Part 46 (1/2)

They are the last creatures in the universe, he and she and the shark. The real world, outside, is running down, and the world they inhabit is a false, constructed world.

But it is a real shark. Fishy blood slimes her hands as she slits its belly with the back-curve of knives that are a part of her, extruded from her hands at need. She grows extra arms as convenient, to hold the wound open while she drags him free.

The shark's skin is silky-slick and sandpaper-rough simultaneously, sc.r.a.ping layers of material from the palms of her hands. The serrations on her blades are like those of the shark's teeth, ragged jags mes.h.i.+ng like the rollers of a thresher.

There had been three living things left in their world.

Now there are two.

She cuts him from the belly of a shark. Allowing himself to be swallowed was the easiest way to beach and kill the monster, which for humane reasons must be dead before the next stage of their plan.

He stands up reefed in gnawed car tires and bits of bungee cord, and picks rubber seaweed from his teeth. They are alone on a boat in a sea like a sunset mirror. The sky overhead is gray metal, and a red sun blazes in it. It is a false sun, but it is all they have.

They have carefully h.o.a.rded this s.p.a.ce, this fragment of creation, until the very end. They have one more task to fulfill.

As for him, how can he survive being swallowed by a shark? If entropy itself comes along and eats you, breaks you down, spreads you out thin in a uniform dispersal permeating its meat and cartilage-if it consumes, if it digests you-surely that's the end? Entropy always wins.

Final peace in the restless belly of a shark, nature's perpetual motion machine. Normally, it would be the end.

But he is immortal, and he cannot die.

There, under the false and dying sun, becalmed on a make-believe sea, they do not make love. She is a lesbian. He is sworn to a celibate priesthood. They are both sterile, in any case. They are immortal, but their seed has been more fortunate.

Instead, he picks the acid-etched rubber and bits of diode from his hair and then dives into the tepid sea. The first splash washes the shark's blood and fluids away.

The water he strokes through is stagnant, insipid. The only heartbeat it has known in lifetimes is the shark's. And now that the shark's is stilled, it won't know the man's. His heart does not beat. Where blood and bone once grew is a perfect replica, a microscopic latticework of infinitesimal machines.

He dives for the bottom. He does not need to breathe.

This desolate sea is little enough, but it is all there is. Outside the habitat, outside the sea and the sun and the boat and the gape-bellied corpse of the shark, outside of the woman and the man, nothing remains.

Or not nothing, precisely. But rather, an infinite, entropic sea of thermodynamic oatmeal. A few degrees above absolute zero, a few scattered atoms more populated than absolute vacuum. Even a transfinite amount of stuff makes a pretty thin layer when you spread it over an infinite amount of s.p.a.ce.

Suffice it to say there is no place anyplace out there; every bit of it is indistinguishable. Uniform.

The universe has been digested.

While the man swims, the woman repairs the shark.

She doesn't use needles and thread, lasers or scalpels. She has tools that are her hands, her body. They will enter the shark as they entered her, millennia ago, and remake the shark as they remade her, until it is no longer a consuming machine made of muscle and sinew, but a consuming machine made of machines.

They are infinitesimal, but they devour the shark in instants. As they consume it, they take on its properties-the perfect jaws, the perfect strength, the slick-sharp hide. The shark, mercifully dead, feels no pain.

The woman is more or less humane.

When the machines reach the animal's brain, they a.s.sume its perfect appet.i.te as well. Every fishy thought. Every animal impulse, every benthic memory, are merely electrical patterns flickering dark in already-decaying flesh. They are consumed before they can vanish.

The shark reanimates hungry.

She heaves it over the side with her six or eight arms, into the false, dead sea, where the man awaits it. It swims for him, driven by a hunger hard to comprehend-a ceaseless, devouring compulsion. And now it can eat anything. The water that once streamed its gills in life-giving oxygen is sustenance, now, and the shark builds more shark-stuff to incorporate it.

The man turns to meet it and holds up his hands.

When its jaws close, they are one.

The being that results when the shark and the man unify, their machinememories interlinking, has the shark's power, its will, its insistent need. Its purpose.

The man gives it language, and knowledge, and will. It begins with the false world, then-the sea and the s.h.i.+p, and the gray metal sky, and the make-believe sun. These are tangible.

The woman, like the man, like the shark-that-has-become, is immortal, and she cannot die.

The shark will consume her last of all.

Consider the shark. An engine for converting meat into motion. Motion generates heat. Heat is entropy. Entropy is the grand running-down of the clock that is the universe.

The shark-that-has-become does nothing but eat. Time is irrelevant. What now the puny unwindings of planet and primary, of star and galaxy? There is no night. There is no day.

There are only the teeth of the shark, vacuuming the cosmos. Enormous electromagnetic webs spin out from its ever-growing maw, sweeping spa.r.s.e dust and heat into its vasty gullet. The shark grows towards infinity.

The dead universe is swept.

The woman follows.

You are a G.o.d. For forty hundred thousand million days and forty hundred thousand million nights, the shark carries you under its unbeating heart. And when all s.p.a.ce lie clean and empty, polished and waiting, you turn to her. You will consume her, last of all.

There will be nothing when she is gone. The entire universe will have pa.s.sed down your throat, and even your appet.i.te must be a.s.suaged. And if it is not, you will devour yourself.

A machine can manage that.

You wonder what it will be like not to hunger, for a while.

But as you turn to swallow her, she holds up her hand. Her small, delicate hand that compa.s.ses galaxies-or could, if there were any left to compa.s.s.

Now, it cups the inverse glow of a naked singularity, as carefully h.o.a.rded as the shark, as the false-world that was the first thing to fall to the shark-that-has-become. She casts it before you, round and rolling, no bigger than a mustard seed.

You lunge. It's hard and heavy going down, and you gulp it sharply. A moment later, she follows, a more delicate mouthful, consumed at leisure.

She joins the man and the shark in your consciousness. And it is her knowledge that calms you as you fall into the singularity you've swallowed, as you-the whole universe of you-is compacted down, swept clean, packed tight.

When you have all fallen in on yourself, she says, there will be a grand and a messy explosion. Shrapnel, chunks and blobs and incandescent energy. The heat and the fires of creation.

The promise of rebirth.

But for now, collapsing, the shark has consumed all there is to consume. The shark is a perfect machine.

And at the end of the world the shark is happy, after all.

Tiger! Tiger!

What of the hunting, hunter bold?