Weird Tales About the End Read online

  Weird Stories about THE END

  Including Four Stories about Manny Farstar, Galactic Edgemaster

  E. W. Farnsworth

  Celestial Ink Publishing

  March, 2020

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  FOREWORD

  The Hominin

  Arching to the Dawn

  3Maggie Solo

  Manny Farstar’s Dream

  The Five Farstar Brothers

  Space Caravanserai

  AFTERWORD

  About the Author

  Works by the Author

  Dedication

  INYAMAN

  Acknowledgements

  The four stories about Manny Farstar were first published during July and August 2019 in the Schlock! Webzine of Rogue Planet Press in the United Kingdom. “3Maggie Solo,” “Manny Farstar’s Dream,” “The Five Farstar Brothers,” and “Space Caravanserai” are included herein by the gracious permission of Gavin Chappell, Editor in Chief of Schlock! Webzine.

  FOREWORD

  The apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic traditions in literature depart from the Book of Revelation. Both Martin Luther and John Calvin claimed not to understand Revelation, yet they wrote commentaries on the visionary biblical book anyway. Their presumption was to gloss what they did understand and leave the rest for others to explain. After the demise of traditional Christianity, the secularization of society and the proliferation of works about the Rapture, contemporary readers and writers reel from a surfeit of attempts to interpret our not-so-distant future in bleak terms—but why? Sales might be one answer, but revenues do not account for the trend that blossomed when the year 2000 came and went without a final catastrophe. In fact, so fatigued by millennial angst were the people that they seemed to require new formulas for a new godless age. Still, the old idea of the end of the world continued to haunt the Earth. Western mankind at minimum seems to be lost with out a large, even universal, seamless whole within which all history might be compassed. Science long ago departed from the religious fold, and its recent lessons wreak havoc on the received history of the hominids as well as the fairy tales about the origin of the stars. While traditionalists have been good at ignoring factual evidence, rebels have called for a complete re-writing of soteriology—salvation history. Dante Alighieri in the propitious year 1300 answered his generation’s call for the same with his sacred trilogy. John Milton, who survived the year 1666, did the same. Some poet surely will rise from today’s writers to pen an epic. In my stories and DarkFire collections attempted to map the territory, and I have written a few lines of epic poetry. If life and health remain to the task, I’ll complete The Voyage of the Spaceship Arcturus. Until then, my scattered fragments must serve.

  E. W. FARNSWORTH

  The Hominin

  Only genetics could have accounted for the likeness of Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Aunt Margaret and me at age twenty-one. Her faded, brown studio photograph made her seem as both sprightly and determined as her reputation as a termagant and man eater in her prime. I memorized her diary when I was thirteen and found it in a trunk in the attic. Even her ancient cursive resembled my scrawl of today. She was from that moment my idol and mentor though she passed two hundred years before I was born in 2129.

  I am usually uncomfortable when I am compared with another woman. Let a man do that, and I will write him out of my book of life for ever. Maybe that is why I had so little luck finding my mate. Margaret died a spinster, and I was convinced I would never find Mister Right any more than she did. I savored her twenty-eight lovers vicariously and, from her diary accounts, I would have made the same judgments as she did in every case.

  Anyway, I resolved that I would follow in Margaret’s footsteps to the very end. But times have changed, and I have the benefits of birth control pills and antibiotics—and, of course, the Hominin DNA injections that are supposed to change everything. Where she had three abortions and a severe bout with syphilis, I felt I was going to be luckier, medically speaking. The world as we knew it had changed, but some things do not ever change. A man’s desire to control a woman’s body as well as her thoughts, for one. A woman’s desire not to be a lifelong slave to a Neanderthal for another. Why are women naturally more intelligent than men? Why do men get all the privileges and pay? Why are women left to keep the home when the men go off to see the world? And why are women left to rebuild and repopulate the empty, blasted world when men have left it in ruins?

  As a teenager, I thought it better to keep a cello between my legs instead of a man. I was first cello in my metaschool orchestra and then a concert cellist for the all-England Philharmonic. Music was my substitute for more intimate kinds of relationships. I was attracted to—and found attractive by gay musical men. Margaret had suffered a similar trend, only she was a watercolorist and dancer. As she entered each of her many relationships, her initial caution broke down as her instincts and hormones took fire. I read digital romances constantly when the global networks were still active, but the hottest passages I knew were those between the lines in my ancestor Margaret’s mentoring prose. When she was seduced, I was seduced too. I fancied I knew her dashing, handsome young blades as well as she.

  Her affair with Billy Wagoner, the first she confessed as a lover, broke her hymen when he and she were thirteen years of age! She claimed it was all her fault. She forced the boy to the barn and took off all her clothes before she dared him to do the same. Poor boy, he had never before seen, much less had a maiden, but he rose to the challenge. After some effort, they both succeeded in their objectives, but Margaret was disappointed by Billy’s performance. He could not look her in the face afterward. She cowed him into promising never to tell what he had done. Her diary spelled out the four weeks’ terror she had felt that she might be pregnant with the timid boy’s child.

  A bloody outcome freed her of that thought, and she had courageously told Billy he had nothing to worry about. His blank look told her he had thought nothing about their intimate encounter. Many years later he returned to pick up where he had left off. Margaret had by then cut him off. She told him never to visit her again. After that, he became a geneticist and made a fortune manufacturing clones and hominins, but he never married. Among his final effects was a pathetic love letter to Margaret, quoted in full in her diary. He only turned to studying genetics, biophysics and paleo forensics because she had spurned him. Later, he won the Nobel Prize.

  I was inspired by my mentor. A tall red-haired boy named Sammy Aldridge who lived down the street seemed a likely candidate for intimacy. He, like me, was a hominin by injection. The same factory provided both our parents with the DNA that makes us special. When my parents were out foraging one Saturday, I lured Sammy into our house and led him to our bathroom. There we shut the door and disrobed, but after that he did not know what to do. I tried to inspire him and we used Mother’s secret sex toys, but he was hopeless. It was all I could do to get him dressed again and shoo him away against his protestations before my parents returned. I was smoldering from frustration and rage. I was sure that Ten-Great Aunt Margaret’s stinky barn might have been a better location for losing my virginity than an antiseptic bathroom in a suburban home of 2142 ACE. What was Margaret’s secret? I did not know.

  I tried again with the lawn care boy, who knocked at the back electric door for a glass of iced distilled water. He reddened when I brought the expensive, clear water totally naked. He could not keep his eyes off me, but he would not come inside though I beckoned to him with my crooked finger. After that I would sit on the porch in my light summer dress and watch him march back and forth mowing the lawn on his hovercraft, keeping hi
s eyes glued on the rows as he passed though his machine’s autopilot could have kept him on course anyway. Nothing I could do could break his concentration on his damn rows. I even tried opening my legs to show I was not wearing panties.

  He was hopeless. I felt helpless. Still, he was so handsome, but he evidently did not appreciate what I offered him. It was as if he was entirely unaware of the reproductive imperative. In metaschool we had just had sex education classes that pounded “the need to breed” into our skulls with pictures and models so we would know how after the population had been decimated.

  On those afternoons, I concentrated on my cello dreaming of having the lawn boy between my legs and bowing my feelings on the strings. In my mind, I saw the future ghosts of my progeny stretched out into the future just as the linkage of my chthonic ancestry extended back into the hazy time when hominins first roamed the earth, particularly here in distant England, and mated in caves and meadows before the green blessed island had a name.

  I missed my chances to lose my flower at thirteen, but the next year 2143 was going to be another matter. Mother helped somewhat. She thought it was high time I had boyfriends. She did not want the world’s population to diminish because of the end games everyone was playing. She preached that my mission was to reproduce as much as possible. After all, she had lots of boyfriends. Father was always gone somewhere on foraging missions or rebuilding exercises, and she had a woman’s needs.

  Mother encouraged me to stand on the banks of the River Thames where I could meet sailors. I brought those randy, swaggering men home, but inevitably, Mother took them into the bedroom for her own purposes. When they emerged from their encounters with her, flushed and stinking from sex, they had no time for me.

  To this day, I am not sure how many of my five brothers were children from what was left of the Great Fleet. I lost count of the sailors I brought home to Mother. She was most appreciative, but, though only a procuress, I became known as “The Siren.” I bristled when I heard my classmates laughing at me behind my back. Some looked at me with admiration because they fancied I had presumably gone where they had not dared to go. My teachers used me as an example to the others—a model breeder who would repopulate the world when all was lost. Rumors about me spread like wildfire, but I was still a frustrated virgin.

  What is a virgin to do when all she wants is for a man to make her a woman? Anyway, to women down a generation or two—if we hominins survive and thrive, this diary is meant to be of some comfort. It’s not easy to have good, clean sex in this world if you are a hominin woman. What worked for Margaret and me may not work for you in future—2200 or later. But keep trying. My story may inspire you to understand that sex does not just happen whenever you want.

  I looked for opportunities in the normal activities of metaschool. I felt as if ancestor Margaret’s achievements would not be paralleled by me. She had taken seven lovers and had two abortions performed before she was eighteen. When I had my eighteenth birthday in 2147, I am embarrassed to say, I was still a maiden. I began reading about women bearing children beyond their prime. Queen Elizabeth I of England was one such. In the literature, the ancient Virgin Queen prepared for her planned wedding to the monarch of Spain by dancing. Her hymen was reported to be of the hardness and texture of cuttlebone. I have done personal explorations on numerous occasions, and I cannot conceive of my having any such physical condition as she. As things turned out, she did not have to endure a consummation. I can only imagine how the Spanish prince would have felt encountering her iron wall of a hymen. How could he or she have survived penetration?

  Speaking of penetration, my next adventure was on a megaschool trip by hovercraft to the nearly bare Pentland Hills in what used to be called Scotland beyond the ancient wall. We all wore smocks with nothing under them, boys and girls alike. We rode horses bareback in the heather and gorse and ate together in rough-hewn wooden buildings. At night we roasted marshmallows around an open fire. We told scary ghost stories to each other. Some girls went into the bracken with their beaus to make glorious love.

  In contrast, I fumed and fretted since the only ones who wanted to make love to me were my girlfriends. I thought fast and centered on a shy, but good looking, sturdy boy named Rolly Hotsprings, mainly on account of his name. He seemed sensitive like a poet. He had dreamy brown eyes. I liked the way he brooded on things as if he had a soul. I know it sounds old fashioned to write about souls as all the churches have long since become blasted ruins. But it is the hominin in me that yearns and dreams. Some think those wild impulses are useless in these times, but I cling to my heritage as to a goat rope against which I struggle too.

  Shy Rolly and I walked in the moonlight by the lake. He skipped stones, and we sat on the pier to watch fireflies wink and hover. He recited old poetry poetry from before the fall and looked out over the water. I liked the words he quoted, and I liked even better his taking my hand in his. When I was least suspecting, I turned my head and he kissed me on the lips and got my juices flowing. I became moist and hot. Instead of lowering me gently to the deck and taking me right away as I wanted, he stood up and hauled me up too, to walk around the lake with him.

  We went to hear the frogs at midnight and see the moon shining on the black water. I so wanted him to stop and ravish me. But all he wanted to do was wax eloquent about the way my hominin hair looked in the moonlight. By the time he had steered me back to the main cabin, I was hot and ready with nowhere to go. The others had returned, so we had missed our chance. From him I learned that poets were not my style after all.

  As it turned out, Rolly for me was like Billy Wagoner. He became involved in a special school that built hybrids from carbon and silicon. Rolly’s technologies were different from the hominin injections Billy developed. When he told me about bringing robots to life with a switch, I shuddered in revulsion. I do not think his creations have the same fire of life as we hominins. Time will tell whether the supposedly advanced models deriving from old 3Maggie robot designs of 2017 would breed survivors. The inventors of those robots with artificial intelligence had left the earth in a spaceship not long after they were created. Lucky Rolly was to have encountered the black magicians who knew the technology well enough to carry on.

  I now arrived at my twenty-first birthday, when, still a virgin, I had legally come of age. It was not from want of trying that I remained a maid. I tried everything to lure a male, and I rehearsed with my girlfriends as much as I dared given my condition. Though the Luddites among us had once again begun to hunt down and kill the robots, artificial intelligences and creators, they had not yet turned against us hominins though that might happen any day.

  I received an encrypted message through a courier in the orchestra. She was a visiting cellist with a beautiful instrument that she could bow to make music like no other. I sensed she must be an AI, probably a learner, but I did not turn her in to the authorities though I was at great risk for not doing so. Her name happened to be Margaret Thridling. The encoded message she passed me could only be broken by using words of a poem that Rolly liked to quote. And the clear text was simple: “Pentland Hills, the cabin. Come with Margaret as soon as you can. Rolly.”

  That afternoon we rehearsed the overture of the Opera Voyage of the Spaceship Arcturus. It is a complex work, full of nuance and virtuosity, especially for cellists like me. Shaken by the music and Rolly’s secret message, I returned home and put away my instrument. Margaret and a friend, who might have been her twin sister, rode up on their hovercrafts. I leapt aboard the craft that Margaret’s friend rode after she dismounted. Then Margaret and I set our vehicles on autopilot and sped all the way to the Pentland Hills, to the old wooden cabin by the lake. Rolly Hotsprings was waiting for us though the whole place was otherwise deserted.

  “Evangeline, I’m so glad you received my message. I had to see you. And here you are!”

  “Rolly,” I said, “what’s going on? Why are you here and not down south?”

  Rolly kept looking aro
und nervously, even though Margaret was evidently keeping watch as she roamed around the perimeter of the greensward that led down to the lake.

  “I’ve made a critical breakthrough. I thought you should know. I may not have much longer before I’m discovered. The being that brought you here is one of my new creations.”

  I nodded. “I guessed she must be a learner AI—and I also guess that her sister is a clone just like her. Congratulations. I didn’t tell anyone that she’s one of them. So you needn’t worry. What are you going to do?”

  “I’m embarrassed to ask, but everything depends on your answer.”

  “I’m taking an incredible risk just being here with you. The authorities can trace my movements. They have ways of getting people to talk.”

  “I’m afraid I’m going to ask you to take a huge risk. I don’t know anyone else who can do what’s necessary.”

  “What do you need me to do? If it’s in my power, I’ll help you. But I don’t know if I can protect you or your creations from the Luddites.”

  “Evangeline, do you remember the night we walked around the lake in the moonlight and saw the fireflies and listened to the frogs?”

  “I do remember, Rolly. You recited poetry. You even composed a beautiful poem about my hominin hair.”

  “That night I had the strongest urge to have sex with you right on the pier. The urge came in waves repeatedly as we walked. I did not know what was coming over me.”

  “I think I know what you felt because I felt the same way. I wanted you to take me and enjoy me just as we were taught in metaschool.”

  “Do you think you could feel that way again now?”

  “Oh, Rolly, I’m overwhelmed. I want to say yes, but I’m fearful. Why are you asking this?”