Fantastic Metropolis

The train picked up a little speed, just as the fail-safe brakes were activating. The locomotive came to the bomb crater and derailed. The coal car pushed it off the embankment. It slid down the side of the gorge, dragging the rest of the train behind it. Bending steel groaned like the end of the world. Shouting anarchists jumped from the couplings. The clinic coach, servant’s car, scullery car, generator car, and caboose went snaking down the side of the gorge.

At the bottom of the gorge, Ivan’s locomotive splayed sideways across a granite outcrop. The boiler blew. Bearing shoes, frame trunnions, draw-bar pins, sand pipes, throttle racks, reach sockets, and wash-out plugs went hurtling in all directions.

A strange white light breathed gently on the falling train. The steel glowed as red as burning coals. The light breathed gently on the corpse of the tsar, and on the sick boy and his mother, and on Bakunin and his men. It blew them all into a fine red mist.

 

After the mountains came Petrograd. Like a magical wind from the heart of the sun, the strange light transformed the city into a tornado of whirling wood splinters and glass flecks.

Anya Linkroda stood up from her chair. She felt as if an electric shock had gone through her. Petrograd was burning out there. Some of the psychics around her were weeping. Bakunin hadn’t warned her about anything like this.

The flesh evaporated from Anya’s bones. As her bones became a spray of ashes, the IIE suddenly realized how cruelly she had played with it. Then it felt its coolant systems failing. The great black egg was dying. Dying felt pleasant. This must be how humans felt as they fell asleep.

 

In Moskva, in a cellar under the Kremlin, Officer Linkroda was torturing Operative Gorodni, using a samovar of scalding coffee, a screwdriver, and pliers. Linkroda was hoping to extract information concerning the mysterious Citizen Tridd. Gorodni’s hands were held by two carpenter’s vices, and Linkroda was working feverishly on his scalp with the jaws of the pliers.

“Where do they keep Tridd?” Linkroda demanded.

Gorodni couldn’t stop laughing. Tridd was certainly a convincing tale. And this was Gorodni’s reward. He had lied too convincingly.

As Gorodni’s mind struggled to tear itself away from the pain, it showed Gorodni a vision of poor Tridd. Tridd’s skull loomed in its scaffolding, bigger than a whale. Tridd’s shriveled body hung from one side of it like a pale ugly grub inside a test tube.

A vibrant white light pierced the windowless cellar. Linkroda dropped his pliers.

Gorodni kept his mind on the pale grub with Tridd’s face. It writhed in agony, lashing itself to and fro, faster and faster. It smashed its plexithane cylinder to pieces against the skull and sent the pieces flying. It twisted loose from the skull and fell free. But it never hit the floor.

Linkroda and Gorodni rode away from the Moskva Kremlin, on the back of a crimson wind.

 

The hydrogen in the stratosphere above Russia caught fire. It roasted Mother Russia alive. A crackling concrescence of hydrogen and oxygen towered over Eurasia like the Firebird of legend. Then the blaze spread. It burned down Germany and Greece and Arabia and Mongolia. It burned down India and Burma and China and Japan.

The oceans hydrolyzed, releasing more hydrogen and more oxygen, to fuel the rising flames. The elements of water and air conspired with the solar fire, to roast all Earthly flesh.

Tides of red mist swept the globe and bled into the vacuum. Earth turned as black as a cinder and as dead as her moon. Tiny robots tumbled in the currents of combustion, wondering what could possibly have gone wrong. Scarlet winds blew through the filing cabinets of the Kremlin. All of the dossiers crumbled to ashes. Human history ended, that day in March of 1917.

Perhaps in an age yet to come, the great-great-grandchildren of Pod and Anchorlegs would tell their children long involved fairy tales about the mighty tsar Nicholas and the clever Citizen Tridd. Or about the romance between Dr. Dunleavy and Astra Leonova. But the humans had told their final story. The tsar had resigned.

 

Now the stars of the heavens are falling to earth like snow. Baba Yaga and Mr. Gogol are dancing a minuet amidst the fireworks.

Jesus and his younger brother, Lucifer, stand atop the embers of the planetary bonfire. They embrace in tears. They begin to dance a waltz.

My story has ended. There are no more engineers or tsarinas. No more spies or physicists. No more heart surgeons or hemophiliacs or bears or ballerinas. There’s no one left to tell lies about.

In a matter of minutes, hydrogen and oxygen have concluded their final meeting.

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“Minutes of the Last Meeting” has been printed twice, first in Leviathan 2 in 1998, then in Stepan Chapman’s story collection Dossier in 2001.