[...]
The first worm night in one million years, and a million worms issue from a
million holes and go in a slimy, undulant, glistening mass down the runnels
to the sea. It's pretty grotesque, but fascinating, in the lumbar light, with
the torches flickering off all those -- did I say one million? One trillion!
One trinity! One trinfinity! -- long slenderoid forms, fluorescent in their
majesty, under the moon, the moon and the Light, and the Satellight.
[...]
If the world were run by headhunters, wouldn't that be a far more
straightforward situation? If it were run by cannibals, the world would be a
better place. Eat your boss. Kill and murder the auditor. Cops, prowling in
their blue patchwork uniforms, trailing scalps and other more hideous
trophies...but by now you have a gun too, and the two of you sneer at each
other with curled lip before moving on...nobody'll be eaten here today.
[...]
Apocalypse at the stoplights, at the polecat spotlights. The apocalypse stops
at the stoplights. The four Riders, ponies pawing the ground, look at each
other, at their grimy watches, whistle a tune, make windy noises of
discontent and impatience. But the light never turns green. Freckles McGee,
that scamp, he got up to some mischief with those stoplights, and there the
Riders wait, forever.
[...]
Heated caveman debates, caveman & newman, heated debates among the new
Indians with their pidgin language in which you can recognize some old
American, Chinese, Hindi, words from all over, really. Just as any one of the
old languages today carries within it words of far ancient provenance --
Chinese for example...some of the weirder words are actually words from old
gone cultures from neverago.
[...]
Under the satellights. Those gigantic spotlights the companies floated back
in the day, where they could shoot light down to your place for a fee,
pennies -- effectively giving electric light to all the remotest places of
the earth -- unfortunately, that was long ago, and those people are all dead
(though their companies lumber on without them, blind, sightless) -- and so
the satellights fire randomly, lighting up a lizard's eye, gleaming over the
glacier, splitting the night where the wolfframs howl.