Viriconium by Michael John Harrison

the file of men behind him. They were lost in a mist of rain, dim shapes huddled and silent on tired mounts.
    At the top of the gully, the entire company halted, and by common, unspoken consent, fanned out along the crest of a dune: each man held solitary and introspective by the bleak panorama before him.
    The Waste rolled north—umber and ochre, dead, endless. Intersecting streams with high, vertical banks scored deep, meaningless ideographs in the earth. In the distance, distorted into deceptive, organic forms, metal girders poked accusing fingers at the empty air, as if there the Rust Desert might fix the source of its millennial pain. Grif’s smugglers muttered, and found that a narrowed eye might discern certain slow but definite movements among the baffling curves of the landscape.
    But tegeus-Cromis turned his horse to face away from the spoiled land, and stared back at the mauve haze that marked the marshes. He was much preoccupied by giants.

5
     
    “We should not strive too hard to imitate the Afternoon Cultures,” said Grif. “They killed this place with industry and left it for the big monitors. In part, if not in whole, they fell because they exhausted the land. We mine the metal they once used, for instance, because there is no ore left in the earth.
    “And in using it all up, they dictated that our achievements should be of a different quality to theirs—”
    “There will be no more Name Stars,” murmured Cromis, looking up from the fragments of his sword. Dusk had drawn a brown veil across the wastes, amplifying the peculiar vagueness of the dune landscape. It was cold. As yet, they had seen no lizards: merely the slow, indistinct movements among the dunes that indicated their presence.
    “Or any more of this, ” said Grif, bleakly.
    They had made camp amid the ruins of a single vast, roofless building of vanished purpose and complicated ground plan. Although nine tenths of it had sunk long ago beneath the bitter earth, the remains that reared around them rose fifty or sixty feet into the twilight. A feeble wind mumbled in off the waste and mourned over their indistinct summits. Among the dunes meandered a vile, sour watercourse, choked with stones worn and scoured by Time.
    Two or three fires burned in the lee of a broken load wall. Grif’s men tended them silently. Infected by the bleakness of the waste, they had picketed the horses close, and the perimeter guards kept well within sight of the main body.
    “There will be no more of anything soon,” said Theomeris Glyn. “The Moidart, the Afternoon Cultures—both are Time by another name. You are sentimentalists, lacking a proper sense of perspective. When you get to my age—”
    “We will grow bored and boring, and make fools of ourselves with dirty girls in Duirinish. It will be a fine time, that.”
    “You may not make it that far, Birkin Grif,” said the old man darkly.
    Since Cromis’s fight in the Metal-Salt Marsh, Cellur’s mechanical vulture had spent most of its time in the air, wheeling in great slow circles over the waste. It would report nothing it had seen from that vantage. Now it perched just beyond the circle of firelight and said:
    “Post-industrial shock effected by the so-called ‘Afternoon Cultures’ was limited in these latitudes. There is evidence, however, that to the west there exists an entire continent despoiled to the degree of the Great Brown Waste.
    “In a global sense, the old man may be right: we are running out of Time.”
    Its precise reedy voice lent a further chill to the night. In the silence that followed, the wind aged, the dying sun ran down like clockwork in an orrery. Birkin Grif laughed uncomfortably; a few thin echoes came from his men.
    “Bird, you will end up as rust, with nothing to your credit but unproven hypotheses. If we are at the end of Time, what have you to show for it? Are you, perhaps, jealous that you cannot experience the misery of flesh, which is this: to know intimately