Alone Against Tomorrow Part 13

Bright Eyes stood trembling uncontrollably, every fiber of his body spasming. His pineal gland throbbed. An intracranial tumor-whose presence in a human brain would have meant death-absolutely imperative for Bright Eyes' coordinated thought processes, which had swollen to five times its size as he concentrated, till his left temple had bulged with the pressing growth of it-now shrank, subsided, sucked itself back down into the gray brain matter, the gliomas itself. And slowly, as the banked fires of his eyes softened once more, Bright Eyes came back to full possession of himself.

"It has been a very long time since that was needed," he said gently, and dwelt for a moment on the powers his race had possessed, powers long-since gone to forgetfulness.

Now that it was over, the giant rat settled to the ground, licking at its fur, at a slash in the flesh where one of the mad things had ripped and found meat.

Bright Eyes went to him. "They are the saddest creatures of all. They are alone." Thomas continued licking at his wounds.

Days later, but closer to their final destination, they came to the edge of a great river. At one time it had been a swiftly-moving stream, whipping itself high in a pounding torrent filled with colors and sounds; but now it flushed itself to the sea wearily, riding low in its own tide-trough, and hampered by the log-jam. The log-jam was made of corpses.

Bodies, hideously bloated and maggot-white puffed out of human shapes, lay across one another, from the near sh.o.r.e to the opposite bank. Thousands of bodies, uncountable thousands, twisted and piled and washed together till it would have been possible to cross the river on the top layer of naked men's faces, bleached women's backs, twisted children's hands crinkled as if left too long in water. For they had been.

As far upstream as Bright Eyes could see, and as far downstream as the bend of the banks permitted, it was the same. No movement, save the very seldom jiggle of a corpse as the water pa.s.sed through. For they were packed so deeply and so tightly that in truth only water at its most sluggish could wanly press through. Yet the water gurgled and twittered among them, stealing slowly downstream- caressing rotting flesh in obscene parody: water, cleansing steppingstones; polis.h.i.+ng and smoothing and drenching them senselessly as it marks its pa.s.sage only by what is left behind.

That was the ultimate horror of this river of dead: that the tide-no matter how held-back now- continued unheeding as it had since the world was born. For the world went on. And did not care.

Bright Eyes stood silently. At the bottom of the short slope that ended with sh.o.r.eline, bodies were strewn in a careless tumble. He breathed very deeply, fighting for air, and the s.h.i.+vering started again. As it grew more p.r.o.nounced, there was movement in the dry-moist river bed. Bodies abruptly began to move.

They trembled as though roiling in a stream growing turbulent. Then, one by one, they rearranged themselves. All up and down the length of the river, the bodies s.h.i.+fted and moved and lifted without aid from their original positions, and far off, where their movement to neatness could not be seen, there came the roar of dammed-up water breaking free, surging forward, freed from its restraining walls of once- human flesh.

As Bright Eyes trembled, power surging through his slight frame, his eyes seeming to wax and wane with currents of electricity, the river of corpses freed itself from its log-jam, and was open once more. The water poured in a great frothing wave down and down the corpse-bordered trough of the river.

It broke out of a box-canyon to Bright Eyes' left, like a wild creature penned too long and at last set free on the wind. It came bubbling, boiling, thras.h.i.+ng forward, pa.s.sed the spot where he stood, and hurled itself away around the bend in the sh.o.r.eline.

As Bright Eyes felt the trembling pa.s.s, the river rose, and rose, and gently now, rose. Covering the ghastly residue of humanity that now lay submerged beneath the mud-blackened waters.

The eyes of the trembling creature, the eyes of the giant rat, the eyes of the uncaring day were blessedly relieved of the sight of decay and death.

Emotions washed quickly, one after another, down his features; washed as quickly as the river had concealed its sad wealth; colors of sadness, imprinted in a manner no human being could ever have conceived, for the face that supported these emotions was of a race that had vanished before man had walked the Earth.

Then Bright Eyes turned, and with the rat, walked upstream. Toward the morning.

When the bleeding birds went over, the sun darkened. Great irregular, hard-edged clouds of them, all species, all wingspreads-but silent. Pa.s.sing across the broad, gray brow of the sky, heading absolutely nowhere, they turned off the sun. It was suddenly chill as a crypt. Heading east. Not toward warmth, or instinct, or destination...just anywhere, nowhere. Until they wearied, expired, dropped. Not manna, garbage. Live garbage that fell in hundredclots from the beat-winged flights.

Many dropped, fluttering idly as if too weary to fight the air currents any longer. As though what tiny instinctual brain substance they had possessed, were now baked, turned to jelly, squashed by an unnameable force into an ichorous juice that ran out through their eyes. As though they no longer cared to live, much less to continue this senseless flight east to nowhere...

...and they bled.

A rain of bird's blood, sick and discolored. It misted down, beading Bright Eyes, and the stiff rat fur, and the trees, and the still, silent, dark land.

Only the dead, flat no-sound of millions of wings metronomic ally beating, beating, beating...

Bright Eyes shuddered, turned his face from the sight above, and finding himself unable to look, yet unable to end the horror as he had the mad dogs or the water of corpses, sought surcease in his own personal vision.

And this, which had driven him forth, was his vision: Sleeping, deep in that place where he had lived so long, Bright Eyes had felt the subtle altering of tempo in the air around him. It was nothing as obvious as machinery beginning to whirr, trembling the walls around him; nor as complex as a s.h.i.+ft in dimensional orientation. It was, rather, a soft sliding in the molecules of everything except Bright Eyes. For an instant everything went just slightly out of synch, a little fuzzy, and Bright Eyes came awake sharply. The thing that had occurred, was something his race had pre-set eons before. It was triggered to activate itself-whatever "itself" was-after certain events had possibly happened.

The fact that this s.h.i.+fting had occurred, made Bright Eyes grow cold and wary. He had expected to die without its ever having come. But now, this was the time, and it had happened, and he waited for the next phase.

It came quickly. The vision.

The air before him grew even more indistinct, more roiled, like a pool of quicksilver smoke tumbling in and in on itself. And from that cloudiness the image of the last of the Castellans took shape.

(Was it image, or reality, or thought within his head? He did not really know, for Bright Eyes was merely the last of his kind, no specially-trained adept, and much of what his race had been, and knew, was lost to him, beyond him.) The Castellan was a fifth-degree adept, and surely the last remaining one of Bright Eyes' race to- go. He wore the purple and blue of royalty, from a House Bright Eyes did not recognize, but the cut of the robe was shorter than styles Bright Eyes recalled as having been current-then. And the Castellan's cowl was up, revealing a face that was bleak with sorrow and even a hint of cruelty. Such was not present, of course, for the Castellans merely performed their duties, but Bright Eyes was certain this adept had been against the decision to-go. Yet he had been chosen to bring the message to Bright Eyes.

He stood, booted and silent, in the soft-washed blue and white lightness of Bright Eyes' sleeping chamber. Bright Eyes was given time to come to full wakefulness, and then the Castellan spoke.

"What you see has been gone for ten centuries. I am the last, save you. They have set me the task, and this twist of my being, of telling you what you must do. If the proper portents trigger my twist to appear before you-pray it never happens-then you must go to the city of the ones with hair, the ones who come after us, the ones who inherit the Earth, the men. Go to their city, with a bag of skulls of our race.

You will know what to do with them.

"Know this, Bright Eyes: we go voluntarily. Some of us-and I am one of them-more reluctantly than most. It is a decision that seems only proper. Those who come after us, Men, will have their chance for the stars. This was the only gift of birth we could offer. No other gift can have meaning between us. They must have our chance, so we have gone to the place where you now lie. By the time I appear to you-if ever I do-we will be gone. This is the way of it, a sad and an inescapable way. You will be the last. And now I will show you a thing."

The Castellan raised his hands before his face, and as though they were growing transparent, they glowed with an inner fire. The Visioning power. The Castellan's face suffused with flames as it conjured up the proper vision for Bright Eyes.

It appeared out of lines of blossoming crimson force, in the very air beside the Castellan. A vision of terror and destruction. Flames man-made and devastating, incredible in their h.e.l.lfire. Like some great arachnid of pure force, the demon flames of the destruction swept and washed across the vision, and when it faded, Bright Eyes lay shaken by what he had seen.

"If this that I have showed you ever comes to pa.s.s, then my twist will appear to you. And if you ever hear me as you hear me now, then go, with the bag of skulls of our people. And do not doubt your feelings.

"For if I appear to you, it will all have been in vain, and those of us who were less pure in our motivations, will have been proved right."

s.h.i.+mmering substance, coalescing nothingness, air that trembled and twittered in reforming, and the Castellan was gone. Bright Eyes rose, and gathered the skulls from the crypt. Then: Feet without toes. Softly-padded feet, furred. Footsteps sounded gently, padding furry, down ink- chill corridors of the place. A place Bright Eyes had inhabited since before time had substance. He walked through night, out of the place.

Night was a condition Bright Eyes understood. And he knew about day...

The bleeding birds were long since gone. Bright Eyes moved through the days, and onward. At one point he pa.s.sed through a sector of trembling mountains that heaved up great slabs of rock and hurled them away like epileptics ridding themselves of clothes. The ground trembled and burst and screamed and the very earth went insane to tunes of destruction it had never written.

There was a plain of dead gra.s.s, sere and wasted with great heaps of dessicated insects heaped here, there. They had flocked together to the last resting-place, and the plain of dead gra.s.s was poor tapestry indeed to hold the imprisoned pigments of their dead flesh, the acrid and bittersweet pervasive odor of formic acid that lingered like hot breath of a mad giant across the silent windless emptiness. Yet, how faint, a sound of weeping...?

Finally, Bright Eyes came to the city.

Thomas would not enter. The twisted rope-pillars of smoke that still climbed relentlessly to the dark sky; the terrible sounds of steel cracking and masonry falling into empty streets; the charnel house odor. Thomas would not go in.

But Bright Eyes was compelled to enter. Into that last debacle of all. From where it had begun.

The dead were everywhere, sighing soundlessly with milkwhite eyes at a tomorrow that had never come. And each fallen one soundlessly spoke the question of why. Bright Eyes walked with the burden of chaos pulsing in him. This. This is what it had come to.

For this, his race had gone away. That the ones with hair, the Men they had been called, they had called themselves, could stride the Earth. How cheap they had left it all. How cheap, how thin, how sordid.

This was the last of it, the last of the race of men. Dust and dead.

Down a street, woman pleading out of death for mercy.

Through what had been a park, old men humped crazily in rigorous failure to escape.

Past a structure, building front ripped away as if fingernails had shorn it clean. Children's arms, pocked and burned, dangling. Tiny hands.

To another place. Not like the place from which Bright Eyes had come, but the place to which he had journeyed. No special marker, just...a place. Sufficient.

And then it was, that Bright Eyes sank to his knees, crying. Tears that had not been seen since before Man had come from caves, tears that Bright Eyes had never known. Infinite sadness. Cried. Cried for the ghosts of the creatures with hair, cried for Men. For Man. Each Man. The Man who had done away with himself so absurdly, so completely. Bright Eyes, on his knees, sorrowing for the ones who had lived here, and were gone, leaving him to the night, and the silence, and eternity. A melody never to be heard again.

He placed the skulls. Down in the soft white ash. Unresponsive, dying Earth, receiving its burden testament.

Bright Eyes, last of a race that had condemned itself to extinction, had condemned him to living in darkness forever, and had had only the saving wistful knowledge that the race coming after would live in the world. But now, gone, all of them, taking the world with them, leaving instead-no fair exchange-charnel house.

And Bright Eyes; alone.

Not only their race had been destroyed, in vain, but his, centuries turned to mud and diamonds in their markerless graves, had pa.s.sed in futility. It had all, all of it, been for nothing.

So Bright Eyes-never Man-was the last man on Earth. Keeper of a silent graveyard; echoless tomb monument to the foolishness, the absurdity, of n.o.bility.

My name is Harlan Jay Ellison.

To the United States Army I was US51403352. To the Diners Club I am 2435-0853-8. To anyone trying to reach me by phone I am 213-271-9636. If you try to send me a letter I'm 91403. When a cop stops me for a U-turn I'm M271930. If I want to cash a check I'm 1223-1400-02139-02622. Though I've never collected one in my life, if I wanted some unemployment compensation, I'd be 280-30-8327. The mortgage to my home is registered to 5537-J6361. The Literary Guild of America doesn't know I write books, but it looks on me fondly as 022-041396LG.

First they steal your name, then they go after your individuality, and finally-as with the protagonist of the next story-they cop your face and form. Alienation? Well, I suppose it means when the Book-Of-The-Month Club overbills you five hundred dollars, and you complain, all you hear is the hollow laughter of the computer in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. I suppose it means that we give in too easily to letting every major and minor corporation from 3M to Nate 'n' Al's Delicatessen "convenience themselves" at our expense.

Sure its convenient. For them. They get their billing done quickly and efficiently-for them. But if you have your mortgage with a bank that's computerized, and they make a mistake, before the big machine can clear its throat and set things right, you can be a DP. So we fight back, some of us. In small ways, because there aren't enough of you yet who'll risk the wrath of the machine. We fight back by overpaying our phone bill 73 a month, which costs the phone company about fifty dollars to trace the error and clear the records properly. We fight back by spindling, folding and mutilating. And we often yell-

Are You Listening?

THERE ARE SEVERAL WAYS I wanted to start telling this : First, I was going to begin it: I began to lose my existence on a Tuesday morning. But then I thought about it and: This is my horror story.

Seemed like a better way to begin. But after thinking it over (I've had a devil of a lot of time to think it over, you can believe me), I realized both of those were pretty melodramatic, and if I wanted to instill trust and faith and ah that from the outset, I had just better begin the way it happened, and tell it through to now, and then make my offer, and well, let you decide for yourself.

Are you listening?

Perhaps it ah began with my genes. Or my chromosomes. Whichever or whatever combination made me a Casper Milquetoast prototype, that or those are to blame, I'm sure. I woke up a year ago on a Tuesday morning in March, and knew I was the same as I had been for hundreds of other mornings past. I was forty-seven years old, I was balding, my eyes were good-and the gla.s.ses I used only for reading. I slept in a separate room from my wife Alma, and I wore long underwear; chiefly because I've always picked up a chill quickly.

The only thing that might possibly be considered out-of-the-ordinary about me is that my name is Winsocki.

Albert Winsocki.

You know, like the song...

"Buckle down Winsocki, you can win Winsocki if you'll only buckle down..." Very early in life I was teased about that, but my mild nature kept me from taking offense, and instead of growing to loathe it, I adopted it as a sort of personal anthem. Whenever I find myself whistling something, it is usually that.

However- I woke up that morning, and got dressed quickly. It was too cold to take a shower, so I just daubed water on my wrists and face, and dressed quickly. As I started down the stairs, Zasu, my wife's Persian, swept past between my legs. Zasu is a pretty stable cat, and I had never been quite snubbed before, though the animal had taken to ignoring me with great skill. But this morning of which I speak, she just swarmed past, and not even a meowrll or a spit. It was unusual, but not remarkable.

But just an indication of what was to come.

I came into the living room, and saw that Alma had laid out my paper on the arm of the sofa, just as she had done for twenty-seven years. I picked it up in pa.s.sing. and came into the dinette.

My orange juice was set out, and I could hear Alma in the kitchen beyond. She was muttering to herself as usual. That is one of my wife's unpleasant habits, I'm afraid. At heart she is a sweet, dear woman, but when she gets annoyed, she murmurs. Nothing obscene, for goodness sake, but just at the bare threshold of audibility, so that it niggles and naggles and bothers. She knew it bothered me, or perhaps she didn't, I'm not sure. I don't think Alma was aware that I really had any likes or dislikes of any real strength.

At any rate. there she was, muttering and murmuring, so I just called out, "I'm down, dear. Good morning." Then I turned to the paper, and the juice. Acidic.

The paper was full of the same sort of stuff, and what else could orange juice be but orange juice?

However, as the minutes pa.s.sed, Alma's mutters did not pa.s.s away. In fact, they got louder, more angry, more annoyed. "Where is that man? He knows I despise waiting breakfast! Now look...the eggs are hard. Oh, where is he?"

This kept up for some time, though I repeatedly yelled in to her, "Alma, please stop, I'm here. I'm down, can't you understand?"

Finally, she came storming past, and went through into the living room. I could hear her at the foot of the stairs-hand on banister, one foot flat on the first step-yelling up to no one at all, " Albert! Will you come down? Are you in the bathroom again? Are you having trouble with your kidneys? Shall I come up?"

Well, that was too much, so I laid aside my napkin, and got up. I walked up behind her and said, just as politely as I could,,. Alma. What is the matter with you, dear? I'm right here."

It made no impression.

She continued howling, and a few moments later stalked upstairs. I sat down on the steps, because I was sure Alma had lost her mind, or her hearing had gone, or something. After twenty-seven happily married years, my wife was dreadfully ill.

I didn't know what to do. I was totally at a loss. I decided it would be best to call Dr. Hairshaw. So I went over and dialed him, and his phone rang three times before he picked it up and said, "h.e.l.lo?"

I always felt guilty calling him, no matter what time of the day it was-he had such an intimidating tone-but I felt even more self-conscious this time, because there was a decidedly muggy value to his voice.

As though he had just gotten out of bed.

"Sorry to wake you at this hour, Doctor," I said quickly. "This is Albert Winso-"

He cut me off with, "h.e.l.lo? h.e.l.lo?"

I repeated, "h.e.l.lo, Doctor? This is Al-"

"h.e.l.lo there? Anyone there?"

I didn't know what to say. It was probably a bad connection, so I screamed as loud as I could, "Doctor, this is-"

"Oh, h.e.l.l!" he yelled, and jammed down the receiver. I stood there for a second with the handpiece gripped tightly and I'm dreadfully afraid an expression of utter bewilderment came over my face. Had everyone gone deaf, today? I was about to re-dial, when Alma came down the stairs, talking out loud to herself.

"Now where on Earth can that man have gone? Don't tell me he got up and went out without any breakfast? Oh well, that's less work for me today."

And she went right smack past me, staring right through me, and into the kitchen. I plonked down the receiver and started after her. This was too much! During the past few years Alma had lessened her attentions to me, even at times seemed to ignore me; I would speak and she would not hear, I would touch her and she would not respond. There had been increasingly more of these occasions, but this was too much!

I went into the kitchen and walked up behind her. She did not turn, just continued scouring the eggs out of the pan with steel wool. I screamed her name. She did not turn, did not even break the chain of humming.

I grabbed the pan from her hands and banged it as hard as I could on the stove-top (something remarkably violent for me, but I'm sure you can understand that this was a remarkable situation). She did not even start at the noise. She went over to the icebox and took out the cube trays. She began to defrost the box.

That was the last straw. I slammed the pan to the floor and stalked out of the room. I was on the verge of swearing, I was so mad. What kind of game was this? All right, so she didn't want to make my breakfast; so that was just one more little ignoring factor I had to put up with. All right, so why didn't she just say so. But this folderol was too much!