take that step herself.  Wait here with Carver, she said.

      Yes, Mother.

      And Dalia Lee stepped through the portal into a forested valley.  In the distance loomed mountain peaks dusted with snow.  The smell of evergreen sap tinged the cool clean air.  She followed a path through the trees for a few hundred meters until she came to a modest log cabin roofed with wood shingles.  It must have been built recently:  the wood had a freshly cut look, and the dappled sunlight shown on the varnish.

      She ascended the steps to the porch, knocked on the door, and entered.

      She caught a glimpse of the living room – gray stone fireplace, large picture window with a view of the woods, shelves with books, tapes, discs, and odd artifacts, dark blue couch and armchairs – and then it shimmered and fragmented, and the fragments began to dance slowly around the room like the inside of a kaleidoscope. 

      When the Time Tiger entered he came apart and his disjointed portions joined the dance:  part of a leg in a corner, and another on a shelf; then shift and an ear was on the shelf, an arm on the floor, nose on the ceiling, one eye in the fireplace which was on the ceiling; then shift and the fireplace was scattered around in bits, eyes were side-by-side in the center.  It was all extremely disconcerting, but Dalia Lee had not come apart with the rest; she still felt centered within herself, so she waited and tried not to get too dizzy.

      You want to talk to me, the Time Tiger said, his voice coming first from one side of the room and then from the other.  I know that I am anathema, and that you would not have come unless you are as well.

      That’s right.  I used a clone to make contact, didn’t I?

      Committing a crime is certainly not proof of honorable intention.

      Yet you let me come this far.

      Yes.  Your story intrigued me, so I have just spent several subjective months confirming it.

      Then why the charade?  Pull yourself together so we can talk face to face.

      "If you know anything at

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