The phone rang while Marley was in the shower, and it was a relief. She’d been unable to sleep until past four in the morning, woken up twice before oversleeping, and run out of cereal. Now that she was fumbling her way out of the nice warm water into the freezing air of the bathroom and dripping all over everywhere things couldn’t get much worse, so the rest of the day had to be pretty good.
“Marley,” she said cheerfully.
“Hello there, it’s your aunt Tina. The peter piper pepper pickers are percolating puppies.”
Marley felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. “And the kittens are kleaning Kleenex?” she inquired.
“The dogs are dancing dachshunds in Deutschland.”
“Is the cleaner clapping clutches of the cargo coops?”
“Baseball bats are breaking beef bat batches.”
“SHIT!” said Marley, and hung up. Her worst fears had been confirmed: she’d have to come in to work today.
That was the problem with working for the Department of Prognostication: your work was so secret that even you never knew what would happen next.
***
Work was a hundred meters underneath a mountain after passing through six separate false entrances inside what looked like an abandoned and triple-condemned mineshaft, each of which was set to collapse and murder you if you put your foot in the wrong place. It used to be seven but Hodges had forgotten to zig instead of zag a few years back.
Past the sixth false entrance was a little keypad, which Marley pushed four buttons on to deactivate and then flipped up to reveal the REAL keypad, which needed twenty-six digits forwards and backwards. At the end of all this the door to work opened up and she went through it and immediately had coffee spilled on her.
“JESUS.”
“Sorry, sorry, shit, sorry, sorry, shit,” said Bruce, as he haplessly watched her wipe scalding caffeine off her arm. “We’re all a bit nervous right now.”
“And I’m sure cup number six there is helping with that?”
“Eleven. Things are BAD.”
Marley spoke one of the four forbidden swears. The air shivered.
“And now I’m gonna have to report that!”
“Sorry. They slip out.”
Bruce emitted a kettlelike whine and Marley knew there’d be no speaking to him for the rest of the morning so she left it at that and proceeded into the high security area past the cyberbotomied loborgs.
High security was a different world. The walls were bare stone and carefully etched with little things that weren’t words, traced in secretions. The guards here were blind deaf-mutes who navigated by smell and nodded politely to her as she proceeded past them all into the very depths of the place, past two more secret doors and a deathtrap.
Under the deathtrap was Cell One. She walked into it, beheld the deep-fields with their careful mushroom farms, breathed deep the fetid air of the sprawling church-settlement, and was barely missed by a hammer.
“JESUS AGAIN.”
“Hello and good fortune,” said the woman with the hammer, who was a web of crude casts and crooked bones. “Would you please step aside? I am trying to break the wall you came through.”
“Escape attempts are prohibited in your contract,” said Marley, seeking comfort in bureaucracy.
“Yes, but there’s nothing wrong with breaking the wall WITHOUT escaping. One grows hungry for more, you know. Always more to know from the insides that the outsides keep hidden away.”
“You almost hit me!”
“And that would’ve been very tragic! Believe me, I’ve broke into enough human insides to see all there is; nothing new would be learned in the slightest. What good is a breaking without newness to bring? The candle of the shatterer must be ever-hungry for fresh ruins, for in those remains may be found-”
“I’ve been told you have something to prognosticate,” said Marley, who’d never been much good at dealing with Jehovah’s Witnesses either.
“Oh, yes. Yes indeed. We broke open the ceiling and it shattered inwards and broke open all of dorm sixteen, and in the fractures we found something most interesting. Doom! Great and powerful and all-encompassing! Inescapable! All-encompassing! The likes of which have not been seen in millions of years! Why, its cracks run through every crook and cranny of what is to come: not one living thing on this globe will be spared the force of its destruction! Am I drooling? You’re giving me that look.”
“Yes.”
The woman with the hammer wiped her mouth. “Sorry. But my, the DOOM! Such a fine doom! Never heard tell of its like. It’ll crack the whole WORLD open and spill its knowledge out into every waiting palm. We’ll all be dead, but we’ll die enlightened as nobody has ever been. Would you like to know more? We can start with just a single metatarsal and it’ll all be so much clearer to you, and-”
“Thank you, goodbye,” said Marley, and she locked the door a little faster than necessary.
“Sorry about your shirt!” called the woman as the seal kicked in.
***
Cell Two was on another level, past the snakepits and through the caltrops and the deadly mirrorballs whose light brought blindness and sickness and deathness. Marley could walk it with her eyes shut, which she did out of necessity.
“Goodbye,” said the man waiting for her inside the door. His voice was a little muffled due to him wearing his long, tattered set of hooded robes entirely backwards, and facing away from her. The room he was in was very small, very tidy, and entirely made of simple mirrors. Opening your eyes was a nice way to nauseate yourself fatally. They’d lost more than one careless janitor that way.
“Hello,” said Marley.
“This is incorrect,” said the man. “I am Hindsight. You are Marley. Goodbye to you.”
“I was told you have something to prognosticate,” said Marley, not bothering to hide her irritation.
“We prognosticate nothing, merely look back upon the inevitable,” said Hindsight with the obnoxious placidity of a lapdog on a pillow.
“Right. Yes. Okay. What’s inevitable?”
“Everything that has been.”
“What. Have you. Learned.”
“Doom. Its arrival was to be, and its arrival has passed, and it is already upon us. There can be no stopping it for it is already here and has been for much time.”
“That isn’t helpful.”
“There is nothing to help. The stakes were set long ago and given up well before our time. Watch it and you watch what has come before.”
“A little proof you’ve done anything at all might be appreciated.”
A hand was waved, and not for the first time Marley noticed that the palm seemed to be on backwards. “Your arm was stained and this endorses our accuracy. We can see its cause by this effect.”
“Predicting things that have already happened isn’t prophecy,” said Marley, who’d thought this many times but not been cross enough to say it aloud.
Hindsight shrugged. “Who cares about what might happen? More things have been than will be, and what has, will be. Or, as you’ve said someone has spoken, ‘those who forget the past are condemned.’”
“’To repeat it.’”
“I spoke correctly and fully.”
Marley wished she could slam the door in his face, but settled for the back of his head.
“Hello,” he called after her affably. “Hello, hello.”
***
There was no door to Cell Three. Its inhabitants didn’t believe in them. Instead a small section of the otherwise solid stone wall was sealed with cheap unpainted drywall, which Marley broke through using the handily provided sledgehammer.
“So,” she said to the box in the middle of the room. “You’ve had some prophecies.”
“Yes,” said the box. It was four feet tall and not very wide. There was a window filled with unpleasantly sharp barbed wire. “I looked Inside and saw.”
“Please describe them to me.”
The padlocks festooning the box shook in ecstasy. “Inside there is disaster already arisen and the shackles are on every neck and in every mind and in every pocket and in every gas tank. The doom came from within and it ensnared from within and soon we will all be trapped together, gloriously trapped, tied in our carbon chains to a writhing, steaming atmosphere that heaves and pants for air as we all roast in our planetary cell. This is already here, Inside.”
Marley looked up from taking notes. “I’m sorry…the doom you forecast is anthropogenic climate change?”
“Not ‘fore.’ Foundcast. It is with us Inside.”
“Oh.” She chewed on a nail. “And the odds that one of the others were prophesizing something different are…”
“Not.”
“Oh.”
“Please reseal me properly next time. I could feel a draft from….out there. And take care of that shirt. It needs to be part of you.”
Marley put up fresh drywall as carefully as she could when she left. She needed the time to think.
***
“Report’s done,” she told Bruce tiredly as she got out of the industrial shower. “Pass it along.”
“Sure thing. Was it good?”
“You know I’m not allowed to tell you that.”
“All good, just joshin’ yo-“
“And no, it wasn’t. Just the same old crap. And you’d better pay me for a new shirt.”
“Right. Right! Keep on keeping on, eh?”
Bruce fidgeted with a stapler until about ten minutes after Marley had left, then sighed a long slow wheeze as he fed the report into a fax, which would be picked up in a dropbox in a condemned building.
That was the trouble with working in the Department of Prognostication: your work was so secret nobody really cared about it.