THE ENDING OF THE DAYS

There was a start to life on Earth and archaeologists and geologists dig it up. But what of the end of life on Earth?

If time were a ball of string the Later Black Ages would be the last few millimetres. Yet they dawned lit up by an ageing sun in a purple sky and with the nights long and perishingly cold. The system that the sun had bred and nurtured over countless millions of years was old, and showed it, and the third planet from it was almost totally exhausted.

Yet people still lived there, human beings with a long and noble memory. There were books in sacred libraries, though these were forbidden because they might tell stories the Government didn't like. It had been like this since that Government had been permanentised, had been taken from the lofty theology of democracy and established as a status quo. Then a voice had suggested the ignorance was always the best policy, and so the people, generations of them, were kept ignorant. And it really was for the best. Show an inmate of hell an image of Heaven and he might feel a little annoyed with his lot.

It was when permanentisation was established that the people finally experienced true contentment because, finally, there was no point in complaining because nothing could possibly happen as a consequence of complaints. So nobody complained. The people lived, and some of them even smiled. They fell in love, quite a lot of them, and shared their lives like people always had. Life wasn't so bad, if you forgot the shortages. And they were manifold - but more later.

Homes were simple places. One room was accounted enough for a happy couple, and if by accident they bred and the muling brat survived, an additional room could be found somewhere. Things weren't totally primitive.

There was, separate and sufficiently distant from the live-in boudoir, a place for preparing food. It was outside in the yard so that the smell could be carried off by any chance breeze. But then, that was essential because the food chosen for the people to cook was … different.

It had to be. The planet was exhausted. Deserts rolled where once there had been green fields and the poles, both North and South, were spreading ever closer to an equator that nobody understood any more. Gone were the days of worrying about global warming. The time for a different kind of climate change was well under way.

And here's the saddest thing. As the populations shrank as shrink they must the food supply became harder to source. So the people were hungry. Most of the time. There was no green stuff to assuage that hunger, no juicy fruits or tangy spices. It was just as well that picture books had been locked away with all the others, or the population might have become rebellious.

But then, these days were called the Later Black Ages and everyone knew that time was really up. Mankind had ruled the planet he called home for so long he'd actually lost count, not of the years but of the geological ages that he'd mastered his environment. And it had been ages. The continents were nothing like the way they'd been in their hey-day. It was said, sadly, that Pangaea had reformed, but nobody understood what Pangaea actually meant.

Mankind had tried to reach beyond his home planet, of course, and way back in the early years of history small experimental stations had been set up on one or two moons of the gas giants, but they were all too far from the sun and when the people out there tried to return home, they found that they couldn't. Fuel, the solar wind, blasted the wrong way. So they had died away from home, and nobody really cared. Hadn't they known that before they went that in all logic it had been a one-way trip? Or had they depended on innate human inventiveness, and had that quality let them down?

Further out, in the vast blacknesses of interstellar space, there were shining specks of metal also launched from Earth before the great Hunger set in, but nobody had really understood what the distances involved actually meant, and hearts had stilled to silence as the years had mounted up.

And the custodians of the end of time, hungry, shivered as one by one the lights went out.

It was cause for celebration when one of them died, though.

For that would mean, and they were all aware of the implications, they had to be, hunger closes minds and destroys fickle morality, it would mean there was meat once more, and the kitchens could roast chops and braise meat for a day or two �" before the hunger returned once more. But those days were days of parties and joy and jesting, of couples sloping off for sex, everyone chewing on this or that juicy bone, of slurping over rich gravy, of reminiscing.

Then the Home Planet was, cynically, renamed Canibalia, and the people danced and demanded one more roasted slice of deliciousness as the winds took the fragrance of meat to nowhere.

This was the ragged end of time, and nobody could be too choosy. Except, of course, for cockroaches.

They had some time left still. Some little time.

© Peter Rogerson 18.01.14

Author's Note

I would have called this SF but it isn't - there's no science in it, just an imagining of the ending of the days.