The two men, one immortal, both elderly in years if not in body, stood side by side on the sloping brown lawn of the mortal’s mansion home looking down into the valley where the metropolis burned in the fires of rage, and hate, and literal flame. Beyond the hundreds of well-fenced palatial homes in the gated community, the rioters spread. Downhill, if he was still there, Roger the Security Guard was praying very hard, but in all likelihood, both men knew Roger had scrammed. He had not been trained or taught for battle, but for politely ignoring drunken underage girls brought from the city for a party in a nice car.
“How long until they get here?” The immortal, one Jefferson Coolidge Clark, known as Clark to his friends of whom the other man numbered. Clark was a verser, a freakish accident of extradimensional physics, and others said the needle in the hand of angels keeping the Multiverse together.
“You’re the expert in TEOTWAKI, as you told me, what five decades ago? The End of the World As We Know It, and you told me it was coming.” Michael Althidge, one of the fortunate few, a man with enough money and the right genetics to buy a rejuvenation treatment so that he stood to watch the End in a thirty year old body instead of a seventy year old one. On the other hand, perhaps not so fortunate.
“Recriminations do little good, and you’ve already repented. I saw your last two films. They were brilliant, and ….”
“They were good. And by that I mean Good with a capital ‘G’. I took ten years off after the ‘Laugh Riot’, after I’d seen what I’d done. Sick I was. I wondered where you were.”
“I was watching, but from a distance. You were figuring it out on your own, and remarkably not getting trapped in dead-ends of thought.”
“I figured as much, later.” Michael said. He sighed. The memories of those years when he could write nothing, when his fourth wife left him, and all about him, he saw the subtext prophesied in Laugh Riot come to pass, the subtext that he had not even been aware was there when he made the film–those memories were painful, but a healing pain.
There was silence until flames touched on the nearer skyscrapers, and it went up quickly, the flames leaping from floor to floor on the exterior of the building. Perhaps someone inside had poured fuel oil down the exterior of the skyscraper or opened windows to provide fuel and oxygen to the coming flames.
“I’d say an hour.” Michael said.
“You’re right, I’ve seen TEOTWAKI a number of times. Saw the Goths invade Rome, and the Celtic priests slaughtered by a Roman bishop, and watched as a certain paperhanger began to rant about Jews and jobs and the environment. But that’s there. This is your home. You know you’re home better than I do.”
Michael fell down weeping in his lawn, and Clark knelt beside him.
“We had such greatness. We could be conquering the solar system right now. Instead, we’re watching our cities burn, and soon, the mobs will turn to the rural areas which already have their plans to build cannon lined walls across the interstates. Soon, this mob will be dead of starvation or countrymen gunfire.”
Michael shuddered.
“Where did it begin?” Clark prodded.
“O tempora, o mores.” Michael said. “Some Sumerian complained that kids these days had no respect, and drove their chariots too fast. So we thought complaints about morality were eternal and banal. What we did not consider was that no one spoke Sumerian anymore.”
“I do.” Clark admitted, and Michael chuckled, patting his friend’s hand.
“Only you then.” And Clark did not disagree.
“We thought we could be eternally hip, be the endless rebel. We forgot many things in this quest. We forgot among them that the job of the old was to be the curmudgeon, to tell the young whippersnappers ‘to get off our lawn’.”
They sat there, and the rioters advanced.
“Now what?” Clark prodded.
Michael looked at him confused.
“I…?” He looked blank, and Clark just stared at him, and Michael’s face flushed in anger for a reason unknown to his conscious mind.
“Going to stay here. Watch the rioters burn your house down? Die?”
” Well, yeah.” Michael seemed a bit defensive. “After all, I can’t stop that. Can you?” Clark shook his head at the growing firestorm that had reached the first line of hills of the rich and powerful. No, not even with his powers and skills could he stop that boiling cloud of madness that spread with fire and murder.
“Then what?” Michael’s teeth bared in challenge, and pain.
“Were you forgiven from your sins, Michael?” Clark asked softly.
Michael turned away, his eyes suddenly tearing up.
“You know the answer.”
“Then why do you seek to pay for them anyways?”
“Its not that. Its…this is the end of the story.”
“God’s a better director than you, Michael, and I don’t think this is your closing curtain.”
“Yeah?”
“This is the word of prophecy to you, Michael. Go to the country, and walk, and when you find some gathering of people, tell them why this horror happened. Eat of their bread if they will give it freely, and then walk again.” Clark spoke, and his voice had a peculiar, cutting power, an assurance not given to normal voices. It was a demand, but in the same calm sense that gravity is a demand. Gravity rarely shouts. It is. It need not shout.
And thus Michael rose, and walked into the dessert, only taking with him a rollagon with water, and five packs of beef jerky, his Bible, and his Scriptwriter’s ‘Bible’. And in the dessert, and the plains, and the mountains, he testified to the Lord and to the people for many years, and such was his faith that he walked past mountain lions and bears, and passed through locked city gates for the Lord had given him a charge, and he would let neither the works of man, nor the creatures of nature stop him until being very old, he died.
–The Tale of Michael the Wanderer.
The girl in the library of the Twin Constitutional Monarchs of Denver, that huge collection of books gifted to the city by those monarchs, straightened up in her chair, cracked her back, and saw a man looking her way. This was not unusual for she was attractive and modestly dressed, but in such a way that was very charming. She smiled tentatively back, and got up to put her book back. He stepped over to her, and took it with graceful ease.
“Let me…ah, you read of Michael the Wanderer. A fascinating man.”
“True, but there is so much myth and legend about him. They say he crowned the Twin Monarchs, the first monarchs the year before he died. Which is impossible. Because he died a decade before then. Other things, contradictions….Its hard to put together a good thesis on him.”
“Perhaps its all true. Perhaps he ….”
“Came back from the dead to crown the twin kings?”
The man smiled.
“Actually, he travelled through time to do it.” She stared at him, and then burst out laughing.
“Good one, mister. What’s your name, if I may be so bold?”
“Clark. And I hope I can convince you Michael was as said. For the first step to the end of the world as we know it is forgetting the past.”
“Well, you can try to convince me over a cup of coffee.” She smiled, and he nodded, following her out of the library.