To Make an End (Tales of the Old Man Book 4), page 1
To Make an End
William Preston
Copyright © 2024 William Preston
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Story's first appearance: May–June 2024, Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 9781234567890
ISBN-10: 1477123456
Cover design by: Art Painter
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018675309
Printed in the United States of America
If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching.
Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower
To Make an End
1. An Idle King
Last night had brought Shoshana’s first moments of belief. Isaac, her brother, had believed since the fringe idea had caught his imagination four years ago. Their parents had inexplicably vanished like thousands of others, lost like millions to more explicable causes in this ravaged time, leaving Shoshana to protect an obsessed adolescent. She had followed Isaac’s strange pilgrimage, thinking one day he would wake from it. But now they were climbing the final hill, and it seemed that her brother’s tale of a buried hero might be true.
They saw nothing as it actually was. The night vision of Shoshana’s exosuit revealed a dark green incline, amplifying her sense of unreality. Inside his own suit, Isaac saw the green world and the single red light near the hill’s summit as more real than any memory of their parents.
The snug, powerful suits eased the climb, but Shoshana stumbled more than once on the uneven, tufted incline, distracted by Isaac’s voice in her suit’s audio, talking to himself. The town lay three miles off, its few lights visible, and the siblings had to assume listeners as well as watchers, especially now that they were, incredibly, so near what Isaac, at least, had so long sought.
He mumbled the story of their years-long trials to himself; he didn’t mean to speak aloud, but some words leaked out. He shook with knowledge and the fear of knowledge. He expected to find a giant of a man enthroned and waiting like a statue of a king; or a beam to be seen everywhere, signaling that worthy people had found the passage; or a doorway to a world, under sea or in another dimension, where he waited for the call.
Last night, their third scouring the hill, they had shoved aside a knee-high stone, knelt above a dark opening, and fed a camera on a wire’s tip down a meter-wide tunnel ribbed like a human throat. The tunnel opened into a cavern the snake couldn’t quite plumb, but they had seen enough. With too little time till dawn, Shoshana counseled another day’s wait. Whatever was here had been here for decades; what would another day mean—except another day of relentless chaos and, though there were fewer these days, strange disappearances.
After their discovery, budging Isaac from the entrance had been harder than shifting the stone. Head still covered by the suit, he had called into the darkness as if he could be heard by anyone but Shoshana. She said his name until he stopped. Then they reset the concealing stone and marked it with the tracker.
Now they had returned. Shoshana tapped her temple to see the world true. A few stars and perhaps a planet or two made sufficient effort to break through the thin cloud cover; the new moon swam there somewhere. If only Orion had been visible, it would have completed Isaac’s reconstruction of this fantastic story.
Shoshana touched her temple again and squatted at one end of the considerable stone. “You with me?” Distracted by his own ongoing narration, Isaac vigorously shook his head to clear it.
“I’m fine, Shoshi,” he said, and they both heard how young he still was.
“Neither of us is fine. Now help.” Shoshana gripped her end of stone, feeling the suit magnify her strength, a river current running along her arms, her thighs. Isaac mirrored her position. “On three,” she said. “Lift with your legs. Toss it to my left.” She counted up, they heaved, and Isaac passed every bit of his anxiety into the effort. The stone launched to the height of their waists, turned halfway over, struck earth on its side, and tumbled several meters downslope till an upthrust of rock stopped it. Their first thoughts were of being discovered. Below, a copse of trees they’d passed through and the dark, fallow field beyond gave up nothing, and nothing visible to their suits passed overhead.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Shoshana faintly moaned. She steadied her breathing. He was a black shape against the powdery green of the warm night. “We both did it. The suits are strong.”
“I know the suits are strong.” His voice was reedy with anger.
Her role, as ever, was to focus him. Take care of him.
“We’ll get it after,” she said. “The tracker’s probably still attached.”
His breath shuddered out. “Okay.”
She put her hands on the entrance lip. “How about if I lead?” He didn’t object, so she plunged forward headfirst, palms pressed to the tunnel sides with momentarily summoned confidence, feet bracing her once she was inside. The angle, terrifying, 60 degrees downward by her estimate, made descent impossible without the suits.
A few meters down, she told Isaac to wait; she thumbed her wrist lamp on and switched off the night vision. “With me?”
No dirt came loose where their hands touched. The tunnel glistened, smoothed by a sealant behind which pressed dirt, rock, and white roots that made Isaac think of intestinal bugs. “With you.”
Ahead of them, they knew from last night’s viewing, the tunnel leveled off before opening onto a chamber, but Shoshana couldn’t see past the turn, and panic tightened a band across her chest.
“Nearly there,” Isaac said; he had been counting down the meters.
When the tunnel leveled, Shoshana knelt and crept forward, the O at the tunnel’s end just ahead. Her jiggling light flashed into the chamber beyond, revealing nothing but another glistening wall. Isaac pressed against her back as she sat on the edge, her toes nearly at the floor. She slid to standing.
Immediately, light from an overhead array filled the space, revealing a curved ceiling of the same sealed dirt reaching perhaps three stories up and a cement floor twice as wide and mostly empty except for a waist-high white cylinder and, beside it, an upright man, facing them from inside a translucent amber capsule.
Isaac’s shouted “Ah!” shocked her. Shoshana touched her left wrist, causing the suit to split from the top of her head and from her fingers and feet. The black carapace folded as it retracted along her body, retreating dominos that slapped flat till the suit had collapsed into a thick necklace above her collarless shirt.
Her brother slipped awkwardly to the chamber floor, overwhelmed. On one knee, he watched his sister move toward the capsule before thinking to collapse his own suit.
Isaac said, “He’s here. He’s been waiting here.”
“He’s not alive.” She felt certain in saying it, and vaguely cruel in her certainty. Her brother had been right, but the search had been pointless. “This is a shrine.” She rapped the capsule with a knuckle. Not a hollow container, but solid, gold-hued as an ancient insect trap. Within, behind distorting ripples, stood the naked man. She thought he might be tall, but the cylinder did not extend to the floor, so his height was hard to gauge.
Issac hung back as his sister circled. Years, it had taken: finding the clues, unearthing the complex narrative that would lead to the Old Man, who now, at this most needful time, had been found. Isaac said, “You’re wrong about that.”
At the figure’s back, Shoshana found a metal plate running the height of the capsule and a segmented metal arm connecting the plate to the floor. She lay her hand on the capsule. No noticeable warmth or coolness; the temperature of the chamber itself, a little cooler than room temperature.
A click from the chamber’s far side alerted them both. Shoshana came around the capsule to find her brother frowning at the wall; a semicircular hole the width of a human hand had appeared just above the floor. The next moment, what appeared to be black insects, countless, poured from the opening and spread into the chamber like water, a ceaseless and widening flow, the sound like wind through stiff grass. They reached her brother first.
“Suit!” she shouted, as at a touch it could instantly cover his head, but he was engulfed before raising a hand. He fell backward. A moment later, the black mites, whispering onward, swarmed up her legs, some slipping inside her leggings, and what most surprised her was that she also hadn’t lifted a hand. She fell sideways against the cylinder, snatched a last breath, and shut her eyes.
The wave enveloped her—plucking at her skin, her clothes, eyelids, rummaging in her ears, scratching her scalp, and she wondered who else would find this trap—who might discover their bodies—now that they had removed the lid. Many times, she had imagined the failure of their quest, but always in terms of finding nothing and having to return to the damaged world her brother’s fantasies had helped obscure. Nothing like this. A weightless, bereft calm gripped her.
She thought of Isaac lying engulfed. She was eleven when he was born; she remembered the home birth, her parents calling her into the room when he’d arrived, and how his small fists shook
That image roused her. She flailed her arms, rolling on the floor. Her right fist smacked the capsule. She forced her remaining air from her nose and mouth to clear them. Then, as if a shroud were ripped away, she was free. Blinking rapidly, getting to her feet, she slapped at herself, but she appeared to be clean. The swarm had poured down from her and retreated.
“Robots,” said Isaac, also standing and seemingly unharmed. They both watched the last of the dark mass withdraw into the hole from which it had emerged.
She flexed her fingers and rubbed her hands together. Smooth. “They . . . cleaned?”
“I guess we triggered it.” In that way he had, his gaze lost focus as he thought through a problem. “Maybe we registered as debris. Or the room runs on a cycle, but the timing seems pretty suspicious.” He brushed at his hair, dark curls like her own. “How do we get him out of there?”
Shoshana pressed her lips together and stared at Isaac till she was sure he had taken the full weight of the look. “What makes you think we can? What makes you think we’re supposed to?”
He pushed his face toward her as if pushing against her look. “This isn’t a burial chamber. There must be machines and computers concealed all around us. He’s being preserved. Hey. Hey.” A fat blue button projected from the white cylinder’s side. “That’s new!” They came closer. On the button were printed PRESS and ME.
“We’re in a children’s story,” Shoshana said.
“It is a story. We were meant to find this.”
“Maybe not ‘we.’”
“Anyone who followed all the clues. Now we do the next thing.”
He slammed his palm onto the button, and she cried out.
Immediately, faintly, machineries went to work inside the column. The flat-topped platform split, opened—the siblings stepped back—then slid into the floor, leaving a red, waist-high metal stand. Atop it, a vise-like holder gripped what appeared to be a short tuning fork; beside it lay a cube-headed metal hammer. The stand’s open side faced the amber capsule. Isaac read aloud the black words on the stand.
“STRIKE IN CASE OF EMERGENCY.”
Shoshana made an uncertain sound.
Isaac said, “This is why we came all this way.”
“I know why we came. But I don’t like— He’s been here for . . . decades, right? Decades. And we’re making decisions over the course of minutes.”
“What’s your point?”
She exhaled loudly. “It’s not a point. It’s a feeling.” Her hands went to her hips and nervously pinched several times. When her brother moved slightly, she snatched the hammer from its stand. He thought she might toss it away, but she waved it about.
It felt too light, inconsequential.
“Maybe you should stand farther back.”
He did.
She took two practice strokes, flexing her wrist. “Here we go.” Standing clear of the sound box, Shoshana struck the hammer to the fork, more lightly than she’d intended. She heard a low tone, but it might have been a sound her ears always carried.
Isaac studied the amber capsule. “This popped,” he said. “A little pop sound.” They listened. “Do it again.” Hands clenched, he shook his arms in a gesture of strength. “Use a firmer grip. You could use the suit.”
“Not yet.” Shoshana set her legs farther apart, steadied the hammer as much as her nerves would allow, squinted, and struck. This time, a solemn tone, no mistaking it, unfurled through the chamber. Isaac touched the back of his neck; hairs stood up. The amber capsule cracked along its length and moments later collapsed into fragments, the man inside tumbling from the platform to the ground.
Shoshana dropped the hammer. Already, the capsule shards had changed to liquid, becoming a film on the floor and rivulets along the naked body of the man, who lay prone, facing them. Yellow water leaked from between his lips. He was nearly the same color the capsule had been, but darker. Isaac moved; he took hold of the near shoulder and lifted to turn him onto his back.
“No. Face down. Get that stuff out of him.” Shoshana freed one of the man’s arms from beneath him and straddled his back. She spread her hands below his shoulder blades, locked her arms, and put her weight forward. Isaac fell back onto his bottom. Again and again his sister drove downward till a fat jet of bronze liquid gushed from the man’s mouth. Shoshana jumped up. The man’s arms came alive, palms slamming the floor. He coughed and gasped, and Shoshana pulled Isaac to his feet. They clutched each other.
The floor around them darkened as the liquid soaked in. The man waved the pair away, moaned, and expelled more fluid, hacking and spitting the last of it. He got his knees under him. Water drained from his nostrils and the red corners of his eyes. He blinked, flicking water from his lashes. He made to speak but croaked instead.
“What can we do?” Isaac asked. “I’m Isaac Hochstein and this is my sister Shoshana. We found you. We followed—”
The man put one foot to the floor, arched his back till he faced straight up, then rose. He seemed to fill out as he stood—still slender with age, but more substantial. “How,” he managed, then cleared his throat roughly. “How did I get here?” The voice was thready, but the siblings saw alertness in the eyes.
“You don’t remember?” Shoshana asked.
The man surveyed the arrangement around him, the blank platform, the metal arm, the tuning fork. He nodded and cleared his throat again.
The Hochsteins thought of the names. The Stone Avenger. The Big Man. The Still One. Tom. The Man Himself.
The Old Man.
“Why did you bring me back?”
Isaac said, “The world is ending.”
The Old Man drew in breath, rising even taller, then let the air ease out. “Of course it is.”
2. Made Weak by Time and Fate
Neither sibling saw what he did at the platform, but it dropped into the floor and the floor slid closed. Steps from where the platform had stood, an oval bureau, topped by a computer screen, rose up. The screen flashed, flickered, and came to life. Colorful icons—too small for the Hochsteins to make out—appeared against a dark background.
With his right hand the Old Man touched the screen in several spots at once; his left hand opened a drawer to extract a slender plastic bottle. Still with one hand on the screen, he unscrewed the lid, shook a capsule into his palm, and replaced the lid. Isaac’s fingers twitched in attempted emulation. His father had tried to teach him a few sleight-of-hand tricks with cards and coins, but Isaac could never master such deftness. “You’re too focused on watching yourself,” his father had said, several times. “The aim is to fool the other person. You can’t fool yourself.” Isaac had thought that wasn’t true, though it often came to mind.
The capsule went in the Old Man’s mouth. He said, “Vitamins,” but he might have been talking to the screen, from which he now lifted his other hand.
A silver faucet and washbasin emerged from the bureau’s side. At a gesture, water ran. Isaac wondered how long that water had waited in the pipes. Water should run for a full minute before it was drinkable. Too soon for Isaac’s comfort, the Old Man bent to the faucet to gulp. Another drawer: a cloth to towel his face. More work at the screen, more touches to the console. Isaac’s attention did not waver, but Shoshana’s did, settling on the tunnel that had led them here. They had been careful, but that meant nothing. They had found the Old Man. Impossible. But now they might themselves be found.
Numbers filled the computer display. Both hands hurried over the surface as the numbers rapidly changed. Beaded water continued to slide down the Old Man’s naked back. He made one final tap at the screen, then opened another drawer and withdrew a stack of clothing.
“I’m pleased to inform you—though you likely knew this—that I am not inside an elaborate computer simulation.” Both siblings looked elsewhere as the Old Man dressed. “It was my one concern. That and never waking up. Two concerns.” He paused. “There was a third . . . ”
“We could have told you we were real,” Isaac said.
Buttoning a beige shirt, the Old Man stepped close. Isaac had learned to read his sister’s expressions, but new people took time, and this face . . . it was like no other. It wasn’t only the age. Most people’s eyes did one of two things: look inward or look outward. These eyes did both at once in a face that seemed too still. Was that kindness? Anger? The wrinkles added to the inscrutability.
