The Last Human

by Zack Jordan

  Oh, goddess, that word. Home.

  “Do you like it?” asks a nearby Observer with a smile.

  Sarya can’t answer. She smells the fire on the breeze, she feels the heat on her skin, she hears the wind in the canopy. She is in the center of a mind who knows exactly what she is and welcomes her not despite it…but because of it. Her eyes are doing that thing again, where they don’t exactly cry but they’re not exactly dry either. She blinks away the burn and raises her gaze to branches full of swaying singing Observers. The color has leaked out of the sky now, except for a hint of orange at one side, and the stars—oh, goddess, the stars. So many billions of stars, and this time she is not overwhelmed, because this time she knows: she is exactly where she’s supposed to be.

  “Yeah,” she whispers. “I like it.”

  Like she has never liked anything in her life.

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  “MUSIC” APPRECIATION AND CONTROVERSIES

  Though extremely rare in the developed galaxy, some species claim the ability to draw great satisfaction from the vibration of matter. These species typically develop a vocabulary replete with terms used only in discussing these vibrations, including numerous words or symbols for individual frequencies, amplitudes, recurrence over time, and combinations of all of the above. This is known as music.

  Many individuals hailing from these species are able to perform interesting tricks regarding the construction and reproduction of these sonic structures. Taken at face value, one might be tempted to regard this music as an actual art. However, millions of years of independent study have concluded that similarities to actual forms of art are only crust-deep.

  DIFFICULTIES IN APPRECIATION

  The deepest strike against music’s potential status as art is the fact that so few species have evolved with sensors sensitive enough to decode it. This fact alone may explain why there exist no registered art critics from any music-making species. Unfortunately for music’s status, this means that the rest of the galaxy has only the claims of the music creators.

  The second problem is that there exists no reliable translation method to convert music to accepted art mediums. Compare this to the great works of the gravity artists, for example, whose sprawling tapestries of time and space can easily be represented via several different means. As a second example, consider the tactile masterpieces that emerged from the Aberration, most of which have been translated to a variety of other media. In contrast, no vibration translation attempt has ever met with the satisfaction of more than a few so-called music composers.

  ORIGINS AND CORRELATIONS

  Though other species have developed an independent taste for music, some xenologists note that every known [Firebringer] species is typically obsessed with music composition and consumption.

  No further data available.

  Observation one: a little fire has become a lot of fire. These things are not heating elements, they are not atmosphere vents, they’re not incinerators, they’re not any of the heat sources that have made appearances in Sarya’s life. These are actual honest-to-goddess uncontrolled and barely contained conflagrations, and there are a lot of them. This clearing is larger than she can measure with Human eyes, and identical bodies dance around dozens of giant fires—closely and spastically enough that she is immediately put on edge.

  Observation two: she has never smelled anything like this. Never in her entire life has a scent seized her by the nostrils and taken control of her body. She stares at the giant, glistening mass hanging over the nearest fire, from which her nose tells her the heavenly odor is emanating. “What,” she asks with a mouth that is suddenly flooding with saliva, “is that?”

  “That thing?” says an Observer, dismissing it with a wave. “Oh, nothing much. Just the mightiest and most magnificent beast in all the forest! Struck down in its prime, by my mighty prowess! A hundred twenty kilos if it’s a gram, and a fighter too!”

  “I lost five bodies bringing this one down,” says another. “I lost hundreds for the whole feast. A fair trade, I’d say.”

  “Those tusks!” says one with admiration. “Surprisingly deadly!”

  Sarya barely hears any of this because her mouth hurts, so fiercely is it salivating. She has already moved past the novelty of killing an animal just to eat it and on to an absolute understanding of why her mother was a hunter. She finds her jaw is actually working up and down and her throat is swallowing on its own, as if her body is rehearsing for what’s to come.

  “I have such a wonderful evening planned!” calls a passing, madly dancing Observer.

  “First the feast!” shouts another.

  “Then the dancing!”

  “Then more feasting!”

  “Then the entertainment! I do so love entertainment.”

  “And all the while, the drinking! Drinking, drinking, far into the night!”

  “And none of it would be happening if not for you!” shout a dozen Observers in chorus.

  “Sarya!” chants the crowd. “Sarya the Daughter!” And then she’s pulled three different ways and plunged into a whirling crowd of dancing, singing Observers.

  “I thought you said feasting was first!” she shouts. She gazes longingly after the roasting animal as she is shoved through a tossing sea of frantically cavorting Observer bodies.

  “I say a lot of things!” says an Observer, seizing another for a wild dance. “You should really pay more attention to what I do.”

  “Here!” shout two more. Before she can react, her arm has been lifted and some kind of object has been thrust beneath it. It’s a hollow cylinder with a membrane stretched across each end. Two Observers near her hold smaller versions and they strike the membranes with their unoccupied hands. “Like this!” they shout in unison, beating a rhythm over the top of the madness.

  So this is what was making those sounds! It makes perfect sense, and after a couple of exploratory taps Sarya finds herself breaking out into a smile as she tries to keep up. It’s a strange sensation, whatever battle is unfolding on her face. She is disoriented, pulled this way and that, but she is not even close to caring. She smells the roasting animal and feels the grass under her feet and then, holy goddess, she is laughing, for the first time since Watertower she is laughing long and hard and almost helplessly.

  “This is amazing!” she laughs, shifting her body in awkward ways in time with the beat.

  “Of course it is!” shouts Observer from a dozen mouths. “This is what you were made for!”

  She doesn’t know or care how long the dancing goes on, but eventually the music begins to quiet. It becomes background, and then the crowd recedes like a tide and she is standing, mussed and manhandled and somehow missing both boots, next to one of the many fires. She wriggles her toes in the grass and inhales a thousand scents and thinks that she could die right now and call it a life well lived.

  “Sarya the Daughter!” says the Observer stepping up to her, wielding a blade nearly as big as its torso. “Will you do the honors?”

  Sarya glances from knife to glistening beast and back. She laughs again and marvels at how easily laughter comes given the right conditions. “Oh, definitely,” she says.

  “Should be easy for the Daughter of a Widow!” says an Observer.

  “For the butcher of the Network!”

  “For the hero of the sector!”

  “Sarya!” shouts the crowd. “Sarya the Daughter!”

  With the help of a half dozen Observers, Sarya attacks the shining flank with the blade and a pointed stick. They offer pointers as she digs in, and they are there to catch the knife when she drops it. When she pulls that stick full of steaming animal away from the carcass, she has eyes for nothing else in the universe.

  “Wait!” cries an Observer, rushing up and sprinkling so
mething on her animal. “Sodium chloride,” it explains. “Delicious.”

  “And some of this!” shout two more, one thrusting a cup into her free hand and the other filling it with a steaming liquid from a pitcher. It smells sweet and spicy enough to compete with the animal, which is really saying something.

  “Sarya!” shouts Observer from any number of mouths. “Sarya the Daughter!” Dozens of him salute Sarya with identical cups before downing their contents in unison.

  Sarya the Daughter, who stands barefoot in firelight with a cup of something hot and a stick full of animal, under a billion billion stars. Sarya the Daughter, who in her short life has traveled farther than perhaps any of her ancestors. Sarya the Daughter, ward of a Widow, product of plan or coincidence, born to find her people. Network was right, and Observer was right, and she was right.

  She was made for this.

  “Oh my goddess,” she says through her teeth when they meet in the middle of the mess on her stick. “Oh. My. Goddess,” she shouts with a full mouth.

  “She likes it!” shouts a single body.

  “She likes it!” roars the rest of Observer.

  And now the chant begins to rise again. “Sarya the Daughter! Sarya the Daughter!”

  She alternates between animal and drink as Observers bounce and dance around her. She is several steps beyond giddy. She has lived her entire life eating and drinking nothing more exciting than food bars and water, unaware that there were things like this in the universe, and now her eyes have been opened. The vapors of the liquid fill her nasal cavities as thoroughly as the animal fills her mouth, and the combination of the two lights a fire in her stomach. She bites and laughs, and sings music and laughs, and cries and laughs, and drinks and coughs and laughs, and it does not take long at all for a pleasant fuzz to settle over her brain.

  “I can never eat a food bar again,” she mumbles into her cup.

  “You’ll never have to!” cries an Observer.

  She laughs again when she spills her drink, two actions that are becoming easier with each passing moment. She becomes aware, when the laugh is done, that a small hand has been tugging at her utility suit for some time.

  “Got a moment?” says the Observer at her feet.

  Sarya’s cheeks ache from all the smiling she’s been doing over the past…the past whatever. Of course she has a moment. She has any number of moments for Observer, the parent of Humanity. She follows this single weaving body across the stomped and matted grass, still chewing, her steps firmly on the beat of the music. A few more small figures join the first and the group leads her away from the fires, toward a darker spot in the clearing, where cool air can flow over her own roasted skin. It’s not so densely populated here, and the Observers who are present are simply lying in the grass looking up at the sky. The golden gleams of their eyes are scattered through the dark grass, mirroring the stars above them.

  “Here,” says one, patting the ground beside it. “Lie down.”

  She takes a deep drink before allowing another Observer to take her stick and her cup. She lowers herself to the ground, still swallowing, then lies back to gaze into the explosion of stars above her. She has seen a star field many times, but this is something different. This is far better—maybe better than reality itself. The stars are brilliant, scintillating, shivering in the depths of space. They are seen not through a Network unit or even a pressure suit holo system, but through a warm blanket of atmosphere and a tree-lined frame of horizon. “Goddess,” she whispers. She has never in her life seen anything like it.

  “I created this view just for you, you know,” says an Observer. “It’s what the sky looked like from your homeworld, back when it existed.”

  She knew this, somehow. Or some part of her did, deep in her brain. With the fire crackling and the scent of smoke and roasted animal in the air, with the tickle of the grass beneath her and the explosion of the universe above her, her brain hadn’t even considered an alternative. This is what it is to be Human, Sarya’s entire being sings.

  “Speaking of which,” says Observer.

  Sarya sits up. She can feel her heart pick up a few beats per minute.

  “You know what I’m talking about,” says Observer with a smile.

  Now Sarya’s heart nearly escapes through her rib cage. The colony’s up there somewhere, Left and Right told her. Nearby. “My—I mean—”

  “Close your eyes,” says Observer gently.

  She closes them instantly, trembling all over. She feels several of Him scoot closer. Her skin tingles under their small hands as they raise her arm and extend her finger. For a split second a blast of light rips red through her eyelids, and then it’s gone.

  “Perfect,” says Observer. “Now…open.”

  It takes a few seconds for her to realize that her eyes are, in fact, open. The brilliant tapestry of stars is gone. The sky is black, from horizon to horizon—with one exception. A single speck remains at the end of her finger, floating in a darkness as deep as the hull of a Human warship. Sarya drops her arm and climbs to her feet slowly, as if this dot were prey and one wrong move would startle it into flight. She is full of love and wonder and roasted animal and foreign chemicals and she can’t do anything but stare at this gray point in an empty sky. She doesn’t even know what it is, and yet every instinct in her body is telling her the same thing.

  Home.

  “I—” she says, but the rest of the sentence dies somewhere in her throat. “I don’t—”

  “Even if you had my senses,” says Observer quietly, “you would see nothing more than a simple cylinder spinning away in the darkness. You might be able to tell there’s a little FTL drive strapped to one end, if you knew what to look for. You might suppose, by the rate of spin, that it contains an ecosystem. But would you guess it contains an entire society, shaped and tended by the mind of Observer?”

  Another picks up the thread, just as gently as the first. “That society is, perhaps, the most interesting in the sector,” it says. “Young. Violent. Passionate. Independent of Network. A society whose members reject Its order by instinct. A species who cannot thrive except in Its absence.”

  And now Observer is practically whispering in her ear, or as close as He can get. “That is a germ, Daughter,” He murmurs. “A seed waiting for its soil. I have hidden it until this moment, in the vast wastes between Network’s stars, but now its time has come.”

  And now a star appears in the blackness, and then another. One by one, in the darkness above Observer’s mind, the star field begins to return. But, far from the riot of light she saw before, this time the sky contains only a sparse sprinkling of points.

  “Daughter,” says Observer. “What do you see?”

  She gazes upward. She could count these few stars, but with a Human mind and Human eyes it would take minutes to arrive at a near-answer. “I don’t know,” she whispers.

  “Eight hundred suns,” says Observer, “each one isolated from the Network by centuries of sublight travel. That’s eight hundred solar systems, free to go their own way, with no Network to police their every move. It will be a millennium, easily, before Network can even attempt a return to these systems.” Observer laughs, softly, from every mouth. “You’ve seen the seed, Daughter,” He says. “And now you’ve seen the soil.”

  Sarya strides through the darkness, a goddess made flesh.

  Sarya stubs her bare toes on things she can’t see, dizzy on drink and possibility.

  She stumbles from fire to fire, and every circle of Observer greets her the same way. They bounce, they cheer, they spill their drinks on each other and occasionally stab one another with their meat sticks. At some fires, they create music to entertain her. At others, they fence with their sticks. Occasionally an Observer ends up in the coals, driven there by an opponent, and its companions cheer as it goes up in screaming flames. The first time this happen
s, she is horrified. By the third, she has realized: this is just Observer. These individuals are skin cells, blood cells, neurons, worth nothing by themselves. She, on the other hand…she’s worth more than she ever imagined. At each fire, she hears her name. “Sarya the Daughter!” cheers Observer’s supermind with countless smiles. And each time, she raises a cup and smiles in return. No matter what He says to her, she hears it the same way:

  You matter.

  She is humming her own name to Observer’s tune by the time she staggers up to a fire with no one around it. She squints; the world is slightly tilted, and she has to concentrate on standing even more than she usually does. There’s a mass lying in the orange flicker, and she feels that she should know what it is. Big, says her brain. The fire lights it unevenly, licking its textured surface. Furry? says her brain. And then, at the top of this rough black shape, dozens of gleams of reflected firelight begin to appear.

  “Well, look who it is,” rumbles Mer.

  The dozens of reflections blink and change size, and then Sandy scampers down Mer’s huge arm to crouch closer to the fire. She is staring at Sarya, but if she is saying anything, Sarya can’t read it. On the far side of the fire, a lanky shape enters the circle of light. It strides to the fire, squats, and begins to insert long pieces of fuel into its flickering glow. Pieces of tree, says her brain, though there is a delay before it finds the correct word. And here, for the first time since she arrived, she sees traces of Network. Two helper intelligences—Mer’s and Sandy’s—and some kind of weird conglomeration somewhere in Roche’s chest. Their strands drift, dark and disconnected, unlit by the fire.

  “Hello, Sarya the Daughter,” says Roche without looking up from the fire. “We were beginning to think you didn’t care.”

  Sarya wobbles in the firelight, cup in hand, her gaze making its unsteady way from one half-lit shape to the next. Even sober she would be having trouble classifying this bloom of emotion. She feels a little sick, that’s for sure, but the evening has offered many potential causes for that. Beyond that, she feels…what is this, guilt? What does she have to feel guilty about? It’s true that she hasn’t spared these three a thought since…well since Riptide, maybe. But come on: what does she really owe them? They were shipmates for a few days. They were all part of the same Network, long ago. But honestly, what weight does that carry? She could say the same about anyone on that Blackstar—and that was back when the Network was even a thing here. Now it’s not. Now they’re free. If anything, she should be feeling pride, not guilt. She swallows and focuses on remaining upright as she condenses these thoughts and more into an appropriate greeting.